Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But I haven't found a good alternative "productive" time waster for when my mind needs a short break.
Works for me :-)
You're right on the latter part. But as of late I've gone to the extreme and deactivated all but Snapchat for social media. As well as using Cold Turkey and editing my hosts file's to keep me away from certain sites.
Hacker News? I mean, you posted this right here!
There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.
But yeah: The app can be disabled at least.
Maybe this is because I stopped using Facebook for so long, there weren't any real notifications to give me. They wanted it to seem like I'd missed something.
Source: I have the same experience.
Why? "Your friend Xxx is now on Instagram". Etc etc. I don't want to know, and I don't want my account visible to everyone there. Please just respect my wishes to make the integration go away!
I also recall that things like e-mail from friends was a lot more common. You know the type - you hadn't heard from someone in a few months and they send you a long e-mail just checking in and telling you about their life. And people would respond to you if you sent the same. A few years ago I stopped sending those types of e-mail out because people stopped responding to them. These days, it would be a genuine shock to get a "just checking in" e-mail from friends.
I feel like Facebook has encouraged connections to be vapid and shallow. As a result, I feel like I have far less meaningful connections with friends now than I had a decade ago.
But I also think that a lot of what has made me happier and calmer day-to-day is more to do with a change in attitude that came with dropping Facebook. Now I assume that I'll waste an hour a day dealing with random horseshit or unnecessary waiting; suddenly, missing the bus or forgetting my keys or standing behind someone who takes 10 minutes to order their lunch doesn't raise my blood pressure. It's just part of the hour.
There's no greater luxury than having time to waste.
suddenly,
>missing the bus or
> forgetting my keys or
> standing behind someone who takes 10 minutes to order their lunch doesn't raise my blood pressure.
>There's no greater luxury than having time to waste.
For you, facebook. For me -- videogames, particularly online competitive style. For someone else? Bingewatching brainless television on Netflix.
I struggled from video game addiction, and continue to struggle (it takes a lot of mental energy for me to simply not play). I used to tell myself, "well at least I am playing online and interacting with real people" or "at least I am sharpening my reflexes!"
If I complete all my todos I get to use News Feed for 5 minutes.
I had tried blocking fb entirely a few times but I always churned and unblocked it... So I thought instead maybe if I could redirect myself to a productive task any time I tried to use News Feed, the most addicting/distracting part of the site for me, that might help. (it has and I love it!)
[1] Todobook: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/todobook/ihbejplhk...
Anything but.
If you care about your digestion, my advice is [sic]
never read soviet newspapers before dinner.[1]
[1] https://medium.com/@antonkovalyov/never-read-soviet-newspape...
There is also a part of the news that a well-informed citizen should know about. There are things everyone can do about injustice that require us to know injustice took place. Sadly, the above part of the news isn't the focus off modern news media. The sensationalist spin doesn't help much either.
What I'm trying to say is that news, in and of itself can be good, necessary even. The question is whether current forms of news do this well enough, and what other harm their sensationalism does.
Here in the U.K. the last three weeks have been endless repetition of media managed slogans and photo opportunities.
There are very real injustices happening in the world - in Syria and in Chechnya for instance - but they're routinely ignored unless you really go looking for them.
How can you say they're ignored while admitting that you can find reporting on them if you look?
I find it ironic that people complain about the quality of mass media while simultaneously swallowing mass media's definition of what is and isn't important.
If you hate mass media, then you are a person who doesn't need to be spoon-fed news, right?
Of course this notion flies in the face of our dear leader, who hates CNN but watches it religiously. He seems to have convinced every far right person to do the same.
Seems like anything that does get reported is merely an opportunity to spin the narrative towards their ideological agenda?
As for being a well informed citizen acting against injustice, I'd say there's a similar situation in that someone need not be very well read to find far more injustice than they're capable of acting on.
We live in a time of excess information yet have societal values that have developed throughout history when information was scarce. Passion, motivation, discipline and ethical principles are the things holding people back from being active, caring citizens of the planet not lack of information.
