1. Privacy-wise: It doesn't matter if you're on Facebook or not. They have a profile about you and you can't do anything about it. There was this article in January [1] that showed how only a few data points Facebook or Google or Twitter actually needs to paint a fairly accurate picture of your personality.
2. Addiction-wise: Uninstall the app, disable all notifications. I rarely use Facebook for the feed, because it's actually extremely boring. Most friends don't post personal stuff anymore anyways. There's a handful of people who post a lot, but mostly links to other websites. I also unfriend people I haven't talked to in a while. Try to reduce your friends (and cognitive load) to <200 or <150. Not all at once. Unfriend 10 or so today, another 20 tomorror etc.
3. I also see tremendous benefits of Facebook and that's why I use it: We have a local startup community. Basically, a page with 100 likes or so. We posted a video about our events and it reached 1,200 people organically. It's an extremely useful tool to discover and promote local events. And new people constantly find our events because of Facebook. You can't do this with your private website. You need to go where the attention is. The only other option to promote local events is the newspaper or distributing flyers, but this takes a lot more time for less awareness, because of broader targeting. I also found new events because of Facebook.
1. Privacy-wise: It doesn't matter if you're on Facebook or not. They have a profile about you and you can't do anything about it. There was this article in January [1] that showed how only a few data points Facebook or Google or Twitter actually needs to paint a fairly accurate picture of your personality.
2. Addiction-wise: Uninstall the app, disable all notifications. I rarely use Facebook for the feed, because it's actually extremely boring. Most friends don't post personal stuff anymore anyways. There's a handful of people who post a lot, but mostly links to other websites. I also unfriend people I haven't talked to in a while. Try to reduce your friends (and cognitive load) to <200 or <150. Not all at once. Unfriend 10 or so today, another 20 tomorror etc.
3. I also see tremendous benefits of Facebook and that's why I use it: We have a local startup community. Basically, a page with 100 likes or so. We posted a video about our events and it reached 1,200 people organically. It's an extremely useful tool to discover and promote local events. And new people constantly find our events because of Facebook. You can't do this with your private website. You need to go where the attention is. The only other option to promote local events is the newspaper or distributing flyers, but this takes a lot more time for less awareness, because of broader targeting. I also found new events because of Facebook.
[1]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-li...
Edit: clarification