They can post photos, statuses, chat with friends, reply to other friends' posts ... what can replace FB for them?
Nothing. So I'm forced to stay on FB.
Vile platform, no alternative.
It’s a chore for people to forward to my preferred communication method and easy to occasionally forget. Which snowballs into only hearing about events afterwards.
Eventually you basically become a weirdo with no mates.
I’m not prepared to make that sacrifice any more. I honestly gave it my best shot and still don’t use FB and Insta but have to use WhatsApp.
What you realy mean is that you value more the convenience it offers that the price to pay for using it.
These people are family in their 90s, for whom well-meaning children and grand-children have set up on FB. They don't use email, they can't write letters because of arthritis (and time delays ... international post can be very slow), and effectively the only async comms they use at all is FB.
I'd ask that you not try to tell me what I really mean.
They didn't have internet.
We managed to get in touch.
> I'd ask that you not try to tell me what I really mean.
Manner of speaking.
The important is again that it is a matter of cost vs convenience.
I understand the cost can get pretty high.
Yet still, people kept in touch for decades with old distant relatives before the internet.
Using facebook is convenience, that's the point. It is very convenient.
It's the whole argument of this thread: the convenience eventually makes most people discard the cost of not using FB as too high, and the privacy things as not important enough compared to that.
For the rest, see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32131180
Reading your post, it seems Facebook is a bit of a recreational activity to keep them sharp and social, which is good. What I was thinking is whether you need to participate in it, since the people this age I know is more than willing to keeping me up to date on all interesting stuff by talking. But of course each family is different so I'll just assume you know what you're doing!
But they like using FB, and it's the only effective way I know to stay in touch and remain a part of their lives.
People should be more charitable.
They said that they must stay in touch with these people and that these people can’t seem to use other things. Often times you have to stay in contact with family members because they aren’t able to properly care for themselves. Those same people may not have the ability to easily change how they interact with the digital world due to mental health issues and you have no choice but to meet them where they are.
I have friends that are not on Facebook. It requires more effort to stay in touch with them (for example, calling them on the phone) but it's doable. I don't see how a thing that was invented 10 years ago is now the sole method of communication with loved ones.
That said, I agree it's not without cost to delete Facebook.
So privacy is not important enough to justify those costs.
Sure, it's a completely different kind of platform, but it serves well. People post their travel pictures there, people ask random stuff and the group can discuss, we can have private discussions by clicking one name.
Sure, it's still Meta, and there's still a lot of bullshit groups, but at least I don't have to be exposed by it, nor do baby/kid pictures are exposed to the world, nor do I give money to Meta.
Of course, maybe by "Facebook" you mean "Messenger", which is more popular than it should in the US. Replacing FB with WhatsApp or Signal is possible because my family and friends are around Latin America, Europe and Asia, where nobody uses Messenger anyways.
There's even graceful degradation in your set of solutions:
1. You drop FB. Now you just look on your spouse's Facebook when necessary, and your family learns to tell your spouse to show you stuff on FB. Annoying? Yes. Unworkable? No.
2. Your entire immediate family drops Facebook. At least one (if not all of you) can still communicate with the rest over text. And the rest of your family knows how to send a photo over text on an Iphone. Annoying to extended fam? Maybe. Unworkable? Definitely not. (In fact, I'd be willing to bet that it cuts out extended family spam and makes those moments of connection more meaningful.)
3. You attempt a quixotic adventure to switching your entire extended family over to some half-baked decentralized alternative to Facebook that will be usable in forever minus a day. Impossible? Yes. So choose #1 or #2 above.
Using the tech is already hard for them. Some are partially sighted, some have mobility issues, some have arthritis, all can easily use FB to stay in touch.
And they don't use anything else.
It's just not an option to try to get them to change, it really isn't. Please, please do me the courtesy of accepting that I've done the analysis. Many times. It's simply not a reasonable objective.
And no, I won't squat on someone else's FB account so I can stay in touch.
Do you really think I haven't considered all these points? Do you really think I haven't considered alternatives? I have, and I have, and my conclusion is that I (a) want to stay in touch with these people, and (b) have no effective alternative.
These are people I care about, who care about me, and who are, today, using FB almost to the exclusion of anything else because they find it convenient and have given up nearly everything else. Despite many attempts they are unwilling or unable to use email as effectively as they use FB, and proliferating platforms would do them no favours at all.
You, and several others in this discussion, are using what you believe to be ironclad reasoning to replace any sense of understanding, sympathy, or empathy.
I'm honestly curious if you considered this and why did you rule it out?
But they (most of them) don't know how to use email, despite my trying to coach and coax them through it multiple times. Their children or niblings have set them up on FB, taught them how to use it, and it's the only thing they use.
I do send a monthly letter to my mother's 97 year-old sister -- my aunt -- because she doesn't use a computer at all, and doesn't even use SMS. But she can't write back to me, so I rely on getting news from her via the phone calls I have with my mother.
