10 ms·

Why I’m Not On Facebook

112 points by rblion 16y ago

RyanMcGreal 16y ago
Given that it's Wired, I'm surprised one of the reasons wasn't, "Facebook is dead."
chrismiller 16y ago
I recently took a month off from Facebook. I would say that 95% of communication (excluding face to face) between people I know is conducted over Facebook. In addition to that all events are organised through Facebook, if I didn't have an account I would be missing out. When I meet someone new I don't exchange phone numbers anymore I exchange Facebook details. For me at least Facebook is my phone number and email address all rolled into one. If I didn't have it I would be unreachable for a good percentage of people I know. This might not be typical I'm a younger person with a good percentage of my friends still in college or just leaving to start work.
- younata 16y ago
  Funny. I'm 18, college freshman, and have been facebookless since May. I got my account when I was 15, so I had two and a half years of addiction to fight. My experience without a facebook? I get the exact same experience as everybody else around me, but with 90% less drama. I like this.
jfb 16y ago
"[a] strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
rm-rf 16y ago
I've stayed away simply because of the inevitable overlap between my personal and professional lives. For each online presence, I decide if it will be professional or personal, and then try to make sure they don't overlap. Some things are fairly easy to separate: Linkedin professionally, Flickr for personal photos. Nobody at work knows who I am on Flickr, so I'm free to post whatever I want w/o affecting me professionally. If I'm job hunting, the prospective employer will not associate my weird photography style with my professional qualifications. FB pretty much assures that I'll end up with friends, family and work mixed together.
- mikeryan 16y ago
  I tried to keep linkedin and facebook private but once a client (who I'm friends with) friended me it made my facebook pretty damn vanilla, and its stayed that way as I've added other professional friends. Now I don't even worry about it I just don't put stuff out on facebook that reveals much. I mostly just lurk and post something I think is funny but not too racy. So I'm on facebook but I'm not worried about anything "getting out" because I don't have anything to hide in that zoo. I've been more tempted to say things that are revealing in this forum but since I use my real name it makes me keep things pretty tight - I'm not going to post anything too offensive. Again - I'm okay with that. In a way I've sacrificed being able to say some things I might later regret. But then again I'm not saying things on teh interwebs that I might regret.
  - metamemetics 16y ago
    >but once a client (who I'm friends with) friended me it made my facebook pretty damn vanilla, and its stayed that way as I've added other professional friends. This is a usability problem with facebook. It should be easy as pie to control the information you present to different GROUPS of people. Instead functionality is scattered across by CONTENT TYPE. Makes no sense and is completely illogical, social networking is about people, differing content-types are just small variations on the sharing theme and not the main conceptual focus. The 100 different content types are the entity sets with privacy attributes, rather than having privacy be an attribute on a manually created (small) number of groups of people. We put people in groups (ie. professional, family, friends) in real life, I can't understand how Facebook can possibly get this so wrong. The root of these problems is piss poor User Interface decisions. Facebook expanded without a plan. It's just like Urban Sprawl: let's add a bunch of widgets everywhere just like a suburb with zero urban planning adds strips malls.
- patrickaljord 16y ago
  > I've stayed away simply because of the inevitable overlap between my personal and professional lives. You can can create simple work/family/etc lists of friends and when you post something you choose who gets it. In some ways, you do pick a recipient whenever you send an email, so it's not like you're not used to having to pick a recipient when posting something on the web. Facebook makes it pretty easy every time you post a status to choose the list of people, or a black list, or white list or even pick the people one by one that will be able to read your post, same as with emails.
emeltzer 16y ago
I deleted my facebook entirely as an experiment, and completely forgot about it a week later. I used to use it very often, but the moment it was gone, I didn't miss it in the least.
baddox 16y ago
Your choice to make your information public is not a privacy issue. Sure, for the naïve (average) user, networks like facebook should provide explicit and honest disclaimers, intuitive customization, and conservative defaults. Beyond that, facebook only has information you choose to make public, and they shouldn't be expected to not use that information. If a random person on facebook can look you up and see your favorite music, then I don't consider any different if advertisers utilize that information (either by scraping it themselves or by purchasing ads through facebook) to target ads. Granted, you can make the valid argument that information can be mined without you explicitly providing it (e.g. friend graphs). That's an iffy ethical argument that is up for debate: is deriving information about someone from public information an invasion of that person's privacy? For example, if you walk out your front door and drive your car away, it's obvious that a neighbor witnessing that has not invaded your privacy. However, if the neighbor noticing you leaving and returning on a regular schedule, and learns that a local strip club has a weekly special event that corresponds to your outings, has the acquisition of that information (whether or not you're actually going to the club) constituted an invasion of your privacy?
