[0xEF]

Why are you still using it?

I dropped FB about 12 years ago, have not looked back since. I ask people this question who still use FB and complain about terrible it is. They answer with some generic "to stay in touch with such and such" which is easier and less invasive to do with SMS or email.

So, why are you still using it?

[nothercastle]

Marketplace… somehow they took over the marketplace for used stuff and killed cl. OfferUp was always crap so it doesn’t count.

[_heimdall]

I haven't used Facebook itself for 7 or 8 years now, but had to break down and make a private account just to access Marketplace. For buying used cars private party today, it seems like Marketplace is the only good option.

[ethagnawl]

Do sellers question the ghost account? I've had that happen to me the few times I've tried using my dev account to make inquiries.

[_heimdall]

I haven't had any issues with it. I honestly don't know how locked down a Facebook account can be these days so "ghost account" may not be the right term.

I have my name and a profile photo on there, but I've never posted anything, don't follow anyone, and all privacy setting are set to block me from search, feeds, etc.

I've only ever had one person block me after messaging about a car for sale, and I couldn't say whether it was because of the account or the questions I sent made them think I'd be an annoying buyer to deal with.

[nothercastle]

No but any account made in the last couple years are questionable

[nothercastle]

Idk how you find anything, it’s almost all spam on fb. There is no way to filter it out either.

[_heimdall]

I haven't run into a problem with spam marketplace listings. I do live in a pretty rural area though, may just not be a problem out here.

[bluGill]

Craigslist is still there. They only way to keep it around is make sure you use it.

[nerdponx]

You can use it, but you're swimming upstream if you do. Fewer buyers, fewer sellers of things you might want to buy.

[bluGill]

Sure, but if you don't use it you just make that worse. Of course if Craigslist had died where you are then there is no choice. However where I live Craigslist is still active enough that I can afford to ignore anyone who isn't there.

[qup]

In some regions (mine) Craigslist never took off, and now is a ghost town.

I would estimate it gets less than 1% of the traffic of FB Marketplace, in terms of number of vehicles posted. And nearly all of them are car lots, not individuals.

[nothercastle]

In Seattle FB marketplace for cars is almost entirely dealer spam and totally useless. It totally depends on location.

Craigslist died for cars because you have to pay to post now

[nothercastle]

As a seller u don’t use it but as a buyer I go where the sellers are

[bluGill]

SMS and (to a lesser extend) email are not ways to communicate with distance friends. Someone I went to school with 30 years ago and haven't seen since isn't going to call me about their new grandkid, Facebook works well to share these types of pictures. SMS and email take too much effort, Facebook is much lower friction to share that and thus I find out, while if they uses SMS or email I wouldn't be on the list as they would give up before they got to my name in their contacts.

[ozim]

Someone who went with me to school 30 years ago and did not sent me an sms or some kind of message - is not my friend and I don’t care.

My distance friends have contact with me at least once a year and mostly at least once a month via WhatsApp.

I do not need feed for that and if someone is gone - it is gone I don’t have time to hunt down people who are not in contact with me anyway.

[reaperducer]

SMS and email take too much effort

If writing an e-mail to a friend is too much effort for you, then you're not a friend. You're an acquaintance, at best.

Low effort means low quality. If all you have to offer is low effort content, what makes you think anyone wants to read it?

Be less lazy.

[bluGill]

I'll accept Acquaintance. I still want some connection - we will meet again in person someday. However because they are that low and it will be years I need to put most of my effort into friends.

[0xEF]

Many of the replies are saying something similar, so I apologize, as I am not trying to call you out, but to better understand; ask yourself why you need to know about the grandkid of someone you went to school with 30 years ago.

So many of these things that we use to sell ourselves to hang on to social media tend to crumble under any honest scrutiny. This upsets people. I get it. I mentioned in another comment having dealt with a substance abuse problem in the past, and the same pattern emerged. I had a problem, but refused to recognize it, so I rationalized continuing down the same path by performing some mental gymnastics about why I needed to keep doing this thing. It was pretty eye-opening when I went through the exact same process during my time leaving Facebook a few years into my sobriety.

We are social creatures and social connection is undoubtedly important to our mental health. But like all things, it tends to be better in moderation. In the case of FB, is hearing about a grandkid from a distant acquaintance a meaningful relationship? Conversely, do the likes we might get from distant acquaintances on our post add value or fulfillment to our lives in any meaningful way?

