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Comment by tobyjsullivan | Hacker News Reader

I've enjoyed roughly the same experience but without the downsides.

As far as events go, the neckbeard in me hasn't actually minded. I still get invited to "high quality" events (things my real-life friends are going to) and haven't really missed the lower quality events.

Photos I just conveniently had solved by having all my photos on Google Photos anyways (I stopped trusting offline storage long ago).

I think my Facebook account is reactivated at the moment (due to logging in to search for something) but I disabled notification when I'd originally left and haven't looked back. Life's easier (and way more productive) without the Book.

Interestingly, I still find a lot of value in Messenger. But they've split concerns so you can use that without reactivating your FB account.

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I was probably one of the first 1000 to join Facebook beyond the American borders, back when it was still a University-only endeavor. I've been off Facebook for more than 4 years.

Life is generally more rewarding. I'm much more in contact with the life that I want to live, instead of the life that I want to portray. People I know have "unlearned" Facebook - I actually receive emails and phone calls to catch up.

I think that Facebook must be dealing with some unknown human behavior. Back when I was on it, everyone I knew (myself included) would have registered as psychopathic. Photos in relationships revolved around posting to Facebook, not creating a treasury of memories. "Not being official until you're Facebook official" was a thing; such a belief was acceptable back then, even though it's absurd and cold in retrospect. It really brought out the most disgusting part of me and everyone that I knew.

Being off the Book is great. From day one it doesn't get easier; life gets better - especially in terms of avoiding the lower quality riff raff.

I'm kind of surprised to see these posts describing how it's possible to get off Facebook. For me, it doesn't really make much of a difference whether I'm on or off. I barely ever log in, barely ever use it, and things don't really spread through Facebook.

However, that just may be that I don't live in the US, and it just might be more pervasive there.

It's... it's not that Facebook itself is the issue. It's the resulting network effects and how you interact with people while still on it.

For example: not being on Facebook means you actually have to keep in touch with people to know what they are doing. That sounds like a "duh" moment, but it's also key to how FB is replacing real social interaction with "social interaction".

The knock on effects of this are deep, because without it you have to have meaningful and importantly intentioned social interaction with people.

That changes things.

I get that it's the network effects, but I guess I don't understand how your relationships are structured. I have a core group of friends with whom I talk every day on IM or the phone or face to face, then a larger group with whom I talk a few times a week, and then the rest are acquaintances I talk to rarely.

If anything happens in any of the first two groups, I hear about it because I'm directly invited. There aren't things that I hear about from Facebook, unless it's some club organizing an event or something similar.

How do you* interact with people, generally? Do you talk to them less but see what they post on Facebook?

* By "you" I mostly mean "people who use Facebook for socialization".

I am a student and I think I can answer how I use Facebook and it provides "some" value to me.

I also have the same three tiered social circle. The first circle I have regular contacts with on the phone, WhatsApp or in person. The second circle tells me when something happens in their life like them getting placed, winning a competition or getting into a relationship.

Facebook helps me immensely with the third group. I can get to know when people are placed in jobs and can then call them up to rekindle the acquaintance (so that I can later get them to introduce me to other people to expand my professional network). If I call regularly (like maybe once each two months) then it quickly turns into silence because we don't know what the other person is doing at the moment, where they are or even what has lately happened in their lives. I can't also talk about common acquaintances due to the same lack of information.

Personally for me Facebook events serve no purpose because if any of us want to plan a meeting we can do so by phone, email or WhatsApp. It does help to plan school reunions though. Facebook's utility to me exists because the people on Facebook keep posting parts of their life on it and I can keep interacting with them without too much effort of having the pain of keeping track of over a 100 acquaintances.

I see, thank you, that makes sense. My problem is that I'll go on Facebook, and see people posting stuff I don't care about, and unfollow them (and obviously lose their important updates as well). Pretty quickly, I have nobody in my timeline, and I just talk to people to see how they're doing.

I agree. Facebook either needs to allow more fine control on what we want to see (education updates, work updates, photos but no text statuses) or improve it's algorithm so that a new comment on a month old content doesn't make it conquer my feed.

I deal with it slightly by checking the "See updates from these people first" for certain people. It causes them to appear in a cluster at the top of my feed. The best thing is that the cluster is collapsed to show just two stories and I can then expand if there are more.

