#deletefacebook

If you've never used it, how do you know it does not make life easier? Similarly, it's possibly a burden (albeit small) on your friends who have to text you in addition to organising for others.

> Now for friends who live in distant locations you need to ask yourself: Does Facebook status updates really make me feel more connected to this person?

For you no, for me absolutely 100%.

Additionally, there are many opportunities I have discovered through Facebook that I likely would not have otherwise. For example, just last weekend I happened to be flying across continents and when I checked Facebook on my phone, I discovered a cousin I haven't seen in a while also happened to be flying to the same city on the same day. There would have been no reason to share this with each other, but because it was out there publicly I was able to see and organise time for us to meet. I often see content which prompts me to get in contact with people.

I have no doubt I can survive without Facebook (though perhaps some might not), so for me you're arguing a strawman. For me, there is no doubt that it _is useful_, the question is whether that offsets the myriad negative impacts. To suggest that your experience (with admission that you've never used Facebook) is reflective of everyone and they should "stop making excuses" is pretty narrow.

I'm 31 and I've never used tobacco. If people who used tobacco just made better choices they could be like me. They really need to ask themselves if tobacco really makes them happier. /s

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I suppose it's a bit facile to compare Facebook to an addictive drug, but the idea that just because you've never used Facebook, nobody else should want to doesn't make any sense. Not everybody's circumstances and background are going to look like yours and people will have different needs. My friends probably have a very different dynamic than your friends so what works for you might not work for me or vice-versa.

Even if another tool exists how would I sway people away from FB and to a new tool?

But hey if it works for you it should work for literally everyone else, right?

Yes, but how do you do that? My long-distance friends are constantly moving address and changing phone numbers. Facebook (or an IM app, if they happen to still use the same one they used to) is the only way I know to figure out how to find my friends when I get back in town after a year or two away.

In other words, you're demonstrating an exception that proves the rule. Organizing events (without Facebook) is not a linear problem, it's a problem where each subcomponent scales directly with the number of people involved. Maybe not O(n^2), but at least O(n*log(n)). Every change to the planning of the event has to be spread to and approved by every attendee, requiring independent contact of each. Facebook centralises this by providing a central organization system that it is as close to guaranteed as possible that everyone has access to. This brings it back close to being a linear endeavor.

Just because you claim you aren't benefiting from Facebook's competency in this area doesn't mean you aren't. You said it yourself: your friends know you are the outlier in this planning, so they can can remember to contact you separately without adding additional time complexity. They can handle all the other nuances of planning directly on Facebook and you gain the benefits without having to interact with it.

The people most attached to Facebook —the people who will never give it up until it's clear it's dead— are those who want to conveniently share what they're doing with real life friends and family, as well as see what they're doing. They want a social network that everybody uses.

I think it's easy for us to forget that when we're yammering on about the problems with Facebook. The way we fix that isn't bitching about Facebook; trying to get them to be a better Facebook, or having silly dreams about writing a competitor. We don't need another Facebook, we need a better technical expression of a social network.

Something so fundamentally different that allows it to be decentralised from the gaping maws of companies like Facebook, simple enough for grandma, and built into everything; as prevalent as SMS and email.

We're not there yet. Given the powers that control these things are also the people making and selling the devices, I'm not sure we'll ever be there... But that's the problem to solve.

Not to mention how difficult it is to put on shows without facebook promotion.

Unfortunately Facebook is practically only platform where all the shows I care about are organized on.

That being said, I've recently got off and now I depend on friends who stay on Facebook or word of mouth which has worked out, but I don't put on shows.

Unfortunately Facebook has it's place.. for now

Sure, if you friends live next door. If they live on different continent, a bit harder to do. SMS is also pretty inefficient. I mean if one of your friends' daughter won a prize in school contest and you want to congratulate the happy father, that really can't happen over SMS. Unless the father is going to spam everybody in the contact list with the news, and get a wave of spam back. That'd be horrible.

> It's become well known that I don't get updates through FB so my friends will text me invites if I haven't asked for an update.

You friends accommodate you and make extra effort to adjust for you. Good for them. But that doesn't mean it is the best way to do things. Maybe Facebook isn't either, but this way doesn't seem to be any better than Facebook. In fact, it's worse.

> Now for friends who live in distant locations you need to ask yourself: Does Facebook status updates really make me feel more connected to this person? My answer would be no

My answer would be absolutely yes.

> There was life before Facebook and there can be life without Facebook, stop making excuses.

