Elon Musk Deletes Own, SpaceX and Tesla Facebook Pages After #deletefacebook | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk Deletes Own, SpaceX and Tesla Facebook Pages After #deletefacebook

techcrunch.com

1,390 pointsmiddle1499 comments

I always felt like doing this (deleting my facebook account), but fear of missing out always kept me from doing it. Whenever I seriously considered leaving the platform, I had a vague sense that I would "not belong to the herd" anymore, that I would lose the option to contact friends / family members, that I would be left outdoors.

The other day I made the step. I deleted my account. Before I did I exported all my data.

Two days past and I have a strange sense of freedom. Previously I would check my FB feed a dozen times a day. Although I deleted the app years ago, never really used Messenger, always had to use different browsers than Safari on my iPhone because FB would not let me read/use messages in Safari, instead it wanted me to install Messagner. So previously I would check my feed many times a day to kill time. I was a "lurker". Never posted anything since years, just used it as a news reader. And glanced over the things that my contacts posted. It gave me an illusionary feeling of connectedness, when in fact I could not be more disconnected from real contacts, quality contacts, and most of all: from myself by fleeing into a dull activity, by entering "the matrix", killing time.

Today I felt like in my childhood, going to appointments, not killing time on my way to my appointment, having seen my surroundings like back in those days without so many distractions. A wonderful feeling.

I hope this platform dies, rather quickly. Because it harms society and individuals more than we are aware of.

Edit: Grammar

>I hope this platform dies, rather quickly. Because it harms society and individuals more than we are aware of.

I'm not deleting my account. I only signed up because I was using the Facebook API for something once and needed an account to test. Other than that, I occasionally post links to news, pictures (look at my food! look at this funny animal!), and I check on groups that I belong to, especially the trading ones. The groups are especially useful. I also only ever log in from a single place, my mobile.

It always amazes me how people use it. What did you think was going to happen to that data? How do you think a service as large as Facebook was paying it's bills? People don't need to stop using Facebook. They need to sit for a second and think about they are using it.

My problem is not how they use / misused the data. Thats a whole different chapter. I am accusing them of having made a platform that is designed to make you come back, as often as possible. They give you the illusion of being connected, liked when you post something and others hit the like button, but in reality many of your contacts feel miserable when you did something that they can't. And all that happens is that your attention gets distracted, whenever you login. Also, this is a machinery that allows to manipulate the psychology of the masses. Manipulate the masses in a way our societies never have seen before. Democracies are vulnerable. They always have been. But never as much as with platforms like this.

And by the way: This man is a genious. He made half the population of the world believe that privacy isn't something valueable, that we should share our most precious moments with half the world.

Edit: minor change

"designed to make you come back" ... but that's true of the whole ad-supported internet, broadcast TV etc. If it's free, you are the product. Still a problem, but not just a FB problem.

> What did you think was going to happen to that data?

In some sense you are right, but in this context you are missing the point. The whole point of this recent uproar is that 3rd parties got access to significant amounts of data without consent. Why should people expect that to happen?

I think the biggest problem with a lot of companies is that it's all about growth. Every year more money, more customers etc. Eventually something will give when you're trying to provide a free service and become a huge company. They have to sell something to someone who will pay.

So for a social media company that is free for users and requires a huge software development effort? What are their assets? Pretty much just users. Maybe their code based. I think it's almost inevitable that they put ads on stuff and then later sell your data. What else were they going to do? Start asking users to pay a subscription? Sell the software so that others can spin up their own social media websites?

Its become a cliche but "if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer, you're the product". Now obviously companies with products and services you pay for, are still going to screw you over. But yes, I think this is exactly what people should expect to happen.

>Today I felt like in my childhood, going to appointments, not killing time on my way to my appointment, having seen my surroundings like back in those days without so many distractions. A wonderful feeling.

Well put. For me, it’s not FB that is standing in the way ... it’s HN! ;)

That being said, this place tends to have much higher caliber comments that what I read on FB, and I learn so much from both articles and discussion. I’ll #neverdeleteHN

In your opinion, what is your criteria for declaring that a platform is "bad for you" and "an unhealthy habit"?

Personally, I spend ALOT of my free time lurking 4chan's /g/ "technology" board, 4chan's /ck/ cooking board, and a carefully curated list of my favorite food and technology related subreddits on Reddit. I personally consider my addictions to be quite healthy because I learn and absorb a tremendous amount of information from sites that focus more on "actual content that matters" and less on worshiping the same small group of narcissistic acquaintances that congregate on platforms where "disliking" content is frowned upon.

Sure there's a lot of stupid crap on 4chan and reddit is full of corporate and government shills, but the internet has grown SO MUCH lately that the signal to noise ratio isn't as bad as it was in the early 2000s. My only problem nowadays is that I don't have enough time in a day to read/watch/comment on all the important stuff I find on the net. Compare that to the early 2000's, when useful information on the internet was so scarce, that I had to use minesweeper in my highschool computer labs to pass the time.

I for one am happy at how much content there is on the internet now. If you're smart, you can curate your own nonstop stream of "useful" content without that much effort. Problem is that you have to reject content that is curated by big businesses like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and program your own method of retrieving things that matter.

People will always complain about the exponential growth of information. Look at newspapers and the printing press. I'm sure that people reacted the same way towards pocket watches and newspapers as people nowadays are reacting to smartphones and social media. Some people just have addictive personalities in general, and will blame not being productive on whoever's in charge of "information" at any given moment.

Not the parent, but I would say that a platform should somehow add value to your life to be "good for you". HN, Reddit (depending on where you go), other sites etc can entertain, teach, and connect you with interesting people. Social networks I've found are value detractors for me because:

A. I don't care what 95% of people I am connected with are doing, and I regularly talk to the people I care about anyway.

B. I can't have any meaningful discussions on them

C. They are dominated by high volume posters who tend to be very opinionated. Very opinionated people tend to have extreme opinions which are usually wrong and aren't particularly interesting to me.

D. The networks present a false sense of reality which lowers happiness. Everyone always posts their highlight reel which makes you feel like the whole world is killing it constantly and you aren't.

> D. The networks present a false sense of reality which lowers happiness. Everyone always posts their highlight reel which makes you feel like the whole world is killing it constantly and you aren't.

This! I can resonate with all of your points. But this one is one of their major weaknesses.

> The networks present a false sense of reality which lowers happiness. Everyone always posts their highlight reel which makes you feel like the whole world is killing it constantly and you aren't.

If this is what happens in your feed, you have a shallower and less genuine set of social media connections than I do. I get highlights, sure, but just as much lowlights, and quotidian events that don't meet either description.

I suspect that the people who connect with networks of people who do exclusive self-image-burnishing social media posts would also connect with people that provide the same kind of fronts in other venues (including in-person), though I'll also grant that if you tend to connect predominantly with such people, social media magnifies their effect, as it's easier to consistently present an image online than in person.)

> you have a shallower and less genuine set of social media connections

I don't think you have to be "shallow" to be biased towards posting highlights.

You spend a nice vacation in Asia? Your kid managed an important accomplishment? Found a restaurant that's awesome? Aren't these the kind of things that you naturally have the tendency to share?

In contrast, you spent your saturday doing nothing at home? Your kid did an average thing? You ate food that's just "okay"? Am I shallow if I don't like posting these things? Sure some of the days I might want to post about some average or bad things, but I think I'm still biased towards the highlights

As to point C, I think the problem you have is that you are following or associating with people whose opinions do not agree with your own. There are many opinionated people who are insightful, intelligent and interesting. Volume of posting does not always imply 'wrongness'. Similarly, regarding point A, why are you even connected to these 95% of people you don't care about? Perhaps if you curated or controlled who you connected to better you would find social networks much more valuable.

So essentially- the lack of a "dislike" or "downvote" button makes people unbearable?

As someone who cooks a lot, I was curious what /ck/ could have to offer. I hadn't been to 4chan in years. I'm not sure how this board has tremendous amounts of useful information.

/ck/ is actually one of the sanest places on 4chan, in my personal opinion. It's not the nicest place on earth- I mean, it is 4chan, so memes and rudeness aren't against the rules. Couple that with optional anonymity, and you're bound to encounter some rough edges here and there.

Having said that though- I've been there since 2007, and I used to get lots of compliments for posting original content (pictures of food being cooked). People love to talk about food there- plus you get to hear actual line cooks talking about things. You don't have to wait forever to get a reply on a thread, and good threads (like costco food threads) can go up to hundreds of replies before being pruned. All in all, I don't hate the place. My usual bookmarks each day are: 1) HN 2) Reddit 3) /ck/ + /g/ + /fit/ 4) google news (only if important stuff is hapenning in the world, though I Have to admit that the fastest place to get instantaneous information nowadays is /b/)

> Previously I would check my FB feed a dozen times a day

Wow. Is this still common these days? I rarely check FB. Honestly, I end up checking Twitter and HN way more.

This is, conservatively, once an hour while awake, which doesn't seem all that much. You are the outlier here, I think. Many people check Facebook much more frequently than hourly.

Pro tip: If you go to touch.facebook.com and request a desktop site, it will let you access your messages on a mobile web browser without installing messenger. :D

Also mbasic.facebook.com, the JavaScript-free version of the site.

Same with m.facebook.com, just request the desktop site and you can access messages.

Though it's not particularly fun to use that way as touch events become quite sensitive and you end up clicking things you didn't mean to

It doesn't have to be all or nothing.

I've installed plugins to disable my newsfeed and it's been great. Can't really think of a downside to it as it previously was a waste of time and only promoting superficial forced relationships through superficial comments.

You can totally stick to using Messenger as it still promotes 1-1 intentional relationships, and messenger is relatively easy to migrate off of as you can always get your closest friends to add you on alternatives.

I never understood these posts. I’m not a huge fan of companies that make their living by selling their users privacy data, but Facebook is just a platform.

I have an account because my social circle organizes events on there, but that’s the only thing I use it for. I log in once or twice a month and have made a total of 3 posts to my wall since 2014.

I understand that it can be a tine sink for some people, but so can 4chan, Reddit, hacker news and other social networks.

And that is the thing I don’t understand. Why is wasting your time talking to strangers on HN more valuable than talking with people you actually know on Facebook?

That being said I’m happy for you. Everyone should drop things that make them miserable, and you’ve managed to do so which I think is great.

I already does not use facebook and the likes. For me, I had a similar feeling after I blocked reddit/hn domains.

>I hope this platform dies, rather quickly. Because it harms society and individuals more than we are aware of.

Reddit/HN are places where places that can make you feel like you are doing something or "contributing", without actually making any real impact. A feeling similar to the the illusionary feeling thing you refer in your comment. On one had, it helps individuals to grow and on the other, it restricts their actions to an isolated chamber where the real world remain safe from their thoughts/questions.

So I think, after a certain point. You should forcefully disconnect/distance yourself from these platform, and start to engage in more real world activities. For ex, write a blog, write actual newspaper articles. Send your thoughts to actual news papers for them to publish in such sections, engage in local activities and discussion Etc.

An example of this is that when we came to know about the testing of self driving vehicles happening, many of the people here might have asked "What are the tests there were done before these vehicles are put on road"? Is there any legal groundwork in place?

But those questions remained safely in the realm of the HN servers as some binary pattern in a Hard disk platter. They didn't get out it the real world. They didn't get translated into real question to real authorities.

>Reddit/HN are places where places that can make you feel like you are doing something or "contributing", without actually making any real impact.

Impact for its own sake is overrated. That's not to say you should navelgaze and philosophize about everything but you really do need a balance. The startup community in particular is in love with the image of hustle and whirlwind activity usually just for the sake of ingratiating a handful of egos.

Blogs and newspaper articles have been left in the dust. We can romanticize the long form journalist but really that's a step back. The pool of ideas is now open to anyone with a well worded comment. Rather than privileging a credentialed journalist to express an opinion for us there is a battle of contrasting ideas from many more (though never all) backgrounds to find consensus. To me this is the future. A handful of ivy league graduates pontificating back and forth in op-eds through limited newspaper and magazine space is the past.

You might argue that this will create an environment full of emotion and rhetoric but really that's business as usual. The well educated have just been schooled in how to dress up their opinions as though they were facts. Internet comment sections are about deciding how a problem or conversation will be framed not necessarily about solving those problems. Framing/rhetoric and analysis of virtues are a huge part of determining what "impact" will look like.

> But those questions remained safely in the realm of the HN servers as some binary pattern in a Hard disk platter. They didn't get out it the real world.

If no one would bother to read them sure. But I fail to see how the fact that information is stored in a 'binary pattern in a hard disk platter' makes it less relevant than it being stored on a slice of fallen tree... Especially in our day and age I would argue for the opposite, the virtual medium has become more important - because more people are using it to get their information.

> virtual medium has become more important - because more people are using it to get their information...

"More" does not necessary equals better..Having talk with a concerned authority or a minister might be thousand times better than communicating to a million reddit/hn readers..

Can you think one single instance where a reddit/hn comment ended up having a real world impact?

FYI here’s a link to delete your Facebook account: https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account

Earlier I had “deactivated” my account thinking it would get deleted, but then I learned I have to visit this page to actually delete it.

Does doing this also delete Messenger? I'm aware there's been a little bit of decoupling of the two services in recent times.

