Reasons why Facebook is evil
- Thread starter Second Summer
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MadamSarcastra
MadamSarcastra, over & out.
Yay.... LMFAO
peacefulveglady
Forum Legend
wow i am only on Facebook now for a few things after i am done i leave it.
MadamSarcastra
MadamSarcastra, over & out.
MadamSarcastra
MadamSarcastra, over & out.
I agree with the points presented. I mainly don't open Facebook as much anymore because I feel like it's just one big show off. It's too much constructed reality. Instead, I opted to create a website of my chosen niche using the hPage website builder at Create a free website! - hPage.com and connect with other bloggers and website owners. It's much more intellectually stimulating that we are able to talk about our interests. Plus, having a website where I earn through ads is like a side hustle too.
OP
OP
I've made the decision to 'log out'. FB gives me very little these days. I just have one or two things to sort out first. One is transferring the ownership of VV's FB group, though if no one volunteers, I'll just delete it.
I was just getting so sick of it all in the end. It's so superficial, commercialised, and has a bad user interface and user experience. I probably said that before ...
I was just getting so sick of it all in the end. It's so superficial, commercialised, and has a bad user interface and user experience. I probably said that before ...
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I agree on Twitter. I just can't get into it even though I have an account. It's even more of time suck than FB, haha.
- Joined
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I’d probably be on Twitter more often if I didn’t have to encounter Donald Trump’s inane tweets every time I signed on.
OP
OP
I use Twitter only in a very targeted way these days: To learn about developments in my field of expertise and to help make a name for myself, i.e. branding.
I try to steer clear of all the random other stuff going on there.
I try to steer clear of all the random other stuff going on there.
There was a man that set a project to like everything people posted, and sides thery suggested for limited period. The only post he didn't press like on, was about someone died (it was before we got the new hearts etc). The more the days went part, the more and more right wing suggestions he got. I think that was a bit interesting.
Other things with FB, is all those chain letters that are going on and on and on. Some of them are used for targeting people for hacking and scamming, other is just filling up your PM with outdated information and ******** and other is in fact bullying people with full name. As those of you that is friend with me perhaps have understood from badly Google translate, this a thing I really hate. I even have gone so far starting to delete people from my friends list because of it.
I'm at FB for a couple of reason. All the dog people are there, it's my main source for information on my illness and it is a really great Norwegian Book Group there that I simply love. Without that, I had been gone for long time.
FB is also a place where you sell everything from children to drugs, the secret groups makes it easier to do illegal stuff there, there are posted voilence there, both towards humans and animals, bullying, racism, sexism. And the place where the brain goes to die too often, where people post the most idiotic things with full name (to be honest, I'm a bit embarrised about a couple of people I'm related to...).
Other things with FB, is all those chain letters that are going on and on and on. Some of them are used for targeting people for hacking and scamming, other is just filling up your PM with outdated information and ******** and other is in fact bullying people with full name. As those of you that is friend with me perhaps have understood from badly Google translate, this a thing I really hate. I even have gone so far starting to delete people from my friends list because of it.
I'm at FB for a couple of reason. All the dog people are there, it's my main source for information on my illness and it is a really great Norwegian Book Group there that I simply love. Without that, I had been gone for long time.
FB is also a place where you sell everything from children to drugs, the secret groups makes it easier to do illegal stuff there, there are posted voilence there, both towards humans and animals, bullying, racism, sexism. And the place where the brain goes to die too often, where people post the most idiotic things with full name (to be honest, I'm a bit embarrised about a couple of people I'm related to...).
Brian W
Conscientious Christian
I vowed never ever to join FB on the grounds that I don't want the whole world to know everything about me and I don't want a hundred strangers begging to be my friend. I also suspected most of the goings-on there are inane and irrelevant to me. My real friends and family can e-mail me if they want to know what is going on in my life. I didn't know that social media had become quite so low and dodgy though so this thread is a real eye opener to me.
Jamie in Chile
Forum Legend
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I thought facebook sucked right from the beginning but I was eventually sucked in as everyone was on it. I joined in 2008 which was basically because at that point everyone was on it (except a minority of people who did no social media at all - even my Mom was on it before me lol).
I still want to stay on facebook for my UK contacts so I can watch what they do and so I can share things on facebook to try and influence people.
However, facebook in Chile is different. It is probably 80% of social media instead of less than 50% in the West, also many small business use facebook as their only presence having no website. More broadly speaking, it is only a slight exaggeration here to say that facebook is the internet. People don't generally use other sites much. Facebook could account for more of a typical person's daily internet usage than other sites put together. It's also easier to use facebook to search for local information about a restaurant say or a local pet service or anything like that than perhaps if you use the whole rest of the internet.
