I am seeing more of this attitude towards Silicon Valley every day. I really do hope the world's leading startup and tech habitat realizes that people are starting to get creeped out by data dicks tracking their every move and the arrogance of twentysomething billionaires who see the only way to a better world being more people who buy their products.

One can only hope that a society of successful nerds re-learns the consequence of not being cool.

I'm gunna defend the otherside here. As a recent post on HN pointed out, when Google Maps happened people were outraged that you could look into their yards. Same thing with Street-View. Zuckerburg just understands that we're moving into a post-privacy world and they're really pushing the envelope here. For example I think people were outraged by Graph Search, but I think if they were to have released it in 2 years it would have been received differently. People were at first creeped out by Google Now and Amazon Echo, but now most people don't mind.

The thing they should worry about is pushing the envelope too far and too fast. I think for-instance WeChat would have totally destroy Facebook if it weren't for its Chinese-gov't tentacles. It has a much saner privacy model where you only see things from your friends ( not to mention it has a much simpler and nicer interface )

All of technology's history has recurring themes of distrust. The first Kodak cameras inspired mobs of angry Luddites who smashed people's cameras, especially if people are taking photos of them.

Would you mind terribly if someone snapped a shot of you on their phone without asking? It's for reasons like these that the Japanese government mandates phones sold there make a shutter click sound whenever a photo is taken.

So yes, we do get used to things, generally, but there will always be activities people find off-putting, or creepy.

However, and this could kill Facebook in enough time, people can go "backwards" as much as they can go what the tech industry considers "forward." It could simply come to be that people, enabled by technology that easily encrypts their communication and obscures their actions, get sick of being watched all the time and prefer social networking sites or means of communication that explicitly do not track their users. Right now the global perception of trust is declining in nearly every major institution, and in the eyes of many who do not live in code, Silicon Valley is just one more group of rich elites who claim to make the world a better place but in practice make it more rushed, monitored, and unpleasant, thanks to lauded businesses that sell people's data right back to them.

I'm reminded of the scene in Fight Club when they loot a liposuction clinic to make soap: "Selling those rich women's fat asses back to them."

Japan requires the shutter snap sound as a way to combat a specific kind of unlawful photograph. Specifically upskirt and peephole surreptitious photographs, not to combat photographs of strangers, etc. It addresses a specific problem in their (and in others) society.

Of course that doesn't stop the harcore ones who build homemade cams into their shoes, or people sabotaging the speaker - but if stops most garden variety ones.

> Right now the global perception of trust is declining in nearly every major institution, and in the eyes of many who do not live in code, Silicon Valley is just one more group of rich elites

I'd argue that people who are not intimately familiar with the tech world see the tech as just a set of products that does things for them, with the additional filter of the mainstream media and their friends/family on top of it.

Most people don't know what kind of data is being gathered about them, and they don't care about the implications of that data. To be fair, it is a difficult thing to conceptualize and quantify. Facebook provides a great service to connect with friends and family. The question is - what's the price?

> The question is - what's the price?

I am familiar with the tech world and I keep asking myself this question too. From what I see now, all the data that Facebook collects can hurt me in two ways: more insidious ads, and when used by a superhuman-level AI to infer pretty much anything about me. The AI doesn't seem on the horizon, and the ads don't seem to be that harmful, they're only annoying. There's of course an angle of a dystopian totalitarian government, but in that case we're all screwed anyway; data collected by Facebook or Google will make little difference.

Then there's an insurance angle, but here I have mixed feelings - it seems to me that it's better for an insurer to know more (I for one would like car insurance companies to have real-time centimeter precision location data about every driver, that could restore some sanity on the roads), but not too much. I don't know where I stand on this yet.

Anyway; the way I see it, this whole data-selling business model works mostly because advertisers are stupid enough (or rather, in so tight a competition) to pay for data that won't give them much edge anyway. In a way, it's not users that are the victims here, it's the advertisers.

