The best thing I ever did was delete the Facebook app from my phone. I had already disabled all the notifications, but that didn't change things like deleting the app. Not being able to get to Facebook wherever you are. As silly as it sounds it was liberating. I still access Facebook from my laptop - but now that it's off of my phone, I'm accessing Facebook less and less frequently and I'm find I'm happier as a result.
Less Facebook == more happy. It's the best advice I can give.
Up until last year, I chalked up the "I deleted my Facebook" phenomenon to hipsterdom or some pathology where people think the can "cure" "addiction" by quitting whatever unhealthy behavior pattern they exhibit for a week or month and then coming back.
Last month I deactivated my Facebook and have yet to turn it back on. In the months prior I started finding alternative sources of news: NYT, Pitchfork, HN, various sub-reddits, Bandcamp, what have you. I outsourced social media to Twitter and Instagram. I outsourced messaging to text/Slack. A bunch of my friends have done the similar things in the last few years.
The lower levels of cognitive dissonance are noticeable. It's not like Facebook has a monopoly on the things I hate: notification spam, stupid arguments, unfulfilling articles, and vacuous political rants all exist elsewhere. Maybe it's the dissociation between who a person is and what is posted. On Reddit you don't know the person and they don't get a big platform to express themselves outside of the comments. On Twitter you can't go on these huge rants and following/unfollowing people is fairly impersonal. On Instagram, you never get "why haven't you posted?? come back!!" notifications. And news sites do what they do best - deliver the news without some other third party getting to give their doctoral thesis on what they think it means.
As an information security person and someone that cares deeply about preserving my privacy and the privacy of my fellow citizens I see Facebook / Google / Amazon as sort of existential threats. For them to exist we can't maintain our privacy to a high degree. And as long as they maintain a network effect, even if you do delete your Facebook account, they will maintain a shadow profile of you. You will always be a node in their graph now. European privacy laws and the right to be absolutely forgotten are the answer. As a free human being I believe in the right to be completely outside of any corporations software system and record keeping. There is so much work to do on this front, look at what happened to Equifax. We don't really get a choice about some things (credit reporting), but for everything else, I am going to fight it.
I am going to fight your shitty operating system updates that take away my privacy
I am going to fight your massive personal information sucking network
I am going to use alternative shopping services, no matter how easy you make it for me to click once and have stuff I really like appear in a great user experience.
I am going to fight these things because privacy matters and in the long run without privacy as consumers and human beings with inalienable rights we will give away something essential in there.
It isn't hipsterism. It isn't being a luddite. It mass-scale experiment about how much these organizations can concentrate before people really understand.
It is being a luddite - in a good way! Don't knock the luddites, they had analogous concerns.
They didn't hate machines or novelty per se, they hated the specifics of how the machines were affecting their quality of life.
Same with facebook - networked communications might be OK (remains to be seen if you ask me), but the socio-technical-political blob that is facebook's implementation of same has side effects that lots of us find horrible.
> As an information security person and someone that cares deeply about preserving my privacy and the privacy of my fellow citizens I see Facebook / Google / Amazon as sort of existential threats. For them to exist we can't maintain our privacy to a high degree.
Seriously, if I could upvote you several times, I would! You just said everything I believe in, including naming the corporations that worry me the most and make me feel hopeless sometimes. I try to educate people at every opportunity, fully knowing that it will take a long time for any effect to be visible. But I'm kinda used to that as an activist in other areas.
I don't know if there will ever be a decentralized and privacy protecting social networking platform that will beat Facebook and the like (pun unintended) in network effect, but I'd be ecstatic to see such a day! On the same lines would be reducing data collection almost everywhere and ensuring that privacy comes first - by governments or private entities. I have very little hope on the latter because information security is truly an afterthought in our Internet connected world where anyone can spin up WordPress, add some random plugins and start a "gig economy" or whatever the fad of the day is. It's too easy to start something software based that is completely insecure!
Facebook encourages a lower level of discourse than other message systems, somehow.
I participate in a couple of groups which have come to replace older forums running PHPbb or VBulletin type software. While the old style forums offer too many features and almost excessive permanence for discussions, Facebook offers too little in that regard.
Conversations are not meant to be searchable, archived, permanent, or long or detailed. Unlike VBulletin, where it's easy to find a post you saw 3 days ago or all the posts you've made in a forum, on Facebook everything effectively disappears after a week or two. The content is still there, just very disorganized and difficult to access. Search is inconsistent and very basic for groups.
Most significant is the impact this has on the discussions that take place. On the old forums, posting seemed like a bigger deal and people rarely posted one word responses or sentence fragments. The FB format seems to encourage that. Long, detailed responses about technical matters are difficult to post and read, so people don't post them as often. Discussions are often repeated because nobody can really find the last one to link to it.
This - I think this also extends to the conversations people have 'on' facebook - even with friends. You end up liking or saying 'cool' to a post, but you don't really have any real interaction. Since I've left facebook (nearly 9 months sober) I've probably talked with fewer friends, but those friends I have spoken to, I've spoken to on a far deeper level. and many of them I now actually _speak_ to more often.
Uninstalling messenger was hard at first, as some people I don't have a number for or they aren't on Whatsapp, but you either find other ways to keep in touch, or you realise that you were actually just on the periphery of each others lives, and liking that they got a new car or similar didn't actually have a positive impact on each others lives. And when you do meet again, you'll have a bunch to talk about.
I've debated making a 'fake' account for facebook groups (esp local sales groups, which seem far better served on fb in my area) but so far I've come the the conclusion that I don't really need to buy more crap from strangers - I have enough of my own already.
What I did was pare down Facebook to the bare essentials. The only people I have on it are actual would-invite-into-my-home friends, the only pages I follow are for concert venues and bands I like, and I block and turn off every single stupid "joke" page, app and game I see.
Now I basically only get posts directly written by my friends, event notifications for concerts, and updates from my favorite bands.
I don't use Facebook for news, I don't engage in political discussions or stupid arguments. I guess I use Facebook for what its original intended purpose, to keep in touch with friends.
Yea I'm not sure why this isn't a more popular option. I do an even less-impactful version of this: I've disabled the Newsfeed (on web), and I've pared down mobile and email notifications to only things that are likely to matter to me like event invites (my friend group uses FB events for pretty much everything, including logistical events for our Burning Man camp).
The main advantage to me is still that it's an easy and stable way to discover and communicate with people I know in real life: there's still nothing that beats the ease of finding someone on Facebook after meeting them, and I very often forget to exchange info with someone in these situations (esp if I've met a lot of cool people that night).
The company itself has been sleazy from day one, and I think they're largely to blame for the trend of fuck-the-user product design[1] in the last ~5 years. But putting a firewall around what I let them do to my devices and my life and taking advantage of what value they do provide has proven really fruitful for me.
[1] There are plenty of things that used to be deal-breakers for me, like spamming the notification bar to increase engagement: companies like Google held out for a long time against this, but Facebook led the charge into making it ubiquitous and now the new equilibrium is that most large apps do it (even @#$%ing Google Maps!)
I used Spotify with my Facebook account. When I deactivated the FB account and logged into Spotify, it reactivated the FB account automatically.
I had to create another standalone Spotify account and contact their support to migrate everything from the FB connected account to the new one, otherwise it would keep reactivating the FB account.
You can still use messenger, and I still do because I don't want to stonewall people who only have me on there. I have to say though, it's a god awful UX. The other day I even had an advertisement for Spotify pop up in my messages with a close friend. What the fuck is that?
Same. I initially only uninstalled messenger (which intolerably presented me with a popup asking me to enable notifications EVERY TIME I OPENED THE APP), then got rid of the FB app. Now even on my laptop facebook.com is pointing at localhost in /etc/hosts, which makes me edit a root file to look at it. I'm much, much happier. If it works for you, cool, but if you're dissatisfied and considering abandoning it anyway, I can offer anecdotally that it has been a great decision for me.
(The only reason I don't close my account: I check it once every week or so, because I have older family members for whom this is probably as far as they're going into the world of social media and I feel a bit guilty either pressuring them to use some alternative or disconnecting from them further, as they are unlikely to understand my dissatisfaction with the FB product and much more likely to take it personally)
I installed the Lite version of Messenger, and it's way better. (Not available in the US App Store; there are verified APKs floating around the internet.) It's just a bare-bones chat app that launches when I want it, without all the nagging about chat bubbles, their Snapchat knockoff, and whatever else.
I picked up Messenger Lite when I was in Fiji. My phone isn't very good and struggled with normal Messenger.
With Messenger Lite, not only does it take a lot less space, it's a lot faster, and feels less bloaty. It's a lot like what Messenger was a few years ago, nice and simple.
I don't want to use Messenger to play games, or send giphys, or any of that other rich interaction stuff. The only thing I miss is the ability to send a pin of your location to someone, which is actually a really useful feature.
You can also go to Facebook on Chrome and request the desktop version of the site- Messages will work in that. That way you don't have to install a Messages app.
This used to work for me but stopped a while ago on android (still seems to work on iPhones somehow). mbasic.facebook.com is a really nice fast and minimalist interface where messages still work and I use it exclusively now.
Actually it worked for me only to read messages. When I tried to reply all the characters I've entered were disappearing so only sent dash and few commas. Bizarre and that was a new low reached by fb in their push of messenger app on mobile.
Actually you don't need to use desktop version. It tries to make you install it, but if you just click back to exit Play Store, and on the FB page to prompt the installation there's a faint X that you can click. At least it works in Opera Mobile.
Interestingly if I leave the tab open I also get notifications if someone responded.
I am honestly wondering if there is an inside joke for tech companies attempting to make the worst possible messaging app. Facebook messenger is god awful ugly, same with snapchat. Google Hangouts is ok at best (I personally have not used Google's other dozen or so messaging apps they have)
GChat used to be great - it was simple, relatively lightweight and quick. Then it was rebranded Hangouts and became a little muddled and unwieldy for a brief period when Whatsapp was ascendent which nearly overnight caused my entire group of friends to switch.
You're right about the IM apps being not great. This and the poor state of desktop email clients on Windows and Linux are my pet hates
I've had facebook messenger, gchat/hangouts installed on my phone for some time. I don't know if I'd call it great, but I have a hard time arguing that it doesn't immediately solve my instant messaging needs.
What exactly do you want that gchat or facebook messenger doesnt solve?
I want open chat protocols so I can use whatever client I damn well please (e.g. Adium, Pidgin, some terminal thing, or a bot made from a little python script, ...).
Whenever I’m stuck using a centralized service (Twitter, facebook, some web forum, whatever bullshit IRC replacement businesses are buying this week, ...) their client invariably does something different than what many people want it to do, but we have no recourse because everything is locked-down proprietary bullshit, even though most of the messages are plain text and could have been delivered just fine by open protocols in 1990. Not to mention these apps are all poorly designed resource hogs that spy on everyone, inject ugly ads, and burn mobile battery.
