Ask HN: Why are you off Facebook?
Privacy is cited a lot but I'm curious if there were other reasons that prompted you to stop using Facebook.
P.S: Please clarify whether you've deleted your account completely or just stopped using it.
P.S: Please clarify whether you've deleted your account completely or just stopped using it.
I hate to see how awesome other people's life seems. I can't stop but get envious and disappointed. Yet, I kept coming back for more. I had the unhealthy compulsion to keep scrolling through the happy stuff, while feeling bad for my "mundane" living.
I stopped using facebook. I feel much better.
The majority of the population never speak about the "bad" things happening in their lives, because it makes you vulnerable which is a feeling we refuse to show in todays world.
Rage-deleted my account after getting tired of being constantly presented with reminders of parts of my life that should have been moved-on-from, except Facebook decides what parts of your life you should be seeing.
If Facebook hadn't steamrolled Evite due to the sheer percentage of general population with accounts, I don't think I'd have any regrets whatsoever. People have to go out of their way to invite me to things, which has definitely had an effect on my specific social network.
Time is a finite resource. What is the most economical way to spend it? Watching The Shawshank Redemption is probably more economical than reading Facebook memes. And similarly, there are hundreds of other things you could do at any given moment with more entertainment value than Facebook.
Now, you could say, "facebook is not entertaining, but is useful". I do not find Facebook useful. If you're interested in networking benefits, there's LinkedIn and email[1]. If there is no answer you can give to the question "Why are you on Facebook?", then you should probably not use it (I'm assuming it has a very low entertainment value for you, which may or may not be true).
"because everyone else is on it".. is not a good enough answer for me. Therefore, I deleted my account completely.
[1] EDIT: and instant messaging.
Now that I've stopped using it I find that I'm in a better, more stable mood throughout the day. Not being reminded of my inferiority means I find I can concentrate better on self-improvement i.e. the things I should be doing if I want to be as successful as these people I'm so jealous of.
Facebook has too much central control.
Social networking should be based on a decentralized system of independent nodes such that no single authority owns the whole damn thing and makes everyone obey their rules, and has everyone's personal info. (And all protocols documented, and implementations open-sourced, needless to say).
Again, a social network only needs to know whom to send your message to and need not know about the contents of the message, If USPS opened our letters, would we argue for a decentralized architecture where we individuals ourselves drove around delivering letters in our spare time?
How were so many of us tricked into handing over so much control?
I am curious to know what you're basing this statement on --"Fast" and "efficient" are not necessarily related.
(For instance, there seems to have been an explosion of decentralized message-queueing mechanisms available for coordinating distributed software systems. A centralized system can suffer from efficiency issues as easily as a decentralized one.)
This means the storage location of the messages you are supposed to receive could change often, making retrieving messages a two step process, looking up the current online location and then retrieving messages. The place to lookup messages is fixed in a centralized system, hence you'll receive messages faster.
This can definitely be sped up by increasing the number of times the messages are replicated in the decentralized system and a constant shuffling of the message between nodes to ensure it is always available for the receiver when they come online, hence inefficient.
But I also do believe the gist of that study which claimed that people feel more depressed after using Facebook. If you're craving human contact, visiting Facebook is a temporary distraction at best -- and the second you leave, you're no better off than you were before. In fact you probably feel worse, because now that temporary distraction is also suddenly gone....
I did it because I can't figure out why I should spend time reading something that no one cares whether I read or not.
Since I left, I noticed something. I think the word 'poser' has been overused and turned into a bizarre cliche, but surely there is a lot of posturing on facebook. I think the I-know-you-knows are a lot of the appeal, and that element is certainly lost with IM/Email. Personal tastes vary, and spending a lot of time on cheap social signals seems to be a pretty human passtime, but I just don't enjoy it.
It might be a generational thing, maturity or otherwise, but IMHO Facebook (and other social networks) has impacted our lives in unhealthy ways, more then being useful. Specially since businesses and everyone came on it (parents, relatives). This switched it from a cool place to hangout to some serious business.
Those two articles explain it more: http://seersuckermag.com/opinion/read/facebook-isnt-giving-b...
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-us...
1. I had come to believe FB couldn't be trusted with my data.
2. The more friends I gained the worse the experience became. It went from people showing their vacation photos, which I was ok with, to a stream of meaningless nonsense that I didn't want to see. I.e Yeah, OK, you had a coke at lunch, but should I really care?
3. It became an unpleasant chore having to keep on top of even the valid activity.
It's worth noting that in the last year of use I just put a status up declaring that I no longer actively used Facebook so please contact via email instead, but the distrust of Facebook grew to a point where I ultimately decided to delete my account.
I'll never go back, and I hear they're full of ads now.
The usefulness of Facebook is a big deal though. And it's just not useful anymore. My friend group tends to be pretty selective, and is mostly made up of people I know and interact with in real life. So I do that instead.
Privacy was not the major contributing factor of me stopping the usage of facebook, but how "nosy" I felt in other peoples lives when I don't even talk to them. The more I used facebook the more alone I felt.
Another issue was the cluttered feel to it. The addition of a twitter clone feed made everything feel like an "all-in-one" solution.
After going on a month long without Facebook, whenever I met my colleages, I would have a lot more to say to them and genuinely ask questions about whats going on in their lives. I default alot less to my phone after I meet with friends.
I still have my account though, I just don't use it.
My news feed is polluted with ads and garbage news that have been shared by people I hardly know. I've added so many 'friends' that are hardly acquaintances now, and I don't feel like deleting them, because my real friends hardly use Facebook either so its not worth it.
An additional annoyance is notifications for things that I don't care about: invites to facebook games (why are they even a thing?), notification of friends activity, and updates from pages I liked years ago. Its just become more of a hassle.
One of the girls in my social circle at the time I had an account made herself a "public figure", I'm not sure what the criteria is for that on Facebook, but her offline life is anything but that of a celebrity/public figure. The level of people "faking it" just gets annoying.
P.S. - people are lazy, and FB makes people work. It's cluttered and doesn't have a core value anymore that Twitter or Instagram or SnapChat can't already deliver. Best bet is to keep the acquisitions going to eliminate competition.
I don't use it because I don't find it very interesting. If I care what's going on with someone, I usually keep in touch via other means. And even for those people, I don't find their day-to-day posts very interesting.
Also, when there is something I need to know posted on Facebook that I haven't heard about via other means, my wife usually fills me in.
Also, I don't want to participate in their facial recognition database. I find this to be the worst in terms of the privacy I give up because I can be tagged in a picture without ever posting a thing. Anonymity goes away once anyone can identify anyone else through a simple picture. Then they can see who you work for, where you live, your family life, your sexual orientation, political beliefs, and so on. The downward spiral goes on from there.
For every interesting announcement from a friend, I had to wade through weeks of "What NATO country are you most like?" results, past their expiry memes, political grandstanding, videos of puppies and people falling over, and endless pictures of food. There's just no compelling use-case I can see.
I decided to take the marketing in my own hands and now have more control over it and reach the right people.
I occasionally use it as a way to contact someone if I don't have their current email or phone number though.
So I still keep my account but I post a picture or status update roughly biannually.
"I can't wait for Facebook to complete their AOL-ification, which will surely include its eventual death spiral."
Felt that living life is so better than recording all of it in facebook.