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It won't be a popular opinion here but here it goes: Well if it all goes to hell we will all be in the same handbasket. I'm simply not willing to cut people ou

It won't be a popular opinion here but here it goes: Well if it all goes to hell we will all be in the same handbasket. I'm simply not willing to cut people out of my life and miss out on things that are important to me because my data is mined and might be used against me. All these distributed platforms are a joke, no really they are technically cool but no one I care about is on them. Maybe if your entire social circle is technically sophisticated you can leave FB for something like diaspora (I don't know if this is the "new hotness" or if there is something better but I really don't care). My social graph is so far from able or willing to switch to something else it's not even funny. Like it or not there is a social stigma around NOT having a FB account. In fact I've thought on multiple occasions that someone is hiding something if they don't have one. You might hate me for that or hate the fact people think like that but good luck changing that mindset. Look I've been on the other side of this, I paid for App.net (I think that's what that twitter clone was called) and tried multiple distributed platforms but they all fall short or require too many compromises. I tried to get friends to use Signal but no one really cares. iMessage/FB Messenger are just easier and everyone is on them. You want people to leave the "evil facebook" then make something better and easier to use. The best doesn't win, the easiest does.

lbstr_ftw 9y ago
It's amusing and sad that you honestly think leaving Facebook is the same thing as cutting people out of your life. I've been Facebook free for several years now. It feels great, and I didn't have to cut anyone out of my life to do it (who I wasn't otherwise already communicating with). Much less noice, more productive, both in my life and in my relationships.
- davidcbc 9y ago
  It is great if it works this way for you, but every group had its own dynamics. Personally my group of friends primarily talks via Messenger, that's where all the planning for things takes place. We have one friend who isn't on Facebook and he unintentionally gets left out of things. He isn't cut out of our lives, but ultimately he pays a penalty for not being on Facebook
Fezzik 9y ago
But what's the advantage of Facebook over email and/or texting? I feel like for anything other than wasting time Facebook is sluggish compared to either. If you're a Facebook user you have a cellphone and/or a computer, and can do everything Facebook does: share pictures, plan events, check-in with friends, family, and groups of people. And not share data* or be peppered with garbage advertisements. * I personally pay for Fastmail and have migrated all my communcations to email and texting (and feel the better for it). Obviously it is a personal decision, but realize everything you do is a vote towards a certain state of things.
- mstade 9y ago
  > But what's the advantage of Facebook over email and/or texting? This is anecdata but among my friends, e-mail addresses and phone numbers tend to change more often than their Facebook profiles. I know people all over the world, but out of all of Facebook connections, I probably only have accurate contact details for 20% of them or less. The contacts I interact with most often are obviously in that bracket, but many of those I talk to once a year or less are probably not. Case in point. I'm currently planning a trip, and while on a previous trip to the same destination I made a couple of friends there. I have a phone number to one of these contacts, but it's out of date. However, we're also connected on Facebook so I sent them a message their to let them know I'll be in their vicinity later this year. For better or worse – and this is obviously my personal context – Facebook is the best mostly self organizing contact list I've ever had. I couldn't care less about the wall, or liking things, or whatever you had for breakfast, but as much as I hate it it's the only stable way I've been able to keep in touch with all these folks that I want to keep in touch with. If or when I no longer want to keep in touch, I just prune them from the list, and likewise I get pruned from other people's lists whenever they feel we're "done." I don't want to use Facebook, but e-mail and phone simply doesn't solve my problem of keeping an up-to-date contact list. They also don't work simply because I can't easily look up a contact and connect with them, because there's no global phone or e-mail book. I'd love to use something else, but fact of the matter is that everyone I want to keep in touch with is there, and until they are also elsewhere in a list that organizes itself, I feel obliged to use it. :o(
  - 9y ago
flubert 9y ago
>Like it or not there is a social stigma around NOT having a FB account. In fact I've thought on multiple occasions that someone is hiding something if they don't have one. Anyone have a source of "further reading" on perceptions towards people not on facebook? And does anyone have statistics on how many people in the U.S. are not on facebook?
