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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

>FB is a positive force in the world do they?

Thats how I keep up with my extended family 1000 miles away. I do think it's a positive force in the world.

I am not trying to demean your comment in any way but I will give you an alternate viewpoint..

Back in 2011 I also used Facebook to "keep up" with my distant friends and family. I read their posts, looked at their photos, liked their comments, left notes here and there.. Chatted with them..

Then one day I realized that these were all (for me) extremely shallow interactions, and I decided I would make a better effort to stay in touch.

I closed my Facebook account, and made a commitment to reach out directly to the people I cared about. Perhaps less often, but in more meaningful ways.

I started sending monthly emails, and scheduling Skype or (eventually) FaceTime calls, and so on..

Fast-forward 6 years of that and I feel much more connected to the distant people I care about in my life than I ever did via Facebook, and almost all of them have reciprocated my efforts at maintaining a better connection..

Again, this is just my story, but you really don't need Facebook to stay in touch with the people you care about, no matter where they are in the world.

But you can only do that with so many people. Facebook is more convenient. And it has the random factor. Sometimes there's a friend d who you weren't super close with but always thought well of. With Facebook you can see when they're visiting your city (if they make a post about it). It gives you the opportunity to know that that friend is around and reach out to them.

I think there are a lot of positives to Facebook, but a lot of potential negatives for certain kinds of personalities (people who are negative or addictive). With the right attitude though, it's certainly helpful

That's not random, that's the algorithm. It might not show you anything if it decides you won't find that friend interesting.

Not that this is "what you decide is interesting". Which makes it much less useful, prone to social signalling and what is worse, actually less meaningful than more direct contact. Remember, it is mostly text, not even time of voice is carried in it. Even a picture is static.

Contrast with realtime voice and video. (Facebook has those features but they're nowhere near as utilized. And they definitely do boot show up in feeds.)

This kind of sounds like hoarding.

I look back on my Facebook usage as a cost / benefit tradeoff and in the end the benefits just weren't paying off.

I know exactly what you mean in theory however, no matter how much one views "status updates" inevitably you're drifting apart from those people and caring less about what they're doing, that's natural. I had less time for my closer friends. It felt artificial to have to stay connected, exhausting, though I didn't realise till I left.

One could check updates less, often, but then what's the point ?

If someone really wants to hangout they just contact me via other channels.

What is the point of reaching out to a "friend" only when it's convenient to you? The only motivations I can think of are quite selfish.

Is it so horrible to have people you're willing to walk to your local pub for, but not willing to travel to their city for?

Just because you're not willing to make time for someone doesn't mean you can't enjoy an evening of chatting and catching up when your lives happen to intersect.

> But you can only do that with so many people.

That's a feature, not a bug.

If I may attempt to bridge two viewpoints?

You're absolutely right. Facebook can be an immensely negative experience for a person, a damaging force in their life. Facebook also can be a positive force, connecting a person to their friends, loved ones, and community.

But might that also have been the case even if Facebook never existed?

Eg maybe getting older was a factor in that.

I lived most of my life without Facebook (born in the late 70s) and it's at least not obvious to me that people had more deeper connections prior to it.

I agree that most relationships weren't more meaningful, but I had less meaningless relationships too.

That's the sick part of FB. That I really don't care for my cousin saving the world in Africa, so why should I care what she's doing?

I don't. And the truth is most of us don't care either. We're unable to admit it to ourselves so we pretend to care

In addition to meaningful communications between you and family/friends, the communication is only between you and you friends. On facebook, the communication is through you --> third party corporation --> family/friends.

There's something to be said about not directly involving corporations with your communications.

The postman, local mail company, phone line company, Microsoft (Skype).

Unless you talk to them face to face, most, if not all, forms of communication rely on third parties.

The postman doesn't read your mail. (Normally, of course. I'm sure it's happened).

Sure it happened somewhat. That's how they caught Solzhenitsyn and that's the protagonist's side job in Catch 22.

But we're talking orders of magnitude of difference.

In general "they" don't read your mail because they can't even if they wanted to. Slow mail is extremely expensive to do a through survailence on.

That's kind of the point though. Even if they would read your mail if they could, they cannot because of the technological limitations on the medium.

The intention doesn't matter, the fact is that slow mail is private for all intents and purposes.

Why use the internet at all then? After all I can 'prove' that real world interactions have far more informational content than virtualized ones, so all non-utilitarian electronic communication is inherently inferior if you begin with that premise.

The internet? Well for example there are many internet services that I do use, for example p2p sharing, decentralized and open source services. There's nothing inherent that says a major social networking site needs to be a multi-billion dollar corporation, in fact that goes against the foundation of decentralization that the internet was built upon.

What I'm trying to say is, the internet is great, with it we can move beyond the old hegemony and monopolies.

