Facebook is bad

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Malcolm
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by Malcolm »

Toenail wrote: Thu Sep 16, 2021 6:29 pm
Malcolm wrote: Thu Sep 16, 2021 5:29 pm
Nadereme wrote: Thu Sep 16, 2021 4:44 pm You’re acting like the medium is inherently bad.
It is.

You might read "In Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations by Jerry Mander.
Or the unibomber manifest.
Umm, very different approaches, and very different authors, the former serving life in prison...
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Svalaksana
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by Svalaksana »

Toenail wrote: Thu Sep 16, 2021 6:29 pm
Malcolm wrote: Thu Sep 16, 2021 5:29 pm
Nadereme wrote: Thu Sep 16, 2021 4:44 pm You’re acting like the medium is inherently bad.
It is.

You might read "In Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations by Jerry Mander.
Or the unibomber manifest.
Ted Kaczynski was unfortunately an extremist but his critique of technology was spot on, many of his arguments persuasive, and runs the risk of acquiring a prescient character. I would recommend reading Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society, as a broader, more comprehensive political and sociological exploration of the risks of unbridled development and infiltration of technology on our daily lives. I heard good things about Lewis Mumford as well but didn't have the chance to pick any of his works yet. Heidegger had some interesting insights concerning the subject too.
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tingdzin
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by tingdzin »

Yeah, I vote to scuttle it.
SilenceMonkey
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by SilenceMonkey »

PadmaVonSamba wrote: Thu Sep 16, 2021 3:24 pm A real red flag should be the fact that people Say “I’m going to go off of Facebook” or “I’m going to take a break from Facebook” as though they are ending a relationship With a boyfriend or girlfriend
And then they come crawling back. :thinking:
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Johnny Dangerous
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by Johnny Dangerous »

Facebook as a medium *is* inherently bad. Look at the studies that it has done on itself! They know their platform screws up teens minds, makes people angrier and dumber, etc..but they keep it as it is.

There are all kinds of possibilities there for sure, but it is literally designed to function like a slot machine that hijacks one with anxious emotions and the worst tribal instincts. I don't think it started off being designed that way, but it went that direction and there was too much money in it to change, so here we are.
Meditate upon Bodhicitta when afflicted by disease

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PeterC
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by PeterC »

Of course social media can and should be shut down, in its entirety. I cannot point to a single supposed benefit that it brings that could not have been accomplished with email or the internet, and was actually a benefit. Not one.

Clearly at least one party has no interest in regulating social media, whatever they say publicly, because they gain a disproportionate advantage from it. Social media has been a huge factor in sustaining the republicans’ frankly illegitimate grip on power.

The issue is how. The mechanism is probably to make the companies much more responsible for speech on their platforms, knowing the identify of participants, etc - ie creating a burden they can’t meet. But what it really needs to be effective is criminal responsibility for the executives. That is about the only thing that actually gets companies to act, rather than to prevaricate, obstruct and litigate.

Social media is barely a couple of decades old. The world worked better without it before, and will be just fine without it again.
SilenceMonkey
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by SilenceMonkey »

PeterC wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 4:27 am Of course social media can and should be shut down, in its entirety. I cannot point to a single supposed benefit that it brings that could not have been accomplished with email or the internet, and was actually a benefit. Not one.
I do like free voice calling or video calling with anyone in the world. But of course, you're right. It all comes with a price.
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Johnny Dangerous
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by Johnny Dangerous »

SilenceMonkey wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 4:54 am
PeterC wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 4:27 am Of course social media can and should be shut down, in its entirety. I cannot point to a single supposed benefit that it brings that could not have been accomplished with email or the internet, and was actually a benefit. Not one.
I do like free voice calling or video calling with anyone in the world. But of course, you're right. It all comes with a price.
That could have just as easily been AOL instant messenger or something if things had gone a different direction.

That is part of what gives FB it's monopoly though, the crazy amount of processing power, server farms, etc. So it's not just the software, but the fact that it is so now so gargantuan that it has hardware well out of most companies reach.