Deactivating your account does nothing to Messenger, not sure about deleting.

Yes, unfortunately.

If you're deleting Facebook and not getting rid of messenger you're missing the point. Messenger is more invasive in many ways, even if it doesn't track your web activity as much.

Invasiveness of Messenger is much more bearable because it lets me communicate with my Facebook friends, which I see as much more important benefit compared to a time sink newsfeed.

Also, using Messenger Lite (Android only) is a vastly better experience than the main Messenger app.

SlimSocial also supports Messenger and is a good alternative to the Facebook app in general. You still have the same privacy issues regarding data on Facebook's servers, but at least this app lacks the client-side analytics.

I also use messenger to communicate with friends, but i think im going to make the effort to convince them to move to a privacy focused and non data mining platform, such as telegram.

Maybe I'm missing something, but why not just use sms?

The thing you are missing is that many of us have friends all over the world. And international SMS quickly gets expensive. (Also, most people are not on signal / your-favorite-messaging-app) ...

My friends use messenger and getting them to change is hard, not sure why they migrated to it in the first place...

Group chat doesn't exist in sms.

Also it is quite old fashioned and painfully limited wrt/attachments.

And expensive for thise with families/friends abroad.

People make group chats in FB messenger. If you don't have messenger, you don't get to be in the group chat.

Because SMS only supports text, but not any form of multimedia. Granted you can use MMS but that's really expensive and only does photo and video. Also, SMS has no encryption or sender authentication, not even any way to prevent MITM sniffing or spoofing (which is why online banking SMS verification is unsafe as hell).

Try threema. They have multimedia, everything is encrypted and group chat works well. - Not open source, it cost a little, but I trust them.

To give my personal answer for it, there's no other cross-platform messaging service that everyone uses.

There are other chat services sure, but the Facebook has by far the most number of people I know on it. Also, not everyone I know exchange numbers. There's no usernames, etc on Facebook so its easy to find people too.

Weird, I know, but guess generations are changing. Apparently now Snapchat has become the main form of 'communication' for many millennial with their friends. So looks like I'm falling behind.

SMS isn't cross-platform and costs money.

It's funny, because for me the primary benefit of Facebook is events. Keeping track of events with calendar invites is much more clunky and higher friction. Messenger is just walled-garden email and I could live without it, but I have no idea how to do community events as well as I can with Facebook.

And it's funny because contrary to the "Facebook as hypnotist" narrative (which is real) Facebook is a really fantastic tool for getting people together talking face to face and even working together on things.

My kids school uses signup genius. There are a few solutions

It just depends on what you use it for. A lot of my friends have cheap phone plans with low network minutes/texts but unlimited wifi. Facebook Messenger becomes a cheap phone in this case. There's alternatives, but I'd have to convince everyone I know to swap to them...not gonna happen.

Meetup.com maybe? But I agree, I use Facebook Events a lot. It comes back to that issue of "everyone is here and using it, so this is where events are posted".

Until you realize that FB has no API to get events out of FB. FB might be useful but it's the same usefulness as having an email thread with a calendar invite. They don't let you export your event data in any meaningful way to keep you on the platform.

My FB events appear in my iCal just fine via CalDav. Not sure why you think you can't grab your data.

It's not just about events automatically appearing. First of all, I'm not sure of a way to do that without individually exporting events, maybe if I setup FB emails for events, I could get GMail to auto-add them, but I don't use GMail so it would take more setup to ingest invites automatically. But even then, there's no way to RSVP inside the calendar invite itself. The interface is opaque, they let you read their data, but not interact with it in a programmatic way despite it being _your_ friend network and _your_ event.

If Facebook decides you should be allowed to talk face to face and work together, that is. One of the big problems with Facebook events is that the algorithm filters them out pretty aggressively unless the creator pays to promote them.

If I have messenger (edit: Messenger Lite) on my phone, is it tracking my location the same as the facebook app would? I usually have location services turned off but I don't imagine that makes much difference.

(I bet that's a stupid question)

Not a stupid question.

I also don't know if turning off location services actually disables the ability of apps to get your location.

It does not. It's essentially preventing them from getting granular or "fine" location. They can still get basic telemetry as I recall.

...and does it actually delete your data from Facebook's servers? I.e. all their records of your messaging history, all your photos, their ability to make a future third party face-recognize you on the street, their knowledge of who you find attractive, what party you are likely to vote for, what crimes you are likely to commit, what you like to spend money on and so on and so forth?

I don't think so. I've kept my account primarily because I assume they'd have a shadow account on me. Just because you don't have a FB account doesn't mean they don't have data on you.

Yes I believe so, although they say it may take a while for various batch processes to get rid of all traces - for instance tape backup.

I've kept an account partly for that reason. I'm wondering how much GDPR might change that though. Can anyone with more expertise on the matter weigh in?

Assuming I could be relatively certain that my data will be deleted, I'd probably keep a bare account but delete most of what they have.

I would expect that much of your data would remain, though specific portions would be anonymized. I would guess that photos, the contents of posts, etc. would vanish (eventually), but the account id and metadata, connections to other accounts, events, and the like, would remain in perpetuity.

What happens to your Spotify account if you delete/deactivate your facebook account? I made the mistake of linking the 2 when I first joined Spotify in my haste to listen to music.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Tutorial-How-to-Di...

You will need to contact Spotify support if you deactivated Facebook prior to disconnecting from Spotify.

Looking through my email archives, I see I had to contact Spotify support via email and ask them to delete the Spotify account I'd created via FB, so that I could signup again via an email login.

However! Spotify support were great, they offered to migrate all my playlists from the old account over to the new account. No guarantees they could do that now with everyone deleting their FB accounts at once, but I was really impressed with the friendliness of their service. They pretty much created a customer for life out of me from that support experience.

You will need to call Spotify. I was not able to cancel my Spotify subscription anymore after I deleted Facebook. So I had to call and they had to manually transfer all my playlists to a new account

You're not the only one - for years Spotify ONLY let you sign in with Facebook. And you aren't allowed to unlink them either. I had to just start a new Spotify account and Los everything.

The problem is, how do you find out how many sites you currently use Facebook Connect for, and get non-FB Connect logins for?

Until recently I thought Lyft made Facebook login mandatory, I'm not sure if that's still the case.

I use Lyft, and I have never used Facebook to log into ANYTHING. So I don't know if they support dropping an existing Facebook login, but they certainly support other authentication methods. (Mine is username-password.)

I don’t have a Facebook account and use Lyft.

I think if you look under "Apps" in your Facebook account settings, you can see a list of websites where you're logged in with Facebook.

> Earlier I had “deactivated” my account thinking it would get deleted, but then I learned I have to visit this page to actually delete it.

Thank you for pointing this out. I, too, was under the impression that "Deactivate" was the delete option, especially considering they place a "Delete" segment right above it but make it sound as if that is about handling your account after death. Some definite dark patterns in the UI right there.

It's both a dark pattern and a connivence - there are a bunch of people who will deactivate their account and then start it up again. Having the data there to just... rehydrate the account makes that re-onboarding much more seamless.

But yeah, there's a sneaking dark side to how they use that feature.

I thought my account was deleted for years. I randomly started getting FB emails about a month ago. A few days ago I was emailed about being tagged in a dead friends picture. Bye Zuck, I hate you at a personal level.

Deleting Facebook now, without good alternatives, might cause more problems than good.

Instead, we should first model what the future of social networking should look like:

https://hackernoon.com/a-new-kind-of-social-network-emotiona...

Then I am curious to hear people's thoughts on:

- Mastodon

- Secure Scuttlebutt

- Steemit

etc.

> Deleting Facebook now, without good alternatives, might cause more problems than good

It's safe to do it now. I got you covered:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

http://www.spacex.com/

https://www.tesla.com/

What's this mean? Really rich dude did something, you should too?

Is it not "safe" to do something until the guy people worship does something? Have respect for yourself.

Parent is saying that the Facebook alternative is a personal/corporate website.

Maybe (though it's vague enough to mean anything), but it's definitely of the Musk does it, you can too variety.

Those alternatives never went anywhere for the past 14 years. Musk is late to the game, what's his wiki prove?

The "I've got new respect for Musk" mantra (actually stated in this thread) when he's doing what other people have been doing for a decade, only difference is, he's rich, is very follow the crowd for something which prides itself on individuality like HN.

I think that the message ModernMech is trying to convey is the following:

-if you want to read the news for Tesla, go to their website -you don't need to be spied on 24/7 and having that "intelligence" coming back to bite you -you don't need a constant spy to follow you around to any page with a "like" button -you don't need to waste 60mins in cat videos and party photos on a party you were not invited, if your actual need to see the news about the new Tesla XYZ car

> I am curious to hear people's thoughts on: Mastodon, Secure Scuttlebutt, Steemit

None of them are very good...?

I #deletedFacebook a decade ago. I've been more than fine, as will everyone.

Hearing people’s rationalization for why leaving FB is impossible makes you realize how addictive and insidious the product truly is.

Seriously. It's like listening to smokers rationalize why they can't stop.

Conveniently ignoring that smokers do have a substance addition to nicotine.

I'm not ignoring it. The rationalizations just sounds similar, that's all. If anything it speaks to the strength of people's addiction to Facebook.

Many of us use Telegram.

Others use Signal.

Signal advantages: tptacek thinks the crypto is good.

Signal disadvantage: It wont work with limited permissions on your phone according to some people on HN.

Telegram advantage: somewhat more userfriendly. Larger userbase. Works even if you limit its permissions.

Telegram disadvantage: every cryptographer seems to think their crypto is bad. Uncertainty wrt their relations with Russian government. (I think they are enemies but some think they are very good friends or blackmailed into cooperation.)

> Many of us use Telegram.

And some friends and me use Threema. Very old fashioned: you pay some money and get a product. But I wouldn't want to switch.

Sounds like a product I'd like.

I used to like WhatsApp, another app with an old-fashioned business model ...

Imho threema is the best client overall. Very fast, very reliable, great UI, good crypto. Designed for company usage. Security whise however I guess Signal has the upper hand.

They both audit their crypto:

Threema audit: https://threema.ch/es/faq/code_audit

Signal audit: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1013.pdf

> Signal disadvantage: It wont work with limited permissions on your phone according to some people on HN.

I'm curious as to what those limited permissions are? I assume this refers to iOS, because in my experience, Android is not as restrictive of apps.

Not anymore, fixed approx. 2 months ago, see changelog:

> This holiday season, don't ask for everything all at once (especially during installation). Signal now supports dynamic permissions.

Disadvantages of Telegram, Signal: Add: don't work on desktops.

Telegram works well on desktops. For me that is part of being userfriendly.

The signal app works fine for me (on Mac)...

Secure Scuttlebutt is pretty amazing. I've seen a few demos of people who run a private social network app, Patchwork. Definitely something to look out for.

Note, if your account is already deactivated when you try to delete it you will again be asked for your password despite being already logged in. You will also be asked to complete a CAPTCHA. This will invariably result in the error message:

"Incorrect email/password combination"[1]

This is despite being logged in to FB with the same password.

The fix is to change your password, log out and log back in with the changed password. You will then be able to delete your account without issue.

Maybe the author could add this information to their post?

People have been asking on the FB help forum for years about how to resolve this error. FB refuses to answer anyone asking for help with this error. I'm guessing their failure to mention this or address this is quite intentional.

Oh and the audio versions of the CAPTCHAs are all completely unintelligible gibberish. I'm guessing this is intentional as well.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=4018056...

Dark UX

I had disabled my account a week ago, not realizing there was a separate delete option, then deleted it a couple days ago. I didn't run into this issue; I signed into my "disabled" account first, then went to the delete link and it worked.

It's a strange bug for sure. Friend I helped had to change their password 2-3 times before it would go through.

We typed it very carefully. Tried copying from notepad, the same copying used to reset the password.

It indeed felt like Hotel California, as someone below compared.

Interesting... completely unrelated to the recent issues, a few months ago, I wanted to log in to Facebook from a mobile browser so I could follow a link without installing the app.

I also ran into a challenging captcha and a page saying my account had been “locked”, but I was still able to log in. After logging in, I received a phone call from Palo Alto. When I let the call go to voicemail, it left a message consisting only of a recorded voice saying “goodbye”. Perhaps this was some poorly-implemented two-factor auth, but in context, I felt like Facebook was intentionally making the experience of using a mobile browser unpleasant to encourage use of the app.

Sounds like the delete your account page has similar “issues”.

From my experience optimizing signup funnels, it made me wonder if somebody is doing that work in reverse here. Are they getting a bonus based on what percentage of people abandon the account deletion process?

Maybe I’m just being paranoid, and optimizing those flows is simply not a high priority. But for a tech-focused company that tends to operate at a pretty high level, it felt like they are actively making things more difficult. Like this was the shittiest experience bright minds could come up with.

That's really weird. I didn't do any of the stuff you said lead up to the call but I also got a voicemail from Palo Alto that just said "Goodbye" I joked with my friends it was that California was about to fall off the US. Wonder if it is related to facebook or something.

I definitely got it within a few minutes of logging into Facebook from a mobile browser, which is not something I normally do... maybe someone was trying to log into your account?

