Oh, I’d add one HUGE con, though:
My photo images get downloaded by strangers, and FB allows anyone to download other people’s images. Too many incidences to count.
@TiggerDad my son is also an amatuar photographer. He figured out a way to embed his name on the bottom of the photographs so that if they get shared then people know who took them. Can you do that?
@bajamm @TiggerDad
It’s called watermarking - there’s a lot of available software online to do it. You see a lot of clipart & photographer websites use it.
@bajamm
Yes, I’ve done that in the past and decided not to continue the practice, because that proved to be hardly a deterrent. It’s extremely easy to “clone” it out and takes less than a minute to do so. Some photographers do so across the entire image, smack in the middle. While that’s much harder to erase for image thieves, no one then likes to look at such images. The only thing FB has to do is to provide another option of disabling the download feature. Give the users a choice in this matter. Obviously, Zuckerberg is not a photographer.
Cons: political posts, people who feel the need to post pictures of every meal they eat etc., people who post a ton of silly memes (I have taken the most egregious offenders off of my newsfeed)
Pros: A nice way to stay in touch a bit with family (ex. cousins who don’t live close by) and friends I don’t see regularly (ex. college roommates etc.)
I don’t know what the top con is. I have never had a FB account.
The downside to NOT having an account is being out of the loop. For example, my brother used to call me just to chat & get up-to-date on each of our lives. Now he uses FB. I don’t chat on the phone nearly as much as before, and my kids end up telling me what’s going on in his life bc they see it on FB. Same with certain friends, etc. it seems like the default assumption is most people are on FB & other forms of communicating & sharing info have taken a back seat?
So much local news and community groups are on FB. I met a women on a hike this weekend who lives in my community and she was filling me in on an important environmental win with the city council. If you are not on FB, it’s more difficult to know what’s going on locally. The local newspaper is a shell of its former self. I had NO idea about this local issue.
Probably the thing that makes my ?♀️ The most. People who post missing persons shares without reading the thing they are sharing…which most of the time says the person was found, or that they were missing in 2015 or something like that.
Read what you share before you share it…find out if it’s still relevant. Often. It’s not.
My H is an excellent photographer and uses FB to share pictures he takes. We also have extended family that live all over the world so for us it is easy to keep up with what they are doing on FB.
I agree with others that I don’t engage in anything political on FB and end up blocking people I know on FB who are too vocal about their politics.
Same stuff here. Although I have a wrinkle that is a little different. My better half(wife) won’t get on FB. She only has an instagram account because D19 set one up and has like 10 followers. Since the wife isn’t on FB over the years I have ended up getting friended by some of her friends. I have even be asked to update my wife on things by them.
D19 only recently got on FB, but doesn’t really do anything with it. Her world is all snapchat and insta. D23 is following in the footsteps of mom with almost no social media presence.
Preventing common browsers from downloading will not prevent all unwanted copying, since a browser that renders an image has to have downloaded it internally (so a modified browser could be made to save the image).
Perhaps you can make low resolution versions to upload to Facebook so that they look ok on a mobile phone, but not so great on a big screen or big print, if that is what you are concerned about.
Yes, images can be stolen even with the download feature disabled, but that’d eliminate a vast number of users without the know how from easily downloading other people’s images to their hard drive.
For now, the only option that has worked for me is to, as you said, use a low resolution when uploading, and that’s been my practice in all sites that I upload. People can steal but they won’t be able to sell.
One big con to FB:
I’ve lost several good friendships during my initial years of using FB, mostly because of the level of toxicity that I hadn’t been exposed to or aware of during our pre-FB years.
Is this really a con or a pro, I haven’t come to my conclusion, yet. An example: when we moved into our current house nearly two decades ago, our immediate neighbor invited us over with a warm, welcoming gesture, and our friendship blossomed in ensuing years. In person, they were a great family with two kids similar age as ours. We played golf together, dined and drank wine in our decks. Nothing but pleasant friendship.
