Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It

This part really resonated with me:<p>&gt; Consider that the ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy. Social media weakens this skill because it’s engineered to be addictive. The more you use social media in the way it’s designed to be used — persistently throughout your waking hours — the more your brain learns to crave a quick hit of stimulus at the slightest hint of boredom.<p>I&#x27;ve recently been finding it really hard to concentrate on my work and I genuinely think this might be the reason. I find myself compulsively opening twitter and tumblr and scrolling through for ages before realising that literally none of it is interesting. I&#x27;m just scrolling past brightly coloured images and auto-playing videos while completely distracted and detached from the real world.<p>I agree with the sentiment elsewhere in these comments that the solution isn&#x27;t to completely delete your accounts (I think they can have some value when used in moderation), but rather to change the way I use them. Maybe deleting the native apps and using the webapps will raise the barrier to entry high enough that I&#x27;ll only use them when there&#x27;s actually something I want to do on them.<p>As for Facebook, I deleted that a few months ago and my quality of life instantly increased.

More importantly social media is bad for your mental health. It hits the brain in many of the same ways as the &#x27;news&#x27; and those intentionally boring phone games. It causes dopamine dysregulation which leads to a dependency. Consider the anxiety you feel if you need to go to the bathroom and cannot find your phone. This dopamine dysregulation destroys your mood and motivation.<p>Being social is a good thing. However companies have figured out they need addictive properties in order to be successful. I previously worked on optimizing companies for user engagement and the addictive properties naturally fall out of the process. If social media satiates your desires you will actually use them less. Think about it; why are your keys always in the last place you look? Because once you find them you stop looking. If you want to keep people on your site you hide their keys. People love a challenge and will be even happier when they find them.<p>It&#x27;s particularly bad with modern (low information) news media. I&#x27;m a compulsive news junkie* so I have to avoid the news in order to get anything done. I quit facebook and google over their insistence on pushing &#x27;news&#x27;. It&#x27;s junk food for the brain. It&#x27;s low information and only gives an illusion of being informed. E.g. the recent election.<p>* Note: I consider HN to be social &#x27;media&#x27; news and I am aware that I&#x27;m here &#x27;chipping&#x27;. I do so intentionally in effort to avoid fettishising vices. Plus HN is as close as I get to an online group of peers. I only use HN after self-flagellating while repeatedly muttering &quot;the flesh is weak&quot;.

Why social media only?<p>After being a news addict for years, I&#x27;ve decided to not only limit my social media posts (and reading) down to zero, but also the amount of time I spend on the daily news sites (NYT, Guardian, Politico etc). Instead I read media that operates on a longer cycles like weekly (Economist, NewYorker) and longer (Foreign Affairs, Private Eye)<p>Its been an interesting experiment: most &quot;news&quot; is just content that is ultimately inconsequential, discussing ephemeral events that will be forgotten by the next news cycle.<p>However, the weeklies and the monthlies, because they have to edit what they write about, do a great job of filtering out the fluff and giving me a better perspective of what mattered that week&#x2F;month.<p>I&#x27;ve found I still know what I need to know, suffer much less distractions, and more time to read books (amazing invention btw!)

About five years ago I bumped into an old friend of mine that I hadn&#x27;t seen since around 2005. Despite not keeping in contact physically, we both knew everything about each other&#x27;s lives. It was great to reconnect, but we didn&#x27;t have the typical reward that comes with the rediscovery. I knew what he was doing for work, the projects he had going on the side, etc.<p>Tracking my friends stripped a lot of the romance, joy. and mystery out of reconnecting.<p>Around the same time I got into a new group of friends that were all about their &#x27;personal brand.&#x27; Every occasion was started with a good ten minutes of silence while they checked-in to Yelp, Foursquare, snapped photos of the venue &#x2F; table &#x2F; food, and tweeted bullshit along the lines of &#x27;having the time of my life!&#x27; -- I spent the time looking for typos and leading errors on the menus. It was exhausting. Everybody was there, but nobody was present. Even the meal itself was dull because of the endless obsession with creating something it wasn&#x27;t.<p>I never bought into those bullshit games of &#x27;put your phone in the middle of the table&#x27; or whatever. If you&#x27;re a typical human being, my expectation is that you can silence your phone and have the slightest bit of restraint to avoid looking at it every few minutes. I understand if there&#x27;s an emergency or whatever, but otherwise, keep it on vibrate and be done.<p>Around this time I completely disabled all notifications and the phone never made a peep.<p>A few years after that I starting tracking how many images and tweets I was reading vs enjoying. It was about one in twenty or so.<p>Examining my own tweets and other contributions to social media had me realizing that I was as social as a guy at a party shouting opinions over the music to a room full of people doing the same. It wasn&#x27;t social, and it was barely media.<p>I decided to purge the accounts and start from scratch -- and will be doing so every year or so. Starting fresh is nice, but I find that I rarely have anything of actual value to contribute.<p>I&#x27;ve avoided facebook for years and only use it for events. Instagram is all kids. Twitter is all business and &#x27;I&#x27;m speaking at x conference --- here&#x27;s a link to an instagram post of a photo of a slide in my presentation taken from the back row&#x27;. I&#x27;ve avoided the graphic design sites like dribbble where most &#x27;portfolios&#x27; aren&#x27;t filled with client work or art, just 99designs level work that is good, but irrelevant... and the list goes on.<p>Social media isn&#x27;t completely dead, but for me, I checked out a long time ago.<p>I&#x27;m hoping that the next wave will be a hybrid of twitter, meetup, foursquare, and tinder --- an app where you check into a location to say &#x27;I&#x27;m here, who wants to hang out?&#x27; and you can hang out with some strangers for a time.

I&#x27;ve read the whole article, but this is where I should have stopped.<p>&gt; I’ve never had a social media account.<p>He basically summarized that procrastination is harmful and social media is to blame. He doesn&#x27;t really share anything I haven&#x27;t known as a social media addict. Kinda like saying to a smoker that smoking tobacco causes cancer. I know that, what now? I tried shutting down social media sites with plugins, blocking sites in the hostfile and other slow to circumvent things. They kinda worked, sometimes never. I also noticed that if a site gets shut down, something new emerges that replace it.<p>This is something you have to deal with, regulate it. If you find yourself constantly opening FB, Twitter or whatever your addiction is, then it signals that something you are having problems with something you should be really doing.

