
Why I deleted my Facebook account - blakewatson
https://www.blakewatson.com/journal/why-i-left-facebook/
======
whiddershins
The one greatest internet life hack I discovered in the last couple of years
is to delete browser autocompletes (cmd + shift + delete or similar).

Once I became aware of the "slot machine" effect of websites I deleted the
default autocompletes for Facebook and Hacker News, for example.

Prior to doing this, if I typed "F" into chrome I went to my Facebook news
feed, and "N" in chrome took me to HN.

I deleted those defaults and made it so the autocomplete takes it to my
profile on each site. My Facebook profile page is inherently non addictive.
It's just me. I can then choose to click on events or whatever.

My HN profile is even more boring. This forces me to make one extra click
before viewing the news stories but that single click is enough to stop me
from compulsively checking news.

I can't overstate how many hours per week I reclaimed from this one change. It
is better for my purposes than any sort of focus blocker. It doesn't prevent
me from doing anything, it just removes the addictive trigger.

I also moved my Facebook app from the first screen on my iPhone, and
disallowed any notifications. This is better for me than deleting the app. As
long as I don't see the little red circle with a number, there's no compulsive
reminder.

As a consequence of using this technique I am able to get what I want from web
services without the addictive component.

\--edit: grammar--

~~~
ivm
Yes, I have a separate laptop for all the distracting sites including HN. My
main machine is for work.

But why do you need Facebook app on your iPhone at all? Messenger is enough.

~~~
softawre
Would you _really_ be surprised to learn that others use technology
differently than you?

Why do you need Messenger on your phone at all? Snapchat/iMessage/etc is
enough.

~~~
ivm
What's with the sarcasm? I asked why somebody keeps a purely entertaining app
while trying not to get distracted by it.

The Messenger argument is completely unrelated because it's a useful app to
stay in touch.

~~~
logicallee
Not the other poster, but something that might explain their reaction is that
you mentioned keeping an entire separate computer. It is easy to see why this
would cause an extreme reaction. (Not saying it's not a good idea.)

~~~
ivm
I wasn't able to predict that discussing a better setup can cause "an extreme
reaction".

The second machine is not that important, I would prefer to schedule
distraction blocking on my computer for most of the day and removing apps like
FB from my phone.

~~~
logicallee
Right, but that's not what you stated. If we take an extreme view of
"scheduling distractions" why not keep your second computer in another
apartment you rent for this purpose, a block away? You can still go there
whenever you take a 10 minute break, but it's a shift in environment and
context that it takes will to go through.

 _Regardless_ of whether this would work or not, or the dollar value you place
on your increased productivity, it is easy to see why the suggestion of
renting a whole other apartment would be extreme! Likewise, given that a
single computer can switch tasks easily, the suggestion of using a whole
separate computer is clearly extreme.

------
fastbeef
I quit Facebook right around the time my son was born. It wasn't for privacy
reasons (and frankly, it never bothered me), but rather for the enormous
energy and time sink it had become. Truly, it was as if I was a dopamine
junkie and Facebook was the pusher of those sweet, sweet red circles with a
number in them that meant someone, somewhere vaguely agreed with something you
posted. I noticed I was not present in the moment with my newborn son, but
rather my brain was hunting for the next quip to post or
cute/smug/humblebragish picture to upload.

I quit cold turkey and have never looked back.

I'm off all social media today (except LinkedIn) and have weeded out a lot
"friends" who really were just co-enablers in the dopamine rush hunt.

~~~
Swizec
I too feel exactly this way with almost everything. Facebook, Twitter, Slack,
Email, Messages ... it's kind of tough to escape. Impossible even.

And here's the worst part: We grew up with this shit. My generation was one of
the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit.
That means we'll never escape. Ever. We're literally wired to seek approval of
strangers on the internet instead of the people around us. It feels more ...
correct? Real? True?

That red circle with a number literally gives more enjoyment than a close
friend saying "Heh that's cool". The worst part is that there's likely no
cure. Rehab, maybe. But rehab for this shit doesn't exist yet.

Plus try explaining to your boss that you're not reading email and slack and
you're never coming back because you're in notification rehab.

Simon Sinek explains it perfectly:
[https://youtu.be/hER0Qp6QJNU?t=195](https://youtu.be/hER0Qp6QJNU?t=195)

~~~
eludwig
I watched the video and the speaker spends a great deal of time making some
very elegant (if somewhat obvious) points. But then at the end he comes to the
wrong conclusion, Imo. He blames the corporations where millennials work and
passes the responsibility for fixing their attention/relationship deficits off
to them! This is totally backwards.

Every generation has their dopamine hits. Of course, as society creates more
leisure time, the number and (arguably) complexity of these increase. That is
the trend. But, as always, the responsibility should be squarely on your own
shoulders! You were not "dealt a bad hand." If that's a truth, then everyone
ever born was dealt a bad hand. If being born at the time when the length and
quality of life (health-wise) is at its longest, then deal me in! There are
many, many benefits to being born in this time and as always, it is up to us
to find the life we want and the balance we need.

~~~
lloeki
> He blames the corporations where millennials work and passes the
> responsibility for fixing their attention/relationship deficits off to them!
> This is totally backwards.

He does blames them, but only as part of his point, not as the whole
conclusion. He blames the corporations for focusing on reductive, short-term
metrics† instead of people, which is precisely what's lead to this[0] and
that[1] abusive situations. As a company you're not hiring robots, you're
hiring _people_.

> Every generation has their dopamine hits.

Indeed it has. The trouble starts when it reaches such heights, recurrence and
omnipresence that it throws whole lives off balance.

> If being born at the time when the length and quality of life (health-wise)
> is at its longest, then deal me in! There are many, many benefits to being
> born in this time and as alway

Strawman. Life expectancy does not invalidate the new challenges we have to
face. If anything, with modern discoveries about happiness vs hardship, people
may literally have been happier _in spite_ of such matters (shocking!). I'm
suddenly reminded of Gladia's tirade in Robots and Empire: would you rather
live a long, dull, purposeless life endlessly being bored to no end or a
shorter life full of brilliance? But we digress.

> it is up to us to find the life we want and the balance we need

This is the kind of attitude that reviles me. You can't blame someone for
becoming alcoholic/depressive/etc. If you do then you don't understand what
those are: illnesses. Nobody breaks his leg or catches a flu on purpose. If a
company refuses to take such humane matters into consideration then you're
just a tool and it's parasitically just sucking onto you till you're dry. When
you're in situations of illnesses, all the good will of the person is not
sufficient: help is needed, from everywhere it can come[2].

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14703661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14703661)

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14711621](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14711621)

[2]: [https://medium.com/@OlarkLiveChat/its-2017-and-mental-
health...](https://medium.com/@OlarkLiveChat/its-2017-and-mental-health-is-
still-an-issue-in-the-workplace-61efbef092f)

† ironically, themselves being addicted to that very same dopamine (or rather
its ethereal corporate equivalent) rush.

