Facebook Is Full of Emotional-Support Groups

My guess is that not only is life is much more complex nowadays, but we are continually showered by polished profiles on Instagram et al showing lives that our own do not compare to. This creates feelings of inferiority and missing out, and eventually depression and other emotional problems. Add to that the general pattern towards a society of increasing inequality, and it's possible to see why in this hypercompetitive context so many people are struggling to maintain a baseline of self-esteem.

Maybe the need didn't skyrocket but the demand did. People used to not have channels to read about their problem, so they were isolated and not talking about it. Now it's easier to anonymously get informed, create support group, join them without much social stigma.

But maybe the need did skyrocket, I don't have data to support either or both hypothesis

If any Facebook employees are reading this, there's a really annoying "feature" that will show a list of suggested friends to add to a private group. I've accidentally added people to private groups by accidentally clicking a single time while scrolling.

Imagine being in an AA group or HIV support group and adding your coworker to it on accident.

Please change this.

I run a facebook breakup support group for men.

About half of the people that request to join the group discover the group themselves on facebook.

For me as a website owner (rapidbreakuprecovery.com) the group has been a convenient way to offer a forum-like functionality without any of the overhead involved with running forum software.

I suspect facebook users have come to expect that these types of groups exist and they're typing things such as "breakup" in the group search field.

There other breakup support groups that are routinely recommended in the sidebar as well as a support group specifically for divorced dads. So it seems that facebook's scale is allowing smaller niche communities to exist where they would not have existed before.

From a usability perspective it's not great. It's easy to set up and it's easy to get members, but I would happily switch to something more discrete, and that's a better fit for support group dynamics (interesting idea by sodosopa).

So I'm curious: have you tried removing details from your Facebook ad preferences?

On the desktop website go to: Settings | Ads | Your Interests. There is a huge ontology of various subjects that have been algorithmically assigned to you. If you remove these, I believe ads targeted to those interests should go away. I periodically just sweep them all clean so I have no interests. I get very few ads and those that I go get are completely generic. I never see anything that would seem creepily aware of who I am.