Facebook?

[vixy]

I'm thinking of deleting my Facebook account.

I almost never look at Facebook at all anymore; the rare times when I do, it doesn't take more than a few minutes for me to lose patience with either the UI or the content or both. Honestly the majority of my Facebook time is spent answering people who send me Facebook messages despite the huge letters in my banner image and profile that say PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME FACEBOOK MESSAGES. I'm kinda starting to wonder what is even the point.

There were reasons I kept it around for so long, but the reasons don't seem to apply anymore. Keeping in touch with family? I don't really. The family I'm in touch with, I interact with more often in other ways. Event invites? Since I'm rarely there anyway, the only ones I really pay attention to are the ones happening at my house, and I usually know when those are going to be anyway. Professional presence? The Vixy and Tony page is our professional presence. And I'm not looking to be a professional musician; I never was. (My mother was. I've seen how much hard work that is. I'm far too lazy to want that life.)

There's sharing petitions and political action items, but lately I kind of feel like I'm shouting into the void there. I can share those here and on Twitter and probably have about the same effect. 

And none of that seems to outweigh the endless stream of horribleness that is Facebook's business model. Every time some fresh hell hits the news, I wonder why I haven't given up on it yet. Inertia, I guess. Feels weird to get rid of something you've had for years, even if it's a digital rather than a physical something. But having already done that with Livejournal kinda makes that seem easier now.

I dunno. Maybe this week.

Comments

not sure if you're asking advice--if you are not, feel free to skip this :)

[alexseanchai]

Is your personal FB account the sole admin for the professional Vixy & Tony FB page? Because if it is, then deleting your personal account is likely to screw things up. If it is not the sole admin (or an admin at all) for that page, then you should be able to delete without problems.

And honestly you haven't stated a single reason why you might want to keep your personal FB account, except its longevity, and you have stated a lot of reasons why you want to be done with FB. "I've had it a long time" as the sole reason to keep something is a silly reason to keep the thing, I think. I vote you make sure some-trusted-one else's personal account has admin powers over that professional page, and then delete your personal account posthaste.

Re: not sure if you're asking advice--if you are not, feel free to skip this :)

[vixy]

Oh, good question. No, it's not. There are three of us with admin privileges for that and I'm not the main one. I haven't touched it in years, actually.

And yeah... I don't mind advice or thoughts on this one. I kinda wanted to write it all out so it was a little more ordered than just vague ideas in my head, and see where that led.

write-only medium

[solarbird]

I genuinely mostly use Facebook as a write-only medium. There are a couple of people who will only communicate via it, so I use it for that. But it is horrible and mostly I ignore it.

If you're staying here and want better mobile usability, I'd very much like it if you'd join the test crew for Coexistence Alpha. Dreamwidth needs mobile support and I'm writing it.

Re: write-only medium

[shaddyr]

Glad to know you are working on mobile support for DW. I was just whining to the youngest offspring that he needed to build me something. :)

Re: write-only medium

[solarbird]

Please consider helping test! This is a highly functional alpha. (.833's released-10-minutes-ago implementation of Navbar 2 is the first mobile-aware Navbar 2.)

[yam]

I ditched facebook when I realized it was just making me hulk out (inside my head) at people I would otherwise like. Nooooo I have learned too much about you, staaaahp! I was sad for a bit because I knew about some events I missed / baby pictures from cousins I missed seeing after I left, but that was a couple years ago and I think using the event invite thing is less of, like, a thing now? And the gramma generation in my family all got iphones, so now I can get my family baby picture fix by just asking them, because you know the grammas demand direct baby picture pipeline now matter whether they understand facebook or not. XD

[filkerdave]

Then I guess I'll have to hope you write more here, OR I'll just have to go to more conventions to interact with you.

[vixy]

You know I'm Vixy on Twitter, right? I see you post all the time! :)

[filkerdave]

I'm 100% sure we follow each other on Twitter!

