I quit using Facebook about 3-4 years ago while I was still in university. Extremely interesting experience.. people I used to be "friends" with got angry at me, people who I had friendly relationships with stopped communicating with me almost immediately, and I no longer received any invitations to any type of social events (http://www.thewrongbox.ca/videos/iamfacebook). At first it was a little lonely, but it made me realize who my real friends were, and we interacted in more meaningful ways-- I also had more time to pursue other hobbies. I still do not have Facebook and I think my life is better for it.
I like this article, and not with a "like" button.
PS. I still use IM, and twitter like a notepad/thoughtstream (although I don't really promote it to friends).
Same experience here, as soon as I dropped out of facebook, I was immediately blacklisted in every social circle that used it, even if the primary mode of communication was texting/email.
Some op-ed considered dropping out of facebook as a radically anti-social act, and I'd have to agree: you're not considering the group's views on communication, and you're forcing them into a personal world. When the entire social circle uses facebook as a communication platform, it's pretty pompous to expect it to use what a single person wants. This is my argument boiled down: expecting a group of people to conform to a single person's views is rude, and the delusion that the one person is so important that everyone else will conform is anti-social.
The majority opinion on HN seems to be that this isn't, oddly enough. The last time I stated my experience it seemed to piss a lot of people off, and there was a knee-jerk reaction that "true friends will work around it." Maybe, but weak connections are important as well, and since facebook is the place for weak-connection friends, defiantly not using it seems off and a little anti-social.
Another argument was that interaction existed before facebook, so not using it is fine. That's dancing around the point: facebook is the current defacto standard of social communication, not participating it is seen as aggravating to the other party, not that it destroys communication completely. Try telling your friends that you'll only interact with them in orkut. Or, for the Gen X'rs here, that you're dropping your phone, and you expect them to say "hi, how's the job" through post mail and in-person visits. There's a series of fall backs here that's reversed for the average hacker. The hacker sees facebook as personal, and email/phone public. The average person sees facebook as a public place, and email/phone as a personal channel.
> The hacker sees facebook as personal, and email/phone public. The average person sees facebook as a public place, and email/phone as a personal channel.
Upvoted just for this. Not sure if it's true or not, but it's a provocative thought.
Sorry, I don't understand how email could be seen as public, let alone the phone. (Except in as much as they're not secure channels, but neither is facebook.)
I think the poster means that for the average person Facebook is the channel you maintain for people you know publicly (i.e., weak social interactions) to contact you, and email/phone is for your inner circle.
For some of us it's the other way around: email and phone is how people we don't know well contact us, reserving Facebook and Twitter for closer interactions.
Cost/value whatever. I'm talking about other people's perceptions of you, which aren't logical. This is the anti-social behavior i'm talking about: you're right, the world's crazy.
"If one person calls you a donkey, ignore him; if five people call you a donkey, buy a saddle"
I make it a point to hold in higher esteem the opinion of someone I personally know to have his or her head screwed on straight than a mob of virtual social butterflies who don't even know my girlfriend's name.
When she calls me a donkey, I'll get fitted for a saddle. When vampyrlust317 and fifty of his/her Facebook "friends" do so, I'll probably ignore it.
Um, the close friends (people I knew for four+ years) are the people who stopped talking to me after I dropped off of facebook. It was generally a "why aren't you back on facebook" for several months, and then they just stopped responding to texts and emails.
It is antisocial to forsake speaking with your friends. Speaking directly is a medium of communication, as is Facebook. You can argue about the cost/benefits of each, and claim your way is the better one, and this would constitute a lack of empathy, a lack of sympathy, or both.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't claim to have been much better.
And FWIW, I've observed the same effect for quitting WoW. Once I did, a whole class of friends stopped talking to me.
If someone told me he was getting rid of his cellphone because it was costing him too much money, time, whatever, I wouldn't leap to the conclusion that he's just snubbing his friends. If you would, I think you have some antisocial issues of your own.
