The best thing I ever did was delete the Facebook app from my phone. I had already disabled all the notifications, but that didn't change things like deleting the app. Not being able to get to Facebook wherever you are. As silly as it sounds it was liberating. I still access Facebook from my laptop - but now that it's off of my phone, I'm accessing Facebook less and less frequently and I'm find I'm happier as a result.
Less Facebook == more happy. It's the best advice I can give.
I have the facebook app on my phone and virtually never use it. I just really don't find myself drawn to use facebook at all. Reddit and HN on the other hand, those i'm addicted to.
Same. I keep thinking that I can rationally explain my Reddit and HN usage because they do serve some utility. But then I wonder how much I’m fooling myself with that sentiment...
I quit facebook about 5 years ago, realizing quickly there was nothing of value in seeing how fake-happy people were. You only see the highlights, so when a friend announced a divorce we, including that person's family, were surprised as the relationship had appeared so solid. This appears to be a documented reality of social media in general.
Reddit is something else, and my reddit time has taken a dive over the last year or so. It's no longer useful to me and the 'community' have become rude, antagonistic and there's always a large group on any sub, including the smaller ones, where users take a contrary argument just for the sake of appearing intelligent, which they never succeed in doing. Only thing keeping me there are the Linux subs and sometimes the hilarity of askreddit (intentional hilarity and otherwise).
Similarly simply logging out of Facebook on Chrome and only accessing it through incognito or another browser has been great. Added benefit: (a little) less tracking.
First week or so was string of surprising moments where I would suddenly find myself at the FB login screen having mindlessly tried to navigate there.
Cleaning cookies, using browser extension like uBlock Origin, and not using facebook login via other web sites such as Yelp will help with reducing tracking.
I still find that after being off Facebook for five years. Luckily the football team I hate the most has a URL that begins with f, so I started visiting that. Cured it in a week...
Yup. And for those rare occasions you need to use facebook messaging, use mbasic.facebook.com so that facebook doesn't "force" you to install their messenger app!
Shhhh, why do you have to mention that for. You're responding to a comment that concluded "Less Facebook == more happy" with an alternate way to increase access to Facebook.
I keep trying to do exactly that, the majority of my time wasted on my phone is spent in Chrome. Almost every other app I have left is a valuable unix-esque utility, like weather, radar, notes, chat, etc.
You joke about this, but my wife and I, in an effort to change our default behaviors, both put parental locks on each others phones disabling the browsers and app installs. We still had GPS and phone and text messaging. We've re-enabled it now, but it definitely unconditioned us from seeking entertainment in our phones.
More productive, less distracted, etc., sure but was FB really getting you down that much? Am I just using Facebook "wrong" in that it's not upsetting me the same way it upsets others?
Think about Facebook the way you might think about alcohol. For many (if not most) people, even the occasional overindulgence isn't going to cause too much harm. But for some, it has an insidious effect and sometimes the best strategy is to simply swear it off completely.
For me, it was more like cigarette usage: "I can quit any time" I thought, even as the constant demands for my attention distracted and upset me. Recognizing how much I disliked Facebook, then quitting cold-turkey was the only way I was able to break my addiction.
having spare moments to think through your day/mood/plans, etc., makes a huge difference to someone who otherwise will ceaselessly distract themselves to avoid said thoughts.
Facebook, per se, maybe not. It could be anything that fills in the holes
Every time I'm on FB. It's pleasant, really pleasant. But, every single time I'll go on the site and to do a thing like, check on the plans for my friend's birthday party. I end up spending like 30min or so more time than I expected to just browsing aimlessly.
It's not like they are putting a gun to my head but, they are using a billion dollars of research and my friends' faces to entice me into doing something I don't want. I'm more or less a monkey and my social circuitry just is so super-stimulated that it's annoying.
And all of that is before the FOMO kicks in and I start feeling bad that my life isn't as nice as my friends even though among my friends, I have a very enviable life (my friends have confided in me as much). But, my every day life cannot compete with the highlight reel of all the best moments of all my friends' lives.
Even though I know all of this stuff consiously, it still affects me because keeping guard and watch over everything constantly is hard. Falling into how it's designed to make you feel is easy.
Deleting FB off your phone is the best thing.
This overwhelming feeling, I'm convinced, is one of the driving factors that created Instagram and Snapchat because it was smaller and less invasive. Ironically, they became just like FB or in some ways (to some people) worse as they grew.
We are social animals and FB weaponizes the faces of all of your friends to suck as much attention from you as possible. It's as unfair a fight as there ever has been in the history of commerce.
Funny thing is that anyone with half a brain cell notices this if you just try to look at it even a bit. People are manipulable to do things they do not like to do. Yet any time there is a comment in HN stating that marketing may not be the best thing since sliced bread, there will be tons of messages of type "hey, just last week I saw an ad of an even I actually wanted to go, so there is nothing bad ever in people throwing ads at my face against my will". Weird. (And don't get me started on the whole damn "science" of economics being based on the (obviously unfalsifiable as per popper) assumption that people always and anywhere just maximize their utility.)
I quit Facebook initially because of notification spam. However I discovered something afterwards. I had less negative feelings toward family and friends. I had unconsciously been forming an opinion of them that was based on the habits Facebook was encouraging rather than their actual personality.
In a sense I'm a lot happier not knowing that Great Aunt Gertrude shared that post. And most of the time Aunt Gertrude didn't even think about what she was sharing so the opinion wasn't based in fact.
I just never read the wall thingy. When I go to FB, it's either directly to the messenger or to facebook.com/<my username>. I really only use it for the IM. I hate how it's 2017 and it doesn't have simple things like bold* or colors, that were available in AIM/MSN/Yahoo/EveryotherMessenger before (not to mention until the early 2010s, FB message was the most unreliable piece of garbage in the world. If you used Pidgin/Audium/anything XMPP, half the time messages wouldn't get through).
I have too many friends spread across the world to ever quit FB, but I only really use it for messages. I only post things if they promote my website and pull people to my content and away from Facebook. Since that's all I do, my posts obviously don't get as much reach. It's kinda the opposite of the Silent Bob effect. You have a friend who always says crap and you ignore them. If someone says things only once a week; you pay attention when they have something to say.
Facebook basically penalizes people who only speak when they have something important to say and rewards people who cannot learn to shut the hell up.
*I realize it has bold now, but it doesn't work universally across all their tools: mobile, web, etc. I know people who just use unicode symbols for italics because it's more reliable.
To me it resembles that condo mailbox, filled with spam and colorful leaflets I know I don't need so pick them up and dump them annoyed into the trash box provided for my convenience and everyone's right next to it. Once a week I end up on Facebook for a few seconds, check to see if someone left some important message, and if not quickly leave the screaming place. For all those needy souls of relatives and acquaintances I instructed my twitter to automatically repost on facebook, which is rare but at least gives them something to feed upon.
Same. I initially only uninstalled messenger (which intolerably presented me with a popup asking me to enable notifications EVERY TIME I OPENED THE APP), then got rid of the FB app. Now even on my laptop facebook.com is pointing at localhost in /etc/hosts, which makes me edit a root file to look at it. I'm much, much happier. If it works for you, cool, but if you're dissatisfied and considering abandoning it anyway, I can offer anecdotally that it has been a great decision for me.
(The only reason I don't close my account: I check it once every week or so, because I have older family members for whom this is probably as far as they're going into the world of social media and I feel a bit guilty either pressuring them to use some alternative or disconnecting from them further, as they are unlikely to understand my dissatisfaction with the FB product and much more likely to take it personally)
I installed the Lite version of Messenger, and it's way better. (Not available in the US App Store; there are verified APKs floating around the internet.) It's just a bare-bones chat app that launches when I want it, without all the nagging about chat bubbles, their Snapchat knockoff, and whatever else.
I picked up Messenger Lite when I was in Fiji. My phone isn't very good and struggled with normal Messenger.
With Messenger Lite, not only does it take a lot less space, it's a lot faster, and feels less bloaty. It's a lot like what Messenger was a few years ago, nice and simple.
I don't want to use Messenger to play games, or send giphys, or any of that other rich interaction stuff. The only thing I miss is the ability to send a pin of your location to someone, which is actually a really useful feature.
You can also go to Facebook on Chrome and request the desktop version of the site- Messages will work in that. That way you don't have to install a Messages app.
This used to work for me but stopped a while ago on android (still seems to work on iPhones somehow). mbasic.facebook.com is a really nice fast and minimalist interface where messages still work and I use it exclusively now.
Actually it worked for me only to read messages. When I tried to reply all the characters I've entered were disappearing so only sent dash and few commas. Bizarre and that was a new low reached by fb in their push of messenger app on mobile.
Actually you don't need to use desktop version. It tries to make you install it, but if you just click back to exit Play Store, and on the FB page to prompt the installation there's a faint X that you can click. At least it works in Opera Mobile.
Interestingly if I leave the tab open I also get notifications if someone responded.
To communicate with other people on my terms, when I want to communicate.
It's the same reason there are only a few phone numbers that can actually make my phone ring (my wife, the school my children attend, and pager duty (:P))
In Android Do Not Disturb mode can do this. You can set it to "priority only" and define who is the priority contacts. iOS should have a similar function.
You can also make only some email messages cause notifications.
Not sure if there's a better way for gmail, but the way I did it was to have a second gmail account, then create filters that send only important messages to that account. Then in the gmail app you can control notifications on a per-account level.
