I've said it before here, and I'll say it every time it's relevant:
Stop using Facebook. Start telling your friends and family to do the same. As the "smart computer person" in many people's lives, you can be the voice they need to hear.
I don't understand why people on HN (Quora too) act all high and mighty and tell people to quit all social media like it's some curse. I understand that social media can be mentally debilitating, but not everyone has this problem. I'm 18, I use Facebook on a daily basis and I don't feel addicted to it.
And even if there is minimal value in using it, so what? I like using it and that's all that matters to me. The day Facebook takes over so much that my work is affected, I'll quit it. I already quit it once and I felt no big difference in life.
People still view the internet as some sort of external luxury that we have. It's not. It's a part of our culture right now and will remain so in some form forever.
There's obvious abstract reasons why they should stop using it:
1. Facebook knows about all of your interactions on Facebook, and they probably know what you are buying and what sites you visit through tracking mechanisms. In real life we call those people stalkers.
2. What utility are they really getting? Is keeping up with every part of your friend's life (or the good parts they show you) really worth the stress and anxiety of feeling like you are missing out? It's fake utility. People somehow existed for something like 300,000 years without this utility, so what value is really there?
That being said, it's designed to get people addicted and the immediate "utility" is a lot stronger than any abstract worries, so there's probably nothing you can say.
The HN set really doesn't seem to understand where the value of Facebook actually is. It's not the feed. The feed is mind numbing, time wasting garbage. It's being able to communicate and organise things, with all your friends, in the one place. It's in Facebook Messenger, which everyone has. It's in events organisation and events discovery. It's in groups.
Facebook supplies a directory of everything happening in my city, algorithmically curated against things Facebook thinks I will like and which my friends have said they're interested in attending. It lets me organise my own events, and communicate easily with attendees, who can see which of their friends are attending and make plans. It lets me make contact with people I briefly met in person but wouldn't have grabbed their phone number/wouldn't text them out of the blue yet (because who does that?).
This kind of utility is completely dependent on having a critical mass of people you know who actively use the platform. I'm 29, live in NYC, pretty active and social. On the odd occasion that I do go on Facebook it seems that the bulk of my ~500 'friends' who are still active on it are like...people I worked with in a summer job in 10th grade who post mostly memes. The events I get invited to are pseudo-spam bulk invitations.
I honestly would feel the opposite about getting a new acquaintance's contact information vs looking them up on Facebook and sending them a message. I've been going to a lot of weddings recently and phone/email exchange has been common, and I have yet to be asked "are we friends on Facebook? I'll put these pictures up there", which was a very common thing in years past.
I think it certainly helps that FBM is the communication standard in Australia - the only SMS I get now are sent by computers, and iMessage never really caught on. This gives some lock in, even if you don't actively use the website or the app. It is assumed that if you want to contact someone after meeting them you'll just look them up in messenger.
Yours is an interesting perspective because I tend to assume that people on HN who say "just call your friends" are less social and don't have as many people they want to catch up with. Honestly events and groups are the real utility - there's where everything I care about happens on Facebook itself (aside from Messenger - which is good, but we would be doing the same thing elsewhere if it didn't exist).
Though the feed is still terrible - I keep my friends list relatively trimmed (~200 people) and it's still rubbish.
I don't need an algorithmic feed to tell me what my interests are and what my friends are doing because I know the first and there are other ways of doing the latter that don't involve giving up my privacy.
There's nothing wrong with calling friends up, but that takes a lot of work and a synchronous connection between two people. There are hundreds of people I want to know about or stay in touch with but don't have the time to call them all up individually.
Facebook makes being friends easier. That's a pretty solid value add. I would probably lose a lot of friends more easily if I didn't have Facebook.
You may not value that, but I find it much more valuable than the value I'd gain from making sure Facebook doesn't know enough about me to show me relevant ads.
A terribly inconvenient way to send/see pictures, organize events, etc. Facebook does what it does very, very well. I don't feel the need for a replacement.
