Ditto. I have seen this as a crippling deficiency in the Facebook platform. Not being able to search properly in my own posts or in the groups I'm a member of really sucks. For all the engineering prowess, open sourced tools, etc., shown by Facebook, the lack of a working search makes the company seem incompetent from the top down.

Sometime ago I started storing important information (like others links, my own comments, etc.) outside of Facebook where I can find them easily. I also started a Facebook page and added Notes into it to make it easier to document, find and share things. It seems ridiculous that I'd have to do this just to have access to information, but that's been the sad state for years.

Facebook is not the internet. This problem was solved long before 2005.

I've noticed facebook groups are replacing email forwards to some extent. Some of my friends have joined various groups (fitness, religion, science, etc) and I constantly see them 'sharing' various soundbites, very similar to how I used to get email forwards a decade ago.

Yep. At least among my friends, family, and acquaintances, nobody posts on their wall anymore; it's a wasteland of weird automated posts and the rare half-hearted re-share of a funny story about a cat.

Where the action is in the groups. Groups for friends, patient support groups, guild groups for MMOs, groups about crafts or hobbies. Which is weird, because Facebook isn't actually a very good platform for that sort of thing.

Odd.

I agree, but sometimes you just cannot. In facebook case - it basically killed most of internet forums as people switched to facebook groups. My experience is with car restoration/old car aficionados forums that were replaced by fb groups, but I'm sure it also aplies to other. So now you cannot find anything as they are not indexed by google, facebook search just sucks and if you set up you own forum then people just don't use it as it's "to much hassle" to open one more tab. And if you're in market for some exotic part fb is your only choice nowdays. Second thing, I don't remember where (maybe here?) I've read article how guy missed his childhood friend's funeral, because he has no faceboook account, and it was the only way that family informed his friends - by posting on fb that he died.

Yeah, and most people I know really only use it for chat, and only out of convenience.

I will occasionally use FB to post pictures and content to curate my public image in case people want to search for me, and most of the people I see on news feed appear to be doing the same thing. The rest are posting stupid content which they will regret making public in 10 years.

Personally, I'm still trying to find a social networking tool which provides truly transient, private communication which is securely deleted and not logged or mined by the company providing the service. Snapchat seems to come closest to this model, but the fact that it is limited to mobile and it's weak encryption prevent it from being used for actually meaningful conversations.

It used to be a great communication tool via "Facebook Groups", then people moved to other platforms and our groups lost their critical mass, and all gone silent. In these days I'm just occasionally sharing photos I'm taking with an international group of friends for showing each other nice things.

It also reminds some birthdays to me, so that's nice.

I don’t think they would.

Creation, discovery, participation, following. None of these is particularly easy if you revert to forums and Google. I won’t join Cute Puppies Forum but I wouldn’t mind following an homonymous group on Facebook for a little while, maybe I’ll answer some questions too.

The average Joe won’t care enough to join their little city group, but Facebook makes it so easy that you find all kinds of non-tech people on it, ready to answer your questions (and sometimes insult you, but I block those on sight).

For me, it has shown that a large chunk my social network is incapable of detecting bullshit. Last year I tried linking to Snopes or Politifact when people would post obvious falsehoods, but most people just don't care.

What I want from FB is a feed that doesn't include shares or likes of any external content. Seeing and reading about life events of my friends and family is what got me hooked on FB, but right now that's all lost in the torrent of bullshit.

Isn't this how people end up trapped in alternative-facts bubbles?

Uhm, yes. There are a lot of venues on the internet flooding with this type of content.

I'm not deleting my account. I only signed up because I was using the Facebook API for something once and needed an account to test. Other than that, I occasionally post links to news, pictures (look at my food! look at this funny animal!), and I check on groups that I belong to, especially the trading ones. The groups are especially useful. I also only ever log in from a single place, my mobile.

It always amazes me how people use it. What did you think was going to happen to that data? How do you think a service as large as Facebook was paying it's bills? People don't need to stop using Facebook. They need to sit for a second and think about they are using it.

It's also a lot less sreamlined. Dare I say it, reddit feels kind of like an RSS stream of popular content.

Facebook groups feel much more like "go check in and read this group" and the timeline has become increasingly useless.

I was able to do this by aggressively curating my feed. It worked, but it was already too late. ~50% of my friends had already ditched Facebook, and the rest rarely posted.

The news articles really killed the social aspect of Facebook, and the social parts that were left are just infuriating and upsetting. You end up "socializing" more with strangers who hate you than with your friends.

Facebook could've been a fantastic business (though still a cancer on privacy) by being the "identity layer" of the web. Instead it decided to become the worst news aggregator combined with the comments sections of old YouTube videos. Truly some of the worst product decisions ever made.

Why not have a Facebook account but only use it read-only for the most part? Nothing requires that you post your beliefs, work history, daily plans and such.

That's what I do. I do post a couple of times or so a year, just to keep the account looking used, but those posts are always just something innocuous. Usually just a link to something funny I saw on Reddit, but sometimes a photo or video of mine. The latest, for example, was a link to this video of several Chestnut-backed Chickadees that landed on my hand to eat peanuts out of my palm [1].

I do the same thing on Twitter.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShPgZhSbxU0 If you watch, I recommend a second viewing going frame by frame as they land and takeoff.

Except when there aren't. For example, my local cat shelter set up a Facebook group to coordinate volunteers. There's also a closed group for a particular program's volunteers.

Sure, they could have set up the groups somewhere else. A shelter I used to be involved with still has a Yahoo group. But the fact is they didn't, and the decision was made way above my level. So if I lost access to Facebook, I'd lose access to a lot more than Candy Crush.

This is not true for all people. Many people use Facebook as a tool for groups, events, etc. Have you been using Google or Yahoo Groups lastly? Facebook has less friction once you are there. This is not a Facebook defence just a reminder to "us" here in HN who use the Internet in another way and with a lot of expertise. Other people don't care if they are in FB, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc they just want a place to share their thoughts insighful or trivial.

Just an anecdote: once I signed up in Facebook zillion of Internet years ago I subscribed to the OpenBSD and C++ groups there. Obviously nobody posted until a few years ago when I started to receive updates. Obviously you will never search for an OpenBSD or C++ solution there but was an interesting social media change. Nowadays I find local groups like Data Science group in Argentina representing well the local scene.

Very cool! Don't meet many of those :)

I had the same experience you describe with Facebook after I deleted my original account, waited years, and then had to recreate it to be able to get information about some event. I had somehow failed community standards before I had provided enough information to tell them anything. Support got me nowhere, similarly to TFA chat history.

So I tried again some months later with a phone number or email instead of the other, and it worked.

It's very discouraging to almost be forced to use a service like that to get along in the modern world. I would have paid to use it to avoid all the bs, at least for the period that I needed it.

I was on Facebook when there were only a few schools on it, and it was very useful and very relevant. Because there were no other schools on it, I was only friends with friends from college and there were certainly no high schoolers or parents on it; you had to have a university address.

Facebook essentially got to where they were because that privacy made it awesome, and then promptly lost the very thing that made people trust them with their data to begin with, which was a limited user base.