#deletefacebook

https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/19/deletefacebook/

by middle1 • 8 years ago

836 397 8 years ago

techcrunch.com

gizmogwai• 8 years ago

Oh, and don't forget to share our article using the little facebook widget at the bottom...

JKCalhoun2• 8 years ago

(Actually makes sense tho.)

kerkeslager• 8 years ago

John Biggs can use TechCrunch's platform to deliver his message without necessarily agreeing with everything TechCrunch does (such as advertising for Facebook via those buttons).

Additionally, if you're encouraging people to delete Facebook, your target audience is people on Facebook, so...

gcatalfamo• 8 years ago

How would you tell people on Facebook without sharing on Facebook? :)

Slansitartop4• 8 years ago

That's not a bad idea.

From Facebook's perspective, dissatisfied users who delete their accounts are a sort of immune system response. The spread of contagious memes like "Facebook is a pointless, addictive time suck" are contained because those "infected" with them take themselves out of the population.

Rather than just deleting your Facebook account, if you spend some time using it to push articles and posts out onto your feed describing your position, then the memetic contagion can spread over Facebook. If enough people do that, it could hasten their collapse (unless they actually manage a heroic effort to successfully address the critics, not just a PR band-aid).

Slansitartop4• 8 years ago

Oh, and don't forget to share our article using the little facebook widget at the bottom...

These kind of comments add no value and rest on incorrect belief that either:

1) authors control the marketing tech stack on the major sites they write for or

2) they can afford to sacrifice audience for their messages, etc. in order to be hyper-picky in order to forestall internet heckles.

The truth is that neither of those things are true. Writers will write, activists will get their messages out, and that's their job. Sometimes they will criticize something so ubiquitous that even they can't avoid it totally, but that doesn't make them hypocrites. In fact, criticizing bad things that literally everyone does is the first step towards fixing those things. If stupid insinuations of hypocrisy like yours had any value, it would be impossible to make progress on many fronts.

oneeyedpigeon2• 8 years ago

I generally agree with this point, in the same way that I think that people are far too ready to call "hypocrisy" when the deed that is 'hypocritical' is just a small subset of the original 'evil'.

Having said that, I also think it's worthy to highlight the impact of the facebook sharing button, which isn't dealt with in the original article. The point is that it's not enough to say to individuals "don't use facebook"; you're still 'at risk' if you visit a site that uses the sharer widget, even if you don't have a facebook account.

As an aside to the aside, techcrunch has to be the first site I've encountered that redirects you when you scroll beyond a certain point of the article, or when you try to search in-page (unless that's a bug, of course).

thrownaway9542• 8 years ago

how about #deleteSolcialMedia?

it's not just facebook doing this. twitter, pinterest, reddit and countless others do the same. heck... there is even a story today about google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16610088

and yes, i know some people will say... but that google story is about law enforcement using warrants... which i will counter with, doesn't matter, it shows that these companies don't care about your privacy and will fold in "defending" it when challenged.

if you care about your privacy, don't give _any_ company, _any_ information about you, in _any_ way.

fibers• 8 years ago

what about github lol

thrownaway9542• 8 years ago

i know you meant for that to be funny, but you are correct in a scary way. github has become _the_ place for sharing code and they (as you already have seen multiple times) have no problem in deleting or locking out repos when the first hit of a DCMA gets into their hands (without any verification to the legitimacy of the DCMA mind you).

aluhut4• 8 years ago

The top comment on that story about google points out the main problem:

2. On multiple recent occasions, police in North Carolina have quietly been successful in obtaining search warrants that force Google to turn over these records. Rather than "standard" search warrants asking for the location of a particular suspect in a crime, these "reverse" or "area based" warrants ask for time and location data for all users who have entered a geographical area during a time of interest. The records returned are initially anonymous account numbers, and the police then make followup requests for identifying information of the subset of accounts that they think are of interest to the case.

Sure you can delete your account on reddit. They'll still track you as if you have one just like the facebook buttons or all those creative new tracking shit we regularly read about here.

In the end, you don't have to be an extremist. Just don't post everything and keep in mind that you are being tracked. This is the internet for you today.

jdbiggs2• 8 years ago

I wrote that, too: https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/13/will-the-last-person-to-le...

sametmax2• 8 years ago

While I agree, there is a huge difference in impact. Facebook has more users, reach a way bigger demographic and has access to a much, much, much broader range of data. Not to mention is has instagram and whatsapp too.

It's two order of magnitude bigger than twitter, reddit, pinterest, etc.

The only ones that compares is Google.

But while I have no problem living without a Facebook account, living without Google is way harder. E.g:

- no hangout is the easiest. I hated it.

- dropping calendar was easy. It was not that good anyway. I missed the integration with a lot of 3rd party though.

- I leaved gmail. It tooks years and many problems with accounts came with it. The competitors UI are worse.

- I tried to leave gmap. But competitors don't have street view, shop open shedules or nearly as accurate traveling times. And waze eventually got bough by google. Maps.me is alright for when I don't have internet, but it's nowhere close to gmap for big cities if you have internet.

- I tried, very hard, to quit google search. Bing. DuckDuckGo.Qwant. They are ok. But I do hundreds of queries a day. Ok doesn't cut it. And if you are looking for result in another language than english, forget about it.

- now for the phone. Well, I won't go apple. Mozilla and MS are no longer here. I tried SailOS for a year. I don't recommend it. So android is what's left if you want a smartphone. I tried rooting, but it's dangerous, and takes time. So now I just avoid using a google account on the phone, which is, well, something at least. And make it extra hard to install apps.

That's a lot of trouble for so-so results.

Who else than a privacy savvy nerd is going to do a 10th of it ?

So to me, no facebook + ublock + no google account is like when I stopped watching TV 20 years ago. It's 80/20, but for privacy instead of sanity.

However, let's all remember HN is a niche, and that most people still watch tv, don't use add blockers and would not even have a though about personal data.

vanadium• 8 years ago

I've had the opposite experience with DDG. While DDG itself resolves about 85% of my searches just fine, getting the hang of the !bang syntax has really elevated my search game without compromising a whole lot. I've been 6-months free of Google as my primary search engine, and see no reason to go back.

Insofar as other steps, I shut down my Twitter account (with a dictionary word username) last year as an experiment to see if I'd care enough to resurrect it before the account was deleted--a 30-day span. I didn't come back to check again for ~40-45 days, and I don't especially miss it. That was enough for me to realize how little value it provided me.

(Never really bothered with Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and the like.)

This year I'm looking into non-Google alternatives for my family's email and common functions (calendaring, etc). It's a slow slog in between a ton of other priorities, but the importance of decentralizing again is growing non-trivially.

Also, I plan to resurrect my blog/personal site for the first time in, spitballing here, about 8 years now. Putting my content back on my terms and reversing the tide in my own way.

ReverseCold• 8 years ago

What's wrong with iOS? I use Google-Android right now, which is arguably the worst possible choice. iOS seems to be a lot better for privacy.

verylittlemeat3• 8 years ago

Facebook's raison d'être is to be a reflection of your real life identity. In that way it is unlike all those other social media sites you mentioned. Sure you could use your real identity on those sites but it's not required and many people opt not to and it has no impact on their ability to use the platform.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. I know black and white thinking is very appealing but we don't need to go back to living in a yurt in the wilderness just because facebook is a net drain on society. I've been participating on forums all over the internet for the past 20 years and it's been the catalyst for some of the greatest things in my life.

JKCalhoun2• 8 years ago

Worth noting. Some users have found they are unable to delete their Facebook account because, when they are asked to enter their password on the final screen, FB says the password is incorrect.

Seems FB has a bug where you must enter your password in all lower case on the final screen.

Imagine, big company like FB, having still not caught that bug....

inetknght2• 8 years ago

Actually, that's intended behavior.

https://security.stackexchange.com/a/68014/47800

oneeyedpigeon2• 8 years ago

That's fascinating. Couldn't they just detect the caps lock being on and warn the user instead?

thisacctforreal• 8 years ago

They can accomplish that feature using 3 separate hashes for various common mistakes, and it will still accept the normal case, but what GP is describing is that only a lowercase version of the password will work for account deletion.

jehlakj• 8 years ago

Reminds me of when I try to unsubscribe to a random newsletter. If it seems tedious to do so, even in the slightest, I don’t even bother googling or looking through the source’s website and ultimately move on. Wonder if this is what fb is trying to do.

replicatorblog2• 8 years ago

I must be part of an A/B test where I only see baby pictures from friends and family, updates from local businesses, and videos of cool construction equipment from TechInsider.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social channels could improve on the margin, but realistically, the problem with social is us. Ask friends and family to go back to sharing their unhinged political views in the form of badly punctuated emails, as God intended. If they continue to share, unfollow.

Social media can be as polarizing or as pleasant as you make it. Foisting blame on Facebook might feel good, but it won't solve the problem.

creep• 8 years ago

This is true. The psychological effects of anything are due to how one uses it. It doesn't matter how addictive something is made to be because a good deal of the addiction is psychological. Opioids are very addictive, but most hospital patients don't use outside of the hospital after their pain has been treated. It's because their pain is not psychological. People can become addicted to Facebook, and yes it was designed to be this way, but I can use Facebook for the purpose I intend if only I am self-aware and know my limits and can stay within those limits.

It's really like anything you can do-- anything. The threshold is defined by the person. The absolutist claim that anything is 100% bad is dangerous and false.

The tools we make and use are defined by us individually. The "mob" is the collection of people in certain echo chambers, and I'm sorry but if those people don't realize they're in an echo chamber, it's not the fault of the tools. We can't be going around limiting everything because the majority don't know how to use it. The majority will always be that way-- though I will note that I think this "mob" majority are better-equipped psychologically with each passing generation.

cryptoz• 8 years ago

the problem with social is us.

No. Facebook proudly does specific psychological experiments on its users. Facebook intentionally decides that it will make some users sad or depressed, just to see if it can. And it can. And it is proud of it. Facebook is proud that it knows how to make you depressed, so much so that they published a paper describing how they made hundreds of thousands of their users fall into a depression.

Facebook is a fucking poison. The problem is not with us. The problem is with large scale propaganda networks and centrally-controlled social networks with misaligned incentives. The problem is Facebook and the core problem is the structure and incentives of corporations in our current not-well-enough-regulated capitalism.

lorenzq• 8 years ago

[citation needed]

pkalinowski2• 8 years ago

That's actually very interesting, never heard of it. Can you link the paper?

Or did you just made that all up, hmm?

Bartweiss3• 8 years ago

This is my experience also.

I've largely stopped using Facebook, but my experience had nothing in common with the author's.

The content was fine, I followed things and people I actually liked and made adjustments when that changed. I felt no addiction loop, my usage time was limited, and it was honestly quite a nice site. Sentiments like "In the absence of human interaction we cling to whatever dark simulacrum is available" are absolutely alien to me; Facebook was a source of real social interaction, and almost entirely additive with other sources of real interaction.

I stopped because advertisements, autoplay videos, and timeline changes slowly made Facebook unusable as a site. Content I liked was consistently buried in favor of content I didn't like, in ways I couldn't fix with settings or following preferences. The discussions of Facebook usage time rising baffle me; my experience was of a good, usable site that destroyed its usability by trying to monetize.

dfxm12• 8 years ago

realistically, the problem with social is us. Ask friends and family to go back to sharing their unhinged political views in the form of badly punctuated emails, as God intended. If they continue to share, unfollow.

This is certainly a problem, but I think more important than this is the illusion of having control over what you see on social media.

You may think you can curate your social media feeds by unfollowing people who share things you don't want to see, but as long as a social media service's feed/timeline (and primary revenue stream) is still based on an easily gamed algorithm and paid ads, you're mistaken.

Social media sites will cater access to their API's to groups who are willing to pay for it. So, even if you can unfollow your uncle who shares "unhinged political views", you can't hide cleverly disguised, hyper targeted, ads, advertising both products and ideas.

replicatorblog2• 8 years ago

All good points. I would take issue with "cleverly disguised, hyper targeted, ads" as it relates to a lot of the discussion around FB's influence on the election. I'm guessing the person "swayed" by an ad depicting Jesus arm wrestling Satan to settle the 2016 election was not really on the fence to begin with.

soared2• 8 years ago

None of that will happen

Why not? My grandparents love looking through old photo albums. I don't see why I couldn't do the same with Facebook.

