During the time Facebook (and related properties) have been unavailable, I can't help but feel a little better about the world. There is so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angry, and harmful messaging on FB platforms. It's nice to know all of that crap is just....gone. At least for a little while.
It's interesting how Facebook experiences differ. To me it's a peaceful place showing mundane updates from friends and family, with zero politics. Plus, a bunch of niche hobby groups I subscribed, full of very kind and constructive people.
The actual war zone to me is Twitter, not Facebook.
I'm from the US and have the same experience. Just glancing at my feed it's:
Somebody celebrating getting out of rehab.
Somebody heading to Italy for vacation.
Somebody going in a hot air balloon.
Somebody going to Santa Fe for vacation and asking for things to do.
Somebody said last night was one of the best nights of their life.
Somebody sharing progress updates on their offgrid homestead.
Somebody got a new pizza oven for National pizza month
Somebody going on a train ride.
Somebody telling me that Dune movie tickets go on sale today (cool).
A bunch of posts from a tesla owners group, laser cutter operators group, and sailing groups that I am a part of.
A bunch of posts from buy nothing, and housing groups that I'm a part of.
I see literally nothing related to politics.
However, jumping over to twitter it's:
Something about "the establishment"
A news story about somebody getting shot.
Something about counterterrorism strategies.
North Korean FUD
Something about a gunfight and a DEA agent being killed.
etc. etc.
Facebook seems to me to be a place where people come together and talk to each other about happy things happening in their lives (or sometimes, looking for support when sad things happen).
Twitter seems like a place people go to get angry and scream at each other.
I quit FB for a bit over a year then came back because I missed connecting with people. I was quickly shocked by what I was actually 'missing'. The thing that jumped out at me was a former elementary/high school classmate who was literally arguing for vehicular manslaughter (murder?) -- that protesters should be run over at high-speeds for blocking the freeway[0].
Now, that's one post from one person. Yes, it's an outlier, but there was a ton of truly corrosive shit people were posting. I quickly found that for me, getting out of FB altogether was the best option. I deleted my account a while back and I don't miss it.
I get that people can actively curate their feed and use FB as a tool for communication, but for me, that's far too much effort and wasn't worth it. I'm actually quite sad -- the promise of what FB could be falls far short of what it is.
The obvious question to me here is why you're "friends" with people like that? One of you sent the friend request in the first place and the other accepted. If/when it turns up you made a mistake with either step it's easy to undo it. As you said it's mostly outliers. Most people don't post/comment at all and the ones who do you can easily regulate (unfriend, or create a custom list (either black- or whitelist) if you need to stay "friends" for whatever reason).
> The obvious question to me here is why you're "friends" with people like that?
I'm sure a lot of people loved others who have had drug addictions, joined a cult, or were fed misinformation by a group of zealots. Sometimes being a friend means "in spite of" not "because of".
As it happens, this individual was the shortest-lived connection I had on the platform. I had gone back on, received and accepted the friend request, and they posted that shortly thereafter, at which point I immediately unfriended them. It wasn't long after that I decided to scrap the whole endeavor.
Same here. I'm not a FB fan but I still use it. I do have a few old friends or acquaintances who post pictures of their families and vacations. It's not the most intellectual content but it's certainly not toxic and it let me stay in touch with people.
Even with your feed I could see someone getting depressed if they couldn't afford vacations in Italy, hot air balloon rides, etc.
Anyway, maybe you're using Facebook correctly, but clearly enough of the world isn't to cause problems. Do you expect all those folks to change, or is it easier to regulate Facebook itself?
I wonder how much this is country-specific. I always see Americans decry the content on Twitter. I'm in Australia and follow mostly Australians. I'm sure there is outrage somewhere, but I don't see much in my feed.
I'm surprised to hear you even have content. That was Facebook for me like 7 years ago. Now it's a ghost town and the only people left are people hitting the share button on low effort posts. I did block almost all of the people who post or share political stuff from one side
Pizza isn't really/doesn't have to be that unhealthy. Fast food takeaway pizza is of course, but 'pizza' is redundant in that.
