I got rid of a lot of Facebook friends recently, a lot of people who I met once, years ago, and haven't talked to since. It's not personal, I just got way too much useless stuff on my feed, compulsively taking over my free time. I also unliked all the pages I have liked over the years. Because when I'm taking a short break from studying to "check up on Facebook" the last thing I need is an advertisement for Silence of the Lambs, or Batman, or Almond Breeze, or any other myriad of random whims I clicked like for. I also removed many people from my news feed who I still would like to have as a possible contact, but don't want to see their status updates constantly.
Originally I had the itch to delete fb entirely, but I use it for some very important reasons, It's my primary storage for all of my pictures... all of them. I know I could use Flickr or something for that, but I don't take high quality photos. I'm not much into photography, I enjoy seeing others excel in it but it's just not a hobby I plan to take up. I also don't want to keep track of some ridiculous external hard drive of memories.I'd rather have a couple thousand photos stored easily assessable on Facebook, in the cloud.
Another thing I use fb for is contacting people who I talk to infrequently and maybe do not have their numbers. I am able to message them if need be. I'm just not too interested in checking my feed 8 times a day anymore only to see advertisements. I didn't like the person I was becoming, looking at my phone every 5 minutes, ignoring the people I was actually with. Instead I might look at fb a couple times a week, and since I only have 59 friends now, and only about half of those on my news feed, I can look through what they've posted in about 10 minutes, comment if I wish, and move on to something more productive, instead of scrolling through advertisements for hours of my day. fb is designed to be addictive, to keep you checking and liking and commenting, and supporting their advertisements. That's fine, that's how they make money, I just am not falling for it anymore, it's way too time consuming.
The last step I took in my social media scale-down was to put my phone number, email address, and blog URL as my background picture on fb, and delete the app from my phone. This way my friends can contact me if they need to, spammers can't (since programs can't read my handwriting on my background picture) and I will have freedom from my update addiction.
If you're feeling like fb is taking over your life. maybe take some of these steps to down-size your media consumption.
