I think this question [originally posed for Ask Slashdot] was actually triggered by the New Zealand massacre. One aspect of the tragedy is that the monster chose Facebook as his primary broadcast media for his butchery, deliberately hoping to start a trend of murder. I think that makes Facebook an accessory to the crime, but we can't kill Facebook, can we? And would it matter anyway? If not Facebook, then some other website...
I hope you have a better solution and will share it here, but here is the best one I've been able to come up with: FFF (Five For Facebook).
Starting immediately, my objective is to limit my contact with Facebook to five minutes per day. FFF. I'm going to check to see if anyone is trying to contact me via Facebook, and if so and if I'm willing to be contacted, then I'll tell that person what channel to use. I will NOT write or even link on Facebook, but only use Facebook as a pager. Period.
I think FFF is the right thing for me, but extending it under Kant's Categorical Imperative, I think widespread adoption of FFF would also hit Facebook where it lives. Engagement time DOWN.
Still hoping for your better suggestions, but I'll go ahead and raise three implementation concerns as secondary questions:
(1) What is the best way to mark my Facebook account as an FFF limited communications channel?
(2) What are the best alternative channels to use? Perhaps a scratch email address is the simplest? I don't want to be handing out my real email address just because someone claims to be an old friend.
(3) What about legitimate groups that insist on announcing their public events on Facebook? Any way to handle them within FFF or just better to sanction such groups, too?
One more time: I really want to hear your better idea or improvements to the FFF idea. I for one don't need any more horror stories about how bad Facebook is.
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It's actually a combination of Questions (1) and (2) that I'm struggling with. I want a way for someone to signal me on Facebook that they want to communicate with me on some other channel. And the goal is to fit it within 5 minutes. Now I realize that I'm trying to define a communications protocol.
ReplyDeleteOne subproblem is how to tell that the signal is coming from a legitimate person. This is actually the same problem I've been wrestling with for a long time, and not just on Facebook. My suggested solution is basically challenge-and-response approach. I actually want to issue these 3 conditional challenges, (1) "If you claim to be an old friend (coworker, teacher, student, etc.), then what information can you share to convince me you're not an imposter?" (2) "If you claim to have a legitimate reason to contact me, then what is it?" (3) If you are a spammer, then how can I most quickly nuke your identity?" I also recommend a handshake challenge for Challenge (1) in the form of a question that will indicate that I, too, am not an imposter. But under FFF, I want to accomplish this within 5 minutes for a new correspondent.
Then there is the question of the best alternative channel to use, which is actually a matching problem. We both need access to that channel. For example, if the other person has a Twitter account, then they can signal me on Facebook and I will check my mostly dormant and unused Twitter ID. Ditto Ello or LinkedIn or Line or WhatsApp or WeChat or KakaoTalk or Hangouts... Is Slashdot a possible channel? Some of those channels are searchable, and others aren't. Since I am not planning to actively purge my Facebook account (and don't even trust Facebook to delete my personal information if I tried), I don't want to risk granting "friend" status on Facebook as part of the communication protocol.
There's also a symmetry subproblem in the communications protocol. I don't want to ask for information I prefer not to or refuse to provide. I've already mentioned my "real" email address in this category.
And whatever it is, whatever steps the communication protocol involves, the Facebook part should be limited to something that fits within 5 minutes. Seems like the questions are trickier than I originally thought they were.
To enforce the time limit, I'm going to use a 5-minute countdown timer for that purpose, though I actually forgot to visit Facebook at all on the first day of FFF. I want to decide on a good regular time. Right now the best candidate seems to be early, but not too early in the morning, while also considering how flexible my mornings tend to be.
Thank you, that's an excellent thought. I think I can even check for that without using the 5 minutes. If I can plan a surgical strike I should be able to dash in and change the settings within the 5-minute time limit.
ReplyDeleteThe LinkedIn email notifications are usually on the edges of being annoying or intrusive, but most days I am quite content to glance at them without looking at LinkedIn. I cannot say that I feel like I've missed anything important by that approach. I actually scan them once a day during the evening news.
Perhaps the funny part is that since I wrote that comment a couple of days ago I haven't actually looked at Facebook. Maybe I'm now at the FFF minutes per week level?
Already up to my second thought... Whenever you try to do anything on Facebook, it is their objective to make it as time-consuming as possible. I think that's probably the main reason I have spent so little time searching through the complexities of the various settings. I'm sure Facebook counts that as part of their "user engagement" time. And they always regard more of my time as better for Facebook.
Since I don't even know how long this Journal entry will remain active before archiving itself, I have decided that the best repository for FFF-related information is my personal blog version at https://eco-epistemology.blogspot.com/2019/03/how-to-solve-problems-of-social-media.html, so I'm going to add a copy of this comment as a reply there. I guess for completeness (or symmetry?) and to provide the rest of the context I should include the Slashdot link to your thought at https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13590104&cid=58291784.
Also for completeness, I should remember to report on the results of my research, but that will probably go directly to the blog comments.
Time for the closing joke: "What!? You don't use Facebook? Are you sure you exist? And how will strangers find and annoy you?"
