
Steve Pavlina: 30 days since I quit Facebook - egorst
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/02/30-day-facebook-fast/
======
zmitri
I quit using Facebook about 3-4 years ago while I was still in university.
Extremely interesting experience.. people I used to be "friends" with got
angry at me, people who I had friendly relationships with stopped
communicating with me almost immediately, and I no longer received any
invitations to any type of social events
(<http://www.thewrongbox.ca/videos/iamfacebook>). At first it was a little
lonely, but it made me realize who my real friends were, and we interacted in
more meaningful ways-- I also had more time to pursue other hobbies. I still
do not have Facebook and I think my life is better for it.

I like this article, and not with a "like" button.

PS. I still use IM, and twitter like a notepad/thoughtstream (although I don't
really promote it to friends).

~~~
sudont
Same experience here, as soon as I dropped out of facebook, I was immediately
blacklisted in every social circle that used it, even if the primary mode of
communication was texting/email.

Some op-ed considered dropping out of facebook as a radically anti-social act,
and I'd have to agree: you're not considering the group's views on
communication, and you're forcing them into a personal world. When the entire
social circle uses facebook as a communication platform, it's pretty pompous
to expect it to use what a single person wants. This is my argument boiled
down: expecting a group of people to conform to a single person's views is
rude, and the delusion that the one person is so important that everyone else
will conform is anti-social.

The majority opinion on HN seems to be that this isn't, oddly enough. The last
time I stated my experience it seemed to piss a lot of people off, and there
was a knee-jerk reaction that "true friends will work around it." Maybe, but
weak connections are important as well, and since facebook is _the_ place for
weak-connection friends, defiantly not using it seems off and a little anti-
social.

Another argument was that interaction existed before facebook, so not using it
is fine. That's dancing around the point: facebook is the current defacto
standard of social communication, not participating it is seen as aggravating
to the other party, not that it destroys communication completely. Try telling
your friends that you'll only interact with them in orkut. Or, for the Gen
X'rs here, that you're dropping your phone, and you expect them to say "hi,
how's the job" through post mail and in-person visits. There's a series of
fall backs here that's reversed for the average hacker. The hacker sees
facebook as personal, and email/phone public. The average person sees facebook
as a public place, and email/phone as a personal channel.

~~~
apotheon
There's nothing antisocial about assessing your use of a service and deciding
its benefits are less significant than its costs.

~~~
sudont
Cost/value whatever. I'm talking about other people's perceptions of you,
which aren't logical. This is the anti-social behavior i'm talking about:
you're right, the world's crazy.

"If one person calls you a donkey, ignore him; if five people call you a
donkey, buy a saddle"

~~~
apotheon
I make it a point to hold in higher esteem the opinion of someone I personally
know to have his or her head screwed on straight than a mob of virtual social
butterflies who don't even know my girlfriend's name.

When _she_ calls me a donkey, I'll get fitted for a saddle. When vampyrlust317
and fifty of his/her Facebook "friends" do so, I'll probably ignore it.

~~~
sudont
Um, the close friends (people I knew for four+ years) _are_ the people who
stopped talking to me after I dropped off of facebook. It was generally a "why
aren't you back on facebook" for several months, and then they just stopped
responding to texts and emails.

~~~
apotheon
Wow.

Seriously, you need a better class of friends. Are you seriously telling me
that people won't talk to you in person because you aren't on Facebook?

What the hell is wrong with people?

~~~
sudont
Yes: minus a former roommate, a girl who quit facebook herself, and somebody I
worked with.

People at work are suspicious when they find out I'm not on facebook, and try
to cajole me into joining.

------
zacharycohn
I don't know why more people don't use the "hide" feature.

I was rapidly becoming sick of Facebook. I only friended people that I'd met
before, but even so it was polluted by people who I went to middle school,
etc. with who I really didn't know that well even then.

Then I found the "Hide" option. I hide probably 95% of my "friends." After I
did this, I LOVED using Facebook again. Every time I logged in, I was able to
keep up with good friends of mine who live in other parts of the state,
country, world. These are people I DO care about, often talk to in other ways,
but it's a nice aggregator. If I post something, everyone that isn't directly
relevant to my life can still see and comment on it, but I don't have to see
their stuff.

It's perfect, it really revitalized Facebook for me and it's actually FUN to
use again.

~~~
jdminhbg
I tried doing the "Hide" thing for a while, but there are two problems:

1) It's a pain in the ass to hunt down and hide various people and apps, and
you have to keep up with it. Consequently, your friends who are likely to say
interesting things but not spend a ton of time tweaking their FB settings tend
to drift off, driving your signal down.

