I deleted all my meta accounts a couple years ago (Facebook, Instagram). When I did it I was afraid I would miss out.
Nope: 5 years after I feel good about not being a dopamine-addicted sheep (At least to Meta). It makes me sick to my stomach whenever I go to a public place and see so many people mindlessly losing their life watching reels and stories full of ads. I Used to take the Caltrain and I estimate >50% of the people were mindlessly scrolling instagram during the 1 hour train ride.
The best time to delete * Meta was yesterday. The next best time is Today.
(To be honest I recreated a bogus account to sell things on MarketPlace and I cannot believe the amount of crap constantly pushed to me)
What does your social life look like? Because the reality for me is that in any major city, a significant number of places - even if they technically have websites - post all of their events and happenings on Instagram/FB.
Sure, I can talk to my close friends on any number of IM platforms, but if I want to get out and have new experiences, join club meetups, be notified of events at venues I care about, etc. - it's Meta or miss out.
The first thing I did when I quit social media was sign up for the newsletter of every concert venue in town. I never overlooked a show.
I can’t speak to your interests or city, but as a rule, the greatest trick the social apps ever pulled was convincing the world that they are the only way to receive information.
If all you need is to view the restaurant/event, imginn.com or kittygr.am works well enough for me. I also like libredirect because it blocks the network connections and is convenient, shame that it's a browser extension it could really be built into the browser or something.
> Most venues and places are slowly going away from closed gardens.
They are? Honestly, first time hearing about this. I've noticed only big events get posted outside of the IG/etc. Even in Tokyo, a simple thing like checking if a place is open on a public holiday is to check their Instagram.
Sadly in Tokyo, most businesses post their info to twitter or instagram, but in both cases you're able to read without an account (not well, but it's possible).
Instagram makes it extremely frustrating without an account. Many times I have checked a small business's opening times on Google Maps only to arrive and find them closed... the only place they reliably post their times is on Instagram.
Maybe I'm just too old for the kinds of activities you're looking to get into, but I haven't had a Facebook since 2014, and had an IG account for just a month or two during the pandemic, and I've had zero qualms finding out information about what I wanted to do or see.
It's definitely not the size of the city that matters, as I was in NYC and only recently relocated to a smaller (but still major) city.
Yeah the instagram posting is such a complete BS. I have a bogus instagram account where I don't follow anyone for the couple times a year I need to find set times for an artist or that kind of stuff.
We need to shame artists/events/clubs that only post on Instagram
Sure, for one category of music in some cities there's a resource. There are often community-curated lists that have some things, but if you want specific things or if you want everything/most things, it's the big platforms.
I'm part of some local photography groups. There's a Discord where members plan informal get togethers, but the big events are all posted on Instagram.
I follow a number of local bartenders, and their popup events are all on Instagram. Same for local performing artists.
My bike club coordinates through a Facebook page.
Honestly, none of my non-tech interests are viable (in a group setting) without Meta properties.
I find a life surrounded only by people who already do the things I do unfulfilling. I also find that almost no one who works outside of tech cares enough about privacy or other issues to care to move off the big platforms.
I already spend my entire work day surrounded by tech workers, I'm not going to change my hobbies to spend more time around them.
I have been barely using FB, but I deactivate my account early 2025 and I never looked back. I never had Instagram or Twitter.
I thought I would miss out on many events, but then I just signed up to a few more newsletters and that's still more events than I have time to vist.
I still wish we had a proper replacement for FB events. At least we have a nice market place platform that everyone uses (willhaben.at). For a long time I didn't even know that FB MarketPlace exists.
I deleted my Facebook account years ago. Recently I tried to make a new one in order to get access to the WhatsApp API to use it for my business, and I just get banned right after the account is created. I'm not sure why, but I guess they don't need my money.
Is there an easy way to delete all of your comments and likes and all of that first? Or at least to randomly alter them into garbage? They make it impossible to do bulk things.
If you really hate a company, you won't delete your account. You'll run spam on that (verified human) account or sell it to some third party who wants an account for spamming.
I mean, these companies are themselves providing the tools to mass produce what would be labelled “spam,” the topic of the OP itself.
