The Seven Reasons

  1. The sole baseline fact - it takes time to keep up with the information - be it new message reading or news reading - it is yet another information source. The less data sources, the less time spent aggregating various data sources.
  2. Facebook is very engaging and even addictive. During a free time period, when you’re waiting for something, it is common to check what’s new on Facebook, and scroooll, often until all the new items in the feed are read. Mistake. One wants to spend less time on the site, one has to activate self-control and use the limited willpower resources. These precious resources, according to the basic neuroscience results, are given as a fixed size packet for each day of a human. Better use that fraction to other, more productivity oriented, activities.
  3. It’s more fun to communicate in private, just directly talk to people, ask to tell what’s up in realtime - over the audio/video call - or by meeting in person.
  4. All the data that happens to be created in Facebook stays in Facebook. Not all the originally uthored data (that includes comments) can be privately backed up. Just try the “Download all your data” feature. It’s a lie. Even the messages are not fully saved.
  5. Facebook had nothing useful in it. I had over 350 friends and all there was - just music links, photos, random anecdotes, spam from “liked” pages, etc. Rubbish.
  6. Facebook, Inc. is in that business cycle phase which means begin seriously monetizing. Since Facebook account is free and will always remain free, users are paying indirectly - by watching the advertisements and exchanging real currency into Facebook currency.
  7. If you can get by without <insert_object_here>, then you should get rid of <insert_object_here>.

I’ve also closed my Google account. I didn’t use any of the services that require a Google login. I host the email server myself - postfix-spamassassin combo is easy to setup and run without any maintenance.

Same for GitHub - I did not use any of their best features - issue tracking, in-place editing, commit commenting. My little cgit+gitolite install works like a champ, infinite private repositories.

As for Twitter - I prefer RSS.