9 ms·

With each passing day, I look less and less like a lunatic for avoiding facebook (and its ilk) like the plague. You should try it.

sillysaurus2 13y ago
People think those who don't use Facebook are lunatics? Why?
- hnha 13y ago
  depending on the demographic, sure.
- mjn 13y ago
  In some demographics it's seen as at least sort of quaint/eccentric disconnection, like not having a mobile phone.
- tabookfaced 13y ago
  Because it's supposedly antisocial behaviour as you don't follow the herd and it has been noted that high profile serial killers and mass murderers don't have facebook. To me it's either people who can't be bothered or people who actually care, are knowledgeable enough and value their time and privacy.
- keevie 13y ago
  I feel like a lot of people don't realize just how omnipresent facebook is in places like college campuses. I personally know about four people who aren't on facebook. There's a whole sphere of social interaction that you can't be a part of if you're not on facebook.
- algorias 13y ago
  For younger generations who grew up with this kind of tech, it's just not conceivable. For them, Facebook is a synonym for having contact with their friends. In a discussion we once had in class, I mentioned that an option that hadn't been listed besides Facebook, Google+, Diaspora, etc was "none of the above". I got bewildered stares of disbelief in return.
  - frio 13y ago
    Maybe. This is rapidly becoming less true. I had to give a talk at a school the other day ("tech is cool, join the tech industry!") and the bulk of the students didn't have Facebook accounts -- because their parents are on it. Maybe that'll change when they reach a University age, but it was striking how few of them used it.
    - gailees 13y ago
      Instagram is taking over amongst young people.
      - rzt 13y ago
        Instagram is even taking over among people in the post-adolescent set. The engagement I see seems to be more vigorous, especially if you're dialed-in and you're making good/interesting photos.
      - Pretzels 13y ago
        Or snapchat.
    - ansgri 13y ago
      Now that's a really good point. No self-respecting kid will use the same _one-to-many_ platform to communicate with friends and parents. Maybe they'll add some convenient 'Circles' feature, but the association with 'those old people' will remain.
  - adventured 13y ago
    Actually Facebook is most likely going to erode from the younger generation/s upwards. They don't need Facebook at all, their social network is new and can be formed on other services. Over the coming decade, Facebook will become an older person's social network (35+). They'll completely lose the youth demographic. The least cool thing is to be where everybody else is, your parents and teachers included. This effect is already hitting Facebook.
- pavs 13y ago
  Yes definitely. People who doesn't use facebook by choice are thought of being crazy. I use facebook, for me its a great to keep in touch with my friends and family members who are all over the world. I have a friend who doesn't want to jump in to the facebook bandwagon and our mutual friends thinks he is crazy for not using facebook. The side effect is he almost never gets invited if there is a get together and have no idea whats going with most of our mutual friends. He does have a close group of friends he keeps in touch with (like me, on phone or whatsapp). I hate facebook's privacy implications, I sympathize with his views. But facebook, the platform, is actually useful to me so I continue to use until a better alternative comes out.
  - darkbot 13y ago
    Have a look at Diaspora
    - tabookfaced 13y ago
      don't waste your time with this, it's an overhyped attempt at being facebook which is not what it should. have a look at the freedom box instead: https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/ https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/
      - Amadou 13y ago
        I'm a big supporter of freedombox - but today you can use a diaspora server operated by someone else, basically no pain. But freedombox is a long ways from a similar no-pain experience.
        a1a 13y ago
        I have failed to find any list of "known attacks" against diaspora. But I would like to point out a fundamental flaw: What is to stop anyone from setting up a malicious server in diaspora? Even if I don't trust facebook, I still trust them more than a random individual running a server. Hopefully there are some solution for this? Perhaps server operators don't actually see any unencrypted data?
- EliRivers 13y ago
  This attitude will die soon enough; the very young are starting to see Facebook as a niche website for grandparents.
tabookfaced 13y ago
Never ever registering or browsing facebook was the obvious thing to do, at least it is for people who have been around and online for a while. It's the total opposite of the web and the internet, not pseudymous, centralized, using shady tactics to grow, spamming at times and so on. I don't care everybody, their grandma and their dog have an account, until it is decentralized p2P, encrypted and my data stays my own and in my own vicinity, I won't be part of so called "social network" services/websites. I have email already.
- a1a 13y ago
  Where did you find this encrypted decentralized p2p email service? Edit: I guess there is a obvious solution, you and all your friends hosts personal mail-servers, correct?
  - evacuationdrill 13y ago
    Don't be shitty, you know the idea is that you CAN set one up and use the same features, or you can freely switch providers. Try that with Facebook. It's like using AOL or something.
jmpe 13y ago
Oddly enough, this happened for me on day one when I considered joining. They asked to provide my email password so they could build up a list of contacts. Oddly enough I was one of the few who thought this is "not done" because it lowers the bar for online security, i.e. it would be considered normal after a while if websites started asking this. It didn't pan out, but as a result I never got a FB account.
