UKC

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60238565.amp

Interesting. Social media seems to be successful off the back of kids initially. Facebook started with younger people, now they are older and have less time on their hands as life takes over.

I used to be on FB, never a massive user, but still enough to have adverts and suggestions start to feel targeted - my account is deleted. Brexit, COVID,  political interference, mistrust, the scandals around damage to mental health and the general quality of people on there have forced me away. Most of my close friends and acquaintances no longer subscribe, apart from those of an attention seeking persuasion, who are those I'd probably largely avoid in real life anyway.

Is this the tipping point for Zuck and FB? What was once a great tool for connecting has become a political tool, an antivaxx tool, an advertising tool, a sinister tool used by foreign nasties.

Can Zuck pull this back or will newer, less toxic competitors take his growth? Will they too become tools for the nefarious? Is this a natural cycle?

Or should we all put our devices down, break the habit of having a fixed 45degree head angle and get out more?

Don't forget "facebook" or Meta as it's now called includes Whatsapp/instagram/messenger and quite a few other brands. not just the old Facebook platform.

The oculus and associated VR stuff is his primary plan for facebooks future.

Tik Tok accounts for the shift

One can but hope.

And, of course, stop feeding the devil.

Perhaps an efflux of morons to "Telegram".

I wonder if the investment pitch for Telegram went along the lines of "So, you know how the user experience of Twitter sucks and they sort of pretend to care about clamping down on dangerous misinformation?  Well they're a spectacular success. We're going to beat them - we'll crank it up a notch by making the user experience way, way worse and not even pretending to care about misinformation".  

$1 Bn funding round, Ka-ching!

A billion dollars for Telegram.  

Aren't you forced to use it by your running club ?

The age of surveillance capitalism by Shoshaana Zuboff might give you an answer.

Facebook might decline as a platform, but personally I highly doubt it. ZB will regardless continue to maintain his position as one of the worlds largest data miners. We’re still only at the beginning of the digital age. 

You're all using it wrong, I have a handful of close friends and family on it and every few months I have to click on a few adverts to say irrelevant and never show me anything from this company/brand again.

The only fly in the ointment is one of my colleagues does big data work and research and honestly Alexa and Siri don't need to listen in, a couple of bits of information about you and they can predict which socks you'll put on in the morning and which foot you'll pull on first.

Cheers

Toby

Facebook is great*. Use it rather than let it use you; use it for what you want and ignore the rest.

*Apart, obviously, from the fact that it randomises the order of uploaded photos!

My club uses WhatsApp (I realise this is part of Meta) much more than Facebook. You can certainly be up to date with what is going on without Facebook, much less so if not in the main WhatsApp group.

No. They have other ways, thankfully.

Never on FB, Signal instead of WA. Not one cent to Zuck and his metarseholes if it can be avoided!

CB

This has become a very common use of Whatsapp but I find it a great irritant - a thread-structured Facebook group is much better to use for non-time-critical communications.  A WA group is either invasive, or if you mute it and come back to it it is hard to get abreast of lengthy conversations and what's important amid a load of banter.

A WA group is handy if you're on a trip with people, but not for a long term thing.

We use our website for non-time-critical communication. We use WhatsApp for time-critical communication and directing people to important importation on the website. We discourage “banter” on the main club WhatsApp group. Works fine for us.

That sounds like a workable way to do it, particularly if the website contains any sort of forum.

It is handy to have something where you can talk about non-time-critical stuff, though, e.g. in your running club example "who fancies doing race X?" - and for that sort of thing the way FB groups work (or indeed Web forums like this one) are ideal.  If your club is small and close-knit then I guess you'd just chat at a run, but at larger clubs (e.g. the massive MK Redway Runners) that isn't really going to work as well.

WA is certainly more use for "tonight's run is cancelled" or "change of venue" as you say.  In essence it's just a slightly different (in architecture) version of Facebook Messenger, which is similarly only really useful for "here and now" type conversation.

Facebooks best days are behind it, like you say young people are using different platforms and us oldies are moving away because its boring and full of shite.

I closed my account 5 or 6 years ago, it's open again now because I need an account to use my vr headset but other than a quick look when I re activated it I haven't been on there for over a year and as soon as they come through with the promise of seperating FB and the VR it will be closed again. 

I abandoned (but didn't delete) my Facebook account years ago. When I got the Quest I didn't resurrect the old account but created a new one specifically for the VR. So the only data they have of mine that they can link to the VR is my credit card number.

