Note I wrote my father in law when he had gone too far down the rabbit hole and legitimately worried about the poison it spreads around his demographic:
I left Facebook when I read some press release about it being designed from the outset to make you feel bad because it keeps you engaged; hoping someone agrees with something you liked or shared and the dopamine hit it releases. I don’t like feeling manipulated and manipulation is facebooks modus operandi. All to track everything I do around the internet to sell me ads for $12/person/year in revenue.
I left Twitter for basically the same reason and when I’d stick on the site refreshing it all day hoping someone noticed the well thought out point I spent 3 hours putting together only to realize no one cares. Leaving both after about a week feels like when I have taken breaks from caffeine. It sucks at first but after a week, you feel refreshed and clean. I’m sure drug abstinence feels similar.
My father went down the rabbit hole of Facebook and shares political crap constantly, flooding peoples news feeds. There’s a feature on Facebook that lets you silently unfollow people so they’re on mute. Everyone of my family members who are Facebook friends with my dad have done this to him and don’t see anything he posts. He’s shouting into a black hole thinking the whole world is paying attention while in reality no one is.
He has said things that the man I grew up with would never have said and Facebook/ talk radio is to blame. We’re all vulnerable to it, which is why I try and stay away from it.
I don't even know what Twitter is for except mutual high fives over the most superficial "look at me" memeish stuff.
It's worse than facebook as far as the "get attention" vibe.
Granted all social media is about getting attention, and I don't think there is anything wrong with it necessarily. Attention is nice, there is good reason for it, but when the message is so tailored to just that and there isn't anything else, I don't know what the point is.
I recently switched careers from a long networking career to web development and thought I'd take another spin on Twitter, but rather I just get sites that paste a link to their website, and hordes of people posting programming truisms or career / resume / coding lifestyle fodder .... so little feels like that person wrote it, so much feels like what those people thing "a commercial about me" should be.
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As for your other notes about the impact on people. It is horrifying. I see some relatives posting terrible things and I wish saying "but you've never met any of those people" had the impact that it should... but it doesn't.
It took me about 10 years to finally "get Twitter". I used to use it for professional reasons, posting what I considered relevant content. For the most part no one really cared. The engagement was almost always nil. Sort of like saying something intelligent, out of the blue, to a crowded stadium of people doing the same thing.
Then, 2 years ago I created a new account that ONLY focused on a personal hobby of mine: retro-computing. I posted photos, links to cool articles, experiences from my workbench, etc. To my surprise, I began to get a lot of engagement. Like, 25-50X more than what I used to ever get on my professional persona's account.
I made a point to only follow back people who posted similarly to my own laser-beam focus. This takes a lot of time, but I have cultivated a stream of content I very much enjoy reading and scanning in my off-hours or lunch breaks. If you post about politics, or food, or cats, or simply whine or are acidic by nature, I don't follow those accounts back. I'm looking for good vibrations for a pastime hobby - that's it. And to my surprise (and those that know me personally and professionally that I've explained this to) it has worked beautifully for that. No one is a jerk and no one is trolling, none of that.
I've actually made several online friends around the country and the world as a result of the past 2+ years on Twitter.
Now, is my experience normal? No. If I were to guess it's probably in the top 2% in terms of the joy it brings me (vs. the rest of the user population who just hates to even look at Twitter anymore). And I totally get that.
I hope the service keeps going for my own greedy self-interests. But I also recognize that Mastadon may be the future, too. Or something else.
It's sort of how I changed my usage with Facebook. I deleted my personal account and created an anonymous account on FB that only is used for FB Groups (in, yes, the same hobby). These are closed groups that are moderated.
And holy smokes. It works.
Go figure.
Remove the YOU from social media, and use it to have fun about whatever it is you do to have fun, and it can actually be ... fun.
I think you're really on to something here. The details are different, but it reminds me of how I use social media.
