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Facebook - Your Opinions.

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Clip

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I have family and friends spread far and wide, so it's very useful for keeping in touch and seeing what everyone is up to.
The problems (for me) are when stuff you aren't interested in appears in your timeline because one of your friends liked it, or replied to it, or plays a game. It clogs up the timeline and makes it difficult to find what you actually want.

You can block a lot of that stuff especially the games.

I'm fine with it - it does what it was set out to do - keep you in touch with people who don't live close and to see what they are doing with their lives/families and also they can see what I and the missus are up to also.
 
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trash80

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You can block these things though they do have a habit of unblocking :)

Facebook is fine if you use it to bring value to your life, when it starts to take over your life thats when you have problems
 

SS4

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Firstly, because not only do they have the privacy settings the opposite way round from most - meaning you have to opt out rather than opt in to displaying things to all and sundry - they are seemingly in the press more often than other sites for poor content control, illogical behaviour and constantly re-setting the defaults meaning everyone who opted for the more private options have to do it again fairly regularly.

Secondly, I find their presentation absolutely awful; not helped by the difficulty of re-locating anything later unless you know the exact specific words used in order to search for it quickly. A forum is far easier to use and keep track of everything. ( Having said that I am annoyed with Twitter over their inability to have a properly chronological timeline... ). However, I have to say that a far worse site for untidy presentation is Yammer where it also virtually impossible to turn off notifications - you have to uncheck things in at least four different places to stop the constant bombardment, and even then it still sends something a couple of times a week.

That's the main reasons.

That sounded rehearsed as though this isn't the first time you've asked. I cannot disagree with it though - beware of using Whatsapp or Instagram as both are owned by Facebook but keep it quiet.
 

Peter Mugridge

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That sounded rehearsed as though this isn't the first time you've asked. I cannot disagree with it though - beware of using Whatsapp or Instagram as both are owned by Facebook but keep it quiet.

Yes, I've been asked a few times!

I don't use Instagram or Whatsapp; I do use Twitter. Everything else public is via forums.
 

MonsooN

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clip said:
I'm fine with it - it does what it was set out to do - keep you in touch with people who don't live close and to see what they are doing with their lives/families and also they can see what I and the missus are up to also.

trash80 said:
Facebook is fine if you use it to bring value to your life, when it starts to take over your life thats when you have problems

^ This.

At the end of the day it's a free service that nobody is under any obligation to use.

I like it because I can keep up with what my family, friends, colleagues and casual acquaintances are doing. It gives you something to chat about if you bump into them in town and I actually feel I know many people better now than I ever did when I knew them "properly"

Of course, there are annoying bits. People posing boring or attention seeking posts, but you can easily put that person on your ignore list, you can block ads you're not interested in or you can just scroll on past.

For me the good far outweighs the bad and as long as that's the case, I'll continue to use it.
 

Tetchytyke

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i only allow people who are actual friends to be my friends on Facebook.

Yep, pretty much. Friends and close(ish) family.

I haven’t been on Facebook for about seven years. It is a ghastly place.

I think Facebook is generally what you make of it. I block the dross (I'm looking at you, The Canary) but it's good enough for seeing pictures of people's cats and kids.

Twitter, on the other hand, is an object example of how poor moderation turns an excellent platform into a cesspool. I was an earlyish adopter of Twitter, long before it was popular, and it was a good place to exchange ideas. Now it's just politicos screaming C**T at each other. Donald Trump sums the place up perfectly.
 

fowler9

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Yep, pretty much. Friends and close(ish) family.



I think Facebook is generally what you make of it. I block the dross (I'm looking at you, The Canary) but it's good enough for seeing pictures of people's cats and kids.

Twitter, on the other hand, is an object example of how poor moderation turns an excellent platform into a cesspool. I was an earlyish adopter of Twitter, long before it was popular, and it was a good place to exchange ideas. Now it's just politicos screaming C**T at each other. Donald Trump sums the place up perfectly.
A good mate of mine once said he was sticking to Twitter because Facebook was full of K**b heads. I pointed out the the K**b heads were people he added as friends. He still uses Facebook, he just doesn't add random people any more.
 

DarloRich

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Twitter, on the other hand, is an object example of how poor moderation turns an excellent platform into a cesspool. I was an earlyish adopter of Twitter, long before it was popular, and it was a good place to exchange ideas. Now it's just politicos screaming C**T at each other. Donald Trump sums the place up perfectly.

