I think these comments come from people who have no trouble engaging with facebook without any unhealthy habits forming. But there are people who are unable to engage with facebook in a healthy way. I personally struggle with facebook's newsfeed and have to put up some serious barriers to ensure I don't waste an hour of my day looking at it. Presumably many of the negative comments about how terrible facebook is come from people like me.
The first step to helping those who are impacted negatively is to acknowledge that there is a real problem here. The next is to attack the problem with various solutions. Some of them facebook will not like.
An ever so brief study of psychology shows this is a bad model to predict human behavior, and an even worse model to use when constructing and shaping our environment. It leads us to construct hostile environments and experiences where we always have to be on edge, and diminishes our humanity.
The usual retort to this is that hostile environments are a good way to teach us to be sharper, but that's just a lazy way of rationalizing the current situation [1], and represents a lack of understanding of how people learn.
If you want to teach people to be more rational you need to create environments where they are set up to succeed and make challenges within reach. In other words, it matters a lot the exact degree to which the environment is hostile or extractive (and to whom), and if you go over that, people are set up for failure.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus
[1] which itself is an irrational bias toward maintaining status quo belief, because it requires less cognitive effort to unwind its knock-on effects
† which is why I'm here on HN, if I'm honest
Being addicted to discovering new information and sharing with others sounds pretty healthy to me. I think the difference with HN vs FB is that at some level, you are driving your HN interaction, while FB is driving your FB interaction.
I think it only becomes "internet addiction" when you're not the one in control.
1. https://blog.codinghorror.com/falling-into-the-pit-of-succes... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout
As a side note, and relevant to what I am working on, MakeCode and Scratch are very good at encouraging coders to fall into the pit of success. I find it quite difficult to find a real program breaking bug in MakeCode scripts for the Micro:bit. Which helps make it excellent as a teaching tool because you can focus on things that will engage younger learners in coding and engineering.
I have no impulse to watch the kind of things that make me feel bad, but many people do. I hear of people wanting to break Netflix addiction. I think certain types of people tend to indulge in certain types of entertainment, and they get drawn into bad behaviour that they wish they could stop.
I think you are right, but there is a larger group who merely think they 'have it under control' and are unaware of how unhealthy their use of social media actually is.
Like people who drink too much but will absolutely refuse to acknowledge they have a drinking problem, even if they can't remember when a day has gone by without using a glass or two.
I have posted such comments. But they are usually in response to people telling me it’s also the best thing I can do. When people make sweeping statements, they should expect pushback.
This is me. :(
Some 8 years ago, Facebook was something that I really enjoyed using. I left way too many friends, close friends, and well, lovers behind. Facebook allowed me to have a healthy relationship with them, even if at a distance.
I went back to Spain on 2010 for the wedding of a close friend, and it was like I've been out of the country for 2 months instead of 2 years, and that was mostly thanks to Facebook.
I can't point exactly at the moment when all that went to shit (May be 5, 6 years ago?) but nowadays FB is a constant string of shitty videos from companies trying to stay afloat, shitty videos made by shitty people, fake news by the thousand - and people adhering to the fake news narrative! - and stupid motivational shit of the kind that really demotivates you, people viciously attacking other people for the stupidest reasons...
I disabled my account some 3 months ago, and I feel much better without it.
Instagram, on the other side, is a different beast. Even with the strong push by FB in order to monetize the network, I think that fact that people can't easily share other people's post, and are kind of forced to post their own material still makes it an interesting place.
As long as instagram does not allow reposting, I think it'll maintain a certain degree of quality.
I also have disabled my insta account, but I do miss the information from the people I was following there (Mostly, artists and crafstmen of all kinds).
>As long as instagram does not allow reposting, I think it'll maintain a certain degree of quality.
This is a fascinating insight I never considered. Disabling reposting results in higher quality, higher-effort discourse. Trashy memes and fake news can’t spread as rapidly or at all without the ability to easily, mindlessly repost them millions of times. It’s like a circuit breaker to our lizard brain, forcing us to actually think about what we’re doing instead of thoughtlessly queuing up another dopamine hit with a quick repost.
This seems to work pretty well in preventing the spread of bad messages, as a boost of such message will imply that you agree with it. That way you're not getting the typical "look at what this horrible person said" messages.
