Poll

Do you have a Facebook account?

No.
120 (50.8%)
Yes. Strictly for technical reasons.
29 (12.3%)
Yes. Mildly used.
44 (18.6%)
Yes. Regularly used.
32 (13.6%)
Yes. Heavily used.
11 (4.7%)

Total Members Voted: 233

Author Topic: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?  (Read 18531 times)

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Offline FrankE

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #25 on: April 12, 2016, 02:14:20 am »
Something mentioned in another thread made me wonder. Are techies really less likely to use Facebook, as I assume?

A recent discussion:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/facebook-it-can-be-tamed-and-useful/
I use it mostly for connecting with tech and STEMM companies, not people.
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #26 on: April 12, 2016, 02:19:43 am »
Facebook is good for staying in touch with distant friends and relatives.  The ex-coworkers you want to stay in loose touch with.  The people you went to school with and didn't stay really close too.  The relatives that are close enough to care about, but not close enough to phone and write all the time.

No need to compete on quantity of friends, or share every moment of life, or respond to all of the silly polls, click bait, and drama that seems to show up there all the time.  Fortunately technical people have a well developed ignore function in their core operating system.   It doesn't require any effort to operate.
 

Offline Halcyon

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #27 on: April 12, 2016, 02:30:56 am »
Fortunately technical people have a well developed ignore function in their core operating system.   It doesn't require any effort to operate.
:clap:

I have never heard this expressed in more truer form! I like it.
 

Offline Tinkerer

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #28 on: April 12, 2016, 02:59:44 am »
No Facebook, no Twitter, no Linkedin, no MySpace, no Google+ yet I still manage to have friends and I get out of the apartment two or three nights a week. Most of the networking sites are a waste of time and one or two are privacy nightmares.
Actually linkedin is a professional networking website, its not a standard social site. I am guessing you have never looked at what linkedin is?
 

Offline MarvinTheMartian

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #29 on: April 12, 2016, 03:02:21 am »
Scary thing is that FB was able to figure out some of my actual friends and FB sends me links of people I might know (and I do know them)
Exactly the reason I don't use any social media.  |O


Source: https://www.facebook.com/terms

Is it only me that's a little disturbed by stuff like this?

It's not just you!  :scared:

Fortunately technical people have a well developed ignore function in their core operating system.   It doesn't require any effort to operate.
:clap:

I have never heard this expressed in more truer form! I like it.
Ditto!  :-DD
Reviving my old hobby after retiring! Know so little...only one thing to do...watch Dave's videos and keep reading the forum! ;-)
 

Offline miguelvp

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #30 on: April 12, 2016, 03:41:54 am »
Scary thing is that FB was able to figure out some of my actual friends and FB sends me links of people I might know (and I do know them)
Exactly the reason I don't use any social media.  |O

Neither do I, that's why it's scary they could figure it out.

They must buy contact information from other entities.
 

Offline warp_foo

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #31 on: April 12, 2016, 03:51:29 am »
I created an account to follow a film maker's project. I may have logged into it 3 or 4 times.
Where are we going, and why are we in a handbasket?
 

Offline steve30

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #32 on: April 12, 2016, 04:51:52 am »
I don't.

IRC and forums pretty much make it redundant.
 

Offline FrankE

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #33 on: April 12, 2016, 05:27:56 am »
Fortunately technical people have a well developed ignore function in their core operating system.   It doesn't require any effort to operate.
I could procrastinate and waste time for England.
 

Offline MarvinTheMartian

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #34 on: April 12, 2016, 05:31:51 am »
I could procrastinate and waste time for England.
Congratulations, a true athlete!  :box:

Hope you do some limbering up exercises first  to avoid injury (viewing one of Dave's videos, perhaps?). :-DD
Reviving my old hobby after retiring! Know so little...only one thing to do...watch Dave's videos and keep reading the forum! ;-)
 

Offline sleemanj

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #35 on: April 12, 2016, 05:42:50 am »
I have an account because I had to develop a couple of website facebook API integration things in the past, thankfully I haven't had to do that in a couple years now, such a pita.

I think it has 2 friend requests on it.  Neither of which are ever going to be accepted.

