How to Save Your Attention From the Social Media Vampire

This is a very odd post for me to write.

On one hand as an entrepreneur and marketer, advertising on Facebook is potentially one of the most lucrative and targeted methods of getting your message in front of the people who could most benefit from your product, and by extension are most likely to buy it.

On the other hand, I have this gut feeling that it's a blight on humanity that's making people angrier, more divisive, and allows people to be more or less brainwashed by clever copywriting and clickbait headlines, creating an ideological arms race of idiots shouting past each other while nothing gets resolved.

What to do, what to do?

I decided to write this post anyway, since the people who also realize it's a problem will want to escape that trap and take action, and there will always be others who don't think it's a problem and will choose to remain entrenched in it, blissfully unaware.

But the same thing could be said of many aspects of humanity; there will always be some people willing to dig deeper and free themselves from suffering, while others would rather ignore the suffering or choose the familiarity of known suffering over the potential happiness, but potentially worse suffering of the unknown. Such is life.

Anyway, enough of my extemporaneous musings about the nature of humanity, let's get to the reason you started reading this in the first place; how to make social media work for you, not against you. This will be primarily focused on Facebook as it's the 800 pound gorilla in the room (or 362.87kg gorilla, for you stuck up Europeans who want to rip on our stupid American system of measurements).

However I'll be touching briefly on Instagram as well, as some simple tweaks and thinking about the purpose of WHY you use that platform should help you make some positive changes there too.

But before we get into all that, I want to touch briefly on why I think it's so important to make these changes to your social media platforms. If you want to skip this bit feel free to scroll ahead; after all, you don't need to understand how your medicine works to take it. But if you're interested in hearing my thoughts on the why, keep reading.

The Consumer is the Product

There's an old quote about television advertising from the 1970s that I believe is relevant here: "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product". In my opinion, this is the unfortunate reality that drives much of modern digital technology. The internet has leveled the cost of a great deal of traditional industries: news and entertainment being the relevant ones in this case.

The problem is, in addition to the lowered cost there's also a MUCH lower barrier to entry. You don't need a journalism degree to write "news", you just need an opinion and a blog with an official sounding name. You don't need a movie studio to create interesting things for people to watch, you just need a phone with a decent camera and a YouTube channel.

This has caused a great many people to throw their hats into the ring of these traditional industries, which has increased competition among them; and if you've ever engaged in a highly competitive industry or business sector, you should have a pretty good idea of what happens next:

A race to the bottom in terms of both pricing, and ethics among the competitors in the arena.

The Internet: the Great Leveler of Ethical Standards

It's possible I'm being a bit hyperbolic when I say this, but I don't think it's excessively so. Even if the size of the pie is getting larger and larger (the pie being money to be made from the internet), more and more people competing in it leads to an inevitable decline in ethics among many of the competitors present.

This is one of the many faults with capitalism (and I say this as someone who is staunchly pro-capitalism). If you have two people in any given competition who have equal knowledge, resources, etc, but one of them is willing to act unethically while the other is not, the person who acts unethically is more likely to come out on top. That's game theory 101.

But in the modern world of social media, it's not just two people competing. It's a seemingly ENDLESS number of people competing, all with different levels of knowledge and resources. This makes it even easier for people on the bottom (in terms of resources or experience) to justify whatever they have to do in order to succeed.

They're fighting an uphill battle, after all, and in the case of the news they're fighting against these gargantuan corporations that make themselves easy targets by playing fast and loose with their own ethics over the past few decades. I could write a long rant about the traditional media outlets as well, but that's a story for another day.

One of the biggest problems with this decrease in ethics is that the social media platforms tend to REWARD this type of behavior by content creators! If you've ever looked under the hood of the algorithms Facebook and the others use when deciding to rank content in your feed, you know this to be true.

There are a handful of things that cause content to show up more often in news feeds, but the biggest one is engagement. This means people reacting to your post with a like or the other options (heart, sad face, angry face, surprised face), commenting on it, replying to other peoples comments, tagging their friends in the comments, etc.

