[redefineminimal]

Facebook offers the promise of socializing and having easier access to your friends and gatherings.

The reality is that socializing on Facebook consists of posting memes and arguments. No one is closer together for it. Facebook doesn't meet it's promise (to the user, advertisers expectations I'm sure are met).

[notacoward]

Bingo. My impression is that only a few leave Facebook because of principle. A hundred times more leave because it's not fun any more. I could argue that how much fun you have has a lot to do with how you curate your feed - mine's good for lots of laughs and only rarely much aggravation - but most people would rather just leave than make the effort to improve their own experience. Same as it is everywhere else, and has been since the dawn of time.

[themodelplumber]

I find a lot of the groups really fun. Unfortunately far too many of them are cluelessly set up as public groups, meaning that your friends or coworkers or worst enemies can really easily keep tabs and even get notified about your activities within the groups. This makes them much less fun. Everybody needs a part of their life that is shut off from their work friends or even their blood relatives. So the otherwise really engaging Facebook group concept is heavily encumbered by yet again the old privacy issue, aka the "you saw me post that!?" issue. It blows my mind that this is still such a stumbling block.

[feocco]

Value of the content is what drove me away.

I tried with much effort to weed out memes and garbage content via the share feature. I'm interested in personal photos and status updates(not twitter-esque complaints). But I had little to no success.

Give me a "disable memes & politics" button and I'd probably be back that day.

[iamdave]

Sounds like you should "just get new friends".

Who else is tired of hearing that worthless piece of advice? I don't dislike these people. Most of them I even strongly agree with-morally and ethically for the most part. Some I even disagree with. But they also wouldn't be on my "friends list" if I didn't value them enough to see their life shares and posts (Oh man Johnny took some amazing pictures of his new house, his new job must really be going well, good for him.)

But holy cow how disposable do you view people to just up and remove them out of your life because of a disagreement (cue someone replying to this post with a morally furious statement about some nebulously defined out-group they personally despise and why disposing of friends is okay because $group is bad)? Never thought I'd see the day where I actually miss pictures of babies, cats and food.

And no, this isn't an appeal to my friends to be apolitical and just stop having beliefs. I'm just fatigued with being bombarded with other people's vociferation at something $group did.

Give me a "disable memes & politics" button and I'd probably be back that day

Co-signing this statement.

[notacoward]

> how disposable do you view people to just up and remove them out of your life

I think that's a bit of a false dichotomy. "Just get new friends" is definitely callow, but muting someone for a while on Facebook isn't the same as shutting them out of your whole life forever. I have a cousin I follow about half the time. He's usually positive and funny and I love to see what he's up to, but sometimes he gets on a really bitchy tangent about his job so I unfollow for a week or two while he and his flight-attendant friends talk about what inferior beings we passengers are. I'd never unfriend him, because I value the connection FB helps us maintain. Sometimes a bit of distance is part of maintaining the health of that relationship. Similarly, my "new friends" are often just humor/meme pages that help me get through my own difficult times. Curating my feed works. Telling people that it might work for them isn't at all the same as telling them to get new friends.

How disposable do you view people to just up and remove a connection to all of them because you don't want to take responsibility for your own experience on a site?

[redefineminimal]

> How disposable do you view people to just up and remove a connection to all of them because you don't want to take responsibility for your own experience on a site?

Because I know a site isn't the only way to connect with those individuals. I didn't really interact with them much on the site to begin with. Said site has other exterior issues attached to it such as tracking and potential employers invading my private life. Ultimately the site has little to nothing to offer for me.

It's not about viewing humans as disposable. It's viewing and understanding that a website is a thing and in itself it is disposable after it no longer fulfills a purpose.

[notacoward]

> Because I know a site isn't the only way to connect with those individuals.

Thank you for helping me illustrate the false dichotomy. The great-grandparent didn't seem to be allowing any space between full engagement and full disconnection. In reality, there are levels of connection. At my age I have family and friends scattered all over the world, some of them still moving to new cities every other year. I have friends from a ski club and a family camp who I will not see in person except during those respective seasons. Many others have similar networks. In terms of interactions per year with the entire set, "get new friends" and "leave Facebook" are in the exactly the same category. They're both ways of telling others to socialize less, to fit the speaker's own notions of right ways and wrong ways based on their own unique experience. I think that's presumptuous. Rather, I think we should help each other work with the tools we have to find something that works for our own individual circumstances. It's too bad other people are too doctrinaire to accept that.

[iamdave]

"Just get new friends" is definitely callow, but muting someone for a while on Facebook isn't the same as shutting them out of your whole life forever.

Maybe I've misunderstood what the implication was supposed to be-in lived experience when told "just get new friends" that suggestion very often stopped short of offering anything further like "use the snooze function" (which I'm already doing quite a bit) or other recommendations to better 'curate' the feed.

It very rarely feels like a recommendation to improve the experience and a call to action, instead to sever personal connections.

[notacoward]

> It very rarely feels like a recommendation to improve the experience and a call to action

If your friends are putting it that way, then get new ... oh, wait. KIDDING!

But seriously, I'm sorry to hear that. IMO the "unfollow" button needs to be more prominent, and its significance more clearly explained e.g. by a rollover tip. I find it incredibly valuable. Groups are handy too. I have one that's basically everyone but my religious family members, for when I swear or get political myself, and I use it quite a bit.

I'd also like an "equalizer" to turn certain topics up or down, but that's a lot harder.