2) Hiding people is a blunt instrument -- you hide someone who's 98% noisy but
2% interesting, and you've hidden more signal you wanted to see. Then, when
they ask you about why you didn't see their baby photos, you have to tell them
that the answer is because you were sick of "Which Twilight Character Are
You?" and hid them.

In the end, it's easier just to quit and go back to using the regular
internet.

~~~
zacharycohn
It took me about one week of using facebook + filtering people to get to the
point where I enjoyed using facebook again. No adding people to lists, no
hunting down people, nothing.

~~~
kleevr
Honestly I don't mind keeping FB as a Rolodex of people I may only
tangentially know, but I don't necessarily want to know what they had for
breakfast. Hiding totally solved this problem for me too.

------
toadi
Don't see what the problem is? Why do you need to quit facebook? Even after
reading all these arguments.

I'm on facebook where I occasionally share a picture of my son or a picture
from something I enjoy. I don't post often but this way my parents en
grandparents can see my son growing up. Don't actually care if my 'friends'
see this.

When I'm on the toilet I sometimes take my iphone and check the FB stream.
Check it when I don't have much time or feel like investing a lot of effort in
reading something.

Just use it like you want to use it. This whole social network hype, like you
can only be social online. People have been social even before the phone was
invented. It is just another extra tool and doesn't replace normal social
interaction. It never will!

~~~
awakeasleep
I'm really interested in the difference between your perspective (which I
share) and the perspective of Mr Pavlina (which my friends share).

I see people's attitudes towards FB fall into these two distinct camps:

1) People who feel compelled by FB somehow, and end up deleting their profiles
or "Quitting" entirely, and

2) People who have a profile, but don't feel compelled to check it or
interact- except at their leisure.

I think it has something to do with implied disrespect when you don't get back
to people quickly; Ignoring a text or phone call sends a message. Does
'ignoring' a facebook ping send that same message? What about _failing to
respond to an indirect message on Facebook?_ There must be some sort of social
phenomenon putting uncomfortable pressure on people somewhere in the setup of
facebook.

~~~
DanI-S
For me, Facebook is a cool address book that lets me contact people I know in
a less 'immediate' way to text/phone. I'm not friends with people that I don't
know in real life. I look at it once a day to see if anyone has posted
anything interesting; from time to time I might post a cool link I've found,
or a couple of photos, or something I heard in the news that pissed me off.

This guy, with 5000 friends, strikes me as odd - isn't that more like what
Twitter is for? I don't think Facebook was conceived with that kind of usage
in mind. It doesn't scale to display such huge amounts of data particularly
well.

It's fascinating how people will adapt your product to uses that you didn't
intend; it must also be frustrating to hear them moan about it.

------
leftnode
Oh, quit using the site, not quit working there. I would've been more
interested in the latter.

~~~
GrooveStomp
My thoughts exactly. I think the headline is misleading.

~~~
lachyg
Maybe for this audience, but I don't think that would be confusing to non
technical people (or people in the startup world).

------
ben1040
I found that much of the "noise" on Facebook comes from the fact that I had
too many "e-friends" at even 100-110 people.

It was still well under the Dunbar[1] threshold, as I knew who they all were
and could probably spend an hour on each one of them telling you how I knew
them in high school or college, etc. But I simply got no _value_ out of seeing
a post from a woman I dated briefly in college 9 years ago talking about what
new yoga studio she was teaching at, or from an old high school classmate
saying what airport he was currently passing through.

The noise was just too loud and overpowering. I ended up deleting my account.

A few months later I came back under a made-up new email address so those
folks wouldn't find me again. My e-friends list now is only about 40 people,
cut way down -- specifically people I see every week or two or people I would
otherwise invite into my home without any hesitation.

With less noise from people I simply don't care much about anymore, I see
useful things. And I feel better about sharing a interesting news article from
HN or a picture from a dinner party with my small inner circle, without
feeling like I'm spamming dozens of people who just don't care.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number>

~~~
natrius
It's very easy to hide people from your news feed without having to actively
avoid them. Click the X next to their posts.

~~~
apotheon
Of course, they're less likely to get angry with you if they just think you've
gotten off Facebook entirely than if they think you're ignoring them while
still accessible to them.

~~~
zacharycohn
They have no way of knowing you've hidden them.