~~~
eludwig
>This is the kind of attitude that reviles me. You can't blame someone for
becoming alcoholic/depressive/etc. If you do then you don't understand what
those are: illnesses.

Waaaait a minute. This is another strawman. My comment did not blame illnesses
on the individual. But I think we need to define carefully what an illness is.
I don't doubt alcoholism is an illness, but I would reasonable argue that
browsing Facebook on your phone is not an illness. Do you really believe that?
I don't. There may be people at the far end of that spectrum that cannot help
themselves, but there are plenty of others that are just bored.

------
grx
It's too late to join the Leaving Facebook party. If you were a regular user
since 2005 and leave now, it does not make any difference anymore. The
collected data about you is enough to interpolate your profile for the next
decades.

Of course, decentralization is a valid point and it's really important to get
people who are kinda "new" to social media on distributed platforms. Twitter
is centralized as well and also tracks with buttons and scripts. We need
critical masses for e.g. XMPP and OStatus platforms like Mastodon.

This of course also applies to mobile clients like WhatsApp.

~~~
sasvari

      If you were a regular user since 2005 and leave now, it does not make any
      difference anymore. The collected data about you is enough to interpolate
      your profile for the next decades.
    

Does it really matter if you have been on facebook at all? Even if you never
joined, people upload their addressbooks with all of their contacts, they
upload pictures of people never been on facebook and tag them (and share other
information about everyone, which facebook probably is able to use as well).
So essentially facebook builds your social graph no matter if you have ever
been a member or not.

It does make a difference. Just not to care and to give up is no solution
either.

~~~
taftster
Right exactly. I don't have (and have never had) a Facebook account. But I
know that they have much more information about me than I would want them to.
They most certainly have some sort of "shadow" account sitting there
associating whatever they can to it; friends' address books, photo tagging,
etc.

And if you throw in the Instagram wildcard, it gets worse. I signed up for an
Instagram account before Facebook purchasing them. I never posted a photo, but
I'm sure this still adds to the reach of their shadow profile. People who
actively use both Facebook and Instagram, I feel sorry for them.

I do use twitter and google extensively though, so I guess I can't complain or
say anything about my social profile. Twitter luckily has a smaller budget, so
they can't quite crunch data as hard as Facebook can. But Google owns me, I'm
afraid.

I'm not (too) scared about NSA. At least, NSA has some sort of government
bureaucracy that slows down their ability and interest in my data; they aren't
trying to use me for-profit. I think we should be more scared about what
Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, et al. can do, especially because they
are generally bound to whatever their current (and fungible) terms of service
and privacy policy stipulates. [edit] i.e. policies written for the sole
benefit of the share-holders.

------
thinbeige
Key is to reduce FB usage to the minimum while still using its features to
socialize and network. FB is like alcohol. Once in a while it's great but FB
or alcohol 24/7 makes you sick. Having the app installed on your phone is a
no-go.

FB is super crucial when it comes to networking. It is so easy to follow
up/stay in touch with people you just met, thanks to real names, a complete
social graph, a smooth Messenger experience and a good DNA for that use case
('hey we are friends now', compare this to Linkedin).

What are the other options? Getting the business card and writing an email or
text the next days? Works as well but it's more formal and not that subtle.
And if you don't have a topic to follow-up with people will forget you and be
surprised about your awkward email six months later. Not with FB.

Linkedin is a strange thing, connecting there feels somehow wrong and the
messaging experience is subpar.

~~~
yosito
> FB is like alcohol

FB is like alcohol with an entire team of people constantly engineering it to
get more and more people using it more and more often.

------
ucarion
The crucial argument for me was that I have to trust Facebook _forever_.
Facebook intends to keep your data forever, so you have to trust them for just
as long.

I don't think Facebook will go forever without some major data leak. I don't
like to count on the competence of corporations in handling secret
information.

Similarly, I don't think any human ever looks at Facebook's statistical models
for any individual. Facebook likely considers this data of the upmost secrecy.
But I'm not sure they'll remain as upstanding decades from now, if they're
ever in dire financial straights. In my view, Facebook is only going to get
eviler.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
There's nothing to stop FB from getting out in front of a leak. They can
figure out that someone is writing about a leak and pull a CNN on them before
they post it on their blog or whatever.

------
bogomipz
The author states:

>"Here’s the thing. You won’t be as outcast and lonely as you think. Your
friends—and I know this is hard to believe—are still your friends in real
life. You just won’t get notifications of what they ate on their lunch break."

This is so true and you might even find that you interact with your real
friends more in real life after quitting Facebook.

"Facebook friends" is really a misnomer that has kind of devalued the word
friend in my opinion. I think for the vast majority of connections on FB are
more likely to be "Facebook acquaintances." These exists in real life as well,
you just might not be as up to date on "what they had for lunch"(quoting the
article.

~~~
walkingolof
Problem with quitting Facebook has nothing to do with your (real) friends, at
least not for me, but for one or two communities (retro computers in this
case), 10 years ago they would have been on a forum-like platform, but are now
on Facebook instead.

~~~
bogomipz
Well FB is also a "forum-like" platform. What does that mean?

What does FB provide your two communities that wouldn't be available via a
Slack Channel/Blog/mailing list/subreddit etc?

~~~
softawre
The fact that all of those people are already in the community on Facebook?

~~~
bogomipz
So what FB is really providing is inertia.

You hear similar sentiments by people that they stay on FB because "I don't
have any of these peoples email addresses."

I think this is the real danger, that FB replaces all these other channels and
mediums.

Have you suggested to the group the possibility of moving off of FB? I mean it
sounds like they are tech people if they are part of a computer group.

------
jhasse
The one thing keeping me on Facebook are events / RSVP.

I don't know any good alternative. For example it's still missing in Diaspora:
[https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1359](https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1359)

~~~
thoth
Same here. I'm on Facebook because of events.

Years ago, a club I was in was using Yahoo Groups, and over time more and more
events were posted to Facebook. People complained, and eventually the
organizer wrote back "I've been using Facebook because it lets me schedule an
event, track RVSP's, link to the location/map, add members, post pics, and
help advertise/recruit for more members. Anybody that wants to help or
takeover any or all of this, let me know".

Total silence for a day or two before about 50 of us joined Facebook.

That was 8 years ago. I moved away but now I'm in at least 4 clubs that
actively use Facebook for events... now it's typical for friends to schedule
birthday parties, housewarmings, plain old get-togethers via Facebook private
events. Also alumni groups, community events and so on that keep in touch or
advertise things to do that way.

The only thing I'm tired of is people that constantly mention how they quit
Facebook. I don't care. It serves a useful purpose for me. It's like that
Onion article about the guy who doesn't own a TV and mentions that as often as
possible - Onion should do an update starring Facebook quitters.

