Facebook Groups? Nah

The Public Square
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Originally published at: Facebook Groups? Nah. - Warhorn Media

In the time we spent planning Sanityville, one question kept coming up: why don’t we just start a Facebook group? It’s a good question, and it deserves a full answer. After all, just about everyone we know already has a Facebook account, and most people check Facebook multiple times per day. On top of that,…

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3 posts were split to a new topic: Can we invite other people yet?

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Regarding Facebook, have any of you ever noticed that FB actively causes relationship destruction through its UI design?

The design practically makes it impossible to have a serious discussion without offending, even if it’s not a tense topic. The reasons for this are numerous, but they all boil down to the fact that they make it extremely hard to actually read a complete discussion. You have to keep clicking and clicking and clicking to read everything, and if you miss one click, which is extremely easy to do, then you don’t know what the person said, even though you think you do. That’s a recipe for disaster, and I’ve seen it happen many times. And that’s assuming that FB even shows you all of the person’s responses, which sometimes it doesn’t, meaning you might miss key comments from the middle of a discussion. A clarification, an apology, a retraction. Miss any of those, and you look like a real jerk when you respond as though they aren’t there.

I’m so happy we aren’t trying to do this on FB. :slight_smile:

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5 posts were split to a new topic: Sanityville is not a private site?

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This is a prime example of how Facebook is not friendly to substantive discussion:

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Do you notice how you have to click multiple times to even see the entire thread? Again, I submit that Facebook is not primarily interested in helping conversations. They are just trying to keep your eyeballs on Facebook.

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It would take video to show how bad it is. Forget clicking multiple times to see the whole thread. Take a single conversation in that thread and see how many times you have to click. Take a single comment of more than a sentence or two and see how many times you have to click. It’s impossible to have real discussion on FB. That’s part of why people resort to memes and animated gifs.

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Since the possibility of being deplatformed is a good reason to not create a Facebook group, in what ways in particular is this site not subject to the same threat? Who is hosting the site? What software is it using?

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I predicted months ago we were going to see a decentralization of social media away from Facebook and Twitter, especially as people realize how much they are being censored.

Twitter’s rules on “misgendering” and “deadnaming” will eventually come to Facebook, so pointing out biological truth will be banned there too. Setting this up before Facebook deplatforms us is smart.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Communication in an age of persecution

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Great questions, Jon. I answered them privately over in Hrothgar’s Hall.

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