The alternatives only suck because we've been made lazy by the seeming ease with which social media facilitates human contact and interaction. Yes, you absolutely should delete social media, and yes, making an effort with people will feel like hard work. But it will be worth it.
I personally think sites like HN and Reddit are better forms of social media because they don't necessarily try to replace the contact you should have with friends and family. If I interacted with friends on Facebook, I felt like I'd already done enough with/for them, and left it at that. Without it, I make more of an effort to stay in touch. But at least on HN, this isn't a replacement for my friend circle, it's just more of an interest group that provides some interesting reading and conversations.
> they don't necessarily try to replace the contact you should have with friends and family
They may not aim to replace those interactions but they definately eat in to what would otherwise be friend or family time for a lot of people. I personally find reddit too negative for my taste but HN strikes a good balance, on the whole I would probably be better off if i limited my time here.
But what if those friends and family that are immediately nearby don't share the same interest? Seems healthy(ish) to peruse the interactions that you find interesting/stimulating similar to reading a book/magazine or playing a video game.
As someone who quit social media a couple of years ago, I would say, yes, you should quit social media (regardless of whether that's the question). It is wonderful for one's mental health.
It's true that you will lose a lot of connections, but you will manage to stay in touch with the people that matter.
I wouldn't consider HN social media, but instead a news aggregator with a robust comment section. These things existed long before the emergence of social-media networks.
Who am I? Who are you? We don't know. There are no friends, connections, or personal details shared. Interactions are fleeting and temporary.
Reading and writing HN comments can suck as much time as social media. I'd say if it sucks too much time for your taste, quit. If it doesn't, good for you.
Time spent is not the only consideration. Consider how the app is affecting one's psychology. Consider how addictive patterns and the so-called attention economy are changing people's attention spans, patterns of behavior, and thinking.
And..having friends on here would be somehow bad?..
I like Clay Shirky's definition of social media, (something like) a website where the users create the content, where the thing wouldn't exist in the same way without the users. But the definition of the word doesn't really matter, I guess. I'm just not sure why not having friends here makes it "ok", and why if you made friends here you'd have to quit because of your policy/your identity as "someone who quit social media years ago".
For what it's worth, my experience is the opposite. The vast majority of negative psychological triggers I see in my online life are on HN, not facebook or twitter or reddit.
> I think everyone can agree there is a dramatic difference between a website like Facebook and a website like HN
No we cannot all agree on that! For one I completely disagree. Also I 100% consider HN social media. It checks all the boxes the way I see it.
Well, I'm not the vast majority hehe. On FB I just chat with my friends around the world and sometimes while doing that, look at their pictures of what they've been up to. It's so nice. My friends are amazing. I've no idea why everyone acts like you are forced to look at your "news feed" on FB.
On here, it's all-too-frequent crazy/nasty/snarky/jerk comments. Yes, negative psychological triggers is a good way of putting it! Like the other day[0] I found the people from the US claiming Australians wouldn't have to put up with the lockdown if we only had guns, really disturbing. Then yesterday, the guy who's surprised when people move to Australia, because the people there are ok with censorship[1]. When I discovered !!Con after being on HN a lot it was like "OMG, there are places where programmers congregate and it's actually fun, joyous, positive and supportive!" haha.
HN is topical, you’re sharing an interest in a public forum that is mostly civil. You might notice my name and recall to avoid or pay attention to.
A “friend” is different, because it creates and incentive for the platform to do something about that graph connection. I don’t HN cares at all whether we’ve ever been associated with each other.
In my experience, Hacker News lacks cults of personality, even small ones like in a friend circle. When I read the comments, I never read the username or timestamp, or votes, because it all looks like boring meta data. Even the back and forth comments can be read on their merit without noticing who's talking.
In total, there's hardly any social pressure.
Adding to the other commenters, I find hacker news similar in form to Reddit. Anonymous-ish aggregators without personal relationships. But it can still be toxic like social media. I didn’t quit social media because I was seeing my friends do cool things. I quit it because it was addictive and because it is stressful to read too many comments and opinions about politics. Those toxic aspects are also present in Reddit and HN, even if they aren’t social media sites per se. HN is a bit better because it’s not deliberately addictive like others, but it’s still extremely easy for HN to be one of the feeds you scroll through addictively in your free time.
