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).
The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
There's a lot of variety in my crowd
Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.
I remember in college, we were encouraged to seek out differing opinions. I remember a guy who once chastised me for not seeking a broad enough range of opinions. He said, "What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be challenged?" My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.
Be who you are. If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
This is almost certainly not true. Your idea of what is the norm is being driven by what is actually the exception because that’s what we see on the news (the news almost by definition shows things that are newsworthy and are out of the norm).
Actually, my notion of this is driven by seeing a dsignated "Safe Space" on a college campus, and a "Free Speech Zone" at the University of Houston.
Don't make assumptions about other people.
How many people do you see on average using it though? Are students in wheel chairs the norm of the campus?
Ala - how many people do you personally observe at the "safe space" - or do you even go there?
I make the safe guess that the University didn't spend money on signs and and allocate public space without there being a demand for it. It sure didn't look like an art installation.
how many people do you personally observe at the "safe space" - or do you even go there?
If by "go," you mean "attend," no I am not a student. If by "go," you mean "visit," I did quite frequently when I lived in Houston. But I didn't make a habit of sitting on a park bench with a clicker and monitoring the habits of other people. Can you tell me that it is never used? Rarely used? Never used? Do you even go there?
The free speech zone exists so that anti-women's-rights protesters can show pictures of fetuses to students.
The safe space area was made when we found out it was physically dangerous for the student communist and anarchist groups to peaceably assemble in the free speech zone.
During my time at UH, the greatest threat to free speech was posed by the conservative student population. I was physically threatened and harmed on many occasions in my 4 years there.