I posit that when we engage with these unfulfilling interactions, we spread ourselves much too thin, causing stress and anxiety by drawing our energies away from relationships that are closer to home, in some cases maybe driving distance between them. Sure, I can only speak from my own experience, but I've yet to see anyone's life change for the worse when walking away from social media. Hence my concern about why people seem so desperate to stay, and make no mistake, from this perspective and the replies I generally see when this gets brought up, it's the same excuse-driven desperation I see in fellow alcoholics that resist recovery.

[nradov]

I don't need to know, but I want to know. Social media interactions doesn't cause me any stress or anxiety: rather the opposite. Most of us don't have problems with substance abuse or negative social media engagement. You shouldn't generalize from your own very limited experience or presume to give advice about things you don't understand.

[lumb63]

Does this desire to want to know things about people you no longer associate with, not strike you as strange? There is no actual communication here - on one end, there is someone who either has no group of people whom they feel care about their update, so they “share” it with everyone; or, they are so conceited as to think everyone on the entire internet cares. On the other end is someone who does not know what they want updates about, but knows that they want updates from some set of people (but does not want the updates enough to actually talk to those people). This mode of “communication” has for a long time struck me as very strange.

[jameshart]

Back in the previous century, people used to do things like post birth and wedding announcements in the local paper. If you had moved away it would not be unheard of for you to be sent a clipping of such a thing by a grandparent letting you know about an old schoolfriend or teacher or neighbor. Keeping in touch with the ongoing life trajectory of people you once knew has long been something people liked to do.

[bluGill]

I still associate with these people. I go to my high school reunion every 5-10 years. sometimes I go back home and run into them on the streets (not often but it happens). Because I see their pictures I recognize them - when you have not seem someone for 30 years you won't recognize them in person when you go to renew that connection, but if you see pictures you can talk to an old friend who life has drifted you part from. (as opposed to talking to a different group of friends and both of you leave wondering why the other didn't even show up as you were hoping to reminisce about something with them)

[RiverCrochet]

It strikes me as strange too. I understand wanting to believe your life is so important that you think the world at large needs to know, but the converse - truly desiring to be the receiving end of those announcements particularly of people you don't know very well - I cannot wrap my head around.

[nradov]

No, it strikes me as being completely normal.

[FredPret]

Exactly - social media is the perfect way to replicate that “town square” vibe our cavemen ancestors must’ve had to communicate with distant social connections, short of having an actual town square.

[Symbiote]

I use it for events.

It aggregates most of the small and large music and other events in the city into a single place, and shows me when a friend is "interested" or "going" to the event.

I have forgotten how we did this before Facebook. But there are many events only advertised on Facebook! For others, I'd need to check 20+ websites every week to keep up. RSS is no longer implemented on these sites, neither are aggregators like last.fm keeping up to date. (That's probably what I used before Facebook.)

My feed is about 30% content I've asked to see or would want to see, the rest junk (AI crap, far right rage, far left rage).

Two months ago I started a subscription to see if that would reduce the amount of junk, hopefully to zero, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference. It has probably hidden ads, but I had an adblocker anyway.

For a long time I've objected under GDPR to the tracking, which I think is why I get the mixture of political junk.

[nicklaf]

> My feed is about 30% content I've asked to see or would want to see, the rest junk (AI crap, far right rage, far left rage).

Since we both seem to use Facebook in the same way, I'll just point out that you can reduce the junk to 0% by skipping your timeline, and going to Feeds: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr

That will give you a feed of pages you've followed, and doesn't have any algorithmic or suggested content. I think the only pitfall is that it only shows you recently posted content.

[0xEF]

> I have forgotten how we did this before Facebook

Radio, newspaper, word-of-mouth, local bulletin boards, email and print newsletters, advertising posters, etc. I might be dating myself, but that's how we got word out about things in urban areas, back in the day.

The way I see it, as a person who has dealt with actual substance abuse and understands an addiction when it presents itself, we have collectively become hooked on social media and give ourselves all sorts of excuses as to why it's better than the way we used to keep in touch or get the word out. Every one of those excuses is really just us giving things up that we cannot get back (such as time and privacy), things that others profit greatly from exploiting, all cloaked in a Trenchcoat of Convenience.

It is likely very easy for you to advertise your music events with a few clicks, yes? It beats walking around town, posting bills and leaving flyers on corner store countertops...in terms of footwork, anyway. But we lose that connection with the community around us in exchange for the illusion of a broader network that is filled with superficial relationships, at best.

> But there are many events only advertised on Facebook!

And there's the rub. These event organizers are giving FB permission to dominate our lives and extract/exploit whatever it wishes from us simply because they wanted to do a little less footwork.