I approach social media (twitter in particular) this way: “try to be a good neuron”.<p>Meaning: social media forms a global hive mind. It determines what a lot of people see and hear about the world. Witness the flare up recently over the influence of “fake news” going viral.<p>A neuron&#x27;s role, as one tiny piece of a brain, a neural network, or, for my purposes, a hive mind, is to take in a number of inputs and filter them, firing occasionally to convey some distillation of the inputs received.<p>Anyone who reshares highly inaccurate or incendiary content is being a bad neuron.<p>If instead you gather a range of news and opinion from a variety of sources and then, being very selective, reshare the one or two things each day (or week) with the best combinations of reputability, newsworthiness, timeliness, importance to current problems society is facing, and exploration of new ideas, then you&#x27;re being a good neuron.<p>This in my opinion is the best use of publicly shared social media. If lots of people did this the world would be better off.<p>There may be career risk in sharing things related to politics, but that&#x27;s a risk I&#x27;m willing to take. Without the freedom to do that, I might as well be in a repressive totalitarian society, and now more than ever that is something we should fight to prevent.

The general message is good: stop procrastinating and actually work (which is what I should be doing instead of mulling over the wording of this comment). The way it is written, however, is less than ideal because it has entirely too many unsupported claims. Without evidence it isn&#x27;t a solid argument.<p>For example: &quot;My second objection concerns the idea that social media is harmless. Consider that the ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy. Social media weakens this skill because it’s engineered to be addictive. The more you use social media in the way it’s designed to be used — persistently throughout your waking hours — the more your brain learns to crave a quick hit of stimulus at the slightest hint of boredom.&quot;<p>I know it is a newspaper article and not an academic paper but I still need evidence to make me believe these claims are true. I&#x27;ve read people claiming that we are becoming more distracted but I haven&#x27;t read that the ability to not be distracted is becoming more valuable. Similarly, while I&#x27;ve read claims that social media is addictive but not that it is engineered to be so.

Rather like alcohol. Universal social lubricant. Popular even in places where it is banned. People complain about it being used noisily in public by young people, especially women, but it may be the lonely older people at home whose use is more problematic. Causes problems for people who don&#x27;t indulge and feel left out. Associated with long-term health risks including suicidal ideation.<p>You probably shouldn&#x27;t indulge at work, but in some careers it may effectively be required.<p>Most people learn moderation, but some may have to cut themselves off.

I found this hard truth by myself. I noticed how my attention spans were decreasing. I&#x27;ve always been a really distracted person, but social media made it worst.<p>I ended up adding Facebook, Twitter,9gag, Reddit and other sites to my &#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts (0.0.0.0). Was the only way to fix it.<p>While I work I leave my phone at a distant table, with notifications turned down. The only thing that I get are phone calls.<p>I remember Simon Sinek saying something like: &quot;if there&#x27;s a person that the first thing he does when he wakes up in the morning is drinking a glass of whiskey, you&#x27;d say he&#x27;s an alcoholic&quot;. What does that make you if the first thing you do when you wake up is checking Facebook?

Social media does one thing really really well. It makes the maintenance of weak social connections really really efficient. Secondarily, it makes the reestablishment of weak social connections and the establishment of new weak social connections very low cost.<p>Facebook is full of old people because they have more weak connections, while my boy doesn&#x27;t use a social media platform because in his words, &quot;I have high school&quot;...I&#x27;d asked him about it just this week.<p>What social media might give the author is the ability to continue their relationship with their editor&#x27;s assistant over the next twenty years as their careers progress and paths diverge and perhaps the editor&#x27;s assistant becomes an editor in their own right. Sure, TANSTAAFL. But it points both ways.

Why throw the baby out with the bathwater?<p>What I did was I&#x27;ve unsubscribed from all people and pages on Facebook, unsubscribed from all Reddit subs, and unsubscribed from all YouTube channels. In the end, I&#x27;ve learned to stop visiting facebook.com, since all I was seeing was an empty page, but at the same time I avoided giving up my network, and I can still check up on people when I remember about them, I can keep using Messenger and I can keep using Facebook as an identity provider on other websites. Not to mention that this way I don&#x27;t have to throw out years of stuff generated by me (which can be painful with photos, especially for a data hoarder like me). Same goes for Reddit and YouTube (I keep my comment and post history, the ability to participate in discussions, my uploaded videos, and more).<p>For Hacker News, which is too valuable to me as a knowledge expanding tool, I did something else: I&#x27;ve started using the &quot;top 10&quot; section on hckrnews.com. I can keep checking it however many times I want, but I&#x27;ll get stuck in at most 10 comment threads per day, which I consider to be a reasonable compromise (this thread being one of them &lt;&#x2F;meta&gt;).<p>Never used Twitter, but I suppose something similar can be accomplished by muting all the accounts you&#x27;re following.<p>YMMV.

I disagree that you should quit everything entirely. You can be an occasional Facebook user. I check it a few times a week to see what friends up to and it&#x27;s not a major distraction to my life. It&#x27;s become a social hub, a way to organize events that not having one makes you &quot;that guy&quot;, a pain to invite to parties, a pain to get a hold of. You can have a Facebook and use it as a tool rather than an addiction. Everything in moderation.

This article reads very much like me, a non-drinker, telling you why you shouldn&#x27;t drink. I&#x27;ve never tried alcohol, but I&#x27;ve heard plenty of bad things about it, and here&#x27;s a list of them! It&#x27;s addictive, you know! Messes with the dopamine system!<p>I do consider social media addictive. But adults can usually handle addictive substances. We just have to know our limits, and cut ourselves off if needed. There&#x27;s really no need for 21st-century temperance activists preaching its evils.

