i mean seriously why would anyone want to check out the kraft macaroni and cheese page on facebook for anything other than a quick laff

free adspace that no one has to visit if they don't choose to. are you talking more about stuff that pops up in your feed like "Bob Johnsons likes KRAFT MAC AND CHEESE" or whatever? because i don't see why it's a company's fault that someone in your list of friends chooses to do their advertising for them.

holy shit dude

how did we both pick the same random product

what the fuck

i agree with all of this as well. the problem is not the website. from my experience, there are only two kinds of facebook users - those who use it everyday without even thinking about it and those who have become frustrated with it in some way and have found it easier to walk away completely from than contending with it.

nice vibes there haha. see we're usually on the same page about things.

i guess my main point is that, when following the money, one thing every product has in common now is an extra little blurb that says "check us out on facebook"

that's all it takes

i just think it's superflous because most people will just assume companies have their own facebook pages

but i don't ever see any of those pages because i don't make an effort to. if paid ads start showing up in my feed, then that will annoy the shit out of me. but until then, i don't really see what's so bad about the pages existing for people who want to visit them.

it's an easy way to find out when like... a bar is having something on special on a particular night and you wouldn't have visited the website but find out about something you are interested in because it shows up on your feed because you subscribed to it for that very reason.

for example

it's not all terrible and awful.

i totally understand what you're saying but the odds of that happening are not worth it to me. that bar will still be sending advertisements multiple times a day, 7 days a week, etc.

also paid ads or unpaid ads its still advertising

i think that saying that telephone and email correspondence is the same as facebook is entirely false

facebook lulls you into an inactive state of friendship that requires little to no effort on anyone's part. what i mean by that is that facebook allows you to "keep up" with "old friends" without you making any sort of effort beyond friending them on facebook. if you were to call the person or write them an e-mail then you'd actually be making an effort to be their friend.

i seriously pared down my friends list a few months back and realized my feed was clogged with even more "ads" even my "closest" friends are using fb as a promotional tool - which is the smart thing to do because its free and everyone uses it

duh. and when there's only about 5 of them that would notice if i died/left town then i don't need facebook. 2 of those 5 are my parents and they aren't even on facebook

No, the point is that I can and I don't need facebook to keep in touch with my three friends.

but why should it

That's not what I meant to say. Posting on someone's wall or sending them a facebook message is comparable to both of those things though.

But it doesn't have to. That's what I'm saying... it gives you plenty of tools to actively communicate with people.

But this, again, does not have to be an inherently bad thing. There are a lot of people that I want to keep up with scattered all over the country. I don't see them all that often (if ever), and if I tried to call them or email them regularly to stay in touch, it would just end up seeming like a burden (just because there are so many. And I don't think I need to limit the number of people I keep up with in order to make it so I can have a ten-minute conversation every week with everyone I consider a friend). I'm also interested in things acquaintances are doing. I would have no reason or desire to maintain a friendship with them outside of this context... but again, why is that bad? Superficial interactions are ok, especially if you have more meaningful communication with other people, and you know which people fit into which category.

Additionally, I live in like three different places. So there are three different groups of people I interact with IRL at different times of the year. Makes it easier to stay in touch with the ones I'm not currently living around. That's in addition to people who live far away from me throughout the year.

I dunno. I guess it boils down to me being more ok with casual acquaintances with low expectations than you are. or something.

because maybe you'll learn something from someone? i dunno, why shouldn't it? why is it inherently bad?

i already explained to you why it's bad but you decided to fault me for it which is another example of why it's bad

if you don't like facebook and have no use for it and thinks it simplifies, cheapens, and exploits human companionship to sell products and turn us all into self-marketers at all times then it's YOUR problem and YOU'RE missing out and YOU suck.

i didn't say that? or didn't mean to imply it if i did?

you don't have to like it. but can't you also see that not everyone has to hate it like you do?

you mean like letters, email, telephone, and actually physically talking with someone ?


oh, bully for you

i think one of the major problems is that everyone thinks being friendly and actual friendship are the same and they aren't. if you can't keep up with your friends they aren't really your friends.

civilization is crumbling

when all of your "friends" are casual acquaintances that blow you off and never hang out with you or speak to you outside of parties i was invited to via facebook, then yes perhaps i am not ok with this at all

nope

because they are Wrong.

haha

i am glad you don't take me super cereal, slunken

i'm temporarily deleting mine while it does the timeline changeover. then i'll have to dedicate a couple hours to hiding everything before this year >:I

heh

i spent a morning looking through mine a couple months ago. there was surprisingly little that i felt like i had to delete. but i've been proactively deleting stuff i don't want on there basically since i got it though. so that might be why.

it was still weird to see wall posts from 2006. no one i knew really had a grasp on how to use it back then. or so it seems.

you had to install a plug in to even do wall posts as i recall

remember all the facebook apps ugh

I don't remember anything like that.

well that doesn't really mean anything, it's not like human memory is infallible

i'm not googling the history of facebook updates though so it doesn't really matter

Let me clarify: I have never installed a plug in for Facebook since I've had an account (November 2004).

facebook is a clunky mess. buggy, horrible to control. way too much going on. i just look at it usually because it beats talking on the phone.

and i just turn everything off (like social apps and all that) and use f.b. purity to hide everything but the newsfeed.

bam.

it is surprising how willfully people will expose personal information to facebook. i did it pretty liberally when i got mine, then i deleted it all after realizing that facebook will save and use EVERYTHING. makes me uncomfortable. facebook wants to own access to your marketing identity. god, i'm starting to sound like the omega concern.

But that's exactly the point for me. For example, there's a girl who used to be a close friend of mine. Along the way, both our lives changed a lot--we actually lost touch for about 2 years (changed e-mail addresses, moved cities, etc.), and it was only by luck that we found each other again on a message board. Now it's been a while again since we last talked (really talked), but it's nice to know that she's within reach. We know where to find each other. It doesn't replace an active friendship, but I never expected that from FB.

There's also this guy who used to be my friend. The last time we talked must have been in 2003 or so. I still google him every now and then to see if I can find a way to get in touch with him. But nothing. Just vanished. Kind of sucks.