I stopped using Facebook last November. It's been a fantastic experience.
Whether you realize it or not, FB changes your emotional health. FB used to make me oddly depressed. Its like sitting in front of the TV and feasting on Sour Patch Kids for two hours. I would sit there staring at how awesome people's lives were and wonder why I wasn't doing such awesome things myself. I heard about the passing of family members from family friends before family members would have a chance to tell me personally.
After I stopped going to FB my important friends started CALLING me. Can you believe that? They picked up the phone and CALLED me. I went out to dinner more. I stopped engaging in those destructive conversations like "Can you believe so-and-so's status message..."
There have been some drawbacks though. I don't always hear about last-minute parties. I don't get to see the pictures my friends take from events. And I don't have the luxury of sending a message to someone I don't quite know very well who wouldn't have my phone number or e-mail, most likely through group activities like Crossfit that I'm a member of.
But all things considered, ditching Facebook is highly recommended.
FB (and social media in general) is the only thing I've found that enables me to organize going out for drinks with more than 2 people at once.
Also the only thing that lets me post "Hey, anyone wanna go out for ice cream tomorrow evening?" and actually having 5 people come. Three of which are completely new outside twitter/facebook.
It's really quite awesome.
Hell, I have very scatterbrained friends who are always busy with something. Without twitter, facebook and irc I'd never get to talk to them at all. Let alone be able to see them almost every other day like I do now.
And that's not even accounting for the fact that some of us tend to leave the country for months at a time, but still wanting to keep in touch.
Seriously though, how do you usefully and efficiently keep in touch with more than 1 person via telephone? I can't even imagine it working.
Oh and, word of advice from a "silly 24 year old". If looking at other people's lives makes you depressed, lead an awesomer life. Friends being better than you should be an encouragement to do better, not a depressor.
When I signed up for Facebook, that was my dream. That I would post stuff like "who wants to get ice cream tomorrow night?" and, just like that, people would take me up on it.
Never happened.
On the contrary, people I met would "friend" me, but still keep me out of their real-world cliques. Example: A guy invited everyone to a party at his house. Everyone else who responded knew where he lived. I sent a message asking. He ignored me.
I had an experience like the GP's. Facebook was an opiate, making me think I was keeping up with friends, when it was really pointless chatter. After I quit, I emailed an overseas friend and we had a far more meaningful exchange than anything during the year we were connected on Facebook.
I guess it depends who you know. Most of my close, in-town friends use FB minimally or not at all. So they weren't the same people I was talking to on FB.
Well, I think this says more about your understanding of friendship versus acquaintance rather than facebook itself.
Just because you added someone on facebook doesn't mean that you are now good friends. It means they know you somehow. You'll get invited to people's parties when you're close to them. Facebook supports existing friendships. It doesn't create new ones (well, in general).
In fact, if someone you know but don't certainly like adds you on facebook, it's socially awkward to not accept their friend request, because it is an outward social refusal to not do so. Essentially, you can "force" your way into friending someone. This weird social dynamic allows people's friend lists to grow way beyond proportion even if the feeling isn't mutual for everyone.
I think you're making the same point as me: "Facebook supports existing friendships. It doesn't create new ones." That's my experience too: Facebook did not turn my acquaintances into friends. But the person I replied to claimed otherwise — he posted an ice cream invite and 3 people he'd never met offline came.
I've made tons of acquaintances into friends. Facebook is a great facilitator for that.
Hell, my current girlfriend-like person was initially just an acquaintance on Facebook.
You need to put in an effort. Consistently including online people in your offline life, will eventually turn them into close friends. You talk to them online first, meaningfully, you invite them to offline friendly gatherings and eventually they just become one of your group of friends.
I mean ... it's the same as offline stuff. All your friends were acquaintances at first.
Honest question about the party: Why didn't you directly contact some of the "everyone" people who responded to ask for the address (or carpool)?
