[celticmusic]

yeah, I've never understood myspace or FB. I remember when myspace was first blowing up, people were talking about having 100 friends, which always blew me away. I couldn't imagine trying to keep up with that many friends.

I had a brief 1-2 year stint on FB where someone finally convinced me to get on it, and I had 13 friends on there. All of them people I know and hang out with regularly in real life. All I ever did was post funny things I came across, and I eventually got pushed off during the election cycle because I got REALLY sick of seeing all the misinformation about hilary and trump (both sides were doing it).

I just don't understand FB.

[bjornjaja]

At its core Facebook is a great and useful tool, but like everything else that is sold to corporate influence its primary purpose rots away. It _should be_ a way to interact with close friends and family, but it’s become a breeding ground for ads, and ads welcome misinformation—for the right price.

Honestly—there’s no reason a social network can’t be decentralized these days. Give people back their friendship circles and their information.

My understanding of Facebook is that it taps into human necessity for socialization, but it’s only masquerading as such and yields too-many, and over-stimulating relationships based on false pretense.

[BurningFrog]

Yeah, you may have done it wrong :)

To me, FB is a way to keep in touch with non close friends and relatives. I know what my close friends are up to anyway, but without FB I'd have no clue what the "next tier" 50-100 people do.

[jbverschoor]

Really? Anyone actually posts something personal these days? Facebook is not about that anymore. It's about liking posts and ads. So basically twitter / reddit, which makes sense as they copied the twitter timeline

[achenatx]

I dont need facebook for my closest friends as I see them often enough. But there are 200-300 friends and family that I dont see often and it is great to see what is going on in their lives.

I only tend to post once every few weeks, but I enjoy reading about what people I know are doing.

Facebook groups have been a great way for neighborhoods and communities to come together.

[oska]

> Facebook groups have been a great way for neighborhoods and communities to come together.

I would argue that we would have organically developed much better online ways for neighbourhoods and communities to come together, absent the monopolistic Facebook.

[205guy]

I don't understand people who don't understand Facebook :-)

You know what a blog is, what photo-sharing is, and RSS too. You know how people are social, a little bit vain, and like to brag. I'm sure you know about ad-tech, data-mining, EULAs nobody reads and dark patterns. I'm sure you've used email and chat, and you know deep down all email clients suck anyway.

Mix it all together, put it on phones with push notifications, and boom, you have Facebook and control half the Internet.

[type0]

> I don't understand people who don't understand Facebook :-)

People who use Facebook mostly do so because they don't understand how it works, in some cases they do understand but prefer to be ignorant.

[celticmusic]

obviously I understand the business model intellectually, what I don't understand is the draw.

Trying to keep up with 200-300 people sounds fucking exhausting to me, yet this is the reason most people have given in response as to why they use FB.

I just have to question if these people actually do anything in life besides socialize.

[205guy]

How is this not a caricature of HN readership and geeks in general? Some/most people might even tell you that the purpose of life is to socialize--and all the games/power plays around that.

To add more information, FB doesn't actually connect you to 200-2000 people literally. When you think of RSS, you think of seeing every single article that you subscribed to, but FB doesn't do that. It shows you only some of the what others publish, and it uses its dark algorithms to make sure those are the most engaging and addictive stories (reposts of click-bait titles, trending gossip, politically divisive arguments, etc.). And then it pads the feed with ads and more click-bait.

Actually the "genius" of FB is to tap into the social-reward centers of the brain by letting you inflate the number of friends, the number of followers, number of notifications, while still trimming down the firehose of pictures of your second cousin's roommate's tacos. Conversely, it lets you post your food pictures into the void and feel that others care about it, without actually bothering too many people.

To answer your question directly, yes these people spend inordinate amount of time doing this, but I believe they feel it is a good thing, to have a big social circle and feel connected to all those people--without always seeing how they were manipulated into being addicted to something that is not real socialization.

[celticmusic]

I am who I am and I make no apologies for it, stereotypes be damned.

I get more value out of being useful than socializing. That's just the way I'm built.