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Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

economist.com

131–136 of 136 posts

Re: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

#131

Alright, here are my honest gripes with facebook: - Professional contacts. I can't share anything I consider "funny" (in the stupid, I'm-in-my-early-20s way) with friends because I have investors and recruiters and these other professional fucks ready to judge me. - I'm tired of seeing your achievements. God damn just wait until I get some, okay? I don't care if you just started med school and are posting pics of you…

Sounds like you're a terrible person on Facebook. I'll assume you're not a terrible person and maybe you can adopt some of my practices if you think they're useful to you:

- Don't connect with professional contacts on Facebook. If you do, use Security groups to not let them see anything. Same for easily-offended family members...

- If you're sick of someone's posts you can hide them from your timeline without de-friending them from the context menu. A well curated timeline is essential to having a good signal-noise ratio.

- Do you really want to get laid by girls who check out your Facebook profile for the proper ratio of girls:guys in your photos? Sounds like you'd rather get laid by women who don't care, figure out where they are and hang out there. Then again I'm a gay man in an open/poly relationship so YMMV.

- You can control who sees your posts as well, this can be as fine-grained as you want with Security groups. Personally, I just have one group that can see everything, and everyone else (cow-orkers, distant relatives, Mom) gets nothing.

- I Like stuff even from people I don't really like because hey cool post! If someone is neurotic enough to look through who Like'd what I probably don't reall ycare what they have to say.

- Yeah, ads suck.

Re: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

#132

Alright, here are my honest gripes with facebook: - Professional contacts. I can't share anything I consider "funny" (in the stupid, I'm-in-my-early-20s way) with friends because I have investors and recruiters and these other professional fucks ready to judge me. - I'm tired of seeing your achievements. God damn just wait until I get some, okay? I don't care if you just started med school and are posting pics of you…

>Constant reputation management. If I post anything, I need to be vigilant for a few days to make sure no stupid highschool friends post anything.

Now that I've added my parents/grandparents on Facebook (Why did I do that?) I'm constantly doing this. I have college buddies that will post the most immature things on my status/wall.

Re: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I don't understand your argument; I said: "No advanced society (past a certain GDP) has slipped back into tyranny" I bring up Japan and Germany. I assumed you were not talking about modern Japan and Germany, and you were referring to WW2 Japan and Germany. Japan was a monarchy that turned into some kind of fascist monarchic bureaucracy and Germany was a failed state that turned fascist. Neither represent a mo…

Because unless they're democratic, they're no true Scotsman right? I guess my problem is that whenever examples are provided which contradict the model as you proposed it you decide to "clarify" the definitions so as to exclude those examples. Maybe that's the argument you originally intended to make, but it's not actually what you said.

Actually you just aren't reading carefully.

"No advanced society (past a certain GDP) has slipped back into tyranny"

The only reason I need to clarify things is because when I say "advanced society past a certain GDP" you think China and early 20th century dictatorships are great example. Then you pretend that in the original post you were talking about modern Japan and Germany, which given the context made no sense

The only clarification I made that sorta moved the goal posts is excluding oil rich countries from my argument, which frankly is a corner case.

Re: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

#134
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit off-topic, but Facebook has always very intentionally been on the cutting edge of eroding privacy and frankly it doesn't really matter what you do. In 10 years people will care even less about privacy than they do now. Due to Facebook people now-a-days are sharing significantly more than they would ever have been comfortable with even 10 years ago. That trend is only going to continue. "one big database that wa…

It is always a failure to interpolate the future linear from now on. History was never linear. It is more like waves between extremes. Therefore my estimate would be a new Biedermeier period. You obviously did not study history. Look up Germanys history (Nazis, Stasi) if you want a picture of what a gov't can do with you or your children.

I do study history, I just don't see the cyclicality of it. I think it's an illusion that people want to see. The late 19th century was a period of extreme nationalism. There wasn't a similar period 100 years before, and there isn't one 100 years later. I think it's very dismissive of the progress we've made intellectually over the past century to think fascism/communism/tyranny is going to come back. I think it's completely unsustainable in our current (and future) society so there is no fundamental reason to militantly guard privacy against some illusory future evil that won't come about.

Re: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

#135

I've deactivated facebook permanently (I changed my password to something impossible to remember before deactivating). This works very well, since facebook is about having higher number of friends, when there's zero, there's no point in going back to it. It's value at one point was very high (when I could still tolerate the level of bullshit amongst my peers on fb; most are insecure little instagram addicts) but now…

I was off Facebook for a year and felt as free as you described. The problem is that girls use FB as a vetting tool. It's weird to not have FB and introduces a barrier to entry in the dating world (pun absolutely intended).

If she uses FB, I'd end the relationship right there. Other things include taking off heels during sex.

Re: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

#136

I've deactivated facebook permanently (I changed my password to something impossible to remember before deactivating). This works very well, since facebook is about having higher number of friends, when there's zero, there's no point in going back to it. It's value at one point was very high (when I could still tolerate the level of bullshit amongst my peers on fb; most are insecure little instagram addicts) but now…

> Now I chuckle whenever I hear some idiot snapping shots of their receipt or food, it's not the camera shutter, it's the sound of insecurity. It's common to take photos of receipts for business purposes. Is there a situation where that type of behavior indicates insecurity?

> It's common to take photos of receipts for business purposes. Is there a situation where that type of behavior indicates insecurity?

Yes, such as when you are at a fancy restaurant you frequent but your friends wants to let his social network know that they just dropped a large portion of their salary on some fish on rice by taking picture of the receipt because it's "ballin"

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