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Deleting Facebook permanently

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Re: Deleting Facebook permanently

#221

Post by tootie »

pmarreck wrote: post #162
tootie wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I love it. I have two opinions that fall into that category. One is that people shouldn't own pets. Least of all sapient creatures like dogs. I'd wager that will become a common point of view a century or two after I'm gone. The other one (relevant to this thread) is that Facebook is a great product and people only hate it now because it's a such a horrendously efficient mirror of the ugliness of humanity.

> One is that people shouldn't own pets. Least of all sapient creatures like dogs. I'd wager that will become a common point of view a century or two after I'm gone. Considering that cats 1) have been human companions since the ancient Egyptian days, when the penalty of killing a cat was death, 2) ONLY became human companions of their own volition after their utility in eradicating mice and rats was recognized (note…

Slavery was normal in egypt too. We're only like 150 years past that being normal. Dogs were useful in ancient times as well. They warned of predators and could protect cattle. Not really relevant anymore. Most modern pets are genetically engineered for centuries to be cute and docile and completely dependent on humans.

Re: Deleting Facebook permanently

#222

Post by jdeibele »

dvtrn wrote: post #98
citizenkeen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find nothing more dumbfounding than people who talk about quitting facebook, but are on insta daily.

I use instagram because several of my friends are amazing photographers and I like their photo diary uploads, others are graphic artists who often release their work in progress on the platform. I quit facebook because it stopped serving any useful purpose to how I consume content from actual friends and in general became rather boring. Is this an equally dumbfounding use?

I have a niece who posts photos more to Instagram than to the family group chat (2/3 iPhone, 1/3 Android).

I don't have any Facebook apps on my phone, tablet, or computer. I use Instagram and Facebook with Firefox with them locked to a Facebook container. For Instagram, I use User/Agent Switcher to tell it that I'm on an iPad using Safari. It works well except that Facebook won't let me set up two-factor authentication and asks me every time to download the app.

Every once in a while Facebook asks me to join the Facebook and Instagram accounts and I refuse to do so. I assume that they're combining the data anyway. But Facebook does let me use a security key as 2FA and I don't want to lose that.

The major downside is that I can't post to Instagram. But that would bother me more if I were a better photographer or my kids were younger than teenagers.

I also use Fluff-Busting Purity (formerly Facebook Purity) and two kinds of ad-blockers (AdGuard DNS on the router, uBlock Origin in the browser).

Re: Deleting Facebook permanently

#223

Post by tonymet »

tonymet wrote: post #88
willis936 wrote: post #5

After losing control of my Yahoo email after trying to delete it, I have learned that it’s not smart to give up control of something that has your identity. I never use facebook, but I will never delete it. I don’t trust facebook.

Once you release your id back into the pool, a criminal can commandeer it to attack your other accounts . It could be used for phishing through your network or resetting your other accounts Keep the account . If you are worried about discipline , reset the password to a random password and lock it in a safe

Haha how did I get downvoted on this sound advice ?

Re: Deleting Facebook permanently

#226

Post by hakfoo »

nrvn wrote: post #215

A bit offtopic but You know what? 1. I am not using whatsapp and recently I stumbled upon an iOS app that asked for a phone number to register and then tried to send OTP through whatsapp. SMS was a fallback option there which showed afterwards and was not active for 5 minutes because of the “timeout” between otp requests ))) 2.A bottle of water advertised some lottery and had a QR code which was a FB link leading to…

I think the universe of topic-driven forums is the best I've seen so far.

What eventually wrecks any of the "meet friends/family/strangers and chat loosely" MySpace/Facebook/Google+/etc. networks toxic is that they're "unbounded" to serve their business model. They want to show 50% quarter-over-quarter active-user growth, and when that caps out, they need to squeeze the user bases for ever more interaction and engagement. Quality is not on the radar. So they're incentivized first to load the site with bots, desperate virality and recruitment efforts, and low-quality content, and later more and more obnoxious algorithms and dark-pattern design.

