[meekrohprocess]

People like you and I didn't decide that it was what we wanted. We just have no other options, because the companies which impose the terms aggressively snuff out or buy up their competition.

I would argue that people are accepting these terms under duress; "consent" is the wrong word.

The market believes that Facebook et al will be able to continue enforcing their will unilaterally, and that is good for the companies, so their stocks go up.

[randmeerkat]

Everyone has options. I deleted FB years ago. No one actually needs FB.

[meekrohprocess]

I agree in principle, and so did I, but there's no denying that it puts a major crimp on your social life. It's wrong that people are forced to decide between accepting predatory terms or losing touch with friendly acquaintances.

Also, if you own a small business, there's a real chance that you'd rely on Facebook for a significant portion of your business, because without a presence on their platforms you had may as well not exist.

[cmorgan31]

Yes, valid points. Also don't think they should hold social interactions hostage in an effort to not lose their grip on selling your attention span. If their product is worth paying for or the individuals in question are too cheap to pay for it without using ads then so be it. Let them monetize on ads, but I don't expect anyone to give a shit about small businesses profiting off our data. I didn't agree to support them by selling my data so I don't feel any emotional attachment to their situation.

[ogre_codes]

> It's wrong that people are forced to decide between accepting predatory terms or losing touch with friendly acquaintances.

Yes and no.

While I've lost touch with a few older friends I don't do anything with, I've learned that reaching out by iMessage and SMS is welcomed by a lot of people. Instead of talking to people the lazy way and posting on Facebook, I text them individually or in small groups and the response tends to be much warmer and ignored less often.

I've always thought I was bugging people, but I've found that many friends appreciate the more personal approach.

[mr_toad]

> Also, if you own a small business

Unless it’s a one person business, have the office administrator do it. No need to bother with every detail.

[madeofpalk]

> but there's no denying that it puts a major crimp on your social life.

I completely deny that.

I deleted Facebook when I was 25 and never once missed it. It never once put a crimp on my social life because my social life was never really organised around facebook in the first place. I still wanted to keep in touch with friends, and they wanted to keep in touch with me, without facebook.

[logifail]

> if you own a small business, there's a real chance that you'd rely on Facebook for a significant portion of your business

Source?

Even if this is true for some types of small business, in some markets, it's a bit of a stretch to claim this applies across the board.

[umvi]

> but there's no denying that it puts a major crimp on your social life

In what way? Social lives existed before 2008 when FB went mainstream. I don't have a FB anymore, and I still text my friends for get-togethers.

[ska]

> In what way?

In the obvious way for some people? It's disingenuous to pretend that opting out of FB doesn't have negative social consequences for some (many?) people, and dismissing their concerns probably isn't a good way to change anyone's mind.

[artful-hacker]

I deleted my facebook account a long time ago, but I definitely do not get invitations to some parties and events because of that. Facebook events are the easiest way to invite people to a party or other gathering.

[logifail]

> I definitely do not get invitations to some parties and events [..]

Our 7 year old goes to an arts and crafts centre, in the aftermath of the furore over the WhatsApp Terms of Service update the organizers changed their contact details to suggesting reaching them via Signal instead. So we switched. Job done.

[MonAlternatiu]

A lot of my friends use social media to stay in touch. Not being on social media would keep me out of the loop, which is not desirable. I try to restrict its usage as much as possible though.

[umvi]

Collect alternative methods of staying in touch with friends you care about before leaving social media (phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses, etc.)

[ryandrake]

Yea. If your friends will abandon you just because you’re not on social media anymore, then I have bad news for you: they probably aren’t really your friends. When I ditched Facebook about 10 years ago, I lost contact with a whole bunch of people who weren't really part of my life anyway, they were simply "names I recognized."

My social life actually got better after dropping social media simply because I'm spending less time scrolling in front of a screen.

[ska]

> No one actually needs FB.

No one actually needs a car either. Or to eat industrially produced food. Or etc. etc.

"Nobody actually needs X" where X is a thing that empirically a huge percentage of people do, is I suspect never a compelling argument.

edit: bordercases brings up a good point, I picked particularly entrenched/difficult areas for examples but it wasn't necessary.

