Every thread about Meta/Facebook always has the save advice to "Just stop using Facebook. Problem solved!"
The HN demographic can follow that but many normies can't because Facebook provides functionality for sharing that can't be replicated by email mailing lists / RSS readers / Mastodon / vBulletin, phpBB boards, etc.
E.g. my friend sees a Youtuber doing some interesting sewing projects to make clothes. To facilitate discussion and collaboration with viewers (sharing photos, videos of projects), the Youtuber created a Facebook group. That's what non-techies do to empower themselves.
Similar situation with normal people using Facebook to share calendars for kids baseball games etc where multiple families can see the same canonical list of upcoming scheduled events.
So the article's recommendations for minimizing data collection can help those people who use Facebook in ways that enhances their lives.
For the folks that only use Facebook to doomscroll an algorithmic newsfeed (a glorified "RSS reader"), that's the type of user that can "just stop using Facebook".
I keep a dummy Facebook account with no followers and nofriends just to access stuff that's exclusively on Facebook. E.g. when I was looking for a tree service to remove some storm damaged trees, it so happened that every tree company I was interested in only used Facebook for up-to-date info. The ones that had their own websites were not maintained and had out of date information. On the other hand, their Facebook pages had the most recent photos of their equipment and their correct phone number. My guess is updating their "real website" requires calling and paying for a web design service to edit things whereas their Facebook page can be updated from the business owner's smartphone for $0.
Because of non-activity on my dummy Facebook account, I worry that Meta will someday flag it as a bot and revoke access.
Stop using Facebook is good advice for most people.
For that to be true, it isn't necesssary that there is nothing of any use or value on Facebook. It simply has be true that those benefits are outweighed by the costs. For most people, there is a very real danger that if they use Facebook, they will end up wasting lots of time scrolling through their feed. Given how precious time is, this is an extremely a high cost.
I didn't find your examples super compelling.
I have kids and they're in groups with shared calendars, and so far no of these have used facebook. If everyone seemed super attached to it, I would go along, but I can't see other parents digging their heels in against "why don't we write it in this shared google doc, which anyone can view or even edit without an account"
I have hobbies and interests. There might be some good content or communities on Facebook. There's lots of good content and communities outside of Facebook. It's not a limiting constraint.
I also didn't get your techie vs normie distinction. Maybe I am not a techie but I don't use email mailing lists, RSS readers, Mastodon, vBulletin, or phpBB boards.
At work I use slack and email. In my personal life, I use email, iMessage, SMS, and Signal.
It's not about normies/techies. It's about recognizing that a Facebook group for a sewing Youtuber provides relatively little value compared to a million other things we can be doing to fill up our entertainment time. You don't need to be tech savvy to recognize this.
Yes. Just stop using facebook. Call your kids' teammates' parents on the phone if you're unsure when the next game is. Call your local businesses on the phone to get info. Join an in person sewing group. Start an in person sewing group if one doesn't exist. These are things "normies" have always done and still do.
Indeed, and in the end, these groups are just a marketing platform for the youtuber. In my experience, they bring very little value other than a fake sense of community.
Okay, but the group for my small regional area that assists people in navigating the system for getting your special needs kid help is valuable and only on Facebook. Normies have historical knowledge that I'm not going to find anywhere about an area that has 100K people tops and involves a dozen or so cities.
That's why I'm stuck on Facebook. It's for hyperlocal information and resources.
The quantity of scam calls means very small businesses can barely operate a phone. Facebook is their only asynchronous messaging. I’ve met these people: they don’t have email addresses and some don’t know what email is. Promoting “in-person” means becoming IT for them and you have my admiration for that.
Or we could just live without so much sharing and communication. We did it before social media and we were arguably better off. Why is it necessary to be so “closely” connected to so many people? Aren’t the people in our more immediate orbit enough?
Yes yes, I understand marginalized people need to find each other. Alternative options like Mastodon already solve that problem better than Facebook because they aren’t owned by Big Tech/the US government.
