What’s the virtue in offending people when you could instead be kind?
I know one woman who is having a baby shower, and I know another woman who recently dealt with the loss of her child. It’s not “secrecy” to celebrate the baby shower and avoid bringing it up with the recently bereaved, it’s respect and good taste.
I feel like we used to call it discretion…
I don’t want to be locked out of the joys of celebrating with friends due to misguided attempts to protect me. If going to a baby shower is going to be a problem, let me decide that.
I’m an adult, and I can use my words to say no for myself. For the record, our own experience hasn’t kept us from enjoying time with pregnant couples, children or babies.
On the other hand, if I found out that my friends were excluding me or my wife from social events, I would actually be upset at having my agency removed.
If the person suffering the loss has asked to not be included, that is different.
If you want to go out with friend A but don't want friend B to see it for whatever reason (maybe B has a feud with A), then that is a thing between B and A, but not you.
I think the whole point of the OP comment is to just go with it. If you don't flauntingly advertise it, it is not your fault.
But in a very social media centric world, even if you are just a participant in a picture can feel like "flaunting it" to 3rd parties.
That's a stretch, considering previous generations forbid people from discussing all manner of life issues and events out of "discretion", which in my estimation has been a key factor in perpetuating shame and all of the horrifying things that come from societal shame.
Not bringing up a sensitive topic when interacting with someone is discretion. Hiding a major life event because it might trigger one person is silly.
There's a phase in a big chunk of people's lives where the only thing on their social media is about having a baby. If you're traumatized by that it's up to you, not everyone else, to keep it away from yourself (e.g. stay off social media or start a new profile and only follow hyperpop jazz trombone and COBOL enthusiasts... or whatever).
Not wanting to share your life on social media is one thing, picking and choosing to keep things secret from person A or B because of some drama or another is childish.
Having a good thing happen or preventing bad things from happening sadly show up as high stakes butterfly effects of the perverted social ranking and opinion games.
It's fine to overshare as much of your life as you're comfortable with. But we should be more mindful of how we include others in this.
As a more general example, you wouldn't talk about a happy hour you were going to after work with people who weren't invited/aren't invited/you wouldn't invite. I believe every sitcom on the planet has at least one episode with this lesson in it.
Are you sure?
one which has been intentionally cultivated, exploited, and capitalized, by Meta,
so yes, it is Instagram's fault. They are the primary party—though I do not excuse those complicit with surveillance capitalism, meaning every person who continues despite unending evidence for how sociopathic and destructive the company, its management, and its impact is, to use their products. Which use however is also traceable in significant part back to Meta, via the ugly mechanics of exploitative and amoral engagement-engineering and their exploitation of monopoly.
This is a front upon which they might and should be confronted... a class action on behalf of those have not consented to participate in surviellance would be a lovely thing.
Under the current political shitshow, also in measurable part the "fault" of Meta, however, we can expect no such thing.
The one-community broadcast-everything model has been embraced and encouraged by these surveillance-based businesses who don't want you to think too hard why they are also privy to all of your communications, and also want to drive the maximum number of interactions for "engagement" metrics. Non-corporate social media, "indie" web, and group chats are much more natural organic patterns of communication.
Rue the consequences of making working for Meta socially and career viable at leisure. Maybe in an El Salvador prison.
There are (or so I've been informed) some pictures of me on Facebook and Instagram. I don't have an account on either website so I can't see those pictures or even request to have them removed. Those were posted by the kind of older relatives who are impossible to educate on anything technology- (or consent-) related, and occasionally by friends-of-friends who snapped a pic while I was unawares.
Whenever I take a picture of anyone, I always ask first, and I never post them anywhere public. Feels like common decency to me, but there is obviously no such thing as universal common decency, so YMMV.
I also hate drama, and would much rather lead a quiet life as a person no one likes than an interesting life who some people dislike.
If they don't respect that, you need a new set of friends.
Zero issues since then. First time my emails got into spam but after unspamming, it worked.
Havent had issues. I use a cheap racknerd $12/year server so its way cheaper than proton or stuff and I have dozens of emails across family members.
I'm sure you'll have some problems if you start serving newsletters right away, but as a personal mail server, you don't really need to do anything.
I even fucked up the config at one point for a week, and all the mail just patiently waited on the senders mail server for mine to be up again. I really love email.
Pay a bit more for a better reputation provider. Use a domain you've owned for a while. Set up all SPF, DKIM, and DMARC properly.
Or just pay fastmail to do it for you.
https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be...
I feel like this is an issue one just has to grow up past. Walking on eggshells and deception so as not to hurt anyone's feelings is an annoying way to live. (I preach as a sinner). Related: https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/apr/01/fringe-frie...
