Slashdot Mirror
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."
IF they want my original content I should be paid. They are making money off of my hard work taking that stupid picture.
People realized sharing everything about themselves to everyone they vaguely know isn't generally the best social strategy? No way.
This is the result of the left-liberals financial crusade for PC. Free speech has been stifled because your "free" speech might just cost you your income/career if you don't toe the line.
I see very little content that's actually from the people I follow. 99% of what I see is just stuff reshared from other places. I hardly ever use Facebook anymore because most of that reshared content doesn't interest me anyway.
Yeah, unfortunately, as something gets so wide spread as facebook and twitter, it can all come back to haunt you. There's no way to prevent bosses or coworkers from seeing anything unless you make everything private and never friend people you work with. But that doesn't really matter either, because things can get shared and reposted.
I've blocked so many pages now it's ridiculous. I've somewhat outgrown Social media, and sharing every thought with people I barely knew. It was neat when it was new, but now it's tedious and irritating. Oh, and internet arguments! When opinion turns to fact, that's when the blocking button gets a workout.
Google+ created circles to allow you to control who you share things with, which would prevent this problem.
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.
Wow. Your Jimmies are really rustled on this topic. Tell us more about your political philosophies!
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 agree. Facebook has the ability to create and manage groups, but it's always been a pain to maintain. The metaphor and controls Google+ created make so much more sense. The problem that Google+ has always faced is that they started too late.....Facebook already had all of the people, and it was really hard to convince people to leave it because "that's where all of my friends already are"
Please stop labeling or inserting political bias into any discussion. A discussion should NOT BE pulled to involve politic.
I actually think why should people post personal things on the public Internet anyway? If they want anyone to see their personal thought, then accept consequences because it is no longer "personal" but rather becomes public. Also, why do they think that Facebook is that PERSONAL in the first place?
...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.
Wish I had a Facebook account to share this post...
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?
You are misinterpreting 'Free Speech'. It simply means you are free to say what you like and the government won't try to stop you. It doesn't mean that you are free from the consequences of what you say. People have an equal right to be offended by your speech, and to dish out some retribution. For example, if your employer doesn't like some racist comments you make, then they can fire you. It's not really a left-liberal thing - more like the right-wing not practicing what they preach and taking responsibility for their actions. Don't want ridiculed or worse? Then, you're free to shut the fuck up.
The author is... more than a little off base. To take the services I'm aware of; Flickr didn't crumble because it reached the mainstream, because it never really reached the mainstream. Flickr* crumbled because of a number of ill advised changes to the UI at the same time Facebook and a number of other photo sharing services were on the rise. In the same way, LiveJournal was quite healthy, even in the mainstream, but the rise of Facebook combined with a number of ill advised changes, and numerous outages due to DDOS attacks pushed people away. Orkut never was mainstream.
He also misses one huge change to Facebook itself - the shift to mobile devices. As slashdotters have long noted, it's hard to produce original content, even text, on tablets, phablets, and phones.
* Yes, Flickr could be considered a social media site even though it's ostensibly a photosharing service. It had extensive groups (forums) dedicated to almost every topic under the sun. People used the text blocks (intended for descriptions) accompanying the photographs for blogging. Etc... etc...
If they can't be trusted with sharing then unfriendly them.
It's not just the PC-left. The PC-right does the same thing. Just try coming out against the military, and see what happens.
Seriously, what is wrong with ether?
As a right-conservative leaning person, I'd have to disagree. I just don't see this as a political issue, left or right.
This is simply people realizing what Facebook is about and what the implications of sharing all the intimate details of your life really means. It means your boss can see what you do in your spare time and who you hang out with. It means people you don't really want to associate you can track your every move. It means you lose your privacy in unexpected and unwelcome ways. It means your kids get into arguments with you because you're posting details of their lives without their consent.
In other words, people are simply learning about the downsides of Facebook. And it's about fucking time.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Political Correctness: Invented by conservatives, perfected by liberals.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
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.
Facebook users are just starting to realise that no one is actually interested in their 'updates' about what they had for breakfast or reading their 'stream of consciousness'.
Its just starting to dawn on them that this is utterly boring and useless.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
There is no simple factor that can explain this; I'm sure it's a confluence of a variety or reasons.
One that I've noticed is that my feed is just noisier now with Ads, other "of interest" stories that FB feels like shoving in there. The nice friends and family updates I want to see are still there, but I have to scroll through a lot of noise to see them.
