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Comment by amirathi | Hacker News Reader

I successfully tricked my mind to not use Facebook by destroying / making my feed non-personal.

How?

I became member of all sorts of group: Buy-N-Sell in my local area, technology groups, 10+ DevOps groups and so on. The quality of posts on these is poor and is irrelevant for me for the most part. So every time I used to open the app out of habit, I would see all non-personal crappy posts and I would close the app in under 10 seconds. Over time my mind hated using FB and clicking on that app went away from my muscle memory without me trying to force any habit changes.

Why not just delete the account? FB is still great to find old friends, ex-colleagues who I might have lost contact with. I also use it as my public mic to post stuff that I want to share as widely as I can.

It's fun to take on the PMs who design addictive products that influence us at psychological level and beat them at their own game. Bring it on!

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I can attest that this would be an effective technique, because recently I accidentally did the opposite.

A while back, I did a big clean up of all my groups, likes and (most of my) friends, which greatly improved the signal to noise. Before that, I hardly ever checked FB because there just wasn't anything I really cared about, and if there was it was too well buried.

Now, though I find myself checking it, just in case there is something worth seeing. I particularly started doing this after happening on two big surprise stories on there from small businesses that made me think "Lucky I was scrolling through FB, otherwise I wouldn't have known about that".

The signal to noise is better, but the problem remains the signal isn't worth receiving most of the time.

FOMO is the only reason I haven’t deleted FB. There are some could-be-important-for-work people on there that I would rather not lose contact with. Other than that, I like doing real life things with people 100x more than seeing their polished vacation pics.

Many interesting events in my area are propagated on FB exclusively, including meetups of my friends :-/

Be the change. People are lazy in general and will use whatever is easy and others use not giving too much thought to consequences.

In my circles I always openly say "I'd love to, but I don't use Facebook" - so if someone wants to have me included, they need to think about a more democratic way to include others. It's not egoistic - many other people don't use FB either. Excluding them just because a group of people is too blind to notice is a very negative approach.

> many other people don't use FB either

This is the problem, I'd be literally the only one. I tried it once - of course they didn't exclude me, but a lot of info got to me too late (when I had other plans already) and smaller events not at all.

The way I see it is: if friends won’t stay in contact with me without me being on Facebook... then they are not really friends. Leaving FB actually improved my social life because it became clear who were the real friends.

They do stay in contact! This is about small-ish events like a friend posting "hey guys, I'm hosting a dinner tomorrow". I can't blame them for forgetting about me (our group is rather large), some of them don't even have my phone number.

> Be the change. [...] > I always openly say "I'd love to, but I don't use Facebook"

It's called network effect and works by majority.

If most of your peers keeps using $foo you can only choose between using it or being left out - both are options that one dislikes.

Intolerant minorities have a lot of power to effect change.

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

If you believe this, you can measure it. Take a year and write down all the truly important things that you see on social media, then cross them out when you hear about them outside of social media.

I would bet that at the end of the experiment you can count your list with one hand or less.

FB has made billions instilling this FOMO into their users’ heads. It’s fake.

That's an interesting strategy and I can't doubt that it works 100%, because, although I used to spend a lot of time on facebook, I find my feed more and more irrelevant now while not liking much irrelevant things.

What has been told in Snapchat's leaked memo really resonates to me despite me not using Snapchat - Facebook has become to impersonal to me. I have too many friends, most of them I don't want to loose, because they are family, old friend, (former) coworkers, etc. but that also mean that I use facebook as an address book more than anything else. I don't browse it and I don't post on it.

I found just deleting the app on my phone was a great way to cut the habit of opening it every time I looked at my phone. I thought I was about ready to delete it after a few days but then suddenly realised that without it I would lose touch with a heap of businesses around town, food trucks, nice takeaways etc, that I wouldn't otherwise know about. Deleting the app has easily cut 90% of the time I was spending on facebook, but my hungry belly still has there :D

Why don't you learn to cook? I've heard of a nice cooking enthusiasts group on FB... oh, wait...

I do enjoy cooking but when someone wants to deliver a delicious breakfast to my door on a Sunday morning then I want to know about it :D

I made myself only use FB via mbasic.facebook.com, it's an awkward enough interface that it helps me minimize using it.

they broke my main use of Facebook for it, which also helps a lot

That is a fantastic idea

Well you can create just a fake account with all fake information and no friends, so you use it just for getting out some information from FB.

I could do, my big issue though was the time I was wasting on there rather than concerns over personal info.

> I successfully tricked my mind to not use Facebook by destroying my feed.

I did the same thing, but using a different technique.

Steps:

1) Taper off - Unfollow everyone who isn't a close friend or family

2) Destroy feed - Unfollow everyone

x) Optional step - Delete all your posts and untag all photos. It took me an hour or two but I deleted everything, one by one. A greasemonkey script managed to clear some of it, but the rest I did by hand.

I still keep my account, just with nothing on it.

I did all those steps and quickly realized how useless the platform is. The final step for me was replacing my password with a random string of characters and logging out for good.

This is an amazing mind hack. Truly out of the box :D :)

I did something similar but for different reasons with several of my puppet FB accounts and man, was it terrible. The amount of gibberish that's out there is enormous. You know something is very wrong if ads become the signal in the noise...

Isn't that done sufficiently by just adding all your acquaintances as friends? There are probably a dozen or so people on Facebook whose posts I actually care about. Everything else I could hardly give a shit about.

I didn't need to do that - the updates from my friends are boring/annoying enough that I avoid FB and mute virtually everyone.

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