I'm in an online course right now that touches upon information literacy: the ability to access, sort through, and analyze information (particularly online). It is not a very in-depth course, and a lot of the recommendations it gives feel a little limited/dated, or just out of touch with current internet practices (e.g. trust .edu and .gov sites -- don't trust .com sites; use Britannica Online instead of Wikipedia). It also doesn't really account for things like memes, social media, or really much of the modern internet landscape.

I know we have a lot of very technically literate as well as informationally literate people here, and I'm curious: if you were tasked with creating a class to help people learn information literacy, including how to identify misinformation online, what would some of your key points or focuses be? How would you convey those to your students (whether those students are kids, adults, or both)?

So my spouse is getting fed up with Facebook and would like to download all of her photos and ideally any photos others have taken that she’s tagged in. She’d like to do a single bulk download, but is having trouble navigating Facebook’s intentionally confusing settings to do this. I don’t have an account and have never used Facebook beyond reading the occasional post a friend has sent me, so I don’t really know how to help in this case.

This guide claims to be from 2021. Following the steps in section 3 we see something that looks very similar but not exactly the same under her settings. Where they have a list containing items like “Posts”, “Photos and videos”, “Comments”, etc. We see a different list and it doesn’t have any option for “Photos and Videos.” There is one section titled, “Short videos”, but nothing about photos at all. Has Facebook changed this recently, or does she have some weird setting that’s causing it not to show up? Or is the guide just wrong? (Or maybe they’re A/B testing something and that’s why she isn’t seeing it?)

Any help appreciated. Thanks!

EDIT: I think we figured it out. It looks like Posts and Photos have been combined into just "Posts" with no mention of photos whatsoever. When you get the resulting .zip file, it contains the photos, though. It's typically shitty of Facebook.

Last week there was a discussion where a few folks took the plunge and quit reddit, including myself.

@acdw mentioned us having a ~noreddit community to support each other and I actually really liked the idea. But in lieu of that, I thought maybe a follow up thread might be a good idea. Just to see how everyone who quit reddit is doing, what challenges they've faced, and maybe share alternative ways to kill time.

For me, I've done pretty well. I've been to reddit a few times by accident (damn you, muscle memory!), scrolled a little, then remembered I quit. Then I mov on to something else. In its place I've spent a lot more time on twitter and medium. I have a very strong love/hate relationship with both of those sites. There's a lot of decent content there, but there's a ton of garbage to sift through. Very much like reddit in that regard, but not quite as easy to fine-tune, imo.

Anyone got any good recommendations?

Over the past couple years I've transitioned from spending far too much time on Reddit, to spending not as much but still too much time on Tildes instead, to spending much less time on Tildes and a reasonable amount of time reading stuff from https://longform.org/ and https://www.theflipside.io/ .

I've found that these two sites (well, a site and an email subscription) respect my time, don't try to monopolize my focus, and provide decently nuanced info rather than outrage-inducing clickbait. They also don't have comments, which means I never get that feeling of needing to correct random internet users and get drawn into their nonsense.

I'm wondering if there are others internet spaces that people find similarly useful in curbing their social media consumption.

And more generally, I'm wondering what other, non-internet things help keep people off social media.

As an example of the latter, lately I've been trying to get into the habit of going to the park after work and eating dinner there while reading a book instead of scrolling through Tildes comments or watching mindless youtube videos while I eat.

I'd love to get a passable alternative interface to YouTube that just shows me what I'm subscribed to, a search bar, and nothing else. Does this exist as a userscript or alternate site?

Edit:

My current solution is to have my YouTube bookmark go directly to my subscriptions listing. I also have my ad blocker cut out the recommendations feed on the side. It works okay but maybe there's a better solution out there.

This is the ad block rule:

www.youtube.com##.ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer
www.youtube.com##.ytd-guide-entry-renderer[title=Explore]
www.youtube.com##.ytd-guide-entry-renderer[title=Home]

How do you tend to your digital selves? Do you create archives for your blogs/journals/social-media-interactions? How meticulously do you organize your pictures? How protectful are you of your backups? Have you thought about where it'd all end up after you've died?