#deletefacebook - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/19/deletefacebook/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting to see how many people make excuses for still using Facebook because it makes event organizing and the like easier. I'm 26 and never used Facebook. My friends organize group events all the time, I'm always kept in the loop because I text my friends and ask what they are doing this weekend and/or meet with my friends regularly enough that they let me know what's going on. It's become well known that I don't get updates through FB so my friends will text me invites if I haven't asked for an update.

People act as if Facebook is the only way to keep up with friends but it's just not the case. Every phone can still receive SMS and you can _gasp_ meet your friends personally to catch up.

Now for friends who live in distant locations you need to ask yourself: Does Facebook status updates really make me feel more _connected_ to this person? My answer would be no, and I accept the fact that I just wont see my friends who live in other locations as much as I'd like, and I simply try to make it a habit of catching up when I'm in town.

There was life before Facebook and there can be life without Facebook, stop making excuses.

<comment><USER3> > It's interesting to see how many people make excuses for still using > Facebook because it makes event organizing and the like easier. I'm 26 and > never used Facebook.

If you've never used it, how do you know it does not make life easier? Similarly, it's possibly a burden (albeit small) on your friends who have to text you in addition to organising for others.

> Now for friends who live in distant locations you need to ask yourself: Does > Facebook status updates really make me feel more connected to this person?

For you no, for me absolutely 100%.

Additionally, there are many opportunities I have discovered through Facebook that I likely would not have otherwise. For example, just last weekend I happened to be flying across continents and when I checked Facebook on my phone, I discovered a cousin I haven't seen in a while also happened to be flying to the same city on the same day. There would have been no reason to share this with each other, but because it was out there publicly I was able to see and organise time for us to meet. I often see content which prompts me to get in contact with people.

I have no doubt I can survive without Facebook (though perhaps some might not), so for me you're arguing a strawman. For me, there is no doubt that it _is useful_, the question is whether that offsets the myriad negative impacts. To suggest that your experience (with admission that you've never used Facebook) is reflective of everyone and they should "stop making excuses" is pretty narrow.

<comment><USER4> >Similarly, it's possibly a burden (albeit small) on your friends who have to text you in addition to organizing for others.

I really have to agree with this: using your friends as personal assistants is not cool. Planning events can be hard work, just scheduling your own weekend can be a hassle. That said: I do wish people used something other than Facebook to plan events. It's just not gonna happen anytime soon.

<comment><USER5> I know I'm an old fogey (like half a decade older than the parent commenter!), but I never really understand what people are talking about with this stuff. Throughout my 20s and to the present day, my weekend was not organized by checking for random events on Facebook, but by talking with my friends digitally or otherwise. How that is akin to "using your friends as personal assistants" is an absolute mystery to me. It sounds more like "using your friends as friends", which seems pretty normal...

<comment><USER6> If you're talking to _one_ friend, then that friend is essentially having to route your updates on time-constraints, preferences for places to go, etc. out to all your other friends, and route all their responses back to you. They really do become your secretary.

Now, it _is_ possible to fan out these update messages yourself through (lots and lots of) SMSing, but in almost every friend group I've been in, the problem is that I don't actually have contact information for everyone who I want to meet up with.

Basically: how do you negotiate restaurants with your best mate's new vegan girlfriend? On Facebook, the two of you just have that conversation on the event page. Without Facebook, you have that conversation _through_ your best mate—or maybe not at all, and then one or the other of you gets mad about where you end up eating.

<comment><USER5> Ok, I see where you're coming from, but none of this is how anything works for me. I just say, "hey let's do something!" and my friends either say, "ok, whatcha want to do?" or "ok, I'm doing X, you want to do that with me?" or "shoot I can't, I'm already doing Y". Then I say either, "well I'd love to Z" or "sure I'll join you for X" or "darn! lunch this week?". Sometimes yeah, people don't want to go to the same restaurant or whatever, but it just gets figured out through communication. It doesn't seem like a big deal. I'm sure this would all work just as well on Facebook, but it works just as well off Facebook too.

<comment><USER7> > . I just say, "hey let's do something!"

That scales ... Poorly.

> Sometimes yeah, people don't want to go to the same restaurant or whatever, > but it just gets figured out through communication.

Sure, solving these problems through communication is fun. Especially with 5+ people involved. Or god forbid 20+.

I wonder how many events these "i dont use facebook its worthless" people organize. And with what frequency.

Even the crappy timeline feature has benefits - I went to awesome concert last week with a friend that I had not met in a while. Only because I saw him interested in it on the timeline.

Facebook sucks, but you people have no idea what its positives are, and therefore you will not ever be able to make any real alternative ... That sucks even more, because I would really like platform with better UI than FB.

<comment><USER8> > That scales ... Poorly.

Maybe the OP doesn't want it to scale. Maybe they're not interested in frequent events with 20+ people. Maybe they prefer going to events with an established group of friends.

Crucially, the OP made a specific point (emphasis mine):

> none of this is how anything works _for me_.

It's not like Facebook removes the hassle of organising 20 people. It just makes it less of a hassle. If you don't typically go to events with that many people, then Facebook solves no problem. Maybe you feel Facebook is necessary for your group of friends, but it's definitely not necessary for every group.

> you people have no idea what its positives are

I've used Facebook. I'm well aware what its positives are. For me they don't outweigh the negatives, so I deleted my account. Maybe "we people" are not interested in "making a real alternative to Facebook". Maybe for us the better alternative already exists and it's called "no Facebook".

<comment><USER7> > Maybe the OP doesn't want it to scale.

Frankly, in topic about "#deletefacebook" that seems like moving goalposts. Plenty of people enjoy those events of 5-10 people, so why so much hate on facebook.

> Maybe they prefer going to events with an established group of friends.

I don't understand, you claim that you can't have established group of friends with count over 20?

> It's not like Facebook removes the hassle of organising 20 people. It just > makes it less of a hassle.

That is funny. Organizing event for 20 people actually IS easy with Facebook, only hassle are those "I don't want to have a Facebook account" people that can't be just copied from previous event like everyone else.

> Maybe "we people" are not interested in "making a real alternative to > Facebook". Maybe for us the better alternative already exists and it's > called "no Facebook".

True, sorry for the strawman. It sometimes seems to me like some people are posturing about their superiority due to not using FB, and it gets on my nerves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hey folks, John Biggs here. I wrote this as a reaction to reason news and it comes at the end of a slow boil. I think we can make better tools than this one and I believe Facebook - and other social media - were originally quite useful and have now devolved due to market pressure. I'm definitely a hypocrite, as well. I still use most things to _broadcast_ not communicate and that's primarily because I've spent 20 years journalizing and am used to the constant, one-sided flow of information. That said I deleted all social apps except for Twitter and, for some masochistic reason, LinkedIn and am ready to tear it all out of my life step by step. It's a poison.

<comment><USER10> Why "except twitter?" I find Twitter to be 100x more toxic, 1% as useful, and infinitely worse design.

<comment><USER11> >Why "except twitter?" I find Twitter to be 100x more toxic, 1% as useful, and infinitely worse design.

Twitter is all about your filter. I have mine curated to an amazing list of intelligent thoughtful, creative people who I enjoy seeing post every day, completely devoid of politics. As soon as you leave that bubble though, it's an absolute nightmare.

<comment><USER12> I have yet to see anything really intelligent and thoughtful in 140 (or even 280) characters.

<comment><USER13> As much as I think most of Twitter's userbase comprises one of the worst cesspools on the Internet (yes, really), you can fit a hyperlink and short commentary to something well worth reading within a tweet.

Its function as a personal RSS feed can still be pretty valuable, and I see no reason why you can't be judicious with your follows and entirely avoid the toxic majority.