It’s an advertiser’s dream and it is wildly expensive in terms of privacy lost and cash spent to steal that privacy.

A few problems with this. Op dates users freely gave away their data, but now advertisers are stealing it?

The same sentence can be said about the internet as a whole - but most people believe the benefits are worth it and op hasn't proved we don't get benefits from Facebook.

Lastly.. the article assumes allowing advertisers to use your data is inherently evil. I'm not arguing either way, but it's never explained. Lots of people believe that to be true, but I don't think you can just call advertisers "the devil" without an explanation. Why is op harmed by data collection (outside of nonsensical hypthotheticals, like getting his house robbed when he posts that he's on vacation?)

aluhut4• 8 years ago

I don't see why I couldn't do the same with Facebook.

Because it very likely won't be there anymore. Your grandparents had full control over their photo albums. You have nothing.

Op dates users freely gave away their data, but now advertisers are stealing it? The same sentence can be said about the internet as a whole - but most people believe the benefits are worth it

Most people don't grasp the _extend_ of what they give to the advertisers. Not even in the slightest way. They still think that as long as they don't fill out a questionnaire, "they" won't know. Or what I give to Facebook, stays with Facebook and so on.

Lots of people believe that to be true, but I don't think you can just call advertisers "the devil" without an explanation.

Their sneaky methods, lack of information and the whole attention stealing industry it is, is bad. Just the basic normal ad on the street is already exploiting us. The digital versions are even able to infect our tools. It's an uncontrolled mess. An anarchy of people who don't give a damn because they can. We'll never know the full extend of misuse happening with our data on daily bases. I don't see a reason to trust them. Do you?

soared2• 8 years ago

Yeah Facebook might not be around, but I'm sure there is an app that will archive everything so you could store it locally.

I don't understand your view though - you believe billboards are an exploiting everyone who sees them? That would mean all advertising should be stopped. I think many people, you included, misunderstand the economic benefit of advertising. It enables commerce that wouldn't take place if it was gone. If a Spotify competitor started out today with zero advertising it would never make it - how would you hear about it? How would anyone learn about it?

I work in digital advetising and see no reason to distrust the industry. Nobody is abusing data about you.. you are tossed into groups that contains millions of people similar to you. No advertisers cares who you are, about any of your data, any of your Facebook posts. They care that you just bought a razor and might want to try their new shaving cream.

I'm not sure what you mean by sneaky methods, but it's as simple as you visited a website or talked online about shaving, so now they know you're interested in shaving. Basic text analysis is most of it.

Edit - very true that most people don't understand it. But then again most people don't understand anything they use daily (the internet, any app, etc).

gaius3• 8 years ago

Most people don't grasp the _extend_ of what they give to the advertisers. Not even in the slightest way. They still think that as long as they don't fill out a questionnaire, "they" won't know.

Right, it's like if you think about searching for some controversial thing and get as far as typing it into the search bar then think I don't want this in my permanent record and close the tab. Too late, every keystroke was already sent as you were typing! Surprise! Or an angry message that you think better of sending, the recipient might not have it, but it's still recorded and may or may not be used against you in some way in the future.

sysbell• 8 years ago

That's one diddle that can't be undone. Does the author really think deleting his old posts is going to somehow cover all the cached copies of his data? Not to mention all the little picadillos in the metadata Axiom has on him that they gleaned from said data? Articles like this make me fear for tech journalism.

bunderbunder• 8 years ago

It can't necessarily be undone, but if you're among the people who is skeeved out by surveillance capitalism, you can at least try to reduce future level of exposure going forward.

Also, if you're worried about the long-term psychological impact of social media, with all its dark patterns designed to get you to spend more and more time distracted by their sites and apps, then all you really have to do there is switch the distractions off. Deleting one's Facebook account isn't the only way to do that, but it's certainly an effective option.

athenot• 8 years ago

Facebook simply replaced the tools we once used to tell the world of our joys and sorrows and it replaced them with cheap knock-offs that make us less connected, not more.

This resonnates with what I've been observing. Instead of birthday card, a call or even a text message, we now simply write a note on someone's wall, between two out-of-context thoughts. It's the path of least resistance. Like fast food, it takes a bit of effort to fight, until the brain hijack starts to fade and new purposeful habits are formed (or reinstated).

Working on it but not there yet... :(

eptakilo• 8 years ago

30 years from now, candidates for president of the United States will have their old social media posts under a microscope. Whatever dumb thing they posted in their teens will be brought to light.

It's probably going to raise a lot of discussions about what constitutes normal human behavior. We might finally stop pretending they are perfect humans.

After realizing that everyone, even future politicians post stupid things, We probably will stop caring about online privacy.

It might also be a bad thing because society would expect oversharing as the norm and would consider anyone who doesn't put their private lives on display, to be hiding something.

Either way social media is here to stay. But it will change, this is version 1.

martin-adams• 8 years ago

I see it like a credit report. Have a bad credit report, it makes you look bad. Have no credit report, it means you're a risk because there is no data on your behaviour. As the world leans in to using social as a form of credit check, we will have to learn the right way to use it for a very different purpose than it was designed for.

acobster• 8 years ago

I also see it like a credit report, but for a different reason: some companies make money by recording your activity and selling your data. They use their profits to corner the market and create an oligopoly so powerful that people just accept it as a fact of life. Finally, when people realize the power they've given these companies and the danger they're in (see: Equifax), they are outraged, but the companies are basically an institution at this point.

VLM2• 8 years ago

Legacy TV during non-prime time is full of commercials about credit cleaning services and similar; perhaps that's the future of social media.

I would be willing to pay a modest sum of money to a startup willing to provide bland and inoffensive social media "filler" content. This is already the norm for celebrities, but at some point it can be automated for the masses. Give me a giant list of checkboxes to select the message I'd like to provide to corporate data miners, then I never have to be bothered with facebook again...

notyourwork• 8 years ago

It is a good analogy, a character report if you will.

CPLX• 8 years ago

Social norms will change.

But the concept of social norms will not go away.

There will always be some norms that society deems taboo to violate.

Therefore, there will always be reputational risks to someone by having a long record of social behavior in the public domain.

Pigo2• 8 years ago

It's really funny when people bring up things people said or did 10 years ago as way to knock them down a peg. If anything, it should show that a person has the capacity to change and mature if they are no longer acting the embarrassing way. It does bother me that people are expected to behave perfectly their entire lives in order to be a leader. It creates a situation that caters to psychopaths.

tachyonbeam2• 8 years ago

What makes it even worse is that there are always people who will try to put forward the worst possible (mis)interpretation of what you said, ie: in the guise of social "justice", and the domain of what constitutes acceptable discourse (the overton window) is constantly shrinking. There is a fair chance that some of what you posted, which was considered perfectly acceptable and maybe humorous 10 years ago, is now considered toxic / harmful / triggering / misogynistic / oppressive / etc.

Heck, what you say now can put you in trouble today. There are a number of opinions that I hold which I consider to be fairly balanced and mild, but am afraid to discuss online, because I think they could put me at risk. If you upset the online twitter mob, they're not going to fight you with coherent arguments and thoughtful discourse. They're going to insult you, threaten you, publicly shame you, and maybe get you fired from your job.

TorKlingberg• 8 years ago

The problem is that people don't usually switch opinion completely, just moderate them. If 10 years ago you wrote about the proletariat rising up and now you just want universal healthcare, your opponents will still call you a communist.

dwighttk• 8 years ago

it should show that a person has the capacity to change and mature if they are no longer acting the embarrassing way.

I mean, it can show that, or it can show that they have gotten better at image cultivation. And the latter is much easier to believe about a person running for office. (I'm not saying that is good.)

gilleain• 8 years ago

Exactly - a decade is a long time; you can be a youth of just 60 years old and make locker room comments about women and furniture shopping that are captured on a hot mike!

People should realise that we mature when we reach 70 and change our opinions :)

asveikau• 8 years ago

It's hard to tell when something like that is a deeply revealing character flaw that the subject will never turn around, or more along the lines of what you described. I think a lot of people's instincts, perhaps informed by life experience, is to assume the former. How often do you really see people improve on their character flaws?

mic47• 8 years ago

We might finally stop pretending they are perfect humans.

This is good thing. Once everyone will be embarased by his history,

We probably will stop caring about online privacy.

This would be bad, I would rather this to happen: "We probably will stop pretending of being perfect and become more honest."

tempodox• 8 years ago

After realizing that everyone ... post stupid things, We probably will stop caring about online privacy.

1. “We” never did care about online privacy to begin with, that's what made social media and all the other surveillance monetizers what they are.

2. Caring about online privacy is about much more than “posting stupid things”.

Slansitartop4• 8 years ago

I'd say there are at least two kinds of privacy:

1) Social privacy from your peers and the public.

2) Technological privacy from customer profiling, data brokers, etc.

The OP who was channeling Mark Zuckerberg circa 2010 was talking about the first kind of privacy, "surveillance monetizers" are the second. I think people are much more comfortable with violations of their "technological privacy" by "surveillance monetizers" because they're so secretive and behind the scenes. It's harder to understand the violations, let alone be bothered by them.

api2• 8 years ago

We've already come to terms with human imperfection in politics. Clinton was known as "slick willie" for his philandering. Obama wasn't known for much personal impropriety but his last name was Hussein Obama which is phonetically similar to both Saddam Hussein and Osama. Trump... well... my god Trump... the guy is such a walking scandal and fountain of political incorrectness he's just overflowed the integer and nobody cares. I mean his team is not even really denying the whole porn star thing.

The thing that concerns me about social media is the way it can be used as a training data set to train propaganda bots. Now that is scary.

shortoncash2• 8 years ago

This new fear around propaganda bots seems unwarranted. I've gotten mail advertising specific political newsletters or products for as long as I've been an adult. Someone was aggregating information and targeting me long before social media was around.

I feel as if the political class is just upset that they are not protected by the usual gatekeepers and that this is a non-issue.

maxerickson• 8 years ago

Clinton was first called Slick Willy by journalists who thought he misrepresented his politics on the campaign trail:

As best as I can determine, thanks to the help of the Pine Bluff public library, it had it's origin on September 27, 1980, shortly after Bill Clinton gave a speech before the state Democratic convention in which he depicted himself as in the tradition of progressive governors in this state, an assertion that offended us at the Pine Bluff Commercial because we thought of him as more of a trimmer who had broken this succession of reform governors, from Winthrop Rockefeller, to Dale Bumpers, to David Prior. And so we used the sobriquet, Slick Willy on that occasion and it caught on.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/choice/bill/g...

I'm sure others had their own reasons for using it.

VLM2• 8 years ago

Use of social media seems to be a exponential or power law distribution where a tiny fraction of people are responsible for most posting, then the next one percent down are half as active, then the next percent down is another half lower yet, and so forth. Not entirely different than criminal activity or any other hobby.

Similar to criminal activity, a very small number of very active social media people will simply be disqualified from office, and it won't really matter to most people.

"Either way social media is here to stay." Like CB radio, or telegrams, or pro sports, or newspapers, or TV, or vinyl records, or magazines, etc. Note that none of those have entirely disappeared, but have gone from utterly culturally dominant and universal, to "is that still around?".

Slansitartop4• 8 years ago

30 years from now, candidates for president of the United States will have their old social media posts under a microscope. Whatever dumb thing they posted in their teens will be brought to light.

In 30 years, the candidates for president will either be bizarre freaks like Trump, or the kind of people who locked down their social media profiles early or were good at covering their tracks.

After realizing that everyone, even future politicians post stupid things, We probably will stop caring about online privacy.

People have been saying stuff like this for ages, I've seen no evidence things will play out that way. In fact, you're literally parroting points Mark Zuckerberg made circa 2010 [1], when he was trying to push more public content to increase "engagement" with Facebook.

