Steve Pavlina: 30 days since I quit Facebook

I quit using Facebook about 3-4 years ago while I was still in university. Extremely interesting experience.. people I used to be "friends" with got angry at me, people who I had friendly relationships with stopped communicating with me almost immediately, and I no longer received any invitations to any type of social events (<a href="http://www.thewrongbox.ca/videos/iamfacebook" rel="nofollow">http://www.thewrongbox.ca/videos/iamfacebook</a>). At first it was a little lonely, but it made me realize who my real friends were, and we interacted in more meaningful ways-- I also had more time to pursue other hobbies. I still do not have Facebook and I think my life is better for it.<p>I like this article, and not with a "like" button.<p>PS. I still use IM, and twitter like a notepad/thoughtstream (although I don't really promote it to friends).

I don't know why more people don't use the "hide" feature.<p>I was rapidly becoming sick of Facebook. I only friended people that I'd met before, but even so it was polluted by people who I went to middle school, etc. with who I really didn't know that well even then.<p>Then I found the "Hide" option. I hide probably 95% of my "friends." After I did this, I LOVED using Facebook again. Every time I logged in, I was able to keep up with good friends of mine who live in other parts of the state, country, world. These are people I DO care about, often talk to in other ways, but it's a nice aggregator. If I post something, everyone that isn't directly relevant to my life can still see and comment on it, but I don't have to see their stuff.<p>It's perfect, it really revitalized Facebook for me and it's actually FUN to use again.

Don't see what the problem is? Why do you need to quit facebook? Even after reading all these arguments.<p>I'm on facebook where I occasionally share a picture of my son or a picture from something I enjoy. I don't post often but this way my parents en grandparents can see my son growing up. Don't actually care if my 'friends' see this.<p>When I'm on the toilet I sometimes take my iphone and check the FB stream. Check it when I don't have much time or feel like investing a lot of effort in reading something.<p>Just use it like you want to use it. This whole social network hype, like you can only be social online. People have been social even before the phone was invented. It is just another extra tool and doesn't replace normal social interaction. It never will!

Oh, quit using the site, not quit working there. I would've been more interested in the latter.

I found that much of the "noise" on Facebook comes from the fact that I had too many "e-friends" at even 100-110 people.<p>It was still well under the Dunbar[1] threshold, as I knew who they all were and could probably spend an hour on each one of them telling you how I knew them in high school or college, etc. But I simply got no <i>value</i> out of seeing a post from a woman I dated briefly in college 9 years ago talking about what new yoga studio she was teaching at, or from an old high school classmate saying what airport he was currently passing through.<p>The noise was just too loud and overpowering. I ended up deleting my account.<p>A few months later I came back under a made-up new email address so those folks wouldn't find me again. My e-friends list now is only about 40 people, cut way down -- specifically people I see every week or two or people I would otherwise invite into my home without any hesitation.<p>With less noise from people I simply don't care much about anymore, I see useful things. And I feel better about sharing a interesting news article from HN or a picture from a dinner party with my small inner circle, without feeling like I'm spamming dozens of people who just don't care.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number</a>

<i>If you’re an active Facebook user, and you go 30 days without it, you’ll gain a much clearer understanding of its role in your life.</i><p>From a fairly long piece, I think this is the salient point.

I quit LinkedIn a couple of days ago. I got a status update of some contact or other, and thought: "What is this? Why do I have this?"<p>I feel much better not having something that felt so obligatory, yet so unlike me.<p>These networks seem to leverage social pressure as much as they solve problems.

I quit over a year ago. Out right deleted my profile.<p>Not a whole lot has changed. I don't get to passively select events and friends to hang out with. So I have to actively maintain a social life. Which is harder, granted, only because managing to stay in touch with more than a dozen or so people in any meaningful way is quite difficult to do. However, the quality of those relationships is quite high.<p>I also have the added bonus of not showing up in ads or have some creep-o advertiser/marketer snooping on my data stream to sell me more crap I don't want or need.<p>It took me a long time to jump on the facebook bandwagon. I only opened an account at the behest of friends who had all but forgotten what a phone was. I tried it and I can now honestly say I was right about it in the first place.<p>Huge. Waste. Of. Time.

