I feel like there are a lot of impulse control issues that make people hate it. I have never felt obsessed with looking at my FB. It’s incredibly handy for mass-communicating to my friends and family (I’ve used the Event creation tool frequently) and personally it helps me memorize a lot of new names & faces each semester. I try to be judicious about who I add to my friends list, and if I discover I’ve added someone obnoxious it’s painless to stop following them. Imperative, though: turn off ALL notifications except direct messages from people.
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Only one of my children has Facebook, and she knew from me to set it up with a fake name. As a result, any photos of her on other people’s pages are tagged with the fake name. It’s worked well so far as a privacy kludge.
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I solved that problem by not having friends who would do that.
Or just by not having any friends… works either way!
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Or maybe it’s Garry Lee! (NSFW…)
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I experimented with suspending my account, but ultimately it’s the only convenient way to keep up with friends in Europe and family scattered around the US, and keep up with some events and organizations I care about. Plus, post-election it’s been great for sharing activism ideas and events and encouraging each other.
My solution: No app on my phone, definitely not messenger. I encourage people who message me to contact me on Signal or at least Whatsapp. I’m in the process of deleting my history and will only keep 2 months of history from here on (Facebook Post Manager is great for this). I wish diaspora would have taken off, as well. Or ello. Or something.
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Me and my young friends mostly use it for Memes.
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“It’s been six years since I quite Facebook and not a day goes by that I don’t realize that my life is better for it.”
Looks like spending time on facebook wasn’t the only thing you quit.
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Neil Peart? Red Green? Dave Sim?
As if you would put up with Dave Sim…
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Bryan Adams? Celine Dion?
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DON’T MAKE ME LAUGH SARCASTICALLY!
Hahahahahaha!HA! No. Dave Sim can diaf.
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I quit Facebook once.
Of course, I’d never signed up for it. Someone else had signed up and gave them my email address. They’d signed up in Arabic, so Gmail automatically routed the Arabic signup confirmation email to the junk folder. (A default for foreign languages, apparently.) Even without having the confirmation email, they managed to get some Facebook access. (Brute-forcing the confirmation URL?)
The flaw in his cunning plan was that I finally looked in my junk folder, went to Facebook and requested a password change, got the confirmation email to my Gmail account and confirmed it. Then I replaced his picture with a Mr Yuk poison image, changed his description to “I am an idiot”, and started the Facebook deletion countdown. (The tricky part was finding the preferences on the right-to-left Arabic screens to switch it English.)
Good times!
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At least he could uninstall it. My previous phone had the Facebook app as one of the non-uninstallable apps, and rooting to yank it out wasn’t possible. Even through I never used the app, didn’t have an account, the trace in Android debugger showed that it connected to the mothership every night. I blocked Facebook at the wifi router to put a stop to that.
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The hilarious thing is that he’s famously private. I can’t imagine how he would react to everyone having his cell number.
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Same here. Put my mostly-drama-hating friends & family together with the Social Fixer add-on and I have the easiest (for me) place to stay in touch with people around the globe that is ad and BS-free.
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If anyone gives you eyebrow about not being on Facebook, play with their brain.
“Aren’t you on Facebook?!”
“Facebook…? Oh yeah, Facebook, ha, I remember that. No, I use a secret Darknet app with cool stuff.”
“Ooh! Which one?”
“A secret one.”
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I’d leave Facebook, but then I’d be missing out on all the good memes.
Facebook is the latest and greatest. Marshall McLuhan argued that every time we had a new medium we amputate something of ourselves. He would have loved it.
I remember when copiers got cheap in the 1970s, so everyone had lots of copies of articles that they were going to look at when they actually had time to deal with them, except, of course, they never did. One copied an article instead of reading it.
Then came the VCR in the 1980s, so everyone had lots of taped television shows and movies that they were going to watch when they actually had time to deal with them, except, of course, they never did. One taped a television show instead of watching it.
Now we have Facebook, so everyone has lots of Facebook friends that they are going to talk with and do stuff with when they actually have time to deal with them, except, of course, they never will. One has Facebook friends instead of spending time with real friends.
I have a Facebook account I created under a pseudonym when a friend of mine’s daughter had a lung transplant and he really couldn’t update everyone concerned with how her surgery was going personally. Instead, he updated his Facebook account. That was some years ago. His daughter is doing fine. I’ve looked at Facebook a few times since then. If another friend or someone they care about greatly has major surgery, I will definitely follow them on Facebook again.
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I’ve got $2 on Alexander Graham Bell, Tim Horton, Doug Henning, Malcolm Lowry, godammit… uh…oh fine, Justin Bieber.
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I’ve never gotten strange stares, but maybe it’s my personality and my friends just don’t expect me to be there. Now, there is one that gets me strange stares sometimes: email.
I gave up email a few years ago. It was just getting too stressful – I was always feeling bad about being behind in my correspondence, so one day I just stopped.
Sometimes I feel a bit guilty – I didn’t tell anyone I was stopping – but for the most part it has been a liberation. Seriously, it feels great.
It’s not that I’m a Luddite or a technophobe: I got on the Internet very early, and through most of the 90’s I owned an ISP. But after so much time on it, I just got tired of it. So I quit.
I keep telling myself that I’ll go back to it at some point, and perhaps I will. But all of my real friends have my phone number, and if they need to send anything to me they can use my work email address (yes, I still have a work email. Being a technologist I kind of need one…).
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