Indeed. You can have a Facebook account and just... Not use it unless you need it for something. All the benefits of the 'I deleted Facebook' crowd without the downsides.

Almost all of these quitting posts just read like people coming to terms with their addiction.

Good for them, but they seem to mistake it as some sort of universal lifehack.

I'm looking forward to seeing this theme worked into n-gate's coverage of the thread next week.

> Good for them, but they seem to mistake it as some sort of universal lifehack.

Does it have to be universal to be useful? Helping 0.01% of the US Facebook userbase save 1 hour every week is still huge...

Facebook will still learn which websites you visit (provided they have the "like" widget) and what articles you read on the NYT, unless you use a good tracking blocker.

So, that's one downside, I think.

I run uBlock Origin everywhere and I rarely visit Facebook anymore. But when I do, I use a private window in a different browser.

Additionally, on macOS you can use Fluid.app to create a Facebook-only browser with separate cookies, etc. Keeps it isolated from the general web. Do the same for google apps.

That requires self control and a resilience to peer pressure, things we are encouraged to devalue for the sake of "followers".

FWIW, I've used Facebook for I think 11 years now and I've never once seen anyone refer to or even remotely care about friend count.

It's not necessarily the number of followers people obsess over, it's their validation.