I recently made the switch. I went from trying to limit how much I log in (to once or twice a week), to actually not logging in. I've been cold-turkey for two months (except for a couple of times when I had a very specific reason to check something).
I thought it would be difficult. Turns out it's not so hard, and it's the fear of reduced social contact (or dopamine withdrawal more likely) that was stopping me. If you have a plan to replace the social interactions with other forms, you realise that the rest is just dross. If I really want to know what my friends had for breakfast I can phone them up and ask. On balance, I'd rather not.
I'm not at the point of deleting the account yet. Small steps.
Here were my reasons FWIW: http://blog.afandian.com/2017/01/why-i-am-giving-up-on-faceb...
If you're reading and considering whether or not you can withdraw from Facebook, you can do it!
If anyone's interested in really ditching Facebook and preventing it from injecting junk into the sites you visit and tracking you, here's a list of URLs I've added to my hosts file. As the repo's name suggests, it helps make the internet suck less.
https://github.com/riebschlager/make-the-internet-suck-less/...
I think if you really want to make sure Facebook doesn't have data directly from you, you'd need to take the time to delete every possible interaction you can, delete browser cookies, wait a couple days, then initiate account deletion (Facebook makes you wait 2 weeks until your account is actually deleted, just enough time for you to change your mind).
I'm 38 years old. I plan events with friends, I get to see their children grow up, new jobs, comfort them when they lose a parent..
There's never been a platform so emotionally engaging. It makes me feel in sync with their lives, even when I haven't seen them in a while.
It's such an amazing platform.
Also I am sad to see your thought is being down-voted.
Do you though? I mean do you really get to see all those things? Having been through the loss of a parent and the arrival a new baby in the past couple of years I can tell you from this end of things there is no value in any online "presence" of friends and family.
The people who come to meet our new baby, who brought food, and who attended the funeral are the ones that actually impacted our lives and improved us and themselves. A DM or post in Instagram meant nothing - it feels more like the person is signaling human emotions than engaging in them.
Facebook is the creepiest site ever. It's way more than the Stasi could have ever hoped for.
On top of that, the interface makes my brain hurt.
Yeppp. I know exactly how you feel, brother. I gave up Facebook for New Years and will be deleting my account after I set up a blog so I have somewhere to blow off steam and tell bad jokes.
The compromise that helped me overcome the feeling of being cut off was that I will have an open comments section and email address, if my friends really want to stay in touch then they will take time out of their week to come say hi.
It's a lot harder than people think. And the last season of South Park was no joke... When I announced I was leaving Facebook, many people were shocked and genuinely concerned for me. They asked me if it was really necessary, if I couldn't just use it less.
But that isn't an option, it's all or nothing and within a few months I will never let Facebook save another cookie on my computer again.
But I know the concern is partially because they understand exactly what is going on in my mind but they don't see a way out. It's really depressing.
For the hell of it I briefly checked my feed last week and I felt like a recovering junkie, visiting their old friends and seeing for the first time what their lifestyle really looked like from the outside.
The following is not meant to be critical - honest.
Why don't you channel your desire to be heard in to live interactions instead of an online one which is ultimately one way? It is much more fulfilling, and admitting/accepting that you don't deserve & need to share every thought that pops in to your head is healthy.
And if you need an extra kick, you can download an archive all your data. It had previous girlfriends, employers, places I signed in, private messages, ad agencies they passed my details on to, etc etc. All stuff I'd rather let fade away, but I know it never will.
This is the problem for me right now. I don't have a plan for replacing the social contact of facebook (and facebook isn't giving me anywhere close to what I need). I'm also struggling with depression right now and pretty socially withdrawn. As soon as the current blues pass and I'm able to come up with a real life third place [1], I hope to start limiting how much time I spend there and eventually quit altogether.