> I read their posts, looked at their photos, liked their comments, left notes here and there.. Chatted with them..

Wow. Back then it had already degenerated into two things: chainmail and the trap of portraying a life that you don't lead. I left when I realised that absolutely none of that "keeping in touch" was happening. If anything, Facebook estranged people.

To the point of the article, imagine all the good that could be done with this data: an alert system for vulnerable teenagers.

I think part of this trap was due to how FB encouraged people to "friend" as many people as they could..

At the height of my Facebook usage, I had less than 100 connections, because even back then I only stayed connected with people I was trying to maintain meaningful connections with.

No co-workers I didn't see socially, no one I went to high school or university with but didn't still keep in touch otherwise, etc..

So I rarely saw "junk" on my feed that was totally irrelevant to me, but it still happened sometimes..

That's just you. My sister has a similar approach (sending out periodic emails) and I find them utterly tedious to read, too polished and edited to approach any kind of spontaneity or intimacy, and mildly annoying as a reminder that she can't be bothered to keep up with any of my online social activity while expecting me to stay up to date with what she considers important to report.

Yes, quite a lot of social networking interactions are shallow, as are most real-world social interactions. but I've also made quite a lot of good friendships from what started out as shallow interactions. You're doing social networking right here on HN, you just treat it differently because it's (I presume) somehow connected to your professional activities.

Maybe your sister is just a bad writer? Or you already don't like her and are predisposed to find her emails tedious? I don't still write to people who didn't write me back, by the way.. I got the message that they were not interested. It's not an exercise in narcissism..

And yes I was indeed sharing a story about what works for me. I never implied it would work for everyone else, or that anyone using FB was doing anything wrong, or that "social networking" is wrong.

You're also right that I am networking on HN as we speak! And these are also very shallow interactions, but that's perfectly ok because this is just HN and I'm just talking with strangers about topics that interest me.

But that wasn't the case with Facebook. Context matters. I was having shallow interactions with people I have deep existing relationships with (good friends who have moved away, family, etc), and I decided that for me personally that didn't work, and I wanted to do things differently.

The concept of social media is a positive force, not Facebook the entity.

I'd like to think this (too), but I don't believe there's any evidence to support this claim.

In many countries they don't have free speech among other things and it's harder for them to organize. Twitter and Facebook have been used to help oppressed people across the world organize to help enact change. It's also helped catch criminals and citizens and first responders react quicker to crisis.

I rarely use Facebook because it's a time suck and I closed Twitter, but there are a lot of positives from social media, especially if you consider it globally.

"In many countries they don't have free speech among other things and it's harder for them to organize. Twitter and Facebook have been used to help oppressed people across the world organize to help enact change."

I see this claim often, but I've never seen any hard evidence backing this claim.

Au contraire: Social media is a fantastic snooping tool for oppressive (or even non-oppressive) regimes.

"Our evidence suggests that social media carried a cascade of messages about freedom and democracy across North Africa and the Middle East, and helped raise expectations for the success of political uprising," said Philip Howard, the project lead and an associate professor in communication at the University of Washington. "People who shared interest in democracy built extensive social networks and organized political action. Social media became a critical part of the toolkit for greater freedom." [1]

"Social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring. A spike in online revolutionary conversations often preceded major events on the ground. Social media helped spread democratic ideas across international borders." [2]

"Global Use of Social Media to Fight Corruption Inspires Youth in Brazil" [3]

"In the Bagega community in Nigeria, lead poisoning had resulted in thousands of children suffering serious health problems. The government announced it would release around $5.3 million for remediation but months later the funds had still not reached the affected community." Two passionate guys formed an organization called Follow the Money and amplified the voices of this forgotten community. Within 48 hours of a Twitter campaign targeting government officials and other influential leaders -- and following a campaign by groups including Human Rights Watch -- the funds were released and affected children are now receiving the urgent medical care that they deserve. [4]

[1] https://phys.org/news/2011-09-quantifies-social-media-arab.h...

[2] http://collectiondevelopment.library.cornell.edu/mideast/Rol...

[3] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/09/Brazil-y...

[4] http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/18/opinion/want-to-expose-corrupt...

Thank you.

Of course there is, people choose to spend their time talking to other people on the internet because they get something out of it that they find superior to other kinds of interactions.

The phone and post office allowed this as well, doesn't mean we need to keep with them on a daily basis.

you don't have an email account, a telephone, skype, AIM client, or even USPS?

Yes, imagine if one of your loved ones had depression and hid it well- facebook could sell him moody movies and suicide literature, while totally raspacting the privacy of cluelessness to the very end. Thank you fb

Or if you are Donald Trump it might convince you from all those like buttons pressed next to your post, that you are the second coming of Christ and only you can save humanity, as long as you continue and keep up your insightful posting.

That's why there's an anger dislike now.

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