As to Zuck's machine having your information, yeah I can imagine if they bothered, they could see that there's always a person or two in all the pictures that aren't associated with any of the faces of the accounts, it can also determine what the friend groups of this person are. Probably even determine their wealth by their clothes, accessories, vacation locations, house ("Oh 5 users are gathered in a particular geolocation that is none of their houses [which we know about because 95% of the time a phone returns to a particular geolocation at night], and we can see from the photos that that 'unregistered user' is with them", that must be this user's house. Oh he lives in this neighborhood, that has a median income of EUR xyz. A reverse lookup of addresses we have because online shops upload their customer data to our system determines that one of the people living in that address is named Wouter Janleys, and from the shopping data he likes, amongst other things, mid-range to expensive wines.".
I wonder if they can even advertise to you through your friends, hah, that'd be a feature improvement for a Facebook project manager. Start showing your friends wine ads a few weeks before your birthday (as well as "It's Wouter's birthday in a few weeks" and "Remember this photo?" which is a photo of the group with glasses of wine)...
Probably did so through shadow profiles
This is a thing in FB: shadow accounts.
A lot of time and money and research goes into it, so that if/when people do decide to join, they will have a very "familiar" experience with all the right suggestions ready to go.
Yes, it's creepy as hell. No, you can't opt out as far as I know.
Afaic, Meta pretty much killed their platforms by pumping rage-bait clicks instead of social content.
And from what I see working with younger people out of uni, it's almost all private group chats, Discord, only real social platform seems to be TikTok. If there wasn't a date on the blog post I'd have guessed it was from 2017 or something, because the problem just feels obsolete now. Didn't Zuckerberg himself even say something to that effect?
There's a reason everyone is on Facebook (one reason is that everyone is on Facebook): Myspace legitimately shot themselves in the foot (I guess Friendster too by lack of proper site performance, even though it was cleaner) by having 'messy' pages. There's real value in being able to find the people you want/need to find by their real names (except, Google, maybe don't you know, hijack people's Youtube accounts in order so that they use Google+)
But then Facebook introduces shifting privacy settings, tagging without permission, not giving people control over how information is displayed generally
I understand it's about beating the competition and about growing and 'connecting the world' but some companies' DNA is set a certain way from the beginning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
People who post without asking don't know me well enough to name or tag me, so I don't care.
If someone posted and named / tagged me without asking, I'd have a serious conversation with them about it.
We need to stop acting like others' ignorance gives them an excuse to do things we don't want. "But everyone does it" is bull, and we're doing people a disservice when we let things slide because of that.
Ultimately you can't stop this though, at all. You say people who don't know you don't tag you, but it just takes a friend of a friend in a group to do so, and then dismiss your concerns and not care, and you have no recourse to do anything.
By the way, during last Monday's blackout in Spain, I had a sense of this kind of burden being lifted from the atmosphere... the idea of nobody having the ability to record and publish anything anymore (for the duration of the blackout, at least), was quite interesting... relieving, even.
I might agree that 'celebrities' and leaders of larger organizations are 'public figures' and thus if there's a reasonable public interest it should be allowed to tag them, probably with a publishing delay for security.
However individuals? Random citizens who aren't part of a platform and cannot manage their data? IMO the default should be deny data collection and do not profile.
Then again, this is a pretty obscure problem, or more of a "problem".
A resident sent a petition asking for a variance from the bylaws, and part of the pitch was "well I saw XYZ on your IG so I thought you'd approve of this".
Uhh thanks, rejected.. blocked on IG, quit IG, bye.
Were you trying to require them to use a more formal process? The smaller the number of people involved, the less formal the processes yet (no matter how much bureaucracy you try to drown them in - in a small political system, drowning someone in bureaucracy is just a rude way of saying no).
They thought I just might like what they were doing and approve it the third time lol.
edit to add more context: On condo boards you deal with a lot of self interested strong willed people who have unreasonable demands & complaints like - "why can't I just put a 1000 gallon hot tub on the roof above my neighbors bedroom without approval.. why do I need legal & architect review .. why do I have to pay for that review.. ". And on denial "hey I saw on your IG you went to an onsen once so I thought you'd like this idea!"
If you wanna do wtf you want, get a house with a large lot away from neighbors. If you want to share walls/floors/ceilings with other people, get used to their being some requirements for common sense and decency.
The term I like is Social Cooling, the subtle way in which people change their behavior because they are both present in person and online. Have you ever heard some use the term "unalive" in person? It's as if they are protecting themselves from an algorithm, as if the conversation will be posted online.
If anything, in recent years, I’m met with something closer to the respect people afford recovering addicts turning down drinks: “oh man, I wish I were off of it too, good for you.”
You might call me a "weirdo", but this has absolutely not been my experience whatsoever. Friends, family and coworkers don't really give a shit that I don't participate in social media, and I haven't been treated any differently for it.
Edit: And hell, generally, what's life without a bit of weird? The homogeneity of everyone doing the same thing together all the time sounds boring as hell. Here's to the weirdos!
A lot of people thought non-drinkers were kinda weird a decade or so ago when drinking wine on morning TV was popular. Now half of the beer aisle is N/A offerings.
Nobody is being socially pressured to avoid the word "dead/died/killed" in person, that's just an illustration of slang perpetuating.
Definitely _not_ a universal feeling.
