Comment by TheBozzCL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheBozzCL | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of an experiment I started about 6 years ago.

I was getting a little sick of the quality of the stuff Facebook was showing me, so I started fresh. I deleted my account, added back all my friends... but I didn't join any groups or like any pages. Even the ones my friends invited me to.

Then, I started hiding and blocking anything that didn't come from one of my friends directly. That includes stuff they shared from pages or other friends of theirs. I also started managing the advertisers who had shared lists using any of my contact information (FB has a dashboard for that) and leaving 1-star reviews for all of them.

This had hilarious effects on Facebook itself. After about a year of this, sometimes the newsfeed couldn't find stuff to show me, and it even completely broke a few times. Group recommendations started to veer towards substance abuse recovery support (I assume many people create new accounts to join them anonymously). Facebook would insist on showing me stuff from pages or friends of friends even after I hid them, because it seems I had blocked so much stuff their filters were not working right anymore. Not that they actually care.

Of course, the fun I had breaking Facebook doesn't change the fact that this was a huge chore that I mostly kept doing out of spite and habit. When I realized I wasn't even using the platform to keep up with old friends anymore, I realized it was time to let go.

The only FB product I keep using is WhatsApp, and it's only because I failed at convincing my friends and family to move to Signal, Telegram or Discord. It has too much of a stronghold in my country.

This reminds me that the opposite behavior—deliberately engaging the platform in unexpected ways—also produces weird results.

On platforms with less personalized or at least personalized content which is more stable over small time windows, I often like to “reward” ads for things I find reprehensible by clicking them to cost them that fraction of a cent. If I do this on Facebook my feed instantly becomes an ever weirder and increasingly crowded view into the thing I disingenuously clicked. It happens almost instantly, and occupies nearly all of my feed for at least a few days, even up to a couple weeks.

Granted my FB usage is pretty minimal, I mostly post pics of my pup at night and check in to see the usual few reactions in the morning. So my own profile is based only on historical usage and whatever I haven’t been able to block/avoid them collecting on the web. Even so, that profile should be drastically unlikely to be interested in the deluge of ads it surfaces. I find it annoying every time, but I still sometimes click the bullshit, just to see how absurd everything gets so rapidly.

"clicking them to cost them that fraction of a cent." ahahah, I remember when I tried some paid advertising on facebook for my game, 2 weeks later I visited my mother proudly saying : - 'Me and my friends see a lot of your commercial on FB, we click on it every time to help you !' - 'Please stop doing that !' It costed a lot more than a fraction of a cents by click :p but I putted a low amount and I assume prices are degressives.

> I failed at convincing my friends and family to move to Signal, Telegram or Discord.

Mostly to others reading this, but please don't spend effort trying to move people to other walled gardens. This just guarantees you need to do it again and multiplies the effort required to get people to move to a protocol instead.

Which protocol should I push my FFF group to?

SMS?

That really doesn’t work when phone carriers give everyone free WhatsApp traffic. Which is why it’s so popular in my country, other than inertia.

There's free as in beer, free as in speech, and free as in "candy" scrawled on the side of a panel van.

If you use something because someone is paying to shove it down your throat, you will pay a thousand fold once they win their monopoly.

Matrix is great and has bridge support for all 4 chat services mentioned.

Most people will not host their own. They'd still be in someone else's garden.

Just don't sign up to any of the biggest three once the protocol reaches mass adoption, and that's not a problem because you can always leave without losing the ability to communicate if someone does something shady, and your private data is private.

Additionally having a long tail with 30-70% of the users makes it impossible to buy. And you probably don't even have to go that far, just not using element is probably enough to prevent matrix from trying it even if they wanted to (which it's clear they don't because they make it easy to leave).

We don't have to 'leave email' or 'leave tcp/ip' every few years because the TOS requires handing over your firstborn or because http is running experiments to see how many people will commit suicide. The idea is borderline-incoherent.

To others reading this: Please do spend as much effort as humanly possible to move people away to ANYTHING other than whatsapp. Signal is great, but anything other than a property owned and operated by facebook will help weaken them, which is better for the entire earth.

Moving to another walled guarden just gives them something else to acquire and signal is not immune to this.

Xmpp, matrix, and sms are options.

Both Signal and WhatsApp are walled gardens and having watched overlords who control these apps I might consider Zuck & Co to be more flexible if I must pick one.

A lot of those people had actually installed Signal. I had convinced them. When things broke, features were missing I just couldn’t tell them what to do. Never again.

But in the process of trying to bring them to Signal, I actually understood why my friends and family (many of them are from remote villages; educated or barely educated) prefer WhatsApp — because they “can actually use” WhatsApp and connect to others unlike anything else!

You know how big that is? That trumps everything Sugnal has to offer and it doesn’t offer much to begin with. Element/Vector/Riot/or whatever they’ll name it next isn’t even in that league and it’s good it is not even trying to be an usable person to person individual chat app/service.

Though I wish they used Telegram (yeah yeah, E2E is opt-in). It’s just too superior an app! Too good. But they don’t. So WhatsApp it is.

I'm all aboard the moxie has some incredibly bad rationalizations every time signal adds another sketchy feature train, but what makes you say facebook is better?

Also element works just fine, especially compared to the massive issues facebook messenger has had over the years.

I did the exact opposite with Facebook. The social feed is useless for me, but other features like the ability to browse local events, or the marketplace, drew me back.

I created a new account with a fake name and denied every friend suggestion, but I have joined some groups. The groups are great and don't have the same draw for endless scrolling.

But the events section, there's nothing like it. Lots of free, family events are only advertised through FB, and I will usually spend a few minutes a week finding interesting things to take my kids to over the weekend

Yet, i still appreciate Fb? why? it has an uncanny ability to group together likeminded individuals. No need to read tabloids, get your junk food pushed to your phone.

They will probably nuke your account.

It happened once. Not an issue if you don't have any relationships on there.

I tried that, at least until the supposed quality of FB Market placed seemed to average out to Gumtree/Craigslist levels.

It had some odd results - for a long time, it would only suggest accounts from central Africa as potential friends. Then it quite suddenly switched to likely-looking people from my own country, and scarily interspersed with people that I really did know.

> for a long time, it would only suggest accounts from central Africa as potential friends

Sounds like FB could not figure out your location and was suggesting people near Null Island

To escape WhatsApp: has anyone tried Element One? https://element.io/element-one

No and I don't plan to. The site states:

"Encrypted messages from WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram are decrypted as they pass across the bridge. The bridge operates in EMS’ trusted environment, with no content scanning or datamining. Bridges will be end-to-end encrypted in the future, but aren’t today."

which defeats the point of why I would choose whatsapp or signal over anything else.

I also undertook a similar experiment, except I would report ads as abusive. My account was eventually banned for using a fake name, even though my name wasn't fake. I could never get through to a real human. To this day, my account is under review. I lost a few friends who I could only contact via FB.

I take it SMS is not included in phone plans in your country? Maybe RCS will see better adoption there...

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