Facebook lost a million users in the US and Canada last quarter

A lot of the HN readers come here to comment "I left FB". Well, good for you. I didn't - if I did so, due to a variety of factors, I'd have lost the option contact a few people. I'm not talking about friends, I'm talking about the option of connection, should it ever be needed, much like a rolodex.

I did, however, started using the HTML only version of Facebook ( https://mbasic.facebook.com ). Since you manually have to click the pagination at the bottom, the urge to keep scrolling is extremely low if the first page doesn't offer anything valuable - which is the case most of the times.

Some links and articles coming via certain groups are quite useful if you have interest in some niche topic. A decade ago these would have been on small subcult sites, but those days are gone, sadly.

Anyway, what I wanted to say: it doesn't matter if you leave FB or not, your time is your time. If you spent hours on FB and the only way for you to leave that behind was to delete you FB account, that's not completely FB's fault.

Don't get me wrong though, I hate FB and what it's made of, all the hoarded user data, with their one and only goals of keeping you fixated at the screen, but this doesn't change the fact that while it's simple to manipulate people, getting rid of addictions is usually only a matter of will. It's not different this case either.

It would be interesting to know the age group of those 1 million and why did they leave. I left Facebook 6 years ago and its a never come back! The time I used to browse Facebook was replaced by reading books, articles or even just to do nothing which is still more valuable comparing to wasting time on FB. The only thing that was interesting for me was the feed from tech companies and tech news which now I just use twitter to do so.

I don't think we know whether this million were genuine users or fake accounts?

Original post: https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily-act...

Left fb about 2 years ago.

- Gained a few hours everyday. - Gained a solid amount of battery time on my phone. - Increased my happiness as I dont have to look at all the hyped up, over advertised, 'Look, my life is a bed of roses' posts from everyone. - Better focussed on my own life.

> Why are people quitting Facebook? The rise of fake news, meddling by Russian agencies, and plenty of content in your feed that you don’t remember subscribing to may all be to blame.

Those reasons are nice, but I hope the reasons become things like going outside to play tennis or shoot some hoops, cooking dinners from scratch, biking to work, and active things like that. Then, instead of posting pictures about it, to continue to more active things with people you're actually in-person with.

As my overall Facebook usage had naturally gone close to "check once per week" in 2017, and do even that because of habit, I decided to delete it entirely from my life as soon as 2018 came around. The only thing that I'm not 100% happy with is that without Facebook you also don't have Messenger, which was the main thing I used to communicate with people. However, I still use Instagram to share Stories and photos and, luckily enough, it has a chat built in as well which works wonders.

I use facebook to keep up with events. I follow the feeds of organizations, not individuals (I hide almost all personal feeds). I follow SFJazz, symphony and opera, various music groups, theater companies, a few outdoors/ecology organizations. There are probably other ways to get this, and I'd prefer not to use facebook at all, but facebook provides a decent roundup.

This works pretty well for me. I can keep up on interesting things without being subjected to constant political sloganeering.

I still can't comprehend how can you spend "two hours everyday" there. What can you possibly do there for two hours? 0_o

I have account on all major social nerworks (Fb, VK, Twitter, Reddit), but I rarely even open their pages\apps, except for reddit and some evening twitter.

Two hours per week is the max I can possibly think of.

Switching from FB to Instagram. What a progress :)

I left facebook a few years ago when HN became my favorite time-sink. :-)

I think about doing the same. I limit myself to less than 10 minutes a week on FB, and find that worthwhile to get news of people I have mostly lost contact with and see pictures posted by friends and relatives.

Reevaluating time spent on FB has also made me consider time spent on HN, Reddit, and Twitter. Tech social media is fun, sometimes useful, but I try to be mindful of the time I am spending. For me a good substitute is taking classes on Course and edX, read more books, and listening to audio books.

Sold my Facebook stock and stopped using it for anything but the messenger app on my phone three months ago.

This is awesome, I think I will give it the thumbs up and share it with all my nonconformist friends.

I am curious how much of this is PR. They are getting a lot of political pressure.