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Eyerollingly boring advice, but quitting (and deleting!) reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, and maybe even HN. Anything designed with the explicit goal of oc

Eyerollingly boring advice, but quitting (and deleting!) reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, and maybe even HN. Anything designed with the explicit goal of occupying your attention. Maybe you've noticed that you haven't managed to read a book in a year. There's a reason for that. And none of those sites can give you knowledge of the depth found in even a particularly crappily-written book. People get all worried about losing their followers & social connections. The social fabric is very adaptable. It does not require public technological codification. You realistically only need fewer than five good friends to be happy; text them. I can guarantee your followers don't care about you at all. The ones who do will reach out to you in other ways. Since the OP also listed a fallacy, one in the same vein is the endowment effect - where people value things more simply because they already possess them. Consider the example of you holding a stock priced at $200. Now consider an alternate universe where you didn't own that stock but had $200 cash (plus some extra for transaction costs). Would you buy the stock? If not, you should probably consider selling it. This same thought process can be applied to nearly anything in your life: job, significant other, city in which you live. It's good for keeping you out of traps.

violetgarden 6y ago
I quit reddit a year or so ago. I knew it was getting bad when I felt like my way of speaking was getting taken over by reddit speak and memes. Screw something silly up at work “that face when...” I worked hard to start reading longer form articles and books again, but my attention span was so crippled! It was a really weird experience to quit reddit and social media. I still get memes from my friends, and I would have found them funny before, but now I’m so out of the loop I find the majority of them to be so half hearted. I guess memes are funnier when you’re reading tons of them and get that quick jolt of amusement.
alecr95 6y ago
> quitting (and deleting!) reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, and maybe even HN. I've completely dropped twitter/facebook/etc, but have found that I keep coming back to HN and reddit primarily to keep some level of awareness of things that happen outside of my "bubble". How would you maintain that level of awareness while still dropping those social media platforms?
- DontGiveTwoFlux 6y ago
  You could subscribe to a newspaper or magazine.
  - d3nj4l 6y ago
    I haven't found a mainstream newspaper yet with the occasional gem of thought/ opinion that I've gotten off HN/ Reddit.
    - modwilliam 6y ago
      Have you tried The Economist?
      - DenisM 6y ago
        Do you find it even-handed or skewed? Like, can you think of an article that would be in support of something Trump (or republicans in general) do?
        modwilliam 6y ago
        It's stated to have a liberal slant, so especially on social issues it would disagree with Trump. It's also explicitly said bad things about Trump's demeanor or attitudes. However, it does praise some actions that Trump and the Republicans have done with regards to covid19. I overall find that it greatly tones down the extreme takes / perspectives I see on Reddit, and finds lots of nuance
        rabidrat 6y ago
        The Economist is definitely not liberal. It's intended to be nonpolitical but its conscious opinions lean conservative. Disagreeing with Trump or talking about Trump in a negative manner does not make one liberal, no matter what US political pundit will tell you.
QuadrupleA 6y ago
Definitely agreed - for anyone that thinks they might be getting too pulled into negative news, reddit upvotes, endless scrolling, video games, etc., https://defetter.com https://defetter.com is nice guide - stumbled on it about a month ago.
- cellularmitosis 6y ago
  I wish I could upvote this twice. The technique they mention (AVRT addictive voice recognition technique) is actually useful for all sorts of things. “That’s my anxiety speaking. It is separate from me and I don’t have to listen to it”, etc. You can personify and diminish all sorts of negative personality traits. “That’s my impulse to complain / interrupt / lash out / etc”
clinta 6y ago
Twitter and reddit, if you tune what you follow correctly, are invaluable for keeping up with the things that are important to you professionally. Especially if you are responsible for security, following the right people on Twitter is the best way to make sure you know about new vulnerabilities quickly. Twitter and Reddit are flexible enough that you can use them strictly professionally and be better for it.
- ahelwer 6y ago
  I envy those who can engage with twitter in a healthy way, but the list of people whom I envy for this is very short. Everything about it designed to draw you outside of your narrow field of interest and thus increase the time spent on it.
  - clinta 6y ago
    I wish more people would maintain separate accounts for professional and personal use. It is annoying when someone you follow for their technical knowledge makes political posts that are very tempting to respond to. I think the key to healthy twitter use is being able to just scroll past those.
nagarjun 6y ago
How do you deal with FOMO? I don't particularly care about Facebook/Instagram updates but RSS/HN/Twitter have been vital in my learning process. I learn something new every time I'm on these platforms. Personally, I think it's better to moderate your usage of these platforms than completely quitting them.
- ahelwer 6y ago