~~~
apotheon
They know whether you respond.

~~~
zacharycohn
Unless they tag you in a post (in which case, you'd get a notification), I
really don't know how many people respond to EVERY SINGLE post of EVERY SINGLE
friend on facebook.

~~~
apotheon
Are you aware that getting responses _never_ is equivalent to being ignored,
at least in most people's minds? On what planet do you live where people carry
on a relationship that involves dead silence on one side?

------
ams6110
_If you’re an active Facebook user, and you go 30 days without it, you’ll gain
a much clearer understanding of its role in your life._

From a fairly long piece, I think this is the salient point.

------
markkat
I quit LinkedIn a couple of days ago. I got a status update of some contact or
other, and thought: "What is this? Why do I have this?"

I feel much better not having something that felt so obligatory, yet so unlike
me.

These networks seem to leverage social pressure as much as they solve
problems.

~~~
kordless
I quit FB, but would never quit LinkedIn. It's key to my day to day business
relationships.

~~~
markkat
I'm in research. PubMed is my LinkedIn. :)

------
agentultra
I quit over a year ago. Out right deleted my profile.

Not a whole lot has changed. I don't get to passively select events and
friends to hang out with. So I have to actively maintain a social life. Which
is harder, granted, only because managing to stay in touch with more than a
dozen or so people in any meaningful way is quite difficult to do. However,
the quality of those relationships is quite high.

I also have the added bonus of not showing up in ads or have some creep-o
advertiser/marketer snooping on my data stream to sell me more crap I don't
want or need.

It took me a long time to jump on the facebook bandwagon. I only opened an
account at the behest of friends who had all but forgotten what a phone was. I
tried it and I can now honestly say I was right about it in the first place.

Huge. Waste. Of. Time.

------
nhangen
He's mostly right, but I also get the sense that he misses it a bit and is
trying to justify not using it - to himself.

I agree with him in that FB communication is generally shallow - the less
meaningful your status updates are, the more people seem to like them.

I also tire of inspirational quotes and Internet Marketing pitches - MLM too.

I continue to use it though because I'm not really bothered enough to ditch my
account.

On a side note - did anyone notice that the picture of SP in his sidebar looks
like Julian Assange?

------
Zolomon
Why the hell does he use the "Like" button if he's quit Facebook? (I know it's
for others to share, but still. Double messages much?)

~~~
qntm
All of my blog posts have buttons for Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Facebook and
StumbleUpon, none of which I use. There are a thousand other buttons I could
add too. Hell, I have Adsense banners which I almost never see on account of
Adblock.

It's not hypocrisy, it's compatibility. Every social networking site offers a
bunch of new interactions, and you can support members without endorsing
membership.

------
arjunnarayan
I quit facebook about a month ago. Most of what Steve Pavlina says is quite
right and I'm probably better off without it, but there is one feature that I
sorely miss: As a young un still at a university, facebook was extremely
useful for getting in touch with girls who I meet around campus randomly.
"I'll look you up on facebook" is a much lower commitment and casual line than
"What's your phone number".

~~~
KMStraub
I'm creating a product that hopefully fills this void. A casual, non-committal
way to show someone you'd like to get to know them better--without all the
noise. I'm also a girl, so my main concern is building something that doesn't
veer into creep-ville. I'll keep you posted.

------
nutanc
Facebook or any other social network works on our egos. We all want to show
off how witty we are and how happy we are.Thats why we always see only the
happy side of a persons life on any social network.

And thats the reason you see only a 'like' button on Facebook. Enable a
'dislike' button and you will see many more dropouts.

Actually, we can try one more experiment. The next time we don't like
something, we say 'dislike' in the comments.Lets see if we can do that.

~~~
notyourwork
I already do: "I would dislike this if I could".

------
rw
If he could learn to care less (for comparison, he should not try to read all
of Twitter), then Facebook would not present such a problem.

~~~
zalew
7 screens of text about quitting using facebook? He seems kind of obsessed by
the idea.

> My Facebook page was maxed out at 5K friends and was very active.

5000 friends??? No wonder he got tired of it. Before I passed 100 I rarely
used the 'hide' button, now I use it more, and I think hiding people and
blocking apps (and sometimes turning chat off) is a good way to make fb
experience less annoying.

~~~
robryan
yeah, 5k friends would be a horrible experience unless they were mostly hidden
from your stream. You would never see anything you close friends posted.

