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Comment by axaxs | Hacker News Reader

I just wish more people and especially companies would join this movement to leave.

I hate that the city I live in has almost zero online presence. If I want to sell something, everyone says 'use FB market.' As someone who refuses to, I have a ton of stuff waiting for the yearly yard sale.

The neighborhood I live in also only posts updates to FB. So cue the monthly surprise(garbage not picked up, road repaving, etc) and never knowing about it in advance.

And don't get me started on companies with zero website and only some FB page.

I know it's 'free', and at this point it feels petty, but I'm literally holding out until the end.

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It's not free, you have to agree to terms and conditions. You shouldn't have to agree to FB terms to learn about government services, like your garbage schedule. Could be a lawsuit here.

Technically perhaps correct, but my HOA pays for garbage so it's more neighborhood level. I have zero interest in interacting with them much less suing them. I just wish they'd spend 10 dollars to setup some simple website, but don't care enough to go through the ranks to suggest that...

Nasty grams about how they dont post updates anywhere would be a start.

I'm sure that their laws say something vague about updates must be made available to all residents and you can swing that Facebook doesnt include all residents

Building out a simple website (Google Sites, etc.) that the HOA can update and then share to Facebook is another.

Open web access then exists and yet those who choose FB are not cut off.

What everyone forgets is how important 'notifications' on Facebook are. When making a post, many if not most residents are likely to see the update. It may even be better than physical mailers, and I doubt many other options even compare for awareness.

A website is unlikely to get nearly any traffic, and especially not timely views for upcoming events. Emails will probably head to spam or not get read.

It shouldn't be Facebook as the default, but the simplicity of reaching most of your audience is valuable.

> and I doubt many other options even compare for awareness.

Are there stats that show a Facebook post is better than email/sms for an important announcement?

How would you even measure that? Announcments don't really require engagement or acknowledgement. I guess you could A/B test announcing city hall events and watching for turnout?

Exactly. You look at turnout rate and/or sample the crowd as to how they learned about it.

> Emails will probably head to spam or not get read.

The heavy and routine use of email in businesses 'going paperless' suggests that this claim has little basis in reality.

Wouldn't this page be public. No login required.

I see you've never met the typical HOA. Let me explain...

One person who usually isn't even the 'president' but still sycophantic about it creates a private group, which only he or she can delete things or add people. Then they distribute flyers every couple weeks informing you about it and how you need to join.

HOAs here are unfortunately the lesser of two evils, but they are far from a good thing.

The goings-on of HOAs typically aren't publicly posted unless required by law. They'd rather keep it to the neighborhood and not have others up in their business.

Why would there be a lawsuit? There's no law that forces local government to run a media company or media companies to run government announcements for free. If the local government had decided to advertise in the local newspaper then the citizens would have to subscribe to this newspaper and pay for all issues in the hope that some of them contained public announcements. Facebook has a different business model and, in this case, the local government (which was elected by the citizens) decided this was a better match for its community's needs. If the citizens don't like it they always have the option to elect someone else instead. (Although, in all likelihood, receiving a decent number of complaints would probably do the trick too.)

I think the lawsuit might come, if the local government switched to facebook in lieu of all other options. Right now, at least where I am, they have to provide freely accessible info ... even if I have to drive to the town hall to get it.

But if they said, instead, "We don't print on paper any more, it's all on facebook", then I think a lawsuit could happen, and win.

Of course, you weren't replying to that. I just have seen, however, leanings in that direction here and there, so it's worth noting.

Facebook is heavily oriented toward photos and audio/video. Does this emphasis ever have a discriminatory effect on, e.g., sight or sound-impaired users.

A local or state government using Facebook exclusively for announcements would arguably be covered by the ADA.

https://www.levelaccess.com/americans-with-disabilities-act-...

That approach won’t work well if they are just text updates.

Except when the text message says something like, "Watch this new video for full details"

they probably post scans of PDFs as photos.

Playing around with automatically accessing Facebook from the command line using netcat, without a browser, I found it is quite easy to "mirror" a Facebook page to a local HTML file. A simple shell script rewrites the HTML into a simple page with no Javascript, suitable for a text-only browser. I see no reason one could not mirror a Facebook page in this way to a web server on the open internet.

The reason I created this is that I did not want to keep opening up a graphical web browser to check Notifications. I can also "follow" any page I want, directly, without relying on FB's algorithms which selectively hide or show certain items to maximise advertising or whatever sort of user manpiulation they are trying to pull off at the moment.

I can create a "manual feed", so to speak.

You should add an option to export that to rss and put the script up on GitHub. That sounds super useful.

What is the preferred format for RSS. There are several.

Just pick one — the major feed readers all do a good job of supporting all of them.

Craiglist doesn't work for selling stuff?

The neighborhood ought to have a mailing list, but yeah FB is very convenient for that.

I don't live in a big city or even a metro area. We surprisingly do have a Craigslist, but it covers the entire rather huge county and it's rather dead. Both times I've used it there were zero replies. Tried OfferUp and such, and same.

Not even scammers interested in this place :).

I've found Craiglist devolves into scam buyers and folks who expect to pay a small fraction of asking prices.

Craigslist arrogance led to stagnation and local markets have been almost universally overtaken by Facebook.

IDK about that. I see lots of interesting stuff on my local craigslist. I've never looked at FB marketplace. Ever.

Then how would you know about all the interesting stuff you’re missing out on in FB marketplace?

I'm sure I am, but my point was at least locally, Craigslist is still quite active, and not apparently stagnating.

If it hasn’t grown by 10x over the last decade as all of the population got online with smartphones, it’s stagnating. It might still be active with the same OG users, but it missed the new market and that’s squarely in the “stagnant” category.

Is being a refusenik alone justifying the charge of arrogance, or was "Craig" smh arrogant beyond merely being a stick in the mud?

It's a bit more than that. I always respected cl for their simple clean design.

But then the internet evolved. On one side prostitution and trafficking became rampant, on the other scammers and spammers. And CL did nothing until court ordered.

Sometimes that's the right decision. But legitimate people suffered through all of it, and left for the first possible replacement.

>FB is very convenient for that.

FB marketplace is a horrifyingly bad interface and platform - just like the rest of Facecrook's site. I assume it is all just some dark pattern though as they must be paying top $ for their UX people.

FB Marketplace is full of sellers who list items for $1 and want to waste your time by getting you to DM them instead of telling you what they really want for the item. Total waste of time.

And no offense drug dealers willing to sell you heroin are very convenient but I wouldn't recommend taking them up on their offer.

It’s too late IMO. I left that cesspool of Facebook a long time ago. If people haven’t left yet, I don’t know what would convince them.

What about Nextdoor?

Nextdoor was good when posts were local to 1 neighborhood (~100 people). Now that posts default to 20+ neighborhoods in a 10 mile radius, the conversations are far less personal and neighborly. And more political topics now, and less moderation.

Pushing beyond Dunbar's number in order to maximize growth and "engagement" was a mistake.

I would suggest that pushing beyond Dunbar’s number to maximize growth and “engagement” is always a mistake for any kind of online community.

Nextdoor is, at least in my area, 10x more toxic than Facebook ever has been.

Point stands that a private service is not a public delivery mechanism unless specifically contracted to do so.

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