As a digital nomad for the past several months, Facebook has been crucial in keeping in touch with friends and family back home, but also a perfect platform for staying in contact with new friends I make on my travels :-)
I am an immigrant. I've been living mostly away from home for 10 years. I have people (friends, relatives, family, people that I know and love) that are easily reachable on Facebook. I deleted my facebook account and realized that I can still reach all the people I want to reach if I had really wanted to. Stuff that is "on Facebook" seems optional to me. When the only way I know them is their Facebook profile then I'm fucked. Now I learned to ask people for their email addresses, I personally think it will live far longer than Facebook.
Sorry, I can no longer edit my comment, so I am adding another comment here. I'm in no way criticizing your way of communication. I think Facebook is an excellent communication tool.
However, to me, there is something special about emails that makes them a much personal way to communicate. When I send an email to a friend, I feel like I made a personal connection. I feel I like the person a lot more when I write an email to them and get an email back. When I commented on/liked a facebook status, it just feels like it's some shit I have to do when I am bored. Since I deleted my facebook, it turns out that there are very few friends/acquaintances that I added on Facebook that I feel like I need to connect on a personal level. That's very strange.
I'm a few months into the no-facebook game and it certainly is strange to realize how vacant most of our interactions on the platform were.
In some ways it feels like I've never been this lonely before. It makes me realize just how superficial most of my connections really were. I moved around a lot and had a sizable group of friends I would interact with on facebook, but now that it's gone... only three of them still make the effort to text or call me at least once a week to catch up. Sure, I have more friends who are simply indisposed and busy, but because they have social media they don't seek much interaction outside of it and so we don't talk.
It honestly hurts and the last two nights I've actually broken into long crying fits over how lonely I feel, because I feel like I don't connect with anyone, even the people I do talk to. I know facebook wasn't providing that level of connection I desired, but I realized it had tricked me into thinking it did. I realized that in the past, when I felt this kind of loneliness-induced depression creeping up, I would get on social media just to look at other human beings and remind me I'm not on a rock by myself and other people are dealing with the same emotions. Decent short-term solution for getting rid of the symptoms, but it did nothing to address the problem itself.
Incentivised social media like Facebook is really not healthy for the developing psyche. It's shaped the way I think and feel, and what triggers my brain's reward systems, and now I'm suffering for it.
I'll list two because I've been on HN too long today already.
1) Facebook is part of an initiative to lay down internet infrastructure in Africa, with the catch being that access to Facebook, Google, et al. is heavily subsidized. They are attempting to trap an entire continent on their platform, with subsidized tax money, knowingly simultaneously creating the most advanced social monitoring tool ever to exist. The CIA already has "social unrest" prediction mechanisms and, regardless of what some people involved think they're doing it for, this tool will be used to enslave the continent, continue preventing its people from achieving economic parity with the West, and provide better data for three-letter agencies to use in their sociopolitical and economic targeting (targeted propaganda, red herring social issues, media blackouts, even full-scale political coups)
2) They have better data than anyone else with respect to gauging addicting user behavior, and instead of taking the Nintendo approach ("Why don't you take a break and play outside?") they actively exploit these behavioral patterns to increase user engagement. 1/4 of the world's population exists on an insulating platform that does not have their interests in mind. They are unwittingly paving Facebook a permanent highway over our social systems. This creates negatively-reinforcing social vacuums and a massive chilling and normalization effect. But even worse than this normalization is the ideological reinforcement and mass hyper-emotional response that tends to result from an network of humans all checking their emotional response against others in a social vacuum. To make things even worse, Facebook capitalizes here as well and exploits users' emotional response mechanisms.
Here's a paper from a few years ago exploring this concept. I wanted to find a more recent article that was quite good but I couldn't locate it with a quick search:
The article I wanted to find mentioned one of the ways Facebook would exploit peoples' emotions to provoke their addictive behavior:
Facebook knows John spends about 10 minutes going through his feed at a time. During work hours, this number is 3 minutes. Right when Facebook thinks John might be about to put his phone away, they will suddenly show him a post from a friend he likes. He might stick around a little longer and comment. He scrolls a little more just because he is used to the behavior, and when Facebook thinks he is about to leave again they show him a post from someone he doesn't like. Bonus points if Facebook has determined the post is positive in nature. This triggers a negative emotional response in John and he scrolls a while longer, looking for a post that will give him another dopamine rush and return his "happiness" to him.
It's disgusting. It's predatory. It's abusive. It's no different than the CIA knowingly spreading crack and fentanyl to control the population and create pockets of crime that call for increased enforcement.
I am really curious about this last technique you mentioned (predicting when the user might be about to put their phone away and intervening at that moment with enticing content). If you remember any clues that might lead to it, or find it again, please post. Thanks!
I still couldn't find it and it really bugs me. If I do, I'll shoot you a PM.
In my search, I did come across this[0] and it concerned me. Seems like Facebook is expanding the ability of its users to enforce the chilling effect by allowing them to report "mentally unhealthy" posts so the users can be targeted for behavioral modification and automatic reporting to mental health agencies, as opposed to say, just messaging their friend directly and saying, "Hey, you OK man? You seem a bit sad."
They are also using ML to do the same thing, automatically. Just further separating us in the name of bringing us together.
GeoHot talked about FB in a few interviews how they used machine learning entirely for the purposes of tricking people into using FB more, which is why he quit working there.
