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Ask HN: How to gracefully exit Facebook?
38 points by forkandwait on Oct 2, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 49 comments
As we left the Social Network movie last night, we hadn't even made it to the car when the wife said "Well, FB has crested." I would like to take down my page and get out, but I don't want to just disappear.

Has anyone here made a graceful Facebook exit? What did you do? What did you wish you had done?



Do you have to completely delete your account right away? Why don't you try gradually reducing your Facebook presence by following these steps:

1. Stop posting any content yourself. Stop using/playing all apps/games. If you need to contact someone, do it via phone, email, or some other non-Facebook medium. Disable Facebook chat so they can't message you on there, and reply to their messages/wall posts in person or over the phone (replying with another internet-based medium might raise some red flags, but using an entirely different form of communication won't).

2. Delete content you've posted in the past. Remove apps/games you have installed and remove yourself from the groups you're in. Remove information from your profile. Untag yourself from pictures others have posted.

3. Delete friends that you haven't talked to in a long time.

4. Contact your remaining friends and give them your contact info.

5. Delete your account.


I did this 6 months ago. I'm still alive and social. This is the five-step program, folks.


My friends already had my contact info. They're my friends, after all.

So I just told them all I was leaving, deleted every post and picture, and removed every friend-link.

It isn't really that hard.


It's more the outer circle of friends that I am concerned about; the close friends already know I am not a facebook person anymore.


Does your outer circle of friends have an expectation of a certain level of knowledge about your life? Would it be considered rude of you to remove all your information and leave a note (in your information) simply saying "I no longer use Facebook, please contact me via email"?


In Germany, StudiVZ (a German facebook clone) was quite notorious for being privacy-challenged, to the point where people started calling it StasiVZ (after the former secret police of the GDR).

What happened was that people removed all identifying information from their profiles and changed their names to something that was not recognizable for anyone to search (i.e., either you had them already in the contact list, or you couldn't find their profile without asking them).

AFAIK, Facebook wants you to have your real name on your profile (as per TOS), but a friend with a stalker problem didn't have any problem to get it set to something non-namelike.

IMO, a combination of a non-searchable name and restricted privacy settings for things like "who can tag you in pictures" and "who can see my posts" should solve the bulk of the issue.

Extra points for blocking third-party inclusion of facebook.com scripts or images in your ad blocker (which also blocks the "sign in via facebook" javascript code, like-buttons etc. - these are probably the biggest privacy issues outside facebook itself).


I "parked" my profile for a month and it really helped break my manic feelings of checking it all the time, then stopping for three days out of guilt, etc.

Ultimately those are the feelings I'm trying to rid myself of, but there are pros to having it around. After a month off, I barely cared to login, but I'm glad it still exists for the random PM or funny news feed. I'm back to checking it every couple of days and I'm happy I didn't delete all my friends, etc.

Your experience may vary though, I doubt most people noticed I was gone.


I did. Missed you, buddy.

What was your name again?


I feel like this is just another thinly disguised "Look at me, I'm deleting Facebook!" post. Do you really need our advice on how to remove yourself from a website? Just delete it, or delete all your data.


Just delete the account and move on. If you attempt to make a "Why I'm too cool/smart to use Facebook anymore" sort of post you're just going to come off as an elitist.


If you're on Hacker News, you probably are.


I have facebook and don't really care for my account I am too busy to use facebook and don't have time to read about my friends status updates.

Honestly if you are a serious business man you don't have time for facebook.


I think while you're definitely free to leave, just keep in mind that the movie is very exaggerated and the truth is really not anywhere as bad as it seems. I think Lawrence Lessig had some great commentary on this the other day:

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/78081/sorkin-zucke...

Aaron Sorkin is a great writer, but he's writing for dramatic effect, not truth. Don't let the film factor in to your escape.


I just skimmed the article and saw Lessig say he thought the three UConnect people didn't deserve anything and that they were being ridiculous along with our system that is awarding them money.

