Comment by physcab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by physcab | Hacker News Reader

I stopped using Facebook last November. It's been a fantastic experience.

Whether you realize it or not, FB changes your emotional health. FB used to make me oddly depressed. Its like sitting in front of the TV and feasting on Sour Patch Kids for two hours. I would sit there staring at how awesome people's lives were and wonder why I wasn't doing such awesome things myself. I heard about the passing of family members from family friends before family members would have a chance to tell me personally.

After I stopped going to FB my important friends started CALLING me. Can you believe that? They picked up the phone and CALLED me. I went out to dinner more. I stopped engaging in those destructive conversations like "Can you believe so-and-so's status message..."

There have been some drawbacks though. I don't always hear about last-minute parties. I don't get to see the pictures my friends take from events. And I don't have the luxury of sending a message to someone I don't quite know very well who wouldn't have my phone number or e-mail, most likely through group activities like Crossfit that I'm a member of.

But all things considered, ditching Facebook is highly recommended.

I don't understand this at all.

FB (and social media in general) is the only thing I've found that enables me to organize going out for drinks with more than 2 people at once.

Also the only thing that lets me post "Hey, anyone wanna go out for ice cream tomorrow evening?" and actually having 5 people come. Three of which are completely new outside twitter/facebook.

It's really quite awesome.

Hell, I have very scatterbrained friends who are always busy with something. Without twitter, facebook and irc I'd never get to talk to them at all. Let alone be able to see them almost every other day like I do now.

And that's not even accounting for the fact that some of us tend to leave the country for months at a time, but still wanting to keep in touch.

Seriously though, how do you usefully and efficiently keep in touch with more than 1 person via telephone? I can't even imagine it working.

Oh and, word of advice from a "silly 24 year old". If looking at other people's lives makes you depressed, lead an awesomer life. Friends being better than you should be an encouragement to do better, not a depressor.

For some reason as I read this I thought of the thread from a few days ago, about how if you freelance, you shouldn't take on low-value, high-demand clients.

Maybe if your "friends" only get together or even talk to you in response to tweets or facebook, and forget all about you otherwise, you need to consider their real commitment to the friendship.

You know that friends did manage to organize cocktail parties at each other's houses, gather at restaurants, etc. before twitter or facebook existed.

Who said they forget all about me? It's just the most convenient way to contact me.

They use twitter/facebook/irc to ask me out for stuff as well ...

I use email just fine for this...

When I signed up for Facebook, that was my dream. That I would post stuff like "who wants to get ice cream tomorrow night?" and, just like that, people would take me up on it.

Never happened.

On the contrary, people I met would "friend" me, but still keep me out of their real-world cliques. Example: A guy invited everyone to a party at his house. Everyone else who responded knew where he lived. I sent a message asking. He ignored me.

I had an experience like the GP's. Facebook was an opiate, making me think I was keeping up with friends, when it was really pointless chatter. After I quit, I emailed an overseas friend and we had a far more meaningful exchange than anything during the year we were connected on Facebook.

I guess it depends who you know. Most of my close, in-town friends use FB minimally or not at all. So they weren't the same people I was talking to on FB.

Well, I think this says more about your understanding of friendship versus acquaintance rather than facebook itself.

Just because you added someone on facebook doesn't mean that you are now good friends. It means they know you somehow. You'll get invited to people's parties when you're close to them. Facebook supports existing friendships. It doesn't create new ones (well, in general).

In fact, if someone you know but don't certainly like adds you on facebook, it's socially awkward to not accept their friend request, because it is an outward social refusal to not do so. Essentially, you can "force" your way into friending someone. This weird social dynamic allows people's friend lists to grow way beyond proportion even if the feeling isn't mutual for everyone.

I think you're making the same point as me: "Facebook supports existing friendships. It doesn't create new ones." That's my experience too: Facebook did not turn my acquaintances into friends. But the person I replied to claimed otherwise — he posted an ice cream invite and 3 people he'd never met offline came.

I've made tons of acquaintances into friends. Facebook is a great facilitator for that.

Hell, my current girlfriend-like person was initially just an acquaintance on Facebook.

You need to put in an effort. Consistently including online people in your offline life, will eventually turn them into close friends. You talk to them online first, meaningfully, you invite them to offline friendly gatherings and eventually they just become one of your group of friends.

I mean ... it's the same as offline stuff. All your friends were acquaintances at first.

Honest question about the party: Why didn't you directly contact some of the "everyone" people who responded to ask for the address (or carpool)?

