The decision to quit facebook has been simmering in my mind for quite some time already. The reasons are mostly philosophical, and to a minor part personal.

There were years when facebook felt like adding positive things to my life. I had a habit of posting both humorous and serious content, and quite often those posts sparked shared joking, or in-depth discussions. I learnt new things by reading articles my academic friends posted links to. I discovered small indie events I would've heard of otherwise. It felt nice to see how some remote friends are doing, and sometimes it made it easier to meet in person when first having some interaction on-line. And, I'd guess these are the core ideas of facebook, and over the years they've just kept on adding additional elements, so that slowly the core is harder and harder to find as everything gets flooded with non-personal content.

Well, facebook contributed to me starting this blog. As the easy-going joking and the occasional good philosophical discussions in the comments made me feel that "okay, it's not that hard. Just write a thing and click 'publish'". I don't know how to best describe this - maybe it is that I've grown to be more and more honest to my introvert aspects, paying more attention to the fact that even though the stream of on-line comments, reactions and discussions can be somehow entertaining, for me it is also energy-consuming. Or, that for my personality type it feels more fruitful to maintain deep and long-term exchange with a few people, instead of having a wide actively bubbling social sphere of acquaintances. No, it doesn't mean that I don't care about the lives of semi-remote friends who I don't actively keep contact with. For example, one of the friends has been posting about their house renovation project, and how it often is very exhausting trying to find time for work, the renovation project, and family life and hobbies, which often results just sleeping less to have more time to do things - reading such content always makes me feel like "oh, I'd love to help", and then I take a look at my calendar and go through my own time-money-energy budget, and realize that they are living about 300 km away and with my finite resources I just don't find the time to go offer a helping hand. And at some point I realize how this "I'd love to do this but I can't" feeling is tiring, and I need to do something to better focus on things I actually can do. Oh well, so - facebook has been increasingly feeling like a distraction to me, and it feels healthier to allocate my limited time and social energy to share with people who I regularly see in the real world.

I have a feeling that over the years there has been more and more non-personal content in the facebook feed. Typically pictures or memes which aren't posted by any on my friends, nor by any of the groups I follow. Some of that content is obviously fake, click-bait stuff for some sort of virus or scam. And I've assumed that some of the content is paid for. That there are third parties who pay facebook to get their content posted on everyone's feed. A lot of that content makes me feel sick. Especially the stuff which reminds me of the unintelligent bullying in the elementary school in the 1980's - and somehow I've been hoping that on a general level we'd evolve past that, learning to embrace the habits of mature and respectful dialogue. But no, here they are again them worn-out jokes attempting to mock the beliefs of some other people, but failing because they don't even properly understand the thing they are attempting to ridicule. I don't know but I'd guess such content is aimed at provoking a reaction - either a like, or a comment trying to correct the obvious glaring misunderstanding. But for me the instant emotional reaction is "I'm tired of this immature behavior, can I just go away?"

At some time they introduced a new option for users in EU. They promised that by paying a monthly fee one can get rid of all paid content. I tried that, and to my surprise it had a very minimal affect on what I saw in my feed. Which made me think that maybe all the provocative content is not paid by a third party, but just chosen by facebook itself. That all the stuff fanning the flames of ever-growing political polarization is good for their business - by tracking user reactions they get data to sell for advertisers, and the more provocative the content the more people tend to engage. (This, of course, it not just a problem with facebook. I've heard professional politicians complaining about the same phenomenon, that all them important but boring facts about the current political debates get baseline minimal attention, but as soon as you say something controversial it gets maximum attention, and so the public discussion becomes more and more about scandals, sidetracking the actual serious content of the decision-making. But, yeah - this and the overall phenomenon of polarization, there are big topics, maybe I'll write more about them later, if I happen to feel like that some other day).

