> My refusal to use Facebook means that I tend to miss out on a lot.
Like what? I'm in my 20s--
I haven't used Facebook in 10 years and I have never once had the feeling from my interactions with other people that I had missed out on something.
Are you in school or training? And/or do you work with members of your social circle? And/or does family live close? If any of these are true, I can see how Facebook offers little value.
But the older you get, the fewer people you tend to have around. My social life is easily 30 times harder to maintain now than it was when I was in college. Work was also an easy place to find friends and kindred spirits. At first. But now, more and more, my coworkers are younger than me and even if we enjoy each other’s company there is simply less and less we have in common.
Family starts dying off, or gradually moves over time to where everyone is scattered across the globe. Same with friends. Or they get married, have kids, get busy with careers, etc.
New friends and family enter ones life of course, but they come fewer and farther between, and never feel quite as deep as those early life relationships.
Many other platforms offer a way to stay connected, of course. But many of them are either too superficial to feel worthwhile, or have too few people on them, or have too much friction to be consistently used.
I agree most of what is on Facebook is rather irrelevant, and I basically ignore 99% of what people post. But for those of us whose social lives have been scattered to the wind, nothing else out there comes close to Facebook’s utility.
I don't have Facebook, and all of these needs for connectivity are taken care of by WhatsApp group chats, essentially. It feels far more intimate and immediate than Facebook ever did too.
I was talking about the functionality aspect, I apologise if that wasn't clear enough in my initial post. I don't miss any functionality that Facebook offers because WhatsApp effectively does away with things I don't care about by providing me with highly curated groups of conversation and sharing, without the cruft.
I am fully aware it's a part of the Facebook ecosystem.
How does one discover such WhatsApp group chats? In my very limited experience, it is just like other messaging apps; I can't quite imagine how you would use it as a social network. Am I missing something?
I don't discover new ones, unless I'm invited to one or I create one. All the people I know who I used to communicate with and share content on Facebook are on WhatsApp. If I'm interested in wider discussions with people I don't "know" in the traditional sense, there's forums, etc. Nothing I got from the Facebook experience I can't get anywhere else, I'm finding. Maybe I was using Facebook wrong, but I didn't add anyone on there as a friend that I didn't know offline.
I use WhatsApp this way. It's not a matter of discovery-- it's a matter of creating a group with your existing friends and then keeping in touch with them day-to-day through sharing things in the group chat.
It's identical to a facebook feed....except it's a tiny one with only the people YOU chose to include, and doesn't get polluted with any external content.
I do similarly with sms/iMessage. It’s actually a great way to keep in touch and seems more “real” than Facebook because it’s me directly and specifically communicating with my friends and the public “performative” aspect is absent.
Yes, I'm aware who owns WhatsApp. I was talking about the functionality aspect, I apologise if that wasn't clear enough in my initial post. I don't miss any functionality that Facebook offers because WhatsApp effectively does away with things I don't care about by providing me with highly curated groups of conversation and sharing, without the cruft.
I am fully aware it's a part of the Facebook ecosystem.
I've been out of high school for 20 years now, but a high school friend reached out to me on Facebook and let me know he and his wife were going to be in town for the weekend. We went out with them a few times and had a blast!
He then let me know that another high school friend of mine had just moved a few miles away from me (I live thousands of miles away from where I went to high school, so this was news to me.) I went to her housewarming party--invited through Facebook--and now she and I have reconnected too.
I am in several Facebook groups for our industry (cell phone repair) and it's how I've made friends, learned about new developments in our industry, and found vendors who are awesome.
I am by no means a huge Facebook fan; the article yesterday about how they treat their outsourced content moderation teams was appalling. However, I acknowledge its utility for both business and personal uses.
As a parent, one kid is involved with a theater group that organizes shows through facebook. School parents tend to communicate through facebook too. Of smaller significance, my regular poker game organizes games over facebook too.
All that added up to me begrudgingly returning to facebook.
For example: I was invited to an event this week, and to participate, I need to RSVP on the Facebook event... I could ask how to get around that, but I'm actually not that interested. The point is, the process has put a roadblock in my participation.
But to be honest, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
In this case, I was invited in person, but the event is part of a larger process and they wanted accurate accounting because attendance included free beer :-)
My whole extended family all use Facebook to post notes and pictures of kids and cousins, ask questions, say hi, and plan events. I have a clear feeling I would miss out on something if I refused to use the product.
What, you say? They don't have to use Facebook to do that? Of course they don't. But they do, and I can't fix that. Your cohort seemingly doesn't, or the members that do aren't members you care about.
That's what network effects are all about. "Facebook" isn't a product or a feature list in this context, it's a community. They have it, Google didn't, and that's what the linked article is about.
Like what? I'm in my 20s-- I haven't used Facebook in 10 years and I have never once had the feeling from my interactions with other people that I had missed out on something.