To trash-talk Facebook feels about as relevant as being critical of smoking cigarettes. We all get it.

And for years, I’ve been aiming what arrows I have at other users, who were spoiling the experience for the rest of us. I understood the economics of the platform, I thought, and accepted that we were all going to be lures for advertisers—fine. We can agree to pay that price or not. We can still take advantage of the social benefits; we just have to be careful, and police our behavior.

So, that’s not going to work out. It was dumb, anyway. People are too busy and just want a few moments of fun. They want to share.

Sharing is the worst. Sharing is the Reply All of the 21st century, the button you’re not supposed to push except for specific situations. Get rid of the sharing option and I might see some hope. Force people to copy and paste URLs, and that shit will go way down. Fewer questionable news sources. Fewer articles we’ve already read a million times. No more incredibly lame Facebook-generated videos that 10 of our friends insist on sending to us on our birthdays even though we’ve already received a bunch (it’s the same video).

No more word-salad phony aphorisms, urging me to STOP DOING THIS or LET THIS SINK IN or whatever nonsense is popular on a given day.

Or fewer, anyway, but again—not gonna happen.

And now I see that this is institutional. This is the nature of the platform. I understand what Mark Zuckerberg and his minions are doing. It’s not hard to see how this has been packaged and arranged. This isn’t utopian. It’s just transactional. They want us to share our secrets so they can target ads. Nothing sinister here. Nothing noble, either. Just business.

Bad business, for us. I think, now, anyway. And I don’t feel compelled to leave the platform, because I don’t think it makes a difference. I’ve locked it down and muted so much that almost all I see are posts from pages I like. I get a lot of videos about travel. And then those stupid graphics with all the wisdom sucked out. It’s not part of my life, not the way it used to be.

But it’s part of the culture, which makes me wonder about all of this. How engaged do I need to be? Or want to be? Good question, no answer yet.

...

The best parts of Facebook—and by the law of platform commutation, all social media—were obvious in my life this past summer. We would never have been able to have our reunion this past summer without Facebook, and I wouldn’t have been able to share our Scotland stuff with friends and family quite so easily.

That’s just taking advantage, though, and accepting the downside. It’s not the only option, obviously. It wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago, for one thing, and somehow we managed.

And the bottom line for me these days is that social media is just not social. I’ve tried to manage small Facebook groups, hoping for a sense of community, and while I haven’t given up hope completely, I haven’t found much satisfaction.

I’ve been thinking this week that I’d like to talk to someone about football, for example. I have a conflicted relationship with the sport (talking about the NFL, not college), and still I follow it. My home team has a very good record this season but I don’t really understand that, and I’d be happy to get involved in a robust discussion about quarterbacks carrying mediocre teams and what to do about the secondary on defense.

Facebook is too big for this, and as much as we talk about living in niche realities I see mostly noise. I don’t want to go to a Facebook group devoted to the Seattle Seahawks and yak with strangers. I’d just like to talk to my friends who are fans, and those who follow the Packers or the Saints or the Chargers, get their takes. I just don’t see it happening.

And maybe I’m not trying hard enough, and maybe that’s all it is. But when I look at the obvious dangers and the established personal benefits after 12 years of using Facebook, it’s not really a hard call.

Again, I’m not going away, suspending my account, making a big splash about it. I’m here, I’m on Instagram, I’m on Twitter. I’m in the newspaper every week.

Not everyone is. I haven’t figured that part out. I might have to take a hard look at how I was living 20 years ago, and do that again. Go Hawks.