Pretty much all that makes a homemade or otherwise decent pizza less healthy than a sandwich is the amount of it one typically eats in a sitting. Or of course if you for some reason pile unhealthy stuff high on your pizzas, but stuff your sandwiches with the height of nutrition. But I assume that would be uncommon.
It's just marketing, I don't see what globalisation particularly has to do with it. Capitalism perhaps, but only to the (debatable) extent that it's responsible for marketing.
You don't see what being connected as a whole (world) has to do with creating social calendar dates? Really?
These things are figments of marketing imagination. They spread through people, not TV or ads. Albeit they start that way. You can throw $$$ at making the 1st of September world Tie day, but it's up to the people to make it stick. Which is becoming increasingly easy as we become a whole connected people.
Sales (lower priced periods) are marketing. "National ___ day" is way more than that.
> You don't see what being connected as a whole (world) has to do with creating social calendar dates? Really?
Well firstly I meant economic globalisation, I was thinking in terms of trade; it seems it has broader/other usages too that I didn't realise. Secondly I'd point to days like Mothering Sunday/Mothers' Day which has a slew of different dates throughout the connected world (even the countries where it's a wholly secular marketing creation can't agree):
> These things are figments of marketing imagination.
Did you mean not? Otherwise we're in agreement.
> You can throw $$$ at making the 1st of September world Tie day, but it's up to the people to make it stick.
They don't need to stick, very few do, you hear for the first time about world tie day in late August, maybe get persuaded to buy a wacky new tie, and then forget all about it - or at least when it is - again.
Sure, although it doesn't seem to be doing very well at the targetting. All of the ads seem to revolve around a singular life event that I recently posted about.
I try to avoid reddit.com/r/all and have my subreddits pared down to dogs, mechanical keyboards, tesla stuff, cryptocurrency, sailing, and locally-relevant things (city subs for the places I have homes).
I'd say facebook is: older people sharing stuff about their life. Benign posts about traveling, maybe some light complaining about the neighborhood where they live getting too expensive, complaining about their job or sports or something like that etc.
Twitter is: younger people who are angry at the world and looking for a scapegoat. Everything is "here's why $outgroup is the core of all the problems in the world in 240 characters or less". Absolutely psychologically abusive garbage.
Reddit is like twitter, but more of an impotent rage. Lots of corporate pop culture references, but still with a strong dose of "here's why $outgroup is so bad!"
Looking at some of the parenting subs I'm on, some of the top posts are prompts for people to explain how terrible things in the world are.
Just really really toxic, awful things.
If I had to guess why: facebook is relatively private. The only things I see are either from people choose to follow explicitly, or from a tier-2 follow like a group (which I can filter if the group starts veering into toxicity).
Twitter is explicitly public. You see and interact with everything from everybody. There seems to be a strong ephasis on sharing other things from people I don't follow.
Reddit is the worst. Completely public, I never followed any of these people. Ignoring/blocking individuals would have almost no effect.
100% agreed. And there is nothing funnier than seeing people on "team Twitter" excitedly tweeting about how "nothing of value was lost" without any sense of irony whatsoever.
To me, it's the difference between default private and default public. On both platforms you can curate your content, and arguably the worst content festers on Facebook because it is so hidden from the public eye, but it also means it doesn't have to find its way to you.
Facebook as a company has had much more problematic behavior, I'd agree with that one for sure.
But if there's anything we've learned from the past decade, it's the old axiom "sunlight is the best disinfectant" is completely and utterly wrong.
>Plus, a bunch of niche hobby groups I subscribed, full of very kind and constructive people.
This is the most underrated aspect. With the caveat that you can't choose your family and schoolfriends, you get the facebook you deserve. And you know, maybe you should try a bit harder to understand your family and schoolfriends?