My siblings and parents do the facebook apparently, I never got the hang of the whole social interaction thing.

~~~
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Offline Halcyon

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #36 on: April 12, 2016, 05:52:05 am »
I never got the hang of the whole social interaction thing.

On the contrary, you probably have better social skills than these people who are glued to their Facebook feeds. My friends (like, actual, living people that I see regularly) have tried to get me to join but I've refused. Nevertheless, I still get regular phone calls asking what I'm doing, if I'm free for dinner. I even got a wedding invite in the post the other day :-)

Life without Facebook makes you realise who your friends actually are.

 

Offline HighVoltage

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #37 on: April 12, 2016, 08:37:57 am »
To me it seems one needs a different mindset to use FB.
Somehow it does not fit to the mind of an engineer.
Or I am just too stupid.

I have not found the need at all to be on FB and I probably never will.
And I have plenty of good contacts around the world, without FB.
There are 3 kinds of people in this world, those who can count and those who can not.
 

Offline BillyD

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #38 on: April 12, 2016, 09:56:46 am »
I'm involved in a couple of clubs and community groups, we use Facebook as the main means of communication and I have to say it's excellent for this purpose, even allowing for the inevitable element of 'noise' posts.
I also use it as a way to keep in touch with friends and family and I follow a number of newspapers which gives me quite a useful newsfeed.
It's like anything, you can use it stupidly or wisely.
(And 'wisely' means - among other things - being aware that it's public, visible, permanent, and is doing its best to gather as much data about you as it can.)

 

Offline TinkerFan

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #39 on: April 12, 2016, 10:01:00 am »
I don't have it either (worried about the data and all that sort of stuff), but sometimes I think it would be good to have, just to stay in contact with someone.
"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering." - Freeman Dyson
 

Offline TerraHertz

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #40 on: April 12, 2016, 10:25:06 am »
No Facebook, no Twitter, no Linkedin, no MySpace, no Google+ yet I still manage to have friends and I get out of the apartment two or three nights a week. Most of the networking sites are a waste of time and one or two are privacy nightmares.
Actually linkedin is a professional networking website, its not a standard social site. I am guessing you have never looked at what linkedin is?

I'm pretty sure he'd know exactly what Linkedin is. As do I, who have the same 'wouldn't touch any of them with a pole' list. It's not just social media, it's any company that tries to own you via your net habits.
At one point I made the mistake of joining Linkedin (forget why), and it very rapidly creeped me out with the extent it was double-guessing me and who I might know.

Others may find this site useful: http://justdelete.me/   (Does what it says.)

Google+ is extra-super annoying, because you more or less have to have an account in order to use youtube. For this one thing alone, I loathe google. Hence my G+ avatar.
« Last Edit: April 12, 2016, 10:45:26 am by TerraHertz »
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Offline Wh1sper

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #41 on: April 12, 2016, 10:37:23 am »
My dog has one.
And I'm typing for her.
Because the dog playground communicate with facebook only, so my dog ask for an account
 

Offline lpc32Topic starter

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #42 on: April 12, 2016, 01:13:39 pm »
Was it Yes or No that surprised you?
Less "yes" than I expected. It increased some since I posted, but the current 38% is still rather low. I've either overestimated the usage in the general population, or underestimated the avoidance by techies.

All that mundane stuff of everyday life isn't interesting to ME, why the hell should it be interesting to anyone else?
Probably, the people who post this stuff do find it interesting to read other people's daily activities.

Quote
The order of operations math problems particularly infuriate me,
What's that?

I tried to decypher my wifes Facebook page once but to me it just looks like this:
Modern art? :)

Is it only me that's a little disturbed by stuff like this?
The poll says you're not the only one.

Facebook cannot share anything that you did not put there in the first place. If any critical detail of your life is leaked - it is your fault.
Technically, perhaps. But many people are unaware of how it works, or of the implications, or are gullible, and Facebook is like a slick conman that's hell-bent on collecting your data and metadata, and maybe also on triggering "involvement". There are probably defaults that expose information you're unaware of, Facebook "apps" that get permissions you didn't expect, and so on. Add to that phone apps, with their own set of shoddy permissions, that use Facebook interfaces or auto-submit stuff to it, and you get a whole lot of attack/exposure surface. Also, shared by whom? Your own info can be shared by someone else on Facebook, also inadvertently.

Some anecdotes:

A friend recently asked me to check a problem related to something on Facebook, so I had some recent FB exposure. I found someplace where FB asks you to fill in details such as linking/identifying your family members: parents, grandparents, siblings, etc.

I've received an SMS from Facebook offering me to look at photos of a person I've talked to over the phone just a handful of times in a professional context.

A 2nd hand story: a friend told me he encountered people who name-tag faces in photos on their account.
