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

I also did this, except I went through and mostly manually deleted everything first. It took weeks, I'm not kidding. There's a page where you can batch delete most posts, but only 50 at a time, and it doesn't always work because the calls take so long that they quite often time out. Most anything else is snappy, certainly posting stuff is, but deleting things can take several seconds per post. I ended up hacking together a script I could run on my activity log to delete most things all at once – Facebook doesn't seem to rate limit this and it didn't trigger any lockouts or captcha like forms. Some things couldn't be deleted by the script, so I just manually tried deleting them. Some things stuck around no matter what, they just couldn't be deleted and would always generate an error. I think these were songs I played on Spotify about a gazillion years ago.

I wouldn't recommend anyone do this. Use whatever automation tools you can find. One thing that was interesting though is that it made me review my "Facebook life" and boy was this depressing. It was more of a digital graveyard of past relationships and memories best left forgotten, than anything else. I deleted all my social media accounts except HN and LinkedIn (because believe it or not, I actually get some good offers there, despite me never having posted anything) the same week, sometime in October I think. It's great, I've read books, took up learning to play the piano and guitar, and just generally feel less anxious about life.

The only downside so far is that mom Is really pissed that she can't spy on my life anymore, and have to call me. Actually nevermind, that too is probably an upside.

(I also deleted everything Google. Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.)

No. I unfollowed everyone and everything on Facebook, and whenever I add someone new, I unfollow them immediately too. So my news feed is perpetually empty. This makes Facebook something that reminds me of people's birthdays, and let's me keep in touch via Messenger, which is all that I need.

Yes.

Nope, I did better...I alienated, anonymized, and corrupted my data stream such that I am no longer a reliable data point. And I recommend all to do the same. Poisoned Lake Theory for the advertisers that prop them up while still able to use the assets.

I didn’t delete my Facebook account and probably won’t.

I deleted the app from my phone and then logged out of all browsers few months after that (i dont know my FB password as it’s stored in my pwd manager so it makes checking FB tad harder). I feel I have a lot more time for other stuff and more focus at work especially.

The only reason why I wont delete my account is that I live abroad and this is the easiest way to stay in touch with family/close friends, especially my non-tech saavy mother. So Im only using Messenger.

I find it more important to learn how to “free myself” from the phone addiction than just deleting a FB account and this is what Ive been working on recently.