[stevenj]

Several of my friends have quit Facebook. Many on multiple occasions.

Nearly all of them have eventually come back. Many of them multiple times.

I think the ones who are still gone will come back sometime.

Some inevitably won't.

But I think the number of people who dislike Facebook enough to never want to use it are in the extreme minority. I think most people just don't think about whether it's evil or not. It's just where they message their friends, upload and view photos, and keep track of upcoming events.

The author of the post references his kids. Someday, his kids will probably be embarrassed by their dad and grow somewhat distant from him as they grow up. Most of the time, though, I think people realize that family is important and so I'll bet that his kids will rediscover the value of their father's love.

Facebook is like your online social homebase. You leave it, travel different places, see new things, meet new people, but it's what you come home to. It's a part of your identity as it serves as an online archive of your life. And for many of its users this archive started pretty early.

In 20 years, I think I'll be happy that I have my Facebook to look back through.

[deveac]

>Facebook is like your online social homebase. You leave it, travel different places, see new things, meet new people, but it's what you come home to. It's a part of your identity as it serves as an online archive of your life.

I really do agree with this.

I detest Facebook's attitude towards privacy. I've got my account on complete lockdown. Friends and family lament that they can't post to my wall, and that I don't post at all. Ever. I've never 'liked' anything to my knowledge. I've had the same three or so pictures on my profile for years, and I've never posted a status update once.

But you know what? Everybody I've ever known and still care to is on there, in my friends list. Paradoxically, it is Facebook's relentless pursuit of building the social graph (privacy be damned) that allowed it to crawl the address books of almost everyone I've ever known and let them track me down and attempt to friend me. Friends from middle school who I've wondered about for years. Right there. Family members whose contact information I'd never have tracked down. Right there. An entire database of all the people I could possibly care about and care to contact in my lifetime (even if it's just once every few years) is right there. All of this with zero effort expended from me.

Last year I was in NYC and was lamenting the loss of an old phone with a lot of contact numbers from friends who had moved out of state or I had otherwise lost touch with. I particularly wanted to meetup with one friend who had moved out to run a museum, but no longer had her number or email handy. I suddenly remembered "Oh wait. Everybody is on Facebook whether they use it or not." Fired it up, searched her name, found it, sent a message with my number, and 8 minutes later she called me for drinks.

That is great. That is useful and relevant to me. Facebook is a social home base. For me it is like the ultimate address book that self-populates and bombards you with tremendous amounts of noise that you wade through when you open it to do what you came there to do, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a very real value.

[tatsuke95]

>"but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a very real value."

You do a good job of demonstrating how Facebook has real, practical value for social lives.

The problem is with the commercial value. The better the user-experience, the worse the commercial value. Can the worlds of social and commercial value co-exist, over lengths of time as long as 20 years? I'm not sure.

[deveac]

Precisely. My anecdote is little comfort to a platform looking to extract value from its users by targeting ads at them.

But it's better than nothing. At least I'm sticking around for the opportunity for them to someday extract value from me. If they didn't have this hook, I'd abandon the site completely. Compare that to something like MySpace in its heyday, which never had anybody's real life social network on there in any meaningful sense. Absolutely nothing to keep them there, and leave they did.

[jamesbritt]

Facebook is like your online social homebase. You leave it, travel different places, see new things, meet new people, but it's what you come home to. It's a part of your identity as it serves as an online archive of your life. And for many of its users this archive started pretty early.

Indeed, it's like my space.

[ryandvm]

Man, I can't even imagine what Facebook would look like after 20 more years of them abusing user privacy. They will probably have their own line of video-enabled shower faucets by then...

[patrickk]

"Want free showers? Tell your friends!"

small print- with frictionless sharing of video live streaming to the web. Don't worry, only your friends, family and work colleagues will see it, no random strangers.

[libraryatnight]

I quit Facebook because I felt the value of what was being collected wasn't really worth saving. Sure, there were occasional birth announcements, and other neat life events, but ultimately most of my timeline was people posting bored comments while they were waiting or about to go do something, people posting pictures that were rather mundane (pictures of food, pictures of new purchases, etc), linking memes, game spam, and telling each other happy birthday. I don't feel I will really care about a vast majority of that in 20 years.

Also, and this is not true for everyone since some are careful to select who is on their Facebook, but I found after leaving that the truly important people in my life stay connected regardless of Facebook. A lot of what was on my Facebook was noise, and relationships that only exist because of and on Facebook.

[alberich]

I quit it too. Besides the high amount of garbage that people were posting, I thought that the privacy controls really sucked.

It's like you have to anticipate everything you or other people will say to you and somehow create your privacy rules, so that only the right people will see the stuff.

For me, facebook was pretty much like TV. A nice way to waste my time doing nothing. I felt weird when I quit facebook, there is a lot of social pressure for you to be part of it. But now I'm used to it :)

[lh7777]

I can't believe that anyone really thinks Facebook, at least in anything close to its current form, will still exist in 20 years. It'll just be something we all nostalgically laugh about from time to time, just like AOL or Geo Cities.

[eclipxe]

...or myspace or friendster or orkut or tribes.net or ...

[kintamanimatt]

So maybe quitting Facebook is like quitting cigarettes. It usually takes multiple attempts, cold turkey, to be successful.

[iskander]

I've been off facebook for half a year but I'm still tempted to return. There isn't a good alternative for sharing photos with a group of friends, though hopefully something will emerge.

[e40]

I've taken to posting photos on google's picasa web and marking them unlisted, then posting a link on facebook. It's not perfect, but when I tried to get everyone I want to view the pictures to get a free flickr account, it was just too hard. Only about 1/5 of them were able to understand and do it, and probably a small fraction of those that did every really checked for new pics.

The problem everyone has been trained on facebook and most have no reason to change. The people on HN don't like it, but the friends and relatives I have on facebook couldn't care less about the privacy and other issues. They just use it.

[jamesbritt]

...though hopefully something will emerge.

Something will only emerge if people insist others use it, just as people now insist others use Facebook.

Acquiescing to FB just perpetuates it.

[rlu]

I agree with your thoughts about having an archive to look back through in many years to come.

I'm in college right now and I can imagine in a few years looking back the messaging history (i.e. private conversations) will seem funny.

I dunno. I think there is something to be said about the whole archival nature of it. And Facebook knows this - it's sort of the entire reason behind Timeline.