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I deactivated my Facebook account several months ago, and it's been about 90% great, 10% frustrating. It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, les

I deactivated my Facebook account several months ago, and it's been about 90% great, 10% frustrating. It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, less compulsion to endlessly scroll your life away, no notification interruptions). The frustrations are real, though. Primarily it's around events and photos. There are some communities I participate in that regularly organize events through Facebook, and now I don't really get invited to those anymore. It's also harder to organize events where you casually invite people you don't know as well. It's also occasionally annoying not being able to dig up a certain photo you wanted for reference. Even if you have a copy of the photo somewhere, if you don't have it hosted online then you can't really bring it up to show it to someone. Still, frustrations aside, it's 90% great, and I recommend everyone try it for themselves.

pcsanwald 9y ago
this has been my experience almost exactly. It's not my nature to be part of an online community where I don't actively participate, so the idea of having a facebook account which I "never check" wasn't appealing to me at all. And while my reasoning was less idealistic than Gruber's, I think he makes a bunch of great points and I very much agree with the spirit of his post.
tw334 9y ago
I deleted the main FB app from my phone and use the Events app which works really well as a standalone product. I also use Google photos, which has all of my photos, not just the ones I've uploaded to Facebook. Plus the search is great. Maybe these suggestions could help your problem and clear that 10%.
manyoso 9y ago
Deleted my facebook account in January. For me it is 100% great and do not miss it even a little.
- srge 9y ago
  Deleted my account 2 years ago along with Twitter's and Instagram's. It's just a better life for me now. Less stress, less anger.
  - iamatworknow 9y ago
    Facebook and Twitter I get, but you were being angered and stressed by Instagram? It's the only social media I actively use precisely because it's not stressful or rage inducing. I'm into photography so it gives me an outlet that way (even though taking a picture with a real camera, editing it on a computer, then sending it to my phone to post on Instagram is a bit of a pain), and the annoying content from other people is very rare. I will say, however that they've stepped up their ad insertion and display algorithm a bit recently, in a bad way, which is unfortunate. But I certainly see much less of the spammy ideological content that I do on Facebook and Twitter.
    - mysterydip 9y ago
      "Hey all, look at this amazing new thing I just got (for free from the company that sponsors me that I don't disclose)!" Maybe it's the same on the rest, but it seems there's a larger portion of it on Instagram.
      - iamatworknow 9y ago
        Maybe I'm unique in my usage of Instagram but I only follow people I know in real life or other photographers, amateur or otherwise, and they typically aren't posting sponsored content. I've only ever seen one person post sponsored content out of hundreds I follow, and it was pretty easy to unfollow them.
        mysterydip 9y ago
        That's likely the difference. My wife follows people with similar interests, rather than only people she knows, so undoubtedly sees more of it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
tobyjsullivan 9y ago
I've enjoyed roughly the same experience but without the downsides. As far as events go, the neckbeard in me hasn't actually minded. I still get invited to "high quality" events (things my real-life friends are going to) and haven't really missed the lower quality events. Photos I just conveniently had solved by having all my photos on Google Photos anyways (I stopped trusting offline storage long ago). I think my Facebook account is reactivated at the moment (due to logging in to search for something) but I disabled notification when I'd originally left and haven't looked back. Life's easier (and way more productive) without the Book. Interestingly, I still find a lot of value in Messenger. But they've split concerns so you can use that without reactivating your FB account.
- Tossrock 9y ago
  Putting my old photos on Google Photos is a good idea and I think I'll do that - thanks. Although it doesn't fully solve the issue of photos that had me tagged but were uploaded by someone else, which FB doesn't give you a copy of when you download your data (afaik). Funnily enough, I found Messenger to be the worst of all their offerings. The lack of searchable history, the terrible (terrible) scroll-back, the default always-on-screen notification bubble, the way they forced the standalone app down users' throats by disabling messages in both the FB app and the mobile web version, all really turned me off to it.
  - dyarosla 9y ago
    Messenger has searchable history. It's not great and it's pretty hidden, but it's there.
  - giobox 9y ago
    A long time ago I used to setup IFTTT to automatically backup Facebook photos with me tagged to a Dropbox folder. This included photos posted by others with me tagged. I've long since abandoned Facebook, but I wouldn't be surprised if a similar IFTTT feature exists to export tagged photos into Google Photos. If I recall this only works for 'new' photos posted that you are tagged in, it doesn't appear to pull images from before you enabled the IFTTT service. At any rate, this lets you see photos you are tagged in without ever having to actually use your Facebook account.
simlevesque 9y ago
About the fact that you miss events, I found the following website really useful: http://carpediem.cd/ http://carpediem.cd/ (no https access) They scrape Facebook events, allowing you to browse them without a Facebook account. It's not perfect but it's better than nothing.
- 0xffff2 9y ago
  Virtually all of the Facebook events I care about are private events among friends. Don't see how this site is useful for those.
drderidder 9y ago
I started thinking of FB more as a channel to publish notifications of content I keep on other sites, like blog entries, Flickr photos, etc. Once I started thinking of it as more of a pub/sub layer for the content I manage externally, I felt better about staying on it.
champagnepapi 9y ago
I deleted my Facebook account in 2011 as I was graduating high school. I do not miss it one bit, and I am glad I do not have an account. Although, I have missed out on social events. However, if someone is not going to go out of there way to invite me because I don't have a FB, I probably don't want to be a going anyways.
