Elon Musk Joins #DeleteFacebook With a Barrage of Tweets

[Lagmonster]

Ridicule Facebook all you want, but it lets me keep in touch with dozens of friends from around the world, who otherwise I'd lose touch with.

How lousy your friends are that they have access to the whole internet, but won't muster the effort to talk to you via literally any other means? If my friends said that to me after I'd voiced serious personal, political, or privacy concerns about the platform we were using, I'd start to develop the fear that I must be somewhat unlikeable.

[Ace Pace]

Ridicule Facebook all you want, but it lets me keep in touch with dozens of friends from around the world, who otherwise I'd lose touch with.

How lousy your friends are that they have access to the whole internet, but won't muster the effort to talk to you via literally any other means? If my friends said that to me after I'd voiced serious personal, political, or privacy concerns about the platform we were using, I'd start to develop the fear that I must be somewhat unlikeable.

I don't know, ask them why they stopped visiting SDN.
More seriously, Facebook is the defacto communication medium. Most people I know, from age ranks from 60 till teenagers, do not check their email in a regular fashion, rather they communicate using WhatsApp or Facebook.

I'd be happy if you suggest an alternative platform that provides communication, social updates, event organisation for free. Bonus points if that platform also has a wide support for community hangouts, lets communal groups such as students, neighborhood associations, volunteer networks easily talk to each other and with the outside world.

Maybe your life allows you to easily disconnect yourself from social media. For many others, it's an interface to an entire world.

[ray245]

International calls aren't cheap as well. Not to mention having timezone difference to work out

[Elheru Aran]

And then there are those of us (hello!) for whom voice phone calls are simply not an option.

To be frank, I'm quite aware Facebook has its issues. But to be frank again, there is no similarly effective alternative option to stay in touch with people as well or effectively, at least in any kind of public forum where like-minded individuals can have a conversation. Email is too limited and honestly there's not a lot of people below a certain age range who use it as Facebook's native messenger function does pretty much the same thing.

There is a generational divide here I think, which might be worth considering; older people are less likely to depend on Facebook. My parents for example don't use it at all-- I keep in touch with them through text and email. But my sister and brother both use it fairly often, and it's my main way of staying abreast of what they've got going on (that they choose to share there). The same goes for several other family members, both biological and the one I married into.

I went without Facebook from about... 2006-2009ish. During that time, my social activity shrank appreciably to the point where the only interaction I had with other people was either at work or facilitated through social contacts of my wife. I only contacted my parents sporadically via e-mail. I wasn't texting anybody because I didn't have a cell phone at the time.

Then we moved, we got an Internet connection, I recovered my FB user/pass, and boom.

[Lagmonster]

I'd be happy if you suggest an alternative platform that provides communication, social updates, event organisation for free. Bonus points if that platform also has a wide support for community hangouts, lets communal groups such as students, neighborhood associations, volunteer networks easily talk to each other and with the outside world.

Maybe your life allows you to easily disconnect yourself from social media. For many others, it's an interface to an entire world.

What I was leading to is, if you are genuinely concerned about Facebook, would your friends not be willing to switch platforms with you? Say, to Google+, for example, or Twitter, or one of the many, many speciality services out there. Would your friends not accommodate you and move, or have an account?

I remember pre-cell phones when I had to have three or four messaging applications on my PC. MSN Messenger, ICQ, and a few I can't recall, and you just did that, because your social life online was segregated largely by interest. Hell, I have friends who I only talk to on Steam's various social interaction forums, chat services, etc., because they're my 'gaming friends'.

[Elheru Aran]

The benefit of Facebook though is that virtually everybody in the millennial generation uses it, to the point that if you don't have a Facebook account it's somewhat unusual. We are talking something like probably close to half to two-thirds (easily) the population of the US here, plus who knows how many people across the world. It's one of the big reasons MSN, ICQ, etc. died apart from technological progression-- it was simply an easier platform that everybody was on anyway, and it provides the dual benefit of private conversations and public forums in one. Want to talk to like-minded fans of a specific subject? Make a group. Want to tell a lot of people about this thing that happened in your life? Post it on your timeline, you don't have to hunt them up one by one or post it on multiple platforms.

It's largely a matter of convenience here. Having to split your attentions across more than one platform (I mean, really, not a whole lot of people outside the professional sphere use Google Plus) means that you take more time and effort to publish whatever you want people to know.

[Ace Pace]

What Elheru said. Sure, I can communicate with some friends over Twitter. But then, I can't move volunteer efforts as easily, nor can I move the dozens of local meetups that live exclusively on Facebook.

My basic point is, sure you can remove Facebook from your life, but it's not as trivial as you claim it is.

