This is an excellent blog post, though it made me sick reading it.
I recently made the switch. I went from trying to limit how much I log in (to once or twice a week), to actually not logging in. I've been cold-turkey for two months (except for a couple of times when I had a very specific reason to check something).
I thought it would be difficult. Turns out it's not so hard, and it's the fear of reduced social contact (or dopamine withdrawal more likely) that was stopping me. If you have a plan to replace the social interactions with other forms, you realise that the rest is just dross. If I really want to know what my friends had for breakfast I can phone them up and ask. On balance, I'd rather not.
I'm not at the point of deleting the account yet. Small steps.
I'm now over one year Facebook-free. As with most things (especially online things) I don't even remember why it was so appealing in the first place. The fear of missing out fades really fast. And as someone else mentioned in this thread, I feel like I value actual friendship a bit more.
If anyone's interested in really ditching Facebook and preventing it from injecting junk into the sites you visit and tracking you, here's a list of URLs I've added to my hosts file. As the repo's name suggests, it helps make the internet suck less.
Nice post! I deleted my Facebook account about 2 or 3 weeks ago and I haven't been happier. Before pulling the plug though, I spent a couple days babysitting a post deletion script that wasn't as autonomous as I've hoped. However, I was able to delete my first 3 years and last 5 years of Facebook posts and a decent amount of recent likes/reactions.
I think if you really want to make sure Facebook doesn't have data directly from you, you'd need to take the time to delete every possible interaction you can, delete browser cookies, wait a couple days, then initiate account deletion (Facebook makes you wait 2 weeks until your account is actually deleted, just enough time for you to change your mind).
I think Facebook is the ultimate realization of the American concept of "friendship" (maybe not your specific case) contrasted to the German version of friendship. In Germany, to call someone your friend, it is a great honor, it means something, it is an investment. Here in the states, "everyone is friends!" Yet it feels so superficial. Now we can just check in on them a couple times a day on their posts without the huge investment. It's perfectly American.
Also I am sad to see your thought is being down-voted.
> I get to see their children grow up, new jobs, comfort them when they lose a parent..
Do you though? I mean do you really get to see all those things? Having been through the loss of a parent and the arrival a new baby in the past couple of years I can tell you from this end of things there is no value in any online "presence" of friends and family.
The people who come to meet our new baby, who brought food, and who attended the funeral are the ones that actually impacted our lives and improved us and themselves. A DM or post in Instagram meant nothing - it feels more like the person is signaling human emotions than engaging in them.
> it's the fear of reduced social contact (or dopamine withdrawal more likely) that was stopping me.
Yeppp. I know exactly how you feel, brother. I gave up Facebook for New Years and will be deleting my account after I set up a blog so I have somewhere to blow off steam and tell bad jokes.
The compromise that helped me overcome the feeling of being cut off was that I will have an open comments section and email address, if my friends really want to stay in touch then they will take time out of their week to come say hi.
It's a lot harder than people think. And the last season of South Park was no joke... When I announced I was leaving Facebook, many people were shocked and genuinely concerned for me. They asked me if it was really necessary, if I couldn't just use it less.
But that isn't an option, it's all or nothing and within a few months I will never let Facebook save another cookie on my computer again.
But I know the concern is partially because they understand exactly what is going on in my mind but they don't see a way out. It's really depressing.
For the hell of it I briefly checked my feed last week and I felt like a recovering junkie, visiting their old friends and seeing for the first time what their lifestyle really looked like from the outside.
> will be deleting my account after I set up a blog so I have somewhere to blow off steam and tell bad jokes
The following is not meant to be critical - honest.
Why don't you channel your desire to be heard in to live interactions instead of an online one which is ultimately one way? It is much more fulfilling, and admitting/accepting that you don't deserve & need to share every thought that pops in to your head is healthy.
I recently sent round an event-organising email and slipped in the facebook thing. Not everyone who replied mentioned it, but everyone that did said that they were thinking exactly the same thing.
