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Comment by Yhippa | Hacker News Reader

I'm not the biggest fan of FB or for the fact that I pretty much have to use it to keep up with friends and family these days.

These are some things that you get in exchange for giving up your information:

  A place to store photos
  A platform to publish your photos
  A communications platform (Messenger)
  A platform to stay officially connected to things you "like" and their updates
  Near instant publication of your brain thoughts to a curated group of people
  High availability
  Maintenance of connections to other people
  IRL event management
  Mobile and web applications to use the aforementioned
  Some of the best engineering talent in the world working on the aforementioned

I think the average person does get a lot in exchange. Look at all of the other social networks that tried to solve this in the past and failed. I don't see any legitimate alternatives.

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I don't have a FB account and I get all those things. I also don't feel like "Some of the best engineering talent in the world working on the aforementioned" is a compelling reason to give away my personal information.

> I don't have a FB account and I get all those things.

From where? Nowhere free or not advertising to you or selling your info to advertisers, I'd bet.

Yeah, but FB wins the hearts of ordinary people by providing convenience: all services are in one place and are simple to understand/use.

It's cool that you don't feel that way.

But is it fair to say that other people feel that way? And that's ok?

The fact that you're almost forced to use it bugs me. I don't have a beef with Facebook, but I just don't get a lot of it.

It sucks though when you miss things that you would have heard on there. For example, I found out too late that somebody whom I was good friends with had a family member pass away. They didn't do an obituary, and folks that I talk to regularly IRL didn't mention it, because they figured I saw it on Facebook!

A platform to stay officially connected to things you "like" and their updates -

This doesn't work for long time already. If you have liked something, you rarely see the updates anymore unless the page owners pay for Facebook. It's called Boosting now. Really sucks for small companies or communities, unless you pay - your page is dead.

For me personally, Event management is the only thing it keeps me on Facebook. Part of it's success if of course because everyone is on Facebook, which makes it easy. But again, if you're a small Facebook page owner and want to invite your loyal fans to your own event you created under your page - Good luck with inviting them, you can't - need you pay again.

A lot of people seem to complain about this. Personally, as a user, I'm pretty okay with Facebook not showing every post from every page that I like in my news feed. If I really want to see every post from a page, I have options that are immediately available in the like dropdown of the page (either "add to interest lists", or "see first").

The thing is, in the current state of Facebook, wanting to hear everything that a page writes is an exception. As a user, I'm glad it isn't default anymore.

The problem is a combination of things. One problem is that there's pressure (from several potential sources, sometimes from Facebook's UI, sometimes social pressure from friends) to like too many pages. This has sort of diluted the meaning of a "Like" w/r/t a page.

Another big problem is that pages spam - some to the tune of several messages per day. I expect that most people who "Like" the pages that often get "Likes" (which appears to be largely big companies, bands, movies, etc.) don't actually want to see every one of these posts - they'd drown out the user's "Friends".

It is unfortunate for small business owners that things happened this way. Fortunately, really loyal fans should be more likely to listen to you when you ask them to subscribe to something outside of Facebook, or to do the extra couple clicks of adding to an interest list in Facebook. I expect, however, that some of the "loyal fan" base might be made up of (as mentioned before) people who liked the page out of social pressure.

> If you have liked something, you rarely see the updates anymore unless the page owners pay for Facebook. It's called Boosting now.

Seems like it's highly dependent on the number of things you liked/followed, not on the page itself.

In one extreme case you have 0 friends, and have liked that and only that page. You're likely to see 100% of their postings.

On the other extreme, you like that page + 500 others + you are friends with 1,500 people who all produce some type of content. Why would you expect to see content of that one page over 2,000 other potential sources?

That's true. Facebook does give you something in return. In a way it's better than the new model we're seeing with these expensive home automation devices that upload everything to the cloud. In that case you pay for the privilege of installing a surveillance device.

I predict failure on a lot of that. The value provided is not sufficient to justify the cost alone, and then on top of that you add privacy concerns. That means I'm paying for a net negative.

I definitely agree with the list but as far as offering something else that nobody else has done or having any legit alternatives, that's where my main problems with Facebook lie.

Others have come up with legit alternatives and doubtless more would try if not for the fact that their biggest asset is lack of interoperability or common protocol. They managed to get just about everyone, techie and non-techie, to sign up and a lot of those people just won't pull up stakes to move to another platform as long as the rest of their "contacts" are using Facebook.

When compared to other communication services that are often hosted by third party companies (webmail is the easiest example) there's really just no way to use something else without still using Facebook in addition. It's not like switching to Gmail or Hotmail because you got tired of your old @aol.com account. In that case you can use any competitor and still communicate with people regardless of whether they switch or ever use the same service as you.

But with Facebook, I can't just start using Google+ or some other service to keep up with friends and family unless they all switch over as well. Or rather, I can switch over but I still need to use Facebook in addition. Same would go for another service even if it was built on a common protocol.

That's the main problem I have with Facebook (or any other service that uses the same model). It's not that I can't find or build something that works better for me. It's that it doesn't matter unless everyone does the same and that simply isn't very likely right now or in the near future.

> "Look at all of the other social networks that tried to solve this in the past and failed."

FB has a network effect, which a a major reason all those products/services get used. However, it's not really fair to imply that FB is 'succeeding' at all the things you listed. If it were, then there'd be little talk of existential threat from things like Instagram/Whatsapp etc...

You will somehow need to give your personal information for a social network to work and to receive these services in return. For e.g., u need to identify yourself and your friends to make sure only your friends can see your photos and vice versa. Question is how much info is too much.

And, in many places people don’t use most of these features, but Facebook still collects Shadow-Profiles of them.

At least for shadow profiles Facebook should pay.

Well, really it would be best if it were legislated that shadow profile type information not be allowed since by definition the user (or even a non-user) has not given informed consent.

It would be great if we could move toward a model where each citizen had copyright-like protection of his personal data.

It is not allowed under EU legislation, which is why Facebook was fined again and again, and had to delete it again and again.

But sadly most people don’t see this as a problem Facebook caused, but as EU overregulation.

It's a natural monopoly. Of course other similar services failed, even those with substantial regional uptake.

Email handles all of this just fine. All we ever needed was a good "whitepages" for email addresses.

This. I wish I could up-vote your post more than once.

In theory, yes. I found, though, that the sort of non-urgent correspondence that often went unresponded-to by friends and family when sent over email resulted in comments and "likes" on Facebook, offering a higher sense of engagement.

I ditched my Facebook account two years ago, seemingly with a mixture of benefits and losses.

80% of that is provided by dropbox or onedrive for free without any charge or privacy invasion.

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