If I remember correctly how I did this years ago, I made filters to label important messages with correct label and chose different notification (sounds at least) for those labels in gmail app.
It's useful to be able to communicate with people in situations where message notifications are awkward or prohibited. (ie work)
My wife exclusively uses messenger for buying and selling stuff on Facebook. She doesn't need nor want notifications.
There's also the creepy factor. I assume if there is any kind of exploit or corner case that allows an app to abuse privilege on iOS, Facebook is scummy enough to always ship it.
It's equivalent to email, but more convenient if you only know the people through facebook. E.g. I admin a facebook group, so admins have a chat to discuss group-related things.
If I don't have notifications enabled it's because I don't want to be distracted. I check my phone often enough, I don't need to immediately stop what I'm doing to read a message.
Equally. When I send a message to someone, I don't want to distract them either. Of course there's no sophistication (e.g. busy mode, notify for messages flagged urgent only) because facebook wants people to drop whatever they're doing and use facebook instead.
In my experience, since Messenger / Hangouts / etc all support persisted, named chats, people start treating them like chatrooms rather than like text messages. I don't want notifications for a chat room (where there's a flurry of conversation that may or may not be directed at me), and in general since I work remote I try to keep the "things that make my phone buzz" list to the bare-minimum, since that list will always include "production outage" which might make me stop mid-step while heading to lunch and turn back around.
Additionally, FB messenger does not allow you to disable "read receipts," it always shows the other party when you have opened a message. Buzzing my pocket and then telling the other person I read their message feels very intrusive to me.
Uninstalling the app and redirecting facebook.com to localhost are great ideas. I also sometimes logout of facebook.com on chrome on my phone so that it makes it even harder to get back on.
Since we are into personal anecdotes: the annoying giant red blinking popup they display all the time to force you to download the app instead of using the mobile website was all I needed to get entirely rid of my habit to visit Reddit, and I like the idea that I might not be the only one.
reddit is not far off from facebook to being a total time suck. i'd like to just be in a couple educational/technical subs or quit entirely but that /r/popular, it just calls out to people.
I am honestly wondering if there is an inside joke for tech companies attempting to make the worst possible messaging app. Facebook messenger is god awful ugly, same with snapchat. Google Hangouts is ok at best (I personally have not used Google's other dozen or so messaging apps they have)
GChat used to be great - it was simple, relatively lightweight and quick. Then it was rebranded Hangouts and became a little muddled and unwieldy for a brief period when Whatsapp was ascendent which nearly overnight caused my entire group of friends to switch.
You're right about the IM apps being not great. This and the poor state of desktop email clients on Windows and Linux are my pet hates
I've had facebook messenger, gchat/hangouts installed on my phone for some time. I don't know if I'd call it great, but I have a hard time arguing that it doesn't immediately solve my instant messaging needs.
What exactly do you want that gchat or facebook messenger doesnt solve?
I want open chat protocols so I can use whatever client I damn well please (e.g. Adium, Pidgin, some terminal thing, or a bot made from a little python script, ...).
Whenever I’m stuck using a centralized service (Twitter, facebook, some web forum, whatever bullshit IRC replacement businesses are buying this week, ...) their client invariably does something different than what many people want it to do, but we have no recourse because everything is locked-down proprietary bullshit, even though most of the messages are plain text and could have been delivered just fine by open protocols in 1990. Not to mention these apps are all poorly designed resource hogs that spy on everyone, inject ugly ads, and burn mobile battery.
Proprietary push notifications on mobile devices are what really killed open IM protocols. What good is an open protocol, if the client app can't wake up to process it without a proprietary channel? We need to fix that mess first, somehow.
Well remember that this was a few years back so things were a lot different from today.
1. gchat (or "Google Talk" I think?) was a nice simple app that was replaced by a rebranded one that had different functionality and a UI that was either different or flakey/slow/unreliable (I forget all the details). I later learned that actually we were all duped by google - gchat itself was only turned off completely very recently, but at the time they managed to convince us that we had to use Hangouts instead. In any case, the whole thing was annoying enough that we left because ...
2. Whatsapp was starting to be very widespread and was a natural replacement for us as most people either had it or could quickly get it (you just needed a phone number and nearly any sort of phone, many feature phones support it) and it had a simple chat-only interface.
3. FB Messenger was not a separate application at the time, it was integrated in the FB app iirc and you still had to be a member of FB and add any contacts as "friends" to communicate. At the time it wasn't seen as a general-purpose chat app by _anyone_, just a way to talk to your FB contacts.
Hope that makes sense. If you're curious about the gchat->hangouts switch, I'm sure a quick search will turn up a few disgruntled articles - there were quite a few people who were annoyed. It probably didn't help that Google were in the habit of dropping products, so a few people may have assumed that they'd do the same with the chat app.
It's not that I want some additional feature, I actually want fewer features. The ability to name group chats and persist them leads people to treat them like chat rooms. The ability to send animated gifs means people send them. These apps very quickly turned from "alternative to text-messaging" to "full-blown chat room that wants push notifications each time anyone sends a message," and I don't want an app to ask me to enable notifications each time I open it.
I realize there are per-thread mute settings, but the whole experience of using these things is highly intrusive. At least with text messaging (or calling) we still have, to some extent, the social expectation that it is known to be intrusive, so people (in my social group at least) are less likely to text for frivolous reasons.
Right on! Total agreement here. Since I was pretty addicted (as of about a year ago), not only did I delete the app from my phone, I changed my passsword to one generated by LastPass (e.g. totally freaking hard to memorize). This re-enforces the fact that the only EASY way to get on FB is via my laptop:)
This has been extremely helpful, and I took it a step further the other week by uninstalling twitter.
Not having a constant stream of news that I can endlessly scroll through has improved my sense of well-being immensely.
I actually uninstalled it because I was out of storage (8GB iPhone), so it was the first app I removed. I feel like it's so much better not to have fb with you all the time to scroll-wasting your time.
The book "Contagion: Why things Catch On" by Jonah Berger basically explains that we share when we have "strong emotions" triggered. That includes anger and anxiety.
So much of social media is dependent on triggering anger or anxiety to get you to share. Which is effective political memes make you mad. Because they're designed to.
I decided that being on a platform that uses me as a transmitter of memes to make cash by making me mad or anxious was (a) sociopathic on behalf of Facebook and (b) stupid on my part. I logged out, deactivated, and deleted. I've done it before, but now it feels permanent.
I'm on twitter sometimes (because there's much less social pressure wrt following/unfollowing) and Goodreads, where I follow people who read and write the books I like to read.
I don't have a phone at all. I am thinking about getting a prepaid phone at some point in the future (I did this at one point - you can get a $5 phone and pay under $100 for minutes that will last a year).
It doesn't even feel weird for me now. I have POTS copper line going to my house but no phone plugged into it at this point.
It probably wouldn't work for most people, but I'm the type who just wants to work on my projects alone and be at a computer most of the day. I do think most people could get away with the prepaid phone and spend under $100 a year on phone service.
I'm a linux user - I'm pretty sure I'd go crazy on macOS without a phone. Giving up iMessages and thousands of dollars of phone/mac apps was tough but now I'd never go back.
How often do you run into a situation where you're forced to enter a phone number? Do you enter a non-existent one or do you use your POTS number? Do you run into situations/signups where you need to verify a number, and if so what do you do for that?
The idea is very attractive, but it seems like the rest of the world is stuck with the mindset that you have to have a phone number, email address, and even a physical address.
Yeah, there's a few services that are hard to use due to requiring phone number verification. Ironically, twilio was one of them. I just don't use these services, but if I absolutely needed to, I could figure it out. I ended up using a lot of bitcoin and other cryptos recently.
When I sign up for something I usually use a fake number.
I think a decent compromise will be using another prepaid cheap phone, although building my own phone would be pretty cool too (lots of hobbyists doing that now)
I haven't had to figure out anything like that in the last few years. I'm not very social - I hang out with friends a few times a month and usually just hack on stuff and drink a few beers.
I've got lots of radios though, and I use them sometimes if I'm doing a convoy or camping, etc.
Same. This sounds drastic to people who are in the habit of Facebooking, but I still have friends and a social life and the hours of mindlessly scrolling through low-info-density posts, likes, links, and whatnot is all gone.
Honest question, what do you do for event planning? Literally the only reason I still have FB is because my friend group uses it heavily for coordinating hikes, camping trips, etc. I'd love to delete it if it weren't for that.
Even better, don't sign up. I'm envious of my friends who are in this category. I deleted after reading about PRISM, then got back on. Deleted again, and then moved away from some friends and got lonely and got back on again. Luckily more and more of my friends are deleting, so should be easier to take the plunge again.
I've found that since my wife and I both deactivated, we've suddenly been finding friends in new places. I invited a coworker and his family over for dinner, which was a great time. We've reconnected with some family of hers that we always thought "they're really nice people, we should get to know them better". Heck, we were at the neighborhood playground in our the other day and we invited a family over to dinner which was a lot of fun. Reconditioning myself to actually talk to people in real life has been really rewarding for me and my family. I used to have really severe anxiety, and it's scary to make that first contact, but man, it's worth it.
Among the never signed up group. It was unappealing to begin with, and it's been increasingly unlikely as, with stories like this, I learn how much worse it's been getting.
I also find people who ask for my facebook account or try to get me to join are the same people I find least interesting and I'm less willing to spend my time with.
