I don't want to do victim blaming or shaming here but why would you use any fb product knowing well about their awful business practices like these?
Sadly I’m happy I left Facebook but I will admit I’ve missed a lot of news and events in friends personal lives. A good friends mom, whom I was very fond of, passed away and I learned about it months later. Another friend had a fast growing tumor and I missed that news and never got a last phone call with him. Both of which I regret missing out on.
I’ll still maintain I’m happy with my departure, but it has its drawbacks unfortunately.
Double edged sword indeed.
It's extremely hard to get by, keep up with people, or even make friends without it.
The same could also be said for Discord as well, which I've seen over the past 4-5 years grow from a gamer-exclusive chat platform to what is probably the #1 choice for students nowadays for group interactions.
As far as we've come though I still think these kinds of things are still in their infancy when it comes to their impact on us as a society, so I guess the best thing to do is just wait and see what happens.
Does it really? Whatever happened to just a friendly weekly email?
Efficiencies and user experience are better for more users on social media than email, despite it's obvious flaws.
Did regional steel mills _have_ to replace local blacksmiths? No, but they did.
The problem sadly isn't tech related. It's education. Corporates will market to the masses who are mostly tech ignorant, if not politically and economically ignorant too. So even with alternatives, the power of commercial communication is greater than what non profit are able to afford.
We will have to wait for people to suffer further and further, more will open their eyes to it, until radical resistance settles in people's limbic systems. We are getting close I think, I hope.
Man I'd love it if I could communicate socially via email, nobody I know would go for it
I'll make a point to give it a go :)
The issue with email is partly a slight inconvenience. Unless you input large content, the UX time overhead is significant enough to prefer IM. EMails has not been designed for frequent back and forth on the same thread even if occasional. From there you loose most people. Email hasn't changed much, from the time we barely had Internet connections, the burden to find a connected client was enough to forgive the UX issue.
Enter email address, autocomplete, type text, click send is enough a deterent for most of us to favor a chat window, type and press enter. And scroll up to see what was communicated prior. Got an image or audio? Drop it in, press enter. You can even record a quick audio message and boom, sent. Email client and protocol simply don't support that. At best you get addons which aren't necessarily supported on the other side.
Openness is the solution, but email protocol doesn't have what is needed for current needs of communication. Corporates building these tools now have the network effect, keeping the crowd in their walled gardens.
For me, the point of SM is burnable bridges. It's a place to take risks and later apply the lessons to meatspace. In spite of that, I've cultivated many lasting online relationships but I can't see myself ever meeting any of them in person.
(I have one friend I send mails to occasionally, though)
Then when we do get a chance to meet up, we can skip right to the discussion of the thing instead of me first having to tell the story.
Especially since some of my friends live very far away and have very busy jobs so we only see each other every few years, but this way I can still keep up on their lives and they on mine.