~~~
zalew
I don't get what's the point having 5000 people in the first place, unless you
use fb only as a publishing stream (but that's what fanpages are for).

~~~
scott_s
The author of this piece is a professional blogger. Having 5,000 FB friends is
probably natural to him because marketing himself is part of his job.

------
BlazingFrog
>maxed out at 5K friends

Really????? I don't even think I met that many people in my 30+ years of life!
When you take anything to that extreme, it inevitably starts to lose some of
its original meaning at some point.

The word "friend" in the context of Facebook creeps me out more and more. It
devalues immensely what it really means to be someone's friend.

------
l0nwlf
The article convinced me that it is for good that I never created a Facebook
account. Recently I have been under lot of peer pressure to create a Facebook
account for so called social-connectivity.

------
qntm
All of this says nothing about e.g. the fact that Facebook is a corporation
whose business model revolves around the acquisition of information about its
users.

I'm paranoid about information about myself. I left Facebook because I want
explicit, direct control over what information about me is made available to
whom. Yes, Facebook has privacy controls, but they are Facebook's privacy
controls.

~~~
gnosis
I completely agree. The primary reason I left Facebook was because of concerns
about my privacy.

No corporation has a right to know who my friends are and who I associate with
(much less exploit that information for advertising, or sell it to anyone who
wants to pay for it).

I find it really disturbing that so many people in this world are so ready to
give up their privacy and information about themselves for very dubious
"services" like Facebook and other social media sites, not to mention things
like online tax services, video/book recommendation services, etc..

All of these services that are collecting information about you, your friends,
and your preferences are going to be datamined to figure out even more
information about you.

For instance, there has been research done to figure out political affiliation
and sexual preferences from the movies one watches on Netflix. It's really
just a matter of time before information like that gets used to discriminate
against people (or worse).

------
Kliment
Wow! I feel my stance on this has just been dramatically confirmed. Some years
ago, I wrote a rant (
[http://everything2.com/title/Facebook+destroys+real+relation...](http://everything2.com/title/Facebook+destroys+real+relationships)
) for the purpose of having a fixed thing to send people who would ask me why
I'm not on Facebook. I got tired of explaining it over and over, so I wrote
this. I got both positive and negative responses to it, and they fit a very
definite pattern. The positive responses were always short and in the line of
"this is exactly how I feel about this, glad I'm not alone". The negative
responses were variations of "you've never tried it, so you can't possibly
know what it's like", with optional "take your uninformed opinion elsewhere".

Now, Steve, as someone who has actually used the site for a nontrivial amount
of time, writes a post bringing up mostly the same points. That feels nice.

------
andresmh
I don't get why he needed to delete the account completely or why he felt
obligated to respond to the messages he got from fans. He could have _changed_
his use of Facebook. He could use Facebook more like Twitter without paying
the publicity price of not having Facebook, especially for someone who is a
what he is for a living.

------
phreakhead
No wonder he didn't like Facebook: he has no real friends! 5000+ friends and
he never met any of them face-to-face? What is the point of that? I only
friend someone if I've met them before in a real-life situation. If the
relationship never goes past that in real life, then I usually just end up
hiding them from my news feed and forgetting about them. I'm sure they do the
same for me and I don't give it a second thought.

However, I do get tremendous value out of my real friends on Facebook, since
we share event invites, photos of our trips, news articles/videos that we
share interest in, etc. I am a performer and all my performer/musician friends
are on Facebook, and that is the main medium for getting news out about a
show. The days of posting flyers on telephone poles and cafe windows are over
- if you are not posting your upcoming shows on Facebook and inviting your
friends, then your band is going to struggle to sell tickets.

------
motters
Facebook is not necessarily bad, provided that you don't hold any false
beliefs about the nature of this particular beast. Like everything which has a
slightly competitive or sociable element to it, it can be abused and folks can
become addicted to it. Similar criticisms could be made about online games or
virtual worlds, which encourage multiple trivial interactions with "friends"
in a tightening web of obligations.

Personally, I'll be happier when decentralised equivalents to Facebook become
more of a viable option, such as Appleseed or Diaspora. At least then you'll
be able to choose not to live your online life inside of a panopticon where
not so trustworthy entities are constantly peering over your shoulder.

------
incandenza
Now he can start counting "days since I stopped telling people about how I
quit Facebook".

------
RoadRunner_23
I think, I need to quit Hacker News as well.. takes up too much time...

------
lurkinggrue
I never fully joined facebook. The account creation process just turned me off
with it bugging me for my gmail account.

That and I am not interested in anybody from high school.

