Does anyone (else) not use social media in its entirety? What are your reasons?
When I refer to social media, I'm talking about the main platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc. rather than those on the cusp (reddit? tildes?).
I'm personally not on any of those platforms. That is not to say I haven't used them in the past - Facebook in particular I've had an account a number of times, my longest time away from facebook was around a year and a half and I relented and signed up for an account. I'm now about six months away from Facebook and think that "this is probably it" in that I cannot foresee myself signing up again.
I have had a Twitter account up until around three months ago, which I had for roughly a year. Instagram I had a brief flirtation with for a few weeks and decided it wasn't for me so killed that off.
My main reasoning for killing my social media accounts is the absolute toxicity of those communities. Of course you can avoid the toxic elements but I find it fairly easy for it to creep up on you when you're not expecting. My second reasoning is privacy issues. I'm not a massive tin foil hat/privacy advocate however it is certainly a concern of mine. There are certain aspects to privacy issues I'm willing to overlook for convenience sake, but I feel like Facebook et al have got it entirely wrong and I'm simply not interested in providing them with any more of my data than they already have.
I do feel that I am missing out, that it is far more difficult to keep in the loop of what friends/family are doing but I'm reasonably happy to make that sacrifice. It does highlight how absolutely reliant people are on Facebook (certainly within my social group) for communication. That's also quite a concern of mine that Facebook does control (I think that is fair) the means of communication between so many people. I feel like nothing good will come of this.
How about you guys? Am I being ridiculous? Am I missing out on something? Do you side with me?
I hear this a lot and I always wonder who on earth are you friends with? Because I don't see that at all on Facebook. Facebook is how I keep in touch with a lot of my friends and family around the world. We share cool stuff, photos of our lives, thoughts, opinions and so on. We have adult conversations about Serious Topics and dick about talking about stupid stuff.
Equally people often worry about "privacy" and their "data" but as I am in complete control of what I share there, it's not really a worry. Private stuff remains private, sometimes that means not posting stuff, sometimes it means using other channels for certain communications. Facebook knows a lot about one aspect of me, the part of me who uses Facebook. I've been warned about the coming privacy/data apocalypse for over a decade now, ever since Gmail started "reading" your mail, and nothing seems to be happening yet. I remain unclear on how this problem will be manifest. Literally all Facebook want to do with my "data", such as it is, is show me relevant ads. And they suck at that.
That said, would I prefer to do all this on another platform like MeWe or similar, something run by a company slightly less rampantly libertarian than Facebook? Sure, I'd love to! But you try explaining to my 67 year old Mum how to do that and why it matters. Rinse and repeat for a few hundred people for whom using a computer at all is a minor challenge let alone using a whole new thing. So the choice is Facebook or lose touch with a lot of people. Not my mum, obviously. She's one of the two people I speak to on the phone - in part at least because we share a timezone, which many of my family/friends do not. But a lot of other people. So no, I'm the exact opposite of you.
That said, Twitter can fuck off. What an absolute shitshow that place is. It's not even it being such a disgusting cesspool of hate and rage that annoys me most, it's the offensively badly designed interface that I can't excuse. How the hell is anyone supposed to have any kind of semi-adult conversation there? It's not social media, it's the opposite, it's anti-social media, millions of individuals just yelling into the void.
Nope. Unless you keep that info pretty much offline. You have some control, but certainly not complete.
They have trackers in every site with that facebook like button.
They have trackers in a large amount of apps
If you have a facebook app on your phone, they have your location, whether that is from GPS, IP, or WiFi Mac addresses.
Does Facebook have access to your contacts? No? Well it probably has access to some of your friends contacts. And people usually have mutual friends.
They even track people who dont have an account and never signed up for anything with "shadow" profiles. Purely by looking at the behaviours of their friends.
In the end, you are free to do as you wish. But you dont use Facebook, Facebook uses you.
I block all the tracking cookies and cross-site tracking these days but only because that's the default in Firefox. Still, there's a lot about me which only exists offline. I'm not one of my web browsers (or indeed all of them). Nor am I my phone, but the FB app is disabled and always has been. They have some of my contacts because lots of friends use the app but I'm not sure why I should care about that. They have my location from my (static) IP at home and the fact I'm a member of several local groups (man, if you ever need to buy baby stuff, you NEED Marketplace).
But that's not exactly private information. If you had my name you could find my home address online very easily, and you finding that doesn't bother me any more than Facebook finding that. If it did I would have that information hidden. If I have stuff I want to keep private - and I do have stuff like that - then I keep it private. It's really not that hard. Facebook have never really hidden anything they're doing, I'm not sure why people act like it's some big conspiracy. I'm always surprised when people seem shocked that they do all the things they've always said they do.
More interestingly, I'm curious as to what you think Facebook uses me for?
I think we may just disagree on what's private. I think my home address, location, who I am friends with and talk to and what I do are private. You think not. And that's fine.
Well they haven't exactly made it explicitly clear either. For some, finding out about what they have been doing is a legitimate shock. I know that it was for some of my friends, especially the older ones. But I I guess we can put that down to my slightly biased views on this.
Offtopic but I'm assuming nasty stock rom on android. You can root and get truly remove FB if you wish.
Because they care about their privacy and want to take action in regards to that. Facebook (and co) have a lot of control on the internet and are difficult to completely remove from ones life. All sorts of things are simply more difficult without them. So people make a fuss about it. And specifically about the word conspiracy, it is difficult to know exactly what data is used for, how it is used and who it is shared with. We know some basics like they sell ads. But specifics are hard. There is a lot Facebook could be doing, but we don't really know until they do it.
