I love how the HN type of people come into Facebook threads like this claiming that using the site is bad and that they are above everyone for never using 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.
I understand your point, but it IS that simple.
My social network completely uses facebook, I do not.
They invite me to things in person and respect my choice, and if they didn't, they would not be my social network.
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?
Which risk is easier to judge and would seem smaller for 90% of teens: "I miss some (or even most) of my peer's social events" or "Facebook may give certain government agencies my information". Resisting peer pressure is a risk assessment and without some impressive "here's what smoking does to your body"-pictures it's a hard sell.
This argument basically boils down to "everyone else is doing it". That's nuts. This is no reason to keep doing something against your own self-interest. Replace the word Facebook with texting while driving and reread your comment.
"Texting while driving" has a simple, safe, more-or-less equivalent substitute: texting while not driving. Facebook, insofar as it is a widely-adopted and community-preferred communications tool, does not: network effects and all that.
Actually it does. The more or less equivalent substitute to "communicating on the internet with Facebook" is "communicating on the internet without Facebook".
Facebook is a subset of Internet communication just as driving is a subset of texting scenarios.
So you're asking people to beseech their friends to adopt regular usage of some alternative to Facebook (email, Jabber, Google, etc.) solely so that they can stay in contact. That's equivalent to asking someone "could you please go to my blog regularly to see if I have anything to say to you?".
I am not asking anyone to do anything. I am just saying that it is possible to communicate outside of Facebook. The choice of tools and exercise of free will that make it a realistic possibility for each individual is up to them.
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.
The difference is that you can reach the exact same people paying the exact same amount of attention to the exact same channels by choosing texting-at-rest over while-driving.
I agree with both, there are cases that support that. But in general it is a very valuable tool for kids trying to fit in during their pre/early teen 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.
I have been thinking about it, but around here Facebook is so common it would be weird not to have it.
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.
> 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.
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.
Before Facebook, there was this thing called "the Grapevine", a decentralized communication network of people who were so intensely interested in everyone else's doings that you couldn't stop them from keeping you up to date about it. I have not, despite my best efforts, been able to unsubscribe from it.
and that "Grapevine" usually resulted in news of your engagement turning into a story about how you helped Maverick engage MIG's over the Bering Strait just in time to save Iceman.
...am I the only one who remembers "The Telephone Game" from pre-school?
One could always maintain a very skeletal Facebook account. No "liked" movies, TV shows, etc., one photo, no bio other than whatever is necessary.
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.
That might very well work, but part of the problem would be the content others generate about you. Pictures and video of you, mentions of where you have been and so on.
I hear ya. And you know, I've come across a few morons who insinuated to me that I am anti-social and have Aspergers' because of my resistance to using Facebook.
All privacy questions aside, I quit Facebook simply because every time I used it, the "after taste" was that I'd wasted my time and made myself stupider in the process.
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/
Really? All my friends who use facebook at first thought it was a useful tool, and then slowly the bloat beyond the first few friends you actually give a shit about occurs.
Your feed started becoming invite spam and people who you dont even really know commenting on their breakfast or their kids or their cat doing a dumb thing.
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
Never ever registering or browsing facebook was the obvious thing to do, at least it is for people who have been around and online for a while.
It's the total opposite of the web and the internet, not pseudymous, centralized, using shady tactics to grow, spamming at times and so on.
I don't care everybody, their grandma and their dog have an account, until it is decentralized p2P, encrypted and my data stays my own and in my own vicinity, I won't be part of so called "social network" services/websites. I have email already.
Don't be shitty, you know the idea is that you CAN set one up and use the same features, or you can freely switch providers. Try that with Facebook. It's like using AOL or something.
I tried it for over five years. Many people use facebook messaging as their primary form of text communication these days.
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.
"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.
> The people who'd do this are exactly those people I don't feel any need to communicate with.
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.
I'll make a slight addendum: Most people have an email address if they frolic online, however I rarely meet people who prefer to conduct communications over it. Of course, they need one for FB or Twitter either way, but...
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.
I've never used Twitter or Facebook, and I have zero problem communicating with friends and family, nor have I noticed any difference in my communication with anyone regardless of wherever they spend their free time on the internet.
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.
> 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 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? :)
Either they go to FB or DM over Twitter or some other "social thing", but they view email as far more cumbersome.
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?
No argument here. It's really a shame and, if you think about it, email is the least evolved method of electronic communication for the masses in every day use (with the exception of possibly IRC).
BBM would have been the ideal email replacement (it's also still extremely popular in Asia), but too bad it's proprietary and centralized.
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.
It's not binary. That someone might still be a good friend, and be willing to communicate by different means for one on one conversations. But it's easy to forget when you're setting up an event and inviting a large group, that one of your friends won't see it and you'll have to contact them individually.
> Not having a facebook account means that you are sabotaging your own communications effectiveness
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.
