6 ms·

If you're reading this and haven't deleted your account already, will you ever?

mic47 5y ago
Probably not...
6AA4FD 5y ago
A lot of the people I know who still have an account, and are aware of Facebook's track record, use it for maintaining contact with friends and status updates, I don't think there is a whole lot that will get those people to drop, they would rather try to further close off the flow of information into Facebook, and they are already not trusting the service or what it does with the information it gets.
- still_grokking 5y ago
  But they're still feeding the machine… The presented line of reasoning makes no sense. But people aren't rational, that's no news.
  - whatsapps2020 5y ago
    You are saying that comfortable communication with friends is rationally less important than long-term ideological battle that you don’t really influence?
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      If you don't mind sharing your private conversations then sure it starts looking rational. It is not just an ideological battle when your information is used directly against you personally. Companies pay for ads targeted to you by mining your personal content. If you are not on facebook or rarely use it they have no opportunity to influence you.
      - tomjakubowski 5y ago
        You can use Facebook while not having any conversations on it you'd wish to stay private. I think most of my friends still on Facebook use it that way.
      - selfhoster11 5y ago
        Facebook is a contact point, first and foremost. Nothing prevents you from greeting a friend and requesting that the conversation continues on a more private channel.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Yes. There are many options outside of Facebook, but compromising your morals sticks with you.
    - still_grokking 5y ago
      You don't need FB to comfortable communication with friends. So there is no reason to use it. If you know what FB is about, and still use it nonetheless (actually for no reason), that's highly irrational. "I want to communicate with my friends" is just a very lame excuse for feeding the machine.
      - asteroidbelt 5y ago
        > You don't need FB to comfortable communication with friends. You don't need planes to meet your distant relatives, but flying is often much more convenient than other modes of transportation. > So there is no reason to use it. Convenience is my reason. If you don't have reasons for yourself, that's fine, don't use it, but don't say for everyone. > feeding the machine This is a bit dramatic.
        fsflover 5y ago
        >You don't need planes to meet your distant relativesx This is not a good parallel. You can use any modern instant messenger like Telegram to talk to your friends as comfortably (or more).
        asteroidbelt 5y ago
        It is a good parallel. Obviously if your relatives live on another continent, flying is the optimal, but for example you can ride a bus from SF to LA instead of flying.
        fsflover 5y ago
        Bus takes much longer, whereas other messengers are practically as convenient as Facebook.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    I have Facebook messenger app installed for the sake of a couple of people, and I check the Facebook main page once in a blue moon to respond to event invites from a friend. Other than this I don't use Facebook at all any more and have used it very very little for the past several years. I use a browser that tries to protect me from trackers and ads. To me, this is what makes sense to do. But they still get a significant amount of my attention because I use Instagram though.
    - GoodJokes 5y ago
      So you use IG. Honestly, you are being irrational. So two friends are forcing to use fb messenger. How? They refuse to communicate outside of it? They don’t sound like good friends and insta is just as bad as fb so…you have literally done nothing to mitigate.
    - realusername 5y ago
      The main issue here is that they also get to link all the other app events to your facebook account due to the facebook sdk and the fact you installed the app on the phone.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    How is this not rational? Not feeding Facebook anything beyond the minimum (minimising anything extracted from the user) but keeping it open as a communications channel (maximising how much value the user is extracting) is exactly the rational strategy to adopt when network effect keeps Facebook as the #1 place people (re)connect.
  - YeBanKo 5y ago
    I use facebook as an address book. When i need to get touch with someone I haven’t been talking recently, I open fb messenger and reach out. Then we can move it to a better form of communication. But it works. I don’t think I feed much info into it. Also fb market place has decent items.
  - xenophonf 5y ago
    "People aren't rational" is just a dishonest way of saying you disagree with someone's very logical reasoning due to different values. I know Facebook is scum, but I have no other way to stay in touch with some of my IRL friends. So really I have competing agendas here, social connectivity vs. personal privacy, and I'm sacrificing some privacy to gain connectivity because I value one over the other. I, personally, mitigate the privacy loss by only sharing stuff I'd consider publishing publicly anyway, only liking stuff that's similar, avoiding groups and pages, periodically deleting all old content from my account, using adblockers and private browsing all the time, and customizing the FB web app via local scripts (thank you, FB Purity). You can disagree with my values and the resulting choices (maybe you value personal privacy over social connectivity), but those choices are completely rational even for people who don't necessarily think about them in painful detail like I do. So get over yourself and quit thinking that other people are somehow beneath you because they make different choices than you.
