A slightly ranting personal criticism of Facebook and the like

everything2.com

1 point·Kliment··4 comments

I wrote this a while ago, when I got tired of explaining why I don't use Facebook. The phenomenon does not appear to have changed since then. I've since gotten several responses from people telling me they liked it, and they thought they were the only ones who disliked the whole Facebook movement. I still feel as somewhat of an outsider. I cannot name more than a few friends of mine who are not on Facebook.

I felt the same way for a while, and then ended up setting up an account.

Facebook is what you make of it. You can be a "friend-whore" and try to get every person you've ever met on your friends list, or you can limit it to just people you want to stay in touch with.

You can share as much or as little as you like.

From your blog post: "I am not a Facebook user. " I think it's hard to have an accurate assessment of the service based only on second-hand experience.

Indeed, I am in no way claiming my assessment is accurate from a user perspective. But being a non-user also has effects on me, and seeing those effects makes me not want to be a user. This is not an impartial review.

Ditto on the last line. I don't use it - yet - but I have been dabbling in confirmation bias occasionally which of course isn't fair to Facebook.

A lot of the stories are merely about people who didn't know how to secure their privacy using pre-existing settings in Facebook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com