I’m a member of a number of Facebook groups and I think I need to quit.
75% there speculate and give poor advice with little or no experience. Has anyone else found the same? I have thought about inviting some users to this message board to get a better education but I’m not sure it would be good to have an influx of knuckleheads. Anyone else have any thoughts? I think Facebook is a really poor venue for this sort of thing.
19 Likes
Don’t invite them, people like that would start fights on a forum like this, they act smarter than everyone else, and refuse to admit that they are wrong, or they refuse to admit that there might be more than one right way to do something.
13 Likes
They are also full of incognito plant sellers.
9 Likes
I think Facebook groups are a mixed bag. Part of the problem is structural. They really don’t have a good forum/thread structure which makes finding information and following conversations more difficult. In the fruit tree related groups there are some highly knowledgeable people but you seem to need to sift thru quite a bit of bad advice to find them.
I recommend this forum to people in general if they have an interest in growing fruit. But I could see an influx of people from Facebook could make the moderators work load increase. I remember not too long ago the forum picked up a very abrasive, combative new member… they were banned in less than a week after multiple warnings. Actually I think ribs1 you gave one of the warnings. If we get an influx of people from Facebook hopefully that won’t be what we mainly get.
edit
Ah, here is one of the combative member’s threads and you did warn them ribs1.
3 Likes
It seems like alot of the groups are that way, I don’t understand how there can be so many people wanting to give advice when they clearly know so little on the subject.
7 Likes
In high school there were the smart kids, the jocks, the rich kids, the kids that wanted to be rock stars, we even had special education. None of us ever really ate lunch together or hung out let alone talk to each other. We sat apart watching ball games and each had our places on the school bus. After that we all went our separate ways and thats how society works.
However with Facebook… everyone of those folks are together in the same room trying to get along and ask and answer questions as if everyone just ate cookies and Kool-Aid and were hyper, yet scholarly experts at the same time.
12 Likes
Yes, exactly, and that is what motivates some of the misinformation, desire to make money.
1 Like
Thanks for the reinforcement. I will abstain from inviting any facebook users whether I think they would be good additions or not. Any serious hobbyist should be able to find this message board on their own.
6 Likes
You could remove the
3 middle terms
and still be giving good advice.
6 Likes
I am choosy about where to spend my time, interacting with szociál média.
In the (deep) past, I followed the r/walmart subreddit (anonymously) where Associates (employees) air out work-related concerns in a forum not curated by the corporation. It gave me foreknowledge of (controversial) topics weeks before they were addressed in official channels, but I had to wade through a preponderance of chaff posts. It was early days for generative artificial intelligence, but, even then, I had the distinct impression that many posts came from chatbots. I wound up classifying participants according to the number and length of their posts. I highlighted and marked those posts as already read that came from participants who posted so frequently about so very little. In that way I could pay more attention to the (much) fewer posters who made more significant contributions.
In the (yet deeper) past, I participated in a very active sarcastic and satirical USENET discussion group about motorcycling, rec.motorcycles, which, as you can see, has devolved into a Sargasso Sea of advertisments for illicit drugs. Reeky (as it was affectionately known) existed from earliest days as an unmoderated mailing list with hundreds of participants, but withered after revelations of U.S. government-sponsored surveillance of Internet traffic.
Nobody could afford to post under his own name, but even using a “motorocyle-related handle” was not secure on USENET where the origins of posts were more or less obvious. I continue to contribute at Reeky anonymously from time to time by using a remailer nowadays, but it is a mere vestige of its old glory.
Reviewing recent traffic on Reeky, it’s obvious that it all comes from GMail (to the tune of at least 80 posts on Hump-day 03 May), so why doesn’t Google do something about it? And the answer is: That’s income to them.
That’s the trouble with szociál média. It’s all so mercenary.
Returning my attention to r/walmart, I think that the trouble there is a related one. The significant traffic is significantly diluted by posts from (corporate operated) water armies (navies) whose intent and purpose is to make the discussion significantly less valuable and therefore signficiantly less attractive so that fewer people take it seriously enough to follow it. I no longer do.
