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.