However, many, many people are reacting to social media by caring about their privacy more. Facebook's original selling point was that was restricted to your peer group. Snapchat's selling point was self-destructing messages. People are locking down the privacy settings on their social media accounts private or deleting them entirely.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/6966628/Face...

overgard3• 8 years ago

I definitely don't support the guy, but to an extent we're already here with Trump. If that guys twitter feed didn't kill his political ambitions it probably points to the fact that people don't really care about their politicians presenting themselves as squeaky clean. It will probably take a decade for this to become the new normal though.

losteric• 8 years ago

Have you seen how Trump supporters treat other politicians? Trump gets a pass on anything because he's on "their team", opponents are under a hyper-partisan microscope where even reasonable normal behavior is criticized.

wlll• 8 years ago

I suspect that this was linked to people seeing Trump as different to the status quo. Yeah, he was rude, made incoherent outbursts, etc. etc. but that set him apart from the career politicians that had gone before.

I'm pretty sure that any "regular" candidates for political office in the future will still be judged harshly by what they have done in the past. I think that what Trump stood for got him a pass.

greggarious2• 8 years ago

30 years from now, candidates for president of the United States will have their old social media posts under a microscope.

You're assuming the United States exists in 30 years, and that it still elects its leader by popular vote :)

cuckcuckspruce• 8 years ago

It would really be a change if we elected the president by popular vote because we don't now and haven't ever.

theandrewbailey• 8 years ago

You're assuming the United States elects its leader by popular vote. I guess you didn't check the latest results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...

drinchev• 8 years ago

30 years from now, candidates for president of the United States will have their old social media posts under a microscope. Whatever dumb thing they posted in their teens will be brought to light.

Considering that the leader of the free world is currently using twitter the same way as some of my friends do it, I really doubt that the social media will be such a significant way to check politicians.

More or less it will happen the opposite ( already happening ), where the politicians will judge the "average" citizen, by analysing tons of social media posts and reactions to them.

riq_• 8 years ago

Considering that the leader of the free world

nit: I think you are referring to Trump, the president of the USA. But I doubt he is the "leader of the free world", whatever that means.

YaxelPerez• 8 years ago

Relevant xkcd: https://m.xkcd.com/1370/

rsp1984• 8 years ago

Trump bragged about "grabbing women by the p*y" on tape only 13 years ago and he still became president.

No matter the amount of stupid or disrespectful stuff someone says on (social) media, many voters actually don't seem to care that much about it.

WalterSear2• 8 years ago

They care; they just have a different perspective than you on acceptable behaviour - one more driven by power dynamics and authoritarianism.

matz1• 8 years ago

I think this how lgbt gaining more and more acceptance, the more it exposed through social media, the more it talked about, it become more normal.

TallGuyShort• 8 years ago

Yeah, can you imagine how stupid it would be to have the leader of the free world post ridiculous status updates for everyone to see, and it would get dissected for hours on end by CNN? Man, I sure am glad I didn't wake up in that world this morning.

sklivvz1971• 8 years ago

After realizing that everyone, even future politicians post stupid things, We probably will stop caring about online privacy.

Online privacy is not about posting rude stuff on Twitter, come on

4684499• 8 years ago

30 years from now, candidates for president of the United States will have their old social media posts under a microscope.

At least it's public, people will eventually accept no body is perfect, let alone when they were teenagers.

I concern more about Google. They monitor everything users did, they memorize everything users did even you delete your account, they use data for everything that may not benefit users.

squozzer• 8 years ago

Let's hope in the future that we won't judge others so harshly, either past or present.

But I doubt it, because we have an oversupply of friends / job candidates / political aspirants, all vying for a piece of us.

djsumdog2• 8 years ago

The leaders of tomorrow are the leaders of today. Prescott Bush groomed his son to be president and the same with W and H.W. Obama was most likely sifted out of the pool in U Chicago by all the Strauss followers. The Clintons are a pretty powerful family and had Hillary won, it would have been a continuation of the Bush Clinton dynasty.

Trump might seem like an outlier, but he's more like Reagan: an actor. He's a puppet on stage and the corporations actually running the show know they can play him. He's there to distract America from all the interest groups that really run things and they selected him because he's so out there.

Make no mistake, the future leaders will either be groomed from an early age to be very careful with their public image or the puppet masters will latch onto actors who will be bombastic to keep America distracted.

The rules are different for the rich. Their PR departments build worlds around them that use social networking. If there's any doubt, remember Obama joked about predator droning people interested in his daughter and people laughed.

eldavido2• 8 years ago

I don't see it man. I think this was the most democratic election in US history, where the people finally got what they really wanted - a blustering populist without a shred of actual policy experience. I mean, come on - the wall, tariffs, and now the death penalty for drug dealers? Is there any mainstream academic/intellectual on either side of the aisle that's really "running the show" here? I don't think so.

glibgil• 8 years ago

Bush Clinton dynasty

oxymoron

Simon_says• 8 years ago

The Clintons are powerful now, but Bill came from rather inauspicious origins.

mtgx• 8 years ago

It's not just about being able to discredit candidates. An even bigger issue is using this data to manipulate voters, which is the main thing revealed about Cambridge Analytica in the story.

chabes• 8 years ago

An even bigger issue is using this data to manipulate voters

Really. The fact that the comments in this thread hardly talk about the actual issue is concerning..

samstave• 8 years ago

We need a #DELETETWITTER as well, esp. considering current POliTicians post stUpid drivel conStantly.

pat_space• 8 years ago

I have no passcode on my phone. I don't expect privacy anymore.

mikenew• 8 years ago

The problem with social media isn't that we aren't sure how much privacy we want to have or how long the things we say should stick around. The problem is that social media is a gamification of social interaction, and it causes us to behave in ways that we normally wouldn't.

In normal life, people don't take turns loudly stating their political opinions to a room of people and then looking to see how many people agree with them. They also don't have product placements or subtle advertising injected into their normal conversations. They also don't obsessively and continuously call up other people to see if they have any interesting new content to share.

Social Media is not just a tool that we use to communicate with each other along the lines of a phone or messaging service. It is a platform that is designed to be addictive and to carefully meter out hits of dopamine to keep people coming back. The current popular social media platforms aren't popular because they provide a nice service that people enjoy, they're popular because they exploit weaknesses in human behavior and cause people to use them obsessively and unhealthily. The customers that are funding these platforms and driving the design are not the people that use them, they are advertisers that want their ads to be as targeted, subtle, and as widely viewed as possible.

I agree that social media is not going away, but unless there is a fundamental shift in the way it's designed it may be "here to stay" in the way that gambling is "here to stay". Okay in moderation, but dangerous and fundamentally designed to take something from you.

cptskippy• 8 years ago

After realizing that everyone, even future politicians post stupid things, We probably will stop caring about online privacy.

Online privacy isn't just about hiding the stupid stuff you post online. Do you wear a name tag on your shirt with PII at all times when you go out in public or interact with others in a public setting? Why not?

I'd love for everyone who says "I don't care about online privacy" to start wearing badges in public with a unique identifier and all the information available about them on the internet for others to see.

gnode• 8 years ago

This could become a reality forced upon us by technological means with applications like FindFace (A Russian face recognition app which matches strangers' faces to their VK profiles). Unfortunately, I can imagine this just becoming the new normal.

ymse• 8 years ago

There's an interesting case going on in Norway right now. The head of the Justice Ministry is being impeached because she made a post on Facebook saying that the police should be able to withdraw the passports of suspected terrorists without a court case.

When the labour party objected publicly, she accused them of being "in favour of terrorism" (again on Facebook I believe), which was very unfortunate seeing that their youth division were the target of the 2011 terror attack on Utøya.

So right now other parties in government are questioning her ability to serve as Minister of Justice and Public Security and she will likely have to leave her post this week.

I could not find any sources in English, but it's the headline of any .no news sites at the moment: https://www.nrk.no/norge/krf-har-holdt-skjebnemote-om-mistil...

andypi• 8 years ago

I deleted my Facebook account in 2012. Haven't missed it. Let's hope this poor soul can finally be brave enough to find the close account button. Might not even need to write a script to do that.

staplers• 8 years ago

When I deactivated my account about 4 years ago, I thought it would impact my life more than it did.

I have actually strengthened my friendships and moved quickly up in my career as a result of deleting most social media.

Social media is like the dessert of the internet. Use it sparingly.

logfromblammo2• 8 years ago

I log on to Facebook twice a year, to let people know that I'm still alive, and to delete older posts and tags.

My concern is that if I shut down my account completely, someone else--possibly Facebook itself--could credibly impersonate me on the platform and thus use the idea of me as a means to target my friends and acquaintances that use it more frequently.

smpetrey• 8 years ago

Agreed. I deleted my account 2 weeks ago and haven't looked back either. Instagram on the other hand is still one of my favorite ways to share photos with my friends.

I think the facebook(.com) product has some serious soul-searching to do and if they continue to ignore their monumental problem -- it will not end well for them, nor their stockholders.

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 8 years ago

I deleted mine around the same time, but it was easy for me because a) I was pressured into having one in the first place by work colleagues, and 2) I don't actually have much of a social network. The few months I spent with FB was like most human social interaction is to me: vapid, meaningless, and utterly tedious.

My understanding, though, is that others don't have this same experience with real life social interaction, so might not as easily notice how much FB amplifies it.

jdbiggs2• 8 years ago

Hey folks, John Biggs here. I wrote this as a reaction to reason news and it comes at the end of a slow boil. I think we can make better tools than this one and I believe Facebook - and other social media - were originally quite useful and have now devolved due to market pressure. I'm definitely a hypocrite, as well. I still use most things to _broadcast_ not communicate and that's primarily because I've spent 20 years journalizing and am used to the constant, one-sided flow of information. That said I deleted all social apps except for Twitter and, for some masochistic reason, LinkedIn and am ready to tear it all out of my life step by step. It's a poison.

adventured5• 8 years ago

I'm curious, what are you primarily using LinkedIn for, that you find it difficult to have already gotten rid of it (in the process of stripping out the other social products)?

I've stalked LinkedIn for years looking for a way to undercut them with a superior competing product. I've never really found what I consider to be a very high value angle of attack that looked like it could cause a big enough wound to bring down the beast.

Bartweiss3• 8 years ago

This is fascinating to me - I know LinkedIn is valuable, and lots of people describe it as an essential account they can't get rid of. Meanwhile, I can't work out what LinkedIn is even for.

I update my profile there occasionally, but only to not have out-of-date info being spread. It occasionally produces a low-quality contact or recruiter spam. That's about it. My peers don't keep theirs up to date, my employers don't use it as a major hiring source, I don't trust endorsements there as meaningful or predictive. The interface is enormously frustrating, and it's not even a particularly good job board.

Is there just a parallel ecosystem of people who engage with LinkedIn so deeply and consistently that it forms a real network? Is software just a low-LinkedIn-use field? What on earth are people doing on that site?

mancerayder2• 8 years ago

I was skeptical for years, nervous that I was now broadcasting even more info about myself than I already gave to the likes of Facebook and Google before it was too late. I was worried about now giving my employment history. Well, I finally did and got a ton of interviews out of it, much more quality recruiters than Dice which has become a spam nightmare.

I guess everything has a price.

vmconfig• 8 years ago

I have some thoughts on a LinkedIn competitor. Want to chat?

cmpb• 8 years ago

I killed my account somewhere around 4 years ago. Overall, I am probably a better person (interpersonally / socially) because I have to actually talk to people in order to "catch up". However, there are some difficult downsides. For instance, given that basically everyone else that I know still uses it, all of my friends now have to single me out with a text when they create an event and want me there or post about something they wanted to get the news out about. Basically, being the one (or one of the few) non-facebook user(s) in my friend group effectively shifts the burden of communicating with me to the person communicating, from the app that was specifically designed for mass communication. So expect to be left out of the loop a lot. Expect to lose some friends (because you won't communicate with all of them anymore). Expect to have to put more effort into maintaining your friendships (since you won't have that constantly opened communication transport that you can easily use).

That being said, I'll never go back to using Facebook. It changed my behavior patterns too much and I was just not happy.

pepelepuanteur• 8 years ago

I've experienced the same things and believe that the requirement to put more effort into maintaining friendships has been a large positive for me. Particularly given that I have been a poor communicator my entire life. The phone calls that I have been forced to have with friends since I stopped using social media have drawn us much closer -- at least in part because a phone call is far more intimate than a series of text messages.