Yeah that works for a bit. I was "more happy" when I deleted it. Now, a year later, I'm just as sad because my wife is on it all the time, but I can't influence that. It's not like I can just delete her instance...
My girlfriend used to grab her phone and start scrolling the fb newsfeed while we were talking. As she knows that I've deleted my fb account, my trick was to gently remind her that we were in the middle of a talk, and although she may be able to do two things at the same time, I don't, and her using the phone is distracting to me and makes me break the flow of the conversation. Like Pavlov's dog, she is now so accustomed to that, that I don't really need to say anything anymore. I just look at her doing that, she understands and turns off the phone (well, most of the time at least).
Even if you aren't both in the middle of a conversation, I suggest to you to slowly start talking to her about all these shaddy things about facebook (important: is not an addiction but a mental conditioning, as "addiction" is a very strong word for some people and "conditioning" is a much fuzzier concept). Then, slowly, start noticing that her "conditioning" on facebook is a turnoff on certain situations. Be honest and frontal about that..
Instead of getting notifications and getting pulled into the app I can visit the site when I have downtime, or have something I actually want to accomplish on FB.
I treat facebook as a contact list for people who I don't regularly communicate with on a daily/weekly cadence. It is a way to keep in touch and up to date with people but the less I frequent facebook the "less unhappy" I am. I don't want to say I am happier not going to facebook, but I do know less facebook isn't a bad thing.
I have FB on my phone and I'll check it once every couple of days, but it doesn't seem like it would be all that liberating to delete it. What makes it so liberating? FB always seems so optional that I'm never really pushed to read it. Work email on the other hand...
Up until last year, I chalked up the "I deleted my Facebook" phenomenon to hipsterdom or some pathology where people think the can "cure" "addiction" by quitting whatever unhealthy behavior pattern they exhibit for a week or month and then coming back.
Last month I deactivated my Facebook and have yet to turn it back on. In the months prior I started finding alternative sources of news: NYT, Pitchfork, HN, various sub-reddits, Bandcamp, what have you. I outsourced social media to Twitter and Instagram. I outsourced messaging to text/Slack. A bunch of my friends have done the similar things in the last few years.
The lower levels of cognitive dissonance are noticeable. It's not like Facebook has a monopoly on the things I hate: notification spam, stupid arguments, unfulfilling articles, and vacuous political rants all exist elsewhere. Maybe it's the dissociation between who a person is and what is posted. On Reddit you don't know the person and they don't get a big platform to express themselves outside of the comments. On Twitter you can't go on these huge rants and following/unfollowing people is fairly impersonal. On Instagram, you never get "why haven't you posted?? come back!!" notifications. And news sites do what they do best - deliver the news without some other third party getting to give their doctoral thesis on what they think it means.
As an information security person and someone that cares deeply about preserving my privacy and the privacy of my fellow citizens I see Facebook / Google / Amazon as sort of existential threats. For them to exist we can't maintain our privacy to a high degree. And as long as they maintain a network effect, even if you do delete your Facebook account, they will maintain a shadow profile of you. You will always be a node in their graph now. European privacy laws and the right to be absolutely forgotten are the answer. As a free human being I believe in the right to be completely outside of any corporations software system and record keeping. There is so much work to do on this front, look at what happened to Equifax. We don't really get a choice about some things (credit reporting), but for everything else, I am going to fight it.
I am going to fight your shitty operating system updates that take away my privacy
I am going to fight your massive personal information sucking network
I am going to use alternative shopping services, no matter how easy you make it for me to click once and have stuff I really like appear in a great user experience.
I am going to fight these things because privacy matters and in the long run without privacy as consumers and human beings with inalienable rights we will give away something essential in there.
It isn't hipsterism. It isn't being a luddite. It mass-scale experiment about how much these organizations can concentrate before people really understand.
It is being a luddite - in a good way! Don't knock the luddites, they had analogous concerns.
They didn't hate machines or novelty per se, they hated the specifics of how the machines were affecting their quality of life.
Same with facebook - networked communications might be OK (remains to be seen if you ask me), but the socio-technical-political blob that is facebook's implementation of same has side effects that lots of us find horrible.
> As an information security person and someone that cares deeply about preserving my privacy and the privacy of my fellow citizens I see Facebook / Google / Amazon as sort of existential threats. For them to exist we can't maintain our privacy to a high degree.
Seriously, if I could upvote you several times, I would! You just said everything I believe in, including naming the corporations that worry me the most and make me feel hopeless sometimes. I try to educate people at every opportunity, fully knowing that it will take a long time for any effect to be visible. But I'm kinda used to that as an activist in other areas.
I don't know if there will ever be a decentralized and privacy protecting social networking platform that will beat Facebook and the like (pun unintended) in network effect, but I'd be ecstatic to see such a day! On the same lines would be reducing data collection almost everywhere and ensuring that privacy comes first - by governments or private entities. I have very little hope on the latter because information security is truly an afterthought in our Internet connected world where anyone can spin up WordPress, add some random plugins and start a "gig economy" or whatever the fad of the day is. It's too easy to start something software based that is completely insecure!
What I did was pare down Facebook to the bare essentials. The only people I have on it are actual would-invite-into-my-home friends, the only pages I follow are for concert venues and bands I like, and I block and turn off every single stupid "joke" page, app and game I see.
Now I basically only get posts directly written by my friends, event notifications for concerts, and updates from my favorite bands.
I don't use Facebook for news, I don't engage in political discussions or stupid arguments. I guess I use Facebook for what its original intended purpose, to keep in touch with friends.
Yea I'm not sure why this isn't a more popular option. I do an even less-impactful version of this: I've disabled the Newsfeed (on web), and I've pared down mobile and email notifications to only things that are likely to matter to me like event invites (my friend group uses FB events for pretty much everything, including logistical events for our Burning Man camp).
The main advantage to me is still that it's an easy and stable way to discover and communicate with people I know in real life: there's still nothing that beats the ease of finding someone on Facebook after meeting them, and I very often forget to exchange info with someone in these situations (esp if I've met a lot of cool people that night).
The company itself has been sleazy from day one, and I think they're largely to blame for the trend of fuck-the-user product design[1] in the last ~5 years. But putting a firewall around what I let them do to my devices and my life and taking advantage of what value they do provide has proven really fruitful for me.
[1] There are plenty of things that used to be deal-breakers for me, like spamming the notification bar to increase engagement: companies like Google held out for a long time against this, but Facebook led the charge into making it ubiquitous and now the new equilibrium is that most large apps do it (even @#$%ing Google Maps!)
You can still use messenger, and I still do because I don't want to stonewall people who only have me on there. I have to say though, it's a god awful UX. The other day I even had an advertisement for Spotify pop up in my messages with a close friend. What the fuck is that?
I used Spotify with my Facebook account. When I deactivated the FB account and logged into Spotify, it reactivated the FB account automatically.
I had to create another standalone Spotify account and contact their support to migrate everything from the FB connected account to the new one, otherwise it would keep reactivating the FB account.
Facebook encourages a lower level of discourse than other message systems, somehow.
I participate in a couple of groups which have come to replace older forums running PHPbb or VBulletin type software. While the old style forums offer too many features and almost excessive permanence for discussions, Facebook offers too little in that regard.
Conversations are not meant to be searchable, archived, permanent, or long or detailed. Unlike VBulletin, where it's easy to find a post you saw 3 days ago or all the posts you've made in a forum, on Facebook everything effectively disappears after a week or two. The content is still there, just very disorganized and difficult to access. Search is inconsistent and very basic for groups.
Most significant is the impact this has on the discussions that take place. On the old forums, posting seemed like a bigger deal and people rarely posted one word responses or sentence fragments. The FB format seems to encourage that. Long, detailed responses about technical matters are difficult to post and read, so people don't post them as often. Discussions are often repeated because nobody can really find the last one to link to it.
This - I think this also extends to the conversations people have 'on' facebook - even with friends. You end up liking or saying 'cool' to a post, but you don't really have any real interaction. Since I've left facebook (nearly 9 months sober) I've probably talked with fewer friends, but those friends I have spoken to, I've spoken to on a far deeper level. and many of them I now actually _speak_ to more often.
Uninstalling messenger was hard at first, as some people I don't have a number for or they aren't on Whatsapp, but you either find other ways to keep in touch, or you realise that you were actually just on the periphery of each others lives, and liking that they got a new car or similar didn't actually have a positive impact on each others lives. And when you do meet again, you'll have a bunch to talk about.
I've debated making a 'fake' account for facebook groups (esp local sales groups, which seem far better served on fb in my area) but so far I've come the the conclusion that I don't really need to buy more crap from strangers - I have enough of my own already.
Same.. couldn't be happier. started by removing messenger & ended up removing FB entirely. I Hated it when my old ATT Galaxy S6 came with it pre-installed and you couldn't delete it only disable it so I did just that. The phone runs faster too.
Wasnt there some stanford study that concluded that more people engage with social media like FB more unhappier they felt. something to do with selection bias in feed.
Like many others have said, it is the same for me too. I deleted the app one day and have felt so much better since.
I actually used to be able to use the browser based messenger to talk to friends but that has been broken lately and now tries to force you to install the app - more dark patterns here (I don't want the app!).
Now I just ignore Facebook completely. I cringe when I need to open the site for some reason. I'm just happier without it.