And before anybody suggests it, Meetup isn't a good alternative. (I'm an
organizer of a Meetup group as well; I like Meetup but fills a different
niche.)

~~~
dabockster
> And before anybody suggests it, Meetup isn't a good alternative.

I agree. And Meetup in general is starting to go downhill here in Seattle.
More and more, I'm seeing more "meetups" that are actually more on the lines
of suburban "mortgage seminars" but for tech.

Example: Company XYZ launches a new API, so they host a "meetup" with free
beer at their HQ where 2/3 of the time is spent by a "developer relations
manager" advertising the new API. In the other 1/3 of the meetup, the
atmosphere is noticeably awkward and nobody really talks to anyone beyond a
friendly hello.

------
elorant
I joined Facebook some ten years ago. It was pretty useless back then.
Couldn't find anyone I know and the UI was fucking hideous. I deleted the
account in less than a month and haven't looked back since. Recently I took a
job as consultant for an art institution and part of the job is to oversee the
use of their social media accounts. Facebook as a marketing venue seems lame.
You get tons of traffic but very little loyalty. It just seems that users use
Facebook pretty much as a photo gallery. They rarely click on anything and
even when they do they visit the site for two minutes and then they leave. As
an avid web user I loathe that behavior. It seems to me that fb is actually
hurting Internet. They aggregate pretty much everything but their content
isn't searchable, not even inside fb itself and they provide little to no
value to web sites.

------
free_everybody
I deleted my Facebook account recently ONLY because of how spammy the
notification system is!

I didn't want many sources for my news feed so I unsubscribed to all of my
hundreds of friends save a few. This redeemed my faith in the news feed,
although I would have preferred to have just turned the whole feature off
honestly.

The problem came when I stopped using Facebook often so I wouldn't have any
notifications, at which point Facebook would arbitrarily fill my notifications
with updates about random posts of random friends of mine (i.e. "John posted a
picture! Mark updated his status!") to whom I was not in any way subscribed to
or particularly interested in. Clearly, Facebook wanted to lure me back into
their world by spamming my notifications, and there was no way to turn this
behavior off.

This approach to UX is condescending and pathetic. No more Facebook for me.

~~~
iak8god
I refuse to install Messenger, so I'm actually annoyed by FB's lack of
notifications (by email) when I receive a FB message. It used to be the case
that FB would email you the message text. They switched that to "you have a
message, click here to see it," but now it seems to be completely random
whether I'm ever notified. The immediate effect on my behavior is that I find
myself logging in to FB frequently just in case I have a message, and then
falling into the endless scroll of crap in my feed.

~~~
free_everybody
Used to happen to me all the time. Wondering if I got any Facebook messages,
log on, spend half an hour wandering through the news feed. Big time suck.

~~~
iak8god
I'd guess this is _why_ they're sending message notifications only
sporadically? I've been thinking of setting up a little service for myself to
monitor the FB web interface messages and then forward their content by email
so I never have to look at the damn thing.

------
em3rgent0rdr
"Facebook tracks posts and comments even before you post them...sending form
data surreptitiously is morally wrong, and everyone knows it..."

protip: you can access FB without javascript via
[https://mbasic.facebook.com/](https://mbasic.facebook.com/) and you don't
have to worry about such concerns. (I learned this from a Stallman video.)

~~~
chinathrow
And you can even write and read messages on mbasic.facebook.com opposed to
m.facebook.com which just re-directs you to the app store in order to install
their messenger app.

~~~
ikeyany
It's not coercive, you see, Zuckerberg is just _empowering_ users to make
_meaningful connections_.

------
dannysu
If you're not sure you want to delete your Facebook account completely, but
think maybe you might want to reduce your use of it, then uninstalling the app
from your phone is very helpful (Assuming you have it on your phone).

That worked very well for me. I used to have it on my phone and would check it
all the time. Then I decided I didn't want to do that so I uninstalled it from
my phone. Doing so helped me reduce and eventually stop using the website.

In between those times I also had a browser plugin to hide the news feed. So
if I do login, I see nothing.

Now I'm basically rarely on Facebook. I have an account, but I don't feel I
need to delete it because the account doesn't control or affect me. I can
still get messages, and Facebook keeps trying to get me back into it with
their notification emails, but I'm in control and I feel great about that.

~~~
KozmoNau7
The best thing I ever did was to disable all notifications on my phone, other
than text messages and direct instant messages.

No Facebook, email or other app notifications. It has severely reduced my
tendency to constantly check my phone, and it doesn't buzz in my pocket all
the friggin time.

~~~
beefield
Done that. If only somebody told me how to disable facebook (and slack and
gmail etc) starting blinking the browser tab when they think something
happened that I need to note, that would make my desktop life much less
distracted.

~~~
Gluek
Just close these tabs. Or use something like The Great Suspender.

~~~
beefield
Great suspender looks promising. Thanks.

------
smnscu
I was a huge facebook fan early days, I used to own facebook.com/<mylastname>,
going as far as using their email address extensively. While I'm somewhat of a
privacy activist (Lavaboom, Oakmail) the real reason I deleted my Facebook
account (several times...) is that I simply hate the clutter I feel it adds to
my life. I barely care for 10-15 people in my life, yet Facebook makes me fill
in my boredom with trite details about quasi-strangers.

------
S_A_P
I deactivated/deleted my FB account in 2010. I've thought that I may try to
open it back up in 2020 just as a self created "time capsule" of my life.
Unfortunately my life circumstances around that time were not fantastic. Mid
divorce and lots of shade thrown by the wife in my direction. Even 7 years
out, I dont like to think about that time, dont know if I will be ready in 3
more years.

------
jakebasile
I regret deleting my original Facebook account. I made it around the time they
opened to every college in the US and there was a lot of history there, photos
and videos and text. Sure most of it was worthless and maybe even embarrassing
but that data is gone now.

~~~
aphextron
For anyone worried about this, Facebook gives you an option to download all of
your data in a single zip file before deleting your account.

[https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467](https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467)

~~~
jakebasile
Yeah, I wish I would have done that (if they had it at the time, I don't think
I even looked).

Just because you don't value the data FB has _now_ doesn't mean you won't in
the future.

------
Hasknewbie
I have to ask: do people really believe that "2 billion users" claim?

I live in Europe, and yes the majority of people I know have an account, but
nowhere near all of them, and they're often unfrequent users. But more
importantly: with the places where FB is banned, all of the people too young
to be on it, all the people too old to have an interest, and all of the people
who have in general a limited/difficult Internet access and have more
important things to do than get facehooked? Being told that 2 out of every 7
human being manually created their account and are 'active users' who log in
at least once a week (or is it month?), somehow leaves me skeptical.

~~~
calafrax
I do. Facebook peaked and is decline in its early markets but still very
strong and growing in other parts of the world.

Interesting question is do they actually make any money in emerging markets
and are those billion users actually an asset.

~~~
Hasknewbie
I did work for a few months in Bombay last year, and most of my colleagues
(20s-to-40s middle class white-collar employees -- a minority in India) had a
FB account, but with very little engagement. I have to assume that having many
non-urbanized people in India, and therefore many less-connected relatives,
probably reduces the interest in FB. They were however all heavy users of
Whatsapp, which makes sense to me.