I'm from the U.S. and your experience matches mine. I just have like 1 niece, 1 cousin and a friend or two that I had to unfollow. I'm still friends with them, I just don't see any of the political stuff they post.
I know some people have like 500+ friends or even the max of 5,000. I keep my friend list to the 250 people I know in real life that I want to keep in touch with. Probably still melting my brain but I'm convinced it's nice to keep up with people's lives.
I feel that way about Twitter. Lots of people in my feed complain about the baggage that dominates their feeds. Mine has none.
There is only one person who was bringing baggage (all men are terrible people, here is a never-ending stream of examples of what they do to make me so bitter) so I just muted them. Other than that person, the people who I've chosen to interact with don't bring these negative experiences, and hopefully appreciate that I likewise don't bring it to them.
Someone else in this thread posted a similar observation to some of the people in my Twitter feed. I personally think most people already know you can refuse to follow and can mute those who make for such negative experiences. If you participate in it, of course it's going to feel that way.
I'm in agreement that facebook is partly what you make it and experiences vary. My own experience has been generally positive; However I was a member of a niche interest group that used to be run on an old-school forum at its own domain. Over the years more and more content moved to the facebook group and there was roughly an even split when an accident by the web host lead to the total loss of the forum which could not be restored which meant all users now moved to the facebook group. The quality of material and the standard of discourse is shockingly worse on facebook than it was on the forums to the point where many interactions degrade into mudslinging. There shouldn't be too much difference between the forum/fb groups, but the only explanation I have come up with is that facebook's algorithm selects and displays content to people who would never have seen it on the forum, and some of them feel compelled to comment with either nasty or unhelpful input. On the forum I think the discovery of this content is self-directed and so only those with a genuine interest come across the post and interact with it, most others will just ignore the post title and scroll on, whereas facebook will show them the whole post with images and this makes them more likely to interact when they shouldn't. The other explanation is just that the mudslinging was always on the forum, but I did not come across it because it was not selected for me, but this goes both ways in that perhaps facebook is selecting "high-engagement" posts (with LOTS of argument) to display to me as well, thinking these will be of more interest. Whatever the cause, the difference is stark for this particular online community.
I suspect the original poster was not complaining about these topics showing up on their timeline; they don't want them showing up on anyone's timeline.
It can't show up on their timeline, mainly because they "Never had a Facebook" or "deleted their Facebook a day/month/year ago and it instantly made them better/happier/sexier"
Facebook is like a mirror. If you want to learn about yourself, look at your feed. If you see a bunch of political stuff, then it turns out that you had a weakness for political content. If you see a bunch of kittens, then you were overindexing in how you interacted with that content compared to alternatives.
It's not too different from alcohol. Two different people start drinking a lot of beer in college. One grows out of it, the other becomes an alcoholic. All things being same, the latter person had a more addictive personality and should have been more careful with alcohol.
To extend the alcohol analogy - some people wanted to prohibit it, but ultimately it's still here and it's just heavily regulated. You're not allowed to have it when you're young or when you're driving. Your friends will think poorly of you if you have too much of it too frequently. I wouldn't be surprised if social networks end up in a similar place.
If you are moderately famous, anything will be controversial.
You can say "water is good for you", and I can guarantee you that someone will reply with "actually, my friend drank too much water and died". Then, the drama would ensue.
it's the importance of curating your social media, twitter for me is basically just tech stuff, sometimes I see the edge of war when other tech people are involved, but mostly its all about cool things happening in tech. Facebook I've limited down a bit, I've mostly stopped looking at comments on news articles (really wish there was an option to remove the ability to see comments on some pages) other than that, its pretty good, except when friends engage in war. I'm also subscribed to some atheist groups, and those are super messy at times.
The thing is: if you ever engaged with political posts, facebook will make sure to show you political posts for the rest of your life, and the more likely to upset you, the better.
This. I actually unfriended and blocked all my personal contacts (not because I hate them, I was just removing my personal self from the platform) and then use it only for a bunch of amateur radio related groups which are largely very civil and helpful, good folks. For many, it's an easier-to--use groups.io.
