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Comment by satysin | Hacker News Reader

Having now read through some of this persons comments on the thread it seems a huge area of regret for them is that they didn't export the content before they closed their accounts.

That I can understand is upsetting much like not having backups of family photos and the drive dying. Why they did not export their content I do not know. Facebook, etc. have all had "check out" functionality for many years now, all before the pandemic hit.

Seems they rushed into closing their accounts rather than exporting and backing all those memories up and without any kind of plan on what to do to fill the social void it would great. As a commenter wrote in reply to them "I gave up eating McDonald's everyday but now I have no food."

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I guess people should "deactivate" their socials rather than "deleting" them if they are not entirely sure. I left Instagram and Facebook a year ago but I cam go back whenever I want to.

Right! I simply abandoned Facebook. Changed my password, deleted my cookies, stopped going there. If I need to, I can look up the password and login. For example, I needed to participate in the event page for the local burn. Then I deleted my cookies again.

Yes. I also don't understand this thing about deleting social media accounts. Just don't login and don't look at the app? Why delete, removing your history permanently?

I suspect there's something psychological going on. The mere existance of the profile and history, not active use, causes mental strain.

Social media is addictive (edit: to some people). It's like telling an alcoholic "why bother throwing away the beer in your fridge, keep it around if a friend comes over and wants to drink, why is it so hard to just not drink it?"

Many people go the extra mile and delete data because they would rather not have a social networking company use it in their absence.

Seems like a big difference though. Deactivating should make all your content hidden until you reactivate.

I don't understand the desire to delete them. It seems to stem from the misconception that this triggers the service to delete everything in their ad targeting profiles. They don't delete everything they know about you just because you delete your account, though, as they maintain those dossiers even about people who don't have accounts.

That's why I keep the account. And there's slim chance of any imposter trying to create one in my place, though I guess after all these years that is less likely.

I've tried a few times to export my data from Facebook and it's never worked for me. I request it and it just silently fails.

You don't realize how expensive these so called free platforms are until you try to leave. You will never recover much of what you invested. It is a hard lesson for many.

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