And if you need an extra kick, you can download an archive all your data. It had previous girlfriends, employers, places I signed in, private messages, ad agencies they passed my details on to, etc etc. All stuff I'd rather let fade away, but I know it never will.
> Turns out it's not so hard, and it's the fear of reduced social contact (or dopamine withdrawal more likely) that was stopping me. If you have a plan to replace the social interactions with other forms, you realise that the rest is just dross.
This is the problem for me right now. I don't have a plan for replacing the social contact of facebook (and facebook isn't giving me anywhere close to what I need). I'm also struggling with depression right now and pretty socially withdrawn. As soon as the current blues pass and I'm able to come up with a real life third place [1], I hope to start limiting how much time I spend there and eventually quit altogether.
I feel lucky in that I have a job that involves social interaction, but moving to a new city left me without any "third place". I definitely empathize with the loneliness that can stir up and so many public spaces seem designed around creating new social interactions between people who aren't already associated.
I read an article not long ago about upscale private clubs. I'm strongly attracted to the status/networking aspect often involved, but the idea of a place gather and socialize that doesn't require buying alcohol/coffee/food is appealing. Place it in a neighborhood. Keep the membership fees accessible to the people who live in that community and then offer some small perks that bars/coffee shops don't (e.g. free billiards on a real table). Hopefully, membership would make people a little more open to socializing with whomever show up, rather than the typical bar in which most people stick to their own group.
Does anyone have experience with private clubs (of any kind)?
Did they open up social interaction in this way?
I found meetup.com is a pretty good place for this, depending on where you are. It's a bunch of people looking for some kind of communal group based on shared interests (programming, political philosophy, SciFi, religion, learning Italian, hiking, etc.). Of course you have to find the right group that fits you, but when you do it's great.
Other places I've had success is with local political/activist groups and hobby groups (dance groups, martial arts groups). Again, you have to try a lot of groups to find the right one, but it's worth it.
<I don't have a plan for replacing the social contact of facebook
Get a fun job. Like at Walmart. People are invigorating. You have real relationships with fellow workers and the regular customers. Human interaction. Just don't have it be your real job so you can ignore drama.
Partner dancing is fantastic for this, IMO. Any sort of social hobby works, though. The less digitized the better - the fundamental problem is probably something like "by default, what I do is stare at a screen."
I didn't have a plan for replacing the social contact of Facebook when I quit. I lost contact with a lot of people. But it turned out that most were acquaintances, not friends, and I could do without them. My acquaintances now are the people I see every day, the doormen and baristas I meet but don't become close with, and I find this means my acquaintances include more variety of people as a result. And the real friends, I've kept in contact with; there are only maybe 10, so it's not hard to text them occasionally.
>"I thought it would be difficult. Turns out it's not so hard, and it's the fear of reduced social contact (or dopamine withdrawal more likely) that was stopping me."
Agreed. People fear they will socially ostracized if the leave Facebook. My experience has been the opposite. I found that FB is a good excuse to be socially lazy. Going to actual social events and meeting new people and having spontaneous conversations is far more gratifying and important. It's easy to delude yourself that you are getting your "social fix" via your FB feed and sending and accepting "friend requests."
There was a time when if you were in a public place waiting for a friend, you would strike up a conversation with a person next to you. Now if you are in say a bar waiting for your friend to show up most people are more likely to use that time to look FB on their phones, rather than interact with unknown people around them. I find this kind of sad.
I also just took the plunge. I guess I'm at about 3 weeks (late next week is one month).
For the past several months, I spent some of my free time going through my history, deleting almost everything I ever posted (note, there's a way to view your timeline by specific year, which seems to include more than the regular timeline view). The few things I couldn't delete (because it didn't give me an option) or that I didn't want to delete (e.g, photos I want to download later), I set to viewable only by me. Then without a peep, I deactivated my account. I probably should have written a script to do this rather than taking all the time. But to be honest, doing it manually was a nice jog down memory lane, even if it was really time consuming.
