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Comment by kareemsabri | Hacker News Reader

The ideal solution here is to stop using Facebook.

Regrettably, I have family members with whom I really must stay in touch, but who think that FB is the internet. No matter what I've said, what I've shown them, and what I've encouraged them to do, there is nothing to replace it.

They can post photos, statuses, chat with friends, reply to other friends' posts ... what can replace FB for them?

Nothing. So I'm forced to stay on FB.

Vile platform, no alternative.

Yeah, that's fair. There's a cost. I've deleted it a couple years ago. I miss out on some stuff for sure. I have an iMessage group chat with my family as a replacement, but of course not the extended family and certainly not the more distant friends.

It’s whatsapp for me. Can’t get away from it. I tried for 3 years. I ended up basically unintentionally ostracized by family and friends.

It’s a chore for people to forward to my preferred communication method and easy to occasionally forget. Which snowballs into only hearing about events afterwards.

Eventually you basically become a weirdo with no mates.

I’m not prepared to make that sacrifice any more. I honestly gave it my best shot and still don’t use FB and Insta but have to use WhatsApp.

I traveled all around the world before Facebook was a thing, and it never prevented me from keeping in touch with the people that mattered.

What you realy mean is that you value more the convenience it offers that the price to pay for using it.

So did I. But things have changed, and some of those people with whom I remained in contact now use FB to the near exclusion of everything else.

These people are family in their 90s, for whom well-meaning children and grand-children have set up on FB. They don't use email, they can't write letters because of arthritis (and time delays ... international post can be very slow), and effectively the only async comms they use at all is FB.

I'd ask that you not try to tell me what I really mean.

I had the same situation with far away old people (grandmas in Venezuela, on in France, me living in Africa or Asia), some had problem with sight, earing, etc.

They didn't have internet.

We managed to get in touch.

> I'd ask that you not try to tell me what I really mean.

Manner of speaking.

The important is again that it is a matter of cost vs convenience.

I understand the cost can get pretty high.

Yet still, people kept in touch for decades with old distant relatives before the internet.

Using facebook is convenience, that's the point. It is very convenient.

It's the whole argument of this thread: the convenience eventually makes most people discard the cost of not using FB as too high, and the privacy things as not important enough compared to that.

They're 90? I wonder if it couldn't be replaced by a weekly phone call.

For reference, I'm 60, nearly 61, my mother is 90, nearly 91, and we are a long-lived family. I phone my mother three times a week.

For the rest, see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32131180

Yeah, for your mother definitely makes sense to already have more than one weekly phone call, but I was thinking about other family members.

Reading your post, it seems Facebook is a bit of a recreational activity to keep them sharp and social, which is good. What I was thinking is whether you need to participate in it, since the people this age I know is more than willing to keeping me up to date on all interesting stuff by talking. But of course each family is different so I'll just assume you know what you're doing!

In my experience, almost everybody over 60 really prefers to talk on the phone anyways

I'm over 60 and I hate talking to people on the phone. My mother likes it, and that's why I call her three times a week. But most of my aunts and uncles prefer to show their photos on FB and talk about what they're doing there. I call them for birthdays and special anniversaries, and having kept up-to-speed via FB means I can talk about things that really matter, or get clarification on things that weren't obvious.

But they like using FB, and it's the only effective way I know to stay in touch and remain a part of their lives.

> What you realy mean is that you value more the convenience it offers that the price to pay for using it.

People should be more charitable.

They said that they must stay in touch with these people and that these people can’t seem to use other things. Often times you have to stay in contact with family members because they aren’t able to properly care for themselves. Those same people may not have the ability to easily change how they interact with the digital world due to mental health issues and you have no choice but to meet them where they are.

I think this is largely a straw man, or taking an extreme case as representative.

I have friends that are not on Facebook. It requires more effort to stay in touch with them (for example, calling them on the phone) but it's doable. I don't see how a thing that was invented 10 years ago is now the sole method of communication with loved ones.

That said, I agree it's not without cost to delete Facebook.

Again, this is implying that the cost of another solution to all those problems is very high, and facebook is a very cheap, convenient solution.

So privacy is not important enough to justify those costs.

My family replaced FB with WhatsApp. So have most of my friends (although with friends it's mostly Signal).

Sure, it's a completely different kind of platform, but it serves well. People post their travel pictures there, people ask random stuff and the group can discuss, we can have private discussions by clicking one name.

Sure, it's still Meta, and there's still a lot of bullshit groups, but at least I don't have to be exposed by it, nor do baby/kid pictures are exposed to the world, nor do I give money to Meta.

Of course, maybe by "Facebook" you mean "Messenger", which is more popular than it should in the US. Replacing FB with WhatsApp or Signal is possible because my family and friends are around Latin America, Europe and Asia, where nobody uses Messenger anyways.

Photos and statuses are nice, but not essential. Though conversely, I'd say that getting tracked online isn't really a big deal either.

So they don't understand email, phones or text messaging where people have been doing what they're doing now for years? I have some family that are like your, I shutdown my Facebook profile, and now I just call them on the phone now and we actually communicate more frequently and have better conversations.

