Is It Time to Delete Your Facebook Account?

Facebook is becoming less popular in the western world. In the United States, United Kingdom and Europe, millions of people have unsubscribed from the site.

According to analysis firm Social Bakers, nine million people in the United States and two million people in the United Kingdom left the social media site in the last 6 months. Last month six million Americans and two million Britons left. Users from Germany, France, Japan and Canada are also turning their back on Facebook. The amount of time we spend on the site is also decreasing.

Maybe we should say goodbye to Facebook. Here are a number of reasons why:

The unwanted new features

The commercials in the news feed, when did they come up with that? All of a sudden they dumped them on our walls. We receive ‘suggested posts’ that are only there for commercial reasons. Were we informed beforehand?

Last year Facebook introduced timeline and the new feature was made mandatory to all users, revealing our past. Our entire history can be seen on our timeline nowadays. We received a notification about the new feature and that was it. Now we are stuck with it. Facebook wants us to tell our life story and also the story we had in the years before the website even existed. You shall be confronted with your past! Perfect for exhibitionists and narcissists who like to show of the glamorous life they are leading but a bit much for most of us. Right?

A few months later they came up with something new: the ticker. The ticker is the bar you see on the right hand side of your screen next to the news feed. The ticker allows your girlfriend to see that you recently liked a picture of a female friend and shows your parents and family that you recently made a naughty but funny comment on one of your mate’s status updates. Was the ticker really a useful new feature? Do we have a say in all this?

The Bore

We’ve all seen them, haven’t we? Pictures of food in our news feed. A friend makes an Instagram picture of his meal and others comment things like ‘enjoy your dinner’ or ‘that looks tasty!’ Bleh. Others post comments about the weather: ‘it is raining!’. Yes, we can all see that, thank you… The more eccentric friends are happy to take their shirts off to beg for likes and comments like ‘you look hot’ or ‘you are so pretty!’ to boost their fragile egos. Most of the time we see the same people posting status updates. There are the regular complainers… To make it even more negative and boring they complain about the same insignificant things: the weather, the commute, the lack of time. Of course we can stop checking our Facebook news feed to relieve ourselves from the boring or useless updates, but on the other hand we want to stay in touch with friends we don’t see every day. That’s the reason most of us decide to keep using the site.

The social pressure

When someone wants to be our friend on the social media site but we don’t accept the friend request we are committing social murder. Seeing the wannabe friend a few days later in real life will be so awkward! It is a social obligation to accept every friend request we get. What do we do when someone we don’t particularly like starts to post comments on our wall? Deleting the comment from our wall will make our ‘friend’ feel humiliated. The wannabe friends are a hassle. But there is another group that can cause anxiety: family members. Posting party pictures is probably not a good idea when your mum also happens to be your friend. Other people can tag you in awful pictures too. Even with the privacy options available we need to be diligent to make sure we don’t hurt anybody’s feelings. Meeting friends face to face without the possibility of keeping track of ‘who said what’ is a refreshing experience at times.

The alternatives

There are indeed many alternatives available. The most trendy among teenagers are Instagram andPath. Many teenagers stop using Facebook or choose to use one of these social media platforms on the side. Instagram is a social network and photo sharing site that has been acquired by Facebook. In the one and a half years that it has been property of the firm it’s gained thirty million users. Path is a mobile network based social network app that is gaining one million users weekly. A good reason for teenagers to step over is the fact that the new services are not overrun by parents. The new cool addition to the social world is SnapChat. SnapChat is an app that allows us to send videos and photos that will disappear quickly after they have been opened. Unlike the social network giant, SnapChat is spontanious, simple and discreet.