Nevertheless, I do think some people are perfectly capable of using both social media and more traditional forms of communication. I don't think I'll ever attempt to achieve that balance given the other ills of social media that I've found myself susceptible to, but to each their own.

edibleEnergy2• 8 years ago

Hi John, just an FYI: if you have Facebook Messenger installed on your phone, you are probably giving Facebook a lot more data than you think.

rybosome• 8 years ago

Can you provide any additional detail about that? I can’t tell if you’re referring to FB mining the contents of the messages, or the app doing unscrupulous things in the background.

drngdds• 8 years ago

Can't you avoid this (on recent Android versions at least) by disabling all permissions? That's what I did.

(I'm sure they're still analyzing the messages I send and how I interact with the app, of course.)

ggregoire• 8 years ago

Hello,

Do you know if it's the same for WhatsApp?

When you think about it, it's kind of alarming that FB, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram are all owned by the same company. I can't even imagine the amount of data they have about us.

eyeball• 8 years ago

Does the same hold true for WhatsApp?

rm_-rf_slash2• 8 years ago

What are your opinions on less personal social media sites like Hacker News and Reddit?

My enjoyment with Facebook ceased the moment Edward Snowden became a household name. I realized then how naked my information was in a world of bad actors. I only use Facebook as a simple contacts list these days.

But it’s harder to wean myself off HN/Reddit, as I get more value of useful information from the former and entertainment from the latter, than I have ever received from Facebook, even though both sites can lend themselves to mindless consumption and propaganda/manipulation, like FB.

Is there a “right” way for social media to be? Or are we resigned to a muddy middle ground forever?

mancerayder2• 8 years ago

Did you say Reddit? I'm really curious how to tolerate it, since the comments seem oriented more around feelings and me too or kneejerk anger than anything substantive. Also the comments are one-liners. Are there particular subreddits with intelligent people you'd recommend?

bwag• 8 years ago

Dude. Just delete it already. Once it's gone you'll quickly realize how much it doesn't even matter.

harryf• 8 years ago

This. Killed mine 7 years ago. Nobody died. Still fully employed. Still getting invited to more-than-enough social events. And my family appreciate getting hand-written Christmas cards once a year.

bluetwo• 8 years ago

I took the less drastic step of limiting to one day a week. I visit on Tuesdays only, usually just once or twice.

scotchmi_st• 8 years ago

I really appreciate the fact you call yourself out as a hypocrite. A hypocrite can still be completely correct (we are all sinners, after all) and I think society would be more well right now if people understood that fact.

I too have been slowly weaning myself off Facebook. Step 1 for those who want to but can't bring themselves to is to just be logged in on your phone or tablet. Has done wonders for me.

jjuel• 8 years ago

Do you mean you only are logged in on your phone or tablet? This seems like the antithesis of what you want. I have removed it from my phone so now I can only log in on a computer. It has made me so much more happy to not have that temptation there with me all the time.

Lorenzo45• 8 years ago

My approach was to simply delete the Facebook app. I can still use facebook.com in my mobile browser once a week if I want and I don't get any push notifications.

rconti4• 8 years ago

Why "except twitter?" I find Twitter to be 100x more toxic, 1% as useful, and infinitely worse design.

Diederich2• 8 years ago

I'm not going to necessarily disagree. My wife and I don't use twitter. Except when 'something is going on'.

When there is a local event or situation, Twitter is pretty valuable. For example, when there is a Caltrain strike, it's almost always more efficient getting details on Twitter.

Can anyone suggest alternatives for such use cases?

news_to_me• 8 years ago

Personally, I have the opposite experience. It's likely because few of my IRL friends are on Twitter, but I like the commentary of the tech folks I follow. They seem to be on Twitter rather than Facebook. And since few of my friends use it, I don't feel the same "ego projection" pressure as I did on FB.

Sure, maybe I'm better off without either, but I think if you exercise some diligence you can craft a useful experience on most social platforms.

aphextron2• 8 years ago

Why "except twitter?" I find Twitter to be 100x more toxic, 1% as useful, and infinitely worse design.

Twitter is all about your filter. I have mine curated to an amazing list of intelligent thoughtful, creative people who I enjoy seeing post every day, completely devoid of politics. As soon as you leave that bubble though, it's an absolute nightmare.

coatmatter2• 8 years ago

Twitter is indeed quite the mixed bag - I don't recommend for anyone to take the habit up but I think I'm starting to see why it's still so popular:

It can sometimes be more toxic, but I've heard it can also be really great and lead to more real-life interactions compared to Facebook if you can build some trust. The breadth and depth of talent is also much larger, because you're not limited to "friends" from your own past. Because you'll encounter more strangers directly, you're free to follow random people a lot more without expecting them to reciprocate it (compare this to the obligation of accepting friend requests on Facebook).

There's also a bigger endorphin rush when someone with many more followers acknowledges one of your replies or tweets (through a like, or even retweet) - this just never happens on Facebook, and Facebook Likes from "friends" pale significantly in comparison because everything (including reshares) blurs together. To get better at Twitter (and not end up on the losing side of debates), you really have to strive for it and learn from the quality of other well-liked replies. Usually humor goes a long way and there are often some genuinely funny and original posts on Twitter (again, because of the greater pool of talent to bump into).

As others have said, if you follow the right people your feed improves significantly but there is quite the learning curve and trial & error until you get there (I'm still working on this part). It's remains primarily a procrastination tool for me, so I don't recommend those who aren't already using Twitter a lot to try harder at getting hooked.

Breaking news of all forms happens lot faster on Twitter due to the number of journalists present as well as normal users "on the ground" (the search works really well), however I think we should ask the question of how much news we really need in our daily lives and whether it affects us / changes our lives all that much. It's pointless if we're not prepared to act on it and becomes just another form of procrastination.

After I deactivated Facebook earlier this year, I found myself focusing more on Twitter - so far that's actually been a better experience overall. But based on that, I'm thinking from this week that I should just fire up a computer game every time I feel like idly opening Twitter - it could turn out to be a more productive experiment if I can segment my time better. Replacing one habit with another slightly-better and enjoyable one always works. I need to learn to shut down the information-hungry part of my brain more often so that it can stay focused on stuff that I really do need to know (almost never news).

znpy• 8 years ago

This. I've been on twitter for more than six years now and I still don't see the useful/worth side of it.

JoshMnem2• 8 years ago

It's a poison.

That's the truth. I quit Facebook and most similar sites, and my social life improved quickly. I also get a lot more done without those distractions.

I block all of their companies in my hosts file and avoid their software libraries (React, etc.) whenever possible too. The company is having a terrible effect on the world and should not be supported. It was fundamentally broken from the start. A platform that connects all the world's people already exists -- it's called the WWW.

I know people who are desperately trying to quit, but they can't, because the site has locked their social connections within the platform, and they are addicted.

ciupicri2• 8 years ago

You're deleting old posts, yet you're keeping all the messages from Messenger. And even if you would delete them, your friends would still have a copy, which means Facebook has one too.

rkrym839• 8 years ago

I hope you realize that facebook keeps all information you are deleting in the back end. You are completely wasting your time.

debaserab2• 8 years ago

Does anyone know if deleting posts and likes actually removes the post from Facebook?

Even if it does, what’s the likelihood it hasn’t already been sold and a shadow profile of ourselves exists with facebooks marketing partners in a place where we can’t reach the delete button?

intopieces• 8 years ago

I think the best thing it's for is sending a message to Facebook. They surely have statistics on post deletion. It's one thing to just stop using Facebook or delete your account using their (hard to find) mechanism. It's another to systematically delete, post-by-post, your contribution.

notthemessiah• 8 years ago

Not really. In some countries, you can submit a request to download everything facebook knows about you, and for deleted posts, it just toggles a flag that removes it from public view instead of removing it from the database.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/10/20/law-student-trig...

ixtli2• 8 years ago

"Until we find them, however, it’s probably better for us to delete the ones we use today."

This is a really dangerous, reactionary notion. If there's something inherent in our social formations that are translating themselves into our public spaces and we are unhappy with, let's work to change them together. This is a thoughtful piece and I think there are great reasons to delete your posts from long ago because, well, people change! Other commenters here have made good supporting arguments for this.

But we must be very, very careful not to demonize tools where their users need to be taken into consideration: unless there is something specific about facebook, unique among other social networks, that is toxic (this may be the case!) then we need to be wary of these arguments because they are very easy to apply to all social media which, imo, is a copout.

kimdcmason3• 8 years ago

Why is it a dangerous notion? For the sake of argument, if everyone went completely over the top and deleted all their social media accounts, the world would go back to looking like it did around 2006. A few corporations would go broke. A few other corporations values would increase. Mass psy-ops would become more difficult and expensive.

Doesn't sound dangerous at all to me.

ixtli2• 8 years ago

So in the extreme case that you're talking about it's not dangerous in any way I can think of at the moment. One of the big reasons I called it dangerous was that the effect only a portion of the users leaving the platform is dangerous and more subtle. To my eye, it's a social critique which leads to people who agree with it voluntarily removing themselves from the 21st century version of the "public square." I worry that this leads to disenfranchisement on their part as I've seen such isolation result in those feelings.

I guess the spirit of my claim is that the shape of group conversation will always come to resemble the cultural context of that conversation, regardless of the medium. While the medium can and should be critiqued, calling for total abstention from the medium is effectively self-censorship and I don't think that'll lead to the desired result.

rambossa• 8 years ago

Where do I share photo albums and keep up with friends?

ishanjain282• 8 years ago

I would like to share my experience here because I think it was creepy on their part.

I only had <50 friends after 2015 on my facebook account. So, I would get notifications 1-2 times every week, "X is new to facebook, Since he is new to facebook, You should introduce him to more friends", Problem is,

1. I have no clue who X is! Sometimes I found that X lived in the same city that I lived in, Sometimes there was no visible co-relation. 2. X was automatically added to my friends list without my permission!

On several occassions, There were some people who were added as my friend but I couldn't find them on my friends list. The only way I figured they were my friends was when I received a notification and then visited their profile.

On 5-10 occassions every month, facebook will randomly send friend requests to people I don't even know and then some day I am just browsing and I get a notification that "Y has accepted your friend request" and I just couldn't recall sending friend request to that person.

So, Yeah, They were literally forcing me to be friends with people I don't even know, presumably, because I never clicked on ads and if I have less friends, That just means there is little activity in my circle and there is little information they can collect about me, IDK.

Whenever this happened, I usually took a screenshot, It probably doesn't do a solid job of proving my claim but it's something.

And before someone here starts running down a list of possible things that might have happened, Like someone hacked into my account, apps that had access to my account etc. I just want to say, I was a member of official 2600 magzine group, I posted all of this multiple times there and they did helped me a lot to prevent me from a lot of ways that someone might be accessing my account. I followed everything and it 6 months later it still didn't stop.

jgh2• 8 years ago

I've definitely seen some weirdness happen with FB.. like I was following a favorite band of mine for a number of years, but suddenly they were gone from my list of follows and some photographer that had taken pictures for them somehow replaced them. Very weird.

beagle34• 8 years ago

If you are the only person seeing this behaviour, it is likely a bug in their system.

Many ages ago, on one of the most popular mail and news systems of the day, it turned out that myself and another person both managed to register the same username, each with a different password, but were assigned to the same account.

After a couple of weeks in which each of us would log in, see the changes the other did, undo them, change our own password, and mail the abuse team (which kept replying "no, we see that you did it yourself on xxxx"), we both realized what had happened, and started talking by emailing ourselves. Eventually, the other guy left the account to me (I had it for 2 years when he managed to register it).

It could just be a bug, rather than malice.

ishanjain282• 8 years ago

It's didn't just happen to me.

Search for "Facebook adding friends without my approval" on google and you'll a lot of threads where people have had similar experience like me.

Here is one, https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=9079047...

singularity2001• 8 years ago

recently on HN: #deleteUber had no lasting effect

zerostar07• 8 years ago

People don't just delete stuff, they replace them. Give them something new.

VikingCoder4• 8 years ago

Is there a reasonable, open-source, distributed Facebook alternative?

I presume built on top of RSS / Atom / something feeds that are available only on authentication (so I can share with limited sets of people.)

