| HN Mirror

Because the entire rest of society has wrapped itself around Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram. It is easy to be a free software purist until you need to know if your child's school has a snow day. Websites and mailing lists are dead. I cannot be involved in my child's school or any of the informal social networks around the parents and teachers without using Meta's platforms. I cannot volunteer at a non-profit I care deeply about without using Meta's platforms, because that's what they have to coordinate.

Are you going to suggest to me that I should force them onto Signal and a pile of other DIY platforms? I dare you. Look a burned out parent in their bloodshot eyes first.

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shrimp-chimp 359 days ago

I live in a mostly rural part of Norway, and I have had a very similar experience with a volunteer group I cared deeply about. I created a Facebook account solely to access two groups they used to coordinate events. Initially it worked, but over time, Facebook’s algorithms stopped showing me new posts at the top. Since I was not an active user, I missed important messages and caused real frustration, both for others and for myself. Trying to explain why I was not seeing the content was more awkward than simply saying, “Sorry, I am not on Facebook.”

Eventually, I decided to step away. This was partly because I was not willing to engage more deeply just to make the platform work properly, and partly because of personal circumstances, such as having twins. After deleting my account, I noticed a significant reduction in stress.

These days, my children’s kindergarten uses a dedicated app to communicate with parents, and their sports club uses another (Spond, which seems fairly common in Norway). However, when I try to connect more informally with other parents, the conversation almost always leads back to Facebook, Messenger, or "insta". Even when people express understanding or sympathy for my choice to avoid those platforms, exchanging phone numbers or using alternatives rarely leads to real communication. It feels as if, socially, I cease to exist if I am not part of those groups.

So no, I would not suggest trying to push others onto Signal or similar platforms. I relate to your experience completely. Although we may have made different choices, the underlying challenge is the same: wanting to participate meaningfully, but finding that the tools we're expected to use often come with a cost we are not willing to pay.

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mousethatroared 359 days ago

No, it's because people don't care.

I have three kids. Sure it's not easy, buying used local things is basically impossible, but it's not terribly hard. You just work around it

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coliveira 359 days ago

Nobody can be forced to use these apps. If you don't want, they will find some other way, I personally only respond to email.

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scott_w 359 days ago

Then you’ll be excluded from a lot of groups and social activities without even knowing. That might be an acceptable trade off for you but it's a trade off nonetheless.

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coliveira 358 days ago

I'm not in high school to be afraid of being "excluded" from some social activities.

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scott_w 358 days ago

And that’s fine, just pointing out that if you were part of a sports club, parents group, whatever, you’re relying on someone keeping you in the loop and making your life harder if you want to be part of it. I don’t judge, I just don’t see why you think it’s immature to want to have a social life.

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closewith 359 days ago

There are parts of the world that run on WhatsApp. In Brazil it is impossible to live a normal life without it, as absolutely everything from shopping to parking to healthcare is managed through WhatsApp specifically.

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bdangubic 359 days ago

I have same situation and:

- tell parents and teachers I can be reached at xxx-xxx-xxxx if they need anything

- absolutely never had meta-requirement to volunteer. if I did I would 100% know my time there is better spent elsewhere

I am not going to suggest you anything except to tell you that you can live a beautiful live outside of the meta-world. it is super easy

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lukan 359 days ago

"I am not going to suggest you anything except to tell you that you can live a beautiful live outside of the meta-world. it is super easy"

Great it is super easy for you, but why do you think your individual experience is valid for other people (who might be thousands of km away in a very different setting)?

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bdangubic 359 days ago

it may not be but I’ve also heard this excuse a million times before. and whatever the situation is meta products can be avoided. we just have a tendency to give into “hey, we have WhateverSupApp group, why don’t you just install garbage on your phone to be a member of this cool group… thanks, but no thanks :)

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koakuma-chan 359 days ago

Not Meta, but I bump into IRL things that require a Google account all the time, and they won't even negotiate. Get a Google account or get out.

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tokioyoyo 359 days ago

Because super vast majority of the population doesn't care. You can just look at the leaks from the last decade and its outcomes. Every company that deals with socials also know that people only care about their privacy within their own small circle. As in, they only care about privacy within their own small bubbles.