And then (for me at least) there is they way they avoid trying to delete data. Deleting your Facebook account is a difficult task, and I doubt they ever truly delete it. And that sort of thing makes me go a bit conspiratorial. Why do they want this data and why do they keep it? I think of FB as a data vacuum cleaner, it just sucks everything up and stores it. For future unknown uses.
There's also other things, like why do they require my real name? What purpose does that serve them? I don't fully trust anything I can't sign up to at least semi-anonymously. Well actually I don't fully trust much, but you get the point.
Also, because Facebook has so much data, they are a target for criminals, and there have certainly been data leaks before. Even if I trust Facebook with my data, can I trust whoever gains that data from Facebook illegally with my data?
I'm being a Stallman clone, I got that phrase from his site, but I say it because Facebook uses you for as much data as they can, which they (ab)use to sell ads.
Privacy is a compromise, and you just take a less extreme approach towards it than I do. Which is fine, you do you.
Yeah, I know. But that is a hassle and it disables Samsung Knox and I use Samsung's backup features a bit. Disabled is fine. I'm not short of storage space. It's not a very nasty rom, as it goes. Reasonably clean, and their overlay is functional enough. I've had much worse (and they do end up getting replaced)
Urgh Stallman. I'm glad he exists because he's done some really great stuff (the GPL is one of the most important creations in all computing), but he's got so extreme about things. We kind of need the extremists sometimes but still. He's too much for me.
Anyway, just as a matter of interest/counterpoint - the way that Google phrase this internally is that they have two customers. Advertisers, who pay with money to get access to eyeballs (not user data, NEVER user data and FB is the same); and users, who pay with eyeballs to get access to services. All GoogBook do is mediate the two transactions. While skimming a cut, of course, but they are a business. But users and advertisers are considered of equal importance, one isn't "used" for the other. They need both for the business to work.
They are also, at least in Facebook's case, weirdly shit at it. Facebook has over a decade of my "data" and they still can't target an advert at me worth a damn. That's partially the advertisers' faults for overly broad targetting (a failure FB give no fucks about because they still make money either way) but it's still strange. It's almost like 'data' targetted advertising doesn't really work (this has been an open secret in parts of the industry for a while now).
Sure, advertisers aren’t given access to PII, but the amount of potential data points accessible can be resolved down to the essence of an individual (at least within lookalike modeling).
Also, to @HanakoIsBestGirl’s point, I have to trust that Facebook won’t leak my data to (overtly) nefarious parties. Cambridge Analytica clearly shows a lapse in their judgment, but you still have to trust that their data won’t be breached. I, for one, was one of the lucky “few” who got their entire data (sans credit card and SSN) stolen. How can I trust a company who pays hand over fist for some of the best engineers in the world to be honest stewards of my data, if they can’t even prevent others from accessing it? I understand that breaches happen (I’m also affected by the Equifax breach, so there’s now enough info out there to steal my entire identity), but with other news like plaintext storage of passwords, I really wonder if the company that prides itself on “move fast and break things” and “global domination” may be doing so at the expense of their users.
As an aside (anecdata to ensue), I know of two examples of friends who have even been misclassified by FB by their own advertising preferences. One was a straight male in a long term relationship (5+ years), who got classified as a homosexual. Another (an Asian-American) was classified as “African-American”. These are both protected groups by law, and to your point, FB is terrible at getting this right. That being said, their ubiquity means they become a de facto source of truth as well.
When people speak out against privacy complaints with “I’ve got nothing to hide, so why should I care?”, I think it’s a dangerous path to go down. What if the government got ahold of FB’s profiling? If I’m in an authoritarian state, people may be put on lists based on undesirable traits (Nazi Germany loved keeping records, and IBM was pivotal in making the holocaust an efficient process). What if those traits are wrong? You may not fear about what you’re doing, but do you trust some ML algorithm that decided you exhibit similar traits to another group you don’t subscribe to? This is the real danger, and why I dislike the consolidation of “companies with data on me”, because the insights gleaned from that amount of data isn’t guaranteed to be accurate, but that won’t stop the wrong hands from acting on it, nonetheless.
Oh man, let me tell you about this.
Things might be better or more nuanced now, but years back recommendation algorithms' responses to finding out someone was gay were both blunt and patronizing.
In the early 2010s, Netflix learned that I was gay. I can't remember specifically what I watched, but it was probably a couple of gay-interest things in succession. I believe one of them might have been Milk, the 2008 biopic about Harvey Milk and the other might have been Fagbug, the 2009 documentary about a girl whose Volkswagen Beetle got vandalized.
What I do remember is the moment when I logged in and my suggested viewings had suddenly become a carousel of flesh. Every single suggested movie was a gay-interest film with shirtless guys on their cover images. Despite me not watching anything akin to those films (many of them were only short steps up from softcore), they were everywhere. I was "sharing" the account with a friend of mine at the time, and I remember her texting me, wondering why Netflix had gone so "porny" recently.
I went through the same process with Amazon and the Kindle library. At some point, based on what I read, the platform learned that I was gay and I was deluged with recommendations for romance novels with, of course, shirtless guys on the cover. At the time, I had the ad-supported Kindle, which showed you ads on the lockscreen when you turned it off. These were usually personalized book recommendations, and, before they figured out I was gay, they were simply a spread of popular pulp novels that didn't feel particularly targeted to my interests.
Then, just like with Netflix, they changed over after they figured out how to pigeonhole me. Thankfully Amazon was a bit more restrictive on what they would show, so it wasn't a complete parade of pecs, but I also think their algorithms weren't fully matured for rifling out adult content. I was in an airport, with people sitting next to me on both sides, when I turned off my Kindle and was horrified to see an ad for a book featuring a shirtless man who had pulled his beltline down very, very low. The title was also overtly suggestive. I won't share it here, but suffice it to say it had the word "Inches" in it.