- VladRussian 16y ago
  The mere learning of the 2 facts, which may have been completely accidental, didn't consitute invasion of privacy. The act of analysis of the information, ie. an act of thinking, is the offense here. DMCA comes to mind here - a law which explicitly (i think first, yet definitely not last, time in human history) made analysis of information, ie. an act of thinking, a crime.
- lzw 16y ago
  Facebook started out excluding everyone who wasn't a college student, keeping it private without oldsters...then when it opened up, it kept things private so only your fiends could see.... Then, later, they made these private things public by default. Facebook violated their privacy promise to me, and I will never forgive them for it. I'm only keeping my account around until I can complete deleting every piece of information I've put into it.
harpastum 16y ago
I agree with a lot of the reasons people give for not using facebook, most substantially the privacy concerns. However, I think the 'someone might read your old status messages and judge you for it' [1] idea is a ridiculous way to live your life. If people are going to judge you on a random message you wrote five years ago, that's their fault, not yours. I think Randall Monroe explains it best: http://xkcd.com/137/ http://xkcd.com/137/ . [1] (FTA "A vindictive ex-partner, or a workplace rival, or a health insurer, or a political opponent, may selectively expose information to your detriment – powerfully re-framing your identity in a way you would consider dishonest.")
- pak 16y ago
  You know, Zuckerberg gets a lot of flak for the "idiots" comment he made five years ago. It's MSM material now. You might say it contributes to public perception of his company, which is a big deal for the value and future success of his brand. The situation you brush off happens all too often. (also, see any political campaign, ever.)
- rm-rf 16y ago
  On the other hand, when I had to give a hiring recommendation on a key lead technical architect position for a multi-billion dollar organization, I searched usenet for old posts from this person (perfectly legal - I cleared it with general council first). Matching up name+date+e-mail domain wasn't hard, so I knew I had the right person. The search taught me that the person was thoughtful, articulate, analytical; had a very good grasp of the complexity of the domain and the technology underlying the domain, did not rush to judgment, etc. Had her posts been filled with OMG-WTF snarky crap, or if her posts had lots of dumb questions that could have been answered with a bit of self-directed study, she would not have been hired.
jamii 16y ago
I avoid the privacy flip-flops by simply making my entire profile public. That way I'm never tempted into writing something I wouldn't want the world to see. To be honest I think I would be a better person if I never held an opinion I wasn't willing to publically defend.
- philwelch 16y ago
  I don't know about that. pg has a whole section in "What You Can't Say" that boils down to this: if you have any interesting or controversial opinions at all, don't go around saying them or else your life will be consumed by controversies completely tangential to what you want your life to be about. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
rblion 16y ago
"Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?" - Steve Jobs, referring to IBM in 1984 Facebook is IBM's grandson. I have nothing against Mark, as I do not know him personally. However, his vision and his history reveal a depraved worldview where we are just users dependent on his social approval drug called FB.
adriand 16y ago
1) It's boring. 2) It's a waste of time.
- cageface 16y ago
  My experience as well. People don't suddenly become interesting just because they have an easy forum at hand. I've trimmed most of my internet use down to directed research and a carefully cultivated list of blogs. I don't feel that I'm missing much.
- srparish 16y ago
  3) There's no discourse nor substance, only an endless stream of lowest-common-denominator prattling
guynamedloren 16y ago
I'm just finishing up a 4 year college degree, and have had a Facebook account since high school. Over the years, I've friended just about everybody I've ever been acquainted with, even if I never had any real connection with them in the first place. I figured it would be a good way to keep in touch with all of these people if I ever wanted to - a great way to be social. Last weekend, I realized that I don't care about 80% of these people. I would waste countless hours a week browsing through photos, profiles, and status updates from people who I've hardly ever known. Not in a creepy stalker way, just in an aimless zoned-out kind of way. Impulsively, I deleted 600 friends (leaving me with about 160) without even feeling the slightest bit of guilt or loss. For me, Facebook was not a networking tool. Facebook had not provided me with social experiences that would have otherwise been lost. Facebook did not connect me with people I would have otherwise not been connected with. Facebook was wasting countless hours of my time that could have been spent on more productive and rewarding endeavors. Facebook has transformed meaningful interactions into emotionless clicks and keystrokes. I'm really considering getting rid of my account altogether for a more wholesome social experience.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- lotusleaf1987 16y ago
