Economists study what happens when people stop using Facebook
calnewport.com
calnewport.com
"Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day.
My own inordinate interest in what the lunatics are up to in every corner of our planet has to do with my childhood. When I was three years old in Belgrade, German bombs started falling on my head. By the time I was seven, I was accustomed to seeing dead people lying in the street, or hung from telephone poles, or thrown into ditches with their throats cut. Like any child growing up in an occupied city during wartime, I didn’t think much about it. I was as serene then as I will ever be, sitting among the ruins smoking my first cigarette, riding on a Russian tank with a friend, or watching our school janitor hang the portraits of Marx, Stalin and Marshal Tito in our classroom after the liberation."
To be honest all of the 1950s Zeitgeist reeks of suppressed trauma addressed in an unhealthy way. The whole lawn obsession reached a zenith from homesickness in Europe and POW camps - and that is just one of the milder examples. Kids ended up taking this state as a deeply unhealthy norm.
I feel like, while the criticism of FaceBook, Twitter, Reddit and co is pretty much warranted, we managed to push aside the biggest time sink we already have since the 60s. TV, and Netflix, for that matter, is wasting our time since many many years.
But the long term benefit of TV/Video isn't a diet that's good for you. Consider all the things you could do (not "achieve") if you'd use it for reading books, travel, learning a language or art. What this medium robs you of is boredom, which maybe feels great in the short run, but is hugely damaging to your creativity, focus and (probably even) mental health.
When I deleted facebook I noticed a huge improvement, but also I shifted my attention to other things which are equally addictive (HN, and my "personal information pipeline"). So like when I stopped smoking and moved to caffeine and sugar I substituted my FB addiction with other forms of unhealthy consumption. Getting rid of FB is therefore easy but getting rid of the underlying addiction is _really_ hard.
Sitting alone in a room with your thoughts is almost impossible (for most). Try it for a couple of days! Do nothing - not even reading a book you'll feel like you're going insane!
What works though is taking really long walks, or going out to nature for a few weeks (or months) and being on your own. You won't feel bored for long I'll promise! The most awesome memories I personally have are from things that made zero sense (and often in the most terrible circumstances).
It becomes even more damaging when the screen is your only window into the world. e.g. we work in front of a screen all day, then on the way home metro/train or whatever hold a phone to check up on social-media, then after dinner switch on the TV. No wonder so many (young!) people are isolated. (young is especially shocking. I'm old and it's normal for me to be alone. Guess men are terribly at socializing. But seeing so many kids end up lonely and isolated is pretty sad)
Personally what he's doing would be hopelessly exhausting to me - I'm quite introvert and the level of social interaction he's engaging in is way above my tolerance level in terms of intensity.
Citation needed
All reading is not inherently valuable, in the same way all television is not. I don't get any more socialisation from reading a book, and indeed unlike e.g. watching TV with housemates/family it's an entirely isolated non-social activity.
Now, if we're talking solely about _children_ then i will give the act of reading additional value due to reading comprehension being a key skill that they need to improve! But mine isn't getting any better at this point, certainly not by reading the same old trash I always do.
"TV bad, Books good" is just a weird generalisation that sticks in my craw and I've never seen a believable piece of evidence for it
It's the behavior, not the medium, that gives this uneasy feeling all of your time is going to a thing that you didn't mean to spend it on.
On the other hand, if you find yourself sucked into a book for a weekend, odds are it's because you can't put it down and will regret nothing. Nobody binge-reads bad books.
On the other hand, books are usually written by one person so they have a much stronger and more focused voice, and that strong voice usually has an interesting axe to grind. Or rephrased, if its not interesting or is overly bland, no one reads the book. Admittedly being the most successful at appealing to the groupthink of a sub-population willing to pay for a book is not a Utopian civilization level result, but it is still better than peddling consumerism, and most authors seem to want to get their story out more than they want wealth. Book authors much like pro athletes are a power law distribution where most starve but a microscopic minority get very famous and very rich, so if money were a primary goal they would have gone into finance or software development instead of writing books.
One exists to addict you into consuming ever more bland megacorporate products, the other exists to sell the best ideas, either inherently best, or at least best at meeting existing groupthink demands.
The voice of the product is like the difference between the billionth corporate marketed mcdonalds burger vs a (celebrity?) chef multi course meal.
