I joined Facebook in 2008. During Obama’s first campaign I was involved with a group of Obama supporters in Italy, and Facebook was new and hip and a great way to organize, especially for those of us living abroad. It felt like the future, and the future – like Obama – looked liberal, open and social.

Of course, that feeling frayed gradually, and broke entirely (for me, at least) in 2016. At that point Facebook, and less so Twitter – which I had joined in 2009, ever the early adopter – had begun to seem like a bar fight, the kind of place you go to get rowdy and bust a few heads and go home with a bloody lip and a black eye. And, of course, the next day you go back for more of the same. Only, the bar never closed and those throwing the barstools were often friends and family. It seems almost insane to me now, thinking back, but arguing was model behavior on social media. We were sold the idea that it was a public square where one was to spend one’s time debating everyone in one’s path in the name of free speech and democracy. And, for a while, I did. I debated religion and atheism, Israel and Palestine, Clinton and Trump, apples and oranges. I made allies and lost friends. I lost members of my family, as well. I stopped checking in to Facebook after the 2016 election and came back reluctantly years later, though never with the same fervor or sense of ease. It was no longer a place I felt like I wanted to be, and that feeling has stayed with me.

I’ve often been one step away from simply deleting my account, as I did with my Twitter/X account a year or two ago, a step which Facebook makes deliberately hard. I’ve been kept from doing that by virtue of the fact that I am ‘in touch’ with people in my life I’d otherwise surely have lost touch with by now. This was the original selling point for Facebook – other than a way to vote on who the hottest babes on campus were – and it remains the only reason I haven’t pulled the plug yet.

In the early days, you could ‘poke’ someone to let them know you were thinking about them. It was cute. Then came the news feed, which ruined everything. I refuse to read the news on Facebook to this day, even to click a link to a news story. You used to see what people you cared about – or were at least tendentially interested in – were up to. Now all I see is AI-generated garbage, pages they want me to follow because my profile says I like the Ramones or bagels or skateboarding, advertisements and posts by people I’ve never heard of before and have no connection with. They want to up my engagement, and I want them to stop it. This is basically what’s left of the experience for me.

Even when I post something like a new poem or a blog post the level of engagement is pitifully low compared to what it was in its salad days, when engaging with friends was the actual point of Facebook. One suspects that the only way to increase engagement is to engage, meaning unless one is constantly on Facebook ‘liking’ and commenting and sharing others’ posts, the algorithm will pay little or no attention to yours. I guess they want to discourage freeloaders, but I’m no longer willing to spend the necessary time and energy required to get any benefit out of it for myself, if that is even the right word. This principle seems to be true across social media, and it’s one reason I’ve grown tired of it. It doesn’t give me back anything I value, and has become mostly an old habit: post, like, comment, repeat.

I grew up before the Internet, and was already in my thirties when social media blew up. I remember a world without this stuff, when you just stared at the ceiling if you were bored or went outside to see who was around to play with. Of course, now all those kids in the street are on Facebook and I can see photos of their kids whenever I like, which is – paradoxically – almost never. That is, I am connected to them through Facebook, though my level of interest has decreased so much that it seems just being connected to them is the whole point, seeing their names and avatars, not actually checking in with them and exchanging messages. It feels like going to a party where everyone you know is and standing by the wall the whole time with a drink. And perhaps we are all standing by the wall with our drinks, ignoring each other. What a party, right?

Ten years ago I would’ve written this as a Facebook post, or ‘note’. It might have generated some comments and discussion, perhaps even a minor skirmish. And, of course, it would’ve disappeared along with the thousand other posts and tweets which are the constant chatter of social media, all flushed immediately down the toilet of the timeline. Today, if I need to write something down to find out what I think about it, I do it here. I own the bar.