82 ms·

To Hell with Facebook (2021)

255 points by mrzool 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
DubiousPusher 4y ago
This explains a lot. About 2 years ago my feed suddenly began to be filled with posts from random pages I had followed. Some I had followed a decade ago and had not seen a post from in years. BTW, when I say filled I mean filled. Literally like 30 page posts with maybe one IRL friend or family post showing up in-between. It got so bad that to actually see the family photos and announcements I cared about I had to manually unsubscribe from almost every page I had ever followed. I guess I'll never know for sure but I'm going to guess "boosting" was to blame?
- boplicity 4y ago
  Once you unfollow every page, they'll start bombarding you with "suggested" posts from pages. There's no way to get away from them anymore. It's how they're able to sneak in their overwhelming amount of advertising.
  - SaltyBackendGuy 4y ago
    I just found this out. I thought by unsubscribing from the boosted posts that I would win back my feed... I was wrong.
  - jwalton 4y ago
    > There's no way to get away from them anymore. Well, you can just stop using Facebook. This is basically what I’ve done, because I can’t stand the ridiculously low signal to noise ratio. 90% if the content on FB is content I have no interest in, and I am just not willing to wade through it to get to the parts I am.
    - JackFr 4y ago
      Honestly it is so goddamn easy to quit Facebook. Really. Just stop. I haven’t been on Facebook in 10 years.
      - boplicity 4y ago
        I'm on Facebook largely because I have a chronic disease, and that's where the active support groups are. It's hard to get away from, because of that.
mostlysimilar 4y ago
It would be nice if we could evacuate walled-garden social media platforms and return to individual websites/blogs + RSS. RSS clients that empower the user to follow, sort, filter, and control their "news feed" of content from individual websites/blogs.
- leephillips 4y ago
  Is anything preventing you from just doing it? There are plenty of RSS/Atom readers.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    At least one complaint is that a lot of content has moved on. And maybe you can just ignore that content. Which I'm not sure would be wrong.
    - atestu 4y ago
      That's fair. There are a lot of big news sites that don't have RSS anymore, like axios.com
      - ghaff 4y ago
        And a lot of people who blogged more now do twitter threads. Or they just don't get started doing blogs.
      - IncRnd 4y ago
        But, they do: https://www.axios.com/feeds/feed.rss https://www.axios.com/feeds/feed.rss
        giobox 4y ago
        Your mileage may vary, but I only ever wanted RSS feeds that provide the actual article content. Just spitting out a feed of links back to the site with headlines is not how I or many others used RSS and RSS readers wayback when. Full article feeds have all but died out now anyway, another nail in the RSS coffin for me.
baggy_trough 4y ago
A non-chronological feed is a lousy feed.
- timbit42 4y ago
  The FBPurity web browser add-on lets you force your news feed to be chronological.
hayst4ck 4y ago
Wow, damninstersting.com! What a throwback. I remember loving the posts there back when digg was still popular. That being said, I have a hard time swallowing the premise of the article. > When we ask them what caused the assumption of our demise, they invariably cite the fact that our posts disappeared from their Facebook news feeds. I would expect reddit to frequently link to damninteresting, but I can't recall seeing them on reddit since digg was still around, which to me points out that there is probably a larger problem than extortion for traffic. I distinctly remember a post from the owner of damn interesting explaining lack of content and/or shutting down at some point too.
- lovingCranberry 4y ago
  The article tries to make the reader feel bad about Facebook by pointing out how the site can create negative emotions. However, the author does not seem to be aware of the fact that he is doing the same thing.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    Not at all the same. Most authors are deliberately trying to elicit emotion in their writing, and you can decide if you want to keep reading or not. Personally, I often get to a point where I realise my mood is being negatively affected by writing, and decide to move on. But that's part of the experience of reading in any media. The difference is that Facebook would be selective about what writing they would move you on to, in order to deliberately manipulate your emotional state over a long period of time. If you read the damninteresting post and felt bad, maybe you would decide to go check out xkcd or theoatmeal or something. But on Facebook, the next article would have a similar sentiment, so you didn't get the unicorn break you needed to maintain a good mood. The decision to move on was taken away from you, without your knowledge, in the interests of "research".
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      The important difference is that an author is just one person with a busy life who for a few hours a week writes to manipulate your emotional state. Facebook is a machine. It's a gargantuan, for-profit, always-on swarm of bots spread globally across multiple data centres all programmed to relentlessly manipulate your emotional state. When making moral comparisons people forget factors of scale and speed matter. Quantitative differences become qualitative differences.
lavventura 4y ago
Does it hold on for Instagram as well?
- toss1 4y ago
  YES, even more so -it's all designed to be toxic sludge. Avoid, expel, expunge, and escape from all FB properties with all possible haste.
rinze 4y ago
Relevant: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
- echelon 4y ago
  I'm glad The Oatmeal is taking a stand against this. The popup asking for my email felt genuine.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
60secs 4y ago
