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Social media is the devil


zambingo
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My thirteen year old daughter was allowed to use pinterest because out of all the social apps that seemed the most tame, plus my wife uses it so I thought she was familiar and would be interacting with our daughter on it. Turns out neither was a good assumption.

 

Messaging is available thru pinterest, which my wife did not realize because apparently all my wife ever used it for was to pin recipes, hair styles and nail ideas. My daughter however used it to the fullest extent. My daughter pinned everything of interest, commented on things, used the messenger and amassed 2.6k followers. The problem here is my daughter was just chatting to every rando that ever messaged her and freely answering Q&As like the randos couldnt possibly be anyone but who they appeared to be.

 

In addition to this, we discovered she has a new in real life boyfriend and from his texts he has had no father figure in his life... ever. He is beyond vulgar and texts to my daughter like she is his property and she just goes along with it.

 

Oh yeah, and my daughter is flunking three of her classes.

 

With the modeling of romance and adult behavior my daughter has between my wife and I (which everyday is striving to be like, but obviously far less dramatic than Gomez and Morticia Goals) this is all quite a surprise. For those unfamiliar with the pop cultural reference... with the balancing of authority that my wife and I share, the strength of intelligence and will of my wife and mutual respect we both have and display, I would never have thought to witness our daughter in a submissive and quite frankly abusive (at least in text form) relationship.

 

Needless to say, there is a lot of shit about to go down in my house.

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Dude, there's not a day goes by I am thankful I had a boy and not a girl. I have to worry about ONE dick-- his.

 

You have to worry about ALL the dicks in the world.

 

We've only let Oliver had Instagram, but thank you for the reminder it's time for me to check his account and search history.

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Yeah, Pinterest is... something if you get into the right corners of it. My friends teenage daughter found the fishier corners, too.

 

Jacob, be like me and abandon it completely, but keep the messenger app on your phone for communication purposes.

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I have a theory that social media, and Facebook in particular, harms us by trying to enforce more relationships than we can handle. The friend terminology in Facebook especially drives home the relationship factor. We can really only have a maximum of ~150 relationships, and by the time you add friends, work, any other organizations, and then you add the guy you sat next to in algebra 20 years ago, it becomes too much for the human brain to track. And since Facebook also offers constant instant gratification, it starts to squeeze out the real, life giving relationships.

 

Getting rid of Facebook made me have better relationships with the people I want to have relationships with.

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I deleted Facebook in 2011. Never gone back. Can't say that I'm out of the loop or miss anything about it.

 

I use Instagram, which is owned by facebook so Im a hypocrite really, but I'm an artist so need it for work.

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I dropped Facebook last week. Not sure for how long. I had lunch with a friend-a FORMER SJW. She's working on her PhD in cultural studies and geography and has had it. I was sure she'd be the last to go. I'm hoping to either not go back or be able to go back and just look at kitties once in a while

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I am the only person who likes your tweets! Also your kids are adorable. I have to meet up with you and April and have a beer or something. I couldn't get tickets to Comic-Con. You have to get out of the house! HA! And April because we're lucky friends in Pokemon Go and we can trade and get a lucky pokemon!

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  • 1 month later...

Try having crippling self-doubt and insecurities and tying your self-worth to your creative output that is then seen and judged by the world at large and think they know best and take to twitter to let you know.

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That's a big part of what I'm talking about. People are just needlessly cruel. I'm up for discussion about almost anything, and I can be blunt and say things without thinking, but I try really hard not to be horrible to people where they'll read it. So I'll be harsher about stuff here, but I think that especially if you're responding to people or tagging them to insult them, you're not a decent person.

 

It's one thing to be critical of a work or an idea. It's different to just be an a-hole.

 

And I enjoyed Hellfest more than the recent Halloween, and not just because you're my friend. And my opinion is worth a thousand Twitter opinions.

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That's a big part of what I'm talking about. People are just needlessly cruel. I'm up for discussion about almost anything, and I can be blunt and say things without thinking, but I try really hard not to be horrible to people where they'll read it. So I'll be harsher about stuff here, but I think that especially if you're responding to people or tagging them to insult them, you're not a decent person.

 

It's one thing to be critical of a work or an idea. It's different to just be an a-hole.

 

I agree entirely. My thing, are people a-holes for attention, or are they really this terrible? We've been on Nightly for 20 years so I know not everyone is a jerk, and some people just genuinely like trolling. But the level of jerk I am seeing IRL lately really has me losing faith in humanity.

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I think that the lack of community has made people become worse. Nightly has formed a community over the past two decades, and most of us care about each other to at least some degree. But for a lot of people, the internet did the opposite of what it was supposed to do: it made the world bigger instead of smaller. People are more cut off now than in the past.

 

What someone says on Twitter or Facebook doesn't REALLY matter because you don't have real connections and you don't have to say it to someone's face and have immediate repercussions. Eventually that bleeds into real life because social media tears you down and eventually you can't cope.

 

I think that Nightly grounds us more, because we're used to having relationships on the internet. I may not have an immediate face to face repercussions if I'm constantly an ass to Tank, but it's still going to happen and poison my experience. On Twitter especially, I can be a dick to someone I'll never have any connection with so there's no reason to not be one. And people spend hours a day in that environment, and it slowly makes it impossible to connect with anyone.

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  • 3 weeks later...
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