I was mortified, and after my flight I contacted Amazon, let them know about the issue, and then had them remove the ads from my Kindle because I didn't want to be subject to it anymore. I didn't like the idea that the algorithms just assumed I was sex-obsessed simply because I was gay, and I especially didn't like that it closed those platforms socially for me (i.e. I wasn't about to open up Netflix anymore when I had friends over).
I share all of this here simply because I have no doubt your friend got pigeonholed in the same way. I also suspect that he probably had a hard time nudging the algorithm away from that conclusion (the digital equivalent of the futile "I'm not gay, I swear!" protestation). Despite not feeding into Netflix or Amazon's romance recommendations, they continued to show recommendations of that type for a long time. They've gotten better now, but it's hard to tell if that's because the algorithms have improved or simply because there's a much greater spread of non-suggestive LGBTQ content for them to choose from. Maybe both.
Yikes. That would have pissed me off for sure.
Consider that their algorithms are this bad for all content, too. I watch one Yang interview on Ben Shapiro, and now youtube is spamming me with ridiculous alt-right garbage all the time. It's just that instead of that spam being 95% of my recommendations, it's a smaller chunk now, more like 20% (which is still annoying as hell). Problem's still there, just a bit more subtle.
What amazes me is that there's no way to filter this crap. Why can't I just go to a preferences page and list certain topics I'm not interested in at all, so they never show up? Their algorithms aren't designed to work with us, they are designed to blast content at us using half-assed guesswork that can't even keep up with a seven year old child.
Combine that with their hamfisted attempts at censorship by demonetization (that kill far more good content in the crossfire) and you're left with a hot mess. Youtube's ripe for a competitor to take them down, they are bad enough at their job that it's within the realm of possibility. At this point, I think the 'no algorithm' option is better than anything they've come up with. I'll decide for myself what to watch and where to subscribe, thanks. If I wanted to be this hassled by moronic tech, I'd build myself a real life clippy and hang it on the wall.
I did stumble on LBRY thanks to the spam, seems like an interesting start for a youtube alternative. It's predictably full of alt-right content fleeing from youtube, but there are a lot of other folks duplicating their channels from other services into it as well, plenty of science content. I'll be interested to see where it goes with further development.
Yeah, recommendations are broken, unfortunately, and I don't think they'll be resolved because of a fundamental misalignment in values. Most modern recommendations want to maximize my engagement with their platform so that I will spend more time on it. Contrastingly, I want most modern recommendation engines to curate the most interesting and valuable content so that I'm spending less time on their platforms more efficiently.
So many recommendations have a sort of bottom-feeding feel where they give us things that align to our basest or most prurient interests (as in my aforementioned cascade of shirtless men) or content that is designed to evoke strong emotional responses (e.g. outrage, fear, etc.). In reality, I want the exact opposite. I want the algorithm to find the top content. I want recommendation algorithms to be a reference librarian, but instead they come across as more of a tabloid journalist.
There's also the other issue where content platforms double as content providers and thus piss in the pool. Netflix, for example, prioritizes its own content over content from other sources, so they've foregone any pretense that their recommendations are neutral or based primarily on my interests.
Even if a platform doesn't have this problem, there's still the idea that financial interests are driving the algorithm. I used to use Spotify, and you could add your own tracks to their desktop client so that songs not on the platform could still be in your library. After shuffling my library a lot, it started to seem like my desktop tracks were a lower priority than the ones that were in the Spotify library.
Was this simply me finding a pattern where one didn't exist? Or did the platform prioritize engagement with their platform over the songs I'd added? Furthermore, was the shuffle a true shuffle, or did they prioritize things that they thought would keep me listening longer? Likewise, did they prioritize different artists based on different payouts, putting more songs up front that gave them more money? I don't know whether any of these things are true, but that's the sort of conspiratorial thinking that's passively encouraged with modern recommendation engines. Are they working for us, or are they working for the financial interests of the companies that provide them?
This leads to questions about the nature of recommendations and their impact on our lives. As you mentioned, we can simply decide what we want to watch and subscribe to, so it's clear that we are not our recommendation feeds. On the other hand, if we choose to engage with them, do we slowly become them? By letting someone else decide what we choose to engage with, do we cede some control of ourselves over to computers/companies?
There has been plenty of discussion about YouTube's algorithm being a factor in radicalizing people's political views, for example. Facebook also showed us that emotional content creates a contagion effect. I'd like to think of myself as my own individual in control of my choices and beliefs, but stories like these show that we are susceptible to suggestion. Am I my own person, or am I a patchwork pastiche of that which I consume? The study and effects of these algorithms show us that it's at least some of the latter.
And I think that's where things get really murky with modern recommendation algorithms, because they can easily become architects of personality and shapers of belief. Ideally, they would help me develop myself into the type of person I want to be--the best version of myself. Instead, in practice, they want me to become a worse version of myself because doing so is strategically beneficial to someone else.
Well said, that's exactly what I'm looking for too. I'm interested in seeing how Tildes' human-powered systems play out in this context over time as the site grows. I suspect they'll be able to easily outclass algorithms.
I really think (most) filtering should be done on a per person level, if possible on the desktop/device level.
E.g. I have a bogo filter in my mail client that learnt from my spam/ham aactions for years, and it is much better at it than GMail's. Barely any spam gets through, and I haven't seen any ham marked as spam in years. That being said even with e-mail, my spam may be someone else's ham, and vice versa. With recommendations this may be much much more nuanced still.
