The actual war zone to me is Twitter, not Facebook.
I should add that I'm not from the US.
That's probably a big part of it.
To me, it's the difference between default private and default public. On both platforms you can curate your content, and arguably the worst content festers on Facebook because it is so hidden from the public eye, but it also means it doesn't have to find its way to you.
Facebook as a company has had much more problematic behavior, I'd agree with that one for sure.
But if there's anything we've learned from the past decade, it's the old axiom "sunlight is the best disinfectant" is completely and utterly wrong.
Certainly for some types of infectant such as weapons-grade dezinformatsiya...
Or at least, to achieve disinfection, that sunlight needs to be applied at intensities found on the surface of the sun vs at the surface of the earth.
This is the most underrated aspect. With the caveat that you can't choose your family and schoolfriends, you get the facebook you deserve. And you know, maybe you should try a bit harder to understand your family and schoolfriends?
Facebook seems to make that harder rather than easier.
I know some people have like 500+ friends or even the max of 5,000. I keep my friend list to the 250 people I know in real life that I want to keep in touch with. Probably still melting my brain but I'm convinced it's nice to keep up with people's lives.
And who do you know who still sends Christmas cards? That was for those people that you never see IRL. Now they're FB friends.
Somebody celebrating getting out of rehab.
Somebody heading to Italy for vacation.
Somebody going in a hot air balloon.
Somebody going to Santa Fe for vacation and asking for things to do.
Somebody said last night was one of the best nights of their life.
Somebody sharing progress updates on their offgrid homestead.
Somebody got a new pizza oven for National pizza month
Somebody going on a train ride.
Somebody telling me that Dune movie tickets go on sale today (cool).
A bunch of posts from a tesla owners group, laser cutter operators group, and sailing groups that I am a part of.
A bunch of posts from buy nothing, and housing groups that I'm a part of.
I see literally nothing related to politics.
However, jumping over to twitter it's:
Something about "the establishment"
A news story about somebody getting shot.
Something about counterterrorism strategies.
North Korean FUD
Something about a gunfight and a DEA agent being killed.
etc. etc.
Facebook seems to me to be a place where people come together and talk to each other about happy things happening in their lives (or sometimes, looking for support when sad things happen).
Twitter seems like a place people go to get angry and scream at each other.
There's a national pizza month?
But honestly: who cares. Any excuse to eat some pizza is good enough for me!
Pretty much all that makes a homemade or otherwise decent pizza less healthy than a sandwich is the amount of it one typically eats in a sitting. Or of course if you for some reason pile unhealthy stuff high on your pizzas, but stuff your sandwiches with the height of nutrition. But I assume that would be uncommon.
These things are figments of marketing imagination. They spread through people, not TV or ads. Albeit they start that way. You can throw $$$ at making the 1st of September world Tie day, but it's up to the people to make it stick. Which is becoming increasingly easy as we become a whole connected people.
Sales (lower priced periods) are marketing. "National ___ day" is way more than that.
Well firstly I meant economic globalisation, I was thinking in terms of trade; it seems it has broader/other usages too that I didn't realise. Secondly I'd point to days like Mothering Sunday/Mothers' Day which has a slew of different dates throughout the connected world (even the countries where it's a wholly secular marketing creation can't agree):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day#Dates_around_th...
> These things are figments of marketing imagination.
Did you mean not? Otherwise we're in agreement.
> You can throw $$$ at making the 1st of September world Tie day, but it's up to the people to make it stick.
They don't need to stick, very few do, you hear for the first time about world tie day in late August, maybe get persuaded to buy a wacky new tie, and then forget all about it - or at least when it is - again.
I don't get where people see this outrage content. Mine is just like cookie recipes and I'm in tons of groups with hundreds of "friends".
The difference is that Facebook will more aggressively push crap at you. Twitter feeds tend to rot over time.
Anyway, maybe you're using Facebook correctly, but clearly enough of the world isn't to cause problems. Do you expect all those folks to change, or is it easier to regulate Facebook itself?
Now, that's one post from one person. Yes, it's an outlier, but there was a ton of truly corrosive shit people were posting. I quickly found that for me, getting out of FB altogether was the best option. I deleted my account a while back and I don't miss it.