Most of my engagement consists of a private Slack groups with groups of friends who enjoy discussing various topics. (And within these groups I tend to subscribe to only the channels that I find more interesting.) Similarly, on Instagram I have one account where I follow a group of close friends I've mostly had since high school, and another where I mostly follow a bunch of car related channels I like. Having that separation and ability to go and seek out a specific kind of content is fantastic. (As opposed to just being subjected to a fire hose "feed" of whatever an algorithm thinks will be engaging.)
Actually, I resisted RSS in the past for much the same reason. Even though you curate the feed, I vastly preferred having a bookmarks folder of blogs and other sites I followed, which I could then pick and choose from to suit my mood, than to have it all served up in a reader.
It would be nice to see things move more in this direction. For example, the default Facebook view, rather than a general news feed, could be a set of groups you belong to, along with ad-hoc groups of interconnected contacts, encouraging you to pick what genre of updates or conversations suits your current mood. Even then I don't know if it would be siloed enough to capture the same benefits, but it would be a step in the right direction I think.
I emailed slack about a year ago suggesting that they were totally missing the boat on slack as a social network. I am in 4 slacks and only one of them is professional. They were not interested.
They've got a lot on their plates already; probably best not to try and dive full into social network for now. Plus you'd have to be really careful not to lose the separation that makes it good in the process.
Sounds a lot like going back to the anonymous/pseudonymous usenet groups and forums that we had before 'social networking' became a buzzword.
Why use Twitter for such things, given its limitations? Why not use a blog, personal site, or forum where instead of just posting a link you can also write your thoughts about it, etc.? I get not wanting to bother with running a personal site or maintain a blog, but there are tons of hobby forums.
Personally, I never got the appeal of Twitter, and while I did enjoy early Facebook, since it jumped the shark I use it primarily as a long-term contact list for people that I don't talk to very often so that we'll still have a way to connect if one of us changes email addresses/phone numbers before the next time we talk.
> Why use Twitter for such things, given its limitations? Why not use a blog, personal site, or forum where instead of just posting a link you can also write your thoughts about it, etc.?
I actually do. I run a forum that I treat like a blog and link to my posts (and other members' posts) of interest.
I think a lot of the appeal of twitter and fb is a matter of perspective, that it's more appealing to people who barely were on the internet before these apps. A lot of these users never even knew web forums existed, and I hear them now after seeing those and they complaint because it's "too complicated" and "too much to read"
Extrapolate that and compare it to these same kids going to apps like instagram or tiktok which are even more visually-heavy (and less text) with content that it's even simpler and more optimized for user reach than user participation.
I use Facebook in the same way you do - for participating in local motorsports. All the clubs organize via Facebook groups, so it's the only practical way to stay active in the sport. I'm using the personal account that I've had since 2005 but I don't post anything publicly anymore.
What makes Facebook stand out here to me is just how difficult they've made for people to do create isolated social networks on a personal level, at least in my experience. It is possible to limit your Facebook feed to friends and family and filter out people spewing garbage memes and obnoxious political points. However, I have not yet found a way to turn off Facebook's annoying habit of trying to "prioritize" posts in your news feed even if you do not want to. There seems to be no way to say "I want to see all of the posts in chronological order from a select group of friends". Even the "most recent" news feed order does not seem to work as advertised, often skewing stuff posted a couple of days ago towards the top.
I do have some family members on Facebook and in the past I would use Facebook to do things like share vacation photos, intended mainly for family members and close friends and the like. This now seems like an impossible task to do reliably -- there's no way I know that someone who hasn't seen my photos and want to will see it, from my perspective. So for me it's back to the ol' Smugmug and email. (I imagine there are other social networks that are able to work like I want, but most of my family isn't on it, and all of my family has email. This just works for me.)
Facebook does have "groups" which do work quite well as you mentioned, and Facebook works well from my perspective as an announcement / engagement platform for businesses and hobbies. Much of their core social network however seems broken to me personally.