The data-selling business model is just one aspect of what could be considered harmful, another aspect is the privacy aspect. For example, potential employers looking through your Facebook posts to see what your personal views and social life are like. It's possible to argue that it's possible to limit access to Facebook content, though there are often changes made to Facebook that make such privacy harder to obtain.

So when working out the price of a service like Facebook, it's important to include the cost of privacy (even if this is effectively impossible to put a numerical value on).

Right. I agree parts of this can be put on the "costs" side of Facebook use.

But this aspect isn't basically the issue of publishing? If you post your Facebook status/photos and mark them publicly visible, you're a publisher. Other people can see it. If, however, you limit it to your friends only, then if your non-friend boss sees them it means someone screwed up - which doesn't seem any different than someone gossiping about you in real life.

Anyway, this aspect is something where I think we need to grow up as a society. Your boss probably did (or still does) the same stupid shit that you do, so him making an issue out of that drunk photo of yours is utterly hypocritical. Looking at some things posted by people with status I'm beginning to believe that Facebook is actually helping here - people are getting used to the concept that they're no different than anyone else wrt. weirdness, and that they can be judged by others just like they themselves judge other people. In the face of this, I hope everyone will finally agree to chill out and stop judging one another entirely :).

> "But this aspect isn't basically the issue of publishing? If you post your Facebook status/photos and mark them publicly visible, you're a publisher."

Sure, that's part of it. However, the issue is that Facebook have tried to increase what constitutes public Facebook content over time.

Here are a couple of links about this:

http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/

https://www.eff.org/en-gb/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timelin...

You also have another group of privacy invasions enabled by the phone apps from Facebook:

https://en-gb.facebook.com/help/210676372433246

http://fortune.com/2015/11/09/facebook-photo-scanning/

I'm sure I could find other privacy issues with Facebook. Can you opt-out of all of this? Probably, but it certainly requires vigilance by its users, especially when new features are rolled out.

What does `post-privacy world` even mean? Who decided that that's where we're going and there's no alternative?

I think the assertion is that Joe Public doesn't really care about his/her privacy anymore provided they consent to it's initial release.

It seems to me that over a billion people are fine giving their privacy over to Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/<insert other company> but not necessarily the Government (of any country).

> "I think the assertion is that Joe Public doesn't really care about his/her privacy anymore provided they consent to it's initial release."

People do care about it, they just don't think about it that often, or only think about people seeing their tamest online behaviour. Here's one recent example of where a privacy policy did capture the public's attention:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/snapchats-new-scary-privacy...

> People do care about it, they just don't think about it that often, or only think about people seeing their tamest online behaviour.

There's also a big difference between not caring and caring, but feeling powerless to actually do anything about it.

For any of these larger privacy issues, most people are powerless to make significant changes. I can't prevent Google from driving its Street View cars by my house. I can't prevent Facebook from making shadow profiles about me. I can't prevent the NSA from conducting mass surveillance, etc.

I'll reiterate a point I believe to be true.

I don't think it's a case of the public not really caring about their privacy, I think it's a case of them not fully understandind exactly what data is collected on them and how it can be used nefariously by companies and by their government.

We in the tech field tend to have an above average knowledge of these things but Joe Public is very ignorant of it.

I believe if people knew exactly what was being collected and how profiles of their entire lives, their thoughts, their actions and their potential thoughts and actions, they would be a lot less happy about it.

The problem is educating people who probably already have enough shit to think about in their own lives and convincing them that this isn't all conspiracy theory.

It's a monumental task.

What happens when people's contemporary attitude regarding privacy and government is applied to corporations? Silicon Valley is in a perception bubble: people won't likely be happy with privacy invasions forever.

Progress of technology decided. If you hurry up, you may start putting some social/legal fences but understand that privacy is becoming mostly about what one shouldn't do, and not about what one can't do.

It means that someone who wants to make money off your private information has decided that they are entitled to it.

It means a world where privacy is reserved only for the rich and the powerful.

