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Ask HN: Life without social media – suggestions, ideas

26 points by iagooar ↗ HN
I'm slowly, but steadily heading towards a life without social media.

Why?

Because it's taking a toll on my wellness. Because I'm sick and tired of wasting my time. Because I feel like I can't even read a regular-sized news article anymore, since content on social media today is so short and short-lived. And I really want to get out of those toxic shitstorms happening all the time.

My question for the HN crowd: for those of you who are not using social media anymore, or those of you who have reduced your usage by a fair amount. How do you manage your digital life? What services do you use instead? How do you get in touch with people, or how do you allow other people to get in touch with you? Or maybe it's a matter of different habits? Do you have your personal website like back in the day?

28 comments

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aseembits93
How do you manage your digital life? I am pretty active on reddit, github and stackoverflow. I use google photos to share my pictures. What services do you use instead? Whatsapp is the only social network I use on a daily basis. I have gone cold turkey and deleted all my social media accounts like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc. How do you get in touch with people, or how do you allow other people to get in touch with you? I share my Whatsapp number and Email address with people I wish to stay in touch with. Do you have your personal website like back in the day? I have a personal webpage where I provide all my links such as email address, github, google scholar etc.
franky47
I believe the problems we face with those platforms come from the "feeds", those infinite sources of attention-grabbing distractions from the actual social part of those networks (talking, commenting, discussing, planning...).

For this reason I only use messaging apps (WhatsApp and FB messenger mainly, which bothers me since it still feeds the beast..).

butteredpopcorn
I quit all personal social media years and years ago. I use a ton of email and text and am deeply involved in several real world communities and hobbies. I do have a LinkedIn I mainly ignore, just because it helps when searching for jobs.

If a person doesn’t have real world interests or networks, I think they should take lessons or classes in things they like from people they respect and see what happens organically over a year or so. They can reintroduce their hobby’s tech stack into their life as needed. For instance, I still watch a lot of YouTube (without an account) and read a lot of non-Reddit forums, like this one, because they help me learn things.

Not having social media is rarely an issue for planning and staying in touch with people and I rarely get asked about it. I still waste lots of digital time but I do it in ways I find more amusing than toxic.

iagooar
I'm actually in a similar situation - I don't want to quit the Internet completely, I just wish to recover some time that I think is wasted on social media, and at the same time "escape" that often toxic environment.

I still want to read interesting discussions, but I don't want to read all the other clutter and BS.

butteredpopcorn
I’m living your dream then! It’s pretty good. It’ll be ten fun tears “mega social media”-free next year.

I’ll use any online tool if it has a point (usually work or hobby related) and doesn’t bother me in terms of privacy, ethics, or the behavior of the other users. The cozy internet of happy, nice people of all ages and backgrounds doing stuff they love still exists, it’s just hidden in smaller places built for specific interests. I consider HN about as general and large a community as I’m willing to frequent, and I only come here to lurk and listen.

My miscellanous private social life (no point other than that I love these people) is all phone, non-Gmail email, and text because IMO no company has created anything more funny and useful than group texts and hour-long phone calls. I do want to be a little elusive and hard to find so that people value my time, and I want my happy times with other people to feel more concentrated. It’s the personal version of avoiding overexposure.

codingdave
> How do you manage your digital life? What services do you use instead?

I don't have anything that I consider to be a 'digital life'. I didn't replace social media with other services. I meet and talk to people in real life. I get in touch by knocking on their door, or calling them on the phone. I spend my time going on walks with my wife, talking to my children, playing card and board games at the kitchen table, painting in my studio, and making furniture in the garage. We go on hikes, and explore the mountains and deserts in the area.

I interact with far fewer people, and in many ways I am far more isolated than I used to be. But that is the point - deeper interactions with the immediate world around you is often more fulfilling than superficial interactions online.

patatino
I don't have any social media account anymore, my biggest problems are sites like hackernews where I waste my time.

