Facebook

I don't know whether this should go here or in Just For Fun.

Does anyone here use Facebook? I have scrounged around on it, and haven't been able to find any real use for it. A couple of times, I've located old friends, but found that they had damn little on their pages and hadn't been there for a long time, so that was of no value.

If you are a regular user of the site, what exactly do you do there?

And is there somewhere I can get instructions on how to use the damn site? Much of it seems to make very little sense.

Not a user.

It's too casual, and their security is too casual, and I'm on enough spam lists already. Almost daily I get spam from The Facebook (enjoyed the movie!) saying "Do you know such-and-such," with some name I haven't spoken with in dog's years. I figure if the turd wants to talk to me I'm readily googleable. If not, I have no interest in collecting "friends" just to prove how popular I am (per Zuckerberg in the movie).

My daughter (of course) has used it and posted such gems as "We're going to a movie this afternoon." or "I made spaghetti for dinner." I can live without that level of detail.

There's a lady on my bus who talks (loudly) on her cellphone all the way to work and all the way home. That's annoying for the same reason.

I live on it.
It's how I talk to my kids and it's how I talk to most of what was DU.
You can't see a lot if you aren't friends with someone, so that may explain the lack of stuff on people's pages.
I don't play the games much, and I don't use a lot of the features but it's damn handy for keeping tabs on friends. I speak to people more often than if I had to begin an email on a blank page every time. Or call them. I'm not good one on one and Facebook lets me approach people in a way where I'm not just standing there like Eddie Izzard going "um, I have French loaf."
Kasira's dog, Clancy's burlesque and naked reading, Owl's beer recommendations, Fiona's quirkiness, Tom's photography, Lisa's there a decent bit, Markaba's latest bit of art or blog post.... Actually, he's coming along quite well. His writing is amazing.

Everybody is over there and you get a much rounder picture of those you care about than we did on DU. I don't think the two sites are interchangeable but if I had known then what I know now I'd have pushed for Martin to do the DU page sooner and keep it more active.

Security isn't bad. Maybe I just have a lower bar for that expectation, but to me it looks like you can set everything and choose who sees what.

As for tutorials, try: http://personalweb.about.com/od/howtofacebook/ss/Learn-Facebook-tutorial.htm#step-heading
Basically, you have your page (timeline) which is your profile and then you have your feed, which is updates on all the stuff you "friend" or "follow". It can be as silly as People of WalMart or it can be news like Salon or The Atlantic. You friend people you know, it's a good idea to drop a note with it if you think they may not recognize the name. You can write on their wall publicly or you can message them privately. Or, if you like, you can play games like Scrabble with them. It's the kind of thing you have to poke around and see where everything is.

Ho-hum, another disclosure of Facebook insecurity.

Really, I don't know why anybody acts surprised.  It was abundantly evident from the outset that social media is just signing yourself up for spam.  That's just common sense.  It's their business model.

Quote :

When you get a free service, you're not the customer, you're the product.

I still have my dead sister's account, for those rare occasions I need to look at FB, and it's secure by the facts that she doesn't have an active e-mail account anymore or any viable bank accounts after seven years of being dead.

Frances Haugen is testifying before Congress this morning, and (SHOCK!) Facebook prioritizes growth and number of views (and thus income) over everything else, including harm to children, promotion of fascist ideology, promotion of health disinformation, etc.  They are the ultimate test of the First Amendment, since nonsensical rants get a platform and can become self-sustaining.

I don't know what the solution is.

You can't really regulate speech, not with any neutral authority.  You can't hold companies like FB financially responsible for the damage their platforms cause.  You can't limit access to social media because that genie is out of the bottle and, as Jenni said, it has its uses. Disclaimers and time limiters wouldn't have the desired effect.

One partial(?) solution I heard was to limit the number of re-tweets/shares a post can get.  If people had to actually type instead of just hitting a button, it would limit the virological spread of bad ideas, especially among the illiterate (where many of them roost).

I just don't know.  You want to think people would use their common sense but it's pretty well established by now that with generational terrible schools, rampant misinformation (all opinions, beliefs and "facts" deserve equal respect), public credulity and a ton of Russian counter-espionage money poured into deliberate disinformation campaigns the reservoir of common sense in this country done just about dried up.

I also blame TV and movies for promoting formerly-fringe beliefs as mainstream: ghosts, goblins, witches, superheroes, aliens, vast international conspiracies, hidden messages, superhuman feats, black-and-white divisions between good-and-evil, promotion of wildly selfish lifestyles, misogyny, white supremacy, white victimhood, etc. it's no wonder the public is primed to deny logic and reason.

Congress taking it upon themselves how to address these problems is pretty laughable.  Hard to imagine a worse arbiter.