In reply to Steve Covello.

@Steve Covello - All good points, and I agree completely.

tl;dr I guess I'm just a forum guy.

I left Facebook for personal reasons. It's not relevant to this discussion but, FWIW, I'm not a fan of the company, and there was this realization that, for me, Facebook was adding very little of value to my life despite the time spent.

With regards to community, I do have a bit of bias and personal expectations that were not satisfied on FB. I used to love forums, and used to be a member on a really active and vibrant design forum. It was a fantastic community where I built a lot of friendships and relationships that I still have today.

Eventually the forum fell apart - not due to lack of participation - it fell apart due to the owning organizations lack of interest in maintaining the community. Over the course of about 2 years it started to get over run with ads and spammers and finally the owning company just shut it down.

The community moved over to Facebook and set up a private group that's still chugging along today but, for all the reasons you can imagine, it wasn't nearly the same. The platform just isn't up to facilitating the same sort of interaction that a dedicated message board can.

I definitely get what you're saying about the networking opportunities - my wife is a photographer and FB is an essential part of her business for a lot of the same reasons you mentioned. She books a ton of assisting & second shooter jobs there and, she really gets a lot of mileage out of the platform.

Like I said, it's just not for me - though I am probably going to have to set up another account soon. I suppose what I get from it really is going to be about managing my own expectations. Thanks for the insightful post.

:)