Twitter in particular is a drug, most normalized among gen Z.
I don’t think anyone should use large social media platforms unless they rigorously curate their feeds, and limit their interaction to positive sum games.
Twitter is best used as a content aggregator where you follow a few elite accounts and consume their wisdom. Don’t get dragged into tribal fights over politics or darwinian fitness signaling.
It’s monkey games all the way down but we have the freedom not to play them.
I appreciate this essay and I think your observation is true, broadly speaking. However one thing I find consistently lacking from the “digital minimalism” space is recognition of the things that social media has eliminated or made harder. The pandemic has compounded this problem. It’s not just that using social media for relationships is individually easier—it’s that the network effects eventually make it so that social infrastructure moves online and eliminates non-digital avenues for community. The logistics of IRL meetups are an enormous hurdle compared to instantaneous online communication, so people just…stop doing IRL events. My friends and family lead busy lives and rely on social media to maintain relationships because the alternative social infrastructure simply does not exist. It’s like car ownership—more cars makes city planning revolve around cars, undermines the critical mass for public transit, and makes everything that ISN’T car-based more difficult. It’s not just a matter of personal choice at that point, but of commons.
I really don't think this is true anymore at least in my generation. I'm in my late 20s and my family and friends really don't seem to post much content anymore on social media after graduating college. It's pretty much for consumption of memes and other internet content and could be cut out easily since its a time sink, vs years ago when people were much more active and no one ever followed commercial accounts or people they didn't personally know. These days I just call and text people, way less friction and I have everyone's number I care about.
I'm also in my late 20's, and my core friend group still coordinates via Messenger and FB Events. Much easier to send a mass invite, including people you aren't too close to, when IRL meetups finally do occur. Not to mention the event reminders, and timeline cards that say x is attending y this Saturday for the network effect to do its thing.
Probably just depends on the group. I haven't used facebook events since undergrad for university sponsored events or off campus parties with like 300 people. I've never had a friend set up their own for a smaller event. If there was a birthday party coming up we'd just text people who are in town and see if they are available that weekend or something. We are in our late 20s now and live across the country, and if you can get 6 friends together to make time out of their increasingly complicated lives to hang out on a specific day, you chalk that up to a big win. Curious, how do your friends use events? For things like birthday parties or even informal hanging out?
I agree… in my life iMessage and text threads replaced social media. Facebook is something I check out once in awhile, I only reactivated recently to share some pictures from a wedding and to share some news of a loved one’s death.
Otherwise it sucks. You can’t discuss anything without some rando friend of friends friend butting in with some sort of nonsense. It’s like going to the middle school dance… everyone lurks except for a minority who like to disrupt or like attention.
Yup, the only things I see on facebook other than 90% sponsored posts that creep in even if I don't follow the pages, generally are wedding photos and people dying. It just makes me feel old now. I just log in maybe once every two weeks for no longer than 30 seconds to see if I need to respond to a cat video my aunt or mother might have sent me.
I see a lot of these sentiments that "nobody posts much any more" - is it true that they actually don't post much, or is it just that most people are now aware of online privacy and the long-term risks of public posting? Maybe everyone's posting a heap to their inner circle but nothing publicly?
I only see people post for something like if they or a close relative gets married now to be honest, so it doesn't seem to be a privacy thing but a lack of caring to post so much like one did in highschool. Maybe its just a part of growing up where you stop craving that sort of validation and are more focused on your real world personal life.
Similar to sibling comment, but from a slightly older perspective as I approach 40.
It seems that people in my circles just don’t use anything any more, at least that I can see. Most who aren’t really techy or political have abandoned or never adopted Twitter. Facebook gets a few photos of first days of school and vacation. Instagram gets the same but more of it, and occasional food pics.
But it seems that most actual communications isn’t public anymore. It’s all silo’d off into various instant message groups, mostly just over text message. Perhaps it’s just aging out, and not sharing as much or people feeling like their life experiences aren’t worth sharing to broader audiences. Whatever the cause, my Internet experience used to be so much about connecting and communicating with people (almost all of which I knew in person), and these days it’s just a much quieter place.
