Leave Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Leave Facebook

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207 pointsingve110 comments

I think Facebook is merely the conduit of human behavior that happens when lack of regulation / social norms or the incentives of profit create a new space much faster than we're used to before. So leaving Facebook and going to some other platform will not fundamentally solve the problem.

As long as:

1) people want to socialize freely (as well as privately) with each other in an online rapid medium,

2) the online forum is incentivized to make money, and

3) that same forum / business doesn't want the burden of regulating people's speech and behavior

then some Facebook analogue will take its place no matter where people go.

Right now it seems we can only choose to have 2 out of the 3.

#1 is very much the case right now as well. With the lockdown, many people I know started to use social networks for more than just showing off or pushing a message. They finally began to socialize and support each other.

I disagree. There were millions of people socializing on many different platforms for years before anything like Facebook was created.

AOL aged people still remember A/S/L?

We are simply living in the Eternal September.

The difference is though, with the internet evolving, the platforms were figuring out their revenue models, and we can see now which model turned out superior.

Millions, yes. Billions, no.

I seriously doubt there are people out there with billions of people on their contact lists, so why would that matter?

I also disagree. The "curation" algorithms and other systems clearly have a serious influence. Facebook is not responsible for human nature, but they are responsible for intentionally guiding it for profit and ignoring the consequences. It's not as if Facebook is merely tabula rasa; they meddle.

There have been many examples of executives and engineers who have spoken to this effect:

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-engineer-resigns-tr...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6e1riShmak (Chamath Palihapitiya)

FB is the network of people on your green list, and FB's most pronounced "algorithmic" influence is deciding priority on a feed of your green-listed friends, but ultimately one has to ask -- can you handle your own relations? Are your friends' ideas just way too infectious for your free will to handle?

> Are your friends' ideas just way too infectious for your free will to handle?

Good point, but I'll add: if the ideas they are spreading weren't infectious, they wouldn't be spreading them in the first place.

I've been on FB lately because my local government has decided that it will use FB to give background info and outlooks wrt Covid-19. From what I saw in the local groups, the "ideas" people spread are not original content, ever. They don't have those ideas, they just read them and say "yeah, share", so the ideas that make it to your feed have proven themselves many times to be infectious. There's a reason we call it "going viral".

And not all of them combined were as successful as Facebook was at its peak.

By what metric should success be measured for a social platform?

>Facebook is merely the conduit of human behavior that happens when lack of regulation / social norms

some time ago I would have agreed on some level but there is too much manual and/or algorithmic manipulation to encourage "retention", "stickiness", "addictiveness" (whatever the current marketing-speak du jour for dependence is) to be a true reflection of behavior.

thats the irony of the current state of social networks - its not just merely allowing conversation/connection; its about encouraging rage, confrontation, polarity. in the pursuit of metrics, ergo dollars.

and even worse, we then look at the distorted reflection we see in the digital mirror and our view of society/discourse is negatively reinforced. what a loop.

A baby step you can take if you want to leave Facebook is to disable (I forget if that's the exact term, it might be deactivate) your account. This removes your access to the site, and hides your profile - while leaving the Messenger half of your account untouched: messages, contacts, etc.

I've done it before for mental health reasons, and found it really refreshing.

Removing notifications and moving the icon to a folder on the 4th page of your home screen is pretty helpful as a first step too

For me the first step was to remove the mobile Facebook app. I used to scroll mindlessly while traveling and commuting, and once I didn't have the app on my phone, my time on FB dropped by like 80%. I also found it refreshing and I felt less stressed about missing something there.

I didn't need to do this to get the same effect. I just deleted the app from my phone.

Now I check Facebook maybe once a month and only for events or to sell stuff. I think it helps that I only ever used it on mobile to begin with. After being away for over a year the feed looks like a dumpster fire. I wouldn't touch it with a 10ft pole. There is some genuine cases of people connecting on there no doubt but it's buried under a pile of anxiety inducing crap. And not the constrictive kind of anxiety either, the hollow kind.