I need somewhere to swear at chronically under-skilled footballers....................
 

Geezertronic

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I've caught up with some old school friends via Facebook and also made some new friends via the groups that I am a member of with shared interests - and not just virtual friends either, if there is a car show or race meeting we arrange to meet up via the Facebook groups. It was also useful to keep an eye on the kids when they were younger (whether they liked it or not).
 

shredder1

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Love it, friends and family all over the world, plus I`m on a large number of railway sites, both in the UK and abroad, a great source for information.
 

Robin Edwards

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A good mate of mine once said he was sticking to Twitter because Facebook was full of K**b heads. I pointed out the the K**b heads were people he added as friends. He still uses Facebook, he just doesn't add random people any more.
that may not be the case though. I am an occasional user for direct family and a few close friends but if I'm drawn into commenting on any news feed item I know I will always regret I bothered because there will be angry, rude and abusive responses that kill any informed debate dead that come from people I'm not connected to. There is no value it trying to discuss anything with those that have already made their minds up about who is right and wrong and probably can't string a sentence together with words of more than two syllables. I find it quite unsettling to think of the scale of ignorance and unintelligence in the world as a result of looking at FB! :) I could probably change some settings to restrict who sees me and whose comments I can see too.
I also have deactivated my account for periods where I just can't be arsed with the draw of flicking through so much newsfeed ****e. It is what it is though and if used in a positive way then it can be informative. It's also a means of inadvertently displaying to your friends where your political persuasions lie and theirs too - in some ways this can lead to unwanted upset and offence if it's clear to my Tory friends for instance, that I perhaps don't like what the Tories are doing for instance! I wouldn't lose any sleep if I decided to delete my account - it's not that important after all.
 

Hornet

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Going over old ground here (to established members)

No facebook, No twitter, No smartphone....

Anyone else still in the club ?

No Faceache, Twatter, Instascam, Whatscrap, Snapcrap, etc for me. Do have a Smartphone which I top up with €25 credit once a year. (Avoid data roaming, instead use free wifi wherever and whenever I might need it). Get along just fine with e-mail, snailmail and, most importantly, face to face meet ups regularly with real friends and family. (And no, i'm not a technophobe).
 

whhistle

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I've uninstalled the main app, and downloaded the lite version of messenger (which isn't in the UK app store).
For iPhones maybe.
It's available in the UK Android store...

I was never one of those people who added people I'd just met. Never really had over 200 people added as "friends", because I like my privacy. (Yes, I am aware how much data companies store but I am a drop in a very large ocean to them, I mean from other random people.)

I have my account locked down so people can't view my photos or timeline or anything but my name and photo.

Like @DarloRich, I am a member of a few choice groups (probably more than I should be!) and that's about it. No games, no this or that. The local "spotted" group I am a member of is on the radar to be deleted as I rarely find anything interesting on there these days.


...and constantly re-setting the defaults meaning everyone who opted for the more private options have to do it again fairly regularly.
Can you point to any articles on this point particularly?
I have never had my settings changed since I set them.


I think the lesson is don't put anything on Facebook that you wouldn't be happy to show your family, friends and your boss.
My boss doesn't have access to my Facebook feed.
I mean, people do realise you can lock profiles down hugely - so people who aren't connected to you directly (IE, aren't friends with you) can't see anything apart from your name and profile photo.
 
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takno

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For iPhones maybe.
It's available in the UK Android store...
Interesting. I don't think it was there when I installed it, but the full app is completely unusable on cheap phones so Facebook might have just decided it was easier to have it there than not. Definitely recommend it then
 

route101

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Dont really use anymore . Seems to be people tagging mostly now in Memes and videos.
 

PeterY

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I only do Facebook and I mainly use it to play Scrabble with friends. It's is nice to keep in touch with friends and family. The cat photos do annoy me a bit MEOW . I only go onto Facebook on my laptop. I don't own a smart phone.
 

DynamicSpirit

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I use Facebook a fair bit, mainly to stay in touch with friends. My own sense is that Facebook was great 10 years ago, when it was purely a way for people to stay in touch with their friends, and let groups of friends know what was going on in their lives. Unfortunately, Mark Zuckerberg and co have kept trying to expand it into everything social media-related, with the result that it's become a jack-of-all-trades kind of platform that doesn't actually do any one thing particularly well...