Why I need any excuses? Facebook is an instrument. Just as any other. No excuses are needed to use an instrument, and nobody owes anybody any explanations or excuses when they use tools they like. You prefer to use different tools? Good for you. Doesn't make any difference to people that have different preferences.

One of my favourite tweets, from Mike Monteiro:

https://twitter.com/monteiro/status/321048448889663488

> I’ve heard excuses from people who want to quit Facebook but can’t that would make heroin addicts blush.

When I invite Family & Friends to my kids birthday party, if I were to do it without Facebook i'd have to have the phone or email of every single one of the people. I don't, it's difficult to keep a contact list updated with every phone or email address. I try to do it but Facebook does it better. It's much easier to not forget people. The suggestions are great. It's also an easy way to RSVP, something a phone would make very difficult to handle.

Also yes Facebook makes me feel much more connected to people. Most of my family is global, my parents live in France, I have quite a lot of friends in France. Same for Canada, and also spread out across states in the US. I only see my sisters, parents, about only once a year. I would be terribly sad if we didn't post updates via Facebook. Yes we call each other via Skype, but it doesn't allow to share the activities we have done.

The only way I would ditch Facebook, is if there is a better tool that does the same things.

I've stalked LinkedIn for years looking for a way to undercut them with a superior competing product. I've never really found what I consider to be a very high value angle of attack that looked like it could cause a big enough wound to bring down the beast.

That being said, I'll never go back to using Facebook. It changed my behavior patterns too much and I was just not happy.

My enjoyment with Facebook ceased the moment Edward Snowden became a household name. I realized then how naked my information was in a world of bad actors. I only use Facebook as a simple contacts list these days.

But it’s harder to wean myself off HN/Reddit, as I get more value of useful information from the former and entertainment from the latter, than I have ever received from Facebook, even though both sites can lend themselves to mindless consumption and propaganda/manipulation, like FB.

Is there a “right” way for social media to be? Or are we resigned to a muddy middle ground forever?

I too have been slowly weaning myself off Facebook. Step 1 for those who want to but can't bring themselves to is to just be logged in on your phone or tablet. Has done wonders for me.

That's the truth. I quit Facebook and most similar sites, and my social life improved quickly. I also get a lot more done without those distractions.

I block all of their companies in my hosts file and avoid their software libraries (React, etc.) whenever possible too. The company is having a terrible effect on the world and should not be supported. It was fundamentally broken from the start. A platform that connects all the world's people already exists -- it's called the WWW.

I know people who are desperately trying to quit, but they can't, because the site has locked their social connections within the platform, and they are addicted.

But I guess this is the best we have.

All of our genies are out of all our bottles. They aren't going back in.

It's really like anything you can do-- anything. The threshold is defined by the person. The absolutist claim that anything is 100% bad is dangerous and false.

The tools we make and use are defined by us individually. The "mob" is the collection of people in certain echo chambers, and I'm sorry but if those people don't realize they're in an echo chamber, it's not the fault of the tools. We can't be going around limiting everything because the majority don't know how to use it. The majority will always be that way-- though I will note that I think this "mob" majority are better-equipped psychologically with each passing generation.

No. Facebook proudly does specific psychological experiments on its users. Facebook intentionally decides that it will make some users sad or depressed, just to see if it can. And it can. And it is proud of it. Facebook is proud that it knows how to make you depressed, so much so that they published a paper describing how they made hundreds of thousands of their users fall into a depression.

Facebook is a fucking poison. The problem is not with us. The problem is with large scale propaganda networks and centrally-controlled social networks with misaligned incentives. The problem is Facebook and the core problem is the structure and incentives of corporations in our current not-well-enough-regulated capitalism.

I've largely stopped using Facebook, but my experience had nothing in common with the author's.

The content was fine, I followed things and people I actually liked and made adjustments when that changed. I felt no addiction loop, my usage time was limited, and it was honestly quite a nice site. Sentiments like "In the absence of human interaction we cling to whatever dark simulacrum is available" are absolutely alien to me; Facebook was a source of real social interaction, and almost entirely additive with other sources of real interaction.

I stopped because advertisements, autoplay videos, and timeline changes slowly made Facebook unusable as a site. Content I liked was consistently buried in favor of content I didn't like, in ways I couldn't fix with settings or following preferences. The discussions of Facebook usage time rising baffle me; my experience was of a good, usable site that destroyed its usability by trying to monetize.

This is certainly a problem, but I think more important than this is the illusion of having control over what you see on social media.

You may think you can curate your social media feeds by unfollowing people who share things you don't want to see, but as long as a social media service's feed/timeline (and primary revenue stream) is still based on an easily gamed algorithm and paid ads, you're mistaken.

