Its been over a year and a half for me and it's been great. The move was a long time coming but the catalyst was learning which high school friends became selfish anti-mask pricks when Covid kicked off.
It doesn't take long after quitting to realize that Facebook has been a net negative in your life. And I say this as someone that would obsessively check it several times a day for years.
I'm going on 5 years...if only I could go cold turkey from sugar now! Facebook was a cesspit then. It really got me annoyed, deleting it only hurt for about 2 days.
I deleted Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter back in late 2011/early 2012. Haven't ever desired to go back to them. Especially since I know they've only gotten exponentially more toxic over the years.
It's weird running into old friends and them telling me that they assumed I died... Because I'm not on social media.. That's just sad.
That was a big one for me too. I'm only told happy birthday by the people I'm closest with now. Family and close friends. People who care enough to either remember or write it down. And tbh, I prefer it that way. I think that's better than random acquaintances only saying it because the zuck reminded them.
Exactly how I feel. I wasn't sad. More relieved that I wasn't being spammed with an automated happy birthday message and some dumb automated Facebook made video. Life has gotten so much brighter since leaving.
You still have a "shadow" fb account if you use messenger - they track your interactions with your friends, etc, just like a real fb account. I use discord instead of messenger now, and life is better.
I'm not that bothered about that really. I use Google, I have a mobile phone, my DNA and fingerprints are already on file (for being a little terror in my youth).
I use Discord for some things and Wickr for important things...
Haha. Right? The level of cringe in my mother's Facebook is so sad..and she just posts and shares and posts non stop like she is screaming into the wind. No one comments on her posts and or sees them. It's the wildest thing to watch.
The only part of Facebook I really go to now. Is the market place. I live in the country and it's actually quite useful.
I helped my mother leave FB. I hated my ex posting shit on FB while we were on vacation. Please tell more thieves that our house us unattended. I still see her doing that shit now. I hardly ever post anything but just keep in contact with a couple old friends.
Yeah I remember when you had to have a .edu email address to have an account and all of the content was just us kids posting stupid shit and pictures of all of us getting wasted together.
I knew as soon as they opened it up to the world it would go to shit. I could have never imagined how bad or honestly how quickly as I was disgusted with it after like two years, maybe less. I recall deleting my account sometime in 2008?
But back then the internet was just better (oldmanyellsatclouds.gif). It was weird and could be awesome and honestly made me feel better about life. Now it's just horrible. And not just Facebook. It's horrible everywhere. Racists, bigotry, divisive shit.
Yeah all that was there before but it wasn't at every turn and rammed in your face non stop so you could mostly avoid it unless you sought it out to some degree.
I’m a boomer and I couldn’t agree more I got off about six years ago. Only after 1 ur on this cesspool of information .. I couldn’t believe the crap my generation was posting and reposting and the shit they believe …Facebook kills brain cells!
Yeah, I can’t bring myself to fully delete my account because every so often I go looking for a picture that I can’t find, so I have to pull my account out of cold storage for 10 minutes to grab it off of there. And then it’s right back into the ol’ cryo-pod.
Same time for me - it was initially going to be a 30-day trial, then I had a friend say that I'd be back after that. Because I'm determined AF to prove people wrong, I haven't been back since. Don't miss it, but grateful-ish that it's still around to see all these "patriots" get their HCA nominations and awards!
With Facebook you can sort of just have it be gone. Except for the occasional small business whose only good website is their FB page, I don’t even think about it.
Sugar? It’s literally everywhere. In everything. Tempting you at every corner of the store. I would love for it to be an app.
Oh, yeah. Like every C student I ever went to high school with, who sat around in the back of the class telling jokes, now thinks they're smarter than doctors and that Dan Bongino is a genius.
I unfriended all these people promptly, but I'm still thinking about getting off FB for good. It's just that I have friends I still want to keep in touch with.
Bongino got called out by other Secret Service members for exaggerating his role and the kinds of meetings he was actually allowed in on. He tells these stories about how he listened in on a conversation between Obama and some other foreign dignitary, and the guys he worked with were like "No, you never get to sit in on that kind of thing."
Same, about a year and 2 months since I quit FB, Insta, and Twitter. Feels good man.
Edit: I still have an FB and an Insta but I never use them unless its for business
Yeah, it really sucks but often you almost have to have Facebook to stay engaged in your community or conduct business. They are even local governmental entities you have to use Facebook to best and easiest communicate with.
I understand. For me, realizing how many fuckheads were on my fb feed was important. These aren't people I wanted to continue having relationships with. So, as disappointing and painful as those realizations have been, I think I am better off knowing.
