I’m leaving Facebook. I’ve never been a very active user I must admit, but lately I was spending too much time on it. I’ve first registered in 2015 after a client of mine asked me why I wasn’t on Facebook: “It’s such a powerful tool to promote yourself and keep contacts“. He helped me sign in the same day, and -there you go- I was finally one of the 2.2 billion users of the most popular social network worldwide.
From then on, here were my daily activities: accept requests, check messages, reply, watch tagged photos or posts, like, comment, accept/deny invitations or events, watch memes, videos, read uninteresting posts… You all know what I’m talking about. And yes, let’s be honest, it takes a large amount of time.
After nearly three years of use, I simply asked myself: “Is it worth all the time I spend on? Has it been useful to gather new clients? And what about all of my friends and relatives?”
The truth is, I couldn’t come up with one client that I could definitively say came from Facebook. And when I want to say hello to a friend or a relative -I’m old school- I still pick up the phone and call or text him. Not to mention I have 550+ friends collected on Facebook in these years and I hardly know who these people are.
After some reflection, Facebook is just not for me. It’s such a time suck in my opinion. And as if I needed any more reason to quit, the recent scandals that have come out of Zuckerberg’s creature with Cambridge Analytica, fake news and data harvesting made my decision easier: goodbye Facebook.
N.B.: My Facebook account will still be online for a while before I delete all of my data. But from now on, please consider this website as the only media for my web presence, so feel free to check my pages to know more about me and what I’m up to, or simply to get in touch and/or hire me. Thank you.
(a small Update: Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account. Basically, the social media is designed to trick you into allowing FB to keep your data even after you have deleted your account. So you need to manually delete ALL of your posts, comments, likes, etc. first. And OF COURSE the platform won’t allow you to just select all and bulk delete, you must check, delete and confirm every SINGLE post, comment, like, etc., making the whole operation almost impossible to achieve. I suggest this Chrome Extension called Social Post Book Manager that can help out a little if you also want to delete your account. But again, be prepared, it will take some time, especially if you have been a long-time user.)