I got rid of the app and I'm only browsing the mobile site in a incognito window, so I have to login every time. This added enough friction to stop the completely mindless browsing and scrolling plus it gave me back some of my battery life.

The next step for me is to remove Facebook from my password manager. Having to type a 20+ character password on a phone is definitely going to add significant friction.

As the article says, leave Instagram too!

It's surprising how many of my friends say they don't use Facebook for political reasons but don't see Instagram as the same company.

Don't forget WhatsApp. Many people I talk to don't realize it's also part of the FB ecosystem.

Leaving WhatsApp is not as easy, in many countries you need it to do things like buying to local producers or communicating with a client. The network effect is more unavoidable than in other FB products.

When traveling West Africa overland, I found that Whatsapp was essential for contacting guesthouses down the road. Due to inconsistent electrical supply in the region, accommodation proprietors don’t have constant mobile phone availability, so trying to contact them on the phone is often fruitless. Instead, they all ask to be contacted over Whatsapp, so that when they get a chance to charge their devices they can catch up on whatever messages have been sent to them in the meantime.

Also, I found in South America that almost no one would respond to an SMS sent to them. Apparently, SMSs used to be extremely expensive, so a culture developed of never answering them. If you want any kind of reply, then people insist you use Whatsapp.

It's also worth mentioning that the whatsapp team still is filled with dedicated anti-surveillance types, leftovers from the original company (note that the founder publicly came out against facebook after the sale). I don't know how much longer that'll be the case, now that they're all vesting, but they're in there.

Unfortunately Android has screwed up here resulting in the rise of WhatsApp. There is no competitor of WhatsApp that has the same reliability.

Also there is no feeds in WhatsApp, making it very different from Insta and FB. But it's still giving strength to the ecosystem.

>There is no competitor of WhatsApp that has the same reliability.

Riot? Telegram?

People want to leave but stay for the network.

How can we leave and take the network with us?'

Edit:

I actually didn't have "friends" in mind. Small businesses, formal and informal groups of interest, event discovery, the use cases are far beyond what I'm aware of.

Also, organizing and protests...

I say forget "the network". If your so-called friends don't have your email address, they aren't your friends.

I would agree with this for phone numbers, but not email.

Especially in the case of Instagram, it's a de facto RSS reader for a lot of really good content, if you curate it right.

I'm happy to say that the network I have built through Instagram has taken my photography to new levels and facilitated social interactions I'd never have had otherwise.

It is very fair to want to take the good (network/community) and leave the bad (walled-garden and tracking).

My RSS reader doesn't spy on and profile me while I use it

You're assuming a similar, or even the same, network can't be found outside of <site-x>.

I suspect this is a subset of what I call "The Fallacy of The Best", the idea that things can objectively be quantified as "the best" and that there is significant value that cannot be realized without "the best".

In reality, the products and services you choose have relatively little impact on the quality of experience you have, both because there is little substantial difference between most things on the main, and because the effort you put into things is far more important.

Many people need to feel part of a social circle in order to be happy. Many if not most of those members of our social circle are going to be friends merely out of convenience or inertia, but that is an unpleasant fact that we avoid thinking about directly.

Leaving social media can be traumatic because you are suddenly brought face to face with the fact that many relationships in your life are a bit of a lie – people don’t really care about you all that much. And sure, you are left with a handful of “real friends” who are still willing to engage with you even though you are now the weirdo of the bunch who doesn’t use social media, but still. I sometimes wonder if the psychological toll of continuing to use social media is less than that of quitting social media.

> If your so-called friends don't have your email address, they aren't your friends.

I don't think that's fair to say in 2020. I'm not arguing for facebook's goodness here, just its ubiquity. When it comes time for me to organize a friends-only event (i.e., not a meetup or community event), I'm not aware of anything better than FB for the task. Say a party with 50 people at it - not all those people have my phone number or email address, but we're still close enough that I could tell you where they grew up. Maybe we chat on messenger sometimes.

