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This is exactly why I had to get off of Facebook (again). I deactivated my first account 8 years ago, but got back on to re-connect with my old pals and acquai

This is exactly why I had to get off of Facebook (again). I deactivated my first account 8 years ago, but got back on to re-connect with my old pals and acquaintances from back in the day. For that reason, it was fantastic. After another year, I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd. I have the sense IRL to know that not everything is for everybody, but that doesn't matter much on Facebook unless you want to spend hours and hours hand-crafting subsets of your friends for different topics (I don't). And I have zero interest in posting selfies or status updates of what's going on in my life, so that made the platform exceedingly boring and a waste of time for me. It's a shame, because it does work really well for "connecting" with people (in the shallowest sense of the word).

alquemist 6y ago
Even in the best of circumstances, being subjected to the highlights of 100 other people will make your life feel miserable in comparison. Amazing vacation locations at the best time of day, gorgeous food from the best angle, amazing health and fashion with the best lightning. That's before we go into likes hunting and what that does to the reward paths in your brain. Social media as a concept is deeply unhealthy. At least the traditional celebrity cult, already rather weird in its American incarnation, had some degree of psychological distance between self and the professionals. With social media, everyone is caught in the celebrity game. Right now is a great time to delete your accounts. The only better time is yesterday.
pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
Note that for many people this would be an example of their plan "working". For some, the most immediate goal is not to change your mind or the minds of others. There's an intermediate goal to make your position appear marginal, which can help in changing the minds of others. By dropping out, you increase the efficacy of this strategy.
- whammywon 6y ago
  Really feels like a Catch 22 situation, then. :-(
Diederich 6y ago
All I use FB for these days is to look in on specific friends, by name. I never view the feed. Yes, that makes me a 'lurker', which is fine with me, though I do use Facebook messenger to chat with some people as well, which is nice.
foobiekr 6y ago
Without going into details, for various reasons, my relationship with my employer essentially made it critical that I delete my account several years ago. I resented it at the time, because while I considered facebook fundamentally unhealthy, I justified it as a way to keep in touch with friends, and, very cynically, use it as a propaganda tool for career advancement. In hindsight, though. I couldn't be more glad for the push. For at least a few years, I had actively unfollowed a good majority of friends from my feed because watching their gyrations (posing, fighting, echoing, ...) was making me lose respect for a lot of people. I don't need their mental hygiene and low-effort politics rubbed in my face and I'm happier not seeing it. Looking back, one thing I did conclude was that the death of email was one of the few things that made Facebook valuable. I had email contact for pretty much every person I was "friends" with on FB, but many of those addresses have expired, or they are so flooded with spam that when you message someone, they don't see it at all or not for +a week or so. I'm like that myself - I only look at my personal email once a week, on Friday night. Also, "social cooling" is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site. They should have called it "Socially Mandated Fronting' or something instead of trying to make an awkward and not very meaningful global climate change analogy.
- nytesky 6y ago
  Wait, is email really dead?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I'm sure it's alive in some circles, but I haven't contacted any friends through email in years.
    - nytesky 6y ago
      So you use a mix of text, FB, WhatsApp, etc?
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
reaperducer 6y ago
I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people. There's a lot of variety in my crowd Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world. I remember in college, we were encouraged to seek out differing opinions. I remember a guy who once chastised me for not seeking a broad enough range of opinions. He said, "What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be challenged?" My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today. Be who you are. If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
- Spooks 6y ago
  In terms of a social media site, what you are saying sounds exhausting. Having a couple of friends with different opinions is great, having like 100+ people not educated in certain topics, all with their own opinion is where it kind of breaks. You mentioned Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia, they were both well versed in law and justice, so it makes sense even if their opinions are different, they can respect each other.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    having like 100+ people not educated in certain topics, all with their own opinion is where it kind of breaks. Why have 100+ people? Why not have a small group of high-quality friends, instead of a large pool of low-quality friends?
    - Spooks 6y ago
      Well that is always an option, which I have thought about. I would basically need to remove my entire family and a large amount of friends (not low-quality friends, they are just educated in other areas). Once I realized that, it was easier to just delete facebook, and keep in touch with my close friends and people that are in similar studies to myself by using group chat messages, emails or just face to face (not so much this option in 2020)