Proprietary push notifications on mobile devices are what really killed open IM protocols. What good is an open protocol, if the client app can't wake up to process it without a proprietary channel? We need to fix that mess first, somehow.
Well remember that this was a few years back so things were a lot different from today.
1. gchat (or "Google Talk" I think?) was a nice simple app that was replaced by a rebranded one that had different functionality and a UI that was either different or flakey/slow/unreliable (I forget all the details). I later learned that actually we were all duped by google - gchat itself was only turned off completely very recently, but at the time they managed to convince us that we had to use Hangouts instead. In any case, the whole thing was annoying enough that we left because ...
2. Whatsapp was starting to be very widespread and was a natural replacement for us as most people either had it or could quickly get it (you just needed a phone number and nearly any sort of phone, many feature phones support it) and it had a simple chat-only interface.
3. FB Messenger was not a separate application at the time, it was integrated in the FB app iirc and you still had to be a member of FB and add any contacts as "friends" to communicate. At the time it wasn't seen as a general-purpose chat app by _anyone_, just a way to talk to your FB contacts.
Hope that makes sense. If you're curious about the gchat->hangouts switch, I'm sure a quick search will turn up a few disgruntled articles - there were quite a few people who were annoyed. It probably didn't help that Google were in the habit of dropping products, so a few people may have assumed that they'd do the same with the chat app.
It's not that I want some additional feature, I actually want fewer features. The ability to name group chats and persist them leads people to treat them like chat rooms. The ability to send animated gifs means people send them. These apps very quickly turned from "alternative to text-messaging" to "full-blown chat room that wants push notifications each time anyone sends a message," and I don't want an app to ask me to enable notifications each time I open it.
I realize there are per-thread mute settings, but the whole experience of using these things is highly intrusive. At least with text messaging (or calling) we still have, to some extent, the social expectation that it is known to be intrusive, so people (in my social group at least) are less likely to text for frivolous reasons.
Uninstalling the app and redirecting facebook.com to localhost are great ideas. I also sometimes logout of facebook.com on chrome on my phone so that it makes it even harder to get back on.
Since we are into personal anecdotes: the annoying giant red blinking popup they display all the time to force you to download the app instead of using the mobile website was all I needed to get entirely rid of my habit to visit Reddit, and I like the idea that I might not be the only one.
reddit is not far off from facebook to being a total time suck. i'd like to just be in a couple educational/technical subs or quit entirely but that /r/popular, it just calls out to people.
To communicate with other people on my terms, when I want to communicate.
It's the same reason there are only a few phone numbers that can actually make my phone ring (my wife, the school my children attend, and pager duty (:P))
You can also make only some email messages cause notifications.
Not sure if there's a better way for gmail, but the way I did it was to have a second gmail account, then create filters that send only important messages to that account. Then in the gmail app you can control notifications on a per-account level.
If I remember correctly how I did this years ago, I made filters to label important messages with correct label and chose different notification (sounds at least) for those labels in gmail app.
In Android Do Not Disturb mode can do this. You can set it to "priority only" and define who is the priority contacts. iOS should have a similar function.
It's useful to be able to communicate with people in situations where message notifications are awkward or prohibited. (ie work)
My wife exclusively uses messenger for buying and selling stuff on Facebook. She doesn't need nor want notifications.
There's also the creepy factor. I assume if there is any kind of exploit or corner case that allows an app to abuse privilege on iOS, Facebook is scummy enough to always ship it.
In my experience, since Messenger / Hangouts / etc all support persisted, named chats, people start treating them like chatrooms rather than like text messages. I don't want notifications for a chat room (where there's a flurry of conversation that may or may not be directed at me), and in general since I work remote I try to keep the "things that make my phone buzz" list to the bare-minimum, since that list will always include "production outage" which might make me stop mid-step while heading to lunch and turn back around.
Additionally, FB messenger does not allow you to disable "read receipts," it always shows the other party when you have opened a message. Buzzing my pocket and then telling the other person I read their message feels very intrusive to me.
It's equivalent to email, but more convenient if you only know the people through facebook. E.g. I admin a facebook group, so admins have a chat to discuss group-related things.
If I don't have notifications enabled it's because I don't want to be distracted. I check my phone often enough, I don't need to immediately stop what I'm doing to read a message.
Equally. When I send a message to someone, I don't want to distract them either. Of course there's no sophistication (e.g. busy mode, notify for messages flagged urgent only) because facebook wants people to drop whatever they're doing and use facebook instead.
I deleted it during the run-up to last year's elections, and I've been happier. Also, my phone battery lasts literally forever.
The thing with optimizing for engagement is that the numbers will tell you to do things that eventually burn out your users. The more thoughtful people leave first, and the community becomes dominated by addicts, and the news feed increasingly dominated by oversharers who spend several hours a day facebooking. That infinite slurry of crappy content rots your brain faster than watching daytime TV.
The book "Contagion: Why things Catch On" by Jonah Berger basically explains that we share when we have "strong emotions" triggered. That includes anger and anxiety.
So much of social media is dependent on triggering anger or anxiety to get you to share. Which is effective political memes make you mad. Because they're designed to.
I decided that being on a platform that uses me as a transmitter of memes to make cash by making me mad or anxious was (a) sociopathic on behalf of Facebook and (b) stupid on my part. I logged out, deactivated, and deleted. I've done it before, but now it feels permanent.
I'm on twitter sometimes (because there's much less social pressure wrt following/unfollowing) and Goodreads, where I follow people who read and write the books I like to read.
Similarly simply logging out of Facebook on Chrome and only accessing it through incognito or another browser has been great. Added benefit: (a little) less tracking.
First week or so was string of surprising moments where I would suddenly find myself at the FB login screen having mindlessly tried to navigate there.
I still find that after being off Facebook for five years. Luckily the football team I hate the most has a URL that begins with f, so I started visiting that. Cured it in a week...
Cleaning cookies, using browser extension like uBlock Origin, and not using facebook login via other web sites such as Yelp will help with reducing tracking.
More productive, less distracted, etc., sure but was FB really getting you down that much? Am I just using Facebook "wrong" in that it's not upsetting me the same way it upsets others?
Every time I'm on FB. It's pleasant, really pleasant. But, every single time I'll go on the site and to do a thing like, check on the plans for my friend's birthday party. I end up spending like 30min or so more time than I expected to just browsing aimlessly.
It's not like they are putting a gun to my head but, they are using a billion dollars of research and my friends' faces to entice me into doing something I don't want. I'm more or less a monkey and my social circuitry just is so super-stimulated that it's annoying.
And all of that is before the FOMO kicks in and I start feeling bad that my life isn't as nice as my friends even though among my friends, I have a very enviable life (my friends have confided in me as much). But, my every day life cannot compete with the highlight reel of all the best moments of all my friends' lives.
Even though I know all of this stuff consiously, it still affects me because keeping guard and watch over everything constantly is hard. Falling into how it's designed to make you feel is easy.
Deleting FB off your phone is the best thing.
This overwhelming feeling, I'm convinced, is one of the driving factors that created Instagram and Snapchat because it was smaller and less invasive. Ironically, they became just like FB or in some ways (to some people) worse as they grew.
We are social animals and FB weaponizes the faces of all of your friends to suck as much attention from you as possible. It's as unfair a fight as there ever has been in the history of commerce.
Funny thing is that anyone with half a brain cell notices this if you just try to look at it even a bit. People are manipulable to do things they do not like to do. Yet any time there is a comment in HN stating that marketing may not be the best thing since sliced bread, there will be tons of messages of type "hey, just last week I saw an ad of an even I actually wanted to go, so there is nothing bad ever in people throwing ads at my face against my will". Weird. (And don't get me started on the whole damn "science" of economics being based on the (obviously unfalsifiable as per popper) assumption that people always and anywhere just maximize their utility.)
Think about Facebook the way you might think about alcohol. For many (if not most) people, even the occasional overindulgence isn't going to cause too much harm. But for some, it has an insidious effect and sometimes the best strategy is to simply swear it off completely.
For me, it was more like cigarette usage: "I can quit any time" I thought, even as the constant demands for my attention distracted and upset me. Recognizing how much I disliked Facebook, then quitting cold-turkey was the only way I was able to break my addiction.
I quit Facebook initially because of notification spam. However I discovered something afterwards. I had less negative feelings toward family and friends. I had unconsciously been forming an opinion of them that was based on the habits Facebook was encouraging rather than their actual personality.
In a sense I'm a lot happier not knowing that Great Aunt Gertrude shared that post. And most of the time Aunt Gertrude didn't even think about what she was sharing so the opinion wasn't based in fact.
I just never read the wall thingy. When I go to FB, it's either directly to the messenger or to facebook.com/<my username>. I really only use it for the IM. I hate how it's 2017 and it doesn't have simple things like bold* or colors, that were available in AIM/MSN/Yahoo/EveryotherMessenger before (not to mention until the early 2010s, FB message was the most unreliable piece of garbage in the world. If you used Pidgin/Audium/anything XMPP, half the time messages wouldn't get through).
I have too many friends spread across the world to ever quit FB, but I only really use it for messages. I only post things if they promote my website and pull people to my content and away from Facebook. Since that's all I do, my posts obviously don't get as much reach. It's kinda the opposite of the Silent Bob effect. You have a friend who always says crap and you ignore them. If someone says things only once a week; you pay attention when they have something to say.
Facebook basically penalizes people who only speak when they have something important to say and rewards people who cannot learn to shut the hell up.
*I realize it has bold now, but it doesn't work universally across all their tools: mobile, web, etc. I know people who just use unicode symbols for italics because it's more reliable.
To me it resembles that condo mailbox, filled with spam and colorful leaflets I know I don't need so pick them up and dump them annoyed into the trash box provided for my convenience and everyone's right next to it. Once a week I end up on Facebook for a few seconds, check to see if someone left some important message, and if not quickly leave the screaming place. For all those needy souls of relatives and acquaintances I instructed my twitter to automatically repost on facebook, which is rare but at least gives them something to feed upon.
having spare moments to think through your day/mood/plans, etc., makes a huge difference to someone who otherwise will ceaselessly distract themselves to avoid said thoughts.
Facebook, per se, maybe not. It could be anything that fills in the holes
I deleted my Facebook account completely last fall. It was interesting to see what happened over the period of about a month. Two weeks in my spouse's status changed from "Married to Ollie" to "Married." About three weeks in I got a notice saying my account to pay for "boosting" posts was cancelled.
My FB fanboy brother is annoyed, because if he wants to tell me something he has to make an effort.
