Gave up FaceBook a year back, no regrets! This is of no relevance, but lately when I see Mark Zuck, he looks to me like a face transplant patient, it's uncanny.
Also, LinkedIn is a bit more fun if you pronounce it "Linky Din", like Fleabag's sister. "On the Linky Din," she said. Ha.
Leaving all forms of social media (except LinkedIn of course) was the best decision I ever made! Initially, it was hard - a feeling of being dislocated from the rest of the world if you like. Before leaving, my persona on social media was becoming hateful and intolerant. I was becoming the person I as so critical of in others. I found myself making vicious comments I’d never say to someone personally. I was also becoming disillusioned and darn right furious at the anti science, and dangerous misinformation being peddled by Dunning Kruger alumni, that have a huge presence on social media. Since leaving, I can honestly say I’m much happier. As someone who worships at the altar of science and rationality, I no longer have to read the utter dreck and bullshit that used to upset me so much.
Out of all of the social networks i'm on linkedin is the one that almost always guarantees to get me furious within the first 30 seconds of scrolling. (I deleted facebook years ago or it might be a close call) It's such a bizarre house of insincerity and lies.
I imagine there's a point in your career where some shadow spirit imparts the wisdom that putting several spaces between each sentence on a linkedin post will increase engagement, and if you end the post with a question asking what your connections think of said insincere business statement you're guaranteed a very special table in hell that gets 24 hour turnaround on business cards
So, LinkedIn is pretty much the same as all the other SM platforms then? A school gym full of people all yelling "Look at me!" Fake people trying to be real and real people faking it. Pick-a-clique.
Funnily enough when I check my phone in the morning if there’s a notification from gmail that you’ve arrived I will go straight to Webworm. One of the things I dislike fb for is the lack of actual non-work emails you get from real people theses days. I miss the heyday of the late 90s-early 2000s for the emails that were more like letters. There’s no point now if you’re both on fb. You’ve already seen the photo of the thing they saw on the way to work that morning. Or back further and letters. I used to send three or four letters a week to out-of-town friends. The amazing letter sets you could buy in the J-Mart with themed paper and stickers and envelopes with malapropisms and strange aphorisms galore. I think I wrote on the last post that I’m afraid I’ll never see anyone again (lol) if I delete the apps - but the more you write about it the better it sounds.
I'm finding LinkedIn half infuriating/ half funny at the moment. The amount of white, male NZ-based middle-aged, middle managers just losing their mind at Jacinda Ardern which I can't help but think is twinged with a level of misogyny, I find amusing but then I see so much of it. It's all built up with emotive terms like apartheid, segregation, Communism - all terms that aren't even remotely true.
It is good that it's so transparent that you can see who you don't really want to do business with though when things "get back to normal".
Before the pile on, I wouldn't say I'm middle-aged but I am a white, male, middle manager from NZ
The more people tell me I 'definitely' need something in my life the more likely I am to 'definitely' not do it haha
LinkedIn in falls into that category. It annoyed me that everyone said I would never get a new job or grow a new career without it. It always saddens me that people hand over their agency in their own lives so completely to things, because it disempowers them. So to set an example that noone will even notice I successfully changed careers and built a new one over the last 5 years just by building real life relationships with people in the businesses I worked in and by doing graft. And it worked. I didn't do any LinkedIn learning or need a single motivational quote. I wish people understood it is them and their skills and their personalities and perspectives that are interesting and wonderful. Not a contrived, monster platform version of their lives. Thanks David. Thanks Honk
I’d love to leave Facebook but I admin two groups that bring me too much joy. One is called “Memorylame” where people post weird NZ nostalgia and memories. Filled with Alf Dolls and plush toys of Wattie’s failed spaghetti mascot “Getti the yeti” I think you’re even a member, David.
Thanks for another interesting and thought provoking read, I enjoyed Honk's approach and related. I think SM has benefits at times. I live far away from friends and family, and a lot of the time, due to the difference in time zones or how many of us are neurodivergent and sometimes quite shit at communication, SM is the only way I can stay up to date with the creative things people are doing with their lives.
There were times in the past I let it get the better of me, early on, and it felt gross. As a sober alcoholic, being part of a program means I need to stay accountable for certain behaviors and over time I think I have gotten quite good at noticing when bad habits are developing. So I know when Im doing something that is really me searching for an outside 'escape' or basically a dopamine hit.