At this point, I have no plans to reactivate my account, with one exception. At some point, when I decide that "it's time," I'll reactivate my account, download an archive of the remaining items, delete what I can of what remains, and use the "account delete" option (for whatever good that actually does). Then that will be it.
Out of habit, I still frequently catch myself saying "ooh, interesting article, I should post that to facebook. Oh, wait..." Hopefully it's only a matter of time before that stops.
I did the same as you about the same amount of time ago...interesting. A month prior, I requested an export of my Facebook data so I at least have that should I feel the need to look at old pics.
Just unfollow everyone, you won't have a feed. There's nothing to do on there without a feed and you won't miss anything. It takes some time to do it but it's worth it. I still login pretty much daily but leave quickly.
I deactivated my account over a year ago. Facebook will not delete your account, deactivate is the best you can do. Interestingly I went to a Facebook event at their headquarters and when I signed in, there was my profile picture staring back at me. I thought pulling it out of my deactivated account was in poor taste.
Anyway, I can say I'm happier without it. I'm now seriously considering deactivating my Twitter account. Twitter really will delete your account after I believe 30 days of it being deactivated.
This is a nefarious dark pattern though - I don't think there's any way to find the delete option through menus, you have to search through Google or Facebook's help center.
I flat out deleted Facebook (the hidden option that truly deletes you). Turned out to improve my social life. I focused on and nurtured the friendships that truly mattered to me.
I would so love to do it, but my use of Facebook is for a specific cause and I login and participate only in a few groups (always with a browser equipped with an ad blocker and tracker blocker). I don't browse time lines or participate on people's time line posts and comments. I don't use the app. I do use the messenger app for one of my FB accounts for convenience (with minimal permissions).
Since I don't use WhatsApp (because it's an FB company and because chat is not a substitute for groups), it'd be very hard to engage with others for my use, find new people, etc.
Personal anecdote: I concluded it was making me slightly depressed, so manually unfollowed everyone (but kept them as friends) and un-liked every single page. Use it basically to reply when someone comments on a post (effectively trying to make it a "write-only" log)
Turns out you apparently cannot do that, as every time I log in, I find myself re-following a few people (2-10) - some of which I had unfollowed long, long before my "isolationist" move...
These 'made the switch' stories always surprise me - seems like an over-reaction. I guess I've never been so 'in' to Facebook that I've felt a pressing need to get 'out'. Sometimes I go weeks/months without engaging much at all, sometimes I browse it daily just to see what everybody's yakking about. I don't really feel like it has a net-negative impact on my life.
I found it interesting for the opposite reason: I've avoided Facebook up to now, but there are enough inconveniences that my resistance is wearing down.
They might be clunky, but I'm sure there are adequate means of doing everything you'd want to do.
The problem many people have is convenience. For example if you are forced to use Facebook in order to log into a Hotel Wifi (as I recently was) then you have to say "I don't want the Wifi more than I want to log in with Facebook". It's not an essential.
Or, it might be more difficult to spend the effort keeping in touch with people on a personal level, but it's not impossible. It just doesn't have the convenience that Facebook gives. But it also doesn't have the costs.
I'm not trying to convince anyone. But I do find it increasingly interesting (as I pay more attention to it) how many people confuse 'convenient' for 'essential'.
It has taken me almost 8 years to cut Facebook from my life, mainly because I used to log on to tend to my business page. However, like you, I decided enough was enough and went cold turkey 2 weeks ago.
Now 2 weeks later, when FB crosses my mind I am actually happy and sometimes grin thinking of how much I've benefited from quitting it!
> I'm not at the point of deleting the account yet. Small steps.
I'm in the same boat. I hardly use it, but I keep it around because it is the favored way to contact certain people and organize events, and I don't want to miss out.
I console myself by deliberately injecting noise into my profile (e.g. fake likes) every once in awhile.
I've also been out from Facebook over a month now. The last time I did it I was out three years, but needed to join back when I moved to a new country.