FridayWithJohn 13y ago
@algorias, I once considered people like you to be weird not to communicate on FB... but for a while now I have really started to mistrust FB. The revelations by Snowden most certainly played a big role, but now that they are asking for freaking IDs I draw the line there. It is now time to really think about me leaving this crap... I think my boss might like that too as I'm sure to do more work now, haha
vincie 13y ago
I hear ya. And you know, I've come across a few morons who insinuated to me that I am anti-social and have Aspergers' because of my resistance to using Facebook. I think this is the genesis of it all: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2184658/Is-joining-Facebook-sign-youre-psychopath-Some-employers-psychologists-say-suspicious.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2184658/Is-joining-F...
- harryf 13y ago
  All privacy questions aside, I quit Facebook simply because every time I used it, the "after taste" was that I'd wasted my time and made myself stupider in the process. The good news is "real life" still works perfectly fine for social interactions and a positive side effect is another source of distractions eliminated - I'm a fan of http://focusmanifesto.com/ http://focusmanifesto.com/
  - welly 13y ago
    > All privacy questions aside... ...I'd wasted my time and made myself stupider in the process. You perhaps need to find smarter friends then.
    - hobs 13y ago
      Really? All my friends who use facebook at first thought it was a useful tool, and then slowly the bloat beyond the first few friends you actually give a shit about occurs. Your feed started becoming invite spam and people who you dont even really know commenting on their breakfast or their kids or their cat doing a dumb thing. All I can think of when I see this on other people's screens (though most of the app invite spam has been taken care of): "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." Eleanor Roosevelt
brador 13y ago
Google will do the same thing soon. It wants one google account per person, and using real ID is the best way to do that.
- algorias 13y ago
  Yeah, they have become very persistent in wanting you to link your google and youtube accounts, for instance. For the first time ever, I'm seriously considering ditching gmail.
- kalleboo 13y ago
  Didn't they already ask for ID back during the whole "real name" debacle?
adventured 13y ago
I have been contemplating dumping Facebook more and more as the year goes on. I've used it probably every day for six plus years. I've gradually come to the conclusion that I can live without it and can easily keep up with all of my friends and family. There's so much trash, hostility and political arguing on Facebook these days, at least on my network. Some days it reminds me of a dramatically bigger version of MySpace.
- VLM 13y ago
  Sounds more like television than myspace. I'm not saying you're wrong about myspace, just TV fits your definition even better. I suspect there is a high correlation between people who don't watch TV and people who don't do facebook/twitter. I am occasionally exposed to TV and I've noticed over the past couple years a ridiculous level of attempts at twitter integration on primetime major network TV.
flexd 13y ago
I have been thinking about it, but around here Facebook is so common it would be weird not to have it. My friends never send SMS any more, they use Facebook messenger. Nobody asks you for your phone number, they ask to add you on Facebook. Nobody invites anyone to anything without creating a Facebook event. If I suddenly leave Facebook I am certain I'll also lose out on a lot of social life. What do you use for instant messages? Do you just use email a lot more? I really wish some kind of distributed social network could take off the way Facebook has. I do not want anyone to keep my data as much as the next guy, but if you want to be a social person in 2013 (at least here), you kind of need to have a Facebook account. A guy I met at the start of the semester is a german exchange student. He had to create a Facebook account when he got here because pretty much everything happens on Facebook. Some things do not even have their own website, just a Facebook page.
- sneak 13y ago
  > Nobody invites anyone to anything without creating a Facebook event. > If I suddenly leave Facebook I am certain I'll also lose out on a lot of social life. This. You can't expect people to set up and populate their own mailing lists to notify everybody they want to invite to their birthday party or share news of their engagement. I hate it too, but the reality is that being off facebook means losing touch with people that you don't have to lose touch with. Very, very few people will make an effort above and beyond the default choice these days (facebook events) to notify/invite you to stuff that involves more than a half-dozen people.
  - bcoates 13y ago
    Before Facebook, there was this thing called "the Grapevine", a decentralized communication network of people who were so intensely interested in everyone else's doings that you couldn't stop them from keeping you up to date about it. I have not, despite my best efforts, been able to unsubscribe from it.
    - ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
      and that "Grapevine" usually resulted in news of your engagement turning into a story about how you helped Maverick engage MIG's over the Bering Strait just in time to save Iceman. ...am I the only one who remembers "The Telephone Game" from pre-school?
sneak 13y ago
