I left Facebook. I don't miss it.

All social media apps are like MySpace. They die. Eventually.

Yesterday I received my long-awaited Facebook class action settlement payment. In theory, this check “compensated” me for Facebook’s violations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act between 2011 and 2015. In practice, it’s sort of just a, “hey, well that’s cool I guess,” sort of settlement check. Facebook violated my privacy, apparently. It violated everyone’s privacy — it’s what Facebook does — and also, it’s Facebook — I used it, and we all kinda get that it’s terrible anyway. But the money is nice.

Like most people, I used to use Facebook a lot. I signed up for it in December 2004 — when it was still only accessible to people who had email addresses associated with certain (read, fancy/exclusive/prestigious) colleges. But then, over the years, again like most people, I grew tired of it. The algorithm was so bad. It was only the same four or five random people who posted constantly, and I wasn’t even particularly close to the people who posted all the time. I had a pretty ideologically homogenous group of friends, so it wasn’t really a case of “omg Aunt Betty is on about how to Make America Great Again — I just can’t do this!”. It was more just that.. everything on there was a waste of time. And it was more a waste of time than Twitter or Instagram or any of the other apps I used when I wanted to turn off my brain and stare at my phone.

So in October 2019, I wrote the following FB post where I said goodbye to all my FB friends and, without trying to be too dramatic or over-wrought with it, just said.. nah. I’m good.

Hi! <<Long Post Warning>>

I wanted to write a note here to say a few things about Facebook. Specifically, I’m leaving Facebook. Or more accurately, I left it about two months ago. I have several reasons for leaving Facebook, and they are good reasons, so I figured I should write about them.

“But wait a minute,” I hear you say. “You, Nigel, are obviously still on Facebook. This (looks around, waves hands) is all Facebook.” To which I say, yes. You are right. I still have a Facebook account. I still have a profile (albeit one I’ve cut down to the bare minimum). And to be honest, that’s a bit of a necessity. I still want to use Facebook messenger to stay in touch with people. Facebook is the de facto event planning / social invitation tool for a number of my friend groups. And with Sam and I still being relatively new Chicagoans, I still *want* people to be able to find me online. This isn’t about trying to go off the grid or make myself difficult to get ahold of.

But in terms of my engagement with the site — posting things, reading what others post, scrolling endlessly through the news feed — all that is something I’ve decided to eliminate. Here’s why.

Facebook is bad. By that I mean first that it is a bad product that is bad at what it does. But secondly it is also bad in the way that oil companies and Fox News are bad. That is, it is bad for us, collectively.

With regard to the first way of being bad, I will start by saying the news feed is terrible. Its purpose is to keep you looking at and using Facebook so the site can sell more ads. But it re-ups the same few posts over and over again from the same dozen or so friends, regardless of whether I actually know these people or care about what they’re posting. It’s not interesting, and it’s a waste of time. The friends I might actually care to hear from either stopped posting a long time ago (which I suspect is the case), or have been filtered out of my feed because the algorithm thinks I would rather see something else. So, about two months ago, I unfollowed everyone in my friend list and turned off all my subscriptions to pages, and my newsfeed is now completely empty. There’s no reason to check it, and I don’t miss anything that used to be there. It’s nice.

As for the second way of being bad, others have said a lot more about this than I could, and they’ve said it much better. Facebook’s only aim is user engagement. It does not care if the things that are posted are true, or if the people doing the posting are acting responsibly. When Facebook has been called out for this, the company has offered half-hearted defenses at best, and it has continued to be completely deficient in rooting out bad actors. This is to say nothing of the company’s utter disregard for users’ privacy concerns. I have no desire to make this a political post (political posts being another whole avenue I could go down about Facebook’s badness, but I digress). But regardless of anyone’s political views, Facebook does not operate in any way that accounts for the broader public trust, and it should. So I’ve stopped looking at Facebook posts, and I’m not going to get any news or information about the world from the site going forward.

