Hossein Derakhshan would probably do well on Daily Kos - they like the long form post filled with links.

We gotta get this guy to join SE. He'd love it.

I wonder what it would take to make that happen. Seriously.

I don't think he's coming. We should probably take down these balloons.

I Quit Liking Things On Facebook for Two Weeks. Here’s How It Changed My View of Humanity.

What Facebook Doesn't Show You

The problem with Facebook is it tries to learn and automate what you want to see on your news feed, instead of giving you fine-grained controls on what you see. Like sending an email to another guy who's fiddling with the controls, instead of letting you play with the controls yourself.

My mother has significant health problems, and all too often I only learn that she was hospitalized via facebook. She's also a compulsive facebook gamer, meme poster, and kitten adoption fanatic. I managed to get most of the game posts killed, but it's either put up with her meme and kitten crap or maybe not learn she's in the hospital until it's too late. Also, I can't get the news feed to consistently contain any of my cop buddy's posts when I want to see every one of them. I don't want to see the crap clickbait friends of my friends post - for that matter, if I could lay the axe to news articles in totality, I would do so. I want my news feed sorted chronologically, not by facebooks' special sauce.

In short, I want my friends thoughts, feelings, and activities, not the stuff they're looking at.

Facebook doesn't really care what you want. Facebook just tries to present you with things that push enough of your buttons to get you interact with it. The thing you have to remember about facebook is it's essentially one giant experimentation platform. Everytime you look at something facebook's polling script sends that information back to the server (along with your likes, shares, and comments) and adds it to the profile being kept on you. The algorithm isn't really trying to give you things you want, what it's doing is experimenting with different combinations of posts to see how that specific combination causes you to react. It's basically feeding you mini-narratives and then recording what in that narrative you focus on. By recording enough of this information it allows Facebook to build up a profile of narratives that will cause you to react in predictable ways. Like an instruction set to the behavior that makes you, you. When it's giving you stuff you like it's basically acclimating you to the system, then it can introduce gradual changes to narratives that best allow them to present advertisements and information in the way they want you to interact with it.

I hate that. I hate every bit of it. It makes me want to quit facebook forever, burn the facebook headquarters to the ground and salt the earth, and hunt down Zuckerberg and murder him slowly over a period of weeks. I am your customer, motherfucker, not your product.

...

But in reality, what can you do? Every other service like facebook is founded on the exact same principles, and I'm not going to convince all of my friends and family to pick up and move to a different service. It's either keep fighting the futile fight and handing over personal data to facebook, or lose contact with a lot of people I care about. Lose-lose. And that's just they way facebook wants it.

It's either keep fighting the futile fight and handing over personal data to facebook, or lose contact with a lot of people I care about.

Call me an asshole, but if someone I cared about couldn't be bothered to stay in contact with me through any other means than Facebook, they'd quickly become someone I no longer cared about.

You have to understand: I'm physically a long way from home, so we can't just show up at each other's doorsteps without elaborate plans, and the entire culture of picking up the phone and calling someone is gone. It's the one option that is ubiquitous.

I have been physically 5 thousands miles from "home" for 4 years now and I go facebook-less. Once in a while I feel that I may be missing a part of the life of friends or family because I don't have news from them often. I may have lost total contact with some people since I did not gave them sign of life for years now....

But in another hand, last time there was a great band in town (FNM!!!) and I was looking for someone to go with me, I just texted a former colleague I knew had eclectic music taste because we talked about music a lot. he was super happy to go to the concert with me. there I took and send some pics to a friend of 20+ years and concert buddy back in europe who is a hardcore FNM fan because I knew he would have loved to be at the concert too ... and I would too. I try to email to friends when I think of them or if I found something they would like. I even send regular post cards/letters/parcels when I can. I keep contact using skype/gmail chat too...

basically I hate facebook because it makes you dependent of it on purpose and I resent that. my position has downsides. I know that some SEer's share using facebook and I miss no being a part of this. but I prefer giving 5 bucks a month to make this website live longer than giving my private parts to FB.