I quit using it in 2018 and was amazed by how miserable it had been making me. I still use messenger though.
Meditate upon Bodhicitta when afflicted by disease

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Meditate upon Bodhicitta when suffering occurs

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SilenceMonkey
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by SilenceMonkey »

Johnny Dangerous wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 5:28 am
SilenceMonkey wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 4:54 am
PeterC wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 4:27 am Of course social media can and should be shut down, in its entirety. I cannot point to a single supposed benefit that it brings that could not have been accomplished with email or the internet, and was actually a benefit. Not one.
I do like free voice calling or video calling with anyone in the world. But of course, you're right. It all comes with a price.
That could have just as easily been AOL instant messenger or something if things had gone a different direction.

That is part of what gives FB it's monopoly though, the crazy amount of processing power, server farms, etc. So it's not just the software, but the fact that it is so now so gargantuan that it has hardware well out of most companies reach.

I quit using it in 2018 and was amazed by how miserable it had been making me. I still use messenger though.
Absolutely. I've also been trying to lessen FB's impact in my life. There's this one book that helped a lot, actually.

"Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport.
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Johnny Dangerous
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by Johnny Dangerous »

SilenceMonkey wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 5:33 am
Johnny Dangerous wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 5:28 am
SilenceMonkey wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 4:54 am

I do like free voice calling or video calling with anyone in the world. But of course, you're right. It all comes with a price.
That could have just as easily been AOL instant messenger or something if things had gone a different direction.

That is part of what gives FB it's monopoly though, the crazy amount of processing power, server farms, etc. So it's not just the software, but the fact that it is so now so gargantuan that it has hardware well out of most companies reach.

I quit using it in 2018 and was amazed by how miserable it had been making me. I still use messenger though.
Absolutely. I've also been trying to lessen FB's impact in my life. There's this one book that helped a lot, actually.

"Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport.
Looks like an interesting book, maybe I'll give it a look.

Only social media I use is this site and occasionally a locals.com group.

Personally it felt -way- better than I expected to stop using FB, and it seems like a lot of my friends and family did at the same time, or at least became way less frequent users.

It's true that I can't keep in touch with farther flung acquaintances, but if anything I feel that has actually been a good thing. There's a kind of background bandwidth that gets taken up by all these vague relationships that aren't really relationships, but somehow FB makes you think they might be.

QQ mentioned earlier regretting some things he'd said to people on FB, I had that too. Hell, I had one whole "friendship" that lasted a year and ended up in a big fight and a lot of pain. All for a relationship that really doesn't mean much. I actually ended up burning bridges with people I hadn't seen in years. Now if I run into those people again instead of being able to rekindle our friendship, we have this shitty, awkward FB conflict to sift through.

Here on DW at least there is a core group of people who have skin in the game, that I have "known" in some sense for a while. It's plenty raucous but there is something about this format that I think has more positives than modern social media.

Having that bandwidth back from FB really feels worth it to me. I didn't know if it would when I quit it.

I also quit because I went to school to study addiction, and it is pretty hard to do that and continue using Facebook, once you see it for what it is. I think that's what put me over the edge. I would say it's "like a drug" but it's not because at least with drugs sometimes you have fun, FB is more like smoking, it's pleasurable here and there but mostly it's just this exhausting crappy habit that slowly chips away at your (mental, emotional in this case) health.

Here's but one example:

The "endless scroll" on sites like Youtube and Facebook works about the way the lack of clocks in a casino does. It keeps you hitting that button and getting that little dopamine hit without being oriented at all in time, which makes it that much more likely you just keep going.

