I deleted my Facebook account yesterday. I was on FB about 45 days and in that short amount of time I learned to hate it. It seemed like the website worked different every time I logged on. Another reason I didn't like FB, I spent too much time looking at my "FB wall". I didn't have a lot of contact with the few members I friended. I had hoped to share updates with my grandson, Dan, who moved 8 hours away, but he doesn't make many posts. My step daughter, Greta, accepted my friend request but wrote to tell me I shouldn't expect anything from her because she hated FB and never used her account. Why didn't I heed her warning?
Pretty soon, I remembered a niece-in-law telling me to get on FB when we saw each other last Christmas. So I searched for her name and sent her a friend request. She accepted. I also friended her husband and their amazing, beautiful daughter. After that it seemed like they owned my FB wall. Seemed like all I saw was their updates and postings. It was hard for me to find my other friends among their very frequent posts.
Then I decided to friend the White House and several newspapers just to balance things out. But all those newspapers were wall hogs. It was even harder to find my real life friends status updates. Being new to FB, I did not realize what all this friending was doing to my real life friends pages.
After two weeks on FB I got into a fluff-up with my niece-in-law because I made a remark about abortion and health insurance she didn't agree with. So we went back and forth about that for an afternoon. Ending with her suggesting I get some professional help. Which I thought was out of line. I figured out how to hide her posts from my wall and pretty soon she noticed and sent me a message asking if I had meant to hide her posts. I told her I meant to. Not long after that I unfriended her, her husband and her daughter. I figured I needed to be the adult and get the heck out of her face otherwise we two would have been simmering our discontent forever.
I was tired of all the news and White House updates so I unfriended those websites after the health insurance bill finally passed in the Senate and President Obama signed it into law. This made my FB wall page look downright homey. I saw just the stuff my friends and family posted. I was very sparing about my comments because I didn't want to start another fluff-up with the friends I had left.
In fact I chose to view my page "offline" most of the time so my F&F wouldn't know I was online. FB has a chat feature, if two friends are online at the same time they can use the 'chat' feature and send messages back&4th. An excessively redundant feature if you ask me. What is the point? My solution was to pretend I wasn't online even when I was. That way nobody bothered me while I was trying to figure out what FB was all about.
I made a determined effort to understand Facebook. I created a fake account so I could see how my things looked on the fake friends page. Because my fake friend didn't have any other friends all I saw was my stuff.
I decided to visit my real friends wall and horrors - they were blocking me from appearing on their wall. Which explains why I never got any comments on the few posts I did write. I couldn't really blame my friends, I guess they decided to hide my stuff during the time I was friending the newspapers. It was probably too many posts for them. Just like my niece-in-laws family posts had seemed like too many for me.
After a few more days I realized how much I hated Facebook. I hated it because I wasted too much time on the FB wall. I hated it because, FB was not as welcoming as I was told it would be. I hated it because, I read FB was giving my profile information away without my consent. I hated it because I felt old and out of date when my younger friends posts didn't make sense to me. Like, why would my grandson post a photo with the caption "thumbs humping his truck" what on earth does he mean? I hated it because the purpose of Facebook eluded me.
When I hit the "Delete my account" button, FB gave me one more reason to hate it. I couldn't just delete my account and be done with it. My account is in "Delete limbo" for 14 days to give me a chance to change my mind and return to the horrid wall.
Let this be my last update status from FB:
Your account has been deactivated from the site and will be permanently deleted within 14 days. If you log into your account within the next 14 days, your account will be reactivated and you will have the option to cancel your request.
Don't think so Facebook I am out of here.
