zlacker

>>rapnie+(OP)
This is exactly why I had to get off of Facebook (again).

I deactivated my first account 8 years ago, but got back on to re-connect with my old pals and acquaintances from back in the day. For that reason, it was fantastic.

After another year, I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd. I have the sense IRL to know that not everything is for everybody, but that doesn't matter much on Facebook unless you want to spend hours and hours hand-crafting subsets of your friends for different topics (I don't). And I have zero interest in posting selfies or status updates of what's going on in my life, so that made the platform exceedingly boring and a waste of time for me. It's a shame, because it does work really well for "connecting" with people (in the shallowest sense of the word).

>>tboyd4+dm
Without going into details, for various reasons, my relationship with my employer essentially made it critical that I delete my account several years ago. I resented it at the time, because while I considered facebook fundamentally unhealthy, I justified it as a way to keep in touch with friends, and, very cynically, use it as a propaganda tool for career advancement.

In hindsight, though. I couldn't be more glad for the push. For at least a few years, I had actively unfollowed a good majority of friends from my feed because watching their gyrations (posing, fighting, echoing, ...) was making me lose respect for a lot of people. I don't need their mental hygiene and low-effort politics rubbed in my face and I'm happier not seeing it.

Looking back, one thing I did conclude was that the death of email was one of the few things that made Facebook valuable. I had email contact for pretty much every person I was "friends" with on FB, but many of those addresses have expired, or they are so flooded with spam that when you message someone, they don't see it at all or not for +a week or so. I'm like that myself - I only look at my personal email once a week, on Friday night.

Also, "social cooling" is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site. They should have called it "Socially Mandated Fronting' or something instead of trying to make an awkward and not very meaningful global climate change analogy.

>>foobie+8r
> Also, "social cooling" is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site.

Agreed.

I thought it was going to be about "evaporative cooling", how bad behaviour drives thoughtful people out of a group, producing a feedback cycle where bad behaviour is further amplified.

Which is tangentially related to the topic of the link, but different enough to be actively misleading. Unfortunate.