While I own an active Facebook account, I don’t “use” as much as other people use it. Heck, its been almost a year since I last scrolled down my feed.
For the interest of those who find it preposterous not to have Facebook always open in a browser tab, here are my reasons why I stopped using Facebook:
The signal to noise ratio is low
Unlike some people who have deleted their Facebook accounts, I understand that Facebook is a very useful tool. It has an integrated “mail” and “chat” service. You can create picture albums. It allows you to organize events. There are a crapload of apps in the platform.
However, the main feature of Facebook is always its social aspect, whether it’s sharing your status or tagging people in pictures. And this is where I don’t like Facebook: this social aspect is always full of noise.
“Oh sure,” the Facebook fanatics will tell you, “but why don’t you just hide or block the noisy people/apps?”
Well if I do that, I’d block 95% of my friends list. It’s so much easier to just not visit Facebook.
Social circles overlap
I can’t seem to find a link to a similar article I saw a while back so I’ll just say it with my own words.
In high school, I had 3 social circles. In college, everyone went to La Salle so I made 4 new social circles. After college, I got another social circle. After I got fired, I made two new social circles.
Long story short, I can post something totally appropriate for one of those many circles while totally offending another.
It’s like attending a really big birthday party with people shouting things for all to hear. Again, too much noise.
It’s also the reason why I’m only using Twitter nowadays: my current Following list only consists of a single social circle.
I am not dependent on social interaction
It’s not obvious, but I rarely use my cellphone. I can go on weeks or even months without texting someone. I started wearing a watch when I realized it would be a hassle for me to dig for my phone in my pocket just to get the time.
It’s the same thing with Facebook. A lot of people are dependent on Facebook the same way they are dependent to their phones: they need to keep in touch with their friends and family.
And I don’t.
How I got to this is a long and complicated story, so I’ll just take a cue from a certain NDS game and just say that I believe that when you become too dependent on social interaction, your world ends with you and your friends.
There are a many great wondrous things in this world, and I choose to see, feel, and experience them rather than waste my time and thoughts to wondering who’s dating who or what drama this group of people are involved in this time.
Good Stuff! I feel the same way about facebook. It’s become very difficult to interact meaningfully with the people you want to interact with. I have like ~300 friends on facebook, but I only want to interact with like 25% of those people on a regular basis (message them, view their feeds, pictures, etc). So to get to those people’s posts, I would need to go through the posts of the other 75% on my feed, which would mean a ton of load mores. I could delete people, but a.) it’s too much effort and b.) you don’t know when your network could become useful. My solution? I don’t use facebook.
It’s an interesting problem, and one that lies in the way they designed a user’s social interaction. You are tied to a feed. And that feed shows everyone’s activity. It was an inevitable problem, rooted in the feed itself.
The sad thing is, facebook isn’t doing anything about it. One of my co-founders likes to say that facebook isn’t very social. At least not anymore. If they want to stay at the top of the game, they need to recognize this as a problem, and do something about it. (Interestingly enough, this is the exact problem that my startup is aiming to remedy)