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Comment by Fezzik | Hacker News Reader

But what's the advantage of Facebook over email and/or texting? I feel like for anything other than wasting time Facebook is sluggish compared to either. If you're a Facebook user you have a cellphone and/or a computer, and can do everything Facebook does: share pictures, plan events, check-in with friends, family, and groups of people. And not share data* or be peppered with garbage advertisements.

* I personally pay for Fastmail and have migrated all my communcations to email and texting (and feel the better for it). Obviously it is a personal decision, but realize everything you do is a vote towards a certain state of things.

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> But what's the advantage of Facebook over email and/or texting?

This is anecdata but among my friends, e-mail addresses and phone numbers tend to change more often than their Facebook profiles. I know people all over the world, but out of all of Facebook connections, I probably only have accurate contact details for 20% of them or less. The contacts I interact with most often are obviously in that bracket, but many of those I talk to once a year or less are probably not.

Case in point. I'm currently planning a trip, and while on a previous trip to the same destination I made a couple of friends there. I have a phone number to one of these contacts, but it's out of date. However, we're also connected on Facebook so I sent them a message their to let them know I'll be in their vicinity later this year.

For better or worse – and this is obviously my personal context – Facebook is the best mostly self organizing contact list I've ever had. I couldn't care less about the wall, or liking things, or whatever you had for breakfast, but as much as I hate it it's the only stable way I've been able to keep in touch with all these folks that I want to keep in touch with. If or when I no longer want to keep in touch, I just prune them from the list, and likewise I get pruned from other people's lists whenever they feel we're "done."

I don't want to use Facebook, but e-mail and phone simply doesn't solve my problem of keeping an up-to-date contact list. They also don't work simply because I can't easily look up a contact and connect with them, because there's no global phone or e-mail book. I'd love to use something else, but fact of the matter is that everyone I want to keep in touch with is there, and until they are also elsewhere in a list that organizes itself, I feel obliged to use it. :o(

This. The only reason I maintain a FB profile is because I use it as a glorified address book, especially for people that I meet abroad.

I email/text close friends and family but if I want to get in touch with a past friend/travel companion/acquaintance, FB makes that easier.

Saying that, a lot of people I come across now have also stopped actively using FB and are very involved in Instagram. I found it odd that co-workers so easily and quickly follow an Instagram feed but FB, email, personal cell #s usually took longer to exchange. I'm assuming because with Instagram, there's a degree of curation and it's personal but not too personal.

I also found it odd that peoples' dogs had IG profiles and they would use those profiles to follow other co-workers' dogs. To each their own, I guess.

Advantage of Facebook over email / texting:

- Facebook shows me updates about friends that I wouldn't otherwise know about. These updates provide an opportunity for a quick connect that is appropriately shallow, just enough to keep the relationship warm.

- For many people I have their FB, but not their email, let alone their phone number. I discover these people through FB's mutual friend suggestion. These people can be those I met briefly at parties, friends in primary school, etc.

- A public exchange on FB allows others to jump in and converse. An email is confined to the intended recipients.

These all sound like they could be disadvantages to another person.

I recognize that while typing out my comments. It seems like there are two archetypes of people:

1. Those who have a close circle of friends that don't change much over time. For these people, phone / email work great because they have a lot more depth.

2. Those who have a large circle of acquaintances that is dynamic (i.e. relationship strength changes over time, new acquaintances appear through FB suggestions). For these people, Facebook is the only way to keep connected, admittedly with little depth.

Everyone is a mix of these two archetypes. I have friends that I call, and also acquaintances that I chat up via Facebook.

> Facebook shows me updates about friends that I wouldn't otherwise know about.

Adding to this, text messaging and emailing and deliberate and specific, which means someone has to think to include you. It takes work to figure all that out--it is an active decision to communicate instead of a passive broadcast about something general that invites people to participate. It's very easy, and a good way to keep relationships warm and to make room for serendipity.

