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Comment by Wintamute | Hacker News Reader

I'm 32 and Facebook has turned into a nightmare cavalcade of weddings and other people's children. No more smiling faces, parties or high jinks, just more wrinkles, more responsibilities, more towing the line.

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That sounds like a problem with you, not with Facebook. It's important to learn to accept that you and everyone you know will grow older, age more or less gracefully, and eventually die.

Also, FWIW, while having children should, and almost always does, imply more reponsibilities; there's no required connection between the rest of the life events and behaviors you mentioned.

Agreed, its mostly a problem with me. But accepting the mortality of myself and my friends, or indeed feeling a pang for lost youth, has little to do with liking over-sharing of wedding and baby photos on public timelines. If I dig into it it's the almost aggressive reinforcement of conventional group-think and life choices that rubs me up the wrong way.

There's a little bit more to having kids than convention and group-think. You're the product of 4 billion years of organisms that decided to have 'em.

Where did I say that I was against having kids, or indeed procreation? For the record I'm ambivalent at best about the tradition of marriage (that's where the group think thing comes in I think), and (as stated) kinda sick of other people's babies on my social feed. But I wouldn't read too much more into it than that.

So, you liked the conventional group-think and life choices of 20-somethings posting photos of getting wasted at bars & parties better?

Also, if you can't take pleasure in the happiness of your "friends", then maybe they aren't your friends and, therefore, shouldn't necessarily be your "friends" either. If you get what I'm saying.

To quote myself I said "smiling faces, parties or high jinks[sic]". That doesn't necessarily equate to getting wasted in bars, or indeed betray any particularly sort of conventional group-think. I'd argue getting married (and to a much lesser extent having kids) constitutes a more real subscription to conventional life choices. Broadcasting it (semi) publicly over Facebook arguably makes it an even more overt stance. There's nothing wrong with that of couse.

Taking pleasure in a close friend's happy life moment in a real and genuine fashion, i.e. by interacting in real life, is quite different to being confronted by the over zealous activity of a Facebook "friend". It was the latter I was complaining about. And I agree, a particularly ruthless "friend" cull would largely solve the issue.

Facebook feels toxic in the sense of how it ruthlessly upholds social norms. I'm probably being whiny about it, but it seemed like FB was less about 'connection' and more about in-group maintenance.

What's so toxic about upholding social norms? You say "social norms", I say "social capital". About 40% of children grow up without both parents in the US, and the number is closer to 60% of poor children and 20% of well-off children. Before 1960, the average was 4% for all demographic groups. Growing up in a traditional family is a huge leg up in life. Popular media doesn't reinforce those traditional norms, so it's nice that we have one source that encourages the values of successful people.

If you ever have children they will be better off for your boring traditional life - encouraged by your upper-middle class friends on facebook.

I think the best leg up for a child is to be brought up in a stimulating, loving, stable environment. Whether that needs to look like a traditional nuclear family I'm not 100% sure. I think some progress can come from looking beyond the sort of social norms that a social network like Facebook seems to aggressively propagate.

The split between people who have children and their friends that don't predates Facebook.

When you have kids your life changes so completely that you no longer have nearly as much in common with your friends that didn't. It is hard to imagine how social media could prevent this.

Pictures of my kid are about all I post on Facebook anymore. The constantly changing privacy settings mean I don't trust it for posting anything especially interesting, so I've mostly stopped posting at all. Every once in awhile I put up a kid picture to make relatives etc. happy, but that's basically my only use case for FB now. Especially since I stopped wanting to read other people's updates too, when I discovered that many people I know have moronic political opinions that they feel compelled to share.

So maybe people block my updates because they are tired of seeing my kid, but I've probably blocked them because I got tired of reading about how Mitt Romney wants to ban tampons or whatever.

Also, "toeing" and "hijinks".

I'd suggest Facebook isn't the best medium for sharing family photos, precisely due to its opaque privacy setting, like you say.

Are you familiar with Facebook's FTC settlement over privacy settings?

The order requires Facebook to obtain its users’ “affirmative express consent” before it can override their own privacy settings. For example, if a user designated certain content to be visible only to “friends,” Facebook could allow that content to be shared more broadly only after obtaining the user’s permission.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/technology/facebook-agree...;

I'm curious whether folks expect this settlement to keep the hijinks in line. Nothing particularly egregious seems to have happened to privacy settings since November 2011.

I have made my peace with "towing the line".

If you just consider the words, it has some different shades of meaning than "toeing the line," but the same general feeling. Instead of a pointless military drill ("toeing"), I like to conjure the image of a bunch of Egyptian slaves dragging stone blocks to build a pyramid ("towing").

Anyway, given the other solecisms out there, it will be a long road to hoe to stamp out "towing."

I have been blocking the people who post nothing but pics of their babies. After the 50th pic, I've long lost an interest in seeing them, however adorable. Not all of my friends or family do this, and I am grateful.

You're not alone, there's actually a browser plugin to hide baby pictures on Facebook. http://unbaby.me/

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