For everyone here who --like me-- has never bought into Facebook, and never gotten hooked on it, congratulations. We are free of the Facebook dopamine dispenser, unlike our poor friends and family.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go refresh the HN front page for the 10th time today, and after checking how many upvotes I got on my latest comments, don't mind if I jump back over to reddit for a while, and then back to watching the Larry David clips that YouTube is sending my way.
I had a similar realization a few years back. All these petty average Joe scrolling selfies and trendy deals doing nothing.
I, on the other side, am scrolling hn, lambdartheultimate, Haskell subs and discords, hoarding caml research papers... doing nothing. I was mostly a snub variant of the above.
Except that on HN I have actually learned a things or two. I have been connected to useful articles on topics that have solved many of my tech problems in recent years. Nobody has ever gotten anything useful from a facebook news feed.
The core difference is that while Facebook seeks to keep our eyes on facebook, places like HN actively encourage people to post links to material outside the core service. HN doesn't try to keep eyeballs on targets. (And HN is so tiny that it loads faster than anything on work connection out in the middle of nowhere.)
I may be in the minority, but I actually rarely visit HN’s homepage, but rather follow @newsyc150 on Twitter, and just get a feed of articles that hit 150 votes (there are other increments, too).
It’s not overwhelming — I generally feel it hits the sweet spot of signal-to-noise. I only pull up Twitter a few times a day, and scan to find interesting things there. My Twitter feed is generally light — I don’t follow any individuals, only sites I want to see updates on without having to poll them.
I check HN once per day when I wake up and only rarely otherwise. I got the social media addiction out of my system years ago on a forum. It was horrible, I had to lock myself out using repeated sha1-hashing which required me to spend many hours of CPU time to get access back.
So glad to be done and over with that sort of addiction. Social media is as addictive as cigarettes or booze and we are way behind on treating it in the same ways.
You made me laugh, but also think what I might be addicted to.
I can't think of a single thing except porn. Highly functional addict buy still one nonetheless. I don't think I can quit.
It's odd though that it's the only thing. I've always thought that susceptibility to addiction is a personality trait that make you usually get addicted to more than one thing.
I know a lot of immigrants/expats and Facebook is pretty much the one thing they have to keep in touch with family and friends back home.
Personally I loathe the company and would be happy if some fatal DNS or other issue took it down for good or if it were legislated out of existence by the EU/US. But we also need to be aware of the value it provides other than as a bullhorn for anti-vaxxers and other nutjobs and perhaps think of how to build a safer and more ethical alternative.
Are they taking about the same Facebook? I find it utterly boring and only use it for messenger anymore.
It used to be addictive, before social media, when it was a social network. You were interacting with real people, you could meet new people, "stalk" people you know IRL, share stuff about yourself or find out stuff about others. You would try to find your crush on FB and check see if you have common acquaintances. And you would obsessively watch who looks at your page and who likes your posts. The thing that made it addictive were the actual human interactions that people crave.
Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society (an information/propagation architecture that exploits how people process information, imo).
For me, Facebook is nothing more than a hometown forum. I havent logged on in months.
> Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society
I'm always surprised that Reddit gets a free pass in these discussions. Reddit has been home to some of the most egregious bad communities and misinformation hives.
Their invisible-hand moderation system allows a small number of moderators to completely control the conversation in a subreddit. Banning dissenters and removing comments that don't agree with what the moderators want people to see is an easy way to make it look like everyone is in natural agreement on a topic.
The weirdest part is that most tech people readily admit that Reddit is full of terrible content, even on the front page. The common retort is that it's not so bad if you create an account and manually remove all of those bad subreddits from your list, but by the same argument Facebook isn't a problem because you can simply not subscribe to the bad content.
>"Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society"
Absolutely. Not only are the people on Twitter much more toxic, the trending feed is way more prone to manipulation and influence campaigns. If I don't know someone directly on Facebook, I'm probably never going to see their stupid hot-takes. No such separation on Twitter. Also, whenever I scroll through Facebook, more than half the posts are advertisements anyways. It rarely shows me anything of value from my friends and somehow fixates on the same dozen people. Oddly, I was never even very friendly with those dozen in real life.
