Why I'll Never Go Back to Facebook

Via nymag.com

Earlier this semester, one of my professors (creative writing) asked the class, by show of hands, how many were on Facebook.  About 90% of the class had their hands up.  The only two people not with their hands up were me and this old dude whom I think is a trucker-rapist.

I've been off Facebook since about last fall, after spending nearly 5 years on the site.  The reasons for my letting go were numerous, but most significant amongst them was how much time I was wasting just sitting in front of my computer, staring at an unchanging screen, waiting for something to happen.  How much of my life had I wasted just staring at Facebook?  I mean, it was really only minutes a day, but you add those minutes up over days, months, years... it's quite significant.

So the other day, my wife inadvertently left herself logged into her Facebook on my iPad, and for the obvious journalistic research I was about to carry out, I started messing around with it.  Instantly, I remembered all the reasons why I can't stand Facebook; these memories were quite literally at my finger tips.


1. The User Interface is fucking terrible.  Facebook's UI is absolutely baffling.  For a website that see's like, a ba-jillion hits every day and has over hundreds of millions of users, you'd think the fine folks down at Palo Alto would make navigating their site just a touch easier.  Try this out:  How many clicks does it take you to see your whole friend's list from your home screen?  Try it out, I'll wait.

What'd you get?  At least like, three or four, right?  Wouldn't you think a website based around connecting to friends would be a little more intuitive regarding seeing your friends?  This is why I strongly believe that Facebook is for closet narcissists.  Everything about Facebook is about self-promotion, it's about me, me, me, me.  Fuck my friends, users say, how can I put up more pictures of the "fun times" I'm having, so other people will think I'm always out having "fun times?"

And on the subject, I recall uploading photos to be a massive pain in the balls.  You could never just upload one pic to the site without having to make a fucking album for it.  I always found it immensely easier to just upload a picture from my phone to my wall (Facebook's iPhone app was actually quite good.  So good in fact, that I had often wished that the site proper took a lesson from it), but this was problematic when I had pictures on another device, ie, my rather nice Sony Cybershot.  Mmm, I could upload a kinda grainy, lowly lit pic from my iPhone 3GS's ... 4 megapixel camera, or my 14 megapixel Sony.... to upload the pics from my Sony, I'd first have to upload them to my computer, and then sync my phone, and then upload to Facebook from my phone, because all those steps were easier than uploading to Facebook's main page from my computer.

2.  Security and Privacy on Facebook are still huge issues.  A while back, there came this sudden uproar where people who had put pictures of, and information about, themselves online, were now appalled to learn that their information was being sold and essentially used against them.  Zuckerburg and his team swooped in and patted everyone on the ass, saying that they were going to make Facebook a fucking nuclear bunker of internet security, and everyone could be rest assured that their privacy and information would no longer be at risk.

However, Facebook's team couldn't account for third party applications tethered to their site.  Everytime you saved a little piggie in Farm Wars or Mafiaville or whatever, all your information was pumped to the servers of Who-Knows-Where.  And all THIS information came out MONTHS after Facebook rearranged it's privacy policy.

Heads up kids: anything you put on the internet is free for anyone to look at.  It blows my mind that this pillar of internet logic has gone so far from people's minds in the last five years.  Do you think Facebook cares if Susan Johnson in St. Louis has her privacy settings ratcheted up to 11?  No, because they can look into anyone's site at any time, and retrieve any information they want.

How do I know this?

Facebook has a standing agreement with law enforcement agencies, under the guise of helping to locate missing children, that if an agency calls (and can rightfully identify itself usually with a faxed letter head) to request information on a particular person, Facebook will cough it up in spades so fast your head will spin.

Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, right?

Facebook and Zuckerburg do not give a shit about you.  With hundreds of millions of users, each one clicking on something every second of every day, Facebook's staff can turn around and sell those clicks to advertisers at a premium.  What the advertisers do with that data is anyone's guess, but I'm sure it's nothing like upholding the sacredness of your kegger's picture album.

