So, I deactivated my Facebook account today.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Depending on your own lifestyle and age, you may now be thinking any of the following:

[ol]
[li] “So what, I myself could take it or leave it anytime.”[/li][li] “Why is this worth making a thread over? I’ve don’t even do social media and you don’t see me announcing it to the world.”[/li][li] “Holy crap, that would seriously upend my daily routine.”[/li][li] “About time; Facebook is dead and doesn’t even know it yet.”[/li][/ol]

I’m in Camp #3. After a couple of years of getting FB notifications on my phone, I’ve spent the last week or two practicing not checking it at stop lights, in preparation for some changes to Utah law that are coming tomorrow. I realized last week that I was actually having a hard time at it, and it was a shock similar to how a smoker or drinker must feel when they get the first inkling they might have a problem*.

Fuck that. :mad:

So I deactivated my account. I did stop just short of deleting it entirely, mostly because it has hundreds of photos of my children that would be difficult, if not impossible, to gather again so easily. If and when I delete the account entirely, I’ll do a mass download of all my content.

It’s interesting how good it feels, though. My so-called big concerns quickly felt small - Yes, I’m one of the admins of my work’s FB page. Who cares, there are five other admins. Yes, I do a lot of the posting for my band’s FB page. I’m sure our dozens of baying fans will be able to figure out when the next show is. My small concerns - *How will my high school classmates be able to keep in touch with me? What about my co-workers from my job six years ago? And the aunt I haven’t seen in person in 20 years? *- seem actively ludicrous. It took me about ten seconds to realize that, even after six years on Facebook, pretty much everybody I really care about has my phone number or email. :stuck_out_tongue:

Besides, I still have plenty of online interaction. This place, for one, and two other forums of more specialized interest.

Cool story, right bro? :smiley:
*It made me laugh when I was reading Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep last week, and he made a blithe reference to those crazy teenagers, checking their Facebooks a half-dozen times a day. I don’t know how that laugher got past his editors, because they must know that people who exist heavily in social media don’t check it six times a day, they check it all day every day. (My guess is SK doesn’t have editors anymore.)

2

I didn’t know you could delete a Facebook account.

3

You can deactivate, which is what I did - I’m gone, unsearchable, unfriendable, and in any comments I’ve made on other people’s posts, I appear as a blank icon, but if I ever log in again, I’m back good as new. Think of this as the “instant dry yeast” option.

Or you can delete your whole account, which really does wipe everything. Everything is gone except as cached data from old search crawls, which means anything that wasn’t publicly viewable is probably gone, period. Think of this as the “Scipio Africanus takes Carthage” option.

4

Funny. I have been mulling something of a pittish thread on FB today.

I reactivated some “commercial” FB and Twitter accounts I created a while back, cleaned them up, and also cleaned out the personal accounts they’re attached to (since you can’t have a group/commercial FB page without attaching it to a person account… AFAIK). That brought me a flood of posts from the 30-40 friends I had on my personal FB account, and I finally realized that these were nice folks with whom I haven’t had anything in common for 10+ years. So I ruthlessly pruned my list down to the 5 or 6 people who still have something sort of interesting to say… that is, not phunny Reddit photos and cat stories.

So one of the posts is about… a current topic. There’s a picture that “proves” how fucked up it is. I point out that the pic has nothing to do with the topic, good or bad, but it’s representative of a larger problem. The string of posts goes on for quite a while, one sentence at a time, basically saying, “Yeah, well, ______ is bad and so it doesn’t matter that the pic has nothing to do with it because it shows how bad _______ is.”

Uh-huh. This sort of idiocy is bad enough in a forum where you can make something like a coherent argument, demand cites, etc. In a toss-it-and-run SMstream like FB… forget it. We’se all equal. We’se all jus’ as smaht. My comment is just as worthy as yours. So there. Have a funny cat picture.