I presume I have to keep running a server to host content. Maybe I can host encrypted content for my friends, too? So, federated. Maybe it even makes it easy for me to bill them, if the costs are prohibitive?

I'm pretty sure I'd want an Android App to talk to it. The Android app would talk to all of the servers that host my friends' contents.

It doesn't let me share with "Friends of Friends" directly. My friends would have to Reshare, I guess. And then I guess I can't interact with them.

Not sure how I want conversations to work. It'd be hard for me to offer a server to my friends, without me having access to their social data.

Maybe everyone needs their own server?

geogra4• 8 years ago

Diaspora?

zaarn2• 8 years ago

I don't think everyone needs their own facebook server (or diaspora in this case).

I'm more in favor of the federated approach where a couple people run servers for their community (I run a server for a fandom community I participate in regularly).

People that use my server play by my house rules, if they don't like that they can pick another server or run their own.

NoGravitas• 8 years ago

Diaspora[0] and Hubzilla[1] exist, but never really caught on for various reasons, possibly nothing more than that they came out too soon.

There is a project to build a Facebook replacement that federates with ActivityPub[2], which would make it to Facebook what Mastodon[3] is to Twitter. However, I don't want to link it because it's in too early a stage to face HN levels of scrutiny.

There is also Patchwork[4], a peer-to-peer social application built on top of the Secure Scuttlebutt Protocol. It doesn't have all the features you'd want yet, but ticks off the boxes some people care about.

[0] https://diasporafoundation.org/

[1] https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project

[2] https://activitypub.rocks/

[3] https://joinmastodon.org/

[4] https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork

LinuxBender4• 8 years ago

Most people won't host their own server. I am not speaking for the HN crowd. In general, people just are not interested enough in learning how to do this or stay on top of patches.

To answer your question though, honestly any blogging software that support good ol' fashion RSS feeds would be fine. Your group of friends could link to each others feeds. With a little effort, you could probably do this server side using some fashion of RPC call. Each language has it's own way to accomplish this.

wybiral2• 8 years ago

I agree with the RSS point. There were complaints about content being hard to monetize with RSS but the way that social media spreads links seems possible (just put a summary and make the feed entry a link to the main content where you can have ads).

Some kind of feed specification like that and a diversity of publishing and aggregation platforms would be healthier than this walled-garden approach.

VikingCoder4• 8 years ago

For the "stay on top of patches" thing, that's why I'm a fan of sandstorm.io. It makes a bunch of sense to me.

And, no, I don't want to broadcast info the everyone. A blog won't cut it.

I want to restrict content to some people with authorization.

zaarn2• 8 years ago

I'm without facebook account for almost a decade by now, I deleted it very early on. I never really missed it.

(Faceboook still sends me stalker/spam mails)

breakpointalpha• 8 years ago

I've been Social Sober for 20 days now. I didn't delete any content from FB, since I had been using a fake name on there for 5 years. I just deactivated the account and haven't logged back in since.

I honestly haven't noticed much of a difference in my life. I still work all day, come home and watch Netflix or play my Switch.

It's ok to not "know" what's happening. Just do it!

jgh2• 8 years ago

I did the same with my facebook account last fall. I haven't missed it either. I admit I still use instagram and messenger though. I think most people on my facebook list had pretty much stopped using it regularly anyway, it was basically all ads by the time I left. Twitter I never really used to start with, its primary use-case for me is I'm walking around somewhere and something's going on and i search Twitter to see if someone who knows more about it than me has mentioned anything. Although even that use-case has gotten pretty hit-or-miss recently.

adam12• 8 years ago

Facebook is using us.

It's funny how people are just now realizing this.

julienchastang• 8 years ago

So far this thread has not mentioned the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I recommend watching this clip from the PBS NewsHour: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-a-data-analytics-firm-....

To quote from the clip "Cambridge Analytica went to Facebook and said we’re conducting academic research with this app. Facebook apparently said O.K. and didn’t do a lot of diligence and through that, because they were able to get sort of the direct access from the people who installed the quiz app and then gather all the information from the friends of the people that had installed the app and that includes likes, you know their various posts, the pages that they subscribe to, just a ton of information. They were able to gather really detailed profile information on 50 million Americans."

The quiz was only a ruse to obtain much more valuable information. Sure FB recently ended their relationship with Cambridge Analytica, but they have probably known about this for months. There's a lot of anger at FB these days and deservedly so.

jcsnv• 8 years ago

How can you delete Facebook if you've become so reliant on its Oauth for login?

I'm just dreading migrating all of those logins

barce2• 8 years ago

If you go here https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications you can see all your logins. You can migrate each login, one by one, using an app like 1Password to generate new passwords that you don't have to remember.

gregknicholson• 8 years ago

I like that Facebook is now a glorified version of OAuth

I don't. One company should not have the power to decide whether I should be recognised as a legitimate individual or not, and they should not act as a gatekeeper between me and my online identity. I don't care how benevolent that one company genuinely is.

If an intermediary is necessary (like an email provider for mere mortals), I should be able to choose a service provider.

julioneander• 8 years ago

Some services/apps may be able to transfer stuff to a new account. When I deactivated my Facebook account, I had Spotify linked to it. I created a new Spotify account with an email and contacted their support to transfer everything to the new account and deactivate the old one, it was quick and worked flawlessly.

swlkr• 8 years ago

I haven’t had a Facebook account for years, sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side

alkonaut2• 8 years ago

I think it's too useful a tool for managing my social network to delete. Event planning, group chats etc are actually pretty HARD to organize without something like it. The impressive bit is the reach. Even my non technical friends and relatives know it.

I try to suggest people just stop giving facebook their information. Don't share anything, don't like anything, absolutely never install "apps" or click ads. Avoid facebook as a sign on provider to other sites. Use good privacy tools in your browser and never hit fb "like" buttons on another site. Avoid linking your accounts to facebook from other applications (instagram, spotify, ...).

I'd love to see a browser plugin that did all this that I could recommend to friends and relatives. A plugin that simply made a visit to facebook completely useless to facebook.

wheresvic1• 8 years ago

Try ghostery

Pingk• 8 years ago

I would recommend Privacy Badger over Ghostery - It's made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (non-profit) and is open source. Ghostery is proprietary and still collects & sells your data.

dade_• 8 years ago

I got rid of Facebook years ago. Finding a useful app for planning an event is very difficult, but just using email works fine. I just use calendar invites and I follow up with chat / SMS if needed. I can't think of any reason FB is better for chat than any other platform, but SMS group chat is available as a last resort.

Zelphyr• 8 years ago

Maybe you're in a different situation than me but I can easily round up all of my friends with a few phone calls. "Hey Tony. I'm planning a party on the first at 6:00pm. Would you mind letting Sue and Mark know they're invited?" That also easily works by email and text if I insist on using technology.

Humans have been organizing into social groups and gatherings for tens of thousands of years without the aid of technology. Why is it all of a sudden people feel like they're incapable of socializing in any form without the likes of Facebook?

I apologize if my candor is overly blunt, but your comment is an excuse to continue your addiction. Nothing more.

ryandrake• 8 years ago

Yea this excuse comes up all the time. Friends won’t invite you to parties unless you’re on Facebook? I’ve got some bad news for you: they might not be really good friends.

I stopped using FB so long ago I forget when it was, and I assure you it’s totally possible to have a robust social life without it... just like only a decade or so ago when FB didn’t even exist.

alkonaut2• 8 years ago

I don't use it either for trivial things. But for example, we are 14 friends from 4 different cities that have been planning a trip for a couple of months now. Deciding where to go. Dates, Hotel choices, flight bookings etc are discussed. People have been added along the way that weren't in to begin with. That kind of thing that's ongoing for a long time, and has input from tons of people is terrible to do in e.g. an email thread, and can't be done by just getting together. Group discussions (long, persistent) like those is what I use it for mostly.

I'd switch to anything reasonably convenient for event planing - but phone and email just aren't replacements for all scenarios.

Why is it all of a sudden people feel like they're incapable of socializing in any form without the likes of Facebook?

I never had that feeling. But I would find it inconvenient to plan a few kinds of events. I'd create a group skype chat. Or even throw up a discourse VM. But send a mass email to a large group asking for "so, where do we go on this years trip?" I would not...

kaennar• 8 years ago

Have you looked at GroupMe? It has the ability to do all the "Social Planning" you need and you don't even need the app to participate in it.

I know it's more common with younger people (at my university there's not a single undergrad who doesn't have it on their phone), but I know some actual adults use it too.

manjushri• 8 years ago

GroupMe is good for event planning and group chats.

wybiral2• 8 years ago

Turns out that deleting your account doesn't stop them from tracking you on every website you visit that uses their code.

bradleyankrom2• 8 years ago

Privacy Badger, Ghostery plugins are wonderful for curtailing this.

a_imho• 8 years ago

Consider obfuscating the profile before deleting the account. Whatever delete means in facebook terms.

LinuxBender4• 8 years ago

I was talked into creating a FB account by some friends a long time ago. I found that I was losing respect for my friends, as it brought out the parts of them I did not want to know about.

I also noticed a disturbing pattern straight away. FB was pushing these little games at me. The questions in each of the little games were nearly identical to the questions in psych and personality tests I was required to take in the military. To the best of my knowledge FB does not have the clearance for this data, so I deleted my FB account and blocked their domains.

AFAIK, I have not really missed out on anything important by not being a member of that system.

jordache• 8 years ago

the author assumes deleting his data via facebook api actually deletes it?

MBCook• 8 years ago

Another good thing to look at is Josh Constine’s article:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/18/move-fast-and-fake-things/

ibdf• 8 years ago

Clickbait much? The writer is struggling to delete his facebook account?

"Will you delete Facebook? Probably not. Will I? I’m working on it." So much drama.

I can help:

How to delete fb account: https://www.facebook.com/help/250563911970368?helpref=hc_glo...

You can also download your data before deleting it: https://www.facebook.com/help/1701730696756992/?helpref=hc_f...

I will delete mine when you delete yours: https://www.facebook.com/johnbiggs

barce2• 8 years ago

So this doesn't really work. You think you deleted it, but when you "re-activate" your account, there are backups that bring back most of the data from the starting date of your account to just before you deleted it - plus or minus a day.

bradleyankrom2• 8 years ago

Also, a) they never really, truly delete your profile (mine, which I deleted in 2013, is still present in some form) and b) one or more shadow profiles will probably pop up, at least giving the impression that you are still on FB.

adtac• 8 years ago

Pretty sure Facebook's "delete" is just a Boolean toggle called isDeleted with everything else unchanged.

But I guess this is the best we have.

jm1234567890• 8 years ago

Will GDPR change this?

verylittlemeat3• 8 years ago

Well think of it this way: all of that data facebook put time, effort and money into collecting from you will become less and less relevant as soon as you delete your account.

I wouldn't be surprised if from facebook's point of view they'd rather collect 1/100th of your data as long as it's current data vs just a bunch of irrelevant old data. Pull the plug.

munificent3• 8 years ago

My understanding from the Cambridge Analytica stuff is that even if you completely wiped every bit of data from Facebook's servers, it doesn't matter any more. Your personal data, attached to your name, is out in the wild. For a price, someone can buy a detailed psychological profile of you.

