Hello people. I wanted to share my story on why I started using Facebook a looooong time ago, how I used it, how did it affect me and why I decided to finally press the hardest button – “Log off”.

This is going to be a personal story so it might not apply for you but it definitely applies for me so that's why I decided to post this under "Personal" and not under "Technology". I hope this makes sense :) .

Also, this is going to be a long post so if you don't care, it's OK.

Anyway, everything started back in 2009 when I saw Facebook for the first time. Before that I was on different platforms, different forums, websites and MySpace which was the first social medial I have ever used but I was not very active on it maybe because I didn't understand it quite a lot but that's a different story. What I mean is that I was already an active internet user before Facebook but when I created my first Facebook account, everything changed for me. At first, I didn't really like it, I thought that Facebook is kinda dumb, useless and I didn't really use it for the first couple of months but with the time I became more active on it. All the people I have known form all different web-spaces have come to facebook and I could finally have all these people at one place and communicating with them became very easy. In general, I don't chat with my real friends on facebook but with people I would probably never meet. People who live outside of my country. In general, I used Facebook mostly for "penpalling". I also used it to participate in many different language groups since languages are what interest me the most. So I decided to meet some of the people I actually used to chat with for about a couple of years and that's exactly what I did. I went to a different country on a trip and I met with one of my facebook "penpals" and I have to say – I was very disappointed. This person was very awkward and we couldn't talk face to face. It was weird. It was like this person didn't care that I was there, that I actually came to his city to visit him and so I became angry and finished the friendship. The problem was that I had this kind of situation with every facebook "penpal" I have seen in the real life – offline. And it sucked. Hard. But I decided that this was reality so fuck it.



The other problem that happened is that I became a victim of spying by some people in my family back in 2012. The issue was not that they were also watching but they also contacted some of the people who have tagged me in their pictures and they started asking them who they are etc. Which was very embarrassing and it pretty much ended my communications with them. Please note that I was like 22 at that time and those people were potential sexual partners that I liked and wanted to be close to and hope for the best ;) . Of course, all of this caused a lot of family drama with the family members in question and a lot of harsh words have been said from my side. This is when I got concerned with my online privacy and started to become less public in my facebook profile. Only my facebook friends could see my activity and I could not be tagged without me approving the tag (I had to click a button).

For the next 6 years I traveled a lot, I visited a lot of different countries and my facebook profile was full with "check-ins" where I was, what I did, what I ate etc. I shared everything with my facebook friends, I even made special albums for them to see and tried to do what everybody does on Facebook – to portrait the "perfect life" - going places, smiling, being positive and all this crap. Eventually, I started using it just for the fun of updating my facebook timeline and not because I wanted to. I started doing what everybody was doing – oversharing useless and pointless information about my life and trying to polish it as much as possible while the reality was a different picture.

In reality I was alone. I was sad, lonely, not happy with my life and overcompensating with the shiny polished pictures and waiting for the "likes" to come. I was very active in the groups too – always commenting and wasting times on pointless arguments. In every free moment, the Facebook app was opened and I was scrolling over the notifications to see how people replied to my comments on some shitty topic. And I thought that this made me less lonely, less sad and more social. When in reality it made me more distant, reserved and numb to the world around me.

The other reason was the internet in general. The internet back in 2007/2008/2009 was still a "cool thing", a thing where you could get away from the shitty reality and now in 2018 the shitty reality is online and in facebook. I can see politics, a ton of ads and the same dystopian articles I could see in the newspapers before I came online.

I believe that one can morph their online existence and their "netlife" so that's why I quit facebook. Because I can.

This doesn't mean that I might not get back to Facebook but for now, I don't miss it. But if somehow I want to get back, I don't see why not – I can do that too.

What are your thoughts about facebook, social media and the time wasting on those platforms? I would love to read your comments on that topic.

If there is a way to edit the title of the treat because for some reason there is a spelling mistake, I would be glad :D :D :D

Well, my thoughts on facebook.. I have one facebook account (just a fake one that isn't related to my real life)
I used to interact with my dollars-chatroom friends on that account , but recently I unfriended all my friends there. Because I got some anonymous attacking me on dollars-chatroom like spread gossip and rumors about me. I knew that was my fault for posting on social media. I wanna be pure anon like I used to before I had facebook with bunch of internet friends. Now every time I go to that dollars-chatroom website with my nickname that related to my facebook, I feel like they're step away from me and don't talk to like when they didn't knew me at all.
I still use facebook just for memes. Not bad at all.