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Mehbook

Remove emotive content from the user interface of social networking
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Other social networking sites are available. This would be one such, and it would use a red and green colour scheme.

Yesterday one of my FB "friends" was becoming distressed at the lack of response she received from people when she attempts to communicate with them. I'm pretty sure this is down to a combination of craving attention and not understanding the algorithm which seems to hide people's statuses. Another factor is the fact that we're encouraged to call contacts on FB "friends" and consider ourselves to "like" statuses and comments. This is all well and good but clearly it does tend to upset people sometimes. I personally suspect our brains did not evolve under selective pressure to participate in online social networking, at least specifically, and that it may in fact be organically impossible to interact authentically more than somewhat using such media.

Consequently, I suggest a more emotionally neutral social networking service. You don't have "friends" but "contacts". You don't "like" statuses or comments, just "note" them. There are no images. In fact, this could just be Ponyhoof but much less fancy, more or less.

So yeah, a Ponyhoof-type interface to FB which makes it a whole lot more phlegmatic. This could've been Google Plus were it not for the fact that Google cocked it up by pushing it in people's faces, so there you go, we need something else.

nineteenthly, Feb 27 2017

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       It should be called 'MehBook', as in "Ooh, nineteenthly just 'casual acquaintanced' me on MehBook!"
hippo, Feb 27 2017
  

       Right, well for that I'm changing the title!
nineteenthly, Feb 27 2017
  

       It depends on how much they bleed into each other, which is partly generational. Even so, that is a factor [Ian].
nineteenthly, Feb 27 2017
  

       I have no truck with social media - the HB is about as social as I want to get.   

       Howevertheless, I suspect that (as [19thly] mentioned), a lot of the problem stems from the "Like" button, the "Kudos" button on various fora, and potentially even our very own bun/bone button. What kind of person considers it meaningful to "like" or be "liked", a la Facebook?   

       I expect any day to overhear a conversation along the lines of "I liked the way you presented the sales figures this morning." "Oh shit! I didn't mean to even post them!"
MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 27 2017
  

       In MehBook, the 'like' button will be replaced with a 'grudgingly acknowledge the existence of' button.
hippo, Feb 27 2017
  

       There's a whole definition thing going on here. If friends are defined as people you like, FB friends are people you FB like, which is not really liking, as in "My baby just died" - <like>.
nineteenthly, Feb 27 2017
  

       //organically impossible to interact authentically more than somewhat//   

       Authenticity in this sense is over-rated ... if it's the sense I think it is, which it may not be.
pertinax, Feb 27 2017
  

       That's quite possible but there's still the problem of mistaking something else for it.
nineteenthly, Feb 28 2017
  

       Isn't what's described already exist in the form of LinkedIn? Certain peculiarities of appearance aside. LinkedIn is the social network no one has any desire to participate in, where any liking or sharing is motivated not by a shared feeling or a need for petty self expression but instead because each represents a penny-fraction transaction, a marginal contribution to your own financial comfort, of even more negligible utility to those of your colleagues and prospective colleagues likewise staring at their phones, at the everscrolling list of besuited corporate desperate. Yes, each click is, I have calculated it, worth exactly one forty billionth of whatever passes for the smallest coinage in your jurisdiction, being not entirely coincidentally the base economic value of one meh.
calum, Feb 28 2017
  

       [+] for an interesting idea I may have just ruined.
notexactly, Mar 04 2017
  
      
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