A Long Goodbye To Facebook | Hacker News Reader

A Long Goodbye To Facebook

om.co

72 pointsballadeer45 comments

> I left because it was making me someone I am not — someone who lives life through the eyes of others.

I agree so much. I was never an avid Facebook user who posts personal life but I was reading over other's lives and that affected who I am, what I should do with my life. Even though I feel I have full control over my life, what I read from FB about my friends changed what I should be doing to be in the current "trend" to belong to the group.

Yeah, I agree with that quote so much. I was a pretty avid user, and only very slowly realized that I'd begun carrying around "The Audience" in my head, which judged what I did and how I looked at all times.

Becoming disenchanted with that mode of consciousness was a very long journey, I'm humbled to say. A key moment for me was realizing that if I was in the city where some "friend" or another lived, I wouldn't try to contact them.

That's not a real friend. I'm not being a real friend. In fact, everything in the whole domain is mislabled, and who wins? The company and it's advertisers. Value is leeched from real-life existence.

Glad to be gone from it -- unknown, away, without apparent value!

I don't know why people take FB so seriously. I use it to post funny anecdotes about my life, like funny shit my kids say, funny photos, etc. I don't post vacation photos, or enhance my own self-opinion. I have a "small" group of 300 Facebook friends, and I use it to keep in touch. If someone is posting fake or annoying posts on it, then I'll unfollow them. That's it.

I do get sucked into an hour or more of videos though, which is a habit I need to break. Especially Graham Norton videos, I've never seen his show but the clips are always extremely entertaining.

Quick note: Total number of people who use FB every single day of their lives in the US stayed steady Q1 to Q2 at 183 million people. This was through all the Cambridge and privacy stuff. The HN bubble is very different than reality.

It was growing exponentially.

US has been stable a long time (at least 6 quarters). International is still growing fast.

Nature abhors exponential curves. It was growing exponentially, and now it's not. There are only so many people - that's not so much an indictment of Facebook's appeal as it is a mundane statement of fact.

That's a rather charitable way to spin going from growth to stagnancy.

Is the reason this is on the front page because he’s an investor? Can HN not feature these “I am quitting facebook” every month? Let’s get back to real news and real thoughts. Oh btw, I have quit facebook too because I was mentally unstable. AMA time but I bet no one would because I ain’t Om.

Om is a lot more than an investor. He started GigaOm... a lot of tech history in Om. He covered FB early on, etc.

> I have quit facebook too because I was mentally unstable.

I think this very effectively distills the essence of his blog post, too. His perception is that everyone is fronting. The fact of the matter is, not everyone is. Some people just post the highlights because they understand that the minutia is boring and not what people want to see. That he sees this as "fronting" is more a commentary on his own lack of self confidence. Well, that and the fact that he had to throw out how many followers he had.

I'm not sure I agree with this analysis.

I don't have a lack of self confidence and I consider the vast majority of Facebook posts to be fronting, even if the person actually posting is not actively aware of the fact that they are fronting. A lot of the time the awareness of "fronting" is absent, when it is in fact the main purpose driving the person to upload. Why else would people post very personal things about their lives to an audience they don't even want to reach out to on a regular basis? Even when they are in the same city, etc? Because those are not friends, and if they are not friends, the uploader is an actor presenting their daily demo real.

Of course there are exceptions to this, but I don't think that saying that a vast majority of people on Facebook are fronting is a reflection on our own personal lack of confidence, as much as it is barely a generalization.

Deleting facebook & twitter and de-gamifying as many other websites as I can (via tampermonkey scripts) is great.

reddit (my) karma score, & poster usernames -> hidden

HN (my) karma score -> hidden

slimming down everything to just content without any influencing factors(poster name, comment points) gives me a much better experience.

i find web forums which i frequent are so much better without karma & reactions.

)

I don't share most of the concerns people have about Facebook (including Om's here about sharing inauthentic life through photos)--I mostly just post text updates--but I wonder if their efforts over the last few years to move from people sharing political links etc to engaging more on original text posts have been working. I feel like when I posted stuff to FB some years ago I got more responses than when I post now.

Seems like the main activity that people I know are into on FB is Groups, which again takes it away from personal update territory. Good thing they bought Instagram/WhatsApp or they could have ended up in a decline phase already...

“My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have chewed, which I could lecture against. If you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing.

-Henry David Thoreau

(Never had Facebook account because it seemed something I didn't want all along. Was a "wacky" opinion for a long time and is now amusing to see all the noise).