It's also an unfortunate truism of human nature that people are more likely to react to things that make them angry than to things that make them happy. It's usually the political posts that have the highest number of comments, as they're just littered with people spitting rage at each other while they pat their friends on the back about how right they are and how wrong the opposing side is.

So the marketplace forces people to lower their ethical standards, and that same marketplace rewards them for doing so by showing what they've created to more people, which leads to increased revenue for them. And they can easily justify doing this if they believe they're on the ideologically correct side and fighting for the forces of good.

Is it any wonder that people seem more divided now than ever?

The Path Forward

I really wish there was a way to simply remove the negative from Facebook without losing some of the positive aspects in the process, but based on the control they give you over your settings that doesn't appear to be the case. Still, you can do so with minimal loss and a large increase in quality of life.

As the quote I referenced before said: "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product". But it's not quite right to say that YOU are the product, the truth is that your ATTENTION is the product.

When you give your attention to a news website with ads on it, they make money. When a bunch of people click the article from some guru in a given field, sign up to their email list, and some of them eventually buy their courses, that person makes money.

Your attention is what people want to get from you, so you have to be RUTHLESSLY protective about where you choose to spend it. It is a preciously limited resource these days, and will only become more so until governments finally understand what's happening and place regulations on the companies doing this. Yet after watching the senate hearings with Mark Zuckerberg, I'm skeptical of whether those simpletons ever will catch on.

So you have to take the matter into your own hands. In my opinion, there are 4 main places where Facebook (or people/businesses operating on Facebook) pull your attention away from whatever you INTENDED to do on the platform, and directs it to the various things they want you to do:

1. The news feed
2. The notifications (the little bell icon next to your messages)
3. The phone app
4. Friend requests (less important than the others, but still relevant)

I'll get to why the phone app is viewed separately later on. But first:

The Facebook Newsfeed: a 15 Year Long Experiment in Masochism

I want to start by asking, how often have you scrolled through your Facebook news feed for 10-30 minutes, and at the end of it thought: "wow, I'm really glad I did that"?

In my case, the answer was practically never. Scrolling through the news feed always left me feeling angry, depressed (usually due to envy), worried, or just all around shitty. For the reasons I've explained above, this shouldn't be surprising.

But at the same time I don't think that's a good reason to just delete Facebook; that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Facebook is still a useful tool that has (and can continue to) improve our lives in many ways, we just need to clean up the parts that are taking away from our quality of life, and we start with the news feed.

Put simply, I see little to no benefit from the existence of the news feed. Sure it might keep you informed about the day-to-day events of the world, but to that point I ask: how often do you really need to be updated on that stuff? A great quote I heard on the subject said "if it isn't important 3 months from now, it was never important".

The people competing in the arena might elevate the importance of "staying informed", and how we need to stand up for these things or the nefarious powers on the other side will win! But remember that THEY are competing for YOUR attention, of course that's how they'll frame the argument.

Despite how your news feed might portray the world as in utter chaos, there's never been a better time to be alive. You can be poor now but still have a roof over your head, easy access to affordable food and medical care, and buy an electronic device for a few hundred dollars that gives you access to EXPONENTIALLY more entertainment and information than ever existed in all of human history!

I would also posit the question that, if you truly believe there is all this evil in the world that needs to be fixed, what would put you in a better state of mind to do the work to fix it; being anxious and depressed about how the world's ending because that's what your news feed tells you? Or being calm, collected, and happy, with plenty of attention to dedicate to solving said problem?

Again, I know it's a bit hyperbolic, but you get what I'm getting at.

For this reason, I'm going to have to share a hard truth with you: your news feed has to go. It's the one aspect of Facebook over which you have the least control, because even if you unfollow all of the news pages and other negative contributors, Facebook can still populate your feed with things you HAVEN'T followed, just because your friends have, or because they're similar to other pages you have followed.

So the news feed has to go.

