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How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

352 points by ronaldl93 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
justin_oaks 8y ago
"Anything from Upworthy" Good for a laugh, but it's pretty easy to get rid of that stuff in particular. Anytime anyone reshares something, I go to the 3-dot menu and select "Hide all from xxxxx". It makes most of the crap go away... except for the one "friend" who somehow manages to reshare everything under the sun. Somehow that guy keeps finding new sources for me to "Hide all" from. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It is by no means a solution, but the signal-to-noise ratio is increased.
- hycaria 8y ago
  You can unfollow someone if you "show more".
- kardos 8y ago
  So it's like curating your own spam email blocklist?
- xab9 8y ago
  Just unfollow 'em all. You have to spend half an hour clicking through your list of "friends" (or fans or whatever these relationships are called these days) or write fifteen lines of javascript to click on the dom elements, but then that's it. Clean wall. Silence.
- endymi0n 8y ago
  That reminds me of the old joke that Facebook helps you deal with the problems you wouldn‘t have without it...
  - Double_a_92 8y ago
    Just like beer.
- gfo 8y ago
  Before I deactivated I tried this. Unfortunately this didn't always solve the problem. For one thing, it would still show those pages when someone interacted with those posts on say, someone else's profile who shared it. Even then, there are thousands of new junk pages created for that garbage every day. It's nearly impossible to keep up with it. Though I unfollowed or unfriended those who were the worst offenders, there would be others who took their place.
amirathi 8y ago
I successfully tricked my mind to not use Facebook by destroying / making my feed non-personal. How? I became member of all sorts of group: Buy-N-Sell in my local area, technology groups, 10+ DevOps groups and so on. The quality of posts on these is poor and is irrelevant for me for the most part. So every time I used to open the app out of habit, I would see all non-personal crappy posts and I would close the app in under 10 seconds. Over time my mind hated using FB and clicking on that app went away from my muscle memory without me trying to force any habit changes. Why not just delete the account? FB is still great to find old friends, ex-colleagues who I might have lost contact with. I also use it as my public mic to post stuff that I want to share as widely as I can. It's fun to take on the PMs who design addictive products that influence us at psychological level and beat them at their own game. Bring it on!
- sdeepak 8y ago
  This is an amazing mind hack. Truly out of the box :D :)
  - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    I did something similar but for different reasons with several of my puppet FB accounts and man, was it terrible. The amount of gibberish that's out there is enormous. You know something is very wrong if ads become the signal in the noise...
- PinkMilkshake 8y ago
  > I successfully tricked my mind to not use Facebook by destroying my feed. I did the same thing, but using a different technique. Steps: 1) Taper off - Unfollow everyone who isn't a close friend or family 2) Destroy feed - Unfollow everyone x) Optional step - Delete all your posts and untag all photos. It took me an hour or two but I deleted everything, one by one. A greasemonkey script managed to clear some of it, but the rest I did by hand. I still keep my account, just with nothing on it.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
doon123 8y ago
There is a IPCC report out today about climate change and how it would destroy the world as we know it. Yet, people are more worried about Facebook! Amazing!!!
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Can’t we be worried about both?
  - doon123 8y ago
    Well, considering that the IPCC story is nowhere to be seen on the front page and this being at the top, shows how much general HN crowd worries about Climate change as compared to Facebook. Such Myopia is what has landed us in this crisis in the first place. But you should not bother. Go worry about the useless photos that you first upload to facebook and then wonder what a for profit company is going to do with all that data.
    - greglindahl 8y ago
      The IPCC report is currently # 29.
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      There was an IPCC story in the top 5 about an hour ago which I can only assume was moderator filtered as it had disappeared entirely a minute or two later when I clicked back to homepage. It wasn't flagged, or further down the pages. Didn't even have chance to attract much in the way of controversy or deniers. So it may not be that reflective of user sentiment. Very disappointing to see though.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  So only climate change articles on HN, anything else is deckchairs?
- gfo 8y ago
  Facebook is a great place to get that message out, but it's only an echo chamber for ideologies. I guarantee those who don't believe in climate change are only seeing articles about why the IPCC report is wrong (note: this is an example, NOT my personal feeling). I would argue Facebook is making the problem worse by making it very easy spread misinformation.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
philliphaydon 8y ago
I’d love to make a dumb social network which could import friends/photos/videos from a Facebook export. Which just shows photos videos and comments/posts. Ditched the shares, likes, and all the other crap. And was just a place where we can keep in touch with people. And leave it at that.
- ravenstine 8y ago
  A lot of people like this idea, but it seems that no one really wants to implement it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - philliphaydon 8y ago
    I would love to build it. Open source. But I suck at design so I donno.
- clusmore 8y ago
  Serious question: How would such a platform be significantly better than email? I'm genuinely curious as to what features of social networks people think can't be fulfilled by email. The only issue I have with email is convincing other people to use it for sharing their life, rather than/as well as on Facebook, but I would have exactly the same problem with a brand new social network.
  - philliphaydon 8y ago
    Just that you can post something and then your circle of friends / family can view your post. At their own leisure. You don't have to write an email and send it to people and such, and try figure out which friends want to see it and which don't. IMO 'Facebook' should be a /dumb/ social network, dumb in the sense that it's features are basic, once built it doesn't need a billion features added to it.
    - 8y ago
Jaruzel 8y ago
This thread seems a good place to re-pimp my Facebook profile cleaner (for those that missed it first time): http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/how-i-erased-5000-facebook-comments-and-likes http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/how-i-erased-5000-facebook-comme...
- motdiem 8y ago
  Going through the mbasic interface of facebook for this is brilliant. Good job !
  - Jaruzel 8y ago
    Cheers!
bfred_it 8y ago
Accepting 1500 friends and then complaining they’re too many. Who’s to blame here? Facebook is what you make of it. It offers relatively granular control over who you want to see so if even you must be friends with someone, you can still unfollow them. Surely the default is a bit annoying, especially when joining groups, but those can be unfollowed too. The only thing I can complain about is “your friend reacted to or commented on some post” I don’t care about. That’s Facebook’s fault but your friends are your fault. Most of the time I add friends and promptly unfollow them because they share memes.
- twblalock 8y ago
  > Facebook is what you make of it. It offers relatively granular control over who you want to see so if even you must be friends with someone, you can still unfollow them. Recent events have demonstrated that the privacy controls are not what people think they are. Cambridge Analytica was able to access data belonging to the friends of people who granted certain permissions, and there was a recent data breach caused by a bug in an impersonation feature. Advertisers are able to see quite a lot of information too.
  - sdrothrock 8y ago