I don't know about you, but I really dislike things like personal newsletters and text messages/emails just to strike up any conversation, probably because at any given time I'm probably pretty busy, and being present requires both thought and time. On the other hand, when I share something on social media, it means I'm pretty much willing to engage with all comers, or if I see you've updated on social media, I'll assume the same.

Secondly, if you're that random friend that insists on only communicating via text message or email or some weird idiosyncratic way that applies only to you, I'm probably going to leave you out of a lot of stuff, even if I like you, because I have limited brainpower and I'm going to forget when I'm managing 15-20 people on a social channel and trying to update you out in the wilderness.

Lastly, email and text really, really suck for discussing topics in large groups, so if I send a link I want to talk about to a bunch of friends, I have the choice of managing 15 individual conversations (with lots of repetition), or managing an incredible amount of chaos.

So yeah, IMHO social media has definitely solidified a place in the communication stack.

> But what's the advantage of Facebook over email and/or texting?

Discoverability. Facebook has it inside the app. Email and texting require you to go out of band for it.

It's impossible to exaggerate the value of this. Groups of people who had lost contact in high school have gotten back in touch in retirement, planned trips, and traveled to a place to meet up together because Facebook has in-band discoverability. Before Facebook such a group of people would just hope someone in the group had enough time and patience to manually track everyone else down, which was probably hundreds of dollars of their time wasted.

Musicians find gigs through it. Friends of friends are leaky so you don't even have to bother people to find useful connections or fan pages. Businesses list specials, trips, blogs, etc. Way cheaper than sending out a snail mail newsletter or even managing an email list.

All Facebook's users save oodles of time connecting with acquaintances and making new connections, for whatever reasons they wish to connect.

Honestly, it's an incredibly difficult question to answer fully because I'm not sure where the short circuit is. Why do you see value in messaging protocols but not social networks?

> Musicians find gigs through it. Businesses list specials, trips, blogs, etc.

Also students are highly reliant on it. These types of loose connections but strong network effects are hard to break.

However... > Way cheaper than sending out a snail mail newsletter or even managing an email list.

This is true less frequently. Facebook used to be a good organic channel to build, but now FB is forcing more payments, by forcing ads to FB pages, and then again for boosting posts on those pages. Plus, the costs are rising.

> Groups of people who had lost contact in high school have gotten back in touch in retirement

I experienced this too, but I also had a controlled test, since I wanted to track down some high school friends who weren't on Facebook. Turned out not to be so hard, and caught up with a bunch of other old friends along the way. :)

Sometimes the alternatives offer other advantages we don't see if we frame the problem as replacing what we have now exactly.

> This is true less frequently. Facebook used to be a good organic channel to build, but now FB is forcing more payments, by forcing ads to FB pages, and then again for boosting posts on those pages. Plus, the costs are rising.

Less frequently than what? Keep in mind the OP I was responding to apparently didn't see any value to Facebook over email/texting. The fact that Facebook is willing to degrade its service even to be slightly better than managing an email list in return for higher ad revenue isn't particularly relevant to that.

> I experienced this too, but I also had a controlled test, since I wanted to track down some high school friends who weren't on Facebook. Turned out not to be so hard, and caught up with a bunch of other old friends along the way. :)

> Sometimes the alternatives offer other advantages we don't see if we frame the problem as replacing what we have now exactly.

That's great, but it has nothing to do with the value of Facebook's in-band discoverability over email/texting.

> But what's the advantage of Facebook over email and/or texting?

For me, there isn't one, and enough negatives to FB that I don't use it. I have no trouble connecting to people I care about via the many, many other methods available.

Voice telephone is becoming unusable for me due to spam, but so far somehow, not text messaging. (I guess the spammers don't cross-polinate yet?) I run my own email server, calendars, image galleries, and other tools for collaborating, sharing, ego-stroking and whatnot.

I do miss out on some random social interactions, but usually that's honestly a plus. Some relatives feed me the "email's too hard" line, and I take that to mean either I'm not or the message isn't important enough to bother, and that's fine[1].

At this point for me, FB is something I talk about more than I ever see - my view of the internet omits them (and several other surveillance shops), aside from the time between when they deploy a new splat of IP addresses and I notice and block them.

