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Facebook Users Are Sharing Less and It's a Big Problem (fortune.com)
Reader Colin Castro writes: Facebook is starting to see decline in original posts and people sharing their thoughts. "Facebook's decline in personal updates reflects a common growing pain for online communities. What starts out as a special and intimate place to share things grows into a big, impersonal, and professional platform ." The author points out one of the reasons why: "They know that, unlike in Facebook's earlier days, their status updates can now be seen by distant relatives, high school classmates, and co-workers -- so they don't share anything too personal."
That is interesting. It would be worth making a study of just how much Zuckerburg's own PC thought police don't share anything that might offend someone policies are contributing.
The counter point would be twitter, which up until very recently, and now with limited success has not really tied to police content other than strait up porn. Arguably twitter is mostly a cesspool of people flaming each other for this an that and advertisements.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
People realize they are becoming narcissistic. So they stop posting.
Then the people that are super narcissistic keep posting. And those that stopped get sick of the daily posts telling everyone what they ate for lunch.
And everyone leaves the site that has become a cluttered mess of posts no one cares about and advertisements.
...What starts out as a special and intimate place to share things grows into a big, impersonal, and professional platform ."...
The problem is that facebook participants slowly began to realize that anything and everything they post is harvested by the advertisers to build a profile of you.
Make a new Facebook without all the Asshat, "features".
Design it for close knit groups only...Family, a few friends. All content hidden by default, invitations only to grant access (not even solicitations to be granted access), etc.
The premise of an on-line place to share things with people you want to share them with was a good idea. But like all internet things, Good Ideas are quickly perverted into blatant, clumsy, and in your face money grabs.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The masterful (/s) algorithm for post visibility is skewed against personal updates. Based on the shit that's on my feed it's the stupid-ass memes that people post which seem to get play, and personal updates show up rarely, or several hours/days late. They should be running all those images through TinEye and if there's a hit, that post gets pushed to the background. If they constantly reward worthless content, they're going to get more and more of it. I wish there was a manual +/- on your friends so that if, by chance, you intentionally (or unintentionally) clicked on one story posted by that obscure guy you met at some conference, you wouldn't automatically be bombarded with his next 100 useless memes and radical political posts.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It's a big problem for Facebook because the more impersonal the posts become, the less people are going to bother visiting to read them. There goes their advertising revenue.
It's a definite trend. The majority of stuff I now see on my time line now is re-shares of crappy viral content. Fewer and fewer friends put anything about themselves or their day, the kind of stuff I might actually care or be interested in. And I understand that. 99% of what little I put is trivial or generic observations. Almost never anything personal.
FB has its place. It is extremely good at getting your message out to everyone you care about.
I rarely post anything on FB anymore, but I do keep it around and monitor it from time-to-time. I also keep Trillian signed in to FB messenger.
It keeps me vaguely in the loop of events and makes me available for my friends and family to contact me. But I keep my privacy options up-to-date and don't use FB as authentication for anything else. Nor do I use many FB apps or games.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
At some point EVERYTHING is political, just like it's personal, despite protestations to the contrary.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Last night, someone posted a manufactured controversy. So I called them on it. Their response? Cyber-stalking across all my social media accounts and threats to call my boss to get me fired.
Why would I be interested in posting anything at all?
IF they want my original content I should be paid.
Turning this around, it appears that the only people who reliably post (at least in my circles) are people who want to use the site as a foundation for their business. They spend a lot of time with phony posts and what not designed to pump up their views. The number of posts I even SEE from people who I care about (i.e. not people's business) have dropped. I can go look at walls to see that they are happening from time to time, but they never show up on my timeline anymore, just the paid stuff.
So kind of Facebook has ruined itself.
I'm not necessarily sure if it's because there are more shares or just because there isn't as much original content.
Ultimately for me facebook has become a lot less useful as more people are on it. It used to be mostly my siblings, a few immediate friends and some of the more tech minded people i knew from work. That was great, I could ask a technical question there and have a discussion about it. Now if i post something like that the first response is usually "lulz i have no idea what you talking 'bout", so I don't bother with stuff like that. I use dropbox to share family photos with my immediate family since I don't want them to have distribution as wide as facebook. I know I *could* set up privacy rules to maintain that stuff better but I can't be bothered.
I strongly believe they are in a downward spiral and think it'll be hard to claw back from that. As the utility it provides to me drops, there's less incentive for me to provide value to them.