I have a Twitter account that's barely more than domain squatting from the early days of the service; at this point I follow probably five people and have logged in a dozen times in almost a decade. But when I do, my feed is dense with fascinating stuff. If I were to spend a little time curating, I could probably get to a lot more volume and still keep the high quality of the feed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Clickbait much? The writer is struggling to delete his facebook account?

"Will you delete Facebook? Probably not. Will I? I'm working on it." So much drama.

I can help:

How to delete fb account: [https://www.facebook.com/help/250563911970368?helpref=hc_glo...](https://www.facebook.com/help/250563911970368?helpref=hc_global_nav)

You can also download your data before deleting it: [https://www.facebook.com/help/1701730696756992/?helpref=hc_f...](https://www.facebook.com/help/1701730696756992/?helpref=hc_fnav)

I will delete mine when you delete yours: [https://www.facebook.com/johnbiggs](https://www.facebook.com/johnbiggs)

<comment><USER15> My understanding from the Cambridge Analytica stuff is that even if you completely wiped every bit of data from Facebook's servers, it doesn't matter any more. Your personal data, attached to your name, is out in the wild. For a price, someone can buy a detailed psychological profile of you.

All of our genies are out of all our bottles. They aren't going back in.

<comment><USER16> This is somewhat true. However, if you stop adding data to your profile it becomes stale. Since I deleted my facebook profile I moved cities, bought a house, a different car, and have new friends in real life. My old FB profile is probably still a good indicator of which way I'd vote in an election, but it's useless now for targeted advertising. The only way to make that break is to delete your profile now; slowly over time your real life will start to change and eventually won't resemble the digital you at all.

<comment><USER17> > but it's useless now for targeted advertising

What makes you think this? According to another recent article about Facebook's data collection[0] says:

> And it showed these odd patterns; that, for example, people who liked 'I > hate Israel' on Facebook also tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats.

This gives me the impression that even mundane bits of information can be used to extrapolate other connections through intelligent guessing.

[0]: [https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war- whistl...](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war- whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I must be part of an A/B test where I only see baby pictures from friends and family, updates from local businesses, and videos of cool construction equipment from TechInsider.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social channels could improve on the margin, but realistically, the problem with social is us. Ask friends and family to go back to sharing their unhinged political views in the form of badly punctuated emails, as God intended. If they continue to share, unfollow.

Social media can be as polarizing or as pleasant as you make it. Foisting blame on Facebook might feel good, but it won't solve the problem.

<comment><USER19> > the problem with social is us.

No. Facebook proudly does specific psychological experiments on its users. Facebook intentionally decides that it will make some users sad or depressed, just to see if it can. And it can. And it is proud of it. Facebook is proud that it knows how to make you depressed, so much so that they published a paper describing how they made hundreds of thousands of their users fall into a depression.

Facebook is a fucking poison. The problem is not with us. The problem is with large scale propaganda networks and centrally-controlled social networks with misaligned incentives. _The problem is Facebook and the core problem is the structure and incentives of corporations in our current not-well-enough- regulated capitalism_.

<comment><USER20> That's actually very interesting, never heard of it. Can you link the paper?

Or did you just made that all up, hmm?

<comment><USER21> Emotional contagion through social networks

Adam D. I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory, Jeffrey T. Hancock

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jun 2014, 111 (24) 8788-8790; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1320040111

[https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320040111](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320040111)

<comment><USER20> Thanks. I'm aware of this report and it's definitely awful what they did and they should be shamed for many years forward.

But there is big difference between comparing moods induced by negativity and "Facebook is proud that it knows how to make you depressed, so much so that they published a paper describing how they made hundreds of thousands of their users fall into a depression."

OP statement is misleading and tabloid worthy. The goal was not to cause depression. It lasted one week and they didn't try make someone depressed or kill him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was talked into creating a FB account by some friends a long time ago. I found that I was losing respect for my friends, as it brought out the parts of them I did not want to know about.

I also noticed a disturbing pattern straight away. FB was pushing these little games at me. The questions in each of the little games were nearly identical to the questions in psych and personality tests I was required to take in the military. To the best of my knowledge FB does not have the clearance for this data, so I deleted my FB account and blocked their domains.

AFAIK, I have not really missed out on anything important by not being a member of that system.

</comment><comment><USER23> how about #deleteSolcialMedia?

it's not just facebook doing this. twitter, pinterest, reddit and countless others do the same. heck... there is even a story today about google: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16610088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16610088)

and yes, i know some people will say... but that google story is about law enforcement using warrants... which i will counter with, doesn't matter, it shows that these companies don't care about your privacy and will fold in "defending" it when challenged.

if you care about your privacy, don't give _any_ company, _any_ information about you, in _any_ way.

<comment><USER24> While I agree, there is a huge difference in impact. Facebook has more users, reach a way bigger demographic and has access to a much, much, much broader range of data. Not to mention is has instagram and whatsapp too.

It's two order of magnitude bigger than twitter, reddit, pinterest, etc.

The only ones that compares is Google.

But while I have no problem living without a Facebook account, living without Google is way harder. E.g:

\- no hangout is the easiest. I hated it.

\- dropping calendar was easy. It was not that good anyway. I missed the integration with a lot of 3rd party though.

\- I leaved gmail. It tooks years and many problems with accounts came with it. The competitors UI are worse.

\- I tried to leave gmap. But competitors don't have street view, shop open shedules or nearly as accurate traveling times. And waze eventually got bough by google. Maps.me is alright for when I don't have internet, but it's nowhere close to gmap for big cities if you have internet.

\- I tried, very hard, to quit google search. Bing. DuckDuckGo.Qwant. They are ok. But I do hundreds of queries a day. Ok doesn't cut it. And if you are looking for result in another language than english, forget about it.

\- now for the phone. Well, I won't go apple. Mozilla and MS are no longer here. I tried SailOS for a year. I don't recommend it. So android is what's left if you want a smartphone. I tried rooting, but it's dangerous, and takes time. So now I just avoid using a google account on the phone, which is, well, something at least. And make it extra hard to install apps.

That's a lot of trouble for so-so results.

Who else than a privacy savvy nerd is going to do a 10th of it ?

So to me, no facebook + ublock + no google account is like when I stopped watching TV 20 years ago. It's 80/20, but for privacy instead of sanity.

However, let's all remember HN is a niche, and that most people still watch tv, don't use add blockers and would not even have a though about personal data.

<comment><USER25> What's wrong with iOS? I use Google-Android right now, which is arguably the worst possible choice. iOS seems to be a lot better for privacy.

<comment><USER24> Apple was part of PRISM so I don't believe anything they do about privacy is anything but for PR.

But as for why not iOS, it's more a choice of brand. I don't like apple products, they restrict to much for my taste.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I deleted my Facebook account in 2012. Haven't missed it. Let's hope this poor soul can finally be brave enough to find the close account button. Might not even need to write a script to do that.

<comment><USER27> When I deactivated my account about 4 years ago, I thought it would impact my life more than it did.

I have actually strengthened my friendships and moved quickly up in my career as a result of deleting most social media.

Social media is like the dessert of the internet. Use it sparingly.

<comment><USER28> I log on to Facebook twice a year, to let people know that I'm still alive, and to delete older posts and tags.

My concern is that if I shut down my account completely, someone else-- possibly Facebook itself--could credibly impersonate me on the platform and thus use the idea of me as a means to target my friends and acquaintances that use it more frequently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think it's too useful a tool for managing my social network to delete. Event planning, group chats etc are actually pretty HARD to organize without something like it. The impressive bit is the reach. Even my non technical friends and relatives know it.

I try to suggest people just stop giving facebook their information. Don't share anything, don't like anything, absolutely never install "apps" or click ads. Avoid facebook as a sign on provider to other sites. Use good privacy tools in your browser and never hit fb "like" buttons on another site. Avoid linking your accounts to facebook from other applications (instagram, spotify, ...).