IMHO, the internet is much better without them.

[1] Of course there's backstory, too, but that's private, and not the sort of thing I'm going to discuss in public on a third-party server.

> But what's the advantage of Facebook over email and/or texting?

Events/Groups is big for me. Not FB message groups (but I'll touch on that in a second) but FB groups, it's great for topics that my friends and I are passionate about to post into. FB Messager groups are awesome because they level the field in terms of experience and in some ways beats even iMessage. It's great for knowing if your friends saw your last minute message about a change in plans and works the same for my iOS and Android friends. Events are great because it keeps all the planning for a trip in one place and provide a good interface for seeing who is going/not. Yes there are other places that you can do all of these things but it's all under my FB identity and that has value. If it wasn't FB I'd probably use Google which is 6 in one, half a dozen in the other to me.

> but realize everything you do is a vote towards a certain state of things.

I believe heavily in democracy and the power of voting but this isn't just a vote. It's a choice to leave my friends and that's a choice I won't make. It's great if you've got friends who are ok with leaving FB, mine aren't and I'm not going to change their minds anytime soon and more honestly it's not worth being that annoying person.

> But what's the advantage of Facebook over email and/or texting?

Many people don't check their emails as frequently as you think. I know quite a few people (young and old) who are constantly on Instagram, FB Messenger, iMessages, WhatsApp, Line etc. but check their emails once a week. Especially if they aren't in an industry that revolves around email e.g. customer service.

Texting costs money in some places and lacks rich capabilities. It's antiquated.

Functionally you can achieve the same outcome using any one of the main methods of communication - a short email, a black snapchat, a tweet, an SMS and a Facebook post can all achieve the same thing (provided the message is short enough, or you can be bothered to chain them in the case of Twitter/Snapchat).

That said, all the different apps have a very different social context to them - how I meet someone and the intention of what I want to say to them will dictate which medium I will choose. Indeed even the expected response time will be different.

An email is a comparatively formal means of communication - I would expect the longest response time and would typically choose this for someone I either didn't know so well or was opting for a more official tone.

A Facebook message is quite informal so I would opt for this if I met someone under quite casual circumstances and/or I wanted to downplay the nature of my message.

Whatsapp is quite quick and fast to the point so I would use this for the fastest response time.

SMS has started to feel weirdly distant now, given that almost everyone is on alternative mediums, I find SMS to be quite the oddball for communication.

YMMV these are just my personal findings...

Facebook means I see all kinds of things people are doing and thinking and saying without having to be sent it deliberately. I can message them with this context sparking a new conversation, learning something about them - or even just ask if I can join them at an event.

People who can't see the difference between email and Facebook are not even trying to get what they can from Facebook.

In a weird way, FB Messenger (or any of the messenger apps) are more "cross platform" than texting. Actually, my main friend group chats are on sms (not even imessages), and adding/removing people really is a bit of a chore. Group management is definitely done better by the apps.

That being said I'm personally still using email the most. But we have these mental associations that one liner emails are a bit frowned upon whereas texts/messages can be 3 words or just an emoticon. That mental expectation and association that has nothing to do with the technical limitations of the platform define our interaction with the tool, for better or for worse.

Lastly I really value being able to send messages on my PC since I have wrist/thumb pain which is helped immensely by the ability to use a proper keyboard.

> But what's the advantage of Facebook over email and/or texting?

An email conversation thread (in say, Gmail) is a poor man's version of a Facebook post. You can add more people to the thread, but they have to look at this poorly formatted "quoted" history of the email to get context of what's going on. Contrast this with a FB Post where you can just tag someone and they see the post in exactly the same format as you see it. No weird formatting.

You can create "subthreads" inside FB posts by replying to a comment in a post. This doesn't exist in an email conversation.

FB Posts have a URL - you can link to them. This mode of communication does not exist in email.

FB Groups are a much more powerful version of email lists. They can contain events, people can mark themselves as "interested" or "going to" events - share these events with friends.

Do you use FB?

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