People don't "tag" me in pictures any more. I don't have to cope with the little burst of emotional juice when somebody pushes the little thumb button on something from me or about me.
Instead of getting notifications and getting pulled into the app I can visit the site when I have downtime, or have something I actually want to accomplish on FB.
I have the facebook app on my phone and virtually never use it. I just really don't find myself drawn to use facebook at all. Reddit and HN on the other hand, those i'm addicted to.
Same. I keep thinking that I can rationally explain my Reddit and HN usage because they do serve some utility. But then I wonder how much I’m fooling myself with that sentiment...
I quit facebook about 5 years ago, realizing quickly there was nothing of value in seeing how fake-happy people were. You only see the highlights, so when a friend announced a divorce we, including that person's family, were surprised as the relationship had appeared so solid. This appears to be a documented reality of social media in general.
Reddit is something else, and my reddit time has taken a dive over the last year or so. It's no longer useful to me and the 'community' have become rude, antagonistic and there's always a large group on any sub, including the smaller ones, where users take a contrary argument just for the sake of appearing intelligent, which they never succeed in doing. Only thing keeping me there are the Linux subs and sometimes the hilarity of askreddit (intentional hilarity and otherwise).
Even better, don't sign up. I'm envious of my friends who are in this category. I deleted after reading about PRISM, then got back on. Deleted again, and then moved away from some friends and got lonely and got back on again. Luckily more and more of my friends are deleting, so should be easier to take the plunge again.
I've found that since my wife and I both deactivated, we've suddenly been finding friends in new places. I invited a coworker and his family over for dinner, which was a great time. We've reconnected with some family of hers that we always thought "they're really nice people, we should get to know them better". Heck, we were at the neighborhood playground in our the other day and we invited a family over to dinner which was a lot of fun. Reconditioning myself to actually talk to people in real life has been really rewarding for me and my family. I used to have really severe anxiety, and it's scary to make that first contact, but man, it's worth it.
Among the never signed up group. It was unappealing to begin with, and it's been increasingly unlikely as, with stories like this, I learn how much worse it's been getting.
I also find people who ask for my facebook account or try to get me to join are the same people I find least interesting and I'm less willing to spend my time with.
Same. This sounds drastic to people who are in the habit of Facebooking, but I still have friends and a social life and the hours of mindlessly scrolling through low-info-density posts, likes, links, and whatnot is all gone.
Honest question, what do you do for event planning? Literally the only reason I still have FB is because my friend group uses it heavily for coordinating hikes, camping trips, etc. I'd love to delete it if it weren't for that.
The 2nd best thing after uninstalling the fb app from the phone was to log out from it in my laptop's browser, make sure my password is a generated one (so I can't enter it manually) and also make sure it won't autocomplete when I go to facebook.com.
Now if I want to access it I have to open the Password Manager, copy the password and then paste it ... which are too many steps for me to take in order to check it out :)
So, in the past 1-2 months I think I spent in total 1-2 hours on facebook.
I keep trying to do exactly that, the majority of my time wasted on my phone is spent in Chrome. Almost every other app I have left is a valuable unix-esque utility, like weather, radar, notes, chat, etc.
You joke about this, but my wife and I, in an effort to change our default behaviors, both put parental locks on each others phones disabling the browsers and app installs. We still had GPS and phone and text messaging. We've re-enabled it now, but it definitely unconditioned us from seeking entertainment in our phones.
I have FB on my phone and I'll check it once every couple of days, but it doesn't seem like it would be all that liberating to delete it. What makes it so liberating? FB always seems so optional that I'm never really pushed to read it. Work email on the other hand...
Agree, news Feed eradicator is my favorite chrome app too. When you go to Facebook it automatically replaces your entire newsfeed with a short quote about using your life for something better. Right now all my newsfeed says is: “Inaction will cause a man to sink into the slough of despond and vanish without a trace.”
~ Farley Mowat"
I've found my Facebook usage just going down in general over the years. Switching to the Messenger app and messenger.com on desktop to chat with friends has made it much easier not getting distracted by the newsfeed at random times. Plus, I switched off a whole bunch of notifications and email subscriptions and actually went through my 'friends' and marked most of them as acquaintances, so I mostly don't hear about them, which improved the quality of the feed immensely. In general, ignoring all Facebooks feeble attempts at engagement doesn't really seem all that difficult to me. And being able to look up "what was the address of that event I'm invited to again?" on the phone is nice, so I don't particularly want to delete the FB app either. So in short, it sounds to me like a lot of people are having a much harder time ignoring Facebook than I do - I wonder if maybe they just need to tweak a few things like I did, and they could happily co-exist without being bothered by it, or if there is something else at play too?
The step that worked for me was unfollowing everything from Facebook, so that I have a completely empty News Feed. If I want to see what's happening for a particular person, I just navigate to their profile and see directly. I've found this way, even if I have Facebook installed I very very rarely open it and if I do, I close it immediately since there's no content.
Well with HN you could just use the noprocrast mode, or I've found that editing your hosts file makes sure that you're intentionally browsing a website. I deactivated Facebook, which has surprised me because I still hear from the people I care about (My grandma was a little annoyed but now she's started emailing me). I've also discovered that checking the news once a week (or even once a month!) doesn't make me feel less informed than checking it every day.
Shhhh, why do you have to mention that for. You're responding to a comment that concluded "Less Facebook == more happy" with an alternate way to increase access to Facebook.
Yup. And for those rare occasions you need to use facebook messaging, use mbasic.facebook.com so that facebook doesn't "force" you to install their messenger app!
Honestly, it is kind of scary how people on HN live in the no-FB bubble. I mean, FB is kind of optional for social life, but the universal "I deleted FB and am happy" does sound like echo chamber. Because Facebook DOES have advantages, even though more introverted people might not appreciate them as much. Especially regarding event organization:
I regularly organize big board game parties, which are attended by 10-15 people (out of ~40 invited). How easily can I invite / manage so many people without some platform like FB, which (almost, at least around me) everyone uses? And I really appreciate easy info / updates events on FB provide for e.g. info about how much food should I cook, telling people about changing time (or day! We just had poll on FB because people liked this sunday more than saturday) of the party, telling them what to bring . . . emails just wouldn't cut it, it would consume much more time, and would be really clunky. And on the other hand, people attending who DO NOT have FB, are PITA to manage, they consume literally 10times more time to keep list of, message, get the answer from . . . FB has it all in one neat (even though sometimes smelly) package.
Similarly for e.g. GoT (also boardgame) events, as exactly-six-people is pain to manage generally. For someone going to such events it also has great UX, without any hassle of mass-sms or mass-email events.
Not to mention classic FB advantages like photo-sharing, communicating with friends on the other side of the world, etc. . .
It seems to me like deleting FB is not an option if I would like to stay as social. And I am actually quite introverted too, but thanks to channeling social interaction to FB (of course no app, just mbasic.facebook.com and desktop website) and particular events I can enjoy my time alone (which is vast majority of the time) without any regrets or being left behind in my social circle.
> Less Facebook == more happy. It's the best advice I can give.
I completely agree, and this works for me too. I take long breaks from Facebook and find it refreshing. It also becomes painful to think of logging in to Facebook afterwards. The tons of notifications and tags and replies. There's too much on the platform manipulating people to stay on it. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is real, and I know people who cannot stay without checking Facebook everyday. The main reason I haven't quit Facebook is because I use it for some activism related topics, and a huge audience exists on the platform.
For privacy reasons, to protect myself a bit more and to avoid ads, I mostly Facebook only from a browser on a computer. I don't use the app even though I know I can deny permissions for contacts, photos, camera, mic, location, notifications, etc., on iOS. Sometimes I visit mbasic.facebook.com from the browser on the phone for kicks and to get to messenger directly without jumping through hoops.
It's the best advice to stay happy. I also removed the app last month on my mobile and it helped me to have a very happy weekend as I don't get to login on my laptop. Earlier on weekends I watch FB in morning and get depressed coz one of my friends friend (out of 500 odd friends) went to Europe and had good time but I feel like a loser and screw up my day.
I feel like this kind of activity really triggers some kind of primal social drive in the brain to the point where it is actively unhealthy. I've also struggled with crazy Facebook compulsions, to the point where I've also had to delete the app, and I force myself to use the terrible mobile web UI to make the experience as painful as possible.
I didn't actively touch Facebook throughout August, and I really feel my general outlook has improved. I'm also more social with people in real life, and not getting my saccharine hits from little snippets of conversation or internet point validation.
Now I'm rarely active with it and feeling better for it. I still reluctantly have to use the messenger for communication with certain people, and login for access to other websites that rely on facebook (e.g. Goodreads).
Right on! Total agreement here. Since I was pretty addicted (as of about a year ago), not only did I delete the app from my phone, I changed my passsword to one generated by LastPass (e.g. totally freaking hard to memorize). This re-enforces the fact that the only EASY way to get on FB is via my laptop:)
Like many others have said, it is the same for me too. I deleted the app one day and have felt so much better since.
I actually used to be able to use the browser based messenger to talk to friends but that has been broken lately and now tries to force you to install the app - more dark patterns here (I don't want the app!).
Now I just ignore Facebook completely. I cringe when I need to open the site for some reason. I'm just happier without it.
I'd love some open source thing like this that was mine first and foremost, but I don't really need that either. I thought I needed social networking way more than I really do.
How often do you run into a situation where you're forced to enter a phone number? Do you enter a non-existent one or do you use your POTS number? Do you run into situations/signups where you need to verify a number, and if so what do you do for that?
The idea is very attractive, but it seems like the rest of the world is stuck with the mindset that you have to have a phone number, email address, and even a physical address.
Yeah, there's a few services that are hard to use due to requiring phone number verification. Ironically, twilio was one of them. I just don't use these services, but if I absolutely needed to, I could figure it out. I ended up using a lot of bitcoin and other cryptos recently.
When I sign up for something I usually use a fake number.
I think a decent compromise will be using another prepaid cheap phone, although building my own phone would be pretty cool too (lots of hobbyists doing that now)
I haven't had to figure out anything like that in the last few years. I'm not very social - I hang out with friends a few times a month and usually just hack on stuff and drink a few beers.
I've got lots of radios though, and I use them sometimes if I'm doing a convoy or camping, etc.
I don't have a phone at all. I am thinking about getting a prepaid phone at some point in the future (I did this at one point - you can get a $5 phone and pay under $100 for minutes that will last a year).
It doesn't even feel weird for me now. I have POTS copper line going to my house but no phone plugged into it at this point.
It probably wouldn't work for most people, but I'm the type who just wants to work on my projects alone and be at a computer most of the day. I do think most people could get away with the prepaid phone and spend under $100 a year on phone service.
