Four years without Facebook

I'm happy to see the media dog-piling on Facebook so much lately. None of this 'news' seems to actually be conveying much that's new, more that it's started taking what was slowly becoming normalised and framed it in a way to highlight the outrage. I don't particularly like the media's approach but I can't feel too sorry about Facebook. We should be outraged with their on-going behaviour.

Four years ago I wrote an article about de-activating Facebook, I have not used Facebook since then and I believe I've permanently deleted my account somewhere along the way. I didn't remove Facebook for it's data hoovering and sharing but simply for it's lack of intrinsic value. There have been points over the years where I felt a little FOMO, but very rarely and never enough to get back onto the site. Perhaps I don't know what I'm missing, but from the looks of it on the outside that hasn't been the case.

I'm happy to see Facebook die(not that I believe this will be anything like a death bell for them). Ideally, I'd like to see functionality it provides get split up into smaller, focused alternatives, that could be something I'd use again.

Perhaps this recent outrage is a nice reminder to question the true value of social networks in general, and to what extent we can meaningfully communicate through them. Think about your last few interactions with Facebook, did you feel good? Did you feel engaged with those around you? I certainly didn't.