> we're moving into a post-privacy world

We will never live in a post privacy world. I'm so fucking sick of seeing people say garbage like that.

Exactly. It's as if some are just wishing privacy away as an inconvenience getting in the way of tracking us for advertising revenue.

So what does a post privacy world look like? Should we do away with curtains in our bedrooms? Should we remove the doors from public restrooms?

Why is conflating these two issues defending the other side?

John Lennon used to say: > Imagine all the people living life in peace

But my imaginary friend used to say: > Imagine the most average people you can imagine. Imagine the most 50%isch people you can imagine. > And then internalize that half of the population is dumber, cares less, is less engaged and thinks less that that dude. > And then, just forget about what you thought and try to make something that you enjoi. Because, people are dicks. > Like those data tracking dicks. Just on a very personal level.

I really don't get the argument here. If you don't like Facebook, don't use it. No one is forcing you.

Many people choose to use Facebook, and in fact use it a lot more than almost any other site/application. Who are you to decide for someone else whether Facebook is good or not? Who are you to decide that these people aren't really getting something out of Facebook? Who are you to decide that they're all "manipulated", forced to do something they don't want to?

Seriously, at what point is it considered arrogant to just assume that so many people are "wrong"? 1 billion people choosing to use Facebook sure sounds like a pretty compelling argument that Facebook provides them with at least some value.

Compare it to smoking, for example. Addictive, harmful, billions of people doing it.

Including the "2nd hand" problems when people that don't have an account are referenced or included in an email.

It's worse than that. If you don't have a profile, Facebook builds a shadow profile of you based on data from data brokers and the social graph of people who do use Facebook. It should be illegal (Belgium is fining Facebook tens of thousands of Euros a day if they don't stop doing it in Belgium).

http://www.zdnet.com/article/firm-facebooks-shadow-profiles-...

There was a full blown study released stating Facebook actively manipulated users news feeds for something like 6 months [1]. That's one way to manipulate their emotions and such.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+study+manipulating+...

Oh, "manipulated". In no worse way than I'm manipulating you now by writing a hasty, little aggressively-toned response. Reading this comment will probably shift your mood a tiny percent down. Should I call my university's ethics board to ask if I can post this comment?

The whole "Facebook manipulating emotions" fiasco is one of the most ridiculous things I've seen happening in the field of social sciences in front of my own eyes. And it illustrates a very dangerous thing about science reporting - hyperbolizing. Almost nobody reads the primary sources (like actual papers), so when a journalist starts using strong words like "manipulated", it colors people's interpretations of the issue, leading them to severly overestimating the meaning of the issue - lo and behold, you can create a shitstorm out of thin air.

The way press was describing Facebook's "manipulating users' emotions" is akin to describing sneezing as an act of biological warfare. Scope matters.

If a user sees photos of their acquaintances going on vacations every day on their respective newsfeed he/she will most definitely feel down on their luck. Disregarding the ethics of the study completely, Facebook certainly forces people to have a negative outlook on their personal lives.

Again, what's the magnitude of this? The way I see it, they aimed for just enough above the noise floor that they could notice some aggregate effects, but low enough that it's below what you'd expect to see in your life at random, every now and then. I honestly think journalists and advertisers do much, much bigger damage here, by constantly exposing us to fabricated, unrealistic dreams of things we can't be and won't have. Compared to that, Facebook is a fresh breeze of honest life experience.

Anyway, I see how people can have problems with Facebook's actions here (though I personally don't, and I'd actually encourage more of such studies - it's an unique vector that could lead to actually meaningful results in social sciences). But the point is, it was totally overblown in media reports, and it still is being totally overblown by commenters on Hacker News. Facebook could not drive you to suicide on purpose by this, so please everyone, stop saying as if they could.

What hedgew said was based on empirical research. Sure it may be a flawed conclusion (and that was noted), but yeah, research allows you to make (tentative) claims about the world.