I'd love some open source thing like this that was mine first and foremost, but I don't really need that either. I thought I needed social networking way more than I really do.
Not a Facebook user, but I did the following with Instagram and never regretted it. If you can't delete the Facebook app, at least disable notifications - you can survive without the distraction of your phone constantly lighting up with alerts about likes or comments and so on.
Agree, news Feed eradicator is my favorite chrome app too. When you go to Facebook it automatically replaces your entire newsfeed with a short quote about using your life for something better. Right now all my newsfeed says is: “Inaction will cause a man to sink into the slough of despond and vanish without a trace.”
~ Farley Mowat"
The step that worked for me was unfollowing everything from Facebook, so that I have a completely empty News Feed. If I want to see what's happening for a particular person, I just navigate to their profile and see directly. I've found this way, even if I have Facebook installed I very very rarely open it and if I do, I close it immediately since there's no content.
It's the best advice to stay happy. I also removed the app last month on my mobile and it helped me to have a very happy weekend as I don't get to login on my laptop. Earlier on weekends I watch FB in morning and get depressed coz one of my friends friend (out of 500 odd friends) went to Europe and had good time but I feel like a loser and screw up my day.
Well with HN you could just use the noprocrast mode, or I've found that editing your hosts file makes sure that you're intentionally browsing a website. I deactivated Facebook, which has surprised me because I still hear from the people I care about (My grandma was a little annoyed but now she's started emailing me). I've also discovered that checking the news once a week (or even once a month!) doesn't make me feel less informed than checking it every day.
I deleted it during the run-up to last year's elections, and I've been happier. Also, my phone battery lasts literally forever.
The thing with optimizing for engagement is that the numbers will tell you to do things that eventually burn out your users. The more thoughtful people leave first, and the community becomes dominated by addicts, and the news feed increasingly dominated by oversharers who spend several hours a day facebooking. That infinite slurry of crappy content rots your brain faster than watching daytime TV.
I get no notifications from my
Facebook app (I'm on iOS). What am I missing? I do get notifications of messages from the Messenger app but I want those as they are from friends
The 2nd best thing after uninstalling the fb app from the phone was to log out from it in my laptop's browser, make sure my password is a generated one (so I can't enter it manually) and also make sure it won't autocomplete when I go to facebook.com.
Now if I want to access it I have to open the Password Manager, copy the password and then paste it ... which are too many steps for me to take in order to check it out :)
So, in the past 1-2 months I think I spent in total 1-2 hours on facebook.
Indeed that's something Cal Newport has been always saying!
Social media is engineered to be addictive and hooking us while the BS reason that we give to be on social networking for is to gain popularity but popularity would follow us when we do Deep work! https://hackernoon.com/hackers-guide-to-internet-minimalism-...
I've found my Facebook usage just going down in general over the years. Switching to the Messenger app and messenger.com on desktop to chat with friends has made it much easier not getting distracted by the newsfeed at random times. Plus, I switched off a whole bunch of notifications and email subscriptions and actually went through my 'friends' and marked most of them as acquaintances, so I mostly don't hear about them, which improved the quality of the feed immensely. In general, ignoring all Facebooks feeble attempts at engagement doesn't really seem all that difficult to me. And being able to look up "what was the address of that event I'm invited to again?" on the phone is nice, so I don't particularly want to delete the FB app either. So in short, it sounds to me like a lot of people are having a much harder time ignoring Facebook than I do - I wonder if maybe they just need to tweak a few things like I did, and they could happily co-exist without being bothered by it, or if there is something else at play too?
Certainly on iOS, the Facebook app eats battery like nobody's business.
I simply use the mobile website which is pretty good - and if I need to take a peek at messenger, I request the desktop site, which is sufficiently inconvenient to prevent me from doing it too often - about once a week.
I deleted my Facebook account completely last fall. It was interesting to see what happened over the period of about a month. Two weeks in my spouse's status changed from "Married to Ollie" to "Married." About three weeks in I got a notice saying my account to pay for "boosting" posts was cancelled.
My FB fanboy brother is annoyed, because if he wants to tell me something he has to make an effort.
People don't "tag" me in pictures any more. I don't have to cope with the little burst of emotional juice when somebody pushes the little thumb button on something from me or about me.
I feel like this kind of activity really triggers some kind of primal social drive in the brain to the point where it is actively unhealthy. I've also struggled with crazy Facebook compulsions, to the point where I've also had to delete the app, and I force myself to use the terrible mobile web UI to make the experience as painful as possible.
I didn't actively touch Facebook throughout August, and I really feel my general outlook has improved. I'm also more social with people in real life, and not getting my saccharine hits from little snippets of conversation or internet point validation.
Now I'm rarely active with it and feeling better for it. I still reluctantly have to use the messenger for communication with certain people, and login for access to other websites that rely on facebook (e.g. Goodreads).
> Less Facebook == more happy. It's the best advice I can give.
I completely agree, and this works for me too. I take long breaks from Facebook and find it refreshing. It also becomes painful to think of logging in to Facebook afterwards. The tons of notifications and tags and replies. There's too much on the platform manipulating people to stay on it. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is real, and I know people who cannot stay without checking Facebook everyday. The main reason I haven't quit Facebook is because I use it for some activism related topics, and a huge audience exists on the platform.
For privacy reasons, to protect myself a bit more and to avoid ads, I mostly Facebook only from a browser on a computer. I don't use the app even though I know I can deny permissions for contacts, photos, camera, mic, location, notifications, etc., on iOS. Sometimes I visit mbasic.facebook.com from the browser on the phone for kicks and to get to messenger directly without jumping through hoops.
Returning to this approximately a day or so after it was posted. I decided to remove the Facebook app from my iPhone and replace it with a Safari bookmark to the mobile site.
Oh my lord, the Facebook app eats battery life. I haven't had to charge my phone yet compared to my 2x charges per day. Whether through less usage or less Facebook doing its thing I can't confirm. I'm not going back either way.
Honestly, it is kind of scary how people on HN live in the no-FB bubble. I mean, FB is kind of optional for social life, but the universal "I deleted FB and am happy" does sound like echo chamber. Because Facebook DOES have advantages, even though more introverted people might not appreciate them as much. Especially regarding event organization:
I regularly organize big board game parties, which are attended by 10-15 people (out of ~40 invited). How easily can I invite / manage so many people without some platform like FB, which (almost, at least around me) everyone uses? And I really appreciate easy info / updates events on FB provide for e.g. info about how much food should I cook, telling people about changing time (or day! We just had poll on FB because people liked this sunday more than saturday) of the party, telling them what to bring . . . emails just wouldn't cut it, it would consume much more time, and would be really clunky. And on the other hand, people attending who DO NOT have FB, are PITA to manage, they consume literally 10times more time to keep list of, message, get the answer from . . . FB has it all in one neat (even though sometimes smelly) package.
Similarly for e.g. GoT (also boardgame) events, as exactly-six-people is pain to manage generally. For someone going to such events it also has great UX, without any hassle of mass-sms or mass-email events.
Not to mention classic FB advantages like photo-sharing, communicating with friends on the other side of the world, etc. . .
It seems to me like deleting FB is not an option if I would like to stay as social. And I am actually quite introverted too, but thanks to channeling social interaction to FB (of course no app, just mbasic.facebook.com and desktop website) and particular events I can enjoy my time alone (which is vast majority of the time) without any regrets or being left behind in my social circle.
There are (at least) two different conventions when it comes to titling: headline and sentence. It's a matter of taste and something that changes over time. I'm not sure if there's a reason deeper than that. In general, I think it's good practice for a publication (or site) to have a style manual for consistency, but just as there are separate AP[0] and Chicago[1] style manuals, it's unlikely you'll see one global style.
Something i've noticed recently is that my feed is flooded with the "x has become friends with y" type of notifications. I literally see 5-10 of them in a row, they make for a very monotonous feed experience. I think its supposed to be a nudge for me to add co-workers and acquaintances to facebook.
They're running out of things to notify you about. I've recently been getting a lot of "X updated their status", where X is someone who I've recently chatted with or whose status I've liked within the past month.
It's silly, but I suppose it's worked on some people.
They also ensure there's ALWAYS at least one notification when you sign in. Even if nothing of importance happened, they find _something_ to notify you about just so you can see the red notification count every time.
I deactivated my account yesterday and look forward to a FB-free life.
Did you deactivate on purpose? Unless you still use Messenger or are considering changing your mind, you should delete your account instead. Deactivation just flips a bit; deletion actually removes your data.
I did it on purpose because I didn't want to be forever locked out of accounts that required a FB signin. Case in point, just hours after deactivating (the first time), I realized I couldn't log into Airbnb without Facebook. So I had to reactivate, change Airbnb settings, then deactivate again.
Yes. The fake orange notification is always annoying. Likewise, the new "feature" where infinite scrolling keeps listing the same posts over and over again.
I'm not quite "done with facebook" but I'm getting there.
I mean, enjoy your FB-free life, but I tweaked my settings a bit, and I only ever get a notification if someone likes my posts/comments, which is all I care about.
If I open the app after not having posted something in a day or two, it's quiet.
I'm beginning to wonder if our ability to sympathize only serves to advance the agendas of those who want to make money on us. Facebook's pushiness is and should always be held as unacceptable, in all circumstances and for all people.
"I sympathize that the company needs business users to keep it afloat" does not justify the kind of begging they've been up to lately.
