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Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It

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Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It

#381

Post by VLM »

rjromero wrote: post #345
hashtagMERKY wrote: post #31

This part really resonated with me: > 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…

I'm curious, what is it in the human psyche that causes us to have such a desire to stay plugged in to social media? Especially when the content we go through usually only ends up white noise to us.

All the positive reinforcement of gossip, with none of the historical negative connotations because of the new name.

As with all renaming strategies, eventually the new name gets enough tarnish that its either given up, gets yet another new name. There was a pretty concerted push a few years ago to rename everything online as "viral" regardless of the original source and meaning of that name. Wasn't time yet, but soon enough "social media" will be for old people but the cool kids will continue doing the same old thing with a new name.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It

#382

Post by chris_wot »

diegoperini wrote: post #251
Veen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've recently been finding it really hard to concentrate on my work I've overcome my Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter problems, but I can't seem to shake Hacker News.

Same here. HN is addictive, but also insanely useful in some cases which makes it hard to leave like any other mentioned site there. I literally owe many of my succesful professional decisions to researches that initally started here. I find some interesting article, read the comments first, then the article, then the comments again. In the middle of this flow, I decide whether it is worthy to save to my Pocket accou…

Hacker News is actually a high quality medium and I God it pretty information dense. Facebook, on the other hand, gives me lots of videos of stuff that is utterly useless, and often just makes you feel angry about the world. I'm using it less and less.

Twitter I don't use at all. I don't even read it.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It

#383

Post by iamhamm »

JDiculous wrote: post #360

Sure, quit social media if you're a robot who's sole purpose in life is to maximize your career - though I'd still argue that social media is valuable in that it enables you to expand your network and maintain/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. If you find yourself constantly wasting time on Faceboo…

I bounce back and forth on this. I don't really feel like Facebook enriches my personal connections; it just lets me remain to a lot of people I'm not really connected to anymore. It's like having a system for maintaining lower tier friends. LinkedIn feels the same way: I have a huge network of people that are all talking, but none of it really does anything to enrich my career. I don't listen to them, they don't listen to me. When I need career advice, help with job hunts, etc. I call someone I know and trust and they do the same. I don't think we can feasibly maintain large networks.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It

#385

Post by Retra »

mreiland wrote: post #266
Retra wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does free speech act as natural selection if there's no penalty for 'bad' speech?

Why are you thinking about free speech in terms of things that need to be penalized (or rewarded)? I encourage everyone to avoid answering that question, it presupposes that the mindset that resulted in such a question is valid on some level and worthy of engagement.

I'm talking about natural selection. You can't have natural selection without the 'selection' part.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It

#386

Post by brilliantcode »

I've said before that Social Media is our generation's "cigarette".

Very much like in the early days, people just didn't have any awareness that cigarettes were harmful. Hell, everybody was doing it (see Mad Men).

I'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.

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.

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.

It's only recently that we are beginning to become aware of the what if effects of being exposed to so much "spamming with our running commentary of bullshit masquerading as insight". So far, studies have confirmed that it's negative on the individual.

Having said that, there's plenty of people who don't care. They are happy uploading selfies and food they are about to digest and poop out in 12 hours. It'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.

Our low interest money has created a whole new economy where the number of active users without any doubt, taken at it's face value rather than examining it's intrinsic worth.

Just how important is it for everybody to be so connected and knowing every possible detail going on with everybody else?

For me, not very, and I've for the most part (besides HN & Reddit) have embraced off the social media grid lifestyle 3 years ago and I'm fucking loving it so far. I feel happier.

I'm not perfect as I use HN & Reddit. Although, I do spend less and less time on those platforms and experience more joy as well.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It

#387

Post by nextos »

diegoperini wrote: post #251
Veen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've recently been finding it really hard to concentrate on my work I've overcome my Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter problems, but I can't seem to shake Hacker News.

Same here. HN is addictive, but also insanely useful in some cases which makes it hard to leave like any other mentioned site there. I literally owe many of my succesful professional decisions to researches that initally started here. I find some interesting article, read the comments first, then the article, then the comments again. In the middle of this flow, I decide whether it is worthy to save to my Pocket accou…

I'm trying to use HN & reddit mostly as a pull-based source of information, instead of something that pushes an endless stream of things into my brain and needs to be followed constantly.

It's quite simple, when I'm looking for something, I do a google-based site-specific search to HN. I often find very old threads with really good value.

I still follow things every few days to stay on top of trends. I haven't discovered how to catch up with those without frequent visits, though. Perhaps the solution lies in NLP summary technology.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It

#388

Post by grzm »

gaur wrote: post #377
grzm wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Purging people based on political opinions is exactly how democracy is supposed to function." What does "purging" mean to you in this case? You've now provided two examples: firing and voting. What level of political disagreement justifies what actions? I don't think there's widespread agreement, and it's something I'm trying to figure out for myself.

> You've now provided two examples: firing and voting. Voting someone out of office is firing them. We're talking about firing.

Cool. I can see that for the purposes of this discussion. Is this only a workplace issue in your mind? At least for right now? Other aspects on my mind is what kind of heuristic do you use to determine if the political opinion is fireable? Or rather, it's not only what the opinion is (there are a lot of controversial political issues), or the opinion itself, it's the expression of it, right? For example, something said (some sort of speech act), or some other behavior.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It

#389

Post by molteanu »

nextos wrote: post #387
diegoperini wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. HN is addictive, but also insanely useful in some cases which makes it hard to leave like any other mentioned site there. I literally owe many of my succesful professional decisions to researches that initally started here. I find some interesting article, read the comments first, then the article, then the comments again. In the middle of this flow, I decide whether it is worthy to save to my Pocket accou…

I'm trying to use HN & reddit mostly as a pull-based source of information, instead of something that pushes an endless stream of things into my brain and needs to be followed constantly. It's quite simple, when I'm looking for something, I do a google-based site-specific search to HN. I often find very old threads with really good value. I still follow things every few days to stay on top of trends. I haven't discov…

As someone else recently pointed out, you do know there is an awesome instant search feature right here on hn, https://hn.algolia.com. Don't need to power up The Google.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It

#390

Post by mamon »

ethanbond wrote: post #148
FreezerburnV wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should not be mocked, agreed. But I think things get more complicated in the current environment where people who have voted for Trump have basically been labeled the same as him. It's apparently possible to have a "hateful attitude", or be racist, or whatever else, which can get you fired at GrubHub, by having voted for Trump. But honestly, regardless of arguing intent or whatever, I think the crux of the arg…

"It's apparently possible" as in you're the one drawing the connection the CEO didn't draw and then explicitly stated he didn't intend to draw: he did not say and did not mean to say that voting for Trump would get you fired. The CEO never said Trump voters aren't welcome. That was the original comment that I disagreed with. It's factually incorrect to say that's what the CEO said.

If he said that directly he could be sued, so he used more subtle threats. Mentioning Trump's name twice in his email is not a coincidence - it wasn't necessary to make his point about racism or anti-immigrant sentiments, but it was necessary to make Trupm's voters get the message that they are not welcomed.
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