Short version of this post: I'm cutting back on Facebook time, so if you want me to see something there, put my name on it (using their system for linking to a person's name).<\/p>\n
Longer version:<\/p>\n
Despite my attempts to skip or skim more FB posts, I'm still spending as much as a few hours a day reading FB. This is, obviously, not sustainable, not if I want to do anything else outside of work.<\/p>\n
In the past, I've run into this problem in other systems: Usenet, LiveJournal, etc. I've usually ended up addressing it by just stopping. For example, when I realized (long ago) that I could spend more than 24 hours a day just reading the Usenet newsgroups I was interested in, I quit cold turkey. I missed it occasionally, and I went back to it for a while a couple years later, but ended up quitting again.<\/p>\n
The other day I decided that the only way to keep my Facebook time manageable was to quit FB entirely. But then it occurred to me that I could probably cut down the amount of time I spend there considerably by managing my notifications list.<\/p>\n
I started using FB notifications in the first place as a way to filter the vast number of posts. The core problem was that some people who I really wanted to hear from posted at times of day when I wasn't reading FB, so I never saw their posts. Notifications provided a way to get around that, without having to stay caught up on the entire stream. (Which would be pretty much impossible.) Then I added close friends regardless of their usual times-of-posting (putting someone on your Close Friends list automatically adds them to your notifications list, I think), and then I added others whose posts I particularly wanted to see. It's a work-in-progress; I keep noticing more people who I want to be on my notifications list.<\/p>\n
So, fairly often, my FB reading lately has consisted entirely of going through my notifications list. In the browser, there's a dynamically generated dropdown for notifications, but its behavior is wonky (at least in Safari\/Mac) when there's more than one screen-height of notifications, which is almost always true for me. So in the browser, my main FB interface these days is the notifications page<\/a>. And in the iPhone and iPad FB apps, I spend a lot of time scrolling through the dropdown list; it doesn't keep track of where you are in the list, so I have to scroll back through 60 notifications, tap, read the item, then scroll back through 59 notifications, and so on. And the yellow-for-unread indicator goes away within a minute or two, probably the next time a new notification appears.<\/p>\n So it seems clear that substantially reducing the number of notifications would substantially reduce the time I spend on FB.<\/p>\n But that's easier said than done. Yesterday, I got about 100 notifications, and about a quarter of those were things I definitely would've wanted to be notified about. What I would really like is a way to set up filters on notifications—notifications for certain kinds of things from certain people, etc. For that matter, I still wish for an author-specified importance-rating system on posts; I started to do that myself recently (by putting stars at the beginning of each post), but haven't figured out entirely how I want it to work yet.<\/p>\n Yesterday, I was talking with Mary Anne, and she said I didn't have to read everything she posted. I haven't been reading everything<\/em> she posts, but I have been reading the vast majority of it, and she posts a lot, and most of it is stuff I find interesting and\/or entertaining. But she pointed out that most of the stuff that's actually about her and her family still goes in her journal<\/a>. So this morning I turned off notifications from Mary Anne. Which makes me sad, but I think it'll free up some of my time. (About a quarter of yesterday's notifications were from her posts.)<\/p>\n I expect to turn off other notifications soon. I might even turn off all<\/em> notifications, which would definitely cut down on my FB time, but would also mean I would miss a fair bit of important personal stuff from friends.<\/p>\n We'll see how it goes. I do still think FB is worthwhile and fun and interesting (and I still love the Like button); but there are other things I want to do too, and I'm not doing them lately.<\/p>\n So if you want to be sure I see something on FB, put my name on it. But I guess that's always true for anyone.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Short version of this post: I’m cutting back on Facebook time, so if you want me to see something there,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-networking"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}