I tried it for over five years. Many people use facebook messaging as their primary form of text communication these days. Texting is expensive and regional, and nobody uses email, wants to remember email addresses or IM handles, or deal with spam. WhatsApp totally fucked themselves by not running on tablets. For lots of people, the most effective way to reach them quickly is facebook messaging. That's fact, not opinion, and how intrusive or shitty facebook is totally irrelevant to that point. Not having a facebook account means that you are sabotaging your own communications effectiveness.
- gngeal 13y ago
  "Texting is expensive and regional, and nobody uses email, wants to remember email addresses or IM handles, or deal with spam. WhatsApp totally fucked themselves by not running on tablets. For lots of people, the most effective way to reach them quickly is facebook messaging. That's fact, not opinion, and how intrusive or shitty facebook is totally irrelevant to that point. Not having a facebook account means that you are sabotaging your own communications effectiveness." The people who'd do this are exactly those people I don't feel any need to communicate with. Is it work-related? E-mail and sometimes phone are given. Is it not work-related, but urgent? I still have a phone. Is that costly? Perhaps, but if you have six urgent things to communicate every day, perhaps you have a much worse problem than having to pay a lot of money. Is it anything else? Well, what could it be? I have no idea. Frankly, this whole "you have to live a hectic social life, everyone's doing it!" movement puzzles me.
  - sneak 13y ago
    > The people who'd do this are exactly those people I don't feel any need to communicate with. Okay, so you're a snob. Doesn't change the fact that you're shooting yourself in the foot. There's nothing about wanting to be able to effectively communicate with people who use facebook messaging as their primary form of textual comms that dictates or necessitates a hectic social life.
    - gngeal 13y ago
      Okay, so you're a snob. No, I'm just an introvert. I have a few people to who I feel deeply connected to, and our exchanges are rare yet substantial. But these don't require IM or anything like that. I don't know anything about "shooting myself in the foot". I just don't have the impulses that some other people do (frankly, for me as a schizoid, people are very puzzling entities). Also, "effectively communicate" is such wonderfully non-specific expression that I don't know what that even means.
jimwalsh 13y ago
I love how the HN type of people come into Facebook threads like this claiming that using the site is bad and that they are above everyone for never using it. It's not that simple for people that aren't in the same circles as HN readers. Younger generations utilize it as their primary means of keeping in touch with people. That's fine if you get along well without it. But take a step back and look at all the teenagers who grew up with never not having Facebook to keep in touch with their friends/setup events/etc. You remember how difficult the social aspect of your younger days were in school. Facebook/Twitter/Instagram alleviate some of that for the younger generation. I've seen that in many youth that I've worked with over the years.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  It might alleviate a few problems, but a. There are better solutions, and b. there are much, much worse problems caused by Facebook.
  - jimwalsh 13y ago
    I agree with both, there are cases that support that. But in general it is a very valuable tool for kids trying to fit in during their pre/early teen years. Now teaching kids how to properly use technology and social media is another aspect that many non-tech savy parents could use some coaching I think.
- hobs 13y ago
  I understand your point, but it IS that simple. My social network completely uses facebook, I do not. They invite me to things in person and respect my choice, and if they didn't, they would not be my social network. It seems you are talking about boils down to peer pressure ... how many after school specials about how not to give in do we need?
  - jkrems 13y ago
    Which risk is easier to judge and would seem smaller for 90% of teens: "I miss some (or even most) of my peer's social events" or "Facebook may give certain government agencies my information". Resisting peer pressure is a risk assessment and without some impressive "here's what smoking does to your body"-pictures it's a hard sell.
arjn 13y ago
Amen to that. I've been off facebook and orkut since early 2008 and have not regretted it for one moment. I get some mild flak from friends once in a while but they all know how to contact me if they want to.
CaptainZapp 13y ago
Why exactly would it be lunatic not to use Facebook? I "deleted" my account about 18 month ago to no ill effect, whatsoever (except having more time for more worthy ventures) I really don't mean to take the piss on you, but I'm constantly surprised in how people perceive Facebook and other social networks as an absolutely essential utility. Like phone service, electricity, water, or even financial services. I vehemently don't feel this to be the case.
imgabe 13y ago
Can you name a single, actual negative consequence that someone has experienced from Facebook, aside from people who lost jobs due to their own foolishness in making information public? So, Facebook asks for an ID to verify your identity because your account as behaving suspiciously. What's the downside of this? Are government agents going to burst into your home and arrest you?
- Zikes 13y ago
  1. Facebook asks for your ID. 2. You give Facebook your ID. 3. Facebook gets hacked. 4. Someone uses your identity to commit a crime. 5. Government agents burst into your home and arrest you. Or they get credit cards in your name and run your credit score into the ground, which would likely take years to clear up (if ever). Next up: Facebook isn't sure you're really the gender, height, and weight you say you are. Please provide full body nude photos for verification.