  I did the same purging of random Facebook 'acquaintances' when I graduated (2009). Then even a year later I was able to trim that 140-150 down to about 80. I also deleted all the random people I had lost touch with from high school who were no longer relevant to me, as since they were added we hadn't bothered to communicate. I realized a lot of people on Facebook are there to collect friends like it's a status symbol. I really didn't like having college friends, coworkers, professors, high school buddies, employers, random celebrities/bands all lumped into one list together, there needs to be a way too separate these groups.
  - araneae 16y ago
    >there needs to be a way to separate these groups I was on Facebook when there were only a few schools on it, and it was very useful and very relevant. Because there were no other schools on it, I was only friends with friends from college and there were certainly no high schoolers or parents on it; you had to have a university address. Facebook essentially got to where they were because that privacy made it awesome, and then promptly lost the very thing that made people trust them with their data to begin with, which was a limited user base.
johnfn 16y ago
I think that announcing "I'm not on Facebook" is sort of like announcing "I don't watch TV." That's nice, but I think you care more than anyone else you're telling. I say this tongue in cheek of course because I'm always telling everyone that I don't use Facebook. It's kind of difficult at times, but really, the people who I want to talk to will still find ways to talk to me. Better, I find that not using Facebook frees up a lot of time that I wasn't really aware that I was using.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- ab9 16y ago
  That's a common sentiment. Indeed, I hear people liken "I'm not on Facebook" to "I don't watch TV" more often than I hear people say "I'm not on Facebook."
  - awakeasleep 16y ago
    I get that this is a joke, but I believe it touches on an important subject. And this article was much more than the author announcing that he doesn't use FB-- That announcement was only an introduction to an article about possible downsides to sharing social information I know it isn't a popular sentiment among hacker circles but if you stop to think, there are a lot of reasons to be cautious. Information about people has always been a precious commodity and now we're giving it away.
    - rblion 16y ago
      I agree. Another subtlety I noticed is this generation's concept of Self is becoming contorted into your number of 'Friends' and quantity of 'Likes'. Not really this intelligent HN crowd but, more so the other 99% of society that unconsciously uses fb.
rubashov 16y ago
Anybody else remember the late 90s when people would send wide distribution emails about their trips and parties and such? I don't really feel facebook improved that system so much.
shortformblog 16y ago
I have his original list, which I think he switched out: 1) I'm not relevant. 2) I don't want to understand the most popular site on the internet, which my publication writes about regularly. 3) Despite my position at a publication that relies on technology and social media as both a promotion tool and main subject, I want to annoy my PR contacts and writers by forcing them to use other techniques to contact me. 4) It's the hip thing to do for the ahead-of-the-ahead-of-the-curve trendsetting techies like Jason Calacanis and I want to show that I have something in common with that guy. 5) I use privacy as a crutch to shield my real reason for not using Facebook (below). 6) I want to be contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. And as a side effect of that, I'm choosing to no longer be relevant in my field of technology. -- I do not understand how someone in his position can do his job and recuse himself of Facebook. You don't have privacy: You're the editor of a major publication that covers technology. Got a problem with that? Don't overshare. Make a fan page so people can worship at your altar, and turn on your privacy settings so nobody else can see your data. Use your head. But you edit the U.K. edition of Wired, one of the most popular technology publications in the world. And you don't use Facebook. It's like wearing a giant sign around the office that says "I don't deserve my job."
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  - shortformblog 16y ago
    That wasn't my point. My point was that THIS PARTICULAR GUY shouldn't be trying it out.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    Civil disobedience is when you disobey your draft orders and go to prison instead of Vietnam. Civil disobedience is not sitting around writing linkbait articles about why you choose not to use certain popular websites.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
Facebook still remains a good tool as an "internet yellow pages". I feel no need to actually use it as intended, but rather maintain a profile with my email address as a means of contact.
