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One takeaway from the study that's often ignored on Hacker News, likely because most users here don't use Facebook or have a negative view towards the company,

One takeaway from the study that's often ignored on Hacker News, likely because most users here don't use Facebook or have a negative view towards the company, is that the majority of FB users place a real value on its service. Instagram and FB and Whatsapp may be useless to you, but that doesn't mean they don't contribute very real (and even positive) utility to the majority of their users. "Our participants’ answers in free response questions and follow-up interviews make clear the diverse ways in which Facebook can improve people’s lives, whether as a source of entertainment, a means to organize a charity or an activist group, or a vital social lifeline for those who are otherwise isolated. Any discussion of social media’s downsides should not obscure the basic fact that it fulfills deep and widespread needs" This is a point often left out of discussions on this website, unfortunately.

nugget 8y ago
What are the best replacements (products, services, or just best practices) for Facebook's core utility of sharing photos and updates, and generally staying in touch with family and friends in your network? I agree with you that there's real value there, but for me it became overshadowed by the deluge of unwanted features and content.
- webmobdev 8y ago
  The old fashioned way - remember their birthdays and anniversaries, call and talk to them regularly (once a month or two is fine), meet them if they come to town or you visit their city, make an effort to be with them during important events (death, birth, marriage, new job etc.) as much as possible. It doesn't matter if they are too busy sometimes - just do this diligently.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 8y ago
    Except that even before FB no one remembered birthdays and anniversaries of more than maybe their 10-20 immediate contacts/relations. The rest were diligently written down in a diary.
    - webmobdev 8y ago
      So use a diary or a digital diary with a reminder (aka most calendar apps). The point is to keep in touch at regular intervals, and talking or meeting is more meaningful than a message or a post.
- o10449366 8y ago
  Personally, I don't use FB anymore even though I still have an account. I use Messenger to keep up with my closest friends and I use Instagram for photo sharing and general life updates. I don't follow anyone who I don't actually consider a friend and my profile is on private. I further restrict my circle with Instagram's "Close Friends" feature when I want to share something on my story with only a select few. Prior to that, though, I just made extensive use of Facebook's unfollow feature and a few key uBlock Origin filters (that block out any posts containing the words "____ was tagged in a post" or such). Also, for what it's worth, I only follow ~200 people on Instagram so maybe I don't have enough feed content to generate any, but I have NEVER seen an advertisement on Instagram and all of the posts also appear in chronological order for me. I get the feeling that most of the people who have a bad time with FB or Instagram are the people who don't use the unfollow feature for their uncle that spends all day posting inflammatory political rants or who follow spammy Instagram accounts that are just promotion bots. If you use FB and FB's apps and services to keep up with your friends, your real friends, I think they're pretty great. Edit: For those interested, these are my uBlock filters for facebook.com: https://pastebin.com/GHwpM9bY https://pastebin.com/GHwpM9bY If you're tired of the noise in your feed I recommend trying these out. They aren't particularly well organized, when I first started using uBlock Origin I wasn't all too familiar with the syntax, but they do a pretty good job (for me).
  - rconti 8y ago
    I'm not sure what "[having] enough feed content to generate [ads]" on Instagram even means. I suspect you must browse on desktop with some filtering? I think I follow fewer than 200 people, and 0 brands/"influencers"/"celebrities" ... and i get PLENTY of ads. maybe every 5th post. Using the app, that is.
    - o10449366 8y ago
      No, 99% of my time spent on Instagram is on my phone. I have never seen an advertisement on there or on the desktop site. My hypothesis is that they have some threshold that "every N posts we insert M ads" and because my feed doesn't meet that N-post threshold I've never seen any ads. That's only a guess, though.
- savanaly 8y ago
  >What are the best replacements (products, services, or just best practices) for Facebook's core utility of sharing photos and updates, and generally staying in touch with family and friends in your network? That we all think of those as Facebook's "core utility" says a lot. I once spoke with a Facebook engineer and learned their primary development area was supporting how certain business owners in certain developing countries use Facebook: as their primary means of being paid for their services. In some places it's common to order delivery via Messenger, then as proof that payment is on the way take a picture of the money transfer receipt and share that picture via Messenger too. That this use of Facebook had never crossed my mind served as a big reminder to me that as an a) first-worlder and b) affluent techie I probably can't fathom 90% of the use that the rest of the world gets out of services that seem to me to be worthless.