I have a feeling that, thanks to smartphone adoption, legions of people are
counted as 'in' by FB only because the app is running in the background, when
in fact it's not seeing any significant use.

------
z92
When someone leaves FB, he makes a public declaration. But his return years or
months later is generally silent.

Not claiming everyone that leaves FB, returns. But Facebook is continuing to
expand.

I remember reading here years back that new generation isn't really using FB
cause their parents are using it. And they weren't comfortable with that
setup. Rather they are switching to other social media.

~~~
zer0tonin
>I remember reading here years back that new generation isn't really using FB
cause their parents are using it. And they weren't comfortable with that
setup. Rather they are switching to other social media.

They are mostly using FB for "public" stuff, and the stuff they would only
share with their friends is on snapchat and similar applications.

------
Bakary
I stopped using Facebook for a variety of reasons years ago and I am starting
to regret it. In my case it had a clear negative effect on my social life,
since friendships are heavily based on repeated unplanned interactions and
many of these now occur on the service. If you add to this the friction of
contacting someone outside of the service (in a context where they are a clear
minority), the slight difference builds up and affects how friendships develop
during student life.

The privacy issue is certainly a factor but over time it feels more like an
expression of vanity. I am just a face in the crowd, what matters is the
relationships I can build with others in the present before my pubes turn
grey. If Zuckerberg becomes the Dark Lord it will be a collective problem
anyway.

~~~
Draiken
You say "friendships" but I don't believe that's the exact word.

Real friendships will continue to survive and thrive, as they did before
Facebook, as long as both parties keep trying. If a "friend" of mine won't
invite me to a party because I don't have Facebook, he's not really my friend.
It's as simple as that for me.

Of course we probably differ on what we define as friendship, but I believe
you'd agree that having a fake number of Facebook "friends" is not going to
change who your real friends are.

Facebook is one of many ways to talk to people (even tho I don't consider
clicking "like" on something is in any way meaningful) but it is not the only
one. If people force you to communicate through one mean they are, pardon my
french, inconsiderate jerks.

~~~
Bakary
My main point is that the lack of Facebook affects the process by which these
real friendships form. In a context where Facebook is used by most of your
peers, the lack of it creates an additional barrier to socialization that has
subtle negative effects which compound over time. The result is that you can
miss out on forming real friendships because the cementing period is stunted
by the reduced amount of unplanned interactions. Of course, this is highly
ironic when seeing that strong friendships are resilient to the absence of
social media or the passage of time.

The concept may seem strange but it's actually no different than someone
growing more distant from a group of friends because they habitually miss out
on the weekly Quiz Night or something.

It's not so much that people force you to communicate by one means, but rather
that the friction involved reduces the amount of interaction in an automatic
way. As kinkrtyavimoodh pointed out, it's an organic process and not really a
conscious choice by people to isolate others.

~~~
Draiken
Makes sense. It's the pressure from society to conform to it's standards, no
matter how bad they are.

Pisses me off when I go to a place that requires you to "check-in on facebook"
to get wifi... Not much I can do about it except not use their wifi

------
djhworld
I returned to FB last year after a 3-4 year hiatus.

I limit my use of it, maybe one visit p/day or less, it seems to work OK. The
nice thing about it is I get to see photos of my family and friends who I
don't see often.

I visit Hacker News more than I visit Facebook, I'm not sure what that says
about me.

~~~
colordrops
I just returned myself after about the same length of time. I was shocked to
find that most content is no longer personal images and text. I counted the
first 66 posts in my timeline, and 2 were personal content. The rest were
viral videos and news items and others junk. That's 3% personal content.
Absurd. I've been spending the last two days clicking "hide all from <media
outlet> to no avail, as the outlets are essentially endless.

Facebook purposely does not provide the ability to separate or filter content
from your friends and content from 3rd parties. That is borderline malicious
behavior, and definitely sociopathic.

~~~
WesleyLivesay
My solution was to Hide all from <person posting a bunch of garbage>, gotta
take care of the problem at the source.

------
Demoneeri
Oh God, my Facebook feed is way more interesting than the comments section on
HN of a post about leaving Facebook. Are you all wearing your "I left
Facebook" badge?

~~~
JohnKacz
Forgive my obtuseness but I'm not understanding your comment.

~~~
NoCoastCoder
People talking about leaving facebook are more boring than the feeds that were
so boring that they has to leave.

------
aphextron
>As a person who writes a lot of JavaScript and (mostly) enjoys it, this makes
me sad because while I enjoy the interactivity it provides, I must concede
that big data companies and advertisers have weaponized it against us.

I could not agree more. I have started browsing the web with JS turned off by
default in all of my browsers (desktop, laptop and mobile) over the last few
months. I've never been happier. Especially on mobile. The web has become a
bloated, unusable mess.

------
jsemrau
Usually I don't like these "why I left [company]" post. However, for this one
it struck a nerve. I am not even on Facebook and since about a week ago
receive emails along the line "Jan see what [real friend of mine]" has posted.
I flagged is as Spam in this is where the emails now land. But WTF is going on
? This is a severe intrusion of my privacy. What's next. Install camera's
wherever I physically go ? Is that the drone plan?

~~~
newscracker
> I am not even on Facebook and since about a week ago receive emails along
> the line "Jan see what [real friend of mine]" has posted. I flagged is as
> Spam in this is where the emails now land. But WTF is going on ? This is a
> severe intrusion of my privacy.

It's just a trap. One of your real friends uploaded all their contacts to
Facebook, and when Facebook found you weren't on it, I guess it decided to
send you an email in the hope that you'd be enticed to join in and see what
your real friends are up to...on Facebook, of course! I wonder if Facebook
does this even for any company/organization addresses that get uploaded or if
it has some sort of intelligence not to do that (imagine a
"payroll@company.com" or "legal@company.com" or "abuse@company.com" getting an
email to check out what friends are up to).

As for the severe intrusion of your privacy, Facebook's privacy policy says
what applies to its users. You're just a shadow profile who can be monetized
in the future or in other ways. You're like an outlaw/alien who doesn't have
rights as far as Facebook is concerned.

------
Jaruzel
I just randomly typed this URL into Chrome to see if it existed:

[http://quitfacebook.com/](http://quitfacebook.com/)

And it does :)

Ironically, it's got Google tracking and Google Ads on it...

------
darrmit
I too have quit Facebook (and all social media) for long periods of time, but
recently got back on. In the past I've felt pressure (from myself) to post
witty things or drive up my friend counts. But now I see the value in just
being a "consumer" \- groups, articles, etc. Plus the added benefit of being
able to see business pages, videos people send, etc.

I still agree it's crazy intrusive and addictive, I just think it's possible
(though difficult) to find a middle ground.

~~~
throwawaymanbot
Facebook wants you to feel its a intrinsic part of your life, but in reality
its not. Your brain fools you. What you dont know about, you wont miss. For me
that 90% garbage on Facebook is not incentive to give in to the feelings of
missing out on other stuff, that I will get to see anyway eventually.

