Stupid Social Media: #DeleteFacebook
A few weeks ago I launched my t shirt line. I started placing designs on my shop on thread-less and announced on the show that these were now for sale. I was ready to begin marketing my shirts. I wanted to marker them via instagram, sadly facebook owns instagram (and is begining to run it into the ground). So I had to go through facebook's shitty excuse for an ad manager. My ad was not approved. Not that my ad was bad, but something was up with my business account.
After messaging facebook's shitty excuse for customer support I recieved this wonderfully crafted message:
As you can see I responded in the best why I knew how, trying not to be a complete dick, but kind of failing. For years I had been wanting to take the leap away from facebook and all of it's bullshit. To be honest I was only keeping it around to run ads for my shirts. Oh you thought I was using it to keep in touch with people? Why would I do that? There's a million other social networks out there! In this day and age it is not hard to find people. If someone wants to find me, they can, and vice versa.
But this was the straw that broke the camels back. I see terribly targeted facebook ads (which I will be covering in a future blog/podcast episode soon enough), yet my whole account was flagged with no reason given. The thing is I'm a small time t shirt designer, not some drug dealer gaming facebook's algothium to sell cocaine. They didn't even give me the sanctification of letting me know why they were being assholes and shutting off my business account. Well done Zuck! You stopped me from selling some t shirts!
Given that facebook burned it's bridge with me, i figured I'd return the favor in kind. For them "it's not personal it's just business." With me however "It's not business, it's just personal." I've outlined some reasons I left the worst book in existence behind as well as how I made an exit.
Facebook is toxic
There are so many reasons for this. I'm not going to link a million articles about how social media is linked to depression, loss of energy, and other shit like that. But they're everywhere, just go look. I will say however it was toxic to me. I'm not talking just the political memes either, I am talking about all of it. I felt drained just scrolling through my feed. It wasn't even status' that were posted anymore. It was shares from fanpages and targeted ads. It was exhausting
Facebook is a very lazy way of having a friendship
Facebook doesn't build connection with others. It's the equivalent of shouting to a group of people and hope they will respond to you. This is what a facebook status basically is. When something new and exciting happened in our lives we would tell people when we saw them and have a conversation about it. Now we just post a status update and some pictures and call it good. It's pretty terrible.
It was too damn much to keep up with!
As a marketer, I felt like I had to post things for the sake of posting things. Because of facebook's algorithm and the way people see time-lines, I felt I had to post constantly. I never wrote a blog for the sake of just having something to fill space, but I creating tons of meaningless posts for updates, links to past shows, participating in pointless marketing holidays that I didn't give a shit about, and took tons of pictures just to show people that I was basically alive. That's not how I operate, but it's how I was operating. At the end of the day, I felt exhausted. My hobby of a podcast was turning quite soulless and my show is everything but that. There were many times I wanted to walk away from my podcast, not because I didn't enjoy the podcast, but because I didn't enjoy all the social media bullshit posts that came a long with it.
What I decided to do
I decided to burn the bridge as I crossed it. I downloaded this chrome extension called Social book post manager. It allows you to delete pretty much everything from your timeline. Past status', reactions, pictures, the whole nine yards. I didn't want to make it easy to come back to facebook. I wanted to do damage to my account that couldn't be undone. I wanted to burn the bridge between me and this social network that was toxifying my life with it's bullshit.
The extension ran it's magic deleteing all my activity from my personal account. It watched it as it did so. It was kind of a long process. I didn't realize how much time I truly had wasted on facebook even though I could've swore I was not on it very much. It was kind of sad in a way. I could've used that time to write shows, work out, having meaningful conversations with friends, but no... I choose to scroll through my mini-feed and be subject to shitty memes and political rants.
While the extension was hard at work pouring gas on the facebook bridge, I decided to grab a can and do a bit of pouring myself. I unliked all fan pages that I had liked in the past. This was alreayd a slim number, but it felt liberating none the less. I also deleted all facebook conversations that I had with friends. Most of theses friends will now be talking with me via text or Discord anyway.
I also ran several business accounts. I deleted every post, picture and link I ever placed on them (with the exception of the Everyone is a Sinner But Me facebook page, due to that I'm not the only one who worked on it). With each deletion I felt a bit of myself die. Because I saw that I had posted things that I did not want to and that I was posting for the sake of facebook's bullshit algorithm
Don't forget the apps
Many apps use facebook as an automatic login. I had been using this for years because, well I'm lazy and I like logging into stuff quickly. Punching in my password? Ain't nobody got time for that! I took a hard look at all the apps I had given facebook access to over the years. There was about 80 of them. I didn't want facebook having access to them and I didn't want to have to use my facebook info to log into them. Luckily, most of the apps were junk.
Now the fun part... Leaving...
I'd admit deleting facebook was a bit hard despite how bitter I was. Like super hard, but it's a good step once you take it. I'd relate it to jumping into the unknown. You have no idea where you are going to land. While you're up in the air you feel helpless about what's going on and wonder if you are going to land on your feet. But then it's over... and it feels great. It felt like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders.
Tons of marketers will read this blog or listen to my podcast and say "Without facebook your products and business will fail!" To them I say, "Go Fuck yourself." Seriously facebook is slowly dying and people will be/are moving towards other platforms. facebook needed to have went the way of myspace long ago. The only reason it's still around is so soulless marketers can suck more money out of people who don't know how terrible facebook really is. - MCS1
