6 ms·

This is what a lot of us who don't hate Zuck's guts actually do use FB for.

kbenson 9y ago
It's not that I hate Zuckerberg that I find it hard to use Facebook, but that I trust them less than the other super-presences outs there (justified or not), and I dislike how it changes my perceptions of some of my friends. The constant posting of inane shit starts to look less like keeping in touch and more like an addiction to my eyes. I still like those people, and enjoy their company, but being constantly exposed to their posts feels like being in their living room as they crack open that 8 AM beer after waking up. It gets uncomfortable, but it's also not something I'm sure it's my place to butt into, since to this point it appears mostly harmless. It is the best tool to keep in contact we currently have though, so I do pop in every week or two to check on notifications. The times I go longer I end up missing events friends have put together and not notified in other ways about, so I try to remember to check in fairly regularly. I only hope they don't swing their attention towards those of us that shun the feed any time soon, and try to find a way to tweak our reward response for that as well (or at least in a more effective way. I'm sure they've put at least some attention to it).
- blazespin 9y ago
  Yeah, I don't get that. I see some people who like to reflect their interests online but I don't consider it inane or addiction. You have a hobby, why not share it online?
  - kbenson 9y ago
    I don't think there's anything wrong with people posting about their hobbies, or what's up in their lives, even multiple times a day. I have people that post multiple times every hour. Sometimes 8-10 times an hour for short periods. Generally it looks like reposting everything they read. They become a one person news aggregator, if by "news" we mean Facebook posts tailored for meme propagation (which means a good portion of them range from misleading to blatantly false). I don't really use my feed, so I'm not bothered by the posts being in my feed for my own sake. I'm just a bit worried that they've become obsessed with Facebook attention to an unhealthy degree.
  - wccrawford 9y ago
    It becomes a problem when you've got people who are incredibly single-minded about something. I don't mind my coworker's weekly posts about car stuff at all, even though I have no interest whatsoever. And when he posts some progress on some car repair he's doing, I'm glad to see he's doing something he loves. But when my SJW friend posts yet another ridiculous over-the-top post about how all X are X, and somehow thinks this means they aren't be prejudiced themselves, it's hard to handle. You can't tell them anything, either, because there's something different about you that makes them think you're unable to empathize with them, or understand what they're going through. Some of them are so incredibly obviously wrong, too. Like: All cops are corrupt. This is a person who is pretty fun to be around and hosts parties that are fun. In person, they aren't so overbearing about this stuff. But online? They're a monster who can't be corrected or even debated with. If you do, you're X and can't understand. In short, I think you're fortunate not to have anyone single-minded like this on your Facebook friends list. The only real solution is to just unfollow them, which is horrible because you then miss the posts from them that you actually want to see.
    - blazespin 9y ago
      Hmm, well I admit I do hide posts from a few of my friends. It's pretty easy, you know.
    - derefr 9y ago
      I have a slowly-brewing notion that it will eventually be a matter of etiquette, to ensure that any content your produce is properly tagged such that people can treat you as a subset of yourself. Eventually—hopefully—it will be seen as incredibly uncouth to intermingle personal, political, and pastime content into one feed with no ability to re-separate them. But that time is, sadly, not today. Until then, building feed-readers with topic-analysis auto-tagging might help.
      - NoGravitas 9y ago