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philistine 359 days ago

Imagine a small local non-profit with 5000 likes on their page. They might be trying their darnedest to improve their newsletter numbers, but they still need to be on Facebook.

Imagine that times a billion.

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bdangubic 359 days ago

meta has made everyone believe that only through their platform can you grow your non-profits and whatnots. and they are obviously great at this, everyone bought that shit. you can organically grow (especially small) non-profits without fucking meta apps.

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vkou 359 days ago

Easily.

The alternatives are also probably up to the same sketchy shit, so your choices are to be a hermit, or accept that your services will spy on you.

If you want to participate in society, you have to either trust a very large list of untrustworthy people... Or acknowledge that they are untrustworthy, and mitigate accordingly. Part of that mitigation is accepting the possibility that if the Mossad want to murder you by blowing up your toaster, nobody's going to stop them.

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dml2135 359 days ago

> Part of that mitigation is accepting the possibility that if the Mossad want to murder you by blowing up your toaster, nobody's going to stop them.

People are not accepting that possibility, they are assuming it will not happen to them and that they are not a target of interest.

Change that assumption and attitudes toward privacy also change.

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bdangubic 359 days ago

don’t use any alternatives. I have been off social media for years now and my life and health and relationships and career and … have improved so much I cannot put it in words. even if one says “well that’s crazy, I must get my dopamine through an “app” on my phone meta is on another level of insanity to even consider infesting your life and especially your loved one’s life

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theshackleford 359 days ago

Checking out of society or any number of other activities you don't feel a huge need for may work for you. You are not everyone and what works for you may not be appropriate for any other individual or group of individuals.

> I have been off social media for years now and my life and health and relationships and career and … have improved so much I cannot put it in words.

It sounds like you personally had a problem. Congratulations I suppose on solving it. However, I have no such issues. My life, health and relationships are all already where I want them to be, and are not impacted by occasional interaction with others through technology as luckily, I have had no such struggles with self control or moderation.

My relationships would be impacted on the other hand if I was to throw a big toddler tantrum about using whatsapp for two weeks whilst i'm overseas with my employer and twenty other people. So i'm probably not going to do that.

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vkou 359 days ago

Sure, I can also avoid putting chemicals on my body by washing my hair with apple cider vinegar and baking soda, and I can also churn my own butter by hand, and if mom wants to hear from me, she can cross an international border and drive for five hours, with her travels being logged by countless security and traffic cameras, gas station payment processors, and no less than two governments, so that she can converse with me in person in my RF-shielded, copper-lined[1] Faraday-cage basement.

There's social media use and there's social media use. Hacker News, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, EMail, and my phone's SMS systems all serve dramatically different purposes, and all of them are a varied mix of pros and cons and risks.

---

[1] Any Arcanist worth his salt knows that copper has no name, and thus cannot be turned against you.

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dh2022 359 days ago

Hyperbole much? The only social network I use is HN. As a matter of fact last week I was chaperoning a middle school parade. The other chaperones wanted to make a WhatsApp chat group t0 keep in touch during the parade - which I rejected as a matter of principle; so we did a phone chat group. I do not wash my hair with vinegar or do any of the other nonsense you mentioned.

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bdangubic 359 days ago

this is too funny how you mind believes social media is “advancement in society” of any kind… don’t blame you though, you are with the majority (and you know what they say when you are… :) )

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vkou 359 days ago

I believe nothing of the sort about social (or mass) media.

I do, however, believe that you aren't engaging with what I'm saying, or recognizing some very obvious logical holes in your arguments. Your argument seems to be one of dogma, not one of reason.

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sellmesoap 358 days ago

Can confim: baking soda and vinagur work great for hair washing.

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x0x0 359 days ago

Signal lagged so far in polish and features that getting friends and family to use it was doa. So I can choose to communicate with friends and family on the apps they use, or I make it very difficult for them to communicate with me.

That ends with them mostly not communicating with me, not with them switching apps.

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bdangubic 359 days ago

don’t your friends and family have phone numbers? I have right now 12 active groups on my text messages. why on earth do you need “app”??! I am lost …

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x0x0 359 days ago

Group messaging via sms is terrible. So is photo sharing.

