(I’m referring to the social media platform, not the CEO.)
…Here’s to another fine ten years of scrolling through my news feed.
A Facebook post I published on my ten-year anniversary of joining Facebook.
Facebook used to be awesome. With Facebook I connected with old and new friends, typed messages on people’s walls, and found out about tons of cool events. And by scrolling through the news feed I got to see what all my friends, loved ones, and acquaintances were up to. What I did not know at the time, and what I did not realize until much later, is that Facebook was a trap.
But not just any trap. What was really going on was that over a long period of time, as Facebook evolved, its billions of users were getting sucked deeper and deeper into an endless cycle of scrolling through the results of an addictive and sometimes destructive algorithm.
A constant stream of friends’ status updates slowly morphed into an infinite stream of noise, more noise, even more noise, and a few posts from friends here and there. In my case, I hardly see posts in my news feed from friends anymore. I would roughly estimate that over 90% of the posts that show up in my feed are from ads or pages that I do not follow. Likewise, I suspect that my posts are not reaching my intended audience in the way that they used to. In the past, my posts would sometimes receive dozens of reactions and comments. Nowadays I am lucky to get five people to hit the like button on a post.
Before I blame Facebook entirely for making everything worse and worse, I acknowledge that my needs have also changed. When I first joined Facebook, I was transitioning from high school into college, I had lots of friends, and I was a single man attending church with a bunch of other single men and women. Now, I am married, am a father, and do not plan on attending social events to pick up any more wives nor concubines. Most of my friends are also married, have kids, and have gone their separate ways.
I do thank Facebook for presenting me with all the hilarious memes, the random videos of Wile E. Coyote getting crushed by the laws of Looney Tunes physics, and for all the political posts about Donald Trump being Orange Man Bad and about Kamala Harris’s word salads. (The political posts were way more entertaining than they were informative.)
If I appreciated what was left of Facebook, why then did I leave?
I had been thinking about leaving Facebook for a while. Facebook was no longer meeting my needs, and yet I kept coming back for more content. It would make sense then that in order for me to leave, some red line would have to be crossed. Indeed, the red line has been crossed—many times, actually, but I’ve reached the point where enough is enough.
Unlike Google, one thing that Facebook is not known for is being good at filtering inappropriate content. It is one thing to accidentally stumble upon inappropriate material when surfing the web. But when Facebook algorithmically presents such material, and there is no easy way to filter it, that is really a cause for concern.
Facebook Reels is what ultimately pulled the trigger. Simply put, Facebook Reels is really bad, but not as bad as TikTok. (I feel sorry for the poor Gen-Z’ers who have been raised on this crap.) Reels takes our existing habits of excessive scrolling and puts them on steroids; they do it in the form of sequences of short videos designed to keep us scrolling and scrolling longer. Also, Facebook does not natively allow us to disable Reels; we would have to use a browser extension to disable it, and we cannot disable it from the mobile app.
Now that I have finally stepped away from Facebook, I’m going to see how that goes. My brain needs some time to get used to the reality that I no longer have access to Facebook. I’ve read stories of people giving up on Facebook, and almost all of them have seen many positive changes in their lives as a result. My hope is that the time I used to spend mindlessly scrolling through my news feed can instead be invested in something more constructive.
One unfortunate side effect of me leaving Facebook is that Monty’s Tech Blog’s Facebook page is now also inactive because I was the only admin for that page. But it’s not the end of the world. I have other ways of bringing traffic into my blog.
Of course, I’m not trying to say that everybody should delete their Facebook accounts, but for some individuals, giving up Facebook can be a very rewarding, although quite challenging, experience. Neither am I suggesting that we abandon social media. In fact, social media is one of the best things ever invented, but only if it is used in the right way. And sometimes, a change in our needs or goals may necessitate an adjustment in the social media platforms we use.