I'm really ashamed to admit it, but I am addicted to Facebook. As much as I despise the lack of depth in the average content, I feel confident that Facebook has stumbled on something in our animal behavior that draws us closer to it.
I've always explained the phenomenon of gossip rags as a surrogate for our innate need to be social. Rather than engaging in actual social scenarios (which can carry social risks), many people have fulfilled our social needs with television shows and gossip rags. Celebrities have become a surrogate community members for many people, and I suspect Facebook ups that by one by creating a platform where you can interact with friends, celebrities and strangers in an environment that mitigates most (not all) risks.
I wish I had a clever idea for a solution to this because I really think the world deserves an open social platform that not only engages people socially, but provides the social lubricant to enable people to form online/offline clubs and interact with each other in a high-bandwidth so we can use the internet to teach each other and create fun things with each other.
Maybe it's only a matter of bandwidth, transistors and time.
Facebook is the social equivalent of fast food. They've tuned the menu to make it addictive.
> I wish I had a clever idea for a solution to this because I really think the world deserves an open social platform that not only engages people socially, but provides the social lubricant to enable people to form online/offline clubs and interact with each other in a high-bandwidth so we can use the internet to teach each other and create fun things with each other.
It's called a coffee shop.
We need to get off the curated online experiences and back to interacting with people physically. It's vital. A therapist friend of mine says that most of the clients he sees that are teens or in their 20s have poor interaction skills in person and social phobia. Those lead to incredible rejection anxiety. I know from my own experience that some of the best conversations I've had with strangers have been people in their 50s and above who know how to engage in casual conversation and find joy in it rather than angst.
Go to a coffee shop and talk to a stranger. We should all do more of that. It's healthy.
It's not just you or your therapist friend. According to a study[1]: Empathy Dropped 40% in College Students between 2000 to 2010.
And now everything is much more addictive, and mobile wasn't even that common in 2010. And now we have virtual reality, which when you read the research some scary side effects surface - stuff like "derealization" - basically having a consistent feeling that real life isn't real. Or stuff about ads having deep brainwashing like power.
And almost nobody is working to solve those issues.
Wow. I've been suspecting this more and more, but whenever I bring it up or similar, it ends with an asinine amount of resistance and I'm regarded as an SJW, worse, and even unempathetic. Hell, when I bring up some of the civics work I do, people get angry that I'm trying to help others. Parpaphrased statements like, "Why are you trying to help dumb people?" are unbearably common and sad.
Thanks for the article. It gives me a lot to think about (after fact checking, of course).
BTW, I'm actually a very social person. I've literally spent years in coffee shops socializing in the days before cell phones, the World Wide Web and Facebook. In the mid 2000's, I discovered Meetup and spent 4-5 nights a week going to or organizing my own meetups. I have no social phobias or rejection anxiety and I'm very comfortable speaking in public.
I think you underestimate the anxiety people experience when they go out. I see it when people come out to my meetups, so I make it a point to introduce myself and introduce them to other people.
When I say I wish I had a clever idea to offset the effects of Facebook, I really mean to say, I wish I had a clever idea encouraged people to go out, talk to strangers and make lifelong friends on a Facebook scale.
Uhhhh... what's the status if I find it easy and enjoyable to interact with other people in-the-flesh, but they find me extremely weird and not a little abrasive because they expect everyone to view the world the same way as them?
Facebook has a large disincentive to connecting people in the real world. If you're at a watching movies, camping in the woods, or just hanging out then you're not online.
Worse, the more you connect in the real world the less interesting passive browsing becomes. Sure, you can still use FB to IM, but that's far less profitable for them.
Another issue I've found since leaving the 'Facebook family' a few years back; there's a large disincentive for members you leave behind to contact you. You fall out of their habitual communication methods.
The onus is on you to call them, which is already hard enough when both people could initiate the call. It becomes a much rarer event unless concerted effort is made.
So until 'the next big social thing' comes along, I'm essentially out in the cold in many respects. But it's a price I'm willing to pay. I simply can't bring myself to support them in any way. The veneer of goodwill is very easy to see through with their constant manipulation tactics. And besides, it's not all bad; it hasn't stopped me from being invited to major events in my social circle. It's nice not to feel beholden to a website, which was the case when I was a member.
