IF you are getting a product or service for free, continuously, the company providing it usually has a different motive, a different way to make money. Usually that means selling your data, thus you are the product being sold in the statement the original poster made.

Can you explain why you consider the statement a banality instead of a rule of thumb? What kind of things do you not pay for where the company providing it is not gaining something from you using it?

Google not selling personally identifiable information is not out of benevolence, but because it makes their own position stronger. They are optimizing how to sell what you are giving them.

Not that there is anything inherently wrong with that, my point is that "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" is usually true. Resigning it to the parenthesized cool-kids corner is (unjustly) diminishing the value of the sentence.

You are being advertised to based on the profile Google has built of you and the profile companies want to advertise to.

As such, your attention your time, based on your life, is being sold to advertisers. I don't see how being aware of this and being okay with this changes this fact? Of course there is a "contract" of sorts (which are always mutual) in play between you and Google, Google provides you with a service and you provide Google with whatever data you want.

Google in turn uses this to sell its product (people like you reading ads) to other parties.

I'm not saying this is inherently bad either. But the sentence is used to make people aware of the fact that companies like Google have something to gain from giving you something for free, which is something a lot of people hadn't thought about before or are aware of (especially when they are internet products). Thus I don't get the pedantry that this statement seems to evoke.

If I was to go one step farther, I'd say the entire powerbase of companies like Facebook and Google is founded on a large mass of people not caring about their privacy. Maybe a step too far, but I'm not so sure.

Can you imagine an internet search engine with a paid option? Perhaps a personal search assistant who sorts through all the junk to find what you are actually after? It may well happen.

As someone whose started a company with a "free product", seeing how it's been monetised has certainly been eye-opening.

Free-to-use, privacy-voiding services kill any paid-for, privacy-respecting service. There's a race to the bottom -- Gresham's Law -- and the "good" services can neither gather sufficient users nor revenues to be sustaining.

The leaders, at the same time, have to stay ahead of all three fronts in the game:

1. They need low per-user costs to sustain themselves.

2. They need to exploit user data (or whatever other advertising-based edge) they have to retain advertisers.

3. They've got to retain sufficient network size and quality to keep smaller services from taking off, or from boiling-off the high-quality users who are no longer satisfied by the service.

Google launched G+ to kill Facebook. It failed in that, with a large number of arguments as to why.

But Facebook's initial attraction was that it was literally Harvard. That is: it began as one of the most selective, aspirational, and attractive (to both other participants, and advertisers) cohorts on the planet.

Metcalfe's Law is only so powerful, and it's a strong overstatement. There's both a falling value with additional nodes (Tilly-Odlyzko), and a per-user cost constant (myself). The size of a network is ultimately governed by that per-user cost.

(There is also, if you will a perverse T-O factor -- a subpopulation who are actively detracting from overall site value. This can be addressed by specifically addressing and neutralising those participants. The cost-constant isn't subject to this.)

Which is why a new social network could form, and relatively easily, among some sufficiently large appealing cohort. Throwing some funding money and support to individuals within such contexts might well take down Facebook, eventually.

(Though the replacement would almost certainly eventually present the same problem.)

how about camera in your home? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X_fP4pPWPw

It's just a trap. One of your real friends uploaded all their contacts to Facebook, and when Facebook found you weren't on it, I guess it decided to send you an email in the hope that you'd be enticed to join in and see what your real friends are up to...on Facebook, of course! I wonder if Facebook does this even for any company/organization addresses that get uploaded or if it has some sort of intelligence not to do that (imagine a "payroll@company.com" or "legal@company.com" or "abuse@company.com" getting an email to check out what friends are up to).

As for the severe intrusion of your privacy, Facebook's privacy policy says what applies to its users. You're just a shadow profile who can be monetized in the future or in other ways. You're like an outlaw/alien who doesn't have rights as far as Facebook is concerned.

protip: you can access FB without javascript via https://mbasic.facebook.com/ and you don't have to worry about such concerns. (I learned this from a Stallman video.)

"To make the site work without the need to run nonfree Javascript code, visit to m.facebook.com rather than facebook.com itself."

FYI, currently m.facebook.com now uses javascript, however mbasic.facebook.com doesn't, and is basically the same as m.facebook.com was at the time of his writing.

Of course, decentralization is a valid point and it's really important to get people who are kinda "new" to social media on distributed platforms. Twitter is centralized as well and also tracks with buttons and scripts. We need critical masses for e.g. XMPP and OStatus platforms like Mastodon.

This of course also applies to mobile clients like WhatsApp.

Did Facebook recently hire Hari Seldon?

Of course I am exaggerating. But IMO people vastly underestimate how similar their own behaviour is to other people. Meaning, if Facebook "knows" me since 12 years (!) it can very precisely categorize me into a group of people. And those other people do not leave Facebook but feed it more information.

It almost makes me jealous of all the data they have.

Even worse are the socially slip-streamed ones that started as a Sponsored post in a friend's news feed that they found funny/interesting/whatever and re-shared. Once reshared it loses even that gray, barely there "Sponsored" tag and has "grown up into a real boy" in the news feed.

A lot of the mind games in the last election cycle happened because of that (target ads to people susceptible to reshare them and watch them go viral for relatively cheap). Facebook has said they may try to crack down on that sort of thing, but slip-streaming ads is where they make their most money and they don't have enough financial incentive to really fix that.

