updated:
远离社交媒体时的一些感受 | Scott H Young
Since it’s been several months since I’ve stopped using social media, I thought I would reflect on some of my experiences. It’s possible I might go back to some limited use at some point, but for now the benefits of being off-platform greatly outweigh the costs.
由于我已经停止使用社交媒体几个月了，我想我应该反思一下我的一些体验。有可能我在某个时候会回到一些局促的方法，但现在远离平台的好处大大超过了成本。**
Still, I don’t want this essay to be misconstrued as some kind of permanent commitment. If you’re reading this years later and I’m no longer following this, there’s no contradiction. I merely thought I’d share some of my experiences now, while the transition is still relatively fresh.
不过，我还是不想这篇文章被误解为某种永久的承诺。如果你在多年后读到这篇文章，而我已经不再关注这个问题，这并不矛盾。我只是觉得现在趁着过渡还比较新鲜的时候，分享一些我的经验。
I should note that while I’m not using social media personally these days, my business definitely does. I’m not typically the person doing the posting, but my team uses most the major platforms to hopefully convert more people to read the weekly newsletter or listen to the podcast.
我应该注意的是，虽然我个人最近没有使用社交媒体，但对于商业我肯定还会使用的。我通常不是发帖的那个人，但我的团队是使用大多数主流平台，希望能有更多的人阅读我每周的周报或收听播客。
Motivations for Going Off-Platform
继续远离平台的动力
I’m less antagonistic toward social media than my oft-collaborator Cal Newport. I think they’re potentially a vice, but they can also be really entertaining and have some worthwhile benefits. Thus I’m only speaking from my own experience, rather than offering a universal prescription.
与我经常合作的卡尔-纽波特(Cal Newport)相比，我对社交媒体的态度没有那么拮抗。我认为他们是潜在的恶习，但他们也可以是真正的娱乐，并有一些值得的好处。因此，我只是从自己的经验出发，而不是提供一个通用的处方。
My own impetus to switch off came from two places: 我关闭社交媒体的动力来自两个地方
First, the overall level of nastiness on platforms, particularly Twitter. I would often follow people for their academic or entrepreneurial expertise, only to find my feed was mostly full of culture-warring threads. At first I tried to diminish this through careful filters (removing tweets that mentioned “Trump” was a start), but I was beginning to feel a bit like Sisysphus by the end.
首先，平台整体上有乌烟瘴气的问题，尤其是Twitter。我经常会因为人们的学术或创业专长而关注他们，但却发现我的信息源大多充满了文化战争的主题。起初，我试图通过设置过滤器来减少这种情况（删除提到 “特朗普 “关键词的推文是一个开始），但到最后我开始觉得自己有点像西西弗斯(山坡上推石头的那个人)。
Second, the additional time wasted beyond the “good” content. This was particularly true of YouTube. There’s a lot of really good content on YouTube, and I had many channels that I loved all their new videos: 3Blue1Brown, Historia Civilis and WW2 in Real Time were a few. But these showed up, at most, a couple times per week. The rest of the time my feed was full of stuff I probably didn’t need to watch.
第二，除 “好 “的内容之外，特别浪费时间。在YouTube上尤其如此。YouTube上有很多非常的好内容，我有订阅了很多频道，我喜欢他们所有的新视频。3Blue1Brown，Historia Civilis和二战实时是几个。但这些内容最多每周出现几次。其余时间，我的feed里都是我可能不需要看的东西。
I was also interested just to see what going off social media completely would do for my life. It was a much more positive change than I had expected, as the impulse to check social media declined considerably and I found alternatives to replace my previous information sources.
我也很感兴趣，只是想看看完全离开社交媒体对我的生活会有什么影响。这比我想象中的变化要积极得多，因为查看社交媒体的冲动大大降低，我找到了替代的信息来源。
Off-Platform, Not Off the Internet
远离社交平台，不是远离网络
I still use the internet quite a bit, so my transition wasn’t toward a life of reading books by candlelight. Instead, I feel like my internet usage now is much closer to how it was when I began blogging—curated information sources rather than algorithmic feeds.
我还是经常使用互联网的，所以我的转型并不是古老地在烛光下看书的生活。相反，我觉得我现在的互联网使用情况更接近于我开始写博客时的情况–是我问规划的信息源而不是算法的信息源。
RSS remains an underrated technology. I follow a few dozen blogs and their articles let me get the echos of current Twitter discussion, without having to wade into the muck myself. Marginal Revolution is one I like, in particular, given Tyler Cowen’s voracious reading habits. (Feedly is good if you want to start with RSS.)
