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Fast Food for the Mind: Why I Don't Have a Facebook or Twitter Account
- daktanis 12y agoI've been thinking about quitting Facebook but I haven't convinced myself of it yet. Over the last year I've been trying to eat better, trying to be more productive with my time....is it time to quit?
- hkmurakami 12y agoIf love to quit if I had another way to keep in touch so easily with friends around the world. :( It's hard when I have lived in three continents and while I could go back to an era when we got by with phone calls and the occasional letter, I really think my life would be poorer if I do that.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- gopher1 12y agoWhy not keep the account but only use it if someone messages you or requests to be a friend? To me that's the useful part of Facebook. The news feed is just nonsense.
- samnardoni 12y agoIt doesn't have to be binary. Just use it less if you don't want to. Use it more if you want to.
- geebee 12y agoYeah... maybe. Social media is very new, and so much of it is getting sorted out. Some people need to treat alcohol as a binary, for instance, but most people don't have to.
- normloman 12y agoIf you can't seem to control yourself, it absolutely should be binary. For others, practice in moderation.
- x1798DE 12y agoI deleted my facebook account when I started looking for jobs during grad school (trying to cut down on my "searchability footprint"). I've barely noticed its absence. Post a message with your e-mail and GPG key or whatever for a week before you delete your facebook so people can get in touch with you I suppose, but I recommend it.
- wutbrodo 12y agoYou could just try treating it like an inbox (which is basically what I do). I feel like people always talk as if the trade-off is between wasting hours of time on the newsfeed or being harder to reach, but this is a false dilemma. I log onto FB in an incognito window once every two or three days to check my messages (I've turned off email notifications). I spent all of 1 minute there, and I haven't looked at the newsfeed in at least a year or two. If I were to close my account and lose its function as an inbox, there's a lot of messages I simply wouldn't get. For example, it's happened more than once that extended family visiting my city from overseas want to grab lunch in < a week; this has happened more than once and I would hate to miss a message like that. Sometimes these people won't go to the effort to hunt down the chain of phone numbers across a few continents to get to my phone number, and that's totally understandable when Facebook is a convenient alternative in terms of messaging.
- mreiland 12y agoI usually check once/day, and I have I think 10 people on my friends list. 1 of them someone I'm dating, and the rest are either friends, or their wives. It takes me minutes to catch up on what everyone has posted, and about the only thing I'll ever post are funny images of the variety that you would normally send around in an email for everyone to get a kick out of. I don't get using FB for more than that, honestly. I just can't take it seriously as anything other than a play area where I'm able to communicate in a non-intrusive way with a small group of people. I just don't understand having 100+ 'friends'. Who can keep up with all of that?
- mercer 12y agoI treat Facebook in much the same way. However, I don't completely agree with your statement that: > I feel like people always talk as if the trade-off is between wasting hours of time on the newsfeed or being harder to reach, but this is a false dilemma. I've often argued the same when friends of mine closed their facebook account and became harder to reach. Then I realized that this choice of 'moderation' can be very difficult for many people, in the same way that for some people it can be really difficult to stop drinking once they start, and in the same way that for me it's really difficult to start watching a new show without binging on it. That said, ideally I'd propose your solution. On mobile this is easier if you just install the messenger app without the facebook app (assuming that's possible).
- Nickoladze 12y agoI quit when it got to the point where nothing on my feed interested me, I never posted anything, and I had trimmed down my friends list so far that it was only people I actually talked to regularly outside of Facebook as well. Some people continue to use it as a way to keep in touch with distant friends and relatives, but I cut ties pretty easily. You just have to deal with being haggled at every family reunion when some distant aunt asks why you didn't see the pictures of her new dog.
- Fuzzwah 12y ago... much like fast food, there are decent options out there for moderate consumption.