I quit Facebook for 6 months and I felt that a big burden was dropped off my shoulders. I found myself reading more books and frequenting a lot of interesting blogs and discussions. I also focused on personal projects without the need of social validation. Then I reactivated it for a week to give sign of life to my &quot;friends&quot;, but felt a pressure to be active, to post and respond to messages. I had gone back to checking my Facebook as my first tab and felt suffocated by the need to always &quot;keep up.&quot; I finally decided to deactivate it once for all and never looked back. I personally think that instant messaging is the sweet spot, allowing me to communicate with friends I actually care about, without the need to rack up likes and keep up with the joneses.

<i>&quot;the ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy. Social media weakens this skill because it’s engineered to be addictive.&quot;</i><p>Interesting viewpoint. Does the author really follow this? Has a webpage, blog and an archive that stretches for 91 pages ~ <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;calnewport.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archive&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;calnewport.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archive&#x2F;</a> Not a good sign if the author thinks you should quit or limit your social media contact. I don&#x27;t care if the authour justifies this as necessary. It&#x27;s a sign that ignoring the real problem doesn&#x27;t seem to work.<p>The Internet is addictive. In fact I&#x27;ve spent a bit of time writing my own tasking system to tackle this problem. In writing up an accompanying blog post on distraction and focus I found the GTD, work hard, achieve more in less time frenzy isn&#x27;t new. It pre-dates the Internet by decades. Take Charles R. Schwab, owner of Bethlehem steel, someone who Thomas Edison described as a hustler. Schwa hired the best productivity guru he could. Ivy Ledbetter Lee. Lee proposed a very simple technique to focus and work on. Then charged Schwab USD$20,000 for the effort. You can read more in this article, <i>&quot;Ivy Ledbetter Lee&quot;</i> ~ <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamesclear.com&#x2F;ivy-lee" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamesclear.com&#x2F;ivy-lee</a><p>Quitting social media is a temporary fix as you&#x27;ll probably find other ways to distract yourself and avoid work. The deeper problem is realising the Internet is very addictive and find coping mechanisms to counter the side effects.<p>While reading up on the problem of Internet addiction and digital works, I re-read the article pg wrote on this topic, <i>&quot;Distracting Distractions&quot;</i> I found an update on his suggestions: <i>&quot;The strategy described at the end of this essay didn&#x27;t work. It would work for a while, and then I&#x27;d gradually find myself using the Internet on my work computer.&quot;</i><p>It is a problem that could yield some interesting work.

A sensationalist headline... The article actually read more like: stop wasting time. Sure, if you spend too much time on social media, reduce the time spent.<p>As someone who, years ago, implemented a lot of change to improve my life; here are some thoughts:<p>If you want a better, and more meaningful life, figure out what (and who) in your life is detrimental to your quality of life. Then rid yourself of those elements.<p>Second, enumerate everything (and everyone) you spend time on that adds no value--eradicate those elements from your life.<p>Make no mistake, these can be two very big, strenous and time-consuming tasks; which might need to be planned out in detail--as in how you will rid yourself of each element. The hardest part will usually be to &quot;quit&quot; detrimental people. But once you are done, boy, will your life improve.<p>When these two steps are done, you have been rewarded more time, not simply given, but earned. In the case of social media, I think I read that the average (globally) time spent is at something like 2 hours per day! If social media is one of those things either detrimental to you, or that adds no value, and you are an average user--then you just freed 14 hours per week.<p>Imagine if you took up a new hobby (do you even have one? many don&#x27;t), something that actually improved quality of life, 14 hours a week learning a new instrument, or learning to draw, or write, or ski. That is a lot of time. Novel activities are good for your brain!<p>Another thing I have observed, especially in the age of social media--but it&#x27;s not new, just seems worse now--is that a lot of young people need to learn how to be alone. Some people are hardly never alone. They have to learn this before they can learn to concentrate.<p>If you are like me, an introvert, you are probably alone a lot (if you are not, that can drain you of energy), but one thing you probably need to learn is to cut down on multitasking. It&#x27;s not good for your brain (learning, memory) or body (stress), it&#x27;s not good for productivity.<p>Sorry for rambling.<p>For the record: I barely use social media; I have inactive accounts here and there.

Extremes should always be evaluated carefully. Social media&#x27;s place in the CS field has two main reasons for me.<p>1) To show how the mind works and to showcase it on a CV. 2) To be available to this thing called the &#x27;internet&#x27; which is basically a giant global party where the only information that we can find out about one and another is either through what others say about us or what we say about ourselves. If I purpose a crazy solution to a problem you will most likely want to verify who I am to see if my idea has any credence.<p>The article is right that it is a distraction but for CS minds to come together and share ideas it is almost a necessity to help drive innovation.

Sure, quit social media if you&#x27;re a robot who&#x27;s sole purpose in life is to maximize your career - though I&#x27;d still argue that social media is valuable in that it enables you to expand your network and maintain&#x2F;strengthen your personal connections. But even if it were the case that social media is worse for your career, a lot of us live for more than our careers.<p>If you find yourself constantly wasting time on Facebook during work, you just lack discipline. I don&#x27;t know about you guys, but my news feed is generally pretty boring, thus I don&#x27;t have the urge to keep checking it. I&#x27;m not trying to claim moral superiority here, just saying that if you have an addiction problem, you need to take responsibility and hold yourself accountable rather than blaming the tool.

We recently had a presentation at my University from a number of local industry leaders, and the topic of Social Media&#x27;s role in the hiring process came up. I&#x27;ve been in the process of slowly reducing and removing social media where possible, and the reaction I got to a question regarding an individual&#x27;s lack of a social media presence was quite negative. Basically the consensus was that if, during the hiring process, the managers &#x2F; recruiters &#x2F; HR were unable to find social media accounts (or found highly private &#x2F; restricted accounts) for the applicant then they would view this as an immediate red flag and indicated that they have previously dropped candidates from consideration purely for this reason. I could have imagined this happening in isolated cases but I was surprised to hear it from 2-3 of the presenters, none of which had any relation to one another.<p>The irony of this whole situation being that the reason they scan applicants social media in the first place was to look for red flags in the applicants behavior outside of the work place and&#x2F;or to find reasons they shouldn&#x27;t be considered for employment.<p>Kind of ridiculous.

