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Comment by vonseel | Hacker News Reader

I quit social media for a long time too. And then I noticed how disconnected I was from all my old school friends and contacts. Even close family that still uses Facebook but I otherwise don’t talk to much directly (brother’s wives posting about their kids and stuff like that, maybe even more extended than that).

Really, I’m starting to think that opting out of social media altogether is a bit like opting to be a hermit in today’s society. Sure, I’m not advocating posting every 5 minutes on Facebook and getting into dumb arguments, but it really feels like opting out is a way of putting walls between yourself and the rest of the world (that is on social media). You will miss out on news of friends having kids, graduating college, going to college, getting new jobs, and even planning events together since many events are organized officially on Facebook - from free local concerts to your friends bachelors party. Many people just go through Facebook and create a private event and invite their Facebook friends when they have a birthday gathering nowadays. You will miss out on these if you opt-out completely. I did.

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Don't conflate the medium with the quality of interaction. Not on FB != hermit, that's just what Facebook wants you to believe. I prefer deep personal relationships with few over hyper connectivity. Others may want a broader, shallower network; neither is wrong just define happiness for yourself.

I gave up facebook in 2014. It was a good decision. Some contacts I've lost. Others I picked up on email.

My sister now posts her baby pics to me via whatsapp (yup: facebook owned) and email. Mom SMSes me when she wants to contact me. Dad emails me from overseas bi-weekly.

Other people, I meet over a beer, or a coffee. And the best of it all? You have actual stuff to talk about. No! I did not know you had a second child already. Wow! Do tell!

> And the best of it all? You have actual stuff to talk about. No! I did not know you had a second child already. Wow! Do tell!

I cannot emphasize how positive this is. I deleted my Facebook account about two years ago, and it's amazing how much more intimate my conversations with friends have become for precisely this reason. They now can't assume that I know things that are going on in their lives, which was hard at first (due to social pressure—"What? You haven't heard?") but became a blessing really quickly. I didn't realize how shallow some of my interactions with friends and acquaintances were until I dumped social media. By actually having a deep, face-to-face conversation with someone, you're much less likely to skip over some of the more nuanced bits that you're assumed to already know.

My immediate family (brother, some nieces) all share a nice What's App group. Way more rewarding when someone posts something to that than FB feed. Also, have various groups with former co-workers, etc. I've replaced bland, meaningless feeds, with small targeted groups. And it couldn't be more perfect.

Understood, but you also have to remember you can't control how your friends communicate. I'd be perfectly fine communicating only via iMessage, but most of my friends have social media accounts and when I quit FB/Instagram and stopped liking their posts, I had less presence in their lives. Think about that - social networks are almost like an Internet schoolyard; just upvoting something shows presence and lets everyone else know that you're in the room.

To me, it's opting into different means for keeping in touch and hence, keeping that "presence" in my friends' lives.

I quit Facebook a year ago - I had 800+ friends. I was only "close" (subjectively) with a slim fraction of that. Now, I text, call, send birthday cards, and use other means to communicate with those I truly care about. Not that I don't care about the other, it's more of my way to prioritize the people who I've shared more life experiences with and/or can better relate to.

If I see the others who aren't in that close circle, we have plenty to talk about. If I see my close friends, well, we do as close friends always have done.

No offense, but I would argue the notion of needing "presence" in people's lives contains some inherent narcissism which is also prevalent on social media; and to be fair, the other piece is the need for belonging. True, it was a tough pill to swallow when first disconnecting, but over time this faded and via the other means I suggested, I've found I get that same level of belonging.

It's the equivalent of body-in-seat nonsense.

I'm not sure that's true. if 3 people like a post I see 3 names. If 15 people like a post I see 3 names so 12 people went unnoticed. Is that presence?

If you really care for each other, they'll find a way. My family has realized that group message are the only way to communicate quickly with one another. I have friends and family with whom I correspond via snail mail. And email bridges the gap between those who prefer digital, but not texting. As others have said, the conversations are more meaningful, even if they are less frequent

yeah, I've never understood myspace or FB. I remember when myspace was first blowing up, people were talking about having 100 friends, which always blew me away. I couldn't imagine trying to keep up with that many friends.

I had a brief 1-2 year stint on FB where someone finally convinced me to get on it, and I had 13 friends on there. All of them people I know and hang out with regularly in real life. All I ever did was post funny things I came across, and I eventually got pushed off during the election cycle because I got REALLY sick of seeing all the misinformation about hilary and trump (both sides were doing it).