My climbing club uses email. It does everything we need, threaded conversations and time sensitive if you need it. I use a few WhatsApp groups and they work well for a group trip but are annoying long term. We have a club Facebook page that only one of the active members ever looks at or posts on.

I thought about doing that but I figured they already have my data from FB. 

Same. We have a main 'annoucement' group that only admins can post to which has all the important stuff, and then certain posts have an invite to the next training session, race, group run etc which is a temporary group you join if it's of interest (and anyone can post to) and it dies after the event. 

Works much better for me as I've refused to have the Facebook app on my phone for a few years and I barely use the website at all aside from checking work stuff occasionally. 

We have a buy/sell group too, as well as an alert for asking/reporting where the Patou/wolf protection dogs happen to be which are quite quite useful and work much better than having to check a website in my opinion. 

Nowt wrong with FB as far as I'm (and our club) are concerned.

I don't understand why people slag it off, for making them look at their phone all the time, don't you have control over what you do.

We use it to let members know when we're doing ad hoc stuff, and who's going where and when, seems to work great for us.

We used to use email, but most people can't be arsed with that any more.

Facebook is whatever you want it to be, think of it as a mirror.

Sure, if you just use it for organising your MC, sports clubs or whatever, it does the job.

But by using it, you're supporting all the damage it does to society that is plainly visible once you venture into any news or political content.

I'm quite sure I wouldn't have had anti-vax 'newspapers' through my door if not for Facebook corrupting people's minds.

I don't think my use of it is going to stop half-witted idiots having strange idea that go against science, but they've been doing that before FB was a thing.

Besides that, I don't like to exist in a bubble of my own thinking, annoying as it is, it good to know what other people are thinking, and just how bat-shit-crazy some people are.

Without FB don't you simply think these dickheads will go elsewhere? It's not like they're going to disappear? Remember Elvis isn't dead, he's just waiting to come back at a the right time.

MeWe  or Parler take your pick.

Vulnerable people sitting at home didn't use to get exposed to this dangerous nonsense. It's frightening how many people have zero regard for evidence and rational thinking that is immediately apparent if you ever venture into the bat**** insane world of politics/misinformation on Facebook. It's an absolute cesspit. The platform exists primarily as a way for people to monetise lies these days.

I have ditched Facebook in the past but reluctantly made a bare bones new profile as several clubs I'm a part of use it heavily.

You seem to think that Facebook is just a passive notice board or a forum environment like UKC. The bit you aren’t accounting for, and which causes a lot of the damage, is the billions they’ve spent on refining their ability to manipulate people’s opinions and behaviour for their own benefit. 

E.g. anger and hate is a strong motivator for online engagement, so their business model has evolved to stoke, generate, amplify hate in order to make money, regardless of the corrosive effect this has on society. The problem isn’t the presence or absence of “dickheads”, it’s facebook’s role in knowingly cultivating extremism, division and hate because it generates more clicks. Facebook isn’t just giving a platform to extreme views, it takes an active role in creating them. 

I don't remember seeing any anger or hate on my FB feed. Maybe I need to get out of my social bubble echo chamber. The closest I get is seeing open comments on things like government and NGO covid information 'adverts'.

I do see huge amounts of hate on the open comments sections of just about every other platform, such as YouTube, newspapers, radio, TV. On the rare occasion that I foolishly enter that swamp.

Thankfully, FB seems to insulate me from that pit of hell.

I'm not arguing that FB doesn't use divisive stuff to promote views. Just that it doesn't seem to be any worse than, say, the Daily Heil. A lot better, IME.

"Up yours Delores".  I'm pretty sure vulnerable people have always been exposed to shite.

Sure, if you don’t fit the profile of someone who will be vulnerable to disappearing down extremist rabbit holes then it won’t show you that content. They would lose your business if they did. However, those who are looking at stuff on the fringes of that sort of content are fed gradually more and more extreme content. 

I suppose another way of framing it is to take your observation that Facebook insulates you from things you don’t want to hear. It does that for everyone else too; which includes actively insulating people with really problematic views from anything that would challenge them and showing them more and more content that helps fuel their beliefs. 

Overall, a business model that knowingly amplifies extreme views wherever it can remains corrosive to society. It does this in far more sophisticated (and less transparent) ways than the Daily Mail does, in no small part because it is selective in who is directed to what content. 