sillysaurus2 13y ago

People think those who don't use Facebook are lunatics? Why?

hnha 13y ago
depending on the demographic, sure.
mjn 13y ago
In some demographics it's seen as at least sort of quaint/eccentric disconnection, like not having a mobile phone.
tabookfaced 13y ago
Because it's supposedly antisocial behaviour as you don't follow the herd and it has been noted that high profile serial killers and mass murderers don't have facebook. To me it's either people who can't be bothered or people who actually care, are knowledgeable enough and value their time and privacy.
keevie 13y ago
I feel like a lot of people don't realize just how omnipresent facebook is in places like college campuses. I personally know about four people who aren't on facebook. There's a whole sphere of social interaction that you can't be a part of if you're not on facebook.
algorias 13y ago
For younger generations who grew up with this kind of tech, it's just not conceivable. For them, Facebook is a synonym for having contact with their friends. In a discussion we once had in class, I mentioned that an option that hadn't been listed besides Facebook, Google+, Diaspora, etc was "none of the above". I got bewildered stares of disbelief in return.
- frio 13y ago
  Maybe. This is rapidly becoming less true. I had to give a talk at a school the other day ("tech is cool, join the tech industry!") and the bulk of the students didn't have Facebook accounts -- because their parents are on it. Maybe that'll change when they reach a University age, but it was striking how few of them used it.
  - gailees 13y ago
    Instagram is taking over amongst young people.
    - rzt 13y ago
      Instagram is even taking over among people in the post-adolescent set. The engagement I see seems to be more vigorous, especially if you're dialed-in and you're making good/interesting photos.
    - Pretzels 13y ago
      Or snapchat.
  - ansgri 13y ago
    Now that's a really good point. No self-respecting kid will use the same _one-to-many_ platform to communicate with friends and parents. Maybe they'll add some convenient 'Circles' feature, but the association with 'those old people' will remain.
- adventured 13y ago
  Actually Facebook is most likely going to erode from the younger generation/s upwards. They don't need Facebook at all, their social network is new and can be formed on other services. Over the coming decade, Facebook will become an older person's social network (35+). They'll completely lose the youth demographic. The least cool thing is to be where everybody else is, your parents and teachers included. This effect is already hitting Facebook.
pavs 13y ago
Yes definitely. People who doesn't use facebook by choice are thought of being crazy. I use facebook, for me its a great to keep in touch with my friends and family members who are all over the world. I have a friend who doesn't want to jump in to the facebook bandwagon and our mutual friends thinks he is crazy for not using facebook. The side effect is he almost never gets invited if there is a get together and have no idea whats going with most of our mutual friends. He does have a close group of friends he keeps in touch with (like me, on phone or whatsapp). I hate facebook's privacy implications, I sympathize with his views. But facebook, the platform, is actually useful to me so I continue to use until a better alternative comes out.
- darkbot 13y ago
  Have a look at Diaspora
  - tabookfaced 13y ago
    don't waste your time with this, it's an overhyped attempt at being facebook which is not what it should. have a look at the freedom box instead: https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/ https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/
    - Amadou 13y ago
      I'm a big supporter of freedombox - but today you can use a diaspora server operated by someone else, basically no pain. But freedombox is a long ways from a similar no-pain experience.
      - a1a 13y ago
        I have failed to find any list of "known attacks" against diaspora. But I would like to point out a fundamental flaw: What is to stop anyone from setting up a malicious server in diaspora? Even if I don't trust facebook, I still trust them more than a random individual running a server. Hopefully there are some solution for this? Perhaps server operators don't actually see any unencrypted data?
EliRivers 13y ago
This attitude will die soon enough; the very young are starting to see Facebook as a niche website for grandparents.

