Caustic Ramblings

I keep going back and forth between deactivating and reactivating my Facebook. I honestly hate the platform in that seething kind of way, yet I find myself periodically having to reactive my account to temporarily re-connect with this or that person or FB group, or to simply see what's going on with a tiny handful of people on there I still have some modicum of common interest with. Then after a couple months I get totally disgusted and remember quite acutely why I deactivated my profile the last time around.

Anyway, without further adieu, here's some choice random internet comments on why people have deactivated or deleted their FB accounts. I chose the quotes which best illustrate why FB is just so damn evil.

“The roaring dumpster fire that people call a news feed was too much for me. I like my friends, but I never wanna know their political views on things.”

***

“Facebook I like to call Fakebook.

You aren’t ‘keeping in touch with your friends.’ You are keeping in touch with the image of the friend that said person wants to project. You only get what they give you, and it’s all fake shit.

Also not to mention how self-centered it is. It’s the reason people have to take selfies with their face in it for everything they do… So they can post it and say ‘LOOK AT ME! I AM IMPORTANT.’”

***

“Everything was a political fight. It turned into scrolling down and just thinking ‘That’s wrong,’ ‘That’s a stupid opinion,’ and various other negative disagreeing statements. That much negativity, even though I know was all on my part, became tiring and affected the rest of my mindset. I was over the ‘debates’ and everyone, including me, posting their crap political stances.

That and the creepy government intrusion, listening via Facebook to everything you say and do. Having federal agents use what you said to others in ‘“privacy’ and they picked up via your phone in court made me realize how this will all be happening in the future. I’d get rid of my cell phone if that was a viable option.”

***

“When I was starting to base my self-worth on the number of (likes) my so-called life got.”

***

“I got fired from my job over my political leanings that were seen on my Facebook page. I decided I didn’t need Facebook after that.”

***

“I had it for two weeks in 2009. Started getting friend requests from people who hated me in high school. Thought ‘Fuck this shit’ and deleted it. My profile resurrected five years later and started messaging everyone about Ray-Bans. Had a quick look, saw absolutely nothing to draw me back. DRAHMAHS.”

***

“Woke up one morning with 14 notifications about people and things I realized I really didn’t care about. Deleted my account and went straight back to sleep. Best decision I have ever made.”

***

“Other people’s fake happiness started to make me jealous. (I’m a horrible person, I know.)”

***

“My mom died and waves of condolences I neither needed or wanted started flooding in from people for whom I didn’t give a shit.”

Editor's note: Fake well-wishes and condolences from people who don't actually give a damn about me (nor do I give a damn about them back) is why I nearly always have my account deactivated during the month of my birthday. See the next quote below.

***

"Every year I deactivate my Facebook account on [my birthday] and it's sort of become a tradition. Come to think of it, I've never bothered to check if I can just hide my birthday but I've basically been doing this for almost ten years now (provided it isn't already deactivated).

Why do I do this? Fear. Fear of people wishing me a Happy Birthday and fear of people not saying it. If people did say something I'd just get sad or angry and think "why does it have to be my birthday for you talk to me?". If they didn't say anything then it'd be even worse.

I was the type of person who never celebrated their birthday because they knew no one would come. And so rather than deal with superficial messages delivered because of a notification system I decided to pretend it doesn't exist. I guess it sounds a bit selfish or arrogant, but I'd rather spend it alone and no one knowing instead of with people that needed to be reminded."

***

“I never socialized with any of my 300 friends other than my sister and 4 friends. All the pages that I got memes from started posting stupid shit and those godawful minion memes. But the worst part was when the pages that gave me news about movies and stuff started posting clickbait. That pushed me to my limit and I deleted my account.”

***

“I found that Facebook would make me really sad. I have an obsessive nature so I would spend hours stalking people, their friends, etc., and comparing their lives to mine. My life seemed really boring in comparison.

It took a few deactivate-reactivate cycles to realize this, and I fully deleted my profile a year ago. I now don’t miss Facebook a bit, and looking at friends on it, I don’t think I will ever go back. It just seems weird to me now.

I prefer to catch up with people every few months; there is often a lot to talk about since I don’t get to see every detail of their lives in real time anymore!”

