You said a whole lot but never actually articulated your point. I'm assuming it's something about how it's not fair that you find Facebook to be useful. Could you clarify?
I find Facebook to be a boring site, with friends complaining about the same things day in and day out, with an occasional link about something interesting, but mostly filled with inspirational memes and images that I don't particularly find relevant. Sure, I could better curate my friends list and follow a wider range of pages and topics, but then aren't we back at something like MySpace, where the idea was to follow everyone and everything you found interesting?
The problem with Facebook's usefulness isn't that I find it useful, it's that everyone else in my circle finds it useful. This means that any event, major life change like marital engagements and announcements of expectancy or child birth, and general updates of wellbeing from my elderly family are all communicated via Facebook. For example, a friend of mine from high school recently had a child. I had not logged into Facebook for over a year, and suddenly found myself embarrassed for my lack of keeping up with her when I ran into her at the grocery store while she was chasing down a toddler who had escaped down an aisle. I did not have the slightest clue as to her family status, because I stopped logging into Facebook to receive those updates and she stopped going out to parties and bars where we normally would run into each other (to avoid drinking and cigarette smoking), and it just appeared like we drifted apart.
Even now, some friends of mine are planning a trip together, and it's entirely done within a closed group on Facebook. There is no way for me to participate in this trip without maintaining some status on Facebook, else my significant other will have to just relay all that information, which is tiring, and prone to the "telephone" effect.
And that's life. Perhaps you weren't that close enough anyway to find about the child. And that's life too.
The notion of "being connected" with all the people you knew is is similar then the "I need to be happy, if not something is wrong with me" and got introduced with modern social media (particularly Facebook).
But is it easier to 'drift apart' from people you know if you're the only one they need to remember specifically call or send email to, when they can in general assume that all their friends sort of follow their FB updates? But it's awkward if you're the only one who keeps contacting them.
If you have already hard time building very durable friendships and are sort of hang-around member of your social circles, the social media -- if you refuse to use it -- does not exactly make your life easier.
Yeah, the social media caters to peoples laziness (hence "connect to all the people you know easier"). But this connection is very shallow and as you said if you're the only one who is trying to maintain a connection apart from consuming "social broadcasts", well, then the relationship is destined to drift apart.
I guess it's a matter of personal preference, I rather have 3 good connections then 10 (not to mention 100, which is ridiculous) shallow ones and when we randomly see each other, there's no "guilt" looming around the meeting.
IMHO this coincides with two recent HN posts about accepting mediocrity [1] and stopping to eternally seek happiness [2].
You don't have to find facebook useful or like it to be coerced into using it. If your friends and family organise everything by facebook because they find it useful, you have to use it or you'll miss out. Much like if you don't use gmail and hate it, google still have enough of your mail to put you in prison because at least half the people you're emailing do use it.
It's like opting out of electricity - pretty theoretical. So we regulate it so it doesn't f. us over too badly. This is what needs to happen here.
Regulation isn't the only option. Decentralization would work better: it would make impossible for any big company to exploit the information of Billions of people, not just illegal.
We don't need Gmail. We could have Freedom Boxes to host and send our mail instead (and filter whatever spam gets out our infected Windows machines). Right now we can't because of the spam filtering policies of most big players, but if everyone have a Freedom Box that's no longer an issue.
Likewise we don't need Facebook, though since I don't use it unless coerced to I don't know what a replacement should look like.
We don't need Twitter.
We don't need YouTube. Or at least we won't need it when our broadband finally get freaking symmetric as it always should have —not happening any time soon despite making absolute sense on the fibre. Then we could just upload our videos from our Freedom Box with a peer-to-peer protocol.
We don't need Dropbox. Distributed backup is a thing, and keeping those backups secure is easy —except for the master passphrase, but you can at least write it down if you're afraid of forgetting it.
Search engines… well, we don't know how to decentralise them yet. The rest is a solved problem: we only to get the logistics and usability straight –a rather daunting task unfortunately.