- GoodJokes 5y ago
  A lot of people you know seem lazy or extremely unimaginative. There are just so many ways to still socialize and keep up with friends. If your friends stop talking to you cuz they can’t do it through fb…maybe re-evaluate said friends.
- walkedaway 5y ago
  If only there was a way to keep in touch with people if you didn't have a Facebook account. I wonder what people did before Facebook?
inglor_cz 5y ago
I deleted my account at the end of July 2019. Facebook did not become a better place through that. But at least I now procrastinate on HN instead. The population here is visibly smarter and the mods actually do their work to keep the standard from sliding into abyss.
- asteroidbelt 5y ago
  > The population here is visibly smarter You pick your Facebook friends, you subscribe groups which you prefer with mods you like, and you are free to ban whatever Facebook recommends you. My Facebook feed is interesting, I even click ads from time to time because ads are good. Comparison to HN is not fair, because Facebook is about friends and HN is about strangers. Still I kinda like Facebook because on HN there's very narrow Overton window and interesting comments are often downvoted while on Facebook I'm exposed to very broad range of ideas from far left to far right.
  - Nuzzerino 5y ago
    If you're frequently on Facebook, you still have to deal with comments from friends of friends, if reading their posts - and that's where the frustration starts.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    "You pick your Facebook friends" True, but this picking is not completely voluntary. If you are on Facebook and your relatives/coworkers/colleagues are, too, they will feel offended if you reject their friend request and you will have some personal hassle in your meatspace. Happened more than once to me and I reacted by cowardly accepting everyone and then filtering out most of them. Was not proud. In that sense, being in a community of complete strangers here in HN is actually refreshing. What I really value on HN is the fact that a lot of comments contain valuable info or at least interesting thoughts. I often changed my perspective on something I previously considered obvious after reading a HN discussion. This is rare on Facebook, most of the user-produced content is low-effort, shallow, information-poor and/or fishing for likes.
jimkleiber 5y ago
I hope for the day when there are more options than stay or leave, when users of a platform have more voice to determine the direction of the platform. Leaving FB (and IG and WhatsApp and GIPHY) seems like moving out of a country and never seeing or talking to many of my friends again. I'd much prefer to stay in the country and have more power in determining the laws governing how we interact with each other.
- apecat 5y ago
  Yeah. Especially seeing the effects the pandemic has had on peoples' social lives, and as such quality of life, I'm not going approach grownups who are unlikely to form new strong friendships, and tell them to cut off a major source of casual semi-social interaction with old buddies. For context, I'm a man in my thirties, and I notice that a lot of my peers are super busy balancing work/life, or just bury themselves in work. I'm from a Nordic culture where we don't have Southern European social customs and strong multi-generational families. I'm really worried about how our norms basically push us into loneliness outside our attempts to run nuclear families, which often fail and leave people divorced with limited additional social bonds.
  - anotherhue 5y ago
    All reasonable, but why does it have to be Facebook?
    - apecat 5y ago
      Social networks and communications platforms have value because there are people using them. I'm sure you know this, it's called the network effect. Facebook's services are places where people in my demographic have accumulated social networks that sometimes forms connections in actual socializing. When we throw parties with my best friends for a wider social circles, friends and acquaintances included, we still use Facebook events, to coordinate them, as an example. Similarly, although I use Signal to talk to my closest friends, Facebook Messenger is still a functional way to get hold of people when you don't have their phone number or e-mail. Where I'm from, people my age didn't really collect phone numbers, since Facebook's convenient for that. Transferring the connection between myself and these acquaintances may be cumbersome or awkward, and mind you, I'm the kind of person who insists on moving conversations to Signal after a certain point. As a case in point, it took years to make Signal something that I actually use for real social connections outside my closest circle of people who humor my nerdy demands. And only succeeded thanks to 1) me having moved some group chats to Whatsapp for encryption the minute Whatsapp released a desktop app in May 2016. This moved the social graph to my phone book, which made it easy to switch to Signal over time. The initial move to Whatsapp worked because people already used it. 2) the larger network effect of Signal taking off, largely over the last year. So, with all of this hassle in mind, I'm not going to tell people who, bluntly put, are at risk of being lonely, to drop useful social tools.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
beardyw 5y ago
I did this year. [Edit] though I had kept clear of it for 5 years.

