Five Years Without Facebook

I think I quit Facebook years ago, but did Facebook really let me go. I thought I had quit and about a year later someone asked why I stopped replying there and found out that my page was still ongoing. Reactivated my account and found that the page was indeed still happening. Tried to shut down page and quit Facebook again.

If I recall correctly, Facebook owns and controls all and my wants are not it's concerns. That is why I left Facebook. But so many companies are just as bad now.
 
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The time wasting, attention mongering and ego stroking that makes Facebook what it is is well worth "missing out" on. You've clearly made a well thought out decision, in point of view anyhow.

I also quit 4 years ago, but had a brief hiatus back in the FB babbleplex earlier this year. The limited value of the social connection (do likes really make me better? I think not) was quickly outweighed by the insecure, faux-virtuous and P.C. nonsense stream.

No I don't want a trick puzzle to determine my IQ, to subscribe, be "offended", read ads, like things to save lives, read "fake news" or be basically subjected to an unfiltered nonsense stream. I can go outside and talk to people if that is really what I need to do, even pick up the phone. I probably won't immediately get 20 likes nor the instant approval that will stroke my ego. You have to work for that in the real world by being consistent and caring, loyal, honest, interesting and a range of other attributes that cannot be edited multiple times before posting.
 
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The only reason I joined was that before Yahoo and ATT.NET went to the new home page formats, you could comment on articles. That is no longer possible, on my computer at least. Back before att.net getting its own start page, some of the articles required a FB login to comment. So, I got one, then my son and daughter-in-law suggested we do facetime video chats with them and our granddaughter, who turned 2 in late March. Since they live almost 7 hours away by road, it only made sense. I have a very limited list of friends, mostly people at church and immediately family, totaling only about 35 or 36 folks. I am perfectly happy with that. FB is constantly trying to include friends suggestions, which I ignore and hide the panel. Without FB, I would not be able to have my granddaughter's activities posted by her mom and my son in videos. That is the only reason I have for staying on it now. But I also realize that they do not charge anything for an account. FOLKS, nothing is free in this world, so, if they want to push some ads at me based on my likes or dislikes, that is fine with me.
 
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A great read! Though I did leave Facebook two times, eventually my friends (I'm too secretive to explain them the reasons) forced me to come back so now I use Messenger mostly with the occasional scrolling of the news feed. One has to realize it's not for everyone and yet not everyone can be expected to not use it.
 
Eh, I don't use FB for attention. Heck, I barely post stuff, and if I do it's just for amusement. I remove the ads, clickbait, drama, and all the other annoying things.
I more or less use FB to keep in touch with good friends (messenger is great for sending media and links) and for keeping up with friends and the occasional posts on the pages I follow. For now it is more useful than annoying.

I also use it as a basic source for news (since I don't watch TV), but I always take the politics with a grain of salt.
 
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I just quit fb for my own reasons. To the author, you should try it again and not feel like you caved. I would suggest doing like the guy above and only add real friends. I tried to only add people I personaly knew, including high scool "friends". I had a relatively small list of people at 150ish, and it's to much.

Anyway you will always wonder "what if"...if you don't. Scratch that itch, and if you hate it, fine. As far as hating preaching Jesus...well that's always sad to hear, since he is the Lord, and demons are cast out in his name. In other words..."their's POWER in the name.
 
Bravo. I applaude you. In my humble opinion, FB is like a tumor on the internet, sucking out energy and information from other sites and means of communication.

I don't need to know whenever a friend of mine baked cookies or took a selfieshot in the waterfront.

No, true friends hold contact, and, if you're not on facebook, then email, textmessages and phonecalls still exist. True friends hold true and accept your choice, noone should ever be forced to use a specific platform.

I praise myself lucky that my entire family has chosen not to be on FB. And my friends and coworkers have accepted it.

Do I miss out on events or happenings? Probably. But the ones that really matters I still attend. An email is still easy to write and reply.

Don't need FB, an ad infested information hogging site with one goal: to make money from your life.

Don't need it, never used it, and perfectly content with my desicion, wether popular or not.
 