It's the aggregate experience is and its influence on society that is more important than the experience of an individual user.
Twitter may seem like more of a war zone, and that's possible, but you have to actually measure things. I suspect the dark corners of Facebook are darker than Twitter, because Facebook is more siloed.
My experience on Facebook is the same, but I also have the same experience on Twitter. I follow really smart people who are in tech who have interesting things to say. That's all I see on Twitter.
Yep. I wouldn't say that there's no politics on my FB feed. But it's all either liberal or socialist -- because that's the consensus among my friends. And none of it is particularly nasty even when it falls out of that. It just doesn't get controversial.
Also, not from the US. From Canada.
Where I see the nastiness is when politics leaks into various hobby topic groups I'm on. And it's almost always Americans raising a stink (mad about masks, vaccines, "libtards" whatever)
Facebook is very far from perfect, but it brings a lot of good to the world as well. I met my partner of almost five years thanks to Facebook's friend recommendation algorithms. I had never met them outside of Facebook and we didn't have any friends in common outside Facebook either. In fact, when we met, we lived on opposite coasts.
I will always be grateful to Zuck & Co. for that, and for the hundreds of other friends I've made on Facebook - people of all ages, backgrounds, professions, and nationalities - people I never have, and almost certainly never WOULD have, met in "real" life. In my experience & opinion as an 8+ year high volume shitposter, Facebook is the best site in the world for dating and for expanding your social horizons/circle
And I say that as a former frontend lead at Ghostery, lol
I think the question is, how do you keep the good and get rid of the bad? I think there's a lot of great things that social media has done to connect people, but all too often it's only a shallow or artificial connection. I think the other problem is that social media will make you find people "like" you. Humans have always sought that out, but there was always some variance that allowed us to remember that others unlike us were still human. Now, with connections possible the world over, we ironically are more likely to only interact with individuals that share our opinions because it's a lot easier to find people like that when you can search the entire world for it. That leads to otherization of any who doesn't share that opinion. So, how do we create social media that keeps that potential for connection you are talking about, but does it in a meaningful way where individuals are exposed to more than an echo chamber?
Anyone capable of that level of introspection is unlikely to be someone who is on the wrong end of misinformation. If the solution is for everyone to identify misinformation and to block it, then the criticisms of social media platforms are legitimate. Only those who are the least likely to be effected would be the ones opting out.
We live in a world where nearly _all_ information fed to the public is misinformation. Except in one case it's due to FB and in another it's 5 dudes who own the entirety of US (and large chunk of the world's) "free" press. In this narrative-rich, (nearly) fact-free environment, aside from the obvious asinine bullshit that's easily seen through, the "misinformation" becomes simply something you don't agree with. The benefit of this is that it's no longer just 5 dudes that control the manufacturing of public consent. At a minimum it's 8 now (add Zuck, Pichai and Dorsey to the mix). With any luck, these 8 might start stabbing each other in the back.
There is a book called “Hate Inc.” by Matt Taibi in which the author inadvertently argues that manufacturing consent is no longer profitable and news outlets are now in the business of manufacturing dissent.
Well, whether they manufacture consent or dissent depends entirely on what party currently controls the White House and the Congress. So he's half-right. I'm a big fan of Taibbi's writing, and especially his books. "Griftopia" was pretty good, too. He's a rare breed - a liberal who is also willing to criticize liberals when they deserve it.
I don't use Facebook so I'm only going by what I've seen from screenshots or over someone's shoulder. Isn't one part of the misery political posts from people you do know? e.g., extended family or old friends going off the deep end?
I always think of one scene in Cool Runnings: a gold medal is a wonderful thing, and if you're not enough without it, there's no way you'll be enough with it.
Facebook gives you what you want, and it's up to you what you make that.
It’s just like YouTube. They need to tweak the algorithms for quality, not just quantity. Those are hard decisions for them because it will cost money in the short term. Ultimately governments will slap them down, which will cost much more.