Herein lies the philosophical side of it. Yes, I know there are ways to use the facebook in such a way that I could still mostly just see what my friends post, avoiding the noise and clutter in the feed. But it is not just my personal experience which matters. I've had a growing sense that by using facebook I'm anyway indirectly supporting their business model, contributing to their global power, and quietly accepting the way how they don't try to stay neutral, how they don't use their influence to promote mature adult dialogue, but how they reap the economical gains by actively promoting polarizing content. My personal belief is that in the evolution of mankind we are living through a critical period, and we have a few decades of time, maybe. The question is that either we learn to co-operate and coordinate global common decisions in an adequate way, or we face the serious (read: likely catastrophic) consequences of inaction - not only is there the global climate change which needs urgent and coordinated response, but it increasingly looks like a bigger war(s) looming. And, in a way, these aren't so very complicated questions. It is all matter of "either you seek to learn co-operation and co-existence, or you endure the ill consequences of short-sighted bigotry". To me it looks like facebook has chosen to promote bigotry for it generates profit for them. I don't want to be involved.

At the same time I'm painfully aware that we can't just simply "boycott anything which does something bad", for there would hardly be anything left in that case. I also think that it is not just the facebook itself, as they are just playing by the rules of global capitalism. I'd love to boycott global capitalism, yeah, but some aspects of it are practically unavoidable, so I try to find ways to live with it, yet looking forward for ways to promote more healthy developments, hoping for a sustainable future instead of the "gambling a global catastrophe for short-term financial gains"-model of the current breed of capitalism. On a practical level, I mean, I think I will still keep my instagram account, at least for some time. Instead of attempting a total boycott of all services by Meta, I try something like "okay, you poisoned the core elements of facebook as a social platform, so I quit that. The current implementation of instagram is still somewhat acceptable, so I will keep on using this. If more and more people do this, eventually the company might pick up the message?"

Of course it is not all easy. There is a slight sense of fear of missing out, the feeling that I'll severe ties with a number of people, no more seeing their facebook content. But facebook is not the world. There is still e-mail, and the good old letters on paper. And meeting people in the real world. So, with these thoughts I opened facebook, with an intention to find the "delete my account" button or equivalent. It told me that I have one new friend request. The request appeared to be from the personal account of artist Mariska, whose live performance I saw just a short while ago. It was written in good Finnish, the pictures made all sense, and it wasn't fully obvious if it is a fake profile or not. Like, 90% likelihood of it being a scam, and 10% for real. I wanted to know, and I sent a direct message to Mariska's verified public account on Instagram. She was kind enough to reply, telling that she doesn't have such a facebook profile, and that she understands my decision to leave facebook, hoping that it would go well as there are rumors that isn't so very easy.

Well, in the process I learnt that quitting facebook will also quit my messenger account. So I posted on facebook, telling that if someone has been communicating with me over the messenger, now is the time to pick alternative methods. I decided to wait for a week, so that people have time to react. Then I realized that quitting facebook is also going to break the tiny applet which was needed to enable "sign in using your facebook account" on this Enormous Elk site. I'm sorry, I decided to sacrifice that as well. If you have trouble logging into the site please find a way to send me a message so I can help you get it sorted out! Although, having an account on the Enormous Elk site is currently of limited use - it just allows bypassing captcha when posting a comment, and it allows sending personal messages to other users. Overall, the whole sit could use some serious re-work, but I'm not yet sure when I will have time for that, so I try to keep going on with minimal site maintenance.

So, today I again went to facebook settings. I had to search for a help article to figure out in which sub-menu the quit option is. And, finally, clicking through all the "temporarily deactivate or permanently delete"-kind of questions it said "something went wrong, please try again". I tried again after a while, and that time it looked like I just got logged out. No e-mail confirmation, no any other message indicating if my account is going down or if I should try again. The funny thing is that the official help says that after permanently deleting the account there is still a 30 day period when you can cancel your decision by logging in to your account again. OK, so now I'm not sure if that 30 day period got initiated, or if I should just click the button again - but to check, I'd need to log in again, which supposedly cancels the termination process. Hehe - and here I was thinking that quitting facebook is not easy because of social reasons, but turns out that it also is technically difficult =)

I think I've already spent enough time with this for today. Time to post this and go do some practical work outdoors.