tabookfaced 13y ago

Never ever registering or browsing facebook was the obvious thing to do, at least it is for people who have been around and online for a while. It's the total opposite of the web and the internet, not pseudymous, centralized, using shady tactics to grow, spamming at times and so on. I don't care everybody, their grandma and their dog have an account, until it is decentralized p2P, encrypted and my data stays my own and in my own vicinity, I won't be part of so called "social network" services/websites. I have email already.

a1a 13y ago
Where did you find this encrypted decentralized p2p email service? Edit: I guess there is a obvious solution, you and all your friends hosts personal mail-servers, correct?
- evacuationdrill 13y ago
  Don't be shitty, you know the idea is that you CAN set one up and use the same features, or you can freely switch providers. Try that with Facebook. It's like using AOL or something.

jmpe 13y ago

Oddly enough, this happened for me on day one when I considered joining. They asked to provide my email password so they could build up a list of contacts. Oddly enough I was one of the few who thought this is "not done" because it lowers the bar for online security, i.e. it would be considered normal after a while if websites started asking this. It didn't pan out, but as a result I never got a FB account.

FridayWithJohn 13y ago

@algorias, I once considered people like you to be weird not to communicate on FB... but for a while now I have really started to mistrust FB. The revelations by Snowden most certainly played a big role, but now that they are asking for freaking IDs I draw the line there. It is now time to really think about me leaving this crap... I think my boss might like that too as I'm sure to do more work now, haha

vincie 13y ago

I hear ya. And you know, I've come across a few morons who insinuated to me that I am anti-social and have Aspergers' because of my resistance to using Facebook. I think this is the genesis of it all: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2184658/Is-joining-Facebook-sign-youre-psychopath-Some-employers-psychologists-say-suspicious.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2184658/Is-joining-F...

harryf 13y ago
All privacy questions aside, I quit Facebook simply because every time I used it, the "after taste" was that I'd wasted my time and made myself stupider in the process. The good news is "real life" still works perfectly fine for social interactions and a positive side effect is another source of distractions eliminated - I'm a fan of http://focusmanifesto.com/ http://focusmanifesto.com/
- welly 13y ago
  > All privacy questions aside... ...I'd wasted my time and made myself stupider in the process. You perhaps need to find smarter friends then.
  - hobs 13y ago
    Really? All my friends who use facebook at first thought it was a useful tool, and then slowly the bloat beyond the first few friends you actually give a shit about occurs. Your feed started becoming invite spam and people who you dont even really know commenting on their breakfast or their kids or their cat doing a dumb thing. All I can think of when I see this on other people's screens (though most of the app invite spam has been taken care of): "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." Eleanor Roosevelt

brador 13y ago

Google will do the same thing soon. It wants one google account per person, and using real ID is the best way to do that.

