Am I wrong in not having a Facebook profile or any other type of social media account?

There's pretty much like 3 people that I talk to on a regular basis on facebook chat. If it weren't for them, I would probably just delete my account now. I try not to friend family members because that will just lead to drama. I've unfollowed most people because they just share a bunch of stupid facebook memes that offer nothing to me or spread a bunch of liberal and conservative hogwash. So pretty much all I see are really good friends that post stuff, bands that I like, my school page, and news from various networks. Yet I still hate it.... It's really unnecessary to have a facebook and I find the whole concept pretty horrible. There's nothing really fun about it. I feel like you have to be a super gossipy person to really care that so and so are getting married or that this person got to go on a vacation to europe. Meanwhile I'm sitting there like "Is this really worth the 20+ likes?" Oh, don't get me started on my sister in law either. There's only so many times I can see her white mom memes.

Well I've tried shaping my facebook to fit around news networks and people that I like, you still get a burst of something that you don't really want to see appearing on your feed and then there's the whole awkwardness of really wanting to delete someone, but you've been friends with them since middle school or they are family members that for whatever reason you added and now you regret it. It's horrible.

The only real social networking site that I enjoy is Tumblr. Unlike facebook, you can go anonymous which is really great when you want to express a little creative freedom when you make a page. You're not obligated to put a picture of yourself, state your age, sex, where you went to high school, and all that other creepy information that facebook asks. You really make it your own too with the people that you follow and what they share on the site. Want to follow extremely passionate feminists? Go right ahead. Interested in gaming and anime blogs? There are tons to choose from. So yeah tumblr may get a bad rep for the loudest people on there, but it's really what you make of it and I find that pretty great. Also reblogging is really addictive so there's that too.

This thread really makes me want to take the plunge and remove all that unnecessary crap from my life. I've gotten really tired of all the political diatribe that I see in my feeds (on both ends of the spectrum, no less), and I feel like I'd be better off actually, truly, communicating with people who actually matter to me.

I might just get like a LinkedIn profile for professional reasons and then say eff it to all that other business. It doesn't seem to do any good, and the idle moments I spend reading through it could probably be used much more constructively. Hell, I could be reading a book. Or heavens forbid, playing a video game.

I know this isn't what the OP means, but I feel like this question is a glimpse to our dark cyber corporate future where private social media businesses control our sense of right and wrong.

No you shouldn't feel that way. I only use Facebook to communicate with family and people who I know irl and speak to regularly. Now that I think about it, I only have like sixty or so friends and more than half are family. I also find having a Facebook is good as just an extra method for people to reach you.

I've got an instagram because I'm in to photography. Taking pics with limited resources (phone) is a good exercise.

I still don't get the point of twitter though...

I don't really use my Facebook account all that much for social things. It's an interesting read every now and then, just to see where some of my old friends are at now. I got to go to a pretty good high school so all the people I know are scattered across the world so it's always nice to see their pictures and to congratulate people for graduating, getting married or buying a house and stuff like that.

That said I think the social feature I use the most is the ability to set up private groups. It's a really easy way to keep in touch with people you wouldn't necessarily call friends and since the majority of people check Facebook more often than their email it works out pretty well.

Also I don't think I'd ever delete my Facebook account even if I stopped using it entirely because I absolutely love signing into stuff with my Facebook ID. I know I'm lazy but seriously this is probably the best feature for me :p .

I don't think I'd ever delete my twitter account either.I pretty much only use it to follow video game people and probably only ever read it once every couple of weeks when I'm bored but it really does come in handy if you need to query companies via their support twitter accounts ( which I've weirdly had to do a lot of these last couple of weeks).

That said I totally understand why you'd get rid of it if you felt like it was getting in the way of your relationships instead of helping with them.

You pretty much got your answer from everyone else, but I'll go ahead and throw another big fat "NO" in the ring. And for the love all that is holy, don't feel guilty or worried that you're the problem. I dumped almost all of it and feel much better for it. It was easy to get caught up in it all when the social media boom got rolling, but you shouldn't feel trapped by it. Social media never made me feel more connected; instead, I felt palpably disconnected and frustrated by all of the stupid shit that abounds within it. Besides, I figure if someone is only willing to interact with me through Facebook, that's a problem in itself.

If you want more out of your real life relationships, then that's where you should focus the energies you might have otherwise spent on Facebook. Good luck on your quest.

Nothing wrong with that. It seems you took the whole thing too seriously anyways.

You probably made the right choice there dude. I only used twitter as a way to keep up with things, but even that can become a useless timesink.

I'm contemplating closing off my Facebook too. I don't blame you. I leave Twitter around because I actually follow news and game news through there and find it easier than most game websites. Through I won't lie I am on Instagram a lot but that's because of my girlfriend now.

There are many times I've thought of closing all of my social media accounts, especially Facebook, but I still have a few people that I talk to on there so I keep it around. I also don't live in my hometown anymore so it's nice to be able to see what old friends and family are up to every now and then. I either unfriend or unfollow anyone that uses their Facebook to post melodramatic crap or just stupid shit in general, so I do pretty good on that front.

So, as everyone else has already said, no you aren't wrong for not having a Facebook account. I actually sort of envy you.

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Not really, but.

Basically, the argument for social media, is to be able to be found. Smartphones have taken over the world, and we don't put numbers in the phone book anymore. Facebook exists for the person uninterested in social media more if someone wants to reconnect, etc. For keeping up on weddings, family events, sharing pictures from vacations, etc. But many people take it too far, and just fire off a stream of consciousness, and all of the opinions and information overload can just make it stressful.

