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Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

nautil.us

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Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#111

Post by bitexploder »

rayiner wrote: post #110
bitexploder wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have learned I just don't need to live social life with distant relatives and friends every day. The important things filter to the surface of your life as do the important people. I get more value out of a longer email or a 15 minute phone call than a bunch of shallow interactions on Facebook. I suspect over time we will learn that Facebook and the like is actually poor at maintaining social relationships in a mea…

There isn’t some set number of relationships you can have such that you’ve got to pick out the “important” ones.

I think in a philosophical sense that is true. However, our wetware is just wired to keep about 100 fellow people close. More than that and relationships seem to become very superficial. Most people only maintain a very small number of close relationships. Those are the "important" ones. Importance is sort of decided naturally, though.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#112

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

coffeemug wrote: post #108
rayiner wrote: post #42

These articles ignore people’s real alternatives. I’m in my 30s and have a small child. While I love to fly into Chicago or New York for a night of drinking with my still-single friends, that’s not really something I get to do more than once every couple of months. Seeing my wife’s extended family (3,000 miles away in the west coast) is a once every year thing, and seeing my extended family (7,000 miles away in Asia)…

That used to be the case for me, but now a lot of that energy moved to WhatsApp (which is also Facebook, but a different product). It's better in every way -- the communication is private, it's two way so people feel closer, and I don't get overwhelmed by memes and ads. This probably couldn't have happened without Facebook proper (now my parents are on WhatsApp), but I think mobile chat groups are a much better form-…

Facebook is smart to have diversified by satisfying both markets.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#114

Post by scottharveyco »

cletus wrote: post #89
badestrand wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love it if Facebook worked that way for me. But unfortunately its just selfies and crappy shares of motivational or "funny" memes. The people that I am interested in mostly never post anything - and me neither, because I a) would like to share with close friends and family but not everyone I am connected to* and b) I find it too stressful to having to worry that my post won't garner many likes and thus will b…

Unfortunately customizing your news feed takes some work. Frankly I'd like a setting that just says I'm not interested in any of the following: - Tag a friend who ... - Quizzes - Inspirational quotes of any kind - Social game results of any kind (or invites for that matter) In my own feed I had a few culprits who were largely responsible for this noise. I think only in one case did I have to resort to unfollow (altho…

I use http://www.fbpurity.com/ to do filtering on Facebook and it works well enough even if it breaks the layout sometimes.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#115

Post by indoobidablee »

There are different types of social interaction on Facebook between different generations, it seems. There are those who use it to keep up with other people and what they're doing, and then there's my generation (the 90s), where everyone tags each other in memes, and it isn't a very personal website.

Whereas there are points in this article that make sense, I don't really understand why they're singling out Facebook as toxic. For many, Facebook is just another feed and not necessarily for social media posts.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#116

Post by closeparen »

0x4f3759df wrote: post #75
rayiner wrote: post #42

These articles ignore people’s real alternatives. I’m in my 30s and have a small child. While I love to fly into Chicago or New York for a night of drinking with my still-single friends, that’s not really something I get to do more than once every couple of months. Seeing my wife’s extended family (3,000 miles away in the west coast) is a once every year thing, and seeing my extended family (7,000 miles away in Asia)…

People with children generally move to the suburbs because urban developers aren't really building family friendly housing and its hard to be social with the suburban model, which is that you get a lot of space but you therefore don't have very many neighbors and you aren't within walking distance of the town center. Your TV comment reminds me that one of the biggest shows was "Cheers" where you kinda get to feel lik…

Walkability only applies to the small set of rich people who live in the most expensive part of the city. Growing up in the suburbs, we'd frequently visit family friends clear across the metro area. It would take at worst 15 minutes to drive to and park at their houses for dinner parties. The geographically closest person I know in San Francisco is around 2 miles away, and that's 40+ minutes on foot or more by bus (off commute hours so low frequency, no express service, etc).

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#117

Post by badestrand »

wutbrodo wrote: post #86
badestrand wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love it if Facebook worked that way for me. But unfortunately its just selfies and crappy shares of motivational or "funny" memes. The people that I am interested in mostly never post anything - and me neither, because I a) would like to share with close friends and family but not everyone I am connected to* and b) I find it too stressful to having to worry that my post won't garner many likes and thus will b…

> I would love it if Facebook worked that way for me. But unfortunately its just selfies and crappy shares of motivational or "funny" memes. I don't know much about Facebook's feed because I don't use it a ton, but can't you just unfollow the people who post this stuff? I'd imagine after doing this just a handful of times, your feed would become a lot better tuned to the kind of stuff you actually want to see. The ~o…

> can't you just unfollow the people who post this stuff?

