Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch
bradfrost.com
bradfrost.com
Less Facebook == more happy. It's the best advice I can give.
Last month I deactivated my Facebook and have yet to turn it back on. In the months prior I started finding alternative sources of news: NYT, Pitchfork, HN, various sub-reddits, Bandcamp, what have you. I outsourced social media to Twitter and Instagram. I outsourced messaging to text/Slack. A bunch of my friends have done the similar things in the last few years.
The lower levels of cognitive dissonance are noticeable. It's not like Facebook has a monopoly on the things I hate: notification spam, stupid arguments, unfulfilling articles, and vacuous political rants all exist elsewhere. Maybe it's the dissociation between who a person is and what is posted. On Reddit you don't know the person and they don't get a big platform to express themselves outside of the comments. On Twitter you can't go on these huge rants and following/unfollowing people is fairly impersonal. On Instagram, you never get "why haven't you posted?? come back!!" notifications. And news sites do what they do best - deliver the news without some other third party getting to give their doctoral thesis on what they think it means.
I am going to fight your shitty operating system updates that take away my privacy
I am going to fight your massive personal information sucking network
I am going to use alternative shopping services, no matter how easy you make it for me to click once and have stuff I really like appear in a great user experience.
I am going to fight these things because privacy matters and in the long run without privacy as consumers and human beings with inalienable rights we will give away something essential in there.
It isn't hipsterism. It isn't being a luddite. It mass-scale experiment about how much these organizations can concentrate before people really understand.
I participate in a couple of groups which have come to replace older forums running PHPbb or VBulletin type software. While the old style forums offer too many features and almost excessive permanence for discussions, Facebook offers too little in that regard.
Conversations are not meant to be searchable, archived, permanent, or long or detailed. Unlike VBulletin, where it's easy to find a post you saw 3 days ago or all the posts you've made in a forum, on Facebook everything effectively disappears after a week or two. The content is still there, just very disorganized and difficult to access. Search is inconsistent and very basic for groups.
Most significant is the impact this has on the discussions that take place. On the old forums, posting seemed like a bigger deal and people rarely posted one word responses or sentence fragments. The FB format seems to encourage that. Long, detailed responses about technical matters are difficult to post and read, so people don't post them as often. Discussions are often repeated because nobody can really find the last one to link to it.
Now I basically only get posts directly written by my friends, event notifications for concerts, and updates from my favorite bands.
I don't use Facebook for news, I don't engage in political discussions or stupid arguments. I guess I use Facebook for what its original intended purpose, to keep in touch with friends.
(The only reason I don't close my account: I check it once every week or so, because I have older family members for whom this is probably as far as they're going into the world of social media and I feel a bit guilty either pressuring them to use some alternative or disconnecting from them further, as they are unlikely to understand my dissatisfaction with the FB product and much more likely to take it personally)
Now if I could only do the same for reddit...
The thing with optimizing for engagement is that the numbers will tell you to do things that eventually burn out your users. The more thoughtful people leave first, and the community becomes dominated by addicts, and the news feed increasingly dominated by oversharers who spend several hours a day facebooking. That infinite slurry of crappy content rots your brain faster than watching daytime TV.
There appears to be a significant negative correlation between Facebook activity and wellbeing.
So much of social media is dependent on triggering anger or anxiety to get you to share. Which is effective political memes make you mad. Because they're designed to.
I decided that being on a platform that uses me as a transmitter of memes to make cash by making me mad or anxious was (a) sociopathic on behalf of Facebook and (b) stupid on my part. I logged out, deactivated, and deleted. I've done it before, but now it feels permanent.
I'm on twitter sometimes (because there's much less social pressure wrt following/unfollowing) and Goodreads, where I follow people who read and write the books I like to read.
First week or so was string of surprising moments where I would suddenly find myself at the FB login screen having mindlessly tried to navigate there.
More productive, less distracted, etc., sure but was FB really getting you down that much? Am I just using Facebook "wrong" in that it's not upsetting me the same way it upsets others?
It's not like they are putting a gun to my head but, they are using a billion dollars of research and my friends' faces to entice me into doing something I don't want. I'm more or less a monkey and my social circuitry just is so super-stimulated that it's annoying.
And all of that is before the FOMO kicks in and I start feeling bad that my life isn't as nice as my friends even though among my friends, I have a very enviable life (my friends have confided in me as much). But, my every day life cannot compete with the highlight reel of all the best moments of all my friends' lives.
Even though I know all of this stuff consiously, it still affects me because keeping guard and watch over everything constantly is hard. Falling into how it's designed to make you feel is easy.
Deleting FB off your phone is the best thing.
