Why I left Facebook

[markschuldenfrei]

As 2018 starts to draw to a close, I started to take stock of my personal life and year. It was not the worst year of my life, but it was also far from the best.

As I navel-gazed, I realized that I had spent an awful lot of time on Facebook (or so it seemed). And I asked myself "was what I got out of it worth the time I put in?"

Overall, the answer was "no". Because Facebook promises one thing, and delivers another entirely different experience.

I went on Facebook to keep in touch with friends - to share, as Facebook calls it. Those were the good parts of what I did and saw.

But Facebook "curates" too much, and advertises too much. It's goal is engagement, and not pleasure. It creates and encourages conflict and outrage, not information and community.

It was Dickensian - the best of times and the worst of times.

I'm familiar with the psychological concept of "intermittent reinforcement", which is a type of behavior reinforcement which is most successful at encouraging certain behaviors. Once I realized that the "good parts" were being made deliberately rare and that doing so served Facebook's needs more than mine, I made a decision.

So - while this is not the first time I've "quit" Facebook, I hope it is the last. Facebook just doesn't make me happy.

Time to try other things.

(FYI, I'll be posting the same content here and on MeWe- let's see if a community forms in either place.)

Comments

[dsrtao]

Among the problems: people frequently belong to several communities, and they don't act the same in all of them. But FB really wants to squish all those things together.

For example: I participate in various technical mailing lists. On one, I'm the sole moderator. In several, I'd like to think that I'm a valued, possibly even respected, contributor. And in others, I'm a lurker or just one step above.

None of those are my social groups, though. Nor are they my family, or my close friends.

I prefer to separate all of those.

[markschuldenfrei]

That discusses a different complaint that I have about Facebook, related both to social flattening and how it encourages the ill-behaved.

I agree with you, but that's not why *I* am leaving, per se.

[sichling]

I try to handle the mixture of groups by having different lists of friends that I post to. A few years ago, I got a large influx of friends from professional settings - which is fine and a good way of staying in touch - but what I want to share there is different.

I do miss the longer discussions of Livejournal and am also giving Dreamwidth another try.

[osewalrus]

Let me know how MeWe works out.

[markschuldenfrei]

Will do.

[jducoeur]

Yep. I'm still using Facebook the way I always have done -- but that specifically does *not* mean paying much attention to my feed. I warn people that, if you post to FB, there's only a 5% chance that I'll notice it, because I don't respect FB's way of doing things.

(I do use FB heavily for *groups* still. But that's solely because it's almost the only game in town. Any groups that move to better systems I would more than happily follow there.)

I currently use Medium for my professional blog, DW for anything else *significant*, and FB for random links. That seems like a decent balance, so far.

I joined MeWe a while back (under my usual handle), when the G+ exodus brought it to my attention; so far I haven't done much there, but I'd be entirely happy for it to take over FB's niche in my life. (I'm trying to remember to cross-post the link stuff there as well as FB.)

[cvirtue]

For me, using FB Purity was enough to reduce FB's attempts to influence my experience, but I can see that it might be insufficient, depending.

Justin's method of ignoring the feed is also something I do, by having a list of about a dozen people that I read, and when I use that list, I don't see ads, either.