Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

3 Weeks Off Facebook and I learned I’m an Addict

Mark Palfreeman
4 min readFeb 10, 2019

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This shouldn’t be surprising. And it probably wouldn’t take quitting to arrive at the same conclusion. But let me back up and see how I got here.

How I Got Here

Social networking really took off with MySpace in the early 2000s, where teenagers (at my time) created online profiles and had “friend” connections—at the time these were mainly just links that said something about who you were close to. You could interact slightly and comment on things, but it was really all about the profile, and people like me had fun customizing theirs and “rebranding themselves” occasionally 😜. Then came Facebook that really won the connection battle, more closely mimicking real relationships (even romantic ones!), allowing better sharing of content with discussions, and popularizing the News Feed™ stream of everything our connections were doing/posting/saying/liking. We hadn’t seen anything like this online, and it was so exciting in college to connect with new “friends,” learn about (stalk?) them, and keep up with people.

Why It’s Great

Since inception, Facebook really has been an incredible product to watch. Things were changed and added constantly, and it almost became its own phenomenon to see what my profile was going to look like next week. Facebook is the one-stop hub of our…

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