[MachinShinn-]

I'm baffled by some of the comments here... Is it so difficult for you guys to just have a facebook account that you don't check in on? You can still sign into random sites that require it that way, arrange meetups, etc but without 'scrolling your life away'

I expect people like me who spend most of their day on the computer to have at least as much digital self discipline as I have, but perhaps that's a poor assumption to make...

[rcjones]

Seems like my feed encourages me to do less scrolling than ever. My feed has become a haven for linked and sponsored content, and there's the occasional spatter of original content from friends. I don't see a lot of the stuff I actually care about (photos of friends, their newborns, lengthy posts, etc.) without going straight to their pages.

I swear some of these personal posts never hit my home feed, they just get buried. This is odd as the personal stuff is the content I'm most likely to interact with. This is doubly confounding because the posts I don't see usually have a lot interaction among my close network, especially compared to the noise that's topping my feed.

More and more I find myself going directly to a handful of profiles and spending less time on FB because of the feed's noise.

[jug]

I think it's Facebook trying to cover that actual interest in the site and keeping it alive by the users themselves is actually dwindling. I recently unliked a lot of old pages I didn't want to see anymore and it was amazing how much it tried to figure out what I liked, rather than just show me what my friends posted. Why? Because my friends didn't post nearly as often enough to keep my timeline full of news. I have ~80 friends/acquaintances there, everyone from adults to kids, various jobs and interests, personalities.

Facebook is doing well as an ad platform to keep the revenue up but I'm not sure Facebook is honestly... doing well, you know?

I've seen them recently try to be Snapchat with the stories. I haven't seen one person use them yet despite being active on Snapchat. Also stickers, the new attention grabbing personal status posts with huge text, etc. It's as if they are lately trying to make people post more personal status updates on the site?

Is it possible there's a social network ad bubble that, once it pops when the realization of how much attention people actually pay on that site rather than just mindlessly scroll through like a heroin addict sinks in, will cause their stock to crash? I honestly don't think Facebook is one a nice trajectory either for us or for them.

[vkou]

This is my biggest problem with Facebook, as of late. It's all advertisements, and sponsored stories. My friends don't spam me with pictures of food, but the signal-to-noise ratio is too damn low.

[gre]

Use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat... and treat FB as a chat program.

[kilroy123]

I agree! I also use this.

I tweet and have all tweets go to facebook automatically. So people will engage sometimes with those posts. Other than that, I only use facebook for certian facebook groups.

[kerbalspacepro]

This! Facebook is a great forum/chatroom if you use it that. Put your actual feeds in an RSS reader.

[jpmattia]

> and sponsored content

FB without an ad-blocker is simply unreadable.

[Ductapemaster]

I deactivated my Facebook mostly because I have a hard time controlling myself. It's not the only thing I find difficult to control in the digital realm (I'm still a regular on Reddit and here), but I've found I intellectually get a lot more out of using Reddit and HN over Facebook. Maybe its confirmation bias, but I come from a family with addictive tendencies and even though I don't have a problem with substances, I definitely see it show up in my life with digital products.

I also found that spending more time on Facebook made me focus on the wrong things in life. I spent a lot of time thinking about what photos I wanted to post to garner interest (in reality few look or care about them). I spent a lot of time checking in on people that I haven't talked to in years, which satisfies my interest without actually ever communicating with them. It just became sort of depressing after a while. It's low effort to become friends with someone on Facebook, and I don't think its healthy to be constantly reminded of these connections you've made in life through various events and never actively continue in real life. You just spend a lot of time thinking about the past or what could have been. I was expending so much energy and getting back nothing but fleeting dopamine hits.

I truly believe I'm better off without it, despite the difficulty coordinating events with people and being invited to things. I communicate more with people in real life now. I find I am more motivated to text or call people to check in. I also use other communication services more because I'm not satisfying my social needs through passive consumption anymore.

[xiaoma]

>"I'm baffled by some of the comments here... Is it so difficult for you guys to just have a facebook account that you don't check in on? You can still sign into random sites that require it that way, arrange meetups, etc but without 'scrolling your life away'"

Some of the smartest people in the world work hard to make the site more addictive. You could just as easily say, "Is it so difficult for you to just have a needle and heroin on your desk and shoot up?"

It might be easy for you or me to have it there within reach, but for those who have already had their mental pathways significantly affected by the daily or more frequent hits of dopamine, it's not easy at all.

[Tritrin]

     >Some of the smartest people in the world work hard to make the site more addictive.

This is a truth most people seem naively oblivious to, they seem to have this idea in their mind that they are immune to persuasion. It is simply not the case, if you are human you are suceptible to unconscious and conscious persuasion.

A famous result concerning this is the 1984 book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robart Cialdini.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28815.Influence

[daddyo]

* Facebook now requires I send them a copy of my ID when I try to open an account. I don't want to facilitate them.

