Hacker News Reader

Comment by 6AA4FD | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the people I know who still have an account, and are aware of Facebook's track record, use it for maintaining contact with friends and status updates, I don't think there is a whole lot that will get those people to drop, they would rather try to further close off the flow of information into Facebook, and they are already not trusting the service or what it does with the information it gets.

View on HN

But they're still feeding the machine…

The presented line of reasoning makes no sense. But people aren't rational, that's no news.

You are saying that comfortable communication with friends is rationally less important than long-term ideological battle that you don’t really influence?

If you don't mind sharing your private conversations then sure it starts looking rational.

It is not just an ideological battle when your information is used directly against you personally. Companies pay for ads targeted to you by mining your personal content.

If you are not on facebook or rarely use it they have no opportunity to influence you.

You can use Facebook while not having any conversations on it you'd wish to stay private. I think most of my friends still on Facebook use it that way.

Facebook is a contact point, first and foremost. Nothing prevents you from greeting a friend and requesting that the conversation continues on a more private channel.

Yes. There are many options outside of Facebook, but compromising your morals sticks with you.

You don't need FB to comfortable communication with friends.

So there is no reason to use it.

If you know what FB is about, and still use it nonetheless (actually for no reason), that's highly irrational.

"I want to communicate with my friends" is just a very lame excuse for feeding the machine.

> You don't need FB to comfortable communication with friends.

You don't need planes to meet your distant relatives, but flying is often much more convenient than other modes of transportation.

> So there is no reason to use it.

Convenience is my reason. If you don't have reasons for yourself, that's fine, don't use it, but don't say for everyone.

> feeding the machine

This is a bit dramatic.

>You don't need planes to meet your distant relativesx

This is not a good parallel. You can use any modern instant messenger like Telegram to talk to your friends as comfortably (or more).

It is a good parallel. Obviously if your relatives live on another continent, flying is the optimal, but for example you can ride a bus from SF to LA instead of flying.

Bus takes much longer, whereas other messengers are practically as convenient as Facebook.

"People aren't rational" is just a dishonest way of saying you disagree with someone's very logical reasoning due to different values.

I know Facebook is scum, but I have no other way to stay in touch with some of my IRL friends. So really I have competing agendas here, social connectivity vs. personal privacy, and I'm sacrificing some privacy to gain connectivity because I value one over the other. I, personally, mitigate the privacy loss by only sharing stuff I'd consider publishing publicly anyway, only liking stuff that's similar, avoiding groups and pages, periodically deleting all old content from my account, using adblockers and private browsing all the time, and customizing the FB web app via local scripts (thank you, FB Purity).

You can disagree with my values and the resulting choices (maybe you value personal privacy over social connectivity), but those choices are completely rational even for people who don't necessarily think about them in painful detail like I do.

So get over yourself and quit thinking that other people are somehow beneath you because they make different choices than you.

I have Facebook messenger app installed for the sake of a couple of people, and I check the Facebook main page once in a blue moon to respond to event invites from a friend.

Other than this I don't use Facebook at all any more and have used it very very little for the past several years.

I use a browser that tries to protect me from trackers and ads.

To me, this is what makes sense to do.

But they still get a significant amount of my attention because I use Instagram though.

The main issue here is that they also get to link all the other app events to your facebook account due to the facebook sdk and the fact you installed the app on the phone.

How is this not rational? Not feeding Facebook anything beyond the minimum (minimising anything extracted from the user) but keeping it open as a communications channel (maximising how much value the user is extracting) is exactly the rational strategy to adopt when network effect keeps Facebook as the #1 place people (re)connect.

I use facebook as an address book. When i need to get touch with someone I haven’t been talking recently, I open fb messenger and reach out. Then we can move it to a better form of communication. But it works. I don’t think I feed much info into it. Also fb market place has decent items.

If only there was a way to keep in touch with people if you didn't have a Facebook account. I wonder what people did before Facebook?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com