Poll: When you use Facebook, how do you feel?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4879757

by lukeqsee • 14 years ago

29 44 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

arjn4• 14 years ago

Stopped using facebook (and orkut) back in late 2007/early 2008. Never looked back and am much happier for it. However, I've taken some flak from friends for not being visible.

lukeqsee3• 14 years ago

Quite the early adopter (in two ways).

Do you think you miss out on any elements of "real life" because you aren't on it?

arjn4• 14 years ago

Not really. I have a close-knit group of friends that I keep up with via email or phone. Same with family. Its somewhat amusing to see all the negative news about social-networks and realize it does not affect me (directly anyways). The big annoyance is when I see sites/services that require a FB/twitter login.

graue3• 14 years ago

Quitting Facebook in 2007 must be the modern equivalent of quitting email in 1990.

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html

arjn4• 14 years ago

Back then I preferred Orkut to FB. It was harder deleting my Orkut account. Didn't like FB then, don't like it now. I thought the interface sucked, its probably better now but I'll never know :)

donall2• 14 years ago

Shouldn't there be a vanilla "I hate it" option? Why must the Facebook-haters of the world have the opinion that it is a necessary evil foisted upon them? :)

JoshTriplett• 14 years ago

Either you hate it but use it anyway ("I hate it, but it is a necessary evil."), or you hate it and don't use it ("I don't have an account."). What other option did you want?

donall2• 14 years ago

I hate it* and don't use it with any sort of regularity, but I have an account. Sometimes people tag me in photos and I check them out. Maybe once per month. Also, some people sometimes invite me to events through it. I wish people would use better photo hosting services and event management services. They exist, so I don't see Facebook as a necessary evil, but rather an unnecessary and mediocre service.

*That's actually a very strong word. I dislike it, but I don't lose sleep over it at night or anything.

Osiris• 14 years ago

I rarely use it unless someone from my family posts a message and I get an email about it. Other than that it's all noise from "friends" from high school and college I really don't care about and I don't want to take the time to put people into categories.

jazzychad• 14 years ago

None of the above. What I feel is a sense of deep personal sadness.

Most of my friends on FB are from college (when FB first launched), and most of them still live on the East Coast. Since I moved to SV, I have not added many new friends on FB (mostly because most SV-type people are not prone to use it that much).

So, when I launch my FB news feed, I am bombarded by news and stories and pictures from friends of old that I haven't kept up with, and I start to feel sadness and regret. I usually last about two minutes before I close the tab. I visit maybe once a week. =/

arjn4• 14 years ago

Maybe you're feeling sad because you're using social-media more than you should. See the following article : http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/01/the_a...

wilfra• 14 years ago

No, it's not because of using social media too much. I have the exact same feeling. Most of my Facebook friends are people I met in grad school in Thailand. I dropped out and moved back to the USA. Thai people are about 20x more active on Facebook than the average American and they had the time of their lives after I left and the party is still going - and they document every second of it on Facebook. Deep regret/sadness is exactly how I feel every time I see their photos filling up my feed.

savrajsingh• 14 years ago

wait, what do you regret?!

graue3• 14 years ago

Moving away from all his friends, I'd assume.

dkersten• 14 years ago

I regret losing contact with people who were once friends and drifting out of the network of people I spent a lot of time with in the past, but whom I have virtually no contact with (outside of Facebook) now. Most of the in-Facebook contact is not nearly deep or meaningful enough to rekindle old friendships and its tough when you've drifted so far apart. Hell, a lot of these people have moved away - some to other cities, some to other countries and some to other continents. When I log onto Facebook and see what these people are doing, I remember the times we had together in the past and I regret that I lost touch with them.

I mean, not so much that I'll jump on a plane and try to re-friend them in real life - I too have moved on and have great friends around me (new and old), just like they do. But sometimes I wonder what life would be like if I still hung out with that guy or girl in that photograph posted on their Facebook wall yesterday. Would I have been in it?

graue3• 14 years ago

That is exactly what happened to me after I moved from the east coast to the Midwest. Every login to Facebook was a reminder of the abundant (real-life) social network that I had left behind to be in a place where I knew virtually nobody. It eventually drove me to close my account. Much as I'd like to rationalize closing my account in terms of privacy or principles, it was really mostly this phenomenon.

benguild• 14 years ago

"I hate it, but it is a necessary evil." when I saw this I knew it'd win

lukeqsee3• 14 years ago

I guessed it would. I wanted to confirm.

That sentiment occurs every time I press ctrl+t, type face, and press enter.

