Families often avoid conflict by not talking about politics and religion at the dinner table. Facebook is like being at the dinner table 24x7, except that it's designed so that you forget your entire family is there. It's also designed to make you angry and get you to talk about politics and religion. In other words, Facebook is designed to provoke conflict in families, which has torn many families apart that might otherwise still be able to tolerate one another.

@freakazoid This is a good point. This is what real name policies and 1 account/identity per person does.

@ajroach42 They do have "lists" but they are a PITA to use so most people don't.

@freakazoid & it's easy to make a mistake with their lists and not notice until you've caused a kerfuffle.

@ajroach42 Yeah if you wanted to do it right you'd show the faces of the people on the list very prominently around the composer.

@freakazoid Or let people legitimately create multiple accounts, with distinct profile pictures and account names.

Tumblr did an okay job of supporting multiple blogs from one account, in a way that was harder to accidentally screw up, but even then I preferred logging in to separate accounts.

@ajroach42 @freakazoid This is why I liked the simple and stupid Twitter & Mastodon model: just make it easy to use different accounts and save yourself the over engineering.

@kensanata @ajroach42 Yep. Facebook claim the real names policy is designed to make conversation more civil, but since it benefits them in so many other ways and also causes harm of it own I'm not inclined to take their word for it.

@freakazoid @ajroach42 there was a time when I thought using real names was important – back when The Wiki Way was young. But I’ve long since learned that I was wrong. Some people seem to prefer being wrong and so I must assume there is money involved somehow but I still don’t understand the economical benefit.

@kensanata @freakazoid Not money, power.

They use real name policies to silence and harass dissenters who are vulnerable.

It's much easier to dox the people that disagree with you if you know that them, and their relatives, are all oversharing in the same place.

@ajroach42 @freakazoid I know this is the effect but I can’t imagine engineers like myself sitting in a meeting and thinking oh yeah, that sounds like a good idea. So I assume that they might consider the possibility but judged it unlikely and rare and considered some other benefit I don’t understand. That simply the Principle of Charity in action as far as I am concerned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

@kensanata @freakazoid

It wasn't engineers that designed the real name policy, and it's not engineers that keep it in place.

And it's no secret that there are transphobes and racists working at most large companies. Facebook can't be the exception. It's simpler to believe that they are acting with malice than that they have been repeatedly told of the harm they are doing and have ignored it.

@ajroach42 @freakazoid @kensanata

OTOH, remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."