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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

I feel like an alien reading an article like this.

The idea of "showing off" with vacations, weekend events or even professional accomplishments seems preposterous to me. How is this socially acceptable is beyond my comprehension.

Likewise, I'm probably only interested in knowing where 10 or so people spent their vacation, and even then, only when the narrative is directed at me or a small number of friends. I can't understand how a public parade of general info and photos can be anything other than utterly shallow and boring.

Needless to say, I don't get Facebook.

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I feel alien reading this too and I have ~500 friends on Facebook.

I don't see people doing anything like this. Maybe I'm selective but really next-to no friends share their consumption. I think the share-your-sunsets-and-dives-into-waterfalls is the movie version of Facebook. We wind up sharing cats, snark and sad moments.

curious: how old are you? location? friend's locations?

i'm 33, sf now oregon raised, and i'd say in general i see less fb usage by my friends, but those that still do use it, it's almost all positive, brag-ish sharing.

people i know with kids, especially, it seems almost impossible to imagine sharing 'cats, snark, and sad moments'.

I feel this, 32M with kids. FB usage by actual friends that I cared about fell to zero and my feed was full of shallow experiential grandstanding.

Deleted my FB account but copped a hiding from the silent majority for being 'hard to get in touch with' and feel a bit guilty about this but overall life is better without FB or any other form of social media.

True experientialism is being there in the moment, not standing outside carefully curating the moment for others to gawk at.

Edit: *experientialism not experimentalism

I'm even older but I happen to have a group of friends of all ages.

Yeah, the people who don't use Facebook much do the "here's a picture of my ski trip thing" but they seem like such the minority.

Anyway, I can at least tell you that once your kids actually grow up, you just might have time to once again waste time online.

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