Please Let’s Have No More Unfriendly Comments About FriendFeed

While it may not have carved out the giant slice of the social media pie that Twitter has, FriendFeed  has something truly exceptional: The individuals who make up the FF community. It is a community that is largely comprised of  good-hearted, wicked-witted and fierce-brained souls who are deeply loyal to each other.

That FriendFeed is special is something I firmly believe — even as a former member of that particular community. (A status revealed in the interest of full disclosure. Similarly, it should be noted that my reasons for leaving had nothing to do with the service or the other folks using it. If you have a year where two people to whom your family is close die in rapid succession, you too might consider spending much more time connecting with those important to you face-to-face as opposed to screen-to-screen.)

But that community is also one that has been feeling more than a little worried ever since Facebook bought up FriendFeed, a feeling perhaps best summarized at the time it happened in this witty yet wise post by Louis Gray.

Thus, it is completely understandable that the community took some offense to Robert Scoble’s comment on the current state of FriendFeed the other day. If someone hurts your friends, you get angry. You defend your friends. Simple as that. And that’s just what people did – some eloquently and some in a more brusque manner. But the reactions to Scoble’s comment that can be glimpsed below the initial post demonstrate what is best about FriendFeed – it is an excellent forum for rapid interchange and discourse rather than just a way to broadcast your own “look at me, look at me!” message. (I’m looking at you Twitter.)

It seems unlikely that Scoble realized quite how disrespectful the tone of his comment seemed or how massive the impact of one of FF’s foremost cheerleaders seemingly turning on it would be — though he almost certainly has an inkling of it now.

Consider the impassioned and articulate response to Scoble crafted by FFer Lindsay Donaghe:

“<plea>
Please, Robert, I know that you’re disappointed in what has happened to FriendFeed and you feel like you need to take out your frustrations on something, but it’s time to take your own advice and leave quietly if you’re going to leave. FriendFeed may not serve your particular needs anymore but your needs seem to be very specific, decidedly not mainstream, and difficult to comply to. That doesn’t mean that FriendFeed is not a valuable service to others with different needs. You don’t have to leave, but there’s no point in making things harder for the rest of us who support the service by trying to hammer the nails in the coffin while we are still pushing up the the lid for air.

You are actively fulfilling your own prophecy by chasing people away from FriendFeed and inciting people there to unsub and block you so that your feed is less and less interesting. And then you are insulting the rest of us by declaring that all the geeks have left when it’s your own efforts in sabotage (or lack of in pruning your feeds) that are making your experience worse, while claiming that you’re trying to spur someone into action to be FriendFeed’s new hero. But we don’t have that knight in shining armor to champion for FriendFeed and return it to its former glory. If anything, you were the most likely candidate. Now we just want to be left alone to use FriendFeed the way we are comfortable to using it. It’s time to stop the abuse.
</plea>”

How many other online communities would inspire commentary with that much depth of feeling and intelligence behind it?

Social Media And Its Role In The Panic-demic

As former member of the fourth estate, I feel quite elegiac about the sound of the presses slowing towards an inevitable stop. Ever since I saw His Girl Friday as a very small child, I wanted to be a reporter. [And who wouldn't - Roz Russell was gorgeous, bantered beautifully with even more beautiful Cary Grant and got to do good through the power of the word!]

Today, however, I find myself in the surprising  and uncomfortable position of being more than a little miffed at my paper- and broadcast-based journalistic brethren. Their eagerness to point the finger at social media as panic-mongers of DOOM as the Swine Flu crisis develops.

REACTIONARY REACTIONS?

An example of the digi-pointing can be found in a blog by Milo Yiannopolous of the UK’s Telegraph who notes:

Twitterers are saturating the Twitterverse with scaremongering and nonsense about swine flu via the #swineflu hashtag. Let us be clear: swine flu aint some hot internet meme. It’s not a lolcat or a great flash game. It is a serious disease.

