The past three or so years, I've used Facebook every day of my life. I really enjoyed using it. But today I decided to delete my account, permanently.
It wasn't long before I became addicted to Facebook. The entire social media site was a scheme. Here on Steemit, every post has equal psychological grab, each having a short, concise, to-the-point header, and if it's interesting, you click on it, AND YOU READ. It's a very intellectually stimulating set up, at least in comparison to Facebook.
Instead of curating minds, Facebook was curating trolls. And too many times I found myself giving into basic psychological temptations. For example, all text is displayed on every Facebook post without headers. This teaches people the habit of just "scrolling on through." This is surprisingly quite a destructive habit, and I'll tell you why. It encourages your brain to skim-read, and to "pick-and-choose" what you want your brain to hear. Noisier, more visually extravagant posts get all the attention, well thought-out messages get scrolled through and ignored.
Another thing wrong with Facebook was text size. The less you wrote, the larger the text was. This encouraged certain trolls to write less in order to grab a larger audience, especially in fringe political groups. Instead of wanting to write an articulate piece on a subject, people were better incentivized to give a quick, quippy opinion. This didn't make a healthy environment, and I've seen it aid in the ripping apart of Libertarian Circles.
Facebook is also very centralized, and did things no fully-aware person would have any good reason to be okay with. Aside from being in bed with Google, buying and selling search history information, Facebook was notorious for censorship, especially the censorship of anyone that didn't conform to a socially liberal, economically authoritarian, and/or nationalist worldview. Too often I find my Google searches in Facebook advertisements, and too often I found myself muted on Facebook for simply sharing an opinion.
I've invested so many hours into Facebook. I've invested days. Months. I kept going over my 10gb/month plan, half of my data being attributed to Facebook. This was expensive, and has costed me money. I never fully realized how negatively this social media site was impacting my life. And I feel this strange peace of mind knowing it has all gone away.
The final and most important reason for quitting Facebook, however, was mostly personal and applies personally to me. Sure, the police can use your Facebook to track you to some extent. But this wasn't all my problem. After being kicked out of my house, my step father decided to get with his ex-attorney (which is now a county prosecutor) to try to find legal ways to take me down. First it was a false claim of property theft, then it was a false claim of mental instability. All that's really behind this is the hatred he has for me after I told him that the State was evil, and that I refuse to go to his church anymore, since I believed in no gods and no masters. They found a reason real quick to cut me from their lives. Removing Facebook from my life became necessary, as I felt unsafe, and it pained me to see the rest of my extended family in idleness, unsure of who's side to take or how to intervene, despite the overwhelming evidence that I'm an innocent man being harassed. For this reason, Facebook is too centralized to be safe for some of us Libertarians including me, and Steemit is a lot safer of a place to reside.
After having thought through all these different wonderful arguments against Facebook, also recognizing that I was addicted so much to it that I didn't even use other social media, I decided to kill the source of my obsession. I figured that it would be better if Steemit was my primary environment anyways, since there's at least a chance I might make some money off of my posts. 😎 👉👉👉 💲💲💲
Anyways, thanks for reading my uninteresting rant on Steemit. Just needed to let off some steam. Have a nice day friends.!