Is Facebook deteriorating?

Siren2011 · Post by **Siren2011** » Mon Apr 04, 2011 4:47 pm

Why is Facebook the one social networking site where it's inappropriate to add random strangers? (Back in the golden days of Myspace, this was not only commonplace, but it was awesome because it opened whole new dimentions for you to explore.) I thought this was the whole point of social networking: meeting new and cool peeps around the world in an online orgy and developing friendships with them/discussing interests, etc. I can't help but feel like there is less emphasis on the "social" aspect and more use of the "liking" button, which is kinda sad IMO.

I'm up for some superficial chit-chat every now and then, but when it's impossible to know anyone on a deeper level, that just defeats the whole point of having an account there.

How many of you use Facebook or have left? Do you use it for business, or a social outlet? I've also noticed that creativity (such as poetry) is met with blank stares (i.e. no comments) and banal comments like "I'm going out for dinner tonight!" get seventeen "likes". In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, "What is up with that?"

Also worth mentioning is the complete lack of a search option which allows you to find people based on similar interests. Why hasn't this feature been implemented?

Udderdude · Post by **Udderdude** » Mon Apr 04, 2011 6:40 pm

Duh. Facebook is for people or acquaintances you already know IRL (Or met some way besides Facebook). It's not MySpace, and trust me, that's a good thing :p

If anything is deteriorating Facebook it's the over-emergence of social gaming and their continual mucking up of privacy issues.

captpain · Post by **captpain** » Mon Apr 04, 2011 9:52 pm

Ugggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

gct · Post by **gct** » Mon Apr 04, 2011 10:27 pm

Nothing personal, but I don't see why it's a problem with Facebook when your friends are lame.

Try adding some people who you know will appreciate some intelligent discourse, and delete the people who never post anything worthwhile so that your main page feed isn't cluttered with mundane crap.

Stormwatch · Post by **Stormwatch** » Mon Apr 04, 2011 10:51 pm

Siren2011 wrote:I've also noticed that creativity (such as poetry) is met with blank stares (i.e. no comments) and banal comments like "I'm going out for dinner tonight!" get seventeen "likes". In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, "What is up with that?"

Duh. If you want to do creative stuff, deviantART is the place to put it.

dcharlie · Post by **dcharlie** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 12:01 am

If anything is deteriorating Facebook it's the over-emergence of social gaming and their continual mucking up of privacy issues.

this basically - and there seems to be a cycle -

at first it's new and exciting, you find your immediate friends/family, then you add your school friends, old work mates, etc
Then you get to a saturation point where there's no one left to add - and then you start adding friends of friends...

Then basically you start to check less and less. At least that's what's happened with several people i know. You end up down to checking once every week or so and that's it. UNLESS you are hooked into one of the games :/

Blackbird · Post by **Blackbird** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 12:06 am

Facebook was a rotting corpse to begin with. It's founded by people that have no respect for personal privacy. They are widely quoted as stating that their customers are "idiots for trusting them with their personal information." I find the idea that these arrogant twits got movie deals and ludicrous wealth at the expense of their customers to be disgusting. I don't know about you guys, but I don't support companies that think their customers are fodder.

Unfortunately, I must occasionally tolerate Facebook as a necessary evil, because some people refuse to use anything else.

BryanM · Post by **BryanM** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 12:09 am

You can't exactly convey very in-depth thoughts on the medium. If you had something to say, you'd use Livejournal or Blogspot or etc.

Better than twitter, when you can't even express that you've taken two poops.

neorichieb1971 · Post by **neorichieb1971** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 12:15 am

Are your friends so important to you that you use FB to cover 95% of your social calender with them, hardly ever meeting them in person?

Because of FB I don't hardly see some of my friends anymore. On the other hand I know people all over the world so it happens to be a positive thing in that respect. The problem with FB is that its linked to just about everything. I open up a photobucket account and its linked to my FB account etc. You buy a phone and it bleeps for every update.. FFS thats just unreal and pointless. It should be that you have to walk to a computer and want to be on it. Obviously people set their phones up for it but I think its just OTT personally.

