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

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

#31

Yes. I deleted everything except LinkedIn this year. I will delete that soon. I wish I could delete everything including this site...

Agreed, as someone that's never used facebook, I see a lot of the criticisms levied against it and think hacker news and other forms of social news are just as damaging.

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

#35
Yes, deleting all posts (using Social Book Posts Manager[1] IIRC) and other footprints as much as possible before I did. Of course, I can't control whether Facebook actually performed those deletions or just simulated it to my satisfaction.

On retrospect I'm now just sick that I was ever caught up in their "engagement at any expense" Skinner Box to the extent that I was. I'd have Facebook open in one tab and start typing f-a-c in a new one before being aware of what I was doing.

Facebook is digital lead, digital radon, digital asbestos—pick your metaphor. Life is much better without it.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...

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

#36

In the midwest ( a place before people have had a mass exodus ), Facebook still serves a purpose as somewhat of the white pages, in that everyone you have ever known at least has an account. It is a single place to find everyone. If you delete your account, which I did in about 2006 and maybe again in 2008 or so, people thought I specifically unfriended only them, and were mad at me. I would love to see the network (…

[deleted]

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

#40
No, but I've just completed exporting as many of my contacts as possible to vcard format and have added them to my Protonmail account. I've also set my existing Gmail accounts to forward to my Protonmail, and I'll sunset those accounts down the road once I'm confident I've transitioned everything off it.

Facebook and Google will soon be eliminated from my life. Amazon will probably be next, but I'm less concerned with Amazon(with the exception of Alexa, which I no longer use).

My Facebook account is still around mostly because much of my family still uses the site and our private group is where most family news, photos, etc. get posted. Otherwise, my account is basically a "husk". Very few of the people I know who are under 40 use it much at all at this point. The site, in relation to my social circle, is tumbleweeds blowing around. I don't know if I'll ever truly delete my Facebook account, but I hardly go to the site and I've purged my phone of all their software.

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