I have severely cut back my usage of Facebook over the last 12 months. I forced myself to try to use it as much as some of my friends, a small subset of whom seem to use it obsessively to post trivial updates on their thoughts and actions dozens of times a day.

I just found myself annoyed by the sheer quantity of non-content, vacuous feel-good stories or images, links to click-bait articles or just outright ignorance and stupidity from people I wouldn't have otherwise suspected that about.

I removed my family and colleagues from my account a very long time ago. It very quickly became clear to me that having anyone like that on there was a grave mistake. Sure enough I was given some tired rants about how I was heartless to have removed them from my list ha ha. That's how seriously some people take this. It's bizarre to me. None of these people need to know anything about what I am doing socially with my friends.

I still have an account but I basically just check it once or twice a week for maybe less than a minute to see if I have any private messages or event invites. A few of my closer friends use Facebook messages as a primary method to organise meetups for board games or drinks and the like.

Since basically cutting down my usage to a few minutes every few days I can't say I've noticed any difference in my social life, but I've definitely noticed a decrease in the amount of inane rubbish my mind has to process from the News Feed.

I have maybe 180 people on the friends list and I'm starting to realise that I could quite happily go the rest of my life without speaking to perhaps 75% of them ever again. I'm not even sure why I accepted their friend requests in the first place. Maybe I was just caufght up in Facebook as a new experience initially.