
A Long Goodbye To Facebook - balladeer
https://om.co/2018/09/01/the-long-goodbye-to-facebook/
======
jameson
> I left because it was making me someone I am not — someone who lives life
> through the eyes of others.

I agree so much. I was never an avid Facebook user who posts personal life but
I was reading over other's lives and that affected who I am, what I should do
with my life. Even though I feel I have full control over my life, what I read
from FB about my friends changed what I should be doing to be in the current
"trend" to belong to the group.

~~~
ripsawridge
Yeah, I agree with that quote so much. I was a pretty avid user, and only very
slowly realized that I'd begun carrying around "The Audience" in my head,
which judged what I did and how I looked at all times.

Becoming disenchanted with that mode of consciousness was a very long journey,
I'm humbled to say. A key moment for me was realizing that if I was in the
city where some "friend" or another lived, I wouldn't try to contact them.

That's not a real friend. I'm not being a real friend. In fact, everything in
the whole domain is mislabled, and who wins? The company and it's advertisers.
Value is leeched from real-life existence.

Glad to be gone from it -- unknown, away, without apparent value!

------
docker_up
I don't know why people take FB so seriously. I use it to post funny anecdotes
about my life, like funny shit my kids say, funny photos, etc. I don't post
vacation photos, or enhance my own self-opinion. I have a "small" group of 300
Facebook friends, and I use it to keep in touch. If someone is posting fake or
annoying posts on it, then I'll unfollow them. That's it.

I do get sucked into an hour or more of videos though, which is a habit I need
to break. Especially Graham Norton videos, I've never seen his show but the
clips are always extremely entertaining.

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cm2012
Quick note: Total number of people who use FB every single day of their lives
in the US stayed steady Q1 to Q2 at 183 million people. This was through all
the Cambridge and privacy stuff. The HN bubble is very different than reality.

~~~
empath75
It was growing exponentially.

~~~
cm2012
US has been stable a long time (at least 6 quarters). International is still
growing fast.

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yeukhon
Is the reason this is on the front page because he’s an investor? Can HN not
feature these “I am quitting facebook” every month? Let’s get back to real
news and real thoughts. Oh btw, I have quit facebook too because I was
mentally unstable. AMA time but I bet no one would because I ain’t Om.

~~~
m0rose
> I have quit facebook too because I was mentally unstable.

I think this very effectively distills the essence of his blog post, too. His
perception is that everyone is fronting. The fact of the matter is, not
everyone is. Some people just post the highlights because they understand that
the minutia is boring and not what people want to see. That he sees this as
"fronting" is more a commentary on his own lack of self confidence. Well, that
and the fact that he had to throw out how many followers he had.

~~~
tvh
I'm not sure I agree with this analysis.

I don't have a lack of self confidence and I consider the vast majority of
Facebook posts to be fronting, even if the person actually posting is not
actively aware of the fact that they are fronting. A lot of the time the
awareness of "fronting" is absent, when it is in fact the main purpose driving
the person to upload. Why else would people post very personal things about
their lives to an audience they don't even want to reach out to on a regular
basis? Even when they are in the same city, etc? Because those are not
friends, and if they are not friends, the uploader is an actor presenting
their daily demo real.

Of course there are exceptions to this, but I don't think that saying that a
vast majority of people on Facebook are fronting is a reflection on our own
personal lack of confidence, as much as it is barely a generalization.

------
shady-lady
Deleting facebook & twitter and de-gamifying as many other websites as I can
(via tampermonkey scripts) is great.

reddit (my) karma score, & poster usernames -> hidden

HN (my) karma score -> hidden

slimming down everything to just content without any influencing
factors(poster name, comment points) gives me a much better experience.

i find web forums which i frequent are so much better without karma &
reactions.

------
muthdra
)

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firasd
I don't share most of the concerns people have about Facebook (including Om's
here about sharing inauthentic life through photos)--I mostly just post text
updates--but I wonder if their efforts over the last few years to move from
people sharing political links etc to engaging more on original text posts
have been working. I feel like when I posted stuff to FB some years ago I got
more responses than when I post now.

Seems like the main activity that people I know are into on FB is Groups,
which again takes it away from personal update territory. Good thing they
bought Instagram/WhatsApp or they could have ended up in a decline phase
already...

------
mythrwy
“My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never
chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco chewers have to pay;
though there are things enough I have chewed, which I could lecture against.
If you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let
your left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing.

-Henry David Thoreau

(Never had Facebook account because it seemed something I didn't want all
along. Was a "wacky" opinion for a long time and is now amusing to see all the
noise).

------
gkanai
What I've done is deleted a majority of the amount of content I had on FB
previously. I went back and deleted most of the content I had posted, and kept
only a handful of posts. I still use FB for some groups that are only on FB
and use Messenger for contacting some friends, so I can't really delete the
account completely. But I've tried to clean out my account as much as
possible.

I plan to do the same with Twitter as well. If anyone has links to good tools
that can enable me to delete old Twitter content, please share!

