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Comment by fahadkhan | Hacker News Reader

I left Facebook. But mainly because I realised that it's a real poor way to keep in touch with anyone. Gives you the feeling that you are keeping in touch when in reality you are just sharing photos and quotes in a medium that's very noisy with adverts.

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If you never comment on each other's posts, then you aren't interacting. However, it is a great way to "keep appraised" of how people are doing.

There are a ton of people I've met throughout my life and around the world, but only a handful with whom I want to interact regularly. FB, annoying as it is, at least let's me know if they are doing ok.

It lets you know how they say they’re doing, and nothing else. If they have a bot updating their status, maybe not even that much.

If you message them you can know

If you’re relying on active messaging, why bother with FB?

For me, it's basically network effects - FB is already set up, I can find people quickly (I don't have alternative contact details for some people), I know the recipients active use FB so will see it, and it's easier to send long messages on PC rather than a mobile device.

I also tend to need to message people at odd hours, and a Facebook notification feels less intrusive/urgent than, e.g., an SMS.

Because everybody else is using FB for messaging? Network effect is a real thing.

Because that's the only reliable way I can message my friends. I'm not sure what else would work, people change/lose numbers all the time. Email is the worst. Not really much solutions out there if you want to keep in touch with your friends.

I personally mostly use messenger.com, rarely use the news feed anymore.

"apprised", not "appraised".

> FB, annoying as it is, at least let's me know if they are doing ok.

For some arbitrary definition of they. I've had a father of a childhood friend die and I didn't notice for two years. But that weird Australian friend of my former roommate that I helped through public transport from the airport last year? I get her drunk pictures. They didn't even like each other.

If you don’t like what you’re seeing, click the “hide stuff like this” option. I used to complain at end, then a friend forced me to use that feature and I rarely see something I don’t care about now (but still miss stuff I do care about as I don’t check FB that often).

Billions of dollars invested into machine learning and online tracking, and still I have to manually tell the thing about my interests.

Those billions are focused on the company interests, not yours.

> online tracking

Do the websites you visit define who you are (with zero context on why you visited it)? Do all the friends you have provide clear signal to what you want?

I don’t care how much $$$ is poured into ML, garbage in will always be garbage out. Something has to feed the model and if it’s all passive clicks with no strong signals from you, you get crappy results generally.

> click the “hide stuff like this” option

I've clicked that button for plenty of sponsored links and hit "unfollow" for people I no longer seek input from. But there are hundreds more where they came from.

This is perhaps viable, like transparently maintaining multiple sets of subscribers to different types of posts is an option. Although the mental overhead of maintaining these sets, and the risk of addressing the wrong crowd, are both too big for me.

My current method of keeping an address book in a spreadsheet, and an active, short list of people that I wish to see, has, however, beat social media when it comes to intimacy and not wasting time.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of events/organizations that organize almost exclusively through Facebook. Unfortunately, there effectively no other free platforms with a critical mass of sign ups big enough to be used in that way.

Of course there is Meetup which is certainly large enough for everything except the most niche event.

It isn't free to set up a meetup on Meetup.com though (which arguably helps keep the spam away).

Meetup is one of the spamiest products ever

Never seen spam in Meetup. I hooked up my personal calendar with Meetup and it added quite a bit of events into my calendar which was a bit spammy but it's only because I had told Meetup I was interested in all that stuff and it was easy to shut off and filter out.

WeWork bought Meetup recently so I don't know if any of that will change now.

Google Calendar/Hangouts/Maybe even plus?

Everyone has the gmail they probably created just to sign up for Facebook, since it seems this younger generation doesn't believe in email.

The younger generation seems to call Facebook by the name MomBook. Facebook is losing younger people by the millions.

I don't think that the problem is that there aren't suitable alternatives. More like, how would I force everyone who uses Facebook now to use something else?

Some of what I need to arrange can be done with calendar invites.

  Unfortunately, there are a lot of 
  events/organizations that organize almost exclusively
  through Facebook

And there are services that require a Facebook account in order to use them. But you know what?

If your business, event, whatever relies on the fact that I have a Facebook account then fuck you very much! I'm not interested.

It's all good if you are in a position to say no.

Eg. I've seen some housing communities use FB for their mailing lists.

I think the best option is to create dummy throwaway accounts if there's something on FB you really need access to.

Except that I want to partake. I'm not willing to drop out of my hobbies just because of this, this isn't the hill I'm going to die on.

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