Ask HN: How many of you quit using Facebook or rarely use?

I found that my friends and family didn't mix well, my crude friends were posting random garbage that my grandma was reading. Then there was family drama, backstabbing, angry political posts. The reasons for me to leave far outweighed the benefits of staying. I also don't like being a "product", I'm not interested in seeing advertising and the way they manipulate your feed now is also something I dislike. I pulled the plug and haven't looked back, I don't miss it at all.

I made a personal policy to not use it a few months ago. I still have the account, because of some messenger threads, but the app is gone from my phone and I have a policy of only logging into FB itself in a private browsing window. This at least reduces their tracking, and makes it a little harder for me to give in, so I only use it if I'm actively using it for something (e.g. looking for hours on a restaurant that doesn't have a real website, checking event information, finding somebodys birthday). I don't allow passive browsing anymore.

My reason is that it was just becoming too big of an echo chamber. Everyone on it was spouting their opinions and getting waves of agreement, making their opinions stronger, in an endless cycle. I just don't want to be part of it.

The biggest effect it's had on my life is that I get seriously bothered when someone asks me if I "saw their post". I immediately respond with something like "i'm not really on facebook anymore, what are you talking about?". The amount that it's dug itself into everyone's lives in pretty baffling. It's nice to not find myself absently staring at an endless "news feed" of the same soundbites and photos over and over again.

My wife will often be using it and get upset at the stupidity of something she sees, and I can't always resist a told-you-so.

I still have an account because of an IRL social group that likes to do event planning through FB Events, but that and using Messenger to communicate with one person are the only reasons I still have an account.

FB and Instagram were only contributing guilt, anxiety, and FOMO to my life, and I am so much better off without them. Weirdly, I've gone back to Twitter, but I only follow one person that I know IRL there. Twitter is great for news and weather.

Actually deleted mine yesterday, then had the fun of creating a new Spotify account as apparently that was linked to my Facebook and you can't unlink it!

I was on Facebook for a couple years, caught up with all my old High School classmates and a couple University classmates as well. Once I saw how everyone was doing Facebook lost interest to me. I got to the point where the only time I logged in to Facebook was to opt-out of some new option that automatically opted me into. It was easy to give it up and I haven't missed it since. That was probably 6 or so years ago.