Facebook's editorial control of users' postings makes it feel I have no control over when/where my own updates appear, thus rendering it irrelevant to me, though I do use it to follow others.

Also, the bulk of my friends on Facebook, by and large, regurgitate garbage 'viral' content I have no interest in.

Links to interesting content for me, are on Twitter, Bandcamp and YC.

It's difficult to rank all the content that is posted on Facebook - filtering by time is one easy pivot, but IMO it becomes difficult to pull the signal out (I find twitter to be a torrent of data I can't keep up with).

The upside is that time is an easy pivot to understand, and if someone close to you posts something and immediately asks you "do you see my post?", it's trivial to answer with confidence.

It would be nice if Facebook exposed controls to allow users to sort their news feed - by time and by whatever other metrics they're currently using.

Facebook's editorial control of users' posting is the natural consequence of you having way too many people in your circle of friends. Average FB user has how many - 100 friends? 500 friends? If Facebook showed you all updates from everyone, as well as the large mass of fanpages you've subscribed to, you'd drown in the noise.

The point being, any usable social network will have to filter user postings.

I've got fewer than 100 "friends" and there are a few whose posts don't show up in my newsfeed. I think their algorithm for showing what people post is fundamentally broken.

Yes, I've gone through the "like/follow/show all posts" dance several times.

I did the dance too, initially, but quickly got used to the new model. I have > 500 friends, so the chronological show-all model would seriously degrade the utility of Facebook (though I am annoyed when I accidentally refresh the feed and lose the posts I only wanted to read).

It was a long time since I had < 100 friends, so I'm willing to believe the current model is broken for small amounts of Facebook relations.

"Just live with the way things are" has pretty much been my model for online services for many years now. It's the only way I can maintain some amount of sanity.

For me Facebook has generated approximately 70 happy points but only 15 unhappy points so it's a net positive. #Data

More seriously, there is no way to respond to "show me the data". The data for Facebook being a net negative is weak as well. Despite living in the age of big data not everything can be quantified.

For me it's like 150 / 20. I guess it's just that the vast majority of people who are satisfied with Facebook don't have anything to whine about, so we don't notice them.

(And yes, they're there - you can hear them whining for a month every time Facebook does a significant UI change - a month it takes to get used to it.)

The good they've done is fill the demand of 1/6 of the world's population who use the site.

> So far the data seems to indicate that internet.org is comparable to releasing swarms of burrowing parasites upon the poorest of the world.

Haven't a clue what you mean by this analogy.

> "Haven't a clue what you mean by this analogy."

The analogy is used because the benefit of Facebook as a tool to improve social relations is questionable.

EDIT: For those downvoting, feel free to tell me why you disagree.

I didn't downvote, but you failed to explain how Facebook's product could figuratively resemble a swarm of burrowing parasites.

The original author is trying to hint at his perception of Facebook as a time/energy leech, and its ability to become deeply ingrained in someone's life, to the point where the person might not even realize they're carrying such a leech around. It also highlights the product's highly distributed nature.

Seems a bit macabre and dramatic to me, but there you go.

> "It also highlights the product's highly distributed nature."

As far as I can see, that's not why the analogy was used. Clearly my interpretation was not clear enough, so to spell it out:

A mission to spread Facebook to those who haven't been connected to the Internet yet is not necessarily a noble goal. It is only a noble goal if Facebook is a net positive in people's lives. If it is a net negative then spreading Facebook further through a program like Internet.org could do more harm than good. The less problematic features of Internet.org could be seen as the sugar coating on top of a less attractive proposition, parasites that disrupt how people relate to each other.

I don't use Facebook that much, and I know some that are happy to use it casually, but I also know people who appear to be practically addicted to it. It's not too much to ask that we examine whether its benefits outweigh its drawbacks.

Is there good data on how Facebook use affects mood (outside of experiments to manipulate it directly)? It certainly increases the costs of being a sociable non-facebook-user.