Though I’ll admit that could just be middle age bias. A lot of priorities change for a lot of people and your 30s can be a slog with the combination of young kids and aging parents.
I know my grandparents used to send a Christmas letter to all their friends and family updating everyone on their life for the previous year, births and deaths, victories and defeats, interesting travels, etc. I’d love to see similar things from the people who I still very much care about even if I don’t get to see them in person much these days.
This is my experience as well, with the difference that almost all my friends are techie. Most have eschewed social media from the start, for the same reason why some airline mechanics don't fly - they know too much about what can go wrong.
We use Signal and text messaging almost exclusively.
> Whatever the cause, my Internet experience used to be so much about connecting and communicating with people
Maybe as we get older, we realize that whatever it was we were doing on social media, it wasn't actually connecting with people. Whatever these companies' mission statements say about "building community" and "bringing the world closer together" and "connecting people," it's not actually what their products are doing, and people are finally wising up and realizing this.
I haven't been on social media for probably a decade. I'm no less "connected" to my family or community or events than someone who is on it. It's not really doing what they claim it's doing.
Maybe as we get older, we realize that whatever it was we were doing on social media, it wasn't actually connecting with people.
Before social media you’d sign up to forums and talk to people with similar interests. The smaller communities and purposeful writing was much better. Now it’s just a cesspool of ads and spammers. These platforms are still useful if you highly limit your usage.
I find the best way to use facebook is to join the useful community groups but otherwise do nothing of consequence. Maybe you post a holiday shot of a landscape so your friends in other countries know you’re alive. Otherwise simply don’t engage and sandbox Facebook.
Twitter is fine if you use it more like a news feed. Follow John Carmack or other people with interesting things to say. Again, don’t engage with the platform. It best when smart people send out ideas.
I guess the next space to watch out for is teleconferencing. How long can they provide a free service for personal use?
While there's certainly some truth to what you say, I think it's also very true that social media platforms used to be much more about connecting people. That's how they got their start.
Then they began to be corrupted by the insatiable search for ever-growing revenue.
yeh most of my friends or at least people i am interested in following don't post much compared to several years ago. those who do are usually techies or people in sales trying to push their agendas
I wouldn't call instant messaging "social media". I see a fundamental differences between the 1:1 (or 1:n where n isn't that high) bidirectional communications and the 1:world fundamentally one-way principle of Twitter and the likes. Yes I know it happens you get replies but I'd say that's less expected (and less happening). So while you use the one for exchanging infos, you use the other for... advertising? And the latter is less important.
I’m barely on any “social” websites other than HN. Getting off Twitter was great. But almost all my friends are on Telegram. They are all over the world and many I’ve known for years. The heat death of the universe is going to happen sooner than me giving up instant messaging.
I feel like some of these articles need context or the author has completely different circumstances than I do.
You dont quit an addiction, you replace it with something else.
But social media is different. It's a reality show in which you re the unpaid actor, a replaceable lab rat. If you feel that, living your whole life oblivious under a painted dome (like in the Truman Show) by getting rewarded with likes is an OK life, then maybe you should grow up. In the end, Truman chose to get out.
My view is that it's not. Especially with the advent of video in social media, and with so many people joining we ve regressed to the mean and below. FB & IG are basically a 24 hour reality show or 24 hour home videos, not quality programming. The news are now made from self-reported tweets without cross-checks. and clickbait videos are gradually increasing the noise in youtube, a paid platform. the world's biggest forums (reddit+twitter) are severely narrowminded. Maintaining a nuanced community requires dedicated effort and expenditure (like HN does).
As always on the internet, after the initial panspermia came a period of severe winner-take-all consolidation into monoculture. I m not sure if it would be different in an alternate timeline where the ad money was going to media companies.
> You dont quit an addiction, you replace it with something else
Not true. Some things are habit forming, like cigarettes or really fun books or games. The same is true for social media. All addictions must start at some point.
I think one effect not often mentioned is the particular pairing of social media with smartphones, where the smartphone is the key agent of change, not social media.
