Very insightful blogpost and good for the author. It shows its possible to get away from Facebook's social network drug store which they purposefully make it hard for you to quit or delete your profile(s). With Facebook, there's no such thing as 'privacy' and 'account deletion'.
I hope that everyone else isn't addicted to another drug that is called 'Twitter' which one of its side-effects is 'getting the worst out of everyone' and all sorts of nasty media stories spreading over there.
Deleting Twitter was easy for me because the platform is so antagonistic on mobile if you don't use their app. I don't even click on links people send me anymore.
Same with reddit. I don't want to use your damn app!! Guess I won't use it at all. Reddit just infuriated me anyway so that was just the nail in the coffin
The day they get rid of old.reddit.com is the day I quit for good.
And I'll be honest, although the writing is on the wall, I really don't want that to happen. I like BBS-style forums! But I refuse to subject myself to the dark-pattern morass that is modern social media design.
I feel so much faster using the old reddit site. Yes it doesn't look as pretty but it's faster in multiple ways. The site loads much quicker due to less bloat, but UI wise it's also a lot more efficient.
Moderating some subreddits I feel like I often have to stick with the new reddit design just to use everything properly and it gets annoying having to flip flop back and forth.
I assume the plan is to add enough b̶l̶o̶a̶t̶ features to New Reddit that they "have to" kill the old one to "provide a consistent experience" or something along those lines. I dread that day, but it wouldn't be called "old" if it wasn't coming.
I assume when they kill off old reddit there will be some cloak/shell RES style baconreader chrome add on for us diehards to convert it old reddit style, hopefully! I cannot stand the cartoony style of the new layout.
My kingdom for more simple text-only craigslist style websites.
From time to time I use reddit on the mobile. The links for accessing the comments are so tiny, that I'm marveled at the fact that I hardly miss them (Guess the touch screen on my phone is really good).
I found reddit a bit refreshing in comparison to Facebook and Twitter, easy to get rid of content I don’t want and easy to start conversations with like minded people. Twitter is really not a place to have conversations, if you’re not somehow famous no one would talk to you unless you jump in a bandwagon of sensationalist content, Facebook on the other hand is limited to your family and old friends, not new people, unless you join groups but then Facebook would go tell your family behind your back about your activity, this “gossip” feature that you can’t control put me off from Facebook groups. Reddit work for me, no followers/friends just topics, no gossip feature, sure there are some heated discussions but you can always chose to silence them.
What's the distinction? They both have a community and social features. Commenting, upvotes/liking, posting links, user profiles. HN mainly lacks private messaging and groups.
The term "social media" seems to have arrived a good time after forums did on the internet. I remember standing up websites and paying for a vBulletin license in order to add forum functionality a decade before I first heard the term "social media." I could entertain the idea that those old forums were "social media" the whole time, but they sure didn't feel like the cesspool of anger that twitter and facebook seem to represent.
The explanation is simple, twitter and facebook rely on ads to make profit. to maximize their profit they need to have people spend as much time as possible on their websites.
The most efficient way is to infuriate people. Hence the business model of these companies is to have people outraged and infuriated.
This is a similar strategy to using the media spread fear so people consume more. Simply said someone who's happy, live a fulfilling life free of worry does not feel the urge to buy and consume.
persistent identity and status, that is to say the 'social' part. A lot of damage of social networks arguably is rooted in the competition for status and attention that you get when you get twitter likes and people complementing you, and the horror when you end up in a shitstorm and your reputation is suddenly ruined. It's also what makes it addictive.
Most people on HN just seem to post more or less anonymously. The upvote or downvote mechanisms aren't even particularly visible.
The worst thing you get here is 4 downvotes and a heated discussion. This is not like twitter where your career and face is on the line.
Anonymity is a major key why older forums were much, much better than our social media of today.
Most forums were based around a hobby or a particular subject, and communities formed around that. Sure, you'd have arguments, or someone stepping out of line, easily solved by a moderator. Sometimes moderators got to powerful and people left and joined another or did something else.
Most of my forum days were based on PC building or video games. Most of them had a bunch of boards with varying topics - and possibly a politics one. You could always separate it out easily because it wasn't visible by default.
Social media today everything is visible by default without anonymity. There is no effective way to filter content - only people, or profiles.
> Anonymity is a major key why older forums were much, much better than our social media of today.
I really doubt this. The mask of anonymity completely removes accountability on forums. Pseudonomity is a better approach, along with moderation, and ultimately, a community committed to civil discourse. But the quality of commentary on any forum is a fragile balance, as the evolution of HN has demonstrated.
> The mask of anonymity completely removes accountability on forums.
Accountable to whom? What accountability? Why was this necessary? Accountability wasn't necessary, as most forums were never big enough to really matter. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter are now forces of nature, especially in politics and matters of public opinion.
> Pseudonomity
This has varying degrees of anonymity - you need to further express what you mean by this, because on its own you could support anonymity through pseudonyms.
> and ultimately, a community committed to civil discourse. But the quality of commentary on any forum is a fragile balance, as the evolution of HN has demonstrated.
Yep, something much easier to do on the old forums of yesteryear - they were much smaller, much easier to moderate, and much easier to remediate if they were unfairly moderated.
> Accountable to whom? What accountability? Why was this necessary?
Accountable to the community represented by the forum itself. Participants in a forum need to have some kind of skin in the game, even if it's based on their pseudonymous identity, which brings us to ...
> Pseudonomity
> This has varying degrees of anonymity
By this I mean a consistent identity that has a history, credibility deriving from a track record of adhering to the community standards. It doesn't have to reference your legal identity, but things like the HN "throwaway" drive-by accounts are a problem, IMO, except in rare cases where the individual would take a great personal risk by speaking out even as their pseudonymous identity. But in that case, the bar of evidence for assertions should be very high.
This existed just fine with anonymity - even if you were anonymous, after time and following the rules, others would "know" who you were based on your interactions - thus having skin in the game.
I would say the difference is that forums are about topics/discussion while social media is about people.
There is a difference if you use it to discuss your interests with like minded individuals or if you broadcast to an audience.
I think this is why social media mostly works in small groups or why many people on facebook still find groups with limited topics useful even if they hate the rest.
It is also my main gripe with things like SSB or the fediverse. They work much better than other social media, because they encourage smaller, more tight knight communities, but they are often still people focused, not discussion focused.
A forum is an online place or media where you have social interaction, hence a social media.
You control idea by controling the language. It turns the internet is actually the social media and each and every thing online is de facto also a social media.
Email is a social media, a blog is a social media, bbs is a social media, usenet is a social media, a forum is a social media, a wiki is a social media, and so on.
The name social media is a marketing ploy akin to the "cloud" to manipulate opinion and mind into thinking a certain way about large companies whose business is massively collecting user personal data without providing any meaningful service other than sitting in between the people wanting to interact.
It's a good old switcheroo. When you hear "social media" you could actually revert it back to "the internet" as it used be.
But when you hear social media you actually think facebook / twitter, which means the marketing ploy succeeded in its attempt of replacing the internet by facebook/twitter.
And it's not only the word, facebook has actually tried to replace the internet in several countries, notably with the facebook basics program outrageously disrespecting net neutrality.