(Regarding the parent linked article, I'm kind of curious where they are going to though and a better understanding of the reasons behind the shift. Most articles I've Googled don't seem to dive very deeply into these things beyond vague demographic musings like "Facebook isn't cool for teenagers" and mentioning Instagram and Snapchat as the replacement. The analysis level isn't even standard media depth to me, even more so than usual. If I look for articles on other things in relative decline where I do have a fair bit of insight -- like say NASCAR racing -- the general media articles actually seemed to (sometimes) make an effort to explain the often seem to make more efforts at explaining the declines, because the reasons are often multi-faceted. I have to believe that any Facebook decline is driven by a lot more details than "my parents are on Facebook".)
I did the same thing with trying to avoiding politics and entertainment, and just following programmers and development thought leaders. Yeah... They almost all wind up being political too. I simply cannot find a way to find interesting accounts that don't wind up talking about politics and current events. I don't care. I don't want to use Twitter for that, but apparently, Twitter doesn't want me to use the service for anything ELSE. (And, before someone suggests it, yes, my list of muted words is already long.)
A few years ago I remember trying out twitter and following John Gruber. Back then I was interested in what he had to say about Apple, but instead I got a mix of Apple stuff and, IIRC, inane baseball updates. I remember thinking that it felt like a real step back to have such a mixed feed, compared to just subscribing to his daringfireball.net RSS feed.
^this is how I use twitter as well. Thriving community in this tiny corner of the web, focusing on neat electronics projects and interesting tech or creative hobbies.
>Remove the YOU from social media, and use it to have fun about whatever it is you do to have fun, and it can actually be ... fun.
This doesn't change the fact that 99% of things people give credit for to social media can be easily done without mediation through a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Neither does it change the fact that Twitter and Facebook have a whole slew of horrible social effects. Centralization of the web, political polarization, emergent mobs trying to ruin people's lives, rise in depression and suicide rates, normalization of global surveillance, normalization of censorship, etc, etc.
Jaron Lanier has some interesting thoughts on the economy behind some of this:
Thing is the overwhelming majority of social network users just couldn't be bothered to use other solutions before this, and can't be bothered to do so now. How many were on online forums for example?.
>Thing is the overwhelming majority of social network users just couldn't be bothered to use other solutions before this
Did you ever stop to think why? It's not like the barrier of entry was high. People simply did not find it worth their time. Chances are, big social media isn't worth their time either, but people are kept there by social pressure and purpose-built addiction mechanisms. And you're spinning it as if this is some kind of positive thing.
Connectivity is like food. The benefits to the person don's scale linearly. Forums and IM were already above the bare minimum. They were like a hearty meal. Social media today is like having a binge eating disorder.
I sort of do the same thing. Mostly hobby/interest stuff.
I have a hard and fast rule of not friending anyone I see regularly or have a real private or personal relationship with (No family, no neighbors, no current coworkers). Avoids so much drama.
It's the same for me on reddit. After following only the subreddits that interest me, the engagement upped my knowledge and enthusiasm. Prior to that I didn't get reddit at all - now it supplements my HN addiction.
Twitter is about following tiny businesses, imho. Youtubers, independent journalists, local shops, local media, local politicians. It's RSS for z-list internet famous people.
Although it pretends that replies are equivalent to top-level tweets, they're not really. It's just that there's a reply thread attach to everything.
Basically, CNN will tell you what your head of state did. Your regional media will tell you what your legislative representative did if it was newsworthy.
Twitter lets you keep tabs on your city councilman.
If the only way to watch local businesses is to join a global centralized network that snagged 335 million international users, something somewhere is really broken.
Not necessarily. It's not outrageous for a large system to incorporate different scopes, even simultaneously. The architecture of the internet itself is a good example of that.
Medical twitter is fairly positive and a great way to learn about new papers and interact with educators and researchers. Check out the #foamed (Free Open Access Medicine) hashtag. I usually try to avoid following political people and keep my feed science-focused.
I've noticed more people in tech posting mostly political stuff nowadays, when I followed them because of their tech posts. I had to go back and prune my feed to get away from all the bile. Angry political screeds are hard to filter out nowadays.
> Angry political screeds are hard to filter out nowadays.