[sistawendy]

I think my main use for it is event invitations, because I don't have that many events at my place. :)

[akawil]

I hardly ever use Facebook either.

One purpose is to *send* event invitations. When I need to invite people to something, I often discover there are people whose primary communications medium is now Facebook, and who no longer check the e-mail address I had for them 10 years ago.

Facebook is also often the most convenient / least intrusive choice for OpenID logins. For example, when I tried to log in recently to post a comment on a WordPress blog, my options were a) create a WordPress login (which involves creating a WordPress *blog*), or b) use my Twitter login (which gives WordPress permission to post tweets as me, no thank you), or c) Facebook, whose permissions were relatively innocuous.

Relatedly, Candy Crush needs a Facebook account to back up my game data. This is *very important*.

(Note that none of these use cases involve ever actually reading Facebook.)

[hms42]

I only joined that timesink to know about what was going on in the filker group, which I have found usable. (Otherwise, I don't care for the UI, either. Not in a friendly format (to me) like DW or LJ (was).)

[another island heard from....]

[maellenkleth]

Nuked my Facebook account six or seven years ago. Don't miss it in the least. I'm a Dreamwidth and MOO person these days.

[damiana]

If it wasn't for long-distance friends I pretty much only see on FB, I would have given it up a while back. I've been realizing that I very seldom post anything personal any more--certainly nothing that would leave me feeling vulnerable--and that leaves me wondering why I'm there. However, if I left, I'd lose touch permanently with friends in Greece, and I'd miss out on some great photos of my younger daughter with various forms of adorably fierce wildlife.

[mdlbear]

I've pretty much stopped reading Facebook except in response to notification emails; the only things I ever post there are announcements and the occasional signal boost.

I stopped reading Twitter a year or so ago; there was never any hope of seeing more than a tiny fraction of what goes by in my feed.

[shaddyr]

I dislike FB, but stay on it for some work contacts that I would never keep track of otherwise and family members that I do actually talk to. Other than that, I agree with pretty much everything you said - it's 92.5% horrible and reading through the morass of crap to find something worthwhile generally makes me cranky.

I adored LJ when it was THE THING that everyone I knew was using. I'm happy to see a resurgence on DW and hope it lasts. Hope you're around more, too.

[randomdreams]

Clearly I'm biased, but I felt like my life improved when I dumped FB, and that was quite a long time ago.

[tigertoy]

Facebook is pure evil, I've never had an account, I never will unless forced to at gunpoint, and I actively encourage everyone I talk to about it to stay away.

[alinsa]

I closed my facebook account ... never looked back, didn't even miss it for a day. Absolutely nothing useful there, and for the most part it's just a cesspool of humanity.

[corvi]

I'm kind of wondering who is actually responsible for posts on facebook, since, judging by the comments here, nobody actually uses it. :) I find facebook useful for sending messages to people I otherwise don't have a good way to reach, and if I know someone's in the hospital or going through some life-changing event it's usually a pretty good way to get updates, but I don't get much day to day use of it.

[clothsprogs]

Looks to me like the decision has already been made and you just need to get around to doing it.

I say "just" but I have no idea what's involved, never having gone the Facebook route.

Teddy

[annathepiper]

I'd say that if Facebook is no longer not only just not useful to you but actively annoying, ditch it.

I myself have my share of annoyance with Facebook, but for the time being, its usefulness to me still outweighs its annoyance. Like solarbird, I tend to treat it mostly as a write-only medium.

[laurenthemself]

Facebook irritates the heck out of me, but I have to use it in an event organising capacity. Plus there's a small amount of people who I'm only in contact with on there.

If you can ditch it, do it, say I. It seems like you don't have any real reason to hang onto it. I think you can undelete it for a certain amount of time anyway, if you change your mind.

[glitch25]

I've been very tempted to do the same. In fact, were it not for the fact that a lot of people I do interact with only seem to use Facebook, I probably would have some time ago. It's a headache and a bit of an echo chamber. I'm not sure other social media types are any better. But at least there would be less yelling at the interface.