I've quit facebook so that I spend more time here!

[joe_geezer]

I joined facebook (about a year or 2 ago) and since have stopped posting here as facebook seems to have consolidated everything I use to do on the web in a single website!

 

It's actually taken the fun out of posting and reading about bass guitars and bassists... It's just all superficial click bait & with little to know substance. I 

suddenly realised I was just scrolling through endless reels of 1 minute videos designed to grab my lizard brain attention. And the groups are just again, post a flashy pic of a fancy bass and lets all celebrate... zero discussion, good or bad 🙂‍↕️.

 

So I have decided to quit facebook and just use bass forums and X. At least with X there's discussions but not so much about the bass guitar, so that's actually a good thing, it's an untapped market! 

Anyway, does anyone feel the same or am I just getting old. great to hear you thoughts 🙏

[Len_derby]

Although Facebook is mostly irritating nonsense I find it very useful for promoting the two bands I’m in. Also for keeping an eye on venues and other acts working in the same area. About a half dozen times over the last three years-ish we’ve picked up gigs when venues put messages on Facebook for last-minute replacements. I often think that musicians who reject social media either don’t gig or leave all the promotional donkey work to others.

Edited Saturday at 11:20 by Len_derby

[BigRedX]

I'm only on Facebook so I can promote whatever band I am currently in. 

 

While I don't think I'd quit if I wasn't using it to promote my music I'd probably only look at it once a week tops and my page would simply be whatever my friends had tagged me in.

[joe_geezer]

3 hours ago, Len_derby said:

Although Facebook is mostly irritating nonsense I find it very useful for promoting the two bands I’m in. Also for keeping an eye on venues and other acts working in the same area. About a half dozen times over the last three years-ish we’ve picked up gigs when venues put messages on Facebook for last-minute replacements. I often think that musicians who reject social media either don’t gig or leave all the promotional donkey work to others.

As i live in London, I prefer to walk in to venues, the old school way if I'm fronting a band. Otherwise, being a sideman I don't need to get involved in that department.

[joe_geezer]

3 hours ago, BigRedX said:

I'm only on Facebook so I can promote whatever band I am currently in. 

 

While I don't think I'd quit if I wasn't using it to promote my music I'd probably only look at it once a week tops and my page would simply be whatever my friends had tagged me in.

That's good of you to chip in to help promoting the projects you're in being a bassist unless you're fronting the band yourself. I'm normally seen and not heard if I'm a sideman! 😂

[binky_bass]

No social media at all here. Deleted my FB account over a decade ago. Never had an X/Twitter/Instagram account. Though I suppose BassChat is a form of social media... So I'm guilty of that. 

Edited Saturday at 21:30 by binky_bass

[joe_geezer]

1 hour ago, binky_bass said:

No social media at all here. Deleted my FB account over a decade ago. Never had an X/Twitter/Instagram account. Though I suppose BassChat is a form of social media... So I'm guilty of that. 

That's great!

[knirirr]

As far as I am concerned Facebook is extremely dastardly - I refuse to have an account there or on any other service owned by the blackguard Zuckerberg. I block all known Meta URLs on my phone via DNS. 

Luckily for me my job doesn't need me to use it (it doesn't appear to be popular in academia), though some hobbies are affected by this stance. 

[bassbiscuits]

22 hours ago, binky_bass said:

No social media at all here. Deleted my FB account over a decade ago. Never had an X/Twitter/Instagram account. Though I suppose BassChat is a form of social media... So I'm guilty of that. 

 

Ditto. Deleted my FB account back in 2017. Never had X, Instagram, Snapchat etc (I’m a few years too old for all that). 
 

I suspect I’d be better connected / better publicised if I did bother with social media but I can’t be @r$ed frankly. 

 

[mcnach]

On 07/11/2025 at 22:46, joe_geezer said:

I joined facebook (about a year or 2 ago) and since have stopped posting here as facebook seems to have consolidated everything I use to do on the web in a single website!

 

It's actually taken the fun out of posting and reading about bass guitars and bassists... It's just all superficial click bait & with little to know substance. I 

suddenly realised I was just scrolling through endless reels of 1 minute videos designed to grab my lizard brain attention. And the groups are just again, post a flashy pic of a fancy bass and lets all celebrate... zero discussion, good or bad 🙂‍↕️.

 

So I have decided to quit facebook and just use bass forums and X. At least with X there's discussions but not so much about the bass guitar, so that's actually a good thing, it's an untapped market! 