I use only the mobile website for years and they are slowly removing features. The last I noticed that was removed was image upload in a comment.

Oh dear, a bug! I wonder if it's a bug like the one that raided your linked contacts and wiped out people's email addresses and replaced them with a @facebook.com email. Or the multiple 'glitches' that would reset your privacy settings to more public.

Or the glitch that makes your input disappear if you try to use the site in desktop mode on a mobile phone. Malicious bugs are at this point an obvious FB tactic for plausible deniability in bad UX directed at users with certain behavior.

Or, not malicious at all, simply a bug. The 'delete user' functionality is going to be rarely used, so it gets hardly any QA test coverage, compared to the news feed page functionality used by many hundreds of millions of people.

>Or the multiple 'glitches' that would reset your privacy settings to more public.

I didn't know this was a real thing. I was getting ready to delete my account a couple days ago but I wanted to set all the privacy settings to be as strict as possible before I did it.

Sure enough, somehow all of the advertising and data retention settings were on the most open option possible, despite restricting them when I made the account and when I would occasionally check my privacy settings

Bye FB, and while I'm at it, so long LinkedIn. Good riddance.

For too many years I kept a page at popular social networks even if they added negative value for me. I don't know, what if someone place a page there impersonating me? Well, I don't care anymore.

Facebook is like Hotel California.

> You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave!"

For anyone staying because of Facebook Messenger, it's not obvious but you can tie Messenger to your phone number instead of having a Facebook account.

It still requires you to create a new account (that has an account key you can automically store in Google Drive) but it works.

The downsides are that messenger.com doesn't support this so you can only access messenger on your phone and that Facebook still has an idea of who you are.

Does FB put in writing somewhere that deleting your account will result in all your data, including inferences and profiling data derived from data you and others have provided will be actually purged from their systems? Or do they just delete what little personal data you may have provided directly, but could still reconstitute virtually everything about you, whether anonymized or re-linked upon request or payment by a third party?

Search for "deleted" in https://www.facebook.com/full_data_use_policy. The bit you'd be worried about is: Keep in mind that information that others have shared about you is not part of your account and will not be deleted when you delete your account.

Which is wrong obviously. I should be able to purge all info about me from the site. Its not hard - after all, people tag users they talk about.

It's not obvious to me that other people's comments should be deleted or modified because they mention you. What if they mention you again after you've left?

While I don't normally give much weight to Business Insider, they have an interesting theory [1] that this is related to Zuckerberg's nasty comments about SpaceX after the rocket carrying Facebook's 85M satellite blew up.

Must feel pretty good for Elon considering how much press this is getting.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-deletes-tesla-space...

Don't forget another instance of back and forth between MZ and EM on twitter about "Dangers of Artificial Intelligence."

That was one of the few times that a rocket blowing up put a smile on my face. The last thing the world needs is Facebook satellites constantly orbiting overhead.

The satellite was headed to geostationary orbit over africa, 4Deg west. Unless you live in northern africa the satellite would never be overhead.

Being pedantic: In GEO, with an orbital radius of about 42Mm, and earth having a radius of 7Mm, that gives a radius of 7Mm * acos( 7Mm / 42Mm ) ~ 9800km around 4°W (almost a hemisphere), for which it would be overhead.

But admittedly it would only give service to a portion of that.

Props for Mm, instead of 'thousand km'.

Facebook didnt own the satellite, msm would lead you to believe they did. Facebook had just leased all the capacity of the satellite from Spacecom. Facebook lost nothing, there was no feaud.

> msm would lead you to believe they did

Yes, blame the media. A faceless abstraction to take your frustrations out on.

The reason people believe Facebook owned the satellite is because of Zuck's own words: "SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite."

Note he said "our," not "the bird we were going to lease time on."

Not that much different from people saying "my car" when they're still making payments to a bank.

Pocketstar is right. Media is supposed to do the checks for any statements and provide the correct info, not just reprint tweets and dramatize them.

99% of "media" reporters are general assignment. That means today they're reporting on rockets. Tomorrow on cats. Nobody can be an expert in everything, which is why there is niche media.

In mass media, there's a spectrum between fast and accurate. The internet age prioritizes fast over accurate.

Yeah actually I think that's the way almost anyone would have described it. Just like you say "my office" for the space your company leases and you work in. But I also agree that it is part of what the news media is supposed to do to point out that the satellite wasn't actually owned by Facebook.

Sounds overblown to me. Zuck's statement was: “As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent.”

I don't see anything nasty about that. It was SpaceX's failure.

And #deleteFacebook is Facebook’s fault. MZ could have phrased his statement more charitably — if he had, Musk may have responded differently.

Basically - Musk Is the MAN!

OT: do/did you work at a Domino's in the Hudson Valley?

whats wrong with working at Domino's in the Hudson valley? I don't think you need to work at Domino's to think the man is a man of his word and a bias towards action.

He didn't indicate there was.

He's just asking. Strikes me that he somehow recognizes you from there. "OT" = Off Topic, so the question wasn't about "the man".

His handle was the store number of the Domino's in Poughkeepsie.

It's passive-aggressive. A bit like deleting one's facebook profile I guess.

A bit of a different though. Elon did not intentionally destroy the Falcon 9 in question, and SpaceX worked very hard to determine what caused the issue and rectify it for future flights. Zuckerberg knew for years what was going on with user data, and gave zero f*s until they were caught.

Substantially easier to throw shade (passive aggressively even) from the moral high ground.

inb4 the conspiracy theories that the rocket blowing up was to set back a competitor to StarLink

I'm afraid that ship has already sailed...

Elon cares tremendously about bad press. He's specifically banned all reporters from filming launch or recovery attempts in case there are failures.

You'll notice that there are NO social media posts whenever there's a accident (of which there have been many).

Zuck drawing attention to it must have really pissed Elon off.

Um, except when Elon posts video compilations of their failures... (seems to me they're pretty open)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2PWKdQzuU8

They do that in a carefully controlled way, well after the event is too cold for the news cycle. And even then, some events that are too dicey-looking are never seen.

Mark, this is not a criticism. Given the way the media handles such things (i.e. sensationally and with minimal or just plain wrong context) it's really for the best.

I don't understand why this is downvoted. This is exactly how a PR firm or department will handle those things.

I'm confused--aren't the launches broadcast live via webstream?

I'm sure they have a delay.

Yes, but landings at sea tend to cause the video feed to go away, and it doesn't come back if anything goes wrong.

What? The general public films all SpaceX launches and all landings on land, not to mention reporters.

Source? Anecdotally speaking, it seems that there's been about as much coverage for each failed launch as there has been for each successful one.

>NO social media posts whenever there's a accident

Sometimes there are - in fact its a running joke that he calls them "rapid unscheduled disassemblies" (or something like that).

Well, no. Doing so openly and not only your own, but also publicly from your companys ... is much more agressive.

So if he would have done it, only because of that statement, I would say clearly overreaction. But deleting Facebook because it is Facebook ... makes still sense.

How is deleting a profile on a website "passive aggressive?"

It is when you do it publicly and announce it to the world.

Where is the passive part?

Do you know what passive aggressive means?

I think you’d at least passive aggressively be mad too if a moving company blew up the truck with your stuff on it, accidentally or not.

If you only had that furniture, yes; if you had no money left to replace it, definitely.

Not when you have enough wealth to replace it. Shit happens, and getting furniture into space is an intrinsic risky affair.

Plus a satellite doesn't have intrinsic value. If a moving truck lost all my stuff I didn't intrinsically value I'd just contact my insurance company and buy a new one. Obviously it takes time to build a satellite, but it's not like it was personal.

Are you seriously comparing a 85M satellite's destruction to deleting a Facebook page?

> It was SpaceX's failure.

In an extremely high-risk endeavor where all parties knew all possible outcomes

The CEO of a huge company throwing public shade at a business partner for a scenario that was known to be a possibility.

That statement works equally well for both CEOs.

Though Musk knowing how Facebook would treat data seems more of the "I'm a scorpion .... it's what I do" variety

As if this rocket blowing up was just peachy for Elon Musk? He was probably as disappointed in the launch failure as Zuckerberg was, if not moreso because it's his entire business. The satellite was a side project for Facebook.

It's not a contest, though. Two people can be disappointed by the same thing.

Does anyone know if the connectivity was to be "free basics"? (provide internet but only to fb properties and select others, but not Google, or the open internet)

Not too long ago there was also some beef on Twitter between Elon and Zuck about AI [1]. Guess that made the decision a bit easier for Elon.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/25/16024444/ai-safety-threat...

>Musk's negative feelings torwards Facebook may be related to a 2016 dispute where Zuckerberg implied that he blamed SpaceX for a failed launch which destroyed a Facebook satellite.

And today is a what year? I had a better opinion about Business Insider.

If that was the reason then why did he not delete the accounts on 2016? I think that the journalist is trying to mislead the public opinion.

Why? Business Insider is an SEO operation run by someone who is permanently banned from the securities industry due to fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget

Well you certainly get a lot more press for dissing Facebook right now than back then. It's the scapegoat of the moment, may as well take advantage and get on board if it suits you.

So glad that facebook satelite blew up.

I think Occam's razor applies.

Several days ago, Musk posted about his brand new "media empire" called Thud! [0] — "That’s the name of my new intergalactic media empire, exclamation point optional" [1].

Not implying that he is building a FB competitor but I'd rather we wait and see, rather than speculate as to his motives for deleting those accounts/pages.

EDIT: Thinking about it a little more, he hasn't deleted his Instagram yet although he acknowledges "FB influence is slowly creeping in".

I think the influence he is referring to is the unintended consequences of the AI powering "The Algorithm" used by Facebook, which no one seems to fully understand. IOW his fears about an all encompassing AI may have something to do with his decision. He has publicly criticized Zuck for being naive [2] about the risks that careless application of AI portends to everyone.

“AI is a rare case where we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive because if we’re reactive in AI regulation it’s too late,”

[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/973857445683462145

[11 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/973972643190792193

[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/889743782387761152

I read his tweets and I thought he was just joking. New level of respect for Elon.

New level of marketing probably more accurate

Facebook pages are in and of themselves avenues for marketing. Stop being so damn cynical about every single thing people do. It is possible, believe it or not, for people to have personal values and beliefs that extend beyond the ceaseless desire for money.

I think the OP above is being practical as opposed to cynical. TBH, most of the demographic that followed him on FB also have insta and twitter. Most of the people i know in my age group (college age - 24) don't even use FB anymore. Theres a little joke that as soon as your parents start to use the platform its time to jump ship. On top of that, its created articles like this - which has led to even more publicity. I also wasn't aware that any of these FB pages existed but i follow them all on insta and twitter.

My thoughts exactly, practicality as opposed to cynicism.

Also, what are his personal values? Who knows? Why does he bore the underground with abandon even when he acknowledges that the environmental impacts are not completely know. One study says autonomous vehicles can be as effective for congestion easing as his underground tunnels.

His transportation is the next level of dependency he is creating and we are turning a blind eye to. As these corporations' services get too essential (through lobbying), there won't be any choice to #delete_boring.

I respect him for what he has achieved, but too much celebrity worship is something we should all be watchful of.

I believe that future cities shouldn’t require roads. The amount of space wasted on roads and parking can be used for better things.

And if anyone hasn’t noticed (this gets brought up all the time), Musk is commercializing everything needed for colonization of the moon/Mars. Electric motors, solar energy, underground infrastructure, and space travel.

Considering his big picture goal is "humans on more than one world", this makes perfect sense. And isn't 100% obvious.

He's been talking about Mars since day one. It's just some people refuse to listen / believe that he really means it.

> It is possible, believe it or not, for people to have personal values and beliefs that extend beyond the ceaseless desire for money.

The best trick is to make people believe this when the opposite is more true.

> Stop being so damn cynical [...] people to have personal values and beliefs that extend beyond the ceaseless desire for money.

They do, but a great deal of stuff out there, if not determined wholly by profit, is at least heavily influenced or constrained by it or similar considerations. Social media is full of self-promoters and curated personas with spurious motives. What curated personas like these publish is in the best case constrained by profit, but in practice done to enhance the brand. Elon Musk is a brand. The deletion of his Facebook pages is at best irrelevant, but most likely just a cheap and easy way to enhance his celebrity or dissociate himself from Facebook. Why else delete them, and delete them now? The recent media brouhaha is largely a nothingburger in the greater context. You think Elon didn't know what many people have known about the use of data extracted from social media?

I don't find it overly cynical. I distrust Elon Musk and other public figures and their motives at all times, just as a matter of policy.

Also having values that extend beyond money is, ironically, a lot easier when you have plenty of money.

In today's society having tons of money is the best possible approximation of not needing money at all, which makes having values beyond it (and following them) a lot easier.

Not that I'm criticizing Musk as I respect him as much as I have low consideration for Zuckerberg, but if Tesla was a startup struggling to stay afloat it probably would have changed something.

"Also having values that extend beyond money is, ironically, a lot easier when you have plenty of money."

In general, yes. But I believe that neither Musk, nor Zuck have "plenty of money". Not when one of them ones to go to mars and the other one control the worlds communication. As you need really much money for both.

He is defining the SpaceX brand. He may or may not have strong opinions about Facebook.