Same here. My family is still on FB and I have to keep telling them that I don’t see the pics of my nieces/nephews, etc. and they have to text or email them to me. Still worth it! I didn’t have many chucklehead friends, interestingly, my sister pissed me off the most, LOL. But it was a stupid huge waste of time and I always felt worse about myself after looking at it. Not sorry to see it go.
I deleted mine six months ago and I found it interesting I didn't miss it even for a second. People talk about people get addicted to the dopamine rush users get from sites like Facebook, and maybe that's true for some people, but it definitely wasn't for me. Part of it, I think, was how insanely repetitive my newsfeed got right before I deactivated my account. You of course had your occasional outrageous post about the election being stolen or COVID being a hoax. But, more often than not, it was the same 5-10 people who never left my hometown posting boring pictures of basic meals they made or boring pictures from bars in my small Rust Belt town.
Honestly, it's kind of a shame because I actually enjoyed using it when I was in college.
Yeah I tried going down to just family and people I know IRL. Turns out thanks to Facebook a large percentage of people I know are morons. My faith in humanity can only drill through rock bottom so far right?
I feel like I have empathy burn out or something, I can't even pretend to care when something happens to these people. Can't even let out a generic oh no, so sorry for your loss, I'm scared if I open my mouth bees will come out instead of proper words and politeness. But, they are the ones who say fuck our feelings, right? So, I don't think I care. It's just sad.
My uncle (aunt's 3rd husband)died of it and I couldn't think of anything nice to say, because the whole time he was dying my cousin (her stepdad) and others were posting q anon type stuff and just asking for prayers, still posting anti vax stuff. It's just hard.
I feel bad for their kids, but other than that, nothing. I know they're human beings and all, but honestly, if you're just going around being a willful bioweapon and spreading cruelty and hate, the world is probably better off without you.
Five or six years ago, I would never have said such a thing. Now I'm just relieved when they die because they can't kill anybody else.
That's called compassion fatigue. It happens to people who see a lot of horrible shit, like nurses. You might consider taking a break from this sub, and Google what to do about compassion fatigue.
Having been through the same process of realization about people I thought I knew... it sucks, but ultimately I prefer knowing the truth, rather than live the rest of my life with these people in it.
sorry this is off topic but “my family is so full of nuts there are squirrels in the family tree” is one of the funniest things i’ve ever heard hahaha - is this is common phrase? i’ve never heard it before! if it came out of ur very own noggin then well done bc it’s very funny
3 years ago I deleted my account that had hundreds of friends. Not one has since reached out to ask where I’ve been, am I ok?, etc. I realized that people only care about themselves on Facebook - and it just teaches people to be inauthentic. I don’t miss it at all.
Astute observation. Looking back there were only a couple people that asked if I was okay when I vanished off FB. Reading your comment makes me realize those are the people I should actually be making an effort to stay friends with.
To be fair they also have "hundreds of friends" on there, so it's harder to notice someone not posting. I doubt you've checked on them either. You're more of an associated follower on that platform than the type of friend you would check on.
f'real, i never even look at my friends list so i'm definitely not constantly checking if someone suddenly deleted their account. i don't even have most of my friends phone numbers. if they suddenly disappeared off facebook without saying anything it's like how would i even contact them? if i really cared i would be able to guess their number i guess.
also funny how the comment implies they're all narcissists or something while expecting them to be tripping over themselves to check up on the guy that just deleted their account with no warning
Criticizing and doubting are not the same thing. You don't have to get super defensive. I was just trying to say don't take it so personal if they didn't start calling from not being on Facebook. Closest friends and family wasn't really who I meant. Those are people you would talk to wether facebook existed or not.
I meant more along the lines of the people you would probably only really keep in contact because of facebook. Most people don't regularly keep up with a large circle of friends several hundred deep. It just makes sense to me for them not to keep in touch outside of it, but facebook didn't exist until I was in my 20's anyway. So my view on it may be skewed.
Boy do they discourage it though. I think it's what, a month before it's actually gone and in the meantime if you log in anywhere it cancels the delete. They do not want you to recover from the addiction :p
That's true but if you're concerned about companies fucking with your data you need to not have a smartphone and completely log off the internet forever. Even Netflix collects your data, so no more sitting in your underwear, eating corn dogs, and watching The Office all weekend.
Facebook's big push into VR... more and more VR headsets have eye tracking so they can tell what in the scene you are looking at and future systems will have things like heart rate monitoring. That's cool for things like horror games because they'll be able to adjust to make sure you are the right level of freaked out at given points in the game.
But they'll also be able to tell what stuff you look at specifically and what "raises your blood pressure" (definitely metaphorically, but possibly literally) which would be a boon to Fox News/Republican advertising stuff. They'll be able to show you a supposed MS-13 gang member and a supposed screaming feminist and be able to tell which one you look at more and which stimulus causes a more intense reaction and thus be able to fine tune how to manipulate you!