I'm a linux user - I'm pretty sure I'd go crazy on macOS without a phone. Giving up iMessages and thousands of dollars of phone/mac apps was tough but now I'd never go back.
Indeed that's something Cal Newport has been always saying!
Social media is engineered to be addictive and hooking us while the BS reason that we give to be on social networking for is to gain popularity but popularity would follow us when we do Deep work! https://hackernoon.com/hackers-guide-to-internet-minimalism-...
Returning to this approximately a day or so after it was posted. I decided to remove the Facebook app from my iPhone and replace it with a Safari bookmark to the mobile site.
Oh my lord, the Facebook app eats battery life. I haven't had to charge my phone yet compared to my 2x charges per day. Whether through less usage or less Facebook doing its thing I can't confirm. I'm not going back either way.
Same.. couldn't be happier. started by removing messenger & ended up removing FB entirely. I Hated it when my old ATT Galaxy S6 came with it pre-installed and you couldn't delete it only disable it so I did just that. The phone runs faster too.
Wasnt there some stanford study that concluded that more people engage with social media like FB more unhappier they felt. something to do with selection bias in feed.
I treat facebook as a contact list for people who I don't regularly communicate with on a daily/weekly cadence. It is a way to keep in touch and up to date with people but the less I frequent facebook the "less unhappy" I am. I don't want to say I am happier not going to facebook, but I do know less facebook isn't a bad thing.
Not a Facebook user, but I did the following with Instagram and never regretted it. If you can't delete the Facebook app, at least disable notifications - you can survive without the distraction of your phone constantly lighting up with alerts about likes or comments and so on.
Certainly on iOS, the Facebook app eats battery like nobody's business.
I simply use the mobile website which is pretty good - and if I need to take a peek at messenger, I request the desktop site, which is sufficiently inconvenient to prevent me from doing it too often - about once a week.
Yeah that works for a bit. I was "more happy" when I deleted it. Now, a year later, I'm just as sad because my wife is on it all the time, but I can't influence that. It's not like I can just delete her instance...
My girlfriend used to grab her phone and start scrolling the fb newsfeed while we were talking. As she knows that I've deleted my fb account, my trick was to gently remind her that we were in the middle of a talk, and although she may be able to do two things at the same time, I don't, and her using the phone is distracting to me and makes me break the flow of the conversation. Like Pavlov's dog, she is now so accustomed to that, that I don't really need to say anything anymore. I just look at her doing that, she understands and turns off the phone (well, most of the time at least).
Even if you aren't both in the middle of a conversation, I suggest to you to slowly start talking to her about all these shaddy things about facebook (important: is not an addiction but a mental conditioning, as "addiction" is a very strong word for some people and "conditioning" is a much fuzzier concept). Then, slowly, start noticing that her "conditioning" on facebook is a turnoff on certain situations. Be honest and frontal about that..
This has been extremely helpful, and I took it a step further the other week by uninstalling twitter.
Not having a constant stream of news that I can endlessly scroll through has improved my sense of well-being immensely.
I actually uninstalled it because I was out of storage (8GB iPhone), so it was the first app I removed. I feel like it's so much better not to have fb with you all the time to scroll-wasting your time.
I get no notifications from my
Facebook app (I'm on iOS). What am I missing? I do get notifications of messages from the Messenger app but I want those as they are from friends
Some friends asked me to sign up for it because they wanted to use the messenger service for a groupchat. When I registered it immediately propagated my profile with information about my highschool (10 years ago) and suggested a lot of people I knew from back then as well as some devs I've collaborated with on Github. All this from a new email.
So I went into the settings and changed all privacy settings I could find, and was suddenly banned for "suspicious activity". To unlock the account they demanded my phonenumber, surely only for 2FA. But because my friends kept nagging I gave them it so I could chat with them.
After about 10 minutes of chatting I got banned again for "suspicious activity". This time they demanded a recent photo of my face to confirm my identity. But also said that I shouldn't worry because only their servers will see it. So I just sent a photo of some random from a local magazine and they replied that it was not me in the image.
So although I've never posted any photos online, never used the email, never posted my phonenumber online. They know everything about me, including what I look like. Can't imagine what data Google has if Facebook has all that..
They probably asked your friends if the picture was you or not; they'd almost certainly be willing to do the verification if told it was to "prevent someone from impersonating you".
I thought they did that, but my experience has been quick, so I cannot imagine anyone got asked. I suspect it was either an automated process, or some human looked at my photos and decide whether I am that person. I believe it would be both, so facial recognition can be trained and perfected. I'd lean to say if this was all automated, they probably did a "Google image" search and came to the conclusion it could not have been the user.
Please do not accuse me without any proof. I only have one account. You have no idea what you are talking about. Do not insult people like that. You can look up my public profile. I am done talking with you.
This applies to a lot of people too because there is a cluster of people who agree/think alike, and there is a cluster who aren't relatively to the other group. The way he said it is actually very insulting and condescending, pretty much ready to attack me and accuse me for something I did not do. I am glad you are being honest with me how you felt in the first place. That would have been a better way to express one's doubt. Although I am not famous, just a nobody HNer, I hope people would at least do a little research on my profile first before accusing me playing a persona game.
This. I went through the same process - Facebook rejected a photo from a really obscure magazine, so I asked one of my friends to send me an image they already uploaded to Facebook. FB quickly accepted that one.
This ties into a phenomena that I've noticed with a lot of social networks lately-- fake content.
What I mean by that specifically is putting things into your feed that nobody actually intended to share. e.g. "XXXX liked this thing!" Or generating notifications of non-events, like "Hey, share a thing!"
The share button is literally right next to the 'uplike' button. And they specifically did not press it. But you're gonna press it for them, because you gotta have content and folks keep pretty mum on facebook (and everywhere else) lately. There is very little I'm interested in sharing with every single person I know. And even less I'm interested in sharing with strangers a la Twitter.
To say nothing of the overall click-baity trollish quality of aformentioned articles. Every time one of my dear friends gets triggered and feeds the trolls, facebook is dutifully shoving it in my face. There is a high correlation between virality and unredeemable shit stirring.
Facebook is doing it. Twitter is doing it. Reddit is perhaps the most shameless of all with their mobile app working hard to spam you with posts that you.... haven't commented on, or even upvoted. (I can't say one way or the other about Snapchat because I'm not a millennial.)
I do believe this is the intersection of 100% social media saturation and the public markets' relentless demand for growth. This is peak social media. They're flogging live video hard, but news flash: I grew up when you had to make plans to watch your favorite TV show, and it's the worst. Live video sucks. I got shit to do. I can't even be bothered to DVR things any more.
This is exactly my prove my with Facebook and the thing that's making it downright close to unusable now -- the crap that you see that nobody intended to share. My feed is a literally endless stream of awful memes because someone I went to high school with ten years ago tagged their friend in a comment and now I have to see that.
I want something that shows only what my friends explicitly posted, in chronological order, and without a tiny character limit.
> What I mean by that specifically is putting things into your feed that nobody actually intended to share. e.g. "XXXX liked this thing!" Or generating notifications of non-events, like "Hey, share a thing!"
I also noticed I get a lot of "this female friend of yours who just like you also doesn't have her relationship status revealed to us is interested in going to X tomorrow" reminders. It's like Facebook wants me to be a creepy stalker male friend.
I started taking screenshots of it and sending them to them - "hey, Facebook wants me to stalk you" style (they're privacy conscious so we can joke about it together instead of them thinking I'm creeping on them)
"The tricks, hooks, and tactics Facebook uses to keep people coming back have gotten more aggressive and explicit. And I feel that takes away from the actual value the platform provides."
This is why I stopped using Facebook. I really didn't mind the platform until they crossed the threshold of being a useful product to reminding my each time I used it that I AM the product.
I like to fly under the radar and prefer people to find my pictures and posts naturally. Once they started force feeding people my content I decided to stop inflicting my peers with fuel for facebooks social cannons.
Agreed. I wonder how long before most of FB's users notice how aggressive this is and, perhaps more likely, how boring the feed becomes with these tricks.
Is FB getting more aggressive because it wants even more or because it is actually losing clicks/logons/attention?
> Is FB getting more aggressive because it wants even more or because it is actually losing clicks/logons/attention?
Probably the latter. I only recall getting the clingy email messages when I haven't checked it in a few days.
I've never had a problem with Facebook over-use, but I know people who have. Those notifications are so slimy and akin to waving a drink in front of an alcoholic's face.
I think a lot of new companies are going to be burned by this eventually.
Every time Facebook turns up the notification rate, they see more engagement. Every time they encourage Boosting a post, they make more money. And then later, when they can't link cause and effect, people like you and me and OP give up on the site completely.
Similarly, sites that A/B test and adjust features and "improve" their design constantly pay a real price - their users feel like guinea pigs and can't ever learn to use the product fluidly. But a .1% conversion boost is measurable now, while a slow bleed of users who want reliability can't be proven.
At a certain point trading goodwill for bigger numbers actually does become a problem, and I think we're getting there.
What do you mean exactly? When did they started doing that? I've always been of the "under the radar" type myself, not too popular and so on, and I can't imagine how Facebook would be forcing my content over people.
(I've closed my account on 2013, so I don't know exactly what happened since then.)
I have a facebook account, but I haven't even logged in in the mast few years. Recently (like a week ago), I started receiving text messages on the number i had setup, after constant nagging by fb about security, looking like this :
I am OUTRAGED by this. My phone text messages is one of the only communication medium that has no spam, and i basically use it for urgent stuff. I never agreed to fb using it for anything further than 2fa. If it wants to spam me, it may send emails.
This was basically the last straw for me. I'm going to send a message to all my friends telling them to send a mail if they want to contact me, delete everything on my profile and wall, and bid farewell. My account will stay up mostly to keep scammers/impostors at bay.
This happened to me with Instagram (which I stopped using after they killed the chronological feed). I'm almost certain I never gave my number to Instagram. I used it to confirm something with Facebook at some point apparently, but I don't recall giving it to them and I can't imagine myself consenting to phone notifications. At one point they sent me a message at 2am local time on a Sunday.
At one point in time, text messages were extremely expensive (several cents per message, depending on the plan you had). At that time, laws were passed (in many countries, I don't know where you are) that made it illegal to send unsolicited text messages.
Not 100% right as some companies in EU member countries such as Finland, where I'm from, were allowed to use a certain clause that would allow them to still add roaming charges (mostly data related). This is done because the majority of operators sell contracts based on the speed and not a monthly GB cap. Almost all contracts are unlimited in data. I for one have a ~30€/month contract that has unlimited data with 50Mbps down / 30Mbps up.
After the roaming change my contract includes ~6GB of roaming data within EU. When that's reached there is a 0.0057€ per MB price in data abroad.