The UConnect guys were led on for two months. Then they see Zuckerberg release thefacebook.com with the main feature they had - exclusivity because of college. I don't see how that doesn't warrant something in the range of 1% of Facebook. Don't get me wrong though, I don't think any of the UConnect guys would've done anything with UConnect on their own, but in these circumstances they do seem to deserve the settlement.


Many of the 'friends' you have on Facebook are anything but. They're all superficial and mainly virtual relationships you have with others you will most likely never meet let alone contact offline. I quit Facebook several months ago and haven't felt a thing. You'll soon realize that those you really cared for and whose relationships mean anything were those who you already kept in contact with outside of the service. I didn't bother leaving a going away message. Unless your friends are part of very small circles, your absence will go unnoticed. Facebook is great at making people think they're getting a lot more attention than they really are, and so people tend to think that leaving will create a void that friends will cry over. While the reason to quit here isn't really a valid one, I really would recommend deleting your Facebook page to anyone, unless the survival of your circle depends on it or you need it for familial purposes. It's a huge time sink and for something so shallow.

In short, if you really want to leave, just do it. Don't bother with being graceful; no one will notice or care for more than a minute.


>Many of the 'friends' you have on Facebook are anything but. They're all superficial and mainly virtual relationships you have with others you will most likely never meet let alone contact offline.

Seriously? I have in the ballpark of 180 friends on Facebook, and maybe a dozen of those are people I haven't met in person. The vast majority are either friends from real life or people from my social circle I interact with occasionally anyway. Then again, I've always treated Facebook as a fairly personal medium, and I don't friend people I don't know or don't like.

I mean, yeah, if you treat Facebook friends like pokemon, it's not going to have a lot of value for you, but if you abuse any social tool, it's not going to have a lot of value for you.

Earlier today, I found out that an old friend of mine that I grew up with is going to be in town in a couple of weeks and made plans to grab lunch while he's here. I haven't seen him in 7 or 8 years. Things like that are incredibly cool to me, and the entire reason I use social networking sites. They facilitate me interacting with people I care about; they're not a substitution for actual interaction, but they make it possible in the first place.


Facebook is an excellent tool, despite its many privacy concerns.

I hear people talking about leaving facebook entirely and that seems a bit short-sighted and draconian in measure. Little do I hear discussed changing the way that we use Facebook.

Last month, I went from 250+ friends to 40. Instead of using Facebook as a mean to accumulate every acquaintance I've ever made, I decided to only keep the friends to which I am close and comfortable sharing parts of my life. I changed most of my privacy settings to the most restrictive possible.

Yes, Facebook may change its privacy settings again. If the privacy becomes such an issue to warrant me leaving, I will leave. However, keeping up with the privacy changes and settings is a price I am willing to pay. Facebook is not free.

Being an entrepreneur, I do want an easy way to announce things I do. I want a way to keep in touch with those closest to me. That number of people is 40 right now, and still seems a bit high. Still, since I have cut most of my friends I have found myself more open and willing to use Facebook.


I haven't deleted my account, but I just post status & a message board message saying I don't log in often and where to contact me - which is my web page. You could just leave an email address there.

For me, Facebook is a giant phone book. It is a way to look people up and for people to find you. I like it for that, beyond that - email me.


It seems pretty simple. Just put your desired contact info in your FB profile, stop going there, and stay logged out.


I deleted my account. They still store your data and your photos on their server for 14 days. They say 'in case you reactivate it'. Just tell your CORE friends/family you are leaving for greener pastures. Just leave a status for everyone else, if they care, they care. If they don't, who cares.


I try to keep only 50 friends max. I use to have like 300+ friends which was totally useless and definitely not good for me because I was always checking every pages, answering comments, chatting etc. but I wasn't "that" connected to my true friends.