If you keep up with current affairs the past few weeks have shown that FB’s alleged problems are supported by data which is disregarded by it’s leadership
Papers 1 and 3 are about correlating _duration_ of FB usage with happiness. Look at the papers referenced here [1] for the same effect as applied to TV. These papers, sans the new controversy over the mental health of young women on Instagram, _don't_ actually point to any stronger of a conclusion than "consuming large amounts of media is correlated with bad mental health".
I'm not saying that FB and this huge corporate capture of the internet is _good_, but making arguments like this doesn't actually make coherent sense.
This is a case where an anecdote is proof, at least a partial proof.
If the proposition is "Facebook brings at least some good to the world". A single confirmed anecdote of Facebook bringing a single good thing to the world is a proof. In the same way that all you need to prove that black sheep exist is to show a single black sheep.
The proposition is "Facebook brings a lot of good to the world" is a bit trickier, we need to define "a lot", but it can still be proven by "a lot" of anecdotes.
It is not a generality we are trying to prove, so we don't need to have data representative of the general case.
The part about Facebook being the best for dating is stated as a personal opinion.
Friend randoms and get to know them over time through public wall interactions; switch to DMs if things are clicking
I've sent thousands of FB friend requests to strangers suggested by the algo; the vast majority accept. I have met some of my favorite people in the world this way. Also some huge assholes/crazies, of course. Sometimes they are the same people
"Facebook is the best site in the world for dating and for expanding your social horizons/circle"
Maybe for boomers and some emerging markets. It appears to be losing popularity very fast among younger folks in most Western countries. Not that alternatives are much better IMO, Twitter in particular is even worse.
Nothing beats going out and talking to real people. It gives you a competitive advantage over the masses that are too lazy to socialize in real world.
I do think Facebook has something really valuable over in person interaction: you can observe how a potential SO interacts with a wide variety of other people
Also, I like that it's async. But that's more of a personal preference
It does feel nice, like the oppressor has died, at least for a bit. Also fun to watch the scramble to get it back online, would be nice if it never came back :)
There has been tons of use for it for hate, but people have found a way to use every method of communication for hate (e.g. TV, Mail, phones) and efforts to crack down on hate on Facebook haven’t seemed to have an effect on hate in the real world (see the people banned from Facebook who went on to use other platforms to coordinate 1/6). I don’t like their privacy intrusions but people seem to have a tendency to blame all of society’s ills on Facebook, phones, and the internet and that in and of itself is a massive oversimplification that doesn’t reflect the real issues with our society
I replied to your toplevel, which I make note of simply because I don't want to seem as if I'm targeting you.
You dislike their privacy intrusions, and I hate them for it. My life is actively made worse for their stalking, their insistence that they be at the forefront of all things social.
I agree that they're not to blame for the hatred in society, nor are they responsible for all of society's problems. But their utter contempt to just let people be is reason enough that I should make myself heard as often as I can, and especially whenever I see an attempt to relieve any amount of pressure that hopefully weighs on their conscience: fuck Facebook and their employees.
Yes people said the same thing about television and by and large most people think Television had some pretty bad side effects. A dumber society, all kinds of depression began manifesting in people who were sold an image of ‘reality’ via ads/unrealistic shows, the gutting of ‘journalism’ into 24-hour news, none of that stuff was wrong.
It's a multibillion dollar corporation that wants to track me wherever I go, whatever I do, whenever I want to connect. Facebook is a maniacal stalker. Their website is merely an innocuous facade that hides a nest of ugly, venomous, snakes.
There are thousands of others. Every week on here there's a new story about some new uncovered act of heinous evil from the Zuck and his buds. It's a wonder you haven't seen them.
> Can you point to the place on the doll where it hurt you?
Using a reference to how survivors of abuse are often required to re-enact their abuse to make a snarky comment is neither funny nor clever and it doesn’t add anything substantive to this conversation.
