Ask HN: Did you delete your Facebook account in 2018?

So some background. I used facebook as a normal user from 2010 to 2012. I thought it was stupid on day 1 but was peer pressured into it (thanks high school) and by 2012 I still thought it was stupid and useless so I quit.

At various intervals between 2012 and now I've had shitposting accounts. Fake names and fake pictures but most people in the friends list knew who was behind the mask (and frustratingly would address me instead of the mask). At some point I was posing as an over the top Chinese nationalist, reposting everything from China daily and xinhua. Using FB in this quasi anonymous way is so liberating. You're not playing the same status game as all those other suckers. You're free to touch any political third rail. In fact you're touching the third rail just to touch it. You don't even care what you're saying. You can completely make a mockery of the banality which consumes social media. I used to begin posts with "speaking as a mother" despite being very obviously male. It is like you're the only one who sees the emperor has no clothes, and you're sitting there jiggling his willy and everyone else is still insisting he's wearing pants.

Anyway my last account was one "Fiona Lockhardt". Her profile pic was a purple pen which had a smiley face and boobs added in ms paint. For people who know me, Fiona really is the name of my pen. It is a pen that I built but it is also a lockpick. I named it after a girl in the office who was caught stealing things. I would use this account to interject into conversations with ostensibly on topic information but secretly I was making lock puns. I would post sterotypically girly vacation photos but with the pen in various poses such as sitting on an airplane or drinking starbucks.

Importantly, none of the pictures posted were me. 100% of uploaded photos were the pen with a face added in ms paint. So one day facebook decides that something about my login is suspicious. They ask me to upload a picture to confirm my identity. They won't let me upload a picture of the pen because they failed to detect a face in the picture. So I upload a photo of Mark Zuckerberg. It goes to manual review and then my account gets locked. Ironic, Fiona could unlock things for others, but couldn't unlock her own account.

Do I care? No not really. Facebook was just a stupid site on the internet from day 1. It never deserved to be taken seriously.

I can block most of that tracking through various channels, while also using the platform in a way that brings me value. I am feeding Facebook data when using their platform and I believe that is somewhat fair for them, but I am doing my best to build a system that doesn't feed them additional data, which I believe is unethical.

Do I like Facebook as a company and the direction in which it's going and the societal changes it brings? No. Do I think Facebook has 0 value? Again, no. Do I have an alternative service for keeping up with my friends and family apart from our occasional real life meetups? Strangely enough, I don't think I do.

Once upon a time we had simple HTTP servers sending you server rendered pages, in time, it evolved to a complex ecosystem of requests and responses for each page you visit. Part of that is used to offer us services which were unimaginable "back in the days", but with it came the other part where your behavior becomes heavily trackable.

I remember the old internet, I wish that simplicity came back in a way (somehow without the popups, the toolbars and the risk of running apps on your machine instead of in your browsers), but I think that ship has long sailed, and I'm not sure I'm willing to give up the possibilities of today for that.

Though I did recently have to create a fake one for work to manage our Facebook page.