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Comment by celestialcheese | Hacker News Reader

It's tough for me to get rid of facebook these days, purely because of FB marketplace. It has almost completely eliminated craigslist in my area for a lot of used items and is significantly nicer to buy/sell things in your area.

I got rid of the timeline by unfollowing _everyone_. Timeline is completely empty. It's bliss

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There are other local marketplace platforms, such as OfferUp, that offer the same experience as Facebook Marketplace without tracking users as severely as Facebook does.

https://offerup.com

But if nobody is using it in the area you live in, those platforms don't help you. The fact that such software exists isn't what brings the value to users, it's the fact that other people use it that you want to interact with. The term for this phenomenon is "network effect", and Facebook just simply buys up tons of platforms that have network effects.

In my area, OfferUp has a significantly larger selection of items than Facebook Marketplace. If you mainly use Facebook Marketplace, it's worth looking at OfferUp, Letgo, or other local marketplaces to see if that's the case for your location.

This is a big issue for lots of people who use the platform for business, or the marketplace. I guess I'm lucky that I was not using FB for any of those purposes and so I had little trouble removing it from my life.

More evidence that Facebook should be broken up. Or, I should be able to create a separate FB Marketplace account.

If people have shifted from other platforms onto FB then doesn't that say the opposite?

Ugh, I am the same way. The search in FB is _terrible_, though.

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