I'm actively looking for alternatives. I think I'll disable my FB to still have access to messenger, but mostly I need a replacement for Events. Marketplace is pointless - I get way more hits on my craigslist posts anyway. Photos is stupid, I just put my stuff on photos.google.com and share the URL with people. Hah, though I am just now remembering Instagram is owned by FB.

Query your friends for alternative contact information (email, phone #, etc.). Select your next platform(s). Leave contact information on FB. In 1-6 months, return to FB and remove your account.

You forget that Facebook is not for friends only. Millions of groups of common interest exist as well as communities formed around pages and personalities.

That's fine if you only want to talk about topics nobody will disagree with, like how much we all love some particular piece of media, but I think it's a waste of time to look for sincere deep conversations under the enforced banality of FB's one-size-fits-globally Community Standards.

You can get contact information and maintain ties with communities in other ways as well. Leaving FB can make discovering communities harder, but it doesn't mean remaining part of communities is lost.

For some communities, you're losing most context by not being on FB. Most of the discussion happens on Facebook and not anywhere else. For some communities I'm in, you're basically completely out of the loop if you're not active on Facebook. Yes, you could try to get context from friends but they're getting it from Facebook as well. Once you're all out - none of you will have context.

We used to just spin up a phpbb instance on a shared host for that. A lot of the hosting platforms had/have one-click installs for it.

Last post: "Here's where you can find me in the future. I'm not on Facebook anymore." (And optionally: "Here's why.")

If people want to get in touch with you, they'll do so. If people want to broadcast information only to those following them on one service, then you'll stop getting that information. That's fine. Other information will take its place.

What if (hypothetically) those 'people' are an organization that needs to organize work, and they're using it because they've tried email and other methods for years, and found that those didn't work?

A lot of us use FB for organizing, not just for seeing what our friends ate for dessert last night. It's not reasonable to tell people abandon one channel without suggesting a replacement. You might as well ask people to give up email, or their phone.

Zulip, Discord, Slack, Signal groups, mass SMS, just to name the first five that come to mind.

How can you be so bad at email that it "doesn't work"?

I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. We're talking about a company that has knowingly promoted white supremacists groups for the sake of clicks. I think that warrants putting just a little effort into email.

No tool is going to do your job for you. If Facebook succeeded where email failed, it's just because someone wasn't doing their job, not because of some special sauce that Facebook has.

Just curious - how much organizing do you do? Do you host events with any regularity? Do people like to ask a lot of questions about your events or want to share publicly that they're going to them with people? Do people sometimes want to know who is going to your events so that they can choose when not to go because they don't like that person? (And when someone is going so that they can go) Do you have a very active group of people who like to interact with each other in a public forum? Now is that group size beyond 100 people?

You'd be surprised how crap email is for any of that. You'd be surprised how people don't want to have 10 different apps for all the activities and prefer one central source to catch up on everything. Facebook can be very useful.

I've been toying with removing all of my content, unfriending the vast majority of acquaintances and unfollowing family who post garbage. Then don't feed the zuck machine by posting, liking memes, or regular checking. Disable all notifications from communities.

Basically try to keep to "business and meaningful contact only" rather than engage with the time-sinks. Make it work for me. (The Intention firefox extension has been super helpful as well.)

Don't forget to log off and clear cookies when not using it so you're not tracked by every "like" / "comment with facebook" button if you don't want to feed the zuck machine. Or use a quarantine browser for your sessions.

The Facebook container add-on does this for you even if you’re still drinking the zuckeraid. It’s amazing how much it blocks.

I went through that process a year ago. It was a good amount of work. When I was done, I realized I wasn't getting anything out of Facebook and deleted.

I left Facebook Nov 10th, 2016 after being on it for about 3 years.

That was easy because it was clear where it was headed. Getting friends to quit took some time, but about 40% of my friends are off completely, and another 20% mostly read instead of post (so they claim).

Now if I lived in certain parts of the world like Myanamar [1] where the Facebook -IS- the internet, I'd be hosed. This is some serious Dole / DelMonte level stuff Zuck is doing.

[1] https://seasia.yale.edu/myanmar-facebook-internet-and-intern...