In the very early stages of social media, say the era of blogs, MySpace, and forums like these, there were no smartphones.
People would live their normal lives during the day, and perhaps reserve an hour or so of "computer time". Where they physically sit behind a desktop with a keyboard. So for some 90% of the day, they were not distracted by anything, and during computer time, they would find themselves using a device very suitable for deep engagement. On a desktop, it's easy enough to read deep content and to respond at length.
With the arrival of smartphones, social media are with you 100% of the time. It may interfere with your important time (your work, your sleep), but if not that, at the very least it will suck up any spare moment that you used to spent on just being bored or waiting for something.
And as we know, this still is only the basic consequence. It may affect one's relationships, distort their politics, cause depression, and replace healthy physical activities, as the article mentions.
Besides the smartphone intruding on your life non-stop, there's the issue that smartphones really suck. They are poor reading devices and even worse engagement devices.
So content has to be snack-sized. A tweet. A 6 second video. Preferably vertical, to save me from the massive effort of turning my phone. And auto-play, as I don't want to hit next or scroll. This trend of escalating effortless consumption turns into disturbing deficiencies in people. Not being able to focus on anything for any stretch of time.
As an engagement device, it has to be simple too. A like, a heart, and a one-line comment at best, full of typos. Because you can't really type well on a smartphone. So deep engagement is dead, replaced with status (likes, retweets).
This combination of effects (100% with you, snack-size content, poor engagement) can all be attributed to the smartphone specifically, in combination with social media. Not social media in itself.
There was an interesting experiment when I took my niece (18 yo) on a 3 week trip through a tropical nation with basically no connectivity at all. She's the stereotypical ultra addict, glued to her phone all day. Interestingly, not a single sign of withdrawal when offline. She was fine, happy, fully engaged in the real world activities, and not a single complaint.
But then, wherever we would return to a place with a gateway to the online world, all hope was lost again. We don't exist. The country does not exist. Dinner is a distraction. Nothing exists but the phone.
Of course I wondered what was it that she missed, that takes hours to catch up with? Actually, I didn't have to wonder as she explained it by pushing her phone in my face about 30 times per hour.
To show what? A meme. A funny video. Not even good ones, just pure low effort pulp garbage.
My friend is an entrepreneur, running some e-commerce warehouses. He stopped hiring young people. They take 30 minute dumps, 3 times a day. He's made clear policies regarding excessive smartphone usage and still finds them hiding behind shelves on their phones.
Great point! Would social media be the massive societal ill that it is without smartphones and wireless Internet everywhere? Without it being in people's pockets all day beeping and buzzing notifications at them, constantly trying to engage them? If we had to carve out a few hours at night for "computer time" like we used to, would it be so toxic?
I'd say the level of toxicity of current social media would simply not be possible in a scenario of dramatically reduced usage. Far less would be posted, it wouldn't spread so instantly, and so on.
The smartphone will invent ways to disrupt you all day. Even if there were no social media, it would be a video game, a stock trading app, whichever. It's a brand new capability to be able to reach all people all day, and it will be used.
There's a reason Merlin is so grumpy in so many portrayals of the character.
Imagine that you are compelled to solve problems, and that you loathe interacting with other human beings, and that you occasionally are lonely. That's why we have hermits, and that's why towns put up their hermits in a house about a mile away. You put them far enough away that they can't hear you enjoying yourself, but close enough so that you can bring them serious problems
Which problems are serious? The ones that give everyone else nightmares trying to even think about — or at least are worth a 2 mile round trip walk and a picnic basket full of delicious food.
Even grumpy old hermits get lonely for human company and variety in food sometimes. They just resent showing it because everyone will make a loud racket and give them hugs and eugh it's just the worst.
Social media, the Internet, BBSes, these all allow satisfying the instinct for human connection without the awfulness of dealing with actual real people very much of the time. Finding a way to make that satisfying and net valuable to you and/or others is the hard work. It doesn't necessarily require giving it up, but it absolutely does require being honest with yourself about whether you're getting a payoff that's worth the price.
HN is one of those social media. It comes with the same problems. But people are good at mental gymnastics and convinced themselves that it's different.