All of our genies are out of all our bottles. They aren't going back in.

verylittlemeat3• 8 years ago

Yeah but I get the feeling that current data is worth way more to facebook and data brokers in general than old data. Having data to make projections is nice but being able to experiment in real time with active data is probably the dream facebook is built on.

olympus• 8 years ago

This is somewhat true. However, if you stop adding data to your profile it becomes stale. Since I deleted my facebook profile I moved cities, bought a house, a different car, and have new friends in real life. My old FB profile is probably still a good indicator of which way I'd vote in an election, but it's useless now for targeted advertising. The only way to make that break is to delete your profile now; slowly over time your real life will start to change and eventually won't resemble the digital you at all.

rhcom2• 8 years ago

I thought it was only if you had used Cambridge Analytica's Facebook app. Is it bigger than even that?

monkeynotes• 8 years ago

Heheh, his last FB post was ~4hrs ago. I guess the cancer has progressed further than he first thought.

throwaway84742• 8 years ago

Whoever organized this coordinated hatchet job, thank you guys for the opportunity to buy FB at a discount. Keep up the good job.

ashelmire• 8 years ago

I deleted my facebook a few months ago. It's been great. I've spent a lot more time studying new things since I did. I feel cut off from the most toxic people I know and toxicity in general, which is also great. I still use instagram, which has become a more negative experience lately as ads have increased. Hoping an alternative to that pops up sometime soon - I use it now because I have a performance hobby where it's heavily used by my friends in the community. Never really got into any other social media. Have a LinkedIn where I get annoyed by recruiters but don't post or do anything useful, don't use twitter.

hokus• 8 years ago

start by deleting all applications that have access to your information.

https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications

You thought setting things to private kept them private?

carlosvega• 8 years ago

Is there any way to batch delete posts in FB?

niwde• 8 years ago

Stop using Facebook. Your future self will thank you for it.

aembleton• 8 years ago

How do you know that `Social Book Post Manager` isn't scraping all of your data and sending it to some third party server?

temp-dude-87844• 8 years ago

Your adversaries can always do more harm with information than friends can do good. This is because information "warfare" is fundamentally asymmetric: one incident, presented a particular way and targeted to a particular group can do great harm: someone somewhere will take offense to what you did or what you said, if a certain actor facilitates the travel of information to paint you in a bad light. Look no further than Twitter, whose functionality is effectively tailor-made for this behavior.

Facebook's original purpose stems from a time of naïveté: put all your interests and factoids about you here, where you can be yourself. As if anyone would use any of this to market you products, target you political ads, toy with your emotions by running A/B tests on your feed, or dox you to grief you in real life -- right?

So you pare down your friend list, you put your best face forward on Insta, keep your silly stuff on Snap, move your chats to WhatsApp, at which point your Facebook is nothing more than meme reposts, a rolodex of your acquaintances, and that one relative who always picks a fight with your friends on your political reblogs, yet you can't delete them because you have to see them at Thanksgiving. Your feed is 60% ads, but you don't care, because all posts are out of order, so you can scroll down until stuff looks vaguely familiar, then x out and return in a few hours when you're bored.

The author's points ring true, but Facebook is already past its prime, infested by overcommercialization, and no more harmful to the average person than the fifty thousand Google cookies they carry with them from their Android to their browsing with Chrome, or Amazon's uncanny ability to show ads for the exact thing you looked up from a different device yesterday. People deride the filter bubble, but what's the alternative; your private space full of people's stuff you can't stand?

3chelon• 8 years ago

In fact, I would wager I use Facebook more to broadcast my ego than interact with real humans

You don't say?

medyadaily4• 8 years ago

I have a personal story from inside facebook to share. 5 years ago Facebook recruiter reached out to me and invited me to the W hotel in Chicago. I was very excited -not for the job- but for the opportunity to meet with senior Facebook managers and tell them about an evil thing Facebook does.

Here is the background story:

I am Kurdish from Iran. And Iran has many provinces. one of them is called Kurdistan. In Facebook profile section for Hometown you could pick all of the Iranian provinces except Kurdistan.

And at first I thought it was a bug. For years and years we submitted bug reports and collected petitions for Facebook they never responded why the Kurdistan province cannot be picked while other provinces could be picked.

Till one day, An internal document -guidance- leaked out of Facebook. That explained it all ! One of the pages was talking about Kurdistan. In which they had explained any reference to Kurdistan is considered terrorism. That was on the request of Turkish government.

In "Turkey", the word Kurdistan is forbidden. and many people in Turkey been prisoned for speaking Kurdish. however in "Iran" we officially have a province called "Kurdistan Province). and Iranian government recognizes the name Kurdistan for my homeland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Iran

But Facebook decided to enforce the Turkish government racist rule on other countries that have Kurdistan (Iran, Iraq, Syria...)

Also in that leaked guidance memo. Kurdistan flag was considered illegal. And hundreds of Kurdish pages and accounts got banned for having Kurdistan flag.

While Kurdish flag is illegal in Turkey. Kurdish flag is officially recognized in the Constitution of Iraq for Kurdistan regional government.

So when they invited me to W Hotel to recruit me. I was like yes finally I can meet the people in person. Because as a Kurd I have no importance and they will never respond to me but a software engineer I am pretty attractive on the market.

So I asked the question from one of the managers. And told them my story this for years and years I send them emails and nobody got back to me and we made petitions about this so-called bug.

He said these things are decided by higher management.

I told him how often do you show this disagreement to higher managers or Mark Zuckerburg's policies if you have a different opinion. He responded if I disagree with them I wouldn't work there.

I left the W Hotel in Chicago 5 years ago refusing to proceed with a job on FB. I knew Facebook is on the wrong path. And today I see that prediction coming true.

Even today when Turkey committed a massacre in Kurdish city of Afrin, Facebook blocked many voices inside the city who were showing massacres by Turkish government.

10 years ago FB came after kurds and you said not my problem. Today they are coming after all of us

dopamean2• 8 years ago

I listen to a podcast called OnTheMedia and they had an episode recently that talked a bit about the politics behind Google Maps. Basically it was about how GM draws borders and names locations in disputed areas (Palestine, Crimea, Kashmir, etc). They didn't mention FB or FB's rules on Kurdistan but you may still find it interesting.

medyadaily4• 8 years ago

Thanks for the information, is that NPR's on the media? btw Kurdistan Province in Iran is not a disputed area, it is officially part of iranian constitution that we have a province called Kurdistan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Iran) so in facebook you could choose any of the provinces of Iran, except Kurdistan.

this_user• 8 years ago

I don't think this is specifically a FB problem, but a problem that globally operating Internet companies in general face: You will be dealing with different groups and countries that have different views about things, and it is next to impossible to avoid being dragged into these political issues. Take map services as an example. There are lots of controversial borders out there, and no matter what you do, you're going to to antagonise someone.

There are also things like data protection laws like the EU's "right to be forgotten" that allows an individual to request the removal of their personal information. Of course, you're now dealing with the situation that the EU is effectively trying to enforce its rules worldwide since the information would not just have to be deleted for users from the EU but for everyone.

In the end, there is no perfect solution, and it comes down to who has more power to impose their will on these companies. In your case, FB is clearly more afraid of getting into trouble with Turkey than the Kurds. Same goes for a lot of what China wants.

medyadaily4• 8 years ago

That is not the case in this case !

Let say FB wants to do everything Turkey wants, Fine ! ban Kurdistan word and Kurdish language for inside Turkey. (sounds horrific but just to go with your poor loginc, lets do that) BUT still according to your logic...

INSIDE IRAN- word kurdistan is not forbiden, Iran OFFICIALLY has a province called Kurdistan, it is on Iran's official Map.

and I am a Kurd from Iranian Kurdistan, and facebook deleted many Iranian Kurds for posting Kurdish material.

That is a flat disgusting targeting an ethnic group.

That is a no brainer, do not make it like Facebook is an innocent company, trying to not get dragged into regional conflicts.

All I am saying they first came for Kurds you said not my problem. That is a regional Others Problem.

Now they are coming for you. Taste it ! Facebook will screw all you over so bad. just wait and see it happening !

medyadaily4• 8 years ago

plus you missed out on the ending part, which FB managers told me they are discouraged from disagring with policies of Mark Z

socratesone2• 8 years ago

Does anyone have a script or app that can go in and delete every post I've ever made? Google turns up a few Chrome plugins that all look dubious. Be great to have an authoritative guide to deleting everything without fully deactivating Facebook (since there is still a lot of utility in it w/r/t rolodex, event planning)

hellofunk• 8 years ago

If you read the article, the actual tools to do what you say are linked from within it.

StavrosK3• 8 years ago

I saw the one in the post, but it's a Chrome extension. I think this will be very useful for me, so I'm going to write a very simple one (basically you just log in with FB/Twitter/whatever) and it deletes every post older than what you specify.

It's going to live at https://forgetme.stavros.io/, if you want to take a look later on to see how far I've gotten. Hopefully, deleting posts will be doable from the APIs, and the app will be feasible.

I expect I'll have a useful app up in a day or two.

socratesone2• 8 years ago

Excellent - would love to test out when you are done

latexr5• 8 years ago

From the website:

an application that will delete all your old posts from social media every so often, to help your privacy.

I’m not sure this will help with privacy. If you keep posting, you keep giving Facebook data and helping them build their profile of you. There’s no guarantee deleting old data from your timeline will delete the data Facebook has on you. To help your privacy, you need to stop giving them data (i.e. stop posting).

carrja99• 8 years ago

Facebook and twitter are trash.

amingilani• 8 years ago

Off topic, has anyone noticed the really cool thing that happens when you scroll too far below this article? You end up at techcrunch.com, as in the homepage. I made a gif if you missed this or are on another type of device.[1]

I'm curious about how they did this.

[1] https://cl.ly/qFLY

282883392• 8 years ago

Not exactly the same, but here's a javascript plugin that can add more content to the bottom of the page as you scroll down.

https://infinite-scroll.com/

yoodenvranx• 8 years ago

Has anyone ever done an analysis which compares the "social media" in the book "Ender's Game" to our current social media?

I haven't read the book in a few years but if I remember correctly there was some sort of global discussion forum / social media which was used to steer political and social discussion. Ender and his siblings wrote tons of articles under pseudonyms and became quite influential.

15-20 years ago this might have sounded like a viable way to do global communications but looking at the current click-baity social media with all its Fake News it looks like we are very far away from a viable system.

teddyh• 8 years ago

If I recall correctly, Ender’s Game basically assumed that the future would be like Usenet Netnews.

IanDrake• 8 years ago

It is creating an echo chamber

It’s more likely the author created his own echo chamber.

My Facebook friends span the political spectrum 70% liberal and the rest some degree of conservative.

I would venture to say, 99% of political post come from my liberal friends. Some of which I will comment on, most of the time I get responses that aren’t logical and mostly insinuate I’m not a good person because I disagree.

For those people, I usually just remove from my feed. Not because I don’t care for their politics, but because they only want a one way conversation.

That is how an echo chamber is created and it’s their own doing, not Facebooks.

Myrmornis• 8 years ago

I’m very down on Facebook nowadays. But because of the way it’s algorithms interfere in my communication with friends: I don’t know who will be shown what message. So they aren’t messages, they are “contributing content”. So it’s not commmunication.

But I don’t get all this obsession with privacy. I’m just not interesting enough for that to be a concern.

kbuchanan• 8 years ago

Ten years ago when Facebook was gaining momentum, I chose to stay away, and remain so today. In recent years a new mantra has emerged: "I wish we could live without Facebook, but that's not practical anymore." Not true. It is practical, and infinitely more desirable.

Social media was never a meaningful way to present ourselves to the public or interact with others.

teilo• 8 years ago

I did this to all my social media accounts and all personally identifiable information on them. No pictures, no dates, locations, etc.. They now exist for messaging and group participation, and nothing else.

Froyoh• 8 years ago

For some reason nothing on my FB feed it's from my friends anymore. Just news articles.

fiatjaf• 8 years ago

Even if Facebook was perfect and did everything everyone is expecting from it, would it be worth losing, say, 2 hours everyday on chat and discussions with friends? With 2 hours every day you could become a master in any art or technique.

munificent3• 8 years ago

There's something I never see talked about in all of these discussions around social media. There is the old refrain "If you didn't pay for it, you aren't the customer, you're the product." But I don't see people talking about that mantra as a useful tool.

We all rushed to use Facebook. We put our data on their servers, we uploaded our photos and watched them get resized, stored, and served. We use a service that costs actual money to run and paid them zero dollars.

Sure, they served ads, but we've all learned to completely tune those out when it comes to being persuaded to actually buy stuff, so that revenue stream isn't enough to keep the lights on.

That doesn't leave Facebook and similar companies with too many other options. I'm not saying they are innocent, but it seems to me that much of this behavior — data mining users, selling ads to the rich to enable them to influence elections, etc. — is a predictable outcome from incentives we put in place by our collective behavior.

If Facebook didn't do this shady stuff, they'd run out of money and get replaced by another company that did. In the cutthroat natural selection environment of the market, only businesses that make money — by any means possible — survive.

