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I recently stopped using all of my social media, inspired by Cal Newport's Deep Work, and this resonates deeply with me. At risk of sounding like an out-of-tou

I recently stopped using all of my social media, inspired by Cal Newport's Deep Work, and this resonates deeply with me. At risk of sounding like an out-of-touch baby boomer (I'm 18), I think the portrayed utility of staying connected with people, etc etc, isn't the utility that drives our social media usage anymore. For me at least, the only tangible thing it accomplished in the long run was disrupting my boredom. I found that most of the content I was consuming was the equivalent of reading a magazine in the bathroom; I probably don't give a shit about the contents, but some content (regardless of quality) is preferable to idle boredom. I've found, after a few weeks of not using it at all, that the times during which I'm bored are more easily spent on things that I'd otherwise ~feel~ too busy for, even if I had the time to do them all along. It's not even that I fill my boredom with productivity; I, kinda abstractly, feel less busy now that I allow myself to idle. It's weirdly made life a lot less stressful even though browsing social media is technically zero-effort. It's also inspired me to tune out all of the content that relied on a push model to reach me (unsubscribing from certain newsletters, barely any notifications enabled, etc). It gives me a feeling of control to be able to choose when to consume certain content instead of being made to by virtue of notification.

Robotbeat 9y ago
> I recently stopped using all of my social media... Same here. And yet here we find ourselves on HN... :) (In our defense, the signal to noise ratio is much better here.)
- krrishd 9y ago
  Haha yup, my excuse is that HN directs me to a lot of long-form content with tangible value instead of throwing shit at me that'd only serve the purpose of keeping me coming back.
- rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
  But in a way that's worse, because the engaging content and discussion on HN makes it that much harder to put the phone down and get back to work. At least with Facebook I know there's almost nothing of value and with the news it's almost always bad, so I'm otherwise not missing much.
  - krrishd 9y ago
    That's fair, although I consider HN a value-add when I use it (once in the morning). You're right though; if it ends up being a habit to check randomly, it causes a lot of the same problems social media does.
    - raamdev 9y ago
      I'm personally trying to fix the habit of constant checking of HN so that I don't miss out on the good stuff with a weekly email that I can review once a week. [1] Admittedly, breaking the habit of checking HN throughout the day is a bit harder to break than subscribing to the newsletter, but in theory it would be an excellent solution. :) 1. http://www.hackernewsletter.com http://www.hackernewsletter.com
    - sjellis 9y ago
      It's worth noting that Hacker News has an anti-procrastination feature: set the "noprocrast" option in your profile to "yes", and then it will time-limit your visits to "maxvisit" in minutes, and block you for the "minaway" period. I don't know of any other site that does this. It's a very cool thing for Y Combinator to have done.
  - andrewbinstock 9y ago
    Fully agreed. Let's give credit where it's due--not only to the community but also to the moderators, who do a great job keeping conversations civil and on track!
tcfunk 9y ago
I didn't disable my social media accounts, but I did disable all notifications except calls and texts and that has made a huge difference. Those little red badges were so enticing, and I often found myself thinking "wait, why did I get my phone out again?" because instead of checking whatever email I had intended to check, I was now on facebook messenger or snapchat or some other bulls%!@.
- amelius 9y ago
  I can also recommend "unfollowing" all (or most) friends.
  - tcfunk 9y ago
    Ah yeah that's a good idea. I unfollowed a fair few during last year's election cycle, could probably stand to lose a few more.
Swizec 9y ago
I agree with all of your points. I haven't gotten to quite quit social media, but I only check when I want to (too often). No notifications anywhere. Phone always on Do Not Disturb mode. The reason I find it hard to quit quit, is that I get a lot of value from posting. Not passive reading, but active engagement. Comment here, write a tweet there, repost this or that ... it's had a measurable impact on my life. Measurable on the level of "If I wasn't active on social media, I'd be living in Slovenia on a $15,000/year webdev salary instead of engineering in downtown San Francisco". So yeah, it's hard to quit. But I try to spend as little time reading as possible. Also, if you get on the right social networks (in the broadest sense), it can have the "open door" effect Hamming talks about in his famous essay. > I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
- krrishd 9y ago
  I feel you, I still briefly log-in to post blog posts + music that I work on, and a significant majority of my professional network came from a select few Facebook communities that I was heavily involved in a few years ago. So yeah I think you're spot on with the "active engagement" bit, a lot of value can be generated when it's used in that sense.
holosmoss 9y ago
To be honest i count StackOverflow as social media. I redirected Facebook's urls to localhost just in case I am even tempted (it pisses me off just being there so its kinda dangerous) and I somewhat focus my twitter on work/personal-work related news. Removed all notifications on everything except my own stuff. This setup doesn't remove the anti-boredom fix pattern in my life but at least it isn't too far from the main thread so the context switch tax isn't too high. I am convinced most of the +sides are deeply held coping mechanism triggering somewhere but the randomness of twitter and the comfy network of SO and HN are important to stay in touch with at least something. I have friends who live from organic-farming and boy is it weird living in a world where computers, internet and all that chaos is easily null. Ty for the book idea, might help to improve my devops ;)
apatters 9y ago
The problem isn't with social media, it's with the business models of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Social media is a great way to keep in touch with people. What isn't great is the constant interruptive notifications, ads all over your feed, ceaseless exposure to brands and people and posts you don't want to see because all of this stuff is known to increase "stickiness" and thus deliver a larger section of your time to advertisers. Even when the experience is literally driving the brains behind those eyeballs to depression. What if instead someone had created a social graph protocol and put it out there as an open thing for anyone to use? Like TCP/IP, or HTTP, or email. Perhaps we wouldn't have these problems today. But the VC model saw an opportunity, moved in with huge amounts of money, colonized the space as fast as they could, and now work hard to pull as much cash out of it as possible. Just like a factory that dumps sludge into the river, they'll be happy to dump sludge into your eyeballs until they get pushback from consumers, regulators, or both. Mastodon, GNU Social et. al. don't have this problem.