jdminhbg 16y ago
I'm not on Facebook because it sucks. Anyone who wants to talk to me has 7 other vectors of communication, none of which spam me with Zynga game updates. Has anyone who's left Facebook felt that they've actually missed anything?
- davidk0101 16y ago
  Nope, I left it a while back and I'm not missing anything but then again I have always valued face to face contact above any other and I consider facebook to be a very poor emulation of a social experience.
Concours 16y ago
To the author: I'm not on facebook , but I'm writing this article on wired, hoping you will "like" it and tweet it. 31 like so far from facebook, I'd like to see an article with the title: 6 reasons why wired is not on facebook or 6 reasons why I don't use the like button my articles. What a funny. As shortformblog put it, it's like wearing a giant sign around the office that says "I don't deserve my Job"
borneogamer 16y ago
Does anyone remember the early 90's where everybody and his mom's cats have their own webpage with their profile, blood type, etc available on angelfire/tripod/geocities? Well, Facebook IS the new angelfire/tripod/geocities. Social sites? I don't think so! The only thing you socialize with in FB are the buttons and the random add friends of friends who you don't know and don't care and will never actually socialize with. And then you show off to other people your 1,284 friends list, 95% of whom you most probably will never, ever socialize with. And then you cry yourself to sleep at night because Zuckerberg sold your info to some data mining company.
mereology 16y ago
It depresses me to see the banality of the the people that I thought were cool in college. Nobody is cool. What a bummer
rick_2047 16y ago
Sometimes it feels like facebook suffers more from wrong use by people rather than their privacy policy. Hear me out before you downmod me. I know their privacy policy kinda sucks (personally I don't have many problems with it, I just am very careful about what I say on the internet). But there is another much deeper problem with facebook which everyone tends to ignore. Partly because we are part and contributors to that problem. Anyone who has a facebook account these days tends to "friend" any random person who proposes a "friend request". I dont think that is very appropriate. You are not comfortable with sharing your information with advertisers who would at least provide relevant ads, but are comfortable with sharing your whole life with these random friends whom you do not remember meeting? I see people who have a friends list of about 300+ people. I don't even have that many numbers on my phone or email ids in my gmail contacts list. And I bet even they don't. Its just amazing how we use the number of fb "friends" as a status symbol. Disclaimer: I use facebook in a very controlled manner, promoting my blog in my college students, viewing picture which have me or my best friends and commenting on them and once in a while commenting on somebody's status. My facebook friends list is 82 people long, that includes 50 people I meet almost daily (my bus pool, best friends, class mates, we have fun together) and other 25 or so relatives. Rest are just very old friends which I feel guilty "defriending". So maybe I don't know what it is like having 300+ friends. Maybe its kinda fun. I am commenting on something which I have never experienced. So take my comment with a grain of salt.
diN0bot 16y ago
I like that facebook is public expression place (with more details and social connections for just friends). I put pictures of adventures and creations on facebook as viewable by anyone with a facebook account. People who vaguely run into me can go there and find out more of who I am...sort of like a resume for friendship (tactless). We also find common interests, conversation starters, etc. I naturally make friends in person; to me facebook is just one more neat tool in the toolbox for forging and maintaining social connections and fun in general.
drp 16y ago
Privacy zuckering is my main concern and why I deactivated my account. Every feature Facebook adds requires a visit to the privacy settings to specifically opt out. It doesn't matter that your preferences were set to yesterday's version of lockdown -- you never told Facebook it couldn't let Yelp see who you are, so you need to revisit your privacy settings to opt out of that. Facebook forces feature adoption by ignoring ethical privacy practices.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
karlzt 16y ago
I don't know what does it feel to be on facebook and never will.
kmfrk 16y ago
"Why You Shouldn't Be on Facebook" would make for an interesting headline, but this will obviously deter most readers. Guess it's better than "Facebook Is Dead", though.
andjones 16y ago
I don't think dropping Facebook is the right answer. Announcing to everyone that "I'm leaving Facebook" seems too idealistic and self-righteous. I have 45 friends on facebook. This number still seems too high to me, but I realize is very low compared to many of my friends. I share things only with those that I am closest to. I decline the large majority of friends requests sent to me. I am comfortable using Facebook for only my closest friends and family, however others have criticized my use of Facebook in this way. There are many ways to use Facebook. If you are prepared to accept some criticism for "not going with the group", I think Facebook can be a very enjoyable social tool.