pyr0hu 6y ago
Hm. Speaking of, is there any way to deactivate a FB profile but stay on messenger? I have no interest in a fb profile but I'm connecting with all my friends and family on Messenger
- ativzzz 6y ago
  You can install messenger separately from the fb app itself on android. Not using your fb profile is basically deactivating it. Remove your pics, set as many things as you want to private, and just don't download or log into the app
- ElectronShak 6y ago
  yes, you can deactivate your facebook account and still use messenger, see https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1526848634305688 https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1526848634305688
- tboyd47 6y ago
  I posted a "good-bye" message so people would know not to expect any more posts, and kept my account because I wanted to still use Groups, Events, and Marketplace.
jawarner 6y ago
Are you on Twitter? It's a more common platform for political stuff. Facebook is for friends, and unless you want to discuss politics with all of your friends at once, why not just keep it to personal stuff?
- bryan_w 6y ago
  It's funny, one of my friends posted on his FB, "Who are you voting for and why?" And nobody took the bait. He just got a bunch of popcorn eating gifs
- tboyd47 6y ago
  Yeah, I tried Twitter too, but so few of my friends use it, it just seemed like a clunkier, angrier version of HN with about half the average IQ points.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    > with about half the average IQ points And character limits.
  - Joeri 6y ago
    I think that is the point of twitter: it is what people say without a filter and without thinking it through. I’ve found the proper way to use it is to follow extreme opinions from the entire spectrum to get a sense of what is brewing.
  - greyswan 6y ago
    I wouldn't say I recommend trying this, but it takes time to find people you are actually interested in on Twitter. All the obvious "blue check-mark" people have zero insight at best. There is a whole weird world of small follower count people on there. Small communities. People with unique ideas. People that will actually respond to replies. Again, I don't think it an addiction you should necessarily cultivate, but there is value to be had.
clairity 6y ago
note that this is a marketing site (as noted in my other comment[0]), so discount appropriately. social pressure predates humans. it's pervasive and our teenage years (especially) are spent coping with/negotiating that. the difference with facebook is that it's potentially unbounded in reach and visibility (in nearly all cases it's not, but every once in a while, something blows completely out of its social circle). as with many modern phenomena, the risk-aversion this induces is out of proportion with the actual risks because of that potential (but not actual) reach and visibility, amplified by memetic social networks that trade in novel (whether true or false) information. in short, the worry over the effects of offense are greater than the potential effects themselves. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629098
wwweston 6y ago
> I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. If you really don't get value out of a platform then it's definitely a good thing to withdraw, but personally... I find there are plenty of interesting things I can talk/post about without flipping any major rage behavior. And I have lefty, liberal, and conservative friends, religious and anti-religious friends, friends who are interested in high/intellectual culture and friends who are not. I do sometimes offend people. Anything that prompts people to evaluate themselves or their models of the world or their particular value-set runs that risk. Sometimes I have things to say that are likely to do that. Like, for example, the suggestion that maybe a personal capacity for diplomacy has as much to do with the ability to hold wide-ranging conversations as much as the foibles of platforms or people do. Some topics are especially difficult, but there sure seem to be approaches that minimize the heat-to-light ratio in discussions.
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  Yeah, I am very curious about what interesting things they're posting that offend people all the time. That's quite an achievement.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- tboyd47 6y ago
  Maybe I'm not always as diplomatic as I could be all the time, but what if I like it that way? I don't have this problem with offending people IRL or even in other online communities. And I'm not interested at all in cutting people out of my life - I like my social circle. So, in my mind, the platform is indeed the problem.
- zucked 6y ago
  I can see how censoring yourself to the point of silence is bad, however, as someone who spent a great deal of time expressing my sometimes offensive POV's with very little consideration for others, the forced filter and permanence of the internet has benefited me. I am more careful and thoughtful about how I express myself now.
darkstar_16 6y ago
I go back and forth between deactivating my again and getting back on FB. I've realised the only reason I'm on FB these days is because of some hobby groups that I'm a part of and those are only on FB. I don't connect with any of my friends on FB and have blocked updates from most acquaintances.
- ehnto 6y ago
  There definitely needs to be an event aggregator that doesn't require a facebook account. I don't use Facebook, but all the hobby groups I ever meet in real life do!
nytesky 6y ago
