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Comment by verytrivial | Hacker News Reader

LOL. No.

A week or so ago I unfriended every one of my 'friends' on Facebook, many there since 2007. I'm now just squatting my own identity for the handful of community and sports clubs that use Facebook as a bulletin board. These people are 'acquaintances', I know most of them by sight, but don't see what they're having for breakfast or when their baby does something amazing. So, basically neighbours in a village.

I realised I did not want to be the reason people were using Facebook, posting their curated/fictional 'best self'. Basically, friends don't encourage friends to use Facebook[1].

Write that email if you expect someone to read it, write a blog post if you don't. But I'm over being party to mining other people's attention spans and identity for personal gratification and someone else's profit.

[1] Or any other parasocial medium in my opinion.

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Right on. I quit Facebook about 2 years ago for the exact same reason and never looked back. I think you're on to something here. Network effects work both ways. If each new user on a platform compounds it's utility and desirability, then the reverse is also true. This means even a relatively small, but non-trivial, number of people shunning Facebook can drastically reduce it's desirability and power.

I saw a little tiny glimpse of this when an organization I'm in wanted to use Facebook to schedule events and communicate. There were perhaps 30 of us in the group and myself and one other person spoke up and said we weren't on Facebook, so we would either need to be emailed the events or simply not participate. The head of the org decided it was easier just to send everyone an email. So two stubborn people out of 30 changed the way an organization decided to interact with it's members.

The 'intolerant minority' is a very interesting and surprisingly useful concept.

Also, the union of different intolerant minorities results in very little tolerance for anything.

> I realised I did not want to be the reason people were using Facebook

I gave up my Facebook account about a decade ago. Not for this reasons (although I very much agree with it), but because I realized that I wasn't using it. Friends and family would try to communicate with me over it, and they wouldn't get a response because I wasn't looking.

A lot of them thought I was ignoring them, so I figured it was better to not have a presence there at all, to eliminate any possible misunderstanding.

> A lot of them thought I was ignoring them, so I figured it was better to not have a presence there at all, to eliminate any possible misunderstanding.

This is how I feel about email. I’m not sure it’s possible to function in modern society without an email address though.

I was recently forwarded a big comment thread from a while ago on that site where a bunch of people I haven't talked to for like 5-8 years were figuring I blocked them when really I just deleted my account a long while back¸ which was pretty funny.

I didn't bother reaching out to correct this at all. I think I value the ability to keep people who think their time is best spent staring into nightmare rectangles and pretty much just gossiping their way into hell experience out of my life, and the people who aren't into that as much in.

So you don't want to be embodied in a world full of Russian and anti-vax propaganda (along with the fictional 'best self' content from 'friends')?

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