Thanks to new consumer protection laws, you can now export your data from most popular platforms. I downloaded my data from Google (Search, Ads, YouTube, Gmail, and Chrome) as well as Facebook (Facebook Core, Instagram, and Messenger). WhatsApp doesn’t have a visible download your data tool, albeit their content is encrypted and stored ephemerally.

We built a service to help you analyze your data from raw dumps, so you don’t have to crawl thru JSON/HTML files to learn about yourself.

All graphs below are taken unmodified from hey.ai.

You can derive similar insights on your own data as well. These graphs are only based on mine (Facebook, Google, YouTube) and my fiancée’s data (Instagram): it is not representative of the market.

Facebook

1 | Content: Posts, Comments

Monthly metrics for content creation are extremely down from my early days on Facebook.

I’ve posted 1777 times, but < 10 times a year in 2017 & 2018. In July 2008, right after high school, I made 125 posts in one month: definitely oversharing. 🤮

People still post or share content & write on my timeline, but mostly only on my birthday now.

2 | Messenger.

Messenger metrics are mostly uphill. The recent dip is likely due to a shift our friends made moving our group chats to WhatsApp, which is still on the FB ecosystem.

Messenger has been one of my core messaging services. I have over 100k messages from 723 different users.

3 | Reactions.

I still react quiet a bit to content, and reactions are upward from early Facebook days. I mostly react to out of network content (i.e. BuzzFeed, Tasty).

4 | Profile.

Ah, the Facebook profile. Sadly, I haven’t edited this since 2015. How will people know what my favorite show is now? Perhaps, with Facebook dating there will be an uptick in profile edits 🤷.

I haven’t updated my profile information since 2015 on Facebook.

5 | Other Insights.

My friends and I have said quiet a bit of offensive content before we went off to college. Time to scrub this horseshit 🤬Thankfully, deleting these posts is an option.

Interestingly, the sentiment of my comments is typically more negative than the posts I make or posts others have made. Here is a comparison of all three: