Comment by dofm
9 days ago
This is the correct decision, IMO.
I only use Facebook in a limited capacity (one phenomenal private group whose usefulness is unfortunately simply unmatched elsewhere, one infrequently updated page and a very locked-down, minimal personal profile).
I think people need to understand what the purpose of Facebook is in terms of its function and constituent parts, in the Stafford Beer sense, and I think if enough people simply can't avoid that truth, it will eventually shrink.
Adblocking lets some people pretend Facebook isn't a privacy hellhole for everyone they talk to. There is essentially no way to use it that doesn't abuse your data privacy, for one thing, but prolonging the impression that it can be ameliorated is a mistake.
Where Facebook has gone, I fear other U.S. social media is headed. Reddit recently blocked access to old.reddit.com for users who are not logged in, which suggests they're doubling down on user tracking. On top of that are the increasing privacy, censorship, and disinformation concerns that come with using any U.S.-based social media.
There is clearly a need for facebook/reddit alternatives for useful groups like the one you describe. There are things like Mastodon out there, but they haven't gained much traction. What will it take to get people off of platforms that are actively hostile to their users? What is keeping existing alternatives from being used?
I find the fall of Reddit to be particularly upsetting. In its prime it was one of the best social networks I'd ever used and I found incredible value in it - but after having my app blown up by their API changes and the continued (unsurprising) push away from their old open platform to a more "curated" experience, it doesn't feel like the same place anymore.
I want someone to actually smack Steve Huffman. Not hard, but enough to get through the veneer of We Take Your Feedback Very Seriously And-
No. Enough. The community is fucking screaming at you
Someone that loves their users does not fire the mods in response to API change protest. And censorship galore, and too much power concentrated in the mods and site
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Honestly? Reddit is a massive public manipulation platform.
Consider that the daughter of the guy who purposefully weakened his product's encryption on behalf of Mossad (and was considered a hero of the state), the same daughter who was rubbing elbows with the world's richest and most powerful people, was a reddit powermod with moderation power on a huge number of major subreddits.
Anyone who thinks that the ~500 most popular subreddits are anything but government/corporate manipulators is deluding themselves.
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Reddit recently blocked access to anything marked NSFW on old.reddit.com unless you upload your ID to Persona (Thiel's company).
Do you have a source for that? I can still access anything nsfw on old.reddit.com from Europe.
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> Reddit recently blocked access to old.reddit.com for users who are not logged in
They haven't for me (just tested before posting this comment), which I realize might be temporary. Have they published a policy, or did you get caught in A/B testing hell?
They did publish a policy and announced it a month or so back. Phased rollout, it took a while before it started applying to me. But now I am unable to use old.reddit at all, and I can only use new reddit on a desktop browser - and only for a little while until it covers the content and tells me I have to login to continue.
I know why they did this, I get it, but they did me a favor by severely curbing the time I might otherwise waste on their web site. For that I thank them.
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I was blocked as well, so did my wife.
A quick google search shows thousands of complaints on, ironically, Reddit itself. So it's probably not just an A/B test, more likely a gradual rollout.
My phone is blocked but not my desktop (yet).
I guess the upside of reddit selling all that post data to AI firms is I'm not sure I'll really need to use reddit anymore. Which means I'll never login to post since I won't be seeing other threads to distract myself with. Which seems like long term will hurt reddit's future data.
I think it's a staged rollout. People were complaining about it a few days, but I didn't get blocked until this morning.
Probably a phased rollout based on region. I was blocked almost a month ago and never got back in.
I abandoned my 5k follower Twitter account for Mastodon a few years ago and 1700 people followed me there. I expect out of the 5k Twitter followers most of them are bots, so I probably lost nothing.
The secret to making alternative platforms work, is actually engaging with them and pretending the toxic platforms you hate no longer exist.
I am a bay area serial founder, with no Twitter, Meta, Google, Apple, or any such other centralized surveillance capitalism bullshit. I do not even have a Signal account as centralization is fundamentally incompatible with freedom and privacy in my eyes. Never gets in my way of doing anything I want to do or talking to anyone I want to talk to.
People sure do like to make excuses on why they still -must- use those platforms even though they do not -want- to. Absolutely never let a platform hold you hostage. Let no one own you if you want freedom.
The smartest people I have ever interacted with are on platforms like IRC, Matrix, and Mastodon. I would rather build a social graph of thousands of people that also really value freedom over thousands of people that make excuses to stay trapped in walled gardens any day.