Social media sites will cater access to their API's to groups who are willing to pay for it. So, even if you can unfollow your uncle who shares "unhinged political views", you can't hide cleverly disguised, hyper targeted, ads, advertising both products and ideas.

> 2. On multiple recent occasions, police in North Carolina have quietly been successful in obtaining search warrants that force Google to turn over these records. Rather than "standard" search warrants asking for the location of a particular suspect in a crime, these "reverse" or "area based" warrants ask for time and location data for all users who have entered a geographical area during a time of interest. The records returned are initially anonymous account numbers, and the police then make followup requests for identifying information of the subset of accounts that they think are of interest to the case.

Sure you can delete your account on reddit. They'll still track you as if you have one just like the facebook buttons or all those creative new tracking shit we regularly read about here.

In the end, you don't have to be an extremist. Just don't post everything and keep in mind that you are being tracked. This is the internet for you today.

It's two order of magnitude bigger than twitter, reddit, pinterest, etc.

The only ones that compares is Google.

But while I have no problem living without a Facebook account, living without Google is way harder. E.g:

- no hangout is the easiest. I hated it.

- dropping calendar was easy. It was not that good anyway. I missed the integration with a lot of 3rd party though.

- I leaved gmail. It tooks years and many problems with accounts came with it. The competitors UI are worse.

- I tried to leave gmap. But competitors don't have street view, shop open shedules or nearly as accurate traveling times. And waze eventually got bough by google. Maps.me is alright for when I don't have internet, but it's nowhere close to gmap for big cities if you have internet.

- I tried, very hard, to quit google search. Bing. DuckDuckGo.Qwant. They are ok. But I do hundreds of queries a day. Ok doesn't cut it. And if you are looking for result in another language than english, forget about it.

- now for the phone. Well, I won't go apple. Mozilla and MS are no longer here. I tried SailOS for a year. I don't recommend it. So android is what's left if you want a smartphone. I tried rooting, but it's dangerous, and takes time. So now I just avoid using a google account on the phone, which is, well, something at least. And make it extra hard to install apps.

That's a lot of trouble for so-so results.

Who else than a privacy savvy nerd is going to do a 10th of it ?

So to me, no facebook + ublock + no google account is like when I stopped watching TV 20 years ago. It's 80/20, but for privacy instead of sanity.

However, let's all remember HN is a niche, and that most people still watch tv, don't use add blockers and would not even have a though about personal data.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. I know black and white thinking is very appealing but we don't need to go back to living in a yurt in the wilderness just because facebook is a net drain on society. I've been participating on forums all over the internet for the past 20 years and it's been the catalyst for some of the greatest things in my life.

I have actually strengthened my friendships and moved quickly up in my career as a result of deleting most social media.

Social media is like the dessert of the internet. Use it sparingly.

I think the facebook(.com) product has some serious soul-searching to do and if they continue to ignore their monumental problem -- it will not end well for them, nor their stockholders.

My understanding, though, is that others don't have this same experience with real life social interaction, so might not as easily notice how much FB amplifies it.

Humans have been organizing into social groups and gatherings for tens of thousands of years without the aid of technology. Why is it all of a sudden people feel like they're incapable of socializing in any form without the likes of Facebook?

I apologize if my candor is overly blunt, but your comment is an excuse to continue your addiction. Nothing more.

I know it's more common with younger people (at my university there's not a single undergrad who doesn't have it on their phone), but I know some actual adults use it too.

I wouldn't say that. It looked pretty benign back at the beginning. And then the noose started tightening, and tightening.... Frog slowly boiled.

I'm more in favor of the federated approach where a couple people run servers for their community (I run a server for a fandom community I participate in regularly).

People that use my server play by my house rules, if they don't like that they can pick another server or run their own.

There is a project to build a Facebook replacement that federates with ActivityPub[2], which would make it to Facebook what Mastodon[3] is to Twitter. However, I don't want to link it because it's in too early a stage to face HN levels of scrutiny.

There is also Patchwork[4], a peer-to-peer social application built on top of the Secure Scuttlebutt Protocol. It doesn't have all the features you'd want yet, but ticks off the boxes some people care about.

[0]: https://diasporafoundation.org/

[1]: https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project

[2]: https://activitypub.rocks/

[3]: https://joinmastodon.org/

[4]: https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork

To answer your question though, honestly any blogging software that support good ol' fashion RSS feeds would be fine. Your group of friends could link to each others feeds. With a little effort, you could probably do this server side using some fashion of RPC call. Each language has it's own way to accomplish this.