> And FWIW, I've observed the same effect for quitting WoW. Once I did, a whole class of friends stopped talking to me.
They're jackasses if that's really the reason they stopped talking to you -- unless WoW is all you had in common with them, in which case I don't understand your problem. I find it difficult to believe you're honestly defending that kind of behavior, if they were supposedly real (not just gaming) friends.
I had the same experience. I got Facebook in 2005, it was useful for keeping in contact with people in your dorm/class (you could search by dorms/classes then), other people you had recently met, and getting invitations to events. Then your list starts to bloat up with people you really only spoke with once for a few minutes in a class or at a party, you can't deny then or else you're seen as a dick and you're probably going to run into that person several more times so it will just be awkward. Then they let in the high schools and that diminishes its usefulness to me, then they opened it up to everyone with further diminished its usefulness. The longer I actually had a FB account, the less I used it and the less I appreciated it.
Once I graduated college, I deleted everyone that I felt like was only an acquaintance. Once I got a job, the bloat began again. How do you deny a friend request to someone you work with?
Now... I can't stand Facebook. There is no use for me in having friends, coworkers, and relatives in one space unless I'm at a wedding or funeral. Facebook also puts all the burden of responsibility on the user to segregate their friends into 'groups' which is by no means as easy as it should be.
I now feel like just deleting it. I hardly ever check it anymore unless I get a message from someone.
I don't know why more people don't use the "hide" feature.
I was rapidly becoming sick of Facebook. I only friended people that I'd met before, but even so it was polluted by people who I went to middle school, etc. with who I really didn't know that well even then.
Then I found the "Hide" option. I hide probably 95% of my "friends." After I did this, I LOVED using Facebook again. Every time I logged in, I was able to keep up with good friends of mine who live in other parts of the state, country, world. These are people I DO care about, often talk to in other ways, but it's a nice aggregator. If I post something, everyone that isn't directly relevant to my life can still see and comment on it, but I don't have to see their stuff.
It's perfect, it really revitalized Facebook for me and it's actually FUN to use again.
I tried doing the "Hide" thing for a while, but there are two problems:
1) It's a pain in the ass to hunt down and hide various people and apps, and you have to keep up with it. Consequently, your friends who are likely to say interesting things but not spend a ton of time tweaking their FB settings tend to drift off, driving your signal down.
2) Hiding people is a blunt instrument -- you hide someone who's 98% noisy but 2% interesting, and you've hidden more signal you wanted to see. Then, when they ask you about why you didn't see their baby photos, you have to tell them that the answer is because you were sick of "Which Twilight Character Are You?" and hid them.
In the end, it's easier just to quit and go back to using the regular internet.
It took me about one week of using facebook + filtering people to get to the point where I enjoyed using facebook again. No adding people to lists, no hunting down people, nothing.
Honestly I don't mind keeping FB as a Rolodex of people I may only tangentially know, but I don't necessarily want to know what they had for breakfast. Hiding totally solved this problem for me too.
Making use of EdgeRank gives me more control than just hiding people.
Whenever I'd like to see more of somebody, I go to their page, make a couple of comments, and pronto, their posts enter my stream, squeezing out posts of people I didn't interact with. Problem solved.
I didn't know Facebook could do that! In general, I find fb's user interface confusing. Recently, I was trying to get it to display a list of all my friends; I managed to get it done eventually, but it took effort and frustration.
Don't see what the problem is? Why do you need to quit facebook? Even after reading all these arguments.
I'm on facebook where I occasionally share a picture of my son or a picture from something I enjoy. I don't post often but this way my parents en grandparents can see my son growing up. Don't actually care if my 'friends' see this.
When I'm on the toilet I sometimes take my iphone and check the FB stream. Check it when I don't have much time or feel like investing a lot of effort in reading something.
Just use it like you want to use it. This whole social network hype, like you can only be social online. People have been social even before the phone was invented. It is just another extra tool and doesn't replace normal social interaction. It never will!
