We decided we wanted to derive cars, but without the harmful effects of being in crashes, so we decided to create safer vehicles. I like some drugs, and a lot of them are okay in some situations with some boundaries... even if a lot of the users are using them for unhealthy reasons in situations that make the drugs problematic.
I like social media-- I'm literally using it right now to communicate with you. But I do that because I value your thought (even though I disagree with it) and I am able to interact with you in a space that both moderates my behavior by giving up/down vote feedback and which doesn't have a lot of tolerance for poor discourse habits.
If you apply those same rubrics to other social media and don't tolerate them when it violates those boundaries, I believe it's possible to use them in healthy ways.
I feel that the sine qua non of "social media" is user generated content conducted between specific users, tied to specific accounts.
Not even wikis meet that definition, and certainly not most of the author-generated content-based site like blogs or market sites such as amazon, or news sites where the discussion isn't the putative content.
I believe a lot of the internet has social aspects. Is it possible that the "social" aspects of this media operate on a sliding scale?
I understand the point that literally any website could be thought of as "user generated"... I've personally made quite a few websites. But the level of interaction and the modalities of how I and a lot of folks use things isn't as interactive as, say, twitter.
So, perhaps for some user populations a Wiki is a social experience, especially for the folks who edit them. Though from my perspective, it feels entirely possible to use it without engaging in that social aspect.
I don't feel the same about Hackernews and/or reddit in general.
The social aspects absolutely work on a sliding scale. I completely agree. But I don't think that the amount or variety of social engagement is what really contributes to something being classified as "social media".
I feel like "user generated content conducted between specific users, tied to specific accounts, where users have one-to-one public conversations and those conversations are foregrounded as the site's content" is reasonable.
So, if that's my definition Wikis aren't social media and HN would be.
But I also feel like HN is just a flavor of Reddit, and I feel that most people understand Reddit to be "social media".
> Unfortunately, social media by its nature is going to be harmful.
I disagree. Social media has never harmed me, I just realized it wasn't worth my time. I've never had issues with self-esteem, confidence, popularity, whatever. I used social media as a photo diary for myself, shared pictures and videos with friends, kept up with what my friends are doing. To this day I check in on social media once in a while just because it's more effective than texting 100+ people to see what they're up to. That being said, I don't think social media is worth more of my time than a few minutes every few weeks or months
How do you know that? This isn't something you can typically know for your self with any degree of confidence.
> To this day I check in on social media once in a while
You've got a lot of recent comments on HN for this to be true. I think you use social media a lot more than you think you do, and it could be impacting you in ways that you don't notice.
> You've got a lot of recent comments on HN for this to be true. I think you use social media a lot more than you think you do, and it could be impacting you in ways that you don't notice.
Ah so you're that kind of user.
Semantics. I don't consider HN social media, when I say social media I mean instagram, facebook, etc. I consider HN a forum like reddit or other places. My usage of forums is a way to kill time when I'm at work.
> How do you know that? This isn't something you can typically know for your self with any degree of confidence.
Speak for yourself. Maybe you can't typically know this for yourself, but I can. And more importantly, if you're not coming into this exchange in good faith and willing to trust my claims, then any chance of reasonable conversation is gone. I'll be wrapping up my end of our conversation here, thanks.
> You've got a lot of recent comments on HN for this to be true. I think you use social media a lot more than you think you do, and it could be impacting you in ways that you don't notice.
The drunk driver contradiction. Drunk people are terrible and assessing how drunk they are.
There is a not so subtle implication of your comments being voted down that those claiming HN is not an instance of social media would be well-advised to reflect on.
Probably a walled city is the only way to achieve that. Such a setup is like a closed mailing list in which all participants have to pass an 'entrance exam' of some kind.
This kind of setup imposes a cost for rude, nasty, aggressive and destructive behavior - since you can simply be excluded from the group in that case.
This is how most of the world works on a day to day basis; you don't let random people into a corporate strategy meeting or an academic council meeting. You only admit people who agree to abide by civil society rules.
Something like that can be incredibly useful, but it requires a lot of up-front organizing effort. Also, malicious types have been known to sneak into say, a closed mailing list, and leak the internal discussions to Twitter or whatever, so...
Yes and Facebook Marketplace is great for me selling things. And I know for others its actually Facebook dating (surprisingly). Facebook is here to stay by filling out all these "jobs to be done" in our lives. Every one of these jobs is backed by a moat that is very hard to compete with, and it's all the same: reach and scale.
I'm less and less confident that is possible, not necessarily because personal interactions and online spaces themselves form an inherent contradiction (though they might). But because the incentive, and ability to commodify, and capitalize these interactions are necessary and sufficient conditions for the creation of these destructive social systems.
We're pretty bad at social systems level thinking, but this precise lack of skill is an opportunity for exploitation. In the same way that hobbyist day traders over-estimate their ability to turn a profit by not understanding the skill level of who they are losing against, social media participants over-estimate their ability to check out because they don't understand the skill level of players who want them to engage. This disparity in the games being played isn't spelled out and why would it be? At least there is hope in that social media systems while ubiquitous, are not yet hegemonic. As long as that holds, there is still hope.
Negative content flows upwards, the more negative or edgy you are the more upvotes you get. Users crave this fake validation to make up for other things that are lacking.
Think about it this way, if you have a good job, fantastic relationships, and other great things going on are you really going to be arguing on Instagram with strangers ?
> for interactions with other people in online spaces to be less destructive
I have the exact opposite opinion, let’s confront them: real-life social spaces are toxic to me, and I seek refuge in computers, where you experience me. If we were a little less toxic to each others, maybe online wouldn’t be a high concentration of people retired from real life?
- Real life has a dump of major problems that “social people” constantly refuse to fix.
- And each time we bring them up, it’s the bane of your life, we get all the names, downvotes, exaggerations, parody, “we’re in $CURRENT_YEAR”, “Have you tried to man up?”, “You’re frustrated”, etc.
- And the problem continues. Online, are you are just meeting with the people that are invisible to you in real life.
The status of the scientific understanding today of gender imbalance in programming (excluding improper studies with doubtful scientific process) is that little boys end up in programming because it’s the only thing in the family which behaves expectedly, doesn’t sulk, calls mum, gets angry for expressing things as they are, retributes effort, etc. Making a little more room for boys in real life would also correct gender imbalance in IT.
It may even make that fewer people in general go to IT and science in general, because they would be more satisfied with real-life interactions. Science would go slower, but people would be happier.
It’s a tough path, but really one that upgrades the lives of millions.
Once the current regime let us go back to church, I deleted my Facebook. It's much better at church. Firstly, they feed me. Secondly, I can say what I think without being censored.
It's not even that people all agree with me at church. It's that they treat you like a human being. Those who are unvaxxed are just some guy down the street, not someone who we are supposed to target in our hour of hate and wish death upon as the more uncivilized amongst the internet regularly do.
I feel sorry for those who have to substitute something so vile for something so wholesome.
