Well put. My only social media connection was via Twitter, which I quit a month ago. This states the motivation, and the resulting benefit, succinctly.
I don't think that is the summary, because a main focus of the post is that social media makes you do things that others thing are "worth consuming", so you can post it for others to consume.
> Social media is like cigarettes and alcohol. Toxic. Addictive. Yet widely accessible.
I never thought I would say this...but I have to wonder if cigarettes and alcohol may be healthier options than social media, simply because they usually accompany real social lives?
EDIT: To be clear, any addictive substance is a bad choice. Please entirely disregard this analogy in that sense.
I forget what magazine carried this essay, and it was from maybe about 10 years ago, but a journalist decided to take up smoking (temporarily) at the age of 30-something or 40-something, with the idea of writing a story about it. One of his takeaways was the sociability of it, especially since everyone nowadays is forced to exit the office building to have a smoke.
I usually pride myself on my google-fu, but this one has eluded me. I also remember this essay.
Do you remember anything more about the essay that would help me find it? There is so much information and blogspam about their for the {nicotine, addiction, cigarettes, voluntary, chooses, sociability, constraints} results.
I also remember the article. I think he smoked in an airport and said nearby people overreacted (his words paraphrased) like a woman clutched her child. And maybe the airport security came too?
I really want to read it now. But can’t find it by Google.
During a period of high stress due to major life changes I was experiencing, I took up smoking. It became a habit. I did experience the social aspect that the essayist described. I found that the best way to meet new friends at anime or gaming conventions is to find out where all the smokers are and hang out there. I've found a few new very good friends this way.
I was a smoker for many years and the sociability is a huge factor that doesn't get much attention, and is the only thing I miss about it.
The relationships I established with fellow smokers, whether it was at work while stepping out from the office, standing outside a pub, stepping outside on a balcony at a party, etc. were almost always stronger than with my non-smoking friends. You immediately become part of a social circle with people you at least have one thing in common with, and are standing around with a limited number of minutes to chat about almost anything.
I haven't had a cigarette for nearly five years and the thought of lighting one up disgusts me, but I miss the carefree banter during smoke breaks with other smokers.
> I was a smoker for many years and the sociability is a huge factor that doesn't get much attention, and is the only thing I miss about it.
The best part about having to go outside for a smoke is you end up standing next to people outside of your normal work hierarchy. You get to have 1v1 conversations with OTHER managers, and people higher than you - whoever at a very casual level. The benefits of this is enourmous. I certainly talked more to our director of IT by smoking than I ever did with my own boss.
Early in my tech career I realized pretty quickly that, despite not being a smoker, I needed go outside with the smokers during their smoke breaks because that's where a lot of ideas were discussed. It was where I could continue learning from guys who were almost all senior to me at the time in a more relaxed, informal setting.
The smoking was terrible--don't get me wrong--and I'm glad its much more rare now than it was 25 years ago.
Same here, but I took up smoking outside with them and it put me in the inside group on projects/tasks. I never picked up smoking outside of these little daily excursions and I realize it's playing with fire, but at least for my career it was one of the best things I could have done.
No, you're spot on. That's been my conclusion of the past few years, that Facebook, Twitter et al. are the tobacco companies of our time. They act very much the same as the tobacco companies did: misleading their 'customers', and corrupting the politicians who would otherwise regulate them.
I'd wager alcohol is healthier (within reason) since it promotes reducing your inhibitions which might open you up to learning since you are more open to new experience and ideas under that influence.
Social media, untamed and untempered, tends to influence in the other direction: piping you into a predefined ideological box—and largely dominated by materialistic influences to boot.
I like the comparison, granted it must be different for different people (ie, individual relationships to tobacco/alcohol). Social media repulses me, but with the other two I enjoy but am suspicious of.
I’d rather have someone tell me about the last cigarette they had than the last social media post they wrote.
In a cursory survey [1] of the alcoholics I've known (both recovering/acknowledged and not), for 80% social drinking hasn't been the problem. The problem was what they did when they were alone with a bottle.
[1] Not an SRS, clearly anecdotal and entirely in my head, so all caveats apply, etc.
Also, tobacco and alcohol have pretty much the same chemical and social impacts throughout (although there are changes in intensity, for example, ABV in beers have been increasing).
Social media changes its addictive by tailoring it over time for every individual user.
The health experts have deemed cigarettes and alcohol extra unhealthy for covid spread reasons now. Social wellbeing is just not something I would entrust to a sector not very well adjusted to work-life balance and desperate for middle-class admiration.
I also have to wonder if the scientific community even wants to know if cigarettes and alcohol correlate with less covid deaths given their great hex on it. It's interesting to think what level of gain/detriment will bring them to get a mention, let alone advise increased uptake. Imagine a world where they dish out wine & ciggs at the hospital as often as they do other drugs of dependence.
I quit sometime last Spring. I don't know what happened but I finally was able to.
I think I feel happier because I have lower expectations and my small successes feel big in my mind because I am not comparing to others.
For example, a few minor home repairs over the weekend feels huge to me. I really feel great about them. One of my best friends is a carpenter and I know shouldn't compare.. but I think I do it unconsciously.
I still have social media accounts. I posted a last message once I knew I wasn't going back to social media.
I still have my accounts and browse through them once every day or two in order to see what people are up to, but I consciously made a decision to stop posting a few years ago, and then to stop commenting on contentious threads maybe a year or so ago. I agree life has been much better, there's no lingering obligation to respond to someone who disagrees with you N times/hour. I see some of my friends posting things to "make people think" or whatever but somehow the discourse is never constructive.
>User generated content, comments, ratings. 3/3 would say so, yes. :-)
That's not great criteria for determining if something's "social media". All those things you listed were part of websites long before social media came along.
My litmus test for what is and is not social media depends on how many people use their real name as handles, and how actively the platform promotes real names. Facebook, nearly 100%, Twitter, less so; reddit and HN, pretty low. Real names transform the old forum/IRC chat room into social media.