This also may be a problem with szociál média at large and Facebook in particular.
The folks who operate the generic szociál média sites have corporate interests at heart. These interests are not to inform, instruct, or inspire but to track, follow, and surveil — to levy a toll on correspondence — to suppress corporate detractors. They pretend to enforce various real-name policies for purposes of holding posters accountable for their beliefs, but they really are interested only in tracing an individual’s appetites for advertising. This is the szociál média paradox: The interest of discourse lies with anonymity.
3 Likes
Facebook really only retains older users, a lot of people stayed only for a group or to occasionally update older family members. It’s always been an iffy social media, for a variety of reasons. misinformation is their stock in trade. it feels like a lot of the people who are active there are either looking to fight, or looking to sell a thing.
I’m in one good local general garden group there, and another that’s not as good. I prefer the forum format. I’ve used reddit too.
I am part of Facebook to hold my photos taken on vacation and am a member of the Colorado Gardening Facebook group. Photos are nice as they stay and I don’t need to shift through photos on my phone all the time. Facebook groups I am mixed on. From one side of the spectrum there are the people giving advice constantly who do not know what they are doing. It also bugs me when I see posts asking for X for free. I really hate it when they are asking for something fairly expensive like a tree for free. Another thing that bothers me is there is no way to shift through information. I have looked for old posts with the search button only to never find them again. What I find useful is there is a lot of people that know how things go locally with certain plants. We used to have other Coloradans here like Richardroundtree but I don’t think I have heard from him for around a year or two now. Drew51 was in Michigan which was a cold state but Drew51 has also disappeared.
1 Like
Drew51 is still here. He visited the site in April as you can see from his profile.
He may be just too busy with other things in life to post right now.
2 Likes
There is another problem. I know of a very good FB group but they are private and restrict members to a single province. I live near there, my zone is similar, and I could learn a lot from the group, but they wouldn’t let me in. So all that knowledge is just locked away.
1 Like
So I guess he is here but not commenting anymore. He used to comment a lot.
Yes, he did post in March though which isn’t that long ago if your life gets busy.
Yea most of the Facebook groups are so full of people who dont have a clue about what they are talking about it is sad. Everyone once in a while I chime in to try and legitimately help someone out and I immediately regret it! LOL
I like to “poke the bear” on another site just to put a smile on my face. He tries to post as a 3rd party to drum business up for his tree nursery business. He might as well just come out and say it, as I would guess its pretty obvious to more than just me. He posts something that makes people think that the nursery he is steering people to is very knowledgeable, but he doesn’t no squat about what he is talking about most of the time. When I point out the misinformation in a post he spends an hour trying to do damage control every time.
5 Likes
That is something I realized about Facebook groups. Lots of nursery owners trying to pedal their business. Between the people trying to pedal their business or nurseries/services like tree trimming and the novices giving bad advice it is hard to trust anyone. There is also a lot of posts I don’t even want to post on. So many of these Posts have 100+ comments in the groups I am in now I hardly find it worth commenting.
1 Like
Fascinating perspective you’re sharing here. I’m far less knowledgeable or involved, but this confirms many of my observations and suspicions.
Even avoiding the motivations and monetization aspect for the moment, many of the flaws and limitations are baked into its architecture by design. Social media reminds me of the way that a Wal-mart or actually any box store for that matter is laid out. Where an older retail model would have almost resembled a library in some respects- maximum organization and cataloging of products according to their purpose or type- the contemporary mega-corp model is one designed for distraction. It’s as though you’re meant to not find what you were looking for in the first place (what did I come in here for anyway?) but instead to bobble around the store impulsively buying things you didn’t know you needed. Wal-mart is particularly crafty in the way that they make aisles intersect one another. I don’t spend much time there, but every time I do, I get lost.
4 Likes
At least they keep their fruit trees outside in one spot…
5 Likes