- joshstrange 9y ago
  I just did a google for "stigma against not being on facebook" and found a handful of articles that look decent. Edit: Did mean to phrase that like "just google it" I just don't have time right now to vet the articles and didn't want to post links before reading them.
- jasode 9y ago
  >Anyone have a source of "further reading" on perceptions towards people not on facebook? I don't know joshstrange or his circle of friends but since I experience zero stigma of not being on Facebook, it seems to be highly depended on one's particular peer group. If I think of the 5 people I regularly interact with, none of them have Facebook accounts. Therefore, it's not strange that I don't have Facebook. The topic never comes up. However, some of the guys' wives have Facebook accounts so in some sense, the female spouses act as the "Facebook gateway" to the outside world. I chuckle at this state of affairs because it seems to duplicate the exact situation of the yesteryear where the husbands engrossed in the newspaper/tv always ignored the ringing landline phone and let the wife answer it. If it makes you feel better, a lot of celebrities (including some under age 30) don't use Facebook either. There are various articles listing names: https://www.google.com/search?q=celebrities+not+on+facebook https://www.google.com/search?q=celebrities+not+on+facebook
ghughes 9y ago
> The best doesn't win, the easiest does. Exactly. Diaspora and its ilk miss this point entirely. If users have to set up their own infrastructure or even think about how it works then it's never going to scale.
- joshstrange 9y ago
  Even if you personally don't have to setup your own infrastructure, like if you join a friend's instance (which in this case would end up being MY instance) it still sucks. Especially for the friend (ME) who sets it up and maintains and PAYS for it. It means I instantly become tech support or the source of "Josh, Diaspora won't let me post this image...". That's the last thing I want to do in my free time.
type0 9y ago
> In fact I've thought on multiple occasions that someone is hiding something if they don't have one. I feel the same about people who do use facebook, when they take pictures of me and others who are not on "The Social Network", then they put those on facebook for others to see with other personal information without concent, they don't inform me about their comments regarding those pictures. For all I know those people could be making fun of me for not being on facebook, not being social enough, having unfashionable clothes etc. From my perspective those people have something to hide, they share information in closed groups, refuse to email me those photos and waive it away like it's too much work, I have even experienced this with some of my relatives which saddens me alot. I'm not forcing them to use any specific website, forcing others to do that is nasty, it's no different than forcing others to smoke by the means of social pressure.
- joshstrange 9y ago
  Expecting people to take an extra step to fit your needs (email) is really almost no different from asking them to share on another platform IMHO. They aren't hiding from you, in fact I'd put money on the table that they'd happily invite you into their group or you'd have access to the photos simply by being their friend on FB. You can't walk outside the bar then complain that none of your friends want to stand in the window and relay everything happening to you or get mad they might be talking about you when you can just walk right back in. > it's no different than forcing others to smoke by the means of social pressure Yeah... no different, except one of them causes cancer but sure, no different.
  - type0 9y ago
    > Expecting people to take an extra step to fit your needs (email) is really almost no different from asking them to share on another platform IMHO. Email is not a platform, I think you are confusing it with gmail. > You can't walk outside the bar then complain that none of your friends want to stand in the window and relay everything happening to you or get mad they might be talking about you when you can just walk right back in. This analogy doesn't stand because such pictures that I were talking about are more often than not are taken in the bar settings or other festivities. Obviously if I were walking outside I couldn't be on the picture could I. And it's not all of my friends that's the point, being forced to smoke even passively harms your health, being forced to be on facebook harms your privacy - that was my point.
eternalvision 9y ago
Your comment sums up the inertia issue nicely. To me, rethinking social means rethinking the internet as a whole. The dream of a decentralized global network has been stolen from us, and it's up to us to find consensus and work together to get out of this mess.
marricks 9y ago