I'd love to see a browser plugin that did all this that I could recommend to friends and relatives. A plugin that simply made a visit to facebook completely useless to facebook.

<comment><USER30> Maybe you're in a different situation than me but I can easily round up all of my friends with a few phone calls. "Hey Tony. I'm planning a party on the first at 6:00pm. Would you mind letting Sue and Mark know they're invited?" That also easily works by email and text if I insist on using technology.

Humans have been organizing into social groups and gatherings for tens of thousands of years without the aid of technology. Why is it all of a sudden people feel like they're incapable of socializing in any form without the likes of Facebook?

I apologize if my candor is overly blunt, but your comment is an excuse to continue your addiction. Nothing more.

<comment><USER29> I don't use it either for trivial things. But for example, we are 14 friends from 4 different cities that have been planning a trip for a couple of months now. Deciding where to go. Dates, Hotel choices, flight bookings etc are discussed. People have been added along the way that weren't in to begin with. That kind of thing that's ongoing for a long time, and has input from tons of people is terrible to do in e.g. an email thread, and can't be done by just getting together. Group discussions (long, persistent) like those is what I use it for mostly.

I'd switch to anything reasonably convenient for event planing - but phone and email just aren't replacements for all scenarios.

> Why is it all of a sudden people feel like they're incapable of socializing > in any form without the likes of Facebook?

I never had that feeling. But I would find it inconvenient to plan a few kinds of events. I'd create a group skype chat. Or even throw up a discourse VM. But send a mass email to a large group asking for "so, where do we go on this years trip?" I would not...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> _" It is a cancer."_ Spoken like someone who has to spend 6 months working up the nerve to delete his account. There's no need to get all ugly and overstated about it, like an overgrown teenager yelling & saying nasty things to his mom instead of moving out. Just do it and walk away.

Not that it's not a cancer. (Although it's more like obesity or type 2 diabetes, in that it's you doing it to yourself through many small bad choices.) But if it's a cancer now, then it always was one, Captain Newsflash.

Just walk away. Yes it is that easy. You'll never see half those assholes again and you'll be glad not to have to try to please them anymore. The rest that you keep around, well we call those your "friends."

People far away, you're not meant to "connect" with them. They're far away. Pull your head out of your butt and be where you are. If it was good enough for Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull to be completely unable to converse with somebody in New Jersey then it's good enough for me and you.

AND GET OFF MY LAWN!

<comment><USER32> > But if it's a cancer now, then it always was one

I wouldn't say that. It looked pretty benign back at the beginning. And then the noose started tightening, and tightening.... Frog slowly boiled.

<comment><USER31> Coloring my remarks is the fact that back in 2011, even I, at the time an ignoramus who didn't really understand much about "tech," could see that Facebook was a data mine and the experience was a sucky time-waster to boot. So I jumped out of the pot / slipped out of the noose / walked out of the room... etc.

The longer I live the more I realize that in a shitty situation the missing ingredient to make it non-shitty is usually not technology, or information, or time or chance or money or whatever other nuance... it's leadership. Which is the loose-fitting name of the bin in which I would also put something like quitting Facebook. Decision-making goes in there. Principles. Shortening the time interval between realizing Facebook is shitty, and getting out of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Facebook simply replaced the tools we once used to tell the world of our > joys and sorrows and it replaced them with cheap knock-offs that make us > less connected, not more.

This resonnates with what I've been observing. Instead of birthday card, a call or even a text message, we now simply write a note on someone's wall, between two out-of-context thoughts. It's the path of least resistance. Like fast food, it takes a bit of effort to fight, until the brain hijack starts to fade and new purposeful habits are formed (or reinstated).

Working on it but not there yet... :(

</comment><comment><USER34> Is there a reasonable, open-source, distributed Facebook alternative?

I presume built on top of RSS / Atom / something feeds that are available only on authentication (so I can share with limited sets of people.)

I presume I have to keep running a server to host content. Maybe I can host encrypted content for my friends, too? So, federated. Maybe it even makes it easy for me to bill them, if the costs are prohibitive?

I'm pretty sure I'd want an Android App to talk to it. The Android app would talk to all of the servers that host my friends' contents.

It doesn't let me share with "Friends of Friends" directly. My friends would have to Reshare, I guess. And then I guess I can't interact with them.

Not sure how I want conversations to work. It'd be hard for me to offer a server to my friends, without me having access to their social data.

Maybe everyone needs their own server?

<comment><USER22> Most people won't host their own server. I am not speaking for the HN crowd. In general, people just are not interested enough in learning how to do this or stay on top of patches.

To answer your question though, honestly any blogging software that support good ol' fashion RSS feeds would be fine. Your group of friends could link to each others feeds. With a little effort, you could probably do this server side using some fashion of RPC call. Each language has it's own way to accomplish this.

<comment><USER34> For the "stay on top of patches" thing, that's why I'm a fan of sandstorm.io. It makes a bunch of sense to me.

And, no, I don't want to broadcast info the everyone. A blog won't cut it.

I want to restrict content to some people with authorization.

<comment><USER22> For those cases, I have used software such as phpBB. Getting people to create a login is unpopular however. Some friends and I shared things similar to what one might find on FB. The distinct advantage was that our photos belonged to us and FB did not have access. The advantage and disadvantage is that my friends had to create accounts on my server. Centralized authentication services are low friction and high risk. If we move such things to another centralized service, it will just become the next target for snooping.

<comment><USER34> I think OAuth makes some sense. So, use your Google or Facebook account to log in, but that's it. They don't get more access to our data.

<comment><USER35> ... until they want it. And then they just give themselves an auth token and access the data.

"Unfortunately, ", said Facebook's spokesman, "we had a bug in our system that authorized our webcrawler to login and crawl every single phpBB or other OAuth site. We will surely delete the data within the next year", he added while winking at the intelligence community representatives in the crowd. -- a few years from now.

<comment><USER34> Ugh, that's evil. Yeah, that makes sense. Good thing to think about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> So far this thread has not mentioned the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I recommend watching this clip from the PBS NewsHour: [https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-a-data-analytics- firm-...](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-a-data-analytics-firm- allegedly-weaponized-facebook-to-swing-votes-in-2016).

To quote from the clip "Cambridge Analytica went to Facebook and said we're conducting academic research with this app. Facebook apparently said O.K. and didn't do a lot of diligence and through that, because they were able to get sort of the direct access from the people who installed the quiz app and then gather all the information from the friends of the people that had installed the app and that includes likes, you know their various posts, the pages that they subscribe to, just a ton of information. They were able to gather really detailed profile information on 50 million Americans."

The quiz was only a ruse to obtain much more valuable information. Sure FB recently ended their relationship with Cambridge Analytica, but they have probably known about this for months. There's a lot of anger at FB these days and deservedly so.

</comment><comment><USER37> I deleted my facebook a few months ago. It's been great. I've spent a lot more time studying new things since I did. I feel cut off from the most toxic people I know and toxicity in general, which is also great. I still use instagram, which has become a more negative experience lately as ads have increased. Hoping an alternative to that pops up sometime soon - I use it now because I have a performance hobby where it's heavily used by my friends in the community. Never really got into any other social media. Have a LinkedIn where I get annoyed by recruiters but don't post or do anything useful, don't use twitter.

</comment><comment> temp-dude-87844 Your adversaries can always do more harm with information than friends can do good. This is because information "warfare" is fundamentally asymmetric: one incident, presented a particular way and targeted to a particular group can do great harm: someone somewhere will take offense to what you did or what you said, if a certain actor facilitates the travel of information to paint you in a bad light. Look no further than Twitter, whose functionality is effectively tailor-made for this behavior.