------
funkdobiest
Never had a Facebook account, never will. I see it as a closed fractured
environment of the web, that needs to go the way of Friendster and Myspace.

------
jschuur
Somewhat related, Steve made a great post 5 years ago about news addiction and
how he doesn't watch/follow the news anymore.

[http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/09/overcoming-news-
add...](http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/09/overcoming-news-addiction/)

Highly recommended, even though I fail completely at the advice and am glued
to Al Jazeera English right now.

And don't get me started on tech news ;)

------
yembi
I use a combination of Hide (after I see someone who likes to spam crap like
"I'm at a coffee shop") and:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-
frie...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-friend-
request-notifi/)

for notifications.

------
jonpaul
Twitter is almost the same. Except that with Twitter you can receive useful
information/links from those who tweet about a specific niche. I can't stand
when some tweet about being drunk, getting a new haircut, etc. Fortunately
there is an "Unfollow" button.

------
jcizzle
Thought he quit working for Facebook, too. Thoroughly disappointed when I
found out he was just complaining that his life was so pathetic that it
warranted 5 full-trackpad swipes of self-righteous douchebaggery on why he is
single.

------
frevd
Congrats Steve, for abandoning it. WOW offers kind of the same addictive
business model, but is obviously better at keeping ppl busy. I myself never
had that kind of problem since I never got the clou about that swarm thing, or
about social interaction either. However, it surprises me how constant
connection to all parts in the world, a phenomen the internet introduced, can
lead to such effects as depersonlization. As a business proposal - wouldn't it
be interesting to have a platform that artificially separates people, to allow
for some deference so ppl actually have sth to say to each other when they
meet? I guess WOW got that right again. Seems we can learn something here -
mankind is not supposed to be a swarm, at least I wouldn't like the idea
(that's why I'd be the only individual left when that happens to happen ;). my
2ct

------
yaix
A very interesting read, until "... my 5k friends ...".

Dude, it's Twitter you are looking for. And you should call those people
"followers" and not friends (half of them are fake profiles for SEO purposes
anyway).

------
webuiarchitect
Wow! I left Facebook a year back for the very same reasons. But my thoughts
weren't so well organized. Thank you very much for the nice write-up.

------
JanezStupar
Well I guess its time that I start a blog and write a post about how I never
started a FB account and how I never bought a TV either.

Damn, my life is completely filled with all the relationship I can muster. I
get to get my work done and surf teh web a bit. I also get to exercise some.

In any case the days are still too short for me - why the hell would I want to
join the worlds biggest privacy fraud?

Yes I have been smart enough to foresee all the negative sides of it 4 years
ago. Ain't I cool?

------
notyourwork
I read this as "quit my employment at facebook", thoroughly upsetting to
determine he meant stop using the service.

------
joubert
There is a Facebook Like button right at the top of the post. The irony.

------
teyc
This is why Facebook needs to become your inbox, because it allows Facebook to
better understand who you are interested in, and stay relevant.

I wonder why FB haven't asked for your web mail logon, and mined the emails to
better understand who you already interact with.

------
Legion
I wonder how many more people have to quit Facebook before we stop getting
these "I quit Social Network X" martyr posts.

Honestly, it's like the people who never fail to let a new acquaintance know
that they abstain from owning televisions.

------
chopsueyar
I thought he was a developer that quit working at Facebook.

------
vertr
There was a twitter meme going around yesterday: "not having facebook is the
new not owning a TV."

I think that this phenomenon is mostly a bandwagon of Guru's who want to have
something new and 'revolutionary' to present to their followers. Pavlina's
always telling people to quit something. First it was regular sleep, then
monogamy, etc. While he purports to be anti-consumption, this really just
makes us focus on our consumption even more.

A better strategy for a balanced digital life is to pragmatically audit your
useage on an ongoing basis.

~~~
ludwigvan
Wow, interesting. I knew about Pavlina only through his writings on polyphasic
sleep. His stance on monogamy seems to be really interesting though (and weird
for me)[1].

I remember him writing that one reason for quitting polyphasic sleep was that
he didn't spend much time in bed with his wife.

It's interesting to note that Facebook seems to me to be a vehicle that can be
easily abused to bypass monogamy.

Maybe the pieces fit in the end.

[1] <http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2009/01/polyamory/>

~~~
scott_s
The other reason, which he probably didn't admit to himself and certainly
didn't admit to the world, is that he was probably soul-crushingly tired all
the time. See: <http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm>

------
idonthack
>online “friends”, most of whom I’d never met in person.

well there's your problem.

