Deleting Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Deleting Facebook

robertheaton.com

61 pointsdomrdy58 comments

Those who are planning to delete all Facebook activity(posts) instead of deleting FB account itself, please note that FB seems to be hiding posts at random in the activity log when it detects unusual deleting spree and pops it up on a later date at a random interval.

I still find some 10 year old cringe post being the only post in my timeline occasionally, something which should have been deleted several years ago when I deleted all activity from my FB account. This has happened about 3-4 times now, it's no fun when the only post on your timeline is a 'liked' photo of a girl from your school whom you don't even remember now.

This dark pattern has been corroborated by others using an automated script[1], not that I'm agreeing to using any such script.

[1]https://github.com/weskerfoot/DeleteFB/issues/88

That was my plan a while ago, just delete all my posts and undo everything I can.

Doing this manually is an unpleasant undertaking riddled from start to finish with dark patterns that can only be described as malicious and petty.

I did not use a tool and did not even have many posts or likes and I was still unable to remove everything after 3 (!) runs. And even then I had to ask others for help to confirm whether something was truly gone because what Facebook showed me and what it showed others differed. Because of those tactics employed by Facebook I'm still unsure whether I got everything...

God I wish I never created an account, I certainly do not miss its usage even a bit but it feels like such a stain on my digital life.

It took me on average about 3 hours a day for 1.5 weeks to manually use Facebook's "manage posts" bulk deletion tool and even then I didn't get everything deleted, as posts to my wall for my birthday were grouped up and in those groups I could only hide them, with ~1500 friends over 13 years, I opted to hide most of them. At least content I posted was gone.

I am glad to hear I am not the only one - these old posts would appear over a course of months sometimes. I used an automation tool to delete eveything and then I went and manually clicked through the Activity log and deleted everything I could. I did several of these rounds to clear everything.

I would still recommend checking frequently, my recent old post popped up a year after any such incident.

I deleted my FB account completely a month ago, so now I don't need to :-).

Great, that's indeed the best solution for this problem. I don't use any realtime communication platforms, so I'm still having FB for emergencies say for asking blood(have faced the need before) but I'm running out patience and having moral dilemma very so often.

Wonder if this is just an example of how their particular "distributed, eventually consistent" platform operates due to CAP tradeoffs?

This is more likely the case then some conspiracy against users.

Software bugs in practice are rarely caused by fundamental problems. Sloppiness, incompetence and, in this case, different priorities are much more likely. Removing data is not a priority for Facebook.

People like to invoke all those theorems from computer science. That gives them an air of being knowledgeable. But at the end of the day, it's much more common that the program malfunctions not because of the halting problem, but because the language it was written in doesn't do bounds-checking on arrays, someone made an off-by-one error, or someone copy-pasted some code and the objective of the system was data collection, not data deletion, so the task of reviewing and testing the code was deprioritized in favour of something more profitable.

But talking about how you struggle daily with the fundamental problems of the universe sounds so much cooler.

Did you mean to reply to the parent comment?

But also, going by your logic, whatever is going on here is because something was depirioritized in favour of profit. The issue with that though, is that improper deletion would be detrimental to metrics in my opinion, not positive.

I gave that benefit of doubt to FB but still doesn't explain why random posts turn up at random intervals. Even it was to with CAP, I'm convinced that there's some amount of dark pattern involved just from the fact that 'user is not allowed to perform intended action'.

Thinking about this from an implementation perspective, I don't see how it would help any metrics and there's probably better explanations for what's going on then a purposeful dark pattern.

That’s most likely a cache bug.

I encountered this problem a number of times. I believe, in my case at least, that I noticed a pattern. I believe that facebook's activity log filters posts related to disabled accounts.

I think that when someone decides to re-enable their disabled account, your posts related to their account re-appear in your activity log. Therefore, one can never be sure if all activity is deleted, and one must iteratively return to the activity log every so often to delete re-appearing posts.

Hidden posts include my own posts as well, so what you stated could also add to the problem but doesn't seem to be the only factor.