An excellent analogy would be watching TV would be like following the Walmart twitter account, whereas reading a book would be like reading Paul Graham's blog posts.
There was a time in the past when you could find true educational content.
Imagine randomly channel surfing and running into this.
But I agree with your point. You can watch PBS mindlessly. I used to geek out on the obscure, ephemeral nature of all the educational films they used to show. It was a guilty pleasure.
I am not sure this sentence is universally true. I'd like to remind you about the experiment with mice that got a button to trigger their own happiness center... They end up pressing that button, until they die from lack of food.
Right, that was the question. What do you use to stay informed?
I don't do that anymore.
However if you find yourself addicted ie you want to do other things but you keep getting “sucked in” then by all means stop - it will have a noticeably positive impact.
(Not in any way criticising you - just the community here often appears obsessed with maximising personal output and I think jeez just relax sometimes guys!!)
Reading, conversation with friends/family, poetry, painting, sitting and enjoying a good meal/cigar etc... all have the quality of chill and recharge without the negative effects of TV.
Personally I find decent TV shows a great way to unwind after a busy day, but of course YMMV.
Modern television isn't just The Big Bang Theory anymore. The line between cinema and television is quickly blurring, with television shows like Chernobyl that are essentially very long films. Even "regular television" can be incredibly enlightening, with shows like Planet Earth exposing us to parts of our own world we might never see otherwise and our imagination might not even do justice!
And much like cinema, sure the experience itself is somewhat isolating in that you're trying to pay attention to it and not converse with those around you. But what's beneficial about some television shows are the emotions they inspire, the conversation they generate after, the fantastical thoughts that come later while you process what you saw.
Sure, garbage exists on television in the same way that pulp fiction (i.e. low-quality literature) never really died out. But I don't think it's fair to dismiss the medium any more than it's fair to dismiss film or literature.
I am not saying you are wrong, or he is, but the ancientness of the claim is not an argument in favor or against it
(I myself do not watch tv but I also have no desire to presume anything of people who do. I at least personally acutely feel a loss of culture because TV and movie watching is very common in socialization rituals and I am unable to engage in them.)
The neural mechanisms have a lot in common. Video games, I would note, also share that mechanism.
Now I just watch Festival of Science or Royal Institution lectures on YouTube and some anime on wakanim :)
There are also a lot of real in-class lectures filmed on various topic on YouTube that I find very nice.
I don't miss regular TV at all.
I quit facebook around 2012 (deleted and purged the accont by waiting 6 months) and I don't miss that either. I still have contact with the friends that I care about via phone, I just don't look at their fake lives on facebook anymore.
Similarly with Facebook; I use it but I don't follow friends particularly - I follow pages, mainly a useful local neighbourhood page that mainly seems to concentrate on who has lost a cat and who can recomnend a plumbe. Similarly with Reddit, just select a few decent subs that you are interested in.
I look at Fscebook every couple of weeks. Reddit - too frequently.
For all its faults - Youtube has a lot of factual content produced by people who want to share their cool hobbies with the world.
The thing I really want to give up next is Twitter. Or at least my 3,000-follower public account. It started out with finding like-minded friends, but quickly turned into a place where I can't even say "I find WD40 often works better than cutting fluid when machining aluminium" without being jumped on.
By "RI Lectures" do you mean the channel with the actual youtube name of "The Royal Institution"? If so, I think the across the pond competitor is "MIT OpenCourseWare" although I find it far easier to download MIT OCW videos from archive.org than trying to find and stream them and keep track of which I've seen.
I've had the interesting experience of learning Linear Algebra from Strang's textbooks a long time ago, then watching his lectures to refresh my memory. You can do something similar with Automata Theory and Ullman via a MOOC, or at least you could a couple years ago.
Applied Science (Ben Krasnow) is one of my favourites. Cody's fantastic too, for the backyard-science angle. I find Hydraulic Press a bit too "let's break stuff and laugh", but it's fun to watch and switch off for a few spare minutes. Same for Backyard Scientist ;)
Post-Apocalyptic Inventor is good for my scrapyard-challenge-but-real fix.
My real hook at the moment is How To Make Everything. He starts with Stone-age technology and shows the progression from there. It's fascinating to see how we got from "there" to "here" with a series of successive discoveries and refinements.