This time I also stopped drinking alcohol, quit nicotine (in the form of snus) and deleted several of my accounts, e.g. Gmail and Linkedin. This feels suspiciously easy...
I did something similar. I deleted the facebook app from my phone (originally due to battery usage). Then eventually I deactivated my account. I believe I have been facebook free for two weeks.
I experienced first hand the drug like quality of Facebook when I made the decision to finally quit..I started asking friends if I had an up to date contact number for them as I was planning to leave the site.
Every single one of them, EVERY one of them made it a mission of sorts to keep me from leaving the site.
"Just unfollow people, spend less time on the site"
Well by spending NO time on the site I AM spending less time on the site so hey we both get what we want right?
One friend went armchair psychologist on me about the affair.
It was an interesting week between emails,phone calls and text messages asking me where I had gone and why. "was it something I posted?"
For my part three months later...I've been reading a lot more and my grades in pre-law are improving, and that's all the feedback I needed to know I was on the right track to removing unnecessary cruft from the life.
Yes, it's really bizarre, even the application/website itself has a whole guilt-trip gauntlet when you choose to deactivate your account. Not to mention that you cannot actually ever even _delete_ your data, you can only put your account into a suspended state of stasis.
The only people I know of who have success in their facebookian encounters are:
+ activists
+ artists (who connect under pseudonyms)
+ businesspeople (who connect under the umbrella of their company)
Data created on someone else's computer cannot ever be owned by you. Data created by someone else's proprietary software on your locked computer is probably never exclusively yours either.
Last week I permanently deleted my FaceBook account. All my data since 2007 (10 years) and friends gone. Well...apparently my data is still somewhere to be used as metadata...
Still, I must say, this was a liberating experience. I don't go there anymore to see another cat/new born/fake news posts. I don't get get angry with dumb comments. I don't have to see at my friends are eating, selfies, etc..
My closest friends and family are reachable one whatsapp/imessage/phone call away. The other hundreds
"friends" I had on FB, I don't even remember their names anymore...
Facebook provides an option to download an archive of your data, you should have downloaded it before deleting your account. Apart from having all your data, it would have been the final nail in your Facebook coffin. To say the least, the data scared the f*ck out of me : they knew me better than any of my family or friends. The ad tracking data was...bang on target, they had facial recognition data, all the locations I signed in from. I sometimes joke that Fb knows more about people than the Government of the user. It's true!
To my knowledge, your account is never actually gone but instead deactivated. Not sure if there is a grace period to that, but as anondon said you can get an archive of all your data (which is what I did before deleting my account).
If you are considering getting off of it for any of these reasons then why haven't you already done it? You feel you might somehow need it, just like a heroin addict has trouble imagining a life without drugs.
It is horrible for your privacy. They collect EVERYTHING about you!
It is in their best interest to manipulate your attention, which to me is terrifying.
It is horrible for your relationships, cut the acquaintance you met 5 years ago that YOU WILL NEVER SPEAK WITH and force yourself to make more intimate connections with the people that actually matter.
It is horrible for your mind, you have a constant bombardment of instant gratification and self reinforcing ideas.
Gotta love the fact that when you're not logged in to FB, clicking on that url shows you the FB login page with a parameter where to redirect you next, which is normal enough, but it also has the referer URL (this HN comments page) as another parameter. They want to know who's linking to their delete page!
(OK they probably have that in every login page redirect, and the cleverer way would be to silently record the HTTP header...)
I de-activate and re-activate every few months, probably for emotional reasons since I read a lot about online privacy. I didn't know we can permanently delete it, glad to see fighters out there forcing them to make this option cause we all know they wouldn't give the option otherwise.
Not long ago I was sitting with some long time friends I hadn't seen in a few years. It was one of those really great visits in which you remember exactly why someone is an important person in your life.
One of the things we ended up talking about was physical photographs and how our families had developed a natural curation and annotation system. "Keepers" get sorted and labeled on the back with names, dates, brief notes, etc. and placed in albums. There were a bore when we were younger, but now we appreciate having some long-lasting artifacts of our families' lives and history. This is a nice thing and differs in importance to my every day interaction with personal media.
