Hey friends,

For Christmas this year, I’ve decided to give you the present of less me in your timeline.

This year, I’ll be quitting Facebook, again, deactivating my account and letting it lie dormant and unused until such time as I decide to return to it. This will actually be the second time I’ve quit Facebook, the first back in 2008 or so after being granted early access and discovering what a horrible experience it was. I recreated this account in 2014 with the idea that it might be useful to promote my self-published books. It wasn’t, though I did make some great friends as a result of joining some writing groups.

Why leave? Oh, you know why. Pretty much all I post here is news articles about how little Facebook values your privacy, how they are bad at securing your data, and how they fail to live up to their promises to “do better”. That’d be bad enough on it’s own, but the platform itself is terrible for sharing anything other than memes and small snippets of text. People don’t “engage” with lengthy posts on Facebook. It’s designed to discourage that with ever-present notification badges and infinite scrolling pages to nowhere. There’s not a lot of thoughtfulness happening on Facebook and an overabundance of people posting to generate reaction more than interaction. If there are good communities or groups on Facebook, they’re damned hard to discover.

It is a bad experience.

I have also posted some pics of my dog in an attempt to farm him out for likes and hearts. I did this without his consent and now that he’s grown up, he’s pretty cheesed off, though appreciative of all your clicks. I feel pretty bad about doing that to him.

So, this is me signing off. You all know how to get in touch with me. If you don’t, shoot me a message over the next week and I’ll happily exchange email addresses and IM details. And I’ll still post the odd bit about audio, electronics and computing on my blog. Who knows, maybe I’ll even have a book update sometime.

Hasta la vista,

Rob