I'm guessing you've never used FB's Ad Manager. I have. It's really nothing like that. You can target down to very fine-grained level but you never know who is seeing your ads. They just go out there. You get click and view data but not a lot more. You can't work the system in reverse, that would endanger Facebook's only real revenue stream. Certain companies may still get deeper-level access but from what I've heard (I have friends who work at FB) that sort of thing is right out these days, even on the quiet. They fucked up with CA et al and they know it, and they also know they can't afford to fuck up that big again. They lost a lot of users and trust with that, and that translates to a lot of money and while the board lets Zuck run around spunking a billion dollars here and there on messaging services, him endangering The Serious Money is not tolerated. FB have rather wobbly ethics by many people's standards - including my own - but they do have some ethics.
Ah, I never said I've got nothing to hide. I definitely have things to hide. But here's the secret: I don't tell Facebook about those things
I don't care about the things I choose to tell Facebook, because they're not things that matter, and in return I get to keep in touch with people I like and have no other means of keeping in touch with. If I try to hide everything it looks a lot like I have something to hide, which is bad hiding tactics! I can't be invisible so why look shady? That just attracts attention. Probably worth explaining here I am drastically overplaying the amount I have to hide. I have very little to hide but not quite nothing. I'm not a spy or terrorist or similar - but if I were I'd do the same thing I'm currently doing. Cover!
The government where I live couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery. They're so much more likely to fuck up than FB are, in your Black-Mirror-esque hypothetical I'd genuinely trust Googbook to get things right over my government. To look at that from a slightly different angle, if a state-level bad guy wants you - let's say GCHQ or the NSA rather than the shambles of elected officialdom who are still debating which end of the bottle they should try to open and drink from - they'll own you and you'll never know a thing about it. That's been the case for a long, long time. State-level cyber surveillance is very likely more than capable of profiling you far more accurately than Faceboogle ever could, should they want to. But they don't, and I really don't think they ever will do. Anything could happen, but lots of things probably won't.
This is always an interesting discussion to have, btw. I like having to go over my thoughts about this stuff every so often, and hear other perspectives on the topic.
They are weirdly shit at it sometimes. Other times not so shit. See here (yes this is target not Facebook, but its still a company (ab)using data).
(Im going into what @UniquelyGeneric said here, so sorry if I repeat what he said a bit)
In future they will likely get better at this whole data (ab)using thing, and make less mistakes (at the very least they certainly will not get worse).
Data leaks. (as @UniquelyGeneric mentioned) Can you trust the crooks that now have your data? Blackmail is entirely possible if you are the kind of person to put data on FB that you really shouldn't.
I don't want to copy @UniquelyGeneric's last point completely. But I would like to add that you cannot guarantee that the government will not turn facist one day. And if they do, years and years of records that have already been kept for them will come in quite handy. As well as the mechanisms for spying on the population already being in place, ready to be stepped up to the next level.
Also, when @UniquelyGeneric said "I understand that breaches happen". This is true, but when they do, they don't need to be nearly as bad as they are.
If companies only store data properly and only if they absolutely have to, then data leaks will be a lot less dangerous. If FB doesn't have your location history, it can't be leaked. Of course this is their whole business model, so good luck changing it. Tildes actually does a very good job of this, it doesn't even store your email address.
I left FaceBook in 2008, when it started to feel like a chore tending to all the pokes and invites instead of interacting with people. It seems things went better for a while after and later gone much worse. I figured that the most practical part of it for me was an updated addressbook. For a slightly longer reasoning, I wrote a blog post back when I left.
Microblogs I never understood – initially I thought it was just Twitter, but I tried identi.ca/StatusNet, and later Mastodon and nope, just doesn’t do it for me. I guess the whole short blurbs screamed to the public at large thing is not my thing in general. I think Reddit is kinda similar nowadays, only that it added gamification and internet egoboo points to it, to make it more addicting.
I also tried Diaspora, Friendica, Movim and many other FOSS federated social networks – those mostly lacked breadth and had a too narrow set of users.
I was also on Orkut way back even before Google acquired it. Oddly enough, I was more active on Orkut than Facebook, even though it was uglier.
I keep a blog, which is written and hosted by me, so I have full power over it and its content. Back in the early 2000’s blog-to-blog communication was the method of longer communication online – we even had a term for it: the blogosphere – and to be honest, I think it went better than most modern solutions to the problem.
After writing this, it seems my main issue with (modern) social networks is that they scream for your attention and want to grab and keep it for as long and as often as possible. There is no time to stop and develop a thought, no time to keep it simmering in your mind, do some analysis and reply thoughtfully and thoroughly. Even if you are posting or replying the “wrong” timezone, you will miss most of the potential audience. In the blogosphere it was perfectly OK to take a few days, even weeks before replying. And people managed to hold a meaningful public correspondence – some still do! – through blog posts. Man, I wish the web was more blog-friendly again.
I do still maintain a LinkedIn profile, but that is basically a CV and adressbook. Its social aspect of it I mostly ignore.
In short, the content is gone, all there is left is the comment section …
I'm really sad I missed the blogosphere days. I geniunely crave thoughtful, insightful correspondence with other people these days.
Eh, it did become a circlejerk at one point. Had most the same feeling of "we can move mountains together if we type loud enough" as Reddit nowadays and some people felt it necessary to blog once a day. So it wasn't all pink unicorns dancing on rainbows either.
But back to your comment. You still can. As I said, some people (not just companies) still maintain blogs and it has never been as easy as now. The tools are still here, some improved, some got a bit forgotten (I'm looking at you RSS/Atom feed browser button!), but there is nothing stopping you from setting up a blog and jumping on board.
