Ultimately explainable by the fact that extremely few, possibly zero people actually live their life according to principles.
Everyone has their pet topic, everyone has their set of vices.
I don't have a Facebook account, but I do own a (non-electric) car. I'm very much aware of how bad it is. Giving it up would restrict my life dramatically, so I don't. (I'd love a Model 3 when they finally hit the UK).
Strangely this website comes pre-installed on every phone I buy, and I can't uninstall it; the best I can do is deactivate. How do I get rid of this "website"?
I haven't bothered to delete it because I'm not very exposed to privacy issue there (I don't given them much of anything to sell) I don't actively post much of anything at all, but within my family it is considered a social norm. I'm expected to occasionally check in and give a like to some posted photos, and send the obligatory "Happy <something> | <congratulations>" here and there.
> I'm not very exposed to privacy issue there (I don't given them much of anything to sell)
Facebook still likely has a lot of usage data about you. For example, they could make a profile of you based on the people you visit and interact with.
To share updates with my friends and family, buy used stuff on the marketplace, get info and be helpful to townspeople on town happenings from my town group (where I've also met some nice people that I now buy beef and eggs from), etc.
Nothing in recent history has changed any of it's utility for me.
But it isn't because I disagree with FB's politics. It's because all my friends (Europeans around 35 yo) just stopped using it.
They all moved to Instagram.
Facebook (the product) will be a desert by 3-5 years. However, Facebook Inc. had a lot of hindsight and bough Whatsapp and Instagram.
I commute via train every day. 99% of the phone screens are either Insta or Whatsapp.
Facebook Inc. wins.
PS: I miss Facebook (the product). I hate Insta. I loathe the fact that it's all pics and no text. I have no good way to share ideas or jokes with my friends. But if I want to know what my friends are up to, that is the app I have to use.
Excuse this old geezer, but.... how do you have discussions on instagram? how is instagram replacing groups and forums for people who share specific interests?
this "we don't use facebook anymore, we use instagram" seems for a narrow usecase.
Because nothing on my account is actually private.
I use fb mostly for groups (buy/sell groups, some technical knowledge sharing groups) and being up to date with band/companies news.
I accept only people I really know and like, but I rarely invite anyone first.
I don't "share my life" nor I look at other people posts about their lives (most of them haven't written a wall post in months anyway). I share "life stuff" with people in person and looks like most people are doing the same.
Oh, and while a lot of people use Messenger I completely don't. Not at all.
To not lie about Messenger: I use it on webpage directly as a private contact initiation when buying/selling stuff. We exchange telephone numbers and that's usually all.
And when somebody starts a random conversation (hadn't happen in a while) I just redirect them somewhere else.
I also keep away from FB/Messenger apps and I avoid visiting FB on phone.
On my pc I block trackers and stuff.
I think all of above is sane way of using Facebook.
Im part of a bunch of private beer raffle groups. It goes like this
1. Someone buys a rare and sought after beer (say, at a release they waited hours in line for)
2. They come up with a valuation
3. They post the beer for N spots in one of these groups (almost always 10 spots, 0-9)
4. Folks buy spots by claiming number
5. Everyone pays up
6. Once full, the next Illinois fireball pick 3 "fireball number" (0-9) that gets drawn decides winner
7 winner gets shipped their beer
These communities only exist on Facebook. And in that sense, fb works very well as a way to keep people honest (must use real accounts, must be vouched for to become a member)
Great. But, Facebook is surely collecting a shitton of data from you and the other beer group members and, possibly, selling it to data brokers, who, in turn, sell it to beer advertisement companies.
But he gets beer, so what if some beer companies know that he likes beer and decide to pay someone to know what kind of beer he's more willing to pay for?
I mean, what's the problem with some companies knowing what you like, if you're intending to pay for it anyway?
Facebook does have utility for making new friends. Just last night I was out at a bar, chatting to some people, and at the end we added eachother on Facebook. We need some kind of service like Facebook, just one which is fully encrypted and where the data is in the users hands.
How did you create a Telegram account without your real number or a number you control? You can create a username and avoid giving out your phone number to other people, if that's what you're referring to. This is not available with WhatsApp or Signal.
Telegram requires a phone number to create an account and to activate the account on additional devices. As an aside, Signal is also tied to a phone number. Wire is the only one that allows people to use email addresses to create accounts.