I just cut the cord and I am now a lot happier without it, facebook is literally a drug,

I think I'm pretty much free of the 'need' to look at what's 'new' now. You might think this means I have loads more free time to do more important things. I'm still waiting for that to happen.

  If you were a regular user since 2005 and leave now, it does not make any
  difference anymore. The collected data about you is enough to interpolate
  your profile for the next decades.

It does make a difference. Just not to care and to give up is no solution either.

And if you throw in the Instagram wildcard, it gets worse. I signed up for an Instagram account before Facebook purchasing them. I never posted a photo, but I'm sure this still adds to the reach of their shadow profile. People who actively use both Facebook and Instagram, I feel sorry for them.

I do use twitter and google extensively though, so I guess I can't complain or say anything about my social profile. Twitter luckily has a smaller budget, so they can't quite crunch data as hard as Facebook can. But Google owns me, I'm afraid.

I'm not (too) scared about NSA. At least, NSA has some sort of government bureaucracy that slows down their ability and interest in my data; they aren't trying to use me for-profit. I think we should be more scared about what Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, et al. can do, especially because they are generally bound to whatever their current (and fungible) terms of service and privacy policy stipulates. [edit] i.e. policies written for the sole benefit of the share-holders.

I haven't updated my FB account since I graduated college and it feels great.

If FB wants to obsessively and endlessly analyze the profile and posts of my college-self, it's free to do so.

https://www.rescuetime.com/

Also, Quitting fb for mental sanity is a worthwhile reason if not privacy

Any way, it's pretty engaging. Check it out.

http://joinmastodon.org

But (most) people prefer taking silly quizzes than thinking about potential dark implications of doing that. And it's not like this is a big secret no one has ever talked about (just google 'Facebook quizzes data' for more on that).

Certainly has to do with the wave of such posts published lately (Susan Fowler & Uber, Coraline Ada Ehmke & GitHub etc.)

Not claiming everyone that leaves FB, returns. But Facebook is continuing to expand.

I remember reading here years back that new generation isn't really using FB cause their parents are using it. And they weren't comfortable with that setup. Rather they are switching to other social media.

They are mostly using FB for "public" stuff, and the stuff they would only share with their friends is on snapchat and similar applications.

I quit cold turkey and have never looked back.

I'm off all social media today (except LinkedIn) and have weeded out a lot "friends" who really were just co-enablers in the dopamine rush hunt.

Whereas with LinkedIn, we are willing to give up much more sensitive and accurate profile data, such as all of our past employers, addresses, phone, email, birthdate, professional experience, headshot, school information, coworkers, etc.

The initial content of a typical LinkedIn profile is much more rich than a starter FB profile. There is no need-to-know for Facebook to have as much "real" information about you as LinkedIn has. I feel that LinkedIn got in through the backdoor with the information most people have provided to it. Though Facebook undoubtedly has more of your day-to-day activities than LinkedIn, which might be more dangerous.

I never personally got suckered into a Facebook profile, one of those (lucky) few that have continued to live on planet earth without a FB account. But LinkedIn is another story, I totally got swooped up in that one for sure.

Combine all this with the fact that there are so many FB users and many of them are children who wouldn't otherwise have a LinkedIn account (and are more comfortable with sharing personal info online).

So, while I agree that LinkedIn is in the group of data collectors, I don't think they're quite on the scale of FB.

I think you mean "innovators". Even though 9/10 times they claim ownership on things they've contracted out on their parent's cash.

the whole world uses whatsapp exactly for that use case you describe.

Sadly both options are awful.

Blackmail works :)

And here's the worst part: We grew up with this shit. My generation was one of the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit. That means we'll never escape. Ever. We're literally wired to seek approval of strangers on the internet instead of the people around us. It feels more ... correct? Real? True?

That red circle with a number literally gives more enjoyment than a close friend saying "Heh that's cool". The worst part is that there's likely no cure. Rehab, maybe. But rehab for this shit doesn't exist yet.

Plus try explaining to your boss that you're not reading email and slack and you're never coming back because you're in notification rehab.

Simon Sinek explains it perfectly: https://youtu.be/hER0Qp6QJNU?t=195

You don't have to tell your boss you're not reading notifications. You just have to eliminate the notifications that serve no purpose except a high. Facebook still spams my email; it's filtered to the trash. Business carries on.

"Oh and if all your friends are doing it and are wondering why you're not having fun with them, just ignore them"

Sure you've quit Facebook. But did you quit dopamine-seeking technology use?

What I've found in myself is that when I pry myself away from Facebook, I spend more time on Twitter. When I pry myself off that as well, suddenly my HN engagement goes up. When I manage to ignore all those, then I check Slack every 2 minutes. If I avoid even that, then I refresh my email all the time.

The medium isn't the problem. The behavior is the problem. There's always another medium you can switch to.

I mean, it's not like I was on Facebook when I got hooked to social media at 14, 15, 16. I was on internet forums and MSN Messenger. The draw was and still is that it broadened my horizons, exposed me to different people, and sometimes I learned really useful things. Hell, it helped me build my entire career.

