It was invaluable during the Thomas fire. Faster and more accurate info from the various official sources and a few ham’s who transcribed the various scanner channels.
For the rest it’s utter garbage. There is nothing “social” in “Social Media”.
I deleted my 14,000+ tweets and likes on Twitter using GoCardigan for the nominal charge of US $1.98. (Other tweet-delete services I looked into are limited to deleting the last 2,000 tweets only.) I still use Twitter periodically, read-only, and I find valuable the collated news, which I read broken down by list, with Nuzzel.
I have a few dozen pics I put up on Instagram, and I probably spend 10 minutes/day there just checking out interesting photos.
I know how to reach people I know or need to contact without social media, and vice versa.
I have a love-hate relationship with twitter. One the one hand, researchers who do interesting work post there, and I feel like it might be a good place to find leads on post docs. On the other hand, there’s a lot of rage. So far science is barely winning and keeping me there.
Deleted Facebook about a year ago, and don’t miss it (after initial withdrawal symptoms).
Now this forum is becoming addictive, and I might have to bail from here too.
I use twitter to keep up with some friends and some causes I care about. I use TweetDeck on my Mac to handle my curated streams.
I use the stock twitter app on my phone to post on twitter but never read twittter on any iOS device.
I try to compartmentalize my app use to the system where I am most efficient and don’t really buy into the “I can do everything anywhere” mode of operation.
Twitter is the only social media platform I’m still on and it remains pretty vital for me. I follow mostly smart tech commentators and journalists whose opinions. Since they regularly tweet links to their own or recommended articles Twitter has been able to replace RSS for me as a way of keeping up with the news. What I like even better, is being able to listen in and participate in their conversations with fans and each other (serious journalists will say stuff about people and events on Twitter that you’ll never hear anywhere else!). Of course, as I’m mainly a lurker and not an expert myself, I don’t have to put up with the crap that the celebrities do. I use Twitterific on iOS and the Mac; like the way it looks and the sync between devices has been very reliable for me.
Apple News can be wonderful, as long as you customized it by adding sites and categories that interest you, and you heart/unheart articles and sites you like/dislike. Apple News very much adopted the format (though not the user interface) of the wonderful Zite service…
… which Flipboard bought, incorporated and shut down as a separate entity. I prefer Zite/AppleNews to Flipboard.
And: almost 10 years without TV (or Netflix, Amazon,…). You start to notice how many conversations revolve around TV, series, etc. Result: a ton of additional time, spent worthwhile. And not having seen one single episode of Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones or whatever (I know the titles just from people talking about that stuff) didn’t worsen my quality of life at all. The opposite: less crap in the brain.
As for Facebook: I was one of the “early adopters” and it was a nice experience, connecting with some people I didn’t see for ages. But then I realized it was just a waste of time. I don’t care where somebody had his/her coffee, the fishing for “likes”, the constant sharing of meaningless memes/links. There was just no value there anymore and I try to keep as far away from that crap as possible. So: goodbye. And BTW: I am in charge of huge (national) social media campaigns and I consult on social-media usage for customer recruitment/retention. So, yes, I am a hypocrite.
That doesn’t make you a hypocrite. A hypocrite is someone who pretends to be something they are not usually in order to appear better to others. The fact that you don’t personally participate in social media but you do work in the social media arena is not hypocritical, it is simply a matter of personal choice based on one’s values. I don’t see that as hypocritical at all. For example, I do almost no social media in my personal life yet I do see its value for my institution and promote SM in that context. To do otherwise given my responsibilities would be failing to ffulfill my fiduciary responsibilities to the institution. I hope that makes sense.
So, yes, I am a hypocrite.