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Stop using Facebook is good advice for most people.

For that to be true, it isn't necesssary that there is nothing of any use or value on Facebook. It simply has be true that those benefits are outweighed by the costs. For most people, there is a very real danger that if they use Facebook, they will end up wasting lots of time scrolling through their feed. Given how precious time is, this is an extremely a high cost.

I didn't find your examples super compelling.

I have kids and they're in groups with shared calendars, and so far no of these have used facebook. If everyone seemed super attached to it, I would go along, but I can't see other parents digging their heels in against "why don't we write it in this shared google doc, which anyone can view or even edit without an account"

I have hobbies and interests. There might be some good content or communities on Facebook. There's lots of good content and communities outside of Facebook. It's not a limiting constraint.

I also didn't get your techie vs normie distinction. Maybe I am not a techie but I don't use email mailing lists, RSS readers, Mastodon, vBulletin, or phpBB boards.

At work I use slack and email. In my personal life, I use email, iMessage, SMS, and Signal.

It's not about normies/techies. It's about recognizing that a Facebook group for a sewing Youtuber provides relatively little value compared to a million other things we can be doing to fill up our entertainment time. You don't need to be tech savvy to recognize this.

Yes. Just stop using facebook. Call your kids' teammates' parents on the phone if you're unsure when the next game is. Call your local businesses on the phone to get info. Join an in person sewing group. Start an in person sewing group if one doesn't exist. These are things "normies" have always done and still do.

Indeed, and in the end, these groups are just a marketing platform for the youtuber. In my experience, they bring very little value other than a fake sense of community.

This. These type of things used to be good faith helpful things. They are now silo's to attach you to their creator, hord discussions/suck them away from truely collaborative spaces, and generate value for the creator.

The quantity of scam calls means very small businesses can barely operate a phone. Facebook is their only asynchronous messaging. I’ve met these people: they don’t have email addresses and some don’t know what email is. Promoting “in-person” means becoming IT for them and you have my admiration for that.

Okay, but the group for my small regional area that assists people in navigating the system for getting your special needs kid help is valuable and only on Facebook. Normies have historical knowledge that I'm not going to find anywhere about an area that has 100K people tops and involves a dozen or so cities.

That's why I'm stuck on Facebook. It's for hyperlocal information and resources.

>That's why I'm stuck on Facebook. It's for hyperlocal information and resources.

If it's for hyperlocal information, why don't you use a hyperlocal resource, like notice boards?

People seem to think this social infrastructure didn't exist in the past but in reality we have never been so disconnected socially.

Or we could just live without so much sharing and communication. We did it before social media and we were arguably better off. Why is it necessary to be so “closely” connected to so many people? Aren’t the people in our more immediate orbit enough?

Yes yes, I understand marginalized people need to find each other. Alternative options like Mastodon already solve that problem better than Facebook because they aren’t owned by Big Tech/the US government.

The thing is that shunning WhatsApp and Facebook doesn't put you back to a time before they existed, it cuts you off completely because they've dispaced what used to exist. Before Facebook there was email and SMS, before that there were phone calls, letters, etc. None of those really exist any more. If something happens, it goes into the family WhatsApp group, if you're not in the group then you don't find out. My parents and their generation still answer the phone at least, and I convinced some fairly close people to use Signal, but generally I'm more disconnected from my family than I would have been in another time.

I truly do not use WhatsApp or Facebook, and I do not find myself cut off from the world in the way you describe. For instance, family groups communicate via text messages and/or email threads.

Maybe my family DOES also communicate via Facebook and I am just missing out on it... I genuinely wouldn't know. But I don't feel disconnected.

> it cuts you off completely because they've dispaced what used to exist

It really doesn't though. You remove trivial inputs from distant acquaintances, old co-workers, 5th cousins, and all manner of other individuals you'd traditionally have no input from. Meaningful relationships survive bailing on social media.

This has been my experience after largely leaving social media. I’m much happier with less noise and nonsense in my life. It’s been a significant net benefit.

The thing is, I'm not talking about my 6th cousin twice removed, it's my literal siblings. At least in the UK, it seems nobody born after 1990 will use anything other than WhatsApp to message people.

You may well have something there. I'm older, as are all of my friends, and the bulk of my family are non-technical. There may well be some selection bias in effect with folks who remember what the world was like before ubiquitous online bullshit having less difficulty reverting to more "traditional" methods of communication.