The author's (and all our) collective sympathy keeps them soliciting us with their bullshit
> I'm beginning to wonder if our ability to sympathize only serves to advance the agendas of those who want to make money on us.
Using your adversary's virtues against them is a strategy as old as humanity. With social media it's baked right into the name. Who doesn't want to be social? Who doesn't want to share? Is something wrong with you?
It's much better to not have a Facebook account. After a while you get used to that feeling of not knowing what people are up to, but then you realize your life isn't negative because of that.
There's probably someone in your circle of friends and family that isn't using Facebook, so your friends and family are already used to reach to that person through other means.
Also, every time you meet friends and family you'll have things to talk about.
"The tricks, hooks, and tactics Facebook uses to keep people coming back have gotten more aggressive and explicit. And I feel that takes away from the actual value the platform provides."
This is why I stopped using Facebook. I really didn't mind the platform until they crossed the threshold of being a useful product to reminding my each time I used it that I AM the product.
I like to fly under the radar and prefer people to find my pictures and posts naturally. Once they started force feeding people my content I decided to stop inflicting my peers with fuel for facebooks social cannons.
What do you mean exactly? When did they started doing that? I've always been of the "under the radar" type myself, not too popular and so on, and I can't imagine how Facebook would be forcing my content over people.
(I've closed my account on 2013, so I don't know exactly what happened since then.)
Agreed. I wonder how long before most of FB's users notice how aggressive this is and, perhaps more likely, how boring the feed becomes with these tricks.
Is FB getting more aggressive because it wants even more or because it is actually losing clicks/logons/attention?
> Is FB getting more aggressive because it wants even more or because it is actually losing clicks/logons/attention?
Probably the latter. I only recall getting the clingy email messages when I haven't checked it in a few days.
I've never had a problem with Facebook over-use, but I know people who have. Those notifications are so slimy and akin to waving a drink in front of an alcoholic's face.
I think a lot of new companies are going to be burned by this eventually.
Every time Facebook turns up the notification rate, they see more engagement. Every time they encourage Boosting a post, they make more money. And then later, when they can't link cause and effect, people like you and me and OP give up on the site completely.
Similarly, sites that A/B test and adjust features and "improve" their design constantly pay a real price - their users feel like guinea pigs and can't ever learn to use the product fluidly. But a .1% conversion boost is measurable now, while a slow bleed of users who want reliability can't be proven.
At a certain point trading goodwill for bigger numbers actually does become a problem, and I think we're getting there.
I'm seriously puzzled how reddit isn't eating facebook's lunch. the content is light years better (and is upstream for much of the facebook feeds I eventually see)
I am an avid redditor with a mostly dead facebook account, so I agree that the content is better, but it's different networks entirely. Reddit has still held on to its psuedo-anonymous roots, and thus hasn't lived up to the "social" part of the social network. The people still consumuning content on facebook are doing so because that's where their friends are.
You know the people that feel a need to tag their friends in a comment on funny posts? That's the kind of user that reddit hasn't been able to convert. Whether reddit wants or should try to garner that traffic/content is a choice they need to make, but the site is doing fine regardless.
I think the bigger issue is why FB hasn't been able to create the kind of conversations that reddit does- the lack of real threading and the lack of a true downvote (preferably anonymous) keep conversations on FB abysmally superficial. You can't engage in a debate with someone if the back-and-forth gets impossible to follow after the second reply, especially with more than two participants. Likewise, FB and users have no idea whether people disagree with a post or are simply ignoring it; or on something like a critical article, whether a user agrees with an article and it's the article's subject which makes them angry or the user disagrees with the article and the post itself makes them angry. FB, with its status as the defacto social network could be a place where people have real constructive discussions, but instead its inability to foster real dialogue has a lot to do with the current stupidity of political discourse and the problems with reality bubbles and whatnot.
Reddit's system has its issues too. Early comments always get more votes and have more sway than later ones, and the "reality bubble" effect is worse because the general consenses upvotes posts that agree with their opinion and downvotes ones that disagree - effectively hiding them whether they're factually correct or not.
Hacker News is much better than Reddit in general for allowing comments on both sides of an issue to be heard, but it's not perfect either. I think it benefits from not being able to see the number of votes on someone's post because it removes that way of checking the previous hive consensus. I'm not sure I even like the greying effect on heavy downvotes.
The best real discussion (especially for ongoing topics and events) I've seen is still on old-school forums like SomethingAwful. The barriers to entry help ($10 on SomethingAwful, 500 points to downvote on Hacker News) but I think Discourse went too far in that direction, where anti-spam limits can make it hard for new users to even write a good post or respond when they want to. I'd like to see a modern forum site where anyone can create a subforum and moderate it themselves the way anyone can create a subreddit on Reddit.
Reddit is very geared towards short-term discussion. Top comments on a post are usually from the first couple of hours and posts last less than a day. For long-term discussion traditional forums with chronological posts and threads that get re-bumped to the top are still king.
That's quite different if I'm reading your meaning correctly. That type of system tends to result in the biggest threads staying at the top and getting bigger and bigger while new ones never appear.
Facebook has notified me once a day of "2 new notifications and 1 message" for the account I created in order to access a developer tool once and I think once clicked one "like" for several months ago. I've never put any more information in than the bare minimum necessary to create an account, never posted, never done anything.
I get that they've essentially tapped out the market for users, but jesus christ, take a rest Facebook.
So far, I've only had to miss one opportunity from not having a Facebook account. Err... I've never had one. Even then, I could still have that opportunity, it'd just take a bit more work and can't be done online.
I guess that I'm trying to say that it's possible to not have social media accounts and still function in the digital world. I know others who don't have accounts but I'm going to call them passive users of the web.
Today I finished unfollowing everything on my fb feed. Now it's just 5 or 6 ads, some relevant, some not. I'm curious to see if this cures the addiction.
My favorite is a push notification to the effect of, "You haven't posted in N weeks. Would you like to post something?" The first time I got it it was annoying. Then it kept happening weekly, by the third time I deleted the app.
Since they changed the timeline to the point where it's impossible for me to see things in reverse chronological order (even if I try to tell it to), I've unfollowed EVERYTHING, set up notifications for the few family members whose posts I don't want to miss, and mostly quit using it for anything but family. I'm so tired of all the ads and marketing crap. I was missing posts I cared about and just seeing crap every day. No thanks.
"I’m likely not going to delete Facebook entirely since I do genuinely enjoy staying in touch with the people in my life, and for better or worse Facebook is where those people hang out"
Is it likely that most people are willing to move and the only problem is there are no compelling options?
This is all from my a sample size of 1, myself, but this is how entrenched Facebook is:
- I know multiple people who do not use email or text socially, because they only use Facebook messenger for either. I can't think of anything else that replaces either one where I know people who use it exclusively.
- The only people I can think of who aren't on Facebook but with whom I'd like to communicate with more, are not on any social media platform at all.
If there was an easy way to automatically process email address changes in your address book and have links to people photoblogs (like RSS) it seems like all the key features would be there. A decentralized email based event manager would be nice. Does Lightning do that, I wonder?
I facepalmed when I read that "not going to delete FB because" sentence. How about that thing called e-mail? If keeping someone's e-mail address and firing a message every now and then is too much hassle, then that person was not worth keeping in touch with in the first place.
I know a lot of people who only check their email when they have signed up for a service. Beyond that "email is for spam". Admittedly these people aren't on Facebook either (they have an account because "you have to").
If/when I move a bit farther from my immediate family, I'll consider setting up a WP blog for catchups and family chat. That way you get to share stati and pics, comment on them, discuss, on top of all, you get RSS and other niceties.
If you want to delete Facebook from your phone but your friends use Facebook Events, there is a stand alone Events app. That being said, I wish my friends didn't use Facebook for events.
I wish you could use that, the Pages app, and the Groups app with a deactivated Facebook profile (I could still connect in meaningful ways). I understand why Facebook has no reason to make it that way, but it is making me vote with my feet.
Perhaps the growth of the platform or certain internal user-based metrics are not being met, so whoever is in charge of making sure they "hit their numbers" is pushing like mad to find ways to grow product. I can see some very aggressive people sitting around a table coming up with ideas to force engagement. Then after a month, they sit back and figure out all the A/B testing that drives the machine.
This reminds me of the quote, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
I keep expecting companies to suffer from this "hit your numbers" approach, and it seems like they're starting to.
Every A/B test makes your site less predictable and straightforward for your users. Every push notification dilutes the value of every other notification sent. Every 'fake' event undermines the thrill of real engagement with other users.
At a certain point you're burning real value to create better metrics, and that's not sustainable for a company that actually wants to endure.
Here is a perspective I read that I thought was interesting[1]:
"There are a billion active accounts on facebook and other than the 208 that are set to private, I can communicate with every single one of them. I don't know what other word I can use other then Power. This is great power, just like the power held by the presidency, with great power comes great responsibility, and loneliness.
The worst thing about Facebook is not the power it gives me. The worst thing about facebook is what I chose to do with the power it gives me.
I certainly couldn't handle it. You might as well say the worst thing about facebook is me.
On facebook, why would I give someone privacy when I have access to all this information. And I don't even need their permission. I can watch your private pictures because you made them available. It's not that I can find out where you work, where you live, where you eat, everything about you. It's that I actually do find out without ever hiring a private detective. It's not what I can do, it's what I do!"