Oh they have, but there's never been such an incredibly effective and wide-reaching platform so ruthlessly efficient at exploiting people's weaknesses.....and it's all available for anyone with a few quid to do with as they please.....

I refuse to touch any of the ZuckSpyPoducts.  Quite amusing for me and my niece.  She can ring, text, or email me. I also block Facebook domains in my browsers since FB is embedded in millions of websites, and the buttons are not just passive share buttons. She likes WhatsApp,  and despite Signal being far better (which I’m on) she won’t download the app to use it. 

The one big social media  platform I am one is YouTube  as I upload  videos now and again.

The right to privacy is on the rise.  But those annoying cookie pop ups needs to go. The default needs to be just essential cookies.

All this has been happening for years though, e.g. Dailly Mail, at least FB allows me to see what other people are thinking, so I'm not stuck in my own world bubble.

Twitter is a much more vile place to visit.

I find a few things odd about Twitter.

It has become acceptable there to swear heavily when making rational arguments, which to me detracts from them.  Additionally, people are increasingly acting in "bubbles" by blocking* anyone who disagrees with them and restricting replies, so you don't really get any quality of debate.

So in essence it's just a sounding board.

I occasionally dabble but mostly just use it for contacting companies for customer service where it works fairly well.  Most notably it's the only way to get a quick reply out of a train company over anything.

* Blocking on social media is necessary in cases of e.g. harrassment, but blocking people because you disagree with them is just bizarre.

Dear lord. Sarcasm or for real?

Facebook's algorithms create echo chambers and show you things that confirm or amplify your existing beliefs. If you actually think that Facebook is the place to go to learn about other people's viewpoints then they've got you hook, line and sinker. This is exactly why platforms like Facebook were used so effectively to influence things like the Brexit vote - despite the scandals, whistleblowers, news reports, government inquiries that all say otherwise, people still believe social media is giving them a clear, unfiltered and rounded view of the world.

That you don't think Facebook is home to as much vile content as Twitter demonstrates how good they are are at segregating viewpoints and insulating them from challenge - it's definitely there by the bucketload. 

Maybe my echo chamber is bigger than yours then! I get all sorts of shite suggested, though rarely click on any of it.

You'd be an idiot to rely on FB or any social media to think that's the go to place for news, though.

Ha ha, I'm specifically singled out to get posts where there's a good proportion of reasoned arguments, or at least excuses for a persons view point, rather than "you're a w*nker", "all these people should be dead" type nackers.

FB, for me at least, gets me other people opinions rater than their out and out resistance.

But there again, I'm probably indoctrinated. ha ha

Cheers,

Blissfully Unaware.

I think the recent changes to FB groups are alienating a lot of people - anyone can join public groups without admin consent, and thus the number of spam/scam posts has multiplied exponentially.

What on Earth are you on about?

What I mostly get on fb is people sharing photos of their trips and other stuff they get up to (which is what I was persuaded to join it for). As a bonus I stay in touch with people I might otherwise lose touch with and have got back in touch with people I had lost touch with and made contact with some  interesting new people. I get some sponsored posts, most of which I scroll past, but some are good and if I click on them I get more (which is good). So it is all good really. I very rarely discuss anything much (that is what UKC is for). So I don't know where all this hate is and I'm not going to go looking for it🙂.

One of the most respectable social media sites has been LinkedIn, which is used seriously by professionals and recruiters. But even that is now getting invaded by fake news, conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers, etc, etc. Most disappointing.

I'm on about, being my own person, I'm aware of what FB tries to do, similarly all advertising, I'm self aware enough to steer my own way through that. I don't think I'm alone in that. I don't see and advert, or an "in my bubble post" and not recognise it for what it is.

I take it you actually read my post, I don't think it's that hard to understand. Maybe that's the problem!

Much of the hate from me, apart from the bullying tactics used by Zuckerberg right from the start to crush competition rather than outperform it - and therefore end up with an inferior product, is the scandalous way it continues to be used to achieve financial and market dominance at the clear expense of democracy and functional harmony in society. I'm sure there are plenty of people (such as yourself, and I'd say me too) who believe they are able to stay distant from negative influence. But the level of damage from misinformation we've seen on that platform clearly shows that very many people (possible including us) are not as good as they think at sorting truth from fiction and ignoring malign influence. Any company that is happy for such a situation to exist - and in this case to continually encourage it by strenuously and legally trying to quash any attempt at reasonable regulation - should be deserving of a boycott by any intelligent folks who care about a functioning society.