I also believe there is another side of the argument, and people just consume media differently today. The internet came and it was the death of media, the TV came and it was the death of books, the books came and they were the death of the bard, etc. Maybe some people actually enjoy Facebook?

It sounds like technology isn't the problem - if you're doing these things with technology you'd be doing the same things without it. Perhaps you'd be spending a lot of time chatting around the water cooler instead of online, but that's not actually any healthier or better. Facebook has brought me a lot of fun in my life - on Tuesday I went to a gig that I only found out about because a casual acquaintance posted it there, and tonight I'm meeting up with another acquaintance because I saw on Facebook we're going to the same gig. I see it as like the gold medal in Cool Runnings - if you're not enough without it, you're not going to be enough with it.

Water cooler chat, which requires active social engagement and is time bounded, is not as addicting as an endless stream of content accessed with a twitch of the finger. You might not use Facebook in that way, and I similarly don't find it that engaging, but I've certainly experienced it with reddit and HN.

And I don't think this is some intractable personality flaw, I think people get used to the comfort of frequent dopamine hits, and find it very difficult to drag themselves away from these sources as a result. Cold turkey can and does make a difference.

What is it you're saying makes everyone feel miserable? AIUI the artificial substitute for dopamine is cocaine, which only makes people miserable when they run out (and more generally as tolerance kicks in)? Social media seems to make some people miserable, but despite how much people love to throw around "dopamine" in Internet arguments ("skinner box" is another good one) there's no scientifically demonstrated connection AFAIK.

Yes dopamine is part of a loop or cycle that is a survival strategy. In a healthy individual in a healthy situation.

When this loop works properly then yes, it is called being happy (there's more things to being happy but a properly functioning dopamine loop is part of it).

Think of a dopamine release and its causes like a particular message in a protocol that runs inside our body.

Our bodies aren't perfect or tested against every possible situation.

Sometimes the combination of the dopamine protocol and the environment causes a weird feedback loop that is no longer beneficial to this survival strategy.

In most of those cases, this results in a state called an addiction. (and in that case we call the dopamine release a "dopamine hit", to emphasize the role of addiction)

Fighting this bad feedback loop can be a constant struggle. A daily, constant struggle that lasts a lifetime once you get stuck in it. If you compare that to "being happy", then I can only assume you've never experienced it (and I hope you never will, but you can still learn compassion).

Sometimes these faults are exploited on purpose, very often for the commercial purposes of the amoral corporations.

It's also the case that certain people are more susceptible to these exploits. For instance ADHD is well-known to be co-morbid with susceptibility to addiction.

Peace :)

The heroin analogy is lazy and irrelevant. The reason people say stuff like "try doing X to quit or cut down" is that, unlike heroin, a fairly large chunk of people who've recognized the problem have been pretty able to easily cut down or stop their "dopamine addiction" to the level that they're comfortable with.

If heroin had such a high success rate from going cold turkey, you can be damn sure that people would be saying "try going cold turkey" or "try this specific path to quitting", because it's worked for so many others. There are successful suggestions on this thread that amount to "I deleted my dealer's number from my phone and poof problem gone".

That isn't to say that these will definitely work for everyone: some people have a more severe problem when it comes to their relationship to dopamine. But it's awfully self-centered to complain about people talking about things that have been successful for them and others.

For example, diets work. But most have a fall-off-the-wagon rate in the couple of months range.

It's definitely easy to quit a social media platform cold turkey. The hard part is quitting social media. I have yet to see anyone who's actually quit social media as a whole (yes that def includes email and texting) and kept with it for more than a month.

Social media addiction in the modern world is a lot like food addiction. Sure you're addicted, but you still gotta eat or you die. Sure you're addicted, but without social media you can't be a functioning member of current society.

Hell, I had one of those "I quit the internet" articles on the frontpage of HackerNews a few years ago. You know what happened? I quit all social media, but I needed access to Github to do my work. So I started friending people and being all social media on Github.

[1] https://swizec.com/blog/my-ideas-are-shitty-so-im-going-on-a... [2] https://swizec.com/blog/the-end-of-my-internet-diet-experime...

Off the top of my head, I have a friend who have been off of Facebook for 9 years, another for 7, and another who never made an account at all. These are all healthy, happy people with robust social lives: their friends just know they need to be texted to be looped into plans. I know still more people (myself included) who have always had a healthy relationship with social media: short periods of "maybe I'm mindlessly browsing this a bit" followed by minor habit tweaks and straight back to a fully healthy relationship. I eat extremely healthy but every once in a while notice that I'm eating a bit of junk food (perhaps due to stress at work or something). I notice it and fix it and go back to eating extremely healthy. It would be completely inaccurate to claim that any lapse means I have an unhealthy relationship with food, and this is exactly the same as with social media et al.

> I have yet to see anyone who's actually quit social media as a whole (yes that def includes email and texting) and kept with it for more than a month.

This is a beyond-absurd definition of social media, and you're now talking about something that no one else here is talking about. The idea that there's no value in email and texting beyond dopamine addiction is frankly just insane. When I get statements from my bank, or delivery notifications from my package receipt service or laundry service, or an update that my friend wants to move our dinner date back by half an hour, am I feeding my addiction? Because your bizarre definition doesn't leave any room for responsible e-mail/text usage.

