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Comment by electic | Hacker News Reader

The greatest thing I did was delete Facebook off my phone. Here are the benefits I discovered:

- I didn't miss anything. Turns out there wasn't any real quality content on there anyway.

- My battery lasts 2x longer.

- I seem to be happier. No joke. With all the rage articles and click bait headlines gone, I am far more happier.

- I am way more informed now. I visit allsides.com and get the news there. I quickly get up to speed and find well written articles that inform me about what is really going on.

- I am more productive. Without all the garbage Facebook puts out, I have more time to get actual work done.

- I feel accomplished. I go home feeling more accomplished. I am happier, more productive, and more informed. It is a win-win-win all around.

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Delete it off your phone, ASAP. There is literally nothing to gain from having the Facebook app on your phone. The app doesn't positively help you with the one thing Facebook is really useful for - event planning.

Every once in a while i like to see what events my friends have invited me to, so I log on to facebook on my browser, check my notifications, and leave. How do I prevent myself from getting sucked in by the news feed? I block it, with News Feed Eradicator, a Chrome extension. If someone posted a picture of you or tagged you in some way, you know, the things that in your news feed that are actually useful/concern you, you get a notification without any clutter to block it up.

It's lowered my stress level and I still get to stay in touch with the things I care about.

Don't see how this is a reason for others to delete the app from their phones, it only show that for you it was the right thing to do.

To come with another data-point, I have the app on my phone, but don't open it every week. I have turned off most notifications, so if I get a notification on the phone I know it is worth it to use 30 sec to check what it is. Instead I check FB a couple of times a day on a PC where I can set the feed to show most recent post first and in a minute or two go through the list of new post from peoples I keep in the feed. Some times it is something interesting there, some times not. For me it is strange how others manage to use hours at a time on FB (except messenger which I use to keep in touch with friends and family).

My point is that you cannot only blame FB for getting addicted, you is the only one that is responsible for how you spend your time. It is getting so "normal" to blame external forces for own behavior

There is a damn good incentive to uninstall the app. By going to mbasic.facebook.com in your browser instead, you use much less bandwidth and you get to use an adblocker (in Firefox, at least), to help weed out most of the nonsense FB throws at you.

I don't see how the 2MB of mobile data the FB app have used so far this month would be any less if I had used the mobile page instead. Going to the web-page is a much worse user experience when you mostly use the app to get notifications you have filtered out to actually get instead of using it to look at stuff you are not interested in.

You don't see all the stuff you don't want to see if you don't keep opening the app all the time. So back to it is how you use the application that is the problem, not the application.

By going there in a browser (and specifically to the mbasic version), you weed out the javascript tracking and bloat, and your adblocker gets to weed out the ads and sponsored content nonsense. As a bonus, there are no auto-playing videos or any of that other junk. That is the problem with using the app (and apps in general): They try very hard to prevent you from blocking ads and sponsored content.

That frees you up to use Facebook for its actual useful function: Handling events and possibly the most genuinely important updates from your friends, without the bloat.

The pared-down user experience in the mbasic version is the entire point. I already filter out everything I don't consider important, and using the mbasic version is another step in the direction of reducing distractions. It also doesn't do the weird re-arranging of discussions and broken infinite scroll that the app does.

It's simply a much easier and less annoying experience.

I as well deleted it off my phone. There is just nothing personal on it anymore. They are also ruining instagram. Too many ads, suggested posts etc. They are morphing it in facebook light. Everything is just bad auto roll food videos, UNILAD shit, and identity politics clickbait sob stories.

The only reason I still have facebook is for group chat messenger during the day, and to keep track of underground parties. One of those chats is moving to discord, and other kind of moved to iMessage. Messenger now has intrusive ads on it as well, I would leave it if I could.

same here. work is the biggest reason that I still have Facebook on my phone. We have work related stuff going on. i work with very non-technical users, and Facebook is about as complicated as things can get. They have a variety of devices, and Facebook + Messenger has worked on everything. Getting them to switch would be hard. :/

For that all you need is messenger app on your phone and messenger.com on your computer. You don’t need Facebook main app or website.

Actually, you can even have the Messenger app with no Facebook account. Just sign in with your phone number, and it'll pick up acquaintances from your contact book (much like WhatsApp). You can still search for other people, but don't need an FB account.

Is giving FB your contact list better than having a FB account you don't use?

Signing up with phone number doesn't work for lots of young people I suspect. We don't have phone numbers of friends anymore, for example I have no phone numbers of even my closest friends, we have been communicating via internet since we have been teenagers (started with ICQ, then moved to emails then FB then whatsapp, never really needed to share our phone numbers as we don't ever call anybody nor send SMS).

This might be just specific to very international people like me who travel and work in many different countries so our phone numbers change often and keeping track of that is almost impossible.

Huh, that's interesting.

I guess this also varies tremendously by region. WhatsApp completely dominates non-work communication in Argentina; we don't use SMS, nor phone calls, and FB is pretty much is second place.

AFAIK, in the US people actually use SMS a lot, and I'm sure it's a bit different everywhere else.

More on topic though; you can use Messenger without an FB account and still find people by username.

How did you sign up in WhatsApp without a phone number? Also, when you want to exchange contacts in WhatsApp, what you do it to pass the phone number registered in the service.

It seems that you have phone number that is in some way associated with you.

You can (for now at least!) access messages on mobile without an intrusive app by using mbasic.facebook.com.

Underground parties?

I'd say www.residentadvisor.com does a better job!

- Spend much more time on HackerNews.

Jokes aside, I did the same. Its a healthy move, I also forgot my FB password on my main computer and have not gone through the trouble of using chrome to look it up.

Did the same, same effect on time on HN!

