With each passing day, I look less and less like a lunatic for avoiding facebook (and its ilk) like the plague.
You should try it.
You should try it.
It's not that simple for people that aren't in the same circles as HN readers. Younger generations utilize it as their primary means of keeping in touch with people. That's fine if you get along well without it. But take a step back and look at all the teenagers who grew up with never not having Facebook to keep in touch with their friends/setup events/etc. You remember how difficult the social aspect of your younger days were in school.
Facebook/Twitter/Instagram alleviate some of that for the younger generation. I've seen that in many youth that I've worked with over the years.
Now teaching kids how to properly use technology and social media is another aspect that many non-tech savy parents could use some coaching I think.
It seems you are talking about boils down to peer pressure ... how many after school specials about how not to give in do we need?
Facebook is a subset of Internet communication just as driving is a subset of texting scenarios.
The idea here is not simply about using an existing alternative network. The idea is that creating an alternative network is always a possibility, and that free will exists.
The "network effect", while a real observable phenomenon, is still a flawed rationalization for the existence of a network, and undermines that thing which actually propagates the network - the free will of the individual.
My friends never send SMS any more, they use Facebook messenger. Nobody asks you for your phone number, they ask to add you on Facebook. Nobody invites anyone to anything without creating a Facebook event.
If I suddenly leave Facebook I am certain I'll also lose out on a lot of social life.
What do you use for instant messages? Do you just use email a lot more?
I really wish some kind of distributed social network could take off the way Facebook has. I do not want anyone to keep my data as much as the next guy, but if you want to be a social person in 2013 (at least here), you kind of need to have a Facebook account.
A guy I met at the start of the semester is a german exchange student. He had to create a Facebook account when he got here because pretty much everything happens on Facebook. Some things do not even have their own website, just a Facebook page.
> If I suddenly leave Facebook I am certain I'll also lose out on a lot of social life.
This. You can't expect people to set up and populate their own mailing lists to notify everybody they want to invite to their birthday party or share news of their engagement.
I hate it too, but the reality is that being off facebook means losing touch with people that you don't have to lose touch with. Very, very few people will make an effort above and beyond the default choice these days (facebook events) to notify/invite you to stuff that involves more than a half-dozen people.
...am I the only one who remembers "The Telephone Game" from pre-school?
You wouldn't be contributing much to FB's market research efforts, but that's OK; you'll still be able to connect with schoolmates and cousins and get invited to parties.
I think this is the genesis of it all: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2184658/Is-joining-F...
The good news is "real life" still works perfectly fine for social interactions and a positive side effect is another source of distractions eliminated - I'm a fan of http://focusmanifesto.com/
You perhaps need to find smarter friends then.
All I can think of when I see this on other people's screens (though most of the app invite spam has been taken care of): "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." Eleanor Roosevelt
Edit: I guess there is a obvious solution, you and all your friends hosts personal mail-servers, correct?
Texting is expensive and regional, and nobody uses email, wants to remember email addresses or IM handles, or deal with spam. WhatsApp totally fucked themselves by not running on tablets.
For lots of people, the most effective way to reach them quickly is facebook messaging. That's fact, not opinion, and how intrusive or shitty facebook is totally irrelevant to that point.
Not having a facebook account means that you are sabotaging your own communications effectiveness.
The people who'd do this are exactly those people I don't feel any need to communicate with. Is it work-related? E-mail and sometimes phone are given. Is it not work-related, but urgent? I still have a phone. Is that costly? Perhaps, but if you have six urgent things to communicate every day, perhaps you have a much worse problem than having to pay a lot of money. Is it anything else? Well, what could it be? I have no idea.
Frankly, this whole "you have to live a hectic social life, everyone's doing it!" movement puzzles me.
Okay, so you're a snob. Doesn't change the fact that you're shooting yourself in the foot.
There's nothing about wanting to be able to effectively communicate with people who use facebook messaging as their primary form of textual comms that dictates or necessitates a hectic social life.
No, I'm just an introvert. I have a few people to who I feel deeply connected to, and our exchanges are rare yet substantial. But these don't require IM or anything like that. I don't know anything about "shooting myself in the foot". I just don't have the impulses that some other people do (frankly, for me as a schizoid, people are very puzzling entities).
Also, "effectively communicate" is such wonderfully non-specific expression that I don't know what that even means.
This is an absurd statement - over 1 billion people use email, far more than actively use FB messages.
Many people use facebook messaging as their primary form of text communication these days.
Many people don't. I've never had an account and never had a problem in my professional or social life as a result. It's just never come up. If your friends all use Facebook, tell them it's a bad idea (for many, many reasons, including the one pointed out here) and to contact you with email/phone/text/twitter whatever other method they prefer. If they can't be bothered, they are not your friends.
This is demonstrably false, and suggests that you don't like people very much.
And yet you have neglected to demonstrate it. No misanthropy here thanks, you should adjust your assumptions. Perhaps we just disagree on the meaning of the word friend - I'd take it to mean someone who you know outside of FB and via other means of communication, someone who is willing to put in the minimal effort of emailing/texting/calling to contact you individually? Someone who doesn't I would consider an acquaintance at best.
If you make a decision to remain on FB and find it valuable, that's totally fine, but don't try to extend your judgement of its utility and experience of communication to everyone.