Anyone defining "communication with other people" as an addiction that needs to be killed off is battling far worse demons than social media/dopamine-hit addiction. That may be interesting in and enough of itself but it couldn't be less relevant to this thread.

Yeah, I am only a year away, born in 1988. Our family's first home computer was put in my room when I was 6 years old and my parents were hands-off about using it, so I grew up on multi-player gaming, forums, chat rooms, porn, etc. It's difficult to express how strongly the internet shaped the direction of my life, and I'm not even as addicted as most people.

Not having a phone helps with staying off Facebook...

Every generation has their dopamine hits. Of course, as society creates more leisure time, the number and (arguably) complexity of these increase. That is the trend. But, as always, the responsibility should be squarely on your own shoulders! You were not "dealt a bad hand." If that's a truth, then everyone ever born was dealt a bad hand. If being born at the time when the length and quality of life (health-wise) is at its longest, then deal me in! There are many, many benefits to being born in this time and as always, it is up to us to find the life we want and the balance we need.

He does blames them, but only as part of his point, not as the whole conclusion. He blames the corporations for focusing on reductive, short-term metrics† instead of people, which is precisely what's lead to this[0] and that[1] abusive situations. As a company you're not hiring robots, you're hiring people.

> Every generation has their dopamine hits.

Indeed it has. The trouble starts when it reaches such heights, recurrence and omnipresence that it throws whole lives off balance.

> If being born at the time when the length and quality of life (health-wise) is at its longest, then deal me in! There are many, many benefits to being born in this time and as alway

Strawman. Life expectancy does not invalidate the new challenges we have to face. If anything, with modern discoveries about happiness vs hardship, people may literally have been happier in spite of such matters (shocking!). I'm suddenly reminded of Gladia's tirade in Robots and Empire: would you rather live a long, dull, purposeless life endlessly being bored to no end or a shorter life full of brilliance? But we digress.

> it is up to us to find the life we want and the balance we need

This is the kind of attitude that reviles me. You can't blame someone for becoming alcoholic/depressive/etc. If you do then you don't understand what those are: illnesses. Nobody breaks his leg or catches a flu on purpose. If a company refuses to take such humane matters into consideration then you're just a tool and it's parasitically just sucking onto you till you're dry. When you're in situations of illnesses, all the good will of the person is not sufficient: help is needed, from everywhere it can come[2].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14703661

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14711621

[2]: https://medium.com/@OlarkLiveChat/its-2017-and-mental-health...

† ironically, themselves being addicted to that very same dopamine (or rather its ethereal corporate equivalent) rush.

Waaaait a minute. This is another strawman. My comment did not blame illnesses on the individual. But I think we need to define carefully what an illness is. I don't doubt alcoholism is an illness, but I would reasonable argue that browsing Facebook on your phone is not an illness. Do you really believe that? I don't. There may be people at the far end of that spectrum that cannot help themselves, but there are plenty of others that are just bored.

I don't think that's really true. I'm about your age, and you were ~20 when the iPhone came out, right? Facebook was just settling in as the tool of choice for every college student, but even then it was mainly just photo-sharing and event-planning. The fact that we missed out on social networking in our entire teenage and preteen years means that we narrowly escaped this.

If you spend any time around people a bit younger than us, the contrast is particularly stark. My cousins are about a decade younger than me (just started college), and throughout high school, Snapchat/Twitter/etc were simply a must-have. The amount of time they spent sharing content and scrolling through others is insane, and if you talk to them about it, they're very aware that it's somewhere between a chore, an addiction, and good ol' fun.

That's the kind of "hardwired into your formative social years" thing that we never really had to deal with.

Most of my "real" friends seemed to have stopped posting on there, yet I was still addicted to scrolling through the feed while waiting for code to compile or whatever (clever design on their part, I guess!).

However, also like you, the privacy side doesn't worry me too much (although as time goes by I do start to think about it more), and I still get some value from communicating with certain people on FB Messenger and being able to access photos from events etc., so instead of quitting, I unfollowed everyone (using a bit of Javascript - I'll try and dig it out).

My feed is now totally blank, so I now only visit maybe twice a day for a few seconds to check for messages (I refuse to install their app - mbasic.facebook.com all the way!). I did think I could refollow people if I felt I was missing out, but surprise surprise, I don't at all.

Of course, I've now replaced reading Facebook with reading Twitter while stuff compiles but at least that's relevant to my work ;)

I'd highly recommend this approach if you feel uncomfortable with your use of Facebook but also value your network of friends on there.

It depends on how you consume it. Often, very often, it's only infotainment.

However, in my opinion their EULA is totally unacceptable, so I cannot use it.

You really should quit linkedin as well. Their security is like a screen door on a submarine.

I noticed on reddit I seek for shallow agreement too. And if a comment gets 0 I'm a bit disappointed. It also taught me that sometimes you get a few downvotes at first but later some people upvote, some even comment. Patience ..

1. It offers nothing while it takes a lot.

2. When something is free, then YOU are the product.

3. Massive violation of privacy (that "like" button on most websites and any other facebook element which now I block with ABP and NoScript)(and all known FB URLs on my hosts file).

4. I can still be in touch with my friend without informing FB (via facebook, instagram, whatsapp) who is my friend and when are we texting.

