The news feed eradicator has been a very good solution for me. I can still message, participate in groups, but that damned newsfeed is blocked! The newsfeed is engineered to suck up all of our precious cognitive space and fill it with mostly junk.
I found this out recently, in case anyone else doesn't know, messenger.com [1] gets you facebook chat without the rest of facebook. I use it a lot during the day when I want to talk to people but not get sucked into the news feed.
I use Messenger.com and I like it except for one big inconvenience. The right bar displaying thumbnails of all your past photos exchanged within a conversation is nothing but annoying and even if you hide it, when you refresh it, it pops up again.
Many years ago I visited a large (junk) news site several times every day (aftonbladet.se - largest site in Sweden). I asked myself why, but couldn't tell. So I started writing down what articles I had read that had been worth ready. Not much it turned out. So I stopped visiting it, and don't regret it. But it was really hard to break the habit, like an addiction.
I am similar boat these days. Every 10 minutes I am doing spending reading something on mobile, 8 minutes will be on Facebook.
Yesterday, I deleted the app and found myself multiple times missing that. So, yeah, it's a habit hard to break. And now, I try to spend same amount of time reading some light book on my kindle app.
It's like a month that I uninstalled the facebook app, because it didn't provide enough value. I didn't noticed the correlation until now, but last week I started carrying with me my old kindle touch during my commute. It just happened and I'm at Chapter 11 of Crystal Society [http://crystal.raelifin.com/].
I found that the timeline is the problem. It has been tweaked and reworked to make you spend as much time as possible mindlessly scrolling, liking and interacting.
I solved the problem by simply removing the timeline. Well, you can't actually remove it. But unfollowing everyone and everything results in this:
I found the same. The news feed was the only bad part about Facebook. Events, chat, groups, are all great. I killed my news feed using this handy extension
I too have done the same, unfortunately Facebook has added a feature that tells me I haven't seen posts against each person. It's better to be able to catch up on your own terms though and a surprising amount of things I've missed out on such as new progeny and marriage proposals are somewhat more relevant than videos of Sad Ben Afleck :-D
I've done the same, it took me a few days to finish unfollowing everyone but it was completely worth it. I find Facebook an excellent tool for connecting with people but the feed is too time expensive, that's supposedly how we pay for the service but if there's a way to circumvent it, I'll take it!
I was considering doing this too, but it would have taken way too long so I never got around to it.
Instead, I used Adblock and blocked the entire div! Now if I want to see my newsfeed, I can just log in on incognito, which I hardly ever do. Works great.
How about a different solution to prevent the problem in the first place - A chrome extension to warn you before loading that tempting facebook link that you are about to spend (statistically) x minutes on Facebook.
Facebook in full anticipation of this problem has hired former DARPA head Regina Dugan, to lead a major R&D effort to ensure that click happens. As Brother Zuckerberg has said there is nothing more important than that click, if the world is to remain open and connected.
On the problem of wasting time browsing - I stick to a rough Pomodoro style principle. Coffee in the morning while I spend 20 minutes gorging on the sweet sweet stream of fresh info from HN/Reddit/Feedly/Twitter that surfaced while I slept.
Anything that looks interesting but requires more than a few minutes to chew on (like this, today: FBI Paid More Than $1M to Hack San Bernardino iPhone) I bookmark.
Throughout the day I take 10mins break for each 50mins of work, I don't go to these sites again, I just work through what I picked out in that first 20 minutes.
Gets the thirst for news out of the way and allows you to procrastinate, in a sense, "productively".
Not too hard. As giancarlostoro said, I simply skim in the mornings - open my favorite sites, find posts I think are worth reading and middle click a lot. Go through the resulting new tabs and bookmark what seems interesting for later.
The goal isn't to read every single new thing on the Internet, but between my pre-filtered sites and the morning skim I get a nice slice of interesting content to read throughout the day.
Keep it open, read an article when I have a free moment. Next free moment scroll to next interesting article. Dont get sucked too far elsewhere into the internet. Not always easy to do. Look where I am now.
We are starting to realise that information overload is leading to a diabetes-like condition for the mind. Solutions like these mean we haven't only diagnosed ourselves but also almost immediately fighting back.
I generated a random password for Facebook, put it in my phone, and then promptly logged out of FB in chrome.
I can look at facebook on my phone all I want, but the app sucks anyway and I feel like an obvious slacker if I look at my phone for a long time, or glance at it more frequently than once an hour or so.
This. Since I've started using messenger.com, I check facebook.com about once a week. Was really easy to switch and saved a lot of mental energy and attention that would have went for random facebook posts, etc.
Having used Facebook mainly for the messaging functionality for years now, I'm amazed I never knew messenger.com existed. It's interesting to consider that, although I use an ad-blocker, it must be in Facebook's interests to keep people on the main site in order to throw adverts at them, further infiltrate their lives etc.
