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Comment by bitexploder | Hacker News Reader

I did have a hard time taking any of what he wrote seriously. It was not thought provoking for me and I felt it wasn’t deep or interesting. It’s interesting in the sense that it is useful to know where FB may be headed, but when I think of Facebook all I see is another advertising company looking for more ways to put ads in front of captive eyeballs.

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One thing I can't understand is why Facebook is still around. But, at the same time, Twitter is still around, too. I guess people got tired switching platforms.

The vast majority of users have never known other platforms.

Because they also purchased IG and WhatsApp and because their messaging app is reasonably successful (in parts because they didn’t add groups to IG messaging, otherwise younger folks would have been even more eager to leave FB). As far as I can tell the main FB app/website has been pretty much deserted by younger people.

If I want to communicate with a bunch of my friends, going back 30 years, it's where I have to go.

I could, I guess, go back to running mailing lists or manual methods of keeping track of contact details and sending things directly to people.

But short of that there's no easier way for me to keep up with friends who are distributed around the planet.

What's wrong with keeping contact details and sending things directly to people?

Nothing. People just find other means more convenient and for some reason are willing to sacrifice their privacy in return. Also, by names and college and work you can find people on these social platforms even if you lost their contact long back.

Basically, it's more difficult/tedious to do. Facebook lowered the cost opportunity of this for the vast majority of people (you and others excluded, obviously).

The UX of that process you describe (without something like facebook) sucks. It's surprising you haven't realized this once you've tried to do that for more than say ~10 people in the list.

If the UX sucks, it means it takes more time and energy to do the same thing, it means that I will not be doing the same thing, I will end up sending to less people or less information. Which means that facebook effectively allows new types of communication which would otherwise not even exist.

It is the low cost of Facebook (and social media) messaging that makes me not use it to send messages to people I love and care about. I still call them on the phone. When it comes to relationships, my communication theory is simple: the cost of the medium is the information. Goes without saying in this setting, there's only few people I call "friends."

If you have more than a handful of people that you wish to meaningfully connect with - facebook is a great tool. I know personally many people including myself that both use calls, emails, chat messages - and yes, facebook - all with the same people. They are just geared towards different kinds and modes of communication. The notion that I have to use phone exclusively to communicate with someone to call them "friends" seems very dated to me personally. It probably works for someone else. (But I mean the numbers show that a lot of people do indeed find facebook useful, it is not that popular for no reason.)

It's about the connection itself, it's about the energy and attention one puts into the relationship, not whether one allows oneself to use facebook for it or not.

I'm not sure that's a bad thing really. Having easy to maintain distance relationships leads to accumulating less meaningful relationships. Then again, I'm hardly a good metric for sociability.

> leads to accumulating less meaningful relationships

This assumption is based on what?

Because they actually solve a real problem for a majority of their users? I mean I get it, I'm on the hate train too but their actual product (the Facebook web site) provides a useful service. It allows me to share a bunch of stuff with a bunch of groups of people who I want to stay in touch with, in a low friction manner.

Pretending Facebook is useless is like pretending GM doesn't make cars. Sure, maybe you don't like GM cars but they fill a genuine need for a lot of people.

But, GM doesn't make cars.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/26/business/gm-cars-dropping-pro...

low effort intelligence collection. I wouldn't mind "investing" into those companies if I were an agency employing who are basically incompetent crooks.

if you manage to convince almost entire population to use an app that you can easily tap to I wouldn't call that "incompetent"

Twitter is heavily used in biotech for news and discussions, surprisingly. It's where nearly all of it breaks.

While I don't actively use Facebook the way I use twitter, I've kept my account for messenging because its the only way to keep in touch with old friends and family. People change numbers, names, locations. Facebook is my Phonebook, in a way.

To be honest, I’m always a little bit happy to see him writing something and have it come off as a bit awkward. I don’t feel so bad about my own writing style when I think that the CEO of a multibillion dollar company is the same :)

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