Kuan

March 5, 2021

Finally, I quit Facebook, for good.

After almost a year of not visiting my Facebook feed, I decided to give it one last look before I start my quitting process. It was 10 in the morning and to my surprise, I saw enough online friends fill up the whole sidebar. That is a lot of active friends current using their Facebook! My friend list was kept purposedly low (100~200?) so that I only connect with my closest friends and cousins. Realizing more than 10% of my friends are actively browsing Facebook at that moment is surprising.

But I was not there to find people for a chat, I wanted to look at my feed. The Feed has ruled over half of the population for the past few years. So, for me, it went like this:

Friend A post a few photos (Good!) > Promoted post > Promoted post > Friend B share a news > Friend A post something > Promoted post > Facebook Page ads > Promoted post > Friend C Photo from a few days ago > Frind A shares a piece of news> Promoted post > …

What the fuck.

I thought I saw like 15 friends were currently active on Facebook, they didn't post anything at all? Facebook does not shy about me using a free service, so I deserved to be like reading a free newspaper, ads every other page! Fine. I can scroll through them to see the updates of my friends. But I am not getting those either! What is going on?

I started to click into my friends' profile and look at their feed instead, just to find out what did they post recently. Mostly hasn't posted more than two life update for the past half-year. Few never post anything for a whole year. I asked a few of them in chat, few still scrolling Facebook, few do not do that often enough, majority of them never bother to post anything. So, they are there just to consume information off that Feed.

Went back to my feed and I start to only pay attention to the friend posts I saw. The Feed is flooded by a handful of frequent posters. Occasionally there will be a post with a lot of interaction, like a photo of the kids going to school, these are good stuff. A gem in a stream of garbage. Feels like I need to be a patience gem prospector to scroll through the ads, shit posts, shared ads, and news.

This is tiring. I can't unseen or unread the promoted post, shared news, stupid motivational quote, and image, because one needs to see to filter it out. All this garbage will at least pass through my brain (and hopefully my brain is clever enough to not save it in the cache!). Feels like I just applied for a job in Google Youtube screener department to weep out all the garbage video and let only the legit one show to the user. I don't remember Facebook paid me anything for this job, I just want to read my friends' update. 

It is asking too much, to be honest. Primarily, my friends do not post that much good stuff anyway. (A photo of your breakfast is good stuff, mind you). Secondary, a few frequent posting friends are doing me a favour to have my feed populated. Tertiary, Facebook is making money off the promoted post and I agreed to this! It was the price to pay. But I thought I already paid enough with my personal information, activities, interest and relationships that Facebook harvest to no end to feed the Algorithm?

Anyway. I quit. Finally.

About Kuan

Web developer building with Flutter, Svelte and JavaScript. Recently fell in love with functional programming.

Malaysian. Proud Sabahan. Ex game developer but still like playing games.

New found hobby is outdoor camping with my love.