- geebee 12y agoWow. This was almost the exact analogy that prompted me to quit facebook about a year ago. I was watching a show about the addictive nature of junk food, and how it works. Many food items, especially zero calorie ones like diet soda, trick your mind into believing it has received something it needs. However, by tricking your mind but denying your body, you come back again for it later (and again, and again). Unfortunately, this applies to high calorie foods that are largely nutritionally empty. You sense a need, you go to the food for that need, and it provides a mental signal that you have received it without actually filling the need. The recommendation was - every time you find yourself reaching for a salty bag of chips or a diet soda, ask yourself, what is my body actually telling me it wants? While it may seem more expensive, try to fulfill that need as low on the "processed" chain as you can. This way, you'll fulfill the signal and the need. That was kind of long winded, but I realized, at that moment, how I was using social media. I'm in a state of life, for better and worse, where I have very, very little time (kids, mortgages, work, and so forth). Many relationships are starting to fade, or rot. My mind was sending me signals that I needed more social interaction, and I was fulfilling these signals with social media rather than real human contact. To me, this is the aspartane of social interactions. You have a need, you use something that satisfies the signal but not the need itself, and so you keep coming back. Very specifically, I was replacing something that used to be a big part of my life - playing music at jams and with friends, with youtube clips and other videos. Now, this is a little complicated, in that videos have actually been a good thing in some ways. For instance, because of youtube, I've been able to learn a lot of bluegrass songs well prior to going to a jam, which has certainly enhanced my experience at those jam sessions. And if all I have is 30 minutes after the kids go to bed to learn a new song, well, at least I got to learn a new song. So I'm not sure total abstinence is a good idea here. There's an interesting continuum of these addictive things. You can quit cigarettes completely, just walk away. You can (and probably should[1]) quit junk food completely, but you can't quit food. And lastly, I'd say you probably shouldn't quit social media completely. But this does make it much more complicated, and you need to be careful about it - and of course, keep in mind that a corporation that seeks to maximize ad revenue from you is something you need to be particularly cautious about. Personally, I am glad I quit facebook, for all kind of reasons, not just the one above. Occasional fast food is pretty much harmless. I'd also guess that the risks of a once in a blue moon cigar are vanishingly low. The difference here is that you can tolerate some of a bad thing, whereas I'm not sure all social media should be considered a bad thing. But I'd put it in the category of food, there is definitely junk social media that you would want to avoid.
- vezzy-fnord 12y agoI never understood the appeal behind Twitter myself. I don't have an account (nor one on Facebook) and I only use it infrequently to search various trends when my curiosity is piqued. Twitter is an indispensable tool to perform sentimental analysis and analyze/predict societal tendencies and trends in general. But as a social media tool? People always keep saying that there's plenty of interesting information to be obtained from following technical individuals. I just don't see that. What can I get that I won't obtain from blogs attached to my RSS reader, or even just by going to high-profile communities and message boards like /r/netsec, HN and Slashdot/SoylentNews/AltSlashdot to use as digests? Finally, even if you do find golden nuggets, they're buried between layers of inanity and mundane content. Who would've thought a communication medium limited to 140 characters would suffer from that? I guess the only real benefit is that I can directly speak to tech figures, although in a highly constrained format. I don't think I'd want to, though, especially considering plenty of those people would likely see you as a Luddite for still using email and IRC. Twitter's very webdev-centric, I find. I waste enough time on the web as is. Adding Twitter to the mix would offer no benefit. Though I'm assuming employers insist on it?
- dobbsbob 12y agoI have a pseudoanon twitter account to follow various researchers and people in the mobile security space. It's great for asking questions since most of them don't have public email addresses and I'm usually asking a minor question. Facebook I've never used, I have a group textsecure room open with close friends and use it like an IRC room idling on it.
- atmosx 12y agoOkay for social media. What about reading online articles?
- vezzy-fnord 12y agoWhat about it?
- smackfu 12y agoA lot of people use it instead of RSS. Just follow the people who have good blogs, and now you get their long articles and their short commentary.
- was_hellbanned 12y agoI eat at McDonald's once a week, and I log onto Facebook a couple of times per month. This sounds like a recovering alcoholic ranting about how alcohol is evil and nobody should drink it.
