Why I left Facebook

That's it. I'm done with this crap. As of about an hour ago, I'm no longer a Facebook user. I know that a lot of people have taken this ever so radical step before me, but for the most part, it's been all about the privacy thing. To be honest, I don't give a rat's ass about the privacy on services like Facebook. Rather, I treat every single thing that winds up there with the knowledge, that anyone could potentially see it (let's face it, limiting access to "friends" doesn't really mean much in the real world of Facebook stalking), so it's never really been a problem to me. No, there are in fact other and way more important reasons as to why I've gotten fed up with an ultimately reached the boiling point where my only outlet was deleting my stupid account. Here's the three most prominent ones:

1. "Friends"

First of all, let's be honest here; the whole concept of "friends" on Facebook has been ruined entirely by the social norms that seem to have organically grown out of this generation of Internet users, among which an extreme sense of entitlement is a pretty dominant one. Essentially, anyone you meet somewhere and chat to for roughly two minutes, while frantically trying to find an escape route fast enough that you can get away without them forcing every single brain cell of yours to commit hara kiri from their yappadiyap, winds up adding you as a "friend" on Facebook within roughly 24 hours give or take the kind of social interaction -- some do require a bit of recovery time before people are finally ready to start "linking up with" every single person they've met. Now, I hate being a prick, so I feel almost obliged to accept this friend request (Justin Bieber, when you read this, do understand that this means that you're a prick for not accepting my friend request) despite knowing that I am most probably never going to interact with them again. Ever.

The kind people at Facebook recently tried to rectify this with their automatically generated lists, that basically group your friends by your "social graph" and general level of interaction, but honestly, it's made no difference to me at all. So, essentially, the people I "know" on Facebook are just a bunch of people I've randomly run into at some point in my life rather than people I actually interact with.

2. Noise, noise and... even more noise

A lot of my Facebook friends were from public school and high school, from which I now live in a safe distance of approximately 300 km. The great thing is however, that this brilliant technology has completely transformed the world to an extent where this distance doesn't matter at all! I still know exactly who kissed who, who danced with who, who of these, to me, completely unimportant people are pregnant, who's in a more or less incestuous relationship (small town, you know...) and many other things that are of, well, zero importance to my life what so ever. In fact, this is nothing but noise. So, I tried the simple thing; I "unfriended" some of the people who mattered the absolute least to me, only for them to mysteriously discover this in some random cyber stalking session. The result is yet another friend request with a "polite" notice about how I must have "mistakenly unfriended them." Great. Fucking social norms.

But, once again, the nice people at Facebook come to my rescue. I could simply just hide messages from a single person (or "unsubscribe" from them as it's been known for the last couple of days in their constant attempts to mimic the successful element of Twitter) but as I have to do this every single time I get annoyed with someone, it becomes a tedious task, that I cannot be bothered with. So, I'm left with the noise and close to no useful information what so ever. Gah.

3. It drains me to try

The last major reason for me saying goodbye to Facebook is simply that it drains me. The social norms, the noise and the complete and utter lack of usefulness to me means, that I just feel drained every single time I venture into using the service. First of all, I have to figure out exactly who the people befriending me are and actually make a decision on the request. Then I have to unsubscribe from them to at least try to remove some of the clutter, and then I can spend yet another half an hour unsubscribing from people whose "content" has become sufficiently obnoxious or self centered since my last visit to annoy me (yes, I'm a grumpy old man, ask my colleagues.) Finally I'm left with a stream of people that are of at least some interest to me, only to find out, that the content they've put up there is either something that I've been able to acquire through other channels that are not dictated by the same level of social obligations (like Twitter) or, and I know this sounds implausible given that we live in this modern world, I've actually talked to them and they've told me about it already.

I usually wind up just shaking my head, close down the browser tab and then return a week later to see if things have changed. It hasn't. I have to go through the same stupid process and ready the same irrelevant content. Ultimately then, just trying to use Facebook simply drains my energy as I'm left with the feeling of "well, that's <insert time span here> I'm never getting back" after every single bit of effort I put into it. In business terms then, my ROI is absolutely zero, and just like any other part of my life, if there's not return, I can't be bothered.

So, after having been quite an early user of Facebook since its introduction into Europe, this is my goodbye.