Probably not...

A lot of the people I know who still have an account, and are aware of Facebook's track record, use it for maintaining contact with friends and status updates, I don't think there is a whole lot that will get those people to drop, they would rather try to further close off the flow of information into Facebook, and they are already not trusting the service or what it does with the information it gets.

still_grokking 5y ago
But they're still feeding the machine… The presented line of reasoning makes no sense. But people aren't rational, that's no news.
- whatsapps2020 5y ago
  You are saying that comfortable communication with friends is rationally less important than long-term ideological battle that you don’t really influence?
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    If you don't mind sharing your private conversations then sure it starts looking rational. It is not just an ideological battle when your information is used directly against you personally. Companies pay for ads targeted to you by mining your personal content. If you are not on facebook or rarely use it they have no opportunity to influence you.
    - tomjakubowski 5y ago
      You can use Facebook while not having any conversations on it you'd wish to stay private. I think most of my friends still on Facebook use it that way.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      Facebook is a contact point, first and foremost. Nothing prevents you from greeting a friend and requesting that the conversation continues on a more private channel.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Yes. There are many options outside of Facebook, but compromising your morals sticks with you.
  - still_grokking 5y ago
    You don't need FB to comfortable communication with friends. So there is no reason to use it. If you know what FB is about, and still use it nonetheless (actually for no reason), that's highly irrational. "I want to communicate with my friends" is just a very lame excuse for feeding the machine.
    - asteroidbelt 5y ago
      > You don't need FB to comfortable communication with friends. You don't need planes to meet your distant relatives, but flying is often much more convenient than other modes of transportation. > So there is no reason to use it. Convenience is my reason. If you don't have reasons for yourself, that's fine, don't use it, but don't say for everyone. > feeding the machine This is a bit dramatic.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        >You don't need planes to meet your distant relativesx This is not a good parallel. You can use any modern instant messenger like Telegram to talk to your friends as comfortably (or more).
        asteroidbelt 5y ago
        It is a good parallel. Obviously if your relatives live on another continent, flying is the optimal, but for example you can ride a bus from SF to LA instead of flying.
        fsflover 5y ago
        Bus takes much longer, whereas other messengers are practically as convenient as Facebook.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- codetrotter 5y ago
  I have Facebook messenger app installed for the sake of a couple of people, and I check the Facebook main page once in a blue moon to respond to event invites from a friend. Other than this I don't use Facebook at all any more and have used it very very little for the past several years. I use a browser that tries to protect me from trackers and ads. To me, this is what makes sense to do. But they still get a significant amount of my attention because I use Instagram though.
  - GoodJokes 5y ago
    So you use IG. Honestly, you are being irrational. So two friends are forcing to use fb messenger. How? They refuse to communicate outside of it? They don’t sound like good friends and insta is just as bad as fb so…you have literally done nothing to mitigate.
  - realusername 5y ago
    The main issue here is that they also get to link all the other app events to your facebook account due to the facebook sdk and the fact you installed the app on the phone.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  How is this not rational? Not feeding Facebook anything beyond the minimum (minimising anything extracted from the user) but keeping it open as a communications channel (maximising how much value the user is extracting) is exactly the rational strategy to adopt when network effect keeps Facebook as the #1 place people (re)connect.
- YeBanKo 5y ago
  I use facebook as an address book. When i need to get touch with someone I haven’t been talking recently, I open fb messenger and reach out. Then we can move it to a better form of communication. But it works. I don’t think I feed much info into it. Also fb market place has decent items.
- xenophonf 5y ago
  "People aren't rational" is just a dishonest way of saying you disagree with someone's very logical reasoning due to different values. I know Facebook is scum, but I have no other way to stay in touch with some of my IRL friends. So really I have competing agendas here, social connectivity vs. personal privacy, and I'm sacrificing some privacy to gain connectivity because I value one over the other. I, personally, mitigate the privacy loss by only sharing stuff I'd consider publishing publicly anyway, only liking stuff that's similar, avoiding groups and pages, periodically deleting all old content from my account, using adblockers and private browsing all the time, and customizing the FB web app via local scripts (thank you, FB Purity). You can disagree with my values and the resulting choices (maybe you value personal privacy over social connectivity), but those choices are completely rational even for people who don't necessarily think about them in painful detail like I do. So get over yourself and quit thinking that other people are somehow beneath you because they make different choices than you.
GoodJokes 5y ago
A lot of people you know seem lazy or extremely unimaginative. There are just so many ways to still socialize and keep up with friends. If your friends stop talking to you cuz they can’t do it through fb…maybe re-evaluate said friends.
walkedaway 5y ago
If only there was a way to keep in touch with people if you didn't have a Facebook account. I wonder what people did before Facebook?