Part of the problem is that these relatives (and pseudo-relatives, very close friends of my parents who were like aunts and uncles) have an relatively (pardon the pun) active group, posting photos and statuses (individually rarely, but as a group there's a post a day on average) which keeps the group connected and active. And they want to know what I'm doing.
The many-to-many aspect of FB really makes it a winner, along with the ease of posting, reading, and staying in touch with the group as a whole. As a platform for capabilities it's genuinely fantastic. It's the underlying cesspit of scumminess that's the problem.
Hope that answers your question.
Just to be clear-- they send and receive rich content over the FB app (taking and forwarding pictures and/or video, etc.), but they don't know how to send/receive that content through text messages?
Not trying to be unsympathetic-- it's just that every non-technical user of a smartphone I've ever seen degrades to text messages.
And you're asking people in their 90s to become familiar with more than one interface when they struggle to understand that "internet" is not "the web", and "the web" is not "Facebook", and worse, they think FB is everything.
And for them, it is. It's the only interface they use.
I think the argument that this filters out those who do not care could also illustrate that they them self also do not care (not that loosing friends to mutual apathy is a terrible thing ultimately).
No, they're not. I refer you to my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32131180
> ... you seem pretty defensive.
I'm really rather tired of people saying "Well just stop using FB" while apparently expending zero effort to understand the context.
I'll stop now.
It wasn’t easy. It was worth it. This isn’t for everyone, and depends in your own stage in life. Be safe, be strong, be happy.
The reason I don't want to use Facebook is it's against my principles and ethos. What's my family's reason for not wanting to use Signal?
(I'm not the parent poster.)
For most of the non-techie people in my life, I just communicate via common open protocols like SMS and email, things everyone can use easily. I do encourage people to try Matrix or Signal, but I certainly don't require those to communicate with me.
What it took for me to bite the bullet and accept changing platforms was all of them agreeing on moving, and then one of them making a hard stance.
Sorry that wasn't much of an answer, but I guess my point is that you (EDIT: royal you, not talking to you directly) gotta find sympathetic people before you declare war on the ones that don't wanna change.
> before you declare war on the ones that don't wanna change
I never "declared war" on anyone. I guess it's a lot easier having never used Facebook or Facebook products. I had a bad feeling about them from the very beginning and I've only ever felt more right in that feeling.
What would usually happen was, I'd meet someone new at some event, or maybe I'd be talking to a relative at a family gathering, and they'd say something like, "What's your Facebook? I'd like to add you to GroupX," and I'd reply that I didn't use Facebook. Then they'd follow up with, "You should join, it's <blah blah blah>," to which I'd politely explain why I won't ever join Facebook. And then one of two things would happen. Either they'd understand, and we'd exchange phone numbers or email addresses, or their eyes would glaze over and they'd find some excuse to walk away.
For the latter group, obviously we didn't interact online. For the former group, I'd text or email, and maybe they'd respond, and we'd have what I consider to be a normal relationship, or maybe they'd rarely or never respond, and we'd have no relationship. But in either case, I wasn't haranguing people not to use Facebook; I just wasn't using it. If not using Facebook meant I didn't have a relationship with someone, I was okay with that.
I should have been clearer about that in my message, as I hate when people do that out of nowhere to me. Sorry.
I beg to differ. I have direct personal experience of a number of people who find FB far, far easier to use than SMS or email. These are close family members in their 90s who don't know how to use email[0], and struggle to use SMSs because of sight problems and physical problems such as arthritis.
I pleased for you that you've been able to avoid people who use FB. I wish you'd grant me the courtesy of accepting that other people have a different experience from yours. I agree with you entirely that MZ is a sociopathic scumbag, but I am unwilling to lose contact with close family members, even though they literally use no communications method other than FB.
[0] Despite using FB they don't use email, because FB was set up for them by others, and they don't even know how to send or receive emails.
I've been railroaded into using Facebook 2 or 3 times by friends, family and even my SO, and my experience each and every time was a soulless one like yours. It was just a non-stop stream of people and their friends reposting shallow things they found on the Internet, inspirational quotes, and political garbage. And if people did comment, they were just brief quips - probably just enough effort to try to manipulate others to like+comment back on their own content.
Email and phone's all I need. If people can't put in the effort to remember or catch up with me, even if it's just every few months, then they're not my friend.
One of the most sinister things about Facebook to me is that it creates the illusion that you are close with friends or relatives when you're really mostly watching a superficial view of peoples' lives in a passive, voyeuristic way. Comments and likes make you feel connected, but they are not meaningful interaction.
When I first deleted my account and stopped using Facebook, I felt initially a lot lonelier. But was I? After more time went by, I became convinced it was all too superficial.
Interestingly, who I spent time with shifted toward other people who were either not on Facebook at all or were very unengaged with it personally (for example, one friend only uses it to promote his business).
