Two weeks ago, I wrote about deactivating my Facebook account, as well as Instagram, to reclaim some time and cut distraction from “social” networks that were not adding any enhancement to my life. I kept a Twitter account active and also kept the LinkedIn app installed on my iPhone. Then I installed the Tumblr app so I could use it as a link blog and catch-all since I did not want to relegate my web site to that task.
Now, I have deleted the Twitter app from my phone. The Tumblr app and account are also gone. As my experiment with leaving Facebook progresses, I feel less compelled to use any of these social networks. They feel far less valuable to me compared to my past interactions. Some might argue that Twitter is the only place to get breaking world news before anyone else, but I’m not interested in having my eyes glued to a feed to “find out first” when I have my own life to live. Seconds are precious. Time will consume our lives no matter what we do, so we should make the most of that time.
I have decided that any link I think I may want to refer to in the future is best stored in Pinboard, out of the way yet accessible and archived forever. If I find that I have something more to say about a link or an article that I read on the Internet, then the appropriate place is right here. If I am going to devote some of my fleeting time to writing about something, I should own it and host it myself. One of the issues with Tumblr is that while it makes it easy to publish any media to the web, it is still an insidious social network that causes compulsive following and feed reading which defeats my purpose for using it.
Twitter is not what it once was for me. I am not quite sure what it ever was other than a place to engage in some witty banter with Internet and real-life friends, but that has faded over time, and now I would rather engage in face to face conversation with friends.
I am done with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr. Will I stay in retirement from these networks? I hope so, although I have a friend who jokes that this is just my usual social network hate phase and that it will pass in a month or two. I hope not. I hope it lasts for a long time.
A bigger concern for me is that so many web applications and sites have begun to rely on social networks for their authentication services that they may become difficult to avoid altogether. Many sites still offer to let you create an account with them, but most offer Facebook, Google, and Twitter as authentication options. I can appreciate the simple beauty of single sign-on authentication and the simplification of infrastructure and operations for companies that accept these other authentication methods, but I don’t want to have to maintain an account with any of those companies.
It’s a matter of trust. I might agree to use your service, but I will not use your service if you force me to use a Facebook or Twitter account to access it. I no longer trust those companies with my information, so I do not want to use them as an authentication method for other services. I don’t think that social networks are the new way to engage people. In fact, traffic metrics prove that search is still the single largest driver of traffic. For my sites, RSS and e-mail also drive a large amount of traffic in. When I tried to use Facebook and Twitter to engage people, there was little to no traffic from those sites.
There’s a reason for this phenomenon. The social networks do not want you to exit the walled garden, nor do the users want to leave them. Facebook would rather have me post an article on their platform than use my own site. Of course, I have tested that as well, and anything more than two short paragraphs in length is often ignored by the Facebook crowd. If you’ve read this far, it is likely that you are an outlier on Facebook.
Facebook and Twitter do not make money if you leave their playground. Twitter is also not built for long form writing. There are apps and utilities that allow you to post long form writing to Twitter, but it’s a mess to read and attempt to follow such posts. Twitter is a haven for marketing and hashtags these days.
Tumblr is great if you like long scrolling pages of reblogs, notes, and likes. And the amount of hashtags on Instagram has become ludicrous. I love some of the photos, but the jumble of text is illegible and detracts from the entire experience.
At the risk of further insulting the hard work and years of effort that brilliant technologists put into building these fabulous web applications, I will wrap it up. It’s enough to say that I do not find value in these services any longer. If you do, that’s all well and good, but my retirement from them is part of a larger change in pruning the iPhone of inessential applications and time wasters.
It’s funny how the human mind works to spot information to the current task. As I have been going through this process, I happened upon the article, “Power Down”, by Jeremy Vandehey in my RSS feed reader. It is an excellent article and worth the 10 minutes or less it takes to read. For those of you who think ten minutes is too long to devote to reading, he provides a social network style summary:
“TL;DR – We are on our phones too much. They were built to enhance our lives, not consume them. Be a human.”
Simple, and beautiful. Don’t let these life enhancements steal your time and thereby your life away from you. Consider the value, if any, they add to your life and adjust your behavior. Go talk to someone face to face. Enjoy the flow of conversation and interaction. Be a human. Live.