Why I Deleted My Facebook Account

Published

October 1, 2013

16 Comments

A Little Bit Of History

My WordPress blog is the latest incarnation of my personal online identity. I’ve had a website operating continuously for roughly 20 years, but I didn’t start to post regular updates online until “blogs” became a thing.

I remember encountering the memepool weblog for the first time in the late 90s, the earliest instance of a site I can think of that had collaboratively posted links in a pure timeline format. I don’t think anyone would claim that Slashdot was a blog, even though it’s always been a collaboratively curated links site. Slashdot always felt like it was more about news and conversation than pure content—the evolutionary path that would eventually branch off into the 4chans and Reddits of today.

But I recall that early on, weblogs weren’t something everyone did. They were largely left to people who were excellent curators, or who had great connections or inside sources, or who generally knew what was going on in the world.

I didn’t start blogging myself until the year 2000, when blogs tended more towards personal journaling. I joined Livejournal because all my friends were doing it, and were all migrating from posting to Usenet newsgroups and to groups within our private network / evolved BBS (the infamous gweep.net).

It wasn’t until the advent of so-called “microblogging” and “social networks” that I moved my personal journaling to Facebook, and then Twitter. I put quotation marks around “social networks” because I still feel that no one has truly nailed social networking yet.

Facebook and LinkedIn have obviously gotten the farthest, but they aren’t social networking tools. Or, if I’m feeling generous, I should say they have only the most rudimentary social networking functions—so much more could be done to manage and discover more about one’s relationships!

Regardless, I went to Facebook when everyone else did, and stayed for a number of years; but I recently (finally) decided to “cut the cord” and leave the network—for good.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

Like many others did in recent years, I dithered about whether or not to continue using Facebook. Over the years, I’ve migrated from system to system like so many other digital nomads: in terms of “social” I go all the way back to Sixdegrees, then Friendster, MySpace… and finally to Facebook.

With an itinerant history like that, I always felt that at some point it’d be time to move on to whatever was the next thing; I just didn’t expect the next best alternative was going back to independent blogging!

Ultimately deciding to delete my Facebook account was a simple matter of weighing the pros and the cons of using and maintaining it.

Reasons To Stay

The most obvious reason to stay was that everyone else is doing it. I could easily send messages to my parents now living in the Deep Southwest, keep tabs on them and the rest of my extended family while they were keeping tabs on me. Having access to a network that most people are part of is pretty great, especially when so many less techie members in my social circles are using it.

As one of those “full stack” unicorn-like software engineers who has to wear every hat at the same time, I also had some incentive to stay connected to the platform so I could continue to develop applications on it and be able to integrate other systems with it. This is especially true for building at hackathons and cobbling together quick apps with a lot of the foundation already built.

Events, invitations, and group pages were all something I wanted to stay on top of; people and local businesses now regularly use Facebook as a nexus for event planning, since everyone is on it and you don’t need to remember anyone’s email or phone number to communicate with them.

My recent inclusion in the private YxYY Facebook group also gave me a sudden upswing in interesting activity and a lot more friend requests.

Reasons To Go

I’m sure that the first thing most of you think I’d talk about as a reason to go is the privacy violation issue. While it’s a real problem, and Facebook has no respect for anyone’s privacy, it’s also a moot point.

There is no privacy left in the world—the NSA monitors everything you say or do, remember? Giant multinationals have mountains of data about every one of us. Privacy died decades ago, so it’s not really related to all this.

No, the things that bother me most about Facebook are the bugs, the inconsistency of the experience, and the constant involuntary upgrades. All the things that I want to access, Facebook goes to great pains to hide.

Sadly, on top of these things, Facebook has also eliminated just about all the reasons to stay that I listed above. The fact that they now actively hide posts and even comments from people, groups, and fan pages that I’m interested in, make the point that “everyone” is on Facebook moot, because now I don’t interact with everyone any more.

Remember the “Facebook is going to start charging you” hoax / meme? It’s basically true at this point, because you and everyone you know have to either go through a ridiculous set of preference and option changes, or you all have to pay to get your posts promoted so that everyone can see them; this makes groups and fan pages less useful too, because they end up having to pay to get their announcements out to their members.

As far as events go, they’re never at the forefront, so I often forget when things are happening. No calendar on the front page? Ridiculous. And now in addition to the events I’ve been invited to (many of which could easily be classified as “event spam” from promoters trying to get me to come to their marketing parties) I also get suggested events that I almost never care about and would feel weird about inviting myself to anyways. And the game requests… good grief, the game requests!

