First, I want to mention that it has been painful to do without the daily interaction with all of my friends. I truly love you. You make my life better and I hope that I had a hand in making yours better as well. Now, I feel very lonely, but it's a self-imposed loneliness, and what's more, it's a similar level of interaction that I had before I started using Facebook regularly about a year ago, so it's possibly an artificial loneliness stemming from the addiction of being surrounded by my friends.
Anyway, here are the reasons I left Facebook:
- Facebook's User Experience sucks. Changes are forced onto users rather than providing users with options so they can choose how they experience Facebook.
- Some of Facebook's forced changes forced me to fundamentally change how I used Facebook. I didn't use Facebook the way most people did because I'd configured it to prioritize certain types of messages and to not show me other types. One day, that all disappeared.
- Facebook wasn't reliably showing me all of my friends' feeds. I started to notice that one or two entries got dropped from here and there, which was enough for me to miss things that my friends thought were important.
- Facebook lost my trust. With the forced UI changes came some privacy changes which defaulted certain things to become publicly viewable. I became concerned that Facebook might change anything at any time without considering my desire for privacy.
- Facebook lost my trust. I read articles about how they had implemented a global password that, if entered, would grant access to any account. The reasons that such a thing would exist are limited and none of them are trustworthy.
- Facebook lost my trust. I was allowed to see certain status changes of people who weren't my friend, merely because I had invited them to become a friend and they had ignored my request.
- Facebook lost my trust. Though it happened after I left, the fact that Facebook misdirected over 100 private messages to a reporter helps me justify my belief that Facebook is untrustworthy.
- Facebook seems to be run by someone lacking ethics or respect for his users. This has permeated through Facebook's culture.
But I have some ideas that I will share on what would make an ideal social networking site. In my next post.