    I don't think this is related to what bfred_it is saying. To me, he's saying "if you have 1500 friends, use Facebook's follow/unfollow feature to improve your S/N ratio while still being friends with those people." That is, rather than privacy (controlling outgoing information), he's discussing the ability to filter incoming information.
    - bfred_it 8y ago
      That’s correct. I’m not talking about what happens to your data but about what you see on your feed.
- styfle 8y ago
  I started getting friend suggestions from facebook very regularly about 6 months ago. They show up as notifications and there are typically more suggestions then actual direct communication notifications. I used to see things like: you were tagged in photo, friend commented on your post, etc. Now all I see is: you might know John Johnson. I don't even see a setting to disable these suggestions. So it's not surprising to me how people end up with 1500 friends.
fromthestart 8y ago
Realistically, what are the odds that deleting a Facebook profile actually removes one's data from Facebook's servers? It's far too easy to secretly retain such data, and Zuckerberg has repeatedly demonstrated the requisite malciousness.
- gaius 8y ago
  Plenty of people have reported deleting their account, creating a new one later, and seeing all their old friends recommended to them. It’s obvious that nothing is ever deleted, just hidden.
- jorisw 8y ago
  The GDPR enforces that. Not saying FB cares.
- jobigoud 8y ago
  They have data on people that never had a Facebook account in the first place, if that can give a clue.
- motdiem 8y ago
  Technically, if you're EU based, you could ask for proof of deletion and/or sue - not sure it's worth the effort though, especially since FB is keeping shadow profiles of you anyway (so you may have deleted your profile, but because your friends have your phone number, email, etc facebook doesn't actually need you to have a profile to track you now...)
v1k65m677 8y ago
I un-fallowed everyone, including pages/groups. No feed, no ads. When I open fb, i see blank screen after few seconds of load. Now I'm now too lazy to fallow them again.
snipem 8y ago
Problem is if you leave Facebook you're not going to be invited for school reunions.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  I disagree, to me that sounds like another reason to leave Facebook.
- astura 8y ago
  If you're so far removed from former classmates that you don't hear about the reunion from any of them that do have Facebook, are you really missing out?
scarejunba 8y ago
I just have a single strike policy for most of my friends. I unfollow anyone as soon as they post something I don't want to see. I don't tell them, obviously. It works quite well. Scrolled down just now and saw one post of someone running a 10k, a complaint about not having a holiday on Monday (haha), an ad from Triplebyte, a photo of the SpaceX rocket launch visible from the city, pictures from Yosemite, a birthday, an ad for Fairy, and a friend cosplaying. Not so bad. I'm fine with that.
- rubatuga 8y ago
  Wow, I’m getting some odd vibes off of you. Would hate to be your friend.
  - wingerlang 8y ago
    Perhaps he means 'FB friends' (he did say /most/ friends). In my FB friends list, the vast majority are more like acquaintances and when they post mostly things I don't care about I unfollow them.
  - foldr 8y ago
    I do the same thing. It's nothing personal. In fact, I find that there's very little correlation between people I get on with well in real life and people whose Facebook posts I don't hate.
  - sedgjh23 8y ago
    > I'm interested in bioinformatics and medicine. "vibes"
  - dang 8y ago
    Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please don't do this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- quest88 8y ago
  FB has become way more enjoyable for me after adopting a similar strategy. Now it's down to my close friends, family, and old HS friends who are up to cool things I'm interested in. The hardest part for me was unfollowing close friends who post a lot of garbage and videos. Before I complained about FB being shit content, but it was really some friends posting shit content. I think in combination unfriending and unfollowing lots of people, and facebook's algorithm updates, it has become more useful and fun to use again.
locusofself 8y ago
I've been using the chrome plugin "Kill News Feed" for several years and took the app off my phone. I feel like a have a healthy relationship with FB now. If someone wants to send me a message, I'm still there. If I need/want to look someone up or tag my family/friends in a photos I can. But the feed is gone, and I won't get sucked in.
chrisper 8y ago
I stopped using Facebook by deleting the app and only using the messenger app and messenger.com
- mrweasel 8y ago
  There a GDPR notification pending every time I login to Facebook. I don’t really care to deal with it, so now I can’t use Facebook or Messenger.
TaylorAlexander 8y ago
I just wanted to say that I walked away from Facebook about a year and a half ago now. I didn’t delete it, I just logged out and uninstalled the mobile app. It’s all been totally fine. The most social social media I use now is reddit, where I’m more just talking to people. I don’t post status updates anywhere, and often amazing things happen to me that I never tell anyone about. I eat great meals and don’t share. I became vegetarian and am going vegan and almost all of the people I would have told before have no idea, but it doesn’t matter at all. I’m just living my life, and when cool things happen I share them with the people I’m around. With the continued leaks and breaches on Facebook, I’d like to do what the author does here. I do want to download the information, but then I’d like to delete my account. I still wish there was some kind of social media platform like Facebook from 2008, but it’s not that big of a deal. I’m glad I don’t get stressed by some app on my phone all the time. People who want to talk to me email or text now. I think social media could work. But until then, consider letting go of the existing platforms are stressing you out. We do just fine without sharing our day with the internet, as long as we have good people in our lives.
- gaius 8y ago
  I wrote up my own quitting FB approach here https://gaius.tech/2017/12/29/less-facebook-more-faces-and-books/ https://gaius.tech/2017/12/29/less-facebook-more-faces-and-b... I still use Insta and WhatsApp tho’ so I am not entirely free but FB is the biggest time sink for sure.
  - ronaldl93 8y ago
    Likewise. I'm still on Instagram and Whatsapp... But in terms of controlling the content you see, Instagram and Whatsapp are a lot more manageable compared to Facebook - especially considering the state my FB was in. I'm trying to win my friends over to use Telegram instead. It's miles ahead of Whatsapp in my opinion.
    - telesilla 8y ago
      What is the long-term expectation of Telegram, once the current funding promise runs out?
fogetti 8y ago
Good for him. Although I don't really understand his stance: did he want to be on a social platform because it was `cool`? It might be only me, but I never wanted to be there because it's cool. I joined it because I wanted to keep contact with some of my friends be it cool or not.
- ronaldl93 8y ago
  I first joined it in 2007, meaning I was 13 or 14 years old :). Being South African, the adoption rate for internet here was quite slow compared to first world countries. So back then it literally was like the cool thing to be on, just like being the kid on the block with latest and greatest Playstation or motorbike. From a socio economic point of view. It's actually terribly when I think of it today. But that's just how it were growing up.
jayalpha 8y ago
https://socialfixer.com/ https://socialfixer.com/
jayalpha 8y ago
Facebook fixer https://socialfixer.com/ https://socialfixer.com/
erazor42 8y ago
I want to delete my account but a lot of my friends use fb messenger (groups ect.). Is there a way to delete profile and keep only messenger ?
- chambo622 8y ago
  If I could keep Messenger + Events and get rid of the rest, I'd do so immediately.
  - gammateam 8y ago
    You can use Messenger with just a phone number, like whatsapp There is/was a Facebook Group app, where its just the groups
    - chambo622 8y ago
      The former, yes. But afaik the Facebook Groups or Local (Events) apps require a full account.
vyuh 8y ago
