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Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

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Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#121

Post by of »

I maintain multiple troll accounts on Twitter and Facebook. That's all I use these services for. I take pride in my active part in the downfall of these services, while at the same time producing intriguing and low-brow troll content.

Once Mark Zuckerberg accepts the fact that not everyone uses the Internet according to his sheltered brain's arbitrary rules (I've even had to send a picture of my driver's license to Facebook to get them to unban one of my accounts. It's just a website! Get over yourselves), then the bubble will pop - with small communities scattered throughout the multiverse of the net just like Web 1.0.

And that's basically it. The web is a multiverse where each of us are simultaneously able to have multiple identities, living multiple realities. It's never been suited to the rules that Facebook is trying to force people into. I feel like Facebook would be better off making their own Internet if they want people to adhere to their bullshit.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#122

Post by toastercat »

RandallBrown wrote: post #62

Am I the only person that has a healthy relationship with social media? I use Twitter to follow interesting celebrities and industry professionals. (Adam Savage Mythbusters fame, pro climber Alex Honnold, several notable iOS programmers). I rarely interact with any of them, but I find out about lots of interesting things. I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends around the country. I can keep my dad updated to wh…

Yes, you are the only person that has a healthy relationship with social media.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#124

Post by scarecrowbob »

RandallBrown wrote: post #62

Am I the only person that has a healthy relationship with social media? I use Twitter to follow interesting celebrities and industry professionals. (Adam Savage Mythbusters fame, pro climber Alex Honnold, several notable iOS programmers). I rarely interact with any of them, but I find out about lots of interesting things. I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends around the country. I can keep my dad updated to wh…

Well, I used to think I had a healthy relationship with drinking, but ohhh...

Not that social media is the same thing at all. But I have a degree in philosophy and was trained in my formative years to argue with folks. That's a terrible mode to be in on social media-- it doesn't serve the people around me and it doesn't serve me at all.

So I stopped arguing and just posted nice things, like songs I sing or good things that happen to me or pictures of my kids.

The problem (for me, maybe not for everyone else) is that:

- I can't really get out of the mode of arguing - I'm constantly encountering people I love casually sharing memes that say that "people like me" are the root cause of all societal problems - I'm constantly reading between a bunch of lines and seeing where folks I love are in fact doing terrible things for their families and relationships.

So, like, that's not at all a fun mode to be in

And it's worse when I have an impulse to check in on it dozens of times a day. To add to conversations that are dumb, to check in on some situation or other that has nothing to do with me, or whatever.

So no, I don't think that there is a super healthy way for me, personally, to work with Facebook specifically. The other stuff, I dunno. I don't mind message boards, instagram, etc. But I really gotta stay off FB.

Just like alcohol, it did a bunch of good things for me and I was using it for those good benefits, but just like alcohol it bundles its own problems.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#125

Post by emodendroket »

This title suggests a somewhat different piece than it actually is. The argument seems to be that cultivating a social media presence as a career strategy is not helpful at best and may even be hurtful for dividing your attention. That's probably true, but I like to use social media to have discussions, find out about local events, or get in touch with friends, and have never really thought that someone would hire me because they liked an opinion I posted on Facebook.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#126

Post by _jal »

RandallBrown wrote: post #62

Am I the only person that has a healthy relationship with social media? I use Twitter to follow interesting celebrities and industry professionals. (Adam Savage Mythbusters fame, pro climber Alex Honnold, several notable iOS programmers). I rarely interact with any of them, but I find out about lots of interesting things. I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends around the country. I can keep my dad updated to wh…

> If I wouldn't do something in public, I wouldn't post it to social media.

Not everyone has that freedom. Gay people in rural Alabama, women in the UAE, undocumented immigrants in Arizona. People fleeing abusive spouses.

> Am I the only person that has a healthy relationship with social media?

Doubtful, but you are a person who doesn't face serious consequences for existing.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#127

Post by jopsen »

davvolun wrote: post #84
RandallBrown wrote: post #62

Am I the only person that has a healthy relationship with social media? I use Twitter to follow interesting celebrities and industry professionals. (Adam Savage Mythbusters fame, pro climber Alex Honnold, several notable iOS programmers). I rarely interact with any of them, but I find out about lots of interesting things. I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends around the country. I can keep my dad updated to wh…

> If I wouldn't do something in public, I wouldn't post it to social media. I've been thinking about this a lot lately in calling and sending emails to my government representatives, attending marches and protests. By definition, these are done in public; there's no point otherwise! But there's nothing preventing my employer from deciding they don't like what I'm putting out there and doing .. something about it. I d…

Unionize!

