Facebook … deactivated

You can tell how worthless Facebook is by the difficulty Meta has made to get out of it. I deactivated my account this morning because my feed has morphed into an endless sludge of bile and stupidity. Then, I tried to log into the browser tab for Messenger, and it logged me back into Facebook and reactivated my account.

I hate it so much.

The journey to freeing myself of that swamp really started back when I was a local newspaper reporter right as the worst of the pandemic was passing. Everyone was angry. Then someone I knew launched a dumb recall campaign against school board members.

What followed were four of the stupidest months I’ve ever endured, with people digging through my account and gossiping. I set my account to public to prevent that. Humanity’s stupidest instincts were plenty to overcome that.

Facebook provided easy access to an audience. If you’re a creative — I write, I also dabble in photography, I like sharing about typewriters … who knew — that makes it a difficult place to leave. You can create and share. You won’t get paid, but you’ll have the audience. If you aren’t interested in monetizing your creativity, that’s a strong incentive to put up with humanity’s worst.

Four years later, Meta has transformed Facebook from a place where you can share with strangers and keep up with folks to an endless slog of posts encouraging strangers to fight. It’s like a nightmare version of a town in the Old West, where every building is a saloon full of drunken cowboys who start slugging it out at the slightest provocation.

My original plan was to delete my account. Yesterday, I learned that deleting my account would make Messenger unusable. The unfortunate thing is I’ve used Messenger as my primary communications platform for a decade. So, once I move all of my conversations to something else, I can finish the job.

Facebook is a toilet. You should abandon it.