Back on 22 August I finally scheduled my Meta/Facebook account to be deleted. Note that you have to schedule the deletion, and then wait 30 days for it to go into full effect. That’s so if you have a change of heart and decide, for whatever reason, that you don’t want to leave. All you have to cancel the deletion is log back into you account. I would have written about this back on the 22nd, but I wasn’t up writing about anything. I was coming out of the worst of COVID at the time. I had just enough presence of mind to find out how to delete my account.

That’s what I find most aggravating about Facebook (and that’s what I’ll continue to call it). I had to search externally via Google (meta delete account) before I found the correct set of instructions within Facebook. If you try and search within Meta/Facebook, you will be led on a wild goose chase and never delete your account. That constitutes a dark pattern of the worst kind.

This isn’t the first time I’ve deleted a Facebook account. This is, in fact, the fourth. I’ve been on Facebook starting in the early 2000s. I remember wasting tremendous time playing Farmville. I never spent any physical dollars, but in hindsight time is certainly money so I wasted quite a bit. In the end I dropped it because Zynga kept updating the game to make it ever more difficult to play without spending real money in-game. Changes would also wipe out progress I’d made up to that point. After that happened twice I just walked away.

That makes the last of the Really Big Social Media platforms I’ve dropped. I still have an Instagram account, but I’ve not been on it since sometime last year. I can’t stand to be on Instagram because of all the ads and accounts I don’t follow overwhelming my feed.

The only new social media accounts I’ve joined in the last twelve months have been Mastodon and Bluesky. I don’t spend any time on them anymore. The idea of wasting time on any social media platform has become anathema to me.