But a few companies are also quite literally replacing the internet infrastructure by their own and the decentralized distributed design by a centralized one.
I am afraid the drug is called society. It is a "folie à deux" except with two replaced with N. It is also absolutely great in bringing out the worst in people and rewarding them for it and the worst part is that attempts to replace it manage to wind up even worse!
This may sound overly-dramatic, but I think Twitter is to blame for many of the problems in the world. The "cancel culture" and lack of real debate that stems from Twitter is all due to a race-to-the-bottom environment with people competing to get the most blunt/sarcastic/outlandish statement distilled into a tiny soundbite to try increase their engagement.
So many important topics are "discussed" on Twitter with the outcomes of these discussions often leading to financial, political or mental ruin. Complex topics such as politics, inequality, racial issues, or gender diversity should never be discussed on Twitter. It's impossible to adequately to condense these complex issues into 240 characters.
I’ve been saying this for years. You’re right about the format, but to make matters worse unlike other forums, a lot of people believe that twitter is both real and reflective of mainstream opinion.
I never had WhatsApp or Instagram. I have Facebook for historical reasons that I searched a job more than a decode ago when Facebook was a thing. I have not logged in since January, so for some 5 months now. I think my record is 9 months without logging in.
I got off Facebook 1.5 years ago as well. Removed my special Facebook browser I used (removed the app long ago) and at first it was weird as I was used to hitting it, whenever I had a few minutes of nothing. But after a week or so it felt great. Less screen time, less mental burden from seeing "stupid" posts, less useless discussions, ...
Couldn't get of WhatsApp, yet, as it's too often the default for friends and family.
I lived in a foreign country recently and Facebook groups were far and away the most important tool I had for meeting people and establishing myself. WhatsApp was the dominate form of communicating with people who lived there. And Instagram was the primary way I kept in touch with my closest friends on other continents.
These things are useful, and just because they can be misused does not make them any less useful.
No doubts that there are uses. Travelling Indonesia WhatsApp was a must (due to free basics / internet.org they were most reliable communication with local Services) and now in Corona lockdowns many shops here in Germany don't update their website, but Facebook with current opening times and offers.
However I spent way too much time on it and Facebook is way to hungry for personal data.
I lived in Spain for 5 years and then I returned to my country 13 years ago.
Some 8 years ago, Facebook was something that I really enjoyed using. I left way too many friends, close friends, and well, lovers behind. Facebook allowed me to have a healthy relationship with them, even if at a distance.
I went back to Spain on 2010 for the wedding of a close friend, and it was like I've been out of the country for 2 months instead of 2 years, and that was mostly thanks to Facebook.
I can't point exactly at the moment when all that went to shit (May be 5, 6 years ago?) but nowadays FB is a constant string of shitty videos from companies trying to stay afloat, shitty videos made by shitty people, fake news by the thousand - and people adhering to the fake news narrative! - and stupid motivational shit of the kind that really demotivates you, people viciously attacking other people for the stupidest reasons...
I disabled my account some 3 months ago, and I feel much better without it.
Instagram, on the other side, is a different beast. Even with the strong push by FB in order to monetize the network, I think that fact that people can't easily share other people's post, and are kind of forced to post their own material still makes it an interesting place.
As long as instagram does not allow reposting, I think it'll maintain a certain degree of quality.
I also have disabled my insta account, but I do miss the information from the people I was following there (Mostly, artists and crafstmen of all kinds).
I make it a point to check if an upstart is from bay area or not. If they are, my first assumption is that behind all that fancy "awesome" talk there is a sugar-coated sociopath that has been vetted and backed by a popular venture firm.
Bail. Find an alternative from Europe or Canada instead. Or simply let it go.
I haven't used FB regularly in about 3 years now (after being an early adopter and heavy user), and honestly the times I logged in to see all the "happy birthday!" notifications, I couldn't believe how far the platform had devolved since I last logged in. It's one of the biggest disappointments of modern technology for me. Such amazing unity of entire communities and families, worldwide, being turned into such an exploitative and IMO harmful platform. There's a bit of signal in the noise (in the form of actual worthwhile friend/family/community posts), but unfortunately for me it's simply not worth the effort of wading through an endless supply of ragebait, propaganda and straight-up misinformation.
The way the social media hivemind works these days, it seems halfway to China's "social credit" system, where people can be fired for liking the "wrong" kind of tweet. For now it's safe to just ignore the noise, but I wonder how long before people will be fired for not liking the "right" kind of tweet.
Already happening, received two angry messages from people I know for not reposting BLM/SJW posts on my instagram story, even though I had already donated to ACLU & signed petitions I agree with in private.
What worries me is this is just the start. Wonder how social interactions will be in 50 years...
I don't think that people will be leaving their houses much in 50 years, assuming we still have "people" and "houses". The singularity is on the horizon and we are running full-speed toward it.
A measure that could significantly improve your Facebook experience (as it did mine) is to curate the content that you want to see.
A few years ago I started actively clicking "not interested" on every type of content that I didn't want to see, and slowly but surely I managed to get rid of all memes, news, and uninteresting bits.
Now I'm left with discussions about AI papers, local events that friends are attending, and updates from friends in other countries. And even then, my feed is so uninteresting that I'm not tempted to scroll through it every day. Of course, this doesn't remove the million other issues with Facebook but at least it doesn't mess with my happiness
I went a step further and used a script to unfollow everything - all friends, pages, and groups. Once you do that the news feed is completely gone and Facebook becomes a much better experience. I left it this way for about six months and then re-followed my family and ten or so close friends.
The best feature that improved my use of Facebook is the "snooze" button.
Whenever someone posts something annoying, like a string of recycled memes or bad political arguments, I hit that snooze button and they disappear from my feed for 30 days.
I have to do a “not interested” purge on my Instagram about once every 4 weeks. That’s how long it takes the Instagram Explore algorithm to devolve into degenerate memes and echo chambers regardless of my interests.
Yes, I think this is the sad thing with a lot of modern tech. They aim to make 0.5% more ad revenue quarter after quarter and by the time they realise it, it's a big mess.
> "I think that fact that people can't easily share other people's post, and are kind of forced to post their own material still makes it an interesting place."
That's an interesting observation, this is one of the reasons I don't enjoy Twitter, everything is retweeted (maybe I just don't get it).
I find Instagram to be a bit too addictive though. It feels like an endless magazine of glossy images, which learns what you want to see, to keep you engaged... forever
I used a tool (Blindfold) to disable retweets on all accounts, and it has made Twitter infinitely more enjoyable to use. Link: https://blindfold.social/
> Instagram, on the other side, is a different beast. Even with the strong push by FB in order to monetize the network, I think that fact that people can't easily share other people's post, and are kind of forced to post their own material still makes it an interesting place.
>As long as instagram does not allow reposting, I think it'll maintain a certain degree of quality.
This is a fascinating insight I never considered. Disabling reposting results in higher quality, higher-effort discourse. Trashy memes and fake news can’t spread as rapidly or at all without the ability to easily, mindlessly repost them millions of times. It’s like a circuit breaker to our lizard brain, forcing us to actually think about what we’re doing instead of thoughtlessly queuing up another dopamine hit with a quick repost.
