My Facebook Exodus


breakup (10/365)

This is something I’ve wanted to do for long damn time and I’m finally frickin’ doing it.

I’m (mostly**) done with Facebook.  Here’s why.

  1. The signal-to-noise ratio is ridiculously low. For all the time I spend on Facebook (which isn’t a ton, but isn’t a little, either), finding anything worth seeing involves wading through an incessant flow of inane bullcrap. This isn’t an indictment on my throngs of Facebook “friends”, but just my own impression.
  2. If I’m friends with you on Facebook, I already keep track of you someplace else. Awhile back, I trimmed the hell out of my Facebook friend list. My criteria were pretty simple, actually.
  • A. Family
  • B. Friend whom I see in real life.
  • C. Friend whom I have had some type of direct contact (email, phone, etc.) within the past year.
  • D. I actually have some interest in maintaining a relationship with you.

That last one may seem a bit harsh, but think of it this way. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like you or wish you ill somehow. The thing is, I’m one dude with a finite amount of time and attention and I simply can’t maintain 500 friendships. I don’t believe anybody can — at least not the type of friendships I’m interested in maintaining.

After doing all of that merciless, prickish culling of my Facebook friend list, I realized something: I have, effectively, pared my list down to people who I already email regularly, see in person regularly or talk to on Twitter (regularly). I no longer needed Facebook.

So, the bottom line, in two parts:

  1. I love all of you and your position (or lack thereof) on my Facebook friends list doesn’t mean shit.
  2. I’ve deleted all of my Facebook friends. Yep, all of them. Even you.

If you were a Facebook friend before this awful turn of events and you’d still like to keep tabs on what I’m doing, here’s a complete guide to stalking me on the Internet without the assistance of Facebook.

  1. Follow me on Twitter. I spend *way* more time there and you can see what I’m doing without entering into some ridiculous fake friendship thing.
  2. Email me. Despite being a very busy and important Internet celebrity, I’m pretty good about replying to people. If you’d like to chat with me, give that a go.
  3. Read my goofy personal blog. I post lots of photos there and the occasional long-ish form post and I intend to do more of both.

There it is: my exodus from Facebook, why I’m exiting and where you can find me elsewhere. Feel free to comment if you have any questions or whatever about this - but I’ll tell you right now, it feels pretty damn good.

And, again, there’s nothing wrong with you or the stuff you post to Facebook.

** Oh, and if you’re wondering why I’m simply “unfriending” everybody instead of deactivating my account, I wanted to make sure that avid Facebookers were still able to catch posts like this one on their favorite platform. Since this blog is syndicated to Facebook and it appears that a good number of folks like that, I’m going to keep the Facebook fan page for this blog alive until further notice and I need to have an active Facebook account to do this. Some of you may think this is dumb, but whatever.

Photo by reallyboring

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