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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

This question may sound absurd to some, but does it even matter if you are not allowed to use Facebook anymore? I use it to sign into Candy Crush. They paid me a few thousand dollars for discovering a bug, that I only discovered because I was playing with their advertising system. That is the entire extent of my Facebook usage. It doesn't play a role in my daily life to any extent whatsoever, and its role in the lives of many formerly heavy users seems to be diminishing as well.

So while it sucks to be excluded from anything for arbitrary reasons, it shouldn't matter very much to him or anyone else. There are plenty of other places to accomplish the things that can be accomplished on Facebook.

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> There are plenty of other places to accomplish the things that can be accomplished on Facebook.

Except when there aren't. For example, my local cat shelter set up a Facebook group to coordinate volunteers. There's also a closed group for a particular program's volunteers.

Sure, they could have set up the groups somewhere else. A shelter I used to be involved with still has a Yahoo group. But the fact is they didn't, and the decision was made way above my level. So if I lost access to Facebook, I'd lose access to a lot more than Candy Crush.

This is vendor lock-in and this is how facebook retains users.

If facebook was not locked down but open, many people would have left already if they had come in the first place.

Now when the volunteers stop using facebook, it's the shelter that will lose their volunteers. The obvious solution is for the shelter to self host its own group.

> This question may sound absurd to some, but does it even matter if you are not allowed to use Facebook anymore?

If Facebook access didn't matter, we wouldn't be talking about this.

This isn't about you or me or our friends. It's irrelevant that Facebook doesn't matter to us. You only have to look around and read the news to see that it is the #1 communication tool for literally hundreds of millions of people. If you care about reaching those people, losing Facebook makes it much harder for you to do that.

Yes, it matters a huge amount.

I fully understand your social life is not the same as my own, but mine revolves almost entirely around Facebook. Every party I go to is organised via Facebook. Every small social event is coordinated via FB Messenger. I maintain a large network of friends around the world who o can and do visit when I travel, and it's not weird because they're up to date with my life and I'm up to date with theirs in a way that would take far far too much work outside of FB. Every baby photo from a friend, every wedding photo, is on Facebook. When I meet someone in person and enjoy their company, we connect on Facebook, and it's a low pressure way to keep in touch that often blossoms in to a real and fulfilling in-person relationship.

I realise not everyone's social life is like this, but for many many people, there would be a severely restricted in-person social life by not being on Facebook.

Indeed your social life works this way, but you're mistaken in thinking that not being on facebook would restrict afk social life. Look at the feedback from people who actually left facebook, humans are social and social finds a way to happen.

Though you are right in pointing out that facebook divides people, without being active on facebook you cannot reach people who put all their social life through this giant transnational corporation website.

It's not that leaving would restrict your social life so much as that FB enables a much looser social network to coordinate. I'd stay in contact with my friends, but I'd see a lot less of what my friends-of-friends and acquaintances are doing. Those more distant social interactions are less valuable to me, sure, but there is some value in them and there are a lot more of them.

It's not that it's absurd, it's just that (as you've admitted) you're not using Facebook for anything so you may not see the utility of it. For those of us who use it, the utility is tremendous. It basically covers all personal and social communication that is not better done via phone (voice) or face-to-face interaction. Which means, it covers almost all personal / social communication. Excluding yourself from Facebook when your social circle uses it would be severly handicapping yoursrelf.

I don't use Facebook much but it's the way many of my friends handle invites to events, so I need access to it for that at least.

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