> If you’ve ever had that conversation, you’ve noticed that there’s a big disconnect between your expectations when you communicate on Facebook and what really happens. Basically, Facebook filters out your posts based on whether or not people will use Facebook more if they don’t see it.
Too often I'd want to share or talk about something and radio silence. Checked with friends and no one saw it. Putting aside caring about privacy, why put effort into a system that over time is more and more geared to peddling crap to you and your friends, and gets in the way of actual communication.
Sure the app is a bit heavy with features I don't personally use (stickers, chat heads, games, stories) but it's at the point where it's easily the best messaging client I've used.
Remember when they tried to replace email with facebook messenger? And then tried to replace text messaging/etc?
If it's the best messaging client you've used, I'm bemused, because it's honestly no better than AIM was in 2002 for communicating with friends on my computer. In fact I probably find it worse most of the time.
Getting friends to switch to Telegram from Skype was a pain. Turning around and saying, after they got cozy, "hey Telegram blows, come check out Signal!" would result in rolled eyes and nothing more.
I concur that FB can be useful for finding out about stuff going in your world.
But if not using a certain commercial product -- any commercial product -- means "cutting people out of your life" to any significant degree, then well... you might want to think about the degree of dependence you've signed onto in using that particular product. And indeed, whether you really "need" that degree of (perceived) interaction with all of those people.
Note: I actually quit because I thought it would mean less procrastination, but then I discovered HN...
Or you could just do a quick inventory of which of those groups / are still important to you. And then sign up again using a different device / email address. Along with, of course, a totally fake user name. And (slowly) sign up again for those pages.
Which I guess would against FB's terms of service, in theory. But fuck that. They certainly aren't honest and above-board with you -- there's no reason you "owe" them any particular degree of honesty in return. Just use them for what you need, and let them (and their expected monetization off the minutia of your inner life) sod off otherwise.
As you with with, you know, any commercial product.
Even if you provided a fake name, you still agreed to the TOS, so they can proceed as if you're still bound by the legal implications.
We know they "can", in principle. But will they? That's something different.
Of course, the better solution is to never sign up with a real name in the first place.
They get info you still say, they get what sites you visit and what content is there, they get what you and your friends say to each other... like even as a partial user you still get MANY of the bad affects.
Not to mention, for me and many other people I bet, "cutting down" doesn't ever really work. They spend tons of money trying to increase engagement and make sure you stay on making that quite hard.
As with any serious addiction.
I suspect, the people you feel happy enough to call, will be people who you would be happy enough to keep in touch with no matter what the medium.
* I personally pay for Fastmail and have migrated all my communcations to email and texting (and feel the better for it). Obviously it is a personal decision, but realize everything you do is a vote towards a certain state of things.
This is anecdata but among my friends, e-mail addresses and phone numbers tend to change more often than their Facebook profiles. I know people all over the world, but out of all of Facebook connections, I probably only have accurate contact details for 20% of them or less. The contacts I interact with most often are obviously in that bracket, but many of those I talk to once a year or less are probably not.
Case in point. I'm currently planning a trip, and while on a previous trip to the same destination I made a couple of friends there. I have a phone number to one of these contacts, but it's out of date. However, we're also connected on Facebook so I sent them a message their to let them know I'll be in their vicinity later this year.
For better or worse – and this is obviously my personal context – Facebook is the best mostly self organizing contact list I've ever had. I couldn't care less about the wall, or liking things, or whatever you had for breakfast, but as much as I hate it it's the only stable way I've been able to keep in touch with all these folks that I want to keep in touch with. If or when I no longer want to keep in touch, I just prune them from the list, and likewise I get pruned from other people's lists whenever they feel we're "done."
I don't want to use Facebook, but e-mail and phone simply doesn't solve my problem of keeping an up-to-date contact list. They also don't work simply because I can't easily look up a contact and connect with them, because there's no global phone or e-mail book. I'd love to use something else, but fact of the matter is that everyone I want to keep in touch with is there, and until they are also elsewhere in a list that organizes itself, I feel obliged to use it. :o(
I email/text close friends and family but if I want to get in touch with a past friend/travel companion/acquaintance, FB makes that easier.
