Americans are changing their relationship with Facebook
pewresearch.org
pewresearch.org
I would post interesting articles I read and make really lame quips about life or what I was doing.
Later, after I got married and had kids, I consciously experimented with posting photos of my kids. Engagement on my posts shot up. This led me to gradually phase out article sharing and life quipping in favor of kids' photos.
I still consumed interesting articles shared by contacts though. And the curated news that Facebook offered, even though I realized it had a risk of being an echo chamber.
Eventually, I started weeding out people who fell below the level of a real-life friend, because I didn't want to share family photos with them. Facebook became a place to share kids' photos and see kids' photos from friends and family.
Now, I mostly read reddit for interesting articles and discussions. Some Facebook groups are decent for that, but they never quite match the reach and range of discussion that reddit does.
Facebook is now my family-photo-sharing service. And even then, I've begun to slow down my usage in favor of other mechanisms for sharing kids' photos.
Some of my actions were motivated by privacy concerns. Some by conscious experiments in engagement. And some by the utility, or lack thereof, of Facebook in general.
I wouldn't consider myself a typical Facebook user, but anecdotally, a decent number of friends have told me their interactions with Facebook have matched mine.
- Family photos go to everyone in the family circle. - Articles about politics go to people in that circle (who might also be in my family circle) - Articles about technical topics go to people in that circle.
We all have different interests and contexts in our lives - like I might want everyone (close friends and acquaintances alike) to know I got married but only my very close family to know I got the flu last weekend.
The part (well last I used google plus which was a while ago) that was missing was sorting that the other way - so when my sister posts family photos it shouldn't show up in the 'news' group that I also have her in.
The interface for google plus sucked, but they got the right idea.
I've always suspected that Google Plus' design killed it. It was so bloated that it would barely run on my netbook with 4 GB of RAM. I think that if it had looked like Craig's List, without the gaudy Material Design animation, it would have been more successful (seriously). Google does data well and design badly.
One might consider it an example of "worse is better", though I'm not convinced.
(Wow, just checked and Google+ is still available. I'd thought it had already shut down like Orkut and Wave).
This problem is bidirectional: which posts of yours will you let me see and of those, which do I want to see. But this is an even heavier ask.
I know Facebook allows this to a certain extent, and I've set up a bunch of Facebook lists in the past. But it's much harder to use.
"Just"?
That would be a disaster. It sounds like something that AI ought to be able to do fairly well, though, so the idea stands.
I haven't taken much advantage of it, just some here and there. For example, there have been times I've excluded current and former coworkers (I was looking into moving out of town for a while—not anymore though—and I wanted to pick my friends' brains on suggestions for places to move to without it getting back to people I work with that I was thinking of leaving the company). Another example, when I was first beginning my gender transition and I wasn't yet out to the world, I would post about transition-related things to a list that contained the small handful of people who knew I was transitioning. And another, when my former best friend went down an extreme far-right rabbit hole and began posting bigoted statements, including using slurs, against groups that I'm part of, I a) put him and his wife on my Acquaintances list and started making 90% of my posts to "Friends except Acquaintances" and b) made a list of people I trust so I could get support for my feelings of being betrayed without tipping off him or anyone who might tell him (I stopped (a) after he deleted his Facebook account a few months ago... at that point, I threw his wife on my Restricted list, which is hardcoded to hide anything that isn't Public from people on that list).
Parents I know ask themselves, "do I have the moral right to post this photo of this (presently) small person, considering it will never go away?"
Seems to me it would only be respectful to /ask first/ whether the people in some party snap are all OK with having their image posted somewhere, tagged and identified and sucked into somebody's gigantic social graph database, but this is clearly not the norm.
That said, I find real value in that. I know what I share and save on Facebook is going to be there in 10 years, and probably will still be somewhere accessible in 50 years. Everyone pretends personal systems (where you are "in control") are safer, but I know how many photos and files I've misplaced over the years.
And Facebook encourages me to do more than just post blind photos, but also to give a story. I've looked through old photo albums, and the pictures become empty all too quickly. I could do all this on my own, but again I'll probably lose things or the stories and photos will become disassociated or some other mistake, or I'll be gone and no one will know or care to retrieve them from whatever system I've created. But even more so I need a reason to put everything together, and sharing it immediately with other people – people who show, even trivially, that they care – gives me a reason.