I think reposting with a comment is the worst. Mastodon has "boosting" which allows you to repost, but you can't add your own commentary to it.
This seems to work pretty well in preventing the spread of bad messages, as a boost of such message will imply that you agree with it. That way you're not getting the typical "look at what this horrible person said" messages.
Also, if you try to follow any type of discussion in the comments its surprisingly difficult. Hard to find the parents of a comment, hard to scroll up to the original comments. And to be honest... I think this is for the best of the platform.
I think you hit the nail on the head with both how Facebook and Instagram has an effect in my mind.
If I may add to that, WhatsApp is going strong due to a similar pattern. It strictly controls your circles. Your experience is only affected by the people and groups you're in. They did not go crazy with feature creep and even more importantly, the design and ux has largely been the same without needless rewrites to justify a paycheck.
This consistency is how they managed to get both the younger demographic and the elderly in a single app.
Your mileage might vary, but where I live WhatsApp is the de-facto messaging medium.
Nobody does not use it. That made it somewhat possible that eventually the whole population got to use it - because there were a lot of people available to help elder people learn to use it.
I agree with you 100% as to what has happened to it. Except a few changes (Voice messages back then, groups and broadcast messages closer in time).
The features are kept in place, and that's a good thing.
Insular US and Canada does not get Whatsapp, if they aren't interacting with people outside of those countries.
But the other Americas, Europe and Africa are so heavy on it. It really is becoming the platform that you see in Asian countries for business, which Zuck had hoped he could have. Clout and reputation for business is all on whatsapp for many people. Compared to websites and public pages from decades past, which are still indicators of legitimacy in the US. Luxury watch dealers just post on their whatsapp story when something new comes in, and its sold in minutes. At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, people post sneakers they get in stock right onto their story and its a mad dash to obtain it. Professional group chats highly active for private equity deal making and collaboration, organic group chats created on the fly. Location specific group chats existing in perpetuity.
I spend almost all day on it now, out of necessity. And I like how utilitarian it is, it doesn't need to "wow" anyone with UI bells and whistles and they are completely invisible if you are not part of groups that use whatsapp.
I don't like that it forces you to share your phone number, but the etiquette seems self-enforcing. The chat size limit is a blessing and a curse, but they probably shouldn't change it.
Its not about what other chat applications can do, its about what happens.
> But the other Americas, Europe and Africa are so heavy on it.
FWIW at least in my neck of the woods I stopped receiving messages on WhatsApp about 2 or 3 years ago and when I got a new phone in October last year I didn't even install it.
Everyone is on Telegram and while I see people joining Signal all the time, the first time I actually had a conversation with anyone on Signal was a few weeks ago.
Telegram is 100% crypto in my world and its a riot, very entertaining. It serves a purpose because crypto people will SS7 attack you if you they know your phone number, so whatsapp isnt good.
Beware, instagram deletes your account after a few months. I've had this happen to me a twice. Second time around was few weeks ago when i decided to return after taking 2-3 month break.
> As long as instagram does not allow reposting, I think it'll maintain a certain degree of quality.
I've never been a big Instagram user, but considering one of my big complaints about FB is the prevalence of regurgitated reposted garbage (memes, crap news, chain letter nonsense), I might have to revisit my IG account and see if I can salvage a bit there.
Your experience mirrors my own. I was never a big Facebook user, but it was a nice service to have and then, as you say maybe 5 or 6 years ago, it all went to hell.
People basically stopped posting to Facebook and it became an endless stream of mindless videos, cutesy images with quotes and supermarkets trying to push offers directly to users (successfully though).
Facebook lost the thing that made it interesting, news about long lost friends and insights into the everyday of the people you know. I'm not sure if it's something Facebook did, or if people just stopped posting.
I agree that some years back it (FB) was way more engaging and meaningful. It's certainly changed for the worse over the years.
Regarding Instagram, I never thought about it in this way, and now that you mention it, perhaps that is why out of the 3 x services I talked about, this one was the least worrysome for me. Restricting reposting does seem to be pretty key to keeping content at a higher 'quality'.
I deleted them, but eventually I made new accounts. Sometimes I just really need to get in touch with someone via Facebook or Instagram, though not many WhatsApp users in my sphere.
I hardly ever use them, but sometimes it comes in handy.
For example, at least twice I found someone's wallet or ID and was able to contact them quickly using Facebook, because their name was the same.
> Telegram is by far a superior product to WhatsApp.
For one simple reason: bots.
One of my Raspberry Pi projects is a bot to delete from the family group any post containing the name of politicians. This wiped out political flame-wars and fake news.
It is very easy to make Telegram bots. You basically create a website, register it in a dynamic dns, add an ssh certificate (letsencrypt or your own) and add it to your group.
It is not a perfect solution, sometimes people send images with political memes. For these I made another bot that temporarily puts the offender under quarantine.
Also, remember to use regular expressions to filter out common letter substituions. So, in Brazil, to filter out our very stupid president (Bolsonaro) I use: b[0o][1l][5s][0o]n[a4]r[0o]
I'm in a similar boat to the author and have also recently deleted my Facebook and Instagram account - although I'll note that the sneaky "to be deleted" state is now 30 days instead of just 7.
But, similar to the author, I'm having more difficulty getting rid of WhatsApp. This is my primary means of communicating with friends and family all over the world. And for some of them I know it's just not an option to try get them to switch to another platform, especially since I'm not sure which is the better platform. In my opinion, WhatsApp strikes the perfect balance of security and usability. Telegram makes me nervous due to the Russian roots and the numerous security concerns I've read online. Signal is overly secure to the point that usability for regular folk suffers (I've personally had terrible experience with their support after losing a bunch of SMS messages.) Matrix, Riot, MatterMost, and many other opensource apps all look good but not overly user-friendly for novices.
Durov (Telegram) had a fallout with Russian government elite who raided his business and now lives in exile in UK (last time I checked). He has no direct links to KGB. Indirect - who knows.
Also security issues, lack of privacy, lack of proper encryption, censorship, etc. among a long trail of reasons.
Also whatsapp founder quitting and leaving 850millions dollars on the table doing so over the way facebook makes money out of whatsapp and for th way facebook made him mislead the european commission to have them green light the sale of whatsapp to facebook.
He also called repeatedly for people to get rid of Facebook services.
The fun part is that whatsapp is actually preventing people like from communicating with friends and family.
My phone happens to a smartphone that's not running windows/apple/google so whatsapp never bother to release for this phone.
Whatsapp being a walled garden it prevents everyone from the outside from reaching people jailed inside.
As you do not have a data plan, I have no internet access with this pocket computer we use as telephone.
Whatsapp is utterly pointless and useless to me, and coherent with facebook way of doing things it actively prevents me from contacting other people, which is shocking to me who grew accustomed to thing like email, jabber or sms .
The amount of people without a "Microsoft/Apple/Google smartphone" (ie. not running iOS, Android, or Windows Phone [sic]) is very low in absolute and relative numbers. You might run say Sailfish OS, they have an Android emulator. Backwards compatibility is extremely important in the software ecosystem.