He's mostly right, but I also get the sense that he misses it a bit and is trying to justify not using it - to himself.<p>I agree with him in that FB communication is generally shallow - the less meaningful your status updates are, the more people seem to like them.<p>I also tire of inspirational quotes and Internet Marketing pitches - MLM too.<p>I continue to use it though because I'm not really bothered enough to ditch my account.<p>On a side note - did anyone notice that the picture of SP in his sidebar looks like Julian Assange?

Why the hell does he use the "Like" button if he's quit Facebook? (I know it's for others to share, but still. Double messages much?)

I quit facebook about a month ago. Most of what Steve Pavlina says is quite right and I'm probably better off without it, but there is one feature that I sorely miss: As a young un still at a university, facebook was extremely useful for getting in touch with girls who I meet around campus randomly. "I'll look you up on facebook" is a much lower commitment and casual line than "What's your phone number".

Facebook or any other social network works on our egos. We all want to show off how witty we are and how happy we are.Thats why we always see only the happy side of a persons life on any social network.<p>And thats the reason you see only a 'like' button on Facebook. Enable a 'dislike' button and you will see many more dropouts.<p>Actually, we can try one more experiment. The next time we don't like something, we say 'dislike' in the comments.Lets see if we can do that.

If he could learn to care less (for comparison, he should not try to read all of Twitter), then Facebook would not present such a problem.

&#62;maxed out at 5K friends<p>Really????? I don't even think I met that many people in my 30+ years of life! When you take anything to that extreme, it inevitably starts to lose some of its original meaning at some point.<p>The word "friend" in the context of Facebook creeps me out more and more. It devalues immensely what it really means to be someone's friend.

The article convinced me that it is for good that I never created a Facebook account. Recently I have been under lot of peer pressure to create a Facebook account for so called social-connectivity.

All of this says nothing about e.g. the fact that Facebook is a corporation whose business model revolves around the acquisition of information about its users.<p>I'm paranoid about information about myself. I left Facebook because I want explicit, direct control over what information about me is made available to whom. Yes, Facebook has privacy controls, but they are Facebook's privacy controls.

Wow! I feel my stance on this has just been dramatically confirmed. Some years ago, I wrote a rant ( <a href="http://everything2.com/title/Facebook+destroys+real+relationships" rel="nofollow">http://everything2.com/title/Facebook+destroys+real+relation...</a> ) for the purpose of having a fixed thing to send people who would ask me why I'm not on Facebook. I got tired of explaining it over and over, so I wrote this. I got both positive and negative responses to it, and they fit a very definite pattern. The positive responses were always short and in the line of "this is exactly how I feel about this, glad I'm not alone". The negative responses were variations of "you've never tried it, so you can't possibly know what it's like", with optional "take your uninformed opinion elsewhere".<p>Now, Steve, as someone who has actually used the site for a nontrivial amount of time, writes a post bringing up mostly the same points. That feels nice.

I don't get why he needed to delete the account completely or why he felt obligated to respond to the messages he got from fans. He could have _changed_ his use of Facebook. He could use Facebook more like Twitter without paying the publicity price of not having Facebook, especially for someone who is a what he is for a living.

No wonder he didn't like Facebook: he has no real friends! 5000+ friends and he never met any of them face-to-face? What is the point of that? I only friend someone if I've met them before in a real-life situation. If the relationship never goes past that in real life, then I usually just end up hiding them from my news feed and forgetting about them. I'm sure they do the same for me and I don't give it a second thought.<p>However, I do get tremendous value out of my real friends on Facebook, since we share event invites, photos of our trips, news articles/videos that we share interest in, etc. I am a performer and all my performer/musician friends are on Facebook, and that is the main medium for getting news out about a show. The days of posting flyers on telephone poles and cafe windows are over - if you are not posting your upcoming shows on Facebook and inviting your friends, then your band is going to struggle to sell tickets.

