faetal on 4/2/2016 at 07:36
Quote Posted by BEAR
(I'm 30 btw, not old I guess but a personal best)
That made me chuckle :)
I've been feeling the same about facebook lately. It's essential for me because I live in France so it's the surest way to keep in touch with my friends and family, but lately I feel it just seems to have become an endless loop of memes, buzzfeed articles and old jokes doing their 5,000th round. If it was just people saying their own thoughts, I'd find it a lot easier to trawl though.
demagogue on 4/2/2016 at 08:57
My one rule I tried to make for myself was to at least post original content, but there's not really a place for that.
Doesn't matter. I know I have excellent opinions on all manner of contemporary goings on. What's the value of tossing them into the blender of derivitive 4th-stage human centipede shit (-_-?
Medlar on 4/2/2016 at 09:03
FB users have their own thoughts? Who'd a guessed eh! :cheeky:
Vivian on 4/2/2016 at 11:01
You guys are so backwards. It's modern life. What you are rejecting is modern life. oooh it's so vapid and annoying. Get better friends! Or don't make friends with people who annoy you!
PigLick on 4/2/2016 at 12:48
rejecting modern life sounds pretty good to me. Or you could talk about dinosaurs or some ancient history shit, who cares about that.
faetal on 4/2/2016 at 13:00
It's a facet of modern life, not the whole thing. You don't need to enjoy the top 20 to enjoy modern music.
Vivian on 4/2/2016 at 13:39
Actually I was trying to work this out the other day. What IS the top 20 these days? Who does it?
Also, I'm going to persist with this. Your experience on FB is pretty much entirely due to your friends. If you think it's full of annoying bullshit, is that (as people seem to be trying to imply) down to something inherent in the platform, or is it that you've made friends with a bunch of annoying people who just post bullshit about their child?
NB PigLick I'm mainly doing kneecap function in living animals now, so thrrrrp.
Thirith on 4/2/2016 at 13:46
My own impression is similar to Vivian's, mixed with something along the lines of managing expectations. What sort of a conversation are you expecting? For me, Facebook is often like the kind of conversations I had during coffee breaks at Uni - some silly banter, followed by more detailed conversation about a film or book, mixed in with a couple of dumb jokes and the guy we all know who's always quoting Monty Python or Douglas Adams. It's also fleeting, and I find that transitory nature appealing. There's a lot of noise and not always that much signal, but there isn't much of a cost to just floating along in Facebook discussions and focusing on the bits that I'm interested in. If there are two dozen posts in between that I'm not interested in, no problem.
I also have to say that my experience with FB improved massively once I realised I could unfollow people without unfriending them. If someone's posts constantly annoy me, one click and those posts don't even show up on my screen any more.
faetal on 4/2/2016 at 14:16
My friends are not chosen based on having a 100% overlap with my temperament and interests - that would be dull. I want to have contact with them, which I can't have in real life. I could remove them from facebook, but I don't think that missing their actual updates is worth it to lose the chaff. I'm just saying why facebook annoys me, not why x is wrong with my life.
Like now for example, there's this "friends day" video thing doing the rounds, so that's all I'm seeing. There is no fool proof way to neatly trim my feed without a baby vs bathwater scenario.
I already have most of the people I don't really associate with hidden from my feed. All I'm saying is that I wish the wheat:chaff ratio were better.
(I'm ill as I type this, so may be rambling)
To answer the latter question, I think facebook has a direct needle into that part of the brain which deals with social inclusion and feeling socially relevant by assimilating what is popular. Facebook makes it easy for people to feed their dopamine stock with likes by simply sharing something - it's the effort:likes ratio essentially.
Pyrian on 4/2/2016 at 14:22
Quote Posted by Vivian
Your experience on FB is pretty much entirely due to your friends. If you think it's full of annoying bullshit, is that (as people seem to be trying to imply) down to something inherent in the platform, or is it that you've made friends with a bunch of annoying people who just post bullshit about their child?
Facebook is ultimately an advertising platform. That's where they get their money. I'm just a product packaged up to sell. What does this mean in practice? My friends' actual updates are little more than a necessary evil to Facebook. It means that Facebook is
far more interested in showing me what products or memes they may have liked, shared, or commented on than their original content, and as far as I can tell, there's no way to change this behavior. Why
would there be, after all?