Overall, I judged Facebook a terrible user experience that I cannot control at all and was no longer worth my time. When I found that WordPress was a viable choice, I made one more Facebook backup and promptly deleted my account. I’ve not looked back since.

So Why WordPress?

When I read the Wikipedia article detailing WordPress’s history, I discovered that the free and open source (free as in freedom) blogging system celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. I feel like I should have known about this milestone, as I clearly recall encountering WordPress many times as I migrated again and again across communications platforms.

Each time I remember looking at WordPress and thinking “It doesn’t have everything I want.” It was always something: it was too clunky to use, it didn’t have every desired feature, it was too hard to maintain and upgrade, and it was ALWAYS getting hacked. Like so many other free software projects, it needed time to build momentum—GNU/Linux wasn’t built in a day. Maybe it takes a good decade for a free software project to actually come fully into its own?

Regardless, this time I have come to WordPress and I have not found it wanting. There is no disputing WordPress’s online domination, just as so many other free software projects dominate the web. The variety of themes and plugins is overwhelming, making its capabilities quite extensive. Automattic’s Jetpack plugins sweeten the deal, with many tasty pieces of slick functionality, including analytics through registering the blog at WordPress.org.

That I was able to import all of my blog posts and comments from all my other blogging platforms made it a complete no-brainer—the only frontier that remains for me is creating an importer to convert my Facebook export into WordPress Posts.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll also say that I started looking at WordPress as a solution again because I was given the gift of a lifetime personal account with WP Engine. I was fortunate enough to take part in the inaugural Yes by Yes Yes event in Palm Springs, where WP Engine was the major sponsor and very generously provided attendees with lifetime signup codes. I’ve been extremely pleased with it so far, and feel very secure using their painless and seamless hosting services.

“Now What Am I Supposed To Do?”

You’re probably asking yourself: “Should I quit Facebook?” I don’t have an answer, you’ve just got to figure it out for yourself—it’s your prerogative.

What are you getting out of it? Are you spending a lot of time using it but find yourself endlessly frustrated? Is all that time and energy you put in worth what you’re getting out of it? Are you concerned about government surveillance, inappropriate trust relationships with major multinational corporations, and endless privacy violations? Does it suck that you have no control over who gets to see your posts, and that you don’t have any say in whose posts you get to see?

To me, Facebook has become like Las Vegas—a glitzy wonderland of games and entertainment, all style and no substance, and almost nothing like a “social network” at all. And just like in Glitter Gulch, a seedy underbelly is throbbing beneath the flashing lights, a churning well of lost souls fueling its engine of personal financial and spiritual ruin.

Facebook addiction is as real as gambling addiction. Visitors to both are constantly bombarded by advertisements and empty promises. Everyone using their facilities is constantly surveilled and totally monitored. Casinos in particular do everything they can to keep you trapped inside their walls and to foil your sense of the passage of time…try logging out of Facebook some time and clearing out all your cookies; you’ll see just how tall and thick their garden walls really are.

I will say that I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything important post-Facebook. I certainly don’t miss all the noise, ads, game requests, spam, and garbage constantly filling my screen.

Mike Caprio lives in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn and works as a software engineer for a major Internet company (all opinions and endorsements are his own). In his spare time he is a community leader among the StartupBus alumni in NYC, is a mentor and local organizer for hackathons (in 2013, the Condé Nast Fashion Hackathon and the 11,000+ participant NASA International Space Apps Challenge), aids news organizations with data journalism expertise, and frequently lends his skills and talents to people in need all over the world.

There are 16 comments

October 1, 2013 #

Joe Fitzsimmons

Excellent article, found it through Twitter. I recently just made this very same choice. I joined Facebook back when it was first started because there weren’t a lot of people on it and it was a great way to stay in touch with friends I was already hanging out with. There also wasn’t a news feed at that time. It was just a bunch of friends with profiles that you could share stuff with. With the addition of the news feed, it was downhill from there. Now interactions between friends were broadcast to mutual friends. It became one huge show and tell.

Fumbling through their privacy settings and account controls is also a nightmare. There are some things they flat out just don’t let you control. When I had the mobile app on my phone, I scoured their settings looking for a way to turn of the little mobile icon that appeared next to my name in chat. Never did they think that maybe people don’t want to broadcast that they’re available via mobile. There is no way to get rid of that icon except uninstalling the app. With all of Facebook’s recent changes I feel like its a part time job to stay on top of my privacy settings. It’s not something I feel like I’m in control of, I feel like I’m just along for the ride while its stockholders try to maximize profits.