cache: https://web.archive.org/web/20220810205711/https://www.damninteresting.com/to-hell-with-facebook/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220810205711/https://www.damni...
lovingCranberry 4y ago
> Using Facebook has been scientifically demonstrated to cause depression Not to say that this line is wrong, but that the evidence for this claim is far from conclusive. The findings from such studies are mixed, partly due to differences in how variables are operationalised. I believe your interaction with digital technology can be a main driver of depression, but not in the way it's being framed. My psychologist (back when I was suicidal and in a strong depressive episode) told me, that I should have at least 20 minutes of face-to-face conversation to day. That I should go outside and find meaningful contacts, goals, and sense in life. I believe that a lot of people, who sit in front of their computer the whole day are missing this. It doesn't matter what medium you consume as much as what you're actually missing. The few girls which I met during therapy were mainly on tumblr, discord, instagram. I didn't use fb either. Welp, even HN didn't keep depression away! Having at least a 20 minute long face-to-face convo per day was honestly a great helper, besides the full-time therapy to stop my head thinking, and pills, of course. Just my two cents to this line. I agree with the other comments about non-chronological feeds being lousy. The article is really trying to push negative emotion towards facebook.
- alex_young 4y ago
  The "it's inconclusive" line is being pushed by FB pretty hard right now, and it feels pretty similar to the smoking industry telling people there's no proof cigarettes cause cancer 20 years ago. Obviously something is causing marked increases in teen depression and suicide attempts over the same period as the move to 24/7 social media. Sure, it's possible there are other factors, but isn't it obvious that social media is at least playing a significant role? https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/990234501/facebook-calls-links-to-depression-inconclusive-these-researchers-disagree https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/990234501/facebook-calls-link...
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    Just because something is doesn't mean it's facebook. Especially since basically no teens use facebook. Your other example also dates you pretty hard. The surgeon general report of 1964 said conclusively that cigarettes cause lung cancer and other diseases. 1964 is somewhat longer ago than 20 years. In short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGrfhsxxmdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGrfhsxxmdE
testhn6656 4y ago
mrwnmonm 4y ago
"The earliest known version of the idiom “the straw that broke the camel’s back” was written by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury in 1677." I am sorry, what?
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  Apparently this is the quotation: > The last Dictate of the Judgement, concerning the Good or Bad, that may follow on any Action, is not properly the whole Cause, but the last Part of it, and yet may be said to produce the Effect necessarily, in such Manner as the last Feather may be said to break a Horses Back, when there were so many laid on before as there want but that one to do it. But I have to admit, I hadn't known it was that recent and had assumed it to be biblical.
  - mrwnmonm 4y ago
    This is ancient, man.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
commandlinefan 4y ago
I use facebook because everybody else uses facebook. I actually tried to get away from it for years, but I eventually had to, under protest, get back on it because I was too disconnected.
- floppydiskette 4y ago
  This is always what people say, yet it’s not really true. You can always stay in touch with the people you care about via other means, and they with you. Yes, there might be some events you’ll get left out of, especially in the beginning when people aren’t aware you’re not on Facebook, but eventually you settle into a calmer social state. I deleted mine five years ago and I just have a bunch of independent group text threads with family and friends as well as slack/discord. It’s different, and not as conveniently centralized, but it’s certainly not impossible to have a fulfilling social life, go to events, and keep up with people without it. Maybe not so much the third cousin or old family friend. Personally, I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything positive by not being on it. Meanwhile, I get to avoid being bombarded by ads, opinions I wasn’t interested in, manufactured outrage, and feeling the need to share my every thought with “everyone”.
  - vanilla_nut 4y ago
    It is undeniably difficult to abstain from Facebook. There are local events, family events, businesses, family members, etc. that only operate within the walled garden. And the walls continue to rise, making it more and more difficult to peer at internal content from without. I've been Facebook (and Instagram)-free for years now, but my personal relationships have suffered for it. Fortunately Facebook is its own worst enemy here, since it keeps making its core products worse and worse for personal relationships. Ads in Messenger, suggested posts, hiding content from friends, dark patterns... it adds up, and over the past couple of years more and more of my friends have abandoned Facebook. Those friendships have largely rekindled. But the heavy users remain jacked in to the News Feed, utterly addicted, to the point where it's difficult to even reach them through another medium.
    - 4y ago
awejkfho 4y ago
most countries run on WhatsBook (aka WhatsApp) and InstaBook (aka Instagram). I can't get a drivers license appointment with the local goverment without a mobile number associated with WhatsBook. ...which is a cia/five-eyes dream. And same for InstaBook. You cannot relate to anyone or find business. Being banned (always without a reason) on InstaBooks means you just lost years of networking because you can't even see the list or contact anyone in any way if all you had was InstaBook direct messages before.