***

“I’m just so fed up with the people who post nothing but one-sided political propaganda all day every day. I thought it would die off after the election, but they just keep going. They do absolutely zero research, don’t read anything longer than a Twitter comment or stupid meme, and pass it along as fact which leads to the next dipshit following suit.”

***

"Privacy: I didn’t like the idea that I was putting my life on display for the entire world, nor did I like the idea that weirdos and exes could just idly stalk me and my family whenever they felt like it.

Manipulation: I don’t like the power Facebook has over its users. It’s a simple matter of steering emotionally charged imagery and opinion towards people to manipulate how they think, act, and believe. I also see it as an extremely polarizing; it’s very easy to get caught up in believing you and all these strangers know THE TRUTH, while the shadowy others that disagree with you are TERRIBLE HITLERS. You never talk to someone who disagrees with you, you simply preach to the choir and circle-jerk each other’s likes. I half-joke that I got rid of FB because I got tired of hating my friends and family.

Isolation: Social media gives the appearance of social interaction, while eliminating as much social interaction as possible. I found myself viewing friends’ pages, liking their pictures, but rarely actually visiting them or calling them up. At a certain point, lifelong friends were as real to me as celebrities or memes. That’s bizarre and horrifying.

Shady business practices: Even though I know that it was laid out to me in the contract, etc. I got more and more uncomfortable with the fact that my thoughts, communications, and images were legally owned by FB and whoever FB decided to sell them to. I didn’t like the idea that my life experiences were commodified, and I started thinking how weird it was that this is so normalized. Tell any mother to leave a box of her baby’s pictures on a park bench for anyone to take, and she’d likely be horrified…but she’ll post every baby pic she ever takes on FB.

Balanced against the things I hate about FB, there’s…what, exactly? I tried to think about what I actually gained from FB, and I came up short. Keeping in touch with people? Email, phones and meeting up did that better. Status signaling? I don’t think surrendering all privacy for a minor ego stroke was a good deal.
There’s nothing for me in that fucking trap. I’m willing to bet there’s nothing there for you, either.”

***

“Seeing pics of my (ex)-gf at a house party drunk and half-naked when she told me she was at her mother’s all weekend….”

***

"I hate pretty much all social media tbh. I think it takes valuable time from people’s lives, takes them away from the present and their friends, and takes them to another place they don’t need to be. I know I’m that annoying person that says ‘will you get off your phone’, but I’d rather be that than the dead-eyed person staring at their screen 24/7.”

***

“A picture from an obviously fake account (pictures didn’t match and showed up on a reverse image search) of an obviously attractive young woman in a wheelchair with the caption ‘my friends say I’m ugly and nobody will share this’…

It was shared 80,000 times with everyone telling her how beautiful she was blah blah blah. One guy even said he would take her out on a date and publicly gave out his phone number.

I just can’t stand how naive and stupid people are anymore.

I know I sound like an elitist snob, but it’s mind-boggling what people believe on Facebook. The ads, constant bragging, game requests, and attention whoring…it just got to me.”

***

“I lasted about 3 weeks. Just found it to be a heaving pit of narcissistic wannabes either relishing in a false life and sense of achievement through status likes, or droning on about how bad the world is. The worst type are the bandwagon-hoppers—every time there are atrocities they are straight on it changing profile pics updating status to #prayforparis or some shit (no offense meant Parisians just an example) like they gave a flying in the first place. Guys with no tops, girls with the arch back and fish face, some pricks snotty brat whose face hasn’t been wiped in a week, all the selfie stick addicts, mugs who spend more time showing off where they are in the world rather than actually enjoying their holiday, the MOTHERFUCKERS who think they know you well enough to disrespectfully spam you day and night with Farmville. Let me tell you this from the bottom of my heart—fuck you and everything you stand for.”

***

"The irrational demand to be acknowledged just for the sake of it. You know, the whole, ‘Since most of you don’t care about me I’m just going to start deleting friends unless you say something.’ Go hug a fucking relative, you depraved brat."

***

“Crazy ex. My current SO and I were together for a while, then we weren’t for about a year, that’s when I was with the Crazy, and since then we’re back together and for good. Crazy was convinced we were somehow fated to be together and got awfully stalkery and disruptive and dealing with that kind of shit made me realize that there isn’t anyone I wanted to interact with on a regular basis that required me to use Facebook to do so. So I shit-canned the whole thing and haven’t looked back.”