- benihana 12y agoI got a similar vibe. It talks about how facebook can be bad for some people, but then basically calls out everyone for being unhealthy. I react to this the same way I react to someone who sees a small part of my life (like me grabbing a shitty McDonald's burger) and extrapolates my entire physical and mental health based on that small point. And that reaction is usually "piss off, you're being really presumptuous."
- mitchty 12y agoWhile you're both correct, I really do think things like twitter do fit somewhat into if not fast food, maybe candy category of social/interaction. It feels empty. I vastly prefer chilling out in person, even if there isn't a ton of conversation, its preferable to texting on my phone or whatever.
- rebelidealist 12y agoThe usefulness and power of FB and Twitter is for your professional network. It is immensely valuable that relevant people that you know get update on your what you are building and any insightful information that you have. Rarely do people keep up with their LinkedIn.
- mattgreenrocks 12y agoThis is why I hate social networks for professional work: a nauseating level of self-promotion. "Wow, my repo has twenty stars!" Great, why did you tell us all that? I'm more interested in discussion or insight. Twitter's character limits make that nearly impossible; relegating it to snark, cheap puns, and humblebrags. We're blind to it here at HN; we worship success and accept that contributing to the noise of it all is a necessary evil so we can build our brand. Meanwhile, everyone's doing the same, hawking e-books/courses/OSS/products/consultancies. It's not communication, it's typing at each other. Now that we're supposed to maintain an online identity, it's utterly exhausting at times. Disclaimer: I'm an old soul. I much preferred the non-social web because we didn't all seem to be pushing something.
- jccalhoun 12y agoPeople who say they don't have a facebook or twitter account are the new people who say they don't own a tv...
- blutoot 12y agoI can't quit - my active Facebook-ing GF and my own profile have a relationship status pointing to each other. If I quit her relationship status would suddenly look weird (I think) and that would raise silly questions. But I'm practically inactive on Facebook. I do request my friends from time to time to not tag me on photos after social gatherings and events. Facebook Message is the only useful thing for me - glad Facebook recognized that there's a market that covers people like me and decided to separate the Message app from the main one.
- coldtea 12y ago>I can't quit - my active Facebook-ing GF and my own profile have a relationship status pointing to each other. If I quit her relationship status would suddenly look weird (I think) and that would raise silly questions. That's a valid reason not to quit Facebook if you're both 14 year olds.
- normloman 12y agoOh no, not .... looking weird! Raising silly questions! What will people think? Just try to be as normal as possible. Wear whatever other people wear, listen to the same music as other people your age, and don't ever say anything controversial.
- Rudism 12y agoThis smells a lot like arguments people would have made against TV when it first showed up. Comic books, non-classical music, yadda yadda yadda. It seems like every generation thinks that the way they grew up was relatively wholesome and meaningful when compared to newer generations... I don't buy it. People change, habits change, ways of communicating and experiencing the world change, but I think it's silly to compare any of that to actually doing things that are physically unhealthy or harmful to your body. All that being said, I don't use Facebook or Twitter either, but mostly because I find them tedious.
- pavelrub 12y agoThe problem with your comment is that it can be said about any criticism of anything new, regardless of whether it is objectively good or bad. Not every way of communicating and experiencing the world is psychologically equivalent. If my choice of "experiencing the world" is lying in bed and watching pictures on reddit for 50 years (let's say I'm rich), without going outside even once, and my idea of "having a relationship" is FB chat - It's likely that this is going to make me a very miserable person. There are limits to the amount of behavioural changes you can make without causing psychological damage. That's why there are actual studies on the matter: does Facebook make us feel good? Is it psychologically healthy? Some of those studies are mentioned in the article. A much better line of criticism would be to address those studies directly, rather than making very general comments that can be used to justify anything.
- shearnie 12y agoI have been having intriguing discussions on Facebook with my friends. I think it's a matter of what friends you have or are paying attention to. One could say visiting mediocre people who gossip about other people is junk food for the brain also.