People say Facebook is dangerous because people fall into a loop of following content they already like and falling into grouptthink. Firstly, how in the world does not apply more strongly with Twitter? Second, on Twitter it is possible to bombard non-followers with repeated, biased, and motivated messaging. I think this is far more insidious because it creates a false sense of consensus and you can condition people to react a certain way with repeated messaging. And, these users don't even need to actively follow the influencers' accounts.
Edit: I don't even follow people like "Brooklyn Dad, Defiant!", "Duty to Warn", or "Palmer Report", yet I am always seeing content from these paid influencers whenever I click on a trending topic. So imagine if you're not a partisan person and you consistently keep seeing messages from these kinds of accounts. Chances are, eventually, some of their tweets are going to influence how you think and give you a biased view of things.
For me Twitter is a bit more than an RSS feed, I block everybody who ends up in my timeline for no good reason. A while ago I told Twitter I live in Germany, because I was told they have to censor nazis down there.
It's way healthier than Facebook, where blocking the crazy friend of your aunt may cause endless real life discussions.
> Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society
I don't really see how that can be true when only 20% of so of the population actually use Twitter. It's very small beans compared to Facebook, or YouTube for that matter.
I feel like everyone ignores scale here. Facebook is an of magnitude larger even before considering Instagram and WhatsApp. They have nearly 3 billion active users.
Twitter is a fraction of the scale/influence, especially outside of english speaking countries.
WhatsApp is the de facto communication platform in some countries. Facebook is the internet in some parts of Africa. India has nearly as many Facebook users as the US has adults in total.
Even if you don't use Facebook yourself, society around you uses it... a lot... and that impacts you.
I personally found Facebook hard to quit, but not entirely impossible. I would compare it to giving up cigarettes: not easy, but I got through it. I am coming to terms with the fact that I have have a very serious and damaging internet addiction, however. Like many serious addictions, there's a lot of shame attached to my real addiction, which is 4chan. 4chan is like being addicted to heroin. Every day is a battle to look away from the train wreck, and so far I haven't been able to overcome this addiction in any meaningful way. What's interesting is that the site doesn't use any of the scandalous techniques that facebook is currently getting heat for, yet it has a grip on me that's basically ruined my life as much as a crack addiction could ruin a person's life. It's so bad that I've spent many years of my life living in very close proximity to hard drug users, because of the poverty my addiction has caused me. So, I guess what I'm getting at is we might have a bigger problem than just facebook, or at least I do.
I find the premise ridiculous. I mean yes, there are people who are addicted to it. There are people who are addicted to lots of things, from playing video games to climbing ice-covered mountains. But the idea that it's harder to quit facebook than to get rid of, say, opioid dependency - which literally rewires your body's biochemistry - sounds like complete BS. Of course, if your life is so empty you have nothing to do but browse facebook, sure it's hard to quit, but it's not because of the strength of the addiction, it's because of the weakness of the alternative. I'm sure if you cut off that person's internet access and threw their phone into a lake, they'd be cured pretty soon.
I don't disagree with you, but I felt the need to point out the positive feedback loop in the scenario you laid out, that is, the more time you use Facebook the less you spend in your real life and so the alternative becomes weaker even if it was strong when you started. People who use Facebook compulsively didn't start out with no friends and family, if they had they'd have had no reason to create an account on the first place.
> if your life is so empty you have nothing to do but browse facebook, sure it's hard to quit, but it's not because of the strength of the addiction, it's because of the weakness of the alternative.
"Weakness of the alternative" is a large reason people get addicted to things in the first place. It goes hand in hand.
Imagine if nicotine had network effects (edit: I mean as strong network effects as fb). You can't quit unless all your friends do too. I hear some alcoholics have a similar challenge when their social life revolves around drinking with peer pressure not to abstain.
>Imagine if nicotine had network effects. You can't quit unless all your friends do too.
As a former smoker, it took me moving from an office full of smokers to an office where I was the only smoker to finally motivate me to quit for good. I tapered down over about a year with a vape though, and I think that almost has an anti-network effect in that you kind of look like a bellend!
While it was fortunately never a problem for me (I've never really drank a lot), when I did business travel for a living, it was pretty common to go to bars after work and expense some drinks to the company (the CEO knew about this, we weren't breaking rules).
I remember thinking that if I were an alcoholic, this would either be the best job in the world or the worst job in the world, depending on your perspective. I can't imagine how much harder it would be to actually quick full-blown alcoholism if all the booze is free. Obviously you were allowed to just buy a soda or seltzer or something, and that's usually what I did, but I could totally see it being ten times harder to quit when all your drinks are comped and all your peers are drinking around you.