One of the things that got me to leave was how crappy facebook has gotten for actual communication. This part of the post really resonated with me > If you’ve ever had that conversation, you’ve noticed that there’s a big disconnect between your expectations when you communicate on Facebook and what really happens. Basically, Facebook filters out your posts based on whether or not people will use Facebook more if they don’t see it. Too often I'd want to share or talk about something and radio silence. Checked with friends and no one saw it. Putting aside caring about privacy, why put effort into a system that over time is more and more geared to peddling crap to you and your friends, and gets in the way of actual communication.
- batiudrami 9y ago
  For actual communication (messaging) it is actually one of the best. It is fast, reliable, and has genuinely great value adds like group messaging, encrypted messages, expiring messages and photos, location sharing, rich attatchments, seen notifications, integration with facebook profiles means I can find anyone (who has a profile) even if I don't have their contact details. Sure the app is a bit heavy with features I don't personally use (stickers, chat heads, games, stories) but it's at the point where it's easily the best messaging client I've used.
  - whyever 9y ago
    Signal has most of these features as well.
    - batiudrami 9y ago
      Sure, but Facebook Messenger has all my friends.
      - satsuma 9y ago
        This is really the crux of the matter. No matter how much a program kicks ass, if nobody uses it nobody is going to want to use it. Getting friends to switch to Telegram from Skype was a pain. Turning around and saying, after they got cozy, "hey Telegram blows, come check out Signal!" would result in rolled eyes and nothing more.
karllager 9y ago
> Like it or not there is a social stigma around NOT having a FB account. Yes of course there is. Please do not take it personal, but the problem described in the article still exists, even if most people don't care. In Germany in the last century, most people cheered for a mass-murdering psychopath. Those who did not cheer, were surely stigmatised - right up to annihilation. Did this invalidate the stigmatised standpoint? On the contrary.
extrastitial 9y ago
> The best doesn't win, the easiest does. This is the crux of the challenge. Plenty of people are concerned about Facebook, not only for privacy concerns but also for its impact on public discourse. [1] But any viable alternative must be mindlessly easy. Salim Virani’s suggestion of phone and email instead of Facebook works in part — replacing Facebook as a messaging medium — but it doesn’t address the use of Facebook as a personalized news feed informed by your social graph. We need something better. Something with a good mission [2] but orders of magnitude better. [1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604082/we-need-more-alternatives-to-facebook/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604082/we-need-more-alter... [2]: https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/
- SaintSal 9y ago
  Salim here. I agree with the 'mindlessly easy' part. I've noticed the lack of convenience, especially in sharing the little moments. As for replacing a personalised news feed, I still use Twitter and find that email newsletters, especially curations like getrevue keep me well-informed on professional news. As for a personal feed, I found that Facebook wasn't really that great - lots of noise and I still missed things I thought were important. I haven't found a replacement, but didn't feel the need to replace something inadequate.
kafkaesq 9y ago
I'm simply not willing to cut people out of my life and miss out on things that are important to me because my data is mined and might be used against me. I concur that FB can be useful for finding out about stuff going in your world. But if not using a certain commercial product -- any commercial product -- means "cutting people out of your life" to any significant degree, then well... you might want to think about the degree of dependence you've signed onto in using that particular product. And indeed, whether you really "need" that degree of (perceived) interaction with all of those people.
- mcgrath_sh 9y ago
  It may not be him that is dependent on a commercial product. I rarely, if ever, use Facebook as an active product. By this I mean I may post a generic status once or twice a month and may actively check my feed once or twice a week. However, if I were to completely close down my Facebook account, I would lose all of the passive information that is sent to me. This includes invitations to parties, people letting me know they are in town, updates from groups and organizations I am a part of, etc. So many people use Facebook as a pseudo or complete replacement for email. By removing myself from that service, I lose contact with those people and organizations. I am only one person. I cannot change the behavior of a couple hundred people to suit me.
  - marricks 9y ago
    I think the article details well how useful you are to facebook even if you are a light user. They get info you still say, they get what sites you visit and what content is there, they get what you and your friends say to each other... like even as a partial user you still get MANY of the bad affects. Not to mention, for me and many other people I bet, "cutting down" doesn't ever really work. They spend tons of money trying to increase engagement and make sure you stay on making that quite hard.
