10 ms·

Steve Pavlina: 30 days since I quit Facebook

187 points by egorst 16y ago

Zolomon 16y ago
Why the hell does he use the "Like" button if he's quit Facebook? (I know it's for others to share, but still. Double messages much?)
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- tygorius 16y ago
  If he'd written that Facebook was evil and the following are reasons no one should use it, I'd see your point. The closest he got to that it seems to me was pointing out the quantity/quality tradeoff. What he wrote were observations after quitting and several of the points he acknowledged were related to higher volume -- points that might not apply to readers with lower public profiles. Actually, there was a GTD aspect of it (inbox, Tweet usage, LinkedIn) that seemed right at home for HN.
- qntm 16y ago
  All of my blog posts have buttons for Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Facebook and StumbleUpon, none of which I use. There are a thousand other buttons I could add too. Hell, I have Adsense banners which I almost never see on account of Adblock. It's not hypocrisy, it's compatibility. Every social networking site offers a bunch of new interactions, and you can support members without endorsing membership.
- mbesto 16y ago
  I think that actually presents a crux to his argument. I don't personally use Facebook all that much now, but I have certain circles of friends who are easily more reachable via Facebook than say e-mail or phone. While they may not be my main groups of friends I still consider them part of my social circles and would like interaction from time to time.
leftnode 16y ago
Oh, quit using the site, not quit working there. I would've been more interested in the latter.
- GrooveStomp 16y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I think the headline is misleading.
  - lachyg 16y ago
    Maybe for this audience, but I don't think that would be confusing to non technical people (or people in the startup world).
  - justinchen 16y ago
    I guess it makes sense if you know who Steve Pavlina is. His stuff is very popular amongst the life hacker types.
- fossuser 16y ago
  I agree I found it ironic that those who 'quit' the site constantly feel the need to ramble about their life changing experiences. Facebook is a great utility and that's it, if you stop using it don't feel the need to share your experience with the world. These posts are uninteresting and usually pretty narcissistic.
nhangen 16y ago
He's mostly right, but I also get the sense that he misses it a bit and is trying to justify not using it - to himself. I agree with him in that FB communication is generally shallow - the less meaningful your status updates are, the more people seem to like them. I also tire of inspirational quotes and Internet Marketing pitches - MLM too. I continue to use it though because I'm not really bothered enough to ditch my account. On a side note - did anyone notice that the picture of SP in his sidebar looks like Julian Assange?
rw 16y ago
If he could learn to care less (for comparison, he should not try to read all of Twitter), then Facebook would not present such a problem.
- zalew 16y ago
  7 screens of text about quitting using facebook? He seems kind of obsessed by the idea. > My Facebook page was maxed out at 5K friends and was very active. 5000 friends??? No wonder he got tired of it. Before I passed 100 I rarely used the 'hide' button, now I use it more, and I think hiding people and blocking apps (and sometimes turning chat off) is a good way to make fb experience less annoying.
  - robryan 16y ago
    yeah, 5k friends would be a horrible experience unless they were mostly hidden from your stream. You would never see anything you close friends posted.
    - zalew 16y ago
      I don't get what's the point having 5000 people in the first place, unless you use fb only as a publishing stream (but that's what fanpages are for).
      - scott_s 16y ago
        The author of this piece is a professional blogger. Having 5,000 FB friends is probably natural to him because marketing himself is part of his job.
zmitri 16y ago
I quit using Facebook about 3-4 years ago while I was still in university. Extremely interesting experience.. people I used to be "friends" with got angry at me, people who I had friendly relationships with stopped communicating with me almost immediately, and I no longer received any invitations to any type of social events (http://www.thewrongbox.ca/videos/iamfacebook http://www.thewrongbox.ca/videos/iamfacebook). At first it was a little lonely, but it made me realize who my real friends were, and we interacted in more meaningful ways-- I also had more time to pursue other hobbies. I still do not have Facebook and I think my life is better for it. I like this article, and not with a "like" button. PS. I still use IM, and twitter like a notepad/thoughtstream (although I don't really promote it to friends).
- sudont 16y ago
  Same experience here, as soon as I dropped out of facebook, I was immediately blacklisted in every social circle that used it, even if the primary mode of communication was texting/email. Some op-ed considered dropping out of facebook as a radically anti-social act, and I'd have to agree: you're not considering the group's views on communication, and you're forcing them into a personal world. When the entire social circle uses facebook as a communication platform, it's pretty pompous to expect it to use what a single person wants. This is my argument boiled down: expecting a group of people to conform to a single person's views is rude, and the delusion that the one person is so important that everyone else will conform is anti-social. The majority opinion on HN seems to be that this isn't, oddly enough. The last time I stated my experience it seemed to piss a lot of people off, and there was a knee-jerk reaction that "true friends will work around it." Maybe, but weak connections are important as well, and since facebook is the place for weak-connection friends, defiantly not using it seems off and a little anti-social. Another argument was that interaction existed before facebook, so not using it is fine. That's dancing around the point: facebook is the current defacto standard of social communication, not participating it is seen as aggravating to the other party, not that it destroys communication completely. Try telling your friends that you'll only interact with them in orkut. Or, for the Gen X'rs here, that you're dropping your phone, and you expect them to say "hi, how's the job" through post mail and in-person visits. There's a series of fall backs here that's reversed for the average hacker. The hacker sees facebook as personal, and email/phone public. The average person sees facebook as a public place, and email/phone as a personal channel.
toadi 16y ago