Facebook's original purpose stems from a time of naïveté: put all your interests and factoids about you here, where you can be yourself. As if anyone would use any of this to market you products, target you political ads, toy with your emotions by running A/B tests on your feed, or dox you to grief you in real life -- right?

So you pare down your friend list, you put your best face forward on Insta, keep your silly stuff on Snap, move your chats to WhatsApp, at which point your Facebook is nothing more than meme reposts, a rolodex of your acquaintances, and that one relative who always picks a fight with your friends on your political reblogs, yet you can't delete them because you have to see them at Thanksgiving. Your feed is 60% ads, but you don't care, because all posts are out of order, so you can scroll down until stuff looks vaguely familiar, then x out and return in a few hours when you're bored.

The author's points ring true, but Facebook is already past its prime, infested by overcommercialization, and no more harmful to the average person than the fifty thousand Google cookies they carry with them from their Android to their browsing with Chrome, or Amazon's uncanny ability to show ads for the exact thing you looked up from a different device yesterday. People deride the filter bubble, but what's the alternative; your private space full of people's stuff you can't stand?

</comment><comment><USER38> Oh, and don't forget to share our article using the little facebook widget at the bottom...

<comment><USER39> > Oh, and don't forget to share our article using the little facebook widget > at the bottom...

These kind of comments add no value and rest on incorrect belief that either:

1) authors control the marketing tech stack on the major sites they write for or

2) they can afford to sacrifice audience for their messages, etc. in order to be hyper-picky in order to forestall internet heckles.

The truth is that neither of those things are true. Writers will write, activists will get their messages out, and that's their job. Sometimes they will criticize something so ubiquitous that even they can't avoid it totally, but that doesn't make them hypocrites. In fact, criticizing bad things that literally everyone does is the first step towards fixing those things. If stupid insinuations of hypocrisy like yours had any value, it would be impossible to make progress on many fronts.

<comment><USER40> I generally agree with this point, in the same way that I think that people are far too ready to call "hypocrisy" when the deed that is 'hypocritical' is just a small subset of the original 'evil'.

Having said that, I also think it's worthy to highlight the impact of the facebook sharing button, which isn't dealt with in the original article. The point is that it's not enough to say to individuals "don't use facebook"; you're still 'at risk' if you visit a site that uses the sharer widget, even if you don't have a facebook account.

As an aside to the aside, techcrunch has to be the first site I've encountered that redirects you when you scroll beyond a certain point of the article, or when you try to search in-page (unless that's a bug, of course).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Ten years ago when Facebook was gaining momentum, I chose to stay away, and remain so today. In recent years a new mantra has emerged: "I wish we could live without Facebook, but that's not practical anymore." Not true. It is practical, and infinitely more desirable.

Social media was never a meaningful way to present ourselves to the public or interact with others.

</comment><comment><USER42> I deleted Facebook 5 years ago. In earlier days technology used to increase productivity but now technology reduces productivity, Facebook is one of the productivity killer.

</comment><comment><USER43> > It is creating an echo chamber

It's more likely the author created his own echo chamber.

My Facebook friends span the political spectrum 70% liberal and the rest some degree of conservative.

I would venture to say, 99% of political post come from my liberal friends. Some of which I will comment on, most of the time I get responses that aren't logical and mostly insinuate I'm not a good person because I disagree.

For those people, I usually just remove from my feed. Not because I don't care for their politics, but because they only want a one way conversation.

That is how an echo chamber is created and it's their own doing, not Facebooks.

</comment><comment><USER44> Can't help but disagree a bit with the premise that these awful properties of Facebook are something new.

> Facebook is using us. It is actively giving away our information. It is > creating an echo chamber in the name of connection. It surfaces the divisive > and destroys the real reason we began using social media in the first place > – human connection.

I think it has always been more about "broadcasting ego" than "human connection", as the author admits two paragraphs later.

What's different today than when Facebook first launched?

While I applaud the effort to delete all your old posts and eventually the account itself, I wish the tone of this were more "we should be ashamed we let this happen" rather than "the good Facebook has been replaced by the evil one".

Broadcasting your ego--in fact your entire life--and selling it to random companies has always been _your_ choice, not something Facebook recently started doing to you.

</comment><comment><USER45> I would like to share my experience here because I think it was creepy on their part.

I only had <50 friends after 2015 on my facebook account. So, I would get notifications 1-2 times every week, "X is new to facebook, Since he is new to facebook, You should introduce him to more friends", Problem is,

1\. I have no clue who X is! Sometimes I found that X lived in the same city that I lived in, Sometimes there was no visible co-relation. 2\. X was automatically added to my friends list without my permission!

On several occassions, There were some people who were added as my friend but I couldn't find them on my friends list. The only way I figured they were my friends was when I received a notification and then visited their profile.

On 5-10 occassions every month, facebook will randomly send friend requests to people I don't even know and then some day I am just browsing and I get a notification that "Y has accepted your friend request" and I just couldn't recall sending friend request to that person.

So, Yeah, They were literally forcing me to be friends with people I don't even know, presumably, because I never clicked on ads and if I have less friends, That just means there is little activity in my circle and there is little information they can collect about me, IDK.

Whenever this happened, I usually took a screenshot, It probably doesn't do a solid job of proving my claim but it's something.

And before someone here starts running down a list of possible things that might have happened, Like someone hacked into my account, apps that had access to my account etc. I just want to say, I was a member of official 2600 magzine group, I posted all of this multiple times there and they did helped me a lot to prevent me from a lot of ways that someone might be accessing my account. I followed everything and it 6 months later it still didn't stop.

<comment><USER35> If you are the only person seeing this behaviour, it is likely a bug in their system.

Many ages ago, on one of the most popular mail and news systems of the day, it turned out that myself and another person both managed to register the same username, each with a different password, but were assigned to the same account.

After a couple of weeks in which each of us would log in, see the changes the other did, undo them, change our own password, and mail the abuse team (which kept replying "no, we see that you did it yourself on xxxx"), we both realized what had happened, and started talking by emailing ourselves. Eventually, the other guy left the account to me (I had it for 2 years when he managed to register it).

It could just be a bug, rather than malice.

<comment><USER45> It's didn't just happen to me.

Search for "Facebook adding friends without my approval" on google and you'll a lot of threads where people have had similar experience like me.

Here is one, [https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=9079047...](https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=907904762560111)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> > None of that will happen

Why not? My grandparents love looking through old photo albums. I don't see why I couldn't do the same with Facebook.

> It's an advertiser's dream and it is wildly expensive in terms of privacy > lost and cash spent to steal that privacy.

A few problems with this. Op dates users freely gave away their data, but now advertisers are stealing it?

The same sentence can be said about the internet as a whole - but most people believe the benefits are worth it and op hasn't proved we don't get benefits from Facebook.

Lastly.. the article assumes allowing advertisers to use your data is inherently evil. I'm not arguing either way, but it's never explained. Lots of people believe that to be true, but I don't think you can just call advertisers "the devil" without an explanation. Why is op harmed by data collection (outside of nonsensical hypthotheticals, like getting his house robbed when he posts that he's on vacation?)

<comment><USER47> > I don't see why I couldn't do the same with Facebook.

Because it very likely won't be there anymore. Your grandparents had full control over their photo albums. You have nothing.

> Op dates users freely gave away their data, but now advertisers are stealing > it? The same sentence can be said about the internet as a whole - but most > people believe the benefits are worth it

Most people don't grasp the _extend_ of what they give to the advertisers. Not even in the slightest way. They still think that as long as they don't fill out a questionnaire, "they" won't know. Or what I give to Facebook, stays with Facebook and so on.

> Lots of people believe that to be true, but I don't think you can just call > advertisers "the devil" without an explanation.