I would love to ditch my smartphone for a dumb phone, but what I need is WhatsApp, because everyone uses it where I live and a good camera for taking pictures. Maybe one day :)

yesenadam
The way people talk about this stuff never quite fits with my experience... I gave up newspapers & most news about 7-8 years ago, TV about 5 years ago, which has been great. I'm 'still' on FB, but never read the news feed, just chat with friends in many countries & sometimes look at the recent pics of the person I'm chatting with. (I never see ads on FB, so all that debate seems weird to me) Sometimes (like today!) I spend too long on HN, noprocrast is amazingly effective for that. Ban myself for 6 hours until the habit to keep coming back is gone. Also have never had a mobile phone. People contact me by FB (mostly) or email (which I dont check so often) or my website (occasionally).

p.s. Not sure why people don't think HN is social media!

muzani
It was actually very easy to break the habit for me. You'll find that things like books and movies are a lot more entertaining and enjoyable.

But I rely on Facebook a lot for work. I actually had to force myself to get back on it.

I would really prefer to quit, but they really are an unfair advantage to those who use it. HN would also fall into the same category imo.

karmakaze
> rely on Facebook a lot for work

Can you elaborate on this? I can't imagine how I would use it for work. Is it just as you might use linked, to keep in touch with past coworkers or more?

muzani
Yeah. Generally, I don't use LinkedIn, because it has an even more toxic culture than Facebook. I've also found that if there's a repulsion to adding someone on FB, that's a major flag in working with them.

Also FB acts as my blog and personal marketing - about 80% of job offers and contracts come from there.

I find it's a better source for tech things than HN too. HN provides perspective from the more senior group, while FB has the younger 20s group. HN's is a little more cynical and FB is a bit more open minded but arrogant.

apohn
>How do you get in touch with people, or how do you allow other people to get in touch with you?

Ask yourself, which people (or types of people) do you actually care about being getting in touch with you. Remember that 90%+ of people in your personal or professional will never get in touch with you. So there's no reason to go out of your way to ensure those people can find you.

For family, friends, etc, most everybody has a phone number, texting, and email. Probably the people who matter to you have your contact information. For new people, give them your phone number.

For work, a LinkedIn account is usually is sufficient. You don't even have to login on a regular basis. That gives people from your professional life a way to find you.

If you want to have a place to show projects, Github and the usual places like that are sufficient. Put your email there.

A lot of times people ask themselves, "What if somebody from the past wants to connect with me? Don't I need Facebook/Instagram/Twitter?" Honestly speaking, most people from high school, college, job 10 years ago, etc don't care if you are alive or dead. The ones that do and really want to connect with you will find a way to do so. I had a friend from high school find me on LinkedIn to get my phone number so we could catch up. Turns out we didn't have much in common anymore so that was the end of that!

drdeadringer
> People will get in touch with you

I found this out in the bad way about a year go. Emergency contacts are a thing. If you have "Just No" family, that's a multiplier against the Bad. If that sounds bonkers to you, consider yourself lucky.

I'm glad that 911, 411, and "welfare checks" work even if I'm on the wrong end of them. I am still trying to understand and deal with otherwise.

justaguyhere
Honestly speaking, most people from high school, college, job 10 years ago, etc don't care if you are alive or dead

This. My guess is that most people know this, but are having trouble accepting it. But once we accept it, it frees us from a lot of behavior that is "expected" of us (like being on Facebook, for example) but have no real/lasting value whatsoever.

I had a friend that connected with me few weeks ago, after not being in contact for 14 something years - we're having a blast catching up and poking fun at each other. Point being, if someone really wants to connect with you, they will find a way - everyone has email and phone, isn't it? What more do we need than emails, SMS and phone calls?

jamil7
I quit all social media, facebook possibly 6 years ago and the others gradually after that. I haven't had or watched a TV probably in 10 years. I use whatsapp right now to communicate with a handful of friends and family and github for work and open source. My apartment also doesn't have an internet connection so no netflix/youtube whatever. I tether my phone with JS and images disabled every nown then to read HN, send a few emails, download some docs or packages and thats about it. All of this happened over a long period of time so I can't tell if I feel better than before but I definately have plenty of time to read and cook. A bonus is I've also become less reliant on search engines / stack overflow to program.
h0p3
I write my wiki and stay in touch with people over it. It is my lifetool. I try to own data and my identity. I integrate communications by hand into my wiki. I write detailed letters to people that mean something to me now. I'm more social than I've been in a long time this way. I get to talk to people who demonstrate they care, and I have evidence that they do.

https://philosopher.life/#Find%20The%20Others:%5B%5BFind%20T...