gthtjtkt 9y ago
Facebook was great in the early years. No ads, no political spam, no viral garbage, no pictures of what your friend ate for dinner, no psychologically manipulative algorithms. Just people talking to their friends and posting pictures of themselves hanging out. If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today.
- grenoire 9y ago
  You cannot exactly enforce the nice-ities though. You would have to structure the community around using your service like that, but that still can be broken down. Manipulative algorithms can be taken out though, I suppose.
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  Excluding the "ads", how would you prevent users from posting "political spam", "viral garbage", and "pictures of what your friend ate for dinner"?
  - ksenzee 9y ago
    You'd get most of the way there by making it possible not to see things your friends have shared.
  - ed312 9y ago
    You'd only let people in with a .edu email and marketing as a hookup app
    - na85 9y ago
      .edu is only used in the United States.
  - guelo 9y ago
    Part of the Facebook problem is that they mostly took control of the feed away from users. They now surface the more "engaging" posts at the top and more frequently. This leads to the overemphasis of viral images and videos. If you post a simple personal status message without an image and Facebook's sentiment analysis considers it to be non-engaging many of your friends won't even see it as Facebook will favor marketing spam over your actual personal post. Users also become trained over time by the number of likes they receive to tailor their posts to conform to Facebook's whims.
steveadoo 9y ago
Can't you just have Facebook and only use it for the events/photos? I've got a Facebook but never use it for posting/looking at other people's posts. Every now and then I'll get an invitation to an event which is really all I use it for.
- res0nat0r 9y ago
  I've cut out Facebook without 99% of the hand wringing here. I just stop browsing the site. If someone wants to talk to me I get a popup on my Messenger app on my phone, and if I get an event invite it shows up there too. Problem solved.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Indeed. You can have a Facebook account and just... Not use it unless you need it for something. All the benefits of the 'I deleted Facebook' crowd without the downsides.
    - ikeyany 9y ago
      That requires self control and a resilience to peer pressure, things we are encouraged to devalue for the sake of "followers".
      - wutbrodo 9y ago
        FWIW, I've used Facebook for I think 11 years now and I've never once seen anyone refer to or even remotely care about friend count.
        ikeyany 9y ago
        It's not necessarily the number of followers people obsess over, it's their validation.
    - FabHK 9y ago
      Facebook will still learn which websites you visit (provided they have the "like" widget) and what articles you read on the NYT, unless you use a good tracking blocker. So, that's one downside, I think.
matwood 9y ago
I'm not sure why it has to be deactivated though. I've had a FB account for a long time and maybe check it once every few days if that. My main use case is to upload shared photos. I would prefer everyone use Google Photos, but that hasn't happened yet.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Why would you want everyone to just move from one walled garden to another?
- pcsanwald 9y ago
  for whatever reason, I have a mental hang up about just checking once every few days or something. I'm incapable ofjust ignoring communications that I get. De-activating is much, much simpler for me.
donatj 9y ago
There's the half way option of having a Facebook and only using it for invites/events, which is what I do for the most part.
zerosome 9y ago
I have found a nice middle ground by only checking it every week or so via a web browser and installing the News Feed Eradicator Chrome extension.
jtwebman 9y ago
I just removed the app from my phone. That way I can still access stuff my PC and get invites and see photos but I do it far less often. Saves lots of time but still allowing me to connect with others or see photos.
linkmotif 9y ago
Been 4-5 years without Facebook. Life for me has definitely been better than without. Same goes with Instagram. Something toxic about both of these platforms.
usegolang 9y ago
What you miss are pretty much the only things I do on FB anymore. I'm just not sure why you had to deactivate to make that happen. I guess it has never sucked me in and wasted my day because I just don't find browsing FB very interesting.
Yhippa 9y ago
I haven't deactivated my Facebook but I've used it much less over the past few years. Same for Instagram. I've actually moved back to MMS, WhatsApp, and email to communicate with people I care about the most. I end up using Google Photos to host and quickly share individual and groups of photos. It's not perfect but does the trick for the most part.
wutbrodo 9y ago
> It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, less compulsion to endlessly scroll your life away, no notification interruptions). The frustrations are real, though. Primarily it's around events and photos. I was almost done with college when FB suddenly became a cross-generational phenomenon and started being about more than photo sharing and event planning; I still fondly remember those days. The one advantage I would add is the rare occasion when someone needs to get in touch with me easily: I've had extended family who lives on the other side of the world get in touch with me through FB on short notice when they were visiting my city. I could definitely imagine that some of these cases wouldn't have happened without Facebook, since they would be required to 1) know that I happened to live in this city and 2) go through probably three separate people across different continents to get my phone number. This is infinitely harder than searching their FB friends for my city and going "oh dang! wutbrodo lives there now? I haven't seen him since we were kids, I should reach out!". That being said, all of the 90% downsides of keeping Facebook are, to some extent, within your control. I won't pretend that I'm congenitally immune to them, but all it took was a little discipline and a little time and it really wasn't that difficult to avoid the timesuck/endless scrolling/notification issues. I've never really been able to relate to the idea of completely deactivating Facebook and losing the 10% benefits, with the possible exception of the few people who have a completely insurmountable psychological compulsion to use Facebook. This is especially true because of all of the levels of FB exposure you can have without going all-or-nothing: Chrome extensions to remove the newsfeed, disabling notifications on your phone, only visiting FB on the web and not the app, etc.