Their sneaky methods, lack of information and the whole attention stealing industry it is, is bad. Just the basic normal ad on the street is already exploiting us. The digital versions are even able to infect our tools. It's an uncontrolled mess. An anarchy of people who don't give a damn because they can. We'll never know the full extend of misuse happening with our data on daily bases. I don't see a reason to trust them. Do you?

<comment><USER46> Yeah Facebook might not be around, but I'm sure there is an app that will archive everything so you could store it locally.

I don't understand your view though - you believe billboards are an exploiting everyone who sees them? That would mean all advertising should be stopped. I think many people, you included, misunderstand the economic benefit of advertising. It enables commerce that wouldn't take place if it was gone. If a Spotify competitor started out today with zero advertising it would never make it - how would you hear about it? How would anyone learn about it?

I work in digital advetising and see no reason to distrust the industry. Nobody is abusing data about you.. you are tossed into groups that contains millions of people similar to you. No advertisers cares who you are, about any of your data, any of your Facebook posts. They care that you just bought a razor and might want to try their new shaving cream.

I'm not sure what you mean by sneaky methods, but it's as simple as you visited a website or talked online about shaving, so now they know you're interested in shaving. Basic text analysis is most of it.

Edit - very true that most people don't understand it. But then again most people don't understand anything they use daily (the internet, any app, etc).

<comment><USER47> > Yeah Facebook might not be around, but I'm sure there is an app that will > archive everything so you could store it locally.

You've forgotten that those pictures belong to Facebook. So whoever buys them out from the remains of Facebook will do whatever they want with it. They may share it with you. They may not. Maybe they'll use it to train some AI and then discard it altogether. Maybe they'll put your head onto some porn star. Maybe China will buy it. Can you imagine, a Chinese man coming to your grandparents house and taking away their photo album? What would your grandpa do?

> I don't understand your view though

It's not a view. It's a fact. Did you even learn your job somewhere? Any scientific background to this "work in digital advertisement"? Ads steal your attention. You can't do anything about it and most of the time you don't even have any kind of profit from it. To say it in the new cultures terms: it's mind rape.

> I think many people, you included, misunderstand the economic benefit of > advertising.

Please spare me that marketing talk. I do accept that there are ads on the internet. Sure. Some people even watch and click them. But just like the part you ignored in my previous comment you seem to intentionally forget about _extend_ here too. There is a huge difference between a cookie and a canvas fingerprint. There is a difference between a picture advertising a product and an autoplay video or malware infected script. There is an difference between an IP in your HPs log and a live track of a user.

The internet would have not gone bankrupt without the higher extend of advertisement intrusion. It's a lie to make advertising companies make even more money because that's what you do on the market. Their new product is data, profiles build upon that data (the more data about a single user, the more worth it is) and the continuous lie about the customer who WANTS their tips on where to spend money. I don't want those tips. I don't know anyone who wants them just like I don't know anyone who didn't want an adblocker installed. Think about it. The trust is gone. Forever.

> I work in digital advetising and see no reason to distrust the industry.

Of course you do...it's soothing for me though because such an amount of ignorance would be frightening.

> I'm not sure what you mean by sneaky methods,

Then you are a pretty shitty digital advertiser. You need to get some updates fast.

Edit@Edit:

> Edit - very true that most people don't understand it. But then again most > people don't understand anything they use daily (the internet, any app, > etc).

So you assume that this gives you a carte blance? I mean, this attitude by people from the ad industry is just another reason nobody trusts you.

Imagine, that I'd be tricking your grandparents into letting me into their apartment by brabbleing some tech bullshit about their cable. I wouldn't do any kind of work. They'd have no benefit at all but I'd have stolen their photo album.

With your world view, I had the justification to do it because they didn't understand a single word I told them to get in their house.

Would you like that?

<comment><USER47> Isn't it a great day today? :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I suppose techies don't have much need for social interaction, but for those of us outside the tech world, Facebook survives because it's useful for facilitating social interaction. I use Facebook (and occasionally Meetup) to help organize local running groups and events. Fantastically useful for coordinating with multiple groups of people across multiple computer and phone platforms, separated by hundreds or thousands of miles. _Nothing else comes close._

It sounds like the author primarily used Facebook to be seen rather than to connect, and so he views it as a cancer. He doesn't understand that Facebook is a tool. The problem isn't Facebook, the problem was him. He was the cancer, treating Facebook as a platform for aggrandizing himself. Good riddance.

<comment><USER49> >but for those of us outside the tech world, Facebook survives because it's useful for facilitating social interaction.

It's useful for facilitating connections with other facebook users. You're in a bubble.

<comment><USER50> > It's useful for facilitating connections with other facebook users.

And anyone willing to join Facebook to keep up with the event invitations. You don't have to post anything at all on Facebook to do this. I definitely know a bunch of people who use Facebook that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I have a personal story from inside facebook to share. 5 years ago Facebook recruiter reached out to me and invited me to the W hotel in Chicago. I was very excited -not for the job- but for the opportunity to meet with senior Facebook managers and tell them about an evil thing Facebook does.

Here is the background story:

I am Kurdish from Iran. And Iran has many provinces. one of them is called Kurdistan. In Facebook profile section for Hometown you could pick all of the Iranian provinces except Kurdistan.

And at first I thought it was a bug. For years and years we submitted bug reports and collected petitions for Facebook they never responded why the Kurdistan province cannot be picked while other provinces could be picked.

Till one day, An internal document -guidance- leaked out of Facebook. That explained it all ! One of the pages was talking about Kurdistan. In which they had explained any reference to Kurdistan is considered terrorism. That was on the request of Turkish government.

In "Turkey", the word Kurdistan is forbidden. and many people in Turkey been prisoned for speaking Kurdish. however in "Iran" we officially have a province called "Kurdistan Province). and Iranian government recognizes the name Kurdistan for my homeland. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Iran](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Iran)

But Facebook decided to enforce the Turkish government racist rule on other countries that have Kurdistan (Iran, Iraq, Syria...)

Also in that leaked guidance memo. Kurdistan flag was considered illegal. And hundreds of Kurdish pages and accounts got banned for having Kurdistan flag.

While Kurdish flag is illegal in Turkey. Kurdish flag is officially recognized in the Constitution of Iraq for Kurdistan regional government.

So when they invited me to W Hotel to recruit me. I was like yes finally I can meet the people in person. Because as a Kurd I have no importance and they will never respond to me but a software engineer I am pretty attractive on the market.

So I asked the question from one of the managers. And told them my story this for years and years I send them emails and nobody got back to me and we made petitions about this so-called bug.

He said these things are decided by higher management.

I told him how often do you show this disagreement to higher managers or Mark Zuckerburg's policies if you have a different opinion. He responded if I disagree with them I wouldn't work there.

I left the W Hotel in Chicago 5 years ago refusing to proceed with a job on FB. I knew Facebook is on the wrong path. And today I see that prediction coming true.

Even today when Turkey committed a massacre in Kurdish city of Afrin, Facebook blocked many voices inside the city who were showing massacres by Turkish government.

10 years ago FB came after kurds and you said not my problem. Today they are coming after all of us

<comment><USER52> I don't think this is specifically a FB problem, but a problem that globally operating Internet companies in general face: You will be dealing with different groups and countries that have different views about things, and it is next to impossible to avoid being dragged into these political issues. Take map services as an example. There are lots of controversial borders out there, and no matter what you do, you're going to to antagonise someone.

There are also things like data protection laws like the EU's "right to be forgotten" that allows an individual to request the removal of their personal information. Of course, you're now dealing with the situation that the EU is effectively trying to enforce its rules worldwide since the information would not just have to be deleted for users from the EU but for everyone.