Going cold turkey is never easy. If you're having trouble withdrawing, consider what I did over the past few years:

1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone; then

2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone; next

3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; then

4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally

5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.

It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?" (It's been years since I've cared to log into Facebook. Feels more like trudging through spam in an old e-mail inbox, now, than anything compelling.)

I don't have any of those. Never did in fact. Yet I still visit Facebook several times a day in the browser, because I'm a member of several automotive groups that I find really useful and I help people out there too.

That's my main problem - the big automotive forums you had 10 years ago have all gone empty, everyone just migrated to Facebook groups. Some forums still hang on(MBClub for instance) but the attendance is miniscule compared to any Mercedes Facebook groups. Like, if someone has a question it probably gets answered within minutes because the discovery is so good, compared with days on a traditional forum.

I just have no idea what to do about it. Facebook has consumed parts of the "old internet" and even if I break with facebook it won't bring those parts back.

I'll echo this sentiment - the age old 'get a new car, join a new forum' has been short circuited by FB. That part, I'll concede, is actually not that awful. Having all my old forums email me on my birthday reminds me what a pain it was to have a unique account of half a dozen forums.

The worst part, though, is that searching through the groups on FB is terrible. Like, atrocious. There is a lot of really good knowledge present, but due to the way FB displays it, finding information is a real chore.

I can also offer this advice, as someone who uses Facebook (mainly Marketplace and groups) but is not used by Facebook: limit the number of your Facebook friends to the absolute minimum you can, people who you don't talk to or talk to elsewhere, remove. And also unfollow everyone in your news feed. This will make the news feed show you content only from pages and groups (and possibly a handful of people you actually want to see content from). I never struggled with Facebook addiction, Facebook is so nasty I couldn't even get into it to begin with, but it has some utility which I like to take advantage of so I keep my account around gutted in this way which is so utilitarian and unexciting at this point I don't think I could even get addicted to Facebook if I tried.

I quit Facebook 5 years ago when it started getting really toxic for me, but I also have a very addictive personality.

I deleted my Facebook account, then edited my computer's hosts file with 127.0.0.1 facebook.com so that the website would redirect to a "this page could not be found" screen. This prevented me from accidentally reactivating my account and eventually the muscle memory faded

I deleted my main Facebook account in 2012.

Two years ago I need to test out some business features and API’s, so I made a new one. They needed my phone number, my gov ID, and my full name. I did everything but shortened my last name so it was “John S.” as I didn’t want it to be searchable. After a day they banned my account, they are dropping my requests to verify or delete it because name on ID isn’t the same as on Facebook account. My phone number is still attached to account. I even contacted a head of Facebook in my country to which she replied “sue us or be gone”.

Now, when I try to open a new one it’s deactivated second after confirming gov ID. So I’m banned for life. It’s sad what they have become, but I’m happy with the result. They could just stop profiling me on the internet thought. :-)

Just imagine the sheer fucking arrogance of demanding people submit government ID for a social media account.

I hate that company with a passion. My mother is addicted to that garbage, and I don't know what to do about it.

To be fair it isn't entirely their fault.

I feel like all of these platforms are trying to satisfy the media. But of course that isn't possible, the media is only satisfied by the hits it gets from dramatic atricles.

They will constantly publish "Platform X has unsavory content" as if it is surprising that some people will communicate "bad" things on a communication platform. But for whatever reason they feel the pressure so they start making it harder for bots, spammers, scammers and people that they disagree with to participate. Of course then the media has a new weapon "Platform X censoring good person Y!".

I'm not saying that all moderation is bad. But these platforms have backed themselves between a rock and a hard place.

I did the same last month after 13 years on Facebook. I first deleted every data I could manually over the last months. I migrated my only active Messenger contacts to Signal (I was surprised a lot of people I know were already using it). I am not missing it, it was consuming a lot of time and really - in the end it was not worth it. I have seen a lot of old timers leave FB and there is much less activity or anything that could be considered quality content. Just lots of ads and political never ending comment wars. For the record - I am located in EU (Slovakia).

