Without any warning I deleted my Facebook account. For some of the non-computer-science-people this step could look strange or even insane. No, I’m not insane and I’m not isolated from the rest of the world now. I would like to explain some of the reasons for my decisions. There are just few of them:

  • From a technical point of view I didn’t like the user interface. There are too many ways of doing the same. Just take a simple feature like posting a picture… You can post it on a wall, or post it into your pictures and then reference this post from your own wall or a wall of someone else. It is just not implemented well.
  • There is a prvacy and traceability aspect. I don’t want my customers to search for facts about me. The facts are mine and I want to control who knows them and who is not supposed to know. Facebook is not a platform I trust my facts, since it is designed to share my private facts with other parties.
  • I was bored by poor, brainless, first-idea-came-in-mind posts. I just want to read something with substance, and in 99,999% of Facebook posts there was no substance.
  • I hated the notifications and messages. I switched off all email notifications. Even not notified by email, the messages are collected and stored in your personal Facebook inbox. In general, the way notification works in Facebook is very similar to a message sent to wrong mailing list. Did it already happened in your company that you receive a incorrectly sent message and then continue to receive the “I don’t understand….” and “Remove me from the mailing list…” messages several hours, since people send those to the entire mailing list again? In particular, I don’t like broadcast-broadcast mode of communication, since it work only in cases in which all participants write the same and have the same opinion. I believe, that in such case the communication is not required anymore…
  • I don’t like the word “Friend” or at least how Facebook define it. In the beginning, there is a collecting phase – people tend to add everyone to the “Friend” list – a classmate, a former co-worker, the wife of a former co-worker which had a red dress on the last corporate event – in general people you don’t know. This list also contains some real Friends – people you spend time with. After some time and tons of spam delivered from people you don’t know you may decide to go to the shrinking phase – delete all the people that are not real friends. On the other hand, you don’t need Facebook to be connected to your friends, but you need it to be connected to those people, who are not your friends! Especially you possibly would be interested in recovering a friendship with someone from the high school if you find out that the person goes to the same parties or concerts as you do. (In fact you again don’t need Facebook for that). So my last phase was anti-friend. I deleted all but my classmates, since I don’t have much contact with them and Facebook was the only way to stay connected. In doing so I ended up in having a Friend list of people I don’t really know anymore.
  • People tend to post more stupid things on Facebook than the post over other channels. It is a paradox, but pretty serious “Friends” post a complete nonsense, which is not a problem in general. The problem is that 100 other “Friends” instantly vote for that nonsense. I really think that this is a problem and this problem is a part of the system Facebook. You are just one click away from liking something, but a whole post away from a dislike. This seems to be a general feature of Facebook and an extreme effective way to distribute nonsense.
  • And last, but not least, people who use computers only for emailing and Facebook underestimate the privacy feature. They post over their entire life there, spending an incredible amount of time on scrolling through those nonsense messages of others and hitting the like button or leaving a stupid comment. It is addictive, and yes, I know at least five people who should go to a specialist with that problem.

In my opinion, the technology as art should move us forward. You may call me conservative, old-fashioned or just stupid, but there should be some aim in all that communication, picture sharing and messaging. Facebook doesn’t provide this aim – it is a social network for its own (Just compare it to some social network with an aim, like linked.in, FlickR or Xing is).

And finally no, there is no “like” button under this post – just a comment field, empty and waiting for your idea…
(Image taken from here).