- Naga 4y ago
  What country requires you to have WhatsApp to get a driver’s license?
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    I assume it is less the government office and more the driving instructor. In my travels through Asia I often noticed how Zuckerberg's "Free Basics" / internet.org initiative which gives free data for reaching Facebook, WhatsApp etc. and Wikipedia completely dominates communication with any local business. SMS, e-mail, phone calls, ... cost money. WhatsApp via cell network is free.
    - wnissen 4y ago
      It is fascinating to get cell service in countries that don't have net neutrality. You can buy a 2GB/unlimited calls and texts plan from the largest Mexican operator for US$15. But after that you can get a plan that only allows social media like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram for US$2.50. As long as you stay within those walled gardens you pay almost nothing. Hard to imagine anyone breaking that monopoly when the alternative is more than 5x the price.
    - _int3_ 4y ago
      Didn't that initiative ended badly like 10 years ago? EDIT: No, it was "Facebook Zero"
jmyeet 4y ago
The central premise of this is that you only get distribution for your page's content if you pay for boosts. That might be true. I can't say. Nor can I say if that's an intentional product change. It's fun (and popular) to dunk on Facebook (sorry, "Meta") with good cause but you should always be wary of any story that affirms your own biases. I'm thinking specifically of Yelp's campaign against Google "stealing" their content. More than anything else, this is Yelp blame-shifting and pointing to the big bad Google while collecting a paycheck and doing absolutely nothing to improve your product for more than a decade. You can have a long career blaming other people for your woes but that doesn't inherently make those claims true. So does Meta require boosting to get the same distribution you previously got for free? Maybe. But it could also be that this site simply fell off.
- beuwisud 4y ago
  I'm a social manager for a marketing agency. The article is right about boosts. When facebook made the switch, my clients saw a huge drop in views across the board. Boosting posts on Facebook is now essential for business pages to grow an audience, in a way that wasn't true back in the day. You seem to be critical of the article while admitting that you don't really know enough to criticize it. It's a good instinct to check your biases, sure, but you shouldn't have a knee jerk reaction to dismiss something everytime it confirms a bias. Sometimes your bias is right.
wikitopian 4y ago
We need to admit our mistake here and ask MySpace Tom to take us back.
- manishsharan 4y ago
  Umm no. I hope that you are aware that Myspace was acquired by Rupert Murdoch (Fox News)
didgetmaster 4y ago
Even though I am a bit anti-social, I still have a Facebook page. I like to try and keep up with what is "happening" in the lives of family, friends, and neighbors. By "happening", I mean things like weddings, funerals, babies born, graduations, etc. I don't mean "What I had for breakfast!", "What movie I saw last night!" or "A running diary of my two week vacation" I never understand people who want to know every detail of all their friends lives and spend hours scrolling through posts every day. I hate having to scroll through hundreds of meaningless posts to find major events. Maybe Facebook has a way to do this and I haven't figured it out, but I wish it had a way to "Rank" your posts (1-10). Then every time you posted something you could assign it a rank (1 = "I got married", 2 = "My kid got married", 3 = "I went to Europe for the summer", ... 7 = "This is what I did in Spain", ... 10 = "This is what I ate for breakfast at a cafe in Spain"). Then you could filter events for each of your 'Facebook friends'. Some you would only want to see #1 posts. Others, you might go to level 4. Maybe you go to level 7 for your best friends.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  >By "happening", I mean things like weddings, funerals, babies born, graduations, etc. WhatsApp friends/family groups take care of this for me. If we are not close enough for that, I can wait until the next time I visit someone’s home to see pictures of life updates. I just wonder how Meta will monetize Whatsapp.
- SteveDR 4y ago
  > I never understand people who want to know every detail of all their friends lives and spend hours scrolling through posts every day. That’s like saying you don’t understand people who want to lose at slots. Those people don’t exist. They just trudge through the misses until they get their next hit.
  - didgetmaster 4y ago
    I guess I haven't become addicted because I only check my Facebook page about once a month.
- BbzzbB 4y ago
rdxm 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gzer0 4y ago
The non-facebook link in the article results in a 404.
black_13 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hayst4ck 4y ago
This article[1] describes a group of people inside of Facebook who attempted to measure who publishes content that results in negativity, hate, and divisiveness. The result (ctrl+f "Hate Bait dashboard" to see a chart) was the conservative media pushes stories that Facebook "wildly rewards" for driving engagement, incidentally through negativity. While that is a satisfying answer itself for why Facebook is the way it is (divisive media drives engagement and therefore profit), I think there is more to the story since Facebook employs people like you and I who care about making the world a better place. Why are they not enabled to make Facebook a more positive place? I think the impact of Peter Thiel on Facebook's policy is probably not well known, but I have to wonder if this is the root of what we see. Peter Thiel, an early investor and board member, appears to be a major MAGA supporter. From wikipedia: In June 2004, the company (facebook) moved to Palo Alto, California. It received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.[2] On 7 February 2022, Thiel announced he would not stand for re-election to the board of Facebook owner Meta at the 2022 annual stockholders' meeting and will leave after serving 17 years in order to support pro Donald Trump candidates in the 2022 United States elections." [3] There appears to be not just aligned monetary interest, but aligned political interest for keeping Facebook filled with division. [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-rules-hate-speech-employees-leaving https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-rules-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#2003%E2%80%932006:_Thefacebook,_Thiel_investment,_and_name_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#2003%E2%80%932006:_Th... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Facebook
