I actually didn't have "friends" in mind. Small businesses, formal and informal groups of interest, event discovery, the use cases are far beyond what I'm aware of.
Especially in the case of Instagram, it's a de facto RSS reader for a lot of really good content, if you curate it right.
I'm happy to say that the network I have built through Instagram has taken my photography to new levels and facilitated social interactions I'd never have had otherwise.
It is very fair to want to take the good (network/community) and leave the bad (walled-garden and tracking).
You're assuming a similar, or even the same, network can't be found outside of <site-x>.
I suspect this is a subset of what I call "The Fallacy of The Best", the idea that things can objectively be quantified as "the best" and that there is significant value that cannot be realized without "the best".
In reality, the products and services you choose have relatively little impact on the quality of experience you have, both because there is little substantial difference between most things on the main, and because the effort you put into things is far more important.
Many people need to feel part of a social circle in order to be happy. Many if not most of those members of our social circle are going to be friends merely out of convenience or inertia, but that is an unpleasant fact that we avoid thinking about directly.
Leaving social media can be traumatic because you are suddenly brought face to face with the fact that many relationships in your life are a bit of a lie – people don’t really care about you all that much. And sure, you are left with a handful of “real friends” who are still willing to engage with you even though you are now the weirdo of the bunch who doesn’t use social media, but still. I sometimes wonder if the psychological toll of continuing to use social media is less than that of quitting social media.
> If your so-called friends don't have your email address, they aren't your friends.
I don't think that's fair to say in 2020. I'm not arguing for facebook's goodness here, just its ubiquity. When it comes time for me to organize a friends-only event (i.e., not a meetup or community event), I'm not aware of anything better than FB for the task. Say a party with 50 people at it - not all those people have my phone number or email address, but we're still close enough that I could tell you where they grew up. Maybe we chat on messenger sometimes.
I'm actively looking for alternatives. I think I'll disable my FB to still have access to messenger, but mostly I need a replacement for Events. Marketplace is pointless - I get way more hits on my craigslist posts anyway. Photos is stupid, I just put my stuff on photos.google.com and share the URL with people. Hah, though I am just now remembering Instagram is owned by FB.
Query your friends for alternative contact information (email, phone #, etc.). Select your next platform(s). Leave contact information on FB. In 1-6 months, return to FB and remove your account.
You forget that Facebook is not for friends only. Millions of groups of common interest exist as well as communities formed around pages and personalities.
That's fine if you only want to talk about topics nobody will disagree with, like how much we all love some particular piece of media, but I think it's a waste of time to look for sincere deep conversations under the enforced banality of FB's one-size-fits-globally Community Standards.
You can get contact information and maintain ties with communities in other ways as well. Leaving FB can make discovering communities harder, but it doesn't mean remaining part of communities is lost.
For some communities, you're losing most context by not being on FB. Most of the discussion happens on Facebook and not anywhere else. For some communities I'm in, you're basically completely out of the loop if you're not active on Facebook. Yes, you could try to get context from friends but they're getting it from Facebook as well. Once you're all out - none of you will have context.
Last post: "Here's where you can find me in the future. I'm not on Facebook anymore." (And optionally: "Here's why.")
If people want to get in touch with you, they'll do so. If people want to broadcast information only to those following them on one service, then you'll stop getting that information. That's fine. Other information will take its place.
What if (hypothetically) those 'people' are an organization that needs to organize work, and they're using it because they've tried email and other methods for years, and found that those didn't work?
A lot of us use FB for organizing, not just for seeing what our friends ate for dessert last night. It's not reasonable to tell people abandon one channel without suggesting a replacement. You might as well ask people to give up email, or their phone.
How can you be so bad at email that it "doesn't work"?
I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. We're talking about a company that has knowingly promoted white supremacists groups for the sake of clicks. I think that warrants putting just a little effort into email.
No tool is going to do your job for you. If Facebook succeeded where email failed, it's just because someone wasn't doing their job, not because of some special sauce that Facebook has.
Just curious - how much organizing do you do? Do you host events with any regularity? Do people like to ask a lot of questions about your events or want to share publicly that they're going to them with people? Do people sometimes want to know who is going to your events so that they can choose when not to go because they don't like that person? (And when someone is going so that they can go) Do you have a very active group of people who like to interact with each other in a public forum? Now is that group size beyond 100 people?