My father picked up smoking when he joined the Navy so that he could participate in the smoke breaks. Fortunately he managed to quit when he got out. I wager many started smoking for the same reason, and never quit.
Facebook is like vendor lock in for human social interactions and emotions.
That's probably why Zuckerberg tries to acquire competitors - trying to lock in your behavior and then sell it to the highest bidder. Makes sense when you think about it.
When I suggest people delete FB apps from their phones, they start writhing uncomfortably, and try to justify not doing so by making some half-ass claim that their social life will suffer if they did. Its the same response I would expect from someone who is a moderate alcoholic and is told to drink less wine during the week. The addiction is obvious.
My experience after deleting FB apps from my phone - social life changed for the better and I feel less anxiety. It turns out, most of my FB "friends" weren't really my friends. And I can still check FB / Insta via web if I wanted to. Added bonus - FB can't track me as well.
FB will do what FB does - try to steal as much data and attention and sell it to the highest bidder. But you can only blame them so much. Collectively, its on people to change and take responsibility if they feel they have grievances related to FB.
Still, I have hope - awareness for social media's downside effects is only increasing. Ms. Haugen's testimony and the Social Dilemma documentary demonstrate that.
It's not just Facebook, it's social media in general. More precisely, it's infinite scroll, which has become a ubiquitous design decision across social media. I recently finally succeeded in developing a healthy relationship to social media, and it involved disabling infinite scroll where I could (using Hackernews, moving to old Reddit) and quitting the social media sites where I couldn't (mostly Youtube). I'm scared to touch Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter because the infinite scroll mechanism is so addictive.
I don't find any particular service difficult to quit, but its pretty much impossible to never be on some sort of dopamine grinder on some level.
Video games are a nice escape hatch in this way. If you pivot to a game, and then beat the game, there's a moment of nothingness where you have nothing gripping your attention constantly. Or at least that's my experience.
Does anyone else find it hard to personally connect with the well-researched claim that people respond with a fight-or-flight response to ideas that challenge their core beliefs? I've always found ideas to be more interesting the more they challenge my core beliefs. This is true of math and science, but especially true of things like religion. I remember how wonderful it was as a teenager to find challenges to the ideas I was raised with, debating my positions with people online, and appreciating losing debates and having my mind opened to new ideas.
I want to thank my insufferable American aunt who did nothing but spin every post and comment into being about her. Made it very easy to quit about eight years ago.
Twitter is trickier. I actually enjoy the discourse (once I figured out how to filter the loud angry idiots).
You know what worked for me to get rid of Facebook? I turned it into a chore and eventually broke it.
When I deleted my old account and created a new one a few years ago, I decided to run a little experiment: I started hiding everything that was not posted directly by friends. "[unknown person] posted on [friend]'s wall"? Hide [unknown person]. "[friend] liked a post by [some page]"? I hid that page. A friend shared a post by someone or from a page? You bet I hid those too. And the same for groups, events and so forth.
I did that a little bit every day, for 3 years, until Facebook became pretty much barren. My friends only really post a handful of things a day and the rest is just cruft. Around that time I also discovered that Facebook started exposing who had uploaded your contact info as part of a marketing list... so I started leaving negative reviews and blocking those pages.
Does this sound like a total bore and a chore? Yes, yes it was. I think I got it going for so long mostly out of spite for the platform. Eventually, it got so bad that it started literally breaking Facebook for me. Sometimes no posts would load at all. Eventually, some of the hiding options stopped working! After a year or so, the experience got so janky and unrewarding I just deleted my account. I took the chance to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp as well, since this was around the time where the latter started pushing for more telemetry.
I got most of my closer friends to jump on Telegram and Signal. I do miss Facebook a bit, in that it's become harder to keep up with some people that don't use other platforms... but not too much. I'm setting up a blog for myself to share whatever I want to write, my tech tutorials and maybe set up a photo gallery.
As someone who's recovered from multiple substance addictions in the past, it is so painfully obvious when I see social media addicts. It's literally the exact same behavior. The compulsion, the lack of awareness, the ignoring of friends and loved ones while mindlessly scrolling; it's all there. Social addiction is even more sinister because the feedback loop is scientifically optimized in a way no substance could ever match, and it feeds the most base primal need that humans have which is status and recognition. It's more powerful than even hunger. I don't know how we can possibly get away from this.