I'm sure there are numerous ways to go about this, but the best way I've found is to install the Facebook Newsfeed Eradicator chrome plugin. This handy little tool blocks the newsfeed entirely, and replaces it with an inspirational quote.

So it takes this:

And turns it into this:

If you're not using Google Chrome, well...you know it's 2019 right? I dig Firefox too, Chrome just seems easier.

If you're using Internet Explorer or Safari, well I'm surprised you read this far in the first place. Get with the program!

Doing this alone will greatly reduce the negative impact that Facebook has on your life, but if you really want to step things up this next part is where you really take back control of your attention. It's also the part that took me more digging to figure out how to change; your notification settings.

Facebook Notifications: Because the News Feed Isn't Distracting Enough

If the news feed is like a shotgun blast of what's going on with everything and everyone you're connected to on Facebook, the notifications are like a sniper rifle: it feeds you the posts with the highest engagement from various people, pages, and groups that you're a part of. It can be a who's who of the most rage-filled post on the worst of days, or jam-packed with with adorable cat videos on the best of days.

It can also give you genuinely useful reminders, like upcoming events that you wanted to go to, as well slightly less useful reminders, like who's birthday it is among the 1000+ "friends" you're connected to on the website.

This area is one where you have the greatest level of control about what things are shown to you, and probably the biggest area where you can take what could be a negative aspect, and turn it into an overall positive.

You see, you actually have control over what appears in your notifications. Not just whether or not you get reminded about birthdays and events, but you can control which pages and groups you follow that you'll be notified about, and how often you will be notified for each of them!

To do this, you need to go into your Facebook Settings:

Then click Notifications midway down the left sidebar:

You'll arrive at a page showing a number of different notification settings you can alter, that looks like this:

First off, if you haven't done this already you're going to want to turn off email and push notifications for pretty much everything:

As if it's not bad enough that Facebook wants to suck your attention dry while you're on their platform, they want to suck you back in when you're doing other stuff as well? Fuck that.

You could spend all day tweaking these notification settings (I have more than once, and still change things now and again), but there are two main areas that need to be focused on to get the greatest return on investment for your time spent in these settings: pages and groups.

First up: Pages

Unfortunately, you don't have as much control over what you see from pages in the settings here:

It's an either/or proposition, turn them on or turn them off. So to make changes to page notifications you'll have to do so on the page in question. As an example, on my page Deskbound below, you'll see that when I like the page by default it also makes me follow the page. But if you hover over that "Following" icon, you'll see it also gives you the option of unfollowing the page entirely:

In other news, I'm writing this off the cuff and don't feel like going back and editing. Remember how I said you have less control over what shows up in your news feed? That's not entirely true. You can choose to see certain pages first in your news feed, and to unfollow others entirely. Facebook actually has a tool specifically for this, which you can access by clicking the dropdown arrow in the top right corner, then clicking "News Feed Preferences":

Here you can change which friends, pages, groups, etc show up in your news feed first, so you can push all the bad stuff to the bottom or forcibly filter it out entirely:

I literally just discovered this tool while writing it, so I haven't messed around with it too much yet, but I've been living without a news feed for so long that I'm content just being without it. But perhaps I'll mess around with this tool one day and write a follow-up post on this subject, to see if it can be used to actually make Facebook a net positive impact on your life. If that's something you're interested in reading about, let me know!

Next Up: Groups

Groups are the main thing that I do still keep my notifications on for, but only for a select few. I'm a member of many different groups for social activity in different cities I've lived, but I don't want to be updated every time someone posts something popular there. Those are a resource for me to use when I need something from them, but outside of that I don't want them pulling me in to irrelevant things.

The only groups I keep notifications active for are social groups in my city who I want to hear from, and select business and marketing related groups:

When you click an individual group to adjust the settings, here's what it will show you:

I believe an all-or-nothing approach is best here, keeping all posts active for the few groups that are relevant, turning the rest off, and as always turning push notifications off.

This partially depends on what your goals are, but if your goal is to get anything important done it's a general truism in life that it's better to focus more intently on fewer things. Also, the more sources of information you introduce the harder it becomes to square the different recommendations with each other, and taking more forward action with fewer information sources usually leads to more things actually getting done.