You'd be surprised how crap email is for any of that. You'd be surprised how people don't want to have 10 different apps for all the activities and prefer one central source to catch up on everything. Facebook can be very useful.
I've been toying with removing all of my content, unfriending the vast majority of acquaintances and unfollowing family who post garbage. Then don't feed the zuck machine by posting, liking memes, or regular checking. Disable all notifications from communities.
Basically try to keep to "business and meaningful contact only" rather than engage with the time-sinks. Make it work for me. (The Intention firefox extension has been super helpful as well.)
Don't forget to log off and clear cookies when not using it so you're not tracked by every "like" / "comment with facebook" button if you don't want to feed the zuck machine.
Or use a quarantine browser for your sessions.
I went through that process a year ago. It was a good amount of work. When I was done, I realized I wasn't getting anything out of Facebook and deleted.
Personally, I find social media to be very problematic. I strongly dislike facebook, twitter, etc. for how they are affecting the way so many people think. It's not because of their business models, it's because I think their product is fundamentally bad for people.
That line of reasoning doesn't lead to any opinion of google, apple, amazon (except youtube, which has some of the problems of social media).
For me, I’m not on twitter or Facebook. I’m “stuck” with google until I get off my rear and migrate my gmail. I signed up when it was invite only and have about 15 years of email history with it. But that’s the only google product I use.
Facebook doesn’t really offer much more than “social” but I can have gmail without using any of google’s other products, including search.
I used amazon a lot in the past but less and less and probably never again based on their response to COVID.
So, for me at least, it’s not the companies so much, I’m pretty disappointed in all of them. It’s the features and I just don’t see a need to be on anything social media related these days unless we’re counting HN as social media. This is close as I come anymore. But, again, for me, buying from amazon or having a gmail account isn’t the same as following what social media has to offer...
Now if this were an important Facebook employee writing this, and many Facebook employees were considering getting together to leave and start something better, I would totally love that.
I don't think deleting a Facebook account really matters in this day and age.
The FB Ads SDK has infiltrated every nook and corner of your life. From websites to your phone to TV's to iot. I am scared by the prospects of that level of intrusion than anything else. They don't need your account.
Visiting my account off FB activity was just there tip of the iceberg. They can connect everything about you without your involvement...
A mere FB account doesn't do much. Sure in the short term we can have lengthy blog posts about "deleteFB" and so on but really it's mostly for sentiment not really concrete.
I agree, but this is not what is being discussed in the article. It is about the manipulation provided by the platform, which you can indeed massively reduce your exposure to by not using it.
(One could argue that targeted ads that would still follow you are another way of manipulation, but it's way lesser than willingly consuming The Feed)
A baby step you can take if you want to leave Facebook is to disable (I forget if that's the exact term, it might be deactivate) your account. This removes your access to the site, and hides your profile - while leaving the Messenger half of your account untouched: messages, contacts, etc.
I've done it before for mental health reasons, and found it really refreshing.
For me the first step was to remove the mobile Facebook app. I used to scroll mindlessly while traveling and commuting, and once I didn't have the app on my phone, my time on FB dropped by like 80%. I also found it refreshing and I felt less stressed about missing something there.
I didn't need to do this to get the same effect. I just deleted the app from my phone.
Now I check Facebook maybe once a month and only for events or to sell stuff. I think it helps that I only ever used it on mobile to begin with. After being away for over a year the feed looks like a dumpster fire. I wouldn't touch it with a 10ft pole. There is some genuine cases of people connecting on there no doubt but it's buried under a pile of anxiety inducing crap. And not the constrictive kind of anxiety either, the hollow kind.
I got rid of the app and I'm only browsing the mobile site in a incognito window, so I have to login every time. This added enough friction to stop the completely mindless browsing and scrolling plus it gave me back some of my battery life.
The next step for me is to remove Facebook from my password manager. Having to type a 20+ character password on a phone is definitely going to add significant friction.