A sign of the times. A lot of people are just really pissed off right now. I also think a lot of people that used to ignore politics realized that it matters...
Things are so weird now. We should feel good that everyone is engaged in dialogue about our grand civic project, right? But when you actually stare out onto the landscape of discussion, there isn't a valuable exchange of ideas to observe.
While political opinions are more numerous, they're divorced from evidence and calcified. As useful as no opinion, and possibly worse. (Then again, that's my opinion, right?)
Maybe that suggests we aren't engaging in dialogue? I think ubiquitous social media access is destroying the cultural "melting pot".
The cost of communication, price and latency, has always defined the structure of our communities. Letters, cars, phones, internet, every invention expanded the reach of individual "community" while cost acted as friction to prevent bad ideas from gaining too much momentum - individuals still had to engage with their local community too.
Social media finally brought the cost to essentially zero. We can talk to anyone or about anything at any time. Great for early adopters and their critical/creative tendencies, but mass adoption by consumers has enabled mass tribalist tendencies to fully decouple from proximity constraints. This might be the "boiling point" for historical conflicts, but "supercritical" seems more appropriate here.
Media consolidation has been synonymous with consolidation of broadcasting viewer opinions and their political parties - many unhappy with both choices but faced with the false dichotomy of "their guy" and "the enemy". Meanwhile grass-roots are numerous but now diffuse and ineffective, cut off from broadcasting influence and digitally disconnected.
Hopefully society starts correcting back to offline engagement. Anecdotes suggest we are, but undoing the damage will still take a while.
>The cost of communication, price and latency, has always defined the structure of our communities. [..] Social media finally brought the cost to essentially zero.
Worse. It brought it in the negative, at least perceptually.
> We should feel good that everyone is engaged in dialogue about our grand civic project, right?
It is people trapped in their echo chambers. Some chambers are better than others (some, much better, but alas). I personally don't hold much hope for things to ever get de-calcified without some kind of large-scale real-world incident to force it. It is almost like two entirely different species of humans at this point who are almost incapable of empathising with each other.
(and note, in many cases, refusing to empathise.... I refuse to empathize with alt-right supporters for example.)
Democracies have never been about evidence, they are about making sure the "rulers" enjoy the support of the people and are strongly incentivised to listen to the concerns of said people. Democracies have a long and storied history of being arbitrary and unfair in defiance of evidence.
In light of that, I'd suggest interpreting political opinions as "I think this person understands what my problems are". When I mentally add that to the end of a political rant usually the rant moves from incomprehensible railing against reality to something rational, but disagreeable.
It's really not "now", it's just that the tables have turned. For the previous two terms, the other party was in power, and the out-of-power people could only whinge about it. And that's the same thing that's happening now.
Your observation is only true in the ephemeral surface. there is no moral equivalence. there is no legal equivalence. What is your purpose in this deflection?
Twitter is really useful for sharing content at conferences or other events with a clear hashtag.
Other than that, and perhaps sharing more substantive articles/blog posts/etc to a wider audience, it's at best silly, and at worse, well...much worse.
I have found that Twitter has been pretty muted for the last couple of years at conferences. Seems like more of the conversation goes on in a slack (that you have to be invited too, or know about).
I have found that the machine learning research community uses twitter pretty effectively. I don't tweet myself, but I do follow a good number of other researchers and often find interesting papers and results through the venue. It's much more effective than scouring the arXiv.
I get a lot of value from Twitter's AI and computer graphics communities, but I used to see a lot of retweeted political garbage too. I found that Twitter's "mute words" feature works wonders. After muting about 100 words ("trump", "obama", "republican", "democrat", "evil", "lied", "nazi", that obnoxious hand clap emoji, etc) it's like a whole different place. Much less rage-inducing.
I dont post anything on Twitter. I follow a bunch of journalists, local activists and local politicians. Using it like this, I mostly get links to articles, or local news events. So for me, I’ve found it’s a great way to follow the news. And I follow a couple funny people so that as I scroll through depressing news stories to read, I get an occasional laugh too. And i only follow a couple dozen people, most who tweet infrequently.