I honestly have not an account since an year but just for two reasons:
- all of my contacts stopped using it well before, basically their whole profiles were empty of any news, photo or share. They just used it to read some news from some groups
- I was still there because a group of my college was still active and I needed the contacts with some of those people. As soon as I didn't need them anymore I left
SW-eu seems a totally empty space for facebook for what I could see. New generations are directly ignoring it, old generations are not even using it, and my generation has just stopped to find it useful at all
I would like to request my data and delete, but severing the only mechanism I have for finding some people I know from previous academic programs is anxiety-inducing, so I avoid making a final decision.
I've been bearish on it for a while now. I think I've been pondering deleting my account since around 2011 or 2012.
I'm not sure when I last logged in.
To a lesser degree, it's also probably the only way I'll find out if a few former professors/mentors die. I am slowly discounting the value of this one because I visit so infrequently that I already only find these out if my spouse notices, or someone I stay in regular contact texts/emails about it. I should probably look into configuring search/news alerts for this, or something.
Honestly, public & private FB groups. Groups dedicated around specific subjects (mostly related to my career) have been some of the most influential places for learning, networking, building relationships that I've been able to call on later.
FB groups are king because:
1. Everyone is already there.
2. It's tied to your real identity (for the most part).
Other areas to learn/network and ask dumb/advanced questions exist, but to "community" vibe in FB groups is unrivaled.
My FB feed is almost nothing but groups posts. I've hidden/unfriended most people I don't care about and no one I've kept really posts to their actual pages much these days anyway.
I really wish Groups was a separate app. I'd keep that and messenger.
I realize my privacy on fb, and likely around the whole web is the tradeoff for this but unfortunately that's what's required to stay on. The advancements I've made in my career and personal life directly & indirectly due to the FB groups I'm in are definitely worth it, and likely would not have happened without the existence of FB groups.
Counterpoint — this depends on the area of interest and the people. That networking and being "anonymous" don't go well is not necessarily true always, and need not be true always. One can have a handle/username/name without revealing one's real name to everyone on Facebook, and yet reveal one's real name through other means (out of band communication) to specific people at specific times for specific needs.
Absolutely agree about the importance of unfollowing all but the very highest signal/noise ratio friends, which includes very interesting posters, and certain family members for whom nothing should be missed!
Add to that some aggressive ad blocking, element zapping, prioritisation of the notification window over the news feed, and use of the basic mobile site [http://mbasic.facebook.com/] and you've got an actually pleasant experience.
Three great features of the basic site are i) predictable middle click behaviour of links, ii) no infinite scroll so you get a very clear indication of when you're about to do more than 'just glance at the top', iii) audio/video links are to raw media files .
It would be great if you could clarify and be more specific about “what we know”...because so far I haven’t come across a single reason me and my friends should stop using Facebook.
Broad generalizations and statements don’t help the conversation
Sure, there is a lot of headlines with reasons...but I can’t remember a single one that wasn’t hugely out of context or debunked.
Groups is the only reason I signed up for FB three years ago. These groups are very important for my open-source projects and professional life. FB is the only platform that offers a common place where these diverse communities exist. Formerly, mailing lists and discussion forums like phpBB filled this need, but unfortunately FB has become the internet for many non-tech people. I have tried my best to lure members of these groups to free spaces that I have set up using software like Discourse. (And briefly, Flarum.) I've put hundreds of hours into building content within Discourse and providing support, but to no avail. It's simply too convenient for people to use Facebook, instead.
I'm really saddened by this development. The rich archives of mailing lists and forums from these communities from the 90's and 00's are still searchable online via a few old sites and archive.org. But all of our discussions and knowledge shared within FB seems to fall into a "black hole". Search functionality within groups is horrible. Not to mention that it's impossible to search if you're not logged into Facebook.
FB is a horrible place to build and share knowledge. But I haven't found a way to convince people to go elsewhere, nor have I found software that's convincing enough an alternative.
