Deletion is too extreme for most people. More reasonable: escalating partial dis-engagement. Here's what my friends and I did, sequentially, over the years:
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone;
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone;
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone;
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?"
Deleted my account nearly a year ago. I don’t miss it at all. For the first few months, I definitely felt like I was missing out on things. But since then I’ve taken a bunch of classes, read a bunch of books, and enjoyed my other hobbies more. It’s hard to do that when wasting time on Facebook. Also I’ve avoided all the bullshit arguments and much of the debates with extremists on all sides of the political spectrum.
I want a social network that encourages human interaction in the real world - not one that turns friends into enemies, feeds narcissism, and provides a platform for corporations and hostile governments to spy on us and manipulate us. Facebook cannot and will not ever be that network.
>I want a social network that encourages human interaction in the real world - not one that turns friends into enemies, feeds narcissism, and provides a platform for corporations and hostile governments to spy on us and manipulate us.
Well this is a site for startups. It seems like you have a good initial idea/problem and/or need. Now the next hard part is concieving and implementing a solution.
There's peer-to-peer networks already though I doubt any of them will be a Facebook replacement. It does provide a solution in part to the spying and data mining (obviously whatever you decide to put out there is free to be harvested).
So how do you encourage human interaction, perhaps meeting, and build constructive discussions?
Unfortunately I'm afraid some of that might just be choosing to predominantly interact with people that are also like that. Although a technologal solution would still be valuable.
> Well this is a site for startups. It seems like you have a good initial idea/problem and/or need. Now the next hard part is conceiving and implementing a solution.
Aha, I'm already moving onto implementation. I've been thinking about this for a while. Maybe I'll be one of the next billionaires in tech ;-)
Well you can give me your second billion after you make your first.
That said, I don't know how you would monetize a system like that.
Furthermore would you really want to?
Seems to me part of Facebook's (and other popular social media platforms) growth is attracting advertisers with access to user data personalization.
Consequencently this set up leads to people (at least geeks/nerds) boycotting or giving up on Facebook due to information mining and obnoxious advertising.
Then those aforementioned nerds/geeks make something new that begins the cycle over again.
> That said, I don't know how you would monetize a system like that.
My personal intuition is that the simplest forms of communication (defined as exchanging data between two or more participants) shouldn't be _directly_ monetized.
If we compare to physical communications means and services, there's an obvious yet powerful realization to make: communication is free (from any third-party) so long as it's distributed (i.e. when you and I talk, we take it upon ourselves to spend the energy required to communicate, we don't need a middleman), whereas it becomes a paid-for service when it's centralized (e.g. post office, telephone system, nowadays internet).
Notice that in the physical world, most (centralized) communication businesses are monetizing a more-or-less public container, which operates as a black box for the (de facto) private content. — e.g. package, letter, phone conversation.
Translate this into the digital world: email, file storage and exchange, chats and calls. So far, to my knowledge, most of the popular solutions have been centralized and therefore, monetized (notable exception are bittorrent or IRC, the protocols, widely used as a consequence, but rather nerdy to the general pop, which I think has to do with UX).
Simply put there's a business behind most of the middlemen (Fb, Gmail, Skype…), few solutions rely strictly on tech that anyone can freely operate: you need that central server authentication to reach other users in the walled garden, and neither 'speaks' to others (can't use app X to speak to someone using app Y).
Back to my personal intuition, there is an increasingly higher chance that someone comes up with a decentralized communication system wherein users each bear the cost/energy required to communicate, based on a free protocol (as in beer, it needs not be OSS, although probably should for security/trust purposes).
Think Bittorrent for data specific to communication. The internet in itself, with requests being free (POST GET etc), is such an example of a distributed architecture which you enter simply by leveraging the correct tech; there is no gatekeeper. Blockchains might be another good example of distributed systems (even ignoring cryptocurrencies and focusing on the distributed database tech).
It's a general trend, I think, that we progressively massively distribute technology-based services starting with the most fundamental, the closest to "first principles" for the purpose. Think about printing, how it started with Gutenberg, what a single individual can do today. It takes decades, centuries, these are deeper trend. However, as fast as things go in this day and age, I think communication is just about to be disrupted _forever_ by virtue of massively distributing the means. Just like printers. Or file exchange.
For a long time I've wished more apps would focus on getting you to the real world as quickly as possible.
Now, I'm trying to do my part. I'm working on building Mutambo (https://www.mutambo.net) which is focused on helping everyone play recreational sports. To avoid becoming the Facebook for sports, a high priority goal of ours is to minimize the time you spend in app – to get you to your sporting events as efficiently as possible.