It's tough for me to get rid of facebook these days, purely because of FB marketplace. It has almost completely eliminated craigslist in my area for a lot of used items and is significantly nicer to buy/sell things in your area.
I got rid of the timeline by unfollowing _everyone_. Timeline is completely empty. It's bliss
There are other local marketplace platforms, such as OfferUp, that offer the same experience as Facebook Marketplace without tracking users as severely as Facebook does.
But if nobody is using it in the area you live in, those platforms don't help you. The fact that such software exists isn't what brings the value to users, it's the fact that other people use it that you want to interact with. The term for this phenomenon is "network effect", and Facebook just simply buys up tons of platforms that have network effects.
In my area, OfferUp has a significantly larger selection of items than Facebook Marketplace. If you mainly use Facebook Marketplace, it's worth looking at OfferUp, Letgo, or other local marketplaces to see if that's the case for your location.
This is a big issue for lots of people who use the platform for business, or the marketplace. I guess I'm lucky that I was not using FB for any of those purposes and so I had little trouble removing it from my life.
people said the same thing about smoking 80 years ago and here we are. I'm not sure appealing to the prevailing common sense on long term issues of public health or socio-economics is particularly relevant.
Facebook intentionally made about 400,000 feel sad/depressed on purpose. They bragged that they had 'informed consent' to perform psychological experiments on all Facebook users simply because you joined the site and agreed to their long legalese T&C.
Maybe the rest of the world feels better on Facebook. But that will only last until Facebook randomly decides one day to throw them into a depression.
> Facebook intentionally made about 400,000 feel sad/depressed on purpose. They bragged that they had 'informed consent' to perform psychological experiments on all Facebook users simply because you joined the site and agreed to their long legalese T&C.
As a certified clinical research professional (CCRP), this is pretty outrageous to hear. Might be an interesting discussion for one of our upcoming glorified journal club roundtables. TY!
I never personally felt depressed when using these platforms in the past. In my post I suggest that those who may not necessarily understand the unfair comparisons they make of themselves versus other people's 'picture perfect' life could be negatively affected.
For me the issue was more about my data being used to serve ads back to me, and being disgruntled over all the outrageous things they were allowing to happen across the platform.
I agree. Reading HN/Reddit it seems that FB is dying any minute now (for past couple of years), in reality they are still growing.
Beside couple of people, everybody else from my social circle seem to be just fine using FB (and others). Though there's definitely more usage of Instagram than FB nowadays (FB Messenger is still super popular)
Scientifically, it's not a robust conclusion. The kind of person who wants to delete FB etc is the kind of person who will feel better after they do it.
Personally, I just use FB in a pretty restricted way. I unfollow most friends unless they post stuff I like engaging with. I give FB the bare minimum of my own personal data, and block all the ads they serve. I mostly post questions for discussion, rather than highlights of my life.
I don't use Insta, although I'm considering it. Lots of friends have described really fun, healthy little communities they're part of. (I still think of Instagram as a photography community, which is how old I am.)
I don't use WhatsApp by choice, but occasionally it's someone else's preferred way to communicate. I don't have a problem with it.
Years ago. I mean, ostensibly, it is still about sharing photos. But originally, it was more about "I took a really nice photo of something in the world, and I'd like you to see it". Now most of the photos are selfies, or otherwise express the personality of the poster, and it isn't about "photography" per se.
> I don't use WhatsApp by choice, but occasionally it's someone else's preferred way to communicate. I don't have a problem with it.
I think this is a good point, just like you are expecting people to contact you on telegram there must be some people who would like you to contact them on whataspp.
On the contrary, _refusing_ to honor others' choice walled garden may eventually make it enough of a problem to warrant renewed efforts towards interoperability.
For me the biggest thing was:
If you feel bad/less when you watch somebodies vacation or achievements, you are using social media wrong/in a hurtful way.
Comparing yourself against a polished virtual image of someone just makes you unhappy.
I used Facebook pretty early on and still have my account but login less then once per month now.
> It started with an urge to delete Facebook around 3 years ago.
This. It's the same problem as when participants self-select into a study. They have different motivations than the average person.
I'm just making the point that if you are persuaded by this article to also get off FB (because it made his life better), you might be disappointed, because you weren't already dissatisfied with FB.
People who get sad looking at other people's lives on Instagram are likely so emotionally fragile that they'd probably get sad reading a book about other people's lives.
Burn all books.
"I burned my books, magazines, and eReaders and I FEEL FUCKING AMAZING OH MY GOD IF YOU COULD EXPERIENCE THIS LEVEL OF PURE UNADULTERATED JOY AND CONTENTMENT YOU WOULD SHIT YOURSELF."
False equivalence. Images and written text have different effects on the brain and emotions. You follow famous people on social media, who have 1,000x your wealth, travel all the time, get adequate sleep, meals, and exercise -- and it can chip away at your self-worth in a way books just can't.
If someone else's good fortune makes you feel bad, this is a problem with you that you need to remedy in yourself, not a problem with the fact that other people have good fortune.
Sorry, editing to clarify because this sounds unnecessarily combative. What I mean is your self-worth should not be externally determined by where you stand in some (mostly imaginary) ranking system compared to random strangers or celebrities, thus it should not be chipped away at by seeing anyone doing better than you in some aspect. This is a crucial skill to learn. You don't have to let your mood and self-worth to be subject to random vagaries of whatever you happen to be looking at at the moment.
Sure, if you are a self-sufficient adult with health and your life more or less in order. But these apps dont prey on that kind of people.They prey on naive teenagers who still are maturing, they prey on technologically clueless senior (and not so senior) citizens who believe everything that is on the Internet, they prey on people disenfranchised, the losers in the dating game in the job market. The mental health damage to those kind of populations is huge.
No, you don't have to wait for everything else in your life to be perfectly arranged in order to take charge of your own feeling of self worth. In fact doing so makes it far less likely that it will ever happen.
This trend of telling people that they are helpless victims of their circumstances comes from a place of compassion, but it is ultimately causing more harm than good. Yes, some things that happen to you, beyond your control, may put you at a disadvantage compared to others. This is not usually insurmountable, and it does not mean that you aren't capable of overcoming it.
Yes pal, let's stop giving preferential treatment to senior citizens, pregnant women, people with disabilities, let all those bastards learn to fend for themselves. The damagce caused by ADA must be estimated in the billions. Lets remove also sex education, those pesky pre-teenagers should learn about how the world works just by their own. Were you fired, lost your insurance and now have cancer? Tough luck. Are you a bipolar person? Just be happy. Were you raped? Bad things happen, just forget it.
You're awfully quick to jump to living in an every-person-for-themself Mad-Max style dystopia. That is a ridiculous straw man.
You can offer sex ed classes, it is up to the kids to pay attention and apply what they teach. Nobody else can learn something for you. You can offer cancer treatments, but people have to show up and stick with them. You can offer therapy and medication, but people still have to go to the therapy and take the meds.
