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Does anyone else here find Facebook to be more of a negative in life than a positive? I find it a depressing addiction to scroll through the thoughts of all of my facebook friends, so I try to avoid using it as much as possible. I find that if I do have to use it that using m.facebook.com (the mobile version) instead to be less of a problem.

I also don't like the urge I have to share my thoughts, then this feeling I'll get afterwards of regretting sharing my thoughts, or feeling embarrassed about having done so. I imagine everyone will read my updates and thoughts and will affect them as much as they affect me, when in reality I think almost everyone ignores them if they even read them.

I feel much better if I never use facebook, but often there are times when I'm forced to use it to keep in touch with somebody, and I feel the negative pull of its addictions when I do so.

I know this sucks to read but you've just described why you need to excise FB from your life. You know who your friends are. Akamai NetSession servers do not. Facebook conditions folks to believe that these exasperations stem from their monopoly on IM & group messaging but the truth is that they're conducting experiments on the psyches of each of their users. Your pageviews are also factored into the advertising revenues they demand, profits which are never passed to you. This is why the heads of industry & state have dedicated staff to handle such "services" for them. Those who profile wish never to be profiled.

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"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

I know I'll probably sound stupid, but the thought of facebook just fills me with dread. I never really used facebook to be honest, but when I was at my uncle's funeral in December, I just felt an urge to. I stepped out of the dinner after the funeral and checked it on my phone... My 12 year old cousin had died in a tragic accident. I was due to go on a holiday to America a few days after this happened, so we got a connection (thank g-d) to Canada to go to his funeral. Every day after that, whenever I checked my facebook, nothing would be in my feed but reminders of my cousin.

I also don't like the whole government spying on my messages thing, but it seems nowadays that they know it all anyway. Oh well!

Oh boy. I de-activated my main account, which had over 400 "friends". I think it separates people more than it connects them, by placing an artificial layer between what would usually be direct human interaction.

cberg, I'm with you all the way on that. It doesn't suck to read at all. I should make some changes so that the handful of people I really want to make sure I can keep in touch with, that I have an alternate way to do so.

MonochromeMatryoshia, I don't have a sad tale to relate to with facebook like that luckily, it just wears me down. In fact I've never added any family members on my facebook, or in fact people I knew from where I grew up, it's only ever been peolpe I've met through and surrounding university. I am also very concerned about government surveillance! I'm really looking forward to the release of megachat, which apparently there will soon be beta-testing invitations. It is intended to be a replacement to skype where all conversations are encrypted so that no one inbetween would be able to access your conversations.

23andaspie I've not thought about that much. Throughout most of my life I've seen internet conversing as a positive for me, as I'm bad at it in person. There have been people who I've met IRL, been too shy to talk much to, and then ended up making friends with online. One thing I hate is people using facebook or cellphones to cancel as an excuse to stand you up, or be late for arranged meetings. I remember when I was a kid, you would choose a time and place to meet up, and unless you gave good forewarning of a change of plans, you would have left your friend waiting on their own with no one to come and meet them. These days it seems more than 50% of the time I plan and meet someone up I get texts saying "sorry going to be 15 mins late" which means 30+ minutes late. Or "sorry I can't make it ".

Facebook is useful if you use it in moderation. If you use it all the time and bother to keep up with all your friends it's a huge nuisance I've found. I could post "Has anyone seen taken 3? Was it a horrid movie?" and get good advice, too. It's not like you have to use it to stalk your friends or post things that enable you to be stalked. I post the bare minimum and read the bare minimum, too.

I love facebook and am on it daily. I have made a lot of friends through it over the years and am a member of many helpful autism/asperger groups as well as social anxiety groups and lgbt groups, etc.

It's a necessary part of my life when one works in the arts. I more easily keep track of all my upcoming events, I have several chat circles with each of my bands where we discuss booking/practice/etc. and - most importantly - it's how I network and stay in touch with contacts. Being that it's much more personal and I can blab about music or movies or whatnot, it often leads into new conversations with said contacts and I stay in their conscience more than I would had I just added them on a LinkedIn or something. A lot of my recent film/music job offers have come over Facebook from people who I've remained in visible (if not physical) contact with.

I could say the exact same thing about the MySpace days. The only real difference (other than Facebook's superior layout) was that I had more of a chance of meeting brand new friends - i.e. "hey, your page looks cool, so I thought I'd say hi!". I actually met a few close friends I still have today from that kind of chance encounter, but now my friends list is 95% people I know in the flesh or mutual connections.

http://thespiritscience.net/2014/11/01/ ... ial-media/

Before they made it into some lousy phone app that I doubt nobody uses, Bebo was a pretty cool social networking site. It was popular around 2005 to 2009. You could give your friends little hearts ("Luv") and I thought it had a neat interface, but then of course Facebook became immensely popular and what does not keep up with popular trending falls down the tubes, so eventually Bebo was cancelled. The stickers thing was kind of annoying, though, as people with slower Internet connections may have discovered.