- VHRanger 4y ago
  It doesnt matter that engineers and data scientists want to make the world a better place if the KPIs theyre told to optimize are inherently bad for society (like raw platform engagement)
timnetworks 4y ago
Amen.
TheBozzCL 4y ago
This reminds me of an experiment I started about 6 years ago. I was getting a little sick of the quality of the stuff Facebook was showing me, so I started fresh. I deleted my account, added back all my friends... but I didn't join any groups or like any pages. Even the ones my friends invited me to. Then, I started hiding and blocking anything that didn't come from one of my friends directly. That includes stuff they shared from pages or other friends of theirs. I also started managing the advertisers who had shared lists using any of my contact information (FB has a dashboard for that) and leaving 1-star reviews for all of them. This had hilarious effects on Facebook itself. After about a year of this, sometimes the newsfeed couldn't find stuff to show me, and it even completely broke a few times. Group recommendations started to veer towards substance abuse recovery support (I assume many people create new accounts to join them anonymously). Facebook would insist on showing me stuff from pages or friends of friends even after I hid them, because it seems I had blocked so much stuff their filters were not working right anymore. Not that they actually care. Of course, the fun I had breaking Facebook doesn't change the fact that this was a huge chore that I mostly kept doing out of spite and habit. When I realized I wasn't even using the platform to keep up with old friends anymore, I realized it was time to let go. The only FB product I keep using is WhatsApp, and it's only because I failed at convincing my friends and family to move to Signal, Telegram or Discord. It has too much of a stronghold in my country.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  This reminds me that the opposite behavior—deliberately engaging the platform in unexpected ways—also produces weird results. On platforms with less personalized or at least personalized content which is more stable over small time windows, I often like to “reward” ads for things I find reprehensible by clicking them to cost them that fraction of a cent. If I do this on Facebook my feed instantly becomes an ever weirder and increasingly crowded view into the thing I disingenuously clicked. It happens almost instantly, and occupies nearly all of my feed for at least a few days, even up to a couple weeks. Granted my FB usage is pretty minimal, I mostly post pics of my pup at night and check in to see the usual few reactions in the morning. So my own profile is based only on historical usage and whatever I haven’t been able to block/avoid them collecting on the web. Even so, that profile should be drastically unlikely to be interested in the deluge of ads it surfaces. I find it annoying every time, but I still sometimes click the bullshit, just to see how absurd everything gets so rapidly.
karaterobot 4y ago
> We should have done this so many times before. Well, yeah. Why didn't they? If Facebook effectively buried their posts years ago, behind what I'll call an extortion wall, why did they continue having a presence there at all? Their nominal reason for leaving now is that Facebook is a net negative force in the world, but that has been true since the beginning, pretty obvious for at least 13 years, and effectively a matter of public record for at least six years. I think of the people at Damned Interesting as being fairly smart and on the ball, so I refuse to believe they are just learning about this. What changed?
drewpayment 4y ago
Everything is better without Facebook. Can’t they just pay for a small one-time boost, announce their departure from Facebook and abandon the platform and spread the word auto their followers hopefully taking as many users off as possible.
beej71 4y ago
If you must Facebook or Instagram, go to their mobile page with uBlock Origin enabled. It's actually usable. At least for now. But really you should probably quit. :)
MarkusWandel 4y ago
My personal feed has devolved into a stream of clickbait with the occasional update from the few actual people who still post content. But what keeps me coming back? Marketplace, and a couple of special interest discussion groups (the kind that can, and do enforce civilized behaviour).
cmsonger 4y ago
Deleted account years ago when the TOS gave them yet more latitude to share my data. Have never once regretted it. Facebook: doing harm at scale.
thedebuglife 4y ago
I couldn’t agree more. Facebook is toxic and preys on the weak. Thank God its usage among young people is downtrending so fast. I didn’t have any social media for three years, and I loved it.
- dclusin 4y ago
  Past tense is really doing a lot of work here. A lot of peoples experience quitting Social media mirrors my experience with quitting smoking. On again off again.
  - thedebuglife 4y ago
    May the next time you quit be successful :)
SergeAx 4y ago
From their home page: > Weird Creature With No Butt May Not Be Our Ancient Ancestor After All > The Unfortunate Sex Life of the Banana > Lucid Decapitation That's a first grade Facebook content obviously, can't figure out what could go wrong with it.

