> (Ideally, tech-savvy people will type f and see no signs of facebook whatsoever, but that's an orthogonal issue.)

I'm tech-savvy and I use Facebook all the time. :-P

Going off-topic here, but outside of Facebook's issues with privacy, I think Facebook is a fine platform. Most of the issues people have with Facebook (again, ignoring the privacy issues) are self-inflicted. You have a racist uncle and don't want to see his bigotry in your feed? Unfollow him. Or in my case, just unfriend him entirely. You want to follow your government representatives to see what's on their mind? Great, just don't engage with the morons in the comment section.

Facebook is a great way to keep up with what your friends are up to. A friend of mine recently went on a trip to Scotland, and I enjoyed his posts on what he was doing. When I got married, it was an easy way to share the photos, since nobody uses Flickr these days.

That works for issues like "annoying uncle" in the US, I don't think, for example, Rohingya in Myanmar could just un-friend the ethnic cleansing that Facebook contributed to.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...

I think the biggest issue with Facebook I've learned recently is that on the margin their algorithms push you towards seeing things that increases their engagement numbers. I think it's hard to understand the effect on you from having every recommended item slightly not what you were asking for in the direction of making you mad.

> Most of the issues people have with Facebook (again, ignoring the privacy issues)

This is _massively_ shifting the goalposts. From a personal user perspective, the privacy issues are pretty much the entirety of the problem with Facebook.

But you're also missing the fact that Facebook _itself_ is A Bad Thing for the world, even if it is locally useful as a product. The parent commenter is presumably saying that it would be a good thing if Facebook did not exist (I agree), not just that it would be a good thing for each individual person if they didn't use Facebook. Even if _you_ unfollow your racist uncle, he's continuing to use the platform to hear and spread more racist invective.

The privacy issues don't actually bother me much because they're just being used to serve ads that I'm going to block anyways. I'm also sort of jaded when it comes to online privacy and operate under the assumption that every website and every device I use is trying to collect as much data about me as they can, and that the battle for privacy has been lost. I'll just run uBlock Origin to block the ads and most of the tracking.

> Even if _you_ unfollow your racist uncle, he's continuing to use the platform to hear and spread more racist invective.

They will ALWAYS have a platform, whether its Facebook, Parler, Gab, or Voat. It doesn't matter to me if they're on the same platform as me if I don't see it.

You and JoshTriplett are arguing different (and non-contradictory) points. You are saying that "the experience of using Facebook is pleasant and worthwhile for me, after taking some steps to alter my experience of it". They are saying "Facebook is a net-bad for society and we would all be better off if it didn't exist". These can both be simultaneously true. Overall-bad things can be pleasant for some users some of the time.

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> The privacy issues don't actually bother me much[...]I'll just run uBlock Origin[...]

That's nice (and I, too, have my own ways for mitigating some of the worst bits of Facebook), but the very fact that you are having to take steps to "protect yourself" from Facebook demonstrates that it is a flawed platform. The vast majority of users are either going to be unaware of those issues, or unable to mitigate them. This is (and I want to emphasise this, because it runs contrary to a common attitude on HN) *not their fault*. It is not reasonable to expect the average computer user to know how to install extensions, nor which ones are important and trustworthy. It would be a wonderful world if they did, but . The fact that we technically-minded folks _can_ mitigate the effects of Facebook's undesirable behaviour for ourselves, does not excuse that behaviour.

(I also think it's a little unimaginative to think that Facebook's tracking is _only_ used to serve ads, and that you will always be able to mitigate all impacts of that tracking - but that's veering into speculation)

> It doesn't matter to me if they're on the same platform as me if I don't see it.

It should do. The harm of extremizing communication is not (only) to the people that see the communication - it is in the outcome of that positive feedback experience. The end result of "communication that you don't see" is "real-world actions that you do see". Would you similarly say "It doesn't matter to me if the KKK are gathering to plan lynchings, so long as they hold their meetings behind closed doors and hand out their flyers on streets I don't frequent"?

Facebook is the largest and most accessible social platform in the world. There _is_ a difference between "Hate groups can collaborate and gather members on Facebook" and "etc. etc. on Parler/Gab", because the former allows them _much_ greater access to fence-sitters, the undecided, the less-politically-aware, and so on. Everyone and their aunt is on Facebook, but (mostly) only those who already hold a particular ideology find themselves on the alternative sites. If hate-groups can only recruit from among those who already agree with their credo, they're going to find it harder to grow - which is a good thing.

> You have a racist uncle

I didn't have a racist uncle - at least not until he started spending too much time on Facebook and reading every piece of racist garbage the algorithm fed him.

I didn't have an anti-vaxxer mom, but guess what.

I type f, see Facebook, hit enter, and by the time I hit enter, Firefox swapped the history result with some search autocomplete that's not helpful at all.

There's an incredibly helpful setting for this. You can change it so the search suggestions are below your bookmark/history search.

Helps me tremendously in that exact issue.

Autocompleting strings is something that allows you to take a shortcut (if it guesses correctly) but is completely ignorable if you never use it. Like, seriously, if you never looked at the bar while you are typing, it behaves the exact same way as if it had never been implemented.

Meanwhile, the omnibar changes old UX behavior to allow Google to MITM requests if people don't recognize it and update how they work. And most people didn't.