Not just that. People realize that so-called 'social media' is anything but, when it comes right down to it. Also, it's trendy as hell. Once it was AOL. Then it was Livejournal and Myspace. Right now it's Facebook. What we're seeing, however, is the Beginning of the End for Facebook (or at least I hope it is). A year from now, the next trendy 'social media' thing will emerge, and all the social-media sheep and attention whores will start migrating towards that, dragging their 'friends' (with a small 'f') with them. Hope for Zuckerbergs' sake he's invested all his millions into something conservative and sound, he's going to need that to live on when Facebook really does become Failbook and is worth nothing, gets sold off to some eastern europeans for a song.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The thing is, people are posting less and less even of pictures. My feed is all idiotic "shares". This is why I use FB less and less with every passing month.
I wish there was a way to block ALL shares, and ONLY see original content created by someone I know. Of course, that doesn't help Zuckerberg's marketing analytics or Facebook's "you are the product" business model.
I think this is a natural result of Zuckerberg's "users are dumbfucks" attitude [1], spelled out by a lack of ethics and consequently trust from the users. I know very few people in my network of recent parents that share their family photos on FB, for the simple fact that FB doesn't have a "privacy first" capability (or if that exists, that they trust FB to deliver).
Most of these folks are sharing on Apple Photostream, or Google Photos.
My surprise is that it took so long for this to happen.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com...
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This isn't a change. It's always been the case that if you share pictures of yourself drunk, mostly naked, and swinging from the chandelier at the strip club with your coworkers, you'd likely get fired.
The internet is a public place. Share something, and it's shared. Get over it.
The only notable aspect to this is that people are now whining about people doing what people whined they should do:
"You shouldn't share personal information on Facebook! That's a bad idea!"
"OK, I'll stop."
"OH MY GOD!!! YOU'RE NOT SHARING PERSONAL INFORMATION ON FACEBOOK!!! IT'S THE END OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION!!! DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER!!!"
Yawn.
I agree.
I'm really just speaking for myself here. I can only speculate that others might have had similar experiences to me, but I definitely don't know what people are doing on Facebook or why.
Essentially, I signed up for Facebook because it was a good way of keeping in touch with peers-- old college friends and current friends. Relatively close friends. I posted whatever I wanted, and didn't think much about it. Then I friended some people who weren't really friends, but more like acquaintances. It didn't change things much. Some of my cousins friended me, but only ones that were roughly my age, so that was fine. Then-- I remember this one event pretty clearly-- one of my aunts friended me. I was really torn. On the one hand, I did not want her to invade the my Facebook social circle. I would have to watch what I said to a much larger degree. Still, I wanted to keep in touch with her, and I couldn't think of a polite way to say "no", so I accepted her friend request.
After that, my parents friended me. Then coworkers. Then bosses-- and by that time, I was careful enough about what I posted that I just accepted without thinking too much about it. I was already careful not to post anything too controversial or inappropriate, so I wasn't too afraid of my boss seeing it. And I was kind of friendly with my boss, so... whatever.
Still, I posted things on Facebook. Nothing very personal. I posted photos that I would be ok with being public. I posted pretty inoffensive thoughts that I thought might be interesting or funny. But then something else started to happen. I don't know if it was because of a cultural shift or just that my network his some sort of critical mass of different viewpoints, but I couldn't post anything without someone getting butthurt. I'd post a comment about Net Neutrality, and one of my conservative uncles would start spamming me with comments about how Net Neutrality was a communist plot to destroy businesses. I'd post something about a video game, and I'd get responses relating to GamerGate. I'd mention that I'd gotten a new iPad and one person bring up the problems in Apple's Chinese factories, and another person would comment, "Apple is for fags. Android 4ever."
I'm exaggerating a little, but not that much. Even innocuous comments had random people coming out of the woodwork to make nasty comments. It wasn't just liberal people or conservative people, Democrats or Republicans, friends from the city or redneck friends. There wasn't really a common thread. Everyone had just gotten much more serious, much less unwilling to read comments in a way that gave you the benefit of the doubt, and much more hostile. Sometimes they were my friends, sometimes friends of friends, and sometimes people I didn't know at all (e.g. commenting on one of my friend's posts, someone I didn't know would yell at me for something or other). The whole thing became so unpleasant that I just stopped. I didn't see the value in posting.
I have always operated on Facebook as a pseudonym, and recently they blocked my account for not having any way to uniquely legally identify me. I have to admit that I am happy with that outcome, and the fact that they won't permit me onto their service without being able to identify me certainly cements my resolve to remain that way.
"No good deed goes unpunished"