[I apologize in advance for the complete lack of polish on this post. I just needed to remind myself why Facebook is an almost complete waste of time (for me).]
Facebook Is Making Us Miserable got me thinking about why I continue to use Facebook. The downsides are easy to list:
- Reading with little or no benefit
- Interactions with people you don’t care about
- Less meaningful interactions with people you do care about
- Annoyances that I need to filter out of the news stream
- Trusting your privacy to a company with an ethically-challenged founder
I’m sure you can think of many others.
Then there are the things I feel that I could be doing with my time spent on Facebook:
- Learning
- Meeting new people
- Improving my career
- Getting healthier and losing weight
Those all seem like pretty important things.
What benefits to Facebook usage can I think of?
- I can keep up with what my wife writes online
- I can see what’s going on with the handful of other people on Facebook I care about
- Anything else? Hmm. Um. No.
So, while there are a couple reasons why I’m not ready to delete my Facebook account, I certainly don’t need to be spending more than a couple minutes per day there.
On a somewhat related note, I’m spending a lot more time logged into IRC these days. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for channels I might be interested in.