Anyway, does anyone feel the same or am I just getting old. great to hear you thoughts 🙏

 

I'm only keeping FB because my main band uses Messenger primarily, and we get a lot of interactions with people and gig info etc through it... but I no longer really use it personally. It's become a really ugly place. The videos kept me going for a bit, it was an easy way to kill a few minutes here and there (as long as you don't go into the comments), but there's some much AI-generated crap... that was the last straw.

 

I seem to have substituted it with Reddit. I found a few subforums that are pretty good. 

 

[TheLowDown]

I gave up FB over a decade ago after a brief period of trying it out, and I don't know anyone who actively uses it. The overall and overwhelming impression I get from others that have left, about to leave, and occasional visitors is that nowadays it's just a cesspit of ads, spammers, and scammers.

[SteveXFR]

Im taking a break from Facebook, possibly permanently. Its mostly either adverts for crap, AI fake videos & images and political propaganda. Mostly political propaganda now it seems. 

At least here, the only discrimination is against pick players, slappers and Scott Devine

[Mediocre Polymath]

I've always had a fairly uneasy relationship with social media. I am of the right age to have joined facebook when it still felt like something fun and somehow private – around 2006, I think – but it jumped the shark some time in the late 2000s or early 2010s and never came back. I've not deleted my account, not really sure why, but I've also not looked at it in about seven years. I dabbled with a few of the other platforms, but always found they got both boring and addictive after a while. 

 

My dislike of the Skinner-Box psychological manipulation that's ubiquitous on the modern internet is actually what attracted me to this place. It's a forum. There are posts. You open the site and look at what's been posted. If there's something interesting, you read or respond. If there isn't, you close it again.

 

Basschat isn't painstakingly engineered to monopolise my attention, it doesn't use the latest scientific research to try to serve me targeted content, to entice me into scrolling or paging through or whatever. It's a website. With stuff on it that I can look at, or ignore.  

 

It does have the unfortunate side effect of leading me to buy more gear, but that's a trade-off I'm willing to make. 

Edited 16 hours ago by Mediocre Polymath

[SteveXFR]

One of the things I like about BC more than social media is its the one place there's no political BS. Its become rather overwhelming everywhere else and im sure thats partly due to deliberate manipulation of algorithms.

There's even the bit useful advice here. 

[SumOne]

Perhaps I've been brainwashed by the algorithm but I find Facebook okay if you can limit your time on it and choose what you allow it to show you  e.g. If you get some toxic political rant pop up you don't want to see you need to click to say you don't want to see more of that, it does tend to do as asked. 

 

Turned it on for 5 mins just now and this is what I see:

 

- Messanger notification (a friend sent a link to a song) 

- Marketplace notification (someone sent a 'is this still available' message for a Bass I'm selling) 

- Roll down my news feed is: Simpsons meme page post, t-shirt advert,  random youtuber doing some click bait walkabout thing in my home town, a post in a drum and bass group asking where a sample is from, train company advert, holiday post from a friend I haven't seen in years, cycle helmet advert. 

..... Now none of that is particularly stuff I needed to see, but also no harm done - they are mildly interesting to me, not interesting enough to spend more time clicking through but not the worst way to spend 5 mins. 

 

Edited 7 hours ago by SumOne

[BigRedX]

Those of you complaining about what Facebook shows you must either have the wrong friends or be following the wrong groups.

 

All I see is posts from my friends and those groups I have chosen to follow. Any "friend" who consistently posts crap I'm not interested in gets unfollowed, likewise with any groups. I get the very occasional suggested or sponsored post which I always mark is irrelevant.

 

Having said that Facebook is not installed on my phone or any other mobile devices. I signed up to it using a one-time email address and it runs sandboxed in its own browser on my desktop computer which is used just for Facebook. I only have that browser open while I am looking at Facebook and quit as soon as I am done. While I am looking at Facebook I don't use anything else to access the internet. Anything that pops up in my feed that looks interesting is noted down and checked out in a different browser after quiting Facebook.

[Sté]

By the past i've felt in a kind of addiction of facebook: hours to scroll things i wasn't interested by. And i had a lot more suggested things than things from what i was really interested and post from m'y real friends. So i quit it and erased completely my profile. Problem is my favorites artists are using it to communicate about news, new music, tours etc.. so i created one new profile and found a way to manage it: i don't go in the général thread anymore but only in my search history. By this way, i only see news from pages i've searched and already looked. A kind of favorites list without any dumb suggestion or sponsorised things around.