Facebook's Memories feature has already shown me that this is important – seeing something I shared one or five or ten years ago makes me realize these things matter to me.
Maybe other people have ways of doing disciplined documentation of their life and experiences and family that I don't. But I'm doubtful.
I'm glad I'm too old to have been subjected to that. Just thinking about what it would feel like to be one of those kids when they find out that they were robbed of any ability to decide for themselves whether or not they wanted that stuff out there makes my skin crawl.
Some parents I know seem to have mainly had their children for the purpose of using them as a social media fashion accessory. It's incredibly sad.
And as I learned about Facebook's (and social media's) privacy leakiness, I scrubbed my posts of all personal info (kids' birthdays, names, schools, etc) and many photos. My privacy settings are pretty tight too. In another comment, I mentioned several alternatives that I've been exploring for photo sharing - since the primary audience for these photos are grandparents, relatives, and close friends.
Unfortunately, I have a relative who's posted photos of my kids and definitely uses them as social media fashion accessories. It's lead to some awkward conversations and demands to scrub their posts of my kids.
As a side note, I've been having conversations with my oldest kid about social media. I even went through all of the photos I posted, asking if any should be removed. I already post very few photos - and when I do, I carefully curate them. My child was comfortable about all of my posts, but did feel embarrassed about a few from the relative I mentioned earlier. My child now also asks on occasion if I can take a photo and post it. Most of the time, my answer is No, and that I'd share it privately with family instead. But once in a while, I'll share it.
I've managed to convince my spouse to not share many of our kids' pictures on social media due to some concerns, but I am unsure the worry about grown up people being worried about their pics as kids is justified.
Do you feel a person in the twenties or teens will be impacted by the fact that 10 years earlier their parents shared a cute picture of them?
I am trying to understand, not argue.
I can't imagine how I could possibly be harmed by the existence of pictures of me as a kid. Yep I was once a child and photos were taken.
I made the front page of my home town paper for various minor awards a few times too. Should the newspaper have been concerned about the morality of publishing a photo I might someday object to?
There are pictures of me in hundreds of copies of people's year books too.
I really struggled with the quality and intelligence of posts and responses on Reddit. I find them short, emotive, adolescent and generally noisy. However a lot of HN folks seem to enjoy it. What's the trick I'm missing? Finding the right subreddits, presumably?
[1] As an example, /r/AskHistorians/ is heavily moderated and high quality.
Which mechanisms?
I'm fairly sure that the opposite is also occurring. That is, people who aren't interested in seeing a constant stream of your kids are weeding you out as well.
In the last few years, I've been aggressive in unfollowing people who post nothing but pictures and updates about their kids. It's not something I'm interested in seeing, and honestly I just can't identify with people who have kids. Seeing people who used to be close friends do nothing but post about their kids just reminds me that we no longer move in the same world.
The only exception is my cousin. I'm fine with seeing pictures of her kids, because they're family (in fact, I configured Facebook to send me a notification whenever she posts), but I'm not interested in seeing anyone else's kids.
It lost me there. Not only am I not proud of my social track record through the ages, but the idea of "privacy is dead" online identification is quaint, naive, and/or intolerable to me. For better or worse, there's a sharp, strategic/emotional partitioning of how I interact with or present myself to strangers, friends, family, employers, and law enforcement, and the chilling effect applied to my behavior from all angles is very limiting.
LONG live pseudonyms. : D
The commentary may have been more relevant in the 90s and more about people calling themselves random names and writing viruses, rather than contributing to Open Source with their names standing behind their work.
The grimy, day to day, forgettable things... not so much. That's the "being human" layer. Not many get to do their more ideal work as their actual job in society.
If you want more of a discussion on this topic, I would highly encourage reading some of Larry Lessig's work on internet identity and "cyberspace". Code 2.0 is a good start. He viewed pseudonyms like you, very much as a feature.
The fact is, people act differently depending on their degree of anonymity, and there's a place for everything on the entire spectrum from pseudonym to real name only.