[1] From the article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
I read an article not long ago about upscale private clubs. I'm strongly attracted to the status/networking aspect often involved, but the idea of a place gather and socialize that doesn't require buying alcohol/coffee/food is appealing. Place it in a neighborhood. Keep the membership fees accessible to the people who live in that community and then offer some small perks that bars/coffee shops don't (e.g. free billiards on a real table). Hopefully, membership would make people a little more open to socializing with whomever show up, rather than the typical bar in which most people stick to their own group.
Does anyone have experience with private clubs (of any kind)? Did they open up social interaction in this way?
Other places I've had success is with local political/activist groups and hobby groups (dance groups, martial arts groups). Again, you have to try a lot of groups to find the right one, but it's worth it.
Get a fun job. Like at Walmart. People are invigorating. You have real relationships with fellow workers and the regular customers. Human interaction. Just don't have it be your real job so you can ignore drama.
Agreed. People fear they will socially ostracized if the leave Facebook. My experience has been the opposite. I found that FB is a good excuse to be socially lazy. Going to actual social events and meeting new people and having spontaneous conversations is far more gratifying and important. It's easy to delude yourself that you are getting your "social fix" via your FB feed and sending and accepting "friend requests."
There was a time when if you were in a public place waiting for a friend, you would strike up a conversation with a person next to you. Now if you are in say a bar waiting for your friend to show up most people are more likely to use that time to look FB on their phones, rather than interact with unknown people around them. I find this kind of sad.
For the past several months, I spent some of my free time going through my history, deleting almost everything I ever posted (note, there's a way to view your timeline by specific year, which seems to include more than the regular timeline view). The few things I couldn't delete (because it didn't give me an option) or that I didn't want to delete (e.g, photos I want to download later), I set to viewable only by me. Then without a peep, I deactivated my account. I probably should have written a script to do this rather than taking all the time. But to be honest, doing it manually was a nice jog down memory lane, even if it was really time consuming.
At this point, I have no plans to reactivate my account, with one exception. At some point, when I decide that "it's time," I'll reactivate my account, download an archive of the remaining items, delete what I can of what remains, and use the "account delete" option (for whatever good that actually does). Then that will be it.
Out of habit, I still frequently catch myself saying "ooh, interesting article, I should post that to facebook. Oh, wait..." Hopefully it's only a matter of time before that stops.
Anyway, I can say I'm happier without it. I'm now seriously considering deactivating my Twitter account. Twitter really will delete your account after I believe 30 days of it being deactivated.
This is a nefarious dark pattern though - I don't think there's any way to find the delete option through menus, you have to search through Google or Facebook's help center.
Since I don't use WhatsApp (because it's an FB company and because chat is not a substitute for groups), it'd be very hard to engage with others for my use, find new people, etc.
Turns out you apparently cannot do that, as every time I log in, I find myself re-following a few people (2-10) - some of which I had unfollowed long, long before my "isolationist" move...
The problem many people have is convenience. For example if you are forced to use Facebook in order to log into a Hotel Wifi (as I recently was) then you have to say "I don't want the Wifi more than I want to log in with Facebook". It's not an essential.
Or, it might be more difficult to spend the effort keeping in touch with people on a personal level, but it's not impossible. It just doesn't have the convenience that Facebook gives. But it also doesn't have the costs.
I'm not trying to convince anyone. But I do find it increasingly interesting (as I pay more attention to it) how many people confuse 'convenient' for 'essential'.
Now 2 weeks later, when FB crosses my mind I am actually happy and sometimes grin thinking of how much I've benefited from quitting it!
I'm in the same boat. I hardly use it, but I keep it around because it is the favored way to contact certain people and organize events, and I don't want to miss out.
I console myself by deliberately injecting noise into my profile (e.g. fake likes) every once in awhile.
This time I also stopped drinking alcohol, quit nicotine (in the form of snus) and deleted several of my accounts, e.g. Gmail and Linkedin. This feels suspiciously easy...