I used to go to local shows at least two or three times a month in my younger days, prior to FB or even MySpace and Friendster, for that matter. I never felt like I was missing any because I didn't hear about them, since it was not hard to catch wind of this or that venue's upcoming bookings. Even the punk shows, which sometimes were organized the day of, knew how to spread the word. We were all connected, but on a more personal level, and I seem to remember less in-fighting within the groups versus what I saw back when I used FB. Online, it seems like people are at each others throats with much more ease, perhaps driven by the social shield of a keyboard, which told me that maybe we were not really meant to be quite that connected with each other. Part of me blames the fatigue that came with our over-exposure to each other being the keystone to exploiting us on a mass scale, be it to sway political opinion, impose oppression or just sell us a product we never needed.

Social media changed our landscape, so it's pretty much impossible to go back to "the way things were," but none of us are expecting that, I think. We need new ways to spread the word, ways that don't exploit us as profitable and disposable soft product. Email could be a start. We beat that drum of email being filled with spam for so many years that it's hard to separate our views on email from that, despite spam filters being pretty darned good now, and various methodologies of mitigating spam to your primary inbox in the first place. There's at least a dozen newsletters I subscribe to and read because it's actually pretty darned convenient, now that my inbox is not filled with spam. Things have changed on that front, so where else have they improved? Is Bluesky a better option than Twitter? Would people still pick up flyers from the counter of a local pizza joint? Can we use VOIP numbers for SMS about local events so nobody's real phone number is being put on a list somewhere?

I see the problem and am open to solutions, but those solutions need to come from the people who think they need FB in their lives, I think.

[prinny_]

The answer is network effect and friction . It is hard to communicate to everyone on your friends list that moving forward they can reach you via email or text only. It’s going to work with close friends and family but other people that want to reach out will not be able to find you. And there are always cases when you want to connect (or be easy to find) with someone who is not a close acquaintance.

[0xEF]

I'm not trying to be combative, but that still seems like a very weak reason. And it's one that I used to use, not just with FB, but Twitter, IG and LinkedIn. They all held the same promise and failed to deliver it.

The idea that we need to be constantly networking is overblown, to say the least. When you step back and have an honest conversation with yourself about how much having access to these people you occasionally talk to benefits your life, it seems to be negligible at best. Certainly not something worth sticking around for, encouraging more and more privacy encroachment, targeted advertising, etc, adding undo stress and annoyance to your experience online and off.

Are we sure that we are not using the "stay connected" excuse to hide the fact that these things were designed to be addictive and we got sucked in by it? The only people benefiting from continued use are not users, but the advertisers and platform owners? Is there really anyone on that list where your life would be worse off for not ever interacting with them again? Are there other ways of making yourself just as accessible on the off chance a stranger wants to collaborate with you on something, such as a contact email in a GitHub profile or personal webpage that would satisfy whatever net positive you think you are getting from doing the same on FB? These are not easy questions to answer, but when we start drilling down, our excuses for sticking around start to fall apart and our control for being their gets exposed in ways that we maybe don't like.

edit: fixed some autocorrect errors from mobile

[prinny_]

I should had clarified my case a bit better. I am a writer. People that I don't know (or know very little about) contact me to invite me to book festivals, propose collaboration on some presentation, reach out to ask stuff about what I write, inform me about updates that I need to follow, coverage that I am included in or interviews that they would like me to give. There is no other way to facilitate this communication other than to have an easily discoverable profile on a social media platform. Could I do it any other way? Sure, I could print my email on my books or leave it to people to reach out to my publisher to get my contact info. But that adds friction. I could create a webpage for my work, but that means people have to visit it to stay up to date. I could create a newsletter, that I would have to keep up to date and that people would never check, alongside the other hundreds of newsletter mail they don't check.

On top of that I also follow other people's work, festivals, book fairs, interviews, publications etc. They also post everything on Facebook (some on Instagram as well). There is no other option to stay in touch with this circle of people if you are not on social media.

I dislike Meta and I agree that the social media have deteriorated considerably from what they supposedly promise to offer. But they are still better than the alternatives.

[parpfish]

People got used to a passive “push” model for staying in touch that they forget the norm used to be “pull”.

Now you just passively absorb updates from people to stay factually informed but don’t directly engage with one another.

With email/sms, you can just ask somebody “hey what’s up?” And get their big updates. It’s more active and requires some more investment but that’s a good thing for making stronger relationships.

And for all those distant connections that you follow on FB but don’t want to talk to… you can ask your real friends “hey, have you anything about so-and-so?”

