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Facebook – You are the Product

lrb.co.uk

271–280 of 321 posts

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promote giving up facebook or advertising via alternative means both to whomever organizes it and among your fellow users. Volunteer to help with those alternative means.

Ask everyone to sign up for different methods of communication. Pick a method for managing the lists. Avoid the additional publicity public facebook postings get you when someone likes it. Those are real tradeoffs that many groups aren't willing to accept, regardless of how willing a single person is to shoulder the burden.

  Ask everyone to sign up for different methods of communication
That's exactly what you are doing by insisting on Facebook use unnecessarily, when email is the true common denominator (doesn't everyone in your friends list have email?).

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#273
post #34
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and I didn't know that either until I tried it out. My regular FB account is "deactivated", but Messenger works just fine. They seem to have decoupled both products some time ago.

They removed that possibility some time ago. Now if you disable your Facebook account, it's reactivated as soon as you log into Messenger. Tried it just a few days ago.

I just tried deactivating, and upon logging in to Messenger (which works) it logged me into Messenger, but not FB.

Sweet!

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#274
I'm using Facebook to earn my "fuck you money".

The advertising tools are so powerful it is downright scary, the level of targeting one can do using it is just insane.

That's partly the reason why I stopped posting updates. After seeing the depth of the advertising tools.

I don't use Facebook for posting personal updates anymore but only to fuel my business. I realise that the only way I can "choose" to stay out of all these services that track and sell our identity to advertisers is if I have "fuck you money" (money is the currency you exchange for your limited time in order to survive in this world).

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#275

I log in whenever I need to use messenger, about once every three months. Was greeted with a notification telling me it had been 258 weeks since I last updated my profile. :)

Facebook has been slowly making messenger worse though. They have added the stupid status updates which nobody in my circle uses. Before I knew that when I got to messenger I would only have conversations, now I dread that they will slowly transform it into yet another "platform".

It would be a right move for them probably, going mobile first like WeChat did in China, still it is probably the only "messaging only" platform which people around me use.

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#277
post #26
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people I know dislike FB. But there are hundreds of millions out there for whom FB had become an addiction. B

Research shows that most people use FB to keep in touch with their close friends and family. I don’t think it’s bad to be addicted to that. Edit: Some references for the people who downvoted: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0193397308000701 (also talks about how FB is a good help for people with low self-esteem) http://www.cairn.info/revue-sociologie-2017-1-p-57.htm (French) http://www.cairn.info/re…

I agree that FB is a valuable tool to reach to individuals and communities and keep in touch with friends

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#278
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…

I recommend making an entirely fake persona for Facebook and use it only for necessary groups and chats. Use the mobile web interface exclusively, and don't install any related mobile apps.

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is true. We always have that moment at parties, "Where's Kyle? Oh shit, he deleted his facebook and didn't see the invite, did anybody text him to tell him?!" No, we didn't, because 99% of our friends use the very useful party organizing app with integrated chat and picture sharing, Facebook.

Those aren't your friends buddy. >No, we didn't, because 99% of our friends use the very useful party organizing app with integrated chat and picture sharing, Facebook. My friends will actively invite me (I don't use facebook) to events if they want me there.

>Those aren't your friends buddy.

Maybe sometimes I want to go see acquintances though, not just people who are already good friends and will remember to invite me via my preferred way of communication?

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those aren't your friends buddy. Um, so? He still wanted to go that party.

The party didn't want him. No one at that party cared enough to make less of an effort to inform him that there was a party than it would take me to get a glass of water from the kitchen.

Sending snail mail is pretty easy too. If you were to switch to only communicating via snail mail, do you think your invites to social events would drop? The events probably didn't want you anyways, since they couldn't be bothered to just send you the snail mail via this simple internet service. They're not your real friends.
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