And this is why Elon is so successful, he cares deeply and he has integrity.

Many people care deeply and have integrity. Why aren't they successful?

My comment doesn't say others won't be successful, I perhaps should have said it's a reason why he's so successful - albeit not the only reason.

My comment is accurate and object, and it is particularly appropriate in response to "respect".

As entertaining as I think this is, come on.

He took a dare to prove he is "the man", give me a break. It's an amazing PR move (and a pretty funny one too), but this isn't about "personal values"; it's about the same as the flamethrower and the Roadster launch, Elon being Elon, and showing everyone he is Elon. What's better than being a playful billionaire who is in full control of his companies? Everyone knowing he is a playful billionaire who is in full control of his companies lol.

If it were about "personal values" he would've released a statement condemning the events and deleted his and his companies instagram accounts too. Instagram is the hot place to build "cool" brand value right now though, so I doubt he will. Facebook pages are useful for a number of reasons, but not essential to the way Tesla and SpaceX make money.

> That’s a quick turnaround, since Musk seems only to have found out these pages existed about 20 minutes prior to his taking them all offline.

From the article. Guess you missed that part. I don't think our boy hatched an evil master marketing plan in 20 minutes. Sounds more like a reaction based on principles.

I'm not quite sure how this action will increase the number of Teslas or rocketships sold...?

Google News notes 21,000+ news stories. A few minutes' work, huge talk about Tesla & SpaceX. Very cost-effective marketing.

Uh... I'm pretty sure SpaceX and Tesla marketing teams are kinda sad right now.

Quite honestly, both companies have enough exposure through the media that losing their Facebook pages is unlikely to make much of a difference. (Especially for a company like SpaceX, which was mostly reaching individuals who weren't in any position to do business with them.)

I would assume a company that size could potentially have at least one person who's full time job (or sizable portion of their job if social was a low priority) was to maintain those pages.

That makes sense if Tesla & SpaceX was an indie hacker startup nobody has heard of. Do you really think Governments will start ordering SpaceX rockets because of this news? Why will someone buy a Tesla because the company deleted their FB page? For what is worth they will lose some Tesla customers they would have reached through Facebook. There is a reason why all the major companies in the world spend tons of money on their FB page. FB page helps companies land more customers.

Please mention the reason as well why this comment is getting downvoted. Downvoting without reason will never help me to figure out why my logic is flawed.

I've learned to never assume Elon is joking.

Or, that he is, and is following through just to spite you.

I really can't tell anymore, but I'm certainly entertained.

Particularly after the flamethrowers. I'm sorry, I mean the not-flamethrowers;)

> New level of respect for Elon.

Also for me. Though in the opposite direction than I assume for you. Unless he also trows away his iPhone and changes his start page from Google to Duck Duck Go, it's a pretty irrational move that I'm surprised to see from Musk.

What's irrational is to expect people to share your principles of extricating themselves from all logging.

I don't have principles of extricating my self from all logging.

I'm pointing out the hypocritical in seeing a big problem on sharing data with Facebook while having no issue with sharing data with Apple, Google, Twitter etc.

On what basis do you see hypocrisy? Could it be merely that they see Facebook as the threat they want to deal with now?

Apple isn't packaging and selling your data. They don't even look at it. iCloud is about the same as Amazon S3 -- it's just a storage system. They aren't doing analytics on your data to sell you things.

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

Facebook does also not sell your data. Facebook sell your eyeballs. They do however give away your data for free to 3rd party developers as does Apple, Google and many other.

Facebook has been shown to be completely careless with securing your data - this wasn't even a data breach, the functionality to get all the data was a part of their API. Apple on the other hand has been very publically proactive about protecting your data.

I feel like this is more a reaction to the complete lack of responsibility Facebook had for keeping your data secure rather than the collection of data in the first place.

1) It has been like this for 10 years and it has been documented in plain sight. Also in this time frame user data has been progressively better protected. Data is better protected on Facebook now than it has even been. So why this outcry in 2018?

2) How does Apple protect 3rd party apps from collecting data? iOS apps even has the option of tracking your location - something that FB apps never had as far as I recall.

1) The perspective of "I have nothing to hide, I have no issue sharing all my data with FaceBook" has been very prevalent for a long time, as the consequences of that happening on a large scale are not obvious at a glance. It's a nuanced topic with too many variables. It takes a large enough event that can be (correctly or not) attributed to this in order to gain peoples attention. Foreign adversary potentially using this information and tooling to influence domestic elections is a large enough event to result in that coming to the public eye.

2) Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp all have "Always" permissions options for Location Services on iOS. Instagram has "While using" or "Never" only. Wouldn't expect this to be substantially different on Android.

1) It's irrational. Facebook as an advertising platform is likely much more effective than what you will gain by crunching the limited data collected through apps. Googles advertising platform has other data points than Facebook but is equally potent in targeted marketing. However the biggest irrational hypocrisy in this shitstorm is that TV ads has always been known to be very effective in influencing elections yet no one has tweeted #deletetv.

2) Since Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp are all 3rd party apps on Apple's platform, you just proved my point. Though I'm not sure you intented to?

You have to explicitly grant location permissions for every app individually, plus the iPhone warns you if an app is using your location in the background, plus gives you the option to only give the app your location while it's open.

So exactly like with Facebook apps, where you also grant permission for every app individually and have granular control over which data if any at all can be shared?

The feature where your iPhone is notifying which app is using your location is a recent feature in iOS. Remember than the current criticism of Facebook is related to how Facebook was doing things years ago. So we should also compare with early versions of iOS to be fair.

I don't think #deletefacebook is a backlash against the results of the 2016 elections. To me it seems that it's more about it now being socially acceptable to dislike Facebook and social media in general. Some may have always innately disliked it, but never had the follow through with any desire to get rid of it, or had to keep it for business/appearances.

I tend to agree with you there. It's difficult for me to believe that the single Cambridge Analytics thing is it personally. And it sounds like as far back as 2012, an Obama campaign person mentioned they were getting similar information. The reality, for me, is I don't/didn't care -- I left Facebook a few years ago[0].

Up until this point, I was pretty sure Facebook wouldn't end up going the direction of MySpace -- partly because there's not a perfect/better alternative (as Facebook was to MySpace) and partly because Facebook has subscribers that I never saw with MySpace[1], and there are increasing numbers non-Facebook things of things tightly coupled with Facebook[2]. At this point, however, the needle has moved quite a bit. There's clearly a massive market for this; and unfortunately, Facebook has everyone on it, which is the product to most people. Starting up a similar social network -- even with amazing features that Facebook lacks (I can't think of any) won't bring people in if the rest of their family, friends, the HS crush they want to stalk, etc aren't there.

Personally speaking, since leaving Facebook, I don't feel like I lost anything. Of the large friend list that I had, there were a small handful that I knew in real life; the rest were acquaintances or people from my past that were it not for Facebook I wouldn't have been terribly interested in having conversations with. Of the small handful, they were there before Facebook and are there after Facebook. It wasn't lost on me that of that friends list, nobody on the "I used to know you/barely know you" ever became a good friend and outside of my volunteer team, very few of the "people I knew in HS/previous jobs/otherwise used to associate with" ended up being people I saw in person.

I did feel like I gained a lot by leaving, though. No more inane posts from people thinking their 40 word status update is going to make me say "Oh, my goodness! All of my political beliefs are wrong. Thank GOD I read your incredible rant about (some dumb politician)" (and other forms of political masturbation), or stupidity like "dial 46 instead of 911 on your cell phone" and other urban legends posted by elderly friends along with their immediate replies linking to Snopes. All sorts of wasted time was reclaimed.

Unfortunately, this would probably have been the perfect* time for Google to launch Google+ and aggressively mine gmail users to create a friends list. I don't think dusting that off at this point would help, especially since a lot of the folks I know who are sour on Facebook feel the same way about Google these days, but it's a tough spot for anyone outside of them to fill adequately.

[0] I was never terribly happy about the privacy thing, but if you value privacy there's a whole lot of the internet you won't use. I left after receiving an angry phone call from a family member because I failed to "like" a picture ... once I became socially obligated to use Facebook in a specific manner, I decided it wasn't worth it. Between that and a somewhat recent announcement -- at the time -- that they'd begin linking stories you read around the web to your account despite you being logged out, I'd had it.

[1] My parents, aunts and uncles had barely heard of MySpace outside of scare-pieces that landed on the local news, let alone considered getting accounts. They're all on Facebook. The volunteer team I led for 5 years which consisted mostly of retired individuals all had Facebook accounts. Ask them about Twitter, Instagram, etc and it feels like I'm talking about MySpace again.

[2] There are services I can't sign up for and groups which have nothing to do with the Internet that I will not show up on their members list and have to rely on my wife to get updates from because that's the only place they provide information.

> socially acceptable to dislike Facebook and social media in general.

I then find it ironic that it is using #hashtag in the movements name then.

Hashtags has been popular before Facebook and in a number of other media.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it dates back to C? And # is used as includes / other first compiler steps? And the hashtag on twitter is a reference to this.

I was under the impression that it was popularized by IRC #channels

I thought it was to make keyword searches work on twitter

Sure but that notation looks obviously inspired by IRC to me.

when i started using twitter back in 2008, that's how it felt to me -- that # tags were basically irc rooms and twitter itself was just a big async irc

Twitter hashtags has obvious similarities and differences to IRC channels.

However I have a strong feeling that I modified/used hashtags (as tagging, not as a channel) back in 2005/6.

I think I got the idea from another system (probably some early wiki) but I'm unable to recall now.

I doubt that. The meaning of # in C does my resemble hashtags at all.

I would guess it was inspired by IRC, the first popular chat system, dating back to the 70s or 80s, which uses channels named with the hashmark and which are often named after the conversation topic

Edit: the meaning of # in C does not resemble hashtags at all. Typo.

An early Twitter user suggested using hashtags, think he's generally credited with it:

http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/08/25/groups-for-twitter-or-...

Don’t forget HTML fragment identifier:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragment_identifier#Basics

#Basics

I always had respect for the fact that Apple just never used Facebook...except for claiming the profile it seems.

https://www.facebook.com/apple

Wow, I never knew that.

They do use it https://www.facebook.com/applemusic/

  > Typically replies within an hour

Damn.

Most companies have that... it's often just a bot.

They have a facebook messenger bot so thats more than likely why.

Why would they use it? Nothing to gain.

Probably for ads. Since ads can be rendered as regular post a profile is needed but they won't be rendered in the profile's feed.

Apple also has an account with no posts on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apple

Apple's Twitter account is used exclusively for ads and special functionality like reminding you about events.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/02/the-invisible-apple-tweet/

I wonder if Facebook lets them do something similar.

They use Instagram and Facebook to advertise iPhone's alot.

Boycotts are one of the most effective methods consumers have to enact change.

I agree with you. Let's see if anything change in a few days and these pages are back. I believe Facebook will not delete them forever.

I can't think of a successful boycott. I believe the largest attempt I witnessed was against BP when they just sank an old oil platform, including all sorts of toxins and petrochemicals.

I think that made a single-digit dent in their revenue.

Politics and law enforcement are far better tools to get corporations to behave. They solve the coordination problem, they can far easier track changing and long chains of ownership, and they allow you to delegate the research work to someone you trust.

They took down gawker by targeting their advertisers. Before the hulk thing their ad revenue was decimated.

Moving the NCAA Tournament out of North Carolina changed the bathroom law within a year if memory serves.

Outrage over Indiana's "religious freedom" act led to several threatened pullouts and changes in the law.

What do you mean by successful? Usually the point is not to dent revenue, it's to cause behaviour change. And there is a long list of boycotts that have achieved that. http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/boycotts/successfulboycotts.a...

Looking at that list, I see two main categories.

One are outcomes dubiously tied to boycotts - did Sea World change their orca problem to protect revenues, or because they feared legal intervention?

The second is indirect outcomes, where the bad actor and the boycott-ee are different. If you threaten a purchaser over a supplier, or a supplier over a purchaser, they can hope to change behavior with no major loss of revenue. It's a very different situation than changing the actual bad behavior. (And in many of these cases the bad behavior was unchanged, some external company just dissociated from it.)

There do seem to be some solid successes there, for instance with product safety, food source sustainability, or sweatshop labor. But even there, I'm curious whether the threat of boycott was a primary influence compared to the other activist campaigns around it.

> One are outcomes dubiously tied to boycotts - did Sea World change their orca problem to protect revenues, or because they feared legal intervention?

They feared legal intervention due to the public attention drawn by the boycott.

Affecting revenue of a targeted actor directly is not the only mechanism by which boycotts are intended to have an effect.

I agree that revenue hits are not the only (and usually not the primary) effect of boycotts.

But what I'm questioning is "due to the public attention drawn by the boycott." Was the consumer boycott actually a major reason SeaWorld feared legal action?

When Blackfish came out, a lot of musicians cancelled planned SeaWorld concerts, which had a visible and immediate revenue impact. Share prices dropped 33%, even though revenue only dropped ~1%; presumably shareholders feared the possibility of legal action. And a range of state and federal Congressmen introduced bills on regarding orca captivity, explicitly citing Blackfish as a motivator.