Even if there might be some people willing to make the effort of re-sharing certain posts, the chain is incredible weaker.
A few years ago I started actively clicking "not interested" on every type of content that I didn't want to see, and slowly but surely I managed to get rid of all memes, news, and uninteresting bits.
Now I'm left with discussions about AI papers, local events that friends are attending, and updates from friends in other countries. And even then, my feed is so uninteresting that I'm not tempted to scroll through it every day. Of course, this doesn't remove the million other issues with Facebook but at least it doesn't mess with my happiness
People basically stopped posting to Facebook and it became an endless stream of mindless videos, cutesy images with quotes and supermarkets trying to push offers directly to users (successfully though).
Facebook lost the thing that made it interesting, news about long lost friends and insights into the everyday of the people you know. I'm not sure if it's something Facebook did, or if people just stopped posting.
That's an interesting observation, this is one of the reasons I don't enjoy Twitter, everything is retweeted (maybe I just don't get it).
I find Instagram to be a bit too addictive though. It feels like an endless magazine of glossy images, which learns what you want to see, to keep you engaged... forever
The code is opensource as well: https://github.com/matthewmorek/blindfold
The features are kept in place, and that's a good thing.
Regarding Instagram, I never thought about it in this way, and now that you mention it, perhaps that is why out of the 3 x services I talked about, this one was the least worrysome for me. Restricting reposting does seem to be pretty key to keeping content at a higher 'quality'.
I've never been a big Instagram user, but considering one of my big complaints about FB is the prevalence of regurgitated reposted garbage (memes, crap news, chain letter nonsense), I might have to revisit my IG account and see if I can salvage a bit there.
Bail. Find an alternative from Europe or Canada instead. Or simply let it go.
I'm happy that with Facebook I can still keep in touch with most of my friends that I made around the world traveling. I end up meeting quite some friends that I haven't seen in decades when I travel.
I understand that some people are unhappy about the downsides of social networks, and Facebook in particular, but I wish more people would realize the upsides as well.
Facebook in 2010 was what we all loved. It's garbage now, and we all know it.
When you outsource you usually lose in resiliency.
These platforms make everything so easy, so additively easy, and it's awkward and difficult to ask for methods of contact outside of the platform or even any other kinds of backups.
Almost as difficult as someone who's never used, and refuses to use these platforms.
It would be nice if there were a similar app in the US with that kind of market share, instead of everything being scattered among various apps, etc.
The only real issue I felt with deleting my facebook was losing access to facebook groups. I was very close to making a burner account to participate in some groups, but I never ended up wanting it that -that- badly as meetup sufficed.
not really, nobody use these apps outside of their respective countries
Facebook is mostly a birthday reminder feature hidden in a glorified walled garden email, its whole point is vacuuming personal data and find ways to make as much profit as possible with it.
IMHO email is vastly superior to facebook as it is open and offers interoperability.
I hope that everyone else isn't addicted to another drug that is called 'Twitter' which one of its side-effects is 'getting the worst out of everyone' and all sorts of nasty media stories spreading over there.
So many important topics are "discussed" on Twitter with the outcomes of these discussions often leading to financial, political or mental ruin. Complex topics such as politics, inequality, racial issues, or gender diversity should never be discussed on Twitter. It's impossible to adequately to condense these complex issues into 240 characters.
it is possible. it's even more so when you there is a picture or a video with a caption.
Personally, I just use FB in a pretty restricted way. I unfollow most friends unless they post stuff I like engaging with. I give FB the bare minimum of my own personal data, and block all the ads they serve. I mostly post questions for discussion, rather than highlights of my life.
I don't use Insta, although I'm considering it. Lots of friends have described really fun, healthy little communities they're part of. (I still think of Instagram as a photography community, which is how old I am.)
I don't use WhatsApp by choice, but occasionally it's someone else's preferred way to communicate. I don't have a problem with it.
I think this is a good point, just like you are expecting people to contact you on telegram there must be some people who would like you to contact them on whataspp.
Wait what? When did that change? I must be old too...
I used Facebook pretty early on and still have my account but login less then once per month now.
This. It's the same problem as when participants self-select into a study. They have different motivations than the average person.
