I remember what made me quit facebook, way before it became Meta: the TV serie Person of interest. It gave me a big awarness of the scale of mass surveillance. I already had the project to quit because of Zuck’s shenanigans and the lack of interest i had in the platform, but this was the last straw for me.
Stop using my Facebook in Covid, most of what I saw was shit about Covid being fake, saw good friend from high school falling for it and realized that the algorithm was tailored to do just that so I delete it shortly after
Stop using Instagram last month. Keep seeing the same shit over and over and when I start flagging it the app revert to show me thirst traps and conspiracy shit. I miss my antifacist bro over there, the dogs and all the illustrators I had followed. So if you know where they at
Thinking of deleting Reddit because my regional sub is cesspool of people thinking they’re the left but are spewing the same Trump argument about immigration but the RPG community is lively there
I quit Reddit and deleted my account after nearly a decade last week. I just found it to be a source of consistent stress. It got to the point where the most innocuous comments kept getting me temporarily banned from subreddits. The final coffin nail was when somebody posted an article about how the Trump administration scrubbed all the information on HIV/AIDS from government health websites. I replied in the comments, “Double plus good.” Apparently Redditors thought that I was endorsing this censorship as a good idea and downvoted me. So to clarify, I edited my comment and said underneath, “For those downvoting me, read the novel 1984 by George Orwell.” That’s all. I didn’t say, “You fucking idiots need to read a goddamn book!” I simply cited the reference for my original comment. For this statement I got a three day ban not just from the subreddit but all of Reddit due to harassment. The ban was automatically imposed by the bots, so I had an opportunity to appeal and have a real person review it. I did so, fully expecting anybody who actually looked into it to be reasonable, but they kept the ban in place, so I decided enough was enough.
The use of automated tools that blindly ban based on keywords and the subreddit is out of control. As you found there is NO attempt to put anything in context. Truly moronic administration that violates their claim to be a “place for discussion”. I got in trouble because I left a comment questioning antivaxxers in an antivax subreddit and suddenly got flooded with bans across reddit because I had left a comment in a politically incorrect subreddit. They use scripts to moderate. Of course there is NO recourse, no mods will listen to you, no reddit admin of the mods to contact, nothing.
My feeling is reddit has reduced discourse to bad puns, nothing even slightly controversial, must agree with the sub’s echo chamber and ads, lots of ads. If you go against the herd you will be culled. Just smile and nod.
They wish to drive away the people who wish to speak the truth. I created an account here yesterday to hedge against Reddit becoming even more of a cesspool.
Welcome to Lemmy, I guess?
Danke.
I think people don’t even realize the scale of the removals, because when it isn’t banning you the platform goes out of its way to hide it from you when your comments are removed, it looks like it is still there while you are logged in but no one else can see it, I only even find out by using the reveddit extension, and I’ve been banned from subreddits just for mentioning that there’s a way to do this. It’s usually a totally innocuous comment that gets removed, assuming they just have a keyword that triggered a bot or a mod just didn’t like what I said and clicked delete. What they’re doing can hardly be termed ‘moderation’ anymore.
back when one could make the little text ads in facebook i saw how one could use the facebook graph to basically zero in on one person and then thought “wow this is gross imagine if i was a bad faith actor zero-ing on one facebook person to target them repeatedly through these little text ads” and that was enough for me off of facebook.
that was like 2008 or so.
when I saw the graph and the possibilities of bad actors abusing it i drove myself off most social media. here isn’t too bad. i like the federated nature.
What made me leave Facebook was discovering Reddit. What made me leave Reddit was getting banned lol. What made me leave Twitter (or never actually ever bother much with it) is that it seems more like a big popularity contest than ‘social’ platform to me. Besides, if it was really social, there wouldn’t be a character limit that benefits marketing speak and hashtags more than constructive conversation.
Never saw the point of places like Instagram that are based on being able to upload photos. Big deal, you can upload photos anywhere. And the only time I use YouTube is when I’m in the mood for music videos. I have less than zero interest in watching people’s crappy home videos, it’s like reality TV but even more boring and brain rotting. And I’ve got better things to spend my time watching. Oh, and I tried TikTok but noped out very quickly. I see absolutely no value in being spoonfed content by some shady algorithm as opposed to choosing and curating your own content.