Boycotts are certainly correlated with major corporate and legal changes, but I'm skeptical that they're a significant cause. Examples like SeaWorld make me think that boycotts and policy changes have common causes (e.g. Blackfish), but the boycotts aren't themselves very impactful.

The Chicago Tribune had a clever bit about the gun-seller boycotts, arguing that boycotts only matter as a way to keep the topic in the news, and it basically doesn't matter whether people actually participate. That's basically my guess, also.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/g00/news/opinion/zorn/ct-persp...

Recent successful boycotts include UFW's "no uvas" and the boycotts related to apartheid.

Wikipedia also has a longer list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boycotts

Indiana - NCAA, GenCon etc threatening to leave over the religious freedom law. It worked. Pence was forced to amend it - weakening it.

The bus boycott in Alabama by MLK and others.

Boycotts can be an effective tool.

The biggest influence was Salesforce's threat to leave after just acquiring Indianapolis based ExactTarget. Benioff was very persuasive along with NCAA, GenCon and most of the Indiana business community.

There has been research into the effectiveness of consumer boycotts. They can be really effective especially against brands.

Nike boycott in the 1990s was really effective. The company’s sales fell in short them, but the damage to the brand was even more significant. Nike had to work a decade to repair the 'child labor' reputation and adopt the global sustainable idea.

On the other hand consumer boycotts against products without brand or network externalities have less effect. They suffer from free rider effect. Boycot is essentially subsidizing the consumption of those who use the boycotted product.

The #DeleteUber campaign was remarkably successful.

one week ago there was a link here on HN with data that it wasn't successful.

The NFL got Arizona to recognize Martin Luther King, Jr. Day by refusing to hold a Super Bowl there until they did.

Boycotts aren't going to be effective against companies that make basic commodities, because those companies don't interact directly with their consumers. Facebook deals directly with its users and advertising clients. I think consumer-facing companies are a lot more careful to maintain good PR and avoid boycotts in the first place.

> Boycotts aren't going to be effective against companies that make basic commodities, because those companies don't interact directly with their consumers.

The grape boycott would suggest otherwise.

It's hard to identify cause and effect, but the large UK/European consumer boycott of South Africa in the 1980s may have had some effect, and there are US Federal laws against boycotting Israel (BDS), so i guess someone fears it is effective in some way.

This is precisely the opposite of true. Boycotts almost never have any effect; the impossible coordination problem they impose is why we need governments and regulation instead.

Boycotts, kind of like protests, show to the government that people care. Specifically, it shows the people care enough to actually take action that takes effort. That is a rather high level of caring.

So, it seems to me that boycots (and protests) are important for convincing regulators something is an issue.

Sadly, I can't agree with you.

While occasionally boycotts have encouraged changes, it typically only happens when other companies get involved.

Consumers "voting with their wallet" very seldom accomplishes much, except giving people a sense of having "done something".

That said, if companies and advertisers start publicly pulling support (like we see here, and the Mozilla story), it can start to raise internal flags, and (occasionally) lead to change.

While I get somewhat nervous about bureaucrats that don't understand technology writing overly broad laws, I do have to agree that legislation is often the most effective driver of change.

In the case of Facebook, users are the product. If they lose 20% of their users, the usefulness of their product diminishes.

Social media companies would literally vanish if all the users stopped using them. What would actual users stand to lose? Event scheduling seems to be the main reason I read on here why people stay. There are soo many ways to do that - it would not be a hardship on users if they view the social gain of #deletefacebook.

I have to disagree.

Target/Sears vanished in Canada because enough of us did vote with the wallets.

Facebook is just another company, with the difference that a lot of powerfull people now wants them gone.

> Target/Sears vanished in Canada

Pretty sure target didn't shut down in Canada over boycotts.

http://fortune.com/2015/01/15/target-canada-fail/

Well, the shops were lacklusting so everyone decided "let's not go there". Most of those were in locations that would be convenient too, you didn't even need to go out of your way to go to a Target. People still decided not to shop there. That's pretty much voting with your wallet.

What other word would you use if a chunk of the population intentionally goes out of their way to walk to a store further away, just to not enter Target?

> While occasionally boycotts have encouraged changes, it typically only happens when other companies get involved.

The other companies getting involved are a result of the boycott and the attention driven by it, so that's just a mechanism of the effect of boycott's, not an indication that they lack effect.

And even if they are weak, that doesn't mean they aren't one of the most effective mechanisms consumers, as such, have to effect change: that would only be rebutted by the presence of demonstrably more effective methods available to consumers.

> While I get somewhat nervous about bureaucrats that don't understand technology writing overly broad laws, I do have to agree that legislation is often the most effective driver of change.

Outside of direct democracy systems (including limited direct democracies, like representative systems where citizens retain the power of initiative), legislation isn't a power of the people generally, but a power that the people can indirectly influence by other means. And citizen influence campaigns against government (especially when there are entrenched interests opposed) are not notably more efficacious than boycotts against businesses. (Indeed, boycotts against businesses are often resorted to -- and sometimes successful in producing legislative changes -- after conventional citizen activism directed at legislative change without boycotts fails.)

> Consumers "voting with their wallet" very seldom accomplishes much,

Boycotts might not acheive much, but there is a much broader class of consuemers voting with their wallet and we usually just call it market forces.

And they have less to do with what consumers want, and more to do with what companies offer as available options to choose from.

The point still stands. Voting with your wallet doesn't work for any meaningful interpretation of the word "voting".

I would write that as "Boycotts are one of the least effective methods consumers have to enact change."

99% of people don't care. This changes absolutely nothing.

Only in cases where the benefits gained and the detriments caused by the consumption are more or less in proportion. In many (most) cases, the benefits are internalized by the consumer and the burdens externalized. In all those cases 'vote with your wallet' has no effect beyond personal handicapping and feel good. Actively pursuing/supporting regulation to curb the behavior is (nearly) always the better option.

Why are the two things opposed or incompatible?

Strongly disagree. Boycotts are almost never effective. What is effective is legislative changes, marching in the streets, and the occasional turned over car.

I abandoned Facebook instead of deleting my account.

I treat Facebook like a big phone book now and left a public status on my profile with an email address that forwards mail to my real email address for people that want to get in touch with me.

The main reason I did not delete my account is that there is one other person with exactly my name and very questionable values, judging the public content of his profile. This really sucks. My name is not common and unfortunately he married a distant cousin of mine and now has my name.

Now I don’t like the idea of people looking for me accidentally getting in touch with him thinking they are contacting me. Unlikely with his current profile picture in place, but still a possibility in the future.

Facebook can be an essential promotional tool for many. If you're rich or an already successful company, then you can handle the loss by not being on Facebook. But if you're poor or just starting up a new venture, then it is harder to afford not being on Facebook.

I'm poor and starting a new venture. I don't have FB. If my success depends on me/my company having FB presence, then my business sucks. How this idea of FB being the "place to be" got so much traction is beyond me.

Yep. LinkedIn as well. Still without one, and starting strong. Very much realize I must put my data where my mouth is.

Similarly, I'll be far less likely to hire one who has Facebook on their resume.

> Similarly, I'll be far less likely to hire one who has Facebook on their resume.

Could you explain why? I don’t see an obvious reason to avoid ex-Facebook employees

From my personal interactions, and with my personal perspective of how Facebook has publicly conducted itself over the years, having worked at Facebook would immediately raise red flags in my mind about the philosophical perspective of the potential employee for having worked 'at will' at the company. Context certainly matters, but it would be become a point of conversation. Not all that different from a health-professional being wary of hiring someone who used to work for a tobacco company.

To me it would indicate the possibility that the person might not want to understand the wider implications of their work, might understand those implications but not care about them so long as they are personally or socially enriched, or might just agree with the duplicitous nature of the company. There are of course circumstances to account for, and everyone's reasons are different - but the above rationalizations would raise red flags for me - especially in my industry where thinking about wider implications of our work is absolutely critical.

I am not the GP but I totally agree and the same goes for NSA employees. They have proven they are okay with violating the privacy rights of a billion people.

LinkedIn is rather more important. It's still the largest professional database we have and a kind of rolodex.

Having worked for and still working part-time for a major, as in top 5, vc firm, investors will definitely look for you on LinkedIn early on to ensure that you're a legit person with a good job history and a network.

This is even more important, when they are hiring for themselves.

There are so many grifters in tech, that investors and people hiring for leadership positions in startups feel the need to be able to draw a connection between your network and theirs.

Moreover, if investors are interested in your venture, they'll want you to create a profile and assembles a network. It's part of having visibility for your venture and a certain amount of legitimacy in the community. A company is people, and their leaders need an online presence outside of Github and fora.

I'm sure people will jump in with all kinds of anecdotal counter-examples, but this is what I've seen in a few years working for Sand Hill.

I honestly would decline funding from investors that expected me to waste time on LinkedIn. Unless you are selling to HR, it's a pointless circle jerk.

LinkedIn is great for their intended use case of documenting and presenting your professional relationships for potential job offers. But LinkedIn doesn't connect you with potential customers.

>If my success depends on me/my company having FB presence, then my business sucks.

And then...

>How this idea of FB being the "place to be" got so much traction is beyond me.

If FB is "the place to be" as you say it is, then it is a valuable marketing resource and your first comment doesn't follow. I don't see how it's any different than advertising on TV in the early days. All of a sudden a new medium for reaching an even larger number of people popped onto the scene, so people used it heavily.

You may not like FB, but you can't dispute the fact that you are able to reach a lot of people for little to no cost using it. You can't then go on to say that a business "sucks" because it relies on FB for marketing.

>but you can't dispute the fact that you are able to reach a lot of people

They are a website!!!!!

The internet is larger than FB. Listen, I'm not denying how popular FB is, all I'm saying is that you can figure it out how to do business without depending on their platform. That's all.

Ninja Edit: I'm not saying "it's the place to be" I'm saying that other folks believe that. I disagree.

Imagine you're a small coffeeshop that just needs to list your hours and location on the internet and maybe make some announcements. What are your options?

- Google Maps

- Facebook Page

- Yelp Page

- Instagram (maaaybe)

You most likely already have a Facebook account, so setting up a Facebook page would be the easiest.

This is a good point. Thank you.

One could argue that having hours and location online is so important for businesses that you do not necessarily have to chose the tool that is the easiest to setup.

But why wouldn't small business owner who has other things to work on not choose the easiet route?

If you travel abroad, you'll notice that Google Maps/Facebook/Foursquare are all the internet presence a lot of cafes and restaurants have.

And I wouldn't be surprised if the Google Maps info was created by a patron and not the owner themself.

Facebook owns Instagram, so that's no good either, if you're trying to avoid it. There's surprisingly little backlash against Facebook-owned entities.

It's pretty easy to claim your location on Google/Google maps, which is usually where I find business hours and contact information.

-A wordpress blog.

-A self-hosted site or a VPS.

But there is the genuine problem of discovery. Better hope your blog appears at the top of google search. Anyway, the vast majority of people for which facebook is basically their homepage of the internet won't know your site exists.

Sorry for this dumb question, I never used facebook, but what is the difference between your own webpage and a page on facebook? How do those facebook users automatically know that you exist when you are on facebook. They still would have to find you somehow?

Facebook's discovery is enhanced because they have more information about you, and so can correlate you and your friends information with information about the page to more effectively match you to that particular page.

For example, you are likely to like an event/business/venue your friends already liked, so facebook can suggest that business to you. Or you see in your feed that your friends checked into a certain event/business/venue, resulting in you being exposed to that.

All this happens without you even performing a search. And if you do perform a search, the top search result will most likely be correct, because it used you and your friends' information.

Hard to comment without being anecdotal, but I exclusively look for business hours on Google maps or Yelp. If I'm searching for a type of business ("hm, is there a bakery near me that's alf-decent?") then I use Yelp. "How busy is <restaurant x> right now?" then I'd use Google Maps. Yelp and Google both link to a businesses' website meaning I don't ever expect to log onto Facebook to check for basic business info. Facebook definitely does have some benefits for businesses such as notifying of promotions and such, but I honestly don't think I've ever thought of FB as the first stop to get business info. It's like a last resort to check for a FB page for me.

Yes, that's my personal experience as well. However, I've also contributed to Google Maps (and OpenStreetMaps) for missing locations that weren't entirely new.

I don't have any data, but I would not be surprised if a significant number of Google Map locations were created by patrons of a venue and not its owners/employees. Facebook Pages, on the otherhand, I see being set up and and maintained by an owner.

That's correct, Maps crowd-sources data if no owner enters stuff. You can even see "Is this your business?" sometimes if the owners haven't bothered to do it. Which, I mean, fair enough.

FB is among the last places I'd look, and would not be impressed by that being the only web presence for a small business. Seriously, seeing such induces an involuntary "ugh".

Putting up a website is trivial & cheap, and looks a whole lot more professional than one on FB. As a customer, I'd look for it by a Google search, and go to the "official" site. Put the hours there, and an easy link to a popular mapping site.

Frankly, having followed social media since dialup BBS days, I find Facebook a surprisingly crufty/poorly-made site. A core design has been hacked up to wedge in whatever new features. A new site could easily provide a next-gen UI, better putting common content together, better assembling a feed, saner advertising, and pointedly avoiding "censorship" ... only thing needed is that "tipping point" for migration.