I get that people can actively curate their feed and use FB as a tool for communication, but for me, that's far too much effort and wasn't worth it. I'm actually quite sad -- the promise of what FB could be falls far short of what it is.
[0] https://www.startribune.com/500-gather-near-u-of-m-to-protes...
I'm sure a lot of people loved others who have had drug addictions, joined a cult, or were fed misinformation by a group of zealots. Sometimes being a friend means "in spite of" not "because of".
I'd say facebook is: older people sharing stuff about their life. Benign posts about traveling, maybe some light complaining about the neighborhood where they live getting too expensive, complaining about their job or sports or something like that etc.
Twitter is: younger people who are angry at the world and looking for a scapegoat. Everything is "here's why $outgroup is the core of all the problems in the world in 240 characters or less". Absolutely psychologically abusive garbage.
Reddit is like twitter, but more of an impotent rage. Lots of corporate pop culture references, but still with a strong dose of "here's why $outgroup is so bad!"
Looking at some of the parenting subs I'm on, some of the top posts are prompts for people to explain how terrible things in the world are.
Just really really toxic, awful things.
If I had to guess why: facebook is relatively private. The only things I see are either from people choose to follow explicitly, or from a tier-2 follow like a group (which I can filter if the group starts veering into toxicity).
Twitter is explicitly public. You see and interact with everything from everybody. There seems to be a strong ephasis on sharing other things from people I don't follow.
Reddit is the worst. Completely public, I never followed any of these people. Ignoring/blocking individuals would have almost no effect.
There is only one person who was bringing baggage (all men are terrible people, here is a never-ending stream of examples of what they do to make me so bitter) so I just muted them. Other than that person, the people who I've chosen to interact with don't bring these negative experiences, and hopefully appreciate that I likewise don't bring it to them.
Someone else in this thread posted a similar observation to some of the people in my Twitter feed. I personally think most people already know you can refuse to follow and can mute those who make for such negative experiences. If you participate in it, of course it's going to feel that way.
Also, not from the US. From Canada.
Where I see the nastiness is when politics leaks into various hobby topic groups I'm on. And it's almost always Americans raising a stink (mad about masks, vaccines, "libtards" whatever)
> a bunch of niche hobby groups
Twitter may seem like more of a war zone, and that's possible, but you have to actually measure things. I suspect the dark corners of Facebook are darker than Twitter, because Facebook is more siloed.
If you are moderately famous, anything will be controversial.
You can say "water is good for you", and I can guarantee you that someone will reply with "actually, my friend drank too much water and died". Then, the drama would ensue.
It's not too different from alcohol. Two different people start drinking a lot of beer in college. One grows out of it, the other becomes an alcoholic. All things being same, the latter person had a more addictive personality and should have been more careful with alcohol.
To extend the alcohol analogy - some people wanted to prohibit it, but ultimately it's still here and it's just heavily regulated. You're not allowed to have it when you're young or when you're driving. Your friends will think poorly of you if you have too much of it too frequently. I wouldn't be surprised if social networks end up in a similar place.
I will always be grateful to Zuck & Co. for that, and for the hundreds of other friends I've made on Facebook - people of all ages, backgrounds, professions, and nationalities - people I never have, and almost certainly never WOULD have, met in "real" life. In my experience & opinion as an 8+ year high volume shitposter, Facebook is the best site in the world for dating and for expanding your social horizons/circle
And I say that as a former frontend lead at Ghostery, lol
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0271...
https://bmcresnotes.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1310...
https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-t...
Facebook's own research: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/22701445/facebook-instagr...
It's nice - and of course timely - that there are some heartwarming feel good stories in this thread.
But the plural of anecdote is not science. And the science is pretty damning.
I'm not saying that FB and this huge corporate capture of the internet is _good_, but making arguments like this doesn't actually make coherent sense.
[1]: https://buddingpsychologists.org/binge-watching-mental-healt... (I didn't read the article, but I did skim the referenced papers)
No one is doing large scales studies of how many people meet their partner on FB, so anecdote is all we have for that.
Most of the criticisms are also anecdotes, but you seem fine with those.