5. FB is the devil :)

Debian Linux, Firefox, gcc, visual studio... The list goes on. I think the "you are the product" quip has become an overplayed meme of late. Mutually beneficial / co dependence and such themes are more applicable in more cases than not when it comes to free products and services, in my own view anyways.

The quip is certainly overplayed, but I think the notion still stands. It is important to be aware of what intentions service providers and product sellers have. It's not so much a dig on libre / free software.

This took literally two seconds to think of off the top of my head. The quotation is _still_ not accurate. It's a useful perspective on how to think about free services, but it's not a substitute for thought.

Other services like that are public radio and TV.

That doesn't apply to most services like facebook for which each active user creates extra bandwidth and processing load.

It's been overplayed for years. The problem with pithy phrases, even when true in their original narrow sense, is that they allow those who aren't willing (or capable) of thinking for themselves to substitute something that superficially looks like wit without having to actually think about what they're talking about.

I've stopped using it because of all of this junk.

They took something that worked well and made it not work well. Brilliant.

Now, you get those whenever you join a group, save an event, have a friend like a post from someone you don't even know, etc etc etc.

I've seen several of my "friends" leave Facebook over the last year simply because the platform isn't a "face book" anymore, but a rough media consumption platform susceptible to manipulation by advertisers, political opponents, nation states, and [dank memes]. It's basically become internet middle school in terms of post quality, and people are noticing.

You can argue that facebook benefits from a lock-in effect and you wouldn't be wrong, but facebook hasn't always had that effect. They must have been doing something right from the start to get that effect.

I remember around 2007-ish when facebook was introduced in my life as a kind of cool club for university kids (I think they had already dropped this idea by then, but I still remember "networks" being a thing), and joining I was struck by how it was everything that my other social networks was not. It felt "professional", it allowed a low-frequency update into people's lives that wasn't matched by IM services like MSN/ICQ/whatever back then, and as it developed it turned into a crucial tool for groups in school, events (a major thing for me as a student), and more.

There will always be people that say they don't "get" facebook, that anything you can do on facebook you can do with other technology. Well, if you're one of those people you're probably also one of those people who thought "meh" when you saw Dropbox the first time because you can easily put together the same thing yourself with an FTP server and version control. Well, the kicker is obvious: normal people who don't read HN can not. Facebook changed lives for people who "can not".

If you fast forward to today and look at how non-profits are run, how political organizations are run, how after school-groups are run, you might have a point saying they could use something else. They could, but not without losing functionality. The payoff is always "a worse solution but you get to keep your privacy". The reality is, almost nobody wants that (unless you're politically active in a repressive regime, but facebook does support Tor, so kudos to them). The basic issues from the past linger: who will host it, who will support it, who will pay for it? Are we going to use an e-mail list, a web based forum, how will we communicate and share content? Like it or not, ad financed networks solve all these issues and people are more than happy to sell their browsing habits for that. I don't think that's changing anytime soon, because even if the minority ("you and me") may be willing to pay for a substitute to buy out our own privacy, most people won't, and then the whole point falls anyway, because the solutions will obviously not integrate.

Isn't this a manufactured problem/requirement?

EDIT: I mean, did people have this problem before social networks?

The manufactured requirement is the need to reach to every person we ever know and share every little detail of your life with them, possibly multiple times a day, in return for their some kind of acknowledgement...

That is the manufactured need and that is what people are hooked on.

Again, the need is not manufactured. But the need for constantly in touch, is manufactured. No one before social network wanted that. There was normal mails, then we had telephones, emails etc etc..all of which have solved this pretty well, even across the globe.

But none of these are 24x7.

The need for 24x7 "networking" is manufactured.

  Well, the kicker is obvious: normal people who don't read HN can not. Facebook changed lives for people who "can not".

  The payoff is always "a worse solution but you get to keep your privacy". 
  The reality is, almost nobody wants that 

  who will host it, who will support it, who will pay for it?

  I don't think that's changing anytime soon, because even if the minority 
  ("you and me") may be willing to pay for a substitute to buy out our own 
  privacy, most people won't, and then the whole point falls anyway, because 
  the solutions will obviously not integrate.

I think the unfortunate truth is that people in general don't care about their data. There are people who do, but they normally have very special reasons to and they will never be a majority, unless we have massive social upheaval worldwide. Hopefully that will not happen, but if it does the technology is already there to solve that problem when it comes along.

There are many free and admirable initiatives such as "riseup" who provide communication services free of charge to organizations working for social change. There are frameworks for you if you care about your data and want to disconnect: but most people don't care. And if you care, you will move away from normal people. That's the unfortunate truth, and it's not changing anytime soon. I'm all for educating the masses, but people will not switch facebook for encrypted e-mail. Not because a lack of encryption workshops, but because it's not the same thing, and facebook is as far as functionality goes, objectively better at solving the problem people perceive.

Is there any good news reader alternative to the platforms mentioned?

>I thought that was a thing from the past

Just like I can't understand how Facebook or something similar can be such a problem for people. Always though that you just keep it to stay in touch (in other words have their contacts info) with some people you met over the time.

2. Go to the actual delete facebook account page.

3. Copy that random string in when it asks your password and the captcha

4. Copy something else

Now you’ve bypassed their arbitrary and nefarious 14 day filter

0. create temporary email account and use it as your facebook email address?