So, what are the alternative to Social Media? What if we expand to include TV? Actually "TV" is so 1999; these are all wrong question, the correct question is:
This is a shallow and poorly written article that doesn't begin to address the issues confronting us. We are being replatformed as a society. Tech companies are addicting us to new ways of connecting. Those same media are sometimes necessary to do our jobs; i.e., the food we are addicted to is also the food we need to survive. Making relapse inevitable.
America, and especially its behaviorally addicted youth, are losing hours per day and hundreds of years of their lives to this crap. And it's not as easy as just saying "I learned to love the difficulty of connecting offline." I don't believe that.
What we need is a modern version of AA to march people through the 12 steps towards a dopamine landscape that is less stimulating.
I quit Facebook years ago when I finally brought myself to acknowledge that most of the people I was subjected to in my “feed” were not only not my friends, but many of them I actively disliked as they grew into their ways. I made a point not to extend any olive branches. The few real friends I had on Facebook would always just text anyway.
Prior to reading this two days earlier I just deleted my social media profile except Twitter for news or updates. I already feel better and I realise now how much of my time was being utilised in social media as a user.
Read books, paint, draw, exercise, play music, listen to music, yoga, meditate, ring your mum and dad, re-arrange rooms, clean, cook, learn to cook, plant something, go camping, ride a bike, fix a bike, walk, take photos whilst walking...etc, etc
> Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce. The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium. At present people in search of pleasure naturally tend to congregate in large herds and to make a noise; in future their natural tendency will be to seek solitude and quiet.
Read books, paint, draw, exercise, play music, listen to music, yoga, meditate, ring your mum and dad, re-arrange rooms, clean, cook, learn to cook, plant something, go camping, ride a bike, fix a bike, walk, take photos whilst walking...etc, etc
66 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadI personally think sites like HN and Reddit are better forms of social media because they don't necessarily try to replace the contact you should have with friends and family. If I interacted with friends on Facebook, I felt like I'd already done enough with/for them, and left it at that. Without it, I make more of an effort to stay in touch. But at least on HN, this isn't a replacement for my friend circle, it's just more of an interest group that provides some interesting reading and conversations.
They may not aim to replace those interactions but they definately eat in to what would otherwise be friend or family time for a lot of people. I personally find reddit too negative for my taste but HN strikes a good balance, on the whole I would probably be better off if i limited my time here.
It's true that you will lose a lot of connections, but you will manage to stay in touch with the people that matter.
Who am I? Who are you? We don't know. There are no friends, connections, or personal details shared. Interactions are fleeting and temporary.
I like Clay Shirky's definition of social media, (something like) a website where the users create the content, where the thing wouldn't exist in the same way without the users. But the definition of the word doesn't really matter, I guess. I'm just not sure why not having friends here makes it "ok", and why if you made friends here you'd have to quit because of your policy/your identity as "someone who quit social media years ago".
The vast majority of the negative psychological triggers, for example, associated with a platform like Facebook, are missing from HN.
> I think everyone can agree there is a dramatic difference between a website like Facebook and a website like HN
No we cannot all agree on that! For one I completely disagree. Also I 100% consider HN social media. It checks all the boxes the way I see it.
It's much easier for me to forget the people here on HN, there's no "follow", there's not pictures, there's just ad hoc comments with random people.
I don't build a relationship with people here. I just read text.
On here, it's all-too-frequent crazy/nasty/snarky/jerk comments. Yes, negative psychological triggers is a good way of putting it! Like the other day[0] I found the people from the US claiming Australians wouldn't have to put up with the lockdown if we only had guns, really disturbing. Then yesterday, the guy who's surprised when people move to Australia, because the people there are ok with censorship[1]. When I discovered !!Con after being on HN a lot it was like "OMG, there are places where programmers congregate and it's actually fun, joyous, positive and supportive!" haha.
[0] For reference. Actually reading all these comments is not recommended. What a shitfight. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28451066
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28452423
A “friend” is different, because it creates and incentive for the platform to do something about that graph connection. I don’t HN cares at all whether we’ve ever been associated with each other.
