Comment by hasbroslasher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hasbroslasher | Hacker News Reader

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Up until last year, I chalked up the "I deleted my Facebook" phenomenon to hipsterdom or some pathology where people think the can "cure" "addiction" by quitting whatever unhealthy behavior pattern they exhibit for a week or month and then coming back.

Last month I deactivated my Facebook and have yet to turn it back on. In the months prior I started finding alternative sources of news: NYT, Pitchfork, HN, various sub-reddits, Bandcamp, what have you. I outsourced social media to Twitter and Instagram. I outsourced messaging to text/Slack. A bunch of my friends have done the similar things in the last few years.

The lower levels of cognitive dissonance are noticeable. It's not like Facebook has a monopoly on the things I hate: notification spam, stupid arguments, unfulfilling articles, and vacuous political rants all exist elsewhere. Maybe it's the dissociation between who a person is and what is posted. On Reddit you don't know the person and they don't get a big platform to express themselves outside of the comments. On Twitter you can't go on these huge rants and following/unfollowing people is fairly impersonal. On Instagram, you never get "why haven't you posted?? come back!!" notifications. And news sites do what they do best - deliver the news without some other third party getting to give their doctoral thesis on what they think it means.

As an information security person and someone that cares deeply about preserving my privacy and the privacy of my fellow citizens I see Facebook / Google / Amazon as sort of existential threats. For them to exist we can't maintain our privacy to a high degree. And as long as they maintain a network effect, even if you do delete your Facebook account, they will maintain a shadow profile of you. You will always be a node in their graph now. European privacy laws and the right to be absolutely forgotten are the answer. As a free human being I believe in the right to be completely outside of any corporations software system and record keeping. There is so much work to do on this front, look at what happened to Equifax. We don't really get a choice about some things (credit reporting), but for everything else, I am going to fight it.

I am going to fight your shitty operating system updates that take away my privacy

I am going to fight your massive personal information sucking network

I am going to use alternative shopping services, no matter how easy you make it for me to click once and have stuff I really like appear in a great user experience.

I am going to fight these things because privacy matters and in the long run without privacy as consumers and human beings with inalienable rights we will give away something essential in there.

It isn't hipsterism. It isn't being a luddite. It mass-scale experiment about how much these organizations can concentrate before people really understand.

It is being a luddite - in a good way! Don't knock the luddites, they had analogous concerns.

They didn't hate machines or novelty per se, they hated the specifics of how the machines were affecting their quality of life.

Same with facebook - networked communications might be OK (remains to be seen if you ask me), but the socio-technical-political blob that is facebook's implementation of same has side effects that lots of us find horrible.

Pedantry over.

> As an information security person and someone that cares deeply about preserving my privacy and the privacy of my fellow citizens I see Facebook / Google / Amazon as sort of existential threats. For them to exist we can't maintain our privacy to a high degree.

Seriously, if I could upvote you several times, I would! You just said everything I believe in, including naming the corporations that worry me the most and make me feel hopeless sometimes. I try to educate people at every opportunity, fully knowing that it will take a long time for any effect to be visible. But I'm kinda used to that as an activist in other areas.

I don't know if there will ever be a decentralized and privacy protecting social networking platform that will beat Facebook and the like (pun unintended) in network effect, but I'd be ecstatic to see such a day! On the same lines would be reducing data collection almost everywhere and ensuring that privacy comes first - by governments or private entities. I have very little hope on the latter because information security is truly an afterthought in our Internet connected world where anyone can spin up WordPress, add some random plugins and start a "gig economy" or whatever the fad of the day is. It's too easy to start something software based that is completely insecure!

Facebook encourages a lower level of discourse than other message systems, somehow.

I participate in a couple of groups which have come to replace older forums running PHPbb or VBulletin type software. While the old style forums offer too many features and almost excessive permanence for discussions, Facebook offers too little in that regard.

