from Hacker News

What should you think about when using Facebook?

by vkb on 2/3/17, 1:04 PM with 234 comments

• by afandian on 2/3/17, 4:28 PM

  This is an excellent blog post, though it made me sick reading it.

  I recently made the switch. I went from trying to limit how much I log in (to once or twice a week), to actually not logging in. I've been cold-turkey for two months (except for a couple of times when I had a very specific reason to check something).

  I thought it would be difficult. Turns out it's not so hard, and it's the fear of reduced social contact (or dopamine withdrawal more likely) that was stopping me. If you have a plan to replace the social interactions with other forms, you realise that the rest is just dross. If I really want to know what my friends had for breakfast I can phone them up and ask. On balance, I'd rather not.

  I'm not at the point of deleting the account yet. Small steps.

  Here were my reasons FWIW: http://blog.afandian.com/2017/01/why-i-am-giving-up-on-faceb...

  If you're reading and considering whether or not you can withdraw from Facebook, you can do it!

• by iamdave on 2/3/17, 9:15 PM

  I experienced first hand the drug like quality of Facebook when I made the decision to finally quit..I started asking friends if I had an up to date contact number for them as I was planning to leave the site.

  Every single one of them, EVERY one of them made it a mission of sorts to keep me from leaving the site.

  "Just unfollow people, spend less time on the site"

  Well by spending NO time on the site I AM spending less time on the site so hey we both get what we want right?

  One friend went armchair psychologist on me about the affair.

  It was an interesting week between emails,phone calls and text messages asking me where I had gone and why. "was it something I posted?"

  For my part three months later...I've been reading a lot more and my grades in pre-law are improving, and that's all the feedback I needed to know I was on the right track to removing unnecessary cruft from the life.

• by phatbyte on 2/3/17, 4:40 PM

  Last week I permanently deleted my FaceBook account. All my data since 2007 (10 years) and friends gone. Well...apparently my data is still somewhere to be used as metadata...

  Still, I must say, this was a liberating experience. I don't go there anymore to see another cat/new born/fake news posts. I don't get get angry with dumb comments. I don't have to see at my friends are eating, selfies, etc..

  My closest friends and family are reachable one whatsapp/imessage/phone call away. The other hundreds "friends" I had on FB, I don't even remember their names anymore...

• by frebord on 2/3/17, 5:06 PM

  Permanently Delete it here: https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account

  If you are considering getting off of it for any of these reasons then why haven't you already done it? You feel you might somehow need it, just like a heroin addict has trouble imagining a life without drugs.

  It is horrible for your privacy. They collect EVERYTHING about you!

  It is in their best interest to manipulate your attention, which to me is terrifying.

  It is horrible for your relationships, cut the acquaintance you met 5 years ago that YOU WILL NEVER SPEAK WITH and force yourself to make more intimate connections with the people that actually matter.

  It is horrible for your mind, you have a constant bombardment of instant gratification and self reinforcing ideas.

• by germinalphrase on 2/3/17, 7:54 PM

  Not long ago I was sitting with some long time friends I hadn't seen in a few years. It was one of those really great visits in which you remember exactly why someone is an important person in your life.

  One of the things we ended up talking about was physical photographs and how our families had developed a natural curation and annotation system. "Keepers" get sorted and labeled on the back with names, dates, brief notes, etc. and placed in albums. There were a bore when we were younger, but now we appreciate having some long-lasting artifacts of our families' lives and history. This is a nice thing and differs in importance to my every day interaction with personal media.

  If I had the talent, I would make a small journaling tool for myself. All I would ask it to do is remind me once a week to select a favorite photograph and make a brief note about who's in it and why it's important. Really, just 30 second a week. Then, one a year a nice, archivally printed photo album would show up on my doorstep with all of these photographs arranged and discretely tagged with names, dates, and notes. That's it.

• by nnd on 2/3/17, 3:39 PM

  Even though Facebook by itself doesn't seem to provide much value anymore, it's incredible how much of a platform lock-in the have. For example, Facebook login becoming essentially a universal identity provider. The worst thing is even when you create a new account under a different name they still manage to track you down, and start suggesting adding friends from the old account. I wonder how they do this, by tracking cookies and fingerprinting your browser?

• by cJ0th on 2/3/17, 5:46 PM

  The funny thing is, these are exactly the things I think about while on facebook. By being online for almost two decades I've developed a 6th sense for sketchy services and the whole UI of Facebook screams "SCAM!". The periodically reoccurring messages harassing you into uploading a picture of yourself, the prompt to denounce people who you believe are using a fake name or the vaguely described privacy settings don't help either.

