In 2008, a school colleague sent me several invitations to a fairly new platform where you could network and exchange information with friends. I had already heard of Friendster and MySpace, but Facebook was something new. So I registered there and at first had difficulty understanding what it was all about and what the value of this social network was. Until one day I was visiting my home town and a cabaret artist friend of mine posted that she was still rehearsing for her show tonight. I had no plans and spontaneously went to her performance. I understood the value and it would only increase over the years.

Over 1,700 friends accumulated in my network, I participated in and managed several Facebook groups and posted quite diligently myself. Often links to my own blog posts, sometimes links to news items and occasionally I tried to contribute something funny. Until, yes, until I realized that I was finding fewer and fewer posts from my friends and more and more advertisements or suggestions to follow this or that group. Only posts from about one or two dozen friends seemed to appear regularly in the timeline, but more and more uninteresting nonsense. My attempts to tame these ads with browser plugins or even make them disappear, or to suppress them with Facebook’s own feedback mechanisms, were to no avail.

Until, yes, until it became too much for me. I also decided to leave this social network. It wasn’t the first. A year earlier I deleted my Instagram account, and a few months later the one on Twitter, now known as X, where I had also accumulated over 5,000 followers since November 2008. While at the latest since the turmoil surrounding Donald Trump’s first presidency and the influence that viral fake news had had on Facebook and Facebook subsequently tried to suppress and only flushed more tame posts into the timeline and articles from daily newspapers almost completely disappeared – see more on this here in this article from CNBC – Twitter/X went the similar and partly opposite way. There, more and more conspiracy theorist websites were pushed algorithmically and, above all, so many bots and fake accounts appeared that discussions became impossible. Added to this were the numerous hate posts and comments that turned Twitter/X into a snake pit. It didn’t help that the new owner of Twitter/X, Elon Musk, contributed to this himself.

When meta-CEO Mark Zuckerberg then dissolved the moderation team on Facebook, threatening to relegate the discussions on Facebook to Twitter/X, it was an easy decision for me. After Instagram (also a meta platform) and Twitter, I said goodbye to Facebook. And not just because of the reasons mentioned. Twitter/X and Facebook in particular proved to be less and less valuable for my work. I am a freelance technology trend researcher and author and I use social media to get a quick overview of topics through my networks, but also to link to and promote my own posts. But the statistics spoke an increasingly clear language. While I had an average of 16,000+ followers and contacts on LinkedIn, with three to four-digit numbers of hits on my websites, the number of hits on Twitter/X and Facebook was often only in the single digits. The effort to engage there was simply not there.

Since I haven’t lost Instagram or Twitter/X yet, I’m sure I won’t miss Facebook either. The most important contacts have moved to LinkedIn and, for example, the Twitter-like but more civilized Bluesky for similar reasons. Thank you Facebook and Twitter/X, it was fun and interesting until it wasn’t for me anymore.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!