This overwhelming feeling, I'm convinced, is one of the driving factors that created Instagram and Snapchat because it was smaller and less invasive. Ironically, they became just like FB or in some ways (to some people) worse as they grew.
We are social animals and FB weaponizes the faces of all of your friends to suck as much attention from you as possible. It's as unfair a fight as there ever has been in the history of commerce.
In a sense I'm a lot happier not knowing that Great Aunt Gertrude shared that post. And most of the time Aunt Gertrude didn't even think about what she was sharing so the opinion wasn't based in fact.
Facebook, per se, maybe not. It could be anything that fills in the holes
Maybe you just don't have an accurate baseline and it's not that using Facebook upsets you but that not using it increases your well-being.
Try not using it for 2 weeks and see if you notice a difference.
I deleted my Facebook account completely last fall. It was interesting to see what happened over the period of about a month. Two weeks in my spouse's status changed from "Married to Ollie" to "Married." About three weeks in I got a notice saying my account to pay for "boosting" posts was cancelled.
My FB fanboy brother is annoyed, because if he wants to tell me something he has to make an effort.
People don't "tag" me in pictures any more. I don't have to cope with the little burst of emotional juice when somebody pushes the little thumb button on something from me or about me.
And, the fake nuz just stopped. Hooray.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2016/04/30/study-l...
https://www.nature.com/news/how-facebook-fake-news-and-frien...
Do we really need researchers to tell us that prolonged heavy anything usage increases the chance of unhappiness?
But I do have the basic mobile site bookmarked:
Instead of getting notifications and getting pulled into the app I can visit the site when I have downtime, or have something I actually want to accomplish on FB.
Now if I want to access it I have to open the Password Manager, copy the password and then paste it ... which are too many steps for me to take in order to check it out :)
So, in the past 1-2 months I think I spent in total 1-2 hours on facebook.
The course is clear, you need to delete your web browser too.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
I'm pretty much in an FB and HN dopamine loop all day.
-_-
Not sure if I'm ready to pull the trigger.
Nice! You're almost to nirvana. ;)
Very liberating indeed.
I regularly organize big board game parties, which are attended by 10-15 people (out of ~40 invited). How easily can I invite / manage so many people without some platform like FB, which (almost, at least around me) everyone uses? And I really appreciate easy info / updates events on FB provide for e.g. info about how much food should I cook, telling people about changing time (or day! We just had poll on FB because people liked this sunday more than saturday) of the party, telling them what to bring . . . emails just wouldn't cut it, it would consume much more time, and would be really clunky. And on the other hand, people attending who DO NOT have FB, are PITA to manage, they consume literally 10times more time to keep list of, message, get the answer from . . . FB has it all in one neat (even though sometimes smelly) package.
Similarly for e.g. GoT (also boardgame) events, as exactly-six-people is pain to manage generally. For someone going to such events it also has great UX, without any hassle of mass-sms or mass-email events.
Not to mention classic FB advantages like photo-sharing, communicating with friends on the other side of the world, etc. . .
It seems to me like deleting FB is not an option if I would like to stay as social. And I am actually quite introverted too, but thanks to channeling social interaction to FB (of course no app, just mbasic.facebook.com and desktop website) and particular events I can enjoy my time alone (which is vast majority of the time) without any regrets or being left behind in my social circle.
I completely agree, and this works for me too. I take long breaks from Facebook and find it refreshing. It also becomes painful to think of logging in to Facebook afterwards. The tons of notifications and tags and replies. There's too much on the platform manipulating people to stay on it. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is real, and I know people who cannot stay without checking Facebook everyday. The main reason I haven't quit Facebook is because I use it for some activism related topics, and a huge audience exists on the platform.
For privacy reasons, to protect myself a bit more and to avoid ads, I mostly Facebook only from a browser on a computer. I don't use the app even though I know I can deny permissions for contacts, photos, camera, mic, location, notifications, etc., on iOS. Sometimes I visit mbasic.facebook.com from the browser on the phone for kicks and to get to messenger directly without jumping through hoops.
I no longer infinite scroll, and things load quicker... I've noticed that I check FB a lot less now that I can't just mindlessly scroll down.
I didn't actively touch Facebook throughout August, and I really feel my general outlook has improved. I'm also more social with people in real life, and not getting my saccharine hits from little snippets of conversation or internet point validation.
Now I'm rarely active with it and feeling better for it. I still reluctantly have to use the messenger for communication with certain people, and login for access to other websites that rely on facebook (e.g. Goodreads).
It really is good advice
I actually used to be able to use the browser based messenger to talk to friends but that has been broken lately and now tries to force you to install the app - more dark patterns here (I don't want the app!).