Hey, you should contact me. We can talk about it!

drdeadringer
> my wiki

This is an interesting idea. How is this more involved than a personal blog? Do you literally auto-bio your entire self into a wiki?

h0p3 

    * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19013043
    * https://philosopher.life/#2019.01.27%20-%20drdeadringer%3A%20First%20Contact

    Hello [[drdeadringer]],

    It's a pleasure to meet you.<<ref "hi">>

    <<<
    > my wiki

    This is an interesting idea.
    <<<

    Thank you. You might check out [[Tiddlywiki|https://tiddlywiki.com/]]. I'm glad I did.

    <<<
    How is this more involved than a personal blog? 
    <<<

    Perhaps the best TLDR answer to your question I can give is simply: it's as personal and involved as you want it to be.

    Imho, the value of your effort scales quite well with this tool (into obsession). In whatever best form and function fits your context, be as [[concise or precise|Ithkuil]] as you can about what matters most to you.

    I know it might sound obvious to you, as though it doesn't need to be defined or I'm being too pedantic, but I'm going to ask you to define "personal blog."<<ref "i">> Tell me what you think is failing, incomplete, or lacking in the essential practice? What should it be instead? What do you think counts as the fitting [[Tit For Two Tats]] method of [[Golden Rule]] cooperating with ourselves and each other in social media?

    I can tell you that telling ourselves the stories of ourselves is mind-bendingly difficult and non-linear. What is the [[good]] for the sake of which one thinks about their life, and what are the most effective means to those end(s)? I suggest to you the wiki is an astoundingly flexible teleological tool for exploring, methodologizing, coherentifying, and evolving all kinds of answers to those questions. I've yet to find any other such low-friction tool which enables me to connect the dots and fill in the holes in my life to this [[dok]]. It's a place to be autonomous and define myself with [[others]].<<ref jyu">> It's the best [[self-modeling]] development environment I've ever had.<<ref "sm">>

    If you are asking how much more involved my wiki is to me than a standard personal blog (or even a book), I can say my wiki is ~25MB of highly-dimensional (for me at least) plaintext in a single html file. I work everyday in it. What I spend my time doing in my wiki varies with my daily context, and it's clear my {[[Focus]]} continues to change year after year.<<ref "sl">> Even though I plan, I cannot say what kind of object this wiki will become in the next year; it's exciting.

    <<<
    Do you literally auto-bio your entire self into a wiki?
    <<<

    It is like having a second brain.<<ref "sb">> I am attempting to upload what I currently think matters most about my mind into this wiki. I appreciate having the chance to read and think about what I've written.

    For both conceptual and practical reasons, I can't auto-bio everything about my life. I do my best with what I've got; it's all I can do. I have to be reductive, empirical, put my tentpegs down in the desert, fix my goggles, and pick out what is salient. If I knew how to be a better philosopher, I would (or so I [[hope]]). Without even remotely espousing a form of relativism here: I can't sufficiently tell you what you need to put in your ~~beetlebox~~ wiki (I probably can't even do it for myself). I'm simply not [[virtous|Virtue is Knowledge]] enough to know the answers to the many questions your question is asking.

    Without reading the entire wiki itself for my current best answer, I believe {[[About]]} and {[[Principles]]} are the best [[antipleonasmic]] answers I have regarding what I'm doing in the wiki and why.