Don't see what the problem is? Why do you need to quit facebook? Even after reading all these arguments. I'm on facebook where I occasionally share a picture of my son or a picture from something I enjoy. I don't post often but this way my parents en grandparents can see my son growing up. Don't actually care if my 'friends' see this. When I'm on the toilet I sometimes take my iphone and check the FB stream. Check it when I don't have much time or feel like investing a lot of effort in reading something. Just use it like you want to use it. This whole social network hype, like you can only be social online. People have been social even before the phone was invented. It is just another extra tool and doesn't replace normal social interaction. It never will!
- awakeasleep 16y ago
  I'm really interested in the difference between your perspective (which I share) and the perspective of Mr Pavlina (which my friends share). I see people's attitudes towards FB fall into these two distinct camps: 1) People who feel compelled by FB somehow, and end up deleting their profiles or "Quitting" entirely, and 2) People who have a profile, but don't feel compelled to check it or interact- except at their leisure. I think it has something to do with implied disrespect when you don't get back to people quickly; Ignoring a text or phone call sends a message. Does 'ignoring' a facebook ping send that same message? What about failing to respond to an indirect message on Facebook? There must be some sort of social phenomenon putting uncomfortable pressure on people somewhere in the setup of facebook.
  - toadi 16y ago
    I agree. But I don't see Facebook as a direct communication link. It is just a feed that I consume at my leisure. If you want to contact me and are in my circle of people that have my cell number that is the best way to directly contact me. But even on my cell I sometimes choose not to pick up immediately and listen to the voicemail. This way I can decide if the message needs my direct interaction. Anyway people put to high of hopes on tools. Social interaction is about people and not the tools.
  - DanI-S 16y ago
jonpaul 16y ago
Twitter is almost the same. Except that with Twitter you can receive useful information/links from those who tweet about a specific niche. I can't stand when some tweet about being drunk, getting a new haircut, etc. Fortunately there is an "Unfollow" button.
ben1040 16y ago
I found that much of the "noise" on Facebook comes from the fact that I had too many "e-friends" at even 100-110 people. It was still well under the Dunbar[1] threshold, as I knew who they all were and could probably spend an hour on each one of them telling you how I knew them in high school or college, etc. But I simply got no value out of seeing a post from a woman I dated briefly in college 9 years ago talking about what new yoga studio she was teaching at, or from an old high school classmate saying what airport he was currently passing through. The noise was just too loud and overpowering. I ended up deleting my account. A few months later I came back under a made-up new email address so those folks wouldn't find me again. My e-friends list now is only about 40 people, cut way down -- specifically people I see every week or two or people I would otherwise invite into my home without any hesitation. With less noise from people I simply don't care much about anymore, I see useful things. And I feel better about sharing a interesting news article from HN or a picture from a dinner party with my small inner circle, without feeling like I'm spamming dozens of people who just don't care. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number
- natrius 16y ago
  It's very easy to hide people from your news feed without having to actively avoid them. Click the X next to their posts.
  - apotheon 16y ago
    Of course, they're less likely to get angry with you if they just think you've gotten off Facebook entirely than if they think you're ignoring them while still accessible to them.
    - zacharycohn 16y ago
      They have no way of knowing you've hidden them.
      - apotheon 16y ago
andresmh 16y ago
I don't get why he needed to delete the account completely or why he felt obligated to respond to the messages he got from fans. He could have _changed_ his use of Facebook. He could use Facebook more like Twitter without paying the publicity price of not having Facebook, especially for someone who is a what he is for a living.
funkdobiest 16y ago
Never had a Facebook account, never will. I see it as a closed fractured environment of the web, that needs to go the way of Friendster and Myspace.
l0nwlf 16y ago
The article convinced me that it is for good that I never created a Facebook account. Recently I have been under lot of peer pressure to create a Facebook account for so called social-connectivity.
qntm 16y ago
All of this says nothing about e.g. the fact that Facebook is a corporation whose business model revolves around the acquisition of information about its users. I'm paranoid about information about myself. I left Facebook because I want explicit, direct control over what information about me is made available to whom. Yes, Facebook has privacy controls, but they are Facebook's privacy controls.
- gnosis 16y ago
  I completely agree. The primary reason I left Facebook was because of concerns about my privacy. No corporation has a right to know who my friends are and who I associate with (much less exploit that information for advertising, or sell it to anyone who wants to pay for it). I find it really disturbing that so many people in this world are so ready to give up their privacy and information about themselves for very dubious "services" like Facebook and other social media sites, not to mention things like online tax services, video/book recommendation services, etc.. All of these services that are collecting information about you, your friends, and your preferences are going to be datamined to figure out even more information about you. For instance, there has been research done to figure out political affiliation and sexual preferences from the movies one watches on Netflix. It's really just a matter of time before information like that gets used to discriminate against people (or worse).
incandenza 16y ago
Now he can start counting "days since I stopped telling people about how I quit Facebook".
notyourwork 16y ago
I read this as "quit my employment at facebook", thoroughly upsetting to determine he meant stop using the service.
JanezStupar 16y ago
Well I guess its time that I start a blog and write a post about how I never started a FB account and how I never bought a TV either. Damn, my life is completely filled with all the relationship I can muster. I get to get my work done and surf teh web a bit. I also get to exercise some. In any case the days are still too short for me - why the hell would I want to join the worlds biggest privacy fraud? Yes I have been smart enough to foresee all the negative sides of it 4 years ago. Ain't I cool?
