Personal Reason for Hating Facebook (2015)

The point being, it is just as likely that the writer of this post wasn’t left out any more than he would have been in the past. What has possibly changed is that a funeral lightly attended by only a few in the past could now reach the many. In the past, he would have missed hearing about the death and would have missed the funeral. In the present, the same thing happened but now feels left out.

It’s a benefit to the mother who lost her child, but a detriment to the friend who feels left behind.

Whether you consider facebook's algorithms benevolent or not, the danger actually lies in the fact that people's opinions and friendships are not forming in a more natural and organic way. If relationships and opinions are shaped by an algorithm from a single source, it's more prone to failure, influence, if not by malevolence than by simple incompetence of not knowing the macro effects of a line of code applied to hundreds of millions of people.

The next morning, however, the other coupons were all used up. He claims nobody else has access to his FB messages and I never bothered to actually check the validity of the codes on Amazon, so there is enough room for plausible deniability, but this coincided in time with this reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/79x7u3/facebook_em... and now there's that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that some underpaid 3rd world facebook employee read through the messages and decided to use the codes themselves.

I don't know, this is all probably a stretch, but that moment reached a new low for Facebook in my mind (not that my opinion of them was high before).

We put together a big list of people for a HS reunion, and used real-life social networks to (try to) reach the names that weren't on FB. Mostly successful and with a large nucleus who were on FB, easy to distribute the workload.

I unfollowed every single person and page I'm connected to on Facebook a month and a half ago.

Every time I look at a Facebook there's just about no value. My feed is empty. Nevertheless, I'll visit it by habit. It's weird to see how that persists.

I am not posting (never really did anyway), and I have no idea what's going on with the people I didn't really interact with that much anyway.

What put me over the edge was answering the question: "Does anyone that I deeply care for post anything (at all)?"

Answer for 90% was no. And there rest I still have phone/text to communicate.

This has all made me consider what relationships in my life are important. And it's made me consider how susceptible I was to a fine-tuned algorithm hungry for outrage and virality, and how that influenced my relationships and myself.

I feel great opting out. I hope to fully delete the whole thing soon. Weird that I can't just do that.

I recommend the unfollow thing.

This captures perfectly my reasons for getting on Facebook in ~2007. One of my best friends had a baby and I was the only one who didn't know because I wasn't on there. I'd also been one of the last of my friends to get a cellphone 3 years before, and was starting to worry that I was just a jerk about keeping in touch.

It's really interesting to compare those two decisions now. The slider phone I got in 2003 was nothing like what we have today, but buying it let me participate in a communication ecosystem that's still evolving fast.

Facebook feels really stagnant by comparison. Its core mechanics, at least the ones I care about, are unchanged. Everyone's usage of it long ago stagnated into the same patterns. I still check it because I have to for life events, but it's not something I look forward to.

>I hate that, if I somehow don’t want to consign my personal data, beliefs, preferences, relationships, work history, daily plans, and private messages to a massive advertising corporation, I have to risk missing out on seminal life events.

I feel very much the same way. Social media is a tool that we can use to make social interaction more convenient, but it should not replace real social interaction. Writing a letter, an email, calling a friend, or even sending a text should not be replaced by Facebook because it is ultimately a corporation that seeks to exploit those very interactions for its own profit through means you may not agree with -- that is, selling off your personal data to advertisers.

That being said, it's fine to use Facebook occasionally to check up on what's happening with your friends across the globe. But I really think that everyone should consider removing their "close" friends from Facebook and moving that communication to in-person talks, phone calls, or even text messages. If you're logging onto Facebook even once a day, you're playing into their psychological traps: it's probably best reserved for a lazy Sunday afternoon, something like how older folks treat email. You certainly don't need it on your phone.

If you're concerned that you'll lose friends by deleting your Facebook, you can always keep a Messenger account connected to your phone number and not miss out on group communications. If you're a mover and shaker in your social groups, try pulling your groups away from Facebook. Organizing an event? Offer to send out a mass email to people instead of using Facebook. Or text people yourself instead. Decoupling yourself from Facebook only gives you more power when they decide to do misbehave (do you really think this is the last or worse scandal we'll see from Zuck), and if you're really successful, your friend group will eventually start to realize that they don't need Facebook any more either. Everyone isn't going to delete their Facebook overnight, but if folks start to disconnect bit by bit we'll a) all be better off and have more future options when it comes to Facebook's manipulation and b) start to make Facebook less and less valuable, so eventually people won't even want to join in the first place. "What is an ocean... but a multitude of drops?"