Now I just ignore Facebook completely. I cringe when I need to open the site for some reason. I'm just happier without it.
I'd love some open source thing like this that was mine first and foremost, but I don't really need that either. I thought I needed social networking way more than I really do.
The idea is very attractive, but it seems like the rest of the world is stuck with the mindset that you have to have a phone number, email address, and even a physical address.
At concerts, I've found it hugely helpful to simple take a picture from where I'm standing, and sending it to my friends.
Social media is engineered to be addictive and hooking us while the BS reason that we give to be on social networking for is to gain popularity but popularity would follow us when we do Deep work! https://hackernoon.com/hackers-guide-to-internet-minimalism-...
Oh my lord, the Facebook app eats battery life. I haven't had to charge my phone yet compared to my 2x charges per day. Whether through less usage or less Facebook doing its thing I can't confirm. I'm not going back either way.
Wasnt there some stanford study that concluded that more people engage with social media like FB more unhappier they felt. something to do with selection bias in feed.
I simply use the mobile website which is pretty good - and if I need to take a peek at messenger, I request the desktop site, which is sufficiently inconvenient to prevent me from doing it too often - about once a week.
Even if you aren't both in the middle of a conversation, I suggest to you to slowly start talking to her about all these shaddy things about facebook (important: is not an addiction but a mental conditioning, as "addiction" is a very strong word for some people and "conditioning" is a much fuzzier concept). Then, slowly, start noticing that her "conditioning" on facebook is a turnoff on certain situations. Be honest and frontal about that..
Uses less battery power, too!
Some friends asked me to sign up for it because they wanted to use the messenger service for a groupchat. When I registered it immediately propagated my profile with information about my highschool (10 years ago) and suggested a lot of people I knew from back then as well as some devs I've collaborated with on Github. All this from a new email.
So I went into the settings and changed all privacy settings I could find, and was suddenly banned for "suspicious activity". To unlock the account they demanded my phonenumber, surely only for 2FA. But because my friends kept nagging I gave them it so I could chat with them.
After about 10 minutes of chatting I got banned again for "suspicious activity". This time they demanded a recent photo of my face to confirm my identity. But also said that I shouldn't worry because only their servers will see it. So I just sent a photo of some random from a local magazine and they replied that it was not me in the image.
So although I've never posted any photos online, never used the email, never posted my phonenumber online. They know everything about me, including what I look like. Can't imagine what data Google has if Facebook has all that..
What I mean by that specifically is putting things into your feed that nobody actually intended to share. e.g. "XXXX liked this thing!" Or generating notifications of non-events, like "Hey, share a thing!"
The share button is literally right next to the 'uplike' button. And they specifically did not press it. But you're gonna press it for them, because you gotta have content and folks keep pretty mum on facebook (and everywhere else) lately. There is very little I'm interested in sharing with every single person I know. And even less I'm interested in sharing with strangers a la Twitter.
To say nothing of the overall click-baity trollish quality of aformentioned articles. Every time one of my dear friends gets triggered and feeds the trolls, facebook is dutifully shoving it in my face. There is a high correlation between virality and unredeemable shit stirring.
Facebook is doing it. Twitter is doing it. Reddit is perhaps the most shameless of all with their mobile app working hard to spam you with posts that you.... haven't commented on, or even upvoted. (I can't say one way or the other about Snapchat because I'm not a millennial.)
I do believe this is the intersection of 100% social media saturation and the public markets' relentless demand for growth. This is peak social media. They're flogging live video hard, but news flash: I grew up when you had to make plans to watch your favorite TV show, and it's the worst. Live video sucks. I got shit to do. I can't even be bothered to DVR things any more.
I want something that shows only what my friends explicitly posted, in chronological order, and without a tiny character limit.
I also noticed I get a lot of "this female friend of yours who just like you also doesn't have her relationship status revealed to us is interested in going to X tomorrow" reminders. It's like Facebook wants me to be a creepy stalker male friend.
I started taking screenshots of it and sending them to them - "hey, Facebook wants me to stalk you" style (they're privacy conscious so we can joke about it together instead of them thinking I'm creeping on them)
This is why I stopped using Facebook. I really didn't mind the platform until they crossed the threshold of being a useful product to reminding my each time I used it that I AM the product.
I like to fly under the radar and prefer people to find my pictures and posts naturally. Once they started force feeding people my content I decided to stop inflicting my peers with fuel for facebooks social cannons.
Is FB getting more aggressive because it wants even more or because it is actually losing clicks/logons/attention?
Probably the latter. I only recall getting the clingy email messages when I haven't checked it in a few days.
