Leaving...

So the 11th was my one year clean of Facebook and Instagram. And just like when I quit smoking all of those years ago I still miss it, even though I know it was really bad for me, for the people around me, for the people who keep using it. That's the nature of addiction. And make no mistake, Meta and the like designed their products to be addictive.

Now, what I'd love to be able to do is to write about how I started three new hobbies and learned two new languages and found a way to save the world with all of that new found free time but...

Well, I still have my phone and I still spend way too much time scrolling news feeds and Bluesky and playing word games. So yeah...not really.

But overall it's still be beneficial to not have it.

The things I miss:

Seeing my friends that I only saw online. I don't know what anyone is doing anymore and I miss that. I'm the weirdo who WANTS to know what you had for breakfast and to see all of your vacation pictures.

Being able to contact companies when I needed help with their products, you would be shocked how much customer service has been shunted off to their Facebook accounts. The number of follow up emails I've had to send that started with, As I said, I don't have Facebook...

Seeing the cute little embedded clips from Instagram that people include in their newsletters. If you don't have an Insta account all that shows is gray box. TikTok will at least let you watch the clip one time without an account. Insta does not.

Seeing the informative little embedded clips from Instagram that people include in the their newsletter.

The hit of dopamine when people liked and shared my content. This piece along with liking and commenting on friend's posts is the real addictive part for me. Anyone who was friends with me in those spaces probably saw a 25% decrease in their likes just from me leaving. I was a serial liker. And I'm not the only one, Meta experimented over and over with the exact metric of likes and shares that would hook people. How to drive that (the variable like emojis for instance) and what to push to keep you liking.

I know I've talked about it a LOT this year. But that's been to keep me from installing it again "just for a quick peek" or setting up a burner account that I wouldn't post on, I swear, I'd just use it to check on friends. It's like working any other addiction meeting, Hi, I'm Denise and I'm a social media addict. Hi, Denise! Great, could you say that again and again all day so I know you're still out there?

But, seriously, it is the way I make sure I don't go back. Because, as a lot of people have pointed out, I don't even miss what Facebook and Instagram are today, I miss what they were when I first started. I miss the fun parts not the shit parts that ended up taking over.

It only took me like 4 years after quitting smoking to always remember that I was no longer a smoker so I guess I've got a few more years of thinking..."Oh that would be a great Insta post!"

But for far so good. I will always miss what it used to be. I will always be glad I missed the complete downfall into AI slop and bots.

One year down. Now to find all of that free time I should have!