Steve Pavlina: 30 days since I quit Facebook
stevepavlina.com
stevepavlina.com
I like this article, and not with a "like" button.
PS. I still use IM, and twitter like a notepad/thoughtstream (although I don't really promote it to friends).
Some op-ed considered dropping out of facebook as a radically anti-social act, and I'd have to agree: you're not considering the group's views on communication, and you're forcing them into a personal world. When the entire social circle uses facebook as a communication platform, it's pretty pompous to expect it to use what a single person wants. This is my argument boiled down: expecting a group of people to conform to a single person's views is rude, and the delusion that the one person is so important that everyone else will conform is anti-social.
The majority opinion on HN seems to be that this isn't, oddly enough. The last time I stated my experience it seemed to piss a lot of people off, and there was a knee-jerk reaction that "true friends will work around it." Maybe, but weak connections are important as well, and since facebook is the place for weak-connection friends, defiantly not using it seems off and a little anti-social.
Another argument was that interaction existed before facebook, so not using it is fine. That's dancing around the point: facebook is the current defacto standard of social communication, not participating it is seen as aggravating to the other party, not that it destroys communication completely. Try telling your friends that you'll only interact with them in orkut. Or, for the Gen X'rs here, that you're dropping your phone, and you expect them to say "hi, how's the job" through post mail and in-person visits. There's a series of fall backs here that's reversed for the average hacker. The hacker sees facebook as personal, and email/phone public. The average person sees facebook as a public place, and email/phone as a personal channel.
"If one person calls you a donkey, ignore him; if five people call you a donkey, buy a saddle"
When she calls me a donkey, I'll get fitted for a saddle. When vampyrlust317 and fifty of his/her Facebook "friends" do so, I'll probably ignore it.
Seriously, you need a better class of friends. Are you seriously telling me that people won't talk to you in person because you aren't on Facebook?
What the hell is wrong with people?
People at work are suspicious when they find out I'm not on facebook, and try to cajole me into joining.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't claim to have been much better.
And FWIW, I've observed the same effect for quitting WoW. Once I did, a whole class of friends stopped talking to me.
> And FWIW, I've observed the same effect for quitting WoW. Once I did, a whole class of friends stopped talking to me.
They're jackasses if that's really the reason they stopped talking to you -- unless WoW is all you had in common with them, in which case I don't understand your problem. I find it difficult to believe you're honestly defending that kind of behavior, if they were supposedly real (not just gaming) friends.
Upvoted just for this. Not sure if it's true or not, but it's a provocative thought.
Could someone explain what this means?
For some of us it's the other way around: email and phone is how people we don't know well contact us, reserving Facebook and Twitter for closer interactions.
Once I graduated college, I deleted everyone that I felt like was only an acquaintance. Once I got a job, the bloat began again. How do you deny a friend request to someone you work with?
Now... I can't stand Facebook. There is no use for me in having friends, coworkers, and relatives in one space unless I'm at a wedding or funeral. Facebook also puts all the burden of responsibility on the user to segregate their friends into 'groups' which is by no means as easy as it should be.
I now feel like just deleting it. I hardly ever check it anymore unless I get a message from someone.
Like you said, I prefer to email or call someone.
I was rapidly becoming sick of Facebook. I only friended people that I'd met before, but even so it was polluted by people who I went to middle school, etc. with who I really didn't know that well even then.
Then I found the "Hide" option. I hide probably 95% of my "friends." After I did this, I LOVED using Facebook again. Every time I logged in, I was able to keep up with good friends of mine who live in other parts of the state, country, world. These are people I DO care about, often talk to in other ways, but it's a nice aggregator. If I post something, everyone that isn't directly relevant to my life can still see and comment on it, but I don't have to see their stuff.
It's perfect, it really revitalized Facebook for me and it's actually FUN to use again.
I didn't know Facebook could do that! In general, I find fb's user interface confusing. Recently, I was trying to get it to display a list of all my friends; I managed to get it done eventually, but it took effort and frustration.
1) It's a pain in the ass to hunt down and hide various people and apps, and you have to keep up with it. Consequently, your friends who are likely to say interesting things but not spend a ton of time tweaking their FB settings tend to drift off, driving your signal down.
2) Hiding people is a blunt instrument -- you hide someone who's 98% noisy but 2% interesting, and you've hidden more signal you wanted to see. Then, when they ask you about why you didn't see their baby photos, you have to tell them that the answer is because you were sick of "Which Twilight Character Are You?" and hid them.
In the end, it's easier just to quit and go back to using the regular internet.
Add people into lists.
Whenever I'd like to see more of somebody, I go to their page, make a couple of comments, and pronto, their posts enter my stream, squeezing out posts of people I didn't interact with. Problem solved.
I'm on facebook where I occasionally share a picture of my son or a picture from something I enjoy. I don't post often but this way my parents en grandparents can see my son growing up. Don't actually care if my 'friends' see this.
