Of course there are employees here of social media corporations who would want to stem the tide of this mass exodus, but it's useless. Social media corporations have overstepped their boundaries and become a net negative on human society.
Deleting your social media accounts results in an immediate improvement of quality of life and mental wellbeing. These sites are intentionally designed with predatory psychological mechanisms, they are designed by hackers like ourselves, but the hackers who see "social engineering" as a perfectly ethical practice and not simply psychological manipulation.
These services are designed to be addictive, full stop. Addiction is not healthy, and neither is social media. Maybe this will bring SV back to its roots, real technological progress for the nation and not desperate bids for data mining based on cheap psychological tricks.
People are growing sickened of the endless scrolls of psychological disturbing viral content combined with the false positivity of human interest stories. It is deepening social divisions, racial conflicts, political partisanship, and general misery. We don't need social media, what we need is real social connections in an increasingly isolated society, and social media stands in the way of this.
Is there evidence of a mass exodus? The parent post seems to me like kind of social media post driven by addictive emotions. It's an expression of strong emotions, but curious, exploratory, or providing knowledge.
> real technological progress for the nation
When was YC's motive to serve the 'nation'? They existed long before the recent surge in economic nationalism (a platform of some very bad people in history, BTW), are an international company in an exceptionally international business - one mainly driven by a free international WAN, and, I would have said, and I long heard from SV in general, a desire to change the world for the better. To help people, not some putative 'nation' - which always ends up meaning 'my power', and by talking about the 'nation' instead of people, they exclude other people from power and basic human rights. The purpose of government is to serve and protect people.
> Addiction is not healthy, and neither is social media.
Maybe I’m an old head, but maybe we need more self discipline in the world? I know this is not pragmatic but I feel there are lots of things that are addictive (even things that were not designed to be).
> We don't need social media, what we need is real social connections Maybe I’m using social media differently, but what is in today's social media that makes it mutually exclusive to real social connections?
Quitting and staying off of toxic social media is a great exercise in self discipline.
>>We don't need social media, what we need is real social connections
>Maybe I’m using social media differently, but what is in today's social media that makes it mutually exclusive to real social connections?
That doesn't mean they're mutually exclusive, it means one is overwhelmingly superior to the other, and that the major shift over the past decade has been in the wrong direction.
Even if your take the full libertarian stance that all drugs should be legal, the parent comment did not seem to be advocating for outlawing social media. It was positing that people have realized that social media is an addictive toxin and are deciding, on their own, to bail out. If something is truly addictive, suggesting people develop some self discipline and partake just little seems misguided at best. It's way easier to just abstain completely. Nobody wants to end up like Doug Stamper dispensing three drops of whiskey from syringe onto their tongue.
I never found deleting or deactivating to be very helpful. At some time or another you're going to need said account for something.
While deleting is a bit extreme, some of these services will respect the actual deletion and others will not. I suppose the question at the end of the day is...why bother?
I've found it much more easy to "declutter" by following digital minimalism practices of getting rid of apps, only using browsers, practicing mindfulness of said platforms, and only using said platforms with a specific intention.
There's a laundry list of tips you could use to make social media harder to use or even more bearable, but the most effective approach I've used is simple moderation and mindfulness.
Also why is Mozilla writing articles about this? I get the privacy angle, but aren't they also willing to put ads in front of people and other partnerships sacrificing that privacy for users? Like how does Mozilla make money outside of Google search engine being the default? I do know they lay off many of my friends who work on dev tools or even mobile apps there(i.e. browsers).
Nope for almost all of these. Different strokes different folks.
> Facebook Nope. Haven't had one for more than 10 years now. So easy to live life without a FB account. I stay in touch with family and friends by phonecalls and Mumble.
> Instagram Used it for maybe 10 minutes in 2013, haven't touched since.
> Snapchat Same as Instagram, but in 2016.
> Tiktok Same as above.
> Spotify I listen to music on my harddrive.
> Venmo Still using Paypal since 2012.
> Twitter Nope, in fact my life has been significantly improved since I've not had an account. I use Nitter when I want to read a Twitter thread.
Amazon and Google are the only ones that I find very hard to avoid, but Google has gotten increasingly easy to avoid as alternative services are popping up.
You are a counter-example for sure, but this means that you don't have a group chat platform to plan coordinated events with your friends? Maybe it's an age thing, but getting my friends in a call at a given time to organise a social event is probably as hard as organising the event itself. Compare with Facebook/Messenger/Whatsapp where everyone is in a group chat I can just write "Anyone wants to have dinner at my place this Friday?".
The fact that venmo is on this list is hilarious, but yes it is deserved. It's genuinely exciting to see where the limit of shameless growth hacking is, if there is any. Will there ever be a dialysis machine that invites all your friends?