Deleting your account may not make even a pixel of difference in their KPI graphs, but -in addition to the mental benefits- you get the moral one of not being a participant in this mess…
I tried threads but had to leave it so quickly. All the posts I see are just baits, people trying to say controversial/stupid things just to seek attention and reaction. I don't know much about social media algorithms, but if the result is that I'm constantly fed with things I don't want to see, maybe it's not the platform I want to be in.
X / Twitter has excellent published scientific (like actual scientific, not bologna) research paper content...BUT it's a chore tuning it to shunt all the rage baiting bullshit, i find.
I like an AI that can answer questions with all information and context on a particular thread. It should not be visible to others in the thread / post.
You ask, it answers and that's it. It should not take over the feed.
I like the Grok Button at the side of Tweet, I dont like "@grok is this true"
AI features are so good, you're forced to use them whether you chose to or not. I guess the reason is to justify all of this datacenter buildout because the "demand" is so high?
People seem unreasonably mad I don't believe in "AI" the way they do. Which is weird, because by their futuristic logic, they'll be miles ahead of me for it. Yet my Luddite citizenship somehow still really gets to them.
Just as I'm sure the number of people blocking the account got to some middle manager somewhere who made it that day's mission to "fix" it.
I only re-activate Facebook when I want to buy something from Marketplace. Deleted the IG app again recently. Also figured out how to change settings on YouTube so I can't scroll through reels and turned off auto play. I'm banned from Reddit and Twitter. Never got into Tik Tok or Threads. Very happy about all of that
To add to this for youtube the unhook extension is great to block everything other than search and playing vids
Then I permanently block youtube and reddit on phone. I've explored quite a few blockers - AppBlock for android is the best I've used / has no bugs on my now older s21.
Yup, on the internet these days it is fine to talk about the most vile and disgusting things you can imagine, to a point. And that point is if you say joke about apoptosis and an elected official or some billionaire in the same sentence, it is [ Removed by Reddit ]. It is amazing the era of censorship we find ourselves in today and no one seems to be complaining about it either.
Running isn't any long term solution. That is why people are mad. Censorship follows where the people are. If a critical mass of people goes to mastodon, that is where the advertising and censorship will go. Just like how it went to reddit after a critical mass went there.
I have been a mastodon user for ages. Its a great platform.
But I haven't been able to recruit for it. And the app I used died and was removed from the play store. I use it to read interesting conversations between european hackers.
It certainly hasnt paid dividends to run my own masto server. I will be retiring it and moving my account somewhere else. I dont post anything there, because nobody I know is there, and so why care about owning my own data?
Mastodon might be better for corporate censorship, but I remember hearing that federated platforms can have problems with censorship from instances blocking each other.
I tried Nostr but there wasn't a great algorithim. All the interesting things are on twitter. I don't really see a huge point in having an account on twitter, though—it feels like all comments go into the void.
Facebook's whole conception of tagging is a disaster. It's pure noise. What do I gain by seeing you tag someone (or worse, a bot) in a post? Just share it with them privately.
One nice thing I heard about recently is you can block the Claude user on Github to create nice yellow banner on vibey repos. It doesn't stop you interacting with the repo if you want to anyway, but has still ended up being a very quick filter for me.
I feel like the suggestion to just delete your Meta account is unhelpful and even harmful in some situations. I know a lot of us in this field don't mind having a small social circle, but for us that struggle to even have that, or that the process of doing that, requires you to be as open and reachable as possible to make it easier to create or maintain friendships, this often requires having an account to use Messenger (I know regionally this may differ).
Being difficult in this way, when most other people, particularly non technical people, don't have a problem with this, in my experience significantly hurts your opportunities and limits the types of people you socialize with in real life, which I think can eventually be harmful.
I do some IRL activities where many of the participants use social media apps to coordinate and plan sessions. I don't have any of these accounts so while I do miss out on some of the casual things, I just show up and still get 80% or more of the interaction and all of thething I'm after in the first place: doing stuff.
If there is more friction to communicate with me I expect to hear from people less often.
As an example, my friends that only use Discord and not SMS or Signal definitely hear from me less frequently. It doesn’t mean we’re not friends, but we do communicate less frequently.
I am not a sparkly special pretty princess. My friends are where they are. In the trade off between meeting people where they're at or doing something unique to me with friction to them, I know which one wins.