When I downloaded my Facebook data few years ago, my notes were missing. I had to reactivate my account, save them as HTML pages, and queue account for deletion again. One should not think of profiles on these sites as reliable archive of ones data. There is no alternative to local backup for this. With deletion one loses so many little memorable things, for example comments.
- motdiem 8y ago
  can I ask how did you save your notes ? Just view source and save the html as files ?
gammateam 8y ago
"GOOD MORNING! Want to see someone getting killed by police and watch your friends quickly get baited by Russians to form to actual American protests related to their preconceived notions? No? Well its already playing enjoy! but be careful where you tap because IF YOU LIKE ANYTHING you'll lose half of your friends in real life but thats okay because we were only going to show you more of this exact thing regardless"
- andygates 8y ago
  > watch your friends quickly get baited Yeah, that's a good sign that you need smarter friends. Autoplay is cancer, though.
heinrichhartman 8y ago
I wrote about this a while ago: http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/2017/12/31/Quitting-Facebook.html http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/2017/12/31/Quitting-Faceboo... """ Problem with the facebook exporter are: - All comments are missing. Even the ones you wrote yourself! - There are no images in the timeline. - The number of likes and shares is missing on the posts. Before I delete my account, I wanted to have a more decent backup of my timeline. I looked into printing out the timeline, exporting it as pdf, full-page screenshots, massaging the DOM/HTML. I could get none of this working, with acceptable effort. Eventually I went throught the whole timeline (100s of posts!) and screenshotted each one individually. To make this process a little less tedious I changed the OSX keyboard shortcut for full page scrrenshot to F1, so I could use the following combo: [...] """
- motdiem 8y ago
  Screenshotting is one method that is surprisingly popular in the wild - It makes me a bit sad that so much state/metadata is lost when screenshotting, but it may prove the most efficient method going forward. I wonder if it'll be easier with DOM screenshot tools now available in major browers, so you can easily screenshot "just a post"
mothsonasloth 8y ago
I quit Facebook for about 2 years back in 2015. It was a good time to self reflect and focus on myself. However I realised I was missing out on birthday/wedding/social invites. I reactivated it and have a policy of only checking it 2-3 times a week. I dont have either apps on my phone. My profile is tidied up and has contact information that my friends can use to reach out to me (hardly anyone has). Reddit is the next thing I am contemplating my usage. It sucks up way too much time for the reward of fake internet points.
- 8fingerlouie 8y ago
  The "problem" with Reddit is that (depending on your selections) most information there is actually relevant. After Google killed Reader, i found myself using Reddit and HN far more than i had previously, as these are good aggregators of stuff i find interesting.
  - pixelbath 8y ago
    Reddit has the problem of highly relevant information with terrible search. Google is the preferred way to search for content on Reddit, but there's no advanced filtering by time, popularity, or any of the other metrics that Reddit useful.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  > Reddit is the next thing I am contemplating my usage. It sucks up way too much time for the reward of fake internet points. I would agree if Reddit were only the inane collection of memes and squabbles that many people assume it is from a cursory glance. The problem is that Reddit subreddits are replacing many independent forums for various hobbies and interests. Message board websites are often dying, they might only have a handful of posts each month or year while the relevant subreddit has informative or useful content several times a week. Reddit is often criticized as a toxic environment, but a dying forum website where only a few cantankerous old grouches are left can feel even more toxic.
cntlzw 8y ago
FB is really great about making you feel guilty if you delete the app, don't use the app. You miss your friends, they miss you, you don't get all the news, you feel out of the loop, you are lonely again. Deactivated (not deleted) my account a couple weeks ago. Guess what? Life goes on. Nothing happened. I am still in the loop and I spare a couple minutes per day. Gained a bit more freedom, at least it does feel like it.
- ronaldl93 8y ago
  Ah yes exactly. For a while I just never logged in, and then suddenly FB started spamming me with emails. "John misses you." "Susan posted something recently, see what she posted." etc etc.
- dorchadas 8y ago
  I got kinda lucky and can now avoid all this. When I first signed up, I used an email address I had in 2007. I now no longer have that one, so can't check it there. The only other email address I ever used with it was my university one, which I needed to join their network. Never added any of the other ones I have, and that one is now deleted. So I never see their endless emails or anything of the such; it's great.
_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
No one lost friends from deleting Facebook. I haven't.
danburzo 8y ago
I quit Facebook before GDPR came into effect, so it's heartening to see FB now has better export tools. At the beginning of the year I had to write my own: https://github.com/danburzo/fb-export https://github.com/danburzo/fb-export
- ilikehurdles 8y ago
  Facebook had this a year ago as well. I quit and exported my data at the beginning of 2017. I actually only just looked at the export after reading this hn post. Up until now I just kept it zipped as a backup "just in case". Looking back at all the things I used to share and participate in on social media just reconfirms my decision to ditch it.
  - danburzo 8y ago
    I may be wrong, but I think up to GDPR compliance, you'd only get a meager HTML file that was not machine-readable, and some (but not all) of the images?
motdiem 8y ago
Very timely post. Full disclosure : my current project [1] deals with archiving content from social network, and we're considering adding more things to import from facebook. The friends list example from the article is a good one : As for my friend list.. well.. It's all in Json format.. So now you can essentially use the power of your brain to think how your friend looked. If you can't, well then you probably weren't friends anyway. Sorry. I'd be interested in your experiences either in leaving facebook, or about things you'd which you could have saved [1](https://www.getkumbu.com/ https://www.getkumbu.com/)
8fingerlouie 8y ago
Sadly deleting Facebook isn't an option for me, as it has become _the_ place to get notified about social events around here. Twitter/Reddit/whatever doesn't have as strong a presence here, and the traditional websites have all be replaced by facebook pages. I've cut out all the services from my life that siphons my "metadata", and while my daily Facebook usage was around 15 minutes/day, i still can't completely delete it. Instead i've banned the Facebook app from my phone/tablet and only check facebook when i'm at home during the evenings, and even then i use Firefox with Facebook Container. As for (Facebook) messenger, i'm trying hard to teach people that i don't use it, or telegram, and instead they can reach me on Signal, or just plain old iMessages/SMS. It takes a few weeks, but usually people "get it" when i don't reply to their messages.
- dmos62 8y ago
  Is deleting your account and creating an anonymous one to just check local events a viable option?
  - notyourloops 8y ago
    Not really. Facebook will put your account in a cycle of verification hell. They really don't seem to like accounts of users trying to be anonymous. Granted, maybe someone else will have better luck with that than I did. For me, they essentially disabled my account and re-enabled it on a weekly basis. I got too annoyed and stopped using it as a result.
Phenomenit 8y ago
I have a account just for some niche buy and sell groups. No Pic no posts, nothing. I can even use it as a SSO. The only info fb has is when and where.
kinleyd 8y ago