I'm just making the point that if you are persuaded by this article to also get off FB (because it made his life better), you might be disappointed, because you weren't already dissatisfied with FB.
-- most of the planet, but you'd never know it by reading HN
-- most of the planet.
I never personally felt depressed when using these platforms in the past. In my post I suggest that those who may not necessarily understand the unfair comparisons they make of themselves versus other people's 'picture perfect' life could be negatively affected.
For me the issue was more about my data being used to serve ads back to me, and being disgruntled over all the outrageous things they were allowing to happen across the platform.
Beside couple of people, everybody else from my social circle seem to be just fine using FB (and others). Though there's definitely more usage of Instagram than FB nowadays (FB Messenger is still super popular)
(not from US)
Maybe the rest of the world feels better on Facebook. But that will only last until Facebook randomly decides one day to throw them into a depression.
As a certified clinical research professional (CCRP), this is pretty outrageous to hear. Might be an interesting discussion for one of our upcoming glorified journal club roundtables. TY!
I got rid of the timeline by unfollowing _everyone_. Timeline is completely empty. It's bliss
Basically facebook being facebook and doing facebook things to the people that were escaping its grasp.
But, similar to the author, I'm having more difficulty getting rid of WhatsApp. This is my primary means of communicating with friends and family all over the world. And for some of them I know it's just not an option to try get them to switch to another platform, especially since I'm not sure which is the better platform. In my opinion, WhatsApp strikes the perfect balance of security and usability. Telegram makes me nervous due to the Russian roots and the numerous security concerns I've read online. Signal is overly secure to the point that usability for regular folk suffers (I've personally had terrible experience with their support after losing a bunch of SMS messages.) Matrix, Riot, MatterMost, and many other opensource apps all look good but not overly user-friendly for novices.
What else is there?
My phone happens to a smartphone that's not running windows/apple/google so whatsapp never bother to release for this phone. Whatsapp being a walled garden it prevents everyone from the outside from reaching people jailed inside.
As you do not have a data plan, I have no internet access with this pocket computer we use as telephone.
Whatsapp is utterly pointless and useless to me, and coherent with facebook way of doing things it actively prevents me from contacting other people, which is shocking to me who grew accustomed to thing like email, jabber or sms .
Also security issues, lack of privacy, lack of proper encryption, censorship, etc. among a long trail of reasons.
Also whatsapp founder quitting and leaving 850millions dollars on the table doing so over the way facebook makes money out of whatsapp and for th way facebook made him mislead the european commission to have them green light the sale of whatsapp to facebook. He also called repeatedly for people to get rid of Facebook services.
for exemple this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp_snooping_scandal and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reception_and_criticism_of_Wha...
BTW I also had to use Facebook once - because everybody at the uni did so its Messenger was the way we texted each other. Now I use Telegram and WhatsApp.
I mean Instagram is a pure time&attention wasting tool, Facebook is the same + a messenger (which is an essential thing everybody needs nowadays - that's the way we communicate with people who don't stand right in front of us at the moment), WhatsApp is a pure messenger, isn't it?
By the way, I've just came up with an idea of what's really wrong with messengers like Telegram and WhatsApp: you can't read a message without telling the sender you've read it. And this forces you to answer. This way I often have to avoid viewing a message so they don't get notified. This is a huge annoyance which kind of ruins my life every now and then. Thanks G-d they don't insist to show when you are online. I would even pay some reasonable subscription to have a stealth mode so people would have no means to see whether I am online and if I've read their message.
I've never had WhatsApp. E-mail works fine. Phone call for people who don't E-mail.
These questions always puzzle me: "How do you do X without Y?" The answer is always easy: the same way I did X before Y even existed.
...so my suggestion is to keep the account but start clearing the data out and poisoning it. Be especially careful about the IP's you log into it from (and randomize that MAC!).
Isn't that all the more reason to do it, though? The more people who delete it or don't have accounts, the more normalized it will become to not have social media profiles.
Anybody else never really joined social media?
2. Do you have backups? Can you make them?
3. What guarantees for consistency have you?
4. How do you know handing over such private info will never be abused? Did you hand out your contact list before to third parties?