Edit: typo.

bascule• 14 years ago

It's the de facto place people put events together because practically everyone is on Facebook. That's pretty much all I use it for now, and it actually isn't too bad for that purpose.

malloreon• 14 years ago

I log in once every 1-2 weeks. 2-3 minutes of scrolling through my most recent newsfeed, and it hits me what a giant waste of time fb is. session over!

shoopy• 14 years ago

There is a finite amount of time on this earth, devote it to the ones you actually care about, don't spread yourself too thinly. I feel that Facebook helps a little with the former but greatly encourages the latter. I know a lot of people whose FB friend list is basically artificial life support for relationships that should have been allowed to fade into the past. FB provides the appearance that the relationship exists and is animated, but really there's still nothing there, and yet you're still paying the price of it in terms of your attention span. Zombie friendships!

ucpete• 14 years ago

Scroll, scroll, scroll, close window. Typically left feeling completely neutral. I've got kids and my friends are at the getting married / having kids age now as well, so my feed has gone from "I'm so fucking high!" pictures to "Look how cute my ugly baby is!". Occasionally I use it to contact people whose phone number / e-mail address I don't have, and it's great for that. It's like my White Pages.

simonsarris• 14 years ago

Man I love facebook.

Every time a Facebook usage topic comes up there's the usual round of scorn usually backed up by a strange display of plumage involving the sentence, "I just deleted my facebook yesterday/last month/last year/never used it."

And that's okay. But I feel compelled to make the same post in response, and so I want to point out to my fellow HN-ers why I think Facebook is so wonderful. There's also a note about privacy at the bottom[1] since that seems to be a big reason people stay away. I feel as if a lot of people here missed the point and don't understand what the average person sees in this system. I'll try to relay my experience in the hopes that the utility becomes more clear.

To most people, especially a shy person, the usefulness of the site is astronomical.

Among others I am friends with my boss, my mother, my little cousins. Facebook lets shy people like me keep in touch with a massive amount of people where I can write them the modern equivalent of letters very quickly and easily, as well as let them broadcast their life's updates to me. I can keep in touch with all manner of people. I love writing letters, people love getting letters.

Literally, facebook is a modern "An open letter to my friends" system. And it's great at it.

~~~~~~

Without Facebook, I'd have no idea cousin X is having a baby, or that Y is having apartment trouble that I can help them with, or that Z got a new game we can play together, or person A is considering selling their car, and so on. I could find these out on my own, through a series of phone calls that I place daily/weekly/monthly, but its exceedingly hard to do with all relatives, and hard from a motivation perspective if you're shy. Status updates solve that well.

If I meet someone at an event and really hit it off (romantically or professionally or friend-ily), I can go on Facebook the next day and look them up by name and add them. No exchanging phone numbers or emails or anything like that. I just search for them and find them. In college it was enormously useful for making friends and I still find it useful now that I've graduated.

I made a page for my hometown (90K population city in NH). I broadcast events going on around the city (fireworks, beer festival, city meetings). In this way I help my community learn about the goings-on of the town. It's a surprisingly popular page (more popular than the local newspaper's facebook page).

These functions in times past were done with the laborious process of making a million letters or phone calls or in many cases (like my hometown page) scarcely made or not made at all. Facebook is not just a system of open letters, its the new Town Crier.

~~~~~~

Okay that's off my chest.

Sadly as of late its getting a little less great at its function. A lot of the reason for the downturn in usage/usability, sadly, is probably due to the fact that every ad, every sponsored story and sponsored "like" is adding to a signal/noise ratio that will make people frown. It's a shame that Facebook's financial success as the model is right now is directly competing with its utility[2], but oh-well. We may have to sigh a bit more, but its still extremely useful to the casual user and has the usage stats to show it.

[1] I don't think privacy alone is enough to negate the utility of fbook. All of my privacy options are on the lowest possible setting. I treat anything that occurs on the site as if it were public. I don't see why not, I'm not going to pretend that photos of myself or my wall postings are anywhere near interesting enough to hide. In fact I'm not sure why people who put things on facebook want privacy at all. I never worry that something I say might be picked up on by the wrong person because I'd never say anything that I wouldn't want the world to hear.

[2] It may be worth pointing out that I love facebook but would never invest in it for a few reasons, and this is one of them. One could argue Google ads make Google searches more useful. Facebook ads, as they are today, directly impinge on the utility of the platform. But that's a separate topic for another day!

joe_the_user• 14 years ago

Indeed,

I find it remarkable that virtually everyone I've ever known either has a Facebook account or has had a Facebook account. Which is say that Facebook has been the gateway drug to the Internet. And as many could predict, the majority of US citizens really are now "citizens of the Internet" now, for good or ill. No one is "just visiting", everyone has "not passed go, not collected $200" and is "in the Internet".

But that has also meant that Facebook itself has become more like the Internet. On Facebook, I interact more now with my "Facebook friends" than with my "friend friends" than when I started. And that's OK. This discussions are deeper and narrower like the Internet. Some people will find other places ... on the Internet. Some people will find other places only in real life. Some people will spend their days texting. That's what one expects from a process of digital stratifying. Good, bad, I don't know but it has had an amazing impact on our personal relations.

zackhall• 14 years ago

"Facebook has been the gateway drug to the internet." I have never thought of it put that way, but it is such a true and insightful statement. When I began high school, almost none of my adult family members were on the internet (less one aunt who did a lot of internet shopping). Here I am closing in on my graduation from college and my entire family has adopted the internet -- grandparents of both sides, my father, aunts & uncles, etc. -- and in every case their first experience was making a facebook account.

majormajor• 14 years ago

This is nearly exactly what I would've said, but more thought out.