[feocco]

You're not removing, just disabling. All connections are stored when FB is disabled. Better yet, messenger can persist without FB and stories are generally quality personal updates. Messenger is a great application.

I found curation of my FB feed was ineffective. Glad you've had luck though!

[debaserab2]

Hah, I like the implication that not being on Facebook somehow means you're willing to dispose all your friends.

[notacoward]

There's no such implication. It's just one connection to those friends, and that's clear from context.

[gaius]

But holy cow how disposable do you view people to just up and remove them out of your life because of a disagreement

I’ve never de-friended anyone over a disagreement over particular policy but I have erased people from my life whose style of debate is just to shout personal insults at anyone who disagrees with them. There is unfortunately alot of that about these days. But I would still recommend it, you will be happier, and anyone who repeatedly called you “Nazi” or whatever at the drop of a hat probably didn’t take your friendship that seriously anyway.

[feocco]

An on point post. My friends are usually those who I value outside of their internet self's.

All our posting habits are up for criticism. And I'm not a fan of feeds that are entertainment or content consumption based. I just want to keep up with what's going on in my friend's lives and have the benefits of that network effect and their tools.

[jrnichols]

Social Fixer has been great at that.

i'm still puzzled why there are entire domains that I am simply unable to block/hide, though. For example, I never ever want to see any content from en.nametests.com on my feed. Not now, not ever. Yet I am unable to block it or hide it. 100% of their content is useless surveys and "what block of cheese are you?" quizzes, which I have zero interest in.

At the same time, Facebook actually tagged a URL from npr.org as spam when I tried to share it.

[delecti]

I would love a button to disable shares from people I'm not friends with (sorry mom, but I can't really do anything about a missing person or pet 2000 miles away), all posted links without any accompanying text, and disabling "X liked/commented on" from triggering an old story to pop back into my feed. That would pretty much make the feed not just immensely more usable, but possibly even a valuable tool.

[notacoward]

> Give me a "disable memes & politics" button and I'd probably be back that day.

Personally I'd prefer that to be two separate buttons, but otherwise I'm right with you. Some days, I really need those memes.

[nradov]

If you aggressively unfollow garbage third party content shared by your friends then eventually your feed will be pretty clean. It takes some work though.

[shantrelle]

It's not about level of effort.

Trying to curate one's feed has strange, unexpected effects. Facebook's behavior is non-deterministic. I have completely depopulated my feed and repopulated it selectively, and to get the effect I'm seeking, it usually means deleting pages from my list pages that I follow. There's no way to follow a page, but keep it away from your feed. Thus to discard a follow feels like a ban/forget/delete action. To grasp what that means, you may wish to follow thousands of pages, but only permit two or three really good sources to supply your automatic home page feed. Then, browse your follow list and cherrypick based on mood. But facebook doesn't work like that. A follow is a follow, and 1,000 follows results in a randomized firehouse that ignores the idea that you might feel like browsing one thing in the morning, and another in the evening. The result: people hate their own feed, even though they might not hate any of the 1,000 follows.

[Spooky23]

I left on principle and stayed away because it wasn’t something that brought me knowledge or joy.

My only regret is that some people choose to do funeral announcements and other types of events on Facebook, which I miss.

As imperfect as it it, group iMessages have replaced Facebook for me.

[beat]

I was talking to my wise daughter and her boyfriend about the ugliness of FB, and they said their secret was to unfollow argumentative people and join a lot of shitposting and meme groups. She gets her daily fix of bunny memes and jokes about Dune, and she's happy.

[jrnichols]

In addition to the constant memes and arguments, Facebook's ridiculously overreaching "community standards" that even affect private/secret groups have driven me farther away from it. I had my account tossed in Facebook jail for "obscenity" after a silly pic of a friend of mine and I - we were both clothed and on the beach, but both in swimsuits. Apparently that's even enough to trigger Facebook now, under the guise of "protecting children." In a group that's all age 18+ and a secret group.

And they have the audacity to test out charging for groups.

[mrweasel]

Users don't even leave Facebook, they stop logging in after a while. As you say you can curate your feed, but how many users understand that and what to deal with it? I seriously doubt that most Facebook users understand that they can influence what content they see. Facebooks isn't helping, it's not clear how the process work.

[twideIt]

Trying to curate one's feed has strange, unexpected effects. Facebook's behavior is non-deterministic.

I have completely depopulated my feed and repopulated it selectively, and to get the effect I'm seeking, it usually means deleting pages from my list pages that I follow. There's no way to follow a page, but keep it away from your feed. Thus to discard a follow feels like a ban/forget/delete action.

To grasp what that means, you may wish to follow thousands of pages, but only permit two or three really good sources to supply your automatic home page feed. Then, browse your follow list and cherrypick based on mood.

But facebook doesn't work like that. A follow is a follow, and 1,000 follows results in a randomized firehouse that ignores the idea that you might feel like browsing one thing in the morning, and another in the evening.

The result: people hate their own feed, even though they might not hate any of the 1,000 follows.

[amelius]

> Facebook offers the promise of socializing and having easier access to your friends and gatherings.

The only reason I use Facebook: events.

I wish someone invented an alternative for it.

[beat]

Facebook events aren't even particularly good for what they do. Because I'm in bands and have other social responsibilities, I wind up posting FB events. But FB really wants you to pay money to promote, or most people, even people you invite, will never see it.

It's probably the main thing that keeps me from deleting my account entirely.

[gaius]

Facebook masquerades as facilitating relationships between A and B whereas A and B really only have relationships with Facebook itself, at least on their platform.