Follow some feeds, write blog posts in response with links to the posts you are replying or referring to and that's it!
Bonus points if you implement/use WebMentions, so it gathers all responses from different blogs, microblogs etc. from allover the web in one (distributed) place.
Thanks man I'll look into it!
Like many good things, or all good things, social meddia sold out. All the way out. And that's when it lost its allure. Just like rock and roll music. Just like athletes or actors who promote shitty products. And it's the same thing reddit is slowly doing that pushed me off that site and brought me here.
I am no longer social on social media. They are now nothing more than tools with varying usefulness. Instagram can be great for being notified of events. Surf events. Skate events. Concerts. Pet adoption events. Everything. Youtube can be useful for seeing what you missed at an event, if it's the kind of thing somebody filmed. Concert, surf event, etc.
Reddit is good for pitchforking at best. Want to cause enough backlash that a movie (SONIC) or a video game (basically all AAA games now) changes something? Reddit pitchforking. It's even worse than twitter pitchforking because from what I've seen reddit gets things up on google results more than twitter does.
Facebook is 100% useless now. It does everything other sites do, at a really low functioning level. Shit photo/video posting, shit conversation threading, shit event mechanics, shit advertising and business promotion.
I low key miss MySpace. Shout out to Tom.
For me, social media is dead and I don't mind at all. It was cheap and lazy once myspace went down the shitter and new sites made it "easier". People used to pour their personalities into MySpace and make their page unique and actually represent them. Facebook literally turned us into social robots churning out information and chasing simpler things like likes and emoji reactions.
The internet is becoming more of a bummer every day in my opinion and I hope it turns everybody right back to going outside, camping, riding bikes, surfing, snowboarding, exercise, martial arts. Anything but sitting on a fucking computer engaging in an addictive behavioral pattern that serves corporations and only corporations. Fuck em...
I use Mastodon, but more like a quick blog rather than communicating with or making friends. Apart from that, I briefly had a Facebook account back in 2010 or something for a few months, and I have a Twitter account for following news about local events which I never check b/c I find it too hard to understand what is posted when and there is too much retweet noise where orgs retweet stuff agressively or tweet irrelevant stuff too frequently and relevant stuff is buried.
I also use Whatsapp b/c SMS has way too many arbitrary limitations. I wish to use Signal but that'd limit my potential interlocutees to myself only, so I'm stuck with WhatsApp ATM. I am glad that it hasn't been aggressively modified so far.
As a guy from Turkey, I can say that the youth is generally getting off of Facebook the actual thing. You'd be hard pressed to find someone that doesn't use WhatsApp, but FB is definitely growing less popular.
What's up with Mastodon? Why isn't it more popular? It seems like everyone was ready to jump ship to it a couple years ago, and then they just kind of stopped.
Part of me just wants to start PMing people I follow on Twitter to help them set up IFTTT bridges to just post to Mastodon everything they post to Twitter. No further work required.
To me it seems like it's actually opened up quite a bit lately. I remember trying to get into it before and it was only FOSS nerds and if you cared about anything else, there was next to nothing for you. Over time it seems like there's more people there for ideological reasons other than FOSS-related ones, and the interest range has broadened as a result. You've still gotta be some kind of a nerd to find a place to fit in, but that's a whole lot better than it used to be.
People's friends are not there. There is not a single person I know of or heard of IRL that uses Mastodon. Also, celebrities or politicians and other useless stuff is not present on Mastodon. I think all these are good things for the way I use the platform, but they do hinder widespread adoption.
IDK if this is of any use really. If you don't have the people who you want to tell stuff to over there, and there won't be much interaction with your posts or you'll just post but never check back, that's not really a meaningful contribution, isn't it? If those people don't participate, all they'd do would be to make some counters increase and that's it.
I think it is coming about slowly but steadily. The theory itself is not ready for the masses, the way federation and moderation is done.
I think it appearing and being sold as a direct copy of Twitter does some harm here. The immediate urge is to go follow important people or friends and while you're able to do so and that situation will be better if it grows...that doesn't lead to the best experience and if you try to do that it'll be lonely.
Emphasizing the worth of instances as their own communities, while making it a little harder to explain federation, would be the most honest and tempting way to sell it. That's where most of the value and possibility for conversation is if you're not the kind to be happy with shouting into the void (most people, I assume?). The average user not even caring/knowing about how federation works should be the goal, they should just know they're a niu.moe user or whatever, hang out there, and follow people from elsewhere occasionally. But it's being sold as a big grand thing that it can't realistically be yet.
For me just having their posts would at least nudge me more into Mastodon. I rarely want to respond to celeb tweets/would expect them to respond back even less. But I see your point.
I just want more reading material on Mastodon, really.
I haven't had a social media account in a little over 2.5 years. Facebook wasn't interesting, I don't care about pictures for Instagram, and Twitter is just a political cess-pool. In my opinion, social media on the internet is equivalent to reality tv on television. Hardly anything is real and everything is manufactured narcissism.
That's not to say that these places could have a redeeming quality to them for certain people, namely those who are part of many diverse social circles. The event planning tools on Facebook are nice and I'm sure Instagram would be fine following hobbies or animals.
I don't see value in Twitter outside of quick, real-time news by the public. But even then, that power has the capability of causing mass-confusion and the spread of disinformation during a crisis.
I gave Facebook up maybe ten years ago now - I haven't deleted the account, but I haven't checked it in that span. I think I just got tired of feeling like a loser because I was constantly seeing one friend or another's best life, by which I mean all the cool things they were doing and I wasn't. That, and it was really depressing to learn of some of my acquaintances more extreme political opinions, so I feel I was better off without that, too.