I just don't understand FB.

At its core Facebook is a great and useful tool, but like everything else that is sold to corporate influence its primary purpose rots away. It _should be_ a way to interact with close friends and family, but it’s become a breeding ground for ads, and ads welcome misinformation—for the right price.

Honestly—there’s no reason a social network can’t be decentralized these days. Give people back their friendship circles and their information.

My understanding of Facebook is that it taps into human necessity for socialization, but it’s only masquerading as such and yields too-many, and over-stimulating relationships based on false pretense.

Yeah, you may have done it wrong :)

To me, FB is a way to keep in touch with non close friends and relatives. I know what my close friends are up to anyway, but without FB I'd have no clue what the "next tier" 50-100 people do.

Really? Anyone actually posts something personal these days? Facebook is not about that anymore. It's about liking posts and ads. So basically twitter / reddit, which makes sense as they copied the twitter timeline

I dont need facebook for my closest friends as I see them often enough. But there are 200-300 friends and family that I dont see often and it is great to see what is going on in their lives.

I only tend to post once every few weeks, but I enjoy reading about what people I know are doing.

Facebook groups have been a great way for neighborhoods and communities to come together.

> Facebook groups have been a great way for neighborhoods and communities to come together.

I would argue that we would have organically developed much better online ways for neighbourhoods and communities to come together, absent the monopolistic Facebook.

I don't understand people who don't understand Facebook :-)

You know what a blog is, what photo-sharing is, and RSS too. You know how people are social, a little bit vain, and like to brag. I'm sure you know about ad-tech, data-mining, EULAs nobody reads and dark patterns. I'm sure you've used email and chat, and you know deep down all email clients suck anyway.

Mix it all together, put it on phones with push notifications, and boom, you have Facebook and control half the Internet.

> I don't understand people who don't understand Facebook :-)

People who use Facebook mostly do so because they don't understand how it works, in some cases they do understand but prefer to be ignorant.

obviously I understand the business model intellectually, what I don't understand is the draw.

Trying to keep up with 200-300 people sounds fucking exhausting to me, yet this is the reason most people have given in response as to why they use FB.

I just have to question if these people actually do anything in life besides socialize.

How is this not a caricature of HN readership and geeks in general? Some/most people might even tell you that the purpose of life is to socialize--and all the games/power plays around that.

To add more information, FB doesn't actually connect you to 200-2000 people literally. When you think of RSS, you think of seeing every single article that you subscribed to, but FB doesn't do that. It shows you only some of the what others publish, and it uses its dark algorithms to make sure those are the most engaging and addictive stories (reposts of click-bait titles, trending gossip, politically divisive arguments, etc.). And then it pads the feed with ads and more click-bait.

Actually the "genius" of FB is to tap into the social-reward centers of the brain by letting you inflate the number of friends, the number of followers, number of notifications, while still trimming down the firehose of pictures of your second cousin's roommate's tacos. Conversely, it lets you post your food pictures into the void and feel that others care about it, without actually bothering too many people.

To answer your question directly, yes these people spend inordinate amount of time doing this, but I believe they feel it is a good thing, to have a big social circle and feel connected to all those people--without always seeing how they were manipulated into being addicted to something that is not real socialization.

I am who I am and I make no apologies for it, stereotypes be damned.

I get more value out of being useful than socializing. That's just the way I'm built.

Precisely my thought process when giving up FB. Sure I'll miss the timeliness, but when I hear the great news or even bad news, I can be there with my friends to celebrate or empathize in person. Quality over quantity.

How about a bit of both? I definitely value my deep personal relationships, which are few, but log in to Facebook every couple of weeks or so. I also get the occasional invitation through Facebook.

It doesn't have to equal hermit-ude but it does require work to avoid it. Social media is great for making low friction contact between people.

Thanks for this. It helps to hear it.

>Many people just go through Facebook and create a private event and invite their Facebook friends when they have a birthday gathering nowadays. You will miss out on these if you opt-out completely. I did.

This has been my experience. It's a valid pragmatic argument for staying, and a valid principled argument for opting out.

If someone can't be arsed to call me or send me an email inviting me to their birthday then I don't consider them a friend.

I have not had this issue since quitting facebook around 2011. But then again I have clearly notified those people that are actually my friends that if they want to include me they need to call or email or something like that. Nobody has issues with that and fully understand my desire to stay away from facebook.