Facebook had lists introduced after Google+ circles. It allowed you to define different views and audiences for your profile from your friend list. I loved it, though building the lists was awful awful. Now its even harder to edit the lists, and they hidden three layers deep and you can only view them on the web browser. They should bring them back.
geebee 6y ago
I've quit (as in, delete, not suspend) my Facebook account twice. Deleted it, signed up again years later, deleted it again. I hope it's for good. The reason really was politics. I've never learned anything new from these posts, they tend to just be the more bombastic restatements of things that everyone already knows about. I think they're a form of social signaling or posturing (people want to establish themselves as the most for or against... whatever their in-group is for or agains). There's a funny onion article I've always enjoyed, "I don't like the person you become when you're on the Jumbotron". https://sports.theonion.com/i-dont-like-the-person-you-become-when-youre-on-the-jum-1819584133 https://sports.theonion.com/i-dont-like-the-person-you-becom... There are people I am friends with, but I wouldn't want to be around when they're drunk. I feel the same way about some people on social media. The problem is, they tend to be the ones who dominate the platform. And it's new, so we're not really aware of the dangers - but I actually do think it may have a lot in common with alcohol addiction.
hinkley 6y ago
I left when coworkers started asking to connect on FB. I don't bring my friends to work with me, except once in a very great while about ADA topics. I don't need my work life to be affected by the activities of my social circles. I wasn't getting much out of it anyway, it was easier not to play (leave and say I didn't have one).
thelastdev 6y ago
I've also noticed I can disagree with people I actually know. Online we're all on teams. If anywhere in your post history you indicate your on a different team then we need to say mean things to each other. In real life I have very liberal , very conservative and somewhat indifferent friends. I've also dated a variety of folks with different political leanings. I've largely stepped back from social media due to this. Why am I going to get into arguments with people I don't even know ? If you want to connect with people, I suggest meet up groups. It's very easy to make friends you can actually hang out with. I would say to prioritize doing things you want to do. Like I'm heavily into tech talks , so I attended a ton of those. I'm fairly optimistic next year the vaccine will be out and things will be somewhat normal.
vmception 6y ago
But at least you can watch autoplaying videos of people getting shot Killer feature
ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
I have no idea how you can do this, all my friends are on FB and that's my only way to keep in touch with them. I just use messenger so I don't really see the downsides that everybody is talking about here.
- sneak 6y ago
  Recently my close friend who still uses FB tried to send someone a link to a public tweet made by the president’s daughter. FB messenger censored the private message and refused to send it, claiming it was against “community standards”. These sorts of logged-forever, censored platforms are absolutely chilling speech, person-to-person, even in DMs, and you wouldn’t even know when it happens to messages sent to you. https://twitter.com/atomly/status/1309632274908946434 https://twitter.com/atomly/status/1309632274908946434 > that's my only way to keep in touch with them That means that you can’t communicate with them, even in DM, in a way that’s not logged for and filtered by a remote party whose interests are not your own. It’s only a matter of time until this is abused by the state. https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/ https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
GekkePrutser 6y ago
Yeah and by handcrafting those subsets you'd give LOTS of valuable info to their algorithms.
bookmarkable 6y ago
I disconnected Facebook, but have no choice now. You cannot be a SMB marketer without Facebook and its properties in 2020.
IanDrake 6y ago
When 'friends' post on Facebook, they are putting their message on my feed. That's fine, that's the implicit agreement. Also part of that agreement, when I comment on their post. That's where most problems arise for me. I typically unfriend people when they're offended when I question their post.
UncleOxidant 6y ago
That was one advantage of Google Circles (or Google Groups or whatever they were calling it before they killed it): you could define different circles and send messages only to specific circles if you wanted. It seemed like good way to do it, but of course, as with all things Google it was killed.
- samatman 6y ago
  Yeah that was sad. The people designing Google Groups were clearly on a mission to fix social media. Their bosses had a different mission: to force all Google services into a single account, unified around some "Facebook killer" that was just going to magically work because, y'know, it's Google. These differing goals came to a head with the "true names" debacle, which Groups never recovered from. But Google did get its One True Account out of it, which is all they really wanted.
  - UncleOxidant 6y ago