lurkinggrue 16y ago
I never fully joined facebook. The account creation process just turned me off with it bugging me for my gmail account. That and I am not interested in anybody from high school.
ams6110 16y ago
If you’re an active Facebook user, and you go 30 days without it, you’ll gain a much clearer understanding of its role in your life. From a fairly long piece, I think this is the salient point.
agentultra 16y ago
I quit over a year ago. Out right deleted my profile. Not a whole lot has changed. I don't get to passively select events and friends to hang out with. So I have to actively maintain a social life. Which is harder, granted, only because managing to stay in touch with more than a dozen or so people in any meaningful way is quite difficult to do. However, the quality of those relationships is quite high. I also have the added bonus of not showing up in ads or have some creep-o advertiser/marketer snooping on my data stream to sell me more crap I don't want or need. It took me a long time to jump on the facebook bandwagon. I only opened an account at the behest of friends who had all but forgotten what a phone was. I tried it and I can now honestly say I was right about it in the first place. Huge. Waste. Of. Time.
nutanc 16y ago
Facebook or any other social network works on our egos. We all want to show off how witty we are and how happy we are.Thats why we always see only the happy side of a persons life on any social network. And thats the reason you see only a 'like' button on Facebook. Enable a 'dislike' button and you will see many more dropouts. Actually, we can try one more experiment. The next time we don't like something, we say 'dislike' in the comments.Lets see if we can do that.
- notyourwork 16y ago
  I already do: "I would dislike this if I could".
  - deleted 16y ago
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markkat 16y ago
I quit LinkedIn a couple of days ago. I got a status update of some contact or other, and thought: "What is this? Why do I have this?" I feel much better not having something that felt so obligatory, yet so unlike me. These networks seem to leverage social pressure as much as they solve problems.
- kordless 16y ago
  I quit FB, but would never quit LinkedIn. It's key to my day to day business relationships.
  - markkat 16y ago
    I'm in research. PubMed is my LinkedIn. :)
- cmos 16y ago
  I quit linkedin when, while trying to send a single person an invite, it sent one to my entire gmail address book. Since I didn't recall ever giving it my address book, and it was a seemingly almost purposely bad UI design that ended up with me spamming my friends and family, I promptly quit, in the middle of a job search nonetheless. There's just something about these worlds that seems unreal, or a slight version of dishonest. Never have joined facebook and time has made me happier with that decision every single day.
arjunnarayan 16y ago
I quit facebook about a month ago. Most of what Steve Pavlina says is quite right and I'm probably better off without it, but there is one feature that I sorely miss: As a young un still at a university, facebook was extremely useful for getting in touch with girls who I meet around campus randomly. "I'll look you up on facebook" is a much lower commitment and casual line than "What's your phone number".
- KMStraub 16y ago
  I'm creating a product that hopefully fills this void. A casual, non-committal way to show someone you'd like to get to know them better--without all the noise. I'm also a girl, so my main concern is building something that doesn't veer into creep-ville. I'll keep you posted.
Legion 16y ago
I wonder how many more people have to quit Facebook before we stop getting these "I quit Social Network X" martyr posts. Honestly, it's like the people who never fail to let a new acquaintance know that they abstain from owning televisions.
vertr 16y ago
There was a twitter meme going around yesterday: "not having facebook is the new not owning a TV." I think that this phenomenon is mostly a bandwagon of Guru's who want to have something new and 'revolutionary' to present to their followers. Pavlina's always telling people to quit something. First it was regular sleep, then monogamy, etc. While he purports to be anti-consumption, this really just makes us focus on our consumption even more. A better strategy for a balanced digital life is to pragmatically audit your useage on an ongoing basis.
- ludwigvan 16y ago
  Wow, interesting. I knew about Pavlina only through his writings on polyphasic sleep. His stance on monogamy seems to be really interesting though (and weird for me)[1]. I remember him writing that one reason for quitting polyphasic sleep was that he didn't spend much time in bed with his wife. It's interesting to note that Facebook seems to me to be a vehicle that can be easily abused to bypass monogamy. Maybe the pieces fit in the end. [1] http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2009/01/polyamory/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2009/01/polyamory/
  - scott_s 16y ago
    The other reason, which he probably didn't admit to himself and certainly didn't admit to the world, is that he was probably soul-crushingly tired all the time. See: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm
- Confusion 16y ago
  That is certainly a better strategy, but is it realistic? It seems to me most people do not succeed in doing so and never will. They get addicted easily and forget to pay attention to what they are doing on a meta-level.
- Estragon 16y ago
  A better strategy for a balanced digital life is to pragmatically audit your useage on an ongoing basis. That sounds interesting. Can you be more specific?
RoadRunner_23 16y ago
I think, I need to quit Hacker News as well.. takes up too much time...
BlazingFrog 16y ago
>maxed out at 5K friends Really????? I don't even think I met that many people in my 30+ years of life! When you take anything to that extreme, it inevitably starts to lose some of its original meaning at some point. The word "friend" in the context of Facebook creeps me out more and more. It devalues immensely what it really means to be someone's friend.
zacharycohn 16y ago
I don't know why more people don't use the "hide" feature. I was rapidly becoming sick of Facebook. I only friended people that I'd met before, but even so it was polluted by people who I went to middle school, etc. with who I really didn't know that well even then. Then I found the "Hide" option. I hide probably 95% of my "friends." After I did this, I LOVED using Facebook again. Every time I logged in, I was able to keep up with good friends of mine who live in other parts of the state, country, world. These are people I DO care about, often talk to in other ways, but it's a nice aggregator. If I post something, everyone that isn't directly relevant to my life can still see and comment on it, but I don't have to see their stuff. It's perfect, it really revitalized Facebook for me and it's actually FUN to use again.
