My FB was becoming a ghost town 5 years ago, so I stopped using it, then deleted my "real" profile. I maintain a shell account now for Marketplace, Groups, and Messenger. I have the "light" apps on my phone with all requested permissions denied.
Marketplace SUCKS from a usability perspective, but it's become equally as active than CL in my area.
Groups are a goldmine of information - my neighborhood has one that is active, I have an active one for my model vehicle, and there are B/S/T groups that are nice, as well. Groups have effectively killed the old Forums/Bulletin Boards.
Messenger is required if you want to buy/sell, etc. I don't use it for anything useful.
There's extra financial value in knowing who is attracted to whom.
I cannot imagine just how terrible the privacy must be for people dating via Facebook.
I figured out that Facebook itself is not awful. It may be in many ways, but it is my 'friends' who drove me away. When I was around them they seemed semi normal. But put them behind a keyboard and the truth came out of what they were and how they really thought about me and my beliefs. Their inner keyboard warrior came out. They were not real friends but 'friends' of proximity. I had confused friendly with friends.
I had similar feelings before I left Facebook. This sort of thing even irked me back in high school, but I couldn't quite put my finger on why.
Every time it was my birthday, my timeline (or "wall" as I think it's known on FB) was inundated with Birthday wishes and greetings. Most of these greetings and wishes came from people who very rarely, if ever, talked to me on FB and oftentimes, never talked to me in real life (Usually my "true" friends would send me a direct message and wish me a Happy Birthday), and these people most certainly wouldn't know when my birthday was if Facebook hadn't reminded them.
It all just seemed so disingenuous, fake, and at the risk of exaggerating, inhuman. It all felt so joyless and disconnected. Before I left FB, I simply got to the point where I wouldn't comment, like, or interact with these birthday wishes in any way. Eventually, the amount of birthday wishes I received became less and less. Thinking about it now, I probably should've just removed my birthday from Facebook.
Regardless, I'm happier without Facebook and I certainly don't miss it.
Was this back when the CDC guidelines were saying the same? I can't fault lay people for placing faith in the words of supposed science/data-driven institutions (if that was what was happening rather than people spouting ridiculous conspiracy theories).
Is this an equally dumbfounding use?
It would be silly if your reason for quitting FB was because you were opposed to them, and then you ran onto IG anyway. Sort of silly when that happens.
I don't have any Facebook apps on my phone, tablet, or computer. I use Instagram and Facebook with Firefox with them locked to a Facebook container. For Instagram, I use User/Agent Switcher to tell it that I'm on an iPad using Safari. It works well except that Facebook won't let me set up two-factor authentication and asks me every time to download the app.
Every once in a while Facebook asks me to join the Facebook and Instagram accounts and I refuse to do so. I assume that they're combining the data anyway. But Facebook does let me use a security key as 2FA and I don't want to lose that.
The major downside is that I can't post to Instagram. But that would bother me more if I were a better photographer or my kids were younger than teenagers.
I also use Fluff-Busting Purity (formerly Facebook Purity) and two kinds of ad-blockers (AdGuard DNS on the router, uBlock Origin in the browser).
Instagram was better for the longest time. I noticed a trend of friends using Facebook for events and nothing else, but they were still posting personal content on Instagram. But during this presidency, with everyone being politically charged and angry all the time, I noticed people were posting political content to leverage their Instagram followers, and now that too is overwhelmed by it.
All that said, Twitter comes off to me as the biggest cesspool. Its entire format is built around short hot takes, sniping at others, "virality", and other societal dark patterns. Reddit is almost at the same degree of cesspoolery with their new designs. Both are also a lot more of an echo chamber than Facebook for me, although I do like that you can use them anonymously (without a real name). Personally, I really can't see why all this hatred is directed at Facebook when Twitter and Reddit are around.
But this isn't a binary choice either. I do get the sense that society would be better off if everyone disengaged and de-escalated from social media in general. It's just hard because it's an effective way to spread one's (political) ideas and gain exposure, and so it's a bit like asking for mutual disarmament.
Can't speak for anyone else, but as OP my post isn't about deleting Facebook because social media is rampant cesspool of dopamine hits. But because Facebook, Inc is an evil company and we shouldn't use their products.
Sincere question: what do you mean by this? I don't perceive them as "evil". That comes off as a vague and subjective accusation. What specifically are you referring to? What makes them worse than other organizations?
Twitter and Reddit aren't even playing the same game, let alone in the same league.
This is typical for every company to the extent that they have the data to do it. Reddit for example, can personalize your feed without needing an account, because they are able to track your behavior based on IP address. Google does the same thing across all their properties, such as YouTube, and arguably their presence is more pervasive than Facebook's.
Everybody I know is on Whatsapp/Signal, so I really don't feel like I'm missing anything.
Same, and in addition, everyone I know has since moved to Instagram. I think what Google+ wanted to do with "circles", Twitter and Instagram did it more elegantly with "follows".
