[HN Gopher] To Hell with Facebook (2021)
___________________________________________________________________
To Hell with Facebook (2021)
Author : mrzool
Score : 149 points
Date : 2022-08-18 21:01 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.damninteresting.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.damninteresting.com)
| testhn6656 wrote:
| rdxm wrote:
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| "The earliest known version of the idiom "the straw that broke
| the camel's back" was written by the English philosopher Thomas
| Hobbes of Malmesbury in 1677."
|
| I am sorry, what?
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Apparently this is the quotation:
|
| > The last Dictate of the Judgement, concerning the Good or
| Bad, that may follow on any Action, is not properly the whole
| Cause, but the last Part of it, and yet may be said to produce
| the Effect necessarily, in such Manner as the last Feather may
| be said to break a Horses Back, when there were so many laid on
| before as there want but that one to do it.
|
| But I have to admit, I hadn't known it was that recent and had
| assumed it to be biblical.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| This is ancient, man.
| [deleted]
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I use facebook because everybody else uses facebook. I actually
| tried to get away from it for years, but I eventually _had_ to,
| under protest, get back on it because I was too disconnected.
| floppydiskette wrote:
| This is always what people say, yet it's not really true. You
| can always stay in touch with the people you care about via
| other means, and they with you. Yes, there might be some events
| you'll get left out of, especially in the beginning when people
| aren't aware you're not on Facebook, but eventually you settle
| into a calmer social state.
|
| I deleted mine five years ago and I just have a bunch of
| independent group text threads with family and friends as well
| as slack/discord. It's different, and not as conveniently
| centralized, but it's certainly not impossible to have a
| fulfilling social life, go to events, and keep up with people
| without it. Maybe not so much the third cousin or old family
| friend. Personally, I don't feel like I'm missing out on
| anything positive by not being on it. Meanwhile, I get to avoid
| being bombarded by ads, opinions I wasn't interested in,
| manufactured outrage, and feeling the need to share my every
| thought with "everyone".
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| It is undeniably difficult to abstain from Facebook. There
| are local events, family events, businesses, family members,
| etc. that only operate within the walled garden. And the
| walls continue to rise, making it more and more difficult to
| peer at internal content from without.
|
| I've been Facebook (and Instagram)-free for years now, but my
| personal relationships have suffered for it. Fortunately
| Facebook is its own worst enemy here, since it keeps making
| its core products worse and worse for personal relationships.
| Ads in Messenger, suggested posts, hiding content from
| friends, dark patterns... it adds up, and over the past
| couple of years more and more of my friends have abandoned
| Facebook. Those friendships have largely rekindled. But the
| heavy users remain jacked in to the News Feed, utterly
| addicted, to the point where it's difficult to even reach
| them through another medium.
| pascalxus wrote:
| you don't have to do anything unless someone is holding a gun
| to your head. Is someone holding a gun to your head? well then
| they're not your friend and you should unfriend them. i go on
| facebook maybe once per month or 3 or 4 times per year. not a
| single friend has complained about that.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| Wow, damninstersting.com! What a throwback. I remember loving the
| posts there back when digg was still popular.
|
| That being said, I have a hard time swallowing the premise of the
| article.
|
| > When we ask them what caused the assumption of our demise, they
| invariably cite the fact that our posts disappeared from their
| Facebook news feeds.
|
| I would expect reddit to frequently link to damninteresting, but
| I can't recall seeing them on reddit since digg was still around,
| which to me points out that there is probably a larger problem
| than extortion for traffic.
|
| I distinctly remember a post from the owner of damn interesting
| explaining lack of content and/or shutting down at some point
| too.
| lovingCranberry wrote:
| The article tries to make the reader feel bad about Facebook by
| pointing out how the site can create negative emotions.
| However, the author does not seem to be aware of the fact that
| he is doing the same thing.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Not at all the same.
|
| Most authors are deliberately trying to elicit emotion in
| their writing, and you can decide if you want to keep reading
| or not. Personally, I often get to a point where I realise my
| mood is being negatively affected by writing, and decide to
| move on. But that's part of the experience of reading in any
| media.
|
| The difference is that Facebook would be selective about what
| writing they would move you on to, in order to deliberately
| manipulate your emotional state over a long period of time.
|
| If you read the damninteresting post and felt bad, maybe you
| would decide to go check out xkcd or theoatmeal or something.
| But on Facebook, the next article would have a similar
| sentiment, so you didn't get the unicorn break you needed to
| maintain a good mood.
|
| The decision to move on was taken away from you, without your
| knowledge, in the interests of "research".
