[darklajid]

That's a rather harsh argument and we could (not trying to derail this) proceed and say the same thing about people that use Google products, Twitter, WhatsApp, 'the cloud' etc. - and in the end we'll finally agree with Stallman.

I don't have a Facebook account and have to admit that I never truly understood the benefit, the appeal. It seemed full of ads, games, random pictures and without structure - i.e. you might read about people ranting about the current soccer game (I hate that), but miss an important update from a close friend.

Plus, as soon as email isn't a suitable format to exchange information, I have the impression that the communication is either too broad (shout to the public) or trivial (one liners about nonsense). I don't get it.

I DO get the network effect though. So while I agree with you that the 'why' might be hard to grasp, I don't like the stab at people's intellect. It doesn't matter if an individual is intelligent or not - not using a service that all your peers decided on using is hard.

Your last line about being severely judged by friends especially doesn't sit well with me.

For one, people might not judge you - they just might communicate less with you, forget you at times (because you're the one person that needs a mail or a text message or whatever).

And then there's the ridiculous 'find different friends' part. Seriously…

[lmm]

> Plus, as soon as email isn't a suitable format to exchange information, I have the impression that the communication is either too broad (shout to the public) or trivial (one liners about nonsense). I don't get it.

What do you do when you want to organize a party/group trip to a concert/etc. and invite several people?

* Email and reply-all? This means you annoy people who can't make it (they keep seeing all the replies), and people who are added to the list have to be re-added several times as people reply-all to old messages and leave them out.

* Create a mailman list for this specific event and require people to unsubscribe/resubscribe? That's a lot of overhead, and the UI is awful.

* Set up a website/blog for this one event? Even more overhead.

And none of the above approaches have decent calendaring integration - you can attach a .ics to an email but it's still a very manual process.

[darklajid]

Not sure if your question was real or merely a set-up for your bullet points. If the former:

Email. I don't tend to organize things with dozens of people on the list (for that I might be convinced that random mail threads might become cumbersome - I'm not convinced that FB is a solution!). If I want to go to a concert and discuss that with <= ten friends, mails are fine. That reply-all argument doesn't come up. If someone has to decline it's trivial for any participant to remove that address. Or he explicitly asks to be removed. Or - and that's probably the general case, that person doesn't care about a couple of emails and marks the thread as read. Done.

I don't claim that you make this issues up or that these things cannot be a nuisance for some people. I .. just don't have these problems, mails work just fine in all cases here.

I agree that a calendar is missing. I tend to use various things for that and don't have a good solution for this so far. Most of the time it's probably 'no calendar' and only a poll of sorts (think doodle or something similar).

[lmm]

Fair enough. I think other people tend to be happier with an "overflowing inbox" than I am; I ruthlessly prune mine (e.g. I don't sign up to mailing lists) to the point where any email should be important enough to interrupt me. And I find it particularly infuriating to keep getting emails about this cool party if I can't make it. But maybe that's just me.

[tdkl]

From my experience this is all depends on people in question. We've been experimenting in my circle of friends of about 20-30 people over these years with trying different solutions for event invitations : email, g+ events, FB events, SMS, various chat services.

The outcome was that some people simply aren't reliable to follow up if they're fine with the event terms or not, no matter what medium. It's not a tech problem, it's a people problem and everyone's responsible.

[psykovsky]

Maybe someone should do a startup with a service like that. It could be called Meetup.com or something.

[thoth]

I just remembered another thing Facebook lets you do that Meetup doesn't: have a virtual group.

All Meetup groups have to be face-to-face group with the intention of physically meeting, so if you want to organize your online play-by-email board games or whatever, or other groups that don't actually intend to meet very often (e.g. class alumni groups mostly for the purpose of distributing info), you can't have either of those be a Meetup group.

But Facebook doesn't care if you do that.

[thoth]

I've had 3 or 4 Meetup groups fold and migrate to Facebook, because Facebook offers basically the same features and some nice extras:

allows private/hidden groups (invite only; Meetup can hide the memberlist and require approval to join but the group existence is still searchable)

free (Meetup currently charges ~$70 for 6 months; source: I'm an organizer for a Meetup group and that's our semi-annual bill. I'm not sure if the scale slides based on membership numbers. I can't find the billing email for the exact number at the moment.)

While I do like Meetup and still use it, using Facebook for small group organization also makes sense.

[pmlnr]

maybe, but just maybe, paying cash is better than paying with every information available on your phone.

[thoth]

Phone? I didn't mention a phone; both Facebook and Meetup are entirely usable via their websites.

We have about 40-50 active and semi-active members (on Meetup), hold a fundraiser, and yet the organizers still have to chip in to make up the inevitable shortfall.

Whether or not to use Facebook (or Meetup for that matter) is something everybody gets to decide for themselves and preaching about what they should do is silly.

[__z]

Facebook groups don't require a cellphone. I participate in one (much to my dismay... but that's where the group is...) and I never "Facebook" on my cell phone - messenger, "app," website... none are loaded on my phone or ever used on my phone.

[lmm]

Meetup seems more oriented towards public events. I'm not offering an open invitation for random folks to come see [band], I'm trying to arrange it with these specific named friends. Who are already my friends on facebook (which is not to say we couldn't equally well become friends on meetup, but does it even have that functionality?).

[psykovsky]

Maybe they're missing on something if they have no such features.

[falcolas]

> and in the end we'll finally agree with Stallman

And that's a bad thing? If your friends get this much information out of messages you're sending them, how much does Facebook have? An individual employee at Facebook? An individual who compromises Facebook's servers? An advertiser who works with Facebook?

Agreeing with Stallman is a good way to start taking back control of what information is available out there about you - assuming that matters to you.

[darklajid]

Don't try to read too much into that comment of mine. I'm a Linux guy, hate G+, FB, WhatsApp etc. with a passion, subscribe to all things DDG.

The point I was trying to make is that one cannot/should not single out FB as anything special here (top-level comment) and that you probably end up somewhere on the privacy/freedom scale between 'posts restroom visits on social networks and shares the movie of ones wife giving birth' and RMS.

I personally lean towards the latter position. We're in agreement here. I wasn't bashing RMS, I was using him as THE example for someone trying to avoid all this nonsense.

[sixothree]

I am finding more and more that people who post on facebook feel like they've gone out of their way to inform you of something. Excluding yourself from facebook means excluding yourself from the events in their life.