I did delete my FB recently, I had closed my business and didn't want clients reaching out anymore, and some scary ex's. I also had years of friends of friends that I just have no interest in hearing about so it seemed like I could spend hours going through it all or just dump the lot and start again. I did the latter and just selected the 20 or so people I care about as friends/family and left it at that. I log on maybe once a week to see what they are up to and then I log off and go on with reality. I love Instagram, I'm a visual creature and I have 2 different accounts. The first is private and where I share images with close friends and family and the second is where I follow all the things I like to look at if I have some down time and don't feel like using it for the betterment of my brain. I make sure this isn't too frequently, but I cut myself a bit of slack if its a horrible day and I want to switch off. Maybe I treat it like people that read trashy magazines from time to time? It's great when SM opens up channels to new people or friends from the past I specifically can't gain access to from my current location.
Linkedin however, in my experience, what a fucking shit show. I don't understand if I was 'doing it wrong' but it didn't feel professional to me in anyway. In the beginning I played the game, adding some of my education and career info, following people I admired blah blah blah, but at some point I started getting odd messages from guys that went from 'your profile was interesting' to intrusive and personal asking about my body ink and what I was into. Maybe that's because a certain type of white male thinks certain looking chicks are ok to approach this way? Linkedin in felt like their home ground. I deleted my original profile at the same time as my Facebook and now have a very basic one purely because its the best app for me to find Autism conferences I want to attend. I am so picky with who I contact. It all feels fake and so like a real office environment with the nice employees that get too many drinks in them at a work do and start trying it on in slimey ways... I just don't understand why any of us need to know that much about our co workers?.. but then that is coming from the woman sitting at her desk talking about weird stuff to a bunch of strangers I feel oddly endeared to so wtf do i know?
I lasted 2 weeks on Twitter, I just couldn't be on there and leave without feeling shit about myself in some way, but again, I think that speaks far more of me than the app. SM really seems like it has a hold on our world and that would be fine, but it isn't policed or governed with morality or social respect for the damage it can do. We get what we put into anything, but there is so much that is vile put out there online that's truly damaging and it's still relatively early days. I truly fear its power and wonder if we will actually grasp in time what it's done and doing for us all in a historical sense. And as for Meta... well a Rose by any other name and all that.
None of my concern stops me logging in and enjoying the images that pop up displaying other peoples lives, so I am absolutely a hypocrite, part of the problem, knowing something is bad but doing it all the same because I enjoy it. I frustrate myself. Thank goodness for Webworm.
I deleted Instagram yesterday. For good, I hope. Although when you click 'delete' it gives you a whole month to change your mind. If I log back in, they'll salvage my account. Annoying!
Facebook is next on the list but involves more work. I'm sure I'm logged into a bunch of stuff via Facebook and I'm also part of a few groups I like. Meta's tentacles are long.
My main motivation? To hear myself think.
I was also getting really creeped out by how much information I was accumulating about total strangers. Their kids' names (and faces), what they'd eat for breakfast, what their living room looks like. The real panic point came when I'd find myself telling my husband stories about people I follow on social media as if I knew them. That's when I knew I had to run for the hills.
LinkedIn: Do you want to endorse person you haven't worked with for 10 years for their skills in time travel, juggling, quantum tunneling , and patisserie? YES! - I've no idea if this is true, but otherwise I'm a bad friend.
Hi, David. I’ve enjoyed the dopamine effects of Facebook for years.
I’ve also experienced feelings of sadness when I learned through Facebook how much I was missing out on, supporting my decades-old belief that I’m never good enough.
Recently I’ve noticed that my my Facebook feed drying up. I was seeing more ads than posts from friends and family.
I wondered, “Are my “friends” no longer posting or am I such a boring or irrelevant Facebook friend that have they decided to unfriend me?”.
I felt sad. I felt left out and rejected. Just what Facebook wanted?, I wondered.
It took only a moment to hit delete.
Keep up the great work, David. And thanks for encouraging us to share our stop and experiences with you.
I feel that I've struck a decent balance with my social media intake. I have employed a couple of strategies that helped me get there:
Installed the "FB Newsfeed Eradicator" extension for Chrome/Edge - By default, this replaces the FB newsfeed with famous inspirational quotes, although you can replace these with your own texts if you prefer. I recommend trying something like "What the fuck are you doing on here?!"