BosnianBill's Locklab, Locknoob and Lockpicking Lawyer are other favourites (but then, I've always found security tech interesting).
I've got an interest in retrocomputing so LGR, Modern Vintage Gamer, Adrian's Digital Basement and CuriousMarc are on there too.
I do mean the Royal Institution's official Youtube channel, yes. I started watching for Andrew Szydlo's chemistry demos and stayed for the other content!
I've heard of MIT OCW (since the original announcement popping up on Slashdot), but never really looked into what was available. Perhaps I should!
Yes the Hydraulic Press guys have a lot of "boom ha ha" content but they sometimes have more intellectual content such as "We're going to make homemade particle board out of sawdust" and I'm like, no, you're not, I know its way to complicated, but its fun to watch them try and be partially successful.
If you like retrocomputing, then "Moshix" channel will provide a couple hundred hours of mainframe content. The editing is slightly off, moves too slow during non-interactive content such as watching scripts run, and too fast during interactive content while hand editing JCL and typing sysprog tasks in general. Just because you CAN type 100+ wpm doesn't mean its a good idea during a screencast. The content is very compelling, regardless of editing decisions.
Something I don't like about retrocomputing is stuff I started out doing is now considered retro. Or even worse, stuff that was futuristic when I had a couple years in, is also considered retro. I guess getting old beats the alternative.
The thing about YouTube vs regular TV is that _I_ chose what to watch not someone else. I also chose the time to watch it.
Slightly OT, but the host of the original Scrapheap Challenge show is now hosting an EV YouTube channel called "Fully Charged Show" :)
Ms Rogers was very interesting to watch as she is near prototypical "maker culture" in the sense of artist-trying-to-do-STEM (IIRC she's a successful musician) but technically predates popular "maker culture" by about a decade. Sometimes seems old fashioned or retro in 2020, but was extremely futuristic around the turn of the century.
And now I'm living the irony, driving a truck and hauling all that stuff that the TV is waving in front of us. Just as some of you are living the irony, spending your hard earned educations building the infrastructure that implements the waving.
"Now:" I'm pulling a trailer from Illinois to Ohio, filled with "cereal, dry," from a maker to a big box chain's distribution center. Eat up! Eat!
I rage-quit my last SWQA job, then discovered that a 60+ year old B player ought not to have done that. And so I drive.
What do I do with all the time in the truck? Drive, watch the road, watch out for you all (you all are cray, and are probably gonna die, I'm just sayin'). Watch my time from various perspectives: time/miles to pickup, time/miles to delivery, time left on my allowed driving time, gallons of diesel remaining, will I make it on time, do I have to warn of late arrival, should I pull off and shut down for wind, rain, snow, ice, fatigue, when will the local troopers open the highway to trucks again, am I speeding or following too close, am I holding people up behind me, are you f'ing tailgating me, are my brakes on fire, what's going on way up there (I can see pretty far with my head ten feet off the ground) ...
I don't care what you're doing in your car, and I virtually never look, except once in awhile I'll look at your head (or search my spider sense) to see if you're paying attention. To the road. Not to your phone.
When I'm not doing that stuff: I don't have a CB radio. Sometimes I don't play any audio and just think, or enjoy the scenery. It's an incredibly beautiful and interesting country. Sometimes I chase NPR across the radio. Wyoming is a pretty good state for NPR, because they have translators all over. Once in awhile I'll drive through a college or tribal radio station that really does just play what they feel like, those are good.
Sometimes Pandora. I've been trying to listen to podcasts, but it's not a great experience. I can't seem to manage podcasts via Pandora or Spotify very well. I don't like pre-downloading, I'd like to just listen via a stream (most recently VLC on Android, bluetooth to my radio, but the casts often just end in the middle (lost cell signal?) and go to the next one).
My thoughts on the industry as a whole are, I can only see a tiny sliver of the industry. There seems to be an infinite number of ways to get stuff from here to there, and all I really know is working as a "solo" (not part of a two person team), "company driver" (not an owner-operator) for one of the large truck companies.
When I started two years ago there was a huge trucker shortage. Now some companies have gone out of business, but "they" say that it'll pick up again soon. I believe large companies are still hiring, because industry turnover is huge. Lots of people decide they don't like it. I like it a lot.
