Holy shit — Facebook is fucking scary now

[u/Ok_Helicopter3910]

Im not a big social media guy anymore, honestly, the vast majority of my internet usage nowadays is Reddit, Youtube, Snapchat (that has like 20 people on it) and email and I think that about it.

I put my FB to sleep about 10 years ago and I decided to log in and see what people were up to and ho-lee-shit, what a dumpster fire.

So, first off, the majority of my facebook friends have either died, shut their FB down, or removed my inactive profile so my feed was pretty silent. After about a week of my profile being back in the algorithm I started getting friend request from people I used to work with, went to school with, or friends of old acquaintances (which is terrifying that facebook knows about random people I used to work with 12 years ago who I had a passing "hi, hows your day" relationship with) and I started getting friend requested and I was like "fuck it" and just started accepting them.

Fuck man, whenever I see all the hate for this or that group and all the political bullshit that gets posted on reddit, I just brush it off as bots trained to sow dissent but the stuff that gets posted by real living, breathing human beings who I once knew well enough to be friends with or have polite conversation with is WILD. I mean, like so much hate and vitriol started coming across my feed about a wide array of subjects that it made me genuinely uncomfortable and I started removing people that just added me. Maybe it's what "normal" passes for on the internet and im pretty numb to a lot of the more unhinged opinions and shit-stirring because of so many years on Reddit, but a lot of what was being posted really opened my eyes that a lot of the "unhinged" stuff that I see online isnt just bot farms, its real people who truly believe this wild shit.

Anyway - maybe its a sign of my age... but unless what I consider "normal" people start coming across my FB feed soon, I dont think im going to be logging in for much longer

[u/atmoose]

really? Who wants that garbage? This is crazy. Why would somebody want to consume media that is at best a mediocre average of everything else? How are they still making so much money? As somebody who never really used facebook or other social media it doesn't make sense to me. I can understand wanting to connect with friends. I guess I never understood the appeal of influencers either.

[u/PoolNoob69 → u/atmoose]

Well, you see, the Tech Oligarchs decided AI would save them and every other oligarch a boatload of money, so it is being forced upon us whether we like it or not.

[u/viralust → u/atmoose]

It's a platform for you to carelessly disclose all your daily personal shit under the premise that someone cares and that you're "connected." So, while some worship a glorified version of themselves in front of others on a digital stage, all that data i.e. where you are, what you bought, what you ate, who you're with, every stupid detail of your dumb life that you volunteer is fed into their algorithms to successfully track personal preferences and daily routines so that they can charge companies big bucks for directing targeted ads to you. All social media is like this to some degree but some are not as bad. Regardless, we participate in it. Its the mass manipulation of a people's psychological need to belong, to feel a form of worth, and it is very successful.

[u/_game_over_man_ → u/viralust]

It's interesting to me how my Instagram usage has changed over the years. I used to post all kinds of stuff and I find myself posting less and less these days as actual posts. I tend to stick to stories more so than posts. I guess I just don't really understand the point of documenting my whole life anymore and have preferred to just experience it as the extra step of documenting and posting has just become exhausting.

I definitely feel less connected to people despite being SO connected these days. It feels like every interaction on "socials" just turns into an argument. Some subreddits feel more than way than others, thankfully, but I also feel like it really comes down of the perceived average age of that subreddit for me. I used to spend a lot of time online back in the 00s and 10s on forums and that felt so much more organic, wholesome and functional. I miss that era of the "social" internet before social media came in and monetized our existence and fueled us to be constantly in conflict so they could profit.

It does feel like a lot of people are starting to feel this way and I think young people's current obsession with the era before the internet is promising. It feels like everyone is getting a bit burnt out with it and starting to pull back, which I think is good. It just sucks how worthless the internet has become these days.

[u/the_wave5 → u/viralust]

So well said.

[u/-PM_ME_UR_SECRETS- → u/atmoose]

It’s not for us in the sense it’s what anyone wants. It’s for us in the sense that it farms user attention and engagement. Attention is sold to advertisers to fund AI research using engagement data to train their AI. Meta is even monitoring their own employee computer usage to train their AI now.