Hacker News Reader

Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

I found a way to dramatically improve facebook. Around the beginning of the year I unfollowed every single friend and page, so my newsfeed is completely empty. Now when I want to know what my friends are up to, I go check out their pages, essentially going from a push feed to a pull. It gets me out of the empty crack addiction-esque cycle of going to the news feed and being disappointed/bored with the lives of my friends, and instead lets me focus on what facebook is actually valuable for: party planning.

View on HN

My solution was to delete my Facebook account. Now, I engage with the people I care about via mechanisms that are far more meaningful: emails, phone calls, a coffee, a lunch.

I did the same and now I'm able to focus and spend time on real friendships that matter vs. clicking through a facebook feed of what facebook decides to show me.

I don't have any reason to delete it. I get messages every so often from friends that are in town, and it makes it easier to host and plan a gathering. It also makes sharing photos among friends easy.

I waste way more time on social media sites like this one than I ever have on Facebook.

I really wish I could do that. I used to ask a friend to change my password, now I use www.offsocialnetwork.com to do it (I'm doing it this week).

But I can't go really long without facebook since all is planned from there, the parties, the social events, the foreign friends visiting my city, foreign friends keeping in touch with me...

I guess it's easier not to have facebook when you didn't travel a lot and don't have a big social life.

It's actually very easy to have a booming social life and travel tons without Facebook.

if you want to share your secrets I'm all ears.

For example, last year I got to meet maybe 30 friends from all over the world because they were passing through France or wanted to go travel to the country I was traveling to. I wouldn't have met them if they didn't have my facebook as I rarely keep touch with people far from me (before facebook). My mail is filled with spam and I change my number every year.

I also moved to a new city, didn't know anyone, joined the erasmus group and a few weeks after I knew 100+ people, was getting invited to parties every day, was meeting new people every day.

You can always try to avoid facebook, it will be more difficult though.

You change your number every year? Why? If it's a privacy issue surely it's more important to change your facebook account every year.

I move a lot, China, Canada, France these last years. I don't want to keep paying to keep my number, and I don't really care about changing my number, if people want to contact me they can always find me on facebook (I have everyone there), and the few that don't use a facebook, well I don't really keep in touch with them but I don't have time to track everybody.

"But I can't go really long without facebook since all is planned from there, the parties, the social events, the foreign friends visiting my city, foreign friends keeping in touch with me..."

I have two questions to respond to this - how did people do all of these things before the facebook platform? What is stopping you from doing these same things?

I find it fascinating that people treat websites like facebook like an actual addiction, and are scared of the withdraw problems in their social life. Is there such a thing as social addiction? Is that a thing?

> I have two questions to respond to this - how did people do all of these things before the facebook platform? What is stopping you from doing these same things?

1) They used other services (e.g. Evite) which had the same effect 2) Nobody uses those other services anymore (okay, I got one evite from the one friend who refused to use facebook...and then somebody created the event page on facebook and all the party planning promptly got hijacked and moved there)

So your choices are to use Facebook and get invited to parties, or be like that guy from ten years ago who refused to get an email address and was butthurt that nobody would pick up the phone to personally invite him to the party.

I feel like that is a false choice. The only options are to either not do anything and be 'butthurt' or use facebook?

What about relationships with people? What about carrier pigeons? What about personal servants?

All of those things are able to do what you're complaining about, they just take slightly more effort.

I guess it's to each his own - is your support of a terrible, invasive company more important than your convenience? That's up to you.

Eh, Facebook isn't that terrible. I'm not saying I think they're good, but they make what is currently the modern equivalent of the telephone. It is what it is.

And it's not about my convenience, it's about not inconveniencing my friends by demanding that they remember that I'm a special snowflake who won't use the dominant communication platform of the day, and I must have my special needs attended to by using older, more inconvenient channels each time they want to send out a mass party invite.

That is a terrible analogy. The modern telephone is the computer, and Facebook, if being forced to stick with the telephone analogy, is some kind of phone book / telemarketer / wiretap agency hybrid.

The fact that computers are too inconvenient to use for communication without using locked centralized platforms and proprietary software is a testament to the failure of computers as a communication tool, rather than a good argument for the necessity of Facebook, which actually is terrible and worth resisting.

> The fact that computers are too inconvenient to use for communication without using locked centralized platforms and proprietary software is a testament to the failure of computers as a communication tool

Or maybe social communication platforms are a natural monopoly and the computers are working just fine.

Please describe this theory for me. I have always had a hard time understanding the concept of 'natural monopoly' when most of nature and the human experience demands diversification.

Huh, I'm from the few who never even created a Facebook account.

Whenever something is up, everyone knows I won't get the memo, and they give me a mail/text/call. Usually more than one person.

And you can't compare that to email vs phone. Phone is costly, time consuming, single threaded. Sending a message on Facebook or an email doesn't make any difference.

> I have two questions to respond to this - how did people do all of these things before the facebook platform? What is stopping you from doing these same things?

Some of "these things" did not exist before. Like yesterday a former coworker of mine posted a bunch of pictures of her kids growing up, it was interesting and reminded me how the time flies.

Would I ask around acquaintances for her phone number, then get on the phone and ask her to send me a printed photo album of her children? Yeah, that seems non-creepy at all.

