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Facebook – You are the Product

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Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#201

Post by notspanishflu »

parthdesai wrote: post #49
notadoc wrote: post #5

I stopped using Facebook years ago and I could not recommend it more. I found it to be mental pollution at best and and a total waste of time. If you want to 'keep in touch' with people, call or text them. Make an effort to actually interact with the people who matter to you.

So tell me, how do i replace around 5 different group chats i have on messenger which can have anywhere between 5-10 people in each chat? Music events that i go to are exclusively promoted on facebook. How do you recommend i find out about these events so that i can get a cheaper ticket price? if anyone wants to organize a plan that has more than 8 people, facebook groups make it much much easier. I personally hate f…

Use Telegram groups.

https://telegram.org/faq#q-what-makes-telegram-groups-cool

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#202

Post by michaelmrose »

tedunangst wrote: post #112
tdurden wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that, in fact, _does_ makes it hard to avoid using facebook without being left out. I think you might mean _fear_ of being left out...friends will find other ways to contact you.

Or not. Maybe they just decide it's not worth the hassle of tracking down the outliers. I guess we can argue that anybody who's a real friend will message you using your preferred comm, though that cuts both ways. If you are a real friend, you'd message them back with their preferred system.

Email is a system which you can assume virtually 100% of users have and doesn't force users to participate in a social network that has been shown to be harmful for a lot of users.

Further email doesn't force you to participate in any particular service at all because it is a federated service.

Assuming that someone should get a facebook to talk to you is like assuming someone should switch to sprint to call you.

Imagine how moronic the world would be if all the different phone networks were disconnected from one another.

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#203

Post by Swizec »

Prefinem wrote: post #200
Swizec wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> casual isn't friendship Why not? People are busy. They have jobs and partners and pets and sometimes kids. All of that takes time and attention. These days I talk less to my closest friends than I did to my farthest acquaintances in high school or even college. It's kinda sad but that's just how it is. And trying to get together face-to-face? LoL, it can take months to align our schedules. And when it comes to larg…

> If I want to invite you to a party like that, are we not friends Acquaintances or good acquaintances. I think this boils down to each person's definition of friends and friendship along with the amount of social interaction each person needs. I need very little social interaction, so I tend to keep close friends and not much else. I know others who always like to be around someone. They don't care much who it is, a…

> Acquaintances or good acquaintances.

So I'm throwing a party with just acquaintances and no friends are coming? That feels weird.

> I need very little social interaction

Me too. Which is why I tend to keep to myself, and throw a huge rager for as many people as I can get to show up a couple times per year.

Maybe I don't really have any close friends anymore, the definition gets muddy when most everyone you used to consider a close friend is now a 12 hour flight away and you never really get to see them anymore.

But my point is that when I'm organizing a party, I want everyone. Acquaintances and close friends alike. It feels weird that just because I'm organizing a larger event, that should automatically make everyone I invite a not-friend. Usually I'd like a mix.

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#204

Post by Symbiote »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #101
yawz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer not to repeat myself and spend that time for more happy memories ;).

How many hours per week do you spend on Facebook instead of making "happy memories"?

(I downvoted you for excessive repetition. You have posted 17 times in this thread, mostly antagonistically, without saying much new.

That's even less useful than the time I spent on Facebook this evening :-)

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#205

Post by michaelmrose »

compiler-guy wrote: post #189
Prefinem wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren't your friends buddy. >No, we didn't, because 99% of our friends use the very useful party organizing app with integrated chat and picture sharing, Facebook. My friends will actively invite me (I don't use facebook) to events if they want me there.

And here we see the mismatch between the two camps: Sure, [good|strong|old|pick your adjective] friends will contact you regardless of your facebook involvement. But there are plenty of acquaintances, groups, events and whatnot that only get organized or contacted on facebook. And even so, why would you put the extra burden on your friends to contact you in a special way? Why wouldn't you make it easy for them to con…

Everyone has an email. You are comparing opening a different app on your phone which requires you to move your finger an inch to a 1000 mile trek.

Anyone who can't move their finger an inch to click on a different ubiquitous app to contact you isn't your friend regardless of what you think.

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#206

Post by michaelmrose »

white-flame wrote: post #186
debaserab2 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but get real. People use technology because it assists and speeds up areas of their life. For many people, facebook far and away is the most convenient way to manage their social life simply because they have the greatest adoption within their social groups. Yes, we could "write someone a letter in the mail instead" or "ask a friend about the events on facebook" but that would defeat the point for the vast…

The problem is that those assistance & speed-up effects are directly tangible, but the addictiveness, echo chamber, and privacy effects aren't quite so apparent. It's not a clear net positive just because of those conveniences, and there are no current "solutions" to give as everything you list is far more relevant to network effects than technical feature set. (e.g. in the past, using Facebook made you an outlier, w…

You could offer to assist in making information about said events available on multiple platforms. You could help everyone and yourself simultaneously.

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#207

Post by alexman »

tucif wrote: post #148
abyssin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped using the harmful part of Facebook, ie the newsfeed, which is designed to create an addictive behaviour, using the following technique. On every single post in my newsfeed, I tell the application I no longer want to see content from the source. It takes some weeks to dry up, but you end up with an empty page. You still get notifications related to your events, group activities, and you can still use the mes…

I also adopted a similar approach, where I unfollowed ALL my firends so that none of them will show up in newsfeed. Then I added the few ones I truly wanted to know about to the "Close friends" list which allows you to activate notifications for everything they post. Now when I log in I only see a bunch of notifications which have a very handy "Mark all as read" link, and I only click further when I see a non-meme st…

This is similar to what I did too but the newsfeed is still polluted with lots of "likes" (e.g. liking a page, liking a post) by my close friends which are irrelevant to me 99% of the time. I wish Facebook let me hide "likes" from my friends.

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#208

Post by michaelmrose »

komali2 wrote: post #179
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point I'm making is thus: if you acknowledge that Facebook is a bad influence on your life but you feel stuck with it, here's a low risk strategy for dipping your toes into life without it that you can try out. I don't spend hours managing my social contacts and calendars and I still feel connected with my family and my friends without Facebook. I'd like to point out that this thread has depressingly similar patt…

>I'd like to point out that this thread has depressingly similar patterns compared to talking with drug addicts about their habit. I feel like if I applied the logic you're using here for that, I could say the same thing about buying food in a store. "It is legal to hunt. There's nothing stopping you from going into the woods, killing a deer, and salting its meat other than your own dependency on the conveniences of…

Do you know the internet was a thing in the 90s?

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#209

Post by rhapsodic »

notadoc wrote: post #5

I stopped using Facebook years ago and I could not recommend it more. I found it to be mental pollution at best and and a total waste of time. If you want to 'keep in touch' with people, call or text them. Make an effort to actually interact with the people who matter to you.

>I found it to be mental pollution at best and and a total waste of time.

I've tried to express the same idea to friends and family who pester me about not being on FB, but I never came up with a phrase as simple and succinct as "mental pollution." Thanks!

Re: Facebook – You are the Product

#210

Post by rconti »

wepple wrote: post #59
adrianlmm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the mod downs? It makes you angry that I find Facebook useful?

Perhaps your comment didn't add anything useful to the discussion other than a lightweight opinion? However, HN downvotes do seem to be trending toward "I disagree" recently too, in my experience.

It's of the same amount of value as the canned "delete facebook" comments we see in every thread on it (including the current top-ranked comment, which has zero value and is factually wrong).
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