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Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

> There's no other site where I can talk and keep up with my grandparents, my college roommate, and my girlfriend simultaneously.

'Necrophiliac bestiality, of course! How else am I to screw my food while I eat it?'

If these people mean something to you, then you should be able to find the time to have adequate direct person to person communication with them instead of broadcasting to them and your closest 600 best buds. If they don't— then why care?

I certainly believe that you find Facebook useful, but don't overstate it. People have had friendships long before there was a friend button.

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I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but arguments of the form "if you really cared you would X" are bunk.

Sure, if I really, really, really cared about my friends, I would practice calligraphy, hand-make my own paper, and train a flock of messenger birds to deliver them.

But there's a lot I want to get done, and a lot of people I'd like to keep in touch with, so if there is a decent way to do so that is more efficient than the 14th-century technology that I could use, then I'm going to use it.

If you have aesthetic objections to new-fangled things like the telegraph, the horseless carriage, and Facebook, by all means don't use 'em. But don't go pissing in other people's soup just because you don't approve of the dish they ordered.

There is more to Facebook than the friend-feed (the broadcast mechanism). Person-to-person communication is mostly what I use it for; it has replaced email and IM for many people.

What does Facebook's person-to-person communication offer beyond email and IM? (Honest question)

No doubt it indeed has replaced email and IM for some people, but I would think it is just because "well, everyone else is on facebook so I'll just use that too"...

Facebook is my primary messaging system.

It's better than e-mail because I don't have to sift through spam in my private message box. I don't even have to sift through messages from companies that I technically have a business relationship with. I only get actual personal contacts.

It's better than various forms of IM software because (1) most of my relatives actually use it and (2) it's in the browser rather than a standalone client.

Of course, YMMV.

Agreed. I hate using Facebook, as I nearly never feel like posting anything, but it's nice to be able to say, "I wonder what ___ is doing", and then see their feed, or see some vacation photos, and not have to actually bother them and interrupt their day. With young kids, time is precious and often not at times which are convenient for socialization. :)

Don't you think that the advantage of being more "clean" compared to email is something that will change once spammers and others start abusing Facebook?

In this role, it's essentially a directory service. The people you know are in its directory, and are tied to an integrated communications system.

Mind, I don't use FB, or trust it, for this.

My family uses Facebook heavily to stay in contact since we tend to be in different countries, along with Skype and email. They moved to this long after the initial craze because Facebook offered some really compelling advantages.

For my tech-savvy parents and non-tech-savvy grandparents, it provides an easy way to share/view photos. Using email/IM means having to come up with some sort of filing system for photos, whereas Facebook just provides it, along with captions which can be useful for travel albums.

It's a broadcast system with less urgency than email. If there's some photos or a story from daily life you want to share, emails like that will get lost in an overload of tasks and requests. IMs are easy to ignore and hard to dig up. Facebook provides a way to find out that hey, something interesting happened, and when I get around to it I can browse what's up with people I care about.

Personally, I live in a foreign country and I find Facebook extremely useful to keep in touch with people. It's great to be able to upload pictures and have all my friends in my home country see them and discuss. Sure, I'll write to grandma every once in a while, but it's unrealistic for me to write individually to every family member and friend I have back home with pictures, explanations, etc. Even if they mean something to me there's just too many and too little time outside work...

  Necrophiliac bestiality

Umm, what? It appears to be a quote from... a movie or something but I am not at all prepared to google it.

I googled directly what he said and necrophilia(c) bestiality (google corrected the necro part). I didn't really find anything relevant on the first page. There was one site with jokes but I didn't read into it since only a word from each sentence got picked up. Hope he comes back because I want to know what he is talking about too.

Basically he's saying "ur doing it wrong". You're doing something weird because you're combining things it doesn't make sense to combine.

Not my personal opinion, just a translation of what I think he's saying.

As an aside, there's the famous line from Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lilly? : "I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse."

Right— it was a gonzo commentary on the kind of justify-anything fallacious reasoning that comes imposing a mix of arbitrary constraints.

"My helo-elephant is the _only_ peanut powered mode of transportation with automatic mouse avoidance!" True, perhaps, but when someone asks why you need a helo-elephant it's often not informative to just say what it does with more words... they're often looking for you to justify why you need to do those things (or do those things at once).

How many times in your life have you moved house to somewhere far away? What you wrote here makes it sound like it probably wasn't very much.

My whole family uses Facebook for keeping up with people we don't live near anymore. I use it for keeping up with college friends whom I don't live near anymore (moving across the state will do that, let alone moving halfway across the world).

You might ask, why am I keeping up with college friends? The answer is: because I'm 23, so they're still a large fraction of all the friends I have.

As I recall, there was a rather frightening New York Times article once posted to HN on how even decades after college, most people still haven't made that many new friends to replace their friends from adolescence.

Scary stuff, hence: Facebook.

My moves since I was a teenager were, by distance— 150mi, 10mi, 2mi, 3mi, 2mi, 400mi, 800mi, 2400mi. My nearest family member (other than my partner) lives 2500 miles away. Perhaps when you're a bit older you'll know that such condescension usually just makes you look silly? :P

Facebook is not endowed with some unique magical distance busting power. Telephone, Email, IM, public websites, and postal mail all work over long distances just as well.

Facebook is not endowed with some unique magical distance busting power. Telephone, Email, IM, public websites, and postal mail all work over long distances just as well.

No, what Facebook does have is broadcasting capabilities. Rather than going through 13 tedious phone calls, I can post one status update. Unlike email, I don't have to specifically include or exclude various relations from the list of people I'm writing to. It contains its own IM service (though my fiancee and I use Skype together). It's far faster than postal mail (like everything else electronic). It costs far less than a personal website with forum software running.

It's a local optimum. Not supremely perfect, not magical, but good at what it does.

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