My union doesn't do collective bargaining negotiations.. I'm a tech worker...

It covers me legally should employers take too much of an interest in my personal life, etc...

They also run a news paper about engineering topics..

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#128

Post by Balgair »

borplk wrote: post #41
tapeleg wrote: post #20

Career and social life should be completely and utterly separated. The content on your social media page should have no bearing on your ability to perform the job at hand. Quite honestly, an employer that even looks at your social media profile to do a sort of casual "character check" on you, is not one that you should want to work for in the first place. Especially true in the realm of IT, where there just simply ar…

> an employer that even looks at your social media profile to do a sort of casual "character check" on you, is not one that you should want to work for in the first place. Companies aren't going to ignore "free information available at your fingertips" about the candidates they hire. For example a problem candidate may have easily accessible "red flags" on their social media such as racist stuff and drug use. They co…

The issue is the false positive/false negative rate and a lack of data in general. Without any measure of how 'good' the info gained via social media is, the data is essentially useless. For large companies like Walmart, they can garner this data and see if it correlates at all. Google used to use GPA in their hiring decisions, but dropped it as it did not correlate to how good an employee is.

For example: drug use. Many people use drugs, but what is the difference between them? Is one type of drug a 'good' drug, like caffeine or nicotine? Burning Man attendees may be good employees and may micro-dose with LSD while at work. Does this make them a good hire? Again, the issue is that there just isn't enough data to properly correlate.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#129

Post by mindcrash »

The problem with Social Media (and a few other platforms aswell) is that they were explicitly designed with addiction in mind. There's even literally a book about this subject called "Hooked" with subtitle "How to create habit forming products", but you can and should translate the "habit forming" in the subtitle into "addictive".

Everybody has neurotransmitters in their body, and these neurotransmitters have the ability to change brain chemistry. One of those neurotransmitters is dopamine, which makes you feel good when you have accomplished something. Basically it's natural crack. So what do these platforms do? They abuse the knowledge of this kind of biology within the experience design of their platforms to create something I call "dopamine loops", which basically means you crave more, and more, and more dopamine (and thus keep interacting with the service). And before you know it the last few hours you should have spent on work or other important things like keeping an eye on the traffic around you or having actual real life social interactions with the people around you, are rather spent on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and whatnot.

So it would rephrase the headline a bit. Not only your career may depend on it, but your entire life may actually depend on it.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#130

Post by aylmao »

RandallBrown wrote: post #62

Am I the only person that has a healthy relationship with social media? I use Twitter to follow interesting celebrities and industry professionals. (Adam Savage Mythbusters fame, pro climber Alex Honnold, several notable iOS programmers). I rarely interact with any of them, but I find out about lots of interesting things. I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends around the country. I can keep my dad updated to wh…

+1. I personally think this near-constant bashing of social media is getting ridiculous. These past two weeks have been all-in, article after article, non-stop.

Is social media bad? You can definitely have a non-healthy relationship with it. But it didn't "break politics" [1] or "elect Trump" [2]. It was mostly just another vector for advertising.

We've known of the privacy issues with Facebook for a while and the whole Cambridge Analytica thing had been in the news before this spree of bad press. We've known Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are distracting for years.

I'm starting to wonder if what's going on here is some sort of war/defence by established media against big tech/social media. We know Murdoch was straight about going to war against Facebook [3] (apparently they lobbied heavily against Google in Europe before too). It wouldn't surprise me if other big-media magnates are in on this too. After all, didn't Facebook cut a bunch of newsfeed traffic to news sites in January?

Big media has always been an incredibly lucrative, power-wielding business, because it largely controls the public's opinion. I almost feel like it was bound to happen; big media was bound to claim it's the bastion of truth and scare people out of social media.

Now, of course, things aren't black and white. I'm not saying one is good and the other is bad, but that's precisely my point. I see traditional media focusing very heavily this past two weeks on painting social media as bad. Trumps election and the whole "fake news" accusations apparently was amazing for their business [4]. The NYT crossed $1billion in revenue in 2017, with strong growth [5]. Asking people nicely won't get you subscribers, when people are scared because "democracy is at stake" then they pour in.

I don't know. Uber literally just killed a woman with a self-driving car: I would've assumed the repercussions of that would be huge and everyone would be talking about the legal aspects of self-driving tech, the future of testing, security, safety, and investigation, etc. But I have seen more articles about Facebook and social media in general in a day than I saw about Uber all of last week.

[1]: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/12/15259438/s...

[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17138854/cambridge-analyt...

[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/12/facebook-rupert-murdoch-thre...

[4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/06/is...

[5]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/new-york-times-c...

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