madeofpalk 9y ago
> It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, less compulsion to endlessly scroll your life away, no notification interruptions). You're not able to exercise self control? I have Facebook, but I never use it apart from the events and Messenger for chatting with certain friends.
- maksimum 9y ago
  > You're not able to exercise self control? Ability to exercise self-control most likely varies significantly among people. It's not like the ability to breath. Also Facebook is explicitly designed to "engage" people, meaning that a piece of information shared on Facebook is going to engage a larger fraction of people than that same piece of information in ... a newspaper (for example). Engagement/attention hacking is a different issue than the walled-garden issue for the most part though.
inostia 9y ago
I'm a part of the local Bay Area music scene and Facebook events has basically become the standard for posting about shows. Without a Facebook I just don't hear about them. I'm considering making a dummy account with a few friends just for the purpose of finding out about events. Side note, does anyone know of a service that allows you to track FB events without having to be in the Facebook app? Not sure if there's an API for that.
- snug 9y ago
  Posted about this above, but check out the app "Events for facebook"
- transpy 9y ago
  I feel you. Facebook virtually grants a certificate of existence. It's almost unimaginable why someone that wants to play music wouldn't have a facebook presence. (Don't know if that last sentence was correct, non native here). My point is the following: I was one day on the street and saw a flyer glued onto a wall, it looked kinda funky and hand-drawn, interesting; some DJ's were going to throw a party and spin salsa, funk, latin jazz, cumbia... And I didn't recognize any of the names or the venues, I was mildly shocked because I believed I knew the local scene pretty well. Almost always I can contextualize a music genre/scene, and see their connections and collaborations. But this random flyer I came across was so obscure! No relations, no known names, and the mix of styles and originality was very interesting! For the first time in many years I felt again what is like to find an underground scene, which I like a lot (like when dancing drum&bass in a basement in Berlin or listening to rap in Mexico). This is a magic that is sometimes lost in the believed omniscence and omnipresence of online/facebook. I bet people soon will want to have those kind of experience, and the new thing will be to find scenes that people don't even know about online.
  - inostia 9y ago
    I miss the old message board days where everything was really DIY and local, just a table with location and bands. People would post to some homegrown site maintained by a devoted local fan. Also miss the days of fliers! Now I have to scroll through ads and a bunch of irrelevant "local events for you" just to find what I'm looking for.
tempestn 9y ago
What's the downside to keeping the account but just not posting to it or checking your news feed? That's roughly what I do, and so can still use it for events and such. I also have it set to email me if my wife or my mom posts a picture. (My mom posts about once a month, and it's more often than not a picture of one of my kids... ;) ) Anyone else I care about (and only the people I really care about) I have on Instagram, which I check every day. But my Facebook feed I view approximately never.
snug 9y ago
I had the same problem, but I found out there is an app "Events for facebook," It means less endless scrolling for me. And then I use the messenger app to communicate with some friends. So far it's been about a week, and it's been 90% great, and 10% meh. I just logged out of facebook on all of my devices and don't save the password, so it at least makes me think before putting in my password. The meh part is the services I use "login with facebook" on, but it's not that big of a deal.
andersonmvd 9y ago
I wonder why people are so extremist. Just like 'mobile phones are the new cigarette' you don't need to throw them out. You just need to know where to draw the line.
weq 9y ago
If u can stop using facebook when u deactivate it, cant u just not deactivate it, and use it for the 10% to stop ur frustration? I treat facebook like i treat my phone. Its a tool. Not a way of life. Been on the internet since '95, back when i was at school i was the only one who would spend hours on the computer, they called us nerds. Now its the opposite, i use the computer at work everyday, and when im home, i stay away from it, my phone, tv, as much as possible and call everyone else geeks who need to stop obsessing over there hands (cause they dont know about computers, they just use them)
- 659087 9y ago
  Did a wormhole temporarily merge HN with yahoo answers?
dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
Just install Todobook (or even News Feed Eradicator) and you'll be fine. I check my FB usage using TimeYourWeb and it fell down by 90% since then.
nvarsj 9y ago
I have an account for a long time now, because some groups, people and activities require it. But I've disabled notifications for a long time, and rarely log in except to check on events. I don't see a reason to deactivate it complete. I have to say though, FB tries really hard to reactivate your notifications. It's especially annoying when it hooks into your mobile Chrome browser notifications (took me a while to figure that out!). And the fact it can't be uninstalled on Samsung devices - at least you don't have to login.
anigbrowl 9y ago
A lot depends on the geographic distribution of your friend network. Many of my closest friends live on the other side of the country. Not to mention that I got to know them through FB. I'm really not that worried about it any more. FB is gufe, but so was AOL. It will in turn be disrupted by a future innovation.
jrcplus 9y ago
I kept my Facebook account but deleted all my friends and most of my personal content (and locked down the privacy settings to prevent people from finding me). This lets me access content on Facebook without using it as a social network. I did this years ago and I have no regrets.

