Stop Using Facebook
stopusingfacebook.co
Stop Using Facebook
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: Stop Using Facebook
#2I like the idea of offering alternatives, but have you considered crowdsourcing those apps? Could add an extra level of transparency if people could select/vote on which alternatives really are better (because that can be awfully subjective).
It would be interesting to link to privacy policies and other relevant information as well!
Re: Stop Using Facebook
#3I think these calls to action are preaching to the choir. I don't even use Facebook and my eyes glazed over when seeing this.
Re: Stop Using Facebook
#4Start regulating Facebook.
There, I fixed it to make it more realistic, otherwise it’s about as useful as saying “Stop Using Oil”.
Re: Stop Using Facebook
#5I think these calls to action are preaching to the choir. I don't even use Facebook and my eyes glazed over when seeing this.
Why are “these calls to action” just preaching to the choir? Over the last year a bunch of people I know have stopped using google search, Facebook, and the epic games launcher. It’s working slowly
Re: Stop Using Facebook
#6Start regulating Facebook. There, I fixed it to make it more realistic, otherwise it’s about as useful as saying “Stop Using Oil”.
Don't we kind of need to stop using oil though?
Re: Stop Using Facebook
#7Start regulating Facebook. There, I fixed it to make it more realistic, otherwise it’s about as useful as saying “Stop Using Oil”.
Don't we kind of need to stop using oil though?
The point is that a) it’s unfair to expect individual consumers to make a difference and b) it’s not realistic to expect individual consumers to make a difference because network effects are so powerful. The modern world exists in part because of cheap, plentiful oil. If you live most places in the US, you need a car, and probably a gas-powered one at that. Similarly, Facebook gobbles up information about you even if you decide not to use it. You can’t stop using Facebook even if you aren’t using Facebook, because Facebook is actually using you and the billions of other people it siphons data from. This libertarian wet dream of “just don’t use it” doesn’t work on a large scale.
Re: Stop Using Facebook
#8The list of reasons is good but the proposed alternatives in terms of social media (as opposed to messaging - which are pretty good) is laughable. Mastodon and all these federated services IMO fail to address the main problem while bringing several other problems to the table; I've explained this in a previous post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513) which I'll quote here:
> One big issue is that there’s nothing decentralised that currently exists that can rival the quality & user experience of mainstream social networks, and decentralisation comes with its own problems (I personally think the problem with mainstream social media is its ad-based business model and not centralisation). Mastodon (which seems to be the biggest alternative being proposed) is still a joke, even the name and branding sounds awful IMO. And who in their right mind thought calling a post a “toot” (https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/toot) was a good idea. Besides the branding, decentralisation comes with its own issues like the lack of network-wide content moderation and agreement on what content is acceptable. There are solutions (more like hacks) around this where instance admins can choose not to federate with instances they don’t like the policies of, but it then causes problems for end-users where they can’t communicate with their peers on those banned instances despite all of them being on Mastodon. Good luck explaining to a non-technical person why they can’t talk to/see the posts of certain people despite them all being on Mastodon, and the solution is to spend time choosing an instance with policies you agree with and making sure your friends are on it or on a similar instance that’s not banned by yours, and then hoping the instances stay online without any kind of funding (there’s also no knowledge of whether they would scale to the size of mainstream social networks). The solution IMO is not Mastodon or any of these fringe social networks. The main problem is the lack of an ethical business model in mainstream social media. The solution would be to vote with your wallets and fund a better Facebook alternative - it could even show the current social networks that there’s profit to be made treating their users with respect and make the situation better for everyone else too.
Re: Stop Using Facebook
#9I only use Facebook for events, yet there seems to be no alternative, partly because of the network effect where small and large organizations keep posting their events only to Facebook.
If there was some kind of bot that would automatically crosspost events from Facebook to other social media platforms, then perhaps there would be a chance of winning me over.
Re: Stop Using Facebook
#10I like the idea of offering alternatives, but have you considered crowdsourcing those apps? Could add an extra level of transparency if people could select/vote on which alternatives really are better (because that can be awfully subjective). It would be interesting to link to privacy policies and other relevant information as well!
You mean like AlternativeTo does?