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Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

economist.com

61–70 of 136 posts

Re: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

#61
Did I miss something or is there a massive correlation vs causation issue with this article?

I actually agree with the premise, but I also know that my lowest-value, highest-boredom moments are spent on Facebook, so it seems like there could be a pretty large variable in the analysis that is getting ignored (underlying boredom levels).

Re: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

#62

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…

This person is just the tip of the iceberg..!

Re: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

#63
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 it's worthless as I can never gain back some 300+ friends on FB.

What's happening now is that I feel much more free. If someone is not there for you in real life to talk to face to face or on the phone once in a while, then I wouldn't have otherwise dealt with them but it was facebook that made all these uncessary contacts seem suddenly necessary, out of hoarding friends and contacts on FB to show other insecure FB friends that you are sociable and awesome.

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.

However, I still keep my linkedin account because it's intrinsic value as a social network tool is immensely more valuable than sharing stupid cat videos and your "friends" who are nothing more than just a few rows of data stored somewhere by an entity trying to show the right ads for you to click on. They might as well tell people to start wearing tshirts that display ads that matches your previous staring habits (were you just checking that chick out, time to bombard you with dating site ads on your friends t-shirt!)

Re: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

#64
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm similar to you. I had an account for a long time, then "deleted it" a couple of months ago. My entire problem with Facebook has been based around invasions to my privacy. As the years went on, I realised that more and more of my privacy was being eroded. I realised that Facebook really didn't care. I realised that I was helping them to build one big database that was searchable and rampant for abuse by a rogue go…

I guarentee that you discouraging your kids from having Facebook accounts (or whatever their equivalent is) will only do harm. Privacy in the modern era means being selective about the disclosure of content. It doesn't mean completely pulling away from social networks which are increasingly vital to social interaction. Plus pretty sure you don't understand modern day kids otherwise you would know that private tools e…

> Plus pretty sure you don't understand modern day kids otherwise you would know that private tools e.g. Snapchat are more often the real invasion of privacy.

How is Snapchat more an invasion of privacy than Facebook? Facebook has played fast and loose with user data at every opportunity while Snapchat is based around user data being ephemeral. Maybe I have missed the news stories of kids committing suicide because of private Snapchats, but the two companies have literally opposite goals in terms of data retention.

Re: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

#65

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…

Re: photos of you being posted: You can enable manual approval of you-being-tagged appearing in your Timeline in privacy settings.

Re: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

#66

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…

Facebook is merely a website for messaging and sharing photos. It is because of YOUR friends that you get the experience you do. So if you are having a poor experience then find better friends. Or remove them from your feed. Or setup groups so you can filter content better. But honestly the problem quite clearly is you. The immature use of the term 'gay' to be derogatory. The fact that you dismiss the uncool people i…

>So if you are having a poor experience then find better friends.

Yes, let's all get different people for friends, so we can have a better FB experience.

Re: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could I email them? Sure, but that's broken and impersonal. How much more personal can you get than one person writing a message specifically to one other person?

Because I have to look up their email (jabberwocky586@yahoo.com) and deliberately send them an email length message. On Facebook, I see their real name, their photo, their about page, and various recent things about their life. If I want to talk to them, I tap the chat bar and say two words. Email is extremely cold and impersonal compared to Facebook chat. Most "normal" people don't use email outside of business or m…

You don't have an address book? When I email someone I see their real name and photo too. I do miss out on where they had dinner last night or that they went to the beach, but that has nothing to do with anything.

Re: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

#68
post #34
post #3

Dr. Stallman also reminds us that Facebook is bad. It doesn't respect the users and their freedom against mass surveillance. http://stallman.org/facebook.html

By now, it is pretty clear there's no freedom from mass surveillance, at least if you're living in the US and using telephones or the internet. So singling out facebook is useless - for any site, if they have any info on you, assume the government has it, and they don't need court order for it either, and they won't allow the site to tell you about it.

I singled out, and deleted my account from, Facebook because of one of the recent news stories that showed that they actively tried to build profiles of people that their users know who are NOT on Facebook. It's one thing for me to voluntarily hand over information about myself, but it's quite another for Facebook to sneakily try to access information about my contacts.

Does it make any practical difference? I'm not sure. Being totally invisible to surveillance may be next to impossible, but I found that action on the part of Facebook to be needlessly over the top.

Re: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

#69
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm similar to you. I had an account for a long time, then "deleted it" a couple of months ago. My entire problem with Facebook has been based around invasions to my privacy. As the years went on, I realised that more and more of my privacy was being eroded. I realised that Facebook really didn't care. I realised that I was helping them to build one big database that was searchable and rampant for abuse by a rogue go…

I guarentee that you discouraging your kids from having Facebook accounts (or whatever their equivalent is) will only do harm. Privacy in the modern era means being selective about the disclosure of content. It doesn't mean completely pulling away from social networks which are increasingly vital to social interaction. Plus pretty sure you don't understand modern day kids otherwise you would know that private tools e…

>I guarentee that you discouraging your kids from having Facebook accounts (or whatever their equivalent is) will only do harm.

Because FB is some kind of inevitable force?

I, for one, also respect parents that don't let their kids watch television crap.

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