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dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2RcbCzr
ok so i dislike facebook but my mom uses it and it’s the best way to know things like, which of my cousins are pregnant, etc. that sort of thing.
i signed up for it in its heyday, and coincidentally when i was doing roller derby and met new people a lot, so. among various other things. and i was real liberal about friending people, so i’ve got like 700 facebook “friends” at this point. i mean, i never put anything real personal up there, so it didn’t matter?
(behind the cut: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Just Ignore Messenger)
but then they changed the direct messaging system to be this freestanding app, of course, and i declined to install Messenger. i don’t chat on facebook, i really just don’t. if you send me a message, i’ll read it eventually when i’m on my desktop and in the browser. i’ve made posts about this several times but of course you can’t, like, pin a tweet on your facebook profile, so people don’t know. if i see there’s a message from someone, i’ll look on there after a while.
there’s one particular facebook friend though… i blocked him on twitter because he was sending me fucking Pepe the Frog memes, and if i retweeted something he was replying to me and to the OP about, like, reactionary shit. i was finally like bro, your shit is stupid and indistinguishable from the general Internet of Shit, so I’m blocking your ass. but he’s still on my FB. And he seems to have recognized that he fucked up at least to an extent; he’s got to have noticed that I softblocked him there too, because I Do Not Want to see his memes. But he’s got a wife I like fine, and a kid I’m generically interested in, and so he sent me a Messenger message a while back, and I waited a couple weeks and finally clicked on it and sure enough, it was a cute photo of his kid with a pumpkin from Halloween, because that’s cute. so I wrote back “aww pumpkins :)” and that was that.
He wrote back like instantly. Clearly this is a person who uses Facebook messenger like an IM. Well, he’s also been around long enough to have already gotten my “oh hey sorry i don’t check this” response, mmm, four times? so like. And it just took me 2 weeks to reply to your cute kid on a pumpkin overture, and everyone knows cute kids on a pumpkin are like, a form of currency in some societies, so like
I let that shit sit there for a couple of weeks, and looked at it today, and it’s like, a conversational opening gambit about a thing we both used to be involved with. I wrote back something noncommittal and closed the window. I just got a notification that he wrote back again. … Listen, I know where he lives, he’s in my timezone, and it’s not yet 6am. really dude??!
anyway. Here’s the thing with Messenger. I mean, with Facebook in general. Everything about that site, they have been forced to admit, is designed to give you the optimally addictive user experience. It is specifically and explicitly designed, as they have legally, under threat of criminal prosecution, admitted in courts of law, to make you a slave to clicking it. Who is old enough to remember when they added the feature on Messages that showed senders when you’d seen their message? Who here was outraged because this does nothing to serve the interests of the users and only serves to increase friction between users, thereby creating additional drama?
Anyway. The foolproof method, my friends, to avoiding that happening, is that you just don’t click on the message. You don’t open it. So you let that shit ride.
It’s kind of Schroedinger’s notification. That little red number is sitting there to show me there’s a message waiting, and I see it. Is it another cute picture of a kid? is it a silly pet photo? is it an apology for years of douche behavior? is it a Pepe the frog meme or some kind of racist rant?
Who knows!
In my regular life, I am the kind of person who cannot abide an uncleared notification. i just cannot abide. i must click. i must clear it. i have zero unread messages in my email inbox and have had zero at all times for the last fifteen years. i cannot let things sit unread.
but somehow, knowing what a fuck Zuckerberg is, I can do it. I can just let that sit there. You sit there, red 1. I’m not clicking on you until December.
(Your picture was not posted)
ok so i dislike facebook but my mom uses it and it’s the best way to know things like, which of my cousins are pregnant, etc. that sort of thing.
i signed up for it in its heyday, and coincidentally when i was doing roller derby and met new people a lot, so. among various other things. and i was real liberal about friending people, so i’ve got like 700 facebook “friends” at this point. i mean, i never put anything real personal up there, so it didn’t matter?
(behind the cut: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Just Ignore Messenger)
but then they changed the direct messaging system to be this freestanding app, of course, and i declined to install Messenger. i don’t chat on facebook, i really just don’t. if you send me a message, i’ll read it eventually when i’m on my desktop and in the browser. i’ve made posts about this several times but of course you can’t, like, pin a tweet on your facebook profile, so people don’t know. if i see there’s a message from someone, i’ll look on there after a while.
there’s one particular facebook friend though… i blocked him on twitter because he was sending me fucking Pepe the Frog memes, and if i retweeted something he was replying to me and to the OP about, like, reactionary shit. i was finally like bro, your shit is stupid and indistinguishable from the general Internet of Shit, so I’m blocking your ass. but he’s still on my FB. And he seems to have recognized that he fucked up at least to an extent; he’s got to have noticed that I softblocked him there too, because I Do Not Want to see his memes. But he’s got a wife I like fine, and a kid I’m generically interested in, and so he sent me a Messenger message a while back, and I waited a couple weeks and finally clicked on it and sure enough, it was a cute photo of his kid with a pumpkin from Halloween, because that’s cute. so I wrote back “aww pumpkins :)” and that was that.
He wrote back like instantly. Clearly this is a person who uses Facebook messenger like an IM. Well, he’s also been around long enough to have already gotten my “oh hey sorry i don’t check this” response, mmm, four times? so like. And it just took me 2 weeks to reply to your cute kid on a pumpkin overture, and everyone knows cute kids on a pumpkin are like, a form of currency in some societies, so like
I let that shit sit there for a couple of weeks, and looked at it today, and it’s like, a conversational opening gambit about a thing we both used to be involved with. I wrote back something noncommittal and closed the window. I just got a notification that he wrote back again. … Listen, I know where he lives, he’s in my timezone, and it’s not yet 6am. really dude??!
anyway. Here’s the thing with Messenger. I mean, with Facebook in general. Everything about that site, they have been forced to admit, is designed to give you the optimally addictive user experience. It is specifically and explicitly designed, as they have legally, under threat of criminal prosecution, admitted in courts of law, to make you a slave to clicking it. Who is old enough to remember when they added the feature on Messages that showed senders when you’d seen their message? Who here was outraged because this does nothing to serve the interests of the users and only serves to increase friction between users, thereby creating additional drama?
Anyway. The foolproof method, my friends, to avoiding that happening, is that you just don’t click on the message. You don’t open it. So you let that shit ride.
It’s kind of Schroedinger’s notification. That little red number is sitting there to show me there’s a message waiting, and I see it. Is it another cute picture of a kid? is it a silly pet photo? is it an apology for years of douche behavior? is it a Pepe the frog meme or some kind of racist rant?
Who knows!
In my regular life, I am the kind of person who cannot abide an uncleared notification. i just cannot abide. i must click. i must clear it. i have zero unread messages in my email inbox and have had zero at all times for the last fifteen years. i cannot let things sit unread.
but somehow, knowing what a fuck Zuckerberg is, I can do it. I can just let that sit there. You sit there, red 1. I’m not clicking on you until December.
(Your picture was not posted)