Deleted the Facebook mobile app. With the de-cluttered website, I'm still able to visit the select few groups that I actually enjoy reading, message friends, and view or host events.
On Instagram I have "muted" the posts and stories of everyone except a few close friends, musicians, record labels and journalists. This way the rest of the bullshit does not appear, but I can still search for a specific account if I want to find something.
It's not foolproof, and I do still find myself looking at pointless shit for minutes at a time before realising, but it's a HUGE improvement. I feel a lot more conscious about it and the compulsion to hop on either of the channels has greatly reduced.
Aside from those two I am very much LinkedOut, so this was a fascinating peek into the corporate social world.
I used FB and Instagram a while back: FB because my sisters were living in different areas and it was a great means to catch up & see pics of the kids growing up, and later Insta when said sisters convinced me I was missing out. I gave up FB first, primarily because I moved closer to said sisters and it was tedious encountering people in public asking if I’d seen their Friend request (which I always had and was obviously ignoring so that was awkward af). Hence, delete.
I gave up on Insta for 2 reasons, first because I got tired of watching people close to me living this weird, alternate-reality second life which totally contradicted what I knew was going on with them. I started doubting what was real - do I believe the tearful phone calls lamenting a broken abusive relationship or the photos posted an hour later showing the same couple in matching onesies drinking champagne, captioned Luv U Babez?? Second because I got so unbelievably tired of watching celebs I’d followed slowly turn into relentless peddlers of their own brand/product.
So, I deleted it all, maybe 6 years ago now. Never marked the day and don’t miss it at all.
One of the interesting things I've found with SM is its ability to contort a happy, balanced, generally optimistic person, into one that's always feeling like they're not quite enough, not achieving enough, and a constant nudge towards broadcasting my life's highlight reel online. I'm still figuring how my position on which platforms I'll continue using. To be fair, I dropped Instagram a year ago (great decision!), and only use Facebook and Linkedin. I'll absolutely continue with Linkedin, it's your digital CV and doesn't require you to feed it content to keep you relevant. FB...I'm working through that one. It feels like every day I'm questioning why I use it. Thanks for the great thought-provoking article - it's timely!
But really, do you want to help the calf get more comfortable???
Gave up FaceBook a year back, no regrets! This is of no relevance, but lately when I see Mark Zuck, he looks to me like a face transplant patient, it's uncanny.
Also, LinkedIn is a bit more fun if you pronounce it "Linky Din", like Fleabag's sister. "On the Linky Din," she said. Ha.
Leaving all forms of social media (except LinkedIn of course) was the best decision I ever made! Initially, it was hard - a feeling of being dislocated from the rest of the world if you like. Before leaving, my persona on social media was becoming hateful and intolerant. I was becoming the person I as so critical of in others. I found myself making vicious comments I’d never say to someone personally. I was also becoming disillusioned and darn right furious at the anti science, and dangerous misinformation being peddled by Dunning Kruger alumni, that have a huge presence on social media. Since leaving, I can honestly say I’m much happier. As someone who worships at the altar of science and rationality, I no longer have to read the utter dreck and bullshit that used to upset me so much.
Out of all of the social networks i'm on linkedin is the one that almost always guarantees to get me furious within the first 30 seconds of scrolling. (I deleted facebook years ago or it might be a close call) It's such a bizarre house of insincerity and lies.
I imagine there's a point in your career where some shadow spirit imparts the wisdom that putting several spaces between each sentence on a linkedin post will increase engagement, and if you end the post with a question asking what your connections think of said insincere business statement you're guaranteed a very special table in hell that gets 24 hour turnaround on business cards
So, LinkedIn is pretty much the same as all the other SM platforms then? A school gym full of people all yelling "Look at me!" Fake people trying to be real and real people faking it. Pick-a-clique.
Funnily enough when I check my phone in the morning if there’s a notification from gmail that you’ve arrived I will go straight to Webworm. One of the things I dislike fb for is the lack of actual non-work emails you get from real people theses days. I miss the heyday of the late 90s-early 2000s for the emails that were more like letters. There’s no point now if you’re both on fb. You’ve already seen the photo of the thing they saw on the way to work that morning. Or back further and letters. I used to send three or four letters a week to out-of-town friends. The amazing letter sets you could buy in the J-Mart with themed paper and stickers and envelopes with malapropisms and strange aphorisms galore. I think I wrote on the last post that I’m afraid I’ll never see anyone again (lol) if I delete the apps - but the more you write about it the better it sounds.
