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Comment by ogre_codes | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is the dumpster fire nobody wants to walk away from because it's here everyone hangs out. Everyone tolerates the smell because if they want to show their mom or their grandmother pictures, it's where you do it. You just have to ignore the flaming garbage all around you while you flip out your photos.

There is no alternative to Facebook. Even if Twitter were tons better, if you want to move, you have to drag all your friends along with you.

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After deleting Facebook, I didn't feel any impact on my relationships... I think it's more related to addiction than not having a platform to hang out with.

Yes, it's absolutely an addiction. I constantly hear people talk about how they can't leave facebook because they'll lose connections with friends and/or family, won't be able to find out about events, or will somehow otherwise be missing out on life. I deleted my account 7 or so years ago and the impact on my life has only been positive

The emotionally charged downvotes from the people that are addicted to facebook will do nothing to change the fact that it IS addicting. It is literally designed to get you addicted, and it's clearly working

Didn't downvote, but I do disagree. There is some kind of compulsive behavior, but I wouldn't describe it as addiction. I've used FB quite regularly and have never felt compelled to return when away from it, or even missed it remotely when I don't have time to check it or don't have signal. A couple weeks ago I uninstalled it and again there is no compulsion, no absence felt. I don't even check in on my iPad when I get home.

When I had it convenient to check, I would pop on during downtime, now it's just gone. I do check HN more often so maybe it's just a general social media itch.

I appreciate that you respond and explain why you disagree rather than simply downvoting and moving on. However, Facebook, and other similar sites, are literally designed to be addictive. Many of the founders of some of the largest social media, and other SV tech, companies took classes that focus on making an app/service/product addictive. You may personally not feel addicted, but that doesn't change the fact that these companies specifically abuse psychological processes and reactions to make their products addictive to the average user. There are a ton of articles on the subject. It may be easier for some to leave than others, but that doesn't mean these companies don't purposely make it psychologically challenging to leave for many. Here are a few articles on the topic

https://www.livescience.com/49585-facebook-addiction-viewed-...

https://www.wired.com/story/phone-addiction-formula/

https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/just-how-bad-kids-sma...

https://www.1843magazine.com/features/the-scientists-who-mak...

Why does this matter? Pornhub is addictive, probably on a much deeper level than Facebook. No one criticizes Pornhub. Reddit is addictive, no one criticizes Reddit. Videogames are addictive. No one says we should ban videogames or take legal action against them. Even if people do criticize these things, they don't criticize them the same way they criticize Facebook.

I think FB has added more to the world (wealth, high tech jobs, open source technology, places for people to organize, ways for people to connect) than it has taken away in the form of FB addiction and manipulative ads.

The masses have always had their bread and circuses. I don't see why a new digital variation is any worse than existing forms of mindless entertainment.

Your 3rd sentence seems unrelated to the 2nd.

As far as I can tell, Twitter is hugely dysfunctional and has literally contributed to at least one friend's mental decline. (Twitter seems much closer to single experience since you automatically get everyone's comments).

Facebook seems much more "what you make it", meaning it can be as bad as Twitter if you choose the wrong friends, wrong groups and wrong approach or it can be a place where you meet people with similar interests and filter out the noise.

Especially, you have this effect "everyone hates Facebook" but that everyone is distributed between people wanting Facebook to censor more (and as they'd prefer), people wanting Facebook to censor less (and especially not bother their bullshit), and people using Facebook as a stand-in for social networking or being on the Internet, or just talking with people you don't know very well.

I use Signal or Telegram, or regular email to send pictures to family and close friends. When they get the pictures they know I thought specifically of them, rather than a post that they may or may not actually see. In that regard, sending a message with a picture seems way more personal than a post to a socialnetworking site.

I don't really disagree with your broader point but...

>if they want to show their mom or their grandmother pictures

Email? Personally that's how I show pictures to my dad. (Well, that and in person.)

My parents have flipped to Google photos. They're tired of Facebook too and don't know what instagram is.

Email sucks. It's the dumpster fire where every single web-site I've ever interacted with thinks they can monopolize my attention. Facebook got big when email was the dominant way of sharing with family & friends and there are a lot of good reasons why.

Email (once abused) sucks because it was born when trust was implicit between both parties in a communication, plus the creators wouldn't even imagine that wonderful tool one day would be used for mass spamming, "419" scams and the like. Those days are long gone sadly, but the protocol is there in the open to be hardened and made more modern (just like NNTP could become a social networking killer if properly extended). Add basic security by default, write clients so conversation mode becomes the norm and you get a mail client that would be much much easier to push to other users. Example: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary

100 times easier than reinventing the wheel, and we get the huge benefit of using well known open protocols and decentralized servers that can talk to each other, and are already there.

And Facebook isn't? Gmail tabs work pretty well for me. Yes, a lot of email comes in but my Primary tab is relatively clean. Email is still my primary communications method for home and work with texting in 2nd place for more immediate needs.