***

“When I realized that I not only wasn’t really interested in what anyone was posting, but also that they actively irritated me. I had over 500 ‘friends,’ but only one or two people were posting anything worth even glancing at, and even those were hit or miss. Then the political crap started. By February 2016, I had enough. When my birthday hit in April, and NOBODY messaged me, I realized that those ‘friends’ were ephemeral at best. Facebook makes you feel better about yourself at first, because it gives you a sense of community, a sense that you belong to something greater, but then the cold reality sets in and you realize that everyone is self-absorbed and just want everyone to think that THEIR life is better than yours. I still hear my wife complaining about all the people that have such great lives, posting wonderful family pictures, but I don’t believe most of them. There were bribes, fights, and tears involved before that final postable photo.”

***

“It’s such a waste of time. Really. And it’s a breeding ground for vile conversations and debates, political and otherwise. Social media in general has dehumanized everyone to the point that nobody has tact or patience, and they’ll say whatever, whenever. Honesty is awesome, but whatever happened to ‘if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all’? I digress. I still have a Facebook account, but only to manage my music page. I very seldom check my newsfeed anymore."

***

"Everybody becoming a political pundit while citing clickbait articles to fuel their political activism."

***

“I just got tired of all the tailored BS with the fake news and fake people. The fake people made me predisposed to depression and reading the ‘news articles’ that were extremely polarized (I was friends with both liberals and conservatives) made me realize that it’s all fake and biased. The real reward was a few months after I deleted fb and my veteran cousin with PTSD and strong/caustic opinions went off on my sister because she posted something about not standing for the National Anthem. I heard about it from my sister and my first reaction was ‘holy crap, that’s messed up’ followed closely by the realization that I avoided all of that drama. It was a pretty nice feeling.”

***

“Ads started coming up in my FB feed for things referring to a condition I recently got diagnosed with. I had not googled the condition or anything like that. I had only write about it in my phone text messaging telling my sister about the diagnose. I felt surveilled and got out.”

***

“I got sick of my girlfriend, who uses Facebook like 25 times a day, always looking over my shoulder to see if other girls were messaging me. I’m just scrolling just like she is! I deleted mine and started hacking into her FB messenger to find other guys she’s been talking to. TL;DR Deleting Facebook helped me dump my guilty ex-GF basically.”

***

“My best friend was killed in a work accident. I’m 35. It was mind-blowing to see all the people who sort of exploited it for ‘likes.’ He didn’t have many friends, but after he died, people who barely knew him were getting tribute tattoos. Those seemed like pretty expensive FB posts, or some sort of grieving-chic thing.

At the end of the day, Facebook is like the game The Sims, or some sort of weird arms race. People parade their poor kids and pets around for daily photoshoots. The addiction is in the constant need to be validated. People get trapped in these personas. It’s very, very sad. People sort of ‘focus test’ their entire lives now, and that’s not how good things rise to the top.”

***

“Influx of baby boomers that ruin it like they ruin everything else.”

***

“I was getting extremely annoyed with people sharing clickbait articles with their deranged opinions, but that was technically the first straw. Final straw was every family member commenting on every status ever.

‘Just went out and bought Childish Gambino’s new album, hope it’s good!’

Grandma comments – I don’t know who that is but I love you! Mom comments – are you still listening to that Devil music? Aunt comments – did that sweater I bought you last Christmas fit? Friend with similar taste in music comments – JK he doesn’t comment because my family can’t just text me.”

***

“I’m a negative enough person as it is, and seeing the worst side of everyone else did not help matters. On top of that, I found myself looking at endless BuzzFeed links and horribly uninformed political opinions.”

***

“I deleted Facebook because I found myself on the verge of hating people I genuinely care about. People are not who they are on Facebook, or at least, that’s what I want to believe. Beyond that I started to hate how I would constantly go back to the app like a rat to the feeder bar. A few days after deleting it I found myself using the time that would have been spent on Facebook doing far more productive things.”

***

I realized that Facebook is just a black hole where your time goes. You have nothing to show for it and get nothing for it. I deleted my Facebook and I really don’t miss it, I feel like my time is now going to better use.”