If you have really serious fame of the sort that means millions know your name, you may find it hard to obfuscate your activities. If you are doing something so bad that some government wants your hide, yeah, they may find you.
But for most folks who just, say, don't want their "respectable clients" to know their porn habits or something like that, having a nickname that your friends know you under separate from your "public"/professional identity can have loads of value and can be sustained for a lot of years without much effort at all.
Nor should they be a privilege. It is cute when a celeb adopts a "stage name". We don't really consider that hiding, but politicians use stage names too. When you want to actually research a person, say to find out if they have a criminal background, cute "stage names" become barriers to legitimate research. If the wealthy and powerful get to use pseudonyms, everyone gets to use pseudonyms.
If you are a high value target, then you need to step up your game, but people always make mistakes and don't appreciate unusual attack vectors.
Then the CIA and FDB have jobs for you. There are a great many people who very effectively hide their online activities from even the best and most determined adversaries. Encryption, obfuscation, old fashioned trade craft, it isn't all that difficult to hide online. Anyone who deems the fight unwinnable has accepted an end to privacy.
See Dread Pirate Roberts for a good example. People eventually get caught if they make enough mistakes and are sufficiently valuable to powerful adversaries.
May be we actually agree about how hard it is, but are saying different words, like when you say "a great many" and I say "very small bunch" (like a "great many" in light of the power of actors like governments and ubiquity of surveillance). But such a perspective of complacency expressed here could only lead poor folk to being too lax, and thus, eventually finding their security compromised.
People have tried to discover who he really is for over a decade, and only have a guess for his real name and age. Given that people have known of him since 2006 (for a twitter account with ~100k followers and known lead for a game with a million MAU), in this era, that's super impressive.
If there's one thing I'd associate with hacker culture it's pseudonyms, especially l33t ones.
Out there among the Great Unwashed, I suspect the issue is more about the value they get from reading. People read a lot more than they write, after all. People were already getting tired of watching all their friends' highlight reels. Then since the last election there have been far more fights in comments, and the feeling of being manipulated, and people pretty naturally start to wonder whether this is time well spent.
I'm not dismissing your concern, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to the OP. Barely makes a dent, really.
Now, I allow myself back on only from a computer at home. I've removed it from my phone. It's still bad, but it's less bad. It saddens me, because I do like keeping up with old friends and new (it's especially great to see people that I lost contact with decades ago, and to keep up with the lives of my sisters and nieces and nephews some).
In the place of all that FB time, I've developed a love affair with my Kindle. I carry a paperwhite with me, and also the Kindle app on my phone, so I have two books going at once. It's so much better for my mind!
Today's two books: Strange Stars: How Science Fiction and Fantasy Transformed Popular Music, by Jason Heller, and The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker.
So yeah, the "value they get from reading" matters a lot. And Facebook has poor value relative to the addictive qualities and bad social habits they design into it. When I came back after my hiatus, FB put me through a quiz, and in an open answer section, I said flat out that the addictive nature was a serious problem. A little hook is good, but not too much! I think I said they should be selling candy, not heroin.
Facebook is clearly in the low-effort category. It's designed to be. That doesn't mean it should be shunned entirely - we all need to relax somehow - but it does mean it should be managed. For some people that means limiting time. For others it means increasing the reward side of the equation, which might paradoxically mean more engagement. I have a friend who's a moderator for a very large and active group there. She has made lots of friends that way, and it makes her happy. Good for her. For still others, a complete separation might indeed be the right answer.
The important thing is that no size fits all. Kids need to be taught how to make these decisions for themselves, and in the better school systems they often are. Given the newness of technology, I think a lot of adults also need such education, and sadly won't get it.
You pull down... something spins... sometimes you get a reward.
Can it really be pure coincidence that Facebook and one-armed bandits have exactly the same UI?
I know the chilling effect of the widened pool of viewers is real. I also know the quality of the feed is generally terrible.
What keeps me there is the quality of the groups (mostly people I don't know) and the somewhat reliable means of contact. I don't know anyone who keeps a phone number for more than a few years, but very few change social networks frequently.
Unfortunately, some sites forbid this to varying degrees. HN perma-banned my primary IP address because I was rotating several times per year. As is their right. But savvy people will generally stay in lurk mode as a result.
