It is my impression that a lot of user interest groups are on Facebook. I can fully understand that leaving Facebook to administer all the back office stuff is an attraction, but I find user groups of this type more cumbersome. I am only involved in a very few forums and a couple of user groups, and notice that with one forum, just about everything has now moved over to a Facebook user group. What do you think?
Quite a few people are not on Facebook and are intentionally avoiding it for reasons of privacy problems, censorship, abundant advertising, inflexible user interface, etc. If a forum I am active on moved to Facebook, I would seriously consider leaving it.
Not a member of and never will be a member of Mr Zuckerberg’s “all-your-data-are-belong-to-us” Facebook
What a dreadful idea! I am not on Facebook which is basically lots of people trying to show off what fantastic lives they have.
Meanwhile, in real life, Facebook makes them very depressed as they are comparing their lives to everybody else’s exaggerated “spin”. It is also an enormous waste of life as I don’t want to see photos of people’s plates of food in restaurants.
Then to make matters worse, Mr Zuckerberg sells your data and decides what political opinions you are allowed to have – ie SJW /left wing. UGGGHHHH!
Never been there, never will be.
Whenever somebody mentions Facebook to me, typically the wife of a friend, I claim I’ve never heard of it which makes the conversation go away. Happily my wife feels the same way.
Unfortunately I have to be on Fakebook, as a couple of professional groups I sort of need to be on for work are there. Wish they weren’t….. in any case, reveal as little as necessary and never, ever! click on an ad. For those who want to know about Fakebook’s evil ways, here’s an article in the NYT. It’s a long read, but worth it.
I have never been on FB which is highly unusual for people my age (30s). I don’t miss it ever. I do use WhatsApp frequently which has similar privacy issues but is much more useful in keeping in touch with real people you actually know and do stuff with (friends, family)
Lots of people have a love-hate relationship with FB; myself included 
It is quite good at keeping in touch, often in a humorous way, with friends. You can post politically incorrect stuff there, seen only by your Friends, and all have a good laugh, especially on a slow day at the office That’s why any organised employer will block facebook.com in their router… also for a good reason: nothing stops someone posting a link to a dodgy/infected site on FB, and then your only remaining defence is the browser security and any AV software which hooks up the browser feed (and IME this rarely works).
The forums on FB are useless for any serious knowledge accumulation / knowledge distribution, due to the structure being highly transient and almost totally dominated by smart-arse one-liners – same as other similar forum sites. FB being behind a login has negligible SEO which also kills off knowledge distribution – the exact opposite of what EuroGA does. This in turn is key to FB being able to sell its user data commercially 
But many people get value out of such a transient structure too. If you are bored, spend the whole day on the internet, and want to chit-chat about breeding cats, you don’t need a structured site where you can post skew-t diagrams and discuss lean of peak engine management and which has a search facility. It’s no good for aviation; I know a few aviation forums there and all are virtually useless for any form of education. All of them are basically one-country forums, too, and are probably ok for highlighting country-specific issues e.g. “Fraport have just taken over Greek Airport XXX”. Of course these are usually in the country’s language, which kills off most of the remaining knowledge distribution potential.
When FB bought Whatsapp, they acquired hundreds of millions of real full names, mobile numbers, GPS locations and in most cases real (not fake/temporary) email addresses and this kicked off the massive privacy breach business really nicely. You can see this in e.g. the “people you may know” feature, where some of the people presented are most curious choices and the likely algorithm is fairly obvious (the raiding of multiple peoples’ phone Contacts books and correlating them). Most FB users have uploaded (possibly unknowingly; anyone doing it knowingly needs their head examined) their entire Contacts book to FB; this is highly likely if you use a FB app rather than using FB in a browser (I don’t think a browser on IOS or Android allows a website to grab your Contacts, does it? – a windows browser definitely cannot, even if you were storing Contacts on a PC… but an “app” definitely can do so… it has to ask for permission at installation but nobody reads that stuff before they click on “Install”). Accordingly I almost never access FB with a phone.
I use Whatsapp (and obviously assume FB gets everything there) and use Telegram (and assume the KGB gets everything there) But neither app has my full real name configured (and neither has my FB account, which uses a mis-spelt name, and a duff date of birth to reduce the risk of ID theft which I’ve already had a few times (fake driving licenses used to withdraw cash)). Telegram is by far the better of the two, functionally.
I am considering shutting down my Facebook account of the social network for the elderly. It’s uncool, for the reasons mentioned above.