Whatsapp runs on tablets without a SIM card. After sms verification fails, whatsapp calls your number and provides a verification code. There is sometimes an issue with play store not allowing you to install whatsapp, but that is easily fixed by downloading the apk fron the official website.
That is true. I think whatsapp is trying to avoid confusing SIM-less users , but in the bargain is missing out on potential users, who might want to use whatsapp on their tablet rather than their cellphone.
Oddly enough, this happened for me on day one when I considered joining. They asked to provide my email password so they could build up a list of contacts. Oddly enough I was one of the few who thought this is "not done" because it lowers the bar for online security, i.e. it would be considered normal after a while if websites started asking this. It didn't pan out, but as a result I never got a FB account.
Yes definitely. People who doesn't use facebook by choice are thought of being crazy. I use facebook, for me its a great to keep in touch with my friends and family members who are all over the world. I have a friend who doesn't want to jump in to the facebook bandwagon and our mutual friends thinks he is crazy for not using facebook. The side effect is he almost never gets invited if there is a get together and have no idea whats going with most of our mutual friends. He does have a close group of friends he keeps in touch with (like me, on phone or whatsapp).
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.
We've been contaminated by greed as a community. We think about building the product that will make us millionnaires when we should be working hard to design consumer tools and protocols that avoid lock-in and promote freedom. We're mislead by people from other spheres that will be the grand winners and leave us with a f-up world and playground. We either build for them or are assimilated by the lure of dollars. Where has the spirit gone ? This isn't what I learnt hacker to mean.
trying to make your non tech friends and family use diaspora is quite problematic.
Its a chicken egg problem: social networks need people. people wont join if peoole is not already there
I'm a big supporter of freedombox - but today you can use a diaspora server operated by someone else, basically no pain. But freedombox is a long ways from a similar no-pain experience.
I have failed to find any list of "known attacks" against diaspora. But I would like to point out a fundamental flaw: What is to stop anyone from setting up a malicious server in diaspora?
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 solution is to run your own server. If you want ultimate control, you have to do it yourself, which is painful - and one of the reasons I like freedombox which has, as a goal, to minimize the pain. They just aren't there yet.
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 think they are just splitting up trust to less trust-able entities. Sure, the impact of a malicious entity would be less severe, but the chance of any being malicious is rather big. Cause let's face it, my mom is not going to run her own server, and I believe she has the right to control her data as well as all of us do.
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.
For younger generations who grew up with this kind of tech, it's just not conceivable. For them, Facebook is a synonym for having contact with their friends.
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. This is rapidly becoming less true. I had to give a talk at a school the other day ("tech is cool, join the tech industry!") and the bulk of the students didn't have Facebook accounts -- because their parents are on it.
Maybe that'll change when they reach a University age, but it was striking how few of them used it.
Instagram is even taking over among people in the post-adolescent set. The engagement I see seems to be more vigorous, especially if you're dialed-in and you're making good/interesting photos.
Now that's a really good point. No self-respecting kid will use the same _one-to-many_ platform to communicate with friends and parents. Maybe they'll add some convenient 'Circles' feature, but the association with 'those old people' will remain.
Actually Facebook is most likely going to erode from the younger generation/s upwards. They don't need Facebook at all, their social network is new and can be formed on other services.
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.
Because it's supposedly antisocial behaviour as you don't follow the herd and it has been noted that high profile serial killers and mass murderers don't have facebook.
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.
I feel like a lot of people don't realize just how omnipresent facebook is in places like college campuses. I personally know about four people who aren't on facebook. There's a whole sphere of social interaction that you can't be a part of if you're not on facebook.
Why exactly would it be lunatic not to use Facebook?
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.
Yeah, they have become very persistent in wanting you to link your google and youtube accounts, for instance. For the first time ever, I'm seriously considering ditching gmail.
I have been contemplating dumping Facebook more and more as the year goes on. I've used it probably every day for six plus years. I've gradually come to the conclusion that I can live without it and can easily keep up with all of my friends and family.
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.
Sounds more like television than myspace. I'm not saying you're wrong about myspace, just TV fits your definition even better. I suspect there is a high correlation between people who don't watch TV and people who don't do facebook/twitter. I am occasionally exposed to TV and I've noticed over the past couple years a ridiculous level of attempts at twitter integration on primetime major network TV.
Amen to that. I've been off facebook and orkut since early 2008 and have not regretted it for one moment. I get some mild flak from friends once in a while but they all know how to contact me if they want to.
Can you name a single, actual negative consequence that someone has experienced from Facebook, aside from people who lost jobs due to their own foolishness in making information public?
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?
@algorias, I once considered people like you to be weird not to communicate on FB... but for a while now I have really started to mistrust FB. The revelations by Snowden most certainly played a big role, but now that they are asking for freaking IDs I draw the line there. It is now time to really think about me leaving this crap... I think my boss might like that too as I'm sure to do more work now, haha
You should try it.