112 points by rblion 16y ago

Given that it's Wired, I'm surprised one of the reasons wasn't, "Facebook is dead."

I recently took a month off from Facebook. I would say that 95% of communication (excluding face to face) between people I know is conducted over Facebook. In addition to that all events are organised through Facebook, if I didn't have an account I would be missing out. When I meet someone new I don't exchange phone numbers anymore I exchange Facebook details. For me at least Facebook is my phone number and email address all rolled into one. If I didn't have it I would be unreachable for a good percentage of people I know. This might not be typical I'm a younger person with a good percentage of my friends still in college or just leaving to start work.

younata 16y ago
Funny. I'm 18, college freshman, and have been facebookless since May. I got my account when I was 15, so I had two and a half years of addiction to fight. My experience without a facebook? I get the exact same experience as everybody else around me, but with 90% less drama. I like this.

jfb 16y ago

"[a] strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

rm-rf 16y ago

I've stayed away simply because of the inevitable overlap between my personal and professional lives. For each online presence, I decide if it will be professional or personal, and then try to make sure they don't overlap. Some things are fairly easy to separate: Linkedin professionally, Flickr for personal photos. Nobody at work knows who I am on Flickr, so I'm free to post whatever I want w/o affecting me professionally. If I'm job hunting, the prospective employer will not associate my weird photography style with my professional qualifications. FB pretty much assures that I'll end up with friends, family and work mixed together.

mikeryan 16y ago
I tried to keep linkedin and facebook private but once a client (who I'm friends with) friended me it made my facebook pretty damn vanilla, and its stayed that way as I've added other professional friends. Now I don't even worry about it I just don't put stuff out on facebook that reveals much. I mostly just lurk and post something I think is funny but not too racy. So I'm on facebook but I'm not worried about anything "getting out" because I don't have anything to hide in that zoo. I've been more tempted to say things that are revealing in this forum but since I use my real name it makes me keep things pretty tight - I'm not going to post anything too offensive. Again - I'm okay with that. In a way I've sacrificed being able to say some things I might later regret. But then again I'm not saying things on teh interwebs that I might regret.
- metamemetics 16y ago
  >but once a client (who I'm friends with) friended me it made my facebook pretty damn vanilla, and its stayed that way as I've added other professional friends. This is a usability problem with facebook. It should be easy as pie to control the information you present to different GROUPS of people. Instead functionality is scattered across by CONTENT TYPE. Makes no sense and is completely illogical, social networking is about people, differing content-types are just small variations on the sharing theme and not the main conceptual focus. The 100 different content types are the entity sets with privacy attributes, rather than having privacy be an attribute on a manually created (small) number of groups of people. We put people in groups (ie. professional, family, friends) in real life, I can't understand how Facebook can possibly get this so wrong. The root of these problems is piss poor User Interface decisions. Facebook expanded without a plan. It's just like Urban Sprawl: let's add a bunch of widgets everywhere just like a suburb with zero urban planning adds strips malls.
patrickaljord 16y ago
> I've stayed away simply because of the inevitable overlap between my personal and professional lives. You can can create simple work/family/etc lists of friends and when you post something you choose who gets it. In some ways, you do pick a recipient whenever you send an email, so it's not like you're not used to having to pick a recipient when posting something on the web. Facebook makes it pretty easy every time you post a status to choose the list of people, or a black list, or white list or even pick the people one by one that will be able to read your post, same as with emails.

emeltzer 16y ago

I deleted my facebook entirely as an experiment, and completely forgot about it a week later. I used to use it very often, but the moment it was gone, I didn't miss it in the least.

baddox 16y ago

Your choice to make your information public is not a privacy issue. Sure, for the naïve (average) user, networks like facebook should provide explicit and honest disclaimers, intuitive customization, and conservative defaults. Beyond that, facebook only has information you choose to make public, and they shouldn't be expected to not use that information. If a random person on facebook can look you up and see your favorite music, then I don't consider any different if advertisers utilize that information (either by scraping it themselves or by purchasing ads through facebook) to target ads. Granted, you can make the valid argument that information can be mined without you explicitly providing it (e.g. friend graphs). That's an iffy ethical argument that is up for debate: is deriving information about someone from public information an invasion of that person's privacy? For example, if you walk out your front door and drive your car away, it's obvious that a neighbor witnessing that has not invaded your privacy. However, if the neighbor noticing you leaving and returning on a regular schedule, and learns that a local strip club has a weekly special event that corresponds to your outings, has the acquisition of that information (whether or not you're actually going to the club) constituted an invasion of your privacy?