&gt; A dedication to cultivating your social media brand is a fundamentally passive approach to professional advancement. It diverts your time and attention away from producing work that matters and toward convincing the world that you matter. The latter activity is seductive, especially for many members of my generation who were raised on this message, but it can be disastrously counterproductive.<p>&gt; Most social media is best described as a collection of somewhat trivial entertainment services that are currently having a good run. These networks are fun, but you’re deluding yourself if you think that Twitter messages, posts and likes are a productive use of your time.<p>This rings of the author&#x27;s experience being in academia. In the business world, good products do not sell themselves.<p>&quot;Most social media&quot; is not Twitter. Twitter is a relatively unique social network.

I have found it weird that despite the commentators here being the loudest proponent of privacy, you cannot actually delete a Hacker News account and all comments with it.

It was interesting that the story was about being distracted rather than having potential future employers seeing you in an earlier and perhaps less flattering context than you currently present yourself. Both are good reasons to avoid social media I suppose.

Good, tightly written article. I think there&#x27;s another reason I was expecting to see but didn&#x27;t - when people say &quot;social media&quot; they usually mean Twitter, and Twitter seems to be optimised for creating huge dramas and flamewars. I think it must be the character limit. You can&#x27;t say anything really interesting in 140 characters, so much of what&#x27;s said ends up being so compressed all nuance and explanation is lost. Also the site encourages you to just blurt out whatevers on your mind without thinking about it. It&#x27;s no surprise that Donald Trump had his Twitter access taken away from him towards the end of his campaign.

There are browser extensions to block websites, but I think a more subtle approach might help: add latency.<p>Social networks spend a lot of time optimizing performance because they know how much it increases traffic. So it seems like a browser extension that adds a bit of latency and gradually ramps it up for the websites you choose could help to reduce the impulse to check too often.

I understand the procrastination argument but if it is not some (social) website it is something else. People who tend to procrastinate will do it anyway.<p>At least this is my personal experience.

Not everyone worships their career.<p>You can of course get rid of TV, music, theater, art, books, .. out of your life and focus only on your career skills development.<p>Social media is young generation&#x27;s way of life. It&#x27;s such a valuable communication channel for teens. Embrace it. Teach them and yourself how to use it to your benefit in moderation.

I&#x27;m wondering if there is a simple trick &#x2F; way to keep social media around without getting too addicted too it. I can completely 100% relate to this article and am scared by it.<p>However, I can&#x27;t just shut my accounts down. The advantages they give me over a life without them are just things that I don&#x27;t want to miss out. I feel &quot;blessed&quot; of having even the opportunity to use amazing worldwide connected tools like facebook and twitter considering the last 100 years.<p>I get around very often and make friends and contacts almost everywhere. Some of these connections are not relevant until I am in location X again. Some are old friends in my hometown that I from time to time contact. Some are professional connections. In many cases Facebook is the only viable connection to keep contact with less-frequently contacted people.<p>Messenger? Doesn&#x27;t work. Some countries use WhatsApp, some LINE, some KakaoTalk, some Threma and some, well, facebook messenger. Replacing facebook with 6 messaging clients is just not gonna work.<p>I am currently blocking most websites through a little snitch profile but I can feel the urge to unblock them and just... one more time... check if there is something new. I even catch myself occasionally opening facebook just to see the &quot;connection unsuccessful&quot; message.<p>From my experience, Pomodoro helps a lot in staying focused. But please, if you have anything to share to get rid of this addiction, share!

I&#x27;m pleasantly surprised this is being discussed at the top of HN.<p>I feel like 2 years ago people would pile on about how unusual it was to not be part of social media, how there is little argument against leaving, or how you must be seeking attention or must be anti-social. Well, as a very social 20-something, I left Facebook 3 years ago, myself a heavy user with thousand+ friends scattered around the world, and it has made zero negative impact on any aspect of my life (&#x27;invitations to events&#x27; or &#x27;keeping contact&#x27; is the typical fear against leaving, and it continues just as seamlessly [1] - people don&#x27;t stop caring, thinking, or reaching out to you just because you leave Facebook, and vis versa), and it has easily been one of the top 5 or 3 decisions I&#x27;ve made in these 3 years. It&#x27;s the equivalent of cutting out unnecessary yet significant things, or simplifying your life so you can remain mindful of the bigger goals. This may sound like something cheesy from the 4HWW, but I nonetheless think that kind of mindset is right on.<p>Now I see more people leaving Facebook who I wouldn&#x27;t have imagined doing so a few years ago. Perceptions will remain divisive for some time, but I can see &quot;avoiding social media&quot; as gaining some real cachet as &quot;I don&#x27;t fuck around&quot;. Regardless of whether there is actually a correlation with avoiding social media and being a more serious, goal-oriented person, I do think mainstream perception will continue to change for the better away from the stigmatizing &quot;Wow &lt;person X&gt; is not on &lt;platform&gt;, what&#x27;s his deal?&quot;<p>[1] Lightweight messaging apps, especially for international contacts... certainly not the whole investment of &#x27;social media&#x27; since it&#x27;s nothing but the messaging.

Always wanted to spare some time to calculate how Facebook and other social distraction influence our productivity and income. Every single notification and distraction during work hours makes us less productive not only by taking time, but also by decreasing ability to focus. We achieve less during the day.<p>Basically, Facebook converts time of every single user life and productivity decrease into own revenue. And it&#x27;s done with very very low efficiency--for the whole year it&#x27;s around $40+ per US user for Facebook. As reported average user spends 50 minutes per day on Facebook. Hence, about 7.3 full 24 hour days (if we add sleep time required to compensate being awake 7.3 x 1.4 = 10.2 days) of your life make Facebook $40+.<p>I wonder what it means for US GDP in general should the data be run countrywide calculating distraction time and productivity decrease during the work hours.