In the end, there is no perfect solution, and it comes down to who has more power to impose their will on these companies. In your case, FB is clearly more afraid of getting into trouble with Turkey than the Kurds. Same goes for a lot of what China wants.

<comment><USER51> That is not the case in this case !

Let say FB wants to do everything Turkey wants, Fine ! ban Kurdistan word and Kurdish language for inside Turkey. (sounds horrific but just to go with your poor loginc, lets do that) BUT still according to your logic...

INSIDE IRAN- word kurdistan is not forbiden, Iran OFFICIALLY has a province called Kurdistan, it is on Iran's official Map.

and I am a Kurd from Iranian Kurdistan, and facebook deleted many Iranian Kurds for posting Kurdish material.

That is a flat disgusting targeting an ethnic group.

That is a no brainer, do not make it like Facebook is an innocent company, trying to not get dragged into regional conflicts.

All I am saying they first came for Kurds you said not my problem. That is a regional Others Problem.

Now they are coming for you. Taste it ! Facebook will screw all you over so bad. just wait and see it happening !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> My partner is still on facebook, she has a "crazy aunt" who posts all manor of sensationalist bulshit, so she blocked her. An this is the crux of the problem, the complete information warfare asymmetry, this aunt is still plaguing her little pool of friends at the push of a button several times a day.

We could try and talk to the aunt, get her to stop, how difficult would that be? Probably very, and likely to cause offence. And if we extrapolate out how can we possibly get the millions of social media dopamine fiend "crazy aunts" out there to think more carefully about the bullshit they spread around the world?

And so another platform is lost to the bottom feeders.

</comment><comment><USER54> > Facebook is using us.

It's funny how people are just now realizing this.

</comment><comment><USER55> Has anyone ever done an analysis which compares the "social media" in the book "Ender's Game" to our current social media?

I haven't read the book in a few years but if I remember correctly there was some sort of global discussion forum / social media which was used to steer political and social discussion. Ender and his siblings wrote tons of articles under pseudonyms and became quite influential.

15-20 years ago this might have sounded like a viable way to do global communications but looking at the current click-baity social media with all its Fake News it looks like we are very far away from a viable system.

<comment><USER56> If I recall correctly, _Ender's Game_ basically assumed that the future would be like Usenet Netnews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Turns out that deleting your account doesn't stop them from tracking you on every website you visit that uses their code.

<comment><USER58> Privacy Badger, Ghostery plugins are wonderful for curtailing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> "I have nothing to hide" - most of the people

a pregnant teenager being outed by the store Target, after it mined her purchase data – larger handbags, headache pills, tissues – and sent her a "congratulations" message as marketing, which her unknowing father got instead. Oops!

Don't confuse privacy with secrecy. I know what you do in the bathroom, but you still close the door. That's because you want privacy, not secrecy.

I found this article very interesting about FB - [http://www.salimvirani.com//facebook/](http://www.salimvirani.com//facebook/)

</comment><comment><USER15> There's something I never see talked about in all of these discussions around social media. There is the old refrain "If you didn't pay for it, you aren't the customer, you're the product." But I don't see people talking about that mantra as a useful tool.

We all rushed to use Facebook. We put our data on their servers, we uploaded our photos and watched them get resized, stored, and served. We use a service that costs actual money to run and paid them zero dollars.

Sure, they served ads, but we've all learned to completely tune those out when it comes to being persuaded to actually buy stuff, so that revenue stream isn't enough to keep the lights on.

That doesn't leave Facebook and similar companies with too many other options. I'm not saying they are _innocent_ , but it seems to me that much of this behavior — data mining users, selling ads to the rich to enable them to influence elections, etc. — is a predictable outcome from incentives we put in place by our collective behavior.

If Facebook didn't do this shady stuff, they'd run out of money and get replaced by another company that did. In the cutthroat natural selection environment of the market, only businesses that make money — by any means possible — survive.

I'm sure I'm naïve and missing something, but it makes me sad that the obvious solution hasn't manifested — _pay for stuff_. A version of Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. that had a monthly subscription fee would have less incentive to extract value from user data because they are already extracting money directly from their users. I miss the days when Reddit just had Reddit gold.

I suppose the answer to my supposition is that companies would do _both_. If you have the data, why not _also_ pimp it out even if your users are already paying you. And, at that point, the goal becomes maximum users, which is gated by subscription costs, so those fees get driven to zero and here we are.

But I do wish a simpler business model where people pay for things they use could be successful and properly incentivize companies to act in our interests. Given that in a capitalist market, businesses fully expand all the way up to the boundary of the letter of the law (and often past that), I suppose there's little left to do but try to get strong regulations passed and vigorously enforced.

Given the fundmental network effects of social media, competition — the primary user-beneficient force in capitalism — is completely ineffective. Absent that, I think all we're left with is the law.

</comment><comment><USER60> As a meme #deletefacebook has limited virulence because of self-termination. Probably #deletefacebookafterpostingaboutitthenwaiting would be better.

</comment><comment><USER61> Off topic, has anyone noticed the really cool thing that happens when you scroll too far below this article? You end up at techcrunch.com, as in the homepage. I made a gif if you missed this or are on another type of device.[1]

I'm curious about how they did this.

[1]: [https://cl.ly/qFLY](https://cl.ly/qFLY)

<comment><USER62> Not exactly the same, but here's a javascript plugin that can add more content to the bottom of the page as you scroll down.

[https://infinite-scroll.com/](https://infinite-scroll.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Does anyone have a script or app that can go in and delete every post I've ever made? Google turns up a few Chrome plugins that all look dubious. Be great to have an authoritative guide to deleting everything without fully deactivating Facebook (since there is still a lot of utility in it w/r/t rolodex, event planning)

<comment><USER64> I saw the one in the post, but it's a Chrome extension. I think this will be very useful for me, so I'm going to write a very simple one (basically you just log in with FB/Twitter/whatever) and it deletes every post older than what you specify.

It's going to live at [https://forgetme.stavros.io/](https://forgetme.stavros.io/), if you want to take a look later on to see how far I've gotten. Hopefully, deleting posts will be doable from the APIs, and the app will be feasible.

I expect I'll have a useful app up in a day or two.

<comment><USER8> From the website:

> an application that will delete all your old posts from social media every > so often, to help your privacy.

I'm not sure this will help with privacy. If you keep posting, you keep giving Facebook data and helping them build their profile of you. There's no guarantee deleting old data from your timeline will delete the data Facebook has on you. To help your privacy, you need to stop giving them data (i.e. stop posting).

<comment><USER64> That's true, but privacy is more than against Twitter/FB. You can also have privacy against a new boss, a new friend, etc. You aren't the person you were ten years ago, there's no reason your opinions should remain somewhere, immutable.

Unfortunately, this is looking very hard to do as a service, as most platforms don't let you delete posts at all (e.g. Facebook) or only give you access to a very limited amount of _your own data_ (e.g. Twitter, where there's no way to access more than your 3200 latest Tweets).

Especially with Twitter, _corporations literally have more access to your data than you_ , as accessing old Tweets is only done via an Enterprise API, and not via the standard API or even the website. You cannot access your own old Tweets unless you pay good money for the Enterprise API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Worth noting. Some users have found they are unable to delete their Facebook account because, when they are asked to enter their password on the final screen, FB says the password is incorrect.

Seems FB has a bug where you must enter your password in _all lower case_ on the final screen.

Imagine, big company like FB, having still not caught that bug....

<comment><USER66> Actually, that's intended behavior.

[https://security.stackexchange.com/a/68014/47800](https://security.stackexchange.com/a/68014/47800)

<comment><USER67> They can accomplish that feature using 3 separate hashes for various common mistakes, and it will still accept the normal case, but what GP is describing is that only a lowercase version of the password will work for account deletion.