- TuringNYC 8y ago
  >> What are the best replacements (products, services, or just best practices) The best replacement is tons of time, mental-energy, and the regimen of actually keeping in touch. Before Facebook, this honestly never happened for me. This is why I'm disappointed Facebook is where it is -- because they provided a service that made keeping in touch automatic and I think they have messed it up, possibly permanently. There are a core of ~10 family members I stay in touch with always, regardless of tools. Same for about ~10 friends. Beyond that, life got in the way. Facebook made it easy to up those numbers to ~30, and ~200. There are people I like, enjoy interacting with, but just aren't so important that i'd be able to schedule a bi-monthly call to catch up with them, or email them, etc. In programmer speak, Facebook is like subscribing to a bunch of topics on a message bus. Could you poll and do message exchange?...yes, you could...but it is too hard and that is why you use async and subscriptions.
moosey 8y ago
I think that there is a dark model here in regards to sharing that people don't think about very often: you share with everyone in your friends list rather than specific people really often. An argumentatively older model for the same thing were emails: a key part of sending that email is selecting the people that you send it to. Emails that I receive are listed in the order that they are received, and I choose how to manage them when I receive them. I think that these few modifications have introduced a number of dark patterns of how we interact with each other, and it differs from person to person based on their personality and perceived social needs. I don't know that it's positive for anyone other than those interested in marketing themselves. Otherwise, the 'feed' is a totally useless piece of advertising - either the people I know throwing that stuff at the wall, or companies trying to get me to buy more trash. These dark patterns are so pervasive that I think it's difficult to see these negative effects, and many people like the various responses that they feel when they see things on facebook, and assume that the dopamine hit is something useful, rather than an addiction. Studies have regularly pointed out the negative effects that these have. Personally, I think that the solution is just going back a step. We don't all need to be marketing ourselves to our friends and the world. The way to get back is to just return to email, IMO, or interest based forums.
- nradov 8y ago
  It's not worse, just different from what we had before. Change makes some people uncomfortable. Facebook users can select exactly which friends they want to share a post with. So the available functionality is the same as email in that way.
- yesenadam 8y ago
  As people on this page have said, those who dislike/criticize FB fail to consider/imagine all the ways it's being used. For example - I use FB for chatting with my friends around the world, i.e. most of my closest friends. I don't look at the news feed. Never see ads on FB. I chat with the people I want to, look at their recent pics when I want to, usually while chatting with them, so I can ask questions. The last few years, I don't share/post pics on FB, I just send in the chat to people when I want to. So your criticism doesn't hit me, indeed my use of FB sounds like your solution. And yet people assume FB can't be used like that, for some reason. p.s. Hacker News is infinitely more addictive..I'm not sure why! Maybe because muh internet points.
sokoloff 8y ago
> likely because most users here don't use Facebook or have a negative view towards the company I'd wager a majority of users here also have FB accounts and likely use FB at least weekly. There's a strong positive correlation between the people who did legitimately boycott or quit FB and the likelihood that they'll tell you about when the topic comes up.
zestyping 8y ago
Hmm. The way they measured this value is interesting. They tried to figure out how much money they would have to pay people for them to agree to stop using Facebook for a period of time. The numbers were a bit startling to me at first: in the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Suppose I said to you that there was a thing I used regularly, that I knew was bad for my health, but I felt compelled to keep using it. And the thought of abstaining from it was so difficult that I would give up hundreds or thousands of dollars to keep using it. What does that sound like? You could describe a drug addiction with exactly the same words. I'm not saying Facebook provides no value whatsoever. But I think the measurement in dollars is not purely a measure of value; it's part value and part compulsion.