255 points by mrzool 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

This explains a lot. About 2 years ago my feed suddenly began to be filled with posts from random pages I had followed. Some I had followed a decade ago and had not seen a post from in years. BTW, when I say filled I mean filled. Literally like 30 page posts with maybe one IRL friend or family post showing up in-between. It got so bad that to actually see the family photos and announcements I cared about I had to manually unsubscribe from almost every page I had ever followed. I guess I'll never know for sure but I'm going to guess "boosting" was to blame?

boplicity 4y ago
Once you unfollow every page, they'll start bombarding you with "suggested" posts from pages. There's no way to get away from them anymore. It's how they're able to sneak in their overwhelming amount of advertising.
- SaltyBackendGuy 4y ago
  I just found this out. I thought by unsubscribing from the boosted posts that I would win back my feed... I was wrong.
- jwalton 4y ago
  > There's no way to get away from them anymore. Well, you can just stop using Facebook. This is basically what I’ve done, because I can’t stand the ridiculously low signal to noise ratio. 90% if the content on FB is content I have no interest in, and I am just not willing to wade through it to get to the parts I am.
  - JackFr 4y ago
    Honestly it is so goddamn easy to quit Facebook. Really. Just stop. I haven’t been on Facebook in 10 years.
    - boplicity 4y ago
      I'm on Facebook largely because I have a chronic disease, and that's where the active support groups are. It's hard to get away from, because of that.

mostlysimilar 4y ago

It would be nice if we could evacuate walled-garden social media platforms and return to individual websites/blogs + RSS. RSS clients that empower the user to follow, sort, filter, and control their "news feed" of content from individual websites/blogs.

leephillips 4y ago
Is anything preventing you from just doing it? There are plenty of RSS/Atom readers.
- ghaff 4y ago
  At least one complaint is that a lot of content has moved on. And maybe you can just ignore that content. Which I'm not sure would be wrong.
  - atestu 4y ago
    That's fair. There are a lot of big news sites that don't have RSS anymore, like axios.com
    - ghaff 4y ago
      And a lot of people who blogged more now do twitter threads. Or they just don't get started doing blogs.
    - IncRnd 4y ago
      But, they do: https://www.axios.com/feeds/feed.rss https://www.axios.com/feeds/feed.rss
      - giobox 4y ago
        Your mileage may vary, but I only ever wanted RSS feeds that provide the actual article content. Just spitting out a feed of links back to the site with headlines is not how I or many others used RSS and RSS readers wayback when. Full article feeds have all but died out now anyway, another nail in the RSS coffin for me.

baggy_trough 4y ago

A non-chronological feed is a lousy feed.

timbit42 4y ago
The FBPurity web browser add-on lets you force your news feed to be chronological.

hayst4ck 4y ago

Wow, damninstersting.com! What a throwback. I remember loving the posts there back when digg was still popular. That being said, I have a hard time swallowing the premise of the article. > When we ask them what caused the assumption of our demise, they invariably cite the fact that our posts disappeared from their Facebook news feeds. I would expect reddit to frequently link to damninteresting, but I can't recall seeing them on reddit since digg was still around, which to me points out that there is probably a larger problem than extortion for traffic. I distinctly remember a post from the owner of damn interesting explaining lack of content and/or shutting down at some point too.

lovingCranberry 4y ago
The article tries to make the reader feel bad about Facebook by pointing out how the site can create negative emotions. However, the author does not seem to be aware of the fact that he is doing the same thing.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  Not at all the same. Most authors are deliberately trying to elicit emotion in their writing, and you can decide if you want to keep reading or not. Personally, I often get to a point where I realise my mood is being negatively affected by writing, and decide to move on. But that's part of the experience of reading in any media. The difference is that Facebook would be selective about what writing they would move you on to, in order to deliberately manipulate your emotional state over a long period of time. If you read the damninteresting post and felt bad, maybe you would decide to go check out xkcd or theoatmeal or something. But on Facebook, the next article would have a similar sentiment, so you didn't get the unicorn break you needed to maintain a good mood. The decision to move on was taken away from you, without your knowledge, in the interests of "research".
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    The important difference is that an author is just one person with a busy life who for a few hours a week writes to manipulate your emotional state. Facebook is a machine. It's a gargantuan, for-profit, always-on swarm of bots spread globally across multiple data centres all programmed to relentlessly manipulate your emotional state. When making moral comparisons people forget factors of scale and speed matter. Quantitative differences become qualitative differences.

lavventura 4y ago

Does it hold on for Instagram as well?

toss1 4y ago
YES, even more so -it's all designed to be toxic sludge. Avoid, expel, expunge, and escape from all FB properties with all possible haste.

rinze 4y ago

Relevant: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people

echelon 4y ago
I'm glad The Oatmeal is taking a stand against this. The popup asking for my email felt genuine.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

