146 - Shrimp Jesus and the Death of Facebook

The Worst of All Possible Worlds

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The lads made this episode with their own hands! 😊 Why do episodes like this never get likes? 😢💔 AmenAmenAmen. 🙏🇺🇸 It is our birthday and nobody wished us one. So excited to begin our cake journey. 🎂 Did you notice when it left you? Why don’t you see these anymore? Gone too soon! ✝️ The joy, the bursts of pleasure, the camaraderie? She did good work, we’re so proud of her! 🤩 This is a place of ghosts. King Charles visited Sudan to feed the hungry children! 🫅🇸🇩 And soon you will join us in the mist. Wow, made it to 100, who else can relate? 💯 Amen.

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Media Referenced in this Episode:

• Facebook blog posts
  • September 5, 2006 - Facebook deprecates the original Wall in favor of the News Feed. A post made to someone else’s profile can now show up on the home page of anyone who is friends with that person
  • September 5, 2006 - Mark Zuckerberg makes a highly defensive and condescending post responding to negative feedback about the shift to the news feed
  • September 8, 2006 - Zucc makes a considerably more measured follow-up post introducing new privacy settings but doubling down on his commitment to “free flow of information on the internet”
  • November 6, 2007 - Facebook introduces its new social ad platform in tandem with Pages, implementing the final piece of its core user monetization strategy
  • February 12, 2009 - Facebook introduces the Like button
  • February 24, 2016 - Facebook rolls out Reactions (love, haha, wow, sad, angery) globally

• News articles:
  • “Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users” by Harry Davies. The Guardian. December 11th, 2015.
  • “A timeline of Facebook's privacy issues — and its responses” by Alyssa Newcomb. NBC News. March 24, 2018
  • “Five Points for Anger, One for a ‘Like’: How Facebook’s Formula Fostered Rage and Misinformation” by Jeremy B. Merrill and Will Oremus. Washington Post. October 26th, 2021
  • How Spammers, Scammers and Creators Leverage AI-Generated Images on Facebook for Audience Growth by Renee DiResta and Josh A. Goldstein. Pre-print paper, Stanford University.
  • Facebook’s Algorithm Is Boosting AI Spam That Links to AI-Generated, Ad-Laden Click Farms by Jason Koebler. 404 Media, March 19, 2024
  • Facebook’s AI Spam Isn’t the ‘Dead Internet’: It’s the Zombie Internet by Jason Koebler. 404 Media, May 2, 2024

• Misc.
  • ”AI is Ruining the Internet” by Drew Gooden.

Commercial: “Scrolling Through Your Old Facebook Feed at 4AM”

• Round Here Piano Cover by John Baumgardn