I find PG's "Relentlessly Resourceful" essay equally-useful in a social context. It took me a long time to realize that (for me) social interactions were an active and often taxing process. (And emails / FB messages are pretty much the most passive form of communication anymore.)

Didn't know those people and wasn't that strongly motivated to go... it was just one of several possible things to do that night. "Relentlessly resourceful" is great, but part of that is to make sure you're solving the right problem. And in social terms, I've found that trying to become friends with flaky/non-responsive people is solving the wrong problem.

I have phone numbers for all my close friends. If I wanted to contact them, I'd just call. The beauty of it is that it isn't all at once :)

WhatsApp FTW? Most of the impromptu meets for food and drinks with friends are organized using that instead of Facebook. Takes way too long to wait for people to check FB, RSVP, etc.

Exactly. You don't have to read any posts. Facebook will email you when someone has invited you to a party, or give you a push notification when someone wants to be friends. You can use Facebook's integration with your phone's address book to get all their contact details, so you can always reach them. You can have all the benefits of Facebook without visiting the actual website or app.

Seconding this

One thing about facebook most people don't notice is it is highly customizable

Want everything by email? Doable. Want to not use the site and have most of the important things go by email (where "important things" is set by you)? Doable

I agree wholeheartedly

And exactly, if you don't know how to socialize, fb won't help you with that! (in the same way MS Excel can't really help you if you don't know math)

And of course, as in the real world, there's vanity, being ignored by people, etc

But I think fb (and twitter) often provide a very good service. Just for a start, fb chat 'killed' MSN messenger

"Seriously though, how do you usefully and efficiently keep in touch with more than 1 person via telephone? I can't even imagine it working."

In response to that I'd say think about what social life was like before the very recent invention of online social networks. There is no end to the amount of complex tasks that were arranged long before anything like social media existed, and long before anything as enabling as the telephone existed. The fact that someone would find it difficult to imagine a scenario without facebook, twitter etc. shows how disconnected from the abundant alternatives we have become.

You also have to understand that I am juuuuuust that age where I've used message boards and MSN more than the telephone in that time of being a teenager when you learn how to socialize with people.

Plus I was always a geek so that goes double for me. So, essentially, I never really learned how to use the phone effectively.

"Seriously though, how do you usefully and efficiently keep in touch with more than 1 person via telephone? I can't even imagine it working."

Efficiency is the least of my worries when it comes to keeping in touch with friends. Why do we have to be in a rush? Why not slow down and actually take the time to sincerely talk to each one of them? If that means I can't be friends with 100 people, then so be it.

Better to have fewer relationships I take the time to nurture, than 100 shallow ones.

Not attempting to dissuade anybody from dumping Facebook - but to present another option.

I use FB once a day.

I treat it like a newspaper. A once-a-day update on friends lives that I poke at over a coffee, then throw away until the next day.

I find this a nice balance between having a "real" life, and maintaining some connections with folk that I otherwise wouldn't see socially very often.

Works for me. YMMV.

Yeah, I'm thinking of deleting the FB app on my phone. It's just a temptation to constantly check what's happening and stop being present with whoever I'm around.

Do it! I've never looked back.

Then, ask yourself if $amount of money per month is still worth it for a 3G contract. This one really depends on your work and your environment (is there WiFi in walking range if you need it?). But it saved me time and money so far.

This is a very rational way to use Facebook. Make yourself the master of it, and get value from the tool on your own terms.

Once a day (e.g. 15 minutes) use probably gives a person 80% of the utility or value of 20x a day (e.g. 2 hours) usage. There is relatively little benefit from all those "extra visits", since almost nothing on Facebook is urgent, actionable, or going to cost money if not attended to immediately. (A great example of the 80-20 rule in action, btw.)

yeah, this is how i try use it too. the problem is that at the end of the day it's really hard to sift through the stream of fwd:fwd:fwd junk to get to the real updates you care about, because it all lands on you at once, so most days i find myself avoiding it, and in practice i end up checking a few people's walls individually once a week or so. i wish facebook provided a precise way for me to set up filter rules (e.g. filter out anything that has been reshared without comment); i don't really trust their automatic signal-versus-noise balancing algorithms to craft me a stream.

Me too. Same kind of rule for email - once per day. And even for work email during office hours - limited to 3x per day. All a big help.

It's funny that people just can't do things in a balanced way, it always has to be all or nothing.