* I assume tracking becomes more aggressive when you have an account. For instance, Facebook could connect you to everyone viewing your account page to create a shadow social network for you.

* Skirting real-name policy is against TOS. Using real-name opens you up to crawlers from governments, trolls, collection agencies, and data brokers/analytics companies. Besides governments can request all your data. You also have another account to keep separate /track of, when doing proper OPSEC.

* Even if for you your account is just used once a month, people you are connected to may have different expectations ("you have an account, why didn't you reply?"), and you have to micro-manage this.

* You miss events, while still having an account or invite, and it is bad social form.

* You are forced to combat social persuasion tactics: Facebook is carefully design to maximize clicks and time-on-site. It's like trying to quit drinking while going to the bar once a week: your determination is actively attacked.

* People can tag your account in photos. A high school teacher I know got in trouble because she was tagged in a photo where people around her were drinking alcohol.

[linkmotif]

This is a good question. I bet some people can control their degree of engagement of with FB without deactivating. And I think I, too, could achieve this with some effort.

But my experience has been that peak FB enjoyment is simply not having FB. Everything about FB feels toxic to me, not just the service itself but its pervasive tendrils throughout the web. Complete, total exclusion of FB and related services—including social sign on, etc—has really improved my QOL.

[wickedOne]

assumption is the mother of all fuckups...

that aside, i deleted my facebook account over seven years ago and even though my real life friends give me some grief over that every now and again, i haven't missed it a single day.

apart from the couple of live streamed murders and abuse cases, there's no actual news on there which isn't accessible through another site with public access. and if i long for cat pictures or funny videos there's always imgur and youtube.

facebook, like many other "social media" sites, is more a habit than a necessity and, as far as i'm concerned, highly overrated in it's purpose

[nnfy]

My problem with an idle Facebook account is at least twofold: my activity is still being tracked against my will, and out of principle I refuse to support an organization which so blatantly disregards personal space.

[throwaway-1209]

Your activity is being tracked irrespective of whether or not you have a Facebook account. Google and Facebook will track you anyway and then correlate your browsing patterns with those of other people (about whom they know more) and infer everything there is to know about you.

[FridgeSeal]

That doesn't mean we should just roll over and give it all to them.

You're not obliged to hand this data over when you don't use their services, and ideally, they wouldn't track you if you didn't want to be tracked, but facebook is pretty close to being ethically void, so they'll do whatever scummy thing they want, so you should by all means make it as difficult as possible for them to get data on you.

[throwaway-1209]

>> That doesn't mean we should just roll over and give it all to them.

Unless you run an ad blocker and/or EFF Privacy Badger, that's exactly what you're doing. Your consent is not required. There are literally _dozens_ of companies that do this, Facebook and Google are just two of them. There were some initiatives in some states to apply a stiff tax to companies that trade in user data, but I don't know if they went anywhere. That's one tax I'd be in favor of, even though I'm not in favor of more taxes in general.

[cyphar]

> Your consent is not required.

The point is that regardless of whether or not consent is required, it's a question of principle to not give consent (and personally I do use LibreJS and the other various tools to improve the shitty state of affairs).

Companies acting unethically shouldn't be given extra leeway to act even more unethically.

[robin_reala]

At least with Facebook I’ve blocked their tracking bugs with Ghostery.

[patrickaljord]

> I refuse to support an organization which so blatantly disregards personal space.

I suppose you have no cell phone and live in a place with no government then, because Facebook can't hold a candle to telcos and governments when it comes to disregarding your personal space.

[nnfy]

Some forms of intrusion are more difficult to avoid than others; obviously that doesn't make it irrational to avoid as much as you realistically can.

Also, Facebook holds a significantly broader type of information than uncle Sam or T-Mobile. And Facebook also provides an avoidable vector for government surveillance. Analogy: no machine is totally secure, that doesn't mean we give up, turn off all security software and stop patching exploits.

[5ilv3r]

Pretty sure protecting your personal space is the government's job. At least in the US. Not saying they are doing a good job in particular, but it's in the mission statement.

[intopieces]

People have to pick their battles based on their resources and level of concern. While the tracking that you bring up is important to keep in mind, its existence does not justify that kind of nefarious privacy invasion that Facebook operates as part of its business plan.

[exergy]

Mine is even more simplistic. I lack self control. With an account, even a deactivated one, I've been guilty of logging back in at 2 AM on a Wednesday morning just to stalk an old acquaintance from high school.

[praisewhitey]

Adding to this: If you have an idle Facebook account, people will use it to invite you to events and tag you in photos, so Facebook will have a much better idea of who you're interacting with and when offline.

[criddell]

Sign out of Facebook and delete the cookie. You should be fine after that.