> unfortunately FB has become the internet for many non-tech people
I'm wondering if this is slightly changing? I'm in a non-profit and we have a FB group for us volunteers. However, messages posted there, are seen sometimes by only 10, sometimes by only 2, members. Out of maybe 40 in total. The FB group doesn't work, because FB doesn't show things posted there, in people's news feed. Instead, FB shows one's friends kittens, and vacation pics? And we're looking for other solutions. (see below)
Agree about the benefits with forums. Closer to 100% certain delivery (instead of 5% or 50% in the Facebook group), and searchable discussion topics, categorizable, taggable, nice formatting and nice full screen editor, various types of topics (question-answers, or HackerNews open-ended, or Slack like chat), weekly summary emails and announcements ... if using sth. better than Facebook.
> But all of our discussions and knowledge shared within FB seems to fall into a "black hole".
Exactly
> Search functionality within groups is horrible
Yes
Plus, Facebook is rather buggy I think. I start typing a chat message — Facebook doesn't save any draft, and the chat message text gets lost because of the-lost-update-bug which FB hasn't fixed. Plus, the chat message window is sometimes like 1x1 cm, on a 30'' screen. Crazy. Network lockin —> UX disaster :-/
> I haven't found a way to convince people to go elsewhere
It'd be interesting to maybe talk a bit about good ways to do that? :- )
> nor have I found software that's convincing enough an alternative.
I'd like us to try Talkyard (see my profile), which I'm developing, and it's like Flarum and Discourse (which you mentioned). However there's also built-in chat, and Question-Answers topics for quickly finding a solution, if one gets stuck e.g. at work, so one can find a solution and get back to work. ... Whilst FB instead does its best to distract everyone with ads and new things in the news feed.
I have two groups of friends who mostly communicate via private Facebook groups, and because I decided to travel for a few years, I don't see either group enough to know what they're doing without Facebook. The social penalty for deleting my account would be the potential loss of a lot of my relationship with a large chunk of my friends.
This also means that I don't use the feed, which is the primary source of Facebook's problems. I get an unfiltered list of posts my friends make, which is really all I ever wanted anyway.
I moved those groups to telegram and riot.im when I dropped my Facebook. I've found it nice to have a complete app dedicated to one group, nice to know exactly which type of notification I'm getting.
What I find interesting with this description is how anyone can be worried about losing “friends” when just changing the contact medium would result in losing them. There’s email, SMS, Signal, and yes: actual phones. Letters even.
A friendship is not endangered by a switch of context, while casual acquaintances may be lost. Friends are people who are mainly interested in you, not ones who choose theirs ranking by convenience of communication method. Any social media has a broadcast mentality to it, like it would be too cumbersome to stay in touch otherwise. This is not a new occurrence. It has always been easier to “stay in touch” with the people immediately surrounding you. However, following that definition, the people who are your best friends would be the people you spend the most time with, which are probably you co-workers.
Just imagine anyone taking the time to actually formulate a piece of personal writing, process thoughts before writing them down and in the end having to weigh what information to share or to write that letter at all, to have finite resources to write and to have to choose who is important and who is not. Instead of just flooding everyone with the same, probably curated and edited, information.
Then again, I’m probably not the intended target group of Facebook and similar networks. People also smoke, drink, take drugs, have unprotected sex with strangers, risk their lives in stupid endeavors and generally do highly illogical things on a constant basis.
I have family and friends all across the US and across the world. I like them all, and I like hearing about their lives, even in the silly little details. Social networks are the easy way to do that, and Facebook is the network everyone seems to use.
For people who are more misanthropic or introverted, or who don't value their connections as much (I mean that in a non-judgmental way), the utility of Facebook is probably a lot less. I think that's one of the big things I see on HN: a lot of people who hate Facebook partly because one of the main services it provides (maintaining long-distance social connections) isn't useful to them.
(And of course I could call/email/text/etc. many of these people one-on-one, and of course I do that, too, but Facebook is a useful supplement for major life announcements from more distant friends/acquaintances, as well as trivial little details from closer friends.)
I think it’s important to take a more active stand. My child joined a school sport this fall and the coach told us information will be provided on a private Facebook group. I told him I don’t use Facebook and demanded he also put the information elsewhere, which he did end up doing. I hope over time, as more people demand this, more people will float away from FB.
Too many of the social event/party/gathering things that I go to use Facebook events as the primary means of letting everyone know about the details (when, where, last minute changes, door code, etc.).