If this weren't HN, I'd assume this comment is satire. Churches certainly aren't immune to censorship, hours of hate, death wishes (explicit or otherwise), or dehumanization.
Social spaces are all vulnerable to the weaknesses of humanity. While I do think the mechanics of the medium play a role in how those weaknesses surface, the source is and will always be us.
Absolutely, but the difference is that no one church is dominant in the United States. Even if we were to claim that Catholicism (the largest faction, although not a majority by any means) were the dominant one, within that church there is also a lot of diversity of thought. As an adult, you can realistically pick and choose with whom to associate at these churches, unlike say Twitter or Facebook where are beholden to whatever religion they follow.
What other word should I use to describe a de facto government of America that blatantly, and loudly, refuses to follow the American constitution? This is not my opinion. The courts have agreed with me that religious service is an essential activity, despite many governor's and the federal government's attempts to ban it. Moreover, the current federal regime has unequivocally said that although the Supreme Court itself has ruled its eviction moratoria illegal, it would enforce them anyway (despite the SC ruling unequivocally that this constituted a violation of the takings clause). That is a constitutonal crisis, that was only glossed over because the media decided it didn't exist.
My use of the word regime befits the current US government.
The American heritage dictionary says that regime means:
A usually heavy-handed administration or group in charge of an organization.
That is exactly what the current federal government and many state governments (including my own) are by the admissions of our own courts.
I was mostly pointing out the hypocrisy of what you were saying.
> I feel sorry for those who have to substitute something so vile for something so wholesome.
Here you are trying to proclaim how your church is so wholesome, while you yourself are being an unwholesome person. You're continuing to divide people with your rhetoric. So wholesome.
If you're a representation of your church, I am glad I am not part of your church, or any church for that matter. I've found that this type of behavior you're spewing is quite common and a reason why I hope organized religion finds its deathbed sooner rather than later.
This has nothing to do with my church in particular but has to do with the idea of a church. Honestly society benefits if people were members of churches other than my own as well. Even a church not my own would foster community and hopefully want people to become better. And provide a community where people can have true connection
And yes, social media is vile. I'm sorry you don't see that. There is nothing dismissive about calling a piece of software vile. Do you see how confused you've become under it's influence? I literally called a software service vile, after decades of published studies and news reports indicating it's I'll effects, and I've been accused of fostering division among people.
This is the great problem with social media. It confuses fake for real, virtual for physical, and computer programs for human beings.
No, I agree social media is awful. I was talking about your rhetoric being divisive. Notably with use of words like "regime" which is often used to describe authoritarian governments. No matter what you think of our particular government in the US, it is not authoritarian and I suspect if you ever actually lived in a location where that was the case you'd still realize there's far more good about the US government than there is bad.
But hey, you can keep blaming me for your shortcomings, that's what religious people like to do.
Our government is a regime, and has been for a very long time. Presidents today rule almost exclusively by executive order. Each administration takes yet more drastic action, completely obliterates past precedent, etc. Why can't we say this really? Is the US as bad as Iran? No of course not. But that's like a the bare minimum here. I'd rather we not get there.
> But hey, you can keep blaming me for your shortcomings, that's what religious people like to do.
You're the one worshipping at the feet of Uncle Sam.
>You're the one worshipping at the feet of Uncle Sam.
Far from it. But I'm not stupid enough to not grasp that we have it a lot better here in the US than others do. It may not be perfect, but it is far from authoritarian or a regime.
You're the one using the incorrect words trying to stir shit up.
I was raised by fundamentalists, and that was not my experience. Wrong kind of opinions got me surrounded by elders who would attempt to brow beat me in to submission. Towards my late teens I'd spend the entire hour and a half of every Sunday hiding out in the kitchen/dining hall in the back of the building, tending to the pot of coffee, until I was old enough to leave and strike out on my own. I still get panic attacks at the idea of stepping foot in to a religious building. Basically, your experience is far from universal, in my experience.
I think I was 14 when I figured out I could skip Sunday school and just wander around without getting caught. What a waste of perfectly good Sundays from the cradle until 16. Haven't been back.
The nice thing about being an adult and going to church is that if you don't like it... you don't have to be there? There are many competing churches in the United States. The same cannot be said realistically of social media.
As the western world secularizes, we need a replacement for the community fulfillment role that organized religion used to take. As someone who was raised religious, but no longer identifies as such, I find my self missing the wonderful sense of community that my church facilitated by bringing broad spectrums of different people together to achieve a higher purpose. I know people's mileage will vary depending on their specific church, and I don't intend to whitewash the toxic actions, or the rejection of certain groups in some churches. But many elements of my church were positive. The sense of community, the volunteering, the people genuinely caring for each other, and even just as a place for people to hangout. I consider being raised in that environment to be a net good, despite later being turned off the actual theology. Is there away we can move to a secular alternative that has the same level of social penetration as the church once did?
I think the "cosmic purpose and stakes" component of religion is really tough to beat, hence the enduring power of churches. Transposing that element into other spaces creates a lot of the same issues. Subtracting it eliminates the secret sauce that makes a church sticky.
I've considered this question at length (for similar reasons as you), experimented once or twice, and haven't cracked it yet.
Agreed, I liked the community and bonding aspects as well. And I'm saying this as a first-generation immigrant who isn't
even Christian - even though I know the church's overall mandate is to 'convert' people or whatever, I got a sense that the youth ministers at the church didn't really care - we all just wanted to share some good times.
Isn't it a forum? It doesn't have friends, following, asking for your contacts, etc. I guess the line is subjective, this is just a plain old forum, managed very well, imo.
Yes it is particularly social because it has the concept of Karma. It has tamed it by policy but vanity can never be tamed outright. It will always exist in some form on these networks and HN/Reddit style forums capitalize on humans’ vanity by appealing to it through Karma.
Thus it ticks up the social-ness score a bit for sites like HN as opposed to some old forums like one would find on Yahoo or used to find on Compuserv.
Karma and the wisdom of crowds gives way to herd mentality and vanity. It is what drives the form of discussion on these sites.
Is karma the line where the social-ness is drawn? I mean, I've been on here for a while and haven't even recognized anyone in any meaningful capacity by their handle. 100% of my interactions on here have been with strangers that have and will remain as strangers, as I am also a stranger to them.
I feel that the sine qua non of "social media" is user generated content conducted between specific users:
tied to specific accounts, where users have one-to-one public conversations and those conversations are foregrounded as the site's content.
I do feel that message forums/ usenet/ bbs/ etc meet those criteria in various ways and I do consider them forms of social media.
I know that this seems overly broad to some people (and they have good reasons even if I don't agree with them in the end). I don't think "social media" is a pejorative in the way a lot of folks use the term... I mean, sure, HN deals with a lot of the horrible parts of what can be done with that media in healthier ways than, say, myspace did.
But just because HN makes it harder to track specific users doesn't mean that it can't be done... people very much do have specific accounts here, and I have often looked up past commentary these users have generated to get more context about their points.
