Maybe he can get the Russian bots to rig a Senate election for his horse
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Well, people used to do exactly that… but I guess Facebook is better or it wouldn’t have taken off.
Shareholders would have to consent to telling the advertisers to suck it, I guess.
More likely, the shareholders would bribe the right people and it would never happen.
One can ignore or unfriend (for example) racist cousins, right-wing former classmates etc., but nothing will stop someone like that from getting embroiled with an actual friend, meaning one ends up seeing it, anyway. Before I quit FB for good, I unfollowed everyone and everything, with a few exceptions. Those exceptions rarely posted, though, and the end result was a near-empty feed. That’s fairly much useless so I finally deleted my account.
Before that I was using the Social Fixer and Facebook Container plugins for Firefox. The latter IIRC will not load anything related to Facebook (including “Share” buttons and their underlying scripts, etc.) unless and until one explicitly navigates to facebook.com.
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I don’t actually know, of course, but I suspect Lanier himself really doesn’t seek publicity (he seems like a hermit). He is, however, the sort of opinionated iconoclast who attracts cult followers, like RMS or Paul Graham or Ayn Rand – and he’s not well-known outside of that following – so his w’pedia page is going to be hagiographic. That’s actually the norm for anything cultish, like the Sinclair C5 or Stirling engines.
I read a couple of his books and I thought they were pretty good. They’re not as preachy or dogmatic as you might assume from bullet-point summaries of his opinions.
I constantly spew my opinions on forums like this one where no one asked for it. So if Jaron Lanier wants to put his opinions in books, which you have to go out of your way to even see, I’m hardly in a position to call that arrogant.
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Create a post to tell them you’re leaving facebook, include all the other ways to reach you, and your real friends will still connect with you.
I mean it’s been suggested several times that BB could likely keep the lights on with a Patreon or similar.
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Tried that. Nobody contacted me.
Guess that means I have no real… oh.
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That’s why I don’t use the bookface.
I don’t like actively keeping a list of all the people who couldn’t give a shit about me in real life.
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I’ve ignored my old account for years. I’ve meant to go back and nuke it, but never got around to it… but my family is urging me to start a new account so I can join the family FB group. I think I’m going to do it, but keep that as the only thing on the account. The last thing I need to do is get deeper into social media… but it’s family.
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I’d suggest first borrowing a family member’s account or shoulder-surfing it to see what exactly you’re missing out on if you don’t join. Usually you’ll hear about the important stuff that truly matters through other channels anyhow. Yes, it sometimes puts the burden on someone who’s already lost to FB to be your conduit, but it’s not exactly a heavy load for them to bear (my mother loves reporting on the standard births-and-deaths stuff from FB, and my sister delights in describing instances of various unfavoured relatives’ social media asshattery).
As I’m sure you’re aware, getting a FB account means that it will extend cancerous tendrils into all of your on-line life, even if you jump through the many ever-changing hoops and dark-pattern dead-ends to make the site as minimalist and private as possible. If you do decide to get the account, don’t put the FB app on your phone – that’s a whole other level of Zuckerberg awfulness.
[really, though, you should read this all imagining the truth: me screaming “For the love of all that is good, don’t do it Nightflyer!”]
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Who can count to 7 billion, anyway?
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