When I was in high school Facebook was just coming out and it was...

- a way for the cool kids to exclude anyone they didn’t like from a visible social circle.

When I was in university Facebook was taking over the world and it was...

- a place for your mom to embarrass you and your racist aunt/uncle to make uncomfortable racist comments.

Today Facebook is...

- a serious threat to society itself. A direct threat to truth and the enemy of the press.

And yet most of these weak-minded, short-term dopamine addicts are still sucking Facebook’s flaccid cock.

———

To loosely quote iceberg slim...

A real pimp can eye a bitch and gauge right away how much mileage she has...

“That hoe is good for 500 fucks”

Once the mileage runs out the bitch gets strung out and you gotta let her go.

I wonder how many more likes these dopamine-driven Facebook hoes have left in them? I wonder?

Ps. Yes, Facebook is a pimp and every time you look at it you are a hoe. You give up the preverbal pussy to them, they sell your pussy to the ticks (advertisers) and then you get fucked, getting just enough dopamine so that your fine with them selling your pussy for profit.

Feels to me like we just have to wait Facebook out. Seems like it's full of middle-aged people. Most of the cool kids are even getting bored with Instagram now.

@platypus To be honest, I used to think the same thing.

But Facebook is like the guy who first sold a dope-fiend cocaine.

Yes, that future crackhead will get tired of cocaine (for the same reason it gets sick of Facebook, dopamine receptors get used to getting their fill) and they will move away from the cocaine.

But they are now a fucking addict, they will move on to another drug to get their fix.

Facebook is like a dealer who give the crack pipe away for free to get you hooked.

I agree that the only impact might be some other privacy abuser will take their place.

However, no-one seems to value privacy anymore. In fact, they seem to go out of their way to "over-share".

Add to that the fact that people are addicted to free stuff and I think society has chosen it's own path.

Google, Facebook, et al may have started the rot, but now they are giving the public what they want. Easy enough to delete Facebook accounts...but who's doing it?

@platypus I’m terms of privacy, I am not concerned. Anyone with the dilution of privacy has their eyes closed. Every service on the planet is monitored directly, every webcam is open, every mic is listenable.

Meh. There is nothing I can do about it so the stoic in me says fuck it.

In terms of the addiction. It’s very little about anything being free but more about companies like FB building systems to trigger the same dopamine bursts in your brain that drugs give you.

For more information about this, and for anyone really, I would suggest reading the book Hooked by Nir Eyal.

It goes through the loop that releases short bursts of dopamine, keeping people coming back. Then after time the are “hooks” built into your natural emotions of loneliness and boredom.

In the same way they when a dope fiend is bored they need to dopamine from drugs and the hook is built in, Facebook owns a hook on their emotions and they will open FB without even thinking first.

But I shouldn’t ruin the book, it really good, informative, and dangerous!

Check out Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
https://goodreads.com/book/show/...

Personally, I am worried about the erosion of privacy in society.

I don't really care what people want to share. However, when openness is almost universal, privacy will start to be seen as something unnatural, and governments will then have free rein to legislate again the hold-outs.

As for addiction, I've not considered that much. Should probably read the book. But, some people suggest that devrant is addictive in their posts. Would it fit the book's profile?

@platypus That is true. DevRant can be addictive but it doesn’t really fall under the books theme. Basically any thing can be addictive to someone with an addictive personality (even hand washing)

But the main part of the book is the hooked loop. On a small level DevRant falls into the loop. But it isn’t as evil about it as FB.

Facebook loops you in at every turn with anything they can imagine...

“See what X friend posted”
Translation: you don’t have any friends in real life so look at them here.

“Did you see this count my Y on Xs post?”
T: don’t ignore your friends or you’ll be seen as a asshole.

“There are new friend suggestions waiting”
T: Your a fucking loser, make some friends.

————

Basically, they will use the normal things to get you back (in our case ++S) but also will use anything at else to grasp and negative emotions like loneliness, boredom, depression and others in order to profit off you.

It gets dangerous when you don’t need the trigger any more. When your brain thinks...

“I’m lonely”

And then without even a conscious thought you pick up your crack pipe, I mean phone, and open Facebook.

@leanrob

Well said sir on an the posts

Unfortunately, the deft manipulating the daft has been around since the caveman days

Same shit, different pile

But I hope we evolve sometime in the next thousand years somehow too

@leanrob Define privacy in your case, then? Because it's far from dead.

End to end encrypted, open source messengers, used correctly, are a very good way of keeping ones conversations private.

End to end encrypted mailing is another way of keeping ones privacy.

Using addons in an open source, privacy respecting browser which prevent shitloads of tracking maybe even in combination with something like the tor browser is a good way of keeping your searches private.

If you're an explicit target of an intelligence agency, you're outright fucked but they, not in a hundred years, have enough man/machine power to target everyone and thus, using open, encrypted services is a great way of retaining ones privacy.

On the other hand, do you broadcast your entire life online fulltime? I don't think so. Those moments when your sleeping or taking a shower or are the toilet, those are private moments which you don't broadcast onto the internet, meaning that you have a choice to do that or not, effectively giving you privacy.

The biggest problem is that anyone can say that they have nothing to hide and that privacy is dead but the thing is, you're not the one who decides what data is worth hiding.

Hell, they thought a registry with everyone's names and addresses and religions was a good idea before the second world war but that data became something to hide very fast.

An extreme example? Sure, but it's one which exactly describes this problem.