There is no way to intentionally follow specific users or customize your view of the site depending on who is a part of your personal network. There is no personal network at all. Those seem to me to be the defining features of social media. Hacker News is just a crowd-sourced link aggregator with comments that requires persistent accounts so the links and comments can't be easily spammed.
Of course, so is Reddit, but I personally don't think Reddit should be considered social media, either. You can personalize your content view there, but the personalization is based on content topics, not the following of specific users.
Sure is, I'd go one step further, if you can't stand having your karma hidden from you (via self-imposed adblocker rule) then you are still addicted to the social network feedback loop and somewhere making compromise for it.
I was able to dodge it. Recently, I was thinking of joining Facebook because of Groups. I don’t have friends and I’m missing to have conversations with similar minded people but I just can’t make myself doing it. The sad things is that probably there are no alternatives. All platforms are almost equally bad.
Sometimes I feel HN also is a similar attention sink, even Wikipedia as well. They also can draw you in for information snacking, and before you know hours have gone. Commenting and reading responses in HN is also another attention consuming loop.
Stands to reason. The purpose of commenting is to be wrong, so that someone will correct you, allowing you to learn more about the subject matter. Cunningham's Law.
If you are well versed in a topic there is no reason to talk about it. You are already well versed in it and gain nothing from discussing it further.
The Gell-Mann amnesia effect: "...In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
I'm not the only person who never feels like they're one of the "smart people" in these threads, right? After close to a decade on this forum I've just learned not to fight that feeling and instead to find the humor in it.
This is what made me delete my Reddit account. I realized I was putting an inappropriate amount of effort into impressing people I'd never meet.
Not sure if that treadmill is just built into my personality or if it was specifically caused by the site. I don't feel it here as much, although it could just be that the account there was older, so it felt like it'd developed more of an 'identity' (silly as that is).
I have a couple Reddit accounts and that is a game you can get caught up in. The trick is that you can always score more points by making a stupid in-group comment on /r/politics or /r/funny than you can being smart. Once you know this the number matters a lot less (at least to me).
My best comment was a dumb in-joke for quite a while. But eventually I beat it with a comment was reassuring people who didn't excel as much as they'd expected during the pandemic. I actually feel pretty good about the comment itself, there were some people who followed up that really did seem to be relieved by the sentiment. But it still is, essentially, this bizarre fleeting interaction where we just see one comment from each other, and no real attachment is made. Then then afterwards, it is like, "am I playing some weird gamified thing where expressing actual human empathy is how you get a high score" which didn't feel good really.
Hmm. I've never cared about that. For whatever reason. I generally don't care what other people think - especially after I read Feynman's book of the same name decades ago.
Feynman certainly cared a great deal about what others thought of him, and he has been known to embellish many stories to appear as the common genius in the situation. In short, he was a genius, but he also wanted it to be known very well by others.
In my case at least browsing Wikipedia is an assumed guilty habit, just like coffee.
What usually happens is that I browse /r/soccer or something similar and I get to the wikipedia page of a specific (mostly European) football league, like the Dutch Eredivisie or the Norwegian first league. Once on that page I click on a specific team (let's say Utrecht, Molde or Groningen) and before I know it I end up reading about the Hanseatic league or about the Spanish dominions in the Low Countries in the 1600s.
I use HN and Twitter in between builds and deploys. Not sure what else I could do during that time, it is too small to focus attention on most other things. I wonder if this time is really "wasted" since otherwise i'd be looking at the docker progress monitor.
It is. There's a lot more than hacker news on here. And the rules aren't always followed, which makes it a bit more social-media-y, but the mods do a great job keeping it tidy. I guess there is more non-hacker news stuff appearing because it gets a little tedious to see "New programming language X" or "CSS tricks you never heard of" every week.
I always find these "quitting social media" blog posts a bit ironic... "social media is addictive and encourages doing and posting things just for the attention and to make other people think I am interesting... so I wrote this blog post about quitting social media, and am posting it to hacker news and other sites... I hope lots of people read it and think I am insightful"
The internet is for sharing. Social media is for driving engagement from users, mining their data, and encouraging unhealthy social comparison (as well as, you know, organizing events and messages and stuff). Nothing wrong with sharing a blog post on an experience you had that you think may be of value to others.
To dive a bit further into this, I was very socially active on the Internet 20 years ago, and it was a magical thing. I made friends that I still communicate with today, and I credit the amazing community I aligned myself with for helping me become the person I am today (in a good way).
Social media today is nothing like those early communities, and I rarely participate for that reason. Some of the core motivations (e.g. desire for connection/community) exist in both places, but the similarities pretty much end there.
The closest modern day equivalent (for me) is HN and some very niche subreddits.
Ditto. The important thing about the forums of yore were that they were largely composed of users who self-selected into it, and were oriented around a particular topic. They didn't have the thing were tons of people latched on and then just hung around for no reason other than their own boredom.
I think there's a fundamental difference in how forums are used vs social media. The catch-all nature of social media molds it into a device which people use to construct an idealized representation of themselves. Forums seem to head more in the direction of discussing/arguing about focused topics, rather than identity-creation.
I feel the same, for the most part. I quit social media during the pandemic early on and didn't even post to say I wouldn't respond anymore. I didn't delete my account, I just deleted the apps and I no longer visit any of the sites. I never blogged about it, and while I'm open about it and have told a few people directly so they would use alternative paths to contact me, it just doesn't seem like a story I need to share widely. I realize the irony in saying that while writing this comment.
Point is, I found that social media was mostly feeding a need I had to be "on display" or "performing" that I used to get in person pre-pandemic by "holding court" in group settings and leading interesting conversations. After making that realization, it caused me to rethink the behavior altogether. I still comment on HN and read HN daily, but this is basically the only site I go on now that's akin to social media. Blogging about quitting social media would have just been me doing this same behavior in another pathway. To a large degree, I feel like that's the "point" of social media. To make us crave attention and to act out specifically to get attention and it's bled into everyday life and in-person interactions.