    - kafkaesq 9y ago
      Not to mention, for me and many other people I bet, "cutting down" doesn't ever really work. As with any serious addiction.
nihonde 9y ago
I think you greatly underestimate the degree to which you cede your personal sovereignty over to others by participating in these services. It's fine if you trust these companies (and more importantly their employees) to take good care of you. I don't trust anyone in America to do that, but you're free to spend your personal freedom how you like.
pasquinelli 9y ago
This is the first I've heard of a stigma against people who don't have a facebook. Anytime it comes up I don't have one -- which is rarely -- seems to either be taken as a simple matter of fact, (usually by people older than me, it seems), or as something to aspire to, like I just told them I'm a vegan or something. Maybe it's regional; I'm in portland. Back when I was on facebook I had a friend who wasn't. I remember just being kind of annoyed that I couldn't just send a group message, I'd have to send him an email separately, but otherwise didn't attach any significance to the choice.
- twothamendment 9y ago
  I'm a software guy. I just turned 40. I started my facebook account about a year ago. I was quite proud to not have one and there is a bit of a stigma against people who don't, but I didn't agree with them. Why did I do it? I moved to an area where the school information, community information, yard sales, just about everything is on FB. I've refused almost all friend requests because I don't really use it. It only exists so I can log in once in a while and check out the info inside the walled garden. Then I log out. How do we replace something that entire communities rely on?
artichokeheart 9y ago
>I'm simply not willing to cut people out of my life I've never understood this reasoning If you require Facebook to keep people in your life are they really in your life in the first place?
- batiudrami 9y ago
  I've never understood your reasoning. "If you require email to keep people in your life are they really in your life in the first place" "If you require a telephone to keep people in your life are they really in your life in the first place" "If you need to send letters to keep people in your life are they really in your life in the first place" For me Facebook is my go to in messaging and events discovery/organisation and it is a genuine value add which I do not want to give up. Just yesterday I organised a party - the invite is on Facebook because every single person I see regularly has it and gives me a simple way to see who is going and contact them, and for my other guests to see the invite list and interact with each other/make plans around it.
intended 9y ago
Thank you for arguing your point. Very often people advocating that we need to flee from social media don't get the chance to argue or at least practice arguments against someone with such a clear and obvious stance as you. In the end, people who hold a similar position as you, must of their own volition leave the site for a general uptick in privacy. And the only way to do that is to show someone something they want.
tempodox 9y ago
> ... that someone is hiding something if they don't have one. We all have something to hide. It's called privacy.
chrischen 9y ago
You don't have to delete facebook. You can try to minimize or stop supplying new info to them (stop posting, disable news feed, and use Facebook primarily for direct chats).
CaptainZapp 9y ago
I'm writing that from a position of having given up my Facebook account in 2012. Like it or not there is a social stigma around NOT having a FB account. That's absolutely true, but you know what? I really don't give a fuck! If your service is only available via Facebook login. Tough luck. You just lost me as a customer. I'd even extend that thought to the current craze of US border control agents allegedly requiring your social media credentials for allowing you into the country. Assuming that Facebook is a requirement to be allowed into the US, well, there's a host of other wonderful places to visit. A world where you are required to do Twitter, Facebook or Instagram is a sad place, indeed.
- scottschulthess 9y ago
  I usually think people who don't have Facebook are cooler than me
SaintSal 9y ago
Maybe we were just too early. When I first wrote that post, years ago, I expected most people to ignore it as tinfoil-hat stuff. But as time has passed, people are becoming more aware. (Also, the implications are becoming more costly.) I no longer write off the non-technical public as "they don't understand/care." This gives me hope that alternatives can work, even alternatives that require network effects. (Though, I think the best alternatives won't be another social network but something more akin to easy ways for people to run their own group communications. I don't think a me-too will win here, but something more of a leap-frog.)