  • The social thing of interacting with your friends via your timeline has got spoilt by the ease of sharing things, which means too many people just lazily mainly post re-shares, often of political stuff of dubious accuracy, instead of writing stuff themselves. And FB's algorithms that try to show you stuff they think you're interested in completely get in the way of just seeing what your friends have been doing most recently. I think it'd be far better if FB made it easier to post your own stuff and harder to re-share external stuff. And scrap those algorithms.
  • FB discussion groups don't work very well because the UI is completely inappropriate to complex conversation chains. Lots of dedicated discussion places (including railforums) do this much better.
  • FB self-promotion is also not brilliant, although for small businesses there probably isn't much better (that's not because FB is good, it's because noone else has come into this space offering a decent UI). NextDoor does a better job for geographically local organisations, Twitter is better for businesses that want to talk to the whole World, and YouTube has the better UI for artists etc. wanting to do videos.

And then there's my biggest gripes:
  • Facebook's rather obviously socially irresponsible attitude to fake news etc. I realize it's very hard to accurately detect, but it seems astonishing that FB has had to be pretty much forced by authorities/public opinion to start doing something about blatent lies being continually spread on their site.
  • And another issue for me is that to my software-developer mind, FB software is so often, in technology terms, basically, rubbish. Messenger has a some longstanding bug with the scrollbars in the web interface that makes it hard to scroll and really should've been fixed decades ago (OK, maybe I exaggerate a bit). And don't get me started on the FB Android app's behaviour with notifications - not syncing properly for notifications that you've already seen, and popping up intrusive avatars over the top of other apps that you're trying to type into, or the complex almost-impossible-to-understand maze of preferences. Someone at FB really needs to get a grip on their software design and testing.
Having said all that, I'll carry on using FB for now because so many of my friends are on it, and there really isn't anything better for sharing stuff about your life amongst friends. I just wish that FB would get their act together, focus on doing that one thing well, sort out their software design, and take a more responsible attitude to the effect they have on society.
 
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Confused147

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facebook are ID obsessed. Not sure if anyone else has encountered this but there is a "upload of photo of yourself" ID check which then just permanlty disables your account if you ever do upload a photo. Be warned I think its a scam, if you ever get this check don't bother posting a photo just make a new account.
 

185143

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I was talking to someone on a train once who referred to Facebook as 'TwoFacebook'.

Make of that what you will...
 

GusB

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I had originally been on Bebo, which was where many of my friends initially congregated, but we all gradually moved over to FB. I wasn't too keen at the time, but went with the flow. At first it was a great way of communicating with friends, but there were a couple of things that made me lose interest. The first was FB's insistence that they decide what content I should see. While I can still order my timeline as "most recent", there's no permanent way to do this. I don't like being told how I should see things. The second reason was that "the olds" got involved. I don't give a monkey's now, but when FB began, the last thing I wanted was for my parents to see my status updates!

When Google+ came along, I embraced it- it wasn't so much a place to keep in touch with known family or friends, but it was a good way to meet new folks with similar interests. I liked the way in which I could organise my contacts into "Circles", and it was easier to control who saw what, but sadly G+ has become a bit of a ghost town.
 

trash80

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Oh yes that timeline thing is so annoying, i want to see the latest not old stuff again but you keep having to reset it. Another annoying thing are things which don't appear on your timeline which your friends post or you miss them because of the way FB orders it.
 

beeza1

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I haven't been on Facebook for years now, not since my account got hacked, corrupted or whatever.
One of my workmates came to me one afternoon complimenting me on the photos I had taken of him and his good lady outside The Cavern Club, taken during the "works trip" to Liverpool, which I had uploaded to my Facebook page, this set the alarm bells ringing as I didn't go on that trip, and at that time I had never been near The Cavern Club! When I got home I logged on to FB and, sure enough there were the photos, "my" profile picture was not me either, I used to do a lot of "off road" motorcycle competitions and, whilst the photo was of someone riding over a tree it certainly wasn't me!
I immediately deactivated my account and haven't touched it since, although I do get emails inviting me to "Get back on Facebook with just one click".
 

Up_Tilt_390

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Kind of late in the moment, but I'll try to bring the thread back to life. For me personally, Facebook is a good site if you wish to keep in touch with old friends and family. It'd been very helpful in allowing me to organise things with friends and family, something that would've been much harder beforehand. Having said that, what kind of does annoy me on Facebook is some of the people. I don't add people I don't know on Facebook, but that doesn't take away from the fact some people just need to bugger off social media as a whole.

