Social Media Caveats

There seems to be a lot of traits that most major social media outlets like Twitter, facebook, instagram, and snapchat have in which there's some sort of inhibiting rule or some other seemingly nonsensical caveat to the things you choose to post.

Many message boards have supported post deleting, post editing, attachments, and many hundreds of thousands of characters for decades. It seems all these social media platforms have some sort of inherent quirk that is only marginally annoying, but pretty obvious.

Instagram bumped it's instagram stories limit from 15 second videos to 60 seconds. On facebook, your status updates can't be deleted or amended, but if people respond negatively to your statuses you can just delete their comments. If you want to have a discussion with someone you met on twitter, well get used to condensing everything into the most terse way of delivering a message as possible because you only get 140 characters. You want to show your friend a picture you got on snapchat? Ooops, too late you only get 10 seconds to view it.

What the fuck is the point of all this? They are just these weird manufactured rules that make it annoying but don't seem to have any reason to exist. Yet many different social media platforms include them like they're some sort of feature.

I guess you could probably make an argument as for why some of these things exist. Truthfully I don't use social media often enough to know if these things have been changed, or new things have been introduced. It's just weird that many of these things seem very limiting, easily fixable, and don't appear to be a side effect of some greater feature. Even the status updates on this site can't be amended once they're posted, like their permanance is an inherent quality of them being so popular. Still you can still edit any other post you make on this site. WTF?

Beats me.  Probably to keep people from posting shit like, "Like this if you think animal abuse is wrong" and then after accumulating so many likes, you edit the post to say, "Like this if you support animal abuse."

2 hours ago, 40oz said:

If you want to have a discussion with someone you met on twitter, well get used to condensing everything into the most terse way of delivering a message as possible because you only get 140 characters.

Pretty much the only thing I don't like about twitter is the 140 character limit which is annoying when you try to post a link but the link will take up a 3rd of the total amount of characters your putting in the tweet <_<

3 hours ago, Tracer said:

Beats me.  Probably to keep people from posting shit like, "Like this if you think animal abuse is wrong" and then after accumulating so many likes, you edit the post to say, "Like this if you support animal abuse."

That would be hilarious if you could do it though.

I used to, back when Facebook was newish and Myspace was still somewhat active.

15 hours ago, Tracer said:

Beats me.  Probably to keep people from posting shit like, "Like this if you think animal abuse is wrong" and then after accumulating so many likes, you edit the post to say, "Like this if you support animal abuse."

True, I didn't think of that. Still, wouldn't you say that falling for a troll attempt by forgetting to unlike something that's now the opposite of what you saw when you liked it in the first place is waaaay less toxic than posting about how your boss is a shitbag in a fit of rage, and not being able to delete it after you cool off the next morning, so your boss fires you and potential employers dont want to hire you?

People say "oooooo be careful what you post on social media" but you wouldn't have to be careful if you weren't bound to these fake rules.

I thought that Twitter rule is pretty much its main attraction? Like it's probably fun to try to condense your thoughts in a very short message, and I guess it kind of keeps everything from becoming too serious and long-winded. Dunno, I never used it myself. But without that rule it would be kind of like all the other sites, no? So maybe it's a way to make it unique?

Perhaps this is a somewhat new feature but you can delete statuses on Facebook. I've had it since 8th grade so as I've gotten older I've had to delete a lot of my teenage rantings. 

2 hours ago, 40oz said:

People say "oooooo be careful what you post on social media" but you wouldn't have to be careful if you weren't bound to these fake rules.

I have to disagree with this statement and its preceding example. When I managed a fast food joint, I would have wrote-up/fired said employee regardless of whether they posted something or if they were recorded saying/doing something about/for the business, (or even if enough people said enough times as witnesses and the person's attitude/words confirmed it) that is either detrimental to the business's reputation or something we wouldn't want to be associated with, because of the simple fact that it is a fire-able offense to begin with and posting it only provides tangible proof, making it kinda easier to just sever ties. Regardless of whether-or-not said "thing" is "taken down," edited, or covered up, people who are not associated with the business saw that, which hurts the business directly, and there is no refuting that there is a chance that post, video, or file was downloaded by somebody else who put it up elsewhere, (and that it still exists on a server somewhere anyway because "deleting" it doesn't actually delete it) and I don't like bad press for a place I want to be reputable; that people feel comfortable spending their money there, eating the food or accepting the services, is extremely important to me. Even if nothing winds up online, because remember businesses have had policies for stuff like this since before the internet, the word of a couple witnesses to a person saying/doing something frowned upon would also be enough to warrent disciplinary action, though there might be a bit more leniency when definitive proof cannot be attained and it's a word against another. But make no mistake that mark would still stain your career in the eyes of a manager if they feel the trust has been breached, and it takes time to get that back, once again all assuming a quick severing of ties doesn't precede the time required for this.

So in the end it has really nothing to do with posting stuff online, but posting stuff online does totally just put the proof right out there for employers to find quickly when somebody mentions, "hey did you see what x posted?" It's not because it's taboo to post things like that which makes people say not to post dirty laundry online; it's because it's comically stupid. Still, makes firing somebody easier! Lol. Case in point though: do you remember the video a couple years back of the walmart employees tossing around boxes of iPhones/iPads, boxes hitting the floor and probably breaking (expensive) product? Remember how it went viral to the point of being shown on the national TV news, then like the next day after it was reported the news reported that they were all fired? These are fire-able offenses to begin with, but to be certain going the step further to post these things online is dangling it in the face of your boss and might as well be a slap to the face/calling them stupid; truly ironic when the stupid one gets fired!

