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Comment by ramblenode | Hacker News Reader

> Unfortunately, deleting your Facebook account won’t help.

Yes, it will. In fact, it may be the only thing that will help.

Facebook has shown willingness to make unpopular changes if it can get away with it--and it always gets away with it. The fact that an informed and visible critic like the author can't even manage to give it up is a case study in why Facebook can and will keep calling bluffs. Complaints mean nothing if you are giving the site the same eyeball time. Facebook's success is due to the size of its social network. The network effect works both ways, though; if enough people leave then those remaining will have less incentive to stay on board, and the network will unravel inversely to how it was built. Only when the eyeball count starts declining will Facebook take users' wishes seriously.

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Facebook can stay dominant longer than you can survive in isolation.

the narrative that puts you in isolation if you don't use facebook is just wrong. This is the excuse that made the author of that post keeping his account, and one the reason fb is successful.

The latter half of that is true, isn't it? And yet.

This is why you can't treat that type of statement as purely factual: so long as you're sharing a world with it, it's of a quine-like type which is always performative to speak, in a way, because how much people believe it on various levels (and thereby decide (or unconsciously "decide") things like "why should I bother to connect to these people when they won't even sign up for a free Facebook account to make it easier for me, since everyone knows that's just what you do") influences how true it is in a much stronger way than is the case for most objective statements.

In light of that, I wonder whether my having said the above is good or bad? Hard to tell.

Listing a couple of examples from my life:

* A group of my friends who play badminton together organize weekly events only through Facebook. They use "Going/Not going" as a way of knowing how many people are coming.

* One of my friends organizes film nights occasionally. Again, he does it through Facebook. He sets the date differently each time, so that all people can attend at least sometime. There is no info about this outside Facebook and we do not meet in real life otherwise (he is not my coworker and he lives in a different part of town).

Is what you are suggesting really "cut from your life a portion of your friends that synchronize only through Facebook"? Surely it will not lead to a complete isolation for me, but being an introverted person, it will reduce my social life by a significant margin.

This is what makes me keep mine too... events. Only events. Eventbrite is free but I've not hosted through it yet as I've not held (m)any events recently. That's a possible way out if it's low friction enough, seems most outgoing people in the BA have an EB account for concerts/meetups/etc... could possibly rally a couple people in your groups with anti-FB sentiment and pave the way off FB for these events. Many people I know feel somewhat trapped by some slice of FB/Google functionality so alternate suggestions could be welcome.

I wish I could get everyone to use something like Retroshare.

http://retroshare.net/

This is the first I've heard of Retroshare. It looks interesting, but there's no way I'll be able to convert enough friends and family without a mobile app. I'm going to try out it out, though, and keep my fingers crossed.

Same boat. I've dragged group conversations on to Signal, but events are a tough nut to crack. Something like meetup/eventbrite seems way too heavy for birthday drinks at a bar, and puts a sign-up/ToS/data burden on people who are interested in attending.

With most people on gmail and Google not being much better, IMAP/ActiveSync CalDAV invitations with all the invitees' names and email addresses aren't too satisfying either.

It's feature bloat, but I really hope an E2E event/calendar protocol makes it in to something like Signal or Riot/Matrix. Ideally it would consistently maintain state (e.g. changing place and time), update your calendar, and provide a place for invitees to chat.

I guess saving the Internet isn't supposed to be easy. Or did you think you could do something good AND have an easier life?

There are no examples of that in history.

Back in the Blackberry days, only one friend had an Android. He still got invited. Now everyone is on iPhones except for him. Still invited.

I keep in contact with everyone I want to and don't need facebook to do so. It's a bubble, albeit a billion+ user bubble.

The reality is that every second you spend on facebook you are dying and the faster you realize that the further into humanity's future you will reach.

We are always dying, and I doubt Facebook kills much faster than HN as most of the lethality comes from sitting still while reading. Of course, FB comes with extra stress for some, but I don't know how the cyber bullying on FB stacks up with the workplace rage from Excel.

I think you took him a little too literally.

It's true that sitting and reading isn't really going to help you live any longer. If you're going to read, however, you should at least get something meaningful out of it.

It may be different for some, but I get much more out of HN than I ever did when I used Facebook.

Chiming in alongside the other posts to say that I have never felt like I was isolated after deleting my FB account 6 years ago.

There are plenty of sources for news and events (I find that Twitter is great for this) and I easily keep up to date with friends and family via a mix of messaging apps.

I felt some relief after deleting my facebook account almost 5 years ago now. It has left me with more time to focus on things that actually matter, in addition to helping me narrow down who I really need in my life in terms of "friends".

Over the election season I contemplated deleting my FB account, just because of how ugly the feed became with partisans being uncivil about everything.

I've found that turning Facebook into solely a consumption platform has worked really well. I spend maybe 15 minutes per week total skimming my feed for meaningful updates. I will never go back to contributing content to FB. I no longer engage in any discussions, which makes it a lot less annoying and stressful. It's essentially a personal RSS feed in this formulation.

I deleted my FB account years ago and haven't regretted it.

Its true though that I have less (fake) friends now.

I speak to people in real life and I don't rely upon fake internet friends to feel valued.

I have email, irc, a telephone (both voice and SMS, and signal type apps), a physical mailbox, and people can actually come over and visit in addition to all of that. I can also communicate via third parties. "John wants you to call him", I've heard.

I never had a facebook account. I don't have trouble keeping up with family, friends, or work. And I have more free time. And less bullshit memes.

I think I can survive another several decades without facebook.

I've been off of it for more than two years now, surviving just fine.

I had one friend who convinced me to believe that there is a very small difference between facebook and a public restroom. I am out of facebook from 2009 and I am not isolated.

A competing product that would will steal their users would probably help even more even if users don't delete their accounts and just stop using it (did you delete your Myspace account?)... so the more bad features Facebook adds, the better.

You can also cut back, and it should help. Delete Facebook from your phone and only log in using a dedicated Chrome profile on a single desktop machine (or alternately, a browser you rarely use). Use some other way of communicating with close friends. You'll find you can go for days without checking it.

There are lots of people who check Facebook only occasionally. If everyone does this then it's basically like LinkedIn, not a core part of your life.

I've done this for years. Currently I'm doing the opposite because I wanted to see what that's like.

This is the boat I'm in. I log onto Facebook about once a week on my phone's browser. I keep in touch with family via Whatsapp (sure, it's owned by FB, but that's what my family uses) and text message/email to keep up with others. It's unsurprisingly bullshit free.

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