Comment by revicon
9 years ago
For me, I'm only interested in postings about "stupid life updates" as you call them when I'm on Facebook. I got so sick of the "10 ways batman is better than superman" articles that I started blocking every external site I saw being posted on my feed. And I mean everything, wsj, nyt, USA Today, etc etc etc.
Facebook is not a newsreader, it's a place where I go to see "stupid life events" from my friends and family that I don't get to see very much. There are a million other places I can go to read the news, I'm glad Facebook is nuking priority on external article posts, I wish they would do it more.
As I grow older, one thing I value more and more from friends is their opinions, knowing what they care about and perspectives they have to share.
I don't think I was alone in spending too much time on Facebook thinking I was connecting to my "friends" talking about important things. Facebook seems to have intentionally or unintentionally stifled that, so I left.
If you view it as a "vapid" place to share, and do important talking elsewhere I think that makes sense, I find it hard to separate those though, and think many do.
Agreed re: the separation. I don't know that I find that all that "hard", though.
Facebook is the place where I can see posts from all my high-school/college/work acquaintances and my extended family. Do I like these people? Sure! Do I want to know what they think about anything? Please, no; every time that happens I end up liking them less! And do I want them to know a single thing about me? Even less! Giving them even the slightest awareness of my actual interests would be a moralizing disaster for everyone involved!
Now, my friends, I have a Discord server for. There, we share all the stupid things we would say to one-another in person, but never ever if it was going to be on a big searchable record somewhere where my Grandma might see. I have some of those same friends added on Facebook, but none of us ever post there. There's no need.
I wouldn't "delete Facebook", as I actually do value keeping up with acquaintances and relatives... from a distance. It's very easy to keep it separated from my "important talking"—because nobody I'd ever want to do any "important talking" with would ever see anything I wrote there.
There's validity in both positions. I am generally the same in that I only use Facebook for stupid life events and keeping in touch with people. Then again, I'd prefer not to use Facebook at all, but these days you are pretty much a no one without a FB profile. Nobody answers their phone and they hardly even text at this point.
Anyway, the problem is that Facebook pretends that it wants to make people "more connected", yet they also want to be the place where people get their news, and the only comments on current events that ever bubble up are the first handful of inflammatory nonsense. Post anything even 30 minutes after the fact, and the likelihood it gets seen drops drastically. Note that this mostly applies to comments made on posts from the media. Make a non-vapid comment on a friend's post, or make a post that's more than a sentence long, and it may never get seen. There were plenty of times when I made posts or comments that should have offended my friends, but when asked if they sae that activity, they had no idea what I was talking about. Yet they somehow always know about my family photos when I add them.
I'd be okay with it if Facebook wasn't also full of shit about being a place for discussion and for aggregating news. Sure, you and I can get our news elsewhere, but most people will continue to use the trending posts as a lens to view the world with. For things that arent vapid, I am going to move to Minds.com. I'm getting sick of Zuckerberg.
Texting sucks and is extraordinary frustrating to try and keep up with massive group texts (almost borderline anxiety-creating), and phone conversations are always difficult and frustrating. However, FaceTime and similar video-calling is great. I wish we could make phone just default to this.
You're crazy! I find the whole concept of synchronous conversations soul-destroying; and the higher-bandwidth they are, the more about you they reveal, the worse it is. The concept of a video call is, to me, on par with a job interview, in that it makes me instantly lose every shred of self-esteem about my appearance, body language, and speaking mannerisms I've ever built.
How about we all just go back to writing letters, so we can take months to compose an air-tight, well-considered, face-on reply, without that being uncouth?
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