Well, the ethos of how long we've been on the net isn't quite as important as our rationale.
I feel that the sine qua non of "social media" is user generated content conducted between specific users:
tied to specific accounts, where users have one-to-one public conversations and those conversations are foregrounded as the site's content.
I don't agree that knowing who has up/down voted a comment is as fundamental as the fact that the sites' content -is- the comment.
And while the system doesn't foreground user accounts, I have often found it helpful to look at a user's contributions to better understand their commentary.
Finally, the fact that it's entirely possible to implement a "friends" list or a "feed" based on search results (and that this would apply to the foregrounded content of the site) seems to me to indicate that there's not just a social aspect to the content here, but that this is, in fact a social media site.
I mean, I could search user reviews on IMBD, amazon, or the wiki, but I've never found that to be in line with how I use those sites... here the conversations are the entire reason I use the site. That user generated content is the whole thing for me.
HN is social, and media, but I don't consider it social media in the same way as FB, Instagram, Twitter, and their ilk.
Let me put it another way, to me, one critical defining feature of a "social media" site: when you register, one of the first tasks you do is to identify people you know (or want to know) so they can be somehow linked to you as a friend or someone you're following.
If you removed the a feature of trying to get other people to sign up from FB would it still be facebook? I think it very much could be....
and consider other feathers that you could remove, such as "likes" (or karma) and posting (ie, user submitted content and comment threads). I feel like if you removed those two features, neither HN/Reddit nor Facebook would be the "same" service.
Consider that we have commenters in here saying they don't use social media... So... Kinda, but certainly not in everyone's mind apparently. I feel some je ne sais quoi about the terminology. There is something different, I dunno
I would not consider it a forum in the sense of an old-fashioned phpBB community, because it has the concept of moving people's contributions to more visible places based on how many people upvote them. In the way I understand the term, a forum would only rank posts and topics based on when people choose to contribute, and nothing more.
Historically, the term came up in the verge of Web 2.0 and was distinct from other social online media in that a specific software was the basis for each respective SN.
So for example Twitter is SN because you had the app on the phone that was only Twitter so that was SN. But an online forum was not, because everybody could obtain the same software and run a forum.
Best question. Declined to join or participate any social media from the beginning. HN is absolutely is on the spectrum of social media, but more like a well moderated usenet group. It's a well run decoupled internet comment section, sort of like a fat tailed reddit.
Without pictures, friends, followers, alerts, verified identities, personalization and emphasis on personal branding, an ad-driven revenue model, I wouldn't call it social media. If someone asked for my "social media accounts," I would not include HN in that, however, a subpoena might treat it differently. Security clearance people might think that as well. The fig-leaf pseudonymity provides some modesty, honesty, and civility for actual discourse, where social media is about status signalling, and not much else.
It doesn't have any networking features as far as I can tell.
If HN was ever directly instrumental in getting someone laid, you might have an argument, but I'm going to say "no".
If it had direct messaging and follow/subscribe features, it absolutely would be, and I say these are things that make Reddit social media while HN is only a forum.
HN is at it's essence a custom subreddit. And Reddit is definitely social media.
Social: majority of time is spent reading people's commentary, many who are just a slightly obscured version of the rest of their social media identity, and sometimes responding in dialogue. Even though it's pseudonymous it doesn't mean it's asocial.
I don't have(and never have had) any social media accounts...ie facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok, etc. The closest would be an HN account.
That said, could someone tell me what I might be missing? Ignorance is bliss, but it's also ignorance - is there any critical information or happiness that everyone else [who uses social media] enjoys that I do not?
I detest talking on the phone. I also accept that there are some people who I'm just not going to get around to arranging a meetup with, as there are too many demands on my time. I don't look at Facebook any more but I follow a lot of illustrators and animators on instagram so my feed is usually full of their interesting stuff. There are few enough people that I can catch up easily if I don't check for a day or two. I also follow friends who've moved to different part of the country and can see how their kids are doing, although I have never posted a pic of my boy on social media (and never will until he can give informed consent).
No. People (like myself) are ultimately using it for a distraction from something more important or a dopamine rush when someone "likes" something you post. You're better off.
That depends on you. Social media should be a way to better connect to your friends and family. In particular distant ones that you don't see daily but still want to be in contact with. I haven't seen my 7th grade crush since high school, but I'm glad to see pictures of her kid's first day of college - as one example.
Most people use social media instead for harmful things that do not help society. Left and Right wing conspiracy theorys abound. Pictures of some cat that you don't own.
Do you have any friends that you've lost touch with?
All my best friends from high school live all over the country. Some of us have grown apart and that's okay, but I do enjoy passively keeping up with what they're doing on Facebook.
How about family members who you grew up with but now live on other sides of the country?
I have some older cousins that moved to California as soon as they graduated college. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time so it's not like I had any real way of keeping in touch with them. Now we're friends on Facebook and I can see what they're doing.
Ever wanted to go on a hike in the mountains in the spring and see if there's snow on the trail you're about to do? Someone probably tried already and posted a photo on Instagram.
Ever see some new construction in a building and wonder "What's moving in to this space?" There's probably a hyper local Facebook group where someone has already posted that information.
If you're watching a football game and want to get live commentary by people other than the announcers. Twitter is great for that.
I also use Facebook for organizing events like ski weekends or camping trips. I haven't found anything that even comes close for event planning.
I dunno if this counts. I use reddit/r/funny together whenever we feel a bit bored or just want to kill time. Other things include finding like minded people on facebook groups which you can use to meet other people too.
> We hire social media to create a virtual representation of the life we want to live, but never actually live it.
HN being the exception to my 2+ years hiatus from Twitter, Facebook, etc, I am careful to represent myself sincerely, in part because I’m assuming my little stories might help someone practice better mental and physical health (I have found some of your collective comments to be helpful—-thank you!).
> We hire social media to observe the life we want, but never actually experience it.
Today I read this post instead of reading further into a book. If I practice reaching for the book instead of HN I may thank myself later, as this forum post is satisfying to complete but otherwise has a low ROI (I tend not to check back soon enough to be part of any discussion). I generally enjoy the life I have, and one action that will make it more enjoyable is to be reading more often, as I find engaging with longer stories over days and weeks to be gratifying.
I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm.
Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation.
My vote for what's more harmful is the scroll. I have a web extension that just removes the scroll on my Facebook feed. A few months after setting it up I all but stopped using Facebook, checking in once maybe every two months to visit folks individually. I haven't done this for Twitter or IG, but then the quality of my main feed is such that I don't want to remove it outright and want that aggregation of content, somehow.
I think that scrolling in general is harmful as a UX pattern, but the obvious alternative of pagination could create all kinds of complexities around deep-linking and fragmentation of content. All the same I'd love to see more platforms adopt this intentional cap on content associated with a given URL. It turns my engagement with content online from scanning to actual reading.
