Facebook and general aviation

Peter wrote:

There are countless “forums” on FB (there are probably several on breeding pedigree siamese cats) but they have no information value in terms of archiving because everything just scrolls off.

Good example. Yesterday I was completing a SOLI Licence application process. I searched it, the answer came up here on Euroga and I followed the same process to fill out the minefield of forms. I could never have done the same with Facebook.

FB is good and bad. You have to use it (if you use it) for what it does well.

For me, it is good for staying in touch with old friends, and for exchanging non-PC jokes And a lot of people use it just for that. It took over Friends Reunited.

A lot of parents use it to keep an eye on their kids. Normally, you know at most 1% of what your teenage kid gets up to The cost of this is that you get a load of sanctimonious comments from them if you write something non- woke

Others find groups (forums) there which are not on the www. There are countless “forums” on FB (there are probably several on breeding pedigree siamese cats) but they have no information value in terms of archiving because everything just scrolls off. You just get the immediate discussion, but it is rarely a “discussion” because once the same topic has been around a few times, the regulars don’t bother to reply yet again. I know people who use FB forums a lot and this is their general comment. Most drop out of them as soon as they can because invariably people get nasty. There is always someone with 16hrs/day to spend on the internet… you get them on www forums too of course but the barrier to entry on FB is much lower. It’s wonderful for “one line tossers” (where “toss” means “throw” ).

I readily see that FB is attractive to so many because if you just want to splurt out some one-liner, FB gives you instant satisfaction. You just get your phone out and drop some comment in. Especially if it is political. Accordingly I have disabled all FB notifications (even private messages) because the damn thing just beeps all day.

For aviation, in general, I am negative about it because of the lack of archival value. You cannot find anything from the past, and if you put effort into typing up a contribution, it disappears, never to be seen again, within a day or so.

There is a great deal of “blogger” activity going on – many young people dream of becoming famous via this route – and many people have a short attention span. So if you look at the GA groups on FB you find lots of youngsters doing their PPLs there. You don’t see them on the www. On FB, they pop up and vanish… But there is almost nobody who actually goes somewhere, has something worthwhile to say, and who has a constant presence. I do comment on a couple of sites, but mainly to promote specific threads on EuroGA If you have something worthwhile to say, you are wasting your time doing it on FB. The GA sites there have people asking questions but the answers they get are mostly crap one-liners. All the CAA/NATS “enforcers” are present, too, just like they are on the UK www sites, and I am sure this is true for every European CAA.

FB groups are mostly poorly moderated so things get out of hand rapidly, and then the mod (if he/she is bothered) goes berserk and kicks a load of people out. Modding FB forums effectively is basically impossible unless the mod reads it 24/7 and quickly chucks people out.

FB attracts every lunatic and conspiracy theorist. 5G masts spreading the virus, etc. In GA, the current flavour of the month is watching FR24 and posting the details of all those “breaching” the “CAA law”, which always ends up in a fist fight.

Unfortunately some videos that are potentially useful appear only on FB and cannot be linked externally. I have no idea why anybody bothers to do that… put effort into something just for the moment, which then disappears and is of almost no use to anybody. I have occassionally downloaded them (there are tools such as this) and put them on my vimeo account so they can be linked here.

Financially, FB is a big and growing problem for www forums and other www sites which carry adverts and rely on them to finance the running of the site. They have lost a lot of traffic so lost a lot of advert clicks but haven’t gained anything in return. Of course all the other “brain consumers” are a factor too e.g. twitter, instagram, etc for the young part of the audience. EuroGA is fine because the donations exceed the running cost OK. But then EuroGA could never exist without someone putting in the time to originally build it, run it, and maintain it. Nobody will ever make a living out of it, and sites such as FB have made sure of that.

Major privacy concerns on FB, of course, because they sell all they have on you. Since they bought Whatsapp they have your real name, real phone #, and probably everything else. For some reason most people are on FB with their full names and photos, which they would consider totally mad on a www forum, or in a video conference.

As I say, if you want to use FB, use it for what it is good for, and it certainly isn’t GA.

Facebook is obviously better for sharing things to more people, the main issue being that you can’t really control it. If you want to contact more people than your own circle, this is an advantage.

I think forums are strictly forums in a way. Facebook is much more. Not particularly good for discussing stuff, but good for meeting people.

In the club, when we have a fly-out or something, we use messenger in FB, not Facebook itself. But Facebook is still good for announcing things.

Oddball??
Thank you Peter.

Yes; groups.io is popular for these oddball groups, which previously existed on yahoo which now appears to be collapsing (and a lot of people lost their logins to yahoo, after some problems there, in addition to all yahoo and btinternet logins and passwords having been hacked a few years ago). One group I used to read (OrCAD – a schematic and PCB design program) has just moved there. IMHO the structure is pretty horrible but it works.

I am a member of the International Morse Preservation Society and we recently moved our discussions to groups.io. Nice and easy and works great.

I have 3 tips for FB users:

1) Replace the standard messenger app with “messenger lite”. Much less intrusive. I believe FB offer this via the app shop only to 3rd World countries (ostensibly because they supposedly have poor internet connections) but the .apk is easy to find – an option for android, at least.

2) Disable notifications from the FB website, otherwise when using a browser on a PC you get popups

3) Install Facebook Purity – this is a chrome plugin which is really brilliant. It removes most FB ads. It has to be updated constantly because obviously FB hate it and they keep changing the HTML structure of the site to thwart it. It is a donation project and I donate a few € periodically.

The main problems with running a forum on FB are the lack of long term visibility and lack of SEO, so the forum does nothing for “spreading the word”.