[Jach]

I'm sure Facebook will still track you (this applies even if you don't have a Facebook account). You'd need to block their domain and any ad domains that may be related. (Edit: Also mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14463127)

[criddell]

I guess I should have clarified that deleting the cookie and staying signed out is about the same as not having a Facebook account.

Even if you block them 100% online, as soon as you use a credit card or loyalty card, you are letting them track you again.

[thinkling]

Deleting cookies isn't enough anymore to prevent tracking. Facebook knows your home IP address, your browser user-agent, and likely your browser finger print. Should they care to, they don't need a cookie to connect you with data they already have about you.

[FridgeSeal]

I wonder if there's a good way to get around some of these problems.

In my country, and with my ISP we have dynamic IP's, so I don't have a 'home IP' as such. Browser user agent's are pretty easy to spoof/mock/etc. Browser fingerprinting is super hard to work around though - especially stuff like the canvas fingerprinting, because blocking it outright can also be used as a unique identifier when combined with other data.

Would it be possible to build some kind of public repository of canvas fingerprints, then whenever a site tries to build one, rather than outright blocking it, you return one of the public fingerprints from the repository. Get the repo big enough and used by enough people (especially if you could extend it out to other identifiers like fonts) and I imagine you would have a good chance of driving down one's uniqueness in a privacy conscious manner.

I'm not familiar with JS or the mechanics of how these fingerprints are generated, so I don't know if this is possible, but I imagine that if you can block them (Firefox 'Canvas Blocker' extension, you could intercept them?

[AlexAffe]

I use noscript and a cookie manager (protection of wanted cookies, deletion of all others upon shortcut). I havent seen facebook tracking pixels by now, are they being used? From an img src request they could still see my IP and user agent, plus knew which site I am on, but as far as I can tell they just use script src, and that gets blocked.

[Balgair]

You think uBlock Origin helps with that? I genuinely do not know.

[gorhill]

I wrote an example of how to reduce privacy exposure by blocking ubiquitous domains using uBO's point-and-click "firewall" pane, and used Facebook as an example:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-to...

[nnfy]

There is no question that Facebook is tracking you by other means, including IP. Even non-social media companies do so.

Why, you may ask? Because mining data about the pages you visit after Facebook allows for targeted advertisement, at the very least.

[tentakull]

I keep the experience super crappy by using fb mobile and not the app. Keeps my browsing sessions pretty short.

[ossmaster]

I do the same thing. Funny how they won't let u use direct messaging on the mobile web client anymore and force you to download the messenger app. I refuse to ha e Facebook on my phone.

[doubleplusgood]

I run Disa as a Messenger replacement

[Groxx]

fwiw that's basically what I do. My account pretty much just says "I'm not active here, email me" and I only friend people who I want to show my email address. I actually visit the site every month or three, and that's about it.

But that's under protest. Facebook is super hostile to its users, but doing so makes their metrics go up, so it's gonna keep happening.

[__jal]

I did exactly the same thing, only I never visit. (I block FB at the router, along with other surveillance shops.)

The net is so much nicer when you block out the evil.

[b0rsuk]

So do Facebook a favor and create your own shadow profile for them ? What if you were against shadow profiles in the first place ?

[kerbalspacepro]

If you create your own shadow profile, you can sort of "Graffiti" your own shadow profile, right? Like a bunch of weird, random nonsense. Become friends with every single bot and every single bots' friends. Hell, you could help make shadows that aren't there.

[wordupmaking]

Yeah, but when you stand up to snoops and crooks, you don't have to contort yourself in ways that are a.) undignified and b.) futile anyways, and c.) waste your own resources of which you have fewer than the server rooms of megacorps, so why not do that.

[AlexAffe]

Yep, there is this thin line in between that requires a little bit of self discipline where everything's fine. Still, the problem is with illiterates in technical fields or general privacy that let everything go to hell. People can't control facebook in general I'll shamelessly state without citing sources.

[abrkn]

I recently downloaded everything in my profile (which they make easy) and ran a userscript to delete everything. I still use Facebook Messenger and add friends I meet when I travel.

[pmlnr]

use mbasic.facebook.com.

So ugly and oldschool you won't miss in, unless you need to get something done there.

[5ourpu55]

> I expect people like me who spend most of their day on the computer to have at least as much digital self discipline as I have, but perhaps that's a poor assumption to make...

That is a terrible assumption to make!! Why would you think that everyone thinks the same way you think?!?

I deleted my facebook and to answer your question: Yes, it was that difficult. I have tried multiple times to do what you did, just leave it alone, but I couldn't. So I deleted it, have not missed it for a second.

[wordupmaking]

> Is it so difficult for you guys to just have a facebook account that you don't check in on?

Yes. Is that so difficult for you to accept? Tough shit.