lbstr_ftw 9y ago

It's amusing and sad that you honestly think leaving Facebook is the same thing as cutting people out of your life. I've been Facebook free for several years now. It feels great, and I didn't have to cut anyone out of my life to do it (who I wasn't otherwise already communicating with). Much less noice, more productive, both in my life and in my relationships.

davidcbc 9y ago
It is great if it works this way for you, but every group had its own dynamics. Personally my group of friends primarily talks via Messenger, that's where all the planning for things takes place. We have one friend who isn't on Facebook and he unintentionally gets left out of things. He isn't cut out of our lives, but ultimately he pays a penalty for not being on Facebook

Fezzik 9y ago

But what's the advantage of Facebook over email and/or texting? I feel like for anything other than wasting time Facebook is sluggish compared to either. If you're a Facebook user you have a cellphone and/or a computer, and can do everything Facebook does: share pictures, plan events, check-in with friends, family, and groups of people. And not share data* or be peppered with garbage advertisements. * I personally pay for Fastmail and have migrated all my communcations to email and texting (and feel the better for it). Obviously it is a personal decision, but realize everything you do is a vote towards a certain state of things.

mstade 9y ago
> But what's the advantage of Facebook over email and/or texting? This is anecdata but among my friends, e-mail addresses and phone numbers tend to change more often than their Facebook profiles. I know people all over the world, but out of all of Facebook connections, I probably only have accurate contact details for 20% of them or less. The contacts I interact with most often are obviously in that bracket, but many of those I talk to once a year or less are probably not. Case in point. I'm currently planning a trip, and while on a previous trip to the same destination I made a couple of friends there. I have a phone number to one of these contacts, but it's out of date. However, we're also connected on Facebook so I sent them a message their to let them know I'll be in their vicinity later this year. For better or worse – and this is obviously my personal context – Facebook is the best mostly self organizing contact list I've ever had. I couldn't care less about the wall, or liking things, or whatever you had for breakfast, but as much as I hate it it's the only stable way I've been able to keep in touch with all these folks that I want to keep in touch with. If or when I no longer want to keep in touch, I just prune them from the list, and likewise I get pruned from other people's lists whenever they feel we're "done." I don't want to use Facebook, but e-mail and phone simply doesn't solve my problem of keeping an up-to-date contact list. They also don't work simply because I can't easily look up a contact and connect with them, because there's no global phone or e-mail book. I'd love to use something else, but fact of the matter is that everyone I want to keep in touch with is there, and until they are also elsewhere in a list that organizes itself, I feel obliged to use it. :o(
- 9y ago

flubert 9y ago

>Like it or not there is a social stigma around NOT having a FB account. In fact I've thought on multiple occasions that someone is hiding something if they don't have one. Anyone have a source of "further reading" on perceptions towards people not on facebook? And does anyone have statistics on how many people in the U.S. are not on facebook?

joshstrange 9y ago
I just did a google for "stigma against not being on facebook" and found a handful of articles that look decent. Edit: Did mean to phrase that like "just google it" I just don't have time right now to vet the articles and didn't want to post links before reading them.
jasode 9y ago
>Anyone have a source of "further reading" on perceptions towards people not on facebook? I don't know joshstrange or his circle of friends but since I experience zero stigma of not being on Facebook, it seems to be highly depended on one's particular peer group. If I think of the 5 people I regularly interact with, none of them have Facebook accounts. Therefore, it's not strange that I don't have Facebook. The topic never comes up. However, some of the guys' wives have Facebook accounts so in some sense, the female spouses act as the "Facebook gateway" to the outside world. I chuckle at this state of affairs because it seems to duplicate the exact situation of the yesteryear where the husbands engrossed in the newspaper/tv always ignored the ringing landline phone and let the wife answer it. If it makes you feel better, a lot of celebrities (including some under age 30) don't use Facebook either. There are various articles listing names: https://www.google.com/search?q=celebrities+not+on+facebook https://www.google.com/search?q=celebrities+not+on+facebook

ghughes 9y ago

> The best doesn't win, the easiest does. Exactly. Diaspora and its ilk miss this point entirely. If users have to set up their own infrastructure or even think about how it works then it's never going to scale.

joshstrange 9y ago
Even if you personally don't have to setup your own infrastructure, like if you join a friend's instance (which in this case would end up being MY instance) it still sucks. Especially for the friend (ME) who sets it up and maintains and PAYS for it. It means I instantly become tech support or the source of "Josh, Diaspora won't let me post this image...". That's the last thing I want to do in my free time.

type0 9y ago

> In fact I've thought on multiple occasions that someone is hiding something if they don't have one. I feel the same about people who do use facebook, when they take pictures of me and others who are not on "The Social Network", then they put those on facebook for others to see with other personal information without concent, they don't inform me about their comments regarding those pictures. For all I know those people could be making fun of me for not being on facebook, not being social enough, having unfashionable clothes etc. From my perspective those people have something to hide, they share information in closed groups, refuse to email me those photos and waive it away like it's too much work, I have even experienced this with some of my relatives which saddens me alot. I'm not forcing them to use any specific website, forcing others to do that is nasty, it's no different than forcing others to smoke by the means of social pressure.

joshstrange 9y ago
Expecting people to take an extra step to fit your needs (email) is really almost no different from asking them to share on another platform IMHO. They aren't hiding from you, in fact I'd put money on the table that they'd happily invite you into their group or you'd have access to the photos simply by being their friend on FB. You can't walk outside the bar then complain that none of your friends want to stand in the window and relay everything happening to you or get mad they might be talking about you when you can just walk right back in. > it's no different than forcing others to smoke by the means of social pressure Yeah... no different, except one of them causes cancer but sure, no different.
- type0 9y ago
  > Expecting people to take an extra step to fit your needs (email) is really almost no different from asking them to share on another platform IMHO. Email is not a platform, I think you are confusing it with gmail. > You can't walk outside the bar then complain that none of your friends want to stand in the window and relay everything happening to you or get mad they might be talking about you when you can just walk right back in. This analogy doesn't stand because such pictures that I were talking about are more often than not are taken in the bar settings or other festivities. Obviously if I were walking outside I couldn't be on the picture could I. And it's not all of my friends that's the point, being forced to smoke even passively harms your health, being forced to be on facebook harms your privacy - that was my point.

