ugh, Facebook
It was exciting at first, as it swept up all my LJ friends, family, partners, and nearly everybody else. I became obsessed with Facebook, and enjoyed receiving Likes and reading people's comments on my posts. I enjoyed interacting with others. I would check Facebook constantly, on my phone if I was away from my laptop.
But over time problems crept in, and now the bottom line is simple: I don't like it anymore. At this point I mainly use Facebook only because a few of the people I care about do. Which is what Facebook is counting on, that they can cater to the obsessive minority while dragging the rest of us along via our personal relationships.
I don't use any Facebook apps on my phone or tablet because I discovered the hard way they were horrible data hogs (consuming all my monthly data plan in just a few days). I don't like using the Facebook website because it is frustratingly slow (especially on mobile devices), and intentionally manipulative. It won't let me see all the posts of the people I want to see, in chronological order. Unlike the way LJ has always done, the way Twitter has always done. Facebook takes your friends' posts and filters them through an algorithm that they believe builds user "engagement". Even if you switch temporarily (it always switches you back) from Top Stories to Most Recent, it doesn't show you everything you want to see, and it doesn't show them in order.
While they may be correct about this algorithm building engagement in the typical user, it pisses me off. Every time I visit the site now it pisses me off.
I can't reliably expect that my friends, family, partners, will see my posts, or that I will see theirs. Why would I want my communications with these people to be filtered by an opaque algorithm? For example, Tod is often asking me whether I saw a particular post of his on Facebook. Um, no ... Facebook doesn't show me everything he posts, even though I am in a Facebook relationship with him!
The alternative is to impose my own minimization on the Facebook system, by interacting with it less, or not at all. So there is ultimately no solution.
Tod tells me there are third-party apps that can fix this problem for you, managing your News Feed the way you want. But these apps can't force Facebook's algorithm to allow my friends to see my posts reliably, in order. So they are at best a one-way street, letting your information travel my way, but not letting my information travel your way.
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Many years ago, during what I called my Wild Week, when I ended up in the mental hospital for a long weekend, I suffered a paranoid vision that software AIs would insert themselves between me and my friends via our chat programs, controlling our communications with each other, controlling how we would experience each other. Censoring our posts, such that we would not, could not, know the other person's true intentions.
Facebook is my paranoid nightmare come true. Software AIs are controlling how you experience your family and friends, and how they experience you.
But over time problems crept in, and now the bottom line is simple: I don't like it anymore. At this point I mainly use Facebook only because a few of the people I care about do. Which is what Facebook is counting on, that they can cater to the obsessive minority while dragging the rest of us along via our personal relationships.
I don't use any Facebook apps on my phone or tablet because I discovered the hard way they were horrible data hogs (consuming all my monthly data plan in just a few days). I don't like using the Facebook website because it is frustratingly slow (especially on mobile devices), and intentionally manipulative. It won't let me see all the posts of the people I want to see, in chronological order. Unlike the way LJ has always done, the way Twitter has always done. Facebook takes your friends' posts and filters them through an algorithm that they believe builds user "engagement". Even if you switch temporarily (it always switches you back) from Top Stories to Most Recent, it doesn't show you everything you want to see, and it doesn't show them in order.
While they may be correct about this algorithm building engagement in the typical user, it pisses me off. Every time I visit the site now it pisses me off.
I can't reliably expect that my friends, family, partners, will see my posts, or that I will see theirs. Why would I want my communications with these people to be filtered by an opaque algorithm? For example, Tod is often asking me whether I saw a particular post of his on Facebook. Um, no ... Facebook doesn't show me everything he posts, even though I am in a Facebook relationship with him!
The alternative is to impose my own minimization on the Facebook system, by interacting with it less, or not at all. So there is ultimately no solution.
Tod tells me there are third-party apps that can fix this problem for you, managing your News Feed the way you want. But these apps can't force Facebook's algorithm to allow my friends to see my posts reliably, in order. So they are at best a one-way street, letting your information travel my way, but not letting my information travel your way.
-----
Many years ago, during what I called my Wild Week, when I ended up in the mental hospital for a long weekend, I suffered a paranoid vision that software AIs would insert themselves between me and my friends via our chat programs, controlling our communications with each other, controlling how we would experience each other. Censoring our posts, such that we would not, could not, know the other person's true intentions.
Facebook is my paranoid nightmare come true. Software AIs are controlling how you experience your family and friends, and how they experience you.