Editor's note: This was originally sent out in the newsletter on 04/26/18

This issue ended up taking longer than it probably should have, I may be riding the "we have a new kid at home" card still but what can you do. The main article of this newsletter got a bit longer than I thought it would, there was even still some stuff I left out, but I wanted to get it out of my head and move on to the next thing. There are a quite a few links in there, but I think they are all worth taking a look at when you have time and add to my overall thoughts.

Before you dig into the main event, here are a couple of other things that I think are worth checking out;

Facebook

Facebook seems to have been thrust into a never-ending news cycle lately. I have had some thoughts about it for a while now, and initially, I was going to share them and leave the privacy topic alone, but I think I am going to try and tackle a little bit of both here today.

I used to enjoy Facebook. At the start it was a fun way to see what people I knew were up to, connect with people I hadn’t talked to in years, plan events, and join groups. It seemed like a pretty sweet tool. Plus being as how I am a naturally curious person, it was an easy way for me to (stalk)follow what everyone was doing. I am honestly not sure when my feelings started to sour away from Facebook. I think it was probably a twofold issue, part of it was me changing, but part of it was them. I think the real divide started when the chronological feed went away.

For a while Facebook let us keep the chronological feed, it was just off by default, and that was okay, but not great. It was the start of the machine feeding us what it wanted instead of what we wanted. (Hank Green made a great video about the feed and how it affects our lives, it is worth the time to check it out)

Then they took the chronological feed away. This felt like an overall shift of what was shared on the platform, but looking back I am sure it was just because what was more shareable was getting pushed. More meme type posts, more hot topic rants, more controversial news articles. Sure you still had some fun stuff, like a dress that no one can agree on a color of, but overall it felt like a decline. The feeds became more polarizing, and I believe this is intentional, there is an old CGP Grey video that explains why this happens, it is so easy to get swept up in the arguments.

You know, as a sidebar here, I always think about how Instagram retains the happiness that Facebook once had. As I laid out the reasons for Facebook ’s shift to the dark side, I should see the writing on the walls for Instagram too. First, the ads came in; now they have stripped the chronological feed away. I hope it doesn’t happen, but we shouldn’t be surprised if it does.

As the sharing gets more controversial, more people feel the need to comment. Social media has given everyone a soapbox to stand on and share their opinion (says the guys sending out a personal newsletter), and then people start treating opinions as if they were facts (this is a whole different subject, maybe for another day). In the old media days, the only people who could push their opinions on to the masses were those in certain positions, TV stars, politicians, newspaper editors. Now we hear everyone’s thoughts on everything.

In the course of regular one on one interaction and even small groups, there are going to be things that just never come up, that you never share. On Facebook that is out the window. You are going to find out things you would never have guessed about your friends, like how much they love Creed, or that they have never seen a single Star Wars movie. It is these weird things that people talk about when they get together too; “did you see John has never seen Star Wars? I know what a freak.” While some of these might only be little quirks about a person, some revelations can show a giant gap in your core beliefs that you never knew existed. All of these little details add to our perception of a person, you might not even realize it, but slowly your opinion of them changes. Your closest friends are bound to have the smallest changes, but those you interact with the least will become a caricature of these things you see.

It turns out these caricatures we see are also sort of what is feeding the algorithm, the more data they get, the better it works. (If you want to get an idea how that works, here is another CGP Grey video that shows you how the bots are always learning from you.) You are the product here; you are not Facebook’s customer, they aren’t operating with your good in mind. This is where all the privacy problems you see in the news are steaming from.

Here is a quick explainer on the Cambridge Analytica problems if you don’t know;

A quiz app was made by a college researcher, and lots of people used it. When they took it, it got access to not only their data but also all of their friend’s data (this is absolutely allowed by Facebook, it is their business model). The part that was not allowed was that this researcher and the group backing him (Cambridge Analytica) then sold the data to other people (political consultants). This sale is only not allowed because Facebook wants to sell the data themselves. They were told to delete the data a few years ago, but reports suggest they still haven’t done this.

Today Explained and The Daily both have great short podcast episodes on the Cambridge Analytica stuff. Honestly, this has been going on for a while. The reason people are getting upset now is that they are spinning it for the political implications. We should all be more aware of this all the time, not just now.

Facebook is built to use the best data it can get to sell ads to you, the better the data, the better the ads. It is not made to better the world, although they sometimes claim this. Recently they hired a doctor to get anonymized medical data from hospitals to match up against their data, just to have an even tighter picture of its users. The better the data, the more it is worth. The more they can get you tell them about you and your friends, the more valuable you are as a data set.

What is the solution then, quit Facebook right? Delete your account? For some people that is the best solution, but for some people, it is a lot more complicated. Paul Miller quit the internet for a year a while back, he wrote a lot of posts about this for The Verge, but with all this coming up he wrote one of the best pieces I have seen on the topic of quitting Facebook. He put it best here;

Well, let’s just be honest with ourselves. The internet is where people are. If your friends are heavy Facebook users, and you quit Facebook, it’s a little bit like if your friends all hang out at a certain bar and you stop going there.

People still use Facebook to set up events, when you don’t have one you might get overlooked at some point, you might actually miss something important. People have moved certain groups to other places, but it is still a hard problem. Some people will never leave it, and in reality, in some parts of the world, Facebook is the internet for them, it’s all they know.

I think if you have to keep it, well, feel you need to keep it anyways, there are a few things you can do to help. You should check all the apps that have access to your info, that is a big part. Go through all the pages you follow and the things you like and get rid of them. Keeping it to a tight list of people you want to interact with and groups that only exist here is best. The people you get value from and enjoy interacting with are going to make your experience better.

Everyone has to decide for themselves though. The world is evolving around us as the technology is changing the way we live every day. It is hard to know what impacts this will all have on society ten years from now. Keep in mind we are all trying to figure it out together, and the change is happening fast. Sometimes we just have to try harder to find the things that connect us instead of being drawn into what pushes us apart.

I will leave you with this quote/tweet from The Stoic Emperor (you should totally follow him on twitter).

Modern humans overdose on information, pushing the limits of our design constraints. Future humans will adopt filtering mechanisms to avoid drowning in random data. They'll look back on us with pity. Attention pollution is a huge drain on our collective intellectual resources.

Let me know what you plan to do or have already done, or if you have other thoughts on it in general.