If Facebook hadn't existed (nor any other high profile social network) I wouldn't have been invited to half the social events I've attended. Thus, I have a lot more friends than I did. Some data.

I bet you would have just as many friends without facebook. That's limited by your capacity to make friends, not the social media you use.

Social media expands one's capability to make (and more importantly, keep) friends, especially if one's busy and/or not an extrovert.

The idea that social media can do this is the central conceit of facebook. A friendship maintained solely because of an entry in a database is not the same as one driven by the memories of the participants. You are not extending your ability to make friends. You are engaging in something fundamentally different from friendship.

Look at the effects--- facebook depresses people, but meeting real people in real life makes us happy. You will say you need facebook to know where the next party is and meet those people, but that's like saying you need to smoke to meet people at bars.

Friendship isn't a token. It's a continued process of communication and exchange. You are not extending your capacity for friendship by submitting your life details to a social network.

EDIT: grammar

With regards to the original guy who said he went to social events from Facebook, you completely missed the point.

I disagree. Let me go point-by-point.

> A friendship maintained solely because of an entry in a database is not the same as one driven by the memories of the participants.

First of all, Facebook isn't about having friendships "maintained solely because of an entry in a database". There are other social networks for that (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, etc.). Facebook is designed to mirror your real-life social network (and the company itself actively pushes against deviating too much from that use). It's a tool that helps you maintain existing frienships, keep weak ties and incubate them if needed so that they may grow to real friendships. But the difference between "weak ties" and "actual friends" is very much dependent on your off-line activity.

> You are not extending your ability to make friends.

That's why I corrected myself to shift the focus on keeping friendships. Because that's what Facebook really is - a self-updating address book that lets you pull regular updates on what people you know are doing. It doesn't really help you make friends out of strangers. But it helps tremendously in keeping ties to people you know.

> You are engaging in something fundamentally different from friendship.

True, but I'd say it's something more. It's an enhancement, an additional aspect. At least that's how it works for my (real-life) friends and me.

> Look at the effects--- facebook depresses people, but meeting real people in real life makes us happy.

This I strongly disagree with, because for me it's the other way around! I'm an introvert[0], I find too much face-to-face interaction depressing and even irritating. But I do get a lot of fun from talking with people on-line, especially in an async mode. So e-mail, Facebook and Hacker News are a big win for me.

> You will say you need facebook to know where the next party is and meet those people, but that's like saying you need to smoke to meet people at bars.

It's all context-dependent. People who use Facebook to communicate will organize parties by starting events on Facebook. People who use other means of communication will utilize those to organize the same parties. When you see someone saying that they need Facebook to be aware of social gatherings, it only means that they and their friends are all prefering Facebook as a tool for coordinating those gatherings. It's a lock-in effect, true, but it doesn't mean its bad.

> Friendship isn't a token. It's a continued process of communication and exchange.

Indeed. And Facebook is an awesome communication and exchange tool that works perfectly for a great subset of population.

[0] - people don't believe me because I like to give public talks and have pretty well-developed social skills, but that only means they don't understand what being an introvert means; I love people, but in small doses, with enough time off to recharge. See [1] for explanation.

[1] - http://imgur.com/gallery/sZmXr1J

I'll cancel your anecdote with one of my own: If facebook hadn't existed, my life would not have been different at all. I don't use it, never have.

But so many people around you do. I don't use it either, but it still affects many around me.

It would have been different, you'd never spend the time to write a reply :)

I have severely cut back my usage of Facebook over the last 12 months. I forced myself to try to use it as much as some of my friends, a small subset of whom seem to use it obsessively to post trivial updates on their thoughts and actions dozens of times a day.

I just found myself annoyed by the sheer quantity of non-content, vacuous feel-good stories or images, links to click-bait articles or just outright ignorance and stupidity from people I wouldn't have otherwise suspected that about.

