Did you notice how Facebook became your bad habit? Do you catch yourself mindlessly scrolling the feed on a daily basis? Do you wish you had more real-life social interactions with your friends and relatives? Do you think the world has Facebook addiction? If yes, then maybe it’s time to get rid of it. Here is a short guide how we can do it together.

Step number one: don’t delete your profile

Deleting your social profile is the common fad among social media quitters. However this will not hurt Facebook. These are the main reasons:

Your friends on Facebook will still think you are in the platform. Most of them assume that everyone is there and will not remember the fact that you’re not. This will not encourage your friends to follow your example. Facebook keeps a shadow profile with your data anyway so profile deletion just means that you lose control of your personal information.

Instead of deleting your profile change you profile picture to this image:

If users start changing their profile images to this picture it will destroy the system from the inside. If you will have this or similar picture the algorithms of Facebook will turn against the platform:

Your friends will always remember that you left the matrix when getting friend anniversaries with inactive friend. Seeing your profile picture will make them constantly reconsider their choices about staying in Facebook. When you will have a birthday everybody will be reminded that there exists such a person in the world who is now free from FB control. If somebody will try to invite you to an event, tag you or send message to you they will also be reminded that you left after seeing your profile picture.

If these profile pictures gain a critical mass Facebook will become an unpleasant and dead place to be. Actually it is already like that but you just don’t see it yet. The profile images will reveal the emptiness and eventually all people will want to move on.

After changing the profile picture I encourage you to take these additional simple steps:

Step number two: do not share, post or like anything on Facebook anymore

This one is obvious. Do not engage with the platform and do not drive any more traffic to it.

Step number three: support social platforms that have a premium model

We have had enough abuse by social companies that have their revenues generated by ads. I don’t think we should shun social media completely, but we should start paying for it. Encourage your friends to join platforms like Medium and also pay for them. Only such platforms can provide a brighter ad-free future where our data is not sold and privacy not violated.

Best of luck and see you on the other side.