I'm with you there. I never signed up to the FB in the first place. Every single person I know did. My closest friends and I still keep in touch just fine. I am happy to not know every single detail of their lives at any given moment.
The people with whom I am less close have faded away - and over the past five or six years I've come to realize there has been no loss there.

Family is another matter, I suppose. I travel more or less constantly for work, so I guess I'm just used to 'not being in touch'.

I know my solution isn't for everyone. And I do worry sometimes that FB has built a vast shadow profile with my name on it that people are interacting with. Seems like something they'd do.

Facebook works for me because with all the mental and physical shit I have going on I often can't do more than exchange a smattering of messages with people. I'm certainly not up to actually meeting people or even talking on the phone.

But I am aware of how shitty it is and I try to be aware of the nonsense and my own responses to it. As much as you can when a huge company throws a fuck ton of resources in to manipulating you.

Difference. Why it's okay for other people to make decisions different from yours based on their own circumstances and preferences.

But he seemed unhappy with his choice ("I hate that. I hate every bit of it."), using it only because of its ubiquity. I was suggesting an even more ubiquitous alternative.

Everybody has email, but not everybody uses it in the same way. I don't want to put words in Uber's mouth, but it sometimes the best solution isn't necessarily the best thing, it's just the best thing that fixes the problem.

I'm not happy with it, no. But it's the platform of choice amongst my friends and family. They've decided the price was worth it, or haven't considered the price at all. And I could pick up and move to another platform, but they won't, so if I do, I'm leaving them behind. It would be one thing entirely if it were a bunch of e-friends I've never met, but it's my mother, my aunt, my sister-in-law, my cop buddy. Forty-eight people I know and love who have chosen the platform for me.

The only one who has chose otherwise is my brother. Who is a texting fiend.

It's that whole 'if you're not the customer, you're the product thing...' This is the part where I push SE subscriptions ;)

But in all seriousness, it's a problem I think about a lot. Especially with Facebook's acquisition of Oculus and the power that VR has to change how people experience the world around them. I've got a few ideas up my sleeve but they require more resources than I've got available to me at the moment. You might be interested in one of the books I advertise on here, Who Owns The Future by Jaron Lanier[no referral on that link ;)]. It's a really intriguing read about what's being done with all that data mined information and how it's shaping the world around and inside of us. He's got some interesting ideas about how to solve it, but they run a bit too libertarian for my personal taste. Still, it's a really good read and he does have a very good grasp of the problems we're currently and going to be facing.

You could have put all of the referrals on that link, I pirated it anyways. Thanks!

(you do know, of course, if I wasn't a dirty poor I'd be throwing money your way.)

There's a pretty good chance I might finally be going back to working full time again, after months of barely scraping by on 15-20 hours a week. As much as I'm looking forward to not having to stress about rent and bills every month and replenishing my alarmingly depleted savings account, the thing I'm most excited about is renewing my SE sub.

I know and I appreciate it. We can be dirt poor together ;)

Nothing wronf with dirt poor.

At least you get to learn to play with dirt for toys and then when you get better resources and get better toys you really appreciate it.

And remember, food comes from dirt. Dirt is practically food!

I was having this discussion with someone about gaming making itself addictive.

Totally! They're very pretty skinner boxes. Those freaking incremental games are like virtual crack.

Hey bro, can I borrow 20 dollars for in game micro purchases? I mean "food". Shit.

Are you a South Park fan?
Freemium Isn't Free - Full Episode - Season 18 - Ep 06

Thanks for getting to the heart of what those snippets were about.

Ive "liked" all of 4 things since my introduction to facebook.

My girlfriend used to get mad at me for not liking her posts, especially posts about important dates such as anniversaries and birthdays. Some friends seem genuinely puzzled when I (supposedly) ignore their posts.

what is really sad is that even after I explain that I don't want customized advertising they look at me funny and cant fathom why I wouldn't want it.

I dunno, facebook scares me sometimes but not half as much as my friends.

Fake internet points are like Beanie Babies. There are people who crave them, though their actual value is next to worthless. To extend the metaphor, you sometimes wind up with a closet full of the things with no idea where they came from and wonder why anyone cares about them.

He didn't use a click-bait title. No one's going to read that