I kind of like the idea of twitter / mastadon, but it tuns out I don't have a lot to say to the world at large. And I am aware of the irony in that I bothered to write it up here.
Why not login and delete it? They wont actually delete it, but its worth a shot. If you are in the EU, you could actually make them delete it.
My boss raised an interesting point about social media. He travels to the US a lot and he doesnt have social media so he's wondering how he's going to go getting a visa now that you need to provide your social media handles.
There has to be an option of "Does not have social media."
I don't have any social media handles, I've never had any social media handles, there are places in the world from which you can travel that still don't have good cell or internet connectivity to not only have no social media handles, but perhaps have never even heard of social media.
Maybe I'm just paranoid but I feel like selecting that option would invite additional scrutiny. After all, what kind of sociopath doesn't use social media??
I left them with only my LinkedIn handle and it was fine. I'm sure there are a lot of people without social media handles. Think older people, or people in power, who need someone else or a whole team to handle their PR.
I'm sure there is but I have to wonder if immigration would look upon that with suspicion
Any excuse to browse through your phone and laptop when you try get in.
This is a thing? I've never traveled outside of the US besides Canada. Could I be asked this for traveling to Europe?
I think it's only for entry to the US. Meanwhile travelling to NZ I got pulled aside for carrying a tent
That makes me resent my government even more.
I don't really have an interesting enough life to post anything (or hang out with friends enough). I also feel sort of stressed out about followers and the like. When I had Instagram, I followed about 70 people and had about the same number of followers, but it felt weird to follow people I never talked with anymore and that I didn't really know, and also to have them see what I post.
The issue is, if I pruned my Instagram, I'd have follow maybe 10 accounts and then I think it'd look sort of creepy, especially to those 10 people.
That along with having a bunch of old cringey stuff on the account led to me just deleting my Instagram. I haven't really touched it since.
I have never used any of the large social media platforms, with two exceptions for my work. I used my work-required accounts only to the minimum extent that was required. Those accounts are only accessed from the work machine, and I don't log into personal accounts from the work machine.
The reason I take measures to keep my personal data private is simply because I can. It's my right to remain anonymous. It sucks that I have to take active measures to remain anonymous on the internet, but that's the reality, so I do what I must.
I remember that data privacy was a hot topic among the tech crowd during the late 90s and early 2000s. The (mis-)use of social media platforms to data mine people and influence them was predicted. Of course, back then we thought that it would be used by big businesses to sell products and services. I don't recall personally believing that data mining could be used as a weapon by nation-states.
I created a facebook account of bogus information once early on, just to view one specific post. Haven't logged into it since, and I still get their spam email all the time. The only one I used briefly is Linkedin, because it was a handy way to keep track of tech associates - people I worked for/with, but not people in my network of friends and family. Haven't logged into it or updated the profile in years. Now that Microsoft owns it, I view it with even more suspicion.
Usually if I need to use a service like that, I give them a completely bullshit profile and lie my ass off about everything. It's not like it's hard, or like they have any way of ever being able to tell. Well, I suppose Google knows a few things about me by now, since I've been using them for email for some time. I have one real account and a dozen or so bullshit ones I use as identities elsewhere. I leave an absolute wasteland of bullshit accounts in my wake on the internet, never ever using a real identity.
It seemed idiotic to hand over so much information to total strangers. I never had the slightest interest in social media, and I still don't. It strikes me as nothing but artificial preening and shallow performances, the kind of thing real people with real lives don't bother to get involved in, and the kind of thing to be looked down on as a waste of time and energy, possibly even a serious mental health risk. Perhaps that's an old fashioned sentiment, but it's kept me clear of that particular world of bullshit.
I don't even like text messages, I prefer phone calls and emails. I don't like people to be able to bother me, and I couldn't give less of a damn what friends and family are doing. I have their phone numbers, if I want to talk to them I'll call them, or they can call me. I'd rather have a conversation with someone I haven't seen in half a decade than keep up on their cat and their breakfast on some mindless social site. That way we'll have plenty to talk about for hours on end.
The only reason I bother coming to forums is because they at least hold out the possibility of interesting conversations - held on my own schedule whenever I feel like visiting or posting. There's also the benefit of not knowing who anyone is beyond their handle, so it swipes away most forms of prejudice. The only thing you can concentrate on is what the other person says.
I can see some value in twitter, as a sort of on-demand broadcast/notification service. The only reason it has that value is due to the size of the userbase, though, not the tech. I imagine I might use it (or, more likely, open source alternatives) if I were ever in the position of needing to engage in that sort of activity.
If I ever truly need that sort of thing, more likely I'll set up my own server, my own site, my own software, my own library of services, not hand it off to someone else to screw up while mining for my data.
While I have all the accounts, I haven't used any of them in years. I never felt like I had any reason to use them at all, I don't care what random friends from high school are doing with their lives at all. It feels like they don't have any other outlets, and just decide they need to let everybody know everything via social media instead of chatting with a small group of friends in private. The only reason I really keep them around is they have various uses; FaceBook I keep for the occasional message to somebody or updates for some group, Instagram just feels extra fake and never go to it, and Twitter I honestly only ever use to yell at some company and get faster customer support.
As a counter-point and to avoid circle-jerking, I would be interested in seeing more from people who are using modern social networks in a full way on why they do so.
Can we integrate this in here, or should I open a new topic?
Happy for the opposing view to take part here!
I'm happy with my social media usage. I check only a few times a day, severely restrict push notifications, and generally contribute OC infrequently, so I haven't experienced any of the addiction-like symptoms people describe.
