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Comment by antimagic | Hacker News Reader

Here's the thing. My friends and I use Facebook to organise evenings out and other outings. We have one friend that refuses to use Facebook, so now we post an event in Facebook, and then someone has to go to the effort of keeping the outcast informed. It's actually quite a pain for your friends if you refuse to use the tool that they are using to organise themselves. It makes your friends do extra work to accomodate you...

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It's you and your friends who decided to make him an outcast by forcing him to choose to stay in a particular closed site when there are so many open options to organise meet-ups, including simply firing an email with CC/BCC to all parties.

Even now there are still simpletons who don't understand the reasoning of those deciding to stay away of these sites. I'm saying just understanding it, not necessarily agreeing to it.

All my other tools don't track everything I do with them, don't sell the information to advertisers, and don't spam me with dozens of emails.

I don't get why it's necessary to justify not using such a "tool".

I know this not the crux of your post, but have you tried turning off email notifications from Facebook? I did sometime ago and I haven't gotten an email from them in years. Moving Facebook notifications out of my inbox and into a space that I had to explicitly poll went a long way towards reducing how annoying FB could be.

1) Facebook do not sell your information to advertisers. 2) The emails are pretty easy to remove - case in point, I stopped them sending me emails in 2009, and have not received one since. Linkedin on the other hand, go straight into spam because they just won't stop sending me mails...

First thing I did was disable all email notifications. Not a trivial task: I had to turn off like 30 different types of notifications one by one. However, these sly bastards just kept coming up with new notifications, that were turned on by default. So I kept getting emails from facebook, even though I thought I had disabled all of them.

That was my experience a year or two ago. At some point I deleted my facebook account, because the value I got out of it wasn't sufficient to tolerate all those annoyances: changing email notifications, constantly changing privacy settings and policies, annoying ads, annoying messages from people I barely know...

I got rid of everything a few years back. The only thing they introduced was the mentions, and i disabled that a few weeks ago (after my friends learned about it). I didn't have the same experience, to be honest. I found Linkedin much more difficult.

Mind you, the constantly shifting privacy settings are weird, its easy to be really granular (go to your Activity Log) but it is effort. You can also change privacy on a post by post basis, but its sticky, so you need to be careful. The ads never really bothered me (except for the dating ones just after i came out of a long term relationship). In fact, I never ad-blocked facebook because I could x out of ads I didn't want to see. The annoying messages from people is not really Facebook's fault, though I feel your pain....

You make it sound like this is the fault of the person who is not on Facebook, as opposed to the fault of the people who chose to use a system that has zero interoperability with other systems. From where I sit, the problem is you for choosing to use a closed system to organize social events. The problem is you for allowing Facebook to control your social life in this fashion.

Making someone into an outcast because they do not use your favorite social networking system is the problem here.

I really like email lists. Everyone has email. Most get it on their phone. I feel your pain... and this is my suggestion for a work-around.

If you were truly his friend you wouldn't be moaning about him in public...

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