Eventually I get tired of scrolling and stop. Then I visit less often, then I post less often, and the cycle perpetuates itself.
FB made changes to their feed sometime back, a year or two ago, and it's definitely affected things.
And then there are all the other issues people mention. Many of the people and their updates which prompted me to join FB are now on WhatsApp and other platforms.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
Odd. I get why no one would want to go to Tumblr unless they had to, but Twitter is usually considered part of the whole social media A-team. What better place to find salacious things to hate you for than abbreviated half-thoughts with perhaps a picture attached? Is it really not actually looked at by HR teams, or is it perhaps a little harder to link an actual individual to a Twitter account unless it is provided?
I'm using it far less because among other things, I find myself pushing back against FB's relentless drive to monetize me by trying to keep me looking at it for hours. I dislike the way they have made it difficult to customize the interface - because I can't be monetized if I have control. And something I can't blame FB for... Every other post is political. I am in agreement with my friends politically for the most part, but darn it I don't want politics mixing so much with my recreation.
Don't step on the baby.
It's a "Big Problem" to people who read Fortune Magazine. If business don't know everything about you, it's harder to exploit you deliver you the very best in personalized targeted premium content!
Too much POLITICAL crap. I post a lot of photos to family/friends, instead of emailing it. That's about the extent of my FB activity. Otherwise, I just CALL the person. People posting about what they dreamed about, selfies, cat videos, what they had for dinner doesn't interest me.
Oh yes, Facebook users are not sharing enough of their petty social drama and that's a "big problem", (for very small values of 'problem').
Never mind all the wars and starvation and the Panama Papers and other shit going on in the world, pay attention because Facebook users aren't sharing enough! OMG whatever will we do???
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The volatility?
If they just made the privacy settings more prominent when creating a post, it will be easier to designate a post's visibility to different groups (and creating those groups).
They tried so hard to hide privacy settings, and this is the result.
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.
I post a lot of news on mine, some commentary and then a link. A lot of my friends enjoy my daily news update, but I stopped putting things about me and my daily life except the random tidbit about a terrible driver or traffic.
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?
Please stop labeling or inserting political bias into any discussion. A discussion should NOT BE pulled to involve politic.
This is what's really wrong with Facebook.
Your mom and General Motors are on Facebook.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I would add that political correctness, by definition, can never be perfect because it's based on one or more false premises. :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Once it's posted on the internet, no matter what they tell you, you no longer have full control over it. Only a sucker believes otherwise.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
Also, it's a consequence of FBs business model.
Some people are now aware that they're being tracked, in detail, and don't want it anymore.
They'll still use FB to see what friends are doing & share a few funny things, but that's it anymore.
More & more people aware that *they're* the product, and stop using it.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
Most people just use FB for clicking Like on family pics and to set up homework groups for classes in high school and college.
You think we'll tell you anything useful? How p3rvy is that?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If they can't be trusted with sharing then unfriendly them.
Or, unfollow them and never see their trash in your feed again--while still leaving line of communication open.
I always kept a small friend list on facebook(around 30, give or take) but I've been mostly avoiding FB for the last 2 months, as what was a nice way to get updates on distant friends mostly became a postboard for "not-so" funny stuff taken from website designed solely to share that stuff.
They have A.I. that hides comments that people make on News Vendors and the like, but hides this fact from these people's accounts, on the basis of arbitrary content criteria. People encounter it, eventually note that their posts are deleted from the usership's view, but they are still visible to them and declare Zuck a commie. This happens on G+ too, another good example of randomly ascribed censorship, also in a cheeky hidden way. The vast majority of people want freedom of speech instead this situation, so they are left with a very bad taste in their mouth. They think they have found a monster! What does it take to sell and what does it take to win?
The purpose of existence is to make money.
What is really the problem with people not sharing their info? Maybe they have started to realize that they are the product.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
"What starts out as a special and intimate place to share things grows into a big, impersonal, and professional platform"
s/b
"What PEOPLE IGNORANTLY BELIEVE IS a special and intimate place to share things IS FINALLY RECOGNIZED AS a big, impersonal, and professional platform"
Thanks for the correction.
-Styopa
I look over my wife's shoulder sometimes when she uses Facebook and it just seems to be an endless stream of chain 'hey look at this funny/thought provoking/sad thing' emails. The kind I never really wanted to get, but people sent me. Not sure why anyone would want to read that.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Of course, that doesn't help Zuckerberg's marketing analytics or Facebook's "you are the product" business model.
