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Comment by _ttg | Hacker News Reader

Faster shortcuts:

It's probably by design, but from experience most people will need non-trivial discipline/hacks to get around the 30 day window and avoid reflexively logging in. Would be curious to know how many people who try deleting their accounts follow through to the end

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I deleted mine 2 years ago, and definitely followed through on it. Once it was done, it was absolutely zero problem to have it out of my life. The only thing I’m curious about though, is what would happen if I try to login again. I’m terrified to even try, for fear that somehow it wasn’t actually deleted even though that’s exactly what I did.

Update: I decided to finally try logging in and thankfully it said it could not locate an account under my email. So I guess that's a good thing. I do wonder if it triggered something else though, just by my trying to login.

If your email has ever appeared in any breaches, your account probably has had many login attempts.

Yes, but were those other login attempts using the actual password that was correct when my account was active? I'm probably just being paranoid... of course FB deleted my account and all its details.

I deleted mine 3 or 4 years ago, and I did end up logging in a couple of times during that 30 day window - "Oh, I'll just have a quick look at those wedding photos" or "I want to go on that trip so I best keep it logged in for that" kind of thing - purely instinctive at the time to find that info.

I imagine if you are hooked on the whole 'social interaction' thing, the 30 day sliding window is ... unhelpful.

If folks can't go cold turkey I'd suggest unfollowing everyone first. It makes the site much more useful and easier to quit.

This was the trick that made it possible for me to stop being addicted to Facebook. You don’t have to fight the urge to load the app. You get a strange sense of satisfaction from slowly unfollowing everything. And the more you unfollow, the less what you’re shown is interesting. You retrain your brain by getting less and less dopamine hits from the action you couldn’t control. Then a day comes where you load the app and there’a simply nothing to see.

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