Are you still on Facebook?

hinault

I've never felt the need to join FB.

If I need to contact friends, I use MS Outlook.
Or better still meet my friends in person.

blacklilly

miss no stars wrote: »

What did you use it for before deleting it? Was it just something where you logged in and looked at other peoples' statuses, or were you engaging with people via facebook? Genuinely curious; I log in every day (admittedly a couple of times per day) and although I don't post a whole lot, I do chat with people and there are a few private groups I belong to on it where there's no offline substitute. Just wondering are you happier because you never used it for much other than looking at other peoples' status updates and photos and you've now gotten rid of a procrastination tool, or did you use it for engaging with people and are happy even though you can no longer do that? (If that makes any sense)

Well partly becuase it's impossible to completely ignore other peoples statuses/pictures etc and I just felt like it was becomming more and more a site used for people to brag and although I''ve a good life and am generally a very upbeat person, I started to notice that everytime I'd see a "bragging" status I'd feel a little tinge of "my life is boring". Then the mundane status updates of what people had for breakfast, when they're going to bed, what they're wearing today etc just really tired me.

I did use it to keep in touch with friends but I also have their numbers and e-mails so there's no issue with contact on that front.There are so many ways in which you can communicate. I wouldn't be entirely happy with the privacy provided by fb but that's another matter.

Obviously if you're happy using it, that's great, I wouldn't knock someone for using it, I just realised it isn't for me.

Arthur Beesley

No

dan1895

blacklilly wrote: »

Well partly becuase it's impossible to completely ignore other peoples statuses/pictures etc and I just felt like it was becomming more and more a site used for people to brag and although I''ve a good life and am generally a very upbeat person, I started to notice that everytime I'd see a "bragging" status I'd feel a little tinge of "my life is boring". Then the mundane status updates of what people had for breakfast, when they're going to bed, what they're wearing today etc just really tired me.

I did use it to keep in touch with friends but I also have their numbers and e-mails so there's no issue with contact on that front.There are so many ways in which you can communicate. I wouldn't be entirely happy with the privacy provided by fb but that's another matter.

Obviously if you're happy using it, that's great, I wouldn't knock someone for using it, I just realised it isn't for me.

Same here but I would also add to that the constant stream of photos of dogs, cats, babies and dinners!
I too used to chat with friends on it but whats app and viber have taken over there and finally the people who I know in real life and would see on a regular basis weren't the same as their online persona. Often much more stupid and infuriating online and I admit I may have come across that way too.

gobnaitolunacy

Really don't get people sharing a pic of what they're going to eat!

IvaBigWun

Zascar wrote: »

It reminds me of 10 years ago the few friends I had who used to say "I wouldn't be seen dead with a mobile phone. Sure what would I need one of them for... If someone needs to contact me they can call my house".

IvaBigWun

From here http://www.independent.ie/business/technology/take-the-facebook-test-here-to-see-how-much-of-your-life-you-have-wasted-29957519.html

If you’ve ever had sleepless nights wondering how much of your life has been idled away on Facebook, a tool has at last been developed that means you can stop wasting your time.

Created to coincide with the social media site’s 10th birthday, the calculator estimates to the minute how much of the past decade you have spent posting, liking and poking.

While Facebook itself does not release information on individual user log-in times, by accessing data on when you joined the site and how often you’ve posted things to your feed, the tool is able to guess roughly how many days of your life “you’ve wasted”.

Developed by TIME Magazine, it then gives you the option to “brag about it” via Twitter or, naturally, Facebook itself.

Though the results may be depressing, they translate to big profits for the company set up Mark Zuckerberg and a few friends on 4 February 2004.

Analysts say Facebook may have had its best ever quarter in terms of revenues, which for 2013 are forecast to have risen almost 50 per cent to $7.6 billion, according to the Financial Times.

If it really is true that Facebook is an “infectious disease” that will see 80 per cent of users “recover” by 2017, it seems a lot of people are going to have a great deal more time on their hands.

Calculator here - http://techland.time.com/2014/01/27/how-much-time-have-you-wasted-on-facebook/

IvaBigWun

Another interesting article

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/01/why-ditching-facebook-feels-like-opting-out-of-modern-life

Why ditching Facebook feels like opting out of modern life

Tired of endless notifications, tedious trivia and the competition to see who has the best life, Samuel Gibbs decided to ignore Facebook for three months - and paid the social price








My phone rings.

"Where the hell are you?" someone screams at me.

Apparently I was meant to be somewhere, with my car stocked and ready to take a group of friends 70 miles out of London. I have no idea what he's on about.

"But it was on Facebook! I sent you the invite and everything!"

The penny drops. My self-prescribed absence from Facebook has bitten me in the behind, because I've realised I wasn't even aware of the stag do, let alone that I'd been nominated as a designated driver. They assumed I knew because everyone sees everything that happens on Facebook, right?

