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If it still sounds a little creepy to have Facebook looking through all your photos, especially as you take them, you are basically left with two options: You c

by lemming 11y ago

If it still sounds a little creepy to have Facebook looking through all your photos, especially as you take them, you are basically left with two options: You can turn off the send-to-your-friend notifications, and you can turn off Facebook's facial recognition feature. Or, you know, ditch Facebook, since this is far from the total extent of their creepiness.

meddlepal 11y ago
It's not really practical to do that. You're basically asking people to give up email or their phone at this point. That's how wired into Facebook most people are.
- existencebox 11y ago
  I normally don't post in the social network threads; but I've seen this argument enough times that I have a bunch of questions I'm legitimately curious about, since I'm clearly not the target audience: (For context, I tried facebook in college, found myself hating a lot of aspects about it despite heavy use, cut myself off by the end of college and have been "clean" for a good few years now.) 1. Why is facebook required? (to get right to the point) I know MANY of my friends use facebook but I still find it quite easy to keep in touch with them over email/gchat/texting/in person. 2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method? This hasn't meshed with my experience, but I'm in a very limited population strata. As a followup, do these people find any difficulties when connecting with non-facebookers, since I know plenty of those? 3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people you know? e.g. is there even a thought of "Am I happy with the tradeoffs at hand to use this" or is it just the accepted dogma at this point. I don't mean to demean the group by suggesting that, I've certainly watched myself do the same in hindsight to other things (video games), but I do wonder if it's at least being considered.
  - Silfen 11y ago
    In my personal experience, the biggest wedge is in planning events. With the caveat that this probably only applies strongly to people currently in their mid-twenties: For a lot of social circles, facebook is the only service that almost everyone will regularly check and that lets you coordinate events. My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes them or thinks to invite them, it's because they opted out of the platform. The other big point of stickiness that I can think of is that facebook is many people's cloud. Years of photos are backed up there and only there. It's unfortunate that they've relinquished control of their files to a closed-platform third party, but that's the way it is.
    - yock 11y ago
      > My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes them or thinks to invite them... Clearly it is, unless you make a conscious decision for every gathering to only include people via Facebook. Does no one ever stop and think "Hey, Jake is pretty cool but he doesn't use Facebook. Maybe someone should call him?" I'd guess that no one thinks like this, and that his omission comes from simply not thinking to invite people who aren't on Facebook. I'd love it if you could explain that I'm wrong and that you are making this conscious decision to exclude them. The justification for this would be even more interesting.
      - eveningcoffee 11y ago
        I am wildly speculating here but maybe all the friends are in the Facebook. All of them. Now they also know that if they leave FB, they are cut of from information about cool parties, because as it seems, nobody cares about people not in FB. So they are all kind of locked in. The situation of course is already familiar in the business world and many companies try to mitigate this kind of risks by supporting open source for example, or open standards.
      - JamesBarney 11y ago
        This doesn't happen when you're throwing a get-together of 5-10 close friends. It's more frequent for me with parties of 100+ invites. The way I accidentally don't invite people is 1. I setup Facebook event. 2. I scroll through a list of my friends on Facebook. 3. As I scroll through I invite any friends I think would have a good time at the party and are in town. 4. Never realize I didn't to invite Jake. 5. During or day after party I wonder why Jake didn't come. Then remember that he doesn't have Facebook I don't think most people sit down and try to remember every person they know. Then create a list of people to invite and then use Facebook to invite them. I think they go through Facebook and invite the ones they recognize similar to the way I do it. It's also hard to keep track of who is, and isn't using Facebook at any given time.
  - meddlepal 11y ago
    I'm the wrong person to answer this because I am not a social butterfly (though I'm not antisocial either by any stretch) so being up and up on everything my friends are doing is not important and consequently I only have about 40 friends in total on FB. Half of which, I could probably get rid of right now and not care. 1. People use it for event planning. I don't get texts asking where I am anymore or what i'm doing. Events are organized... Personally, I despise this because I love impromptu meetups, but that's just not how my friends do things anymore it seems. 2. For all non-business communication the answer is yes. Professional contact is still E-mail driven (or Slack/IRC for dev-friends). That said, LinkedIn is starting to pickup some of the professional communication in my circles. 3. I've been okay with the trade-offs, but that decision fits my social profile. I have to make an active effort now to get invited to things though which kind of sucks, but I suppose that's OK too since it allows me to be more selective about what I go to.
  - waterlesscloud 11y ago
