I'm done.

Facebook was the granddaddy of social media. Twenty years ago it filled a genuine gap. We had MySpace and Friends Reunited… niche platforms doing narrow things. Facebook arrived and I could reconnect with friends old and new, see what people were up to, and feel vaguely connected again. That mattered then - I’d recently moved far away, got married, started a family. Facebook was the answer to staying in touch.

I honestly think it peaked around the time they let you add a cover photo to your profile.

Since then… it’s just gone to shit. Endless algorithmic sludge. Rage-bait. Sponsored nonsense. AI-generated trash. A feed full of people I don’t know, and pages I never followed. This “content” is optimised to keep my eyeballs twitching rather than my brain engaged.

It was all so obvious when Meta ditched Instagram’s usability in favour of tricking users into using it like TikTok.

• Stories embedded into the main feed.
• Videos blasting at full volume.
• Gestures that didn’t back out of content - they closed the app entirely - only to reopen into another reel.

It was a bad experience and it was deliberate. 

What finally made it intolerable was watching my father-in-law struggle with it. A few months before he passed, short on time, he was just trying to see pictures of his granddaughter enjoying life at university… instead he was getting pulled into an endless stream of noise, wasting minutes he didn’t have left.

Deleting Instagram was one of the most gratifying things I’ve ever done.

Since then Facebook has been on limited time. None of the socially functional humans I know use it anymore. So what’s even the point?

The final straw arrived when Meta blocked my login and demanded a choice… pay a subscription, or accept ad-supported surveillance.

Fuck that.

These cunts already have a horrifying amount of my life. Decades of posts. Photos of my children growing up. Location data. Relationship graphs. Audio snippets. Behavioural patterns. A stitched-together digital Frankenstein of me and my family, spanning a generation.

They harvested it all while smiling and called it “free”. Now they want monthly payments as well? That was the moment they broke the spell.

Apps deleted and my account is effectively mothballed. The only reason it still exists is to keep my VR headset connected to the Meta store until they inevitably shutter that too.

I won’t miss Facebook. I miss what it was before - before the greed hollowed it out.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.