People gripe about this, but what do you expect? Even Slashdot has to pay the bills. Facebook isn't some altruistic touchy-feely social experiment, it's a business. An you are not obligated to participate.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
The chilling effect of surveillance must also be factored in.
It does help Facebook's model. The problem right now is that, due to the lack of original content, people aren't paying attention to their news feeds and that means Facebook has less product to sell. I used to love FB because it enriched relationships. Now it's just a bunch of worthless auto-play videos. If there were more original content on FB, they would be able to get a much better price advertising to their users. That's the point of the article.
Well, it's kind of the same thing - just from 2 different entities. One without guns, one with.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
. A lot of my friends enjoy my daily news update, but I stopped putting things about me and my daily life except the random tidbit about a terrible driver or traffic.
No, no one cares.
What I wish Facebook would release is a "no politics" filter. It's become really tedious to have half my feed consist of "Trump is Hitler" and "Hillary is Satan". I've been trying to train FB by hiding all of those and marking them as spam when it gives me the option. But it just doesn't seem to get the hint.
Imagine all the people...
No, it isn't. It is merely being intellectually lazy to consider everything through political lenses. This is what gave us the current cesspool of people always on the lookout for "micro-slights" so they can submit to the temptation to get angry and then turn that anger into obscene outbursts in an adolescent bid for attention.
Well yeah, but that would fuck up the flow of my pithy sentence :)
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Is that you hon?
I shared this link https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/04/08/1515249/facebook-users-are-sharing-less-and-its-a-big-problem . I hope we aren't friends...
You entirely missed the point. If everything is political, and everything is personal, it's time to grow a thicker skin because nobody is a special snowflake - everyone's in the same boat.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You just explained more about it that that stupid flying umbrella commercial. Although I did like that the beaver says "Leave it to me!" Because none of the people young enough to be interested in their product would even get the reference.
Whenever I post a picture of my young'n, or anything personal, I add them to my personal site/gallery and then fire an update to FB letting people know there's new pictures. I've already asked that family *not* post pictures of her to Facebook, just send 'em to me for inclusion in the gallery.
I don't want to see my kid (or myself for that matter) showing up in Facebook ads or third-parties because some retarded EULA gave them permission to it.
? What do you mean? I don't have facebook or a tv and both objectively and subjectively am doing well in life and don't feel I'm missing anything, have a lot more free time to read and study and would save over $1200/year over what I would spend on cable. For comparison, that's a vacation on the other side of the US, even a trip to Europe or to double the insulation in my house.
diddums, they'll have to datamine elsewhere - after all, that's what they sell. YOUR data, to which by posting you have per their terms of use granted them a nonexclusive commercial licence to which no royalties or credit is due you. Ever.
What do you mean, you didn't read the terms and conditions??
Right, I'm calling Tim Cook.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I have a fiend who used to read fortune magazine in grade school and come to school in a tie and dress shirt every day. He was really poor and didn't even speak English. All the kids made fun of him, but is worth over 10M today.
One of the reasons(and there are many...) that I didn't create a FB account is that I have personally seen people who were at one time "real" friends get into personal/cultural/political disagreements on FB and have it turn into a huge blowup.
I have seen people post things that then were commented on by someone else, and the person who commented said something that they didn't "intend" to cause harm, but they weren't thinking "clearly" and the repercussions were bad.
I've seen people who IRL were on good, friendly terms then turn into enemies because of political posts and eventual flame wars
I've seen, in effect, that when people post as themselves, and not anon that is when the problems start.
People will say and post things on FB that they would never say IRL to someone.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Or the police. They'll happily tell you that any police officer who shoots a fleeing black guy in the back did the right thing, that the black guy deserved it, shouldn't have run, etc.
Of course, that doesn't help Zuckerberg's marketing analytics or Facebook's "you are the product" business model.
People gripe about this, but what do you expect? Even Slashdot has to pay the bills. Facebook isn't some altruistic touchy-feely social experiment, it's a business. An you are not obligated to participate.
The problem is that Facebook is a business masquerading as some altruistic touchy-feely social experiment. When its facade wears thin and people see how it treats them and their touchy-feely social things, they tend to pick up and take their business elsewhere. Basically, Facebook could have a production problem. Its product doesn't especially want to get sold and the more FB tries to sell the more the product pushes back.
The solution is for Facebook to tone down the salesmanship a bit and get back in touch with the touchy-feely social end of things, but that's not going to happen. When a business is threatened it doesn't lighten up on its core practices, it doubles down.
