I have different types of ‘friends’ on Facebook, such as “Family”, “Rationalists”, “English-speaking”, etc. Different materials I post are interesting for different groups. There is an option to select visibility of my posts, but that seems not exactly what I want.
What I’d like is to make my posts so that they are available to everyone, including people I don’t know (e.g. if anyone clicks on my name, they will see everything I ever posted), but I don’t want all my posts to appear automatically on all of my ‘friends’ home pages, if they follow me. In other words, I don’t want to spam my ’friends″ pages with stuff they are unlikely to read, yet I want anyone to be able to read each of my posts if they wish so.
Is there an option “don’t push this automatically to all people, but let them see it if they click on a permalink”?
I don’t understand why facebook messes up the language issue so strongly. It seems like the American’s at facebook quarters just don’t care about bilinguals.
Yeah, your explanation sounds absolutely correct. But before you think “silly monoglot Americans”, remember that London is closer to Istanbul than New York is to Mexico. Countries where people don’t mostly speak English are thousands of kilometers away from most Americans.
Here is a map with London and Istanbul on it. In between them are many countries with at least six majority languages (and that’s a low count, where some people would lynch me for saying that their language is the same as the one their neighbor speaks). Los Angeles and Tijuana on the other hand are two cities right by a border, and the only languages commonly spoken between them is English, the language of the USA, and Spanish, the language of Mexico.
I understood solipsist’s argument to mean that Americans can be excused for being ignorant of other languages because most of them live too far from other linguistic communities, and pointed at the mutual closeness of European countries for contrast, implying that it’s likelier to find a Turkish-speaking Brit than a Spanish-speaking American.
What I tried to say was that there was no need to artificially inflate the comparison distance by choosing Istanbul. Londoners can find speakers of a completely different language by merely driving to Cardiff. But the U.S. is not a monolingual bloc of homogeneity either: ironically, solipsist chose New York for his example, a multilingual smorgasbord if ever there was one.
Well, I don’t know. Some of the US is near Mexico, but most of it isn’t. In Europe the farthest you can get from a border to foreign speaking country is perhaps southern Italy. The four US states which border Mexico are each bigger than Italy. Germany is a bigish country in Europe area-wise, but it’s less than 3.7% the size of the US. The Mercator projection makes an optical illusion—the US is huge.
I think solipsist’s point isn’t that they have an excuse but that they have a reason—being monoglot hurts them less than it would if they were e.g. on the European continent, so monoglossy (or whatever the right word is) isn’t necessarily silly for them.
[EDITED to add:] Disappointingly, OED suggests that the right word is just “monoglottism”.
The problem is exactly the “how much they want to see of you” part, namely that there is only the one undifferentiated “you” instead of “your rationality posts”, “your family photos”, “your posts with kitten videos”. I don’t want to bother my family with rationality posts, and don’t want to bother my LW friends with Slovak posts, but as long as I don’t want to limit it all to ‘friends of my friends’ I don’t have a choice.
Technically, the solution would be to create multiple accounts for mutliple aspects of my life, and have different sets of ‘friends’ for each. But this is against Facebook TOS, and is also technically inconvenient.
Actually, maybe I could use the “Pages” feature for this… That allows people to post under multiple identities, so each of them can have different followers. But officially, “Pages are for businesses, brands and organizations”. Not sure if “Viliam’s comments on politics in Slovakia” qualitfies as any of that.
What you seem to be already doing, which is to manually select what group will see each post, seems to be good enough for your purposes. Anyone who actively wants to see more of you can simply go to your profile and see everything.
Facebook question:
I have different types of ‘friends’ on Facebook, such as “Family”, “Rationalists”, “English-speaking”, etc. Different materials I post are interesting for different groups. There is an option to select visibility of my posts, but that seems not exactly what I want.
What I’d like is to make my posts so that they are available to everyone, including people I don’t know (e.g. if anyone clicks on my name, they will see everything I ever posted), but I don’t want all my posts to appear automatically on all of my ‘friends’ home pages, if they follow me. In other words, I don’t want to spam my ’friends″ pages with stuff they are unlikely to read, yet I want anyone to be able to read each of my posts if they wish so.
Is there an option “don’t push this automatically to all people, but let them see it if they click on a permalink”?
I don’t understand why facebook messes up the language issue so strongly. It seems like the American’s at facebook quarters just don’t care about bilinguals.
Yeah, your explanation sounds absolutely correct. But before you think “silly monoglot Americans”, remember that London is closer to Istanbul than New York is to Mexico. Countries where people don’t mostly speak English are thousands of kilometers away from most Americans.
Those are suspiciously convenient examples. A more relevant comparison would be: Los Angeles is closer to Tijuana than London is to Paris.
Here is a map with London and Istanbul on it. In between them are many countries with at least six majority languages (and that’s a low count, where some people would lynch me for saying that their language is the same as the one their neighbor speaks). Los Angeles and Tijuana on the other hand are two cities right by a border, and the only languages commonly spoken between them is English, the language of the USA, and Spanish, the language of Mexico.
I understood solipsist’s argument to mean that Americans can be excused for being ignorant of other languages because most of them live too far from other linguistic communities, and pointed at the mutual closeness of European countries for contrast, implying that it’s likelier to find a Turkish-speaking Brit than a Spanish-speaking American.
What I tried to say was that there was no need to artificially inflate the comparison distance by choosing Istanbul. Londoners can find speakers of a completely different language by merely driving to Cardiff. But the U.S. is not a monolingual bloc of homogeneity either: ironically, solipsist chose New York for his example, a multilingual smorgasbord if ever there was one.
Well, I don’t know. Some of the US is near Mexico, but most of it isn’t. In Europe the farthest you can get from a border to foreign speaking country is perhaps southern Italy. The four US states which border Mexico are each bigger than Italy. Germany is a bigish country in Europe area-wise, but it’s less than 3.7% the size of the US. The Mercator projection makes an optical illusion—the US is huge.
Just because they have an excuse that geography made them silly monoglots doesn’t mean they aren’t silly monoglots :p
I think solipsist’s point isn’t that they have an excuse but that they have a reason—being monoglot hurts them less than it would if they were e.g. on the European continent, so monoglossy (or whatever the right word is) isn’t necessarily silly for them.
[EDITED to add:] Disappointingly, OED suggests that the right word is just “monoglottism”.
The way Facebook works, you decide what’s available, but each of your friends has to individually decide how much they want to see of you.
The problem is exactly the “how much they want to see of you” part, namely that there is only the one undifferentiated “you” instead of “your rationality posts”, “your family photos”, “your posts with kitten videos”. I don’t want to bother my family with rationality posts, and don’t want to bother my LW friends with Slovak posts, but as long as I don’t want to limit it all to ‘friends of my friends’ I don’t have a choice.
Technically, the solution would be to create multiple accounts for mutliple aspects of my life, and have different sets of ‘friends’ for each. But this is against Facebook TOS, and is also technically inconvenient.
Actually, maybe I could use the “Pages” feature for this… That allows people to post under multiple identities, so each of them can have different followers. But officially, “Pages are for businesses, brands and organizations”. Not sure if “Viliam’s comments on politics in Slovakia” qualitfies as any of that.
What you seem to be already doing, which is to manually select what group will see each post, seems to be good enough for your purposes. Anyone who actively wants to see more of you can simply go to your profile and see everything.