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Do you regret deleting FB or IG or any social media?

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31–40 of 46 posts

Re: Do you regret deleting FB or IG or any social media?

#31
Deleted FB well over a decade ago, probably more like 15 years.

Don't regret it at all.

I was at a family gathering today with family I don't see terribly often (some I haven't seen in 20+ years) and got introduced a few times as "that's adam, the one without the facebook account" The net effect of it was that I got to interact and tell people about what was going on in my life and learn about what was going on in theirs, they hadn't already heard it all from Facebook.

The dog does have an instagram account though. Can't get him to delete it.

https://www.instagram.com/stupendousoliver/

Re: Do you regret deleting FB or IG or any social media?

#35
I killed FB in 2019 and Twitter in 2020.

No regrets, I am a bit out of sync with the mainstream, but when the mainstream is all about the "outrage of the day", it might actually be a net positive.

When it comes to social contacts, my life has reverted to the 1990s standard: if you don't meet somebody in meatspace, you slowly forget about that person existing. Not totally, but "out of sight, out of mind" works.

Re: Do you regret deleting FB or IG or any social media?

#36
I deleted my FB account about 10 years ago. At the time all contacts were family/friends. Fast forward to today and I only see Facebook as a place for the loonies of this world.I've tried to browse it a bit a couple of months ago using my wife's account. The whole spectrum of conspiracy theorists and useful idiots on any subject. Granted, not everyone's like that, but the crowd sentiment is huge. I also got very annoyed that my daughter's nursery uses FB group to discuss day to day stuff & had one software product where the whole support community was based on Facebook. All in all I feel I made a good decision to quit it.

Re: Do you regret deleting FB or IG or any social media?

#37
I still have it but rarely login and have unfollowed most “friends”. I don’t belong to any groups or anything, so it’s pretty boring. The main issue is the same messenger. Occasionally I get a message which I only see after a month or two, because I can’t seem to appear as “I don’t use this” mode. My wife asks me to keep the account so that a) her married status goes somewhere b) in case she needs to share something. I rarely see any posts to be fair and she will keep me updated on any relevant things happening. I don’t need to check for myself. I have a personal feed curator ;)

Had a few instagram accounts and deleted them all now as it just got boring after a while and nothing much of value. I had an account to enter competitions but with each one being “tag 4 friends” it was difficult as I generally just followed companies or people I didn’t feel like I could tag.

Had a twitter for a while but it became too much work trying to keep up with all the posts and eventually also tired of the same old content.

I use WhatsApp because of the network effect, as well as signal for another group of friends.

Never quite got mastodon or others of that ilk either as no one I know or wanted to follow is on those.

LinkedIn also had zero value and I ended up getting “friend requests” from my mum who I know doesn’t have an account. The dark patterns like this were enough for me to shut the door on that too.

People always complain why they can’t contact me on Facebook etc. I say you can call me, email me, WhatsApp, signal, SMS, or write me a letter. That should suffice. Really.

Re: Do you regret deleting FB or IG or any social media?

#38
post #15

I removed FB after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out. I still had WhatsApp messenger for a few years since I have a very active high school friends group on it. When WhatsApp started changing their privacy policies I just removed WhatsApp as well. We also have a Signal group. My friends and colleagues know how to reach me for anything important, so I don't think I have missed out on anything. Google is the ne…

Switching from Chrome to Brave was one of the easiest things I've done.

Yes, I read about Brave quite a bit. Somehow, I haven't been brave enough to switch to Brave yet due to lurking suspicion about their browser native crypto integrations.

Some prior HN discussions on Brave were not confidence inspiring.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19129086

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32110993

Re: Do you regret deleting FB or IG or any social media?

#39

A bit of a deviation from the original question but I regret hard deleting my MySpace profile only because of all the pictures lost and it’d be a cool time capsule. Because of that I maintain fb/ig but haven’t signed onto either in years - it’d be nice to delete them though

Jdownloader2 or some similar app, there's got to be a way to establish a local copy easier. I also use linkclump (extension) for copying URLs en-masse from the web. JD2 will scrape page for content.

Unfortunately it’s easier for me to do nothing with the accounts rather than backup the data and delete them :/

Re: Do you regret deleting FB or IG or any social media?

#40

4 August 2019. India government fucked me and my land of 8 million, banned internet for 8 months and started persecuting anyone "misusing social media " which is doublespeak for criticizing the government. I haven't logged in to my Facebook since because I will write some nasty stuff and I do not want Facebook to rat me out. I do it on reddit or hn

Jesus christ man, I can't imagine how fucked that situation must be. Understandable why so many people there want to abolish the state.

>Understandable why so many people there want to abolish the state.

WTF does that mean?

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