8 ms·

I stopped two years ago. As far as I am aware I'm not missing much. I did have a lot of old friends on FB, but I didn't stay in contact with them in real life.

• onewaystreet 11y ago
  The fact that 1.5 billion people use Facebook kind of suggests that you are wrong.
  • baldfat 11y ago
    Feeling connected no matter how small is a very strong force. I like that I have connections from my childhood to my present and to all the places I lived. Even if it is I see that my friends kids are now in high school or that someone had a great event that I had zero impact on them having. When my son was dying from cancer I just had to jump on Facebook and I had a ton of people that were willing to help out or send him messages and videos. It was a great tool to find people who could help.
    • AtmaScout 11y ago
      I'm sorry about your son.
    • junto 11y ago
      That is awful. I don't want to imagine one of my children being seriously or terminally ill. I'm glad Facebook was able to help you and your son in that horrible situation. Thank you for sharing your alternative viewpoint.
    • FlaceBook 11y ago
      Facebook would like to thank you for giving them the opportunity to monetize your son's cancer.
  • junto 11y ago
    > The fact that 1.5 billion people use Facebook kind of suggests that you are wrong. I'm wrong? No I'm an individual with my own preferences. Each to their own. I wasn't telling anyone else to leave. I was just describing my experiences.
    • RogerL 11y ago
      I kind of had the same thought the person you are responding to had. You switch from "I" to "you" in your last paragraph, which seemed to imply that you were using your experience to declare how things are for others. I found myself nodding while reading the prior paragraphs, as I have similar experiences, but disagreeing with your last paragraph as it clearly wasn't true for many others. It's somewhat true for me now, but I joined Facebook because my mother was quite (terminally) ill, and it was a perfect medium to share with her but not place any particular burden for her to write emails or respond. And I'm the 'you' in the context of your message.
      • junto 11y ago
        Thanks Roger. I hadn't realised that you could read it in that way. I was talking about myself, but it wasn't clear.
  • cristianpascu 11y ago
    (S)he's on the wrong side of history.
    • scrollaway 11y ago
      If you actually think that you might want to look up what that actually means.
  • J_Darnley 11y ago
    Isn't that 1.5 billion accounts? How many are bots, fake, duplicates, or otherwise not representing exactly 1 person?
    • celticninja 11y ago
      how many of those are no longer active?
      • sp332 11y ago
        936 million daily active users on average for March 2015 1.44 billion monthly active users as of March 31, 2015 https://newsroom.fb.com/Company-Info/ https://newsroom.fb.com/Company-Info/
  • makeitsuckless 11y ago
    Guess that means I'm wrong too about reality tv, Justin Bieber, fast food and the importance of cars as a status symbol. Oh, and let's not forget the believe in the existence of an omnipotent deity.
• dade_ 11y ago
  It doesn't take a lot of effort to maintain contact with people that are important in our life today. The relationships that are important to us need to be nurtured, not followed. Facebook has created this (inadvertent) anti-social follow use case, and I think a lot of people have fallen into it.
  • logan5 11y ago
    Exactly. And if you keep seeing similar posts on a regular basis from the same set of people (close or distant), it gets repetitive and boring. How often do you need to know that x is doing y?
  • smackfu 11y ago
    Eh, I remember the days of trying to keep in touch via email, and not getting replies, or feeling bad that I wasn't sending a reply. Just to keep in general contact, with no specific goal in mind. I don't look forward to going back to them.
    • mariodiana 11y ago
      Facebook has become something of a "Third Place," in this respect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
    • ekianjo 11y ago
      if people don't reply to your emails, maybe that says a lot about how much they care about you.
      • smackfu 11y ago
        Exactly? I'm talking about a situation where we both care exactly at a "casual Facebook friend" level. Like we would meet up if we were in the same town at the same time, but we aren't writing emails back and forth about what has happened lately. And that is great, IMHO.
      • deleted 11y ago
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• deleted 11y ago
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• Thriptic 11y ago
  I have trouble leaving Facebook because for better or worse it is how many of my friends and acquaintances communicate. I ended up finding a nice compromise: I installed an extension which hides all the content on news feed but still allows FB chat. When I couple this extension with ublock, the only thing I see when I go to Facebook is the chat interface, which is perfect for how I use the service.
  • jackvalentine 11y ago
    Facebook have done that themselves! No extensions required! www.messenger.com is literally just FB chat, nothing else.
    • czzarr 11y ago
      wow thanks, I feel stupid for not knowing about that.
      • mercer 11y ago
        I only found out recently and I think it's relatively new 'feature'.
    • Thriptic 11y ago
      Wow thanks!
    • tjt 11y ago
      Awesome. Thank you! Can't believe I didn't know about this.
  • sp332 11y ago
    Or just use https://www.facebook.com/messages/ https://www.facebook.com/messages/ ?
    • JonCox 11y ago
      Or even just https://www.messenger.com https://www.messenger.com
• heimatau 11y ago
  I feel the same way @junto. Facebook was a nice phase but now it's phased out of my life. Anyone that is important to me has my email/phone.
• madez 11y ago
  I also stopped using Facebook, shortly before the revelations of massive surveillance. At that time I was convinced I shouldn't be in the arms of companies, stopped using many services and started self-hosting stuff. People didn't understand me. Then, Edward Snowden revealed that the possible abstract threats I wanted to avoid can in fact become real. We are fortunate to have received this information. People still didn't understand me. In the beginning of my time without the services I clearly felt that something was missing, but it wasn't hard to withstand, for the idealistic flame burning within me. After some time my interest for the services faded away, like an addiction you successfully cured. Now, I'm not even thinking about using them anymore. Many don't understand me even now, and I'm not holding my breath, anymore.