I have a need to connect with people on a couple of specific topics that I believe are very important, and unfortunately, Facebook is where most people are. So I use (only) Facebook groups. All the forums and message boards of the past are not where many people are. I stay away from my timeline and the news feed. I believe that the timeline is a useless stream of junk with people always arguing and fighting one another. Recently I noticed that Facebook has prioritized video content, and now the news feed is an endless stream of useless videos that auto play. This is not the result of personalization, because I do not react to people's posts or comments (and give hints to Facebook). It's as if Facebook intends to create its own version of a future based on Idiocracy (the movie). [1]
Facebook groups has some good features and has improved a lot for administrators over the last couple of years. But as dpau says in another comment here [2], search on Facebook and Facebook groups is terrible — it's worse than any bad web search engine one can think of. Most people end up posting the same posts and the same comments over and over again (this is not a Facebook-only issue, but the lack of good search makes enforcing "searching first as the norm" next to impossible). All the etiquette built around newsgroups and online forums over decades is nowhere to be seen on Facebook groups. Everybody seems to want to be spoonfed with answers, instantly.
As dpau says [2], Facebook as a place to store useful information for posterity is a lost cause. If, either intentionally or unintentionally, Facebook were to delete all content older than a week from groups and timelines right now, nothing will be missed! Facebook _is the place_ where content goes to die! I tell people to put their content elsewhere on the web and share the link on Facebook, but many people are loathe to do it, not understanding that their effort, knowledge and time are wasted so pitifully by an incompetent and arrogant corporation that doesn't care much about anything on the human side (except showing more videos to show more video ads to make more money).
I'm of the opinion that the sooner Facebook dies, the better off we'll be, even if there's no single alternative that fulfills all the features it offers.
Facebook is not only a sketchy company, but the FB product itself has also gotten continually worse. It's now a bloated mess absolutely plastered in ads and viral/scammy/politics-as-sports trash. Even the annoying autoplay "facebook trash" videos in the feed have interstitial ads now - i.e. ads inside of ads. The whole site has become a down-market cesspool that I have very little desire to use. That's ironic because I feel like FB got it's start because MySpace became a cesspool of trash and FB felt like the upscale alternative.
But all that being said, I still have a FB account so I can check in on family members who don't (yet) use something else. But even among that unhip group of older people, they are quickly drifting away to instagram and I barely ever check in on Facebook anymore.
It's an easy way to see what people are up to. Especially once you have kids it's not often you get to catch up with friends. And they aren't going to another service en masse.
It's also a way to see some random content, much like my LinkedIn. Just a bunch of articles and memes. I do find that it's low quality, often very political on the articles side. But the memes and jokes are okay.
It's gotten a lot less addictive over the years. Maybe I'll end up using it less and less naturally.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 87.8 ms ] threadEveryone has their pet topic, everyone has their set of vices.
I don't have a Facebook account, but I do own a (non-electric) car. I'm very much aware of how bad it is. Giving it up would restrict my life dramatically, so I don't. (I'd love a Model 3 when they finally hit the UK).
What are you fishing for?
I'm not judging you but it is honestly shocking to read Facebook's crisis framed as, "Sure it has problems but...".
I appreciate your honest feedback.
Strangely this website comes pre-installed on every phone I buy, and I can't uninstall it; the best I can do is deactivate. How do I get rid of this "website"?
Facebook still likely has a lot of usage data about you. For example, they could make a profile of you based on the people you visit and interact with.
I only keep the account to log in into various services.
They buy data direct from airlines and credit cards now.
Nothing in recent history has changed any of it's utility for me.
But it isn't because I disagree with FB's politics. It's because all my friends (Europeans around 35 yo) just stopped using it.
They all moved to Instagram.
Facebook (the product) will be a desert by 3-5 years. However, Facebook Inc. had a lot of hindsight and bough Whatsapp and Instagram.
I commute via train every day. 99% of the phone screens are either Insta or Whatsapp.
Facebook Inc. wins.
PS: I miss Facebook (the product). I hate Insta. I loathe the fact that it's all pics and no text. I have no good way to share ideas or jokes with my friends. But if I want to know what my friends are up to, that is the app I have to use.
this "we don't use facebook anymore, we use instagram" seems for a narrow usecase.
I use fb mostly for groups (buy/sell groups, some technical knowledge sharing groups) and being up to date with band/companies news.
I accept only people I really know and like, but I rarely invite anyone first.
I don't "share my life" nor I look at other people posts about their lives (most of them haven't written a wall post in months anyway). I share "life stuff" with people in person and looks like most people are doing the same.