I have a similar perspective. I know many people whose only electronic communication is on Facebook - it's essentially an integrated email, chat and twitter client with a custom homepage. I have private message threads going with people, and it's essentially email. I have no problem with this.
FB is also a convenient way to keep in contact with people you no longer live near and see on a regular basis. I feel bad for the people who obsess over status updates and feel compelled to share everything. Because if you don't do that, it can actually be a great way to keep in contact with people you actually care about.
I'm really interested in the difference between your perspective (which I share) and the perspective of Mr Pavlina (which my friends share).
I see people's attitudes towards FB fall into these two distinct camps:
1) People who feel compelled by FB somehow, and end up deleting their profiles or "Quitting" entirely, and
2) People who have a profile, but don't feel compelled to check it or interact- except at their leisure.
I think it has something to do with implied disrespect when you don't get back to people quickly; Ignoring a text or phone call sends a message. Does 'ignoring' a facebook ping send that same message? What about failing to respond to an indirect message on Facebook? There must be some sort of social phenomenon putting uncomfortable pressure on people somewhere in the setup of facebook.
For me, Facebook is a cool address book that lets me contact people I know in a less 'immediate' way to text/phone. I'm not friends with people that I don't know in real life. I look at it once a day to see if anyone has posted anything interesting; from time to time I might post a cool link I've found, or a couple of photos, or something I heard in the news that pissed me off.
This guy, with 5000 friends, strikes me as odd - isn't that more like what Twitter is for? I don't think Facebook was conceived with that kind of usage in mind. It doesn't scale to display such huge amounts of data particularly well.
It's fascinating how people will adapt your product to uses that you didn't intend; it must also be frustrating to hear them moan about it.
I fall squarely into the second camp, and most of my friends know it - they don't expect a reply from me on facebook, and for something time-sensitive they contact me through email or phone.
Everyone has different means of communication they prefer. Some people like to stick to email or IM, others vastly prefer phone, some people always let their phone go to voicemail and call you back at their leisure (or not at all). There's always going to be some give-and-take, Facebook is just another piece in that puzzle.
I agree. But I don't see Facebook as a direct communication link. It is just a feed that I consume at my leisure.
If you want to contact me and are in my circle of people that have my cell number that is the best way to directly contact me. But even on my cell I sometimes choose not to pick up immediately and listen to the voicemail. This way I can decide if the message needs my direct interaction.
Anyway people put to high of hopes on tools. Social interaction is about people and not the tools.
At least no for me. If I ignore a call or text, I was busy. If its important, s/he'll call again. If I forget to call back later, I forgot it. No drama.
Or maybe its just this kind of acting that makes the drama people stop contacting me. Sort of natural selection. Works pretty well.
I can sympathize. EVERYONE is on Facebook, and it's dead simple to use. I almost solely use it to post pictures of & stories about the kids to relatives. It also allows me to keep in touch with geo distant relatives' lives without them having to write it out on a postcard.
I don't know of anything else that is in the same galaxy of convenience. If Facebook didn't do this, I wouldn't ever have signed up for an account at all.
No. Not everyone is on Facebook. Sure, it's useful, but it's not the be-all and end-all of communication, and it will not replace every other means of communication ever invented. Stop this nonsense.
It provides sort of a "first hit is free" experience when you're trying to ignore it. "Oh, I'll just check my wall really quickly," followed by "I'm going to check this person's wall, because that comment was interesting," followed by more.
I don't have that problem. My problem is that I notice someone invited me to a party two months ago, and didn't bother to contact me via direct email -- something I actually check regularly. I'm socially lazy in a way completely different from the social lazy he describes; I don't make any effort to check the various online sources of "socialness" with any regularity, in part because I'm an introverted hermit. I do well in social settings, but first you have to get me to a social setting.
Despite this, I can understand the siren call of a service like Facebook for some people, because on the rare occasion I remember to check my Facebook page I can hear it calling. After about five or ten minutes, though, I get tired of it and stop for another month or two. Many others do not have that low threshold for getting tired of the Facebook experience, and I can see how someone might get sucked in.