Then, FB came along, and we became FB friends there, as well. That’s when the neighbor started posting their extreme views on things in a totally oblivious and unfiltered manner that alarmed not only me but our mutual friends, as well. All those years that we have known them, none of this came to light, but somehow FB made the neighbor feel they could say anything that’s been in the deepest recesses of their dark soul with unbridled freedom. I remained FB friends with them without responding to any of their posts for awhile, but eventually I ended up unfriending them as I couldn’t stomach the things they were posting.
In another case, I was able to find a long lost childhood friend that I had left behind when I emigrated to US in 1971. I had no knowledge of his existence until, just a couple of years ago, we were finally reconnected thanks to FB. Then, like my neighbor, I found his FB posts filled with toxicity spewing out of his soul accompanied by foulest languages. Eventually, I let him go, too. I don’t need toxic beings around me. For making me deeply sad, yes, this is one of FB’s cons. For making me see the reality, I’d mark this as one of FB’s pros.
For anyone in this thread concerned about privacy including those data-mining quizzes (and not just that…everything from your photos/friends/likes/comments), I recommend the documentary The Great Hack on Netflix. Very thought provoking and exposes this exact issue.
I mostly use facebook as a public diary, a place to share things that I want to remember and that I don’t care if others see.
I do tend to post most of my postings to friends except acquaintances and most of the people on my list are acquaitances, so very few people actually see what I post.
I also go through my friends list every couple of months and make sure the list is properly marked as friend or acquaitance. I also unfriend some from time to time if I just am sure the person doesn’t need to be there at all. Or if I can’t remember why they were there in the first place.
As others have written - privacy, privacy, privacy.
Do not participate in any games or quizzes, do not post anything that you would not tell your friends in public or post on the front of your house. As long as you understand that FB is, essentially, a public forum, you’re more or less OK, at least until FB starts allowing companies to use FB to disseminate spyware onto or PCs.
Closing your account will not help. Despite their claims that they delete all of your information, they actually do not (I have know a number of people who worked at FB).
I use FB, since it is the main way I interact with many organizations and people, and I have been on for over a decade, but I do my best to keep privacy settings at the max, and not to post anything on FB unless I deem that it won’t cause me any real damage if it goes public.
FB isn’t for any specific age group - it’s for people who prefer posting actual text, rather than just pictures. However, kids generally prefer pictures to text (kinda like how very young kids prefer picture books, while grown-ups generally read books which are text-only), so that’s why Instagram is preferred by youngsters, while older people generally like FB. Since Instagram is only 9 years old, and has only been on Android for 7 years, I do not know whether the kids who who use Instagram will switch to FB, or something similar, when they get into their late 20s or 30s. Perhaps there will be another type of social media by then.
Twitter is mostly for politics, since almost all politics today is expressed in soundbites.
My Ds in their mid 20’s have Facebook, but neither really uses it any longer. Everything for them is Instagram or Snapchat.
My daughter (35) uses Twitter and Instagram mainly. She is quite active on Twitter in her professional capacity and uses Instagram mainly for personal pictures. I use Twitter for sports and sports contacts- as well as political news.
More pros than cons for me, my life has been enriched by FB reconnections, but what I don’t like:
- Friending someone than wishing you hadn’t because you don’t want them knowing what’s going on in your life.
- A friend request from someone you really like that you decline because it feels awkward having them being a FB friend. Example...husbands of my friends are on FB, and I’m friends with them IRL (couple stuff), but I don’t want to communicate with them like that. Too awkward.
- Just as with @abasket, I hate the coyness of some posters and won’t respond to things like “what an incredibly horrible day”. And that’s it. Won’t play the game.
- FB friends who aren’t really close friends.
- Feeling jealous when I see others having so much fun, makes me wish I had a huge group of true friends who do everything together.
Twitter is “mostly politics” only if you choose to follow people/places that talk mostly politics.
Another “Con” of Facebook: all the suggestions of what I might like. I am NOT into following many businesses/products. I don’t care that “friend so and so likes this page” - just like the door to door salesman, if I’m interested in a business/product I’ll look it up myself!!
I like Twitter. I never post anything though. Twitter is mostly politics? Hmmm… pick your followees accordingly. For me, it is all professional stuff and Olympic spots. ?