Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> a few million profiles deleted

Unrelated to Cambridge Analytica, I started de-escalating my Facebook usage a few months ago.

First, I turned off notifications on my phone for Facebook and Facebook Messenger. (I've had e-mail notifications off for years.) Next, I deleted the Facebook app from my phone. Then, I deleted the Facebook Messenger app from my phone. Finally, I force myself to log out of Facebook on my laptop every time I visit.

This combination strikes a better balance, for me, between the connecting benefits of Facebook and its addictive time- and emotion-sucking downsides.

View on HN

You need to just remove it from your phone. I promise you won't miss it. I did this a few years ago. It's freed up so much more time to Reddit.

I never facebooked. You need to do much more than that to remove their tracking, since many pages have a Facebook like button, which tells Facebook what you are browsing based on your ip, which they undoubtedly already know is you.

They track you whether you join or not.

I actually got my girlfriend on to Signal because of all of this. Her last use case was FB Messenger to talk to friends out west on the cheap. I got her to install Signal and she discovered a bunch of people on her contact list were already using it, including her boss. As soon as she tried it and found out there were video and audio chat as well, she was really excited.

There's often an alternative. Myself, I left FB behind a few years back and subsequently lost contact with a lot of people. I didn't try hard to find alternatives, though. Just the same, I've been far more happy and present without it.

> Finally, I force myself to log out of Facebook on my laptop every time I visit.

There are browser plugins which automatically delete cookies when a tab is closed. They work wonderfully as automatic log out by default.

I use a separate Chrome profile specifically for Facebook, to keep its cookies quarantined.

Facebook will analyse this to get a better psychological profile of you and serve you more tech-related and privacy-centered ads. /s

I'm not so sure that /s is necessary here.

Maybe a bit off topic:

I'm not using facebook a lot as of late. I just scroll through my feed and close the app when I'm bored. I don't click, share, write posts anymore...

I could delete facebook, but what's stopping me from doing it, is sharing of my vacation photo's with my friends and different groups that our friends use to discuss different plans (as where we can go in the weekend or organise a vacation together...)

Is there a good alternative for these 2 things:

- Online album for photo's? The same goes to: where can I see pics of my friends? - Site/app to organise things (whatsapp is enough to organise small things (evening events, dinners, ...), but no trips...)

You could upload the photos to S3 and share links to the friends that are interested (i.e. those who text/call and ask "How was your vacation?"). There's not really a need to post the photos for any of your FB friends to see - most of them don't care.

For discussing plans, you have the following options:

1. Group email thread

2. Group text (either SMS or even a chat app with E2E encryption)

3. Conference call

4. Slack group

5. Group IM (Hangouts, Jabber-based thingy)

6. Private Trello board (can you use Asana for the same thing?)

Same. When they changed the algorithm to show things other than my most recent friends updates, I removed the FB app from my phone.

I still use FB because I have a lot of international friends, but removing the FB app and replacing it with the site.

I only use Messenger for about 3 people right now, so that's going soon too.

I'm aboard this train as well. Removed both the app and messenger from my phone. Should I need to access messenger on foot I can use mbasic.facebook.com (sneaky, because the regular website disables messenger to push for app adoption, which is another button trigger for me)

I know I won't reliably remember to log out of Facebook, so I just limit my fb use to whatever my backup browser is.

To further improve your FB experience you should delete the account itself.

Source: Deleted my FB account 8 years ago

Reply on news.ycombinator.com