Quitters Never Win

A little over a month ago I quit Facebook. Since then I’ve updated my profile picture twice, posted three videos, and updated my status twice.  So it probably doesn’t count as “quitting”, but as Confucius said, “quitting Facebook can be harder than it seems”.

It is often stated that people on Facebook have no life.  As a formerly frequent Facebooker, I can say with 100% authority that that is not true.  As I am sitting here typing this right now, I clearly have a life.  It is just a largely unfulfilling one with a huge crevasse where my soul should be.  My main Facebook activity used to be making joke status updates and hoping for “Likes”.  For a while getting little 1’s in my notification bar filled my soul hole. 

Strangely Satisfying

Sadly, the negatives to the ‘book started to outweigh the positives.  The primary negative is that most of my friends who had interesting and/or fun status updates stopped posting and returned to raising their kids and focusing on work or whatever they hell they do.  This left only a handful of worthwhile updates and boatloads of useless ones.

A Google search for “top 10 most annoying facebook users” returns 26,900,000 results. That should tell you something. And that something is that people write lots of blog posts about Facebook hoping it will drive up their readership.  It also tells you that most people don’t like their friends.  Or at least their friends’ curated versions of themselves.

Dream come true

I won’t bore with yet another one of these lists even though that was what I planned to do until I saw it would be the 26,900,001 post about it.  Or the 267,000,001 on Bing.  Who knew Bing was still around?   Anyway, maybe the people complaining about their friends should find new friends.  Or “quit” like I did and switch to Twitter where you can send messages to random celebrities and hope they acknowledge you.

They other reason I quit was Facebook’s repeated abuse of user data.  Any page with a Like button essentially has a built-in tracking device. They have shown again and again that they can’t be trusted with your data. The most recent transgression is their Like recycling where they make it look like you are endorsing things you aren’t.  You would think they might have learned their lesson after the sponsored stories settlement or Beacon brouhaha, but they clearly hold user privacy in low regard.  Almost as low as investors hold FB.

Also, Timeline sucks.