So that’s all to say that there are less common uses of these platforms than you might know. Also, because of how I use it, Twitter doesn’t bother showing me any ads. I get about one ad a week. Go figure.
I recently muted every Twitter account that wasn’t either individual people tweeting about their lives (predominantly in the “hilarious quotes from small children” genre) or NBA news. Man was that a relief. Twitter can be absolutely toxic but if you never read replies or follow randoms and you curate carefully, it’s fine.
I think a huge feature for that is “mute”. Being publicly observed to follow a Twitter without actually seeing its content is, shamefully enough, important and useful a lot more than you’d think.
I basically use Twitter for what I would use Facebook. I follow people I consider friends online and see their updates. I don't look at my timeline even, I just look at the stuff my friends post and share, the only time I see something from an account I don't follow is when a friend shares it. As a platform for keeping touch with a few dozen people you like, it's pretty good.
I don't think Twitter was made for something, other than to broadcast sms, which it can't even be used for since they doubled their limit.
I will tell you what I use it for: follow interesting people, and pictures of cute animals. My goto rule of thumb for the first is, are they saying something where you go "hu?" in a positive way?
Don't disagree with your views on Twitter but if you think of Twitter as only mutual high-fives then I'd be interested in your point of view on Instagram. :)
As a small business owner, I find Twitter useful for sharing news on product updates, articles/tutorials and new features. Ironically, this has cost me $0.0 so far.
My sister has gone down the same rabbit hole. She really thinks she's "fighting the good fight" by posting a fresh outrage every day. She's glued to a changing handful of posts, replying rapid-fire to anyone who disagrees. I used to post (4-5 times per year) photos of my vacations, but I don't want to feed the whole lifestyle porn/envy cycle.
> She really thinks she's "fighting the good fight" by posting a fresh outrage every day.
I have a few people in my feed who do this, from both sides. It almost feels like they've turned into nothing but meme/share-bots. It gets so annoying that I should probably block them already.
If you try to call out the content, you either get childishly shouted down because you're on "the other side", or called out as "the problem" because you don't agree with their group-think.
> or called out as "the problem" because you don't agree with their group-think.
It feels good to have someone verbalize this.
I can't enjoy much social media anymore because there's an expectation that discussing anything opinionated requires a preface about what side you're on.
Making a politically neutral statement means you're with the enemy (where the enemy is on the side opposite whoever reads your neutral statement).
I'm not even referring to politics or discussion of world events: even more futurist/what-if thoughts about how society works/could work.
HN is the calmest place to have a discussion with someone, because no one's looking for clues about your personal beliefs and what side you're ostensibly warring for.
9 times out of 10, only the content of your comment seems to matter. As it should be.
> HN is the calmest place to have a discussion with someone, because no one's looking for clues about your personal beliefs and what side you're ostensibly warring for.
just scroll to the bottom where everything is downvote-collapsed already, anything that isn't Silicon Valley political echo chamber isn't really discussed holistically and garners the same "you're the enemy" or "you're not in the middle if you don't already agree with me" response as other networks
need a patch for this
My thoughts are that Americans need a credible external threat for unity, and currently we don't have one. The Cold War thing jumped the shark decades ago and just doesn't have unifying consensus as being a problem for America, the religious extremist story has fallen apart with everyone knowing its all part of our cozy relationship with the House of Saud. So here we are
It's hard to argue with people who think that a debate is won by finding the best ad-hominem put-down. It's probably not even worth trying, unless you enjoy a kind of rational trolling where you state your case and ignore the responses.
I used to waste time doing this and would argue with right-winger family who was brainwashed by Fox news. I finally realized no matter how good your points are, and no matter how eloquently said or rationally stated you will just flat out never convince someone or change their opinion on policy based on a facebook discussion. Literally the only thing arguing politics on there does is polarize people, and further entrench everyone onto their already premade opinions. I started putting myself in their shoes and realized how futile their arguments were because I'd never consider a right wing perspective. Then I realized what a waste of time it was to even engage at all. I unfollowed everyone, stopped logging in and have been a lot happier. If I want to check up on someone specifically I search them and go straight to their page. Otherwise I don't even bother reading the timeline anymore. I went from daily checking facebook to about 2x a month. It's awesome.
