If you could delete your Facebook profile, congratulations! However, you should realize that not all people can do this. If your society is not reliant to Facebook, then good for you, I also hate Facebook and Gualdrapo seems to hate it too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32576061). However, giving incomplete replacements (especially the infamous "migrate them to another messaging app!") would just result in backfiring and further entrenchment of Meta products. Worse, if that other service really improved a lot they will no longer try it due to past experience. Short of a) Facebook being no longer tolerable to a majority of your friends and b) there's a viable replacement for Facebook's features (especially it's group features - a phpBB-like forum is not good for this), it'll be hard to fully remove Facebook.
If the autodialers were part of the phone company AND the makers of your phone, yeah throw away your phone would be sound advice. Yes, Facebook is that.
I don't live in the USA, I live in Europe and we don't have anymore a robo-call issue (if we ever had it at all), heck I would say we don't almost even have a cold-call from call-centers issue anymore (it was totally an issue a few years ago).Probably because it was... regulated?
Oh, the Europe Country. I live in a country in Europe too and we do have a problem with cold calls. There was an attempt at regulating it, there's also a service you can subscribe to that supposedly hinders this.
Doesn't work though because there are lists of phone numbers and addresses that can be bought that still give you access. And if you're considered a customer, which is extremely loosely defined, they can call you.
Sure, it's far from as bad as it seems to be in the US but my personal threshold is 0.
It's about as helpful as telling someone to delete their Google account or their Apple account. If someone is actually invested in either of these services, they're not going to want to walk away even if they're harmful to their security/privacy/personal wellbeing. The average person really doesn't care, so begging HN users to leave Facebook is almost comedically useless advice. All it serves to do is farm karma and make you feel better for posting it, really.
Personally I despise Facebook as a company and a service, but the amount of flak HN gives them is straight-up ridiculous. Facebook is indeed bad, but is this site really going to forget the military contract work Microsoft does, or the religious manhunt Apple aids China in? And yet, when people here about these war crimes they don't suggest throwing away their computer or finding a new replacement service. They just... keep using it. Same as Facebook users. Same as Macbook users. Same as Windows users.
And all of this is fine!
The overall goal shouldn't be to dictate how other people use the internet. Facebook has a right to exist, and we have a right to hold it in check with relevent litigation. If people think that Facebook violates the law, then let's hold them accountable! Otherwise, your complaints are genuinely useless in the context of discussing healthy browsing habits on HN.
No one is dictating anything, you have a choice to not buy an Apple (which I admit isn't easy because you just need some apps), you more easily can just get rid of Facebook. That's all.
I think that's a nuanced distinction that very much comes down to exactly how the other person suggests getting off facebook. If I get the impression that the commenter cares about the well-being of somebody and suggests it as a solution, I tent to categorize it as "good advice". Example: "I had the same problem / know of people who had the same problem, getting off facebook seems to help".
On the other hand, when it's a barely related topic (nothing about mental health, only related to the company) + there's no actual person to care about + the comment is very standoff-ish, I jump to virtue signaling.
Unsolicited advice, especially when given in a tone like this, is often much more about the giver of the advice than anyone else imo.
Because believe it or not, there are millions of people who do see some value in using facebook to stay in touch with family/friends etc. Yes, we can argue it is not needed and all but making a blanket statement like "Delete Facebook" doesn't help anything.
I have a "fake" account to talk to one or two people who refuse to use anything else, so I have to use messenger to get their attention. I never actually "use facebook".
Facebook for actual one on one friendships sounds like overkill. Facebook for a small
business to have a website sounds fine. And keeping in touch with large swaths of people who live far from you can be tricky, I guess you can use Facebook for that. I’d rather just not deal with anything beyond a few people on a group chat, and text messages seem fine for that.
I once made a person startled by just saying "oh because I don't have a Facebook" after being asked why they can't seem to find me by name there, so I guess it is a signal to its users.
It is called disincentive. In this particular case spamming would be akin to the negative externality in the Economics because spammers are hurting the whole system and the whole userbase by their toxic behaviour(activity).
If you have a pebble in your shoe and it's bothering you, is it not good advice to remove the pebble and go about your day (as opposed to trying to make the pebble become less uncomfortable)?
Because in this case your analogy is not perfect. There are many reasons why a user is forced to use Facebook. As a user pointed out, if your society has basically mandated using Facebook to interact with basic life, the suggestion to remove Facebook without sugesting replacements for the whole society is just being plainly obtuse.
Your anecdote, while I presume is true, doesn't address the main point. You should probably read
Gualdrapo's experience (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32576061), and I find it true on large swaths of Latin America and Asia.
I, for one, would lose contact to a lot of my friends if I deleted facebook (and already have lost contact with some of them because they selfishly deleted their fb)
You've commented twice here to the effect that there are many reasons why a person might be forced to use Facebook. Care to elaborate? I can't think of any.
If the society in which one lives is backwards to the point of mandating a Facebook account to interact on a basic level... it might be time to turn on, tune in, drop out.
Gualdrapo's post doesn't actually say anything about why he _needs_ to use Facebook. Neighboorhood groups and FB marketplace are not necessary to live. I think we might be conflating needs and wants here.
Being accustomed to doing things in specific ways is not a need.
> If the society in which you live is backwards to the point of mandating a Facebook account to interact on a basic level... it might be time to turn on, tune in, drop out.
That's why it's de facto forced on to you. Ministries (Americans: Departments, not religious ministries) are usually only reachable either on Facebook or by physically traveling hours to their office. Facebook groups are the communication platform for any community point-of-contact, and most are set to only be accessible by having a Facebook account.
As a society, is it avoidable? Yes. As an individual? Good luck convincing others. It might be hard to wrap your head around it if you were not living in such an area, so thank your government that you have a say on your communication.
> Ministries (Americans: Departments, not religious ministries) are usually only reachable either on Facebook or by physically traveling hours to their office.
Can you give one example? A link to their website or FB page would suffice.
I understand this. It seems like this situation would be avoidable by an individual, but not by society at large because most individuals would take the path of least resistance.
Could you send mail through the post? Call on a telephone?
Technically? But in my experience as a foreigner that have lived in Thailand, mail services are atrocious. It's unlike in Singapore or UK where it's excellent. It's even weirder considering parcels on the Amazon-equivalent (Lazada and Shopee) are faster on this one.
> Call on a telephone?
Mobile-to-telephone charges are obscene to the point that it's cheaper to use an international VoIP service to call (just to remind you that most people here are those who would skip and never experienced any telephones altogether) and unsurprisingly these are the kinds of government to ban unapproved VoIP to its citizens.
I have used Thailand here, but it's the same in Brazil (or from what I heard nowadays, was, but they still apparently used Meta's services extensively) except for the citizen-legal VoIP loophole.
Because family members use it and they don't want to use alternative communication methods, because groups you are involved in use it for organization and if you want to stay involved in said groups then you have to use it, because the country you live in has a large amount of its social web woven through facebook.
There are lots of reasons. Yes they aren't literal needs as in you are going to die, but sometimes the cost of not using facebook is significantly greater than the cost of using it.
