I Finally Deleted Facebook
Nov. 15th, 2018 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
causticusYes, I finally did it and it was much easier to do now than it was even just one year ago. Even though I was going to get rid of my facesuck sometime soon anyway, what really sealed the deal at this moment is the fact that I can keep using Messenger to chat with friends who are still exclusively using FB, while being able to keep my profile completely deactivated.
Freakin' good riddance. The endless "news"-feed of attention seeking, ideological parroting via dumb meme shares, lemming-like cultural-signalling, narcissistic selfies, and random mental burps in the form of status updates few-if-any people actually care about, ect. Sure, Facesuck was pretty "awesome" at first (think c. 2008-2013) in terms of keeping up with actual friends, upcoming local events, common interests via groups, and whatnot. I remember back when I first joined it was like a cleaned up version of Myspace; I took to the more formal and respectable appearance and format right away. It was a great place to share thoughts with friends and acquaintances (yes, my FB experience was still mostly IRL friends back then) that I didn't have the opportunity to hang out in person with very often. Then feature-creep started setting in. FB kept adding more mini-apps, site features and other little gimmicks, until the whole experience became a rather bloated affair. And then the smartphone craze happened and the subsequent "appification" of everything imaginable.
Facebook went to shit as the ever-swelling international user base necessitated a site moderation policy of over-accommodation of specific grievance issues and thus mass dumbing down of everything. And now people with even a modicum of tech savvyness are fleeing it like rats from a sinking ship. All I can hope for is a re-decentralization of the internet. Big, bloated nanny-state monolith platforms (remember AOL??) always end up getting crushed under their own weight. FB will eventually succomb to this and of course the normies will find a new or different platform to congregate in.
The great fun that the internet is, and could once again be, is an internet of massively- decentralized functions; something that authoritarians and busybodies fear and loathe. This is where I am headed back to. Deleting my facesuck was a major step in this unfolding process.
Freakin' good riddance. The endless "news"-feed of attention seeking, ideological parroting via dumb meme shares, lemming-like cultural-signalling, narcissistic selfies, and random mental burps in the form of status updates few-if-any people actually care about, ect. Sure, Facesuck was pretty "awesome" at first (think c. 2008-2013) in terms of keeping up with actual friends, upcoming local events, common interests via groups, and whatnot. I remember back when I first joined it was like a cleaned up version of Myspace; I took to the more formal and respectable appearance and format right away. It was a great place to share thoughts with friends and acquaintances (yes, my FB experience was still mostly IRL friends back then) that I didn't have the opportunity to hang out in person with very often. Then feature-creep started setting in. FB kept adding more mini-apps, site features and other little gimmicks, until the whole experience became a rather bloated affair. And then the smartphone craze happened and the subsequent "appification" of everything imaginable.
Facebook went to shit as the ever-swelling international user base necessitated a site moderation policy of over-accommodation of specific grievance issues and thus mass dumbing down of everything. And now people with even a modicum of tech savvyness are fleeing it like rats from a sinking ship. All I can hope for is a re-decentralization of the internet. Big, bloated nanny-state monolith platforms (remember AOL??) always end up getting crushed under their own weight. FB will eventually succomb to this and of course the normies will find a new or different platform to congregate in.
The great fun that the internet is, and could once again be, is an internet of massively- decentralized functions; something that authoritarians and busybodies fear and loathe. This is where I am headed back to. Deleting my facesuck was a major step in this unfolding process.
