It’s time, once again, to talk about reducing the fire hose of information. It’s been a few years since the last time I went through this. In the intervening time there’s been a fairly huge upheaval in the social media landscape with Instagram, Reddit, X Twitter, etc all managing to make their way onto and off of my phone. So I thought I’d summarize for myself here the state of play at the start of 2025 (and compare and contrast with where things were back in 2017).
Reducing the noise…again
The very first time I wrote about this was way back in 2015. At the time, I was concerned mostly with managing my RSS feed…it’s astonishing that was 10 years ago and how much the world of aggregators has changed. Far from the “let’s find a collection of blogs to follow”, now we’re managing access to the aggregators themselves and dealing with what “The Algorithm” wants us to see. I may go back through the list of blogs I had in 2015 at some point and see what still exists and what has long fallen into the dustbin of time.
Fast forwarding to 2017, I had managed to use the “old” version of the Apple News app as a means of focusing information into what I actually wanted to read. Somewhere along the line, my interaction with the News feed shifted so that I only ever see the “Top Stories” in the news. Which is now as full of clickbaity junk as anything else.
The 2025 Purge
It’s early 2025. The last month has included the fires in LA, the start of the second Trump presidency, the swirl of Twitter down in to a tiny shell of its former self, and finally making a decision to get off of Facebook (which I’d already abandoned for most things except a few local disc golf groups). The level of churn on both my news feeds and in social media is at an all time high. So it’s time for a reset.
Phase I was removing phone apps. Twitter has been gone for a while. Facebook only appears when we’re trying to get rid of things on our local giveaway groups and somehow manages to stick around. Ditto for Messenger. I find a large fraction of my phone time is sucked into Instagram/Facebook Reels, both of which we TicTok style short videos. Both are gone. As is Threads. I also removed the Reddit widget that showed a “popular” post form my phone. This has zero social media applications on my phone. We had also bought into the Apple News+ ecosystem for a while. However, I’ve found that standard news outlets are becoming more and more like Buzzfeed click bait headers. So the News “Top Story” widget is now gone from my home screen.
Phase II is managing work streams. Currently this is pruned down to Slack and Mail/Outlook. My phone calendar synchs up to my Outlook one, so this is fairly well connected. I do have Teams on my phone, but it’s fairly targeted usage and it’s not on my home screen. So I’m fairly happy with the level of Work nagging at me when I look at my phone.
I have long since turned off “unread” bubbles on my apps. However, I also keep my work email triaged down to keep the number of unread messages at zero. Not so much for our personal emails (that’s an entirely different beast), but I also don’t have any bubbles showing the thousands of unread messages there, either.
Phase III is managing content I do want to see. On my home page this is now the New York Times and the L.A. Times, both of which we pay for. The other most used content now is Podcasts (curated down a few n my “up next” widget). And…that’s it. There is now no way for me to pickup my phone and get sucked into a time sink by following a link that I want to see.
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