Facebook introduces new revolutionary new features

Social media users should brace themselves for a whole Facebook experience filled chock-a-block with features set to revolutionise the way you live in the online world.

“We’re changing everything,” said head of the R&D team at Facebook, Cody Compyler, “and not just the colour and logo font.”

“Facebook forces users to go through their entire lives, photos, opinions, thoughts and personality, and choose only a tiny fraction of a percentage of what is true to impress the people around you,” he said, “but most of us got Facebook when we were 16-year-old morons who thought liking a page called ‘Beer and Cigarettes’ made us look like rebellious bad boys. How can you pretend to be cool on Facebook if there’s over three years of evidence to the contrary that you can’t delete for fear of making it look like you joined Facebook this year, like your grandmother?”

This issue, says Compyler, is expounded only by its corollary.

“Then, when your mother or grandmother or someone close to you goes on Facebook, they judge you or start worrying because the only photos of you are taken at parties or trance festivals, making them say they’re worried about your ‘drinking problem’ when actually you’re not even that much of a lady-slaying party animal.”

In light of this, they’re introducing two new features: the ‘Real User feature, and the ‘Make Me Cool’ feature.

“Let’s see these features in action. If we go to my friend Jake’s profile, we can see he has photos of himself in the gym, at the beach with his really hot girlfriend, and driving around in his badass car. All of this makes me feel pretty inadequate. So if I press the ‘Show Me The Real Jake’ button over here, Facebook immediately shows me pictures of his girlfriend in a Onesie without makeup on, and here it gives us some really embarrassing childhood pictures, and here we have a collection of desperate and awkward messages to his grandmother and his ex-girlfriend who he apparently still loves to death. This is great, because now I know that Jake isn’t as cool as he seems, and also that my life isn’t that shit in comparison.”

“Now, if I go to my own profile, we can see that I have over 2943 photos and six years of likes, comments, posts and shares. I can’t possibly go through all of this and sweep all the embarrassing stuff under the carpet – that would take hours. So I just click the ‘Make Me Cool’ button and voilà! Thanks to Facebook’s coolness algorithm, I no longer liked ‘Beer’ and ‘Fast Cars’ and ‘The Hangover’ when I was 16, but instead I liked ‘The works of Noam Chomsky’ and ‘Psychodynamic analysis of postmodern literature’.”

The R&D team now report that they are working on a feature that will half the time it takes to ignore, trivialise or mock people on your newsfeed.

“It used to take as much as an entire hour to entirely debase someone’s existence and being, but we’ve cut down that time to as little as sixty seconds,” they said. “Hell, the only thing it doesn’t do for you is groan, roll your eyes and moan ‘how fucking retarded are some people?’”

Buzzfeed apologises for endless stream of shallow, un-lifechanging garbage

Citing the endless stream of failed attempts to “blow your mind”, “change your life”, “make you weep” and other such hyperbolic click-baitery, the chief editor and long-time writer at viral media website and “content aggregator” Buzzfeed has this morning issued a long and heartfelt apology to the internet, people who originally made the content they so brazenly “aggregate”, and the world in general.

“We just want to say we’re so damn sorry,” said editor Plaie Gerize. “Looking back at our long and ugly history of hyperbole, exaggeration and outright lies, we want to wholeheartedly apologise.”

Gerize’s list of apologies was long.

“We’re sorry. We know that Picture Number 8 didn’t blow your mind. We know Number 6 wasn’t perfect, as we said it would be in countless articles,” he said, permanently deleting the entire website in a show of ultimate contrition and sorrow. “Those fabulous snaps of Jennifer Lawrence didn’t prove that she was perfection, and that series of photos that was supposed to restore your faith in humanity was completely inadequate. We're scum. We're cancer. And we’re sorry. We can’t say that enough.”

Pictured: the new Buzzfeed website, with all relevant changes.

His apology extended to all the content that the Buzzfeed team as a whole –regardless of country or origin or format – had produced.

“Even our videos. When they weren’t silly or ham-fistedly trying to send an self-evident life-lesson, they were just totally trivial. Also, time and time again we totally blew down the importance of individual people’s hard work and passion by never using their name and just reducing them to their sex, nationality or even just ‘someone’. We should have given them due respect, even if it is hard to get a click out of you by using someone’s full name.”

He continued.

“We’re also sorry for having outright stolen content from many sites. Sorry, ‘aggregated’. Or maybe ‘curated’? I dunno, which word are we using these days?”