- u48998 16y ago
  I agree. The day I learned to hide (apps spam etc and people) the day I started using Facebook without any issue.
- cabalamat 16y ago
  > Then I found the "Hide" option. I didn't know Facebook could do that! In general, I find fb's user interface confusing. Recently, I was trying to get it to display a list of all my friends; I managed to get it done eventually, but it took effort and frustration.
- jdminhbg 16y ago
  I tried doing the "Hide" thing for a while, but there are two problems: 1) It's a pain in the ass to hunt down and hide various people and apps, and you have to keep up with it. Consequently, your friends who are likely to say interesting things but not spend a ton of time tweaking their FB settings tend to drift off, driving your signal down. 2) Hiding people is a blunt instrument -- you hide someone who's 98% noisy but 2% interesting, and you've hidden more signal you wanted to see. Then, when they ask you about why you didn't see their baby photos, you have to tell them that the answer is because you were sick of "Which Twilight Character Are You?" and hid them. In the end, it's easier just to quit and go back to using the regular internet.
motters 16y ago
Facebook is not necessarily bad, provided that you don't hold any false beliefs about the nature of this particular beast. Like everything which has a slightly competitive or sociable element to it, it can be abused and folks can become addicted to it. Similar criticisms could be made about online games or virtual worlds, which encourage multiple trivial interactions with "friends" in a tightening web of obligations. Personally, I'll be happier when decentralised equivalents to Facebook become more of a viable option, such as Appleseed or Diaspora. At least then you'll be able to choose not to live your online life inside of a panopticon where not so trustworthy entities are constantly peering over your shoulder.
chopsueyar 16y ago
I thought he was a developer that quit working at Facebook.
frevd 16y ago
Congrats Steve, for abandoning it. WOW offers kind of the same addictive business model, but is obviously better at keeping ppl busy. I myself never had that kind of problem since I never got the clou about that swarm thing, or about social interaction either. However, it surprises me how constant connection to all parts in the world, a phenomen the internet introduced, can lead to such effects as depersonlization. As a business proposal - wouldn't it be interesting to have a platform that artificially separates people, to allow for some deference so ppl actually have sth to say to each other when they meet? I guess WOW got that right again. Seems we can learn something here - mankind is not supposed to be a swarm, at least I wouldn't like the idea (that's why I'd be the only individual left when that happens to happen ;). my 2ct
toephu 16y ago
that is one damn long essay about facebook
joubert 16y ago
There is a Facebook Like button right at the top of the post. The irony.
idonthack 16y ago
>online “friends”, most of whom I’d never met in person. well there's your problem.
jschuur 16y ago
Somewhat related, Steve made a great post 5 years ago about news addiction and how he doesn't watch/follow the news anymore. http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/09/overcoming-news-addiction/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/09/overcoming-news-add... Highly recommended, even though I fail completely at the advice and am glued to Al Jazeera English right now. And don't get me started on tech news ;)
deleted 16y ago
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phreakhead 16y ago
No wonder he didn't like Facebook: he has no real friends! 5000+ friends and he never met any of them face-to-face? What is the point of that? I only friend someone if I've met them before in a real-life situation. If the relationship never goes past that in real life, then I usually just end up hiding them from my news feed and forgetting about them. I'm sure they do the same for me and I don't give it a second thought. However, I do get tremendous value out of my real friends on Facebook, since we share event invites, photos of our trips, news articles/videos that we share interest in, etc. I am a performer and all my performer/musician friends are on Facebook, and that is the main medium for getting news out about a show. The days of posting flyers on telephone poles and cafe windows are over - if you are not posting your upcoming shows on Facebook and inviting your friends, then your band is going to struggle to sell tickets.
teyc 16y ago
This is why Facebook needs to become your inbox, because it allows Facebook to better understand who you are interested in, and stay relevant. I wonder why FB haven't asked for your web mail logon, and mined the emails to better understand who you already interact with.
jcizzle 16y ago
Thought he quit working for Facebook, too. Thoroughly disappointed when I found out he was just complaining that his life was so pathetic that it warranted 5 full-trackpad swipes of self-righteous douchebaggery on why he is single.
yaix 16y ago
A very interesting read, until "... my 5k friends ...". Dude, it's Twitter you are looking for. And you should call those people "followers" and not friends (half of them are fake profiles for SEO purposes anyway).
Kliment 16y ago
Wow! I feel my stance on this has just been dramatically confirmed. Some years ago, I wrote a rant ( http://everything2.com/title/Facebook+destroys+real+relationships http://everything2.com/title/Facebook+destroys+real+relation... ) for the purpose of having a fixed thing to send people who would ask me why I'm not on Facebook. I got tired of explaining it over and over, so I wrote this. I got both positive and negative responses to it, and they fit a very definite pattern. The positive responses were always short and in the line of "this is exactly how I feel about this, glad I'm not alone". The negative responses were variations of "you've never tried it, so you can't possibly know what it's like", with optional "take your uninformed opinion elsewhere". Now, Steve, as someone who has actually used the site for a nontrivial amount of time, writes a post bringing up mostly the same points. That feels nice.
webuiarchitect 16y ago
Wow! I left Facebook a year back for the very same reasons. But my thoughts weren't so well organized. Thank you very much for the nice write-up.
yembi 16y ago
I use a combination of Hide (after I see someone who likes to spam crap like "I'm at a coffee shop") and: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-friend-request-notifi/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-frie... for notifications.