I left Twitter and LinkedIn this year which were my main vices. Probably 70k reasonably organic connections down the drain.
However, I feel much happier and relaxed and have better relationships online and offline with a smaller group of people.
Would definetly recommend binning social media. It’s a toxic time sink.
I don’t think anyone should use large social media platforms unless they rigorously curate their feeds, and limit their interaction to positive sum games.
Twitter is best used as a content aggregator where you follow a few elite accounts and consume their wisdom. Don’t get dragged into tribal fights over politics or darwinian fitness signaling.
It’s monkey games all the way down but we have the freedom not to play them.
Otherwise it sucks. You can’t discuss anything without some rando friend of friends friend butting in with some sort of nonsense. It’s like going to the middle school dance… everyone lurks except for a minority who like to disrupt or like attention.
It seems that people in my circles just don’t use anything any more, at least that I can see. Most who aren’t really techy or political have abandoned or never adopted Twitter. Facebook gets a few photos of first days of school and vacation. Instagram gets the same but more of it, and occasional food pics.
But it seems that most actual communications isn’t public anymore. It’s all silo’d off into various instant message groups, mostly just over text message. Perhaps it’s just aging out, and not sharing as much or people feeling like their life experiences aren’t worth sharing to broader audiences. Whatever the cause, my Internet experience used to be so much about connecting and communicating with people (almost all of which I knew in person), and these days it’s just a much quieter place.
Though I’ll admit that could just be middle age bias. A lot of priorities change for a lot of people and your 30s can be a slog with the combination of young kids and aging parents.
I know my grandparents used to send a Christmas letter to all their friends and family updating everyone on their life for the previous year, births and deaths, victories and defeats, interesting travels, etc. I’d love to see similar things from the people who I still very much care about even if I don’t get to see them in person much these days.
As for your grandparents things, dont worry, when you ll worry abt being irrelevant, you'll send the postcards too :)
We use Signal and text messaging almost exclusively.
Maybe as we get older, we realize that whatever it was we were doing on social media, it wasn't actually connecting with people. Whatever these companies' mission statements say about "building community" and "bringing the world closer together" and "connecting people," it's not actually what their products are doing, and people are finally wising up and realizing this.
I haven't been on social media for probably a decade. I'm no less "connected" to my family or community or events than someone who is on it. It's not really doing what they claim it's doing.
Before social media you’d sign up to forums and talk to people with similar interests. The smaller communities and purposeful writing was much better. Now it’s just a cesspool of ads and spammers. These platforms are still useful if you highly limit your usage.
I find the best way to use facebook is to join the useful community groups but otherwise do nothing of consequence. Maybe you post a holiday shot of a landscape so your friends in other countries know you’re alive. Otherwise simply don’t engage and sandbox Facebook.
Twitter is fine if you use it more like a news feed. Follow John Carmack or other people with interesting things to say. Again, don’t engage with the platform. It best when smart people send out ideas.
I guess the next space to watch out for is teleconferencing. How long can they provide a free service for personal use?
Then they began to be corrupted by the insatiable search for ever-growing revenue.
I’m barely on any “social” websites other than HN. Getting off Twitter was great. But almost all my friends are on Telegram. They are all over the world and many I’ve known for years. The heat death of the universe is going to happen sooner than me giving up instant messaging.
I feel like some of these articles need context or the author has completely different circumstances than I do.
But social media is different. It's a reality show in which you re the unpaid actor, a replaceable lab rat. If you feel that, living your whole life oblivious under a painted dome (like in the Truman Show) by getting rewarded with likes is an OK life, then maybe you should grow up. In the end, Truman chose to get out.
As always on the internet, after the initial panspermia came a period of severe winner-take-all consolidation into monoculture. I m not sure if it would be different in an alternate timeline where the ad money was going to media companies.
Maybe I replaced it with something that is not an addiction?
Your phrase might sound nice but it's not necessarily true.
Not true. Some things are habit forming, like cigarettes or really fun books or games. The same is true for social media. All addictions must start at some point.
Oddly poignant.
In the very early stages of social media, say the era of blogs, MySpace, and forums like these, there were no smartphones.