  I only log in when I get an e-mail notification for a message I've received. Some time ago you could simply reply to that e-mail but that doesn't work anymore. Furthermore, you can't say: I just want a notification in case of a message. You have to accept some other stuff as well. I've told my spam filter to delete every e-mail from facebook that doesn't include "message" its the subject.

• by cygned on 2/3/17, 3:57 PM

  I left Facebook three years ago or so. It did not offer any value for me - and I couldn't stand the quality of "information" on that platform. To much crazy stuff in my stream, things I am not interested in, stupid games, ads, click bait, and so on.

  I also left twitter months ago. The people seem to be better there, but I have the image of twitter being a bad company. And the time spent there didn't provide enough value to me. It was too easy to get disrupted at work. And after keeping apps closed, the service became useless for me.

  Most of the people I have contact with are developers, and like 99% don't have a Facebook account either.

• by daemonk on 2/3/17, 3:57 PM

  Can someone make a browser plugin that will send fake data to facebook? Instead of hiding your own behavior, might as well poison their database.

• by Kiro on 2/3/17, 3:16 PM

  I treat everything I do on Facebook as public and permanent information. With that mindset the experience is rather pleasant.

• by anondon on 2/3/17, 4:27 PM

  Genuine question : do you think a privacy oriented social network where users pay a small annual fee (around $5) would work? Think Whatsapp (use phone number as an id, no native discovery, only connect through phone contacts, encrypted user data only to prevent database leaks from causing damage) + Facebook (feed like feature, share photos, videos, direct messaging, group messaging). No user tracking, no ads, just a no bullshit social network where the average Joe would feel right at home and also one which the HN crowd would use, assuming social networks have a place in their lives.

• by nefreat on 2/3/17, 3:45 PM

  Many people in the tech industry don't realize the tradeoffs they are making by participating on FB. This is to say nothing of the nontechnical crowd who make up the overwhelming majority of the site.

  My wish is that mainstream news media would cover these issues. It'd be great if most of FB's users thought about the troves of personal info that they are providing not just about themselves but their friends as well.

• by francamps on 2/3/17, 5:33 PM

  There is a solution that can help you get here, and it worked for me: unfollow everyone and everything.

  By unfollowing everyone except a handful of boring sites that barely ever publish anything, my newsfeed has become very boring and I rarely feel the pull towards it or any of its addictive power. The end result is that when I do log in, I only see notifications for a couple of groups full of my friends or interests that are truly relevant and I don’t waste any time scrolling.

  At this point in my life, Messenger (not from the main site, but from its own site) and Groups are quite convenient, and both are a bit necessary for me at the moment, so I can’t quite disable Fb, but I’m very happily giving up on the feed for good.

  I might eventually quit altogether, but this method has worked for me quite well for the last few months.

• by OliverJones on 2/3/17, 5:00 PM

  Another comment has mentioned poisoning the FB database with fake clickstreams, etc.

  It looks like skillful black hat marketers have already succeeded at poisoning FB's content. Read this Vice story, then delete your FB account and delete the cookies from your browser. Friends don't let friends use FB.

  https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/big-data-cambridg...

• by vgy7ujm on 2/3/17, 2:52 PM

  Start using other apps with better privacy for communication. Get a real website or blog for your PR needs.

• by ar15saveslives on 2/3/17, 5:20 PM

  Bit unrelated, but there's a working way to get rid of FB addiction. Just start unfollowing everything that you see in your "news feed". It's not visible to anyone, and you will gradually (a couple of weeks in my case) phase out of FB, just because there's nothing to see there.

  But the very first step, for sure, is to admit that you have the addiction.

• by tdaltonc on 2/3/17, 9:15 PM

  If you're looking to use Facebook less (but can't bring yourself to quit) I just launched a tool for that!

  http://youjustneedspace.com

  The iOS version is a web app because Apple rejected our native app. They said any app that encourages you to use your phone less is not appropriate for the app store.

• by cygned on 2/3/17, 5:58 PM

  The linked "Blue Feed, Red Feed" from WSJ is impressive and scary.

  http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/

• by toothbrush on 2/5/17, 11:28 AM

  A long while back (2012?) i deleted my Facebook account without really thinking it through, and i lost contact with a bunch of people i'd met during an overseas period. I still find that a bit of a pity, but ultimately (as cynical as it sounds) life goes on, and i've found more compatible people whom i care more about in the meantime.

  However, a few years ago i recreated a Facebook profile (this time a pseudonym with initially 0 friends) because some of the events i'm interested in (local music/art galleries for example) only publish their events on Facebook, it seems. No mailing list available, invariably. This is a pity, because i don't have friends to rely on to drag me to the good gigs (i like to keep up-to-date with local experimental music, for example, which my friends don't care for).

