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Why I deleted my Facebook account

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Re: Why I deleted my Facebook account

#101

Post by CalRobert »

keganunderwood wrote: post #27
fastbeef wrote: post #17

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…

LinkedIn is perhaps the worst of the bunch though. I see people in "people you may know" that I've already tried to add but LinkedIn will show them to me because I assume they're not the ones spamming if it happens due to me clicking a button. All for a blip in user engagement.

Except Linkedin is boring, inane drivel from "thought leaders" so I'm not even tempted to have a look. At least FB has the occasional picture of someone I care about, or a political link (that inevitably agrees with my already-established view of things)

Re: Why I deleted my Facebook account

#102

Post by 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.

Re: Why I deleted my Facebook account

#103

Post by rikkus »

gambiting wrote: post #28
grx wrote: post #10

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…

I haven't left because I was concerned about the data they were collecting, I left because I realised that I couldn't stop going on facebook, any time my hands were free I would open up my phone and check the feed, scroll through the endless stream of garbage and crap I didn't care about in the slightest. That, and the fact that I was getting really depressed by all the news surrounding brexit, then I would go and re…

I shifted to Twitter for a while and eventually kicked that too. I get the HN daily digest email and generally only visit the links from that, though there are exceptions when I'm looking for something interesting over morning coffee (hence replying to this post at this time). I stopped paying attention to the news media years ago.

I think I'm pretty much free of the 'need' to look at what's 'new' now. You might think this means I have loads more free time to do more important things. I'm still waiting for that to happen.

Re: Why I deleted my Facebook account

#105

Post by amelius »

booleandilemma wrote: post #93
grx wrote: post #10

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…

It's never too late. The day you quit FB is the day you reclaim a lot of time you spend on FB. I haven't updated my FB account since I graduated college and it feels great. If FB wants to obsessively and endlessly analyze the profile and posts of my college-self, it's free to do so.

Is there a good browser extension that measures how much time one actively spends on various sites?

Re: Why I deleted my Facebook account

#106

Post by 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.

Re: Why I deleted my Facebook account

#107

Post by taftster »

sasvari wrote: post #66
grx wrote: post #10

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…

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 informa…

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.

Re: Why I deleted my Facebook account

#108

Post by beefield »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #100
dannysu wrote: post #83

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 a…

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.

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.

Re: Why I deleted my Facebook account

#109

Post by dredmorbius »

cobbzilla wrote: post #24
notliketherest wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that even mean? Do you even know what you're talking about? I don't pay for a lot of things of which I'm certainly not the product. FYI resorting to such banalities is rather pathetic

Let me rephrase: if you are not paying for it, you are the product, but you probably don't know it, and even if you did know it, you probably don't care. If I was to go one step farther, I'd say the entire powerbase of companies like Facebook and Google is founded on a large mass of people not caring about their privacy. Maybe a step too far, but I'm not so sure.

Not so much not caring, but getting stuck in a vortext.

Free-to-use, privacy-voiding services kill any paid-for, privacy-respecting service. There's a race to the bottom -- Gresham's Law -- and the "good" services can neither gather sufficient users nor revenues to be sustaining.

The leaders, at the same time, have to stay ahead of all three fronts in the game:

1. They need low per-user costs to sustain themselves.

2. They need to exploit user data (or whatever other advertising-based edge) they have to retain advertisers.

3. They've got to retain sufficient network size and quality to keep smaller services from taking off, or from boiling-off the high-quality users who are no longer satisfied by the service.

Google launched G+ to kill Facebook. It failed in that, with a large number of arguments as to why.

But Facebook's initial attraction was that it was literally Harvard. That is: it began as one of the most selective, aspirational, and attractive (to both other participants, and advertisers) cohorts on the planet.

Metcalfe's Law is only so powerful, and it's a strong overstatement. There's both a falling value with additional nodes (Tilly-Odlyzko), and a per-user cost constant (myself). The size of a network is ultimately governed by that per-user cost.

(There is also, if you will a perverse T-O factor -- a subpopulation who are actively detracting from overall site value. This can be addressed by specifically addressing and neutralising those participants. The cost-constant isn't subject to this.)

Which is why a new social network could form, and relatively easily, among some sufficiently large appealing cohort. Throwing some funding money and support to individuals within such contexts might well take down Facebook, eventually.

(Though the replacement would almost certainly eventually present the same problem.)

Re: Why I deleted my Facebook account

#110

Post by 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

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