Unless you've turned off all Facebook alerts and emails...
A competition to see who has the best life

At one point I had around 300 friends on Facebook - considerably more than the average 130 for most Britons, according to social media site the Wall. Most seemed shallow connections, and the excuse for connecting was that random meetings, mutual friendships or past jobs inflated my friend count. It seemed more about networking or reminiscing with lapsed friendships.

In reality, after the initial flurry of conversation I realised I had little in common with them, which meant my network wasn't related to my real world network at all - a couple of hundred people I never talked to properly, or didn't even really know. Yet they knew when I'd been drunk at a party, or that my boss was a pig, or that my relationship was a bit “complicated”. I don't think that's normal.

Having hundreds of friends and a constant stream of conversation happening day and night looks extremely sociable. How could anyone be lonely with hundreds of Facebook friends?

In yet another academic study on Facebook from August 2013, researchers claimed that the more people used Facebook in their test group, the more unsatisfied they felt with their lives - regardless of how many friends they had amassed.

“On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it,” concluded the study.

One explanation - which rings true for my own experience - is the bias towards presenting a perfect self-image. There's an enormous pressure to appear fantastic at every occasion, and whether boasting about success at work, an amazing night out or uploading a photo, it can feel like a competition to see who had the best life.

Facebook is now the lowest common denominator for communication among my friends, largely replacing email and text with brief comments and likes.

More than anything, I started to feel that I was calling my friends less, seeing my friends less and that our friendships were being reduced to a trickle of pictures, comments and quips. I could no longer remember the last time I just called up a friend for a chat or had something genuinely new to say that someone hadn't already seen on Facebook.
ENOUGH!

I had simply had enough. The volume of messages telling me I'd been tagged, mentioned, commented on - that someone I don't even know said "totes amazeballs" on one of my posts - the pressure of being perfect, having to come up with witty one-liners and the utter disappointment when one of my posts didn't get more than five likes.

So I switched every notification off, and swore not to touch Facebook for at least three months.

Unfortunately, that happened at about the same time as one of my friends was getting married. When his best man sent an invite on Facebook, he assumed that everyone had seen it and we ended up with that panic phone call, a sprint downstairs and a mad dash (all within legal speed limits, of course) down the M3.

He hadn't even noticed my social media blockade. "Why would you want to do that?!" he said with horror when I explained.
The social penalty for being off-Facebook

Facebook's pervasiveness means that it reaches most people’s lives, including mine. Leaving the service seems straightforward, but notice that your account is deactivated, rather than deleted, and they do keep your data.

However... there is a social penalty for being out of the Facebook loop - as I found out. Opt out, and you opt out of the phone book of our age. It might mean you miss out on casual but important invitations and news. There is a currency, however superficial, in the ambience of a Facebook friendship, the holiday photos, the baby photos, the shared interest in a news story. It's not essential, but it keeps a trickle of communication open between someone you might otherwise not hear from.
Facebook is the identity key for thousands of sites

From your fitness tracker to your music service, Facebook Login is used to sign into thousands of sites and services, as well as those who require a login before you can comment.

Spotify is a good example, where sharing music with friends, seeing what people listen to and discovering new music through a shared listening experience is very much driven by Facebook. It is possible to follow people without connecting to Facebook, but it’s much harder and with nowhere near as many features.

Leaving Facebook, then, creates a whole new set of problems.
A friend cull

So my solution was a halfway house, a compromise that involved an enormous friend cull. I went through my 300-odd friend list and removed everyone I wasn't actually friends with. I removed all my work colleagues and anyone who I hadn't spoken to in three months, leaving just a 50 people that included all my actual friends and a few family members – I couldn't quite bring myself to tell my Mum that she couldn't be my friend any more.

That changed the way I used Facebook. It is no longer a competition to see who has the best life. It also meant that I wasn't bombarded with notifications, because I had dialled down my notification settings so that I only received updates about the most important things form the most important people.

In fact, Facebook works quite well as a communication platform once you've ditched the chaff, so perhaps it wasn't the site that was the problem but the people. Maybe it's time to find some new friends.

zcorpian88

I'm still on it, I have friends all over the place near and far, I keep in touch with them all on it. Not bothered with Twitter, I fear change!

Don't like the fact that parents let their under 13 kids on it and leave them on it all day, had friend requests from kids in my neighbourhood adding me, and they do be on all day posting stupid pictures of themselves initiating me to untick the show in feed option. Love that feature.

Parents: Make your kids go outside stop letting them on an iPad/laptop. No wonder the numbers for overweight kids are on the rise, would drive me mad seeing a kid of mine parked on the couch with a laptop if it's fine outside.

Also hate when people put in "full time mad bastard" as their occupation, makes my teeth itch. To me it just means "Annoying Pisshead"

jacksie66

This post has been deleted.

Spunge

I havent been on it in years, or well, ever, only used it for a few weeks in 2008. It seemed good if your social but now it seems like it was the next world of warcraft or something.

old_aussie

I can hear an Eagle's song playing in the background again...what is it...it's it's.....Desperado