pcsanwald 9y ago

this has been my experience almost exactly. It's not my nature to be part of an online community where I don't actively participate, so the idea of having a facebook account which I "never check" wasn't appealing to me at all. And while my reasoning was less idealistic than Gruber's, I think he makes a bunch of great points and I very much agree with the spirit of his post.

tw334 9y ago

I deleted the main FB app from my phone and use the Events app which works really well as a standalone product. I also use Google photos, which has all of my photos, not just the ones I've uploaded to Facebook. Plus the search is great. Maybe these suggestions could help your problem and clear that 10%.

manyoso 9y ago

Deleted my facebook account in January. For me it is 100% great and do not miss it even a little.

srge 9y ago
Deleted my account 2 years ago along with Twitter's and Instagram's. It's just a better life for me now. Less stress, less anger.
- iamatworknow 9y ago
  Facebook and Twitter I get, but you were being angered and stressed by Instagram? It's the only social media I actively use precisely because it's not stressful or rage inducing. I'm into photography so it gives me an outlet that way (even though taking a picture with a real camera, editing it on a computer, then sending it to my phone to post on Instagram is a bit of a pain), and the annoying content from other people is very rare. I will say, however that they've stepped up their ad insertion and display algorithm a bit recently, in a bad way, which is unfortunate. But I certainly see much less of the spammy ideological content that I do on Facebook and Twitter.
  - mysterydip 9y ago
    "Hey all, look at this amazing new thing I just got (for free from the company that sponsors me that I don't disclose)!" Maybe it's the same on the rest, but it seems there's a larger portion of it on Instagram.
    - iamatworknow 9y ago
      Maybe I'm unique in my usage of Instagram but I only follow people I know in real life or other photographers, amateur or otherwise, and they typically aren't posting sponsored content. I've only ever seen one person post sponsored content out of hundreds I follow, and it was pretty easy to unfollow them.
      - mysterydip 9y ago
        That's likely the difference. My wife follows people with similar interests, rather than only people she knows, so undoubtedly sees more of it.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