VladRussian 16y ago
The mere learning of the 2 facts, which may have been completely accidental, didn't consitute invasion of privacy. The act of analysis of the information, ie. an act of thinking, is the offense here. DMCA comes to mind here - a law which explicitly (i think first, yet definitely not last, time in human history) made analysis of information, ie. an act of thinking, a crime.
lzw 16y ago
Facebook started out excluding everyone who wasn't a college student, keeping it private without oldsters...then when it opened up, it kept things private so only your fiends could see.... Then, later, they made these private things public by default. Facebook violated their privacy promise to me, and I will never forgive them for it. I'm only keeping my account around until I can complete deleting every piece of information I've put into it.

harpastum 16y ago

I agree with a lot of the reasons people give for not using facebook, most substantially the privacy concerns. However, I think the 'someone might read your old status messages and judge you for it' [1] idea is a ridiculous way to live your life. If people are going to judge you on a random message you wrote five years ago, that's their fault, not yours. I think Randall Monroe explains it best: http://xkcd.com/137/ http://xkcd.com/137/ . [1] (FTA "A vindictive ex-partner, or a workplace rival, or a health insurer, or a political opponent, may selectively expose information to your detriment – powerfully re-framing your identity in a way you would consider dishonest.")

pak 16y ago
You know, Zuckerberg gets a lot of flak for the "idiots" comment he made five years ago. It's MSM material now. You might say it contributes to public perception of his company, which is a big deal for the value and future success of his brand. The situation you brush off happens all too often. (also, see any political campaign, ever.)
rm-rf 16y ago
On the other hand, when I had to give a hiring recommendation on a key lead technical architect position for a multi-billion dollar organization, I searched usenet for old posts from this person (perfectly legal - I cleared it with general council first). Matching up name+date+e-mail domain wasn't hard, so I knew I had the right person. The search taught me that the person was thoughtful, articulate, analytical; had a very good grasp of the complexity of the domain and the technology underlying the domain, did not rush to judgment, etc. Had her posts been filled with OMG-WTF snarky crap, or if her posts had lots of dumb questions that could have been answered with a bit of self-directed study, she would not have been hired.

jamii 16y ago

I avoid the privacy flip-flops by simply making my entire profile public. That way I'm never tempted into writing something I wouldn't want the world to see. To be honest I think I would be a better person if I never held an opinion I wasn't willing to publically defend.

philwelch 16y ago
I don't know about that. pg has a whole section in "What You Can't Say" that boils down to this: if you have any interesting or controversial opinions at all, don't go around saying them or else your life will be consumed by controversies completely tangential to what you want your life to be about. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

rblion 16y ago

"Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?" - Steve Jobs, referring to IBM in 1984 Facebook is IBM's grandson. I have nothing against Mark, as I do not know him personally. However, his vision and his history reveal a depraved worldview where we are just users dependent on his social approval drug called FB.

adriand 16y ago

1) It's boring. 2) It's a waste of time.

cageface 16y ago
My experience as well. People don't suddenly become interesting just because they have an easy forum at hand. I've trimmed most of my internet use down to directed research and a carefully cultivated list of blogs. I don't feel that I'm missing much.
srparish 16y ago
3) There's no discourse nor substance, only an endless stream of lowest-common-denominator prattling