The psychological effects are yet to be studied in depth, I'm sure.
I left FB (several times in fact), and I always end up returning. Firstly no-one cares you've gone - most of your 'friends' don't even notice you don't post or comment any more. Secondly, no-one contacts you directly either. You end up a social outcast, missing events that only get posted on Facebook. I didn't know some of my friends had had babies until several weeks after the fact, because they only announced on Facebook assuming everyone would see it, and I was on a Facebook hiatus at the time.
The most damning thing about the Facebook plague is that it's causing most of it's users to completely forget that other means of communication exists. The friction to send an email to, or god-forbid actually call, your non-Facebook friends is now simply too high that most people no longer do it. Email is now just a place where all those unread eBay and Amazon receipt notifications go.
Personally, I know I can walk away from FB any time I choose, however right now the cost of the social disconnect is too high.
Maybe the answer is to just accept we have no real friends any more, and just log out.
I'm not convinced, correct me if I'm wrong, that you really missed anything by not knowing about your friends' baby until a few weeks after.
A quick explanation: immediate family, you would have known without FB's involvement. Closest friends, same. Wider friends you see less often, maybe might have been mentioned at some point during the pregnancy, you can mark it off on a calendar and guesstimate arrival of baby. Friends you never see who've had a baby? Your definition of friend is stretched very thinly at that point, even if you were once close friends. Knowing/not knowing at that point makes very little difference to your ongoing relationship, particularly if it wasn't mentioned once during the previous 9 months.
I agree that email has become a second class citizen to social media sites, despite it being completely open and able to conduct group chats (albeit slightly painfully) for events etc.
The only thing many people are waiting for at this point is a suitable replacement for private, widely-used social comms that encourages more human interaction, without the manipulation and monetisation of relationships.
> I didn't know some of my friends had had babies until several weeks after the fact, because they only announced on Facebook assuming everyone would see it, and I was on a Facebook hiatus at the time.
Didn't take a "hiatus", just straight up closed my account about eight years ago.
People who matter still make the effort, and I find the personalized interaction much more rewarding.
I always go back to the example of some friends of mine. They got engaged. Everyone else found out on Facebook. They got that news while they were pooping, sitting on the couch watching TV, etc.
I found out a few days later than everyone else... when they told me in person. And I got to be excited with them. And hug her and shake his hand.
Your post sounds a bit like "all the kids are in the playground, but I don't like it, so I sit on my own in the library. The playground sucks and all the other kids are wrong"
A friend of mine returned to FB a few days ago, claiming that he had lost like 90% of his social contact. That sounds a bit much to me, bur one should definitely take this into consideration before leaving.
That a person's social activity should be dictated by a single website, in this world of ubiquitous social media, portable phones with hours of pre-paid talk-time... The effect may be more pronounced in the generation who've grown up solely on social media, but it certainly exists as a phenomenon.
Whether the 'social contact' referred to by your friend is genuine in-person social contact or vague 'online contact' will probably depend on their age.
Us pre-80s/90s kids had phonecalls, 'knocking on the person's door to see if they were in', postcards and 'meeting at the usual spot at the usual time' social habits. Now a lazy click to 'like' something posted to boost the poster's ego counts as socialising. That would be fine if we actually met up and spoke from time to time but that sadly is not the case.
I thought at one point the younger generation had started to push back against screentime, but I seem to have been mistaken for the moment. Perhaps in another few years, with a bit of luck.
Facebook is beholden to its shareholders first and foremost, then it's customers (advertisers, not you). Lastly, they want to make the inventory happy (that's you), so they can dish up ads.
Now, if Facebook manages to release a successful augmented reality platform, they will have no qualms with you going out in the real world. If you're camping in the woods, that's just a nice opportunity for a singalong app to place an ad for you and your buddies. If you're going to the movies, that's an opportunity for Coke to subtly remind you that you can get Coke points on your way.
It would be that Facebook has an incentive to get you out into the real world if they can influence where you go and spend your money. There are many ways you can do that without augmented reality.
Facebook is controlled by Zuckerberg who had 56.9 percent of the shareholder voting power and can tell the shareholders and advertisers to get lost if he really wants.
While you are correct, and on the face of it i would agree because I am cynical, they can never really lose that battle. I doubt a normal Facebook user can ever be in the same place as all of their Facebook friends. So family, college friends, high school friends, etc, will always be accessible online at the expense of the other parties real life presence.