And that’s why I don’t FB or SM in general, folks. I will, however, exploit the meejum for my semi-commercial purposes. Ha ha there’s a funny pic for ya.

5

Why would you have placed ‘hundreds” of photos of your children online? And why wouldn’t you have those pictures backed up elsewhere so that if Facebooks loses them (due to a massive data breach/failure for instance) that you’d still have them?

Frankly, I have always found Facebook to be useless. It isn’t even a good dating site. I’m always amused that law enforcement and the media are to gather intimate details of people from the their narcissistic oversharing on the website. If or when it does a “MySpace” and collapses onto itself, I wouldn’t even miss it.

6

“Hundreds” because I have a lot of kids - between bio kids and stepkids, we have five. I take pictures of all of them, and the older ones take pictures of themselves as well. Facebook is a good central place for their aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, etc. to see them.

I don’t have them all backed up because those hundreds of photos contain:

  • photos I cross-posted from my Flickr (already backed up, obviously)
  • photos I uploaded straight to FB from my phone, before there was a Flickr app, and therefore exist only on Facebook
  • photos other people took and tagged me in, because I and/or my kids were in them, and I may have no access to these outside of FB

I said they would be difficult to gather again so easily. I never said they would be lost forever. I just need to download and archive them.

It would be a horrible dating site. It was never intended as a dating site, and in fact makes it difficult to meet completely new people. Unless you’re trying to find new people by [del]creeping the friends lists of[/del] networking from the people you already know, I don’t even know how you would begin to use it as a dating site.

I wouldn’t say I find it useless, but I certainly came to find it more trouble than it was worth. Hence this thread. :slight_smile:

7

FB brings the street-corner soapbox indoors. Anyone can stand up tall and shout about themselves, from a comfy chair and with none of that pesky weather stuff interfering.

Anyone who thinks this is a good thing, or useful, or serves some purpose (except to Big Brother) is deranged. Or Narcissus himself.

8

I never had one. I don’t even own a computer

9

I deleted my FB account after I realized I had jealousy issues. I wasn’t on such a good place in my life: stuck in a job I hated, not ready for children, no extra money for anything, hadn’t been on vacation since I was in the 7th grade, and just tired of reading the mundane things people did all day. I would turn green with envy when I read “I’m pregnant” posts or “pictures from Cancun!”. My husband soon followed me when his stepmother was perusing his page and spreading gossip when she misread posts.

I moved away from my hometown in September and signed up for a new account. I rarely use the page except to post my photography. I just made sure to spell my name wrong so my old friends can’t find me. I have maybe 15 friends and the majority of them are family members.

10

Not trying to offend…but:

  1. You have a computer
  2. You seem to be computer literate
  3. You obviously have at least ONE digital camera or access to one
  4. You had to physically upload every single picture either from the camera itself or its digital media card to get them online.

It had to have occurred to you at some point that these pictures could be lost if they weren’t backed up locally somewhere.

Also, since both Seagate and Western Digital offer low cost portable hard drive which could potentially store all of the photos that you could ever take (or want to) in an average lifetime for between $50-75 ( they have terabyte models which could store several lifetime’s worth for only slightly more) it seems to have been overconfidence in Facebook to store treasured memories on their servers.

Even base model laptops now come with enough storage space to store almost all of the photographs that the average wants to save, making their use of online sites for storage a questionable decision at best.

Umm…people find dates in churches,at their jobs and in bars and nightclubs all of which are far worse places to meet someone than on a social media web site where you interact with people with similar interests and outlooks. Meeting people in person has always been at the core of Facebook; that some of those encounters might lead to romance is to be expected.

Facebook may not be completely useless as , again, romance may be found by some there. However, I personally have found it to be useless as it simply allows other people to monitor you and your activities and to potentially penalize you if those activities or your personal statements are deemed to be offensive.

Who needs that?

11

Just pointing out that this isn’t true. I can post directly from my phone to Facebook, you can do the same from many current cameras. There’s no need to pass through a computer anymore, and I would guess that for a lot of kids with smartphones that’s the norm.