Now about my new Facebook status: Disengaged!
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking about what to say in parting from Facebook, even if the parting is only partial and imperfect. And above all, needs to be limited to 5 minutes at a time.
I have decided on four initial steps:
(1) My disengaged status message, which I will draft below (in this very comment). Then when I start my timed visit to Facebook, it's just a cut-and-paste into my main status box. [First draft finished below. Wound up divided into a small header and a longer rambling and polemic explanation. Not satisfactory, but I can always replace it with a better version. Something more positive? However, this morning my thoughts towards Facebook are truly that negative.]
(2) Checking for "urgent" incoming notifications. That basically covers two categories. If someone is trying to contact me, then I should try to ACK at a minimum. The other category is direct comments on things that I've written specifically on Facebook. I should be ready to ACK such comments with a polite ACK including the URL of this blog, https://eco-epistemology.blogspot.com/2019/03/how-to-solve-problems-of-social-media.html, again for the quick pasting.
(3) Exploration of the settings for email notifications. I am pretty sure that this will consume the bulk of several 5-minute daily visits. As I've noted before, we mustn't forget that Facebook counts that as engagement time, which is why they have no incentive to make the process quick and painless, but instead are motivated to make it as engaging as possible--and engagement for Facebook is always defined in terms of time, not such complexities as positive or negative feelings, including my increasingly negative feelings and anti-engagement towards Facebook.
(4) Disengagement from the groups. That basically calls for a kind of apology message, again with a link to this blog. The main complexity here is between the groups I've joined and those I've actually created. Details to follow, but...
For now, I need to focus on the details of the main disengagement message for my so-called timeline:
My new Facebook status is "Disengaged by FFF".
The FFF stands for Five For Facebook, which is how many minutes I will permit myself to spend on Facebook (enforced with a countdown timer). For now, that is daily, but I will probably make it weekly soon.
Now I want to explain why, but if you are my actual friend, you know I'm prone to verbosity. Therefore the long part is split off as a comment linked to this short status.
[Unamusingly enough, Blogger forced me to divide it here...]
Delete[The explanation part, to be cut-and-pasted as a comment.]
Though I've often regarded myself as less than a perfect friend, I've never regarded the idea of friendship itself as a waste of time. But that was before Facebook started redefining friendship in terms of convenient clicks and the fake cash cow of engagement.
I have been using Facebook for many years. If you know how to check the ID numbers, you will see that mine is one of the original university-level IDs, and I think I joined Facebook before it went fully public. But looking back over all that time, I can see very little value received. The main positive was obtaining links to a few of my old friends, and I can thank Facebook for that, but I now regard almost all of the other time spent on Facebook as wasted. You never get your wasted time back, though you might learn something from it.
What is so wrong with Facebook? I think the main problems are the two horns of the "fake cash cow" aspect of Facebook (seen as a kind of corporate cancer). I think the perceived value of Facebook is entirely bogus.
Facebook has consumed vast amounts of human time and produced nothing of true value, but instead has perverted the very idea of "friendship" with convenient, but time-consuming, clicks. The time per click is small, but in their billions (probably trillions by now), the aggregate numbers look impressive, creating the fake value.
The first part of the fake value of Facebook is the stock price. There was a time when stock prices were related to actual assets, but now they are just opinions, and mostly not even actual opinions from actual human beings. These days stock prices are primarily the programmed predictions of computers. If the prediction is that that the stock can be sold at a higher price in the future, then the computer will buy it, and if enough computers agree, then the demand will drive the price up. In contrast, if the computer predicts the price is about to fall, then it will sell the stock, even if it has to accept a lower price, because the computer is in a fake state of programmed panic. Obviously I do not think this asymmetric insanity is going to end well, and the market panic of 2008 was just the slightest taste of the poison in today's stock market.
The other part of the fake value is advertising, the second horn of the fake cash cow. Bill Hicks was on the right track there. There are some legitimate reasons for advertising, but they have long since been lost in the torrent of lies. Actually, it's another aspect of real value versus fake value. The last increments of quality are expensive, and even if a company spent that money and produced the best product, they could fail and go bankrupt. One road to failure would be by getting beaten by a competitor with a better product, and there can only be one #1 product in any category. However the more likely road to death by quality is via advertising that makes lower quality products seem more valuable than they are. By increasing sales and prices and profits, advertising seems to work, but at some point it always becomes too far divorced from reality. Obviously I believe more days of reckoning are coming here, too.
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ReplyDeleteWent pretty well for the first day. I think I managed to accomplish the first three steps of the disengagement process with about 20 seconds to spare. A few observations:
ReplyDelete(1) Felt a fairly strong urge to look at one group, the most personal of them, the old Austin BBS group as transported to Facebook. Was already planning for that to be last group I'd sign off from.
(2) I should have considered which group to leave first and made a note. Assuming that I'm going to use the same basic process, it will take about one day per group. Some of the similar groups can be dealt with at the same time, but in a couple of cases I want to leave link of some sort...
(3) Mostly feeling a kind of relief that it seemed to go so smoothly. I do think I'll miss that one group.