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Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that have lots of immediate help about all sorts of things -- I'd immediately lose access to all that. I wish there was a better way, but I can't see myself getting rid of FB without a notable disruption to my life. #sad

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I've never used fb, so it's scary to see comments like this.

Right? As if those of us who haven't used facebook for years are living these inhospitably inconvenient lives? I have friends all over the world and we keep in touch...we don't really need a central platform to do so either. I can honestly say that I could really easily drop any of the platforms that I do use (telegram, snapchat, flickr, hackernews) in an instant and it would probably have such a minimal impact in my life that I could care less. Is it these companies' impetus to trick its users into thinking they can't live without them? I think so.

Arguments like yours are extremely tired, and have a strong smell of "look how sad your life is compared to mine".

I could easily make the same argument about email. You know the last time I emailed a friend? Literally never. I don't even know my friends email addresses. I don't even know if they use it.

I could make the same argument about letters. I don't know the addresses of my friends. I know where their houses are and I can drive to them, but I've never sent them a letter.

I could make the same argument about phone calls. I know my friends numbers, but only so I can text them. If I called one of my friends on the phone, I imagine they'd be very confused as to why I didn't just text them. Their first question would probably be "are you driving or what?"

Oh how sad the lives must be of people who call, write letters, or write emails. What inhospitably inconvenient lives they lead. I'm glad you've evolved to more advanced forms of social interaction. Now please stop judging everyone else who chooses a different method of social interaction than you.

I deleted the Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps from my phone two months ago. I love how well that works for me.

I can still contact people (just have to open my computer) and read FB groups. But I don't really post to FB anymore and don't browse the feed at all.

And I don't feel like I am missing anything. (YMMV)

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to try without it for 30 days: if you truly can’t find a way around it, fine, check it every second day. You might be surprised how unimportant it ends up being

Yes I do this as well. I don't use facebook for platform, news or ads. I use facebook every other day to comment on what friends are doing and its useful for my local community news, events via groups or are they pages not sure. I don't trust Facebook and don't upload or share my personal information.

I've slowly stopped using it because the quality of content is just so incredibly low. Facebook has created a negative feedback loop for me, the more "suggested" bullshit they attempt to push the less I care. I when every third post is that sort of thing it becomes less useful. I've personally been blocked from "hiding" ads on numerous occasions.

What happened to good ol' emails? Serious question... Can't you organize amongst friends with emails? I hate to suggest Slack as well... But there are alternatives is the point...

What about Meetup.com for bigger groups?

How old are you? I am asking because I remember full well the pre-facebook days when people would send around 'funny videos' to groups of friends, with no chance of opting out, getting your email address shared with people you don't know, filling your inbox with crap, etc... Something like FB is hundreds times more convenient

Lol.. good point. I like to think I was one of the first million people on Facebook when I got it in college... Maybe users who were initiated to Facebook earlier have it more ingrained in their lives.

Gosh, I miss Uncle Dan's chain emails about how terrible Bill Clinton is. . .

wat

It's insanely easier to filter those things out with email.

It's been years since I've used FB, but I don't recall any very good filters for those types of things, and in fact they are incentivized to show you more of them.

No it isn't - not if the same person sends you a mixture of useless and usefule emails. And it doesn't solve the problem of your email adress being made public.

With FB, you simply go on it when you feel like / have the time.

Yeah, actually, I do that all the time. Regex's are awesome, and so is spamassasin. There are plenty of other "rule-based" type tools out there too.

What is the problem with an email being public? I don't think I understand what you mean.

Yes, of course, we all have the time for endless fiddling with regular expressions... please

I never said you had to. I provided a list of tools. You have yet to bring anything worthwhile to the discussion except to complain about tools you don't understand.

Any UX expert can tell you that every little bit of friction counts. I see that mentioned or assumed every day here on HN, but somehow in discussions about using vs. abandoning Facebook it gets thrown out the window. I might be comfortable with email, you might be comfortable with Slack, but my uncle or my high-school friend who's a massage therapist might not be. Also, they and a couple of dozen other older, younger, or less tech-savvy friends are already on Facebook and comfortable doing things there. Getting them to switch to a different platform is a hard sell even if it's more convenient, and if it's even marginally less convenient then forget it. Ease of use and network effects are both real things.