If the print newspaper were invented today, it would grab hundreds of millions of VC money in Silicon Valley as the cure for news overload. (I guess the pitch would have to include some silly AI or IoT angle though.)
If that was true, newspapers would have variable length. But they don't.
They fill in the same BS arbitrary number of pages day-in, day-out.
Edit: Downvoting as if this isn't self-evident?
(If they were set to a fixed number of pages, they wouldn't have the flexibility to sell more ads when there's a busy occasion such as an election...)
That have quotas that they fill day-in, day-out, and they add some additional pages based on special occasions (elections, some huge crime, attack, holidays, and such). But they will never give you e.g. a 12 page newspaper even if there is nothing happening. They'll use any BS story to fill pages.
Humans aren't designed to cope with the whole world's problems.
For example, would you want to sit down now and read an analysis from September 2016 about who is most likely going to win the U.S. presidential election? No? Then similar pieces (trying to predict elections in 2018, 2020, etc.) are probably not terribly important to you. Would you read a piece from September 2016 about infrastructure issues in the U.S.? Yes? Then that's probably the type of article with more value.
Another would be to wait a few weeks before reading much about breaking news. Some years ago I read the paper daily, and it's interesting how many articles about the major stories are 80-90% the same from day to day with slight updates with the latest information. Better to wait and get the whole story than to get a slow trickle of news with endless rehashes of what you've already been told.
Periodicals that are less interested in breaking news and more interested in long-term stories are good in this regard.
Then I used to ignore them and continue.
Then one fine day, I sat on a bus, there was something going on about Kashmir and Indian military and I found that the guy next to me was also posting in a heated discussoon.
It was there that I figured out we are wasting time, we think our opinions matter, but they don't. Fb is just a waste of time. Of course, if you use it to stay in touch with frnds then it's a great tool, but there are other tools for that, if you can't get your friends on something say telegram's secret chat or signal (i hear it is peivacy focused) then it's a tragedy.
I have been living peacefully without fb/whatsapp.
Life is amazing when you realize the crazy volume of time we spend on whatsapp & the return on that time is nothing. We are superficially in touch with people
The final straw for me was actually a girl from my elementary school who wanted to friend me. The chat went like this...
Me: I have to ask you something. So we haven't seen each other for decades, the last time being when we were 7 year olds. Back then we probably exchanged less than 100 words. I don't mean to be rude but I'm genuinely curious to know why you want to connect with me?
Her: Oh I'm sorry. Didn't mean to offend
And that was it. She didn't have a reason other than "just because". That was when it really clicked for me what an utter waste of time Facebook actually is.
Never looked back
I think that questioning the motive was justified.
No, a pretty dick move to piss on her for asking to reconnect with an old schoolmate with a rude response.
FB is not some "personal circle". People connect to wide circles of accountancies they barely meet once in a decade and old schoolmates from way beyond and such all the time. And if one doesn't, it's still perfectly fine, given the widespread practice, for others to assume that it's ok for them to ask.
No other motive needed other than we're all humans, and we tend to think of people that passed through our lives in some way or another, and might want to occasionally catch up and/or share some old-time story.
No further need to "question the motive" (as if she's some huge scammer) than to question "high school reunions".
In the end, one could just ignore the request, or reply politely ("Sorry, I only add close friends and relatives on FB").
It's not like you need to have some huge reason to want to connect to some people on FB. It's not about being some big taskforce or goal-oriented group of connection.
Sometimes you just lookup people that were in you life to catch up, and see what they're up to. Or to make sense of what your life was, and the people that might have influenced it, or took part in it.
As I wrote elsewhere here, I don't think FB is any real platform to affect change or share opinions (it's at best an echo chamber, at worst nobody cares).
But for casual chat, it doesn't hurt to add some "girl from elementary" school or random acquaintance in your Friends list. It's not like they have to justify their presence in utility. One can just ignore their posts.