Every single one of them, EVERY one of them made it a mission of sorts to keep me from leaving the site.
"Just unfollow people, spend less time on the site"
Well by spending NO time on the site I AM spending less time on the site so hey we both get what we want right?
One friend went armchair psychologist on me about the affair.
It was an interesting week between emails,phone calls and text messages asking me where I had gone and why. "was it something I posted?"
For my part three months later...I've been reading a lot more and my grades in pre-law are improving, and that's all the feedback I needed to know I was on the right track to removing unnecessary cruft from the life.
The only people I know of who have success in their facebookian encounters are:
+ activists + artists (who connect under pseudonyms) + businesspeople (who connect under the umbrella of their company)
Still, I must say, this was a liberating experience. I don't go there anymore to see another cat/new born/fake news posts. I don't get get angry with dumb comments. I don't have to see at my friends are eating, selfies, etc..
My closest friends and family are reachable one whatsapp/imessage/phone call away. The other hundreds "friends" I had on FB, I don't even remember their names anymore...
If you are considering getting off of it for any of these reasons then why haven't you already done it? You feel you might somehow need it, just like a heroin addict has trouble imagining a life without drugs.
It is horrible for your privacy. They collect EVERYTHING about you!
It is in their best interest to manipulate your attention, which to me is terrifying.
It is horrible for your relationships, cut the acquaintance you met 5 years ago that YOU WILL NEVER SPEAK WITH and force yourself to make more intimate connections with the people that actually matter.
It is horrible for your mind, you have a constant bombardment of instant gratification and self reinforcing ideas.
(OK they probably have that in every login page redirect, and the cleverer way would be to silently record the HTTP header...)
Thanks for sharing the link.
One of the things we ended up talking about was physical photographs and how our families had developed a natural curation and annotation system. "Keepers" get sorted and labeled on the back with names, dates, brief notes, etc. and placed in albums. There were a bore when we were younger, but now we appreciate having some long-lasting artifacts of our families' lives and history. This is a nice thing and differs in importance to my every day interaction with personal media.
If I had the talent, I would make a small journaling tool for myself. All I would ask it to do is remind me once a week to select a favorite photograph and make a brief note about who's in it and why it's important. Really, just 30 second a week. Then, one a year a nice, archivally printed photo album would show up on my doorstep with all of these photographs arranged and discretely tagged with names, dates, and notes. That's it.
Browser fingerprint plus IP and/or geo location and I'd think you could get a fairly accurate guess of who you are.
There is a JS project based on that and that gives you an ID based on the fingerprint. [1]
[1] https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs2
Edit: I just saw that the link provide even more data like this. Just my list of font is a > 99.9% of uniqueness. Multiplied by all the other likelihood, it's getting close to having the signature of every person on internet.
Interesting article: http://fusion.net/story/339018/facebook-psychiatrist-privacy...
Yep, this is the #1 reason I still have a FB account. Until recently, I needed it so I could use Tinder. I have a great gf now, but just in case that fails, I'll want to be able to reactivate my Tinder account, and I need my FB login for that.
The only other reason I have a FB account is so I can be "friends" with some family members and some other people, because they use it. In practice, however, I never actually look at anything on there unless someone tells me "I sent you a FB message about such-and-such!".
I only log in when I get an e-mail notification for a message I've received. Some time ago you could simply reply to that e-mail but that doesn't work anymore. Furthermore, you can't say: I just want a notification in case of a message. You have to accept some other stuff as well. I've told my spam filter to delete every e-mail from facebook that doesn't include "message" its the subject.
You can, but they try to make mobile users think you can't; you have to either use the desktop version of messenger.com (e.g., with "request desktop version" from a mobile browser) or use mbasic.facebook.com
They actually do this? That's pretty scary
I also left twitter months ago. The people seem to be better there, but I have the image of twitter being a bad company. And the time spent there didn't provide enough value to me. It was too easy to get disrupted at work. And after keeping apps closed, the service became useless for me.