I don't know that there have been any studies yet, but I'm willing to bet some kind of detailed fMRI of heavy users brains on Facebook and other social media would be pretty similar to the brains of compulsive gamblers, etc...only perhaps with less pleasure and often getting sucked into a kind of reward loop based on anger, exclusion/inclusion and some kind of tribalism.
Meditate upon Bodhicitta when afflicted by disease

Meditate upon Bodhicitta when sad

Meditate upon Bodhicitta when suffering occurs

Meditate upon Bodhicitta when you are scared

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PeterC
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by PeterC »

SilenceMonkey wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 4:54 am
PeterC wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 4:27 am Of course social media can and should be shut down, in its entirety. I cannot point to a single supposed benefit that it brings that could not have been accomplished with email or the internet, and was actually a benefit. Not one.
I do like free voice calling or video calling with anyone in the world. But of course, you're right. It all comes with a price.
That’s not a feature of social media. If you want an alternative to WhatsApp, try Signal. Basically same functionality as WhatsApp but doesn’t steal/sell your data, and is more secure.

When the founder of WhatsApp decided he’d finally had enough of Facebook and quit - forgoing prt of his deferred compensation for WhatsApp - he donated a hundred million or so to signal to help them scale up without the pressure of fundraising.
dharmafootsteps
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by dharmafootsteps »

“The medium is inherently bad” “Shutdown all social media”

What do people mean by those sorts of comments? What specifically is it about the medium you see as problematic?

For example, it’s been mentioned Dharma Wheel is good, but social media is bad. However it’s very easy to also class forums as social media (and many people do), in terms of feature set they basically provide the same core functions. Presumably people don’t want forums shutdown. What about youtube, that’s usually classed as social media these days. Some sanghas have their own social media platforms, many companies do etc. etc.

I’m not making a case for social media, I’m just interested to get to the root of what people see as the problematic parts. “Shutdown social media” is too vague for a real policy, there would have to be specific functionality that it banned.

As a policy maker what is it you do? Or as a software engineer how to do you attempt to avoid inadvertent negative impact of your platform?
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Kim O'Hara
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by Kim O'Hara »

dharmafootsteps wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 8:08 am “The medium is inherently bad” “Shutdown all social media”

What do people mean by those sorts of comments? What specifically is it about the medium you see as problematic?

For example, it’s been mentioned Dharma Wheel is good, but social media is bad. However it’s very easy to also class forums as social media (and many people do), in terms of feature set they basically provide the same core functions. Presumably people don’t want forums shutdown. What about youtube, that’s usually classed as social media these days. Some sanghas have their own social media platforms, many companies do etc. etc.

I’m not making a case for social media, I’m just interested to get to the root of what people see as the problematic parts. “Shutdown social media” is too vague for a real policy, there would have to be specific functionality that it banned.

As a policy maker what is it you do? Or as a software engineer how to do you attempt to avoid inadvertent negative impact of your platform?
No-one here has really defined what they mean by "social media" but I think you're right, "social media" does include forums like DW and (in response to an earlier post) email and the old usenet groups should also be included.

But where I see the difference between good social media and bad is that the good ones' prime function is to provide a service and the bad ones' prime function is to channel advertising to their users. As soon as they start selling eyeballs to big business, they alter the medium to make it more addictive, to be able to sell more eyeballs. :toilet:
In those terms, the forum software is fine. The site owner pays for it, the software company makes its money out of selling (or renting - I haven't checked) the software and we, the users, are not sucked into using it by any dirty tricks and aren't bombarded with "sponsored content" or tracked from site to site around the internet when we leave this one. (Facebook does exactly that, in case you didn't know. Google does it too: search for "caravan" and you will be magically hit with ads for caravans, camping holidays, theme parks ... )

We know there is no such thing as a free lunch but there needs to be a reasonable balance between the benefit we gain from a service and the costs (in privacy and sanity) we pay for it. And there should be transparency about those costs!
Basically, getting away from Apple, Google, Amazon and FB when you can is a good idea. All of those monsters want to own your whole life. There are workarounds for some of the problems - ad-blockers, tracker blockers (e.g. Privacy Badger). DuckDuckGo is a good search engine and doesn't track anyone, and Firefox is free and gets you away from Chrome, Edge or whatever.
:jedi:

That said, using them (as much on your own terms as possible) is sometimes unavoidable and sometimes avoidable but worth the cost. I use FB but carefully. I use an Android phone because I need a phone. Etc.

