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>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 eac

>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?
- deleted 11y ago
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- superuser2 11y ago
  Parent asked whether anyone actually uses Facebook as their sole communication medium. I'm saying yes, because there's little reason to bother with anything else when everyone has Facebook (and can already find each other on it). And for the most part that's true, in my experience. I've met exactly two people who don't have Facebook; neither of them want to be contacted electronically at all. Never met someone in a peer group who wanted to IM but was morally opposed to Facebook in particular. > Either you care about contacting someone or you don't. Cuts both ways. If Facebook is someone's primary communication system and you refuse to use it, then you don't particularly care about contacting them either. >"Overhead" to contact someone? Most groups of friends I'm aware of have running group chats. In an effort to be inclusive of people with Androids, many switched from iMessage to Facebook. But if you refused to use Facebook and an event was planned that way, yes, someone would have to make the effort to reach out to you individually. Overhead. Even if they really like you despite your self-righteous inconveniencing of everyone else, it's not obvious whose responsibility it should be to bridge between Facebook and your smoke signals, and they're likely to forget sometimes.
  - darklajid 11y ago
    > self-righteous inconveniencing of everyone else > between Facebook and your smoke signals Whoa there. I'd say that was both a bit over the top, no? I'll end my participation in this thread with this: Obviously anyone/everyone can choose to use FB - I never tried to talk a single person out of using it. I consider it utterly useless for me, personally, and am so far unconvinced by any 'you have to use it or miss out' arguments and certainly don't buy the 'you are inconveniencing your peers' line of thought.
cheshire137 11y ago
I have several friends, including non-tech people, who avoid Facebook. It's become an en vogue thing to ditch Facebook and I've seen more people doing it. I have to remember the preferred communication medium for each individual friend, because I have people that do text/iMessage only, Hangouts only, or Facebook only. I wish there was one non-email fast-chatting way of talking to everyone, like a unifying app for all these services, but that feels a little like this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

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?

deleted 11y ago
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superuser2 11y ago
Parent asked whether anyone actually uses Facebook as their sole communication medium. I'm saying yes, because there's little reason to bother with anything else when everyone has Facebook (and can already find each other on it). And for the most part that's true, in my experience. I've met exactly two people who don't have Facebook; neither of them want to be contacted electronically at all. Never met someone in a peer group who wanted to IM but was morally opposed to Facebook in particular. > Either you care about contacting someone or you don't. Cuts both ways. If Facebook is someone's primary communication system and you refuse to use it, then you don't particularly care about contacting them either. >"Overhead" to contact someone? Most groups of friends I'm aware of have running group chats. In an effort to be inclusive of people with Androids, many switched from iMessage to Facebook. But if you refused to use Facebook and an event was planned that way, yes, someone would have to make the effort to reach out to you individually. Overhead. Even if they really like you despite your self-righteous inconveniencing of everyone else, it's not obvious whose responsibility it should be to bridge between Facebook and your smoke signals, and they're likely to forget sometimes.
- darklajid 11y ago
  > self-righteous inconveniencing of everyone else > between Facebook and your smoke signals Whoa there. I'd say that was both a bit over the top, no? I'll end my participation in this thread with this: Obviously anyone/everyone can choose to use FB - I never tried to talk a single person out of using it. I consider it utterly useless for me, personally, and am so far unconvinced by any 'you have to use it or miss out' arguments and certainly don't buy the 'you are inconveniencing your peers' line of thought.

cheshire137 11y ago

I have several friends, including non-tech people, who avoid Facebook. It's become an en vogue thing to ditch Facebook and I've seen more people doing it. I have to remember the preferred communication medium for each individual friend, because I have people that do text/iMessage only, Hangouts only, or Facebook only. I wish there was one non-email fast-chatting way of talking to everyone, like a unifying app for all these services, but that feels a little like this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/