<comment><USER68> It's most likely that they're using lower(password) everywhere, except someone forgot to use that on the account deletion page and no one noticed.

<comment><USER69> How convenient that they forgot to use it on the one action they never want you to perform

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Adverticing companies and Internet search engines are like a decietful friend that would rat you out in communist East Germany or in Pol Pot's Cambodia. They spew out garbage that fuels insecurity in the adolescents of our generation. It's goal is to make people feel uneasy. I deleted facebook in 2011. It's to late though. Facebook and google have ratted me out a long time ago. DDR anno 2018, wouldn't be much different than western societies. They would have evolved. Facebook and google and advertising and marketing companies are the stasi of our time. I don't even dare applying for a visa to the US. A country I would love to visit and my nr.1 travel destination. This is mainly because of a drunken rant on facebook a decade ago. Hate to be denied entrance at Newark after a 7 hour flight.

</comment><comment><USER71> Another good thing to look at is Josh Constine's article:

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/18/move-fast-and-fake- things/](https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/18/move-fast-and-fake-things/)

</comment><comment><USER72> I never liked the reciprocal friend model of Facebook, and I liked even less that it was exposed publicly by default, allowing anyone to crawl the social graph. Even if you lock down your friend list, it doesn't matter because your friends mostly aren't locking down theirs.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal clearly demonstrates why this is a dangerous thing. The clear solution is to unfriend everybody then delete (not suspend, but delete) your account.

Enough people do this, and Facebook's cherished network effect will be weakened enough for better alternatives to begin appearing. Alternatives that don't vomit large amounts of data about you into the public sphere by default.

<comment><USER73> And what exactly is the business model for that going to be? Unless people switch to decentralised services (they won't) or pay for a centralised one (they won't), what way could any alternatives survive?

The problem isn't Facebook as much as it is the system in which it exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I'm without facebook account for almost a decade by now, I deleted it very early on. I never really missed it.

(Faceboook still sends me stalker/spam mails)

</comment><comment><USER75> I quit Facebook a few months back and I've tried to coax my BH into quitting and she would have if not for one reason.

Our son's school shares all updates on their Facebook page which is only accessible by members. Ironically Facebook should not be the place to share such information & content given the recent happenings.

I wish schools could find another solution or platform.

</comment><comment><USER76> I've been Social Sober for 20 days now. I didn't delete any content from FB, since I had been using a fake name on there for 5 years. I just deactivated the account and haven't logged back in since.

I honestly haven't noticed much of a difference in my life. I still work all day, come home and watch Netflix or play my Switch.

It's ok to not "know" what's happening. Just do it!

<comment><USER77> I did the same with my facebook account last fall. I haven't missed it either. I admit I still use instagram and messenger though. I think most people on my facebook list had pretty much stopped using it regularly anyway, it was basically all ads by the time I left. Twitter I never really used to start with, its primary use-case for me is I'm walking around somewhere and something's going on and i search Twitter to see if someone who knows more about it than me has mentioned anything. Although even that use-case has gotten pretty hit-or-miss recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> I deleted facebook when Candian Border Patrol demanded I log into my Facebook account on my phone so they can peruse it at their will.

</comment><comment><USER79> How do you know that `Social Book Post Manager` isn't scraping all of your data and sending it to some third party server?

</comment><comment><USER80> That's one diddle that can't be undone. Does the author really think deleting his old posts is going to somehow cover all the cached copies of his data? Not to mention all the little picadillos in the metadata Axiom has on him that they gleaned from said data? Articles like this make me fear for tech journalism.

<comment><USER81> It can't necessarily be undone, but if you're among the people who is skeeved out by surveillance capitalism, you can at least try to reduce future level of exposure going forward.

Also, if you're worried about the long-term psychological impact of social media, with all its dark patterns designed to get you to spend more and more time distracted by their sites and apps, then all you really have to do there is switch the distractions off. Deleting one's Facebook account isn't the only way to do that, but it's certainly an effective option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> How can you delete Facebook if you've become so reliant on its Oauth for login?

I'm just dreading migrating all of those logins

<comment><USER83> > I like that Facebook is now a glorified version of OAuth

I don't. One company should not have the power to decide whether I should be recognised as a legitimate individual or not, and they should not act as a gatekeeper between me and my online identity. I don't care how benevolent that one company genuinely is.

If an intermediary is necessary (like an email provider for mere mortals), I should be able to choose a service provider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> I don't use the Facebook mobile app. I only use messenger.

Also, I use the "newsfeed eradicator" chrome addon to remove the newsfeed when I go to facebook on my PC. That way I only see notifications, where I am tagged/invited & I only go see posts from a few groups that interest me.

</comment><comment><USER85> Consider obfuscating the profile before deleting the account. Whatever delete means in facebook terms.

</comment><comment><USER86> Does anyone know if FB uses deleted photos in their face recognition feature? Or if there is any detail around what happens when data is deleted? I think it probably is like running chkdsk: the data still exists it's just not addressed at the user level any more.

</comment><comment><USER87> Does anyone know if deleting posts and likes actually removes the post from Facebook?

Even if it does, what's the likelihood it hasn't already been sold and a shadow profile of ourselves exists with facebooks marketing partners in a place where we can't reach the delete button?

<comment><USER88> Not really. In some countries, you can submit a request to download everything facebook knows about you, and for deleted posts, it just toggles a flag that removes it from public view instead of removing it from the database.

[https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/10/20/law-student- trig...](https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/10/20/law-student- triggers-22-legal-complaints-and-likely-audit-of-facebook/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> Even if Facebook was perfect and did everything everyone is expecting from it, would it be worth losing, say, 2 hours everyday on chat and discussions with friends? With 2 hours every day you could become a master in any art or technique.

</comment><comment><USER90> "Until we find them, however, it's probably better for us to delete the ones we use today."

This is a really dangerous, reactionary notion. If there's something inherent in our social formations that are translating themselves into our public spaces and we are unhappy with, let's work to change them together. This is a thoughtful piece and I think there are great reasons to delete your posts from long ago because, well, people change! Other commenters here have made good supporting arguments for this.

But we must be very, very careful not to demonize tools where their users need to be taken into consideration: unless there is something specific about facebook, unique among other social networks, that is toxic (this may be the case!) then we need to be wary of these arguments because they are very easy to apply to all social media which, imo, is a copout.

<comment><USER72> Why is it a dangerous notion? For the sake of argument, if everyone went completely over the top and deleted all their social media accounts, the world would go back to looking like it did around 2006. A few corporations would go broke. A few other corporations values would increase. Mass psy-ops would become more difficult and expensive.

Doesn't sound dangerous at all to me.

<comment><USER90> So in the extreme case that you're talking about it's not dangerous in any way I can think of at the moment. One of the big reasons I called it dangerous was that the effect only a portion of the users leaving the platform is dangerous and more subtle. To my eye, it's a social critique which leads to people who agree with it voluntarily removing themselves from the 21st century version of the "public square." I worry that this leads to disenfranchisement on their part as I've seen such isolation result in those feelings.

I guess the spirit of my claim is that the shape of group conversation will always come to resemble the cultural context of that conversation, regardless of the medium. While the medium can and should be critiqued, calling for total abstention from the medium is effectively self-censorship and I don't think that'll lead to the desired result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> People don't just delete stuff, they replace them. Give them something new.

</comment><comment><USER92> I did this to all my social media accounts and all personally identifiable information on them. No pictures, no dates, locations, etc.. They now exist for messaging and group participation, and nothing else.

</comment><comment><USER93> Stop using Facebook. Your future self will thank you for it.

</comment><comment><USER94> Where do I share photo albums and keep up with friends?