Sir you just said phone calls and letters don't exist anymore. Do you know how happy your mom would be if you gave her a call or sent her a letter?

Get off Facebook!

> it cuts you off completely because they've dispaced what used to exist

That hasn't been my experience at all. All of the other methods of communication still exist. What FB gives is greater convenience, but not using it doesn't cut me out of anything. Not even those things where FB is the primary way people organize.

> Alternative options like Mastodon already solve that problem better than Facebook because they aren’t owned by Big Tech/the US government.

Them not being owned by Big Tech/government does not make them a better solution to the problem. It's a benefit (to some, not all), but if you're trying to recruit "normies" away from social media to, well, a different social media, then that should not be the first bullet point.

I’m not really interested in converting the normies. It’s just not worth the effort. People are free to do what they want. My point is simply that we have better options and we’re free to choose them.

If the only way I can interact with a business is through Facebook, that's a business telling me they don't want me as a customer and I'm more than happy to oblige them.

I've very rarely encountered that, though. Most businesses at least have a phone number I can use to talk to them.

A harder problem is group activities. I keep bees and ride a bike. The local groups that have support, experience, supplies and all the people are on Facebook (the beekeepers) and WhatsApp (the cyclists).

I miss various announcements with the beekeepers but caved last month on WhatsApp with the cyclists, I joined WhatsApp. Being 50km from home with equipment issues, you need to be able to talk to the others and they are on WhatsApp. Cancelled rides or proposed new ones are all on WhatsApp.

I’m in that same social situation. The technological situation is that SMS and Facebook are pre-installed on their phones. In one case, Signal was acceptable. Specifically, Signal only rings when someone is among your contacts. The “do not disturb” feature on their smartphone was not blocking endless scam calls.

In another, because Signal needs to be installed, the amount of time performing as IT eroded the social time.

> If the only way I can interact with a business is through Facebook, that's a business telling me they don't want me as a customer and I'm more than happy to oblige them.

I don’t think this is a reasonable position given what OP correctly said: Facebook makes having a web presence easy for 99.9999% of the population. Not everyone is as technologically literate as those on this forum. By having only a FB presence, they are not telling you they don’t want you as a customer - they just don’t know any better.

> Not everyone is as technologically literate as those on this forum

I don't understand how technological literacy factors into this at all. It takes very little of that to have a phone number.

I assume OP wasn’t suggesting that these companies don’t have phone numbers, but rather that they didn’t have web presences outside Facebook. Technologically literacy or high cost are the hurdles for web presences outside FB.

>If the only way I can interact with a business is through Facebook, that's a business telling me they don't want me as a customer [...] I've very rarely encountered that,

I encounter it often because I deal with small contractors for home services and repairs and Facebook is how they reach new customers.

I used the word "businesses" but it is giving a false elevated impression that these local services are bigger than they actually are. The "business" is often just 1 guy. And the "business phone number" is just the guy's personal cell number. I hired a father-and-son business to replace some doors in the house and the only "website" they had was their Facebook page. Sure, the "Mr HandyMan" national franchise chains have "real websites" but hiring them also costs more. I'd rather hire the computer-illiterate father&son duo who knows how to replace my doors for a fair price rather than reject them just because don't know how to buy a domain name + website and relies on Facebook for customers to reach them.

Similar situation with other "small businesses" like local yoga instructors, etc. They rely on Facebook pages instead of real websites.

> I encounter it often because I deal with small contractors for home services and repairs and Facebook is how they reach new customers.

I deal more with small businesses than large myself, but I've never been unable to find their phone number.

However, as I said, if Facebook really is the only way to talk to these people, then these people clearly don't want my business anyway. Their loss, not mine.

> but I've never been unable to find their phone number. However, as I said, if Facebook really is the only way to talk to these people,

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I'm not communicating with home repair contractors exclusively via Facebook Messaging. I'm talking about browsing potential contractors to hire and the only so-called "website" they happen to have is their Facebook page.

It's not just the phone number. It's that their Facebook page also shows photos of their past work and/or has a bullet list of tasks they specialize in. For this purpose, there's no need for them to be computer savvy enough to install Apache or NGINX web server, or pay for website builders like Wix / Squarespace, or hiring a website designer, etc.

It's the business owner using the skills they already know (aka they know how to use Facebook) to update their web presence.

