frankie boyle's beanbag chair of death

I suppose you might not be able to solve a cultural problem with technical solutions, but you can cause cultural problems technically!

Hey, I like porn.

I remember when G+ introduced the same "feature" of showing +1's to all your followers, but at least they had an option to turn it off (albeit buried deep in an obscure section of the preferences.) I shut that off as quickly as I could.

When they rolled this feature out, it was treated as a boon for people like me - people who had a tiny number of follows who nonetheless kept checking for regular updates. I get that, in that if you have a user base who are pressing the 'GIMME MORE CONTENT' button, you want to look for ways to meet that demand, and the hypothetical structure that 'if you like these people you might like what they like' follows from that, but it also betrays a vision of these users that they are (for example) behaving 'rationally.' Which I know I wasn't. I was checking for new content every five seconds on a bus trip because I was bored and trying to not feel carsick AND afraid I was going to miss a sign one of my friends was having an emotional breakdown and needed me.

As a response to this system, I did not start spreading my follows or liking more content to spread it to my followers in a similar situation - I stopped using the like button at all.

The "other people liked" thing is good for when someone has a gender-affirming surgery, for a while twitter was showing me random pics of happy gals in hospital beds almost daily.

God it's the worst. "How many people will have this tweet shoved on them if I like it" was a fun game.

This whole thing was especially fun when there was that bug that showed a like on a quote tweet as if it were on the original tweet, which could make you or your friends look like assholes for liking some awful thing when they had actually liked the exact opposite of that thing, and you had no way of knowing!

I'm not seeing any upside with social media showing off who I follow and what I like but I've seen the downsides of it quite often.

the giant goddamn panopticon "ah yes every private thought and whim must be visible and accessible"

I hated that feature, except for the time it let everyone who followed our cto know he was horny on main.

While it does suck, I can't lie that being shown things my friends like IS pretty nice. Just too intrusive and spammy

i have been seeing the hoat pennis but i;ve hoarded it for myself, they sit on a pile of thrones in the sewage atrium of my mind palacio