[2] https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/facebook-is-the-internet-f...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/01/facebook-free-...

[4] https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/facebook-is-the-internet-f...

After not having logged in to my FB account for over 3-4 years, I finally logged in today and deleted it.

I didn't feel like I needed to download anything, since I had not been sharing anything anyway.. Now onto deleting other FB properties. I'll need to figure out how to motivate some friends to move off of WhatsApp and onto Signal. But once I'm able to do that, or just decide that the price of staying on WhatsApp is not worth it, I'll be fully rid of FB. Was never on Instagram or anything else..

To those who are on the fence, just try not to login for a few days, then a few weeks and you will realize you are not missing anything at all.

Of all the social networks, I believe LinkedIn would be the most difficult, if not outright impossible for me to get out of. But FB was a very easy choice.

What is keeping many people on Facebook is FOMO. Every person who quits and leaves, especially publicly, reduces the chance that those remaining will miss something important and the perception that it is an important source of news and information. Let it become a ghost town of bots.

Zuckerberg hires police officers cited for using excessive force to work as his personal bodyguards.

Yes, that's right. While he's busy pretending to feel bad about the situation with bad cops, he recruits and pays them to protect his family.

Facebook and Zuckerberg are well beyond complicit.

He is complicit for wanting that he be not lynched by a mob?

If anything the virulent comments on this thread are enough reason for him to hire as many bodyguards as he may need.

Some people here have no sense of perspective.

It is possible to hire bodyguards who aren't ex-cops with stained records.

(I don't know the truth about the situation, but if the facts are correct, that is morally troubling.)

how do you know this information?

We should see Facebook as a drug store which its top kingpin, Mr Zuckerberg sell its social network 'drugs' to billions of his users, which when abused over and over again, the results are always never positive and messes with your dopamine levels. Because of the social connections, followers and inertia, it is harder for friends and family to leave.

Apart from its flagship product, social network 'drugs' it owns includes Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. The fine-print is if you mix that with trolls, disinformation and bots it equals never-ending reactionary anger. Very unhealthy for you.

Is there a significant amount of Facebook employees that are actually planning on leaving?

From my experience money talks. Many people will use the logic of "if not me it will be someone else" for their cognitive dissonance to work at morally degenerate organizations. I'd be interested if there was a survey of current employees who would be willing to leave if another entity paid an analogous salary.

>Is there a significant amount of Facebook employees that are actually planning on leaving?

Of course not. The proof is in the puddin'. There is, and never has been, a mass exodus of technical talent from these companies. And during this period there has been near constant hand wringing and crocodile tears about the evil things these companies do.

Especially now with the US economy in the toilet and unemployment numbers at astronomical levels. No mass exodus is going to happen unless people can easily move into another job.

I don't know of a "significant amount" of employees, but my LinkedIn feed this morning had two engineers post that they had left. But also had one guy say that he had just joined. Take that for what it's worth.

Why? Why not Google, Apple, Amazon?

Why not Google, Apple, Amazon?

Why does leaving one require someone to leave all the others?

Do we not bandage a wound just because there are other wounds?

Personally, I find social media to be very problematic. I strongly dislike facebook, twitter, etc. for how they are affecting the way so many people think. It's not because of their business models, it's because I think their product is fundamentally bad for people.

That line of reasoning doesn't lead to any opinion of google, apple, amazon (except youtube, which has some of the problems of social media).

An alternative to mainstream media, at least?

As if Facebook media were any better...

Or, while we are at it, why not Twitter.

I've seen an amusingly large number of tweets lately calling for deletion of Facebook.

For me, I’m not on twitter or Facebook. I’m “stuck” with google until I get off my rear and migrate my gmail. I signed up when it was invite only and have about 15 years of email history with it. But that’s the only google product I use.

Facebook doesn’t really offer much more than “social” but I can have gmail without using any of google’s other products, including search.

I used amazon a lot in the past but less and less and probably never again based on their response to COVID.