    I dunno. My main circle of friends, clustered in our late-40s for the most part, use a variety of different online media. Facebook and email are primary, though I wouldn't say either is ahead of the other at this point. Texting is of course very common. Facebook Messenger has been our primary chat for the last couple years. We're also on Twitter and Instagram, at least big chunks of us are. One connected subgroup of us with a common interest have been on a private google groups for a long while, and a private yahoo group for years before that. We set up slack for the group this week. In other words, we're using whatever seems handiest at the moment for whatever it is we're doing. It's not a particularly tech-savvy group of people, though nearly all of my main circle is quite well-educated.
  - noblethrasher 11y ago
    Anecdata: I don't use FB, but it turns out that people can form pretty strong bonds over incidental things. At least those bonds appear to be strong to the people on the outside, and that's all that really matters when you're talking about social stuff. At this point in my life, the costs are negligible, but ten years ago those same cost would have been closer to 'devestaating'.
    - samstave 11y ago
      >At least those bonds appear to be strong to the people on the outside, and that's all that really matters when you're talking about survellience stuff. FTFY
      - noblethrasher 11y ago
        My point is that while I'm perfectly eager to act in a way that affords a delusion that I'm somehow frustrating the surveillance state, the costs are still real and too much for many/most people.
  - peteretep 11y ago
    I'm often the person making that argument, so only seems fair I take a crack at this. > 1. Why is facebook required? (to get right to the > point) I know MANY of my friends use facebook but I > still find it quite easy to keep in touch with them > over email/gchat/texting/in person. There's a few factors, but let's start with "low interaction friendship". When I log in to Facebook, there's a post from a guy who lives in a different country to me, who I met on a bus 8 years ago, posting about his crusade to stop his vet offering homeopathy(!). I see an update once every two or three days from this guy, but we're not really close enough to send each other regular emails or messages. But last time we were in the same city, I sent him a message, and we had dinner, drinks, and went to a show. I listened to his latest album a few years back, and as a result, we had him play at our wedding. I have a lot of low-interaction friends like this, and they enrich my life incredibly. I would not have the mental energy or time to maintain lots of friendships like this by email. I have a reasonably large extended family. We could start up a mailing list, but we're not all related to the same people. When I see them in person, I have been "keeping in touch" because I've been seeing their family photos, seeing daily updates from them, and interacting with them. Again, I don't have the time or energy to do this actively. We have a party organized this weekend. There are 40 people on the invite list. A Facebook event has meant that we've invited a whole load of people who we might not have invited to a more intimate event, but also that we got suggestions for a bunch of people to invite - we went through our friends list, and often thought "haven't seen Joe in ages! I'd forgotten he was in town, let's invite him". Facebook has kept track of who's coming for us, and will gently nag our guests to reply either way. We don't have cellphone numbers of email addresses for many of these people. Conversely, a couple we don't know very well has invited us to an event in a fortnight. We're not that close to them, but we can see on Facebook that a whole bunch of our mutual friends who we do really really like are going. As a result, we'll probably go. Many of these things are possible without Facebook, they're just much much harder, and we probably wouldn't bother. > 2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively > to facebook as their sole communication method? This > hasn't meshed with my experience, but I'm in a very > limited population strata. As a followup, do these > people find any difficulties when connecting with > non-facebookers, since I know plenty of those? Yes. Facebook Messenger is the primary way I communicate socially with people. If I happen to have everyone's cellphone, I'll use WhatsApp, as it has a few more useful features, and not everyone has Messenger installed, but generally FB Messenger is how I communicate with people, as it's a constant, even when they move country, change numbers, change email, whatever. I ran in to some old high school friends at a university alumni event recently, who I hadn't seen in decades. I added one of them on Facebook, and he created a Messenger group with some other people we went to high school with, and we organized lunch. I could have gotten his email, and we could have done it that way, but I don't think he had contact details for some of the other people he invited, other than Facebook. I have three ex colleagues who I'd love to be more in touch with, who aren't on Facebook. I try and see them when I am in the same city as them, but I often forget they're around, and because I'm not up to date with what's going on in their lives, we often have less to talk about. > 3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people > you know? e.g. is there even a thought of "Am I happy > with the tradeoffs at hand to use this" or is it just > the accepted dogma at this point. Not as far as I know. People who aren't on Facebook are the big exception, and they tend to be the slightly kookier people. The trade-offs seem hard to articulate. I don't feel like my social graph is particularly private. There are plenty of things that I do like to keep private, but Facebook knowing who my friends and family are isn't really one of them. Anyway, hope this wall of text helps a little.
  - auganov 11y ago
    1. Messenger was the thing that ultimately locked me in (and most friends I suppose). It's just great software that everyone uses. Sure if I could get everyone to install telegram I totally would. But it's not happening. The way you phrased the question shows your not a big IMer. 2. Messenger + some Snapchat basically. I have only one friend that didn't make the switch to Facebook and keeps on using old IM software that used to be popular. Our friendship (wasn't a huge one) kind of died cause of it. 3. I don't think most people care. It's the way things are. Most also seem to be fairly aware of what's being exposed publicly and curate their behavior accordingly. I have to note I basically only have friends online. I'm 22, I kind of consider myself an early adopter. Just 4-5 years ago it was pretty weird to most, nowadays its slowly entering the mainstream. Younger people seem especially adept.