tobyjsullivan 9y ago

I've enjoyed roughly the same experience but without the downsides. As far as events go, the neckbeard in me hasn't actually minded. I still get invited to "high quality" events (things my real-life friends are going to) and haven't really missed the lower quality events. Photos I just conveniently had solved by having all my photos on Google Photos anyways (I stopped trusting offline storage long ago). I think my Facebook account is reactivated at the moment (due to logging in to search for something) but I disabled notification when I'd originally left and haven't looked back. Life's easier (and way more productive) without the Book. Interestingly, I still find a lot of value in Messenger. But they've split concerns so you can use that without reactivating your FB account.

Tossrock 9y ago
Putting my old photos on Google Photos is a good idea and I think I'll do that - thanks. Although it doesn't fully solve the issue of photos that had me tagged but were uploaded by someone else, which FB doesn't give you a copy of when you download your data (afaik). Funnily enough, I found Messenger to be the worst of all their offerings. The lack of searchable history, the terrible (terrible) scroll-back, the default always-on-screen notification bubble, the way they forced the standalone app down users' throats by disabling messages in both the FB app and the mobile web version, all really turned me off to it.
- dyarosla 9y ago
  Messenger has searchable history. It's not great and it's pretty hidden, but it's there.
- giobox 9y ago
  A long time ago I used to setup IFTTT to automatically backup Facebook photos with me tagged to a Dropbox folder. This included photos posted by others with me tagged. I've long since abandoned Facebook, but I wouldn't be surprised if a similar IFTTT feature exists to export tagged photos into Google Photos. If I recall this only works for 'new' photos posted that you are tagged in, it doesn't appear to pull images from before you enabled the IFTTT service. At any rate, this lets you see photos you are tagged in without ever having to actually use your Facebook account.

simlevesque 9y ago

About the fact that you miss events, I found the following website really useful: http://carpediem.cd/ http://carpediem.cd/ (no https access) They scrape Facebook events, allowing you to browse them without a Facebook account. It's not perfect but it's better than nothing.

0xffff2 9y ago
Virtually all of the Facebook events I care about are private events among friends. Don't see how this site is useful for those.

drderidder 9y ago

I started thinking of FB more as a channel to publish notifications of content I keep on other sites, like blog entries, Flickr photos, etc. Once I started thinking of it as more of a pub/sub layer for the content I manage externally, I felt better about staying on it.

champagnepapi 9y ago

I deleted my Facebook account in 2011 as I was graduating high school. I do not miss it one bit, and I am glad I do not have an account. Although, I have missed out on social events. However, if someone is not going to go out of there way to invite me because I don't have a FB, I probably don't want to be a going anyways.

gthtjtkt 9y ago

Facebook was great in the early years. No ads, no political spam, no viral garbage, no pictures of what your friend ate for dinner, no psychologically manipulative algorithms. Just people talking to their friends and posting pictures of themselves hanging out. If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today.

grenoire 9y ago
You cannot exactly enforce the nice-ities though. You would have to structure the community around using your service like that, but that still can be broken down. Manipulative algorithms can be taken out though, I suppose.
aeorgnoieang 9y ago
Excluding the "ads", how would you prevent users from posting "political spam", "viral garbage", and "pictures of what your friend ate for dinner"?
- ksenzee 9y ago
  You'd get most of the way there by making it possible not to see things your friends have shared.
- ed312 9y ago
  You'd only let people in with a .edu email and marketing as a hookup app
  - na85 9y ago
    .edu is only used in the United States.
- guelo 9y ago
  Part of the Facebook problem is that they mostly took control of the feed away from users. They now surface the more "engaging" posts at the top and more frequently. This leads to the overemphasis of viral images and videos. If you post a simple personal status message without an image and Facebook's sentiment analysis considers it to be non-engaging many of your friends won't even see it as Facebook will favor marketing spam over your actual personal post. Users also become trained over time by the number of likes they receive to tailor their posts to conform to Facebook's whims.

steveadoo 9y ago

Can't you just have Facebook and only use it for the events/photos? I've got a Facebook but never use it for posting/looking at other people's posts. Every now and then I'll get an invitation to an event which is really all I use it for.