[TheFeniX]

It is for some people. I just stopped logging in, though I had very little personal information on there in the first place and realized as I got older, the friends I needed were the ones I was already chatting with when need be. None of them really bother with Facebook either, we send texts. I had no idea what to do with it anyway, I think my last post was uploading some screenshots from STO, back before it went F2P (so, that tells you something).

So, it's completely dependent on who you are if removing Facebook from your life is trivial. For me, it was less than that. For many, it could take a serious amount of effort.

[LaCroix]

In Hungary, it is very likely that a business has a facebook site but no homepage...

[Lagmonster]

My basic point is, sure you can remove Facebook from your life, but it's not as trivial as you claim it is.

I don't mean to belittle or trivialize it; I recognize the difficulty in switching platforms. My question continues to be: If they are your friends, and leaving Facebook MATTERS to you, would they not accommodate you? I'm focussing on the 'that's what friends do' aspect rather than a features comparison of other sites. When one of my friends went unexpectedly vegan, we just stopped going to steakhouses with him. And I HATE most vegan cuisine. It just became an accommodation we were ok with.

[Elheru Aran]

So, it's completely dependent on who you are if removing Facebook from your life is trivial. For me, it was less than that. For many, it could take a serious amount of effort.

^This is what it pretty much comes down to for me. If you don't know a whole lot of people on FB and you mostly got on it just 'cause? Trivial. If most of your social circle are on FB, keep up with each other there, and might not even know each other's email? Another kettle of fish entirely.

It's not just about YOU (or ME, whatever) leaving FB-- it's about telling a whole bunch of other people that you're leaving FB, hey come talk to me on [insert platform of choice]. Certainly you can do it. Will they? Are they as involved with FB as you are? Are they *more* involved, or less? They have their own social circles to consider. You (I) are probably not their only friend on the platform. And to be brutally honest, unless you're seeing and interacting with these people on a fairly regular basis offline, in which case you probably already have alternative means of contacting them anyway, it's far easier for them to not put out the effort.

The way I see it is this: Until such a point occurs at which FB has an about-face and adjusts its policies, either post publicly or privately that you are either moving to another platform or leaving entirely and accept that you may lose touch with possibly quite a few people, OR accept that a certain amount of personal data probably already has been and is being siphoned and do what you can to minimize this by limiting what apps you allow to access FB, access your phone information, etc. The reality is that most people probably don't care unless it inconveniences them directly. If they're aware of it, sure it makes them uncomfortable, but they probably don't care enough to really intervene.

[Solauren]

I could care less.

I don't play facebook games I get invites for.
Rarely do any of the 'click for funny banner' links (okay, some I do)

And I fucking well knew going in that it's a commercial venture that want's my personal data for resale. How else were they going to keep the lights on without making it a paid service?

I just didn't give them any data on me. They have the exact same information on me you could get out of a phonebook, except I didn't put my phone number in.

[JI_Joe84]

I'm seriously considering ditching Facebook. The main thing holding me back is that its my primary means of staying in touch with a number of people I know.

I swear to Buddy Christ, it's like people have forgotten how to fucking talk on a phone over the last fifteen years.

Most people Back In The Day never did really keep up with dozens of people over the telephone, I suspect. It gets unwieldy.

Also, social media platforms have the advantage that you can 'park' messages for a person's later convenience more efficiently than on any other platform except physical mail, and physical mail takes long round trip times and has much higher per-message costs. You can also share references to interesting things more readily, which helps people feel some degree of commonality.

You mean texting? The thing every phone comes with in its calling app? Because that is what that is.

[Ace Pace]

I swear to Buddy Christ, it's like people have forgotten how to fucking talk on a phone over the last fifteen years.

Most people Back In The Day never did really keep up with dozens of people over the telephone, I suspect. It gets unwieldy.

Also, social media platforms have the advantage that you can 'park' messages for a person's later convenience more efficiently than on any other platform except physical mail, and physical mail takes long round trip times and has much higher per-message costs. You can also share references to interesting things more readily, which helps people feel some degree of commonality.

You mean texting? The thing every phone comes with in its calling app? Because that is what that is.

And we repeat again, the phone book is not a directory for people whose numbers you don't have.

[Elheru Aran]

Most people Back In The Day never did really keep up with dozens of people over the telephone, I suspect. It gets unwieldy.

Also, social media platforms have the advantage that you can 'park' messages for a person's later convenience more efficiently than on any other platform except physical mail, and physical mail takes long round trip times and has much higher per-message costs. You can also share references to interesting things more readily, which helps people feel some degree of commonality.

You mean texting? The thing every phone comes with in its calling app? Because that is what that is.

And we repeat again, the phone book is not a directory for people whose numbers you don't have.

To boot: Texting is clunky (at least in my experience) when trying to have a conversation with multiple people. For individual conversations it's fine, but not all phones handle group conversations very well. Facebook (usually) remains quite consistent across most platforms and is fairly accessible to well-nigh everybody with a data connection.