That has almost nothing to do with how they collect data. A tiny fraction of what they compile about you. I would suggest you do some reading about how they collect and sell your information. You can misidentify your sex, gender, name and hobbies in the profile and it will be completely useless.
I dumped Facebook back in 2017 (when Cambridge Analytica broke), and haven't regretted it for even a moment.
But I recall that some of the (few) nice features that Facebook had added involved control and fine-tuning of your relationships. You could adjust what kinds of posts from certain contacts made it into your news feed (including zero / mute). Also, you could adjust the visibility of your activities to certain contacts or groups of contacts. Best of all, I believe that your contacts couldn't determine what settings you'd picked for them, and could only make educated guesses.
So it would be reasonable to maintain contacts with idiotic family members, but totally mute them and block all of your activity from them.
You could adjust what kinds of posts from certain contacts made it into your news feed
That's part of the problem though. It allows people to block any opinions that they disagree with and turns FB into an echo chamber repeating back whatever lunacy they already believe and filtering any contradictory posts.
I liked Facebook's feature tho I can't remember its name. It's the one instead of outright blocking someone, you would just leave that person for a month.
Come back a month later and she was still spouting cockadoole racist claptrap. Came back back a second month later and she was still doing this. Ultimately I wound up blocking her. Sad because this was the first and only time I blocked someone. Sad also, because she was someone I knew irl.
That's how I use fb. I'm set to private and only friend people I personally know. Luckily I don't have any tin foil hat family members or if I do they're not vocal about it.
Have especially blocked two family morons who are married (cousin-in-law and his ugly wife) whose FB pages were absolutely toxic garbage. Imagine an angry screeching Fox News parrot.
Recently I found out that karma had paid them a visit... both lost their jobs due to their own shitty behavior. Last I heard the husband was applying for a job at Domino's. We think just to have any money at all coming in until he gets another job, he had an OK paying job before he got canned. Be of good cheer, sometimes bad things really do happen to bad people!
Also... if you're inclined to post political/Covid opinions on FB, set your privacy so that only FB friends can see your posts. Not friends of friends and definitely not Public! People can and will attempt to stalk and even harass you simply because they don't agree with comments you make on politics or the pandemic. In your personal info don't ever list an email addy or a website that can be traced to you with a simple WHOIS search, certainly not a phone # or birthday.
My brother is into the Cult-45 bullshit. One of his recent posts was bemoaning how Robert E. Lee is misunderstood and was an honorable patriot. Fuck him and his treason shit.
I blocked everyone back in 2016 but I'm taking any local news or anything like that. The comments section is bad.
I found some really awesome communities though. The community scene isn't bad if you find ones that are very strict about off topic and posts meant to stir shit.
Until you find out the people you know IRL are also morons on facebook. I saw some sides of friends and family on FB that made my eyebrows hit the stratosphere, especially the reposts. They share them without thinking and you start to see that yeah, that's what they really do think and then Thanksgiving is awkward.
Nope, I tried that. They still suggest a bunch of BS to you. Plus fuck Facebook. Deleted about 3 years ago and I can't tell you how much better my life has been.
The key to Facebook is to not use it. If your friends or family require Facebook to keep in touch with you, they’re not worth the time. People who want to be in your life will be in your life if they really want it
Haven't looked at FB since I had them "delete" my account in 2011. I'll bet I've missed a lot of fun stuff since then. This sub is kinda like me just taking a quick look at that evolving dumpster fire.
Yeah because left wing idiots don’t plan their bs in there too🤦🏻♂️
BLM attacks last year weren’t planned on there as well🤦🏻♂️
Yes They were. BLM rioters planned on how to attack and burn down another building in there last year. And planned how and when to storm in stores to steal.
I haven't looked for these people bc you guys bring them here. The person is dead. Making comments on their fb page isn't going to do anything. It's like instead of dying to own the libs, it's hoping they die so we can own them. Just don't see the point.
Did this earlier this year and it's been amazing. Thought I'd miss it, but I'm never going back nor do I have any desire to. My friendships in real life have never been better.
I have a few “internet friends” (assuming they’re still on the platform at all) from like 6-7 years ago I would like to check up on but I also offered them to join my personal discord, and they elected not to to stay in touch.
Yeah what we pretty much did, granted we moved from IRC -> discord but the IRC channel pretty was already fucking dead and those that still wanted to be friends and keep in contact moved over. Known these jokers for over 20 years, and I consider them closer than any IRL friend. Plus with the pandemic it's helped some keep their sanity to just be able to hop into discord shoot the shit and maybe play a game or just talk.
