Why I'm deleting my Facebook account

I’ve always been an enthusiastic proponent of social media, I had a MySpace page before anyone I know. I looked with disdain on Bebo as positively amateur but was an early Facebook user. Now Ive had to watch as the post Bebo generation have infected a perfectly adequate platform with horoscopes and hangover updates. I’ve face palmed when ‘I love the cock’ gets 300 ‘likes’ but ‘I’m feeling pretty low today’ gets no reaction in friends, acquaintances and randomers updates.
I have defected to twitter, which seems to encompass all the people I want to be my friends without the creepiness of trawling through their unprotected photographs on Facebook. I meet minds, I ignore, I have no fear of recrimination or insult, I will not be tagged with a double chin….. perhaps if I want to find out what friends are doing I will hence forth call them.

There are a number of key annoyances in the land of Facebook, firstly,
Apps.
Apple did something right when it chose to filter apps for iphone, and while my open source heart breaks to admit it, its time to put a clamp down on half the garbage that ends up in my timeline. I block and block, but for each one I chop down 2 spring up in its place. I sometimes wish there was an 'idiocyfree' button I could click to remove all horoscope/celebrity/I dont know how he survived THIS-click like to see' pages from my life permanantly.

Secondly Adverts

No matter how many times I inform Facebook that an advert is offensive (they all are, I didn’t come here to buy anything) they continue to replace them, it would appear as though feedback is not listened to, and god damn it, I want to be listened to. Every other page is populated with adverts and frankly Facebook, I don’t need a fucking bra for a backless dress today, thanks (I just checked my profile to give you an honest answer and that’s what they ‘targeted’ me as needing)

Gatekeepers
Perhaps I’m not as much of a leftie liberal as Id like to believe, but allowing pages to go up unfiltered such as in the ‘Raoul Moate is a legend’ case but censoring pictures of women breastfeeding is a tad skewed in my thinking. Filtering any mention of sex but allowing hate groups to put pages together to bash gays, muslims and minorities seems to me to be a bizarre criteria for inclusion in the Facebook universe.

Kids
If another U13 year old child of a friend sends me a request I am highly likely to loose my mind. Not only am I bothered that parents will allow unsupervised access to the social media for primary school children, Im peeved that they think Im a suitable ‘friend’ candidate (I must be going soft) I don’t want to filter my status or worry about the suitability of my posts, I do not want people to access my friends list and find the kiddies on there. I do want Facebook to engage in more rigorous age verification techniques. When it started out it was most definitely a grown ups forum, now its Bebo on steroids.

Etiquette
The final straw came this week, I turned 35 (I’m admitting it, I will revert to 32 in about a week) a pretty big occasion in my humble estimation. The 'divisible by 5’s' are the unit to go by past 21. I got the obligatory Happy Birthday wishes from many people, very nice, very nice, but there are limits to this.
1: If you are a close friend/family and have somebody’s phone number a call or text is polite on a birthday
2: For people who wouldn’t talk regularly or have a close relationship, through distance or other reasons a message through Facebook is fine.
3: If you are MY ONLY BROTHER AND CLOSEST SIBLING a fucking wall post on my birthday doesn’t cut it… even my 2 sisters managed the monumental task of sending a text message.

And this is the proverbial straw, I have become so distanced from others, even my family that they consider a wall post an effective means to communicate with me on an important occasion, there is simply no choice left but to abandon it.