Goodbye, Facebook

Last night I effectively deleted my Facebook account by ratcheting up my privacy settings to the highest possible level. Oh, the calamity! All I can do now is accept invitations to events: anybody who hits my Facebook profile will find a link here, followed by a few old-skool-ish contact details: mobile number, email, and Twitter username.

I’m really, really bad with trivial shit, and I love great conversation, so one of my New Year’s Resolutions was to make a concerted effort this year to avoid the former and seek out the latter. Facebook, from my experience, seems to suffer from a really poor signal to noise ratio: the junk far outweighs the pay dirt. It’s not that those in my network aren’t smart, funny, creative or articulate – the issue (I hope!) is that Facebook seems to encourage quantity, while doing nothing to reward quality. That doesn’t gel with me at all.

Twitter, meanwhile, has a few nifty features in place to help ensure signal outweighs noise. Because followers subscribe to your content, the most successful strategy is to post less, but better. 140 characters encourages conciseness. Retweeting rewards quality. Hashtags encourage relevance.

Twitter feels like the digital equivalent of a dream dinner party: because you control the guestlist, and because everybody’s out to impress, there’s no excuse at all for bad conversation. Facebook feels more like the digital equivalent of a beer hall: sure, everybody you know is there, but you have to listen real hard to hear over the racket, and nobody remembers much the next day.

So, simply put: this year, I’m going to avoid noise and gun for signal. I’m going to avoid the people, places, services and situations that leave me feeling hollow, and head toward the stuff that fills me up. Facebook didn’t hurt me – it just never felt particularly nourishing. For the short stuff, Twitter seems healthy enough. The rest of the time, I want to dive in deep: letters, long emails, and more of those hours-long conversations that keep you buzzing for days.

I don’t want serious, but I do want indelible.

Update: this is why I quit Facebook.