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The joy of deleting Facebook in 2021 is something I'll never be able to put into words. A company that's right up there with gambling and tobacco: designed to

by pyman 1y ago

The joy of deleting Facebook in 2021 is something I'll never be able to put into words. A company that's right up there with gambling and tobacco: designed to keep you hooked, no matter the cost.

gambiting 1y ago
I was going to say Instagram is much worse in terms of keeping you hooked but then I remembered who owns it.
- pyman 1y ago
  Facebook is way worse than Instagram. I've never, ever seen an algorithm as evil and anti-social as the one Facebook's programmers created. At one point, it was showing my family and friends a comment my cousin had made about a politician, and they started getting into heated arguments with him. And this kept happening again and again. It honestly felt like the algorithm was trying to polarise entire families and friend groups, driving engagement by surfacing exactly the things people disagreed with or didn't want to hear. During the pandemic the algorithm drove everyone insane. At one point, I compared Facebook to a virus. It hijacked conversations, infected relationships, misled people, and distorted their perceptions of others.
  - arccy 1y ago
    Yeah facebook is definitely worse, though it's kind of like twitter: any action can become an item in other people's timelines. instagram is still bad now that they push more ads and content from people you don't follow onto you, but at least it's only things that are explicitly posted, and it's easier to maintain multiple profiles with different feeds
  - jofla_net 1y ago
    Its just "giving users more of what they want", said the owner of Marks Meats. I dont think a take on technology and society could be more naive.
willsmith72 1y ago
I completely agree, and haven't had the meta/twitter/reddit apps in years. But facebook does keep me around (or at least keep me from deleting my account) through marketplace. I've now found my last two apartment rentals there, both of which were nicer and cheaper than alternatives on dedicated rental sites. I find keeping an account open solely for desktop marketplace is a fine compromise
mslansn 1y ago
All companies want you to give them more money no matter the cost.
- reaperducer 1y ago
  All companies want you to give them more money no matter the cost. This is false; and considering the hundreds of thousands of companies that people encounter every day that do not operate with your singular mindset, I can only assume the comment was not made in good faith.
- unfolding 1y ago
  they don't want your money - they want your attention
  - xrisk 1y ago
    They want your attention because it makes them money. It’s not attention for attention’s sake.
    - pkkkzip 1y ago
      its not soley for money and thats not why attention is important and matters for a large platform
fredley 1y ago
The best time to delete Facebook was many years ago. The second best time is now.
- gambiting 1y ago
  Unfortunately, many of the old forums for various non-IT-related hobbies have disappeared and moved over to facebook groups and there is no alternative as such. Discord is great for anything related to software or hardware with computers, there are some fantastic communities, but if you are into cars or mountain biking or watches or fellwalking/hiking etc......you really don't have any alternative to facebook. I'm trying to never just passively browse the main feed because it very quickly turns into pure trash, but there are communities there that are worth participating there and which don't really have any other online space.
  - aunty_helen 1y ago
    Yes the death of forums is one of the huge hidden costs and another great reason to hate fb. Now info you search for online about cars comes from forums that haven’t had a post in the last year, yet in 2009 someone asked a great question about part compatibility. We need a pirate effort to exfiltrate this data back into the public domain.
    - TeMPOraL 1y ago
      Unfortunately we're facing a cultural issue here as well - people moved on from Facebook to Discord or private WhatsApp groups, and young would-be pirates see it as normal and good.
    - whoisyc 1y ago
      Limiting the spread of the information is a feature, not a bug. You don’t want others to take your 2009 forum post out of context and ridicule you in front of a million angry YouTube viewers.
      - rchaud 1y ago
nikolayasdf123 1y ago
deleted it in 2018. happy ever since. did not regret for a moment
- reaperducer 1y ago
  I got locked out of Facebook right about that time. Looking back at the last eight years, I can say without qualification that it did wonders for my personality, my mental health, and the way I interact with other people. A couple of times I've looked back at my messages and photos from the annual data downloads I did back then. I can't believe how angry I was, and that I would think it was O.K. to talk that way to perfect strangers. Then I dig a little deeper, and see that the early messages were fine. I was a nice to strangers. But as my Facebook use continued, the tone and unpleasantness of the messages becomes palpable. It's like watching a malignant Facebook disease spreading in my own brain. Kind of horrifying now that I put it into words. Glad I'm Facebook-free today, and enjoying life almost as much as someone in an Apple commercial.
