[Semaphor]

Can someone explain to me the facebook problem? I'm not talking about privacy problems, just all the people saying everything is so much better for them without it. Is it just me using it too weirdly?

I use messenger to chat with people (I'd love to use my jabber account more, but everyone is either on FB, GTalk or WhatsApp), I read a few groups and use events to keep things organized and I post sometimes, either forgetting about it soon or if it strikes a point reading interesting discussions.

The vast majority of my friendlist are people I know IRL, some exceptions are online friends I know via other channels. I also regularly delete people (usually on their birthday, thanks for the reminder facebook) I'm not in contact with anymore (well, and anyone who invites me to play a game more than once, first time I tell them never to spam me again, 2nd time they are gone).

I'm just wondering how anything would improve for me without it?

[adventured]

In my experience, some of the nicest people I know also happen to have extremely overwhelming political opinions & behaviors. They're extreme partisans basically. Facebook has shown me a side of them that is very ugly. Plus, we're now culturally living in a time of belligerent identity politics combined with a sort of 'if you are not aggressively with us, you are against us and evil'. It's an incredibly toxic environment.

For example (more recently), several of my most liberal friends (all extremely nice people in person) have become venom spewing monsters, they rage non-stop, pretty much every day, about Trump this and Trump that and so on and so forth. They spew vindictive statements, they cheer about terrible things, they wish for horrible things to happen for political reasons, they casually toss insults, they threaten their other friends if they support Trump or if they don't support the anti-Trump side enough.

That kind of stuff makes me really dislike Facebook. Everybody I know on the network has had a similar experience over the last few years (and it really got bad with the election). And that's before you get to the other political stuff like intentional misinformation, lying, propaganda, fake news, etc. etc. And... that's before you get to the personal drama that occasionally spills over to FB. It's like six layers of hell frosted with brain-numbing spam from 22words and Bored Panda. So you start hiding posts by certain people, trying to restrain the flow of sewage. Block this page, block that game, ignore that notice, roll over a wall of 27 auto-playing spam videos, hide this post by that friend, stop seeing posts by that person. Facebook has gotten so large that it has become humanity, in my opinion, in all the good and bad ways that implies.

[Semaphor]

Interesting, that sounds to me that you are seeing sides of your friends you didn't want to know about? I don't have that problem, but if I would, I'd either unfollow their posts or outright delete them (depending on if I need/want to keep in contact with them on messenger).

[adventured]

Well for example with the rage party regarding Trump. I knew all the political opinions of my friends that have lost their minds over that (so to speak). I'm socially liberal, so their political ideas mostly never bothered me (even when I disagree with them). Their behavior on the other hand, is grotesque. They've become what they proclaimed to dislike.

Almost all people behave differently under different social circumstances and pressures. Facebook seems to bring out - unleash - the worst in some very nice people. My observation is, as one would expect, they justify the bad behavior by proclaiming that the venom spewing is justified by the nature of the opponents they're attempting to counter. Means justified by the end goal.

It's said that online anonymity + forum = asshole behavior. I've come to wonder if enough time being acclimated to a public social network like Facebook, doesn't degrade the social niceties and manners that used to exist among friends in the early days of MySpace and Facebook.

[Semaphor]

I mean finding out too much not by their opinions, but how they, at least sometimes, behave.

> Means justified by the end goal.

Had a person like that once, they posted a picture with text (my personal wisdom for those is to assume it's all wrong), I called them out on some bullshit on it, they said "And? The company is still evil.". Unfollow instantly solved that for me.

[raverbashing]

As much as I despise M.Z. and Fb is full of bad ideas (and bad users) I guess people have not realized how to use some magical buttons in Fb called 'unfriend', 'block this page' and 'stop following'

I use it as well to keep contact with people (and don't give me that "just call them" BS) but that doesn't mean I have to accept all the clickbaits or fake news or just low effort crap

[Semaphor]

Exactly what I'm doing, yes.

[clusmore]

I haven't deactivated my account, but I have unfollowed absolutely everything so that I have an entirely blank news feed, and uninstalled the app from my phone to avoid notifications. I still use messenger for communication with friends. For me, it was the realisation that 99% of the content in my news feed was posts by corporate pages. I signed up to connect with friends, and initially I did only see status updates from friends. But over time it became exclusively friends liking or commenting on posts by pages, and I was no longer connecting with people.

[Semaphor]

> But over time it became exclusively friends liking or commenting on posts by pages

I just scrolled through several pages of my newsfeed (actually found a bunch of pages I never saw content from but which were also not relevant to me anymore which I unliked) and didn't find anything like that. Everything was personal posts, a few relevant page posts and posts from groups I'm in.

But why did you unfollow everything just for messenger? Wouldn't it be far easier to just use the messenger site directly and ignore facebook.com?

[clusmore]

Hmm, maybe it has improved. I did this around a year ago. I spent weeks trying to train it, hiding every single "X liked this post" "Y commented on this post" and worse "Z liked a comment on this post" hoping to only see actual posts by my actual friends but it never worked. The reason I unfollowed everything was to stop my self from coming back to Facebook and scrolling through pages of garbage, wasting my time. Now if I ever accidentally visit Facebook (I do use messenger.com) it's empty so I close the tab straight away.

[robteix]

I was recently surprised to find out they if you deactivate your account, FB gives you the option to keep Messenger. Might be an option for you or OP.

[jccalhoun]

Most of the posts from friends on facebook are personal posts and even the ones that are my friends commenting on posts or sharing stories are at least somewhat interesting to me because I want to see what my friends think are interesting or important.

[jventura]

For me it was information overload. Not that I care what my neighbour ate for lunch yesterday, but don't throw it in my face. I thought that such stupid information would be innocuous, and in a sense it is, but as they say, ignorance is bliss. I simply don't know what the current trend is on social media (are people still dropping water from buckets over themselves?) and I'm happier. In other words, I was once ignorant and I guess I'm happy because I now know how to be ignorant again! :)

[Semaphor]

I guess because I barely check the FB wall, I miss such things anyway ;) Thanks.

[madshiva]

It's not because everybody is using it, that the tools is ok. It's like everybody is playing LoL, are LoL great? Doubt so, but it's like playing it because everybody play it.

You have mail, if people can't contact you without facebook, then the problem is not you, but the users. Like for example a friends won't join discord because it own is own chat server, yes like I want a tool by friends. I just ignore him he always wanted that I adopt his solution.

[Semaphor]

It's a combination of people being there AND having a bunch of related tools (mainly of importance to me, groups, events and comments for events). E-Mail is inconvenient for most things I use messenger for.