I've never had a problem with Facebook over-use, but I know people who have. Those notifications are so slimy and akin to waving a drink in front of an alcoholic's face.
Every time Facebook turns up the notification rate, they see more engagement. Every time they encourage Boosting a post, they make more money. And then later, when they can't link cause and effect, people like you and me and OP give up on the site completely.
Similarly, sites that A/B test and adjust features and "improve" their design constantly pay a real price - their users feel like guinea pigs and can't ever learn to use the product fluidly. But a .1% conversion boost is measurable now, while a slow bleed of users who want reliability can't be proven.
At a certain point trading goodwill for bigger numbers actually does become a problem, and I think we're getting there.
(I've closed my account on 2013, so I don't know exactly what happened since then.)
Robin, get back on Facebook by clicking: https://fb.com/l/someIDhere
I am OUTRAGED by this. My phone text messages is one of the only communication medium that has no spam, and i basically use it for urgent stuff. I never agreed to fb using it for anything further than 2fa. If it wants to spam me, it may send emails.
This was basically the last straw for me. I'm going to send a message to all my friends telling them to send a mail if they want to contact me, delete everything on my profile and wall, and bid farewell. My account will stay up mostly to keep scammers/impostors at bay.
At one point in time, text messages were extremely expensive (several cents per message, depending on the plan you had). At that time, laws were passed (in many countries, I don't know where you are) that made it illegal to send unsolicited text messages.
You should see if you can scare Facebook.
Most everywhere the cost was always borne by the sender (except when roaming)
To be unsolicited, you must not have had previous business contact with the company before they contacted you. If you have a business relationship with the company, for example because you opened an account and gave them your phone number, then these laws do not apply.
In all honesty, you really can't.
## Linkedin - Trash useless email
if allof(
address :is "From" "messages-noreply@linkedin.com",
anyof(
header :regex "Subject" "^(Congratulate|Say happy birthday to) .+",
header :regex "Subject" "^Check out .+ (updated profile|new skill|new photo)",
header :regex "Subject" ".+ is a?waiting (for )?your response$",
header :regex "Subject" "^News about .+",
header :regex "Subject" "ou have [0-9]+ (unread message|new update)",
header :regex "Subject" "Do you know .+",
header :regex "Subject" "^.+, you have .+waiting for you on LinkedIn$",
header :regex "Subject" "see who you already know on LinkedIn$",
header :regex "Subject" "^.+, more than [0-9,]+ new jobs in .+$",
header :regex "Subject" "^Connect to your classmates from .+$"
)
){
addflag "\\Seen";
fileinto "Trash";
stop;
}
Have a look at Me (menu) > Settings & Privacy > Communications (tab) > Email frequency (controls not only overall frequency but frequency per message type, i.e. group message notifications, invitations, job notifications, connection update notifications, etc.).
Also, you can entirely disable classes of notifications you no longer want to receive/see (even when you're viewing the site) by going to the Notifications tab, then clicking the context menu ("...") on a given notification and selecting "Turn off" (stop receiving this type of notification) or "Unfollow" (stop receiving updates from the given source).
Facebook does too, but it's also slimy too. You can't preemptively opt out of specific notifications, but you can unsubscribe to types you've already received via a link in the email. The slimy thing is that some of these are fairly generically named and you can never be sure exactly what you're unsubscribing from sometimes.
I want to receive ONLY event invites and messages notifications from Facebook, but there have been a couple times where those stopped and the only way I was able to get them back was to resubscribe to stuff until I hit the one that suppressed them.
Although I run my own mail server, there are other good providers out there which allow you to use sieve based filtering. Fastmail for example:
It also uses regexes so it would be easy to convert mike-cardwell's rules.
I deactivated my account yesterday and look forward to a FB-free life.
If I open the app after not having posted something in a day or two, it's quiet.
I'm not quite "done with facebook" but I'm getting there.
Almost a year ago now, I deactivated it and haven't turned it back on.
Keeping in mind that this is Facebook we are talking about, I doubt the data is actually removed.
"There are a billion active accounts on facebook and other than the 208 that are set to private, I can communicate with every single one of them. I don't know what other word I can use other then Power. This is great power, just like the power held by the presidency, with great power comes great responsibility, and loneliness.
The worst thing about Facebook is not the power it gives me. The worst thing about facebook is what I chose to do with the power it gives me.
I certainly couldn't handle it. You might as well say the worst thing about facebook is me.
On facebook, why would I give someone privacy when I have access to all this information. And I don't even need their permission. I can watch your private pictures because you made them available. It's not that I can find out where you work, where you live, where you eat, everything about you. It's that I actually do find out without ever hiring a private detective. It's not what I can do, it's what I do!"