187 points by egorst 16y ago

Why the hell does he use the "Like" button if he's quit Facebook? (I know it's for others to share, but still. Double messages much?)

deleted 16y ago
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tygorius 16y ago
If he'd written that Facebook was evil and the following are reasons no one should use it, I'd see your point. The closest he got to that it seems to me was pointing out the quantity/quality tradeoff. What he wrote were observations after quitting and several of the points he acknowledged were related to higher volume -- points that might not apply to readers with lower public profiles. Actually, there was a GTD aspect of it (inbox, Tweet usage, LinkedIn) that seemed right at home for HN.
qntm 16y ago
All of my blog posts have buttons for Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Facebook and StumbleUpon, none of which I use. There are a thousand other buttons I could add too. Hell, I have Adsense banners which I almost never see on account of Adblock. It's not hypocrisy, it's compatibility. Every social networking site offers a bunch of new interactions, and you can support members without endorsing membership.
mbesto 16y ago
I think that actually presents a crux to his argument. I don't personally use Facebook all that much now, but I have certain circles of friends who are easily more reachable via Facebook than say e-mail or phone. While they may not be my main groups of friends I still consider them part of my social circles and would like interaction from time to time.

leftnode 16y ago

Oh, quit using the site, not quit working there. I would've been more interested in the latter.

GrooveStomp 16y ago
My thoughts exactly. I think the headline is misleading.
- lachyg 16y ago
  Maybe for this audience, but I don't think that would be confusing to non technical people (or people in the startup world).
- justinchen 16y ago
  I guess it makes sense if you know who Steve Pavlina is. His stuff is very popular amongst the life hacker types.
fossuser 16y ago
I agree I found it ironic that those who 'quit' the site constantly feel the need to ramble about their life changing experiences. Facebook is a great utility and that's it, if you stop using it don't feel the need to share your experience with the world. These posts are uninteresting and usually pretty narcissistic.

nhangen 16y ago

He's mostly right, but I also get the sense that he misses it a bit and is trying to justify not using it - to himself. I agree with him in that FB communication is generally shallow - the less meaningful your status updates are, the more people seem to like them. I also tire of inspirational quotes and Internet Marketing pitches - MLM too. I continue to use it though because I'm not really bothered enough to ditch my account. On a side note - did anyone notice that the picture of SP in his sidebar looks like Julian Assange?

rw 16y ago

If he could learn to care less (for comparison, he should not try to read all of Twitter), then Facebook would not present such a problem.

zalew 16y ago
7 screens of text about quitting using facebook? He seems kind of obsessed by the idea. > My Facebook page was maxed out at 5K friends and was very active. 5000 friends??? No wonder he got tired of it. Before I passed 100 I rarely used the 'hide' button, now I use it more, and I think hiding people and blocking apps (and sometimes turning chat off) is a good way to make fb experience less annoying.
- robryan 16y ago
  yeah, 5k friends would be a horrible experience unless they were mostly hidden from your stream. You would never see anything you close friends posted.
  - zalew 16y ago
    I don't get what's the point having 5000 people in the first place, unless you use fb only as a publishing stream (but that's what fanpages are for).
    - scott_s 16y ago
      The author of this piece is a professional blogger. Having 5,000 FB friends is probably natural to him because marketing himself is part of his job.

zmitri 16y ago

I quit using Facebook about 3-4 years ago while I was still in university. Extremely interesting experience.. people I used to be "friends" with got angry at me, people who I had friendly relationships with stopped communicating with me almost immediately, and I no longer received any invitations to any type of social events (http://www.thewrongbox.ca/videos/iamfacebook http://www.thewrongbox.ca/videos/iamfacebook). At first it was a little lonely, but it made me realize who my real friends were, and we interacted in more meaningful ways-- I also had more time to pursue other hobbies. I still do not have Facebook and I think my life is better for it. I like this article, and not with a "like" button. PS. I still use IM, and twitter like a notepad/thoughtstream (although I don't really promote it to friends).

sudont 16y ago
Same experience here, as soon as I dropped out of facebook, I was immediately blacklisted in every social circle that used it, even if the primary mode of communication was texting/email. Some op-ed considered dropping out of facebook as a radically anti-social act, and I'd have to agree: you're not considering the group's views on communication, and you're forcing them into a personal world. When the entire social circle uses facebook as a communication platform, it's pretty pompous to expect it to use what a single person wants. This is my argument boiled down: expecting a group of people to conform to a single person's views is rude, and the delusion that the one person is so important that everyone else will conform is anti-social. The majority opinion on HN seems to be that this isn't, oddly enough. The last time I stated my experience it seemed to piss a lot of people off, and there was a knee-jerk reaction that "true friends will work around it." Maybe, but weak connections are important as well, and since facebook is the place for weak-connection friends, defiantly not using it seems off and a little anti-social. Another argument was that interaction existed before facebook, so not using it is fine. That's dancing around the point: facebook is the current defacto standard of social communication, not participating it is seen as aggravating to the other party, not that it destroys communication completely. Try telling your friends that you'll only interact with them in orkut. Or, for the Gen X'rs here, that you're dropping your phone, and you expect them to say "hi, how's the job" through post mail and in-person visits. There's a series of fall backs here that's reversed for the average hacker. The hacker sees facebook as personal, and email/phone public. The average person sees facebook as a public place, and email/phone as a personal channel.