> If someone can't be arsed to call me or send me an email inviting me to their birthday then I don't consider them a friend.

And they think the same of you. If their preferred method of communication is Facebook message, are you really a friend if you don’t care?

I do care about my friends though, which is why I’m trying to fight against the current and get them to also opt out of Facebook which I see as a toxic cancer upon society. I miss out on socializing by not smoking cigarettes too.

If you've stated your preference to them and explained why you personally don't feel comfortable using Facebook, and they don't care, then they are the one being unfriendly.

Of course there are many ways to state that preference, ranging from "you're an idiot if you want to keep that advertising agency alive" to "I don't feel comfortable putting details of my personal life, including our friendship, on the Internet for private companies to profit". If someone truly belittled the second, then yeah, they aren't a friend.

If I have some friends who are into amateur radio, am I not really their friend if I don't get my own ham radio so they can contact me through that?

I wouldn't say that. But don't be surprised if the ham radio friends become grow apart from you. It isn't necessarily a bad thing because people change.

"Hi friend, whenever we eat together I don't want it to be a self-catered barbeque or picnic in a park, dinner at my place or yours, a meal at a great local restaurant or any other of a thousand and one possibilities. No, whenever we eat together it must be at a MacDonalds restaurant. Otherwise we can't be friends."

> And they think the same of you. If their preferred method of communication is Facebook message, are you really a friend if you don’t care?

It's hardly the same though, it's not like the other commenter's expressing a preference for a call or text where the other would be equally possible. It's exceedingly unlikely that someone with the capacity to have a preference for Facebook messaging is unable to call or text; the reverse isn't true.

Saying 'I would rather we texted' vs. email or whatever is not the same as 'I would rather you sign up for this service and use it to contact me'.

If they think the same of me then so be it. We are obviously not compatible then.

For information I still have the same set of core friends from elementary school so it has not stopped anyone that I actually care about from contacting me.

Edit: and yes as the a side comment here suggest I do not say this in a patronising way, I just explain why I am not on facebook and that there are other ways to contact me.

Assuming that they already use a computer and/or a cellphone, sending an email, making a call, or sending an SMS is much easier than creating and maintaining a Facebook account.

I would believe it if someone didn't want to use cellphones at all, for moral reasons, but that person wouldn't have a Facebook account anyway.

> Assuming that they already use a computer and/or a cellphone, sending an email, making a call, or sending an SMS is much easier than creating and maintaining a Facebook account.

An empty FaceBook account that does nothing but notify you when someone invites you to an event? Requires no maintenance.

Asking someone to remember that you need to be specially invited because you're special -- that's ongoing maintenance right there.

If I prefer social interactions at a bar and I allow a friendship to suffer because I don't respect a recovering alcoholics preference to avoid those places it makes me the arsehole, not them.

I mean, I only joined Facebook back in 2009 because my flatmates were forgetting to tell me about flat parties.

I quit completely for several months and came back to it because of your exact line of reasoning - keeping in touch with those at the outskirts of my social circles is valuable to me.

However, I'm on the edge of leaving again because moderation is very difficult.

The problem with social media is that using it in moderation is an uphill battle against our own nature. It is designed to be addictive. Much like an alcoholic that keeps a bottle of vodka in the freezer and the dieter who keeps chips in the cupboard, you will constantly have to exercise restraint to keep yourself in check.

If you've woken up to the downsides of social media, and are trying to moderate, is that struggle worth the upside? I'm not so sure any more.

I don't have a solution for Facebook, since it feels like there's a bit too much garbage on the platform. But for Instagram, I've started fresh following a limited set of close friends and interests.

Few enough that I can still participate and get updates about friends and interests without feeling the urge to check multiple times per day. If anything "important" happens to someone I'm not following, my friends are kind enough to fill me in if it's interesting.

That is a great approach. I'll take a stab at pruning who I'm connected with and see if the experience improves!

Yep. I started with a new account to make things easier. Pruning from hundreds down to 10-50 is much harder than just thinking about who/what you actually care about.

Yeah, it's definitely a mixed bag.

In some ways, my mental health has improved since I'm not chasing online validation/FOMO all the time. My current friends don't use Facebook a ton, so organizing happens via text or other methods.

But for my college/HS friends, I'm definitely less close because I'm not present in the online arenas that they socialize in. Hopefully I can get back into social media without partaking in all the behaviors that made me quit it in the fist place.