I may have said this before but leaving facebook in a country like Chile is way more of a commitment than in say the US or UK. And the same thing is probably true in a lot of other developed countries in South America, Africa and South-East Asia.
I still want to stay on facebook for my UK contacts so I can watch what they do and so I can share things on facebook to try and influence people.
However, facebook in Chile is different. It is probably 80% of social media instead of less than 50% in the West, also many small business use facebook as their only presence having no website. More broadly speaking, it is only a slight exaggeration here to say that facebook is the internet. People don't generally use other sites much. Facebook could account for more of a typical person's daily internet usage than other sites put together. It's also easier to use facebook to search for local information about a restaurant say or a local pet service or anything like that than perhaps if you use the whole rest of the internet.
I may have said this before but leaving facebook in a country like Chile is way more of a commitment than in say the US or UK. And the same thing is probably true in a lot of other developed countries in South America, Africa and South-East Asia.
I think if FB weren't so intrusive, the hate wouldn't be so prevalent. There have been reports that FB follows users even when they aren't using FB, which I find reprehensible. It's all about information gathering and selling that information. That seems to be the business model for FB, more so than even advertising. Also, FB has not been up front about its tactics, so information we thought was somewhat private has been breached, like private messages and whatnot.I really don’t understand the Facebook hate at all.
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2012
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- 19,493
- Age
- 64
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- I'm liek, in Cali, dude.
- Lifestyle
- Vegetarian
The Daily Banter was a Facebook entity that I subscribed to. They shut down, and now they’re an email-only entity called The Banter. Here’s what just arrived in my inbox:
Facebook Must Die (And Soon)
The exodus will happen. The history of digital media proves it. First there was Friendster, then there was My Space, then there was Facebook. What’s next?
Feb 14 Public post
Editor’s note: This week we are publishing all of our articles on The Banter newsletter for free. If you’d like to sign up for the full newsletter and get access to premium articles going forward, you can get 50% off the entire year if you sign up before Monday, Feb. 18th.
Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day! - Ben
by Bob Cesca
This week, I thought I’d try something a little different by way of a “cold open” -- teasing the punchline before the set-up. So, here goes. There’s very little we can do, if anything, as individuals to stop Facebook from doing what it’s doing. The sad reality is that almost everyone uses the social media megalith, and deleting our accounts in protest is, in an fully immersed digital culture, suicidal.
Now, the rest of the story.
Imagine for a moment spending years of your life cultivating a Facebook presence, be it a group, a page or a regular old profile. You’ve spent day after day exhaustively posting statuses and reaching out to new friends, accumulating thousands if not millions of readers. Whether your presence is geared toward promoting a non-Facebook site, or if you’re just building a page for the sake of activism or journalism or your dinner pics, you’ve dedicated valuable years accomplishing exactly what the platform was designed to do: creating a network of “friends” who choose to be part of your Facebook thing.
Now imagine Facebook suddenly and without warning deleting all of that work -- photos, statuses, memes, videos, death or illness announcements, breaking news items or plain old cat pics. In an instant, upwards of a decade of your life is obliterated. No explanation, no resolution, no nothing. As many of us have learned the hard way, Facebook’s customer support system makes the cable company look speedy and attentive, so good luck complaining to a real-life human being at Facebook.
Worse yet, imagine that your Facebook page is directly tethered to your livelihood. This is the most tragic story of all, knowing that hundreds of political Facebook pages, left and right alike, were destroyed back on October 11, 2018. “The Purge” wiped out more than 800 pages by colleagues and activists like Kimberley A. Johnson and James Reader, as well as group pages like Everlasting GOP Stoppers and pro-Trump conservative pages like Nation in Distress. Again, no warnings, no three strikes, no time-outs, just POOF!Gone. Deleted.
The explanation by Facebook was that many of these pages were allegedly spamming their own readers -- readers, by the way, who directly chose to follow the authors and their pages. Facebook’s insufferable tech-spaz euphemism was “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” specifically meaning that the page admins were posting the same articles links across two or more other pages. To repeat, these admins were using Facebook within the bounds of what Facebook allowed, until, that is, Facebook retroactively changed the rules after the Purge.
Some of the deleted pages might very well have been violating known rules, but many victims who were caught in the Purge didn’t do anything wrong. And now their work is gone forever, as are their personal incomes.