Based on eating out, I can say that groups of people still use their phones to connect to Facebook, even with large groups of "Friends" IRL.
Yeah, Facebook is nice. I actually spend about 30 minutes in an entire day (open it in the morning, open it in the evening), catch up on what family & friends are postin', maybe venture into a shared post's comments (I like watching trainwrecks), and then I'm done.
And then once every few months, I decide to dig in to someone's FB page/photos since I haven't thought about them in a long time and what to see what they've been up to.
I get enjoyment out of it. I don't understand why the people who hate it, hate it so much.
I'm one of those anti-Facebook people you're talking about. I have several issues with Facebook.
It's principally designed to profile people. This makes it extremely dangerous and a powerful weapon against you. Got nothing to hide? It doesn't matter if someone has something to gain. In the future, someone could easily generate a list based on your political party of preference. I can think of many scenarios how I could aggregate and abuse such information.
Facebook is also one of the least sincere communications I can think of. Many comments here reflect it .. "friends didn't know I was gone". They're not true friends. My friends all speak in person or on the phone. We catch up for coffee, lunch, dinner or as a social outing. I can't even imagine how people equate the synthetic "had a baby" tag (or whatever FB uses) even constitutes worthy communication. You didn't know a friend had a baby? Not a friend. They don't want to send you photos if you're not on FB? Not a friend.
It's fascinating to watch FB users chat online or see them in real life. It looks synthetic and there is a significant emphasis on minutia "[chuckle] my brother just had KFC for lunch".. To which I reply "aaannnnddd??" "Oh, he normally eats Subway".. "Aaannnnddd?" "Oh, you just don't get it!". That's true, I don't.
It is odd that we make so much noise about secret courts and encryption impacting privacy, yet, we give our privacy away freely on FB. To quote OMC, "how bizarre". I don't think I'll ever get it.
Yeah, I think we understand each other. I don't really hate FB. Or if I do hate it, I hate it the same way I "hate" World of Warcraft. I've just realized that I am easily addicted to things, and I recognize in FB something that could easily consume hours of my life every week. It's better for me to just pretend it doesn't exist most of the time, until the occasion where a real-life friend mentions something they posted on FB that seems worth delving into, like the aforementioned baby pictures.
Wouldn't it make a little more sense to spread those four hours out over the year? I never spend more than a few minutes at a time on Facebook, because there's never that much new stuff since I looked at it yesterday.
Yeah, definitely. I think for my personality, I just have a really hard time just "snacking" on Facebook. I also might have a more active set of Facebook friends/family than you do. I feel like whenever I open it, even when I've toyed with checking it weekly, I end up spending hours reading posts and articles people have linked to, etc. It's easier for me to just ignore it for months at a time and being okay missing the occasional important update.
re [1] - closest I got to this was downloading profile images from meetup.com for a meetup I ran to help me put names to faces. I then created a series of Anki flash cards. I'm still terrible at it though ;)
> I feel confident that Facebook has stumbled on something in our animal behavior that draws us closer to it.
It's a "novelty addiction". They weren't the first, it's just its content is closer and more relevant to you since it's people you know. The feeling when you find something new gives you a pleasurable dopamine hit, so you're constantly looking for more.
Same can be said for people addicted to reddit, HN, Twitter, etc.
One thing that has recently helped me kick the "addiction" is by unfollowing literally everybody I know. It's taken a while, but now when I go back in it literally says something to the effect that "you need to follow friends to get news in your feed".
I'm now placing the onus on going back in and actively going to the feeds of friends and family that I care about; as opposed to the mindless thumbing through the feed.
I am not addicted to facebook or any other social media. In fact, the only reason I use them with any regularity is to take part in social interactions with my immediate family.
However, I still think you're onto something. Social media has figured out how to really, at a deep level, grab our attention and keep it.
But it doesn't work on me because I'm not a very social person. I'm pretty far on the 'recluse' spectrum.
> As much as I despise the lack of depth in the average content, I feel confident that Facebook has stumbled on something in our animal behavior that draws us closer to it.
