From one 'hater' [1], some (obviously very personal) explanations:
- I dislike 'social networks' in general. They tend to look messy to me, they seem to try too hard to match me with this guy, connect me with that, make me follow one group and post to another. Arguably FB is worse right now, but I see the trend in G+ as well. RSS (and, occasionally Twitter) is good enough for reading for me. Mail and IM (GTalk, ironically) is enough for contacting the people around me.
- Privacy. I do have a Facebook account, mostly to stay in contact with some friends back in Germany. I tried to lock down the account as much as possible regarding privacy settings and my list of friends contains ~40 - well - friends (or family). I don't 'collect' friends and have no 'friends'.
- The combination of my mail(sort of, reduced that a lot already)/contacts/calendar/IM (hi, Android) provider with a 'You need to provide an ID if we feel like it'/'We delete your stuff if we feel like it'/'Pseudonyms are not wanted here' attitude social network seems scary. For one because I don't trust the 'plus' part of Google any single bit by now. And in addition I'd throw a large amount of extra free data about myself at a company that already collects far too much - for no benefit.
- It's full of bull.. Maybe it's me, but I had an account in the past, tried to follow interesting persons and ended up with pseudonym noise (people that were interesting being deleted, everyone discussing about this policy etc) or animated gif images. It was more 4chan than anything else - and I really tried hard to block people after the first 1-2 'offenses'.
- I loved the idea of circles, that is until I started to use them. The metaphor seemed nice at first, but it became frustrating after I moved past the first 20-30 contacts.
1: Actually I tend to reserve the word hate for things that - well - are actually of importance. 'I hate X' where X is a thing or a person I temporarily disagree with seems inflationary use of the term 'hate'.
- I dislike 'social networks' in general. They tend to look messy to me, they seem to try too hard to match me with this guy, connect me with that, make me follow one group and post to another. Arguably FB is worse right now, but I see the trend in G+ as well. RSS (and, occasionally Twitter) is good enough for reading for me. Mail and IM (GTalk, ironically) is enough for contacting the people around me.
- Privacy. I do have a Facebook account, mostly to stay in contact with some friends back in Germany. I tried to lock down the account as much as possible regarding privacy settings and my list of friends contains ~40 - well - friends (or family). I don't 'collect' friends and have no 'friends'.
- The combination of my mail(sort of, reduced that a lot already)/contacts/calendar/IM (hi, Android) provider with a 'You need to provide an ID if we feel like it'/'We delete your stuff if we feel like it'/'Pseudonyms are not wanted here' attitude social network seems scary. For one because I don't trust the 'plus' part of Google any single bit by now. And in addition I'd throw a large amount of extra free data about myself at a company that already collects far too much - for no benefit.
- It's full of bull.. Maybe it's me, but I had an account in the past, tried to follow interesting persons and ended up with pseudonym noise (people that were interesting being deleted, everyone discussing about this policy etc) or animated gif images. It was more 4chan than anything else - and I really tried hard to block people after the first 1-2 'offenses'.
- I loved the idea of circles, that is until I started to use them. The metaphor seemed nice at first, but it became frustrating after I moved past the first 20-30 contacts.
1: Actually I tend to reserve the word hate for things that - well - are actually of importance. 'I hate X' where X is a thing or a person I temporarily disagree with seems inflationary use of the term 'hate'.