I find PG's "Relentlessly Resourceful" essay equally-useful in a social context. It took me a long time to realize that (for me) social interactions were an active and often taxing process. (And emails / FB messages are pretty much the most passive form of communication anymore.)
Didn't know those people and wasn't that strongly motivated to go... it was just one of several possible things to do that night. "Relentlessly resourceful" is great, but part of that is to make sure you're solving the right problem. And in social terms, I've found that trying to become friends with flaky/non-responsive people is solving the wrong problem.
Exactly. You don't have to read any posts. Facebook will email you when someone has invited you to a party, or give you a push notification when someone wants to be friends. You can use Facebook's integration with your phone's address book to get all their contact details, so you can always reach them. You can have all the benefits of Facebook without visiting the actual website or app.
One thing about facebook most people don't notice is it is highly customizable
Want everything by email? Doable. Want to not use the site and have most of the important things go by email (where "important things" is set by you)? Doable
"Seriously though, how do you usefully and efficiently keep in touch with more than 1 person via telephone? I can't even imagine it working."
In response to that I'd say think about what social life was like before the very recent invention of online social networks. There is no end to the amount of complex tasks that were arranged long before anything like social media existed, and long before anything as enabling as the telephone existed. The fact that someone would find it difficult to imagine a scenario without facebook, twitter etc. shows how disconnected from the abundant alternatives we have become.
You also have to understand that I am juuuuuust that age where I've used message boards and MSN more than the telephone in that time of being a teenager when you learn how to socialize with people.
Plus I was always a geek so that goes double for me. So, essentially, I never really learned how to use the phone effectively.
For some reason as I read this I thought of the thread from a few days ago, about how if you freelance, you shouldn't take on low-value, high-demand clients.
Maybe if your "friends" only get together or even talk to you in response to tweets or facebook, and forget all about you otherwise, you need to consider their real commitment to the friendship.
You know that friends did manage to organize cocktail parties at each other's houses, gather at restaurants, etc. before twitter or facebook existed.
"Seriously though, how do you usefully and efficiently keep in touch with more than 1 person via telephone? I can't even imagine it working."
Efficiency is the least of my worries when it comes to keeping in touch with friends. Why do we have to be in a rush? Why not slow down and actually take the time to sincerely talk to each one of them? If that means I can't be friends with 100 people, then so be it.
Better to have fewer relationships I take the time to nurture, than 100 shallow ones.
WhatsApp FTW? Most of the impromptu meets for food and drinks with friends are organized using that instead of Facebook. Takes way too long to wait for people to check FB, RSVP, etc.
This is a very rational way to use Facebook. Make yourself the master of it, and get value from the tool on your own terms.
Once a day (e.g. 15 minutes) use probably gives a person 80% of the utility or value of 20x a day (e.g. 2 hours) usage. There is relatively little benefit from all those "extra visits", since almost nothing on Facebook is urgent, actionable, or going to cost money if not attended to immediately. (A great example of the 80-20 rule in action, btw.)
Yeah, I'm thinking of deleting the FB app on my phone. It's just a temptation to constantly check what's happening and stop being present with whoever I'm around.
Then, ask yourself if $amount of money per month is still worth it for a 3G contract. This one really depends on your work and your environment (is there WiFi in walking range if you need it?). But it saved me time and money so far.
yeah, this is how i try use it too. the problem is that at the end of the day it's really hard to sift through the stream of fwd:fwd:fwd junk to get to the real updates you care about, because it all lands on you at once, so most days i find myself avoiding it, and in practice i end up checking a few people's walls individually once a week or so. i wish facebook provided a precise way for me to set up filter rules (e.g. filter out anything that has been reshared without comment); i don't really trust their automatic signal-versus-noise balancing algorithms to craft me a stream.
It's funny that people just can't do things in a balanced way, it always has to be all or nothing.
In the past 5 years, I've lived in 5 different cities across 3 different countries. My network of friends is very widespread geographically, and I love Facebook for being able to see pictures of my friends or read their random thoughts and what they're up to in life without hassles of long distance calls, scheduling skype sessions, time difference, etc. We often have lengthy conversations through comment threads or Facebook chat.