Yes. This is what created the validation feedback loop, and what generally causes the social harm
The like button, and the variations on it is IMO the biggest problem with social media
Forums and other discussion boards did not have these problems and while you could have "flame war" that involved actual argumentation back and forth not 1000's of passive visitors choosing to upvote, or downvote on a post with no argumentation
I would place more emphasis on the downvote button causing most of the harm. If you post something, and it doesn't get up-voted, that's less of a hit than posting something and having it be actively downvoted. One is a statement that no one found it interesting enough to vote up, the other is a way of saying that kind of content isn't desired here. I'm guessing it's the downvotes that cause people to leave, leaving an echo chamber in their wake.
Upvotes can lead to karma farming, and the need to see that number of likes go up can be a problem I admit. I just think the echo chamber effect is a worse problem. We've all dealt with fragile egos and boisterous idiots before.
I miss the days where you weren't shunned for wrong-think, just argued with constantly if your opinion differed from the norm.
Twitter doesn't have upvotes and I find it to be more addicting than sites with a upvote/downvote system. In a way, downvoting is still getting a response from a person, maybe that is why
The pagination on HN is one of its better UX decisions. Same with turning off auto-loading when you reach the end of the front page of Reddit (but that's not the default).
> Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case.
The way I've started to look at it is that all social media has some harmful and some beneficial aspects, but the nexus of identity-based (vs topic-based like HN) social media with upvote/like functionality is the most problematic for people struggling with identity and self worth. Even as someone established enough not to struggle with self-worth, I avoid that type of social media completely.
Topic based social media with clear and enforced guidelines for content seems to have the least bad trade-off between the harmful and the beneficial.
Of course no social media property is exclusively one or the other, but the design and operation of the service strongly influences the direction in which it goes.
the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise.
but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer.
the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions.
and this malicious example is just chosen for clarity. even in a more innocuous context, if there is no absolute correct answer and nobody is testing the answers for accuracy, upvotes often do more harm than good, and upvote sites are almost by definition groupthink factories, when they don't pertain to verifiable claims that are quickly tested (which is what makes upvotes helpful on a site like Stack Overflow).
> the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise.
> but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer.
> the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions.
The obvious answer to this however is not to remove the very useful upvote button everywhere but to
- stop frequenting racist forums,
- if they are actually racist, tell law enforcement (where applicable)
I was lurking here last year during the racial justice protests, and before that during the James Damore controversy. I still saw casually racist/sexist posts get upvoted fairly often. A discriminatory argument can be stated well and seem reasonable on its face, but still be discriminatory. It's the kind that moderators here are too lenient against and won't really want to delete as long as there isn't a pattern of it, because it could just be an well-meaning person suffering an error in judgement. I don't know how our world is supposed to move past that, or if it's even possible. I would have probably been a little less disappointed in the state of humanity if some of those posts had been flagged, because there were a lot of them across the whole internet.
Incitement to racial hatred, done publicly, can be held illegal if it crosses certain thresholds. I don’t think this means Europeans don’t have free speech.
>but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer.
Sure, there's correlation but the correlation always breaks down whenever anyone needs it most.
If you ask an easy question you could have just googled or read the man pages to get a decent answer is what's upvoted. But few people really need help answering those questions.
If you ask a hard question potentially involving nuances and situational constraints or if you ask a very specific question requiring expertise you will get the same naive surface level answers highly up-voted and the one guy who actually knows your question has his answer downvoted to oblivion by the people who know just enough to be dangerous.
If you aren't familiar with the subject matter in question it's even worse because a guy who knows what he's talking about answering your hard question and getting downvoted for it is indistinguishable from a guy who has no idea what he's talking about giving a wrong answer to an easy question.
Of course the end result is that everyone who knows WTF they're talking about contributes minimally if at all.
Stack Overflow is better than most subreddits because you can link a man page or doc but the more a subject requires subjective judgement the more it displays the pattern I described above.
How can you distinguish identity-based from topic-based social media? Doesn't your identity influence which topics you're interested in, and don't the topics which interest you form your identity? This forum says in the guidelines to submit "Anything that good hackers would find interesting." That reads to me like an identity-based forum.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, are primarily networks of personal (or corporate) identities. The centerpiece is the user. HN and Reddit are primarily ranked lists of interesting URLs. I don’t know one user from another, apart from a handful of prolific users, and half the accounts start with “throwaway”. (It wasn’t so in the beginning, but even then there was no reason to go to someone’s user page.)
I think you are misunderstanding my use of the the phrase "identity-based". What I mean is that the primary entity around which conversation and content revolve on HN is the topic (from URLs or questions), not the individual user's identity.
Topic based forums are a thing. I'm a member of a paid (gasp!) forum for high-performance building methods.
Hacker News IS harmful because there's no established standard for what should receive an upvote or downvote (>500 karma can downvote). This leads to people just upvoting things they agree with and downvoting things they don't. It's all groupthink. Alternatively, all well thought out comments should receive upvotes (despite personal cognitive dissonance) and inflammatory, trolling, or irrelevant comments should be downvoted. That would support diversity of thought and ideas.
I'm confused, isn't established standard too nebulous a concept to be "needs to be upvoted", there is just too diverse of an opinion on what what is a "well thought out comment" and one person's "inflammatory" comment could be another person's "well thought out comment", the cognitive dissonance is upstream of all the voting patterns and there can be no set standard except organic, binary up/down voting. I think the ideal is that on average the local maxima (upvote groupthink) eventually is balanced by local minima (downvote groupthink)...
but I would like to see how an established standard could be set for what should or shouldn't be upvoted?
You're right. I was just offering one scenario where it might work, but even then there are people that think they are the sole arbiter of moral thought and speech they disagree with is akin to violence, etc. I didn't want to get into all that. Sufficed to say upvote/downvote is not a great system.
Hacker news is not social media. I have never recognized a user/username in between two sessions. And I would probably miss the mythical PG if he showed up in a thread. I don't know his handle anyways. Sometimes I'm made aware that a relevant "celebrity" is present in the thread but that's when people act obviously star struck like "oh thank you for that seminal paper back in '15".
So nothing social going on here, just weird/interesting discussions between persons x, y, z, i, j and k.
Edit: I just noticed that some usernames are green. I don't know what that signifies and I do not want to know.
It isn't? It seems to me like it is. We have groups of people discussing issues in these online forums. Isn't that social media? And although we don't seem to have "clout mechanics" for users, we do have the upvote/downvote mechanics for posts and comment count per post. Admittedly I quickly scan all posts for these numbers to help me decide where to click.
So it seems like what can make social media a positive or a negative in a person's life is pretty complex. What each person brings to their interactions with the media varies a lot and the ways mechanics are used in the different sites and apps vary a lot.
So it seems like a lot social is going on here on this site. The social group here is responsible for all of the content, I think? Right? It wouldn't be the same if it were posts selected by an elite group and we were just allowed to comment on them.
So I think the article's suggestion to "quit social media" is too simplistic and lacks the nuance it would need to be helpful advice.