And once in a while I unfortunately "need" Facebook: Restaurants having current info only there etc. and each time I'm happy not to waste time there anymore
This, 100%. I went dry for January and included social media in that. Deleted apps on 1/1 and still find myself occasionally instinctively going to where they were - much less often now, but it was startling at first.
you don’t actually need the accounts for anything, I deleted all of mine and felt the same way at first… but 3 years in and I have zero doubts that i’m better off without them, should have done it sooner
For Instagram and Twitter, my rule of thumb is to prefer topical accounts to entity ones. That is, accounts that are dedicated to a single topic, no matter how narrow or large the scope, over those of people and/or companies.
Personal and business accounts, no matter how focused they are, tend to go off topic very often, and there's nothing to do about it. A designer or an art studio can still post about politics, religion, or whatever the controversy du jour is about. An account about logo design or some python framework, not so much if ever.
This allows me to have a feed whose content I sort of control. With Twitter, it gets even better with lists, so I have ones about dev stuff, others about business topics, etc. and the content there is almost on topic most of the time.
Since I started doing this, the impact of social media on my mood almost vanished, yet I'm still able to closely follow what's happening on topics I really care about.
When I want to see what's happening on the real world, I check my Facebook.
I'm sure aware of how bad these companies are with personal data. So it you think it'd be better to delete your account, then, yes, do it.
This. These services aren't toxic if you don't follow toxic accounts.
Also, I didn't think much about it in the past but now that I split my time between 3 countries and 2 continents, having FB (messenger) is the best way to keep in touch with people without bugging them with my several phone numbers (and charges that may occur, thanks Canadian telecoms).
Well. They do their best with recommendations and popular posts which try to lurk into your feed anyway. The whole TikTok is kinda based in that idea.
Your ability to moderate your usage of these services doesn’t make them not toxic. Your statement is victim blaming.
These services are still major proprietors of surveillance capitalism. They sell your future behavior to the highest bidder. This is toxic in itself.
Beyond which, your participation in these services is a signal to those who trust you that these services are safe for them to use. They are not, because they are not safe for anyone to use. That you have mitigated the harm through devoting even more of your attention to them doesn’t change that.
This is so wrong, on so many levels. They will capture your clicks, your usage patterns, your interests, and the internet will present to you in a non-neutral way, in a way which will not be in your interest, but in the interest of whoever is paying for the results of your data analysis. A way which will influence your perception of reality in microscopic and permanent ways, because they will know you more intimately than you know yourself.
Do not interact with surveillance capitalists. You will lose.
One should instead protect its behavioural breadcrumbs and try to use non surveillance ways of communication.
Frankly, it’s shocking how much mental energy some random dude you met once 8 years ago can occupy if you let him on your feed. We choose to not remove them due to some vague fear of “the social media bubble” as if we don’t filter out people and organizations we don’t like all the time with or without it.
I realize many have reasons to get rid of Facebook entirely, but for me this was a reasonable compromise.
People bemoan the Facebook of old where it was updates from friends old and new, and family - but that's still the core of the product, groups are optional.
I have a tasty bottle of rather expensive whiskey on the bar in my basement right now. Luxury consumables are a good gift, I guess.
I don't want to drink it right now because I have things to do requiring sobriety, its a bit early in the day for that sort of thing, etc. I got my reasons, none of them terribly interesting.
If I don't want to drink it for various reasons, I merely need to not drink it; for me this is very easy to do, not having an addiction.
An alcoholic whom does not want to drink it, would absolutely need to perform the ritual of dumping it down the drain.
Note that the ritualistic act of pouring alcohol down the drain does not cure alcoholism, it just wastes time and money. And it is just so with social media addicts periodically deleting their accounts. Usually comes alongside a long rationalization and projection about privacy and paranoia about sharing information.
For the only moderately addicted social media user, the cost of recreating your accounts might actually be greater than abstaining.
And all it would take is a small burst of motivation caused by finding a website that 1. causes self-reflection towards one's use of social media and 2. reduces the cost of deleting your accounts.
Point being, pouring the alcohol down the drain increases the cost of further addiction and increases the likelihood of prolonged abstinence.
It would be a truly messed up world if that was the case
Its like claiming its impossible for that bottle of whiskey to sit, undrinking, on my basement bar top, whiskey can only either be chugged immediately or angrily poured down the drain. Its impossible that bottle is sitting there without my drinking it.
I assure you, despite your claim that its impossible, I have a mostly full bottle of whiskey on my bar and an unused Facebook account. Why do you believe I'm lying? It seems realistic, reasonable, and a wise course of action.
The other reason deletion is pushed is to provide the illusion of privacy. You have no privacy anymore. Everyone important or actionable has total access to your entire digital life and always has and always will; the government, the banks, the big corporations. Its a false illusion that deleting your cat-meme-sharing account somehow protects you from the credit reporting agencies or the NSA. Its important to provide that false illusion of choice so that people are distracted from the actions of the credit reporting agencies and the NSA and the IRS and the banks and ...
