I'm relived that at least some people are leaving social media. "Gamification of personal interaction" certainly degraded my health. Quitting Facebook "cold turkey" is the best decision I've made this year.
I found that no longer posting or interacting, accomplished enough to not need to quit. I enjoy being able to get updates, entirely at my leisure, regarding friends & family. Basically turns Facebook into an RSS feed of life updates. I've also never allowed Facebook on any phone, keeping it isolated in a specific use box.
I joined Facebook when it initially became open to the public. For a few years it was nice, relatively calm, mostly fun. Then enough people joined that the quality of everything plunged, the public arguing and political fights escalated among friends, people increasingly brought the crap from real life to the platform. Frequent oversharing, having it be persistent (carried everywhere with you), and an always-present town square aspect (and how that warps behavior), then amplifies the negativity among the whole network. A few years ago I gave up posting & discussing anything, stopped sharing any media, deleted all my public posts and comments.
The swamp that is Facebook nearly brought me to disliking a couple dozen people I've known my entire adult life. Facebook creates a pressurized social atmosphere, almost like cohabitation with the people you're connected to on there. It becomes like the saying about guests and fish both smelling after three days.
> I found that no longer posting or interacting, accomplished enough to not need to quit. [...] Basically turns Facebook into an RSS feed of life updates.
This!
However, I think there's a big cultural divide there. I have many Brazilian friends and many European ones and I feel that Facebook as an impact in this order:
Brazilian >> French > German
For many Brazilian friends it's to see and to be seen, for the European ones much less so. I'd also venture to guess that the post frequency is much higher (like an order of magnitude) for Brazilians than for others.
If I include other nationalities with n <30, I'd say it's mostly a problem in the Americas where I see much higher usage and feel "high pressure to be seen as having a fulfilling life".
I've quit, but not entirely. I just unfollowed everyone. My newsfeed is blank, it doesn't even have ads amazingly. Without the feed, I still get the upsides of Facebook (I can communicate with people on a platform they almost all use, I can organise events easily), but (along with a suite of tracker-blockers) remove almost all the downsides.
Same here, and added the FB Purity extension on top of it. It's glorious to visit FB today and see the same 3 posts I saw yesterday (I follow a few media co's). It's slowly gotten me out of the habit of randomly checking in to see what's going on; when nothing is going on, you start forgetting to check in.
I'm constantly amazed by all this "I quit facebook" bragging on HN. I'm avoiding FB as much as I can, but it doesn't feel to me at all like a problem that doesn't affect me if I'm not using it. That's pretty much the point for me. It's harder and harder for me to avoid FB. Local businesses don't bother making their own websites anymore, gym will post updates in some FB group (or whatever it's called), pretty much everyone expects me to be on FB. Fuck, many web-based services will not allow me creating a new account with them, I must use google or fb accounts to log in. Ordinary people I meet everyday don't ask me for a phone number, telegram/whatsapp account (as if it is not evil enough), surely not an email. They ask me how to find me on FB, and find it somewhat creepy that I'm not using it. My friends will text me and send me links to something hosted on FB that I cannot see if not logged in.
And I'm not even some Stallman-grade eremite that declines anything but email. I have a phone, whatsapp, telegram, I'm ready to make a new account on your website. Facebook still affects me, in a harmful way.
Is depersonalized social media, such as this site, any different? I think media aggregation is of course a hugely valuable resource. But what ratio of our time do we spend discussing things versus learning new things. And how much of the discussion is at all productive?
I wonder about the time and physiological consequences. In particular the behavior of rapidly clicking back to these sites checking to see if anything interesting has popped up or if you have any discussions ongoing - I can't really see that as something that's particularly great for our longterm healthfulness. It's likely not just a correlation that the average human attention span has fallen by 33% just since 2000. We now have a lower attention span than goldfish. [1]
My justification is I've certainly changed my views on numerous things thanks to these interactions, and I've also even managed to convince a few people to change their views on various things. And that, on a high enough level, is how society evolves. But on the other hand the literally exact same justification can be used to argue that water cooler gossip is a socially productive behavior.
But there is another side to the story. I quit Facebook many years ago in 2008 because I disagree with their ToS. However, since then I lost contact to many friends far-away. Sure, FB feeds are not really "contact" in any meaningful sense, but they still allow you to get a glimpse at what's going on in their lives. Another things is that I've lost the opportunity to use FB to market my German sci-fi novels to friends and acquaintances.
Anyway, these disadvantages are not high enough for me to return to social media, that's for sure. Social media have essentially just become a data mining business, and there is too much that can be read off social graphs. They are a real long-term danger to society, IMHO.
There's much better to come, this is a kind of weird side product, so you probably won't like it. Also, people tell me that I'm bad at self-marketing. :p