This may not be received well, but I’ll try anyway. Yeah debate can definitely be polarizing, but I appreciate people that bring a reasoned argument to the table without being conflicting. When that happens I have a little more faith in humanity even when their opinions are different than my own. It’s a give and take and it sounds like in your situation you felt like you were the only one trying to have a civil discussion. That is exhausting.
Honestly if I talk/debate with someone long enough I can tell if they won’t be convinced, but sometimes it’s not the person you are debating that you are going to convince, but someone on the sidelines. Honestly the people that are most vocal are likely the ones that are already polarized and irrational, but that doesn’t mean the world is full of irrational people. Sometimes I believe not participating in an online debate is the right thing to do, but on the other hand the only way the tone will change about politics is if people change it.
I think you make a good point and I'd be open to having rational discussions about it, but these are people posting "O'Bummer" Obama memes... imo just not even worth wading into. They're not looking for my input, as the poster below mentioned they just post as a rallying cry to get likes from their other right wing family members.
Wow. Thanks for the way you put this out. This is exactly how I was feeling / what I was experiencing. So I went ahead, and installed my own MatterMost instance with friends.
What I realized recently is that Facebook is built in a way that makes it really hard to have a real conversation. People only share links and shout their opinions with no real place for exchange.
I understand that. My Facebook profile is mostly empty to an outsider, and even to many of my so-called friends. Hehe!
I said that because the more I think about it, the more I find social media platforms don't really help me stay in touch with anyone. I mean, yeah, I can see they got a third kid or that hunting season was great this year, but nothing near a real conversation around a coffee or a beer.
That's why I started using MatterMost ,an open source Slack clone, or like I tell my less tech-savvy friends: IRC on steroids. (IRC was the go to choice when we were teens)
This is actually why I don't visit facebook often, I had to spend so much time curating all of the echo chamber effects and political posts. My entire feed got flooded with crazy stuff and none of it was anything I actually wanted to hear about. I wanted to hear about people in my life but those who posted popular shares got all the exposure. It has become a platform to yell at people and to echo chamber each other. Having real conversations is impossible.
It would be uniquely refreshing if Facebook would apply an overlay to every post that gave it a true/false and hate/love rating. This makes an interesting 2 x 2 box score and for a while I was looking at some NLP to pull out common themes and rate them, but I realized that if you just used a bi-variable version of the "like" widget you could have people moderate.
Such a signal, combined with actual research on the veracity and tone of the post could be combined to highlight places where people need help and where bad actors might be plying their wares.
But I don't honestly expect anyone in management at Facebook to advocate such a system.
> It would be uniquely refreshing if Facebook would apply an overlay to every post that gave it a true/false and hate/love rating.
It would instantly be weaponized. Already, right-wing groups specialize in taking down antifa and LGBT pages on Facebook or Twitter by abusing the report feature. To make it worse, Facebook apparently automatically locks pages upon getting a high number of reports in a short timeframe.
You can bet that anything not from Fox News or Infowars would be flag-abused as "fake news" in an instant.
The one my in-laws have on all day is Glenn Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Levin. It's a constant stream of angry/crazy white guy. Even the late night isn't a refuge. Whatever the show is that used to be Art Bell is quasi-political now.
It astounds me that Facebook still has as many users as it has but that there isn't also an exodus of employees from Facebook. You have to be really drunk on the koolaid to think that your company is doing anything good in the world. Twitter the same.
How is it with all our technology, the cutting edge are these digital septic tanks (or sewers if you live in the city)?
This is basically how I felt back in 2014 after I pretty much stopped using all social media.
I have my facebook only to announce big events and let immigration officers know that I love my wife very much by having a detailed photo album of all our interactions over many years.