In the case of The Daily Banter, we managed to avoid the now infamous Purge even though, yeah, as an admin I was posting my articles on the Banter Facebook page as well as Justin Rosario’s page, as well as on both my Bob Cesca Show page and my personal profile. But I wasn’t purged. Neither was Justin or Ben Cohen or The Daily Banter. Yay for us. Unfortunately, the Purge wasn’t the only front in Facebook’s war against its own users.
Back in 2013, Facebook began to monkey with the algorithm that determines which statuses appear in the News Feeds of its users. Before the algorithm change, links to The Daily Banter or Salon or any other news site were given the same visibility as cat pics and food porn, and traffic to the Banter was great. After the algorithm change, however, links to non-Facebook sites began to be throttled. Facebook placed arbitrary limits on how often statuses with links were seen in New Feeds. Over time, the digital cock-blocking grew more and more restrictive, with smaller and smaller respites between contractions until, last Summer, Facebook’s algorithm grew so suffocating it became nearly impossible to build traffic from users who -- again -- chose to receive updates and links from the throttled sites.
In terms of the algorithm, Facebook wanted pages like the Banter’s to pay for exposure in News Feeds. If we didn’t pay, our statuses were buried and our traffic suffered -- meaning that indie low-budget or no-budget pages were screwed with their pants on.
In terms of the Purge, we’re talking about a corporation and its thieving CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, taking punitive measures against innocent users all because Zuckerberg got caught accepting money from the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU, and other Russia-linked propaganda farms. Pressured by Congress with the threat of regulatory measures, Zuckerberg authorized the Purge and the rest is tragic history. To put it simply: Zuckerberg fucked up, so hundreds of pages operating within the rules were killed. And guess what? There are still thousands of Russian trolls and literally billions of fake accounts on the platform anyway.
Back to our “cold open.”
Like an incurable virus, Facebook has become inextricably embedded in our public lives. If we want to compete in the digital world, whether it’s our businesses or our personal thoughts on politics, it’s mandatory to be on Facebook. Unplug, and we might as well not bother. We might as well cease to exist, while other pages and sites will gladly slip into our empty chair. It’s just not as easy as leaving Facebook unilaterally unless everyone does it.
And the exodus will happen. The history of digital media proves it. First there was Friendster, then there was My Space, then there was Facebook. What’s next?
It’s not happening yet, but Facebook is flummoxing the world with such harrowing frequency, be it the Purge or a conga-line of news reports about its gratuitous privacy breaches, Facebook is gradually killing itself. My dream is for another enterprising gaggle of under-fed, sleep deprived Silicon Valley nerds to invent the next big social media platform that’ll become what Facebook used to be -- a social network where status updates, links or not, are untethered by mysterious artificial intelligence bots or sinister algorithms designed to extort money from users.
Hell, Zuckerberg stole “The Facebook” from the Winklevoss brothers, so perhaps it’s time for someone else to steal Zuckerberg’s platform by creating one that’s basically Facebook Classic, circa 2012-ish, but with enough structural differences to keep it from being sued and shut down. The time is now. Facebook has to die. And when it does, I’m throwing a party and everyone’s invited.
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© 2019
6641 S St NW, Washington DC, USA
A Substack newsletter
Facebook Must Die (And Soon)
The exodus will happen. The history of digital media proves it. First there was Friendster, then there was My Space, then there was Facebook. What’s next?
Feb 14 Public post
Editor’s note: This week we are publishing all of our articles on The Banter newsletter for free. If you’d like to sign up for the full newsletter and get access to premium articles going forward, you can get 50% off the entire year if you sign up before Monday, Feb. 18th.
Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day! - Ben
by Bob Cesca
This week, I thought I’d try something a little different by way of a “cold open” -- teasing the punchline before the set-up. So, here goes. There’s very little we can do, if anything, as individuals to stop Facebook from doing what it’s doing. The sad reality is that almost everyone uses the social media megalith, and deleting our accounts in protest is, in an fully immersed digital culture, suicidal.
Now, the rest of the story.
Imagine for a moment spending years of your life cultivating a Facebook presence, be it a group, a page or a regular old profile. You’ve spent day after day exhaustively posting statuses and reaching out to new friends, accumulating thousands if not millions of readers. Whether your presence is geared toward promoting a non-Facebook site, or if you’re just building a page for the sake of activism or journalism or your dinner pics, you’ve dedicated valuable years accomplishing exactly what the platform was designed to do: creating a network of “friends” who choose to be part of your Facebook thing.
