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Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

If you stop using facebook, then you also lose the benefits of facebook. Some people want to use facebook, but not be searchable by name. It is not difficult to change one's name on facebook, so I hardly think it's a ridiculous response.

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So real question: I've changed mine a while back and removed all the vowels - not machine readable but still human recognizable. At one point they did have my actual name and I imagine they still do. What is to say they don't tune their search to include previous names used on a profile?

I also remember last time I changed my name I had a hard time getting around their validation. Any hints on how to defeat that check using an alias?

I just checked and it seems they have also limited the number of times you can change your name. Apparently I only have 4 changes left.

They do keep previous names, so that if you search for someone who was married, you'll still get their result.

The benefits of facebook? What, that they're holding my relationships hostage behind a wall? Again, the lengths that users are going to so that they can use a basic utility without being manipulated and taken advantage of is ridiculous.

Nearly all of my friends use Facebook for scheduling events. If you can tell me how I can convince them all to switch to another service, I'll delete my Facebook account.

Ideally, this plan will also work for when that service becomes a burden, so I can continue asking my friends to switch to new services.

Also, I know I could just talk to my friends more often, and ask them regularly if there are events they've forgotten to invite me to, but that will make me sound needy and pathetic, much like someone refusing to own a telephone, and instead showing up at their friends' houses unannounced, just in case they had something to communicate.

If you refrain from using Facebook for anything but receiving event notifications, you solve that problem while avoiding most of the harm.

I do it over email. Or even text. Or voice even. It works just fine.

Really, it is entirely possible to schedule events without Facebook. It was possible to do so when FB was not there, and it is possible to do it now :)

You can't control how other people schedule events.

You don't. People change the way they schedule events, or more likely they make an exception for you. A lot more people do that than people who just don't invite me to things.

They want me there, so why shouldn't they make an effort? If they don't want me there at least that badly, why would I want to be there? Luckily, I don't have that problem - people text me, or email me, or try to run into me or something.

Which is fine - people make an exception for you. But the original point was that other people use Facebook to schedule things, and the response was "Well, I schedule things over email and text." Which misses the point, because we're talking about other people's behavior, not your own.

Yeah, but the question is how do you make other people do that.

I don't have a facebook account. My friends that do generally just send me (and a few others without facebook accounts) an email when they are hosting an event. Is it really that much of an effort to remember to invite people who aren't on facebook?

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