It's a really good job for me, as I'm not very sociable. I'll go months without going home (divorced, one grown son). Most long distance drivers take 3 or 4 days a month in "home time." Some drivers are regional or local and they're naturally home more often and more regularly.
I drive a 2017 Kenworth T-680, 15 liter straight-six Cummins engine, 10 speed Eton automatic. I mostly pull "dry vans," the 53 foot closed rectangular trailers that you mostly see. Sometimes I'll pull a "reefer," refrigerated trailer, basically the same as a dry van but you also have to pay attention to the reefer operation and temperatures (multiple compartments inside the trailer).
I typically have about an hour of time at the end of the day, and an hour in the morning. Sometimes a little more. Rarely a lot more, when the company hasn't found any freight for me to haul. The longest I've spent without freight has been a weekend, and that's rare. I only get paid for miles driven in service of an assigned trip.
During my typical two +/- hours/day I eat, clean, read, communicate with the fam. I've written hundreds of emails home, with pictures, and I'm trying to clean some of those up to get them posted at a location to be named later. In my free time.
I'm in the business of lending money to the people who buy all the things you haul.
Third'd. I cut the cord years back mostly as a consequence of doing the digital nomad thing. I agree with the shocking vicious part. It reminds me of getting crab cakes on the east coast -- in the 90s it was mostly lumps of tasty crab with a little bread, and now it's mostly bread with a little crumb of crab. TV feels the same -- mostly BS with a few shrinking nuggets of entertainment. No wonder Netflix and other streaming services are going strong.
* Deleted Facebook. Don't miss it one bit.
* Deleted Reddit. I open the app every once in a while, scan what's popular. But not a lot.
* Pruned twitter. I don't follow anyone on Twitter anymore, save my partner. I deleted all my posts, going back to the beginning. I don't read it anymore, but I've preserved my username.
* Kept Instagram. I like following certain people in places around the world I have a travel connection too. And certain athletes in sports I follow.
And so... If there's no benefit to posting -- there's very little inclination to consume. No arguing, no triggering, no pavlov-ian itch.
I post to Instagram, I post a little bit here on YC. This leveling keeps the "push for pellet", or "pull down for more content" habits very minimal.
The big corporate channels like "Analog Devices Inc" have too many premade for facebook 90 second snaps, and not enough relax in the living room recliner long format content.
The more niche the content the better the odds of "big corporate" producing quality content. "Analog Devices Inc" is mostly 90 second commercials, but "Arm Mbed" and its office hours series, despite also being "big corporate", has lots of enjoyable long format content, assuming you're into embedded FOSS RTOS for ARM or STM32.
Reddit and Twitter on the other hand show all the bad sides of anonymity to the fullest. Way too much blind tribalism and conflict seeking, few adults actually capable of real discussion. So it's not only a waste of time, but one that gives you a bad mood as well.
Twitter was the #1 source of left-wing extremist noise in my life. I'm sure there were/are right-wing extremists on that platform too, but one seemed to appear in my algorithmic feed more than the other. Or perhaps it was confirmation bias. Who knows!
Good riddance.
There are few ways to strip out some of their 10-year "improvement" and oh how deserted it looks under there...
I think this is true of most social networks, and is more obvious in certain cases, e.g., Tumblr.
The truth: most of those messages are angry and argumentative, and most of those "active users" are just the same people being angry and tribal towards each other.
It makes for good stats, but like all stats, they're just numbers if presented without the context and analysis behind them.
Of course it depends a lot which subreddits you use. Some are toxic. The more technically oriented ones are fine in my experience.
Most people are using Twitter for the memes, the (often educational) content, the news, and direct messaging. The average person is probably not there to look for people to have a long form discussion with, especially if that person is a stranger who is trying to argue with them.
We had a discussion about this recently in my Spanish class. Someone asked me for my facebook and when I said I closed it long ago they were all like "eeewww privacy freak".
So I explained my reasons, the abuse of personal data, the manipulation of the masses (Cambridge Analytica) and the others immediately sprang to life saying how horrible it all is. And turned out to have good knowledge of the facts. But yeah, it's so easy to stay in touch with friends.. Well yes I know, as an expat it's not easy without it.
Still, their initial "ewww" reaction really surprises me considering their apprehension at Facebook's practices.
Legislation enshrining adversarial interoperability would allow competition to improve user experience.
But now Facebook is a kingmaker akin to the Murdoch press legislators are not incentivised to corral Facebook.