I understand your POV on this, I quit social media relatively silently[1]. From my POV, ex-social-media-addict now "clean" for 838 days[2], there is a strong degree of FOMO attached to not being on SM. Here are a few examples of where I wish I had "told folks" that I was quitting:
* For the first 9 months folks would often say: "I missed you at my such-and-such event last month", and I would reply: "email me next time". Perhaps if I had quit loudly I'd have felt less FOMO-y and been invited to more events.
* Births / Deaths / Marriages; I'm completely out of the loop, which is almost always a worse off situation. I've come to learn that I want to know sooner rather than later when folks have died because going through grief a week or two after other folks absolutely sucks. I wonder if I quit loudly folks would reach out more proactively in these situations?
* Generally feeling connected: a "personal talent" of mine is a relatively strong ability to remember what I read about folks on their FB timelines. Without that I feel pretty disconnected; and there are a lot of folks I "miss" as a result. Would this have been different if I quit in the open? Would folks have said: "oh you can follow my photo stream and see what I'm up to?"
That final example, when coupled with deaths, is particularly acute. You're left wondering whether you could have helped prevent self harm, etc.
Leaving social media really helped me evaluate who my actual friends are, and who were just names on a list. If someone is only willing to communicate with me if it's through a single corporate-mediated ad/promotion machine, and will just stop contacting if I'm not on said machine, are they really my friend? I've come to the conclusion "No" and honestly, I feel my life is better off interacting with fewer real friends than awash in the feeds of numerous names-on-a-list.
At the end of the day, I realized I don't care about such-and-such events, births, deaths, etc. of people who will only talk to me if it's through Facebook.
> so I wrote this blog post about quitting social media, and am posting it to hacker news and other sites
I'm not sure if the fact that the author includes "Share to Facebook/Twitter" links at the bottom of the blog post is more comical or downright insulting to the reader.
They spend several paragraphs describing all the harm social media causes to themselves and society as a whole, then describe their epiphany and the joy of freeing themselves from its psychological chains, and then ask you to contribute to it. At very least it's extremely insincere.
If the point of the attention-seeking is to encourage others to leave the attention-seeking platform, then it belongs in the set of special self-subverting cases.
Same logic applied to Stallman using a proprietary compiler to build a free-software compiler that obviated the need for said proprietary compiler. He really did do that. (Unironically, at that.)
I write a blog too, but I do not want people to become addicted to it and spend hours on my site. I do not even want to track them, so Jetpack was uninstalled promptly.
Blogs are like books or newspapers. We can live with books and newspapers, they have been around for centuries. Social media are like fentanyl.
Same feeling. Additionally, the author stands he felt used by social media, but you find a properly newsletter subscription at the end of the article. Of course, if you create a writing piece which implied some time to produce, you're looking for something in return.. same than social media. The difference is that usually behind the last ones there is a corporate logic.
It's almost impossible to promote art and music organically these days without being involved in social media. It's different than traditional sinful addictions in that way...
Product designers don't realize that each user has a different purpose for using social media, and totally different goals, while the basic narrative is that all of social media is dedicated towards selling products and building online celebrity status.
The real problem is that social media sites try to dominate the world without creating sub-communities for specialization, and they have also devalued and underestimated the value of being able to build followers in hopes of a focus on engagement and paid ad revenue. Social sites usually focus on one front page, and one script/method for success on them, and that's a massive failure to the different reasons users use them.
Social sites start out fair, with orderly time lines and visibility of individual accounts, but as year over year profit and user base increases becomes their focus, they grow corrupt and too big to change. They stop developing useful features and turn towards profit.
It's a cycle they repeat until their user base wakes up to the reality of it all and realizes all of their content will be deleted if they quit. It is a cycle of abuse and loss compounded by lost time... More like the year I spent wound up in GTA4 than like drinking Tequila and smoking Newports.
Social sites were always on a quest to attract those with the greatest promotional capability, from start to finish. If the sites were about fairness they'd limit everyone/everything to not exceed the average reach.
They should really be called Promotional Networks. Their incentive structure is not set up to advance any intellectual specialisation except through a lens of promotion. Consider the fact that the biggest platforms must go "external" to find fact-checker organisations, it proves my point that no great intellecting is happening within the platform. It's ironic given that fact-checking is itself employed in an act of phoney self-promotion, to not-so-subtly suggest intellectual pursuits must be occurring here, excessively so, since "corrections" are needed.
The thing that drives me crazy is how hard it is to avoid it. I have plenty of real life friends, a busy career, a family. Still an old friend said "reach out to me on whatsapp". I can't even use the thing without agreeing to import my contacts. Or my Oculus headset-- which I really enjoy-- demands I have an account. Bummer.
I've never understood this. I think if you have a relationship with social media that elicits a desire to "quit", it's not because social media is terrible, it's because the relationship is bad.
I wonder as well if there's a difference between people who use it to catch up with their real-life friends vs. people who use it to communicate with online friends. I deleted my Facebook account last year simply because I had never used it; most of my friends on there were people I was acquainted with in real life at some point but I have no desire to talk to them. I never used it so I just deleted my account. However, I use Twitter, and I'd never dream of deleting it; most of my interactions on there are between me and friends I initially met online, and social media is one of the main ways we communicate. These are real friends - I've met several of them in person now - but I'd be losing a huge channel of communication with them if I went dark on social media.
Which, when worded like that, almost sounds like they're trapping me on there, but I also have no desire to quit. I've never felt Twitter negatively impacting my life. I go on it daily, I usually have it open in a tab while doing other things on my computer, but I don't spend hours just scrolling, and I don't follow people who say things that will only make my day worse. I don't see it as wasting my time any more than watching TV or doing crossword puzzles, which are also things I spend a reasonable amount of time doing.
The comparison to cigarettes and alcohol is ridiculous in my opinion. I don't buy the premise that social media, by default and for most people, makes your life worse. Maybe I'm just the exception? I have no idea.