Robotbeat 9y ago

> I recently stopped using all of my social media... Same here. And yet here we find ourselves on HN... :) (In our defense, the signal to noise ratio is much better here.)

krrishd 9y ago
Haha yup, my excuse is that HN directs me to a lot of long-form content with tangible value instead of throwing shit at me that'd only serve the purpose of keeping me coming back.
rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
But in a way that's worse, because the engaging content and discussion on HN makes it that much harder to put the phone down and get back to work. At least with Facebook I know there's almost nothing of value and with the news it's almost always bad, so I'm otherwise not missing much.
- krrishd 9y ago
  That's fair, although I consider HN a value-add when I use it (once in the morning). You're right though; if it ends up being a habit to check randomly, it causes a lot of the same problems social media does.
  - raamdev 9y ago
    I'm personally trying to fix the habit of constant checking of HN so that I don't miss out on the good stuff with a weekly email that I can review once a week. [1] Admittedly, breaking the habit of checking HN throughout the day is a bit harder to break than subscribing to the newsletter, but in theory it would be an excellent solution. :) 1. http://www.hackernewsletter.com http://www.hackernewsletter.com
  - sjellis 9y ago
    It's worth noting that Hacker News has an anti-procrastination feature: set the "noprocrast" option in your profile to "yes", and then it will time-limit your visits to "maxvisit" in minutes, and block you for the "minaway" period. I don't know of any other site that does this. It's a very cool thing for Y Combinator to have done.
- andrewbinstock 9y ago
  Fully agreed. Let's give credit where it's due--not only to the community but also to the moderators, who do a great job keeping conversations civil and on track!

tcfunk 9y ago

I didn't disable my social media accounts, but I did disable all notifications except calls and texts and that has made a huge difference. Those little red badges were so enticing, and I often found myself thinking "wait, why did I get my phone out again?" because instead of checking whatever email I had intended to check, I was now on facebook messenger or snapchat or some other bulls%!@.

amelius 9y ago
I can also recommend "unfollowing" all (or most) friends.
- tcfunk 9y ago
  Ah yeah that's a good idea. I unfollowed a fair few during last year's election cycle, could probably stand to lose a few more.

Swizec 9y ago

I agree with all of your points. I haven't gotten to quite quit social media, but I only check when I want to (too often). No notifications anywhere. Phone always on Do Not Disturb mode. The reason I find it hard to quit quit, is that I get a lot of value from posting. Not passive reading, but active engagement. Comment here, write a tweet there, repost this or that ... it's had a measurable impact on my life. Measurable on the level of "If I wasn't active on social media, I'd be living in Slovenia on a $15,000/year webdev salary instead of engineering in downtown San Francisco". So yeah, it's hard to quit. But I try to spend as little time reading as possible. Also, if you get on the right social networks (in the broadest sense), it can have the "open door" effect Hamming talks about in his famous essay. > I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

krrishd 9y ago
I feel you, I still briefly log-in to post blog posts + music that I work on, and a significant majority of my professional network came from a select few Facebook communities that I was heavily involved in a few years ago. So yeah I think you're spot on with the "active engagement" bit, a lot of value can be generated when it's used in that sense.

holosmoss 9y ago

To be honest i count StackOverflow as social media. I redirected Facebook's urls to localhost just in case I am even tempted (it pisses me off just being there so its kinda dangerous) and I somewhat focus my twitter on work/personal-work related news. Removed all notifications on everything except my own stuff. This setup doesn't remove the anti-boredom fix pattern in my life but at least it isn't too far from the main thread so the context switch tax isn't too high. I am convinced most of the +sides are deeply held coping mechanism triggering somewhere but the randomness of twitter and the comfy network of SO and HN are important to stay in touch with at least something. I have friends who live from organic-farming and boy is it weird living in a world where computers, internet and all that chaos is easily null. Ty for the book idea, might help to improve my devops ;)

apatters 9y ago

The problem isn't with social media, it's with the business models of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Social media is a great way to keep in touch with people. What isn't great is the constant interruptive notifications, ads all over your feed, ceaseless exposure to brands and people and posts you don't want to see because all of this stuff is known to increase "stickiness" and thus deliver a larger section of your time to advertisers. Even when the experience is literally driving the brains behind those eyeballs to depression. What if instead someone had created a social graph protocol and put it out there as an open thing for anyone to use? Like TCP/IP, or HTTP, or email. Perhaps we wouldn't have these problems today. But the VC model saw an opportunity, moved in with huge amounts of money, colonized the space as fast as they could, and now work hard to pull as much cash out of it as possible. Just like a factory that dumps sludge into the river, they'll be happy to dump sludge into your eyeballs until they get pushback from consumers, regulators, or both. Mastodon, GNU Social et. al. don't have this problem.