I think lots of HN readers here are missing perspectives from Facebook users in 'third' world countries, where there aren't a lots of alternatives for information sharing and discovery.
As someone who grew up in one of those countries, I found Facebook incredibly useful to find alumni of my high school in US universities and ask them questions on how they got here (LinkedIn was not a thing then). There weren't, and still aren't, any alumni network or guidance counselor. I didn't even know where to begin (say to Google things).
This is, of course, just one use case but the point is that Facebook does provide value to some people. Back home, for many people of generation before the internet, it is the only way they stay in touch with their several kins on other countries. We can debate about what 'value' / 'meaning' it adds to their lives. But that is a separate conversation.
And yes, there are concerns about privacy. But that is the tradeoff you make in life.
I am personally from one of those third-world countries (India) and in my experience, it's easier to stop using Facebook here since the social fabric is already strong enough that you don't really need Facebook to be able to stay in connection with people. I quit Facebook half a decade years ago when I was 16 and haven't had to use it again.
People used to have social connections before Facebook came around and the methods to form and maintain those connections aren't dead yet since there is a large portion of population who never started using Facebook (my parents, for instance.
If you are in a field of work which requires self-promotion, then Facebook is extremely useful, and empowering, because you can promote yourself without a middleman.
There's plenty other positives about facebook. It allows more convient and efficent ways of communication, networking, and sharing that honestly didn't exist before.
To me the fundamental problem of Facebook is not computer-facilitated social networking, but rather that it is run on proprietary centralized servers by a for-profit corporation.
As someone who grew up in one of those countries, I found Facebook incredibly useful to find alumni of my high school in US universities and ask them questions on how they got here (LinkedIn was not a thing then). There weren't, and still aren't, any alumni network or guidance counselor. I didn't even know where to begin (say to Google things).
This is, of course, just one use case but the point is that Facebook does provide value to some people. Back home, for many people of generation before the internet, it is the only way they stay in touch with their several kins on other countries. We can debate about what 'value' / 'meaning' it adds to their lives. But that is a separate conversation.
And yes, there are concerns about privacy. But that is the tradeoff you make in life.