It sounds like you're basically using Twitter as something like email, which never occurred to me (my friends and I do "group comms" via actual email).
Do other people use Twitter in this way? Maybe you are the exception :)
Just taking all social media apps off your phone and having a complex password that makes it difficult to sign into their webapps are a huge step. Not having your social media of choice a finger press away helps a lot. It's easier to get off them if you start with that. I did that years ago and replaced my favorite app with the kindle app. I read a lot more (books) now and I don't get the addicted feeling.
> You are no longer used by social media, you start to use the tool.
This is the key. Either you use technology intentionally or it uses you. You don't have to quit altogether, but it's important that you use it as a tool.
I wrote about this from a different angle - in my view, the problem can be isolated to feeds[0]. They encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice. If you can eliminate them, these services magically become tools rather than escapes.
I recommended it in a similar discussion before, but Cal Newport's "Digital Minimalism" offers reasonable ways to introduce intermittent fasting patterns into your social media consumption vs quitting cold turkey.
Some sample strategies to adopt:
1) Mobile sites only, never apps. Always log out when done to increase the friction of subsequent logins. The most insidious pattern of mindless engagement is when you're bored at the checkout line, waiting in-between meetings with nothing to do, sitting on the toilet.
2) Even better: computer access only, never mobile. Your phone is always around, unlike your PC. Set a time slot (20 min or so) when you know you're around your computer. Social networks really excel at this pattern of usage. You'll get the most important stuff, fluff relegated to the bottom of the feed, which solves the FOMO and shield you from the rest. This can be daily first and then cut down to whatever pattern you feel like (Newport himself claims he catches up on social media once a week).
I am sure I am butchering some of his advice, so worth reading the book.
> The most insidious pattern of mindless engagement is when you're bored at the checkout line, waiting in-between meetings with nothing to do, sitting on the toilet.
Just curious, why is this considered the "most insidious"? Isn't that time wasted anyway? Before cellphones you would just stare off into space (you're not getting any deep thinking or deep work done waiting in line) or would just browse the gum or trash magazines.
> computer access only, never mobile
This one definitely makes sense. It was interesting time when Facebook was around but smartphones weren't fully ubiquitous. You would only see your feed on the laptop and had to text friends to stay in touch in real-time (even if async)
You could think and self-reflect. There is a reason why shower thoughts are a thing, in a society dominated by things that illicit emotional reactions it's hard to have time to just be.
Shower thoughts are great b/c you know nearly exactly how long a shower takes, you're relaxed, doing something basically automatic, and can take longer if you need to. You can also talk to yourself.
I guess what I'm saying is I find other moments in my day (shower, sipping my coffee in the morning, the few moments I take after I close my work laptop but before I start my evening, journaling, jogging or walking) to be much more effective and rewarding for thinking and self-reflection. Those times give insight and clarity. Not out in public with the cacophony of other people.
Obviously one can do both and more power to them/you.
I personally find the worst mind-scrolling is when I could be doing anything else (opportunity cost) not when I'm literally just waiting around.
Mowing does it for me as well. It's why I carry a pocket notebook and a pen with me. I avoid apps because distractions can pull me, like an unread text message and I lose my flow of thought.
Occasionally I even write pseudo paper that I wrote in my head while doing something else.
I think you identified an important part, it's the habit of doing something, while your mind doesn't have to use a lot of horse power. I never thought about it from that perspective, but it rings true.
> Before cellphones you would just stare off into space (you're not getting any deep thinking or deep work done waiting in line) or would just browse the gum or trash magazines.
The key is that the "before cellphones" behavior often involved a greater connection to one's immediate surroundings, or being "present". The risk/concern with browsing a phone in these moments is that it promotes disconnection and feeds our brain's need for that next dopamine hit. Some hypothesize that this constant disconnection from "here/now" is part of society's broader problems and people increasingly look at the real world through the lens of social media, which we know to be a major distortion of reality.
Disclaimer: anecdote, sample size of one, etc...for me personally, I've been working hard not to fill those idle moments and instead focus on being present and stay in the moment. This could literally be as simple as noticing the variety of gum options in the checkout line. I already have dissociative tendencies due to PTSD, and one of the most effective ways for me to dissociate is to lose myself in the endless scroll. Conversely, staying present/connected to my surroundings helps my mental state immensely.
> Just curious, why is this considered the "most insidious"?
I think it's insidious not because it is inherently worse to check your phone than it is to stare into space at odd moments (that may be true, but I don't think that was the point). It's insidious because it's not a conscious decision you're making to do something because you want to, it's more like a tic, or a sign of addiction.
I love Twitter but recently removed Instagram from my phone and as a result, my usage dropped to near zero. I found I was watching the same updates (here's my baby doing this fun thing!), which was nice, but I wasn't really connected to this individual, and for most of my Instagram it was old friends and colleagues who no longer live near me or share much similarities.
Twitter, Instagram, Hacker News, etc. are all attention sinks but I realized I wasn't getting much value from Instagram beyond a minor wholesome feeling to see (old) friends living their life. Reels were kind of fun sometimes but mostly a waste of time, though.
The joy I get from Twitter is being able to consume topics highly relevant to me, and I aggressively curate through blocking/muting, grooming followers, and interacting with very smart people in their respective fields.
The pain I get from Twitter is a feeling I'm never good enough. I make a good salary which pays for my entire family of four's well-being, but ... there's always someone on there making more, or creating something cooler. During parental leave I spent more of my time with neighbours, volunteering at the community garden, and it felt more whole, but I still had a part of my brain thinking about the missed opportunities in building value / wealth. Hm.
A couple thoughts here. I was an adult before social media was a thing, or even the web, and I sometimes wonder if I would have even attempted much of the experimentation I did - doubtful, at least at that age. Why bother when now it takes only a few minutes searching to find someone who already solved the problem, and better than you (think) you could have. But now I understand I would have missed out on so much had I not even tried. Who knows what fresh angle you’ll bring to the table? It happens.