In a way, I use Facebook a bit like a private message board with my close friends and family (this isn't hard for me as I was a big user of message boards as a teenager, so this habit of sharing life with people in a digitally written form is ingrained into me).
But I also go out to dinner with the friends in my current city, hang out and go out with them, text/call them to hear about how that job interview went, etc.
You can use Facebook in an "socially healthy" way, and not spend hours reading it passively.
(I also use Facebook in a semi-unusual way: I have 2 different accounts; one that has less than 50 friends and is not viewable publicly, where I post pictures, ask friends for advice, etc.; and one account with several hundreds of friends that I use as a "public" account. I also have a third account, that I don't really use, as I work a lot with kids and teenagers, and they tend to want to add me— this account is solely for that purpose).
I completely agree...I've "quit" Facebook by changing my password to some pasted value that I can't memorize. I have FB email me if someone direct messages me...so if I really need to tell someone something, I can...but the hassle of logging in is great enough that I do it only when necessary. And for times in my life when I feel like using FB more, I can switch the password (or use a cookie)
The all-or-nothing mindset is silly
> I would sit there staring at how awesome people's lives were and wonder why I wasn't doing such awesome things myself.
I felt this way with Facebook, but then worked out what was going on. It's a multiple-endpoints situation. The status updates you read aren't coming from a random distribution of your friends. They come from a self-selected population that is doing something interesting at that particular time. People (mostly) don't post status updates about an average workday or lazy weekend.
If you have 52 friends, who each go on vacation one week out of the year, then every week Facebook will be showing you somebody's awesome vacation updates. That doesn't mean that your own life is worse or less interesting for not being on vacation that particular week.
I ditched facebook about 2 years ago, for 14 months.
I learned that I never made enough of an impression for any of my friends to inquire where I was.
It was incredibly depressing because I exposed a lie to myself, that I had close friends.
I guess it's been neat, knowing the truth, but it was an expensive trade to obtain it. I've been back on there for a few months again, and sadly, even knowing none of those people actually think about me in their daily lives, it's once again a fantastic placebo.
So if you're sensitive and there's a chance your friends aren't really as close as you think, you should pause before you test every single one of them at the same time.
It's that generalization i take issue with. The communication medium you use to talk with your friends doesn't have all that much correlation between how close of friends you are. Distance, time, and other concerns would rank much more highly than facebook vs something else.
I would say that real friendship requires intimate conversation - discussing things that you wouldn't share with just anyone. This is what separates friends from acquaintances.
Intimate conversation, by definition, must be (or at least feel) private. So if you communicate with someone face to face, by phone, or by email, you may maintain the feeling of privacy necessary for real conversation. I'd allow that "private" Facebook messages might serve the same purpose.
Wall posts, however, could not. Everything is said with half a mind to how everyone else will read it.
That's only part conversation; the other part is performance.
I agree. Email, IM's do not replace face to face contact. We're biologically wired for those type of interactions, not online ones. It's a true generalization, even if there are exceptions.
I think this whole "social networking" thing will start to fade soon, as people increasingly realize that it's not "cool" anymore, and that they don't really need it, other perhaps than checking their accounts twice a year. So this whole discussion about whether Google+ or other company can beat Facebook or not might be irrelevant, if the whole social networking "industry" collapses in the next 5 years.
Facebook has over 900 million monthly active users (google it and you can easily confirm this from multiple sources). It may not be "cool", but the time when you could proclaim it a fad has long since passed. That's like saying TV's not cool.
You ass. You can't compare things that are essential to a functioning economy to be compared to annoying background noise like '"social" networking'. It more closely related to TV and online media. Both of which are incredibly draining and mind numbing. Try going without TV for a year and take up a productive/creative hobby.
Try telling Syrian activists that social networking is "noise." The ability to freely share information is highly underrated in places where information may be freely shared. Thanks for the tip.