If I had the talent, I would make a small journaling tool for myself. All I would ask it to do is remind me once a week to select a favorite photograph and make a brief note about who's in it and why it's important. Really, just 30 second a week. Then, one a year a nice, archivally printed photo album would show up on my doorstep with all of these photographs arranged and discretely tagged with names, dates, and notes. That's it.
I like it. My wife subscribes to a service that will automatically print and mail her a small printed photo book for every X photos she favorites on her phone. It doesn't have the nice tagging and dates and notes, but it creates a chronological hard copy series of photo books that are great to have around, without requiring much forethought.
Even though Facebook by itself doesn't seem to provide much value anymore, it's incredible how much of a platform lock-in the have. For example, Facebook login becoming essentially a universal identity provider. The worst thing is even when you create a new account under a different name they still manage to track you down, and start suggesting adding friends from the old account. I wonder how they do this, by tracking cookies and fingerprinting your browser?
Edit: I just saw that the link provide even more data like this. Just my list of font is a > 99.9% of uniqueness. Multiplied by all the other likelihood, it's getting close to having the signature of every person on internet.
I've wondered this too. I have friend suggestions for my work colleagues, even though my Facebook email is my own private address and I've never emailed them from that address. It's amazing and bothersome
>For example, Facebook login becoming essentially a universal identity provider.
Yep, this is the #1 reason I still have a FB account. Until recently, I needed it so I could use Tinder. I have a great gf now, but just in case that fails, I'll want to be able to reactivate my Tinder account, and I need my FB login for that.
The only other reason I have a FB account is so I can be "friends" with some family members and some other people, because they use it. In practice, however, I never actually look at anything on there unless someone tells me "I sent you a FB message about such-and-such!".
The funny thing is, these are exactly the things I think about while on facebook. By being online for almost two decades I've developed a 6th sense for sketchy services and the whole UI of Facebook screams "SCAM!". The periodically reoccurring messages harassing you into uploading a picture of yourself, the prompt to denounce people who you believe are using a fake name or the vaguely described privacy settings don't help either.
I only log in when I get an e-mail notification for a message I've received. Some time ago you could simply reply to that e-mail but that doesn't work anymore. Furthermore, you can't say: I just want a notification in case of a message. You have to accept some other stuff as well. I've told my spam filter to delete every e-mail from facebook that doesn't include "message" its the subject.
I deleted facebook app from phone (android) and occasionally was visiting facebook website after notifications received. And apparently you cannot neither read nor reply to messages via browser anymore, you asked to install messenger app and it's not a "BETTER EXPERIENCE VIA APP (thank you, continue to site)" type of modal, there is no tiny text option to proceed with web
> And apparently you cannot neither read nor reply to messages via browser anymore
You can, but they try to make mobile users think you can't; you have to either use the desktop version of messenger.com (e.g., with "request desktop version" from a mobile browser) or use mbasic.facebook.com
It's interesting how annoying Facebook becomes when you don't come back for a while; push notifications on your phone, if you have the app installed, and emails about what you missed.
Facebook has always been based on real people using real names. Originally, it was your official university email address. That's what makes it much more useful than Twitter or Reddit etc. If you want to be anonymous, use a different site.
yeah, it's better. Still, I want to minimize the contact I have with FB. People who know me know that I don't like FB. If someone sends me a somewhat personal message on FB I've no qualms to to reply to this person via e-mail (when that person has a gmail address it's a tough decision, though ;) )
I left Facebook three years ago or so. It did not offer any value for me - and I couldn't stand the quality of "information" on that platform. To much crazy stuff in my stream, things I am not interested in, stupid games, ads, click bait, and so on.
I also left twitter months ago. The people seem to be better there, but I have the image of twitter being a bad company. And the time spent there didn't provide enough value to me. It was too easy to get disrupted at work. And after keeping apps closed, the service became useless for me.