Conversations are not meant to be searchable, archived, permanent, or long or detailed. Unlike VBulletin, where it's easy to find a post you saw 3 days ago or all the posts you've made in a forum, on Facebook everything effectively disappears after a week or two. The content is still there, just very disorganized and difficult to access. Search is inconsistent and very basic for groups.

Most significant is the impact this has on the discussions that take place. On the old forums, posting seemed like a bigger deal and people rarely posted one word responses or sentence fragments. The FB format seems to encourage that. Long, detailed responses about technical matters are difficult to post and read, so people don't post them as often. Discussions are often repeated because nobody can really find the last one to link to it.

This - I think this also extends to the conversations people have 'on' facebook - even with friends. You end up liking or saying 'cool' to a post, but you don't really have any real interaction. Since I've left facebook (nearly 9 months sober) I've probably talked with fewer friends, but those friends I have spoken to, I've spoken to on a far deeper level. and many of them I now actually _speak_ to more often.

Uninstalling messenger was hard at first, as some people I don't have a number for or they aren't on Whatsapp, but you either find other ways to keep in touch, or you realise that you were actually just on the periphery of each others lives, and liking that they got a new car or similar didn't actually have a positive impact on each others lives. And when you do meet again, you'll have a bunch to talk about.

I've debated making a 'fake' account for facebook groups (esp local sales groups, which seem far better served on fb in my area) but so far I've come the the conclusion that I don't really need to buy more crap from strangers - I have enough of my own already.

What I did was pare down Facebook to the bare essentials. The only people I have on it are actual would-invite-into-my-home friends, the only pages I follow are for concert venues and bands I like, and I block and turn off every single stupid "joke" page, app and game I see.

Now I basically only get posts directly written by my friends, event notifications for concerts, and updates from my favorite bands.

I don't use Facebook for news, I don't engage in political discussions or stupid arguments. I guess I use Facebook for what its original intended purpose, to keep in touch with friends.

Yea I'm not sure why this isn't a more popular option. I do an even less-impactful version of this: I've disabled the Newsfeed (on web), and I've pared down mobile and email notifications to only things that are likely to matter to me like event invites (my friend group uses FB events for pretty much everything, including logistical events for our Burning Man camp).

The main advantage to me is still that it's an easy and stable way to discover and communicate with people I know in real life: there's still nothing that beats the ease of finding someone on Facebook after meeting them, and I very often forget to exchange info with someone in these situations (esp if I've met a lot of cool people that night).

The company itself has been sleazy from day one, and I think they're largely to blame for the trend of fuck-the-user product design[1] in the last ~5 years. But putting a firewall around what I let them do to my devices and my life and taking advantage of what value they do provide has proven really fruitful for me.

[1] There are plenty of things that used to be deal-breakers for me, like spamming the notification bar to increase engagement: companies like Google held out for a long time against this, but Facebook led the charge into making it ubiquitous and now the new equilibrium is that most large apps do it (even @#$%ing Google Maps!)

You can still use Facebook Messenger with a deactivated Facebook account in case you didn't know

When you deactivate your Facebook, can you still use it to log into stuff (e.g. Tinder and Messenger)? I've a few friends and groups that are on that.

No.

For third-party app logins I use a friendless FB account under a pseudonym.

FB still knows it's you.

Sure, that's the cost of doing anything with FB. A pseudonym is used to avoid nosy third parties, not Facebook itself.

Less pressure to expose one's self to the psychological pathogen that is the Facebook Timeline.

You can still use messenger, and I still do because I don't want to stonewall people who only have me on there. I have to say though, it's a god awful UX. The other day I even had an advertisement for Spotify pop up in my messages with a close friend. What the fuck is that?

I used Spotify with my Facebook account. When I deactivated the FB account and logged into Spotify, it reactivated the FB account automatically.

I had to create another standalone Spotify account and contact their support to migrate everything from the FB connected account to the new one, otherwise it would keep reactivating the FB account.

Wait, Bandcamp is a news source?

yes. a year or two ago they built out an editorial staff.

If you're into music absolutely.

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