12

So, gosh… all this “cloud storage” and shared public bins that make life so convenient and E-Z and just plain fun have… a downside? Whoda.

13

It would be seriously inconvenient, as our Girl Scout troop and my daughter’s friend’s Mothers do most of our scheduling through FB messages. I’d also miss out on a lot of pics of my child, as we all upload after camping trips or recitals and grab photos which include our children. (I always get permission from parents first, and know who would prefer this not happen, and who doesn’t mind as long as it’s not tagged.)

It also allows me to stay in touch with old friends across Europe and cousins in Ireland. We get a chance to keep up on each other’s lives without having to devote a lot of time to it. Then when we do talk, the conversation can be more substantive, rather than just catching up on the minutiae.

I have less than 100 fB friends, but they are all people I care about. I could never manage to stay connected with them by old fashioned means.

And we do have really deep political or IT-related, or scientific arguments by FB occasionally. Any conversation you might see here on the SDMB can also be held by FB, its just a matter of having the right people in your friends list. It’s not a daily occurrence there, but at least once a month there’s a good intellectual chat going on.

If it weren’t serving my needs, I’d get rid of it. If I were checking it more than twice a day, I’d be making an effort to increase my IRL social time. As it is, great tool, I’d miss it if it were gone.

14

What a wonderful idea! I didn’t understand that it could be deactivated. A friend encouraged me to join and I was immediately regretful. It’s been nothing but a PITA.

Guess I’m really old-fashioned but I prefer to make friends with people I know, I’m long since done networking and the friends I have can bother to make real-life contact with me or what kind of friends are they?

15

WTH? Thank goodness Utah did whatever to make you stop facey-booking while driving.

16

I’m not offended, but I feel as though I’m repeating myself. Once again, I have three types of photo associated with me on Facebook:

1) Photos I cross-posted from my Flickr. I “have” these already.
2) Photos I uploaded directly to Facebook from my phone, because there wasn’t a good way to do it through Flickr. I need to download these and archive them elsewhere if I decide to get rid of FB permanently. As pointed out already, it is not at all necessary to have those photos pass through a physical computer on their way to the internet.
3) Photos other people have posted that include me or my family. Same basic situation as #2.

We have a terabyte drive that we originally bought to store photos and music, but it’s been literally two years since we’ve used it. I think personal, physical backup of data is on its way out. I have the feeling that in another year or two I’m going to look at that Western Digital drive the way I look at my stacks of CDs now. :slight_smile:

I think we’re just coming from very different directions here, as I’ve been in the same relationship (now marriage) since before I joined Facebook, so I never approached it as a dating site. I always approached Facebook as a way to stay in touch with family, to get back in touch with old friends, and to notify my circle of acquaintances if there’s anything semi-momentous going on in my life (move, new job, illness). I don’t think I have a single FB friend whom I didn’t know IRL first. And in going back and forth with you about this, I think I’ve ignored the possibility that other people might be looking for other things there than I do. Mea culpa.

If I were assessing Facebook’s worth as a dating site, I think I would have abandoned it long ago. It just doesn’t have any good mechanism for finding new people, let alone figuring out how compatible you might be with said people. There are far better dating sites out there.

17

They’ve had a “no texting” law for a few years, but finally caught up to the evolving times. (Sample argument to cop: “I wasn’t texting! I was Facebooking/Tweeting/Instagramming a selfie/Repinning!”) The amended law that goes into effect tomorrow is a blanket NO TOUCHING YOUR PHONE AT ALL WHILE YOUR CAR IS RUNNING.

18

In the same sense it could be held by smoke signals, messages in bottles or graffiti, yes.

19

If you find your FB conversations are lacking something, that is pretty much entirely due to the people you are talking with on FB.

20

I’m pretty sure we’re friends on FB. :stuck_out_tongue: