I quit Facebook after about six months. It wasn’t easy though. Facebook puts your account on hold unless you DELETE it, which is harder to do than “deactivating”.
No regrets.
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Early 20th century, “I don’t smoke”, might be more apt.
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I would dump Facebook in a sec except for one thing. It is the only way I can stay in contact with family in different parts of the country.
My story almost exactly except that I’m in Asia and they’re on the opposite side of the planet.
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This!
Fuck the pizza, and fuck the topping, (not in an American Pie kinda way either).
I was on FB briefly and quit after spending 20min fixing my privacy settings for the third time in a month and then idly scrolling through stuff and realizing I’d just wasted another 30sec of my life on a long-winded dissertation from an acquaintance regarding her day of laundry and cleaning the fishpond.
Fuck that shit, Ima see ya IRL or not at all!
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Count me in that cohort too. Occasionally only hear about an event after it’s happened, but otherwise ignorance is BLISS.
I’m of the view that Facebook is what you make it. Nobody is forcing you to add a million friends and read all of their vacuous updates. If you want to use it for keeping up with family, only add them. If you like the news follow those outlets. Follow close friends and have a policy of not adding randoms.
If any of the pages I follow start posting click bait or otherwise low quality stuff they get removed. Similarly if friends (or their girlfriends) post generally stupid stuff they get unfollowed. I unfollowed two of my uncles because they were reposting things from the English Defence League and Britain First (racists).
I haven’t felt the need to do a review of my privacy settings in a while because nothing appears to have changed recently but its probably a good thing to do every now and then. Other than that you control what you share so its in your hands what Facebook know about you - I suppose its different if you are tagged in photos but surely you could just speak to people and tell them not to.
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Aren’t you supposed to be a security writer?
FOMO is a real marker of these times. The idea and concern that the grass really is greener is perennial and often corrosive.
Take a week off. See what happens. You won’t miss the Met Gala Ball that you won’t be invited to!
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That’s what really shits me about Facebook, always has. It’s so hard to maintain a coherent picture of how your posts are shared. It doesn’t help that they constantly change it, but it was always hard from the beginning.
I hardly use it for that reason, even ignoring the data they gather about you and the way they use or share that, just in terms of normal use of the site, I find the way information is shared deliberately hard to understand.
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True story: I joined Facebook late. Perhaps eight years ago? I didn’t mention to anyone that I had done so. Within three hours, I had received a friend request from my mother. I closed the account immediately.
I’m a terrible person.
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Being constantly plugged into social media reminds me of back in the 90’s when we had times when the land-line home phone kept ringing all day. Social media is as much an annoyance as it is a boon.
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Those were the days. Each family had one phone, two at most. No apps, just phone. If you were lucky enough to have the Internet, you had to unplug the phone and plug in this big huge contraption less powerful than today’s smart phones. And we were fine with that system.
Now get off my lawn.
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PITA, I realize, but could you make a non-FB linked Spotify account, share all the playlists from your old account to it, and delete the old account? I haven’t actually tried this, I’m spitballing.
Another corrosive thing I saw recently was my friend who has a music page. She is on there several times a day to see if the ‘people like me’ counter has incremented, and gets excited when it has. She has like 60 fans, and while she is very talented and sounds good at the bar, I don’t see it becoming a career for her. She covers her babysitting when she has a gig once a month sort of thing. It is a fantastic outlet for her, but it’s not likely something she will get discovered doing, though not impossible, and that counter on facebook seems to really provide her with a meter that she puts much weight on. She seems to think it means something more than that 60 people have wanted to know more about her music. Like some day that number is going to explode and all her problems will be solved or something. I can’t blame facebook for that, but she gets very discouraged from her music because she has a way of measuring something and is not seeing “progress” in that thing, the knowledge of which only slows her down and takes her out of the moment - I think it discourages her creativity.
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It definitely reminds me of what life was before an old pal from college could send you a cat video from australia while you were camping in canada.
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“I only jumped off this bridge because everybody else was doing it.”
When Facebook first came out, I didn’t know what it was. A cousin sent me an email with pictures of a visit. I clicked on it and it said to see the pictures, I had to create an account. I did so, saw the pictures, forgot about it. Less than a year later, I started to get requests from people I’d long forgotten about in my life to be their friend on this annoying website. I instantly deleted the account. It’s the internet for dummies. It’s the new version of AOL Desktop. It’s total garbage and nobody should be on it, period.
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Yup. Ieft Facebook four years ago, and Instagram this week. Don’t miss either of them at all.
It’s not that I didn’t like being vaguely informed about what my distant - and even close - friends and relatives are up to, it’s just that I realised every day I was spending more than half an hour looking at all this stuff, and absolutely none of it was actually interesting. It was the online equivalent of running into someone you vaguely know in the supermarket and engaging in small talk for five minutes. Not actively bad, but it sure wasn’t bringing anything into my life that I’d look back on with any fondness.
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A Directory of Wonderful Things
Breaking My Arm Patting Myself On The Back
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