The thing is that shunning WhatsApp and Facebook doesn't put you back to a time before they existed, it cuts you off completely because they've dispaced what used to exist.
Before Facebook there was email and SMS, before that there were phone calls, letters, etc.
None of those really exist any more. If something happens, it goes into the family WhatsApp group, if you're not in the group then you don't find out.
My parents and their generation still answer the phone at least, and I convinced some fairly close people to use Signal, but generally I'm more disconnected from my family than I would have been in another time.
> Alternative options like Mastodon already solve that problem better than Facebook because they aren’t owned by Big Tech/the US government.
Them not being owned by Big Tech/government does not make them a better solution to the problem. It's a benefit (to some, not all), but if you're trying to recruit "normies" away from social media to, well, a different social media, then that should not be the first bullet point.
If the only way I can interact with a business is through Facebook, that's a business telling me they don't want me as a customer and I'm more than happy to oblige them.
I've very rarely encountered that, though. Most businesses at least have a phone number I can use to talk to them.
>If the only way I can interact with a business is through Facebook, that's a business telling me they don't want me as a customer [...] I've very rarely encountered that,
I encounter it often because I deal with small contractors for home services and repairs and Facebook is how they reach new customers.
I used the word "businesses" but it is giving a false elevated impression that these local services are bigger than they actually are. The "business" is often just 1 guy. And the "business phone number" is just the guy's personal cell number. I hired a father-and-son business to replace some doors in the house and the only "website" they had was their Facebook page. Sure, the "Mr HandyMan" national franchise chains have "real websites" but hiring them also costs more. I'd rather hire the computer-illiterate father&son duo who knows how to replace my doors for a fair price rather than reject them just because don't know how to buy a domain name + website and relies on Facebook for customers to reach them.
Similar situation with other "small businesses" like local yoga instructors, etc. They rely on Facebook pages instead of real websites.
A harder problem is group activities. I keep bees and ride a bike. The local groups that have support, experience, supplies and all the people are on Facebook (the beekeepers) and WhatsApp (the cyclists).
I miss various announcements with the beekeepers but caved last month on WhatsApp with the cyclists, I joined WhatsApp. Being 50km from home with equipment issues, you need to be able to talk to the others and they are on WhatsApp. Cancelled rides or proposed new ones are all on WhatsApp.
> If the only way I can interact with a business is through Facebook, that's a business telling me they don't want me as a customer and I'm more than happy to oblige them.
I don’t think this is a reasonable position given what OP correctly said: Facebook makes having a web presence easy for 99.9999% of the population. Not everyone is as technologically literate as those on this forum. By having only a FB presence, they are not telling you they don’t want you as a customer - they just don’t know any better.
I do exactly the same, no follows, no friends. But its still useful to access the marketplace, and some cool groups which I can't find anywhere.
I think we really miss some sort of "community" software (discussion boards won't make it these days), where people can gather around and talk and share stuff. I think Meetup was nice, but the fact that it's way too centered around actual meet-ups, plays against it.
I've thought many times about starting to build something, but the thought of having to market it and make it grow to have an impact demotivates me instantly.
In its high-growth period, Facebook devoured Usenet and forums precisely to defeat that. Low technical barriers meant moderation became important, thus CraigsList is risky.
For the life of me Idk why the social graph has not been scraped from facbook yet.
Back in the friendster days I distinctly remember being able to import my friends over to myspace and then later from myspace to facebook years later. We used to have a mass exodus every few years and then we we’re locked into facebook. Facebook should have died many times over. That no competing service has been built that has made migration easy is in my opinion the reason facebook has been allowed to fester for so long.
That such a tactic may be a violation of tos or questionable legally never stopped anyone before… and on the legal front I would argue it’s the users who own their social graph. Before facebook your address book was a thing of immense value. I have multiple friends irl that would sell their contacts for $10k+. That everyone just decided to give that info to facebook still boggles my mind and especially after all the bs they pulled over the years, yet here we are.
