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mashby

The personal blog of Michael Ashby

Tag / social media

January 22, 2023

Everything Old Is New Again

Went down a little rabbit hole over the past couple of weeks and thought I’d share.

I’ve been sitting back watching Twitter slowly fall apart as a spectator and rather enjoying it becasue it didn’t affect me directly. All the outrage seemed to be focused on those that used the default client app or web site. Not me. As soon as there were 3rd party clients available back-in-the-day (has it been 16 YEARS?!?), I’ve used them. First with Twitterrific and then I migrated to Tweetbot, which I’ve been using since around 2011. I’ve never had ads, promoted Tweets or timeline shenanigans, so I was immune to all the fuss. That all changed last week.

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The words delete written in graffiti in East London
September 1, 2017

I Deleted My Facebook Account

I have been in a love-hate relationship with Facebook for a while now and as of almost two-weeks ago, I decided to delete my account. I took it a step further and instead of doing the default by suspending my account, I actually requested that my account be deleted.

Facebook has felt like a necessary evil in order to stay in touch with friends and family, but I found that my usage habits had changed as well and I didn’t like the result. I think, like most people, Facebook has become a welcome distraction during the day. Work/life/whatever sucks, so let’s see what other people are doing, that sort of thing.

After all the focus on how Facebook and bots contributed to the 2016 US presidential election and listening to podcast episodes like Sam Harris: What is Technology Doing to Us?, I became more aware of my habits and began questioning why I continued to use the service. Was it really to stay-in-touch, or was it more a Pavlovian response to stress?

Ultimately I think it was the latter, which is why I opted to delete my account.

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