res0nat0r 9y ago
I've cut out Facebook without 99% of the hand wringing here. I just stop browsing the site. If someone wants to talk to me I get a popup on my Messenger app on my phone, and if I get an event invite it shows up there too. Problem solved.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Indeed. You can have a Facebook account and just... Not use it unless you need it for something. All the benefits of the 'I deleted Facebook' crowd without the downsides.
  - ikeyany 9y ago
    That requires self control and a resilience to peer pressure, things we are encouraged to devalue for the sake of "followers".
    - wutbrodo 9y ago
      FWIW, I've used Facebook for I think 11 years now and I've never once seen anyone refer to or even remotely care about friend count.
      - ikeyany 9y ago
        It's not necessarily the number of followers people obsess over, it's their validation.
  - FabHK 9y ago
    Facebook will still learn which websites you visit (provided they have the "like" widget) and what articles you read on the NYT, unless you use a good tracking blocker. So, that's one downside, I think.

matwood 9y ago

I'm not sure why it has to be deactivated though. I've had a FB account for a long time and maybe check it once every few days if that. My main use case is to upload shared photos. I would prefer everyone use Google Photos, but that hasn't happened yet.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Why would you want everyone to just move from one walled garden to another?
pcsanwald 9y ago
for whatever reason, I have a mental hang up about just checking once every few days or something. I'm incapable ofjust ignoring communications that I get. De-activating is much, much simpler for me.

donatj 9y ago

There's the half way option of having a Facebook and only using it for invites/events, which is what I do for the most part.

zerosome 9y ago

I have found a nice middle ground by only checking it every week or so via a web browser and installing the News Feed Eradicator Chrome extension.

jtwebman 9y ago

I just removed the app from my phone. That way I can still access stuff my PC and get invites and see photos but I do it far less often. Saves lots of time but still allowing me to connect with others or see photos.

linkmotif 9y ago

Been 4-5 years without Facebook. Life for me has definitely been better than without. Same goes with Instagram. Something toxic about both of these platforms.

usegolang 9y ago

What you miss are pretty much the only things I do on FB anymore. I'm just not sure why you had to deactivate to make that happen. I guess it has never sucked me in and wasted my day because I just don't find browsing FB very interesting.

Yhippa 9y ago

I haven't deactivated my Facebook but I've used it much less over the past few years. Same for Instagram. I've actually moved back to MMS, WhatsApp, and email to communicate with people I care about the most. I end up using Google Photos to host and quickly share individual and groups of photos. It's not perfect but does the trick for the most part.

wutbrodo 9y ago

> It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, less compulsion to endlessly scroll your life away, no notification interruptions). The frustrations are real, though. Primarily it's around events and photos. I was almost done with college when FB suddenly became a cross-generational phenomenon and started being about more than photo sharing and event planning; I still fondly remember those days. The one advantage I would add is the rare occasion when someone needs to get in touch with me easily: I've had extended family who lives on the other side of the world get in touch with me through FB on short notice when they were visiting my city. I could definitely imagine that some of these cases wouldn't have happened without Facebook, since they would be required to 1) know that I happened to live in this city and 2) go through probably three separate people across different continents to get my phone number. This is infinitely harder than searching their FB friends for my city and going "oh dang! wutbrodo lives there now? I haven't seen him since we were kids, I should reach out!". That being said, all of the 90% downsides of keeping Facebook are, to some extent, within your control. I won't pretend that I'm congenitally immune to them, but all it took was a little discipline and a little time and it really wasn't that difficult to avoid the timesuck/endless scrolling/notification issues. I've never really been able to relate to the idea of completely deactivating Facebook and losing the 10% benefits, with the possible exception of the few people who have a completely insurmountable psychological compulsion to use Facebook. This is especially true because of all of the levels of FB exposure you can have without going all-or-nothing: Chrome extensions to remove the newsfeed, disabling notifications on your phone, only visiting FB on the web and not the app, etc.

madeofpalk 9y ago

> It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, less compulsion to endlessly scroll your life away, no notification interruptions). You're not able to exercise self control? I have Facebook, but I never use it apart from the events and Messenger for chatting with certain friends.

maksimum 9y ago
> You're not able to exercise self control? Ability to exercise self-control most likely varies significantly among people. It's not like the ability to breath. Also Facebook is explicitly designed to "engage" people, meaning that a piece of information shared on Facebook is going to engage a larger fraction of people than that same piece of information in ... a newspaper (for example). Engagement/attention hacking is a different issue than the walled-garden issue for the most part though.