Most of the people I have contact with are developers, and like 99% don't have a Facebook account either.
Readit News
I recently made the switch. I went from trying to limit how much I log in (to once or twice a week), to actually not logging in. I've been cold-turkey for two months (except for a couple of times when I had a very specific reason to check something).
I thought it would be difficult. Turns out it's not so hard, and it's the fear of reduced social contact (or dopamine withdrawal more likely) that was stopping me. If you have a plan to replace the social interactions with other forms, you realise that the rest is just dross. If I really want to know what my friends had for breakfast I can phone them up and ask. On balance, I'd rather not.
I'm not at the point of deleting the account yet. Small steps.
Here were my reasons FWIW: http://blog.afandian.com/2017/01/why-i-am-giving-up-on-faceb...
If you're reading and considering whether or not you can withdraw from Facebook, you can do it!
If anyone's interested in really ditching Facebook and preventing it from injecting junk into the sites you visit and tracking you, here's a list of URLs I've added to my hosts file. As the repo's name suggests, it helps make the internet suck less.
https://github.com/riebschlager/make-the-internet-suck-less/...
https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
I think if you really want to make sure Facebook doesn't have data directly from you, you'd need to take the time to delete every possible interaction you can, delete browser cookies, wait a couple days, then initiate account deletion (Facebook makes you wait 2 weeks until your account is actually deleted, just enough time for you to change your mind).
I'm 38 years old. I plan events with friends, I get to see their children grow up, new jobs, comfort them when they lose a parent..
There's never been a platform so emotionally engaging. It makes me feel in sync with their lives, even when I haven't seen them in a while.
It's such an amazing platform.
Also I am sad to see your thought is being down-voted.
Do you though? I mean do you really get to see all those things? Having been through the loss of a parent and the arrival a new baby in the past couple of years I can tell you from this end of things there is no value in any online "presence" of friends and family.
The people who come to meet our new baby, who brought food, and who attended the funeral are the ones that actually impacted our lives and improved us and themselves. A DM or post in Instagram meant nothing - it feels more like the person is signaling human emotions than engaging in them.
Facebook is the creepiest site ever. It's way more than the Stasi could have ever hoped for.
On top of that, the interface makes my brain hurt.
Yeppp. I know exactly how you feel, brother. I gave up Facebook for New Years and will be deleting my account after I set up a blog so I have somewhere to blow off steam and tell bad jokes.
The compromise that helped me overcome the feeling of being cut off was that I will have an open comments section and email address, if my friends really want to stay in touch then they will take time out of their week to come say hi.
It's a lot harder than people think. And the last season of South Park was no joke... When I announced I was leaving Facebook, many people were shocked and genuinely concerned for me. They asked me if it was really necessary, if I couldn't just use it less.
But that isn't an option, it's all or nothing and within a few months I will never let Facebook save another cookie on my computer again.
But I know the concern is partially because they understand exactly what is going on in my mind but they don't see a way out. It's really depressing.
For the hell of it I briefly checked my feed last week and I felt like a recovering junkie, visiting their old friends and seeing for the first time what their lifestyle really looked like from the outside.
The following is not meant to be critical - honest.
Why don't you channel your desire to be heard in to live interactions instead of an online one which is ultimately one way? It is much more fulfilling, and admitting/accepting that you don't deserve & need to share every thought that pops in to your head is healthy.
And if you need an extra kick, you can download an archive all your data. It had previous girlfriends, employers, places I signed in, private messages, ad agencies they passed my details on to, etc etc. All stuff I'd rather let fade away, but I know it never will.
This is the problem for me right now. I don't have a plan for replacing the social contact of facebook (and facebook isn't giving me anywhere close to what I need). I'm also struggling with depression right now and pretty socially withdrawn. As soon as the current blues pass and I'm able to come up with a real life third place [1], I hope to start limiting how much time I spend there and eventually quit altogether.