5. How do you control the spread of your contact info?
Facebook: I met lots of elementary/junior high school friends many years ago who have been lost contact with more than 2 decades via this platform. Useful, isn't it? Remember, it was before 2010. And I don't spend much time scrolling on my timeline because I prefer group discussions. Remember that Google had shut down it's consumer version of Google Plus.
WhatsApp: My de facto messenger app. Many years ago, it was BlackBerry Messenger. Now Whatsapp. I like this app because it's essentially just a messenger app without useless stuffs like news, job search etc (yes Line, I'm looking at you). Telegram is also cool. It's open source so you can make your own modified version.
Instagram: Ahh Instagram. I don't want to sound like an grumpy old man. Do you remember that in 2010 till 2012, it was a "privillege" only iOS users can enjoy? And when they announced Android version, we Android users shouted in joy? I'm a photography enthusiast so I purposefully post my photos on it. You won't find my latest dinner photos or selfies on beautiful beaches there, promise. I also follow the accounts of some famous photographers and photographers hashtags to provide me more visual references.
People some also to forget that many many years ago, back in the film era, gaining recognition is harder: you need to build years of reputation, publish your works on magazines, do exhibitions on gallery etc. Now? We have social media. Waaayyy easier. Post your photos and in less than 5 minutes, people in Africa or Alaska can enjoy them. Even any kid can do that.
Despite the useless craps, I'm glad that there are people who still use social medias in a sane way :)
A gallery show will bring people to you and your work, let you sell prints, collect emails, potentially meet publishers/other curators/etc. Good luck getting noticed in all the noise on Instagram, or making any money.
Well, it does have some not-so-essential features like "whatsapp status". It should have just been a messenger instead of switching over to the social media hype.
It'd be myopic if we ignore all the persuasive techniques they employ.
Couldn't get of WhatsApp, yet, as it's too often the default for friends and family.
These things are useful, and just because they can be misused does not make them any less useful.
However I spent way too much time on it and Facebook is way to hungry for personal data.
And perhaps too bad actors weren't involved.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodri...
For one simple reason: bots.
One of my Raspberry Pi projects is a bot to delete from the family group any post containing the name of politicians. This wiped out political flame-wars and fake news.
It is very easy to make Telegram bots. You basically create a website, register it in a dynamic dns, add an ssh certificate (letsencrypt or your own) and add it to your group.
It is not a perfect solution, sometimes people send images with political memes. For these I made another bot that temporarily puts the offender under quarantine.
Also, remember to use regular expressions to filter out common letter substituions. So, in Brazil, to filter out our very stupid president (Bolsonaro) I use: b[0o][1l][5s][0o]n[a4]r[0o]
I'm a retiree. My kids and family are scattered. Social media is an important part of maintaining family cohesion and my role in the family. I've reconnected with old friends that I otherwise would have lost forever. Deleting social media would impoverish my life and drastically increase my loneliness and isolation.
Do gooders: give it a rest.
Facebook can decrease family cohesion and alienate family members as well. I stopped posting on there and stopped logging into my accounts after too many Fox news brainwashed great aunts and uncles ranted about how minorities should get out of the country or the NFL should ban black players who kneeled.
If you're lonely and isolated, consider moving closer to family and interacting with them in real life instead of expecting your family to sacrifice their data privacy to make Mark Zuckerberg more rich.
Deleting Facebook etc. is not the solution; it seems like the author threw out the baby with the bathwater here.
getting rid of facebook is the right move here.
What's a good alternative that has a web client at least when you are on desktop + you can video call too?
You can pay $10/month for your own Modular.im Matrix server host and use that with your family (it also funds the devs).
They have Jitsi support for video (you can also just use Jitsi stand alone).
I think signal also has video calling, but not sure about group call support.
Both have mobile and desktop apps. Both are encrypted and ad free. Matrix is federated, but modular.im makes setup easy.
https://www.corycollier.com/2020/06/10/why-i-removed-my-soci...
To be honest, OP deleted only Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram accounts (all Facebook family), but NOT Twitter[0]
If you trust Google to protect them that is fine. Personally I don't expect Google to fail me in that particular way.
But it also means any E2E-encryption argument from WhatsApp goes out the window.