I just want to buy a damn pillow! (Don't forget to review it, your opinion is important to the world! And the manufacturer would like to know how useful it was to you but won't do anything if it wasn't!)
This reminds me of the quote, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Every A/B test makes your site less predictable and straightforward for your users. Every push notification dilutes the value of every other notification sent. Every 'fake' event undermines the thrill of real engagement with other users.
At a certain point you're burning real value to create better metrics, and that's not sustainable for a company that actually wants to endure.
Every time I log in I somehow have around 6 notifications. Facebook always finds something to notify me about. It's never a daunting number, but it's never zero either. If I log in twice in a week, I'll have something under a dozen notifications both days. So you'd think that after not logging in for 3 months I'd have dozens of notifications, right? Nope. Always some kind of number that I imagine Facebook has decided is the ideal number of notifications to keep me interested.
I've tried in vain to limit my notifications to things that I actually care about, but I've never been able to get rid of the random noise. Facebook is determined to send me push notifications about something. I can't stand it.
For Facebook employees: Is this really the company you want to work for? Is this the impact you want to have on the world? Is this really the best place in society to apply your talents?
I've wondered the same about a few companies, Facebook and Amazon in particular. Even if one may be working on some storage deduplication or scaling the system or other seemingly dissociated pieces from the obnoxious front end, how is it possible to imagine that you're truly doing something for the good of humankind (net-net)? I can understand the higher pay, facilities and probably technical and other challenges. But impact on the world at large with consideration for the future being created? I personally don't get it.
The "Facebook reaches coveted non-existant people (NEP) demo" story would be amusing, if it weren't symbolic of greater industry-wide risks concerning click-fraud scrutiny.
But of greater concern as investigations into Russian meddling of the election heat up, is that $FB profited enormously from microtargeted ads specifically engineered as part of a program of mass psyops. With everyone looking for a scapegoat, this could result in actual indictments.
Why Nobody Can Trust Facebook
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-11/why-nobody-can-trus...
Facebook Wins, Democracy Loses
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/opinion/facebook-wins-dem...
And... you might tell me that I could just unsubscribe. Yeah. I did, multiple times. The notifications still come. They just go to the spam bucket now.
Facebook is one of the worst "products" on the market and I'm pretty close to telling family to find some other means of communicating with me. Like, you know, a good old fashioned phone call.
Messenger seems to be moving more and more towards a snapchat clone, where as I just want something to message people. I don't want to post updates, play games, see ads, make phone calls, get spammed when someone new signs up.
iMessage before iOS 10 was perfect, except not all my friends use Apple.
The article is pretty careful to use the term user - undoubtedly we are users.
But here is the problematic statement:
"This is what happens when the metric of how much time users spend using your thing supersedes the goal of providing legitimate value to your users."
The thing is - sure, the user time spent is measured, and "providing legitimate value" is not. How would one measure that, exactly?
But - more importantly - the metric, the ONLY metric, that really really matters is revenue. From real paying customers - ie: advertisers, some alluded to in the article.
So that is the one for which all optimizations are directed - via the indirect metric of "user engagement" where "user engagement is a pretty good proxy for "users see ads" and perhaps "users click on ads."
It does not appear that "providing legitimate value" is part of any of that, nor is there any reason that it ever would be.
IFF sufficient value could be provided that people would actually pay money just to use Facebook, so much money that it dwarfs all other forms of revenue (and perhaps even anti-correlates with ad revenue).... THEN we'll see Facebook focussed on user value. But not until then.
https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/2172707...
0.0.0.0 facebook.com
0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com
https?://([a-z\.]*)?facebook\.com.*If you want to be really shocked you should search for some of the host files out there that attempt to list every known Facebook-owned host; there are hundreds of lines or more. It is extremely difficult to prevent Facebook tentacles from being loaded by other sites, and it’s surely a losing battle (I bet they register new domains daily).
Too much mental stimulation, specially from things that don't have much interest, was making my mind very shallow and easily distracted. I still read a lot of HN, but I'm trying to reduce my internet leisure time to 1 hour per day at most.
Since now I easily get bored, I started doing some sudokus (on a paper book) and I am finally starting to feel my mind a little bit sharper. I also feel the need to find more productive things to pass the time. For instance, three days ago I explored, quite in depth, C pointers and pointer arithmetic because of the first comment on this hn thread [0]. Also, yesterday, starting on the hn thread on microkernels [1], I started reading about these "alternative" OSes (Minix, HelenOS, etc), checked the source code of some of them, and eventually played a bit with nasm assembler and made a 32 bit and 64 bit "hello world" app for MacOS. These are things that I wouldn't learn and do if I was being mentally "stimulated" by facebook and that kind of things.
