What is it about Facebook that makes some cringe?

I don’t have any desire or need for the world knowing every detail about my life. I prefer to network the old-fashioned way .. in person… Fluther being the exception.

For moments like this

I really don’t understand most of the complaints I hear about Facebook. The two biggest complaints I hear is what @Pachyderm_In_The_Room said, and that there is too much drama from friends. Those two things are very easy to remedy. Don’t share every minute of your day, and don’t be friends with people who cause drama.

-Feeling constantly exposed and ‘connected.’ The difficulty of keeping work and private life separate.
-Hands over your personal details for targeted advertising.
-It can make relationships more artificial: It seems like friends are more in your life than they are, and it also reduces communication because people think “Oh, well, I can always find them on facebook if I need to.”
-People often act like you don’t exist if you aren’t on there.
-Reading First World Problem status updates, relationship drama, what people ate for lunch, etc.
-People being able to find you whom you might not want to find you.
-It’s an even worse procrastination device than Fluther!

I use FB to promote theatrical events and groups I’m associated with. It’s very handy that way to get the word out quickly and efficiently and free.

I also use it to keep up with friends from the past, the present, and a few I’ve made online. In the past couple of months, I found two friends I haven’t heard from in almost 30 years. It’s truly wonderful to be able to chat and share stories with them again.

I know some people who post minutia of their daily routine, and I simply don’t read it. I’ve had a couple of bad experiences with some who don’t like LGBT folk, and it was easily remedied. I took them off my list of friends.

What I put on it is up to me. Who sees my input is also up to me.

Don’t have a facebook. Won’t ever have a Facebook. I don’t give a fuck what your doing in your daily life nor do I feel the need to share what I’m doing in mine. I enjoy my privacy. I actually make it a point to have zero results come up when you Google my name. I dont have any pictures of myself on the internet either.

It’s boring. It takes too much work to figure out how to make it do what you want it to do. And you can’t really keep things private that you want to keep private. Also, they keep changing the interface. The only thing it seems useful for is sharing pictures, and there are plenty of other places to do that.

What @jonsblond said.

People have many misconceptions about Facebook.

You don’t need to put things on there that you don’t wish others to know, but many people forget that. @Pachyderm_In_The_Room, I’m looking at you; if you want to keep something private, just refrain from posting it on the Internet!

People forget/don’t know that you can drop people who spam your page with useless crap or drama.

Personally, I think that the biggest problem is that most people are not ready for technology. They want the convenience, but none of the responsibility, just like kids want to drive without learning how or paying for gas.

What @uberbatman x one million.

Some kids and even adults think collecting Facebook friends is real friendship.

@mazingerz88 That one does make me cringe. I have a niece who lives in a small town (less than 400), but she has over 1,000 fb friends. wth?

I do find FB dreadful and cringeworthy, but not for the usual reasons. I like it, in general. It keeps me in contact with people I wouldn’t otherwise be in contact with, and many of my friends post interesting stuff. However, I avoid it now because it was a terrible experience finding out a friend had died by clicking onto his page. I’ll consider tapping on the FB bookmark for a moment but then slide on over to the jellyfish instead, usually. This place distracts me from a life I have no desire to be buried in, at the moment. Contrariwise, burying you in your life by formalising and re-presenting your situatedness to you as “news” is essentially what Facebook does. I can see a lot of reasons to resist that.

I enjoy Facebook, though I’m not addicted to it like some people seem to be.

You know, Facebook started as a way for college students to network. Now, pre-teens all the way up to grandmas and grandpas have one. It’s not geared toward people over 30ish, so why would those folks expect to like it? I’m constantly getting friend requests from aunts or my husband’s dad or our parents. I don’t get why they even care enough to have one. And even worse is the fact that my 9-year-old niece has one. WHY?!

I certainly don’t share every moment of my life on Facebook. This is why I refuse to get a Twitter account. I update every few days, and it’s rarely personal. I have no drama on Facebook. I only friend people I actually like, and they’re all pretty easy-going.

It’s a way to keep in contact with people and stay updated on out friends’ lives through statuses, photos, and messages. The days of calling someone on the phone or visiting them at their house seem to be behind us (at least for this particular age group). Some would rather just send a text or a Facebook message. Some may find this to be a shame, and it may be, but it’s just how it is.