Exactly this. It's like an occasional middle class cocaine user who has a snort once in a month from his friendly local dealer trying to justify this because nobody gets hurt between consenting adults. What this civilised exchange hides is that it helps to fuel (and tacitly supports) a mega industry which entraps our kids, encourages undesirable behaviour, creates countless addicts, turns people to depression, anxiety and suicide, destroys lives, corrupts governments, turns people to murder, theatens society and democracy. I could go on. 

All of this is can be said of Facebook. Look at those descriptions above and tell me which doesnt apply and think, in the cold light of day, whether things have gone too far.

I see. Your original comments appeared to be arguing that Facebook hasn’t had any negative influence on society. That was the point I was debating, not the immediate impact on you as one specific individual.

If your stance is essentially that you don’t care about any wider societal impact of the platform, as long as it benefits you in the short term, that’s fine. I’m not going to be able to convince you otherwise. But I credit you with being capable of looking beyond your own experiences and acknowledging that the rise of social media has brought more than a few problems with it. And it’s hardly a state secret by now that Facebook (and others) have been well aware of these problems for a long time and knowingly put profit above ethics, social cohesion, and peoples safety and well being. The cocaine analogy above frames it pretty well. 

I did. The paragraph about being specifically singled out for stuff was gibberish. 

Maybe, but Facebook's strength is that it is a near monopoly. If the people I know were scattered over several online places, the links (the social network in fact) would be lost and the system wouldn't work. Social media needs universality to function as it is supposed to, so I think it is natural that it should gravitate towards one and then be very hard to break. A microcosm of this was when some of my acquaintances were pressuring for a switch from Whatsapp to Signal; it just didn't get off the ground and newly formed groups soon floundered.

It is a similar situation with Amazon its enormous strength is its near monopoly which makes the online shopping so wonderfully convenient and efficient and the trauma of non-online shopping rarely necessary.

Of course I do recognise the evils of both Facebook and Amazon and am currently living with the associated guilt along with their huge benefits.

I think that in an ideal world, both social media and online shopping would be nationalised and run by the state at taxpayers' expense in an entirely benign way.

In an ideal world, social media communication would follow the model set by email many years ago (before the days of communication monopolies), in that a protocol for information exchange is agreed and adhered to by a range of companies, allowing people to choose their preferred interface through which such comms are sent and received. The analogy with web browsers is very strong too; no monopoly and therefore no way for a single company to exploit any kind of exclusive hold on people's browser choice. I don't see government control as being in any way necessary, except most likely to maintain and evolve the shared protocol model.
I also don't se why, in principle at least, a similar approach could not be taken to online shopping, though it surely would be more complicated.

Surely this is capitalism writ large, it's what happens in a capitalistic society. I'm not fan of The Zucker, but isn't he living the American dream, and aren't most people wishing they could do the same?

"Anybody can be a millionaire. So everybody's gotta try"

We're reaping what we sow.

ha ha sounds like you're a commie.

It is precisely that, yes. And we all know that whatever benefits capitalism may bring, it runs into serious trouble when effective regulation is not in place to maintain a level playing field and genuine competition.

I suppose I look on social media and online shopping like other universal utilities. Ought to work best nationalised.

Like water, electricity, gas and trains?

But this never happens, there's never genuine competition because even if there are two or three companies, they all know what the other is likely to charge / be able to get away with, it's a fallacy.

We get smaller and smaller choices and poorer and poorer services.

The (mostly) documentary "The Social Dilemma" highlights many of the issues discussed here.  Interviews with many techies and executives from FB, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Worth watching, and certainly scarier than the latest in the "Halloween" franchise.

Exactly.

Ah, you mean 'Facebook for tw*ts'? "Look at me, aren't I amazing? I reduced costs by xx and drove adoption of yy, improving profitability by zz. I'm not going to mention how things went to pot 2 years after I left as the long-term consequences of my actions seriously harmed the business"

Totally, I have to use LinkedIn for work, its unavoidable unfortunately but it is fast becoming a cesspit. The second someone posts a personal post, a self congratulatory post, mentions 'rocket ship' or starts a sentence with 'I wouldn't normally post this here but' get's a permanent mute.