I have a facebook account, but I don't use it anymore.
I hate to see how awesome other people's life seems. I can't stop but get envious and disappointed. Yet, I kept coming back for more. I had the unhealthy compulsion to keep scrolling through the happy stuff, while feeling bad for my "mundane" living.
Agreed. I think its not about hate and envy, but the "my life is perfect" image shown to you when in actual fact everybody has their own insecurities or are going through tough family, friends and relationship (personal and professional) issues. We all know life has its ups and downs, but we pretend like the downs never exist.
The majority of the population never speak about the "bad" things happening in their lives, because it makes you vulnerable which is a feeling we refuse to show in todays world.
I just slowly trailed off using it. I wish I could say something more defined like other posters in this thread, but I just stopped.
I first just never logged in on my computer (I think I may have Firefox private browsing and Do Not Track to thank for this since I had to enter my password every time I wanted to go on rather than just hit the URL). It wasn't as interesting at work for a quick break as Hacker News or USA Today, etc.
I still had it on my phone and would look at it when I was waiting for the bus, sitting at a restaurant waiting for someone, or in the washroom. But then I started using Twitter and Instagram.
All the news that I was interested in was on Twitter, and all the pictures of friends I wanted to see were on Instagram. So all that was left on Facebook was articles form Buzzfeed and ads. One day I realized that it was just taking up space on my phone's home screen. I deleted it so I could move Slack and Snapchat up to the first screen.
I still like Facebook Messenger, and keep that app on my phone. Its good to always have <i>something</i> to get in touch with friends with (especially when traveling).
The irony is that I deleted WhatsApp so I could move Messenger up to my phone's home screen. So Facebook and Facebook-owned companies are sort of replacing themselves for me.
Sorry, just re-read the full question. To clarify, I still have an account. I do not log in anymore. I deleted the app off my phone and do not visit the site.
As a Web developer and Internet Citizen (TM), I can't wait for Facebook to complete their AOL-ification, which will surely include its eventual death spiral.
Rage-deleted my account after getting tired of being constantly presented with reminders of parts of my life that should have been moved-on-from, except Facebook decides what parts of your life you should be seeing.
If Facebook hadn't steamrolled Evite due to the sheer percentage of general population with accounts, I don't think I'd have any regrets whatsoever. People have to go out of their way to invite me to things, which has definitely had an effect on my specific social network.
Time is a finite resource. What is the most economical way to spend it? Watching The Shawshank Redemption is probably more economical than reading Facebook memes. And similarly, there are hundreds of other things you could do at any given moment with more entertainment value than Facebook.
Now, you could say, "facebook is not entertaining, but is useful". I do not find Facebook useful. If you're interested in networking benefits, there's LinkedIn and email[1]. If there is no answer you can give to the question "Why are you on Facebook?", then you should probably not use it (I'm assuming it has a very low entertainment value for you, which may or may not be true).
"because everyone else is on it".. is not a good enough answer for me. Therefore, I deleted my account completely.
Now that I've stopped using it I find that I'm in a better, more stable mood throughout the day. Not being reminded of my inferiority means I find I can concentrate better on self-improvement i.e. the things I should be doing if I want to be as successful as these people I'm so jealous of.
Social networking should be based on a decentralized system of independent nodes such that no single authority owns the whole damn thing and makes everyone obey their rules, and has everyone's personal info. (And all protocols documented, and implementations open-sourced, needless to say).
The fastest way to fan out messages efficiently between a group is through one node that is always online. I think no decentralized architecture can be more efficient compared to a centralized system.
Again, a social network only needs to know whom to send your message to and need not know about the contents of the message, If USPS opened our letters, would we argue for a decentralized architecture where we individuals ourselves drove around delivering letters in our spare time?
How were so many of us tricked into handing over so much control?
> The fastest way to fan out messages efficiently between a group is through one node that is always online.
I am curious to know what you're basing this statement on --"Fast" and "efficient" are not necessarily related.
(For instance, there seems to have been an explosion of decentralized message-queueing mechanisms available for coordinating distributed software systems. A centralized system can suffer from efficiency issues as easily as a decentralized one.)