See my other replies:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32131013

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32131180

Your last two sentences don't pass the smell test.

There's even graceful degradation in your set of solutions:

1. You drop FB. Now you just look on your spouse's Facebook when necessary, and your family learns to tell your spouse to show you stuff on FB. Annoying? Yes. Unworkable? No.

2. Your entire immediate family drops Facebook. At least one (if not all of you) can still communicate with the rest over text. And the rest of your family knows how to send a photo over text on an Iphone. Annoying to extended fam? Maybe. Unworkable? Definitely not. (In fact, I'd be willing to bet that it cuts out extended family spam and makes those moments of connection more meaningful.)

3. You attempt a quixotic adventure to switching your entire extended family over to some half-baked decentralized alternative to Facebook that will be usable in forever minus a day. Impossible? Yes. So choose #1 or #2 above.

I have 10 to 15 family members in their 80s and 90s who use FB. A group has been set up for them, and they post photos and comments, and they chat with each other using Messenger. These are people who don't know of and honestly don't care about the difference between the internet and the web, and to them, "The Internet" simply is Facebook.

Using the tech is already hard for them. Some are partially sighted, some have mobility issues, some have arthritis, all can easily use FB to stay in touch.

And they don't use anything else.

It's just not an option to try to get them to change, it really isn't. Please, please do me the courtesy of accepting that I've done the analysis. Many times. It's simply not a reasonable objective.

And no, I won't squat on someone else's FB account so I can stay in touch.

Perhaps the best strategy is to use Facebook but never click on links. At least that solves the particular tracking that this post is about.

What about SMS and phone calls?

It's like saying I need alcohol to stay in touch with my alcoholic friend. No you don't.

See my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32131180

privileged solution. In many countries Facebook is the de facto communication infrastructure. They own four of the five largest communication platforms in the world.

The ideal solution is to hit them with the hammer until morale improves. Regulators need to wake up and just start fining them absurd amounts of money and keep it vague until Facebook et al. are scared enough to comply and then some.

Facebook is facebook.com, that's what the article is about. I don't know what other communication platforms aside from WhatsApp you're referring to, but they aren't relevant to the discussion.

If you think it's necessary to caveat that if you rely on facebook.com as your "communication infrastructure" (not that many countries would fit that bill) then you shouldn't delete it, I'm happy to do so.

messenger, whatsapp and instagram. And of course they're relevant because if Facebook employs these tactics on one site there's no reason to believe they won't do equivalent things anywhere else. They own the largest competitors to their own products, obviously that's relevant because it shows how strong their grip is and that there's no genuine alternatives.

"delete it" isn't a solution at all. You may as well say "turn the electricity off". People deserve privacy when services are provided to them by private companies, that's not a bonus, it ought to be a fundamental right. It's not the job of individuals to take on trillion dollar multinationals.

Delete it is absolutely a solution. You may not like it, but it's a solution.

For some reason people here seem to think I'm precluding regulatory action against Facebook. I'm not. I just also think it's better not to use it.

That's like saying 'stop being poor.' I'm not personally invested in FB, but people with large extended families, businesses, political campaigns etc. don't have the option of just ignoring it.

Every HN thread about social media has one sub-thread like this, and it never produces anything of value because the premise is trite.

It's not like saying that at all.

God I wonder what people with large extended families did before Facebook was invented! Surely they were all isolated and out of touch, how sad.

This comment was not directed at people running Facebook business accounts or political campaigns. The reason this thread produces nothing of value is because of pedantic comments such as yours bringing up irrelevant edge cases.

Large extended families used the best option they had before Facebook. Now they have Facebook, they use Facebook, because it's the best, most useful option for the vast majority of them. This thread is full of people saying that if people aren't willing to switch to other platforms for you then you should cut them out of your life. This might be fine for some acquaintances or even friends, but no normal person is going to cut their close family out of their life because they didn't switch to Signal. Nor does this even begin to take into account people who live in countries where Facebook or WhatsApp are the internet to the average person. Making an individualistic moral stand is nice and all, but to the majority it isn't a realistic solution, Facebook is too in-baked to society and how it functions. Thus the solution needs to be regulatory/political.

Yes, it's exactly like saying that.

Your sarcasm is misplaced; once people adapt to a benefit, many understandably don't wish to forgo it, and leveraging such network effects is the core business model of social media.

As for who the comment was directed at, it was so broad as to be inclusive of all users, because it didn't qualify its suggestion at all; that's why it's trite. You're just making a 'not true Scotsmen' argument.

Just like the ideal solution for climate change is to stop eating meat, stop flying, stop driving, stop heating, stop air conditioning, and, for good measure, stop using computers.

Heaven forbid that we seek a political/regulatory solution.

Seek whatever you like. I don't think those are comparable examples.

I've just deleted my Messenger account. Won't lie, that felt good. Good thing my friends/family from there are on the other two alternatives I use.

And like all ideals, that's easier said than done

Yeah most things involve tradeoffs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com