  FOMO was probably the hardest thing to overcome before quitting twitter, after fear of losing my meagre number of followers. There are a few ways to look at this. First, consider the things you are happy to have not missed out on. Can you name them? Can you articulate what you got out of seeing them when they were brand new? Would seeing them a year or more later have changed what you got out of them? One thing which helped a lot was realizing just how slow things really move. People post very interesting technical things every day, but those are usually the products of maybe a year of intensive offline effort. You don't fall behind by skipping reading those. You do fall behind by endlessly reading those and doing nothing with your own time. Four hours sitting with a textbook in your area of interest is worth more than a month's worth of twitter posts. As a corrolary, you needn't worry about falling behind in general - because of how slow things move, you'll always be able to catch up. It takes probably two orders of magnitude less effort to understand a concept than to research & come up with it in the first place. As you develop an area of interest and talk with other practitioners, you'll naturally hear about interesting things eventually. The rest is just brain candy you wouldn't have cared about anyway.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  You should question whether you really are getting valuable learning from these sources. For example, most product launches / company launches / open source project launches / arxiv research paper announcements / developer conference presentations / AI or ML demos / etc that end up on the frontpage of Hacker News are just noise / junk that gets a flare up of attention and never goes anywhere and doesn’t persist even 6 months later as a newsworthy topic or something someone needs to know to stay current. The only thing I find unique to Hacker News is much higher quality analytical comments about politics, economics and tech industry labor issues. Almost everything else is in one ear out the other.
alexpetralia 6y ago
I agree with eradicating sources of distractions, but I must protest that personally I've learned _far more_ from newsletters/Hacker News/Twitter than I have from books. When I compare the amount of notes I take weekly from those bite-sized sources versus books, the former far outweighs the latter (like 5-10x).
- ahelwer 6y ago
  For me HN and twitter are only useful for learning of things, not learning the things themselves. It's easy to get caught in the perpetual 101-level trap. All my actual valuable knowledge has come from reading textbooks & documentation or trying to build something in my own time.
  - polynomial 6y ago
    "The smartest person in the room... is the room." -D. Weinberger
- polynomial 6y ago
  I learn more facts about the world and such from BSS (bite-sized sources) but I learn more about myself from books. Facts are useful (in emergencies) but I've found that knowing myself is far more useful. YMMV.
fma 6y ago
I know this will be ironic as I'm posting...but I'm trying to post less on HN/FB/Reddit. I find myself spending time replying, checking karma or upvotes etc...I get emotionally attached if people like it, or dislike it. I can spend 5 minutes reading an article and multiples of that following up...It becomes a diminishing point of return. If I do post on Reddit I'll disable inbox replies and just check once a day or something for any replies. Edit: Also since HN doesn't have a 'disable inbox' type (that I know of?), 75% of the time I'm not logged in. I'll log in if I really have a comment and then log back out.
k__ 6y ago
the trick isn't to give up and quit, but to embrace it and build an audience.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
HN and Reddit are the places I read. Reddit is easy if you configure your homepage to stuff you like. JUST DON'T READ THE COMMENTS, and you have a curated list of things to read and catch up on. Much like twitter, facebook, youtube comments, etc most comment sections are a dumpster fire of recycled ideas, tribalism, and infighting.
rbosinger 6y ago
But how is the stock market doing in this alternate universe?
city41 6y ago
As a counter point, I find I learn a lot from Twitter, HN and Reddit. In that order too (ie, Reddit is the least useful). Twitter absolutely does wonders for staying on top of tech trends (especially TweetDeck), and has shown me lots of tools, libraries, techniques, etc that have made my software endeavors much more successful. I do agree with you overall though. I have a virtual desktop dedicated to social sites, and a separate desktop for work, and I keep myself always aware of what "mode" I am in. Facebook is utterly useless, I deleted my account years ago.
- Cyph0n 6y ago
  > In that order too (ie, Reddit is the least useful). For me, it's the exact opposite. In the case of Reddit, you can filter it down to only subreddits you are interested in, which increases the signal-to-noise ratio significantly. Twitter would be the first thing I would get rid of tbh. It encourages shallow retorts and memes more than anything else. The only thing I still get from it is news, but Reddit gives you that with potentially interesting discussions on top.
  - spanhandler 6y ago
    I don't really participate in it, but Reddit's the only place I can easily find opinions about products that're maybe not paid shilling, now that smaller sites and forums are practically un-Googleable unless you already know their names—i.e. they won't come up for a search for anything general that they write about or discuss, unless you include their name, and even then it's iffy. Actually that's also true for a lot of things that aren't exactly products. If I want to know about a vacation spot but I don't want blogspam shill bullshit then I'll probably head to Reddit. I do a lot of "reddit [thing I want to know about]" in DDG, just to kick the Reddit results to the top over all the webspam. Not "!reddit [thing I want to know about]" because Reddit's internal site search is, like most, worse than DDG or Google.
- justaguyhere 6y ago
  I find I learn a lot from Twitter, HN and Reddit Are these learnings useful in your daily life and career? I too have learned a bit from these sites but I really do not know if that knowledge is useful in practice. Sure one can argue that our ability to think and connect things improve, any knowledge is useful etc and there is some truth to it. But at what cost though? Looking at the amount of time I spent on Reddit over the years, anything I might have learned seems miniscule. ROI is so low.
pritovido 6y ago
I don't use reddit, twitter, facebook or instagram, but HN is super important for me. It makes me more efficient because it gives me the knowledge of the community. HN gives me a treasure of information in so many areas I have found invaluable when I need it. Just use something like Zotero so when you see something interesting, you just give a quick look at it, and save it without spending a significant amount of time. And also learn to manage yourself. Without it you will not need facebook to waste your time, you will fantasy dream while looking at the window or staring against the wall.
jb3689 6y ago
If you don't want to delete things, I've found using generated passwords for everything (and not using autofill) is a great way to soft-lock yourself out of things. It's kind of like freezing a credit card in a block of ice - you still have access to it, but you have more steps to rethink your actions
novaleaf 6y ago
don't forget: quit TV and Video Games.