algorias 13y ago
Yeah, they have become very persistent in wanting you to link your google and youtube accounts, for instance. For the first time ever, I'm seriously considering ditching gmail.
kalleboo 13y ago
Didn't they already ask for ID back during the whole "real name" debacle?

adventured 13y ago

I have been contemplating dumping Facebook more and more as the year goes on. I've used it probably every day for six plus years. I've gradually come to the conclusion that I can live without it and can easily keep up with all of my friends and family. There's so much trash, hostility and political arguing on Facebook these days, at least on my network. Some days it reminds me of a dramatically bigger version of MySpace.

VLM 13y ago
Sounds more like television than myspace. I'm not saying you're wrong about myspace, just TV fits your definition even better. I suspect there is a high correlation between people who don't watch TV and people who don't do facebook/twitter. I am occasionally exposed to TV and I've noticed over the past couple years a ridiculous level of attempts at twitter integration on primetime major network TV.

flexd 13y ago

I have been thinking about it, but around here Facebook is so common it would be weird not to have it. My friends never send SMS any more, they use Facebook messenger. Nobody asks you for your phone number, they ask to add you on Facebook. Nobody invites anyone to anything without creating a Facebook event. If I suddenly leave Facebook I am certain I'll also lose out on a lot of social life. What do you use for instant messages? Do you just use email a lot more? I really wish some kind of distributed social network could take off the way Facebook has. I do not want anyone to keep my data as much as the next guy, but if you want to be a social person in 2013 (at least here), you kind of need to have a Facebook account. A guy I met at the start of the semester is a german exchange student. He had to create a Facebook account when he got here because pretty much everything happens on Facebook. Some things do not even have their own website, just a Facebook page.

sneak 13y ago
> Nobody invites anyone to anything without creating a Facebook event. > If I suddenly leave Facebook I am certain I'll also lose out on a lot of social life. This. You can't expect people to set up and populate their own mailing lists to notify everybody they want to invite to their birthday party or share news of their engagement. I hate it too, but the reality is that being off facebook means losing touch with people that you don't have to lose touch with. Very, very few people will make an effort above and beyond the default choice these days (facebook events) to notify/invite you to stuff that involves more than a half-dozen people.
- bcoates 13y ago
  Before Facebook, there was this thing called "the Grapevine", a decentralized communication network of people who were so intensely interested in everyone else's doings that you couldn't stop them from keeping you up to date about it. I have not, despite my best efforts, been able to unsubscribe from it.
  - ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
    and that "Grapevine" usually resulted in news of your engagement turning into a story about how you helped Maverick engage MIG's over the Bering Strait just in time to save Iceman. ...am I the only one who remembers "The Telephone Game" from pre-school?

sneak 13y ago

I tried it for over five years. Many people use facebook messaging as their primary form of text communication these days. Texting is expensive and regional, and nobody uses email, wants to remember email addresses or IM handles, or deal with spam. WhatsApp totally fucked themselves by not running on tablets. For lots of people, the most effective way to reach them quickly is facebook messaging. That's fact, not opinion, and how intrusive or shitty facebook is totally irrelevant to that point. Not having a facebook account means that you are sabotaging your own communications effectiveness.