For me the beginning of the end was when Facebook created the Newsfeed and started "optimizing" it based on your behavior. Suddenly, content was no longer chronological (including photos in a single post!), all articles were click-bait, and most posts were "on behalf of the user". For example, "So-and-so has liked Pepsi!", "So-and-so has expressed interest in this local event!", etc. All content seems designed to provide the illusion that everyone is always on Facebook. And you should be too!
Luckily, I've found a workaround that fits my workflow well. I'm still a pretty avid RSS (GNU Emacs / Gnus) user, so I added the people I care about to my "Close Friends" group, subscribed to the RSS feed, and read it on my own time. Posts maintain chronological order and are 100% text (unless I choose to click on them). Most importantly, when I'm done sifting through the notifications, I'm done. Since I'm not on the website, Facebook can't manipulate me into wasting my time.
With my luck, they're shut down this feature in the near future.
Just sign out. Facebook's response is hilarious -- they send you "please come back" emails for a few weeks.
I stopped using it a few months ago, don't really miss it at all. If you find you're missing someone whom you normally interacted with on Facebook, give them a call.
Yeah those messages are hilarious. I got a pathetic new wrinkle on that the other day:
It looks like someone tried to log into your account on April XX at X:XXxm using an unknown device. Your account is safe; we just wanted to make sure it was you who tried to log in from somewhere new.
If you don't think this was you, please log into Facebook so we can walk you through a few steps to keep your account safe.
> "I wish I had a clever idea for a solution to this because I really think the world deserves an open social platform that not only engages people socially, but provides the social lubricant to enable people to form online/offline clubs and interact with each other in a high-bandwidth so we can use the internet to teach each other and create fun things with each other."
So like Meetup but with a stronger online discussion platform?
> I feel confident that Facebook has stumbled on something in our animal behavior that draws us closer to it.
I strongly agree.
I also believe that it is very easy to disturb their black magic.
Ever since I started using Stylish to customize the interface, I find myself less compulsively drawn to it. My version of Facebook remplaces all the blue for red hues and adds a wallpaper. I find that this makes Facebook more tiring to use.
This must be why Facebook is so against browser apps that change their features even when it's only minimally.
I'm not sure if it's a joke or not, but using the hosts file to block websites is a big way to gain productivity. Even better if you ask your admin to do it while not giving you the rights to change it back!
Edit: Also, Hacker News has built-in features to do this. Look up "noprocrast" in your profile! You have "maxvisit" and "minaway" you can use to keep you from coming here too much!
It's easy to dismiss little hacks like this because "you can always change it back". But what I've found is the simple little disruption of a lazy habit is enough. If I need to open the hosts file with sudo, that's enough of a block
If you are trying to fix this. I started muting everything that came across my feeds, that why I can use it for my groups and only the friends I want to see how things are going.
I wonder if and at what point competition authorities will start requiring Facebook to make these options available with accounts on other social networks. Otherwise, we end up in the same place as Internet Explorer killing Netscape on Windows - a company releasing technically inferior products that squash competition by using their strengths in other irrelevant areas.
I can use Whatsapp and Instagram without a Facebook account, and there's no reason I couldn't use this new video streaming thing in the same way.
As much as I dislike facebook, I've moved around a lot throughout my life, as have a lot of my friends, both from high school and university. So realistically, I just don't see any realistic alternative single platform which allows me to keep in touch with all these people.
If such a platform did exist, and I knew about it, I would switch immediately. Their entire business model revolves around getting users addicted, and their history of abusing user's data means I will never be able to even trust the platform.
That being said, I limit my facebook usage to messanger and wishing people happy birthday, so I guess it could be worse.
True, but I also need people I want to talk to to be on the messaging tool, which is the real issue here.
As for email, to me it just doesn't serve the same purpose that IM does. It's analogous to sending letters back and forth as opposed to having a face-to-face conversation -- the increased time lag between replies encouraged by the medium has a huge influence on the nature of conversations that occur through it.
I still use email, for example when I want to send something more in-depth to someone and I don't expect a quick reply. But it's not the right tool if I want a real-time, informal conversation with someone, which is most of my conversations.
I use Google Messenger. Everyone has a cell phone number. No need to enroll. I can share pictures, audio, text, video. Text messaging is the only thing you need.
I have a group chat with 2/3 other friends I've know for 20+ years. Then I usually text others individually.
