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Facebook – You are the Product

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Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#261

Post by lloydde »

mseebach wrote: post #153
lloydde wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pithy saying that gets across that you as the user and the proprietor's interests may not align. We are manipulated with low doses of pleasure, nostalgia, etc. This often involves some level of deception. Sophisticated psychology is used in advertisers. When you pay with money the incentives and transactions are more clear. I'm most aware of this through my children's interactions with entertainment where YouT…

Yeah, but it's mostly wrong, and it's a sophomoric commercephobic understanding of business (also, it's an arrogant and misanthropic view of Facebooks two billion actual users as ignorant victims of something that sounds almost like a scam). The exact same argument can be made for supermarkets: they are conduits for putting you in front of goods from suppliers (supermarkets invest a lot more in their relationship wit…

I tried to ignore your accusations, ad hominem attacks and attempts to paint me into an extremist corner. Where as I'm being sophomoric, your arguments are not reductionism? Adam Smith's comments do not age well when applied to convoluted multi-party interests in the virtual world.

"Value" is a low bar. Do you have thoughts on Facebook's moral responsibilities to their actual users particularly given the sophisticated psychology experiments it's known to run? Is reduction to engagement and economic value appropriate for what is the social platform monopoly?

I have every confidence that the psychological manipulation used today will be found to be unethical in the decades ahead as we gain understanding of the brain and establish science that supports morality.

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#262

Post by johnfn »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #68
parthdesai wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So tell me, how do i replace around 5 different group chats i have on messenger which can have anywhere between 5-10 people in each chat? Music events that i go to are exclusively promoted on facebook. How do you recommend i find out about these events so that i can get a cheaper ticket price? if anyone wants to organize a plan that has more than 8 people, facebook groups make it much much easier. I personally hate f…

It's not that hard, you've just forgotten how to do these things without Facebook. >I personally hate facebook's mobile apps and some it's policies ( Internet.org comes 1st to my mind), but it's hard to completely stop using it. Try it! Deactivate your account for a week. Do it again later for two weeks. Maybe for a month. When you learn how to live without it, delete it.

> It's not that hard, you've just forgotten how to do these things without Facebook.

This doesn't work because the world has changed since Facebook didn't exist. Now that it does, some forms of social interaction that existed outside of FB now only exist on FB.

I have friends with whom FB is the only form of communication with them, and many more friends with whom FB is easily the primary form. You can't singlehandedly convince all of your friends to move off FB and onto a better platform. Especially since most of these friendships are kinda small.

I've often seen the argument "well if they aren't meaningful friendships, it doesn't matter" but that's just not practical. Sometimes you'll reconnect with someone who you haven't spoken with in 5 years - that's occasionally how friendships work. Friendships aren't permanent and steady in intensity: they sometimes fade in and out. Quitting FB obliterates all those transient and potential future friendships.

We can reduce you saying "When you learn how to live without it" to you saying "When you learn how to live without interacting with a decent chunk of people that you know". Does it seem so easy now?

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#263

Post by chrischen »

parthdesai wrote: post #49
notadoc wrote: post #5

I stopped using Facebook years ago and I could not recommend it more. I found it to be mental pollution at best and and a total waste of time. If you want to 'keep in touch' with people, call or text them. Make an effort to actually interact with the people who matter to you.

So tell me, how do i replace around 5 different group chats i have on messenger which can have anywhere between 5-10 people in each chat? Music events that i go to are exclusively promoted on facebook. How do you recommend i find out about these events so that i can get a cheaper ticket price? if anyone wants to organize a plan that has more than 8 people, facebook groups make it much much easier. I personally hate f…

The group chats are just standard messenger services that’s basically interchangeable with imessage, gchat, msn messenger, aim, whatsapp, line, wechat, or kakaotalk.

It’s ok to use that part since it’s basically a commodity feature that can be swapped if it becomes bad. That being said, they do read your messenger chats.

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#264

Post by skinnymuch »

pessimizer wrote: post #253
EGreg wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the parent comment's guess about 100% of people having email useful?

That it is true, and a communication system?

But if many don't use email much, how does it help? I barely check my personal email. And no one in my normal life knows my business email. Once in while a family member or friend will send something unimportant via email. Either I never see it. Or I see it a week or month afterward. My career relates strongly to the internet too.

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#265

Post by chrischen »

tedunangst wrote: post #112
tdurden wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that, in fact, _does_ makes it hard to avoid using facebook without being left out. I think you might mean _fear_ of being left out...friends will find other ways to contact you.

Or not. Maybe they just decide it's not worth the hassle of tracking down the outliers. I guess we can argue that anybody who's a real friend will message you using your preferred comm, though that cuts both ways. If you are a real friend, you'd message them back with their preferred system.

If you’re considered an outlier then you should probably start finding new friends.

Generally back when I used facebook the cloests friends I had had 0 interaction on facebook and we usually just direct message through messenger or imessage.

Fscebook at that time was just for maintaining those “outlier” relationships until I realized its better to have closer bonds with fewer people.

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#266

Post by provost »

alexman wrote: post #207
tucif wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also adopted a similar approach, where I unfollowed ALL my firends so that none of them will show up in newsfeed. Then I added the few ones I truly wanted to know about to the "Close friends" list which allows you to activate notifications for everything they post. Now when I log in I only see a bunch of notifications which have a very handy "Mark all as read" link, and I only click further when I see a non-meme st…

This is similar to what I did too but the newsfeed is still polluted with lots of "likes" (e.g. liking a page, liking a post) by my close friends which are irrelevant to me 99% of the time. I wish Facebook let me hide "likes" from my friends.

If it really bothers you, a simple Greasemonkey script can fix that.

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#267

Post by rhizome31 »

gertef wrote: post #159
elorant wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So tell me, how do i replace around 5 different group chats i have on messenger which can have anywhere between 5-10 people in each chat? You throw a party and get to talk to everyone. I mean come on, we used to socialize before social networks.

Many of us did not, because throwing a party is expensive and complicated.

It doesn't have to be expensive if you tell everybody to bring something to eat or drink. It does require à bit of organization but nothing very complicated. If your place is too small you can do a picnic in a public park.

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#268

Post by [deleted] »

gertef wrote: post #159
elorant wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So tell me, how do i replace around 5 different group chats i have on messenger which can have anywhere between 5-10 people in each chat? You throw a party and get to talk to everyone. I mean come on, we used to socialize before social networks.

Many of us did not, because throwing a party is expensive and complicated.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#269

Post by [deleted] »

gertef wrote: post #159
elorant wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So tell me, how do i replace around 5 different group chats i have on messenger which can have anywhere between 5-10 people in each chat? You throw a party and get to talk to everyone. I mean come on, we used to socialize before social networks.

Many of us did not, because throwing a party is expensive and complicated.

[deleted]
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