I'm finding LinkedIn half infuriating/ half funny at the moment. The amount of white, male NZ-based middle-aged, middle managers just losing their mind at Jacinda Ardern which I can't help but think is twinged with a level of misogyny, I find amusing but then I see so much of it. It's all built up with emotive terms like apartheid, segregation, Communism - all terms that aren't even remotely true.
It is good that it's so transparent that you can see who you don't really want to do business with though when things "get back to normal".
Before the pile on, I wouldn't say I'm middle-aged but I am a white, male, middle manager from NZ
The more people tell me I 'definitely' need something in my life the more likely I am to 'definitely' not do it haha
LinkedIn in falls into that category. It annoyed me that everyone said I would never get a new job or grow a new career without it. It always saddens me that people hand over their agency in their own lives so completely to things, because it disempowers them. So to set an example that noone will even notice I successfully changed careers and built a new one over the last 5 years just by building real life relationships with people in the businesses I worked in and by doing graft. And it worked. I didn't do any LinkedIn learning or need a single motivational quote. I wish people understood it is them and their skills and their personalities and perspectives that are interesting and wonderful. Not a contrived, monster platform version of their lives. Thanks David. Thanks Honk
I’d love to leave Facebook but I admin two groups that bring me too much joy. One is called “Memorylame” where people post weird NZ nostalgia and memories. Filled with Alf Dolls and plush toys of Wattie’s failed spaghetti mascot “Getti the yeti” I think you’re even a member, David.
Thanks for another interesting and thought provoking read, I enjoyed Honk's approach and related. I think SM has benefits at times. I live far away from friends and family, and a lot of the time, due to the difference in time zones or how many of us are neurodivergent and sometimes quite shit at communication, SM is the only way I can stay up to date with the creative things people are doing with their lives.
There were times in the past I let it get the better of me, early on, and it felt gross. As a sober alcoholic, being part of a program means I need to stay accountable for certain behaviors and over time I think I have gotten quite good at noticing when bad habits are developing. So I know when Im doing something that is really me searching for an outside 'escape' or basically a dopamine hit.
I did delete my FB recently, I had closed my business and didn't want clients reaching out anymore, and some scary ex's. I also had years of friends of friends that I just have no interest in hearing about so it seemed like I could spend hours going through it all or just dump the lot and start again. I did the latter and just selected the 20 or so people I care about as friends/family and left it at that. I log on maybe once a week to see what they are up to and then I log off and go on with reality. I love Instagram, I'm a visual creature and I have 2 different accounts. The first is private and where I share images with close friends and family and the second is where I follow all the things I like to look at if I have some down time and don't feel like using it for the betterment of my brain. I make sure this isn't too frequently, but I cut myself a bit of slack if its a horrible day and I want to switch off. Maybe I treat it like people that read trashy magazines from time to time? It's great when SM opens up channels to new people or friends from the past I specifically can't gain access to from my current location.
Linkedin however, in my experience, what a fucking shit show. I don't understand if I was 'doing it wrong' but it didn't feel professional to me in anyway. In the beginning I played the game, adding some of my education and career info, following people I admired blah blah blah, but at some point I started getting odd messages from guys that went from 'your profile was interesting' to intrusive and personal asking about my body ink and what I was into. Maybe that's because a certain type of white male thinks certain looking chicks are ok to approach this way? Linkedin in felt like their home ground. I deleted my original profile at the same time as my Facebook and now have a very basic one purely because its the best app for me to find Autism conferences I want to attend. I am so picky with who I contact. It all feels fake and so like a real office environment with the nice employees that get too many drinks in them at a work do and start trying it on in slimey ways... I just don't understand why any of us need to know that much about our co workers?.. but then that is coming from the woman sitting at her desk talking about weird stuff to a bunch of strangers I feel oddly endeared to so wtf do i know?
I lasted 2 weeks on Twitter, I just couldn't be on there and leave without feeling shit about myself in some way, but again, I think that speaks far more of me than the app. SM really seems like it has a hold on our world and that would be fine, but it isn't policed or governed with morality or social respect for the damage it can do. We get what we put into anything, but there is so much that is vile put out there online that's truly damaging and it's still relatively early days. I truly fear its power and wonder if we will actually grasp in time what it's done and doing for us all in a historical sense. And as for Meta... well a Rose by any other name and all that.