    Sincerely,

    [[h0p3]]

    ---
    <<footnotes "hi" "Thank you for {[[contact]]}ing me, please make yourself at home, and let me know if or how I can {[[help]]} [[you...
saghm
One thing to note is that you can deactivate your Facebook account but still use Messenger, which is what I did. I'd prefer not to use messenger either, but I have so many friends from over the years that I use messenger a new primary way of talking with them that it's not likely I'd ever be able to convince all of them to switch to another platform. That being said, I still see this as a huge improvement; not having a news feed to look at has been a net win for me, and since college I hadn't used groups very much, so at least in terms of the amount of time I spent idly on social media, deactivating the account has been a huge success. I'd guess that one of the bigger roadblocks to doing this for a lot of people would be losing access to the events features, since many people use that as their primary way of notifying others of an event they're planning. The only advice I can offer here is to let your friends who often plan events know to tell you directly (or text/message/etc.), which may or may not work well depending on your set of friends.
drdeadringer
> How do you manage your digital life?

You just don't. It's like not turning on the TV, not buying the Newspaper, walking past the Bar and not going in. You just "nope". Sometime it takes a mindful "I will not", sometimes it takes a simple "I have someplace better to be". It depends.

Other times you have to actively "fuck off". You do the "unsubscribe me". You "mark as spam". You do a new email address. All of this as you needs must at your pleasure.

vkaku
Uninstall the apps. Use the browser if you need to. The friction will reduce usage.
iagooar
This is a simple, yet very good idea, thank you.
WebDanube
Quit Facebook in November last year. Quit WhatsApp in 2017. Never really used Instagram. Sparingly use Twitter/LinkedIn, mostly for following super smart people in my industry. A heavy reddit user though (my mind somehow doesn't accept that reddit is a "social media").

I have never felt more better, both in terms of my mood and my mental health at large. My mobile screen time took a nosedive post quitting. I couldn't be more happier not knowing what 500+ of my "friends" are doing in real time.

As for managing digital life -- I now call/email some of my closest friends every weekend, and use SMS to communicate with members of my family every other day. That's about it.

Though it's been kind of tiring explaining to people the actual reason I quit these platforms (privacy/lack of trust on these big corps to safeguard my sensitive private data), I've realized that it is possible to still communicate well over email/phone call/text.

I don't have a personal website as of now, but I'm seriously considering building one -- mostly for acting as a 'first point of contact' when people search for me on the web.

iagooar
> I don't have a personal website as of now, but I'm seriously considering building one -- mostly for acting as a 'first point of contact' when people search for me on the web.

This is what I've been doing the last few days. I think that having our own place in the digital space is key to get back the autonomy lost to the big platforms.

tugberkk
Personally, I closed my facebook and I did not regret one bit. However, it is safe to say that I was not a heavy facebook user. On the other hand, while I do not share much in Instagram, I check my news feed a lot. What I did: I decreased the number of people I follow, installed Duolingo and started learning Spanish!
roland35
I haven't used Facebook for 10 years now, and have not signed up for other social networks mainly to eliminate unwanted attention from family I was trying to avoid!

I do almost all of my communication through texting, messaging apps (RIP Hangouts), and email. It seems to work out OK! I do get periodic updates about what is going on with random people from my wife who still has Facebook but I can't say I would miss that if it was gone! She is stuck in because many groups she is involved with are organized on there.

Not even seeing what is going on in social media is great; I think not having it is quality over quantity in terms of interaction.

raztogt21
After the iOS update that included the screen-time function. I started tracked my Instagram time (the only social media I used). It went for 3-4 hours per day. A huge sink of time.

Where I currently live, Instagram is huge. Always keeping up with the Joneses, who is having dinner with whom, show if you visited the last fancy place, etc.

It took a toll on my girlfriend mental health, always comparing herself. So I put the example that is possible to delete your account.

At first, you get the 'fomo' to not look where everyone is or what they are doing. After a month you start getting personal messages. So people that truly care about you will reach out at the end (and viceversa).

cweiss
Figure out where the toxic shitstorms are coming from and cut those items out of your life.

In my case, the main FB news stream and TV news were the primary antagonizers. I stopped watching TV news and get my news from HN and Google News (even that's a struggle to hide the useless crap). For FB, there are several special-interest-groups about things I'm interested in (Fusion 360, woodworking, blacksmithing, etc) that are not prone to off-topic or sensational chatter (thank you, moderators!) and I installed 'News Feed Eradicator for Facebook'[0] which has cut way back on the unpleasantness and even turned FB into a positive experience.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...