Oh, and while a lot of people use Messenger I completely don't. Not at all.
And when somebody starts a random conversation (hadn't happen in a while) I just redirect them somewhere else.
I also keep away from FB/Messenger apps and I avoid visiting FB on phone.
On my pc I block trackers and stuff.
I think all of above is sane way of using Facebook.
Im part of a bunch of private beer raffle groups. It goes like this
1. Someone buys a rare and sought after beer (say, at a release they waited hours in line for) 2. They come up with a valuation 3. They post the beer for N spots in one of these groups (almost always 10 spots, 0-9) 4. Folks buy spots by claiming number 5. Everyone pays up 6. Once full, the next Illinois fireball pick 3 "fireball number" (0-9) that gets drawn decides winner 7 winner gets shipped their beer
These communities only exist on Facebook. And in that sense, fb works very well as a way to keep people honest (must use real accounts, must be vouched for to become a member)
Yeah its a niche, but it's my niche.
You are the product.
I mean, what's the problem with some companies knowing what you like, if you're intending to pay for it anyway?
Telegram requires a phone number to create an account and to activate the account on additional devices. As an aside, Signal is also tied to a phone number. Wire is the only one that allows people to use email addresses to create accounts.
- all of my contacts stopped using it well before, basically their whole profiles were empty of any news, photo or share. They just used it to read some news from some groups
- I was still there because a group of my college was still active and I needed the contacts with some of those people. As soon as I didn't need them anymore I left
SW-eu seems a totally empty space for facebook for what I could see. New generations are directly ignoring it, old generations are not even using it, and my generation has just stopped to find it useful at all
I've been bearish on it for a while now. I think I've been pondering deleting my account since around 2011 or 2012.
I'm not sure when I last logged in.
To a lesser degree, it's also probably the only way I'll find out if a few former professors/mentors die. I am slowly discounting the value of this one because I visit so infrequently that I already only find these out if my spouse notices, or someone I stay in regular contact texts/emails about it. I should probably look into configuring search/news alerts for this, or something.
FB groups are king because:
1. Everyone is already there. 2. It's tied to your real identity (for the most part).
Other areas to learn/network and ask dumb/advanced questions exist, but to "community" vibe in FB groups is unrivaled.
My FB feed is almost nothing but groups posts. I've hidden/unfriended most people I don't care about and no one I've kept really posts to their actual pages much these days anyway.
I really wish Groups was a separate app. I'd keep that and messenger.
I realize my privacy on fb, and likely around the whole web is the tradeoff for this but unfortunately that's what's required to stay on. The advancements I've made in my career and personal life directly & indirectly due to the FB groups I'm in are definitely worth it, and likely would not have happened without the existence of FB groups.
Why would you prefer this, versus anonymity-by-default on somewhere like Reddit?
Add to that some aggressive ad blocking, element zapping, prioritisation of the notification window over the news feed, and use of the basic mobile site [http://mbasic.facebook.com/] and you've got an actually pleasant experience.
Three great features of the basic site are i) predictable middle click behaviour of links, ii) no infinite scroll so you get a very clear indication of when you're about to do more than 'just glance at the top', iii) audio/video links are to raw media files .
Broad generalizations and statements don’t help the conversation
Sure, there is a lot of headlines with reasons...but I can’t remember a single one that wasn’t hugely out of context or debunked.
I'm really saddened by this development. The rich archives of mailing lists and forums from these communities from the 90's and 00's are still searchable online via a few old sites and archive.org. But all of our discussions and knowledge shared within FB seems to fall into a "black hole". Search functionality within groups is horrible. Not to mention that it's impossible to search if you're not logged into Facebook.
FB is a horrible place to build and share knowledge. But I haven't found a way to convince people to go elsewhere, nor have I found software that's convincing enough an alternative.
I'm wondering if this is slightly changing? I'm in a non-profit and we have a FB group for us volunteers. However, messages posted there, are seen sometimes by only 10, sometimes by only 2, members. Out of maybe 40 in total. The FB group doesn't work, because FB doesn't show things posted there, in people's news feed. Instead, FB shows one's friends kittens, and vacation pics? And we're looking for other solutions. (see below)
Agree about the benefits with forums. Closer to 100% certain delivery (instead of 5% or 50% in the Facebook group), and searchable discussion topics, categorizable, taggable, nice formatting and nice full screen editor, various types of topics (question-answers, or HackerNews open-ended, or Slack like chat), weekly summary emails and announcements ... if using sth. better than Facebook.