Facebook - "Personal" - Only for people I have interacted with socially IRL. I periodically cull my friends list. "Is this person important to me?" "Is there a real chance I'll ever talk to this person again?" My list hovers around 200. There's a few I keep but unfollow (mostly excessive link/meme-sharers). I don't use groups. I've gone through all of the privacy and ad settings. As a result, my news feed and notifications are very manageable and relevant. Events is my most "actively" used feature due to simplicity and network reach.
Twitter - "Casual professional" - While I follow some friends and interesting accounts, the majority are other people in my industry, which is most active on Twitter. Some I've met at conferences, others I've stumbled across online. Similar to Facebook, I cull the list periodically. Twitter also seems to be an effective way to reach out to companies when I have a problem.
Linkedin - "Professional resume" - Have one, update my info occasionally, don't touch the social aspect.
Instagram - I have a handful of friends who take their photography a bit more seriously and, for whatever reason, primarily post on IG. I've posted a handful of photos that I think have value to those beyond my immediate social circle.
Many years ago I bumped into an old friend at Whole Foods. We started to catch up, but realized that we knew almost everything that had happened in each other's lives through a combination of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I had just divorced a month or so prior to this, and that was really the only interesting thing... but it was truly the last thing I wanted to talk about.
It's nice to know what's going on in my friends' lives, but I value 'catching up' in person more than simply reading about it. I don't click with a lot of people in the same way I did in my 20s / early 30s.
I set up email notifications for Facebook events. With my social circles, it's really all anybody uses facebook for now. Basically a glorified Evite with the most comprehensive address book. For most people, Facebook is still an excellent SPOC, regardless of how much they use the rest of it.
I used to have a facebook account until 2016, when I realized there's just no point. I mean I don't had many friends on there and liked a lot of pages, but even after unliking the pages I still had to literally go to my friends profiles to see what they're posting, else I'd just see advertisements.
I deleted my Facebook account shortly after graduating from college, sometime in 2012. It hasn't interfered with keeping in touch with close friends (with whom I mostly use Signal or SMS and email), but it has made it harder to keep track of more distant friends and acquaintances. In retrospect, I was never addicted to or obsessed with it (even by the relatively tame standards of 2012), and I should have kept the account, logged in to check up very occasionally, and ghosteried/privacy badgered the third-party tracking out of existence.
I have a linkedin account, but I very rarely log in, only accept link requests from people I know via email notifications.
"Microblogging" never appealed. I thought it was stupid and a massive social ill when it first exploded, and now hey look, it was a massive social ill in even more ways than I thought! I hate being right. Mastodon et. al. fix the most irrelevant flaw of Twitter's design (centralization) while doubling down on the most fundamental issues (it's by design impossible to communicate meaningfully).
I'm on tildes (obviously), Reddit, and lobste.rs. The latter has had some growing pains but I think is overall a good place for tech discussions. Reddit is of course a poorly-moderated disaster, but the one smart thing they did—designing subreddits as silos, rather than as tags—has made it possible to heavily curate your experience, and so mine is tolerable. I still think about ditching it every few weeks, and some day I probably will.
Overall, I think the concept of social media is fantastic. The Internet was supposed to be the world's most amazing communication tool—let's make it one, rather than a glorified newspaper! And at times and in places, it's delivered on that in spades, but it's extremely clear at this point that the results of what we actually got have been mixed at best. It's easy to blame this on capitalism ruining everything, and that's certainly a part of it, but I would actually narrow my focus more and blame most of the problems with extant social media platforms on advertising. When the platforms are funded by advertisers, everyone's incentives are totally screwed up and an effective, respectful communication platform can't possibly develop naturally.
I don't really have a fix for the problem, unfortunately, other than stupid non-actionable soundbites like "ban advertising". Maybe if Netscape had developed a functional, decentralized micropayment system alongside SSL…? But that would be asking for a lot of foresight from a company that sunk themselves with a rewrite of their only product.
I started with social media when social media started. The first thing I ever did on the Internet was IRC, which of course was followed by things like ICQ ultimately ending that whole aspect with the ubiquity of texting. I did Usenet. I was on classmates.com. I had a Friendster account. I had an Orkut account. I made the big move to MySpace with everyone else. I joined Twitter. I made the big move to Facebook with everyone else.
Through all of this, "social media" was only marginally interesting to me. I enjoyed interacting with people, but I didn't find the platforms in any way interesting. In fact, each one of them had its own series of annoyances that became amplified the longer I used them. This was the largest motivation to move from one to the next, and yet the move itself was always fairly exhausting. By the time I moved to Facebook, I was beyond annoyed. I joined around 2007 and did very little with it. I'd put a lot of effort into MySpace and had nothing now to show for it, I wasn't inclined to do the same with Facebook. The whole time I was on Facebook, I was increasingly annoyed by the interface, which was horrible and made it very difficult to do what I wanted to do. I didn't realize it at the time, but that was on purpose. Facebook was becoming the data behemoth it knew it had to become to dominate.
I didn't understand what was going on until I noticed that my (decidedly un-computer-savvy) mom had joined Facebook. And I knew about it the second she joined. She likely knew all about my account as well (for clarification, I don't use my real name on any of my social media accounts, my Internet identity has always only partly revealed who I am). That was way different anything I'd experienced before, and it didn't interest me, it made me nervous. I didn't want my online identity and my real life to mingle without my consent, and I could now clearly see the handwriting on the wall.
I immediately deleted Facebook and never looked back. That was 2010. I don't miss "social media" because I never participated in it like people do now, with such wild abandon. I don't want to connect with people as easily as all that. The convenience that people find in social media doesn't appeal to me. I'd rather be a somewhat mysterious figure on the periphery.