Make all those interactions more interesting by having people sitting together. Offer them some beer, wine, coffee. Maybe even food. You can also even charge some extra money for such amenities, people are known to be willing to pay for VIP treatment.
Suddenly, you will realize you are no longer stuck in the silly "you are the product" business. You are offering real goods and services.
Congratulations! You have reinvented the ages-old "restaurant/bar" concept.
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 was glad that Eich stepped down, because he had turned into a lighting rod for Mozilla. But that incident definitely showed why you have to be careful about protecting your privacy, and about why letting your employer or the whole world know about your private life, your beliefs, your political positions, etc. is extremely dangerous and will bite you in the ass one day. No matter what your position is, someone's going to have a problem with it, and if they have power, they're likely to use it against you.
Whoosh. See (closely) your previous comment.
As it should. By your definition, words have power. They have just as much to elevate your as much as they have to bring you down. This comment like many earlier fall into the camp of "Nothing at all has changed but now you're noticing it". If you want to tell the world you like sodomizing animals, that's your business, knock yourself out, and as long as its legal wherever you are, you won't be thrown in jail. That doesn't mean that people reading your words don't have the right to feel / judge you based on them. Take some personal responsibility for yourself.
Bye!
The Facebook Purity extension has a filter that will remove "share posts" from your feed. They have a bunch of other filters to remove sponsored posts and the like as well. With the right combination of options, you can just about rewind facebook to 2008 or so.
Nicely...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Facebook keeps reverting your newsfeed to "top stories" (from "latest stories"), so most people are only seeing the most popular posts. And how often are a geek's posts popular? You post, nobody reacts, you hate the platform.
When you post, Facebook shares is with just a couple of the people who have reacted to your posts (like, share, comment) before. If they don't react, your post isn't shared with anyone else. If they do react, Facebook shares it with a few more people. They react? More people see it.
Like most geeks, who aren't sharing pictures of friends and food and generally displaying a charmed life, my posts are about things and projects and happenstance and other boring stuff nobody cares about. I post it, Facebook shares it with a couple people who don't respond, and Facebook kills it. Nobody sees it, I don't bother posting it anymore.
Admit it, this is how your facebook experience goes, too. So you post to slashdot how useless and intrusive Facebook is.
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.
This is all true. The funny thing is that Facebook could have made it easier to do all of this. They could have made it easier for people to have online pseudonyms or multiple "personalities" (or whatever you want to call them) that allow you to easily group friends into various categories.
And they sort of do that now, but it's not intuitive. And there's no way to completely separate account details unless you violate Facebook's principle that you're only supposed to have one account per real person. (Otherwise, so Zuckerberg has argued, you're being deceptive or something... despite the fact that in real life we behave as "different people" depending on our audience.)
And you couple that with the various trends over the years where Facebook tried to deliberate undermine privacy settings you may have already made by progressively setting things to be more and more open.
I understand why Facebook did this: they thought the more content was shared with the widest audience, the more "data points" they could get to profile you, which is what they're really trying to get to sell to other businesses to make money. The more "likes" among random friends, the more data points. But if you're only sharing most of your posts with 5 close friends, that's much less new information for Facebook.
The problem is that people are realizing what this does -- it makes Facebook much less useful for the kind of socialization people want to do. They want to have clusters of friends -- the coworkers, the people you drink with after work, the people at church or the club or whatever. And they do NOT want that data to go between those groups. That's what most people do in real life.
And so Facebook is starting to lose. It's main market now is for teenagers who haven't yet figured out how stupid it is to post something online that will potentially follow you for your entire life. As the rest of the adult public realizes this, they will post less and less... and a medium that allows more personalized groups and doesn't insist on a "one profile with a real name for one person that's shared with everyone" policy will ultimately be more desirable.
IMO I should be able to click News feed then tick a Checkbox to show 'ONLY Status Updates'
Then go click another link and see 'ONLY Shares', then Tick an extra option to see 'ONLY Shares that Originated from Friends'
Next, there should be an option to see ONLY Shares by Friends in a specified list.
Finally, there should be some checkboxes that allow me to Hide shares that meet certain criteria.
For example: Hide shares that link to an external website
Hide shares that contain certain keywords.
Hide shares that have been shared more than X times.
Hide shares that have more than X likes and fewer than X likes by friends.
ETC.
I should be able to decide what I want to see. Just like with a UseNet reader or E-mail client and Folders/Inbox rules/spam scores.