RSS仍然是一项被低估的技术。我关注了几十个博客，他们的文章让我获得了当前Twitter讨论的回声，而不必将自己涉足泥潭。鉴于Tyler Cowen贪婪的阅读习惯，Marginal Revolution是我特别喜欢的一个博客。如果你想从RSS开始，Feedly是不错的选择）。
Much of my previous random YouTube watching time is now on online courses instead. While I have also been reading more as well, there are some times when I’d prefer to watch than read (say if I’m having a quick lunch by myself) and online classes fill the gap.
我以前随便看YouTube的时间，现在大部分都改成了在线课程。虽然我也一直在阅读更多的内容，但有些时候，我宁愿看也不愿意读时（比如说我自己吃个快餐），在线课程就能填补这个空缺。
My phone use is now much more heavily skewed toward reading. These days it’s mostly my Kindle app and The New York Times. I still check my phone quite a bit, but I find that the fact that the news doesn’t refresh nearly so often means that I’m not “sucked in” nearly as much as before.
我的手机使用现在更偏向于阅读。这些天主要是看我的Kindle和《纽约时报》。我仍然会经常查看手机，但我发现新闻刷新的频率并不高，这意味着我不再像以前那样 “被吸进去”。
Recently I found out you can also follow YouTube channels via RSS, so this solves my previous dilemma about what to do with my favorite channels. Now I only get new updates from sources I’m actually subscribed to
最近我发现你也可以通过RSS关注YouTube频道，所以这解决了我之前关于如何处理我喜欢的频道的难题。现在我只从我实际订阅的频道获得新的更新。
Benefits of Going Off Social Media
远离社交媒体的好处
The transition away from social media was a lot easier than I had expected in the long-term. The short-term can be quite difficult because many of the habits to check are strongly reinforced. However, several months out I’m now wondering why I was fussing over it.
从长期来看，离开社交媒体的过渡比我预期的要容易得多。短期内可能相当困难，因为许多需要检查的习惯都被很大的强化。然而，几个月过去了，我现在在想，我为什么要为它大惊小怪。
This raises, at least in my mind, the value of the argument that social media is a mild kind of addiction or compulsive behavior. If withdrawal seems hard in the short-term, but barely noticeable in the long-term, it seems unlikely to me that our collective social media use is entirely derived from us getting value from the activity.
这至少在我看来，提出了社交媒体是一种温和的上瘾或强迫行为的论点价值。如果短期内戒断似乎很难，但长期来看几乎看不出什么，那么在我看来，我们社交媒体的使用价值不可能源于我们从这项活动中获得价值。
Initially, a major benefit of cutting social media was reclaiming quite a bit of time. However, as replacement activities such as reading (or more constrained internet use) have filled up some of this, the time gap doesn’t seem salient any more. The opposite feeling—“How did I used to have time for this?”—is what I tend to feel now.
最初，削减社交媒体的一个主要好处是收回了不少时间。然而，随着阅读（或更有节制地使用互联网）等替代活动填补了其中的一部分，时间差距似乎不再突出。相反的感觉–”我以前怎么会有时间做这个？”–是我现在倾向于的感觉。
I think the anxiety-lowering effects of going off Twitter are more significant than the time savings. While I enjoyed the intellectual discussions, the overall hostility definitely made me more anxious. The feature of modern social media, where it becomes more appealing the more it makes you miserable, seems like its biggest flaw.
我认为关闭Twitter的降低焦虑的效果比节省时间更显著。虽然我很享受知识性的讨论，但整体的敌意绝对让我更加焦虑。现代社交媒体的特点是越让你痛苦就越吸引人，这似乎是它最大的缺陷。
Not all platforms share this problem equally. YouTube and Reddit were largely time-wasters for me, rather than anxiety-provoking. Reddit does seem to have a lot of caustic discussion, but since you can choose which subreddits to follow, you can simply omit those talking about something you don’t care about. However, in the end, I found the intellectual caliber of conversations on Reddit was fairly low.
