Why I Left Facebook

There are two main reasons behind my move away from Facebook: it was turning me into a creepy stalker and I don’t actually find it useful.

Both of these points have roots in the main problem; Facebook is a way to waste time.  This meant I would log on, look through the news feed and click around my friends’ profiles idly, even the ones I had no real connection to.  While Facebook was the reason I knew when your birthday was, it’s also the reason I know you’re engaged or that you’ve just failed your last midterm or that you hate your job.  We haven’t talked in 8 years?  Doesn’t matter, I’m poking around your photos anyway.

As I surfed over to my next time-wasting website (Ravelry, if anyone wants to know) I’d think “What did I actually accomplish?” and the answer was always a resounding “NOTHING.”  In college, Facebook was useful for events, birthdays, photos, groups and occasionally finding the contact info for your lab partner 2 hours before the project was due.  Now, I really only find it useful for photos and that usefulness is mitigated by the amount of spam I get from those stupid applications.  Final conclusion?  Facebook is pretty useless.

So what did I do about it?  I’m not quite willing to delete my account (who knows when it might be useful again).  My vision for my use of Facebook was a bit more like a phonebook: me and my contact info and nothing else.  So I got as close as I could and severely limited the access to my profile, shut down my wall and locked up my photos and videos.  If you found me now, you could see my basic info and friends list (and how much does it bother me that you can’t lock down the friends list?  A lot.)  I set it up to email me for the things I care about (photos, birthday reminders) and deleted the bookmark.

The only thing I’ve noticed so far is that my cycle of wasting time on the internet is five minutes shorter.  I don’t feel disconnected because I didn’t actually care about your status to begin with.