Maybe my age (finished grad school in 2004) but I never created a Facebook account. Seemed like a waste of time and energy. And now? I’d gladly buy an Occulus but nope, need a Facebook account. Seems like a horrid company and where the cigarettes analogy seems apt and I used to smoke Marlboros as a kid. A lot of kids are now addicted to a product that actively harms them, Instaspam especially. Frankly love that FB makes it so hard to read stuff posted. Every time I’m linked to something there and it requires an account, I nope right out. I’ve banned Facebook from my life. Highly recommend not what you’ve lost, but what you’ll find instead.
I don't use Facebook either. Part of the problem is that other people treat it as if everyone is on Facebook.
People will only invite you to events on Facebook. Restaurants will only post updates to Facebook. Businesses have support forums in Facebook groups. Etc.
You do miss out on a portion of the internet by not being on Facebook. But I think that's because people rely too much on it.
Interestingly those born in 2004 don't necessarily have them either - my neighbour was born then and mentioned that their year group don't use FB at all.
I recently recreated a facebook account merely because many companies offer more prompt customer service through that platform. Instead of filling in some broken "contact us" form and wondering if you get a reply it's just one more way to track down customer service for things.
That said, I'm keeping their creepy apps off my phone...
Unpopular opinion: Instagram and Pintrest are absolutely amazing for discovering aesthetics and visual culture. I don't use them for their intended purposes or any social need. Have no followers or I follow no one. Just save images and cultivate what I like.
Same here. I just didn't get why I'd want to broadcast every shit I took, or everything I ate. Low on substance, high on drama.
Fast forward to today, and we now know that Facebook and other social media are encouraging narcissistic behavior, because narcissists are easy to manipulate: They are highly likely to have multiple addictions, they are easy to emotionally provoke, have nearly no ability to moderate there own behavior, and they take any attack on there beliefs as a persona attack, and will hate there attacker forever, becoming flying monkeys.
I highly encourage everyone to watch the documovie: The Social Dilemma.
You can create an account that has none of your personal information. I understand why people don't have an FB account. I don't, and I use an Oculus . But the downside of having an FB account is they plant cookies on your browser or track you in their app.
If you are only using the FB account on your Oculus, its an Oculus account that calls itself an FB account. You need an account for most game devices these days and for Steam. I am not saying its perfect, I am saying that not using an Oculus because you are off FB doesn't make that much sense to me. I do exactly that.
Nobody needs a Facebook account but there is a lot on there to like. Instagram has a tremendous amount of creativity and craft (and a bunch of butt shots), WhatsApp is a low cost way for billions of people to text, Facebook lets me keep updated on old friends and acquaintances. Overall I think I get positive value from it.
It amazes me that on the one hand, people keep getting banned from Facebook for odd inscrutable reasons, while on the other hand, none of the spammers or scammers I've reported ever get banned, no matter how obvious.
Literally yesterday, I was looking through my ignored friend requests and found some random profile that had thousands of 'friends', and all the posts in his timeline were ads for dodgy weight loss and/or boner pills, with hundreds of people tagged in the photos. Dozens of posts a day, every post title full of punctuation-as-text to avoid triggering spam filters. Reported it as a spam account, got a response a few hours later that they had checked the profile, determined it didn't violate their community standards and that it would not be removed.
I guess it's just fascinating that with all that money and power, they've managed to build a moderation system with such a high rate of both false-positives and false-negatives. You'd think they could at least constrain it to being terrible in one direction.
Every time I see an article about the advance of AI, with the vague sci-fi theme of "AI is now so good it is about to replace humans" I think of the many, many stories I've heard like yours, where the FAANG seem unable to build even basic statistical systems, nevermind AI. Some articles suggest AI is on the verge of human sentience, meanwhile, in real life, I constantly encounter stupid algorithms, even from big companies with lots of money. The advertising companies are the worst. I bought a guitar and then, for the next 6 months, every ad I saw on every site was about guitars. How many guitars do they really think I'm going to buy in one year? It's really a once-every-two-or-three-years purchase, it doesn't justify the saturation I was exposed to.
Or elevators. I'm in New York City and everyday I go into some building that has a terrible algorithm for its elevators. I don't need advanced AI, my life would be improved with even minor tweaks to most algorithms for elevators.
On one hand I agree, it is perplexing. But then I realize that profile with a picture of a hot girl with lots of "friends" counts as a user that brings "engagement on the platform" so it's valuable to FB when they're trying to convince shareholders that the platform isn't dying. They're specifically incentivized to ignore those accounts and let them persist.
why would anyone want to constrain it that way? To ban no one or ban everyone would be terrible.
Do the math: 1 million of 2 Billion legit users get banned wrongly. 2.9 Billion of 3 Billion slammers get banned.