violetgarden 6y ago

I quit reddit a year or so ago. I knew it was getting bad when I felt like my way of speaking was getting taken over by reddit speak and memes. Screw something silly up at work “that face when...” I worked hard to start reading longer form articles and books again, but my attention span was so crippled! It was a really weird experience to quit reddit and social media. I still get memes from my friends, and I would have found them funny before, but now I’m so out of the loop I find the majority of them to be so half hearted. I guess memes are funnier when you’re reading tons of them and get that quick jolt of amusement.

alecr95 6y ago

> quitting (and deleting!) reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, and maybe even HN. I've completely dropped twitter/facebook/etc, but have found that I keep coming back to HN and reddit primarily to keep some level of awareness of things that happen outside of my "bubble". How would you maintain that level of awareness while still dropping those social media platforms?

DontGiveTwoFlux 6y ago
You could subscribe to a newspaper or magazine.
- d3nj4l 6y ago
  I haven't found a mainstream newspaper yet with the occasional gem of thought/ opinion that I've gotten off HN/ Reddit.
  - modwilliam 6y ago
    Have you tried The Economist?
    - DenisM 6y ago
      Do you find it even-handed or skewed? Like, can you think of an article that would be in support of something Trump (or republicans in general) do?
      - modwilliam 6y ago
        It's stated to have a liberal slant, so especially on social issues it would disagree with Trump. It's also explicitly said bad things about Trump's demeanor or attitudes. However, it does praise some actions that Trump and the Republicans have done with regards to covid19. I overall find that it greatly tones down the extreme takes / perspectives I see on Reddit, and finds lots of nuance
        rabidrat 6y ago
        The Economist is definitely not liberal. It's intended to be nonpolitical but its conscious opinions lean conservative. Disagreeing with Trump or talking about Trump in a negative manner does not make one liberal, no matter what US political pundit will tell you.

