I’m leaving Facebook.
I’m not leaving in a huff, nor to make a strong statement. I simply haven’t been getting anything out of Facebook in a long time and like to do a good house cleaning from time to time.
To be honest, I’m a bit surprised myself to find myself leaving out of disinterest rather than conviction. (I do feel a little ashamed of that fact, but there you go. We all contain multitudes.) I never particularly liked FB, but used to use it a lot. And as someone who for a long time worked professionally in/with/about social media, there simply wasn’t a way around it, and that was ok, and I would say “I’m not a fan, but it works for x or y, and there’s no way around it anyway.” In 2017, this feels patently untrue.
I’d like to stress that I’m not judging for using or not using FB or any other platform. People like what they like, and it’s ok!
Personally, to me Facebook feels like an outdated model of social media. It feels a bit like reading the news on paper rather than my phone: It might be ok, but it’s just not for me anymore. Social conversations still happen of course, but the semi-public model, and more importantly the model that’s financed through driving up “engagement” (read: anything goes that gets you to click “like” or “share”) is one that feels kind of dirty by now.
For me, the conversations happen across a number of platforms. Slack and Whatsapp are a constant presence in my communications landscape, I still enjoy a good private Instagram, and of course I never left Twitter: It’s still the platform I use most, every single day, and I still get a lot of interesting and helpful interactions there every day. (I’m old school that way.)
Again, this isn’t a political statement. I’m 5 years too late for that, when many of my early adopter friends left. It simply feels like the party is over. That said, I’ll be happy to vote with my feet and take a tiny, miniscule fraction out of the “monthly active users” stats away with me. Facebook aligned its service a little too perfectly with their financial incentives, and picked dangerous incentives for my taste.
I’m of course a little worried about losing some contact details. I’m afraid there’s only so much I can do about that. The best I can do, at this point, is to share my contact details and hope everybody who needs them notes them down. They’re also easy to find online.
- On Twitter, I’m @peterbihr
- You can find more contact details at thewavingcat.com/contact
I might also keep a shadow profile to occasionally have a look at some pages I (notionally) manage. But given that we haven’t done a great job maintaining those anyway and you can tell by the lack of conversations there, we might just delete them altogether. The conversations for ThingsCon and my other collaborative projects are happening on Twitter and Slack anyway. Maybe it’s better that way.
Sincerely, P.