When I'm on the toilet I sometimes take my iphone and check the FB stream. Check it when I don't have much time or feel like investing a lot of effort in reading something.
Just use it like you want to use it. This whole social network hype, like you can only be social online. People have been social even before the phone was invented. It is just another extra tool and doesn't replace normal social interaction. It never will!
I see people's attitudes towards FB fall into these two distinct camps:
1) People who feel compelled by FB somehow, and end up deleting their profiles or "Quitting" entirely, and
2) People who have a profile, but don't feel compelled to check it or interact- except at their leisure.
I think it has something to do with implied disrespect when you don't get back to people quickly; Ignoring a text or phone call sends a message. Does 'ignoring' a facebook ping send that same message? What about failing to respond to an indirect message on Facebook? There must be some sort of social phenomenon putting uncomfortable pressure on people somewhere in the setup of facebook.
If you want to contact me and are in my circle of people that have my cell number that is the best way to directly contact me. But even on my cell I sometimes choose not to pick up immediately and listen to the voicemail. This way I can decide if the message needs my direct interaction.
Anyway people put to high of hopes on tools. Social interaction is about people and not the tools.
This guy, with 5000 friends, strikes me as odd - isn't that more like what Twitter is for? I don't think Facebook was conceived with that kind of usage in mind. It doesn't scale to display such huge amounts of data particularly well.
It's fascinating how people will adapt your product to uses that you didn't intend; it must also be frustrating to hear them moan about it.
Everyone has different means of communication they prefer. Some people like to stick to email or IM, others vastly prefer phone, some people always let their phone go to voicemail and call you back at their leisure (or not at all). There's always going to be some give-and-take, Facebook is just another piece in that puzzle.
No it doesn't.
At least no for me. If I ignore a call or text, I was busy. If its important, s/he'll call again. If I forget to call back later, I forgot it. No drama.
Or maybe its just this kind of acting that makes the drama people stop contacting me. Sort of natural selection. Works pretty well.
I don't know of anything else that is in the same galaxy of convenience. If Facebook didn't do this, I wouldn't ever have signed up for an account at all.
Oops.
Like your list of friends?
No corporation has a right to know who my friends are. And keeping off sites like Facebooks is one of the best ways to keep that information private.
No. Not everyone is on Facebook. Sure, it's useful, but it's not the be-all and end-all of communication, and it will not replace every other means of communication ever invented. Stop this nonsense.
FB is also a convenient way to keep in contact with people you no longer live near and see on a regular basis. I feel bad for the people who obsess over status updates and feel compelled to share everything. Because if you don't do that, it can actually be a great way to keep in contact with people you actually care about.
I don't have that problem. My problem is that I notice someone invited me to a party two months ago, and didn't bother to contact me via direct email -- something I actually check regularly. I'm socially lazy in a way completely different from the social lazy he describes; I don't make any effort to check the various online sources of "socialness" with any regularity, in part because I'm an introverted hermit. I do well in social settings, but first you have to get me to a social setting.
Despite this, I can understand the siren call of a service like Facebook for some people, because on the rare occasion I remember to check my Facebook page I can hear it calling. After about five or ten minutes, though, I get tired of it and stop for another month or two. Many others do not have that low threshold for getting tired of the Facebook experience, and I can see how someone might get sucked in.
If you're one of those people, the only way to scale back might be to quit cold turkey. In fact, I think that's probably true for the majority of regular (as in "common and frequent") Facebook users, though they may not realize it.
It was still well under the Dunbar[1] threshold, as I knew who they all were and could probably spend an hour on each one of them telling you how I knew them in high school or college, etc. But I simply got no value out of seeing a post from a woman I dated briefly in college 9 years ago talking about what new yoga studio she was teaching at, or from an old high school classmate saying what airport he was currently passing through.
The noise was just too loud and overpowering. I ended up deleting my account.
A few months later I came back under a made-up new email address so those folks wouldn't find me again. My e-friends list now is only about 40 people, cut way down -- specifically people I see every week or two or people I would otherwise invite into my home without any hesitation.
With less noise from people I simply don't care much about anymore, I see useful things. And I feel better about sharing a interesting news article from HN or a picture from a dinner party with my small inner circle, without feeling like I'm spamming dozens of people who just don't care.
From a fairly long piece, I think this is the salient point.
I feel much better not having something that felt so obligatory, yet so unlike me.
These networks seem to leverage social pressure as much as they solve problems.
Never have joined facebook and time has made me happier with that decision every single day.
Not a whole lot has changed. I don't get to passively select events and friends to hang out with. So I have to actively maintain a social life. Which is harder, granted, only because managing to stay in touch with more than a dozen or so people in any meaningful way is quite difficult to do. However, the quality of those relationships is quite high.
I also have the added bonus of not showing up in ads or have some creep-o advertiser/marketer snooping on my data stream to sell me more crap I don't want or need.