Actually I did just a month ago but now my feed is quite empty. It seems the people I am interested in stopped posting or even deleted their accounts. I wonder whether and how FB is working on getting those back.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#118

Post by wutbrodo »

billysbeanes wrote: post #99
wutbrodo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I can't really understand why all the complaints about Facebook are so maximalizing. I feel like the authors of all these hitpieces are personally unable to engage in healthy, limited usage of it, so they cast it as as some universal evil that every person is powerless to resist. I got Facebook in 2006, when it was only college kids (and some high school kids), and my usage throughout college was 99% photo shari…

> I feel like the authors of all these hitpieces are personally unable to engage in healthy, limited usage of it, so they cast it as as some universal evil that every person is powerless to resist. I can smoke cigarettes responsibly. One every few weeks, which I have researched and believe does not negatively impact my health. In fact, it provides a moment of stress relief that outweighs possible negatives. How do yo…

You should read the article, and my comment, a little more closely before responding. You're making a massive, unwarranted leap from "not a universal evil" to "must not have any legislation around it". I also don't think cars are pure evil....do you assume that I think that cars should be 100% unregulated? I'm specifically complaining about the maximalizing tendency of the author and others on this post: casting Facebook use as a pure vice, and ignoring the millions (hundreds of millions? I have no idea) of people who are able to get a very positive cost/benefit out of responsible use of it. Your cigarette analogy is apt in that I think that way of tobacco: I have a cigar a few times a year, and I think that the notion that tobacco is some evil force that we have to ascetically shy away from is idiotic[1].

> Which, by the way, is an awful metric for whether something should be banned

Dude, seriously, _what are you talking about_? At no point did I mention anything about banning Facebook or anything else. I don't know whose post your comment is supposed to be responding to, but just FYI you clicked "reply" under mine for some reason.

The point I am making is that "Facebook use" and "unhealthy Facebook use" are not the same thing, and the tendency I am criticizing is writing articles about the latter and bait-and-switching them to be about the former. I can use my phone to call a drug dealer, I can use my car to hit a pedestrian, I can use my computer to harass people online: and yet nobody considers those to be indictments of the overall concept of phones, cars, or computers.

--- Leaving aside the fact that your cigarette example doesn't make any sense:

Which cigarette legislation in particular are you thinking of? I'm of the same mind as the rest of society when it comes to kids being protected and having less autonomy in their decision-making, so not being able to advertise cigarettes to kids is obviously good. I'm not opposed to Pigovian taxes to balance externalities, especially when harm scales with amount of use and has significant enough externalities (like second-hand smoke), so the taxes on cigarettes don't bother me either. I think that there's some scope for paternalistic legislation of activities that don't harm others, but I think the bar has to be pretty damn high and pretty damn robust for that.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#119

Post by badestrand »

cletus wrote: post #89
badestrand wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love it if Facebook worked that way for me. But unfortunately its just selfies and crappy shares of motivational or "funny" memes. The people that I am interested in mostly never post anything - and me neither, because I a) would like to share with close friends and family but not everyone I am connected to* and b) I find it too stressful to having to worry that my post won't garner many likes and thus will b…

Unfortunately customizing your news feed takes some work. Frankly I'd like a setting that just says I'm not interested in any of the following: - Tag a friend who ... - Quizzes - Inspirational quotes of any kind - Social game results of any kind (or invites for that matter) In my own feed I had a few culprits who were largely responsible for this noise. I think only in one case did I have to resort to unfollow (altho…

> In the right group you may find more sense of community

Interesting, but I am not even looking for a community, I just don't want to put a post out there that will be "unsuccessful". It doesn't bother me if I only get a few likes, it bothers me that all my friends see how my post is "failing". I am not in panic but it puts me off from posting. Am I the only one with those thoughts? Facebook without the like mechanism would cater to me much more.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#120

Post by morpheuskafka »

Anyone who choses to use FB is just not thinking. I could get joining Instagram, Snapchat, etc b/c of friends. But even if you don't care about privacy, don;t care about algorithms censoring human expression, and don't care about unauthorized physiological experiments to influence your emotions, why would you choose a platform with tons of ads, a terrible UI that fills up timelines with every time someone uploads a new profile, is slow as hell, and is a haphazard mess of sloppily assembled groups with all-caps titles. It's not attractive. It's not addictive. It's both morally and graphically disgusting at every level.

I'm beginning to think the latter is intentional, just like scam email with copious misspellings.

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