  And, the problem too, is that inevitably, i've made one or two friends with that account, partly with my previous FB experience in mind, and partly because they seemed belligerently anti-email (and texting isn't practical when you're in another country). So now i'm far from being back to square one, and i only look at Facebook about once every month, but i still would love to just get rid of it, except i don't really know how to handle musicians and artists who only publish their upcoming events on Facebook. But aside from that, the comments are spot on. If people can't be arsed to email me if i prefer email (and i, too, believe that i am easily google'able), they're probably not really worth chasing.

  Does that exist? Like-on-Facebook-and-relay-via-email-as-a-Service?

• by jgrahamc on 2/3/17, 3:50 PM

  A related question is "Should you sign up for Facebook today?". Five years ago I killed my Facebook account (and LinkedIn and G+) and it hasn't bothered me, but... am I missing out on something?

• by 3rdkind on 2/3/17, 5:57 PM

  Zuck: "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers." Oh, well, but they seem to be hooked in there anyway: http://web.archive.org/web/20150826205104/https://bosnadev.c...

• by Wajid_Ali on 2/9/17, 5:54 AM

  I think facebook is the most dangerous spy of the world. let me tell you a story, once I was setting with my friend and he was using his facebook app in android phone, and suddenly I saw, "Invite your friends to facebook" and the number and name down this statement was personal contact, and she don't even know what facebook is? you would wonder how I came to know about that number so quickly, becuase my nameing convention for contacts is very different i.e. like I write "C" before every classmate contact and "F" before every friend things like that. and then I stopped using facebook in my phone.

• by throwxwy on 2/3/17, 5:26 PM

  I keep my social media accounts locked down and off search engines, so I was surprised to see my name, photo and a link to my profile appearing in a Facebook list of people with my name when I self-Googled. The problem seems to apply to localized versions of FB (it-it, en-gb) so it is probably a bug.

  Google Plus had a similar problem, but for much longer. Even though my account was locked down, the people who had me in their circles were showing up in Google search results for my name, so I deleted my Google Plus profile, and advised my friends and family to do the same.

  I nuked my Pinterest profile after it was scraped despite being locked down.

  FB also did something rather disturbing the other day that reminded me why vigilance is critical. It generated a (private) music video about my friends, but freakily, the person who it started up with was a secret crush -the attraction was mutual but never went anywhere-from 15 years ago (we became FB friends a few years later). The two of us don't interact much on FB, so it must have inferred this based on her ongoing views of my profile, or vice-versa. My wife has no idea about this crush, and is friends with the other person. Our circle of mutual friends does know about it, but has kept it secret for years. Having it appear on my FB timeline would have been awkward, to say the least.

• by saycheese on 2/3/17, 6:14 PM

  Never used Facebook, though I'm postive they have a lot of data on me, for which I never agreed to share with them, cannot see, have no way to opt-out of, etc.

• by yeukhon on 2/3/17, 4:05 PM

  My take. I have been using FB since 2007 I was a sophomore in high school. A couple years ago I didn't use FB as often as I did, but just this past year I started to use FB more frequently.

  The change has to do with the people I actually network with on FB. I always have friends, real life friends on my FB, but most of them aren't very active on Facebook. This past year I met a bunch of new friends and they are the social bunch. I started to post more of my social life on Facebook. It's been fun to actually see what's happening in everyone's life. With the recent political shit storm in America, FB is becoming more active.

  I also started to follow a bunch of pages ranging from food to inspiration quotes to news page. They have been helpful to get me through my day, learning new perspectives and finding more interesting things.

  I've used other products such as quora, flipboard, etc but they don't provide the same conveniences as FB does. I have family members actively on FB (my father and my sister in particular), and I enjoy sharing my moments with them.

  I know there's a lot of privacy concerns with using FB but I simply try to accommodate it. I believe in controlling my privacy but I also enjoy using the product. As far as I am concerned, if I am not leaking my social security number or talking shit about my work on FB, I am not too concerned.

  But in the future when I become a parent, I would certainly be concerned of the safety and the privacy more and more, specifically how it is easy for someone to look at another person's profile for as long as the profile is shared with friends and friends. Fake news and the left/right war on Facebook are also quite problematic.

• by mydpy on 2/3/17, 4:26 PM

  I think it's interesting that despite deep and widely-publicized privacy concerns, Facebook's users have mostly been loyal to the platform. Myself included.

  Data collections seems necessary to monetize the platform. Are there any alternatives, or do we just need smaller more close-knit social networks?

• by andy_ppp on 2/3/17, 3:19 PM

  I think about it as a simple Message and Event's calendar that my friends have access to me once per week when I look at it.