As someone who has never had a cell phone, I can say that living this way in a first-world country is challenging. I've been in situations where it's assumed I do have a cell phone, and the result ranges from awkward to maddening for the other party.

I also don't have a Facebook account. Not having a cell phone is much more troublesome.

The pull of network effect doesn't just mean that people join for opportunity. If sufficiently insinuated into daily life, some become compelled to join out of necessity.

But with Facebook and Cell Phones, joining this club takes a major toll one's privacy.

That's the dilemma anyone resisting network effect faces.

Its a matter of letting a nefarious actor into your life to feed you addictive poison, torpedo your well being, and feed you propaganda. Each new revelation makes this increasingly clear.

Is missing a high school reunion or the funeral of a long-list friend really "seminal"? Socially awkward, perhaps, but seminal? No, not really. Seminal is getting married, the death of a parent, birth of a child, finishing college. Not getting drunk with a bunch of people you barely know any more.

Why not have a Facebook account but only use it read-only for the most part? Nothing requires that you post your beliefs, work history, daily plans and such.

That's what I do. I do post a couple of times or so a year, just to keep the account looking used, but those posts are always just something innocuous. Usually just a link to something funny I saw on Reddit, but sometimes a photo or video of mine. The latest, for example, was a link to this video of several Chestnut-backed Chickadees that landed on my hand to eat peanuts out of my palm [1].

I do the same thing on Twitter.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShPgZhSbxU0 If you watch, I recommend a second viewing going frame by frame as they land and takeoff.

We have ways to track contacts, organize E-mail threads, view restaurant web sites, etc. and all those tools are uninvented when the data is only visible through Facebook. Even when Facebook graciously permits you to keep using one of your tools (like a web browser), it’s still effectively broken until you log in.

I find a silver lining in this by making it as friction-full as possible for me to view Facebook content. For example, having to unblock domains and log in every time (never saving passwords, etc.). It works: it makes me consider whether or not I really want to spend time viewing whatever silly video/rant/whatever I initially thought was interesting. And of course then I am not sucked into an hour of grazing the rest of the feed.

To be more clear: They know where you go, who you call and text, and what you buy.

That said, I think it is a terrible shame more efforts haven't gone into making an alternative -- and at this point, it would need to be a compatible alternative -- that is not controlled by a single for-profit organization.

I put it to you that Facebook is about group communication, whereas friendship is about one-on-one communication. As such Facebook has nothing to do with friendship, and it is a delusion to think otherwise. Those Facebook "friends" are actually acquaintances, and your friends are those smaller number of people whom you talk to outside Facebook.

The world would absolutely freak out like never before and I would sit back and chortle with delight as I watched my fellow people throw tantrums like little babies for months on end. Think of the lawsuits and blubbering that would ensue!

I think it would be an excellent lesson to society that they shouldn't ever, ever, ever entrust their personal data to a profit-driven corporation again.

Out of the ashes would arise a better, decentralized system and control would be given back to the individuals and we would stop hating each other and being glued to our fucking phones all the time and, well ok this fantasy has gone off the rails, but you get the idea!

A talk by Moxie Marlinspike called "Changing threats to privacy" also addressed some of these network effect aspects in a thoughtful way. https://archive.org/details/youtube-dBtmzY5gcO8

As long as you remain friends with people you need to keep in touch with, but never post anything or fill out your personal details, you will not be giving up any privacy or missing out.

Um, yes? That's literally what bring a part of a society is about. I'm not thrilled that Facebook has woven itself so deeply into our society, but if you're not on it, it's likely you'll be missing out on some things. Many of those things you may not care about, but unfortunately for some, like the death of a dear friend, you will care.

And overall says about facebook hate but, like, it is just a platform, a technology; it all starts and ends up with people, so he'd better say "I hate people but want their attention but don't want to tell 'em that by owning a facebook profile".