I know people that have FB, Email, Twitter and Skype on their phones, its pointless going out with them.. You might as well FB them or text them because in their company they are constantly doing it to others. I've gone to dinner with people and spent the whole time looking out the window whilst people happily input data in their phones. grrr.

drauch · Post by **drauch** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 12:18 am

Social networking is the epitome of evil.

dcharlie · Post by **dcharlie** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 12:32 am

Are your friends so important to you that you use FB to cover 95% of your social calender with them, hardly ever meeting them in person?

nope.

Facebook is an additional tool, not a replacement - it's great for me personally: most of the people i grew up with in my hope town moved across the world, so i can at least keep in touch with them so if they are in the UK/Japan at the same time, or i'm in there country we can meet up. Same with people from Uni. I can see what my extended family are up to too.

maxlords · Post by **maxlords** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 2:01 am

neorichieb1971 wrote: I've gone to dinner with people and spent the whole time looking out the window whilst people happily input data in their phones. grrr.

Holy fuck! I thought I was the only one this happened to! It's happened to me a bunch of times lately since smartphones became the "in" thing for everyone to have! I went out for sushi with 5 coworkers a little while ago and we all ordered, then bam, 5 smartphones out and games are being played apps are being downloaded conversation is all about apps if there is any. It was bizarre. I'm the only holdout on the smartphone front of my friends and it's getting to be inconvenient NOT to have one. I had lunch at work in the cafeteria last week and the same thing....6 or 7 phones out, texts firing off willy nilly, conversation to a minimum. Even at the theater....my one friend is looking up reviews of the movie we're about to see....while the coming attractions are playing!! You're already IN the theater to watch it.... *sigh*

I'm waiting for text to replace speech as the prefered medium.

Hell...the other day I was gonna go to a guy's house and he goes "let me text you the directions". I said...you can't...I don't text. He didn't know what to do...I had to ask for the address!

I hate how dependent people have become on these things...

Siren2011 · Post by **Siren2011** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 2:11 am

Nothing personal, but I don't see why it's a problem with Facebook when your friends are lame.

No offense taken, and I see where you're coming from. There are still a couple of people on there who I really care about. Most of the people on my friends list used to be pretty close to me, so I guess I'm trying in vain to renew some of those friendships that are never going to be renewed. That's life, I guess. People move on/change. Moving plays a big part in this too. I just arrived in Texas and hardly know anyone. That will change once I go to University of Houston this Summer, though.

at first it's new and exciting, you find your immediate friends/family, then you add your school friends, old work mates, etc
Then you get to a saturation point where there's no one left to add - and then you start adding friends of friends...

I really hate to sound like a tool, but man... it's those damn notifications that stimulate your brain for an instant that keep me there. It's fun knowing that there are people ready to converse. Being an extrovert (with some introvert traits) for the most part, I live for conversation. But this is a double edged sword, because they seldom have anything to add besides "I'm good. You?", which is a Scene-kid level of conversation. Statuses seem to be what people talk the most about, and those are almost always about little things like work or groceries. Yeahhh, not really interesting to say the least. Of course, maybe I'm just not interesting to them, in which case, who needs 'em?

Because of FB I don't hardly see some of my friends anymore.

If they rather talk to you online than in person, then they are not worthy of the title of "friends" in my mind.

Better than twitter, when you can't even express that you've taken two poops.

It's hard to convey how much I can't stand that site. I'll just leave it at this:

I'm waiting for text to replace speech as the preferred medium.

Oh, we are racing to that point. There was this girl who I used to know, who midway through conversation would flip her phone out and text someone. WTF you stupid bitch? I'm talking to you! (I didn't actually say that, but I wish I did.) It became so intolerable that I started ignoring her. THAT gave her a message. Women are funny that way. The second they know they've done someone wrong when they get the silent treatment, they act all sorry and shit.

RNGmaster · Post by **RNGmaster** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 2:16 am

maxlords wrote: I hate how dependent people have become on these things...

That's why I hold out on getting one, even though there are probably tons of great games for iDevices. I don't like being overly dependent on anything - I thought that was a basic human impulse, but apparently people don't mind being addicted if it means they can have everything supplied for their convenience.

The convenience part also bugs me - it's like the lotus-eaters from the Odyssey, where all of their desires are satisfied, so they accomplish nothing of value and just wander aimlessly. I worry that smart devices will become so practical that humans won't get anything done.

Of course, that's probably just crazy talk.

BryanM · Post by **BryanM** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 6:12 am

Siren2011 wrote:Oh, we are racing to that point. There was this girl who I used to know, who midway through conversation would flip her phone out and text someone. WTF you stupid bitch? I'm talking to you!

You should have grabbed her boob when she was distracted.

If you didn't want to touch her boob... why were you talking to her?

rancor · Post by **rancor** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 7:18 am

I had Friendster, Live Journal, Mixi, Bebo, and Myspace.. I'm sitting out Facebook and smartphones - I see how intolerable it's made other people. My wife feels the same, luckily. There really aren't that many people that I want to stay in close of contact with anyhow. I can't even tell you how many people emailed me after the Japan quake and said "I looked you up on Facebook, but I couldn't find your account..."
I suppose that by making this choice I've become "that guy". You know, kind of like "that guy" who doesn't have a TV and makes sure to let everyone know in every conversation.. haha.

austere · Post by **austere** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 8:24 am

rancor wrote:I suppose that by making this choice I've become "that guy". You know, kind of like "that guy" who doesn't have a TV and makes sure to let everyone know in every conversation.. haha.

Heh, well, in the latter case, most of the time it's in response to someone asking you if you've watched some crappy TV show, with faceshit, they ask for your account so they can "add you" to their list of similarly mediocre friends. You can't avoid mentioning that you don't have an account or watch TV for that matter. I actually had an account on there around 2005 and eventually deleted it when I became sick of all the idiots I re-encountered thanks to it, as well as the 20 or so idiots emailing me demanding that I accept their request. The funny thing is, through the 3 years I had an account, I never made a single update, never uploaded a profile photo, never uploaded a photograph just added friends and maybe wished a few people a happy birthday.

In Australia and the UK, it's pretty much replacing instant messaging, even mobile phones for certain people. Unlike the US where people might make 7 updates per week, people here make 20 updates per day. Some morons even used it to invite their friends to a wedding reception. Whatever, they can enjoy their cesspit, I'll have no part in this pretentious anti-social networking (a.k.a data mining) mental illness. All the interesting people are not on it -- or use it regularly anyway. They're welcome to contact me, if they can find me.

So to answer the question of whether faceshit is deteriorating or not: it isn't. It has always been this bad, it just took certain people a while longer to realise this.

BPzeBanshee · Post by **BPzeBanshee** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 8:58 am

Meh. I just use MSN. Might consider getting a Facebook account if only for my girlfriend's sake but otherwise not a chance.

I get enough topic reply notifications from this forum as it is.

neorichieb1971 · Post by **neorichieb1971** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 9:48 am

dcharlie wrote:
Are your friends so important to you that you use FB to cover 95% of your social calender with them, hardly ever meeting them in person?
nope.

Facebook is an additional tool, not a replacement - it's great for me personally: most of the people i grew up with in my hope town moved across the world, so i can at least keep in touch with them so if they are in the UK/Japan at the same time, or i'm in there country we can meet up. Same with people from Uni. I can see what my extended family are up to too.

It brings the far ones closer, but it definitely moves the closer ones further away. I have a friend that lives on the other side of town (15 mins drive) and I've not seen him since Feb 2010. He's quite happy to use FB and email and he's one of these people that is always texting, skyping, twittering. Perhaps its the people not the tool. As with everything you can abuse it, get addicted to it or in the worst case scenario, perhaps pretends to like you

Thread name change - Does Facebook deteriorate people?

dcharlie · Post by **dcharlie** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 10:02 am

It brings the far ones closer, but it definitely moves the closer ones further away. I have a friend that lives on the other side of town (15 mins drive) and I've not seen him since Feb 2010. He's quite happy to use FB and email and he's one of these people that is always texting, skyping, twittering. Perhaps its the people not the tool. As with everything you can abuse it, get addicted to it or in the worst case scenario, perhaps pretends to like you

i don't think this is true either - i have several different circles of friends (gaming (japanese/foreign), futsal (japanese/foreign), etc) and now when they post up social events that i might have missed, i'm invited and i can go and catch up. Plus i will usually drop a "let's go for a pint!" messages - i think it's a great tool for that - i think the problem is if you LET it replace your social life. No one to blame there but the individual users IMO. *shrug*

having a kid has played way more havok on my social life than Facebook - one has made i more difficult, the other has facilitated it.