So, for me at least, it’s not the companies so much, I’m pretty disappointed in all of them. It’s the features and I just don’t see a need to be on anything social media related these days unless we’re counting HN as social media. This is close as I come anymore. But, again, for me, buying from amazon or having a gmail account isn’t the same as following what social media has to offer...

I’ve never been a FB user and only have a throwaway account to login quickly into certain services (I use it pretty much like Apple Sign In works).

Calling a platform evil may be a bit out there, however, in the case of FB, the word toxic is the best way to describe it. HN users, I assume, can handle the toxic FB feed. But I’ve heard numerous times from people (usually older generation) claiming that a certain (fake)news article was real.. because it was on FB. People who can’t distinguish between real or fake news, real or misleading ads, are becoming victims of fraud, misinformation and all sorts of bad stuff.

Is FB to blame for all of that? Maybe not. But serving the world brings about a certain responsibility that they clearly don’t seem to take serious enough.

Leaving FB so your friends and family members will leave may be the least you can do to help.

The network effect is hard. I have family in India that would be next to impossible to get in touch with if Im not using whatsapp. Everything over there happens on it.

There are good things too, my friend found a kidney donor on there, a random person which saved their life !!

It needs to happen, its a tough jump

Yeah, I mean, who needs kidneys anyways #deleteFB

I shared this post, and I'm deleting my facebook account tomorrow. Most of the people I care about already have my phone number any way.

I will miss the concert notifications for bands I follow, but I guess I'll just have to put slightly more effort into following them :)

Facebook and most other social media make money by capturing peoples' attention for very long periods of time. One way to push back, in a weaker form, is to set a maximum amount of time per month that you will be on Facebook. I set a 20 minute a month limit on myself. I get to occasionally look at my feed and also use the platform to announce my new book releases. I also use a single container for Facebook (and others for single use on specific web properties).

I suspect that Facebook makes very little money off of me. On the other hand, I have relatives who love Facebook, and as long as they don't try to use it as a way to contact me I am fine with whatever they want for themselves.

I don't think deleting a Facebook account really matters in this day and age.

The FB Ads SDK has infiltrated every nook and corner of your life. From websites to your phone to TV's to iot. I am scared by the prospects of that level of intrusion than anything else. They don't need your account.

Visiting my account off FB activity was just there tip of the iceberg. They can connect everything about you without your involvement...

A mere FB account doesn't do much. Sure in the short term we can have lengthy blog posts about "deleteFB" and so on but really it's mostly for sentiment not really concrete.

I agree, but this is not what is being discussed in the article. It is about the manipulation provided by the platform, which you can indeed massively reduce your exposure to by not using it.

(One could argue that targeted ads that would still follow you are another way of manipulation, but it's way lesser than willingly consuming The Feed)

Does anyone have recommendations for a tool similar to Facebook Events that I can use for planning the assloads of parties and camping trips I plan? That's genuinely the only thing between me and deleting my FB.

https://www.eventbrite.com/ ?

I deleted my Facebook almost 8 years ago and never looked back. Was hard at first but great for my mental health. I encourage you to try disabling it for a while and keeping up with your network with alternatives

Related reading, regarding my own process of Auditing Facebook.

https://londondailypost.com/zeaun-zarrieff-writes-to-faceboo...

https://businessnewsledger.com/zeaun-zarrieff-from-amerihub-...

Going to repost this here too: How many of FB users would need to have adblockers and commit to never clicking on an ad in facebook to cause a big enough dip in revenue in Q2 (ends this month)? Especially given already depressed levels of online advertising spend. I don't mean this in a "lets take down FB" way but more of a "how can we force Zuckerberg to have more discussion/thought on this and brush it away?".

I would love to see some type of fact check warning be implemented for FB but not necessarily censorship.

Why isn't there a social network that actually cares about society? I swear if one existed it would be gaining a million users a day right now. I'm dying to abandon Facebook, but --I hate to say-- it's the best way for me to stay in touch with international friends and family at the moment. Can't someone please create a simple facebook-style app that's not driven by profit? Please please please.