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Bravo! Never saw any value in FB for me & can't understand why young folks despise e-mail, the greatest communication format ever devised. It's always there when I'm ready for it. It never rings or alerts me with distractions, interruptions or redirects, until or unless I open it. I can respond or not, to messages. My responses never ring or alert others with distractions, interruptions or redirects. My message is always there for them when they're ready for it. No stamps, no envelopes, no scribbling, no mail drops, no next day pickup, no 4+ days 'til delivery, no sold out vending machines, no lines at the P. O., no closed P. O., nobody going postal, no texting while driving, crossing the RR trax, walking into traffic, or into a citation or into a rear end collision. I once came upon an intersection collision with the stricken vehicle on its side, the striking vehicle totalled in the front, dazed people lying around & being put into ambulances, no skid marks from panic braking. Bet it wasn't from e-mail.
 
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It's simple, if you are over the age of 30, you are most likely not finding the use for this, or maybe if you have 2 friends. It's not even that, you make Facebook what you make out of it.

If you get into Keyboard Warrior scenario, it means you seeked that out. No one is telling you to get involved or have friends, like pages which trigger this.

Find your privacy invaded, get of the Internet made, because hate to break it to ya, your privacy has already been invaded. You can tell me you are running Onion, VPNs, no-cache policy blah blah, but its all bunch of horse nuggets.

Facebook, Twitter and all of these Social Networking websites are extremely helpful, whether form business standpoint or simply communication.

Don't get me wrong, no going on Facebook will probably save me more time and I can spend it on myself but living a fast paced, high activity life, its quite a requirement for me as from business standpoint as well.

Sure, if I had to choose, Youtube would be the only platform id visit if I had an amazing house somewhere in Antigua and did not have to worry about anything just live of a "stash of cash".
 
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Hello Shawn.

This was the best TechSpot article, I've read since my arrival.
Yesterday, I took the decision to deactivate my Facebook around my birthday - this my goal, now.

I also thought about completely deleting it, one day.

Who knows, what happens?

//
 
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H3llion said:
It's simple, if you are over the age of 30, you are most likely not finding the use for this, or maybe if you have 2 friends. It's not even that, you make Facebook what you make out of it.

If you get into Keyboard Warrior scenario, it means you seeked that out. No one is telling you to get involved or have friends, like pages which trigger this.

Find your privacy invaded, get of the Internet made, because hate to break it to ya, your privacy has already been invaded. You can tell me you are running Onion, VPNs, no-cache policy blah blah, but its all bunch of horse nuggets.

Facebook, Twitter and all of these Social Networking websites are extremely helpful, whether form business standpoint or simply communication.

Don't get me wrong, no going on Facebook will probably save me more time and I can spend it on myself but living a fast paced, high activity life, its quite a requirement for me as from business standpoint as well.

Sure, if I had to choose, Youtube would be the only platform id visit if I had an amazing house somewhere in Antigua and did not have to worry about anything just live of a "stash of cash".
Click to expand...

Hi Julio,

You're not breaking anything to me. I knew years ago that my mail was transparent to many as it's obvious by the tracking & kinds of responses I get. All of those social networking sites are extremely helpful to those who use them, & are much more helpful to the social networking sites. I don't use them because I don't need that kind of help & my not using them doesn't harm the networking sites without the use of my data to sell. They have more than enough without me.

BTW, I do have 2 friends & don't think my worth depends on those 2 or any others, let alone on the # of friends I do or do not have. It's a case of different strokes for different folks.
 
For me Facebook is a way to communicate with companies. It's often easier to get a response via Facebook than trying to find a relevant e-mail or phone number.

It's useful for some other things. I've entered giveaways on it, sometimes even gamed on it, but I never shared on it. I did on some occasions found interesting things about people I knew, on the rare occasion that I reach something that's not a company page.

Still, it's better than WhatsApp.
 
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Facebook can be what you want it to be...or you can become what Facebook wants you to be.

I've only had FB for a couple years, since being rather reclusive, I don't have any family or friends. So I avoided FB for years, having no reason for it. Then when I learned about the business benefits of FB, such as pages and advertising, I joined in order to use it for promoting my business and spreading the word about it. But also using the personal side of FB, I learned that it's a great way to connect to people with similar likes & interests and share information. And I've met some great people all over the country & world doing that.

I'm a news & politics junkie, so during the political season, I had great fun contributing to the liberal meltdowns as Trump soared to the Presidency during that year. I trade photos and technical info with other car people and computer tech people. I follow companies that interest me and they get my .02 cents feedback. I've helped new friends start their businesses by giving them advice from my own experiences.

And most importantly, as was my original intent, my own business has greatly improved its visibility via its page, my postings about what's going on with projects, and also delving into the paid FB advertising. My business has made more money simply by being active on FB and attracting new clients.