There's nothing nefarious about it. If I got your question, I'd be torn between just saying "just curious what you have been up to for ____ years, that's all," and her response, because the question in and of itself seems kind of unusual.
The problem with the internet and social media is a lot of people not realizing they aren't that different to real life, and have been getting less and less different.
Two yrs after cutting fb/whatsapp I am writing a sci fi novel, on the 80'th page!
Down vote me all anyone likes for this inane I have to totally agree with this absolute truth.
Yeah, even more so: if we spent the same time/energy in becoming better at something else (studying, writing, etc), we could actually acquire more influential voices that actually matter a little more (or a lot more).
If some world news subject REALLY matters to us, for example, instead of commenting on FB, we could study it thoroughly, read books about it, start writing an opinion column on some media outlet, participate in some group that affects change, write a book on the matter, shoot a documentary, write some software or web service that helps the people with that issue, etc.
And then we have a real voice and affect some smaller or bigger, but real change.
Not some BS post we posted to 2000 friends on FB, of which 300 automatically clicked like and 10 actually read, of which we engaging in a flame war with 3.
And if the subject doesn't REALLY matter to us? Well, then the world might be better off without our uniformed comment or "just repeated what I was told from the news outlets I read" rehash.
Edit: And I am (proudly) Facebook free, for over 1.5 years now.
Most of the visually enticing bragging has moved onto Instagram, where the content is front-and-center and all about the number of hearts, imitating the style of celebrity influencers: beach scene with brand cocktail, friends taking a multi-selfie at an event, etc.
Conversely, my Snapchat is full of relatively mundane stuff: morning selfies with makeup on point, silly antics at a party, funny faces and filters.
To me, Instagram is actually the most frustrating, as it's the one that amplifies discrepancies between the popularity of your friends the most. For those of your real life friends who attract a lot of likes, it makes you feel like an increasingly irrelevant fan of a rising celebrity; while those who get very little validation are attract solely the sympathy heart, and often get deleted at the end of the day, leaving both the poster and you dissatisfied.
For these reasons, Instagram is a bad fit for people who are self-conscious about their relative lack of popularity, which is -- let's face it -- quite a few people. On the other hand, it's a great fit for people who, for whatever reason, can get plenty of likes from strangers and friends alike: no wonder it's the favored platform for social media influencers and their sponsors.
Instagram can be made into something that is not just a mirror of your Facebook. If there's little difference between the two, you end up with the same problems - FOMO, envy, self-loathing. Instead, if you follow artists/photographers/creatives, you can find an interesting, beautiful world. Of course, there's a tension here. The more popular someone is, the more likely their feed is to devolve into brand endorsements. That commercial force corrupts.
So while its possible for instagram to be less superficial that Facebook, its a constant battle.
This is my primary issue with Facebook and one of the reasons I stopped using it. It's fine while you have a tight social circle, but once you have several social circles on Facebook, it's very difficult to navigate those kinds of tastes, whereas in real life it's never really an issue because the people never meet.
As another poster said, Facebook is most useful as a collection of contacts, but that usefulness is constantly at war with being able to express yourself.
I know G+ gets a lot of hate but the circles aspect seemed well implemented and made compartmentalizing your different social/professional circles much easier and more transparent. I wonder why FB doesn't allow something similar?
I've been tempted to join FB in the past, not to partake in the social activities, but as a tool to manage my contacts, but I'm incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of my different social groups and my professional contacts sharing the same connections to me. If I could completely separate different circles to ensure they have absolutely no overlap or ability to see my other connections I would probably use FB.
Instagram is really toxic.
I would argue that they don't - you only think they do, and that's the real issue. Not judging as I've been in that mindset myself. I'm a pretty self-concious person but I truly don't think people our age care about likes. You mentioned being mid-20's which I also mentioned in my post in case this issue came up. I understand that children and teenagers care about likes (and I've seen articles with evidence to back that up) but I think by our age that's gone (or didn't ever really exist that strongly as we were too old by the time social media went super mainstream).
