Not Rage Quitting
Facebook is the smoking section in restaurants
By now, smoking in restaurants is illegal in most states and has been for 20 years. If you are over 40, you probably clearly remember the smoking section of every restaurant. Before those laws passed, many restaurants went smoke free of their own accord.
It did not happen immediately. It happened at the speed of life over years. There were times where we were angry, silly, or hypocritical. The day a smoker read that his second hand smoke was deadly to his favorite waitress, he probably still went to the restaurant and smoked while he drank his coffee.
But five years later he was not. If he still smoked, he went outside to light up. And likely over the years he has quit. The better angels of people take time, but they bend the zeitgeist.
I am hoping that our dopamine social media addiction turns in a similar direction.
I have made no objective survey, but a large amount of people that I am connected to on social media are feeling disturbed, disconnected, and used. This was somewhat true before, but the recent choices of Mark Zuckerberg have tipped a few people over an edge.1
There have been edges before, and some have left. Many of those have returned. It seems that Facebook’s bet is that, however distasteful it is to people, their memory of the sourness will fade and they will return to the platform. Like a dealer watching their prey go into rehab, they don’t believe it will stick. You will come back.
But the platform stinks for a lot of us. The stink has slowly grown in the 20 years that we have used Facebook.
When AI-generated people-impersonators are sucking up electricity to make up things for you to view, Facebook has moved from being social media to being media of some strange new kind.
My connection to it matters not just for me but for us as a society. I hope that is obvious by now. Leo and I are trying to talk about differences between Americans as interchanges not divides. Facebook is pushing us into our camps and feeding us stories that keep us divided. It knows that rage keeps us addicted. Those of us who get emotional about issues will hate how it makes us feel but keep coming back and lighting up.
https://www.oldtruckgoodcoffee.com/p/dont-call-it-a-divide
Facebook is not the same place we signed up for. When 60-80 percent of what you are shown is an ad or from someone you have never heard of, it is not social time. The feed you face has not just ads but posts and videos by professional content creators from around the world. Your own snapshots and shaky videos of your kid playing with your dog are no match for a drone shot over Victoria Falls. And you don't know if Grandma will even see it in the deluge of ads and long quasi-historic posts.
If you looked at the product evolution, this is the inevitable evolution of a successful business. It is good to know Corey Doctorow’s concept of Enshittification.2
Incidentally, enshittification is the word of the year for 2024 for the Australian Dictionary Macquarie.3
This was always the three-way bargain between Facebook, businesses purchasing advertisements, and us. It has been terrifically successful for Facebook and for the advertisers. United, they are major contributors — pioneers that led the way for other apps — in creating dopamine addiction, isolation, and depression. The use of it seems innocuous, but zoom out across our culture and it is not.
20 years. It has been a part of some American’s life as long as they can remember. But that does not mean that it will be successful forever, or remain in this form. We change. Not overnight, not in a way that works for the last act of a Marvel Universe movie, but we change.
We removed lead from gas. We stopped smoking in restaurants. We can turn away from Facebook.
Getting ready to quit, or just planning to cut back
Some (many) have rage quit their social media apps. I appreciate the power they can summon, but I fear giving up the thing that Zuckerberg holds hostage for the advertisers; you.
I still want you. I want to write to you and I want to read about you. I do not want videos of fly fishing, although I watch them when I open this app even though I just wanted to see what you are doing.
I do not want un-attributed historical stories that align with my political views. I do not want political rages and fights, though I have been known to post them and I have been known to engage with them.
We don't have to stay there, but I would miss you. I found and connected with old friends. I posted pictures about my daily life. I supported people who were struggling and I asked for support when I was struggling.
It wasn't Mayberry, but it was nice. More social than media. When I realize how far it has come, I miss THAT.
I have asked a few friends what they look for in Facebook. Everyone has their own thing.
The groups
Facebook marketplace
Their friends
Political organizing
Distraction
Information from their particular interests
No one I talk to says "I love the way this platform is going." Some of us are humbly willing to admit that we engage on the dopamine level with it. I am addicted. I open up the app, see a preview of a fly fishing video, and lose 30 minutes of my workday to a drug-like distraction state.
Knowing that I am doing exactly what they want and hating that part of myself is a classic sense of addiction, and I truly want to excise it from my life. But as I said, I would miss you.
Plan quit
I don't want to rage quit. Can we plan quit? What if, instead of declaring "I am out of here" and closing our profiles (Facebook even makes deleting your account hard — because they know you will come crawling back and they want your seat ready for you, just as you like it.)
How about a measured, timely quit? How about 30 days or 60 days to quit?
In that time one could examine what you value and find a good replacement for it.
You could perhaps discover the reason that you are on Facebook makes sense for you so you go ahead and stay, but feel aligned about your use. Maybe it would help you not be distracted by the content that guides you away from that purpose.
In the meantime, I am going to reach out to the people and groups that I do value on Facebook and see if they would move somewhere else.
Some replacement options
Depending on why you are on Facebook, there could be intentional replacements
BlueSky is another business-operated application that functions more like Twitter than Facebook -- in fact started by one of the founders of Twitter. It has stronger moderation and the ability to control your own algorithm, which is nice. A lot of your friends (including me)4 are already there.
As a business, it will need to monetize eventually. I am not optimistic. It wants “eyeballs,” which I read as dopamine addicts.
It has a pretty liberal bent right now as liberals who did not feel comfortable on Twitter/X have moved there.