> But all of our discussions and knowledge shared within FB seems to fall into a "black hole".
Exactly
> Search functionality within groups is horrible
Yes
Plus, Facebook is rather buggy I think. I start typing a chat message — Facebook doesn't save any draft, and the chat message text gets lost because of the-lost-update-bug which FB hasn't fixed. Plus, the chat message window is sometimes like 1x1 cm, on a 30'' screen. Crazy. Network lockin —> UX disaster :-/
> I haven't found a way to convince people to go elsewhere
It'd be interesting to maybe talk a bit about good ways to do that? :- )
> nor have I found software that's convincing enough an alternative.
I'd like us to try Talkyard (see my profile), which I'm developing, and it's like Flarum and Discourse (which you mentioned). However there's also built-in chat, and Question-Answers topics for quickly finding a solution, if one gets stuck e.g. at work, so one can find a solution and get back to work. ... Whilst FB instead does its best to distract everyone with ads and new things in the news feed.
This also means that I don't use the feed, which is the primary source of Facebook's problems. I get an unfiltered list of posts my friends make, which is really all I ever wanted anyway.
A friendship is not endangered by a switch of context, while casual acquaintances may be lost. Friends are people who are mainly interested in you, not ones who choose theirs ranking by convenience of communication method. Any social media has a broadcast mentality to it, like it would be too cumbersome to stay in touch otherwise. This is not a new occurrence. It has always been easier to “stay in touch” with the people immediately surrounding you. However, following that definition, the people who are your best friends would be the people you spend the most time with, which are probably you co-workers.
Just imagine anyone taking the time to actually formulate a piece of personal writing, process thoughts before writing them down and in the end having to weigh what information to share or to write that letter at all, to have finite resources to write and to have to choose who is important and who is not. Instead of just flooding everyone with the same, probably curated and edited, information.
Then again, I’m probably not the intended target group of Facebook and similar networks. People also smoke, drink, take drugs, have unprotected sex with strangers, risk their lives in stupid endeavors and generally do highly illogical things on a constant basis.
For people who are more misanthropic or introverted, or who don't value their connections as much (I mean that in a non-judgmental way), the utility of Facebook is probably a lot less. I think that's one of the big things I see on HN: a lot of people who hate Facebook partly because one of the main services it provides (maintaining long-distance social connections) isn't useful to them.
(And of course I could call/email/text/etc. many of these people one-on-one, and of course I do that, too, but Facebook is a useful supplement for major life announcements from more distant friends/acquaintances, as well as trivial little details from closer friends.)
Facebook groups has some good features and has improved a lot for administrators over the last couple of years. But as dpau says in another comment here [2], search on Facebook and Facebook groups is terrible — it's worse than any bad web search engine one can think of. Most people end up posting the same posts and the same comments over and over again (this is not a Facebook-only issue, but the lack of good search makes enforcing "searching first as the norm" next to impossible). All the etiquette built around newsgroups and online forums over decades is nowhere to be seen on Facebook groups. Everybody seems to want to be spoonfed with answers, instantly.
As dpau says [2], Facebook as a place to store useful information for posterity is a lost cause. If, either intentionally or unintentionally, Facebook were to delete all content older than a week from groups and timelines right now, nothing will be missed! Facebook _is the place_ where content goes to die! I tell people to put their content elsewhere on the web and share the link on Facebook, but many people are loathe to do it, not understanding that their effort, knowledge and time are wasted so pitifully by an incompetent and arrogant corporation that doesn't care much about anything on the human side (except showing more videos to show more video ads to make more money).
I'm of the opinion that the sooner Facebook dies, the better off we'll be, even if there's no single alternative that fulfills all the features it offers.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18481458
But all that being said, I still have a FB account so I can check in on family members who don't (yet) use something else. But even among that unhip group of older people, they are quickly drifting away to instagram and I barely ever check in on Facebook anymore.
It's also a way to see some random content, much like my LinkedIn. Just a bunch of articles and memes. I do find that it's low quality, often very political on the articles side. But the memes and jokes are okay.
It's gotten a lot less addictive over the years. Maybe I'll end up using it less and less naturally.