How 41 People in Lithuania Took Over Your Facebook Feed

Cannibalism -- the consumers provide the content they consume for free. This guy's going to turn a 20 million dollar profit this year. repackaging it. Meanwhile every move you make on the internet is going into data bases which are not only used for selling you stuff and spying on you -- they are used for creating AI because AI requires more information than all the rest of it combined. Click away, friends, click away. Won't it be cool when your car drives itself so you don't have to stop stuffing your consciousness with Bored Panda pablum on the way to your destination?

I think the model may be Readers Digest 1945~48. It's not what it was, but it's still around...

It’s got a great name, too. Who doesn’t love pandas, even if the posts are about something else?

The greatest brains of a generation are figuring out how to get other brains to watch cat videos. Pathetic, but then again, we get what we deserve.

Groundbreaking. This is reminding me of all the fat people who escaped earth in Pixar's "Wall-e" and are seating in floating chairs on a spaceship drinking big gulp while looking at tv screens and ads all day long, waiting to be able to come back to earth after robots like have cleaned up their messes... this will not end well for humanity.

If websites want to be less dependent on FB, they need to allow user interaction. Case in point: The New York Times. NYT survives and thrives on it's own online, I would guess, largely from the content created by the comments section. How much longer are readers floating around NYT reading comments after the they read the article. And, even more so if they choose to craft a comment. NYT has the best comment section of all the major papers. I'll bet it has the strongest growth and most stable online subscription loyalty. I'll bet WSJ and the Washington Post are envious and taking note. NYT has actually succeeded at creating a user community of sorts. If Bored Panda wants to create a solid foundation independent of FB's fickle algorithms, it needs to attract people's creative reactions to their content on THEIR website, not Facebook's. I am unsure what Bored Panda offers in the form of user interaction, but I would guess, since it's not mentioned in this article, that it's use is marginal or unattractive. Websites that have staying power thrive because of people power, user posts, reader comments. Bored Panda should parlay FB eyes to create their own Panda community. Make it cool to be a Panda.

Interesting that FB is creating a separate feed for these kind of services. I’ve been blocking them for several years (especially political ones, of any stripe) because I want to hear from my friends, not see what they think is amusing or outrageous. I quickly discovered that many, even very active people, post almost no original content. You don’t actually hear from people, like only ever talking about the weather even with your closest friends. I am slowly leaving FB behind, as I am sick of the lack of true community, fake notifications, and posts that refuse to leave my feed. I’ve gone back (of sorts) to a blogging service with a time based feed and no like buttons. People talking to each other! Actually listening! Imagine that! Companies like this, for better or worse, are a flash in the pan. They rise and fall, and if they are lucky, make money for a while. Facebook too will not be forever.

Benign for sure, but also a big-time occupier of our time. Since I have gotten off Facebook (and am much happier for it), I have friends who send me Bored Panda links daily. It's fluff, and after a while it gets old. Now they go into Spam directly. Real life may not be fun at all times, but living in the marshmallow world of innocuous or kind of innocuous offerings like these only serves to distract us from what's going on around us. And can become suffocating. Caveat emptor!

It will be FaceBook that takes the big plunge into VR. They will replace "likes" with options to "share" a "pat on the back," "fist bump" and "quickie foot rub". The latter, of course, will be the test to see if FaceBook should create another entity called FaceBed, where users can "interact" and "communicate in meaningful ways." Dinosaurs are laughing at us.

Let's face it. The people in such countries an Lithuania are light years ahed of The Lithuanians and Estonians are light years ahead of the western European countries and the United states when it comes to computer science and many other high tech disciplines.. Their speed and degree of connectivity are rivaled by none and high tech (in the area of computers) seems to be where they decided to invest all of their effort to become top players on the world stage since they don't have the manpower to compete in the military sphere. Thankfully, they are not malicious and tend to do things like this all in fun. They actually love and respect the free countries in the world being among the most free in the world themselves.

Just imagine if time were electrical power, millions of wasted hours looking at cats and dogs could be powering the moon shot or at least one of whatshisnames electrical cars. people are spending hours doing useless activites--one wonders how much work time is spent there--instead of learn a language, Chinese, for example, because they will soon be the new landlords of the place at 1600 Pennsylvania ave. at my age, I wish I could back to reclaim many my frittered-away hours. I'll soon be in a box, but wish that I had been more observant about how I spent my time. I have many things that I still want to do but alas, the candle is nearly burnt out. Time lost can never be made up.