The second thought is at some point you come to terms with your own limitations (and strengths!), and you realize, yes this person is great at such and such, but am I able to do what I want in my life with my talents? Am I happy doing my thing, even if it’s not “as good” as them? Yep. So good for them. And good for you.
I've noticed that I did a lot more theorycrafting in games prior to the easy availability of game streams. I think I am finally coming around to the idea that these videos should inspire me to do more theorycrafting instead of letting other people do it for me, but it's been a long journey.
The safety lectures in videos for some hobbies probably would have let me get farther along in them as a child, if I had bothered to participate instead of just spectate.
I've had the same reaction to watching videos about strategies and combos in fighting games. What I started doing was asking myself how I could have discovered this idea and taking it back to the lab to reconstruct the discovery, so to speak.
What I've found over time is that I got better at discovering what I needed, but that it was still worth looking over some theorycrafting type videos to see anything I might have missed.
This brought me full circle to the point where, even though I was still watching a video, I felt like there was a dialogue going on ("yeah, I know A, B and C, but D is a neat trick. You seemed to have missed E though.").
> but I still had a part of my brain thinking about the missed opportunities in building value / wealth. Hm.
I think this was your main point right? I also feel the same, but not because of Twitter. I think Twitter is an amazing social platform but it takes certain type of people to succeed on it. I'm sure there are tons of people who are very smart and is making more or creating something cooler but not broadcasting it on Twitter. Maybe you are one of those people.
Let's not forget the lies that are broadcasted left and right on social media, in which thousands become millions, and trite tropes are sold like congress-worthy insights.
You are right, it takes a certain type of people to succeed on Twitter and, jealous as I am of my private life for example and unwilling to interact or share much online, I am definitely not among those.
> instead of refreshing like a lunatic for new information all the time during your day. You simply search for a solution only when you are experiencing a problem.
> You treat social media like any other website online. You visit it only when you need something. You don’t visit it to find something to need.
Maybe I'm the outlier - but everybody I am "friends" with on social media I'm friends with IRL (save for Twitter, but that's more blogging than social media). We just post what we did this weekend and stuff like that. Post stuff that the kids are doing (and for some of my friends what the grandkids are doing). No one is trying to impress anyone else. People just staying in touch. Maybe we older folks have a better feel for how to integrate technology into our everyday lives than we're given credit for.
Who your friends with changes a lot during our younger years. School, college, job changes, neighborhood changes, …etc, all bring new friends and old friends you can’t find time for. These changes are rarely reflected in social media.
In addition, younger people do follow a lot of “influencers” - the worst kinda people to follow in social media.
I’ve noticed some groups of people are better than others. Most of my baby boomer relatives are really bad about social media, sharing tons of political things (often nasty and offputting) and seem to liken social media to spending time with people or catching up with them a bit inappropriately.
I agree - Instagram and Facebook I only follow / friend people that I'm actually friends with and would normally speak with. Limiting it this (1) makes it less frustrating / argumentative content, but also (2) makes it run out of content faster, which means spending less time on it.
My biggest complaint about Facebook (besides the obvious shitty company stuff) is that I don't want to see what other people are sharing (meme posts, etc). I wish there was an "only show me OC" filter.
A good sanity check of this is to use Dunbar's number (usually considered at ~150)[0] and see how many of your friends and friends of friends have a number of social media "friends" that reaches or exceeds that number.
In case you are unfamiliar: Dunbar's number is a proposed cognitive limit to the number of real social relationships we can have based on brain size.
The total number of real, stable social relationships you can have is physiologically limited, so having 200 facebook "friends" that truly are your friends is impossible.
Because we do have connections with people outside of social media (hopefully!) even 150 friends is nearly impossible unless you are friends with literally every social relationship you have.
So if you want to see, I would first establish that you are really in the group you think you are. If you are only connected with true, irl friends you likely don't have much more than 30 "friends". Then sample the graph of that network a bit and see where you are in the distribution of "friends".
I have roughly 70-80 social media friends, discounting Twitter which I don't engage with my friends at all but instead engage with other computer science, mathematics, physics and beer enthusiasts. These are people having similar interests to me, but they're not my friends. Sort of like HN - you can think of HN as a professional community where we all have like interests, but we're not friends. Like this conversation, we're just strangers who've met and are talking for a brief moment.
What makes the real difference is curating followers and avoiding mindless "reel type" scrolling. As always, it's being intentional rather than setting hard limits (e.g., being friends only in real life, limiting the number of follows after some weak sociological studies) that makes the difference in the quality of the experience.
I've learned a lot from Tiktok, Reddit, Twitter, certain corners of Facebook, etc., and met a lot of interesting people on dating apps. And I hope people have learned from me. Sure, I've wasted time too, and waited too long before I muted people who made me angry, and it took me some unnecessary time before I realized they weren't talking to me, but my world has gotten a lot bigger and more interesting and more adventurous than before.
I think there are only three types of modern social media: Facebook, Pinterest, and then virtually everything else. (I don't consider Reddit to be in this conversation because it's a glorified forum, and those have been around since BBSes).
Facebook was conceived and still largely operates as a social network in the community aspect: you are in touch with your friends and family members for the most part. Facebook has of course tried to deviate from this path in the last decade, but that's still strongly what the site is.
Pinterest is probably the least interactive social media platform in terms of communication between people, but it's probably the most useful, even if it's nothing but a collection of bookmarks.
All the other social media platforms are basically centered around groups of people yelling at influencers in a desperate attempt to be noticed. They are giant dopamine sinks.
> I still haven’t deleted my social media accounts. I still have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I don’t need to delete them. I don’t feel that I need to delete them. I simply don’t open them because I simply unfollowed everyone there.
You're not really quitting if you still keep all your accounts. It's like stopping drinking but leaving a bottle of whiskey in the cupboard just in case.
> Important things – news, events, etc. – that we think we’ll miss will come to you either way. Either a friend will tell you about an upcoming concert or you’ll read it somewhere else.