I clicked on you. Karma 918. I have absolutely no reference of whether this is "good" or "bad" because I never do do this to form opinions about others here. =D The only thing I know is that this comment (28626404) made me think about something and then type something as a reply and that could be good news or bad news, who can say?
> Hacker news is not social media. I have never recognized a user/username in between two sessions.
OK, let's call it a discussion forum instead. I'd still argue that is a subcategory of social media. The general shape of these things has been around since at least the BBS days.
These terms, however, don't seem to capture the difference I posited between identity-based and topic-based social-discussion-service thingies, and I don't think there exists a standard terminology to make this distinction at this time.
My reasoning is that the socialness here doesn't affect my experience in any way (that I'm aware of). "Liking" stuff by upvoting doesn't mean _I_ get more of "Content X" on my frontpage, it just means everyone gets more of this content. And I can't friend/follow people so my frontpage can't be affected by a secret algorithm that shows me more content of what my clique is currently raging about.
So I both agree with you and disagree with you. Our terminology is lacking for sure. And I agree that this is _more_ of a discussion forum, but not just simply that. But I wouldn't classify a discussion forum as a subcategory of social media. Maybe the other way around.
There are different kind of social medias, like there are 50 shades of gray. Any media that have network effects and a positive feedback loop is a social media. I'd say HN is one of the healthier social medias.
I feel the same is true for me as well. I wasn't aware of this extension though. For now, what I do is if I see myself getting addicted to an app, I just uninstall/block it for 2-3 weeks. After that even if I install it back, the craving is mostly gone.
It does come back though in 3-4 months. Facebook was boring for me so never used it again after uninstalling.
I'm not sure it's anything mechanical. Facebook is a wretched hive of scum and villainy for sociocultural inertial reasons. You may as well ask why Detroit is a crappier place to live than Madison. Facebook succumbed early on to echo chambers, disinformation campaigns, and marketing of snake oil and pyramid schemes. Hacker News set rules and followed them consistently, moderating the discussion in accordance with those rules.
Maybe for a better example, just look at Reddit. Something like AskHistorians or SilphRoad for Pokemon Go are terrific communities full of great information and productive discussion, whereas many other subs are as bad or worse than Facebook. That is in spite of exactly the same interface technology. The difference is culture.
If Facebook has a design problem, it's not having any sort of guiding principles other than engagement. The purely algorithmic curation isn't really curation. It doesn't create a culture at all. It just creates addiction. Infinite scroll is in service of that, but it doesn't create it. In fact, the mobile reader I use for Hacker News has infinite scroll and it doesn't make the site worse.
Facebook was PAID to carry disinformation campaigns. It's just another sort of advertising to a certain way of thinking, and they probably figured they were acting like a common carrier and waited to see if counter-disinformation campaigns coughed up any money to retort.
I don't think it was happy times at Facebook when they figured out what they'd collaborated with, but it put them on the defensive. And Mark Zuckerberg isn't really wired to play defense. He is not a natural diplomat.
The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0], but pedants don't love that.)
Feeds 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.
> The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0], but pedants don't love that.)
> Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice.
Isn't the problem more one of open-ended feeds rather than feeds generally?
I can live fine with my RSS feed for example: nothing gets in there if I don't actually put it there.
My Facebook and Twitter feeds however are full of this person liked this, reshared that and commented there. So full that I cannot finish it ever.
Of course my addiction is HN, I frequently forget to visit Facebook for weeks (booooring maybe especially after people stopped posting what they did and started just posting motivational posters and memes) and I only visit Twitter as some kind of duty (it is one of the dumbest ideas that ever got traction IMO so I don't exactly enjoy it).
I would argue that there is something about the physical interaction that is scrolling. you can scroll at the same time you are reading--this makes the text more of a moving target, and then your "reading" becomes mere scanning. it's hard to shift out of that shallow level of engagement once your there because it's by definition a distracted state, you're trying to just get the gist of this and move onto the next thing you just know is out there which you will actually want to read.
thank you for the link! I'm happy to see other people making this point--raises my hopes some future UX designers will bring it to the platforms someday.
I think many definitely get obsessed with the need to like/upvote on here as a means to register their response. It seems to detract from the information you get out of other comments. Although it does help to hone in on which comments are most helpful.
I find scrolling easy to avoid on FB as I just click on the notifications icon, and there are usually only notifications that are of interest - and a relatively small number.
Also I use FBP plugin that let's me filter things out on a very fine-granular level, and I am very aggressive with filtering.
I think the problem is not necessarily things such as likes, upvotes, shares or other features but platforms which don't consider Goodhart's law when they introduce them.
Large Reddits tend toward bland and repetitive cookie-cutter content not solely because Reddit has a voting mechanism, but because the site's structure allows that mechanism to be highly vulnerable to karma farming. There are many casual users who don't notice the content is low-effort or repetitive, special interest subs make it easy to target posts, and the volume is too high for moderators to handle (and many will have a "we can't delete things which are popular and within the rules, even if we don't like them" policy).
Facebook (and YouTube, and to some extent Twitter) are a weird branch of that. The application of Goodhart's law wasn't initially to the users but to the platforms themselves. I have little doubt that initially they started with an altruistic observation that people spent more time on the site if they tended to see content from their most entertaining friends, but then someone realised seeing bad takes from a stranger was even more engaging and so you should see that instead. People realise they get more visibility for being controversial, and again there is no real moderation for this, so we have even more of a tyre fire than the blandness which upvote-driven sites tend toward.
(Twitter at least still offer tools to curate and remove algorithmic ranking from your feed, even if they try to nudge users away from them. That doesn't protect more popular users from the "trolling brings me attention" culture elsewhere on the site, though.)
I think HN is less affected by karma farming due to having a broader range of topics, active moderation of repetitive content and perhaps most importantly a relatively small community with a strong appreciation that the upvote should be used sparingly for interesting and unique content. Also the text and link based format helps - this might change quickly if e.g. HN allowed posting photos of vintage computer equipment, which could disproportionately gain upvotes compared to insightful long-format articles despite being easier to produce.
In my opinion the main differentiator is whether or not the platform's userbase is more or less like the population at large.
This is important for two reasons:
- If a website is full of normies - sorry for the word, feel free to suggest a more appropriate one - then mainstream cultural references, information sources, opinions and so on are bound to dominate the scene. This makes the community far less interesting, because mainstream sources necessarly aim for the lowest common denominator. Those communities also look very similar to each other, as though they were TV channels.
- The community is prone to segment itself along the same lines that divide us in real life. Language, politics, education, etc.
As harsh as it sounds, I have come to think that being exclusionary in at least some dimensions is necessary for any kind of community to be interesting.
> I think HN is less affected by karma farming
A very underrated feature that I have come to really like is how positive scores are hidden for everyone except yourself. That a comment is flagged or at -4 is useful signal (I might disagree with the signal but it's clear that other commenters really disliked that), but on the other hand not knowing whether a comment sits at +1 or +20 forces you to think about what the comment is actually saying.