If you ever heard about Maslow hierarchy, the status is way towards the top. Things like hunger, safety and not being in pain is much lower. So I highly doubt many people would forgo food and agree to be in constant excruciating pain just to be able to access facebook.
I'm pretty sure there are substances that can match whatever addictive qualities you get from reading a screen. My best friend from high school died while detoxing from alcohol. I'm reasonably sure social media withdrawal is not physically dangerous.
I quit Facebook around 6 years ago and it was So easy. Facebook is trash, the ui is trash, I mean it's ridiculous, and that was 6 years ago. I can't imagine how bad the ui is now, but it gives me a headache to try.
I can only imagine it must be likes, I've rarely gotten likes on any platform. I assume it is because I am writing what I can only assume is gibberish to others. This simple fact stopped me from being addicted.
Be less likeable and quitting social media is super easy. Just tell the truth, that seems to work great at reducing likes.
It was really hard to quit for me for sure. Near the end I kept telling my friends it feels like posting to FB is just slapping the feeder button in a rat cage, or that I feel like I'm suffering for outrage burnout. I quit just before the lead up to the 2016 election because my feed was becoming a warzone and it was really upsetting. I didn't like seeing family who I loved turning into raging assholes. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made but in some ways it was almost like when I was trying to quit smoking. I'd go away for a week and come back, tell myself I quit again and come back again in one to two week cycles. The only thing that got me to finally leave was backing up all my account assets and actually deleting it. I've never looked back. I feel like I made the right choice especially seeing things like /r/hermancainaward and seeing how polarizing the effects of social media are still accelerating discourse. I think the worse thing is seeing dialogue by meme becoming the most prevalent method of sharing ideas. Taking a complex idea shaving it down to 5 to 10 words with funny image in the background is not the way to have an argument, changes no minds, and seems to have hypnotized entire demographics into ideological mania.
Equally true if you replace "Facebook" with "online media". They optimize their articles and headlines for virality, including this one, just as aggressively as FB optimizes its algorithms. They're just two different parts of the same electronic drug-pushing machine.
Give your attention and care and trust to the goals and people in your life that are worthy of it.
That "Facebook" we always speak of is never the same thing for everyone. Every Page "like", every "friendship", will change what one sees in their social bubble.
I, for one, am glad that my social bubble is utterly boring and un-engaging, and my level of engagement with Facebook is inversely proportional to my engagement/passion in life as such.
What I noticed about my son’s peer group is that FB just doesn’t occupy their mind share. It’s mostly Roblox, Minecraft, Netflix, YouTube or some other game.
FB may well be an addictive space now but I suspect its growth has just about peaked. I keep hearing kids say that FB is something adults use and hence isn’t cool or trendy.
Those sound like pretty young kids. Teens are more actively seeking socialization, but they also gravitate to places adults aren't. Unfortunately it doesn't sound like the new generation of sites like Tiktok is any less insidious.
[+] [-] khazhoux|4 years ago|reply
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go refresh the HN front page for the 10th time today, and after checking how many upvotes I got on my latest comments, don't mind if I jump back over to reddit for a while, and then back to watching the Larry David clips that YouTube is sending my way.
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|4 years ago|reply
I, on the other side, am scrolling hn, lambdartheultimate, Haskell subs and discords, hoarding caml research papers... doing nothing. I was mostly a snub variant of the above.
[+] [-] sandworm101|4 years ago|reply
The core difference is that while Facebook seeks to keep our eyes on facebook, places like HN actively encourage people to post links to material outside the core service. HN doesn't try to keep eyeballs on targets. (And HN is so tiny that it loads faster than anything on work connection out in the middle of nowhere.)
[+] [-] jader201|4 years ago|reply
It’s not overwhelming — I generally feel it hits the sweet spot of signal-to-noise. I only pull up Twitter a few times a day, and scan to find interesting things there. My Twitter feed is generally light — I don’t follow any individuals, only sites I want to see updates on without having to poll them.
[+] [-] Syonyk|4 years ago|reply
It removes comment/upvote numbers from Hacker News and makes it far less able to exploit human psychological loopholes related to numbers.