Facebook is an awful medium to conduct intimate conversations over. After two failed attempts to ditch it in the past, I've been off Facebook for a year. I can attest that you won't miss it. Just use SMS.
At the moment, the frequency of social app turnover is much higher than the rate at which people become old, even for definitions of "old" as low as "30". Facebook is bucking the trend, but it's still not possible to know whether that's a "permanent" situation or just a trend-bucker. There's no guarantee they'll "end up" on Facebook.
if all the webs content ends up migrated into facebook, they wont have a ton of choice.
imagine all of yelp and craigslist locked, oh and every small business web page, requiring an account to view. stuff kids might not be interested in, but adults probably are.
I have friends and family scattered all over the place. They're all on Facebook. That makes it really easy to connect with them, which reinforces the loop.
I use Facebook Messenger more often than texts now.
But perhaps more interestingly, I'm neither addicted to Facebook nor worried about this trend. It just fades into the background for me. The real value is the communication I have with other people. And as for the ads... I rarely notice them anymore.
Not sure if it's an Israeli thing, but Facebook groups are probably the biggest value I get out of Facebook (excluding messanger/whatsapp).
We have very active programming groups (Israeli IOS/Android devs, Javascript Israel), neighborhood and city groups (Secret Tel Aviv), social groups (Burning man Israel) and even a large discussion group about politics and economics.
This. I spent 95% of my time on Facebook in groups. Its definitely not a Israeli thing. In Nepal too, we have groups of programming language, groups about all sort of stuffs.
This, for me (in Canada). I now regularly throughout the day check several facebook groups related to my various hobbies. For example a group where serious cyclists from my area are buying/selling parts. Yes, I also check craigslist/kijiji, but the Facebook group is much more responsive, you can ask questions and comment, and I don't have to sift through a bunch of cheap parts I don't want. Also I trust it more because most people are somehow connected.
In fact I hardly ever check my facebook feed anymore, I mostly just go directly to the group I'm interested in.
Not just an Israeli thing. I firmly believe messenger and groups (+ group events) are the only parts of Facebook that actually consistently provide value to users. The rest of it exists for the purpose of turning those users into a sellable product.
I deleted my Facebook sometime ago when I noticed an acute "icky" feeling every time I used it. Whether it was the posts complaining about whatever the latest outrage was (Supreme Court legalizing same sex marriage, etc) or the barrage of games, or whatever else, the signal to noise ratio was awful.
That was about a year ago. I don't miss it, and I don't feel that I'm missing anything. I think there are plenty of niche, high value aggregators of content, and ways to "connect" that are more useful to me. Such as where I am posting now. And I don't have to feel bad about myself when I use them.
No you shouldn't be concerned. Facebook for me personally, turned into just "blocking" everyone on my feed, because all they posted was garbage. It was endless posts of people airing their dirty laundry. Too much drama, so at the end of last year, I closed my account, and haven't logged in since. I do however have a separate developer account with zero connections, so I can get work done.
LinkedIn, I still have an active account. But I really don't "get it". The amount of garbage and spam posted by your connections on there, is quickly approaching Facebook levels. I rarely use it, except to clear out inbox requests from head hunters. It's basically a SpaceBook for business people.
I am "on Facebook", but it's for four specific reasons:
1) So I don't get questions about why I'm not on Facebook.
2) To let friends tag me in pictures (and see what pictures are being posted of me).
3) To let friends invite me to parties through Facebook.
4) See pictures of friends' babies.
I think it's good to have a Facebook account. It lets people push stuff to you, and more often I'm seeing invitations coming exclusively through FB. But I personally don't think you're missing anything by not actively using it.
Likewise, LinkedIn can be nice to keep tabs on past colleagues, not those you were close to obviously, but those on your periphery. You don't need to participate in the community to get the biggest benefit, IMO.
I'm on it, but still get asked all the time why I'm not on it. It seems like if you're not posting and commenting all the time people forget you exist.
Every time I'm asked why I'm not on facebook I just say I don't need it. They usually never ask again and I have no problem keeping in touch with friends by text message even if they are heavy facebook users.
Not really. If you feel no peer pressure to sign up, great!
For me, I was missing out on events when classmates and even teachers started communicating via Facebook. These days it has died down again in favor of Telegram so I could technically deactivate the account, but I'm keeping it for convenience. Recently saw someone's wedding being announced there, not something I want to be missing out on. I'd have caught on eventually, but this is easier.
