Why I Left Facebook
I just logged into Facebook for the last time, at least to actually use the site for anything really constructive. I got an email from Facebook telling me I had a friend request from some stranger that I don’t recognize in the least. I logged on to kill off the friend request and then I found there were others from people I do recognize, so I accepted their requests and I wanted to add them to my NoWall group. I then started a useless trudge through Facebook’s interface looking for my Friends Lists. They were moved and so I had to search for them all over again. I lost about an hour on-and-off looking for this stupid settings page before I finally blundered into it.
I have had enough of Facebook.
Why? There are many reasons that drive me to abandon Facebook. First is the unpleasant user interface. The way that Facebook has altered their pages over the years has just gotten worse and worse. Functionality that used to make Friends Lists useful were dumped and my requests to have the old functions restored were ignored. I just don’t want to use it anymore. Every time I look at the site my head hurts. I can’t find anything worth following beyond meaningless claptrap related to all the scrobbling applications that fill up Facebook. Bits from stupid game apps that do nothing, and aren’t really games or even fun contributed a lot to this general sense of irritation. Secondly, I’m living a rather involved compartmentalized life on Facebook. I keep half of my friends list in the dark. I want to share a lot of things with my loved ones, but I want to pick and choose them. I love some of them more than I love others. Facebook used to have really easy ways of managing Friends Lists, but recently they’ve eroded a lot of that functionality away. I maintained a NoWall group and banned that group from seeing any content on my Facebook page. I then stuffed family members, friends, and people I know a little bit into that group. Partly because I don’t want to deal with them seeing all that I have to share and partly to punish some for being social twats. Finally, and probably the biggest reason why I am leaving Facebook is because the lack of controls for sharing got me into serious trouble at work.
That in the end is the biggest point of all. Share controls. I want to share different things with different people and Facebook really made a mess of things. So I left Facebook and moved to Google+. There I can control how I share very conveniently and I quite enjoy the clean wide open spaces and all the ways I can segment the social flow of information. On Google, I have placed everyone into neat little circles and that’s how I want to manage it. With Google+ I can be free to be who I am and say what I want without having to fear reprisals, retribution, or censorship. The people in the dark are happy there, and I’m happy keeping them there.