This essay could also be called, "Life in the 80s (and early 90s) for most people." Back then, you had to be relatively informed to have access to "social media" (i.e. Usenet, gopher, BBS).
It's amazing how much productivity has been disrupted by social media. There are of course huge upsides as well, but sometimes I wonder if the full downside is recognized. A lot of people I know do very little work in the workplace, as they spend all day on Twitter and Facebook. They get around IT bans by using their smartphones... sometimes I wonder if the only thing running corporations these days is automated software.
I was a news hound in the 80s which was great because TV news didn't suck.
Another 80s early 90s information device was the magazine, there were tons of magazines which were mostly killed off by the Internet.
Social media is a whole lot of everything and 1% substance on a good day. It's a habit it's like Entertainment Tonight you sit there and one day think "why am I watching this?". That actually happened to me in the late 80s I realized I had a half smile grin Joker sort of thing watching banal celebrity news. These days instead of a dumb smile it's my left elbow with osteoarthritis from leaning on it reading about cats, rage faces and other memes or arguing with strangers over things 5000km away.
Ditched my TV last week and have been cutting back on my internet habit when I'm home for a while now. I suddenly have hours of free time every evening and I'm re-discovering magazines. But you're right, lots of them have been under pressure or have disappeared.
One thing I found out about myself is that internet made me lazy. These days I find it easier to read short articles - online articles used to get bookmarked and never read. I'm also trying harder to work on stuff without the net. I'm in electronics/embedded and I used to click around for every little thing. Now I sit down with pencil & paper again until I crack it by hand.
This is a great blog post -- I can't help but feel like its an argument less against social media and more about how we use social media.
I think it's particularly ironic that he singled out Reddit for providing "absolutely 0 value to me", since Reddit's original use was a news aggregator devoted to separating signal from noise. Nowadays, its a place for people to spout memes.
I use reddit, but I had to unsubscribe from most of the default subreddits, and also from a few subreddits that I'd hand picked. It's a shame, but it's difficult to get programming news from reddit these days. Apart from silly memes, it's sipping from a firehose. So these days I largely stick to the backwaters where there's a much smaller amount of total content and good signal:noise.
I'd argue though that a news aggregator can separate signal from noise and still provide no value. On HN I catch myself reading very well-written, thoroughly researched and fascinating articles... that have nothing to do with my life. That takes time away from _doing_ things, like the writing and painting OP accomplished on his info diet.
> Nowadays, its a place for people to spout memes.
You have to groom your subreddit subscriptions.
My picks: askscience, 1000words, linguistics, science, somethingimade, DepthHub, books. All these largely contain interesting and productive discussions.
I ditched Facebook, and while I miss the ease of social engagement (getting invited to events via friend-spam was nice, since most people never invite me personally) i'm glad for no longer needing to constantly check my feed.
However, I noticed that Twitter and Hacker News tend to replace Facebook in that way, so I may follow your lead and ditch those too. But I sometimes find myself in a bar, searching through the internet, trying to find something to read rather than make conversation with a stranger. So i'm going to go one step further and ditch my smartphone. (Protip: Google supports syncing contacts/calendars using SyncML and S60 devices)
I'm not sure how well I will do without Google Maps and GPS to be my Hitchiker's Guidebook, but something tells me that not knowing where your going will lead to a more interesting destination. Or, since I live in Baltimore, getting shot. Either way it's an adventure.
Paul Miller, one of The Verge's editors, is taking one year off from the Internet. He's blogging about it (via a USB stick that someone else publishes from) https://www.theverge.com/label/offline It's very interesting, especially "Ghost Limbs" and "Ignorance".
I've been following this, there is a hacker news thread about it, and The Verge have published a P.O. box for Mr Miller. I'm hacking out a letter over the weekend (typed, on onionskin paper, on my uncle's Olivetti).
I use Miller's page with teenagers (I'm a teacher); and the article here will be added to my collection. The pitch is 'control and focus your attention'.