guynamedloren 16y ago

I'm just finishing up a 4 year college degree, and have had a Facebook account since high school. Over the years, I've friended just about everybody I've ever been acquainted with, even if I never had any real connection with them in the first place. I figured it would be a good way to keep in touch with all of these people if I ever wanted to - a great way to be social. Last weekend, I realized that I don't care about 80% of these people. I would waste countless hours a week browsing through photos, profiles, and status updates from people who I've hardly ever known. Not in a creepy stalker way, just in an aimless zoned-out kind of way. Impulsively, I deleted 600 friends (leaving me with about 160) without even feeling the slightest bit of guilt or loss. For me, Facebook was not a networking tool. Facebook had not provided me with social experiences that would have otherwise been lost. Facebook did not connect me with people I would have otherwise not been connected with. Facebook was wasting countless hours of my time that could have been spent on more productive and rewarding endeavors. Facebook has transformed meaningful interactions into emotionless clicks and keystrokes. I'm really considering getting rid of my account altogether for a more wholesome social experience.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
lotusleaf1987 16y ago
I did the same purging of random Facebook 'acquaintances' when I graduated (2009). Then even a year later I was able to trim that 140-150 down to about 80. I also deleted all the random people I had lost touch with from high school who were no longer relevant to me, as since they were added we hadn't bothered to communicate. I realized a lot of people on Facebook are there to collect friends like it's a status symbol. I really didn't like having college friends, coworkers, professors, high school buddies, employers, random celebrities/bands all lumped into one list together, there needs to be a way too separate these groups.
- araneae 16y ago
  >there needs to be a way to separate these groups I was on Facebook when there were only a few schools on it, and it was very useful and very relevant. Because there were no other schools on it, I was only friends with friends from college and there were certainly no high schoolers or parents on it; you had to have a university address. Facebook essentially got to where they were because that privacy made it awesome, and then promptly lost the very thing that made people trust them with their data to begin with, which was a limited user base.

johnfn 16y ago

I think that announcing "I'm not on Facebook" is sort of like announcing "I don't watch TV." That's nice, but I think you care more than anyone else you're telling. I say this tongue in cheek of course because I'm always telling everyone that I don't use Facebook. It's kind of difficult at times, but really, the people who I want to talk to will still find ways to talk to me. Better, I find that not using Facebook frees up a lot of time that I wasn't really aware that I was using.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ab9 16y ago
That's a common sentiment. Indeed, I hear people liken "I'm not on Facebook" to "I don't watch TV" more often than I hear people say "I'm not on Facebook."
- awakeasleep 16y ago
  I get that this is a joke, but I believe it touches on an important subject. And this article was much more than the author announcing that he doesn't use FB-- That announcement was only an introduction to an article about possible downsides to sharing social information I know it isn't a popular sentiment among hacker circles but if you stop to think, there are a lot of reasons to be cautious. Information about people has always been a precious commodity and now we're giving it away.
  - rblion 16y ago
    I agree. Another subtlety I noticed is this generation's concept of Self is becoming contorted into your number of 'Friends' and quantity of 'Likes'. Not really this intelligent HN crowd but, more so the other 99% of society that unconsciously uses fb.

rubashov 16y ago

Anybody else remember the late 90s when people would send wide distribution emails about their trips and parties and such? I don't really feel facebook improved that system so much.

shortformblog 16y ago

I have his original list, which I think he switched out: 1) I'm not relevant. 2) I don't want to understand the most popular site on the internet, which my publication writes about regularly. 3) Despite my position at a publication that relies on technology and social media as both a promotion tool and main subject, I want to annoy my PR contacts and writers by forcing them to use other techniques to contact me. 4) It's the hip thing to do for the ahead-of-the-ahead-of-the-curve trendsetting techies like Jason Calacanis and I want to show that I have something in common with that guy. 5) I use privacy as a crutch to shield my real reason for not using Facebook (below). 6) I want to be contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. And as a side effect of that, I'm choosing to no longer be relevant in my field of technology. -- I do not understand how someone in his position can do his job and recuse himself of Facebook. You don't have privacy: You're the editor of a major publication that covers technology. Got a problem with that? Don't overshare. Make a fan page so people can worship at your altar, and turn on your privacy settings so nobody else can see your data. Use your head. But you edit the U.K. edition of Wired, one of the most popular technology publications in the world. And you don't use Facebook. It's like wearing a giant sign around the office that says "I don't deserve my job."

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- shortformblog 16y ago
  That wasn't my point. My point was that THIS PARTICULAR GUY shouldn't be trying it out.
- philwelch 16y ago
  Civil disobedience is when you disobey your draft orders and go to prison instead of Vietnam. Civil disobedience is not sitting around writing linkbait articles about why you choose not to use certain popular websites.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]

FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago

Facebook still remains a good tool as an "internet yellow pages". I feel no need to actually use it as intended, but rather maintain a profile with my email address as a means of contact.

jdminhbg 16y ago

I'm not on Facebook because it sucks. Anyone who wants to talk to me has 7 other vectors of communication, none of which spam me with Zynga game updates. Has anyone who's left Facebook felt that they've actually missed anything?

davidk0101 16y ago
Nope, I left it a while back and I'm not missing anything but then again I have always valued face to face contact above any other and I consider facebook to be a very poor emulation of a social experience.