gngeal 13y ago
"Texting is expensive and regional, and nobody uses email, wants to remember email addresses or IM handles, or deal with spam. WhatsApp totally fucked themselves by not running on tablets. For lots of people, the most effective way to reach them quickly is facebook messaging. That's fact, not opinion, and how intrusive or shitty facebook is totally irrelevant to that point. Not having a facebook account means that you are sabotaging your own communications effectiveness." The people who'd do this are exactly those people I don't feel any need to communicate with. Is it work-related? E-mail and sometimes phone are given. Is it not work-related, but urgent? I still have a phone. Is that costly? Perhaps, but if you have six urgent things to communicate every day, perhaps you have a much worse problem than having to pay a lot of money. Is it anything else? Well, what could it be? I have no idea. Frankly, this whole "you have to live a hectic social life, everyone's doing it!" movement puzzles me.
- sneak 13y ago
  > The people who'd do this are exactly those people I don't feel any need to communicate with. Okay, so you're a snob. Doesn't change the fact that you're shooting yourself in the foot. There's nothing about wanting to be able to effectively communicate with people who use facebook messaging as their primary form of textual comms that dictates or necessitates a hectic social life.
  - gngeal 13y ago
    Okay, so you're a snob. No, I'm just an introvert. I have a few people to who I feel deeply connected to, and our exchanges are rare yet substantial. But these don't require IM or anything like that. I don't know anything about "shooting myself in the foot". I just don't have the impulses that some other people do (frankly, for me as a schizoid, people are very puzzling entities). Also, "effectively communicate" is such wonderfully non-specific expression that I don't know what that even means.

jimwalsh 13y ago

I love how the HN type of people come into Facebook threads like this claiming that using the site is bad and that they are above everyone for never using it. It's not that simple for people that aren't in the same circles as HN readers. Younger generations utilize it as their primary means of keeping in touch with people. That's fine if you get along well without it. But take a step back and look at all the teenagers who grew up with never not having Facebook to keep in touch with their friends/setup events/etc. You remember how difficult the social aspect of your younger days were in school. Facebook/Twitter/Instagram alleviate some of that for the younger generation. I've seen that in many youth that I've worked with over the years.

chris_wot 13y ago
It might alleviate a few problems, but a. There are better solutions, and b. there are much, much worse problems caused by Facebook.
- jimwalsh 13y ago
  I agree with both, there are cases that support that. But in general it is a very valuable tool for kids trying to fit in during their pre/early teen years. Now teaching kids how to properly use technology and social media is another aspect that many non-tech savy parents could use some coaching I think.
hobs 13y ago
I understand your point, but it IS that simple. My social network completely uses facebook, I do not. They invite me to things in person and respect my choice, and if they didn't, they would not be my social network. It seems you are talking about boils down to peer pressure ... how many after school specials about how not to give in do we need?
- jkrems 13y ago
  Which risk is easier to judge and would seem smaller for 90% of teens: "I miss some (or even most) of my peer's social events" or "Facebook may give certain government agencies my information". Resisting peer pressure is a risk assessment and without some impressive "here's what smoking does to your body"-pictures it's a hard sell.

arjn 13y ago

Amen to that. I've been off facebook and orkut since early 2008 and have not regretted it for one moment. I get some mild flak from friends once in a while but they all know how to contact me if they want to.

CaptainZapp 13y ago

Why exactly would it be lunatic not to use Facebook? I "deleted" my account about 18 month ago to no ill effect, whatsoever (except having more time for more worthy ventures) I really don't mean to take the piss on you, but I'm constantly surprised in how people perceive Facebook and other social networks as an absolutely essential utility. Like phone service, electricity, water, or even financial services. I vehemently don't feel this to be the case.

imgabe 13y ago

Can you name a single, actual negative consequence that someone has experienced from Facebook, aside from people who lost jobs due to their own foolishness in making information public? So, Facebook asks for an ID to verify your identity because your account as behaving suspiciously. What's the downside of this? Are government agents going to burst into your home and arrest you?

Zikes 13y ago
1. Facebook asks for your ID. 2. You give Facebook your ID. 3. Facebook gets hacked. 4. Someone uses your identity to commit a crime. 5. Government agents burst into your home and arrest you. Or they get credit cards in your name and run your credit score into the ground, which would likely take years to clear up (if ever). Next up: Facebook isn't sure you're really the gender, height, and weight you say you are. Please provide full body nude photos for verification.