Edit: Thought you were the parent who mentioned they were mid-20's, just realised you are not the parent. Curious what age you are (roughly even, if you don't mind) as I think that has a lot of bearing on this conversation.
Intsagram was a nice tool to see cool pictures and keep in touch with artists. It was like a hi-res Tumblr without the drama and the crap of Tumblr. Then I decided to start uploading photos and follow people in know in real life and that was the biggest mistake I did.
In addition to what you said, Instagram is really toxic. Because I followed lot's of people, my following/followers ratio was something like 350/80. I heard some people talk about how sad it is that I only have 80 followers. One time I followed someone I know and she didn't follow back, and I when I asked her why she didn't follow back, she said that she didn't know it was me (I didn't use my real name) and she thought I was some random ass loser because I didn't have many followers.
I later realized that in real life, people judge you based on how many likes you get and how many followers you have. It's now about the content, it's about how popular you are. If you don't get likes and followers you are seen as a loser/not cool.
That's what made me delete my Instagram account. Not to mention how shitty the app is when it comes to battery life. People complain about the FB app being shit, but IG is not that much better. It consumes a lot of battery life and has so many irregular activities and runs a lot in the background.
It must be good because of the daily active user number! Yeah well Tobacco has a high DAU too.
Not that I'm actually very great at staying private online. It started as avoidance of other people and now I avoid it simply because it's just another data silo to me. I already give Google my life story, why add Facebook?
So. How can Facebook give me what I most want now from the platform? The ability to both stay in touch and stay invisible -- seems improbable.
Then they started compartmentalizing everything. After awhile, if you wanted to mention something that didn’t have a field in their form, there wasn’t really anywhere to put that. All the plug-ins went away.
Then I started to realize that if I learned too much about things by reading a feed, I had no idea what to talk about in person because I already “knew” everything. Ironically a social platform was making real social behavior more difficult.
Eventually though, knowing things was not exactly beneficial because it was like dirty laundry. Paragraphs and paragraphs of stuff that I didn’t want to see. Oh, great: didn’t know that co-worker was actually super-religious and was going to start posting every possible religious thing that crossed his inbox [hide]. Oh, great: friends that go to the same places every single weekend and post the same maps of those places and the same pictures every single time [hide]. Oh, great: pages of the latest political diatribes [hide]. Oh, great: 50 things I have already seen on Reddit [hide]. These days if I do log in, I can scroll for quite awhile and see nothing interesting at all, even after being gone from Facebook for a week.
That means it’s become a glorified address book, which is kind of where we started and perhaps where we should have always remained. What is the multi-billion-dollar “value” of Facebook now?
Sometime ago, I put up a music video and yesterday I was chatting with a friend who had seen it.
Obviously this is the addictive part for a large number of people, an endless stream of crap to keep looking at. Had the exact opposite effect on me. It finally drove me away from Facebook. I just realized my feed was utterly useless at that point.
I highly recommend it.
It works beautifully. The immediate FOMO fades quickly.
Nothing of value is lost. Real friends and important info finds a way to get through.
I've also found this to be true.
I didn't unfollow everyone like the grandparent, but I have no desire to go to the main sight. I, however, use messenger constantly (via messenger.com) because it's a unified service that all my friends are on. I've been pretty satisfied with it, but Facebook keeps adding more and more features that I have no interest in and clutter the UI.
That was when I decided to deactivate my account, and it's been the best thing so far. The account deactivation form is scary, Facebook practically begs for you to stay. I don't miss it at all.
This works pretty well for me (though only on desktop, unfortunately).
I had the issue where I was suddenly following everyone again on one occasion (years ago), but since I've unfollowed everyone again, I haven't had any issues.
That said, I did not have any "miserable" problems with Facebook because I removed everyone from my wall except close friends and family, essentially making Facebook just Messenger. Maybe Facebook changed the rules by now or something, but I recommend to ruthlessly unfollow people you don't care for but might want to be able to talk to one day.