[1] From the article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
I read an article not long ago about upscale private clubs. I'm strongly attracted to the status/networking aspect often involved, but the idea of a place gather and socialize that doesn't require buying alcohol/coffee/food is appealing. Place it in a neighborhood. Keep the membership fees accessible to the people who live in that community and then offer some small perks that bars/coffee shops don't (e.g. free billiards on a real table). Hopefully, membership would make people a little more open to socializing with whomever show up, rather than the typical bar in which most people stick to their own group.
Does anyone have experience with private clubs (of any kind)? Did they open up social interaction in this way?
Other places I've had success is with local political/activist groups and hobby groups (dance groups, martial arts groups). Again, you have to try a lot of groups to find the right one, but it's worth it.
Get a fun job. Like at Walmart. People are invigorating. You have real relationships with fellow workers and the regular customers. Human interaction. Just don't have it be your real job so you can ignore drama.
Agreed. People fear they will socially ostracized if the leave Facebook. My experience has been the opposite. I found that FB is a good excuse to be socially lazy. Going to actual social events and meeting new people and having spontaneous conversations is far more gratifying and important. It's easy to delude yourself that you are getting your "social fix" via your FB feed and sending and accepting "friend requests."
There was a time when if you were in a public place waiting for a friend, you would strike up a conversation with a person next to you. Now if you are in say a bar waiting for your friend to show up most people are more likely to use that time to look FB on their phones, rather than interact with unknown people around them. I find this kind of sad.
For the past several months, I spent some of my free time going through my history, deleting almost everything I ever posted (note, there's a way to view your timeline by specific year, which seems to include more than the regular timeline view). The few things I couldn't delete (because it didn't give me an option) or that I didn't want to delete (e.g, photos I want to download later), I set to viewable only by me. Then without a peep, I deactivated my account. I probably should have written a script to do this rather than taking all the time. But to be honest, doing it manually was a nice jog down memory lane, even if it was really time consuming.
At this point, I have no plans to reactivate my account, with one exception. At some point, when I decide that "it's time," I'll reactivate my account, download an archive of the remaining items, delete what I can of what remains, and use the "account delete" option (for whatever good that actually does). Then that will be it.
Out of habit, I still frequently catch myself saying "ooh, interesting article, I should post that to facebook. Oh, wait..." Hopefully it's only a matter of time before that stops.
Anyway, I can say I'm happier without it. I'm now seriously considering deactivating my Twitter account. Twitter really will delete your account after I believe 30 days of it being deactivated.
This is a nefarious dark pattern though - I don't think there's any way to find the delete option through menus, you have to search through Google or Facebook's help center.
Since I don't use WhatsApp (because it's an FB company and because chat is not a substitute for groups), it'd be very hard to engage with others for my use, find new people, etc.
Turns out you apparently cannot do that, as every time I log in, I find myself re-following a few people (2-10) - some of which I had unfollowed long, long before my "isolationist" move...
The problem many people have is convenience. For example if you are forced to use Facebook in order to log into a Hotel Wifi (as I recently was) then you have to say "I don't want the Wifi more than I want to log in with Facebook". It's not an essential.
Or, it might be more difficult to spend the effort keeping in touch with people on a personal level, but it's not impossible. It just doesn't have the convenience that Facebook gives. But it also doesn't have the costs.
I'm not trying to convince anyone. But I do find it increasingly interesting (as I pay more attention to it) how many people confuse 'convenient' for 'essential'.
Now 2 weeks later, when FB crosses my mind I am actually happy and sometimes grin thinking of how much I've benefited from quitting it!
I'm in the same boat. I hardly use it, but I keep it around because it is the favored way to contact certain people and organize events, and I don't want to miss out.
I console myself by deliberately injecting noise into my profile (e.g. fake likes) every once in awhile.
This time I also stopped drinking alcohol, quit nicotine (in the form of snus) and deleted several of my accounts, e.g. Gmail and Linkedin. This feels suspiciously easy...
Every single one of them, EVERY one of them made it a mission of sorts to keep me from leaving the site.