I have a facebook account, but I haven't even logged in in the mast few years. Recently (like a week ago), I started receiving text messages on the number i had setup, after constant nagging by fb about security, looking like this :
I am OUTRAGED by this. My phone text messages is one of the only communication medium that has no spam, and i basically use it for urgent stuff. I never agreed to fb using it for anything further than 2fa. If it wants to spam me, it may send emails.
This was basically the last straw for me. I'm going to send a message to all my friends telling them to send a mail if they want to contact me, delete everything on my profile and wall, and bid farewell. My account will stay up mostly to keep scammers/impostors at bay.
At one point in time, text messages were extremely expensive (several cents per message, depending on the plan you had). At that time, laws were passed (in many countries, I don't know where you are) that made it illegal to send unsolicited text messages.
Not 100% right as some companies in EU member countries such as Finland, where I'm from, were allowed to use a certain clause that would allow them to still add roaming charges (mostly data related). This is done because the majority of operators sell contracts based on the speed and not a monthly GB cap. Almost all contracts are unlimited in data. I for one have a ~30€/month contract that has unlimited data with 50Mbps down / 30Mbps up.
After the roaming change my contract includes ~6GB of roaming data within EU. When that's reached there is a 0.0057€ per MB price in data abroad.
This is legally not "unsolicited", at least in my jurisdiction.
To be unsolicited, you must not have had previous business contact with the company before they contacted you. If you have a business relationship with the company, for example because you opened an account and gave them your phone number, then these laws do not apply.
This happened to me with Instagram (which I stopped using after they killed the chronological feed). I'm almost certain I never gave my number to Instagram. I used it to confirm something with Facebook at some point apparently, but I don't recall giving it to them and I can't imagine myself consenting to phone notifications. At one point they sent me a message at 2am local time on a Sunday.
I use Google Voice for 2FA. It kind of defeats the purpose of 2FA, but it ensures that all the spam stays in my inbox, and lets me change phone numbers when I change country without causing problems.
Apart from the core message that the author was trying to push across, I immediately noticed that names/faces of family/friends were not masked. I personally wouldn't like it if someone put out my information this way. I think that is breaching someone else's privacy.
I still don't quite get why people (especially alleged news sources) post pictures of a twitter box, rather than just say 'User NoodleHead on twitter is quoted as saying "I don't like this"'.
This feels like a not-so-gentle manipulation.
Some guy, who might be sitting next to you on the bus right now, said something on twitter, but that's now news because it's got their @IGN, their actual name (or maybe not), a weirdly formatted date string, the numbers '1' and '6' adjacent to icons at the bottom of the box, a 'Follow' button so you can forever be bombarded with more nuggets of wisdom from this person you don't know, all inside a box that doesn't even have rounded corners.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadLess Facebook == more happy. It's the best advice I can give.
Nice! You're almost to nirvana. ;)
Very liberating indeed.
Reddit is something else, and my reddit time has taken a dive over the last year or so. It's no longer useful to me and the 'community' have become rude, antagonistic and there's always a large group on any sub, including the smaller ones, where users take a contrary argument just for the sake of appearing intelligent, which they never succeed in doing. Only thing keeping me there are the Linux subs and sometimes the hilarity of askreddit (intentional hilarity and otherwise).
First week or so was string of surprising moments where I would suddenly find myself at the FB login screen having mindlessly tried to navigate there.
The course is clear, you need to delete your web browser too.
More productive, less distracted, etc., sure but was FB really getting you down that much? Am I just using Facebook "wrong" in that it's not upsetting me the same way it upsets others?
Facebook, per se, maybe not. It could be anything that fills in the holes
It's not like they are putting a gun to my head but, they are using a billion dollars of research and my friends' faces to entice me into doing something I don't want. I'm more or less a monkey and my social circuitry just is so super-stimulated that it's annoying.
And all of that is before the FOMO kicks in and I start feeling bad that my life isn't as nice as my friends even though among my friends, I have a very enviable life (my friends have confided in me as much). But, my every day life cannot compete with the highlight reel of all the best moments of all my friends' lives.
Even though I know all of this stuff consiously, it still affects me because keeping guard and watch over everything constantly is hard. Falling into how it's designed to make you feel is easy.
Deleting FB off your phone is the best thing.
This overwhelming feeling, I'm convinced, is one of the driving factors that created Instagram and Snapchat because it was smaller and less invasive. Ironically, they became just like FB or in some ways (to some people) worse as they grew.
We are social animals and FB weaponizes the faces of all of your friends to suck as much attention from you as possible. It's as unfair a fight as there ever has been in the history of commerce.
In a sense I'm a lot happier not knowing that Great Aunt Gertrude shared that post. And most of the time Aunt Gertrude didn't even think about what she was sharing so the opinion wasn't based in fact.
I have too many friends spread across the world to ever quit FB, but I only really use it for messages. I only post things if they promote my website and pull people to my content and away from Facebook. Since that's all I do, my posts obviously don't get as much reach. It's kinda the opposite of the Silent Bob effect. You have a friend who always says crap and you ignore them. If someone says things only once a week; you pay attention when they have something to say.
Facebook basically penalizes people who only speak when they have something important to say and rewards people who cannot learn to shut the hell up.
*I realize it has bold now, but it doesn't work universally across all their tools: mobile, web, etc. I know people who just use unicode symbols for italics because it's more reliable.
Maybe you just don't have an accurate baseline and it's not that using Facebook upsets you but that not using it increases your well-being.
Try not using it for 2 weeks and see if you notice a difference.
(The only reason I don't close my account: I check it once every week or so, because I have older family members for whom this is probably as far as they're going into the world of social media and I feel a bit guilty either pressuring them to use some alternative or disconnecting from them further, as they are unlikely to understand my dissatisfaction with the FB product and much more likely to take it personally)
With Messenger Lite, not only does it take a lot less space, it's a lot faster, and feels less bloaty. It's a lot like what Messenger was a few years ago, nice and simple.
I don't want to use Messenger to play games, or send giphys, or any of that other rich interaction stuff. The only thing I miss is the ability to send a pin of your location to someone, which is actually a really useful feature.
Interestingly if I leave the tab open I also get notifications if someone responded.
It's the same reason there are only a few phone numbers that can actually make my phone ring (my wife, the school my children attend, and pager duty (:P))
My device exists for my convenience.
Could you describe briefly how to configure that state of affairs? What OS do you use?
Settings>Sound>Do Not Disturb>Priority only allows
You can limit notifications to starred contacts only for calls and also SMS, and then only star the contacts you want to allow.
Not sure if there's a better way for gmail, but the way I did it was to have a second gmail account, then create filters that send only important messages to that account. Then in the gmail app you can control notifications on a per-account level.
My wife exclusively uses messenger for buying and selling stuff on Facebook. She doesn't need nor want notifications.
There's also the creepy factor. I assume if there is any kind of exploit or corner case that allows an app to abuse privilege on iOS, Facebook is scummy enough to always ship it.
If I don't have notifications enabled it's because I don't want to be distracted. I check my phone often enough, I don't need to immediately stop what I'm doing to read a message.
Equally. When I send a message to someone, I don't want to distract them either. Of course there's no sophistication (e.g. busy mode, notify for messages flagged urgent only) because facebook wants people to drop whatever they're doing and use facebook instead.
Additionally, FB messenger does not allow you to disable "read receipts," it always shows the other party when you have opened a message. Buzzing my pocket and then telling the other person I read their message feels very intrusive to me.
Now if I could only do the same for reddit...
You're right about the IM apps being not great. This and the poor state of desktop email clients on Windows and Linux are my pet hates
I've had facebook messenger, gchat/hangouts installed on my phone for some time. I don't know if I'd call it great, but I have a hard time arguing that it doesn't immediately solve my instant messaging needs.
What exactly do you want that gchat or facebook messenger doesnt solve?
Whenever I’m stuck using a centralized service (Twitter, facebook, some web forum, whatever bullshit IRC replacement businesses are buying this week, ...) their client invariably does something different than what many people want it to do, but we have no recourse because everything is locked-down proprietary bullshit, even though most of the messages are plain text and could have been delivered just fine by open protocols in 1990. Not to mention these apps are all poorly designed resource hogs that spy on everyone, inject ugly ads, and burn mobile battery.
1. gchat (or "Google Talk" I think?) was a nice simple app that was replaced by a rebranded one that had different functionality and a UI that was either different or flakey/slow/unreliable (I forget all the details). I later learned that actually we were all duped by google - gchat itself was only turned off completely very recently, but at the time they managed to convince us that we had to use Hangouts instead. In any case, the whole thing was annoying enough that we left because ...
2. Whatsapp was starting to be very widespread and was a natural replacement for us as most people either had it or could quickly get it (you just needed a phone number and nearly any sort of phone, many feature phones support it) and it had a simple chat-only interface.
3. FB Messenger was not a separate application at the time, it was integrated in the FB app iirc and you still had to be a member of FB and add any contacts as "friends" to communicate. At the time it wasn't seen as a general-purpose chat app by _anyone_, just a way to talk to your FB contacts.
Hope that makes sense. If you're curious about the gchat->hangouts switch, I'm sure a quick search will turn up a few disgruntled articles - there were quite a few people who were annoyed. It probably didn't help that Google were in the habit of dropping products, so a few people may have assumed that they'd do the same with the chat app.
