Social Media: The good, the bad, and why I'm leaving

Those that know me will know I've never really been a fan of social media. The only site I've ever really had an account with consistently is Facebook, and I've not really used it a whole lot in recent history, going so far as to start a "tradition" of deactivating my account over the holidays each year. I've never had an Instagram account, only had Snapchat for almost exactly one year in college, created a couple different Twitter accounts for short periods that I never posted on, and while reddit is probably my second most-used platform, I've continually created and deleted accounts.

Those that have known me for more than ~5 years will also know that my current Facebook account is my second one, and that I didn't have Facebook for about a year between 2018 and 2019. I honestly really enjoyed that time away, and now I'm looking to return to that state, hopefully for good. There are many obvious reasons that have motivated me to delete my account, which for the sake of brevity I won't rehash (you know the reasons I'm referencing here...), so I hope with this post to outline some less obvious reasons why I'm stepping away.

The Good

Before I trash social media though, I want to acknowledge its strengths. It has brought so many people together from many different places and cultures from all over the world, creating a great sense of connectedness. This has brought about a massive transfer of knowledge and a feeling of empathy, the likes of which have never been seen before in human history. It's helped bring light to many of the issues plaguing society and the planet, and opened up many people's eyes to new ways of thinking.

I myself have gotten a lot of joy and practical use out of social media as well. It's nice to see what my friends are up to and what they're creating, as well as have an easy way to stay in touch (and one that's generally more rich and just better than SMS text messages). It's also been incredibly helpful for planning and inviting people to events, as well as finding out what's happening in my community, on any scale from my friend groups, to local happenings, to worldwide news.

The Bad

As many people know, however, social media also has developed quite a bad side to it as it's progressed over the past couple decades of its existence, though I'd argue the start of its more severe downfall has been more in the past 5-10 years. Let me spell out some of the more important points that resonate with me:

Connectedness?

While social media has created a much larger sense of community than humans have ever had before, it has also contributed to a lot of division lately (as you all have seen and noted, so I won't go into that here), but I'd also argue that the "connectedness" it creates isn't as rich as people might think, and may hurt other aspects of the relationships we have with each other.

Obviously, the posts people make on social media are usually edited and cherry-picked, but that argument has been made before. One thing I've noticed though is that some of the genuine updates people share on Facebook make in-person interactions less interesting; if I've already read about your new promotion, pet, house, achievement, etc. on Facebook, then why would you need to tell me about it when we see each other in person? I've got a couple friends from college who don't live close by anymore, and both really don't use social media either, so when I go visit them we actually have to "catch up" and fill each other in on what's been going on in our lives. It makes for much richer conversation, and in my opinion is a more interesting and exciting way to keep up to date on what all my friends are doing. Someone telling me about something in person is usually a lot more interesting than reading it on a screen!

Another thing I've been thinking about is the number of relationships humans can truly handle. I can't remember where exactly I saw it, or what the exact figures are, but an argument has been made that humans can only truly maintain somewhere from 50-100 relationships. I can't remember that exact number either. At press time, I have 559 "friends" on Facebook. Most may wish me happy birthday when Facebook tells them to, but would I consider all of them to be true friends though? Probably not (no offense), and that's even with me not really accepting friend requests from people I haven't met in person.

Quality (or lack thereof)

I'm sure I'm not the only person who's noticed this, but over the years the quality of content I've observed on social media (primarily Facebook, as that's all I've had really) has gone downhill fast, and also the level of sponsored and "recommended" posts in my feed has gone dramatically up. This makes scrolling Facebook to find out stuff I actually care about nearly impossible.

But that's been happening for a while. More recently though, the advent and propagation of ✨ Generative AI ✨ has made those sponsored and recommended posts that much worse. I know there are merits to generative AI, but using it to create mindless, clickbaity slop to post on social media is not one of them, at least in my eyes. The Facebook home feed has become so bad now that I've simply blocked it with a browser extension; it's not worth my time.

Another more recent "innovation" that I do not like is the rampant promotion of short-form content ("Reels," "Shorts," TikToks, etc.). They're engineered to be addicting and get your eyes glued to their respective apps to get more advertising revenue and data about you they can sell. I've thankfully largely avoided the grip such content, but they're always around taunting me.

Big tech = bad

This is certainly not a new or controversial take, but over the years I've come to to despise "big tech" companies – and honestly the technology industry as a whole (ironically partly because of my time as a software developer) – more and more. Increasingly it seems they're acting only in their own best interests, developing more and more ways to keep you hooked on their products and giving them more of your time, attention, and money. They're generally not releasing products, features, or updates to actually improve people's lives or solve problems, they're doing it all mostly in service of making the "line go up" and "delivering value to shareholders." It all just feels rather insidious. I do recognize that is how businesses work, but maybe I don't like the economic system they exist in that forces them to do that either (that's a story for another blog post though...)

Why I'm Leaving

In addition to all of the reasons listed above, I do have some other miscellaneous reasons, big and small, that have been pushing me to delete my Facebook (again). Among them are:

• General buginess of the web interface. Perhaps this is partially self-inflicted because I use Firefox (or derivatives) as my web browser of choice – most web developers assume people are browsing on Chrome or derivatives like Edge, Brave, or Opera, so they don't care how or if stuff works in other browsers – which I've also loaded up with privacy-enhancing extensions, but Facebook's site has never felt very solid for me, especially as they continue to redesign it.
• Facebook Messenger unreliability. Ever since Facebook introduced end-to-end encryption in Messenger (which I actually do think is a very good thing), the Messenger app for Mac, which is how I primarily interact with the service, has frequently failed to deliver messages to me or send them to others, even after trying many different troubleshooting steps. This has made me rely on it less and less, or resort to logging into the browser which isn't great (see above).
• Two-Factor Authentication. I have two-factor authentication turned on – as I'd encourage everyone to enable on all their important accounts (or at least as many as you can) – specifically using a Yubikey 5C, and every time I log in Facebook always requests me to provide a code via my authenticator app instead of the much more conveneint security key. I always have to manually select that option, and I can't find a way to have it default to security key login (as it has in the past). This is admittedly a minor gripe and a slight "first world problem," but it's just another thing that grates on me every time I want to use Facebook.
• Going low-tech. Probably the biggest reason pushing me to do this is my overall journey with tech as a whole over the past decade or so. What started as a general desire to move away from Google products and services to bolster my internet privacy (after being probably a bit over-committed to the Google ecosystem, even going so far as to use Google Voice as a primary means of calling and texting) has evolved into me hosting a variety of alternatives to online services (Nextcloud, Jellyfin, and Bitwarden to name a few) on my own server, as well as having a "dumb" phone - the Light Phone II – which I've had for two years now and have no intent of going back to a smartphone, at least in the near term. The Light Phone especially has made Facebook harder to use, as I'm now limited to using it on my laptop, which has led me to miss important communications from friends over Messenger since I can't easily check it on the road. The Light Phone has also helped me realize that (perhaps obviously) humans have existed for many centuries without social media – even as recently as two decades ago – and there are many alternative ways to replicate some of its functionality without it. It's helping me form a more healthy relationship with technology and appreciate the slower, less stressful life that comes with less technology, and for that I'm immensely grateful.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

There you have it, that's it all spelled out for you. If you read this whole thing, then I sincerely thank you for your time, I didn't expect this post would balloon to the size that it has. I don't necessarily hope I've convinced you that any of my opinions are right, I just hope you can understand where I'm coming from.

Going forward, I intend to post more on this blog, and (I hope) the rest of the posts won't be as "heavy" as this one is. You can likely expect the next post I make on here to have a lot more train pics 😉

Stay tuned!