So I recently decided to prepare to drop facebook once and for all.
My reasoning is:
News
I read/consume new many different ways, I used to use /. (slashdot) to comment and discuss news articles but over the years that has become needlessly complex and I no longer like the interface layout and site features, but replaced that with reddit. I also consume news via feedly, feedly is a website that is just an RSS reader so you feed it rss links to websites and it provides yo9u with an easy interface to read all articles created by the websites you feed it.
Interaction
This is where most of my irk lay. I like to discuss subjects and topics and have in the passed joined many FB groups to facilitate this but over time I noticed peoples behaviour changing, in that when a discussion gets going people quickly descend into a verbal fight and then the attacks come which then get venomous and based on the info provided by your profile becomes the subject matter. So I no longer bothered joining the groups but the change I just mentioned has seemed to spread and over the past couple of weeks I noticed more and more trolling of my posts/comments but also family members and close friends appearing to be annoyed that I challenge their opinion/thought process.
I know this seems odd but I really think FB is causing people to take this attitude and I can’t fathom why as I have always been who I am and these people have known me for a long time so why is it now an annoyance? ..Is FB giving them a way to voice their irk at me where as previously it was just internalised!
To give and example a few month back someone close said “Why do you have an opinion ion everything?, Can’t you just keep it to yourself?” This to me is really odd behaviour because one of the first things I learnt from mother was to ask questions and voice your opinion on things that you find disagreeable.
Adverts
There are just too many now.
For a while now I have used a “jailed browser profile” that is only used for FB access to thwart Zuckerberg’s attempts at following me around the web and creating a database of my webular actions. I am fed up with wasting time and drive space on this just to stop him so I want to ditch it and reclaim the space so I can just stick with ublock origin.
For further information on what I mean by a jailed browser profile see my Browser Privacy Part 1 post
Connections
This is the part I will find hardest to drop. FB has been a source of connections to wonderful people I have yet to meet but I will try to maintain a connection with. The sheer volume of people I know just through FB is astounding and also there is the fact I met my wife on FB via an old defunct game called fighter club, the people who played that I largely still speak to but I know my wife will remain on FB for the foreseeable so at least I still have a fallback in case I totally lose contact with them.
As well as the good ones I have connected with some very toxic people who for want of better words are just toxic and nothing else, seriously I cannot understand the brain process that makes you want to be toxic and seek out others in your life.
So for now my goodbye post on FB will remain until I login next and deactivate totally.
Sionara facebook!