QuadrupleA 6y ago

Definitely agreed - for anyone that thinks they might be getting too pulled into negative news, reddit upvotes, endless scrolling, video games, etc., https://defetter.com https://defetter.com is nice guide - stumbled on it about a month ago.

cellularmitosis 6y ago
I wish I could upvote this twice. The technique they mention (AVRT addictive voice recognition technique) is actually useful for all sorts of things. “That’s my anxiety speaking. It is separate from me and I don’t have to listen to it”, etc. You can personify and diminish all sorts of negative personality traits. “That’s my impulse to complain / interrupt / lash out / etc”

clinta 6y ago

Twitter and reddit, if you tune what you follow correctly, are invaluable for keeping up with the things that are important to you professionally. Especially if you are responsible for security, following the right people on Twitter is the best way to make sure you know about new vulnerabilities quickly. Twitter and Reddit are flexible enough that you can use them strictly professionally and be better for it.

ahelwer 6y ago
I envy those who can engage with twitter in a healthy way, but the list of people whom I envy for this is very short. Everything about it designed to draw you outside of your narrow field of interest and thus increase the time spent on it.
- clinta 6y ago
  I wish more people would maintain separate accounts for professional and personal use. It is annoying when someone you follow for their technical knowledge makes political posts that are very tempting to respond to. I think the key to healthy twitter use is being able to just scroll past those.

nagarjun 6y ago

How do you deal with FOMO? I don't particularly care about Facebook/Instagram updates but RSS/HN/Twitter have been vital in my learning process. I learn something new every time I'm on these platforms. Personally, I think it's better to moderate your usage of these platforms than completely quitting them.

ahelwer 6y ago
FOMO was probably the hardest thing to overcome before quitting twitter, after fear of losing my meagre number of followers. There are a few ways to look at this. First, consider the things you are happy to have not missed out on. Can you name them? Can you articulate what you got out of seeing them when they were brand new? Would seeing them a year or more later have changed what you got out of them? One thing which helped a lot was realizing just how slow things really move. People post very interesting technical things every day, but those are usually the products of maybe a year of intensive offline effort. You don't fall behind by skipping reading those. You do fall behind by endlessly reading those and doing nothing with your own time. Four hours sitting with a textbook in your area of interest is worth more than a month's worth of twitter posts. As a corrolary, you needn't worry about falling behind in general - because of how slow things move, you'll always be able to catch up. It takes probably two orders of magnitude less effort to understand a concept than to research & come up with it in the first place. As you develop an area of interest and talk with other practitioners, you'll naturally hear about interesting things eventually. The rest is just brain candy you wouldn't have cared about anyway.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
You should question whether you really are getting valuable learning from these sources. For example, most product launches / company launches / open source project launches / arxiv research paper announcements / developer conference presentations / AI or ML demos / etc that end up on the frontpage of Hacker News are just noise / junk that gets a flare up of attention and never goes anywhere and doesn’t persist even 6 months later as a newsworthy topic or something someone needs to know to stay current. The only thing I find unique to Hacker News is much higher quality analytical comments about politics, economics and tech industry labor issues. Almost everything else is in one ear out the other.

alexpetralia 6y ago

I agree with eradicating sources of distractions, but I must protest that personally I've learned _far more_ from newsletters/Hacker News/Twitter than I have from books. When I compare the amount of notes I take weekly from those bite-sized sources versus books, the former far outweighs the latter (like 5-10x).

ahelwer 6y ago
For me HN and twitter are only useful for learning of things, not learning the things themselves. It's easy to get caught in the perpetual 101-level trap. All my actual valuable knowledge has come from reading textbooks & documentation or trying to build something in my own time.
- polynomial 6y ago
  "The smartest person in the room... is the room." -D. Weinberger
polynomial 6y ago
I learn more facts about the world and such from BSS (bite-sized sources) but I learn more about myself from books. Facts are useful (in emergencies) but I've found that knowing myself is far more useful. YMMV.