Nope. Iam an sober alcoholic and don't have any issues with alcohol in my flat around me. In fact there is a bottle of expensive wine standing on the table next to the front door for a few weeks now (kind of a tip for a favor I did) I just dont care. Ill hand it to my mom when I see her next.
I guess its a bit pedantic to point this out. I felt the need to do it.
In particular if you see a photo of you or yours somewhere and want it modified or removed.
Not to mention there’s really no value in deletion. Log out, stop using all of the clients. The end.
I see value in deleting information about me on the Internet. Not to hide it from companies like Facebook (because they probably hold you data even if you delete them), but from other people. You never know who can use your pictures/profile for. Obviously, the first step would be to not publish sensitive information about yourself, but if that ship has already sailed, well, the least you can do is to remove it before you "log out and stop using all the clients".
I don’t really see what you gain by deletion. Better off running one of many scripts to delete all your data and retain the account
The counter to all of this is "for now..." - there's no network that gets massive without falling prey to numerous kinds of incentives.
They still retain all of your messages (including DMs) unencrypted indefinitely with no easy way to remove them. Deleting your account doesn't remove messages either.
The UX as a free discord user is horrible.
It shows how awful FB is at design and UX. They really are the Fisher Price of the web. Its seems as if they build for stupid people who have no tech skills... In other words: the majority of people...
I lived through the firefox extension debacle in 2019 or so when FF accidentally let a cert expire and it helpfully uninstalled all my "unverified" extensions, of which container tabs was one. When everything was fixed, my settings were erased.
Except they weren't. To this day, I still get random ghost-like behaviour from my old container tabs settings. Google-contained apps will try to open in my banking container, as I gradually realise all of my containers were deleted but the URL-to-container mapping wasn't, and it was by ID not name, and the IDs have been reused.
Containers should be a core feature because they are /the/ feature ff has over the chrome army right now. I know they were (are?) trying to prove that core features aren't necessary because you can write anything in a web extension (IIRC that's how they justified getting rid of RSS), but it just hasn't been so in my experience.
Did it a few years back, trust me you won't miss out on anything important. In fact, the opposite: important things will find a way to you regardless. It's the unimportant things that will filter out.
I used to advertise on FB so had to maintain an account purely for this purpose but noticed a few times that 'people you may know' were usually a result of random encounters looking me up. Maybe because only facebook can verify you're not a creep or something?
One time I asked soemone out on a date and she seemed keen until the next day she had changed her mind. Probably pure coincidence that this person I didn't know until 2 days before was suddenly one of my 'people you may know' list.
Sure enough my blank FB profile was the giveaway that I am actually a serial killer. Now I'd rather these people just go down a rabbit hole of looking through 1000 possible matches and finding nothing instead.
I use it to clean twitter on regular interval.
It works with every service except Google and Apple related ones (They can't add support for those without getting kicked off the app stores)
No idea, just wondering if it's just batches of 3000 would solve that.
I deleted my linkedin because I kept getting nothing but spam emails, with no actual prospects of a job. Tbh I think that entire platform is a cesspool.
At that point it's worth considering heading to a university library and reading the periodicals and books that are housed there.
Obsession = 3+ hours a day attempting to defeat tracking in a category of software designed to track you.
I live about 40 minutes away from a decent university library.
In your first six days of failing to avoid fingerprinting, I would have gotten nine hours of private, uninterrupted reading time.
Even better-- if I chose to read a newspaper in the library, I wouldn't be distracted by a cheapo "companion scroll" taped to the bottom by Silicon Valley types so their underlings can paste "Gellman-Amnesia effect ftw" during breaks in some desperate attempt to misdirect the angst that must come from polishing someone else's ad tech for a living.
Many regular social media consumers feel that they get useful info out of it along with their entertainment content. Consider this, there are specific sources to get entertainment-netflix,local newspaper website's movie/gossip section,etc. And if one is looking for useful info, the chance of finding the info that is really useful/timely in the specific moment of their life is more via a web search than their infinite feed in their Facebook/twitter/instagram. If you really need an info then you wouldn't rely on random chance/luck that's needed in finding that in your feed.
Here in India, WhatsApp is ubiquitous, it is kind of used as a work chat as well when people are logged out of work MSTeams/Skype. So I have WhatsApp installed but I don't go to it to browse the status messages/pics people post, no matter how tempting it is :). I use other more privacy friendly apps for messaging with family and friends.
It is hard to tell people to stop using social media, sometimes people find it offending/intrusive. But the perspective of life changes if you don't use social media. You seem to have time for more things in life.
We also have to admit that many don't have the luxury(work/professional reasons) to avoid social media altogether.