On the other hand, every so often, whenever I come across other people's Facebook wall, I realise that I'm not really missing out on people sharing their life, but instead, on looking at long pages of the loud, angry venting, and I realise that, at some point over the past four years, I went from missing facebook to realising that I'd built up too much mental resistance against it to ever put myself through opening an account ever again. That, plus the feel-good factor I get from being "more privacy conscious".
Say what you will, but WhatsApp/Messenger usage statistics correlated with Facebook usage statistics of less privacy conscious contacts can still paint a pretty damn good picture (read marketing profile).
You literally can't use any popular (digital) communication methods without opening yourself to advertisers or those wanting to buy an election. It's a minor miracle we still have email.
I use uBlock origin for general stuff and FB Purity for Facebook (laptop use). I see roughly zero ads. I donated a bit to the FB Purity guy - It was a noticeable improvement to my life.
I put off creating a Facebook account for a long time but eventually gave in. And I was pleasantly surprised to find how well it works for sharing photo albums with my friends and family.
I don't think it's any particular, discrete thing like that in itself, but rather the accumulated impact of the social media heuristic described over a period of years.
For a more extreme example, look at LinkedIn. Judging by the posts, one can easily be led to believe that all of one's connections are super-successful but utterly brainwashed corporate droids. It's a warped and misleading portrayal of human reality (for most of them, anyway—there are always those few that really do drink the Kool Aid that much). But it's naturally going to lead a lot of people to the anxiety: should I be as invested in my work as these amped-up salespeople? Am I working hard enough to promote my professional brand?
Yes, people are generally fragile.
My schedule was completely full with kids, lots of work, and little down time for hobbies or relaxation. But I got into the groove and was reasonably content. Enter Facebook's feed with endless updates from friends on vacations, attending conferences, exotic work travel etc., and suddenly I start viewing my own lot in a shitty light. My rational assessment was that things were fine, but I just didn't feel very good about it. I quit FB cold turkey and within probably a month these feelings evaporated.
I don't think fragile is a good description. I think it's simply reacting. If the shared family photos you mentioned started having a lot of stuff that you didn't like, you'd probably choose to avoid it.
Are the majority of HN folks off facebook, or is it just the vocal ones?
So there's simply value in saying that you aren't on it, when these kind of threads or sound boxes pop up.
I will casually browse it now and then to keep up with how friends are doing. I pay attention to some FB groups and post there sometimes, but they are groups on things I am interested in. I'll post one update every few days so people know what's going on in my world. Most of my time with FB is spent on Messenger though, as friends and I chat and organize get togethers there. FB is really convenient in this regard since there's less friction with being FB friends than there is with asking for someone's number.
I don't worry about having to always check the internet though - if I'm busy doing something, the internet can wait.
And that's what I see as Facebook's biggest problem. Humans are complex animals that have complex interaction patterns. Facebook is, for better or for worse, altering those patterns, and not always for the better. We need to be very aware of what we're losing when we choose to let Facebook do that to us.
The peace of mind that came with stepping away from the constant barrage of useless information that I couldn't ignore or make go away to b/c it came from 'friends' was an added bonus.
Now several years later I created a FB account using a false last name and use it only for real-world groups I belong to that rely on FB groups/events features (athletic groups, my CSA, etc). My profile explains that "I only use FB for groups. But we can be friends in real life."
So many people share articles that they've never read, they're really just sharing a headline. Or post from useless meme pages (I can go to reddit or something for that). So I have hidden almost every article source ("Hide all from Buzzfeed/NYT/science memes page" etc)
All I want to see are people's mundane life updates and baby photos, personal projects, and other "lives of my friends" things. I love that facebook is an open letter system to your friends, I just wish more people would use it that way.
I just want the unique thoughts and photos of my Facebook friends to see what's going on in their lives.