I left my Facebook account idle for about 6 years now, and didn't miss it at all. Now I'm trying to delete it and I can't find the link to "Your Facebook Information" no matter where I look. This is where the delete option is according to Facebook's help section. Anyone having the same problem or is Facebook deliberately burying that link?
thisismyusernam 8y ago
This doesn't actually answer the issue posed in the title, "How not to lose your friends". I was expecting at least a little discussion on how to replace Facebook friends, how to stay connected, alternatives etc.
- virmundi 8y ago
  Text message. Just text them. You can send funny pictures. You can have group chats. You get all of this as part of your unlimited texting plan that's probably laying fallow.
- okmokmz 8y ago
  >how to replace Facebook friends Join another social network, add a bunch of people that you barely know, wah lah facebook friends replaced >how to stay connected Letters, phone calls, texts, meet in person, etc. How many friends do you have that you don't ever see or interact with besides on facebook, and what percentage of that group are actual friends that you would hangout with in person?
- gfo 8y ago
  Email, call, text them. I've started sending birthday cards to my close friends (whose birthdays I actually know) rather than simply writing a message on their profile or shooting a quick text. I've found most really appreciate the card - it's interesting how birthday cards used to seem the 'easy' way to wish someone a happy birthday but now they appear to have more meaning.
virmundi 8y ago
Why do people care about the photos? There's a Lewis Black joke where he opines on this exact same thing: "I didn't even like looking at my family photo album". Why not close the account and never look back without regard to the photos? There seems to be a belief that holding someone in your list of contacts is equivalent to being their friend. You're not. You're an entry in a really small Rolodex. If you haven't actually personally spoken with them in a few months, you are dusty card in that Rolodex. Burn the pile and let those relationships that matter emerge from the ash.
zer0faith 8y ago
Walking away from social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram was one best things I could do to reduce the negativity in my life.
barrad0s 8y ago
Deleted mine about 5 years ago, don't have any social media and I survived.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
- Rjevski 8y ago
  GDPR subject access request (and deletion request for the "locked" accounts) to Facebook, and if that doesn't work complain to your country's privacy regulator (the ICO if you're in the UK).
capdeck 8y ago
So, he downloaded his data from Facebook... and uploaded it to Google. I don't know -- doesn't seem like anything has changed.
blancheneige 8y ago
as a side note, keep in mind that with the option of downloading your entire messaging history, it will be sent as an unencrypted zip file to your email address. a surveillance dragnet dream come true.
dmschulman 8y ago
Chiming in to say I'm similarly semi-disconnected from Facebook at this point. My account is still active and I still post occasional updates from a third-party platform (mostly articles I've read), but I rarely browse the site anymore. The only thing I find useful on Facebook that I can't find reliably anywhere else is a comprehensive listing of local events and concerts (as well as invites to things my friends host). If there were a separate site that could aggregate and organize events content as nicely and completely as FB does I would have deleted my account outright a while ago.
mkaziz 8y ago
Unfortunately, deleting facebook means losing captions on your photos. Most of my college memories are captioned, so I can't just delete my account :(
okmokmz 8y ago
I've always felt that if deleting facebook caused me to loose contact with someone entirely, we probably weren't really friends in the first place
- elhudy 8y ago
  Acquaintances who happened to have made great point-in-time connections should be viewed as potential "real" friends. I've met amazing people around the world who I would hate to sever connections with, but, by realities of living busy lives on opposite sides of the world, we don't communicate regularly. We've reconnected through work/vacation travels and been ecstatic about having local tour guides. For these connections, facebook has been my only lifeline as the commonality between us.
tokyodude 8y ago
Maybe I'm just not very social, I have 834 "friends" on facebook but I don't feel any need to delete it nor do I feel any fear of being left out or stuff like that nor do I spend too much time on or any of the myriad of other things so many HNers report with their experience on FB. I don't really want to delete it as it's how I stay in touch with friends and family. It's how most of my friends organize events. Messenger (not the FB app) is the #1 way friends communicate with me and each other as well. I did do a few things though. I aggressively unfollowed people. Anyone I only met a few times. Friends I haven't seen in years or don't expect to see. Anyone who posts too much (except my sister who I feel I can't unfollow). Friends who post too much political stuff. I click "this ad offends me on every ad". I use FB Purity on the desktop web site with about 10 filters to filter out a bunch of crap like "was mentioned in a post" or "replied to a comment", "shared her post", "shared his post", "is with" and other attention spam. Not that much shows up but I'm still able to keep up with a few really close friends and family and still participate in event organizing etc and not feel I'm being spammed too much. I don;'t have FB Purity on my phone but I guess I don't use the app all that much on the phone. I mostly use Messenger for messages and the FB app to look at profiles (linked from Messenger) and to read/post in shared event pages. Of course maybe you want to delete FB because of leaks or you just don't want to be tracked which are really good reasons to get off. All I'm trying to say is I don't recognize many of the other complaints in my own experiences with FB so maybe others might find those solutions useful?
0db532a0 8y ago
In 2013 I left Facebook. I decided who I wanted to stay in contact with and sent a message to each one explaining that I was leaving. I asked them to email me if they wanted to stay in contact. I am still in contact with every person I wanted to stay in contact with.
tmalsburg2 8y ago
If you lose contact with someone after deleting Facebook, they were not your friend in the first place. My conclusion after deleting my account four years ago. Getting rid of Facebook was one of the best decisions of my life.
- jedimastert 8y ago
  I don't think I agree with that idea. People have different ways of communicating, not to mention I don't think people who do use Facebook as a main communication method should be punished because you think you're above it.
  - throwaway9763 8y ago
    People choosing to use a walled garden are being punished by those who would rather not? You may have that reversed - this isn't about thinking you're "above" a communication method, but it is worth noting that Facebook requires using their specific service while many other methods (phone, email, etc.) can be used from a variety of providers. So, saying "I only use Facebook to communicate" and expecting others to conform is a bit more naturally presumptuous than choosing to leave Facebook - and it's a fair point that if a relationship can't survive not using a specific proprietary tool, then maybe it wasn't that strong of a relationship.
gfo 8y ago
I've only deactivated Facebook, not deleted. I'm worried that if I completely delete I have no way left to access the data Facebook has on me. Is anyone aware of how their shadow profiles work? If I deactivate, are they still able to attribute things like someone uploading my number from their contacts back to my profile? It's this reason that I haven't nuked it entirely yet. I also use Messenger on occasion to communicate with those I haven't spoken to in a long time. I'm ready to make that leap soon. And no, not all of those folks whose numbers or email addresses I lack are not 'friends' necessarily - I have a few former colleagues and bosses on there as well I like to chat with on occasion.
andrewxhill 8y ago
We posted this a while back, just a simple tool to make the photo exports a bit better, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16682940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16682940
nvr219 8y ago
Put on google to keep photos secure??