***

“People are way too dramatic, and everyone is always fighting. I also found out the average IQ of my friends was around 4, and it just hurt talking to them.”

***

“The last straw was a quote from Mark Zuckerburg that implied people were idiots for giving their personal information to his company for free. Prior to that however, it was clear that Facebook was a popularity contest – people who are attractive or sociable got likes for posting anything whereas good content would go ignored if it wasn’t from one of these types.”

***

And last but not least...

“The news feed is 99.99% pure cancer.”

Are the progressive fanatics who run most of the major Silicon Valley tech companies in self-destruct mode? From P:

It's almost beyond comprehension the seismic [expletive]-storm that Jack and his band of social justice idiots at Patreon unleashed on their own dumb asses. Just another reminder that the lunatics on the left will always wind their way to utter self-destruction if left unchecked. Consider yourself checked (and checkmated) all you [expletives] at Patreon, Facebook, Twitter and beyond. You've issued your last shadowbanning denial, and you [expletive-verb'd] your company and your employees over in the process.

Some finer analysis here may hearken back to the "Social Threefolding" concept I laid out in the previous post. I think what we're seeing now regarding the cumulative effects from last 3 years or so of hyper-progressive ideological fervor, is the Cultural Sphere beginning to assert itself over both the Political and Economic Spheres. And this is not necessarily by top-down conspiratorial design. What we are seeing is a cultural movement that's become consumed by a moral panic, or rather a cluster[expletive] of interlocking moral panics. These are storms not so different from weather systems; they gain momentum, wreak their havoc and then eventually exhaust themselves of energy and die down. Anyone remotely schooled in esoteric might understand the idea that emotions are just like weather patterns.



Silicon Valley has been collectively engaging in precisely the type of cathartic emotional outburst we can see in the video above. Their progressive ideology is little different in character from that of a religion; in this case a very dogmatic, evangelical, and fanatical one. Low-T Left Coast bugman tech CEOs like Jack Conte of Patreon are men of deep faith; we're now at the point where the deep religiosity of such people supercede their pragmatic or even economic concerns. From a business perspective this spells nothing but ruin; one cannot run a for-profit business when their religious motives are in the driver's seat. Of course, many of these tech companies don't even break even on their balance sheets; they stay alive as long as their billionaire investors are pumping money into the company coffers. A deep-pocked investor may have motives that go beyond simple profitability, but only so much. In the media business there have been plenty of examples of publications that never managed to make any money, yet the investor(s) kept the media outlet alive for vanity or propagandistic purposes. I'm not sure this "business" model will work for tech companies in the long run however. A company that keeps making dumb financial decisions and losing money/customers, will eventually find itself in the corporate graveyard. I predict that when the moral panic(s) die down, many of these hyped-up tech companies will be history and we'll be seeing a sizable group of hyper-religious tech workers and entrepreneurs grovelling for jobs at companies that are actually solvent and have a reliable, realistic business model.

At the end of the day, the Cultural Sphere can only run the Economic sphere in a Theocratic system. When the people are allowed to choose what to believe and not believe, it's impossible for Theocratic system to assert any kind of monopolistic power over the general public. This whole mess we're seeing now is going to crash and burn sooner or later.

This is yet another example of: Get Woke, Go Broke.

This comment from a youtube user regarding Tim Cook's recent virtue-signalling storm where he bleated on about his amazing powers of censorship:

Being lectured to on ethics by a Silicon Valley billionaire who makes his products using Third World labour and is unanswerable to anyone is such a joy.

This one sentence beautifully sums of the sheer absurdity of the obnoxious moralizing behavior we're starting to see more and more from the heads of Silicon Valley tech behemoths. These statements, usually steeped in the sort of vapid virute-signalling that totally insults the intelligence of anyone who isn't a brainwashed progressive ideologue. It does take a hefty dose of cognitive dissonance and doublethink to unironically believe that giant corporations are anything more than sociopathic money-grabbing machines, much less organizations that act on anything resembling ethical motives.

As Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin) stated in the summary of the video he just uploaded on Patreon's totally arbitrary banning of his account, "The Great White Saviours of Silicon Valley are actively looking for ways to deplatform anyone who is not politically correct, as Patreon did to me."