    I'm kind of surprised that FB didn't copy that targeted circles feature. It was such a great idea. You could even do some logical operations on the circles. You could have a circle for professional stuff which you kept politics out of and you could have a separate political circle for politics only, but if you wanted to target both you could do an AND.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    The Google+ push definitely provided some activation energy, but unifying accounts---and more importantly, building out a framework for account unification given that Google knows it will continue to build new applications and purchase companies that must be integrated against its existing applications---had been a goal for a while. It was becoming a game of technological whack-a-mole on Google's back end to manage account information across apps. For example, was a user logged into Gmail also logged into YouTube? Were they logged in as the same person? How do resources get unified across different apps, since that's behavior users assume should work? What applications had authority to act on a user's behalf, in what contexts, And can we provide a better way to support that functionality than requiring a user to give their whole password to a third-party system? And when an account had to be banned for being abusive, what precisely got banned? previous to account unification, it was a shotgun depending on who did the banning and in what context. True names was, in my opinion, a misstep. The account unification goal was a great idea.
SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
> I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd. This is called "context collapse" https://www.rewire.org/context-collapse-online/ https://www.rewire.org/context-collapse-online/ https://fanlore.org/wiki/Context_Collapse https://fanlore.org/wiki/Context_Collapse You might know what to say and how to say it in each context, but this becomes impossible when the contexts are all collapsed into one.
la6471 6y ago
As we provide platforms to everyone to broadcast their opinions on everything , what I foresee is that if we continue to keep generating these gazillions of data points every second all the time then soon AI’s will be needed to do the analysis for us and complement or help human policy makers to make the right decisions. We already see this with things like sentiment analysis. Welcome to the singularity .. I for once can’t wait to have our constantly bickering politicians replaced with AI agents whose sole job is to work for the people and who can be overidden by executive authority only as a last resort.
bart_spoon 6y ago
I agree with you, but I find it interesting to contrast this with what this site is describing as social cooling. The website's claims are entirely big data and algorithm driven. But what you describe here, and what I think most people initially think of in terms of "social cooling" is the type of self-censorship and fear of the masses that is the result of masses of individual users, rather than algorithmic bias adjusting to our digital fingerprint. The two aren't completely inseparable. Social media and the modern internet drive the kind of digital puritanism you are describing, and social media and the modern internet are largely based on monetization through advertising, which is driving the social cooling the website is describing. But the two are different phenomena, and I find the one you are describing much more relevant and terrifying than algorithms tracking my clicks to curate my advertisements and Instagram feed.
- tboyd47 6y ago
  That's fair. I read the "Social Cooling" site (as an aside, what would you call sites like this? E-pamphlets seems like a good term to use.) and it immediately made me think of this essay I read years ago: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/institute-for-precarious-consciousness-we-are-all-very-anxious https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/institute-for-precar... I think this "social cooling" is related to this generalized feeling of "precarity," the feeling that your place in society can be suspended or deleted in an instant. Whether the agent of this deletion is a state actor (China), a corporation acting on behalf of a state or advertiser (YouTube/Facebook/Twitter), or just ordinary people not acting on any agenda but just carrying forward the anxiety they experience internally. I don't find the latter particularly scarier than the first two since it doesn't carry as much of a threat with it. I certainly didn't experience it as such; but just a minor annoyance and general dissatisfaction with Facebook as a product. I find it ironic that so many took my top-level comment to mean something was wrong with my social universe; as if, instead of the obvious solution of eschewing Facebook, my solution should be to separate from the people in my life and find better people who I could be on Facebook with. The assumption that it's healthy or even possible to "cancel" people out of your life for not passing some arbitrary standard of behavior is ludicrous to me (and, I would think, to any sane person with family ties, work relationships, etc.). Other people are messy, unpredictable and sometimes awful, but we do need them, and they need us. I think they have internalized this experience of precarity and turned it into a weapon they can wield against others, like an abused person becoming an abuser.
smadge 6y ago
Offending your peers is a separate issue than social cooling as described by this submission. That is an interpersonal issue. Social cooling is a relationship between an individual and powerful institutions like credit agencies, governments, employers, banks, etc.
reader_mode 6y ago
Why would you want to share that with random acquatiances anyway ? For me Facebook is about life events of people I know and easy contact/messaging not political discussions or whatever else people find triggering.
dariosalvi78 6y ago
Facebook is the new television: a pile of rubbish made to keep the plebes entertained. I use it mainly for fun (posting memes and jokes) and to see what people I haven't seen for ages are up to. No serious conversation can go on on FB, forget it.
boboboboboboo 6y ago
I’m really curious about the things you were saying that were making people mad.

