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Comment by _uhtu | Hacker News Reader

Delete it off your phone, ASAP. There is literally nothing to gain from having the Facebook app on your phone. The app doesn't positively help you with the one thing Facebook is really useful for - event planning.

Every once in a while i like to see what events my friends have invited me to, so I log on to facebook on my browser, check my notifications, and leave. How do I prevent myself from getting sucked in by the news feed? I block it, with News Feed Eradicator, a Chrome extension. If someone posted a picture of you or tagged you in some way, you know, the things that in your news feed that are actually useful/concern you, you get a notification without any clutter to block it up.

It's lowered my stress level and I still get to stay in touch with the things I care about.

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Don't see how this is a reason for others to delete the app from their phones, it only show that for you it was the right thing to do.

To come with another data-point, I have the app on my phone, but don't open it every week. I have turned off most notifications, so if I get a notification on the phone I know it is worth it to use 30 sec to check what it is. Instead I check FB a couple of times a day on a PC where I can set the feed to show most recent post first and in a minute or two go through the list of new post from peoples I keep in the feed. Some times it is something interesting there, some times not. For me it is strange how others manage to use hours at a time on FB (except messenger which I use to keep in touch with friends and family).

My point is that you cannot only blame FB for getting addicted, you is the only one that is responsible for how you spend your time. It is getting so "normal" to blame external forces for own behavior

There is a damn good incentive to uninstall the app. By going to mbasic.facebook.com in your browser instead, you use much less bandwidth and you get to use an adblocker (in Firefox, at least), to help weed out most of the nonsense FB throws at you.

I don't see how the 2MB of mobile data the FB app have used so far this month would be any less if I had used the mobile page instead. Going to the web-page is a much worse user experience when you mostly use the app to get notifications you have filtered out to actually get instead of using it to look at stuff you are not interested in.

You don't see all the stuff you don't want to see if you don't keep opening the app all the time. So back to it is how you use the application that is the problem, not the application.

By going there in a browser (and specifically to the mbasic version), you weed out the javascript tracking and bloat, and your adblocker gets to weed out the ads and sponsored content nonsense. As a bonus, there are no auto-playing videos or any of that other junk. That is the problem with using the app (and apps in general): They try very hard to prevent you from blocking ads and sponsored content.

That frees you up to use Facebook for its actual useful function: Handling events and possibly the most genuinely important updates from your friends, without the bloat.

The pared-down user experience in the mbasic version is the entire point. I already filter out everything I don't consider important, and using the mbasic version is another step in the direction of reducing distractions. It also doesn't do the weird re-arranging of discussions and broken infinite scroll that the app does.

It's simply a much easier and less annoying experience.

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