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Comment by 1propionyl | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised I haven't seen a single comment say what ought to be the obvious: the easiest way to never see Facebook ads is to just not use Facebook.

I should hope I'm preaching to the choir, I'm sure, but... quitting really isn't as hard as you tell yourself it is.

It's not as essential as you think it is.

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I'd like to add that it is not necessary to leave Facebook to not use Facebook. I have a FB account and I'll never close it, because I like having my username on all online services I might use if once. That being said I only have it logged in at a home desktop, not my phone, not any work machine. I use it for like two minutes weekly, one to check a few specialty groups I'm a lurker in and two to co-admin a page with a group of my friends where I once helped promote a post because the UX of doing so is too shitty for normal people wanting to bother navigating it. Facebook has had no effect on my mental health and it has a marginal benefit of being a kinda up to date contact book, even if it is getting worse at that. But that's it. You can have a Facebook account and only use it when it benefits you and not Facebook.

Edit: Oh and I use it in a Firefox Facebook container so I'm not at all worried about it tracking me online.

Although you're not a heavy Facebook user, you still use it weekly. People who don't want to use Facebook at all would benefit from deleting their accounts, because leaving Facebook adds a hurdle that discourages them from returning to Facebook.

Well, sure, but there's a difference between using Facebook heavily and using Facebook occasionally. It's not a binary. Indeed, you can even use Facebook once in a blue moon. For instance, you can log out on all your devices and set your password to something you've autogenerated but you haven't saved so you have to go through the "forgot password" process.

Facebook wants to be addictive, but it's okay and possible to use it once every two or three months so you can add your great aunt and post holiday photos (so people know you're safe). And by using Facebook less, it takes away some of Mark Zuckerberg's power over you and our society.

>Oh and I use it in a Firefox Facebook container so I'm not at all worried about it tracking me online.

You think that once you log in to FB in a container -- Facebook can't track you? Those container details are now appendage to your online fingerprint as far as Facebook are concerned.

Containers only work if you don't actually log in to such services. The only sure way for FB to not track you is to not use FB at all -- even then it requires other steps too as they'll be building a shadow profile on you.

You're of course correct, they can still see that I'm a container user because they can only even see me accessing Facebook directly, but fail to see any activity from other pages loading the like buttons and their other tracking crap. So that's a data point to them. Another is that I've disabled the "app platform" or whatever they call it in my profile settings before, so I didn't see their online tentacles to being with and keeping them contained is just to keep them honest (the "do not use app platform" toggle is similar to "do not track" in this regard). But they can't do much with the profile they build on me: they know I'm a container using, ad-blocking, Facebook-barely-using, well-off (I participate in a group about an expensive hobby) dude who they failed to generate a single click off in their entire lifetime. That's not-being-tracked enough for me. Getting protection from tracking beyond that is not IMO scalably solvable using techological means and crosses over to the regulatory realm.

I'll admit I don't fully understand how those containers work, but I assumed it would allow me to have different fingerprints for different scumbags so that it's harder to cross-correlate.

Is that naive?

> You can have a Facebook account and only use it when it benefits you and not Facebook.

I used to think so too, but then I realized that Facebook would let people add me to group chats or something without my knowledge and that these people would then blindly assume that I had read the messages in those chat groups. I find that "I have a Facebook account but I almost never log in" tends to get misunderstood, whereas "I no longer have a Facebook account" gets the message across quite clearly.

This is what finally pushed me to delete my Facebook account too. Many people only use Facebook to communicate even if they have my phone number. So, they'd send me something on Facebook and expect me to read it there. Sometimes they'd even get angry if I didn't despite me telling them many times that I don't login to Facebook. I mostly don't hear from those people anymore and I'm fine with that.

This exact issue was the final nail in the coffin for me with Facebook. I was expected to use it as a primary means of communication and I refused. The hard part is, the people I don't hear from anymore are family.

I used to do this as well until it got to the point where family members would get upset if I didn't like or post a comment on something they posted. I left facebook because it was only a negative in my life.

I never liked facebook so I never really used it, deleted my account 3 years ago. I always was (and still am) against their practices and business model.

