I wholeheartedly agree with this. I deleted my facebook account several years ago and I still have contact with my real friends via phone and email and a thing called meeting up in real life. All I lost were the friends I never wanted anyway.

As a side note, my company recently had a meeting with execs of our national branch of facebook, and after that meeting about 50% of our execs went and deleted their account...

>As a side note, my company recently had a meeting with execs of our national branch of facebook, and after that meeting about 50% of our execs went and deleted their account...

I am interested, can you please elaborate ? (Feel free to email me - see my profile - if it is sensitive)

I'd rather not, it is sensitive, but I can tell you that the whole management at our company came out shocked at how FB operated, and not to the positive.

The issue was the "product"s (i.e regular people) privacy and the attitude towards them by the local FB management.

Thanks that makes sense to me, it is the level of insight I was after :)

I concur with you. I realized that social apps were taking too much of my time an uninstalled them from my phone. I only use my laptop to access fb and Twitter and I'm very happy with the move.

How is HN not a social network? (I'm not being snarky, I'm just curious on your line of thinking here)

There is no network or linkage between users? And people are not allowed to post inane topics or messages.

Pretty basic.

How do you think the voting ring detection works?

Some users post contact info in their profile, so there is the possibility for messaging (email). Yes, there are policies, and structure and many good things - I'm not sure that means that HN isn't a social network of sorts?

I suppose it might boil down to a technicality, but I always read "social network" as a graph that describes how a group is connected - not as some strict technological definition. So a bunch of people that informally meet at a cafe to discuss politics, art and other topics can be described as a social network.

That is an implementation detail not a feature.

each human can have multiple identities as well.

free time which now you are spending discussing about FB.

Try doing that as a mobile developer.