About three months ago (on February 22, 2024) I had an experience with Facebook that was both extremely anticlimactic and also the beginning of the end. Since then, I’ve stopped using Facebook. I wanted to capture my thoughts and feelings, in case I wanted to reflect on this transition sometime in the future.

I actually like social media

To set the stage, I generally like social media. I often get value out of it: connection, community, inspiration, job leads, sometimes even fame. I also get sucked into it too much sometimes (a lot), cycling between apps on my phone or tabs on my computer, checking for new content, and then realizing that was not how I really wanted to spend that chunk of time. That intermittent variable reward, that little hit of dopamine!

I’ve read all about addictive tech – I literally studied gamification in grad school when I worked on games with a purpose, and I became cynical enough to write a rant-paper titled “GWAPs: Games with a Problem”. I’ve also read a number of books that talk about the attention economy and ways to be more self-aware and try to reclaim your attention for yourself. These include Cal Newport’s Deep Work, Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, Manoush Zomorodi’s Bored and Brilliant. I have a few personal systems in place, like removing most social media apps from my phone and having programs to block certain sites on my computer at certain times, but I still… partake.

The final straw

Anyway, this February day, my muscle memory (command-t f) took me to Facebook and I was mindlessly scrolling for a while, as a “break” from something else.

At one point, I thought, “Hmm, I haven’t seen anything from any of my actual friends, or even groups, in a while….” And I decided to count the number of posts. I counted over 40 posts in a row of meaningless chuff that had no real relation to my life, then I saw one thing from a group I was in, and then another 40+ posts of meaninglessness. It was like I was a kid in a huge store suddenly realizing my parents were gone and I was surrounded by complete strangers.

Just to really capture this experience, in case it’s important to my life in the future, these were the kinds of posts I remember seeing. I’m not going to log back in to double check the exact content, so you just get to hear my memories. Sorry if it’s like listening to someone retelling their dream…

One thing I remember seeing was clips of the Friends TV show, which I had seen enough of to be familiar with but never watched regularly. These clips would catch my attention in the way of “is that something I remember seeing on TV decades ago or not?” The algorithm behind my feed sensed this weakness with other 90s/early 00’s nostalgia, too. It’s not that I ever actively chose to see this content, or sought it out, it was just something that got implanted into my feed because I was susceptible to it. And it wasn’t even an ad for anything. Just a meta ad for hanging around Facebook longer to possibly see more ads. It just something that would steal seconds of my life here and there with no obvious benefit to anyone.

The other thing I remember seeing a lot of in my feed, in a similar tricking-my-stupid-monkey-brain sort of way, was artificially generated photos of celebrities, of like young Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet (see 90s nostalgia above) or the couple from Grease, except not real. When I saw these posts, I’d probably linger just a bit longer, because my brain would think, “Oh! A a familiar face! Is that my friend? Do I get to finally see a post from someone I know?” But once I realized it was not a friend, my brain would spiral in a different direction. I’d have an existential crisis (a mini one, but a new crisis for nearly every post like this) about this niche generative AI application and my time in grad school and seeing computer vision research on faces (and in general) thrive by scraping the internet for celebrity photos and how datasets like that had probably matured and been adopted by the modern wave of AI people thinking “we have all this data, what can we do with it that we can do well enough to put out into the public, and bonus points if it aligns with business goals of increasing engagement and oh what about making a bunch of fake photos of famous people just because we can?” And I’d invent this whole cynical (but probably not un-true?) narrative in my head about the backstory of why this content was in my feed, and feel sad about what a huge waste of resources it all is.

I almost longed for the days when the awkward content I saw on Facebook consisted of distant friends commenting or arguing on generic posts, like those ones saying “90% of you will get this math equation wrong because it’s ambiguously written!” At least there was a human touch, some insight about a friend that also spent too much time on Facebook.

Anyway, after finding myself in a desert wasteland of vapid non-posts like the ones above, I suddenly got so irritated by what I was seeing. The algorithm didn’t get me, but it was still sucking me in. (Or you could argue that it really got me by triggering me with AI-generated Titanic stars, but I can only take so much of that.) The dopamine hits were now coming from wading through this unfamiliar crap until finally stumbling across something from someone I knew. I know all about intermittent variable reward, but how did finally seeing a 3-day-old post from someone I knew 10 years ago become the reward?

Those who left before me

I’ve had other friends leave Facebook long ago. For very good reasons. Reasons that made me want to leave, too.

At the time, I felt like I couldn’t do that. I needed to stay connected, to keep in touch and know the goings-on of my friends and family, to keep my own family unit plugged in, to keep myself socially connected to my friends.

But if I’m not getting that connection value, if it’s drowned out by vapid fluff content, if that drives other people away so there’s even less real human-created content… then I really can’t stay.

The mechanics of me rage quitting Facebook

So what actions did I actually take?

I ranted on Mastodon, a social media site where you can gloriously run out of content, and use that as a sign that you should switch to something else.

I also ranted on Facebook, a sort of *table flip* “I’m out!” post. And then I logged out, and deleted my password from my password manager so I wouldn’t be able to easily log back in.

Then I went to my phone… and I re-downloaded the Facebook app (I’d removed it months ago because of similar issues, and I would only download it during holidays or a big trip when I planned to post photos). The app was hard to log out of, because I was also logged into Messenger and Instagram. (Side note: I’m still getting value out of Instagram, even though it has its own set of problems). When I logged back in to Facebook, I saw people were already starting to engage with my post about quitting, and I felt panicked about getting sucked back in. So I hastily deleted the app again.

A week or so later, I redownloaded the Facebook app and was relieved (and sad) to find that it finally wanted my password to log me in. I didn’t have it, so I couldn’t do it without jumping through a password reset hoop, which was enough friction to stop me from.

Relapsing a little bit

I was helping organize a conference and I volunteered to be more involved with the organization’s Facebook group shortly before this whole quitting debacle, so at one point I felt compelled to log in to check on that group.

I did have to jump through the password reset hoop, which I had a bit of a scare with. Partly because the Facebook website is shit, and partly because I was authenticating with a university email address that I wasn’t 100% sure I still had access to.

When I had been away for a while, I did see more content from my actual friends. But it wasn’t fulfilling enough, and my feed was still so littered with cruft that I logged back out and deleted my password once again.

Moving out of the old neighborhood

I’ve had other socials die out (or change for the worse), like Geocities, AIM, Livejournal, and even Twitter, and I feel some amount of grief. It’s like moving away from a town that you and your friends all used to live in together and it would be weird or impossible to go back. Now everyone is scattered to other online towns. Some of us live together and see each other often, but some I just don’t get to visit virtually as much anymore. But and I’ve also made new friends in these new online spaces…

It hasn’t been “tough” to stay away from Facebook, but I was thinking about it a lot for the first month. (I wrote most of this blog post about 1 or 2 months after, but now that it’s the end of May, I’ve actually been thinking about it a lot less.)

What did I get out of it? What am I missing now that I’m not logging into Facebook? How can I find other ways to fill in what I’m missing? Or is it even a problem that I’m missing something? On a logistical level, what part of my life is archived only within Facebook and what can I do to rescue it? How did TWENTY FUCKING YEARS pass since I joined it originally?

I don’t have answers to all these questions right now. I still use a bunch of other social media, including ones that are still in the Facebook ecosystem. But to get a bit meta with it (shit, that’s a terrible pun), getting back to blogging is part of me finding an alternative way of being social online.