No, but I've definitely been giving it a serious rest.
Ask HN: Did you delete your Facebook account in 2018?
311–320 of 408 posts
Re: Ask HN: Did you delete your Facebook account in 2018?
#312No. And it's a completely laughable idea.
1) Friends in California who keep the social group messaging on Messenger despite pleading with them to migrate so that I can at least uninstall Messenger from my phone. If you have lived in a variety of places, made friends in those places, and it's important to you to keep in touch with them, then they're on Facebook. The End.
2) Facebook properties are huge locally (Tel Aviv). Need to find housing? Facebook groups. Looking for local events? Facebook events. WhatsApp is endemic here: if you get somebody's number, the default is to contact them on WhatsApp. Want to make an appointment? Nobody needs some kind of business-focused WhatsApp - the guy just gets a cheap phone, sets up normal WhatsApp on the number, and publishes that number. Every social group imaginable is on WhatsApp - roommates, work, family, various social groups, coordinating weekly exercise groups, absolutely everything.
I visualize people who quit Facebook as the kind of person who always lived in one place, probably rural, is friendly with a handful of people from work, maybe a couple of people from school/college, and family. Sum total maybe fifty people who they've ever been close to in their life. If they're quitting Facebook, it's because Facebook didn't provide them much added value in the first place. And they either don't live in a place where WhatsApp is huge, or their social group is small enough and close enough that it's not a big deal for them to drop off the grid.
Re: Ask HN: Did you delete your Facebook account in 2018?
#313No, instead I deleted every post, picture, video and "details about me" and hid every event/milestone/activity and left one post up linking to an article about facebook's privacy breaches over the years.
Re: Ask HN: Did you delete your Facebook account in 2018?
#314After many comments I made here how leaving Facebook is unviable because of my hobby, I did.
I also deleted my Google account when getting an iPhone, and deleted my Twitter account (that was the thing I felt most — in a very positive way, I'm much less angry all the time).
Re: Ask HN: Did you delete your Facebook account in 2018?
#315Deleted mine in 2010. 2 months was all I could handle was horrible experience then. It is a cheap way to keep up superficial relationship with people. If you had to put any energy/time keeping up a relationship with these people you would probably stop talking to them all together.
Re: Ask HN: Did you delete your Facebook account in 2018?
#316Almost. I started the process—downloaded all my data, etc. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go through with it for reasons I’m embarrassed to admit: 1. One entire side of my extended family relies on it for all familial communications. I was forced to use Facebook Messenger recently to help with wedding planning, for example. These people are addicted to it an have invested everything in it—Facebook knows their entire lives…
> People post pictures of me on Facebook despite my objections. Continuously. They tag me—despite my objections. With an account, I can make it difficult for an average person to find photos of me. In the privacy settings there's a control so that you need to approve taggings of you before they go public.
You're only getting the privacy settings, if you have an account. That was his point.
Re: Ask HN: Did you delete your Facebook account in 2018?
#317I got banned from facebook this year. 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 th…
You're not actually as cool and edgy as you think you are. No one is impressed.
https://i.imgur.com/lOrM7m0.png
Things that make you go hmmmmm
Re: Ask HN: Did you delete your Facebook account in 2018?
#318No. And it's a completely laughable idea. 1) Friends in California who keep the social group messaging on Messenger despite pleading with them to migrate so that I can at least uninstall Messenger from my phone. If you have lived in a variety of places, made friends in those places, and it's important to you to keep in touch with them, then they're on Facebook. The End. 2) Facebook properties are huge locally (Tel Av…
Quitting isn't a laughable idea. I live in California (SF Bay) and got all of Facebook's companies out of my life in 2017. I had over 2,000 connections there.
Since leaving, my offline social life improved and I'm more productive, because I don't scroll through newsfeeds, waste time chatting online about things that are not related to work, or think about posting anything on Facebook at all.
Re: Ask HN: Did you delete your Facebook account in 2018?
#319Yes. I deleted my facebook account because I realized that I have not used facebook and posted any comments on it.
These days, there are more useful SNSs a lot, so I think everyone do not have to use facebook.
Re: Ask HN: Did you delete your Facebook account in 2018?
#320I simply "logged out" of Facebook in 2015 and haven't logged back on since. Why not delete? Because I still have people who message on Messenger every once in a while and the effort of asking them to switch to a different service is simply not worth the effort (for me).
Thankfully, Facebook has https://messenger.com where I can log in every 1-2 months to reply to messages I've gotten there (Which are mostly either long lost friends trying to get back in touch or the dreaded "Hey how are you? PS I need a favor" type messages)
Sure, I probably miss out on knowing whats going on in everyone's life, but I think with age (hit my mid 20s), I've leaned more towards cultivating a fixed set of "good, stable, bankable" friends instead of 1500 contacts (which was my FB when I quit), and the quality of life improvement has been massive for me. As they say, FB makes you compare your backreel with everyone's highlights and that has a massive psychological impact. I've gained back hours of time which I used to spend scrolling endlessly on the "infinite" timeline and managed to use large parts of it to do things that truly enrich me.
Fact is that FB has reached a point of "uncool" in the younger generation (I know people 6-7 years younger to me who wouldn't be caught dead on FB simply because it's not cool) and more and more people are moving off of FB, or using it more as a secondary network (again, only applicable for my network), so in many ways, I feel that leaving FB today is much easier than a couple years ago (leaving the FB network of Whatsapp/Instagram as well is a different question).