60secs 4y ago

cache: https://web.archive.org/web/20220810205711/https://www.damninteresting.com/to-hell-with-facebook/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220810205711/https://www.damni...

lovingCranberry 4y ago

> Using Facebook has been scientifically demonstrated to cause depression Not to say that this line is wrong, but that the evidence for this claim is far from conclusive. The findings from such studies are mixed, partly due to differences in how variables are operationalised. I believe your interaction with digital technology can be a main driver of depression, but not in the way it's being framed. My psychologist (back when I was suicidal and in a strong depressive episode) told me, that I should have at least 20 minutes of face-to-face conversation to day. That I should go outside and find meaningful contacts, goals, and sense in life. I believe that a lot of people, who sit in front of their computer the whole day are missing this. It doesn't matter what medium you consume as much as what you're actually missing. The few girls which I met during therapy were mainly on tumblr, discord, instagram. I didn't use fb either. Welp, even HN didn't keep depression away! Having at least a 20 minute long face-to-face convo per day was honestly a great helper, besides the full-time therapy to stop my head thinking, and pills, of course. Just my two cents to this line. I agree with the other comments about non-chronological feeds being lousy. The article is really trying to push negative emotion towards facebook.

alex_young 4y ago
The "it's inconclusive" line is being pushed by FB pretty hard right now, and it feels pretty similar to the smoking industry telling people there's no proof cigarettes cause cancer 20 years ago. Obviously something is causing marked increases in teen depression and suicide attempts over the same period as the move to 24/7 social media. Sure, it's possible there are other factors, but isn't it obvious that social media is at least playing a significant role? https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/990234501/facebook-calls-links-to-depression-inconclusive-these-researchers-disagree https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/990234501/facebook-calls-link...
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Just because something is doesn't mean it's facebook. Especially since basically no teens use facebook. Your other example also dates you pretty hard. The surgeon general report of 1964 said conclusively that cigarettes cause lung cancer and other diseases. 1964 is somewhat longer ago than 20 years. In short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGrfhsxxmdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGrfhsxxmdE

testhn6656 4y ago

mrwnmonm 4y ago

"The earliest known version of the idiom “the straw that broke the camel’s back” was written by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury in 1677." I am sorry, what?

adhesive_wombat 4y ago
Apparently this is the quotation: > The last Dictate of the Judgement, concerning the Good or Bad, that may follow on any Action, is not properly the whole Cause, but the last Part of it, and yet may be said to produce the Effect necessarily, in such Manner as the last Feather may be said to break a Horses Back, when there were so many laid on before as there want but that one to do it. But I have to admit, I hadn't known it was that recent and had assumed it to be biblical.
- mrwnmonm 4y ago
  This is ancient, man.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

commandlinefan 4y ago

I use facebook because everybody else uses facebook. I actually tried to get away from it for years, but I eventually had to, under protest, get back on it because I was too disconnected.

floppydiskette 4y ago
This is always what people say, yet it’s not really true. You can always stay in touch with the people you care about via other means, and they with you. Yes, there might be some events you’ll get left out of, especially in the beginning when people aren’t aware you’re not on Facebook, but eventually you settle into a calmer social state. I deleted mine five years ago and I just have a bunch of independent group text threads with family and friends as well as slack/discord. It’s different, and not as conveniently centralized, but it’s certainly not impossible to have a fulfilling social life, go to events, and keep up with people without it. Maybe not so much the third cousin or old family friend. Personally, I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything positive by not being on it. Meanwhile, I get to avoid being bombarded by ads, opinions I wasn’t interested in, manufactured outrage, and feeling the need to share my every thought with “everyone”.
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  It is undeniably difficult to abstain from Facebook. There are local events, family events, businesses, family members, etc. that only operate within the walled garden. And the walls continue to rise, making it more and more difficult to peer at internal content from without. I've been Facebook (and Instagram)-free for years now, but my personal relationships have suffered for it. Fortunately Facebook is its own worst enemy here, since it keeps making its core products worse and worse for personal relationships. Ads in Messenger, suggested posts, hiding content from friends, dark patterns... it adds up, and over the past couple of years more and more of my friends have abandoned Facebook. Those friendships have largely rekindled. But the heavy users remain jacked in to the News Feed, utterly addicted, to the point where it's difficult to even reach them through another medium.
  - 4y ago

awejkfho 4y ago

most countries run on WhatsBook (aka WhatsApp) and InstaBook (aka Instagram). I can't get a drivers license appointment with the local goverment without a mobile number associated with WhatsBook. ...which is a cia/five-eyes dream. And same for InstaBook. You cannot relate to anyone or find business. Being banned (always without a reason) on InstaBooks means you just lost years of networking because you can't even see the list or contact anyone in any way if all you had was InstaBook direct messages before.