Most of the people I have contact with are developers, and like 99% don't have a Facebook account either.
Then used to target you in every possible ways.
The next wave that will eventually unseat Facebook (the product) will have to be something entirely different. And it might even come from Facebook (the company).
People want to be able to find their friends, so you need some way for discovery to happen. If there's no tracking locations and relationships, then how do you do it? Usernames are the only privacy-concious way to accomplish that, and then you've just described MySpace. Facebook works because when you drunkenly befriend someone at a party, you can find them the next day online. It's bootstrapped discovery. Like it or not, that's what most of the world likes about Facebook.
Google almost solved this problem with G+, but they did it by scanning your email contacts. Is that still a privacy breach?
Though...Bloomberg Chat meets your criteria (ex-fee). It consists of ~300K financial users who pay ~$25K/year/terminal. Many argue this is the killer feature of Bloomberg. I agree. It's like an exclusive, digital country club.
I don't think it would work in the world we live in because people are long used to getting things for "free" (from the days of "free email"), where they exchange their attention and personal information for some services. Somehow people have also been trained to avoid even tiny costs in monetary terms (one reason why iOS App Store pricing is always a bad trap for most developers). In my own experience, the cost-benefit ratio takes a longer time to analyze and convince myself of in certain cases.
But if there were such a platform, I would certainly want to try it if it provided similar features (not lagging like Google+ and not including features in "New" that were in "Classic").
When Ello started a few years ago, I really wanted to use it and see it grow fast. But it turned out to be a platform that self-targeted some niche artistic crowd and didn't focus on features I wanted (like groups).
I keep pushing people in my circle to try new things as much as I can possibly do (like Telegram, Wire, Signal). So I'd be very interested in breaking out of Facebook.
MySpace died because they weren't evil enough.
We already have this. It's called "Diaspora". It's a great idea using all the things you talk about: decentralized, peer-to-peer, etc.
No one uses it.
>but I don't require mainstream adoption to use it.
Then I encourage you to set up your own Diaspora account. Maybe if enough people do so, it'll eventually get somewhere.
The average person just doesn't care about privacy at all.
I always feel that I come across as a tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy theorist when I'm trying to explain to friends why I don't use Facebook.
Facebook had a net income of $3.6bn from 1.86bn monthly active users, or $1.93 per user.
I don't think many users are going to work for what Facebook could reasonably pay out of that....
Worse, any remotely attractive payment might well lead to the rapid creation of billions of fake accounts.
[1] http://static2.uk.businessinsider.com/image/589259d8dd0895fb...
My wish is that mainstream news media would cover these issues. It'd be great if most of FB's users thought about the troves of personal info that they are providing not just about themselves but their friends as well.
By unfollowing everyone except a handful of boring sites that barely ever publish anything, my newsfeed has become very boring and I rarely feel the pull towards it or any of its addictive power. The end result is that when I do log in, I only see notifications for a couple of groups full of my friends or interests that are truly relevant and I don’t waste any time scrolling.
At this point in my life, Messenger (not from the main site, but from its own site) and Groups are quite convenient, and both are a bit necessary for me at the moment, so I can’t quite disable Fb, but I’m very happily giving up on the feed for good.
I might eventually quit altogether, but this method has worked for me quite well for the last few months.
I have several friends who would benefit a lot if they stopped following hundreds of accounts, keeping their feeds and brains busy with "nothing."
I ended up deleting my account anyway.
It looks like skillful black hat marketers have already succeeded at poisoning FB's content. Read this Vice story, then delete your FB account and delete the cookies from your browser. Friends don't let friends use FB.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/big-data-cambridg...
Btw if you weren't already aware... a lot of small businesses (e.g. mom & pop restaurants, handymen contractors, yoga studios, etc) actually did have a real website but they abandoned them and only maintained their Facebook pages.
