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Comment by lisp123 | Hacker News Reader

It always astounds me that 30-year-olds or older think they represent the average Facebook user. I have never seen anyone older than 30 write anything intelligent about Facebook. You people are not real users. Please understand this. How you "use" Facebook is so completely different from how people in college and recent grads use Facebook. For you, most of your pictures were what you actually posted yourself. For real Facebook power users, the vast, vast majority of photos come from other people. It's becoming clear that understanding of Facebook is the clearest dividing line between those in their late twenties and beyond and those younger. You pretend users really sound like old men shouting at kids to stay off your lawn. Why don't you at least try to educate yourselves about how Facebook actually works?

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I started university when I was 18, and at the same time I joined Facebook. I'm now 22, close to graduating, and Facebook chronicles my last 4 years of misadventure. Yet I have to agree with tptacek, it's not a big deal.

It's not hard to untag yourself from dodgy photos, leave silly groups, clean up your profile and put professional contacts in a restricted list. Most importantly though, I've come to the conclusion most people expect you to have dirt on Facebook. If your boss wants to be your friend on Facebook and doesn't get why you won't actually share any personal info with them... well, good luck to you, but my professional contacts all seem to understand (and often reciprocate for the same reasons).

That photo you untagged yourself from but your friend is in so mutual friends can still see it - I'll agree that's a problem, but not worth throwing a hissy about. We "lost our privacy" the day the camera was invented.

> You people (over 30) are not real users. Please understand this.

Baseless generalization. There's some age correlation there, no doubt, but I know people over 30 who use Facebook as enthusiastically as the most social of high-schoolers, and I know people under 30 who won't touch it. At least among the technically inclined, Facebook usage style is more a matter of personal disposition than age. It's stupid to say nobody over 30 has anything useful to say about the site.

And the over-30-year-olds I know who make minimal use of Facebook? They have plenty clue "about how Facebook actually works", thank you; due to their years of experience I find them often more clueful than the most voracious teenage user. They just choose to use the site differently, or not at all, regardless of their level of understanding.

I myself am well under 30, by the way, lest you accuse me of an age group bias.

According to insidefacebook.com the percentage of users under 25 years old is 39% (http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/04/02/facebook%E2%80%99s-...) and, judging by their numbers from previous months, falling.

Also, your conception of "real users" sure sounds an awful lot like a minority group of users who use it heavily.

Why don't you at least try to educate yourselves about how Facebook actually works?

Why don't you tell us how we would go about doing that?

"I have never seen anyone older than 30 write anything intelligent about Facebook."

Have a read of this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070720160253/http://blog.pmarca...

The author was over 30 and he's now on the FB board.

So can you give an example of how your behavior was documented by a photo and then you were later embarrassed by your behavior?

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