If every time something goes wrong for you, everyone tells you that hey, "there's nothing you could have done", "of course it doesn't work out for you because of X circumstance in your life". Maybe it feels like you're being kind, but you're just robbing them of agency and telling them that they are doomed no matter what. Is your goal to actually make people's lives better, or to make yourself feel better by adhering to some "good person" script?
>Images and written text have different effect on the brain and emotions.
You are right. I agree with you 100%. We are the same, you and me.
BAN ALL Pornography!!!!
Images and text have different effects on the brain and emotions. A young man looking at nudie mags who can't get his wicket bent will turn into a soul-less self-abusing sex-pervert.
Porn will chip away at your self-worth in a way books just can't.
See? Aren't you glad we all agree here, just one big happy family of consensus?
Everyone should stop looking at porn. It is dirty, nasty, stuff and the boobies will turn you into a listless, lazy, loser!
I threw away my Juggs, Fat Ass Weeklys, and Bronzed Bimbos in Bikinis magazines, and felt great since!
Please read this article about how subscribing to Penthouse Magazine is bad for you.
This is incredibly callous and ignorant. Anyone who isn't a sociopath is subject to their emotions being manipulated by the content they view. Puppies make them happy. Dead people make them sad. Same with basically anything in between (but harder to measure small effects). The reason to stop browsing curated feeds designed to deliver advertisements is because these will effect you, and they are likely doing so in a way that is not in your best interest.
Why is everyone responding like I was being sarcastic or facetious? ;-)
You and me are peas in a pod.
"The reason to stop browsing curated feeds designed to deliver advertisements is because these will effect you, and they are likely doing so in a way that is not in your best interest."
That's why you're joining my crusade to get people to stop reading newspapers and magazines, right?
You're so smart, seeing that newspapers and magazines are also "curated feeds designed to deliver advertising likely doing so in a way that is not in your best interest."
Is there some aspect of WhatsApp that I'm missing? The way I use it, it is purely a messaging app. No different than text messages really. How does this get lumped in with Facebook and Instagram? (other than being owned by the same company).
That's it. The clincher for me was when they announced that they would be starting to share user data from WhatsApp with parent company Facebook for ad targeting purposes.
Yes. you are missing the part where it's used for surveillance, for collecting personal data and exploiting it, for giving a false sense of security, and so on.
Basically facebook being facebook and doing facebook things to the people that were escaping its grasp.
Comparing your inside with others' outsides will make you unhappy. It's important to learn not to do that, because it can happen in offline situations too.
Deleting Facebook etc. is not the solution; it seems like the author threw out the baby with the bathwater here.
Facebook is entirely designed around this, being used by facebook without falling to this would mean an incredible mental load and fatigue that would take a toll on your ability to properly function through the day.
Try using Signal side by side with telegram. Telegram has more features but it works the same way as whatsapp. On the other hand signal is trying its best to provide privacy which whatsapp and telegram never do
I think you're being a little harsh on WhatsApp. Although I use Signal personally, I consider WhatsApp to be a good middle. It has more users and features than Signal but also much better privacy than Telegram.
Recently I went to Milan and remembered that I had a good friend there. I tried to reach out to him on Facebook and it turns out that he had deleted his account. I couldn't reach out to him again because I never knew his email, or really had much friends in common. It was pretty sad when I think about it.
I'm happy that with Facebook I can still keep in touch with most of my friends that I made around the world traveling. I end up meeting quite some friends that I haven't seen in decades when I travel.
I understand that some people are unhappy about the downsides of social networks, and Facebook in particular, but I wish more people would realize the upsides as well.
Agreed. Platforms like facebook are very easy to find and contact with old friends, but when people delete the account it becomes 10x tougher to find them again. I wish people improve their self control when it comes to using apps like instagram and facebook.
Wechat/Line/Kakaotalk handle this without the damages of Facebook and the like. At least for KakaoTalk, it's not a "social network" in the same way your contacts list isn't one, but since everyone [in Korea] is on Kakaotalk it makes adding and maintaining friends easy. You don't have to worry about people deleting their accounts because there's nothing -to- delete an account over; it's just a chat app that everyone uses.
It would be nice if there were a similar app in the US with that kind of market share, instead of everything being scattered among various apps, etc.
The only real issue I felt with deleting my facebook was losing access to facebook groups. I was very close to making a burner account to participate in some groups, but I never ended up wanting it that -that- badly as meetup sufficed.
The same reason no one else on these platforms asks for backup contact details...
These platforms make everything so easy, so additively easy, and it's awkward and difficult to ask for methods of contact outside of the platform or even any other kinds of backups.
Almost as difficult as someone who's never used, and refuses to use these platforms.
As someone who clearly saw the shortcomings of facebook from the get go and as a consequence never bother to register, I wonder what are the upsides you mention.
Facebook is mostly a birthday reminder feature hidden in a glorified walled garden email, its whole point is vacuuming personal data and find ways to make as much profit as possible with it.
IMHO email is vastly superior to facebook as it is open and offers interoperability.
You seem to have a healthy relationship with FB. Issue is...FB is actively optimizing the experience to achieve an unhealthy relationship that is effectively an addiction. That’s the evil part.
that's, why I ultimately decided to not delete it (as well as Instagram) - they'll keep their shadow profile anyway. Good idea about unfollowing most people though (some other post herr) - makes visiting it stupid unless to check if someone contacted you/contact someone.
I deleted everything I've posted and stopped logging in and just kept my shell profile as I figured they were keeping a shadow profile on me. I log in an check messages every few months or whenever I randomly remember. I have all notifications turned off because I found they were sending me fake sketchy random notifications to get me to log in more when I stopped logging in, so now I only log in when I choose to.
I still have a FB account strictly to do messaging with a certain group of friends. I would feel great about browsing FB too if it didn't feel so much like I was contributing to the downfall of modern society.
Unfollowing all news sources on Facebook has improved the experience for me. I would see an article, and before long be reading comments from white supremacists and/or SJWs.
Yep, Facebook in my day (I deleted it in 2014), was a lot better. It was just people saying what they did, sharing photos. It seemed a lot less political. And companies weren't fully onboard yet in using their ad campaigns, and politicians weren't either.
Facebook has not changed a bit, it was a glorified birthday reminder capturing as much personal data as possible and it still is.
Well except maybe that at some point it started to aim at replacing the internet on order to keep the investor storytime running, which had the interesting side effect of facebook putting a dictator in power[1].
I have accounts on many platforms, including those 3. If you feel like you can't give something up, that's a good reason to spend a few weeks breaking the addiction.
When I did that for BBC News and 9gag, I decided that I didn't want to go back to reading those sites (although I do click through sometimes from HN).
I still use Facebook messages through mbasic.facebook.com on an old phone. I don't use 3G (or 4G or 5G), but read books on my phone or offline Wikipedia when on the bus. The news feed never interested me; it was all about having contact Lists, organising Events, and discussing topics in common-interest Groups.
WhatsApp won't work on my old iOS 6, so I use it on Bluestacks and check it only when needed. The group chats on there would drive me crazy if they actually made notifications on my phone. Instagram seems to be full of pretty girls and memes, which I guess isn't that different to 9gag in some ways.
