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Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

blog.chaddickerson.com

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Re: Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

#71

Post by ramblerman »

wyattpeak wrote: post #61

There's one aspect of Facebook which seems to always be ignored by these "deleting Facebook" posts and it confuses me. I've never really scrolled through the frontpage, I don't look at people's posts and photos, happy to message them through text or WhatsApp, but I absolutely need the events. Without them, I'd lose so much touch with all but my closest friends. People tend to respond to this concern with "if they don…

> and I'd feel my life diminished if I didn't have them

That's a bit drastic. You would probably see a few of them more, and a few of them less. People managed relationships just fine before facebook.

Also events will still get to you though the contacts you do keep, did you know so&so got married, etc. People love sharing information (or gossip).

I get the fear, I faced it myself but in my case deleting FB, improved my life.

I do use whatsapp though.

Re: Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

#73

Post by wyattpeak »

gnicholas wrote: post #62
wyattpeak wrote: post #61

There's one aspect of Facebook which seems to always be ignored by these "deleting Facebook" posts and it confuses me. I've never really scrolled through the frontpage, I don't look at people's posts and photos, happy to message them through text or WhatsApp, but I absolutely need the events. Without them, I'd lose so much touch with all but my closest friends. People tend to respond to this concern with "if they don…

I have been on Facebook for a decade and can count on one hand the number of events I cared about that I was invited to on FB. Maybe this is because I'm "old" (late 30s). Or maybe some friend groups simply do not use FB in this way. Most events I'm invited to are via email, evite, or text.

That makes sense, I wonder if it is just a generational thing (late 20s). While I'm aware of evites, I've never received one, and my circle of friends seem to basically set up a Facebook event and then forget about it.

I don't think I've ever received an invite to a casual event over text/email/phone either, except in conversations of the "Hey, what are you up to?"/"Going to a party, want to come?" ilk.

Re: Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

#74

Post by hervature »

Semaphor wrote: post #68
hervature wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really sure how to answer this because I am not sure how old you are. But your birthday example seems rather silly. Typically people either have big parties in which case one of your close friends will let you know there is a big party via text or WhatsApp as you say. This mimics exactly how Facebook works. Most of the time, a friend invites you to a big event, not the host. Otherwise, they don't want you at thei…

> Most of the time, a friend invites you to a big event, not the host. Pretty much never had this happen to me. It's the host who invites and invites are sent via FB usually.

I'm curious, if you don't mind sharing, what age range are you? In my undergrad (5 years ago), big events with 100s of people were just mass invites. I never had big events like that out of not wanting to trash our house. The parties we had were around 50ish people and the only convenience that Facebook provided was less clicks to invite everyone. It also had the benefit of reminding people continuously what their Friday night plans are. I'm just struggling to understand the host that is unwilling to invite you because of a text message requirement but still judiciously picks which friends to invite via Facebook.

Re: Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

#75

Post by bigbugbag »

brandonmenc wrote: post #44

My family (parents, sister, some cousins) "replaced" Facebook with iCloud. Shared photo albums with comments and iMessage covers pretty much everything.

This bears some same issue facebook has:

1: Some of the people who matters may not have an apple device/account now or may not have one in the future

4: With Apple services, you're not free to switch platforms and your data is not on your own computer

Re: Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

#76

Post by wyattpeak »

ramblerman wrote: post #71
wyattpeak wrote: post #61

There's one aspect of Facebook which seems to always be ignored by these "deleting Facebook" posts and it confuses me. I've never really scrolled through the frontpage, I don't look at people's posts and photos, happy to message them through text or WhatsApp, but I absolutely need the events. Without them, I'd lose so much touch with all but my closest friends. People tend to respond to this concern with "if they don…

> and I'd feel my life diminished if I didn't have them That's a bit drastic. You would probably see a few of them more, and a few of them less. People managed relationships just fine before facebook. Also events will still get to you though the contacts you do keep, did you know so&so got married, etc. People love sharing information (or gossip). I get the fear, I faced it myself but in my case deleting FB, improved…

I'm not suggesting it would mortally wound me, just what I said - it'd be a little worse.

