Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

This particular "creative solution" is adding wasted data transmission and slowing down page responsiveness to _everyone_'s use of the site to combat a few people that feel strongly about their privacy or sanity of mind[1]. All of these tactics are terrible.

[1] Skipping over ads takes effort from your brain and it seems to be training us all to be worse readers. In the modern world of sponsored messages and content it pays to skim information for honesty before digesting it and it seems (IMO) to be hurting our general level of reading comprehension and attention.

It's their site. If they want to deliver information I'm sure they don't consider it wasted. You talk as if people go to Facebook to receive data transmissions as efficiently as possible. I've never met a development company which cares about that at such a low level. Especially if it means more exposure on their website for ads, which is how they get money.

Skimming is taught in school from a young age. It's an appropriate skill. It doesn't take much brain power to read something in a detailed way or in a quick way. The notion that we are so susceptible to our brains being influenced by things like this is ridiculous.

But still fuck Facebook.

> Skimming is taught in school from a young age. It's an appropriate skill. It doesn't take much brain power to read something in a detailed way or in a quick way. The notion that we are so susceptible to our brains being influenced by things like this is ridiculous.

I learned to read in kindergarten. Between private kindergarten, public grade school, and state university, I have _never_ been taught to skim things quickly; rather I was taught what was called _reading comprehension_ where we were told to read a small story of 1-2 paragraphs, occasionally being given a short amount of time to read it only once, and were then asked questions about it; later this turned into class discussions, where we occasionally debated wording that would likely have been missed entirely if one was skimming. I have _never_ had a teacher tell me that I should skim a text, and I was in fact instructed not to do so as it would cause me to miss things. As a rather fast reader in school, I was occasionally suspected of not reading an assignment thoroughly and told to read the whole thing.

Having said all that, there is a great deal to be said on how things you _don't_ think about affect you. You don't have to be actively paying attention to something to remember it, otherwise billboards wouldn't exist; neither would the ads on the back inner/outer cover of a magazine or the back cover of a newspaper. Nor would product placement be a thing.