I’m On the Brink of Leaving Facebook for Good. Here’s Why.
Flashback to the year 2008, where Friendster is at its peak, merely approaching its soon to be a very quick and subtle dive into the unknown due to its competitors; Multiply, Twitter and Facebook stealing its thunder, I made my Facebook account; and Facebook isn’t anywhere close to what it looks like now. I was a trend-geek back then. Being in a country where tech is only accessible to those who can afford it, I always pride myself on being the first on to something, not because I can afford it but I more of having the means and reasons to do so.
So I started adding my friends, or rather convincing my friends to create an account since they thought Friendster is more appealing to them because of its ability to be personalized, which is technically the same with Multiply only that it creates a more website-ish feel than Friendster. I added more people, mostly strangers I just met somewhere in the internet also trying to figure out all the fuss about this new social media asset. Few posts later, a lot of my friends are joing the Zuck-wagon already, Multiply is getting a lot of traction and Twitter is talking about a lot of things-Facebook included. For a moment, I kinda envisioned something like what Facebook is today. And honestly, knowing what Facebook’s potential is, I started to love it.
Few updates later it started to tick me off. It started to bring games in, and the games aren’t the ones that ticked me off, it’s what people do to Facebook due to this games. The frenzy over farming crops on a game called Farmville defeats the purpose of the platform being social. But I just let it pass, at this point I still believed in Facebook.
Fast forward to 2017, I already have a much deeper and better understanding of tech and Facebook is already booming and widely accepted. Messenger dissolved the idea of texting. You can now easily get to know a person just by looking at their profiles and here’s where that “facebook potential” I thought about decades ago gets out of hand. It’s not just a social media platform anymore not anywhere close than being social. Privacy being exploited as ads from different companies run on the background. People start to base everything in it and on it. The saying “If it’s not on facebook, it didn’t happen” is becoming more of a norm than an urban joke. Have you ever heard of the term minimalistic mess? no? well that’s Facebook. or What has become of it. A messy jungle of social media fanatics racing to fame and digital glory with fabricated truths, and petty lies. It is a social media platform where flower bloom at a point and can instantly become of bowl of toxicity and madness if you’re not careful. and the worse part is that you cannot simply undo once this bowl spills over your profile. The 2020–2021 pandemic made me redo all of my digital presence with hopes on somehow leaving Facebook behind. I started disconnecting apps from my facebook accounts and stopped tuning my professional things inside. Now, Facebook is just a platform where I keep track on what my friends are currently doing, nothing more, nothing less. I now focus more on making memories through photos through Instagram (I know, it’s still part of Zucks Circus of Social Media platforms), I started talking more on Twitter (where I think is more social than facebook) and engage more professionally through LinkedIn then moved on to dev.to as my new social home where I honestly think of as my new home in the internet universe. I still have hopes for Facebook, but not as high as before. I still want to consider facebook as the best, but barely a hairline.
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