I ended up hating it. I would quit a job before doing it again. Some hints, most of which I arrived at the hard way.
1. Set some limits - have work hours, and if you can "go to work" even if that's just going into the office or other room.
Outside those hours don't be tempted to just go fix that thing when you have a flash of inspiration. Make a note, forget it until tomorrow.
2. If possible meet regularly with people in the business / team. It's very easy to end up feeling isolated and out of the loop. skype or hangouts don't cut it.
3. Make more time in your life for people and actual IRL time with them.
Well there's a simplistic view of the world if I ever saw one. It is not, for many people, the advertisers that are the problem, but the ad networks.
It's the ad networks that cookie and track.
It's the ad networks that load the website with horribly slow loading external JS.
It's the ad networks that want to track, profile and retarget us to death.
It's the ad networks that use any means possible to get that view. From animations and modals to popunders, sound and other trickery.
It's the bottom feeding ad networks that accidentally end up pushing malware out. Repeatedly.
Most web sites are loading so many external scripts, ads and trackers that the experience is simply broken. Without ad, social and script blocking the web has become unusably slow.
Meanwhile, I and many others would be glad to see ads from the little guy - without all the cruft and pollution, if I could do so safe from all the above.
That little guy just wants an advert to get her new business going. The ad network sold them all the other crap.
Personally I agree completely. As someone in tech I find it very difficult to ascribe meaning to a meaningless number. Especially when people "like" things they hate for comedy or irony purposes, or clicked accidentally a few years ago. Reading online reviews is a case of trying to glean a little truth from something everyone should know is being heavily gamed. But they don't.
Amongst the non-tech population there is trust taken from these numbers. People believe those reviews. People seem to believe that a lot of likes is indicative of trust. People used to believe that clicking blue links was good, and so the web used to be a cesspool of adsense sites providing no real information.
Sad fact is it works. Both with the algorithms - more likes gets more random likes from nowhere over time, and with the visitor perceptions. probably only the non-technical ones.
FB's own advertising is as cheap than fiverr. $5 can get you a thousand or two likes if you geo locate the campaign to certain parts of the world. Some parts of the world seem to like everything!
Seems to be all legit accounts, so presumably far safer from any FB fake detection algorithms. Just don't expect them to buy your service!
But who, in this day and age, would trust or hire a new online business that had a page with 0-100 likes? The apparent presumption on seeing under 1k likes or under a few thousand twitter followers is the business is defective. Or forgotten, or no good. The incorrect wisdom of the crowd is that a legit business has a certain number of likes, followers etc, or it looks suspicious
For a new local business who is never going to get a HN or /. effect, or get some "viral buzz" from the cool kids, buying a few thousand can be a way to get to perceived neutrality. Enough likes or followers that they're no longer clicked away from for being "suspiciously" unloved.
Fake reviews on the other hand are much more directly fraudulent. Mind I'm surprised anyone at all still trusts online reviews, apart from negative ones!
Want something more than a year old or a little less than mainstream? Good luck finding an active torrent. Maybe you'll find one with incredible bandwidth where the CD or TV show from a year or two back you seek can download at all instead of sitting stalled at some random percentage.
You seem to be describing the picture of 4 or 5 years back rather than now
1. Set some limits - have work hours, and if you can "go to work" even if that's just going into the office or other room.
Outside those hours don't be tempted to just go fix that thing when you have a flash of inspiration. Make a note, forget it until tomorrow.
2. If possible meet regularly with people in the business / team. It's very easy to end up feeling isolated and out of the loop. skype or hangouts don't cut it.
3. Make more time in your life for people and actual IRL time with them.