FB will just attract more right-wingers as they play the "hands off" role, both as users and employees. Every person who leaves because of this will be replaced by someone who considers FB to be the "fair and balanced" tech company.
Why isn't there a social network that actually cares about society? I swear if one existed it would be gaining a million users a day right now. I'm dying to abandon Facebook, but --I hate to say-- it's the best way for me to stay in touch with international friends and family at the moment. Can't someone please create a simple facebook-style app that's not driven by profit? Please please please.
I think Facebook is merely the conduit of human behavior that happens when lack of regulation / social norms or the incentives of profit create a new space much faster than we're used to before. So leaving Facebook and going to some other platform will not fundamentally solve the problem.
As long as:
1) people want to socialize freely (as well as privately) with each other in an online rapid medium,
2) the online forum is incentivized to make money, and
3) that same forum / business doesn't want the burden of regulating people's speech and behavior
then some Facebook analogue will take its place no matter where people go.
Right now it seems we can only choose to have 2 out of the 3.
#1 is very much the case right now as well. With the lockdown, many people I know started to use social networks for more than just showing off or pushing a message. They finally began to socialize and support each other.
The difference is though, with the internet evolving, the platforms were figuring out their revenue models, and we can see now which model turned out superior.
I also disagree. The "curation" algorithms and other systems clearly have a serious influence. Facebook is not responsible for human nature, but they are responsible for intentionally guiding it for profit and ignoring the consequences. It's not as if Facebook is merely tabula rasa; they meddle.
There have been many examples of executives and engineers who have spoken to this effect:
FB is the network of people on your green list, and FB's most pronounced "algorithmic" influence is deciding priority on a feed of your green-listed friends, but ultimately one has to ask -- can you handle your own relations? Are your friends' ideas just way too infectious for your free will to handle?
> Are your friends' ideas just way too infectious for your free will to handle?
Good point, but I'll add: if the ideas they are spreading weren't infectious, they wouldn't be spreading them in the first place.
I've been on FB lately because my local government has decided that it will use FB to give background info and outlooks wrt Covid-19. From what I saw in the local groups, the "ideas" people spread are not original content, ever. They don't have those ideas, they just read them and say "yeah, share", so the ideas that make it to your feed have proven themselves many times to be infectious. There's a reason we call it "going viral".
>Facebook is merely the conduit of human behavior that happens when lack of regulation / social norms
some time ago I would have agreed on some level but there is too much manual and/or algorithmic manipulation to encourage "retention", "stickiness", "addictiveness" (whatever the current marketing-speak du jour for dependence is) to be a true reflection of behavior.
thats the irony of the current state of social networks - its not just merely allowing conversation/connection; its about encouraging rage, confrontation, polarity. in the pursuit of metrics, ergo dollars.
and even worse, we then look at the distorted reflection we see in the digital mirror and our view of society/discourse is negatively reinforced. what a loop.
Leaving WhatsApp is not as easy, in many countries you need it to do things like buying to local producers or communicating with a client. The network effect is more unavoidable than in other FB products.
When traveling West Africa overland, I found that Whatsapp was essential for contacting guesthouses down the road. Due to inconsistent electrical supply in the region, accommodation proprietors don’t have constant mobile phone availability, so trying to contact them on the phone is often fruitless. Instead, they all ask to be contacted over Whatsapp, so that when they get a chance to charge their devices they can catch up on whatever messages have been sent to them in the meantime.
Also, I found in South America that almost no one would respond to an SMS sent to them. Apparently, SMSs used to be extremely expensive, so a culture developed of never answering them. If you want any kind of reply, then people insist you use Whatsapp.
It's also worth mentioning that the whatsapp team still is filled with dedicated anti-surveillance types, leftovers from the original company (note that the founder publicly came out against facebook after the sale). I don't know how much longer that'll be the case, now that they're all vesting, but they're in there.
I deleted my Facebook almost 8 years ago and never looked back. Was hard at first but great for my mental health. I encourage you to try disabling it for a while and keeping up with your network with alternatives
There have been plenty of good reasons to leave Facebook, for many years. If you only now want to dump FB because they didn’t muzzle Trump, you are probably part of the problem.