Maybe that's the future: Most posts by bots, most humans reading only.
The reality is that socializing on Facebook consists of posting memes and arguments. No one is closer together for it. Facebook doesn't meet it's promise (to the user, advertisers expectations I'm sure are met).
I tried with much effort to weed out memes and garbage content via the share feature. I'm interested in personal photos and status updates(not twitter-esque complaints). But I had little to no success.
Give me a "disable memes & politics" button and I'd probably be back that day.
Who else is tired of hearing that worthless piece of advice? I don't dislike these people. Most of them I even strongly agree with-morally and ethically for the most part. Some I even disagree with. But they also wouldn't be on my "friends list" if I didn't value them enough to see their life shares and posts (Oh man Johnny took some amazing pictures of his new house, his new job must really be going well, good for him.)
But holy cow how disposable do you view people to just up and remove them out of your life because of a disagreement (cue someone replying to this post with a morally furious statement about some nebulously defined out-group they personally despise and why disposing of friends is okay because $group is bad)? Never thought I'd see the day where I actually miss pictures of babies, cats and food.
And no, this isn't an appeal to my friends to be apolitical and just stop having beliefs. I'm just fatigued with being bombarded with other people's vociferation at something $group did.
Give me a "disable memes & politics" button and I'd probably be back that day
Co-signing this statement.
I think that's a bit of a false dichotomy. "Just get new friends" is definitely callow, but muting someone for a while on Facebook isn't the same as shutting them out of your whole life forever. I have a cousin I follow about half the time. He's usually positive and funny and I love to see what he's up to, but sometimes he gets on a really bitchy tangent about his job so I unfollow for a week or two while he and his flight-attendant friends talk about what inferior beings we passengers are. I'd never unfriend him, because I value the connection FB helps us maintain. Sometimes a bit of distance is part of maintaining the health of that relationship. Similarly, my "new friends" are often just humor/meme pages that help me get through my own difficult times. Curating my feed works. Telling people that it might work for them isn't at all the same as telling them to get new friends.
How disposable do you view people to just up and remove a connection to all of them because you don't want to take responsibility for your own experience on a site?
Because I know a site isn't the only way to connect with those individuals. I didn't really interact with them much on the site to begin with. Said site has other exterior issues attached to it such as tracking and potential employers invading my private life. Ultimately the site has little to nothing to offer for me.
It's not about viewing humans as disposable. It's viewing and understanding that a website is a thing and in itself it is disposable after it no longer fulfills a purpose.
Thank you for helping me illustrate the false dichotomy. The great-grandparent didn't seem to be allowing any space between full engagement and full disconnection. In reality, there are levels of connection. At my age I have family and friends scattered all over the world, some of them still moving to new cities every other year. I have friends from a ski club and a family camp who I will not see in person except during those respective seasons. Many others have similar networks. In terms of interactions per year with the entire set, "get new friends" and "leave Facebook" are in the exactly the same category. They're both ways of telling others to socialize less, to fit the speaker's own notions of right ways and wrong ways based on their own unique experience. I think that's presumptuous. Rather, I think we should help each other work with the tools we have to find something that works for our own individual circumstances. It's too bad other people are too doctrinaire to accept that.
Maybe I've misunderstood what the implication was supposed to be-in lived experience when told "just get new friends" that suggestion very often stopped short of offering anything further like "use the snooze function" (which I'm already doing quite a bit) or other recommendations to better 'curate' the feed.
It very rarely feels like a recommendation to improve the experience and a call to action, instead to sever personal connections.
If your friends are putting it that way, then get new ... oh, wait. KIDDING!
But seriously, I'm sorry to hear that. IMO the "unfollow" button needs to be more prominent, and its significance more clearly explained e.g. by a rollover tip. I find it incredibly valuable. Groups are handy too. I have one that's basically everyone but my religious family members, for when I swear or get political myself, and I use it quite a bit.
I'd also like an "equalizer" to turn certain topics up or down, but that's a lot harder.
I found curation of my FB feed was ineffective. Glad you've had luck though!