Concours 16y ago

To the author: I'm not on facebook , but I'm writing this article on wired, hoping you will "like" it and tweet it. 31 like so far from facebook, I'd like to see an article with the title: 6 reasons why wired is not on facebook or 6 reasons why I don't use the like button my articles. What a funny. As shortformblog put it, it's like wearing a giant sign around the office that says "I don't deserve my Job"

borneogamer 16y ago

Does anyone remember the early 90's where everybody and his mom's cats have their own webpage with their profile, blood type, etc available on angelfire/tripod/geocities? Well, Facebook IS the new angelfire/tripod/geocities. Social sites? I don't think so! The only thing you socialize with in FB are the buttons and the random add friends of friends who you don't know and don't care and will never actually socialize with. And then you show off to other people your 1,284 friends list, 95% of whom you most probably will never, ever socialize with. And then you cry yourself to sleep at night because Zuckerberg sold your info to some data mining company.

mereology 16y ago

It depresses me to see the banality of the the people that I thought were cool in college. Nobody is cool. What a bummer

rick_2047 16y ago

Sometimes it feels like facebook suffers more from wrong use by people rather than their privacy policy. Hear me out before you downmod me. I know their privacy policy kinda sucks (personally I don't have many problems with it, I just am very careful about what I say on the internet). But there is another much deeper problem with facebook which everyone tends to ignore. Partly because we are part and contributors to that problem. Anyone who has a facebook account these days tends to "friend" any random person who proposes a "friend request". I dont think that is very appropriate. You are not comfortable with sharing your information with advertisers who would at least provide relevant ads, but are comfortable with sharing your whole life with these random friends whom you do not remember meeting? I see people who have a friends list of about 300+ people. I don't even have that many numbers on my phone or email ids in my gmail contacts list. And I bet even they don't. Its just amazing how we use the number of fb "friends" as a status symbol. Disclaimer: I use facebook in a very controlled manner, promoting my blog in my college students, viewing picture which have me or my best friends and commenting on them and once in a while commenting on somebody's status. My facebook friends list is 82 people long, that includes 50 people I meet almost daily (my bus pool, best friends, class mates, we have fun together) and other 25 or so relatives. Rest are just very old friends which I feel guilty "defriending". So maybe I don't know what it is like having 300+ friends. Maybe its kinda fun. I am commenting on something which I have never experienced. So take my comment with a grain of salt.

diN0bot 16y ago

I like that facebook is public expression place (with more details and social connections for just friends). I put pictures of adventures and creations on facebook as viewable by anyone with a facebook account. People who vaguely run into me can go there and find out more of who I am...sort of like a resume for friendship (tactless). We also find common interests, conversation starters, etc. I naturally make friends in person; to me facebook is just one more neat tool in the toolbox for forging and maintaining social connections and fun in general.

drp 16y ago

Privacy zuckering is my main concern and why I deactivated my account. Every feature Facebook adds requires a visit to the privacy settings to specifically opt out. It doesn't matter that your preferences were set to yesterday's version of lockdown -- you never told Facebook it couldn't let Yelp see who you are, so you need to revisit your privacy settings to opt out of that. Facebook forces feature adoption by ignoring ethical privacy practices.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

karlzt 16y ago

I don't know what does it feel to be on facebook and never will.

kmfrk 16y ago

"Why You Shouldn't Be on Facebook" would make for an interesting headline, but this will obviously deter most readers. Guess it's better than "Facebook Is Dead", though.

andjones 16y ago

I don't think dropping Facebook is the right answer. Announcing to everyone that "I'm leaving Facebook" seems too idealistic and self-righteous. I have 45 friends on facebook. This number still seems too high to me, but I realize is very low compared to many of my friends. I share things only with those that I am closest to. I decline the large majority of friends requests sent to me. I am comfortable using Facebook for only my closest friends and family, however others have criticized my use of Facebook in this way. There are many ways to use Facebook. If you are prepared to accept some criticism for "not going with the group", I think Facebook can be a very enjoyable social tool.