Several of my friend groups coordinate big events through Facebook events and Messenger. It would be harder to participate if I didn't have an account.
Also, in my area, Facebook Marketplace has totally displaced Craigslist for used goods.
These are the only things I use Facebook for, but they're hard to get away from.
Have never been using facebook. Gave instagram a short stint few years ago to remove it eventually because of too high ads/friends ratio in the feed. No problem in organizing social life.
FWIW, whatsapp provides excellent capabilities (well, for 2025 where only old timers remember phpBB and can compare to it) for local community discussions and meetups, interest groups, parent groups, whatever group discussions and coordination.
I live in a fairly small town in Wales, and pretty much everything is coordinated via Facebook. Makes it very hard to completely escape it, but as you say a "burner" account is the only way to permit access with minimal engagement.
> I keep a dummy Facebook account with no followers and no friends just to access stuff that's exclusively on Facebook.
Facebook still provides an API. Wouldn't it be possible to leverage that API to build a proxy service, and then at least mitigate one side of their monopoly?
> The HN demographic can follow that but many normies can't because Facebook provides functionality for sharing that can't be replicated by email mailing lists / RSS readers / Mastodon / vBulletin, phpBB boards, etc.
Then normies should not actively be trying to make the service that is indispensable to them non-viable.
Either you need to use it, in which case you should not try to sabotage it, or you don't, in which case you should not need to sabotage it. So what is the point of attempting to sabotage it?
I don't understand your choice of the word "sabotage". The thread's article is telling users about the official Facebook approved ways to turn off some ad preferences. This isn't UBlock, or Pi-Hole, AdNauseum, etc.
I use Firefox containers for meta controlled domains. I don't trust third party websites to not pass information to Meta or meta to not be greedy. So, a complete absence of meta related cookies and other cruft is the best defense against that. I mostly stopped checking Facebook. I have a few things with social logins tied to Facebook that I open in the same container that I can't be bothered to untangle.
I've de-activated my instagram account ages ago. I just have no interest in what happens there. People sharing images and short videos just annoys me mostly. So, I'm happy to let people entertain each other over there without distracting me. In the same way, I have zero interest in tik tok, youtube shorts, and related nonsense from competitors. My life is rich enough without that.
Whatsapp unfortunately remains a necessary evil because that's what most people I know seem to insist on using. I mostly use it in a browser tab because I hate typing on mobile phones. My thumbs keep hitting the wrong tiny keys. If I type 3 letters, 2 will be wrong. I probably should move whatsapp to its own container. Thankfully it remains ad-free so far (or my adblocker is just that good, hard to tell these days). I think meta mostly walked back controversial plans to do something about that.
I have every Facebook owned domain blocked in NextDNS so it's essentially impossible for them to track me. I don't even have a Facebook account but they obviously don't need me to have one to build a shadow profile.
It's helpful to pop in to Facebook from time to time just to try to understand the insanity going on in the world. I can see the constant flow of misleading content that's driving the seemingly irrational decision-making and I can then understand it. I steel myself against the propaganda as one does, but if I were spending even one hour a day reading that sewage that's pushed at regular people every day, and I believed in even a fraction of it, I would probably make the same insane decisions as them. So it actually reduces the anxiety, a little bit, to at least know where it comes from.
If I've understood correctly, it might not be necessary to isolate everything in different containers. As long as you block social logins using an adblocker, the total cookie protection in firefox shouldn't allow websites to know what other sites you're visiting.
I am in the EU. I opted out of targeted ads a while back when the Facebook app asked me about it and it is now showing me inline ads with a timer. I literally have to wait before I can continue doomscrolling which is just enough time to just put the phone down and go back to work. Thank you, Meta.
Some months ago (years?) I was shown a popup asking me to either agree to be tracked or to pay a monthly fee [1]. I chose neither and haven't logged in since.