I’ve never de-friended anyone over a disagreement over particular policy but I have erased people from my life whose style of debate is just to shout personal insults at anyone who disagrees with them. There is unfortunately alot of that about these days. But I would still recommend it, you will be happier, and anyone who repeatedly called you “Nazi” or whatever at the drop of a hat probably didn’t take your friendship that seriously anyway.
All our posting habits are up for criticism. And I'm not a fan of feeds that are entertainment or content consumption based. I just want to keep up with what's going on in my friend's lives and have the benefits of that network effect and their tools.
i'm still puzzled why there are entire domains that I am simply unable to block/hide, though. For example, I never ever want to see any content from en.nametests.com on my feed. Not now, not ever. Yet I am unable to block it or hide it. 100% of their content is useless surveys and "what block of cheese are you?" quizzes, which I have zero interest in.
At the same time, Facebook actually tagged a URL from npr.org as spam when I tried to share it.
Personally I'd prefer that to be two separate buttons, but otherwise I'm right with you. Some days, I really need those memes.
Trying to curate one's feed has strange, unexpected effects. Facebook's behavior is non-deterministic. I have completely depopulated my feed and repopulated it selectively, and to get the effect I'm seeking, it usually means deleting pages from my list pages that I follow. There's no way to follow a page, but keep it away from your feed. Thus to discard a follow feels like a ban/forget/delete action. To grasp what that means, you may wish to follow thousands of pages, but only permit two or three really good sources to supply your automatic home page feed. Then, browse your follow list and cherrypick based on mood. But facebook doesn't work like that. A follow is a follow, and 1,000 follows results in a randomized firehouse that ignores the idea that you might feel like browsing one thing in the morning, and another in the evening. The result: people hate their own feed, even though they might not hate any of the 1,000 follows.
My only regret is that some people choose to do funeral announcements and other types of events on Facebook, which I miss.
As imperfect as it it, group iMessages have replaced Facebook for me.
And they have the audacity to test out charging for groups.
I have completely depopulated my feed and repopulated it selectively, and to get the effect I'm seeking, it usually means deleting pages from my list pages that I follow. There's no way to follow a page, but keep it away from your feed. Thus to discard a follow feels like a ban/forget/delete action.
To grasp what that means, you may wish to follow thousands of pages, but only permit two or three really good sources to supply your automatic home page feed. Then, browse your follow list and cherrypick based on mood.
But facebook doesn't work like that. A follow is a follow, and 1,000 follows results in a randomized firehouse that ignores the idea that you might feel like browsing one thing in the morning, and another in the evening.
The result: people hate their own feed, even though they might not hate any of the 1,000 follows.
The only reason I use Facebook: events.
I wish someone invented an alternative for it.
It's probably the main thing that keeps me from deleting my account entirely.
But I see Instagram going the same way as Facebook. Eventually it will not be "fun to share when mom, your aunt, your employer, your future employers, law enforcement, the TSA, the NSA and foreign governments are going to read it." As another has said.
I abandoned Facebook because the connections I have that are active only use it to post baby photos or political content. To me political content is the worst because it is mostly whining and people feel like if they whine on social media they are being heard and therefore validated. Not to mention the postings of 20 pages op-ed pieces they clearly didn't read. And then one of their random acquaintances decides to disagree and then someone else feels compelled to "set them straight" and then its like 100 comments of bickering. Dude fuck that...
I especially despise the people who use "Instagram Stories" for political content because they basically trick you into giving your entire phone to them for 1-2 seconds for their political message. Yea no thanks. Unfriend...
Yet.
It was bad.
I'm still learning about Mastodon but it seems like it utilizes the same concepts as Discord and other chat apps except it's federated which seems really cool to me.
If you look at the myriad Mastodon domains, operating as single-instance hosted websites, on whatever infrastructure they deploy to, very, very few sites have more than 1,000 users, and any of the under 1,000 club are filled with mostly geeky accounts, and a fanout of a handful of lurker accounts per each identifiable personality.
The one really, really huge Mastodon node is basically filled with sex workers (and their johns, presumably), and is operated out of Australia.
That being said, consider what CAP theorem does to conversations as federated servers pop in and out of existence as they go offline. It's going to be link rot to all hell. You can figure that the prostitution Mastodon instance is probably going to experience some pressure, and eventually collapse. And not only that, any users on that trunk of the federation will disappear. So what happens to the followers, and the followed? Where do the conversations go? Does it matter? It's mostly the promotional efforts of ladies (and not-so-much-ladies), hawking their fare.
