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1293 points rmason | 5 comments | | HN request time: 1.079s | source
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socrates1998 ◴[] No.19323322[source]
Anecdotally, I work with teenagers and none of them have a Facebook pages. It's viewed as a place for old people and parents.

For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family.

It's probably best use for me is local events and an occasional major event from a friend/family member.

Still, I find myself going there less and less.

From a small business standpoint, it's just not worth the time, effort and money to advertise there. It's much more effective to focus on getting referrals with my current clients.

I really wish there was a paid social media service that everyone used. I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data.

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gwbas1c ◴[] No.19323410[source]
> For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family.

Bingo, that's what's doing it for me.

Before the 2016 presidential election, Facebook was fun. It was also a great way to get news.

But now, what I'm finding is that a lot of people on Facebook just don't know how to behave in a public forum. It makes it painful, because someone always knows someone who's a jerk online.

I really don't know what changed, to be honest. Did Facebook change, or did too many people come to the party?

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1. elliekelly ◴[] No.19324688[source]
I feel like the major change was who started using Facebook: people who had never "interneted" before. When it first launched and was limited to .edu emails everyone on the platform had grown up online. Before we had Facebook we said and shared a whole lot of dumb stuff anonymously and figured out the real-world consequences of our online actions. We "trolled" a wikipedia article about elephants with John Stewart and learned about "fake news" from Bonsai Kittens and pop-up ads promising we'd just become millionares. We "socialized" on AIM, LiveJournal, Xanaga and MySpace. For early Facebook users, Facebook was just one of many destinations on the internet.

But for most of today's Facebook users Facebook is the internet and they missed out on their internet training wheels. Facebook has merely replaced AOL for a generation of people who will now take any "article" their friend posted at face value, share it with all of their friends, and then angrily complain about "mainstream media" when their phone blows up in the microwave instead of charging like the "news" told them it would.

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2. rootusrootus ◴[] No.19324908[source]
I'm not sure if I buy that. I would say for most young folks today "The Internet" is YouTube, not Facebook.
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3. elliekelly ◴[] No.19324984[source]
Sorry if I was unclear as I was trying not to malign baby boomers but I was referring to the 50+/not tech savvy crowd on Facebook, not the young internet users of today.
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4. rootusrootus ◴[] No.19325031{3}[source]
Ah, I misunderstood.

Please be careful with the "50+" comments, ha! Not there yet but closer than I'd like to admit, and I grew up during the sweet spot of modern computing. My biased opinion is that Gen X had it best in this regard.

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5. elliekelly ◴[] No.19325189{4}[source]
Yes I was trying not to specifically say baby boomers because I know even the oldest user on HN is very much not the type I was trying to refer to.

I meant the users like my 60 year old father who was recently "Facebook hacked" when he accidentally hit the "insert" button on his keyboard.