I agree short breaks are good ideas: they can give you time to mull over the things you've learned and seen, for ideas to finally sprout, etc. But to extend this to any broader theses like 'you should quit social media' is unwarranted; for a counter anecdote, I'm reminded of Hamming's You and Your Research http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
> Another trait, it took me a while to notice. 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. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.
Meanwhile, in the real world, millions of people use Facebook to keep in touch with friends, share photos, and set up events, in addition to meeting in person.
Defining yourself by not using something is no better than defining yourself by using it. Just let go and accept that it's a useful tool, nothing more, nothing less.
Amazing! If you can charge 10 dollars a month for something which really doesn't do much and for which there are many free alternatives (some even provided by you) then I applaud. Do you have any paying customers at the moment?
We're just launching the pro version now. The parent post is more promotion than just about anything we've done so far. But I'm a fan of transparency, and would be happy to share numbers in a month or three.
I understand the urge to keep away from facebook or twitter. However, Hacker News is very important resource for career and personal development IMHO.
Since I came to know about Hacker News, my life has changed. Not only I stay away from social media such as facebook, twitter, but also I am away from news websites such as cnn and bbc.And, let me say, it is very good for mind and body to not consume so much news.
I'm confident he's serious, and I feel much the same way. I use cperciva's Hacker News Daily (http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/) to help avoid spending too much time at Hacker News and to make sure I don't miss any big stories.
There will be a point where HN could hurt you. So it's like that bell curve where you feel reading HN would help you but one side of the bell curve is a downward side and that's where you'll learn that HN is becoming more and more like any other aggregation sites out there.
I ditched Facebook for about 8 months (I've been back since January) last year and it was incredibly liberating. As a result of my complete withdrawal for such a long period I don't check nearly as much as I previously did, although I must admit I have been starting to slip back into old habits. Also when I re-activated my Facebook I also joined Twitter which I now spent far too much time on. Despite some regression, I still feel that by having taken such an extended hiatus I am far less addicted to receiving the constant stream of information, as I once was.
This post has inspired me to take some steps to make sure I don't completely revert to the state I was ~1.5 years ago. I too plan to be more consciousness of my Twitter/Facebook/Reddit usage and not just spend large chunks of time mindlessly browsing them, when I could be doing some productive.
I don't really know what social media is well enough to say I would go without it. I am simplifying it and getting off Facebook though (Strangely about a month ago I just quit signing on-- I suppose I should announce to people that I am no longer going to be there.)
But social media can be a larger thing. Email lists, discussion forums like this, blogs, etc. Some of those are central to my ability to stay informed and some are central to my actual productive work. I don't know you can separate email lists from something like Hackers News.
So I am separating things into three piles.
1) Discard: Facebook
2) Check 1-2 times/day (HN, a few blogs)
3) Check occasionally (LinkedIn, etc)
I haven't gotten on the Twitter bandwagon, so I don't have any experience with that.
Last week, I tried to make producing something instead of consuming something the first thing I did in the morning. Practically, this meant working on a bunch of blog posts that I've had queued up for ages, plus actually writing about those "a ha" moments you have at work. It was really great and I felt good all day.
I was about to say I just spent my lifetime without social media but I had no idea Hacker News was social media too. I guess that's good. Means I'm getting on with the times and not living in the 80s as one commenter put it.
Giving values and more hobbies? OP sounds like he's doing PUA's inner game stuff.
I guess I'm a bit on the high horse since, I can do social media, and still be able to Judo, workout (6 days a week with insanity,gym, and hiking), dance at clubs, hang out with friends, self help stuff, and study for fun.
I don't think social media is the problem but his lack of discipline.
And everybody is jumping on the bandwagon "Whooa he's right! It's all social media fault." Hello, what you do with your time is up to you, it's not social media fault at all. It's your lack of time management skill.