Additionally, if you're encouraging people to delete Facebook, your target audience is people on Facebook, so...

These kind of comments add no value and rest on incorrect belief that either:

1) authors control the marketing tech stack on the major sites they write for or

2) they can afford to sacrifice audience for their messages, etc. in order to be hyper-picky in order to forestall internet heckles.

The truth is that neither of those things are true. Writers will write, activists will get their messages out, and that's their job. Sometimes they will criticize something so ubiquitous that even they can't avoid it totally, but that doesn't make them hypocrites. In fact, criticizing bad things that literally everyone does is the first step towards fixing those things. If stupid insinuations of hypocrisy like yours had any value, it would be impossible to make progress on many fronts.

Many ages ago, on one of the most popular mail and news systems of the day, it turned out that myself and another person both managed to register the same username, each with a different password, but were assigned to the same account.

After a couple of weeks in which each of us would log in, see the changes the other did, undo them, change our own password, and mail the abuse team (which kept replying "no, we see that you did it yourself on xxxx"), we both realized what had happened, and started talking by emailing ourselves. Eventually, the other guy left the account to me (I had it for 2 years when he managed to register it).

It could just be a bug, rather than malice.

Because it very likely won't be there anymore. Your grandparents had full control over their photo albums. You have nothing.

> Op dates users freely gave away their data, but now advertisers are stealing it? The same sentence can be said about the internet as a whole - but most people believe the benefits are worth it

Most people don't grasp the _extend_ of what they give to the advertisers. Not even in the slightest way. They still think that as long as they don't fill out a questionnaire, "they" won't know. Or what I give to Facebook, stays with Facebook and so on.

> Lots of people believe that to be true, but I don't think you can just call advertisers "the devil" without an explanation.

Their sneaky methods, lack of information and the whole attention stealing industry it is, is bad. Just the basic normal ad on the street is already exploiting us. The digital versions are even able to infect our tools. It's an uncontrolled mess. An anarchy of people who don't give a damn because they can. We'll never know the full extend of misuse happening with our data on daily bases. I don't see a reason to trust them. Do you?

Sure....

It's useful for facilitating connections with other facebook users. You're in a bubble.

p.s. Join us in Runners Anonymous.

Humans in general need social interaction. That’s why solitary confinement is so psychologically damaging.

> Facebook survives because it's useful for facilitating social interaction.

Facebook “survives” because its social graph has many nodes and edges due to network effects. You admit to using Meetup, meaning that Facebook isn’t enough on its own for your purposes.

> It sounds like the author primarily used Facebook to be seen rather than to connect, and so he views it as a cancer.

You’re using it for that same exact purpose. If your events can’t be seen, why would you use Facebook?

I don't know a developer who doesn't always have an IRC/Discord/etc running in the background 24/7 as they work...

There are also things like data protection laws like the EU's "right to be forgotten" that allows an individual to request the removal of their personal information. Of course, you're now dealing with the situation that the EU is effectively trying to enforce its rules worldwide since the information would not just have to be deleted for users from the EU but for everyone.

In the end, there is no perfect solution, and it comes down to who has more power to impose their will on these companies. In your case, FB is clearly more afraid of getting into trouble with Turkey than the Kurds. Same goes for a lot of what China wants.

https://infinite-scroll.com/

It's going to live at https://forgetme.stavros.io/, if you want to take a look later on to see how far I've gotten. Hopefully, deleting posts will be doable from the APIs, and the app will be feasible.

I expect I'll have a useful app up in a day or two.

https://security.stackexchange.com/a/68014/47800

The problem isn't Facebook as much as it is the system in which it exists.

Also, if you're worried about the long-term psychological impact of social media, with all its dark patterns designed to get you to spend more and more time distracted by their sites and apps, then all you really have to do there is switch the distractions off. Deleting one's Facebook account isn't the only way to do that, but it's certainly an effective option.

I don't. One company should not have the power to decide whether I should be recognised as a legitimate individual or not, and they should not act as a gatekeeper between me and my online identity. I don't care how benevolent that one company genuinely is.

If an intermediary is necessary (like an email provider for mere mortals), I should be able to choose a service provider.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/10/20/law-student-trig...

Doesn't sound dangerous at all to me.

But the concept of social norms will not go away.

There will always be some norms that society deems taboo to violate.

Therefore, there will always be reputational risks to someone by having a long record of social behavior in the public domain.

