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by osogolo 3014 days ago
I empathize a lot with this guy. I wanted to share my recent story:

I unfollowed every single person and page I'm connected to on Facebook a month and a half ago.

Every time I look at a Facebook there's just about no value. My feed is empty. Nevertheless, I'll visit it by habit. It's weird to see how that persists.

I am not posting (never really did anyway), and I have no idea what's going on with the people I didn't really interact with that much anyway.

What put me over the edge was answering the question: "Does anyone that I deeply care for post anything (at all)?"

Answer for 90% was no. And there rest I still have phone/text to communicate.

This has all made me consider what relationships in my life are important. And it's made me consider how susceptible I was to a fine-tuned algorithm hungry for outrage and virality, and how that influenced my relationships and myself.

I feel great opting out. I hope to fully delete the whole thing soon. Weird that I can't just do that.

I recommend the unfollow thing.

4 comments

I remember when I tried to do the same thing three years ago (the year before I deleted my account) – Unfollow every person. AFAIK I had 600+ contacts.

What was funny, after ~300 clicks I got the captcha to fill and 14 clicks later week block with a message: "This is not a proper using of the function". Also, FB was hypocritical. It allowed me to click to follow again, just unfollow was blocked. :-)

I did the same thing: Unfollowed everybody except for the people I truly cared about. Needless to say the news feed wasn’t nearly as full, and a lot of the content was redundant because I had a real “off network” relationship with the people I still followed. It became unnecessary to check Facebook at this point, and now I rarely log in, if at all.

I also highly recommend curating who you follow, you may realize you don’t need FB after all.

You don't have to delete it. I signed in my Facebook account for a first time in about 5 years, and find I lose nothing. I did not unfollow anyone I followed, and spent 5 minutes reading about some recent news, feeling guilty of wasting that time.
> Every time I look at a Facebook there's just about no value. My feed is empty. Nevertheless, I'll visit it by habit. It's weird to see how that persists.

To eliminate this behavior I use the Crackbook extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/crackbook-revival/...

It acts as hinted in this comic: https://xkcd.com/862/