I never made a conscious decision to stop using it. I got really annoyed by Facebook emails and phone notifications, so I created a filter for Facebook email, and turned off notifications. Once it stopped constantly bugging me to look at it, I kind of just lost interest. At some point, I just realized I hadn't logged in in a long time, and noticed that I didn't miss it at all.
The only downside is some groups won't accept you if you don't have any friends, but there doesn't seem to be many like that.
Checking it takes about 5 minutes. There are usually 10 posts from friends at the top.
The rest of it is total garbage. Petitions, fake news, etc.
I noticed that if I visit Facebook more than 5 minutes per week, I will feel miserable.
95% of my fb feed is designed to make me upset. I just don't need all of that negativity.
If I used a bot to delete all of my posts (and literally everything else) after which, I deleted my account... is that actually deleted? Edit: It's been a year or more since doing this.
It was such a time waster, and I felt that... if I remove some of my data, it might be a good idea. It is a bit tinfoil-y, I admit but the less data that is out there, the better since Facebook is going into a lot of other markets.
Edit 2: Reason for deletion was that I noticed some of my very old posts were not created by me but said they were. I assume it was either a virus or, more likely, some of my friends xD... I am sure the teenagers can relate.. people go on your screen in labs and write "HACKED" (NOT REALLY SILLY!!!)
Even if you probably can't achieve actual deletion, what you did probably didn't hurt and removed information for other public or API access.
of course, this ignores that we all have friends who do things we don't like, and they're friends in spite of that. so the question is, given that facebook is used mainly for
1. communication
2. event planning
3. keeping the relationship alive.
how do you get those things without all of the bloat, both cognitively and as a matter of tech?
I feel that facebook is overkill if that's indeed true. what we (or at least I) need is just something that will sift through my calendar and all forms of communication and just let me know if I haven't contacted a friend in so often.
such a thing would eliminate the need for facebook for 99% of people, I suspect.
each time you bother to manually check on someone, you could've just called/emailed/messaged them. at that point you might as well delete your account imo.
Remember, sharing is spamming.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/may/05/earn-a-living-... [2] https://socialix.com/facebook-influencers
Seems like a point with some depth to it.
I think everyone under the age of 40 knows that their insta and fb involve posts that make us look cooler/more hip/sexier than we really are. Isn't that how things have always been? How many nytimes articles have been written about Irritable Bowel Syndrome, to use their example? Or how often do you talk about it with friends before the internet? Has that really changed?
It's just the medium that has changed. Some thing's are new, some are the same. People presenting the best of themselves certainly hasn't.
I don't care much about the upvotes, but as I do a lot of walking on the mountains around my house, I now have a kind of a motivation to snap a photo, add some effects or change the colors a bit (on the phone itself) and publish.. :)
Oh, and there's someone I follow who posts a lot of beautiful places on my country, places I eventually would like to go..
Edit: I've checked it, thanks, it seems good, but I'm wary of adding another app to my list. As long as I can add photos and my closest family/friends can see them, FB is enough for me. :)
Much to my surprise, It seems to be a much better platform for artwork and photography (most of my followers are posting the same, so generally interesting to go through as well). It will also post to facebook from the instagram app.
This is the only utility I get from Facebook now. Anything else is just akin to endless spam, except it's from people I know (some well, some not so well).
I made the mistake when I first opened an account of adding all my family and colleagues. Man, that was quickly realised as a grave mistake.
I've also got a lot of friends who purposefully stay off Facebook for the same reasons espoused in the posts on HN, and I understand that reasoning too.
The only minor irritation I have is that a lot of events that go on in my city, or that my friends host, use Facebook events. I'll occasionally get a complain from a non-facebook using friend that they didn't get invited to ______, and it's usually just because they weren't on Facebook and the host doesn't know them well enough to go out of their way to invite them.
And the person not invited usually responds along the lines of "well, apparently the party host is not a close enough friend to SMS or email or call me, so whatever," That might or might not be entirely true.. but either way, why are you complaining about not being invited?! Because you are using Facebook as some gauge of friendship, and now you feel this friendship isn't a 'deep' as you thought it was because they don't want to SMS you individually?