That leaves a huge amount of false positive and false negatives while still being almost perfect.
I bought an Oculus headset before it required a Facebook login. I haven't used it since that requirement was added. The metaverse I envisioned comes from William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, not a sanitized and sexless universe where Code of Conducts written by Home Owners Associations are strictly enforced and LinkedIn type interactions are the norm. Bill Gates recently said all business meetings would be on it in three years. I don't like to criticize people personally, but billionaires have so much power I think it's ok: Bill G is not exactly a tech visionary, famously having to rewrite his book "The Road Ahead" because he missed the internet happening. I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg loves it because his personality already seems blank and smoothed over like an avatar. Do I want to live inside a sappy television commercial where Coke teaches the world to sing and everyone smiles and expresses only approved virtuous thoughts? Nope.
Wish you get a lift of the ban. Meanwhile, I can't wait to see another episode of "vip complains online about bigtech ban and an insider helps him out while the rest of the plebs struggle with their permabans"
Classic "honest mistake"™. Followed by people calling for immediate cease of any critique since "they are very sorry and corrected the error".
In all seriousness though: It's time to find some name for this behaviour where the only chance for support or help is being a VIP or making the news headlines somehow.
Maybe it's just me, but I never got the hang of the social network part of GitHub. Sure, I interact with issues related to work and I star repos that I might need later, but I never used the feed or had some discussions on it which are not work related.
This is one of the reasons I don't have any FB (or FB owned) account. You're at their mercy, with all your eggs in their basket you have to hope they don't decide you're not allowed your eggs.
It's not the only reason. Not even at the top on my list for reasons. But if there is going to be a metaverse, Facebook cannot be the gatekeeper, or any other US tech company that randomly and for no given reason permabans you cough Google.
I see a lot of people saying "who cares, it's just a site, so what if you're banned". But I am reading about people losing connections with relatives, friends, business partners, unable to access services and have their lives upended because somebody, somewhere, for some undisclosed reasons, and without any recourse, decided to cancel their account. I suspect it's going beyond "just some site". And we either need a public awareness campaign for people to stop their reliance on such sites so much in their public lives, or find some solution to the immense control that companies like Facebook have on people's life and how abusive this control has become.
People that have platforms with millions of listeners should start using their platforms - not just to make their friend unbanned this one time, but to illuminate the dangers of the dystopian situation we're sleepwalking into. People should know that facebook is unreliable, erratic, capricious platform, where you could get randomly excluded for life without any recourse, and friends shouldn't let friends use facebook, at least not for anything remotely important.
Another thing that irks me as blatantly wrong is that those account bans just cut the people off the network cold turkey. Even criminals don't get such treatment. You don't just "disappear" if you are convicted. But with facebook you just vanish. Nobody tells you "your account will be banned in 7 days, please close up the convos". You can't post "hey, I'm getting off facebook, contact me by email at xxx". There's no autoreply. People you were having dialog with don't know what happened, just assume you blew them off. And also facebook (and google for the same matter) is used by many sites as an identity provider, which has an effect of severing your access to sites that may or may not want that, and likely don't even know. What if you are in the middle of financial transaction, which you can not complete now because account is banned? This is such a clusterfuck
The aptly named Matrix might end up being the perfect OSS Metaverse. It will require people to actually bother to build it though. Identity is going to be key and we should accept no substitute for the federated variety. So, matrix has that and the brand. And conveniently, Facebook has nothing else than a vague idea of what they think they might need to build, which is basically Whatsapp and Instagram but with AR goggles, in their narrow minded heads. Which, is they same as saying that they have no clue whatsoever. That's good news! Whatever, it's going to be, it's not going to be theirs to own in perpetuity.
Matrix is for now one of the few actually federated things (in addition to email) that still has a chance of not failing. As such it's a good basis for people to build a Metaverse on top of. Of course it is going to require people actually showing up and doing that. Email completely destroyed it's competitors by virtue of "you can email everyone instead of just the morons that bought the exact same shit that you bought". Thirty years on, nothing has changed. Whatever it's going to be, Zuck's ffing walled garden ain't it.
Neal Stephenson has been repeatedly answering the question what he thinks about the whole Meta thing as part of his recent book tour for Termination Shock. He'd be the person that coined the whole notion of the Metaverse in Snowcrash in the early 90's.
He does not seem very impressed with this effort by Facebook and nor did Facebook bother to even talk to him about their plans. I think that is probably a tactical mistake by Facebook and it kind of outlines how desperate they are.
Nearly no one in software development, particularly VR, seems to care about the morality of supporting Facebook. Are we too mesmerized by their latest shiny toys, Quest 2, et. al.? Doing a search for anything concerning the ethics of feeding the Meta beast led me to this scant result.