Your core group of friends may use Messenger for IM and FB events for meeting up. You can still probably catch up but it will take a _lot_ more effort.

0riginal neckbeard here - I have none of these problems, I have no friends, personal network, relationships, photos, or social interactions. I have never had Facebook, and I feel absolutely fantastic.

I can attest to that. It is like herding cats.

The question is why then keep an account?

> That changes things.

No, that's exactly what it doesn't. Rather, it leaves them as they were before this stupid and insufficient replacement was invented.

> I still get invited to "high quality" events (things my real-life friends are going to) and haven't really missed the lower quality events.

Just to run a counterpoint to this, there are Facebook groups that have opened up whole new social circles for me and provide opportunities. I'm into whitewater kayaking and the "Where's the Whitewater at?" group has people planning informal trips at a few hours notice when someone drives by and notices a river is runnable. You go out and paddle with people you haven't met before, make new friends who share your interests, etc.

Also, it is great for learning about new hazards in a river, i.e. fallen trees, that make a certain trip either possible or much more dangerous.

Yes, I go to a few underground dance parties a year and it would be a lot harder to find those events (let alone discern which ones I'd prefer to attend, who of my friends will be there, etc) without the networks I have on FB.

Putting my old photos on Google Photos is a good idea and I think I'll do that - thanks. Although it doesn't fully solve the issue of photos that had me tagged but were uploaded by someone else, which FB doesn't give you a copy of when you download your data (afaik).

Funnily enough, I found Messenger to be the worst of all their offerings. The lack of searchable history, the terrible (terrible) scroll-back, the default always-on-screen notification bubble, the way they forced the standalone app down users' throats by disabling messages in both the FB app and the mobile web version, all really turned me off to it.

> The lack of searchable history, ...

Use https://m.me - It's the web app just for Messenger; on my desktop I launch it via Chrome with the --app= param so it runs in it's own window.

Click on the ⓘ that's located in the top right of a conversation, and you'll see the search option (among other things).

A long time ago I used to setup IFTTT to automatically backup Facebook photos with me tagged to a Dropbox folder. This included photos posted by others with me tagged.

I've long since abandoned Facebook, but I wouldn't be surprised if a similar IFTTT feature exists to export tagged photos into Google Photos. If I recall this only works for 'new' photos posted that you are tagged in, it doesn't appear to pull images from before you enabled the IFTTT service. At any rate, this lets you see photos you are tagged in without ever having to actually use your Facebook account.

Messenger has searchable history. It's not great and it's pretty hidden, but it's there.

I never installed Messenger mainly because I was satisfied with using Facebook app's messaging feature. When it was disabled in the app, I moved to using Facebook in the browser (uninstalled the app). They later removed messaging support in the browser as well so now I request "Desktop mode" when I want to read/write a message. What started as "I don't want to install another app I don't need" became "I will uninstall all apps by Facebook" and now I'm happy I never receive FB-related notifications, I only browse it when I feel like it :)

Protip: try mbasic.facebook.com for messaging, or the "Toffeed" app on Android which is just a thin wrapper around this.

That's very helpful, thanks!

There's also https://touch.facebook.com for the not-quite-as-light-as-mbasic version.

wow used to use this one before having the app back in the day, good to know it still exists and a perfect alternative for m.facebook.com with messenger support.

Suggest adding FB to your hosts file:

https://gist.github.com/thomasbilk/1506210/2d20f47bbcca75b2f...

No more accidental or ambiguous re-activation...

Yes! I've done this with a number of websites! It's been a really useful tool in developing self control.

Filtering: not just for censorship.

> (I stopped trusting offline storage long ago).

Do you trust online storage? Meaning, do you have backups of your photos offline somewhere, or are you only in the cloud?

> Interestingly, I still find a lot of value in Messenger. But they've split concerns so you can use that without reactivating your FB account.

Afaik when you deactivate your Facebook account, you have the option to keep the Messenger account, but just deactivate/delete the Facebook account.

If you _deactivate_ account you can keep using Messenger, and you are able to reactivate account in the future. Facebook doesn't delete your data. If you _delete_ account then Facebook will delete all your data and Messenger will be gone too.

Thanks! I didn't know this was possible. I was locked in Facebook because of the Messenger: that's how I communicate with most of my friends. I just deactivated my Facebook account and kept the Messenger.

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