Anywho, right now, suffice to say, Mastodon is in a weird place. The first people driven out of Twitter, were using Twitter as a bunker, after Backpage was dismantled. Then Twitter cracked down on those sorts of accounts, and now they're pioneering the largest Mastodon community in operation, because there are few open options.
So, Mastodon is likely going to become associated with that sort of Craigslist vibe, but in the form of a Web 2.0, single page web app, right now. And where that will take things in the future is anybody's game, but we see what happens to these underground bunkers over and over again. Mastodon will unfold a little bit differently though, because of it's Twitter-style publicity angle.
Perhaps we will see similar articles soon, making the point about Facebook. But I'm not expecting to see people abandon Facebook suddenly, the way people suddenly abandoned MySpace. Rather, the process this time seems a bit more subtle -- people realize that everyone they know (plus future employers) is watching, therefore they have to censor themselves, therefore they have to limit their engagement. The effect is the same, Metcalfe's Law in reverse, the network loses value.
Lots of people I know spurn Facebook but use Instagram. Nearly everybody I meet on Fortnite communicates off-game via Snapchat. I personally get my internet dopamine fix through Reddit and Hacker News, and if I want to stay in touch with friends, I call/text/email, like the good old days of like 10 years ago.
I don’t see a general global social network around the corner gearing up to dethrone Facebook, but at the same time I am noticing social media usage splintering across a myriad of sites and apps, instead of being dominated by one giant social network.
I think that if we would be talking bout people switching from using Google services (specially considering androids Marketshare) that would be more surprising.
Reddit these days has gotten really bad these days, likely because there are just far too many people on it now.
It's a good question. Personally, I got rid of Facebook and didn't feel like I needed a replacement. I do use Instagram and Snapchat, but mostly to communicate with family.
When asked why, they said they watch Hulu and HBO Go and Fox's apps.
They simply couldn't wrap their brains around the notion that all that stuff was on a television.
They also didn't know that there was such a thing as free over-the-air TV. They acted like it was some kind of black magic to get TV without a cable or internet connection.
I live outside my home country, so messenger is the only way I can talk to many friends back home (or friends here in Canada when I'm home myself).
Being in school(as well as some employers and organizations) means there are all sorts of groups for socializing, sports, clubs etc etc, and Facebook is certainly the main platform for organizing these sorts of things here.
And just a few days ago I managed to find an apartment sublet through Facebook (1 day before classes started, yes I'm that dumb).
Aside from those 3 activities, I'd estimate I spend about 30 minutes a week on Facebook max. It's just not fun, feels very lowest common denominator (despite analytics-driven content). I have the impression that a lot of people (my age or otherwise) are in a similar camp: depending on Facebook for a few key services but otherwise loath to use it.
If they can abuse my profile, I can significantly lower it's value to them.
Reddit is now doing the same thing. Yea no thanks
Like many such surveys, there's selection bias here in that it's people who have a land line and will agree to answer a survey about Facebook. This is going to bias toward people for whom something interesting has happened recently in their relationship to Facebook. Additional bias comes from the fact that the only participants invited were ones who previously agreed to answer a political survey.
44% of younger users (those ages 18 to 29) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their phone in the past year, nearly four times the share of users ages 65 and older (12%) who have done so.
I may be a cynic, but whats the biggest consequence of people moving from FB to Insta? Probably not having to pay all of the tech debt FB incurred during its meteoric rise.
[1]: https://www.spredfast.com/social-media-tips/social-media-dem...
Facebook should have never been allowed to buy Instagram, just like Google should have never been allowed to buy AdMob and perhaps Deepmind and a few other companies.
It hurts competition and the economy (in the long term) when large players can just buy out anyone that presents a threat to them, and then either integrate them into their main service or shut them down. Facebook has been trying lately to get Instagram people to post more om Facebook for instance. Facebook also attempted to buy Snapchat at one point.