It's incredibly annoying that at this juncture I have to keep it because of what other people / entities want rather than myself. This is why I refuse to use LinkdIn instead of job boards or the career sites for the company.
The aggressive commercialization of Social Media has been the greatest failure to be borne out of the internet and our society will be suffering its effects for many years. At least the stockholders (who are probably too darn old to use the site) are very happy.
Edit: I also very much appreciate the irony of spending so much time and energy on posting on Hacker News!
Exactly. The manipulative and unproductive nature go hand in hand and were the two things that made me quit all social networks except for LinkedIn (where I see the value that I get is higher than the time that I invest there).
I think some people unconsciously know this, but they fail to act on it due to the addictive nature of the product, creating false excuses to justify their account (it doesn't matter how important you think you are, no one cares really).
Others are completely oblivious to what Facebook is doing to them. I don't think there is any hope for them. Facebook will continue to use them to squeeze every bit of free time they have into pointless egocentric activity.
Yep. I've heard of this movie but haven't watched it yet - though my sibling assures me it is a copy of our experience with our parents. They were conservative/moderate at one point, but now regurgitate radical right-wing talking points without defending them, and say that "everyone just reads what they want to believe" but applies it only to me and my New York Times, moreso than them and their literal fake news peddling outlets.
FWIW I now have my own blog (not associated with HN, yet) that I use to type out my thoughts on things. I've shared it with a few people in my life that I think might care. The act of it being a blog instead of posts on Facebook is very intentional, and I don't care that not many see it. It is more of a journal.
That movie reminds me of my own family and it is so sad. I think they got radicalized when they retired and had nothing to do other than sit around watching Fox and listening to Rush Limbaugh. They used to be normal, reasonable people and now they're absolute nutters.
But what's the point of traveling to places if you can't tell all your friends about all the places you are traveling to? Or books you're reading? Etc.
Although I suspect this is sarcasm you do raise a good point. Even as someone who has traveled a lot including pre-Internet, now that I have gotten used to the idea of essentially live bragging about where I am, its hard to turn that reflex off.
I was trying to be sarcastic. :)
Some of my friends keep posting pics and status updates and sometimes I realize that all they think while traveling is... Letting their friends know where they are and what they are doing.
I'd be really interested to know how you got to "$12/person/year".
I would be interested in the values for other platforms. I think it builds a more tangible argument when explaining the hidden costs of using various "free" products.
Have a look here [0]. It's a personal essay, but there are a lot of resources, in the links especially, which go into detail about how your worries around manipulation etc. are in fact true.
It sounds like he is infected with something very similar to a religion. Religious ideas are very hard to change. For every rational argument, there's a doctrine-based reply.
Do you have a source for that extraordinary claim that Facebook was designed from the outset to make people unhappy, and that people use Facebook more when they are made unhappy?
I left Facebook when I read some press release about it being designed from the outset to make you feel bad because it keeps you engaged; hoping someone agrees with something you liked or shared and the dopamine hit it releases. I don’t like feeling manipulated and manipulation is facebooks modus operandi. All to track everything I do around the internet to sell me ads for $12/person/year in revenue.
I left Twitter for basically the same reason and when I’d stick on the site refreshing it all day hoping someone noticed the well thought out point I spent 3 hours putting together only to realize no one cares. Leaving both after about a week feels like when I have taken breaks from caffeine. It sucks at first but after a week, you feel refreshed and clean. I’m sure drug abstinence feels similar.
My father went down the rabbit hole of Facebook and shares political crap constantly, flooding peoples news feeds. There’s a feature on Facebook that lets you silently unfollow people so they’re on mute. Everyone of my family members who are Facebook friends with my dad have done this to him and don’t see anything he posts. He’s shouting into a black hole thinking the whole world is paying attention while in reality no one is.
He has said things that the man I grew up with would never have said and Facebook/ talk radio is to blame. We’re all vulnerable to it, which is why I try and stay away from it.
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/dont-believe-lies-just-people-...