I remember when I used to use myspace/facebook/twitter to interact with friends. Now I feel like it's just a bunch of ads from people that I know. Half of my notifications are invites to some kind of event.
DAE miss the good old days where social media was actually a useful social tool?
It's not like it was some kind of closely guarded secret. The whole purpose of facebook has always been to get people to willingly submit their personal information, their location, where they go, who their friends are, what they "like" so that it could be marketed to advertisers. Advertisers love it. They get to put their ads in front of people who might actually buy their products. Like cars? Have a Mobile 1 ad and a coupon for $5.00 of when you buy a whole case! Like action movies? here is the newest trailer for that film franchise you love - etc, etc, etc. Of course it is annoying. But I remember years ago when our real mail boxes were crammed full of direct marketing. You could opt out some of the time, but most people actually signed up for more junk mail when they had a chance.
Definitely, although maybe for a different reason. I enjoy the segregation of my interests in different social networks. The less crossover there is, the better. Maybe paradoxically, I've found that I can't be truly open without being able to segregate parts of my social experience from one another. Hacker News is good for my tech discussion, Google+ for talking to a certain group of friends, Facebook for another, reddit for complaining about reddit, etc. Once you introduce another variable into the mix like, say, family or coworkers, what I say changes dramatically. It isn't so much me censoring myself to appear more palatable to other groups insomuch as it is attempting to cultivate different personas with different people which, now that I'm typing it out, seems a bit duplicitous, but I think most people would agree that they act different with their family and their friends. I am, however, going off on a bit of a tangent. I didn't sign up to Facebook in order to see which companies people liked. I signed up, well, because of peer pressure, but also because I wanted to be able to keep in touch with people I don't see every day. As Facebook trended more and more away from that, I've used Facebook less. I like my online life to be able to be divided into discrete, modular chunks.