On one level, Trump's statements about mail-in voting are just flatly untrue, pure propaganda, and completely irresponsible. But isn't it weird as well how much people are willing to let these massive tech companies essentially become fact-checkers for the content posted on it? I that that's also frightening to think about.
Shouldn't the guy have been banned from the service for violating the terms of service a long time ago? If you or me had said similar things we would have been deplatformed a while back.
I think this is just a half assed way of making amends for allowing so much prominent lies on the network.
Plus it's their network, they likely have TOS allowing them to do anything on it. Probaly except altering the posts (... but they replace links with their shortener i think).
>But isn't it weird as well how much people are willing to let these massive tech companies essentially become fact-checkers for the content posted on it?
* If someone criticized newspapers for yellow journalism and inciting violence with sensationalism, would it seem so weird to push the newspapers to "essentially become fact-checkers for the content posted" on them?
* Is the way that people view large public figures on social media all that different than how they did with newspapers?
I think it is important that there is a diversity of avenues toward publishing, so that incorrectly judged messages / messages that the population disagrees about the harm of can still be published somewhere, but it's never been easier than now to publish things to the web even without the help of a specific individual platform like Facebook. The web isn't just Facebook.
Please Please Please offer some GOOD alternatives to Facebook.
Now is the time to come together and replace Facebook with a free decentralised alternative.
If you want to switch away from other surveillance capitalist software like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or WhatsApp here's a list [0]
Decentralization is usually pitched as a solution to "censorship". In this case, the complaint seems to be the reverse, that there was insufficient intervention against misinformation. So I'm not sure how decentralization applies here.
I think that's a really good point to bring up. Decentralization solves some problems but it doesn't automatically make everything better.
An interesting example relevant to this case would be Mastodon: it's an alternative to Twitter where many instances federate together, and instances are allowed to do their own moderation. Many instances have much more protective rules than Twitter and have smaller communities that their moderators are better able to integrate with.
The hyperbole of this is almost incomprehensible. The absurdity of this latest "controversy" - Zuck not wrapping some form of token and meaningless censorship around a single Trump tweet - is proof that this isn't about Trump. Hell, all this did was give Trump more exposure. No, it's clear that this is about breaking Zuck for political purposes, and taking control of Facebook for a single "side." Not one person genuinely cares about this dumb Trump tweet, this is just trying to tip over Zuck once and for all and get him to be full-on Dorsey.
I left Facebook five years ago but it certainly wasn't about Zuck or Facebook. I hate to break it to you guys but at the end of the day, Facebook is just people. Get upset all you want but you're really just getting upset at other people for whatever reason. Facebook isn't the problem, human nature is.
Yes, human nature is the problem, and I think its why we developed a set of laws and values that allow us to live peacefully with each other.
We need to extend these laws and values to Facebook and other social media.
People should be held accountable for things they post publicly on the internet. Public posts should not be anonymous. If damage is caused as a result of your misleading communications, you should be held responsible for that damage.
Yes it would destroy social media (and reshape the entire internet as we know it), but the world is burning and its because nobody knows what to believe.
Absolutely not. Facebook is the last major social network where people are able to speak their minds. And since I can select who I want to listen to, I like it. As it so happens, everyone who I follow on Facebook speaks their minds by posting pictures of their babies. This is perfectly fine by me.
I am sceptical that the paternalists will let me be when they're done dealing with Trump et al.
> Absolutely not. Facebook is the last bastion of people being able to speak their minds. And since I can select who I want to listen to, I like it. As it so happens, everyone who I follow on Facebook speaks their minds by posting pictures of their babies. This is perfectly fine by me.
I am sceptical that the paternalists will let me be when they're done dealing with Trump et al.
How is it the last bastion of anything? It is a place where people seem to be able to speak their mind. It's not the last place. The Internet is vast, and the major social networks aren't the only things in existence on it.
That's true. Allow me to edit it to "last major social network". I have access to places where I can speak my mind. I think society is stronger for allowing everyone places like that, and Facebook's discoverability is a lot higher than many other places. Maybe Reddit is also as good but it's much smaller.
LinkedIn is professional, so I think people tend to self-censor.