Just as Google has gone into markets that are far beyond search engines (like phones), Facebook will. I think there is a high likelyhood that five years from now people will look back at this time and realize now was just the beginning for Facebook.


yeah agreed, they have a subscriber base of 500 million. there are plenty of ways to monetize that with products.

i.e. the rumored facebook phone


I rarely visit the Facebook site, and only then via a different browser than my main browser, which isn't logged in to Facebook, so it doesn't have the cookies etc. It is also ad-blocking the Facebook domains.

To get notified of interesting things happening, I subscribe to Facebook RSS feeds. JWZ made a listing of some of them here: http://jwz.livejournal.com/1144527.html About the only thing it doesn't include is photo updates.

With this setup, I visit Facebook perhaps once a week.


Do you have a website? If you do, this would be a lot easier. If not - well you can always message everyone a copy of your email address one week before you disappear.

In my experience it's not that hard to get out of Facebook - the friends who do want to find you will either Google for you or ask people they know are your friends for contact information. And that's for the really urgent stuff. Just make sure you have a Google-able presence (maybe a Google profile?), an email that's easy to find and you're good to go.

Good luck with the move! :)


Tell your actual friends you're leaving Facebook.

As for your "Facebook Friends", remove all of your content, lock down your privacy settings, and leave a note on your profile page that says the account is no longer being used. That way, when people find you on Facebook they will know what's going on.


Facebook is just kind of a shitty website. There's not much to making a graceful exit -- I gave all my friends advance warning that I was deleting my account, and then did so. For the vast majority of people, anyone you want to talk to has ways of doing so outside of FB.


Just delete your account, done.

Real friends will contact you anyway. You might miss a few stupid pictures or something, but you can spent your time with more useful things anyway. It is no big deal, delete your account and forget about it. One time sucker less. It is really no big deal!


I think my favorite departure comes from Half Baked: "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you're cool, and fuck you, I'm out!"

That said, you can keep an account without ever visiting the site, for those not-that-close friends.


it's easy.

post "i'm deleting my facebook account"

deactivate your account

stop using it for 14 days

you're gone.


You can't fully leave Facebook. People can still tag you on photos they take even when you don't have an account. (Just a text tag, but it could still be incriminating...)


But this is true even if you never had an account. That's like saying you can't leave the internet, because people can still talk about you online.


True. But I guess as a social utility the internet and facebook are more evasive than people assume. I think, facebook more so, because if you know anybody that uses it, you lose more 'privacy'.


i'd like to understand the thinking behind "fb has crested" and wanting to take down your page and get out. i haven't seen the movie, so maybe i'm missing something.

to the point of still being findable, use http://about.me or http://extendr.com/ to avoid disappearing.

and strangely enough, the SERP for "matt albiniak" on DDG has twitter first, linkedin second, and facebook third.


Who cares if fb has "crested?" If you have some reason of privacy, I can understand, however just deleting your account because it's not the cool thing anymore seems rather petty. Clearly if it's how your friends find you, it still serves a function in your life. Delete your friendster account, yes. I don't understand this compulsion to leave facebook.


I joined FB in late 2004. My main objections to today's Facebook are:

  * It's boring.
  * It's a waste of time.
  * I don't trust it.
The new Places app is a great case study. Here you can check yourself in anywhere, tag your friends (whether they're there or not), and see where others are checking in. But my checkin history is clearly of more benefit to retailers and advertisers than it is to my friends. I want to use this app to meet up with people, to organize events, to see where my friends' favorite places are. It's just not very good for that, and it reeks of poor design -- for example, enough people checking in at your house will force it to be a public location, and there is no process to privatize it again.

For many years I was north of FB's average of 55 minutes per user per day on the site. Several months ago I stopped reading the news feed, and that more than anything else has helped me keep my usage under 2 minutes per day.

I don't regret effectively deactivating my account, and like others have noted, I doubt anyone noticed I'm gone. My main reason for joining in the first place was basic social planning -- today, I still think their photo and event apps are very well executed and among the most valuable parts of the site. There's just too much baggage that comes with their use.