toadi 16y ago

Don't see what the problem is? Why do you need to quit facebook? Even after reading all these arguments. I'm on facebook where I occasionally share a picture of my son or a picture from something I enjoy. I don't post often but this way my parents en grandparents can see my son growing up. Don't actually care if my 'friends' see this. When I'm on the toilet I sometimes take my iphone and check the FB stream. Check it when I don't have much time or feel like investing a lot of effort in reading something. Just use it like you want to use it. This whole social network hype, like you can only be social online. People have been social even before the phone was invented. It is just another extra tool and doesn't replace normal social interaction. It never will!

awakeasleep 16y ago
I'm really interested in the difference between your perspective (which I share) and the perspective of Mr Pavlina (which my friends share). I see people's attitudes towards FB fall into these two distinct camps: 1) People who feel compelled by FB somehow, and end up deleting their profiles or "Quitting" entirely, and 2) People who have a profile, but don't feel compelled to check it or interact- except at their leisure. I think it has something to do with implied disrespect when you don't get back to people quickly; Ignoring a text or phone call sends a message. Does 'ignoring' a facebook ping send that same message? What about failing to respond to an indirect message on Facebook? There must be some sort of social phenomenon putting uncomfortable pressure on people somewhere in the setup of facebook.
- toadi 16y ago
  I agree. But I don't see Facebook as a direct communication link. It is just a feed that I consume at my leisure. If you want to contact me and are in my circle of people that have my cell number that is the best way to directly contact me. But even on my cell I sometimes choose not to pick up immediately and listen to the voicemail. This way I can decide if the message needs my direct interaction. Anyway people put to high of hopes on tools. Social interaction is about people and not the tools.
- DanI-S 16y ago

jonpaul 16y ago

Twitter is almost the same. Except that with Twitter you can receive useful information/links from those who tweet about a specific niche. I can't stand when some tweet about being drunk, getting a new haircut, etc. Fortunately there is an "Unfollow" button.

ben1040 16y ago

I found that much of the "noise" on Facebook comes from the fact that I had too many "e-friends" at even 100-110 people. It was still well under the Dunbar[1] threshold, as I knew who they all were and could probably spend an hour on each one of them telling you how I knew them in high school or college, etc. But I simply got no value out of seeing a post from a woman I dated briefly in college 9 years ago talking about what new yoga studio she was teaching at, or from an old high school classmate saying what airport he was currently passing through. The noise was just too loud and overpowering. I ended up deleting my account. A few months later I came back under a made-up new email address so those folks wouldn't find me again. My e-friends list now is only about 40 people, cut way down -- specifically people I see every week or two or people I would otherwise invite into my home without any hesitation. With less noise from people I simply don't care much about anymore, I see useful things. And I feel better about sharing a interesting news article from HN or a picture from a dinner party with my small inner circle, without feeling like I'm spamming dozens of people who just don't care. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number

natrius 16y ago
It's very easy to hide people from your news feed without having to actively avoid them. Click the X next to their posts.
- apotheon 16y ago
  Of course, they're less likely to get angry with you if they just think you've gotten off Facebook entirely than if they think you're ignoring them while still accessible to them.
  - zacharycohn 16y ago
    They have no way of knowing you've hidden them.
    - apotheon 16y ago

andresmh 16y ago

I don't get why he needed to delete the account completely or why he felt obligated to respond to the messages he got from fans. He could have _changed_ his use of Facebook. He could use Facebook more like Twitter without paying the publicity price of not having Facebook, especially for someone who is a what he is for a living.

funkdobiest 16y ago

Never had a Facebook account, never will. I see it as a closed fractured environment of the web, that needs to go the way of Friendster and Myspace.

l0nwlf 16y ago

The article convinced me that it is for good that I never created a Facebook account. Recently I have been under lot of peer pressure to create a Facebook account for so called social-connectivity.

qntm 16y ago

All of this says nothing about e.g. the fact that Facebook is a corporation whose business model revolves around the acquisition of information about its users. I'm paranoid about information about myself. I left Facebook because I want explicit, direct control over what information about me is made available to whom. Yes, Facebook has privacy controls, but they are Facebook's privacy controls.

gnosis 16y ago
I completely agree. The primary reason I left Facebook was because of concerns about my privacy. No corporation has a right to know who my friends are and who I associate with (much less exploit that information for advertising, or sell it to anyone who wants to pay for it). I find it really disturbing that so many people in this world are so ready to give up their privacy and information about themselves for very dubious "services" like Facebook and other social media sites, not to mention things like online tax services, video/book recommendation services, etc.. All of these services that are collecting information about you, your friends, and your preferences are going to be datamined to figure out even more information about you. For instance, there has been research done to figure out political affiliation and sexual preferences from the movies one watches on Netflix. It's really just a matter of time before information like that gets used to discriminate against people (or worse).

incandenza 16y ago

Now he can start counting "days since I stopped telling people about how I quit Facebook".

notyourwork 16y ago

I read this as "quit my employment at facebook", thoroughly upsetting to determine he meant stop using the service.

