A couple of weeks ago, I closed my Facebook account. I haven’t really missed it since.
I wasn’t really using it much anyway, and it was just becoming more of a burden than a benefit. I never posted any status updates; nothing in my life really seems worth injecting into other people’s news streams. Reading other people’s updates was just a depressing inadequacy reminder. The constant stream of ads and game updates and ‘suggestions’ were annoying and nearly impossible to fully disable. The web page behaved poorly in Chrome, often chewing up huge amounts of CPU or crashing the tab. The privacy options were murky at best and what they track increasingly invasive. Perhaps what was the last straw was the update they tried to push to their Android client, that practically takes over the device and tracks what you do on it.
“But you’ll miss out on what all your friends are doing!”
I don’t need it.
Yeah, Facebook is great at efficiently distributing the news of your life to all the people you know, but I’ve been finding it increasingly alienating. Nobody communicates to me, it’s all indirect typing past each other. Telling Facebook about how your day went is not the same thing as telling me how your day went. Comments are not a replacement for conversation. If you want to talk to me, talk to me. If you don’t, that’s fine too, social interaction shouldn’t be forced.
And yeah, it’s a bit hypocritical in that this blog is the same kind of indirect interaction, but I’d like to think that the important differences are that I try to keep it to bigger and/or more niche topics, and stuff I’d rant about to no one in particular, not day-to-day stuff; that your decision to come here and read is voluntary, not obligatory just because you labeled someone a friend; and that I have total control here and am not trying to sell you something or track your reading habits.
Ya make some damn fine points; I wish I could close my FB acc’t, but unless all my relatives switch to Twitter, I’m stuck there. As for Twitter itself, at least when people add / follow me I know it’s not the last time they’ll talk to me like most FB “friends” do. There are other benefits T has over FB, but I didn’t stop to post a sales pitch any more than you did. ;-)
Facebook or not, you’re not rid of me, anyway. ;-)
technically, i’m forced to read your posts when they show up in feedly. ;)
i’d happily quit facebook if it wasn’t for fomo and ontarian relatives. plus, i don’t want the latter to be aware of my twitters. that’s for the non-judgy favourites. and archive.org, i suppose.
since i can’t quit, i’m doing the next best thing: unfollowing pretty much everybody to avoid newsfeed spam. phew.
Yeah, I can certainly see how you can get trapped in it due to other people’s needs, and I wouldn’t say that everyone should quit it. It just hasn’t been working for me and my hermit-like ways, and people were starting to wonder where I’d vanished to. :)