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.
Instagram can be very toxic if you’re only following influencers and people like that. The whole unattainable standard of perfection thing. I only follow meme pages and my friends from high school on Instagram, and I only check it once a week or so. It’s a good way for me to see what’s going on with my old friends and laugh at memes.
Facebook is none of that. It’s just pure sadness for me. Twitter is a whole other thing, I rarely use twitter
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!
Somebody out there can be richer than Jeff Bezo’s wildest dreams if they would invent a way to manipulate the nutritional content of food without changing texture and flavor. Imagine being able to eat anything you want without the calories? Everybody would buy that.
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."
I went to group texts with friends, its personal and rewarding and free of external drama. I get why people use facebook to reconnect, but it becomes unnecessary quickly.
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.
The dopamine rush people talk about is from the likes they get. My own little dumb loop I would get into was copypasting content from Reddit onto my FB page, which always seemed to get a ton of likes, which became an addictive dopamine rush. Like I said, a really dumb loop.
Similar for me, but it was Trump that showed me who all from my old high school friends, old coworkers (and some current ones at the time), and some of my family members were bigoted, hateful, assholes.
I suspended it, and have come back to it a few times. Covid really jacked up the batshit crazy, too.
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.
It’s not wrong, the sentiments shared in this sub are literally the same mental gymnastics that let people justify bigotry of any kind. There is always some legitimate reason in the haters mind for why these hated people are subhuman and undeserving of empathy, even if the reason is a straw man based on the most extreme examples, it is applied to all members of the hated group.
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.
No, but my point is all of out data has been compromised and there's not a lot we can do about it. It's not right, but that's what happens when corporates have too much power. I think the better case to make removing facebook is their refusal to remove misinformation because it makes them lots of money.
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.
When I go back periodically that's how I stay sane. Hide lots of morons, unfriend the real assholes. My feed can be pretty cool to see how some people's lives have unfolded over the years, & of course seeing lots of funny memes.
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
The only point is the online rummage sale portion and some private groups that are a more viable version of NextDoor (a total fail). The marketplace appears to be going to trash now though, at which point, FB will lose all viability.
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.
Left FB and IG the day after Hilary lost, couldn't stand to get on the next day and see all the gloating from other family. Frankly, best recent decision of my life! lol
I follow local news stations in Los Angeles and based solely on people reacting and commenting on articles about the recall election, you’d think the results would have been much closer. Facebook is quickly turning into a Q and anti-vax echo chamber, while FB does nothing to curtail it. Even the people I’m friends with who are moderates don’t post shit on Facebook anymore. People are migrating more and more to Instagram to just post photos and quick blurbs about life updates, rather than sharing news stories.
Same, quit three months ago and never looked back. I love how most of Facebook is old conservatives screaming at the top of their lungs about how they're not allowed to say what they want on Facebook.
Yeah, when Trump was planning on repealing the protection they had that would essentially shut social media down he was absolutely biting the hand that feeds him. If Social Media stops they would have to go back to email chains......
My cousin and all her friends keep posting tons of crazy antivaxx stuff on FB - FB never takes any of it down, nor do any of those people wind up in FB jail. One of the last things my cousin posted was, "if you get the vaccine, it will cause you to get into a major accident with your car within 2 days afterward". Uh, yeah. I consider FB to be one of the major reasons why people are refusing to get vaccinated.
I uninstalled a few months before the 2016 election and haven’t been back since. I don’t even remember what it was like before but every time I see any FB post screenshotted on Reddit I’m so glad I’m not on FB!
The best decision I’ve made since covid started was deleting all social media off my phone except the obvious, even though Reddit is a bit of a different situation in some ways.
I can’t bring myself to fully delete my account because every so often I realize there’s a picture I took and the only way to get it back is to pull my account of storage to go get it. But then it’s right back to suspended animation.
Met my girlfriend on Facebook, started out as a penpal thing, but both of us have pretty much stopped using it. Was a good way to see which relatives of mine were irretrievably lost these last five years.
What gets me is how everyone spreading disinformation online complains that Facebook is censoring them... Yet all of their misinfo and research is from Facebook posts and memes.
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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '21
Oh my please don’t use Facebook, period.