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There's a "social capital" thing going on here. Your friends are usually willing to make some amount of effort to talk and hang out with you, depending on how c
by ufmace 6y ago
There's a "social capital" thing going on here. Your friends are usually willing to make some amount of effort to talk and hang out with you, depending on how close friends you are, but there are limits to that. Nobody wants to get together with someone who insists on doing everything their way every time. Most people don't care to spend what social capital they have getting their friends to use a different messaging app. You're only burning even more social capital if you try to lecture them about things they don't care about, such as Facebook having their personal information.
Particularly, this social capital is at its minimum when you're trying to develop new friendships. Good luck starting any when you refuse to use the app that everyone else in the area uses to communicate.
- 72deluxe 6y agoThat just sounds like "everyone else is smoking, so I should start smoking too". Just because everyone else is doing it does not mean it is the right thing for you to do. In this instance, if developing friendships relies on me sending my data to some unknown person the other side of the world so that they can build graphs on my activity and follow me around just because everyone else has decided that's what they want to do, then I would choose another path. Wouldn't you? If not, please send me all your data and details of your activities, all the time. If you can trust that data to some guy you've never met in a datacenter, then why not send it to me. You've got my username - that's more than you'll ever know about the people looking at your data at Facebook.
- FalconSensei 6y ago> "everyone else is smoking, so I should start smoking too" No, what they said is equivalent to "everybody is smoking but I'll annoy the hell out of them so they stop, and I'll refuse to meet them in person before they quit"
- ufmace 6y agoIt's an individual-level realpolitik. You (the general you) are welcome to take such a stand if you care to, but the price is that your social opportunities may be severely constrained. There might be other things about you or your life that also constrain your social opportunities, things more important than who has your data, and if that's the case, then taking such a stand may leave you rather seriously isolated. I would not "choose another path" because those things are more important to me. To be blunt, I'm not sending such data to any individual HN reader because that would have no relation at all to my practical ability to maintain friendships with people in real life.