I love hearing people say “I’m going to stop using Facebook, I’ll use instagram instead”.
People aren’t going to quit Facebook because deep down people WANT to give out all this information. They want to publicly post their locations and random ramblings and fake happyness, and in a week or two people will forget that they were pretending to be up in arms about information they put out publicly being consumed.
And I say publicly because even if your profile isn’t public the vast majority of people do not actually curate their friends list, and most of the stuff they post they would not tell most of those people in person if the opportunity presented itself.
I understand there is some shadyness behind the scenes but I feel very whatever about the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica stuff. If I send an iMessage to my friend and he hands his phone to a third party (unlocked) and they read my text I don’t get upset with Apple, I get upset with my friend who shared my information with a third party without my permission.
I’m still a little amazed at how vile everyone seems to find FB usage to be when it’s been such an enormous positive in my life in the last few years here in Raleigh, as outlined here:
I mean, hey, I totally get the political ramifications of the death of privacy and the sale of the minds of our most vulnerable and impressionable racist citizens to the highest bidder, but all of you guys have this really weird view that FB is this endless procession of misery and self-centered shittiness 100% of the time in the social/psychological sphere that does not bear out with my high daily usage. Not to say that stuff doesn’t happen or exist, but it’s far and away from the only possible result.
Then again, as I noted elsewhere, you’re all old and bitter, so maybe it’s no surprise you feel this way ;-)
Hey, when I was in college Facebook was cool, because it was just college students.
When my old parents got on Facebook? Pretty much stopped being cool.
You rail against the GOP republicans but you embrace their tools. You can’t have it both ways. Remember how Zuckerberg came out after the election and said there was NO WAY FACEBOOK INFLUENCED THE ELECTION. Remember that?
SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg addressed growing criticism of Facebook’s ascendant power to sway public opinion, saying the “small amount” of fake news that spread on the social network during the election did not influence the outcome.
“To think it influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,” Zuckerberg said Thursday evening during the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif.
If you’re going to embrace their tools, then you need to dial back your vehemence.
Probably because it does what people need of it and everyone is on it.
Need to organize an event with people? Easy to do. Need to share a picture of your cat with your extended family? Piece of cake. And now they’re entrenched so getting grandma who finally figured out how to use one site on the entire internet 4 years ago to switch over to something new is unlikely.
The only reason I really stay on it is because it’s the only contact method I have with old friends, family and acquaintances. If it disappeared tomorrow, likely so would my contact with them. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, but I’d always wonder what my friend who moved to Thailand to teach was up to and how she was doing.
The downside is that they took all that stuff and sold it and the reality is that if Facebook died and we got some new product, it would likely end up in the same exact situation in a decade because it turns out people like being billionaires and have power to influence people. Go figure.
Then again I never really got committed to it. I have like 70 friends or something. I never had a problem deleting people from it and when I’d see people I knew with like 1000 friends I knew it was just a form of e-peen measuring. Those people would accept literally any friend request sent to them and would send them to complete strangers. I used to get them fairly often. “Somedude is friends with Lisa.” Well, I’ve never heard of this person in my life ever and I barely interact with Lisa so I think I’ll pass. But most people just add to the score.
The next iteration will be the same thing with some gimmick around it.
I joined Facebook only 2 years ago when I got back into bowling again after quitting for over 15 years. I was getting involved in the bowling scene and local tournaments again and my friends list of now 130 or so is probably 90% bowling contacts and 10% family and old friends I have reconnected with.
I manage our City Bowling Association Facebook page and do event listings and status updates and results from tournaments. I have also managed to capture a couple 300 games shot live and uploaded those and people seem to really enjoy that. We are trying to get more weekly updates so that people can get some recognition for their achievements with many of the physical ones being taken away by the association on a national level.
I also manage a Bowling Tour Facebook Page for a tour I help run and we post live updates, pictures and videos of the events so that family members and friends can watch how the people they know are doing. I mass invite some bowler friends I know at times so that I can invite them to our tour events and give them updates.
I do see a lot of political posts from people on both sides of all of the major issues the past couple years. I mostly just chuckle a little at how clever some of them are, on both sides, and don’t take them seriously, but I could see how some people could be influenced by the barrage of content that some people put out there.
That is my sediment as well. From my perspective, the nonsensical, very obvious and one-sided propaganda hit pieces (from both sides of the tribal divide) did not do anything to influence anything.
It is quite a tragedy/comedy to see how all the FB posts as well as mainstream media mocking and belittling Trump in the lead up to the GOP convention. And YET, he still managed to get nomination and proceeded to win.
