Couple of years ago, I deleted my Facebook account. I was a digital corpse.
I did not like it in Facebook. More precisely, I did not like the digital noise and the fact that everyone was shouting, but nobody was listening. Even with only couple of tens of Facebook friends you don’t really want to know what they are doing all the time. Of course, you can adjust your privacy settings and you can decide not to accept a friend invitation, but on what grounds would you want to reject somebody.
It is just too hard.
Now, a few years later, i find myself again with a Facebook account. Not because I want to have one, but because I noticed that I sometimes need one. With the new account I have zero friends and I receive no invitations, because I have limited the friend requests to friends of friends.
I know that is weird. I still expect people to email or call me, if they want to converse. I true fossil I am.
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I don’t think Facebook is totally useless, but I think it has created a culture of pseudo-communication that is completely bogus. And more importantly, it has created a monopoly; you have to have a Facebook account, otherwise you do not exist. Facebook owns you and it owns you data.
Who remembers Diaspora, that was going to be a rival to Facebook, never heard of it? Not many have, and it seems to have died away a long time ago. Google+ and other options are far behind Facebook in popularity and they all fail to solve the basic problem: if you want to change your social platform provider, you have to abandon you data and your friends.
