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I realized I was checking facebook a lot each day whenever I had a spare moment, but didn't have anything really interesting happening, and I wanted to engage m
by brobdingnagians 8y ago
I realized I was checking facebook a lot each day whenever I had a spare moment, but didn't have anything really interesting happening, and I wanted to engage more with those around me and have more time for down-time thinking. So I deleted the app, knowing that making the threshold higher for checking it would reduce my usage, now I might check facebook once a month on my desktop, and still nothing happening, so it is super brief. My life is better, I feel better, my relationships are better, and I don't miss it at all.
- MattBearman 8y agoThis is exactly how my leaving facebook started. After a few months without the app I logged out on desktop, and then it wasn't long until I deactivated my account. I'd like to delete it entirely but at the moment too many people still use messenger to contact me.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoAnytime I speak with someone on Messenger, I mention my cellphone # and email. Gotta prime that OOB comms pump, otherwise you'll never break free. If only there was a Messenger API to setup an autoresponder with alternate contact info...
- davchana 8y agoAre not there some messenger bot which could do this?
- alexchantavy 8y agoSounds like it's time for Trillian to have a reboot just like Winamp did recently :-)
- sdegutis 8y agoOh man that brings back fond memories of creating Trillian 0.73-0.74 skins! I was just thinking the other day that I should make an app for Mac that lets you skin it via XML in the same way. Away with the conformity of Aqua and Aqua Dark, let creativity reign free!
- johnchristopher 8y agoYou can't set up a bot or an automated message for personnal accounts, only for pages.
- nickbarnwell 8y agoBut you could use the Bitlbee FBMQTT Plugin [1] and WeeChat's scripting functionality to implement it for your personal account. Probably an afternoon's worth of work if you have a VPS or t1.micro lying around to run a daemon on for a few months :) [1]: https://wiki.bitlbee.org/HowtoFacebookMQTT https://wiki.bitlbee.org/HowtoFacebookMQTT [2]: https://weechat.org/ https://weechat.org/
- bdamm 8y agoIt's nice that phone numbers are so stable these days.
- rtkwe 8y agoYeah used to be it'd be the opposite. We'd try desperately try to migrate everyone to using something like Messenger (eg: AIM or ICQ) because we couldn't count on our number remaining the same.
- rootusrootus 8y agoI wonder how long that will continue. I get so many spam calls every day (about a dozen now) that I am looking towards a future where I don't have a POTS number.
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- illegalsmile 8y agoThe spam phone calls and especially texts have dramatically risen over the last two years. Any idea why this is?
- simcop2387 8y agoI imagine a large part of it is the dramatic lower barrier thanks to services like twilio and competitors. They enable a lot of really cool tech but the programatic access to the phone network like that makes all that stuff significantly easier
- sudosteph 8y agoSo this is just my two-cents based on working for a VOIP company for a couple years, but I noticed a few patterns, specifically the industry-wide pressure to compete with Twilio, that seem to make it easier to spam text/calls. 1.) VOIP providers have low-barriers to sign-up (typically just a credit card fraud check + check to see if IP or address is from certain countries where fraud calls are common). The up-side to this is that it makes the user experience more friendly to real customers b/c they don't have to wait around, but the downside is that any spammer semi-familiar with the checks that get done can sign up and start sending spam calls for a day or two before most places get complaints and shut them down. The fact that many voip providers allow users to set their Display Id to anything too without any approval also is also really convenient for spammers (ie, there aren't usually ways to immediately detect when a user fraudently set their Caller Id to the name of a bank or something) 2.) APIs everywhere. Twilio got big in part b/c it made APIs available, but the smaller providers are catching up and also adding APIs for texting and calling services. Spammers can automate their spam and re-use the scripts between different accounts when they get banned, so it makes sending out spam texts easier too. 3.) VOIP companies actually are ok with some degree of spam, as long as the spammers pay their bills. So they don't have a motivation to actually stop all of it. Instead of blocking all spam-ish calls outright, some places will just make a deal so that some callers (identified by having a high rate of unanswered calls + very short length calls) pay a higher rate to compensate for potential reputation damage. This is meant for legal cold-calling I imagine, but in practice, they don't know what is actually being said on those phone calls.