I was unfairly (and unprofessionally) pressured into using fb for a group project chat at uni this year. I tried to create an account about 5 times but was completely unable. Each time I logged in or created an account, I was shown to have ‘violated community standards’ and promptly kicked off. This was on brand-spanking-new accounts. I must have really pissed someone off at fb over the years.
By any chance did you have an initial picture without your face?
Over recent years Facebook has been clamping down with those same sort of messages (sometimes it will appear after a few days or weeks for people I know) and for better or worse the main fix was having a picture with a face on a brand new account.
Older accounts don't have this problem though.
It's a similar tactic to how in recent years twitter lets you sign up without a mobile number but after some time you will suspiciously get your account locked until you "verify" with a mobile number.
I'm banned from Instagram and i can't create new accounts because they banned my phone number. So if i want an instagram account i have to buy another number. No way. I can still live without instagram, but this is the way Facebook inc/Meta do business.
For me Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatApp have to die!
In the early 90s I ran a BBS and was a USENET user and administrator (ISP) for years. The SnR of major social media platforms is so poor now. I find it hard to even explain to the young how much better such forums can be.
This is a decent comparison. Metaverse is going to have most of the same issues with eyestrain, even more motion sickness and bulkier headgear. It might be a fun curiosity for some but it won't gain the mainstream appeal that Facebook has (or at least once had).
You’re wrong on this one, pre-“metaverse” it was just called social vr, and that universe is really something special. The creativity and energy in there is like nothing I’ve ever seen before and it’s very very exciting
This is stupid because if the overall societal goal was to create better behaviour, then a lifetime ban totally removes any possibility of engagement and education, which could result in improvement and rehabilitation.
(I am aware the language here potentially indicates willing participation in some kind of arbitrary totalitarianism, but it's for the point of discussion)
So this is an equivelent of a life sentance, what's next, special towns where only people banned by facebook live? Or maybe execution.
From Facebooks business model perspective, this probably doesn't hurt them while the numbers stay under some smallish magic threshold, but cross that threshhold range and all of sudden they might find they have banned themselves into irrelevance and be just be another MySpace.
Calling facebook "meta" is the ultimate in marketing people their own conceptual understanding of things back to them. Truly FB is trying to ZUCK the internet. This meme takeover is the worst part, speaking as a mostly non-user of FACEBOOK products.
I dreamed of a OS filter that lets you turn "meta" back to "facebook" where appropriate. We can't bring AI to the OS fast enough.
Let's see whether this will remain legal. It seems EU has some laws impacting these cases, according to rumors. There recently was a case of someone who went to court and successfully revoked his lifetime-ban on a certain platform. This was for a business-account and nothing is really public yet regarding the case and laws involved. So I'm not entirely sure whether it was settled outside of court at the end or whether a law forced the judgment. But this case gives me some hope that we do move in the direction where we limit the power of platforms in favor of the customers.
[+] [-] robg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leros|4 years ago|reply
People will only invite you to events on Facebook. Restaurants will only post updates to Facebook. Businesses have support forums in Facebook groups. Etc.
You do miss out on a portion of the internet by not being on Facebook. But I think that's because people rely too much on it.
[+] [-] skylanh|4 years ago|reply
Direct link to the material--I can see it, if I'm trying to find additional material, nope.
The negative patterns are too bold.
[+] [-] tchalla|4 years ago|reply
Facebook says that Oculus won't require a Facebook sign in anymore.
https://www.facebook.com/boz/posts/10114026973983491
[+] [-] exdsq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] B1FF_PSUVM|4 years ago|reply
Me neither. The "dumb fucks trusted me" vibe rubbed me the wrong way right out of the gate.
Wish someone had stopped them grabbing Whatsapp, etc., deleted my account there too.
[+] [-] _huayra_|4 years ago|reply
That said, I'm keeping their creepy apps off my phone...
[+] [-] systemvoltage|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] webdoodle|4 years ago|reply
Fast forward to today, and we now know that Facebook and other social media are encouraging narcissistic behavior, because narcissists are easy to manipulate: They are highly likely to have multiple addictions, they are easy to emotionally provoke, have nearly no ability to moderate there own behavior, and they take any attack on there beliefs as a persona attack, and will hate there attacker forever, becoming flying monkeys.
I highly encourage everyone to watch the documovie: The Social Dilemma.
[+] [-] georgeecollins|4 years ago|reply
If you are only using the FB account on your Oculus, its an Oculus account that calls itself an FB account. You need an account for most game devices these days and for Steam. I am not saying its perfect, I am saying that not using an Oculus because you are off FB doesn't make that much sense to me. I do exactly that.
