I've said it before here, and I'll say it every time it's relevant:
Stop using Facebook. Start telling your friends and family to do the same. As the "smart computer person" in many people's lives, you can be the voice they need to hear.
Stop using Facebook. Start telling your friends and family to do the same. As the "smart computer person" in many people's lives, you can be the voice they need to hear.
1. Facebook knows about all of your interactions on Facebook, and they probably know what you are buying and what sites you visit through tracking mechanisms. In real life we call those people stalkers.
2. What utility are they really getting? Is keeping up with every part of your friend's life (or the good parts they show you) really worth the stress and anxiety of feeling like you are missing out? It's fake utility. People somehow existed for something like 300,000 years without this utility, so what value is really there?
That being said, it's designed to get people addicted and the immediate "utility" is a lot stronger than any abstract worries, so there's probably nothing you can say.
So what? I mean that earnestly - why is it inherently bad if a company knows a lot about me?
> What utility are they really getting? It's fake utility.
Do you really believe that easily keeping up with friends is "fake" utility? You really think that billions of people log on to a website every day that provides no "real" utility?
> People somehow existed for something like 300,000 years without this utility, so what value is really there?
People existed for a long time without the the lightbulb, automobiles, the wheel, computers, etc. You're basically arguing that there can't be any utility in anything new.
That said, I'm not convinced that the value Facebook provides is net negative.
With enough data about you (Facebook collects more than enough) it becomes easy to manipulate you (blackmail, "targeted advertising" aka propaganda, etc), and your pattern-of-life can be sold for profit. Data doesn't go away and we keep inventing more powerful analysis methods, so the risk, that collected data will be used against you only increases with time.
Claiming that this risk doesn't exist or isn't likely to happen requires showing how Facebook won't lose control of the data to any future hacker, government, or buyer with a sufficiently large cash offer. Pretending otherwise is a just-world fallacy.
Facebook supplies a directory of everything happening in my city, algorithmically curated against things Facebook thinks I will like and which my friends have said they're interested in attending. It lets me organise my own events, and communicate easily with attendees, who can see which of their friends are attending and make plans. It lets me make contact with people I briefly met in person but wouldn't have grabbed their phone number/wouldn't text them out of the blue yet (because who does that?).
I don't need an algorithmic feed to tell me what my interests are and what my friends are doing because I know the first and there are other ways of doing the latter that don't involve giving up my privacy.
There's nothing wrong with calling friends up, but that takes a lot of work and a synchronous connection between two people. There are hundreds of people I want to know about or stay in touch with but don't have the time to call them all up individually.
Facebook makes being friends easier. That's a pretty solid value add. I would probably lose a lot of friends more easily if I didn't have Facebook.
You may not value that, but I find it much more valuable than the value I'd gain from making sure Facebook doesn't know enough about me to show me relevant ads.
I honestly would feel the opposite about getting a new acquaintance's contact information vs looking them up on Facebook and sending them a message. I've been going to a lot of weddings recently and phone/email exchange has been common, and I have yet to be asked "are we friends on Facebook? I'll put these pictures up there", which was a very common thing in years past.
Yours is an interesting perspective because I tend to assume that people on HN who say "just call your friends" are less social and don't have as many people they want to catch up with. Honestly events and groups are the real utility - there's where everything I care about happens on Facebook itself (aside from Messenger - which is good, but we would be doing the same thing elsewhere if it didn't exist).
Though the feed is still terrible - I keep my friends list relatively trimmed (~200 people) and it's still rubbish.
I don't understand why people on HN (Quora too) act all high and mighty and tell people to quit all social media like it's some curse. I understand that social media can be mentally debilitating, but not everyone has this problem. I'm 18, I use Facebook on a daily basis and I don't feel addicted to it.
And even if there is minimal value in using it, so what? I like using it and that's all that matters to me. The day Facebook takes over so much that my work is affected, I'll quit it. I already quit it once and I felt no big difference in life.
People still view the internet as some sort of external luxury that we have. It's not. It's a part of our culture right now and will remain so in some form forever.
It's a centralised platform where I can message almost everyone I know, and put people in group chats.
It's also very useful to be able to tell at a glance where people are, and get updates as to what people are doing or where they are going, and also to be able let other people know where I am or what I am doing.
It does have its fair share of issues, like too many posts from pages showing up, or people tagging other people in posts showing up. It also has its ethical issues, but for me they are outweighed by the power and convenience of the platform.
They don't make it easy.
The process, according to Spotify support, is:
+ Create a new Spotify account
+ Contact Spotify support to migrate playlists etc. across.
+ Cancel my paid subscription on the old account.
+ Create a new paid subscription on the new account.
+ Migrate my family members onto the new account.
This is reminiscent of Microsoft's strategies back in the 90s, to make it incredibly difficult to ship a PC w/o DOS (and later, Windows).
Yes from the early beta Spotify had it's own account system, then it switched to all new accounts must be FB but legacy accounts could still sign in. This was a while ago though around the time I stopped using it.
Facebook is used for many social and business events. I get a lot of work via contacts that come through facebook. Withought it I'm certain I would miss out on some of these. I'd also miss out on keeping up with family abroad.
Do you have any suggestions?
It sounds like from your examples you're the perfect case for lock-in they are after. It's penetrated your business and family life so much you're afraid to leave it. That bothered me when I started to feel like that, which is why I left. Since then so many other things have happened (there's a link-fest from another commenter on this thread that I won't bother to compete with - thanks) that I'm pretty good with accepting that I might have missed out on a few things as a result.
I deleted my account and was "clean" for a few years, but last year decided to sign up again.
I only use it occasionally, maybe once or twice a week. It's nice to catch up with family and friends, and it's very simple to filter out the cruft that you have no interest in.
What makes this one of those times?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
"An operant conditioning chamber permits experimenters to study behavior conditioning (training) by teaching a subject animal to perform certain actions (like pressing a lever) in response to specific stimuli, such as a light or sound signal. When the subject correctly performs the behavior, the chamber mechanism delivers food or another reward. In some cases, the mechanism delivers a punishment for incorrect or missing responses."
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/4/10708590/facebook-google-a...
"Facebook made its Android app crash to test your loyalty"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/12161461/Facebook-addiction-...
"Facebook addiction ‘activates same part of the brain as cocaine’"
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886911...
"Narcissism on Facebook: Self-promotional and anti-social behavior"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...
"Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users' Emotions For Science"
https://twitter.com/niftyc/status/482925976251154432
"#facebook emotional contagion study effect sizes are small--probably nobody was driven to suicide. #jokingnotjoking http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full …"