Saying that facebook connects people only in ways limited by the imagination if its creators is true. But still, it CONNECTS PEOPLE. By deleting facebook without finding a replacement that is better than facebook, you are losing this new way of connecting people. Stuff like skype works for connecting with a relatively small social circle. Facebook allows a looser but also much larger circle. Presumably a better means of communication will come along sooner or later. The telephone replaced the telegraph, myspace replaced friendster, but until it comes along facebook(twitter?) is still the best means for this new large scale high volume asynchronous communication that we have.
I think this is largely a straw man, or taking an extreme case as representative.
I have friends that are not on Facebook. It requires more effort to stay in touch with them (for example, calling them on the phone) but it's doable. I don't see how a thing that was invented 10 years ago is now the sole method of communication with loved ones.
That said, I agree it's not without cost to delete Facebook.
I agree. My life has been much improved since deleting Facebook from my phone.
I don’t need a social network. E-mail and IM actually work fine; it’s trivial to include a link to web content in an e-mail which covers almost everything else.
LinkedIn is great for work; because it’s explicitly a curated experience focused on employment. But past that I neither need nor want a social network. I think this realization will be the most damning for Facebook.
My issue with deleting Facebook is that a lot of services depend on it for authentication and friend/contact discovery. I wish there were an open standard for a social graph.
Ehh I’m not convinced. I deleted my Facebook a long time ago (hard delete, not just a deactivation) and I’ve managed to replicate the same value I got from Facebook in Slacks and Discords - except it’s just stuff I want, and people I want to hear from. When some congressmen asked Zuckerberg about monopoly, I thought this: I actually think there are plenty of alternatives. I derive a lot more value from the Slack channels I’m on with friends who are now lawyers or tech gurus or thinking about doing a startup...and none of it is interrupted by ads or annoying posts from my parents and their friends. If the point here is “delete most of your ‘friends’” then why keep Facebook at all?
There is another perspective regarding "deleting FB is not viable option". When you encounter a case in your real life, when you are unable to stop using "something" even if it clearly hurts you, it is typically called addiction. Maybe it ia time that people revise if it is really not a viable choice.
Let me give you my example, I am not a FB user. Never was. Do I have problem finding events? Do I have less real friends? Is my quality of life any worse becoase of that? I have hard time going to all events that interest me, I am forced to prioritise meeting my real friends due to lack of time, I still chat with them using email, sms, phone, messanging. I dont see anything that FB could change here to better, only to worse, by alienating those real life friendships that I am having now (by adding endless noise of social network - I am having over 400 phone numbers in my phone, I don't want to get all the possible news about their life, it is impossible to handle).
Social networks don't help you having real friends, for those you need to keep feal life contacts, they help you to loose them, by giving you fake feeling that you have "bytefriends" and dispersing your attention from those you care the most to buch of insignificant acquaintances.
Facebook isn't dying but I think it is easier to leave than it once was. The pull of Facebook is weaker with the proliferation and growth of more niche social networks - or networks such as Twitter where users can carve their own niches - and other methods of discovery of content (the article mentions Reddit and StumbleUpon).
The common complaint that Facebook is full of advertising, apps and ranty, passive aggressive status updates is justified. It is possible that people will grow tired of having their friendships and other social interactions mediated through Facebook without major changes in usage habits (maybe something more intimate and limited like Path) and the way that Facebook goes about making money.
While I agree that Facebook makes it easier to keep in touch with friends - possibly due to the critical mass rather than anything inherent in the service, - I do not think this is necessarily a good thing. It is often passive (stalking) rather than active. I deleted my Facebook account last weekend and I already feel as if I have an obligation to actively pursue friendships if I want them to continue.
The thing I was pointing is that it's not about facebook: it's just tools; if those tools are removed, people will do the same with other tools (instead of whatsapp it will be telegram, instead of posts it will be twitter/reddit/...), it is just a matter of time until something replaces a void, because people are needing this nowadays
I believe it. Facebook doesn't have anything going for it at this point other than the fact that everyone is on it. The problem is that it's becoming increasingly less interesting, to the point where it will be no more interesting than the Yellow Pages - everyone is in there, but nobody cares about opening it up anymore, except for once a year perhaps. At that point Facebook is dead, and it doesn't matter if people actually press that non-delete Delete button, or they stop logging in to it.
There are plenty of ways to communicate with friends and family. If Facebook is down long enough, many people will just move to something else. (And I hope they do)
I don't understand why deleting Facebook is difficult. It may be the easiest way to opt out. It's no more difficult than abandoning corporate media. You don't need it. Connect with real people who you care about in the real world.
Sadly deleting Facebook isn't an option for me, as it has become _the_ place to get notified about social events around here.
Twitter/Reddit/whatever doesn't have as strong a presence here, and the traditional websites have all be replaced by facebook pages.
I've cut out all the services from my life that siphons my "metadata", and while my daily Facebook usage was around 15 minutes/day, i still can't completely delete it.
Instead i've banned the Facebook app from my phone/tablet and only check facebook when i'm at home during the evenings, and even then i use Firefox with Facebook Container.
As for (Facebook) messenger, i'm trying hard to teach people that i don't use it, or telegram, and instead they can reach me on Signal, or just plain old iMessages/SMS. It takes a few weeks, but usually people "get it" when i don't reply to their messages.
That's a bad metric. I find Facebook a privacy disaster (and user hostile and i am less happy when I use it). But am I willing to delete it? No, because if I meet someone I can friend them on FB later, and it's my only means of communication for some people. If a better communications network were available I would switch, but since there isn't, I can't.
Any company that wants to be as ubiquitous in connecting people as Facebook is should not have the power to delete one's social life like this. It's inhumane.
I don’t think there really is a need to get rid of Facebook completely if you use it for useful things. If you don’t do much there you don’t feed them any information and or contribute to toxic discussions.
EFF is not saying that people should not leave Facebook. It is saying that currently for most of its 2 billion users, leaving Facebook is too difficult, they wont do that and if they did that they would loose too much.
Your argument is phone and messaging which does not replaces Facebook for most of those people. Phone being completely irrelevant. Just because those people are not exactly like you, dont have same needs, same usage patterns and similar social groups around them as you have, does not mean they don't exist. Nor it means that EFF should not use them as an argument.
I wish Facebook didn't exist. The sad truth is that if I delete my Facebook there are a couple hundred people I would never hear from again. Countless community events I would never be invited to because Facebook is all anyone uses to get the word out around here.
Saying that facebook connects people only in ways limited by the imagination if its creators is true. But still, it CONNECTS PEOPLE. By deleting facebook without finding a replacement that is better than facebook, you are losing this new way of connecting people. Stuff like skype works for connecting with a relatively small social circle. Facebook allows a looser but also much larger circle. Presumably a better means of communication will come along sooner or later. The telephone replaced the telegraph, myspace replaced friendster, but until it comes along facebook(twitter?) is still the best means for this new large scale high volume asynchronous communication that we have.
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