The behavior pattern is the same: the "real website" whether it was a CMS built on PHP-Drupal or a Wordpress blog was too complicated for owners to mess with. (e.g. "uh, what's this domain renewal email I just got from Godaddy have to do with my website?!?") The real website then suffers "digital rot" or they expire.
Facebook pages are easier. Therefore, advising them to maintain real websites isn't going to convince them. They've already "been there done that" and saw no value in it. As far as privacy and data collection, businesses don't care -- it's their public storefront.
Until they land in the news for something and then people can go back and start digging up and doxxing people at the company and any other nefarious information they can get their hands on. ANY information on a business FB page is like a gold mine for social engineers. Everybody on FB eventually "over shares" information they think is safe, but its really not.
One problem with FB sites for businesses is loss if identity since the platform looks the same.
I get that small physical shops that don't want to pay for a webmaster etc may have problems updating their sites. But I do miss seeing their original sites.
Twitter and Instagram are ok channels. The problem with FB is the privacy of its individual real person members and their families and friends. When did we sign up to get directed ads etc?
Zuckerberg probably had that idea early on, but the FB members had to accept new terms several times to continue using the platform.
Twitter is actually OK in my opinion as it is obviously a more PR like channel by design. (Also Instagram for showcasing new products etc.)
I think that FB sites are a poor substitute for well designed unique websites with depth and relevant information.
The question is how to get viewers or subscribers. But since FB started out as a "personal/friends" service I think that ads and PR will soon be perceived as spam. When people start waking up that is.
Or am I just naive in believing it's something sophisticated?
But the very first step, for sure, is to admit that you have the addiction.
And you can re-follow people any time if things get quiet.
The iOS version is a web app because Apple rejected our native app. They said any app that encourages you to use your phone less is not appropriate for the app store.
However, a few years ago i recreated a Facebook profile (this time a pseudonym with initially 0 friends) because some of the events i'm interested in (local music/art galleries for example) only publish their events on Facebook, it seems. No mailing list available, invariably. This is a pity, because i don't have friends to rely on to drag me to the good gigs (i like to keep up-to-date with local experimental music, for example, which my friends don't care for).
And, the problem too, is that inevitably, i've made one or two friends with that account, partly with my previous FB experience in mind, and partly because they seemed belligerently anti-email (and texting isn't practical when you're in another country). So now i'm far from being back to square one, and i only look at Facebook about once every month, but i still would love to just get rid of it, except i don't really know how to handle musicians and artists who only publish their upcoming events on Facebook. But aside from that, the comments are spot on. If people can't be arsed to email me if i prefer email (and i, too, believe that i am easily google'able), they're probably not really worth chasing.
Does that exist? Like-on-Facebook-and-relay-via-email-as-a-Service?
Unfortunately it sucks me into political fake news and lots of other bad things. Blocking all games helped greatly.
On balance the real purpose of Facebook: keeping up with distance family and friends; is a very useful part of life. Thus it is worth it.
The only productive use of Facebook is to keep in touch with people. If you do this using alternative methods (Whatsapp, email or direct phone calls) then you save yourself from the continuous stream of garbage that is the news feed.
I occasionally get pushback from some relatives who tell me I'm not taking part in family stuff. That probably matters to some people, depending on their family dynamics. I simply point out that I also publish stuff online in places they don't choose to look.
I also miss out on some community chatter and the occasional event with a couple of orgs I'm involved with. I don't personally care.
In general, my calculation is that my life is noticeably better without it. I'm not someone who needs constant human contact, in fact, too much is bad for me. I'm also apparently pretty far off-median on the Bell-curve in terms of the value I place on my privacy. YMMV.
Something like http://spokt.com
What does "direct access" mean exactly? Does having to enter a password constitute indirect access?
It's the "will be" that you should be wary of.
Google Plus had a similar problem, but for much longer. Even though my account was locked down, the people who had me in their circles were showing up in Google search results for my name, so I deleted my Google Plus profile, and advised my friends and family to do the same.