Saying that, a lot of people I come across now have also stopped actively using FB and are very involved in Instagram. I found it odd that co-workers so easily and quickly follow an Instagram feed but FB, email, personal cell #s usually took longer to exchange. I'm assuming because with Instagram, there's a degree of curation and it's personal but not too personal.
I also found it odd that peoples' dogs had IG profiles and they would use those profiles to follow other co-workers' dogs. To each their own, I guess.
- Facebook shows me updates about friends that I wouldn't otherwise know about. These updates provide an opportunity for a quick connect that is appropriately shallow, just enough to keep the relationship warm.
- For many people I have their FB, but not their email, let alone their phone number. I discover these people through FB's mutual friend suggestion. These people can be those I met briefly at parties, friends in primary school, etc.
- A public exchange on FB allows others to jump in and converse. An email is confined to the intended recipients.
Adding to this, text messaging and emailing and deliberate and specific, which means someone has to think to include you. It takes work to figure all that out--it is an active decision to communicate instead of a passive broadcast about something general that invites people to participate. It's very easy, and a good way to keep relationships warm and to make room for serendipity.
I don't know about you, but I really dislike things like personal newsletters and text messages/emails just to strike up any conversation, probably because at any given time I'm probably pretty busy, and being present requires both thought and time. On the other hand, when I share something on social media, it means I'm pretty much willing to engage with all comers, or if I see you've updated on social media, I'll assume the same.
Secondly, if you're that random friend that insists on only communicating via text message or email or some weird idiosyncratic way that applies only to you, I'm probably going to leave you out of a lot of stuff, even if I like you, because I have limited brainpower and I'm going to forget when I'm managing 15-20 people on a social channel and trying to update you out in the wilderness.
Lastly, email and text really, really suck for discussing topics in large groups, so if I send a link I want to talk about to a bunch of friends, I have the choice of managing 15 individual conversations (with lots of repetition), or managing an incredible amount of chaos.
So yeah, IMHO social media has definitely solidified a place in the communication stack.
1. Those who have a close circle of friends that don't change much over time. For these people, phone / email work great because they have a lot more depth.
2. Those who have a large circle of acquaintances that is dynamic (i.e. relationship strength changes over time, new acquaintances appear through FB suggestions). For these people, Facebook is the only way to keep connected, admittedly with little depth.
Everyone is a mix of these two archetypes. I have friends that I call, and also acquaintances that I chat up via Facebook.
Discoverability. Facebook has it inside the app. Email and texting require you to go out of band for it.
It's impossible to exaggerate the value of this. Groups of people who had lost contact in high school have gotten back in touch in retirement, planned trips, and traveled to a place to meet up together because Facebook has in-band discoverability. Before Facebook such a group of people would just hope someone in the group had enough time and patience to manually track everyone else down, which was probably hundreds of dollars of their time wasted.
Musicians find gigs through it. Friends of friends are leaky so you don't even have to bother people to find useful connections or fan pages. Businesses list specials, trips, blogs, etc. Way cheaper than sending out a snail mail newsletter or even managing an email list.
All Facebook's users save oodles of time connecting with acquaintances and making new connections, for whatever reasons they wish to connect.
Honestly, it's an incredibly difficult question to answer fully because I'm not sure where the short circuit is. Why do you see value in messaging protocols but not social networks?
Also students are highly reliant on it. These types of loose connections but strong network effects are hard to break.
However... > Way cheaper than sending out a snail mail newsletter or even managing an email list.
This is true less frequently. Facebook used to be a good organic channel to build, but now FB is forcing more payments, by forcing ads to FB pages, and then again for boosting posts on those pages. Plus, the costs are rising.