inglor_cz 5y ago

I deleted my account at the end of July 2019. Facebook did not become a better place through that. But at least I now procrastinate on HN instead. The population here is visibly smarter and the mods actually do their work to keep the standard from sliding into abyss.

asteroidbelt 5y ago
> The population here is visibly smarter You pick your Facebook friends, you subscribe groups which you prefer with mods you like, and you are free to ban whatever Facebook recommends you. My Facebook feed is interesting, I even click ads from time to time because ads are good. Comparison to HN is not fair, because Facebook is about friends and HN is about strangers. Still I kinda like Facebook because on HN there's very narrow Overton window and interesting comments are often downvoted while on Facebook I'm exposed to very broad range of ideas from far left to far right.
- Nuzzerino 5y ago
  If you're frequently on Facebook, you still have to deal with comments from friends of friends, if reading their posts - and that's where the frustration starts.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  "You pick your Facebook friends" True, but this picking is not completely voluntary. If you are on Facebook and your relatives/coworkers/colleagues are, too, they will feel offended if you reject their friend request and you will have some personal hassle in your meatspace. Happened more than once to me and I reacted by cowardly accepting everyone and then filtering out most of them. Was not proud. In that sense, being in a community of complete strangers here in HN is actually refreshing. What I really value on HN is the fact that a lot of comments contain valuable info or at least interesting thoughts. I often changed my perspective on something I previously considered obvious after reading a HN discussion. This is rare on Facebook, most of the user-produced content is low-effort, shallow, information-poor and/or fishing for likes.

jimkleiber 5y ago

I hope for the day when there are more options than stay or leave, when users of a platform have more voice to determine the direction of the platform. Leaving FB (and IG and WhatsApp and GIPHY) seems like moving out of a country and never seeing or talking to many of my friends again. I'd much prefer to stay in the country and have more power in determining the laws governing how we interact with each other.

apecat 5y ago
Yeah. Especially seeing the effects the pandemic has had on peoples' social lives, and as such quality of life, I'm not going approach grownups who are unlikely to form new strong friendships, and tell them to cut off a major source of casual semi-social interaction with old buddies. For context, I'm a man in my thirties, and I notice that a lot of my peers are super busy balancing work/life, or just bury themselves in work. I'm from a Nordic culture where we don't have Southern European social customs and strong multi-generational families. I'm really worried about how our norms basically push us into loneliness outside our attempts to run nuclear families, which often fail and leave people divorced with limited additional social bonds.
- anotherhue 5y ago
  All reasonable, but why does it have to be Facebook?
  - apecat 5y ago
    Social networks and communications platforms have value because there are people using them. I'm sure you know this, it's called the network effect. Facebook's services are places where people in my demographic have accumulated social networks that sometimes forms connections in actual socializing. When we throw parties with my best friends for a wider social circles, friends and acquaintances included, we still use Facebook events, to coordinate them, as an example. Similarly, although I use Signal to talk to my closest friends, Facebook Messenger is still a functional way to get hold of people when you don't have their phone number or e-mail. Where I'm from, people my age didn't really collect phone numbers, since Facebook's convenient for that. Transferring the connection between myself and these acquaintances may be cumbersome or awkward, and mind you, I'm the kind of person who insists on moving conversations to Signal after a certain point. As a case in point, it took years to make Signal something that I actually use for real social connections outside my closest circle of people who humor my nerdy demands. And only succeeded thanks to 1) me having moved some group chats to Whatsapp for encryption the minute Whatsapp released a desktop app in May 2016. This moved the social graph to my phone book, which made it easy to switch to Signal over time. The initial move to Whatsapp worked because people already used it. 2) the larger network effect of Signal taking off, largely over the last year. So, with all of this hassle in mind, I'm not going to tell people who, bluntly put, are at risk of being lonely, to drop useful social tools.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

beardyw 5y ago

I did this year. [Edit] though I had kept clear of it for 5 years.