The speed with which idle chatter about swine flu is propagating, at the hands of those (it seems almost wilfully) ignorant of the facts, is terrifying and may cost lives. It has now become impossible to separate hysteria from vital news. For perhaps the first time, Twitter has become a hindrance and not a help to newsgathering and to the public seeking information.

And closer to home, the usually level-headed and excellent news source NPR has also chimed in, with  Evgeny Morozov noting that

despite all the recent Twitter-enthusiasm about this platform’s unique power to alert millions of people in decentralized and previously unavailable ways, there are quite a few reasons to be concerned about Twitter’s role in facilitating an unnecessary global panic about swine flu.

You’ll forgive me if I state that this sounds a bit like sour grapes. True, one of the justifiable concerns about social media is that there is a dearth of fact-checking. And yes, there are idiots out there who will play the Web 2.0 version of the game of telephone, terror edition.  But has there never been a panic caused by a broadcast network or a newspaper? Truly? Rumours never have flown because of a hyperbolic headline or an over-emphatic piece on a 24 hour news network?

ANOTHER LOOK AT SOCIAL MEDIA IN RELATION TO SWINE FLU

No one is downplaying the fact that this is a potentially deadly illness and that people have been tested positive for it on several continents. The threat is real and frightening.

However, it is also true that almost nobody has looked at the positive ways social media has been used in the course of this porcine pandemic.

Just to offer a few examples:

The Centre for Disease Control has been offering updates on Twitter such as

“20 confirmed cases of swine flu in U.S. 1 hospitalized. All have fully recovered. http://bit.ly/uycgL #swineflu”

And over on FriendFeed, one of its users has created a Swine Flu room which aggregates “various real-time information streams on swine flu from across the web,” making it a reliable and timely source of information.

The CDC has also used YouTube to present a video by Dr. Joe Bresee of its Influenza Division dealing with the signs, symptoms, transmission and treatment of Swine Flu.

So, in fact, social media has been a means for calming the public and providing it with a stream of accurate and useful information – which is not a story you are likely to see in your local paper, if in fact you still have one.

FriendFeed: Trolling for Trouble?

Social media can be a wonderful experience.

As anyone who looks at this blog with any frequency knows, I have been extolling the virtues of FriendFeed for some time.

Friendfeed is  a “lifestream aggregator.” What that means in “non-tech-speak” is that it is a place you can bring together all your various feeds. As Wikipedia astutely noted:

“Friendfeed consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS/ Atom feed. Users can use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share (and comment) with friends.

But it is more than that. So much more.

THE GOOD

FriendFeed is a place populated by a diverse group of individuals, some extremely intelligent. Not a day goes by where I do not learn something new about technology, arts, sports, literature and current events. And almost always I learn these things hours if not days before the mainstream media gets around to discussing the topics in question.  So FF is indeed a place to learn.

FriendFeed is also a place to interact. There are some truly complex, thoughtful, warm and witty people on there. For some, FF has become a  very strong community.

THE REALLY GOOD

A great example of this was the recent birth of a beautiful baby girl. So many people were so excited about the pregnancy and the birth – which the father actually twittered but still, FF was kept apprised. And there was genuine rejoicing over her entrance into the world.

And if people have connected through FF for a long time, they have developed shared jokes, common interests and a genuine concern for each other. There’s even been an FF-sparked romance between two really funny, smart, spirited and lovely individuals.

Why then am I thinking of leaving this community if it is all lollipops and rainbows and kittens? [LOL Cats to be more specific.]

THE BAD

It may be the phases of the moon or growing pains or the fact that the discussion of politics can bring out the worst in people. But as of late, many pockets of FF have been filled with drama and sniping and comments that are clearly designed to provoke people.

In the darker corners of FF, the  trolls have been out in force. For those not familiar with the term, here is a very good definition of a troll from a public-domain document known as The Jargon File:

An individual who… regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks… for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand – they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics….