I haven't been particularly active on Facebook for a year or two now. I think the very-active period lasted only a few months for me.

However, Facebook still has huge residual utility value even if I'm not actively using it. Friends use it to get in touch sometimes. Occasionally I receive a message from someone I care about who doesn't have my email anymore for some reason.

I wouldn't delete my Facebook account if you gave me £100 to do so, even though I'm not actively using it - for the same reason I don't delete my LinkedIn account.


I don't care that it has crested (though it has) -- I care about the privacy concerns, and I don't want my high school friends finding my dad and my current grad school social circle all on the same page (yuck!).


Start removing friends. I do it every once in a while.

If you no longer want to be in the lives of your high school friends or vice versa, even online, cut the cord. You'll find that people are usually apathetic and none the wiser.


You can hide all this information and you can make yourself unsearchable. You can create multiple accounts (technically not supposed to but lots do). It's just like any other social tool. Use it how you want it. Tell it what you want to. Don't be friends with your dad if you don't want people finding him. The problem is not facebook, it's you and how you use it.


Maybe it is petty leave Facebook because it's not the cool thing anymore. But I joined Facebook because it was the cool thing which is equally petty. My friends can contact me just fine without Facebook. So yes it's petty, but that comes with the Facebook territory.


Well, it may be petty. But isn't that the whole point of a social website? It's about small talk, ephemera, and socializing online instead of at a party, club, bar or coffee shop.

If it's no longer cool because everyone goes there, then how do I remain cool? First by making sure everyone knows I don't go there anymore,. "Facebook is so last year." If I was through being cool, then I could just stop going there and not make a statement about it.


Working on it. My suggestion is send your friends some contact info, like email address and or phone number (depending on whether they are really friends) and let them know you're shutting down your facebook account. Don't really need to give any explanation, just say you're closing it down. If pressed, maybe just say it is a distraction, or whatever.

Facebook won't actually close your account, though. That's the hard part. You have to go thru and delete all your information manually. IF you look on your feed / wall, you can see everything you've done, and you can go and click on it, and delete it. It is a long slow tedious process, and it takes me about 2 hours to do a year.

The normal "cancel my facebook account" procedure that facebook does is to just suspend your account. IT is all there and if you ever log in again, it comes right back. While it is suspended you won't show up on your friends lists, etc, but all your activity is still there.

This makes it really easy & tempting--in the days where just about every webpage has a facebook like button that if you accidentally press will cause you to see the facebook login screen-- to bring your account back.

I went around and around with them over a year ago about this, and their policy is that there is no such thing as "canceling" a facebook account. They keep it ready and waiting for you "for when you want to come back." Thus they will only allow you to "suspend" it. (this policy may have changed given all the high profile facebook quitting in the last year.)

I'm deleting all of the info, when that is done, I'm going to change the real name on the account to asdsrqwer sadfvcawer and then the password to something random and then "Suspend it".


http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_ac...

In the last few months, Facebook has amended their help pages to be more clear that there is also a permanent delete option. It suspends your account for 30 days, then purges it. I used this, and as promised I could no longer log in after the 30 days were up. The comments I had left on others' posts were removed, and photos I was tagged in had the tags dropped.


You can delete your account here: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_ac...


You could try Suicide Machine. They essentially do what you just described (Delete all your friends, and posts, etc.

Also, that removes the temptation/ or means to go back to your old profile for which you will manually have to re-add all your friends.

http://suicidemachine.org/


I wouldn't waste time clicking the "delete" button on everything in your wall. When I left facebook this spring, I spent an hour or so clicking that button hundreds of times.. then I ran Give Me My Data -- and it found the old, "deleted" wall posts. It's not particularly surprising that deleting something just hides it, poorly.

While I then perma-deleted my account (at least I hope so), I assume they still have all my data, and that it's probably leaking out to anyone who knows where to look.


You could try the Web 2.0 suicide machine. It automates what you are trying to..

http://www.suicidemachine.org


That is when it works and is up...




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