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bdangubic 359 days ago

all these are easy excuses… you are here on HN, probably some dope SWE doing amazing shit, I am sure you are more than capable of solving any “picture sharing” problem that is an issue with SMS.

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x0x0 359 days ago

I am not capable of solving shitty downscaled image sharing; flakiness with mms message receipt (esp photos) both on tmobile and verizon; and even worse downscaled video sharing. Because those cannot be addressed by anyone but the telcos.

Nor the inability to add people to groups. sms doesn't have groups; it has pools of numbers. And it works terribly when, eg, one of you is traveling or living outside the US.

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bdangubic 359 days ago

really? what are you missing, emojis by Kim Kardashian for $19.99 per month?

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closewith 359 days ago

> I have right now 12 active groups on my text messages.

You're definitely in a minority. Most people send and receive zero non-MFA related SMS.

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vkou 359 days ago

You're using a telephone to call and message people?

If you think that your phone provider isn't spying on you, I would like to cut you into an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity in some Louisiana waterfront property.

All I need is your phone number, mother's maiden name, ...

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bdangubic 359 days ago

sure, NSA might be :) but not Meta…

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x0x0 359 days ago

And China. And likely lots of other nations.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/chinese-hackers-stole-...

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mywrathacademia 359 days ago

Signal can’t be trusted

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bdangubic 359 days ago

I agree, I think you should just go with tried&true trusted apps made by guy who could not get laid in high school and is trying to compensate for that by fucking with you and all your loved ones that install his shitware on their phones :)

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mgraczyk 359 days ago

I was around for a lot of these. In none of these cases did Meta lie. They are all either fake or honest mistakes that Meta never lied about.

For the second one in particular, Meta never listened to anyone's mic. I would know, I worked on this stuff there at that time.

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EGreg 358 days ago

Interesting, you say Facebook didn’t listen to anyone’s audio, yet they themselves admit their contractors routinely did: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/13/facebook-...

They even paid them to do transcribe chats: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-13/facebook-...

And this is just the publicly known stuff. So perhaps you weren’t privy to everything?

So Facebook (not Meta at the time) just “forgot” to turn off the camera after they were done with it? Sounds reasonable… except wait, they were actively re-activating it while you were scrolling, and until iOS 14 users were none-the-wiser. If it was an honest mistake, do you think FB testers would have not caught it during the MONTHS between iOS 14 developer preview and release? And yet, for this one I do think it was probably a bug about when to activate the camera.

https://medium.com/macoclock/apples-ios-14-catches-facebook-...

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mgraczyk 358 days ago

Actually not even that. What happened was we added a mechanism to preload the camera to reduce startup time. And it was not gathering any data

You're confusing the audio calls with secretly listening to microphone, which never happened

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eesmith 359 days ago

Are you doing one of those 'a lie requires intention, and we can't know their internal state of mind, so we can't know if something is a lie unless they tell us' things?

Do you consider misrepresentation a lie?

If there's a lawsuit which determines that Meta misrepresented something, do you consider that a lie, even if Meta says it was merely on honest mistake made in good faith?

If the European Commission "fines Facebook €110 million for providing misleading information about WhatsApp takeover" and that "contrary to Facebook's statements in the 2014 merger review process, the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook and WhatsApp users' identities already existed in 2014, and that Facebook staff were aware of such a possibility" then that statement was not actually a lie, right, because no one at Facebook said they lied, correct?

Can you give an example of any company which has lied, but where the company officials have never agreed with that conclusion?

There is a long history in the US of companies having to pay a fine but never accepting responsibility. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/paying-a-fine-bu...

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mgraczyk 354 days ago

I don't think they misrepresented anything. The European Commission is wrong on the facts. Technology improved in unpredictable ways.

Large public companies do not lie very often because it's incredibly easily for lies to be discovered, and the penalties are high. There are many examples where the popular narrative is the the company lied, but when you look at details it becomes clear that no lying occurred.

For example, David Rainey probably did not actually lie about the extent of the BP oil spill even though most people still believe he did. He was acquitted by a jury who had access to far more information, and more time to think about it, than anyone else.

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