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Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

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Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#281

Post by pjc50 »

hollerith wrote: post #119
ygjb wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To communicate with other people on my terms, when I want to communicate. It's the same reason there are only a few phone numbers that can actually make my phone ring (my wife, the school my children attend, and pager duty (:P)) My device exists for my convenience.

>there are only a few phone numbers that can actually make my phone ring Could you describe briefly how to configure that state of affairs? What OS do you use?

Poor man's version of this: set your ringtone to a silent MP3, then apply custom tones to those people you actually want to hear.

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#282

Post by ClassyJacket »

warcher wrote: post #90

This ties into a phenomena that I've noticed with a lot of social networks lately-- fake content. What I mean by that specifically is putting things into your feed that nobody actually intended to share . e.g. "XXXX liked this thing!" Or generating notifications of non-events, like "Hey, share a thing!" The share button is literally right next to the 'uplike' button. And they specifically did not press it. But you're…

This is exactly my prove my with Facebook and the thing that's making it downright close to unusable now -- the crap that you see that nobody intended to share. My feed is a literally endless stream of awful memes because someone I went to high school with ten years ago tagged their friend in a comment and now I have to see that.

I want something that shows only what my friends explicitly posted, in chronological order, and without a tiny character limit.

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#283

Post by int_19h »

jacobolus wrote: post #261
debaserab2 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but what? I've had facebook messenger, gchat/hangouts installed on my phone for some time. I don't know if I'd call it great, but I have a hard time arguing that it doesn't immediately solve my instant messaging needs. What exactly do you want that gchat or facebook messenger doesnt solve?

I want open chat protocols so I can use whatever client I damn well please (e.g. Adium, Pidgin, some terminal thing, or a bot made from a little python script, ...). Whenever I’m stuck using a centralized service (Twitter, facebook, some web forum, whatever bullshit IRC replacement businesses are buying this week, ...) their client invariably does something different than what many people want it to do, but we have n…

Proprietary push notifications on mobile devices are what really killed open IM protocols. What good is an open protocol, if the client app can't wake up to process it without a proprietary channel? We need to fix that mess first, somehow.

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#284

Post by thundergolfer »

duderific wrote: post #161
penglish1 wrote: post #135

There probably should be a robot that responds about Facebook posts "you aren't the customer, you are the product." The article is pretty careful to use the term user - undoubtedly we are users. But here is the problematic statement: "This is what happens when the metric of how much time users spend using your thing supersedes the goal of providing legitimate value to your users." The thing is - sure, the user time s…

I've always thought would be interesting to create a survey that would ask FB users: what is the maximum amount they would pay per month to use Facebook? What is it really worth to them? Or, would they continue to use it if it was $10/month? How about 50 cents?

Check this article out. Cites a study that puts the estimated annual value of Facebook to study participants @ $750!

https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/2172707...

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#285

Post by smcl »

debaserab2 wrote: post #255
smcl wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GChat used to be great - it was simple, relatively lightweight and quick. Then it was rebranded Hangouts and became a little muddled and unwieldy for a brief period when Whatsapp was ascendent which nearly overnight caused my entire group of friends to switch. You're right about the IM apps being not great. This and the poor state of desktop email clients on Windows and Linux are my pet hates

I'm sorry, but what? I've had facebook messenger, gchat/hangouts installed on my phone for some time. I don't know if I'd call it great, but I have a hard time arguing that it doesn't immediately solve my instant messaging needs. What exactly do you want that gchat or facebook messenger doesnt solve?

Well remember that this was a few years back so things were a lot different from today.

1. gchat (or "Google Talk" I think?) was a nice simple app that was replaced by a rebranded one that had different functionality and a UI that was either different or flakey/slow/unreliable (I forget all the details). I later learned that actually we were all duped by google - gchat itself was only turned off completely very recently, but at the time they managed to convince us that we had to use Hangouts instead. In any case, the whole thing was annoying enough that we left because ...

2. Whatsapp was starting to be very widespread and was a natural replacement for us as most people either had it or could quickly get it (you just needed a phone number and nearly any sort of phone, many feature phones support it) and it had a simple chat-only interface.

3. FB Messenger was not a separate application at the time, it was integrated in the FB app iirc and you still had to be a member of FB and add any contacts as "friends" to communicate. At the time it wasn't seen as a general-purpose chat app by _anyone_, just a way to talk to your FB contacts.