Imagine a message client that interacts with facebookosphere and allows the use of a single detoxified client for messages and feeds from all protocols, services and ospheres.
It never fails to amaze me how we (as a group) can have a free and open discussion of microcontroller RTOS options, but god help someone who has the wrong opinion about bicycling the groupthink will incinerate them.
Free to have any opinion here about tech things, but the counter reaction to that is no freedom at all about non-tech related opinions.
ehh... yes and no.
On the one hand, there is something to the idea that folks should take responsibility for figuring out how to not waste their time like this (if they consider it a problem; if you want to spend all day on goofing around on the internet, have fun I guess). There's some internal motivation required to make that happen that's a skill worth learning.
...but on the other hand, companies spend a ton of money researching how to keep people "engaged." This includes hiring psychologists to help them fine-tune the crap out of their platforms to make them addictive. Given that level of manipulative behavior, I don't think it's entirely fair to blame the users. And yes, without Facebook they might just do the same on Twitter or YouTube, but those platforms are doing the same thing. It doesn't make it ok just because everyone else is doing it.
I just want status updates and photos from my friends. If I could literally mute all shared content (memes, twitter dunk screenshots and "shares") it would be a much nicer platform to use, but from Facebook's perspective this would be awful because I would be on and off the site in a few minutes.
It turns out I really just wanted MySpace with photo albums.
So ironically, I am not in period of starting to use Facebook again, so that I have more contact with people again.
Besides that, walking groups or book reading clubs don't exist here. Photography or creative clubs exist only in form of structured classes, where you pay for two lessons a week. Adults/older people, they mostly come and hurry back home - which is what I would do too I guess anyway. They are not really social places where you come for idle chat and build relationships that survive end of semester.
So it does not even matter that none of these activities appeals to me in any way - I could not belong to creative group, because I completely sux at art and find it frustrating.
Another suggestion (last one ;) if you have a family is board games. You have adult / kid games,lots of banter to be had and can be played with other families for a good time.
Also everyone sux at art in the beginning :)
Maybe I was an extreme case, but it had a horrible effect on me and I would never consider using it regularly again.
Did the researchers fail to look for those things? Or did they just not come up?
The proposed binary thinking option is users will be detrimentally manipulated and exploited as an advertising product where the manipulation is sometimes intense enough to exacerbate mental illnesses, whereas the binary alternative of deleting everything and going Unibomber will result in extreme social and job related ostracism because obviously "he's trying to hide something".
There are analog middle options that are just as valid as the polarizing binary extremes. I have a perfectly good FB account with plenty of connections, but I only log in every couple months. A little awkward when someone wishes me happy birthday and I don't see it until four months later, but whatever. Most of the time stuff that was posted six months ago is irrelevant today, and likewise I feel pretty safe ignoring most of what was posted today. I find that on FB, as with any other online media, that there's at least 10 to 100 times as much lurking as posting, so there's really not that much to read anyway. For example my best old work friend is about as much of a lurker as I am, so there's really nothing to see.
Or to summarize, the negative effects of deleting your account have nothing to do with the result of "stop using facebook", if you simply stop using it and do not delete your account.
But yes, there are problems with this study imo...none of which are really addressed in the paper. Giving someone $100 to quit is kind of an "economist" thing to do but is that really enough of an incentive to do something you wouldn't otherwise do? No.
They do say that their ad didn't mention quitting Facebook. And they did some kind of survey first (which is how they got the $100 figure if I understood that correctly) but it still doesn't look great to me. In particular, they claim that they did an RCT because they randomly assigned the people who clicked on their ad...that isn't random.
I also think compliance is far harder to observe than the author's believe. The subjects deactivate, and if they log back in it reactivates but is that foolproof? Not really. Tbf though, the number of subjects who fail to complete is low given upside of $100...so maybe.
The key parts of the survey really rely on self-reporting (will people have a bias to report improved wellbeing given all the bad publicity about FB? probably).
But yeah, this isn't really an RCT. It would be nice to see one but I think the issue is that most people who use Facebook a lot probably aren't interested in stopping.
These days I prefer to use social media as a form of dialogue, almost like forums, than anything else. The focus is on ideas and conversation.... which is why I actually really enjoy HN.
