My Theory About Why Facebook Is Phasing Out Comment Counters In Discussion Threads

I'm picturing a scenario somewhat like this:

"Mr Zuckerberg, the gals and fellas in IT have been on this for months like stink on a -- well, like stink on an IT guy who hasn't left his cubicle to shower in months. They've been interfacing with my guys and gals from finance daily, sometimes there's been two or three large-scale meetings about it per day. The algorithms and other thingies they've been applying to this -- well, you know me, Mr Zuckerberg, I'm just an old dinosaur bean-counter, I can't begin to keep up with all the math, and I shouldn't pretend that I can. One time during this process I made a remark about Boolean algebra, and the whole room exploded in laughter. It's okay, it's okay, they were right: the old man was frontin'. Tryin' ta sound hip. They caught me! When I'm with these kids I need to talk less and listen more, who knows, I'm might even learn something! Heh, heh. So. Bottom line. The kids are confident -- I'm talking about both the IT people and my finance kids -- and hey, how often do they ever agree about anything, am I right?! -- they've both looked this front to back and top to bottom again and again and again, and bot IT and finance are highly confident that if Facebook phases out the comment counters in the threads, long-term, it could shave 3 cents a day off of our operating costs. Highly confident. ...Oh. And, yes, also, you could throw a sop to the environmental nuts, tell 'em that we're using less electricity and saving the rainforest, bla bla bla. You know, the usual environmental bullshit. So, Mr Zuckerberg, should we go ahead and phase out the comment counters?"

"Uh -- YUHH!"

Oooohhh. Owww. Arrrghhh.

That's me groaning in pain. I'm a 53-year-old man and I've owned my first smartphone for about 48 hours now, a Motorola Droid mini, and I don't know how to work the damn thing. (I'm not exactly sure what PowerPoint is.) I've spent hours on the phone with tech support, I've looked through online support pages. This thing is really cool, but, for instance, I'm not writing this post on my new phone, I'm writing it on my PC as usual, because I don't know how to do it on my phone yet. (Maybe it can't be done on my phone. I don't know.) I have written a couple of things on my phone, like the names of some contacts I put on speed-dial -- you can't imagine how long and painful the process of sort of learning how to do that was -- and I wrote the wrong monkey in the Google search window and saw my blog on my phone, just don't know how to post on my blog from my phone yet. And even if I did, it's going to take a while to get used to using those teeny-tiny keypads. I think I've got them set as big as I can. They're set on "huge." If I can find a way to make them bigger than "huge," that would be great. Cause if you ask me, "huge" is still pretty frickin tiny, and I still hit wrong letters a lot. Machete don't text!



I didn't get into computers at all until 1997. I had had opportunities to familiarize myself with IT before that -- a professor comes to mind who, during my most recent failed attempt at grad school, in 1991-92, frequently urged us grad students to avail ourselves of a certain room full of computers. I think it may have been called a computer lab, I don't remember for sure. I have no idea what I missed by never visiting the place. At that time I was still going out of my way to avoid all computers, and I was proud of it. I'm not proud of it now.

My brother went the other way: got awards for programs he wrote in high school, which he graduated from in 1981, as valedictorian. Got 2 degrees from MIT in the 80's, the first one a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering with an emphasis on computer applications. He's literally a rocket scientist.

I took a much more Luddite approach until I first saw the Internet in 1997. Most of my interaction with computers since then has involved -- see, I don't even know now the correct terminology for it. There's online and the WWW and the Internet and email and I don't know what the exact definitions of all of them are and how much overlap there is, but most of my interaction with computers has involved all that stuff. I started this blog in 2009 because 2009 was when someone who had asked me why I eschewed a blog explained to me what a blog was and that Blogspot was one of the user-freindly ways of publishing one.

And now, late in 2014, I cross the smartphone Rubicon. Or drown trying to cross. I'm in pain.