> Groups of people who had lost contact in high school have gotten back in touch in retirement
I experienced this too, but I also had a controlled test, since I wanted to track down some high school friends who weren't on Facebook. Turned out not to be so hard, and caught up with a bunch of other old friends along the way. :)
Sometimes the alternatives offer other advantages we don't see if we frame the problem as replacing what we have now exactly.
Less frequently than what? Keep in mind the OP I was responding to apparently didn't see any value to Facebook over email/texting. The fact that Facebook is willing to degrade its service even to be slightly better than managing an email list in return for higher ad revenue isn't particularly relevant to that.
> I experienced this too, but I also had a controlled test, since I wanted to track down some high school friends who weren't on Facebook. Turned out not to be so hard, and caught up with a bunch of other old friends along the way. :)
> Sometimes the alternatives offer other advantages we don't see if we frame the problem as replacing what we have now exactly.
That's great, but it has nothing to do with the value of Facebook's in-band discoverability over email/texting.
For me, there isn't one, and enough negatives to FB that I don't use it. I have no trouble connecting to people I care about via the many, many other methods available.
Voice telephone is becoming unusable for me due to spam, but so far somehow, not text messaging. (I guess the spammers don't cross-polinate yet?) I run my own email server, calendars, image galleries, and other tools for collaborating, sharing, ego-stroking and whatnot.
I do miss out on some random social interactions, but usually that's honestly a plus. Some relatives feed me the "email's too hard" line, and I take that to mean either I'm not or the message isn't important enough to bother, and that's fine[1].
At this point for me, FB is something I talk about more than I ever see - my view of the internet omits them (and several other surveillance shops), aside from the time between when they deploy a new splat of IP addresses and I notice and block them.
IMHO, the internet is much better without them.
[1] Of course there's backstory, too, but that's private, and not the sort of thing I'm going to discuss in public on a third-party server.
Events/Groups is big for me. Not FB message groups (but I'll touch on that in a second) but FB groups, it's great for topics that my friends and I are passionate about to post into. FB Messager groups are awesome because they level the field in terms of experience and in some ways beats even iMessage. It's great for knowing if your friends saw your last minute message about a change in plans and works the same for my iOS and Android friends. Events are great because it keeps all the planning for a trip in one place and provide a good interface for seeing who is going/not. Yes there are other places that you can do all of these things but it's all under my FB identity and that has value. If it wasn't FB I'd probably use Google which is 6 in one, half a dozen in the other to me.
> but realize everything you do is a vote towards a certain state of things.
I believe heavily in democracy and the power of voting but this isn't just a vote. It's a choice to leave my friends and that's a choice I won't make. It's great if you've got friends who are ok with leaving FB, mine aren't and I'm not going to change their minds anytime soon and more honestly it's not worth being that annoying person.
Many people don't check their emails as frequently as you think. I know quite a few people (young and old) who are constantly on Instagram, FB Messenger, iMessages, WhatsApp, Line etc. but check their emails once a week. Especially if they aren't in an industry that revolves around email e.g. customer service.
Texting costs money in some places and lacks rich capabilities. It's antiquated.
That said, all the different apps have a very different social context to them - how I meet someone and the intention of what I want to say to them will dictate which medium I will choose. Indeed even the expected response time will be different.
An email is a comparatively formal means of communication - I would expect the longest response time and would typically choose this for someone I either didn't know so well or was opting for a more official tone.
A Facebook message is quite informal so I would opt for this if I met someone under quite casual circumstances and/or I wanted to downplay the nature of my message.
Whatsapp is quite quick and fast to the point so I would use this for the fastest response time.
SMS has started to feel weirdly distant now, given that almost everyone is on alternative mediums, I find SMS to be quite the oddball for communication.
YMMV these are just my personal findings...
People who can't see the difference between email and Facebook are not even trying to get what they can from Facebook.