[+] [-] spoonjim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 29athrowaway|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doopy1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] CommieBobDole|4 years ago|reply
Literally yesterday, I was looking through my ignored friend requests and found some random profile that had thousands of 'friends', and all the posts in his timeline were ads for dodgy weight loss and/or boner pills, with hundreds of people tagged in the photos. Dozens of posts a day, every post title full of punctuation-as-text to avoid triggering spam filters. Reported it as a spam account, got a response a few hours later that they had checked the profile, determined it didn't violate their community standards and that it would not be removed.
I guess it's just fascinating that with all that money and power, they've managed to build a moderation system with such a high rate of both false-positives and false-negatives. You'd think they could at least constrain it to being terrible in one direction.
[+] [-] lkrubner|4 years ago|reply
Or elevators. I'm in New York City and everyday I go into some building that has a terrible algorithm for its elevators. I don't need advanced AI, my life would be improved with even minor tweaks to most algorithms for elevators.
[+] [-] sockaddr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjpnz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lupire|4 years ago|reply
why would anyone want to constrain it that way? To ban no one or ban everyone would be terrible.
Do the math: 1 million of 2 Billion legit users get banned wrongly. 2.9 Billion of 3 Billion slammers get banned. That leaves a huge amount of false positive and false negatives while still being almost perfect.
[+] [-] rasz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwattsun|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gtsop|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2pEXgD0fZ5cF|4 years ago|reply
In all seriousness though: It's time to find some name for this behaviour where the only chance for support or help is being a VIP or making the news headlines somehow.
[+] [-] sshine|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sebb767|4 years ago|reply
Maybe it's just me, but I never got the hang of the social network part of GitHub. Sure, I interact with issues related to work and I star repos that I might need later, but I never used the feed or had some discussions on it which are not work related.
[+] [-] benmarks|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] account-5|4 years ago|reply
It's not the only reason. Not even at the top on my list for reasons. But if there is going to be a metaverse, Facebook cannot be the gatekeeper, or any other US tech company that randomly and for no given reason permabans you cough Google.
[+] [-] smsm42|4 years ago|reply
People that have platforms with millions of listeners should start using their platforms - not just to make their friend unbanned this one time, but to illuminate the dangers of the dystopian situation we're sleepwalking into. People should know that facebook is unreliable, erratic, capricious platform, where you could get randomly excluded for life without any recourse, and friends shouldn't let friends use facebook, at least not for anything remotely important.
[+] [-] kova12|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrevorFSmith|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|4 years ago|reply
Matrix is for now one of the few actually federated things (in addition to email) that still has a chance of not failing. As such it's a good basis for people to build a Metaverse on top of. Of course it is going to require people actually showing up and doing that. Email completely destroyed it's competitors by virtue of "you can email everyone instead of just the morons that bought the exact same shit that you bought". Thirty years on, nothing has changed. Whatever it's going to be, Zuck's ffing walled garden ain't it.
Neal Stephenson has been repeatedly answering the question what he thinks about the whole Meta thing as part of his recent book tour for Termination Shock. He'd be the person that coined the whole notion of the Metaverse in Snowcrash in the early 90's.
He does not seem very impressed with this effort by Facebook and nor did Facebook bother to even talk to him about their plans. I think that is probably a tactical mistake by Facebook and it kind of outlines how desperate they are.
[+] [-] anonimamente|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeman1000|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InGoodFaith|4 years ago|reply
Over recent years Facebook has been clamping down with those same sort of messages (sometimes it will appear after a few days or weeks for people I know) and for better or worse the main fix was having a picture with a face on a brand new account.
Older accounts don't have this problem though.
It's a similar tactic to how in recent years twitter lets you sign up without a mobile number but after some time you will suspiciously get your account locked until you "verify" with a mobile number.
[+] [-] albybisy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickdothutton|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sys_64738|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] j_m_b|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjpnz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haxiomic|4 years ago|reply
Not the vision you’ll get from Meta however
[+] [-] airbreather|4 years ago|reply
(I am aware the language here potentially indicates willing participation in some kind of arbitrary totalitarianism, but it's for the point of discussion)
So this is an equivelent of a life sentance, what's next, special towns where only people banned by facebook live? Or maybe execution.
From Facebooks business model perspective, this probably doesn't hurt them while the numbers stay under some smallish magic threshold, but cross that threshhold range and all of sudden they might find they have banned themselves into irrelevance and be just be another MySpace.
[+] [-] lil_dispaches|4 years ago|reply
I dreamed of a OS filter that lets you turn "meta" back to "facebook" where appropriate. We can't bring AI to the OS fast enough.
[+] [-] comeonseriously|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] champagnois|4 years ago|reply
Block and filter anything related to their platforms.
[+] [-] amelius|4 years ago|reply
There should be a "no-tether" law.
[+] [-] Yaa101|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slightwinder|4 years ago|reply