Instead of complaining about data being sold, why don't we try to build a better social network? CouchSurfing put up a paywall. The community is moving en-masse to BeWelcome, a donation-funded, volunteer-driven, open-source, ad-free platform.
The BeWelcome site is managed under a French non-profit, BeVolunteer: the same structure as Wikipedia and Wikimedia. I think that other projects could be part of the same organisation. Why stop at hospitality exchange? I think that if BeWelcome can get critical mass, a related site could then break into mainstream social networking.
I'm getting quite sick of reading these blanket templated "I stopped using X and I feel great!" blog posts.
Don't get me wrong, having more freedoms is an extraordinary thing. But everything has a valid use-case, including Facebook. Blanket deleting social media at this point just feels like a cheap-shot to get clicks and overshadows the more realistic benefits such as reconnecting with old friends, talking to tech illiterate family members, etc.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 366 ms ] threadI hope that everyone else isn't addicted to another drug that is called 'Twitter' which one of its side-effects is 'getting the worst out of everyone' and all sorts of nasty media stories spreading over there.
And I'll be honest, although the writing is on the wall, I really don't want that to happen. I like BBS-style forums! But I refuse to subject myself to the dark-pattern morass that is modern social media design.
Moderating some subreddits I feel like I often have to stick with the new reddit design just to use everything properly and it gets annoying having to flip flop back and forth.
My kingdom for more simple text-only craigslist style websites.
Not that that's a defining feature of social media (at least it shouldn't be).
But I would say that traditional forums and ones like this and Slashdot fall within this (somewhat arbitrary) definition:
> Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.
The most efficient way is to infuriate people. Hence the business model of these companies is to have people outraged and infuriated.
This is a similar strategy to using the media spread fear so people consume more. Simply said someone who's happy, live a fulfilling life free of worry does not feel the urge to buy and consume.
persistent identity and status, that is to say the 'social' part. A lot of damage of social networks arguably is rooted in the competition for status and attention that you get when you get twitter likes and people complementing you, and the horror when you end up in a shitstorm and your reputation is suddenly ruined. It's also what makes it addictive.
Most people on HN just seem to post more or less anonymously. The upvote or downvote mechanisms aren't even particularly visible.
The worst thing you get here is 4 downvotes and a heated discussion. This is not like twitter where your career and face is on the line.
Most forums were based around a hobby or a particular subject, and communities formed around that. Sure, you'd have arguments, or someone stepping out of line, easily solved by a moderator. Sometimes moderators got to powerful and people left and joined another or did something else.
Most of my forum days were based on PC building or video games. Most of them had a bunch of boards with varying topics - and possibly a politics one. You could always separate it out easily because it wasn't visible by default.
Social media today everything is visible by default without anonymity. There is no effective way to filter content - only people, or profiles.
I really doubt this. The mask of anonymity completely removes accountability on forums. Pseudonomity is a better approach, along with moderation, and ultimately, a community committed to civil discourse. But the quality of commentary on any forum is a fragile balance, as the evolution of HN has demonstrated.
Accountable to whom? What accountability? Why was this necessary? Accountability wasn't necessary, as most forums were never big enough to really matter. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter are now forces of nature, especially in politics and matters of public opinion.
> Pseudonomity
This has varying degrees of anonymity - you need to further express what you mean by this, because on its own you could support anonymity through pseudonyms.
> and ultimately, a community committed to civil discourse. But the quality of commentary on any forum is a fragile balance, as the evolution of HN has demonstrated.
Yep, something much easier to do on the old forums of yesteryear - they were much smaller, much easier to moderate, and much easier to remediate if they were unfairly moderated.
Accountable to the community represented by the forum itself. Participants in a forum need to have some kind of skin in the game, even if it's based on their pseudonymous identity, which brings us to ...
> Pseudonomity > This has varying degrees of anonymity
By this I mean a consistent identity that has a history, credibility deriving from a track record of adhering to the community standards. It doesn't have to reference your legal identity, but things like the HN "throwaway" drive-by accounts are a problem, IMO, except in rare cases where the individual would take a great personal risk by speaking out even as their pseudonymous identity. But in that case, the bar of evidence for assertions should be very high.
That's pseudonymity, is it not? Otherwise why the quotes around "know"?
There is a difference if you use it to discuss your interests with like minded individuals or if you broadcast to an audience. I think this is why social media mostly works in small groups or why many people on facebook still find groups with limited topics useful even if they hate the rest.
It is also my main gripe with things like SSB or the fediverse. They work much better than other social media, because they encourage smaller, more tight knight communities, but they are often still people focused, not discussion focused.
You control idea by controling the language. It turns the internet is actually the social media and each and every thing online is de facto also a social media.
Email is a social media, a blog is a social media, bbs is a social media, usenet is a social media, a forum is a social media, a wiki is a social media, and so on.
The name social media is a marketing ploy akin to the "cloud" to manipulate opinion and mind into thinking a certain way about large companies whose business is massively collecting user personal data without providing any meaningful service other than sitting in between the people wanting to interact.
It's a good old switcheroo. When you hear "social media" you could actually revert it back to "the internet" as it used be. But when you hear social media you actually think facebook / twitter, which means the marketing ploy succeeded in its attempt of replacing the internet by facebook/twitter.
And it's not only the word, facebook has actually tried to replace the internet in several countries, notably with the facebook basics program outrageously disrespecting net neutrality. But a few companies are also quite literally replacing the internet infrastructure by their own and the decentralized distributed design by a centralized one.
So many important topics are "discussed" on Twitter with the outcomes of these discussions often leading to financial, political or mental ruin. Complex topics such as politics, inequality, racial issues, or gender diversity should never be discussed on Twitter. It's impossible to adequately to condense these complex issues into 240 characters.
it is possible. it's even more so when you there is a picture or a video with a caption.
Only 240 letters for a words alone that offer a nuanced, carefully crafted, fully informative message? Sounds unlikely to me.
A link to some other richer media; maybe.
Couldn't get of WhatsApp, yet, as it's too often the default for friends and family.
These things are useful, and just because they can be misused does not make them any less useful.
However I spent way too much time on it and Facebook is way to hungry for personal data.
Some 8 years ago, Facebook was something that I really enjoyed using. I left way too many friends, close friends, and well, lovers behind. Facebook allowed me to have a healthy relationship with them, even if at a distance.
I went back to Spain on 2010 for the wedding of a close friend, and it was like I've been out of the country for 2 months instead of 2 years, and that was mostly thanks to Facebook.
I can't point exactly at the moment when all that went to shit (May be 5, 6 years ago?) but nowadays FB is a constant string of shitty videos from companies trying to stay afloat, shitty videos made by shitty people, fake news by the thousand - and people adhering to the fake news narrative! - and stupid motivational shit of the kind that really demotivates you, people viciously attacking other people for the stupidest reasons...
I disabled my account some 3 months ago, and I feel much better without it.
Instagram, on the other side, is a different beast. Even with the strong push by FB in order to monetize the network, I think that fact that people can't easily share other people's post, and are kind of forced to post their own material still makes it an interesting place.
As long as instagram does not allow reposting, I think it'll maintain a certain degree of quality.
