I deleted my Facebook account

I created an account to park my boy's Dragonvale account on, and before I had completed the sign-up process I had 32 friends. Apparently Facebook camps on your email address waiting for it to appear, then instalinks you to everyone who has your address in their email books. They hounded me to friend them back for a bit and then gave up. That was kind of amusing.

I have two facebook accounts now, don't actually use either one of them.

S.

I found mine really useful. Anything I don't like I just hide them from view. I rarely unfriend friends. I even have Islamic extremist wanna be and a very obnoxious house wife (who was my high school friend).

I use it to keep track of my friend (I *love* stalking people), and there are some really good friends who are really interesting. It also keep me up to date: I know about US politics, the race tension, even about the NFL guy who punched his wife. I first knew about Scotland referendum from Facebook.

I used to play a game like crazy, that I added random strangers for it. But now when the game was shut down, some of these random strangers turned out to be real people. They're interesting. I've got pinoy, republican, lesbian, trucker (!).

I tend to ignore obnoxious links that people share. In fact, I just bought a can of Pringles because someone posted about Pringles being cancerous. Not to spite her, but rather the article used a *really* mouth watering picture of Pringles, and I haven't had Pringles for months.

I am on the FB very rarely. I have a friend who deleted his account years ago. Recently I was on and FB directed me to his page. I thought he was back on and was gonna leave a message until I noticed the last post on his page was five years old. Yes, it was his old account, still banging around on the interwebs. We will all live forever!

I think you have to specifically ask FB for a delete and then they are obliged to follow through by law, I think. Inactivity and deleting just your friends is not a full delete. May be that's what happened.

Facebook makes you wait two weeks before they delete your account. Yesterday was the end of that two week period, so I'm assuming it's dead now. I've won contests on Facebook and had some good discussions, but the ratio of good stuff to wasted time is not very promising. It bothered me that there was this thing I felt compelled to use all the time but increasingly didn't care for.

If you (anyone) are looking for an alternative, ad-free networking site I saw this a few months ago:

Ello

Your social network is owned by advertisers.

Every post you share, every friend you make, and every link you follow is tracked, recorded, and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold.

We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity, and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.

We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce, and manipulate — but a place to connect, create, and celebrate life.

You are not a product.


I never really followed it up as I do minimal social networking anyway so have no idea if it is any good or useful to use.

Ello is interesting and a little rough.

I haven't deleted my Facebook account, but I hardly ever log in. It's too cluttered with ads, promotional posts, people I don't really care about and their political leanings, etc. It doesn't bother me I have one, I just never use it.

I prefer Instagram to follow friends and family, all I care about is their pictures anyway. And I use twitter to keep up with news that interests me.

Kudos to the OP for deleting his account.

I grew up a military brat pre-internet, and moving around every 2-3 years it was easy to lose touch with a lot of friends. I got on FB about 7 years ago to see if I could find some of those childhood friends. It was amazing catching up with folks. We even setup a few reunions and met face-to-face. Fun times.

The past 6 years....not so much. After that initial 'how ya doing?', folks (myself included) just don't have that much interesting to say to keep this going day in and day out.

I used to post a lot more than I do now. Anymore, I'll just put up a handful of photos every month just for family across the country. Maybe I should do Instagram or something instead.

I've considered dropping out many times, but I've _really_ been thinking about culling out the list. I guess I haven't done it though, because I'd feel like a heel. Oh well...

I find facebook useful, but just barely enough to offset the garbage. Main use is organizing game groups. You can make private groups, set up events, have multiple threads to talk about stuff, etc.

To keep my sanity, I use a few tricks:

- Hide everyone unless they are related to me or live near me. Otherwise I hope they have a nice life but I don't need to be part of it. There are exceptions; if an old friend is consistently entertaining then I won't hide them, or if a relative is consistently annoying then I will.

- Use the fbpurity extension for the browser. Automatically hides dumb stuff.

- Adblock etc.