The newsfeed was overwhelming at first, but the day I realized I didn't need to feel bad about not responding to a friend request from some old acquaintance I never actually liked, or about blocking/defriending someone who just posted annoying stuff all the time, was the day it became super useful to me once again. Now my newsfeed is mostly people I care about sharing stuff I find interesting or amusing, and that's a wonderful utility for someone who's moved a few times and has friends all over the country.

I'm convinced that what you get out of Facebook is what you put into it. It doesn't have to be an unpleasant experience.

icebraining• 14 years ago

For me, those family status updates are distributed by an older social network: humans, particularly retired ones ;) Talking to my grandmothers is more than enough to know all about family members having babies, getting married, etc - whether I'm interested or not!

Mz• 14 years ago

I had a facebook account. Someone who clearly dislikes me and carries a grudge from 500 years ago for godknowswhat "friended" me to promote their thingy that they were involved with. That turned me sour on the whole thing. Many months later, I left their thingy and was wondering if I should unfriend them or something when I realized I had not logged into fb in over a year. So I decided the clean, diplomatic thing to do would be nuke the whole account. So I did.

I will never figure out social media or self promotion. Ugh.

Kaivo• 14 years ago

Sometimes, I feel like quitting facebook. Some others, I enjoy watching friends flaming on politics and video games. But most of the time, I just use it to contact people I can't contact otherwise, mostly aquaintances I rarely see. I always think of Facebook like the modern version of the adress book we had next to the phone before such social networking sites appeared. I keep my old contacts in case I ever want to talk to them again for any reason, a couple years from now.

mtgx• 14 years ago

I deleted my account last year, and I have to say I feel pretty good about it.

tptacek2• 14 years ago

I love it, I don't care, I hate it?

What if I, uh, like it just fine?

lukeqsee3• 14 years ago

My thinking "I don't care" = "like it just fine". Perhaps a better choice of words was "I like it".

tptacek2• 14 years ago

I don't "not care" about Facebook. I wouldn't be devastated if it vanished. I like it fine. It's useful.

simplexion• 14 years ago

I use it like an RSS feed. Follow interesting pages that post interesting articles. Hide annoying friends from my feed.

kylec• 14 years ago

I have an account, but I don't use it. Recently Facebook has been sending me emails with people it thinks I might know, but I don't know any of them, which in turn means Facebook doesn't know me at all. Just the way I like it.

halis• 14 years ago

Photos and likes make Facebook worth it for me.

ekalvi• 14 years ago

Why no "It's OK"? Something more moderate and common.

dominicf• 14 years ago

I don't care. I just use it to keep track of what my overseas relatives are up to and contact them if necessary.

kstenerud• 14 years ago

I have an account so that relatives who don't use email can contact me, and for those annoying event apps that require a facebook login. Aside from responding to private messages, I log in about once a month to turn off whatever invasive feature they've added and automatically enabled.

Twitter is actually more annoying because they keep sending me "you haven't logged in recently" emails.

TheCrazy88• 14 years ago

In our age social networking is necessary, not Facebook.

OafTobark• 14 years ago

Where's the "I'm lazy and bored"

brakmar• 14 years ago

Weak. Even though I know for sure how evil it is, there is this fucking social incentive.

shousper• 14 years ago

Facebook is the greatest, most powerful weapon ever created. If there was a god of attention, it's name would be Facebook.

Twitter, Google+, WoW, TV, radio, magazines, whatever. They all pale in comparison to the amount of time and effort =wasted= on Facebook. Discussing meaningless things, liking meaningless posts or comments, or pages about meaningless things, photos of meaningless things.

It doesn't matter how many people or pages you subscribe, like or friend who _might_ talk or be about something important in the world, your "feed" will be chock full of rubbish by the thousands of other posts about NOTHING.

Forgive the brutality here, but why do you need to read on Facebook how someone is feeling? If they're important enough to you to care how they feel, shouldn't they be around you? Within arms reach? Why do you need to see what someone had for lunch? Why do you need to share pictures of you and your friends drunk? Why do you need to see scenic photos of places your friends or family have been? Why do you need to know about everyone's birthday?

Why do you care? Really?

For all the time you spend absorbing this information, what good does it do you or anyone else? Is it creating homes or jobs for those with nothing? Is it curing cancer? Is it feeding starving children? Is it teaching anyone anything useful that could improve their life? How about the planet? Is it fixing the ozone? Is it cleaning the air we breathe? Or even you, specifically? Is it putting food on your table? Is it putting clothes on your back? Is it paying your bills? Is it quenching your thirst? Is it?

No.

It's flooded with useless information that everyone wastes copious quantities of time and energy consuming that could be spent on any number of better activities.

You know what I'm talking about.

/rant. waits for the hellban

Poll: When you use Facebook, how do you feel?

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