My point was more about the futility of observing a common behavior and rejecting it superficially, so perhaps I should have used "Nobody needs a smart phone" or "No family of 4 needs a >2000sq/ft house" or the like as examples.

[bordercases]

Categorically yes, but the connotation is that it's still possible for the vast majority of people to get rid of Facebook and still lead a satisfying life. I can buy this. I can reason that it's likely true from e.g. the hedonic setpoint. There are a lot of people that were happy before Facebook and will be happy after Facebook is gone.

Facebook is only ~15 years old and it deals mostly with aggregating text-based communications from people that feel the compulsion to post almost entirely because it's there. And they don't need Facebook, they just need the functions it provides; there was a time when these functions would have been split up into separate services until they were acquihired or integrated.

And although Facebook is monolithic, its monopoly is primarily enforced by network effects and conventions. Shit happens, like stock rallies or privacy scares. Facebook might still be around but the exodus of e.g. WhatsApp to Signal still shows the power of close substitutes to challenge what is "necessary".

There's also nothing fallacious in your counterargument. Both cars and industrial farming are being challenged in their own right. Cars for issues behind pollution and sprawl (resulting in ride-sharing, electric cars and transit) and industrial farming for its ethics and chemical impact on the environment (organic food, veganism, greater awareness of bioaccumulation of pesticides and microplastics). In educated circles these have become widely considered as Good Things, but would involve challenging the assumption that things we take for granted as necessary are actually so. That's just progress.

[zepto]

“No one actually needs a car either. Or to eat industrially produced food. Or etc. etc.“

This is a false equivalence.

Facebook is nowhere near at that level of need yet.

[ska]

I think it's not really a false equivalence, as a matter of degree - but see edit made in response to this.

There is also an issue of Maslow style leveling here, but the core point is identical.

[zepto]

I still think it’s essentially a false equivalence:

> Nobody needs a smart phone" or "No family of 4 needs a >2000sq/ft house" or the like as examples.

Even these are in a totally different class of ‘need’ to Facebook which is trivially substituted by comparison.

[ska]

I think you miss the point the point I was trying to make (i.e. I didn't articulate it well).

Regardless of how trivial you think it is, the fact that so many people demonstrate a preference not to should make you think harder about the problem. It's not just the technology, and many tech people tend to get this wrong consistently.

Let's put it another way: if it was actually as trivial as you seem to think, it probably would have happened already.

[_jal]

I never signed up in the first place.

But I don't go to a school that posts assignments on FB (I have heard of this quite a bit), my workplace doesn't use it (ditto) and I'm in a comfortable-enough place that putting up with the passive aggression from family and friends when they whine about my comm preferences is no big deal.

Yes, everyone has options. But not everyone operates under the same pressures.

[OkGoDoIt]

Actually I run a live theater venue and the vast majority of our tickets are purchased through a combination of Facebook advertising and Facebook event pages. There’s no getting around that. I had deleted Facebook but needed to reinstate my account once I got involved in the theater industry. It’s really frustrating actually. Facebook is the Comcast of social media, you don’t really want to use them and you know they’re abusing you, but you don’t really have a choice.

[dfxm12]

Is Facebook still creating shadow profiles? Whether or not you have an account with them, they might still be harvesting data about you. An individual can't really "delete FB".

[dTal]

It's very narrow-minded to assume that because you don't need Facebook, no one does. Facebook clearly provides some value, or no one would use it at all. Some people can't afford not to take advantage of that value. You can't tell a small business "don't use Facebook for social media outreach, it's evil and monopolistic" when the alternative is being outcompeted by those who do.

[phito]

Totally agree. I have a very niche small business (you can check my comment history) and all the community is on facebook, it has completely replaced forums. I don't have a choice, I need facebook and instagram otherwise I wouldn't be able to reach them.

[intrasight]

Also, remember that this is only about the FB app - and only on iOS. You can use only the FB site like I do and have all tracking and ads disabled.

[samstave]

I absolutely detest FB - and I don't like the fact that you can't determine if FB is tracking you even when you do not use it.