The good and bad sides of chatting

Chatting on social media is one of the things I love doing and I have been doing it for several years that I am practically a pro at it (if there's anything like that). My use of social media started back in 2010 with a very popular app back then known as 2go. We used those small Java phones back then and I used 2go to stay in contact with my friends which is what I prefer to call.

I moved from 2go to blackberry messenger (BBM), then later on I migrated to Whatsapp which is the one I have remained with till now. Initially, I only use social media just to have fun and whirl away time, but later on, I started using it to look for money-making opportunities and that's mostly what I use it for today.

The good thing with chatting

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Like I said above, I now use social media to make money and that actually started back in 2019. I stumbled on a WhatsApp group that's filled with individuals that are always sharing money-making opportunities and I quickly joined. I was very active in the group and I always chat with other group members, which usually makes me one of the first people to grab hold of any new opportunity.

Sometimes the opportunities are free and some of them might involve answering surveys or being the first few persons to register for a new product, and then we get rewarded afterward. But some of the opportunities involved investing money into them and making profits after a while but they don't always end well (I will talk more about that later).

Chatting is also how I discovered hive and other blogging platforms. I am very active on a Nigeria forum known as nairaland and one day, I saw a thread that was about people discussing the different things they do to make money on the internet and someone mentioned crypto blogging. That sounded interesting, so I probed him to tell me more about it.

He mentioned hive, read.cash, and noise.cash and he said I can research more about them on my own and that was what I did. I signed up on all 3 platforms on the same day and I took out time to learn about them but I had to drop hive after a while because it was too complicated for me then.

I came back to hive after the friends I made on readcash helped me to understand how it works. You can see how chatting is very instrumental in making me who I am today, I couldn't have discovered hive if I didn't ask that person about it that day, and I also wouldn't have been able to understand how it works if I didn't chat up my friends and asked questions about it.

The bad side of chatting

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Chatting on social media isn't always a good thing, there are some negative aspects attached to it and for me, the number one on the list is addiction. I was very addicted to social media especially Whatsapp to the extent that I spend half of my day chatting with friends and acquaintances.

I thought about it during the COVID-19 period and I realized I had to reduce my online presence so that I can focus more on important things. The problem with addiction is that it doesn't just go away even if you tell yourself that you want to limit the things you do, as long as you keep doing that same thing, the addiction never goes away.

Even after I try to limit the way I chat, it still interferes with my daily activities. I might be reading an article here on Hive and a WhatsApp message will pop up on my phone, I can't resist replying to it and from there I just continue chatting. At one point I came up with a system where I will read a paragraph of an article, and then reply to one Whatsapp message, but that didn't work so well. I eventually froze my WhatsApp, and it has remained that way till today, it's probably the best decision I have made.

Another bad thing with chatting is that it has led me into lots of scams. Remember when I said we sometimes have to invest money in some of the opportunities we come across in the Whatsapp group I mentioned earlier? Many of them ended up becoming a scam and I lost a lot of money, they all happened in 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown (that was the year of scams!).

I did a few of those investments earlier (which turned out to be Ponzi schemes) and I made a lot of money from them but I started losing to many of them later on. I ended up losing all my savings because I was trying to recover the earlier losses I faced, I got greedy and it made me frustrated after I realized I have lost everything. I vowed to never go up to any of those investments and I became less active in the Whatsapp group.

Chatting on social media can be a very powerful tool if done in the right way. You can build strong connections by networking with people and getting good job opportunities (which is something I plan on doing with Twitter and LinkedIn). But social media can also be a nightmare if you don't limit the way you chat with them, you have to apply wisdom in the way you interact with people and be mindful of the things you accept or share.

Thanks for reading

Connect with me on:
Twitter: @kushyzeena
Readcash: @kushyzee