People, it's all about the money.

The last component about Facebook's privacy features comes from the end users themselves.  Anyone's Facebook page can be hacked by anyone else who knows your password, and I'm thinking most of you probably use the same password for everything, and it's something relatively easy to guess, just by knowing you.  Once someone else has your Facebook password, then game over.  They can find all those incriminating, nasty, toilet-hugging photos of you and do whatever they want with them.

You know that tagged pic of you sticking your tongue down some skanky chick's throat?  Say g'bye to ever running for office.....

3.  "Friend" Obligations.  You go out, get introduced to some dude by your date, and 24 hours later you get a friend request from this guy.  You have no idea who he is, but you feel obligated to "friend" him because you (barely) met him in person.  This can go one of two ways, neither very good:  Either you have this "friend" who just sits on your feed all day, sending you bullshit-ass game requests or other annoying horseshit (find out he's a Birther with a soapbox) or you find out he's your girlfriend's ex or something else even more creepy, and you're now letting him stalk the shit out of you.

Or even better, the always awkward Aunt Request.  Your mom's sister finally gets on Facebook and sends you a friend request and what do you do?  You can't deny her; like that won't make Thanksgiving a total shit-show.

By now I'm sure college kids have developed enough tact to be able to parry Awkward Aunt Requests, but not me.  Nope, can't side step that shit to save my life.

And then you have all those people you barely were able to tolerate in real life so many years ago: people from high school you always thought were dicks (turns out, with little investigation, they're still dicks, with a cunt wife and dick children) or obnoxious co-workers you not-so-secretly wish would just stop showing up to work one day, reasons be damned.  These people send you friend requests EXPECTING you to friend them, and when you don't, out come the indignant attitudes, which leads us to....

4.  Unnecessary Facebook Drama:  "Hey, did you see what I put up on Facebook?  No?  Why not?  What do you mean you 'unfriended' me?" or "Who's that girl were you talking to back and forth on your wall?"  Etc.  Just plain bullshit drama generated by everyone being connected to Facebook.  When Facebook shit started to spill over into my real life, and led to real arguments with my wife, I was pretty much sold on the idea of getting rid of it.  But it goes further than that.

We've usurped actual real-deal communication with wall feeds and trolling people's picture albums.  I remember a time when my wife and I were both on our laptops in the living room, sitting next to each other, in dead silence because we were both talking to other people on Facebook.  That's fucked up.

People really aught to reconnect with the people around them, not ex's from five years ago, not people you never spoke to while in high school.

5.  Facebook is an enormous time suck.  You hear stories from your friends who work in offices or whatever, on how FB (as well as other social networking sites) are blocked while at work.  This is because employers were seeing significant drops in productivity during the day, because people were spending their entire days diddling Facebook.

There's this gravitational field of non-productivity that surrounds the site.  As I mentioned earlier, I would spend hours a week just staring at my news feed, waiting for changes to happen.  Since getting rid of my Facebook, I've been able to get to the gym earlier, and I spend less time sitting on my ass (which is better for you from a health perspective: people who sit all day are more prone to back and leg injuries and poor general health.  Plus you get fatter, quicker as your ass expands to mold itself into your chair, truth.).

People, you can use Facebook, ... hell, you can marry it if you want.  These are just my reasons for letting it go, and if you share any of these reasons with me, maybe this will give you pause for thought about finally giving the site the heave-ho.  I KNOW I'm better for it, really.  It was hard at first, but I got over it after a week or so.

There's a million ways to stay in touch with people you care about.  Emails, text messages, Twitter, hell, the good ol' fashion phone call is still a primary means of communication in some parts of our country.  And we're a First World Nation.

Try it out: just don't log in for a week.  Both on the site and on your phone.  See what a week does?

What's the worst that could happen?  You miss out on a campus-wide kegger?  Oh well.