I nuked my Pinterest profile after it was scraped despite being locked down.
FB also did something rather disturbing the other day that reminded me why vigilance is critical. It generated a (private) music video about my friends, but freakily, the person who it started up with was a secret crush -the attraction was mutual but never went anywhere-from 15 years ago (we became FB friends a few years later). The two of us don't interact much on FB, so it must have inferred this based on her ongoing views of my profile, or vice-versa. My wife has no idea about this crush, and is friends with the other person. Our circle of mutual friends does know about it, but has kept it secret for years. Having it appear on my FB timeline would have been awkward, to say the least.
127.0.0.1 facebook.com 127.0.0.1 fbcdn.com etc.
Multiple people maintain lists of Facebook and other surveillancecorp domains.
The change has to do with the people I actually network with on FB. I always have friends, real life friends on my FB, but most of them aren't very active on Facebook. This past year I met a bunch of new friends and they are the social bunch. I started to post more of my social life on Facebook. It's been fun to actually see what's happening in everyone's life. With the recent political shit storm in America, FB is becoming more active.
I also started to follow a bunch of pages ranging from food to inspiration quotes to news page. They have been helpful to get me through my day, learning new perspectives and finding more interesting things.
I've used other products such as quora, flipboard, etc but they don't provide the same conveniences as FB does. I have family members actively on FB (my father and my sister in particular), and I enjoy sharing my moments with them.
I know there's a lot of privacy concerns with using FB but I simply try to accommodate it. I believe in controlling my privacy but I also enjoy using the product. As far as I am concerned, if I am not leaking my social security number or talking shit about my work on FB, I am not too concerned.
But in the future when I become a parent, I would certainly be concerned of the safety and the privacy more and more, specifically how it is easy for someone to look at another person's profile for as long as the profile is shared with friends and friends. Fake news and the left/right war on Facebook are also quite problematic.
Data collections seems necessary to monetize the platform. Are there any alternatives, or do we just need smaller more close-knit social networks?
Also occasionally use it as a login systems for sites I don't want to sign up to.
What else does it do? I unfollowed everyone/thing from my wall ... which seems to improve it somewhat!
So tell me how you got your feed to stop being full of bad things? :)
I started making photo albums again and putting my pictures in there whenever friends come over I get to show it to them.
As far as cat videos goes I get to watch them on YouTube
To be honest it has been the most productive time of my life since I deactivated Facebook and my friendship has become stronger
Moral of the story yes you an live without Facebook
I've removed my Facebook account 3 years ago and never looked back. Everyone who should be in touch with me have my e-mail address and mobile phone number, other's who actually want to take a sniff into my life try to trick me creating one, but hey - I've been there, f*ck off. Nonetheless I relocated to the US, Boston, 7 months ago and haven't acquired any meaningful friendship with anyone, I still don't care. I better off read Literature and Philosophy rather than infinite stream of non-sense.
GJ
Does anyone have evidence of this? Not surprising or difficult, of course, but while watching ajax traffic and typing into a status box I don't see obvious posts with either the text I'm typing or obscured blobs. On the other hand, there's plenty of ajax traffic polling for updates and sending other analytics.
If they're malicious they could wait a few minutes before reporting what you were thinking of posting.. or they're using websockets, which you may have missed.
Even without an FB account, it's interesting how Fb probably has a profile of you from your friends. If you have 5 friends who use FB and they upload party pics of you 6, FB can probably nake a profile of that "ghost" through your friends' characters. E.g. All 5 like metal, all 5 checked-in to a metal concert/the FB app places them there, and there's a pre-concert photo of you 6, the machine can conclude the ghost (you) probably like metal too. And it already has your face in its face recognition database...
Use a free service like Rep'nUp to identify all unprofessional posts, images, and tags. You can then link back to each post and curate if needed.