Personally, I do not care if the platform that I’m on uses my data to advertise to me. I fell in with the ‘privacy’ crowd like a decade ago and did my time shaking my fists at big brother but I just don’t care anymore. None of this is new. As long as the people on the platform are the kind of people that I could get along with, I’m fine. And quite capable of using an ad blocker if I so desire. I couldn’t care less if Reddit used my posts in the Xena or She-Ra subreddits to advertise romance fantasy novels to me. There’s more important things to focus on.
I quit Reddit when they killed third party apps, I quit Twitter when Musk bought it.
Reddit API change, I never use any others
I killed Instagram and Whatsapp recently when Mark started buddying up to Trump.
Deleted Twitter shortly after Elon took over, which bummed me out since it was a good place for software development information.
Quit reddit after the API ordeal when I didn’t want to use the official client.
I was a long time user of each platform, and I was bummed when I had to leave each.
Now I have bluesky, lemmy, mastodon, and some occasional discord servers I hangout on. I miss Instagram as a time waster, but I’ll survive without funny dog videos and fitness models.
Loops.video is a great insta/tiktok replacement for dog/cat videos at least.
How do I follow loops.video contents from pixelfed?
That I am less sure of. The only way I got in was making a separate account at loops.video and downloading the app.
I don’t think it’s federated yet
I left fb when I realized I was on it out of obligation and not because I wanted to be on it. The experience was degrading minute to minute. So I just decided to delete the account one day.
Never been on Twitter as I find in rather dumb long before it was bought by Musk. I am still hanging onto my reddit account because some of the communities are not there elsewhere.
I only really used Reddit, so during the API crisis I left.
Same. But before that. The last straw for me was in 2019 I think where Instagram announced they will use your Pictures for AI.
I left it. But I managed to leave everything and go to reddit, after destroying my Phone and using an old Phone without google on it.
Musk unbanned Trump from Twitter.
My family relied on Facebook messenger for communication for a long time so I only just recently deleted it and Instagram after Zuck announced hate speech was explicitly allowed
Setup a matrix instance with a meta bridge and use that to slowly get rid of meta altogether. Works both for messenger and Instagram dms.
Didn’t realize there was a meta bridge to messenger. That’s dope
Thankfully my family shifted to iMessage a while ago and at least that’s encrypted and doesn’t support the meta business. I deleted all of my Meta accounts already
there is a brdieg even for imessage… just saying…
deleted by creator
FB: I gradually felt more bored with it, so I started to log in less frequently. I think I haven’t logged in for at least five years, but I had already stopped using it regularly about a decade ago.
Twitter: As above, but the toxicity of the environment was what pushed me away.
YouTube: Newpipe. I only log in when I really, really really need to message someone on the platform or if I need to upload content (like once in a year or less).
Reddit: the API change, although I have logged in a couple times last year to ask things we don’t have active communities for here. Niche stuff.
Deviantart: their Eclipse “upgrade”, which trashed all the search system and the way art circulated.
I left reddit over API stuff, obviously.
Twitter had a few weeks where the algorithm was so broken people were getting recommended gore videos. Just a description of the most common one set off my OCD trying to avoid it. It was always kind of a shit website and not worth having an episode over, so I just deleted my account.
Tumblr’s nsfw ban also nuked a bunch of communities that aren’t inherently nsfw, but have large factions that are. Think like the furry fandom. I just woke up one day and my tags didn’t work and my favorite creators were gone. PLUS the wording included the phrase “female-presenting nipples”, which just sounds wildly transphobic and has no definition so they can ban whoever they want. And they doubled down on it a week later. Immediately uninstalled, heard they’ve only gotten more overtly transphobic since.
I don’t even remember when I stopped using Facebook. I don’t like being stalked by every heterosexual mom I went to church with as a teenager, so I never used it long.
Snowden revelations in 2013
I quit Facebook/Insta long ago but started perma deleting stagnant accounts a little after Cambridge Analytic stuff I think? It was my first real eye-opening moment when it came to data privacy and the whole misinformation cesspool that is social media.
Reddit when 3rd party apps were dropped.
Twitter partly when Musk killed 3rd party apps…then fully when he became a shithead.
Snapchat mostly because it annoyed me.
Never used TikTok other than viewing a video someone sent me in a web browser.
Bonus because I’m still salty: Prime when they introduced ads in Prime Video.
