Sure, there _are_, but also don't underestimate humans...
> Nine young backpackers were rushed to hospital in the west Australian city of Perth after snorting a drug they mistook for cocaine. Three remain in critical condition after *ingesting the mystery white powder which arrived in the post addressed to someone else*
> The bystander states that the older man is a “death with dignity” patient who invited loved ones to be present while he consumed the [Medical Aid in Dying] medication. After his first swallow, he remarked, “Man that burns!” The younger man said, “Let me see,” and then also took a swallow.
It's been nine days, and I've been thinking sporadically about your comment. The two links you provided are great to make your point. Specially the second.
> She remarks that the older man “should be dead” and the younger one “should be alive.”
> it's easy to stop using Facebook. It's a lot harder to stop using Google or Amazon.
Not in my country, where Facebook owns basically the entire messaging space through Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. I have been able to switch my default search engine, email provider, mobile OS, office suite, etc. from Google no problem, but the network effect has been too strong to get most of my friends out of Meta's ad network. It doesn't help that most groups and basically all events are organized through there.
The only real messaging alternative with significant adoption at this point seems to be Telegram, which I cannot support for numerous reasons, primarily for the founder selling the entire user base of vkontakte to an authoritarian state.
One thing I have noticed is that local businesses don't have websites any more, they have Facebook pages instead. So if you want to find out about local events, Facebook is the only way.
As sibling said, using the mautrix bridges. I started with just bridge mode I think, and then switched to puppet mode, which seemed to integrate much better. Pictures and everything work fine.
However, you have to maintain a homeserver, which is not for everyone. If wouldn't have one already, I would just pay the element.io service which includes bridging (but I haven't tried it out).
Over the course of 5-6 years, I managed to move everyone that is important enough to me to Telegram. I don't care about privacy at all, I just couldn't stand the wrong abrasive spit-in-your-face whatsapp UX. It's funny how facebook was enshitified long before it was cool.
Now I don't have notifications enabled for Whatsapp and I rarely answer messages there. It makes me a freak by many standards but I'm free from enshitification in this regard!
The event organizing space in my country is all Facebook events, it begs some proper disruption. I'm no fan of Apple's walled garden, because I believe public events should be fully accessible to the public, but it's hard to understate how bad Facebook events are if you do not use its apps and don't have an account. I'm talking about things like missing a crucial time/location change from the organizer because Facebook does not show non-logged in users any event posts. So, while I hope that Apple fails at walling off events, I do hope some proper disruption happens in the space.
The recent Matrix movie is certainly bad, but I strongly believe that a single change would have been cool: in the scenes where it's revealed to the viewer that Neo looks like a different man[1], he should look like Cypher. Someone famous, important, struggling to reintegrate, joylessly chewing on some steak, etc. ...
Thanks, but I don't really see how these articles support the claim that their ad network is more efficient. As you note, the first article has a single anecdata point about it actually being 10-15% worse, while the second one basically says 'trust me bro'. Also of note from the second article is the fact that the ad spend would actually increase.
Of course, if businesses are gullible enough to believe facebook when it fudges up some brand lift metrics without having a real impact on conversions, that's their choice. Trusting facebook to report any analytics is how you take your business behind the barn and help it pivot to video. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video