You’re also absolutely right that it’s really hard to find things you want on Facebook and with a giant user base it has grown into something else. Having your own WordPress blog takes a lot of the power back to the user where it belongs.

Funny thing is, I don’t miss it at all. I feel better without it. I can still email photos to my family, I can still be in contact with distant friends via text messaging. The only thing that has changed is the public stage known as Facebook that I was displaying all that information on.
- October 2, 2013 #
  
  Mike Caprio
  
  Thank you!
October 1, 2013 #

Peter Knight

re: Privacy being a moot point. I think this is a ridiculous point. You may have a friend that knows all your deepest darkest secrets, you would still obviously care that other people also find out. And it shouldn’t have any bearing on whether privacy should no longer be a point of concern. The fact is, by quitting Facebook you lower your footprint somewhat. On the continuum of privacy, you’ve gotten to be more private. And I think privacy as being on a continuum. It is not a black and white thing, but people seem to treat it that way when they say ‘privacy is dead’. Even in a completely non-digital world, being seen in public means sharing all kinds of data (appearance, quirks etc). It’s how your private information is being used, by whom and for what purpose that matters. And that’s something people can do about, quitting FB being one such positive action.

Now ask yourself this, given what we know today, would you still join a facebook that had none of the gripes you mentioned? I think most people linger because of their friends and family are connected there now, not because they are in love with the platform or unconcerned about privacy.
- October 2, 2013 #
  
  Mike Caprio
  
  To clarify, my point was that using privacy as a reason to quit Facebook really doesn’t have that big an impact on your “true” footprint when you consider that every phone call, email, and otherwise electronic transmission you make is being stored and analyzed by the NSA, by other intelligence community folks, and by the security & intelligence hackers all over the world that have obtained that information – let alone considering all the data mining and data aggregation that multinational corporations (ranging all over the spectrum from consumer goods to insurance and financial institutions) have collected about you. Our footprints are so vast that taking little old Facebook out of the equation barely makes a dent. I do agree that quitting Facebook is a positive action, but I really think it’s the least that can be done.
  
  My solution to maintaining privacy in everyday life is to not transmit anything anywhere on the Internet that I don’t want to be public. I also work hard to have as few secrets as possible that anyone would care about. 😀
  
  The next time I consider joining a site that purports to be about social networking, I’m going to carefully examine the utility of its tools to manage relationships, events, groups, and so forth. Lately I’ve been somewhat happy using an iOS app called Brewster simply because it’s able to tell me who I’m losing touch with, who’s trending in my contacts, who’s currently in my geographic area. I wish it had the ability to create events and invite people – that would be a great piece of functionality!
  
  But as far as communications goes, I’m pretty happy using WordPress to express my views and using Twitter for conversations.
  - October 2, 2013 #
    
    Peter Knight
    
    First, I think you are minimizing the enormous influence facebook does have on one’s privacy footprint. FB follows people around all over the web. It has thousands of advertising partners and a large employee base on its own. It’s a common hacking target. Employers monitor FB to evaluate potential hires. Entities that have not been granted allseeing powers will find FB a valuable data source. We have no idea what the effect of having all this personal data out there will have on the long term (just think of children growing up in the social media age). By quitting FB, not only does one create a smaller footprint and eliminate another attack vector for hackers, it has a network effect. FB as a whole weakens with every person that exits.
    
    It is also one less company that is leveraging one’s data for corporate profit. It’s a signal that doesn’t strengthen the incentive that exists for companies to build businesses around exploiting people’s data.
    
    Second of all, I think it’s a particularly dangerous to submit a viewpoint that enforces the idea that privacy is moot at this point. This is disinformation and communicates the lack of privacy as it if is an accepted norm. It is not the norm, even if various entities are collecting and intercepting masses amounts of data. When it becomes the norm in the eyes of the public, people will accept it blindly and start disregarding their basic rights – that’s a dangerous thing. Each generation needs to be reminded what their rights are and how they were fought for. Yes, the fact is lots of data gets sucked up, people should be aware of that. Even more reason to be vigilant about one’s own rights and one’s own privacy. All the more reason to make small decisions like quitting FB, it’s an easy win.
    
