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Comment by ZenoArrow | Hacker News Reader

What compels people to use Facebook? That's a genuine question, I don't think I fully understand it.

Speaking personally, the only value it has for me is in keeping some form of connection to people I would otherwise have lost contact with. I don't use it for people I keep in contact with in other ways. For me the staying power of Facebook is that it places low demands on staying connected. The setting also seems to add to the informality, I could see myself preferring to email long time friends (and I sometimes do), but perhaps the directness of connection is off putting for some people who are used to sharing amongst an audience.

Does anyone here have any views about why people continue to use Facebook?

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Before Edgerank it was handy to keep in touch with more distant contacts, as you say. Now it's frankly damaging to friendships. Many people I'd once have been on a phone call with once every 3 or 6 months now "keep it to facebook" and barely talk. Edgerank ensures you no longer see those updates from those distant contacts reliably.

Now it's a low budget reality show - over sharing of wonderful or terrible lives - far removed from those people's actual lives. Sharing of politics, grinding axes, in the place of actually doing something, and endless memes. It's the low budget replacement of friendships, but I genuinely don't understand the point or attraction of the new incarnation.

For the most part (there are a few exceptions of people who talk on Facebook regularly) I have gone back to emailing and phone friends, and they do similar.

> What compels people to use Facebook?

Ubiquity. Before Facebook there was Email as the ubiquitous communication platform. My family kept in contact using a group, then there was Facebook and now there's a Whatsapp group. In that light it's blindingly obvious why Facebook acquired Whatsapp.

Low friction broadcast to the people that you care about. Emotions and the sustenance of emotions is how you trap human beings. Any other features merely drive us to feel more connected. Businesses want to participate in social media because, ultimately, they can benefit from being included in this emotional process.

I can't move my whole family and my friends off the current ubiquity because it would mean moving all of their emotional properties (friends) off as well.

The move to video makes complete sense: other players have already demonstrated how much more powerful video is as an emotional platform.

While I enjoy Facebook (largely treating it as entertainment) it's Events that's the killer feature for me. Nothing else is as comprehensive for my hobby as a consumer. As a promotor its free (at my usage level) and has the audience. Without this feature I'd probably be elsewhere by now.

Loss of the fb timeline historical data is psychologically very hard to accept even for people wanting to close their accounts.

I've talked about this with friends, relatives and co-workers and while most of them have considered closing their accounts at some point, almost all of them feel like they would be erasing an irreplaceable documented view into their past self.

For me personally I don't post or read since a few years ago, and while I wouldn't mind seeing my timeline erased, what has kept me from deleting y account is simply that i "need" facebook as a contacts /messaging app. Although I would prefer to handle my communication needs exclusively on email, I have people in my life that simply do not reply to email, the only way to reach them is via a facebook message.

Is there some interface that makes the timeline usable? Maybe all these features exist and I just don't know where they are or how to use them but basically I find facebook impossible to find anything but the last 3-10 days of stuff. If I want to find posts from 2013/11-2013/12 from me is there a clear way to do that? Search just seems to so much fail.

You can download all your data including photos. Click the little down arrow, settings, general and download a copy of all your data.

I did it 3 days ago. Try it and see what's there.

> Although I would prefer to handle my communication needs exclusively on email, I have people in my life that simply do not reply to email, the only way to reach them is via a facebook message.

This is a big one. A lot of people I know simply don't send or reply to e-mail anymore. And people don't use messenger services like they used to. So for a lot of people, you're probably going to only message them on Facebook, or lose contact with them.

I definitely think that email and messenger programs are better, since you seem to have actual conversations with people (most Facebook conversations I've had are pretty shallow). But they're not an option in a lot of cases. Also, there's a good chance that you probably should lose contact with most of the people you've met, but that's understandably hard for most people.

It's good for things like "who wants to do <X> tomorrow?" where you're looking to get a crowd together that includes people beyond your close circle of friends.

It's good for tracking what photos are uploaded of you. People don't think for a second that somebody might not want their photo online and they're going to do it anyway. I might as well know what's out there.

Most useful for me, it's good for finding out what's going on in my city. A lot of people just forget to invite somebody if they're not on FB.

>I don't use it for people I keep in contact with in other ways.

Seems to me that the "other ways" is the key barrier for most people. The "other ways" works for you; it doesn't for most others.

The typical answer of alternatives to Facebook is "email" and "what about picking up the phone and calling?" etc but those are not low-friction broadcasting mechanisms. You can't post a "status" via email -- unless you create a "mailing list" of friends or carbon-copy email to a bunch of people. That would be a very nerdy way of doing it. That's also a "push" mechanism instead of the "pull" mechanism of others following your newsfeed on Facebook.

