I expect people like me who spend most of their day on the computer to have at least as much digital self discipline as I have, but perhaps that's a poor assumption to make...
I swear some of these personal posts never hit my home feed, they just get buried. This is odd as the personal stuff is the content I'm most likely to interact with. This is doubly confounding because the posts I don't see usually have a lot interaction among my close network, especially compared to the noise that's topping my feed.
More and more I find myself going directly to a handful of profiles and spending less time on FB because of the feed's noise.
FB without an ad-blocker is simply unreadable.
I tweet and have all tweets go to facebook automatically. So people will engage sometimes with those posts. Other than that, I only use facebook for certian facebook groups.
Facebook is doing well as an ad platform to keep the revenue up but I'm not sure Facebook is honestly... doing well, you know?
I've seen them recently try to be Snapchat with the stories. I haven't seen one person use them yet despite being active on Snapchat. Also stickers, the new attention grabbing personal status posts with huge text, etc. It's as if they are lately trying to make people post more personal status updates on the site?
Is it possible there's a social network ad bubble that, once it pops when the realization of how much attention people actually pay on that site rather than just mindlessly scroll through like a heroin addict sinks in, will cause their stock to crash? I honestly don't think Facebook is one a nice trajectory either for us or for them.
I also found that spending more time on Facebook made me focus on the wrong things in life. I spent a lot of time thinking about what photos I wanted to post to garner interest (in reality few look or care about them). I spent a lot of time checking in on people that I haven't talked to in years, which satisfies my interest without actually ever communicating with them. It just became sort of depressing after a while. It's low effort to become friends with someone on Facebook, and I don't think its healthy to be constantly reminded of these connections you've made in life through various events and never actively continue in real life. You just spend a lot of time thinking about the past or what could have been. I was expending so much energy and getting back nothing but fleeting dopamine hits.
I truly believe I'm better off without it, despite the difficulty coordinating events with people and being invited to things. I communicate more with people in real life now. I find I am more motivated to text or call people to check in. I also use other communication services more because I'm not satisfying my social needs through passive consumption anymore.
Some of the smartest people in the world work hard to make the site more addictive. You could just as easily say, "Is it so difficult for you to just have a needle and heroin on your desk and shoot up?"
It might be easy for you or me to have it there within reach, but for those who have already had their mental pathways significantly affected by the daily or more frequent hits of dopamine, it's not easy at all.
>Some of the smartest people in the world work hard to make the site more addictive.
A famous result concerning this is the 1984 book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robart Cialdini.
* I assume tracking becomes more aggressive when you have an account. For instance, Facebook could connect you to everyone viewing your account page to create a shadow social network for you.
* Skirting real-name policy is against TOS. Using real-name opens you up to crawlers from governments, trolls, collection agencies, and data brokers/analytics companies. Besides governments can request all your data. You also have another account to keep separate /track of, when doing proper OPSEC.
* Even if for you your account is just used once a month, people you are connected to may have different expectations ("you have an account, why didn't you reply?"), and you have to micro-manage this.
* You miss events, while still having an account or invite, and it is bad social form.
* You are forced to combat social persuasion tactics: Facebook is carefully design to maximize clicks and time-on-site. It's like trying to quit drinking while going to the bar once a week: your determination is actively attacked.
* People can tag your account in photos. A high school teacher I know got in trouble because she was tagged in a photo where people around her were drinking alcohol.
But my experience has been that peak FB enjoyment is simply not having FB. Everything about FB feels toxic to me, not just the service itself but its pervasive tendrils throughout the web. Complete, total exclusion of FB and related services—including social sign on, etc—has really improved my QOL.
that aside, i deleted my facebook account over seven years ago and even though my real life friends give me some grief over that every now and again, i haven't missed it a single day.
apart from the couple of live streamed murders and abuse cases, there's no actual news on there which isn't accessible through another site with public access. and if i long for cat pictures or funny videos there's always imgur and youtube.
facebook, like many other "social media" sites, is more a habit than a necessity and, as far as i'm concerned, highly overrated in it's purpose
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-to...
Even if you block them 100% online, as soon as you use a credit card or loyalty card, you are letting them track you again.
In my country, and with my ISP we have dynamic IP's, so I don't have a 'home IP' as such. Browser user agent's are pretty easy to spoof/mock/etc. Browser fingerprinting is super hard to work around though - especially stuff like the canvas fingerprinting, because blocking it outright can also be used as a unique identifier when combined with other data.
Would it be possible to build some kind of public repository of canvas fingerprints, then whenever a site tries to build one, rather than outright blocking it, you return one of the public fingerprints from the repository. Get the repo big enough and used by enough people (especially if you could extend it out to other identifiers like fonts) and I imagine you would have a good chance of driving down one's uniqueness in a privacy conscious manner.
I'm not familiar with JS or the mechanics of how these fingerprints are generated, so I don't know if this is possible, but I imagine that if you can block them (Firefox 'Canvas Blocker' extension, you could intercept them?
Why, you may ask? Because mining data about the pages you visit after Facebook allows for targeted advertisement, at the very least.
I suppose you have no cell phone and live in a place with no government then, because Facebook can't hold a candle to telcos and governments when it comes to disregarding your personal space.
Also, Facebook holds a significantly broader type of information than uncle Sam or T-Mobile. And Facebook also provides an avoidable vector for government surveillance. Analogy: no machine is totally secure, that doesn't mean we give up, turn off all security software and stop patching exploits.
You're not obliged to hand this data over when you don't use their services, and ideally, they wouldn't track you if you didn't want to be tracked, but facebook is pretty close to being ethically void, so they'll do whatever scummy thing they want, so you should by all means make it as difficult as possible for them to get data on you.
Unless you run an ad blocker and/or EFF Privacy Badger, that's exactly what you're doing. Your consent is not required. There are literally _dozens_ of companies that do this, Facebook and Google are just two of them. There were some initiatives in some states to apply a stiff tax to companies that trade in user data, but I don't know if they went anywhere. That's one tax I'd be in favor of, even though I'm not in favor of more taxes in general.
The point is that regardless of whether or not consent is required, it's a question of principle to not give consent (and personally I do use LibreJS and the other various tools to improve the shitty state of affairs).
Companies acting unethically shouldn't be given extra leeway to act even more unethically.
But that's under protest. Facebook is super hostile to its users, but doing so makes their metrics go up, so it's gonna keep happening.
The net is so much nicer when you block out the evil.
So ugly and oldschool you won't miss in, unless you need to get something done there.
That is a terrible assumption to make!! Why would you think that everyone thinks the same way you think?!?
I deleted my facebook and to answer your question: Yes, it was that difficult. I have tried multiple times to do what you did, just leave it alone, but I couldn't. So I deleted it, have not missed it for a second.
Yes. Is that so difficult for you to accept? Tough shit.