I realize there are per-thread mute settings, but the whole experience of using these things is highly intrusive. At least with text messaging (or calling) we still have, to some extent, the social expectation that it is known to be intrusive, so people (in my social group at least) are less likely to text for frivolous reasons.
Notifications from people are fine, e.g. 'x messaged you'.
Notifications from machines are the problem, e.g. 'x just did y'.
There appears to be a significant negative correlation between Facebook activity and wellbeing.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28093386
So much of social media is dependent on triggering anger or anxiety to get you to share. Which is effective political memes make you mad. Because they're designed to.
I decided that being on a platform that uses me as a transmitter of memes to make cash by making me mad or anxious was (a) sociopathic on behalf of Facebook and (b) stupid on my part. I logged out, deactivated, and deleted. I've done it before, but now it feels permanent.
I'm on twitter sometimes (because there's much less social pressure wrt following/unfollowing) and Goodreads, where I follow people who read and write the books I like to read.
It doesn't even feel weird for me now. I have POTS copper line going to my house but no phone plugged into it at this point.
It probably wouldn't work for most people, but I'm the type who just wants to work on my projects alone and be at a computer most of the day. I do think most people could get away with the prepaid phone and spend under $100 a year on phone service.
I'm a linux user - I'm pretty sure I'd go crazy on macOS without a phone. Giving up iMessages and thousands of dollars of phone/mac apps was tough but now I'd never go back.
The idea is very attractive, but it seems like the rest of the world is stuck with the mindset that you have to have a phone number, email address, and even a physical address.
When I sign up for something I usually use a fake number.
I think a decent compromise will be using another prepaid cheap phone, although building my own phone would be pretty cool too (lots of hobbyists doing that now)
At concerts, I've found it hugely helpful to simple take a picture from where I'm standing, and sending it to my friends.
I've got lots of radios though, and I use them sometimes if I'm doing a convoy or camping, etc.
I also find people who ask for my facebook account or try to get me to join are the same people I find least interesting and I'm less willing to spend my time with.
Even if you aren't both in the middle of a conversation, I suggest to you to slowly start talking to her about all these shaddy things about facebook (important: is not an addiction but a mental conditioning, as "addiction" is a very strong word for some people and "conditioning" is a much fuzzier concept). Then, slowly, start noticing that her "conditioning" on facebook is a turnoff on certain situations. Be honest and frontal about that..
But I do have the basic mobile site bookmarked:
https://mbasic.facebook.com
Instead of getting notifications and getting pulled into the app I can visit the site when I have downtime, or have something I actually want to accomplish on FB.
Last month I deactivated my Facebook and have yet to turn it back on. In the months prior I started finding alternative sources of news: NYT, Pitchfork, HN, various sub-reddits, Bandcamp, what have you. I outsourced social media to Twitter and Instagram. I outsourced messaging to text/Slack. A bunch of my friends have done the similar things in the last few years.
The lower levels of cognitive dissonance are noticeable. It's not like Facebook has a monopoly on the things I hate: notification spam, stupid arguments, unfulfilling articles, and vacuous political rants all exist elsewhere. Maybe it's the dissociation between who a person is and what is posted. On Reddit you don't know the person and they don't get a big platform to express themselves outside of the comments. On Twitter you can't go on these huge rants and following/unfollowing people is fairly impersonal. On Instagram, you never get "why haven't you posted?? come back!!" notifications. And news sites do what they do best - deliver the news without some other third party getting to give their doctoral thesis on what they think it means.
I am going to fight your shitty operating system updates that take away my privacy
I am going to fight your massive personal information sucking network
I am going to use alternative shopping services, no matter how easy you make it for me to click once and have stuff I really like appear in a great user experience.
I am going to fight these things because privacy matters and in the long run without privacy as consumers and human beings with inalienable rights we will give away something essential in there.
It isn't hipsterism. It isn't being a luddite. It mass-scale experiment about how much these organizations can concentrate before people really understand.
They didn't hate machines or novelty per se, they hated the specifics of how the machines were affecting their quality of life.
Same with facebook - networked communications might be OK (remains to be seen if you ask me), but the socio-technical-political blob that is facebook's implementation of same has side effects that lots of us find horrible.
Pedantry over.
Seriously, if I could upvote you several times, I would! You just said everything I believe in, including naming the corporations that worry me the most and make me feel hopeless sometimes. I try to educate people at every opportunity, fully knowing that it will take a long time for any effect to be visible. But I'm kinda used to that as an activist in other areas.
I don't know if there will ever be a decentralized and privacy protecting social networking platform that will beat Facebook and the like (pun unintended) in network effect, but I'd be ecstatic to see such a day! On the same lines would be reducing data collection almost everywhere and ensuring that privacy comes first - by governments or private entities. I have very little hope on the latter because information security is truly an afterthought in our Internet connected world where anyone can spin up WordPress, add some random plugins and start a "gig economy" or whatever the fad of the day is. It's too easy to start something software based that is completely insecure!
Now I basically only get posts directly written by my friends, event notifications for concerts, and updates from my favorite bands.
I don't use Facebook for news, I don't engage in political discussions or stupid arguments. I guess I use Facebook for what its original intended purpose, to keep in touch with friends.
The main advantage to me is still that it's an easy and stable way to discover and communicate with people I know in real life: there's still nothing that beats the ease of finding someone on Facebook after meeting them, and I very often forget to exchange info with someone in these situations (esp if I've met a lot of cool people that night).
The company itself has been sleazy from day one, and I think they're largely to blame for the trend of fuck-the-user product design[1] in the last ~5 years. But putting a firewall around what I let them do to my devices and my life and taking advantage of what value they do provide has proven really fruitful for me.
[1] There are plenty of things that used to be deal-breakers for me, like spamming the notification bar to increase engagement: companies like Google held out for a long time against this, but Facebook led the charge into making it ubiquitous and now the new equilibrium is that most large apps do it (even @#$%ing Google Maps!)
For third-party app logins I use a friendless FB account under a pseudonym.
Less pressure to expose one's self to the psychological pathogen that is the Facebook Timeline.
I had to create another standalone Spotify account and contact their support to migrate everything from the FB connected account to the new one, otherwise it would keep reactivating the FB account.
I participate in a couple of groups which have come to replace older forums running PHPbb or VBulletin type software. While the old style forums offer too many features and almost excessive permanence for discussions, Facebook offers too little in that regard.
Conversations are not meant to be searchable, archived, permanent, or long or detailed. Unlike VBulletin, where it's easy to find a post you saw 3 days ago or all the posts you've made in a forum, on Facebook everything effectively disappears after a week or two. The content is still there, just very disorganized and difficult to access. Search is inconsistent and very basic for groups.
Most significant is the impact this has on the discussions that take place. On the old forums, posting seemed like a bigger deal and people rarely posted one word responses or sentence fragments. The FB format seems to encourage that. Long, detailed responses about technical matters are difficult to post and read, so people don't post them as often. Discussions are often repeated because nobody can really find the last one to link to it.
Uninstalling messenger was hard at first, as some people I don't have a number for or they aren't on Whatsapp, but you either find other ways to keep in touch, or you realise that you were actually just on the periphery of each others lives, and liking that they got a new car or similar didn't actually have a positive impact on each others lives. And when you do meet again, you'll have a bunch to talk about.
I've debated making a 'fake' account for facebook groups (esp local sales groups, which seem far better served on fb in my area) but so far I've come the the conclusion that I don't really need to buy more crap from strangers - I have enough of my own already.
Wasnt there some stanford study that concluded that more people engage with social media like FB more unhappier they felt. something to do with selection bias in feed.
I actually used to be able to use the browser based messenger to talk to friends but that has been broken lately and now tries to force you to install the app - more dark patterns here (I don't want the app!).
Now I just ignore Facebook completely. I cringe when I need to open the site for some reason. I'm just happier without it.
I'd love some open source thing like this that was mine first and foremost, but I don't really need that either. I thought I needed social networking way more than I really do.
I no longer infinite scroll, and things load quicker... I've noticed that I check FB a lot less now that I can't just mindlessly scroll down.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14755217
I'm pretty much in an FB and HN dopamine loop all day.
-_-
Not sure if I'm ready to pull the trigger.
The thing with optimizing for engagement is that the numbers will tell you to do things that eventually burn out your users. The more thoughtful people leave first, and the community becomes dominated by addicts, and the news feed increasingly dominated by oversharers who spend several hours a day facebooking. That infinite slurry of crappy content rots your brain faster than watching daytime TV.
ᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵwww.bosscyber.comᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵ
Uses less battery power, too!
As much as they want to force you into messenger, they don't want to cut off users of feature phones.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2016/04/30/study-l...
https://www.nature.com/news/how-facebook-fake-news-and-frien...
Do we really need researchers to tell us that prolonged heavy anything usage increases the chance of unhappiness?
Now if I want to access it I have to open the Password Manager, copy the password and then paste it ... which are too many steps for me to take in order to check it out :)
So, in the past 1-2 months I think I spent in total 1-2 hours on facebook.
Social media is engineered to be addictive and hooking us while the BS reason that we give to be on social networking for is to gain popularity but popularity would follow us when we do Deep work! https://hackernoon.com/hackers-guide-to-internet-minimalism-...
I simply use the mobile website which is pretty good - and if I need to take a peek at messenger, I request the desktop site, which is sufficiently inconvenient to prevent me from doing it too often - about once a week.