I'm sure I'm naïve and missing something, but it makes me sad that the obvious solution hasn't manifested — pay for stuff. A version of Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. that had a monthly subscription fee would have less incentive to extract value from user data because they are already extracting money directly from their users. I miss the days when Reddit just had Reddit gold.

I suppose the answer to my supposition is that companies would do both. If you have the data, why not also pimp it out even if your users are already paying you. And, at that point, the goal becomes maximum users, which is gated by subscription costs, so those fees get driven to zero and here we are.

But I do wish a simpler business model where people pay for things they use could be successful and properly incentivize companies to act in our interests. Given that in a capitalist market, businesses fully expand all the way up to the boundary of the letter of the law (and often past that), I suppose there's little left to do but try to get strong regulations passed and vigorously enforced.

Given the fundmental network effects of social media, competition — the primary user-beneficient force in capitalism — is completely ineffective. Absent that, I think all we're left with is the law.

master_yoda_1• 8 years ago

I deleted Facebook 5 years ago. In earlier days technology used to increase productivity but now technology reduces productivity, Facebook is one of the productivity killer.

kimdcmason3• 8 years ago

I never liked the reciprocal friend model of Facebook, and I liked even less that it was exposed publicly by default, allowing anyone to crawl the social graph. Even if you lock down your friend list, it doesn't matter because your friends mostly aren't locking down theirs.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal clearly demonstrates why this is a dangerous thing. The clear solution is to unfriend everybody then delete (not suspend, but delete) your account.

Enough people do this, and Facebook's cherished network effect will be weakened enough for better alternatives to begin appearing. Alternatives that don't vomit large amounts of data about you into the public sphere by default.

leadingthenet• 8 years ago

And what exactly is the business model for that going to be? Unless people switch to decentralised services (they won't) or pay for a centralised one (they won't), what way could any alternatives survive?

The problem isn't Facebook as much as it is the system in which it exists.

apeace• 8 years ago

Can't help but disagree a bit with the premise that these awful properties of Facebook are something new.

Facebook is using us. It is actively giving away our information. It is creating an echo chamber in the name of connection. It surfaces the divisive and destroys the real reason we began using social media in the first place – human connection.

I think it has always been more about "broadcasting ego" than "human connection", as the author admits two paragraphs later.

What's different today than when Facebook first launched?

While I applaud the effort to delete all your old posts and eventually the account itself, I wish the tone of this were more "we should be ashamed we let this happen" rather than "the good Facebook has been replaced by the evil one".

Broadcasting your ego--in fact your entire life--and selling it to random companies has always been your choice, not something Facebook recently started doing to you.

gamblor956• 8 years ago

I suppose techies don't have much need for social interaction, but for those of us outside the tech world, Facebook survives because it's useful for facilitating social interaction. I use Facebook (and occasionally Meetup) to help organize local running groups and events. Fantastically useful for coordinating with multiple groups of people across multiple computer and phone platforms, separated by hundreds or thousands of miles. Nothing else comes close.

It sounds like the author primarily used Facebook to be seen rather than to connect, and so he views it as a cancer. He doesn't understand that Facebook is a tool. The problem isn't Facebook, the problem was him. He was the cancer, treating Facebook as a platform for aggrandizing himself. Good riddance.

quii• 8 years ago

I suppose techies don't have much need for social interaction

Sure....

Sir_Substance• 8 years ago

but for those of us outside the tech world, Facebook survives because it's useful for facilitating social interaction.

It's useful for facilitating connections with other facebook users. You're in a bubble.

astine3• 8 years ago

It's useful for facilitating connections with other facebook users.

And anyone willing to join Facebook to keep up with the event invitations. You don't have to post anything at all on Facebook to do this. I definitely know a bunch of people who use Facebook that way.

js2• 8 years ago

Groups are Facebook's best feature to me and the only one I really care about.

p.s. Join us in Runners Anonymous.

ShabbosGoy• 8 years ago

I suppose techies don't have much need for social interaction

Humans in general need social interaction. That’s why solitary confinement is so psychologically damaging.

Facebook survives because it's useful for facilitating social interaction.

Facebook “survives” because its social graph has many nodes and edges due to network effects. You admit to using Meetup, meaning that Facebook isn’t enough on its own for your purposes.

It sounds like the author primarily used Facebook to be seen rather than to connect, and so he views it as a cancer.

You’re using it for that same exact purpose. If your events can’t be seen, why would you use Facebook?

dmix2• 8 years ago

I suppose techies don't have much need for social interaction

I don't know a developer who doesn't always have an IRC/Discord/etc running in the background 24/7 as they work...

fooblitzky• 8 years ago

I'm sure Facebook is useful for organizing groups and events, but not everyone uses it (yet). I'm not signed up to Facebook (for what I feel have been proved valid reasons over the years), and I feel excluded each time it's required to participate in some event. It's good if organizers can use Facebook as an additional means of organization, rather than assuming it is both necessary and sufficient.

overgard3• 8 years ago

Stereotype much? I guess we should all go back to our nerd caves to be forever alone.

readams• 8 years ago

As a meme #deletefacebook has limited virulence because of self-termination. Probably #deletefacebookafterpostingaboutitthenwaiting would be better.

40acres5• 8 years ago

It's interesting to see how many people make excuses for still using Facebook because it makes event organizing and the like easier. I'm 26 and never used Facebook. My friends organize group events all the time, I'm always kept in the loop because I text my friends and ask what they are doing this weekend and/or meet with my friends regularly enough that they let me know what's going on. It's become well known that I don't get updates through FB so my friends will text me invites if I haven't asked for an update.

People act as if Facebook is the only way to keep up with friends but it's just not the case. Every phone can still receive SMS and you can gasp meet your friends personally to catch up.

Now for friends who live in distant locations you need to ask yourself: Does Facebook status updates really make me feel more connected to this person? My answer would be no, and I accept the fact that I just wont see my friends who live in other locations as much as I'd like, and I simply try to make it a habit of catching up when I'm in town.

There was life before Facebook and there can be life without Facebook, stop making excuses.

Huggernaut• 8 years ago

It's interesting to see how many people make excuses for still using Facebook because it makes event organizing and the like easier. I'm 26 and never used Facebook.

If you've never used it, how do you know it does not make life easier? Similarly, it's possibly a burden (albeit small) on your friends who have to text you in addition to organising for others.

Now for friends who live in distant locations you need to ask yourself: Does Facebook status updates really make me feel more connected to this person?

For you no, for me absolutely 100%.

Additionally, there are many opportunities I have discovered through Facebook that I likely would not have otherwise. For example, just last weekend I happened to be flying across continents and when I checked Facebook on my phone, I discovered a cousin I haven't seen in a while also happened to be flying to the same city on the same day. There would have been no reason to share this with each other, but because it was out there publicly I was able to see and organise time for us to meet. I often see content which prompts me to get in contact with people.

I have no doubt I can survive without Facebook (though perhaps some might not), so for me you're arguing a strawman. For me, there is no doubt that it _is useful_, the question is whether that offsets the myriad negative impacts. To suggest that your experience (with admission that you've never used Facebook) is reflective of everyone and they should "stop making excuses" is pretty narrow.

runj__• 8 years ago

Similarly, it's possibly a burden (albeit small) on your friends who have to text you in addition to organizing for others.

I really have to agree with this: using your friends as personal assistants is not cool. Planning events can be hard work, just scheduling your own weekend can be a hassle. That said: I do wish people used something other than Facebook to plan events. It's just not gonna happen anytime soon.

40acres5• 8 years ago

Additionally, there are many opportunities I have discovered through Facebook that I likely would not have otherwise. For example, just last weekend I happened to be flying across continents and when I checked Facebook on my phone, I discovered a cousin I haven't seen in a while also happened to be flying to the same city on the same day. There would have been no reason to share this with each other, but because it was out there publicly I was able to see and organise time for us to meet. I often see content which prompts me to get in contact with people.

I can understand this point but I think you would agree that this is really a case of serendipity and is not reflective of the "average" interaction between two people are connected via social media but do not meet regularly face to face.

I went to high school on the east coast but now live on the west coast. I had instagram for a few years but stopped in late 2017 because the algorithm changes annoyed me. Most of the people in my feed where either friends from high school who I don't connect with regularly (and if I do it would be during the holidays) or local friends who I meet w/ every couple of weeks at the least. The level of 'connectedness' between me and my high school friends on the east coast stayed relatively the same (very low) once I stopped using instagram. I mean it was funny to see memes and interesting to look at what vacations they were taking but there was very minimal interaction then and there is minimal interaction now.

JoshMnem2• 8 years ago

If you've never used it, how do you know it does not make life easier?

I've used Facebook and then quit. Facebook doesn't make life easier. It's a huge time waster, in addition to being dangerous for society. My social life improved a lot since leaving. I did have some interesting meetings with people through Facebook, but the overall effect was detrimental to my life. I've seen many people there whose lives are being damaged by the site due to addiction. They want to quit but can't, because Facebook has locked their social connections within the site.

astine3• 8 years ago

I'm 26 and never used Facebook.

I'm 31 and I've never used tobacco. If people who used tobacco just made better choices they could be like me. They really need to ask themselves if tobacco really makes them happier. /s

---

I suppose it's a bit facile to compare Facebook to an addictive drug, but the idea that just because you've never used Facebook, nobody else should want to doesn't make any sense. Not everybody's circumstances and background are going to look like yours and people will have different needs. My friends probably have a very different dynamic than your friends so what works for you might not work for me or vice-versa.

justherefortart• 8 years ago

If you're 31, you've had facebook for what 11 years of your life at most? How'd you survive the other 20.

Needs, that's comical. Facebook is not a need.

SilasX• 8 years ago

A lot of the Facebook deletion advice comes down to: "I'm hypercompetent at managing my social life and am constantly invited to important events by direct contact, and barely remember what it would not be like to be that way, therefore I don't see a significant downside to immediate cessation of all FB use."

twblalock2• 8 years ago

You need to accept that Facebook adds value for some people. Maybe it doesn't add value for you, but that's no justification for extrapolating your personal experience to everyone else and assuming they are making excuses.

eecks• 8 years ago

Not everyone has good friends like that.

cwaffler• 8 years ago

I am a musician and we HAVE TO follow the trends to get shows. Used to be a bunch of tools, (I.E. myspace/reverb nation/bookyourownfuckinglife...) but now facebook seems to have dominated DIY events and concerts. Groups help with people to share shows and I'm not really aware of another tool that the majority of people will use to get shows booked in my community.

Even if another tool exists how would I sway people away from FB and to a new tool?

Symbiote• 8 years ago

I like going to see small bands, and it's easiest to find them using Facebook.

I "follow" two local promoters and a couple of venues, with the setting to show their events at the top of my timeline.

Friends share events they're going to, and Facebook's algorithm shares them too.

I used to use Last.FM, but stopped checking it once everything seemed to be on Facebook anyway. I still use it if I'm travelling to another city.

I used to get a printed flyer from the promoter when I went to a gig, but they have mostly stopped printing them.

I'd prefer not to have to check 10 promoter/venue websites, magazines or whatever. They probably don't have RSS, and are usually less-complete than Facebook.

em3rgent0rdr• 8 years ago

ditto here...musician and you basically have to be on facebook. Fans don't check every band & venue website calendars. It would have be great if average folk figured out RSS.

e40• 8 years ago

Momentum. I'm part of an organization that uses FB to communicate things to members. Yeah, I could try and get them to change. It's not worth my time. I just go to FB when I need to do business with the group.

grahamburger• 8 years ago

When people recommend that I quite Facebook I feel a little bit like I would if they recommended that I stop eating cookies. Sure - if I were to remove cookies completely from my diet there might be a marginal health benefit, as long as I didn't just replace them with something else. But really I don't eat cookies all that often anyway, it would be a pretty small change to my life. And when I do eat cookies I kind of enjoy it - sure I've had a bad one now and then but overall the experience is positive. Eating cookies isn't a big enough part of my life that I would really miss them in any meaningful way, but it's also not a big enough part of my life to feel like making an effort to cut them out would be at all worthwhile.

But hey if it works for you it should work for literally everyone else, right?

derefr3• 8 years ago

I simply try to make it a habit of catching up when I'm in town

Yes, but how do you do that? My long-distance friends are constantly moving address and changing phone numbers. Facebook (or an IM app, if they happen to still use the same one they used to) is the only way I know to figure out how to find my friends when I get back in town after a year or two away.