Reddit is small in comparison to Facebook. I think it's like one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook in DAUs. Medium is tiny likewise. I think both Instagram and WhatsApp individually are bigger than Reddit, let alone the big daddy FB itself. 1 in 3 people worldwide visits Facebook at least once a month.
Is there a significant amount of Facebook employees that are actually planning on leaving?
From my experience money talks. Many people will use the logic of "if not me it will be someone else" for their cognitive dissonance to work at morally degenerate organizations. I'd be interested if there was a survey of current employees who would be willing to leave if another entity paid an analogous salary.
>Is there a significant amount of Facebook employees that are actually planning on leaving?
Of course not. The proof is in the puddin'. There is, and never has been, a mass exodus of technical talent from these companies. And during this period there has been near constant hand wringing and crocodile tears about the evil things these companies do.
Especially now with the US economy in the toilet and unemployment numbers at astronomical levels. No mass exodus is going to happen unless people can easily move into another job.
I don't know of a "significant amount" of employees, but my LinkedIn feed this morning had two engineers post that they had left. But also had one guy say that he had just joined. Take that for what it's worth.
Does anyone have recommendations for a tool similar to Facebook Events that I can use for planning the assloads of parties and camping trips I plan? That's genuinely the only thing between me and deleting my FB.
We should see Facebook as a drug store which its top kingpin, Mr Zuckerberg sell its social network 'drugs' to billions of his users, which when abused over and over again, the results are always never positive and messes with your dopamine levels. Because of the social connections, followers and inertia, it is harder for friends and family to leave.
Apart from its flagship product, social network 'drugs' it owns includes Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. The fine-print is if you mix that with trolls, disinformation and bots it equals never-ending reactionary anger. Very unhealthy for you.
The network effect is hard. I have family in India that would be next to impossible to get in touch with if Im not using whatsapp. Everything over there happens on it.
There are good things too, my friend found a kidney donor on there, a random person which saved their life !!
Going to repost this here too: How many of FB users would need to have adblockers and commit to never clicking on an ad in facebook to cause a big enough dip in revenue in Q2 (ends this month)? Especially given already depressed levels of online advertising spend. I don't mean this in a "lets take down FB" way but more of a "how can we force Zuckerberg to have more discussion/thought on this and brush it away?".
I would love to see some type of fact check warning be implemented for FB but not necessarily censorship.
Wow this is getting out of hand, not the spying, not the data collection, not the poor morals with ads... but the support for free speech did it and not being extreme left. Great bravo guys, bravo
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadHow can we leave and take the network with us?'
Edit:
I actually didn't have "friends" in mind. Small businesses, formal and informal groups of interest, event discovery, the use cases are far beyond what I'm aware of.
Also, organizing and protests...
I'm happy to say that the network I have built through Instagram has taken my photography to new levels and facilitated social interactions I'd never have had otherwise.
It is very fair to want to take the good (network/community) and leave the bad (walled-garden and tracking).
I suspect this is a subset of what I call "The Fallacy of The Best", the idea that things can objectively be quantified as "the best" and that there is significant value that cannot be realized without "the best".
In reality, the products and services you choose have relatively little impact on the quality of experience you have, both because there is little substantial difference between most things on the main, and because the effort you put into things is far more important.
Leaving social media can be traumatic because you are suddenly brought face to face with the fact that many relationships in your life are a bit of a lie – people don’t really care about you all that much. And sure, you are left with a handful of “real friends” who are still willing to engage with you even though you are now the weirdo of the bunch who doesn’t use social media, but still. I sometimes wonder if the psychological toll of continuing to use social media is less than that of quitting social media.
I don't think that's fair to say in 2020. I'm not arguing for facebook's goodness here, just its ubiquity. When it comes time for me to organize a friends-only event (i.e., not a meetup or community event), I'm not aware of anything better than FB for the task. Say a party with 50 people at it - not all those people have my phone number or email address, but we're still close enough that I could tell you where they grew up. Maybe we chat on messenger sometimes.
I'm actively looking for alternatives. I think I'll disable my FB to still have access to messenger, but mostly I need a replacement for Events. Marketplace is pointless - I get way more hits on my craigslist posts anyway. Photos is stupid, I just put my stuff on photos.google.com and share the URL with people. Hah, though I am just now remembering Instagram is owned by FB.