If you're one of those people, the only way to scale back might be to quit cold turkey. In fact, I think that's probably true for the majority of regular (as in "common and frequent") Facebook users, though they may not realize it.
I do not need my inbox filled with the same crap that appears on Facebook. My email is for other purposes (like actual personal, direct contact, in the case of the address I give my real-world friends). Facebook is designed like a public feeding trough.
I agree I found it ironic that those who 'quit' the site constantly feel the need to ramble about their life changing experiences. Facebook is a great utility and that's it, if you stop using it don't feel the need to share your experience with the world. These posts are uninteresting and usually pretty narcissistic.
I found that much of the "noise" on Facebook comes from the fact that I had too many "e-friends" at even 100-110 people.
It was still well under the Dunbar[1] threshold, as I knew who they all were and could probably spend an hour on each one of them telling you how I knew them in high school or college, etc. But I simply got no value out of seeing a post from a woman I dated briefly in college 9 years ago talking about what new yoga studio she was teaching at, or from an old high school classmate saying what airport he was currently passing through.
The noise was just too loud and overpowering. I ended up deleting my account.
A few months later I came back under a made-up new email address so those folks wouldn't find me again. My e-friends list now is only about 40 people, cut way down -- specifically people I see every week or two or people I would otherwise invite into my home without any hesitation.
With less noise from people I simply don't care much about anymore, I see useful things. And I feel better about sharing a interesting news article from HN or a picture from a dinner party with my small inner circle, without feeling like I'm spamming dozens of people who just don't care.
Of course, they're less likely to get angry with you if they just think you've gotten off Facebook entirely than if they think you're ignoring them while still accessible to them.
Unless they tag you in a post (in which case, you'd get a notification), I really don't know how many people respond to EVERY SINGLE post of EVERY SINGLE friend on facebook.
Are you aware that getting responses never is equivalent to being ignored, at least in most people's minds? On what planet do you live where people carry on a relationship that involves dead silence on one side?
I quit linkedin when, while trying to send a single person an invite, it sent one to my entire gmail address book. Since I didn't recall ever giving it my address book, and it was a seemingly almost purposely bad UI design that ended up with me spamming my friends and family, I promptly quit, in the middle of a job search nonetheless. There's just something about these worlds that seems unreal, or a slight version of dishonest.
Never have joined facebook and time has made me happier with that decision every single day.
I quit over a year ago. Out right deleted my profile.
Not a whole lot has changed. I don't get to passively select events and friends to hang out with. So I have to actively maintain a social life. Which is harder, granted, only because managing to stay in touch with more than a dozen or so people in any meaningful way is quite difficult to do. However, the quality of those relationships is quite high.
I also have the added bonus of not showing up in ads or have some creep-o advertiser/marketer snooping on my data stream to sell me more crap I don't want or need.
It took me a long time to jump on the facebook bandwagon. I only opened an account at the behest of friends who had all but forgotten what a phone was. I tried it and I can now honestly say I was right about it in the first place.
All of my blog posts have buttons for Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Facebook and StumbleUpon, none of which I use. There are a thousand other buttons I could add too. Hell, I have Adsense banners which I almost never see on account of Adblock.
It's not hypocrisy, it's compatibility. Every social networking site offers a bunch of new interactions, and you can support members without endorsing membership.
If he'd written that Facebook was evil and the following are reasons no one should use it, I'd see your point. The closest he got to that it seems to me was pointing out the quantity/quality tradeoff.
What he wrote were observations after quitting and several of the points he acknowledged were related to higher volume -- points that might not apply to readers with lower public profiles.
Actually, there was a GTD aspect of it (inbox, Tweet usage, LinkedIn) that seemed right at home for HN.
I think that actually presents a crux to his argument. I don't personally use Facebook all that much now, but I have certain circles of friends who are easily more reachable via Facebook than say e-mail or phone. While they may not be my main groups of friends I still consider them part of my social circles and would like interaction from time to time.