Routing messages between peers in a decentralized system need to take into account that both senders and receivers could be online and offline at multiple times.
This means the storage location of the messages you are supposed to receive could change often, making retrieving messages a two step process, looking up the current online location and then retrieving messages. The place to lookup messages is fixed in a centralized system, hence you'll receive messages faster.
This can definitely be sped up by increasing the number of times the messages are replicated in the decentralized system and a constant shuffling of the message between nodes to ensure it is always available for the receiver when they come online, hence inefficient.
I'm trying to avoid Facebook as much as possible. Partly because it cuts into productivity. (The "rabbit hole" effect, where a few seconds of reading a blurb lead to a longer article or video...)
But I also do believe the gist of that study which claimed that people feel more depressed after using Facebook. If you're craving human contact, visiting Facebook is a temporary distraction at best -- and the second you leave, you're no better off than you were before. In fact you probably feel worse, because now that temporary distraction is also suddenly gone....
Deleted permanently. It isn't interesting anymore, unless you enjoy only seeing posts that involve mundane bs mixed with advertising. Sad how it went from being an exclusive university friends only joke to a "serious enough to apply for employment with" joke of a site that everybody's grandmother uses regularly.
I shut down my facebook account about two years ago.
I did it because I can't figure out why I should spend time reading something that no one cares whether I read or not.
Since I left, I noticed something. I think the word 'poser' has been overused and turned into a bizarre cliche, but surely there is a lot of posturing on facebook. I think the I-know-you-knows are a lot of the appeal, and that element is certainly lost with IM/Email. Personal tastes vary, and spending a lot of time on cheap social signals seems to be a pretty human passtime, but I just don't enjoy it.
I just don't like it. It's a big boring time sink. My friends who I actually care about what they have going on in their lives, I just talk to them the people did "back in the old days". I do however still have a Facebook account so my friends can tag me in whatever thing they have going on, but I don't install the app on my phone, nor do I log into the website, and I have everything setup to not send me any type of notifications
After being an user from 2007 I've deleted my account in February 2013, then re-registered in October 2013. It doesn't contain any private data now, only close circle of friends and acquaintances and is primarily used as a contact holder/event responder.
It might be a generational thing, maturity or otherwise, but IMHO Facebook (and other social networks) has impacted our lives in unhealthy ways, more then being useful. Specially since businesses and everyone came on it (parents, relatives). This switched it from a cool place to hangout to some serious business.
I created an account back in 2005. It started out being a great way to re-connect with friends that I had lost track of and then to keep in touch. I deleted my account two years later for the following reasons.
1. I had come to believe FB couldn't be trusted with my data.
2. The more friends I gained the worse the experience became. It went from people showing their vacation photos, which I was ok with, to a stream of meaningless nonsense that I didn't want to see. I.e Yeah, OK, you had a coke at lunch, but should I really care?
3. It became an unpleasant chore having to keep on top of even the valid activity.
It's worth noting that in the last year of use I just put a status up declaring that I no longer actively used Facebook so please contact via email instead, but the distrust of Facebook grew to a point where I ultimately decided to delete my account.
I'll never go back, and I hear they're full of ads now.
I deactivated my account. It's still around, of course, and I can log in again when I want. But I didn't want the distraction anymore. I found that checking the feed on my phone became an automatic habit for no observable benefit. I don't mind so much the whole privacy thing, because I don't think Facebook is that evil. Your information is public somewhere, and you're being tracked by someone, whether you like it or not. And this happens outside of the internet -- it's how business works. So it's not a big deal to me.
The usefulness of Facebook is a big deal though. And it's just not useful anymore. My friend group tends to be pretty selective, and is mostly made up of people I know and interact with in real life. So I do that instead.
I used to be a heavy facebook user. Now I log in once a week for messages.
Privacy was not the major contributing factor of me stopping the usage of facebook, but how "nosy" I felt in other peoples lives when I don't even talk to them. The more I used facebook the more alone I felt.