“But hold on, Nigel,” I hear you say, having read this far in my post for reasons passing understanding. “If this is how you feel, you should really leave Facebook! Delete your account! And what about Instagram? Aren’t you still on Facebook-owned-and-operated Instagram??” And you’re right. I need to address that argument, too. I’m still keeping my Facebook account for the reasons I said above. It’s useful to have a place where I can find people and people can find me. This usefulness outweighs the moral purity that would come from deleting my account. And as for Instagram, I find it to be a better product than Facebook the app. Instagram shows me pictures of my friends doing things, and I like to see that. There are some very bad aspects to Instagram, too, for sure (the realm of the influencers and the curated, ultra-filtered insta-life can be hugely damaging). But these bad elements are bad in the way that Coca-Cola is bad if you have it with three meals a day and it rots your teeth. Like most things, Instagram should be used in moderation, and when I find myself staring at it too much and wasting time there, I try to stop. I still use Amazon and Google (and I drive a car and buy gasoline, giving money to oil companies), too, even though these are all bad entities that do bad things. But their products are useful to me, and I’m making the tradeoff, for better or worse. Facebook the app has no tradeoff. It’s just … bad. It sucks up my time, and it leaves me refreshing the feed like a social media slot machine. I’m freer, and I feel better, and I am no less informed for having quit looking at it.

So there. That’s my very long post. Consider unfollowing your friends and deleting your news feed. Use another platform that does a better job of helping you stay in touch with friends. I’m still reachable via Messenger if you wanna say hi.

It’s now been two and a half years since I wrote that post. In all that time, there’s been plenty that’s happened. There was a pandemic where everyone was stuck at home, trying to connect digitally. There was an election year. I went on some big exciting trips to places. Oh yeah, and I got married. But through all that, the desire to post on FB was just…. eh. Not there. I did post a photo right after Sam and I got married to like.. tell people. But I was instantly flooded with comments and likes and IM’s and people saying congrats and all and like… This sounds terrible, but I couldn’t bring myself to even respond to them. I liked my friends just fine, but the “room” in which they were talking to me was so awful, I just couldn’t bring myself to go in there.

Weirdly enough, and maybe this doesn’t make any sense, I still have the Facebook app on my phone. And I still have certain notifications enabled. So from time to time, (or honestly, sometimes multiple times a day), I get alerts that look like this:

And still, I just … don’t care. I swipe away, and I never really bother to look.

I don’t say any of this to brag about some holier-than-thou “I’m above Facebook” superiority. Nor am I here to just dunk on how much Facebook sucks, because I mean, that should just be obvious. Rather, my point is — Facebook used to seem important and all-encompassing on the internet. It mattered so much once upon a time. And now it doesn’t. At least not to me, and not to my friends. If there’s a world where people care about what’s on Facebook, that’s not a world I have any connection to. I feel like I have a very online life (and probably that’s a bad thing!), but Facebook’s role in all that is basically zero.

So if that’s the case with Facebook, then what about the others? In my current life, it’s hard to picture my day-to-day phone activity without thinking of Instagram and Twitter.¹ But that doesn’t mean it will always be that way. Twitter will one day (mercifully) become boring and pointless and not worth using. So too with Instagram. The friends I connect with on these apps will grow older and get busier and will do other things besides post. Or I myself will become older and less interested. Memes will become boring and tired. The energy of youth and excitement will all be funneled into new apps that don’t even exist yet. And eventually TikTok stars will be making videos about how to apply for Medicare Advantage. So it goes.

We all worry about what social media is doing to our brains, and the toxic appeal of the likes indicator and the need to appear a certain way online. And those destructive, captivating tendencies aren’t going away anytime soon. But that’s not really any one social media app’s fault, either — that’s just how life is. If you spend too much time thinking about what other people think of you or looking for external validation, you’ll be miserable. It doesn’t matter what app is popular at the moment, because there will always be an app, and there will always be the temptation to engage the app for likes or whatever.

So yes. Maybe Elon will take over Twitter (or maybe he won’t), and maybe in a year Twitter will be a huge political/disinformation dumpster fire that no one wants anything to do with. And maybe Insta will become so monetized and commercialized that it feels more like a cheap shopping mall than anything else. Or maybe we’ll all just get sick of these apps because “the vibe” is off. But I do think there’s a lifecycle to these things. All apps eventually go the way of MySpace. Or Tumblr. Or Vine. Or Friendster.² They’ll all fade away. They have to, because they’re all premised on being fresh and different and exciting, and that kind of energy can only ever be temporary. And with any luck, as we get older, our relationship with social media will be healthier.

1. Also Snap. I still use Snap. But Snap has this weird brand where everyone acts like it’s only ever used by 20 year olds, even though absolutely everyone has Snapchat. You might not be a heavy Snap user, but you have it. And it’s been around for over ten years! Quit acting like it’s just for kids.

2. No one remembers Friendster.