I removed my family and colleagues from my account a very long time ago. It very quickly became clear to me that having anyone like that on there was a grave mistake. Sure enough I was given some tired rants about how I was heartless to have removed them from my list ha ha. That's how seriously some people take this. It's bizarre to me. None of these people need to know anything about what I am doing socially with my friends.

I still have an account but I basically just check it once or twice a week for maybe less than a minute to see if I have any private messages or event invites. A few of my closer friends use Facebook messages as a primary method to organise meetups for board games or drinks and the like.

Since basically cutting down my usage to a few minutes every few days I can't say I've noticed any difference in my social life, but I've definitely noticed a decrease in the amount of inane rubbish my mind has to process from the News Feed.

I have maybe 180 people on the friends list and I'm starting to realise that I could quite happily go the rest of my life without speaking to perhaps 75% of them ever again. I'm not even sure why I accepted their friend requests in the first place. Maybe I was just caufght up in Facebook as a new experience initially.

I tried to use it years ago and found that every time I used it, I came away from the site in a much worse mood than when I entered it. I started arguments with and began to loathe my relatives. I realized my friends can't spell basic English words or compose complete thoughts. I don't care about baby pictures or what you ate for lunch, so my time was wasted. My life was actively made worse by its existence, so I stopped using it.

You made a right choice. Compare with me, for whom Facebook improves my relationship with family. It lets me correct my friends' occasional lapses in spelling, it only rarely displays baby pictures (which I abhore), doesn't show anyone's lunch (aren't you confusing FB with Instagram here?). Which helps me maintain weak ties with hundreds of people - ties which sometimes turn into much stronger ones, and that wouldn't be physically possible to maintain without Facebook. Which is another place for HN-quality-level discussions with both friends and strangers.

Facebook is a different thing for different people; I think it's as good to you as you're willing to maintain it. Also, if you have crappy friends in real life, you'll have crappy friends on Facebook.

Yeah, it definitely requires maintenance that I'm not willing to put in. Just too much garbage to sort through and throw out for way too little meaningful signal.

I wonder about two possible reasons for the difference between you and me (as representatives of classes of people who like and dislike Facebook, respectively):

1) When did you start using it? I remember starting quite early, so maybe the well-maintained garden comes from the fact I did it gradually over the years, so I didn't notice the work?

2) It may be simply that Facebook caters well only to some lifestyles, while it conflicts with another. And/or personality types; I think I've noticed that the more extrovert people tend to use Facebook a little less - mostly to share funny stuff and coordinate the next real-life party. All the interesting discussions I have on Facebook are usually held with people who, like myself, aren't very party-going.

It's a good question. I often wonder if I'm missing out on valuable relationships and stuff by not using it. But then when I do use it, I get frustrated and regret having used it. My stream could be summed up as baby photos; right-wing political nonsense; image macros; and pithy one-line comments with no meaning to me. I don't want any of that.

I never really "used it" for any length of time, just a few weeks or a month or two. This was probably 5 years ago. I still have the account, but I log in maybe once or twice a year. I basically accept everyone I've met IRL, because it'd be rude not to (right? I don't know the etiquette). I know there are muting controls and stuff, but that's already more effort than I care to spend given I see no benefit.

I'm quite introverted. I'd say I have about 10 people I'd call friends, and even fewer that I talk to on a monthly basis. I have my own sources of finding entertainment, and I don't like parties; I go to three or four a year and host one or two myself. That's plenty for me.

It just doesn't fulfill any purpose in my life and actively makes me angry.

(To be clear, I'm just describing my own situation, not expressing any sense of superiority.)

Thanks for the detailed description of your experience.

I don't like framing the issue in terms of "missing out". It leads to the "paradox of choice"-type worrying. There are always more interesting and fulfilling things to do than hours in a day. You seem to have developed a good social life framework for yourself that doesn't include Facebook, so I wouldn't say you're missing out.

As for stream, if mine looked like that I'd be unhappy too. You could probably clean up yours quickly though - just scroll through it and/or visit profile pages of some of your friends, and start "liking"/commenting on posts that you find interesting. Facebook filtering algos will quickly catch on your interest, and you'll be seeing much less crap.