Well, hey. There's the utility I guess - it makes something I want to do (find out how and when I can hang out with my friends) much simpler than it was previously. If I want to see some live music on a Thursday it's a lot easier to mark myself as "interested" on the gig and see who contacts me about wanting to come along than messaging or calling the 30-40 people who might be interested.
> Facebook knows about all of your interactions on Facebook, and they probably know what you are buying and what sites you visit through tracking mechanisms.
So what? I mean that earnestly - why is it inherently bad if a company knows a lot about me?
> What utility are they really getting? It's fake utility.
Do you really believe that easily keeping up with friends is "fake" utility? You really think that billions of people log on to a website every day that provides no "real" utility?
> People somehow existed for something like 300,000 years without this utility, so what value is really there?
People existed for a long time without the the lightbulb, automobiles, the wheel, computers, etc. You're basically arguing that there can't be any utility in anything new.
> why is it inherently bad if a company knows a lot about me?
With enough data about you (Facebook collects more than enough) it becomes easy to manipulate you (blackmail, "targeted advertising" aka propaganda, etc), and your pattern-of-life can be sold for profit. Data doesn't go away and we keep inventing more powerful analysis methods, so the risk, that collected data will be used against you only increases with time.
Claiming that this risk doesn't exist or isn't likely to happen requires showing how Facebook won't lose control of the data to any future hacker, government, or buyer with a sufficiently large cash offer. Pretending otherwise is a just-world fallacy.
For all its flaws, there's nothing that can actually replace the functions of Facebook, especially if you have a lot of friends and family all over the world.
It's a centralised platform where I can message almost everyone I know, and put people in group chats.
It's also very useful to be able to tell at a glance where people are, and get updates as to what people are doing or where they are going, and also to be able let other people know where I am or what I am doing.
It does have its fair share of issues, like too many posts from pages showing up, or people tagging other people in posts showing up. It also has its ethical issues, but for me they are outweighed by the power and convenience of the platform.
Was there a time, and if so was this throwaway FB account part of it, when you could only sign up to Spotify with a FB account? I was a paying member of Spotify for about two years and my account wasn't tied to FB but Spotify had already been around for a few years prior.
> Was there a time, and if so was this throwaway FB account part of it, when you could only sign up to Spotify with a FB account?
Yes from the early beta Spotify had it's own account system, then it switched to all new accounts must be FB but legacy accounts could still sign in.
This was a while ago though around the time I stopped using it.
I would like to stop, but the devil is in the details.
Facebook is used for many social and business events. I get a lot of work via contacts that come through facebook. Withought it I'm certain I would miss out on some of these. I'd also miss out on keeping up with family abroad.
4 years later, and I have missed out on invitations to a few parties I probably didn't want to go to, and one that comes to mind that I did want to go to, but found out about with enough time anyway. I honestly believe they've done a fantastic job convincing you it's more important to you than it is.
It sounds like from your examples you're the perfect case for lock-in they are after. It's penetrated your business and family life so much you're afraid to leave it. That bothered me when I started to feel like that, which is why I left. Since then so many other things have happened (there's a link-fest from another commenter on this thread that I won't bother to compete with - thanks) that I'm pretty good with accepting that I might have missed out on a few things as a result.
I deleted my account and was "clean" for a few years, but last year decided to sign up again.
I only use it occasionally, maybe once or twice a week. It's nice to catch up with family and friends, and it's very simple to filter out the cruft that you have no interest in.
OP might have meant when Facebook exhibits another attribute closely resembling a skinner box [1]. Or the use of their platform as a world scale behavioral analysis experiment.
"An operant conditioning chamber permits experimenters to study behavior conditioning (training) by teaching a subject animal to perform certain actions (like pressing a lever) in response to specific stimuli, such as a light or sound signal. When the subject correctly performs the behavior, the chamber mechanism delivers food or another reward. In some cases, the mechanism delivers a punishment for incorrect or missing responses."
I don't know which is more disturbing: that Facebook, by including this feature, seems to presume itself a ubiquitous public utility, or that it could actually become one.
Stop using Facebook. Start telling your friends and family to do the same. As the "smart computer person" in many people's lives, you can be the voice they need to hear.