A lot of those idiotic shares can be fixed by blocking the pages they come from. My block list is getting pretty extensive now, but it's helping my feed be more about people.
Not everyone would agree on which evil is lesser:
"if Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons"
Imagine all the people...
In other words, people are simply learning about the downsides of Facebook.
Yes, and one of those downsides is that if you say the wrong thing, the PC Police come after you. Anyone paying attention thinks twice before posting anything controversial on FB. It's just common sense now to most people.
He didn't say it wasn't true; it's just tedious to hear everybody keep repeating it over and over.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Please stop labeling or inserting political bias into any discussion. A discussion should NOT BE pulled to involve politic.
I actually think why should people post personal things on the public Internet anyway? If they want anyone to see their personal thought, then accept consequences because it is no longer "personal" but rather becomes public. Also, why do they think that Facebook is that PERSONAL in the first place?
I think at some point, the facade that Facebook was "personal" became an unsupportable fantasy soon after FB went public and decided to have all sorts of garbage showing up in your stream.
I personally HATE that they keep spamming you as if one of your friends/family are "still waiting for your response". I love that Google has ghettoed the FB/Linkedin/etc into the "Social" bucket so it doesn't hit my "important" inbox.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
It is interesting you say this. Back before social media took off I ran a webserver and wrote up basically a quick version of facebook, my friends all logged in and could post things. We used it for planning and sharing stuff over the day. Every once in a while though a topic like you mentioned would come up and people really got on one another's nerves.
It was a consequence of spending more time with one another, even though you aren't in person, that time to read what everyone is thinking can bring up some more differences. It's easy to hang out and go tubing down a river without caring what religion/political leanings people have, but when people start posting about it, it can change a lot.
Some people can see this as bad but I think it can also open the door for people to step up and make things better, to respect other people's views even though you don't agree. In a friend group you have more motivation to work through your disagreements and learn to function with someone you don't quite see eye to eye on.
It also has the opportunity to foster deeper friendships if you find you agree on things that you never knew before.
I don't know that FB though is the best place for that though, perhaps too easy to just be angry at another person and leave it at that.
Ha! That's laughable that you use Twitter as the example of a non-PC policed space. Nothing could be further from the truth! Twitter absolutely censors and encourages censorship of views that don't fit the typical SJW/PC vocabulary. I guess you missed their Trust and Safety Council. You should read up on it. I think you'd be interested in the subject matter and who is and is not on the council.
Vote Cthuhlu 2016 - Why Settle for the Lesser Evil?
The trouble is, this year, Cthulhu is the Lesser Evil. (Which really ticks him off...)
Once it's posted on the internet, no matter what they tell you, you no longer have full control over it. Only a sucker believes otherwise.
This is the truth that has resulted in the whole "social media" downturn.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
We are a nation of Tut Tut'rs who do nothing but point out what others are doing wrong, and scream from the mountain tops that the person should be publicly vilified.
If I DARE say something that is a slightest bit non-PC I will have strangers looking up my place of employment, and asking that I be fired. Or held against me for any future employment.
Fuck that, and fuck facebook and any other social media site.
Oh yeah, fuck Political Correctness!!
I've tried to explain instant run-off to people, but it seems (unbelievably) too hard to grasp. People who've participated in caucuses seem to be the only ones who get it. I believe we can implement this in the U.S. without amending the U.S. constitution, but it would require states to select electors based on instant run-off. I don't think it's the "people" who wouldn't want it (if they could grasp the concept), it's the establishment that controls the election laws now that don't want third parties to become viable - so they keep the current system and convince people third party votes are a waste. I've written my local representative with the suggestion and basically got laughed at.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
You can block all shares with fbpurity
http://www.fbpurity.com/
I'll give him that.
Time to offend someone
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"
I can't tell you the number of times I've started writing posts or thought to reply to something when I hit shift A and press delete and close the comment. Too many eyes make it not worth it to say anything. Too many people fired or upset or eyes on.
For me it is a bit paralyzing, I have always kept too myself what I like or dislike. When I was younger the internet was a savior, I could finally say what I wanted without fear of mockery IRL, not that i'm controversial at all, just, it was hard to let it out. With the general population being online and the datamining abilities of companies to string things together, posting anything online has become much more dangerous than speaking aloud.
I keep trying to push through it sometimes, but it's hard. Even now I just shift A'ed this post and almost deleted. I'll put it out there this time though.
