The “Facebook Nevers”
500ish.com
500ish.com
I've noticed this amongst my family. The cousins, etc I have under 16 either don't have a facebook account or abandoned shortly after creating it. It's "uncool" because their parents see everything they do on there -- I know you can customize your sharing, but I doubt they know or care to be that careful on Facebook.
"This is why the smartest thing Facebook ever did was buy Instagram. Instagram is likely past a billion active users on its own now."
Unfortunately, this is why I don't use IG. I want to, but it seems impossible for me to keep it out of my Facebook like I want to. FB always pops up with "look what your friends are doing on IG" and I don't want my photography to be plastered in front of my grandparents.
The big reason seems to be the fact hat FB was too public. People were all in each other business and it gets ugly. Snap and IG are more direct, more one-on-one so to speak (at least my perception, I don't use social) giving people more privacy to post and like things they may not want mom/dad/grandma to see.
I wish somebody would create an open, federated Events implementation, and copy all event data (including rsvps) from FB continuously.
Besides the even thing, your group also gets a discussion board, mailing list, photo sharing and a few other tools.
The cost might be a barrier to the adoption but I'm hoping it will grow more
Personally, I did quit Facebook, after years of less rewarding interactions, and an increasing amount of friction with the site. Often the newsfeed's choices of content felt personally insulting. It's a habit to visit, even though it really doesn't offer much, like smoking.
What I did is I change my password to something that I don't remember to break the habit. Then, in the time it would take to recover the password and sign in, I have already remembered that I don't want to. I haven't been there in a couple of weeks, and the last times I did, my notifications were quite dull.
One thing that reinforces quitting is that not using the site for a while seems to greatly reduce the reach of posts when you return. When I post content and get no responses it feels humiliating, like I appear to have no friends who are interested in my content. In reality, Facebook is showing my content to very few people. I get about 10 times the response on Instagram, from basically the same group of people, and it was even more so before they partially ruined Instagram by making the feed more like Facebook.
It's refreshing to get rid of that "must give my 2 cents on everything" urge.
Except, you know, in this case. The "Me too!" urge was too strong so I reset my HN password ;)
That sentence particularly resonated with me. I recently quit Quora, and it perfectly describes my recent experience there.
When it was first out there were a lot of smart writers posting thought-provoking content, a lot of (SV) insiders giving interesting anecdata, etc. It seems that it has devolved into a more yahoo answers meets TED / stevepavlina.com type community now, but maybe that's just my feed. I admit that I've hardly used it in the past few years so it could just be my shitty and uncurated list of topics and people i follow
They had the foundations to build one of few reliable and high quality "expert" social graphs with a high bar of discussion but threw it all away when they chased expansion via search-engine marketing
Are you a magazine journalist? If not, why do you have “content”?
Maybe Facebook has trained you to believe you're playing a churnalism RPG, and that your ability to grind for Likes reflects your value as a person.
All I'm trying to is casually keep in touch with my friends and acquaintances. The like/heart/favorite serves as a register that someone read it and/or cared enough to send that signal.
And the Facebook app. And WhatsApp, too, I think
get rid of the huge fixed headers and fixed footers garbage. PLEASE. fuck this stupid trend.
The fact that Snapchat, which is a very popular product for teens/college users, usage continues to stagnate tells me that the "Facebook nevers" is not really a proven theory but just another hypothesis. Instagram, otoh, is popular across all age groups.
Though that strategy requires the cooperation of both the government and the leaders of those "next big things."
The founder of the next big social network may prefer to be the next Mark Zuckerberg rather than the next Kevin Systrom.
/me looks at Wikipedia page of Kevin Systrom
> Net worth: 1.6 billion $
I think I'd be okay with being Kevin Systrom. (Especially considering that Systrom is mostly unknown in the general public, whereas Zuck has a large amount of people who personally hate him.)
>> Net worth: 1.6 billion $
Net worth of Mark Zuckerberg: 75.6 billion USD
> I think I'd be okay with being Kevin Systrom. (Especially considering that Systrom is mostly unknown in the general public, whereas Zuck has a large amount of people who personally hate him.)
I would probably make the same decision as Systrom, given the opportunity, but I don't think everyone would. Some people would rather be the new tech titan rather than the guy who sold himself out to keep the old tech titan in power for another decade.
There are also other motivations a found may have to not sell out to Zuckerberg. In my original comment considered including the WhatsApp founders. They both made out handsomely, but their creation will be corrupted to fit Zuckerberg's privacy-free vision rather than their privacy-preserving one.
It seems like I don't really get fresh content anymore. It seems like a few, mostly stale stories from people I barely talk to. That makes it harder to be engaged in the service, and it makes me use the service less.
What I wish I could have (by default) is just a chronological list of things that people have posted.
Maybe there is a team of facebook who needs to justify their jobs or something? I don't want my feed optimized at all. I do the optimizing by selecting who I follow.
> It seems like I don't really get fresh content anymore. It seems like a few, mostly stale stories from people I barely talk to. That makes it harder to be engaged in the service, and it makes me use the service less.
It's entirely possible that their algorithms fail for your personality/usage patterns, but are successful enough on other accounts to make up for your loss of "engagement" from Facebook's perspective.
> What I wish I could have (by default) is just a chronological list of things that people have posted.
> Maybe there is a team of facebook who needs to justify their jobs or something? I don't want my feed optimized at all. I do the optimizing by selecting who I follow.
They don't want you to do the optimizing for yourself because that means they can't nudge you into doing what serves them the most.
Bookmark this URL, which shows your feed chronologically:
Perhaps what you're observing is the result of people abandoning Facebook or using it much less. It's not that Facebook is poorly optimized for you, it's that the people you want to hear from are using the platform less that before?