I used that tactic successfully in the past.

Given the current costs of storage, many are skeptical of this.

https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467

Just because you don't value the data FB has now doesn't mean you won't in the future.

I rejoined FB last year or so, but their "recover your deleted data" feature recovered nothing, presumably they do a permanent delete after 2 years or something rather than a soft one.

http://quitfacebook.com/

And it does :)

Ironically, it's got Google tracking and Google Ads on it...

>One New York comedian had a SWAT team break into his house based on a joke post.

could someone find a citation, I'd like to read about that case? I googled what I just quoted and a couple of variations and did not find it.

Thanks.

I don't think Facebook will go forever without some major data leak. I don't like to count on the competence of corporations in handling secret information.

Similarly, I don't think any human ever looks at Facebook's statistical models for any individual. Facebook likely considers this data of the upmost secrecy. But I'm not sure they'll remain as upstanding decades from now, if they're ever in dire financial straights. In my view, Facebook is only going to get eviler.

This is true, especially of my current use of Facebook.

This is true, especially of my current use of Facebook.

For sure you have somebody in your group that gave them access, without knowing, to their contacts and your number in in there too, to their pictures and your face and easily recognizable landmarks are in there and so on. You might have a massive profile already all due to the little bits of information your friends are giving away.

Another problem is that the profile only grows larger with time. They never delete anything.

(FWIW Meetup does completely replicate this use case, but they charge money)

In a lot of ways, mid-2000s evite would be perfect -- but there's the spam / nagging side of their business that spoils it.

To be fair, I have no idea how one would monetize my dream events platform.

Also, keep in mind that not everybody is as savvy as the people who typically participate on HN. It should be as simple and minimal as possible.

I could not agree more. I have started browsing the web with JS turned off by default in all of my browsers (desktop, laptop and mobile) over the last few months. I've never been happier. Especially on mobile. The web has become a bloated, unusable mess.

That worked very well for me. I used to have it on my phone and would check it all the time. Then I decided I didn't want to do that so I uninstalled it from my phone. Doing so helped me reduce and eventually stop using the website.

In between those times I also had a browser plugin to hide the news feed. So if I do login, I see nothing.

Now I'm basically rarely on Facebook. I have an account, but I don't feel I need to delete it because the account doesn't control or affect me. I can still get messages, and Facebook keeps trying to get me back into it with their notification emails, but I'm in control and I feel great about that.

No Facebook, email or other app notifications. It has severely reduced my tendency to constantly check my phone, and it doesn't buzz in my pocket all the friggin time.

Another one - I created a dev account some time back with dummy email Id, but gave my mobile number of deleted account. Voila ! Facebook was suggesting my old contacts. Though this was suggested as expected by scanning the contacts of suggested members, I find this creepy enough.

I'm a happy and relaxed person for six years now, and as with all other things you will get used to life without Facebook. Deleting fb account is not like jumping a ring of fire as your social circle might suggest.

All of the games, copy-paste "share this!" bullshit and random shitposting pages of "humor" I either ignore or outright block. I also refuse to read news and engage in related discussions.

With some discipline, Facebook can be a useful tool.

I don't really see the value in deleting it as I don't really use it and it does offer me a connection to old friends if I'm so inclined to contact them.

There are lots of articles about how the price of using Facebook is your privacy but I've never seen one explaining to me what you get for that price and why you'd want that.

I limit my use of it, maybe one visit p/day or less, it seems to work OK. The nice thing about it is I get to see photos of my family and friends who I don't see often.

I visit Hacker News more than I visit Facebook, I'm not sure what that says about me.

Facebook purposely does not provide the ability to separate or filter content from your friends and content from 3rd parties. That is borderline malicious behavior, and definitely sociopathic.

This strategy has worked great. People "know" her. When we go to the race track (my hobby), everyone knows who she is. Many, many people comment on how much they love watching her grow up, etc. This is exactly what I was hoping for. She isn't some random kid at the track now, she's my kid, and everyone knows her.

Maybe Facebook is evil. I have no idea. I don't really care. I care about the bridge that it provides between me and other people.

So now I use one of my old phones with nothing on it, including no contacts, just for Facebook on a guest wifi channel on home router so it cannot link into main home network.

I look at once a week at most.

Otherwise it sits there marooned ha ha

The implication of this is that Google listens in and recommends things based on your phone conversations. A much more likely explanation is that you talk on the phone about the same things you look at online, and you're making an incorrect assumption about Google's source of data.

More likely explanations could be:

- Your topic is a common/popular one, so it's statistically likely that Youtube mentions it.

- Other people that (text-)search the same things as you tend to watch these videos (i.e. you have been put is some category or other).

- You did not search for it, but your phone correspondant did, and Youtube/Google tries the same suggestions on you because you're linked (see: there are other and less costly ways for Google to be creepy!).

1. Privacy-wise: It doesn't matter if you're on Facebook or not. They have a profile about you and you can't do anything about it. There was this article in January [1] that showed how only a few data points Facebook or Google or Twitter actually needs to paint a fairly accurate picture of your personality.

