Facebook is an addiction. If you cannot see that, you’re already addicted.
When I first heard of Facebook’s psycho experiments, I knew I had to get off. Facebook went from a place to connect, to a global shithouse focused on fucking with your mind.
Though I was conscientious of the fact I spent way too much time on Facebook, I didn’t do much about it. Why? Because I was addicted.
I started taking to others who had deleted their Facebook accounts. One thing most of them said was after closing their account, they continually would go back to Facebook.com. Only after 3-4 days, were they able to change this routine. Cray. So, my question them was: what did you do to replace your FB time? Their answer: they went to news sites and actually learned something.
Ok, ok, that’s awesome. Get smarter, save time, get disconnected from the social experiment. But, my concern was, what about all of my connections? I can’t lose them. I’ve got friends, family, etc.
Alright, can I use a different platform? Ello, email, Skype? Email kind of sucks, only nerds use IRC (I’m a nerd, but not a lot of people I know), and not everyone has iMessage. Alright, I want to keep Facebook, but I no longer want to look at my bullshit home feed filled with crappy shit from Distractify.
I had a few options. Do I keep Facebook messenger? Do I only use Facebook on my phone? I decided for the latter. But how do I prevent myself from using it on my laptop?
Meet SelfControl. SelfControl allows you to make a blacklist of web addresses and prevents you from accessing them. I could keep FB, but I couldn’t open it. Sweet. But, what to do now? I still tried to open FB, like 5 times. I couldn’t access it, so I went to Feedly and consumed information from Qntra. I also logged onto #bitcoin-assets on IRC. Holy shit, the others were right, you do start to read.
Skip forward a bit. It’s been 3 days since I’ve installed SelfControl. I can tell you, it’s great. I’ve gotten the routine out of my system. In fact, look at me – I’m blogging. WTF? Facebook sucks, really. It’s wasted time, or put in another way: FB is empty calories making you fat and stupid. Log off and do something useful (read, program, hang with your kids, whatev). 🙂
One helpful tip for quitting facebook… Just nuke your account. Might seems drastic, but… it works.
Linux: echo ‘127.0.0.1 facebook.com’ >> /etc/hosts
Mac: There’s a nap for that.
Windows: Just keep scrolling.
C:/System32/Drivers/hosts would be the one.
I just nuked my old account and created a new one. Added only people I care about to some degree (down from 700 to about 30 friends), and only check it when I have a notification.
Works pretty well, still connectedish when necessaryish but no unruly distractions.
Get off other people’s articles and get the sand out of your vagina.
“Get off other people’s articles” – riiight. You mean articles you bit from others ? You should be thanking me.
This is really amusing. Instead of just learning the lesson, being less stupid next time and moving on, Travis has the need to parade around everywhere showing just how deeply butthurt he is. Man, this isn’t going to work.
Back on the topic of self-control as a Facebook used, I’d like to mention that I’ve tried many things to make it harder to access, and always ended up disabling them, because sometimes I do need to check or post something there.
What finally worked for me is using a style sheet to hide the feed so you don’t end up scrolling in an endless timesink, but can still access the site to write a post or check the messages without having to use their ‘apps’ (they’ve recently axed XMPP access). It’s a less drastic solution but could still significantly reduce the time spent there.
https://userstyles.org/styles/93003/facebook-hide-news-feed < in case it's useful for someone else.