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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Americans got tired of big social media in 2017. Or at least, we stopped wanting to look at it, and we stopped pretending to like it.
This feels true to me as someone who uses the internet every day, but I also know it’s true because when The Verge partnered with Reticle Research to conduct a representative survey of Americans’ attitudes towards tech’s biggest power players, 15.4 percent of Facebook users said they “greatly” or “somewhat” disliked using the product, while 17 percent of Twitter users said the same. That made them the most disliked of the six companies in question, which also included Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. More than 10 percent of respondents described Facebook’s effect on society as “very negative,” and 10.5 percent said the same about Twitter — in both cases a higher number than the other four companies combined.
The survey doesn’t reveal why Americans feel the way they do, but last December, writing about the impulse to call 2016 “the worst year ever,” The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino articulated a pretty good guess as to why spending your time on the web’s massive, news-saturated platforms might feel so bad: “There is no limit to the amount of misfortune a person can take in via the internet,” she says. 2016 couldn’t possibly be the worst year in history, Tolentino decided, but it was the year that convinced her the promise of the social media had been false, and that “the internet would only ever induce the sense of powerlessness that comes when the sphere of what a person can influence remains static, while the sphere of what can influence us seems to expand without limit, allowing no respite at all.”
[...] The old promise of the internet — niche communities, human connection, people exchanging ideas, maybe even paying each other for the work they’d made — never really lost its appeal, but this year it came back with a miniature vengeance.
We can see this longing for community — and specifically, the sort of small, weird communities that populated and defined the early internet — everywhere. There’s Amino, the Tumblr-inspired app that lets fandoms build online spaces that are essentially club houses, then coordinate the creation of elaborate works of fan art, fiction, cosplay, and fandom lore. At the request of its largely teenage audience, the platform released its first cosplay yearbook this December, and doled out honors to the best writing, photography, and tutorials around cosplay. The thousands of fandom-specific rooms are lively and strange, each with their own moderators and byzantine rules.
And there’s the kids who are bending major platforms to their will, having their fun on Instagram but circumventing the intended use by making “finstagrams,” separate, strange accounts that aren’t tied to the Facebook social graph and therefore let users post weirder, funnier content they wouldn’t share to everyone they know.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 02 2018, @05:12PM (7 children)
Except, people who DON'T use FB get by just fine!
It's like cell phones: we didn't have them as kids, but now you GOTTA HAVE ONE!!....ummmm...no you don't. You WANT one.
If people really want to include you in something, they'll include you. If they won't do it outside FB, they really don't want you there. Just tell them you are gone, that FB is shite. If they care, they will email you, or phone you or come to your house. Truly. My family knows I don't FB, so I get emails or phone calls... because they WANT me there. They like me-- NAY, they love me, so I get included.
People I don't care about? I don't get bothered by.
It's easy. Just do it.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday January 02 2018, @05:27PM
Absolutely agree.
I don't use FB.
I don't understand why people think FB needs to be treated so delicately. Just nuke it from orbit!
Paid for by Americans for Renewable Complaining and Sustainable Whining.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Wootery on Wednesday January 03 2018, @10:17AM (5 children)
You're just pretending that there's no value to Facebook. Again, that just isn't good enough when we're trying to have a real discussion about this stuff.
You can't always rely on someone being willing to reroute Facebook discussions to you via another channel.
If you're a 'semi-active' member of a club or social group, you're likely to miss out on various silly-but-fun group conversations, small events, or conceivably more important discussions (the which venue for our seminar? discussion, for instance).
You can argue for or against leaving Facebook, and you can argue how we might diminish our dependence on it, but if you just insist there's no cost in deleting your account, then you aren't tracking reality.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday January 03 2018, @03:33PM (4 children)
From your post below:
" Using it also often helps Facebook conduct surveillance on people who don't even use the service, like when someone uploads a picture with them in it without their permission.
Totally agree - that's a real faux pas, but very often people don't seem to get it. I'm often disappointed by polite society's failure to 'keep up' regarding what behaviours are deserving of scorn. (Sharing vacuous brain-dead clickbait is another example.)"
So, you don't like that EVERYONE is tracked EVEN THOSE WHO DO NOT WANT TO BE TRACKED, but that's okay, because friends are okay with things like that.
You say "but if you just insist there's no cost in deleting your account, then you aren't tracking reality.": i say if you insist that there is no cost in KEEPING your account, then you aren't tracking reality.
The cost of staying on fb is FAR too great in terms of privacy; privacy for yourself but even greater, privacy for others especially those who may not want fb knowing things about them.
The cost IS negligible: you delete it and maintain contact in less intrusive ways.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday January 03 2018, @03:49PM (3 children)
Do use quote tags, they're far more readable.
I don't like it, but it's not the end of the world as you seem to want to imply. As I said, the alternative really would cost me considerably.
If only Americans would stop paying ISPs for Internet connectivity, their obscene monopolies would soon collapse. But they don't, because of the considerable cost that being the only person offline, would bring. The sad fact is that boycotts rarely work.
As it happens, I am far more qualified than you are to judge what it would cost me. And no, the cost for me would not be negligible, and I'm not the only person for whom this is true.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday January 03 2018, @04:16PM (2 children)
So, you don't mind being tracked where you go, what you do, who you contact, where you meet up with them, addresses, names, birth dates, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc?
So you don't mind your contacts being tracked either? Even those who don't want fb to know the above info?
Give me your wallet, your social insurance number and birth certificate and the info above of your contacts as well. I'm sure the consequences of that will be negligible.
You don't understand: your friends may not know the consequences of fb knowing their info but YOU DO. Privacy IS important: why are you giving it away, and why are you giving your friends privacy away? Insidious things are happening in the world that you, being on this site, are aware of: don't be a rat. Be smart.
Oh, you wanted quotes:
Are you considering the cost to your friends? What if you share a picture that has someone in it that doesn't want to have their face on fb? You tag that photo and their privacy is partially gone.
Etc. Whatever. You won't listen even though you know consequences. Consequences to you, who cares: it's consequences to others i'd be considering.
I guess sheeple can't move off fb because their world revolves around it. Sad.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday January 03 2018, @04:28PM (1 child)
Didn't I just answer this question? Again: I don't like it, but it's not the end of the world as you seem to want to imply.
The difference being, of course, that Facebook haven't committed any crimes with the data they have on me. Not sure what point you're trying to make.
My friends and I are getting a valuable service in return. The privacy cost remains real, of course, but again the reason is that Facebook is an effective and an entrenched platform.
I generally don't upload things to Facebook.
Again, yes I agree that it's not always nice to tag someone, especially someone who hasn't even opted in to Facebook.
You seem really committed to failing to comprehend nuance. No, having a Facebook account doesn't mean my world revolves around it. That's pure silliness. I waste far more time here, than I do on Facebook.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday January 03 2018, @04:53PM
Okay.
Good luck.
Yet.
I guessed as a regular Soylentil that you'd be more aware of what is going on in the world. I seem to be wrong.
Hmmmm......
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---