"Delete Facebook, The New Virtue Signaling", by every HN commentor ever.
Is advising people not to smoke "virtue signalling" or just good advice?
The keyword here is network effect.
Doesn't work though because there are lists of phone numbers and addresses that can be bought that still give you access. And if you're considered a customer, which is extremely loosely defined, they can call you.
Sure, it's far from as bad as it seems to be in the US but my personal threshold is 0.
If you could delete your Facebook profile, congratulations! However, you should realize that not all people can do this. If your society is not reliant to Facebook, then good for you, I also hate Facebook and Gualdrapo seems to hate it too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32576061). However, giving incomplete replacements (especially the infamous "migrate them to another messaging app!") would just result in backfiring and further entrenchment of Meta products. Worse, if that other service really improved a lot they will no longer try it due to past experience. Short of a) Facebook being no longer tolerable to a majority of your friends and b) there's a viable replacement for Facebook's features (especially it's group features - a phpBB-like forum is not good for this), it'll be hard to fully remove Facebook.
I think that's a nuanced distinction that very much comes down to exactly how the other person suggests getting off facebook. If I get the impression that the commenter cares about the well-being of somebody and suggests it as a solution, I tent to categorize it as "good advice". Example: "I had the same problem / know of people who had the same problem, getting off facebook seems to help".
On the other hand, when it's a barely related topic (nothing about mental health, only related to the company) + there's no actual person to care about + the comment is very standoff-ish, I jump to virtue signaling.
Unsolicited advice, especially when given in a tone like this, is often much more about the giver of the advice than anyone else imo.
Personally I despise Facebook as a company and a service, but the amount of flak HN gives them is straight-up ridiculous. Facebook is indeed bad, but is this site really going to forget the military contract work Microsoft does, or the religious manhunt Apple aids China in? And yet, when people here about these war crimes they don't suggest throwing away their computer or finding a new replacement service. They just... keep using it. Same as Facebook users. Same as Macbook users. Same as Windows users.
And all of this is fine!
The overall goal shouldn't be to dictate how other people use the internet. Facebook has a right to exist, and we have a right to hold it in check with relevent litigation. If people think that Facebook violates the law, then let's hold them accountable! Otherwise, your complaints are genuinely useless in the context of discussing healthy browsing habits on HN.
But I have friends
You’re proving my point. If you travel you can’t use txt message to keep in touch with anyone
I have a "fake" account to talk to one or two people who refuse to use anything else, so I have to use messenger to get their attention. I never actually "use facebook".
If the society in which one lives is backwards to the point of mandating a Facebook account to interact on a basic level... it might be time to turn on, tune in, drop out.
Gualdrapo's post doesn't actually say anything about why he _needs_ to use Facebook. Neighboorhood groups and FB marketplace are not necessary to live. I think we might be conflating needs and wants here.
Being accustomed to doing things in specific ways is not a need.
That's why it's de facto forced on to you. Ministries (Americans: Departments, not religious ministries) are usually only reachable either on Facebook or by physically traveling hours to their office. Facebook groups are the communication platform for any community point-of-contact, and most are set to only be accessible by having a Facebook account.
As a society, is it avoidable? Yes. As an individual? Good luck convincing others. It might be hard to wrap your head around it if you were not living in such an area, so thank your government that you have a say on your communication.
Could you send mail through the post? Call on a telephone?
Technically? But in my experience as a foreigner that have lived in Thailand, mail services are atrocious. It's unlike in Singapore or UK where it's excellent. It's even weirder considering parcels on the Amazon-equivalent (Lazada and Shopee) are faster on this one.
> Call on a telephone?
Mobile-to-telephone charges are obscene to the point that it's cheaper to use an international VoIP service to call (just to remind you that most people here are those who would skip and never experienced any telephones altogether) and unsurprisingly these are the kinds of government to ban unapproved VoIP to its citizens.
I have used Thailand here, but it's the same in Brazil (or from what I heard nowadays, was, but they still apparently used Meta's services extensively) except for the citizen-legal VoIP loophole.
Can you give one example? A link to their website or FB page would suffice.
There are lots of reasons. Yes they aren't literal needs as in you are going to die, but sometimes the cost of not using facebook is significantly greater than the cost of using it.
Its up there with people that get triggered by how "people get triggered by the most insignificant things these days".