"Just unfollow people, spend less time on the site"
Well by spending NO time on the site I AM spending less time on the site so hey we both get what we want right?
One friend went armchair psychologist on me about the affair.
It was an interesting week between emails,phone calls and text messages asking me where I had gone and why. "was it something I posted?"
For my part three months later...I've been reading a lot more and my grades in pre-law are improving, and that's all the feedback I needed to know I was on the right track to removing unnecessary cruft from the life.
The only people I know of who have success in their facebookian encounters are:
+ activists + artists (who connect under pseudonyms) + businesspeople (who connect under the umbrella of their company)
Still, I must say, this was a liberating experience. I don't go there anymore to see another cat/new born/fake news posts. I don't get get angry with dumb comments. I don't have to see at my friends are eating, selfies, etc..
My closest friends and family are reachable one whatsapp/imessage/phone call away. The other hundreds "friends" I had on FB, I don't even remember their names anymore...
https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account
Dead Comment
If you are considering getting off of it for any of these reasons then why haven't you already done it? You feel you might somehow need it, just like a heroin addict has trouble imagining a life without drugs.
It is horrible for your privacy. They collect EVERYTHING about you!
It is in their best interest to manipulate your attention, which to me is terrifying.
It is horrible for your relationships, cut the acquaintance you met 5 years ago that YOU WILL NEVER SPEAK WITH and force yourself to make more intimate connections with the people that actually matter.
It is horrible for your mind, you have a constant bombardment of instant gratification and self reinforcing ideas.
(OK they probably have that in every login page redirect, and the cleverer way would be to silently record the HTTP header...)
Thanks for sharing the link.
One of the things we ended up talking about was physical photographs and how our families had developed a natural curation and annotation system. "Keepers" get sorted and labeled on the back with names, dates, brief notes, etc. and placed in albums. There were a bore when we were younger, but now we appreciate having some long-lasting artifacts of our families' lives and history. This is a nice thing and differs in importance to my every day interaction with personal media.
If I had the talent, I would make a small journaling tool for myself. All I would ask it to do is remind me once a week to select a favorite photograph and make a brief note about who's in it and why it's important. Really, just 30 second a week. Then, one a year a nice, archivally printed photo album would show up on my doorstep with all of these photographs arranged and discretely tagged with names, dates, and notes. That's it.
Browser fingerprint plus IP and/or geo location and I'd think you could get a fairly accurate guess of who you are.
There is a JS project based on that and that gives you an ID based on the fingerprint. [1]
[1] https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs2
Edit: I just saw that the link provide even more data like this. Just my list of font is a > 99.9% of uniqueness. Multiplied by all the other likelihood, it's getting close to having the signature of every person on internet.
Interesting article: http://fusion.net/story/339018/facebook-psychiatrist-privacy...
Yep, this is the #1 reason I still have a FB account. Until recently, I needed it so I could use Tinder. I have a great gf now, but just in case that fails, I'll want to be able to reactivate my Tinder account, and I need my FB login for that.
The only other reason I have a FB account is so I can be "friends" with some family members and some other people, because they use it. In practice, however, I never actually look at anything on there unless someone tells me "I sent you a FB message about such-and-such!".
I only log in when I get an e-mail notification for a message I've received. Some time ago you could simply reply to that e-mail but that doesn't work anymore. Furthermore, you can't say: I just want a notification in case of a message. You have to accept some other stuff as well. I've told my spam filter to delete every e-mail from facebook that doesn't include "message" its the subject.
You can, but they try to make mobile users think you can't; you have to either use the desktop version of messenger.com (e.g., with "request desktop version" from a mobile browser) or use mbasic.facebook.com
They actually do this? That's pretty scary
I also left twitter months ago. The people seem to be better there, but I have the image of twitter being a bad company. And the time spent there didn't provide enough value to me. It was too easy to get disrupted at work. And after keeping apps closed, the service became useless for me.
Most of the people I have contact with are developers, and like 99% don't have a Facebook account either.