352 points by ronaldl93 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

"Anything from Upworthy" Good for a laugh, but it's pretty easy to get rid of that stuff in particular. Anytime anyone reshares something, I go to the 3-dot menu and select "Hide all from xxxxx". It makes most of the crap go away... except for the one "friend" who somehow manages to reshare everything under the sun. Somehow that guy keeps finding new sources for me to "Hide all" from. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It is by no means a solution, but the signal-to-noise ratio is increased.

hycaria 8y ago
You can unfollow someone if you "show more".
kardos 8y ago
So it's like curating your own spam email blocklist?
xab9 8y ago
Just unfollow 'em all. You have to spend half an hour clicking through your list of "friends" (or fans or whatever these relationships are called these days) or write fifteen lines of javascript to click on the dom elements, but then that's it. Clean wall. Silence.
endymi0n 8y ago
That reminds me of the old joke that Facebook helps you deal with the problems you wouldn‘t have without it...
- Double_a_92 8y ago
  Just like beer.
gfo 8y ago
Before I deactivated I tried this. Unfortunately this didn't always solve the problem. For one thing, it would still show those pages when someone interacted with those posts on say, someone else's profile who shared it. Even then, there are thousands of new junk pages created for that garbage every day. It's nearly impossible to keep up with it. Though I unfollowed or unfriended those who were the worst offenders, there would be others who took their place.

amirathi 8y ago

I successfully tricked my mind to not use Facebook by destroying / making my feed non-personal. How? I became member of all sorts of group: Buy-N-Sell in my local area, technology groups, 10+ DevOps groups and so on. The quality of posts on these is poor and is irrelevant for me for the most part. So every time I used to open the app out of habit, I would see all non-personal crappy posts and I would close the app in under 10 seconds. Over time my mind hated using FB and clicking on that app went away from my muscle memory without me trying to force any habit changes. Why not just delete the account? FB is still great to find old friends, ex-colleagues who I might have lost contact with. I also use it as my public mic to post stuff that I want to share as widely as I can. It's fun to take on the PMs who design addictive products that influence us at psychological level and beat them at their own game. Bring it on!

sdeepak 8y ago
This is an amazing mind hack. Truly out of the box :D :)
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  I did something similar but for different reasons with several of my puppet FB accounts and man, was it terrible. The amount of gibberish that's out there is enormous. You know something is very wrong if ads become the signal in the noise...
PinkMilkshake 8y ago
> I successfully tricked my mind to not use Facebook by destroying my feed. I did the same thing, but using a different technique. Steps: 1) Taper off - Unfollow everyone who isn't a close friend or family 2) Destroy feed - Unfollow everyone x) Optional step - Delete all your posts and untag all photos. It took me an hour or two but I deleted everything, one by one. A greasemonkey script managed to clear some of it, but the rest I did by hand. I still keep my account, just with nothing on it.
- ryandrake 8y ago

doon123 8y ago

There is a IPCC report out today about climate change and how it would destroy the world as we know it. Yet, people are more worried about Facebook! Amazing!!!

saagarjha 8y ago
Can’t we be worried about both?
- doon123 8y ago
  Well, considering that the IPCC story is nowhere to be seen on the front page and this being at the top, shows how much general HN crowd worries about Climate change as compared to Facebook. Such Myopia is what has landed us in this crisis in the first place. But you should not bother. Go worry about the useless photos that you first upload to facebook and then wonder what a for profit company is going to do with all that data.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    The IPCC report is currently # 29.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    There was an IPCC story in the top 5 about an hour ago which I can only assume was moderator filtered as it had disappeared entirely a minute or two later when I clicked back to homepage. It wasn't flagged, or further down the pages. Didn't even have chance to attract much in the way of controversy or deniers. So it may not be that reflective of user sentiment. Very disappointing to see though.
quickthrower2 8y ago
So only climate change articles on HN, anything else is deckchairs?
gfo 8y ago
Facebook is a great place to get that message out, but it's only an echo chamber for ideologies. I guarantee those who don't believe in climate change are only seeing articles about why the IPCC report is wrong (note: this is an example, NOT my personal feeling). I would argue Facebook is making the problem worse by making it very easy spread misinformation.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

philliphaydon 8y ago

I’d love to make a dumb social network which could import friends/photos/videos from a Facebook export. Which just shows photos videos and comments/posts. Ditched the shares, likes, and all the other crap. And was just a place where we can keep in touch with people. And leave it at that.

ravenstine 8y ago
A lot of people like this idea, but it seems that no one really wants to implement it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- philliphaydon 8y ago
  I would love to build it. Open source. But I suck at design so I donno.
clusmore 8y ago
Serious question: How would such a platform be significantly better than email? I'm genuinely curious as to what features of social networks people think can't be fulfilled by email. The only issue I have with email is convincing other people to use it for sharing their life, rather than/as well as on Facebook, but I would have exactly the same problem with a brand new social network.
- philliphaydon 8y ago
  Just that you can post something and then your circle of friends / family can view your post. At their own leisure. You don't have to write an email and send it to people and such, and try figure out which friends want to see it and which don't. IMO 'Facebook' should be a /dumb/ social network, dumb in the sense that it's features are basic, once built it doesn't need a billion features added to it.
  - 8y ago

Jaruzel 8y ago

This thread seems a good place to re-pimp my Facebook profile cleaner (for those that missed it first time): http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/how-i-erased-5000-facebook-comments-and-likes http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/how-i-erased-5000-facebook-comme...

motdiem 8y ago
Going through the mbasic interface of facebook for this is brilliant. Good job !
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  Cheers!

bfred_it 8y ago

Accepting 1500 friends and then complaining they’re too many. Who’s to blame here? Facebook is what you make of it. It offers relatively granular control over who you want to see so if even you must be friends with someone, you can still unfollow them. Surely the default is a bit annoying, especially when joining groups, but those can be unfollowed too. The only thing I can complain about is “your friend reacted to or commented on some post” I don’t care about. That’s Facebook’s fault but your friends are your fault. Most of the time I add friends and promptly unfollow them because they share memes.

twblalock 8y ago
> Facebook is what you make of it. It offers relatively granular control over who you want to see so if even you must be friends with someone, you can still unfollow them. Recent events have demonstrated that the privacy controls are not what people think they are. Cambridge Analytica was able to access data belonging to the friends of people who granted certain permissions, and there was a recent data breach caused by a bug in an impersonation feature. Advertisers are able to see quite a lot of information too.
- sdrothrock 8y ago
  I don't think this is related to what bfred_it is saying. To me, he's saying "if you have 1500 friends, use Facebook's follow/unfollow feature to improve your S/N ratio while still being friends with those people." That is, rather than privacy (controlling outgoing information), he's discussing the ability to filter incoming information.
  - bfred_it 8y ago
    That’s correct. I’m not talking about what happens to your data but about what you see on your feed.
styfle 8y ago
I started getting friend suggestions from facebook very regularly about 6 months ago. They show up as notifications and there are typically more suggestions then actual direct communication notifications. I used to see things like: you were tagged in photo, friend commented on your post, etc. Now all I see is: you might know John Johnson. I don't even see a setting to disable these suggestions. So it's not surprising to me how people end up with 1500 friends.