So, there are pluses to FB if you make it what you want it to be. To the author, I'd say his love of photography and other interests would have benefited by being able to more easily share them with others, while seeing what others are doing and learning from them. I've learned a lot from the people I know & share with on FB, which is one of its benefits.

Most people let FB use them or let the power of FB go to waste. If your contributions only include posting photos of your meals or pets or keeping tabs on the lives of others as some form of self-validation...well, that's on you, not FB.

Bear in mind that I full well know FB uses us too, no matter what. We see ads, stupid polls, and their fascistic style of censoring users and what news you see & read (much like Twitter). But that slack is taken up by being well read with the news elsewhere on your own. As for the ads, that's fine too...for the benefits I've had with FB, it's easy to scroll past the ads and other fluff that pays FB's bills (and makes them billions).
 
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Sorry Shawn but I ended up skimming most of your article. Maybe because it's Monday morning.

I haven't used Facebook for at least over 8 years now and I still don't miss it. I still use twitter time to time but I'm not hooked to it like I was before. I think in part it is because 50% of the time people are posting about negative stuff. I already got enough drama and I don't need anymore, thank you very much. ;P
 
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Facebook, or as I like to call it, FAKEBOOK, had so many ads, that the ad blockers work overtime to knock them down. Now, as you read posts from corporations, politicians, celebrities etc...it's nothing more than a place for them to run up their website click counts by posting teaser posts on facebook, that require you to click a link to see the whole story. It's more fun, trolling those when I'm bored, going to the link, then posting what the link says to save others from having to click the link. For some reason, these guys don't like that LOL.
 
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I've never used FB, and I certainly have no regrets about that. No one I know uses it, and it's hard for me to imagine the kinds of reactions Shawn posts about. Strange reactions from people when they learn I don't have a presence there? No, not really.

Having never been a part of that,. I can't imagine how not using something is such a phenomenon that it warrants this kind of reflection. I can't imagine wanting to be a part of it, with all of the spying and scraping people's posts for useful information that can be used to build a complete profile to be used to my detriment (and plying me with ads specifically chosen to manipulate me personally into buying something is detrimental). I don't see the change from the original Facebook, though, as I had pretty much this same reaction and gut-level aversion the first time I heard of it. The whole "groupthink" potential was immediately apparent, and I just always avoided it.

And no, not wanting to share every mundane aspect of my life without a second thought doesn't make me a sociopath. Do you even know what a sociopath is? It doesn't even make any sense. A sociopath has no remorse when he harms others. Am I harming others by not being on Facebook, so that I should feel remorseful about not being there? That's silly.

I never lived my life to impress others, nor particularly cared what others think of me, so the loss of the false admiration and the tiny ego boosts (offset by the constant drag toward depression if you can't post as good an ongoing narrative about your life as your "friends") when someone 'likes' something don't hold any appeal. You see this and think anyone who does *not* participate might be nuts?

I don't use any other social media either (I don't consider posting in comment sections like this to be social media; YMMV), nor do I have a smart phone. I don't do SMS text messages either. There are ways to contact me if people want to... email, phone (land line, and I screen calls with my answering machine). If you don't want to use those because they're too antiquated or uncool, that's fine. Whatever you want to tell me must not be important if you let that stand in the way. That being the case, I'd rather not be bothered anyway!
 
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Many times I thought to quit for many different reasons and a few weird one like it's not because everyone is on Facebook that I should also use it but also because even if spying on me is negligible, I just don't want to encourage that in any way. Think of Facebook at the really beginning and compare it to now, it's totally different. When I say this I'm talking about how clean the code was before just doing it's purpose of sharing posts with friends and nothing else. Today we are being tracked and spyed for so many reasons but that's a well keep secret. People only know a fraction of what's really going on.

Anway, point is my daughters will be 13 soon and I guess they will start using Facebook to chat with friends and I want to be there when it will happen in hope I will be able to monitor them more than what Facebook can do but sometimes I have doubts because I think they will know more than me and I hate that but what else I can do? Forbid them to ever subscribe to Facebook? Not an easy task... but it may be possible, at least to delay it should be possible, we will see. For now I'm a very low user, being not very active mean that when I post I usually get unnoticed too, it's ok I guess. I know I could get praised a lot more just joining my gf friends circle but I'm not interested, that would mean more time spent reading Facebook and like posts and such but I'm disgusted just thinking of it.
 
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