  - superuser2 11y ago
    >1. Why is facebook required? Because Facebook has a searchable, discoverable database of real names. Many people skip or haven't gotten to the "write down each others' contact information" step but still want to talk to each other. Actually there is a deliberate, important progression in a relationship from using Facebook Messenger to exchanging cell phone numbers. >2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method? Yes. Some people have international friends or care about proper handling of long messages, delivery confirmation, read receipts, etc. excluding SMS. Some people have friends with Androids, excluding iMessage. Some people have friends with Outlook.com or Yahoo email addresses, which excludes GChat/Hangouts. People are too scattered around Whatsapp/Telegram/WeChat for any of them to be worth anything. Everyone has Facebook. The cognitive overhead of "Which of 8 different services do I use to talk to this particular friend?" is fucking annoying and people avoid it by just using Facebook. Many people in my (millennial) generation touch their emails as little as possible. Email is for bosses, professors, receipts, and annoying mailing lists. People I know are as likely to write a social email as they are to walk to their local Western Union office and ask to send a telegram. >3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people you know? Yes. Facebook is the only option inclusive of everyone, even those with the cheapest, broken phones that are out of free space.
    - darklajid 11y ago
      But .. the argument that this includes everyone is provably wrong. The GP doesn't have FB. I don't. Any social circles including him or me have to live with the fact that yes - you might have to use something different to contact us. If you have only 1 or 2 of those in your network, isn't the big 'one IM service to rule them all' idea dead? If you already are at a point where it's "FB for most, except for mail/whatever for X", is it a big step to "everyone chooses what to use again"? The overhead is already there, no? All I can say is: This works fine for me. I have neither FB nor WhatsApp (I stopped using the former a long time ago and never joined the latter). People can reach me just fine and ~probably~ get a faster response from me anyway. I really don't understand this whole concept. "Overhead" to contact someone? Let's be real here: Either you care about contacting someone or you don't. If you don't, then I'd just not name them a 'Friend'. If you do, the mental exercise to open a different app (like - mail) shouldn't even be worth mentioning?
  - welly 11y ago
    > Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method Yes. Absolutely. People communicate via Facebook Messenger instead of SMS or the likes of WhatsApp. They organise social events using Facebook. Announce weddings and divorces, births of children, new jobs. Everything via Facebook. You're clearly not a Facebook user (or not a regular user) otherwise you would know the extent to which people are using it. And most people really don't care about Facebook privacy issues to any significant degree. It's more convenient to use Facebook and have compromised privacy than not to use Facebook for many.
- deleted 11y ago
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- grey-area 11y ago
  It's not really practical to do that. It really is quite simple to live without FB.
  - peteretep 11y ago
    It's also really quite simple to live without meat, friends, using a cellphone, a soft mattress and so on. That doesn't mean you're not missing out, though.
    - chillwaves 11y ago
      Trust me, I am not missing out.
      - welly 11y ago
        I would suggest that speaks more about your social group than anything. And by which I'm not saying that negatively. You perhaps have a group of friends who are not big social media users or that use Facebook and the like to organise almost every aspect of their social lives. For me, I would say if I wasn't using Facebook I would be missing out. The biggest thing I would be missing out on would be keeping up to date and in contact with a multitude of friends and family back in the UK where I'm originally from (I live in Australia now). Sure, there is always email but many friends and family don't use email very much any more and it would be me expecting them to change their habits to suit my preferences.
        imakesnowflakes 11y ago
        > I would be missing out on would be keeping up to date.. Know what? May be it does not matter. May be it is a "learned necessity". For example, you don't need to have facebook to keep up to date with all the family members. You just need to call your mom back home and have a chat with her once in a while. Wouldn't you think that would be much healthy way to do this that steals very little of your time and attention?
- eveningcoffee 11y ago
  This is your fault that you have let this to happen. It is time to make it right again. After this comes the next solution, and next, and then next. Think about it. Edit: of course I am half joking, but only half.
  - gcr 11y ago
    "Yes! My friends' choices are completely my fault!" "I should never have allowed my friends to use their telephone in the way they want!" "I should in fact terminate my friendships with any hooligans who don't use my preferred choice of social network!" (To be honest, this sentiment doesn't make much sense to me)
    - eveningcoffee 11y ago
