Face Book and similar

About 10 years ago, I was on Facebook, for about a month. First I was getting creeped out by some of the weirdos wanting to’ friend’ me, who became offensive when I refused.

It was around this time that I considered one of my own maxims; “When you find a terrific free app, chances are you are not the customer, but the product”. I thought about that for a bit, and also looked at the kinds of things people posted on Facebook; then it dawned on me; Facebook is a sophisticated data mining device. I decided it was not sufficiently trustworthy to have any information about me .

Much later, I not only found out I was right, but that Mark Zuckerberg seems to be an odious little toe rag, with the moral values of a newt.

I’ve started this thread because it has occurred to me that my opinion may simply be that of an out-of-touch baby boomer. Be very interested in the views of some younger members.

Facebook is primarily used by older people now as there is plenty more relevant social media for the young. It does mine your data but so does almost everything else online.

I had an account years ago to keep in touch with some military buddies but its been several years since I’ve used it. In my 30-something opinion social media is not too bad in itself as long as a person has a real life outside of it, however a lot of younger millennials seem to have grown up with it and were never really socialized right. They are basically addicted to the screen and dysfunctional at normal human relationships.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez recently said social media has an unhealthy effect on the public and it’s hard to disagree.

I am an older person, a boomer, but I have enuf healthy paranoia to have avoided ever joining Facebook. Instagram, among others, I would also suggest avoiding.

I love anything that AOC says, even when she is naively mistaken, but in this case she is not.

But I believe that ppl unwittingly selling their personal info to entities on the internet has nefarious possibilities that go way beyond wasting their time and health sitting in front of screens.

 

Like giving the Russians and others the key to the back door.

Babyboomer here too. I’ve tried Facebook and considering the blogging I do, people tell me I should use it and that makes sense, But . . .

but besides the creep factor, data mining, the entire format never made much sense to me. Seems like a stream of random consciousness scene - sharing your running thoughts with no goal in mind. Or something like that.

Seems like a stream of random consciousness scene – sharing your running thoughts with no goal in mind
I'd say it's more party conversation. You say a few words, see a friend, go talk to them, come back, get pulled away, get a drink, talk to someone you never met, on and on.

A forum like this is designed with more of a growing dialog in mind, although it can quickly degrade, but you can scroll back, quote someone, refer to a reference, and generally work to a goal.

For computer questions, I like the stackoverflow format. Questions and answers are voted on and there are sub-comment for each. The highest voted answer comes to the top, so I quickly see what the group concluded. There’s less back and forth discussion, but I don’t want that in this case, I want the answer.

Twitter and Instagram are just weird.