If you're reading this and haven't deleted your account already, will you ever?
The presented line of reasoning makes no sense. But people aren't rational, that's no news.
So there is no reason to use it.
If you know what FB is about, and still use it nonetheless (actually for no reason), that's highly irrational.
"I want to communicate with my friends" is just a very lame excuse for feeding the machine.
You don't need planes to meet your distant relatives, but flying is often much more convenient than other modes of transportation.
> So there is no reason to use it.
Convenience is my reason. If you don't have reasons for yourself, that's fine, don't use it, but don't say for everyone.
> feeding the machine
This is a bit dramatic.
This is not a good parallel. You can use any modern instant messenger like Telegram to talk to your friends as comfortably (or more).
It is not just an ideological battle when your information is used directly against you personally. Companies pay for ads targeted to you by mining your personal content.
If you are not on facebook or rarely use it they have no opportunity to influence you.
Other than this I don't use Facebook at all any more and have used it very very little for the past several years.
I use a browser that tries to protect me from trackers and ads.
To me, this is what makes sense to do.
But they still get a significant amount of my attention because I use Instagram though.
I know Facebook is scum, but I have no other way to stay in touch with some of my IRL friends. So really I have competing agendas here, social connectivity vs. personal privacy, and I'm sacrificing some privacy to gain connectivity because I value one over the other. I, personally, mitigate the privacy loss by only sharing stuff I'd consider publishing publicly anyway, only liking stuff that's similar, avoiding groups and pages, periodically deleting all old content from my account, using adblockers and private browsing all the time, and customizing the FB web app via local scripts (thank you, FB Purity).
You can disagree with my values and the resulting choices (maybe you value personal privacy over social connectivity), but those choices are completely rational even for people who don't necessarily think about them in painful detail like I do.
So get over yourself and quit thinking that other people are somehow beneath you because they make different choices than you.
Facebook did not become a better place through that. But at least I now procrastinate on HN instead. The population here is visibly smarter and the mods actually do their work to keep the standard from sliding into abyss.
You pick your Facebook friends, you subscribe groups which you prefer with mods you like, and you are free to ban whatever Facebook recommends you. My Facebook feed is interesting, I even click ads from time to time because ads are good.
Comparison to HN is not fair, because Facebook is about friends and HN is about strangers. Still I kinda like Facebook because on HN there's very narrow Overton window and interesting comments are often downvoted while on Facebook I'm exposed to very broad range of ideas from far left to far right.
True, but this picking is not completely voluntary. If you are on Facebook and your relatives/coworkers/colleagues are, too, they will feel offended if you reject their friend request and you will have some personal hassle in your meatspace. Happened more than once to me and I reacted by cowardly accepting everyone and then filtering out most of them. Was not proud.
In that sense, being in a community of complete strangers here in HN is actually refreshing.
What I really value on HN is the fact that a lot of comments contain valuable info or at least interesting thoughts. I often changed my perspective on something I previously considered obvious after reading a HN discussion.
This is rare on Facebook, most of the user-produced content is low-effort, shallow, information-poor and/or fishing for likes.
Leaving FB (and IG and WhatsApp and GIPHY) seems like moving out of a country and never seeing or talking to many of my friends again. I'd much prefer to stay in the country and have more power in determining the laws governing how we interact with each other.
For context, I'm a man in my thirties, and I notice that a lot of my peers are super busy balancing work/life, or just bury themselves in work.
I'm from a Nordic culture where we don't have Southern European social customs and strong multi-generational families. I'm really worried about how our norms basically push us into loneliness outside our attempts to run nuclear families, which often fail and leave people divorced with limited additional social bonds.
Facebook's services are places where people in my demographic have accumulated social networks that sometimes forms connections in actual socializing.
When we throw parties with my best friends for a wider social circles, friends and acquaintances included, we still use Facebook events, to coordinate them, as an example.
Similarly, although I use Signal to talk to my closest friends, Facebook Messenger is still a functional way to get hold of people when you don't have their phone number or e-mail. Where I'm from, people my age didn't really collect phone numbers, since Facebook's convenient for that.
Transferring the connection between myself and these acquaintances may be cumbersome or awkward, and mind you, I'm the kind of person who insists on moving conversations to Signal after a certain point.
As a case in point, it took years to make Signal something that I actually use for real social connections outside my closest circle of people who humor my nerdy demands. And only succeeded thanks to 1) me having moved some group chats to Whatsapp for encryption the minute Whatsapp released a desktop app in May 2016. This moved the social graph to my phone book, which made it easy to switch to Signal over time. The initial move to Whatsapp worked because people already used it. 2) the larger network effect of Signal taking off, largely over the last year.
So, with all of this hassle in mind, I'm not going to tell people who, bluntly put, are at risk of being lonely, to drop useful social tools.
I would not wish lonliness on anyone, though I hope in your example, FB is used to facilitate better social interaction, rather than subsume it entirely.
> So, with all of this hassle in mind, I'm not going to tell people who, bluntly put, are at risk of being lonely, to drop useful social tools.
I think I'm playing a lot with the metaphor of Facebook or other internet properties as cities or countries—as locations where people exist and root. Similar to you, I have struggled to get people to leave the FB "city" or the iMessage "city" to follow me to the Signal "city." They may occasionally visit me on Signal but prefer to reside in iMessage or another place.
And then I feel bad asking them to move to Signal "city," as there aren't too many residents at the moment and not many whom they may know. So to take them to a sparsely populated foreign land where they don't really speak the language/dialect (different UI) can make me feel worried that it may disconnect them from the few connections they have back "home."
Anyways, thank you for sharing about your experience and inspiring me to explore this metaphor more deeply.
So yes, I wish we don't have to cut off our digital ties to others where we may still be maintaining some of those non-work, non-family relationships.
[Edit] though I had kept clear of it for 5 years.