yieldcrv 1y ago
I haven't had Facebook app in 12 years or so and the only thing that hampers me are - Coordinating with Gen Xers’s burning man camps. They are just stuck in their ways. Like they say, nobody can prevent you from becoming like your parents - A couple times I want to use Facebook marketplace, a new profile looks like a scammer. Which is the platform’s problem
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
MOARDONGZPLZ 1y ago
Facebook is the worst. I haven’t had the app itself in a decade, but use the mobile version in a mobile browser to catch up on friends’ posts. I hope they go through with Zuckerberg’s idea of removing all connections, at which point the lift to reconnect is too great and I will actually delete my account (and I was one of the first FB users when they expanded to my school just after Harvard).
polishdude20 1y ago
I keep my Facebook account mainly because I use messenger for a lot of interactions with friends. I never really go on Facebook itself. I don't get the self congratulatory fest that goes on when deleting your account. I get the same feeling and outcome by just not using it.
- repeekad 1y ago
  I don’t think it’s self congratulatory to get an “I was right” in about an article where meta is covertly asking to train their AI models on your entire private camera roll
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  You're still enabling them in a way that others who have deleted their accounts are not. You're contributing to the network effect problem.
  - p2detar 1y ago
    Maybe relationships are more important to GP than attitude. I know what GP means and I was even recently asked to join a Messenger group of friends. I declined but only because I have other comm channels and I dropped FB and Messenger years ago.
bongodongobob 1y ago
Cool. I gamble, use tobacco, alcohol and other drugs and occasionally use FB from time to time. I enjoy things.
hoistbypetard 1y ago
Too many people I know still use it. I created mine (and keep it) to prevent someone from impersonating me to my friends and acquaintences, and use it as a directory where friends and acquaintences can find my contact info and vice versa. I avoid feeding them any new data (other than acknowledging or blocking friend requests I receive) but deleting seems worse for me than being present but inactive right now.
whoisyc 1y ago
I haven’t used Facebook in years and I don’t think I will ever pick it up again. But I also don’t think “just quit facebook, bro” is an effective pitch to the average person. Facebook (and other Meta properties) has sadly become the only popular channel for many sorts of offline activities. The average local sports group, DIY group, parents group, outdoors group etc around me are all on Facebook. The average musician and local business is on Instagram. Not to mention the millions in Europe and Latin America who only use WhatsApp for online communication. Which is to say for many people the choice is not between Facebook and no Facebook. Their choice is between Facebook and inability to participate in their communities. Yes this sucks, but this is the reality. You cannot ask individuals to make expensive individual decisions to solve a society-wide problem. Instead you should look for regulations, and start building reasonable alternative to facebook and make it palatable to the average person. You mentioned tobacco and gambling and I think they are actually apt examples of why the change must happen at the society level. Tobacco usage plummeted after decades of anti-tobacco education, smoking bans, advertising bans etc. And we also don’t just ask people to stop smoking, we prescribe nicotine patches to make it easier to quit. Similar for gambling. We don’t just ask people to not gamble, we regulate the industry (or outright ban it) and even in places where gambling is legal and prevalent there are still regulations like making it possible to ban yourself from gambling if it is becoming a problem.
- noman-land 1y ago
  Millions of thematic groups have existed for many hundreds of years and they did not need Facebook to organize. People are experiencing inertia and are too lazy or naive to help themselves. And, yes, some are truly addicted. This inertia and naivete is harmful and dangerous to everyone involved. It's like if they met in a sketchy part of town or were using tools unsafely to the point where they could injure someone. Going along with that, and especially without saying anything, or trying to change the situation makes you complicit.
backendEngineer 1y ago
just deleted that trash in 2025, fuck Zuck

by pyman 1y ago

The joy of deleting Facebook in 2021 is something I'll never be able to put into words. A company that's right up there with gambling and tobacco: designed to keep you hooked, no matter the cost.