I think Trump as president is not a sane choice to make. But from my point of view from a 3rd party with no bone to contend, it’s disingenuous to place the blame solely on FB and social media when it is quite apparent that there much more to the underlying factors contributing to the huge tribalism that is going on in the U.S.
I am totally up for suggestions, if you have any. I need to be able to communicate with 30 people at once but it needs to be something that other people can check at their leisure, not something annoying like a group email.
Facebook is a tool and like any tool what you get out of it depends on how you use it. For millions of people, it provides a communication outlet, that people will not be willing to give up, so unless the government shuts it down, facebook is going nowhere. I have 9 brothers and sisters which leads to a huge extended family. We are close emotionally but geographically, we are spread out all over the country. FB has allowed us to easily organize get togethers and also allows us to keep the entire family apprised of important events and life changes, without having to make 40 seperate phone calls each time something happens.
A significant portion of my vehemence is that it’s high time Democrats stopped pointlessly trying to walk the high road and used tactics that obviously work rather than pussyfooting around with philosophical platforms that no one seems to give a shit about.
I mean yes, the endgoal of the Permanent Progressive Majority is the reeducation of the population into an ever-increasingly more progressive and liberal mindset from now until the heat death of the universe (which such an enlightened and perfected race would be able to indefinitely forestall). But unfortunately, the electorate we’ve got now seems to be bizarrely susceptible to shitty Russian frog memes on their Facebooks and Twitters because they’re the product of a savaged educational system and decades of drip-fed Fox News and AM Radio propaganda, and their reasoning faculties have been sawed off exposing the burning core of hatred at the heart of every man-creature, preventing the soothing salve of education and civilization from cooling their natural inclinations towards tribalism and cruelty and turning them toward better purposes.
AKA, we’ve got a bunch of brainwashed lunks pulling the lever every 2-4 years, and they’ve been reconditioned to respond to this shit. It’s all they’re capable of understanding. It’s shitty that that’s the case, but they’re the population we’ve got to work with, and so long as they keep voting their masters into power, the tragic social and economic grindstones we’ve been pressed against for so long are going to keep on turning.
So, yeah. Use the tools of the enemy. The ends will justify the means.
Also, I mean, if I deleted my Facebook, how would I get people to click Like on my cooking pictures and give me a dopamine boost at 3AM on a Thursday when I’m wondering what the point of my shitty meaningless existence is outside of tiny drips of social approval from nigh-strangers?
Yes, from what I can tell the kids don’t bother with FB – that’s what their parents and grandparents use – and instead use Instagram, Whatsapp, and Snapchat.
I think there are a lot of people who use FB in a relatively positive manner to exchange stories and pics among a group of friends. I don’t see that going away.
The problem I see with FB is they want to be all things to all people, so they don’t want to exclude anything, including questionable and dishonest content.
Well the kids don’t really vote either. FB ads, lies, scames, fake stories designed to hugely change voting behavior probably wouldn’t target them purposefully.
Things I like about facebook:
Keeping up with social friends
Keeping up with the family
Interest groups I’ve joined
Things I dislike about facebook:
Facebook as a news source. This wasn’t needed, it’s part of the problem.
Facebook Live
Facebook Stories
Facebook selling my information for targeted ads
Facebook apparently having my phone call logs and phone text messages
Facebook tracking my location
Facebook as an authentication mechanism
Facebook Pixel tracking on non-facebook websites so they get EVEN MORE information about you
Facebook hardware trackers at some businesses
I’ll buy that, but it’s hard to isolate just that on Facebook. You get smothered with all news. And so while you or I might see, “break in at ‘localtown’ bank this afternoon,” someone out there might see, “The FBI is destroying your safety, here’s why!”
I should add, those last four items are what really get to me a bit. Especially combined with other data that Facebook has on you, it’s a bit scary.
At a business I frequent, to get on wireless there you have to log in via Facebook. Even if you choose not to, if you use their website, it shares information from you as a Facebook user back to them. And if you don’t do that either, but sit at their establishment and happen to use Facebook for other things, the tracker lets them know of nearby Facebook users.
It’s far from ideal for sure, but my alternative is to get on the roof and install an antenna and then watch the news live, probably never going to happen, or go to the crappy websites of our local affiliates. Facebook, right now, is my best choice since the local newspaper put their content behind a paywall and the cost of that paper is ridiculous.
The butcher shop down the street also advertises their sales there, and the only other way to find those is the radio or drive by and hope for a sign.
Everything I use online tracks me, and the only suggestion I see from all these articles pointing out privacy now is… to not use it. I’m not really willing to isolate myself like that. I would prefer if these companies didn’t have 20 pages to read about their tracking and an accept it or leave attitude, but they do.
