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Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if people will ever quit Facebook.. I mean after all the stuff that's happened and they still haven't.

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.

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Facebook, like many other things in our society, is a Clan-thing. "My clan vs your clan" is a game that humans play very very well. Their initial reaction is just "oh, you are not one of us". If you talk about the details, they might agree with you, but they still fall for the "not one of my clan"-thing initially. Same happens with many things. Linux vs Windows vs Mac OS Android vs iOS Left vs Right Vegetarian vs meat-eater vaxxination vs anti-vaxx choose your poison.

HN contains many obvious example of clan behavior. New Urbanism, bicycling, cooking for yourself instead of eating restaurant food every meal, Trump derangement syndrome, Brexit is going to cause the collapse of civilization, all strictly enforced groupthink on HN.

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.

It is awful that staying in contact with messages from friends and loved ones forces one to be exposed to Facebook's addictive advertising, propaganda and surveillance machine - especially as Facebook is a monopoly.

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.

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