      "Yes! My friends' choices are completely my fault!" To be honest, yes, indeed, when it is in your power to help to not to make the mistakes (or at least try). Say for example you see that your friend is drunk and wants to go driving. You have taken the keys but you still return them and your friend dies. I can say that this was also your fault then. "I should never have allowed my friends to use their telephone in the way they want!" I think that one should at least make a honest attempt to explain the situation to your friend. Say your friend has installed a hypothetical (but real and fully functional) "Meet the serial killer" app and is hyper super excited about it. Would you then at least somehow try to say that this is maybe really not a good idea? Or not? I should in fact terminate my friendships with any hooligans who don't use my preferred choice of social network!" You mean a Facebook friendship? Or could you maybe explain why you should terminate your friendship with your friend? Sounds silly to me, to be honest. (To be honest, this sentiment doesn't make much sense to me) I am sorry.
- api 11y ago
  I've seen this declining in the last year or two. My Facebook feed is now pretty much dead.
- Zelphyr 11y ago
  Its very practical to do that. I've been free of it for four years and despite most of my friends and family still being on it its trivial to talk to them when I need and want to. We got along for 200,000 years as a species without it. It's not necessary now.
- lugg 11y ago
  I've been inching away from facebook for the last year or so. Nobody contacts me via it anymore, I could ditch it today and I wouldn't feel the pain. Although, I don't know why I would ditch it. At least now I decide what they have in the profile on me. (afaik) I don't run it on my phone. Only log in when I hear there is an event I need to organise, or a message i need to send to a long lost friend or something of that kind.
  - pmlnr 11y ago
    This is the only really important comment here. Drop all the apps. Use the web interface.
- chillwaves 11y ago
  Not at all.
- krisgenre 11y ago
  True but at least in my case I hardly find any engagement. Facebook is more like the 'email-forwards' of the 90's, all I see now-a-days on my timeline are shares of funny videos.
- fezz 11y ago
  It's very easy because it's not necessary. It's only hard for the people still on facebook because they can't reach you or feed off your posts.
- mattlutze 11y ago
  Anecdotally... The lion's share of my friends, and their friends, and their friends, are not on and posting to Facebook almost at all. For most of them it's just an app to schedule events. A lot of the now college students a generation younger than me are using it like Twitter if at all -- self-promotion for the ones that are like event promoters or self-styled social movers, and passive consumption of that traffic. The only reason I'm on it at all is because I moved pretty far away from home, and folks in my parents' generation and/or geography in the last year or two seriously dug into it en masse. So, I post to remind Mom I'm still alive. Messenger is a thing, WhatsApp and Instagram are things. But the core Facebook is hollowing out with the people I interact with, and they're quite the opposite from Luddites or technophobes. Success for that company is a assured as their ability to acquire the next big social connection app. When they stop making good bets, we'll see how they're doing I guess.
yeukhon 11y ago
It is a choice. I choose to turn off facial recognition and continue to use my Facebook account. I find some values in using Facebook, just as I find both open source and closed source each exists with its own value.
- slavik81 11y ago
  Its way too much work to keep up with privacy changes, though. Imagine I didn't read HN. Would I actually notice the implications when they rolled the update out to my phone? I'm not sure. That's why I think I'll be uninstalling Facebook.
  - spicyj 11y ago
    Except that it's opt-in.
  - yeukhon 11y ago
    No I completely agree with you that this is an aggressive move on FB's part. The feature is great as a product idea, but from an actual usability standpoint the implementation is really bad because there are so many photos I don't think my friends would want to see and would probably embarrass them if those photos appear on public timeline. I think the idea was to reduce the chore of asking "hey who has the picture of me from yesterday's trip." Only thing is, I still find some values of using Facebook, so to suck it up I am submitting myself to the product, and decides to work around.
- aikah 11y ago
  > It is a choice. I choose to turn off facial recognition and continue to use my Facebook account Facebook as a good history of making some "features" opt-out. Tomorrow it could enable "auto-sharing", you wouldn't even notice. So yes it is a choice, until it is not. The only real choice here is to use or not to use facebook.
thewarrior 11y ago
I hate seeing this is a the top comment on every story on Facebook. I don't know about North America but here in India , Facebook is synonymous with the internet and getting rid of it altogether is like cutting yourself off from everyone else. I have so many friends whom I couldn't reach if it weren't for Facebook. This is why I'm skeptical of people predicting peak Facebook. They've managed to entrench themselves to quite an extent in a way that few companies have done before. If you can't fathom what "normals" get out of Facebook then you need to get out of your HN/Valley filter bubble.
- orthoganol 11y ago
  Funny, in my travels outside of the US people seemed more interested in getting your WhatsApp, Skype, Line, or WeChat. Regional variations I suppose.
  - ocean3 11y ago
    Whatsapp is huge in India. Most of the daily communication has moved from Facebook to whatsapp.
- lzr_io 11y ago
  Speaking from Germany, Facebook is not important in my circle of accquaintaces. On the other hand, a friend currently working in Denmark tells me that Facebook is the de-facto social operating system over there. So it is not a HN / Valley exclusive thing to be ditching facebook, but there are probably regions/groups where the social cost of leaving is higher than the discussions here suggest.
yason 11y ago
I use Facebook on my phone by browsing their mobile website. I also use a separate browser (or browser profile) for Facebook both on mobile devices and desktop devices, to remove any linkage between my regular browsing and Facebook activities. Further, I run a connection blocker such as uBlock where applicable, to only allow access to first-party resources and 3rd-party resources only when whitelisted. Facebook is useful but not on their terms rather than mine.

