No one has commented, so I COULD just erase the whole Yahoo News bit altogether, but I'm kind of amused by my gaffe.

I do have an internal rule that I can edit the OP ruthlessly until the first comment has been made. However, I also have a competing rule that any time I have an impulse to post, I should exercise it and not overthink it, lest I develop any learned hesitancy towards posting.

Wait.

Maybe I'll just lightly bury this whole thing under a new check in thread. Toss a little soil on top.

3: you rang?

Just commenting.

It's an interesting thing, that at this point, when it comes to political or politics-proximate issues, if it's in the FTFNYT, I just discount it immediately. Don't even wanna pollute my intake, b/c I'd have to figure out cui bono, and who has the patience for that?

I really hope Facebook is dying. If MySpace comes back, I'll try it this time.

If MySpace comes back, I'll probably just keep posting here.

Oddly, I just read that article at the New York Times website, before I saw your post.

It seems like people have been saying for a while that kids don't use Facebook -- that iconic quote "Facebook is for old people" is in history textbooks by now, right? But that's about the Facebook platform itself -- no snot-nosed kid has told a reporter that "Instagram is for old people" yet. Right?

1: That's really interesting. I had read that piece in the NYT, but wouldn't otherwise have realized that's where it came from. The NYT banner doesn't get much space on that page.

It's nice to think of Facebook's eventual demise. And while Donald Trump, as a tax cheat, has largely escaped one of life's certainties, he will at most only delay the other.

Still, there's plenty of opportunity left for Facebook and Trump to engage in fantastically harmful mischief.

I just feel smug that I've put so many people's birthdays in my Google Calendar instead of relying on FB to remember. Of course, if Calendar goes the way of Reader, I'm screwed.

I want to gloat about Facebook's misfortune to a large audience, but I don't have anywhere to do it.

FB is already back up for me, although it's throwing a lot of errors.

Fixed That For New York Times...?

Facebook will die eventually bc everything does, but it'll be due to long-term trends where youth flee from social media with too many old people on it, not because of an internal slide deck created by a junior UX researcher in 2017.

The leaker's Burning Man background is funny to me. Wonder if that's where she reached the conclusion that this was a thing she must do.

Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs and Sheets will be the last things to go; they're so heavily used internally that they'd only go away if the lights were being turned out entirely.

14: The ad revenue from horse de-worming resellers must have plummeted.

You can export your Google Calendar: I didn't check what format it's in, but I'd bet you can import that elsewhere.
You can export your Google Contacts as a CSV.
and you can set GMail to forward all your messages to some forwarding address.

I do the last pretty much continuously, so I have all my mail mirrored on another machine.

And last, IIRC, you can get a zip file of your entire Google data set.

It doesn't solve the problem of what to use instead. But they don't hold your data hostage.

I've been using Apple's Calendar, mail, and address book, though I have resisted storing anything on their cloud (so my calendar stuff is stored on my laptop only, no syncing with anything else). For my loyalty to their OS Apple rewards me AIMHMHB by erasing all contacts and calendar events every two to three years. So far I have been able to hang on to my old mail but things are slipping lately on the mail front, too.

Headline: Zuckerberg apologises for 6 hour fb shutdown. I didn't notice. I saw it was down, so I just came across and read threads on Unfogged.

I have a question related to the ways that Facebook could be harming our kids and a threat to democracy. I've never been a big Facebook user, so I didn't see it/ am pretty oblivious. When I did use it, I looked at my friends comments and birthdays. I don't click through to anything. I hear how people become radicalized on Facebook and join Qanon that way, and I'm curious about the experience of people here who were heavier users. Did you notice ad or click on other links and find that they led you to lefty sites? I think I just tune out the advertising.

I believe the danger comes from the algorithmic newsfeed: it always shows you at the top of the page the stories it reckons will maximise the time you spend on facebook. This works by finding stories like the ones you spend most time on and/or reacted most violently to in the past. So in one sense it does the opposite of blocking someone whose opinions upset you.

Youtube works the same way. So if I spend five minutes watching in mounting disbelief a video explaining that Obama is a lizard, the algorithm will show me more of those the next time I log on.

Yeah, fairly recently (under a year or so?) FB started feeding me videos that start running as I scroll past, and it has successfully determined that it can get my attention with cute animals often enough that it keeps trying. I'm not getting lefty politics, but I don't want political news on video, or at the level FB stories tend to be pitched at even if I agree with them, so I scroll past anything in that category without pausing.

I get weird handyman projects done somewhere in Asia, a Russian guy casting metal things, and outdoor cooking from somewhere like Uzbekistan.

Honestly, the outdoor cooking sometimes looks disgusting because they keep boiling meat.