As for the topic at large: I don't use much social media any more. I used facebook a bit more when I was younger and of course myspace before that, but nowadays I rarely get on facebook; I actually forgot to thank people for wishing me a happy bday, but then again I havent even checked to see that anybody did, heh, though some people told me in person that they did and I thanked them there on the spot like a human bein--

Anyway, re: Twitter: I was always under the impression that the character limit was one of the biggest draws for the site (as Memfis said). I never made a twitter acct and dont ever get on there, so idk anything here from a user's perspective, but I understood that it was meant to fill a slightly different niche than facebook; same goes for Instagram when people technically could just post those types of things on their status on facebook. Then again perhaps the point of these fads are just to stay ahead of "the masses," or at least the old, heh.

Idk why we can't edit certain posts here on DW; it would be really nice to have a window for spellchecking, but at the same time if you want to compare it to the real world we can't take back or edit what we say anyway ;p just have to learn to be careful with our tongues (and conscious of our spelling, hehe).

Let me also state just real quick that getting written up is no big deal if you don't plan on continuing bad behavior, and if anything the manager should be more pissed than the employee for the employee making the manager waste both of their (and company's) times with a write-up, as well as for making the manager write-up/discipline somebody they might actually like, which is really shitty to have to do and which I straight up told the few people I had to write up, because I couldn't say much else that was on my mind, but I made sure that people knew it was them that caused this, not me. When you or somebody else gets pissed and tantrums online about an employer, you/they cause your/their own downfall, so why put definitive proof against yourself up for anybody to see? Lol

I'm not sure I'm following what it is youre disagreeing with. The context of that excerpt was that there are much more negative effects of facebook withholding the ability to delete or modify your own facebook posts than there are positive effects of making them permanent.

Although MA did say you can delete them now, which I was not aware of so that particular example is moot anyway.

I'm interested in hearing more about the attraction of twitter 140 character limit -- that post certainly wouldn't have fit in a tweet but people argue about stuff on twitter all the time.

I'm disagreeing with the shifting of blame off of oneself for one's own actions and onto another, in this case facespace or twitagram. I'm saying that it doesn't matter what their rules are, throwing a tantrum and cursing out your boss or your company isn't acceptable regardless of whether you do it online or not, (though online is considerably more public) but online has that extra "world's dumbest ___" vibe to it ;p Just need some c-list celebrities to make halfway funny, snide remarks. So I'm saying that I have no sympathy for the example; don't say today what you won't stand by tomorrow.

Of course with the amount of selective posting/replying that you do I'm really not surprised you see the blame as facespace's and not the user who posted said tantrum. As a matter of fact, the sentiments and levels of paranoid delusions (they are together and doing this against me!) here sound fairly closely akin to what I've heard come out of your podcast when interviewing banned DW members and talking about DW... but then again, hey, at least those portions are actually/technically "Doom related..."

None of it will matter when I fulfill my duty of eradicating the human race once and for all.

8 hours ago, 40oz said:

True, I didn't think of that. Still, wouldn't you say that falling for a troll attempt by forgetting to unlike something that's now the opposite of what you saw when you liked it in the first place is waaaay less toxic than posting about how your boss is a shitbag in a fit of rage, and not being able to delete it after you cool off the next morning, so your boss fires you and potential employers dont want to hire you?

 

People say "oooooo be careful what you post on social media" but you wouldn't have to be careful if you weren't bound to these fake rules.

18 hours ago, Red said:

None of it will matter when I fulfill my duty of eradicating the human race once and for all.

Is this the kind of incriminating post you were referring to, @40oz?  Haha

Aren't what you're mentioning about Facebook, instagram e t c their so called "selling point"? Maybe I am approaching this issue from a wrong angle  dunno.

5 hours ago, NeedHealth said:

Aren't what you're mentioning about Facebook, instagram e t c their so called "selling point"? Maybe I am approaching this issue from a wrong angle  dunno.

When i found out all my high school friends had a facebook, that's what encouraged me to make a profile.

Is there a marketing campaign or old news articles that talk about these things like they're cool?

Heh, so apparently Twitter is considering doubling the character limit for some languages now? That's kind of surprising and it makes my statement less credible.

I personally do not have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

The only type of social media I'd say I take part in is this forum and maybe Steam if you count it's social features. I personally despise the general effect I've observed from social media, Twitter in particular, as I can rarely see any positive ways to look at it. I am a person who tries to look at things from multiple angles and understand why others may disagree with me. Most alternative angles I look at for this issue are either illogical to me or ignore something I believe to be very significant. My personal opinion is that most social media devolves language into an incomprehensible mess if it is allowed to, and so far it has been. I cannot for the life of me see how a 140 character limit does anything to preserve the intelligence of a person's logic when they need to condense it. Condensed reasoning almost always loses the majority of what made it reasonable in the first place.

I'd much rather read a long-winded four-page post on this forum and understand exactly what the poster is trying to communicate instead of a single sentence on Twitter that makes no sense because the poster had no way of accurately expressing them self within the space. Not to mention, character limits force you to misspell words deliberately to save space, which is unacceptable in all circumstances beyond stylistic dialogue. I am personally offended when I see someone who speaks English natively write worse than someone who speaks a foreign language natively (not offended by the person who learned to speak English, offended by the person who speaks it but can't write it properly). Just imagine if I had to condense that last sentence down because of a character limit, I would have been forced to exclude what is parenthesized and you may have misread it as me being offended by the person who doesn't speak English natively.

Of course not all of my problems with the modern developments of language stem from social media, but most of it either comes directly or indirectly from it. My anger towards this issue at this time may have been raised slightly due to current events I don't care to mention right now.

It's all short and to the point so it can be quickly consumed and forgotten. Just how the masses like it.

It's a good way to see people for who they really are when it's blunt and to the point. Most people therefore are fucking worthless.