If the proposition is "Facebook brings at least some good to the world". A single confirmed anecdote of Facebook bringing a single good thing to the world is a proof. In the same way that all you need to prove that black sheep exist is to show a single black sheep.
The proposition is "Facebook brings a lot of good to the world" is a bit trickier, we need to define "a lot", but it can still be proven by "a lot" of anecdotes.
It is not a generality we are trying to prove, so we don't need to have data representative of the general case.
The part about Facebook being the best for dating is stated as a personal opinion.
Facebook gives you what you want, and it's up to you what you make that.
Maybe for boomers and some emerging markets. It appears to be losing popularity very fast among younger folks in most Western countries. Not that alternatives are much better IMO, Twitter in particular is even worse.
Nothing beats going out and talking to real people. It gives you a competitive advantage over the masses that are too lazy to socialize in real world.
I do think Facebook has something really valuable over in person interaction: you can observe how a potential SO interacts with a wide variety of other people
Also, I like that it's async. But that's more of a personal preference
I feel like I'm missing something here.
I've sent thousands of FB friend requests to strangers suggested by the algo; the vast majority accept. I have met some of my favorite people in the world this way. Also some huge assholes/crazies, of course. Sometimes they are the same people
It’s a website that shows you what your friends are doing. That’s it. People said the same things about television
You dislike their privacy intrusions, and I hate them for it. My life is actively made worse for their stalking, their insistence that they be at the forefront of all things social.
I agree that they're not to blame for the hatred in society, nor are they responsible for all of society's problems. But their utter contempt to just let people be is reason enough that I should make myself heard as often as I can, and especially whenever I see an attempt to relieve any amount of pressure that hopefully weighs on their conscience: fuck Facebook and their employees.
It really, really isn't all they're doing. Not by the longest of shots.
Here is one example: https://indica.medium.com/facebook-is-evil-and-i-quit-215105...
There are thousands of others. Every week on here there's a new story about some new uncovered act of heinous evil from the Zuck and his buds. It's a wonder you haven't seen them.
I've made nearly a dozen friends in Japan who I've now met there on two separate trips purely through a shared interest by connecting on Instagram.
I rarely see content that I don't expect or care to see.
This isn't a fault on the part of FB. You indicated you are friends with those people and want to follow their content. If you want to be friends with them on FB, but not see their content pop up on your timeline, that option is a click away. If you want more granular filtering, so that you can still see non-political posts from those people, you need to indicate to the algorithm that you want less of that by clicking "show me less posts like this", and it will eventually learn.
I see those options as a reasonable approach, as I struggle to come up with a better way to filter the content of people you follow with such granularity. The only option I can see in my mind that would work better is literally having someone work as your personal "filter", so that they can only show you the posts you want from those people. But that, obviously, is not a viable approach.
It's just like in real life. If you have a friend who you want to continue socializing with, but in public settings they say extremely off-putting things half the time that you don't want to hear, your options are to either stop socializing with them completely (aka unfollowing), to ask them to stop doing it, and that's pretty much it. All of those options are available on facebook as well, except facebook offers even more options that are all pretty good.
And I am saying this as someone who opens facebook at most once-twice a week for a little bit of time, just to check up on what my friends post and to read thru a few interesting discussions in the hobby groups I am in. If I occasionally see a wild political shitpost, I just click "show me less content like this". And the algorithm, surprisingly enough, tends to adjust to this pretty well.
I just personally don't see this as a social media problem but I know it can definitely happen in real life (I've been that person listening to "friends" discuss views I don't agree with at an event/party/hangout).
On a post you don't like, click the triple dots in the top right corner, then "Hide post" (subtitle: "See fewer posts like this").
Do this enough and you may be able to avoid politics on fb.
IME merely avoiding any interaction (including reading) of political posts is enough to gradually hide them from your timeline (I don't see any).
All the bad people still exist. Its not like fb the platform solely created them or that they will just go away if that particular platform disappeared.
and should be regulated as such
If you want to argue underregulated capitalism is bad, by all means, but lets not pretend that there aren't hundreds of websites waiting to take facebook's place if fb's downtime went on for more than a few days.
https://babylonbee.com/news/hackers-warn-that-if-demands-are...