alquemist 6y ago

Even in the best of circumstances, being subjected to the highlights of 100 other people will make your life feel miserable in comparison. Amazing vacation locations at the best time of day, gorgeous food from the best angle, amazing health and fashion with the best lightning. That's before we go into likes hunting and what that does to the reward paths in your brain. Social media as a concept is deeply unhealthy. At least the traditional celebrity cult, already rather weird in its American incarnation, had some degree of psychological distance between self and the professionals. With social media, everyone is caught in the celebrity game. Right now is a great time to delete your accounts. The only better time is yesterday.

pwdisswordfish0 6y ago

Note that for many people this would be an example of their plan "working". For some, the most immediate goal is not to change your mind or the minds of others. There's an intermediate goal to make your position appear marginal, which can help in changing the minds of others. By dropping out, you increase the efficacy of this strategy.

whammywon 6y ago
Really feels like a Catch 22 situation, then. :-(

Diederich 6y ago

All I use FB for these days is to look in on specific friends, by name. I never view the feed. Yes, that makes me a 'lurker', which is fine with me, though I do use Facebook messenger to chat with some people as well, which is nice.

foobiekr 6y ago

Without going into details, for various reasons, my relationship with my employer essentially made it critical that I delete my account several years ago. I resented it at the time, because while I considered facebook fundamentally unhealthy, I justified it as a way to keep in touch with friends, and, very cynically, use it as a propaganda tool for career advancement. In hindsight, though. I couldn't be more glad for the push. For at least a few years, I had actively unfollowed a good majority of friends from my feed because watching their gyrations (posing, fighting, echoing, ...) was making me lose respect for a lot of people. I don't need their mental hygiene and low-effort politics rubbed in my face and I'm happier not seeing it. Looking back, one thing I did conclude was that the death of email was one of the few things that made Facebook valuable. I had email contact for pretty much every person I was "friends" with on FB, but many of those addresses have expired, or they are so flooded with spam that when you message someone, they don't see it at all or not for +a week or so. I'm like that myself - I only look at my personal email once a week, on Friday night. Also, "social cooling" is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site. They should have called it "Socially Mandated Fronting' or something instead of trying to make an awkward and not very meaningful global climate change analogy.

nytesky 6y ago
Wait, is email really dead?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I'm sure it's alive in some circles, but I haven't contacted any friends through email in years.
  - nytesky 6y ago
    So you use a mix of text, FB, WhatsApp, etc?
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

reaperducer 6y ago

I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people. There's a lot of variety in my crowd Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world. I remember in college, we were encouraged to seek out differing opinions. I remember a guy who once chastised me for not seeking a broad enough range of opinions. He said, "What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be challenged?" My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today. Be who you are. If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.

Spooks 6y ago
In terms of a social media site, what you are saying sounds exhausting. Having a couple of friends with different opinions is great, having like 100+ people not educated in certain topics, all with their own opinion is where it kind of breaks. You mentioned Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia, they were both well versed in law and justice, so it makes sense even if their opinions are different, they can respect each other.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  having like 100+ people not educated in certain topics, all with their own opinion is where it kind of breaks. Why have 100+ people? Why not have a small group of high-quality friends, instead of a large pool of low-quality friends?
  - Spooks 6y ago
    Well that is always an option, which I have thought about. I would basically need to remove my entire family and a large amount of friends (not low-quality friends, they are just educated in other areas). Once I realized that, it was easier to just delete facebook, and keep in touch with my close friends and people that are in similar studies to myself by using group chat messages, emails or just face to face (not so much this option in 2020)

pyr0hu 6y ago

Hm. Speaking of, is there any way to deactivate a FB profile but stay on messenger? I have no interest in a fb profile but I'm connecting with all my friends and family on Messenger

ativzzz 6y ago
You can install messenger separately from the fb app itself on android. Not using your fb profile is basically deactivating it. Remove your pics, set as many things as you want to private, and just don't download or log into the app
ElectronShak 6y ago
yes, you can deactivate your facebook account and still use messenger, see https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1526848634305688 https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1526848634305688
tboyd47 6y ago
I posted a "good-bye" message so people would know not to expect any more posts, and kept my account because I wanted to still use Groups, Events, and Marketplace.

