How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos • Hacker News Board

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#141

Post by elhudy » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 4:06 PM UTC

okmokmz wrote: post #125

I've always felt that if deleting facebook caused me to loose contact with someone entirely, we probably weren't really friends in the first place

Acquaintances who happened to have made great point-in-time connections should be viewed as potential "real" friends. I've met amazing people around the world who I would hate to sever connections with, but, by realities of living busy lives on opposite sides of the world, we don't communicate regularly.

We've reconnected through work/vacation travels and been ecstatic about having local tour guides. For these connections, facebook has been my only lifeline as the commonality between us.

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#142

Post by ryandrake » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 4:08 PM UTC

PinkMilkshake wrote: post #12

amirathi wrote: post #7

I successfully tricked my mind to not use Facebook by destroying / making my feed non-personal. How? I became member of all sorts of group: Buy-N-Sell in my local area, technology groups, 10+ DevOps groups and so on. The quality of posts on these is poor and is irrelevant for me for the most part. So every time I used to open the app out of habit, I would see all non-personal crappy posts and I would close the app in…

> I successfully tricked my mind to not use Facebook by destroying my feed. I did the same thing, but using a different technique. Steps: 1) Taper off - Unfollow everyone who isn't a close friend or family 2) Destroy feed - Unfollow everyone x) Optional step - Delete all your posts and untag all photos. It took me an hour or two but I deleted everything, one by one. A greasemonkey script managed to clear some of it,…

I did all those steps and quickly realized how useless the platform is. The final step for me was replacing my password with a random string of characters and logging out for good.

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#143

Post by tmalsburg2 » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 4:15 PM UTC

If you lose contact with someone after deleting Facebook, they were not your friend in the first place. My conclusion after deleting my account four years ago. Getting rid of Facebook was one of the best decisions of my life.

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#144

Post by 394549 » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 4:23 PM UTC

SequoiaHope wrote: post #46

I just wanted to say that I walked away from Facebook about a year and a half ago now. I didn’t delete it, I just logged out and uninstalled the mobile app. It’s all been totally fine. The most social social media I use now is reddit, where I’m more just talking to people. I don’t post status updates anywhere, and often amazing things happen to me that I never tell anyone about. I eat great meals and don’t share. I b…

> I just wanted to say that I walked away from Facebook about a year and a half ago now. I didn’t delete it, I just logged out and uninstalled the mobile app. It’s all been totally fine.

If you do this, change your profile pic/cover photo to a text-image saying something like "No longer using Facebook" in letters big enough to be read in the thumbnail views. It'll help build social momentum around disconnecting from Facebook, and it will let your Facebook connections know it's not a good medium to communicate with you.

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#145

Post by quest88 » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

scarejunba wrote: post #41

I just have a single strike policy for most of my friends. I unfollow anyone as soon as they post something I don't want to see. I don't tell them, obviously. It works quite well. Scrolled down just now and saw one post of someone running a 10k, a complaint about not having a holiday on Monday (haha), an ad from Triplebyte, a photo of the SpaceX rocket launch visible from the city, pictures from Yosemite, a birthday,…

FB has become way more enjoyable for me after adopting a similar strategy. Now it's down to my close friends, family, and old HS friends who are up to cool things I'm interested in.

The hardest part for me was unfollowing close friends who post a lot of garbage and videos. Before I complained about FB being shit content, but it was really some friends posting shit content.

I think in combination unfriending and unfollowing lots of people, and facebook's algorithm updates, it has become more useful and fun to use again.

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#146

Post by 394549 » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

jameskegel wrote: post #129

davchana wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too, about 1.5 years agi, realised that facebook & orkut is consuming too much time of mine, kind of addictive. I coldly uninstalled app, logged out everywhere. Felt so free. Then found reddit & hackernews, & now again whenever I feel i am spending too much time, I just delete the shortcuts of these from my most-recent-tabs.

This is the first time I’ve ever heard someone say Orkut was a time monopolizer. Can you share a bit about your background and use for this network?

Wasn't Orkut massively popular in India and Brazil?

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#147

Post by bunderbunder » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #112

SequoiaHope wrote: post #46

I just wanted to say that I walked away from Facebook about a year and a half ago now. I didn’t delete it, I just logged out and uninstalled the mobile app. It’s all been totally fine. The most social social media I use now is reddit, where I’m more just talking to people. I don’t post status updates anywhere, and often amazing things happen to me that I never tell anyone about. I eat great meals and don’t share. I b…

Interesting. I've experimented with deleting or going cold turkey from various social platforms over the past year or so to see how it affected my life. After a fair bit of experimentation it seems that deleting Twitter, and blocking Reddit, have been the two things that have most improved my mental state. Just a guess but I feel like the combination of endlessness (you can literally just scroll/browse forever) and t…

> that sort of trademark internet sarcasm, cliche, meme, pithy style of communication, just left me in a perpetually bad mood.

Interesting observation. I hadn't really thought of it before, but, now that you mention it, I do feel like Twitter is somewhat set up to be a game of seeing who can be the most misanthropic. Sardonic and sarcastic humor are the kinds that are best suited to such a short form.

I suppose it's theoretically only a performance people are doing for fun. But, if you're doing it all the time. . . well, practice makes perfect.

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#148

Post by gfo » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 4:53 PM UTC

I've only deactivated Facebook, not deleted. I'm worried that if I completely delete I have no way left to access the data Facebook has on me. Is anyone aware of how their shadow profiles work? If I deactivate, are they still able to attribute things like someone uploading my number from their contacts back to my profile?

It's this reason that I haven't nuked it entirely yet. I also use Messenger on occasion to communicate with those I haven't spoken to in a long time. I'm ready to make that leap soon. And no, not all of those folks whose numbers or email addresses I lack are not 'friends' necessarily - I have a few former colleagues and bosses on there as well I like to chat with on occasion.

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#149

Post by gfo » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 4:55 PM UTC

justin_oaks wrote: post #3

"Anything from Upworthy" Good for a laugh, but it's pretty easy to get rid of that stuff in particular. Anytime anyone reshares something, I go to the 3-dot menu and select "Hide all from xxxxx". It makes most of the crap go away... except for the one "friend" who somehow manages to reshare everything under the sun. Somehow that guy keeps finding new sources for me to "Hide all" from. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It is by no means a so…

Before I deactivated I tried this.

Unfortunately this didn't always solve the problem. For one thing, it would still show those pages when someone interacted with those posts on say, someone else's profile who shared it.

Even then, there are thousands of new junk pages created for that garbage every day. It's nearly impossible to keep up with it. Though I unfollowed or unfriended those who were the worst offenders, there would be others who took their place.

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#150

Post by gfo » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 4:56 PM UTC

thisismyusernam wrote: post #104

This doesn't actually answer the issue posed in the title, "How not to lose your friends". I was expecting at least a little discussion on how to replace Facebook friends, how to stay connected, alternatives etc.

Email, call, text them. I've started sending birthday cards to my close friends (whose birthdays I actually know) rather than simply writing a message on their profile or shooting a quick text. I've found most really appreciate the card - it's interesting how birthday cards used to seem the 'easy' way to wish someone a happy birthday but now they appear to have more meaning.