A quick Google search on the web shows that people are leaving Facebook. And I might be one who’s abandoning Facebook soon too.
Usually when we decide to stop doing something online, we just stop. We unplug and delete the app, or just never come back. However, with Facebook, it is never easy. Facebook is supposedly the place where everyone gets connected. So why are people leaving Facebook?
With the rise of social media (especially Facebook), it’s increasingly difficult to not compare your life to other people’s. Unfortunately, on these platforms, people are always presenting the bits and pieces of their lives that are incredibly fortunate and great. It makes that person feel better, and either annoys or makes everybody else feel substandard. It’s a ruthless cycle, and you have to pluck yourself out of it.
Jesse Browning shared his frustration through his personal blog, saying that he was sick of Facebook being yet another mediating force between his life and others.
There’s a massive false sense of reality through online social networks, and if you don’t agree with me on this, spend about 30 minutes viewing the Facebook profiles of your friends. For many, the foundational content of your Facebook profile is this: “How cool can I convince people I am, without making it look like I’m trying to convince people I’m cool in the first place?”
How much time are you spending consuming content produced by someone else versus creating your own?
While Jesse was a bit extreme in expressing his views, for me personally, Facebook was taking away too much of my time. Slowly and surely, Facebook was becoming irrelevant to me. I was no longer excited about Facebook, which is flooded with feeds on food photos, status updates of friends venting out their frustrations, and memes. I was spending hours everyday consuming content that was either: irrelevant to me, or content that was produced by other people, hours which I could be spending creating my own content or product.
I suddenly had more time to appreciate my surroundings
While there are extreme cases where people deactivated their whole Facebook account, I couldnt bring myself to do it. What I did instead was, I deleted my Facebook mobile app from my smartphone. Deleting it was easy, getting used to it was the harder part. During the first two days, I would stare at my home screen and wondering what to do.
When I started getting used to it, I suddenly had more time: I could appreciate what’s happening around me when I was on the move. I could spend more time listening to my friends during dinner. I had lesser reasons to pick up my phone and check the notifications. It felt like my personal life was unshackled, and now I have more time to focus more on the reality of the true community around me. Not an online one that exists in a realm of electronic databases and falsely projected personas.
The decline of Facebook?
I wasn’t the only odd one out. More than a third of Facebook users are spending less time on the site now than they were six months ago, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found, and Facebook’s U.S. user growth rate in April was the smallest ever since comScore started tracking the figure four years ago. Even Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president and an early investor in the company, said he feels “somewhat bored” by the social network.
However, the global sentiment is that Facebook is here to stay. As reflected by its current share price ($42.66), there is a positive bullish view on the future of Facebook. The global social network has managed to entrench and root itself deeply in the advertising world, where businesses rely heavily on it to reach out and engage its audience.
Facebook would have to earn its mobile advertising dollars from everyone else, but not from me.
Why I deleted my Facebook mobile app – Click To Tweet
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