Hope that makes sense. If you're curious about the gchat->hangouts switch, I'm sure a quick search will turn up a few disgruntled articles - there were quite a few people who were annoyed. It probably didn't help that Google were in the habit of dropping products, so a few people may have assumed that they'd do the same with the chat app.

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#286

Post by larodi »

Facebook is/was important step in the evolution of our understanding for social interaction and what is import as information and what not. The complete exhaustion of the moving force behind FB is needed for us to transcend into the next hyper-dense digital-society.

There's a saying that 'many things fly, only few are edible', and understanding FB is fundamentally understanding this principle.

I doubt the service will ever completely disappear, but its high time it gets marginalized (at least in developed societies) the same way TV is marginalized as FB is essentially the same programmed stream of bullshit, that you don't normally need in your life.

Understanding what the author understood in his article is a cathartic moment, that besides other things, has something to do with the conscious decision to actually consume what you want and not what you were given. This means focus.

Dropping out of FB and similar means of "social presence" is essentially taking back control over where you are going in terms of information being consumed by oneself.

Of course it will feel liberating to not feed oneself with irrelevant information. It doesn't mean stopping being social, but re-evaluating what socialization effectively means.

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#287

Post by billysielu »

mbillie1 wrote: post #36
taylodl wrote: post #2

The best thing I ever did was delete the Facebook app from my phone. I had already disabled all the notifications, but that didn't change things like deleting the app. Not being able to get to Facebook wherever you are. As silly as it sounds it was liberating. I still access Facebook from my laptop - but now that it's off of my phone, I'm accessing Facebook less and less frequently and I'm find I'm happier as a resul…

Same. I initially only uninstalled messenger (which intolerably presented me with a popup asking me to enable notifications EVERY TIME I OPENED THE APP ), then got rid of the FB app. Now even on my laptop facebook.com is pointing at localhost in /etc/hosts, which makes me edit a root file to look at it. I'm much, much happier. If it works for you, cool, but if you're dissatisfied and considering abandoning it anyway,…

This guy has been talking about it for a while, see: http://www.timewellspent.io/

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#289

Post by chaosite »

mcherm wrote: post #128
roblabla wrote: post #65

I have a facebook account, but I haven't even logged in in the mast few years. Recently (like a week ago), I started receiving text messages on the number i had setup, after constant nagging by fb about security, looking like this : Robin, get back on Facebook by clicking: https://fb.com/l/someIDhere I am OUTRAGED by this. My phone text messages is one of the only communication medium that has no spam, and i basicall…

You are in luck! At one point in time, text messages were extremely expensive (several cents per message, depending on the plan you had). At that time, laws were passed (in many countries, I don't know where you are) that made it illegal to send unsolicited text messages. You should see if you can scare Facebook.

This is legally not "unsolicited", at least in my jurisdiction.

To be unsolicited, you must not have had previous business contact with the company before they contacted you. If you have a business relationship with the company, for example because you opened an account and gave them your phone number, then these laws do not apply.

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#290

Post by m12k »

taylodl wrote: post #2

The best thing I ever did was delete the Facebook app from my phone. I had already disabled all the notifications, but that didn't change things like deleting the app. Not being able to get to Facebook wherever you are. As silly as it sounds it was liberating. I still access Facebook from my laptop - but now that it's off of my phone, I'm accessing Facebook less and less frequently and I'm find I'm happier as a resul…

I've found my Facebook usage just going down in general over the years. Switching to the Messenger app and messenger.com on desktop to chat with friends has made it much easier not getting distracted by the newsfeed at random times. Plus, I switched off a whole bunch of notifications and email subscriptions and actually went through my 'friends' and marked most of them as acquaintances, so I mostly don't hear about them, which improved the quality of the feed immensely. In general, ignoring all Facebooks feeble attempts at engagement doesn't really seem all that difficult to me. And being able to look up "what was the address of that event I'm invited to again?" on the phone is nice, so I don't particularly want to delete the FB app either. So in short, it sounds to me like a lot of people are having a much harder time ignoring Facebook than I do - I wonder if maybe they just need to tweak a few things like I did, and they could happily co-exist without being bothered by it, or if there is something else at play too?
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