The problem for me, and many others, is we are friends with people on the complete opposite political spectrum. I don't have the granularity to block their political posts while still being able to see their regular posts.
This sounds more like an issue when it comes to interacting with those people in general, regardless of the medium. I bet those friends would still bring up their political views in irrelevant conversations irl, on twitter, or literally everywhere else they socialize.
This isn't a fault on the part of FB. You indicated you are friends with those people and want to follow their content. If you want to be friends with them on FB, but not see their content pop up on your timeline, that option is a click away. If you want more granular filtering, so that you can still see non-political posts from those people, you need to indicate to the algorithm that you want less of that by clicking "show me less posts like this", and it will eventually learn.
I see those options as a reasonable approach, as I struggle to come up with a better way to filter the content of people you follow with such granularity. The only option I can see in my mind that would work better is literally having someone work as your personal "filter", so that they can only show you the posts you want from those people. But that, obviously, is not a viable approach.
It's just like in real life. If you have a friend who you want to continue socializing with, but in public settings they say extremely off-putting things half the time that you don't want to hear, your options are to either stop socializing with them completely (aka unfollowing), to ask them to stop doing it, and that's pretty much it. All of those options are available on facebook as well, except facebook offers even more options that are all pretty good.
And I am saying this as someone who opens facebook at most once-twice a week for a little bit of time, just to check up on what my friends post and to read thru a few interesting discussions in the hobby groups I am in. If I occasionally see a wild political shitpost, I just click "show me less content like this". And the algorithm, surprisingly enough, tends to adjust to this pretty well.
If you went to a group meeting with them, even if you're talking to someone else you could potentially overhear the other friends talking to someone else about those political views, wouldn't you?
I just personally don't see this as a social media problem but I know it can definitely happen in real life (I've been that person listening to "friends" discuss views I don't agree with at an event/party/hangout).
Your experience must be very different from mine. My Facebook feed is full of interesting pictures from my friends. It's only when I visit HN that I find lots of hatred and bile... for Facebook.
It's like that scene in approximately 500,000 movies where, for just a moment, it is revealed that the immortal arch-villain actually has a weakness, and can be killed.
All the bad people still exist. Its not like fb the platform solely created them or that they will just go away if that particular platform disappeared.
So? Do you think its the only curated experience to maximize ad revenue on the internet (not to mention the non digital world).
If you want to argue underregulated capitalism is bad, by all means, but lets not pretend that there aren't hundreds of websites waiting to take facebook's place if fb's downtime went on for more than a few days.
The thing to remember about tech -- both when it's lionized as a revolution for the better or vilified as the source of evils making things worse -- is that most of the time what tech does is magnify existing human dynamics.
FB could do more to attenuate problems and better boost virtues, but it's not the source of the problems. Its absence won't solve them or prevent something equally bad (or worse) from filling any gap it might leave behind.
It’s relatively low friction to migrate to Signal or Telegram compared to a social network. I could said to family and friends stop using WA use that replacement with some success, but there is no migration for FB, Insta, YouTube…
I feel like we're singling out FB here. Can we bundle Twitter and Tiktok with it? May be Youtube comments? The danger of course is that we have all piled up on a scape goat and the rest of the social media companies will continue to enjoy great PR. Tiktok continues to be HN's darling.
What you are seeing is a major weakness of platforms like HN and Reddit. This weakness could very well cause more harm than Facebook, but studies or articles that point this out likely wouldn't receive exposure on the platforms they impugn.
We've seen the negative effects of this feedback loop in the past (who else remembers Reddit's role in the Boston Marathon bombing?), but it is clearly a much lower priority than the current Facebook witch hunt.
Television is a new medium where opinions are neither rare nor well done. (~~Anonymous from the 1930s, with many varieties)
It helps to remember that most new mediums follow the same trend: when its easier to share opinions, everyone is flabbergasted at the huge volume of "low quality" opinions.