Ive found on my 16GB phone I can either have the facebook app or every other app that I want but not both at the same time . It takes up an insane amount of space for a mobile app and they for some reason need to update it once a week. Needless to say I use the browser now to check fb.

Out of curiosity, why did you have it installed in the first place instead of just using your browser?

It's a better user experience

Nothing wrong with updating an app often IMO. There are dozens of teams working on the app concurrently (didn't they compain about the 65,535 class limit in objc due to their iPhone app?) so no surprise they have a regular release cadence.

I am off Facebook for a year now.

I think life is a bit better not having facebook -- considered everything is already alright.

I think, however, if someone is depressed, being on Facebook is a huge problem. Which is ironically what I resorted to when I was depressed. It was like living in hell.

> allsides.com

Wow, I've been looking for something like this. Wish they did more than just the USA.

Yeah, I'd like something like this for Europe.

http://www.theweek.co.uk/ is the closest I know of, though you need to know the political leanings of each publication mentioned, whereas allsides.com really spells it out.

I don't know, the articles it links to aren't especially good judging by a few that I've checked just now.

They're mostly either partisan drivel, or bland statements of fact that don't explain why this news is good/bad/important.

The ability to do the latter in a neutral manner is what's valuable – to me, at least, – and I don't see it here.

I have been leaving the FB app off my phone (Android) for 2-3 years now, and I don't miss it one bit. I was running Messenger, but that's also a resource hog.

I am now using Messenger Lite, as I am in some personal friend groups (muted) that I sometimes catch up on, and I will say that it hardly uses any resources at all. Would highly recommend it for anyone who still wants Messenger but without the bloat and battery loss.

I share your experience. At the time I did a simple cost-benefit analysis.

It was costing me >0 resources (i.e. my time) and was having a net negative effect on me. I was just so irritated by the mind numbingly dumb things that I'd consume while browsing the news feed. Which unfortunately over time became close to 100% of the content on my feed.

Agreed. I have deleted Facebook app from my phone and it has been great since then. I feel like I waste less time scrolling through meaningless feed of pictures, posts and ads algorithmically crafted to be as addictive as possible.

I have also stopped using the main FB website. I only use messenger.com to talk to my friends but no need to go to the main website anymore.

The only reason why I haven't deleted my FB account completely yet is because I got a lot of pictures on FB and haven't found a convenient way to export them yet. So I might keep my FB account just as free cloud storage for my pictures, that's all.

> haven't found a convenient way to export them yet

Click the triangle on the right in the menu bar, and go to Settings. Under "General - General Account Settings" there's a light-grey link that takes you to "Download a copy of your Facebook data". From there you can request an archive of your profile.

It doesn't include all the 'shadow profile' info they keep of you, but it gives you and easy way to download all of your photos at once, easy to import in your photo management app.

EDIT: I've just done a fresh export of my profile, and it seems that sadly the photos don't get exported at full resolution, so this might not be the best option if FB is your primary photo storage at the moment.

I see. Not sure what I would use as alternative way of managing my photos though. I don't like using the Photos app on my MacBook as it is too clunky. I'd like to have a single website which is just like the photo albums part of FB minus the whole social network. That would be ideal.

I was off Facebook for years, but a few years ago I got back on it. It's just junk food for the brain.

Before I deleted the app on my phone recently, I scrolled through my feed for about 5-10 minutes with a simple test: if I encountered something that genuinely improved my life, I'd keep it installed. I didn't. I can (and do) get my news and politics elsewhere, the comic strips I follow I'll figure out another solution for, and if I want to see photos I can log in through the website whenever the urge hits me.

Anyone know how to block a particular website like FB on Android without being rooted or signing up for a subscription to some security or parental-control app? A google search just turns up a million people recommending editing the host file with ES File Explorer (which doesn't work unless you're rooted) or using the TrendMicro Mobile Security app (which requires a subscription).

Why in the hell is this so hard?

I think if use Firefox you can get a variant of the StayFocusd extension.

If you don't want the overhead of another extension, a quick win is to add this to your `/etc/hosts`:

    127.0.0.1	facebook.com
    127.0.0.1	www.facebook.com

After a week you'll completely forget you have facebook.

BTW, there is a github repo that lists every domain owned by facebook, they have ~900 domains now.

https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...

Yes, I mentioned this one in my comment ("editing the host file with ES File Explorer"), but it requires your phone to be rooted.

There are some site-blocking hosted-on-the-device VPNs on Android. I haven't found any I'd be comfortable recommending though - gotta find an open source one I can reasonably audit and isn't terrible :|

This is definitely not a request to do a free audit on my behalf, but one of the other commenters recommended this, which I guess is open source:

https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard

If you have a Samsung phone you can use some apps that run as part of the Knox framework and block ads or arbitrary websites system-wide without rooting.

NetGuard, it's from the same developer who created Xprivacy

install it from the Github repo and you can use it load a custom host file (the playstore version doesn't allow this) it functions as a VPN. Free service that also lets you block trackers and individual app analytics

https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard

Same experience here with Facebook. This is a little off-topic, but, given the common ground, I visited Allsides.com and it was an interesting experience. I expected to like it, but it felt more like being a 3rd wheel watching a couple argue while both of them made the problem worse. Sigh.

Agree, you are kind of watching from the outside inside. I end up mostly focusing on center stories. But being on the site, it really hits you just how bad the media has become. No one, it seems, listed to John Stewart when he appeared on Crossfire. Instead, the morphed the whole network into Crossfire. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE

I almost regret that I never used FB for any significant amount time and can't experience the same after giving it up :-)

Want to feel better? Delete your account

Same boat. Also got rid of Twitter app.

Now just to block HN most hours of the day...

i deleted the app but always had issues with Facebook Login in some apps which was annoying, so i reinstalled it.

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