Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

One of the reasons I left Facebook was the amount of web presence people give their young children.

It's not that I don't think children are adorable. I'm talking about parents who have a baby and then spend every day posting photos about every event in the child's life. I know 3 people in my relatively small circle who have been posting on behalf of their children for years.

Maybe I'm a freak, but I think there's something seriously messed up with having one's life broadcasted to strangers. I'm not saying that it's bad to include updates about/with one's children occasionally in social media posts, but I think it's wrong to make a child's entire life an open book without their consent.

Worst of all, it's not really about the child. I mean, it kind of is, but it's mostly for the parents to feel good.

View on HN

I totally agree, I deactivated my Facebook a few years back. We use WhatsApp to share pictures and information about our baby with close friends and family, just hope the end-to-end encryption is legit. One big concern for me was the idea of Facebook having a 'shadow profile' of our daughter without our consent.

The point is, if you are sharing it with close family/friends, and their presence in the photo could prompt them to share it in their facebook. So in some way, it will end up in someone's profile with a tag to you/your kids name, unless you explicitly say every time "don't share".

To your point about strangers: There are two basic ways to use social media: public to the world and friends only. I feel like the first is a non starter, do you feel the same about the second use-case?

Your description of the second omits participants: FB and their hundreds of "partners".

Of course their participation is much different than what you're thinking of, but those unknown databases should be part of the calculation.

Not necessarily. It'd be one thing if these "friends" were people the child might actually know in real life, and whom have a meaningful relationship to the parents.

The problem starts for me with the fact that most of the "friends" people have on sites like Facebook are not actual friends, but acquaintances they might not have seen or talked to again for years. Most of the my "friends" on Facebook have hundreds of "friends", sometimes thousands. For all intents and purposes, most of those people are strangers.

This redefinition of "friend" is one of my big pet peeves of social media -- not one specific site, but in general.

It feels like it massively cheapens actual friendships.

"Followers" isn't much better. Different word, similar implications.

It's attention-seeking. Or if you prefer, validation-seeking. They're addicted to seeing the "likes" counter go up...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com