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Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

bradfrost.com

311–320 of 401 posts

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#311
post #2

The best thing I ever did was delete the Facebook app from my phone. I had already disabled all the notifications, but that didn't change things like deleting the app. Not being able to get to Facebook wherever you are. As silly as it sounds it was liberating. I still access Facebook from my laptop - but now that it's off of my phone, I'm accessing Facebook less and less frequently and I'm find I'm happier as a resul…

This is true, and now even scientifically backed. https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2016/04/30/study-l... https://www.nature.com/news/how-facebook-fake-news-and-frien...

“Research Links Heavy Facebook And Social Media Usage To Depression”

Do we really need researchers to tell us that prolonged heavy anything usage increases the chance of unhappiness?

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#312
As a small part of a larger change in my personal life, I've also decided to delete my facebook account as well as Linkedin and other social media accounts. Basically I was in the need for a mental break.

Too much mental stimulation, specially from things that don't have much interest, was making my mind very shallow and easily distracted. I still read a lot of HN, but I'm trying to reduce my internet leisure time to 1 hour per day at most.

Since now I easily get bored, I started doing some sudokus (on a paper book) and I am finally starting to feel my mind a little bit sharper. I also feel the need to find more productive things to pass the time. For instance, three days ago I explored, quite in depth, C pointers and pointer arithmetic because of the first comment on this hn thread [0]. Also, yesterday, starting on the hn thread on microkernels [1], I started reading about these "alternative" OSes (Minix, HelenOS, etc), checked the source code of some of them, and eventually played a bit with nasm assembler and made a 32 bit and 64 bit "hello world" app for MacOS. These are things that I wouldn't learn and do if I was being mentally "stimulated" by facebook and that kind of things.

However, one positive thing about facebook is that those friends that used to send emails with funny memes, videos and what else, now use facebook for that. As a result, my email inbox is now much cleaner and calmer.. :)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15198093

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15216615

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#313

Although I'm not on Facebook anymore, I have the same problem with LinkedIn. To deal with it, I just add to my email sieve filter every so often. So far I have: ## Linkedin - Trash useless email if allof( address :is "From" "messages-noreply@linkedin.com", anyof( header :regex "Subject" "^(Congratulate|Say happy birthday to) .+", header :regex "Subject" "^Check out .+ (updated profile|new skill|new photo)", header :r…

Slight tangent, but any suggestions on how to do this kind of real-time filtering with Gmail? The filter functionality doesn't quite let you do regexes.

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#314

As a small part of a larger change in my personal life, I've also decided to delete my facebook account as well as Linkedin and other social media accounts. Basically I was in the need for a mental break. Too much mental stimulation, specially from things that don't have much interest, was making my mind very shallow and easily distracted. I still read a lot of HN, but I'm trying to reduce my internet leisure time to…

Thanks for sharing your experience! :)

Funny now that you mention.. I've been doing less and less side projects since my life got 'invaded' by social media. I wonder if I'm suffering from a similar problem...

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#315
post #294

> you’ve shared x days in a row and your friends are responding A month ago, FB's first senior software engineer was saying on the Internet History Podcast that FB would never create useless features/tactics to bring users to the platform like the Snapchat streak. Listen here, 27:20 mark. http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/08/facebooks-firs...

lol. This is just so lol. Good find. Thanks!

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#316
post #2

The best thing I ever did was delete the Facebook app from my phone. I had already disabled all the notifications, but that didn't change things like deleting the app. Not being able to get to Facebook wherever you are. As silly as it sounds it was liberating. I still access Facebook from my laptop - but now that it's off of my phone, I'm accessing Facebook less and less frequently and I'm find I'm happier as a resul…

This is useful too: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

Make Hacker News Your Facebook Newsfeed

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14755217

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#317

On a meta note, I really like the design on the OP's site. The interactive SVG circles is a nice touch, and trying to color them all in with my pointer was almost as satisfying as popping bubble wrap.

I wasted a few enjoyable minutes doing just that. Then I realised that if I revisited a circle I'd already coloured in, it would change colour. The thought leaped into my head: "Can I make all of them the same colour?"

I realised I was standing on the edge of the abyss, and closed the page.

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#318
Yepp Facebook is more or less a big Machine Learning Apperatus tuning in on user brain grabbing.

Like a cheap TV Channel or a Casino and similar crap.

Yes i still use Facebook but only to chat to people. It replaced icq and i don't wan't to lose my contacts :(.

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#319

I've recently received several friend requests a day from spambots. This is annoying, but I can just ignore the "friend request" tab and go on with my life. However, as if it wasn't a nuisance enough, Facebook now gives me plain notifications of these friend requests in my normal notification feed. "Spambot is new to Facebook and just sent you a friend request." I'd switch to only Messenger, but Facebook seems to thi…

I get these too. But for some reason, I believe it might be facebook which is doing A/B testing by sending friend requests from random bots to people whose activity is very less. The friend requests are usually from the opposite gender apparently.

Re: Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch

#320

Although I'm not on Facebook anymore, I have the same problem with LinkedIn. To deal with it, I just add to my email sieve filter every so often. So far I have: ## Linkedin - Trash useless email if allof( address :is "From" "messages-noreply@linkedin.com", anyof( header :regex "Subject" "^(Congratulate|Say happy birthday to) .+", header :regex "Subject" "^Check out .+ (updated profile|new skill|new photo)", header :r…

Dumb question: Why not filter by the from address?
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