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| The important difference is that an author is just one
| person with a busy life who for a few hours a week writes
| to manipulate your emotional state.
|
| Facebook is a machine. It's a gargantuan, for-profit,
| always-on swarm of bots spread globally across multiple
| data centres all programmed to relentlessly manipulate your
| emotional state.
|
| When making moral comparisons people forget factors of
| scale and speed matter. Quantitative differences become
| qualitative differences.
| lavventura wrote:
| Does it hold on for Instagram as well?
| toss1 wrote:
| YES, even more so -it's all designed to be toxic sludge.
|
| Avoid, expel, expunge, and escape from all FB properties with
| all possible haste.
| awejkfho wrote:
| most countries run on WhatsBook (aka WhatsApp) and InstaBook (aka
| Instagram).
|
| I can't get a drivers license appointment with the local
| goverment without a mobile number associated with WhatsBook.
| ...which is a cia/five-eyes dream.
|
| And same for InstaBook. You cannot relate to anyone or find
| business. Being banned (always without a reason) on InstaBooks
| means you just lost years of networking because you can't even
| see the list or contact anyone in any way if all you had was
| InstaBook direct messages before.
| Naga wrote:
| What country requires you to have WhatsApp to get a driver's
| license?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| I assume it is less the government office and more the
| driving instructor.
|
| In my travels through Asia I often noticed how Zuckerberg's
| "Free Basics" / internet.org initiative which gives free data
| for reaching Facebook, WhatsApp etc. and Wikipedia completely
| dominates communication with any local business. SMS, e-mail,
| phone calls, ... cost money. WhatsApp via cell network is
| free.
| wnissen wrote:
| It is fascinating to get cell service in countries that
| don't have net neutrality. You can buy a 2GB/unlimited
| calls and texts plan from the largest Mexican operator for
| US$15. But after that you can get a plan that only allows
| social media like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram for
| US$2.50. As long as you stay within those walled gardens
| you pay almost nothing. Hard to imagine anyone breaking
| that monopoly when the alternative is more than 5x the
| price.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| rinze wrote:
| Relevant: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
| echelon wrote:
| I'm glad The Oatmeal is taking a stand against this. The popup
| asking for my email felt genuine.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| This explains a lot. About 2 years ago my feed suddenly began to
| be filled with posts from random pages I had followed. Some I had
| followed a decade ago and had not seen a post from in years. BTW,
| when I say filled I mean filled. Literally like 30 page posts
| with maybe one IRL friend or family post showing up in-between.
|
| It got so bad that to actually see the family photos and
| announcements I cared about I had to manually unsubscribe from
| almost every page I had ever followed. I guess I'll never know
| for sure but I'm going to guess "boosting" was to blame?
| boplicity wrote:
| Once you unfollow every page, they'll start bombarding you with
| "suggested" posts from pages. There's no way to get away from
| them anymore. It's how they're able to sneak in their
| overwhelming amount of advertising.
| SaltyBackendGuy wrote:
| I just found this out. I thought by unsubscribing from the
| boosted posts that I would win back my feed... I was wrong.
| 60secs wrote:
| cache:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220810205711/https://www.damni...
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| It would be nice if we could evacuate walled-garden social media
| platforms and return to individual websites/blogs + RSS. RSS
| clients that empower the user to follow, sort, filter, and
| control their "news feed" of content from individual
| websites/blogs.
| leephillips wrote:
| Is anything preventing you from just doing it? There are plenty
| of RSS/Atom readers.
| ghaff wrote:
| At least one complaint is that a lot of content has moved on.
| And maybe you can just ignore that content. Which I'm not
| sure would be wrong.
| atestu wrote:
| That's fair. There are a lot of big news sites that don't
| have RSS anymore, like axios.com
| ghaff wrote:
| And a lot of people who blogged more now do twitter
| threads. Or they just don't get started doing blogs.
| IncRnd wrote:
| But, they do: https://www.axios.com/feeds/feed.rss
| giobox wrote:
| Your mileage may vary, but I only ever wanted RSS feeds
| that provide the actual article content. Just spitting
| out a feed of links back to the site with headlines is
| not how I or many others used RSS and RSS readers wayback
| when. Full article feeds have all but died out now
| anyway, another nail in the RSS coffin for me.