[bluGill]

Those models don't work for distant friends. I should call my mom more often. However nobody would call someone they were distant friends with 20 years ago to talk about their kids sports game - but 10 seconds to see those pictures on Facebook is still appreciated. When that is what Facebook does it is valuable.

[parpfish]

what's the point in seeing photos of a kids sports game if you are so uninterested in maintaining a relationship that you'd never consider chatting with the person? at that point, it may as well be a parasocial relationship with a celebrity where you look at photos of their life and say "wow, i'm so glad i've connected with them".

there's a difference between being informed about the goings-on in somebody's life (which social media browsing/posting can help with) and actually having relationships with people.

[bluGill]

The point is to have something to talk about at the next reunion. It won't be for several more years, but I do plan on connecting again. Remember these pictures take only seconds to view, but they ensure when I next meet that person we have some place to start from when talking.

[tokioyoyo]

Your argument holds a weight only if you already think that “Facebook/IG is bad for keeping in touch”. For almost any average person, that just doesn’t matter. Privacy, targeted ads, “benefits of networking for your future” are things that only us, extremely fringe group of people, care about. My parents? Never. My non-techie friends? I don’t think they know what “targeted ads” even mean.

[nradov]

Your reasons are even weaker. We don't need to be constantly networking but for better or worse, Meta platforms have become the only remaining effective ways to get updates from a large group of extended family and friends spread out all over the world. Like if my second cousin in Indiana has a baby I'd like to know, and I didn't think they're going to announce it via email.

[Kiro]

I don't understand why people are downvoting you when you're just explaining the reason why. Judging by the sentiment and aggressive downvoting in this thread one would think using anything else than email and text is completely abnormal. Fwiw I don't know a single person using email outside of work and the only texts people get are appointment reminders.

[downsplat]

Don't people use whatsapp in your corner of the world? Over here in Europe all of that happens over whatsapp, which is still a Meta property at the end of the day, but one that hasn't been enshittified with off-network crap or algorithmic feeds... so far!

[Kiro]

I presume GP thinks it's equally unnecessary considering they specifically mentions email and SMS.

[freehorse]

What is the big difference between messaging apps and sms? They are both forms of semi-synchronous communication via texting. SMS in many cases incures charges, moreover messaging apps actually do not necessarily require using an actual phone, or even _having_ a phone, which is a big plus in my book.

[freehorse]

Events and groups/communities (eg hobby, housing etc related). Otherwise I do not "follow" any of my actual (or not) friends.

[Kiro]

How is SMS easier? I can't easily access it on the desktop or the browser. Group SMS chats seem to be non-standard if possible (never seen anyone use it). Sharing things such as photos and videos through SMS is still a broken mess.

[reaperducer]

How is SMS easier? I can't easily access it on the desktop or the browser.

As someone in the Apple ecosystem, I find SMS much easier when using it from Apple's desktop Messages program.

It's not ideal that not everyone has that opportunity, but don't make the mistake of thinking that your experience is the only experience.

It's also a bit strange, because back when I was making the transition from Wintel to Macintosh – this was before the iPhone – there were many programs that would link your desktop with your phone via Bluetooth so you could send and receive SMS messages. Do they no longer exist?

[Kiro]

> but don't make the mistake of thinking that your experience is the only experience

I'm literally responding to someone claiming it's easier across the board. I'm not the one making that mistake.

> Do they no longer exist?

That sounds really complicated compared to just opening a web page. Besides, my computer doesn't even have a Bluetooth connection.

[reaperducer]

That sounds really complicated compared to just opening a web page.

It's actually less complicated than using a web page because you just start the SMS/iMessage program, and it's there ready to go. With a browser you have to start the browser and then tell it to go to Facebook. Then open the messaging portion of Facebook. Three times a many steps.

Besides, my computer doesn't even have a Bluetooth connection.

That's interesting to me. I didn't think any computer made in the last 20 years didn't have Bluetooth. What kind is it?

[nick__m]

  That's interesting to me. I didn't think any computer made in the last 20 years didn't have Bluetooth. What kind is it?

When you assemble your own computer wifi and Bluetooth are still completely optional.

[reaperducer]

He's too lazy to write an email. He's probably too lazy to build a computer.

Unless building your own computer is like LEGO now. It's been a few years since I've needed to do it.

[spacechild1]

In my case:

1. stay in touch with all sorts people around the world (who are not family, close friends or colleagues). Basically like an extended address book.

2. advertize events to many people in a certain area. Conversely, I regularly find out about events on FB.

The FB timeline has become a complete shitshow and I stopped engaging. I really wish there were good replacements for my last remaining use cases...

[TheSkyHasEyes]

Friends and relations afar.