Quitting social media

I often tell my wife she should stay off Facebook because she has the most depressing feed I've ever heard. It's like every other story she tells me is some off-the-charts tragedy befalling some kid, or some other awfulness that only makes the world seem cruel. She keeps reading, though.

 

I still have Facebook and use it to look up people or businesses, but don’t interact with anyone on it. My Instagram account has pretty much just become for sharing pictures of the kids with friends and family.

But I love Twitter. I don’t get people who complain about trash on it because it’s so easy to make your feed or lists exactly what you want it to be. I rarely ever see anything offensive from accounts I follow, other than @BestFansStLouis retweeting Cardinals fans for entertainment purposes.

 

I have accounts on all the big social media places -- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat -- because my rule with my kids is if they're using a cellphone I pay for to be "on" social media then they must let me follow/monitor them. I've relaxed that somewhat with the older two, but the 16YO DaughterQuant has yet to be thusly emancipated.

Facebook is my only true social media place, though. I've unfollowed the most political of my friends -- left or right -- because I really don't want to hear that level of nonsense. I mean, I've got friends who are Greenpeace activists in Australia and others who are Trumpists in bumblefuck South Carolina. If I didn't do some serious unfollowing, I'd never see anything I'm interested in.

Like Rags and others, I mostly use it to keep in touch with people who mean a lot to me. Sometimes this keeping-up is painful -- one of my closest friends from high school and college had a daughter die a few weeks ago, and her week or so on life support literally became a digitized death watch -- but sometimes it's fabulous.

 

So, you would understand why Trump can't seem to let it go?

I've sometimes thought that if he would just stop tweeting, his approval rating, and indeed, his actual performance, would improve drastically, and there would be so much less to talk about with regard to him. I've never understood why he won't just stop with Twitter.

I, myself, have Twitter and Facebook accounts. I look at Facebook at least once, and usually, a couple of times, a day, just to keep up with acquaintances with whom I would lose contact otherwise. I feel like this is largely what Facebook is for. Conversely, I virtually never use my Twitter account. I only have a few people/feeds that I've ever followed, and I'm about as close as you can get to being a completely inactive user while still having an open account. I'm not addicted to either of them.

I have a friend who once said that people tend to either be Facebook people, or Twitter people, and for the most part, that's apparently true.

 

I'm on Facebook, but only to post the occasional pictures of my kids.

Will never be "on" Twitter, and all of the others seem weird and scary to me.

 

I'm really trying to cut down on my Twitter usage. It's a really valuable news feed, and when I come into work in the morning, I'll end up opening a half dozen story links to read throughout the day.

It's fun to interact with other Caps fans, for instance, during games. Otherwise, as type points out, you can find yourself digging down deep, depressing rabbit holes, whether it's political posts or people actually @ing football players when they get hurt because they're screwing their fantasy teams.

 

Instagram is fairly pleasant, if boring. Twitter...we've debated that ad nauseam. I'd ditch them all if I didn't work with them as part of my job.

 

I can't quit social media because I never started. Never been on Facebook, My Space, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat — any of them — and my life is fine. If I want to communicate with someone, I have the phone, Skype, e-mail and text; one of those choices is sufficient. I don't need an update that tells me my brother-in-law is about to go out for lunch and have a turkey sandwich; nor do I care to know what thousands of idiot armchair quarterbacks think about a game I'm watching.