:namaste:
Kim
dharmafootsteps
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by dharmafootsteps »

Kim O'Hara wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 12:18 pm
dharmafootsteps wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 8:08 am “The medium is inherently bad” “Shutdown all social media”

What do people mean by those sorts of comments? What specifically is it about the medium you see as problematic?

For example, it’s been mentioned Dharma Wheel is good, but social media is bad. However it’s very easy to also class forums as social media (and many people do), in terms of feature set they basically provide the same core functions. Presumably people don’t want forums shutdown. What about youtube, that’s usually classed as social media these days. Some sanghas have their own social media platforms, many companies do etc. etc.

I’m not making a case for social media, I’m just interested to get to the root of what people see as the problematic parts. “Shutdown social media” is too vague for a real policy, there would have to be specific functionality that it banned.

As a policy maker what is it you do? Or as a software engineer how to do you attempt to avoid inadvertent negative impact of your platform?
No-one here has really defined what they mean by "social media" but I think you're right, "social media" does include forums like DW and (in response to an earlier post) email and the old usenet groups should also be included.

But where I see the difference between good social media and bad is that the good ones' prime function is to provide a service and the bad ones' prime function is to channel advertising to their users. As soon as they start selling eyeballs to big business, they alter the medium to make it more addictive, to be able to sell more eyeballs. :toilet:
In those terms, the forum software is fine. The site owner pays for it, the software company makes its money out of selling (or renting - I haven't checked) the software and we, the users, are not sucked into using it by any dirty tricks and aren't bombarded with "sponsored content" or tracked from site to site around the internet when we leave this one. (Facebook does exactly that, in case you didn't know. Google does it too: search for "caravan" and you will be magically hit with ads for caravans, camping holidays, theme parks ... )

We know there is no such thing as a free lunch but there needs to be a reasonable balance between the benefit we gain from a service and the costs (in privacy and sanity) we pay for it. And there should be transparency about those costs!
Basically, getting away from Apple, Google, Amazon and FB when you can is a good idea. All of those monsters want to own your whole life. There are workarounds for some of the problems - ad-blockers, tracker blockers (e.g. Privacy Badger). DuckDuckGo is a good search engine and doesn't track anyone, and Firefox is free and gets you away from Chrome, Edge or whatever.
:jedi:

That said, using them (as much on your own terms as possible) is sometimes unavoidable and sometimes avoidable but worth the cost. I use FB but carefully. I use an Android phone because I need a phone. Etc.

:namaste:
Kim
Agreed, I largely think a lot of the problem comes from the “user is the product” vs “service is the product” distinction.

When the user is the product, for these social media giants to be effective businesses they’re very highly incentivised to optimise UI/UX and algorithms for user engagement. Combine that with human psychology/physiology and you start getting dopamine flywheels for things that push for screen time through emotional reaction, from that emerges polarisation etc.

I think on balance getting rid of social platforms that are paid for through advertising would probably be a net positive. There is a little complexity to the issue though. For example, on the surface Zuck’s old stated aim of connecting the world, and his commitment to keeping it free to users doesn’t sound so bad. Personally I’d be happy to put my money where my mouth is and pay for a service that is advertising free, doesn’t collect data, and doesn’t have algorithms that encourage excessive use. However that would exclude many of my current Facebook contacts who come from countries and backgrounds where they could never afford to pay a commercially viable price for such a service.

I agree on your sentiment around the idea of “selling eyeballs to big business”, however I also think there’s more to it. Social media is as much about small business and individuals as it is big business. One of the revelations of Web 2.0, of which social media is a key part, is opening up the web from being read-only for most people, the domain of big businesses, to a more egalatarian web where everyone can participate. This shows on social media. I never see adverts from the likes of Nike, Pepsi, Nestle, Walmart etc. I see them from much much smaller companies, even sole traders. Social media really opened advertising as a medium to the little guys, where previously it mostly was only available to big businesses.