Naga 4y ago
What country requires you to have WhatsApp to get a driver’s license?
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  I assume it is less the government office and more the driving instructor. In my travels through Asia I often noticed how Zuckerberg's "Free Basics" / internet.org initiative which gives free data for reaching Facebook, WhatsApp etc. and Wikipedia completely dominates communication with any local business. SMS, e-mail, phone calls, ... cost money. WhatsApp via cell network is free.
  - wnissen 4y ago
    It is fascinating to get cell service in countries that don't have net neutrality. You can buy a 2GB/unlimited calls and texts plan from the largest Mexican operator for US$15. But after that you can get a plan that only allows social media like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram for US$2.50. As long as you stay within those walled gardens you pay almost nothing. Hard to imagine anyone breaking that monopoly when the alternative is more than 5x the price.
  - _int3_ 4y ago
    Didn't that initiative ended badly like 10 years ago? EDIT: No, it was "Facebook Zero"

jmyeet 4y ago

The central premise of this is that you only get distribution for your page's content if you pay for boosts. That might be true. I can't say. Nor can I say if that's an intentional product change. It's fun (and popular) to dunk on Facebook (sorry, "Meta") with good cause but you should always be wary of any story that affirms your own biases. I'm thinking specifically of Yelp's campaign against Google "stealing" their content. More than anything else, this is Yelp blame-shifting and pointing to the big bad Google while collecting a paycheck and doing absolutely nothing to improve your product for more than a decade. You can have a long career blaming other people for your woes but that doesn't inherently make those claims true. So does Meta require boosting to get the same distribution you previously got for free? Maybe. But it could also be that this site simply fell off.

beuwisud 4y ago
I'm a social manager for a marketing agency. The article is right about boosts. When facebook made the switch, my clients saw a huge drop in views across the board. Boosting posts on Facebook is now essential for business pages to grow an audience, in a way that wasn't true back in the day. You seem to be critical of the article while admitting that you don't really know enough to criticize it. It's a good instinct to check your biases, sure, but you shouldn't have a knee jerk reaction to dismiss something everytime it confirms a bias. Sometimes your bias is right.

wikitopian 4y ago

We need to admit our mistake here and ask MySpace Tom to take us back.

manishsharan 4y ago
Umm no. I hope that you are aware that Myspace was acquired by Rupert Murdoch (Fox News)

didgetmaster 4y ago

Even though I am a bit anti-social, I still have a Facebook page. I like to try and keep up with what is "happening" in the lives of family, friends, and neighbors. By "happening", I mean things like weddings, funerals, babies born, graduations, etc. I don't mean "What I had for breakfast!", "What movie I saw last night!" or "A running diary of my two week vacation" I never understand people who want to know every detail of all their friends lives and spend hours scrolling through posts every day. I hate having to scroll through hundreds of meaningless posts to find major events. Maybe Facebook has a way to do this and I haven't figured it out, but I wish it had a way to "Rank" your posts (1-10). Then every time you posted something you could assign it a rank (1 = "I got married", 2 = "My kid got married", 3 = "I went to Europe for the summer", ... 7 = "This is what I did in Spain", ... 10 = "This is what I ate for breakfast at a cafe in Spain"). Then you could filter events for each of your 'Facebook friends'. Some you would only want to see #1 posts. Others, you might go to level 4. Maybe you go to level 7 for your best friends.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
>By "happening", I mean things like weddings, funerals, babies born, graduations, etc. WhatsApp friends/family groups take care of this for me. If we are not close enough for that, I can wait until the next time I visit someone’s home to see pictures of life updates. I just wonder how Meta will monetize Whatsapp.
SteveDR 4y ago
> I never understand people who want to know every detail of all their friends lives and spend hours scrolling through posts every day. That’s like saying you don’t understand people who want to lose at slots. Those people don’t exist. They just trudge through the misses until they get their next hit.
- didgetmaster 4y ago
  I guess I haven't become addicted because I only check my Facebook page about once a month.
BbzzbB 4y ago

rdxm 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gzer0 4y ago

The non-facebook link in the article results in a 404.

black_13 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hayst4ck 4y ago

This article[1] describes a group of people inside of Facebook who attempted to measure who publishes content that results in negativity, hate, and divisiveness. The result (ctrl+f "Hate Bait dashboard" to see a chart) was the conservative media pushes stories that Facebook "wildly rewards" for driving engagement, incidentally through negativity. While that is a satisfying answer itself for why Facebook is the way it is (divisive media drives engagement and therefore profit), I think there is more to the story since Facebook employs people like you and I who care about making the world a better place. Why are they not enabled to make Facebook a more positive place? I think the impact of Peter Thiel on Facebook's policy is probably not well known, but I have to wonder if this is the root of what we see. Peter Thiel, an early investor and board member, appears to be a major MAGA supporter. From wikipedia: In June 2004, the company (facebook) moved to Palo Alto, California. It received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.[2] On 7 February 2022, Thiel announced he would not stand for re-election to the board of Facebook owner Meta at the 2022 annual stockholders' meeting and will leave after serving 17 years in order to support pro Donald Trump candidates in the 2022 United States elections." [3] There appears to be not just aligned monetary interest, but aligned political interest for keeping Facebook filled with division. [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-rules-hate-speech-employees-leaving https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-rules-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#2003%E2%80%932006:_Thefacebook,_Thiel_investment,_and_name_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#2003%E2%80%932006:_Th... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Facebook

VHRanger 4y ago
It doesnt matter that engineers and data scientists want to make the world a better place if the KPIs theyre told to optimize are inherently bad for society (like raw platform engagement)

timnetworks 4y ago

Amen.

