Ask HN: How many of you aren't on facebook ?

11 points by KeepTalking ↗ HN
How many of you out there aren't on face book or other "social" networking sites ; I specifically mean sites such as facebook , myspace , orkut. It would be great if you could reason out too. I frequently hear about people quitting "FB" and wanted to understand what turns off ppl.

10 comments

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I created a facebook account a few years ago; looked around; decided that there wasn't anything interesting to see; logged out; and promptly forgot my password. I haven't heard anything since which makes me think that I'm missing anything.
Not on FB, MySpace, or Twitter. Accounts on all three lasted no more than a week. Reason? Spectacularly mundane way to interact with other humans who live dull lives.
I deactivated my Facebook account. It was a privacy thing, I suppose. There are probably only 20 people I feel totally comfortable with. There are about 100 people that I don't. It just got too awkward ignoring repeated friend requests.

If Facebook let me choose to be entirely hidden, except to those 20 people, and only let me initiate outgoing friend requests I'd reactivate my account. I know there are friend lists, but I don't think there's anyway to use them to do this.

[tldr; "a girl"]

I deactivated my fb because I didn't really use it. I'm not mr. social and I felt that if anyone needed to reach me and really wanted to reach me the extra effort was worth it. I especially didn't like this idea of mass fb invites. I don't want to be a checkbox on a list to get invited to a party. I know I know, its convenient, but I'm just stubborn like that.

Ok, mostly I deactivated my fb account because my last gf and I parted ways and it was not a good idea to have that absurd of a connection with someone you have to let go. - yes, blocking was not enough, I needed to drop off the face of the planet for a little while ...

Turns out its not that bad at all.

I am an edge case, people can have their facebook, I'm just the type of guy that rather have 2 lifetime ultra friends, rather then 3,000 facebooky friends. Is it mutually exclusive? Who knows.

Why don't people hand write letters any more? Because in a world of text messages and email its the hugest pain in the ass to hand write a letter. -Yeah.

And that is exactly the reason why any girlfriend of mine is going to get a damned hand written letter every now and then until the end of time.

-Yeah.

Not a one of them - all a silly waste of time and an accident waiting to happen for the unwary.
I only use Facebook and Hacker News (and a couple of forums: BoS and FreelanceSwitch). I use Facebook because all (yes, with no exception) my friends are their and we have fun commenting at videos or chatting. Sure I do control my time on FaceBook and the overall experience was always great.
I got kicked off. I was posting too many links. :-)
I've never had a Facebook or MySpace account. I am on LinkedIn because a former boss was all excited about it and asked everyone to sign up, but I rarely log in or update my profile
I am also on LinkedIn, and am linked to many of my current and past colleagues. However, we rarely use it communicate.
No Facebook, MySpace etc. and never have. I can not really find time for any more activities at the moment, online or offline, and Facebook is very low on priorities list so it does not make it. I guess I just see no benefits from having an account.

I have a LinkedIn account though - created when I was last looking for a job. I almost never login though, but sometimes people that know me in real life send invitations to join their network, and I accept. That pretty much sums my activities.