Why are so many people so addicted to Facebook?

I’ve poked around on my nephew’s, sister’s and friend’s accounts, and I know facebook is not for me. Most people that I know who spend a great deal of time on there tend to have rather crude interests such as small talk and other people’s personal affairs. I referred a site to my nephew to help with his math homework, and ironically he didn’t have a clue how to find it. However, when it comes to facebook he can do and find everything imaginable.

It does amaze me that you can learn or read about virtually any topic you want to on the Internet, and yet many chronic facebook users choose to spend most of their internet time on facebook or youtube. I can understand the basic appeal of facebook, such as occasional chat and picture sharing, and the games are an added bonus. However, it does seem like facebook for the most part is the home for many apathetic hedonists or intellectually indifferent folks.

Not my thing, I had an acct. for about a year, 3 years ago. Deleted it. I could care less about what other people are doing. lol
I also hated the stupid game solicitations like Farmville. Seriously…what kind of moron plays those games? haha
Waaay too much a ” look at me and how cool I am” scene. Gak!

IMO because they have to keep their mind busy and lack more important things to do with their live and time.

Hang on, I’m reading another funny facebook status…

I prefer going out, doing things, and interacting with real friends, instead of spending hours and hours on Facebook with virtual friends.

I don’t have facebook, so my answer might not be true, but I don’t think it’s the level of addiction. Most of the time it’s merely obsession, and primarily due to the fact that they enjoy the interaction, and facebook makes it seem like a real life.

Part of the attraction perhaps is you nerver know what your “friends” will post. A curiosity. A snoopynes if you will. Also people get a kind of satisfaction when they post information, picture and videos of their own personal world. Of course they may just simply be bored.

I like Facebook. I can keep up with pictures and activities of friends, family, and classmates without actually having to talk to any of those fuckers.

@gondwanalon The only thing I can’t stand about the curiosity factor of Facebook is scrolling through your news feed and suddenly seeing a rant about someone’s life being over because their vibrator broke or the fact that they “just took the most massive shit ever.” I don’t need to know that much about someone’s personal world, LOL!

@WillWorkForChocolate, HA! That’s the too much information factor. I just blow past the “friends” that typically do that.

I have this ex “friend” now, the woman was so manipulative all under the guise of being angelic. Gah!
I had posted a bunch of vacation photos of my travels in Asia at the time, of which she was part of the group. Anyway…I woke up one morning to about 100 emails from FB of her “tagging” all my photos!

OMG! I couldn’t believe it!

FUCK!

It took me about an hour just to delete the stupid “your photo has been tagged” emails!

Once one goes through the process of personalizing the settings, you can prevent or drastically reduce the unpleasant things that people have complained about.
• Don’t want to get invitations from games? Set to Ignore All Invitations.
• Don’t want to see games progress in your News Feed? Set to block posts from that game.
• Don’t want to know every little detail about someone’s bathroom habits? Set to Only show Important Life Events in your News Feed.
• Don’t want people to tag your photos or to tag you in other people’s photos? Set tagging permissions to Only Me.
• Don’t want Notifications popping up on your mobile device or clogging up your email? Set Notifications to go where you want and only for content that you deem is important to you.

Like all other technology and tools, it is what you make of it, and FB is actually very customizable; being able to fine tune all those options is cumbersome, but worth it.

^^^ Too much work and management…bah, I opted to just get the hell out of My Face land. lol

Simple. Facebook allows people to socialize via one convenient location.

It’s probably nothing special these days where there are any number of slick sites people can congregate. But back when I first started surfing (do they still use that word), having your own personalized community hub wasn’t possible. In fact, a simple (crude) personal webpage required a bit of skill and a lot of effort. I recall spending many many hours trying to master HTML code to create simple webpages. That kind of effort isn’t required anymore.

My wife passed away a few weeks ago. Of all the headache I had to endure making preparations for my wife’s burial, notifying friends and family was not one of them. I simply posted an “Event” to Facebook and the word was out.

Of course Facebook isn’t for everybody…but what is? Like it or not, it’s light years ahead of what was available during the age of dial up modems.

@SABOTEUR My wife passed away a few weeks ago.
My condolences, sorry for your loss.

@SABOTEUR: My deepest condolences to you and your family.

Thank you for the condolences. I didn’t intend to hijack the thread; I just shared what I did because it provided a good example. My apologies.