Yea, I think semantics and writing style are important. I think that many issues that arise on FB show how bad most people are at writing and expressing their thoughts and feelings via the written word. This is probably why social networking is evolving towards a more image based system.
The funniest/worst part is that I have been an "arbitrator" of sorts between friends/relatives who have gotten into "misunderstandings" over things that were posted on FB. They know I don't have an account so I'm sort of the neutral person.
Yes, when it comes to politics/religion, etc, its better if people leave that out, and from I've seen on FB lately(I can log in via another account...), it seems people are doing that. It there are those who want to constantly banter about politics, etc but there are many more who just want to share cat videos, etc. To me, both of those are annoying.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
but I couldn't post anything without someone getting butthurt.
Bingo. That really is the crux of the problem.
And what is really interesting, is there is sort of a "thinning of the skin" so to speak regarding how easy people get "butt-hurt" now, since the advent of social networking. IMHO people are way more sensitive about everything, whether it is climate change, the war in Iraq, transgender politics, the budget deficit, etc, etc.
In a way, social networking has engendered the exact human behavioral reaction they don't want.
Also, the recent MS chatbot incident is symptomatic of this "dumbing down" or de-civilizing of discourse via the web.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I don't see what's laughable I said "until recently" and "with limited success". I know twitter has reversed course on this, but its recent reversal. facebook on the other hand has always been policed at least since it out grew its college kids only rule, and with some level of efficacy.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
God forbid we actually use the Internet for political debate in as an open marketplace of ideas. Can't have that. It might hurt someones feelings.
Actually you can have it, just like we do here on /.
The problem starts when people have to post as themselves.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
a medium that allows more personalized groups and doesn't insist on a "one profile with a real name for one person that's shared with everyone" policy will ultimately be more desirable.
The "circles" feature of Google+ was designed specifically around this concept. Though it uses a real name, posts can be shared only with a specific circle of other users. Why didn't it take off?
The rest of us? Not at all.
letting your employer or the whole world know about your private life, your beliefs, your political positions, etc. is extremely dangerous and will bite you in the ass one day
On the other hand what is the point in having beliefs if you are not going to espouse them, or political positions if you are not going to advocate for them?
Maybe the problem here is that we are all trying to hard to come together. It used to be communities organized around a set of beliefs. Look around this country various Protestant groups tend to be concentrated regionally. It used to be that you simply settled with people who were like you. Maybe this expands up to the international scale to when it comes to Islamic extremism and the like. Perhaps we have made the world to small a place, and we would actually be better off with higher walls around our boarders, less trade, less travel, and less talking to each other.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The thing is, people are posting less and less even of pictures. My feed is all idiotic "shares". ...I wish there was a way to block ALL shares, and ONLY see original content created by someone I know....
I agree that there should more feed filtering options. I also wish I could apply rules to my feed filter out posts containing certain words. In particular, I have few friends/family involved in home sales companies (e.g. Mary Kay, Stella&Dot, Shakeology, etc.). It's impossible to filter their marketing out of my feed except by unfriending or hiding that person from my feed entirely, which I'm not going to do because sometimes they do have posts I care about. Funny too that Facebook purposely hides official company Facebook pages unless they pay for a corporate account or sponsored posts, but they let these pyramid-scheme home marketing sales companies go free.
It's worse than just reshares. I've recently started seeing "shares" that are really just a share from a company that one of my friends had liked. Annoyingly, this also means all the companies I have liked are now posting posts that look like I shared. I'm now trying to decide between deleting my facebook account or unliking every page that I've ever liked so I'm not endorsing posts I may not approve of.
No, that's not entirely true. If I get myself a talkshow in China and spend all my time critical of Mao (or some such), I expect the government to try to stop me. Might be through coercion, might be through threat of violence (or even actual violence), but either way, to stop me. If I do the same in the US of Obama, I might get picked up by Fox News. There may be people protesting me, and I may have to deal with mean worded emails, but this is the consequences of what I am saying. Not imprisonment or threat of imprisonment. Maybe the IRS will pull out a rubber glove with my name on it, but if someone gets caught using the IRS this way, they (theoretically) get in trouble for it. This is free speech. Not "You can say whatever you want with no consequences whatsoever."