jawarner 6y ago

Are you on Twitter? It's a more common platform for political stuff. Facebook is for friends, and unless you want to discuss politics with all of your friends at once, why not just keep it to personal stuff?

bryan_w 6y ago
It's funny, one of my friends posted on his FB, "Who are you voting for and why?" And nobody took the bait. He just got a bunch of popcorn eating gifs
tboyd47 6y ago
Yeah, I tried Twitter too, but so few of my friends use it, it just seemed like a clunkier, angrier version of HN with about half the average IQ points.
- Shared404 6y ago
  > with about half the average IQ points And character limits.
- Joeri 6y ago
  I think that is the point of twitter: it is what people say without a filter and without thinking it through. I’ve found the proper way to use it is to follow extreme opinions from the entire spectrum to get a sense of what is brewing.
- greyswan 6y ago
  I wouldn't say I recommend trying this, but it takes time to find people you are actually interested in on Twitter. All the obvious "blue check-mark" people have zero insight at best. There is a whole weird world of small follower count people on there. Small communities. People with unique ideas. People that will actually respond to replies. Again, I don't think it an addiction you should necessarily cultivate, but there is value to be had.

clairity 6y ago

note that this is a marketing site (as noted in my other comment[0]), so discount appropriately. social pressure predates humans. it's pervasive and our teenage years (especially) are spent coping with/negotiating that. the difference with facebook is that it's potentially unbounded in reach and visibility (in nearly all cases it's not, but every once in a while, something blows completely out of its social circle). as with many modern phenomena, the risk-aversion this induces is out of proportion with the actual risks because of that potential (but not actual) reach and visibility, amplified by memetic social networks that trade in novel (whether true or false) information. in short, the worry over the effects of offense are greater than the potential effects themselves. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629098

wwweston 6y ago

> I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. If you really don't get value out of a platform then it's definitely a good thing to withdraw, but personally... I find there are plenty of interesting things I can talk/post about without flipping any major rage behavior. And I have lefty, liberal, and conservative friends, religious and anti-religious friends, friends who are interested in high/intellectual culture and friends who are not. I do sometimes offend people. Anything that prompts people to evaluate themselves or their models of the world or their particular value-set runs that risk. Sometimes I have things to say that are likely to do that. Like, for example, the suggestion that maybe a personal capacity for diplomacy has as much to do with the ability to hold wide-ranging conversations as much as the foibles of platforms or people do. Some topics are especially difficult, but there sure seem to be approaches that minimize the heat-to-light ratio in discussions.

filleduchaos 6y ago
Yeah, I am very curious about what interesting things they're posting that offend people all the time. That's quite an achievement.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tboyd47 6y ago
Maybe I'm not always as diplomatic as I could be all the time, but what if I like it that way? I don't have this problem with offending people IRL or even in other online communities. And I'm not interested at all in cutting people out of my life - I like my social circle. So, in my mind, the platform is indeed the problem.
zucked 6y ago
I can see how censoring yourself to the point of silence is bad, however, as someone who spent a great deal of time expressing my sometimes offensive POV's with very little consideration for others, the forced filter and permanence of the internet has benefited me. I am more careful and thoughtful about how I express myself now.

darkstar_16 6y ago

I go back and forth between deactivating my again and getting back on FB. I've realised the only reason I'm on FB these days is because of some hobby groups that I'm a part of and those are only on FB. I don't connect with any of my friends on FB and have blocked updates from most acquaintances.

ehnto 6y ago
There definitely needs to be an event aggregator that doesn't require a facebook account. I don't use Facebook, but all the hobby groups I ever meet in real life do!

nytesky 6y ago

Facebook had lists introduced after Google+ circles. It allowed you to define different views and audiences for your profile from your friend list. I loved it, though building the lists was awful awful. Now its even harder to edit the lists, and they hidden three layers deep and you can only view them on the web browser. They should bring them back.