Maybe it&#x27;s the discipline I&#x27;ve learned from years of power lifting, but I don&#x27;t have any issues with social media. I&#x27;ll often skip FB for days because it&#x27;s not something I think about doing. I do like games though and will sometimes play one for an hour or maybe even 2 hours if it&#x27;s the weekend. After that I start feeling like I need to do something productive.<p>As far as comments, I always try to act online as I would in real life. This means I try to avoid snark online since it is so hard convey sarcasm online. I also always think about if I was having a real conversation how would I act. If you read my comment history, most (all?) are calm, and I think are how I have disagreements in real life. I try to follow the thought process that you can shear a sheep many times, but can only skin it once.

Great article :). Cal Newport has some reaaaallly important ideas. I encourage you to read his book Deep Work in which he explains how to create deep, complex stuff.

I&#x27;ve written about this many times in responses here on HN. Removing myself from Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and what not, was the best thing I&#x27;ve ever done. For any remaining sites, I&#x27;ve installed comment blockers, so I don&#x27;t have a chance to get sucked into negativity. Someday HN will be on the chopping block, but for now, it provides real dialogue. There really is nothing of value gained from wasting time on those sites. Now I have more time to read, hike, finish personal projects, whatever I want. Dating since Tinder has been completely ruined. Relationships are disposable, while everyone is just looking for the next big thing.<p>I&#x27;m really looking forward to a post social network world. Though I fear something even more addictive, and destructive will come around.

Not realistic. I&#x27;ve seen multiple companies build their success on social media (don&#x27;t forget Pinterest) after stagnating through SEO and traditional advertising, so to say &quot;quit it&quot; is not only killing millions of dollars of opportunity but completely unnecessary if your point is that you as a worker waste too much of your work day on it.<p>Do like I do and turn your phone or tablet notifications for these apps off and check them later in your free time. If you really can&#x27;t handle being personally responsible in your job, then sure, quit social media, but otherwise grow up and keep your brain on.

I sort of agree, but at the same time, I don&#x27;t use social media to advance my career. I use it to keep in touch with friends, which is important because I moved away from most of them two years ago.

I recently started and finished a side project over a week and did so on a computer that I don&#x27;t normally use. I was not logged into any of my normal &#x27;social&#x27; websites and I found my productivity was very, very high.<p>It was quite an eye opener.<p>This may also have something to do with the fact that this was a novel and enjoyable project (for me) with a hard deadline, but there were a couple times where my brain was trained to go open up Reddit when I was stumped on something, and I immediately caught myself since it wasn&#x27;t the normal page and got back to work.

The closest comparable to journalists running their blog is hackers to run their github portfolio. There seems pressure to run one almost professionally and on the other hand there are others in the industry that are doing well without one.<p>I like his scarcity argument there is something to it.<p>I&#x27;m less convinced of his argument that he and Steve Martin don&#x27;t need it. Yeah right - but they already got visibility. Arguing against marketing from the top of the hill may get you print in the NYT but it still feels false.<p>There may be generational aspects to this story too.

&quot;In a capitalist economy, the market rewards things that are rare and valuable. Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable. &quot;<p>This sounds such a short-sighted argument. Do people greet others because they expect some sort of rewards? It&#x27;s a basic courtesy. Yes, some people overdo it but using a social media moderately could be a good norm. Again, the balance is the key, and we&#x27;ll still need a bit more time to figure out the right amount of dose for each, but rejecting them outright is equally misguided.

FWIW -- Cal Newport&#x27;s books on career development (&#x27;Deep Work&#x27; and &#x27;So Good They Can&#x27;t Ignore You&#x27;) are very good, quick reads for those interested.

Why not to use FB in one classic line: you are the product being sold, everything else is just an illusion. Case in point: in FB. ads you can even target specific individuals.<p>The only problem is that like every social illusion it creates a social contract which makes it hard to get out of it - mostly because it will feel like being isolated from the &quot;world&quot; and in losing that perfectly crafted new &quot;self&#x2F;identity&quot; will shatter the ego (we all know the ego doesn&#x27;t enjoy being messed with).<p>Even if one is using it &quot;just&quot; for the messenger part, one is still part of all of this.<p>I&#x27;m not sure why would anyone use FB. to get new opportunities, FB. et al should not be taken seriously since most create their own persona on it akin to an MMORPG where one can literally choose to act like an Apache helicopter.<p>Moreover FB. is pure evil at its core: it&#x27;s a global scale psychological experiment that future generations will refer to as: &quot;those decades where everyone diluted their identity online, forgot about their &quot;real&quot; selves and thus slowly became clinically insane&quot;.<p>Some of the other arguments in the article are so broad that one can apply them to the Internet as a whole e.g. &quot;distraction free work: just unplug your cable or disconnect your wi-fi&quot;

As someone who&#x27;s quit social media several times, I can confidently say that my life is far better with it. Saying you never post and rarely look at it is like saying 30 years ago that you hardly ever call your friends and rarely pick up your phone because it&#x27;s distracting and mentally damaging. And yes, I understand that it&#x27;s a flawed analogy because social media updates are far more frequent than phone calls, but the analogy is still strong. We can make excuses for why all communication platforms are bad.<p>At the end of the day, you gotta do what you gotta do. If you have to avoid social media to stay mentally healthy and to get your work done, OK. If you can still do your work and remain mentally healthy while using social media, OK.<p>I don&#x27;t see the point in using anecdotal evidence, limited research, and popular myths to prove that social media is bad or that we should delete it. If it doesn&#x27;t work for you, stop. It&#x27;s like telling the world that alcohol is bad and that we&#x27;re better off not doing it because you have a problem with alcohol. I&#x27;m not here to defend alcohol. I am here to suggesting considering that alcohol isn&#x27;t necessarily evil. And I&#x27;m also here to say the same about social media.<p>This idea that social media is inherently evil because of the psychological tactics used is academically interesting but practically just a way for you to get onto your soap box and sound profound. It might also be a way for you to rationalize your choice for having somewhat regretfully deleted your Facebook. I get it. I did that for a long time. I see now that my problems with social media were mostly my own issues; and I see now that I can maximize the benefit of social media without becoming mentally disturbed or financially ruined.