It took me a long time to jump on the facebook bandwagon. I only opened an account at the behest of friends who had all but forgotten what a phone was. I tried it and I can now honestly say I was right about it in the first place.
Huge. Waste. Of. Time.
I agree with him in that FB communication is generally shallow - the less meaningful your status updates are, the more people seem to like them.
I also tire of inspirational quotes and Internet Marketing pitches - MLM too.
I continue to use it though because I'm not really bothered enough to ditch my account.
On a side note - did anyone notice that the picture of SP in his sidebar looks like Julian Assange?
What he wrote were observations after quitting and several of the points he acknowledged were related to higher volume -- points that might not apply to readers with lower public profiles.
Actually, there was a GTD aspect of it (inbox, Tweet usage, LinkedIn) that seemed right at home for HN.
It's not hypocrisy, it's compatibility. Every social networking site offers a bunch of new interactions, and you can support members without endorsing membership.
And thats the reason you see only a 'like' button on Facebook. Enable a 'dislike' button and you will see many more dropouts.
Actually, we can try one more experiment. The next time we don't like something, we say 'dislike' in the comments.Lets see if we can do that.
> My Facebook page was maxed out at 5K friends and was very active.
5000 friends??? No wonder he got tired of it. Before I passed 100 I rarely used the 'hide' button, now I use it more, and I think hiding people and blocking apps (and sometimes turning chat off) is a good way to make fb experience less annoying.
Really????? I don't even think I met that many people in my 30+ years of life! When you take anything to that extreme, it inevitably starts to lose some of its original meaning at some point.
The word "friend" in the context of Facebook creeps me out more and more. It devalues immensely what it really means to be someone's friend.
I'm paranoid about information about myself. I left Facebook because I want explicit, direct control over what information about me is made available to whom. Yes, Facebook has privacy controls, but they are Facebook's privacy controls.
No corporation has a right to know who my friends are and who I associate with (much less exploit that information for advertising, or sell it to anyone who wants to pay for it).
I find it really disturbing that so many people in this world are so ready to give up their privacy and information about themselves for very dubious "services" like Facebook and other social media sites, not to mention things like online tax services, video/book recommendation services, etc..
All of these services that are collecting information about you, your friends, and your preferences are going to be datamined to figure out even more information about you.
For instance, there has been research done to figure out political affiliation and sexual preferences from the movies one watches on Netflix. It's really just a matter of time before information like that gets used to discriminate against people (or worse).
Now, Steve, as someone who has actually used the site for a nontrivial amount of time, writes a post bringing up mostly the same points. That feels nice.
However, I do get tremendous value out of my real friends on Facebook, since we share event invites, photos of our trips, news articles/videos that we share interest in, etc. I am a performer and all my performer/musician friends are on Facebook, and that is the main medium for getting news out about a show. The days of posting flyers on telephone poles and cafe windows are over - if you are not posting your upcoming shows on Facebook and inviting your friends, then your band is going to struggle to sell tickets.
Personally, I'll be happier when decentralised equivalents to Facebook become more of a viable option, such as Appleseed or Diaspora. At least then you'll be able to choose not to live your online life inside of a panopticon where not so trustworthy entities are constantly peering over your shoulder.
That and I am not interested in anybody from high school.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/09/overcoming-news-add...
Highly recommended, even though I fail completely at the advice and am glued to Al Jazeera English right now.
And don't get me started on tech news ;)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-frie...
for notifications.
Dude, it's Twitter you are looking for. And you should call those people "followers" and not friends (half of them are fake profiles for SEO purposes anyway).
Damn, my life is completely filled with all the relationship I can muster. I get to get my work done and surf teh web a bit. I also get to exercise some.
In any case the days are still too short for me - why the hell would I want to join the worlds biggest privacy fraud?
Yes I have been smart enough to foresee all the negative sides of it 4 years ago. Ain't I cool?
I wonder why FB haven't asked for your web mail logon, and mined the emails to better understand who you already interact with.
Honestly, it's like the people who never fail to let a new acquaintance know that they abstain from owning televisions.
I think that this phenomenon is mostly a bandwagon of Guru's who want to have something new and 'revolutionary' to present to their followers. Pavlina's always telling people to quit something. First it was regular sleep, then monogamy, etc. While he purports to be anti-consumption, this really just makes us focus on our consumption even more.
A better strategy for a balanced digital life is to pragmatically audit your useage on an ongoing basis.
I remember him writing that one reason for quitting polyphasic sleep was that he didn't spend much time in bed with his wife.
It's interesting to note that Facebook seems to me to be a vehicle that can be easily abused to bypass monogamy.
Maybe the pieces fit in the end.
A better strategy for a balanced digital life is to
pragmatically audit your useage on an ongoing basis.
Great analogy. Both are a complete waste of time.
well there's your problem.