This is what bugs me about out current state. Sure, I ended my addiction to social media but I often still rely on my friends telling me about events that THEY saw in their feed. I wish business and artists would stop using social media as their primary platform for engagement. Use a website instead, an RSS feed or email.
This post is suspiciously long for someone who seems to charge money to summarise books (reading books being another unworthy use of one’s time on this planet, presumably).
I quit Facebook (2019) and Twitter (2021). My general mood has improved, those platforms really are a cesspool that promotes and rewards the most hateful people and you can't help but get dirty from them and their attacks on anything and anyone they don't like. But I am quite a bit more isolated as an individual. And I noticed that HN serves me as kind of a surrogate.
We are slowly forgetting how to interact in the real world.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 3123 ms ] threadI never thought I would be able to work through the music, but damn there are some really good entries in the genre.
There's something about the use of consume in this way that has always bugged me.
I never thought I would say this...but I have to wonder if cigarettes and alcohol may be healthier options than social media, simply because they usually accompany real social lives?
EDIT: To be clear, any addictive substance is a bad choice. Please entirely disregard this analogy in that sense.
Do you remember anything more about the essay that would help me find it? There is so much information and blogspam about their for the {nicotine, addiction, cigarettes, voluntary, chooses, sociability, constraints} results.
Some other things:
- might have been the Atlantic
- he talked about etiquette around things like flicking ash and smoking circles
- he talked about asking his doctor about starting smoking
It was definitely an interesting one
I really want to read it now. But can’t find it by Google.
Search terms I used were: starting smoking at 40 cigarettes
It was the sixth google result for me.
During a period of high stress due to major life changes I was experiencing, I took up smoking. It became a habit. I did experience the social aspect that the essayist described. I found that the best way to meet new friends at anime or gaming conventions is to find out where all the smokers are and hang out there. I've found a few new very good friends this way.
PS: I don't smoke cigarettes anymore.
The relationships I established with fellow smokers, whether it was at work while stepping out from the office, standing outside a pub, stepping outside on a balcony at a party, etc. were almost always stronger than with my non-smoking friends. You immediately become part of a social circle with people you at least have one thing in common with, and are standing around with a limited number of minutes to chat about almost anything.
I haven't had a cigarette for nearly five years and the thought of lighting one up disgusts me, but I miss the carefree banter during smoke breaks with other smokers.
The best part about having to go outside for a smoke is you end up standing next to people outside of your normal work hierarchy. You get to have 1v1 conversations with OTHER managers, and people higher than you - whoever at a very casual level. The benefits of this is enourmous. I certainly talked more to our director of IT by smoking than I ever did with my own boss.
The smoking was terrible--don't get me wrong--and I'm glad its much more rare now than it was 25 years ago.
Social media, untamed and untempered, tends to influence in the other direction: piping you into a predefined ideological box—and largely dominated by materialistic influences to boot.
I’d rather have someone tell me about the last cigarette they had than the last social media post they wrote.
In a cursory survey [1] of the alcoholics I've known (both recovering/acknowledged and not), for 80% social drinking hasn't been the problem. The problem was what they did when they were alone with a bottle.
[1] Not an SRS, clearly anecdotal and entirely in my head, so all caveats apply, etc.
Used to do the same thing with gaming. Encrypted windows and whensend.com the key to me in the future. Can't game on the linux drive.
Social media changes its addictive by tailoring it over time for every individual user.
I also have to wonder if the scientific community even wants to know if cigarettes and alcohol correlate with less covid deaths given their great hex on it. It's interesting to think what level of gain/detriment will bring them to get a mention, let alone advise increased uptake. Imagine a world where they dish out wine & ciggs at the hospital as often as they do other drugs of dependence.
I think I feel happier because I have lower expectations and my small successes feel big in my mind because I am not comparing to others.
For example, a few minor home repairs over the weekend feels huge to me. I really feel great about them. One of my best friends is a carpenter and I know shouldn't compare.. but I think I do it unconsciously.
I still have social media accounts. I posted a last message once I knew I wasn't going back to social media.
:)
That's not great criteria for determining if something's "social media". All those things you listed were part of websites long before social media came along.
Of course, so is Reddit, but I personally don't think Reddit should be considered social media, either. You can personalize your content view there, but the personalization is based on content topics, not the following of specific users.
From https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ . I happen to agree.
If you are well versed in a topic there is no reason to talk about it. You are already well versed in it and gain nothing from discussing it further.
https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
Not sure if that treadmill is just built into my personality or if it was specifically caused by the site. I don't feel it here as much, although it could just be that the account there was older, so it felt like it'd developed more of an 'identity' (silly as that is).
In my case at least browsing Wikipedia is an assumed guilty habit, just like coffee.
What usually happens is that I browse /r/soccer or something similar and I get to the wikipedia page of a specific (mostly European) football league, like the Dutch Eredivisie or the Norwegian first league. Once on that page I click on a specific team (let's say Utrecht, Molde or Groningen) and before I know it I end up reading about the Hanseatic league or about the Spanish dominions in the Low Countries in the 1600s.
Perhaps I could take a walk, which would be good.
Social media today is nothing like those early communities, and I rarely participate for that reason. Some of the core motivations (e.g. desire for connection/community) exist in both places, but the similarities pretty much end there.
The closest modern day equivalent (for me) is HN and some very niche subreddits.
I think there's a fundamental difference in how forums are used vs social media. The catch-all nature of social media molds it into a device which people use to construct an idealized representation of themselves. Forums seem to head more in the direction of discussing/arguing about focused topics, rather than identity-creation.
Point is, I found that social media was mostly feeding a need I had to be "on display" or "performing" that I used to get in person pre-pandemic by "holding court" in group settings and leading interesting conversations. After making that realization, it caused me to rethink the behavior altogether. I still comment on HN and read HN daily, but this is basically the only site I go on now that's akin to social media. Blogging about quitting social media would have just been me doing this same behavior in another pathway. To a large degree, I feel like that's the "point" of social media. To make us crave attention and to act out specifically to get attention and it's bled into everyday life and in-person interactions.