« Last Edit: April 12, 2016, 01:32:44 pm by lpc32 »
 

Offline tszaboo

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #43 on: April 12, 2016, 01:34:07 pm »
No Facebook, no Twitter, no Linkedin, no MySpace, no Google+ yet I still manage to have friends and I get out of the apartment two or three nights a week. Most of the networking sites are a waste of time and one or two are privacy nightmares.
Actually linkedin is a professional networking website, its not a standard social site. I am guessing you have never looked at what linkedin is?
I got my last job solely because Linkedin. I'm earning more and have a better job, better position.
Probably so far the most productive time of my life was when I've uploaded and updated my profile.
 

Offline Bud

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #44 on: April 12, 2016, 01:51:45 pm »
I understand what you said re finding your new job but boy, if there is a hell of a confusing web site that is LinkedIn. Every time i log in (to accept connection invites from people i know) i am lost in how to do simple things like see my connections. This site is a total mess, my eng education is insufficient to navigate that piece of crap.
Facebook-free life and Rigol-free shack.
 

Offline gnavigator1007

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #45 on: April 12, 2016, 03:44:33 pm »
Hell no.  Never have never will.  I lived so completely of the grid for about 15 years that the state of Florida had no record of my existence lol.  That was a big surprise trying to renew a 12 year expired ID.  Something with the conversion to paperless records.  Didn't have so much as a bill or bank account in my name.  Really a pretty comfortable time of my life.  I've had to make a lot of effort to get back into the system, but Facebook is just too much even now that I use twitter and occasionally post in forums.  Always refused Facebook even when employers have tried to bully me into it.  I'm still pissed youtube required me to get a google+ account. 
 

Offline TheWelly888

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #46 on: April 12, 2016, 05:25:10 pm »
Just after I voted, the Nos have it with 51.1% after 180 people voted!

I have a theory why this may be the case - ordinary non-techy people find it awkward to use forums like this especially when putting pictures up or looking up the latest postings and they find FB's interface much easier to use. This forum is full of techy people who can cope with forum webpages and so don't need FB (as well as a much higher awareness of how FB pays for itself!)

I am on a private web forum for ex-pupils of my old school which saw it's traffic decline by at least 80% over the past 2 years since more people adopted FB and went over there. One person admitted that she could not cope with the forum's new interface and so gave up on it.
You can do anything with the right attitude and a hammer.
 

Offline rx8pilot

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #47 on: April 12, 2016, 05:40:53 pm »
This thread has been an eye opener. I did not realize so many people were scared and/or hate Facebook and seemingly all other social media. After reading all the posts, I still cannot understand why it is so evil and horrible though. Maybe some people just like to live in pure isolation and have no idea what anyone else is up to.

I regularly learn of important and timely issues about people I know and care about. It allows me to respond (or not) to a need for help or a congratulations for a success that I otherwise would never know about. There is obviously a ton of noise, but it is not difficult to scroll past that one guy always posting about politics and how wrong everyone is. If one person is posting too much, they get blocked with a single click of the mouse.

Everyone knows that FB makes money off of analysis of your activity and posts - they are able to target ads to you based on your location and the content of your posts. Who cares? I usually run a VPN so they don't know where I am, but that is true of anything on the internet. Somebody, somewhere is recording the origin of your IP and if you do not make it hard that will be used to target you for ads and whatever else. Some of the targeted ads are actually useful - I found a machine shop the other day from a targeted ad that I would never have found otherwise.

I have been 'online' since the BBS days starting in the mid-80's. I have never had a single problem with anyone stealing my stuff. The internet has and always will be a double edged sword - just like real life.
Factory400 - the worlds smallest factory. https://www.youtube.com/c/Factory400
 
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Offline lpc32Topic starter

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #48 on: April 12, 2016, 06:29:24 pm »
Just after I voted, the Nos have it with 51.1% after 180 people voted!
I look at the 2nd poll option as a practical "no" as well.

Quote
I have a theory why this may be the case - ordinary non-techy people find it awkward to use forums like this
I think another factor is that many techies aren't exactly socialites.

rx8pilot: It's not only ads. The leaking of private info to large audiences, potentially irrevocably, can have real life implications. It also just makes me uncomfortable in general. BTW, not many avenues for abuse on BBSes, unless you mean the sysop. :)
 

Offline rdl

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Re: [Poll] Do you have a Facebook account?
« Reply #49 on: April 12, 2016, 06:30:34 pm »
Why do I avoid facebook?
Because no matter what else they want to call it or how they want to justify it, what they do is spying.
And like most people, I seem to have an almost instinctive dislike of being spied upon.

Quote from: Merriam-Webster
Full Definition of spy

    1 :  to watch secretly usually for hostile purposes

Hostile. Purposes.

On top of that, their CEO is an asshole.
 


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