12 thoughts on “Facebook”

  1. It took me a while to see it, but I’m very happy I closed my account. Ironically, they don’t let you close your account immediately. You tell them to close your account in a month.

  2. Even then be careful. I thought I had closed my account (their way) after they closed it for me for posting a link to the CDC that ran afoul of their fact checkers, and discovered that my account was still there.

  3. I never really did Facebook except for a brief stint as admin for The Moon Society (TMS). The issue I had was why was I creating content on the Facebook site when I should be creating content on the TMS website? My IT guys could never figure out how to port the TMS content automatically to the various social media sites like I wanted. It was very frustrating, though not as much as spending three years trying to get an updated website from the group… I’m supposed to do stuff on Facebook for work, but I regard my customer base as the youth, not ol’ folks, even though the old folks are the only ones with any money, and so don’t use it often.

    My only twittering was an experiment for getting the word out about Moon Day that didn’t really yield fruit and so I abandoned the effort. Still get e-mails for the 2012 effort though I haven’t touched it in years. I’ve never felt that what I have to say can be condensed to 140 characters.

    I don’t think the social media websites have been good for the health of what could be called the internet ecosystem. So many interesting little websites are lost, gone forever as traffic consolidates to a handful of sites. Just look at the link rot in Rand’s blog roll. But so long as enough folks choose to use them, they will continue. The real question is whether the cancer of what has been learned by these websites and the way they operate can ever be excised. Like the nastiness learned from the Nazis after WW2 which still infects the deep corridors of government and society, I have a feeling this poison will be around for a while.

    1. Social media can be good and bad. Twitter is a cesspool but all the various government agencies at all levels use it. The same problem exists as you describe, their individual websites suffer to some extent. But Twitter is a great way to keep up to date on natural disasters, road work, and whether or not your kid’s school is open. FB is useful for these things too. I think this is what makes them common carriers. Denying people access is denying them access to important information critical to life.

      You had some issues reposting your content and it is much easier to fire off a tweet or FB post rather than write something a little longer and host is someplace else but people/groups who have their own sites should be using social media to entice their audience off the social media platform. Social media should be on the outside of the marketing funnel. This means more work as simply linking to content isn’t enough. It is also important to interact with your audience and this is how people get trapped on social media sites instead of working on their funnel.

      Something similar happens to audiences. They might not load up your site everyday because they are locked into a social media site out of habit and the audience needs a way off provided to them.

  4. I’m thankfully now a Facebook/Twitter/Instagram non-entity.

    When social media moves to peer-to-peer I might start a personal wall I can share with friends. But it’s on MY computer and it shares what I want and doesn’t blab my content to anyone else I haven’t said can either read it or respond to it, via encryption.

  5. Facebook is like that greedy & seedy publisher of pulp/porn fiction from the 1950’s who’ll publish your story for a pittance just to have filler between the pictures and advertisements.

    Only in those days the grubby editors didn’t sell off to their advertisers your name, address, marital status, number of kids, their ages, or hire private detectives to track your comings and goings….

  6. I was shocked to find this quote from an article in The Atlantic, of all places. It encapulates my feelings exactly of both FB and Twitter:

    Facebook is a lie-disseminating instrument of civilizational collapse. It is designed for blunt-force emotional reaction, reducing human interaction to the clicking of buttons. The algorithm guides users inexorably toward less nuanced, more extreme material, because that’s what most efficiently elicits a reaction. Users are implicitly trained to seek reactions to what they post, which perpetuates the cycle. Facebook executives have tolerated the promotion on their platform of propaganda, terrorist recruitment, and genocide. They point to democratic virtues like free speech to defend themselves, while dismantling democracy itself.

    Adrienne LaFrance
    The Atlantic
    9/28/21
    Feel free to diseminate widely.

    1. Partially true except that the greatest deceits that have affected our society since the launch of FB did not arise from this condition infecting the unwashed hordes of the normals but incepted in the public by the most powerful in our society. While controversy does attract attention, an alternative where nothing shared is controversial doesn’t mean that those differences in opinion don’t exist, just that they are being suppressed.

      I’ll take a wild stab in the dark that the author supported all of these falsehoods and helped spread them and she has supported crackdowns and censorship of all things not left wing.

      Too bad she didn’t go into more detail about her preferred solutions. I suspect those solutions would only exacerbate the problems she identified and solidify Progressive Marxist control of FB and our government.

  7. “Seeing Facebook as a hostile foreign power could force people to acknowledge what they’re participating in, and what they’re giving up, when they log in. In the end it doesn’t really matter what Facebook is; it matters what Facebook is doing.”

    It does matter what FB is doing. They are an arm of the Democrat party and as long as they are, nothing bad will ever happen to them.

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