* For the first 9 months folks would often say: "I missed you at my such-and-such event last month", and I would reply: "email me next time". Perhaps if I had quit loudly I'd have felt less FOMO-y and been invited to more events.
* Births / Deaths / Marriages; I'm completely out of the loop, which is almost always a worse off situation. I've come to learn that I want to know sooner rather than later when folks have died because going through grief a week or two after other folks absolutely sucks. I wonder if I quit loudly folks would reach out more proactively in these situations?
* Generally feeling connected: a "personal talent" of mine is a relatively strong ability to remember what I read about folks on their FB timelines. Without that I feel pretty disconnected; and there are a lot of folks I "miss" as a result. Would this have been different if I quit in the open? Would folks have said: "oh you can follow my photo stream and see what I'm up to?"
That final example, when coupled with deaths, is particularly acute. You're left wondering whether you could have helped prevent self harm, etc.
[1] https://twitter.com/ossareh/status/1133957584153694214
[2] I mean this jovially, apologies to anyone that struggles with a more manifest addiction if this phrasing comes across as trite.
At the end of the day, I realized I don't care about such-and-such events, births, deaths, etc. of people who will only talk to me if it's through Facebook.
I'm not sure if the fact that the author includes "Share to Facebook/Twitter" links at the bottom of the blog post is more comical or downright insulting to the reader.
They spend several paragraphs describing all the harm social media causes to themselves and society as a whole, then describe their epiphany and the joy of freeing themselves from its psychological chains, and then ask you to contribute to it. At very least it's extremely insincere.
Same logic applied to Stallman using a proprietary compiler to build a free-software compiler that obviated the need for said proprietary compiler. He really did do that. (Unironically, at that.)
Blogs are like books or newspapers. We can live with books and newspapers, they have been around for centuries. Social media are like fentanyl.
Product designers don't realize that each user has a different purpose for using social media, and totally different goals, while the basic narrative is that all of social media is dedicated towards selling products and building online celebrity status.
The real problem is that social media sites try to dominate the world without creating sub-communities for specialization, and they have also devalued and underestimated the value of being able to build followers in hopes of a focus on engagement and paid ad revenue. Social sites usually focus on one front page, and one script/method for success on them, and that's a massive failure to the different reasons users use them.
Social sites start out fair, with orderly time lines and visibility of individual accounts, but as year over year profit and user base increases becomes their focus, they grow corrupt and too big to change. They stop developing useful features and turn towards profit.
It's a cycle they repeat until their user base wakes up to the reality of it all and realizes all of their content will be deleted if they quit. It is a cycle of abuse and loss compounded by lost time... More like the year I spent wound up in GTA4 than like drinking Tequila and smoking Newports.
They should really be called Promotional Networks. Their incentive structure is not set up to advance any intellectual specialisation except through a lens of promotion. Consider the fact that the biggest platforms must go "external" to find fact-checker organisations, it proves my point that no great intellecting is happening within the platform. It's ironic given that fact-checking is itself employed in an act of phoney self-promotion, to not-so-subtly suggest intellectual pursuits must be occurring here, excessively so, since "corrections" are needed.
I wonder as well if there's a difference between people who use it to catch up with their real-life friends vs. people who use it to communicate with online friends. I deleted my Facebook account last year simply because I had never used it; most of my friends on there were people I was acquainted with in real life at some point but I have no desire to talk to them. I never used it so I just deleted my account. However, I use Twitter, and I'd never dream of deleting it; most of my interactions on there are between me and friends I initially met online, and social media is one of the main ways we communicate. These are real friends - I've met several of them in person now - but I'd be losing a huge channel of communication with them if I went dark on social media.
Which, when worded like that, almost sounds like they're trapping me on there, but I also have no desire to quit. I've never felt Twitter negatively impacting my life. I go on it daily, I usually have it open in a tab while doing other things on my computer, but I don't spend hours just scrolling, and I don't follow people who say things that will only make my day worse. I don't see it as wasting my time any more than watching TV or doing crossword puzzles, which are also things I spend a reasonable amount of time doing.
The comparison to cigarettes and alcohol is ridiculous in my opinion. I don't buy the premise that social media, by default and for most people, makes your life worse. Maybe I'm just the exception? I have no idea.
Do other people use Twitter in this way? Maybe you are the exception :)
This is the key. Either you use technology intentionally or it uses you. You don't have to quit altogether, but it's important that you use it as a tool.
I wrote about this from a different angle - in my view, the problem can be isolated to feeds[0]. They encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice. If you can eliminate them, these services magically become tools rather than escapes.
[0] https://suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful
Some sample strategies to adopt:
1) Mobile sites only, never apps. Always log out when done to increase the friction of subsequent logins. The most insidious pattern of mindless engagement is when you're bored at the checkout line, waiting in-between meetings with nothing to do, sitting on the toilet.
2) Even better: computer access only, never mobile. Your phone is always around, unlike your PC. Set a time slot (20 min or so) when you know you're around your computer. Social networks really excel at this pattern of usage. You'll get the most important stuff, fluff relegated to the bottom of the feed, which solves the FOMO and shield you from the rest. This can be daily first and then cut down to whatever pattern you feel like (Newport himself claims he catches up on social media once a week).
I am sure I am butchering some of his advice, so worth reading the book.
Just curious, why is this considered the "most insidious"? Isn't that time wasted anyway? Before cellphones you would just stare off into space (you're not getting any deep thinking or deep work done waiting in line) or would just browse the gum or trash magazines.
> computer access only, never mobile
This one definitely makes sense. It was interesting time when Facebook was around but smartphones weren't fully ubiquitous. You would only see your feed on the laptop and had to text friends to stay in touch in real-time (even if async)
I guess what I'm saying is I find other moments in my day (shower, sipping my coffee in the morning, the few moments I take after I close my work laptop but before I start my evening, journaling, jogging or walking) to be much more effective and rewarding for thinking and self-reflection. Those times give insight and clarity. Not out in public with the cacophony of other people.