Another issue was the cluttered feel to it. The addition of a twitter clone feed made everything feel like an "all-in-one" solution.
After going on a month long without Facebook, whenever I met my colleages, I would have a lot more to say to them and genuinely ask questions about whats going on in their lives. I default alot less to my phone after I meet with friends.
I only go on for college club/team notifications, other than that, I am off it completely.
My news feed is polluted with ads and garbage news that have been shared by people I hardly know. I've added so many 'friends' that are hardly acquaintances now, and I don't feel like deleting them, because my real friends hardly use Facebook either so its not worth it.
An additional annoyance is notifications for things that I don't care about: invites to facebook games (why are they even a thing?), notification of friends activity, and updates from pages I liked years ago. Its just become more of a hassle.
I stopped using it when I realized that 99% of what my "friends" were posting was total shit. The 1% interesting stuff I can get with a phone call or stuff like that.
I still have my account though, I just don't use it.
Everything has it's time. Facebook had a nice run but something will inevitably replace it. Social beings will constantly be craving what's next. Exclusivity amongst college students was what ignited the fire, but younger generations are gravitating away from this platform day by day because it's too complex.
P.S. - people are lazy, and FB makes people work. It's cluttered and doesn't have a core value anymore that Twitter or Instagram or SnapChat can't already deliver. Best bet is to keep the acquisitions going to eliminate competition.
I haven't deleted my account, I've just stopped using it. I log in and check it out every month or two, but never stay for very long.
I don't use it because I don't find it very interesting. If I care what's going on with someone, I usually keep in touch via other means. And even for those people, I don't find their day-to-day posts very interesting.
Also, when there is something I need to know posted on Facebook that I haven't heard about via other means, my wife usually fills me in.
Reading my wall posts became a list of people essentially saying "my life is awesome and yours isn't, here's why", which was explained by photos, videos, and wall posts.
One of the girls in my social circle at the time I had an account made herself a "public figure", I'm not sure what the criteria is for that on Facebook, but her offline life is anything but that of a celebrity/public figure. The level of people "faking it" just gets annoying.
Also, I don't want to participate in their facial recognition database. I find this to be the worst in terms of the privacy I give up because I can be tagged in a picture without ever posting a thing. Anonymity goes away once anyone can identify anyone else through a simple picture. Then they can see who you work for, where you live, your family life, your sexual orientation, political beliefs, and so on. The downward spiral goes on from there.
I still have an account, but I don't really use it anymore. Facebook is just not very fun anymore. It's busy, sort of confusing and I never seem to get things written on my wall, or see what people are up to right now. I see popular stuff that is non-chronological, and I'm a little fuzzy on whether walls are a thing anymore
For every interesting announcement from a friend, I had to wade through weeks of "What NATO country are you most like?" results, past their expiry memes, political grandstanding, videos of puppies and people falling over, and endless pictures of food. There's just no compelling use-case I can see.
I deleted my facebook account about a year ago. I got so sick of seeing all the whining, political arguing, hoax type posts, etc... and if I blocked all of the people that did that stuff, I wouldn't have anyone left on there to follow. I don't miss it at all.
Too many buzzfeed links from people who I have nothing in common with. It takes a lot of effort to scroll through pictures of people you hardly knew back in college. Being socially aloof does not help either ;)
I pretty much only use it for messaging and the occasional event registration. Mostly because I find my friends' updates uninteresting. Would much rather browse strangers lives on IG or my own site.
The problem not only resides on Facebook but to me all mainstream networks are selling out to the "ad revenue model". I may be speaking for myself but let's be honest the internet is wayyyy outdated. Most people can agree that after surfing CNN TMZ stopping by Mashable and Twitter the day is pretty much done with an occasional rinse and repeat. Where is the fun and innovation that the internet first brought to us in the early 90s.
I hate to see how awesome other people's life seems. I can't stop but get envious and disappointed. Yet, I kept coming back for more. I had the unhealthy compulsion to keep scrolling through the happy stuff, while feeling bad for my "mundane" living.
I stopped using facebook. I feel much better.