I also have disabled my insta account, but I do miss the information from the people I was following there (Mostly, artists and crafstmen of all kinds).
Bail. Find an alternative from Europe or Canada instead. Or simply let it go.
What worries me is this is just the start. Wonder how social interactions will be in 50 years...
A few years ago I started actively clicking "not interested" on every type of content that I didn't want to see, and slowly but surely I managed to get rid of all memes, news, and uninteresting bits.
Now I'm left with discussions about AI papers, local events that friends are attending, and updates from friends in other countries. And even then, my feed is so uninteresting that I'm not tempted to scroll through it every day. Of course, this doesn't remove the million other issues with Facebook but at least it doesn't mess with my happiness
Whenever someone posts something annoying, like a string of recycled memes or bad political arguments, I hit that snooze button and they disappear from my feed for 30 days.
In 30 days they've usually calmed down.
That's an interesting observation, this is one of the reasons I don't enjoy Twitter, everything is retweeted (maybe I just don't get it).
I find Instagram to be a bit too addictive though. It feels like an endless magazine of glossy images, which learns what you want to see, to keep you engaged... forever
The code is opensource as well: https://github.com/matthewmorek/blindfold
>As long as instagram does not allow reposting, I think it'll maintain a certain degree of quality.
This is a fascinating insight I never considered. Disabling reposting results in higher quality, higher-effort discourse. Trashy memes and fake news can’t spread as rapidly or at all without the ability to easily, mindlessly repost them millions of times. It’s like a circuit breaker to our lizard brain, forcing us to actually think about what we’re doing instead of thoughtlessly queuing up another dopamine hit with a quick repost.
Even if there might be some people willing to make the effort of re-sharing certain posts, the chain is incredible weaker.
This seems to work pretty well in preventing the spread of bad messages, as a boost of such message will imply that you agree with it. That way you're not getting the typical "look at what this horrible person said" messages.
The features are kept in place, and that's a good thing.
But the other Americas, Europe and Africa are so heavy on it. It really is becoming the platform that you see in Asian countries for business, which Zuck had hoped he could have. Clout and reputation for business is all on whatsapp for many people. Compared to websites and public pages from decades past, which are still indicators of legitimacy in the US. Luxury watch dealers just post on their whatsapp story when something new comes in, and its sold in minutes. At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, people post sneakers they get in stock right onto their story and its a mad dash to obtain it. Professional group chats highly active for private equity deal making and collaboration, organic group chats created on the fly. Location specific group chats existing in perpetuity.
I spend almost all day on it now, out of necessity. And I like how utilitarian it is, it doesn't need to "wow" anyone with UI bells and whistles and they are completely invisible if you are not part of groups that use whatsapp.
I don't like that it forces you to share your phone number, but the etiquette seems self-enforcing. The chat size limit is a blessing and a curse, but they probably shouldn't change it.
Its not about what other chat applications can do, its about what happens.
FWIW at least in my neck of the woods I stopped receiving messages on WhatsApp about 2 or 3 years ago and when I got a new phone in October last year I didn't even install it.
Everyone is on Telegram and while I see people joining Signal all the time, the first time I actually had a conversation with anyone on Signal was a few weeks ago.
I've never been a big Instagram user, but considering one of my big complaints about FB is the prevalence of regurgitated reposted garbage (memes, crap news, chain letter nonsense), I might have to revisit my IG account and see if I can salvage a bit there.
People basically stopped posting to Facebook and it became an endless stream of mindless videos, cutesy images with quotes and supermarkets trying to push offers directly to users (successfully though).
Facebook lost the thing that made it interesting, news about long lost friends and insights into the everyday of the people you know. I'm not sure if it's something Facebook did, or if people just stopped posting.
Regarding Instagram, I never thought about it in this way, and now that you mention it, perhaps that is why out of the 3 x services I talked about, this one was the least worrysome for me. Restricting reposting does seem to be pretty key to keeping content at a higher 'quality'.
What's a good alternative that has a web client at least when you are on desktop + you can video call too?
You can pay $10/month for your own Modular.im Matrix server host and use that with your family (it also funds the devs).
They have Jitsi support for video (you can also just use Jitsi stand alone).
I think signal also has video calling, but not sure about group call support.
Both have mobile and desktop apps. Both are encrypted and ad free. Matrix is federated, but modular.im makes setup easy.
I hardly ever use them, but sometimes it comes in handy.
For example, at least twice I found someone's wallet or ID and was able to contact them quickly using Facebook, because their name was the same.
For one simple reason: bots.
One of my Raspberry Pi projects is a bot to delete from the family group any post containing the name of politicians. This wiped out political flame-wars and fake news.
It is very easy to make Telegram bots. You basically create a website, register it in a dynamic dns, add an ssh certificate (letsencrypt or your own) and add it to your group.
It is not a perfect solution, sometimes people send images with political memes. For these I made another bot that temporarily puts the offender under quarantine.
Also, remember to use regular expressions to filter out common letter substituions. So, in Brazil, to filter out our very stupid president (Bolsonaro) I use: b[0o][1l][5s][0o]n[a4]r[0o]
>Not too big, about 50 people.
Your country has a different definition of "big family" than mine :)
My family WhatsApp is 5 people.
But, similar to the author, I'm having more difficulty getting rid of WhatsApp. This is my primary means of communicating with friends and family all over the world. And for some of them I know it's just not an option to try get them to switch to another platform, especially since I'm not sure which is the better platform. In my opinion, WhatsApp strikes the perfect balance of security and usability. Telegram makes me nervous due to the Russian roots and the numerous security concerns I've read online. Signal is overly secure to the point that usability for regular folk suffers (I've personally had terrible experience with their support after losing a bunch of SMS messages.) Matrix, Riot, MatterMost, and many other opensource apps all look good but not overly user-friendly for novices.
What else is there?
Also security issues, lack of privacy, lack of proper encryption, censorship, etc. among a long trail of reasons.
Also whatsapp founder quitting and leaving 850millions dollars on the table doing so over the way facebook makes money out of whatsapp and for th way facebook made him mislead the european commission to have them green light the sale of whatsapp to facebook. He also called repeatedly for people to get rid of Facebook services.
for exemple this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp_snooping_scandal and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reception_and_criticism_of_Wha...
It's also not related to the Facebook app so it makes no sense.
My phone happens to a smartphone that's not running windows/apple/google so whatsapp never bother to release for this phone. Whatsapp being a walled garden it prevents everyone from the outside from reaching people jailed inside.
As you do not have a data plan, I have no internet access with this pocket computer we use as telephone.
Whatsapp is utterly pointless and useless to me, and coherent with facebook way of doing things it actively prevents me from contacting other people, which is shocking to me who grew accustomed to thing like email, jabber or sms .
I got rid of the timeline by unfollowing _everyone_. Timeline is completely empty. It's bliss
https://offerup.com
-- most of the planet, but you'd never know it by reading HN
Maybe the rest of the world feels better on Facebook. But that will only last until Facebook randomly decides one day to throw them into a depression.
As a certified clinical research professional (CCRP), this is pretty outrageous to hear. Might be an interesting discussion for one of our upcoming glorified journal club roundtables. TY!
-- most of the planet.