I&#x27;m currently in the process of withdrawing myself from social media.<p>I pulled the plug on Facebook and Instagram this weekend, not that I was a heavy user of Instagram anyway and Facebook a light to moderate user. (it sounds like I&#x27;m discussing a coke habit here). What I will find frustrating is that in my social group - and I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m not alone - Facebook appears to be the central tool for organising one&#x27;s life.<p>Everything is organised on Facebook. Social events, parties, last minute &quot;Does anyone want to go for a drink?&quot; requests, discussions and meetup arrangements on my side hobby of homebrewing. I fear I shall become something of a social outcast, particularly as many friends I have, I don&#x27;t have their mobile numbers as all contact was made through Facebook messenger.<p>This is one part of the reason that I&#x27;m pulling away from Facebook in particular. Facebook has almost two billion users and the internet as a whole has roughly 3.5 billion users.<p>How one corporation having that much data willingly supplied - where they live, where they work, where they&#x27;ve been, where they currently are, among everything else - by so many people is, frankly, a disaster waiting to happen. I want no part of it. I&#x27;ve given them enough data over the last couple of years. No more.<p>And on a less tin-foil hat angle it is a huge distraction that, aside from the social life organisation aspect, serves no good purpose that can&#x27;t be provided using other means (email? phone calls? meeting face to face and sharing your selfies in person?).<p>I&#x27;ve also withdrawn from Instagram and plan to start developing in VueJS or EmberJS rather than React. I&#x27;m not officially boycotting Facebook, I&#x27;m just choosing not to use their products.

This reads more like adjusting how you use social media than quitting it altogether. The overly sensationalist headline probably obscures what the actual point of the article is.<p>If you&#x27;re trying to turn social media into your career - say, being a journalist but only tweeting about things - then, no, that&#x27;s probably not going to work. This seems to be what the article is railing against.<p>If however, you&#x27;re using social media to help your work elsewhere find a wider audience, and then providing added nuggets of value on social media, then that&#x27;s valuable.<p>The era of someone producing one piece of work that defines them for the rest of their career is now probably over. Theres an expectation now that you&#x27;re continually engaged.

Some also people made a career and a lot of money out of saying obnoxious things on social media.<p>I think it works both way. It can be detrimental to people who think what they say online is &quot;private&quot; (Justine Sacco), but plenty of attention seekers double down and take advantage of the viral effect of Twitter or Facebook to &quot;promote their brand&quot;, whatever that means, or to make up controversy. But for these people it is also a double edged sword as the consequences of saying something on social media cannot really be controlled. But for most of us it is only a source of problems and unnecessary controversy, it is especially true on Twitter.

Of course, if you&#x27;re a journalist or news reporter, then you&#x27;re a bit screwed here. The stuff you need to write about is what&#x27;s being posted on social media, especially when you&#x27;re working for an entertainment focused media outlet. Someone working for a gaming, TV, film or music focused site or writing for a gossip mag isn&#x27;t going to be able to quit Twitter&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;Reddit&#x2F;YouTube any time soon.<p>Then again, maybe that&#x27;s also kind of why everything&#x27;s become so polarised and clickbaity in the media world now. Because the people writing for it are incapable of writing anything deeper than a 140 character soundbite.

I&#x27;ve read Cal Newport&#x27;s book Deep Work. I&#x27;ve also quit facebook almost 2 years ago and more recently twitter and instagram. I have zero regrets and overall I can say that my life improved a lot, including my professional life.

In 1992, a fellow student called Usenet the &#x27;ultimate procrastination device&#x27;. The Internet provides access to an inexhaustible supply of people, topics and thoughts (some interesting, others less so).<p>This is still the case, except that the number of access methods and filters have increased, and many of them are with us everywhere, all the time.<p>Our own time is indeed finite, and my experience has been that the digital world will consume as much of that limited time as you let it.<p>Awareness is a first step, and a purposeful approach to consuming content helps keep your content consuming time balanced with, well, all the other stuff you can do in this world.

&gt; Consider that the ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy.<p>I agree with this particular sentiment but I don&#x27;t believe that &quot;deep work&quot;, as Cal Newport calls it, requires us to turn off social media or other forms of less-deep work altogether. Certainly, we must balance and control our usage of social media. Certainly, we must be more than just consumers and create tweets&#x2F;posts&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;etc. These mediums can be great ways to give back to the community.

I agreed with everything in the article. However I have also seen no shortage of job posts for tech - backend dev, where employers asked to provide links to any social media activity. So there is a fair amount of tech jobs that seem to expect you to have cultivated an online brand. This has always made me uncomfortable because I am of the same opinion of the the author and I generally won&#x27;t apply to a company when I see this being asked for in an open job post. For things like &quot;evangelist&quot; I understand asking for this but otherwise no.

You could also say reading hacker news is somewhat of an addiction as well. It&#x27;s easy to become fixated on seeing what the latest trending stories, repos are. Everything in moderation.

Beyond the &quot;work without distractions angle&quot; think about this:<p>You online presence affords recruiters and hiring managers the opportunity to identify who you are before they make a determination to formally invite you to an interview (phone or in person). Even if you opt out of self identify, they can still figure it out if you have FB, Twitter, Linkedin, etc.<p>Thus, are you qualified, but didn&#x27;t get a call back or request to interview email? It may be because of your race, gender, sexuality, etc.

I created an extension to solve this problem while I was preparing for GRE and it has served me quite well since then! Here is the link in case someone would like to try: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;fb-feed-modifier&#x2F;hbhdccjdfjcpakliojfnpincocolhcob" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;fb-feed-modifier&#x2F;h...</a>

&quot;<i>My research on successful professionals underscores that this experience is common: As you become more valuable to the marketplace, good things will find you.</i>&quot;<p>If I didn&#x27;t laugh so hard at this, I&#x27;d have to cry. Let&#x27;s say my mileage has varied significantly. Diametrically. Exponentially. Hilariously.<p>No idea whether social media has any effect on anything; I don&#x27;t use it. So there&#x27;s that.

