My Facebook and Vkontakte feeds are disabled, I have no subscriptions on Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. At the same time, I did not leave anywhere, did not go to the monastery and continue to lead the normal life of a person in 2020. Put on your tinfoil hat and sit back as I talk about my crusade against social media. You will find out how I managed to reduce the impact of smart tape on my life without losing anything significant.
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I have a problem
In 2018, I spent 246 hours and 11 minutes of my life on social media. This is about 15% of the total time that was logged then through RescueTime . If you don't understand, I spent 10 days in social networks. And this is only from a computer, without taking into account the telegram and YouTube, as well as the phone. For comparison, I spent only one and a half times more time on my main work occupation (writing and editing text) - 416 hours. But this activity at least brought money, and not just likes.
I don’t know what I was doing there all this time, but the problem is obvious
I am sure that social media is a great thing that helps you communicate, establish contacts with new people, research the audience and find partners. But that's okay, as long as smart ranking alogrhythms don't take over and you don't lose control of the situation. It seems to me that smart feed algorithms and other attention management mechanics are the reason for my long sticking on social networks. The brain is weak, and there is no choice but to succumb to their influence.
I write about the experience of dealing with social networks on a computer, because I don't have them on my phone, and I use the gadget itself for less than 30 minutes a day. I told about it in the article →
By the way, why are we addicted to social networks?
We so easily find ourselves in the captivity of the social media feed and, forgetting about other matters, scrolling cats on Instagram or photos of those on Facebook, due to the different speed of two processes that determine our life: evolution and technological revolution . The first one is changing our body very slowly, and the second is changing the world around us at an insane speed. As a result, people easily fall into the information hook. Our biology, neurophysiology, and psychology are losing the battle for our attention.
“We live in a world of godlike technologies, medieval institutions and primitive emotions” - E.O. Wilson , father of “sociobiology”
Technology has leaped forward, but our brains work the same way as they did tens of thousands of years ago. We are surrounded by products and services that exploit biological weaknesses that have emerged through evolution. Software products are built on the dopamine cycle, that is, they form habits that have an understandable chemical nature. Now there will be a small excursion into biology, and if it seems boring to you, feel free to wind further on to practical advice.
How habits are formed
I talked about how smart feeds arise a few years ago in an article on my blog. In short, when you, as a developer of a social network or other system with recommendation mechanics, have goals to increase the time spent by the user on the page, you most likely count and use the deep mechanisms of the brain that the user does not understand to your advantage. On the counteraction to this pattern, the movement of the Center for Humane Technologies is built , which advocates that all user actions be conscious, but this is not the point now.
Scientists have been researching the influence of social networks on our body for a long time and this is what they found out:
- « » (IJSTL, 2012, JSP, 2017)
- (, ) (CHB, 2015)
- 10 , 9 % (CBSN, 2018)
As a result, my global goal was to abandon social networks. I wanted to: get out of the closed dopamine cycle and stop blindly following the algorithms; start independently managing your information agenda; explore the world without relying on technology that I don't fully understand. At the end of the article I will tell you what the rejection of social networks gave me, but for now, let's figure out how I did it.
How to block ...
All of my tips for blocking social media are based on three basic principles:
- Subtraction. This practice is described by Nassim Talleb in Antifragility . Its essence is that if we want to cope with a problem, we need to remove everything that could lead to it. My problem was wasted time scrolled, and the solution was to abandon social networks.
- 20 . . , . , . (Acor, 2011)
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Below I have collected a few tips and hacks for each social network separately. You do not have to read them all in a row, choose those social networks that seem to you the most sticky. Unfortunately, I have nothing to say about Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok, the basic mechanisms are about the same, so the tips should also work.
A couple of years ago I already talked about how I gave up Facebook. Since then, little has changed. In short, my news feed is off, I do not see updates, I do not follow what is happening with my friends.
Facebook in absolute single-tasking mode The
new interface cannot be defeated yet, even without a feed it looks like a spaceship control panel.In the
beginning, I turned off the news feed with a special add-on , and then I just manually unsubscribed from all my friends' updates. I spent several hours of my life on this, but did not regret a minute. In addition to the obvious effect on the computer, I no longer run the risk of getting stuck in the feed on my phone, where sometimes I need to do something through the web interface of the social network.
Now, adding someone as a friend, the first thing I do is unsubscribe from his updates. You can do this in the news feed itself.
There is also a less radical way to defeat the feed. The founder of the IT-agency Seva Ustinov told about it. Using the SoshalFixer script, you can customize the feed for yourself: hide ads and policies, disable the display of certain blocks on the page, and most importantly reduce the number of posts. So you can turn an endless smart feed into a completely finite one.
All page blocks that can be disabled via SoshalFixer
I went a little further in the fight against Facebook and cut down all the information garbage: turned off all notifications about likes and subscriptions, birthdays, forbade inviting myself to groups and like something. Left only posts about new comments to answer readers' questions.