    With WordPress and Twitter, at least there is zero ambiguity – what is published is public by design, with the user’s full understanding. That is empowering and one the reasons WordPress is so great.
    - October 2, 2013 #
      
      Mike Caprio
      
      I undertand the impact perfectly well – employers do the same things you’re describing on Twitter, Linkedin, anywhere online. Every online Internet business ties in to the same advertising networks. You’re really making Facebook out to be way more special than it is in this realm, which was entirely my point. It’s not. Google is WAY more of a concern privacywise than Facebook is. Facebook doesn’t access my emails or phone calls or Skype calls. Facebook is really not that much different than any ther eyeball site out there. There is nothing that Facebook’s “social graph” provides that metadata analysis at any other eyeball site gives away.
      - October 2, 2013 #
        
        Peter Knight
        
        Of course there are other companies with big concerns. The logic you’ve provided breaks down by making FB sound like an unimportant pebble in the ocean. And I’m sure you yourself don’t truly believe that a billion+ social network is the same as any other ol’ company running ads and running a comment system.
        
        To put it another way…
        [start silly analogy]
        If you’re looking to buy a car, safety is important right? Just because people drive unsafely (beyond your control) and vendors might sell unsafe cars, doesn’t mean that safety no longer should be a factor in deciding what car to buy. You don’t reason like, “well I didn’t buy this unsafe car, because well, there are lots of other unsafe cars and unsafe drivers so this wasn’t an important factor”. In fact, it would make more sense to seek out a car that is extra safe because of the way things are. What you’d be saying is, “I stopped driving this Big Wheels that emits poisonous gasses and flames, but that wasn’t really part of the reason I dumped it, the fact that I couldn’t easily find a parking space was the biggest problem…Safety? Well that’s a moot point… look at the roads my friend…”
        [/end silly analogy]
      - October 2, 2013 #
        
        Mike Caprio
        
        As a matter of fact, I do wholly believe that Facebook’s “billion” is overblown. How do those billion really impact each other? I can’t even get at the posts of my own friends and family within two degrees of me, why do any of the other hundreds of millions matter to me? You said it exactly yourself, it’s just an ad serving comment system. Now Google, that’s an entirely different ball of wax.
        
        Additionally, when you look at the long tail of other comment systems out there and the quality of comments in niche communities, Facebook doesn’t even come close to stacking up to them. Sorry, but based on Facebook’s current trajectory, you just can’t convince me that Facebook has any future beyond the one that awaited Myspace. People will stop using it the worse it gets, I’m just at the leading edge.
October 1, 2013 #

Chris Rouse

I deleted all of my “friends” a few years ago and never add anyone. The only people left (less than 25) are family and a few friends that aren’t on any other network of mine. My Facebook posts are almost exclusively cross posted from Twitter or Instagram now.It’s incredibly rare that I post directly to Facebook. I’ve locked down all my privacy settings so that no one can actually find me, and I don’t participate in groups, like pages, or use any apps. I have Facebook connected to a few things, but I always make sure those are set to not post to my wall. I’ll be keeping Facebook (for now) simply because it is my only way to interact with certain people.
- October 2, 2013 #
  
  Michelle Oznowicz
  
  I bet your newsfeed is so uncluttered. I’m curious what types of ads come through.
  - October 2, 2013 #
    
    Chris Rouse
    
    What are ads? I’ve had Adblock Plus installed for years. It blocks all of the ads and can be setup to block a bunch of the random crap that clutters up the right sidebar. My Facebook News Feed looks great still.
    - October 2, 2013 #
      
      Michelle Oznowicz
      
      Wow. I’m impressed and inspired. I’ve been meaning to set some time aside to tackle the irritability-inducing monstrosity that is my Facebook account.
    - November 13, 2013 #
      
      Elias Carlsson
      
      Adblock blocks out the sidebar ads, sure, but what about sponsored stories in the news feed?
      - November 13, 2013 #
        
        Chris Rouse
        
        I think so. I don’t remember the last ad that I’ve seen on Facebook. There are also some Facebook specific blocks that have been added to ABP recently. I just wish it worked on the mobile app.
October 2, 2013 #

Tesla Themes

Good choice. using wordpress instead of facebook for sharing your desired info is much more effective and easier.
October 3, 2013 #

Jose Cervantes

Well said Mike. Enjoyed the article. Thanks for sharing your views and experience. I almost never use FB but I have like 400 friends I never see. Err…