I'd argue that the problem is much deeper than social media. It's the internet and we're acting surprised that giving a microphone to every human was not going to lead to angry mobs and echo-chambers of the scale the world has never seen. Then, we decided to clamp down on it, lose civil liberties and the ability to dissent. Comedians are apologizing for making people laugh - think about it. So we're overall worse off in terms of social civility than we were 30 years ago. I still believe that the internet has done more good than bad, but it's foolish to not acknowledge the shortcomings.
Are you familiar with the 1st Amendment, and the immediate backlash (aka: the Sedition act) passed almost immediately afterwards?
The printing press had the exact same issues as today's media, albeit at a slower pace but it was still there. A balance must be found.
A few decades ago, the balance people liked was that newspapers were free to say anything, but if something was untruthful, then people could sue newspapers (providing a strong incentive for newspapers to remain truthful). I don't think it was a perfect system, but it was better than what we have today for sure.
The issue is that we haven't figured out what the new system should be. (If someone posts misinformation on Facebook or more commonly: false-information on Google Reviews / Amazon Reviews / Yelp reviews: who do you sue?). Heck, people seem to have entirely forgotten the first 150+ years of American history with the 1st Amendment and how we settled upon the libel / slander laws.
People don't really care about the national-level discussion. National level is abstract and doesn't really affect our day-to-day lives. But ask people about how misleading Yelp reviews or Amazon reviews have hurt (or helped) them, and you can tell that people are incredibly jaded about this "Free information" online.
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I don't know what the new system should be. But the 1st step is to acknowledge that at all points of our history, we've had freedoms AND we've had problems associated with those freedoms. We want the "good stuff" associated with free communication, but we must work our best to clamp down on the "evil stuff".
I don't think anyone disagrees upon "evil stuff" of free speech: doxing, swatting, "fake news" / "misinformation", etc. etc. Both sides pretty much agree upon the realities of today's media (the right calls it "Fake News", the left calls it "misinformation". Come on, its not like we're that far apart on the matter).
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In any case: take solace in history. The 1st Amendment vs Sedition Acts were the big debate in the late 1700s. Its not like the discussion was ever resolved: we just had different political powers swing free-speech one way, and then swing enforcement the other way (ex: Office of Censorship during WW2).
I've recently realized that a lot of the crap on Facebook comes from this ambiguity.
They've basically created a system where it is very hard for anyone to take responsibility. Case in point: New articles posted on FB tend to have very low quality comments, almost as a rule. For pages that post these articles, it is extremely difficult for them to "moderate" those comments, in order to enforce high quality discussions. In fact, their is a lot of pressure on those pages to not enforce quality commenting. It is hard to say, even, that the organizations who post new articles are even responsible for creating a positive community around their Facebook posts.
Contrast this with the "old way" that newspaper brought in reader voices: Through letters to the editor. No matter whether or not you agreed with the opinions, these letters were (and are), of a completely different caliber than the typical FB comment. The newspapers willingly published them, and, in a sense, took responsibility for them. Namecalling, slander, misinformation, etc are mostly (though not always) filtered out of letters published by newspapers.
Compare this, too, to a forum like Hacker News. Here, we have a steady moderator who enforces the rules, and that the community also helps enforce. The rules are clear enough. Low quality discourse is discouraged, and sometimes even removed. There is someone whose job it is to maintain the quality of discussions. On the comments on a Facebook page, that almost never happens, neither from FB or from the company hosting the page.
As has happened through the history of online forums, without decent moderation, things tend to devolve very quickly. This is exactly what's happened at Facebook. They've created "pages" that could be there responsibility, or could be the responsibility of the people running the page, but nobody really takes responsibility. Everything, instead, is focused on engagement. Publishers want to drive traffic to their websites. FB wants to keep people on the site, and "engaged" with their advertisements. Moderation, in essence, has been almost completely ignored.
If you feel that Facebook is really that detrimental to your online existence, there are easier (and more persistent) ways for you to block them out of your life.