None of my concern stops me logging in and enjoying the images that pop up displaying other peoples lives, so I am absolutely a hypocrite, part of the problem, knowing something is bad but doing it all the same because I enjoy it. I frustrate myself. Thank goodness for Webworm.
I deleted Instagram yesterday. For good, I hope. Although when you click 'delete' it gives you a whole month to change your mind. If I log back in, they'll salvage my account. Annoying!
Facebook is next on the list but involves more work. I'm sure I'm logged into a bunch of stuff via Facebook and I'm also part of a few groups I like. Meta's tentacles are long.
My main motivation? To hear myself think.
I was also getting really creeped out by how much information I was accumulating about total strangers. Their kids' names (and faces), what they'd eat for breakfast, what their living room looks like. The real panic point came when I'd find myself telling my husband stories about people I follow on social media as if I knew them. That's when I knew I had to run for the hills.
LinkedIn: Do you want to endorse person you haven't worked with for 10 years for their skills in time travel, juggling, quantum tunneling , and patisserie? YES! - I've no idea if this is true, but otherwise I'm a bad friend.
Hi, David. I’ve enjoyed the dopamine effects of Facebook for years.
I’ve also experienced feelings of sadness when I learned through Facebook how much I was missing out on, supporting my decades-old belief that I’m never good enough.
Recently I’ve noticed that my my Facebook feed drying up. I was seeing more ads than posts from friends and family.
I wondered, “Are my “friends” no longer posting or am I such a boring or irrelevant Facebook friend that have they decided to unfriend me?”.
I felt sad. I felt left out and rejected. Just what Facebook wanted?, I wondered.
It took only a moment to hit delete.
Keep up the great work, David. And thanks for encouraging us to share our stop and experiences with you.
I feel that I've struck a decent balance with my social media intake. I have employed a couple of strategies that helped me get there:
Installed the "FB Newsfeed Eradicator" extension for Chrome/Edge - By default, this replaces the FB newsfeed with famous inspirational quotes, although you can replace these with your own texts if you prefer. I recommend trying something like "What the fuck are you doing on here?!"
Deleted the Facebook mobile app. With the de-cluttered website, I'm still able to visit the select few groups that I actually enjoy reading, message friends, and view or host events.
On Instagram I have "muted" the posts and stories of everyone except a few close friends, musicians, record labels and journalists. This way the rest of the bullshit does not appear, but I can still search for a specific account if I want to find something.
It's not foolproof, and I do still find myself looking at pointless shit for minutes at a time before realising, but it's a HUGE improvement. I feel a lot more conscious about it and the compulsion to hop on either of the channels has greatly reduced.
Aside from those two I am very much LinkedOut, so this was a fascinating peek into the corporate social world.
Big ups, David and Honk <3
I used FB and Instagram a while back: FB because my sisters were living in different areas and it was a great means to catch up & see pics of the kids growing up, and later Insta when said sisters convinced me I was missing out. I gave up FB first, primarily because I moved closer to said sisters and it was tedious encountering people in public asking if I’d seen their Friend request (which I always had and was obviously ignoring so that was awkward af). Hence, delete.
I gave up on Insta for 2 reasons, first because I got tired of watching people close to me living this weird, alternate-reality second life which totally contradicted what I knew was going on with them. I started doubting what was real - do I believe the tearful phone calls lamenting a broken abusive relationship or the photos posted an hour later showing the same couple in matching onesies drinking champagne, captioned Luv U Babez?? Second because I got so unbelievably tired of watching celebs I’d followed slowly turn into relentless peddlers of their own brand/product.
So, I deleted it all, maybe 6 years ago now. Never marked the day and don’t miss it at all.
Good on ya Honk for largely doing the same :)
One of the interesting things I've found with SM is its ability to contort a happy, balanced, generally optimistic person, into one that's always feeling like they're not quite enough, not achieving enough, and a constant nudge towards broadcasting my life's highlight reel online. I'm still figuring how my position on which platforms I'll continue using. To be fair, I dropped Instagram a year ago (great decision!), and only use Facebook and Linkedin. I'll absolutely continue with Linkedin, it's your digital CV and doesn't require you to feed it content to keep you relevant. FB...I'm working through that one. It feels like every day I'm questioning why I use it. Thanks for the great thought-provoking article - it's timely!