inostia 9y ago

I'm a part of the local Bay Area music scene and Facebook events has basically become the standard for posting about shows. Without a Facebook I just don't hear about them. I'm considering making a dummy account with a few friends just for the purpose of finding out about events. Side note, does anyone know of a service that allows you to track FB events without having to be in the Facebook app? Not sure if there's an API for that.

snug 9y ago
Posted about this above, but check out the app "Events for facebook"
transpy 9y ago
I feel you. Facebook virtually grants a certificate of existence. It's almost unimaginable why someone that wants to play music wouldn't have a facebook presence. (Don't know if that last sentence was correct, non native here). My point is the following: I was one day on the street and saw a flyer glued onto a wall, it looked kinda funky and hand-drawn, interesting; some DJ's were going to throw a party and spin salsa, funk, latin jazz, cumbia... And I didn't recognize any of the names or the venues, I was mildly shocked because I believed I knew the local scene pretty well. Almost always I can contextualize a music genre/scene, and see their connections and collaborations. But this random flyer I came across was so obscure! No relations, no known names, and the mix of styles and originality was very interesting! For the first time in many years I felt again what is like to find an underground scene, which I like a lot (like when dancing drum&bass in a basement in Berlin or listening to rap in Mexico). This is a magic that is sometimes lost in the believed omniscence and omnipresence of online/facebook. I bet people soon will want to have those kind of experience, and the new thing will be to find scenes that people don't even know about online.
- inostia 9y ago
  I miss the old message board days where everything was really DIY and local, just a table with location and bands. People would post to some homegrown site maintained by a devoted local fan. Also miss the days of fliers! Now I have to scroll through ads and a bunch of irrelevant "local events for you" just to find what I'm looking for.

tempestn 9y ago

What's the downside to keeping the account but just not posting to it or checking your news feed? That's roughly what I do, and so can still use it for events and such. I also have it set to email me if my wife or my mom posts a picture. (My mom posts about once a month, and it's more often than not a picture of one of my kids... ;) ) Anyone else I care about (and only the people I really care about) I have on Instagram, which I check every day. But my Facebook feed I view approximately never.

snug 9y ago

I had the same problem, but I found out there is an app "Events for facebook," It means less endless scrolling for me. And then I use the messenger app to communicate with some friends. So far it's been about a week, and it's been 90% great, and 10% meh. I just logged out of facebook on all of my devices and don't save the password, so it at least makes me think before putting in my password. The meh part is the services I use "login with facebook" on, but it's not that big of a deal.

andersonmvd 9y ago

I wonder why people are so extremist. Just like 'mobile phones are the new cigarette' you don't need to throw them out. You just need to know where to draw the line.

weq 9y ago

If u can stop using facebook when u deactivate it, cant u just not deactivate it, and use it for the 10% to stop ur frustration? I treat facebook like i treat my phone. Its a tool. Not a way of life. Been on the internet since '95, back when i was at school i was the only one who would spend hours on the computer, they called us nerds. Now its the opposite, i use the computer at work everyday, and when im home, i stay away from it, my phone, tv, as much as possible and call everyone else geeks who need to stop obsessing over there hands (cause they dont know about computers, they just use them)

659087 9y ago
Did a wormhole temporarily merge HN with yahoo answers?

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago

Just install Todobook (or even News Feed Eradicator) and you'll be fine. I check my FB usage using TimeYourWeb and it fell down by 90% since then.

nvarsj 9y ago

I have an account for a long time now, because some groups, people and activities require it. But I've disabled notifications for a long time, and rarely log in except to check on events. I don't see a reason to deactivate it complete. I have to say though, FB tries really hard to reactivate your notifications. It's especially annoying when it hooks into your mobile Chrome browser notifications (took me a while to figure that out!). And the fact it can't be uninstalled on Samsung devices - at least you don't have to login.

anigbrowl 9y ago

A lot depends on the geographic distribution of your friend network. Many of my closest friends live on the other side of the country. Not to mention that I got to know them through FB. I'm really not that worried about it any more. FB is gufe, but so was AOL. It will in turn be disrupted by a future innovation.

jrcplus 9y ago

I kept my Facebook account but deleted all my friends and most of my personal content (and locked down the privacy settings to prevent people from finding me). This lets me access content on Facebook without using it as a social network. I did this years ago and I have no regrets.