Now imagine Facebook suddenly and without warning deleting all of that work -- photos, statuses, memes, videos, death or illness announcements, breaking news items or plain old cat pics. In an instant, upwards of a decade of your life is obliterated. No explanation, no resolution, no nothing. As many of us have learned the hard way, Facebook’s customer support system makes the cable company look speedy and attentive, so good luck complaining to a real-life human being at Facebook.
Worse yet, imagine that your Facebook page is directly tethered to your livelihood. This is the most tragic story of all, knowing that hundreds of political Facebook pages, left and right alike, were destroyed back on October 11, 2018. “The Purge” wiped out more than 800 pages by colleagues and activists like Kimberley A. Johnson and James Reader, as well as group pages like Everlasting GOP Stoppers and pro-Trump conservative pages like Nation in Distress. Again, no warnings, no three strikes, no time-outs, just POOF!Gone. Deleted.
The explanation by Facebook was that many of these pages were allegedly spamming their own readers -- readers, by the way, who directly chose to follow the authors and their pages. Facebook’s insufferable tech-spaz euphemism was “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” specifically meaning that the page admins were posting the same articles links across two or more other pages. To repeat, these admins were using Facebook within the bounds of what Facebook allowed, until, that is, Facebook retroactively changed the rules after the Purge.
Some of the deleted pages might very well have been violating known rules, but many victims who were caught in the Purge didn’t do anything wrong. And now their work is gone forever, as are their personal incomes.
In the case of The Daily Banter, we managed to avoid the now infamous Purge even though, yeah, as an admin I was posting my articles on the Banter Facebook page as well as Justin Rosario’s page, as well as on both my Bob Cesca Show page and my personal profile. But I wasn’t purged. Neither was Justin or Ben Cohen or The Daily Banter. Yay for us. Unfortunately, the Purge wasn’t the only front in Facebook’s war against its own users.
Back in 2013, Facebook began to monkey with the algorithm that determines which statuses appear in the News Feeds of its users. Before the algorithm change, links to The Daily Banter or Salon or any other news site were given the same visibility as cat pics and food porn, and traffic to the Banter was great. After the algorithm change, however, links to non-Facebook sites began to be throttled. Facebook placed arbitrary limits on how often statuses with links were seen in New Feeds. Over time, the digital cock-blocking grew more and more restrictive, with smaller and smaller respites between contractions until, last Summer, Facebook’s algorithm grew so suffocating it became nearly impossible to build traffic from users who -- again -- chose to receive updates and links from the throttled sites.
In terms of the algorithm, Facebook wanted pages like the Banter’s to pay for exposure in News Feeds. If we didn’t pay, our statuses were buried and our traffic suffered -- meaning that indie low-budget or no-budget pages were screwed with their pants on.
In terms of the Purge, we’re talking about a corporation and its thieving CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, taking punitive measures against innocent users all because Zuckerberg got caught accepting money from the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU, and other Russia-linked propaganda farms. Pressured by Congress with the threat of regulatory measures, Zuckerberg authorized the Purge and the rest is tragic history. To put it simply: Zuckerberg fucked up, so hundreds of pages operating within the rules were killed. And guess what? There are still thousands of Russian trolls and literally billions of fake accounts on the platform anyway.
Back to our “cold open.”
Like an incurable virus, Facebook has become inextricably embedded in our public lives. If we want to compete in the digital world, whether it’s our businesses or our personal thoughts on politics, it’s mandatory to be on Facebook. Unplug, and we might as well not bother. We might as well cease to exist, while other pages and sites will gladly slip into our empty chair. It’s just not as easy as leaving Facebook unilaterally unless everyone does it.
And the exodus will happen. The history of digital media proves it. First there was Friendster, then there was My Space, then there was Facebook. What’s next?
It’s not happening yet, but Facebook is flummoxing the world with such harrowing frequency, be it the Purge or a conga-line of news reports about its gratuitous privacy breaches, Facebook is gradually killing itself. My dream is for another enterprising gaggle of under-fed, sleep deprived Silicon Valley nerds to invent the next big social media platform that’ll become what Facebook used to be -- a social network where status updates, links or not, are untethered by mysterious artificial intelligence bots or sinister algorithms designed to extort money from users.
Hell, Zuckerberg stole “The Facebook” from the Winklevoss brothers, so perhaps it’s time for someone else to steal Zuckerberg’s platform by creating one that’s basically Facebook Classic, circa 2012-ish, but with enough structural differences to keep it from being sued and shut down. The time is now. Facebook has to die. And when it does, I’m throwing a party and everyone’s invited.
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