>That a comment is flagged or at -4 is useful signal
Knowing that something is a) spot on but ideologically inconvenient b) wrong doesn't really help if you don't have the subject matter familiarity to already know what's right and wrong. It just reduces your options to a binary choice.
It does a good job of saying, "That comment isn't a good fit for this community." You may decide you don't care; you may decide to adjust your tone or approach; you may decide HN isn't for you. But it provides useful information.
"ideologically inconvenient" is indistinguishable from "incoherent nonsense" if you put yourself in the shoes of someone who disagrees with said ideology.
It's typical of people knee-deep in weird politics to fall into "with us or against us" type of thinking.
> "ideologically inconvenient" is indistinguishable from "incoherent nonsense" if
No it's not. Counterexample (which is inconvenient to a wide variety of different ideologies):
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H. L. Mencken
I agree that Upvote based sites and engagement based sites usually produce different dynamics, and that upvote places become echo chambers and that engagement based sites tend toward controversial content for exactly those reasons. I think the frustration comes from the fact that many highly specific communities use upvotes as a proxy for correctness. It's one thing to write off Twitter's lack of quality as a facet of its highly general audience, bit it's another one when highly technical (not necessarily computing) forums full of expert hobbyists and practitioners succumb to groupthink. And if you think HN is immune to karma games and groupthink, just look at any thread about $CURRENT_HYPE programming language.
> the text and link based format helps - this might change quickly if e.g. HN allowed posting photos of vintage computer equipment, which could disproportionately gain upvotes
That's an interesting point. The ThinkPad subreddit has been taken over by "Thinkstagram" photos. People seem to love them, based on the votes, but I'd hoped for a place to have actual discussion of ThinkPads.
Of course even being text-only may not help. I used to be an active participant in the old ThinkPad mailing list. A small group but very knowledgeable people with interesting discussion of ThinkPad issues.
But then one person turned the list into his own tech support channel. He would ask things like "How do I do X in Microsoft Word?" People would tell him "That's not really a ThinkPad question." And he would say "Yeah, but you are the smartest people I know, so I figured I would ask here."
After that went on for a while I kind of lost interest in the mailing list and unsubscribed.
> it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm.
it's the fact that they're undemocratic black box algorithms that make the participation very one directional (explained below). add to that the centralization and non-interoperability/walled garden aspects, as well as platforms focusing on generating profit instead of helping us make deeper connections, and you've got a big dangerous stew.
the most constructive content doesn't actually surface; things that generate 'viralness' do. there are also few tools to individually manage this social data or build any sort of coherent framing/narrative. in other words: profit-seeking social media platforms are a straightjacketed collective stream of consciousness; they are undemocratically 'governed' spaces injected with ads that come with no useful tools to organize and structure information about the world around us.
"oh but that's not what social media is designed for!"
exactly, the medium is the message. by logging into a third party facebook server to connect with friends and people i want to follow, i am constrained by Zuck's rules and Zuck's black box 'social media' functions. going back to a peer to peer setup by using the ideas of bittorrent's DHTs combined with git's version control, like the holochain framework implements, seems to me to be a way to actually get at the root of this problem: it allows us to see the immense overlaps between today's SV platforms to then be able to quickly decommodify humanity's communication and coordination technology, by publicly sharing and collaboratively improving the underlying functions of our networked apps.
although in very early stages, these projects like IPFS, DAT, SSB, and especially holochain [1], which allows for a full distribution of social media functions (and more: http://valueflo.ws), and which has forking and complete distribution mechanics built into it from the start, will allow a powerful new wave of dweb application evolution/experimentation.
It scales, just not at the price companies are willing to pay. Or, put another way, the main social media platforms aren't spending enough to ensure their service works well.
>Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation.
I don't think it's the upvote/downvote system itself, but the fact that you can see your own "score" that changes behaviour.
It has definitely made me more likely to comment, even when I don't have much to add, and I've noticed my comments getting more and more inflammatory/polarising over the past few months as I start to optimise for engagement.
Before I turned on noprocrast, I'd often sit there "babysitting" my comments; checking on them every 10 minutes to see how people have reacted to it.
I'd be interested to see if @dang has found similar negative effects associated with giving precise counts and scores.
> I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm.
I believe it's advertisement-driven content curation. You're being fooled into thinking that your feed follows your interest, but instead it optimizes around stealing your attention. The feeds control you, not the other way around.
> it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm
Honestly, I think it's just the fact that it's a website that allows you to constantly be exposed to different things that are interesting and stimulating. You can remove upvotes, scrolling, all you want, but you'll still have the IV drip of novel content. Constant exposure to novelty is harmful, I think. We weren't designed to have our minds blown every 5 minutes.
Spend a few hours a day having your brain washed with memes and fascinating articles (or at least the titles), and your brain will re-calibrate to this as the new normal, and anything less stimulating (reading books etc.) will feel boring. Constant novelty makes the world seem unstable and makes me feel flighty and anxious compared to more mundane activities, so the mental health connection is no surprise.
Hacker News is less stimulating than other social media because it's text-based, it's about more serious topics, it's well moderated, and it doesn't abuse addictive techniques like infinite scrolling. However, I bet many people here will attest that they sometimes close HN only to open it right back up again. Closing a website only to open it immediately because you are bored is a sign that you subconsciously believe the website is one of the only interesting things you can do. Either your brain is right, and everything besides HN, reddit, Twitter, etc. is actually boring, or these things are just so artificially stimulating that using them causes everything else to feel boring in comparison. I'll let you decide which you think sounds more accurate.
This guy is making a lot of inferences based on his own experience and I think he may want to consider hiring a therapist to work through these issues:
"In reality, we hire social media to distract our minds from our unpleasant, average life. And, by faking photos, to convince others, including ourselves, that our life is amazing while internally we are in pain."
If you recognize the pitfalls/dangers of social media, I think you can utilize the platforms if you are mindful without falling for those pitfalls/dangers. Pitfalls such as creating "echo chambers" and "bubbles" with who you follow and further falling for emotional hooks ( Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks
https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788 )
I strictly use social media for only about 30 minutes. I divide them into three uses. In that way, I can check out what's happening with my friends and on the internet while not taking too much of our time.
In reality, when people quit social media, they don't start using their time better, they mostly shift their time into different time waster websites. For example, people quit using facebook for 2 hours a day just start skimming reddit for 2 hours a day. They aren't going to start writing a book or bettering themselves in some way.
I think that it is a trap to feel like all time needs to be productive. Not only is it an unachievable ideal, it also makes time spent doing "unproductive" stuff less restorative.
I'd argue that's still an improvement. With the video game and the TV show your are focused on the appreciation of an art form. Granted, you're not strolling the halls of the Louvre or something, but it is art.
Time doesn't have to be spent productively to be time well spent.