- phreeza 8y agoWait, you can deactivate your account and still use messenger?
- strifey 8y agoYep. It currently explicitly states this and does it by default when you get to the final deactivation step. Previously it was an option you had to notice and click.
- tomjakubowski 8y agoI did this one time and my account ended up in a broken state where friends couldn't send me messages in long-running one-on-one Messenger chats (they got some mystery error like "This user is not accepting messages right now."). Group chats still worked and I could send messages to those same long-running Messenger conversations. Re-activating the Facebook side of the account resolved the issue. Caveat deactivator.
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- tomphoolery 8y agoYou can indeed! You can even reactivate your account _only_ for messenger. I kinda wish you could do that for events...
- brightball 8y agoThe only thing that keeps me on it is that college football season is really entertaining.
- TuringNYC 8y agoSlightly different scenario on my side -- I want to use it, but the timeline has gotten so limited it doesn't draw me in as much. (No, i'm not on blocked lists. But strange things happen, e.g., Facebook has decided that despite my brother and I being friends and being marked "close" and not blocking each other, we dont see many of each others' posts.) I'll confess I actually like using Facebook because it allows me to keep engaged and in touch with family with much less effort than before -- but whatever timeline changes they keep doing, I now see the same stories on my scroll. If I log in five times during the day, i see the same set of stories each of the five times. Result: I don't check it as much, dont want to check it as much. So much for ranking functions.
- te_chris 8y agoHonestly, I feel the same a bit. Like the company itself is cancerous - their complete lack of regard with the way they let hate spread on their platform is shameful. But...I've been on since the old days. I remember when it was actually a community platform and all your friends were there. That was pretty cool. Not sure where that's going to pop up next.
- erikig 8y agoI've never been a huge Facebook app user but the company definitely has me hooked on Whatsapp. All my friends, family, business partners, seem to have gravitated to Whatsapp and WhatsApp groups. It feels like Facebook.app is dead, Long live Facebook (Inc)...
- corobo 8y agoI've actually been seeing "No more posts" a lot recently. I scroll through two pageloads of content and then it tells me there's nothing more to display. Facebook, I've been signed up since you first opened up to non-edu accounts.. you're telling me there's nothing at all more to display?
- appleiigs 8y agoI want to check FB once a week or two to catch up on how my friends are doing, but the FB ranking also fails me. All I get is viral click-bait and none of the meaningful news of friends. One friend was sick, another launched an app... i found out about all this after. No reason to log in anymore.
- mrweasel 8y agoI believe that is how Facebook dies. Not people deleting their account, they’ll just stop checking their feed, because it’s spam and stuff friends likes or share and no longer posts about their life.
- 2sk21 8y agoThat pretty much exactly describes me - I never did delete the app on my phone but I can't remember when I last opened it. I just have no interest in checking it anymore.
- deminature 8y agoI stopped posting because of the whole thing about social media written in ink. I'm not posting something which may be held against me, or have me randomly shamed in the future because the nuance of my joke was lost in text. When I last posted in 2007, the internet seemed to be a much different, friendlier place. Facebook in 2007 was also mostly about friends, and not selling me stuff that it couldn't possibly know I was interested in unless my movements over the entire internet were being tracked.
- clarry 8y agoIt is frightening how the internet outrage culture is getting people fired and destroying their lives over some stupid tweet.
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- diogenescynic 8y agoChecking Facebook became the digital equivalent of looking in the fridge. You already know what’s in there, but you look anyways. Eventually people get over this. I notice far fewer of my friends seem to be posting and using it.
- nadim 8y agoSometimes I feel this way about the Internet in general.
- incadenza 8y agoIt’s like checking the fridge when you’re not even hungry. On steroids.
- cheeze 8y agoI worry if not Facebook its something else. I deleted fb but now I check this website a hundred times a day...
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoYou and me both. At least HN is educational. That's what I keep telling myself, at least.