2. Addiction-wise: Uninstall the app, disable all notifications. I rarely use Facebook for the feed, because it's actually extremely boring. Most friends don't post personal stuff anymore anyways. There's a handful of people who post a lot, but mostly links to other websites. I also unfriend people I haven't talked to in a while. Try to reduce your friends (and cognitive load) to <200 or <150. Not all at once. Unfriend 10 or so today, another 20 tomorror etc.

3. I also see tremendous benefits of Facebook and that's why I use it: We have a local startup community. Basically, a page with 100 likes or so. We posted a video about our events and it reached 1,200 people organically. It's an extremely useful tool to discover and promote local events. And new people constantly find our events because of Facebook. You can't do this with your private website. You need to go where the attention is. The only other option to promote local events is the newspaper or distributing flyers, but this takes a lot more time for less awareness, because of broader targeting. I also found new events because of Facebook.

[1]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-li...

Edit: clarification

And I ended up with a nice empty timeline.

I started using it again recently, because it's the norm. I have only 30 friends and I remove them very easily. I use it to watch events, shops in my neighborhood, signin in other apps, but nothing else.

It's weird because facebook is usually a place of exclusivity since you only interact with your "friends", meanwhile it should really be a place where you could discover things and potential users using geolocalization (hobbies, parties, neighborhood). I don't know why they are not doing it. Pokemon go and tinder already proved geolocalization is awesome.

So all in all, facebook just collects information about you, but it's useless for the users. You just share photos, post comments about people you know, but nothing else really. And in the end, you add friends with people you might have lost touch with 10 years ago, and they will peek into your life, but the fact is your life changed. Just like in real life, you constantly have to use make-believe and behave well because your personal life is shared with all your friends at the same time. I don't understand why people really use facebook at all.

Facebook is about showcasing your life. It has become very superficial.

Are people nowadays not capable of moderation? Purely anecdotally, but I mostly see older generations being the ones that hop off. Is it because they didn’t grow up with this kinda of social media and can’t seem to balance what is a perfectly fine way to interact with friends and stay updated without pulling a cold turkey on it?

I personally mainly like to have my FB profile as a catalog for my pictures, and might casually browse it when I got nothing else to do. There’s a lot of value in various FB groups, for example, I’m currently in South Korea for a year, and there are communities in the different areas for posting apartments and asking questions for expats and internationals.

I don’t know what I’m trying to get at, but I feel that the cold turkey approach is rather an indication of a persons lack of self-control and moderation - you don’t have to choose an all or nothing approach, simply disable notifications if that is what’s bothering you, unfollow people that annoy you, and a ton of other methods to handle these things other than going nuke-all.

  Are people nowadays not capable of moderation? Purely
  anecdotally, but I mostly see older generations being the
  ones that hop off. Is it because they didn’t grow up with
  this kinda of social media and can’t seem to balance what
  is a perfectly fine way to interact with friends and stay
  updated without pulling a cold turkey on it?

I’m not sure I follow what is implied here? I’m an avid consumer of HN, mostly out of boredom or in my brain breaks.

>It wasn't until I found a "last straw" that I finally managed it permanently, and that was the runup to the recent US election

Or you could a) not be afraid of having political discussions (although that honestly sometimes probably isn’t possible in the way the US handles their discourse), or b) just not comment on those posts. But alas, to each their own, not like I gain anything from people either leaving or staying.

Is there anything inherently bad in that? You have to do something on the boring commute. This is honestly the worst example as a counter-point, literally in a situation where you have little else to do, and even then, that something definitely also depends on where you are.

For instance, in Japan I mostly see people playing games, IM’ing or reading pocket books. In South Korea I honestly don’t see phones that often in public transportation, and in Denmark it is maybe half social networks and half just reading online or listening to music.

The second aspect is social assumption. All smartphone use in a car is labeled as "texting" although I haven't used legacy SMS messages since about the time I got a smartphone (although SMS texting long predates smartphones of course). Culturally among non-technical people all messaging apps from Slack to IRC to the big advertising companies is "texting" which leads to confusion when a normie asks you to text them, they mean guess which of the dozen or so popular messaging apps you connect with them on, whereas I'm trying to remember how to use old fashioned SMS on my phone. Likewise everyone on the subway does social media, even if everyone is actually changing podcasts/music/audio books or reading ebooks or general web surfing around or whatever rando thing. I feel guilty about the endless indoctrination on billboards about "texting kills" when driving, especially when I'm merely changing my audiobook in audible while at a stop sign, not texting someone a copy of War and Peace at 85 MPH, although I don't feel any discomfort about the endless indoctrination about "drinking and driving kills" despite sipping tap water from a water bottle occasionally in public while driving. Worry of what if someone thinks my water bottle is full of grain alcohol isn't part of culture as much as what if someone thinks my safe audible app is (literally) killer app facebook messenger?

Third aspect as an older guy I can still remember when the default "I'm bored" activity was mindless TV watching. You might wish the default bored activity is not social media but something more useful, like online MOOC education or reading great books or prayer or whatever but lets be realistic, endless scrolling social media is of the Mork and Mindy syndicated TV show rerun social class of activity, the people doing it will merely find something even more inane to fill downtime, perhaps spinning fidget spinners to ever higher RPMs. As an inane time filler, social media isn't that bad compared to the realistic practical alternatives.

So I think the thing that makes them addicted and the thing that stops them regulating themselves is the very thing that Facebook uses and promotes.