        One thing I've been noticing about Mastodon[0] is that it is incredibly easy to segregate your personal, political, and pastime posts, trivially by having multiple sites in multiple browser tabs, but even better with a client that supports multiple accounts. You can tie your different identities together through your profile, and import/export your subscription lists between instances. And everyone who follows you can follow only those of your identities that they are interested in. [0]: https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  I still sometimes wonder if anyone else has a good name for what Facebook lost somewhere in the switch between the much more ephemeral "Status" system of 2004's TheFacebook to today's "Posts" and their littered, ad-filled home the "News Feed". Even the "Notes" system in the middle of the transition was more "opt in" than firehose and a bit more rare and curated by the fewer users using it. There is a spirit to the old systems lost to the new ones that I can't quite name. In the rush to increase communication overall, and build an addictive platform that people feel a need to check often, perhaps too much of the signal has been drowned out in noise. But that doesn't feel a strong description either because the signals become so different, too.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
    I wonder if you have a slightly over-romanticized view of the old FB. I got on FB sometime in 2007 and for a few years it was overrun with quizzes and games and such spam. It was a different kind of spam from ad-spam but today's FB seems much more streamlined in many senses.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      2004 when I first joined was a year or so before a lot of the quizzes and games and such spam. At the time the "spam" was a large collection of "Groups" that had silly in-joke names specific to your College/University. That time "Groups" were more like a list of hobbies than the "Groups" of today. "Photos" also didn't show up until a few months after I first joined. I'm not saying we should romanticize the incomplete, under-developed TheFacebook of 2004, but only that the things that made it viral on college campuses in 2004 are very different from those that made it viral among the masses in 2014. I'm not sure which one is better or worse, it's definitely complicated. But there's definitely that feeling that Facebook is not TheFacebook any more. Not just branding, but in... spirit, maybe? Like I said there's word missing that I'm curious to find.
      - cacarr 9y ago
        "Fun"? Facebook was fun in 2005. Now it's just ... addictive.
AndrewUnmuted 9y ago
That's what you think you'd LIKE to use FB for. But remember, the medium is the message. You can't escape the interactive narrow mindedness of FB because it is inherent to the design of the overall product. In reality, you use FB to have your data packaged up and sold to advertisers, brands, and government agencies. You're the product, not the customer.
robbiep 9y ago
Having everyone watch all your interactions with your nearest and dearest creeps me the fuck out. I'm more private than that
hoffs 9y ago
Yeah, but if you have 10 or more friends your 'wall' gets littered with all kinds of useless information. Unless you unfollow and explicitly tell to not to show any of their likes and other random information.
- bryondowd 9y ago
  I do exactly this and have no problem with FB. I only friend people I actually know and care to have interactions with, and I kick anyone who's posts are overall more worth my time than not off my feed. This means my feed is actually worth scrolling through (and takes maybe 10 minutes every couple days to get through) and if I want to see what's going on with some particular person who isn't on my feed, I can go to their page and skim through. I don't get all the hate on FB. Sure, the default is mess, but that's what most people want, and if it's not what you want, there are means to control it and still have a powerful communication tool. A tool is what you make of it, and it's really not hard to make use of FB in a sane way.
Semaphor 9y ago
I agree, but they do make it harder to use for anything but posting memes every year.
coldtea 9y ago
Unless FB facilitates this use (which it doesn't -- back in the day, maybe) then whether one hate's Zuck's guts or not is not really relevant.