nugget 8y ago

What are the best replacements (products, services, or just best practices) for Facebook's core utility of sharing photos and updates, and generally staying in touch with family and friends in your network? I agree with you that there's real value there, but for me it became overshadowed by the deluge of unwanted features and content.

webmobdev 8y ago
The old fashioned way - remember their birthdays and anniversaries, call and talk to them regularly (once a month or two is fine), meet them if they come to town or you visit their city, make an effort to be with them during important events (death, birth, marriage, new job etc.) as much as possible. It doesn't matter if they are too busy sometimes - just do this diligently.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 8y ago
  Except that even before FB no one remembered birthdays and anniversaries of more than maybe their 10-20 immediate contacts/relations. The rest were diligently written down in a diary.
  - webmobdev 8y ago
    So use a diary or a digital diary with a reminder (aka most calendar apps). The point is to keep in touch at regular intervals, and talking or meeting is more meaningful than a message or a post.
o10449366 8y ago
Personally, I don't use FB anymore even though I still have an account. I use Messenger to keep up with my closest friends and I use Instagram for photo sharing and general life updates. I don't follow anyone who I don't actually consider a friend and my profile is on private. I further restrict my circle with Instagram's "Close Friends" feature when I want to share something on my story with only a select few. Prior to that, though, I just made extensive use of Facebook's unfollow feature and a few key uBlock Origin filters (that block out any posts containing the words "____ was tagged in a post" or such). Also, for what it's worth, I only follow ~200 people on Instagram so maybe I don't have enough feed content to generate any, but I have NEVER seen an advertisement on Instagram and all of the posts also appear in chronological order for me. I get the feeling that most of the people who have a bad time with FB or Instagram are the people who don't use the unfollow feature for their uncle that spends all day posting inflammatory political rants or who follow spammy Instagram accounts that are just promotion bots. If you use FB and FB's apps and services to keep up with your friends, your real friends, I think they're pretty great. Edit: For those interested, these are my uBlock filters for facebook.com: https://pastebin.com/GHwpM9bY https://pastebin.com/GHwpM9bY If you're tired of the noise in your feed I recommend trying these out. They aren't particularly well organized, when I first started using uBlock Origin I wasn't all too familiar with the syntax, but they do a pretty good job (for me).
- rconti 8y ago
  I'm not sure what "[having] enough feed content to generate [ads]" on Instagram even means. I suspect you must browse on desktop with some filtering? I think I follow fewer than 200 people, and 0 brands/"influencers"/"celebrities" ... and i get PLENTY of ads. maybe every 5th post. Using the app, that is.
  - o10449366 8y ago
    No, 99% of my time spent on Instagram is on my phone. I have never seen an advertisement on there or on the desktop site. My hypothesis is that they have some threshold that "every N posts we insert M ads" and because my feed doesn't meet that N-post threshold I've never seen any ads. That's only a guess, though.
savanaly 8y ago
>What are the best replacements (products, services, or just best practices) for Facebook's core utility of sharing photos and updates, and generally staying in touch with family and friends in your network? That we all think of those as Facebook's "core utility" says a lot. I once spoke with a Facebook engineer and learned their primary development area was supporting how certain business owners in certain developing countries use Facebook: as their primary means of being paid for their services. In some places it's common to order delivery via Messenger, then as proof that payment is on the way take a picture of the money transfer receipt and share that picture via Messenger too. That this use of Facebook had never crossed my mind served as a big reminder to me that as an a) first-worlder and b) affluent techie I probably can't fathom 90% of the use that the rest of the world gets out of services that seem to me to be worthless.
TuringNYC 8y ago
>> What are the best replacements (products, services, or just best practices) The best replacement is tons of time, mental-energy, and the regimen of actually keeping in touch. Before Facebook, this honestly never happened for me. This is why I'm disappointed Facebook is where it is -- because they provided a service that made keeping in touch automatic and I think they have messed it up, possibly permanently. There are a core of ~10 family members I stay in touch with always, regardless of tools. Same for about ~10 friends. Beyond that, life got in the way. Facebook made it easy to up those numbers to ~30, and ~200. There are people I like, enjoy interacting with, but just aren't so important that i'd be able to schedule a bi-monthly call to catch up with them, or email them, etc. In programmer speak, Facebook is like subscribing to a bunch of topics on a message bus. Could you poll and do message exchange?...yes, you could...but it is too hard and that is why you use async and subscriptions.

moosey 8y ago

I think that there is a dark model here in regards to sharing that people don't think about very often: you share with everyone in your friends list rather than specific people really often. An argumentatively older model for the same thing were emails: a key part of sending that email is selecting the people that you send it to. Emails that I receive are listed in the order that they are received, and I choose how to manage them when I receive them. I think that these few modifications have introduced a number of dark patterns of how we interact with each other, and it differs from person to person based on their personality and perceived social needs. I don't know that it's positive for anyone other than those interested in marketing themselves. Otherwise, the 'feed' is a totally useless piece of advertising - either the people I know throwing that stuff at the wall, or companies trying to get me to buy more trash. These dark patterns are so pervasive that I think it's difficult to see these negative effects, and many people like the various responses that they feel when they see things on facebook, and assume that the dopamine hit is something useful, rather than an addiction. Studies have regularly pointed out the negative effects that these have. Personally, I think that the solution is just going back a step. We don't all need to be marketing ourselves to our friends and the world. The way to get back is to just return to email, IMO, or interest based forums.

nradov 8y ago
It's not worse, just different from what we had before. Change makes some people uncomfortable. Facebook users can select exactly which friends they want to share a post with. So the available functionality is the same as email in that way.
yesenadam 8y ago
As people on this page have said, those who dislike/criticize FB fail to consider/imagine all the ways it's being used. For example - I use FB for chatting with my friends around the world, i.e. most of my closest friends. I don't look at the news feed. Never see ads on FB. I chat with the people I want to, look at their recent pics when I want to, usually while chatting with them, so I can ask questions. The last few years, I don't share/post pics on FB, I just send in the chat to people when I want to. So your criticism doesn't hit me, indeed my use of FB sounds like your solution. And yet people assume FB can't be used like that, for some reason. p.s. Hacker News is infinitely more addictive..I'm not sure why! Maybe because muh internet points.

sokoloff 8y ago

> likely because most users here don't use Facebook or have a negative view towards the company I'd wager a majority of users here also have FB accounts and likely use FB at least weekly. There's a strong positive correlation between the people who did legitimately boycott or quit FB and the likelihood that they'll tell you about when the topic comes up.

zestyping 8y ago

Hmm. The way they measured this value is interesting. They tried to figure out how much money they would have to pay people for them to agree to stop using Facebook for a period of time. The numbers were a bit startling to me at first: in the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Suppose I said to you that there was a thing I used regularly, that I knew was bad for my health, but I felt compelled to keep using it. And the thought of abstaining from it was so difficult that I would give up hundreds or thousands of dollars to keep using it. What does that sound like? You could describe a drug addiction with exactly the same words. I'm not saying Facebook provides no value whatsoever. But I think the measurement in dollars is not purely a measure of value; it's part value and part compulsion.