Eliminating Facebook from our lives?

[jennypenny]

I'm missing the Brian Williams connection with Zakaria. Is there a story I don't know?

Sadly, more than one.
From 2012 ... https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyl ... story.html
From last year ... http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/ ... world.html

[SilverElephant]

As far as organizing events goes, my experience strongly suggests that people who want to be at your event will come no matter how you invite them and people who want you at their event will find a way to invite you.

I use FB as the mentioned phonebook for the extended family and have never, ever used it as an event thingy. My circle of acquaintances is not huge, but the ones who are important to me have always managed to give me a call when something was up. Those that haven't have dropped out of my life because they were too busy living the selfie life and I've found I don't miss them.

[Chad]

@JP
I had forgotten about that. Definitely a black eye for him.

[Noided]

I thought about deleting my facebook, but then I heard that employers also like to check if at least you have one. Some of them try to friend you (good luck with that lol). So I still keep my account, but I just use the chat (FB Messenger website) nowadays.

[steveo73]

I've never used it.

I've used it less than 5 times or around that level. I just don't see the point.

[Hman768]

I very much agree with your sentiment. I think Facebook is responsible for a lot of problems that people don't give it credit for - depression (especially among young people) hyper consumerization (keeping up with the joneses), and the political polarization. I have recently been working hard to wean myself from it.

[connie]

this is like anti FB lol

[Summer]

Except for posting photos I don't see why one would use it. But I use it because I use an app that requires me to have a Facebook.

[fiby41]

I am in on the group idea by vexed.

I use it to get updates from pages and college updates... I am not fond of it, and it can be addictive and boring at the same time, but I don't get some people blaming the medium for the content when a subset of their particular group of friends is clearly the problem. fb provides plenty of options to filter (lists and sort by) if you look around.

Alternatively you can set email notifications for the pages important to you only and this way I didn't have to login for months without missing anything important.

[Bankai]

I'm not on social media.

Sometimes I still get weird looks when I admit this, but living "differently" than typical person in so many areas of life for so many years taught me not to worry too much about opinions of others.

Re FB, I could never understand it's phenomena, but hey, identity trap.

[fiby41]

This also pertains to ethics thread...

During April Facebook was peddling hard its internet.org on to network providers and urging users to sign petitions to TRAI in its favour. This was criticised heavily for violating net neutrality which rigs the playing field in favour of big services like Facebook and their content creator corporate friends, leaving out hundreds of small, niche sites which include the ERE site.

They do this by partnering with network providers to coax them into providing Facebook for free... take it to its logical extreme and you can see the future internet where cable is today... paying for viewing a channel subscription AND being bombarded with ads.

Last month Facebook resumed its dirty tricks by giving internet.org new clothes to put on by calling it "Free Basics", adding bells and whistles. This was severely criticised by Tim Berners-Lee, co-creator of the World Wide Web.

In a zero-sum world, the benefit of a few always comes from the detrimental effects on many small content creators and service websites on the internet: Remember, there is no such thing as a free lunch. If it is free, 'you' are the product being sold to advertisers. Internet is for content creators big and small- Not just for Facebook and its corporate friends.

If this descision is not passed in favour of net neutrality, against this new gimmick Facebook has come up with, it will lead to similar attempts to crush net neutrality in other countries too.
Fortunately, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued a consultation paper before reaching a conclusion.

This is why I urge you to sign this petition regardless of the country you live in:

Don't allow differential pricing of services on the Internet. Let the consumers choose how they want to use Internet. #netneutrality

More points to consider:

1 Facebook is intentionally misleading the most gullible of its users in favour of the 'for' side. There is no formal mechanism with can rival their reach which is why I have resorted to this informal method for support of the 'against' side

2 You give them an inch and they WILL take a mile.

3 It is a matter of principle and not of dogma. If these services really benefit anyone at all, let them compete with others in the open market, we have got the closest to a free market we can practically get on the internet.

Historic note: Nokia had tried to provide the services which have been recently added under "Free Basics" in 09-10 but it didn't catch on.

Don't allow differential pricing of services on the Internet. Let the consumers choose how they want to use Internet. #netneutrality

[George the original one]

It's also important in the light that Verizon now owns AOL in addition to Dish and their own cable TV services. AT&T is similarly positioned. Verizon & AT&T literally don't care if you cut the cord or drop cable TV because they also own the cords and destination sites, so as long as you want to visit the destinations, you will pay them.

[thrifty++]

Zalo at times I often despise facebook. I feel like much of it is about keeping up with the Joneses. Many of my friends feel pressure to try and make themselves appear as interesting as possible by constantly updating whenever they are doing something and seek external approval about what they are doing. I had a friend get extremely angry at me (no kidding) when I said I didn't want him to check us in at some restaurant. How rediculous. I almost never post anything. I only have updates on my profile as a result of others tagging me in things. People may think I am boring as a result but rather I just dont display everything I am doing 24/7.
I think Facebook is a superficial extrovert paradise. I mainly retain it as a means of keeping in touch with people overseas via facebook email. But I am going to change my privacy settings to block everyone off so that they see next to nothing about me.

[fiby41]

OP: One can subscribe to RSS feed of their notifications so you don't have to login to check updates.
This way you can 'eliminate' without the 'fear of missing out.'

How to: Go to web version of the notifications page and click 'Subscribe to RSS feed' at the top left hand corner.

You can also subscribe to pages/groups that update with info difficult to find elsewhere by setting it to 'receive notifications' from the downward arrow dropdown menu beside the like/subscribe button on that page.

[jbrown79]

I use Facebook once a week just for the sake of checking what's happening with my friends or relatives, but that's it. I love Pinterest-ing more.

[drachma]

I hate it, for all the reasons stated.

endless scrolling / passive entertainment. unproductive. comparison and competition among friends. only posting highlights/feelgoods and not enabling real deep interactions. political BS, polarization. and so on.

but it has one simple purpose, letting me keep up with a wider circle of people than I have time to see in day-to-day life. you feel like less of a stranger when you see that person you haven't seen in a few weeks, if he/she's clicked "like" on a few of your photos or you shared some comments over that inane cat video.

many of you might question what the need is for a friendship at all if you don't see each other that often. I identify as introvert, and simply put I don't like to go see people very often. And the friends I do have often have very different pasttimes so when i do go see them it's for "different activities." e.g., some of my friends are into hiking, some are into board games, some are into backyard BBQing, and i only have so much time to participate in each one of those things so I only see each friend now and then. if i can keep up a "closer" relationship with less effort by using facebook, thats useful to me!

that said I am trying to find a way to quit it, because it just sucks me in.

[FBeyer]

...
that said I am trying to find a way to quit it, because it just sucks me in.

I changed my password preferences to never remember the password for FB. Then I changed the keyword to a 12 digit numerical upper/lower case gibberish and logged out.

That REALLY did the trick

[jennypenny]

Interesting article this morning on Wired regarding Facebook ... https://www.wired.com/story/inside-face ... s-of-hell/

[fips]

Inside the Center for Humane Technology: Tech creators push back

Is anyone still actively using (and getting lost on) facebook?

[slsdly]

I still want to use it for some clubs I am a part of, and for Facebook Messenger. I installed an addon [1] which removes the news feed, and I tend to use a dedicated app for messaging (on the desktop, Pidgin [2] + purple-facebook [3]). Works for me!

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... -news-feed
[2] https://pidgin.im
[3] https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook/wiki