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Comment by vivekd | Hacker News Reader

Just because I can only have a few meaningful relationships doesn't mean that I don't like to keep track of what's going on in the lives of my friends and family that I've met over the years. That's a great service.

Yes Facebook does bad things from time to time, researching what days of the week teenagers are most likely to post given content does not, in my mind, qualify as an especially nefarious action.

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Give me a break, we supposed to protect the weak teenagers not sell them to advertisers for exploitation. They are vulnerable they need support at this time not the lucid loop of facebook. This is sad news.

Also about your "keep track of what's going on in the lives of ..", just call your friends to find out what is going on in their life. People normally don't post everything on facebook. I think its a great service if you want to know what's going on in Kim Kardashian life.

>Also about your "keep track of what's going on in the lives of ..", just call your friends to find out what is going on in their life.

I don't understand the need many people have to know what their friends are doing at all times. I check my friends' Snapchat stories sometimes, but usually I just don't care and they can tell me next time I have a conversation with them.

'Why do people like something I do not enjoy?'

That's not the question, and I do enjoy knowing what people are doing. What I don't understand is the addiction many people have to social media.

You seem to be mixing up social networking in general and FB in particular.

Slightly tangential experiment: I'm commenting here because this thread is quite close to the top of the page, and the top-level comment I left with the following info is not likely to become un-buried at this point.

Just wanted to say that the paywalled article in The Australian can be viewed via cache: just fine:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dRqAloI...

Here's a more permanent copy: http://archive.is/paAKu

Whoops, this is now at -2.

My apologies, and thanks for the feedback; I won't try this again.

>Also about your "keep track of what's going on in the lives of ..", just call your friends to find out what is going on in their life. People normally don't post everything on facebook.

Not all of my Facebook friends are close enough that I'd call them to keep in touch, but it's still nice to know how they're getting on.

One of my friends from high school just finished her education to become a Doctor. Good for her. I didn't need to know that, but it's still nice, and I would never have known without something like Facebook.

The toxic thing about social media is that people are only sharing their best moments or are even trying to portrait their lives to be a lot better, then they actually are.

So if you're a depressed person on social media seeing all those awesome things people are doing, just sends you down a downward spiral, even though a lot of people are probably not much better off.

And you just said it yourself. You didn't need to know your "friend" got her doctors and your life probably had zero impact from knowing, which really is the best case szenario with social media.

I am not saying, social media serves no porpuse though. For event organizing and crowd funding and probably a lot of other things, it comes in handy.

>One of my friends from high school just finished her education to become a Doctor. [] I didn't need to know that, but it's still nice.

I reminded of the scene in Fight club where the narrator discovers that "Chloe died of cancer". He'd forgotten all about her, but discovering her death made him react as though sad. When challenged as to whether he cares, he says something like "I don't know, I haven't thought about her in a while".

(unnecessary reference, but I guess it frames the other side).

After I'd left uni for a couple of years Facebook became a long list of people I used to know sharing lots of minutae and a few big events in their life. Processing that has a cost, emotionally and intellectually. Is that cost worth paying? My deciding "no" doesn't mean that it's true for everyone!

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