Mastodon? https://rmpr.github.io/Migrating-from-Twitter-to-Mastodon/

I signed up for Mastodon. However it seems to be more of a Twitter clone than Facebook. I'm looking for a Facebook alternative.

I am not on FB and I tried to get out of WhatsApp too. I deleted WhatsApp and implored all my friends to move to Signal. But out of the 100 or so people I reached, only 2 moved to Signal. My extended family is in India and WhatsApp is very entrenched there. The other issue is that people in India do not realize that the attention issue these apps create is a long term problem - at least not yet.

Yes this is a huge problem. After several years of shunning Facebook I installed WhatsApp last year because it’s the only way to stay in contact with much of my family these days.

I deactivated my Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram accounts yesterday, and let me tell you, it's worth doing it just for the feeling of deleting these apps from your phone. So far I do not miss any of them at all. In a week or two I'll log back in and delete them forever. For now I'm trying to campaign some of my friends to get on Signal.

I remember the leave Facebook campaign after they released their mobile app and showed a pop-up on the mobile site offering the mobile app.

I did in fact leave over that. It was a simpler time.

Why leave? There's tons of options that "serve the cause" better imo, all while getting paid to boot:

You could become a "stuck cog," deliberately working shittily to slow down development. You could cause a disaster hid behind plausible deniability - fuck up a deploy, accidentally forward an email, that kind of thing. You just gotta try to avoid committing a crime.

Or you could bombard senior management with emails demanding they take action until they just fire you.

You could spend all day improving your vimgolf skills.

I left Facebook many years ago - perhaps 2007 or 2008?

One of the best things I did for my mental health. Highly recommended.

Deleted mine just now after 7 years of virtually zero activity. No regrets.

Also I bought this book for my dad - Facebook is extremely toxic for Boomer-era people, just absolutely overrun with propaganda, low-value memes. The complete opposite of critical thinking.

We haven't had a chance to discuss the book's arguments or merits, but I told him I was really concerned for his mental health and his increasing paranoia, and I thought a lot of it stemmed from social media.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079DTVVG8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

Anyway, if anyone has any other advice for convincing others to leave social media, I'd love to hear it.

Now if this were an important Facebook employee writing this, and many Facebook employees were considering getting together to leave and start something better, I would totally love that.

Please Please Please offer some GOOD alternatives to Facebook. Now is the time to come together and replace Facebook with a free decentralised alternative.

If you want to switch away from other surveillance capitalist software like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or WhatsApp here's a list [0]

[0] https://switching.software/

Decentralization is usually pitched as a solution to "censorship". In this case, the complaint seems to be the reverse, that there was insufficient intervention against misinformation. So I'm not sure how decentralization applies here.

I think that's a really good point to bring up. Decentralization solves some problems but it doesn't automatically make everything better.

An interesting example relevant to this case would be Mastodon: it's an alternative to Twitter where many instances federate together, and instances are allowed to do their own moderation. Many instances have much more protective rules than Twitter and have smaller communities that their moderators are better able to integrate with.

To add on to Mastodon, Pleroma is another federated, decentralised platform with slightly different features as far as I'm aware.

There's a whole ecosystem of decentralised alternatives out there, which you can check out at https://fediverse.party/

It's definitely not easy to get people to jump ship, but I've seen an influx of new users to the Mastodon instance I'm part of.

Many of the people joining the instance I'm part of had troubles getting started (follow people, What's going on, ...) I ended up writing a blog post https://rmpr.github.io/Migrating-from-Twitter-to-Mastodon/

On one level, Trump's statements about mail-in voting are just flatly untrue, pure propaganda, and completely irresponsible. But isn't it weird as well how much people are willing to let these massive tech companies essentially become fact-checkers for the content posted on it? I that that's also frightening to think about.

Shouldn't the guy have been banned from the service for violating the terms of service a long time ago? If you or me had said similar things we would have been deplatformed a while back. I think this is just a half assed way of making amends for allowing so much prominent lies on the network.

Plus it's their network, they likely have TOS allowing them to do anything on it. Probaly except altering the posts (... but they replace links with their shortener i think).