Email also doesn't have a built-in calendar mechansim for coordinating meetups/events. Email also isn't great for sharing a set of vacation photos. (Oops, forgot to attach my photos in my previous email. Or, error message, your free email account is limited to 10MB attachment limit, etc)

For typical non-HN readers of 1+ billion people, the altenatives to Facebook using combination of email + geocities web pages + voice calls is way clunkier. As for the other option of using alternative social networking websites such as Google+, the answer has been covered numerous times: "network effects".

To me, the massive use of Facebook by so many is very logical consequence of how everything else that is not Facebook doesn't work as well.

Personally, my favorite method of keeping in touch is email but I recognize that a billion other people don't think like me.

Because it's the best discussion platform we have on the web, like a less nerdy version of Reddit. Politicians post on it and actually interact with their followers (with proper threads and without dumb character limits). There are groups for funny cat pictures that many people follow. You can ask "hey what do you think of this thing?" and get email-length responses from people you actually know. It's like a centralised comment section for the internet.

Its messenger also works on all platforms. It boggles the mind that this is still the exception. iMessage only works on Apple devices, WhatsApp only supports one device per user, Skype is run by idiots. Messenger has all users, devices and features covered. It's the new IMAP, although WhatsApp/LINE/kik etc are more popular with the mobile-only crowd.

I seem to be kind of unusual here in that I like Facebook. Liked it from day one, still like it and have no major problems with it. The reason is to keep in touch with what friends and family are up to, let them know what I'm up to and message them easily.

No where else I can do that as my friends and family are not on G+, snapchat et al and only a very small percentage on Twitter. I genuinely have a bit of a problem understanding why most people here dislike Facebook. It's a messaging and social news service. If you don't like it use something else. If your friends and family are on it it's probably because they like it.

That said I spend more time on HN as there is more interesting content here on the whole.

As a service used by billions, Facebook is not just some inconsequential site we can ignore; just like major TV channels, it has influence over society at large, and promotes what some of us consider pernicious and unsafe behaviors and expectations. For example, the idea that we should always use our "official" name was relatively uncommon back in 2005/6 when it came about.

But more than that, you can't choose to use something else. Their whole approach right from the start was to get as much info from everyone as possible, tracking people even on third-party sites[1]. Their all-seeing "Like buttons" are everywhere, and only naive people believe they aren't tracking non-users.

Quoting Mr. Zuckerberg himself, "They trust me. Dumb fucks."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon

Facebook's appeal is a bit like reality television. The horror of the timeline and voyeuristic nature of peering into the intimacies of other people's lives, some of whom you barely know, seems to have appeal for many. The same way watching some C-grade celebrity eat insects on a remote island appeals to many.

I haven't logged into Facebook now for months, and have no compelling reason to do so. Like you, everyone I wish to keep in contact with I have other means to do so, via a good old fashioned telephone call, email or some messaging application (Telegram and to a lesser extent WhatsApp). I can see a time in the future where I do log into Facebook just to obtain the contact details of someone, but that is the extent of it.

The social aspects of Facebook are just another time sink, eating precious minutes which could be better spent on other things (like HN!).

The only way in which my lack of Facebook use has had a negative impact on my life is that a local sports club solely uses a private Facebook group to organise things like training, match transport and events. I just ended up drifting away from the club and don't have much involvement anymore. This is a bit of a shame, and I'm sure I would be more motivated to stay involved if information was distributed via email or published directly on their website.

In my opinion, the most compelling reason is that many people are there. There's nothing Google or Microsoft can't do that facebook is doing, technologically, what they lack is people. I still feel facebook is a good platform for running private groups. For others it gives an audience to show off, not necessarily a bad thing.

Facebook is what every individual wants but is hesitant of accepting.

> In my opinion, the most compelling reason is that many people are there.

Yes, I've seen this in action with real-world groups that form a Facebook group to replace a mailing list, or ( shudder ) a Yahoo Group. 99.99% of their recipients are already on Facebook, it's free-at-point-of-use and it supports group functions.

So they go ahead, freezing-out the ones who aren't on Facebook with quotes like 'just create an account, it's free'.

I'd join Facebook if I could pay a subscription fee each month so as not to be analysed and advertised-to, just to rejoin many groups that have moved there.

I'm a member of a cycling club, 19 of my 20 odd facebook friends are in that club.

It's superb for organising rides, handling new members and generally organising rides since it's near ubiquitous, everyone knows how to work it and it has reasonable features in that direction.

I prefer the UI of Messenger over Email, all my friends use Messenger, some of them couldn't tell me their Email address. The timeline stuff is almost entirely terrible (I'd probably say 1% of it are things I care about, and there's probably nothing I wouldn't find out some other way), but you don't have to look at it - messenger.com and the Messenger app don't push any of it on you.

Because everybody else uses it, that's herd thinking at it's best. There are many features that people use it for, private groups for example. It's great for spreading gossip and what have you.

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