Obviously one can do both and more power to them/you.
I personally find the worst mind-scrolling is when I could be doing anything else (opportunity cost) not when I'm literally just waiting around.
Occasionally I even write pseudo paper that I wrote in my head while doing something else.
I think you identified an important part, it's the habit of doing something, while your mind doesn't have to use a lot of horse power. I never thought about it from that perspective, but it rings true.
The key is that the "before cellphones" behavior often involved a greater connection to one's immediate surroundings, or being "present". The risk/concern with browsing a phone in these moments is that it promotes disconnection and feeds our brain's need for that next dopamine hit. Some hypothesize that this constant disconnection from "here/now" is part of society's broader problems and people increasingly look at the real world through the lens of social media, which we know to be a major distortion of reality.
Disclaimer: anecdote, sample size of one, etc...for me personally, I've been working hard not to fill those idle moments and instead focus on being present and stay in the moment. This could literally be as simple as noticing the variety of gum options in the checkout line. I already have dissociative tendencies due to PTSD, and one of the most effective ways for me to dissociate is to lose myself in the endless scroll. Conversely, staying present/connected to my surroundings helps my mental state immensely.
I think it's insidious not because it is inherently worse to check your phone than it is to stare into space at odd moments (that may be true, but I don't think that was the point). It's insidious because it's not a conscious decision you're making to do something because you want to, it's more like a tic, or a sign of addiction.
Twitter, Instagram, Hacker News, etc. are all attention sinks but I realized I wasn't getting much value from Instagram beyond a minor wholesome feeling to see (old) friends living their life. Reels were kind of fun sometimes but mostly a waste of time, though.
The joy I get from Twitter is being able to consume topics highly relevant to me, and I aggressively curate through blocking/muting, grooming followers, and interacting with very smart people in their respective fields.
The pain I get from Twitter is a feeling I'm never good enough. I make a good salary which pays for my entire family of four's well-being, but ... there's always someone on there making more, or creating something cooler. During parental leave I spent more of my time with neighbours, volunteering at the community garden, and it felt more whole, but I still had a part of my brain thinking about the missed opportunities in building value / wealth. Hm.
The second thought is at some point you come to terms with your own limitations (and strengths!), and you realize, yes this person is great at such and such, but am I able to do what I want in my life with my talents? Am I happy doing my thing, even if it’s not “as good” as them? Yep. So good for them. And good for you.
The safety lectures in videos for some hobbies probably would have let me get farther along in them as a child, if I had bothered to participate instead of just spectate.
What I've found over time is that I got better at discovering what I needed, but that it was still worth looking over some theorycrafting type videos to see anything I might have missed.
This brought me full circle to the point where, even though I was still watching a video, I felt like there was a dialogue going on ("yeah, I know A, B and C, but D is a neat trick. You seemed to have missed E though.").
I think this was your main point right? I also feel the same, but not because of Twitter. I think Twitter is an amazing social platform but it takes certain type of people to succeed on it. I'm sure there are tons of people who are very smart and is making more or creating something cooler but not broadcasting it on Twitter. Maybe you are one of those people.
You are right, it takes a certain type of people to succeed on Twitter and, jealous as I am of my private life for example and unwilling to interact or share much online, I am definitely not among those.
> You treat social media like any other website online. You visit it only when you need something. You don’t visit it to find something to need.
In addition, younger people do follow a lot of “influencers” - the worst kinda people to follow in social media.
I’ve noticed some groups of people are better than others. Most of my baby boomer relatives are really bad about social media, sharing tons of political things (often nasty and offputting) and seem to liken social media to spending time with people or catching up with them a bit inappropriately.
My biggest complaint about Facebook (besides the obvious shitty company stuff) is that I don't want to see what other people are sharing (meme posts, etc). I wish there was an "only show me OC" filter.
A good sanity check of this is to use Dunbar's number (usually considered at ~150)[0] and see how many of your friends and friends of friends have a number of social media "friends" that reaches or exceeds that number.
In case you are unfamiliar: Dunbar's number is a proposed cognitive limit to the number of real social relationships we can have based on brain size.
The total number of real, stable social relationships you can have is physiologically limited, so having 200 facebook "friends" that truly are your friends is impossible.
Because we do have connections with people outside of social media (hopefully!) even 150 friends is nearly impossible unless you are friends with literally every social relationship you have.
So if you want to see, I would first establish that you are really in the group you think you are. If you are only connected with true, irl friends you likely don't have much more than 30 "friends". Then sample the graph of that network a bit and see where you are in the distribution of "friends".
0.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
I've learned a lot from Tiktok, Reddit, Twitter, certain corners of Facebook, etc., and met a lot of interesting people on dating apps. And I hope people have learned from me. Sure, I've wasted time too, and waited too long before I muted people who made me angry, and it took me some unnecessary time before I realized they weren't talking to me, but my world has gotten a lot bigger and more interesting and more adventurous than before.
Facebook was conceived and still largely operates as a social network in the community aspect: you are in touch with your friends and family members for the most part. Facebook has of course tried to deviate from this path in the last decade, but that's still strongly what the site is.
Pinterest is probably the least interactive social media platform in terms of communication between people, but it's probably the most useful, even if it's nothing but a collection of bookmarks.
All the other social media platforms are basically centered around groups of people yelling at influencers in a desperate attempt to be noticed. They are giant dopamine sinks.
You're not really quitting if you still keep all your accounts. It's like stopping drinking but leaving a bottle of whiskey in the cupboard just in case.
This is what bugs me about out current state. Sure, I ended my addiction to social media but I often still rely on my friends telling me about events that THEY saw in their feed. I wish business and artists would stop using social media as their primary platform for engagement. Use a website instead, an RSS feed or email.
We are slowly forgetting how to interact in the real world.