Facebook and other social media platforms might be heading for the type of reckoning the fast food industry had in the late 90s and early 2000s.
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I wonder how much the push back against McDonald's is class based. It's not healthy, but the same can be said for a lot of the food we eat. A lot of fast casual burgers, which seem to hold a higher position in the public perception, have more calories. Of course, overall health is more complicated than just calories, but it's worth pointing out since that's one of the main complaints against McDonald's (including in the article you linked to). Cereal has declined in popularity, but it doesn't seem to have had quite the same negative stigma, even though a lot of it is simply processed flour and sugar (which was then marketed as being "part of this balanced breakfast"); neither do brands like Starbucks or Coke.
There's a good amount of sociological research on this topic, which not only agrees with your claim but also posits the obesity war is just a away for the middle and upper class (who are also overweight, at times even more so that the poor[0]) to push a moral agenda on the poor that emphasizes self-control issues of others while ignoring those of their own.[1]
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db51.htm [1]: A fascinating read on the history and current affairs of the topic: "Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health"
This is very true. In India McD has a more prestige positioning (not extremely but it's a luxury for the lower class, a treat for most middle class families, and a non-shameful food destination for the upper-middle class, and no one shits on McD food as being particularly bad for you.
It's put up there with the food you will get from other similar joints (KFC, Dominos, Papa Johns etc.)—not a bastion of good eating but nothing particularly inimical.
I find the comparison with KFC, etc as odd. From my european perspective, all of these places are seen as producing unhealthy food (not to mention destroying important ecosystems such as rainforests to produce cheap meat) McDonalds is the target of campaigns only because of it's prominence and brand recognition.
In India you will have to find people who want to eat meat, to what I've heard.
I think that's more related than "luxury food"
McDonald's in India has a much larger focus on vegetarian and chicken burgers[0], avoiding the beef that's a problem for a significant portion (but not all by far) of the population.
> It's not healthy
I get a quarter pounder, a side salad, and cup of water. It's a decent, healthy meal.
>It's a decent, healthy meal.
Especially when the alternative involves a caloric-deficit. While fast food like McDonalds is nutritionally sub-optimal, it cannot be understated how effectively they deliver much-needed calories at an affordable price. Even though this is accomplished with dubious subsidies and ethically-challenged animal farming practices, superior options are few when it comes to filling your belly with a few hard-won dollars.
Is an egg-mcmuffin with no cheese and no hash-brown really that bad for you? It's literally an egg on bread.
No it’s not that bad for you.
How many people only order an egg on bread at McDonald's?
I also get a coffee (black).
it's not real egg and the processed bread-resembling muffin isn't very nutritious either
How exactly does McDonalds make eggs that aren't real eggs> I don't believe that.
There are carton "eggs" that you pour. The McMuffin really is made from fresh cracked eggs, though. I think they are delicious.
What's wrong with carton eggs? How are they not real eggs?
Just curious. What do you think those are made from?
Do you really think they'd be allowed to call it an Egg McMuffin if it didn't have real eggs? It would be a pretty clear-cut case of false advertising.
Do you read the ingredients of anything you eat/drink? This happens all the time. Read ingredients of "Apple Juice" or "Orange Juice" and it will often say upon inspection "Contains 12% juice" or something of the like.
Yeah... your Egg McMuffin probably has SOME egg in it, but that's about it.
There was a promotional document a couple of years ago which describes each type of egg they do.[0] The egg mcmuffin is actually the best, as it's entirely just an egg, cracked and cooked from scratch right there.
[0] http://static6.uk.businessinsider.com/image/54c920c1dd08950d...
Find me anything with fake egg that passes itself off as Egg Something. Cadbury doesn't count, it has to be an egg substitute.
The food industry plays all sorts of games. Ever seen what's actually in "pork" sausages or "chicken" nuggets?
I though that too "oh no look at those chavs" at MacDonald's Supersize me also did not see what happened to you if you eat a full xmass dinner every day for a month did it.
It might be a mistake asking this, but what the heck is a 'chav' ?