------
hnarn
This might be an unpopular opinion in the tech-savvy crowd of HN, but while I
agree with pretty much 100% of the points brought up in this article, I still
disagree that leaving facebook is a net positive. I simply believe that as
privacy violating as facebook is, as scary and orwellian their statistical
analysis of my life and habits are, they have solved a very real problem for
real people: social networking online.

You can argue that facebook benefits from a lock-in effect and you wouldn't be
wrong, but facebook hasn't always had that effect. They must have been doing
something right from the start to get that effect.

I remember around 2007-ish when facebook was introduced in my life as a kind
of cool club for university kids (I think they had already dropped this idea
by then, but I still remember "networks" being a thing), and joining I was
struck by how it was everything that my other social networks was not. It felt
"professional", it allowed a low-frequency update into people's lives that
wasn't matched by IM services like MSN/ICQ/whatever back then, and as it
developed it turned into a crucial tool for groups in school, events (a major
thing for me as a student), and more.

There will always be people that say they don't "get" facebook, that anything
you can do on facebook you can do with other technology. Well, if you're one
of those people you're probably also one of those people who thought "meh"
when you saw Dropbox the first time because you can easily put together the
same thing yourself with an FTP server and version control. Well, the kicker
is obvious: normal people who don't read HN can not. Facebook changed lives
for people who "can not".

If you fast forward to today and look at how non-profits are run, how
political organizations are run, how after school-groups are run, you might
have a point saying they could use something else. They could, but not without
losing functionality. The payoff is always "a worse solution but you get to
keep your privacy". The reality is, almost nobody wants that (unless you're
politically active in a repressive regime, but facebook does support Tor, so
kudos to them). The basic issues from the past linger: who will host it, who
will support it, who will pay for it? Are we going to use an e-mail list, a
web based forum, how will we communicate and share content? Like it or not, ad
financed networks solve all these issues and people are more than happy to
sell their browsing habits for that. I don't think that's changing anytime
soon, because even if the minority ("you and me") may be willing to pay for a
substitute to buy out our own privacy, most people won't, and then the whole
point falls anyway, because the solutions will obviously not integrate.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
Ideally could have an "ad financed network" that is open-source and
distributed p2p, allowing anyone to install the server in their home on a
raspberry pi and still be somewhat in control.

~~~
grx
Problem could be that implementations for ad networks are notorious for
tracking. You would need privacy sensitive, distributed ad networks as well.

~~~
yellow_postit
The money in such a network is severely lacking when more targeted products
are available.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
but there is not much money that needs to be made to recoup the basic costs of
a raspberry and the energy, and all the profit can be given directly to the
users and content creators.

------
AJRF
1\. Change Password -> generate a random string -> copy paste it as your new
password

2\. Go to the actual delete facebook account page.

3\. Copy that random string in when it asks your password and the captcha

4\. Copy something else

Now you’ve bypassed their arbitrary and nefarious 14 day filter

~~~
mamon
What about password reminders? Should we add:

0\. create temporary email account and use it as your facebook email address?

I used that tactic successfully in the past.

------
kodt
One issue now is many social groups and businesses primarily communicate
through Facebook. I was part of a subreddit that was basically dead, gaining
no users only around 30 active people. The mod decided to create a Facebook
group instead, that group quickly ballooned to 1,000 members and now has over
7,000, this is for a single metropolitan area. The subreddit still exists but
has very little activity or useful information. If you want to be a part of
that community Facebook is pretty much your only choice.

I also follow a number of small business in a certain industry, and I would
say 100% of them have Facebook accounts, 90% have websites, 50% have
decent/good websites, 10% actually update and post news to their website. A
good amount use Twitter & Instagram, but all post events, news, promotions,
etc.. on Facebook. If you want to follow these businesses, you have to use
Facebook to do so.

------
palerdot
I quit Facebook around 2011. One funny/shocking thing that happened is I got
email notifications even after 14 day grace period. I had to go and click the
unsubscribe link manually to stop that even though I don't have a valid fb
account at this point of time. Not sure, if it is happening still.

Another one - I created a dev account some time back with dummy email Id, but
gave my mobile number of deleted account. Voila ! Facebook was suggesting my
old contacts. Though this was suggested as expected by scanning the contacts
of suggested members, I find this creepy enough.

I'm a happy and relaxed person for six years now, and as with all other things
you will get used to life without Facebook. Deleting fb account is not like
jumping a ring of fire as your social circle might suggest.

~~~
Macha
They seem to also populate it based on IP address. Created a dummy amount to
sync a mobile game across devices that requires a Facebook login to do so. It
was created in a brand new private window, with no overlapping details with my
actual account and it still suggested all the friends on my regular account.

------
submeta
I use Facebook as a Google Reader replacement. I don't care what my contacts
share. Twitter was my go-to site for this use case (news consumption). But
that platform is too polluted now. Feedly was another site I used regularly.

Is there any good news reader alternative to the platforms mentioned?

~~~
rhizome
There are a variety of RSS readers for each platform, is there something
specific you're looking for?

~~~
submeta
Do people still use RSS readers? Honestly curious. I thought that was a thing
from the past.

~~~
konart
Well... no real alternative as many see it. How else can you get
updates\aggregate articles from the blogs you want to follow?

>I thought that was a thing from the past

Just like I can't understand how Facebook or something similar can be such a
problem for people. Always though that you just keep it to stay in touch (in
other words have their contacts info) with some people you met over the time.

------
GoToRO
Even if you were never on facebook, all it takes is for somebody to post a
picture in which they can clearly see your face. That's your unique id. Then
they will add more information to your profile gathered not from you, but from
your friends.

For sure you have somebody in your group that gave them access, without
knowing, to their contacts and your number in in there too, to their pictures
and your face and easily recognizable landmarks are in there and so on. You
might have a massive profile already all due to the little bits of information
your friends are giving away.

Another problem is that the profile only grows larger with time. They never
delete anything.

------
microwavecamera
I quit using Facebook years ago. If you value your privacy, I would recommend
you do the same. Facebook's data gathering is pervasive and perverse. And it
doesn't stop with facebook.com. All those social media buttons you see for
Facebook on websites also gather data for Facebook and Facebook works with
several 3rd party companies to gather data such as Acxiom and Atlas Solutions,
which is owned by Facebook. Government organizations, such as the NSA, can and
do legally purchase and acquire this data without a warrant.

[https://labs.rs/en/category/facebook-
research](https://labs.rs/en/category/facebook-research)

[http://veekaybee.github.io/facebook-is-collecting-
this](http://veekaybee.github.io/facebook-is-collecting-this)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2016/08...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2016/08/19/98-personal-data-points-that-facebook-uses-to-target-
ads-to-you)

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-
li...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-
trump-win)

"The only winning move is not to play."

------
jokoon
I stopped using facebook around 2009 after I created a group for a highschool.
Some students of my class were harassing me and insulting me on it, so I
deleted the group and stopped using facebook entirely, in bitter anger.

I started using it again recently, because it's the norm. I have only 30
friends and I remove them very easily. I use it to watch events, shops in my
neighborhood, signin in other apps, but nothing else.

It's weird because facebook is usually a place of exclusivity since you only
interact with your "friends", meanwhile it should really be a place where you
could discover things and potential users using geolocalization (hobbies,
parties, neighborhood). I don't know why they are not doing it. Pokemon go and
tinder already proved geolocalization is awesome.

So all in all, facebook just collects information about you, but it's useless
for the users. You just share photos, post comments about people you know, but
nothing else really. And in the end, you add friends with people you might
have lost touch with 10 years ago, and they will peek into your life, but the
fact is your life changed. Just like in real life, you constantly have to use
make-believe and behave well because your personal life is shared with all
your friends at the same time. I don't understand why people really use
facebook at all.

Facebook is about showcasing your life. It has become very superficial.

------
kvgr
I unfollowed every page and all of my +-400 friends. Now I follow only my
wife, mother and brother. They do not post much. This cleaning helped me a
lot. But every time I add new friend, I need to remember to unfollow him,
because than my wall is constantly cluterred with random post from viral pages
and friends interaction on the site. I wish there still was the option to
deactivate facebook and keep messenger. I don't want to delete facebook and
then recreate the friends on messenger only again.