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Social media outrage is so prevalent nowadays that even an innocent misspelling or use of a word someone deems as "offensive' can have life or career damaging consequences. I rarely post anything on facebook or any social media sites any more after one incident where I was very publicly called out for being a bigoted anti-LGBT misogynist because I made the innocent mistake of referring to someone as male who was actually trans-gendered. Once the SJWs jumped on-board, no amount of apologizing was acceptable to them. This after I spent years writing posts supporting gay-marriage, equal rights and encouraging people to vote for these things. Those very same people who "liked" my posts turned on me in an instant, one going so far as to threaten to report me to my employer. Screw Social Media.
Nonsense. Free speech doesn't mean the absence of prior restraint (i.e. censorship imposed before you've said anything). Having Free Speech means freedom from consequences. If you know that you'll face retribution(other than ridicule or counter-argument) for expressing *wrong* opinions, then you don't really have Free Speech.
I wish there was a way to block ALL shares, and ONLY see original content created by someone I know.
There is a way: FBPurity.
You sound like someone I would unfollow instantly.
But approval voting doesn't actually let you choose a favorite, or an order, amongst those you approve of. Definitely better than the current two party stranglehold, though.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
That kid's name? Albert Einstein.
No I realize that and only respond to comment from people about others w/o tvs I don't actively going around telling people this. I'm honestly curious about what is wrong with not owning a television (other than I cannot afford it).
It was invite only.
So was Facebook. For the first two and a half years of Facebook's existence, only people who could prove an affiliation with a participating university were eligible for a Facebook account. It was first tested at Harvard, then other Ivy League schools, followed by the grand opening to university students across North America in April 2004. I had already graduated in 2003 and lost access to my .edu e-mail address, making me ineligible for a Facebook account at the time. Only on September 26, 2006, did the field trial end.
If one generalizes a network, and makes the system provider, more secure, with websites using a higher level approach, one gets a better internet, more like society as we are used to, and also finely granulated genres will make the more intimate feel, for those interested. And this can be taken all the way to the digital government. For instance, reducing a government to, a republic like this: Prime minister: Knowledgeable person for administrating the system itself, and going through with/modifying according to advisors wishes. Is elected by the people. Advisors - advisors for each relevant political grouping. Political groups - elects advisors from their own, and index their products or services in the system. The digitized government will instead of advertising have all products indexed, with everyone having the possibility to comment, and such things can also be crossindexed, in a universalized government network, that has the popular social networking features of such services. And resources is something that exists in the moment only, and a good system will adapt to the environment as well as possible. Then ofcourse everything is universalized and connected to a real society. And ofcourse related security should be sufficient. Microsoft for instance, did more security on their games, but that can ofcourse be taken rather to the whole OS approach. Peaceful Greetings.
I don't think so.
The deal is pretty simple: the more broad visibility you have, the more you need to try to not offend anyone.
So if you want to be part of some weird religious sect and convince people to join it, that's fine, but you're probably not going to do well if you're also trying to be the head of a multinational corporation, or a famous celebrity (unless you're Tom Cruise). But if you just work at the 7-11 or you work as a self-employed handyman in your small town, then no one's going to care.
There's plenty of people who still have weird beliefs, follow various weird religions, etc. You don't know about them because they don't have a highly public profile. You do, however, know about what religion various high-visibility political figures are.
So if you're going to have non-mainstream beliefs, go ahead, but don't expect for everyone to like it and want to vote for you or choose you for a high-level position.
And less travel??? Yeah, if you're some kind of asshole that needs to travel to far-off places then try to force your weird beliefs on people there, maybe you shouldn't do that. Most people have no trouble traveling; they go, they visit, they're respectful of the natives there, and they don't intentionally antagonize them.
Yeah, I didn't say that he did what he did publicly, I was just pointing out how having your personal beliefs aired can get you in trouble if they don't match up with whatever crowd you're trying to hang with.
Hey, at least this is one time we can BOTH be right! Win-win FTW :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The problem is that Facebook is a business masquerading as some altruistic touchy-feely social experiment. When its facade wears thin and people see how it treats them and their touchy-feely social things, they tend to pick up and take their business elsewhere.
While I'd LIKE to think that's true, I don't think it really is for most people. Most Facebook users seem not to give a crap about how terrible Facebook treats them, their data, their privacy, serving up ads, whatever. Slashdot users tend to be more sensitive to these sorts of things, but I really doubt that means much to the average person on Facebook. Sure, the Facebook "user experience" (such as it is) has degraded a bit, but I don't think it's bad enough to drive more than a small percentage away.
Instead, the current trend discussed in TFA is about Facebook becoming too FULL of people. What used to be a hangout for students and peers has now become a place for your grandparents and your boss.