Hmm… I don't think that what the author was getting at. I felt it was more closely aligned with the point that social media put some of wall/distance between us and our connections/relationships - in the sense that we are assimilating stories of our friends through status updates instead of a more personal face to face interaction. ie: Getting the news your friend is pregnant through status update vs. them breaking the news to you face to face and the emotions that happens as you congratulate and hug them.
Of course it's not social media's fault. he's just saying, it brings about certain tendencies in him that he wants to change. Just like being in a casino brings about tendencies to gamble, or being in a McDonalds brings about tendencies to eat unhealthy.
I'm not sure which corporate internet filter application our building uses (I think Sophos?) or if they use their own custom rules or subscribe else where but, steve corona, your entire site is blocked to me as:
Access to the web page you were trying to visit has been
blocked in accordance with company policy. Please contact
your system administrator if you believe this is in error.
URL: stevecorona.com/how-30-days-without-social-media-changed-my-life
Category: adult-and-pornography
Facebook, like most other social media platforms, are tools. You can use tools to benefit or enhance your life or you can use it to destroy or negatively affect your life. Money is a tool, for example.
Other than that though, this was a great article and I'd be interested to start a similar experiment. I do think you if you are more purposeful with social media, you can still be as productive and do cool things like the writer did.
It's funny how he couldn't do any of these things before while using social media. This is BS. I knew even before clicking the link exactly what it would say. Incredibly cliche. Someone should write an article - Moderation. How does it work?
> It's funny how he couldn't do any of these things before while using social media.
Yes, almost as if our brains evolved in an environment where social media didn't exist, such that social media constitute an exploit for a security vulnerability in our motivation systems. Oh wait, they do.
> Incredibly cliche.
So is "don't take drugs". Sometimes something is a cliche because it's both true and worth repeating.
> Moderation. How does it work?
Step one is to be lucky in the genetic lottery. Seriously, there are people who can indefinitely maintain a moderate habit with cookies, whiskey, cigarettes, cocaine, poker, television and Facebook; and there are people who can't, and need to go cold turkey. As it happens I'm one of the former (well I haven't tried it with cocaine, but I can do the others), but that doesn't make me a better person than the people who can't, just luckier.
It's also worth noting some people have found going cold turkey for a while, was enough to break the addiction such that they could then go back cautiously, in moderation.
I have yet to read an obituary (even one of a young person killed in an accident) where FB was ever mentioned as being a hobby or passion or an admirable part of the deceased's life.
Ha ha. I actually have a running joke now. I log into Facebook about once a day with a hearty, "time to check Facebook!" About 30-40 seconds later when I've skimmed the latest posts, I quit with a boisterous, "well, that was great!"
I'm assuming that anyone who can spend more than ten minutes on Facebook has way more friends than I do, and/or those friends are much more prolific than mine.
Or more interesting. I have a small number of friends and an even smaller number that I allow to see updates from. And even then, I rarely do more than scroll to wherever I left off last time or lose interest before I even get there.
I have the same reaction as you do most days. Oh well, sure glad I checked that! (not). Google+ is actually the opposite. There is such a tech focus from the people I follow that there are demo videos, technical papers, etc that I want to read but don't. Certainly not this, I'm happy because other people are, nonsense.
Whether you realize it or not, FB changes your emotional health. FB used to make me oddly depressed. Its like sitting in front of the TV and feasting on Sour Patch Kids for two hours. I would sit there staring at how awesome people's lives were and wonder why I wasn't doing such awesome things myself. I heard about the passing of family members from family friends before family members would have a chance to tell me personally.
After I stopped going to FB my important friends started CALLING me. Can you believe that? They picked up the phone and CALLED me. I went out to dinner more. I stopped engaging in those destructive conversations like "Can you believe so-and-so's status message..."
There have been some drawbacks though. I don't always hear about last-minute parties. I don't get to see the pictures my friends take from events. And I don't have the luxury of sending a message to someone I don't quite know very well who wouldn't have my phone number or e-mail, most likely through group activities like Crossfit that I'm a member of.
But all things considered, ditching Facebook is highly recommended.