In the not-too-distant future I'll be summarizing my experiences with and overall impressions of each of the new/emerging "Alt Tech" social media and content-hosting platforms that have arisen in response to Big Tech's (Silicon Valley) ever-increasing censorship of any form of expression that doesn't bend the knee to their cultural-left ideology.

Here's but a few of the new platforms and my very basic and highly-opinionated impression of each of them:

Gab(dot)com - Gab is a Twitter clone and doesn't really pretend it's anything beyond being a "Free Speech" version of Twitter. It began as a haven for people banned from Twitter for arbitrarily-defined infractions like hate speech and harassment. The interface is slick and user-friendly, though the site itself has been buggy an unreliable since the recent attacks on them by SJW craptivists and tech infrastructure corporations (like domain registrars and hosting companies) that easily cave into pressure campaigns from the aforementioned censorship-loving puritans. Having said that, I've found the site's core user base to be pretty cancerous, as from day one it's been a safe haven for the far-right, i.e. the Alt Right: those obsessive white nationalists/identitarians and pathetic Nazi-LARPers. This is what I mean the actual far-right, not the imaginary one the mainstream media bills as anyone with a right-of-center and anti-establishment opinion. Half the posts I scroll by on Gab is an endless stream of drivel that blames "teh Jooz!" and nonwhites for every imaginable problem with Western culture today. That's not the majority of the user base however. The rest tend to be basic-bitch MAGA-populist conservative types who worship President Trump and have a worldview that is a rough mashup of watered-down libertarianism and a protestant Christian identity, i.e. typical American prole conservatism. I don't have a problem with these folk per-se, I just find them to be rather boring, vacuous and something quite obnoxious when the Buble-thumping factor is cranked to 11. It's because of this boring and annoying atmosphere, I don't really use Gab much. The cherry on top is that I pretty much despise microblogging to begin with.

Minds(dot)com - Minds presents itself as a "Free Speech" Facebook alternative, though in practice it tries to combine the functions of several different social platforms without implementing any of those functions in a way that's equal to or better than the originals. On top of that, the user interface is cluttered as hell and the feed is massively-spammy due to Minds's poorly-thought-out BOOST feature, which also happens to be its most annoying feature. Not only that but you have to pay Minds a small monthly fee to get rid of BOOSTS from random users popping up in your feed. Having laid all that out, I actually like the culture that has grown on Minds. It's more of an artistic and creative leaning user base, (i.e. the kind of people I tend to get along with) as opposed to the boring conservatives of Gab I mentioned above. If Minds is to grow and be a true replacement for any of the bigger platforms it needs to clean up its interface and functionality and start redesigning the site with the end user in mind. As it stands now, it's not a place where I can keep up with friends, due to the lack of differentiation between different user types. In other words, Minds needs to look more like Faceboook and less like a bastardization of Twitter and Youtube. I keep coming back to Minds and seeing the same old crap, despite an occasional cosmetic facelift. Finally, Minds can be a rather nice place to look at photography and art that users upload. And oh yeah, they've taken some cues from Steemit and now offer an Ethereum-based points system for content sharing.

Steemit - It's a blockchain-oriented blogging platform with some incorporated features like DTube (another alt video hosting service). I have to admit that I don't really "get" Steemit, nor the particular appeal of Steemit; it looks to me like a blogging site that tries to be a social media platform too. Most of the hot topics users write about are about tech and cryptocurrency. While I find those things interesting, they're not my core areas of interest and thus I'm not sure the kind of stuff I write about would find much of a receptive audience there. Overall, Steemit looks to me like a minimalist, less artsy, and much less annoying version of Minds. There quite an active community established there and the interface gets right to the point and is super easy to use for basic functionality like posting. But beyond that, effective use of Steemit it's quite complicated in a tech-arcane sort of way and this will serve as a deterrent to anything approaching mass-adoption. The whole thing looks like it was designed by eggheads for eggheads. Perhaps my non-egghead self will mirror this entry on Steemit and see how it goes over ;)

Bitchute - In short, a Youtube alternative. Like the others above, it's geared toward "Free Speech" and basically lets users upload whatever they want, within the limits of the law of course. It's main distinguishing feature is the way it distributes the bandwidth for each video among the users viewing the video, not so different from the way the BitTorrent protocol decentralizes bandwidth. In practice, Bitchute has become a haven for Youtube content creators who have had their videos age-restricted, demonetized and even take down, for reasons that often border on frivolous and absurd. And as of recent Bitchute had their Paypal account suspended (see: craptivist brigading), effectively cutting off their main income stream. In summary, as long as Youtube keeps censoring and harassing its creators, the more sites like Bitchute will need to exist. And hopefully these site will survive the constant attacks from the BigTech-MSM-Deepstate cabal.

