I’m sorry you had to go through that and am glad things are better. I’m also not surprised that this thread is starting to fill up with personal stories of real pain caused by Facebook, backing up what the social scientists said from the beginning.
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I guess I’m just hoping that if people start to really understand there are real people being hurt by this maybe they’ll at least be more ok with, you know, just sending an email or a private chat… I mean the more we “need” facebook the more it becomes a necessary evil in even the most sympathetic people’s minds.
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It’s like Facebook, but with more feckless management, a post limit of 280 characters and the ability for users to keep their personal accounts anonymous (which most aren’t smart enough or are too thirsty for attention to do).
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In all seriousness, I appreciate people’s bad experiences with Facebook, but I question the fuck out of the original article and its characterisation of the problem and its solution. “People feel inadequate because of folks broadcasting the best possible version of their lives” is not in my top 20 of major social media issues.
As every social network shows, allowing people to create throwaway personalities means some will use them to attack others. The nostalgic feeling of ‘anonymity allows people to show vulnerability and true connection’ is naive, because in practice anonymity is liable to collapse at any moment.
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This is why I loved web forums and mailing lists. I didn’t have a concrete identity to follow me around. It’s annoying in other mediums especially when my identity is largely irrelevant. If I join a mailing list covered cooking should my gender identity factor into figure out how to convert metric measures to American for a recipe? Or does the existence of one of my friends on a web forum matters if we happen to go to the same one? I really think such details are only relevant in context. Without context one’s identity, the details thereof, should always be confidential for everyone. If that means I go back to mailing lists and web forums and lose use of Facebook then so be it. I only use it to read the posts in one group for an SDR that I own since the vendor also posts there. Otherwise, Facebook is just there taking up space on my phone.
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The problem with your argument is that pseudonyms don’t mean you don’t know the person. On old web forums where the groups were small you kinda know who you were dealing with. And it took energy for someone to constantly churn out new identities to fool moderators on said small forums. Eventually that person would get IP banned from the site and that would be that. Twitter, other the hand, has a huge problem of being too big. Something like Twitter should’ve been designed to be federated where you could control access to your timeline and your friends. This would help with managing bad actors since they would have to put more energy into getting access to you and your friends. No more 4chan or KF types able to get their ‘lulz’ fix when you can basically block a dip down to their MAC Address (and most folks don’t bother digging up scripts/app that can manipulate that). This doesn’t mean bad actors won’t try to get through that barrier (they always will) but if it’s designed with end users in mind then it would be much better than this current crop of crappy services.
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Yeah, but I think what you are missing is not web forums, but the smallness of the internet that enabled forums where all the regulars knew each other. If there’s only one person trying to trolley, systems can control and eliminate them, and we believed back then that these forums are a semi-private space that no one malicious will ever dig into. But that can’t be scaled up - in the modern internet, each trolley can be allowed to post exactly one message and that’ll be enough to swamp a site. Sites like reddit show how such systems fail and trollies can dominate. Endless accounts of people being doxxed and folks digging into their histories show that anonymous identities will be found once people really have it out for them.
I think people have a reasonable nostalgia for the old web but I don’t see any real way to go back to it.
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Sometimes the following could be a good thing:
Anonymity has had salubrious effects in almost equal measure to enforced real-name policies, allowing people safe spaces to discuss personal issues, to express progressive political opinions they might otherwise keep to themselves, and to participate in discussions where they might not otherwise have been welcome.
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HEY EVERYBODY CHECK IT OUT, CORRELATION IMPLIES CAUSATION. Thanks, Michigan and YouTube, for that crackerjack analysis.
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Roger that.
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Glad to hear this.
Been there.
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How much worse?
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Actually that was my point. We need to we get around the problem by ensuring people can make social connections as needed and limit access to identifying information. Meaning, we make a large network from many small ones. It does mean we lose the whole single signon functionality of sites like Facebook but I think people will accept this over having their careers ruined or their children threatened by 4chan-types. Web forums here were a primitive example of this that did work for a time. But it only worked because moderators were always there making sure people weren’t going off the rails. Twitter tries to automate AND moderate which doesn’t work. I’ve seen all kinds of doxes going on that in a more intimate environment would get smacked down. With the current one-platform-to-rule-all isn’t working to fix this problem, it just makes it more aggressive and easier to propagate. Essentially, aggregation only lends itself to bad actors (I see this as a general principle since even HFT has a similar problem with quote stuffing). Basically disaggregation, allowing for selective atomization, is one part of a bigger solution I think.
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Yep, that’s where I think modern social networks fail. The sweet front end Facebook and company provides hides the shallow nature of their services. You lose so much when you try to shove everything into a web-centric model. It’s why I feel the whole Web 2.0 trend was a mistake since it wasn’t just a technological trend but an economic one where everything got consolidated into closed off platforms. Eventually some government will have to break the back of a few of these giants to reset the process back to disaggregation/decentralization. Otherwise, we’ll have eternal Ma Bell on the global scale.
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I agree with the OP but @Fang’s point is true, also. If the OP is right, then the forced-anonymity of 4Chan would be the healthiest web community 
But actually, maybe it is more healthy in theory, but because the majority of people use Facebook et al, then only the rejects use 4Chan? @Fang is right about anonymity begetting rampant trolling, but if you accept that as a given then it’s easy to spot and ignore? Like the drug problem: when non-drug users make policy, they make DARE and more cops and prisons–forced sobriety. But none of that works. But turning everyone into drug addicts is hardly a solution, either. The sane perspective on drugs is to have used some softer drugs in moderation, recognize users that are out-of-control, and not get involved with their BS; but then you have to advocate for drug use and that’s traditionally been a no-no. Nowadays we’re moving towards a sane drug policy that accounts for how people actually use drugs, but I think that’s key to our internet identity policy, too. Forced-identity is FB, forced anonymity is 4Chan, and neither one is moderated in a meaningful way (which is probably the bigger issue?) Neither model works, but the best policy might lie in the middle somehow?
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4chan does not actually force anonymity, there are methods to identify yourself. But it is anonymous by default. The failure of 4chan I don’t think is really it being made up of ‘rejects’, the problem is actually that the community self-purged. When the tenor of discussion is such, everyone who does not fit into it really have no reason to stick around. It becomes suicidal to want to identify yourself.
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one definite example of my white, male privilege is the fact that i’ve never felt the need to compartmentalize my existence and can appear on fb as myself and take no more abuse for my out-of-the-texas-mainstream political views than i do in real life.
that said, my primary use for fb is displaying carefully curated photo albums since almost none of my friends and relatives belong to any one particular photo site.
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Not everyone has the social capital to just walk away. If not using it means losing a large chunk of your social life that’s not really a option.
There are also companies out there that require you to use Facebook. I’ve never been in either situation but I know of at least one company where not using Facebook wouldn’t be a option.
I’m assuming you know about Mastodon. If you don’t you should check it out, it’s basically exactly this.
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I’m another “nope.” (Btw. kudos for the octopus gif).
Another reason to avoid them is that their whole business model is mining all your social interactions for their commercial benefit, with all the creepy privacy violating that implies.
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