However, one positive thing about facebook is that those friends that used to send emails with funny memes, videos and what else, now use facebook for that. As a result, my email inbox is now much cleaner and calmer.. :)
Funny now that you mention.. I've been doing less and less side projects since my life got 'invaded' by social media. I wonder if I'm suffering from a similar problem...
The content quality is abysmal. People simply do not care to share on Facebook in ways that they have in the past. Their awful algorithm ruined the user value.
I think if they returned to a default chronological sorted news feed, with still sprinkling in ads as they do, they could increase the amount of time people spend on the service, show more ads, and increase revenue all while providing a superior experience. Why they don't return to this level of simplicity that the platform once had is beyond me. Too many engineers and too many PM's pushing for their pet projects, I assume, and you really just end up with an overdeveloped product.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/events-from-facebook-find-th...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.S...
"I sympathize that the company needs business users to keep it afloat" does not justify the kind of begging they've been up to lately.
The author's (and all our) collective sympathy keeps them soliciting us with their bullshit
Using your adversary's virtues against them is a strategy as old as humanity. With social media it's baked right into the name. Who doesn't want to be social? Who doesn't want to share? Is something wrong with you?
As a heavily connected individual, work in tech, I find that disconnecting does alleviate mental baggage. I have gained more time to read and that brings me more joy than scanning an insta-feed.
This one is worse because it also uses the iOS/OSX notifications system for maximum passive aggressiveness: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/887740777031278592
It's silly, but I suppose it's worked on some people.
Why would any real person want to be friend with a ghost fake account?
Facebook is not only "needy", it's a big bullshit engine.
Rather, Facebook has a huge number of scammers. A few might be scamming you, but mostly they're from clickfarms that are trying to increase 'organic' behaviors so their accounts won't be banned.
I get that they've essentially tapped out the market for users, but jesus christ, take a rest Facebook.
I guess that I'm trying to say that it's possible to not have social media accounts and still function in the digital world. I know others who don't have accounts but I'm going to call them passive users of the web.
# for net in $(whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS32934' | grep '^route:' | sed -e 's/.* //') ; do ipset add block-facebook-ips $net ; done
and if you have ipset-presistent
# /etc/init.d/ipset-persistent save
The same for IPv6 is left as an exercise for the reader.
There's probably someone in your circle of friends and family that isn't using Facebook, so your friends and family are already used to reach to that person through other means.
Also, every time you meet friends and family you'll have things to talk about.
Is it likely that most people are willing to move and the only problem is there are no compelling options?
FB has turned people into needy Rolodex hoarders.
This feels like a not-so-gentle manipulation.
Some guy, who might be sitting next to you on the bus right now, said something on twitter, but that's now news because it's got their @IGN, their actual name (or maybe not), a weirdly formatted date string, the numbers '1' and '6' adjacent to icons at the bottom of the box, a 'Follow' button so you can forever be bombarded with more nuggets of wisdom from this person you don't know, all inside a box that doesn't even have rounded corners.
A month ago, FB's first senior software engineer was saying on the Internet History Podcast that FB would never create useless features/tactics to bring users to the platform like the Snapchat streak. Listen here, 27:20 mark. http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/08/facebooks-firs...
Recently though, I've noticed that Facebook seems to be moving what was once in the news feed to notifications. Now that they've spoiled the feed with useless information - the notifications box is the next exploit.
The cognitive overload from using Facebook is now so high for me that I almost never visit the site. Once a daily user of Facebook, now deleting my account would hardly affect me. If I have a choice, I always prefer to communicate with friends over anything but Facebook.
I believe Facebook's constant neediness will eventually be the demise of the platform. The mindless profit driven motives for constant engagement are harmful not only to its users, but society, and the company itself. I wrote more about this here: https://blog.west.io/2016/11/30/the-birth-and-death-of-faceb....
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
And it's not just Facebook. Every platform these days has been spamming with notifications. Quora's infamous un-turn-off-able x upvoted an answer after seeing your upvote or your Facebook friend y is now on quora, welcome him by sacrificing a goat to the mighty God Ra. Irritating.
You are competing against other product managers and people at the company to be a rising star or to get that big bonus. You are rated on the code that makes it to production and it's lift.
I can't imagine the scheming that goes on to get your stuff into the website or app. All in the name of drawing in more advertisers or people who will pay for the data.
Whilst I don't use Facebook, and dislike the social impact that Facebook has brought about (acknowledging the amazing precedents Facebook has set too of course) I do wonder how they get around this. There are only so many humans on the planet that they can play these engagement tricks on. The number of new users and amount of engagement will have to level off at some point.
