The Day I Quit Facebook
About a couple of weeks ago, I ‘quit’ Facebook. It was a transient Friday social experiment moment, so I’m guessing not many people would have actually noticed.
Number of hours it took before someone noticed: Approximately Six.
Number of hours before I caved in and realized I couldn’t do a lot of things that I wanted to while doing a cold turkey: About a day.
By Saturday morning, I was back.
Nevertheless, the process was an interesting one.
Here is the lesson, if ever you feel the need to take yourself “off the grid”, deactivate your account, don’t terminate it.
Termination is permanent, deactivation less so.
Deactivation: What happens
When you deactivate your account, you lose all the settings in your applications (no one told me about that!), but for the most part, most of the other services are up and running within hours (as promised).
The steps (should you want to try it):
Settings > Account Settings > Deactivate account.
When you click on the Deactivate account link, that’s when things start to get really interesting. Some kind of algorithm is running in the background to generate the names of certain friends, and photos of you and them, saying that they will “miss you”.
From what I see, the first round of visual emotional blackmail persuasion aimed at getting you to change your mind seems to feature those people that have communicated frequently with you, and the second round (when Facebook wants to ask you if you are really sure about deactivating) seems to feature those who have most recently tagged you. Either way, they know the people who are likely to matter more to you or have recently been in touch, and they’re making full use of it. Or so I assume.
Then, they proceed to give very logical reasons to try and solve the general issues that might prompt deactivation tendencies.
Amusingly, I noticed they took away the “Facebook is causing too much social drama in my life option“, because I saw it on the web when I was checking out what exactly would happen when I deactivated my account. I suppose there is either no solution, or no logical reply that could solve social drama.
My little experiment was before the entire fiasco about the Facebook terms of service, so it’s nice to know that they’ve dedicated front page space to address this issue right now.
Getting booted out of Facebook
On the flip side, involuntarily being booted out of Facebook is not impossible either.
Apparently, some power users of Facebook have been kicked out of their accounts for various reasons, mostly related to the immense amount of activity that their networks generated, or for having too many friends (?). It seemed the system deemed the level of such activity incapable of originating from a single user, and booted them. Just for laughs, it seems that accounts linked to fake names (of animals) are not spared either.
The SNS of Choice
My experience at a college in North America was that Facebook event invitations are the norm. In Singapore, such a mode of communication is becoming increasingly accepted and trusted, although there are still the select few people who will wonder how credible an invitation is if it is through Facebook and not the traditional channels like snail mail, phone, or direct email.
This article by Louis Gray seems to highlight exactly how pivotal Facebook is right now, with the young and old alike adopting it as their social networking site of choice. Personally, at this point of time, I would have to concur.
As an address book, events calendar, communication channel and so much more all rolled into one, it is just starting to get increasingly difficult to live without Facebook. Is it the same for you? Leave your thoughts!
Sounds fun. Now I feel like deactivating my facebook account too. Hahahahaha…..
@DK: haha! Well, you don’t have to really press the final button to check out all the things that FB does to try and change your mind! Take a look! You’ll have to go through 2 rounds of photo viewing, 1 round of reason giving and of course, typing in the letters shown on the code to prove that you’re human.
OK, I tried to deactivate my account to see who are the friends that they use for “persuasion”. I think they just randomly pick a few friends from the list. The friends they show on the screen aren’t those that I’m in contact with frequently on facebook.
So persuasion fail.
@DK: Interesting! Mine didn’t seem that random, maybe they go by how many photographs you have taken with that person instead.
I just pulled the plug and deactivated my Facebook account. I am so glad I did. It was taking up to much time. and really are all those people your friends? I feel that facebook and others like it lead to a solitary life, It is a virtual life. Not a real life.
@Nicole: thanks for your comment! Actually, I don’t add random people that I don’t know to my account, so yes, I would say that most of them are not “just a name” in that sense.
ah, i really dont think so, I deactivated mine sine half year ago, when it says, “XXXX will miss you”, and the one was actually the reason i deactivate my account, well, I chatted on msn quite often but never on facebook, how the hell he was the one missing me on facebook.
plus, I just activated my account yesterday, and my account is whole blank ,everything is gone. Suddenly i received an conformation email from facebook, it says XXXX confirmed you as a friend on facebook, but what the hell, I DID NOT add anyone on facebook, how come the one confirmed any thing? it says confirmed, not a request. so weird !!!!
anyone got idea?
I just deactivated. Feels good. Came across this site when I queried what happens when you deactivate.
@Wade: there is a certain sense of ‘freedom’ I suppose – but I’m too much into the site now to ever try that again.
I just permanently deleted mine today. I think it is scary when people want to leave and they feel like they can’t. I think that is a HUGE warning sign. I told all my friends I was leaving and if they wanted to contact me they could e mail me or call my mobile. They all have it so it was not much of a problem. I guess it was easier for me because the only reason why I had facebook in the first place was to talk to my friends. I made sure I didn’t get too much into it because I know how addictive these social networking sites can be. I actually feel liberated. I was one of those people who thought I could not delete my account because of my friends but you know what that is just not true. That is what facebook wants you to think. I mean think about it. They take you in by saying you can connect with your friends and they will keep your information private. That was the main reason why facebook became the biggest social networking site on the internet. Once it had you hooked (and once they had the numbers – 400 million to be exact!) they laxed the privacy settings and let advertising companies have access to your private information (that is how they make their money!)and god knows who else they are giving your information too. The CEO of Facebook (look him up if you don’t know who he is) is not the most moral or ethical person on the planet either. He made facebook for college students attending Harvard university. Then boasted to his friends that he could access all their e mails and private data. Well guess what it is not just Harvard college students anymore it is EVERYONE who has joined facebook!
The scary thing is even once you have deleted your account there is no guarantee they will NOT use the information in your account. They won’t make it available to anyone else…..but they still have access to it. At least it will be out of date and be of less value to them. Facebook also seems to be an internet bully. Many times they have blocked other social networking sites that have tried to give users of the internet an alternative other than Facebook. I just think people should be weary of just one company having the monopoly over people the way FaceBook does……..