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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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This means I no longer routinely use Facebook or any of their products, even though I've been a piece of their captured audience for more than 15 years.

Yeah this is really weird to me. I quite enjoyed facebook for many years, as it was the only reasonable way I could keep track of people I knew above my Dunbar limit. It was genuinely quite pleasant to get a drip-trickle of new information about people I knew, like oh neat they went to Spain, oh dang that's some insane workplace drama, oh wow they have triplets! And EVERYONE used it, so it worked almost perfectly as an address book of sorts.

The downside for me started maybe about 5 years ago, where instead of seeing my friends' status updates, I was increasingly bombarded with seeing their 'likes' on thoroughly shitty meme pages. It just felt so depersonal all of a sudden. I had to duct tape a variety of browser extensions to get it anywhere near usable but it just got worse. The vibe felt off, maybe it was just the culture war but people felt increasingly nasty and hostile, just shoving outrageous clickbait into everyone's face and saying "LOOK AT THIS SHIT". I truly hated it.

Nowadays it's desperately trying to claw onto attention by pretending it's TikTok, so I just get inundated with videos about pugs acting silly. I keep it around as an archive I guess, and it's still useful as very limited address book. But besides that, it's more or less useless.

Which brings me to the biggest loss of all: events. Oh my god, events. This was the best feature by far. Because everyone had a facebook account, the default assumption was that you will create a page on facebook for all your parties. And jesus fucking christ it cannot be understated how amazing of a feature it was that you could see who was going!!! I admit it, if I was on the fence about a party, I'd trawl through the 'attending' tab to see if any hotties were going. Facebook also let me know what their favorite bands were. I'd show up to the party already equipped with a solid opener.

Those were the days, and there's no comparable replacement for events. RIP.