There are a huge number of small businesses that would fail overnight were advertising on social media to be shutdown. Big business would survive however, they would just go back to the old advertising channels. Whereas the small scale entrepreneurs, artisans, service provides would have to go back to working for those big businesses.
Malcolm
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by Malcolm »

dharmafootsteps wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 8:08 am
I’m not making a case for social media, I’m just interested to get to the root of what people see as the problematic parts. “Shutdown social media” is too vague for a real policy, there would have to be specific functionality that it banned.
It is not social media that is the issue, it is Facebook, specifically, that is a cancer gnawing away at social comity.
dharmafootsteps
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by dharmafootsteps »

Malcolm wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 2:12 pm
dharmafootsteps wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 8:08 am
I’m not making a case for social media, I’m just interested to get to the root of what people see as the problematic parts. “Shutdown social media” is too vague for a real policy, there would have to be specific functionality that it banned.
It is not social media that is the issue, it is Facebook, specifically, that is a cancer gnawing away at social comity.
I agree, Facebook sucks, but currently it’s legal. So what about it should be made illegal, without inadvertently shutting down things that are not a problem, or are even positive in other web applications?
Malcolm
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by Malcolm »

dharmafootsteps wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 2:20 pm So what about it should be made illegal...
It needs to be broken up for antitrust reasons, and what remains needs strict federal oversight.
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Queequeg
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by Queequeg »

Johnny Dangerous wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 5:55 am
SilenceMonkey wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 5:33 am
Johnny Dangerous wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 5:28 am

That could have just as easily been AOL instant messenger or something if things had gone a different direction.

That is part of what gives FB it's monopoly though, the crazy amount of processing power, server farms, etc. So it's not just the software, but the fact that it is so now so gargantuan that it has hardware well out of most companies reach.

I quit using it in 2018 and was amazed by how miserable it had been making me. I still use messenger though.
Absolutely. I've also been trying to lessen FB's impact in my life. There's this one book that helped a lot, actually.

"Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport.
Looks like an interesting book, maybe I'll give it a look.

Only social media I use is this site and occasionally a locals.com group.

Personally it felt -way- better than I expected to stop using FB, and it seems like a lot of my friends and family did at the same time, or at least became way less frequent users.

It's true that I can't keep in touch with farther flung acquaintances, but if anything I feel that has actually been a good thing. There's a kind of background bandwidth that gets taken up by all these vague relationships that aren't really relationships, but somehow FB makes you think they might be.

QQ mentioned earlier regretting some things he'd said to people on FB, I had that too. Hell, I had one whole "friendship" that lasted a year and ended up in a big fight and a lot of pain. All for a relationship that really doesn't mean much. I actually ended up burning bridges with people I hadn't seen in years. Now if I run into those people again instead of being able to rekindle our friendship, we have this shitty, awkward FB conflict to sift through.

Here on DW at least there is a core group of people who have skin in the game, that I have "known" in some sense for a while. It's plenty raucous but there is something about this format that I think has more positives than modern social media.

Having that bandwidth back from FB really feels worth it to me. I didn't know if it would when I quit it.

I also quit because I went to school to study addiction, and it is pretty hard to do that and continue using Facebook, once you see it for what it is. I think that's what put me over the edge. I would say it's "like a drug" but it's not because at least with drugs sometimes you have fun, FB is more like smoking, it's pleasurable here and there but mostly it's just this exhausting crappy habit that slowly chips away at your (mental, emotional in this case) health.

Here's but one example:

The "endless scroll" on sites like Youtube and Facebook works about the way the lack of clocks in a casino does. It keeps you hitting that button and getting that little dopamine hit without being oriented at all in time, which makes it that much more likely you just keep going.

I don't know that there have been any studies yet, but I'm willing to bet some kind of detailed fMRI of heavy users brains on Facebook and other social media would be pretty similar to the brains of compulsive gamblers, etc...only perhaps with less pleasure and often getting sucked into a kind of reward loop based on anger, exclusion/inclusion and some kind of tribalism.
You were one of the people who influenced me to delete my account. I don't remember specifics, but it was something along the lines of getting to look at it as an addiction. The immediate cause was some stupid political argument with a cousin who, other than his Trumpism, I really like. I need to go an mend that.