I logged in just now and everything seems to be working fine. But then I went to the "Ad preferences" and I'm shown a message saying I have to choose between using Facebook for free with ads or subscribe, and that my information won't be used for ads until I make a choice.
Looks like my account is stuck in some weird middle ground where my data can't used for ads but I also don't have to pay. Did I get away with neither? Or will they ask me to pay next time I log in, two years from now?
There's indeed a middle ground now, as far as I can tell. It's called "show less personalized ads" or something like that, but in effect I think it's showing ads related just to the page you're currently looking at. I'm perfectly fine with this model, and I'd rather we collectively go back to it, instead of ad trackers following you around on the Internet and serving you ads based on your browser history instead.
Of course that doesn't mean I trust Meta/Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp, but at least on the surface it seems they understood the assignment.
That's one way to break the doomscrolling habit! Meta unintentionally doing you a favor. Maybe they should market it as a -productivity feature- instead of an ad strategy
I remember in 2012-13 facebook didnt even have a delete account option only deactivate. I dug deep enough to stumble across a facebook delete link in their community support or something.
I made sure to change all my details and then i used that link to delete my account. Used my friends account to verify if it was actually deleted or not.
Even better: just stop using their services. Given that these settings are presented to you by a party you already don't trust, why should you believe they don't do the opposite of what they say?
There are regions in this world where the majority of business and online interaction with friends and family are conducted through Facebook. It's easy for you to say "just stop using their services" if you live in the western bubble.
Things like this are just rationalisations to keep doing something unhealthy with a better conscience. Sure, it probably helps a tiny bit, but if you're aware enough of how bad facebook is for the world, just stop using their services.
People were able to live without facebook before it existed, and you can again. Just arrange to interact with the people you care about face to face or via a call.
The people you "keep in touch with" by sometimes pressing like are not real relationships
This is a simplistic and not helpful form of advice. Often we need to use a thing that is not altogether good, but we can take steps to reduce the harm.
People were able to live before houses and apartments existed. And a lot of grandmas and grandpas only get their birthday remembered thanks to Facebook, sad as that may be it's the truth, those and many other relationships are keep alive because their counterparts check FB and only FB, by talking there not only clicking "like" or any other reductionisms alike.
You can also remove yourself from ad topics, and even if you don't want to remove yourself from them it can be interesting to take a look and see what meta has associated you with - https://accountscenter.facebook.com/ads/ad_topics
It won't stop you getting ads, of course, and I have yet to find the holy grail of fictional facebook settings "Never show me reels or suggest groups you think I might be interested in, stick to my actual friends".
On Facebook, if you go to 'Menu' > 'Feeds' > 'Friends' you will see a feed of only your contacts' activity and none of the suggested posts & random pages on the normal Feed
Holy crap, I knew it was there but didn't think it let you go straight in via a link. Turns out https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr is more or less what I've been looking for for a few years...
In fact https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr might just be perfect - it's got my friends, groups and the handful of things I am interested in, in chronological order, and nothing else. Amazing.
Readit News
The HN demographic can follow that but many normies can't because Facebook provides functionality for sharing that can't be replicated by email mailing lists / RSS readers / Mastodon / vBulletin, phpBB boards, etc.
E.g. my friend sees a Youtuber doing some interesting sewing projects to make clothes. To facilitate discussion and collaboration with viewers (sharing photos, videos of projects), the Youtuber created a Facebook group. That's what non-techies do to empower themselves.
Similar situation with normal people using Facebook to share calendars for kids baseball games etc where multiple families can see the same canonical list of upcoming scheduled events.
So the article's recommendations for minimizing data collection can help those people who use Facebook in ways that enhances their lives.
For the folks that only use Facebook to doomscroll an algorithmic newsfeed (a glorified "RSS reader"), that's the type of user that can "just stop using Facebook".