If you want to give up communicating remotely with humans, OK I guess. Have fun. But giving up one specific interface? That's meaningless. It's like giving up Sauvignon Blanc but drinking Pinot Grigio everyday.
Don't get me wrong, having more freedoms is an extraordinary thing. But everything has a valid use-case, including Facebook. Blanket deleting social media at this point just feels like a cheap-shot to get clicks and overshadows the more realistic benefits such as reconnecting with old friends, talking to tech illiterate family members, etc.
And that's the rub: all of these things can be replaced with email.
Email - plain old text - can carry just as much info as all the web things, to my eyes - and, doesn't allow for much emerald-king manipulation behind the mirrors and smoke, either.
If only my friends and family all understood how to use email properly, in the first place.
Because this writing skill has been supplanted by software-usage skills. Why learn to top/quote/bottom, or properly cite text, or contract a useful file-archive and include URL's .. when this 'is what the computer is for' ..
Seriously though, I could radically reduce my social sphere down to the people I know can handle email etiquette and methodology well enough, and I won't need any other third-party service. Even my pizza guy can handle an email.
However, literacy being what it is, people don't have time or motivation to become proficient in email, as a tool. Its far easier just to swipe and touch things to share information, apparently .. perhaps the time has come for me to finally write an email client, hmm ..
Facebook was very easy to get reed of in fact. IG I was hesitant, since I like photography. It was obvious though quickly after it was bought that it had quickly become a narcissistic sewage and nothing to do with photography.
I hardly ever use them, but sometimes it comes in handy.
For example, at least twice I found someone's wallet or ID and was able to contact them quickly using Facebook, because their name was the same.
I never got into instagram. As an american expat I find whatsapp convenient to contact my family overseas using their day-to-day telephone.
When most people in your circle are on WhatsApp, you're tied to it as well. Sometimes even your bosses and colleagues need to reach you with that. Also if you just delete the account for Telegram there's less motivation for friends to reach you to just catch up because they don't use Telegram. Sure your best friends and family will reach you through whatever platform but that's about it. You lose friends. Some are ok with that but others should be aware of what switching messaging platforms costs.
I also realized that the hundred thousands points I had mean exactly nothing.
It was a relief beyond what I expected.
I created a new account for the only sake to ask questions on the tech subreds which are of interest. I do not read r/all and other similar trash subreds
I unfollow most pages also. Can recommend testing this method out.
I'm in the process of adding a day on each end. Or perhaps going *less Mon, Wed and Fri.
Living abroad, having a few friends and contact locally but a lot of connections non easily reachable physically makes the shutdown of FB, WA or IG hard, especially when most of your contacts uses ONLY the aforementioned platforms and nothing else.
That means killing your connections and cut bridges with people.
When I did that for BBC News and 9gag, I decided that I didn't want to go back to reading those sites (although I do click through sometimes from HN).
I still use Facebook messages through mbasic.facebook.com on an old phone. I don't use 3G (or 4G or 5G), but read books on my phone or offline Wikipedia when on the bus. The news feed never interested me; it was all about having contact Lists, organising Events, and discussing topics in common-interest Groups.
WhatsApp won't work on my old iOS 6, so I use it on Bluestacks and check it only when needed. The group chats on there would drive me crazy if they actually made notifications on my phone. Instagram seems to be full of pretty girls and memes, which I guess isn't that different to 9gag in some ways.
Instead of complaining about data being sold, why don't we try to build a better social network? CouchSurfing put up a paywall. The community is moving en-masse to BeWelcome, a donation-funded, volunteer-driven, open-source, ad-free platform.
The BeWelcome site is managed under a French non-profit, BeVolunteer: the same structure as Wikipedia and Wikimedia. I think that other projects could be part of the same organisation. Why stop at hospitality exchange? I think that if BeWelcome can get critical mass, a related site could then break into mainstream social networking.
good luck deleting Whatsapp (and Messenger) in Europe, you essentialy cut yourself from most of the communication
also replacing Whatsapp with E2E Signal encryption by default with unsafe Telegram with no encryption by default and even optional with questionable quality doesn't seem like very clever choice, I would have expected switch to Signal, Riot etc. instead notgoriously unsafe service, which doesn't even provide videocalls
