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Comment by krenoten | Hacker News Reader

Facebook yields a lot of value for a lot of people. Most of the people I am friends with use it extensively, and post things that will make it harder for them to get a public sector job that requires any kind of background check. They are pretty much all banned from politics for the content that they have shared. Not a lot of college students in the US are choosing majors that will help them get jobs, and it makes me sad that they are hurting their chances even more. They have heard from me and other people that it is important to communicate so openly only with those they trust, but I have only managed to teach a few of them how to use cryptography effectively. It is a very hard sell.

Facebook is worth it for a lot of people. But it's easy to run too far against the diminishing returns that additional time on it yields, and it's easy to slam doors in your future that may otherwise have been valuable.

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My own experiences with Facebook have been pretty disappointing. I ended up reconnecting with old friends I'd lost touch with over the years, only to find out that with the exception of exactly one of them, they all had political, religious, and social views vastly different than my own.

A large number of them also apparently spend what I would consider a very unhealthy amount of time on Facebook posting angry, racist messages that just seem to continually make them angrier and more racist as they feed off of one another. I've lost a lot of respect for a lot of people because of the things they put on Facebook. It's like, they log on to the site and all filters go off.

I've found that with the exception of 2 or 3 people who only seem to communicate with the outside world via their Facebook account, everyone that I follow whom I genuinely want to keep up with are ones I was already talking to through other channels.

Myself and most of my friends use Skype quite extensively for keeping in touch. Others email and use Google Talk.

To be honest - it is actually somewhat important for racist people to be able to communicate in the open like that. You don't want to sweep your problems under the carpet and pretend they don't exist. Facebook has shown a lot of people just how far from dead racism really is.

I don't use FB at all anymore, I have a deactivated account that I will log into once every year and a half or so when I need somebody's phone number and I don't have their email address. There really is a lot of value in how connected the network is, but to be honest I find my life to be infinitely more satisfying when I'm not spending most of it comparing myself to others. If I want to communicate, I like to maximize bandwidth, and use phone if I can't video chat or be in person. I hate texting because of how little communication happens compared with a phone call. So many misunderstandings happen when you strip out the vocal layer and limit the text length so drastically.

> My own experiences with Facebook have been pretty disappointing. I ended up reconnecting with old friends I'd lost touch with over the years, only to find out that with the exception of exactly one of them, they all had political, religious, and social views vastly different than my own.

"I used to like that guy, until I found out he thinks things what are different from things I think"

(racists are still terrible OK)

Oh, sorry. I can see how that was misinterpreted.

I don't mind that they have different opinions/views, I just meant that after reconnecting came the realization that we have virtually nothing in common anymore, so I didn't really derive any benefit out of it in the sense that it didn't really rekindle any old friendships.

Nothing wrong with that at all and I can respect that, our lives just went in different directions.

The only ones where I was really bothered/lost respect where the ones constantly posting the racist/hateful stuff, which certainly wasn't all of them, but a large enough portion that a combination of these two factors has just made the whole experience useless at best.

I'm not on FB. (Seriously.) What are they sharing that is so embarassing for their future jobs? Affairs? Stripper parties? Pot smoking? Wet t-shirt contests?

Watching "Mike & Molly" on CBS is telling me that in the future none of that matter. If the granny network has a show about pot-smoking and guys going down on senior citizens, then those types of photos will be considered PG-13 in the near future.

That kind of content is televised precisely because it is a controversial spectacle that "normal" people aren't engaging in.

They post photos they take at interesting parties. Pretty standard for college but enough to twist any of them into grossly irresponsible, bad people if they ever decide to try to change something controlled by a powerful entity that chooses to fight back.

Yeah, Obama can say he's done cocaine and other things, but to my knowledge he told of those things to diffuse any potential ammo the other side could use against him in the presidential election - long after he had already become a very powerful man. It is my fear that many people will simply be denied entry at the gate. And I'm not expecting them to be running for office, but I am expecting a lot of them to join NGO's where they will need to take part in some level of political struggle.

I see what you mean. Thanks for elaborating. Good luck to you and your friends.

I use Facebook, somehow I managed to get a federal job, even after multiple background checks of varying thoroughness. The big thing a lot of these checks look for is how susceptible you might be to outside pressure. Who cares if you got drunk a lot in college? What they really want to know is if you have a mistress or some other secret that could be used as blackmail.

It sounds like a sad life, if you are supposed to live it by some specific rules that make it possible to get a public sector job later on. I think if this is the situation, it is the public sector that needs fixing, not peoples' lives or Facebook.

You are absolutely free to share anything you want with whomever you choose. Just make sure you properly define who all that is and use basic crypto to keep out the unintended.

It's not the public sector job so much as the ability to participate in politics to seek change without giving a checkmate to any potential adversary who has police friends that can view any content.

Considering that Michelle Bachmann is in Congress, In think his whole "FB pics kill your career" thing is overstated.

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