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Comment by ablation | Hacker News Reader

That’s a bit of a flawed argument. Facebook isn’t the only place online or offline where humans can socialise. Making the argument that staying with Facebook just for one potential (and flawed) avenue for socialising is to ignore myriad other ways to socialise.

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Except that it's where the people that I would choose to socialize are. My twitter social graph is has nearly no overlap with my FB graph. For me twitter is mostly writers/literary types, FB is mostly people I know in real life (although most of my interaction on FB has been with interest-based communities for which no analogue exists outside of FB).

That said, I'm doing a social media fast for Lent. It's entirely possible that when Easter comes I might not go back to either Twitter or Facebook.

I deleted my Facebook account some years ago. Even when I had one, most of my friends used it as a micro blog, image host, or free ad platform (e.g. "network marketing"), and the amount of meaningful socializing was slim to none.

Most of my socializing has been and continues to be done in person, over text, or over email. I do miss out on updates from distant family and friends, but the interaction on Facebook was always shallow anyway, so I don't feel like I'm missing much.

Comparing not using FB to complete social and sexual abstinence is quite absurd indeed; like an alcoholic who knows its bad for them but doesn't want to stop going to bars and clubs because they think that's the only way they can socialize and find sexual partners.

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