Well, I Did It

I quit facebook. I can hear the shocks and awes from my previous 143 friends now. Some of them may think I no longer wish to be friends with them. Others may think I've gone temporarily insane. But whatever reasons they think are not the true reasons why I did it. Here are the real reasons.

Their privacy settings are out of control. You can change it one day and the next you are automatically enrolled in something new and you have to go back in and change it. I got tired of changing everything every time I logged in. Plus, there are well documented situations of privacy concerns for facebook, and you can read about one of them here.

I also did not like the idea of people I'm not particularly fond of requesting to add me as a friend. I don't like you. Why on earth would I add you as a friend? What's more is that they keep sending the request causing a new wave of frustration/guilt every time I click "ignore", and yes, I do click the "ignore" button. People I haven't seen since high school, ones who were complete jerks to me, would send me friend requests along with quick messages that said something to the effect of "Crystal!? Is that you? Oh, man! It's SSSSOOOOO good to see you again! Will you add me as a friend so we can catch up?" I want to write back and say "No. No I won't." but that would require me to add them as a friend, send the message, then promptly go back in and delete them from my list of friends, which is more harsh than just clicking "ignore". And it didn't stop there. It expanded into friends of friends that would request me to add them as a friend just because they know one of my friends. And if you dig even deeper, you soon realize that person only knows my friend because they are friends with another person who is friends with another person who is friends with my friends. It's a never-ending cycle of MADNESS!! I kept my list of friends down to a mere 143, and I still didn't know everyone on my list all that well. I knew people who had over 500 friends on there and I'm confident it was a race between two of my friends to see who could get the most amount of friends in a period of time. It's. Not. Worth. It.

I also couldn't handle the status updates with all the misspellings, poor grammar, and excessive use of punctuation. I found myself correcting people all the time, and that doesn't make for good comments, really. Not only that, but if you click "like" on someones status, you get notifications of every single person who also likes or comments on that status and sometimes it's just out of control. You may tell me to go in and change my notification settings. Yeah, that's right up there with the second paragraph above. I had to keep changing it over and over and over and over...

The games. I could make a post all by itself about the games on facebook, most of which I simply adore. If Farmville was out on the market and available for me to install on my computer I would totally buy it. It's a really fun game. But it consumes a lot of time that could be spent doing something better and more productive. I've neglected some of my own computer games just to play that one, so I think it's time I revisited them. There are a couple of other games that I would more than likely purchase if they were computer games, but again my time would best be spent doing something else. I haven't played any of the games on facebook in well over a month, though.

All in all, I think the world will continue turning, and life will go on as expected even though I don't post a status update about my latest blog entry, or that I need to clean my kitchen. My friends who I already associate with on a daily basis know how to get in touch with me, and I them. Truth be told, I don't think anyone will even notice that I am no longer on there, so really, everybody wins. I am very guarded with my private life and try to keep it separate from work or school. Some things I share, but I get to choose what that is, not some web site that tells me what I can and can't share all the time. It's better this way.