So I dont think anyone 'needs' social media, but it has a purpose that is greater than petty arguing and privacy invasion. It's like the few people who didn't want cable in the 90s, before the internet started to really compete with TV as an entertainment source, everyone just kinda had cable, but there were a few holdouts that just didnt want it, and there was nothing wrong with that. Facebook has yet to become the social necessity the telephone was and still is, and I don't think it ever will.

Thanks for ll the love GB dudes and dudettes. Reading how many of you felt the same way and reacted the same sure is a good way to calm my anxiety.

Happier? Could be, just have some anxiety at seeing how my friends IRL dwindle, but I guess it's for the best, huh?

And that brings me to another related point, how do married, 30+ year olds, make friends IRL nowadays?

When Facebook was taking off, I was still in high school. So a vast majority of my Facebook friends are my high school friends. A few I have kept in touch with, but for the other, oh let's say 98%, I did not. In college I wasn't the best at mingling and didn't really meet that many friends in college. I'm coming up on the four year anniversary of my college graduation, and I haven't kept in touch with anyone. So the 150 or so friends I have on Facebook are more or less the same 150 friends I had like 7 years ago.

I randomly signed into my Facebook to see if anybody tried to get in touch with me that way. Nope. I mean besides the same people trying to friend me because we had the same last name and saying Happy Birthday because a notification popped up on their Facebook wall. I then spent the next 30 minutes looking through my friends list to see what happened to the ole high school gang. A few people cleaned themselves up. More people got married to people I never heard of before. A few people had 2,000 friends. (How does that even happen?) Some people changed drastically, while just as many others stayed more or less the same. It was a nice thing to do, but it was more out of a curiosity than reaching out to them.

So yeah, I've been kind of over Facebook for years now. I've been thinking about deleting my Facebook for the past year and I probably will do it soon. I enjoy using Twitter though. Even if I only have a few followers who actually know me, I like the act of tweeting. I like it in terms of a sort of record keeping, like I was here on this day, or I did this on this day, or I said something really dumb. Plus with how you can favorite things, I can go back and look at all of the dumb stuff that happened on the internet, things that made me laugh, or articles I liked that somebody posted the link to. Also I like the reach it has, whether it's talking to somebody internet famous I know, or having a reply I had favorited by somebody. It's a cool experience.

But yeah, I'm not really into the whole internet society as much as I was when I was in college. Memes come and go. Who cares what's trending every single day. You don't really need to be logged in at every single second. The personal connections thing is sort of another matter. I know it is a more common adult problem with how do working individuals make new friends and get in relationships, but it feels like it hit me earlier than other people. That hit me when I was in college, while it feels like you typically hear about that happening to people when they're out of college or they move away from their hometown or something.

Nope especially when it comes to Facebook, it was alight when people first started using the site but the vast majority of it now seems like repost after repost and nine times out of ten all they are reposting are memes. Then there are what seems like purely hypercritical postings for whatever cause that you know that person doesn't follow or support they are only doing it to appear trendy. I use it because social media is part of my work so it's good for business but I'm constantly taking weeks and even months away from logging into my personal profile. Like any kind of online forum social media especially gives rise to a lot of internet bravery so facebook and twitter don't go a day if not a second without some form of stupidity that just makes you want to reach through the screen and smack them. You aren't missing much by not being part of it, well maybe a headache.

Nothing wrong with liking pancakes more than waffles.

Edit: Hit the wrong button here. I meant to add that I've had FB and Twitter accounts since their births and they barely take up 10 minutes of my day, if even that. The doctor's office or bus rides is where I use them.

I have a Twitter account and I don't use it "seriously". I have a facebook account and I don't use it "seriously"...in fact, my family got upset that I didn't post information about my wife being pregnant on there. I do use FB to communicate quicker with a large group of friends for our tabletop nights and stuff like that.

Quick answer? No, you're not wrong. Live your life.

I should add: The quality of content on social media is heavily dependent of the people you choose to follow. There was a time when I contemplated deleting my Facebook. Instead I purged the people I gave zero fucks about. It's fine now. As I mentioned before I use it to share photos/update my family and friends if I can't tell them in person at the moment.

Nah man, live clean. More power to you.

Yeah Facebook is a waste of time. I use it mainly for talking to family out of state and some groups for college. My college has a for sale group on facebook that people sell stuff for ridiculously cheap prices at the end of each semester. I guess because they are moving out of their dorms and have to get rid of it asap. But yeah other than that its just people posting pictures with captions and complaining about politics. Pretty boring.

Eh. Social media isn't necessary.

I use mostly Facebook and dabble with Google+, mostly just to stay in touch with people who I don't see very often that I'm close friends with that moved to other states. Also to help organize groups for various gaming activities. Aaaand that's about it. I pretty much try to stay out of the drama of it all.

Facebook is still a necessary evil for me. Twitter is the most worthless piece of shit I've ever experienced in my life.

I've been reading this blog and book: Quite by Susan Cain, maybe you have hear about it. It talks about this type of thing and feelings and I thought some of you might be interested in learning more bout introverts and extroverts:

http://www.quietrev.com/

The Power of Introverts: 9 Best-Loved Stories by Susan Cain

@nime: I would like to know how you deactivate a news feed. I would love to kick FB, but I too find the messenger worthwhile.

@wrinklydinosaur: There isn't a direct one button solution (that I'm aware of, I did do this years ago), but you can "unfollow" certain people to stop seeing their posts, and I just did that for every one of my friends. When I add someone new, I just unfollow them when I see a post from them. So I still have a newsfeed, it's just entirely blank.

On the left of the newsfeed tab on the left sidebar there is an edit button and in there you can bulk unfollow people.

I really enjoy not seeing any posts because it prevents me from getting caught up in what other people are doing, but as I said before still see Facebook as a necessity for keeping in touch.