I'd love to hear what Facebook plan to do to continue to "grow" in the the sense that shareholders are kept happy when they reach this saturation point.
Facebook truly is the poster child for sleazy tech company: I can't think of any point during their existence where they stood for anything but cold, exploit-the-user amorality, as opposed to (e.g.) Google's traditional "only earn profit by creating value" and Apple's "bring your vision to the world because it needs it"[1].
[1] I don't even like Apple as a company, but I do believe that company culture is rooted in prosocial motivations at some level, which is something I have never thought about Facebook.
Facebook seems to be one of the few things even more addictive than gambling. What is one of the only things humans value more than money? Attention, love, affection, friendship, relationships...
Regulation in the gambling industry is not there to protect you. It's there to enforce monopoly.
"I can appreciate the businesses paying for posts keeps the big blue ship afloat"
It was hard-ish at first, and it took a lot of "Do I or Don't I?" before I actually did it. I didn't delete my account or anything, so I could still check it from home, but as time went on and I was _only_ able to check it from home, I would frequently find myself thinking, "wow, there's really not much good here." which is one of those things that only occurs to you after taking time away from it.
I realized I replaced my Facebook habit with an Instagram habit, so I deleted that too. The only remaining distraction is Reddit, but I've never been as impulsively hooked into Reddit as I was the other two.
When people say that it's better without Facebook, they're not kidding. You should try it.
I feel forced to use Facebook to keep up with friends and family but I absolutely hate using it the entire time and I try to avoid it where possible. It's just amazing how spammy it's gotten and how their popularity continues to just go up.
However, as if it wasn't a nuisance enough, Facebook now gives me plain notifications of these friend requests in my normal notification feed. "Spambot is new to Facebook and just sent you a friend request."
I'd switch to only Messenger, but Facebook seems to think that I don't have Messenger, so I keep receiving invites to install Messenger from my friends as it covers half their conversation with me with that notification.
Don't forget, you are not the user, you are the product ;)
The PRIMARY use of Facebook should be to post about stuff like this, explaining all the ways Facebook is unethical.
Note: write something like "I saw this article that really made me think… and you should get in touch with offline to learn more about what's going on in my life" and no link. Then you can link to this article in the comments. Facebook has decided that links that get people to leave Facebook are bad, so you have to pretend your post is about something personal.
However, I don't think me (and may others in this thread) are a big cause of worry for facebook. While tech-savvy/privacy-aware users are leaving facebook in greater numbers, their absolute percentage is a fraction of the gigantic market of users in the developing world.
The developing world is a huge pie for facebook that is totally primed for taking. Majority of people in that group have absolutely no qualms about happily sharing private information (if at all any awareness of them being the product). In such a demographic, the social/economic/caste divide has been so wide and entrenched that facebook is seen as something that breaks barriers. People from lower socio-economic strata who have always been treated poorly by the privileged can now buy a cheap Android smartphone and be on the same platform of the people they serve and communicate as equals. They used to look aspirationally at the privileged sitting in air-conditioned shops sipping coffee while browsing smartphones - now they can (atleast partially) fulfill the fantasy.
They have all the time in the world, they love the notifications and they are eager to share. Our leaving barely makes a dent.
You know the people that feel a need to tag their friends in a comment on funny posts? That's the kind of user that reddit hasn't been able to convert. Whether reddit wants or should try to garner that traffic/content is a choice they need to make, but the site is doing fine regardless.
There's a saying that 'many things fly, only few are edible', and understanding FB is fundamentally understanding this principle.
I doubt the service will ever completely disappear, but its high time it gets marginalized (at least in developed societies) the same way TV is marginalized as FB is essentially the same programmed stream of bullshit, that you don't normally need in your life.
Understanding what the author understood in his article is a cathartic moment, that besides other things, has something to do with the conscious decision to actually consume what you want and not what you were given. This means focus.
Dropping out of FB and similar means of "social presence" is essentially taking back control over where you are going in terms of information being consumed by oneself.
Of course it will feel liberating to not feed oneself with irrelevant information. It doesn't mean stopping being social, but re-evaluating what socialization effectively means.
1. Complain a whole lot about the state of affairs with FB,
2. Say "but I still like FB and will probably keep using it"
3. Propose no alternatives to the status quo.
I think this post underscores the fact that FB really didn't have anything to lose doing these things. In fact, these things caused some mildly annoyed users to write lengthy blog posts about FB to give the company even more attention attention and mental time.
It doesn't surprise me, not anymore. A lot of marketing is getting high on its own supply, as in, they actually somewhat believe what they are saying; even if they're not believing the euphemisms they put out externally, they still have euphemisms internally they are really not thinking through.