I believe you can do it. Keep up the work. We need to relearn, and reteach people how to communicate without the big platforms distracting and moderating the focus.

I think the problem is that social media usage is on a continuum, and you can find yourself at a local maximum that is well below your global maximum. For example, if you check FB once a day, then maybe you would be somewhat happier if you increased to 2x or 3x daily. But if you decreased your usage to once weekly, then you'd actually be much happier. The problem is that you'd have to go through the "valley" of once every 3 days and once very 5 days before you get to once a week. There's also the fact that FB sets up the bday posting stuff to encourage you to log on every day.

I wish there were ways to distinguish between periodically checking FB and essentially being addicted to it (several times daily use). Perhaps we could employ language like "I use FB" versus "FB uses me". Only half-joking...

I stopped posting happy birthday's on FB because it's always someone's birthday. Occasionally I will wish a close friend a happy birthday, but usually through text message. It's also annoying on my birthday when all these people I barely know come out of the woodwork to comment. I usually ignore FB that day, then reply to all with a thank you the day after.

One of my best friends has his birthday on fb set to a different date. Always funny to see :-)

Maybe I'm an outlier, but I was never seeing news like that when I had Facebook. Instead I was bombarded with videos (usually "suggested by facebook") in between ads for things I had searched for days prior.

I almost think it's my own fault as I never interacted with those posts about friends having kids or getting new jobs (at least not on Facebook), so I wonder if the algorithms just showed me less and less of my own friends content. If it matters I only ever looked at FB through the mobile web browser - I didn't have the app and never looked at it on my computer.

If you need Facebook to keep in touch with your friends, they’re not your friends anymore. Accept it and move on.

Why focus on pretending you’re all still in school? Live in the now.

I bailed out of social media and while I can see how people will value that kind of interaction, I’ve felt a whole heap better forming closer connections and putting the effort into maintaining them.

For me personally, I didn’t see much value in getting second hand info from Facebook. It felt too impersonal and distant.

If I cared about someone getting pregnant or married or whatever I would have preferred the direct conversation over the social optimisation of receiving a broadcast. And if we weren’t close enough for that, then I’m sure it’d come up in conversation at some point. No need to be looking out for an announcement.

Getting rid of social media was basically my decision to cultivate a small handful of meaningful, high quality relationships over a much larger number of less meaningful associations. I see a lot more people in person now I’ve done that.

As an aside, it was as if one aspect of my depression was fuelled by having too much of the rest of the world in my head and not enough of myself, so it was a great move for self-care too.

I don't know how old you are, but I think that what you describe was just the natural course of things before social media, and everyone got through life just fine. Yeah, you lose contact with your old friends, yeah you lose updates from close but not immediate family. But you also start your own family and become way more involved in them. That happened to my grand parents, my parents, and myself. I think the idea that you have to be up to date on everyone's business you've ever met seems to be a new phenomenon, and maybe the solution to all this is to just be comfortable with the idea you can maintain a relationship without being in constant contact. I see some of my friends once or twice a year. None of us are on Facebook or social media. But we have the same relationship dynamic we've had since middle school, despite differences in time and space.

I've definitely had a lot of these thoughts before! In a way as life goes on our social networks get smaller but our lives get bigger.. I think the saying goes something like that.

I did something else to structure how I could interact with Facebook. I unfollowed all my friends. Joined only Facebook groups that had some value to me on a weekly basis (primarily organizing meeting new people in my local area). I'd say it's transformed my relationship with FB in a positive way.

>I quit social media for a long time too. And then I noticed how disconnected I was from all my old school friends and contacts.

As opposed to faux-connected through FB though?

You're not wrong.

I guess it depends on where you are in life on how much it matters to you. Personally, I'm single and live alone, so it's nice to keep a superficial awareness of people I met in school not that many years ago. If I were married and having my own kids, I'd probably have enough social contact at home and through my wife and kids that I don't really care about observing others' lives from 1000 feet away.

I'd argue those people that are too lazy/inconsiderate/uncaring to not invite people who are not on FB are not friends at all. It takes a few seconds to text/email someone, sometimes even less if you text/email a whole group at a time. Expecting people to give up their privacy and use an addictive surveillance platform just so they don't miss out on parties and other events, is way too much to ask of anyone. This is especially true of close friends and family that one cares about. It's easy for people to forget the true consequences of using a platform like FB. It's literally inconsiderate when they do so, however.

