Quit it like smoking or soda. Just stop.
Or hitch a ride with the Doctor and never start.
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I also don’t have a television… And I don’t go to movie theaters. I haven’t missed those either.
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You say that like it’s a bad thing… Personally, I consider that a feature more than a bug.
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Having an account but not really having used it in years feels ok, too.
I assume correlation among the biographies of my Facebook friends has a lot to do with it, but ca, 2011 I lost interest, not so much for any principled reason, but mostly because it seemed to have lost its relevance and nobody seemed to post anything worth reading.
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It’s Geddy Lee, but she won’t admit it.
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Absolutely, utterly, agreed.
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I’m not on, but my wife is a heavy user with many, many people all over the world. Her secret? She ignores the politics and professional self-promotion, and uses it just to communicate with friends. She doesn’t read the political posts, doesn’t comment on them or post them. Scroll past, it’s that simple. To use the TV analogy, some people seem to be like “I had to throw my TV out because it was showing the 700 club nonstop!” Well, did you try changing the channel?
The privacy stuff, well yeah, that’s a different ball of wax, and totally makes sense to not sign up on that basis alone.
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[quote=“doctorow, post:1, topic:90688”]
I’d find myself there, scrolling down in what can only be described as a fetid swamp of echo-chamber-y hyper partisan news, the same old disagreements about the same old topics.[/quote]
It’s almost like people have the idea that you can effect positive change by being a dick to other people online.
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Having shut mine down some time ago, I revisited it with a new account last year, and rather than the 300+ ‘friends’ who did make it a “a fetid swamp of echo-chamber-y hyper partisan news” and reraised it without anyone who even posted that kind of stuff. I think I have 40 ‘friends’. They post pictures of their kids, they’re not braggy or bigoted. They’re just kind folks who want to share.
In other words, when i limited myself to folks who tended to use it politely, and not even connect with folks who use it like the message boards on the door to their old college dorm room (Which is where I presume the idea for fb and myspace etc… originated), it got better. It was a wetware solution.
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I’ve been burned twice by fb – because I hid people on FB and didn’t know important things about them when I ran into them IRL
1 - loose friend from HS had cancer … I looked stupid when I had no idea
2 - loose friend from old job got divorced … I looked stupid when I had no idea
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I was an early adopter of quitting by not joining.
Feeling sad that I don’t know what kind of topping you had on your pizza.
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Ah, what a dream from both sides of that!
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I don’t consider it fair or reasonable that someone would expect you to have read their refrigerator notes - so I assume that neither of us look stupid when I find myself in this situation, and just move on as though an obsession with facebook is detrimental to a deep relationship.
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I don’t have a Facebook account or a television 
That and television, and talking on the phone. Why watch scheduled TV when there’s Netflix, Hulu, etc for binge watching whatever you want? Also, why talk when you can text? Texting is better for super casual conversations when doing other stuff. Intense conversation is best done face to face. Phone is neither here nor there.
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It’s funny, the folks that seem to spread the most fake news, that are the most narcissistic ME ME ME, the ones that feel entitled that the world should revolve around how they think and want to shove your nose in their choices are more often than not the ones I see telling me how they don’t watch television, or don’t have facebook…and seem to think they are all the more enlightened about it.
All the while finding exact analogues for their previous vices. But if you point this out to them, they will stare at you blindly.
Personally, I realize there are aspects of FB that are negative. Then again, I see just as much fake news on BoingBoing as I do FB. At least I can ignore the conservative fake news because I know instantly it’s fake. The liberal fake news piques enough of my interest that I think it might be…until I read it and the sources, but I still see the ‘enlightened’ folks rah-rah’ing it anyways.
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Sadly, Facebook is the one and only way my extended family has chosen to stay in touch, share photos, news, etc, so I keep it around for that reason alone, as much as I’d like to dump it.
Hell, when I changed my profile picture to a black square when Trump won, my parents panicked and sent me daily messages about how concerned they were for my health and well being until I switched it back, and immediately got messages from cousins and uncles saying how relieved they were. It’s icky.
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The part I hate the most–face tagging. Sitting with old friends, and later I noticed that the person taking the image had tagged my face, thereby cracking FB’s door just that much wider on my information. I log in every 6 months to see if FB has deleted my profile or not…haven’t checked in a while, though.
My little brother and I communicate almost entirely by Snapchat. Almost every morning he sends me a shot of the front a/c vent in his car (?), sometimes circled, sometimes not, and without any explanatory text. I send him various bits and pieces of the day as well, some repeated, some not. It’s like communicating via GIF*.
*chill to -37C, serve with pickled Feuilles et bâtons.
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If this is what you use it for, why would you like to dump it?
Beyond all of this, it ends up being a one-stop shop for local events, being able to schedule with friends without having to devote half your day to contacting each and everyone one of them. Like it or not, we don’t behave the way that we did before the advent of cell phones and FB…
There are many ways to just not use it in ways that you don’t want. I have two accounts…one that has EVERYONE and one for just close friends and family (under a different alias / browse / and uses a VPN). I probably should just switch to the second some day…but that goes to my enjoyment of a lot of the things we all find detrimental (but fun in short doses).