Quite frankly, I love being invited to things by far acquaintances, because it just gives me an opportunity to meet new people. I don't use Facebook friending/event invites as any metric for the depth of a relationship. Just to find new stuff to do.
1. Unfollow (not unfriend, i.e. not noticable) all your friends - this will clean up your newsfeed and confuse the algorithm
2. Follow some pages that do not post a lot from brands you are interested in
3. Uninstall the facebook mobile app and increase your battery
All in all, I can still use messenger for some things but without the load that facebook brings to the table. You might miss out on some things but you'll be happier because you are oblivious.
(clearly this doesn't include areas where most people don't have TVs.)
What set this off was seeing a a buddy I hadn't spoken with in nearly a decade. Typically bumping into an old friend and catching up would be great, but we both knew nearly everything about each other due to our investment in social media. We still had stuff to talk about, but I felt somewhat robbed of that moment.
From day one I avoided adding people from high school or other areas of my life where I wasn't interested in sharing real-world social experiences. It might sound harsh, but I just don't care what these strangers are up to.
Social media is fine for some people, but I've never been happier to be ignorant of my friend's lives until I spend real time with them.
That being said, the event organization aspect of Facebook is great, and I know a lot of people who have stayed with the site for the same reason. The sooner a simple, centralized event organization platform becomes popular, the sooner we can start a proper exodus.
There were only one major difference from the previous similar services namely the shift to having people carelessly use their actual names which is something that was unthinkable until then. And a minor difference in the large use of tricks from the dark book of anti-patterns and dark patterns to get more and more unsuspecting people on board.
To be 100% honest I did use facebook for a little while as I was employed in the shady business of uncovering online users identities and tracking them in the real world. The emergence of facebook made my job a breeze at first, then before long made the whole job position entirely expendable, clients would simply use facebook themselves to conveniently find all the info they were after in one place.
But, I really don't have much interest in what most of my friends post. Luckily, it's easy to just "unfollow" them to declutter my feed. They are still on my friends list and we can still communicate via FB/Messenger if needed. I just don't have to scroll through pictures of their food or kids or pets.
They could probably bake it into messenger.
Facebook has stand alone apps for groups and events, individually.
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/10/introducing-the-events-...
A crude solution driven by the people simply being there
To me it seems that you remove almost all of what facebook offers to keep instant messaging, contact list and email. Things one can achieve outside of facebook but for some reason people still insist on using facebook for these even though they admit they dislike it.
Just leave the damn thing already and build your networking outside of it instead giving more momentum to something you don't like and know is bad at the global scale.
Everyone else is reading this and thinking - "Oh yeah, I suppose I shouldn't be so bothered".
No need to read untrue postings from people claiming that they are the "winners of life" while everybody knows that they did not achieve anything for real...
Being able to pop down just the messages with a click and back off straight after means I'm only going to the site every other day to check the notifications for a few minutes.
If there's something I can ask FB to do is to make it still easier to manage privacy of posts, and to unsubscribe to second-degree stuff like "X liked Y" or "X reacted to Y".
I don't think Facebook is universally bad, but if you have your doubts, try quitting it for a month and see what happens.
It will never make me miserable since I rarely post and don't care about "likes"
I like snapchat a lot better since it's actually social.
I am a lot happier as a person
That's OK fine. Anyone who really matters can use other channels.
Facebook is a great way to stay connected with old friends. There's a pleasant feeling about seeing how the people you once knew are doing these days.
If you do inevitably end up focusing more on the Maserati, the million dollar wedding, etc., then that's your problem. Your insecurity. Whenever I scroll past those things, I simply say, "Cool" and move on.
And to the people who stopped using Facebook altogether to help them concentrate better: Self-control. It's like how a lactose intolerant person blames the ice-cream in the freezer for making them eat it.
Human nature