I have a hobby which is growing carnivorous plants and last year I started a small side business selling my extra plants. The entire community is now on facebook (before that it was mostly forums) and I had to reopen an account to be part of it.

Sadly it is essential for some people. Not facebook itself, but the fact that it is the main social network makes it essential if you want to be a part of some communities. I hate that I have to use Facebook, but I don't have the choice.

It opened so many more opportunities for me than when I wasn't using it, it has really been surreal and I've never felt more engaged and happy in my life. I wouldn't credit facebook for it because in the end, it's the people on it that brings me happyness, but there's no way I would have interacted with them without it.

Of course if you don't have any hobbies/business that depends on it, deleting Facebook is indeed the way to go, but for a lot of people it's not such a black or white thing

Its funny, I have a few hobbies that have settled on fb as the central hub of discussion. Yet, a single friendship irl still yeilds me more info. If the caliber of person guiding my hobby feels facebook is the best forum, I might already be ahead of the pack.

Stop making excuses for sidlining your personal integrity, you are now just another part of the problem.

I think Facebook has been very successful at instilling FOMO in people. People are paralyzed by the fear that they will miss out on this or that if they leave, which is great for their retention.

I quit using Facebook close to 10 years ago, yet I still have a robust social life, communicate regularly with friends and family, participate in hobbies (even ones who unfortunately moved their community to FB) and do all of the above without the unhealthy “like-obsessed” feedback loops. It’s great!

But when you tell people it’s possible to live without Facebook, all you get are lame excuses about why their case is special and they couldn’t possibly do it themselves!

Cannot agree more. Quit Facebook and its sister service completely (talking about WhatsApp; never really got around to using Instagram) after the 'View As' feature exploit last year that led to 50 mil user accounts' data being exposed [0], and I must say, I've never felt more calmer, tranquil or better, mental health wise.

I feel our brains could do much better with a little less of constant bombardment of highlight-reel version of other people's lives. The psychological literature on the negative impacts of social media usage is only ballooning by the day, and there's never been a better time to quit Facebook.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-...

Amen to this. I stopped using Facebook due to the same reason. If anything, my quality of life has gone up since then.

Quitting Facebook itself would help with what you are saying, but I am curious what you replaced WhatsApp/Messenger with.

For example, I have good friends in other countries, and sending pictures and short texts is one of the best ways to stay in contact. We do talk over the phone occasionally, but not having a simple way to send pictures or links would pull us much further apart.

Sure, email could be an option, but WhatsApp is just so much more convenient.

discord is really advanced Iove it you can do group video chat

Signal

Signal or Matrix (using the Riot client, for instance).

From before the Facebook acquisition WhatsApp had gotten really embedded in The Netherlands (and the rest of Europe?) as a free replacement for paid SMS service. Not only because it was free but also more convenient for sending long messages, pictures, etc. compared to the MMS hellhole.

I've been trying to get people on Signal but it's a struggle especially for older people used to WhatsApp. For a lot of them WhatsApp → Signal is a big step even though (for us) the apps are pretty much similar.

Agree. Outside the small tech bubble around me, the vast majority of people use WhatsApp for all their messaging communication.

What I was curious about with GP's comment was more on the aspect of social/psychological effects of social media. I know Signal/Telegram/others could be used as a 1:1 replacement of WA/Messenger for the purpose of avoiding Facebook Inc.

I was wondering if they found some other strategy to keep in contact with their close ones without using messaging in the first place, not replacing Facebook services with some other service.

Telegram might be convenient, it's a middle ground between bloated Facebook things and "geeky" apps like Signal (I don't dislike it, but it's just unpopular).

I guess it depends where you are. In central europe many people have Signal and its growing (i have 40 signal contacts).

Also i dont agree at all that its more geeky. If you don't think about technical backround Signal is ux wise simpler app.

Threema. You pay a certain modest sum and get a service. A terribly old-fashioned business model it seems... (but works for me).

Threema's mobile clients are closed source, while Signal and Riot are both open source and free of charge.

Are all of your friends on it? I don't know anyone running it so it wouldn't work for me. Everyone I know is either on Messenger or Whatsapp. One friend is on Telegram, but he's also on Whatsapp.

Your friends also definitely have an email and a phone number since those are required to use Facebook.