eternalvision 9y ago

Your comment sums up the inertia issue nicely. To me, rethinking social means rethinking the internet as a whole. The dream of a decentralized global network has been stolen from us, and it's up to us to find consensus and work together to get out of this mess.

marricks 9y ago

One of the things that got me to leave was how crappy facebook has gotten for actual communication. This part of the post really resonated with me > If you’ve ever had that conversation, you’ve noticed that there’s a big disconnect between your expectations when you communicate on Facebook and what really happens. Basically, Facebook filters out your posts based on whether or not people will use Facebook more if they don’t see it. Too often I'd want to share or talk about something and radio silence. Checked with friends and no one saw it. Putting aside caring about privacy, why put effort into a system that over time is more and more geared to peddling crap to you and your friends, and gets in the way of actual communication.

batiudrami 9y ago
For actual communication (messaging) it is actually one of the best. It is fast, reliable, and has genuinely great value adds like group messaging, encrypted messages, expiring messages and photos, location sharing, rich attatchments, seen notifications, integration with facebook profiles means I can find anyone (who has a profile) even if I don't have their contact details. Sure the app is a bit heavy with features I don't personally use (stickers, chat heads, games, stories) but it's at the point where it's easily the best messaging client I've used.
- whyever 9y ago
  Signal has most of these features as well.
  - batiudrami 9y ago
    Sure, but Facebook Messenger has all my friends.
    - satsuma 9y ago
      This is really the crux of the matter. No matter how much a program kicks ass, if nobody uses it nobody is going to want to use it. Getting friends to switch to Telegram from Skype was a pain. Turning around and saying, after they got cozy, "hey Telegram blows, come check out Signal!" would result in rolled eyes and nothing more.

karllager 9y ago

> Like it or not there is a social stigma around NOT having a FB account. Yes of course there is. Please do not take it personal, but the problem described in the article still exists, even if most people don't care. In Germany in the last century, most people cheered for a mass-murdering psychopath. Those who did not cheer, were surely stigmatised - right up to annihilation. Did this invalidate the stigmatised standpoint? On the contrary.

extrastitial 9y ago

> The best doesn't win, the easiest does. This is the crux of the challenge. Plenty of people are concerned about Facebook, not only for privacy concerns but also for its impact on public discourse. [1] But any viable alternative must be mindlessly easy. Salim Virani’s suggestion of phone and email instead of Facebook works in part — replacing Facebook as a messaging medium — but it doesn’t address the use of Facebook as a personalized news feed informed by your social graph. We need something better. Something with a good mission [2] but orders of magnitude better. [1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604082/we-need-more-alternatives-to-facebook/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604082/we-need-more-alter... [2]: https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/

SaintSal 9y ago
Salim here. I agree with the 'mindlessly easy' part. I've noticed the lack of convenience, especially in sharing the little moments. As for replacing a personalised news feed, I still use Twitter and find that email newsletters, especially curations like getrevue keep me well-informed on professional news. As for a personal feed, I found that Facebook wasn't really that great - lots of noise and I still missed things I thought were important. I haven't found a replacement, but didn't feel the need to replace something inadequate.

kafkaesq 9y ago

I'm simply not willing to cut people out of my life and miss out on things that are important to me because my data is mined and might be used against me. I concur that FB can be useful for finding out about stuff going in your world. But if not using a certain commercial product -- any commercial product -- means "cutting people out of your life" to any significant degree, then well... you might want to think about the degree of dependence you've signed onto in using that particular product. And indeed, whether you really "need" that degree of (perceived) interaction with all of those people.