I quit facebook about a month ago. Most of what Steve Pavlina says is quite right and I'm probably better off without it, but there is one feature that I sorely miss: As a young un still at a university, facebook was extremely useful for getting in touch with girls who I meet around campus randomly. "I'll look you up on facebook" is a much lower commitment and casual line than "What's your phone number".
I'm creating a product that hopefully fills this void. A casual, non-committal way to show someone you'd like to get to know them better--without all the noise. I'm also a girl, so my main concern is building something that doesn't veer into creep-ville. I'll keep you posted.
Facebook or any other social network works on our egos. We all want to show off how witty we are and how happy we are.Thats why we always see only the happy side of a persons life on any social network.
And thats the reason you see only a 'like' button on Facebook. Enable a 'dislike' button and you will see many more dropouts.
Actually, we can try one more experiment. The next time we don't like something, we say 'dislike' in the comments.Lets see if we can do that.
7 screens of text about quitting using facebook? He seems kind of obsessed by the idea.
> My Facebook page was maxed out at 5K friends and was very active.
5000 friends??? No wonder he got tired of it. Before I passed 100 I rarely used the 'hide' button, now I use it more, and I think hiding people and blocking apps (and sometimes turning chat off) is a good way to make fb experience less annoying.
yeah, 5k friends would be a horrible experience unless they were mostly hidden from your stream. You would never see anything you close friends posted.
Really????? I don't even think I met that many people in my 30+ years of life!
When you take anything to that extreme, it inevitably starts to lose some of its original meaning at some point.
The word "friend" in the context of Facebook creeps me out more and more. It devalues immensely what it really means to be someone's friend.
The article convinced me that it is for good that I never created a Facebook account. Recently I have been under lot of peer pressure to create a Facebook account for so called social-connectivity.
All of this says nothing about e.g. the fact that Facebook is a corporation whose business model revolves around the acquisition of information about its users.
I'm paranoid about information about myself. I left Facebook because I want explicit, direct control over what information about me is made available to whom. Yes, Facebook has privacy controls, but they are Facebook's privacy controls.
I completely agree. The primary reason I left Facebook was because of concerns about my privacy.
No corporation has a right to know who my friends are and who I associate with (much less exploit that information for advertising, or sell it to anyone who wants to pay for it).
I find it really disturbing that so many people in this world are so ready to give up their privacy and information about themselves for very dubious "services" like Facebook and other social media sites, not to mention things like online tax services, video/book recommendation services, etc..
All of these services that are collecting information about you, your friends, and your preferences are going to be datamined to figure out even more information about you.
For instance, there has been research done to figure out political affiliation and sexual preferences from the movies one watches on Netflix. It's really just a matter of time before information like that gets used to discriminate against people (or worse).
Wow! I feel my stance on this has just been dramatically confirmed. Some years ago, I wrote a rant ( http://everything2.com/title/Facebook+destroys+real+relation... ) for the purpose of having a fixed thing to send people who would ask me why I'm not on Facebook. I got tired of explaining it over and over, so I wrote this. I got both positive and negative responses to it, and they fit a very definite pattern. The positive responses were always short and in the line of "this is exactly how I feel about this, glad I'm not alone". The negative responses were variations of "you've never tried it, so you can't possibly know what it's like", with optional "take your uninformed opinion elsewhere".
Now, Steve, as someone who has actually used the site for a nontrivial amount of time, writes a post bringing up mostly the same points. That feels nice.
I don't get why he needed to delete the account completely or why he felt obligated to respond to the messages he got from fans. He could have _changed_ his use of Facebook. He could use Facebook more like Twitter without paying the publicity price of not having Facebook, especially for someone who is a what he is for a living.
No wonder he didn't like Facebook: he has no real friends! 5000+ friends and he never met any of them face-to-face? What is the point of that? I only friend someone if I've met them before in a real-life situation. If the relationship never goes past that in real life, then I usually just end up hiding them from my news feed and forgetting about them. I'm sure they do the same for me and I don't give it a second thought.
