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Comment by zaarn | Hacker News Reader

I've deleted my facebook account a decade ago, the last time I logged in when facebook revived the account and told me it was hacked.

I don't think I've ever really had the desire myself to reactivate it, my fellow students started posting into some shared group there but eventually everyone moved to whatsapp as that was more widely deployed and direct.

FB, for me, has no actual value other than capturing users like a venus flytrap.

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everyone moved to whatsapp

Maybe the distinction is worthwhile to make if you try, but in general “I don’t use Facebook, I use [thing that is also Facebook]” is not really a convincing argument.

Facebook is more public. Even if your posts are only visible to "friends" it's more about browsing and less about actually starting conversations. It also gets data-mined more heavily, compared to WhatsApp which has end-to-end encryption using the same underlying protocol as Signal.

While owned by the same company I don't think it traps you in the same way. Whenever I log into facebook it turns into a 10 to 15 minute thing that could have been one or two. I avoid that thing as much as possible, but that's not really a problem with whatsapp.

I do dislike the "status" feature they put in though...

Whatsapp is a much different product and atm everything is end-to-end encrypted, so I trust that more than facebook itself.

There is also little binding to the service, the entire semester could switch to a new service within a week (we've played out the scenario "what if whatsapp goes belly up" as part of a course)

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