(note - this is snarky and I don't actually fully disagree with you)
Nope: 5 years after I feel good about not being a dopamine-addicted sheep (At least to Meta). It makes me sick to my stomach whenever I go to a public place and see so many people mindlessly losing their life watching reels and stories full of ads. I Used to take the Caltrain and I estimate >50% of the people were mindlessly scrolling instagram during the 1 hour train ride.
The best time to delete * Meta was yesterday. The next best time is Today.
(To be honest I recreated a bogus account to sell things on MarketPlace and I cannot believe the amount of crap constantly pushed to me)
Sure, I can talk to my close friends on any number of IM platforms, but if I want to get out and have new experiences, join club meetups, be notified of events at venues I care about, etc. - it's Meta or miss out.
I can’t speak to your interests or city, but as a rule, the greatest trick the social apps ever pulled was convincing the world that they are the only way to receive information.
Berlin, Germany
Most venues and places are slowly going away from closed gardens.
They are? Honestly, first time hearing about this. I've noticed only big events get posted outside of the IG/etc. Even in Tokyo, a simple thing like checking if a place is open on a public holiday is to check their Instagram.
Consider the grammar
Hey Alice, did you see the event for Chris's band?
No
It was on Facebook, publically posted (audience set to public)
I'm not on Facebook
Like... you post something public on FB/IG and people STILL CAN'T SEE IT because apparently 'public' means 'must make an account'. It's insanity
I gave up and got Instagram.
It's definitely not the size of the city that matters, as I was in NYC and only recently relocated to a smaller (but still major) city.
We need to shame artists/events/clubs that only post on Instagram
I'm part of some local photography groups. There's a Discord where members plan informal get togethers, but the big events are all posted on Instagram.
I follow a number of local bartenders, and their popup events are all on Instagram. Same for local performing artists.
My bike club coordinates through a Facebook page.
Honestly, none of my non-tech interests are viable (in a group setting) without Meta properties.
It’s like saying “none of my group interests are viable unless I smoke”.
I already spend my entire work day surrounded by tech workers, I'm not going to change my hobbies to spend more time around them.
Be fucking serious
I thought I would miss out on many events, but then I just signed up to a few more newsletters and that's still more events than I have time to vist.
I still wish we had a proper replacement for FB events. At least we have a nice market place platform that everyone uses (willhaben.at). For a long time I didn't even know that FB MarketPlace exists.
All the cool kids left FB a decade ago. You're not missing anything.
Deleting your account may not make even a pixel of difference in their KPI graphs, but -in addition to the mental benefits- you get the moral one of not being a participant in this mess…
You ask, it answers and that's it. It should not take over the feed.
I like the Grok Button at the side of Tweet, I dont like "@grok is this true"
Just as I'm sure the number of people blocking the account got to some middle manager somewhere who made it that day's mission to "fix" it.
Then I permanently block youtube and reddit on phone. I've explored quite a few blockers - AppBlock for android is the best I've used / has no bugs on my now older s21.
“I don’t want a solution, I want to be mad”
But I haven't been able to recruit for it. And the app I used died and was removed from the play store. I use it to read interesting conversations between european hackers.
It certainly hasnt paid dividends to run my own masto server. I will be retiring it and moving my account somewhere else. I dont post anything there, because nobody I know is there, and so why care about owning my own data?
Metcalfe was right etc etc.
I tried Nostr but there wasn't a great algorithim. All the interesting things are on twitter. I don't really see a huge point in having an account on twitter, though—it feels like all comments go into the void.
I just use xcancel.
Facebook now has AI nonsense that look like reels, or whatever they call reels. So I nope out of those too.
Being difficult in this way, when most other people, particularly non technical people, don't have a problem with this, in my experience significantly hurts your opportunities and limits the types of people you socialize with in real life, which I think can eventually be harmful.
You really can live without social media.
I’ve deleted all my Meta accounts and other social media accounts and have lost touch with many people and find it much harder to meet new people.
Personally, I accept that tradeoff but can see how others wouldn’t (or can’t).
If there is more friction to communicate with me I expect to hear from people less often.
As an example, my friends that only use Discord and not SMS or Signal definitely hear from me less frequently. It doesn’t mean we’re not friends, but we do communicate less frequently.
(note - this is snarky and I don't actually fully disagree with you)