Email addresses come and go all the time, get changed, deactivated, or people start using different emails and never check the old ones. But FB messages are always seen. Email is just not a reliable long-term "address" for someone.

I only go on facebook to talk to other car enthusiasts for a particular brand. Some of them are on some online forums, but most aren't. They are also not my friends - so I don't really want to share emails. The group is also non-English speaking - so services like Meetup or Slack are out of the question. It's a tough one. I think reverting back to standard post-based online forums is the best, but they have more friction and they are hard to discover for some.

I deleted it three or four months ago when I realized that it was just making me unhappy.

You know, I thought the same thing. But honestly I rarely used those forums. And the people I can't keep in contact with, well... I don't really miss them. I have phone numbers for the people that matter and have resumed exchanging phone numbers with people, which I hadn't really done in several years.

I am part of an organization that uses fb as the primary means of communication. The people that at the top have been pretty obnoxious about me not being on it anymore. But frankly, I see their attitude as pretty toxic and think they should move to a professional method of communication (they are a pretty amateurish / small org).

Sometimes disruption is a good thing. I've been studying a lot more (as a professional dev taking online classes) in the past few months since leaving fb.

This is what I do to keep facebook from being annoying

1. Delete (disable) facebook app on phone 2. Stop all notifications from facebook from browser 3. Use email notifications to see updates to conversations 4. Use a seperate browser (phone and desktop) to login into facebook to reduce privacy tracking

If you want to check up on a specific friend, just go to their facebook profile.

You can deactivate your FB account and still use Messenger (and hence keep your contacts). You would lose Groups and Events though

You'd still have to go give up your phone number. In the end, you might give up your FB profile but you've not quite achieved the objective of giving up your FB profile.

Why would anyone want to use messenger, it is such a low quality app to be beyond useless.

Because all your friends already have Facebook accounts.

It seems like a big problem until you just do it, and then you realise you didn't need it anywhere near as much as you think.

Are you unable to ask those people for alternative contact information?

Many dozens or even hundreds of people, not to mention the thousands on the groups that are helpful strangers? And even if I got all that contact information, email and other contact stuff changes pretty quickly, easily a lot of it would got out of date within a year or two. But people keep their FB accounts active so you can always contact them through there.

What is the point of staying in contact only in Facebook ? If someone is important for me, I'd be in contact with them in real life or another platform.

Also, lots of people seem to be unaware of that you can delete your Facebook account. They don't have a link to the delete page from settings menu though. It's here: https://facebook.com/account/delete

Page not found

It would be very Facebook-y to change that URL daily to break all the "how to delete your Facebook" tutorials that crop up.

It's actually https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account

This is one of those 'soooo obvious but untrue' statements

I use it to keep in touch with far away or unimportant people. Second degree aunts, ex schoolmates, etc. Without FB it's a nightmare keeping in touch the few times I want to (people change email addresses all the time). Also, many groups are useful

You can stay in touch with relatives via mobile phone. You can text them and ask how they do. Personally, I created a Whatsapp group for my extended family. Some of them don't use Facebook by the way.

It doesn't make any sense to complain about Facebook's business model and also not want to sacrifice a worthless personal account noone cares about.

We choose what we use and they choose how they make money. You can expect them to be ethical but they have no responsibilities to meet your expectations, as they have never promised to be a platform that respects privacy.

"I created a Whatsapp group for my extended family"... You're just changing one poison for another one. Don't forget who owns Whatsapp.

I own Whatsapp. Do you know why? Because I own my contact list. I can migrate my whole family to Telegram or Signal tomorrow. Currently it's not bothering me.

It’s not perfect to still be sharing your social graph, but at least chats are e2e encrypted by default.

LOL, and who owns WhatsApp /facepalm

I don't like the "always on" part of WhatsApp and the like. I like FB because I can go on when I fell like. Who are you to tell me what I should use?

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