That being said I'm personally still using email the most. But we have these mental associations that one liner emails are a bit frowned upon whereas texts/messages can be 3 words or just an emoticon. That mental expectation and association that has nothing to do with the technical limitations of the platform define our interaction with the tool, for better or for worse.
Lastly I really value being able to send messages on my PC since I have wrist/thumb pain which is helped immensely by the ability to use a proper keyboard.
An email conversation thread (in say, Gmail) is a poor man's version of a Facebook post. You can add more people to the thread, but they have to look at this poorly formatted "quoted" history of the email to get context of what's going on. Contrast this with a FB Post where you can just tag someone and they see the post in exactly the same format as you see it. No weird formatting.
You can create "subthreads" inside FB posts by replying to a comment in a post. This doesn't exist in an email conversation.
FB Posts have a URL - you can link to them. This mode of communication does not exist in email.
FB Groups are a much more powerful version of email lists. They can contain events, people can mark themselves as "interested" or "going to" events - share these events with friends.
Do you use FB?
I feel the same about people who do use facebook, when they take pictures of me and others who are not on "The Social Network", then they put those on facebook for others to see with other personal information without concent, they don't inform me about their comments regarding those pictures.
For all I know those people could be making fun of me for not being on facebook, not being social enough, having unfashionable clothes etc. From my perspective those people have something to hide, they share information in closed groups, refuse to email me those photos and waive it away like it's too much work, I have even experienced this with some of my relatives which saddens me alot. I'm not forcing them to use any specific website, forcing others to do that is nasty, it's no different than forcing others to smoke by the means of social pressure.
> it's no different than forcing others to smoke by the means of social pressure
Yeah... no different, except one of them causes cancer but sure, no different.
Email is not a platform, I think you are confusing it with gmail.
> You can't walk outside the bar then complain that none of your friends want to stand in the window and relay everything happening to you or get mad they might be talking about you when you can just walk right back in.
This analogy doesn't stand because such pictures that I were talking about are more often than not are taken in the bar settings or other festivities. Obviously if I were walking outside I couldn't be on the picture could I. And it's not all of my friends that's the point, being forced to smoke even passively harms your health, being forced to be on facebook harms your privacy - that was my point.
> Yeah... no different, except one of them causes cancer but sure, no different.
And Facebook causes harm to people in other ways. It's an overly dramatic way of making the point, but the point is that people using Facebook doesn't just affect them -- it affects anyone in their social circle.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/19/popular-soci...
I see Facebook as a type of cancer so...
Maybe it's regional; I'm in portland.
Back when I was on facebook I had a friend who wasn't. I remember just being kind of annoyed that I couldn't just send a group message, I'd have to send him an email separately, but otherwise didn't attach any significance to the choice.
Exactly. Diaspora and its ilk miss this point entirely. If users have to set up their own infrastructure or even think about how it works then it's never going to scale.
This is the crux of the challenge.
Plenty of people are concerned about Facebook, not only for privacy concerns but also for its impact on public discourse. [1]
But any viable alternative must be mindlessly easy.
Salim Virani’s suggestion of phone and email instead of Facebook works in part — replacing Facebook as a messaging medium — but it doesn’t address the use of Facebook as a personalized news feed informed by your social graph.
We need something better. Something with a good mission [2] but orders of magnitude better.
[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604082/we-need-more-alter...
As for replacing a personalised news feed, I still use Twitter and find that email newsletters, especially curations like getrevue keep me well-informed on professional news.
As for a personal feed, I found that Facebook wasn't really that great - lots of noise and I still missed things I thought were important. I haven't found a replacement, but didn't feel the need to replace something inadequate.
To me, rethinking social means rethinking the internet as a whole. The dream of a decentralized global network has been stolen from us, and it's up to us to find consensus and work together to get out of this mess.
Very often people advocating that we need to flee from social media don't get the chance to argue or at least practice arguments against someone with such a clear and obvious stance as you.
In the end, people who hold a similar position as you, must of their own volition leave the site for a general uptick in privacy.
And the only way to do that is to show someone something they want.
