Hacker News Reader

Comment by aneth | Hacker News Reader

Not to be uncool, but I enjoy Facebook. I find it to be a fun way to stay in touch with connections, discuss, share, chat, etc. Sure I want data portability, but I believe that will come in time from competitive and user forces, and my life is not a protest. My online social activity is inane anyway - I don't care that much who stores it.

If you are worried about your activities being tracked and sold, stop using your credit cards. Have you read the privacy policy on those lately?

All this anti-Facebook pride strikes me as bitterness. Everyone has a right to do what they want, but would be all the wiser to look at themselves to understand why.

Facebook gives me more than I give Facebook - a lot more. When that stops being true, I'll stop using it. I too am kicking myself for not building a social network in 1996 - I'm not going to convince myself Facebook is evil because I didn't.

View on HN

I use FB for what it is - a way to keep in touch with people I don't see often.

From my point of view, most people are on FB, some are on Twitter, and almost nobody is on G+.

I feel the same way, but I'd emphasize that interoperability won't happen by accident. We users need push for it and encourage competition. It's not that Facebook should lose, but that Google+, LinkedIn, Skype/MSN, and miscellaneous startups like Diaspora should also win.

Ditto. I got rid of my Facebook account for that reason, primarily -- I don't believe monopoly is ever a good thing and Facebook is headed that way fast (simply because of the network effect, not because they're gurus at building monopolies).

There's another reason I ditched Facebook, though. I found that my life was getting too entangled with other people. I had a lot of friends in the past who worked or still work for the US govt. and my current views on that government (that it is corrupt to the core and needs to be rebooted) were making them afraid for their jobs. Simply unfriending me is not enough, because Facebook has a memory...so I sent everyone my email and Twitter ID and went through the 2-week-long process of deleting my Facebook account.

What scares the hell out of me is that Facebook is concentrating so much personal knowledge in one place -- one-stop shopping for corrupt governments!

The proper approach is to federate the social networks together, so people can move from Facebook to Twitter to G+ to LinkedIn effortlessly but retain control of their data and hence put up a sizable barrier to corruption.

I see your point about making a statement by not being present on the social net.

But I'm not about to alienate myself from the people I love in order to do so. So I stay in FB and only put stuff on there that can be put in the front page of the newspaper. I do not mind not having privacy because I go in with no expectation of privacy at all.

I like sharing stuff with my friends. I only add people I know but I go under a fake name (which seems like a false sense of security TBH).

I won't delete it because it's fun.

One thing I worry about online is someone misinterpreting what I share. For example, I share a lot of hacker related news.

I am really interested in reasons why not to have one or delete it entirely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com