fromthestart 8y ago

Realistically, what are the odds that deleting a Facebook profile actually removes one's data from Facebook's servers? It's far too easy to secretly retain such data, and Zuckerberg has repeatedly demonstrated the requisite malciousness.

gaius 8y ago
Plenty of people have reported deleting their account, creating a new one later, and seeing all their old friends recommended to them. It’s obvious that nothing is ever deleted, just hidden.
jorisw 8y ago
The GDPR enforces that. Not saying FB cares.
jobigoud 8y ago
They have data on people that never had a Facebook account in the first place, if that can give a clue.
motdiem 8y ago
Technically, if you're EU based, you could ask for proof of deletion and/or sue - not sure it's worth the effort though, especially since FB is keeping shadow profiles of you anyway (so you may have deleted your profile, but because your friends have your phone number, email, etc facebook doesn't actually need you to have a profile to track you now...)

v1k65m677 8y ago

I un-fallowed everyone, including pages/groups. No feed, no ads. When I open fb, i see blank screen after few seconds of load. Now I'm now too lazy to fallow them again.

snipem 8y ago

Problem is if you leave Facebook you're not going to be invited for school reunions.

quickthrower2 8y ago
I disagree, to me that sounds like another reason to leave Facebook.
astura 8y ago
If you're so far removed from former classmates that you don't hear about the reunion from any of them that do have Facebook, are you really missing out?

scarejunba 8y ago

I just have a single strike policy for most of my friends. I unfollow anyone as soon as they post something I don't want to see. I don't tell them, obviously. It works quite well. Scrolled down just now and saw one post of someone running a 10k, a complaint about not having a holiday on Monday (haha), an ad from Triplebyte, a photo of the SpaceX rocket launch visible from the city, pictures from Yosemite, a birthday, an ad for Fairy, and a friend cosplaying. Not so bad. I'm fine with that.

rubatuga 8y ago
Wow, I’m getting some odd vibes off of you. Would hate to be your friend.
- wingerlang 8y ago
  Perhaps he means 'FB friends' (he did say /most/ friends). In my FB friends list, the vast majority are more like acquaintances and when they post mostly things I don't care about I unfollow them.
- foldr 8y ago
  I do the same thing. It's nothing personal. In fact, I find that there's very little correlation between people I get on with well in real life and people whose Facebook posts I don't hate.
- sedgjh23 8y ago
  > I'm interested in bioinformatics and medicine. "vibes"
- dang 8y ago
  Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please don't do this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
quest88 8y ago
FB has become way more enjoyable for me after adopting a similar strategy. Now it's down to my close friends, family, and old HS friends who are up to cool things I'm interested in. The hardest part for me was unfollowing close friends who post a lot of garbage and videos. Before I complained about FB being shit content, but it was really some friends posting shit content. I think in combination unfriending and unfollowing lots of people, and facebook's algorithm updates, it has become more useful and fun to use again.

locusofself 8y ago

I've been using the chrome plugin "Kill News Feed" for several years and took the app off my phone. I feel like a have a healthy relationship with FB now. If someone wants to send me a message, I'm still there. If I need/want to look someone up or tag my family/friends in a photos I can. But the feed is gone, and I won't get sucked in.

chrisper 8y ago

I stopped using Facebook by deleting the app and only using the messenger app and messenger.com

mrweasel 8y ago
There a GDPR notification pending every time I login to Facebook. I don’t really care to deal with it, so now I can’t use Facebook or Messenger.

TaylorAlexander 8y ago

I just wanted to say that I walked away from Facebook about a year and a half ago now. I didn’t delete it, I just logged out and uninstalled the mobile app. It’s all been totally fine. The most social social media I use now is reddit, where I’m more just talking to people. I don’t post status updates anywhere, and often amazing things happen to me that I never tell anyone about. I eat great meals and don’t share. I became vegetarian and am going vegan and almost all of the people I would have told before have no idea, but it doesn’t matter at all. I’m just living my life, and when cool things happen I share them with the people I’m around. With the continued leaks and breaches on Facebook, I’d like to do what the author does here. I do want to download the information, but then I’d like to delete my account. I still wish there was some kind of social media platform like Facebook from 2008, but it’s not that big of a deal. I’m glad I don’t get stressed by some app on my phone all the time. People who want to talk to me email or text now. I think social media could work. But until then, consider letting go of the existing platforms are stressing you out. We do just fine without sharing our day with the internet, as long as we have good people in our lives.

gaius 8y ago
I wrote up my own quitting FB approach here https://gaius.tech/2017/12/29/less-facebook-more-faces-and-books/ https://gaius.tech/2017/12/29/less-facebook-more-faces-and-b... I still use Insta and WhatsApp tho’ so I am not entirely free but FB is the biggest time sink for sure.
- ronaldl93 8y ago
  Likewise. I'm still on Instagram and Whatsapp... But in terms of controlling the content you see, Instagram and Whatsapp are a lot more manageable compared to Facebook - especially considering the state my FB was in. I'm trying to win my friends over to use Telegram instead. It's miles ahead of Whatsapp in my opinion.
  - telesilla 8y ago
    What is the long-term expectation of Telegram, once the current funding promise runs out?

fogetti 8y ago

Good for him. Although I don't really understand his stance: did he want to be on a social platform because it was `cool`? It might be only me, but I never wanted to be there because it's cool. I joined it because I wanted to keep contact with some of my friends be it cool or not.

ronaldl93 8y ago
I first joined it in 2007, meaning I was 13 or 14 years old :). Being South African, the adoption rate for internet here was quite slow compared to first world countries. So back then it literally was like the cool thing to be on, just like being the kid on the block with latest and greatest Playstation or motorbike. From a socio economic point of view. It's actually terribly when I think of it today. But that's just how it were growing up.

jayalpha 8y ago

https://socialfixer.com/ https://socialfixer.com/

jayalpha 8y ago

Facebook fixer https://socialfixer.com/ https://socialfixer.com/

erazor42 8y ago

I want to delete my account but a lot of my friends use fb messenger (groups ect.). Is there a way to delete profile and keep only messenger ?

chambo622 8y ago
If I could keep Messenger + Events and get rid of the rest, I'd do so immediately.
- gammateam 8y ago
  You can use Messenger with just a phone number, like whatsapp There is/was a Facebook Group app, where its just the groups
  - chambo622 8y ago
    The former, yes. But afaik the Facebook Groups or Local (Events) apps require a full account.