Facebook events is probably the best after meetup.com, and unlike meetup.com it's free to use. With Facebook it's more about the way you and your friends using it (except privacy concerns). I just unsubscribe from everyone except people/pages who post always on-topic and rarely. I get maybe 2 new posts a day in my FB feed.
I waste a lot more time and witness a lot more drama on HN than Facebook.
I decided to drop Facebook because I spent all day arguing with people that I cared about.
I decided I didn't want or need that in my life, so I've dropped it in favor of arguing with people I don't care about on Reddit instead. So much more time for Reddit now!
Dockit Calendar is an app I made, best version is on the iOS app store. It's a social calendar application, wouldn't mind your feedback if you're actually looking for a social network that encourages activities.
I realized Facebook had become the digital equivalent of walking into the kitchen and opening the fridge. You know what's inside, but you still end up looking.
Deleting WhatsApp though would be very difficult. It's completely replaced SMS as the primary means of communication for every personal network I am part of.
Yeah, don't think I can move off Whatsapp. It's the default communication channel for me. Virtually every conversation happens on it, from planning an evening out to asking my wife to pick up some eggs and milk.
I've mostly done this but landed on still keeping a facebook tab on the laptop -- quarantined in its own container using the excellent Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension.
Most "friends" unfollowed except a handful of close people. Some less connected but more interesting people pop up in the feed for a bit but then get put back in 30 day snooze with their first new less-than-interesting post.
I won't interact with posts that are world-viewable, but might like or comment on some that are more restricted.
This brings it down to just one or two posts a day in my facebook tab. Something I can spend one or two minutes on in the morning or evening. I mostly see my sister's new baby, and that's fine :)
I've done all the same steps over a number of years. One more item I'd add is that mbasic.facebook.com still allows you to get messages.
For no valid technical reason I'm aware of, they removed the ability to view messages in the standard mobile site. It used to work, and frankly it worked really well. But I'm sure the engagement and quantity of data they sucked up were orders of magnitude better with Facebook Messenger.
For me, it was the mobile interface interlaced with so many video ads that killed my usage. I do open the app sometimes to check what some of my distant friends post, but my usage has drastically gone down. I think 5 years back I spent at least 30 mins on the app every day, now I don't even open it on a few days. To top that, the Cambridge Analytica incident.
That said, I remain invested in FB, since my hypothesis was that 'a majority of people are not like me'. Looks like I am being proven wrong, but let's see the long term impact.
The only regret I have about deleting my FB account is that I forgot it was attached to a mobile game account that my partner plays... when she lost her tablet, she lost the account and could no longer recover or login because the FB account attached to it was long gone. Oops.
I did 1 and 3, for 2 I've switched off audible notifications but not visual for the messenger apps. Unlike the others I actually feel that I get real value from those but that's because they're more inherently participatory than FB itself.
I only look at my phone to see if there are new messages a few times a day, usually right after I've done an email check (I don't keep an email client permanently available either unless I'm in a rare window when I have to be quickly reachable).
The few extra steps it takes me to log in on my laptop mean that I check FB two or three times a week - down from two-three times an hour. When I do use it, I usually scroll through invites (the only real reason that I wouldn't delete my account).
The gradual de-escalation works well because social media does have real value but it's a good idea to test what that value is against the attention costs it imposes.
Turning off notifications for messenger ("We noticed notifications are off, would you like to turn it on? Yes/No), I kid you not, took at least 30 to 40 times as of a few months ago for it to stop bugging me to turn it back on. Few months before that, 25 times at least. Who knows what that number is now. That kind of engagement should be flat out illegal or regulated.
It has the same persistence if you haven't posted in awhile. I haven't posted a status in over a year, and the first few months I got countless notifications along the lines of "OMG YOU HAVEN'T POSTED IN ___ WEEKS! GET STARTED AGAIN".
Also, there's no reason for a "starter message" and prompt when I add a friend.
I'm sure once you do post something after a prolonged absence that they somehow highlight your post to everyone much more than it would normally appear.
I once went through a long tedious process of manually deleting posts and photos and after a while I got a very increased interaction on older images, not newer. Interaction from people who wouldn't normally comment, either.
I've been thinking of what to do with my next influential post (if I have one). Suicide awareness and help lines around the holidays could happen, or one mega life update with everything from the last however many months.
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone;
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone;
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone;
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?"