Private, closer, more social
Another option is to use a tool that is more private. Text works, with some limitations. One could create text groups or use an application like Signal or Telegram to keep in touch with a group of people. I have multiple Signal groups that have been exchanging quips, news, mutual support, and event planning for years. Works great and I never get distracted by unrelated content.
Realtime video or phone
One can set up a calendar event that recurs every month or week. Add a Zoom, Google Meet and other video platform link and a group that is spread out can get together in real time on the regular.
You could gather in person. I know, crazy, right? Spending time with people in person is healthy. If I took all the half hours that I lose to fly fishing videos in a week and spent that time in person with humans, I could benefit from the experiences and knowledge of other people and fulfill the human need to gather.
A better, more focused application
If you are looking to browse video content while waiting in the doctor's office, could YouTube work? It is still owned by a powerful corporation, still manipulates you, but the creators are more rewarded and YouTube has not abandoned content moderation.
Listen to the nerds
The nerds have a lot of solutions that work great once you figure them out.
For instance, they can help you set up a Discord server where invited people can discuss things. Or get you set up on Mastodon. But, of course Mastodon is boring.
Mastadon is boring (e.g. Mastodon is low dopamine)
The big question for a lot of people is what about Mastodon? Mastodon functions like Facebook but has differences that seem to be daunting for people at first. They then say that it is boring. In my mind, Mastodon is different BECAUSE it is not motivated to provide you dopamine. So we call it boring. But if your friends were accessible without having to pass by drone videos and dancers, could you get what you want and rebuild your attention span?
Can you use it to create and expand community and publish your own thoughts and images? Can you get your friends on there? Perhaps! You can find me at https://mastodon.social/@joelbarker and we can give it a try.
Under the hood, Mastodon has a very interesting design feature; using something called ActivityPub, it allows for people on one app, like Mastodon, to read and comment on something stored elsewhere, such as someone’s blog. This is interesting because perhaps if large corporations were not trying to trap us into their space, connect with each other regardless of what platform they are using. It would be like being able to see your Twitter friends on while logged into Facebook.
Spend time with your self
I have actually been reading paper books more. At first this was hard as my mind was getting distracted more easily than before we found ourselves in a dopamine economy. My attention is extending now that I am reading. I am renewed in the pleasure of getting immersed in ideas and characters. The feeling that I am missing out on something fades.
Please help me
I am writing out what is important to social media and then I am going to take the energy to have an intentional relationship with it.
I will be sorting out some questions, seeking clarity. For instance, there is audience for Old Truck Good Coffee on Facebook and I hesitate to give that up. Can I have a reasonable relationship with them?
Groups that I care about I am going to approach to discuss if we can move somewhere else. We will have to discuss how people can find us to join. I don’t know.
There is a lot that I don’t know. I need your help. We all need each other’s help. How would you engage in an intentional change in your relationship with Facebook? Please message me or even better post in the comments. I will read through them as we iterate to a future where we go to restaurants with out a Facebook section.
Do you have capacity to help? Could someone make a worksheet? Can people provide guides to Mastodon or Signal?
Share this with people you know who can provide input and people who feel despair about their relationship with social media!
Call to action
Think about what you want when you go to social media
Find another technology that offers it
Reach out to the people who could go with you
Make a date to leave Facebook
—
This form, where daily we engage with something that we don't trust and that accepts no input from us to change other than our use data that reflects the degree at which we are addicted.
If you have not heard of enshittification, give Doctorow’s post a read. you will start seeing it happening all around you. Basically, once a service-minded company traps you, they shift value away from users to their business customers. User experience goes to hell.https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/
Joel on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/joelbyronbarker.bsky.social
I am on both Mastodon (first choice) and Bluesky (second choice). Still on Facebook simply because I don’t make the rules for everyone else and so many of my friends are still there and only there. If I had my first choice, everyone would move to Mastodon, since it is the most enshittification-resistant (unlike Facebook or Bluesky, no one entity owns it, it is a protocol by which multiple independent servers exchange posts). I suppose I could make a worksheet for showing people what Mastodon is and how to switch to it (though I believe there are plenty of those around already).
P.S. One other thing I really dislike about social media is the almost complete lack of transparency. It just flings posts at you from people and organizations you have never heard of before. You have no idea if they are genuine or just front groups. You have no idea who may or may not behind whatever agendas they are pushing. I grew up as a child listening to shortwave radio in the pre-Internet era. The biggest broadcaster on the shortwave bands was the USSR. You couldn’t swing a dead cat on the shortwave bands without running across a Radio Moscow broadcast or three (often in English, targeting Americans). Yet every half hour, there it was, the station ID: “You are listening to the world service of Radio Moscow.” You knew exactly who and what you were listening to. Facebook is literally less transparent than the state propaganda of the USSR. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Joel
Thank you for your perspective and perception.
I am an old guy, ranch raised, which perhaps accounts for never getting trapped into the social media thing. Retiring after 3 decades in managing/operating big IT systems it is not that I'm a Luddite.
I have witnessed in my own family the degradation of individuals once they are trapped in the social media morass. I applaud Australia for having the foresight, and courage, to ban social media use to those under 16. If only the US had the courage to do the same. It appears as of now we are even unable to ban Tik Tok when we seem to know it poses a security threat. Listening to users decrying the possible loss on the news makes my stomach turn.
My daughter, an adult with children of her own, constantly tells me of how much more complicated the world is now. That is when she can put her phone down to carry on a conversation. I think the "world" is pretty much the same as it has always been. Spend part of each day in the woods and you can verify that. What has changed is the way human animals are behaving. In no small part due to their immersion in technology in general and social media engineering in particular.
Keep up the great work!