Friend of my spouse checked in at a restaurant that's opened just recently, I saw my wife liking it, and asked about opinion of the food. Would the "before" solution include compiling a list of my + my spouse's friends with their respective phone numbers, then calling everybody inquiring which restaurants they recently visited?

Passive information discovery sucked before.

This is a bit disingenuous to say these kind of reflection were not possible before. What happened in the old days was that your social life was much more localized : your street, your neighborhood, your village, your parish, etc. So rather that looking at pictures, you would be on your porch and you would be looking at your friend's kids playing in the street , wondering how all these years had gone so fast. Social platform allow to extend your social network beyond some (arbitrary) geographical limitations, but it does not really add anything to the human experience that was not there before, so to speak. I know that I am stating the obvious, but I think "some of these things did not exit before" was a bit too strong.

Yeah, communication and conversation was very location-dependent.

Jesus H. Christ, watch some old TV shows and movies. How would one see coworkers kid's photos before facebook!?! They'd pull them out of their wallet or purse, an album on the coffee table. It was a cliche and staple of sitcoms to be annoyed by the endless stream of kid photos from a wallet.

How about ex-coworker?

Facebook is simply, hands down, the easiest service on which to do these things today. It's only an addiction in the same sense that using a cellphone is an addiction. You could just as easily use a landline, or schedule meetings with friends and co-workers a day in advance, by writing them a letter, talking to them in person or getting in touch with them through common friends. Less convenient, sure, but equally functional.

To me, avoiding Facebook in the absence of any negatives (you are free to log on only whenever you want to) seems like some strange puritanical or old-fashioned ritual. Why avoid something that works?

>I have two questions to respond to this - how did people do all of these things before the facebook platform? What is stopping you from doing these same things?

Simple. It was just harder so it did't happen nearly as often. If someone is complaining about an airline, you don't respond with, "How did people get from LA to NYC before airlines? What is stopping you from doing it that way?"

People vastly underestimate the value of the network effects on Facebook.

You are a freaking WUSSY! And you have NO life,let alone social life. Social life is OUTSIDE, face to face, NOT on facebook. Get a fucking life, freaking zombie.

If deleting your Facebook would not have a negative affect on your real life social life, you are not using it the way most people do.

Almost every organised event that I go to starts with a Facebook invite, or someone sharing the event on their feed. It's also a massive time waster, but until another event service gains actual adoption (a service such as this is useless without users, right?), I'll keep using Facebook.

If your life relies on Facebook, then you have to social life and no friends ad all, you just have an illusion. If no one would call you for an event,what does this say about you?

It really only says that my friends are lazy. You could equally say the same thing with a mobile phone - if your friend would not send a paper invite, what does that say about you?

Projecting much?

I honestly think Facebook was better when it was just a directory of profiles, then it decided to completely change the nature of the service by focusing entirely on the newsfeed. It sure made sense in terms of users engagement, but the value I get from it has declined steeply over the last few years. Now I only use the messenger app.

The "profile" meant something back when Facebook first started - in fact one of my favorite things was when the news feed would announce things like "Friend1 updated his favorite movies" - then I would click and go see what they added.

I can't even guess when the last time was that I looked at someone's information directly on their profile on FB

I have completely hidden my news feed. Since I consider FB only to be valuable as a utility, i.e. a means of communication or a repository of information such as where someone lives, the newsfeed is a complete waste of time and useless.

My solution is to use custom CSS to hide the newsfeed, but keep everything else. As a result, I spent 1/10th the time on Facebook, and only use it when I need to get information from it.

https://medium.com/productivity-efficiency/631ed8f466e1

I really like this idea. I think I'll give it a go. Thanks for sharing it!

You're welcome! Let me know how it works for you in the Medium comments.

I did something similar on Youtube, I've hidden all the side videos to help me focus on the video I was watching. But on FB, I unfollowed 99% of the people, and only left things like 'March Against Monsanto', and 'Naturalnews', so so my feed only contains stuff that matters to me.

How long did it take you to unfollow everyone on FB? Sounds like that would take a while for someone with 1800 friends.

Yeah and someone with 1800 friends probably wouldn't have the time at hand anyway

~150 friends only, I unfollowed only when a post appeared. And I marked lots of people as acquaintances. Why do you have 1800 friends? Dang.

Thanks, this is great!

In my case, the majority of my friends only share with friends. So unfriending them all would result in mostly empty timelines for me.

You can unfollow without unfriend.

My friend had a solution to keep maximally 100 people on his account. One day, I received a message that I had to go. OK. A few months he asked me for friendship again :)

> Now when I want to know what my friends are up to, I go check out their pages, essentially going from a push feed to a pull.

I think you just invented MySpace.

Hmm, Facebook seems to randomly refollow people on my behalf when I try this. Perhaps it's latency or something?

Sounds like you're still addicted, just using a different way.

Exactly, event planning/tracking is the only reason I stay on.

Yeah i did the Facebook 300 Diet #FB300D 2 years ago and it was amazing. Basically, I unfriended all but 300 people and my feed got much better. I even created a word document that details who you should unfriend.

Smart. Pull is future. We don't want to be pushed.

That's exactly how Orkut worked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com