~~~
GuiA
You can very much disable FB and keep Messenger.

Your account will get reactivated if you click through one of their emails or
use FB login though.

~~~
kvgr
I tried to do that, but it seems the option is not available when I was trying
to deactivate facebook.

~~~
krrishd
It happens by default when you deactivate. Try deactivating and then logging
into messenger.com or the Messenger app.

------
2845197541
I deleted my Facebook, created a new one with 0 friends and now only use the
messenger as a second email to communicate with my actual friends if I have a
message that's too long for text. And I'm so glad to not care anymore what
____ who I met at a St. Patrick's day party five years ago is doing on
vacation in ____. I also enjoy not seeing my good friends falsely display
their lives. There's been so many times where I was with _____ for some outing
and the next day saw a different, composed representation on Facebook.
Facebook is an extension of the obscurantism of photo albums of the past. It
used to be that photo albums were these things that you looked into and got a
sort of false narrative where in every picture everyone is smiling and you
can't see the metastasizing cancer in grandpa's lungs as he stands next to
Niagara falls in 1978 months shy of his divorce from grandma. Now you're not
looking at a photo album's exclusion of life's complexities once in a blue
moon when someone's grandmother pulls it out you're looking at it every day,
several times a day, in 2d, 3d, 4d, 5d, with footnotes and notifications in an
endless feed. Not to mention it's created a culture of poisoned narcissists.

------
Tehnix
While I certainly get why you’d get off Facebook for privacy reasons, I feel
like a lot of the “addiction” comments here and in similar posts as OP’s are a
bit of a weird thing to me.

Are people nowadays not capable of moderation? Purely anecdotally, but I
mostly see older generations being the ones that hop off. Is it because they
didn’t grow up with this kinda of social media and can’t seem to balance what
is a perfectly fine way to interact with friends and stay updated without
pulling a cold turkey on it?

I personally mainly like to have my FB profile as a catalog for my pictures,
and might casually browse it when I got nothing else to do. There’s a lot of
value in various FB groups, for example, I’m currently in South Korea for a
year, and there are communities in the different areas for posting apartments
and asking questions for expats and internationals.

I don’t know what I’m trying to get at, but I feel that the cold turkey
approach is rather an indication of a persons lack of self-control and
moderation - you don’t have to choose an all or nothing approach, simply
disable notifications if that is what’s bothering you, unfollow people that
annoy you, and a ton of other methods to handle these things other than going
nuke-all.

~~~
sasvari

      Are people nowadays not capable of moderation? Purely
      anecdotally, but I mostly see older generations being the
      ones that hop off. Is it because they didn’t grow up with
      this kinda of social media and can’t seem to balance what
      is a perfectly fine way to interact with friends and stay
      updated without pulling a cold turkey on it?
    

95% of the people I see on the subway every day are glued to their smartphones
without interruption the moment they enter the carriage until they leave. And
around 80% of the time I get a glimpse of the screen of those it's
facebook/instagram/snapchat/<insert your social network of choice>. This is
somehow independent of age. So moderation? Balance? Probably depends on the
definition.

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
I think the grandparent author is simply not possessed by the same personality
traits that generally define the type of person who gets a lot of value out of
HN. I tend towards OCD, which caused getting off Facebook to take about 8
tries. It wasn't until I found a "last straw" that I finally managed it
permanently, and that was the runup to the recent US election. I simply did
not want to find myself at odds, politically, with a certain couple of family
members, and feel like I could not say anything in response to their posts
without damaging a relationship I otherwise highly value. With my all-or-
nothing personality and approach to things, "the only winning move is... not
to play."

~~~
Tehnix
>...simply not possessed by the same personality traits that generally define
the type of person who gets a lot of value out of HN

I’m not sure I follow what is implied here? I’m an avid consumer of HN, mostly
out of boredom or in my brain breaks.

>It wasn't until I found a "last straw" that I finally managed it permanently,
and that was the runup to the recent US election

Or you could a) not be afraid of having political discussions (although that
honestly sometimes probably isn’t possible in the way the US handles their
discourse), or b) just not comment on those posts. But alas, to each their
own, not like I gain anything from people either leaving or staying.

------
gorhill
> This article is all about Facebook, but I have also scaled back my use of
> other big services like Google

The issue is with whatever 3rd parties which are ubiquitous enough.

The difficulty is, how do we find which 3rd parties are ubiquitous enough so
as to warrant that we take action against it?

This is why I wrote uBO-Scope[1], its whole purpose is to inform users of
which 3rd parties out there are ubiquitous, according to their own browsing
history, and according to which 3rd parties were allowed to connect on any
given site.

The extension observes network traffic on all pages you visit and from the
data it collects over time, and will inform you about which 3rd parties are in
a position to collect how much of your browsing history using a per-base
domain heatmap of privacy exposure.

It's a side-side-project, and hopefully I will find time again to further
improve it. The whole motivation is that I want people to become aware of what
is happening when they browse the net, and in the spirit of informed consent,
to encourage them to take action to reduce their privacy exposure.

[1] [https://github.com/gorhill/uBO-
Scope#preamble](https://github.com/gorhill/uBO-Scope#preamble)

------
kbar13
i quit facebook because honestly it's not even good for what it's intended to
do. i want to know about what my friends are doing? snapchat, instagram, sms,
twitter, old friends are on irc. want to stay in on communities? discord,
slack, real life facetime with people. facebook just isn't really that useful
for me anymore, a lot of the posts on my feed were from people i don't care
about.

------
minademian
"... one of the last things that kept me on Facebook—after I had largely
stopped posting and reading the News Feed—was simply checking my
notifications. I unconsciously craved that little hit of happiness one gets
when they see, So-and-so liked your post. But that’s not real happiness. It’s
an unhealthy addiction."

This is true, especially of my current use of Facebook.

