On a question about my recent Facebook inactivity

(Originally posted via Google+)

I've partitioned my FB and G+ activities for specific reasons.

When I find or post tech/civlib/science/politics stuff on G+, I get to participate in discussions that directly benefit my thinking and my work, and disagreements amplify our mutual awarenesses of the world's many nuances.

When I post anything that breaks from the groupthink on FB, the best realistic outcome is to be ignored immediately. The worst are the weeklong slogs to cut through basic fallacies of logic and reasoning before any new ideas or science I try to bring are summarily dismissed as astroturfing as though I am incapable of forming alternative opinions and beliefs of my own. I'm tired of giving up on such discussions with people I care about, but I don't have the skills or time to do any better right now.

To be fair, this doesn't describe most people on FB, or even a large number of people on FB, but they appear more prominent than those who silently agree or don't care.

For stuff that I read on FB, I usually see the same content posted and discussed on G+ or Reddit or by e-mail hours or days before.

FB is great for organizing shenanigans with my current Uni people and guilds, and for occasional personal stuff, and I continue to use it for those purposes. But for almost everything else, FB feels like high school with cliques formed around preferred distribution models for wealth and power, instead of clothes or binders. In the last few months especially, the fact that a few dozen of my IRL friends have been incesting their way through local politics in competing disrespectful camps gives me some very good reasons to mostly disappear from FB and Twitter.

If FB still had a convenient feature that would allow me to update my FB status by e-mail, I'd use that to automagically syndicate all of my content from G+ and other places to FB. The alternative would be for me to micro-manage posts and friend lists and my own expressed views based on others' potential to be offended, instead of being able to plainly state my views as I can here. I'm not ready to make that personal compromise.