• I appreciate its menu-driven functions, and enjoy its civilized and serious blogs.
• It's fairly easy to set up notification filters, so my mailbox isn't flooded with unwanted material.
• Linked in is well suited to purposeful people with full schedules—professionals, businesspeople, educators, and the like, who have serious objectives to meet, and who have little taste for idle gossip or time to waste on foolishness.
• What I dislike are the frequent pitches to upgrade, from free to paid service.  This is a network for business people.  But my "business" (Fourth R Practical Philosophy) is purely philanthropic.  It is a public service, takes in no money, and thus does not justify paying for extras.

• Facebook is enormously popular, even among people with little other affinity for computers or Internet.  So, when asked to create a website for my high school graduating class, I also established a personal Facebook account to facilitate reconnecting with classmates who'd fallen out of touch.

However, I dislike the system intensely.

• I dislike always having to re-learn how Facebook works.  It seems that each time I sign on, it works differently.  Perhaps I should sign on more often?  Nah, that would only make me more disgusted with the other things I dislike about it.
• I dislike Facebook's claim to ownership of my intellectual property, so I do very little posting there.
• I dislike its incessant, mind-numbingly trivial "notifications" of "updated status," "comments on status," etc.  I'm not that nosy or lacking for things on which to fritter away my time; I have my own life to live.
• I dislike broadcasting personal messages.  Want to tell / ask me something?  Email me.  (Access email via the "Contact Owner" link at the top of this website's Main page.)
• I'm not into "friendships" arranged by a mechanized advertising medium ostensibly on my behalf.

• In my view, Twitter's 140-character limit (upped to 280 characters in 2017) is for nit-twits.  I'm a philosopher: I think in sentences of 140 words!  Maybe if I were fighting street battles somewhere, or aligned with some fringe ideology, I'd find Twitter handy for something.  Why do I bother to mention it, if I don't have an account?  Because I respect that your time might be no less valuable than mine, so I'm doing you the favor of letting you know not to waste it looking for me there.

• Quantum-Link: I got started in computer chat and bulletin board systems while recovering from a surgery in the late 1980s, on this Commodore-only system.  Q-Link was bought out (and dismantled) by AOL a few years later.  But while it was active, I made a number of friends, with some of whom I'm still in touch.
• GEnie: I went to General Electric's online system for a few years, until it, too, faded out, a victim of the "free" Internet.  I made a few lasting friends there.
• Usenet: When I signed up with AT&T as my Internet provider, its service package included access to Usenet / Newsnet, which I both enjoyed and endured for a number of years, until this part of AT&T's service was phased out.  I've since discovered an alternative.  (See Linked in.)
• Internet Relay Chat: After departing GEnie, I migrated to the non-proprietary Internet Relay Chat.  It was a fun way for a night-worker / day-sleeper to waste a lot of time with folks from all over the world.  But as life goes on, time seems to become more precious, so I seldom visit IRC anymore, and have pretty much forgotten most of the commands.