Original sharing of personal stories -- rather than posts about public information like news articles -- dropped 21 percent year over year as of mid-2015

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-07/facebook-said-to-face-decline-in-people-posting-personal-content

Mark can go to HELL

Interesting, because that's about the point that I made a conscious decision to stop posting any personal details and only post articles. And then at the end of 2015 I decided to deactivate my account and not use FB at all.

>21 percent year over year

Well, at that rate they have about 3 years to figure out how to alter course.

>that's about the point

I was recently asked by an FB-paranoid, elder travel demographic in the rv forums to post a tutorial on how to set up a gutted account.   FB sucks for technical discussions by comparison to forum software, but if you want younger members in your group you have to go to FB. The younger social users look at forums as being too rigidly structured and somewhat daunting.

Quote from: ergophobe on April 09, 2016, 05:05:17 PM
Interesting, because that's about the point that I made a conscious decision to stop posting any personal details and only post articles. And then at the end of 2015 I decided to deactivate my account and not use FB at all.

Yes i left late last year.

Don't think i've posted it here before but i found it annoying that they parsed all posts and private messages for 'illegal' URLs.

You can't post a message or send a PM with the URL farcebook.com in it.

Strangely, you can't post pat2pdf.org in a post or PM either, it's a harmless patent-to-pdf download site.

So, yes, THE HELL WITH MARK ;+}


Cheers,

Gary.

I deleted rather than deactivated.

I deactivated because the *first* time I deleted and then my wife was in the middle organizing my rock climbing plans with people used to contacting me via Facebook and she told me she was quitting as my social director and I had to at least get an FB account for long enough to contact those people... and I got sucked in.

The thing is, there are people I'm pretty much only in contact with through FB and some of the best intellectual discussions I've had in recent years have been on Facebook - writing, history, politics. There's nowhere else that I discuss those much. So I was not sure I wanted to give that up.

What I did want to give up and why is long, convoluted and perhaps conflicting. I wrote it all down ad nauseum and in extenso at the time... but I'll spare you the details

Yes we get trapped because so many others use it.

I got out before i got too entangled.

God it sounds like we're discussing an actual relationship ;+}

Really, a gutted and silo-ed account is fine. It's the tug of your *relationships* that keep pulling you astray, you emotional fuckers.

FB still sucks at ads, btw.

It needs a reading management script ...some flagging options for the user. If it had an rss feed, I'd program in a "Disinterested" flag that would kill the thread as Active.

A BOT  you mean

I have a FB account mainly to keep in contact with old high school friends.  I hardly ever post, but even if I didn't have an account FB would still have a fingerprint of me.  Some of my friends and family have posted and tagged pictures of me, if I wasn't on FB I wouldn't know it was happening.  So, even if you remove your account you are probably still going to have data about you in there -- unless you have been a hermit for the last several decades*.

^{*My sister posted a very cringe worthy picture of me from 1991 the other day.}

Alas, the days of needing a release to publish someone's picture for things that don't qualify as "news" are long gone.

Our digital histories are certain to be treated as personal cruise missiles which others will use to cause us harm if we ever become prominent.

Yeah, I keep telling my kids that the old adage about how anything on the Internet is like pee in a swimming pool and hope that they have the sense to not put themselves in compromising positions.  However, I do think values will probably shift some as it becomes apparent that everybody has less-than-stellar moments well documented and in public view.

Agree w/ LM. You are being profiled by 3rd party input.  But, at least on the surface,  FB seems to wait for you to acknowledge/confirm.

And if you do not have a facebook account, you cannot be tagged.