This is legally not "unsolicited", at least in my jurisdiction.
To be unsolicited, you must not have had previous business contact with the company before they contacted you. If you have a business relationship with the company, for example because you opened an account and gave them your phone number, then these laws do not apply.
I use Google Voice for 2FA. It kind of defeats the purpose of 2FA, but it ensures that all the spam stays in my inbox, and lets me change phone numbers when I change country without causing problems.
Although I'm not on Facebook anymore, I have the same problem with LinkedIn. To deal with it, I just add to my email sieve filter every so often. So far I have:
## Linkedin - Trash useless email
if allof(
address :is "From" "messages-noreply@linkedin.com",
anyof(
header :regex "Subject" "^(Congratulate|Say happy birthday to) .+",
header :regex "Subject" "^Check out .+ (updated profile|new skill|new photo)",
header :regex "Subject" ".+ is a?waiting (for )?your response$",
header :regex "Subject" "^News about .+",
header :regex "Subject" "ou have [0-9]+ (unread message|new update)",
header :regex "Subject" "Do you know .+",
header :regex "Subject" "^.+, you have .+waiting for you on LinkedIn$",
header :regex "Subject" "see who you already know on LinkedIn$",
header :regex "Subject" "^.+, more than [0-9,]+ new jobs in .+$",
header :regex "Subject" "^Connect to your classmates from .+$"
)
){
addflag "\\Seen";
fileinto "Trash";
stop;
}
I'm sure you could do something similar for Facebook if you just switched to email notifications and stopped using the mobile apps.
FYI, LinkedIn has somewhat fine-grained email/notification configuration so you can stop these at the source.
Have a look at Me (menu) > Settings & Privacy > Communications (tab) > Email frequency (controls not only overall frequency but frequency per message type, i.e. group message notifications, invitations, job notifications, connection update notifications, etc.).
Also, you can entirely disable classes of notifications you no longer want to receive/see (even when you're viewing the site) by going to the Notifications tab, then clicking the context menu ("...") on a given notification and selecting "Turn off" (stop receiving this type of notification) or "Unfollow" (stop receiving updates from the given source).
> FYI, LinkedIn has somewhat fine-grained email/notification configuration so you can stop these at the source.
Facebook does too, but it's also slimy too. You can't preemptively opt out of specific notifications, but you can unsubscribe to types you've already received via a link in the email. The slimy thing is that some of these are fairly generically named and you can never be sure exactly what you're unsubscribing from sometimes.
I want to receive ONLY event invites and messages notifications from Facebook, but there have been a couple times where those stopped and the only way I was able to get them back was to resubscribe to stuff until I hit the one that suppressed them.
Slight tangent, but any suggestions on how to do this kind of real-time filtering with Gmail? The filter functionality doesn't quite let you do regexes.
They also ensure there's ALWAYS at least one notification when you sign in. Even if nothing of importance happened, they find _something_ to notify you about just so you can see the red notification count every time.
I deactivated my account yesterday and look forward to a FB-free life.
I mean, enjoy your FB-free life, but I tweaked my settings a bit, and I only ever get a notification if someone likes my posts/comments, which is all I care about.
If I open the app after not having posted something in a day or two, it's quiet.
Yes. The fake orange notification is always annoying. Likewise, the new "feature" where infinite scrolling keeps listing the same posts over and over again.
I'm not quite "done with facebook" but I'm getting there.
Did you deactivate on purpose? Unless you still use Messenger or are considering changing your mind, you should delete your account instead. Deactivation just flips a bit; deletion actually removes your data.
I did it on purpose because I didn't want to be forever locked out of accounts that required a FB signin. Case in point, just hours after deactivating (the first time), I realized I couldn't log into Airbnb without Facebook. So I had to reactivate, change Airbnb settings, then deactivate again.
Here is a perspective I read that I thought was interesting[1]:
"There are a billion active accounts on facebook and other than the 208 that are set to private, I can communicate with every single one of them. I don't know what other word I can use other then Power. This is great power, just like the power held by the presidency, with great power comes great responsibility, and loneliness.
The worst thing about Facebook is not the power it gives me. The worst thing about facebook is what I chose to do with the power it gives me.
I certainly couldn't handle it. You might as well say the worst thing about facebook is me.
On facebook, why would I give someone privacy when I have access to all this information. And I don't even need their permission. I can watch your private pictures because you made them available. It's not that I can find out where you work, where you live, where you eat, everything about you. It's that I actually do find out without ever hiring a private detective. It's not what I can do, it's what I do!"
Lots of things we see as innocuous online would seem really weird, clingy, abusive in other contexts. Imagine if every time you walked into a store before you even looked at anything someone steps up right into your face and says "Sign up for our newsletter!" Then you walk two steps and someone steps up to you with a phone in their hand "Hey, call your friends and tell them you love our store! We'll give you 5% off!" then a couple steps later a marketer comes up to you "Hey, our advertising department wants your phone number so they can call you up and just say something to you a few times a day!"
I just want to buy a damn pillow! (Don't forget to review it, your opinion is important to the world! And the manufacturer would like to know how useful it was to you but won't do anything if it wasn't!)
Every postmodern retail shop in the US already does this. Have you been to a Lush, Rituals, matress sales, or any clothing boutique lately? Their peppy, pseudo-personal sales staff has a perfectly crafted script and they know it cold. They'll interrupt me when I'm obviously happily browsing on my own. "Just to let you know, everything in the back is 5% off, everything with a red tag is 6% off, and if you sign up for our email newsletter today, we'll give you $2 off. What is your name, by the way?" I want to ask them if there will be a quiz on the material. They also ask for your phone number or email at checkout. When I politely decline, they often act like that has never happened before
Perhaps the growth of the platform or certain internal user-based metrics are not being met, so whoever is in charge of making sure they "hit their numbers" is pushing like mad to find ways to grow product. I can see some very aggressive people sitting around a table coming up with ideas to force engagement. Then after a month, they sit back and figure out all the A/B testing that drives the machine.
This reminds me of the quote, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
I keep expecting companies to suffer from this "hit your numbers" approach, and it seems like they're starting to.
Every A/B test makes your site less predictable and straightforward for your users. Every push notification dilutes the value of every other notification sent. Every 'fake' event undermines the thrill of real engagement with other users.
At a certain point you're burning real value to create better metrics, and that's not sustainable for a company that actually wants to endure.
As someone with maybe an "outside" perspective (I never got "in" to Facebook, I never logged in with any regularity, I've posted once, and I essentially have a blank profile), the "We haven’t heard from you in a while" thing is what keeps from using the platform at all. I'm an "inbox zero" kind of person, and there's so much noise on Facebook that I can't get any signal.
Every time I log in I somehow have around 6 notifications. Facebook always finds something to notify me about. It's never a daunting number, but it's never zero either. If I log in twice in a week, I'll have something under a dozen notifications both days. So you'd think that after not logging in for 3 months I'd have dozens of notifications, right? Nope. Always some kind of number that I imagine Facebook has decided is the ideal number of notifications to keep me interested.
I've tried in vain to limit my notifications to things that I actually care about, but I've never been able to get rid of the random noise. Facebook is determined to send me push notifications about something. I can't stand it.
It's official. I will never work for Facebook. In terms of hipness (lack of it), positive impact (lack of it), and sliminess, this puts them on the same shelf as Comcast for me. It also frames their ruinous impact on societal discourse as "hostile" rather than just a "a naive and clumsy mistake".
For Facebook employees: Is this really the company you want to work for? Is this the impact you want to have on the world? Is this really the best place in society to apply your talents?
Facebook employees are fed a lot of kool aid and each work on a very narrow piece of the system. I don't think they question the larger problem they're enabling.
> For Facebook employees: Is this really the company you want to work for? Is this the impact you want to have on the world? Is this really the best place in society to apply your talents?
I've wondered the same about a few companies, Facebook and Amazon in particular. Even if one may be working on some storage deduplication or scaling the system or other seemingly dissociated pieces from the obnoxious front end, how is it possible to imagine that you're truly doing something for the good of humankind (net-net)? I can understand the higher pay, facilities and probably technical and other challenges. But impact on the world at large with consideration for the future being created? I personally don't get it.
Unfortunately for $FB, they may have bigger fish to fry than user revolt over cloying UX dark patterns.
The "Facebook reaches coveted non-existant people (NEP) demo" story would be amusing, if it weren't symbolic of greater industry-wide risks concerning click-fraud scrutiny.
But of greater concern as investigations into Russian meddling of the election heat up, is that $FB profited enormously from microtargeted ads specifically engineered as part of a program of mass psyops. With everyone looking for a scapegoat, this could result in actual indictments.
I haven't used Facebook for anything other than _chatting with family_ in more than a year. I still get "notifications" about things that I literally could not care any less about. Someone posted something on _their_ wall? I don't fucking care! Someone said something and it got a lot of attention? I literally hate that person, why are you telling me this?
And... you might tell me that I could just unsubscribe. Yeah. I did, multiple times. The notifications still come. They just go to the spam bucket now.
Facebook is one of the worst "products" on the market and I'm pretty close to telling family to find some other means of communicating with me. Like, you know, a good old fashioned phone call.
I'm in pretty much the same situation - the main reason why I use Facebook is to message friends. Basically all my friends have Facebook, so it's the easiest way.
Messenger seems to be moving more and more towards a snapchat clone, where as I just want something to message people. I don't want to post updates, play games, see ads, make phone calls, get spammed when someone new signs up.
iMessage before iOS 10 was perfect, except not all my friends use Apple.
There probably should be a robot that responds about Facebook posts "you aren't the customer, you are the product."
The article is pretty careful to use the term user - undoubtedly we are users.
But here is the problematic statement:
"This is what happens when the metric of how much time users spend using your thing supersedes the goal of providing legitimate value to your users."
The thing is - sure, the user time spent is measured, and "providing legitimate value" is not. How would one measure that, exactly?
But - more importantly - the metric, the ONLY metric, that really really matters is revenue. From real paying customers - ie: advertisers, some alluded to in the article.
So that is the one for which all optimizations are directed - via the indirect metric of "user engagement" where "user engagement is a pretty good proxy for "users see ads" and perhaps "users click on ads."
It does not appear that "providing legitimate value" is part of any of that, nor is there any reason that it ever would be.
IFF sufficient value could be provided that people would actually pay money just to use Facebook, so much money that it dwarfs all other forms of revenue (and perhaps even anti-correlates with ad revenue).... THEN we'll see Facebook focussed on user value. But not until then.
I've always thought would be interesting to create a survey that would ask FB users: what is the maximum amount they would pay per month to use Facebook? What is it really worth to them? Or, would they continue to use it if it was $10/month? How about 50 cents?
