No grand exit. I simply slipped away in the night, quietly, without goodbyes. Over 750 “friends” instantly gone. Everyone I met while traveling, faces from train rides, shared drinks in pubs, people whose lives I had somehow followed for years, disappeared with a single click. It feels absurd that years of human connection can vanish this easily. The truth is, none of it was rooted in the real world anyway. When I sat down, and genuinely thought about it, and reflected on mindless scrolling through friends’ and strangers’ posts, I realized that I have never felt further away from another human being.
FB showed me everything I hate but nothing I value.
Algorithms (of any social media platform) are trained to trigger outrage, anxiety, and tribalism. Negative emotions deliver longer session times, more ad income for them. Social media is literally selling my attention, my time.
Digital chores: weird sensation of needing to instantly reply to comments, post amazing food I ate, and an interesting sticker on a car in front of me just because I feared people would miss out on things “I”, “me”, “myself” found interesting. Every beautiful moment from real life got shoved into the digital world to see whether the strangers would validate it.
My messenger was getting bombarded daily with (good-intentioned) 30-40 videos from many friends, sometimes more. I get it, everyone wants to share the funny or interesting shorts, but if I were to watch and reply to every single one, it would be a full-time job.
I was completely deprived of solitude and time to spend with my own mind.
Zuckerberg is a complete alien to me. I do not get him, nor do I want to. I would not trust him to guard my pet rock, if I had one, let alone my data, so I do not want to be involved in anything he touches.
The business model of FB became nothing but suggested pages, ads, AI bots, mind-numbing posts, and simply irrelevant low-quality content.
Unregulated fake news, kitsch, and AI slop everywhere.
Unverified political and religious garbage rage baits are everywhere. Boomers spreading hate with AI they think is real.
I have realized that most of my WANTS in real life came from Social media and not real life. Manufactured by an algorithm.
No one seems to have anything original or even interesting to say anymore.
I was losing the quiet places where my thoughts live. I needed to regain the solitude of my mind. Be alone with my own thoughts, where no one is anything to me.
I do not like what it does to my psyche, chipping away at my attention, and how slowly it molds me into a person I do not want to become, and I thought I was one of the careful ones.
I do not want to continuously broadcast and document my life, my thoughts, publicly. It creates another online version of me, my digital twin, that doesn’t exist anywhere else. And maybe this is the part that bothers me the most.
Enshittification of the once-great platform is now complete, and I am out.
You become what you consume.