RE etiquette, as far as I can tell you're correct; generally you accept people you met IRL, with rare exceptions of both kinds - sometimes you don't really like your new acquaintance, and other times you may decide to add someone you met on-line if you know them well enough already. At least that's how I myself and people I know use Facebook - maybe the culture is slightly different in other parts of the world. But the rule of thumb seems to be: if you think the person is OK and you might want to talk some more in the future, it's OK to send/accept a Facebook friendship invite.

> It just doesn't fulfill any purpose in my life and actively makes me angry.

That's totally fine and, IMO, a perfectly good reason to not use Facebook.

I never thought of treating it as liking things I like, instead of banishing things I don't. Interesting...

Facebook needs to have some data about your preferences in order to filter effectively; the most direct interactions you can make that send this signal are liking, commenting and sharing[0]. The most directly observable result of those is that similar content to the one you "approved" will be shown much more often for some time. From my observations[1], Facebook seems to do some kind of an exponential filtering (think e^-x) - things similar (or from the same person) to those you liked will initially show up much more often, but their rate will quickly diminish. But then, if this was a good guess on Facebook's part then you're more likely to "like" some of those posts, which sustains the effect. Another example would be "forgetting curves".

It may sound crude, but it is pretty effective. They make sure that you mostly see things you're interested with, sprinkled with some other stuff - because a) you might find it important too, but they don't know, and b) everyone changes their interests from time to time.

[0] - Yes, there're options to signal "please don't show me this kind of stuff" or "don't show me stuff from this person", but I use them so rarely I don't really know if they work in any other way than just blacklisting the thing/person you pointed out.

[1] - I've noticed this directly after liking a post under a fanpage I basically never interacted with. I suddenly saw their posts everyday. Then every other day. Then every few days. Another like, and they're back to showing up daily for a while.

And instead, you'd still have time to sleep, for hobbies; you could attend to less events for a longer time, or have meaningful conversations with fewer people.

But true, a lot of friends with the ability to press a button or to select and emoji to communicate is way better.

I'm picking up your cynicism and I've got plenty of complaints about Facebook myself (mostly related to how it's a closed-off system that requires you to use their service to communicate with people, unlike email where you can choose your provider/host and still communicate with people who prefer others).

That said, the idea that you automatically use such services for shallow, mass communication with large numbers of fleeting friends is sort of disingenuous. I keep an account there because like many people, it's a fairly effective way to coordinate with friends and family without creating long email chains or massive group texts.

Not everyone is trying to be a social butterfly, resigning themselves to quantity over quality or neglecting sleep and hobbies. Plenty of us have people we'd like to keep in touch with and a place to announce events (cookouts or parties we're holding, concerts or camping trips we're attending, etc) so our other friends and acquaintances can find out about them and join us in person.

I've currently got a closed group on there where 4 or 5 of us have been sharing our progress on some neat electronic art projects we're working on. It's not something we use at the expense of hobbies and interests but rather a common tool for us to casually collaborate and share the things we're interested in and working on.

So yeah, I'd love if I could use Google+ or some other service where I like the interface and features better and I'd love if that didn't require everyone to "jump ship" at the same time. A common protocol between social forums (again, like email) would go a long way toward addressing the complaints I have with them.

But since that's not likely to happen, I'll take occasionally checking my Facebook accounts for things people have shared with me over missing out on those conversations due to distance or personal time constraints. I don't live on Facebook but I stop by a few times a week when I feel like looking at Facebook. Haven't lost any sleep over it yet and I've developed quite a few hobbies around the communication that FB and other services foster.

>... by manipulating the way people socialize.

I realized this not receiving some of my wife updates in my stream!

Mark her as "close friend" / tick "Get Notifications", and you'll get every update along with a handy notification for each. Hover over the " Friends" button on her profile to enable that.