Jeez I quit Facebook like 6 years ago and never looked back. What’s the real need here? Old buddies you barely know of? Let them go.<p>Just drop FB, it’s not that important, and 70% of people are clearly (by reading all the “I quit Facebook drama posts”) over attached to it.
I dislike Zuckerberg more and more everyday. What a piece of work that guy is, hiding the reality of FB behind his self-righteous mission of connecting the world while selling you to advertisers and fragmenting your attention and happiness potential.
Part of me thinks the the anti-Facebook media sentiment is because Facebook replaced newspapers/magazines as the highly profitable media aggregator. Old media struggles for relevance and lashes out at Facebook, the new winner.<p>Facebook makes fantastic communications tool and gives them away for a whopping $0. I love staying aware of what's going on with my grandparents, old classmates, friends, and family, AND not having to directly pay money for this.<p>I would love to hear other perspectives.<p>EDIT: Downvote away, but my point is that people pick on Facebook for privacy concerns but we all know it's an advertising company (probably the best the world has ever seen). It also operates the best communications tools the world has ever seen and it doesn't get enough credit for that. In 2006, the News Feed was publicly bemoaned because of privacy issues and it's now the core product. Facebook has built great tools over time, even when people didn't initially agree. Not trying to incite anger, just pushing toward a debate.
What if<p>we declared Facebook to be a monopoly and broke it up like we did Ma Bell in the 70s?<p>I dunno. Feels like it's too big, too ubiquitous, and is too much oriented towards encouraging behaviors that are much better for their pockets than for anyone using it.<p>Hell, look at this story: Facebook already has (according to a quick google search, [citation needed]) about 58% of the US' entire adult population, or 3/4 of all adult Americans who use the Internet. (which is about 81%). Their user growth rate is going flat, because they're running out of people <i>willing</i> and <i>able</i> to be online. But they need to keep acquiring new users no matter what, so now they're turning their eyes to the people who they are legally barred from giving accounts to.<p>Gotta find more eyeballs to show ads to.
The article speaks of using powerful algorithms and AI to scour Facebook's dark corners of pedophilia, terrorism, suicide, etc. This led me to a somewhat scary conclusion. Taking the following premises:<p>* Community management, AI, and algorithms in general will eventually be powerful enough to do completely eradicate anything considering double plus ungood by Facebook.<p>* Life on Facebook is a slice of human social life, although admittedly poorly curated.<p>* Sensor and mobile technology will before long be good enough to have a full annotated and indexed high definition 3D recording of every person's existence at all moments.<p>With these taken together, it's not hard to imagine a Facebook that becomes the perfect law enforcer and social control mechanism far beyond anything thought up by Orwell or Demolition Man, definitely leaning more toward the Matrix.
All advertising is (intended to be) mind control. It wants to get you to take an action you weren't previously inclined to take.<p>It follows that any product that's successful at controlling people can sell that control.<p>If you consider the implications of Facebook-as-mass-mind-control, then Russian election-meddling, viral suicides, and all of Facebook's other facets make a lot of sense.<p>It also makes sense that Facebook wants to get better at controlling you by learning more about what motivates you, leveraging social pressure, and taking over more of your attention.<p>(That said, I still enjoy and use Facebook. I'm just worried about how powerful it is.)
Facebook has a big advantage over other ways to keep in contact with your social circles: it's not full of people constantly talking about how they have quit Facebook.
From their point of view why wouldn't they, children become eyeballs, sorry adults with money to spend.<p>I've given up expecting corporations to be nice, I haven't quite given up on expecting them to obey the law, the bits they haven't written themselves anyway.
The advertisement on TV is heavily regulated, I hope we'll get the same thing on the internet before it's too late and a whole generation has lost its attention capacity.<p>Governments have a huge work to do in order to analyze what could be harmful and what is ok, and pass law about it.
As a parent and someone who has always found social media unpalatable, I think this isn't new or specific just to FB. The competition to control your children's mind begins early and never stops when it comes to any institutionalized power mechanism, that's how power is reinforced and retained over generations.<p>This is just another thing you'll need to teach your children about as you do your best to ready them for the world and help them become independent thinkers.
Don't trust facebook.
There are so many reasons to not use it, but this imho is the greatest.<p>Of all the productive and happy people I have known, none use facebook.<p>Of all the miserable and lost people I know, most of them do.
Zuck:<p>> My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age.<p>According to Wikipedia, Zuck has two children. Let's see their public profiles!
NRK (Norways largest media corp) har a great story yesterday about the how the highly addictive snapstreaks feature in Snapchat are controlling teen's lives:<p><a href="https://www.nrk.no/slukt-av-snap-1.13811834" rel="nofollow">https://www.nrk.no/slukt-av-snap-1.13811834</a>
I have to call what they're doing "the open garden" model. They simply want to be as much of the online context of peoples' lives as possible. It's really no different than the closed garden, except that people do more online now and what would have previously gone to LiveJournal and Flickr and any number of separate sites now all goes into FB, raising the switching costs to the level of closed gardens. It can't take more than a year or two of MBA to be able to fall back on this strategy. Beats working for a living.
My question after reading all the comments here is, is there any alternative? or is there really a choice?<p>If I have to build a social networking site, say - FriendBook, what features would you like in it?<p>So is the case with WhatsApp.<p>Privacy, if not now, will be unsustainable part of business model later. Look at Apple Ping[0].<p>[0]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping</a>