This is good thing. Once everyone will be embarased by his history,

> We probably will stop caring about online privacy.

This would be bad, I would rather this to happen: "We probably will stop pretending of being perfect and become more honest."

1. “We” never did care about online privacy to begin with, that's what made social media and all the other surveillance monetizers what they are.

2. Caring about online privacy is about much more than “posting stupid things”.

The thing that concerns me about social media is the way it can be used as a training data set to train propaganda bots. Now that is scary.

Similar to criminal activity, a very small number of very active social media people will simply be disqualified from office, and it won't really matter to most people.

"Either way social media is here to stay." Like CB radio, or telegrams, or pro sports, or newspapers, or TV, or vinyl records, or magazines, etc. Note that none of those have entirely disappeared, but have gone from utterly culturally dominant and universal, to "is that still around?".

In 30 years, the candidates for president will either be bizarre freaks like Trump, or the kind of people who locked down their social media profiles early or were good at covering their tracks.

> After realizing that everyone, even future politicians post stupid things, We probably will stop caring about online privacy.

People have been saying stuff like this for ages, I've seen no evidence things will play out that way. In fact, you're literally parroting points Mark Zuckerberg made circa 2010 [1], when he was trying to push more public content to increase "engagement" with Facebook.

However, many, many people are reacting to social media by caring about their privacy more. Facebook's original selling point was that was restricted to your peer group. Snapchat's selling point was self-destructing messages. People are locking down the privacy settings on their social media accounts private or deleting them entirely.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/6966628/Face...

You're assuming the United States exists in 30 years, and that it still elects its leader by popular vote :)

Considering that the leader of the free world is currently using twitter the same way as some of my friends do it, I really doubt that the social media will be such a significant way to check politicians.

More or less it will happen the opposite ( already happening ), where the politicians will judge the "average" citizen, by analysing tons of social media posts and reactions to them.

No matter the amount of stupid or disrespectful stuff someone says on (social) media, many voters actually don't seem to care that much about it.

Online privacy is not about posting rude stuff on Twitter, come on

At least it's public, people will eventually accept no body is perfect, let alone when they were teenagers.

I concern more about Google. They monitor everything users did, they memorize everything users did even you delete your account, they use data for everything that may not benefit users.

But I doubt it, because we have an oversupply of friends / job candidates / political aspirants, all vying for a piece of us.

Trump might seem like an outlier, but he's more like Reagan: an actor. He's a puppet on stage and the corporations actually running the show know they can play him. He's there to distract America from all the interest groups that really run things and they selected him because he's so out there.

Make no mistake, the future leaders will either be groomed from an early age to be very careful with their public image or the puppet masters will latch onto actors who will be bombastic to keep America distracted.

The rules are different for the rich. Their PR departments build worlds around them that use social networking. If there's any doubt, remember Obama joked about predator droning people interested in his daughter and people laughed.

In normal life, people don't take turns loudly stating their political opinions to a room of people and then looking to see how many people agree with them. They also don't have product placements or subtle advertising injected into their normal conversations. They also don't obsessively and continuously call up other people to see if they have any interesting new content to share.

Social Media is not just a tool that we use to communicate with each other along the lines of a phone or messaging service. It is a platform that is designed to be addictive and to carefully meter out hits of dopamine to keep people coming back. The current popular social media platforms aren't popular because they provide a nice service that people enjoy, they're popular because they exploit weaknesses in human behavior and cause people to use them obsessively and unhealthily. The customers that are funding these platforms and driving the design are not the people that use them, they are advertisers that want their ads to be as targeted, subtle, and as widely viewed as possible.

I agree that social media is not going away, but unless there is a fundamental shift in the way it's designed it may be "here to stay" in the way that gambling is "here to stay". Okay in moderation, but dangerous and fundamentally designed to take something from you.

Online privacy isn't just about hiding the stupid stuff you post online. Do you wear a name tag on your shirt with PII at all times when you go out in public or interact with others in a public setting? Why not?

I'd love for everyone who says "I don't care about online privacy" to start wearing badges in public with a unique identifier and all the information available about them on the internet for others to see.

When the labour party objected publicly, she accused them of being "in favour of terrorism" (again on Facebook I believe), which was very unfortunate seeing that their youth division were the target of the 2011 terror attack on Utøya.

So right now other parties in government are questioning her ability to serve as Minister of Justice and Public Security and she will likely have to leave her post this week.

I could not find any sources in English, but it's the headline of any .no news sites at the moment: https://www.nrk.no/norge/krf-har-holdt-skjebnemote-om-mistil...