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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

There's obvious abstract reasons why they should stop using it:

1. Facebook knows about all of your interactions on Facebook, and they probably know what you are buying and what sites you visit through tracking mechanisms. In real life we call those people stalkers.

2. What utility are they really getting? Is keeping up with every part of your friend's life (or the good parts they show you) really worth the stress and anxiety of feeling like you are missing out? It's fake utility. People somehow existed for something like 300,000 years without this utility, so what value is really there?

That being said, it's designed to get people addicted and the immediate "utility" is a lot stronger than any abstract worries, so there's probably nothing you can say.

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The HN set really doesn't seem to understand where the value of Facebook actually is. It's not the feed. The feed is mind numbing, time wasting garbage. It's being able to communicate and organise things, with all your friends, in the one place. It's in Facebook Messenger, which everyone has. It's in events organisation and events discovery. It's in groups.

Facebook supplies a directory of everything happening in my city, algorithmically curated against things Facebook thinks I will like and which my friends have said they're interested in attending. It lets me organise my own events, and communicate easily with attendees, who can see which of their friends are attending and make plans. It lets me make contact with people I briefly met in person but wouldn't have grabbed their phone number/wouldn't text them out of the blue yet (because who does that?).

I just call my friends up. Crazy, I know.

I don't need an algorithmic feed to tell me what my interests are and what my friends are doing because I know the first and there are other ways of doing the latter that don't involve giving up my privacy.

Well, hey. There's the utility I guess - it makes something I want to do (find out how and when I can hang out with my friends) much simpler than it was previously. If I want to see some live music on a Thursday it's a lot easier to mark myself as "interested" on the gig and see who contacts me about wanting to come along than messaging or calling the 30-40 people who might be interested.

> I just call my friends up. Crazy, I know.

There's nothing wrong with calling friends up, but that takes a lot of work and a synchronous connection between two people. There are hundreds of people I want to know about or stay in touch with but don't have the time to call them all up individually.

Facebook makes being friends easier. That's a pretty solid value add. I would probably lose a lot of friends more easily if I didn't have Facebook.

You may not value that, but I find it much more valuable than the value I'd gain from making sure Facebook doesn't know enough about me to show me relevant ads.

How about email?

A terribly inconvenient way to send/see pictures, organize events, etc. Facebook does what it does very, very well. I don't feel the need for a replacement.

This kind of utility is completely dependent on having a critical mass of people you know who actively use the platform. I'm 29, live in NYC, pretty active and social. On the odd occasion that I do go on Facebook it seems that the bulk of my ~500 'friends' who are still active on it are like...people I worked with in a summer job in 10th grade who post mostly memes. The events I get invited to are pseudo-spam bulk invitations.

I honestly would feel the opposite about getting a new acquaintance's contact information vs looking them up on Facebook and sending them a message. I've been going to a lot of weddings recently and phone/email exchange has been common, and I have yet to be asked "are we friends on Facebook? I'll put these pictures up there", which was a very common thing in years past.

I think it certainly helps that FBM is the communication standard in Australia - the only SMS I get now are sent by computers, and iMessage never really caught on. This gives some lock in, even if you don't actively use the website or the app. It is assumed that if you want to contact someone after meeting them you'll just look them up in messenger.

Yours is an interesting perspective because I tend to assume that people on HN who say "just call your friends" are less social and don't have as many people they want to catch up with. Honestly events and groups are the real utility - there's where everything I care about happens on Facebook itself (aside from Messenger - which is good, but we would be doing the same thing elsewhere if it didn't exist).

Though the feed is still terrible - I keep my friends list relatively trimmed (~200 people) and it's still rubbish.

> Facebook knows about all of your interactions on Facebook, and they probably know what you are buying and what sites you visit through tracking mechanisms.

So what? I mean that earnestly - why is it inherently bad if a company knows a lot about me?

> What utility are they really getting? It's fake utility.

Do you really believe that easily keeping up with friends is "fake" utility? You really think that billions of people log on to a website every day that provides no "real" utility?

> People somehow existed for something like 300,000 years without this utility, so what value is really there?

People existed for a long time without the the lightbulb, automobiles, the wheel, computers, etc. You're basically arguing that there can't be any utility in anything new.

42% of the US population smoked daily. You really think that a hundred million people lit up daily with no "real" utility?

Fair point - people finding value in something doesn't imply that it's a net positive.

That said, I'm not convinced that the value Facebook provides is net negative.

> why is it inherently bad if a company knows a lot about me?

With enough data about you (Facebook collects more than enough) it becomes easy to manipulate you (blackmail, "targeted advertising" aka propaganda, etc), and your pattern-of-life can be sold for profit. Data doesn't go away and we keep inventing more powerful analysis methods, so the risk, that collected data will be used against you only increases with time.

Claiming that this risk doesn't exist or isn't likely to happen requires showing how Facebook won't lose control of the data to any future hacker, government, or buyer with a sufficiently large cash offer. Pretending otherwise is a just-world fallacy.

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