I deleted my Facebook account completely last fall. It was interesting to see what happened over the period of about a month. Two weeks in my spouse's status changed from "Married to Ollie" to "Married." About three weeks in I got a notice saying my account to pay for "boosting" posts was cancelled.
My FB fanboy brother is annoyed, because if he wants to tell me something he has to make an effort.
People don't "tag" me in pictures any more. I don't have to cope with the little burst of emotional juice when somebody pushes the little thumb button on something from me or about me.
And, the fake nuz just stopped. Hooray.
I didn't actively touch Facebook throughout August, and I really feel my general outlook has improved. I'm also more social with people in real life, and not getting my saccharine hits from little snippets of conversation or internet point validation.
Now I'm rarely active with it and feeling better for it. I still reluctantly have to use the messenger for communication with certain people, and login for access to other websites that rely on facebook (e.g. Goodreads).
It really is good advice
I completely agree, and this works for me too. I take long breaks from Facebook and find it refreshing. It also becomes painful to think of logging in to Facebook afterwards. The tons of notifications and tags and replies. There's too much on the platform manipulating people to stay on it. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is real, and I know people who cannot stay without checking Facebook everyday. The main reason I haven't quit Facebook is because I use it for some activism related topics, and a huge audience exists on the platform.
For privacy reasons, to protect myself a bit more and to avoid ads, I mostly Facebook only from a browser on a computer. I don't use the app even though I know I can deny permissions for contacts, photos, camera, mic, location, notifications, etc., on iOS. Sometimes I visit mbasic.facebook.com from the browser on the phone for kicks and to get to messenger directly without jumping through hoops.
Oh my lord, the Facebook app eats battery life. I haven't had to charge my phone yet compared to my 2x charges per day. Whether through less usage or less Facebook doing its thing I can't confirm. I'm not going back either way.
I regularly organize big board game parties, which are attended by 10-15 people (out of ~40 invited). How easily can I invite / manage so many people without some platform like FB, which (almost, at least around me) everyone uses? And I really appreciate easy info / updates events on FB provide for e.g. info about how much food should I cook, telling people about changing time (or day! We just had poll on FB because people liked this sunday more than saturday) of the party, telling them what to bring . . . emails just wouldn't cut it, it would consume much more time, and would be really clunky. And on the other hand, people attending who DO NOT have FB, are PITA to manage, they consume literally 10times more time to keep list of, message, get the answer from . . . FB has it all in one neat (even though sometimes smelly) package.
Similarly for e.g. GoT (also boardgame) events, as exactly-six-people is pain to manage generally. For someone going to such events it also has great UX, without any hassle of mass-sms or mass-email events.
Not to mention classic FB advantages like photo-sharing, communicating with friends on the other side of the world, etc. . .
It seems to me like deleting FB is not an option if I would like to stay as social. And I am actually quite introverted too, but thanks to channeling social interaction to FB (of course no app, just mbasic.facebook.com and desktop website) and particular events I can enjoy my time alone (which is vast majority of the time) without any regrets or being left behind in my social circle.
This one is worse because it also uses the iOS/OSX notifications system for maximum passive aggressiveness: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/887740777031278592
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Stylebook
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicago_Manual_of_Style
It's silly, but I suppose it's worked on some people.
I deactivated my account yesterday and look forward to a FB-free life.
Keeping in mind that this is Facebook we are talking about, I doubt the data is actually removed.
I'm not quite "done with facebook" but I'm getting there.
Almost a year ago now, I deactivated it and haven't turned it back on.
If I open the app after not having posted something in a day or two, it's quiet.
"I sympathize that the company needs business users to keep it afloat" does not justify the kind of begging they've been up to lately.
The author's (and all our) collective sympathy keeps them soliciting us with their bullshit
Using your adversary's virtues against them is a strategy as old as humanity. With social media it's baked right into the name. Who doesn't want to be social? Who doesn't want to share? Is something wrong with you?
There's probably someone in your circle of friends and family that isn't using Facebook, so your friends and family are already used to reach to that person through other means.
Also, every time you meet friends and family you'll have things to talk about.
This is why I stopped using Facebook. I really didn't mind the platform until they crossed the threshold of being a useful product to reminding my each time I used it that I AM the product.
I like to fly under the radar and prefer people to find my pictures and posts naturally. Once they started force feeding people my content I decided to stop inflicting my peers with fuel for facebooks social cannons.
(I've closed my account on 2013, so I don't know exactly what happened since then.)
Is FB getting more aggressive because it wants even more or because it is actually losing clicks/logons/attention?
Probably the latter. I only recall getting the clingy email messages when I haven't checked it in a few days.
I've never had a problem with Facebook over-use, but I know people who have. Those notifications are so slimy and akin to waving a drink in front of an alcoholic's face.
http://fortune.com/2016/04/07/facebook-sharing-decline/
Every time Facebook turns up the notification rate, they see more engagement. Every time they encourage Boosting a post, they make more money. And then later, when they can't link cause and effect, people like you and me and OP give up on the site completely.
Similarly, sites that A/B test and adjust features and "improve" their design constantly pay a real price - their users feel like guinea pigs and can't ever learn to use the product fluidly. But a .1% conversion boost is measurable now, while a slow bleed of users who want reliability can't be proven.
At a certain point trading goodwill for bigger numbers actually does become a problem, and I think we're getting there.
You know the people that feel a need to tag their friends in a comment on funny posts? That's the kind of user that reddit hasn't been able to convert. Whether reddit wants or should try to garner that traffic/content is a choice they need to make, but the site is doing fine regardless.
Hacker News is much better than Reddit in general for allowing comments on both sides of an issue to be heard, but it's not perfect either. I think it benefits from not being able to see the number of votes on someone's post because it removes that way of checking the previous hive consensus. I'm not sure I even like the greying effect on heavy downvotes.
The best real discussion (especially for ongoing topics and events) I've seen is still on old-school forums like SomethingAwful. The barriers to entry help ($10 on SomethingAwful, 500 points to downvote on Hacker News) but I think Discourse went too far in that direction, where anti-spam limits can make it hard for new users to even write a good post or respond when they want to. I'd like to see a modern forum site where anyone can create a subforum and moderate it themselves the way anyone can create a subreddit on Reddit.
Isn't that...Reddit?
I get that they've essentially tapped out the market for users, but jesus christ, take a rest Facebook.
I guess that I'm trying to say that it's possible to not have social media accounts and still function in the digital world. I know others who don't have accounts but I'm going to call them passive users of the web.
Is it likely that most people are willing to move and the only problem is there are no compelling options?
So nothing is even close.
FB has turned people into needy Rolodex hoarders.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/events-from-facebook-find-th...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.S...
Facebook is permanently quarantined
It sits on a desk closed up and never comes with me when i am out.
i look at once week at most to see if i need to respond to anything.
This reminds me of the quote, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Every A/B test makes your site less predictable and straightforward for your users. Every push notification dilutes the value of every other notification sent. Every 'fake' event undermines the thrill of real engagement with other users.
At a certain point you're burning real value to create better metrics, and that's not sustainable for a company that actually wants to endure.
"There are a billion active accounts on facebook and other than the 208 that are set to private, I can communicate with every single one of them. I don't know what other word I can use other then Power. This is great power, just like the power held by the presidency, with great power comes great responsibility, and loneliness.
The worst thing about Facebook is not the power it gives me. The worst thing about facebook is what I chose to do with the power it gives me.
I certainly couldn't handle it. You might as well say the worst thing about facebook is me.
On facebook, why would I give someone privacy when I have access to all this information. And I don't even need their permission. I can watch your private pictures because you made them available. It's not that I can find out where you work, where you live, where you eat, everything about you. It's that I actually do find out without ever hiring a private detective. It's not what I can do, it's what I do!"
[1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/facebook-and-me
Robin, get back on Facebook by clicking: https://fb.com/l/someIDhere
I am OUTRAGED by this. My phone text messages is one of the only communication medium that has no spam, and i basically use it for urgent stuff. I never agreed to fb using it for anything further than 2fa. If it wants to spam me, it may send emails.
This was basically the last straw for me. I'm going to send a message to all my friends telling them to send a mail if they want to contact me, delete everything on my profile and wall, and bid farewell. My account will stay up mostly to keep scammers/impostors at bay.
At one point in time, text messages were extremely expensive (several cents per message, depending on the plan you had). At that time, laws were passed (in many countries, I don't know where you are) that made it illegal to send unsolicited text messages.
You should see if you can scare Facebook.
Most everywhere the cost was always borne by the sender (except when roaming)
If you need to receive an 2FA token, well, you need to receive an 2FA token.
Since this summer, roaming charges are also banned altogether within the EU.
After the roaming change my contract includes ~6GB of roaming data within EU. When that's reached there is a 0.0057€ per MB price in data abroad.
In all honesty, you really can't.
To be unsolicited, you must not have had previous business contact with the company before they contacted you. If you have a business relationship with the company, for example because you opened an account and gave them your phone number, then these laws do not apply.
This feels like a not-so-gentle manipulation.
Some guy, who might be sitting next to you on the bus right now, said something on twitter, but that's now news because it's got their @IGN, their actual name (or maybe not), a weirdly formatted date string, the numbers '1' and '6' adjacent to icons at the bottom of the box, a 'Follow' button so you can forever be bombarded with more nuggets of wisdom from this person you don't know, all inside a box that doesn't even have rounded corners.