On Facebook I can (passively) keep up with people I might otherwise rarely speak with. I don't have to call someone to see baby photos, or big life events. A lot of the posts point this out as a negative but frankly I couldn't disagree more. Being able to stay connected with people that I care about, regardless of how I do so, is a positive for me. I have neither the energy nor the extraversion to call up every person I occasionally think of, but on Facebook I can at least stay connected with them on some minor level. And it's the same for other people, too. Many people that I care about but we're both very introverted I've managed to maintain or even improve my relationship with them because Facebook exists.

It's also the hub for my family. Everyone is on it (for better or worse) and ultimately it's the easiest way for us to communicate with each other. Could this be done on an external bulletin board? Sure. Is that at all convenient or even a better solution? Probably not. The older folks aren't really interested in moving platforms, particularly when the one that exists already works perfectly for their use case.

I get it. They don't respect your privacy at all and likely never will. The writer of this post didn't get the same value out of it. He acknowledges that some people might find more utility in it than he does and that is fine. But to gain traction on Hacker News of all things feels peculiar to me. To read all these posts about how positive an impact deleting facebook has been on their lives when they're discussing these effects on another social media website, with even more questionable added value.

I have no connection with anyone on this website. I don't know any of you personally (at least as far as I know) and I've never developed any meaningful relationships with people on here either. The value to me perhaps is occasionally about finding new and interesting articles but more often than not it's largely tied to the discussions about technology with, if not actually, effectively anonymous folk. Those discussions are rarely fulfilling though, and it's often just a platform to try and point out why my point of view is correct or to argue with someone about theirs. I find value in it, but it's definitely not as valuable to me as Facebook.

I've not gone as far as delete my account, it's still got the network effect for some friends and family but I have deleted it from my phone and now soley use it in a facebook container in firefox. I find it's actually improved my attention and quality of engaement and I'm more focussed. Plus now I don't check my phone every 10 minutes for a dopamine hit.

> Plus now I don't check my phone every 10 minutes for a dopamine hit.

And here we're, on HNs :)

I deleted my Facebook on July 30, 2019. They just rubbed me the wrong way all the time.

I was afraid that disappearing from FB will negatively impact visits to my blog and revenue from selling my books via e-shop, but it actually slowly increased.

I have a nagging suspicion that paying for FB ads was worthless.

"I’ve never been asked to do anything particularly grimy at work, but if I was then I’d probably try to change teams and I like to think that if that wasn’t allowed then I’d leave immediately, without delay, as soon as I’d finished vesting." Made me chuckle.

I took all of the anti-fb steps (removed the app, deleted IG account, logged out of the fb app on my phone and desktop browsers), but I couldn't bring myself to actually delete my account. I still haven't deleted it, but last fall I got a new phone and my google authenticator app (for 2fa) lost all of my accounts (i.e. google and fb). Luckily I was able to login to my google account, but FB requires that I send them a photo of my drivers license. I know that I wouldn't be sending them any information that they don't already have, but something about that act just offends me. I haven't been able to log in since September and now I've pretty much forgotten about it.

I deleted my Facebook account last month and I haven't missed it at all. Sure, I get the occasional "is everything okay" text message for leaving, but so far, everyone has completely understood, with the majority saying something similar to "I should get rid of mine too" usually followed by some reason why they won't (old friends, relatives, all of their photos etc).

It's not that hard. You can download your entire profile. It even takes 30 days for the deletion to actually occur. If you think you should delete your Facebook account, just do it. If you change your mind after a few days you can stop the deletion process until you're ready.

I did likewise. I’d mostly stopped posting a few years ago and simply commented sometimes on others’ posts. But whereas Facebook used to be fun and a place where one’s friends and family shared about their lives, which had genuine and unique utility, it has become instead a platform where people share links/news. And not a good one. I don’t care about what outrage outlet a high school classmate reads or the hot take of a Boomer relative; Facebook has become a real world paper clip AI, churning out “engagement” by appealing to our baser psychological habits and offering each user little actual value.