FB is useful, for example, if you want to find Jupiter in your night sky.

@livelaughlove21 I’m 42 and I really like Facebook. Facebook has made it easier for me to share photos of my children with friends and family. I remember the good old days when I had to go to the store to develop my pictures, then I had to buy envelopes and stamps to send these pictures to loved ones. I did all of this walking uphill, both ways, in the snow.

Thanks to Facebook and Gail, I would not have looked at Jupiter this evening. :D

Facebook is a fantastic tool. You can keep in touch with people, meet folks you knew long ago, meet NEW people, you can promote your company, band, studio, whatever.

Now, people can do whatever they want, but I also have the right to my opinion. Most of what I see on there seems so trite and banal. If people like it as a social network to have fun with and express themselves with, then cool. But personally, I really don’t give a shit at all about how obsessed someone is with My Little Pony, and I also don’t give a shit what one ate last night. This is what makes me cringe, and I have no real desire to participate much on there.

See, I think it’s pretty cool if Japan finds a 900 ft long calamari in the ocean, but unless I post a picture of a kitty inside a sock, no one is going to pay attention to my huge ass calamari. it’s better on here :D

And that’s FINE. I’m not saying it isn’t, but it isn’t my cup of Darugar ale. So it makes me shy away. But some day, if I ever get my own horror movie website up, or have my own pillow store, Facebook is going to start looking pretty useful.

also, MySpace sucks

@Symbeline Trust me, if you posted a giant calamari captured, and we were FB friends that I’d click. The whole kitty cat thing, not so much. Haha. Damn so many pot holes on FB platform. But as @jerv pointed out we don’t really have to do a damn thing with it. The whole platform has literally turned into somewhat a contest. Not really, but it can feel that because the way the “wall” is set up. Before people would post whatever about themselves, and it would be fine because you had to actually click that persons profile, which meant you made an effort to check up on that person and had genuine interest. The whole “wall” concept forces everyones stuff in front of you. Of course you can stop following that persons feed, yet still be their friends. But what’s the point of being their friend if you don’t follow their feed. It goes back to this whole, “no wonder why were not friends in real life” kind of deal.

It’s strange indeed!

@pleiades But as @jerv pointed out we don’t really have to do a damn thing with it.

Which I don’t lol. Or barely.

I saw an article in the paper about this giant ass calamari that was found, (or rather scanned, it’s way too deep for anyone to get to) but I can’t find it online anywhere. :/ That said, another reason why FB can be cool is because there’s groups you can join. Say like, ’‘crazy ass marine creatures found’’ group. I have to admit though, I haven’t made much of an effort to locate groups that specialize in things that interest me. Maybe on that side, I should explore FB a bit more.

As with most things, I like to see the funny side of faceyuk!

@wildpotato: ”[...] burying you in your life by formalising and re-presenting your situatedness to you as “news” is essentially what Facebook does.”

Wow, well said. I wouldn’t have known how to say this, but this is yet another reason that it creeps me out.

I can’t remember who said this but it’s a useful maxim: “If you’re not paying for a service YOU are the PRODUCT, NOT THE CUSTOMER.”

@jonsblond doesn’t it creep you out that Facebook owns those images of your children and can do with them what they want? I can easily image how they could be used by an insurance company to deny people care because activity portrayed in a picture might be used to exclude them from coverage somehow.

@gorillapaws lt may have been Nathan Newman

@gorillapaws Facebook does not own the pictures of my children. Read Here “You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings,”.

I use privacy settings for my pictures. I do not make them public.

For me, I try to deal with the negative aspect of Facebook (i.e. people posting what they ate for dinner – just keep scrolling!) and I enjoy the positive – finding and keeping in touch with people I have lost touch with, and posting photos and viewing photos from friends. If there are people I don’t want to know too much about me, I just “up” my privacy settings to exclude them.

Because people take pictures of me at various events, post them without my knowledge or approval, describe the event in great detail, and tag my image with my name. Maybe I don’t WANT the entire world to know that I attended so-and-so’s party or participated in the such-and-such political rally. I’m a private person who dislikes having my life broadcast.