I'm aware people managed before, but things have changed. I was just responding to a person talking about the myriad ways they get invited to things. Those simply don't happen to me. Everything is Facebook.

Marriages aren't really what I'm worried about (if I'm being invited to a wedding they're presumably the sort of friend who'll contact me directly) - it's the "Hey, it's my birthday, let's go down to the pub and knock back a few" sort of things.

I'm not afraid. If I were told tomorrow that I could never use Facebook again I'd be just fine, but I actually don't want to lose those things. I'm not really looking for head-patting, but people's experiences and whether/how they preserved those relationships.

Re: Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

#77

Post by Semaphor »

hervature wrote: post #74
Semaphor wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the time, a friend invites you to a big event, not the host. Pretty much never had this happen to me. It's the host who invites and invites are sent via FB usually.

I'm curious, if you don't mind sharing, what age range are you? In my undergrad (5 years ago), big events with 100s of people were just mass invites. I never had big events like that out of not wanting to trash our house. The parties we had were around 50ish people and the only convenience that Facebook provided was less clicks to invite everyone. It also had the benefit of reminding people continuously what their Fr…

32. I never went to events with 100s of people.

Birthday parties are usually 10-30 people and invites are sent to, for example, school friends, many of whom you see maybe once a year if that much because you now live in different cities or even different countries.

Re: Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

#78

Post by bigbugbag »

NoPicklez wrote: post #55

Lesson 2: Email is more intimate and leads to better conversations. Lesson 3: You control the narrative completely in email which provides a much better opportunity for story-telling. Facebook Messenger? Facebook isn't just a place to post publicly on your wall. Arguably the reason why Facebook messenger exists on the platform is provide intimacy.

Anything that exists on facebook is there to profit facebook not the user.

if facebook messenger exists, it is not to provide intimacy but for some reasons aligned with facebook interests such as getting the people online on facebook longer to peek further in their life and social links to feed the investor storytime narrative that facebook will collect more data to eventually be able to target people efficiently enough at some point in the future so that investor will make a big ROI.

Then again email vs instant messaging is an old debate and email does provide much better conversation and intimacy due to its asynchronous nature.

Re: Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

#79

Post by bobthepanda »

gnicholas wrote: post #62
wyattpeak wrote: post #61

There's one aspect of Facebook which seems to always be ignored by these "deleting Facebook" posts and it confuses me. I've never really scrolled through the frontpage, I don't look at people's posts and photos, happy to message them through text or WhatsApp, but I absolutely need the events. Without them, I'd lose so much touch with all but my closest friends. People tend to respond to this concern with "if they don…

I have been on Facebook for a decade and can count on one hand the number of events I cared about that I was invited to on FB. Maybe this is because I'm "old" (late 30s). Or maybe some friend groups simply do not use FB in this way. Most events I'm invited to are via email, evite, or text.

Evites aren’t very flexible though; one of the very useful features of facebook events is for organizing the members, e.g. “what are people bringing to the potluck?” “Does anyone have food restrictions?”

Re: Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

#80

Post by Wuzzy2 »

wyattpeak wrote: post #61

There's one aspect of Facebook which seems to always be ignored by these "deleting Facebook" posts and it confuses me. I've never really scrolled through the frontpage, I don't look at people's posts and photos, happy to message them through text or WhatsApp, but I absolutely need the events. Without them, I'd lose so much touch with all but my closest friends. People tend to respond to this concern with "if they don…

This is exactly what makes Facebook so dangerous. Because so many people are blindly following it, it makes it hard to leave. Network effects are strong and make Facebook immensely powerful, and it is never good when any company wields such power.

Also, I think this is also politics. It's not good when people basically force you to use Facebook, otherwise you'd be cut off mostly. A change is impossible when some people aren't taking a stand.

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