Things I learned while deleting facebook

 Deleting all my Facebook activity proved to be a real chore.

Facebook has this option, in the Activity Log, where you can ostensibly select "all" activity and hit the "Remove" button. Great win for data privacy, right? Now you can bulk delete Facebook stuff. Awesome.

However, that would be too easy, wouldn't it? Truth is, if you're trying to delete more than about 250 posts, Facebook will just throw you a "Something went wrong. Please try again." error message. Over and over and over. It simply cannot handle deleting everything at once. And sometimes it will throw that error message randomly even if you keep it below 250, or the "Remove" button will disappear, and there's no way around it other than logging out of Facebook, logging back in after clearing browsing history (or using a Private window), and trying again.

Also, sometimes stuff just... reappears after being deleted. My timeline posts deleted pretty easily, but other things seem to be stickier. After timeline posts, I worked my way through comments, deleting them year by year, 100-200 posts at a time. Some of them did seem to be actually deleted. But these "ghost comments" kept coming back, where it says like, "JamEverywhere commented on a post," or "JamEverywhere replied to a comment," and has a date associated with it, but no link and no content. Just a shell saying, "you cannot erase that you were here. We will not let you." I managed to delete all my "likes" except Adventure Time, stuck in the purgatory of a trash bin I can no longer manually empty. I could delete all my Life Events except one of the high schools I went to for some reason. And on and on it goes.

Facebook wants it to seem like deleting all your data is only a click away, but it isn't, and it never was. They won't let go so easily.

I also noticed some things about my own use patterns. Early in my use of Facebook--from 2007 through about 2010--I would only make something like 200 comments/posts per year. Less than a post a day... not too bad. This slowly ramps up until 2014, when I'm suddenly looking at 200 posts per month. It's kind of sad to watch. Especially the frantic posting in groups and discussion threads featuring people I'd never met in real life, and never would. It's stark, contrasting it to the early days of Facebook, when the point of the whole thing was to interact with friends you already had and arrange for face-to-face activities or share photos. 

There's something insidious about social media, and we all know it, right? We've all seen news reports of weird Twitter wars, even if we haven't observed them first-hand. We've heard that body dysmorphia and social anxiety are getting worse in the youth. We've seen our own capacity to do mundane things like wait in line without our phones turn into torture... we've seen the number of books we read per year dwindle from 24 to 12 to 6 to 3 to maybe half of one...

Or maybe we haven't. Maybe it's just me.

Anyway, I deactivated Facebook today. I left Twitter a long time ago, and I nuked my entire Reddit history a few weeks ago. Now this blog, which I don't even think anyone checks anymore--not even my mom, who always followed the links here that I posted on Facebook--is my only voice on the internet.

That's okay; I think it's better that way. Maybe someday even this space will vanish into the aether. But for now, this is what I want. My daily life will be mostly free from social media and internet bullshittery. On the weekends I will indulge in a lil Discord discourse with randos, if I want. I'm reading books again, though. And doing art. And writing in my journal almost every morning.

I'm resetting. Back to pre-2007 internet use levels. Wish me luck.