For most people, socializing with your grandparents or with your boss is a very different thing from socializing with your close friends. But Facebook tries to smear it all together... and that's not working well as a "touchy-feely social experiment."
I've seen, in effect, that when people post as themselves, and not anon that is when the problems start.
People will say and post things on FB that they would never say IRL to someone.
I think there are two separate issues related to what you bring up:
(1) People will say (and do!) nasty things to other people when they are disconnected from them. The more impersonal the medium of communication, the more aggressive people feel free to be. Witness the use of car horns, for example. The vast majority of times someone beeps at someone else, they probably wouldn't go around shouting at that person in real life. But they beep nonetheless.
(While I'm on this topic, I should note that I don't think anonymous posts solve this problem -- they actually exacerbate it. But you're right that they solve the social problem of not alienating your friends if you don't identify yourself by name.)
(2) Part of the problem is the platform itself. By default, most people tend to post to all their "friends," but that category has come to encompass not only close actual "friends" but random acquaintances, coworkers, business acquaintances/clients, your boss, your grandparents, etc. There are very few things you could ever say to such a diverse group of people that won't offend SOMEONE at SOME point.
And people know this in real life -- in real life, they wouldn't say a lot of these things to certain people. But they don't tend to worry about it as much on Facebook, because they're often posting to the people with whom they mostly interact on Facebook... not thinking about what a random acquaintance might think, because they probably don't really know them well enough. Nevertheless those posts are going out to them too.
Thank you for posting it. It is very insightful. Myself and a lot of my close friends I spoke about this have similar experiences.
Nothing. OP was pointing out a tendency for some of those that have eschewed television to become arrogant regarding their decision. People like this will not hesitate to interject this into a conversation, and can be quite condescending about it.
She's a PR exec, and was clearly in the wrong line of work.
I noticed this starting about 2 years ago, I don't know what has taken Facebook so long. But I always thought it was a result of the way Facebook is filtering the newsfeed, and possible kickbacks from "viral" spam sites. Now, very few of my friends are posting anything original, and when they do, it seldom makes it into my feed. These days I check Facebook about once a week, selecting "I want to see less of things like this" for most of the posts in a fruitless attempt to make my feed more relevant.
It's only really useful for coordinating who's going to an event, easier than trying to get hold of everyone by phone and coordinating that way.
And that's about it, honestly. Everything else is noise or just a copy of news I already have in my feeds.
Eat the rich.
Delete your account and open a new one, this time being more judicious in your choice of friends. Duh.
IF they want my original content I should be paid. They are making money off of my hard work taking that stupid picture.
Donald Trump Syndrome
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
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.
Welcome to understanding how useless shit dies.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
This thread was very refreshing to me as I thought I was alone in not ever joining facebook as I saw what it was from the very beginning. A tool to hate the people you once thought of as friends. But after this thread I feel that there are sensible people and only the gormless attention whores are its users.
Right, they should share revenues like YouTube does. No shortage of new content there. Instead, Facebook charges publishers to share the content they've provided (free!) to their followers, and which they are advertising against. It's self-defeating, especially when you throw in the normal decreasing interest that all social media networks see.
... which is essentially why I suspended my account a couple of weeks ago. That'll take my monthly interaction with Facebook down by a couple of hours.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Slashdot certainly has degenerated last few years, used to be a poster with a history of such shitty articles wouldn't get any attention at all.
Pretty much everything about this article is shit. It's a great example of how NOT to write an article.
Considering Failbook sells your info to the highest bidder and people are stupid enough to actually believe they don't because they say so:
I never thought this day would come!
You can send a Tweet whenever you take a shit. We are all breathless in anticipation.
Your GRANNY is on Facebook.
Come on guys - think about it. Facebook have in fact managed to turn themselves into the world's first anti-social social network. And _that_ is quite an achievement really.
Its just another 'chilling effect' variant really.
Makes ya realize that all those social rules that inhibit us from flapping our yaps all the time are actually kind of preferred over the "let me just share MY opinion" that online communication tends to engender.
And it is actually kind of disheartening to see someone you respect, or are close with, start to spout off some totally disrespectable, small-minded bigotry / arrogance / fallacious / hateful / stereotypical / closed-minded spew of garbage.
We had that with NOPPL ("No Politics, Please"), but it may have gone defunct. Or perhaps some malware author is just waiting to take over the extension and shoulder-surf your Facebook sessions.