For the past several months I’ve been growing increasingly annoyed with Facebook. The persistent changing of my news feed from Most Recent to Top Stories, and still moving old posts up when someone new replies (seriously, just let me see things in the order they are posted). The autoplay of videos and continual encroachment of ads, the multitude of privacy concerns. I know there are various plugins and settings that can be changed that will alleviate some of these issues, some I’ve used, but some I didn’t feel like putting in the work to fix on a site I spent less than an hour on a day.

I keep my Facebook friends list very small on purpose (currently it’s just under 50 people). If you’re a casual acquaintance or co-worker I’m not going to accept your friend request, because I just don’t care about what’s going on in your life. I’m not a very social person in general, so I don’t want to be connected to hundreds of people on a social network. I like to have a small group of people, and I like to be able to see things that they’ve posted, in the order they’ve posted them. When I go on Facebook I want to skim posts until I hit ones I’ve seen already, so I know there’s nothing new to read. Messing with the post order makes that complicated. But that’s not what this blog post is about, this is about Facebook slowly turning into that needy girlfriend/boyfriend who constantly needs attention.

It was near the end of August and I was preparing to move to a new house with my girlfriend, and decided that I didn’t need the annoyance (only a minor annoyance, but one I thought I could easily control) that came with keeping up with Facebook several times a day, so I decided to take a break. I stopped going to the site entirely, and I stopped checking the app on my phone. For the first few days my break was a success, I had successfully disconnected.

I’ll add here that I’m using a much older version of the app (version 3.9), so my experience may not be how the current version handles things, but I expect it is. When Facebook started enabling auto play videos in the news feed on mobile I stopped updating the app. I’m aware that you can turn that off in the settings but at the time I wasn’t sure what options would be available. Keeping the old version had an advantage though, when Facebook unbundled messenger from the main app mine kept working, I’m still able to open one app and read my news feed and send a friend a message if I want to.

You’re probably asking, “Hey, if Facebook was annoying you so much, why didn’t you uninstall the app?” Well, I may have decided to stop using Facebook, but I knew other people were still using it as their primary way of keeping in contact. I had friends who were helping me move that (other than in person) only talked with me over Facebook, and I have a weekly D&D gaming group that talks entirely over Facebook to let the others know if plans need to change. As you can see, keeping the app made more sense for keeping up with messages, I’d just disable all notifications other than Facebook messages.

Everything went well for the first several days, I stopped checking Facebook, stopped getting any notifications, and was generally happier for it (it’s the little things in life). Then something odd happened… I started getting notifications I’d never gotten before. I have the notification sounds on my phone set to various video game sound effects, and I know what each one is for once I hear it. The sound effect I have for Facebook notifications happens to be that odd sound when Mario jumps on Yoshi in Super Mario World, so it’s a hard one to miss. A few days into my Facebook detox I heard that familiar Yoshi noise, and thought that I had received a message. I pulled out my phone to check, but there was no message there. Instead it was a happy little Facebook notification that someone had updated their status.

This was especially odd because even when I was using Facebook daily I never received a notice about someones status unless I was tagged in it. And this was a status from someone I never actually talk to, and I definitely wasn’t tagged in it. I swiped it aside and figured I would ignore it. Then the next day it happened again. “So and so just uploaded a picture.” Well that’s nice, but I’m still not checking Facebook. The next day I received a notification that I had 9 new notifications and 2 new invites. Things that I had specifically turned off notifications for. This continued over the next week, getting up to 3 notifications a day that things were going on online and I was missing out by not opening the app.

One of the notifications came in around 9:30 at night when I was sitting in bed with my girlfriend. I had told her that Facebook was getting needy, and she assumed that I must have missed one of the settings for notifications. We opened up the app, I cleared out the notifications that had been accumulating, and we found one setting about notifying when close friends post that hadn’t been turned off. I don’t actually have my list sorted into close friends, friends, and acquaintances, because I’m not 12, and the idea of sorting friends into lists by closeness seems unnecessary to me.

The next day, despite double checking that every notification except for chats was turned off, I got another notice that someone had updated their status. This has continued where every day I’ll receive a couple of notifications that people are being active online, and I’m missing out on everything. At this point it just makes me more stubborn and determined to not check Facebook as I laugh at the app’s attempts to get me to interact with it. It’s akin to Navi continually buzzing around your head shouting “Hey Listen!” in Ocarina of Time.

It’s not like I’ve completely disconnected from my online habits, I still get my news from Digg and Reddit, I still read through twitter and Google+ (yes there are a few of us who still use Google+ regularly) to keep up with people I follow on there. I’m sure I still spend an unhealthy amount of time at my computer even without having Facebook to check. For some reason despite taking up a drastic minority of my online time, Facebook was the cause of the majority of my online annoyances, and I’m generally happier without it.

I’m sure there will be some point where I log back onto Facebook and start keeping up with my small list of friends on there again, but until then I can laugh to myself as the app tries to get my attention, and I continue to ignore it.