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My own experiences with Facebook have been pretty disappointing. I ended up reconnecting with old friends I'd lost touch with over the years, only to find out t

My own experiences with Facebook have been pretty disappointing. I ended up reconnecting with old friends I'd lost touch with over the years, only to find out that with the exception of exactly one of them, they all had political, religious, and social views vastly different than my own. A large number of them also apparently spend what I would consider a very unhealthy amount of time on Facebook posting angry, racist messages that just seem to continually make them angrier and more racist as they feed off of one another. I've lost a lot of respect for a lot of people because of the things they put on Facebook. It's like, they log on to the site and all filters go off. I've found that with the exception of 2 or 3 people who only seem to communicate with the outside world via their Facebook account, everyone that I follow whom I genuinely want to keep up with are ones I was already talking to through other channels. Myself and most of my friends use Skype quite extensively for keeping in touch. Others email and use Google Talk.

krenoten 14y ago
To be honest - it is actually somewhat important for racist people to be able to communicate in the open like that. You don't want to sweep your problems under the carpet and pretend they don't exist. Facebook has shown a lot of people just how far from dead racism really is. I don't use FB at all anymore, I have a deactivated account that I will log into once every year and a half or so when I need somebody's phone number and I don't have their email address. There really is a lot of value in how connected the network is, but to be honest I find my life to be infinitely more satisfying when I'm not spending most of it comparing myself to others. If I want to communicate, I like to maximize bandwidth, and use phone if I can't video chat or be in person. I hate texting because of how little communication happens compared with a phone call. So many misunderstandings happen when you strip out the vocal layer and limit the text length so drastically.
jff 14y ago
> My own experiences with Facebook have been pretty disappointing. I ended up reconnecting with old friends I'd lost touch with over the years, only to find out that with the exception of exactly one of them, they all had political, religious, and social views vastly different than my own. "I used to like that guy, until I found out he thinks things what are different from things I think" (racists are still terrible OK)
- kellishaver 14y ago
  Oh, sorry. I can see how that was misinterpreted. I don't mind that they have different opinions/views, I just meant that after reconnecting came the realization that we have virtually nothing in common anymore, so I didn't really derive any benefit out of it in the sense that it didn't really rekindle any old friendships. Nothing wrong with that at all and I can respect that, our lives just went in different directions. The only ones where I was really bothered/lost respect where the ones constantly posting the racist/hateful stuff, which certainly wasn't all of them, but a large enough portion that a combination of these two factors has just made the whole experience useless at best.

krenoten 14y ago

To be honest - it is actually somewhat important for racist people to be able to communicate in the open like that. You don't want to sweep your problems under the carpet and pretend they don't exist. Facebook has shown a lot of people just how far from dead racism really is. I don't use FB at all anymore, I have a deactivated account that I will log into once every year and a half or so when I need somebody's phone number and I don't have their email address. There really is a lot of value in how connected the network is, but to be honest I find my life to be infinitely more satisfying when I'm not spending most of it comparing myself to others. If I want to communicate, I like to maximize bandwidth, and use phone if I can't video chat or be in person. I hate texting because of how little communication happens compared with a phone call. So many misunderstandings happen when you strip out the vocal layer and limit the text length so drastically.

jff 14y ago

> My own experiences with Facebook have been pretty disappointing. I ended up reconnecting with old friends I'd lost touch with over the years, only to find out that with the exception of exactly one of them, they all had political, religious, and social views vastly different than my own. "I used to like that guy, until I found out he thinks things what are different from things I think" (racists are still terrible OK)

kellishaver 14y ago
Oh, sorry. I can see how that was misinterpreted. I don't mind that they have different opinions/views, I just meant that after reconnecting came the realization that we have virtually nothing in common anymore, so I didn't really derive any benefit out of it in the sense that it didn't really rekindle any old friendships. Nothing wrong with that at all and I can respect that, our lives just went in different directions. The only ones where I was really bothered/lost respect where the ones constantly posting the racist/hateful stuff, which certainly wasn't all of them, but a large enough portion that a combination of these two factors has just made the whole experience useless at best.