WOW! The Zuck has never asked me to follow him. I feel slighted.
2 Likes
“ditch Facebook and find cool stuff by checking bookmarks, visiting your favorite sites by typing their URLs in your browser bar, or searching for them on your favorite search-engine.”
I get what he’s saying, but I don’t think Foster Kamer understands why most people use Facebook. It’s not to “find cool stuff” or as some kind of news/internet aggregator, it’s to see your cousin’s baby photos, to send invitations or messages or questions to your friends and family, or to read and respond to the news from a group you’ve joined. I hate using Facebook, but it uniquely makes all of those things possible all at once, and does it on a level that a kid or a grandparent can understand.
4 Likes
1 Like
-
Keeping in contact with far-away friends and family I really care about: e-mail and text messages and (how quaint) voice calls.
-
Sharing photos and videos selectively: see above. The best of others’ stuff eventually gets sorted from the chaff and makes its way to my inbox.
-
Non-business newsfeed and finding interesting stuff: Feedly and RSS filled with reputable news sources.
-
Spouting off with opinions like this one: a couple of well-modded sites that are 98% free of trolls and various iterations of sexist and racist uncles. This is one of them.
-
Sending invitations: Evite, which all the Facebook users I know also use.
All that without volunteering to sell out my privacy to a company that’s demonstrated zero respect for the concept, without the constant streams of notifications about nonsense, without a flood of bigots and sexists and temporarily embarrassed millionaires throwing in their two cents, without dodgy media outlets getting equal standing with real ones.
Ok, so I can’t use Tinder, but I’m still very happy I never joined Facebook. I look forward to the day it goes the way of AOL.
6 Likes
We hate that, too! We’re actively working to get rid of those annoying third party ads. The modern remnant ad networks currently generate more annoyance and work for me than running the site does.
We do not approve hijacking, audio-on-by-default ads, and never will.
10 Likes
I only read what BoingBoing tells me to.
3 Likes
Some people can handle their booze; have one or two drinks on the weekend and walk away. They enjoy it, and it serves multiple purposes. Some obviously can’t. If you can’t check out the latest pictures of your nieces and nephews, respond to a party invite, or share a favorite recipe with a friends/family group; then go and read actual news sites for actual news, maybe the problem isn’t Facebook. As for all the moaning over privacy, there are ways to reduce how much person info “they” get. Also plenty of programs that scrub the crap out of feeds. Should some of your older or less intelligent relatives be on Facebook? Maybe not, just like they probably shouldn’t drink because they just end up ruining family gatherings. Possibly a more constructive idea would be to help those relatives by installing some Facebook sanitizing plugins.
Cheers!
1 Like
I think I’m going to delete all the news aggregators and Facebook from my phone. I’ll keep Facebook only to have some kind of presence my parents can contact me if they some how forget that I have the same phone number going on 4 years (had to change telcos when moving to Minnesota). I really hate Facebook these days since it’s all about trying to shovel all its crap news onto my feed. All I wanted from Facebook for was to keep up with my friends but now who I got as friends on there rarely use it for talking about their lives. Like I have two people on my account that I know personally and they regularly post updates about what’s going on in their lives. The rest are just resharing crap news/articles. It’s really pissing me off how things have gotten this way but doing normal human things like socializing on a social media platform isn’t marketable I guess.
1 Like
… with these individuals standing in the back
5 Likes
My theory is that Facebook as is will just change. I wouldn’t even assume they won’t try federating when it becomes clear that a single network to rule them all isn’t working. So instead of them having just one silo, they’ll just have many arbitrary ones which they can massage for ad dollars. But the result will be better, in my opinion, as people will get the idea that maybe they can start using similar applications without having to rely on one provider for it. How long that takes depends on many factors but the big one will be whether or not net neutrality in any form gets reinstated. If that happens then I expect a decade or two before we start seeing the trend toward federation of social networks, otherwise it might take a generation (remember, Bell was still a big corporation for nearly a century thanks to govt favoritism).
1 Like
A bar that spends most of its time catering to and encouraging the latter type of clientelle is not one a sane person would spend any time at. At the moment, though, it’s the only bar in Americaville for both the degenerate boozehound and the casual tippler – one where the bouncer also picks your pocket for your address book and wallet photos to build its customer list and where they hang out welcome signs for corporate shills and for racist and sexist Cliff Clavens masquerading as experts.
8 Likes
What, specifically, do you mean by “federating,” here? I have an idea, but I want to hear yours so that I understand correctly. Thanks
I’m already doing that, but it isn’t helping. People aren’t using “search engines” to look for “web sites” in a “browser.” It’s too much work, and too slow. They’re just poking the “F” button on their phones to find people, and the “A” button to find things. Anything else is too complicated.
What’s weird is that I always hear people saying that Facebook steals your personal information, takes away your privacy, etc. I’m (grudgingly) on Facebook to keep in touch with family, and I’ve never had to volunteer any information that I didn’t want to volunteer. I can easily block racists/nazis/trolls. I think Facebook is a user interface nightmare and I hate their lax attitude towards the way they influenced the election and allowed Russian interference, but they’ve been pretty good about protecting user privacy.
1 Like
I am not on Facebook but my sister keeps uploading pictures of me and tagging them with my name. When I tell her not to do that I just get a blank look. She is stealing my information and there is nothing I can do to stop it.
6 Likes
Then stop it from happening using the tools available to you.
What tools?
5 Likes
But that’s just the thing though - it ISN’T the only bar in town. Saying that it is only absolves you of the responsibility/agency of choice. Perhaps in the same way that being with an abusive partner is a choice, it is hard to accept that other options are also not easy, perhaps risky and uncomfortable. But it is still important to know that options do exist. When we deny that there are options, we are denying that we have the agency to overcome abuse.
I really do think of the phenomenon as a sort of Stockholm syndrome. It is easy to commiserate that a deeply entrenched service causes us problems. But people get uncomfortable and it takes kid gloves to hint that “maybe there are other choices you could make…” Capitalism is not enslaving the masses by force, it is more efficient to rely upon (perceived) convenience.
1 Like
It’s not about volunteering the information, it’s volunteering to join a site that does everything it can to get you to share your contacts list (whether the people on it are interested in Facebook or not), tagging other people in your photos with their names (whether or not they want that – I give people I know very strict instructions about this), and then storing everything in their databases and processing it through their algorithms and combining it with third-party info brokers to create demographic and psychographic and behavioural profiles (again, whether or not you use Facebook).
1 Like