Seems like one way to do that would be to offer opting out of ads, A/B testing for price. It'd let them find the balance between user-supported revenue and advertiser-supported revenue.
I’ve done something similar but technically that only prevents you from visiting the main site.
If you want to be really shocked you should search for some of the host files out there that attempt to list every known Facebook-owned host; there are hundreds of lines or more. It is extremely difficult to prevent Facebook tentacles from being loaded by other sites, and it’s surely a losing battle (I bet they register new domains daily).
As a small part of a larger change in my personal life, I've also decided to delete my facebook account as well as Linkedin and other social media accounts. Basically I was in the need for a mental break.
Too much mental stimulation, specially from things that don't have much interest, was making my mind very shallow and easily distracted. I still read a lot of HN, but I'm trying to reduce my internet leisure time to 1 hour per day at most.
Since now I easily get bored, I started doing some sudokus (on a paper book) and I am finally starting to feel my mind a little bit sharper. I also feel the need to find more productive things to pass the time. For instance, three days ago I explored, quite in depth, C pointers and pointer arithmetic because of the first comment on this hn thread [0]. Also, yesterday, starting on the hn thread on microkernels [1], I started reading about these "alternative" OSes (Minix, HelenOS, etc), checked the source code of some of them, and eventually played a bit with nasm assembler and made a 32 bit and 64 bit "hello world" app for MacOS. These are things that I wouldn't learn and do if I was being mentally "stimulated" by facebook and that kind of things.
However, one positive thing about facebook is that those friends that used to send emails with funny memes, videos and what else, now use facebook for that. As a result, my email inbox is now much cleaner and calmer.. :)
Funny now that you mention.. I've been doing less and less side projects since my life got 'invaded' by social media. I wonder if I'm suffering from a similar problem...
I think so many platforms these days employ so many attention-grabbing techniques, that they wear down people. So now they have to go to the bottom of the barrel, notifying you for things that aren't really notifications -- the fact that you haven't posted in a week, for example.
The content quality is abysmal. People simply do not care to share on Facebook in ways that they have in the past. Their awful algorithm ruined the user value.
I think if they returned to a default chronological sorted news feed, with still sprinkling in ads as they do, they could increase the amount of time people spend on the service, show more ads, and increase revenue all while providing a superior experience. Why they don't return to this level of simplicity that the platform once had is beyond me. Too many engineers and too many PM's pushing for their pet projects, I assume, and you really just end up with an overdeveloped product.
If you want to delete Facebook from your phone but your friends use Facebook Events, there is a stand alone Events app. That being said, I wish my friends didn't use Facebook for events.
I wish you could use that, the Pages app, and the Groups app with a deactivated Facebook profile (I could still connect in meaningful ways). I understand why Facebook has no reason to make it that way, but it is making me vote with my feet.
I'm beginning to wonder if our ability to sympathize only serves to advance the agendas of those who want to make money on us. Facebook's pushiness is and should always be held as unacceptable, in all circumstances and for all people.
"I sympathize that the company needs business users to keep it afloat" does not justify the kind of begging they've been up to lately.
The author's (and all our) collective sympathy keeps them soliciting us with their bullshit
> I'm beginning to wonder if our ability to sympathize only serves to advance the agendas of those who want to make money on us.
Using your adversary's virtues against them is a strategy as old as humanity. With social media it's baked right into the name. Who doesn't want to be social? Who doesn't want to share? Is something wrong with you?
I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago and quickly found that it provided little value to my everyday. I would say longer term, as friends had kids, I missed some of the "social bonding" experience via the web, but din't miss anything in person. A month ago my phone died and as a test, I didn't install Instagram. Instagram was the last FB connection. I always defended Instagram to myself. It didn't require as much attention as FB and barrier to entry was low (post some pics sometimes). In the last year Instagram has shifted more towards the FB notification style and adopted more Snap features. My feed became filled with ads, stories gained dominance, and notifications became persistent. I figured that is sufficient mental intrusion to warrant my departure.
As a heavily connected individual, work in tech, I find that disconnecting does alleviate mental baggage. I have gained more time to read and that brings me more joy than scanning an insta-feed.
Something i've noticed recently is that my feed is flooded with the "x has become friends with y" type of notifications. I literally see 5-10 of them in a row, they make for a very monotonous feed experience. I think its supposed to be a nudge for me to add co-workers and acquaintances to facebook.
They're running out of things to notify you about. I've recently been getting a lot of "X updated their status", where X is someone who I've recently chatted with or whose status I've liked within the past month.
It's silly, but I suppose it's worked on some people.
I've never been on Facebook but I have a few fake accounts. Those accounts don't have photos, never posted anything, never friended anyone, never even connected to anybody, etc. Yet they constantly get new "friends requests" and pokes and whatnot.
Why would any real person want to be friend with a ghost fake account?
Facebook is not only "needy", it's a big bullshit engine.
Those prompts almost certainly aren't Facebook-run. Too much effort and risk, no real need.
Rather, Facebook has a huge number of scammers. A few might be scamming you, but mostly they're from clickfarms that are trying to increase 'organic' behaviors so their accounts won't be banned.
What really pissed me off recently, is that after deleting my FB account, whenever I login with email/password to a web site where I previously connected my FB (Spotify, for example), it restores my FB account without asking me and tells about it to my FB friends. Why the hell does it even keep a list of friends if I deleted the whole thing?.
Facebook has notified me once a day of "2 new notifications and 1 message" for the account I created in order to access a developer tool once and I think once clicked one "like" for several months ago. I've never put any more information in than the bare minimum necessary to create an account, never posted, never done anything.
I get that they've essentially tapped out the market for users, but jesus christ, take a rest Facebook.
So far, I've only had to miss one opportunity from not having a Facebook account. Err... I've never had one. Even then, I could still have that opportunity, it'd just take a bit more work and can't be done online.
I guess that I'm trying to say that it's possible to not have social media accounts and still function in the digital world. I know others who don't have accounts but I'm going to call them passive users of the web.
It's much better to not have a Facebook account. After a while you get used to that feeling of not knowing what people are up to, but then you realize your life isn't negative because of that.
There's probably someone in your circle of friends and family that isn't using Facebook, so your friends and family are already used to reach to that person through other means.
Also, every time you meet friends and family you'll have things to talk about.
Apart from the core message that the author was trying to push across, I immediately noticed that names/faces of family/friends were not masked. I personally wouldn't like it if someone put out my information this way. I think that is breaching someone else's privacy.
"I’m likely not going to delete Facebook entirely since I do genuinely enjoy staying in touch with the people in my life, and for better or worse Facebook is where those people hang out"
Is it likely that most people are willing to move and the only problem is there are no compelling options?
This is all from my a sample size of 1, myself, but this is how entrenched Facebook is:
- I know multiple people who do not use email or text socially, because they only use Facebook messenger for either. I can't think of anything else that replaces either one where I know people who use it exclusively.
- The only people I can think of who aren't on Facebook but with whom I'd like to communicate with more, are not on any social media platform at all.
If there was an easy way to automatically process email address changes in your address book and have links to people photoblogs (like RSS) it seems like all the key features would be there. A decentralized email based event manager would be nice. Does Lightning do that, I wonder?
I facepalmed when I read that "not going to delete FB because" sentence. How about that thing called e-mail? If keeping someone's e-mail address and firing a message every now and then is too much hassle, then that person was not worth keeping in touch with in the first place.
If/when I move a bit farther from my immediate family, I'll consider setting up a WP blog for catchups and family chat. That way you get to share stati and pics, comment on them, discuss, on top of all, you get RSS and other niceties.
I know a lot of people who only check their email when they have signed up for a service. Beyond that "email is for spam". Admittedly these people aren't on Facebook either (they have an account because "you have to").
I still don't quite get why people (especially alleged news sources) post pictures of a twitter box, rather than just say 'User NoodleHead on twitter is quoted as saying "I don't like this"'.
This feels like a not-so-gentle manipulation.
Some guy, who might be sitting next to you on the bus right now, said something on twitter, but that's now news because it's got their @IGN, their actual name (or maybe not), a weirdly formatted date string, the numbers '1' and '6' adjacent to icons at the bottom of the box, a 'Follow' button so you can forever be bombarded with more nuggets of wisdom from this person you don't know, all inside a box that doesn't even have rounded corners.
> you’ve shared x days in a row and your friends are responding
A month ago, FB's first senior software engineer was saying on the Internet History Podcast that FB would never create useless features/tactics to bring users to the platform like the Snapchat streak. Listen here, 27:20 mark.
http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/08/facebooks-firs...
Years ago I wrote a Chrome extension to block the news feed [1] so I could keep using it without losing my sanity.
Recently though, I've noticed that Facebook seems to be moving what was once in the news feed to notifications. Now that they've spoiled the feed with useless information - the notifications box is the next exploit.
The cognitive overload from using Facebook is now so high for me that I almost never visit the site. Once a daily user of Facebook, now deleting my account would hardly affect me. If I have a choice, I always prefer to communicate with friends over anything but Facebook.
I believe Facebook's constant neediness will eventually be the demise of the platform. The mindless profit driven motives for constant engagement are harmful not only to its users, but society, and the company itself. I wrote more about this here: https://blog.west.io/2016/11/30/the-birth-and-death-of-faceb....
I deleted my thefacebook.com account in 2008 when the daily privacy rollbacks were the rage du jour. The chief reason was that 90% of the content I was seeing was who received a banana in Mafia wars, which in retrospect is annoying but relatively benign.
Since they changed the timeline to the point where it's impossible for me to see things in reverse chronological order (even if I try to tell it to), I've unfollowed EVERYTHING, set up notifications for the few family members whose posts I don't want to miss, and mostly quit using it for anything but family. I'm so tired of all the ads and marketing crap. I was missing posts I cared about and just seeing crap every day. No thanks.
The Facebook app is an abomination. It takes up all your battery, caches all it wants, needs access to every permission my phone has to offer and those goddamn notifications.
And it's not just Facebook. Every platform these days has been spamming with notifications.
Quora's infamous un-turn-off-able x upvoted an answer after seeing your upvote or your Facebook friend y is now on quora, welcome him by sacrificing a goat to the mighty God Ra. Irritating.
My favorite is a push notification to the effect of, "You haven't posted in N weeks. Would you like to post something?" The first time I got it it was annoying. Then it kept happening weekly, by the third time I deleted the app.
Can you imagine being a product manager at Facebook?
You are competing against other product managers and people at the company to be a rising star or to get that big bonus. You are rated on the code that makes it to production and it's lift.
I can't imagine the scheming that goes on to get your stuff into the website or app. All in the name of drawing in more advertisers or people who will pay for the data.
Facebook is just dying and they know that from their internal metrics long time now so these features have been developed to save the engagement because otherwise facebook's stock value will plange.
