Leave Facebook • Hacker News Board

Re: Leave Facebook

#101

Post by renewiltord » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 1:09 AM UTC

ken wrote: post #92

renewiltord wrote: post #35

Absolutely not. Facebook is the last major social network where people are able to speak their minds. And since I can select who I want to listen to, I like it. As it so happens, everyone who I follow on Facebook speaks their minds by posting pictures of their babies. This is perfectly fine by me. I am sceptical that the paternalists will let me be when they're done dealing with Trump et al.

> Facebook is the last major social network where people are able to speak their minds. Do LinkedIn or Reddit or Medium not allow you to speak your mind? In what way?

LinkedIn is professional, so I think people tend to self-censor.

Reddit is small in comparison to Facebook. I think it's like one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook in DAUs. Medium is tiny likewise. I think both Instagram and WhatsApp individually are bigger than Reddit, let alone the big daddy FB itself. 1 in 3 people worldwide visits Facebook at least once a month.

Re: Leave Facebook

#102

Post by bradlys » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 1:11 AM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #98

ken wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if (hypothetically) those 'people' are an organization that needs to organize work, and they're using it because they've tried email and other methods for years, and found that those didn't work? A lot of us use FB for organizing, not just for seeing what our friends ate for dessert last night. It's not reasonable to tell people abandon one channel without suggesting a replacement. You might as well ask people t…

How can you be so bad at email that it "doesn't work"? I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. We're talking about a company that has knowingly promoted white supremacists groups for the sake of clicks. I think that warrants putting just a little effort into email. No tool is going to do your job for you. If Facebook succeeded where email failed, it's just because someone wasn't doing their job, not because of some specia…

Just curious - how much organizing do you do? Do you host events with any regularity? Do people like to ask a lot of questions about your events or want to share publicly that they're going to them with people? Do people sometimes want to know who is going to your events so that they can choose when not to go because they don't like that person? (And when someone is going so that they can go) Do you have a very active group of people who like to interact with each other in a public forum? Now is that group size beyond 100 people?

You'd be surprised how crap email is for any of that. You'd be surprised how people don't want to have 10 different apps for all the activities and prefer one central source to catch up on everything. Facebook can be very useful.

Re: Leave Facebook

#103

Post by bradlys » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 1:18 AM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #38

drukenemo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forget that Facebook is not for friends only. Millions of groups of common interest exist as well as communities formed around pages and personalities.

You can get contact information and maintain ties with communities in other ways as well. Leaving FB can make discovering communities harder, but it doesn't mean remaining part of communities is lost.

For some communities, you're losing most context by not being on FB. Most of the discussion happens on Facebook and not anywhere else. For some communities I'm in, you're basically completely out of the loop if you're not active on Facebook. Yes, you could try to get context from friends but they're getting it from Facebook as well. Once you're all out - none of you will have context.

Re: Leave Facebook

#104

Post by bryan_w » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 1:25 AM UTC

bilal4hmed wrote: post #52

The network effect is hard. I have family in India that would be next to impossible to get in touch with if Im not using whatsapp. Everything over there happens on it. There are good things too, my friend found a kidney donor on there, a random person which saved their life !! It needs to happen, its a tough jump

Yeah, I mean, who needs kidneys anyways #deleteFB

Re: Leave Facebook

#105

Post by ryanianian » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 2:37 AM UTC

nico_h wrote: post #58

ryanianian wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been toying with removing all of my content, unfriending the vast majority of acquaintances and unfollowing family who post garbage. Then don't feed the zuck machine by posting, liking memes, or regular checking. Disable all notifications from communities. Basically try to keep to "business and meaningful contact only" rather than engage with the time-sinks. Make it work for me. (The Intention firefox extension…

Don't forget to log off and clear cookies when not using it so you're not tracked by every "like" / "comment with facebook" button if you don't want to feed the zuck machine. Or use a quarantine browser for your sessions.

The Facebook container add-on does this for you even if you’re still drinking the zuckeraid. It’s amazing how much it blocks.

Re: Leave Facebook

#106

Post by yumraj » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 4:14 AM UTC

After not having logged in to my FB account for over 3-4 years, I finally logged in today and deleted it.

I didn't feel like I needed to download anything, since I had not been sharing anything anyway.. Now onto deleting other FB properties. I'll need to figure out how to motivate some friends to move off of WhatsApp and onto Signal. But once I'm able to do that, or just decide that the price of staying on WhatsApp is not worth it, I'll be fully rid of FB. Was never on Instagram or anything else..

To those who are on the fence, just try not to login for a few days, then a few weeks and you will realize you are not missing anything at all.

Of all the social networks, I believe LinkedIn would be the most difficult, if not outright impossible for me to get out of. But FB was a very easy choice.

Re: Leave Facebook

#107

Post by kthejoker2 » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 4:21 AM UTC

Deleted mine just now after 7 years of virtually zero activity. No regrets.

Also I bought this book for my dad - Facebook is extremely toxic for Boomer-era people, just absolutely overrun with propaganda, low-value memes. The complete opposite of critical thinking.

We haven't had a chance to discuss the book's arguments or merits, but I told him I was really concerned for his mental health and his increasing paranoia, and I thought a lot of it stemmed from social media.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079DTVVG8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

Anyway, if anyone has any other advice for convincing others to leave social media, I'd love to hear it.

Re: Leave Facebook

#108

Post by wobbly_bush » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 4:30 AM UTC

HenryBemis wrote: post #25

bmarquez wrote: post #18

As the article says, leave Instagram too! It's surprising how many of my friends say they don't use Facebook for political reasons but don't see Instagram as the same company.

Don't forget WhatsApp. Many people I talk to don't realize it's also part of the FB ecosystem.

Unfortunately Android has screwed up here resulting in the rise of WhatsApp. There is no competitor of WhatsApp that has the same reliability.

Also there is no feeds in WhatsApp, making it very different from Insta and FB. But it's still giving strength to the ecosystem.

Re: Leave Facebook

#109

Post by pizzicato » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:27 AM UTC

AgentME wrote: post #89

satyrnein wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralization is usually pitched as a solution to "censorship". In this case, the complaint seems to be the reverse, that there was insufficient intervention against misinformation. So I'm not sure how decentralization applies here.

I think that's a really good point to bring up. Decentralization solves some problems but it doesn't automatically make everything better. An interesting example relevant to this case would be Mastodon: it's an alternative to Twitter where many instances federate together, and instances are allowed to do their own moderation. Many instances have much more protective rules than Twitter and have smaller communities tha…

To add on to Mastodon, Pleroma is another federated, decentralised platform with slightly different features as far as I'm aware.

There's a whole ecosystem of decentralised alternatives out there, which you can check out at https://fediverse.party/

It's definitely not easy to get people to jump ship, but I've seen an influx of new users to the Mastodon instance I'm part of.

Re: Leave Facebook

#110

Post by palimpsests » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:35 AM UTC

dnsprovider wrote: post #81

Zuckerberg hires police officers cited for using excessive force to work as his personal bodyguards. Yes, that's right. While he's busy pretending to feel bad about the situation with bad cops, he recruits and pays them to protect his family. Facebook and Zuckerberg are well beyond complicit.

how do you know this information?