It depends how often I check it. If I have lots of stuff I want to do, I might not check it for a month. If I'm bored a lot (i.e. when school begins again after the holidays), I'll probably be on it before Monday morning is out, and be checking it every other day from thereon.
Linkedin:
Depends on your situation and business I'd guess, but as someone with not too much experience with Linkedin, I don't know. I've got it and I actively make connections, but I don't really use it other than that. More of a backup thing.
Can you go into a little more detail about Telegram?
I find the whole tech platform very promising, and I have a group chat and a couple private chats going on it, but at least in my social circle, we haven't transitioned.
Do you do event invites with it? Do you do family group chats with it? Just wondering.
The killer feature for developers is just proper desktop support. Another killer feature for security- and privacy-conscious people is that the clients are open source. People also seem to like the stickers, but they're not my thing.
Anyway, people in my vicinity usually get their healthy dose of paranoia through me so sooner or later, they typically end up installing Telegram. It's not perfect, I have a wishlist, but it's a far cry better from Whatsapp privacy-wise and client-wise (and sticker-wise if that's your thing).
Sometimes it takes a little pushing and inflicting logic (why should I install technically inferior Whatsapp for you, but you not technically superior Telegram for me?), but most people get around to it. Those who don't, I usually just end up losing contact with -- and so far I have no regrets about losing contact with anyone.
> Do you do event invites with it?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean with "event" invites, but whenever a group needs making (e.g. for project groups), I create it in Telegram and invite everyone that already has it. Sometimes there are one or two people who still need to install it, sometimes grudgingly, but if they have at least a few friends on it, they usually don't go back to Whatsapp anymore afterwards. (They don't switch exclusively, but they'll use both.)
I'm sorry, what invitation are you talking about? The Facebook event system?
If so, if someone wants to invite me, I'm sure they can find a way around Mark Zuckerberg to do this. If not, their loss. I'm not a party person though, that might have something to do with it as well. (I do get around to my share of hacker conferences, but they somehow don't seem to use Facebook...)
with facebook you can get in touch with people that might be othwerwise unreachable (it allowed us to do a proper high school reunion for example).
the key is to use it sparingly and not spend too much time, it has some addictive factor in constant news feed that make news sites look like static HTML pages. it can be a good tool but a bad master
linkedin is purely professional, basically your online CV + network of your colleagues. they tried to make it more FB-like but I don't know a single person who is not recruiter who actually ever checks that.
If you have friends or family on Facebook then you may already be part of its social graph, even if you haven't explicitly joined . Ditto if you are an email contact of a LinkedIn user who is careless with app permissions.
But personally I don't think that you are missing out.
I find that my friends who don't use Facebook become a little bit detached from my social scene. It's sad but true.
It's a bit like those friends that stubbornly refused to get a mobile phone in the nineties - I just didn't keep in touch with them as much as my friends that had mobiles. Their argument was that they didn't want to be reachable all the time. Fair enough, but the trade off for them is that they're less reachable socially.
Eventually, of course, they got a phone. And eventually I'm sure everyone will be on Facebook too. There's nothing dystopian about sharing news, plans and photos.
# if you're bothering with a hostfile block, you probably want these
fbcdn.com www.fbcdn.com fbcdn.net www.fbcdn.net
www.static.ak.fbcdn.net static.ak.fbcdn.net
facebook.com www.facebook.com connect.facebook.com
login.facebook.com www.login.facebook.com
www.static.ak.connect.facebook.com static.ak.connect.facebook.com
www.static.ak.facebook.com static.ak.facebook.com
# might want to add these as well
google-analytics.com www.google-analytics.com ssl.google-analytics.com
I find it really weird that when I click on a browser link from the facebook site to an external site, it ends up going back to opening facebook in firefox which asks me to login from the browser so I can see this external website.
It's like it wants me to view the internet from facebook wtf
That's actually doing you a service - Facebook maintain a database of malware sites, and they run the link through it to make you aren't going to be exposed.
Of course, they don't really do this for your benefit, as it also enables them to track metrics on which links get clicked.
I think on FB, celebs can follow normal people without them appearing as their followers (can anyone confirm this??) This means that power moves up the chain, but not necessarily down it (you lose the bragging rights.) What sort of company culture would do that?