by lemming 11y ago

meddlepal 11y ago

It's not really practical to do that. You're basically asking people to give up email or their phone at this point. That's how wired into Facebook most people are.

existencebox 11y ago
I normally don't post in the social network threads; but I've seen this argument enough times that I have a bunch of questions I'm legitimately curious about, since I'm clearly not the target audience: (For context, I tried facebook in college, found myself hating a lot of aspects about it despite heavy use, cut myself off by the end of college and have been "clean" for a good few years now.) 1. Why is facebook required? (to get right to the point) I know MANY of my friends use facebook but I still find it quite easy to keep in touch with them over email/gchat/texting/in person. 2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method? This hasn't meshed with my experience, but I'm in a very limited population strata. As a followup, do these people find any difficulties when connecting with non-facebookers, since I know plenty of those? 3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people you know? e.g. is there even a thought of "Am I happy with the tradeoffs at hand to use this" or is it just the accepted dogma at this point. I don't mean to demean the group by suggesting that, I've certainly watched myself do the same in hindsight to other things (video games), but I do wonder if it's at least being considered.
- Silfen 11y ago
  In my personal experience, the biggest wedge is in planning events. With the caveat that this probably only applies strongly to people currently in their mid-twenties: For a lot of social circles, facebook is the only service that almost everyone will regularly check and that lets you coordinate events. My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes them or thinks to invite them, it's because they opted out of the platform. The other big point of stickiness that I can think of is that facebook is many people's cloud. Years of photos are backed up there and only there. It's unfortunate that they've relinquished control of their files to a closed-platform third party, but that's the way it is.
  - yock 11y ago
    > My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes them or thinks to invite them... Clearly it is, unless you make a conscious decision for every gathering to only include people via Facebook. Does no one ever stop and think "Hey, Jake is pretty cool but he doesn't use Facebook. Maybe someone should call him?" I'd guess that no one thinks like this, and that his omission comes from simply not thinking to invite people who aren't on Facebook. I'd love it if you could explain that I'm wrong and that you are making this conscious decision to exclude them. The justification for this would be even more interesting.
    - eveningcoffee 11y ago
      I am wildly speculating here but maybe all the friends are in the Facebook. All of them. Now they also know that if they leave FB, they are cut of from information about cool parties, because as it seems, nobody cares about people not in FB. So they are all kind of locked in. The situation of course is already familiar in the business world and many companies try to mitigate this kind of risks by supporting open source for example, or open standards.
    - JamesBarney 11y ago
      This doesn't happen when you're throwing a get-together of 5-10 close friends. It's more frequent for me with parties of 100+ invites. The way I accidentally don't invite people is 1. I setup Facebook event. 2. I scroll through a list of my friends on Facebook. 3. As I scroll through I invite any friends I think would have a good time at the party and are in town. 4. Never realize I didn't to invite Jake. 5. During or day after party I wonder why Jake didn't come. Then remember that he doesn't have Facebook I don't think most people sit down and try to remember every person they know. Then create a list of people to invite and then use Facebook to invite them. I think they go through Facebook and invite the ones they recognize similar to the way I do it. It's also hard to keep track of who is, and isn't using Facebook at any given time.
- meddlepal 11y ago
  I'm the wrong person to answer this because I am not a social butterfly (though I'm not antisocial either by any stretch) so being up and up on everything my friends are doing is not important and consequently I only have about 40 friends in total on FB. Half of which, I could probably get rid of right now and not care. 1. People use it for event planning. I don't get texts asking where I am anymore or what i'm doing. Events are organized... Personally, I despise this because I love impromptu meetups, but that's just not how my friends do things anymore it seems. 2. For all non-business communication the answer is yes. Professional contact is still E-mail driven (or Slack/IRC for dev-friends). That said, LinkedIn is starting to pickup some of the professional communication in my circles. 3. I've been okay with the trade-offs, but that decision fits my social profile. I have to make an active effort now to get invited to things though which kind of sucks, but I suppose that's OK too since it allows me to be more selective about what I go to.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  I dunno. My main circle of friends, clustered in our late-40s for the most part, use a variety of different online media. Facebook and email are primary, though I wouldn't say either is ahead of the other at this point. Texting is of course very common. Facebook Messenger has been our primary chat for the last couple years. We're also on Twitter and Instagram, at least big chunks of us are. One connected subgroup of us with a common interest have been on a private google groups for a long while, and a private yahoo group for years before that. We set up slack for the group this week. In other words, we're using whatever seems handiest at the moment for whatever it is we're doing. It's not a particularly tech-savvy group of people, though nearly all of my main circle is quite well-educated.
- noblethrasher 11y ago
  Anecdata: I don't use FB, but it turns out that people can form pretty strong bonds over incidental things. At least those bonds appear to be strong to the people on the outside, and that's all that really matters when you're talking about social stuff. At this point in my life, the costs are negligible, but ten years ago those same cost would have been closer to 'devestaating'.
  - samstave 11y ago
    >At least those bonds appear to be strong to the people on the outside, and that's all that really matters when you're talking about survellience stuff. FTFY
    - noblethrasher 11y ago
      My point is that while I'm perfectly eager to act in a way that affords a delusion that I'm somehow frustrating the surveillance state, the costs are still real and too much for many/most people.
- peteretep 11y ago
