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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
Not public, privately own by facebook (and partners and clients) and aggregated with everything that is actually public and every other privately own data they could gather.
Genuine question : do you think a privacy oriented social network where users pay a small annual fee (around $5) would work? Think Whatsapp (use phone number as an id, no native discovery, only connect through phone contacts, encrypted user data only to prevent database leaks from causing damage) + Facebook (feed like feature, share photos, videos, direct messaging, group messaging). No user tracking, no ads, just a no bullshit social network where the average Joe would feel right at home and also one which the HN crowd would use, assuming social networks have a place in their lives.
Many people in the tech industry don't realize the tradeoffs they are making by participating on FB. This is to say nothing of the nontechnical crowd who make up the overwhelming majority of the site.
My wish is that mainstream news media would cover these issues. It'd be great if most of FB's users thought about the troves of personal info that they are providing not just about themselves but their friends as well.
There is a solution that can help you get here, and it worked for me: unfollow everyone and everything.
By unfollowing everyone except a handful of boring sites that barely ever publish anything, my newsfeed has become very boring and I rarely feel the pull towards it or any of its addictive power. The end result is that when I do log in, I only see notifications for a couple of groups full of my friends or interests that are truly relevant and I don’t waste any time scrolling.
At this point in my life, Messenger (not from the main site, but from its own site) and Groups are quite convenient, and both are a bit necessary for me at the moment, so I can’t quite disable Fb, but I’m very happily giving up on the feed for good.
I might eventually quit altogether, but this method has worked for me quite well for the last few months.
Another comment has mentioned poisoning the FB database with fake clickstreams, etc.
It looks like skillful black hat marketers have already succeeded at poisoning FB's content. Read this Vice story, then delete your FB account and delete the cookies from your browser. Friends don't let friends use FB.
Bit unrelated, but there's a working way to get rid of FB addiction. Just start unfollowing everything that you see in your "news feed". It's not visible to anyone, and you will gradually (a couple of weeks in my case) phase out of FB, just because there's nothing to see there.
But the very first step, for sure, is to admit that you have the addiction.
The iOS version is a web app because Apple rejected our native app. They said any app that encourages you to use your phone less is not appropriate for the app store.
Did you bring up the number of apps which either block a tone of sites with a simulated con or notify you until you reopen the app to keep you off you're phone?
A long while back (2012?) i deleted my Facebook account without really thinking it through, and i lost contact with a bunch of people i'd met during an overseas period. I still find that a bit of a pity, but ultimately (as cynical as it sounds) life goes on, and i've found more compatible people whom i care more about in the meantime.
However, a few years ago i recreated a Facebook profile (this time a pseudonym with initially 0 friends) because some of the events i'm interested in (local music/art galleries for example) only publish their events on Facebook, it seems. No mailing list available, invariably. This is a pity, because i don't have friends to rely on to drag me to the good gigs (i like to keep up-to-date with local experimental music, for example, which my friends don't care for).
And, the problem too, is that inevitably, i've made one or two friends with that account, partly with my previous FB experience in mind, and partly because they seemed belligerently anti-email (and texting isn't practical when you're in another country). So now i'm far from being back to square one, and i only look at Facebook about once every month, but i still would love to just get rid of it, except i don't really know how to handle musicians and artists who only publish their upcoming events on Facebook. But aside from that, the comments are spot on. If people can't be arsed to email me if i prefer email (and i, too, believe that i am easily google'able), they're probably not really worth chasing.
Does that exist? Like-on-Facebook-and-relay-via-email-as-a-Service?
A related question is "Should you sign up for Facebook today?". Five years ago I killed my Facebook account (and LinkedIn and G+) and it hasn't bothered me, but... am I missing out on something?
[+] [-] afandian|9 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] riebschlager|9 years ago|reply
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/...
[+] [-] aantix|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kakarot|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Kluny|9 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] bogomipz|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bblough|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cylinder|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] city41|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newscracker|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] herval|9 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] grahamburger|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macintux|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nugem_|9 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] DashRattlesnake|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pimeys|9 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamdave|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sova|9 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] phatbyte|9 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] anondon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grenoire|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icantdrive55|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] frebord|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] germinalphrase|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nnd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dxhdr|9 years ago|reply
Browser fingerprint plus IP and/or geo location and I'd think you could get a fairly accurate guess of who you are.
[+] [-] spraak|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Arizhel|9 years ago|reply
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!".
[+] [-] cJ0th|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pound|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cygned|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ljk|9 years ago|reply
They actually do this? That's pretty scary
[+] [-] cygned|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] daemonk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kiro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigbugbag|9 years ago|reply
Then used to target you in every possible ways.
[+] [-] anondon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nefreat|9 years ago|reply
My wish is that mainstream news media would cover these issues. It'd be great if most of FB's users thought about the troves of personal info that they are providing not just about themselves but their friends as well.
[+] [-] francamps|9 years ago|reply
By unfollowing everyone except a handful of boring sites that barely ever publish anything, my newsfeed has become very boring and I rarely feel the pull towards it or any of its addictive power. The end result is that when I do log in, I only see notifications for a couple of groups full of my friends or interests that are truly relevant and I don’t waste any time scrolling.
At this point in my life, Messenger (not from the main site, but from its own site) and Groups are quite convenient, and both are a bit necessary for me at the moment, so I can’t quite disable Fb, but I’m very happily giving up on the feed for good.
I might eventually quit altogether, but this method has worked for me quite well for the last few months.
[+] [-] OliverJones|9 years ago|reply
It looks like skillful black hat marketers have already succeeded at poisoning FB's content. Read this Vice story, then delete your FB account and delete the cookies from your browser. Friends don't let friends use FB.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/big-data-cambridg...
[+] [-] vgy7ujm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ar15saveslives|9 years ago|reply
But the very first step, for sure, is to admit that you have the addiction.
[+] [-] tdaltonc|9 years ago|reply
http://youjustneedspace.com
The iOS version is a web app because Apple rejected our native app. They said any app that encourages you to use your phone less is not appropriate for the app store.
[+] [-] H4CK3RM4N|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cygned|9 years ago|reply
http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/
[+] [-] toothbrush|9 years ago|reply
However, a few years ago i recreated a Facebook profile (this time a pseudonym with initially 0 friends) because some of the events i'm interested in (local music/art galleries for example) only publish their events on Facebook, it seems. No mailing list available, invariably. This is a pity, because i don't have friends to rely on to drag me to the good gigs (i like to keep up-to-date with local experimental music, for example, which my friends don't care for).
And, the problem too, is that inevitably, i've made one or two friends with that account, partly with my previous FB experience in mind, and partly because they seemed belligerently anti-email (and texting isn't practical when you're in another country). So now i'm far from being back to square one, and i only look at Facebook about once every month, but i still would love to just get rid of it, except i don't really know how to handle musicians and artists who only publish their upcoming events on Facebook. But aside from that, the comments are spot on. If people can't be arsed to email me if i prefer email (and i, too, believe that i am easily google'able), they're probably not really worth chasing.
Does that exist? Like-on-Facebook-and-relay-via-email-as-a-Service?
[+] [-] jgrahamc|9 years ago|reply