The other explanation is A/B testing, which would be even more sad.
I, for one, have just logged out and never logged in for a solid 3 months now and haven't looked back.
And even for that matter i ve stopped limited use of twitter. As i see some of good classmates have become kind of trolls on few topics.
Makes me wonder if the real reason is that so many people got sick of "normal" Facebook when all they wanted is to use groups that engagement suffered and they needed to bring everybody back.
I check it a couple of times a day now I guess. Never allowed it to get its mitts on my phone, though, web use only. More and more of my feed is "Your friend X liked some inconsequential response by Y on a boring post by Z" where I don't even know who Y and Z are.
It may be that my friends are gravitating away and posting less - I certainly am - but I suspect if it is then it's part of a big feedback loop initiated by facebook trying to become a news source rather than just a place to share everyday happenstance and a few pictures with friends.
It looks like it's done a pivot since the last time I was there, going by the new onboarding process asking me if I'm an artist or a fan.
I have all notifications turned off in the app, I've disabled all email except if someone explicitly mentions me by name in a discussion (I should probably switch off that one, too) and I've made an effort to hide all kinds of stupid apps and games and pages that are nothing but time wasters. I also only like and follow pages that I have a genuine interest in (such as concert venues and bands I love).
Sure, there's a token notice from time to time ("why not repost a picture from 7 years ago?" and so on), but I find them easy to ignore.
Once you beat Facebook into submission, it becomes a reasonably useful tool.
Since I've signed out of Facebook on my PC and kill the mobile Facebook app while not using it, I tend to get multiple push notifications per day, most of them asking if I know some random person.
My girlfriend, who is on Facebook daily, has never seen any of these notifications.
Like a cheap TV Channel or a Casino and similar crap.
Yes i still use Facebook but only to chat to people. It replaced icq and i don't wan't to lose my contacts :(.
That's why I only look every couple weeks, though. There's nothing worth looking at on the site. I probably should delete it, to be honest. I never post and I rarely find something worth looking at.
Facebook is permanently quarantined
It sits on a desk closed up and never comes with me when i am out.
i look at once week at most to see if i need to respond to anything.
I realised I was standing on the edge of the abyss, and closed the page.
Personally, it comes off to me as desperate and presumptuous. They seem to have come to the conclusion that most users see value in getting "engagement" on Facebook, even in a nebulous and non-specific sense.
In the beginning I added artists and maybe some companies I fancied: that's a huge mistake. FB is only an ad framework for these entities and they are going to occupy 100% of your feed.
You erase all that and I started to see some friends doing stuff again, which is nice. I still think tho the algorithm to generate your feed is real s*.
It was so easy to make the change! Facebook is just a habit, a bad habit, but it's easy to break.
facebook teaches us to be sincere to others because facebook cares. it really does.
Facebook has specialized Growth teams that come up with features like that in order to move metrics such as retention, signups, active advertisers.
It's one of the reasons Facebook is so successful and the number of people using it daily keeps growing, as well as revenue and stock price.
I believe most tech companies have teams 100% focused on growth.
I don't understand the people that find peace only after deleting the whole app from their phones.
I've had a FB account since inception and it has loads of people in it. Yet I probably look at facebook a maximum of maybe 10 times a year because I'm able to mentally compartmentalize the people there into groups of "important" and "not important"
They are a juggernaut.
What every tricks they are playing, it has reached saturation in my mind.
I just don't find it that interesting or providing any value at this point in time.
Facebook is full of memes, trolls and pages whose sole purpose is to get more likes and comments. It's not a social network anymore.
I gave in to "big blue" and created an account in 2009 when I moved to a new country. I deleted it about 4 months later and am happy to report NOTHING IN MY LIFE CHANGED (other than feeling happy with myself for calling facebook's bluff and deleting the fucking thing).
If you don't like the crack, put the pipe down. It's that easy.
All facebook related domains blocked via hosts file on my router and on VPN that my iPhone uses.
Used Instagram but it got creepy too. Never used WhatsUp.
Facebook has a page for your business, that you maintain for them.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Stylebook
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicago_Manual_of_Style
What metric would be better to gauge "legitimate value"?
Yes Facebook is bad. They're an advertising company. Advertising companies are bad. We know this. Saying "How dare they, I can't believe..." is a defense against change.
There’s no respite from these messages, so it constantly feels like a gun to your head to get you to boost, promote, and pay.
Really? Like a gun to your head? So you are in fear for your life and you think if you don't click on this link, you literally are going to die this second? Or maybe it is a tiny annoyance which you completely can ignore and go on with your life, and you are over-dramatizing it a teensy bit?