  I'm often the person making that argument, so only seems fair I take a crack at this. > 1. Why is facebook required? (to get right to the > point) I know MANY of my friends use facebook but I > still find it quite easy to keep in touch with them > over email/gchat/texting/in person. There's a few factors, but let's start with "low interaction friendship". When I log in to Facebook, there's a post from a guy who lives in a different country to me, who I met on a bus 8 years ago, posting about his crusade to stop his vet offering homeopathy(!). I see an update once every two or three days from this guy, but we're not really close enough to send each other regular emails or messages. But last time we were in the same city, I sent him a message, and we had dinner, drinks, and went to a show. I listened to his latest album a few years back, and as a result, we had him play at our wedding. I have a lot of low-interaction friends like this, and they enrich my life incredibly. I would not have the mental energy or time to maintain lots of friendships like this by email. I have a reasonably large extended family. We could start up a mailing list, but we're not all related to the same people. When I see them in person, I have been "keeping in touch" because I've been seeing their family photos, seeing daily updates from them, and interacting with them. Again, I don't have the time or energy to do this actively. We have a party organized this weekend. There are 40 people on the invite list. A Facebook event has meant that we've invited a whole load of people who we might not have invited to a more intimate event, but also that we got suggestions for a bunch of people to invite - we went through our friends list, and often thought "haven't seen Joe in ages! I'd forgotten he was in town, let's invite him". Facebook has kept track of who's coming for us, and will gently nag our guests to reply either way. We don't have cellphone numbers of email addresses for many of these people. Conversely, a couple we don't know very well has invited us to an event in a fortnight. We're not that close to them, but we can see on Facebook that a whole bunch of our mutual friends who we do really really like are going. As a result, we'll probably go. Many of these things are possible without Facebook, they're just much much harder, and we probably wouldn't bother. > 2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively > to facebook as their sole communication method? This > hasn't meshed with my experience, but I'm in a very > limited population strata. As a followup, do these > people find any difficulties when connecting with > non-facebookers, since I know plenty of those? Yes. Facebook Messenger is the primary way I communicate socially with people. If I happen to have everyone's cellphone, I'll use WhatsApp, as it has a few more useful features, and not everyone has Messenger installed, but generally FB Messenger is how I communicate with people, as it's a constant, even when they move country, change numbers, change email, whatever. I ran in to some old high school friends at a university alumni event recently, who I hadn't seen in decades. I added one of them on Facebook, and he created a Messenger group with some other people we went to high school with, and we organized lunch. I could have gotten his email, and we could have done it that way, but I don't think he had contact details for some of the other people he invited, other than Facebook. I have three ex colleagues who I'd love to be more in touch with, who aren't on Facebook. I try and see them when I am in the same city as them, but I often forget they're around, and because I'm not up to date with what's going on in their lives, we often have less to talk about. > 3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people > you know? e.g. is there even a thought of "Am I happy > with the tradeoffs at hand to use this" or is it just > the accepted dogma at this point. Not as far as I know. People who aren't on Facebook are the big exception, and they tend to be the slightly kookier people. The trade-offs seem hard to articulate. I don't feel like my social graph is particularly private. There are plenty of things that I do like to keep private, but Facebook knowing who my friends and family are isn't really one of them. Anyway, hope this wall of text helps a little.
- auganov 11y ago
  1. Messenger was the thing that ultimately locked me in (and most friends I suppose). It's just great software that everyone uses. Sure if I could get everyone to install telegram I totally would. But it's not happening. The way you phrased the question shows your not a big IMer. 2. Messenger + some Snapchat basically. I have only one friend that didn't make the switch to Facebook and keeps on using old IM software that used to be popular. Our friendship (wasn't a huge one) kind of died cause of it. 3. I don't think most people care. It's the way things are. Most also seem to be fairly aware of what's being exposed publicly and curate their behavior accordingly. I have to note I basically only have friends online. I'm 22, I kind of consider myself an early adopter. Just 4-5 years ago it was pretty weird to most, nowadays its slowly entering the mainstream. Younger people seem especially adept.
- superuser2 11y ago
  >1. Why is facebook required? Because Facebook has a searchable, discoverable database of real names. Many people skip or haven't gotten to the "write down each others' contact information" step but still want to talk to each other. Actually there is a deliberate, important progression in a relationship from using Facebook Messenger to exchanging cell phone numbers. >2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method? Yes. Some people have international friends or care about proper handling of long messages, delivery confirmation, read receipts, etc. excluding SMS. Some people have friends with Androids, excluding iMessage. Some people have friends with Outlook.com or Yahoo email addresses, which excludes GChat/Hangouts. People are too scattered around Whatsapp/Telegram/WeChat for any of them to be worth anything. Everyone has Facebook. The cognitive overhead of "Which of 8 different services do I use to talk to this particular friend?" is fucking annoying and people avoid it by just using Facebook. Many people in my (millennial) generation touch their emails as little as possible. Email is for bosses, professors, receipts, and annoying mailing lists. People I know are as likely to write a social email as they are to walk to their local Western Union office and ask to send a telegram. >3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people you know? Yes. Facebook is the only option inclusive of everyone, even those with the cheapest, broken phones that are out of free space.
  - darklajid 11y ago