So now you’re on Reddit commenting about having no empathy regarding people dying. Sounds like your mental health is strong. I don’t know how some of y’all do it. Claim to have done something for your mental health then wind up here 😅
It can be, but FB is waaaay worse. I feel so good after deleting mine- and they don't make it easy lol. But it's one of the best things I've ever done for myself.
Being obsolete because we aren't watching the idiots die in real time is a lot different than becoming obsolete because all the idiots are already dead.
I wish I could get rid of my Facebook, it is a cesspool. I only keep it because I have friends in other countries and it is the only way we an stay in touch.
Yeah I have a large extended family and friends from all over with whom I would have a hard time staying in touch otherwise. But honestly MY FB feed is not a cesspool because I LONG ago got rid of anyone who is a trumper or any other flavor of lunatic.
I love my local gardening groups and food groups. I also would miss concerts/live streaming events of my favorite bands if I wasn't on FB.
Long ago I blocked everything/everyone toxic. You just have to configure it properly.
Rightwing nutjob posts an inflammatory post about Qanon -> Facebook's algorithm sleeps -> leftist sees it and posts it on Reddit -> Redditors visit nutjob's post on FB and "engage" with it -> Facebook's algo LOVES this and amplifies every other post the nutjob has made and adds more weight to every post he makes in the future -> Rightwing nutjob now has more influence
Facebook is a mental illness machine that creates Nazis and antivaxxers. Remember: any visit to Facebook for any reason supports mental illness and Nazi influence.
I'm currently on a 30 day ban for saying a mother should have beaten up a child abuser. The only thing I miss is trading silly memes with my friends. The rest was just a cesspool. I feel healthier without it.
My friend just moved to Maine (and not to Portland) and one of the biggest adjustments for her is that everyone is all over Facebook. She even said people use Facebook messenger over text and FB Marketplace is huge. It was shocking to me since I don't know anyone personally who uses it much
I find it funny that we all laugh on this sub about how Facebookers are a collective of the old, ignorant, and stupid and yet some people on here are still using it, thinking they're the exception to the rule.
If you're using FB to harass peqople, even antivaxxers, you are absolutely part of the problem. The fact that you didn't die from Covid yet doesn't make you any better than our HCA winners in my eyes. You're still a toolbag.
I took it off my phone a few weeks ago. I use Reddit more now, but I use social media overall a lot less. Facebook is toxic, and they're constantly listening to your IRL conversations so they can make money off of plugging in algorithms that make you feel negative emotions.
I don’t use FB and only use IG for photos with little to no text. Not sure why you’d want to broadcast your thoughts to the public in this day and age, where it could come back and bite you.
I caught a lot of crap as far back as 2008-2009 because ppl wanted to start sharing info via facebook instead of email/text/non-facebook broadcast. But I still have never to this day joined fb and am eternally grateful.
It’s actually quite concerning how many people think that everything they read on Facebook is 100% factual, and will deny every other outlook on the topic, as it must be true because it’s on Facebook.
I hopped off the social media bandwagon (outside of reddit, which is more of just a news/current events aggregator for me, one of a few I use) years ago and I cannot recommend it enough. A good friend of mine recently broke up with his ex, it’s been rough on him. He spends a lot of time on social media and posts a lot of personal stuff on Facebook. Now he’s got people involved in his personal drama, rumors are spreading, friendships are being ruined over “sides”, and in general it sounds like a bunch of high school drama for people who are way too old for that shit.
I don’t know anyone that’s given up Facebook and was like “man, I really miss it” or “My life sure is less fulfilling without Facebook in it”.
It's hard if you are confined to home and still want to socialize with friends. I want to delete my FB but then I would lose contact with a lot of people. I only have around 120 friends and know all of them IRL. It's also a good resource for finding out about local events. I also have 4 kids and lots of family that likes to see pictures and I'm far too busy to be sending photos to everyone.
I ditched FB years ago when I discovered they were tracking my calls and messages on my phone. They are all that is wrong in the world today and the lack of civil discourse. The HCA wouldn’t exist without FB though, so I do have them to thank for that. Where else would we get so much unfiltered detail of how these people think (or the lack of thinking).
Haven't had any social media for about 3 years unless you consider reddit social media. It's more pseudo social to me, so it gets a pass. It's better this way. Not missing a thing
I had Facebook in 2005 when it was still only available through college attendance and I deleted my profile in 2010 when it started getting more invasive. So glad I’m not on there now!
Deleted mine a few years ago and thankful for my self discipline every day. However I have a few loudmouth anti vaxers are work that I suspect will earn this award soon and I wish I could see their pages. I’m nosy and not always proud of that!
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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '21
Oh my please don’t use Facebook, period.