I deleted my Facebook account last year and friends have asked why.
Why I liked Facebook:
- Aggregation and notifications. Facebook did what RSS promised to do but never did. It brought together contact info, blog posts, and photo and video sharing all in one place. This was so convenient, and really, what I wanted all along. And on top of that, Facebook gave me notifications for things I was very likely to be interested in- photos I’m in, notes that friends tagged me in.
- Private conversations with real life friends. I only care about people that I friend and who I friend back. No spam, no strangers. Just people I have actually met and know.
- You go where your friends are. There’s no point in writing blog posts that no one is actually reading. Facebook gives me an audience that might actually care about what I have to say.
Why I hated Facebook:
- Facebook was a rag-tag collection of sharing tools. Photos were resized and compressed to death. Videos were…where are videos now? Under photos? What? Notes were horrendous for anything but plain text and links. Inline photos in notes were never the right size, the right alignment, or have the right padding. Editing and previewing a note was also a painfully slow process, especially since a note never looked right anyway. All of Facebook was slow. Click through 5 photos and the 6th would give you the awesome blue Knight Rider loading animation. Seriously frustrating for as long as I was on Facebook.
- Facebook was becoming less and less private. Yishan Wong made the case (anonymously on Quora) that this was not a devious Facebook plot, but a response to what the users wanted. Whatever the reason, the result was privacy definitions that were confusing and changing.
- I felt trapped. Trapped by the tools- I wanted Flickr, Vimeo, and Tumblr. Having everything in one place seemed like a good idea, but what we got were mediocre versions of great sites. I was confused by my desire for privacy but also to share things openly and be heard. I was trapped by the feeling that all my thoughts were captured on Facebook with no way to get them off. And scared of the momentum of Facebook and the thought that everyone would eventually join and I’d really be trapped with all those annoyances.
Deleting my Facebook account seems drastic, even to me, but I was annoyed for so long and I was not finding a way out. In forcing myself to delete my account, I was finally able to liberate my notes and my videos. My photos were for the most part copies of what originated from my iPhoto library (so sorry, only I can see them for now). The Facebook photos were poor quality copies anyway.
I thought I didn’t like Facebook because of privacy issues. That didn’t make total sense to me because the alternatives I turned to were completely public- Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Privacy confusion was one reason I left, but it wasn’t until I joined Google+ that it finally came together for me. You’ll be happy to know my online world makes sense to me again. The pieces are all in order and I’m relatively satisfied with it.
Maybe I’ll even log back into Facebook so I can stalk what my friends in Chicago are up to. I mean, reconnect with old friends. Wait, what’d I say the first time?