    But .. the argument that this includes everyone is provably wrong. The GP doesn't have FB. I don't. Any social circles including him or me have to live with the fact that yes - you might have to use something different to contact us. If you have only 1 or 2 of those in your network, isn't the big 'one IM service to rule them all' idea dead? If you already are at a point where it's "FB for most, except for mail/whatever for X", is it a big step to "everyone chooses what to use again"? The overhead is already there, no? All I can say is: This works fine for me. I have neither FB nor WhatsApp (I stopped using the former a long time ago and never joined the latter). People can reach me just fine and ~probably~ get a faster response from me anyway. I really don't understand this whole concept. "Overhead" to contact someone? Let's be real here: Either you care about contacting someone or you don't. If you don't, then I'd just not name them a 'Friend'. If you do, the mental exercise to open a different app (like - mail) shouldn't even be worth mentioning?
- welly 11y ago
  > Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method Yes. Absolutely. People communicate via Facebook Messenger instead of SMS or the likes of WhatsApp. They organise social events using Facebook. Announce weddings and divorces, births of children, new jobs. Everything via Facebook. You're clearly not a Facebook user (or not a regular user) otherwise you would know the extent to which people are using it. And most people really don't care about Facebook privacy issues to any significant degree. It's more convenient to use Facebook and have compromised privacy than not to use Facebook for many.
deleted 11y ago
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grey-area 11y ago
It's not really practical to do that. It really is quite simple to live without FB.
- peteretep 11y ago
  It's also really quite simple to live without meat, friends, using a cellphone, a soft mattress and so on. That doesn't mean you're not missing out, though.
  - chillwaves 11y ago
    Trust me, I am not missing out.
    - welly 11y ago
      I would suggest that speaks more about your social group than anything. And by which I'm not saying that negatively. You perhaps have a group of friends who are not big social media users or that use Facebook and the like to organise almost every aspect of their social lives. For me, I would say if I wasn't using Facebook I would be missing out. The biggest thing I would be missing out on would be keeping up to date and in contact with a multitude of friends and family back in the UK where I'm originally from (I live in Australia now). Sure, there is always email but many friends and family don't use email very much any more and it would be me expecting them to change their habits to suit my preferences.
      - imakesnowflakes 11y ago
        > I would be missing out on would be keeping up to date.. Know what? May be it does not matter. May be it is a "learned necessity". For example, you don't need to have facebook to keep up to date with all the family members. You just need to call your mom back home and have a chat with her once in a while. Wouldn't you think that would be much healthy way to do this that steals very little of your time and attention?
eveningcoffee 11y ago
This is your fault that you have let this to happen. It is time to make it right again. After this comes the next solution, and next, and then next. Think about it. Edit: of course I am half joking, but only half.
- gcr 11y ago
  "Yes! My friends' choices are completely my fault!" "I should never have allowed my friends to use their telephone in the way they want!" "I should in fact terminate my friendships with any hooligans who don't use my preferred choice of social network!" (To be honest, this sentiment doesn't make much sense to me)
  - eveningcoffee 11y ago
    "Yes! My friends' choices are completely my fault!" To be honest, yes, indeed, when it is in your power to help to not to make the mistakes (or at least try). Say for example you see that your friend is drunk and wants to go driving. You have taken the keys but you still return them and your friend dies. I can say that this was also your fault then. "I should never have allowed my friends to use their telephone in the way they want!" I think that one should at least make a honest attempt to explain the situation to your friend. Say your friend has installed a hypothetical (but real and fully functional) "Meet the serial killer" app and is hyper super excited about it. Would you then at least somehow try to say that this is maybe really not a good idea? Or not? I should in fact terminate my friendships with any hooligans who don't use my preferred choice of social network!" You mean a Facebook friendship? Or could you maybe explain why you should terminate your friendship with your friend? Sounds silly to me, to be honest. (To be honest, this sentiment doesn't make much sense to me) I am sorry.
api 11y ago
I've seen this declining in the last year or two. My Facebook feed is now pretty much dead.
Zelphyr 11y ago
Its very practical to do that. I've been free of it for four years and despite most of my friends and family still being on it its trivial to talk to them when I need and want to. We got along for 200,000 years as a species without it. It's not necessary now.
lugg 11y ago
I've been inching away from facebook for the last year or so. Nobody contacts me via it anymore, I could ditch it today and I wouldn't feel the pain. Although, I don't know why I would ditch it. At least now I decide what they have in the profile on me. (afaik) I don't run it on my phone. Only log in when I hear there is an event I need to organise, or a message i need to send to a long lost friend or something of that kind.
- pmlnr 11y ago
  This is the only really important comment here. Drop all the apps. Use the web interface.
chillwaves 11y ago
Not at all.
krisgenre 11y ago
True but at least in my case I hardly find any engagement. Facebook is more like the 'email-forwards' of the 90's, all I see now-a-days on my timeline are shares of funny videos.
fezz 11y ago
It's very easy because it's not necessary. It's only hard for the people still on facebook because they can't reach you or feed off your posts.
mattlutze 11y ago
Anecdotally... The lion's share of my friends, and their friends, and their friends, are not on and posting to Facebook almost at all. For most of them it's just an app to schedule events. A lot of the now college students a generation younger than me are using it like Twitter if at all -- self-promotion for the ones that are like event promoters or self-styled social movers, and passive consumption of that traffic. The only reason I'm on it at all is because I moved pretty far away from home, and folks in my parents' generation and/or geography in the last year or two seriously dug into it en masse. So, I post to remind Mom I'm still alive. Messenger is a thing, WhatsApp and Instagram are things. But the core Facebook is hollowing out with the people I interact with, and they're quite the opposite from Luddites or technophobes. Success for that company is a assured as their ability to acquire the next big social connection app. When they stop making good bets, we'll see how they're doing I guess.