OMG Fox New published 51,919 articles in October?! 10x CNN?!

A better title for this hit piece against a well-intentioned and apolitical startup would be, "How 41 People in Lithuania Threaten Our Mission to Control Your Mind."

"How 41 People in Lithuania Took Over Your Facebook Feed" This headline is wrong: I have no Facebook feed.

What an odd headline. Is the NYT only for people with Facebook accounts? Nobody took over my Facebook timeline because I don't have one.

Is Facebook really much more than an aphrodisiac for narcissists? The fix is easy, get off of FB, get off of twitter. Contact with people in person ("what", I'd have to have social skills and get off of my cell phone?") Want your family to see your photos? Send them in an email! Come on, we walked right into it. You really don't need to be fed unfiltered nonsense from hostile countries.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter are cancers on our society by publishing lies in the form of news and advertisements. If they were selling a physical product, they would be sued for fraud, but "free speech" allows them to make money on advertising lies.

I do wonder who is really being “protected” here- the consumers’ eyes, shielded from sensationalism? I worked for such a news site during the algorithm fiasco, and let me tell you- lots of people love clicking on that which Facebook determines to be junk. You know why? Because they are choosing to click on whatever they want to click on. On the other hand, you have countless media and news companies with many employees, who in turn, lose their jobs and suffer mightily because they chose (or more likely than not, we’re driven out of necessity) to work for a product founded upon a traffic source which no longer exists. So, who suffers more, really - Facebook users who have to see some articles they don’t like in their newsfeeds, or media employees who can’t make a living, for which they and their families suffer?

In reading this article, and that sudden changes by Facebook can cause disruption to the businesses using their platform, I'm struck by the similarity to the early days of creating embedded code. There was no process, only chaos. Software folks would change something, and suddenly the product wouldn't work, or work the same way. Sometimes the hardware teams would be blind-sided by these changes. Relying on Facebook for consistency seems to be a hazard.

The change in algorithms by Facebook and Google, allegedly to weed out 'fake news' is the classic Trojan Horse. First, it's impossible to objectively define 'fake news.' If I say something that's a fact. But if what I say contains a lie, does that turn it into fake news? And what if a third party reports on what I said, including my lie, does that report become 'fake news'? Bored Panda should be concerned because these digital giants are steering traffic away from sites that they, on their own with no public standards have decided are 'fake news.' Along the way they have reduced the traffic to over 200 left leaning web sites from 40% to 70%. Coincidence? Hardly. And, just for the record Google does have a number of government contracts, including with the NSA.

The headline is deplorable. In a different environment it might be an acceptable rhetorical exaggeration, but as things are, it makes it sound as if this harmless company is engaged in political hacking, which according to the article's content, they've gone out of their way not to do.

Note the disconnect here between the alarming headline, "How 41 People in Lithuania Took Over Your Facebook Feed," and the entirely benign story: They simply try to make an honest euro helping to "fight boredom with art and good news stories" and quietly hope that FB does not make them "disappear with the push of a button."

I remember when the Internet was developed by researchers at MIT, Berkeley, and other major universities. Bill Gates had nothing to do with any of it. Actually he's famously known for seeing the Internet as a flash-in-the-pan and didn't think Windows needed to deal with any of it until the mid-1990s. Internet technologies were designed to enable secure communication among military sites after a nuclear attack. That's why it was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense. Commercialization came decades later.

Remember when computers couldn't talk to each other? Then Bill Gates bought the "windows" concept for $42,000 from a couple of unknown developers, somehow forced manufacturers to include the windows program with every computer sold and shortly after that The United States of America was connected via the internet. I thought it was wonderful. Then I heard a radio show host talking about the most used and profitable thing about the internet - porn. The fact that digital communication/commerce were allowed to run wild with no regulation is causing a global communications/truth meltdown and putting the world into the hands of the most evil people on the planet. I wonder if that is what Bill Gates and other digital pioneers had in mind? Destruction of the world as we know it? The only answer is for WE THE PEOPLE to collectively use OUR power to rein in the bad actors with selected/timed/promoted communication and commerce boycotts. WE THE PEOPLE have the real power and it's past time we use it.