I thought I would get a better Facebook, a new feed with only posts from people I care about, turned out my Facebook is empty now, the people and pages I do care about seem to stopped posting a long time ago, I just didn't know because Facebook made it look like my feed was full of interactions I cared about.
What can Facebook offer me? I don't use it, I have never had an account, and I always thought it was a fad. It seems that it has taken awhile, but the world has agreed it was a fad and it is now over it.
So, what did I actually miss out on?
It turns out that all those people I had shallow social connections to from some time in our past? I don't miss 'em.
Not necessarily. Lots of social circles use Facebook Events to organize get togethers, and not having an active Facebook account leads to you being left out. The people leaving you out may only be acquaintances, but that doesn't mean it's ok.
This is the reason why I still have a Facebook account. It's obviously and explicitly inactive, and I only log in when I get an event invite.
I have many reasons to dislike Fb but at the top of that is how gated it makes communities.
If Facebook is such a problem then people could just stop being part of these social circles. It really isn't that difficult.
No, it actually is that difficult, or more precisely that undesirable. Very few people are such anti-Facebook activists that they're going to dump valued friends and acquaintances in order to dump Facebook. That's why Facebook is going to hold on to a lot of users, and why it'll end in a whimper and not a bang.
The only case where it "really isn't that difficult" is if you have no valued relationships that have a Facebook component.
Will you only decide which hobbies I may have, or do I have to submit planned meals and TV watching for your approval, as well?
"Just stop being part", my ass...
So no e-mail, no contact form and 3/4 of those services belong to FB :/
FB is how the event is marketed. Fb is how i find about different underground shows. And my use of Fb is limited for events, but for my friend, life without Fb is very much impossible.
All of human social relationships is "in people's minds", no?
I with my hobbies (Swing dancing) would dearly miss out. That's why I'm still evaluating whether it's feasible to delete my account, by getting other sources for events. So far, only very limited success.
Does it? This is the closest I can get:
> Facebook has been giving many people many reasons not to sign up over the years. But we’ve had to: everyone we knew was on Facebook. And eventually, this trickled up and our parents were on Facebook. Now the trickle down effects of this are the opposite: kids don’t want to be on Facebook because it’s what their parents are using.
That's not really the same as "impossible".
> Is this article more a reflection of the author's poor self control than of reality?
Is poor self control the only reason one would be on Facebook?
But the fact that everyone they know is on Facebook doesn't mean I have to be in Facebook. I never made an account for it.
Poor self control is what turns "many reasons to sign up" into "had to".
0: Admittedly, NoScript helps a lot with this.
The life of a social moth. Always going for shining lights. Getting burnt. And having so low a life expectancy that 10 years is long-term.
I'm guilty as charged too. I don't have a Facebook but I still eat fish, drive a car, etc, etc.
This trait right here is why I am not optimistic about the future no matter how much technology progresses.
Still, no single indvidual is to blame in most cases.
The education and the media in practice are means to shape the values, believes and perception of people. At the mass scale, people flows into an unstoppable current, growing, fed by itself.
Taking a stand against these currents from the outside would be suicide. (Fortunately there is not only one current to go into, yet).
FB will likely reach a dead end someday, but that sort of current will continue to flow.
IMHO, the best effort for an individual is trying to get other individuals realize and have some understanding in what kind of current they are flowing.
Personally I never claimed that I will quit Facebook, because I know I ain't going to do it, as all my family is on it.
That said, I only visit Facebook about once per week or even less, because frankly it's not that interesting. I was also checking out my ads profile. Turns out, I never clicked on any ads. And when posting content, I'm always careful to post for my friends only, which isn't a big list of people. Meaning that in the large scheme of things, Facebook isn't getting much from me. My social network of choice has been Twitter.
I also own two cars. But I ride my bike to and from work every day, in all seasons but winter.
I ate a lot of meat, but I'm trying to cut down on it due to health benefits. Considering that I gave up smoking, sodas and alcoholic beverages completely, it's a little hard for me to further restrict what I put in my mouth.
And yes, I am only human. FYI the actions of any one particular individual to cut down on usage based on moral or social factors are zilch. If you want meaningful change, there are only 3 ways to do it:
1. invent technology that makes the status quo irrelevant, but this isn't actually something that most of us can do
2. keep the competition alive by voting with your wallet, because every dollar counts
3. get involved in politics, or at least talk more often with your representatives, go vote and convince the people around you to do the same
Because cutting down on meat due to environmental reasons, quitting Facebook and so on, that's the bullshit we do to feel good, but doesn't actually matter.
Smoking is orders of magnitude harder, at least it was for me. But it's doable indeed, millions have done it.
Having a motive, not the same as "motivation", makes a difference indeed.
Militant vegans do make it hard to listen at times but there are also other some other voices starting to speak up. Laboratory meats are probably going to be a monumental moment for the movement.
Moderation is key to everything. Facebook and most social media is built on feedloops that, in my opinion, stifle human potential. It’ll will be looked back on one day like people view cigarettes today. I’ll bet money on that.
I’ve gone through a crazy adventure through out my 20s to feel how I feel today. I feel healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, spiritually, etc etc.
I’m kinda out there now, renouncing all my possessions besides one backpack, working on Option 1 in your list. I’m 28, first generation American
That happens in authoritarian regimes where blasphemy against the official truth can mean jail or execution. But even in democratic, liberal societies going against the "right way of thinking" can get you in a lot of trouble.
Edit (accidentally sent before finished): it's reasonable that hypocrisy increases when you share your opinions with the whole world (potentially) instead of a like-minded circle of close friends.
Even instagram is breeding mental instability in millions of people around the world. It may not be you or me. It’s a real phenomenon.