Somehow, my random observation that some owners that paid for a real custom website at one point in their life had it show an old phone number that was out-of-date and yet their Facebook page had the updated phone number -- derailed the discussion. It was just a datapoint on how small business people find Facebook useful enough to maintain accurate info but their "real website" was so complicated that they abandoned it to digital rot.

I didn't bring the phone up because of your comment, I brought it up because what I'm saying is that if a business' only public presence is Facebook, that means the business effectively doesn't exist for me.

> It's that their Facebook page also shows photos of their past work and/or has a bullet list of tasks they specialize in.

Yeah, that's not what I was talking about, really. If I can't see those photos without Facebook, then I'm just not looking at those photos. I'll rely entirely on word of mouth at that point, because I have no other information to go on. If that costs the business a sale, well, that's just the way the cookie crumbles.

One thing I'm certainly not going to do is support Facebook in any way, including using their services. There are plenty of other businesses (the majority of them, in my experience) that don't use it exclusively for customer relations.

I do exactly the same, no follows, no friends. But its still useful to access the marketplace, and some cool groups which I can't find anywhere.

I think we really miss some sort of "community" software (discussion boards won't make it these days), where people can gather around and talk and share stuff. I think Meetup was nice, but the fact that it's way too centered around actual meet-ups, plays against it.

I've thought many times about starting to build something, but the thought of having to market it and make it grow to have an impact demotivates me instantly.

In its high-growth period, Facebook devoured Usenet and forums precisely to defeat that. Low technical barriers meant moderation became important, thus CraigsList is risky.

For the life of me Idk why the social graph has not been scraped from facbook yet.

Back in the friendster days I distinctly remember being able to import my friends over to myspace and then later from myspace to facebook years later. We used to have a mass exodus every few years and then we we’re locked into facebook. Facebook should have died many times over. That no competing service has been built that has made migration easy is in my opinion the reason facebook has been allowed to fester for so long.

That such a tactic may be a violation of tos or questionable legally never stopped anyone before… and on the legal front I would argue it’s the users who own their social graph. Before facebook your address book was a thing of immense value. I have multiple friends irl that would sell their contacts for $10k+. That everyone just decided to give that info to facebook still boggles my mind and especially after all the bs they pulled over the years, yet here we are.

Graph API sat at v1.0 until Cambridge Analytica. The answer to your question is related to the amount they paid Facebook.

Several of my friend groups coordinate big events through Facebook events and Messenger. It would be harder to participate if I didn't have an account.

Also, in my area, Facebook Marketplace has totally displaced Craigslist for used goods.

These are the only things I use Facebook for, but they're hard to get away from.

> I worry that Meta will someday flag as a bot and revoke access.

You shouldn’t. Meta will always find a way to count users like you in the MAU. If they didn’t, they would destroy their statistics.

There are just too many accounts like yours on FB now.

Have never been using facebook. Gave instagram a short stint few years ago to remove it eventually because of too high ads/friends ratio in the feed. No problem in organizing social life.

FWIW, whatsapp provides excellent capabilities (well, for 2025 where only old timers remember phpBB and can compare to it) for local community discussions and meetups, interest groups, parent groups, whatever group discussions and coordination.

I live in a fairly small town in Wales, and pretty much everything is coordinated via Facebook. Makes it very hard to completely escape it, but as you say a "burner" account is the only way to permit access with minimal engagement.

The right answer is still the right answer even if it would cause inconvenience to "normies".

> I keep a dummy Facebook account with no followers and no friends just to access stuff that's exclusively on Facebook.

Facebook still provides an API. Wouldn't it be possible to leverage that API to build a proxy service, and then at least mitigate one side of their monopoly?

> The HN demographic can follow that but many normies can't because Facebook provides functionality for sharing that can't be replicated by email mailing lists / RSS readers / Mastodon / vBulletin, phpBB boards, etc.

Then normies should not actively be trying to make the service that is indispensable to them non-viable.

Either you need to use it, in which case you should not try to sabotage it, or you don't, in which case you should not need to sabotage it. So what is the point of attempting to sabotage it?

>to sabotage it?

I don't understand your choice of the word "sabotage". The thread's article is telling users about the official Facebook approved ways to turn off some ad preferences. This isn't UBlock, or Pi-Hole, AdNauseum, etc.

Similar to official Google method to turn off some ads settings in Chrome: https://www.techlicious.com/images/computers/chrome-enhanced...

If users have those 3 advertising settings in Chrome turned off, is that also "sabotage"?