Markoff• 8 years ago

most of my contacts didn't change their email address in last ten years so you could always reach them through email if you don't have their whatsapp

LordDragonfang• 8 years ago

using Facebook because it makes event organizing and the like easier...I'm always kept in the loop because I text my friends and ask what they are doing this weekend and/or meet with my friends regularly enough that they let me know what's going on. It's become well known that I don't get updates through FB so my friends will text me invites if I haven't asked for an update.

In other words, you're demonstrating an exception that proves the rule. Organizing events (without Facebook) is not a linear problem, it's a problem where each subcomponent scales directly with the number of people involved. Maybe not O(n^2), but at least O(n*log(n)). Every change to the planning of the event has to be spread to and approved by every attendee, requiring independent contact of each. Facebook centralises this by providing a central organization system that it is as close to guaranteed as possible that everyone has access to. This brings it back close to being a linear endeavor.

Just because you claim you aren't benefiting from Facebook's competency in this area doesn't mean you aren't. You said it yourself: your friends know you are the outlier in this planning, so they can can remember to contact you separately without adding additional time complexity. They can handle all the other nuances of planning directly on Facebook and you gain the benefits without having to interact with it.

40acres5• 8 years ago

I think this is... fine? Are we concerned about our friends not using Facebook or are we concerned about you yourself not using Facebook. I don't see a problem with letting your friends organize things on Facebook and getting pulled into the loop by a member of the group.

oliwarner• 8 years ago

The problem Facebook papers over is something that could and perhaps now should be fixed by open protocol.

The people most attached to Facebook —the people who will never give it up until it's clear it's dead— are those who want to conveniently share what they're doing with real life friends and family, as well as see what they're doing. They want a social network that everybody uses.

I think it's easy for us to forget that when we're yammering on about the problems with Facebook. The way we fix that isn't bitching about Facebook; trying to get them to be a better Facebook, or having silly dreams about writing a competitor. We don't need another Facebook, we need a better technical expression of a social network.

Something so fundamentally different that allows it to be decentralised from the gaping maws of companies like Facebook, simple enough for grandma, and built into everything; as prevalent as SMS and email.

We're not there yet. Given the powers that control these things are also the people making and selling the devices, I'm not sure we'll ever be there... But that's the problem to solve.

marcelrusu• 8 years ago

This is true for organizing small events with friends but unfortunately for larger events like local concerts and such it gets hard to keep track of all the shows happening as someone active in the local music scene.

Not to mention how difficult it is to put on shows without facebook promotion.

Unfortunately Facebook is practically only platform where all the shows I care about are organized on.

That being said, I've recently got off and now I depend on friends who stay on Facebook or word of mouth which has worked out, but I don't put on shows.

Unfortunately Facebook has it's place.. for now

smsm42• 8 years ago

Every phone can still receive SMS and you can gasp meet your friends personally to catch up.

Sure, if you friends live next door. If they live on different continent, a bit harder to do. SMS is also pretty inefficient. I mean if one of your friends' daughter won a prize in school contest and you want to congratulate the happy father, that really can't happen over SMS. Unless the father is going to spam everybody in the contact list with the news, and get a wave of spam back. That'd be horrible.

It's become well known that I don't get updates through FB so my friends will text me invites if I haven't asked for an update.

You friends accommodate you and make extra effort to adjust for you. Good for them. But that doesn't mean it is the best way to do things. Maybe Facebook isn't either, but this way doesn't seem to be any better than Facebook. In fact, it's worse.

Now for friends who live in distant locations you need to ask yourself: Does Facebook status updates really make me feel more connected to this person? My answer would be no

My answer would be absolutely yes.

There was life before Facebook and there can be life without Facebook, stop making excuses.

Why I need any excuses? Facebook is an instrument. Just as any other. No excuses are needed to use an instrument, and nobody owes anybody any explanations or excuses when they use tools they like. You prefer to use different tools? Good for you. Doesn't make any difference to people that have different preferences.

latexr5• 8 years ago

It's interesting to see how many people make excuses for still using Facebook because it makes event organizing and the like easier.

One of my favourite tweets, from Mike Monteiro:

https://twitter.com/monteiro/status/321048448889663488

I’ve heard excuses from people who want to quit Facebook but can’t that would make heroin addicts blush.

xtrimsky1234• 8 years ago

It's not about making excuses, it's about Facebook being the best tool. You could say that with anything, of course I could live without a car, without a cell phone, but they make the life better an easier.

When I invite Family & Friends to my kids birthday party, if I were to do it without Facebook i'd have to have the phone or email of every single one of the people. I don't, it's difficult to keep a contact list updated with every phone or email address. I try to do it but Facebook does it better. It's much easier to not forget people. The suggestions are great. It's also an easy way to RSVP, something a phone would make very difficult to handle.

Also yes Facebook makes me feel much more connected to people. Most of my family is global, my parents live in France, I have quite a lot of friends in France. Same for Canada, and also spread out across states in the US. I only see my sisters, parents, about only once a year. I would be terribly sad if we didn't post updates via Facebook. Yes we call each other via Skype, but it doesn't allow to share the activities we have done.

The only way I would ditch Facebook, is if there is a better tool that does the same things.

jonbarker• 8 years ago

Does anyone know if FB uses deleted photos in their face recognition feature? Or if there is any detail around what happens when data is deleted? I think it probably is like running chkdsk: the data still exists it's just not addressed at the user level any more.

ravenstine• 8 years ago

I normally wouldn't defend Facebook, but did people using it really think that they weren't selling off their private information? I thought this was just something everyone accepted, as they accept Siri/Alexa/Google to listen to their every word. (yes I know they listen for only wake words)

I mean, Zuck called us all "dumb fucks". You can look it up. Everyone shrugged it off because college boys be college boys.

I have a Facebook profile, and never used it with the expectation that I owned the content I placed on it. I do think that we need a better alternative to Facebook, but at the same time it's not wrong for someone not to delete their profile.

Sorry, but texting is not a viable replacement. Neither is email. Reactions and comment threads are fun and useful ways of interacting with shared life events. For a lot of people, including myself, being off Facebook means missing out on social interaction. The reality is that texting or emailing people sometimes simply doesn't cut it; if you don't pull the same perceived weight as everyone else in your social group, you're going to be outcast and perhaps forgotten about. That can be the perception, anyway, and it's not entirely wrong.

Why hasn't a viable alternative to Facebook come up? I mean a serious one – not some piece of shit whipped up by right-wing bloggers. Perhaps it's because everyone feels that they need to compete with Facebook. Facebook has its tentacles in a lot of things, but perhaps we can just boil it down to a few things:

- Posts with images, comments, and reactions.

- Direct messages that are interoperable with email and SMS.

- Event planning and coordination.

How much else do you really need to be social? Everything else about Facebook is really about selling ads and has nothing to do with people being social. Building something that can replace the social aspect of Facebook shouldn't be that monumental. If Duck Duck Go has survived, surely a DDG of social networking shouldn't be so far away.

Even better: sell it with the idea that it's algorithm-free. Everything should go back to being chronological.

Outlandish? Not really. The real reason that your feed is algorithmically sorted is to bubble up more paid content and viral posts. If you unlike/unfollow all the company and group pages associated with your account, you're left with only what your friends are posting. Ooh, even better – delete people who aren't actual friends. If you only include the people you care about, you don't need some black box algorithm to tell you what you need to be seeing. You'd have enough time to see what people are up to in the order of which their posts were made.

But not, I won't be deleting my Facebook. I'm fine limiting my use to mbasic.facebook.com. That is, until that better thing comes along or I have the time and will-power to just build it myself.

HlessClaudesman• 8 years ago

My partner is still on facebook, she has a "crazy aunt" who posts all manor of sensationalist bulshit, so she blocked her. An this is the crux of the problem, the complete information warfare asymmetry, this aunt is still plaguing her little pool of friends at the push of a button several times a day.

We could try and talk to the aunt, get her to stop, how difficult would that be? Probably very, and likely to cause offence. And if we extrapolate out how can we possibly get the millions of social media dopamine fiend "crazy aunts" out there to think more carefully about the bullshit they spread around the world?

And so another platform is lost to the bottom feeders.

JonasJSchreiber• 8 years ago

That was such a well written article and an empassioned plea.

leoharsha2• 8 years ago

“I have nothing to hide” - most of the people

a pregnant teenager being outed by the store Target, after it mined her purchase data – larger handbags, headache pills, tissues – and sent her a “congratulations” message as marketing, which her unknowing father got instead. Oops!

Don't confuse privacy with secrecy. I know what you do in the bathroom, but you still close the door. That’s because you want privacy, not secrecy.

I found this article very interesting about FB - http://www.salimvirani.com//facebook/

MaxWell360• 8 years ago

I don't use the Facebook mobile app. I only use messenger.

Also, I use the "newsfeed eradicator" chrome addon to remove the newsfeed when I go to facebook on my PC. That way I only see notifications, where I am tagged/invited & I only go see posts from a few groups that interest me.

1MillMegabytes• 8 years ago

Adverticing companies and Internet search engines are like a decietful friend that would rat you out in communist East Germany or in Pol Pot's Cambodia. They spew out garbage that fuels insecurity in the adolescents of our generation. It's goal is to make people feel uneasy. I deleted facebook in 2011. It's to late though. Facebook and google have ratted me out a long time ago. DDR anno 2018, wouldn't be much different than western societies. They would have evolved. Facebook and google and advertising and marketing companies are the stasi of our time. I don't even dare applying for a visa to the US. A country I would love to visit and my nr.1 travel destination. This is mainly because of a drunken rant on facebook a decade ago. Hate to be denied entrance at Newark after a 7 hour flight.

butterbot• 8 years ago

Your new hosts file https://pastebin.com/d04ah8eP

throwaway39393• 8 years ago

I deleted facebook when Candian Border Patrol demanded I log into my Facebook account on my phone so they can peruse it at their will.

rdiddly2• 8 years ago

"It is a cancer." Spoken like someone who has to spend 6 months working up the nerve to delete his account. There's no need to get all ugly and overstated about it, like an overgrown teenager yelling & saying nasty things to his mom instead of moving out. Just do it and walk away.

Not that it's not a cancer. (Although it's more like obesity or type 2 diabetes, in that it's you doing it to yourself through many small bad choices.) But if it's a cancer now, then it always was one, Captain Newsflash.

Just walk away. Yes it is that easy. You'll never see half those assholes again and you'll be glad not to have to try to please them anymore. The rest that you keep around, well we call those your "friends."

People far away, you're not meant to "connect" with them. They're far away. Pull your head out of your butt and be where you are. If it was good enough for Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull to be completely unable to converse with somebody in New Jersey then it's good enough for me and you.

AND GET OFF MY LAWN!

8bitsrule• 8 years ago

But if it's a cancer now, then it always was one

I wouldn't say that. It looked pretty benign back at the beginning. And then the noose started tightening, and tightening.... Frog slowly boiled.

rdiddly2• 8 years ago

Coloring my remarks is the fact that back in 2011, even I, at the time an ignoramus who didn't really understand much about "tech," could see that Facebook was a data mine and the experience was a sucky time-waster to boot. So I jumped out of the pot / slipped out of the noose / walked out of the room... etc.

The longer I live the more I realize that in a shitty situation the missing ingredient to make it non-shitty is usually not technology, or information, or time or chance or money or whatever other nuance... it's leadership. Which is the loose-fitting name of the bin in which I would also put something like quitting Facebook. Decision-making goes in there. Principles. Shortening the time interval between realizing Facebook is shitty, and getting out of it.

dmurthy• 8 years ago

I quit Facebook a few months back and I've tried to coax my BH into quitting and she would have if not for one reason.

Our son's school shares all updates on their Facebook page which is only accessible by members. Ironically Facebook should not be the place to share such information & content given the recent happenings.

I wish schools could find another solution or platform.

ggm• 8 years ago

How does whatsapp compare to facebook messenger, for intrusiveness and access to data and call logs?

MacroChip• 8 years ago

If you delete your posts or account, Facebook is probably still using the data.

#deletefacebook

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