Your account will get reactivated if you click through one of their emails or use FB login though.

I live in Europe, and yes the majority of people I know have an account, but nowhere near all of them, and they're often unfrequent users. But more importantly: with the places where FB is banned, all of the people too young to be on it, all the people too old to have an interest, and all of the people who have in general a limited/difficult Internet access and have more important things to do than get facehooked? Being told that 2 out of every 7 human being manually created their account and are 'active users' who log in at least once a week (or is it month?), somehow leaves me skeptical.

Interesting question is do they actually make any money in emerging markets and are those billion users actually an asset.

I have a feeling that, thanks to smartphone adoption, legions of people are counted as 'in' by FB only because the app is running in the background, when in fact it's not seeing any significant use.

The privacy issue is certainly a factor but over time it feels more like an expression of vanity. I am just a face in the crowd, what matters is the relationships I can build with others in the present before my pubes turn grey. If Zuckerberg becomes the Dark Lord it will be a collective problem anyway.

Real friendships will continue to survive and thrive, as they did before Facebook, as long as both parties keep trying. If a "friend" of mine won't invite me to a party because I don't have Facebook, he's not really my friend. It's as simple as that for me.

Of course we probably differ on what we define as friendship, but I believe you'd agree that having a fake number of Facebook "friends" is not going to change who your real friends are.

Facebook is one of many ways to talk to people (even tho I don't consider clicking "like" on something is in any way meaningful) but it is not the only one. If people force you to communicate through one mean they are, pardon my french, inconsiderate jerks.

I think this hits the nail on the head. 'Unplanned' is the keyword here. If it's a party it's likely your friend will invite you, but it's also very likely that you will miss out on some banter in the comment section of a pic they uploaded on FB because you were not around. This is not something deliberate—it's casual, it's unplanned, it's organic, and you will not be included in it if you are not on the platform.

I think a lot of people here on HN are parts of bubbles (for lack of a better word) whether their real life social circles are not very active on FB either. If that's the case, you can pretty much leave FB without it affecting you too much. But if your friends are active on FB, and you are the only one who is not, well it's your choice and that's perfectly fine, but it definitely has an effect.

People would think that person is strange and likely not interact with them or bother to invite them to events.

Sadly, this is becoming partially the case with Facebook. I am not talking about existing friends, but making new friends, especially among young people where Facebook is the norm and they don't remember a time before the internet and cell phones.

What you see as true is based on your unique perspective of the world. And I have to say that I am struck by your strange, possibly normal view.

Perhaps what you say is true. Maybe society has technologically evolved to the point where we ought to care about what you've fear-mongered.

But I must say, your fear-mongering might be a result of your personal fears, and therefore might not be applicable to most other people.

Your first question is a strawman and hurts the general point of this discussion. Why include telephone with computers? I wonder how many people on this planet actually refuse both computer and telephone. Plenty rely solely on telephone and written letters, and they have plenty of friends.

I agree that people would find someone who refuses both computers AND telephones strange. That's because it's extremely rare - so rare that I have to ask you for examples of people you know of who act this way. I wonder if you're not just making up fairytales to make your fear-mongering more impactful.

"Sadly, this is becoming partially the case with Facebook."

You're attempting to compare the oddity of refusing telephone to refusing Facebook. Let's get serious about this. How many people do you know who can suffice as evidence for your above claim? You state that this is becoming the case with Facebook. How do you know?

People don't need lots of friends. They don't need 100s of possibly useful people on a website they have to maintain and update in order to "fit in". Based on what I've learned from history, people who keep to themselves and avoid fame live happier lives.

Social media has created the false illusion that you need to stay in contact with everyone you meet on a daily basis. Otherwise, you might lose out on opportunities to increase your social capital. It's a trick, and Zuckerberg has you by the balls.

Get out while you still can. Live a great life with a handful of phone contacts.

>People don't need lots of friends. They don't need 100s of possibly useful people on a website they have to maintain and update in order to "fit in".

I can guarantee that if you have the gregarious personality type that suits this type of lifestyle, having a large network of acquaintances that are conveniently accessible in a single location can indeed improve the quality of your life in a significant way. This is especially true for people who travel a lot or those who are in a university setting. It's not so much about social capital or social climbing but rather the simple availability of making plans and doing fun things with other people that would not happen without the specific dynamics made possible by Facebook.

How young? Data I've seen say that teenagers prefer Snapchat and think Facebook is for old people. The pressure is not the same across all age groups. That tells me that it's a generational / trend-based problem. And because of that, the pressure you speak of doesn't necessitate that we must use Facebook or <insert a similar social media platform>.

"having a large network of acquaintances that are conveniently accessible in a single location can indeed improve the quality of your life in a significant way"

Seemingly, but is that really the case? Can you speak of anyone specifically who sees a net benefit from the type of large network you're talking about?

I imagine most people with a gregarious lifestyle also suffer from stalking, harassment, identity-theft, and many other problems that result in them not even having personal social media accounts.

For people who have a large cast of fans to announce news to (musicians, celebrities, companies), social media can definitely help. But I wonder if we're certain of the net benefit, once you factor in all of the negative consequences (a few of which I just mentioned above).

There are other ways for those people to broadcast information to a large number of people without having to depend on Mark Zuckerberg or <insert another "hero">