I instant message but am notorious for "answering late" and keep getting complaints that I don't check everything immediately. I usually put my phone on the charger when I get back to work and only look at it every now and then, sometimes not at all until I go to bed.
Interestingly, I am very interested in how social media works technologically and have also been an early adopter of many technologies. However I feel like I'm fairly "results oriented" when it comes to social media so I expect some sort of benefit from using them vs. the time spent.
I've also noticed that I'd probably test well on my ability to delay gratification and I feel like this might be correlated with social media consumption in some way (maybe there's studies on this?).
If you asked Reddit or Hacker News readers to do the same, I almost guarantee similar or the same results.
Facebook, on the other hand, is an all or nothing app in my opinion. It's difficult to distinguish between who to friend and who not. Close friends and family members, I keep in touch with through WhatsApp, text and whatnot.
As an entertainment (or informative) platform, Facebook is even worse. Sensationalism and misinformation is rampant, or you're bombarded with ads. And you're not really allowed to interact or disagree without getting into a de-railed discussion.
On top of that, you're comparing your life with those of others (' highlights). It's a useless and depressing timesink (which Instagram is as well for those exact same reasons).
I'm glad I quit Facebook (for 99%).
Now I have absolutely no reservations saying : 'No sorry I dont have FB' and it's such a relief.
I do still have other bad habits such as over consumption of youtube/news sites which I'm also working on, but I recommend the leap away from the plague of Faceobok.
When I have kids, I genuinely will be very diligent about deamonizing all social media and education around modest useage.
The social media enviornment has exploded so fast there has never been time to fully realise the impacts or the effects later. But all indications look towards it being incredibly damaging.
> In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election (i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use. Deactivation reduced post-experiment valuations of Facebook, suggesting that traditional metrics may overstate consumer surplus.
I interpret that as 'reduced propaganda and it's resultant effects". Much like giving up television.
Never mind that lack of it has historically lead to /way worse/ outcomes. Unity is not a good thing in itself.
Sometimes I wonder if I missed social occasions because of not using facebook. Generally I realized facebook didn't really allow to "make new friends" because it lacks "discovery" features.
Now there are social networks who are focused on neighborhood and honestly I wish facebook would do something about discovery. I haven't heard from the facebook dating app either.
Facebook, even if it's successful, feels like such a big waste of potential.
Now when I want to avoid working I just end up watching stupid clickbait instead of interesting clickbait...
If you have a well-developed circle of friends, sure. But this only holds for what, half of Americans? I don't know people well enough that I'd have a functioning social life without Facebook, unfortunately. I think this holds for many other people as well.
I quit Facebook a couple of years ago and went back to take a look recently. Whole bucket of "nope" right there. I am now concerned about other platforms I find quite sticky though, including Reddit, HN and particularly Twitter.
Newspaper: late 70's-2002
Friendster: 2003-2005
TV: late 70's-2006
Myspace: 2004-2006
Orkut: 2005-2006
Facebook: 2003-2007
/.: 2004-2007
Flickr: 2004-2010
Radio: late 70's-2011
Twitter: 2008-2013
Quora: 2009-2013
Snap: 2012-2013
Meat agriculture & palm kernel oil (yeah, yeah no stupid comments): late 70's-2014
Reddit: 2017-2020
LinkedIn: 2004-2020
IRC: 1996-
Craigslist: 2000-
eBay: 2001-
Amazon: 2001-
AliExpress: 2016-
Wish: 2019-
Addicted to materialism, I guess.
I'm curious if the findings are "social media in general" or "just Facebook"
Facebook is free? Not even close.
Any recommendations?
seems to be fine.
Since in your case you didn’t save them before deleting it, I wonder if it would be an interesting opportunity to randomly message people you haven’t spoken with in a while, to put some birthdays in the calendar.
Facebook is not a social network for connecting people with people they care about.
Yes, people use Facebook. No, you don't have to.
Edit: yes, please downvote this comment. Let the HN naval gazing continue.
HN just has an unhealthy obsession with Facebook.
Get over it already.
I have to ask to be emailed about these events and often I get a screenshot of their facebook post!
You should not have to be on a platform to participate and luckily everyone that I explained this problem to understands it and do send me the email with events. But it creates enormous pressure to be on the platform.
HN is hardly alone on this, plenty of other sites including redit and a few others that I know of hate on facebook regularly.