If people want to get in touch with you, they'll do so. If people want to broadcast information only to those following them on one service, then you'll stop getting that information. That's fine. Other information will take its place.
A lot of us use FB for organizing, not just for seeing what our friends ate for dessert last night. It's not reasonable to tell people abandon one channel without suggesting a replacement. You might as well ask people to give up email, or their phone.
I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. We're talking about a company that has knowingly promoted white supremacists groups for the sake of clicks. I think that warrants putting just a little effort into email.
No tool is going to do your job for you. If Facebook succeeded where email failed, it's just because someone wasn't doing their job, not because of some special sauce that Facebook has.
You'd be surprised how crap email is for any of that. You'd be surprised how people don't want to have 10 different apps for all the activities and prefer one central source to catch up on everything. Facebook can be very useful.
Basically try to keep to "business and meaningful contact only" rather than engage with the time-sinks. Make it work for me. (The Intention firefox extension has been super helpful as well.)
Why does leaving one require someone to leave all the others?
Do we not bandage a wound just because there are other wounds?
That line of reasoning doesn't lead to any opinion of google, apple, amazon (except youtube, which has some of the problems of social media).
I've seen an amusingly large number of tweets lately calling for deletion of Facebook.
Facebook doesn’t really offer much more than “social” but I can have gmail without using any of google’s other products, including search.
I used amazon a lot in the past but less and less and probably never again based on their response to COVID.
So, for me at least, it’s not the companies so much, I’m pretty disappointed in all of them. It’s the features and I just don’t see a need to be on anything social media related these days unless we’re counting HN as social media. This is close as I come anymore. But, again, for me, buying from amazon or having a gmail account isn’t the same as following what social media has to offer...
The FB Ads SDK has infiltrated every nook and corner of your life. From websites to your phone to TV's to iot. I am scared by the prospects of that level of intrusion than anything else. They don't need your account.
Visiting my account off FB activity was just there tip of the iceberg. They can connect everything about you without your involvement...
A mere FB account doesn't do much. Sure in the short term we can have lengthy blog posts about "deleteFB" and so on but really it's mostly for sentiment not really concrete.
(One could argue that targeted ads that would still follow you are another way of manipulation, but it's way lesser than willingly consuming The Feed)
I've done it before for mental health reasons, and found it really refreshing.
Now I check Facebook maybe once a month and only for events or to sell stuff. I think it helps that I only ever used it on mobile to begin with. After being away for over a year the feed looks like a dumpster fire. I wouldn't touch it with a 10ft pole. There is some genuine cases of people connecting on there no doubt but it's buried under a pile of anxiety inducing crap. And not the constrictive kind of anxiety either, the hollow kind.
The next step for me is to remove Facebook from my password manager. Having to type a 20+ character password on a phone is definitely going to add significant friction.
https://londondailypost.com/zeaun-zarrieff-writes-to-faceboo...
https://businessnewsledger.com/zeaun-zarrieff-from-amerihub-...
As long as:
1) people want to socialize freely (as well as privately) with each other in an online rapid medium,
2) the online forum is incentivized to make money, and
3) that same forum / business doesn't want the burden of regulating people's speech and behavior
then some Facebook analogue will take its place no matter where people go.
Right now it seems we can only choose to have 2 out of the 3.
We are simply living in the Eternal September.
There have been many examples of executives and engineers who have spoken to this effect:
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-engineer-resigns-tr...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6e1riShmak (Chamath Palihapitiya)
Good point, but I'll add: if the ideas they are spreading weren't infectious, they wouldn't be spreading them in the first place.
I've been on FB lately because my local government has decided that it will use FB to give background info and outlooks wrt Covid-19. From what I saw in the local groups, the "ideas" people spread are not original content, ever. They don't have those ideas, they just read them and say "yeah, share", so the ideas that make it to your feed have proven themselves many times to be infectious. There's a reason we call it "going viral".
some time ago I would have agreed on some level but there is too much manual and/or algorithmic manipulation to encourage "retention", "stickiness", "addictiveness" (whatever the current marketing-speak du jour for dependence is) to be a true reflection of behavior.
thats the irony of the current state of social networks - its not just merely allowing conversation/connection; its about encouraging rage, confrontation, polarity. in the pursuit of metrics, ergo dollars.
and even worse, we then look at the distorted reflection we see in the digital mirror and our view of society/discourse is negatively reinforced. what a loop.