------
romanovcode
Wow what a news. You deleted facebook, congratulations! Is anyone even using
FB, I think it's slowly dying for the past years.

~~~
davidivadavid
They recently crossed 2 billion active users. Guess that qualifies as
"anyone."

------
dontlie
I stopped using facebook when i graduated from college, i couldnt accept to
have my whole life archived somewhere in the internet.

~~~
notliketherest
No one uses Facebook enough to actually have their whole life archived on the
internet. You're running from a fantasy.

~~~
e12e
Maybe you don't, but what about you and the sum of your friends and friends of
your friends? That doesn't just mean tagging pictures or facial recognition -
that includes collating ips and times - in someone checks into Starbucks with
a NATed ipv4 ip from Starbucks wlan and your visit fb from the same external
ip...

------
skc
So here's a question.

Facebook seems to have a really bad rep here on HN. But I'm wondering how many
people here that hate Facebook, run their own businesses or have apps that
include some form of Facebook interaction whether it be for ads,
authentication, social media integration etc and how do you justify that if
so.

------
jancsika
I'd really like to see some kind of "Proving Ground" social network that
exists for the sole purpose of verifying and elucidating the emotional
manipulation that can be achieved with the current technology.

Otherwise I predict we're going to continue getting articles from
technologists leaving Facebook who all keep quoting the same scant material,
who all make highly speculative and grand conclusions that aren't supported by
the evidence. (E.g., Facebook's "emotional lock-in" that the author doesn't
back up with any evidence.)

People break DRM thanks to the toolset that others made available on their OS.
People _will_ break the facile emotional manipulation that exists on every
social network today, but only when we have the toolset to at least elucidate
the problem.

------
strokeswan
Have a look at [https://www.vero.co/](https://www.vero.co/) I worked there for
more than 2 years, I can assure you they have absolutly no intention to use
your data. \+ there is no ads. they gonna start charge new users after 1M
users

~~~
aembleton
Android app is 68MB! Why so big?

~~~
strokeswan
you get a lot of offline features

------
stevewillows
For most people I know, we're only using facebook for events and as a
centralized location where I can basically contact anybody. The sooner someone
creates a standalone, sustainable event organizing application that doesn't
spam you to death, the sooner the exodus can begin.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
google calendar?

~~~
lmm
No good discussion/update flow, groups aren't really dynamic enough, and
getting a google account isn't going to appeal to the kind of people who
dislike facebook.

(FWIW Meetup does completely replicate this use case, but they charge money)

~~~
stevewillows
exactly. Even with meetup, its not perfect for 'I want this specific group to
come over.'

In a lot of ways, mid-2000s evite would be perfect -- but there's the spam /
nagging side of their business that spoils it.

To be fair, I have no idea how one would monetize my dream events platform.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
is monitization terribly necessary? The server costs of an open-source type of
meetup should be negligible. Hypothetically a lot can even be done with plain
email, provided users set up a filter to send all the invites into a separate
folder if don't want to get distracted.

~~~
stevewillows
somebody always pays. Ideally it would have a strong app and desktop version
with a standard calendar export... not too far off from facebook today, just
omitting their other garbage. It wouldn't be too server intensive, but if
people are using it, there's a cost.

Also, keep in mind that not everybody is as savvy as the people who typically
participate on HN. It should be as simple and minimal as possible.

------
riledhel
All the posts about this subject and not a single one I've read mention using
facebook login for websites or mobile apps. There are a lot of these out there
that simply don't work otherwise. Take instagram for example, even before
facebook's buying it.

~~~
Propen
and freakin' Tinder. damn it

------
hdi
Got rid of it about 6-7 years ago, mainly due to all the annoying people
posting photos of their food and pointless updates and check-ins. Who needs
that.. I don't miss it one bit nor do I plan on using it ever again.

~~~
colordrops
It's way worse now. At least you were seeing pictures and text that your
friends posted. Now it's over 90% viral content.

------
throwawaymanbot
Once Facebook changed their algorithm that hid people I didn't communicate
with regularly further down my feed, in favor of the few that I did being in
my face more, I have to say, I lost interest.

So, about 4 or 5 years ago I quit Facebook. Privacy concerns aside, I'm happy
to say my social life has not suffered. I feel saner, more informed, (No
"obama needs to be locked up" posts for me) and I feel like I have more mental
energy for REAL things I interact with, such as colleagues and friends, which
are more important to me.

------
jaxomlotus
I still have my account but disabled all notifications and effectively stopped
visiting it except for rare occasions. I did this about 4 months after the
election, when I realized how toxic Facebook had become, watching my friends
and family deride each other for their voting choices. It wasn't healthy. I am
actually glad that I stopped visiting it because in retrospect I don't miss it
at all, and can't even estimate how much productive time I probably wasted on
it.

------
gcoda
I quit Facebook years ago, and just recently created new account. It really
helps, I need eyes on me, to get some opportunities. I need to be visible. I
am controlling is my behavior, treat fb.com as a real public life, and it's
hard for me, I used internet as free place where I can be my true self as
oppose to real life where other people might disagree, where it is better to
always avoid politics and religion to maximize social gain.

------
KozmoNau7
Good for him. I basically use Facebook as a way to keep track of upcoming
shows and events, and which of my friends are going. It's a lot easier than
maintaining invites in a Google Calender (or similar) by hand.

All of the games, copy-paste "share this!" bullshit and random shitposting
pages of "humor" I either ignore or outright block. I also refuse to read news
and engage in related discussions.

With some discipline, Facebook can be a useful tool.

------
NumberCruncher
Back then when Zynga got big I got more and more annoyed by the "water my
plants, bor!" and "milk my cows, bro!" requests. At one point I decided to
unfollow anybody on the spot sending me Zynga requests. After that I
unfollowed my favourite bands inviting me to concerts on a different
continent. Then people posting about political topics. Than everybody posting
annoying BS.

And I ended up with a nice empty timeline.

------
randomsearch
Pro tip: use messenger.com rather than going to Facebook if you want to keep
using chat without the distractions of the news feed and notifications etc.

------
allenleein
Hacker News is my new Facebook.

------
valentinebm
>all those silly games and quizzes people are adding to their account are
making off with all sorts of information about you.

But (most) people prefer taking silly quizzes than thinking about potential
dark implications of doing that. And it's not like this is a big secret no one
has ever talked about (just google 'Facebook quizzes data' for more on that).

------
nilsocket
I have deleted my Facebook account, because must of my feed is stupid and
doesn't make any sense. Ever thought to read a post on Facebook without having
an account. You probably can't read , due to their very big banner saying you
to "connect with friends". That doesn't go away it keeps re-visiting for every
3 to 5 seconds.

------
infectoid
Similar boat to everyone else. Have had an FB account for ages. But gradually
used it less as opposed to more. Barely use it at all now. Social Media has
just never really my bag.

I don't really see the value in deleting it as I don't really use it and it
does offer me a connection to old friends if I'm so inclined to contact them.

