I really really don’t like facebook. I belonged to it for about 1 year before doing anything with it. Then I started reconnecting with some people I knew in high school. Then my in-laws started friending me. (fortunately, my family apparently has no interest in using it.) Then my in-laws 8 and 12 yr old kids started friending me. So I deleted crap and inactivated the account.
I initially never really “got it”. It seemed like a lame place where people who have nothing better to do post the meaningless minutia of their lives. Hey thanks - my life is boring enough, I don’t need the details of your boring life! It was also a place to reconnect with people I lost touch with and never really cared enough about to actually look for in any other internet source. All we ever had in common was high school and related things, and talking now is full of awkward silences or just reminiscing.
Now, I email the people that I reconnected with and they are all wondering why I left “paradise”. For me, not only was it superficial and mind-numbing (which my life has plenty of, thank you) but it was also a “worlds are colliding” issue (ala Seinfeld - George), especially when the kids started trying to friend me.
So now I kinda wonder - is it just me? Am I just the kind of anti-social hermit that social networking is not designed for, or are their other facebook haters out there?
But what’s the point of being on it if I am just gonna ignore it? I was doing that, and not responding the the kid’s friend requests, until it came up at a family dinner: “gee why haven’t you responded to my friend requests?” Me: "Well I don’t really spend my time on it … . ", kid: “well now you know you need to get on it, cause I am there”. :rolleyes:
So far, it sounds like its just me and that everyone else is “normal”.
I like Facebook. You don’t. I should probably use it, then. You probably shouldn’t. Why are you creating a dramatic situation out of this? And who are these freaks you know who refer to Facebook as “paradise”?
I don’t use Facebook, so I’ll put this out there for the people who do:
The thing with Facebook, AFAICT, is that there seems to be no real middle ground of privacy. Either everything is all locked up tight so that you’re really hard to find and connect with … or you’re just all wide open for any and all.
For instance, can you do things like this:
Make your “wall” only visible to a small circle of people?
Make some messages on your wall visible to some people, but not to others? IOW, if three different friends looked at your wall, they’d see three different things.
Make it kind of hard for people to extend friend requests to you? So that friends of your hand-picked friends don’t have an in? IOW, somehow have a better system than “wide-open door”?
I think it is one of those to each their own situations. I live far away from my family and they are all on there, as well as the adult nieces/nephews as well as the younger ones. I love hearing about what is going on in their lives–minutia included. For one it gives me a sense of ‘my family’ again, and now when I go home and visit I will have a sense of what they have been up to. Before I always felt so disconnected from them. I also like to stay connected to old friends and new friends. I have several friends I only see maybe once or twice a year, so it helps me to stay connected. YMMV and clearly does.
I guess I am not trying to create a “dramatic situation”, more of a “is there anyone else out there that feels like this too?”. Everyone I talk seems to think fb is great, and I have yet to run into anyone that has actually used it that thinks like me. So its a search to see if there are similar people.
You’re not the only one. I’ve kind of been thinking about leaving Facebook as well. I signed up so I could look at my nephew’s new house photos (which I never actually ended up doing), friended some of my old high school buddies and gaming friends, and essentially did nothing else. Now every time I log in to check it (which is rarely) I’m bombarded by requests to join people’s Mafias or car racing teams or take some stupid quiz…it just doesn’t really do anything for me. Even after I learned to turn off all the Mafia spam…yeah.
Now my spouse’s very nice but very white-bread religious family have discovered it, and they’re all friending each other. I figure it’s only a matter of time before they find me. The “worlds collide” thing sort of sums up my nervousness about it too–I don’t want my gaming friends and my spouse’s religious family hooking up, for example. I don’t want the family posting pictures that include me (I’ve tried very hard, and mostly succeeded, to keep identifiable pictures of me off the net–I prize my internet anonymity and I hate the way I look in pictures) and then tagging my name on them. To put it bluntly, I don’t want my different circles of friends intersecting with each other.
So yeah, I’ve thought about just quitting. I might still do it. For now, I pretty much just ignore it.
Of course there are. My brother-in-law, for one, refuses to use Facebook. He briefly signed up for an account, decided he didn’t like it, and promptly deleted it. To each their own.
Winterhawk11 you summed up a lot of my issues very well. An in-law actually posted a picture of me from when I was 8 (which she clearly got from my mom). talk about a wtfbbq moment. And of course it is tagged, and of course I did not find out till it was already up. No one in my circle started with a basic “gee this is someone else, maybe they don’t want a 20+ yr old picture of themselves out on the internet” mindset. So then I had to be the ass that asked them to take it down. (why, cause its a privacy thing, and I guess just like fb - you either get it or you don’t.)
BTW, apparently there is a way to un-tag your name off a photo if the person won’t take it down. I’m not quite sure how to do it (the only photo of me that I got notice of, the person graciously untagged when I asked them to, so I don’t have anything to practice on) but I know you can. Of course the person can re-tag it, but you can keep tagging and untagging indefinitely, as far as I know.
Yes. Facebook actually has very good privacy settings if you know how to use them. I’ve found the privacy settings particularly useful when posting photos that I only want certain people to see.
I’m in my 30s which means that most of my friends’ postings are about their babies. Either that or political soapboxing, neither of which interests me very much. So I’m trying to stay away from daily checks, and I only go on when I receive a notification or to post photos. It’s a happy medium - people can still find me but I don’t have to read about their mundane lives every day.
If you are viewing the photo, there’s a link that says “Un-tag this photo,” if I remember correctly. Also, once you have untagged a photo of yourself, it cannot be retagged with your name.
I don’t like Facebook. I don’t like finding out what whacked out political and religious beliefs my distant cousins have. I don’t like worrying about my grandparents reading my blog (for a short time I had my blog crosspost to Facebook but I had to stop that madness!). I don’t like pictures of me getting tagged (I’ve also done my best to keep pictures of me offline). I don’t like the sense that my family is encroaching more and more on the non-family area of my life. I don’t like the drama that seems to be waiting, lurking under the surface. Like the time my dad changed his facebook status to “married” before we had the chance to tell my mom that he eloped with some lady. It’s like an invitation to combine all the wankery you find online with all the drama inherent in any family situation, creating a ticking time bomb.
I just wanna hug you! <sniffle, sniffle> what you wrote was so heart-warming to me that I am about to swoon from the sheer joy of it. Aaahh - its so nice knowing I am not alone.
I don’t like facebook either. It’s main purpose seemed to be to communicate with people I don’t normally talk to. But there’s a damn good reason I don’t normally talk with those people. And I certainly have no interest in renewing a friendship with people I knew in elementary school.
Another detractor of Facebook. If you (generically speaking) like it, more power to ya. For me though, it was just too much to keep up with all the time. So that I, too, am no longer a user and echoes the fact that you’re not alone.