vyuh 8y ago

When I downloaded my Facebook data few years ago, my notes were missing. I had to reactivate my account, save them as HTML pages, and queue account for deletion again. One should not think of profiles on these sites as reliable archive of ones data. There is no alternative to local backup for this. With deletion one loses so many little memorable things, for example comments.

motdiem 8y ago
can I ask how did you save your notes ? Just view source and save the html as files ?

gammateam 8y ago

"GOOD MORNING! Want to see someone getting killed by police and watch your friends quickly get baited by Russians to form to actual American protests related to their preconceived notions? No? Well its already playing enjoy! but be careful where you tap because IF YOU LIKE ANYTHING you'll lose half of your friends in real life but thats okay because we were only going to show you more of this exact thing regardless"

andygates 8y ago
> watch your friends quickly get baited Yeah, that's a good sign that you need smarter friends. Autoplay is cancer, though.

heinrichhartman 8y ago

I wrote about this a while ago: http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/2017/12/31/Quitting-Facebook.html http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/2017/12/31/Quitting-Faceboo... """ Problem with the facebook exporter are: - All comments are missing. Even the ones you wrote yourself! - There are no images in the timeline. - The number of likes and shares is missing on the posts. Before I delete my account, I wanted to have a more decent backup of my timeline. I looked into printing out the timeline, exporting it as pdf, full-page screenshots, massaging the DOM/HTML. I could get none of this working, with acceptable effort. Eventually I went throught the whole timeline (100s of posts!) and screenshotted each one individually. To make this process a little less tedious I changed the OSX keyboard shortcut for full page scrrenshot to F1, so I could use the following combo: [...] """

motdiem 8y ago
Screenshotting is one method that is surprisingly popular in the wild - It makes me a bit sad that so much state/metadata is lost when screenshotting, but it may prove the most efficient method going forward. I wonder if it'll be easier with DOM screenshot tools now available in major browers, so you can easily screenshot "just a post"

mothsonasloth 8y ago

I quit Facebook for about 2 years back in 2015. It was a good time to self reflect and focus on myself. However I realised I was missing out on birthday/wedding/social invites. I reactivated it and have a policy of only checking it 2-3 times a week. I dont have either apps on my phone. My profile is tidied up and has contact information that my friends can use to reach out to me (hardly anyone has). Reddit is the next thing I am contemplating my usage. It sucks up way too much time for the reward of fake internet points.

8fingerlouie 8y ago
The "problem" with Reddit is that (depending on your selections) most information there is actually relevant. After Google killed Reader, i found myself using Reddit and HN far more than i had previously, as these are good aggregators of stuff i find interesting.
- pixelbath 8y ago
  Reddit has the problem of highly relevant information with terrible search. Google is the preferred way to search for content on Reddit, but there's no advanced filtering by time, popularity, or any of the other metrics that Reddit useful.
Mediterraneo10 8y ago
> Reddit is the next thing I am contemplating my usage. It sucks up way too much time for the reward of fake internet points. I would agree if Reddit were only the inane collection of memes and squabbles that many people assume it is from a cursory glance. The problem is that Reddit subreddits are replacing many independent forums for various hobbies and interests. Message board websites are often dying, they might only have a handful of posts each month or year while the relevant subreddit has informative or useful content several times a week. Reddit is often criticized as a toxic environment, but a dying forum website where only a few cantankerous old grouches are left can feel even more toxic.

cntlzw 8y ago

FB is really great about making you feel guilty if you delete the app, don't use the app. You miss your friends, they miss you, you don't get all the news, you feel out of the loop, you are lonely again. Deactivated (not deleted) my account a couple weeks ago. Guess what? Life goes on. Nothing happened. I am still in the loop and I spare a couple minutes per day. Gained a bit more freedom, at least it does feel like it.

ronaldl93 8y ago
Ah yes exactly. For a while I just never logged in, and then suddenly FB started spamming me with emails. "John misses you." "Susan posted something recently, see what she posted." etc etc.
dorchadas 8y ago
I got kinda lucky and can now avoid all this. When I first signed up, I used an email address I had in 2007. I now no longer have that one, so can't check it there. The only other email address I ever used with it was my university one, which I needed to join their network. Never added any of the other ones I have, and that one is now deleted. So I never see their endless emails or anything of the such; it's great.

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago

No one lost friends from deleting Facebook. I haven't.

danburzo 8y ago

I quit Facebook before GDPR came into effect, so it's heartening to see FB now has better export tools. At the beginning of the year I had to write my own: https://github.com/danburzo/fb-export https://github.com/danburzo/fb-export

ilikehurdles 8y ago
Facebook had this a year ago as well. I quit and exported my data at the beginning of 2017. I actually only just looked at the export after reading this hn post. Up until now I just kept it zipped as a backup "just in case". Looking back at all the things I used to share and participate in on social media just reconfirms my decision to ditch it.
- danburzo 8y ago
  I may be wrong, but I think up to GDPR compliance, you'd only get a meager HTML file that was not machine-readable, and some (but not all) of the images?

motdiem 8y ago

Very timely post. Full disclosure : my current project [1] deals with archiving content from social network, and we're considering adding more things to import from facebook. The friends list example from the article is a good one : As for my friend list.. well.. It's all in Json format.. So now you can essentially use the power of your brain to think how your friend looked. If you can't, well then you probably weren't friends anyway. Sorry. I'd be interested in your experiences either in leaving facebook, or about things you'd which you could have saved [1](https://www.getkumbu.com/ https://www.getkumbu.com/)

8fingerlouie 8y ago

Sadly deleting Facebook isn't an option for me, as it has become _the_ place to get notified about social events around here. Twitter/Reddit/whatever doesn't have as strong a presence here, and the traditional websites have all be replaced by facebook pages. I've cut out all the services from my life that siphons my "metadata", and while my daily Facebook usage was around 15 minutes/day, i still can't completely delete it. Instead i've banned the Facebook app from my phone/tablet and only check facebook when i'm at home during the evenings, and even then i use Firefox with Facebook Container. As for (Facebook) messenger, i'm trying hard to teach people that i don't use it, or telegram, and instead they can reach me on Signal, or just plain old iMessages/SMS. It takes a few weeks, but usually people "get it" when i don't reply to their messages.

dmos62 8y ago
Is deleting your account and creating an anonymous one to just check local events a viable option?
- notyourloops 8y ago
  Not really. Facebook will put your account in a cycle of verification hell. They really don't seem to like accounts of users trying to be anonymous. Granted, maybe someone else will have better luck with that than I did. For me, they essentially disabled my account and re-enabled it on a weekly basis. I got too annoyed and stopped using it as a result.

