Why I deleted Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Why I deleted Facebook

sivers.org

57 pointsslig5 comments

I find the whole social media attraction very puzzling. I used Facebook first in 2009 or so. I logged in a few times a month for the next 3 years and then my account was hacked. I now have thousands of Greek "friends." Facebook discovered this and blocked my account so now I can't even log in and I have literally no reason to call them to prove I'm me and get access back. It simply has no value to me. Yeah, my wife and older kid are on it, but I see them in person every day, so...

The friends I caught up with over the years were nice to hear from, but then I realized there was a reason we had drifted apart and there was no reason to wake up sleeping dogs.

Twitter's probably even worse. I signed up for an account, then thought "what the hell am I going to do with this?" and never logged back in. They "closed" my account last year for lack of activity.

But I "get" Reddit. I "get" HN and the other online fora I contribute to. Those actually provide value to me. Facebook & Twitter? Not so much.

Reddit and HN are closer to the anti-social media end of the spectrum, in so far as any relationships built are generally pretty loose. People are be aware of each other, but generally the discussion is focused on the topic at hand.

Facebook in it's purest form is a Personal Relationship Management platform - you'll keep in touch with friends and associates, be reminded of birthdays, keep up with what your chums are doing without having to ask, plan events, accidentally like your ex's holiday pics from 4 years ago, all that stuff. The topic is less relevant than the people.*

I'd actually be interested in a PRM platform that wasn't inherently evil, but in the absence of interoperability, things like that will only really gain any meaningful value from their ubiquitousness and i don't have the enthusiasm to persuade everybody i know to sign up to a service to see pictures of my cat. It's a pretty good cat too.

*Of course FB advertising, promoted posts, people being terrible and Fake News™ all muddy the waters a bit.

He reasons that FB will be gone one day because so were mp3.com and myspace. I don't agree with this logic. It was a race between social media sites and FB has won. FB will go through many challenges and maybe their business model will change drastically at some point but they are already way too big to bust.

There was a time when some would have said the same of AOL.

That may be but I think the global influence they wield is closer to that of Microsoft. Microsoft has long been a bit of the sick man of the IT-industry (missed mobile etc) but they are not leaving any time soon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com