I never personally felt depressed when using these platforms in the past. In my post I suggest that those who may not necessarily understand the unfair comparisons they make of themselves versus other people's 'picture perfect' life could be negatively affected.
For me the issue was more about my data being used to serve ads back to me, and being disgruntled over all the outrageous things they were allowing to happen across the platform.
Beside couple of people, everybody else from my social circle seem to be just fine using FB (and others). Though there's definitely more usage of Instagram than FB nowadays (FB Messenger is still super popular)
(not from US)
Personally, I just use FB in a pretty restricted way. I unfollow most friends unless they post stuff I like engaging with. I give FB the bare minimum of my own personal data, and block all the ads they serve. I mostly post questions for discussion, rather than highlights of my life.
I don't use Insta, although I'm considering it. Lots of friends have described really fun, healthy little communities they're part of. (I still think of Instagram as a photography community, which is how old I am.)
I don't use WhatsApp by choice, but occasionally it's someone else's preferred way to communicate. I don't have a problem with it.
Wait what? When did that change? I must be old too...
I think this is a good point, just like you are expecting people to contact you on telegram there must be some people who would like you to contact them on whataspp.
I used Facebook pretty early on and still have my account but login less then once per month now.
This. It's the same problem as when participants self-select into a study. They have different motivations than the average person.
I'm just making the point that if you are persuaded by this article to also get off FB (because it made his life better), you might be disappointed, because you weren't already dissatisfied with FB.
Burn all books.
"I burned my books, magazines, and eReaders and I FEEL FUCKING AMAZING OH MY GOD IF YOU COULD EXPERIENCE THIS LEVEL OF PURE UNADULTERATED JOY AND CONTENTMENT YOU WOULD SHIT YOURSELF."
Sorry, editing to clarify because this sounds unnecessarily combative. What I mean is your self-worth should not be externally determined by where you stand in some (mostly imaginary) ranking system compared to random strangers or celebrities, thus it should not be chipped away at by seeing anyone doing better than you in some aspect. This is a crucial skill to learn. You don't have to let your mood and self-worth to be subject to random vagaries of whatever you happen to be looking at at the moment.
This trend of telling people that they are helpless victims of their circumstances comes from a place of compassion, but it is ultimately causing more harm than good. Yes, some things that happen to you, beyond your control, may put you at a disadvantage compared to others. This is not usually insurmountable, and it does not mean that you aren't capable of overcoming it.
You can offer sex ed classes, it is up to the kids to pay attention and apply what they teach. Nobody else can learn something for you. You can offer cancer treatments, but people have to show up and stick with them. You can offer therapy and medication, but people still have to go to the therapy and take the meds.
If every time something goes wrong for you, everyone tells you that hey, "there's nothing you could have done", "of course it doesn't work out for you because of X circumstance in your life". Maybe it feels like you're being kind, but you're just robbing them of agency and telling them that they are doomed no matter what. Is your goal to actually make people's lives better, or to make yourself feel better by adhering to some "good person" script?
You are right. I agree with you 100%. We are the same, you and me.
BAN ALL Pornography!!!!
Images and text have different effects on the brain and emotions. A young man looking at nudie mags who can't get his wicket bent will turn into a soul-less self-abusing sex-pervert.
Porn will chip away at your self-worth in a way books just can't.
See? Aren't you glad we all agree here, just one big happy family of consensus?
Everyone should stop looking at porn. It is dirty, nasty, stuff and the boobies will turn you into a listless, lazy, loser!
I threw away my Juggs, Fat Ass Weeklys, and Bronzed Bimbos in Bikinis magazines, and felt great since!
Please read this article about how subscribing to Penthouse Magazine is bad for you.
Why is everyone responding like I was being sarcastic or facetious? ;-)
You and me are peas in a pod.
"The reason to stop browsing curated feeds designed to deliver advertisements is because these will effect you, and they are likely doing so in a way that is not in your best interest."
That's why you're joining my crusade to get people to stop reading newspapers and magazines, right?
You're so smart, seeing that newspapers and magazines are also "curated feeds designed to deliver advertising likely doing so in a way that is not in your best interest."
Opinion Brothers (or Siblings!)
*high five
Basically facebook being facebook and doing facebook things to the people that were escaping its grasp.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/25/whatsapp-to-share-user-dat...
edit: Here's some better links from @bigbugbag down below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp_snooping_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reception_and_criticism_of_Wha...
Deleting Facebook etc. is not the solution; it seems like the author threw out the baby with the bathwater here.
getting rid of facebook is the right move here.
I'm happy that with Facebook I can still keep in touch with most of my friends that I made around the world traveling. I end up meeting quite some friends that I haven't seen in decades when I travel.
I understand that some people are unhappy about the downsides of social networks, and Facebook in particular, but I wish more people would realize the upsides as well.
Facebook in 2010 was what we all loved. It's garbage now, and we all know it.
It would be nice if there were a similar app in the US with that kind of market share, instead of everything being scattered among various apps, etc.
The only real issue I felt with deleting my facebook was losing access to facebook groups. I was very close to making a burner account to participate in some groups, but I never ended up wanting it that -that- badly as meetup sufficed.
not really, nobody use these apps outside of their respective countries
When you outsource you usually lose in resiliency.
These platforms make everything so easy, so additively easy, and it's awkward and difficult to ask for methods of contact outside of the platform or even any other kinds of backups.
Almost as difficult as someone who's never used, and refuses to use these platforms.
Facebook is mostly a birthday reminder feature hidden in a glorified walled garden email, its whole point is vacuuming personal data and find ways to make as much profit as possible with it.
IMHO email is vastly superior to facebook as it is open and offers interoperability.
And perhaps too bad actors weren't involved.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodri...
Behind the scenes FB was nefarious then and now.
When I did that for BBC News and 9gag, I decided that I didn't want to go back to reading those sites (although I do click through sometimes from HN).
I still use Facebook messages through mbasic.facebook.com on an old phone. I don't use 3G (or 4G or 5G), but read books on my phone or offline Wikipedia when on the bus. The news feed never interested me; it was all about having contact Lists, organising Events, and discussing topics in common-interest Groups.
WhatsApp won't work on my old iOS 6, so I use it on Bluestacks and check it only when needed. The group chats on there would drive me crazy if they actually made notifications on my phone. Instagram seems to be full of pretty girls and memes, which I guess isn't that different to 9gag in some ways.
Instead of complaining about data being sold, why don't we try to build a better social network? CouchSurfing put up a paywall. The community is moving en-masse to BeWelcome, a donation-funded, volunteer-driven, open-source, ad-free platform.
The BeWelcome site is managed under a French non-profit, BeVolunteer: the same structure as Wikipedia and Wikimedia. I think that other projects could be part of the same organisation. Why stop at hospitality exchange? I think that if BeWelcome can get critical mass, a related site could then break into mainstream social networking.
Don't get me wrong, having more freedoms is an extraordinary thing. But everything has a valid use-case, including Facebook. Blanket deleting social media at this point just feels like a cheap-shot to get clicks and overshadows the more realistic benefits such as reconnecting with old friends, talking to tech illiterate family members, etc.