Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society?
by brightball on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @05:40PM
(#13871714)
I've noticed largely the same thing. I tried to purge it by unfollowing / hiding every major news source without blocking friends because MOST of the negative stuff in my feed was attached to links in those news sources.
The algorithm knows how to make you engage though. I'd get lost in really good debates with people over topics that we've discussed a before...and it just struck me about what a time sink it is because no matter how much we discuss things, nothing changes. All I'm doing it generating ad traffic for Facebook because they're keeping me engaged.
It's a lot easier to like a baby picture and walk away than it is to walk away from a topic you like discussing (and there are a lot of political topics that I like discussing). One of my good friends is a teacher and at some point in our discussion I made an observation that I'd never really thought of before (that had some negative implications)...and he did not take it well and got really, really upset with me. I apologized by phone, we cleared it up...
But at that point it really just finally hit the "enough is enough" point where nothing good is coming from this activity anymore...and I was done. And it's been great...except that now I notice how much time other people spend on it a lot more.
Regarding the observation point of contention, we were discussing the limits of current attempts at implementing school choice where schools had to opt in rather than giving people the money to go wherever they wanted. I realized that by including any type of religious name in a school, it basically legalized discrimination against poorer families since government funds wouldn't allow them to attend those schools. Struck me as an angle of the discussion I hadn't considered before and he took it as implying that he endorsed discrimination against those families - which would understandably upset anyone.
The algorithm knows how to make you engage though. I'd get lost in really good debates with people over topics that we've discussed a before...and it just struck me about what a time sink it is because no matter how much we discuss things, nothing changes. All I'm doing it generating ad traffic for Facebook because they're keeping me engaged.
It's a lot easier to like a baby picture and walk away than it is to walk away from a topic you like discussing (and there are a lot of political topics that I like discussing). One of my good friends is a teacher and at some point in our discussion I made an observation that I'd never really thought of before (that had some negative implications)...and he did not take it well and got really, really upset with me. I apologized by phone, we cleared it up...
But at that point it really just finally hit the "enough is enough" point where nothing good is coming from this activity anymore...and I was done. And it's been great...except that now I notice how much time other people spend on it a lot more.
Regarding the observation point of contention, we were discussing the limits of current attempts at implementing school choice where schools had to opt in rather than giving people the money to go wherever they wanted. I realized that by including any type of religious name in a school, it basically legalized discrimination against poorer families since government funds wouldn't allow them to attend those schools. Struck me as an angle of the discussion I hadn't considered before and he took it as implying that he endorsed discrimination against those families - which would understandably upset anyone.