MeWe - It's a true Facebook clone and looks quite nice when it comes to the site's design and features. Though I'm weary about it being a "Free Speech" platform as it seems to be run by the usual gaggle of San Francisco leftists. I've only played around with it a little and my overall impression is that it's nicely-designed social platform waiting for a user base. In other words, it's pretty dead and there's not very much engagement on user posts. Lack of engagement is effectively death for a social media platform, as without the "social" aspect there is no network or media. We'll see how this goes; my hopes for MeWe aren't too high.

Mastodon/Ostatus - This is a federated version of Twitter. Federated means the overall service is decentralized into a network of independent servers, or "instances" ... kind of like nodes in a network. Each instance can institute its own rules for its users. In a user feed using software like Mastodon, the user can either browse just the activity on their own instance or they can see the entire "Fediverse" which is the global network. Users can even block out entire instances they might deem to be objectionable for whatever reason. And instance admins can also block out other instances, as far as I know. I like the overall concept of the Fediverse and there's a chance a system like this could be the future of internet social networking. However this arrangement does tend to encourage the sort of ideological tribalism we're so used to seeing in the currentyear. Each instance can become an echo chamber for whatever the prevailing ideology that instance was formed around. And then instances which allow for controversial content are easily assigned an outcast status and mass-blocked from other instances. The Ostatus protocol seems to have taken cues from the now-moribund Diaspora project, which was an attempt to create a decentralized version of Facebook. Ostatus platforms like Mastodon might go the way of Diaspora. While the federated structure is great in theory, it does require some degree of tech literacy to navigate. In other words, such a system will probably never attract a critical mass of "normies" who seem to love those invasive, centralized platforms that make everything just so damn easy and convenient!

----

There's surely more platforms to go over, but I can't really think of any major ones at the moment, so I'll stop here. And for some of the more notable ones like Gab and Minds, I'll go into more detail on in follow-up posts at some point.

Yes, I finally did it and it was much easier to do now than it was even just one year ago. Even though I was going to get rid of my facesuck sometime soon anyway, what really sealed the deal at this moment is the fact that I can keep using Messenger to chat with friends who are still exclusively using FB, while being able to keep my profile completely deactivated.

Freakin' good riddance. The endless "news"-feed of attention seeking, ideological parroting via dumb meme shares, lemming-like cultural-signalling, narcissistic selfies, and random mental burps in the form of status updates few-if-any people actually care about, ect. Sure, Facesuck was pretty "awesome" at first (think c. 2008-2013) in terms of keeping up with actual friends, upcoming local events, common interests via groups, and whatnot. I remember back when I first joined it was like a cleaned up version of Myspace; I took to the more formal and respectable appearance and format right away. It was a great place to share thoughts with friends and acquaintances (yes, my FB experience was still mostly IRL friends back then) that I didn't have the opportunity to hang out in person with very often. Then feature-creep started setting in. FB kept adding more mini-apps, site features and other little gimmicks, until the whole experience became a rather bloated affair. And then the smartphone craze happened and the subsequent "appification" of everything imaginable.

Facebook went to shit as the ever-swelling international user base necessitated a site moderation policy of over-accommodation of specific grievance issues and thus mass dumbing down of everything. And now people with even a modicum of tech savvyness are fleeing it like rats from a sinking ship. All I can hope for is a re-decentralization of the internet. Big, bloated nanny-state monolith platforms (remember AOL??) always end up getting crushed under their own weight. FB will eventually succomb to this and of course the normies will find a new or different platform to congregate in.

The great fun that the internet is, and could once again be, is an internet of massively- decentralized functions; something that authoritarians and busybodies fear and loathe. This is where I am headed back to. Deleting my facesuck was a major step in this unfolding process.