Dear Reader,

Facebook is a scary place. There are angry humans, vulgar displays of ignorance, people vehemently disagreeing with you, anxiety-provoking news, lots of silly and useless posts you have to scroll through to reach what you do care about. You may want to avoid seeing a person out of dislike, or because seeing he/she hurts you.

But hey, I could have just described what you could find in every human settlement, workplace, large family. Unless you live alone in a lighthouse or a secluded monastery, and you don’t have access to any means of communication, of course.

If you’d like to quit Facebook, I will not blame you. In this post, I’m going to explain why I won’t leave it, but just in case here is a quick guide on how to delete your account permanently.

I have felt the same frustration that some friends reported me about Facebook, and I’ve thought about leaving the Zucker-Blob-Thing-Monster. However, I’ve realised that the pros of using Facebook can vastly exceed its cons (however, the advantages are not necessarily significant, it depends on you). Let’s try to make a quick list:

PROS:

  1. It provides another way to contact people you know. They could change mail, phone number, address. I’m old enough to have spent my years in high school without a cell phone, and I don’t have the number of many school-time friends, but thanks to Facebook I can reach them
  2. You can keep track and take part in what happens in your communities, be they virtual or real, local or distant
  3. Joining groups is a fantastic opportunity for learning, sharing your progress and experience with other enthusiasts from all skill levels
  4. You can be heard. If you think that you can give a positive contribution to the world, you can offer it via your posts
  5. You can be publicly appreciated for what you do and contribute. Everybody needs a dopamine boost now and then!

CONS:

  1. Let’s be frank. Facebook is full of hate, assholes and bots ready to jump to your neck. That scares me a lot
  2. There is a lot of useless material on social networks. Low-level humour, kittens, hopeless causes, contents you don’t care about at all and that only clutter your feed. Not the same as spam, but pretty close
  3. Facebook can be a great distractor. Think about how many times a day you open the app on your phone, and try to keep track of the time spent. I’m writing this paragraph at 06:30 AM and I’ve already spent 11 minutes on Facebook. Damn!
  4. Your privacy can be at risk if you are not careful enough.

The lists are not complete, and every item could be expanded into a whole post, but I’m sure that the issues are more or less familiar to anyone. My purpose is to make you think for a minute about facts you already know and go on to analyse how to respond to every con with some prescription. In the end, we’ll see if Facebook is still worth a visit given the right “preemptive actions”.

Let’s start by addressing cons number 1 and 2, and let me summarise them as “there is content I don’t want to see or people I don’t want to interact with”. I began experienced this feeling with a friend who posted many angry, polemical, extremist political posts. I didn’t want to do anything drastic: he is a good guy that I know because of my tabletop gaming passion, and his opinions are within the norm of what everyone is entitled to profess. He was just a little over the top for me. Then I discovered the “unfollow” option: go to your friend Facebook page and check Unfollow. His posts will stop appearing in your News Feed, and he will not be notified about the fact. Immediate benefit! No more whiny posts to read, yet we are still friends and can contact each other. I did the same with other friends after that enlightening moment, to put an end to situations of hatred/general assholeness and to stop useless content in general. Another excellent tool for decluttering your feed is to shut down single pages. Suppose you don’t want to unfollow a friend, but you can’t stand some of its reposts: you can opt to block out just some of the pages that he is reposting from. Your brother is a great guy, but you couldn’t care less about one of his strange hobbies? Stop the pages he is posting. Instant tidiness!

Con number 3 represents one of the greatest battles of modern times: hordes of psychologists, marketers and artificial intelligence VS your brain and limited willpower. The struggle seems doomed from the start, and it is a struggle for life itself: your ability to focus is one of your greatest assets in today’s world, the one that can give you a clear competitive advantage. My opinion is that you cannot always hope for your willpower to outperform the competition: you have to find a way to make looking at Facebook a little less practical than what you are used experience (or, even better, unnecessary by design). There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this point, so I’m going to discuss some different strategies.

First of all, disable Facebook notifications on your phone and desktop browser. You don’t need them. They are just a distraction. It works for anyone, anywhere, anytime, and it’s immediate.

I usually scroll through my feed using the app on my phone, which is an ultra-quick way to access it. I tried an experiment for one week: I deleted the app (which, by the way, is a storage and battery drainer) and used only the browser, closing the tab after every access. That improved things a lot: less access, I could still keep up with my friends and news, share my thoughts. After that week, I installed the app back: it did not feel the same, and I spent too much time on it again. You guessed it. I deleted the app again.

Another strategy to avoid accessing Facebook less is to use other services to post. I share my blog posts using automation created with the If This Then That (IFTTT) service: within an hour of publication, the article gets delivered to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and stored in my Evernote. No need to access any one of those services. Another service I use for publishing is Buffer, which allows you to create a schedule (e.g. “every day at 18:30”). Then you proceed to add contents to a queue, and Buffer will automatically post them according to schedule. I use the service to satisfy the demented humorist residing in my brain and to keep the “Indomiti Idioti dell’Idioma” (the Fearless Idiots of the Language) page updated with an unhealthy dose of silly Italian wordplays.

As far as the negative aspect #4, the potential loss of privacy, I will not say much, for two reasons. First, I’m not an expert on the topic, and second, there is enough material out there to sink a battleship. The short version is: don’t use Facebook if you value your privacy above everything else.

SO?

In conclusion,  what am I going to do? I’m not going to cancel me out of Facebook. I’m going to customise my experience and cut down usage time. That’s pretty simple and straightforward, but realising you need to do it and doing it are two steps that are not quickly taken.

Also, I will increase off-screen activities in a subtly indirect way: having more lunches outside the office with friends, always carrying a book with me, scheduling more face to face gaming sessions and band rehearsals. This sounds trite, but it’s just what I need; same as taking broth when you have flu: old but gold.

While writing this post, I read Cal Newport’s new book Digital Minimalism. I strongly suggest that you do the same; it’s like THE instruction manual for life-tech interactions.

Until next time, remember that you should run the show on your screens, not the other way around.