A couple years ago, I didn’t see much point in websites like MySpace or Facebook. MySpace’s user demographics seemed to skew much, much younger than I was willing to accept and just my cursory glances at people’s pages made my head hurt. To me, it was more than just an eyesore and it sealed my decision not to partake in the site. At the time, Facebook didn’t look that much better.
However, on a holiday where my brother and I were home at the same time, he got his laptop out and showed me a bunch of friends that were using Facebook, posting old pictures with comments asking where I was and what I was doing, I truly felt compelled. It roped me in and I created a profile. I was greeted by a number of old friends almost instantly, both from college and high school (mostly college) and it felt good to be in touch with all these people that I hadn’t interacted with for many years.
But good things don’t always last and such is the way with Facebook. I could link a bunch of articles about Facebook’s ongoing issues with privacy, but there’s been so many I feel I really don’t even have to do so. The breaking point for me was when the email address I have linked to Facebook got busted into and someone started sending spam emails to everyone on my contact list. Fortunately, I only have about ten contacts on that particular email account as it is not my main, so the damage was minimal. It did cause about four hours of login/password changes (what can I say, I get paranoid) and make me seriously reevaluate Facebook.
That single breach moved Facebook from the feel-good, I-can-stay-in-touch-with-old-friends website to one that I noticed constantly annoyed me with Farmville/Mafia Wars updates and invites as well as their ever shifting privacy policy. Speaking of, every time they’ve adjusted their policy, I’ve had to go deep into the settings and opt out. Having to opt out is bad enough, but to have to do so multiple times borders on crazy.
Not only are there the personal concerns, but I just don’t like the guy who started Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe if I started a web page in my twenties and all the sudden people started throwing millions of dollars at me I would have become an insufferable douche-bag as well. But I’ll never know. In a certain way, it seems he just got lucky with Facebook hitting it big as it doesn’t seem like he’s much of a visionary. And of course, who doesn’t appreciate a guy who calls his users some nasty words. Incidentally, that last link was highlighting some early privacy concerns with Facebook and Zuckerberg specifically.
The culmination of this is that I’m not going to Facebook very much any more. In fact, I think I check it about once every two or three weeks now, find that much of what’s going on is rather drab and boring, clear the mass invites I get and then log off again. I find that most of my quick-hit internet fix needs are actually met by Twitter (believe it or not). With Twitter, you do get regular sandwich updates (I find them funny), but I’ve gotten heads up on nearby concerts, fun and informative tidbits, links to causes worth my time and at least a couple of good belly laughs a day. Conceptually, I didn’t get Twitter until I started using it…then it made sense.
Facebook, however, does not make sense for me right now. I’m not going to go out and delete my account, as that would be just silly. It would be nice to know what some old friends of mine are doing and I’ll check it from time to time, but my presence on the site will be minimal. I am waiting for Diaspora to come out for my social networking needs as are a number of other geeks. Till then, I’d rather devote more time to this website where I am in complete control.
2 Responses to “Why I’m Not on Facebook Much Anymore”
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“Maybe if I started a web page in my twenties and all the sudden people started throwing millions of dollars at me I would have become an insufferable douche-bag as well.” – LOL
This is why I keep my Facebook updates so darn entertaining, but truth me told, I do duplicate a lot of them on Twitter, so beyond photos you’re probably not missing much from me by just focusing on the one medium.
I however, am still a big Facebook fan. It took me awhile to really “get” it, and once I honed my news feed to where it wasn’t all app updates, now I find I get more compelling information there than on Twitter. I follow way too many people on Twitter, but I use it for more professional purposes. I use lists a bit to cull the wheat from the chaff, but for me, checking Twitter apart from the handful of people I follow on SMS (including you) feels more like a chore than checking Facebook. Not sure why, exactly. Visual interface, maybe?
Yeah, maybe it’s the way I have it, but after culling nearly every app update I see and being more focused with the updates from just the friends I have…well…let me get into an uncomfortable area for me.
Here’s a number of things I can count on with Facebook updates: every Monday, I’ll see between a dozen and twenty “I hate Mondays” posts. During the week, I’ll see a handful of lyrics from songs I don’t recognize and even if I did, the context often seems wrong or disturbing. Every Friday, at least twenty or more TGIF posts and the “weekend is here” updates. Scattered throughout all of that are the updates which serve as reminders of how far apart I’ve grown from some of the people I hung out with or went to school together. A handful of updates are a lot of knee-jerk reactions to stuff they’ve heard about without digging deeper. Add into that the location updates or “I’m back at work” stuff or other monotonous items.
What I like about specific Facebook updates is the sharing of good news or bad news; I feel genuine camaraderie from those and like to congratulate or console as the case may be. I like getting links to some fascinating articles, especially funny ones or those that make you really think, really challenging your world view. I like the things that are not everyday happenings.
I know I can post some boring or weird things, but if I post a latte update, I do it with a wink in my eye hoping someone will get a laugh that I’m going on again about lattes. Too many times, I don’t get that sense from people on Facebook when they post just ordinary day-to-day stuff, but that their update is just how it is. It reminds me of Thoreau when he said “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” It’s hard for me to think about friends of mine and to have that quote being the first thought that comes to my head is not encouraging; I know it that isn’t the case for many people, but there it is.
There are a number of people on Facebook that are a joy to follow and you’re one of them. I can just say that I’ve honestly been happier not following Facebook that closely. Between the interesting updates, there are a mass of updates that I can be very indifferent about which has a strange effect on me, an effect that is not encouraging. I hope that explains part of it.
Twitter for me is fun and not part of any working that I do, so it remains a fun thing and I follow who I want. I guess that’s a big difference.