The only reason why I have not been using Facebook is their android app on 4.4.3 burns through my battery.
I still have their messenger app which I use every now and then to keep in touch with friends overseas. I might return to using the regular it in the future.
Facebook is slowly eating the rest of the Internet... of course that depends on your use of the internet.
I have a profile but it's been closed for years.
For me the internet are forums that provide some technical insight that helps me fix a problem, open source software and a way to buy something without getting out of my chair.
On the plus side, facebook took away from email a lot of non requested emails and that made more straightforward the service, another plus is that suddenly I can get telephone numbers for most stores in case I need to do a call (sometimes small business doesn't have a webpage)
Some of the reasons Facebook took away from email are UI/UX-based: 1) have you ever wanted to send just a message without a subject line (email forces you to stop and think for 2 seconds, which is not good), 2) you have to remember the person's email address or how it starts (emails are still not great at just entering the person's name), 3) if the person changes email address you have to know the new one or your mail goes undelivered.
FB gave these folks email without all the above extra and folders, tags, and all that other non sense.
I am not on facebook, and yet i don't see the internet being "eaten" around me. Maybe it's a good thing to have a wall behind which all the trivialities occur. If something great happens, it will jump out of there. Facebook is apparently "eating" the social networking world. To me, that's good, i would like to see companies innovating in other, more exciting areas.
From the article: "Facebook does come out with great, original ideas. It reinvented the iconic 'like' button and created Facebook reactions."
I know they had to tread carefully on a heavily-used feature of the app. And it's a welcome update for sure. Still, let's not oversell it, either. They added a few more icons. I hope that's not the leading example of a great, original idea.
ever since i enabled 2 factor i'm too lazy to log in so that did the trick. When I do log in once in a while, it just looks like a tumblr feed of people posting funny videos with occasional personal photo, I can get that on reddit already. so i'm just keeping my account alive in case i have anything to announce in the future..
You can control what you see from individual people and what things they share. It's very granular and it works well. You can also follow really interesting people, pages and groups. It's all about using the tool properly.
I find following interesting people on twitter to be a better signal to noise ratio. That way I get exactly what they put out and nothing more, instead of some complicated algorithm designed to keep me "engaged".
I agree, i do like Twitter just a slight tad more...but I wonder: if a person is following someone on Twitter, do they see all of the actual output from that person? Or does Twitter do something similar to Facebook, and limit things a bit? If not now, then I wonder if it will happen eventually (Twitter's gotta monetize somehow, someday)? I should have began my comment with the disclaimer that I am becoming more and more of a curmudgeon of being a user on someone else's platform. Doubtful I'll get to RMS levels, but def. I'm a curmudgeon. ;-)
frankly I wish twitter would do this for direct replies to other tweets (maybe just show the first reply, and to see the rest you should click on that thread)
Tool? It all just gets thrown into one page, either chronologically (a setting FB constantly "forgets") or filtered through a totally opaque algorithm. There is no way to display things in various ways, e.g. as list (just the date, type (text/link/image/video), poster, number of likes/comments/shares). There is no way to show posts matching specific criteria, be it the date range or content. There is just the endless scrolling nonsense. Anything I ever posted on my own CMS I can find in like 10 seconds if I remember any detail about it. On Facebook, unless it was last week, why bother? The stuff effectively disappears for normal human use, and is only really remembered by the algorithms and spooks that peruse the data.
So it's not even trying to be a tool as far as I can see. It's certainly not about people posting and curating things, it's just about posting and seeing whatever random stuff some random person or group currently posted. The same for groups: the way they are, they're as bad as no forum ever was, even in the 90s. Which I would say about a lot of sites with comment functions, e.g. YouTube and Twitter, but that doesn't improve FB.
Facebook is not a blogging platform. It isn't promising a long-term store of curated searchable data. It's an endlessly scrolling feed of what's going on now, plus an events tool and photos etc. When did it ever promise anything more?
Well, it is a long-term store of searchable data, just not for the people who actually put it there or care what their friends said or did. But more to your point: so it doesn't break a completely meaningless promise such as this one:
> Founded in 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.
Great promise. I have a hard time coming up with anything, from cooking food to murdering people in the streets, that doesn't fit this definition if you just squint hard enough.