gambiting 1y ago

I was going to say Instagram is much worse in terms of keeping you hooked but then I remembered who owns it.

pyman 1y ago
Facebook is way worse than Instagram. I've never, ever seen an algorithm as evil and anti-social as the one Facebook's programmers created. At one point, it was showing my family and friends a comment my cousin had made about a politician, and they started getting into heated arguments with him. And this kept happening again and again. It honestly felt like the algorithm was trying to polarise entire families and friend groups, driving engagement by surfacing exactly the things people disagreed with or didn't want to hear. During the pandemic the algorithm drove everyone insane. At one point, I compared Facebook to a virus. It hijacked conversations, infected relationships, misled people, and distorted their perceptions of others.
- arccy 1y ago
  Yeah facebook is definitely worse, though it's kind of like twitter: any action can become an item in other people's timelines. instagram is still bad now that they push more ads and content from people you don't follow onto you, but at least it's only things that are explicitly posted, and it's easier to maintain multiple profiles with different feeds
- jofla_net 1y ago
  Its just "giving users more of what they want", said the owner of Marks Meats. I dont think a take on technology and society could be more naive.

willsmith72 1y ago

I completely agree, and haven't had the meta/twitter/reddit apps in years. But facebook does keep me around (or at least keep me from deleting my account) through marketplace. I've now found my last two apartment rentals there, both of which were nicer and cheaper than alternatives on dedicated rental sites. I find keeping an account open solely for desktop marketplace is a fine compromise

mslansn 1y ago

All companies want you to give them more money no matter the cost.

reaperducer 1y ago
All companies want you to give them more money no matter the cost. This is false; and considering the hundreds of thousands of companies that people encounter every day that do not operate with your singular mindset, I can only assume the comment was not made in good faith.
unfolding 1y ago
they don't want your money - they want your attention
- xrisk 1y ago
  They want your attention because it makes them money. It’s not attention for attention’s sake.
  - pkkkzip 1y ago
    its not soley for money and thats not why attention is important and matters for a large platform

fredley 1y ago

The best time to delete Facebook was many years ago. The second best time is now.

gambiting 1y ago
Unfortunately, many of the old forums for various non-IT-related hobbies have disappeared and moved over to facebook groups and there is no alternative as such. Discord is great for anything related to software or hardware with computers, there are some fantastic communities, but if you are into cars or mountain biking or watches or fellwalking/hiking etc......you really don't have any alternative to facebook. I'm trying to never just passively browse the main feed because it very quickly turns into pure trash, but there are communities there that are worth participating there and which don't really have any other online space.
- aunty_helen 1y ago
  Yes the death of forums is one of the huge hidden costs and another great reason to hate fb. Now info you search for online about cars comes from forums that haven’t had a post in the last year, yet in 2009 someone asked a great question about part compatibility. We need a pirate effort to exfiltrate this data back into the public domain.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    Unfortunately we're facing a cultural issue here as well - people moved on from Facebook to Discord or private WhatsApp groups, and young would-be pirates see it as normal and good.
  - whoisyc 1y ago
    Limiting the spread of the information is a feature, not a bug. You don’t want others to take your 2009 forum post out of context and ridicule you in front of a million angry YouTube viewers.
    - rchaud 1y ago

nikolayasdf123 1y ago

deleted it in 2018. happy ever since. did not regret for a moment

reaperducer 1y ago
I got locked out of Facebook right about that time. Looking back at the last eight years, I can say without qualification that it did wonders for my personality, my mental health, and the way I interact with other people. A couple of times I've looked back at my messages and photos from the annual data downloads I did back then. I can't believe how angry I was, and that I would think it was O.K. to talk that way to perfect strangers. Then I dig a little deeper, and see that the early messages were fine. I was a nice to strangers. But as my Facebook use continued, the tone and unpleasantness of the messages becomes palpable. It's like watching a malignant Facebook disease spreading in my own brain. Kind of horrifying now that I put it into words. Glad I'm Facebook-free today, and enjoying life almost as much as someone in an Apple commercial.

