The last sentence resonates with me. My twitter account was started in 08 and largely unused until this year. I'm surprised how much I like it after it clicked for me one day. Twitter works (for me) by keeping the number of people I follow low and keeping the signal to noise high.
You sound like me. I have now recently deleted my Facebook account. I recently realised that I was not participating, only lurking, mainly because I no longer trust Facebook with my data (I've spoken previously about soft-deletes archiving versus physical deletes). I also no longer trust the NSA Facebook relationship post-PRISM.
If there are more people like me, then I truly fear for Facebook's long term success. (Disclaimer: I still own Facebook stock).
Sounds like you are a Facebook leech! Community involves active participation!
You just have to learn to ignore some posts - gloss over them.
If you swapped Facebook out for say a private email list - would you be more inclined to participate? And if that is the case - why don't people just use mailing lists?
1) No one can post on my wall
2) No one can tag me in pictures, post or places.
3) My profile picture excludes my face.
4) I post little to nothing.
5) I only friend a narrow group of people. Being an offline friend of mine for years is not enough.
6) People who make weird comments are unfriended quickly.
7) The list goes on, but it can be summarized as do as little on FB as possible.
My best friends, most of my girlfriends, my family -- I am not friends with on FB!
You can have a FB account and maintain some basic degree of privacy. It probably is not the way Mark Zuckerberg intends it. The more he does to interfere with my usage patterns, the less I use FB (and I hold him ultimately responsible for the UX.) I expect to continue to lose control over my account in the future. The more this occurs, the less I'll use it.
Strangely, over the past year I have begun to really enjoy and understand using Twitter.