In the past 5 years, I've lived in 5 different cities across 3 different countries. My network of friends is very widespread geographically, and I love Facebook for being able to see pictures of my friends or read their random thoughts and what they're up to in life without hassles of long distance calls, scheduling skype sessions, time difference, etc. We often have lengthy conversations through comment threads or Facebook chat. In a way, I use Facebook a bit like a private message board with my close friends and family (this isn't hard for me as I was a big user of message boards as a teenager, so this habit of sharing life with people in a digitally written form is ingrained into me).

But I also go out to dinner with the friends in my current city, hang out and go out with them, text/call them to hear about how that job interview went, etc.

You can use Facebook in an "socially healthy" way, and not spend hours reading it passively.

(I also use Facebook in a semi-unusual way: I have 2 different accounts; one that has less than 50 friends and is not viewable publicly, where I post pictures, ask friends for advice, etc.; and one account with several hundreds of friends that I use as a "public" account. I also have a third account, that I don't really use, as I work a lot with kids and teenagers, and they tend to want to add me— this account is solely for that purpose).

Careful not to get banned for multiple accounts.

I completely agree...I've "quit" Facebook by changing my password to some pasted value that I can't memorize. I have FB email me if someone direct messages me...so if I really need to tell someone something, I can...but the hassle of logging in is great enough that I do it only when necessary. And for times in my life when I feel like using FB more, I can switch the password (or use a cookie) The all-or-nothing mindset is silly

3 accounts doesn't sound like "balanced" usage.

> I would sit there staring at how awesome people's lives were and wonder why I wasn't doing such awesome things myself.

I felt this way with Facebook, but then worked out what was going on. It's a multiple-endpoints situation. The status updates you read aren't coming from a random distribution of your friends. They come from a self-selected population that is doing something interesting at that particular time. People (mostly) don't post status updates about an average workday or lazy weekend.

If you have 52 friends, who each go on vacation one week out of the year, then every week Facebook will be showing you somebody's awesome vacation updates. That doesn't mean that your own life is worse or less interesting for not being on vacation that particular week.

I ditched facebook about 2 years ago, for 14 months.

I learned that I never made enough of an impression for any of my friends to inquire where I was.

It was incredibly depressing because I exposed a lie to myself, that I had close friends.

I guess it's been neat, knowing the truth, but it was an expensive trade to obtain it. I've been back on there for a few months again, and sadly, even knowing none of those people actually think about me in their daily lives, it's once again a fantastic placebo.

So if you're sensitive and there's a chance your friends aren't really as close as you think, you should pause before you test every single one of them at the same time.

> I learned that I never made enough of an impression for any of my friends to inquire where I was.

Well, did you ever inquire where they were?

If your main interaction with a person is via facebook, they are not a close friend.

That's a heck of a generalization.

It can still be a more-true-than-false generalization. Most of what we can claim is limited to generalizing.

It's that generalization i take issue with. The communication medium you use to talk with your friends doesn't have all that much correlation between how close of friends you are. Distance, time, and other concerns would rank much more highly than facebook vs something else.

I would say that real friendship requires intimate conversation - discussing things that you wouldn't share with just anyone. This is what separates friends from acquaintances.

Intimate conversation, by definition, must be (or at least feel) private. So if you communicate with someone face to face, by phone, or by email, you may maintain the feeling of privacy necessary for real conversation. I'd allow that "private" Facebook messages might serve the same purpose.

Wall posts, however, could not. Everything is said with half a mind to how everyone else will read it.

That's only part conversation; the other part is performance.

I agree. Email, IM's do not replace face to face contact. We're biologically wired for those type of interactions, not online ones. It's a true generalization, even if there are exceptions.

I think this whole "social networking" thing will start to fade soon, as people increasingly realize that it's not "cool" anymore, and that they don't really need it, other perhaps than checking their accounts twice a year. So this whole discussion about whether Google+ or other company can beat Facebook or not might be irrelevant, if the whole social networking "industry" collapses in the next 5 years.

I agree. This whole "Internet" thing is highly overrated. Also, "electricity" and "clean water."

You ass. You can't compare things that are essential to a functioning economy to be compared to annoying background noise like '"social" networking'. It more closely related to TV and online media. Both of which are incredibly draining and mind numbing. Try going without TV for a year and take up a productive/creative hobby.

Try telling Syrian activists that social networking is "noise." The ability to freely share information is highly underrated in places where information may be freely shared. Thanks for the tip.

Facebook has over 900 million monthly active users (google it and you can easily confirm this from multiple sources). It may not be "cool", but the time when you could proclaim it a fad has long since passed. That's like saying TV's not cool.

This is amazing. I was just discussing this with a friend, and quitting Facebook was one of the first things we considered. Interesting coincidence.

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