I was about to say exactly the same thing. This stinks of desperation on Facebook's part to keep their metrics swinging up and to the right. They are acutely aware that any levelling off in these metrics will have a knock on effect for their share price.
Whilst I don't use Facebook, and dislike the social impact that Facebook has brought about (acknowledging the amazing precedents Facebook has set too of course) I do wonder how they get around this. There are only so many humans on the planet that they can play these engagement tricks on. The number of new users and amount of engagement will have to level off at some point.
I'd love to hear what Facebook plan to do to continue to "grow" in the the sense that shareholders are kept happy when they reach this saturation point.
It's far not the first time when Facebook is using cheap manipulative tricks. I remember when I only registered on Facebook for the first time, its contact suggestions were mostly females (I'm a guy) in a proportion way more than I actually have females on my contact list or in my social circles. Manipulation is deeply in Facebook's DNA.
I generally find that people are too quick to point to features as "manipulation" when they actually have benefit to the user as well: I saw this feature for the first time this morning, and my immediate reaction was mild disgust. I can't think of a single way this is remotely beneficial to me, which makes it just pure manipulation to increase engagement.
Facebook truly is the poster child for sleazy tech company: I can't think of any point during their existence where they stood for anything but cold, exploit-the-user amorality, as opposed to (e.g.) Google's traditional "only earn profit by creating value" and Apple's "bring your vision to the world because it needs it"[1].
[1] I don't even like Apple as a company, but I do believe that company culture is rooted in prosocial motivations at some level, which is something I have never thought about Facebook.
It's interesting the large amount of regulations that are involved with gambling, due to how addictive and potentially harmful it is.
Facebook seems to be one of the few things even more addictive than gambling. What is one of the only things humans value more than money? Attention, love, affection, friendship, relationships...
When Facebook's sound for getting a chat message was a "pop", I could imitate it pretty well with my mouth, and trick my friends into checking their messages.
I removed Facebook from my phone because I didn't like how impulsively I was using it at any moment of waiting or downtime.
It was hard-ish at first, and it took a lot of "Do I or Don't I?" before I actually did it. I didn't delete my account or anything, so I could still check it from home, but as time went on and I was _only_ able to check it from home, I would frequently find myself thinking, "wow, there's really not much good here." which is one of those things that only occurs to you after taking time away from it.
I realized I replaced my Facebook habit with an Instagram habit, so I deleted that too. The only remaining distraction is Reddit, but I've never been as impulsively hooked into Reddit as I was the other two.
When people say that it's better without Facebook, they're not kidding. You should try it.
Today I finished unfollowing everything on my fb feed. Now it's just 5 or 6 ads, some relevant, some not. I'm curious to see if this cures the addiction.
Once upon a time I had a Dell Streak mobile, carrier locked. Without rooting there was no way to remove the default Facebook app. It would keep asking for you to log in. There was nothing you could do. If you dismissed the login activity it would just respawn within two minutes.
Since FB got Instagram under the belt, it's no less annoying. On the mobile app, I've turned off all notifications, because why? If I want to check in on my Instagram apps, I'll open the app myself, thank you very much. No need to litter my screen with that stuff. But guess what? The app of course knows if you have notifications turned off, and there is no way whatsoever to get the app to stop bothering you about this when you open. Every time, it asks me why I don't have notifications turned on, and does so in a half-screen-sized banner that is obnoxious. No matter what I do, this never tops appearing until I turn on notifications again.
I don't know about iOS, but I think it recent versions of Android you can suppress notifications from an app at the OS level? Does it nag you about that?
Lately Facebook has been pestering me to enable notifications in my browser nearly every time I visit. This is an anti-patern as I suspect once I accept notifications, it is hard to remove. Some services just fatigue their users into opting in.
I also get this quite frequently. I setup a Facebook page for a side project of mine that I hope to turn into a sort of side business and I wanted to make sure the name didn't get taken. I get notifications almost EVERY SINGLE DAY that my page won't be visible unless I add more stuff to it. I literally got 3 emails a few days ago, in the same day, saying the same thing for my page.
I feel forced to use Facebook to keep up with friends and family but I absolutely hate using it the entire time and I try to avoid it where possible. It's just amazing how spammy it's gotten and how their popularity continues to just go up.
I've recently received several friend requests a day from spambots. This is annoying, but I can just ignore the "friend request" tab and go on with my life.
However, as if it wasn't a nuisance enough, Facebook now gives me plain notifications of these friend requests in my normal notification feed. "Spambot is new to Facebook and just sent you a friend request."
I'd switch to only Messenger, but Facebook seems to think that I don't have Messenger, so I keep receiving invites to install Messenger from my friends as it covers half their conversation with me with that notification.
I get these too. But for some reason, I believe it might be facebook which is doing A/B testing by sending friend requests from random bots to people whose activity is very less. The friend requests are usually from the opposite gender apparently.
I held out on Messenger for a very long time for the reason that it required way too many permissions upon installation. I was not going to give FB access to my camera, file storage, location, microphone, contacts, etc. No thanks. I've never had the FB app installed. For a while I was checking my messages via the FB website requesting desktop mode or via the desktop browser. I also used to be a big opponent of notifications. Once three things aligned, namely granular permission granting for Messenger, a person I cared to actually chat with enough, and my realization that the only value I got out of FB was in messages, I installed Messenger. Still being the opponent to notifications that I am, I only turned on push notifications for a few select people. No sounds or lights or any other bullshit. Surprisingly, I'm way happier with this setup. I'm far less likely to check FB. I'm not habitually checking for messages from the few people I care about, in general now I feel more control, and I'm not annoyed. I found the result surprising. Occasionally I'll log in to FB and take a look at what's going on, but aside from the skating vidyas it's mostly vacuous crap. In hindsight this all makes sense. Increase the valuable communication between users, give them more control and they'll be happier (at least in my case). Who would've guessed?
The PRIMARY use of Facebook should be to post about stuff like this, explaining all the ways Facebook is unethical.
Note: write something like "I saw this article that really made me think… and you should get in touch with offline to learn more about what's going on in my life" and no link. Then you can link to this article in the comments. Facebook has decided that links that get people to leave Facebook are bad, so you have to pretend your post is about something personal.
I deleted my facebook account last year and haven't looked back. It was a great decision.
However, I don't think me (and may others in this thread) are a big cause of worry for facebook. While tech-savvy/privacy-aware users are leaving facebook in greater numbers, their absolute percentage is a fraction of the gigantic market of users in the developing world.
The developing world is a huge pie for facebook that is totally primed for taking. Majority of people in that group have absolutely no qualms about happily sharing private information (if at all any awareness of them being the product). In such a demographic, the social/economic/caste divide has been so wide and entrenched that facebook is seen as something that breaks barriers. People from lower socio-economic strata who have always been treated poorly by the privileged can now buy a cheap Android smartphone and be on the same platform of the people they serve and communicate as equals. They used to look aspirationally at the privileged sitting in air-conditioned shops sipping coffee while browsing smartphones - now they can (atleast partially) fulfill the fantasy.
They have all the time in the world, they love the notifications and they are eager to share. Our leaving barely makes a dent.
I'm seriously puzzled how reddit isn't eating facebook's lunch. the content is light years better (and is upstream for much of the facebook feeds I eventually see)
I am an avid redditor with a mostly dead facebook account, so I agree that the content is better, but it's different networks entirely. Reddit has still held on to its psuedo-anonymous roots, and thus hasn't lived up to the "social" part of the social network. The people still consumuning content on facebook are doing so because that's where their friends are.
You know the people that feel a need to tag their friends in a comment on funny posts? That's the kind of user that reddit hasn't been able to convert. Whether reddit wants or should try to garner that traffic/content is a choice they need to make, but the site is doing fine regardless.
I think the bigger issue is why FB hasn't been able to create the kind of conversations that reddit does- the lack of real threading and the lack of a true downvote (preferably anonymous) keep conversations on FB abysmally superficial. You can't engage in a debate with someone if the back-and-forth gets impossible to follow after the second reply, especially with more than two participants. Likewise, FB and users have no idea whether people disagree with a post or are simply ignoring it; or on something like a critical article, whether a user agrees with an article and it's the article's subject which makes them angry or the user disagrees with the article and the post itself makes them angry. FB, with its status as the defacto social network could be a place where people have real constructive discussions, but instead its inability to foster real dialogue has a lot to do with the current stupidity of political discourse and the problems with reality bubbles and whatnot.
Reddit's system has its issues too. Early comments always get more votes and have more sway than later ones, and the "reality bubble" effect is worse because the general consenses upvotes posts that agree with their opinion and downvotes ones that disagree - effectively hiding them whether they're factually correct or not.
Hacker News is much better than Reddit in general for allowing comments on both sides of an issue to be heard, but it's not perfect either. I think it benefits from not being able to see the number of votes on someone's post because it removes that way of checking the previous hive consensus. I'm not sure I even like the greying effect on heavy downvotes.
The best real discussion (especially for ongoing topics and events) I've seen is still on old-school forums like SomethingAwful. The barriers to entry help ($10 on SomethingAwful, 500 points to downvote on Hacker News) but I think Discourse went too far in that direction, where anti-spam limits can make it hard for new users to even write a good post or respond when they want to. I'd like to see a modern forum site where anyone can create a subforum and moderate it themselves the way anyone can create a subreddit on Reddit.
Reddit is very geared towards short-term discussion. Top comments on a post are usually from the first couple of hours and posts last less than a day. For long-term discussion traditional forums with chronological posts and threads that get re-bumped to the top are still king.
That's quite different if I'm reading your meaning correctly. That type of system tends to result in the biggest threads staying at the top and getting bigger and bigger while new ones never appear.
Facebook is/was important step in the evolution of our understanding for social interaction and what is import as information and what not. The complete exhaustion of the moving force behind FB is needed for us to transcend into the next hyper-dense digital-society.
There's a saying that 'many things fly, only few are edible', and understanding FB is fundamentally understanding this principle.
I doubt the service will ever completely disappear, but its high time it gets marginalized (at least in developed societies) the same way TV is marginalized as FB is essentially the same programmed stream of bullshit, that you don't normally need in your life.
Understanding what the author understood in his article is a cathartic moment, that besides other things, has something to do with the conscious decision to actually consume what you want and not what you were given. This means focus.
Dropping out of FB and similar means of "social presence" is essentially taking back control over where you are going in terms of information being consumed by oneself.
Of course it will feel liberating to not feed oneself with irrelevant information. It doesn't mean stopping being social, but re-evaluating what socialization effectively means.
Reading the comments here reconfirms that I had a good idea not using the FB app on my phone—using inside Firefox it is, of necessity, less pushy. If you want to use FB messages without the crapfest, note that using the url mbasic dot facebook dot com will get you a text-minimalist version of the site (designed for very old mobiles) where you can receive messages without the app. (No push notifications, but afaic that's a feature.)