[+] [-] emerged|4 years ago|reply
So glad to be done and over with that sort of addiction. Social media is as addictive as cigarettes or booze and we are way behind on treating it in the same ways.
[+] [-] rafale|4 years ago|reply
It's odd though that it's the only thing. I've always thought that susceptibility to addiction is a personality trait that make you usually get addicted to more than one thing.
[+] [-] danjac|4 years ago|reply
Personally I loathe the company and would be happy if some fatal DNS or other issue took it down for good or if it were legislated out of existence by the EU/US. But we also need to be aware of the value it provides other than as a bullhorn for anti-vaxxers and other nutjobs and perhaps think of how to build a safer and more ethical alternative.
[+] [-] btown|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lurquer|4 years ago|reply
Once I hit 1000, I’m outa here. Promise.
[+] [-] afarviral|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] captainmuon|4 years ago|reply
It used to be addictive, before social media, when it was a social network. You were interacting with real people, you could meet new people, "stalk" people you know IRL, share stuff about yourself or find out stuff about others. You would try to find your crush on FB and check see if you have common acquaintances. And you would obsessively watch who looks at your page and who likes your posts. The thing that made it addictive were the actual human interactions that people crave.
I wish someone would make a site like that again!
[+] [-] ramoz|4 years ago|reply
Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society (an information/propagation architecture that exploits how people process information, imo).
For me, Facebook is nothing more than a hometown forum. I havent logged on in months.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
I'm always surprised that Reddit gets a free pass in these discussions. Reddit has been home to some of the most egregious bad communities and misinformation hives.
Their invisible-hand moderation system allows a small number of moderators to completely control the conversation in a subreddit. Banning dissenters and removing comments that don't agree with what the moderators want people to see is an easy way to make it look like everyone is in natural agreement on a topic.
The weirdest part is that most tech people readily admit that Reddit is full of terrible content, even on the front page. The common retort is that it's not so bad if you create an account and manually remove all of those bad subreddits from your list, but by the same argument Facebook isn't a problem because you can simply not subscribe to the bad content.
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|4 years ago|reply
Absolutely. Not only are the people on Twitter much more toxic, the trending feed is way more prone to manipulation and influence campaigns. If I don't know someone directly on Facebook, I'm probably never going to see their stupid hot-takes. No such separation on Twitter. Also, whenever I scroll through Facebook, more than half the posts are advertisements anyways. It rarely shows me anything of value from my friends and somehow fixates on the same dozen people. Oddly, I was never even very friendly with those dozen in real life.
People say Facebook is dangerous because people fall into a loop of following content they already like and falling into grouptthink. Firstly, how in the world does not apply more strongly with Twitter? Second, on Twitter it is possible to bombard non-followers with repeated, biased, and motivated messaging. I think this is far more insidious because it creates a false sense of consensus and you can condition people to react a certain way with repeated messaging. And, these users don't even need to actively follow the influencers' accounts.
Edit: I don't even follow people like "Brooklyn Dad, Defiant!", "Duty to Warn", or "Palmer Report", yet I am always seeing content from these paid influencers whenever I click on a trending topic. So imagine if you're not a partisan person and you consistently keep seeing messages from these kinds of accounts. Chances are, eventually, some of their tweets are going to influence how you think and give you a biased view of things.
[+] [-] mmarq|4 years ago|reply
It's way healthier than Facebook, where blocking the crazy friend of your aunt may cause endless real life discussions.
[+] [-] afavour|4 years ago|reply
I don't really see how that can be true when only 20% of so of the population actually use Twitter. It's very small beans compared to Facebook, or YouTube for that matter.
[+] [-] micromacrofoot|4 years ago|reply
Twitter is a fraction of the scale/influence, especially outside of english speaking countries.
WhatsApp is the de facto communication platform in some countries. Facebook is the internet in some parts of Africa. India has nearly as many Facebook users as the US has adults in total.
Even if you don't use Facebook yourself, society around you uses it... a lot... and that impacts you.
[+] [-] iammisc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] alchemyromcom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] betwixthewires|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gotostatement|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barbs|4 years ago|reply
"Weakness of the alternative" is a large reason people get addicted to things in the first place. It goes hand in hand.
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BoxOfRain|4 years ago|reply
As a former smoker, it took me moving from an office full of smokers to an office where I was the only smoker to finally motivate me to quit for good. I tapered down over about a year with a vape though, and I think that almost has an anti-network effect in that you kind of look like a bellend!
