How? There is an easy solution to being inundated with things you don't want to see. Unfollow anyone who regularly posts things you don't want to see. I've done this. I've unfollowed pretty much everyone on Facebook, except for a few people / groups. I also hide posts that I don't like, but come from people I still want to hear from (I've heard this gets fed into FB's ranking algo for you).
Now my feed is mostly interesting news stories / interesting commentary / educational content / conversations on Facebook groups related to my interests. My FB news feed is actually better than Twitter now, albeit with 30x less content. Tangentially, this is why I appreciate the Twitter algorithm change.
Now I spend less than 20 minutes a day on Facebook. I don't get why people feel the need to delete the account altogether.
I don't get why people feel the need to delete the
account altogether.
Can I ask how old you are? Growing up, Facebook was not just an aside: for a brief moment in my life, Facebook was life. It's where things happened. I'm now 25 and glad I've never stepped foot on Facebook soil since I was halfway past 18. My personal experience is that it was a vile substitute for social life and I don't miss it one bit. So my point is that depending on the demographics, Facebook can mean a totally different thing. For a young man growing up, no Facebook meant no girls, no parties, no fun - and that is a travesty.
Edit: I don't understand how my comment is controversial - it's an anecdote. To the risk of sinking even further: would downvoters care to express themselves?
I'm 33 and FB lets me keep in touch with people I no longer see every day or even for a few months. It provides a real value for me.
Many people seem unhappy with Facebook because "ugh others are stupid". Hide their posts, problem solved. This seems to me a teenage problem, not a tool problem. We've all been teens (even if only by definition) but bashing the tool because of the users seems a bit snarky.
My girlfriend uses Facebook for much the same reasons as you - to keep in touch with friends and family who live far away. But my gripe with Facebook is just the social dynamics of it, not the users per se. In my particular case, Facebook was, for a time, a very toxic and all-encompassing environment. It just isn't for me.
This is exactly what I've done with my FB newsfeed. You really do have to be ruthless with unfollowing people. But now my feed is just a stream of stories from the Times, Economist, Atlantic, etc. Some public figures post interesting stuff to: Yann Lecunn, etc.
20 minutes to see what up with a few close friends, save interesting articles about society/economics/the world to read later, see what technologies/etc. engineering students at my alma mater are talking about (Facebook group)? That's nothing...
My solution has been the following: Create a selected Friends list on FB and only click on that when logging in via my laptop, since it'd take more work to unfollow those I don't want to hear from in my normal feed. Then, per recent news regarding deleting FB app to increase battery life, I deleted both it and Messenger as well, and now just access it via mobile Safari, going straight to the aforementioned selected Friends list. This also solves being notified all the time from either FB or Messenger, as I only see notifications when I click on the FB icon I've created via Safari.
How? There is an easy solution to being inundated with things you don't want to see. Unfollow anyone who regularly posts things you don't want to see. I've done this. I've unfollowed pretty much everyone on Facebook, except for a few people / groups. I also hide posts that I don't like, but come from people I still want to hear from (I've heard this gets fed into FB's ranking algo for you).
Now my feed is mostly interesting news stories / interesting commentary / educational content / conversations on Facebook groups related to my interests. My FB news feed is actually better than Twitter now, albeit with 30x less content. Tangentially, this is why I appreciate the Twitter algorithm change.
Now I spend less than 20 minutes a day on Facebook. I don't get why people feel the need to delete the account altogether.