If the rules to stop such mergers don't yet exist, then maybe someone should invent them. Much more often than not the consequences of these mergers and consolidations, as well as various crimes the big companies commit, are dealt with when it's way too late, and the companies have profited much more than what the punishment takes away a decade later.
http://www2.harpercollege.edu/mhealy/eco211/lectures/monopol...
Even when I remove all related packages, Facebook stuff still shows up in the app manager as 'Not Installed'.
Anybody have a complete list of packages and know if removing them prevents data harvesting by FB?
Pretty much. It's all so pointless now.
My feed today:
Important service alert from a transit agency in some other city.
Obviously fake friend request from someone who thinks a Sharpie is an eyebrow pencil.
Promoted post from some company I've never heard of pushing something I don't care about.
People You May Know who are all people I don't know.
Someone else's shared memory of an event 5 years ago I wasn't at and don't care about.
Post from a "neighborhood" group on the other side of town.
Suggested Post about something I don't care about.
Post in a language that I don't speak, but that's OK because I did intentionally follow the Yomiuri Giants.
Post from the state parks people about a state park 400 miles away.
Image caption repost of a repost of a repost of a repost from someone who thinks that life's problems can be solved by re-posting other people's refrigerator magnet thoughts.
Ad for a coffee chain in another city with no locations within 700 miles.
"Breaking News" weather alert about a dust storm last week.
News item that a local TV station posted three months ago.
Photograph of someone I don't know who is friends with someone who is friends with someone I might know.
Photo from an actual Facebook friend, but it's of his tween daughter in a leotard. Ummm...
Ad for a coffee chain in another country.
One of those "URGENT! URGENT!!! !! Please help us find out dog!" re-posts from someone 2,500 miles away.
A re-post of an image caption that's been around since the 1990's.
Photograph of a friend not wearing enough clothing with a bunch of other quite hairy people not wearing enough clothing in what I really really hope is a sauna.
Good job, Facebook. Glad to see the $70 billion spent on "user engagement AI" is working out for you.
Just no. And it's not even on my timeline or something, it's an actual notification, the ones we use if an actual human being sends you specifically a one on one message.
Same with Twitter. It's sorting algorithms have been awful. Made it totally worthless for things I want to see, like local National Weather Service updates for local severe weather.
I had found myself either hiding or unfriending folks I'd been friends or acquaintances with over 25 years ago. People I no longer had anything in common with, yet had re-connected on Facebook because we could. Seeing some of their posts, however, became a total pool of swirling toxicity.
So I finally just deleted it. I used to "take breaks" and simply disconnect it for months at a time. But I'd never gone full nuclear option until last year.
At first I had these weird feelings of - I assume - withdrawal. They lasted intensely for 2-3 days where I'd experience something with my kids and think, "Man, that would have been a photo I would have loved sharing." After about two weeks all of those thoughts drifted away. By week three, they were utterly gone. I don't miss it one bit. I'd relearned to experience life normally and not feel the need to put it out there. I still take a lot of pics; I just email them to my mom now.
Now that being said, I did create an "anonymous" Facebook account for one single use: Groups.
I'm deep into the retro-computing/gaming scene (especially Commodore) so I created a moniker that has nothing to do with me personally. This allows me to maintain my privacy and sanity while being able to stay "in the know" around these niche topics.
I never post any personal articles, photos, etc. It's just for Groups. And at least from that standpoint, I've found it very useful. None of the content (for the most part) is ever objectionable nor even controversial. It's the new Forum, basically.
For example, all my friends in their 20s will post pictures of them at various raves but none of them will post it on Facebook. Everyone knows half the people there are on ecstacy, which is fine for your friends to know, but perhaps not all of your colleagues.
There's a great deal of limiting self-expression on FB, because it's become such a public place. You're left with people who keep very small facebook circles, which is a tiny minority of mostly inactive users, people with sizeable circles who keep quiet because things you're open about to your 20 closest people, you don't want to share with the other 480, and there's people with huge circles who are the most vocal and often extreme in opinions and things they share.