The thing to remember about tech -- both when it's lionized as a revolution for the better or vilified as the source of evils making things worse -- is that most of the time what tech does is magnify existing human dynamics.
FB could do more to attenuate problems and better boost virtues, but it's not the source of the problems. Its absence won't solve them or prevent something equally bad (or worse) from filling any gap it might leave behind.
WhatsApp should have IPO'd instead of selling out.
And yet, you are still on them.
RE: downvotes
I understand my comment is low effort, but so is the parent comment. I would be more than happy to see both removed.
Edit: Downvotes really? What for?
It helps to remember that most new mediums follow the same trend: when its easier to share opinions, everyone is flabbergasted at the huge volume of "low quality" opinions.
The printing press had the exact same issues as today's media, albeit at a slower pace but it was still there. A balance must be found.
A few decades ago, the balance people liked was that newspapers were free to say anything, but if something was untruthful, then people could sue newspapers (providing a strong incentive for newspapers to remain truthful). I don't think it was a perfect system, but it was better than what we have today for sure.
The issue is that we haven't figured out what the new system should be. (If someone posts misinformation on Facebook or more commonly: false-information on Google Reviews / Amazon Reviews / Yelp reviews: who do you sue?). Heck, people seem to have entirely forgotten the first 150+ years of American history with the 1st Amendment and how we settled upon the libel / slander laws.
People don't really care about the national-level discussion. National level is abstract and doesn't really affect our day-to-day lives. But ask people about how misleading Yelp reviews or Amazon reviews have hurt (or helped) them, and you can tell that people are incredibly jaded about this "Free information" online.
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I don't know what the new system should be. But the 1st step is to acknowledge that at all points of our history, we've had freedoms AND we've had problems associated with those freedoms. We want the "good stuff" associated with free communication, but we must work our best to clamp down on the "evil stuff".
I don't think anyone disagrees upon "evil stuff" of free speech: doxing, swatting, "fake news" / "misinformation", etc. etc. Both sides pretty much agree upon the realities of today's media (the right calls it "Fake News", the left calls it "misinformation". Come on, its not like we're that far apart on the matter).
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In any case: take solace in history. The 1st Amendment vs Sedition Acts were the big debate in the late 1700s. Its not like the discussion was ever resolved: we just had different political powers swing free-speech one way, and then swing enforcement the other way (ex: Office of Censorship during WW2).
I've recently realized that a lot of the crap on Facebook comes from this ambiguity.
They've basically created a system where it is very hard for anyone to take responsibility. Case in point: New articles posted on FB tend to have very low quality comments, almost as a rule. For pages that post these articles, it is extremely difficult for them to "moderate" those comments, in order to enforce high quality discussions. In fact, their is a lot of pressure on those pages to not enforce quality commenting. It is hard to say, even, that the organizations who post new articles are even responsible for creating a positive community around their Facebook posts.
Contrast this with the "old way" that newspaper brought in reader voices: Through letters to the editor. No matter whether or not you agreed with the opinions, these letters were (and are), of a completely different caliber than the typical FB comment. The newspapers willingly published them, and, in a sense, took responsibility for them. Namecalling, slander, misinformation, etc are mostly (though not always) filtered out of letters published by newspapers.
Compare this, too, to a forum like Hacker News. Here, we have a steady moderator who enforces the rules, and that the community also helps enforce. The rules are clear enough. Low quality discourse is discouraged, and sometimes even removed. There is someone whose job it is to maintain the quality of discussions. On the comments on a Facebook page, that almost never happens, neither from FB or from the company hosting the page.
As has happened through the history of online forums, without decent moderation, things tend to devolve very quickly. This is exactly what's happened at Facebook. They've created "pages" that could be there responsibility, or could be the responsibility of the people running the page, but nobody really takes responsibility. Everything, instead, is focused on engagement. Publishers want to drive traffic to their websites. FB wants to keep people on the site, and "engaged" with their advertisements. Moderation, in essence, has been almost completely ignored.
We've seen the negative effects of this feedback loop in the past (who else remembers Reddit's role in the Boston Marathon bombing?), but it is clearly a much lower priority than the current Facebook witch hunt.