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I joined Facebook in 2008 and in the beginning it was nice reconnecting with several friends from high school who I had lost contact with but over the past 2 years or so I became more and more fed up with the ever more obtrusive ads, the hackers, the fake accounts contacting me and the auto-generated political blogs that would show up in my feed with the obvious intent of just drumming up outrage and controversy. So I finally deleted my account a couple days ago. Has anyone else here recently dumped social media?

You had an account?

If I had known I would have friended you, haha.

Actually, I'm not one for social media. I got MySpace in 2007 as a joke (I made it for my cat) but got talked into getting FB in 2009. I had that account but used it on a limited basis until 2017 or so when I suspect that someone who had a vendetta against me reported me for not using my real name on my profile. WTF would I? I value my privacy. So my account got banned, and in order to re-establish it, FB wanted me to show them proof that my name was actually Bones, including a driver's license or having them contact me with my webcam on so they can verify me physically. WTF! I was like, if that was so important for you, why didn't you ask us for that info from the getgo when we signed up? So, it must not be that needed, so you can't have it. So I just made another account with a different more obscure name and really policed my friends list--I keep it to a bare minimum. The only thing I regret from losing my old account is all the memories and pictures I had built up there, like when I got engaged and our honeymoon pix, but I have those in my personal archives anyway. It would just be digital hoarding.

But these days, man, the ads are rampant! I literally have to scroll through no less than 7 ads just to get to the first feed from one of my friends. The spying is horrible too. My wife and I will literally physically IRL talk about something, and the next thing you know, an ad pops up for it in our feed. It's really scary. We also noticed since we go to things like concerts alot, that if we are at a venue and we see certain people that we know but aren't FB friends with, suddenly we start getting friend suggestions for them. They must either track you via your GPS, and if your GPS is off (like mine is) they triangulate you via cel tower, see who else is near you in the same way, and target you for connection.

I don't do IG or any of the other ones---FB is bad enough. I didn't even know Twitter became X...I found that out from a local municipality's marquee sign, haha! But, I'm not big on FB really anyway except for very shallow, uninvolved things like, hey, I saw Furiosa! It rocked! Not like others where they have to "VagueBook" just to get attention or worse, just flat out expound their thoughts without regard to anyone else. I mean, sometimes it seems like a mental and emotional disease for a lot of people on social media. I prefer to keep my thoughts and feeling private.

v6,
boNes

Great post bones and you touched on several key aspects behind why I dumped my account.

I dumped FB a few years ago. No regrets.
I do use IG and X... though not much anymore thankfully.

The only reason I keep FB is to see pictures of family. That’s it. I don’t really post on it. I use IG too much. Although, I’ve made a commitment to stop logging on and read more books instead with that time.

I still have FB but dont check it that often. I have IG but dont use it. I have X but rarely use it anymore. My wife have FB and is a part of several groups so I just kept my account but I dont do much with it all that often. I frankly forget to check it. I guess Discord and good ole email are my main sources of social communication.

For my work Linked-in is very common so I keep up with that for work networking purposes and corporate stuff.