If you have to announce how and why you are quitting, then you probably are doing it too much.
and I'm certain I've seen one on slate.com
Is Facebook really so all consuming for these people who have to quit it publicly?
Personally I love FB. It's like auto-pilot for my social life. It reminds me about the birthdays about the people I only vaguely care about, leave them a one-line message on their wall and that's it until next year.
All the people who are really in my life I rarely interact with on FB but it's great for making lots of people think that lots of people care about them.
What's not to like?
followed by
What's not to like?
Dude, I think you answered your own question: superficial relationships masquerading as genuine ones - you know, that does bother some people.
you could easily automate that :)
What I love about Facebook is that if you want to use Facebook "responsibly", you can, and when you do Facebook doesn't nag you to be more supersocial or anything. Ditto Twitter, actually, though I have no need for Twitter myself. It gives you control.
Compare that to other sites - Tumblr comes to mind since it was mentioned in this article - that attempt to force users into contributing more. I've even heard some sites show a leaderboard of their "Top" users, and inherently pressure their users to post things that the largest amount of people will agree with.
However, I'm sure nicotine and caffeine (not to mention wow) are even worse for most people.
It's a combination of the stimulus and each individual's reaction to it. I'm sure that the vast, vast majority of people have no problems releasing themselves from social media.
If you tell people that you are quitting something, there is a social pressure on you to follow through on your promise. Your friends and family might also be willing to help you achieve your goal, which can be encouraging and push you that much further.
Well worth it, if you ask me. Best of luck to the author.
Hell, that's half of why I'm a user on this site. I don't think that time spent encouraging people not to waste so much time online is necessarily a bad thing.
Also, haven't there been a dozen articles posted here about how publicly stating your intent hinders your ability to achieve it? It was in reference to startups, but it's the same psychology at work I imagine.
It seems like at the start of my day I'll log onto Hacker News and read 5 or 6 interesting articles. However, without even trying, by the end of the day, all the links will be grey instead of black. I'll end up clicking on every link, even the links I really don't give a shit about. It's a time sink - it really is like surfing channels without feeling as guilty about it.
However, I wouldn't want to quit, I'd really want to limit myself. I'm not sure how to approach that though. Maybe an hour a day or reading random articles? How can I count that? Maybe a firefox extension.
But then how do I seperate searching for random articles from searching for solutions to problems when I'm coding or doing real work? How do I seperate those two things? I think part of what makes the internet so easy to kill time on is that it blurs the distinction.
If anyone can come up with a good plan or strategy to prevent time and life from being sucked away by the dark corners and alleys of the internet, while still allowing me to use it for interesting and productive work, please let me know. I think it would be helpful for all of us.
It is utterly PATHETIC that I need to limit myself so. However .. humans are weak. You have to trick yourself.
I was thinking of writing a daemon to rewrite HN's IP before I found out about noprocrast ... good feature.
What about those who use this illusion to drive traffic to their website or front door? Just because you use Twitter for useless chatter doesn't mean everyone else does. Or am I missing the point of the article?
If you spend x hours Tweeting every week and can track it all the way to measurable 'results', you can still get a sense of accomplishment that the author seems to be searching for.
Participating means you're using it for useless chatter.
It's the same as IM. I use IM at work for work, and it's a lot less inane than the regular IM I use with my friends.