I'm sure Facebook, the company, enjoys posts like these:
1. Complain a whole lot about the state of affairs with FB,
2. Say "but I still like FB and will probably keep using it"
3. Propose no alternatives to the status quo.
I think this post underscores the fact that FB really didn't have anything to lose doing these things. In fact, these things caused some mildly annoyed users to write lengthy blog posts about FB to give the company even more attention attention and mental time.
Not going to comment on the article, but I liked the contrast of text and background on that site. It's nice to see something that is not grey on light grey.
> it seems strange and disturbing to talk to regular users like they’re all marketeers
It doesn't surprise me, not anymore. A lot of marketing is getting high on its own supply, as in, they actually somewhat believe what they are saying; even if they're not believing the euphemisms they put out externally, they still have euphemisms internally they are really not thinking through.
The other explanation is A/B testing, which would be even more sad.
The best thing I did was uninstall the official Facebook app and replace it with Friendly. The features like having most recent posts as defaults and no ads are nice (paid feature) but I also like it because the UI feels a bit clunky so I use it less.
I don't seem to have a lot of the BS anymore and notifications are off and I'm feeling better not glued to the app anymore.
I wonder when the majority of the people will get fed up and leave, like, when have they pushed everyone over the edge and the last person on earth has gotten the hint that Facebook is just a massive timesink with some social sprinkled on...
I, for one, have just logged out and never logged in for a solid 3 months now and haven't looked back.
Im glad that im not on facebook. 20 years ago, facebook could be equivalent of sitting in street and checking on what others are doing/liking/commenting/ranting/watching. Nutsos.
And even for that matter i ve stopped limited use of twitter. As i see some of good classmates have become kind of trolls on few topics.
Interesting in this context that they killed the groups app so as to bring people back into the main app.
Makes me wonder if the real reason is that so many people got sick of "normal" Facebook when all they wanted is to use groups that engagement suffered and they needed to bring everybody back.
I use Messenger way more than Facebook now, so it's similar problem. I have bigger groups (family, etc.) where I know what I send will be seen and read and I don't care about main Facebook very much anymore.
No idea about the app, but the service itself is hugely popular. From what I can tell, there's a huge iceberg of hidden group activity that we don't see.
I find it interesting that they guy is talking about tweaks, hooks and pokes to keep you interested, and the whole trying-to-expose-you-to-new-stuff phenomenon... but I find it all makes fb less appealing.
I check it a couple of times a day now I guess. Never allowed it to get its mitts on my phone, though, web use only.
More and more of my feed is "Your friend X liked some inconsequential response by Y on a boring post by Z" where I don't even know who Y and Z are.
It may be that my friends are gravitating away and posting less - I certainly am - but I suspect if it is then it's part of a big feedback loop initiated by facebook trying to become a news source rather than just a place to share everyday happenstance and a few pictures with friends.
Btw has anyone tried alternate social networks like ello. at the launch it seemd like a good idea (having privacy protections in the company charter). honestly I'd be happy to pay FB something like 100 bucks a year for a just leave me alone, no-ads/no-tracking version.
I have no idea what I did, but I don't get any of that nonsense.
I have all notifications turned off in the app, I've disabled all email except if someone explicitly mentions me by name in a discussion (I should probably switch off that one, too) and I've made an effort to hide all kinds of stupid apps and games and pages that are nothing but time wasters. I also only like and follow pages that I have a genuine interest in (such as concert venues and bands I love).
Sure, there's a token notice from time to time ("why not repost a picture from 7 years ago?" and so on), but I find them easy to ignore.
Once you beat Facebook into submission, it becomes a reasonably useful tool.
Maybe they are collecting enough data about you that they don't feel the need to bother you. Are you signed in to Facebook in your primary browser? Do you have the mobile app running in the background?
Since I've signed out of Facebook on my PC and kill the mobile Facebook app while not using it, I tend to get multiple push notifications per day, most of them asking if I know some random person.
My girlfriend, who is on Facebook daily, has never seen any of these notifications.
Possibly. Or maybe whatever they have is so boring they can't be bothered to ask me for more. I share very little personal stuff on Facebook. Actually none at all, now that I think about it. Most of my profile is empty.
I don't find it difficult to be a casual user. I've disabled all email and notifications from them. I look at it maybe once every 2 weeks. There's nothing really ever on it aside from a band mentioning they're touring again. All the other stuff is just noise. Photos of babies, photos of people at landmarks, shared news articles and outrageous comments.
That's why I only look every couple weeks, though. There's nothing worth looking at on the site. I probably should delete it, to be honest. I never post and I rarely find something worth looking at.
The appeal of getting likes, making numerous amounts of friends, sharing awesome posts, etc. is lost within the pile of nonsense that fills up the feed every single day. it's simply not cool any more. At least on other platforms I can follow a catered list of people that I find worthwhile. And the number of followers mean much more. Facebook is just a jumbled mess right now. The only thing it's good for is making it easier to keep in contact with others that phone numbers can't do. Notifications are facebooks way of trying to encourage engagement I think
On a meta note, I really like the design on the OP's site. The interactive SVG circles is a nice touch, and trying to color them all in with my pointer was almost as satisfying as popping bubble wrap.
I wasted a few enjoyable minutes doing just that. Then I realised that if I revisited a circle I'd already coloured in, it would change colour. The thought leaped into my head: "Can I make all of them the same colour?"
I realised I was standing on the edge of the abyss, and closed the page.
It feels like growth tactic desperation levels have hit a new high. The interesting thing is that it isn't just limited to tiny startups trying to grab market share as this type of language once was - Facebook seems to have no hesitation to just flat out beg for usage.
Personally, it comes off to me as desperate and presumptuous. They seem to have come to the conclusion that most users see value in getting "engagement" on Facebook, even in a nebulous and non-specific sense.
I went cold turkey a while back, never looked back. Facebook is the digital equivalent of opening the fridge & staring inside, even though you're not hungry.
What kills this platform is entities other than people participating. I ignore anything else of facebook baits for posting/visiting.
In the beginning I added artists and maybe some companies I fancied: that's a huge mistake. FB is only an ad framework for these entities and they are going to occupy 100% of your feed.
You erase all that and I started to see some friends doing stuff again, which is nice. I still think tho
the algorithm to generate your feed is real s*.
https://twitter.com/janamjohnson/status/900372990881402880 (linked from the article) is dead. Does anyone have a saved or cached copy of the image in this tweet? Or a similar screen shot? I don't have Facebook, so I haven't seen this engagement email
i have never had a facebook account. seeing everyone agonize over the pros and cons of using facebook is ridiculous to me. is it better on a phone? with or without notifications? are my privacy settings dialed in? facebook is genuinely useless, if you agonize over how its so bad but also so good, just stop using it. if someone is really your friend, you can keep up with what their current email and phone number is.
I don't understand the people that find peace only after deleting the whole app from their phones.
I've had a FB account since inception and it has loads of people in it. Yet I probably look at facebook a maximum of maybe 10 times a year because I'm able to mentally compartmentalize the people there into groups of "important" and "not important"
Deleted Facebook in 2011 and I've never looked back. I've got a faceless account with no personal data whatsoever I use for social log-ins but that's it. It's popular to bash social networks but I think it's probably more effective to thoroughly educate users on the tactics used by social networks to keep users hooked.
It’s been over a month or so since I logged in and I received an apparently-real E-mail trying to “help me log back in to Facebook”. I thought, oh the gall to act like that’s the reason I am not there right now. They’re seeming increasingly desperate-and-therefore-creepy lately and it’s not encouraging me to return.
Yet another post on that subject... It's so disappointing that there are still people discovering life without Facebook when they should have uninstalled it long ago. They're very late in that process since sooo many have done it and written about it in thorough details.
It's disappointing that people are doing the thing you want them to do? What else would you like, them to hop into a time machine and do it at the right time too? :P
Deactivated my Facebook account last week and it's been one of the best things I've done. No more mindlessly logging in, I still use messenger to communicate with a couple of my friends who use it.
I also deleted facebook app from my mobile 2 weeks ago. And I feel better. Although, sometimes I could not resist and open facebook in chrome but still it feels better. And i agree to the point that these days I get a lot of unnecessary notifications. It sucks!
I've received 160 emails over around 200 days after signing up with a temporary email to load up ads. I've even filmed this: https://youtu.be/xUwjs2Te5hw
THis. i too have noticed a 5x uptick in these dark patterns. perhaps the only way to bend back their new algo is to manually disable/opt out of each one? perhaps that will retrain their Ai? its seriously disgusting at this point.
I started using Twitter 3 months back. From that day onwards, my time spent on Facebook started reducing dramatically. I just use FB to connect people and reach them, if i don't have any other medium to reach.
I don't get it. If you don't like facebook or how they operate their platform, don't use it. Surely every person in your life has one or more of a). a phone number you can call them on or send an sms to, b). whatsapp/skype, c). linkedin, d). email address, e). instagram/snap, f). postal address, e). slack/irc channel they hang out on?
I gave in to "big blue" and created an account in 2009 when I moved to a new country. I deleted it about 4 months later and am happy to report NOTHING IN MY LIFE CHANGED (other than feeling happy with myself for calling facebook's bluff and deleting the fucking thing).
If you don't like the crack, put the pipe down. It's that easy.
Facebook is annoying and grabby? This guy obviously hasn't ever used ResearchGate. Facebook is the paragon of non-intrusive user experience compared to RG.
There are (at least) two different conventions when it comes to titling: headline and sentence. It's a matter of taste and something that changes over time. I'm not sure if there's a reason deeper than that. In general, I think it's good practice for a publication (or site) to have a style manual for consistency, but just as there are separate AP[0] and Chicago[1] style manuals, it's unlikely you'll see one global style.
I mean, they do this shit for a reason. I'm not defending them or saying it's okay, but either stop using it (actually stop), or don't. This sanctimonious "look at them prompting me to do the thing they want me to do!", what purpose does it serve?
Yes Facebook is bad. They're an advertising company. Advertising companies are bad. We know this. Saying "How dare they, I can't believe..." is a defense against change.
OK, I get it, Facebook marketing is dialing it to the 11 to get you to use it more. But really, how hard is it to ignore it? The article says:
There’s no respite from these messages, so it constantly feels like a gun to your head to get you to boost, promote, and pay.
Really? Like a gun to your head? So you are in fear for your life and you think if you don't click on this link, you literally are going to die this second? Or maybe it is a tiny annoyance which you completely can ignore and go on with your life, and you are over-dramatizing it a teensy bit?
Less Facebook == more happy. It's the best advice I can give.