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Comment by peterlk | Hacker News Reader

Also, if you use facebook, stop. I haven't used facebook in years, and I feel pretty fine. I still have friends; we hang out; we show each other pictures. And, best of all, our communication isn't being injected with ads meant to distract us from communicating with each other. Texting, email, slack, whatsapp (yes, I know), signal, discord, and gchat work pretty well. If you're a user of FB, stop, and their power over you and your friends will begin to evaporate (if that's something you're concerned about)

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> whatsapp (yes, I know)

Hold on a sec... what do you mean by this?

How is using WhatsApp or Instagram not essentially the same thing as continuing to use Facebook?

The name is different... ;)

I’m not sure why aside from the fact that end-to-end encryption should make it harder (impossible in theory) for them to read your messages. They still have access to your contacts book, which is kinda scary since some people I know keep Social Security numbers in their contacts.

They don't have to be able to read your messages server-side to pick out keywords client-side and send those unencrypted.

It would still be truthful: all messages are encrypted e2e, but the app on your device parses decrypted messages to "deliver relevant ads".

Also:

>kinda scary since some people I know keep Social Security numbers in their contacts.

That is absolutely terrifying.

> some people I know keep Social Security numbers in their contacts

That's now how this works. That's not how any of this works!

He knows.

I too have deleted FB account long ago but I use Whatsapp. I realize it is much harder to quit Whatsapp than Facebook because I really 'need' whatsapp. But as of now I don't see any strong reason to quit Whatsapp because Facebook isn't using it to show ads in creepy ways.

If only I could persuade my family members and few friends to ditch Whatsapp...

I've been part of moving several hundred people away from WhatsApp so it's definitely doable. (My family was the worst. They're possibly more stubborn than me.)

Where did you move them? I moved a few to Signal, but most complain that their friends aren't on there and the quality isn't quite as good.

Telegram. Maybe I'd chosen something else today but it has served us very well.

But is it though? WhatsApp is an inherently less monetizable platform due to e2e encryption. If all of the people who use Facebook completely switch to WhatsApp the revenue of FB will plummet.

E2E but both ends are Facebook...

How? Isn't it encrypted from the senders device and decrypted at the receivers?

Which both run an app made by Facebook.

Seconded! I "deleted" my account some 5 years ago.

Just to add: I also don't use Whatsapp.

I refuse to touch any property, which is connected in any way with this evil, slimy carbuncle of a company. No matter if I'm slightly inconvenienced in the process.

I posted to my facebook yesterday that I'm deleting my account today. I can be reached in other ways... but yes, with this week's news, my own personal inclination to maintain my FB account has evaporated.

The bigger impact would be to convince everyone you can to stop spending money on their ads, but I have to say it's not easy to do because marketing managers are usually convinced that fb is the web 3.0

>"Also, if you use facebook, stop."

It sounds so easy, but unfortunately it's not feasible in a lot of cases. As an example, my entire social group organizes just about everything through Facebook events.

Monthly music quiz, including signup and updates about subjects and prizes, Christmas/Easter/others lunchs, pre-concert meetups, festival line-up "study group", and all the other various get-togethers. All discussion about these subjects happens in FB groups.

FB Messenger is the IM platform here in Denmark. WhatsApp is a very distant second.

Quitting FB cold turkey would cut me off from a lot of social interaction. Not with my closest friends of course, but with everyone else. And all of my closest friends use FB Messenger exclusively. I've tried getting people to adopt Signal or Slack or just something other than FB, but so far haven't had any success. There's too much friction, and FB has the userbase and appropriate lineup of features.

I feel like at this point, anyone using Facebook still is using it because of their addiction or for business purposes.

I see it as much more like Linkedin - I have to maintain a presence to communicate with a few people, but I don't spend my free time there.

When your product is compared to Linkedin, you’ve gone way off piste.

I occasionally share kid pics with relatives, and keep in touch with the martial arts school I attend. It's a perfectly fine tool for me, but I see how everyone else uses it and it makes me feel slightly sick each time I open it up.

Or because it's still one of the best ways to keep in touch with people, like all the people I'm not close enough with to call (so, almost everyone).

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