What I've done is deleted a majority of the amount of content I had on FB previously. I went back and deleted most of the content I had posted, and kept only a handful of posts. I still use FB for some groups that are only on FB and use Messenger for contacting some friends, so I can't really delete the account completely. But I've tried to clean out my account as much as possible.

I plan to do the same with Twitter as well. If anyone has links to good tools that can enable me to delete old Twitter content, please share!

I forget whether it was Twitter or Instagram but one of them, maybe both, make it incredibly difficult to bleach or eject from the platform.

20 per day deletion/unfollow limits, etc.

I think he really boils it down to the fundamental question everyone should be asking themselves: do you want to define yourself through the eyes of others, or not?

You need more upvotes

I’m not sure what to take away from posts like this. On the one hand, I have only a few hundred friends (and practically no followers) that I would be walking away from. On the other hand, I don’t have a well-read blog and twitter following to fall back on.

So is it harder or easier for a nobody like me to quit Facebook? And is the main point of this post to migrate FB followers to Twitter followers?

Why is there even a need to fall back onto something? Migrating to another platform he considered less fronting and superficial was his choice, but I don't see the need nor appeal in that, personally.

I am like 90% sure Facebook still keeps track of you indirectly. So as far as Facebook is concerned, you definitely still exist after quitting.

https://spideroak.com/articles/facebook-shadow-profiles-a-pr...

Ghostery. Privacy Badger. To name two.

Do you believe tracking in websites is the only mechanism by which they collect information about you? Hint: it is not. At all.

These days I use FB to follow events and participate in groups whose topic interests me. There is no other platform that comes close in terms of variety or critical mass for this.

The sad truth is most people's friends are boring

There’s nothing sad about being boring.

May you live in exciting times.

Most people are boring. Lord knows I’m boring. Just watching TV, working, and waiting to die.

What is your "circle of happiness?"

>I'm quitting fb for real this time.

>Oh, and look at all these thousands devoted followers I'm walking away from

>I just don't want to always put up a front of my existence for others to see

>I don't want to live for how others perceive me.

>Better share this transcendental experience on my blog.

I couldn't find one of the statements you quoted. Specifically,

Better share this transcendental experience on my blog.

is not in the post. Have you misquoted? Are you deliberately misquoting to prove a larger point?

I gather from your post that you think all of the quoted statements form a contradiction. I don't think it necessarily does and only time will tell if Mr. Malik will use his blog to "live for how others perceive" him. Only time will tell if Mr. Malik uses his blog to do this.

I think Facebook is very good at manipulating people and getting people to engage with it a certain way. These forces of manipulation may not be present for a person who has a personal blog.

I think his statement about the number of his followers is that in spite of this he feels an emptiness with the interaction. Maybe the ego boost is no longer there. I don't think the statement was made for egotistical reasons. I don't know Mr. Malik but I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to him.

People often complain about being downvoted but your post actually adds nothing to the discussion. In fact, you just reframed everything Om said negatively.

What he's paraphrasing is "I have had a revelation about Facebook being bad, I'm better without it and you will be too. Rather than sharing this on Facebook where I'll reach hundreds of thousands of people that are using Facebook and might be helped, I'm sharing it on my blog where few will see it."

I get your snark: social media is built on narcissistic borderline personalities. But it does make sense that someone with a huge following might want to redirect to his personal blog, where he has complete control. I left FB two years ago and I read the blogs of people I used to follow, well, those who keep blogs. I'd like to see a return to RSS and curate my own feeds, but I'm hopelessly nostalgic.

Coming to YC Winter Batch 2019 - Squeezr, an on-demand masseuse app. For when you pull a muscle while patting yourself on the back for quitting Facebook.

How do you spot that someone has quit Facebook? They'll tell you.

While you are sitting next to them sharing a vegan meal not watching TV and listening to Vampire Weekend (before they got big and ruined it for everyone.)

Perhaps this will become a new joke. Sort of like the ones about being an atheist, vegan, or being into CrossFit. Yogi Berra's quote comes to mind. I'll paraphrase. No one goes on Facebook anymore because there's too many posts being made.

This is very tired attempt at humor.

Well there's "quitting" and "stop using". I have friends who've quit and told me, etc. I also have friends who just went dark. I don't have updated non-FB contact info, because all our comms had collapsed onto FB - or were only ever FB. Their last post was in 2015 or 2016, and they obviously don't reply to Messenger. They just stopped participating one day.

Actually, people thought I unfriended them. There was no point in me making a post, it would have been impossible for them to see it through all of the promoted content in their newsfeed.

Om is right, Facebook is not needed, but to me Facebook is the worst thing to happen to the Internet because they are trying to make the open Internet irrelevant. I hate them for it.

Should I know who this guy is?

Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

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