> People sure do like to make excuses on why they still -must- use those platforms even though they do not -want- to.
They are not always excuses and you really should understand that if you have tech industry experience.
Try having a small business in some niches and doing so without Facebook.
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> and pretending the toxic platforms you hate no longer exist
Thank you. One reason I spend more time on my Mastodon feed than my Bluesky feed is there are fewer people there complaining about Twitter. Less rage and complaining in general.
I'm 99.99% sure your audience is tech people.
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Social media in general is doomed. Adverts, invasive tracking, and AI slop have killed it.
Rather than creating tiktok but open source, we should just dump the idea entirely. Social media was a net negative to society.
It all depends on what you count as social media. We had platforms before "social media" was a term that would now fall under it for many people and I am not eager to get rid of all of those. Sure, burn the algorithm, the centralization, etc. but I will keep talking to people online both privately and semi-publicly.
I'm honestly surprised that there isn't a successor platform to Reddit overtaking yet considering how far they have gone with the enshittification.
> I think people need to understand what the purpose of Facebook is in terms of its function and constituent parts
Given how many people do not yet use adblockers, I don't have much reason to believe that this will lead to significant amounts of people suddenly seeing this.
I only use FB for the occasional Marketplace sale/purchase because the rest of the site is a cesspool of nonsense and toxic ragebait. It's impossible to only see your friends updates now, so it's lost 99% of it's utility. Letting people see how awful it is will force folks to either leave or Facebook to fix itself, which will never happen. It seems like execs prefer to drive companies into the ground and bankruptcy court rather than change them to be more user friendly.
The vast majority of FB users see the unfiltered site, yet they are not leaving contrary to your theory. FB does not seem to be anywhere near the ground or bankruptcy court. These are very strange things you're commenting about one of the largest companies on the planet.
And thus the social media addiction lawsuits and age gating are gaining traction. It seems clear the problem isn't going to solve itself, so society is turning to regulation.
FB is losing users, especially amongst younger demo groups. There's a wave of AI craptent on the platform driving people away. Google also sees high profits right now but it's from squeezing, not improvement and customer happiness.
> not leaving
It's hard to leave a monopoly, and you can't contact your friends any other way https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
Anecdotally, someone I know deleted their account, had it reactivated (the site did this) and now they show up on People You May Know. Plenty of other people have tried deleting it and found it nigh impossible
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I mean, obviously Facebook is not in financial difficulty.
But it is, at some level, culturally dying. It is very evident.
It would not be loss of revenue that troubled Facebook, for years at least — it would be slowing engagement and lower demand for reach.
Most people I've talked to actually use the "friends feed" in the menu that shows literally only what your friends have posted and nothing else; that could be my friend bias though
> yet they are not leaving
Are you so sure? Anecdotally, I know increasingly more people who either left the platform or stopped using it last years, and this seems to be a pattern if we believe online sources [0]. Of course many stay, but the platform gets worse and worse ime.
I visit facebook only for events and some groups that I cannot avoid, so I just enter specific pages there than navigating feeds. But looking at the normal feed, it is just so bad. Complete nonsense, irrelevant stuff and more and more AI generated slop. If we exclude some groups, no real, organic people actually post (except some influencers). For those who stay, assuming they do not get the "friends feed", I am really unsure how they can tolerate that.
[0] https://policy.economy.ac/news/2026/05/202605289098
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I don't mean personal offense to you but I find the heavily qualified "I don't support this person/organization but I support this person/organization" doublespeak to be frustrating.
Not just your comment. It's all over the place here.
But maybe I shouldn't be throwing stones in my glass house. I smoked cigarettes for a few years on college, knew they were terrible for me and for those around me, but continued for too long because I frankly enjoyed the pleasure.
It’s not doublespeak, just context. I am saying: I alas use it like almost everyone else, because I more or less have to. It would be a lie if I said I don’t, and my critique would be of little value if i didn’t. I do use it minimally and locked down, as I say; three family members as friends, an old page I need to manage, and a doodle for a profile photo. But I am seeing all the problems I am talking about.
I don’t think people need to leave, necessarily, and I cannot urge them to do so. But I do think people should shrink their engagement with it, use it as little as is feasible, shrink their footprint, allow it less, so Facebook changes. Unfortunately it is a big part of life on the internet, it’s often people’s literal job to be there, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.