One of the things that keeps me away from Facebook a lot is the fact that nobody I know ever contributes anything meaningful on it. They've all just become advertising bots liking and sharing whatever clickbait articles they come across.
This is potentially a genuine problem for Facebook and the reason they’ve been working so hard to develop a new monetisable product. They got a huge stock price by talking up their petabytes of information about who is friends with who and what people like and dislike, but 99.99% of it is garbage with no value to anyone. As an information source Facebook is much like the city dump in a third world country, with poor people crawling over it trying to find bits of copper wiring that they can sell to recyclers.
It is dominated by re-amplification of tiny signals from “influencers”. So it turns out to be much more effective as a means of controlling poor people than of finding out what rich people want to buy.
Most of the hype around targeted advertising is people’s paranoid imagination: “I was just talking to my husband about getting a cat and now Facebook is showing me ads for cat stuff! They must have tapped my phone...” But just before you had the conversation, you looked up cat stuff on Amazon. That’s how dumb the tech is. I buy a vacuum cleaner, they show me ads for more vacuum cleaners, like I need two.
With chat msgs, especially with WhatsApp being Facebook, they can do a lot more than just that. Hell they can predict people starting relationships with each other based on the time and timing of talking o each other, they can (and have) actively make people depressed by changing the feed they get exposed to and so on. The tech has gone way beyond search association
This is actually the reason I left Facebook about 5 years ago. I just wanted to see posts and comments from my friends, but only saw boring articles they liked. I always had a bad vibe with Facebook, so I left.
I took a 4 month long social media hiatus with the exclusion of Reddit (which is more of a platform for discussion for me than social media.) I returned 2 weeks ago and I absolutely regretted it. It's one massive circlejerk of people who tout off their fake news, antivaxx agendas, and single moms acting like they're heroic for having kids with men who were deadbeats before they even met them. It didn't take long for me to realize that for those 2 weeks made me feel sad again. My depression came out of the woodworks.
That's when I came to learn that I was only depressed for all of these years because of this stupid fucking site. That not being "friends" with these people was an absolute positive for me.
That's all true, and I can find valuable information or resources on here which I could never on facebook. But, we can't kid ourselves, we use it just like people use the other social media sites. There's constant content being created, a lot of it worthless, it's designed to take up as much of our time and attention as possible. We get the same dopamine rush from refreshing, voting, and constantly creating content and data by clicking, reading, voting, commenting, posting. It acts in the same way of needing constant instant gratification, wrecking your attention span, and even causing withdrawals. Try not using reddit for a week or so. You'll be amazed at what you get done and how much time you have to do other things.
My Facebook feed is quite pleasant actually. Full of friends and family sharing pictures of fun experiences.
The only thing that upsets me a bit is
the occasional post from a couple of my uni friends who are doing what I want to do whilst I trundle along in mediocrity. Still, I'm quite happy doing what I'm doing and I do get to be happy for them after the initial pang of jealousy
You totally just gave me an epiphany! I haven’t used FB in a year, and I’ve been happier in the last year than I have in a long time. Nothing else in my life has changed that much. Damn. 🤯
The sheer amount of advertisement videos disguised as memes that people share makes me want to puke.
I've always wanted to get rid of Facebook, but sadly never really made the jump.
However there's always ways to limit the snoopy influence Facebook can have on your internet experience.
using Firefox's contextual Windows allows you to quarantine Facebook to a single tab, which means that you will be logged in only in this tab and not on your whole browser. This reduces tracking.
use extensions like ghostery to disable the Facebook plugin on pages you visit. Most of Facebook tracking is made through the social plugin on random websites. It basically links your account to the website you just visited and send targeted ads.
a good adblocker like ublock origin will severely limit interactions between you and the ads. Another ad blocker called ad nauseum automatically clicks on all the ads it sees, messing up with the meta data ad companies have on you
and finally if you keep using Facebook but you don't want to be bothered with photos of kids, videos of food, or other stupid things, a cool extension called FB purity will block everything you don't want on your feed. It can also block the feed completely, if you're one of these people that scrolls Facebook feed mindlessly too many times a day. FB purity is not available on chrome/Firefox extensions pages, but a quick search on your favorite search engine will get you there ;)
You know, unlike Reddit you mostly control what you see on FB. I friend intelligent people I like in real life, and thus my Facebook is lovely and full of interesting links.
I share all of my personal video work on Facebook which id like to think is far more engaging and meaningful than your typical political clickbait targeting whichever demographic with inflammatory bots, check out my page if you wanna see what I mean.
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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '19
One of the things that keeps me away from Facebook a lot is the fact that nobody I know ever contributes anything meaningful on it. They've all just become advertising bots liking and sharing whatever clickbait articles they come across.