No More Facebook

A few days ago, I finally terminated my Facebook account permanently. Not because of being "addicted" or anything like that but because of this.

And because I don't want to be Facebook's product to sell, because that's what you are for them. You're not their customer. You're not Google's customer if you use Google+ or any other of their free services either, in fact. You're the product. You're plenty of information to sell and you're a pair of eyes that can look at advertisements. Yet, I still use some Google services. At least they're not trying to "share" everything I do in new ways every week and have me opt-out of that if I want to and if I can find the hidden setting for it like Facebook did. And well, Google still has services that are actually useful.

But mainly because of the first reason. I'll quote myself:

"Having to explain any of this really feels like explaining how to walk because it's such a basic thing. Trust and circles. Being you the worker and you the friend and you the parent. It's about filtering away parts of ourselves and sometimes adding a bit more depending on the people you interact with. Put all those groups in a single place... I mean, picture how you would need to shape yourself, what role to put yourself in, for that to work. Ask your friends, family, flirts, co-workers and your boss to come home for a party where you act as if everyone was the same kind of friend. It'd get totally fucked up, and if not, it'd get so extremely shallow and boring. That's what we get with people assuming we're in any shape or form resembling our real selves on Facebook. We're not. That would be absurd."

And yes, I'll remove the Facebook Like-buttons from my blog the day I can be assed to figure out how.

Another thing with services like that is that they're designed to suck you in and get stuck consuming a stream of unimportant information disguised as important, and make you feel that supplying similar information is important, because everyone else does it. It's really a nasty piece of psychological garbage that a lot of people get completely sucked into. People even lose jobs because of this.

It's meant to give you quick fixes. A few likes. More friends, more potential likes. A photo of a cat. A photo of a hamburger. Oh lucky you, you've got a kid, upload a photo and get an instant high score of likes. Disgustingly optimistic and naive? Tell it to everybody! Call it "being realistic"! Billions of likes! Keep it rolling, don't stop! Welcome to the world of... no substance at all.

Instead, you can be creative and productive with your time. Facebook doesn't want that, naturally, because that would mean less time reloading pages on their site which means seeing less advertisements and supplying less information to their database of what you are interested in.