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Facebook is an attack on the open web

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Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook and Twitter I get, but you were being angered and stressed by Instagram? It's the only social media I actively use precisely because it's not stressful or rage inducing. I'm into photography so it gives me an outlet that way (even though taking a picture with a real camera, editing it on a computer, then sending it to my phone to post on Instagram is a bit of a pain), and the annoying content from other peop…

I feel that pretenses of the life you pretend to live are more evident on Instagram than anywhere else -- the site is all about portraying yourself in the best light possible, or at least, that is how many of the people I know seem to use it. Having not had it for a couple years, I can safely say that when I do want to be on it again, it's usually just a play on the part of my ego that wants some attention from the l…

>In other words, most of what I saw on Instagram was people trying to get followers and likes, trying to be like some "adventure photographer", whatever the hell that means. The feeds became clogged with homogenous shots of feet over the same beaches, curving roads, VW vans, etc.

That still happens, and it can be a pain, but it's also easy to ignore.

And I do play the hashtag game; not to garner followers or likes but for the rare occasion where another photographer with a similar interest in "real photography" happens to be checking that same hashtag and comes across my photos, or vice versa.

On average I'm getting about 100 likes and 4 or 5 followers per shot. A lot of that is noise, but some of them are real photographers with an interest in the hobby and it's nice to meet people based solely on their photos. I've had conversations with some folks on Instagram local to me suggesting what parks I should shoot at, and I've chatted with others different film development techniques, and so on. For those situations it's worth it.

I will say that Instagram's saving grace is that it's hard to blindly share content since it requires a separate app currently. If that ever changes, and it probably will, I'll be gone.

I should add that very few of the people I follow post anything about themselves. Lazy selfies get them unfollowed. I'm in it because it's a more active photographer community than flickr/500px/whatever.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#162
I think it's hilarious that the comments in here suggest Facebook gets in the way of quality of life because of the way it captures your attention. Yet, then they spend a large amount of time on this site practicing another form of toxicity.

I get that some people, here especially it seems, have very strongly held beliefs about privacy and personal space that Facebook will never accommodate for. Nor should they be expected to. Clearly those people will never be the target audience and that's 100% okay.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#163
I agree with the authors points about blogging on facebook and having a decent logged out experience, but I want to push back against him lumping in anti-adblock pop overs.

Every publisher of high quality content is dependent on advertising to stay in business. When you are using adblock, your eyeballs are freeloading off of all the users who are using the website as intended.

I certainly understand the urge to use adblock, but it's amazing to me that people would feel entitled enough to actually expect publishers not to try to prevent this.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've cut out Facebook without 99% of the hand wringing here. I just stop browsing the site. If someone wants to talk to me I get a popup on my Messenger app on my phone, and if I get an event invite it shows up there too. Problem solved.

Indeed. You can have a Facebook account and just... Not use it unless you need it for something. All the benefits of the 'I deleted Facebook' crowd without the downsides.

That requires self control and a resilience to peer pressure, things we are encouraged to devalue for the sake of "followers".

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#166

I'm baffled by some of the comments here... Is it so difficult for you guys to just have a facebook account that you don't check in on? You can still sign into random sites that require it that way, arrange meetups, etc but without 'scrolling your life away' I expect people like me who spend most of their day on the computer to have at least as much digital self discipline as I have, but perhaps that's a poor assumpt…

Seems like my feed encourages me to do less scrolling than ever. My feed has become a haven for linked and sponsored content, and there's the occasional spatter of original content from friends. I don't see a lot of the stuff I actually care about (photos of friends, their newborns, lengthy posts, etc.) without going straight to their pages. I swear some of these personal posts never hit my home feed, they just get b…

Use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat... and treat FB as a chat program.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#168
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excluding the "ads", how would you prevent users from posting "political spam", "viral garbage", and "pictures of what your friend ate for dinner"?

Part of the Facebook problem is that they mostly took control of the feed away from users. They now surface the more "engaging" posts at the top and more frequently. This leads to the overemphasis of viral images and videos. If you post a simple personal status message without an image and Facebook's sentiment analysis considers it to be non-engaging many of your friends won't even see it as Facebook will favor marke…

I tried to write an extension that would hide all video/photo/link posts and only show pure text posts from my friends. It was really nice, although there wasn't much to the feed once all the garbage was hidden...

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#170
post #14

You've ever been to one of those pages that embed Facebook's comment engine? Yeah, those are the worst. I did some analysis on a random page with just three Facebook comments. Requests to Facebook's servers accounted for 1.5 MB of the 2.4 MB tranfered by the ENTIRE page. 87 network requests, 35 javascript files injected and it didn't even load all the comments! (I had to click on a "Load more comments" button to load…

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