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Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

Dump facebook. Make the effort. Get non-facebook contact details from anyone you want to stay in touch with. Advertise you're going to do it a few times then just pull the plug.

Life is significantly better without it. Really.

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As a counterpoint, Facebook also happens to be a great tool to organize people in times like this. Just today I saw a post in my feed where some acquaintances had organized to raise money for a girl they know who was diagnosed with cancer. They managed to raise about $38,000 for her. That’s a big deal.

Plenty of other tools exist

Yes, plenty of other tools exist. However, Facebook is the one that everyone is already on.

So if you want to raise some money for a friend who has cancer you can start a GoFundMe campaign and spread the word via email. It's going to be more work, though, and I bet you won't get as big of a response due to the friction of the medium.

I've found Twitter and reddit work equally well, as does subscribing to the emails of local organizers.

In all those cases, you can block ads. On Facebook, you can't. The arms race between Facebook and adblockers seems to be in Facebook's favor.

I don’t know about your family, but I have only one relative on Twitter and none on Reddit. If I wanted to organize something with my family, Twitter or Reddit would be the wrong place for it.

Also I’m not sure how relevant blocking ads is to this. If it’s just about annoyance then Reddit and Twitter both have some extremely annoying aspects as well. Reddit is absolutely relentless about trying to get you to install their crappy app. Twitter is relentless about trolling external links that get too popular.

I'm actually a member of several active public and private groups on Facebook where many posts have informative discussions. I rarely ever look at my newsfeed though. If I only had the newsfeed, I would have dumped Facebook long ago.

When you have cancer everybody plus one seem to feel the need to utter advices in the imperative mood. Source: My wife has cancer and I have seen it.

Cancer patients need compassion and listening instead.

I just unfollowed everyone that wasn't a close friend or family. The addictive draw is pretty much gone as I'll scroll it for 5 min every week or so and be totally caught up

I go on once a year. Luckily my wife tells me any news of consequence that's happening in my family.

I don't miss it.

I've found just blocking the news feed to be helpful. I can still do events and messenger without any ads being shown or the addictive feed

how do you do that? I had considered making a chrome extension to always remove the div, but instead I've just been off Facebook for a decade.

I've made one for a few months to communicate with Gen-Xers and Europeans in some special planning group here and there. Then I download and delete. Always use a new email address or new phone number for the next profile, although lately Facebook will block your account within hours if you do that, it is extremely creepy. They must be so smug that their antispam provisions coincide with their social graph vampirism.

Unfollow everyone. This is what I do, when I land on the Facebook home feed I get the “add friends” onboarding experience.

There are various chrome extensions that do it. I used to use Facebook purity, but it ended up being easier to just remove the div using ublock origin

Whats app was my non-fb alternative :( of course they own that now too

Somebody always owns something, that's capitalism. But I would argue that Whatsapp works differently than FB, it's really just a communication tool, it doesn't manipulate you through a "feed".

And what's to say Facebook isn't harvesting all the phone numbers, contacts and the social graph and feeding it into FB and FB's ads? Especially since Whatsapp does not seem to be monetized in any way.

There’s no need to speculate on this. WhatsApp officially declared some years ago that it will share communication metadata with Facebook. So even though the message content (being E2E encrypted) isn’t shared with Facebook, everything else about one’s messages is.

signal.

The issue is getting all your contacts to use it. Works for about half of mine and it's ready to go for the rest when facebook do something foul that pisses them off. This is a good backstop that counterbalances all the reasons facebook want to do something evil to those users. (Eg break the encryption, put ads in the messages, provide the NSA with a backdoor etc etc.) "Mark, if we do that, we lose most whatsapp users to signal by the end of the week."

Signal is great. It costs nothing to have next to whatsapp on your phone. The desktop client is significantly better. Most of what is good about whatsapp they literally bought from signal.

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