TheBozzCL 4y ago

This reminds me of an experiment I started about 6 years ago. I was getting a little sick of the quality of the stuff Facebook was showing me, so I started fresh. I deleted my account, added back all my friends... but I didn't join any groups or like any pages. Even the ones my friends invited me to. Then, I started hiding and blocking anything that didn't come from one of my friends directly. That includes stuff they shared from pages or other friends of theirs. I also started managing the advertisers who had shared lists using any of my contact information (FB has a dashboard for that) and leaving 1-star reviews for all of them. This had hilarious effects on Facebook itself. After about a year of this, sometimes the newsfeed couldn't find stuff to show me, and it even completely broke a few times. Group recommendations started to veer towards substance abuse recovery support (I assume many people create new accounts to join them anonymously). Facebook would insist on showing me stuff from pages or friends of friends even after I hid them, because it seems I had blocked so much stuff their filters were not working right anymore. Not that they actually care. Of course, the fun I had breaking Facebook doesn't change the fact that this was a huge chore that I mostly kept doing out of spite and habit. When I realized I wasn't even using the platform to keep up with old friends anymore, I realized it was time to let go. The only FB product I keep using is WhatsApp, and it's only because I failed at convincing my friends and family to move to Signal, Telegram or Discord. It has too much of a stronghold in my country.

eyelidlessness 4y ago
This reminds me that the opposite behavior—deliberately engaging the platform in unexpected ways—also produces weird results. On platforms with less personalized or at least personalized content which is more stable over small time windows, I often like to “reward” ads for things I find reprehensible by clicking them to cost them that fraction of a cent. If I do this on Facebook my feed instantly becomes an ever weirder and increasingly crowded view into the thing I disingenuously clicked. It happens almost instantly, and occupies nearly all of my feed for at least a few days, even up to a couple weeks. Granted my FB usage is pretty minimal, I mostly post pics of my pup at night and check in to see the usual few reactions in the morning. So my own profile is based only on historical usage and whatever I haven’t been able to block/avoid them collecting on the web. Even so, that profile should be drastically unlikely to be interested in the deluge of ads it surfaces. I find it annoying every time, but I still sometimes click the bullshit, just to see how absurd everything gets so rapidly.

karaterobot 4y ago

> We should have done this so many times before. Well, yeah. Why didn't they? If Facebook effectively buried their posts years ago, behind what I'll call an extortion wall, why did they continue having a presence there at all? Their nominal reason for leaving now is that Facebook is a net negative force in the world, but that has been true since the beginning, pretty obvious for at least 13 years, and effectively a matter of public record for at least six years. I think of the people at Damned Interesting as being fairly smart and on the ball, so I refuse to believe they are just learning about this. What changed?

drewpayment 4y ago

Everything is better without Facebook. Can’t they just pay for a small one-time boost, announce their departure from Facebook and abandon the platform and spread the word auto their followers hopefully taking as many users off as possible.

beej71 4y ago

If you must Facebook or Instagram, go to their mobile page with uBlock Origin enabled. It's actually usable. At least for now. But really you should probably quit. :)

MarkusWandel 4y ago

My personal feed has devolved into a stream of clickbait with the occasional update from the few actual people who still post content. But what keeps me coming back? Marketplace, and a couple of special interest discussion groups (the kind that can, and do enforce civilized behaviour).

cmsonger 4y ago

Deleted account years ago when the TOS gave them yet more latitude to share my data. Have never once regretted it. Facebook: doing harm at scale.

thedebuglife 4y ago

I couldn’t agree more. Facebook is toxic and preys on the weak. Thank God its usage among young people is downtrending so fast. I didn’t have any social media for three years, and I loved it.

dclusin 4y ago
Past tense is really doing a lot of work here. A lot of peoples experience quitting Social media mirrors my experience with quitting smoking. On again off again.
- thedebuglife 4y ago
  May the next time you quit be successful :)

SergeAx 4y ago

From their home page: > Weird Creature With No Butt May Not Be Our Ancient Ancestor After All > The Unfortunate Sex Life of the Banana > Lucid Decapitation That's a first grade Facebook content obviously, can't figure out what could go wrong with it.