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Comment by eric_b | Hacker News Reader

I've had a dormant FB account for years. I don't like the site and I never add content. I believe that social media has become a net detractor to quality-of-life for many (most?) humans who use it. I think Mark Zuckerberg is either incredibly naive, or a sleaze bag, but in either case should suffer some consequences from this.

That said, I probably won't delete my account. It remains the only way many of my friends plan events. It exists, for me, solely so I can be invited to things. I imagine there are many others like me. Like it or not, I suspect this is a blip for FB.

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I am sure that MZ is the latter. F*book is a farce. You are the problem. Be the change you want to see. Reach out to people other ways for events. FFS, you are connected 24x7 to the internet, not facebook exclusively, never in the history of humanity have we had this level of instantaneous hyperconnection, that excuse is a lie.

It surprises me how many people assume that Zuckerberg is evil. I've never seen any convincing evidence of him being anything other than a relatively regular guy in an extremely unique circumstance.

What makes you so sure he's a sleazebag?

> Reach out to people other ways for events.

It's the other way around, he's being reached by other people through FB. What good would it do to make an account where his friends are not?

Surely the reason he is being invited is not because he has an account on an online platform. We are in a hyperconnected world where an infinite number of ways to communicate exist.

You don't need to rely on a single closed-garden platform for communication. F*book sole purpose as a corporation is built around harvesting as much personal data about you as possible and selling it to the highest and most nefarious bidder.

As someone who never had an FB account, I can assure you I've missed multiple events over the years over this. People simply forget that I don't have an account.

I would not call people friends if they can't take the little inconvenience to text me to invite me somewhere if I don't use Facebook.

As a long-time human, who's worked with a lot of humans, I'd advise you not to underestimate the power of trivial inconveniences.

Rational, perfectly selfish agents in an environment of frictionless transactions might still invite me to events if I were off their social media platform. Humans will not.

Sounds like a semantic nitpick. The point doesn't change if they're acquaintances instead.

Same here. I probably gave FB way too much information over the early years, but I can't see what difference a dormant FB account with occasional event planning activity does over deleting it outright. It's not like you can ever "delete" your FB account anyway.

As we say around these parts, "perfect is the enemy of good".

I've used Facebook a fair bit over the past decade and only deactivated it two months ago, after Zuckerberg signalled his intentions for 2018. I see a deactivated account as being a precursor to finding a way to test, properly obfuscate and then really delete.

So compared to doing nothing, I am in the process of deleting as much as possible. I don't want to participate with events, groups or with people who might be encouraged by me staying (this assumes that they care, of which some do; so it is my responsibility to help pull them away).

Read this: http://www.salimvirani.com/facebook/

I agree there are tons of share praxtices here - but there is always the “alternative cost” to consider. For example - would the alternative be just switching to a different social network for “social graph management”? If so - which one? And for Facebook’s many services (calebdar, photo albums, chat) there are numerous alternatives to each - but would the privacy issues of using all those competitors together be worse or better than just staying on Facebook?

There is also the issue of damage done. Facebook knows a lot about me, too much, but the competing service might not. Switching to other services means giving them a lot of the information I already regret I gave Facebook.

So in the end - unless one convinces both one self and all contacts to switch to “traditional” social networking such as a phonebook, a list of email addresses, blogs for photos, secure chat apps - one must consider what the alternative “integrity cost” to Facebook is.

People have to be pulled not just from Facebook but to something else (unless they agree to the phonebook style social network - which nearly no one will). But what?

They're good questions and would likely depend on how already invested one is into Facebook. You completely leaving it (for example) would probably not have as great an effect as me leaving, guessing on the fact that I've used it quite a lot over the past x years.

For those who are light users - my best guess is that they'll either not see the problem and continue, or switch to a more addictive platform (Twitter). You might choose to hand out a not-Facebook contact detail or alternative preferred method of events notification and this will probably contribute something to nudging another person toward a particular direction (if it's as simple as handing out a secure chat app and letting others know they exist, that could be a good thing)

For moderate and heavy users, they might deactivate and then delete Facebook and learn from that experience and then be wary of all social media from that point on and choose to go outside more to ride a bike in their local area, etc.

It's all worth considering.

> I think Mark Zuckerberg is either incredibly naive, or a sleaze bag

Hmm typically when someone says that people are "dumb fucks" it usually means they are simply incredibly naive /s

Or he lacks the social awareness, introspectiveness to see how his product has a negative impact.

Or in this case, he was a 20 year old kid running a website with his college friends and roommates.

At this point, I think it is unproductive to comment on Zuckerberg as an individual (ad-hominem attacks?) because this leads to assuming that any alternative CEO would be better. I don't think we've had any solid evidence so far that he's naïve or a "sleazebag". However, what might be more frightening is the fact that he appears to be very normal and that many of us might share more traits with him than we'd be comfortable with admitting. Or perhaps that isn't frightening for many, and he is who some still aspire to (just like how many admire the management style of Torvalds or Jobs).

Facebook's business model doesn't depend on Mark Zuckerberg's "magic". It will continue to grow or break regardless of whether he's at the helm or not. Users, advertisers, competitors and governments will have to be the ones to decide.

When a 20 year old calls people dumb fucks in a private conversation, it generally means that they are a normal 20 year old.

Saying that Zuckerberg is a sleazebag based on a snippet of a private conversation he had 15 years ago when he was a college student is a stretch.

I remember being 20 years old and no, I haven't been calling people "dumb fucks" in private conversations; to the contrary, I ran a small website on geocites in 1995 (if you don't know them, google it) and was super-happy when I had people commenting on it. Last thing my 20-year old would call them was "dumb fucks" for merely entertaining with my site.

Your behavior is too small a sample size to have any bearing on the behavior of 20 year olds on average.

It's entirely possible that you're a much better person than Mark Zuckerberg. That doesn't make him a bad person.

I also remember being 20 and I said much worse things than calling a bunch of people dumb fucks in private conversation.

Paperless Post is an event planning alternative that doesn't require people to sign up or to make an account, just to have an email address.

I'm in same boat like you. I use Facebook occasionally when I need to post/look at posts in rental listings groups.

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