When my third child was born and I took leave, I was spending a ton of time on Facebook. One day I put the phone down and realized I couldn't remember a single thing I'd been looking at the past two hours. If you can at least remember what you saw it's a major improvement.
This may be true, but being productive doesn't necessarily need to be your goal here. Maybe using social media as entertainment had negative effects on your mental health that playing a video game doesn't.
“ We persuade our minds that liking pictures and joining virtual groups gives us a sense of belonging. Connection with others”
Except in many cases its not persuasion. Joining groups actually does give us these things. My gf is part of “bay area moms” group and the amount of useful tips she gets out of participating in that is significant. Or “bay area hikers” for me. Also, if i want to sell something, I hire facebook to find a buyer for my old ipad or iphone.
Social media has caught on to the jobs framework. Jack Dorsey references it directly on Twitter earnings calls. He says we need to fill more jobs for more people. He constantly asks what can people hire twitter for?
I think to reduce social media to some of the crappy jobs it does serve artificially diminishes what it can be.
> I think to reduce social media to some of the crappy jobs it does serve artificially diminishes what it can be.
I agree completely with this. The article takes two bad parts of social media and assumes that those are the only uses for it. You've mentioned more. There's also keeping connected in a group context with family and friends that are scattered across the globe. I have an active family group in which my family shares pictures of nephews/nieces, vacation, and more - all stuff that helps keep us close when we can't see each other for long periods of time. I have an active friend group with my college roommates that does the same - when one of them discovered that his spouse was having an affair, we could all support him together.
I agree as well. Those two use-cases for using Facebook don't seem to apply to me. Here's what I use it for:
- Local community groups - I have a few groups localised for my suburb and surrounds, specifically "good karma" groups which are for people asking for/offering help. I'm also part of volunteer organisations and specific interest groups that post updates.
- Buying/selling, both on the marketplace and groups specific for certain things.
- Events. Useful for keeping up-to-date with event information, offering lifts to places and buying/selling tickets.
- Chat. Both with my friends and certain chat groups and also being able to contact people within my network quickly and easily.
I rarely if ever post anything on my profile, and I block the News Feed with plugins/extensions to avoid the infinite scroll.
Granted, a lot of these things could be replaced with other services out there. I'm aware of the privacy concerns and the UI/UX is getting worse over time. I hate Facebook, but the community and people I want to access all use it, so I don't really have a choice if I want to keep in touch.
To claim that people only use social media to seek validation or because your life is so mediocre that you need to consume the best moments of other people's lives, strikes me as a bit out-of-touch and arrogant.
I've yet to find a better tool for managing and communicating with local interest groups. For example, my local pinball group uses it to announce events, manage RSVPs, advertise machines for sale, and just chat about pinball. Meetup.com was a thing, but was more expensive and not quite as good of a product. This replaced a mailing list, but FB is frankly better at this, especially when it comes to managing events.
Imagine how our life will look like with the extra hours we spend on social media? Maybe we can become productive enough and finish something that we always wanted.
Man, the time before social media must have been glorious indeed.
It seems that before social media people were engaged and productive and attentive and whatever.
Wait. MySpace was founded in 2003, twitter in 2006, Facebook in 2004, etc. I was an adult by then. I grew up before social media.
And yeah, people are more or less still people. Those 20 reasons are a wishlist. They're the same 20 things we always promise ourselves every single day after we spent the previous day failing to achieve those 20 things.
I'm not saying there aren't problems with social media, but let's not pretend we'll all become ubermensch if we all log off of twitter.
I have not used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc etc for the last 10+ years. There wasn’t really an event or a moment where I said “I’m quitting social media”, rather I just sort of faded out of it.
I do browse Reddit and occasionally comment on something, or here on HN, so I still see things like Twitter posts frequently and keep up with things through some of those channels.
When I say I don’t use social media, I mean it directed more towards the kind of posting what I made for dinner so my friends can comment on it use case. I think our society is heavily focused on social media and it’s become an integral part of staying informed and up to date.
For that reason, I do check on certain people’s Twitter from time to time, or look at some replies to a tweet that was linked to from an article or something, what’s troublesome to me is that I can’t do almost any of this without signing up. I have more of a problem with it in regards to Twitter, as that has seemingly become the nearly exclusive place for a lot of prominent figures(including elected officials, high profile CEOs, etc) to give updates. Creating this walled garden feels like an attempt to limit access to information that is intended to be publicly available, and at this point my unwillingness to create an account is stemming more from my disdain for this practice than my desire to “quit social media”.
The biggest problem with twitter is low engagement. You can comment on popular stories and likely no one will see or engage at all. Same for sending direct messages or replying. Much of twitter is just a few thousand big accounts doing all the broadcasting.
I think COVID lockdown made keeping social media usage to a minimum really difficult. I noticed that I started to watch chatting streams on Twitch as a crutch for not being able to socialize outside. Socializing over a video call with your friends are also difficult because you're not left with much topics to talk about.
I have an account on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, and many more, but I don't use them actively or passively. Maybe the occasional browsing.
On facebook I made it a point to unfollow all friends so that my newsfeed is blank at any point of time. When I did this initially a few years back I felt.. weird. But I got used to it and now I visit once in a while for the facebook groups. After that I don't end up spending time on FB. For quora after I blocked a majority of tags/topics, the feed was cleaner, but it got boring to be a passive consumer. Similarly for Twitter, I blocked a lot of topics/tags/people and followed a certain few which has made it easier to scroll twitter once in a while.
I have an app (StayFree) on android which calculates the time spent on each app. When I see it now for the last 7 months, I see I have used it for 185 hours, of which 40 hours are on reddit. With whatsapp at 11 hours, the rest of the apps are below 8 hours of usage. I also have trackercontrol which blocks the trackers in my phone. In my browser I have ActivityWatch which shows HN is my most visited apart from the occasional reddit.
For me, the benefits of being a part of these social media comes after investing the time to filter and refine my experience. That does take time. Overall I feel my experience with social media has been better, I'm able to interact with people around the world and learn and ask questions. I dunno if I've turned these evil entities (social media) into my friends.
Maybe off topic, does having an account on these social media sites / apps on phone be harmful in any way when you don't consume it that much? If yes then what sort of harm does it have? Is it mitigated by having trackercontrol? What evil happens if tracking my account gives these companies nothing but close to 0 activity? Are there others like me here?
>Maybe off topic, does having an account on these social media sites / apps on phone be harmful in any way when you don't consume it that much?
For me, it's not about harm to me. It's that I despise the business models of those companies.
So I voted with my (lack of) attention because I don't want to be responsible for generating any revenue for those rapacious scumbags.
I certainly don't push others to get off those platforms, but I choose to live my values and don't support them.
It was never about trying to limit my time on such websites (those phone apps are just poorly implemented interfaces to the existing web platform), rather it was about what sorts of businesses I (don't) wish to support.
I'm glad you found your sweet spot with that. Mine is altogether elsewhere.
I have quit all social media except for HN and Reddit.