Semi-anonymous posting with threaded conversation and community feedback and moderation has been (imo) the most interesting thing on the Internet. I've little to no identity to speak of on these sites and so moving between them is easy for me, and I do it to chase the most interesting and least shit conversations, which is why I'm here. :)
I'm with you about the toxicity stuff. I just recently (like two weeks ago) finally disabled my Instagram, and have been off the main Facebook site for almost a year now. I just don't support FB's ethics and lack of action about toxicity, hate groups, stochastic terrorism, etc. And now they want to start a currency? Thanks but no thanks.
I'd gladly pay $5-10 a month to use a more ethical FB alternative that promised to be more mindful about the site's content, but the cynic in me says that any commercial social platform is going to eventually (or immediately) double-dip and just take your money for hosting and sell your info to advertisers.
I still use Twitter, but I'd like to leave that (for the same reasons) as well and just opt for Mastodon. I post webcomics every now and again and have built a bit of a following, so I'd rather not just up and leave them all at once.
With friends and family, for now it's back to postcards and the like. My life isn't exciting enough to warrant having any of those types of accounts on the reg anyway.
Next up I hope soon to leave Reddit and just stay on Tildes.
I'm on:
Tildes
Reddit
Facebook
(in order of how much time I spend on them)
That's it.
I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I get my news and information from my subscribed news site, plus Tildes. I see my family & friends' activities on Facebook. That's enough for me.
In fact, there are times when I think that even those three are more than I can keep up with (especially right now when I'm picking up the pieces of someone else's moderation meltdown on Reddit).
Thinking about it some more, it seems paid subscriptions would help here a lot. Leaving privacy and profiling/targeting aside, the reason why the social networks are such attention whores boils down to them selling your attention to others. Which is why they try to force you to drop by often and stay long.
Now, if you take that away, having you constantly checking for new comments or content is just a strain on their servers and therefore additional cost.
So anyone hosting themselves for free would ideally not like too many users to cope with. So a sweet spot needs to be met where it is not a too big dent in the hoster's/maintainer's personal budget, but still vivid enough to be engaging and useful. If it becomes too crowded, it becomes to expensive to run (both in time and money), which is why we see many self-hosted (nodes of federated) social networks get killed off in the height of its popularity (s.c. Mastodon nodes).
In a paid subscription (or donation etc.) system, the incentive is to have as many paying users as possible, while not pushing for activity too much.
I put off deleting some things longer than I should have, but I don’t have any social networking accounts on any platform to my knowledge. No Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, none of it. I deleted my Reddit account(s) too. At this point, I have a few specific subreddits that I’ve bookmarked (baseball, hockey, books) for when I want news or recommendations, but getting rid of the concept of a timeline - or an infinite scroll of information - has greatly improved my life and reduced my wasted time.
I think forums were better for discussion than reddit and its clones, presented company included, but this is a pretty small, closed community, which I seem to enjoy.
I basically removed everything that stressed me out from my life. Politics? News? Gossip? It’s basically all gone and has been for over a year now. My life is considerably better when I choose what information I want to consume, rather than having it fed to me.
But I’m probably just a kook wearing a tin foil hat. :)
To some extent I agree. What Tildes, Reddit, and their ilk (from technical PoV) improve though is the threading. Most forums do not have that, with a Discourse as a notable exception.
Part of the reason why forums were/are a better experience for communication is that 1) they were typically smaller communities specialising in a specific topic, and (as such) 2) their “owners” had little incentive to keep and sell your attention to others. Both of which together meant that it was a place for like-minded people discussing a common topic.
I think part of the appeal of Reddit, Digg, Tildes, etc. was to have all of these specialised topics covered under one portal, asking for just one login, instead of having to keep track of several specialised fora, mailing lists, blogs etc.
… kinda like Usegroups of the olden days, I guess, only with ads. Damn, we got around in a full circle.
Reddit is no longer on the cusp, its incredibly popular and exhibits many of the nasty traits Facebook does.
As for me on social media.
I used to have a reddit account and then the place became a shithole.
I also used to have a google account, which they undoubtably havent really deleted.
As for why? Privacy concerns and realising that I didnt need the services / could find alternatives that had some respect for me.
I've never made a Facebook account. Whenever I consider getting one just to keep up with friends, Mark Zuckerberg does some new asshatted thing to make me want to stay far away from it. I did used to use Google+, but I fell out of it long before it got shut down.
I have a Twitter account but I never use it. I get drawn into arguments and I hate the way it makes me feel.
This is one of the reasons I killed my twitter account. Not that I spent a lot of time on it but I found I got engaged in arguments that wasted time I could have used more productively. I think if you're going to have arguments, on the internet is possibly one of the worst places to have them.
Aside from the politics and privacy issues others have discussed, I just don't give a shit. I don't need to be in constant contact with friends and family. All celebs can just fuck off and die and I don't care for whatever the latest politicians drama is. I don't need to see the latest mindless meme. I don't need to see the best story of everyone's life. I don't need constant validation.
I much prefer real, in person conversations. If something's on, someone can message me. If I want to catch up with someone I can message them and organise something. I'd much rather read an essay or technical article on some issue than some shitty mindless paragraph by some dropkick.
I like IM and forums. They're good for discussion, and convos with people a good distance away. But social media has absolutely no value. It solves no problems. Actually, it really has negative value, given the way it shits on your mental health and fucks with politics.
I am on FB for one reason -- keeping in touch with family. I don't use most social media.
I have Facebook because I own a website and in my country there are no other places for me to publicize my stuff. Apart from that I only use Tildes and Reddit.