My sister now posts her baby pics to me via whatsapp (yup: facebook owned) and email. Mom SMSes me when she wants to contact me. Dad emails me from overseas bi-weekly.
Other people, I meet over a beer, or a coffee. And the best of it all? You have actual stuff to talk about. No! I did not know you had a second child already. Wow! Do tell!
I cannot emphasize how positive this is. I deleted my Facebook account about two years ago, and it's amazing how much more intimate my conversations with friends have become for precisely this reason. They now can't assume that I know things that are going on in their lives, which was hard at first (due to social pressure—"What? You haven't heard?") but became a blessing really quickly. I didn't realize how shallow some of my interactions with friends and acquaintances were until I dumped social media. By actually having a deep, face-to-face conversation with someone, you're much less likely to skip over some of the more nuanced bits that you're assumed to already know.
I quit Facebook a year ago - I had 800+ friends. I was only "close" (subjectively) with a slim fraction of that. Now, I text, call, send birthday cards, and use other means to communicate with those I truly care about. Not that I don't care about the other, it's more of my way to prioritize the people who I've shared more life experiences with and/or can better relate to.
If I see the others who aren't in that close circle, we have plenty to talk about. If I see my close friends, well, we do as close friends always have done.
No offense, but I would argue the notion of needing "presence" in people's lives contains some inherent narcissism which is also prevalent on social media; and to be fair, the other piece is the need for belonging. True, it was a tough pill to swallow when first disconnecting, but over time this faded and via the other means I suggested, I've found I get that same level of belonging.
I had a brief 1-2 year stint on FB where someone finally convinced me to get on it, and I had 13 friends on there. All of them people I know and hang out with regularly in real life. All I ever did was post funny things I came across, and I eventually got pushed off during the election cycle because I got REALLY sick of seeing all the misinformation about hilary and trump (both sides were doing it).
I just don't understand FB.
Honestly—there’s no reason a social network can’t be decentralized these days. Give people back their friendship circles and their information.
My understanding of Facebook is that it taps into human necessity for socialization, but it’s only masquerading as such and yields too-many, and over-stimulating relationships based on false pretense.
To me, FB is a way to keep in touch with non close friends and relatives. I know what my close friends are up to anyway, but without FB I'd have no clue what the "next tier" 50-100 people do.
I only tend to post once every few weeks, but I enjoy reading about what people I know are doing.
Facebook groups have been a great way for neighborhoods and communities to come together.
I would argue that we would have organically developed much better online ways for neighbourhoods and communities to come together, absent the monopolistic Facebook.
You know what a blog is, what photo-sharing is, and RSS too. You know how people are social, a little bit vain, and like to brag. I'm sure you know about ad-tech, data-mining, EULAs nobody reads and dark patterns. I'm sure you've used email and chat, and you know deep down all email clients suck anyway.
Mix it all together, put it on phones with push notifications, and boom, you have Facebook and control half the Internet.
People who use Facebook mostly do so because they don't understand how it works, in some cases they do understand but prefer to be ignorant.
Trying to keep up with 200-300 people sounds fucking exhausting to me, yet this is the reason most people have given in response as to why they use FB.
I just have to question if these people actually do anything in life besides socialize.
To add more information, FB doesn't actually connect you to 200-2000 people literally. When you think of RSS, you think of seeing every single article that you subscribed to, but FB doesn't do that. It shows you only some of the what others publish, and it uses its dark algorithms to make sure those are the most engaging and addictive stories (reposts of click-bait titles, trending gossip, politically divisive arguments, etc.). And then it pads the feed with ads and more click-bait.
Actually the "genius" of FB is to tap into the social-reward centers of the brain by letting you inflate the number of friends, the number of followers, number of notifications, while still trimming down the firehose of pictures of your second cousin's roommate's tacos. Conversely, it lets you post your food pictures into the void and feel that others care about it, without actually bothering too many people.
To answer your question directly, yes these people spend inordinate amount of time doing this, but I believe they feel it is a good thing, to have a big social circle and feel connected to all those people--without always seeing how they were manipulated into being addicted to something that is not real socialization.
I get more value out of being useful than socializing. That's just the way I'm built.
This has been my experience. It's a valid pragmatic argument for staying, and a valid principled argument for opting out.
I have not had this issue since quitting facebook around 2011. But then again I have clearly notified those people that are actually my friends that if they want to include me they need to call or email or something like that. Nobody has issues with that and fully understand my desire to stay away from facebook.
And they think the same of you. If their preferred method of communication is Facebook message, are you really a friend if you don’t care?
Of course there are many ways to state that preference, ranging from "you're an idiot if you want to keep that advertising agency alive" to "I don't feel comfortable putting details of my personal life, including our friendship, on the Internet for private companies to profit". If someone truly belittled the second, then yeah, they aren't a friend.
It's hardly the same though, it's not like the other commenter's expressing a preference for a call or text where the other would be equally possible. It's exceedingly unlikely that someone with the capacity to have a preference for Facebook messaging is unable to call or text; the reverse isn't true.
Saying 'I would rather we texted' vs. email or whatever is not the same as 'I would rather you sign up for this service and use it to contact me'.