Phenomenit 8y ago

I have a account just for some niche buy and sell groups. No Pic no posts, nothing. I can even use it as a SSO. The only info fb has is when and where.

kinleyd 8y ago

I left my Facebook account idle for about 6 years now, and didn't miss it at all. Now I'm trying to delete it and I can't find the link to "Your Facebook Information" no matter where I look. This is where the delete option is according to Facebook's help section. Anyone having the same problem or is Facebook deliberately burying that link?

thisismyusernam 8y ago

This doesn't actually answer the issue posed in the title, "How not to lose your friends". I was expecting at least a little discussion on how to replace Facebook friends, how to stay connected, alternatives etc.

virmundi 8y ago
Text message. Just text them. You can send funny pictures. You can have group chats. You get all of this as part of your unlimited texting plan that's probably laying fallow.
okmokmz 8y ago
>how to replace Facebook friends Join another social network, add a bunch of people that you barely know, wah lah facebook friends replaced >how to stay connected Letters, phone calls, texts, meet in person, etc. How many friends do you have that you don't ever see or interact with besides on facebook, and what percentage of that group are actual friends that you would hangout with in person?
gfo 8y ago
Email, call, text them. I've started sending birthday cards to my close friends (whose birthdays I actually know) rather than simply writing a message on their profile or shooting a quick text. I've found most really appreciate the card - it's interesting how birthday cards used to seem the 'easy' way to wish someone a happy birthday but now they appear to have more meaning.

virmundi 8y ago

Why do people care about the photos? There's a Lewis Black joke where he opines on this exact same thing: "I didn't even like looking at my family photo album". Why not close the account and never look back without regard to the photos? There seems to be a belief that holding someone in your list of contacts is equivalent to being their friend. You're not. You're an entry in a really small Rolodex. If you haven't actually personally spoken with them in a few months, you are dusty card in that Rolodex. Burn the pile and let those relationships that matter emerge from the ash.

zer0faith 8y ago

Walking away from social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram was one best things I could do to reduce the negativity in my life.

barrad0s 8y ago

Deleted mine about 5 years ago, don't have any social media and I survived.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Rjevski 8y ago
GDPR subject access request (and deletion request for the "locked" accounts) to Facebook, and if that doesn't work complain to your country's privacy regulator (the ICO if you're in the UK).

capdeck 8y ago

So, he downloaded his data from Facebook... and uploaded it to Google. I don't know -- doesn't seem like anything has changed.

blancheneige 8y ago

as a side note, keep in mind that with the option of downloading your entire messaging history, it will be sent as an unencrypted zip file to your email address. a surveillance dragnet dream come true.

dmschulman 8y ago

Chiming in to say I'm similarly semi-disconnected from Facebook at this point. My account is still active and I still post occasional updates from a third-party platform (mostly articles I've read), but I rarely browse the site anymore. The only thing I find useful on Facebook that I can't find reliably anywhere else is a comprehensive listing of local events and concerts (as well as invites to things my friends host). If there were a separate site that could aggregate and organize events content as nicely and completely as FB does I would have deleted my account outright a while ago.

mkaziz 8y ago

Unfortunately, deleting facebook means losing captions on your photos. Most of my college memories are captioned, so I can't just delete my account :(

okmokmz 8y ago

I've always felt that if deleting facebook caused me to loose contact with someone entirely, we probably weren't really friends in the first place

elhudy 8y ago
Acquaintances who happened to have made great point-in-time connections should be viewed as potential "real" friends. I've met amazing people around the world who I would hate to sever connections with, but, by realities of living busy lives on opposite sides of the world, we don't communicate regularly. We've reconnected through work/vacation travels and been ecstatic about having local tour guides. For these connections, facebook has been my only lifeline as the commonality between us.

tokyodude 8y ago

Maybe I'm just not very social, I have 834 "friends" on facebook but I don't feel any need to delete it nor do I feel any fear of being left out or stuff like that nor do I spend too much time on or any of the myriad of other things so many HNers report with their experience on FB. I don't really want to delete it as it's how I stay in touch with friends and family. It's how most of my friends organize events. Messenger (not the FB app) is the #1 way friends communicate with me and each other as well. I did do a few things though. I aggressively unfollowed people. Anyone I only met a few times. Friends I haven't seen in years or don't expect to see. Anyone who posts too much (except my sister who I feel I can't unfollow). Friends who post too much political stuff. I click "this ad offends me on every ad". I use FB Purity on the desktop web site with about 10 filters to filter out a bunch of crap like "was mentioned in a post" or "replied to a comment", "shared her post", "shared his post", "is with" and other attention spam. Not that much shows up but I'm still able to keep up with a few really close friends and family and still participate in event organizing etc and not feel I'm being spammed too much. I don;'t have FB Purity on my phone but I guess I don't use the app all that much on the phone. I mostly use Messenger for messages and the FB app to look at profiles (linked from Messenger) and to read/post in shared event pages. Of course maybe you want to delete FB because of leaks or you just don't want to be tracked which are really good reasons to get off. All I'm trying to say is I don't recognize many of the other complaints in my own experiences with FB so maybe others might find those solutions useful?

0db532a0 8y ago

In 2013 I left Facebook. I decided who I wanted to stay in contact with and sent a message to each one explaining that I was leaving. I asked them to email me if they wanted to stay in contact. I am still in contact with every person I wanted to stay in contact with.

tmalsburg2 8y ago

If you lose contact with someone after deleting Facebook, they were not your friend in the first place. My conclusion after deleting my account four years ago. Getting rid of Facebook was one of the best decisions of my life.

jedimastert 8y ago
I don't think I agree with that idea. People have different ways of communicating, not to mention I don't think people who do use Facebook as a main communication method should be punished because you think you're above it.
- throwaway9763 8y ago
  People choosing to use a walled garden are being punished by those who would rather not? You may have that reversed - this isn't about thinking you're "above" a communication method, but it is worth noting that Facebook requires using their specific service while many other methods (phone, email, etc.) can be used from a variety of providers. So, saying "I only use Facebook to communicate" and expecting others to conform is a bit more naturally presumptuous than choosing to leave Facebook - and it's a fair point that if a relationship can't survive not using a specific proprietary tool, then maybe it wasn't that strong of a relationship.

gfo 8y ago

I've only deactivated Facebook, not deleted. I'm worried that if I completely delete I have no way left to access the data Facebook has on me. Is anyone aware of how their shadow profiles work? If I deactivate, are they still able to attribute things like someone uploading my number from their contacts back to my profile? It's this reason that I haven't nuked it entirely yet. I also use Messenger on occasion to communicate with those I haven't spoken to in a long time. I'm ready to make that leap soon. And no, not all of those folks whose numbers or email addresses I lack are not 'friends' necessarily - I have a few former colleagues and bosses on there as well I like to chat with on occasion.

andrewxhill 8y ago

We posted this a while back, just a simple tool to make the photo exports a bit better, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16682940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16682940

nvr219 8y ago

Put on google to keep photos secure??