[+] [-] tombert|4 years ago|reply
I remember thinking that if I were an alcoholic, this would either be the best job in the world or the worst job in the world, depending on your perspective. I can't imagine how much harder it would be to actually quick full-blown alcoholism if all the booze is free. Obviously you were allowed to just buy a soda or seltzer or something, and that's usually what I did, but I could totally see it being ten times harder to quit when all your drinks are comped and all your peers are drinking around you.
[+] [-] speedybird|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonameiguess|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] game_the0ry|4 years ago|reply
That's probably why Zuckerberg tries to acquire competitors - trying to lock in your behavior and then sell it to the highest bidder. Makes sense when you think about it.
When I suggest people delete FB apps from their phones, they start writhing uncomfortably, and try to justify not doing so by making some half-ass claim that their social life will suffer if they did. Its the same response I would expect from someone who is a moderate alcoholic and is told to drink less wine during the week. The addiction is obvious.
My experience after deleting FB apps from my phone - social life changed for the better and I feel less anxiety. It turns out, most of my FB "friends" weren't really my friends. And I can still check FB / Insta via web if I wanted to. Added bonus - FB can't track me as well.
FB will do what FB does - try to steal as much data and attention and sell it to the highest bidder. But you can only blame them so much. Collectively, its on people to change and take responsibility if they feel they have grievances related to FB.
Still, I have hope - awareness for social media's downside effects is only increasing. Ms. Haugen's testimony and the Social Dilemma documentary demonstrate that.
[+] [-] btheshoe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barbs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spywaregorilla|4 years ago|reply
Video games are a nice escape hatch in this way. If you pivot to a game, and then beat the game, there's a moment of nothingness where you have nothing gripping your attention constantly. Or at least that's my experience.
[+] [-] ewzimm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|4 years ago|reply
Twitter is trickier. I actually enjoy the discourse (once I figured out how to filter the loud angry idiots).
[+] [-] TheBozzCL|4 years ago|reply
When I deleted my old account and created a new one a few years ago, I decided to run a little experiment: I started hiding everything that was not posted directly by friends. "[unknown person] posted on [friend]'s wall"? Hide [unknown person]. "[friend] liked a post by [some page]"? I hid that page. A friend shared a post by someone or from a page? You bet I hid those too. And the same for groups, events and so forth.
I did that a little bit every day, for 3 years, until Facebook became pretty much barren. My friends only really post a handful of things a day and the rest is just cruft. Around that time I also discovered that Facebook started exposing who had uploaded your contact info as part of a marketing list... so I started leaving negative reviews and blocking those pages.
Does this sound like a total bore and a chore? Yes, yes it was. I think I got it going for so long mostly out of spite for the platform. Eventually, it got so bad that it started literally breaking Facebook for me. Sometimes no posts would load at all. Eventually, some of the hiding options stopped working! After a year or so, the experience got so janky and unrewarding I just deleted my account. I took the chance to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp as well, since this was around the time where the latter started pushing for more telemetry.
I got most of my closer friends to jump on Telegram and Signal. I do miss Facebook a bit, in that it's become harder to keep up with some people that don't use other platforms... but not too much. I'm setting up a blog for myself to share whatever I want to write, my tech tutorials and maybe set up a photo gallery.
[+] [-] kmetan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramesh31|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonameiguess|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ldehaan|4 years ago|reply
I can only imagine it must be likes, I've rarely gotten likes on any platform. I assume it is because I am writing what I can only assume is gibberish to others. This simple fact stopped me from being addicted.
Be less likeable and quitting social media is super easy. Just tell the truth, that seems to work great at reducing likes.
[+] [-] stillbourne|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] civilized|4 years ago|reply
Give your attention and care and trust to the goals and people in your life that are worthy of it.
[+] [-] ypcx|4 years ago|reply
I, for one, am glad that my social bubble is utterly boring and un-engaging, and my level of engagement with Facebook is inversely proportional to my engagement/passion in life as such.
[+] [-] vishnugupta|4 years ago|reply
FB may well be an addictive space now but I suspect its growth has just about peaked. I keep hearing kids say that FB is something adults use and hence isn’t cool or trendy.
[+] [-] svachalek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suzzer99|4 years ago|reply