<i>> It was around Day 9 that the most telling thing happened: Facebook noticed my absence ... I was being shown a new kind of notification: “Check out Jim’s comment on his photo” or “Jane commented on her status” as though someone else using Facebook is something I ought to be notified about. These contrived notifications were the “Emperor wears no clothes” moment for me. It became obvious then that Facebook knows its users have better things to do, and quietly hopes they don’t notice how little they get out of it.</i><p>Good observation, just saw this recently.
Why not go one step further and get rid of internet at home? I've been doing so since April and it's dramatically reduced my time spent on social media or watching TV/movies. Instead of binging TV I go out and do something.
Ditched Facebook on the phone ages ago and I had exactly the same experience. I now check FB from time to time on my desktop. Twitter might be up next but for some reason I don't find it nearly as addicting as I found Facebook.<p>The other big lifestyle change was trying to change how I engage in internet comments. I had a knee-jerk failure today but mostly I'm trying to be less breathless and cynical when I post online. Keeps me from spending all day rage-returning to some stupid flamewar that I either started or perpetuated.
I had removed the Fb from my phone before and reinstalled it at a later date. What kept it off my phone 'for good, so far' was that for a while I'd unfollow anyone who posted any utter garbage to my feed, with occasional strategic exceptions.<p>Now if I want to check Fb I'm only on it for a few minutes due to 1) Using mbasic.facebook.com and 2) Only checking the 'notifications' tab. There's very little else getting through to the News Feed anyway.
I wish a lot of companies hadn't decided to embrace Facebook as an identity provider. Sometimes that's the only way for me to log in to something. Can't even use normal username and password credentials. That's probably the only think keeping the app on my phone.
I've rendered my iPhone pretty inert at this point, in an effort to increase my own online-data privacy and reduce distractions created by the compulsion-driving behaviour programmed into the apps made available to us.<p>No notifications from anything but iMessage, phone calls and WhatsApp. Do Not Disturb on continually to filter anyone that is not in my contact list. Fb/Twitter/Reddit/etc. apps removed. Time in calendar set once per week to check updates on FB, Instagram & Twitter, timeboxed to an hour.<p>This has made daily life a lot more pleasant, I feel. However, behaviour on my desktop/laptop remains pretty unproductive once the workday is done. Still burning time every day glued to Reddit, particularly browsing the comments.<p>What is it with comment sections that have that particular draw? I don't even post on Reddit, but when it comes to the comments on the content there's a somewhat inert desire to not look away, and I know I'm not alone in that.
For the desktop there are time-spent trackers like RescueTime, but for the iOS phone one trick I use is to look at battery percentage spent in various apps during last 24h and 7 days. Works best if you use dedicated apps to access obvious time-wasters like instagram or facebook, but you don't get a breakdown on mobile browser(s).
Same here. I decided a month ago to uninstall Facebook, twitter, reddit & co from my phone and I’ve been pretty relaxed since then. I’ve been trying to spread the word as well. I feel like it’s aking to being a vegetarian, you need to be annoying and tell the world about it. But seriously, you should try it too.<p>I’ve also disabled all notifications. Now every app is agressively telling me agressively to switch them back on. It’s insane (looking at you Messenger).
Man. This really feels like I could've written it. Really good article I feel exactly the same. I've done exactly the same as well and come to the same conclusion. The note about facebook noticing you're gone and sending weird notifications is really what did it for me. Facebook lost all notification privileges after that and I haven't heard from it since. It's kind of nice!
The only reason I'm addicted to my smartphone is because my work email is connected to it. I've fallen into this habit of checking my work email every few minutes to make sure there are no fires or when I'm in meetings. On weekends, when I consciously keep my phone away, I find myself less attached to the phone though it's more than I'd like it to be.
This is a confusing issue because there is a mix of newsfeed and friends, and "friends" on Facebook.<p>Do you consider time spent on twitter to be catching up on news, and thinking about the world, or a waste of time?<p>How about hacker news?