I agree with you, but the reality is that domain registrations lapse, the niece/nephew who set up the initial web site went away to college, passwords are forgotten.

All these responses about setting up your own web site are similar to BrandonM's infamous Dropbox advice in the context of small retail shop owners.

This, in an nutshell.

FB is yet another (large) marketing/engagement channel. Do you get more/better customers from FB? Perhaps/perhaps not.

Do you even know what you are talking about? Here, let me give you an example to open up your mind.

Imagine, you are a kids jacket retailer and have a Shopify store. Yes, these exists and are popular. How do you get users to your store? Yes, you use Facebook. Do you know how you Facebook here? You create a group with VIP members and offer them an exclusive discount over new jackets. This builds loyalty and provides word of mouth marketing. Next you create a page and try to post different images/videos of kids in your exclusive jackets and build followers who will like/share your post and thus get you free organic distribution. Next, you use fb ads and target your specific demographics (say women 25-40 yrs old who are interested in kids) to get users in.

This is a real thing. One of my best friends has a multimillion dollar business a yr on kids jackets and all she uses for marketing is facebook and she swears by it.

Your friend should write a book and sell seminars on how to launch a multi-million dollar shopify store then. That's where the real money is.

Source: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/117-the-worlds-most-ex...

The real money is telling people how to make money. Sounds like a pyramid scheme.

not really. I believe that is real. Telling people how to make money comes with no risk and high profit margin.

Well, if the real money is in teaching people how to make money, then teaching people how to make money involves teaching people how to teach people how to make money, and thus recursed.

This is a pyramid scheme.

Depends on the business. Entertainment venue? Live music/special events/etc? Almost every spot in my town seems to use Facebook to advertise these events, and NOTHING ELSE.

I don't like it... but it's what people do. It's the only reason I have a facebook.

> If you're rich or an already successful company

Also easier if you've got a non-consumer or big-ticket product. If I'm selling a new brand of bath soap, I obviously want a Facebook page. If I'm selling rockets, or cars, or laser eye surgery, hopefully it's a less important pathway.

(The Solar City page is gone too, which seems like a bit more of a sacrifice - someone might actually look them up on FB.)

This is key; Facebook is incredibly important for a small business.

I started a firearms business, and being unable to use Facebook had a huge effect on how I was able to grow my business - making the same decision for political reasons is simply not an option for many small businesses who are just barely getting by.

Are you referring to Facebook like pages? They've been essentially pointless for a while now, since you only get onto your followers feeds if you "boost" a post, money that for a "poor" or "just starting up" new venture is better spent elsewhere.

What they did was genius - encourage everyone to make their Facebook following central to their online marketing strategy, then lock them out unless they cough up.

> since you only get onto your followers feeds if you "boost" a post,

Actually most people and new ventures on Facebook get plenty of buzz without paying a cent. This is done by relying on your friends and getting happy customers to repost stuff from your page, thereby reaching new audiences organically.

I've been told by people who do this sort of thing that an algorithm change in the last 6 mos. or so has made organic buzz much harder to get going on FB without paying.

To a small extent. Yes, they make you pay to "promote" a post higher in a user's timeline who simply liked your page.

But I'm talking more about organic buzz, whereby for instance your friend shares something from a page or talks favorably about it. There is no option to pay to promote those shared posts. The priority of those shared post depends more on how good of a relationship you have with your friend and how much engagement facebook thinks it will get form it.

My issue is that a huge percentage of that effort ultimately promotes Facebook.

Who is winning when the restaurant I’m sitting in has a “Zagat Rated” sticker in their window?

Who is winning when a hotel in Phuket has a “TripAdvisor recommended” sign outside in the sidewalk?

I feel like any attempt I’ve made to use Facebook to promote my endeavors ultimately just benefited Facebook.

I'm low-middle class and starting a new business, avoiding facebook at all costs. Although I do have a linkedin.

On the contrary, in my experience when you’re starting up a new venture you should be laser focused on real customers, not engaging the peanut gallery.

You don't need a facebook page. Throw up an HTML page and use Twitter for updates. Get instargram if you want to actively engage followers.

> "Get instagram if you want to actively engage followers"

Just to be clear, Facebook owns instagram.

And Twitter isn't categorically different from Facebook.

But at the same time if you relied on exactly one platform to build out your business, you are taking a huge risk. The issue you are facing is the platform version of "What if your key employee gets run over by a bus?". On the other hand, if you wouldn't be thrown out of business by the metaphorical bus running over FB, then you have only made your business stronger, so best to start planning now.

Does anyone know if it works if you change your location to Europe and then delete your account to take advantage of the better privacy protections?

I've lived in America all my life, but since I signed up for Facebook 10 years ago my hometown/current city has always been listed as a place in Portugal. For a long time all my adds were served in Portuguese, but that changed years ago to English. My guess is they know where you really are.

Knowing it enough to serve ads is one thing.

Knowing it enough to be sure under European privacy rules, especially the new GDPR ones, is another. I doubt one person's data is worth the risk Facebook would take by keeping it.

And if you said you were a a European Citizen (or even just neglecting to mention that you aren't), would Facebook really check?

Once I clicked on a slate.fr link et depuis cette occasion tout Facebook apparait en français pour moi.

For Facebook to truly die someone needs to come up with a bare bones social network that has all the basics - friends lists, photos, address book, messaging, groups. Charge $1 a month. No sleazy tracking you everywhere on the internet, no ads, no newsfeed filled with garbage clickbait ads and conspiracy theories. This would be insanely profitable assuming it reaches some critical mass.

Except it probably won't ever happen. Charging anything turns off the vast majority of users.

There may be enough people out there now who wouldn’t mind paying for a social network with the assurance that their personal data isn’t going to be mined and sold to the highest bidder. Definitely wouldn’t happen 15 years ago though, but a lot has changed. These people are probably more valuable to advertisers and if they disappear from Facebook it might cause advertising revenue to seriously dry up.

Definitely. People are reluctant to buy $1 or $2 mobile apps that would be really useful, even though they would never notice the money was gone. Just because most apps are free. Also, most people lose more than they gain by deleting their facebook or anything else. Tech people tend to care about privacy because of all of the terrible implications and possibilities that come with all your personal info being freely bought and sold, but the vast majority of people will never (at least consciously) suffer any ill effects of government tracking or targeted ads.

I remember reading this a few years back a feeling a little guilty while having such a good laugh: http://theoatmeal.com/blog/apps

WhatsApp is free for the first year then a small amount each year to continue. Maybe that works.

I believe this is no longer the case and WhatsApp is free to use now.

Regardless, the free trial -> paid version is a popular model, even if 1 year is a long "trial"

I'm curious how the "first year for free" business model works out. I'm guessing smaller companies couldn't survive on that as it's too long to wait until you start getting revenue?

I paid a few dollars for WhatsApp once or twice to keep it working after the first year. It was such a small amount I didn't care. I remember some of my friends freaking out about it though, like they were being tricked.

Could set it up as a foundation, like Wikipedia. Might be able to run on donations only.

I'm not sure that model would work for a social network, the costs are an order of magnitude higher. People expect to be able to upload photos and videos with no practical limit, and you need a ton of full-time moderation staff when you get to Facebook's scale.

It may be possible to get users to use it by doing what WhatsApp did: make a very long free period, then charge them a low yearly rate.

I agree for the most part though. Some uses just flat out refuse to pay money for apps, even $1.

Let's do this in a distributed way. No company should host our life events/photos/thoughts.

This already exists, it was a big story back in the day (for the time a highly backed Kickstarter campaign):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

The idea is that everyone is on it, that's what makes it a viable platform. An all encompassing social network requires an all encompassing social network.

Your idea would be similar to healthy meals that take 4 minutes to prepare to combat fast food chains: a big reason why McDonald's is as large as it is, is because of the speed of it.

And of course to the last point: anything would be insanely profitable if a billion people pay a dollar per month for it.

Big friggin whoop. Systems that already meet the "everyone is on it" requirement better than Facebook include:

Plain old phone calls

SMS

I don't know what you are trying to say. They're not social media in the Facebook sense; they're communication methods. But you are correct in that everyone is on it.

Name a use case I can accomplish with FB I cannot accomplish otherwise then.

Critical mass?

I haven't had an FB account in over 8 years, but I rue to this day the fact that 'most' people 'mostly' rely upon it for their communication. Doesn't matter what i believe or what I use, it matters what everyone else 'mostly' uses.

I don't understand. I asked for a use case. You gave me a glittering generality. What concrete task that i might desire to achieve in life can be done with Facebook but not the other tools?

Pretty much everyone who has a facebook has a phone, so I can communicate just fine with Facebook users

None, but evidently the point I was trying to make was a bit too elusive — it is the userbase and concentration of information it forms that is itself the use case or desirable feature. FB's walled garden IS the tool.

I don't myself agree with it - I'm in your camp, thinking there're far better existant tools out there. I just know from my own experience I'm 'missing out' on stuff shared or put in there by people locked into a domain I do not myself have access to.

The problem with email, calls and SMS is one of discovery. How do you find your high school friend's email or phone number?

People like(d) FB because it was trivial to look up and stalk old friends. The "what are they doing now" effect is powerful as it the "look at me now" effect.

Simple, you don't. Most people are perfectly fine leaving the past behind. If I'm no longer in touch with someone there is typically a good reason for it.

Exactly! I think when FB came out, the newness of being able to reconnect with a high school acquaintance you were never that close to to begin with, with such low effort, got people excited. A few years later the novelty has worn off and we are realizing it's not that valuable anyway.

Like, if you really wanted to, you could reconnect through mutual acquaintances. I mean you went to the same high school, right? All FB does is make it so low effort that you can therefore "reconnect" (does mutual Facebook wall stalking really count as human connection though?) with people yoy previously could have found if you really wanted to, but were not worth the effort

Well, there's Sublevel owned and developed from scratch by me. But it doesn't have all those features for privacy reasons.

I’m hopeful that this will push more interest into decentralised and open services. Sure not everybody will want to host their own data, but for those who have the know how, why should I trust someone else to hold on to my data?

>> friends lists, photos, address book, messaging, groups.

What you're listing sounds very similar to... email or one of the many instant messaging platforms.

True

Email lacks an inherent Follow dynamic. Blog + RSS / Atom will give that.

You can use mailing lists, though those impose a bit of additional friction in several dynamics.

There's also the matter of format conventions and client rendering, which can be quite significant particularly across various schools / application models: Usenet / Unix style top quoting, ccmail, LotusMail, or Exchange quote & reply styles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net

> friends lists, photos, address book, messaging, groups.

Sound astonishingly similar to my phone.

As I keep saying, your phone's notification center is what eventually kills Facebook News Feed and potentially Facebook itself.

Messaging over SMS is outdated, it's just not possible for a lot of cases, including international messaging. Unless Android and iOS solve this, you will need a separate app or social network to accomplish this.

Can anybody who lives in the valley speak to whether people really hate Zuckerberg enough over there to the point where this seems like a rational thing to do? I live out in Mass and while the 'scandal' has definitely been front page news, for a company to do this (especially with a well-known entrepreneur) would be decidedly odd.

Elon lives in LA I believe.

I haven't seen many people here (in the valley) delete FB recently.

I don't have the privileged information to know if it is true, but this feels more like a gut reaction then a cost benefit analysis action. Musk is known to be pretty polarized in his tech ethics opinions.

Cambridge Analytica isn't the first incidence where Facebook was used for political purposes. Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina explains their use of it in 2013:

https://youtu.be/mZmcyHpG31A

yeah, this wasn't a leak, this was the way Facebook was meant to be used

I live in the valley, have several friends at Facebook, etc. I don't know anybody who hates Zuckerberg. I don't hate him. But I am very upset with Facebook-the-company and Facebook-the-system. What bothers me most is that, to the best that I can tell, Facebook-the-company and especially Facebook-the-system just _do not care_ about me or you as individuals.

I have a thread on Twitter that goes into more detail here: https://twitter.com/jf/status/976250584213803008

Talking about Facebook on Twitter seems to be the height of irony...

(I hate Twitter, although if you ask me to substantiate why, I would probably come up with the oft-repeated talking points of echo chamber, Russian bots, rage mobs, etc, etc.)

Irony bordering on hypocrisy!

If we were to compare reasons why we dislike Twitter, I expect that we'd have a lot to agree on. I tried to leave Twitter too, but found that I couldn't because I still get too much value from Twitter. I still hope that someday the winds will shift to a system that brings me the joy I got from Twitter between 2008 and 2016.

Hi jf, I missed you facebook. :)

Me too! Not having Facebook prevented me from asking you what you think of this claim: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7s36ub/what_cons...

LOL... that comment is hilarious because it touches one key truth about Vietnamese culture...

When you ask a Vietnamese person if they can do something, they ALWAYS say they can, even if they have no clue what it is. Especially Vietnamese men. We have this weird need to always pretend like we know everything.

It's similar to the TV sitcom stereotype of how all men think they can fix a leaking pipe, even if they have no clue how to do it.

Good stuff... I'll see you around jf.

First it used to be excitement, then "love to hate" with increased utility but ads, but then your parents and other family started joining and it became a chore and "meh".

