The End of The Facebook Decade

Happy Year of the Rat. As we kick into 2020, I just uninstalled the Facebook app on my cell phone. I immediately felt an enormous amount of relief and have quickly filled the gap on my homescreen with my favourite reformer pilates app Vive Active.

Facebook is the new tobacco. It is toxic, addictive and people who enjoy it find it very difficult to get rid of it. Government, namely in Australia and the US has been trying to tax big tech. Australia has done a great job adding plenty of taxes on cigarettes which has been successful in incentivising smokers to quit or rather disincetivising them to smoke.

When that dreaded "f" logo disappered off my homescreen, a huge wave of nostalgia came over me as I reminisced on the days before Facebook i.e. pre 2004. Golden years when RSVPs to event invitations actually meant something. As the decade was coming to an end in 2019, there was marked decrease in Facebook usage especially relative to Instagram. The Facebook app, in particular timeline, has undergone very little innovation and has become complacent. The only significant change it adopted was not making the number of likes visible on the platform for both Facebook and Instagram.

It took me a while to rid myself of Facebook. One of the best catalysts was my frequent travel to China. Due to the "Great Firewall" of China, Facebook along with all its subsidiaries and also Alphabet with all its subsidiaries are banned in China. What a refreshing detox it is everytime I land on the mainland. This does not mean there is a lack of social media in China. On the contrary, WeChat is the envy of Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Google, Snapchat, etc. It is a super app and I gain great satisfaction as well as value from using it. It's not used to manipulate voting preferences. It's ironic that Facebook is perverted as a propaganda tool. If Hitler had access to Facebook the world may not have made it beyond 1943.

I'll leave you with some follow up reading thanks to a couple Oxford researchers: https://www.sciencealert.com/in-50-years-there-could-be-more-dead-people-on-facebook-than-living-ones I would go so far as to say that Facebook is in fact the equivalent of being buried alive. It is killing you as you scroll through aimlessly and get brainwashed. Do so at your own risk. You've been warned.