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Comment by Silfen | Hacker News Reader

In my personal experience, the biggest wedge is in planning events. With the caveat that this probably only applies strongly to people currently in their mid-twenties:

For a lot of social circles, facebook is the only service that almost everyone will regularly check and that lets you coordinate events. My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes them or thinks to invite them, it's because they opted out of the platform.

The other big point of stickiness that I can think of is that facebook is many people's cloud. Years of photos are backed up there and only there. It's unfortunate that they've relinquished control of their files to a closed-platform third party, but that's the way it is.

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> My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes them or thinks to invite them...

Clearly it is, unless you make a conscious decision for every gathering to only include people via Facebook. Does no one ever stop and think "Hey, Jake is pretty cool but he doesn't use Facebook. Maybe someone should call him?" I'd guess that no one thinks like this, and that his omission comes from simply not thinking to invite people who aren't on Facebook.

I'd love it if you could explain that I'm wrong and that you are making this conscious decision to exclude them. The justification for this would be even more interesting.

I am wildly speculating here but maybe all the friends are in the Facebook. All of them. Now they also know that if they leave FB, they are cut of from information about cool parties, because as it seems, nobody cares about people not in FB. So they are all kind of locked in.

The situation of course is already familiar in the business world and many companies try to mitigate this kind of risks by supporting open source for example, or open standards.

This doesn't happen when you're throwing a get-together of 5-10 close friends.

It's more frequent for me with parties of 100+ invites.

The way I accidentally don't invite people is

1. I setup Facebook event.

2. I scroll through a list of my friends on Facebook.

3. As I scroll through I invite any friends I think would have a good time at the party and are in town.

4. Never realize I didn't to invite Jake.

5. During or day after party I wonder why Jake didn't come. Then remember that he doesn't have Facebook

I don't think most people sit down and try to remember every person they know. Then create a list of people to invite and then use Facebook to invite them. I think they go through Facebook and invite the ones they recognize similar to the way I do it. It's also hard to keep track of who is, and isn't using Facebook at any given time.

A bit of contrary anecdata:

I'm throwing a party on Sunday. I don't throw parties very often. The last time I did was a little over a year ago. I created a Facebook event for parties as I usually do, and about half the people I invited didn't even see the invite (Facebook helpfully tells you who has and hasn't seen such things). So I had to chase down these people through other means (texting, hangouts, and yes, FB messenger). Last year when I did this, pretty much everyone saw the invite.

I'm not sure what changed. Perhaps it's notification fatigue, perhaps some quit or curtailed their use of Facebook. But it kind of sucks from my perspective, as there is no clear better alternative. I do not know the email addresses of all my friends, and people aren't necessarily responsive to email either.

Demographic here is late 20s-late 30s, in the Bay Area.

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