Early last year I unplugged from all social media sites, and for me personally it has been a very healthy choice. I&#x27;m still pretty easily able to read anything I want to read on Twitter without having an account or installing the app. There is no worthwhile content on Facebook or LinkedIn, so eliminating those was pure gain. I never had an account with Instagram, Pinterest, or others.<p>I&#x27;ve occasionally applied for jobs either directly with social media companies or with companies that make products or services that augment social media experiences, and they often ask why I would be interested in working for them if I am not myself a consumer of social media sites.<p>I try to explain that even if I don&#x27;t personally get much value out of it, I can still appreciate that other do (or at least <i>believe</i> they do) and at the end of the day I&#x27;m interested in engineering problems that help customers.<p>Sometimes these places don&#x27;t want to talk further with me because they seem to believe it&#x27;s just not possible to empathize with a social media user or customer unless you yourself are one. Some other places don&#x27;t seem to care about that at all.<p>I do worry that as the ubiquity of Facebook rises, people will try to unfairly accuse non-Facebook people of &quot;having something to hide.&quot; I always want an individual&#x27;s ability to choose to not interact to be highly socially respected and not come with downsides that are in the slightest bit meaningful in terms of that person&#x27;s life goals, and I fear that a social media culture damages that.<p>I talk to my much younger sister about it sometimes. She is just starting to reach an age where our parents will consider letting her have an account. She&#x27;s very precocious and asks me all the time why I don&#x27;t have an account. But when I explain my reasons (e.g. I don&#x27;t like ads, I don&#x27;t like sharing data about my personal connections, I don&#x27;t want to feel like the service is adaptively responding in some ways to optimize itself against my behaviors) she doesn&#x27;t understand. To her, Facebook is life. Without Facebook, in her social circles even in middle school, you&#x27;re a nobody and can&#x27;t possibly have functional circles of friends. You just miss out on all the inside jokes, stories, photos, etc., that everyone will be talking about at school.<p>I feel bad for her. I&#x27;m at a point in my life where I couldn&#x27;t give less of a fuck about that kind of stuff, and most of the close friends I have are the same and would never exclude me just because I didn&#x27;t see their vacation photos on Facebook.<p>But for her, it&#x27;s very much like she does not have an actual choice. Functional social experiences are <i>necessary</i> for healthy development, and it&#x27;s getting to a point where kids can&#x27;t have functional social experiences without Facebook.<p>This frightens me and makes me want to use my choice to not have an account as a tiny, laughably insignificant market signal that maybe we should stop, and maybe we don&#x27;t actually get the value out of this concept that we think we do.