I was clearing some links from the hundreds of articles that I have marked as “To Read”. And Somewhere at the end of the marathon, I stumbled upon Facebook’s problems can be solved with design.
It’s really well written. It mentions the issues that Facebook has as a platform, and lists proposals that deserve at least to be tried.
Unsurprisingly, I already have a love-hate relationship with this social network. It’s good for you if you don’t like missing any outside activities with your friends, but the way the news feed is created — it’s absolutely detrimental to your health. I won’t go into details about why. The way the algorithm spoon-feeds you content makes it the ultimate time-waster and the worst noise generator on the internet.
That article made me think how bad lately was Facebook for me, and after spending some time imagining my bright Facebook-free future - I “Quitted” it. This time for real.
I unfollowed all my friends to clear out the feed and make it harder to come back, deleted Facebook-related cookies, then logged out. And I have no intentions of going back. I still have to transfer most of the pages I followed there, to either Twitter or RSS, but I’m sure that’s for good.
My profile is not “deleted” though. I still use messenger from my phone to talk with friends, because in some countries Facebook is still widely used by almost everyone, for everything. And it’s nearly impossible to quit it 100%.
Fortunately, Twitter still supports serving APIs that don’t force feed you content from algorithms, and you have at least some control over the content that’s served to you.