Yes, it’s possible to un-tag one’s name from other people’s pictures. Yet, the photos remain online, and I need to learn about the picture before I can even do the un-tagging.

@jonsblond from your link:“By posting content covered by IP rights (photos, videos, and such), you agree to “give [Facebook] the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License).”

IANAL, but this language seem to imply that they can sell access to your data, and even though you may own those photos of your kids, by posting them on Facebook, I’m pretty sure they have the right to transfer or sub-liscense them to a paying third party who may not have you/your kids’ best interest at heart.

How do you think they pay for all of those servers and bandwidth? It’s not with goodwill, and happy thoughts.

Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos
Here

@gorillapaws It claims the right to do so “subject to your privacy and application settings”. In reality, this translates to showing your photos in rankings in games that you and your friends play, or using your photo in third-party ads to tell your friends that you liked product X if you have given your permission for them to do this. You can deny them permission. I have for the latter, but not for the former – and they respect that.

@glacial Thank you for that information.

@zensky I’ve never used Instagram, and never will.

@zensky: I believe after that Instagram thing came out and upset a lot of people, Instagram changed its policy and says now that the original owner of the photos remains the owner of the photos.

Not that it matters to me, I don’t use Instagram.

Facebook and Instagram are one.

A family member, whom I will not ID, just drove from a NYC suburb to Miami Beach. Every 200 miles she took a photo of a stretch of interstate and its location for her fascinated readers. Once in MB, she snapped underexposed pix of entrées as well as the labels on the wine bottles at the restaurants they visited nightly.

@gailcalled Did any fascinated criminals keep abreast of her travel progress and take advantage of such a splendid opportunity to burglarize her house?

Putting aside my sarcasm, isn’t this a perfect example of boneheaded internet use? People post all sorts of information that can be dangerous. Would anyone stand in the middle of downtown, with a loud bullhorn, and yell, “I live at 123 Main Street, and I’ll be out of town for the next week?” Of course not! Yet, people feel some strange sense of invulnerability online.

I hate Facebook because virtual friends are replacing true friendships, and because e-communication is taking the place of real socializing.

When you look back on 2013, what will your memories be? Will you fondly recall all those hours spent emailing and texting, or will you remember the times when you went to interesting places, did fun things, interacted face-to-face with people, and expanded your world by learning and experiencing things?

@PaulSadieMartin I’m basically homebound most of the time. We live in a very small town on a farm. We are a one car family and I’m a stay-at-home parent right now. Most days I’m stuck at home, by myself, without a vehicle. We also don’t have money at the moment to travel. Our last vacation was 3 years ago. Facebook gives me the opportunity to interact with people all around the world. My memories of 2013 will be those spent with family. Memories I get to share on Facebook with family and friends I don’t get to see that often. You do make some good points, but Facebook does have some benefits for those who can’t get away from home.

@jonsblond I understand completely, and I apologize if I offended you. Obviously, I’m Fluthering at this very moment, so I certainly enjoy some e-communicating of my own!

When I posted, I was thinking about a friend who didn’t know that her sister had given birth. She knew that her sister was expecting a baby, of course, but nobody bothered to call when her sister went to the hospital and had the baby. When she expressed, later, that she’d been hurt and embarrassed, her sister looked at her with amazement and said, “You should have checked Facebook!”

I was also thinking about how I drive around my (safe, lovely) neighborhood on a weekend day and never see kids playing. Nobody’s jumping rope, tossing around a football, riding a bicycle, playing tag, or otherwise getting exercise and fresh air. They’re at home, cruising the internet, emailing, and IM-ing. Is it any mystery why childhood obesity is becoming an epidemic, and why kids make playdates instead of friends?

Even though you live in a remote location and are staying at home, I’m guessing that you spend plenty of good time with your husband and children. Nobody needs to take expensive trips to see interesting things; there’s beauty to be found in changing seasons and the wonder of a fresh, new day. A picnic doesn’t cost any more than a meal eaten at home, but it’s an fun outing and an adventure. An old-fashioned board game can make a memorable evening. From reading your posts, I have no doubt that you’re the sort of wife and mother who finds ways to spend real time and build memories with her family.