I was about to write - I&#x27;m ok, I don&#x27;t have a Facebook login and my twitter is just for show...<p>And then I realize that HN is social media, after all.

This article assumes we are at the whim of social when infact many people have tamed social and, for lack of better phrasing, made social their bitch.<p>Read The Distraction Addiction: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;16131064-the-distraction-addiction" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;16131064-the-distraction...</a>

What this article doesn&#x27;t mention but should very seriously be considered, recruiters often look to disqualify candidates based on controversial ideas or standpoints that might not agree with the company&#x27;s cultural mindset. Definitely need to be mindful of how your views will be analyzed before you have even been considered for an interview or offered a job.

I really enjoyed this article. I initially was introduced to Cal Newport&#x27;s, Deep Work book. This book is amazing and I recommend anyone to read it. Since then, it&#x27;s sent me into an almost obsessive time where i&#x27;m trying to do more productive and meaningful work. I respect this article and actually am off all social media myself (unless HN counts :) ).

I wrote about this last year, your online persona in relation to your personal career.<p>Quitting social media for personal usage is a pretty good idea though if you&#x27;re always checking it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sosuke.com&#x2F;creating-and-taking-ownership-of-your-personal-brand&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sosuke.com&#x2F;creating-and-taking-ownership-of-your-per...</a>

The author mentions:<p>&quot;There are many issues with social media, from its corrosion of civic life to its cultural shallowness,...&quot;<p>Can anyone elaborate on how it &quot;corrodes&quot; civic life? I am guessing this mean &quot;civic&quot; in the sense of civility not civic as in civic duty? Is this referring to the mean spiritedness of many people&#x27;s online personas?

People don&#x27;t realize how negative an impact social media and its related notifications can have at work. I recently wrote a blog post about notifications at work while pairing: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;krishicks.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;notifications&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;krishicks.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;notifications&#x2F;</a>

&quot;If you’re serious about making an impact in the world, power down your smartphone, close your browser tabs, roll up your sleeves and get to work.&quot; -- without the tabs open I hardly can work anything these days, sigh. But yes I agree that social media attention decreases my long-time-focus-capability gradually and it is terrible.

Why was the correct punctuation of the original headline replaced with a comma splice?<p>Can we get someone to restore the correct punctuation?

I&#x27;ve been telling everyone I care about to follow my lead and leave facebook, twitter behind. Like the author, people seem surprised that someone in my field is against it so much, and once I explain why, they seem to understand but not want to process that understanding (like explaining to a smoker that tobacco kills).

Are engineers who work at addictive software (social media apps, some type of games, etc.) actually breaking ethics? Should we defy this as a profession, not allow our skills to be used for a thing that&#x27;s borderline evil?<p>If pushing addictive narcotics is denounced as one of the moste evil deeds possible, how&#x27;s this different?

It would be interesting if there was a simple way to monitor dopamine release into the system, with a little bell attached.<p>Every time you distract yourself with browsing HN or checking whether Toady One has updated Dwarf Fortress, a little ding lets you know you just satisfied an addiction.<p>Probably turn people into bell addicts with a feedback loop.

I&#x27;ve recently started reading the dead tree version of the newspaper and I&#x27;ve noticed that only do I seem to retain more of what I&#x27;ve read vs. reading the electronic version, for me it&#x27;s something along the lines of a focus exercise. It really feels like it&#x27;s clearing out the cobwebs.

The author implies that there is no value in social media. It seems to me that there is value in social media. Effective usage of social media can build networks and be an alternative to meetups.<p>I think a valid solution is to limit social media usage to within specific windows (eg: only use social media for 1 hour per day)

I recommend a different approach - if one feels bound to go on social media often, take a couple of month hiatus from it. The main important thing is to be able to break the power of addiction, since it is what causes the distractions in the first place. It is not really a problem unique to social media.

Has anyone found a reliable way of blocking websites &#x2F; apps (ideally on a time-restricted basis) on iPhone? Short of routing all your traffic through a remote SOCKS proxy. I&#x27;m tempted to move to Android just to customise my &#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts but I&#x27;d rather there be a simpler way...

It&#x27;s like in that anecdote - I guess the author is <i>not</i> using the wrong kind of social media ;) I get a lot of useful information from diaspora* for instance.<p>If someone builds a stereotype and then says - I don&#x27;t like that. It speaks more about the stereotype, than about the real thing necessarily.

Since no one&#x27;s mentioned it, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr covers some of the neurological effects of constant social media&#x2F;internet gratification quite well. Ironically it took me about a year to finish the book because I kept getting distracted...

Concerning facebook, I got annoyed by the whole newsfeed a long time ago. So I unfollowed everyone &amp; groups. Next was the invitation crap. End result is a near empty newsfeed. If I&#x27;m interested in some person I will go to their page myself.

The NYT is putting you on notice that any political involvement, <i>especially</i> outside of approved channels, may necessitate threatening your career. What you should really be doing is paying taxes and keeping your head down.

A simple fix for social media addiction is using the &#x27;do not disturb&#x27; feature. No notifications for the next hour. Take breaks every hour to take a short walk and look at your phone. I find it to be very effective.

If this article made sense to you, you should read the author&#x27;s book on the topic. I&#x27;ve just finished it and really liked it.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.to&#x2F;2fdEaol" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.to&#x2F;2fdEaol</a>

I&#x27;m more than willing to delete all my social media accounts. The only problem is: I travel frequently and need a way to keep in touch with a wide variety of people. Ergo, Facebook.<p>Any suggestions on replacing in this manner?

If this topic interests you, Tim Wu&#x27;s latest book, &quot;The Attention Merchants,&quot; might also. He chronicles the rise of attention-monetizing by the media and the various rebellions against them.

If you struggle with this, try: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;selfcontrolapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;selfcontrolapp.com&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s a digital nicotine patch for your bad browsing habits.

I agree with this sentiment mostly. I did delete my personal facebook. My twitter account I removed a lot of previous posts in the hopes to inactivate it without deleting it publicly.

