As I have related in another HN thread, I actually enjoy the friend-mash-up aspect of Facebook. I am more than twice as old as the median HN participation age (I'm pretty sure), and I have lived in more than one country, so I have friends from various eras of my life and various places. Now on Facebook I post a lot of links (some of which I learn about here on HN, with a hat tip in gratitude) and friends comment about those links, with all sorts of interesting discussions with diverse viewpoints. Friends of mine who have never, ever met one another are good virtual friends as they meet up in my discussion threads. There are even FB friends of my FB friends who have asked me to become directly FB-friended by me (a request I have honored) so that they can get in on all the link postings. This has been a fun and unexpected aspect of FB for me. I block ads on Facebook and all other websites, and I use Facebook Purity to block other FB annoyances. I never, ever play FB games or do anything on FB that directly costs me money. I like the way I can free-ride on FB and enjoy a service monetized by people who have less intellectual ways of having fun.