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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

It might not be obvious if you don't use the application, but I've met countless people throughout facebook, including my now-wife, and have kept in touch with my friends throughout the world thanks to that app. I've lost touch with a few people, who sadly have deleted their facebook accounts, but whenever I travel I get to meet old friends thanks to fb. I also reconnected with childhood friends who I managed to find through the app.

I know my wife basically keeps in touch with all of her family through Facebook. I try to avoid that because I've always posted more liberally there, but I connect with all my family (including my 90 year-old grand mother) through whatsapp.

There's a real benefit from having a public registry that everyone signs up to.

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To that I might add what the OP also mentions, that is how FB leveled the playing field when it comes to advertising. You can launch a new business competing with big corps with as little as a 100$ ad budget. It wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago. Without Facebook, many SME owners would be in serious trouble (see what happened with iOS 14).

> There's a real benefit from having a public registry that everyone signs up to.

Is there? or is there a benefit from having a communications platform that is easy to use.

if there was a public utility that allowed you to contact anyone on the planet and all you needed to know was their userID would that not meet 80% of the functionality without these scathing problems? Maybe you could use some kind of federated system that allowed operators local to each cohort of people to moderate abuse properly.

(I'm joking of course, this is somewhat how the phone system works).

Are you seriously implying that the phone system is a reliable registry? I change phone number every year, most of my friends have changed phone number several times since I know them. There's a reason I've lost touch with old friends who deleted their facebook accounts.

That’s very strange. Why would you change phone numbers? It seems like you’re being deliberately hard to reach?

It seems similar to deleting your Facebook account every year.

How is this similar? I only use a phone number for services and never for friends. I change often because I travel a lot.

Well, that in itself seems unusual. I don’t believe I ever met anyone who didn’t talk to friends and relatives on the phone.

Really? I don’t know anyone who use their phones to talk to friends or relatives. Everybody use whatsapp or messenger.

i guess whatsapp runs on your phone?

Ah, then we agree. I thought you meant using phone numbers to call someone directly.

we agree to the point that a "phone" is usually involved.

still i frequently call and get called by people _directly_ (business and personal) and i don't see that changing until neccessitated by latency or bandwidth constraints (eg. interplanetary communication)

changing a phone number does about the same damage to your reachability than deleting you (fb-)account and creating one with a new name.

facebook is less of a public registry than the phone system thou.

I disagree, eventhough I've changed phone number 10 times in the last 10 years, I've only lost contact with a few people (who were the ones who deleted their fb account). Perhaps we're not from the same generation, but people around me keep in touch not with phone numbers. Actually, I still remember a time in a distant past where people who ask for each other's phone numbers after meeting, but that's long gone.

i respect your disagreement and, baring the possibility that we are indeed of a different generation, would like to bring to your attention the fact that it makes litte difference wether you change your phone number or make a new facebook account - the links associated with the old handle are gone unless migrated somehow.

ppl are still exchanging identifiers after meetings

Counterpoint: I've had the same phone number for 7 years (Sweden), and another number for 15 years (British), but I've deleted my Facebook account multiple times in that timespan, and removed "friends" even more commonly when they started posting excessively political stuff and I didn't have a strong connection to them.

Are you aware that you can take phone numbers with you when you change providers? As for the other point: they're addressable on the entire planet, you can be sure everyone has one and it's not tied to a singular company.

So, while I'm joking about the equivalency, you said that a "registry that everyone on the planet was on" was the value add- I'm suggesting, somewhat tongue-in-cheekly, that we have such a system.

I travel a lot, and so do my friends as I end up meeting a lot of exchange students and expats. Moving with your phone number is not a thing everywhere.

more to the point: moving with your $account_id is not a thing everywhere.

phone number is a username in a worldwide public registry

I'm with you and I don't have any connection with, or financial interest in, Facebook. I use it. A lot of my friends and family do too.

It makes it easy to stay connected with and re-engage with people in your social group.

It managed the spam problem reasonably well (those Ray Ban scams are a relatively infrequent problem).

It makes to easy to start, run, find, and join niche interest groups. I'm in a dance community that would find it much harder to find each other's events without Facebook Events. My wife is in a vintage community that carries out low-friction international vintage clothing exchanges through Facebook Groups.

There are communities using Facebok to run small businesses and serve their communities.

Oh and I change my phone number when I change phone company because it's easier than not.

Now, I also think there are things wrong with Facebook and with how the network effect impacts on its competition. I think it could use oversight and regulation. But your naysayers are unimaginative children. Of course Facebook provides societal benefits. Get real.

If it's good enough for WhatsApp...

I find it really hard to argue that any of that is worth the enormous loss of privacy, the rising anxiety and effects of Instagram on the youth and the terrible effects Facebook is having across the globe when it comes to politics.

You’re quoting stories focused on the negative side.

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