Ditch Social Media Apps

You might have heard from multiple people to “quit social media”.

I say: ditch social media apps.

Let me explain.

First, understand why people advise you to quit social media. Some reasons that I could think of are:

• because it distracts you by sending unnecessary notifications
• because it may lower your self-esteem if you’re not careful
• because you can waste your valuable time browsing
• because social media is addictive and unhealthy
• because you can develop some kind of inferiority complex
• because it may cause some privacy issues, etc.

And, all these are caused by excessive and uncontrolled use of social media. You try to do something meaningful and then you receive a notification that wastes 1-2 hours.

According to me, the biggest culprit is the push notification feature. Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies learn how you use the platform and send push notifications to keep you engaged.

Yes, I agree that it’s you who should control your usage behavior but some ways can significantly reduce that unnecessary usage.

Here’s how I do:

I do not have any social media app on my smartphone. And, if I have to check any updates, I use the platform in the smartphone’s browsers.

Whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter; all (except Instagram) perform well in Google Chrome or any other browser.

If you ask, how it’s different or what are the benefits; let me list everything out:

• you open the social platform when you want, not when they want
• enhanced privacy as the platforms cannot collect as much data about you as they can through the app
• no annoying notifications so that you can focus on your work and avoid any kind of distractions
• doesn’t run in the background and consumes lesser computing resources so your battery lasts longer
• video streaming is not optimized on browsers so you won’t like to watch videos and ultimately you win 😎

What if an app doesn’t run in the browser?

Well!

In that case, you can turn off the push notifications of the app and it won’t distract you anymore. But… it won’t provide you with other benefits like enhanced privacy and longer battery life.

It’s still better than getting distracted and wasting your time, right?

Also, I’ve seen some people receiving a lot of notifications in their browser because they click “allow” if any website asks them to send notifications. In that case, you can go to the browser’s setting and turn off all the notifications from the browser.

That’s it.

💬 Discussion

Let’s discuss on LinkedIn