[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.

[zepto]

That makes the point a lot worse, and really just comes across as you responding to a set of assumptions nobody is actually making.

What is the ‘it’ which you imagine people think is trivial?

Who is saying anything is trivial?

Where is anyone saying it’s just technology?

Who said people don’t have a preference to use Facebook?

How do you know how hard people have thought about this?

I don’t think Facebook is trivial to replace, but that isn’t because people are dependent on it in a way that is comparable to the other examples you mentioned.

Unlike the examples you listed, people can easily do without Facebook. There just isn’t much incentive for most people to do so, since they don’t perceive the downsides adequately.

[ska]

I think we're down in the weeds here - so I'll leave it at this. I shouldn't have focused it on tech so much, other people make the same category of mistake.

The assumptions that I am talking about are basically this. (1) "people can easily do without Facebook", or the variant that "Facebook isn't very important to them" (2) There are viable replacements available to the people who do value this, at least in their own estimation.

Both these assumptions are (empirically) incorrect, at least for many people. If you reject them both, you are basically saying people are incapable of really knowing their own best interests, which is laughable. The best you can do is advocate they understand the implications better.

Hence this falls in to the category I was drawing, mainly that if you say "People don't really need X" and lots of people are at the same time saying "I really need X" and "I don't see a good replacement for X" then you are far more likely to be wrong than they are.

You dislike all my examples, try this one "Nobody needs a fossil fuel engine car". Obvious, right? Electrics are available and better in every way (just ask your favorite tesla owner). Telling people they can do fine without FB because you do is a bit like telling them they can do fine without gasoline because you do. Even when technically true for some values of "fine" and "need", it's not useful.