~~~
swozey
I forget whether it was Twitter or Instagram but one of them, maybe both, make
it incredibly difficult to bleach or eject from the platform.

20 per day deletion/unfollow limits, etc.

------
crunchlibrarian
I think he really boils it down to the fundamental question everyone should be
asking themselves: do you want to define yourself through the eyes of others,
or not?

~~~
tvh
You need more upvotes

------
gnicholas
I’m not sure what to take away from posts like this. On the one hand, I have
only a few hundred friends (and practically no followers) that I would be
walking away from. On the other hand, I don’t have a well-read blog and
twitter following to fall back on.

So is it harder or easier for a nobody like me to quit Facebook? And is the
main point of this post to migrate FB followers to Twitter followers?

~~~
tvh
Why is there even a need to fall back onto something? Migrating to another
platform he considered less fronting and superficial was his choice, but I
don't see the need nor appeal in that, personally.

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bloaf
I am like 90% sure Facebook still keeps track of you indirectly. So as far as
Facebook is concerned, you definitely still exist after quitting.

[https://spideroak.com/articles/facebook-shadow-profiles-a-
pr...](https://spideroak.com/articles/facebook-shadow-profiles-a-profile-of-
you-that-you-never-created/)

~~~
SomeHacker44
Ghostery. Privacy Badger. To name two.

~~~
bloaf
Do you believe tracking in websites is the only mechanism by which they
collect information about you? Hint: it is not. At all.

------
dbmk
These days I use FB to follow events and participate in groups whose topic
interests me. There is no other platform that comes close in terms of variety
or critical mass for this.

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sparkzilla
The sad truth is most people's friends are boring

~~~
shawn
There’s nothing sad about being boring.

~~~
stephengillie
_May you live in exciting times._

------
rokhayakebe
What is your "circle of happiness?"

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glalonde
>I'm quitting fb for real this time.

>Oh, and look at all these thousands devoted followers I'm walking away from

>I just don't want to always put up a front of my existence for others to see

>I don't want to live for how others perceive me.

>Better share this transcendental experience on my blog.

k.

~~~
esturk
People often complain about being downvoted but your post actually adds
nothing to the discussion. In fact, you just reframed everything Om said
negatively.

~~~
burnte
What he's paraphrasing is "I have had a revelation about Facebook being bad,
I'm better without it and you will be too. Rather than sharing this on
Facebook where I'll reach hundreds of thousands of people that are using
Facebook and might be helped, I'm sharing it on my blog where few will see
it."

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paulcole
Coming to YC Winter Batch 2019 - Squeezr, an on-demand masseuse app. For when
you pull a muscle while patting yourself on the back for quitting Facebook.

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marban
How do you spot that someone has quit Facebook? They'll tell you.

~~~
akeck
Well there's "quitting" and "stop using". I have friends who've quit and told
me, etc. I also have friends who just went dark. I don't have updated non-FB
contact info, because all our comms had collapsed onto FB - or were only ever
FB. Their last post was in 2015 or 2016, and they obviously don't reply to
Messenger. They just stopped participating one day.

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Aloha
Should I know who this guy is?

~~~
dang
Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