A topic-driven forum tends to have different motivations. The definition of success is to be a compelling community and content for a specific, and typically finite, audience. You're not going to growth-hack Hacker News or Deskthority in quite the same toxic way as Facebook does.

A small, but tighter-knit community often can be self-funded via subscriptions or donations, and if you go ad supported, there's a potential for a high-quality non-programmatic-nightmare ad experience, based on direct relations with advertisers directly relevant to the site theme and audience.

There's also granularity and control created by it not being a single all-purpose systen. Each new community is an opt-in choice rather than an algorithmic imposition, and you can punt the toxic ones without having to delete them all.

Re: Deleting Facebook permanently

#227

Post by beagle3 »

meowster wrote: post #217
polka_haunts_us wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if you could go more into the unpleasantness someone could do with an abandoned phone number. I inherited my mom's phone number years ago and recently had to dump it when I swapped my data plan. It honestly feels like the best thing that ever happened to me b/c I used to get daily spam calls and since getting the new number have gotten maybe 1 spam call total in the past two years, so had planned to chang…

In case anyone doesn't want to give up a number, but doesn't necessarily need it, you can also park the phone number at a VOIP provider for about $1/month.

Or google voice for a one time fee of $25 if you trust google (and you could still use it through google voice)

Re: Deleting Facebook permanently

#228

Post by dhsysusbsjsi »

tdfx wrote: post #118
rocgf wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quit it about a year ago and I cannot even remember what it was like having an account, it just seems so strange that this would be such an important part of their online life. Everybody I know is on Whatsapp/Signal, so I really don't feel like I'm missing anything.

> Everybody I know is on Whatsapp/Signal I wish I could say this. It seems the US is the only country where everyone wants to continue using SMS/iMessage for everything. It's literally the only way to communicate with most of my American friends.

The last three weeks I’ve slowly been moving all of my friends and group chats onto Signal (from WhatsApp, which is about to be a huge privacy disaster. If it’s not already...)

Most non-nerd friends just do what they’re told and love the idea of “Signal is WhatsApp but Zuck isn’t reading your messages”.

Re: Deleting Facebook permanently

#229

Post by MrDresden »

arconis987 wrote: post #138
MrDresden wrote: post #115

I'm a year and a half in on the removal of Facebook from my life. Deleted the account and didn't look back. Has not had any impact on my social or professional life. I'd recommend doing the same. I am currenlty well on my way in the process of uncondition myself from using Instagram, and I haven't touched WA in months.

Count me as another data point. I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and it has not affected my social or professional life in any noticeable way. I was worried I would lose access to my Oculus purchases, but I did not. The straw that broke the camel’s back was reading my ads profile summary in Facebook settings. It claimed I was in “Established Adult Family Life with Children” or something similar. This was r…

I was genuinly sad when Facebook bought Oculus as I knew they would never be able to resist the temptation to add all kinds of data harvesting to it.

And so I have not yet bought my self a VR set. Thankfully Valve stepped up last year.

Re: Deleting Facebook permanently

#230

Post by xaedes »

tootie wrote: post #107
keiferski wrote: post #15

I’ve become throughly convinced that the only way to dethrone Facebook is by creating the Next Big Thing and being crazy (and well-funded) enough to reject any acquisitions on the way up. “Delete your Facebook” social movements are doomed from the start. Social trends seem to come in waves, and people get bored quickly. I wouldn’t be surprised if the world tires of today’s brand of social media in a decade or two. Th…

I don't see how any of the problems with facebook are due to any specific aspect of how they operate. It's the nature of any social network. Is there actually less garbage on Insta or Twitter or YouTube? The problem we people feeling compelled to post nonsense, to obsess over status, to be anxious about social inclusion and the free flow of disinformation. Happens everywhere.

Hackernews is also a kind of social network.
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