It's not that I hate Zuckerberg that I find it hard to use Facebook, but that I trust them less than the other super-presences outs there (justified or not), and I dislike how it changes my perceptions of some of my friends. The constant posting of inane shit starts to look less like keeping in touch and more like an addiction to my eyes. I still like those people, and enjoy their company, but being constantly exposed to their posts feels like being in their living room as they crack open that 8 AM beer after waking up. It gets uncomfortable, but it's also not something I'm sure it's my place to butt into, since to this point it appears mostly harmless. It is the best tool to keep in contact we currently have though, so I do pop in every week or two to check on notifications. The times I go longer I end up missing events friends have put together and not notified in other ways about, so I try to remember to check in fairly regularly. I only hope they don't swing their attention towards those of us that shun the feed any time soon, and try to find a way to tweak our reward response for that as well (or at least in a more effective way. I'm sure they've put at least some attention to it).

blazespin 9y ago
Yeah, I don't get that. I see some people who like to reflect their interests online but I don't consider it inane or addiction. You have a hobby, why not share it online?
- kbenson 9y ago
  I don't think there's anything wrong with people posting about their hobbies, or what's up in their lives, even multiple times a day. I have people that post multiple times every hour. Sometimes 8-10 times an hour for short periods. Generally it looks like reposting everything they read. They become a one person news aggregator, if by "news" we mean Facebook posts tailored for meme propagation (which means a good portion of them range from misleading to blatantly false). I don't really use my feed, so I'm not bothered by the posts being in my feed for my own sake. I'm just a bit worried that they've become obsessed with Facebook attention to an unhealthy degree.
- wccrawford 9y ago
  It becomes a problem when you've got people who are incredibly single-minded about something. I don't mind my coworker's weekly posts about car stuff at all, even though I have no interest whatsoever. And when he posts some progress on some car repair he's doing, I'm glad to see he's doing something he loves. But when my SJW friend posts yet another ridiculous over-the-top post about how all X are X, and somehow thinks this means they aren't be prejudiced themselves, it's hard to handle. You can't tell them anything, either, because there's something different about you that makes them think you're unable to empathize with them, or understand what they're going through. Some of them are so incredibly obviously wrong, too. Like: All cops are corrupt. This is a person who is pretty fun to be around and hosts parties that are fun. In person, they aren't so overbearing about this stuff. But online? They're a monster who can't be corrected or even debated with. If you do, you're X and can't understand. In short, I think you're fortunate not to have anyone single-minded like this on your Facebook friends list. The only real solution is to just unfollow them, which is horrible because you then miss the posts from them that you actually want to see.
  - blazespin 9y ago
    Hmm, well I admit I do hide posts from a few of my friends. It's pretty easy, you know.
  - derefr 9y ago
    I have a slowly-brewing notion that it will eventually be a matter of etiquette, to ensure that any content your produce is properly tagged such that people can treat you as a subset of yourself. Eventually—hopefully—it will be seen as incredibly uncouth to intermingle personal, political, and pastime content into one feed with no ability to re-separate them. But that time is, sadly, not today. Until then, building feed-readers with topic-analysis auto-tagging might help.
    - NoGravitas 9y ago
      One thing I've been noticing about Mastodon[0] is that it is incredibly easy to segregate your personal, political, and pastime posts, trivially by having multiple sites in multiple browser tabs, but even better with a client that supports multiple accounts. You can tie your different identities together through your profile, and import/export your subscription lists between instances. And everyone who follows you can follow only those of your identities that they are interested in. [0]: https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/
WorldMaker 9y ago
I still sometimes wonder if anyone else has a good name for what Facebook lost somewhere in the switch between the much more ephemeral "Status" system of 2004's TheFacebook to today's "Posts" and their littered, ad-filled home the "News Feed". Even the "Notes" system in the middle of the transition was more "opt in" than firehose and a bit more rare and curated by the fewer users using it. There is a spirit to the old systems lost to the new ones that I can't quite name. In the rush to increase communication overall, and build an addictive platform that people feel a need to check often, perhaps too much of the signal has been drowned out in noise. But that doesn't feel a strong description either because the signals become so different, too.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  I wonder if you have a slightly over-romanticized view of the old FB. I got on FB sometime in 2007 and for a few years it was overrun with quizzes and games and such spam. It was a different kind of spam from ad-spam but today's FB seems much more streamlined in many senses.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    2004 when I first joined was a year or so before a lot of the quizzes and games and such spam. At the time the "spam" was a large collection of "Groups" that had silly in-joke names specific to your College/University. That time "Groups" were more like a list of hobbies than the "Groups" of today. "Photos" also didn't show up until a few months after I first joined. I'm not saying we should romanticize the incomplete, under-developed TheFacebook of 2004, but only that the things that made it viral on college campuses in 2004 are very different from those that made it viral among the masses in 2014. I'm not sure which one is better or worse, it's definitely complicated. But there's definitely that feeling that Facebook is not TheFacebook any more. Not just branding, but in... spirit, maybe? Like I said there's word missing that I'm curious to find.
    - cacarr 9y ago
      "Fun"? Facebook was fun in 2005. Now it's just ... addictive.

AndrewUnmuted 9y ago

That's what you think you'd LIKE to use FB for. But remember, the medium is the message. You can't escape the interactive narrow mindedness of FB because it is inherent to the design of the overall product. In reality, you use FB to have your data packaged up and sold to advertisers, brands, and government agencies. You're the product, not the customer.

robbiep 9y ago

Having everyone watch all your interactions with your nearest and dearest creeps me the fuck out. I'm more private than that

hoffs 9y ago

Yeah, but if you have 10 or more friends your 'wall' gets littered with all kinds of useless information. Unless you unfollow and explicitly tell to not to show any of their likes and other random information.

bryondowd 9y ago
I do exactly this and have no problem with FB. I only friend people I actually know and care to have interactions with, and I kick anyone who's posts are overall more worth my time than not off my feed. This means my feed is actually worth scrolling through (and takes maybe 10 minutes every couple days to get through) and if I want to see what's going on with some particular person who isn't on my feed, I can go to their page and skim through. I don't get all the hate on FB. Sure, the default is mess, but that's what most people want, and if it's not what you want, there are means to control it and still have a powerful communication tool. A tool is what you make of it, and it's really not hard to make use of FB in a sane way.

Semaphor 9y ago

I agree, but they do make it harder to use for anything but posting memes every year.

coldtea 9y ago

Unless FB facilitates this use (which it doesn't -- back in the day, maybe) then whether one hate's Zuck's guts or not is not really relevant.