I don't get how Facebook is detrimental to society. Probably I am missing something.
The majority of people do have an option to delete their account or simply not to log in. Apart from Facebook's involvement in scandals like Cambridge Analytica, I don't see what's wrong with the site or company. It's true that it can be used for causing harm, but that's true for almost every other tech out there.
Tools, organization, policies,... are always an expression of a specific or a common intent. How Facebook moderates the platform, makes design choices, how it decides on what to show on your newsfeed,... all of that is intentional.
Facebook isn't a public commons, it's not a space where people freely control the flow of the content they publish or control what they see or when they get to see it. Facebook is designed with the express goal of getting to know as much as possible about its tenants - "insights" in marketing speak - so it can then sell that information.
The problem with Facebook is how 2nd and 3rd order network effects that disrupt the fabric of society, emerge through its sheer scale. What's wrong with the platform is that it is entirely unwilling to acknowledge those effects and happily shift responsibility towards society and individuals.
If people aren't willing to delete their account, then that's because Facebook has captured how people communicate and understands that it plays into basic psychological behaviors such as FOMO, or that nobody likes to be an outsider.
If literally everyone you know goes to the top place in town every thursday and saturday night, if all the gossip happens at that spot, well, it's extremely hard to stay clear of that without feeling left out.
I mean I consider Facebook a pile of trash but that I recognize that the problem has always been the people who make up society being vapid, foolish, and vain caring more about it. Banning Facebook won't fix those problems - their ancestors have been witchhunting, engaging in stupid "reformations and moral crusades" that only make things worse without any redeeming values and lashing back at inconvenient facts long before Facebook.
The reason you can't hold politicians accountable is because their whole aparatus of government is deathlty afraid of setting any precedent which might hold them personally accountable for direct misdeeds.
See the furious rationalizations known as Qualified Immunity and refusal to prosecute literal war criminals. See the furious reaction to whistleblowers above literal traitors who sell secrets to foreign governments. It is abundantly clear that they fear transparency and accountability above all else and replacing the clusterfuck with something not even worse is politically very difficult.
Blaming Facebook for "influence" is questionably third to fourth order as well, especially when far more direct culprits go unpunished without reason. It is classic cycle of abuse displacement of blame from a more responsible to a more accessible and vulnerable target.
Sure grandma may voted for a guy whose campaign platform was literally "Mein Campf" subsisted for the local language and country but maybe the uncomfortable truth is that she was always quietly a genocidal racist who felt that mass murder was preferrable to being on an equal footing to "lessers" but was fine before because they "knew their place". Utterly horrifying but easy to see why most would prefer to blame Facebook over their family members for being responsible for being horrible people.
It reeks of "follow the money" ambulance chasing of suing the laundromat for not having bulletproof windows instead of the gangbangers who hit the victims during a drive by shooting. Only in this case it is "follow the politicial power to try to dragoon it to something they think will be in their favor".
I know several people who essentially need to maintain facebook and other social media presence to be employed because they work in social media adjacent fields or journalism, where social networks are nowadays the main source to do basic things like get into contact with sources and so on.
So no many people are actually dragged into these networks rather involuntarily. The same is also true when it comes to people's dating lives if one looks at the behaviour of particularly young people.
Regardless, they presumably maintain a Facebook presence because that’s where people are, but that’s not where you have to be. Shocking, I know.
I bet many of the people here grind their teeths when they see mark Zuckerberg earning billions doing what they didn't and now can't because of Facebook Monopoly on social media apps. They patched up every way to connect inside their walled garden and grab the existing users.
As a side note, make a Facebook account and never log in beside the first time with zillions of anti tracking plugins. People who will otherwise ask for your Facebook can just search your name (they do this first before asking) and send a friend request, and I doubt anyone would ask why you didn't accept their friend request because
A. You might not like them or so will they think. They will be afraid to open up that they are bothered by you not accepting the friend request. After some time, if you remain friendly irl or on other platform they will think maybe you forgot or something. They will make up a reason for you that satisfies them of the image they have of you for not accepting the friend request.
B. They simply send too many friend request to remember whether someone accepted or not.
Have an upvote!
May I recomend you a book? https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...
Or, if books are not your thing, maybe watch Black Mirror - Nosedive (S03E01).
You need to understand that some people are older than facebook and have seen the tranformation of human society since the Facebook came.