>But isn't it weird as well how much people are willing to let these massive tech companies essentially become fact-checkers for the content posted on it?

* If someone criticized newspapers for yellow journalism and inciting violence with sensationalism, would it seem so weird to push the newspapers to "essentially become fact-checkers for the content posted" on them?

* Is the way that people view large public figures on social media all that different than how they did with newspapers?

I think it is important that there is a diversity of avenues toward publishing, so that incorrectly judged messages / messages that the population disagrees about the harm of can still be published somewhere, but it's never been easier than now to publish things to the web even without the help of a specific individual platform like Facebook. The web isn't just Facebook.

The hyperbole of this is almost incomprehensible. The absurdity of this latest "controversy" - Zuck not wrapping some form of token and meaningless censorship around a single Trump tweet - is proof that this isn't about Trump. Hell, all this did was give Trump more exposure. No, it's clear that this is about breaking Zuck for political purposes, and taking control of Facebook for a single "side." Not one person genuinely cares about this dumb Trump tweet, this is just trying to tip over Zuck once and for all and get him to be full-on Dorsey.

I left Facebook five years ago but it certainly wasn't about Zuck or Facebook. I hate to break it to you guys but at the end of the day, Facebook is just people. Get upset all you want but you're really just getting upset at other people for whatever reason. Facebook isn't the problem, human nature is.

> Facebook isn't the problem, human nature is.

This is almost exactly the line of thinking that the story The Weapon by Fredric Brown warns against.

http://www.digital-eel.com/blog/library/The_Weapon.pdf

Yes, human nature is the problem, and I think its why we developed a set of laws and values that allow us to live peacefully with each other.

We need to extend these laws and values to Facebook and other social media.

People should be held accountable for things they post publicly on the internet. Public posts should not be anonymous. If damage is caused as a result of your misleading communications, you should be held responsible for that damage.

Yes it would destroy social media (and reshape the entire internet as we know it), but the world is burning and its because nobody knows what to believe.

Absolutely not. Facebook is the last major social network where people are able to speak their minds. And since I can select who I want to listen to, I like it. As it so happens, everyone who I follow on Facebook speaks their minds by posting pictures of their babies. This is perfectly fine by me.

I am sceptical that the paternalists will let me be when they're done dealing with Trump et al.

> Absolutely not. Facebook is the last bastion of people being able to speak their minds. And since I can select who I want to listen to, I like it. As it so happens, everyone who I follow on Facebook speaks their minds by posting pictures of their babies. This is perfectly fine by me. I am sceptical that the paternalists will let me be when they're done dealing with Trump et al.

How is it the last bastion of anything? It is a place where people seem to be able to speak their mind. It's not the last place. The Internet is vast, and the major social networks aren't the only things in existence on it.

That's true. Allow me to edit it to "last major social network". I have access to places where I can speak my mind. I think society is stronger for allowing everyone places like that, and Facebook's discoverability is a lot higher than many other places. Maybe Reddit is also as good but it's much smaller.

> Facebook is the last major social network where people are able to speak their minds.

Do LinkedIn or Reddit or Medium not allow you to speak your mind? In what way?

LinkedIn is professional, so I think people tend to self-censor.

Reddit is small in comparison to Facebook. I think it's like one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook in DAUs. Medium is tiny likewise. I think both Instagram and WhatsApp individually are bigger than Reddit, let alone the big daddy FB itself. 1 in 3 people worldwide visits Facebook at least once a month.

FB will just attract more right-wingers as they play the "hands off" role, both as users and employees. Every person who leaves because of this will be replaced by someone who considers FB to be the "fair and balanced" tech company.

Yep

There have been plenty of good reasons to leave Facebook, for many years. If you only now want to dump FB because they didn’t muzzle Trump, you are probably part of the problem.

Hmm you control your network on both FB and TW. People forget that is is then ck trailing this network. Why do you need someone else controlling your network? If you don't like someone you simply unfollow him. Doing twitter style fact checking or blocking content is censorship is this should be the reason to stop using platform not opposite allowing everyone for a free speech.

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