[geppeto]

Outside of Silicon Valley, people are marginally bewildered when you tell them you don't have Facebook. Inside Silicon Valley you'll quite often run into someone that works at Facebook and they'll switch to a psych analysis algorithm to understand how their service is not catering to you, while trying to mask their offense.

It must be good because of the daily active user number! Yeah well Tobacco has a high DAU too.

[artifaxx]

I remember a professor who equated smartphone use with smoking, he told people to go outside with the smokers if they wanted to use their smartphones/Facebook.

[H4CK3RM4N]

I once saw those behaviours described as "idle animations"(on Reddit of all places).

[cableshaft]

I once made a recommendation of "people checking their smart phone" to add as an idle animation for a Facebook game I was working on once. So makes sense to me!

[drvdevd]

Gosh I'd love to talk to this psychoanalyst. I can say as a non-adopter of Facebook (and before that MySpace) from the beginning (despite some immense social pressure) it has simply always been about "privacy" and the desire to stay out of touch.

Not that I'm actually very great at staying private online. It started as avoidance of other people and now I avoid it simply because it's just another data silo to me. I already give Google my life story, why add Facebook?

So. How can Facebook give me what I most want now from the platform? The ability to both stay in touch and stay invisible -- seems improbable.