People would live their normal lives during the day, and perhaps reserve an hour or so of "computer time". Where they physically sit behind a desktop with a keyboard. So for some 90% of the day, they were not distracted by anything, and during computer time, they would find themselves using a device very suitable for deep engagement. On a desktop, it's easy enough to read deep content and to respond at length.
With the arrival of smartphones, social media are with you 100% of the time. It may interfere with your important time (your work, your sleep), but if not that, at the very least it will suck up any spare moment that you used to spent on just being bored or waiting for something.
And as we know, this still is only the basic consequence. It may affect one's relationships, distort their politics, cause depression, and replace healthy physical activities, as the article mentions.
Besides the smartphone intruding on your life non-stop, there's the issue that smartphones really suck. They are poor reading devices and even worse engagement devices.
So content has to be snack-sized. A tweet. A 6 second video. Preferably vertical, to save me from the massive effort of turning my phone. And auto-play, as I don't want to hit next or scroll. This trend of escalating effortless consumption turns into disturbing deficiencies in people. Not being able to focus on anything for any stretch of time.
As an engagement device, it has to be simple too. A like, a heart, and a one-line comment at best, full of typos. Because you can't really type well on a smartphone. So deep engagement is dead, replaced with status (likes, retweets).
This combination of effects (100% with you, snack-size content, poor engagement) can all be attributed to the smartphone specifically, in combination with social media. Not social media in itself.
There was an interesting experiment when I took my niece (18 yo) on a 3 week trip through a tropical nation with basically no connectivity at all. She's the stereotypical ultra addict, glued to her phone all day. Interestingly, not a single sign of withdrawal when offline. She was fine, happy, fully engaged in the real world activities, and not a single complaint.
But then, wherever we would return to a place with a gateway to the online world, all hope was lost again. We don't exist. The country does not exist. Dinner is a distraction. Nothing exists but the phone.
Of course I wondered what was it that she missed, that takes hours to catch up with? Actually, I didn't have to wonder as she explained it by pushing her phone in my face about 30 times per hour.
To show what? A meme. A funny video. Not even good ones, just pure low effort pulp garbage.
My friend is an entrepreneur, running some e-commerce warehouses. He stopped hiring young people. They take 30 minute dumps, 3 times a day. He's made clear policies regarding excessive smartphone usage and still finds them hiding behind shelves on their phones.
It's an epidemic.
The smartphone will invent ways to disrupt you all day. Even if there were no social media, it would be a video game, a stock trading app, whichever. It's a brand new capability to be able to reach all people all day, and it will be used.
Think twice before getting married today.
You could be stuck with somebody addicted to social media, or worse, tindr.
Imagine that you are compelled to solve problems, and that you loathe interacting with other human beings, and that you occasionally are lonely. That's why we have hermits, and that's why towns put up their hermits in a house about a mile away. You put them far enough away that they can't hear you enjoying yourself, but close enough so that you can bring them serious problems
Which problems are serious? The ones that give everyone else nightmares trying to even think about — or at least are worth a 2 mile round trip walk and a picnic basket full of delicious food.
Even grumpy old hermits get lonely for human company and variety in food sometimes. They just resent showing it because everyone will make a loud racket and give them hugs and eugh it's just the worst.
Social media, the Internet, BBSes, these all allow satisfying the instinct for human connection without the awfulness of dealing with actual real people very much of the time. Finding a way to make that satisfying and net valuable to you and/or others is the hard work. It doesn't necessarily require giving it up, but it absolutely does require being honest with yourself about whether you're getting a payoff that's worth the price.
What are the alternative to replace "screens"?
Books (ink on paper)?
Out and about, preferably in nature?
Meditation?
Writing?
Gym?
America, and especially its behaviorally addicted youth, are losing hours per day and hundreds of years of their lives to this crap. And it's not as easy as just saying "I learned to love the difficulty of connecting offline." I don't believe that.
What we need is a modern version of AA to march people through the 12 steps towards a dopamine landscape that is less stimulating.
Put a capital L in Living.
Who needs social media?
Who needs social interaction, you should rather be asking.
Chrome Yellow, Aldous Huxley
I see at least 9 of them as shared.
No thanks.