My only partial regret with any of this is that the pandemic really scrambled this. Almost all of my friends were purely people I saw in person, with no online component to our friendship. That all got paused in 2020, and has been very hard to get back to the same level since.
Just out of curiosity, as long as you don't mind: what was the reason (or which feature, actually) they asked you to use Facebook in those cases? I haven't needed it in 5 or 6 years and nobody I know really uses it (or nobody admits), but that might be due to my location (Germany), so I'm a bit curious what's it still good for!
Second time was from some new friends I had made, who argued that exchanging phone numbers and emails were old-fashioned and awkward when meeting new people, and that it was essential to have Facebook since it's easier to just say "you can just look for me on Facebook; you'll know it's me since I have XYZ in my profile pic". I saw some validity to the argument, since recently I had met and got along with a couple cute girls on a train ride, but regretted not exchanging contact details with the two of them because asking for numbers/emails felt like a slight overreach. Though if I had a FB account at the time, I thought it'd have made sense if I could've just been able to casually say something like "look up John Smith on FB if you wanna hang out sometime. See ya!".
Third time was my then-SO. She posted on Facebook a LOT, and had many hundreds of followers. She begged me to make an account for months, so I could bask in all the content she posted.
Anyway, your experience with people not using Facebook sounds on-par. Facebook is increasingly considered a "boomer" technology, especially by the younger generations. Many younger folk these days tend to keep in touch via small Discord groups, or whatever dopamine-drip privacy-nightmare app of the week is.
Interestingly I also met some cute girls and a friendly guy in a train recently and they tried to exchange Instagram handles with me. I just asked for WhatsApp and we created a little group (but then again, Germany).
I guess a SO being there would actually make me use it. I did have a Twitch account for a while because of someone I dated....... (Curiously I haven't admitted this even to my therapist, lol). On the other hand, it's Facebook so I'd probably troll them and ask for printouts of the posts.
About the boomer thing, interestingly I never really had close family using it. But everyone under 25 I know denies having it like it's some kinda plague. The ones over 25 claim they forgot their password.
Visiting in person would require a 70 to 80 hour round trip. And once in the same country, getting to see all of them is also a further multi-day journey.
I've worked on this, I've thought about it, I've considered all the alternatives I can find, and I've come to the conclusion that the only effective way to stay in touch with my relatives is to use FB. Really, I've thought about it. A lot. Really. I have.
You've read my comments, and if I haven't explained well enough for you to understand now then I guess I'm just not able to make myself understood, so I'll give up.
Most people don't have problems with Facebook. It's useful for them, and they don't consider the bigger picture because they're not in tech and they have more important things taking up their attention.
Now you swoop in and say "Facebook is evil, and if you don't get off of it, I'll cut you out of my life!" In that scenario, you're the one who doesn't care about the relationship, not them - you're the one that won't get off your high horse. You could make a minimalistic FB profile that has no information and use it to exchange messages and reply to event invitations. But instead you demand that they change their behaviors in order to support your moral imperative. That's your prerogative, but it is ridiculous to think your relationship is pretend as a result.
Also, to be clear, you're the only one here talking about a relationship that consists of a few likes on Facebook. Everyone else is talking about a broader set of interactions, like using Messenger to chat and sharing photos with each other.
I said no such thing, and I'd thank you not to put words in my mouth. As I explained in a different subthread:
It's like saying I need alcohol to stay in touch with my alcoholic friend. No you don't.
The ideal solution is to hit them with the hammer until morale improves. Regulators need to wake up and just start fining them absurd amounts of money and keep it vague until Facebook et al. are scared enough to comply and then some.
If you think it's necessary to caveat that if you rely on facebook.com as your "communication infrastructure" (not that many countries would fit that bill) then you shouldn't delete it, I'm happy to do so.
"delete it" isn't a solution at all. You may as well say "turn the electricity off". People deserve privacy when services are provided to them by private companies, that's not a bonus, it ought to be a fundamental right. It's not the job of individuals to take on trillion dollar multinationals.
For some reason people here seem to think I'm precluding regulatory action against Facebook. I'm not. I just also think it's better not to use it.
Every HN thread about social media has one sub-thread like this, and it never produces anything of value because the premise is trite.
God I wonder what people with large extended families did before Facebook was invented! Surely they were all isolated and out of touch, how sad.
This comment was not directed at people running Facebook business accounts or political campaigns. The reason this thread produces nothing of value is because of pedantic comments such as yours bringing up irrelevant edge cases.
Your sarcasm is misplaced; once people adapt to a benefit, many understandably don't wish to forgo it, and leveraging such network effects is the core business model of social media.
As for who the comment was directed at, it was so broad as to be inclusive of all users, because it didn't qualify its suggestion at all; that's why it's trite. You're just making a 'not true Scotsmen' argument.
Heaven forbid that we seek a political/regulatory solution.