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Comment by shooner | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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 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.

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 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.

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.

> 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'.

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.

"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."

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

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