2 Steps to Reduce Social Media Addiction and Get the Most of It + Tutorial
Social media has been part of our lives for so long now. No matter if it will be Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, those services are taking a big part of our day. Only a few are completely out of social media, which in my opinion is really hard.
I’ve been trying to get out of social media completely but that’s an impossible goal to achieve for me. Every time I go and delete my apps from my phone, I go back within weeks and install it again. It feels so bad, like a drug.
A few weeks ago I decided to stop setting so hard goals like to get off social media completely, but instead, make it give me the only information I need. In my case, this led to a significant reduction in social media usage and more quality information there.
Today I’ll show you the 2 steps I took to reduce my social media usage and improve the quality of the information I get there:
1. Get Rid of Everyone/Everything You Follow
As Facebook is one of the top used social media those days I decided to use it for the tutorial. You can write me a DM or comment under the post if you want to get a tutorial for other social media and I can help as the process is pretty much similar.
So, by using Facebook for more than 10 years already I’ve become a friend with many people, liked tons of pages, and followed a huge amount of people. At some point, this led to me getting a huge amount of information on my news feed and 90% of it was total bullshit that led me to go infinite scrolling to find something interesting.
That’s why I decided to unfollow everything and start from scratch. Imagine clicking more than 5000 times a button by yourself, not so effective. So I found this pretty simple solution that almost everyone can make to unfollow everyone:
Step 1. Click on the arrow down next to your profile and then select Settings & Privacy
Step 2. From the menu that appeared select News Feed preferences
Step 3. Next, you’ll see the following pop up where you need to choose Unfollow
Step 4. Then you’ll get to the final screen, from there you can choose between different options to unfollow (All, Groups, Pages, Friends)
While on this screen scroll down to get more loaded and proceed with the next step.
Step 5. While on this screen, open the browser console and paste the following code
(depending on your browser it can be opened differently but on Chrome, macOS the key combination is CMD + Option + I)
const follows = document.querySelectorAll('div[aria-label="Toggle to follow"]')for (let i = 0; i < follows.length; i++) {
setTimeout(() => follows[i].click(), i * 1500)
}
When you press Enter you’ll see the script running and unfollowing. You can leave this tab open and continue your work in another tab.
2. Simplify the actions you can take on the website
The second biggest problem is the number of actions you can take on a social media platform. The more things you can click and see, the more time you’ll spend on it.
Here is how Facebook looks like by default:
Here is how Facebook may look like if you do the same optimizations that I did:
Do you see the difference? It’s huge. I got rid of 90% of the elements on the page I want to see and now it feels like a newspaper. Combined with the above method, you’ll have a straightforward website on which you’ll spend way less time.
So, to achieve the above, I used the AdBlock extension uBlock Origin. I’ve tried many different AdBlock extensions for the past years but in my opinion, this is one of the best. The difference comes from the fact that uBlock Origin is not only an AdBlock extension, but it’s also a content blocker that is super efficient in terms of CPU and Memory, so you’ll almost don’t realize that something is removing so many pieces of content while you browse.
Step 1: Install uBlock Origin
You can use other content-blocking tools, but as I’m going to show the procedure using uBlock, you may want to install it.
For Chrome: Download it from Chrome Web Store, then double-click to install and you’ll have it running within a seconds.
For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/
For Safari: https://ublock.org/safari/
Step 2: Open Facebook (or whatever website you want to remove content from)
After you installed the extension it will appear at the top navbar of your browser, in my case, this is Google Chrome. When you click on the extension you’ll see that uBlock is running and blocking ads.
Step 3: Use the Element picker mode to disable content on the page
Now it comes the actual magic. Element picker tool is a powerful tool that will allow you to remove any piece of content on the webpage and keep it invisible while uBlock is active.
To do it. Just click on the uBlock extension at the top, then select the element picker icon. After doing this, you’ll enter a mode where you can select any item on the page and it will add it to the list of the blocked elements.
Aftereffect
2 months ago I felt really obsessed with social media. Several times I felt into situations when I realize that I’m infinite scrolling without actually paying attention to what I’m looking at. I was jumping from one platform to the other just to do some meaningless scrolling trying to find something interesting.
The problem back then was that this “something interesting” thing was hidden between all the bullshit content I followed during the past 10 years I’m using social media. It’s from pages that are producing so much of it that the meaningful one gets hidden.
After I unfollowed everything, Facebook crashed for me:
Probably they’ve never thought that some people are going to unfollow everything and there was just no view for such case.
Then I started going around and thinking about what content I want to follow and I started following step by step few pages and people, but such that I want to see their content every day.
After I’ve done this I realized that first I’m spending less time on Facebook because I’m able to read everything with 2–3 scrolls and I have nothing more to do there. Second I was able to see the content I want to and every post was super meaningful for me and I was getting value from it.
The second step I did was to clear all the unneeded content using the approach I show you. What happened? I forgot that there are stories, I forgot that there is Marketplace on Facebook. I forgot about all the options I had on this platform for which I don’t care about.
Facebook started to be a place where I get value from the content I read, I spend less time but the best time I can spend on such a platform.
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