Economists study what happens when people stop using Facebook

The proposed binary thinking option is users will be detrimentally manipulated and exploited as an advertising product where the manipulation is sometimes intense enough to exacerbate mental illnesses, whereas the binary alternative of deleting everything and going Unibomber will result in extreme social and job related ostracism because obviously "he's trying to hide something".

There are analog middle options that are just as valid as the polarizing binary extremes. I have a perfectly good FB account with plenty of connections, but I only log in every couple months. A little awkward when someone wishes me happy birthday and I don't see it until four months later, but whatever. Most of the time stuff that was posted six months ago is irrelevant today, and likewise I feel pretty safe ignoring most of what was posted today. I find that on FB, as with any other online media, that there's at least 10 to 100 times as much lurking as posting, so there's really not that much to read anyway. For example my best old work friend is about as much of a lurker as I am, so there's really nothing to see.

Or to summarize, the negative effects of deleting your account have nothing to do with the result of "stop using facebook", if you simply stop using it and do not delete your account.

(I myself do not watch tv but I also have no desire to presume anything of people who do. I at least personally acutely feel a loss of culture because TV and movie watching is very common in socialization rituals and I am unable to engage in them.)

Personally what he's doing would be hopelessly exhausting to me - I'm quite introvert and the level of social interaction he's engaging in is way above my tolerance level in terms of intensity.

Sometimes I wonder if I missed social occasions because of not using facebook. Generally I realized facebook didn't really allow to "make new friends" because it lacks "discovery" features.

Now there are social networks who are focused on neighborhood and honestly I wish facebook would do something about discovery. I haven't heard from the facebook dating app either.

Facebook, even if it's successful, feels like such a big waste of potential.

On the other hand, books are usually written by one person so they have a much stronger and more focused voice, and that strong voice usually has an interesting axe to grind. Or rephrased, if its not interesting or is overly bland, no one reads the book. Admittedly being the most successful at appealing to the groupthink of a sub-population willing to pay for a book is not a Utopian civilization level result, but it is still better than peddling consumerism, and most authors seem to want to get their story out more than they want wealth. Book authors much like pro athletes are a power law distribution where most starve but a microscopic minority get very famous and very rich, so if money were a primary goal they would have gone into finance or software development instead of writing books.

One exists to addict you into consuming ever more bland megacorporate products, the other exists to sell the best ideas, either inherently best, or at least best at meeting existing groupthink demands.

The voice of the product is like the difference between the billionth corporate marketed mcdonalds burger vs a (celebrity?) chef multi course meal.

An excellent analogy would be watching TV would be like following the Walmart twitter account, whereas reading a book would be like reading Paul Graham's blog posts.