I'd see an announcement of my death on Facebook as an insult, as my death would essentially be creating engagement/ad impressions/clicks for Facebook.
That's an odd way of seeing it considering that paid obituaries, in Newspapers, have been a thing for quite a while. The family pays the newspaper for the obituary, the newspaper sells advertisement space and then even asks people to pay for that whole package.
Compared to that, the Facebook version at least feels only like half a rip-off because your family wouldn't have to pay for it being posted and others wouldn't have to pay to read it.
But, I suppose that if I die today, someone will post something on facebook (statistically, at least one of the person I know should use it for that; although I totally condemn FB (FB, not the social network thing))
In Germany, at least, they are still very popular. Working at an ambulant palliative service, one of my colleagues checks the local newspapers each morning, over the years it's happened quite a few times that we found out about one of our patients passing away from the obituary in the newspaper before we got a notice from the family or the acting physician.
> FB is based on advertisement and on social information commercial exploitation.
So are pretty much the majority of newspapers at this point, just because Facebook is better at the social information exploitation angle doesn't turn them into an entirely different beast, as I'm pretty sure newspapers are equally busy trying to categorize their customers for better ad impressions, their databases just ain't remotely as big and detailed as those of Facebook.
From a practical perspective, I'd still prefer a free obituary to a paid one anytime. Sure, it might not be completely free, as you are paying with personal information, it's at least more free than "Pay for the obituary, pay for the newspaper and then still look at advertisements".
The best solution would probably something like Facebook that doesn't finance itself through the commercialization of its user's data. I wonder how viable an approach like the original WhatsApp one (subscription services with very small fees) would work for a social media platform at the scale of Facebook?
I know a lot of people. Many of those people unfortunately use Facebook. There's a good chance that at least one of them will be posting something about it, regardless of my wishes.