Other Tips and Tricks

Some other notifications I would recommend turning off entirely, but it's up to your discretion:

1. People you may know: while it might seem nice to connect with friends that you aren't connected to yet, the truth is if you're not already connected they're probably not a pretty important person in your life. Meanwhile, you can find yourself going down a rabbit hole scrolling through people you may know for a while, with nothing useful happening as a result.
2. Updates from friends: again, this will show you the posts from your friends with the highest engagement. Sometimes it's something positive, sometimes it's something negative, and often it's something positive that might leave you feeling envious and bad about yourself, which is a negative outcome. This is a case of losing some of the upside while eliminating all of the downside.

One very important final note on this: as you start to pay closer attention to how Facebook pushes and pulls your attention in different directions, you'll become more aware of when it seems that it's intentionally distracting you.

So every time you get a notification (and after changing the settings in this way, you will get FAR fewer overall), ask yourself: is this something I'm glad I was notified about? Was it helpful? Can and should I change it so I don't get this notification anymore?

After a few weeks of this you'll have the notifications tool of Facebook highly dialed in, and find that it's a far more useful, less distracting tool.

Now on to the next part:

The Facebook Phone App

If you've taken action on everything I've written above, the answer should be pretty obvious. You have two choices here:

1. Go through and curate your news feed by unfollowing all of the pages, friends, and groups that distract you or lead towards negative thoughts and feelings.
2. Delete the Facebook phone app.

I personally opted for the second option, but as you might've gathered from everything I've written so far I tend to take an all-or-nothing approach to these sorts of things. The good news is that you can have Facebook on your phone, install Facebook messenger, then delete the Facebook app but keep using messenger. This way you get a lot of the benefits of the tool while removing the negatives.

I've also taken a hard line with optimizing my phone home screen to get rid of many time wasters as possible, as you can see in the screenshot below:

My phone only has this one page, so no swiping left or right to access more apps. This reduces the likelihood of opening an app to mindlessly scroll through it, as I have to now open my app tray and intentionally go to the app I want to open before doing so. It's a small change, but it seems to help.

Last up on the list, we have:

How to Change Who Can Add You as a Friend

As I said before, this one is less of an issue than the others but can still be useful. I personally don't get THAT many spam friend requests, but when I do it's annoying.

Even more annoying though, is when some guru sees me post in a group, and tries to add me as a friend/strike up a conversation with me to eventually push me towards joining their Facebook group, email list, etc. Fuck those guys (and gals. It's 2019 people, I'm equal opportunity enough to know that both genders can be equally shitty in this way!).

The way to deal with this is to again go into your Facebook settings, then click Privacy in the left column:

Then click edit next to "Who can send you friend requests?":

You can change this so that only friends of your existing friends can add you. This doesn't block all requests, since sometimes your idiot friends accept requests from accounts that are clearly fake, but it's better than nothing.

Final Thoughts

But Brandon, you said you were gonna talk about Instagram too!

Yeah, I did. I also sat down to start writing this 5 hours ago, intending to spend FAR less time on it than I did. I'm tired, hungry, my back hurts, and I need a break. I'll deal with Instagram another day.

All in all I still believe Facebook is a great tool that can be used as a positive for organizing events, communicating with people through messenger, and communicating ideas in groups with other people who have a similar interest and passion as you do. I think you just need to be intentional about filtering out all the bullshit, or it will slowly drive you insane.

Anyway, if you enjoyed this post please let me know! I enjoy writing things like this, but when I put it out there and all I hear back is radio silence, it doesn't really motivate a guy to write more.

And most importantly, if you like this post PLEASE SHARE IT! I genuinely believe that when people let Facebook run rampant over our attention it make us angrier, dumber, and more divisive as a species. I don't plan to ever make money from this, I wrote it because I believe it's important and can do a great deal of good for the quality of life of everyone.

Till next time!

Brandon