I don’t deal with any business that uses solely facebook as means for communication. I don’t miss them, the platform does a bit less and things get less enshitified. Craigslist isn’t that bad, I still use them all the time, people are much better than the flakes I used to deal with on facebook marketplace. There will be a federated classifieds soon, I’m sure, and the people will regain that corner of the market again.
That’s true, but on the otther hand, nobody GenZ or onwards checks for websites anymore. Most people will look up a business on instagram first, so I don’t blame them, especially small businesses, when they operate on social media primarily.
What? Myself and most of my friends are Gen Z and nobody I know does this. Google Maps is always the first place I look, and 70% of the time I click through to the business’s actual site.
That’s great then. I’m a musician so not a business per se, but I need to promote my music and act as a business in that regard. My anecdotal experience - Even though I have a linktree as my “website”, most people who look me up when I post my music search my social media profiles instead. From the business pov, it makes sense because getting a follow on social media means long term visibility and engagement, instead of viewing a website one time and forgetting about it; unless you have a newsletter people can sign up for (if they even bother). So I agree that websites should still be a thing, on the other hand I also understand how small businesses choose to operate on social media.
I took the phrase “small business” to mean places with an actual storefront (restaurants, small shops, studios, and so on) who use FB or IG in lieu of having their own site. For those places it makes particularly little sense because social media isn’t most people’s first port of call when they’re looking for somewhere to eat dinner or go thrifting.
You study a college, everyone has a Facebook account so it makes sense for teachers to just notify students through Facebook. If everyone has a Facebook account and you dont, its your problem. Noone is going to message you via email just for you.
A different example, You go to an Office. There is a huge notice board. Its filled with notices and there is a huge queue. The office management has not made it digital so the staff members themselves setup a Facebook page and post the pics of notices. Because they know how to use Facebook and everyone around them use Facebook. So what kind of fool would reject that convinience in looking up notices and go queue up in there?
Even in your example, absolutely no one forced anyone to use it as a “social media” app. If it is a matter of convenience to access the notices, or talk to teacher, then use it like how you would use school/work apps such as canvas/blackboard/slack/teams apps. Stop using it beyond it’s purpose. Which is to say, add “friends” if you have to so that you can access notices or messages from your teacher or whatever. But doom scrolling on clickbait and keeping tabs on Exes shouldn’t be done.
It’s not so much about Meta itself but a social network can be very useful. It just so happens to be that the most popular one currently is Facebook. If someone decides they want to use and would benefit from the services a social network has to offer then naturally they’re going to want to use the one that almost all the people they know are already using. No point using social network B while all your friends and family are only using social network A. That would be like wanting to party/socialise in the city at night but only going to empty bars and then scratching your head about why you have no one to talk to. You go to the bar that’s popular. The choice of which one is already made for you if that’s the kind of thing you want to do.
Don’t get me wrong, I spend about a minute on Facebook a month, I find it very useful for events especially. Given the convenience of the tools available, I don’t expect people to message me directly when they’re organising a medium to large gathering.
My best friend is planning her hens do and she invited me only on Facebook and didn’t reach out to me personally. Would you say she is an acquaintance at best?
If I could get all my friends and family to stop using it, I would. Unfortunately they and also several communities I’m a part of choose to continue using Facebook and IG and nothing else, and if I’m not on there I only learn about events and such by word of mouth several weeks later, after they’re over. I have tried to convince them to leave or at least cross-post on other communities but they look at me like a crazy person and don’t care.
Well in that case you have better memory than any human who has ever existed. Also they also have better memory than any human who is better existed.
So there is apparently 1,000 people out there who are freaks of nature and no one’s noticed.
Come on dude it’s literally impossible to remember 1,000 people’s names, even if you had met even half of them. Which you haven’t because you can’t meet 1,000 people in any real sense, you can see 1,000 people in a stadium perhaps but you can’t really interact with them in any meaningful way.
Just because it says there your friends on Facebook doesn’t mean they actually are your friends. In that you know them and would attend their weddings.
I’m in a similar situation. I’m also in a town where I have no friends and I can only keep in touch with the friends I have via Facebook, and then a handful by other methods. My brother is also ASD and Facebook is his preferred communications medium. I really wonder if I’ll ever hear from him again if Facebook goes down. He’s never once called me or emailed me and I don’t know his phone number or email address.
Does that matter? Facebook, Insta and Threads are all owned by the same company.
Why shouldn’t they merge them all together? Gmail sends appointments, flights, etc to Google Calendar. Should I be outraged by that too?
If you’re still oversharing on Facebook at this point, you know what you’re getting into. Even those that post that nonsense “I do NOT give Facebook permission” spam that highlights everyone vulnerable to other scams.
Everyone has an excuse but you’ve gotta start somewhere. There are probably hundreds of ways to message people and we would all survive if Meta and it’s products vanished.
I think people use things like Reddit for anything because Reddit has a built in system of human curation. It’s not just SEO engineered garbage fake websites like basically every search engine will yield now, or sites’ internal searches pushing you to their top players instead of what you’re actually searching for.
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