------
WA
Thoughts on Facebook:

1\. Privacy-wise: It doesn't matter if you're on Facebook or not. They have a
profile about you and you can't do anything about it. There was this article
in January [1] that showed how only a few data points Facebook or Google or
Twitter actually needs to paint a fairly accurate picture of your personality.

2\. Addiction-wise: Uninstall the app, disable all notifications. I rarely use
Facebook for the feed, because it's actually extremely boring. Most friends
don't post personal stuff anymore anyways. There's a handful of people who
post a lot, but mostly links to other websites. I also unfriend people I
haven't talked to in a while. Try to reduce your friends (and cognitive load)
to <200 or <150\. Not all at once. Unfriend 10 or so today, another 20
tomorror etc.

3\. I also see tremendous benefits of Facebook and that's why I use it: We
have a local startup community. Basically, a page with 100 likes or so. We
posted a video about our events and it reached 1,200 people organically. It's
an extremely useful tool to discover and promote local events. And new people
constantly find our events because of Facebook. You can't do this with your
private website. You need to go where the attention is. The only other option
to promote local events is the newspaper or distributing flyers, but this
takes a lot more time for less awareness, because of broader targeting. I also
found new events because of Facebook.

[1]: [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-
li...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-
trump-win)

Edit: clarification

------
basicplus2
I quit Facebook but was forced to return when it was the only way to
communicate with certain Social groups.

So now I use one of my old phones with nothing on it, including no contacts,
just for Facebook on a guest wifi channel on home router so it cannot link
into main home network.

I look at once a week at most.

Otherwise it sits there marooned ha ha

------
baby
I personally rarely use facebook.com but messenger.com instead. I can't afford
to delete my facebook account because this is how I keep in touch with most of
my friends. People who can delete their facebook accounts probably all have
their friends in the same city?

------
rajadigopula
I deactivated my facebook almost 7 years ago, and never looked back. Now I am
considering to move away from google services, as google is getting aggressive
these days. I use nexus 6p phone and I am seeing youtube recommendations these
days based on my phone conversations!

~~~
onion2k
_I use nexus 6p phone and I am seeing youtube recommendations these days based
on my phone conversations!_

The implication of this is that Google listens in and recommends things based
on your phone conversations. A much more likely explanation is that you talk
on the phone about the same things you look at online, and you're making an
incorrect assumption about Google's source of data.

~~~
rajadigopula
I know what I talk on phone and what I search online. I have observed this so
many times - not once. So I am confident in what I imply.

~~~
Hasknewbie
Doing voice processing is much much more computationally expensive than
scanning text, and has a much higher error rate, so it would make little sense
for Google to do that.

More likely explanations could be:

\- Your topic is a common/popular one, so it's statistically likely that
Youtube mentions it.

\- Other people that (text-)search the same things as you tend to watch these
videos (i.e. you have been put is some category or other).

\- You did not search for it, but your phone correspondant did, and
Youtube/Google tries the same suggestions on you because you're linked (see:
there are other and less costly ways for Google to be creepy!).

------
Aaargh20318
I never had an account because I never had a need to and can't see any
advantages to having one.

There are lots of articles about how the price of using Facebook is your
privacy but I've never seen one explaining to me what you get for that price
and why you'd want that.

------
primozk
Sadly all local events are posted on FB and it is the easiest way to track
them.

------
AndrewOMartin
How do you know when someone doesn't have a Facebook account?

------
rcdwealth
Well Facebook has stolen US $400 from us, in a single click, as they have been
thinking we are not watching the campaign. There was absolutely no support or
answer on incident.

~~~
8draco8
How they did that?

------
UseaName
I used to like facebook until it wanted to know where I was and what I was
doing at all times. It's just creepy. A goldmine for stalkers and other
criminals.

------
rdiddly
"It’s difficult to know how much of your information will be truly deleted."

Not difficult - the answer is _none of it._ But at least you can stop adding
to it.

------
throw2bit
I am happy to leave Facebook. But what will I tell the US govt if they ask for
my social media ? I frequently fly in & out of US and not a citizen.

------
adgasf
For those looking for a replacement "hit", why not divert your procrastination
into something useful, like StackOverflow or Codewars?

------
dsfyu404ed
To all the people who deleted FB, has your husband/wife deleted it. If FB has
them hooked then they may as well have you.

------
yuhong
The studies they mention in this is pretty fun, both the self-censorship and
the news feed one.

------
Elect2
Where/How do you get daily news after quitting Facebook?

~~~
tmccrmck
I deleted my FB nearly three years ago and it forces you to actually go to
news sites. I'm much more informed this way.

I get my local newspapers (the Chronicle and the East Bay Times) delivered and
I go online throughout the day to read NYT, LA Times, WaPo, BBC. I've never
felt the need for the instant spam news that you get on FB or Twitter. There's
only been one time where I've had to use Twitter for realtime news and that
was during the fire in Oakland last fall.

------
jstewartmobile
If I drop Facebook, where will I get my vaporwave fix?

------
known
I use a fake account;

------
TrickyRick
Was it just me who thought it was referring to working at Facebook before
clicking the link?

~~~
sparky_
No, I'm in your boat. I was expecting a rather enlightening introspection on
the weaker points of FB's corporate culture.

~~~
valentinebm
+1

Certainly has to do with the wave of such posts published lately (Susan Fowler
& Uber, Coraline Ada Ehmke & GitHub etc.)

------
ioquatix
If you are not paying for it, you are probably the product.

~~~
kronos29296
And privacy isn't worth anything. Nobody cares. Because everybody is on
Facebook.

~~~
avaer
If privacy isn't worth anything, someone should tell the advertisers spending
billions to buy it.

~~~
kleer001
Someone really should. Also tell them that 90% of what they do doesn't work.
In fact we should get rid of most advertizing.

------
weego
Do we need a why? because you wanted to? Over opinionation and over
justification is an insidious disease in tech related fields.

------
DigitalTraffic
Facebook is great for developers!

The groups for specific languages and graphics packages are very active. The
Lightwave group is great for example.

Asocial and autistic people are generally not interested, but for the rest of
us, it's great! I can see how nerds would have problems with it.

------
logicallee
The article quotes someone saying:

>One New York comedian had a SWAT team break into his house based on a joke
post.

could someone find a citation, I'd like to read about that case? I googled
what I just quoted and a couple of variations and did not find it.

Thanks.

~~~
blakewatson
[https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/414/...](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/414/right-to-remain-silent)

------
petraeus
Look at all you facebook haters lol, its just a tool, its YOUR problem if you
cant control it. Its like swearing never to use a hammer again because you
missed a nail once.

~~~
krrishd
I think that's a flawed comparison, at least for some people it has a negative
impact (as opposed to simply not being useful enough as a tool).

I've actually derived a lot of value from Facebook in the time that I've had
it, but I left as an experiment with my mental health and it's genuinely
helped me.

Also, not being able to control it is hard to blame on the end-user when
Facebook designs aggressively around engagement and hooking users in by virtue
of psychology.