JanezStupar 16y ago

Well I guess its time that I start a blog and write a post about how I never started a FB account and how I never bought a TV either. Damn, my life is completely filled with all the relationship I can muster. I get to get my work done and surf teh web a bit. I also get to exercise some. In any case the days are still too short for me - why the hell would I want to join the worlds biggest privacy fraud? Yes I have been smart enough to foresee all the negative sides of it 4 years ago. Ain't I cool?

lurkinggrue 16y ago

I never fully joined facebook. The account creation process just turned me off with it bugging me for my gmail account. That and I am not interested in anybody from high school.

ams6110 16y ago

If you’re an active Facebook user, and you go 30 days without it, you’ll gain a much clearer understanding of its role in your life. From a fairly long piece, I think this is the salient point.

agentultra 16y ago

I quit over a year ago. Out right deleted my profile. Not a whole lot has changed. I don't get to passively select events and friends to hang out with. So I have to actively maintain a social life. Which is harder, granted, only because managing to stay in touch with more than a dozen or so people in any meaningful way is quite difficult to do. However, the quality of those relationships is quite high. I also have the added bonus of not showing up in ads or have some creep-o advertiser/marketer snooping on my data stream to sell me more crap I don't want or need. It took me a long time to jump on the facebook bandwagon. I only opened an account at the behest of friends who had all but forgotten what a phone was. I tried it and I can now honestly say I was right about it in the first place. Huge. Waste. Of. Time.

nutanc 16y ago

Facebook or any other social network works on our egos. We all want to show off how witty we are and how happy we are.Thats why we always see only the happy side of a persons life on any social network. And thats the reason you see only a 'like' button on Facebook. Enable a 'dislike' button and you will see many more dropouts. Actually, we can try one more experiment. The next time we don't like something, we say 'dislike' in the comments.Lets see if we can do that.

notyourwork 16y ago
I already do: "I would dislike this if I could".
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

markkat 16y ago

I quit LinkedIn a couple of days ago. I got a status update of some contact or other, and thought: "What is this? Why do I have this?" I feel much better not having something that felt so obligatory, yet so unlike me. These networks seem to leverage social pressure as much as they solve problems.

kordless 16y ago
I quit FB, but would never quit LinkedIn. It's key to my day to day business relationships.
- markkat 16y ago
  I'm in research. PubMed is my LinkedIn. :)
cmos 16y ago
I quit linkedin when, while trying to send a single person an invite, it sent one to my entire gmail address book. Since I didn't recall ever giving it my address book, and it was a seemingly almost purposely bad UI design that ended up with me spamming my friends and family, I promptly quit, in the middle of a job search nonetheless. There's just something about these worlds that seems unreal, or a slight version of dishonest. Never have joined facebook and time has made me happier with that decision every single day.

arjunnarayan 16y ago

I quit facebook about a month ago. Most of what Steve Pavlina says is quite right and I'm probably better off without it, but there is one feature that I sorely miss: As a young un still at a university, facebook was extremely useful for getting in touch with girls who I meet around campus randomly. "I'll look you up on facebook" is a much lower commitment and casual line than "What's your phone number".

KMStraub 16y ago
I'm creating a product that hopefully fills this void. A casual, non-committal way to show someone you'd like to get to know them better--without all the noise. I'm also a girl, so my main concern is building something that doesn't veer into creep-ville. I'll keep you posted.

Legion 16y ago

I wonder how many more people have to quit Facebook before we stop getting these "I quit Social Network X" martyr posts. Honestly, it's like the people who never fail to let a new acquaintance know that they abstain from owning televisions.

vertr 16y ago

There was a twitter meme going around yesterday: "not having facebook is the new not owning a TV." I think that this phenomenon is mostly a bandwagon of Guru's who want to have something new and 'revolutionary' to present to their followers. Pavlina's always telling people to quit something. First it was regular sleep, then monogamy, etc. While he purports to be anti-consumption, this really just makes us focus on our consumption even more. A better strategy for a balanced digital life is to pragmatically audit your useage on an ongoing basis.

ludwigvan 16y ago
Wow, interesting. I knew about Pavlina only through his writings on polyphasic sleep. His stance on monogamy seems to be really interesting though (and weird for me)[1]. I remember him writing that one reason for quitting polyphasic sleep was that he didn't spend much time in bed with his wife. It's interesting to note that Facebook seems to me to be a vehicle that can be easily abused to bypass monogamy. Maybe the pieces fit in the end. [1] http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2009/01/polyamory/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2009/01/polyamory/
- scott_s 16y ago
  The other reason, which he probably didn't admit to himself and certainly didn't admit to the world, is that he was probably soul-crushingly tired all the time. See: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm
Confusion 16y ago
That is certainly a better strategy, but is it realistic? It seems to me most people do not succeed in doing so and never will. They get addicted easily and forget to pay attention to what they are doing on a meta-level.
Estragon 16y ago
A better strategy for a balanced digital life is to pragmatically audit your useage on an ongoing basis. That sounds interesting. Can you be more specific?

RoadRunner_23 16y ago

I think, I need to quit Hacker News as well.. takes up too much time...

BlazingFrog 16y ago

>maxed out at 5K friends Really????? I don't even think I met that many people in my 30+ years of life! When you take anything to that extreme, it inevitably starts to lose some of its original meaning at some point. The word "friend" in the context of Facebook creeps me out more and more. It devalues immensely what it really means to be someone's friend.

zacharycohn 16y ago

I don't know why more people don't use the "hide" feature. I was rapidly becoming sick of Facebook. I only friended people that I'd met before, but even so it was polluted by people who I went to middle school, etc. with who I really didn't know that well even then. Then I found the "Hide" option. I hide probably 95% of my "friends." After I did this, I LOVED using Facebook again. Every time I logged in, I was able to keep up with good friends of mine who live in other parts of the state, country, world. These are people I DO care about, often talk to in other ways, but it's a nice aggregator. If I post something, everyone that isn't directly relevant to my life can still see and comment on it, but I don't have to see their stuff. It's perfect, it really revitalized Facebook for me and it's actually FUN to use again.

