I’ve been around long enough to remember the days when “social media” was writing someone a letter, putting it in an envelope, mailing it, and waiting (and maybe hoping) that the recipient would write back a week or more later. Then repeating the cycle. Slow media.
Occasionally one could make a station-to-station or even a person-to-person call to a relative. I lived in the hinterlands out on the prairie and subscribed to the Sunday NYT, which would arrive maybe on Thursday of the following week. Slow news.
I don’t mind aging myself, and do not miss all that, of course, but I am glad I am in the cadre of those who can remember that there was something important and different about long gaps between hearing from friends and relatives or about the world that made the communication far more special than text flowing out of iMessage or Twitter or anything electronic. Communication was more about memory and imagination, I think, than what we do today.
Congratulations, really! Good for you.
I never had a Facebook account, and every time I read the news about them I’m more confident that I made the right choice.
I canceled my Facebook account August of 2019, so I’m approaching my 1-year anniversary of being FB free and I don’t miss it a bit. However, I do find it challenging that this discussion is shifting from quitting Facebook to being a blatant political statement. Personally, and with all sincerity, I abhor all things politics, and it saddens me to see this site shifting into something other than a safe place for all Apple hardware and software enthusiasts. Can we be one of the few sites on the internet where we check our politics at the door?
@GregJones Talking about not wanting to talk about politics is one of the worst ways to avoid talking about politics.
On FOMO, JOMO, and the cost of quitting:
I imagine that “individual” and “context” are two key factors in making the call as to whether these platforms are a good fit for you/your family and friends/your career/your hobbies.
A key example: I got involved in local politics (a school board election; also, sorry, Greg) and one of the key ways I engaged potential voters was by being active on FB both via a Page and by participating in e.g., community Facebook Groups. I lost, sadly (a couple dozen votes in the difference!) but I will likely run again. I don’t think it’ll look good to have a fresh profile for just that purpose.
Similarly, as an early academic, Twitter’s a key platform for learning about conferences, projects, and key topics of research. I avoid it but when conferences are happening it is a noticeable loss to not be active.
Small purpose-built communities like MPU are a much better experience, though.
I have managed to find a decent win-win situation by effectively deleting FB use from my life. I unfollowed everyone and everything, so my FB news feed just throws an error. I’m still on there, but it’s hard-blocked on all devices. It took a few months but I haven’t habitually checked it in more than a year.
I would agree with that, but here we are. I look at David’s welcome to this forum and I interpret “Welcome to the Mac Power Users forum. This is intended as a nice, safe place for Mac Power Users listeners and other Apple hardware and software enthusiasts.” to mean just that. Creating a “nice, safe space” should not be situational depending on one’s political opinions. And to be clear, I’m not advocating one political perspective over another, rather than I come here to gain insight and discuss Apple technology, not politics.
I think Discourse’s threaded nature is a wonderful way to self-manage when you engage. One of the key points from KillerWhale’s opening post is that Facebook has grown into a monster. I have to assume that at least one of the monstrous traits are the recent inactions that have caused advertisers to pull from the platform—ergo, this thread is fundamentally political, so I would avoid it if you aren’t keen to participate in the political side of technology.
However, it has to be said: if we’re creating a “nice, safe place,” we should be talking about these issues, as they are paramount to creating nice, safe places for everyone.
In other news (literally, though it’s an old study): apparently, in 2016, 6/10 Americans got their news from social media. Are those of you that have quit or have recently quit concerned about this element of social media use? Is it important to at least be aware of what the rest of the world is thinking about, these days?
As I said before, I don’t use FB or Twitter much anymore, but I do regularly check Reddit for news. I am aware that this is a bit of a doomscrolling habit, though it seems important to at least be aware of what the world is talking about. But maybe that’s just the dopamine talking!
The quality of the conversation is more important than listening to a lot of uninformed, vacuous and often mean spirited, to put it kindly, “commentary” and “news”. I recognize there are exceptions but as a whole, SM Is the “shallows”. There is abundant high quality information and commentary outside social media. One does not need SM to stay informed. I’d argue one can be better informed without it.
Absolutely true if you just go wherever you’re led on social media.