Facebook is not necessarily bad, provided that you don't hold any false beliefs about the nature of this particular beast. Like everything which has a slightly competitive or sociable element to it, it can be abused and folks can become addicted to it. Similar criticisms could be made about online games or virtual worlds, which encourage multiple trivial interactions with "friends" in a tightening web of obligations.<p>Personally, I'll be happier when decentralised equivalents to Facebook become more of a viable option, such as Appleseed or Diaspora. At least then you'll be able to choose not to live your online life inside of a panopticon where not so trustworthy entities are constantly peering over your shoulder.

Now he can start counting "days since I stopped telling people about how I quit Facebook".

I think, I need to quit Hacker News as well.. takes up too much time...

I never fully joined facebook. The account creation process just turned me off with it bugging me for my gmail account.<p>That and I am not interested in anybody from high school.

Never had a Facebook account, never will. I see it as a closed fractured environment of the web, that needs to go the way of Friendster and Myspace.

Somewhat related, Steve made a great post 5 years ago about news addiction and how he doesn't watch/follow the news anymore.<p><a href="http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/09/overcoming-news-addiction/" rel="nofollow">http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/09/overcoming-news-add...</a><p>Highly recommended, even though I fail completely at the advice and am glued to Al Jazeera English right now.<p>And don't get me started on tech news ;)

I use a combination of Hide (after I see someone who likes to spam crap like "I'm at a coffee shop") and:<p><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-friend-request-notifi/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-frie...</a><p>for notifications.

Twitter is almost the same. Except that with Twitter you can receive useful information/links from those who tweet about a specific niche. I can't stand when some tweet about being drunk, getting a new haircut, etc. Fortunately there is an "Unfollow" button.

Thought he quit working for Facebook, too. Thoroughly disappointed when I found out he was just complaining that his life was so pathetic that it warranted 5 full-trackpad swipes of self-righteous douchebaggery on why he is single.

Congrats Steve, for abandoning it. WOW offers kind of the same addictive business model, but is obviously better at keeping ppl busy. I myself never had that kind of problem since I never got the clou about that swarm thing, or about social interaction either. However, it surprises me how constant connection to all parts in the world, a phenomen the internet introduced, can lead to such effects as depersonlization. As a business proposal - wouldn't it be interesting to have a platform that artificially separates people, to allow for some deference so ppl actually have sth to say to each other when they meet? I guess WOW got that right again. Seems we can learn something here - mankind is not supposed to be a swarm, at least I wouldn't like the idea (that's why I'd be the only individual left when that happens to happen ;). my 2ct

A very interesting read, until "... my 5k friends ...".<p>Dude, it's Twitter you are looking for. And you should call those people "followers" and not friends (half of them are fake profiles for SEO purposes anyway).

Wow! I left Facebook a year back for the very same reasons. But my thoughts weren't so well organized. Thank you very much for the nice write-up.

Well I guess its time that I start a blog and write a post about how I never started a FB account and how I never bought a TV either.<p>Damn, my life is completely filled with all the relationship I can muster. I get to get my work done and surf teh web a bit. I also get to exercise some.<p>In any case the days are still too short for me - why the hell would I want to join the worlds biggest privacy fraud?<p>Yes I have been smart enough to foresee all the negative sides of it 4 years ago. Ain't I cool?

I read this as "quit my employment at facebook", thoroughly upsetting to determine he meant stop using the service.

There is a Facebook Like button right at the top of the post. The irony.

This is why Facebook needs to become your inbox, because it allows Facebook to better understand who you are interested in, and stay relevant.<p>I wonder why FB haven't asked for your web mail logon, and mined the emails to better understand who you already interact with.

I wonder how many more people have to quit Facebook before we stop getting these "I quit Social Network X" martyr posts.<p>Honestly, it's like the people who never fail to let a new acquaintance know that they abstain from owning televisions.

I thought he was a developer that quit working at Facebook.

There was a twitter meme going around yesterday: "not having facebook is the new not owning a TV."<p>I think that this phenomenon is mostly a bandwagon of Guru's who want to have something new and 'revolutionary' to present to their followers. Pavlina's always telling people to quit something. First it was regular sleep, then monogamy, etc. While he purports to be anti-consumption, this really just makes us focus on our consumption even more.<p>A better strategy for a balanced digital life is to pragmatically audit your useage on an ongoing basis.

&#62;online “friends”, most of whom I’d never met in person.<p>well there's your problem.