| giobox wrote:
| In my experience, RSS isn't close to the level of widespread
| high quality support it had in the early "web2.0" days on the
| server side - picking an RSS client even with the demise of
| Google Reader hasn't been my issue with RSS in recent years
| anyway, its just the content isn't there anymore like it once
| was.
| lancesells wrote:
| I don't use any social media and I've found that many
| businesses at least neglect their website and quite
| understandably resort to posting on social media. The few
| local news sites that I use usually will have an article
| about a business or a news story and then link to instagram
| or twitter rather than their website.
|
| I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything but the
| usefulness of the web lessens year over year. Now that the
| platforms have locked down even viewing an instagram or
| twitter fee without an account I almost wish I could just get
| rid of all links pointing to them.
|
| The easiest thing would be to give in an make an account but
| I'm too stubborn ha.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| During the pandemic lockdowns I found that reactivating my
| Facebook account was the best way to figure out if a shop
| did still exist and how they changed their opening hours
| ... websites unmaintained all in the walled garden. And
| looking at my "news feed" reminded me that I don't really
| miss anything from there.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I figure that any business that effectively only
| communicates using social media is a business that actively
| doesn't want me as a customer.
|
| Good riddance.
| rakoo wrote:
| People I want to follow don't have the technical chops to
| self-host. One can say it's sad, but I think it's worse that
| one _needs_ technical chops to self-host.
|
| Come up with a way for anyone to publish content from their
| phone, with no subscription, and no need for an always-on
| server, and you'll have the basis for something less
| centralized.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Tumblr's owned by Automattic now, and they're throwing in
| some Indieweb features ([this] doesn't look official, but
| it actually is!). It also has proper RSS. Using a platform
| like that rather than a totally closed one like FB seems to
| me like a step up.
|
| [this]: https://github.com/indieweb/tumblr
| [deleted]
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| How do you discover people in this system, though?
|
| And at the end of the day, there has to be some kind of
| server somewhere. Even if it's using SMS or DNS or
| something to accomplish this.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| that nobody else is doing it. There's a reason it's called a
| social _network_. The value is in the connections, hence the
| dominance of platforms.
| n3storm wrote:
| How do you call it when the platform replaces the social
| network? 80% of the content is created to acquire relevance
| in/to the platform not to create or consolidate meaningful
| relationships.
| dylan604 wrote:
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I like your use of the word "evacuate".
|
| Recently I came upon the the phrase "cloud repatriation", which
| seemed a fresh angle on a word that's fallen on hard times.
|
| Evacuate! Yes we need a Dunkirk for those helpless souls left
| on the beaches of Facebook. The idea that they're going to
| swim, one by one, back the safety of personal web pages is
| silly.
| function_seven wrote:
| Bring back MySpace exactly as it was in 2005. Yeah, even with
| the XSS and other craziness. That was part of the adventure!
|
| (Okay, okay, maybe a bit more work on security, but don't go so
| far as to make it bland.)
|
| Maybe I my lenses are rose tinted, but that era of social media
| was fun.
| lkrubner wrote:
| I think this cannot be done with IP/TCP because of the reliance
| on each individual to pay for both active web servers and some
| kind of DNS config. It's possible to imagine other protocols
| that could force at least text messaging to flow over other
| networks. Simple text, over a simpler network protocol, might
| be possible. The governments could potentially force all cable
| companies to support it, as a requirement of being licensed.
| That would allow something like the text exchange that
| universities enjoyed in the 1980s, when the Internet was
| confined to universities and subsidized by the Nation Science
| Foundation. Or, for that matter, the government could directly
| subsidize something similar. But I think the protocol would
| have to be simpler. Just plain text, I think.
|
| Merely keeping the current system, but wishing consumers would
| use it differently, is a utopian dream that is unlikely to come
| true. You need to look at why consumers behave the way in the
| current system, and then you have to imagine a different
| system, and that different system cannot look anything like
| IP/TCP/UDP.
|
| We currently have like 8,000 RFCs. We've designed the world's
| most flexible system. It is very complex. I think you'd need a
| system simple enough that you could specify the whole thing in
| a 50 page document. That kind of simplicity. The simplicity
| should allow it to be cheap, and therefore easy to subsidize,
| either by the government or out of the profits of cable or
| phone or network companies.
| immibis wrote:
| IPv4 doesn't help. If every PC had an IP address, you could
| have a blog on your own PC, leaving it on overnight - even a
| laptop.