  • luxpir 11y ago
    Similar situation here. Frustrating as it is, it's The Right Thing to do. It's a shame that some people assume you're disinterested, but then don't return emails/calls. I heard about an old Norwegian guy who had always made short calls to friends and family throughout his life and that those people appreciated that. That's more the direction I'd rather go in over the passive friend-surveillance that has crept in. I'd rather do that over an encrypted line with open protocols, but you can't have it all! At least I've managed to move over nearly wholesale to open software - phone, OS, email, syncthing, text file notes etc. etc. - so that's one of the major personal benefits to me. The drawbacks I still need to learn to better work around. Addiction/productivity doesn't really come into it for me; I have my days of perfect self-discipline and others where my procrast-fu is strong. I've used and use all manner of productivity systems to make sure the bread and butter work gets done (currently running an espeak Pomodoro reminder every 25 minutes, with semi-ironic (totally not...) inspirational quotes read out in the breaks), it's just the side-projects that sometimes suffer. That's no fault of social media, though, that's on me.
    • j2bax 11y ago
      I would like to follow your lead, but in some ways it feels selfish of me and thats why I stick around on FB. I live quite some distance from my family and it is the easiest way to share photos of my family with all of them without requiring them to all get a new account somewhere else. Are there better more private solutions that are still very convenient for everyone from my 15 year old niece to my 80 year old grandparents? I also am friends with just about everyone I've ever had any sort of meaningful interaction with and I hate that I am constantly scrolling through my news feed seeing stuff that I could care less about but just doing it to pass time. I would love to shut Facebook off if it didn't mean losing the ability to share photos with my close family and friends. Maybe its just a matter of paring my Friend list down to about 20-30 people (from about 350) but I'd still like to stop offering my personal information to a megacorp to sell out to their advertisers and who knows who else.
• sveme 11y ago
  I stopped at about the same time as you, but I actually returned a couple of months ago. Without friending anyone. And the reason? I use Facebook as a very simple way to get news about really minor things of importance to me: + my climbing gym has some new routes! + a new video by K.I.Z, yeah! + oh, demonstration against some Nazis demonstrating in my neighbourhood, should definitely go there + Someone's looking for a climbing partner next weekend, finally heading out to the rocks again! So likes have become a poor-man's subscription to an RSS feed and groups have become an easy to follow replacement of forums. The key in these cases is the newsfeed, which is okay for having an overview of important stuff (and without friends is not crowded with inane stuff). I repeatedly have idle thoughts about a startup idea, combining Facebook with github's business model: Any entity such as users, companies, organizations get a page where they can post arbitrary stuff like on their current facebook profile. Users can subscribe and get an overview on their newsfeed. So far, just like Facebook but without the social crap. Financing is not done through targeted ads but by requiring companies to pay for the service - something like 500 subscribers are free, 1000 - 10 $/months etc. Quite rough around the edges, the idea, but I personally would like such a service. Anyone interested in working on that with me?
  • Xeoncross 11y ago
    So, like twitter with more media and text options?
    • sveme 11y ago
      Yes, somewhat. Anything shareable. The major point would be the github-like financing model: It's not the individual users that pay for the service by enabling targeted ads but companies that want to get in contact with potential customers on their page. It seems like a minor difference but would have quite strong effects on user privacy - there would not be a need for ever more tracking of every online activity.
      • nosuchthing 11y ago
        Ello recently tried this, and they're still making good progress
• Jipha 11y ago
  Agreed – I stopped because there were too many posts I didn't really care about. I've found that if there's anything significant, someone will mention it to you anyway.
• joeblau 11y ago
  Yeah I slowed down heavily around 2 years ago. The original value prop of connecting me with my friends is all but gone from the platform. It reminds me of AIM which started off as a great chat program, but AOL added too many features and ads. The original reason why I wanted to use AIM was peppered with so much bloated software cruft on it, that it became to frustrating to use. 12 years later, I'm at the same point with Facebook. The only reason I still have it is because I have friends overseas and it's the best way to keep in touch with them if I need to get a hold of them; otherwise I don't need it.
• robbyking 11y ago
  For me Facebook works best as a calendar. Nearly everyone I know has a Fb account (one they check every day, at that), so it makes planning group trips/parties/events easier than trying to sync large groups of people across platforms and devices. It allows me to update my event details without having to worry that one of my friends won't get they update because they synced an out of date .ics file or added the event to their work calendar by mistake.
• agumonkey 11y ago
  This is a thing I think people start to realize about the digital era. We can have it all, more friend, more memories, more data... but nature likes to recycle, evolutionary pressure to keep things people working together together while the rest rearrange.
• galfarragem 11y ago
  Facebook is not cool anymore but Facebook is more useful than ever was and will probably remain so for a long time: they managed to get almost all available users (directly or by aqquisitions) and changing the status quo would be really difficult (not even Google was able to do it..). Facebook is the userbase. I still use FB because everybody is there, if I need to talk to someone or arrange an event, I can send them a message without knowing their actual email or phone. I'm not interested in knowing that a friend I meet once a year went to the restaurant (I can easily block it) but I am interested in being able to contact him if I need to. Facebook is great for that.