Most of the time I can ignore such behaviour. As the mother of a crafty, clever 4-year-old, I’ve been well-trained to do so: Tantruming wee children and trolls are not all that different. They both want attention and they want it NOW.

At least the children are cute.

THE UGLY

Common courtesy has become an oxymoron it seems. (Or maybe morons just don’t know how to be courteous? )

Right now on FF, many people seem to have lost the ability to agree to disagree or to debate things they don’t see eye-to-eye on civilly.

Today I reached my limit during a discussion of the Inauguration of President Obama. There has been a lot of excitement and hope generated by the Obama over on FF. And apparently trolls don’t like hope.

In response to a series of primarily positive comments I made, someone suggested that I go do something rather nasty.

That’s usually not a problem for me except what they suggested — an action that could be thought of as somewhat benign — was in fact the method used by someone I loved to end their existence. And having to relive that- to plummet to that kind of despair after having been so full of hope and joy – was too much.

The final straw snapped.

CONCLUSION

But please don’t take this as a condemnation of FriendFeed. With exceptions, it is a magnificent and lively group of  intriguing, intelligent souls. You just need to have infinite patience to deal with the few vile and insistent trolls oozing out from under that particular community’s bridge.

Alas,  my patience has reached its limits – and thus, regretfully, my time on FF likely has too.

Chewing the Fat

I’ll admit it. I’m mad- probably in all senses of the word, but today in the sense of being angry.

WHAT HAPPENED

Oddly enough, it’s because of something that usually brings me tremendous joy: The articulate exchange of disparate opinions on FriendFeed.

I’m not going to link to the exchange that set me off because I don’t think it’s fair to gang up on the individual whose commentary actually represents a widespread (though wrongheaded) point-of-view: Fat people are only fat because they cannot control themselves. They don’t exercise but instead recline on the sofa scarfing entire chocolate cakes in one bite. Worse, I got the sense that this was meant to be particularly true of women who are all supposed to be a size zero even though the AVERAGE size in North America now is apparently a 14.

While the remarks were staggering in their callousness, what was worse was that they displayed a breathtaking level of ignorance.

UNCONSIDERED FACTORS

Clearly the folks with the “fatties have no self-control” viewpoint are unaware that there are medical issues that can also contribute to weight gain or exponentially increase the difficulty in terms of shedding pounds. It can be the treatments such as mood stabilizers for bipolar disorder such as lithium or steroids such as prednisone which can be used to treat disorders from lupus to psoriasis to arthritis.

And then there are actual disorders such as  hypothyroidism or  the heartbreaking condition known as Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. PCOS is a nasty endocrine disorder that can not only promote obesity and cystic acne in a woman but can also render her infertile in a worst-case scenario. But perhaps if women with PCOS just had more self-discipline, they could will themselves to ovulate right?

Obviously some people cannot imagine how hard it can be to be out and about in society today if you are overweight. They have no sense of the shame one can feel or the self-loathing at not being able to even come close to approximating the  [nearly impossible] ideal of a size two. Nor do they seem to understand that just because one’s nerve endings are more thickly-covered, it doesn’t mean that cruel, thoughtless commentary won’t strike home and hurt.

Nobody wants to be fat. Nobody wants to be mocked. And hopefully, nobody wants to remain ignorant either.

WHY IS THIS SO?

Aside from the ire of a woman who’s curvier than she’d like to be after the birth of a beautiful baby girl, what this situation has brought to the fore is this vital question:

Why is it still acceptable to make fun of fat people? Why can people make jokes about them they wouldn’t dare (and shouldn’t) make about any other minority?

Frankly, I’d rather be somewhat fat in body than a truly fat-headed fool — but hopefully both excess pounds and ingrained ignorance are conditions that can be overcome. Perhaps some sort of campaign is necessary? Or just a reminder that kindness and decency shouldn’t be rarities?