Anyone have a source of "further reading" on perceptions towards people not on facebook? And does anyone have statistics on how many people in the U.S. are not on facebook?
I don't know joshstrange or his circle of friends but since I experience zero stigma of not being on Facebook, it seems to be highly depended on one's particular peer group.
If I think of the 5 people I regularly interact with, none of them have Facebook accounts. Therefore, it's not strange that I don't have Facebook. The topic never comes up. However, some of the guys' wives have Facebook accounts so in some sense, the female spouses act as the "Facebook gateway" to the outside world. I chuckle at this state of affairs because it seems to duplicate the exact situation of the yesteryear where the husbands engrossed in the newspaper/tv always ignored the ringing landline phone and let the wife answer it.
If it makes you feel better, a lot of celebrities (including some under age 30) don't use Facebook either. There are various articles listing names: https://www.google.com/search?q=celebrities+not+on+facebook
Edit: Did mean to phrase that like "just google it" I just don't have time right now to vet the articles and didn't want to post links before reading them.
I've never understood this reasoning
If you require Facebook to keep people in your life are they really in your life in the first place?
"If you require email to keep people in your life are they really in your life in the first place"
"If you require a telephone to keep people in your life are they really in your life in the first place"
"If you need to send letters to keep people in your life are they really in your life in the first place"
For me Facebook is my go to in messaging and events discovery/organisation and it is a genuine value add which I do not want to give up. Just yesterday I organised a party - the invite is on Facebook because every single person I see regularly has it and gives me a simple way to see who is going and contact them, and for my other guests to see the invite list and interact with each other/make plans around it.
Like it or not there is a social stigma around NOT having a FB account.
I'd even extend that thought to the current craze of US border control agents allegedly requiring your social media credentials for allowing you into the country.
Assuming that Facebook is a requirement to be allowed into the US, well, there's a host of other wonderful places to visit.
A world where you are required to do Twitter, Facebook or Instagram is a sad place, indeed.
When I first wrote that post, years ago, I expected most people to ignore it as tinfoil-hat stuff. But as time has passed, people are becoming more aware. (Also, the implications are becoming more costly.)
I no longer write off the non-technical public as "they don't understand/care."
This gives me hope that alternatives can work, even alternatives that require network effects. (Though, I think the best alternatives won't be another social network but something more akin to easy ways for people to run their own group communications. I don't think a me-too will win here, but something more of a leap-frog.)
We all have something to hide. It's called privacy.
I've been Facebook free for several years now. It feels great, and I didn't have to cut anyone out of my life to do it (who I wasn't otherwise already communicating with). Much less noice, more productive, both in my life and in my relationships.
Yes of course there is. Please do not take it personal, but the problem described in the article still exists, even if most people don't care. In Germany in the last century, most people cheered for a mass-murdering psychopath. Those who did not cheer, were surely stigmatised - right up to annihilation. Did this invalidate the stigmatised standpoint? On the contrary.
Well if it all goes to hell we will all be in the same handbasket. I'm simply not willing to cut people out of my life and miss out on things that are important to me because my data is mined and might be used against me. All these distributed platforms are a joke, no really they are technically cool but no one I care about is on them. Maybe if your entire social circle is technically sophisticated you can leave FB for something like diaspora (I don't know if this is the "new hotness" or if there is something better but I really don't care). My social graph is so far from able or willing to switch to something else it's not even funny. Like it or not there is a social stigma around NOT having a FB account. In fact I've thought on multiple occasions that someone is hiding something if they don't have one. You might hate me for that or hate the fact people think like that but good luck changing that mindset.
Look I've been on the other side of this, I paid for App.net (I think that's what that twitter clone was called) and tried multiple distributed platforms but they all fall short or require too many compromises. I tried to get friends to use Signal but no one really cares. iMessage/FB Messenger are just easier and everyone is on them. You want people to leave the "evil facebook" then make something better and easier to use. The best doesn't win, the easiest does.