The dilution of your newsfeed and privacy issues highlighted meant you got more for your money from Instagram/Snapchat/Whatsapp and you got better responses from tweeting your issues with @company. Most folks I knew at this point either claimed they didn't use FB regularly (ie, they probably still did but maybe only by habit) or just for FB messenger.

All the while the slow drip drip of privacy issues eroded trust.

So we're at the point where if you haven't dropped, the utility can be elsewhere and there's no love lost if you drop FB. FB is in Uber-territory here, some don't mind - but you no longer get weird looks when you tell someone you shut down your FB account. In fact, it's often a good conversation starter.

then "love to hate" with increased utility but ads

This is the best one-phrase summary of the decay and toxicity of Facebook I have ever seen!

Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

Elon and SpaceX have enough existing 'juice' or brand cachet or whatever to get away with a move like this and maybe even get a PR boost from it. My local Girl Scouts chapter, Jeep club, etc... not so much. They're married to Facebook as infrastructure.

If you're considering doing the same but is still on the fence, here's an alternative: News Feed Eradicator [1].

It still gives you access to messages, but eliminates the news feed, so it breaks your habit of going there to "check what's new".

Go ahead and give it a try. If after 30 days you still miss the news feed, you can just disable the extension. But I bet you won't even notice...

ps: but don't forget to delete the mobile app. Conveniently FB offers you a separate app just for messages, if desired.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

just use messenger.com ?

I don't need that (probably because I never got into a habit of checking the news feed) but I'd love to eradicate most of the things in the left and right columns, particularly, the profile photos of friends.

You can accomplish the same thing by unfollowing everyone in your friends list. My news feed is always empty, it's great.

And yet, still a heavy Instagram user.

As long we keep guessing which companies are “bad” and which aren't, we are not solving the problem. We need open, decentralized standards and protocols. We can then choose the fashionable front end client du jour.

Context:

Elon Musk: "What’s Facebook?" -https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/976231995846963201

ISTM Acton's statement is more surprising than Musk's. They gave that dude a pile of money, not very long ago.

Ha ha.. this reminds me of a politician who once said "If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money and then vote against them you've got no business being up here." Brian Acton for President!

Jesse Unruh. Truly, a man for his time. If Raquel Welch had nicknamed me "Big Daddy", that fact would be on my tombstone.

Who would turn down that amount of money. Also, I think he didn't join facebook after the acquisition.

He remained there for three years. A founder that didn't agree to stay on for a respectful period would get dinged on the price. He probably didn't want to do that to co-founders.

Like apple, facebook has very successfully created an ecosystem which makes it very very hard for you to escape and remain sane. I used 4 products from facebook - the website(deleted), instagram, messenger(deleted), whatsapp because all of my contacts are on either of them. I do not have an alternative currently where I can be assured of finding any of my contact to connect and share stuff with.

I lost a lot of friends quitting Facebook. All of the events we coordinated were over Facebook. I was no longer able to invite people to my events, and they no longer were notifying me of their events. I was off the radar.

Took me more than two years to build up a new set of friends who could coordinate apart from Facebook after that.

Not fun, but Facebook was definitely unhealthy.

That's the only reason I won't delete. So many friends from traveling that would be lost ...

Same. As much as I would like to move off Facebook, my friends are worth more to me than that. I could still communicate with them if I didn't have it, but it would take much more effort and I'm not the type to reach out that often. For people in my age range, we often make a facebook event, invite all the relevant friends, and it's done. If you don't have Facebook or don't check it, I won't remember to text you an invite. Maybe it makes me a shitty friend but I just assume everyone will see it on Facebook

Badger people for contact details (phone, email, etc.). It’s a good excuse to catch-up with people, and it’s a good thing to do, even if you won’t be deleting you’re account.

Even if this whole thing blows over in a week, Facebook will eventually go out of style for the usual reasons that social platforms do.

Your connections are more important than an ad surveillance network.

Backup your relationships!

>> facebook has very successfully created an ecosystem which makes it very very hard for you to escape and remain sane.

Really? Ok granted, I'm probably "old" for an HN user, but to me Facebook is a system that creates an artificial sense of connectedness. I don't consider that an essential service.

Do we all need to be connected to everyone and know what they're doing at all times? I've drifted away from friends I had 20, 30, 40 years ago, and that's perfectly OK. If people are important to you, you will find a way to stay connected. It's not the end of the world if you lose touch. It was a perfectly normal phenomena before social media, and it will be after social media as well.

As I've gotten older, I've noticed that I prefer fewer, deeper relationships than having a large number of shallow relationships. That's why I tend to use email/instant messaging with only my close friends/family. I have a Facebook presence, but it's only there to maintain weaker connections to people outside of my core social circle.

There is something greater than a social circle, the economic circle. It might not be for you but lot my contacts have transactional relationships with me, i.e., they have my details because they know I can offer something they have availed in the past and might someday need in the future, they trust me. And same goes for me, if someday I need my friend Tushaar's video and audio skills for some project I should be able to look him up instantly and message him rather than asking around helplessly within my social circle for his contact.

They have bought instagram and whatsapp, neither of which require you to have a facebook account.

But I am pretty sure they have their data extraction and storage machinery hooked up to instagram and whatsapp (I see related ads on instagram)

I only use whatsapp, it's end to end encrypted and data's kept on the device. I'm fairly sure my whatsapp messages are private enough, although I'd be happy if I was informed should that not be the actual case.

While it might seem a big deal to give up a platform with millions of followers (2.6M, apparently), it's much less of a sacrifice for a company that has a large presence on Instagram (which the article notes Musk has said is "borderline", and he's not deleting) and Twitter. Also, they're in the news all the time, both for their victories and failures.

So this is a great way for Musk to brand Tesla, SpaceX, and himself, without actually giving up much in terms of his social media reach.

An unbelievable amount of bots on that twitter thread responding to a fake Ethereum giveaway by not 1, but 2 * fake Brian Action a/c's:

https://imgur.com/a/yv1Hm

very nearly believed it was legit too..

*fake twitter handle of brianhacton (h) & brianpacton (p)

Thanks for pointing out the "h" and "p"! This is so lame; it's kind of like the fake IRS agents who called basically everyone in my family over the last month.

not surprising that there are even more of these fake look-a-like a/cs:

brianlacton (l) brianmacton (m) brianzacton (z)

Is it really that hard for Twitter to detect a fake look-a-like a/c given that:

a) the display name is the same for all fakes

b) they all have limited posts, all posting the same link

c) the bad actors do seem to be making ever so slight changes to (full square) profile pics in an avoidance attempt- ref https://imgur.com/a/QruDm ??

I've personally clicked report scam on the initial a/cs I listed along with all the fake a/c's that liked/replied duplicitously.

Interesting considering I've not been happy about the lack of privacy regarding driving/location metrics by Tesla automobiles. Has that improved any?

There is a very big difference in the privacy problems posed by Facebook compared to Tesla. Equating the two is a clear false equivalence.

Edit: I'm no longer allowed to post on HN. I guess my posts are considered low-quality and not welcome here. Here is my response to the comment below, regardless. Thanks for continually banning me, downvoters.

> Why does that bother you?

Because you exclusively use logical fallacies in these posts to make points that make no logical sense.

> whether Tesla will start caring about privacy as well

This implies Tesla does not care about privacy. That simply is not true. If you have a concern, voice it in some logical manner, not in some accusatory already-made-up-your-mind tone about how so-and-so doesn't care about your privacy.

Edit 2: Does Elon really babble on Twitter about people's speeds and driving locations? I don't think so. And surely if you drive a car then you know that the people in the city/state/federal government offices and other tracking corporations also know where you go at all times anyway. Having a Tesla and driving it does not meaningfully invade your privacy in any fashion more than driving any other car does.

I didn't "equate" them, but asked a question regarding whether Tesla will start caring about privacy as well. Why does that bother you? You seem to be angry about it.

> Having a Tesla and driving it does not meaningfully invade your privacy in any fashion more…

They track you by the millisecond versus a few times a day, perhaps you are not aware of the details:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/03/the-custo...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/02/19/the-big-...

Basically Tesla uses your driving metrics against you when they choose to, but will not release the information to help you. It has been a lose-lose situation for the consumer. I'd heard they might give the ability to disable it, but details are hard to find to nonexistent.

I think it's worth bringing up, one of the reasons I didn't buy a Tesla was because I didn't want the CEO immediately blabbing all over twitter about exactly how fast I was driving or how many times I left my lane if there happened to be some sort of accident.

They seem to take the same attitude as Facebook, mainly: we own all your data and you have zero rights to anything in the car.

This will deeply count in facebook's demise I think.

Tech people act as prescribers to the rest. When they use something new, it then propagates to the population. Abandoning is the same.

Now Elon Musk is mystically revered by tech people. Then transitively, his example will accelerate tech peoples' condamnation of facebook, then everyone listening to techies advice.

Google+

Exactly. But Google+ was a side-game for Google..

If FB turns to the new G+ we might soon profit from discount hardware!

> But Google+ was a side-game for Google..

That's not what Google said when it launched. They were restructuring all of their products around social networks...

Sorry for the late reply, but I suppose I need to elaborate more.

At least as I remember it, when Google+ launched I was in my second year of university studying Computer Science. I remember all of my fellow CS students were excited about it and sharing beta invites. Once Google+ became available to the general public, it quickly lost its appeal. Then Google forced it upon everyone and it never recovered.

> Tech people act as prescribers to the rest

Any good examples of this? I don't find this at all. Hackernews for example is always very against Facebook, ads and tracking user behaviour. As far as I can see, none of my less technical friends want to know more details about any of this or care in the slightest.

Most of the time if my non-technical friends are asking for technology advice, it's advice to help them follow the crowd e.g. my friends wouldn't ask me what social network to use, they'd ask me how to install Facebook on their phone. If I started ranting about privacy stuff for something all their friends used, they'd just dismiss it as me being overly concerned.

  Any good examples of this?

Not really I must admit. It's more that when the tide turns, people ask techies why and what to do.

In FB case they'll ask you what is so bad about it and you'll come up with a solid answer. They'll repeat your word around and the tide will gain momentum ?

Linux. My parents got a laptop with Windows 8. We couldn't make sense of it. I pitched Ubuntu, installed it and they never turned back.

When their friends evoke problems with their computers, they will hear about Ubuntu from my folks.

Things I like about Facebook:

* seeing what events in the area my friends are going to, helps me know what's happening around me and going there

* facebook groups for some friends / professional organizations

* following bands / band tours so I can get updates about them

Don't really care about anything else on there. Can I keep just the good parts somehow?

The problem here is just adding anonymized (so international traveling bands aren't stopped at customs) tour schedules to something like bandcamp won't do. Music is generally served on some type of forum, that's how it grows and permeates. For me, the ever-aging metal/punk/hardcore scenes are fairly present on facebook- the older crowd stays because they have jobs to worry about and are technophobic/terrible at computers (mostly). The younger crowd is the innovative one, and tries new things. Currently a bunch of friends are all leaving facebook and I'm a crotchity old 30-something being like "well ralph where the fuck am I going to find your tour schedule?"

There's been every sort of private forum for these things city by city and the problem is basically the drama that comes with it, that's why people like facebook because the architecture of conversations is so spread out you can avoid something that would otherwise get someone trolling.

I guess its something to really respect about the service is its ability to have so many people with such public opinions online and friends with each other. That's what you need for stuff like music related tours/bands/etc, professional circles where all sorts of people come together, school programs (me.. night school MBA), etc.

Facebook won't die by a movement like this, it'll die when users adopt alternatives.

would it not be better for the #deletefacebook movement to delete all data and post a single protest message instead? Future users clicking through to the SpaceX or Tesla pages from links on the net won't know why they did this.

Deletes the profile, Facebook keeps the data :)

They’re forced to delete the data as well aren’t they? Or is that just in the EU?

Just the EU. If I'm not mistaken, being a US company they are not even forced until GDPR takes effect.

With all the backlash, I really wonder if Facebook will give EU citizens the option to delete their data but not American citizens.

GPRD couldn't come at a worse time for them...

Even though they will have technical and business procedures in place to ensure compliance with the 'right to be forgotten' for EU citizens behind the scenes - and therefore any user globally - I would be very surprised if they offered this outside the EU (unless forced to by the likes of the EFF but I doubt enough people care). It would directly reduce the attraction to advertisers, and impact their bottom line.

I just downloaded all the data that FB has on me. It's quite surprising to see every single message and wall post I have made and others have made to me.

One thing I realized is that even if I delete my account, facebook will still store my communication with other people in case they request to download their information too. So I'm not sure if it would ever get deleted unless both parties delete their accounts? For my info to truly get deleted, all of my contacts would have to delete their accounts too.

In a funny way, this reminds me of the Six Degrees from Bacon game:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon

Facebook just made it real using your data.

This is why starlets aren't posting their naughty pictures to Facebook.

I believe their posts will be gone, however I only have facebook memories ('on this day') as fickle proof.

A friend who commented on a lot of my posts deleted his facebook two or three years ago now.

All of his posts are missing which is confusing with other people responding to his opinions or jokes.

>I just downloaded all the data that FB has on me.

Where can one do this?

https://www.facebook.com/settings at the bottom where it says "Download a copy of your Facebook data."