Oh I'd argue the same, but I have friends who I have known for my entire life that I would consider brothers who can't even be bothered to answer a text message, so you really can't expect the same out of everyone else that you expect out of yourselves. You definitely can't expect them all to see Facebook as an "addictive surveillance program" (even if it is).

> brother’s wives posting about their kids and stuff like that

Either that is a misplaced apostrophe, or you are revealing more about your family than you intended! Punctuation is important :)

Most of my relationships that were worth anything have largely moved to platforms that involve actual conversation rather than the posting format of Facebook. This is stuff like WhatsApp and Discord and Slack mostly. Most of the life update stuff that doesn't merit conversation is on Instagram at this point.

I think the key is really just using the services in ways where they can't dark pattern you into engaging with them. So notifications get shut off and anything you can do to turn off "endless scroll" mode is worth doing.

Facebook was originally designed as a sort of directory or phone book type page for people and that's still what it's best at. Instead of using the regular page, which just tries to dark pattern you into engaging with it, I've bookmarked mbasic.facebook.com which lets you see only the top 5 to 10 posts on your feed at a time and then I shut off all notifications that weren't sent to me directly.

Once I got rid of the "one more post" effect of wanting to keep reading, I found myself spending a lot more time going through my RSS feed, which is nice as that's content I find much more edifying.

I used mbasic at some point (and had the normal one blocked), and then I just unfollowed everyone. I now just check someone's profile when I remember that they exist - once a month or even less often.

The thing that makes this so much harder is that there's still an algorithm between you and your FB feed. Even if you feel you're good the check in once a week, you still don't see the "important" posts and there's still mindless noise in your feed. I don't know if there's a way to curate this, but I've found that FB is all or nothing for me (and I feel better with nothing)

One thing that helped my Facebook feed a lot was going through and unliking EVERY page/interest/book/movie/whatever (or most of them). My news feed is now only populated by actual friend posts and ads.

Yeah, I haven't done any tests on this myself but the algorithm is frustrating. I see a lot of posts from people I am not that close with, but I don't really scroll the feed anymore. The only people who really like my posts are family members, and I've heard that once Facebook marks a post as "relevant to family" then it mostly gets pushed to your relatives' newsfeeds, so I'm not sure if non-family people are even seeing my posts.

Simple solution: unfollow everyone except your family. Unfollow anything/one you’ve liked too.

Edit: same comment as below oops

Is that not then a case of making an effort to keep in contact with those friendships you value? I still use messaging apps to facilitate communication but I opt out of the social 'media'. Instead of sharing media we should be sharing our thoughts, feelings and experiences. Those who want to contact me can easily do so. Group chats are another big time sink that I try to avoid by muting the ones filled with spam, keeping the most relevant ones unmuted for upcoming social events.

Perhaps missing out will create a forcing function in your life where you start to focus on the people that are important to you - whether that's your children, neighbors, parents.

Maybe you'll move locations to be closer to the people you love. I've often wondered if I might have lived in a different country if I couldn't watch my friends from afar.

I've never used social media and I sometimes wonder what other people think when they ask me what my account name is and I tell them I don't have one. They've never seemed to care that I don't have an account. What goes through your head when someone tells you that they don't have a social media account?

> What goes through your head when someone tells you that they don't have a social media account?

Up until a few years ago, it wasn't common but it wasn't super rare. I knew more than a handful of people who didn't have any Facebook/Insta/etc. accounts and mostly I just assumed they wanted to keep their personal lives private from friends and colleagues.

In recent years though, I can only think of two persons that I know directly who I could not find a trace of online. The first was a smart programmer I assumed to be into HN privacy-activism type groups or something like Anonymous. The second, which was more baffling, is someone I knew in college that appears to have disappeared off the face of the planet, and I thought maybe he had died until someone told me he "doesn't want to be found".

Maybe old school friends and in-laws don't really matter that much. I see my brother in law a few times a year; i see old school friends once every couple years. Is this not sufficient? On the other hand i could legit be a hermit...

I've found a happy medium in checking it once every few weeks without deleting it.

You aren't putting up walls around yourself when you do that. Facebook is.

People have forgotten how to gossip, which is historically how you learned about babies, and other life events.

When people do gossip now a days, it's about politics, or celebrities.

I think you have just perfectly described what makes FB et al walled gardens.

> Really, I’m starting to think that opting out of social media altogether is a bit like opting to be a hermit in today’s society

Perhaps this is what the network wants you to think? Or how your behavior has been modified by too much reliance on this technology?

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