On the other hand, I am, without doubt, a better-informed person by being on Twitter. But Twitter, for me, is primarily a supplement to my RSS feeds, a place to find links to articles and book recommendations I wouldn’t find elsewhere, at least not nearly as easily. The list of people I follow is short, and I’ve built it carefully and pruned it vigilantly to include only people who I know are better informed and better read than I am. I never post, and it’s rare that I’m there to read anyone else’s tweets. Certainly there are amusing or interesting thoughts expressed occasionally, but I’m mostly interested in what they link to. My DEVONthink database, my bookshelf, and my Kobo and Kindle readers are jam packed with the fruits of those recommendations.
I have indeed left my initial post at “toxic” and not delved anymore into that, but I believe, as technology gets intimately intertwined with our very lives, politics cannot be left out of it entirely. Take for instance the privacy stance of Apple, our examination of what browser is private, or end-to-end encryption – these are technical, but very much political issues as they reflect opinions on society.
It’s like art. All art is political, no matter what.
However, I do agree that we can (and should, as per the rules of our good hosts) keep that to a minimum
I kindly disagree; it’s not that all art is political, it’s that everything is political
That’s the reason why I never get the argument: let’s keep this place safe, let’s leave politics outta here.
I’m more like: let’s keep this place safe, let’s talk about everything like smart adults do (btw it’s how I feel things are done here on MPU forum, no matter the topic. Well Fantastical going subscription aside ).
I do periodically think about deleting FB, but instead I really try to control what I see and do not see. The value in it for me is I live in the U.S., in Boston, and I have a GIANT family in Alabama who I am separated from geographically, but also in other ways, but I do love being in touch with them. FB is honestly the easiest/best way to do that and I can “snooze” or unfollow the egregious political posters.
I’m also in a few really niche groups that I cannot find elsewhere - one being an Armenian Genealogy group that has people from all over the world and have now run several in-person conferences based on it. And less, um, studiously, I’m in a few Rhodesian Ridgeback groups that really has helped these first 2 years of puppyhood with our giant dog.
Lastly, I work in Digital Marketing and while what I market is mostly free - it is geared toward teachers and we find SO many of them on FB. We invite them to webinars and to download our resources which are all focused on challenging teachers and students to stand up to bigotry and hatred and this year 68% of our webinar registrants came from FB lead generation ads. FB has also donated $10k to us periodically to share our resources on the platform and as a non-profit/NGO we kind of cannot pass that up.
So it’s still in the “necessary evil” camp for me, maybe someday the balance will tip.
I think all social media is designed to keep you on social media, so the company can make more money from advertisers. They are designed to give you a dopamine hit so you will stay on the platform.
A lot of the toxic nature isn’t fully understood but we are learning.I suspect in a few years we will realise how bad it is personally and for society, and start to view it as we do smoking, or driving without a seatbelt.
This part of FB’s business model has been called “algorithmic amplification” by Roger McNamee, an early Facebook business investor who later became a vocal critic. Mr. McNamee is widely published and quoted. You might consider reading his book: Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.
It is gratifying to see that more people are waking up to this.
A nice explanation of the “addictive” tendencies of social media (especially Facebook) appears in Roger McNamee’s article in Time online magazine: I Mentored Mark Zuckerberg. I Loved Facebook. But I Can’t Stay Silent About What’s Happening.
(link: https://time.com/5505441/mark-zuckerberg-mentor-facebook-downfall/)
Quote:
… the financial incentives of advertising business models guarantee that persuasion will always be the default goal of every design. Every pixel on every screen of every Internet app has been tuned to influence users’ behavior. Not every user can be influenced all the time, but nearly all users can be influenced some of the time. In the most extreme cases, users develop behavioral addictions that can lower their quality of life and that of family members, co-workers and close friends. We don’t know the prevalence of behavioral addictions to the Internet, but anecdotally they seem widespread…
I am easily distracted, waste far too much time on my iPhone and end up feeling bad because of it, especially when I am aimlessly scrolling through feeds late at night. I have been wanting to address this for a while and this thread nudged me a bit along the way. I went ahead and deleted Facebook from my phone… then Tweetbot… followed by Reeder. I then went and put a time limit of 15 minutes/day for Instagram, though I don’t spend much time on it anyway. I had started out with the aim of getting rid of Facebook alone so things escalated quickly!
I don’t know how this will pan out but I feel better already. I like and value Twitter and my RSS feeds but think that checking them a couple of times a day, along with Facebook, on my iPad should be fine. Hopefully all the time I will save endlessly checking on the same things multiple times a day can be spent doing justice to the news and magazine subscriptions that have been largely unused or towards some other, more meaningful, activity.
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