yieldcrv 1y ago

I haven't had Facebook app in 12 years or so and the only thing that hampers me are - Coordinating with Gen Xers’s burning man camps. They are just stuck in their ways. Like they say, nobody can prevent you from becoming like your parents - A couple times I want to use Facebook marketplace, a new profile looks like a scammer. Which is the platform’s problem

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

MOARDONGZPLZ 1y ago

Facebook is the worst. I haven’t had the app itself in a decade, but use the mobile version in a mobile browser to catch up on friends’ posts. I hope they go through with Zuckerberg’s idea of removing all connections, at which point the lift to reconnect is too great and I will actually delete my account (and I was one of the first FB users when they expanded to my school just after Harvard).

polishdude20 1y ago

I keep my Facebook account mainly because I use messenger for a lot of interactions with friends. I never really go on Facebook itself. I don't get the self congratulatory fest that goes on when deleting your account. I get the same feeling and outcome by just not using it.

repeekad 1y ago
I don’t think it’s self congratulatory to get an “I was right” in about an article where meta is covertly asking to train their AI models on your entire private camera roll
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
You're still enabling them in a way that others who have deleted their accounts are not. You're contributing to the network effect problem.
- p2detar 1y ago
  Maybe relationships are more important to GP than attitude. I know what GP means and I was even recently asked to join a Messenger group of friends. I declined but only because I have other comm channels and I dropped FB and Messenger years ago.

bongodongobob 1y ago

Cool. I gamble, use tobacco, alcohol and other drugs and occasionally use FB from time to time. I enjoy things.

hoistbypetard 1y ago

Too many people I know still use it. I created mine (and keep it) to prevent someone from impersonating me to my friends and acquaintences, and use it as a directory where friends and acquaintences can find my contact info and vice versa. I avoid feeding them any new data (other than acknowledging or blocking friend requests I receive) but deleting seems worse for me than being present but inactive right now.

whoisyc 1y ago

I haven’t used Facebook in years and I don’t think I will ever pick it up again. But I also don’t think “just quit facebook, bro” is an effective pitch to the average person. Facebook (and other Meta properties) has sadly become the only popular channel for many sorts of offline activities. The average local sports group, DIY group, parents group, outdoors group etc around me are all on Facebook. The average musician and local business is on Instagram. Not to mention the millions in Europe and Latin America who only use WhatsApp for online communication. Which is to say for many people the choice is not between Facebook and no Facebook. Their choice is between Facebook and inability to participate in their communities. Yes this sucks, but this is the reality. You cannot ask individuals to make expensive individual decisions to solve a society-wide problem. Instead you should look for regulations, and start building reasonable alternative to facebook and make it palatable to the average person. You mentioned tobacco and gambling and I think they are actually apt examples of why the change must happen at the society level. Tobacco usage plummeted after decades of anti-tobacco education, smoking bans, advertising bans etc. And we also don’t just ask people to stop smoking, we prescribe nicotine patches to make it easier to quit. Similar for gambling. We don’t just ask people to not gamble, we regulate the industry (or outright ban it) and even in places where gambling is legal and prevalent there are still regulations like making it possible to ban yourself from gambling if it is becoming a problem.

noman-land 1y ago
Millions of thematic groups have existed for many hundreds of years and they did not need Facebook to organize. People are experiencing inertia and are too lazy or naive to help themselves. And, yes, some are truly addicted. This inertia and naivete is harmful and dangerous to everyone involved. It's like if they met in a sketchy part of town or were using tools unsafely to the point where they could injure someone. Going along with that, and especially without saying anything, or trying to change the situation makes you complicit.

backendEngineer 1y ago

just deleted that trash in 2025, fuck Zuck