Facebook is trying to move in on the numerous hobby forums on the internet and strip away their users and get them into Facebook groups. Starting last year, I found my feed filled with material from groups on several of my interests and hobbies, particularly electronics and electronic music along with solar and wind energy. It was an easy investigation to find out how Facebook got the information on these hobbies and interests. In all of them I’d used a Gmail account that was linked to the email I use for Facebook to register on a forum. All of my other interests where I’d used an email that wasn’t connected to my personal Gmail account to register on a forum have not appeared on my Facebook feed. So it’s obvious that Google/Alphabet sold the information to Facebook/Meta. The only question I have is how far the information went because I get Facebook suggestions that suggest that not only was the information that I joined the forum given to Facebook without my knowledge and consent, information about specific topics I’d posted on was as well. I don’t use my real name on any of these forums so that means that Gmail scanned my emails and collected my user names for these forums and then sold it. If not the user name itself, at the very least, a list of specific areas of interest derived from my posts.

And what does it mean in the larger scope of things? One is that forum participation is down from what it was ten years ago and what was once completely decentralized and scattered into numerous independent forums is more and more being collected into Facebook groups with all the attendent Facebook crap. In comparing the experience of being on a solar and wind energy forum several years ago to that of a Facebook group I joined with a similar focus, the forum experience was so much better. I had to leave the Facebook group because of all the idiot posts and comments. It’s one thing to ask stupid questions, it’s another entirely to give stupid answers and then start insulting the people who correct you. With the forum, the joke was that you had better know what you’re talking about because most of the people on the forum have engineering degrees and they will check your math. Facebook, on the other hand, is an idiocracy where the least qualified have the most to say. All the algorithmic like and share structure is designed for emotional response, not the transmission of knowledge and just gets in the way of serious discussion on a technical level. And being anonymous is also a great thing because it means you’re focused on the subject, not who’s talking about it. On forums you earn your reputation by what you know, not by how many people who know next to nothing like your comment. Another advantage of forums is that content is quickly buried on Facebook while it’s there for the long run in a forum. I’ve often done searches for technical information and found my own old forum posts from ten to twenty years ago. On Facebook, it’s buried in a few days and not easy to find afterwards. And the forums never pushed content, you got what you looked for, not what some algorithm pushed on you to try and grab your attention. And that, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with this trend. The forums were run by people passionate about whatever it was that interested them, whether it was old computers, growing cannabis guitar playing, or whatever. With Facebook, it’s just big business with no passion from the provider who will just suck out and exploit whatever passion the users have for its own profit, not to mention the tracking and privacy issues with Facebook that don’t exist on the forums. The word these days for this sort of thing is “eshitification”, the degradation of the online internet experience from what it was a few short years ago.