However, I do get tremendous value out of my real friends on Facebook, since we share event invites, photos of our trips, news articles/videos that we share interest in, etc. I am a performer and all my performer/musician friends are on Facebook, and that is the main medium for getting news out about a show. The days of posting flyers on telephone poles and cafe windows are over - if you are not posting your upcoming shows on Facebook and inviting your friends, then your band is going to struggle to sell tickets.
Facebook is not necessarily bad, provided that you don't hold any false beliefs about the nature of this particular beast. Like everything which has a slightly competitive or sociable element to it, it can be abused and folks can become addicted to it. Similar criticisms could be made about online games or virtual worlds, which encourage multiple trivial interactions with "friends" in a tightening web of obligations.
Personally, I'll be happier when decentralised equivalents to Facebook become more of a viable option, such as Appleseed or Diaspora. At least then you'll be able to choose not to live your online life inside of a panopticon where not so trustworthy entities are constantly peering over your shoulder.
Twitter is almost the same. Except that with Twitter you can receive useful information/links from those who tweet about a specific niche. I can't stand when some tweet about being drunk, getting a new haircut, etc. Fortunately there is an "Unfollow" button.
Thought he quit working for Facebook, too. Thoroughly disappointed when I found out he was just complaining that his life was so pathetic that it warranted 5 full-trackpad swipes of self-righteous douchebaggery on why he is single.
Congrats Steve, for abandoning it.
WOW offers kind of the same addictive business model, but is obviously better at keeping ppl busy.
I myself never had that kind of problem since I never got the clou about that swarm thing, or about social interaction either.
However, it surprises me how constant connection to all parts in the world, a phenomen the internet introduced, can lead to such effects as depersonlization.
As a business proposal - wouldn't it be interesting to have a platform that artificially separates people, to allow for some deference so ppl actually have sth to say to each other when they meet? I guess WOW got that right again. Seems we can learn something here - mankind is not supposed to be a swarm, at least I wouldn't like the idea (that's why I'd be the only individual left when that happens to happen ;).
my 2ct
A very interesting read, until "... my 5k friends ...".
Dude, it's Twitter you are looking for. And you should call those people "followers" and not friends (half of them are fake profiles for SEO purposes anyway).
Well I guess its time that I start a blog and write a post about how I never started a FB account and how I never bought a TV either.
Damn, my life is completely filled with all the relationship I can muster. I get to get my work done and surf teh web a bit. I also get to exercise some.
In any case the days are still too short for me - why the hell would I want to join the worlds biggest privacy fraud?
Yes I have been smart enough to foresee all the negative sides of it 4 years ago. Ain't I cool?
There was a twitter meme going around yesterday: "not having facebook is the new not owning a TV."
I think that this phenomenon is mostly a bandwagon of Guru's who want to have something new and 'revolutionary' to present to their followers. Pavlina's always telling people to quit something. First it was regular sleep, then monogamy, etc. While he purports to be anti-consumption, this really just makes us focus on our consumption even more.
A better strategy for a balanced digital life is to pragmatically audit your useage on an ongoing basis.
Wow, interesting. I knew about Pavlina only through his writings on polyphasic sleep. His stance on monogamy seems to be really interesting though (and weird for me)[1].
I remember him writing that one reason for quitting polyphasic sleep was that he didn't spend much time in bed with his wife.
It's interesting to note that Facebook seems to me to be a vehicle that can be easily abused to bypass monogamy.
The other reason, which he probably didn't admit to himself and certainly didn't admit to the world, is that he was probably soul-crushingly tired all the time. See: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm
That is certainly a better strategy, but is it realistic? It seems to me most people do not succeed in doing so and never will. They get addicted easily and forget to pay attention to what they are doing on a meta-level.
I like this article, and not with a "like" button.
PS. I still use IM, and twitter like a notepad/thoughtstream (although I don't really promote it to friends).