mcgrath_sh 9y ago
It may not be him that is dependent on a commercial product. I rarely, if ever, use Facebook as an active product. By this I mean I may post a generic status once or twice a month and may actively check my feed once or twice a week. However, if I were to completely close down my Facebook account, I would lose all of the passive information that is sent to me. This includes invitations to parties, people letting me know they are in town, updates from groups and organizations I am a part of, etc. So many people use Facebook as a pseudo or complete replacement for email. By removing myself from that service, I lose contact with those people and organizations. I am only one person. I cannot change the behavior of a couple hundred people to suit me.
- marricks 9y ago
  I think the article details well how useful you are to facebook even if you are a light user. They get info you still say, they get what sites you visit and what content is there, they get what you and your friends say to each other... like even as a partial user you still get MANY of the bad affects. Not to mention, for me and many other people I bet, "cutting down" doesn't ever really work. They spend tons of money trying to increase engagement and make sure you stay on making that quite hard.
  - kafkaesq 9y ago
    Not to mention, for me and many other people I bet, "cutting down" doesn't ever really work. As with any serious addiction.

nihonde 9y ago

I think you greatly underestimate the degree to which you cede your personal sovereignty over to others by participating in these services. It's fine if you trust these companies (and more importantly their employees) to take good care of you. I don't trust anyone in America to do that, but you're free to spend your personal freedom how you like.

pasquinelli 9y ago

This is the first I've heard of a stigma against people who don't have a facebook. Anytime it comes up I don't have one -- which is rarely -- seems to either be taken as a simple matter of fact, (usually by people older than me, it seems), or as something to aspire to, like I just told them I'm a vegan or something. Maybe it's regional; I'm in portland. Back when I was on facebook I had a friend who wasn't. I remember just being kind of annoyed that I couldn't just send a group message, I'd have to send him an email separately, but otherwise didn't attach any significance to the choice.

twothamendment 9y ago
I'm a software guy. I just turned 40. I started my facebook account about a year ago. I was quite proud to not have one and there is a bit of a stigma against people who don't, but I didn't agree with them. Why did I do it? I moved to an area where the school information, community information, yard sales, just about everything is on FB. I've refused almost all friend requests because I don't really use it. It only exists so I can log in once in a while and check out the info inside the walled garden. Then I log out. How do we replace something that entire communities rely on?

artichokeheart 9y ago

>I'm simply not willing to cut people out of my life I've never understood this reasoning If you require Facebook to keep people in your life are they really in your life in the first place?

batiudrami 9y ago
I've never understood your reasoning. "If you require email to keep people in your life are they really in your life in the first place" "If you require a telephone to keep people in your life are they really in your life in the first place" "If you need to send letters to keep people in your life are they really in your life in the first place" For me Facebook is my go to in messaging and events discovery/organisation and it is a genuine value add which I do not want to give up. Just yesterday I organised a party - the invite is on Facebook because every single person I see regularly has it and gives me a simple way to see who is going and contact them, and for my other guests to see the invite list and interact with each other/make plans around it.

intended 9y ago

Thank you for arguing your point. Very often people advocating that we need to flee from social media don't get the chance to argue or at least practice arguments against someone with such a clear and obvious stance as you. In the end, people who hold a similar position as you, must of their own volition leave the site for a general uptick in privacy. And the only way to do that is to show someone something they want.

tempodox 9y ago

> ... that someone is hiding something if they don't have one. We all have something to hide. It's called privacy.

chrischen 9y ago

You don't have to delete facebook. You can try to minimize or stop supplying new info to them (stop posting, disable news feed, and use Facebook primarily for direct chats).

CaptainZapp 9y ago

I'm writing that from a position of having given up my Facebook account in 2012. Like it or not there is a social stigma around NOT having a FB account. That's absolutely true, but you know what? I really don't give a fuck! If your service is only available via Facebook login. Tough luck. You just lost me as a customer. I'd even extend that thought to the current craze of US border control agents allegedly requiring your social media credentials for allowing you into the country. Assuming that Facebook is a requirement to be allowed into the US, well, there's a host of other wonderful places to visit. A world where you are required to do Twitter, Facebook or Instagram is a sad place, indeed.

scottschulthess 9y ago
I usually think people who don't have Facebook are cooler than me

SaintSal 9y ago

Maybe we were just too early. When I first wrote that post, years ago, I expected most people to ignore it as tinfoil-hat stuff. But as time has passed, people are becoming more aware. (Also, the implications are becoming more costly.) I no longer write off the non-technical public as "they don't understand/care." This gives me hope that alternatives can work, even alternatives that require network effects. (Though, I think the best alternatives won't be another social network but something more akin to easy ways for people to run their own group communications. I don't think a me-too will win here, but something more of a leap-frog.)