Just to add, your post reminded me of this article from a couple of years back. It’s not short but interesting in relation to the “walled gardens” of the digital world:
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useful and interesting article. Thanks for posting.
Never had a Facebook account. Never will. Never watched sports on TV. Never will. My life feels longer and richer for not having either distraction.
I use Twitter only for contacting developers who insist on only taking support requests via Twitter.
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I totally agree and love reading this.
But.
I’m in not an entirely comfortable position: I’m a fiction writer and social media – for a long time – allowed me to keep in touch with my community and, honestly, it also was a way to promote myself. If I wasn’t in that position, I never would have signed up on Facebook in the first place and even less on Twitter. To be honest… I didn’t see the point.
Books are long things to put out and it’s important to keep my name alive even inside my community. However, I’m increasingly looking into smarter ways to do promotion. I’m keeping Twitter so far, which I have come to tentatively enjoy, but I would delete all social media in a heartbeat if I didn’t need it professionally (… or so I think?)
Anyway, this forums has been the most fun I’ve had on the Internet in a good while, so thanks, MPU. 
(Also, thanks for the article, @skiptime.)
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I was off FB for a couple of years, then COVID. We were no longer able to have game nights once a month to see friends. A couple of my friends got sick, so I got back on just to monitor friends and have some interaction. If not for that, I wouldn’t be on.
I have Twitter and the rare science bit I get from it makes tolerating the rest worth while so far.
Surprisingly, I think reddit is the best platform for interacting with people on a subject-specific basis. On Twitter, for instance, you get the science person you follow going off on a tare about some political something or other, and there’s no way to separate the wheat from the chaff. This doesn’t seem to happen as much on reddit, as people are in a group for a specific reason. Now granted, there is a good deal of 12-year-old mentality on reddit, but unlike Facebook, most of the people with that mentality are actually 12 
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I’m pretty much off of all SM. A few caveats:
- I have to occasionally make a comment on our organization’s social media accounts. The marketing/communications department tells me I have to.
- I’ve never found Twitter to be a good use of time.
- I deleted my original FB account and then created a new one. All privacy settings are set as tight as possible, all notifications are off, and I have 8 friends—immediate family members only. I probably check it 5-10 minutes/week.
- I spend too much on this forum but it is a happy, helpful place.
Social media is by-in-large a cesspool. It is also a “reality distortion field” of gigantic proportions. Here is an interesting read on the negative impact of not just SM, but news in general:
As a result of this article, I also deleted the News app from my devices. I now read selected newspapers and journals, and only watch the local news, no cable news — mostly for sports and weather. I’m perfectly up to date on relevant, important news.
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Well, there is something to be said for the shear beauty of being able to watch a well trained athlete in any sport “up close and personal”.
—
JJW
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I quit facebook, twitter, and the other socials more than 12 years ago…
And I think, no I’m sure I am better for it.
It took a while for the world to catch up, but we are getting there.
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As I understand it, to put it simply, FB gets financially rewarded by increasing attention, and attention is increased by emotion and outrage so its algorithms are designed to promote emotion and outrage.
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Randomized reinforcement, like a slot machine.
And nothing holds our attention better than the unknown. The things that captivate, engross, and entertain us, all have an element of surprise. Our brains can’t get enough of trying to predict what’s next and our dopamine system kicks into high-gear when we’re waiting to know if our team will make the field goal, how the dice will land, or how the movie plot ends. Like a loose slot machine, the infinite scroll gives users fast access to variable rewards.
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Yep. The psychological theory many companies use to harvest our attention relies on three emotional vectors (among a other things) to motivate our behavior: hope vs fear, pain vs pleasure, and social acceptance vs rejection.
BF Skinner’s schedules of reinforcement that @JohnAtl linked to are a key factor as well, effectively “dosing” dopamine through intermittent rewards.
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I should also point out, these design patterns are everywhere, including this very forum.
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I would say this is not a design pattern in this case – it’s just inherent to the nature of an asynchronous conversation, the way email is (remember when email was exciting and some of us would check it compulsively? I did). So it may lead to that “slot machine” pattern but it’s not intentional, and our good hosts have nothing to gain to it.
What I even find very refreshing with the way Discourse works is, it encourages long answers (20 characters), works fine with people not logging in in a few days and even encourages to “necro” threads (post in subjects that may be years old) in order to keep the discussion centralised.
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I particularly like the positive tone, lack of political polarization, decent language, helpfulness, expertise and depth of thought on this forum—all of which are a sharp contrast to most of social media, and news for that matter.
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At one time during election season FB was turning me into a real jerk actually, I feel bringing out the absolute worse in me. Which is a kind of combative smart alec. Thank you very much for the link too. I read Jared Lanier’s book and it had a big effect on me. I really hadn’t understood how the algorithms worked until then. I think
reality distortion field
says it well.
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I think that is a really useful comment. It is what I intend to do and you have encouraged me in that direction.
It is roughly what I took Jared Lanier to be saying at one point in his book. He is quite adamant that the web could have been built to default, if you like, to that from the get go.
Yes, a lot of FB is ‘Oyster Shack’ or village pump really, My recent encounter though involved improper, unfair and mean spirited moderation. Moderation alone doesn’t solve the issue. Moderation on this site is done well and fairly. Not always the case.
I think FB wasn’t too bad until the commercial incentives kicked in. I actually met my wife on FB. So I am not a knee jerk opponent. However it is now a cess pool it really is. And in fairness to those who run it, the core problems may well be beyond their control unless they were to simply de commercialize it and effectively help do what @Wolfie suggests. His suggestion is very useful I think; made me ponder a lot when I read it and think hard about the ownership issue.
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I struggle with this a couple of times a month. I do a lot of linkhblogging and microblogging and I get in most of my conversations on Facebook. And I really like the conversations.
Twitter and micro.blog aren’t the same, and asking people to switch platforms never, ever works. I have tried that several times.
I wish - I really wish - publishing on your website alone was as effective as sharing links to your work on social media seems to be. Is it the case? I don’t know. I do have my platform and I’m publishing there as much as I can but it seems whatever content gets visited there is helped by social media.
I say « seems » because I’m not sure, and boy do I hope I’m mistaken.
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For me the tradeoff of being on FB was unacceptable I can see how that might be different for somebody else though. You might be right and we do have a kind of ‘tipping point’ problem. I have no easy answer but I do believe tipping points will occur against FB, I think some might already be in place. In fact in my own circles, I hear the polite equivalent of ‘FB is for losers’ quite often now. There is though, and I see your point, a dilema as to when one can do this sometimes and avoid the ‘lock in’. It is a general problem I think with monopolies and I don’t have a glib answer, wish I did.
There will be a point when the whole things switches I actually believe. I think it has happened already. NOTE that David Sparks bailed for this very group. That was actually, due to my respect for these guys, a factor for me and I noted it. I actually mention it in circles which have nothing to do with Macs or IT. I respect their judgement in other words and that is how this works? Do you think I have something right?
FB is like a groovy bar that becomes a ‘dive’ if you know what I mean. As Yogi Berra is supposed to have said. “Nobody goes there anymore, it is too crowded”. By the way, my mom in law is there posting pro Statue memes, but the kids, well they ain’t I am told.
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