Facebook has all the basic functionality to change this, moreso than instagram for example. You can put all your contacts in a limited-profile list, which reveals a profile picture, a handful of holiday pics and posts you explicitly set to public. And then you can put 20 friends in your close circle, which every picture and post is revealed to by default. This can be even more private and intimate than say instagram. But FB doesn't push it. So people end up having 1 privacy setting for everyone, accepting everyone on facebook, and rejecting most people on instagram. Most friends I know will rather accept 100 distant accounts (travel, food, lifestyle accounts of individuals abroad or companies) on instagram than accept a colleague that's 10 years older that you have lunch with everyday and are cool with, and have been facebook friends with since your first week at the company.
>Just over half of Facebook users ages 18 and older (54%) say they have adjusted their privacy settings in the past 12 months, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Around four-in-ten (42%) say they have taken a break from checking the platform for a period of several weeks or more, while around a quarter (26%) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their cellphone. All told, some 74% of Facebook users say they have taken at least one of these three actions in the past year.
Is this different from what these people have done in the past? I've changed my Facebook privacy settings in the past year––but I've also changed them on a regular basis since getting on Facebook. Likewise, I've always taken regular Facebook breaks in the 13 years I've been on it.
This study is interesting, but it doesn't prove the claim in the headline.
FB threw an interstitial in front of people for GDPR. It'd be weird if people didn't change their privacy settings then?
If you've used Facebook continuously for the last decade, you won't notice as much because the changes have been gradual. But if you came to Facebook now as a new user, it's all but incomprehensible. Combined with being "the place your parents hang out", it's no surprise that no one new wants to join Facebook or understands why they would want to be there.
Here are three concrete examples of these diseases:
1. Comments on posts and groups are shown out of order using relevance ranking. You just see the fragments of conversation that are most likely to get you to click and write an enraged reply without any context. No sane designer would ever choose this design for a message posting system. It's clear that a PM ran an A/B test and is optimizing for short term "engagement numbers" and doesn't care at all if you can actually have a normal discussion with their product. Juicing engagement drives users away in the long term.
2. Since the visibility of nearly all content is algorithmic, the shittiest content rises to the top automatically. If you are friends with people who work on products like YouTube, they will tell you privately that the reason there are so many conspiracy videos suggested by YouTube is because crazy people click on ads at an absurdly high rate compared to the general public which makes that content very valuable to the algorithm and drives it to the top unless the penalize it artificially. The same thing happens all over Facebook. Human misery and lowest common denominator content rises to the top because it gets clicks. Again, you are juicing short-term engagement but driving away users in the long term when misery fatigue sets in.
3. Facebook has so many overlapping features and no clear product vision. PMs have slapped on feature after feature with little consideration for the overall product. You can literally feel the PMs fighting over screen space in the web page layout.
For example on my default landing page, I have a live chat sidebar, a widget to post "Stores" and separate a widget to post "Posts", separate links to "Watch", "Live Video" and "Gaming Video", a link to "Marketplace" despite a totally separate link to something called "Buy and Sell Groups" and yet another one called "Offers", and all manner of bizarre and creepy sounding stuff like "Town Hall" and "Messenger Kids"(!). There's even some bullshit about a "Friendiversary" and a separate "Memories" tab. There must be 100+ separate "Products" on the screen that I can navigate into. Who is Facebook for??
If Facebook is going to survive as a viable place for people to hang out, someone with a clear product vision needs to be put in charge and the product needs to be severely stripped down and de-algorithmed. But of course that will never happen in a giant company, so instead Instagram will eventually overtake Facebook because it's actually still somewhat usable. But then Instagram itself will be PMed and algorithmed to death and replaced by something else. It's the corporate lifecycle.
oh, wait. too late. it's coming.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/01/facebook-dating-service-how-...
> The website allowed visitors to compare two female student pictures side-by-side and let them decide who was hot or not.
... and ...
> I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10 pm and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendiedous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.
Internet memory is an amazing thing, no?
Just over half of Facebook users ages 18 and older (54%) say they have adjusted their privacy settings in the past 12 months, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Around four-in-ten (42%) say they have taken a break from checking the platform for a period of several weeks or more, while around a quarter (26%) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their cellphone.
I can also imagine that older people could be lured into using it more while younger people abandon it nearly completely, which may show a steady MAU and that Americans relationship with Fbook is indeed changing - they can both be true I believe.
The question is whether facebook can afford to pay the bills in 20 years when its only us 70's and 80's kids that still use it for only messenger and calendars/events.