

Why I left Facebook - dgurney
http://concertwindow.com/3469/why-i-left-facebook

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MatthewB
I deactivated my Facebook account last week. I have been an active member of
facebook since early 2005...right at the beginning. It was awesome at first, I
could connect with my friends and see what they were doing, and share photos
with people easily.

Fast forward a few years and now everyone is on facebook. I had 400 or so
"friends" and only about 10 of those people I actually cared about what they
were doing. The signal to noise ratio became too poor.

Yes, I could have setup groups and filtered my results and bla bla bla, but I
didn't want to. The only value I got out of facebook was I had a contact list
of pretty much everyone I have ever known.

This was not enough to keep me interested. Anyone I was doing business with I
can keep in touch with on linkedin, which provides me exactly the information
I am looking about those people. My close friends and family I keep in contact
with this crazy idea of...BEING AROUND THEM.

I quit facebook and haven't looked back.

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dgurney
amen to that! The signal-to-noise issue really bothered me too.. I hated only
being able to send a status message to EVERYONE, and setting up groups
would've been too time consuming.

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endlessvoid94
I thought this was going to be about leaving facebook as an engineer.

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warfangle
So did I - I remember a slew of similar articles about leaving Google et al a
couple years ago.

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dgurney
haha yeah i can see how it could come off like that.. sorry to disappoint :)

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ajslater
Pretty common to see grandstanding "I left" posts for Facebook. Not as much
Twitter. Or really any other service that someone just stops using without
devoting an entire blog post to the minutiae of how and why.

Coming up next: WHY I LEFT COLOR.

Edit: I too was looking for gossip from a former engineer.

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lordlarm
The author should have said: "Why i deactivated my Facebook account", but it's
ok.

I did the same thing a while back at it was great. Reactivated again in order
to get invited to certain events (yeah, people tend to 'forget' to remain
those not on facebook) and to access peoples birthdays.

But deactivating my facebook account for some months really got me to realize
how much time I was spending there, and how most of it was a waste. And as the
author points out: "Not social at all".

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warfangle
I did this about three (or four, maybe? I forget) months ago. I actually feel
happier. More focused.

I guess the tipping point for me was seeing an image. I can't find it anymore
(it's lost in my tumbleblog somewhere). It was split horizontally, like a
comic book; the top pane was Assange, the bottom was Zuckerburg.

Assange's photo was labeled: "I take private corporate and government secrets
and make them freely public, and I'm a criminal."

Zuckerburg's was labeled: "I take your private social information and sell it
to corporations for profit, and I'm Time's man of the year."

Pretty much got me right there...

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dgurney
oh yeah, I remember that image too. I guess I'm ok with them selling my info
because I freely gave it up and I knew that was going to happen. Not saying
it's right, but also not saying I was duped. But definitely a valid reason for
leaving.

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Apocryphon
I'm disappointed; I thought he meant that he was an ex-FB employee. That would
make for juicy insider gossip.