Either they go to FB or DM over Twitter or some other "social thing", but they view email as far more cumbersome. This is especially true with family these days as the first question I get is, "are you on Facebook". It's an inescapable part of society nowadays in that they view the site as something-other-than-internet and more user-friendly, more quick and more "connected", if that's the operative word, than email.
Sending/receiving text is over FB chat is still viewed as preferable to the not so straightforward method of email. Even the venerable IRC is viewed as less acceptable; "wait, don't I need a client or something for that? Won't I get viruses and stuff?" Never mind the fact that they still need a mobile client to chat over FB or Twitter, but they view it as "it came with the phone".
Bottom line: FB and Twitter have taken over communication where email once ruled for the vast majority of people I interact with. They can't be bothered with email, but they still are my friends and family.
If someone can't be bothered to send you an e-mail or call, you might want to reconsider how close those people are to you.
Indeed, it would be very neat if the world worked that way. Unfortunately, I have, and they are, and they don't use email.
I was on facebook for ~2 years, was off for five, and have been back on for about a month. The frequency and quality of communication with almost everyone I care about and don't see often (I moved continents from where I grew up) has increased dramatically.
I'm in a similar boat, almost.
A few years ago I finally succumbed to getting on FB. But after a few months I got spooked again, because of this seemingly never-ending barrage of FB-related privacy scandals at the time (and due to my interests I got a lot of such news). So I deleted the whole thing--wait no I merely shut down the account, they'd never let me delete the whole thing hahahaha :)
But currently I'm really on the fence of going back again. Because so many people around me use it as their primary mode of communication. Privacy-wise not much has changed, and "thanks" to the NSA scandals, I now know it's a lost cause whether I'm on FB or not. Use has gone way up. My meditation group plans all their things on FB and I have to use email or text to get in the loop :) They don't mind, fortunately, but it is cumbersome.
I dunno why I'm telling you this, but your last line, tell me more :) I need some convincing I guess, before I bite the bullet and go there. How many accounts should I need, you think? :)
>If someone can't be bothered to send you an e-mail or call, you might want
to reconsider how close those people are to you.
E-mail clients need to be reinvented. There's no real reason for e-mail operation to be cumbersome. I mean, we have such a wonderful, decentralized, asynchronous messaging protocol based on pure text; why do most (if not virtually all) client applications suck so badly?
BBM would have been the ideal email replacement (it's also still extremely popular in Asia), but too bad it's proprietary and centralized.
- Spam is basically non-existent in FB messaging.
- Mobile e-mail clients are hard to set up and use (for average folk).
If I send anything to it I need to tell her (in person, text, twitter, facebook messenger, skype - pretty much anything but email) to check it.
She has switched off notifications on her phone because all she gets are marketing messages, spam and stuff from old people (ie me and her mum).
Sideloading never "easily fix[es]" anything that needs to happen on hundreds of millions of mobile devices owned largely by nontechnical users.
Network effect, remember?
Maybe if your social group consists of teenage girls, but who uses Facebook for serious communication these days? What I see from my newsfeed is a mixture of a photo repository, a phone book, and a "I'm passing through town are you available" bit. I don't recall having ever been hindered seriously by having a deactivated account.
EDIT: I should also note that this wasn't true 4-6 years ago, but I was also still in school.
To me it's either people who can't be bothered or people who actually care, are knowledgeable enough and value their time and privacy.
In a discussion we once had in class, I mentioned that an option that hadn't been listed besides Facebook, Google+, Diaspora, etc was "none of the above". I got bewildered stares of disbelief in return.
Maybe that'll change when they reach a University age, but it was striking how few of them used it.
Over the coming decade, Facebook will become an older person's social network (35+). They'll completely lose the youth demographic.
The least cool thing is to be where everybody else is, your parents and teachers included. This effect is already hitting Facebook.
I hate facebook's privacy implications, I sympathize with his views. But facebook, the platform, is actually useful to me so I continue to use until a better alternative comes out.
have a look at the freedom box instead: https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/
Even if I don't trust facebook, I still trust them more than a random individual running a server.
Hopefully there are some solution for this? Perhaps server operators don't actually see any unencrypted data?
The benefit of using a diaspora server operated by someone you trust is the decentralization. Facebook gets EVERYTHING about EVERYBODY, diaspora server operators only get everything about the users on their particular server.
I believe the only way to properly implement a social network is not to trust anyone but your friends. I'm thinking something like a freenet-like apporach, everybody in the network holds a little bit of encypted data, but only the ones you have accepted as friends will be able to see your data unencrypted.
I "deleted" my account about 18 month ago to no ill effect, whatsoever (except having more time for more worthy ventures)
I really don't mean to take the piss on you, but I'm constantly surprised in how people perceive Facebook and other social networks as an absolutely essential utility. Like phone service, electricity, water, or even financial services.
I vehemently don't feel this to be the case.
There's so much trash, hostility and political arguing on Facebook these days, at least on my network. Some days it reminds me of a dramatically bigger version of MySpace.
So, Facebook asks for an ID to verify your identity because your account as behaving suspiciously. What's the downside of this? Are government agents going to burst into your home and arrest you?
2. You give Facebook your ID.
3. Facebook gets hacked.
4. Someone uses your identity to commit a crime.
5. Government agents burst into your home and arrest you.
Or they get credit cards in your name and run your credit score into the ground, which would likely take years to clear up (if ever).
Next up: Facebook isn't sure you're really the gender, height, and weight you say you are. Please provide full body nude photos for verification.