“Furthermore, we’re sorry about contradicting articles that provide you with reasons why each member of your favourite boyband or series is the best one. Like those twenty articles which individually claimed why different members of Friends or One Direction or The Backstreet Boy or whatever were by far the best. I mean, how did we not see how black our souls were, posting these kinds of articles at the same time and having each written by the same author? How could we have been so spineless as to not have an editorial stance on anything?”

“Finally, we’re sorry for using social issues and controversial topics to squeeze a few cheap clicks out of you. Like videos where we show people giving homeless people a pizza or a hundred dollars in a video that probably makes eighteen times that, or with serious issues that don’t deserve to be trivialised in shallow, bullet-point, GIF-heavy listicles.”

Having realised their errors, editors and writers at the website have since vowed to take courses in ethics and journalistic values, and have furthermore vowed to never oversimplify an argument or concept by using cat pictures or images cut from popular culture.

“We realise now that our insatiable hunger to just get that click out of you, to bleed you and other readers for pageviews and time, made us blind,” he said in a long, profound, ten-chapter essay that didn’t contain one picture or numerical bulletpoint. “It turned us into monsters, veritable scum-sucking bottom feeders who lurked on Reddit and subReddit forums and Tumblr pages, copy-pasting and rehashing and resharing old and boring content because we knew that, hell, you’d click whatever old shit we regurgitate.”

The move has been met by widespread praise.

"Their apology was amazing, incredibly. It literally blew my mind and changed my life," said one internet user. "In fact, if there was a list of 10 apologies published on the internet somewhere, this would probably be at number 4."

Those wanting to know more about this story can read this exact same article on The Huffington Post, Upworthy and Elitedaily.

SRC prepares real-life facebook replacement

 

Following the horrifying news that Facebook will be temporarily down for upgrades to its  major servers, forcing you to talk to real people, the Student Representative Council of Rhodes University has swung into swift action with a huge contingency plan aimed at helping students deal with the upcoming trauma.

"We know that you can't go a single day without liking or commenting on stuff, and so we have stepped in to make this terrible day all the more bearable," said SRC President Betha Thaan-Nhobadhi. "As such, we will have contingencies deployed all around campus."

Plans to ease the students' fragile frames of mind are extensive, ranging from impromptu walls to makeshift Instagram services.

"We will be handing out packs of 'LIKE' cards with the normal thumbs-up sign, and blank comment box stickers for students to pin up on whatever they want," said SRC Facebook Contingency Councillor Lyka Khomment. "This way, students will be able to leave their mark on the things that don't matter in their lives,"  

He went on to add that the university staff had approved a request to turn every wall on campus into a 'wall'. "Now there will be ample space to tell people about stuff that no one wants to hear."

The SRC has also secured plans to have a guy with a megaphone at the major locations around campus, so as to announce your presence every time you 'check in' to a different location.

"We want to keep your 754 friends, acquaintances, old highschool friends that you never even talk to, and that guy who always creeps your profile and invites you to events all the time constantly updated with your changing social life," Khomment said. According to the SRC, this megaphone wielder will also act as an impromptu newsfeed, informing you of the most pertinent events in the Rhodes social sphere, for example  'zOMG Lara was tagged in 212 photos: thirty people like this'.

"We know that your life cannot be lived to its fullest without being notified every time one of Lara's friends post about how 'zOMG babez u so gorjus luv u xxxxox'," he said.

However, a real-life facebook would be nothing without crappy artistic photos - but the SRC has students covered.

Thanks to the SRC, the world will still be able to know about it every time you eat or drink something.

"A team of highly-trained instagram reproducers will walk around with polaroid cameras, taking pictures of your breakfast and of you pouting and pretending that the photograph wasn't totally preplanned and carefully posed," said fourth-year photography student Haza Ritchdhad.

"These professionals will try as best they can to give you, our Rhodes Students, the best real-life instagram experience possible," she said. She also added that these photographers will even soak the polaroid in tea to make it all blurry and sepia-toned. 

Students have reacted to the news with fervent excitement, including first-year journalism student Stacey Blake.

"I can barely wait, smiley face, smiley face, thumbs-up, winking smiley, party hat emoticon!" she said.

Readers looking to get their Muse and Abuse fix will sadly have to go cold turkey. I don't get paid for this, and I am not running for an SRC Portfolio do not have unlimited printing credit for a print edition.

Thanks to the SRC, the world will still be able to know about it every time you eat or drink something.