I just finished reading his book &quot;deep work&quot; this morning. I highly recommend it, I&#x27;m not going to give up social media but I&#x27;m not going to give in to it either.

I got into the industry working for Geocities. Back then we had no cell phones no social media it was easier to focus in a world of landline answering machines lol.

On a somewhat related note I started just shutting Slack off at work when I need to get some thing done and it&#x27;s been incredibly liberating.

I was the only one that laughed out loud reading the title while seeing Twitter and Facebook share buttons on top of the article?

I found unfollowing everyone on facebook helps. I now just look at my friends list to see who has new posts a few times a month.

Flagging this for obvious, one-sided political bias. The bunny trail from Trump being elected, to &quot;fake news on Facebook&quot; story being perpetuated in the press, to this editorial, is just straight laughable to me.<p>Maybe I made the wrong call, but I&#x27;m happy to start flagging nytimes articles with the same judiciousness I&#x27;d flag a Breitbart article with an innocent-seeming but obviously-politically-motivated conclusion at hand.

I wonder if surviving Usenet Septembers prior to the Endless September conferred some immunity on the survivors?

Only in <i></i><i></i><i></i>* (fear of Godwin point reference) society do you fear to have opinions.

This especially was amplified through the election season. The distraction was all the time!

A simple way to break a bad habit it, Ted Talk transcript:<p>judson_brewer_a_simple_way_to_break_a_bad_habit

Have there been any studies done that link social media and a decreased attention span?

How can you trust someone about social media who said they never own a social media?

I gotta tell you, that has to be one of the least convincing reasons I have heard.

The underlying issue is that we are going to see if the coming nationalist &#x2F; populist policies will break down mundialism and its pretence for the educated white-collars to live in one single, global, always connected community.

Quit hacker news, your career may depend on it

So does this also apply to quitting H&#x2F;N ?

As usual, NYT is ON IT. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;NYTOnIt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;NYTOnIt</a>

ghost blog i believe has more potential

tl;dr &#x27;back to work peon!&#x27;

There is also another aspect. In theory your personal life and work are separated. Your religion or political opinions should not matter at work.<p>But many people (sadly even on HN) think it is ok to fire people, based on their opinions.

I&#x27;ve said before that Social Media is our generation&#x27;s &quot;cigarette&quot;.<p>Very much like in the early days, people just didn&#x27;t have any awareness that cigarettes were harmful. Hell, everybody was doing it (see Mad Men).<p>I&#x27;ve learned from day trading and investing is how much we downplay herd psychology. Our society has geared us to beat any sense of opposition as hostile. Our evolutionary process have selected individuals based on how well they are able to blend and we feel instinctively safer in large numbers (def. mech. against predators). We are social creatures so they say.<p>But history is filled with instances were the crowd behaves very predictably over and over because the underlying constraints of group think are there. Social media is particularly aggravating medium for which false,fake,wrong have greater mobility than facts and common sense.<p>Besides the dissemination of false information which is harmful to our society and individual as a whole, perhaps the sheer noise and frequency of sensationalist artifacts is the biggest perpetrator of all.<p>It&#x27;s only recently that we are beginning to become aware of the what if effects of being exposed to so much &quot;spamming with our running commentary of bullshit masquerading as insight&quot;. So far, studies have confirmed that it&#x27;s negative on the individual.<p>Having said that, there&#x27;s plenty of people who don&#x27;t care. They are happy uploading selfies and food they are about to digest and poop out in 12 hours. It&#x27;s fleeting moments that are so ephemeral, information that otherwise would be irrelevant, insignificant noise, is being magnified through the crowd effect that social media platforms exploit and engineer to grow their user base.<p>Our low interest money has created a whole new economy where the number of active users without any doubt, taken at it&#x27;s face value rather than examining it&#x27;s intrinsic worth.<p>Just how important is it for everybody to be so connected and knowing every possible detail going on with everybody else?<p>For me, not very, and I&#x27;ve for the most part (besides HN &amp; Reddit) have embraced off the social media grid lifestyle 3 years ago and I&#x27;m fucking loving it so far. I feel happier.<p>I&#x27;m not perfect as I use HN &amp; Reddit. Although, I do spend less and less time on those platforms and experience more joy as well.

&gt;I’ve never had a social media account.<p>So why should I listen to what this guy has to say about social media?

I get dependent already on computer games (not a bad thing for Nethack and the Dark Souls series of course). It might be easy for me to get dependent, so I avoid drugs and other dependency causing things religiously -- like social networks.<p>But I am now a heavy FB user despite that, as an expatriate it helps a lot with keeping the fluency of my native tongue. The ease with keeping in contact is also really good for me, quite a bit away. I just wish there were fewer cat pictures.<p>The relevance for work and career is zero, of course. But the personal value is high.

Social media was supposed to be about your social life and not about your career. And of course social life doesn&#x27;t help in career (less time for working&#x2F;studying). How a post changes someones social life (positive&#x2F;negative) is a question, but I think must 16 year old teens are much better at it than the author.

God the nytimes had become so click-baity, it&#x27;s sad to see this happening.

Already quit Facebook, but this article just convinced me to quit LinkedIn too.

I&#x27;m addicted to HN like that. Should I quit it then?

So if your co-worker believes that, for example, black people and gays are subhuman and expresses that view you think that&#x27;s ok and we should all just put up with it?

Always post anonymously on Internet. Nobody wants you to succeed.

&gt; I would take a 45 minute dump just catching up on stuff<p>ROFL. That&#x27;s 1 long helluva a Dump. Hope you don&#x27;t have roommates or a large family.

The way I help myself with this is I set up different profiles in Chrome. My work one disables JavaScript, Cookies, and Images by default for every site; I enable them only for sites which I need for work. This way, when the reflex to &quot;C-t h a RET&quot; myself to Hacker News comes, I&#x27;m instead reminded not to.

Who the F do you think you are to order me around?<p>That&#x27;s my immediate reaction to the title.<p>As it happens, deciding for myself is more important to me than my career assessment by other people.