Added: What email was/is bad for is the family member/friend who just had to share jokes, what we call memes these days, etc. with 100 of their closest friends on a daily if not hourly basis. Facebook etc. have largely replaced that sort of thing and that's for the best. But sharing baby pictures with the grandparents? Email's is fine, even best, for that.

> And Facebook isn't?

I posted as much above. Both are dumpster fires, for different reasons.

You can add filters to your email to ensure that you see messages from your friends and family. Facebook hides a good portion of these messages no matter what you do.

I'm on board on the Facebook hate train, but I still have one.

Why? Because the martial arts gyms I visit only communicate there. And because the card gaming communities (I used to play Netrunner) always used Facebook to coordinate. All seminars, tournaments and other events require Facebook.

I don't really care about talking to friends, and I haven't even added friends on Facebook. But Facebook being the gatekeeper to my hobbies, which I really don't want to miss, means I will continue having an account there. You're right that there's no alternative for me.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. There are a ton of people or groups where the only communications channel we have in common is FB. Quite a few only support FB.

Thus we have a dumpster file everyone hates but still uses.

Or they're a service that is what you make of it but that it's hip to hate, like a wide variety of other things in human society.

I throw events in Toronto. Same kinda deal.

I think you framed it negativly. The reason why I am not leaving, is because it's actually far better than other social networks, including YouTube and Twitter.

Google made a bad decision by closing Plus, but I guess they smelled the stench in the media, and decided it would be bad for their public image. This is just my speculation, however.

Regardless, fact remains. Facebook is providing a great service to users for free.

Facebook—the product is possibly better than the other social networks at doing the basics.

Facebook—the company, is morally bankrupt. Arguably the worst of the bunch. The overly invasive data-collection, sharing of data in questionable ways, repeated lying about.. just about everything... etc.

For me, the product is not appealing enough to compensate for the failings of the companies. If it weren't for the fact that so many friends/ businesses/ family rely on it for communications I would quit it entirely.

"free" isn't really the word we should be using at this point to describe facebook. You're mostly paying with the private intimate details of your personal life and by consenting to be manipulated but you're still paying.

That is part of the false narrative promoted by the anti-ads crowd. If you understand the history of the internet, then you can only disagree strongly with that kind of thinking. It is basically just sawing off the branch we are all sitting on.

The user does not become a product because Facebook run ads, and they are also not entitled to part of the profit. It would be minuscule anyway.

No, actually, there is no real product, except the reach and engagement Facebook is able to create through the ads.

> The user does not become a product because Facebook run ads

they become a product because Facebook collects their personal information and uses it to manipulate them for profit. Facebook could show ads without mining user data, without buying information from data brokers, and without creating shadow profiles for people who choose not to interact with their service. They do all of those things though because the user is 100% the product as far as Facebook is concerned.

We just need a better place to show our parents pictures of their grandkids. Is that such a hard ask?

Our family uses shared albums in Google Photos

Pixelfed?

One keeps reading things like this on the Internet or in the media, and yet the data keep pointing in the opposite direction: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo...

Article has nothing to do with my comment. There is a big difference between saying "people hate Facebook" and "Facebook is doomed". This is easy to illustrate if you replace the Facebook with Comcast. Monopolies are free to screw over the customers as much as they like.

Really? I've been sharing Google Photos / iCloud Photo Library albums with my friends family for years, and even my technically-inept relatives have had no trouble liking or commenting on them, all without the need for Facebook.

> Everyone tolerates the smell because if they want to show their mom or their grandmother pictures, it's where you do it.

I guess people were sharing pictures with their mom before Facebook.

The alternative is to email / direct message / snail mail your family members. It works just fine.

And to have them all agree to do it with you. Which they won't.

Wait… we still have Fedex next day air right?

Just stop posting anything about your personal life on it, block all forms of geolocation (other than by IP, which they can still do), and use it for only shitposting.

I'm honestly creeped out by people who post photos of the interior of their homes, the children, etc on Facebook now.

There was a time when people moving to a new place would voluntarily list their names, phone number, and residential address in a public directory.

We have lost a lot of privacy in recent decades but some expectations have actually changed towards more privacy.

Well, there was also a time when the SS7/PSTN phone network was the only way to get in contact with people quickly. And by "quickly", I mean that almost nobody carried a cellphone, so leave a message on their cassette tape based answering machine if they're not home.

What's interesting to me now is how blithely people give up a lot of their personal privacy to random social media companies.

I don't use it, but i hear it's the root of all evil. I wonder what will people do without FB. This evil is a kind of solution.

Nobody hangs out on facebook anymore except middle-aged/old people that nobody wants to interact with.

Today I learned that 2,400,000,000 = nobody. Must be HN math.

Also, ageist much?

Instagram is still Facebook.

It's FACEBOOK now.

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