| wwweston wrote:
| > I think this cannot be done with IP/TCP because of the
| reliance on each individual to pay for both active web
| servers and some kind of DNS config.
|
| You can pay someone for that, somewhere around the order of
| $5 a month, probably less, or free but ad-supported.
|
| And that's more or less what Facebook is, except we pay with
| our data and attention on the back end rather than our
| dollars up front. The product might be rather different if we
| did pay in dollars, and for that reason I suspect digital
| protocols aren't the fundamental problem.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| A non-chronological feed is a lousy feed.
| jmyeet wrote:
| The central premise of this is that you only get distribution for
| your page's content if you pay for boosts. That might be true. I
| can't say. Nor can I say if that's an intentional product change.
|
| It's fun (and popular) to dunk on Facebook (sorry, "Meta") with
| good cause but you should always be wary of any story that
| affirms your own biases.
|
| I'm thinking specifically of Yelp's campaign against Google
| "stealing" their content. More than anything else, this is Yelp
| blame-shifting and pointing to the big bad Google while
| collecting a paycheck and doing absolutely nothing to improve
| your product for more than a decade.
|
| You can have a long career blaming other people for your woes but
| that doesn't inherently make those claims true.
|
| So does Meta require boosting to get the same distribution you
| previously got for free? Maybe. But it could also be that this
| site simply fell off.
| wikitopian wrote:
| We need to admit our mistake here and ask MySpace Tom to take us
| back.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Even though I am a bit anti-social, I still have a Facebook page.
| I like to try and keep up with what is "happening" in the lives
| of family, friends, and neighbors.
|
| By "happening", I mean things like weddings, funerals, babies
| born, graduations, etc. I don't mean "What I had for breakfast!",
| "What movie I saw last night!" or "A running diary of my two week
| vacation"
|
| I never understand people who want to know every detail of all
| their friends lives and spend hours scrolling through posts every
| day.
|
| I hate having to scroll through hundreds of meaningless posts to
| find major events. Maybe Facebook has a way to do this and I
| haven't figured it out, but I wish it had a way to "Rank" your
| posts (1-10). Then every time you posted something you could
| assign it a rank (1 = "I got married", 2 = "My kid got married",
| 3 = "I went to Europe for the summer", ... 7 = "This is what I
| did in Spain", ... 10 = "This is what I ate for breakfast at a
| cafe in Spain").
|
| Then you could filter events for each of your 'Facebook friends'.
| Some you would only want to see #1 posts. Others, you might go to
| level 4. Maybe you go to level 7 for your best friends.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >By "happening", I mean things like weddings, funerals, babies
| born, graduations, etc.
|
| WhatsApp friends/family groups take care of this for me. If we
| are not close enough for that, I can wait until the next time I
| visit someone's home to see pictures of life updates.
|
| I just wonder how Meta will monetize Whatsapp.
| SteveDR wrote:
| > I never understand people who want to know every detail of
| all their friends lives and spend hours scrolling through posts
| every day.
|
| That's like saying you don't understand people who want to lose
| at slots. Those people don't exist. They just trudge through
| the misses until they get their next hit.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| I guess I haven't become addicted because I only check my
| Facebook page about once a month.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| >Maybe Facebook has a way to do this
|
| Isn't that pretty much it's default behavior? It seems to know
| pretty well which handful of people really matter to me, and
| their "content" always finds it's way to the very top of my
| feed. Pretty much always the first post if it's a big one
| (usually has a lot of engagement on it).
| rr808 wrote:
| It used to be until a couple of weeks ago and now it starts
| with tiktok like videos with a few of your friend's posts
| hidden inbetween.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I can't even use Facebook for that. I reduced my Facebook
| friends to a dozen people and two organizations never saw them
| in my timeline even through the combined number of posts was a
| few dozen a day.
| conductr wrote:
| I use FB roughly in this manner. So I only go in the app about
| once a month. I've learned that if I just like the relevant
| posts from those people I actually care about, that's what I
| will see. They still post crap stuff, but the algorithm usually
| knows the post is old AND was low engagement so doesn't show to
| me by the time I show up.
|
| Downside is I'm that weird guy that's liking 3 week old posts
| that are ancient history to everyone else.
| lovingCranberry wrote:
| > Using Facebook has been scientifically demonstrated to cause
| depression
|
| Not to say that this line is wrong, but that the evidence for
| this claim is far from conclusive. The findings from such studies
| are mixed, partly due to differences in how variables are
| operationalised.