I keep a dummy Facebook account with no followers and nofriends just to access stuff that's exclusively on Facebook. E.g. when I was looking for a tree service to remove some storm damaged trees, it so happened that every tree company I was interested in only used Facebook for up-to-date info. The ones that had their own websites were not maintained and had out of date information. On the other hand, their Facebook pages had the most recent photos of their equipment and their correct phone number. My guess is updating their "real website" requires calling and paying for a web design service to edit things whereas their Facebook page can be updated from the business owner's smartphone for $0.
Because of non-activity on my dummy Facebook account, I worry that Meta will someday flag it as a bot and revoke access.
For that to be true, it isn't necesssary that there is nothing of any use or value on Facebook. It simply has be true that those benefits are outweighed by the costs. For most people, there is a very real danger that if they use Facebook, they will end up wasting lots of time scrolling through their feed. Given how precious time is, this is an extremely a high cost.
I didn't find your examples super compelling.
I have kids and they're in groups with shared calendars, and so far no of these have used facebook. If everyone seemed super attached to it, I would go along, but I can't see other parents digging their heels in against "why don't we write it in this shared google doc, which anyone can view or even edit without an account"
I have hobbies and interests. There might be some good content or communities on Facebook. There's lots of good content and communities outside of Facebook. It's not a limiting constraint.
I also didn't get your techie vs normie distinction. Maybe I am not a techie but I don't use email mailing lists, RSS readers, Mastodon, vBulletin, or phpBB boards.
At work I use slack and email. In my personal life, I use email, iMessage, SMS, and Signal.
Yes. Just stop using facebook. Call your kids' teammates' parents on the phone if you're unsure when the next game is. Call your local businesses on the phone to get info. Join an in person sewing group. Start an in person sewing group if one doesn't exist. These are things "normies" have always done and still do.
That's why I'm stuck on Facebook. It's for hyperlocal information and resources.
Yes yes, I understand marginalized people need to find each other. Alternative options like Mastodon already solve that problem better than Facebook because they aren’t owned by Big Tech/the US government.
Them not being owned by Big Tech/government does not make them a better solution to the problem. It's a benefit (to some, not all), but if you're trying to recruit "normies" away from social media to, well, a different social media, then that should not be the first bullet point.
I've very rarely encountered that, though. Most businesses at least have a phone number I can use to talk to them.
I encounter it often because I deal with small contractors for home services and repairs and Facebook is how they reach new customers.
I used the word "businesses" but it is giving a false elevated impression that these local services are bigger than they actually are. The "business" is often just 1 guy. And the "business phone number" is just the guy's personal cell number. I hired a father-and-son business to replace some doors in the house and the only "website" they had was their Facebook page. Sure, the "Mr HandyMan" national franchise chains have "real websites" but hiring them also costs more. I'd rather hire the computer-illiterate father&son duo who knows how to replace my doors for a fair price rather than reject them just because don't know how to buy a domain name + website and relies on Facebook for customers to reach them.
Similar situation with other "small businesses" like local yoga instructors, etc. They rely on Facebook pages instead of real websites.
I miss various announcements with the beekeepers but caved last month on WhatsApp with the cyclists, I joined WhatsApp. Being 50km from home with equipment issues, you need to be able to talk to the others and they are on WhatsApp. Cancelled rides or proposed new ones are all on WhatsApp.
I don’t think this is a reasonable position given what OP correctly said: Facebook makes having a web presence easy for 99.9999% of the population. Not everyone is as technologically literate as those on this forum. By having only a FB presence, they are not telling you they don’t want you as a customer - they just don’t know any better.
I think we really miss some sort of "community" software (discussion boards won't make it these days), where people can gather around and talk and share stuff. I think Meetup was nice, but the fact that it's way too centered around actual meet-ups, plays against it.
I've thought many times about starting to build something, but the thought of having to market it and make it grow to have an impact demotivates me instantly.
Back in the friendster days I distinctly remember being able to import my friends over to myspace and then later from myspace to facebook years later. We used to have a mass exodus every few years and then we we’re locked into facebook. Facebook should have died many times over. That no competing service has been built that has made migration easy is in my opinion the reason facebook has been allowed to fester for so long.
