Facebook Bringing Voice and Video Calling Back to Main App After Moving Them to Messenger

[willchris]

I keep wishing for Facebook to go away but given the recent news I now want them to grow big enough so they get forced to sell Instagram.

I obviously don't know how to use this site. Can anyone please tell me how I can comment on a post without quoting it? Should I have used a different option?

 

[Thebrochure]

I think most Facebook regulars strongly dislike the way the service runs things, but they find it too difficult to leave the platform -- with no other reasonable alternatives out there.

That's the proverbial boat I find myself in. I have a lot of people I want to stay in touch with, but don't necessarily want to keep in regular contact with them some traditional way (like phone conversations or emails back and forth). Facebook is the most efficient tool I've found for that. It sort of "pushes" things to your feed that they think is worthy of posting about - so at a glance, you get updates on what they're doing. (Did old Uncle So-and-So go on vacation in Cancun this week? Is your old buddy from college still drag racing his modified cars?) I only have so much free time and I try to focus it on my closest friends who I'm really going to hang out with over a weekend, etc. That doesn't mean I want to lose all knowledge of what the others are up to.

On top of that, it also makes a decent free place to list and sell things, and to find out about local events coming up.

Sure they "sell my information" but I don't tend to share much that I care if they know or monetize. Truth is, a lot of the stuff they data-mine to sell is info you can obtain elsewhere anyway. (Try buying a list of targeted addresses/names/numbers sometime from one of the companies that sells them for marketing purposes. They already know a LOT about everyone, to the point you can buy lists to hit people in certain zip codes in certain income brackets who have specific interests and hobbies, and work in certain fields while voting a certain way.) Facebook has to pay to keep its lights on too and they don't bill me to use it or store my photos I share ....

I was in the same boat. I just couldn't pull the trigger because my Facebook account had become a digital rolodex, so to speak. They (Facebook) had put their hooks into me silently over the years, basically forcing me against my will to continue to do their bidding and stay the course, even though I hardly even used the thing.

But then, eventually, I was just like... screw it. You know what? I managed to live the first three decades of my life without social media and did just fine. So why do I need it now?

The answer?

I didn't.

So what I did was send private messages to the most important people on my friends list, people that I would actually want to hang out with in real life or just stay in touch with, and I told them I was leaving. Most of them got back to me right away. Some of them didn't. The ones that did, we made sure our phone numbers were up to date and even caught up a little on each other's lives. The ones that didn't? Well, that sort of tells you just how "friendly" some of these Facebook "friends" really are, right? No loss there!

Anyway, I got the most important people's info, then deleted it all and honestly? I do not miss it at all. All these years, thinking that I needed it, thinking that I had to keep it because if I didn't, I would loose touch with tons of people--it was pure, irrational delusion.

Why?

Because the people who you really care about, they're going to be in your life no matter what, social media or no social media.

And really, isn't that all that matters?

I honestly can not believe that people still use the internet. With everything we've found out about them mining data, spying on you, selling your private information... it's truly remarkable that they keep on going like this.

I wholeheartedly agree. The internet's promise has always been dwarfed by its poison--and it's only getting worse.