neorichieb1971 · Post by **neorichieb1971** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 10:15 am

Yes, I get your point.. the point i'm making is that some people can't wait till the end of the day to read whats going on. If they had their phone taken away it would be taking their lifeline away. Facebook has created addicted users who can no longer live without being connected at all times. Obviously thats not you or me, but out of a billion users, it definitely affects some of them.

Im off too work.. Don't tweet me ok?

burgerkingdiamond · Post by **burgerkingdiamond** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 1:51 pm

I think it can serve some purpose. It's good for me to at least keep some kind of contact with friends that don't live in the immediate area. And I have no problem ingoring friend requests so I try to keep it somewhat restricted to people I would actually interact with if I ever saw them in public.

Basically though, it is useless. I only go on there as a time killer. There's nothing interesting about it really.

Evilmaxwar · Post by **Evilmaxwar** » Wed Apr 06, 2011 5:07 am

Fecebook

headcaseGames · Post by **headcaseGames** » Fri Apr 08, 2011 3:17 am

Personally, I don't really care for things like Facebook and twitter and find them fairly uninteresting (although twitter does get points for being a very useful tool to find very specific info quite easily, more and more).

Myspace was fun years ago when I came in after the bars closed and would hit on girls with the rest of my leftover drunk energy

Professionally, twitter and Facebook are extremely invaluable to me since I am trying to sell something and if you're kind of smart and creative, you can get a lot of useful and helpful marketing done which otherwise would have been prohibitively expensive and therefore impossible. If I didn't need them for that purpose, then I wouldn't really bother looking at them. I prefer to hang out with my friends in person, and if they live far away we generally don't talk anymore anyway!

Ixmucane2 · Post by **Ixmucane2** » Fri Apr 08, 2011 7:33 am

At first, I collected people I know as "friends" as if they were trading cards; now I still add actual real-life acquaintances as needed.
I started playing Farmville and kicked it relatively fast; now my Facebook games consist of Tetris (a remarkably good official version), arguably a very anti-social game, every few months.

Currently I read Facebook daily, occasionally finding interesting links and comments in the middle of stupid or irrelevant ones, and rarely contributing some of my own.

Improving my Facebook experience equates to improving the signal to noise ratio, but this requires deleting people, which so far I haven't had the guts for, and meeting new witty friends, which is easier said than done.

Arwing904 · Post by **Arwing904** » Fri Apr 08, 2011 11:34 am

Facebook is a very sore point for me at the moment as even though my profile is locked down tight, my account has been hacked twice in the last couple of months and im growing weary of the whole thing!

Not using it very often at all just lately so will probably close my account altogether in the not too distant future. My id there is Arwing904 but there's nothing too spectacular to see on it short of my parents being massive ABBA fans and naming me after one of the group... Oh the shame! *lol*

Domino · Post by **Domino** » Fri Apr 08, 2011 3:00 pm

I use it so I can keep up with what my friends are doing on it. I don't post a lot on my wall I just use it to spy on people. It helps a lot. I just got on FB like five months ago. I was never a fan of the site but it is the current norm so I do have to use it.

headcaseGames · Post by **headcaseGames** » Fri Apr 08, 2011 6:20 pm

http://suicidemachine.org/ if you want to destroy your account for real (otherwise, not an easily doable thing)

Bloodreign · Post by **Bloodreign** » Fri Apr 08, 2011 8:25 pm

Use it for family, classmates, drinking buddies I've long lost, and internet folks I've known about a decade or so.

Siren2011 · Post by **Siren2011** » Fri Apr 08, 2011 8:33 pm

http://suicidemachine.org/ if you want to destroy your account for real (otherwise, not an easily doable thing)

Sure it is! You just need to press the magic button on this page: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.ph ... te_account

Also, I love how this particular group has almost 100,000 members. lol.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703

shmups.system11.org

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