"Assuming you're socially allowed to quit Facebook."

I don't even know what that means. How is it that all of the rest of us managed to quite Facebook and continue to have a relatively vibrant social life. Is it the case that WhatsApp/Viber/SMS/Email are no longer considered effective means of communication to get together?

> How is it that all of the rest of us managed to quite Facebook and continue to have a relatively vibrant social life.

Because some people have different lives than you.

Please provide a little story of the type of person who cannot quit facebook, and why he cannot quit facebook. Until you do, you're just making up boogie men.

It's true that some people (like me) only use Facebook for its usefulness as a social tool. In that case, just strip your account of any serious personal information.

Quitting Facebook is really not that big of a deal. You won't become a social pariah, an outcast or loose all your friends because you cancel a website account.

You might well lose touch with a geographically diverse crowd of people. FB and the like keep people involved in the minutiae of each others lives and very much help keep real friendships alive.

Of course FB is trying to destroy this as much as possible by controlling what you see of what people post. Trying to decide what's important to me is another facet of the 'dumb' algorithms the OP complains about.

>Of course FB is trying to destroy this as much as possible by controlling what you see of what people post.

Because the alternative brings the wingnuts out. The more Facebook lets people see, the more they get castigated for doing what the entire freaking purpose of a social network site is!

I know there have been a lot of issues about information leaking out because of various security and privacy defaults being bad, but that's not what I meant.

There seems to be some algorithm deciding what gets put into your stream by weighting posts on who you most frequently interact with and how "important" the news is, meaning that your fb experience turns more and more into a echo chamber, and posts by people that don't post often seem to get lost.

Anyway, meh I say, meh!

I guess that depends.

I'm 33, married, two kids.

I have never used Facebook but I do feel 'out of the loop.' especially since the baby arrived - I don't hear about things 'through the grapevine' and subsequently seldom find myself with many social options on the days that I have free.

This is good for my startup but bad for my self esteem.

Hey there, 34, married, 3 kids here. You have two good options in this situation. One is to get your wife on FB so she can keep you in the loop. The other is to have one more kid and then you won't have to worry about what to do with your free time because you won't have any ever again. If you're starting up, I'd recommend option A.

Shit. I'm also 34... Totally forgot I had a birthday recently. My life seems to take place between 4am zombie walks to the kitchen to make milk bottles.

I do have sort of a wife's account vector but tbh: she also starts feeling shit and creeped out after being in there.

It's ok, as the apologists are wont to point out, there is a choice.

Mine is made.

There, of course, people whose circumstances mean that Facebook is a (/the) major source of human interaction in their lives. I really wish those people, and the rest of us, could move to something less ethically troubling.

Because people didn't have a social life or communicate before there was Facebook? Give me a break.

I can't help but think that statement is similar to saying, "Letters are a perfectly valid means of communication; I don't see the use of these telephones."