It’s an English word for rougher lower class young men. People look down on them, it’s partially a class thing and partially how they dress and how they’re just boisterous. Don’t know what the equivalent word in the USA is but in Australia we say Bogan which is similar.
Equivalent words for lower class people in the USA often have a racial slur component involved so you don't see them used in the same context. I thought the word "bro" might be close but bro has a upper or middle class connotation, being derived from frat brother, rather than lower class.
Chavs certainly don't have to be men. Also I'm pretty sure the youth requirement has atrophied now, and it's more of a direct class-epithet.
I don't think there's a race-neutral equivalent in American English, but "white trash" captures much of the spirit.
Interesting. I was under the impression that 'bogan' was sort of the Aussie equivalent to the classic American "hillbilly" -- and there's a slight (and depending on how it's used, sometimes not-so-slight) negative connotation to it here in the US as well.
The Australian equivalent is a "lad". As in "eshays adlay".
Bogan seems to be roughly equivalent to hick from what I gather.
There is no American counterpart for euro chavs, and it’s too late for that now. Euro chav fashion has been very influential in America over the last decade. A lot of Americans think chavs were hip as a result.
It's an English term for a young, obnoxious lower class person wearing tacky clothes.
Apart from when they got into Burberry - which the marketing tem refer to (with a shudder) as "The Time"
"Council Housed And Violent" (unless that's a backronym)
It's the British version of white trash.
Absolutely. When will governments (EU?) step the hell up and regulate this huge part of our lives?
Why don't you regulate yourselves?
The article posted above was suggesting that Facebook is more a detriment to society than a plus. Society is typically safeguarded from toxic products through regulation. So, if Facebook is a perfectly engineered attention trap, you or I self-regulating, which plenty of us here do anyway, helps society in no meaningful way.
McDonalds is still a viable business. When Facebook goes, it will evaporate like MySpace did. And not a moment too soon.
I'm not too sure. I think there's a lot of value in a centralized identity management system. Facebook seems to have filled that role. I can see a near future where it acts as a sort of SSO for the web. That doesn't necessarily sound like a $550B company, but could still be worth quite a bit.
I wonder if their rampant quest for click-money (annoying users with constant emails, useless spammy notifications, ads, sponsored content) is going to poison that well, though. I anecdotally know a lot of people in their early-mid twenties who have already deleted their accounts. If too many people start doing that, Facebook loses its one trump card.
Similarly, tv channels on YouTube (for the UK, see BBC, C4, E4) appear to be jumping on the bandwagon with clickbait, videos empty of genuine content, misleading titles and clips repeatedly churned through different videos.
This appears to have short term benefits (huge view counts), but surely it turns people off long term and impacts the brand.
centralized identity management system. Facebook seems to have filled that role.
They blatantly cannot do this unless they actually implement their real names policy. Which they won’t.
The number of sites that tie their cart to that horse is pretty low. Most sites offer their own authentication or offer multiple ones besides FB.
Don't know why this is so downvoted much. Just because Facebook evaporates doesn't mean the very concept of "social graph" will go down altogether with it.
Facebook will probably be replaced with more flexible identity and social graph architecture that's more decentralized.
It's different from McDonald's because humans have to eat, and McDonald's can always pivot or acquire other companies to provide the type of food that's more in vogue, but what Facebook has created is equivalent to a nightclub. When a nightclub loses its reputation it's very hard to recover.
How would it be decentralized? You and your webpage on your box gave rise to yahoo and then google.
There will always be a market for a dominant social media platform, just like there will always be a market for a dominant search provider, os, office suite, document interchange format, etc. All tech with a wide reach needs uniformity.
Whether or not we have reached the maturity with social media to make facebook as difficult to unseat as apple, adobe, microsoft, or google remains to be seen. But they will not just evaporate like the wonky myspace of old. Times have changed.
I personally think they have reached that level, and also do not use them because I greatly dislike social media in just about any form. But I am self-aware enough to know I am part of a tiny minority.