</comment><comment><USER95> Your new hosts file [https://pastebin.com/d04ah8eP](https://pastebin.com/d04ah8eP)

</comment><comment><USER96> Whoever organized this coordinated hatchet job, thank you guys for the opportunity to buy FB at a discount. Keep up the good job.

</comment><comment><USER97> How does whatsapp compare to facebook messenger, for intrusiveness and access to data and call logs?

</comment><comment><USER98> > In fact, I would wager I use Facebook more to broadcast my ego than interact > with real humans

You don't say?

</comment><comment><USER99> I haven't had a Facebook account for years, sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side

</comment><comment><USER100> start by deleting all applications that have access to your information.

[https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications](https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications)

You thought setting things to private kept them private?

</comment><comment><USER101> For some reason nothing on my FB feed it's from my friends anymore. Just news articles.

</comment><comment><USER102> I'm very down on Facebook nowadays. But because of the way it's algorithms interfere in my communication with friends: I don't know who will be shown what message. So they aren't messages, they are "contributing content". So it's not commmunication.

But I don't get all this obsession with privacy. I'm just not interesting enough for that to be a concern.

</comment><comment><USER103> If you delete your posts or account, Facebook is probably still using the data.

</comment><comment><USER104> Facebook and twitter are trash.

</comment><comment><USER105> That was such a well written article and an empassioned plea.

</comment><comment><USER106> recently on HN: #deleteUber had no lasting effect

</comment><comment><USER107> Is there any way to batch delete posts in FB?

</comment><comment><USER108> the author assumes deleting his data via facebook api actually deletes it?

</comment><comment><USER109> I normally wouldn't defend Facebook, but did people using it _really_ think that they weren't selling off their private information? I thought this was just something everyone accepted, as they accept Siri/Alexa/Google to listen to their every word. (yes I know they listen for only wake words)

I mean, Zuck called us all "dumb fucks". You can look it up. Everyone shrugged it off because college boys be college boys.

I have a Facebook profile, and never used it with the expectation that I owned the content I placed on it. I do think that we need a better alternative to Facebook, but at the same time it's not wrong for someone not to delete their profile.

Sorry, but texting is not a viable replacement. Neither is email. Reactions and comment threads are fun and useful ways of interacting with shared life events. For a lot of people, including myself, being off Facebook means missing out on social interaction. The reality is that texting or emailing people sometimes simply doesn't cut it; if you don't pull the same perceived weight as everyone else in your social group, you're going to be outcast and perhaps forgotten about. That can be the perception, anyway, and it's not entirely wrong.

Why hasn't a viable alternative to Facebook come up? I mean a serious one – not some piece of shit whipped up by right-wing bloggers. Perhaps it's because everyone feels that they need to _compete_ with Facebook. Facebook has its tentacles in a lot of things, but perhaps we can just boil it down to a few things:

\- Posts with images, comments, and reactions.

\- Direct messages that are interoperable with email and SMS.

\- Event planning and coordination.

How much else do you really need to be social? Everything else about Facebook is really about selling ads and has nothing to do with people being social. Building something that can replace the social aspect of Facebook shouldn't be that monumental. If Duck Duck Go has survived, surely a DDG of social networking shouldn't be so far away.

Even better: sell it with the idea that it's algorithm-free. Everything should go back to being chronological.

Outlandish? Not really. The real reason that your feed is algorithmically sorted is to bubble up more paid content and viral posts. If you unlike/unfollow all the company and group pages associated with your account, you're left with only what your friends are posting. Ooh, even better – delete people who aren't actual friends. If you only include the people you care about, you don't need some black box algorithm to tell you what you need to be seeing. You'd have enough time to see what people are up to in the order of which their posts were made.

But not, I won't be deleting my Facebook. I'm fine limiting my use to mbasic.facebook.com. That is, until that better thing comes along or I have the time and will-power to just build it myself.

</comment><comment><USER110> 30 years from now, candidates for president of the United States will have their old social media posts under a microscope. Whatever dumb thing they posted in their teens will be brought to light.

It's probably going to raise a lot of discussions about what constitutes normal human behavior. We might finally stop pretending they are perfect humans.

After realizing that everyone, even future politicians post stupid things, We probably will stop caring about online privacy.

It might also be a bad thing because society would expect oversharing as the norm and would consider anyone who doesn't put their private lives on display, to be hiding something.

Either way social media is here to stay. But it will change, this is version 1.

<comment><USER111> It's really funny when people bring up things people said or did 10 years ago as way to knock them down a peg. If anything, it should show that a person has the capacity to change and mature if they are no longer acting the embarrassing way. It does bother me that people are expected to behave perfectly their entire lives in order to be a leader. It creates a situation that caters to psychopaths.

<comment><USER112> What makes it even worse is that there are always people who will try to put forward the worst possible (mis)interpretation of what you said, ie: in the guise of social "justice", and the domain of what constitutes acceptable discourse (the overton window) is constantly shrinking. There is a fair chance that some of what you posted, which was considered perfectly acceptable and maybe humorous 10 years ago, is now considered toxic / harmful / triggering / misogynistic / oppressive / etc.

Heck, what you say now can put you in trouble today. There are a number of opinions that I hold which I consider to be fairly balanced and mild, but am afraid to discuss online, because I think they could put me at risk. If you upset the online twitter mob, they're not going to fight you with coherent arguments and thoughtful discourse. They're going to insult you, threaten you, publicly shame you, and maybe get you fired from your job.

<comment><USER113> The attempts to demonize the words "social justice" are quite Orwellian.

"Justice" is literally the last word in America that I thought would be used in some RWA-type context.

<comment><USER112> What's Orwellian is being publicly lynched for wrongthink. The far-left is just as authoritarian as the far-right, IMO. The left accuses the right of living in a bubble, but they're completely unaware of their own dogmatic echo chamber.

I'm queer. I'm in favor of universal access to abortion and socialised healthcare, but there are a few things I could say that would quickly get me labelled as right-wing and all sorts of bad things. It used to be that being liberal, being left stood for freedom of speech and the open discussion of ideas.

<comment><USER114> Ah yes, the ever-famous both sides argument. I always hear this alongside arguments from people using the word Lynch in an incredibly inappropriate context.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


National Popular Vote Interstate Compact - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact <comment><USER2> One of the benefits behind the electoral college is that it effectively forces candidates to visit smaller and more competitive states they would not otherwise campaign in. As different states become "swing" states, candidates go there, as they are winner-take-all.

In a popular vote, candidates would spend most of their time in large states like California, Texas, and New York.

<comment><USER3> >In a popular vote, candidates would spend most of their time in large states like California, Texas, and New York.

This does not bother me. If more people are there, then more time should be spent there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> pretty interesting. looks like this could be done at a state level.

<comment> D-Coder Yes, exactly. It does not require any Constitutional amendment (which would be difficult and time-consuming) to make the Electoral College almost identical to the popular vote.</comment></comment>


To Lynch a Child: Bullying and Gender Non-Conformity in Our Nation's Schools - <AUTHOR> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1558135

<comment><USER2> This seems like a really bad article - trying to compare "white supremacy" to "gender stereotypes".

There is a huge difference between a child killing himself (suicide) and lynching. The author should maybe consult a dictionary if he/she does not see a difference. The author also seems to be a proponent for "legal solutions" to playground taunts – this is just ridiculous.

Everyone has stereotypes and prior beliefs, society and subgroups have many unspoken rules. This clearly is not the place for laws to regulate stereotypes and beliefs. Everyone gets bullied and everyone gets taunted (I was too).

The question should be why the depression in children was not noticed by either their teachers or their care-givers. Surely someone would notice if something was seriously wrong with a child?

Another problem that is often overlooked and not adequately addressed is the incidence of depression in children.

I guess this author had a prior axe to grind though.</comment>