fma 6y ago

I know this will be ironic as I'm posting...but I'm trying to post less on HN/FB/Reddit. I find myself spending time replying, checking karma or upvotes etc...I get emotionally attached if people like it, or dislike it. I can spend 5 minutes reading an article and multiples of that following up...It becomes a diminishing point of return. If I do post on Reddit I'll disable inbox replies and just check once a day or something for any replies. Edit: Also since HN doesn't have a 'disable inbox' type (that I know of?), 75% of the time I'm not logged in. I'll log in if I really have a comment and then log back out.

k__ 6y ago

the trick isn't to give up and quit, but to embrace it and build an audience.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

HN and Reddit are the places I read. Reddit is easy if you configure your homepage to stuff you like. JUST DON'T READ THE COMMENTS, and you have a curated list of things to read and catch up on. Much like twitter, facebook, youtube comments, etc most comment sections are a dumpster fire of recycled ideas, tribalism, and infighting.

rbosinger 6y ago

But how is the stock market doing in this alternate universe?

city41 6y ago

As a counter point, I find I learn a lot from Twitter, HN and Reddit. In that order too (ie, Reddit is the least useful). Twitter absolutely does wonders for staying on top of tech trends (especially TweetDeck), and has shown me lots of tools, libraries, techniques, etc that have made my software endeavors much more successful. I do agree with you overall though. I have a virtual desktop dedicated to social sites, and a separate desktop for work, and I keep myself always aware of what "mode" I am in. Facebook is utterly useless, I deleted my account years ago.

Cyph0n 6y ago
> In that order too (ie, Reddit is the least useful). For me, it's the exact opposite. In the case of Reddit, you can filter it down to only subreddits you are interested in, which increases the signal-to-noise ratio significantly. Twitter would be the first thing I would get rid of tbh. It encourages shallow retorts and memes more than anything else. The only thing I still get from it is news, but Reddit gives you that with potentially interesting discussions on top.
- spanhandler 6y ago
  I don't really participate in it, but Reddit's the only place I can easily find opinions about products that're maybe not paid shilling, now that smaller sites and forums are practically un-Googleable unless you already know their names—i.e. they won't come up for a search for anything general that they write about or discuss, unless you include their name, and even then it's iffy. Actually that's also true for a lot of things that aren't exactly products. If I want to know about a vacation spot but I don't want blogspam shill bullshit then I'll probably head to Reddit. I do a lot of "reddit [thing I want to know about]" in DDG, just to kick the Reddit results to the top over all the webspam. Not "!reddit [thing I want to know about]" because Reddit's internal site search is, like most, worse than DDG or Google.
justaguyhere 6y ago
I find I learn a lot from Twitter, HN and Reddit Are these learnings useful in your daily life and career? I too have learned a bit from these sites but I really do not know if that knowledge is useful in practice. Sure one can argue that our ability to think and connect things improve, any knowledge is useful etc and there is some truth to it. But at what cost though? Looking at the amount of time I spent on Reddit over the years, anything I might have learned seems miniscule. ROI is so low.

pritovido 6y ago

I don't use reddit, twitter, facebook or instagram, but HN is super important for me. It makes me more efficient because it gives me the knowledge of the community. HN gives me a treasure of information in so many areas I have found invaluable when I need it. Just use something like Zotero so when you see something interesting, you just give a quick look at it, and save it without spending a significant amount of time. And also learn to manage yourself. Without it you will not need facebook to waste your time, you will fantasy dream while looking at the window or staring against the wall.

jb3689 6y ago

If you don't want to delete things, I've found using generated passwords for everything (and not using autofill) is a great way to soft-lock yourself out of things. It's kind of like freezing a credit card in a block of ice - you still have access to it, but you have more steps to rethink your actions

novaleaf 6y ago

don't forget: quit TV and Video Games.