This won't work because it requires user input. People are lazy, and unless you are extremely disciplined I guarantee you will stop wanting to use that input box very soon after installing.
hey Raphemdia, actual developer and OP here, (user yonah91 was created a few minutes ago) the line of code you're referring to is in a file called popup.js which is never actually loaded . It's from the sample code which I used to learn how to make a chrome extension (https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted#resources) I'll remove it now, so that people don't the wrong idea.
Hey, developer here. Unfortunately there's no free lunch and I need to do some demographic research with my free projects in order to make them viable.
This would be a great plugin for the workplace, but it appears to be laced with profanity. That's definitely going to prevent a number of people from using it. Maybe redo the language and add an "Angry Mode" that is a bit more insulting if the user wants that...
Also, it's clearly tracking me, but nowhere can I find anything that discloses that. I can only assume you're collecting/selling my data, so there's absolutely no way I am installing this, and I am DEFINITELY not recommending it for workplace use, because I don't know what kind of data you might be collecting.
If you want to make some cash on these things, add some ads. You definitely have space in that injected header to fit a banner or two.
Hey. Good point about the profanity. I'll add an option toggle it on and off. It was meant to be sort of a fun tool for myself.
About tracking, it is absolutely not tracking anything or anyone. That line of code referring to gtmetrix.com is from the sample google extension which i just forgot to remove. https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted#resources
I'll remove it now. Sorry for the confusion. I hate tracking and would never do it to anyone without their permission (or even with their permission)
RIMR - I've just uploaded a new version to the chrome store that has a switch to turn off profanity. Keep an eye on the chrome store for version 1.3, it should be available in an hr or so
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadhttps://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
[1] https://www.messenger.com/
Every hour, you should see a quick summary of the pages you browsed through for the past hour.
It's easy to waste time not realizing how long you spent on AskReddit/TvTropes/whatever...
But if an hour of browsing flashes before your eyes and you can see nothing productive, it will wake you up.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/timestats/ejifodhj...
Yesterday, I deleted the app and found myself multiple times missing that. So, yeah, it's a habit hard to break. And now, I try to spend same amount of time reading some light book on my kindle app.
I solved the problem by simply removing the timeline. Well, you can't actually remove it. But unfollowing everyone and everything results in this:
https://i.imgur.com/w4JZbct.png
It might not be for everyone, but it works excellent for me. And nowadays I actually complete what I came there for.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kill-news-feed/hjo...
Instead, I used Adblock and blocked the entire div! Now if I want to see my newsfeed, I can just log in on incognito, which I hardly ever do. Works great.
Anything that looks interesting but requires more than a few minutes to chew on (like this, today: FBI Paid More Than $1M to Hack San Bernardino iPhone) I bookmark.
Throughout the day I take 10mins break for each 50mins of work, I don't go to these sites again, I just work through what I picked out in that first 20 minutes.
Gets the thirst for news out of the way and allows you to procrastinate, in a sense, "productively".
How do you consume 4 streams (HN, Reddit, Feedly and Twitter) each containing roughly 24 hours of activity, in 20 minutes?
The goal isn't to read every single new thing on the Internet, but between my pre-filtered sites and the morning skim I get a nice slice of interesting content to read throughout the day.
Keep it open, read an article when I have a free moment. Next free moment scroll to next interesting article. Dont get sucked too far elsewhere into the internet. Not always easy to do. Look where I am now.
I can look at facebook on my phone all I want, but the app sucks anyway and I feel like an obvious slacker if I look at my phone for a long time, or glance at it more frequently than once an hour or so.
Works for me.
It's a way better interface for just chatting then the Facebook site and they have been adding new features to it regularly.
My only complaint is that it refuses to work on mobile (even though the desktop site is very responsive). It just pushes you at the app.
It's an electron-based app which allows you to load the web versions of Messenger, Whatsapp, Slack and many more.
[1] http://meetfranz.com/
Electron app, uses native notifications, no need to run a webpage in a browser.
From the github:
"f.action = 'http://gtmetrix.com/analyze.html?bm';"
... are you tracking people with this application?
I didn't investigate much. Looking back, yes, this file was not used!
Definitely using your app and recommending it to my friends!
and it's since been removed
Also, it's clearly tracking me, but nowhere can I find anything that discloses that. I can only assume you're collecting/selling my data, so there's absolutely no way I am installing this, and I am DEFINITELY not recommending it for workplace use, because I don't know what kind of data you might be collecting.
If you want to make some cash on these things, add some ads. You definitely have space in that injected header to fit a banner or two.
About tracking, it is absolutely not tracking anything or anyone. That line of code referring to gtmetrix.com is from the sample google extension which i just forgot to remove. https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted#resources I'll remove it now. Sorry for the confusion. I hate tracking and would never do it to anyone without their permission (or even with their permission)
You can access the feeds on Panda http://usepanda.com instead of Facebook feed.