4 hours per year on facebook is pretty good :)

Yeah, Facebook is nice. I actually spend about 30 minutes in an entire day (open it in the morning, open it in the evening), catch up on what family & friends are postin', maybe venture into a shared post's comments (I like watching trainwrecks), and then I'm done.

And then once every few months, I decide to dig in to someone's FB page/photos since I haven't thought about them in a long time and what to see what they've been up to.

I get enjoyment out of it. I don't understand why the people who hate it, hate it so much.

I'm one of those anti-Facebook people you're talking about. I have several issues with Facebook.

It's principally designed to profile people. This makes it extremely dangerous and a powerful weapon against you. Got nothing to hide? It doesn't matter if someone has something to gain. In the future, someone could easily generate a list based on your political party of preference. I can think of many scenarios how I could aggregate and abuse such information.

Facebook is also one of the least sincere communications I can think of. Many comments here reflect it .. "friends didn't know I was gone". They're not true friends. My friends all speak in person or on the phone. We catch up for coffee, lunch, dinner or as a social outing. I can't even imagine how people equate the synthetic "had a baby" tag (or whatever FB uses) even constitutes worthy communication. You didn't know a friend had a baby? Not a friend. They don't want to send you photos if you're not on FB? Not a friend.

It's fascinating to watch FB users chat online or see them in real life. It looks synthetic and there is a significant emphasis on minutia "[chuckle] my brother just had KFC for lunch".. To which I reply "aaannnnddd??" "Oh, he normally eats Subway".. "Aaannnnddd?" "Oh, you just don't get it!". That's true, I don't.

It is odd that we make so much noise about secret courts and encryption impacting privacy, yet, we give our privacy away freely on FB. To quote OMC, "how bizarre". I don't think I'll ever get it.

Yeah, I think we understand each other. I don't really hate FB. Or if I do hate it, I hate it the same way I "hate" World of Warcraft. I've just realized that I am easily addicted to things, and I recognize in FB something that could easily consume hours of my life every week. It's better for me to just pretend it doesn't exist most of the time, until the occasion where a real-life friend mentions something they posted on FB that seems worth delving into, like the aforementioned baby pictures.

Wouldn't it make a little more sense to spread those four hours out over the year? I never spend more than a few minutes at a time on Facebook, because there's never that much new stuff since I looked at it yesterday.

Yeah, definitely. I think for my personality, I just have a really hard time just "snacking" on Facebook. I also might have a more active set of Facebook friends/family than you do. I feel like whenever I open it, even when I've toyed with checking it weekly, I end up spending hours reading posts and articles people have linked to, etc. It's easier for me to just ignore it for months at a time and being okay missing the occasional important update.

I try to use facebook more [0][1] but I just find it boring compared to family, work, friends and HN.

[0]: I really struggle with faces and figured Facebook would be perfect for practicing.

[1]: If anyone knows if someone has made a game out of names and faces on the social graph I'd be interested. If not gøfeel free to steal that idea.

re [1] - closest I got to this was downloading profile images from meetup.com for a meetup I ran to help me put names to faces. I then created a series of Anki flash cards. I'm still terrible at it though ;)

I do agree it'd be a useful app.