Have a LinkedIn in for professional connections. Anyone that I see/communicate with regularly I just text.
Twitter has been my main source of news. For the news I care about it has been more reliable than main stream media. But I do understand why some people want to stopping using it.
Google is really hard because of YouTube, which is my main source of passive entertainment.
Venmo is surprising to me---how do people use Venmo? Are they using it as social network somehow? I just open it when I need to pay someone, and close it when I finish, like using a wallet. Why are people bothered by it?
But when I follow people (where possible, e.g. twitter) I only follow people that are interesting or have a completely different worldview than me.
I don't want to live in a bubble and I don't need to hear my own opinion, I know it anyway.
Like the added friction of creating a new account doesn’t make it less likely for you to relapse, or increase the time it takes for it to happen.
Like social media applications won’t send you notifications however they can to keep you engaged.
Like it doesn’t affect the companies perceived value to lose real users.
Like it doesn’t diminish network effects to see fewer of the people you like on the platform.
Like retaining the data you’ve contributed doesn’t increase the performance of their machine learning models, broaden their understanding of consumers, or directly provide content for consumption. (okay this point is a bit shaky because it depends on their data deletion policy, or if you can take advantage of CCPA/GDPR, but you get the idea)
I agree that leaving or maintaining healthy use of these platforms ultimately requires developing some amount of self-control, but saying that there’s no value to deleting an account doesn’t seem grounded in truth.
I found it way easier to just delete the majority of my social media accounts than try to curate or moderate their use. Most social media platforms aren’t built with your best interests at heart, why risk it for some momentarily satisfying content/interactions that you could probably find elsewhere?
In 2016 I deleted all the tweets I had made over the previous 9 years, and soon after I backed up then cleaned out my FB profile and unfollowed all my contacts. There was a lot of manual labor involved in this because I had auto imported a bunch of stuff early in FBs life, and it was all sort of stuck in there. FBs crappy API and barely functioning admin UI made it slow going, but it was worth it.
As soon as Instagram shows any sign of its popularity waning with my contacts, I'll be deleting all the pics there as well.
I still partake in social media though just accounts not tied to my name.
I want to delete my FB account but it has all of my old pictures/videos from childhood. I closed it for now, made another one just for family.
The main reason I abandoned my main FB account is too many people that were asking me for money found me and I stupidly accepted their friend requests.
I spend most of my time alone though so social media still has a place for me.
The least you can do is to do it of your own will instead of being pushed into it by conditioning from various social networks.
Edit: I'd even pay >$100 just for a ZIP of "everything you might regret deleting." The connections are valueless at this point, but the pictures and my mom's priceless comments on them not so much.
Many used to be actively helpful by serving web feeds of public content. Now, not only have they removed the feeds, but they actively sabotage their public website to pressure you back into their control.
I would've written to the support, but I can't find any way to contact facebook. Any suggestions?
I got forwarded screenshots from all these worried people wondering where the fuck I went. Some of them thought I blocked them or something
Like no, I just got incredibly sick of being exposed to that level of banality
I think only 1 or 2 apps are allowed so send notifications and one of them is my own.
That said, it would be great to have some kind of service like that again. It shouldn’t be hard to erase a digital identity, that’s what GDPR stipulates anyway.
More info on the service I’m referring to: https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/12/facebook...
Instagram literally has no contactable support if you aren’t a massive account (200k+ followers or whatever). I feel this should be highly illegal.
I have thought about retaining a lawyer and see if I can twist their arm legally (via GDPR), but I don’t want a simple account deletion to run in the tens of thousands of euros.
Yes I am intensely frustrated.
The automated ID verification might fail for a variety of reasons (frankly if they don’t originally have a copy I’m not sure what they’d be comparing it to) but the GDPR process should work if you fight long enough. You might need to prove that you owned the email or number though - email might be tricky but number is easier as you can submit a bill or do another subject access request to your provider which should still have records about it.
Good luck!
(I did notice some said "subject to applicable law" - so I guess Europe!)
Hope they post this again in six months time for those of us in the southern hemisphere to be able to take advantage of it. :-^
[0]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/privacy/
[1]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/about/
They're all for privacy (which is a selling point) until there's money on the line.
Much like Apple.
This is a missed opportunity to recommend good alternatives, especially for email and getting people onto their own domains.
https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-erasure...
Send this letter by email and my registered snail mail letter to the Data Protection Officer of the company (e.g. Facebook's Dublin Office).
Violating such a request can lead to fines of 4% of annual revenue of any offending company.
Then I had to open a Facebook account anyway, because house hunting here became next to impossible without it. So that’s there.
I mean, if you don’t have such connections then who cares, but if you do think about that
You can always exchange email addresses before closing down accounts to stay in touch.
Zuck needs you more than you need Zuck.