yeukhon 11y ago

It is a choice. I choose to turn off facial recognition and continue to use my Facebook account. I find some values in using Facebook, just as I find both open source and closed source each exists with its own value.

slavik81 11y ago
Its way too much work to keep up with privacy changes, though. Imagine I didn't read HN. Would I actually notice the implications when they rolled the update out to my phone? I'm not sure. That's why I think I'll be uninstalling Facebook.
- spicyj 11y ago
  Except that it's opt-in.
- yeukhon 11y ago
  No I completely agree with you that this is an aggressive move on FB's part. The feature is great as a product idea, but from an actual usability standpoint the implementation is really bad because there are so many photos I don't think my friends would want to see and would probably embarrass them if those photos appear on public timeline. I think the idea was to reduce the chore of asking "hey who has the picture of me from yesterday's trip." Only thing is, I still find some values of using Facebook, so to suck it up I am submitting myself to the product, and decides to work around.
aikah 11y ago
> It is a choice. I choose to turn off facial recognition and continue to use my Facebook account Facebook as a good history of making some "features" opt-out. Tomorrow it could enable "auto-sharing", you wouldn't even notice. So yes it is a choice, until it is not. The only real choice here is to use or not to use facebook.

thewarrior 11y ago

I hate seeing this is a the top comment on every story on Facebook. I don't know about North America but here in India , Facebook is synonymous with the internet and getting rid of it altogether is like cutting yourself off from everyone else. I have so many friends whom I couldn't reach if it weren't for Facebook. This is why I'm skeptical of people predicting peak Facebook. They've managed to entrench themselves to quite an extent in a way that few companies have done before. If you can't fathom what "normals" get out of Facebook then you need to get out of your HN/Valley filter bubble.

orthoganol 11y ago
Funny, in my travels outside of the US people seemed more interested in getting your WhatsApp, Skype, Line, or WeChat. Regional variations I suppose.
- ocean3 11y ago
  Whatsapp is huge in India. Most of the daily communication has moved from Facebook to whatsapp.
lzr_io 11y ago
Speaking from Germany, Facebook is not important in my circle of accquaintaces. On the other hand, a friend currently working in Denmark tells me that Facebook is the de-facto social operating system over there. So it is not a HN / Valley exclusive thing to be ditching facebook, but there are probably regions/groups where the social cost of leaving is higher than the discussions here suggest.

yason 11y ago

I use Facebook on my phone by browsing their mobile website. I also use a separate browser (or browser profile) for Facebook both on mobile devices and desktop devices, to remove any linkage between my regular browsing and Facebook activities. Further, I run a connection blocker such as uBlock where applicable, to only allow access to first-party resources and 3rd-party resources only when whitelisted. Facebook is useful but not on their terms rather than mine.