  Also occasionally use it as a login systems for sites I don't want to sign up to.

  What else does it do? I unfollowed everyone/thing from my wall ... which seems to improve it somewhat!

• by james_niro on 2/4/17, 5:55 AM

  Going on two years without Facebook. At first I thought it will be hard to stay in touch with friend but it is the opposite, I get to hangout more often with my friends, our conversations are more intimate, we genuinely want to know what happened since we last saw each other. As far as news goes I subscribed to news paper, have dozen email subscriptions which delivers it to my inbox every morning.

  I started making photo albums again and putting my pictures in there whenever friends come over I get to show it to them.

  As far as cat videos goes I get to watch them on YouTube

  To be honest it has been the most productive time of my life since I deactivated Facebook and my friendship has become stronger

  Moral of the story yes you an live without Facebook

• by TIMALAUS on 2/4/17, 5:04 AM

  Nice Post! Learned a lot. Thank you!

  I've removed my Facebook account 3 years ago and never looked back. Everyone who should be in touch with me have my e-mail address and mobile phone number, other's who actually want to take a sniff into my life try to trick me creating one, but hey - I've been there, f*ck off. Nonetheless I relocated to the US, Boston, 7 months ago and haven't acquired any meaningful friendship with anyone, I still don't care. I better off read Literature and Philosophy rather than infinite stream of non-sense.

  GJ

• by neltnerb on 2/3/17, 6:34 PM

  I wonder if the edge case has been tested wherein someone turning 18 retroactively withdraws consent their parents gave when uploading information about them while they were minors. Taking photos of other people and data mining them, especially minors, seems like something that is very probably illegal in at least a few states. Would be very curious if on someone's 18th birthday they can actually force Facebook to delete everything they have about them.

• by bjourne on 2/3/17, 5:10 PM

  I've always had the wrong birth date on Facebook because I'm not comfortable with sharing too much personal information with that company. So people have been congratulating me on the wrong date. Which doesn't bother me at all because keeping track of peoples birthday is impossible. But I've gotten the impression from some that I've broken a taboo and that they think it is deceptive of me to have the wrong birth date displayed.

• by malz on 2/3/17, 6:33 PM

  >As you are crafting your message, Facebook collects your keystrokes.

  Does anyone have evidence of this? Not surprising or difficult, of course, but while watching ajax traffic and typing into a status box I don't see obvious posts with either the text I'm typing or obscured blobs. On the other hand, there's plenty of ajax traffic polling for updates and sending other analytics.

• by astanway on 2/3/17, 4:25 PM

  "A similarly-sized company of 15,000 might have 5 data scientists" - this is so far off the mark I don't even have a response.

• by owly on 2/4/17, 4:12 AM

  Deleted FB years ago and haven't missed it one bit. Get out while you can and block all FB domains via hosts or on your router.

• by siegecraft on 2/3/17, 4:42 PM

  Does anyone have suggestions or best practices for using facebook securely (ie to maintain an account but not let it be linked w/ all of your other browsing activities)? I was thinking something like hosting a hardened/non-fingerprintable browser from a VPS/cloud provider somewhere and only using that to interact with the site.

• by omilu on 2/5/17, 2:24 AM

  With respect to tracking you throughout the interwebs, Amazon is as bad. It pisses me off when I look at a pair of shoes then start seeing amazon ads on every site I go to for months, hey remember the shoes you looked at?

• by Swenrekcah on 2/3/17, 3:56 PM

  Related: Now Facebook has been pushing the Moments app to share photos. I don't want to use it but a lot of people around me do. Can anyone recommend an alternative photo sharing app?

• by Wazzymandias on 2/3/17, 4:11 PM

  What I think about when I use Facebook: don't use Facebook.

• by xj9 on 2/3/17, 7:01 PM

  I usually think, why am I on Facebook? I just want messenger to open already.

• by okidwiyulianto on 2/3/17, 3:59 PM

  I think it is very simple. We should think positive update status. If we won't tracked as a 'blacklist' we should have decorum or ethical.

• by okidwiyulianto on 2/3/17, 4:11 PM

  I should think, can I beat Facebook? If no. So give up. If yes, make something interesting than Facebook.

• by PunchTornado on 2/3/17, 10:25 PM

  Facebook is good for one thing only: organizing political protests.

• by ben_jones on 2/3/17, 7:43 PM

  Damn you, Tinder.

• by jeffrey-sean on 2/3/17, 11:19 PM

  Whether you realize it or not, your posts are being analyzed by everyone.

  Use a free service like Rep'nUp to identify all unprofessional posts, images, and tags. You can then link back to each post and curate if needed.

  https://www.repnup.com/