Bye Facebook

I’m not headed anywhere :)

• Twitter for work-related things (that’s also been getting more annoying in some ways, but nowhere near as painful as Facebook)
• This blog has been 99% work stuff, but yes, I think I’ll use that slightly more often
• Just more real-world interactions/fun stuff. I’m fine with not knowing all the things about everybody’s lives! Less information overload.
• e-mail! (I have been wanting to e-mail you for quite some time now actually — expect one soon!)

The data dump I have: a whopping six and a half megabytes!

Well … https://xkcd.com/1810/

I haven’t used Messenger in years, precisely because of what I wrote in my blog post, plus that fragmentation. But it is cool that you can have a Messenger account without a Facebook account, I didn’t know that!

conversations these days are way less nice/easy to have

Agreed! I wrote this at the end:

It makes for more interesting conversations when you do get to see each other again.

I’m not sure I entirely understand what you mean by many Facebook users not being able to leave? There’s discomfort due to the network effect, yes (Facebook Groups for school, Facebook Events for parties)?

Are you referring to people not familiar with the actual web, and who equate “Facebook” with “the web” (or “the internet”)?

I don’t disagree … but I think your proposal is not realistic. First: XMPP/Jabber are dead. Second: running your own servers requires a quite high degree of technical proficiency that cannot be expected from the general population (let alone keeping them up-to-date/patched).

I switched from Google Apps (for Gmail on my own domain) to FastMail. I’ll happily pay the ~€4/month so others A) maintain it for me, B) have the time to innovate (see http://jmap.io).

Maciej! Smart & hilarious. Every single one of his talks is beyond awesome.

I’ll try to answer your question:

• American companies like to euphemize, and self-aggrandize, and they instill that sentiment in new employees. I experienced it at Facebook’s employee orientation day, but also at my current employer, Acquia. Every achievement is publicly called “amazing”, but failures are usually ignored or dismissed, public self-reflection isn’t part of American company culture as far as I’ve seen. The Marketing Machine is always working.
• That being said, Facebook’s weekly open Q&A was definitely open for critical question. While I was there, some very sensitive things were called into question.
• I think most people have the best intentions, but I suspect they often suffer from tunnel vision. Which is of course not at all exceptional, it’s just very … traditional. Pretty much every company, dazzingly cool start-up or boringly conventional, suffers from this problem.

The key difference is of course that Facebook is so deeply engrained in people’s lives: from personal data/communication, to habits/addictions. Companies dealing with similarly sensitive aspects (pharmaceutical, insurance and ISPs) are heavily regulated. I think unfortunately more regulation is needed because look where we are today.

Privacy is regulated much more strongly in the E.U. than it is in the U.S.A. But because Facebook is an American company, they IMHO try to dodge their ethical responsibility under the guise of “fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders”.

As for how many people quitting it will take: a good friend of mine quit Facebook a few months ago. Another friend told me today that they’re also quitting. I think it’s fairly simple: the network effect. So far, it’s been a positive feedback loop leading to exponential growth. The opposite is also true: once a negative feedback loop is achieved, it leads to exponential decay. I’m not sure exponential decay of Facebook’s entire social graph will ever happen, but I’m certain it’ll happen in certain subgraphs (i.e. certain communities/groups of friends). Once there’s no more critical mass of your friends on Facebook, the value is massively reduced, and you’re likely to ignore/delete your account.

Perhaps it’s more fun to just do a (video) call every once in a while — so many stories to tell then!

However, I totally understand where you were coming from. Back in 2007, I was in a very different social situation. I was also pretty isolated. My social network (not in the Facebook sense, but in the real-world sense) was limited, weak. I think Facebook made a big difference then — I had a bigger need for it.

But now, Facebook is something that gets in the way: it distracts because when you’re spending time with family/friends, you’re practicing your Facebook habits (are there new posts? did I get new messages?).

So, for me, Facebook has served its valuable purpose, but A) I have no more need for it, B) it’s gotten parasitical, and for me personally, it’s even become extractionist.

Thanks for posting this comment and helping me realize this :)

I remember reading that a year ago! Thanks for writing it!

Choice quotes:

While my relationship with the world’s largest social networking platform has had its ups and downs over the years, I found that over time its continued presence in my life had slowly and subtly become an increasingly negative presence.

So recognizable!

But if there’s a single word that defines Facebook for me more than any other, that word is “addictive”.

Yep. And to me, after some time, and after some people began posting the most banal things, it felt like I had my own personalized tabloid.

When you realize you’re basically addicted to a personalized tabloid, it’s time for action.

And that’s no accident; Facebook’s very survival depends on as many people as possible spending as much time using the site as possible.

Indeed. This is why their news feed has become so utterly useless. It was personal, meaningful, useful. It became banal, noisy, spammy, wasteful.

designed to keep people on their properties and give them as few reasons as possible to go elsewhere. These efforts have been so successful that user loyalty experiments performed by Facebook engineers several years ago that deliberately introduced bugs into the Android version of its mobile app revealed that people wouldn’t abandon the site even when its app crashed all the time.

Wow, I totally forgot about that! That’s scary!

My personal Facebook habit was not only taking time and attention away from my real-life friends and family, it was also making me a less happy and centered person.

Yes!

The problems that I have with Facebook are largely ones that are natural consequences of the company’s need to attract and retain customers while supporting itself through advertising revenue.

Very much agree with this. See some of my other comments here.

Thanks for sharing your experience! I especially recognize this:

It becomes common that people I meet automatically assume that all they posted on FB is already known and needs no mention. I have to keep explaining I prefer a correspondence or a physical meeting over following live updates from everybody’s lives. I am afraid this trend will be worsening.

This used to happen to me too, but only with a few people:

More and more people I used to communicate with via e-mail have in the meantime switched over to FB. When they want to reach me they do not send me a mail even though they know it - they send a few lines via Messenger.

… and no longer having a Facebook account actually solved that problem :)

Perhaps even if we decide to use e-mail, we may find some people unreachable except via FB or Messenger.

Well … they will never get a response. And since you need an e-mail address to sign up with Facebook, it’s guaranteed that everybody does have an e-mail address.

It seems that people >=5 years younger than me find e-mail too “formal”. It’s the thing you use for legal things and for contacting your teacher/professor. Not the thing you use to stay in touch with your friends.

Perception matters a lot in these things.

I’m curious how this blog post and the comments will be perceived five or ten years from now :)

The entire article is very much worth reading. It’s long, but contains staggeringly many interesting insights!