Signal or Telegram

Things I pragmatically need Facebook (including Messenger) for:

- My martial arts classes post updates there

- So does the community garden I help out at

- Keeping up with family news, and directly talking to family

- Keeping up with what's happening to my friends in the USA or other far flung places

- Access to topical news that matches my political beliefs rather than being heavily centrist-biased and ignoring all the important stuff

- Monitoring political campaigns and issue campaigns

And honestly, good luck finding all that anywhere else.

Create bookmarks directly to those pages and ignore the news feed.

Missing the bit where I want the news feed.

That reads to me like "I like the Facebook service and so I use it". Of course if you want to use Facebook then quitting Facebook isn't practical.

I'd like it better with less evil.

That's a universal platitude that could be applied to any profit-seeking company. At the end of the day you either regard Facebook as so abhorrent that you will refuse to use their services or not, but you definitely don't need to use them.

And that's lazy deference to an inevitability that isn't inevitable. It's a cultural choice, to tolerate evil of that sort.

I have made no defense. IMO, bargaining on the axis of moral flexibility to maintain the convenience of using a service you regard as evil is explicit "toleration" of said evil.

Exactly. The real reason why FB is evil is not because it makes a ton of money from data that you willingly provide it, its simply because of what it is - a platform that takes advantage of a human weakness - vanity, to keep you "engaged". It is an addiction that Zuck sells, pretty sure he knows it. The privacy bit is only a red herring and what should be the least of user's concerns. Just stop "using".

I think you have summarized my thoughts exactly on this. In their quest for increasing "engagement", they have unleashed a monster.

127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net

127.0.0.1 graph.facebook.com

127.0.0.1 staticxx.facebook.com

127.0.0.1 api.facebook.com

127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com

127.0.0.1 an.facebook.com

I typically use 0.0.0.0 rather than 127.0.0.1, then it's not even reachable.

Genuine question, it can't possibly be reachable on 127 anyway can it?

Put another way, what's the difference between 0 and 127 here? What makes it safer? TIA

Not OP but read about it on this hosts config [0].

From that page:

> We prefer to use 0.0.0.0, which is defined as a non-routable meta-address used to designate an invalid, unknown, or non applicable target.

> Using 0.0.0.0 is empirically faster, possibly because there's no wait for a timeout resolution. It also does not interfere with a web server that may be running on the local PC.

[0] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

For 127.0.0.1 it will try to connect and fail, either right away or on timeout depending on the on-box firewall setup.

For 0.0.0.0 it won't even try to connect (or fail instantly depending on how you look at it).

I usually have a web server running on posts 80 and 443 on my local machine. Using 127.0.0.1 will make requests to Facebook end up there, which is not necessarily what you want.

Although I share hour feelings, is not that easy either. I have family all over the world, and facebook is the best way to get communicated with them.

Same thought, same choir. Stopped feeding their fidget spinner profit engine years ago. Have more interesting things to spend time on these days (like reading HN).

Easiest way to quit was to add "facebook.com" to my LAN's pihole blacklist and delete their (tracking) app from my phone. The account is still there to reserve my name but it has no other real data.

I suspected I'd enter the comments and see this sort of comment. I don't feel like the author is telling us how to block ads on facebook - they are just exploring the techniques that facebook use to sidestep ad-blockers

>It's not as essential as you think it is.

It is if you are travelling often, especially in non-western countries.

Rent in local Facebook groups is sometimes 2-3 times cheaper than AirBnB and alike, as well as large expat communities.

I want to second this. I never had an account and I've seen the deterioration of conversations among my friends from being about reconnecting positive experiences to complaints of what someone says on there all the time. Unfriending their relatives with racist rants. All the cake news.

They don't realize the impact it's having on their lives. Facebook has become a justification to bring hate into our personal conversations. Their crazy aunt says something on there so they believe this makes it a public conversation, but I have no idea about that.

Their debates are personal conversations had in public. Facebook has made the problems of talking about class, religion, race and politics inescapable.

There's a reason we avoid those topics at holiday gatherings and business functions. They divide us and cause psychological injury.