u48998 16y ago
I agree. The day I learned to hide (apps spam etc and people) the day I started using Facebook without any issue.
cabalamat 16y ago
> Then I found the "Hide" option. I didn't know Facebook could do that! In general, I find fb's user interface confusing. Recently, I was trying to get it to display a list of all my friends; I managed to get it done eventually, but it took effort and frustration.
jdminhbg 16y ago
I tried doing the "Hide" thing for a while, but there are two problems: 1) It's a pain in the ass to hunt down and hide various people and apps, and you have to keep up with it. Consequently, your friends who are likely to say interesting things but not spend a ton of time tweaking their FB settings tend to drift off, driving your signal down. 2) Hiding people is a blunt instrument -- you hide someone who's 98% noisy but 2% interesting, and you've hidden more signal you wanted to see. Then, when they ask you about why you didn't see their baby photos, you have to tell them that the answer is because you were sick of "Which Twilight Character Are You?" and hid them. In the end, it's easier just to quit and go back to using the regular internet.

motters 16y ago

Facebook is not necessarily bad, provided that you don't hold any false beliefs about the nature of this particular beast. Like everything which has a slightly competitive or sociable element to it, it can be abused and folks can become addicted to it. Similar criticisms could be made about online games or virtual worlds, which encourage multiple trivial interactions with "friends" in a tightening web of obligations. Personally, I'll be happier when decentralised equivalents to Facebook become more of a viable option, such as Appleseed or Diaspora. At least then you'll be able to choose not to live your online life inside of a panopticon where not so trustworthy entities are constantly peering over your shoulder.

chopsueyar 16y ago

I thought he was a developer that quit working at Facebook.

frevd 16y ago

Congrats Steve, for abandoning it. WOW offers kind of the same addictive business model, but is obviously better at keeping ppl busy. I myself never had that kind of problem since I never got the clou about that swarm thing, or about social interaction either. However, it surprises me how constant connection to all parts in the world, a phenomen the internet introduced, can lead to such effects as depersonlization. As a business proposal - wouldn't it be interesting to have a platform that artificially separates people, to allow for some deference so ppl actually have sth to say to each other when they meet? I guess WOW got that right again. Seems we can learn something here - mankind is not supposed to be a swarm, at least I wouldn't like the idea (that's why I'd be the only individual left when that happens to happen ;). my 2ct

toephu 16y ago

that is one damn long essay about facebook

joubert 16y ago

There is a Facebook Like button right at the top of the post. The irony.

idonthack 16y ago

>online “friends”, most of whom I’d never met in person. well there's your problem.

jschuur 16y ago

Somewhat related, Steve made a great post 5 years ago about news addiction and how he doesn't watch/follow the news anymore. http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/09/overcoming-news-addiction/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/09/overcoming-news-add... Highly recommended, even though I fail completely at the advice and am glued to Al Jazeera English right now. And don't get me started on tech news ;)

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

phreakhead 16y ago

No wonder he didn't like Facebook: he has no real friends! 5000+ friends and he never met any of them face-to-face? What is the point of that? I only friend someone if I've met them before in a real-life situation. If the relationship never goes past that in real life, then I usually just end up hiding them from my news feed and forgetting about them. I'm sure they do the same for me and I don't give it a second thought. However, I do get tremendous value out of my real friends on Facebook, since we share event invites, photos of our trips, news articles/videos that we share interest in, etc. I am a performer and all my performer/musician friends are on Facebook, and that is the main medium for getting news out about a show. The days of posting flyers on telephone poles and cafe windows are over - if you are not posting your upcoming shows on Facebook and inviting your friends, then your band is going to struggle to sell tickets.

teyc 16y ago

This is why Facebook needs to become your inbox, because it allows Facebook to better understand who you are interested in, and stay relevant. I wonder why FB haven't asked for your web mail logon, and mined the emails to better understand who you already interact with.

jcizzle 16y ago

Thought he quit working for Facebook, too. Thoroughly disappointed when I found out he was just complaining that his life was so pathetic that it warranted 5 full-trackpad swipes of self-righteous douchebaggery on why he is single.

yaix 16y ago

A very interesting read, until "... my 5k friends ...". Dude, it's Twitter you are looking for. And you should call those people "followers" and not friends (half of them are fake profiles for SEO purposes anyway).

Kliment 16y ago

Wow! I feel my stance on this has just been dramatically confirmed. Some years ago, I wrote a rant ( http://everything2.com/title/Facebook+destroys+real+relationships http://everything2.com/title/Facebook+destroys+real+relation... ) for the purpose of having a fixed thing to send people who would ask me why I'm not on Facebook. I got tired of explaining it over and over, so I wrote this. I got both positive and negative responses to it, and they fit a very definite pattern. The positive responses were always short and in the line of "this is exactly how I feel about this, glad I'm not alone". The negative responses were variations of "you've never tried it, so you can't possibly know what it's like", with optional "take your uninformed opinion elsewhere". Now, Steve, as someone who has actually used the site for a nontrivial amount of time, writes a post bringing up mostly the same points. That feels nice.

webuiarchitect 16y ago

Wow! I left Facebook a year back for the very same reasons. But my thoughts weren't so well organized. Thank you very much for the nice write-up.

yembi 16y ago

I use a combination of Hide (after I see someone who likes to spam crap like "I'm at a coffee shop") and: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-friend-request-notifi/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-frie... for notifications.