geebee 6y ago

I've quit (as in, delete, not suspend) my Facebook account twice. Deleted it, signed up again years later, deleted it again. I hope it's for good. The reason really was politics. I've never learned anything new from these posts, they tend to just be the more bombastic restatements of things that everyone already knows about. I think they're a form of social signaling or posturing (people want to establish themselves as the most for or against... whatever their in-group is for or agains). There's a funny onion article I've always enjoyed, "I don't like the person you become when you're on the Jumbotron". https://sports.theonion.com/i-dont-like-the-person-you-become-when-youre-on-the-jum-1819584133 https://sports.theonion.com/i-dont-like-the-person-you-becom... There are people I am friends with, but I wouldn't want to be around when they're drunk. I feel the same way about some people on social media. The problem is, they tend to be the ones who dominate the platform. And it's new, so we're not really aware of the dangers - but I actually do think it may have a lot in common with alcohol addiction.

hinkley 6y ago

I left when coworkers started asking to connect on FB. I don't bring my friends to work with me, except once in a very great while about ADA topics. I don't need my work life to be affected by the activities of my social circles. I wasn't getting much out of it anyway, it was easier not to play (leave and say I didn't have one).

thelastdev 6y ago

I've also noticed I can disagree with people I actually know. Online we're all on teams. If anywhere in your post history you indicate your on a different team then we need to say mean things to each other. In real life I have very liberal , very conservative and somewhat indifferent friends. I've also dated a variety of folks with different political leanings. I've largely stepped back from social media due to this. Why am I going to get into arguments with people I don't even know ? If you want to connect with people, I suggest meet up groups. It's very easy to make friends you can actually hang out with. I would say to prioritize doing things you want to do. Like I'm heavily into tech talks , so I attended a ton of those. I'm fairly optimistic next year the vaccine will be out and things will be somewhat normal.

vmception 6y ago

But at least you can watch autoplaying videos of people getting shot Killer feature

ccktlmazeltov 6y ago

I have no idea how you can do this, all my friends are on FB and that's my only way to keep in touch with them. I just use messenger so I don't really see the downsides that everybody is talking about here.

sneak 6y ago
Recently my close friend who still uses FB tried to send someone a link to a public tweet made by the president’s daughter. FB messenger censored the private message and refused to send it, claiming it was against “community standards”. These sorts of logged-forever, censored platforms are absolutely chilling speech, person-to-person, even in DMs, and you wouldn’t even know when it happens to messages sent to you. https://twitter.com/atomly/status/1309632274908946434 https://twitter.com/atomly/status/1309632274908946434 > that's my only way to keep in touch with them That means that you can’t communicate with them, even in DM, in a way that’s not logged for and filtered by a remote party whose interests are not your own. It’s only a matter of time until this is abused by the state. https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/ https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/

GekkePrutser 6y ago

Yeah and by handcrafting those subsets you'd give LOTS of valuable info to their algorithms.

bookmarkable 6y ago

I disconnected Facebook, but have no choice now. You cannot be a SMB marketer without Facebook and its properties in 2020.

IanDrake 6y ago

When 'friends' post on Facebook, they are putting their message on my feed. That's fine, that's the implicit agreement. Also part of that agreement, when I comment on their post. That's where most problems arise for me. I typically unfriend people when they're offended when I question their post.

UncleOxidant 6y ago

That was one advantage of Google Circles (or Google Groups or whatever they were calling it before they killed it): you could define different circles and send messages only to specific circles if you wanted. It seemed like good way to do it, but of course, as with all things Google it was killed.

samatman 6y ago
Yeah that was sad. The people designing Google Groups were clearly on a mission to fix social media. Their bosses had a different mission: to force all Google services into a single account, unified around some "Facebook killer" that was just going to magically work because, y'know, it's Google. These differing goals came to a head with the "true names" debacle, which Groups never recovered from. But Google did get its One True Account out of it, which is all they really wanted.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  I'm kind of surprised that FB didn't copy that targeted circles feature. It was such a great idea. You could even do some logical operations on the circles. You could have a circle for professional stuff which you kept politics out of and you could have a separate political circle for politics only, but if you wanted to target both you could do an AND.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  The Google+ push definitely provided some activation energy, but unifying accounts---and more importantly, building out a framework for account unification given that Google knows it will continue to build new applications and purchase companies that must be integrated against its existing applications---had been a goal for a while. It was becoming a game of technological whack-a-mole on Google's back end to manage account information across apps. For example, was a user logged into Gmail also logged into YouTube? Were they logged in as the same person? How do resources get unified across different apps, since that's behavior users assume should work? What applications had authority to act on a user's behalf, in what contexts, And can we provide a better way to support that functionality than requiring a user to give their whole password to a third-party system? And when an account had to be banned for being abusive, what precisely got banned? previous to account unification, it was a shotgun depending on who did the banning and in what context. True names was, in my opinion, a misstep. The account unification goal was a great idea.

SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago

> I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd. This is called "context collapse" https://www.rewire.org/context-collapse-online/ https://www.rewire.org/context-collapse-online/ https://fanlore.org/wiki/Context_Collapse https://fanlore.org/wiki/Context_Collapse You might know what to say and how to say it in each context, but this becomes impossible when the contexts are all collapsed into one.

la6471 6y ago

As we provide platforms to everyone to broadcast their opinions on everything , what I foresee is that if we continue to keep generating these gazillions of data points every second all the time then soon AI’s will be needed to do the analysis for us and complement or help human policy makers to make the right decisions. We already see this with things like sentiment analysis. Welcome to the singularity .. I for once can’t wait to have our constantly bickering politicians replaced with AI agents whose sole job is to work for the people and who can be overidden by executive authority only as a last resort.

bart_spoon 6y ago

I agree with you, but I find it interesting to contrast this with what this site is describing as social cooling. The website's claims are entirely big data and algorithm driven. But what you describe here, and what I think most people initially think of in terms of "social cooling" is the type of self-censorship and fear of the masses that is the result of masses of individual users, rather than algorithmic bias adjusting to our digital fingerprint. The two aren't completely inseparable. Social media and the modern internet drive the kind of digital puritanism you are describing, and social media and the modern internet are largely based on monetization through advertising, which is driving the social cooling the website is describing. But the two are different phenomena, and I find the one you are describing much more relevant and terrifying than algorithms tracking my clicks to curate my advertisements and Instagram feed.

tboyd47 6y ago
That's fair. I read the "Social Cooling" site (as an aside, what would you call sites like this? E-pamphlets seems like a good term to use.) and it immediately made me think of this essay I read years ago: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/institute-for-precarious-consciousness-we-are-all-very-anxious https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/institute-for-precar... I think this "social cooling" is related to this generalized feeling of "precarity," the feeling that your place in society can be suspended or deleted in an instant. Whether the agent of this deletion is a state actor (China), a corporation acting on behalf of a state or advertiser (YouTube/Facebook/Twitter), or just ordinary people not acting on any agenda but just carrying forward the anxiety they experience internally. I don't find the latter particularly scarier than the first two since it doesn't carry as much of a threat with it. I certainly didn't experience it as such; but just a minor annoyance and general dissatisfaction with Facebook as a product. I find it ironic that so many took my top-level comment to mean something was wrong with my social universe; as if, instead of the obvious solution of eschewing Facebook, my solution should be to separate from the people in my life and find better people who I could be on Facebook with. The assumption that it's healthy or even possible to "cancel" people out of your life for not passing some arbitrary standard of behavior is ludicrous to me (and, I would think, to any sane person with family ties, work relationships, etc.). Other people are messy, unpredictable and sometimes awful, but we do need them, and they need us. I think they have internalized this experience of precarity and turned it into a weapon they can wield against others, like an abused person becoming an abuser.

smadge 6y ago

Offending your peers is a separate issue than social cooling as described by this submission. That is an interpersonal issue. Social cooling is a relationship between an individual and powerful institutions like credit agencies, governments, employers, banks, etc.

reader_mode 6y ago

Why would you want to share that with random acquatiances anyway ? For me Facebook is about life events of people I know and easy contact/messaging not political discussions or whatever else people find triggering.

dariosalvi78 6y ago

Facebook is the new television: a pile of rubbish made to keep the plebes entertained. I use it mainly for fun (posting memes and jokes) and to see what people I haven't seen for ages are up to. No serious conversation can go on on FB, forget it.

boboboboboboo 6y ago

I’m really curious about the things you were saying that were making people mad.