It's a long time since I used Facebook on a regular basis, but Instagram is a weak spot where I have had to set the phone to give me just 10 minutes per day, then shut it off. Now I can go days without opening the app, and I usually manage to exit before the time is up.
I can highly recommend the book "Carless People" by Sarah Wynn-Williams if you want to know just how bad it really is/was. Just remember that this is just one side of the story. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg (no longer at Meta) probably have a different story.
> Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg (no longer at Meta) probably have a different story.
Safe to assume anything Zuckberg says in relation to his actions being positive are either an outright lie or so inflated by his arrogance, greed and ego that it's completely unreliable information (still a lie)
Zuck has his pipes and wires hooked up to a bullshit image management unit. I'm surprised there's not some mini operator inside him punching in FWD 10, LEFT 90, FWD 5.
I finally got around to reading "Careless People" by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Not surprised at all by this headline. I quit Facebook and Instagram several years ago but was motivated to finally quit WhatsApp after reading that book. Can't support this morally-bankrupt company.
By the way, the thing that fucking amazes me about that book is not only do you hear things about "Meta is suing her to stop her talking about the book" (fuck that. Break Meta up. Zuckerberg for prison) but the financial penalty for SWW would apparently be 11 million dollars, something like that
I only use facebook in like once a month and have 50 friends there from school time.
But every-time I log-in, the facebook feed recommends me the most outrageous and triggering posts from total strangers, I don't follow them or my friends don't follow them either.
But facebook is like, you know what, I think you should read this scummy post.
Yeah, they transitioned from a social network to a engagement black hole a while ago. There is a "Feeds" page buried in there somewhere but it's far from default.
Twitter might be full of politically dubious [1] and worse-than-Temu/Wish/etc sponsored posts, but at least it can still default to the "You follow" screen.
It really is a shame. Past the obvious privacy issues, having somewhere you could engage with your people online was genuinely nice. I miss early Facebook.
This is the reason I quit the habit of scrolling through facebook and keep it logged off with no password autofill to add traction. And I know I'm not the only one.
Could it be an algorithm optimizing some badly designed metrics, like "the engagement of active users"? Where making an user inactive also makes the line go up.
On the other hand my mother claims she doesn't get any ragebait.
That is my experience too. I am constantly being recommended ragebait, which is designed to take me into some form of extremism or another. The one small mercy is that most of it is so unsubtle I see it for what it is.
The other stuff it recommends from strangers tends to be moronic, or tries to be emotionally manipulative in some way.
Stanford used to have a "persuasion technology" ("Facebook") class for deliberately maximizing trustworthiness and manipulating users. Interaction and style design are like nonverbal behavior: it's never "apolitical" or "unbiased", unavoidably omnipresent, and has real-world consequences, especially at scale.
I can highly recommend the book "Carless People" by Sarah Wynn-Williams if you want to know just how bad it really is/was. Just remember that this is just one side of the story. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg (no longer at Meta) probably have a different story.