Fb has capitalized on this fury and drives profit from anger, dispute, hate and all these other emotions we don't want to have. These are the conversations that don't end and people want to win. They're live long disagreements where people won't change their mind and find equally violating people to fuel their rage and others to direct it at.

These didn't use to be everyday conversations. Fb makes it easy to intact with those you disagree with violently and often. People you'd choose to avoid in real life but new can't because fb makes more money of pitting those two divergent personalities together and continually antagonizing them.

It's hurting their mental health to be surrounded constantly by dissenting voices trekking then they are wrong for whatever reason.

You're wrong. You're wrong. You're a bad person because you believe that. You're inconsequential. Someone said this thing about you.

It's ruining people and I don't know how to get that awareness through to them. They're telling me more often they wished they'd just never gone on there and I say don't go back. Fb is like the abusive spouse they are addicted to.

How do we save our friends and family from that abuse? How do we help them escape? I'm so sad for them and I feel helpless to save them from the peril that is so obvious from the outside.

I’m involved in a couple of IRL groups where Facebook is the only way events get announced. I don’t think there’s a good way to delete Facebook and still learn about those events.

It may be the easiest way but it's not that easy for people hooked on it.

I still have an account but I rarely log in (perhaps couple of times per year and when I do it's with Firefox Containers and with cookies cleared after log out plus I block third-party connections from Facebook and its domains), but Facebook is more than Facebook.

A lot of people I know spend way more time on Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger then they do on Facebook itself so it will be difficult for them to not use it.

"It's not as essential as you think it is."

I'm not able to avoid it. Since I can't make extended family members use something else, it's a source for family news. My family is large, both on my side and my spouse's, so FB isn't trivial to replace.

Something that could scrape and mirror a curated "family news" would be cool. But given the rate of change at FB, it would be hopelessly brittle.

>Since I can't make extended family members use something else, it's a source for family news.

How did your family accomplish this 10 years ago? How valuable is the family news if you need it curated?

"How did your family accomplish this 10 years ago?"

I don't see how that matters. I'm not going to be successful convincing 100+ people flung across the country to go back to how we used to do things. They like Facebook, and likely aren't interested in their crazy uncle's rant about Facebook. They post their news there, and not anywhere else.

"How valuable is the family news if you need it curated"

FB is my source for things like "who graduated", "who is pregnant", "who got married", "who got a new job", "how that horse on cousin Fred's ranch is doing" and so on. I like to know these things.

By "curated", I mean something like a scraper that could pull out posts from family people and put it somewhere so I wouldn't need to log into Facebook and get exposed to a bunch of other stuff I don't want to see...and the pervasive tracking. I also mentioned it's probably not practical.

I'm anticipating a transition from filtering to scrapping. I've already switched to "reader mode" and RSS feeds as much as possible. Mostly for ad avoidance and battery guarding.

I'm also anticipating applying differential debugging techniques to automatically compile ad blocking filter lists. View the top X sites via multiple personas, diff the content, anything static is more likely not ads.

I do find it funny that so many on HN seem to wear this “I never use Facebook” as some sort of badge of honor.

Yep...Not on their product.

Although this is fascinating, the amount of attack/defense in our browser just trying to put a block of ad in front of you and the CPU cycles that are wasted, I don't think it apply to my case.

The same can be said of alcohol, but life is lived to its fullest when practicing moderation on many fronts :)

> It's not as essential as you think it is.

Please don't tell people you don't even know what their lives are like

Except your not actually blocking Facebook ads are you?

And what do you do with the 100.000.000 websites using Facebook logins, SDK, like button etc.? I think you need to go a bit further than just not using it. You need to block the entire IP range and DNS to completely block them.

There are filter lists for ad blockers that can block Facebook's third-party web requests.

Fanboy's Annoyance List and Anti-Facebook List: https://www.fanboy.co.nz/

Fanboy's Annoyance List (source): https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/fanboy-annoyance....

Fanboy's Anti-Facebook List (source): https://fanboy.co.nz/fanboy-antifacebook.txt

AdGuard Social Media filter (source): https://filters.adtidy.org/extension/chromium/filters/4.txt

All of these work with uBlock Origin.

Thanks, I usually use PiHole with the lists merged into one and just block it at the DNS level.

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