It's surprising how many of my friends say they don't use Facebook for political reasons but don't see Instagram as the same company.
Also, I found in South America that almost no one would respond to an SMS sent to them. Apparently, SMSs used to be extremely expensive, so a culture developed of never answering them. If you want any kind of reply, then people insist you use Whatsapp.
Also there is no feeds in WhatsApp, making it very different from Insta and FB. But it's still giving strength to the ecosystem.
Riot? Telegram?
Plus it's their network, they likely have TOS allowing them to do anything on it. Probaly except altering the posts (... but they replace links with their shortener i think).
* If someone criticized newspapers for yellow journalism and inciting violence with sensationalism, would it seem so weird to push the newspapers to "essentially become fact-checkers for the content posted" on them?
* Is the way that people view large public figures on social media all that different than how they did with newspapers?
I think it is important that there is a diversity of avenues toward publishing, so that incorrectly judged messages / messages that the population disagrees about the harm of can still be published somewhere, but it's never been easier than now to publish things to the web even without the help of a specific individual platform like Facebook. The web isn't just Facebook.
If you want to switch away from other surveillance capitalist software like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or WhatsApp here's a list [0]
[0] https://switching.software/
An interesting example relevant to this case would be Mastodon: it's an alternative to Twitter where many instances federate together, and instances are allowed to do their own moderation. Many instances have much more protective rules than Twitter and have smaller communities that their moderators are better able to integrate with.
There's a whole ecosystem of decentralised alternatives out there, which you can check out at https://fediverse.party/
It's definitely not easy to get people to jump ship, but I've seen an influx of new users to the Mastodon instance I'm part of.
I left Facebook five years ago but it certainly wasn't about Zuck or Facebook. I hate to break it to you guys but at the end of the day, Facebook is just people. Get upset all you want but you're really just getting upset at other people for whatever reason. Facebook isn't the problem, human nature is.
This is almost exactly the line of thinking that the story The Weapon by Fredric Brown warns against.
http://www.digital-eel.com/blog/library/The_Weapon.pdf
We need to extend these laws and values to Facebook and other social media.
People should be held accountable for things they post publicly on the internet. Public posts should not be anonymous. If damage is caused as a result of your misleading communications, you should be held responsible for that damage.
Yes it would destroy social media (and reshape the entire internet as we know it), but the world is burning and its because nobody knows what to believe.
I am sceptical that the paternalists will let me be when they're done dealing with Trump et al.
How is it the last bastion of anything? It is a place where people seem to be able to speak their mind. It's not the last place. The Internet is vast, and the major social networks aren't the only things in existence on it.
Do LinkedIn or Reddit or Medium not allow you to speak your mind? In what way?
Reddit is small in comparison to Facebook. I think it's like one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook in DAUs. Medium is tiny likewise. I think both Instagram and WhatsApp individually are bigger than Reddit, let alone the big daddy FB itself. 1 in 3 people worldwide visits Facebook at least once a month.
From my experience money talks. Many people will use the logic of "if not me it will be someone else" for their cognitive dissonance to work at morally degenerate organizations. I'd be interested if there was a survey of current employees who would be willing to leave if another entity paid an analogous salary.
Of course not. The proof is in the puddin'. There is, and never has been, a mass exodus of technical talent from these companies. And during this period there has been near constant hand wringing and crocodile tears about the evil things these companies do.
One of the best things I did for my mental health. Highly recommended.
Apart from its flagship product, social network 'drugs' it owns includes Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. The fine-print is if you mix that with trolls, disinformation and bots it equals never-ending reactionary anger. Very unhealthy for you.
I will miss the concert notifications for bands I follow, but I guess I'll just have to put slightly more effort into following them :)
There are good things too, my friend found a kidney donor on there, a random person which saved their life !!
It needs to happen, its a tough jump
I would love to see some type of fact check warning be implemented for FB but not necessarily censorship.