Facebook is moderately useful for keeping in touch with people you want to hear from and who just won't use email/Mastadon or whatever, and for interest-based groups and events. That is all. And as long as you strictly restrict yourself to using only the website through a browser and eschew their apps and carefully go over the privacy settings and tune them to your needs you should be okay. As for endlessly scrolling the newsfeed all day, well that is not so much Facebook's fault as that people who do that are probably having too much idle time and not knowing how to do some productive or more creative activity. If Facebook did not exist those people would trawl through Twitter or Youtube or something else.
> As for endlessly scrolling the newsfeed all day, well that is not so much Facebook's fault as that people who do that are probably having too much idle time and not knowing how to do some productive or more creative activity. If Facebook did not exist those people would trawl through Twitter or Youtube or something else.
ehh... yes and no.
On the one hand, there is something to the idea that folks should take responsibility for figuring out how to not waste their time like this (if they consider it a problem; if you want to spend all day on goofing around on the internet, have fun I guess). There's some internal motivation required to make that happen that's a skill worth learning.
...but on the other hand, companies spend a ton of money researching how to keep people "engaged." This includes hiring psychologists to help them fine-tune the crap out of their platforms to make them addictive. Given that level of manipulative behavior, I don't think it's entirely fair to blame the users. And yes, without Facebook they might just do the same on Twitter or YouTube, but those platforms are doing the same thing. It doesn't make it ok just because everyone else is doing it.
I just want status updates and photos from my friends. If I could literally mute all shared content (memes, twitter dunk screenshots and "shares") it would be a much nicer platform to use, but from Facebook's perspective this would be awful because I would be on and off the site in a few minutes.
It turns out I really just wanted MySpace with photo albums.
The internally-inconsistent premise FB is based on, keeping in touch with friends, ultimately leaves nothing new and no mystery to talk about.. and no point to ever meet, effectively creating distance from and losing friends. Isn't that an awesome technology?