For starters I've had several people in my lifetime post about their relationships, tagging each other in loving memes and posts, and telling each other how so in love they (think) are in with each other. Seriously, it's just so annoying. I don't care what you're doing with your boyfriend/girlfriend, I don't care how much you love them, and nobody else really does either, and sometimes I have this very sadistic thought in my head that says "it is going to be so funny when they break up". If you ask me, the best relationships seem to be ones that you never see on Facebook all too often (the odd occasion such as holidays or party pictures is decent enough).

To add to that, there's some people who just post the same stuff over and over again. I often feel like saying "yeah, I saw it the first time, I didn't care then either". It's the usual thing of some people saying how they will never trust a lad or a lass ever again, but I've seen one person do this over and over again. I'm willing to bet that they're either too stupid to learn or they're just holding a grudge or pretending to just for attention. I can honestly see why some people don't bother with social media, because it's where a lot of the idiots get together.

But then there's people who just post all the pointless rubbish or try to make conversation for no reasons. I hate small talk personally, so people posting pointless stuff and striking up pointless conversations is just the worst for an introvert like myself. Some people can tolerate it, but even the best people have their limits. All in all, Facebook is good because it allows you to connect with family and friends, and even speak to new people if you're into that stuff, but because so many people are on it you also come across some of the most intolerable people of all.

It's just a miracle that you have the ability to ignore posts and block people, otherwise I'd say stay off it unless you had the patience. It was a long opinion on Facebook, but I thought it would be a good one to highlight some of the annoying things that people might relate to. I'd say get Facebook if you really wanted to, just be prepared for the annoying downsides. Apologies for the long posts, I can only hope you will have enjoyed such a long rant...
 

fowler9

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Kind of late in the moment, but I'll try to bring the thread back to life. For me personally, Facebook is a good site if you wish to keep in touch with old friends and family. It'd been very helpful in allowing me to organise things with friends and family, something that would've been much harder beforehand. Having said that, what kind of does annoy me on Facebook is some of the people. I don't add people I don't know on Facebook, but that doesn't take away from the fact some people just need to bugger off social media as a whole.

For starters I've had several people in my lifetime post about their relationships, tagging each other in loving memes and posts, and telling each other how so in love they (think) are in with each other. Seriously, it's just so annoying. I don't care what you're doing with your boyfriend/girlfriend, I don't care how much you love them, and nobody else really does either, and sometimes I have this very sadistic thought in my head that says "it is going to be so funny when they break up". If you ask me, the best relationships seem to be ones that you never see on Facebook all too often (the odd occasion such as holidays or party pictures is decent enough).

To add to that, there's some people who just post the same stuff over and over again. I often feel like saying "yeah, I saw it the first time, I didn't care then either". It's the usual thing of some people saying how they will never trust a lad or a lass ever again, but I've seen one person do this over and over again. I'm willing to bet that they're either too stupid to learn or they're just holding a grudge or pretending to just for attention. I can honestly see why some people don't bother with social media, because it's where a lot of the idiots get together.

But then there's people who just post all the pointless rubbish or try to make conversation for no reasons. I hate small talk personally, so people posting pointless stuff and striking up pointless conversations is just the worst for an introvert like myself. Some people can tolerate it, but even the best people have their limits. All in all, Facebook is good because it allows you to connect with family and friends, and even speak to new people if you're into that stuff, but because so many people are on it you also come across some of the most intolerable people of all.

It's just a miracle that you have the ability to ignore posts and block people, otherwise I'd say stay off it unless you had the patience. It was a long opinion on Facebook, but I thought it would be a good one to highlight some of the annoying things that people might relate to. I'd say get Facebook if you really wanted to, just be prepared for the annoying downsides. Apologies for the long posts, I can only hope you will have enjoyed such a long rant...
As I've said before the things that seem to annoy you are the people you are friends with, not Facebook. Perhaps get some new mates.
 

GMT

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Burglars love social media like facebook. Blimey, some people post anything about themselves. Me, never had an account. Who knows what I'm missing out on. Some time ago I bought the DVD The Social Network, so I got an idea of how everything started.
 
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takno

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Burglars love social media like facebook. Blimey, some people post anything about themselves. Me, never had an account. Who knows what I'm missing on. Some time ago I bought the DVD The Social Network, so I got an idea of how everything started.
Burglars have got a lot to be getting on with, what with all the breaking in and rifling through stuff. I doubt they really have time for Facebook tbh
 
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