Reading between the lines of this presentation at f8 [0], I think, even Zuck's resigned to the fact that Facebook the company is now all about WhatsApp and Instagram.
The more I think about the WhatsApp deal, the less it makes sense for Jan and Brian to have cashed out. It could have been a different world had they not.
I wish I could say this. It seems the US is the only country where everyone wants to continue using SMS/iMessage for everything. It's literally the only way to communicate with most of my American friends.
Most non-nerd friends just do what they’re told and love the idea of “Signal is WhatsApp but Zuck isn’t reading your messages”.
I use Whatsapp regularly and it still can't hold a candle to iMessage. I blame Android adoption, and the fact that Google never built an iMessage competitor so they are stuck with 20 year old SMS.
Not only do I not miss it, I'm actively hostile towards Facebook for the damage it does to the idea of friendship.
There are people I know from mailing lists and newsgroups and fora who are my acquaintances, even though we've never met in meatspace. I have cried over their deaths and been happy at news of their joys.
There are people I remember from tens of years and thousands of miles away, whom I hear from more regularly because of social media networks. That's nice. It's low effort for me, it's low effort for them, and we all get more out of it than we put in.
If what you mean by the word "friend" is, someone who will answer your call in the middle of the night and bring over a shovel and a tarp -- I have only a few of those. Those relationships take more work, and are not fully sustained by social media, though they may be partially supported by it.
However, today due to everyone moving to Facebook and other content silos with a mobile app, independent website forums are severely hollowing out. On some of the forums about various hobbies that I follow, the most active posters left are often extremely curmudgeonly elderly people, and if they hail from very polarized countries they are quick to descend into political rants to the point that they do little on-topic posting. Facebook isn’t a satisfying place for friendship due to the feeds and algorithms, and independent forums can now be high-stress environments. Consequently, the internet feels like a more lonely place than before.
Tools being tools, some of them are better than others.
Here's a list of subjects that I know people have bonded over:
- fandom of specific works - generic fandom - fish aquaria - genre literature - a period of history - games (video, board, role-playing, LARP...) - sports - watches - cars - appliance repair - carpentry
You need strict enough moderation that firefights and trolls are quashed immediately, and loose enough moderation that the occasional side-conversation or on-topic rant is allowed through. Proper threading and the ability to know what you've already seen and what is new: those are also necessary.
The internet is what you make of it.
Although the instagram platform is more active than ever for browsing chatting and comments, the individuals aren't posting often and the individual activity has shifted to TikTok.
People used to post images every day on Instagram, that's down to like once a year maybe amongst my friends in their 20s and younger.
With the ephemeral stories being common-ish.
And it seems like most of the viral stories/reels/IGTV are just resyndicated from TikTok.
Meme/activist/comedian/lifestyle brand accounts are like all the static post activity. Which is a lot of activity and growing, but I don't think it is fulfilling the "social network" itch that people think it is, the itch where people have just gotten used to seeing a feed/stream of their friends over the last 15 years. I think that has moved on elsewhere.
So, whenever someone makes a fuss about that huge importance of deleting Facebook and how supposedly hard it is - I genuinely fail to understand the problem.
I have a house in a remote community where it's hard to find contractors and the like. The local FB group has been invaluable in finding local resources, getting to know neighbors, and alerting neighbors of local conditions. The alternatives are basically Nextdoor and craigslist which suffer from network effects among other things.
Of course people use the group as a soap-box or meme/clickbait sprayer at times, but the mods do a pretty good job such that there are very few wortwhile "forked" groups.
Similar applies for a few other interest groups I'm in. Groups.io is starting to eat their lunch on that, and reddit is gaining steam in the mainstream, but again network effects are strong.
When using an app container and limiting engagement with clickbait content, there is still some human value in participating on facebook in these very limited ways.
in addition there are many hobbies groups on FB that have no alternative venue other than old-style forums which suck
and finally FB marketplace has been very useful to me ,especially with this corona situation causing store closings and delays in shipping
Whatsapp for group communication with friends overseas.
Both of these apps don't have the BS that comes with Facebook.
If you still want to get your fix, TikTok is better platform for getting a mix of interesting content from normal people.
Aside from using Facebook messenger to chat, I don't see a good purpose for Facebook any more, maybe the groups are useful for people?
One group I'm in, entirely devoted to online games, has switched to Discord. But there is a 0% chance Discord will be adopted by the rest of the groups/friends that use FB event scheduling and messaging.
From what friends have said, FB groups features (scheduling, etc.) are what keep them on that platform, along with messenger.
My first wake up call came from Trump winning the 2016 election, 2nd from Cambridge Analytica. 3rd, The Social Dilemma put the nail in the coffin.
I just could not see myself contributing directly or indirectly to these externalities. The costs outweighed the benefits (if any at all)
PS: I know this post might be marketing for you, but ultimately all social networks will become polluted as long as they encourage the weaknesses/dark sides of human nature. I don’t see Spacehey being any different.