|
| I believe your interaction with digital technology can be a main
| driver of depression, but not in the way it's being framed. My
| psychologist (back when I was suicidal and in a strong depressive
| episode) told me, that I should have at least 20 minutes of face-
| to-face conversation to day. That I should go outside and find
| meaningful contacts, goals, and sense in life. I believe that a
| lot of people, who sit in front of their computer the whole day
| are missing this. It doesn't matter what medium you consume as
| much as what you're actually missing. The few girls which I met
| during therapy were mainly on tumblr, discord, instagram. I
| didn't use fb either. Welp, even HN didn't keep depression away!
|
| Having at least a 20 minute long face-to-face convo per day was
| honestly a great helper, besides the full-time therapy to stop my
| head thinking, and pills, of course.
|
| Just my two cents to this line. I agree with the other comments
| about non-chronological feeds being lousy. The article is really
| trying to push negative emotion towards facebook.
| rr808 wrote:
| Yeah its depressing watching all the stupid political memes,
| less so the envy.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I totally agree with everything you've written, but would just
| point out that Facebook (and other social media companies) pay
| _huge_ amounts of money to some of the smartest people in the
| world whose sole goal is to get you to scroll, scroll, scroll.
|
| Yes, individuals can choose their relationship to technology,
| but let's not let the drug pushers off the hook.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| So what? McDonalds also pays huge amounts of money to
| optimize their food. McDonalds isn't liable in any way when
| someone ruins their life with Big Macs. Facebook, like
| literally every business on the planet, focuses a lot of time
| & money on getting people to use their product as much as
| possible. What hook do you not want to let them off that
| doesn't also apply to literally everyone else? The only
| exception to date has been narcotics that create physical
| dependencies, and even then we broadly allow alcohol and
| nicotine, just with age limits.
| acrobatsunfish wrote:
| "Comparison of the theif of joy." What better way to compare
| then hd photos on Facebook, Instagram, etc
| alex_young wrote:
| The "it's inconclusive" line is being pushed by FB pretty hard
| right now, and it feels pretty similar to the smoking industry
| telling people there's no proof cigarettes cause cancer 20
| years ago.
|
| Obviously _something_ is causing marked increases in teen
| depression and suicide attempts over the same period as the
| move to 24 /7 social media. Sure, it's possible there are other
| factors, but isn't it obvious that social media is at least
| playing a significant role?
|
| https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/990234501/facebook-calls-link...
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| I'd be interested in hearing a comparison of how researching
| go about establishing causality for a smoking-cancer link vs.
| a Facebook-depression link. Obviously, it's hard to do a
| proper randomized controlled trial in both cases. Anyone know
| more about what kinds of methods can be used? I think it
| would be useful to help this conversation be a little more
| fact-based and less ideological.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Just because something is doesn't mean it's facebook.
| Especially since basically no teens use facebook.
|
| Your other example also dates you pretty hard. The surgeon
| general report of 1964 said conclusively that cigarettes
| cause lung cancer and other diseases. 1964 is somewhat longer
| ago than 20 years.
|
| In short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGrfhsxxmdE
| dhosek wrote:
| But the tobacco companies insisted to the contrary and
| funded their own "studies" to the contrary well after 1964.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| They did not. The studies which cast doubt on smoking
| cancer link were all done in the 1950s:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/
|
| The next 30 years to the 1990s were a fight to muddy the
| science over second hand smoke which was a different
| issue.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Your nitpicking doesn't further the discussion.
|
| It's a fact that they did their best to mislead the
| public for the longest possible time.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Can't you just replace Facebook with "social media"?
| There's very few good uses of social media and the entire
| thing is free, so there's no way they are making money
| doing things in your interest.
| googlryas wrote:
| Even if we took it as conclusive, OP is far overstating the
| research by making it seem like "If you use facebook, you will
| become depressed". It would be like saying "Using a swimming
| pool has been scientifically demonstrated to cause drownings".
|
| Yes, you can drown a swimming pool, and that is tragic, but you
| really need to talk about the rate that these bad things
| happen.
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _It doesn 't matter what medium you consume as much as what
| you're actually missing._
|
| Disagreed. Both matter.
|
| Deliberately triggering people is bad for them. You have to be
| very disingenuous to deny it.
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(page generated 2022-08-18 23:00 UTC)