并非所有平台都同样存在这个问题。YouTube和Reddit对我来说主要是浪费时间，而不是让人焦虑。Reddit确实有很多苛刻的讨论，但由于你可以选择关注哪些subreddits，你可以轻松地省略那些你不关心的东西。不过，到头来，我发现Reddit上的对话的智力水平相当低。
Why is Twitter smart and nasty, but Reddit is dull and fun? The choice to follow people rather than topics seems pivotal here. Twitter allows you to follow the smartest minds, but you get everything they’re interested in, not just their expertise. Reddit’s upvoting system instead gives a kind of intellectual populism where the majority opinion rules the day, but this tends not to be the most insightful analysis. 为什么Twitter聪明又讨厌，
而Reddit却枯燥又有趣？选择关注人而不是话题在这里似乎很关键。Twitter可以让你关注最聪明的人，但你收到讯息的是他们感兴趣的一切，而不仅仅是他们的专业知识。Reddit的投票系统反而给人一种知识分子的民粹主义，多数人的意见主宰一切，并且这往往不是最有见地的分析。
My verdict: following blogs via RSS is superior on both counts, even if it required more time to maintain and curate a blogroll.
我的结论是：通过RSS关注博客在这两方面都有优势，即使它需要更多的时间来维护和规划博客卷。
What are the Downsides?
弊端有哪些？
Right now the balance of pros-to-cons of ditching social media is definitely toward the “pro” for me. But I can comment on a few side-effects that I observed and have worked to mitigate:
现在，对我来说，抛弃社交媒体的利弊平衡肯定是倾向于 “利”。但我可以谈一下我观察到的一些副作用，并努力减轻这些副作用。
I did become a little less informed of current events. Part of me reactivating my NYTimes subscription was to counter the fact that I suddenly lost most of my breaking news. I’m somewhat ambivalent as to whether being constantly informed is a good thing, but it is something to note.
我对时事的了解确实少了一点。我重新激活了《纽约时报》订阅，部分原因是为了应对我突然失去的大部分即时新闻。我有些矛盾，不断地了解信息是否是一件好事，但这是值得记录的事情。
I have found it harder to stay in contact with some friends. Before I had Twitter friends and some friends who mostly messaged me via Facebook. Because of my absence, I’m probably missing some communication. There may be some costs to this (especially for my business), but I suspect the long-run shift to deeper relationships with people offline is going to more than make up for it.
我发现和一些朋友保持联系比较困难。之前我有Twitter的朋友，还有一些朋友大多通过Facebook给我发信息。因为我的缺席，我可能会缺少一些交流。这可能会有一些成本（尤其是对我的商业而言），但我猜测，从长远来看，转变为与线下的人去建立更深层次的关系，将是多多益善的。
RSS and newsletters need more active management. The advantage of algorithms is that they do all the work for you. They figure out what you like to read and watch and make sure you see it first. If you use RSS or get most of your content via email newsletters, you’re responsible for unsubscribing when the volume gets too high or the content irrelevant. I’ve been doing this for years, so this was easy for me, but it is an important factor to keep in mind.
RSS和新闻通讯需要更积极的管理。算法的优势在于，它们为你做了所有的工作。它们会找出你喜欢阅读和观看的内容，并确保你最先看到它。如果你使用RSS或通过电子邮件通讯获取大部分内容，当数量过大或内容不相关时，你有责任取消订阅。我已经做了很多年，所以这对我来说很容易，并且这是一个重要的因素，要记住。
People are now telling me about new social media services like Clubhouse and TikTok. No thank you.
I can’t rule out the possibility that there will be a new service that is worth it for me in the long-run (or existing services remove some of their toxicity). But, I’m doubtful. Not because it would be impossible, but just because it wouldn’t be as popular or profit-generating.
人们现在推荐我新的社交媒体服务，比如Clubhouse和TikTok。不，谢谢。
我不排除从长远来看，会有一种新的服务值得我去用（或者现有的服务去除一些毒性）。但是，我很怀疑。不是因为它不可能，只是因为它不会那么受欢迎，也不会产生利润。
In the end, I’m optimistic about content online. There is a lot of good discussions, entertainment and educational materials and it’s getting better every year. But I think curating our own access to that content is probably better than allowing a company to do it for you.
最后，我对网上的内容持乐观态度。有很多好的讨论、娱乐和教育材料，而且每年都在进步。但我认为，我们自己策划获取这些内容，可能比让公司为你做更好。
最后，哪位大佬能告诉我图片怎么居中而不影响全文，
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