For information I still have the same set of core friends from elementary school so it has not stopped anyone that I actually care about from contacting me.
Edit: and yes as the a side comment here suggest I do not say this in a patronising way, I just explain why I am not on facebook and that there are other ways to contact me.
I would believe it if someone didn't want to use cellphones at all, for moral reasons, but that person wouldn't have a Facebook account anyway.
An empty FaceBook account that does nothing but notify you when someone invites you to an event? Requires no maintenance.
Asking someone to remember that you need to be specially invited because you're special -- that's ongoing maintenance right there.
However, I'm on the edge of leaving again because moderation is very difficult.
The problem with social media is that using it in moderation is an uphill battle against our own nature. It is designed to be addictive. Much like an alcoholic that keeps a bottle of vodka in the freezer and the dieter who keeps chips in the cupboard, you will constantly have to exercise restraint to keep yourself in check.
If you've woken up to the downsides of social media, and are trying to moderate, is that struggle worth the upside? I'm not so sure any more.
Few enough that I can still participate and get updates about friends and interests without feeling the urge to check multiple times per day. If anything "important" happens to someone I'm not following, my friends are kind enough to fill me in if it's interesting.
In some ways, my mental health has improved since I'm not chasing online validation/FOMO all the time. My current friends don't use Facebook a ton, so organizing happens via text or other methods.
But for my college/HS friends, I'm definitely less close because I'm not present in the online arenas that they socialize in. Hopefully I can get back into social media without partaking in all the behaviors that made me quit it in the fist place.
I wish there were ways to distinguish between periodically checking FB and essentially being addicted to it (several times daily use). Perhaps we could employ language like "I use FB" versus "FB uses me". Only half-joking...
I almost think it's my own fault as I never interacted with those posts about friends having kids or getting new jobs (at least not on Facebook), so I wonder if the algorithms just showed me less and less of my own friends content. If it matters I only ever looked at FB through the mobile web browser - I didn't have the app and never looked at it on my computer.
Why focus on pretending you’re all still in school? Live in the now.
For me personally, I didn’t see much value in getting second hand info from Facebook. It felt too impersonal and distant.
If I cared about someone getting pregnant or married or whatever I would have preferred the direct conversation over the social optimisation of receiving a broadcast. And if we weren’t close enough for that, then I’m sure it’d come up in conversation at some point. No need to be looking out for an announcement.
Getting rid of social media was basically my decision to cultivate a small handful of meaningful, high quality relationships over a much larger number of less meaningful associations. I see a lot more people in person now I’ve done that.
As an aside, it was as if one aspect of my depression was fuelled by having too much of the rest of the world in my head and not enough of myself, so it was a great move for self-care too.
As opposed to faux-connected through FB though?
I guess it depends on where you are in life on how much it matters to you. Personally, I'm single and live alone, so it's nice to keep a superficial awareness of people I met in school not that many years ago. If I were married and having my own kids, I'd probably have enough social contact at home and through my wife and kids that I don't really care about observing others' lives from 1000 feet away.
Either that is a misplaced apostrophe, or you are revealing more about your family than you intended! Punctuation is important :)
I think the key is really just using the services in ways where they can't dark pattern you into engaging with them. So notifications get shut off and anything you can do to turn off "endless scroll" mode is worth doing.
Facebook was originally designed as a sort of directory or phone book type page for people and that's still what it's best at. Instead of using the regular page, which just tries to dark pattern you into engaging with it, I've bookmarked mbasic.facebook.com which lets you see only the top 5 to 10 posts on your feed at a time and then I shut off all notifications that weren't sent to me directly.
Once I got rid of the "one more post" effect of wanting to keep reading, I found myself spending a lot more time going through my RSS feed, which is nice as that's content I find much more edifying.
Edit: same comment as below oops
Maybe you'll move locations to be closer to the people you love. I've often wondered if I might have lived in a different country if I couldn't watch my friends from afar.
Up until a few years ago, it wasn't common but it wasn't super rare. I knew more than a handful of people who didn't have any Facebook/Insta/etc. accounts and mostly I just assumed they wanted to keep their personal lives private from friends and colleagues.
In recent years though, I can only think of two persons that I know directly who I could not find a trace of online. The first was a smart programmer I assumed to be into HN privacy-activism type groups or something like Anonymous. The second, which was more baffling, is someone I knew in college that appears to have disappeared off the face of the planet, and I thought maybe he had died until someone told me he "doesn't want to be found".
When people do gossip now a days, it's about politics, or celebrities.
Perhaps this is what the network wants you to think? Or how your behavior has been modified by too much reliance on this technology?
Really, I’m starting to think that opting out of social media altogether is a bit like opting to be a hermit in today’s society. Sure, I’m not advocating posting every 5 minutes on Facebook and getting into dumb arguments, but it really feels like opting out is a way of putting walls between yourself and the rest of the world (that is on social media). You will miss out on news of friends having kids, graduating college, going to college, getting new jobs, and even planning events together since many events are organized officially on Facebook - from free local concerts to your friends bachelors party. Many people just go through Facebook and create a private event and invite their Facebook friends when they have a birthday gathering nowadays. You will miss out on these if you opt-out completely. I did.