I still find myself typing “fb” in a browser bar sometimes as I’m surfing and bored, but I don’t miss it; I’m spending more time reading NYT, WaPo, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and researching topics of my own interest.

I check Facebook maybe once a week at most. I don't really use it anymore but I have a handful of contacts that still use it as their main social networking platform so I use it to see if I've gotten a message from them or if my D&D group wants to get together (hasn't been an issue for about a year, sadly). Sometimes if I'm not expecting anything from them I'll go a month without looking at it.

I've been kicking facebook out of my life by accident simply by the virtue of it becoming less and less useful for me.

If someone can post a script or something that lets you extract all of your friends' birthdays into a Google calendar, it would go a long way towards making deletion more palatable

AFAIK Facebook sends reminders to your email, so you can collect the birthdays from there.

Not tried it myself, but there is this script: https://github.com/mobeigi/fb2cal

I'm certain it was possible to create a link on Facebook that could be used to import birthdays to your regular calendar application, but I can't find this feature anymore.

edit: First sentence of their actual description clarifies it:

> Around 20 June 2019, Facebook removed their Facebook Birthday ICS export option.

After reading the TOS, I never understood why people were okay with even using it. To this day I still don't know what exactly Facebook even is or what the point of it is. People always gave me the same line of "It's the only way I can keep in touch with family and friends." That sounded like nothing beyond a bogus excuse to me, I call and message my friends and family and for my whole life the only thing to change was going from mail to email to messengers.

I remember watching a PBS Frontline episode about Facebook and they mentioned how they're able to create a profile of anyone basically because they purchase profiles from credit card companies and credit agencies. So even if you delete it, they still have your profile and match it with these other companies and are able to sell the data like nothing happened.

That’s true, but Metcalfe’s Law works both ways: a small reduction in the size of the network significantly decreases the value of the network.

I closed mine 3 months ago. Among many positive changes this has had in my life, one I havent been seen mentioned is that now I call/msg people I care about often.

Before I would never feel like I missed someone and just call them. Its like fb artificially satisfies this need for human connection. Its interesting to notice these kinds of effects you weren't aware of.

Disabling/deactivating your FB account is a good way. Your automatically off FB but can come back if you want.

Been off for about 3 years and its great. Log in once a year or so.

Seriously what is the point of Facebook? Chasing likes? Getting into angry political discourse. Watching cat videos? no thanks.

You can use what's app or meet up for groups /family stuff. FB is so pointless.

You can also use messenger and have your account still be disabled. I do that.

How does this work? Simply log into messenger?

yes exactly. You just log into messenger and FB is still disabled.

Just delete cold turkey and realize in a few days it is not missed. Not really. Do you really care about that inane chatter?

That’s some of the reasons why I made https://nomorefacebook.xyz/ with privacy-friendly alternatives. I hope the list gets bigger as new things emerge.

I deleted my account for the same reasons. Also canned my LinkedIn. Gsuite is next!

Somehow I’ve never had a Facebook account this entire time, is there anything I’ve been missing with it? I keep seeing posts like this, but I haven’t really understood what makes quitting it so hard.

I think it's partly FOMO, partly sunk cost, and partly https://xkcd.com/386/

My kid's school and my apartment building sends out updates on Facebook. Its kinda sad there is nothing else that majority of people can use to listen on (other than email).

I only stay on Facebook due to one important group using Messenger exclusively. They’ve built their (small) business community and communications around it. It’s disappointing.

i just trimmed my friends to actual friends, i'm not sure of my other settings. Maybe i'm just lucky but i don't have any issues with my account.

Deleted mine years ago also. My only issue is trying to join other systems that only allow "login with facebook" and no other means of authentication

The only downside to deleting your FB account is that you'll have to explain to people why you don't have an account.

I'm finding that this isn't as much an eyebrow raiser as it would have been 2 or 3 years ago.

Source: haven't been "on" Facebook in probably 5+ years at this point. I have a dummy account with bunk info for Marketplace and a few FB groups, but have no friends.

I did the same a year ago. I wasnt really engaged with it though.

I never used facebook and I am all OK.

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