[Semaphor]

It’s to keep a loose connection with distant people and organize private events and find out about non-personal events and happenings.

Just because the people you added on facebook filled it with bullshit, doesn’t mean it’s like that for everyone.

I’d love to get away from them, but I have yet to find a workable alternative.

[ilikehurdles]

My connections I cared about simply switched to other forms of communication. Private events, I still find out about. People care about others attending their events (quelle surprise). I just now keep in touch with others in a more personal way instead.

"Non-personal events and happenings" are something whose value is worth thinking about. They were one of those things I'm very happy to have optimized away. If it's important, I'll find out about it. Rephrased, I will not make it my responsibility to find out about something you yourself didn't find important enough to tell me about. Reacting to a post is neither taking part in the event nor engaging with the people involved in it. It's this artificial, vicarious interaction that people convince themselves is a valuable addition to their life when in reality it's a fleeting sentence on an infinitely scrolling newsfeed. It replaced the tv show we'd have on in the background but never quite watch. Something mindless yet just engaging enough to take our focus away from doing absolutely nothing at all.

I used to spend my time on facebook finding out about these "non-personal events and happenings", like my cousin's husband's sister's graduation that I never would have attended or been invited to anyway, my aunt's trip to the beach, and some anniversary party a friend and her partner had. Was any of that important? The only difference between being on facebook and being off facebook, is that the former is full of one-way communication where I show minimal engagement with 90% of people's statuses, while the other is a two-way communication where I personally socialize with the 50% of those people who added value to my life. Magically, almost as if humans have evolved to be able to communicate in more ways than one with no effort, I still find out about the significant events.

In my newly-found free time I've become a board member of a large local non-profit, met more of my neighbors and a large chunk of my local government officials, and found time to regularly exercise hard and explore the outdoors.

[jpamata]

I don't understand where this Facebook takes up a lot of one's time is coming from. You can always minimize it further. Nowadays, it just takes about 2-10 minutes of my lunchtime. I log in, skim the notifications for events and invitations, and that's it for the day. I don't check a post unless someone in real life tells me about it. While reacting to a post might not seem engaging, I'd say leaving a comment to a friend is. The only feature that kills my time is messenger, but that's because it's pretty much the de facto platform for communication in my country. Apps like telegram, wechat, and whatsapp aren't popular here since they ask for your phone number. The traditional phone call and text are expensive, especially when you're travelling internationally. It also becomes a problem when your contact switches their number. Messenger is free, can be used without the phone, no collecting of phone numbers required - just an easy friend request, and you don't have to worry about spam from people you don't know.

[Semaphor]

I said it before on HN and it’s still my impression. Those who say loudly how liberating it is to be off facebook always seem to have had an addiction of some level or another.

Personally the most I read on FB is when I’m on the loo and already checked HackerNews ;)

[Semaphor]

> My connections I cared about simply switched to other forms of communication.

I’ve been trying for years to get people to use XMPP. It worked while GTalk and Messenger used XMPP and worked with it. Nowadays my list contains 0 people.

> Private events, I still find out about.

Some I might, some I might not. And I’d certainly hear about it late and not even be in the discussion about when something happens. Because that happens on FB.

> Reacting to a post is neither taking part in the event nor engaging with the people involved in it. It's this artificial, vicarious interaction that people convince themselves is a valuable addition to their life when in reality it's a fleeting sentence on an infinitely scrolling newsfeed.

You misunderstood me or maybe I expressed myself badly. I mean events where you don’t have a close personal relation to the organizer. A gothic night in a club. The English language meetup. The neighbouring city’s birthday celebrations.

If I stopped using facebook right now, I’d get back less than 5 minutes per day. Unlike so many on HN I never had the problem of somehow being addicted to FB. The site became worse (UX wise) over time and nowadays I don’t even feel slightly compelled to read there.

[tenebrisalietum]

Block the memes at the source. Each time I see it, I block it. If the people on your page are like mine, they are reposting from these meme groups and not manually uploading these pictures.

The result is my feed is pretty free of this garbage.

My block list is probably over 100 of these stupid groups.

I wish it could be exported and shared.

[ilikehurdles]

I used to regularly block pages and posts that reached my feed that were from entities who weren’t in my immediate network. Pages people liked, news articles and their organizations. All these things that make Facebook money. I stopped reacting to anything that wasn’t made by someone in my network and cleared out my generated “interests” multiple times, but they’d always come back.

After being off it for a couple of years, whenever I look at someone’s feed I’m absolutely blown away by the saturation of things that are at best ads. It seems like 4/5 items on a timeline would be an update from something that wasn’t a directly-added friend. Facebook shoves the impersonal stuff in my face while all I wanted is the personal stuff.

[tenebrisalietum]

I haven't seen anything come back after I block it. But I've only been doing this for about six months. I use the "Block all posts from XXX" option.

[Semaphor]

Back before FB fucked it up and I actually read what my friends were posting, I simply unfollowed those that posted memes. Problem solved (for me).

[nimajneb]

Yes, I rarely see memes, super political posts, or such. A lot of what I see on FB is stuff that people would tell me in person if I was standing next to them at the time. You can also somewhat filter what you see by unfollowing or unfriending people that post a lot of stuff you dislike.