This is where the notification settings live.
Notifications are pretty easy to set up
Despite its monstrosity, Facebook is the most user-friendly in dealing with the feed and other retention mechanics (at least in the old interface). You can customize anything and how you want.
In contact with
Dealing with Vkontakte turned out to be a little more difficult than dealing with Facebook. There is no add-on for it that would block the feed (if you know one, advise in the comments). I had to unsubscribe from friends, communities and publics manually. I spent about an hour on this and this is what I got in the end:
The most interesting thing in the VK feed is the new wonderful people with whom the social network invites me to meet. But it would be better if they returned the wall, really!
Just like on Facebook, I unsubscribe from a person after adding him as a friend. This does not lose the social function of the site, but reduces unnecessary distractions and the impact of the smart feed:
Another little hack is to hide unnecessary options in the side menu. Left there only that which cannot be removed:
, , , .
The next most addictive for me was YouTube. And this is not surprising. For a very long time, the key goal of the site development team has been to increase the time users spend on it. This is even written in a book about the CCR . Over the years, programmers and designers have created a recommendation system and user interface that best served the right content in the right place, and you just couldn't stop until you watched it all.
I tried following the Facebook blocking model and unsubscribed from the channels that I had previously followed. But the recommendation system turned out to be stronger: on the main page and in the right column, videos were shown to me, which it was simply impossible not to click on. Therefore, we had to act radically.
I have installedaddon for Safari , which blocks everything on YouTube except searching and watching videos. There are the same extensions for other browsers, for example, Chrome ( this or this ).
Surprising but useful on the main YouTube page - about 2%. And if you remove the remaining 98%, then you actually won't lose anything.At
first, the video on the page looks lonely, but you can always turn on full-screen or theatrical mode and restore
justice.The only method of dealing with YouTube that worked for me is to block the recommendation system to hell. Immediately it became easier to breathe, but the functionality of the site did not diminish: I can find what I need and watch videos without being distracted by anything.
There are even fewer options here: either delete your account, or block the entire social network, or unsubscribe from all friends. I chose the third one. I left subscriptions to only two of my wife's accounts.
All I see in the feed are my photos. Looked at them a thousand times.
Again, there is a less radical method. If you have no life without Instagram, then you can introduce a restriction on the use of the social network at the program level.
There are few ways to limit Instagram, but they are, especially if you understand that you need to do it.
Telegram and other messengers
As soon as I silenced all the news feeds and deprived of consciousness of the choices associated with sticky and meaningless scrolling, it turned out that there is another place to fall into - messengers . Channels and group chats were time consuming, but did not provide any benefit, so I systematically approached the question:
- Removed the application of all messengers, except for Telegram. I left a message in the Wotsap and Viber statuses that I was no longer there, if you need me, write to the cart.
- Archived all channels and group chats, leaving only personal correspondence in the list. This became an additional obstacle to sticking and defocusing of attention.
- Unsubscribed from channels and chats that I rarely read. Nothing prevents me from finding them through the search, if necessary. The exception is closed groups, which are difficult to get back into.
- Collected all the necessary chats in folders. I got myself a working folder, a folder for personal projects and a universal inbox, where all unread messages from people go (no channels and group chats). Setting it up is pretty simple:
Glory to Durov for the folders! Now you can make a real empty inbox in Telegram and not be distracted by anything. Cope with messengers turned out to be easier than ever
. The lack of a smart tape and a more environmentally friendly operating principle played a role.
All at once
If my advice on blocking individual social networks did not work for you, then try turning to programs and extensions that block access to entire websites. This measure seems to me excessive, because all the useful functionality is lost. But if you feel this is a problem, then you should try:
The main thing I have to say is that I did not notice any big changes in the information agenda due to the rejection of social networks. I don't seem to have missed a single important meme, not a single news, trailer or news. Yes, I learn about what is happening in the world and from my friends later than others, but I do not lose anything. This was a paragraph for those who suffer from pronounced FOMA.
Here are a couple of things for which I am grateful to all my locks:
Time freed up. According to Rescue Time, in 2019 I spent 73 hours in social networks (3.36 times less than a year earlier). For six months of 2020 - about 20 hours. I am still doing something on Facebook and Vkontakte, but the time has decreased significantly. No sticking, dips, or impulsive scrolling. Everything is clear and to the point.
Information pressure has decreased.Our brain works in one of three modes: it consumes information, reacts to it, or digests and rests. Ditching smart feeds reduced the flow of content and the time I spent consuming it. This freed up resources for work and quality rest.
There are topics for conversation with friends. Now there is always something to talk about in the company. I often don’t know who changed jobs, went on vacation or published some big project. I learn about it for real, and not from the tape of friends.
Write in the comments if you also blocked social media feeds. Interesting to know your experience!