I judge Facebook by how it improves or impoverishes the world and the web, not by whether it keeps promises that are so vague one could apply them to just about anything, and which I would say are also lies by omission (which may be par of the course for marketing, but that doesn't change what it is). I don't see anything in their FAQ about "dumb fucks" trusting anyone, either.
You cannot "control what you see from individual people" as you claimed. You can click "see less stuff like this", sure, but what is "like this"? Nobody knows, nobody cares, just some fuzzy thing or other. That's not "control".
And even if you follow people/groups that never post stuff you don't like, it's still a tumblr-like "feed", and that has nothing to do with using the "tool" wrong, that's using it exactly right, seeing random stuff and feeding algorithms with your likes and shares. It extracts value from people, it keeps the data, and gives very little back to them; again, par of the course, again, doesn't change what it is.
You have an incredible sense of entitlement when it comes to a website that is provided free of charge (with fairly well-targeted and unobtrusive advertising) for you and your friends to use.
If you think the site is not sophisticated enough for your tastes, don't use it. But if you don't use it and your friends do, then you may miss out on social connection. Because that's what the site is for.
Facebook gives a lot to its users, and all for free. The complexity of building a site that serves 1.5bn users is astonishing, and with live notifications too. It's just brilliant. But if you're too sophisticated for it then don't use it. Makes no difference to me.
> But if you don't use it and your friends do, then you may miss out on social connection.
Which makes the whole "free of charge and voluntary" thing kind of moot. If it sucks up people, it better not suck, or at least connect with things like diaspora etc. (which also lack these features, but at least wouldn't fight you tooth and nail if you tried to implement them). If that is incredibly entitled, well, I guess I am then.
> The complexity of building a site that serves 1.5bn users is astonishing
As for me is the desire to even do that. I think true genius is found in protocols, not applications and silos. The internet was invented to withstand nuclear strikes, and the return to centralization seems to be solely for the purpose of spooks shoveling eyeballs into the jaws of advertisers. I can't admire the technical proficiency if I disagree with the spirit and goal of it so deeply.
If you want to be sociable, it's your responsibility to socialise where your friends socialise.
It's not the bar's fault, or the sports club's fault, or Facebook's fault, if your friends choose to go there but you don't.
The situation is only "involuntary" in that the choices of your friends aren't under your own control.
But thanks to Facebook the situation -is- free of charge.
True genius might lie in protocols. But it's up to your friends if they prefer communicating you via protocols or via a friendly website with a good mobile app.
I spent two months trying to control what the facebook feed would give me.
I wanted only posts by my friends. Photos of my friends. Videos of my friends. No third-party posts. No news posts. No ads masquerading as content. No clickbait. No stupid memes. Only news about the lives of my friends.
Every morning I would open my feed and go through every post on the top page that was a "shared" post and tell Facebook to never display content from that site again. I probably blocked hundreds of sites and yet every morning my feed would still be full of idiotic shared news articles. I blocked all my pages and I really only have a small number of friends and relatives added to the site (less than a hundred).
I have yet to find a tool where Facebook actually shows me what is blocked and allows me to define what I want (no shared content, only first-party posts by friends). I still saw a lot of blocked site's content pop up the next day even after blocking it the day prior, so I highly suspect the "block this content" option is taken as a suggestion and not a hard demand.
Sort of similar: I've only kept my Facebook account because I need it for work. I log in to Facebook (Business) and check that our product feed is behaving, and log out.
Facebook is the most powerful attempt to construct a true modern walled garden. Bots and VR could be really useful in this attempt. Please, do not let this happen.
I've always explained the phenomenon of gossip rags as a surrogate for our innate need to be social. Rather than engaging in actual social scenarios (which can carry social risks), many people have fulfilled our social needs with television shows and gossip rags. Celebrities have become a surrogate community members for many people, and I suspect Facebook ups that by one by creating a platform where you can interact with friends, celebrities and strangers in an environment that mitigates most (not all) risks.
I wish I had a clever idea for a solution to this because I really think the world deserves an open social platform that not only engages people socially, but provides the social lubricant to enable people to form online/offline clubs and interact with each other in a high-bandwidth so we can use the internet to teach each other and create fun things with each other.
Maybe it's only a matter of bandwidth, transistors and time.