Peak Facebook

I wasn’t on facebook before it was cool to not be on facebook.

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I created The Face Book. I have it all on a FuddRucker’s napkin.

True. Many become completely unhinged.

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Yeah, man, like you just noticed? The cool kids have been saying it’s just for squares like forever.

For a moment I thought worriedly a mountain had been renamed.

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“Bad actor” is business speak for douche-bag…

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Clams are also known to make Fanny Hill look like a dead pope.

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Every walled garden I ever used, all the way back to Compuserve, had
problems with bad actors who’d fill up your screen with commercial
pitches, hatemail, and other undesirable junk.

While this is undoubtedly true – and I don’t have an FB account myself – couldn’t the same be said of any place on the Internet, walled or not? I don’t recall USENET being particularly usable after September…

BB itself is somewhat walled, and it seems cleaner. Don’t see much of a correlation.

You can unfollow someone without unfriending them, and they will never know. Except if they ask you directly if you saw their post about something-or-other, at which point you can lie and blame Facebook’s algorithms for not showing it to you for whatever reason.

Coping with Facebook is, IMHO, easier than coping with typical workplace and family social obligations.

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" acceptable " ( or “cromulent " ) { NOTequal } " nice " ~ ~
as in , both the great flood , and many plagues were " godsent "
also , it is usually expressed as 2 words ~ ~
therefore , robotmonkeys was correctly left !! ( twicely )
qed , imho , sic , sis ,” domine es requiem ( bonk ! ) " etc , etc , and such !!
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cromulent ( i made up " twicely " just now !! , just for this post !! ) ( although , others may have made it up before , with or without aforethought )

A clear case of literacy privilege.

More people than use Twitter. Would you say that Twitter is a wasteland?

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My principal requires all school staff to have a FB and uses FB as the primary means of communication within our district. The myriad of ways this is stupid, and probably illegal have not swayed him. The amount of time I have to spend keeping book-club from posting pictures of wine drinking, maintaining privacy settings, etc. is unfathomable.

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“I’ve always felt that this was wildly oversold: the hardest-to-deal-with “spam” in my inbox is stuff from people I know, or who know me, and who want attention from me for something that is worthy but that I lack time for (if I pay attention to their stuff, I’ll have to neglect something else I’ve already committed to).”

Rub it in our faces that you have more of a life than we do.

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The problem with “friends” you don’t want to include but that you’ve got
to include for various and sundry reasons is one reason I prefer
Google+'s approach of circles. I can have a circle for regular
co-workers/bosses or for family and not have everything I post visible
to them.

And you can do that with Facebook too. In fact, you could do that with Facebook before G+ was even opened as a public beta.

The interface, however, was originally terrible for it, so most people had no idea that you could. (It’s gotten better, but it’s still not great. But then, Facebook’s interface is always “not great”.)

That, and I’m pretty certain that the vast majority of people posting on Facebook would just post to “All Circles” if they were also active on G+. The size and activity of the user base means that something that is mainly a problem due to volume is more readily apparent on Facebook (where an individual user averages several hours a month on the site) than on G+ (average of less than 5 minutes per month for active users).

My teenagers and their friends eschew Facebook. In fact, they consider it the bastion of “old people”.

My irritation with FB is the constant presence of the stupid little “f” icon on every damn website. No, I don’t want to login with my FB account!

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The more you use it, the better it works, really. If you don’t interact with a particular person or a page, FB stops putting those updates in your feed. The pages you do like and interact with appear more frequently. If all you have is junk on your page, you’re using it wrong. Don’t “like” junk, and use the “hide” button liberally, and you should have a feed that’s to your liking. (Also, if you’re friending a lot of people you barely know, that’s your own fault, and not Facebook’s.)

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The secret to FB fun is Secret Groups. Like other FB groups you may be a part of, by setting it to Secret only the members of the group can see the posts. If you and your friends are perhaps more crass than some of your obligated friends like HS alums or church-oriented peers, get lunch-table cliquey and ask your like-minded friends to join your secret group. I’m in a secret group of my HS friends and one of my current friends and FB is fun - because you can interact with the secret group in your main feed. So I see all the mundane posts where I have to mind my p’s and q’s, but I also see all the secret posts where we can cuss or speak or be snarky until our hearts content. I suppose this a form of workaround for creating our own google+ circles within FB, but if that’s what it takes to be where the users are - might as well make it enjoyable.

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Yes. A thousand times yes.

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I am the opposite of this: I use Facebook specifically to keep up with the people I don’t have much contact with. It’s a middle ground between ‘goodbye forever’ and ‘by all means, stay in my living room.’

So when I see posts that I find boring, I remind myself that people use Facebook for different reasons, that other human beings are not always fun and exciting, and that other people might not find my own contributions that interesting sometimes. (There are limits to this doctrine, though; constant political screeds get dropped from my feed pretty quickly.)

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