That such a tactic may be a violation of tos or questionable legally never stopped anyone before… and on the legal front I would argue it’s the users who own their social graph. Before facebook your address book was a thing of immense value. I have multiple friends irl that would sell their contacts for $10k+. That everyone just decided to give that info to facebook still boggles my mind and especially after all the bs they pulled over the years, yet here we are.
Also, in my area, Facebook Marketplace has totally displaced Craigslist for used goods.
These are the only things I use Facebook for, but they're hard to get away from.
Deleted Comment
You shouldn’t. Meta will always find a way to count users like you in the MAU. If they didn’t, they would destroy their statistics.
There are just too many accounts like yours on FB now.
FWIW, whatsapp provides excellent capabilities (well, for 2025 where only old timers remember phpBB and can compare to it) for local community discussions and meetups, interest groups, parent groups, whatever group discussions and coordination.
Facebook still provides an API. Wouldn't it be possible to leverage that API to build a proxy service, and then at least mitigate one side of their monopoly?
Then normies should not actively be trying to make the service that is indispensable to them non-viable.
Either you need to use it, in which case you should not try to sabotage it, or you don't, in which case you should not need to sabotage it. So what is the point of attempting to sabotage it?
I don't understand your choice of the word "sabotage". The thread's article is telling users about the official Facebook approved ways to turn off some ad preferences. This isn't UBlock, or Pi-Hole, AdNauseum, etc.
Similar to official Google method to turn off some ads settings in Chrome: https://www.techlicious.com/images/computers/chrome-enhanced...
If users have those 3 advertising settings in Chrome turned off, is that also "sabotage"?
I've de-activated my instagram account ages ago. I just have no interest in what happens there. People sharing images and short videos just annoys me mostly. So, I'm happy to let people entertain each other over there without distracting me. In the same way, I have zero interest in tik tok, youtube shorts, and related nonsense from competitors. My life is rich enough without that.
Whatsapp unfortunately remains a necessary evil because that's what most people I know seem to insist on using. I mostly use it in a browser tab because I hate typing on mobile phones. My thumbs keep hitting the wrong tiny keys. If I type 3 letters, 2 will be wrong. I probably should move whatsapp to its own container. Thankfully it remains ad-free so far (or my adblocker is just that good, hard to tell these days). I think meta mostly walked back controversial plans to do something about that.
Dead Comment
Same for meta and ebay, plus all my financials, I don't want them knowing what I visit.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/how-firefoxs-to...
Some months ago (years?) I was shown a popup asking me to either agree to be tracked or to pay a monthly fee [1]. I chose neither and haven't logged in since.
I logged in just now and everything seems to be working fine. But then I went to the "Ad preferences" and I'm shown a message saying I have to choose between using Facebook for free with ads or subscribe, and that my information won't be used for ads until I make a choice.
Looks like my account is stuck in some weird middle ground where my data can't used for ads but I also don't have to pay. Did I get away with neither? Or will they ask me to pay next time I log in, two years from now?
[1] https://www.voanews.com/a/meta-risks-fines-over-pay-for-priv...
Of course that doesn't mean I trust Meta/Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp, but at least on the surface it seems they understood the assignment.
What i do is completely ignore facebook, and the rest of their properties (including whatsapp now).
ublock origin to block out the social media links/badges, and make sure to never visit facebook site directly.
Hopefully, what this means is that my "account" and whatever they identify as me, looks like an inactive user with zero potential to be advertised to.
Never visited facebook since. Its great!
People were able to live without facebook before it existed, and you can again. Just arrange to interact with the people you care about face to face or via a call.
The people you "keep in touch with" by sometimes pressing like are not real relationships
It won't stop you getting ads, of course, and I have yet to find the holy grail of fictional facebook settings "Never show me reels or suggest groups you think I might be interested in, stick to my actual friends".
In fact https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr might just be perfect - it's got my friends, groups and the handful of things I am interested in, in chronological order, and nothing else. Amazing.