I think what distinguishes this crowd here at DW is that we're bound by dharma practice. We might have nothing else in common except that we're trying to figure out emptiness. A person's comment on that either resonates or it doesn't. Maybe disagreement can get a little hot, but in the end, what brings us together is that we have a common goal. We might go at each other off and on for years, but the arguments are pretty circumscribed. The political threads are a different story... which is why they're in the ghetto down at the bottom of the landing page.

Back to the point - On FB, the contacts are often a grab bag of random relationships. There's family and actual friends, then more distant friends, or friends from the past, and then acquaintances and the random person you had a good conversation with at a party 5 years ago. And then all those groups and paid posts. Offering a random like or passing comment to a post brings the people who posted, commented and liked that same post closer into your orbit. The net effect, for someone like me is that I end up with a lot of other FB crackheads in my feed, mutually enabling each other. Incidentally, more disagreement makes more activity, which feeds into the algorithm and brings us yet closer together. Its diabolically brilliant and incredibly toxic.

My wife still has an account, but all she does is like baby pictures from her friends and never comments, so her feed is just a bunch of "first day of school" "first bike ride" "Oh, look at this mess Charlie made"... "anyone have a recommendation for a local yoga class?" Its all very tame and insipid.

My kids instinctively hate FB, at least for now. When we take a picture, they say, "Don't post this!" Who knows how long this will last. We're keeping them away from the internet for now, though they've discovered how to access youtube on the tv and watch youtube celebrities who post videos of themselves playing minecraft, until we discover what they're doing. They figure out how to access this stuff themselves, so I don't know how we'll keep them away from it short of banishing devices from our house. My strategy is to get them involved in real life activities like sports and musical instruments, and make them play outside, regardless of what they actually want. We have enough families around us who tend toward "get out of the house and play" child rearing philosophy so that works in our favor. Instilling an appreciation of IRL stuff I hope will temper their interest in the virtual stuff, which I am afraid is only going to get more subtle and insidious as tech advances. The potential of VR put to use by companies like FB is going to be even worse than this.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
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Chenda
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by Chenda »

If it wasn't such a necessity these days for university, I wouldn't even be using it. I used to actively use Twitter and Instagram before, but I now almost always just use Facebook for Messenger and class groups.

There's also Discord, but I would say it's a tad better than Facebook in the sense that I get to choose the servers I'm in and people I interact with.
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Queequeg
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Re: Facebook is bad

Post by Queequeg »

Kim O'Hara wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 12:18 pm But where I see the difference between good social media and bad is that the good ones' prime function is to provide a service and the bad ones' prime function is to channel advertising to their users. As soon as they start selling eyeballs to big business, they alter the medium to make it more addictive, to be able to sell more eyeballs. :toilet:
I think there's a good number of us who remember when forums like this were new tech, and a whole lot more. I remember very distinctly back in high school (this will very accurately date me) in the very early 90s - going to the school library which had access to remote digital databases and some new fangled service called Netscape (which the librarian showed as as part of the research tutorial) and finding articles about Jane's Addiction from local alt newspapers on the West Coast. Mind was blown. Up to that point, we had Rolling Stone, and since I was in the NY metro region, we could sometimes get copies of the Village Voice. The rest of my music information was very local 'zines and small circulation publications I could find at the record store a couple towns over when I made the pilgrimage. Oh, and Thrasher. For an alt kid like me, finding troves of information on little known stuff and then finding communities of people who were also into this stuff was a world changing revelation.

Back then, I remember all this commentary about how the internet and the free exchange of information was going to change the world. And I think the countercultural momentum was real and palpable ack then. The internet was a collection of blocky websites put up by nerds of all stripes about stuff the mainstream world knew nothing about. It was a cool secret.

Things changed when the internet started getting monetized in the dot com boom.

Now, information is just a deluge, and I feel so much better when I just shut the spigot off.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
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