Aha cheers!

In EU, are they not obliged to keep some data? Imagine the case: commit a crime using FB, delete your profile. I cannot imagine the judge/police would not get some exploitable data...

There's some exemptions around law enforcement matters:

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...

For example:

"the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences;"

But this does not justify keeping a profile and continuing to use it in the future.

I was lucky enough to see this coming a mile away, I deleted mine 5+ years ago.

Faceobook has my pictures/contact list/private messages/thoughts from when I was in highschool and some college, but it isn't accurate any more.

> I was lucky enough to see this coming a mile away, I deleted mine 5+ years ago.

Assuming average speed, this means it came at 0.0000228m/h!

Must have been using LIDAR.

I don't think keeping public data about Musk/Tesla/SpaceX, probably managed by multiple people, gives FB any sort of important information to Facebook.

I think the theory is FB gets to keep data on who liked/followed/interacted with the page/content, which is still valuable data to mine for profiling the users. A true removal of an account should result in all interactions with the account and its content being removed as well, which I really doubt is the case.

I don’t have FB account for more than 5 years (for both privacy reasons and also cos it felt wasting my time for a platform that doesn’t add any value to my life) and today I’m very happy about that.

It is kinda funny how people are reacting just now because I am pretty sure people already knew what was happening to their data anyway. It was obvious, there was so many discussions around it. So it’s a lie if you say you didn’t know they are using your data.

But everybody chose to stay just because everyone else was there. (most)People don’t dare to move alone and that’s very sad and stupid.

Perhaps this will result in a re-booted demand for custom websites that replace Facebook business pages, or at least take on more responsibilities and tasks that would otherwise be left to FB.

Over the years I've seen many businesses including those I've worked for (as frontend developer) putting effort into Facebook and diminishing effort into their own websites (the kind that I make for a living).

It surprised and disappointed me over the years as I saw organisations move in and start paying Facebook to promote posts. The misguided assumption that user behaviour was better quality because of the real name policy (not true); and that "everyone was on it". There's also a mistaken perception that Facebook is good for long form or archived topics, such as factual content, but this is not correct. It's awful for anything other than recent buzz.

We seem to have lots of nice new web technology standards, but there's an absence of something approaching a "social profile" or system whereby users and businesses can create, manage, share, follow, and control 100% the data in some social context web mechanism, decoupled from a closed platform with CEO at the top. I don't pretend to have the solution on how that might be possible.

I deleted Facebook after the Beacon fiasco, but I think I'm gonna go ahead and move off google today. Mainly just gmail.

I wonder if there will be a backlash against cloud services more generally? Could we see people return to buying their own servers and hiring network engineers again? Everyone I talk to is so concerned about where their data lives now, I could see it happening.

What email service are you switching to?

FastMail and ProtonMail seem to be very popular recommendations on HN.

I moved off Gmail 6-7 months ago - I picked FastMail.

How does this work? You start changing all your account logins? How do you preserve history? Does FastMail import this? (actually just realized this would be a totally different email address, so might be moot)

I've considered it but there are a lot more variables I'm concerned about than delivery.

Start here to see what all data they have on you and decide what you want to archive or delete.

https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity

It turns out that I actually disabled pretty much everything years ago. So my activity is empty!

This is why you should have your own domain for email. Your email address is important and should remain constant regardless of who is providing your email service.

I like this idea, and do it for a domain or two but am not currently using it for private email. Are you just talking about using a domain registrar and using an email redirect? Is there a better way to do it? I can see wanting to grab the common TLD's, just to make sure you are easy to get in touch with. I'm thinking of com, net, org, and info.

I can speak to what I did, and I recommend people at least start doing this immediately, even if they don't intend to switch email providers. Buy a domain name of your own, make an email address at it, and forward it to your current email provider. Every time you log into a website, make sure to update your email address to your new one.

Now, you're no longer tied to one company! When I decided to switch to FastMail, eighteen months later, I repointed the domain, and the vast majority of my email started flowing to the new service automatically! As a side bonus, if your email provider ever decides to ban your account (as Google has been known to do for spurious reasons), you can repoint your domain somewhere else, and you won't have to worry about losing access to all your other accounts and online assets.

You can use an IMAP email client to transfer your old mail, of course, and then I occasionally check my old mail account for stragglers. I chose not to auto-forward it so I'd clearly see what was or wasn't routing through my old Gmail account. I used to check it as often as I check FastMail. Then every couple days. Now I check my old Gmail account every week or two.

I switched from gmail to zoho mail some years ago, when I frist got my own domain. Slowly moved logins etc. over time, but using my domain for all personal communication. Then at some point I switched to Fastmail, and as I owned the domain, did not have to do anything. Then a couple years ago I switched to gandi's mail because dollars became so costly that $30 was too much for me as a uni student. Today I do not have a use for my gmail, but I let it linger around because I need one for my android devices anyways. I was quite hopeful that Ubuntu Phone would be my next phone OS, but it let me down unfortunately. When I will be able to get rid of android, I'll remove my google account altogether.

For email I highly recommend FastMail. It is $30 a year and their spam filters are better than Gmail's. They also have a sleek web interface. The annual fee also includes good looking calendar and document storage features, but I have only dabbled with using those so I do not know how good they are.

Notes from a happy user with no relationship to the company.

How is Fastmail on Android?

My experience is from a couple years ago, but the app was not all that good. No trouble though, as K-9 mail is a quite nice OSS mail client for Android, it's probably the only mobile app that I've used and am nearly satisfied with the experience.

I like it but it feels like a webview.

https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/

Or $50 / year if you want a custom domain.

Can't recommend mailcow[1] enough! Took me a couple of hours setting up and moving 6 domains and 31 mailboxes after having to leave a shady provider quickly.

It includes everything like automatic certs, SPF, DKIM and has imapsync with a simple admin interface built in. Also comes with SOGo for webmail.

[1] https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized

Had to backtrack to https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow to figure out what this is.

It's a self-hosted email system built from pre-existing components (Postfix, Dovecot, etc).

So step 1: find a hosting solution that isn't on spam blacklists.

When I left Gmail a couple of years ago, I switched to https://posteo.de and have been extremely happy so far. They are very serious about security and privacy (you can pay anonymously by sending cash in an envelope) but they are also open about their limitations. They are for example not offering Protonmail-style "end-to-end encryption" because that is essentally security theater (since the email provider controls the code that implements e2e, they can basically do anything they want). Based in Germany.

Not parent but I have heard really god things about https://www.openmailbox.org/. It is not free if you want to use an external mail client (but paying for services with money is what we should want).

> (but paying for services with money is what we should want).

Only if you can trust the provider not to 'double dip' and sell your data anyway.

That's my boy! We need more tech leaders to take this stance.

This is excellent. We need more high-profile people to do this. It's not so hard!

After years off all personal/social media, I recently joined the mastodon fediverse; it's really a breath of fresh air, I'm enjoying it.

I never had the impression that Musk cared much about privacy but I seem to be wrong. Or perhaps it has more to do with the current POTUS and his impact in the environment. Either way, I am happy for his decision.

Considering that Elon and Mark constantly disagreed on subjects like AI, this isn't surprising.

Also notable is that typical Tesla customers probably don't rely on Facebook anyway so this should not have consequences.

One of the best things to come out of all this controversy surrounding FB will be that people will no longer look at me like I have two heads when I tell them I don’t have a FB account.

I don't think that this matters nearly as much as a major advertiser like Johnson and Johnson or pseudo celebrity Instagram followers pulling out.

I don't work at FB and I don't have their shares either . But to me this is looking like punishment beating because it is linked to Trump victory at the polls. We all know that FB is in the business of selling data in one form or other. And we also know that FB is human and is subjected errors and mistakes. But deleting FB , leaving FB , pulling adverts from FB may not change the fundamental.

I will not use any service that requires to specify my personal info such as real name, address, phones anymore unless it is tightly coupled to my offline life (financial, hiring). Even email can link many scattered info into one and guess who I am, but at least it gives a lot more complexity than one single source has my info.

Interesting, especially considering that Facebook is/was a customer of SpaceX: https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-rocket-test-hit-by-explo...

No, Facebook was planning on being a customer of Spacecom, the satellite owner. Spacecom is SpaceX's customer.

hopefully people deleting facebook don't flee to instagram and think their somehow safe from facebook.

I am ashamed that I missed seeing my obvious error in 'their/they're' usage long enough that I cannot edit the parent of this post.

#deletefacebook really isn't going to go anywhere, outside of a vocal minority that don't rely on it. The train stops once the general population realizes they can no longer login to their favorite sites without it. Social Auth is a thing, and it's MASSIVE.

Found the one Facebook oAuth engineer. /s

I am seriously considering disallowing OAuth in my apps for a few reasons:

  1. It would be impossible for the user to voluntarily give up rights to information they may not understand.

  2. It would be impossible for the app to act on behalf of a user.

  3. True early adopters are not deterred by the lack of quick sign-in if they truly love the product.

  4. Signing up with email is easy today, and browsers make logging in an automatic and smooth process.

  5. Emails already act as zero-permission identities.

For me, emails are the root of my internet activity. Everything I do is tethered to email, not Facebook or Twitter. Going to my email to click a verification link is trivial and takes a few seconds; well designed email-verification can be seamless. It might even take me more time to read and grok all of the permissions the app is asking for.

Furthermore, I don't have to worry about having a user account system that has to be ready to deal with N different OAuth tokens. Personally, I have found OAuth to be a very inelegant technology.

Next time I build a website that has accounts, I will try and market the lack of "signing in with Facebook" as a boon to the user. OAuth is a slippery tool for collusion, something I never want my customers to be victims of. I cannot advocate for technology that is primarily used to extract information from passive people.

Making the rules so hard to read that the average person just says "yes" was unethical in 1492, and it's unethical now.

Screen shot from my twitter feed https://twitter.com/warnerw/status/976431809889210368

That is cool. I wonder if he can kick his Instagram addiction, though.

This is great but... This is deleting FB pages not actually deleting FB ads. Facebook doesn't care about FB pages anymore now that they can track people closely for ad targetting.

I want to delete my FB profile but I'm reluctant because it opens the door for someone to start a new profile with my name and pictures. Perfect for social engineering.

My guess is that they just made the pages private and will quietly bring them back after realizing how much traffic they lose as a result, and/or after a shareholder lawsuit is filed alleging that Musk is squandering a valuable company asset on a whim, based on his own political views. Tesla is especially vulnerable to such shareholder lawsuits, given that it had millions of “fans” on the platform. Arguably Musk just took an asset worth tens of millions of dollars, that technically belongs to his shareholders, and set it on fire. That won’t fly, even amongst the most liberal investors.

If you think that the FB page is worth that much to Tesla and SpaceX, I’d like to sell you some Facebook pages...

You don’t think a fan page liked by nearly 3 million people, many of whom are customers or potential customers for a $100,000+ car, is worth at least $10M in sales to them? That’s only ~100 sales. I’d bet just about anything that the Tesla FB Page has helped drive at least that many sales. People look at comments to see what other customers feel about the car etc.

Good! Time for Facebook refugees to switch to decentralized social networks, that respect their privacy and don't treat their profiles as a product.

Elon and Mark were not getting along well as far as i can tell from reading past news. My guess is Mark and Bezos might be getting along well.

Out of the loop here, are people mad at Facebook for third-party apps that use their oauth data sharing API?

As far as I can tell, yes that's exactly what's happening.

The HN crowd has, of course, hated Facebook for a long time now for a variety of reasons completely unrelated to that, but that was the incident that seems to have triggered all this.

In that case, people are just looking for anything to rabble about. Facebook did nothing wrong here.

Is there a way to bulk-download photos?

That's about the only FB related item I care about.

Photos you uploaded are included in the "download your Facebook data" archive.

https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467/

Just checked myself in google. It looks he really did. No Facebook page opened

this pushed me over the edge to delete my account too.

facebook is toxic

And I just bought some more tesla stock

SpaceXBook?

Elon ought to boot up a social media company.

Don't get him started. He needs to focus.

Elon Musk is already using #Mastodon. I suspect he has possibly supported it in other ways as well, through public praise and/or contributions.

https://mastodon.social/users/elonmusk/followers

Can you check when he created the account? He hasn't made any "toot" yet, so he might've just created the account so no one would pretend to be him?

Unfortunately, AFAIK there is no way to check that if he hasn't tooted. Also, bear in mind it might not be him..might be a fake account, but then I'd suspect it would have been used more.

Why is this news?

Is he still on Instagram? If he is, he's still supporting Facebook.

People quitting FB but staying on Instagram is still going to hurt FB. Part of FB’s strength is the massive network effects.

Elon, whatever your reasons, I applaud this.

Now delete insragram.

Probably Tesla workers were using it to talk about unionization.

He deleted his company's Fan Pages, which are basically used to do marketing ("Check out our new car", "Coming soon on 2019", etc). It's not a discussion group or a forum.

Their facebook page? what are you talking about?

Hey, Elon, why don't you build a better Facebook? Call it, "the better interplanetary Facebook".

We could call it.... Spacebooks. I could surf my Spacebooks feed, while eating at Spacedonalds, before heading to the Spaceradioshack to get parts for my Spaceship before heading to Spacemars.

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