Although on Reddit I just use a burner account for comments and I have a cron job that deletes all my comments/submissions at 5PM every day so I'm not providing any value to the site. Has helped me wean off of just endless scrolling. I only use it about 15 minutes a day now.
I found reddit worse than twitter as far as self esteem and group think. Reddit's downvoting is used as punishment for not being "bubbly" (don't know how else to describe the reddit vibe) enough.
I do think a feed of programming posts would be nice but I don't want to visit that site.
Yeah - the lack of retention control on these platforms makes me hesitant to use them.
For Twitter there are third party sites that make it easy to remove old tweets, but it's nearly impossible to remove likes (you have to start a process with their DPO office and then manually remove them in 3k batches and they have to reload them after each).
Reddit is tedious in that you have to do it one by one, there are some scripts to assist (if you edit and clear first it actually removes the comment content they have saved in their DB, but I didn't know this at the time).
FB was also extremely tedious - there's a third party plugin that removes things one by one from the UI of the activity log, but the activity log barely works and fails to load often. It took months of rerunning it to clear out the history.
I get why a forum like reddit or HN doesn't want to allow deletion since it removes value from the forum, but FB should really make it easier. In theory account deletion removes it, but I'm not sure what that looks like on the backend. You can request the data from FB and see it (including details about what profiles you looked at, images you loaded, etc.).
I've reduced down to HN, reddit (a bit), and Twitter without likes. I reject new social apps where I don't have control over my content.
I use shreddit whitelisting a handful of subreddits that talk about programming (where I think my comments are useful) otherwise I see Reddit as ephemeral.
Reddit has started to throttle it's API though and I have a feeling they will eventually prevent comment deletion.
What I really want is the ability to disconnect the link between my account and a comment (currently you need to delete the entire account to do this). If I could do that I'd most of them up instead of deleting them.
Agree with this. Smartphones have enabled profligation of low effort posts and comments, emotional outbursts and mood based content.
This sort of direct or indirect attention grabbing content which is more often than not extremely unhealthy for society gets pushed up by people, because it satisfies our primal dopamine instincts.
As communities get larger and harder to moderate, more and more people assume it is the status quo to create such unhealthy content, and because of smartphones, it is extremely easy to push up such content, and those who werent originally into this also get dragged in.
On an aside, is it really ethical for a company to make insane amounts of profit for being a platform which enables people to bicker, fight and create echo chambers? Agreed that not all social media communities are like this, but even so, is it fair?
Personally, I use social media as a way for inspiration. As an artist, I’m always curious about a new style or something I’ve never seen before. Social media does a good job curating it so I can explore my hobby more . Don’t feel that this is covered well here.
The mindset of someone who would willingly engage in social media (reddit, insta, FB, TikTok, etc) is the real crux of all of this.
The need for attention, validation, to fit in, and be seen fitting it. It encourages the worst traits of old internet forums. The upvote system is a compounding factor on all of this because it gives direct feedback. Violating the group think is instantly punished. Conforming to the group think is instantly rewarded. They are thereby programmed to attempt to appease the group constantly. They live for the rush of validation and dopamine when the upvotes start ticking.
This shit becomes such a powerful feedback loop that they really have no grasp on reality at all. I've had the misfortune of talking to some IRL hardcore redditors face to face. They're socially inept in an entirely unique way. They're capable of basic social graces that an actual mentally ill people aren't, but they still lack critical self awareness. They don't know how to differentiate between the internet and real life. They're gullible and will believe anything even if it's half way agreeable to them. Its tragic, they're virtually lobotomized. Genuine NPCs.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadWhat I want is for interactions with other people in online social spaces to be less destructive.
Unfortunately, social media by its nature is going to be harmful. It was never designed to consider the world we live in now.
We decided we wanted to derive cars, but without the harmful effects of being in crashes, so we decided to create safer vehicles. I like some drugs, and a lot of them are okay in some situations with some boundaries... even if a lot of the users are using them for unhealthy reasons in situations that make the drugs problematic.
I like social media-- I'm literally using it right now to communicate with you. But I do that because I value your thought (even though I disagree with it) and I am able to interact with you in a space that both moderates my behavior by giving up/down vote feedback and which doesn't have a lot of tolerance for poor discourse habits.
If you apply those same rubrics to other social media and don't tolerate them when it violates those boundaries, I believe it's possible to use them in healthy ways.
If you're extending the definition of social media to include sites like Hacker News, you may as well categorize the entire Internet as social media
I feel that the sine qua non of "social media" is user generated content conducted between specific users, tied to specific accounts.
Not even wikis meet that definition, and certainly not most of the author-generated content-based site like blogs or market sites such as amazon, or news sites where the discussion isn't the putative content.
I understand the point that literally any website could be thought of as "user generated"... I've personally made quite a few websites. But the level of interaction and the modalities of how I and a lot of folks use things isn't as interactive as, say, twitter.
So, perhaps for some user populations a Wiki is a social experience, especially for the folks who edit them. Though from my perspective, it feels entirely possible to use it without engaging in that social aspect.
I don't feel the same about Hackernews and/or reddit in general.
I feel like "user generated content conducted between specific users, tied to specific accounts, where users have one-to-one public conversations and those conversations are foregrounded as the site's content" is reasonable.
So, if that's my definition Wikis aren't social media and HN would be.
But I also feel like HN is just a flavor of Reddit, and I feel that most people understand Reddit to be "social media".
I could be worng about those feelings.
I disagree. Social media has never harmed me, I just realized it wasn't worth my time. I've never had issues with self-esteem, confidence, popularity, whatever. I used social media as a photo diary for myself, shared pictures and videos with friends, kept up with what my friends are doing. To this day I check in on social media once in a while just because it's more effective than texting 100+ people to see what they're up to. That being said, I don't think social media is worth more of my time than a few minutes every few weeks or months
How do you know that? This isn't something you can typically know for your self with any degree of confidence.
> To this day I check in on social media once in a while
You've got a lot of recent comments on HN for this to be true. I think you use social media a lot more than you think you do, and it could be impacting you in ways that you don't notice.
Ah so you're that kind of user.
Semantics. I don't consider HN social media, when I say social media I mean instagram, facebook, etc. I consider HN a forum like reddit or other places. My usage of forums is a way to kill time when I'm at work.
> How do you know that? This isn't something you can typically know for your self with any degree of confidence.
Speak for yourself. Maybe you can't typically know this for yourself, but I can. And more importantly, if you're not coming into this exchange in good faith and willing to trust my claims, then any chance of reasonable conversation is gone. I'll be wrapping up my end of our conversation here, thanks.
The drunk driver contradiction. Drunk people are terrible and assessing how drunk they are.
Is wasting your time not a harm?
Somehow coffee is completely different.
Somehow coffee is on the same tier as tobacco or cocaine.
It's not.
Relax.
Enjoy a cocoa.
"I don't want to stop eating food, I just want food that is not going to harm me while I eat it"
"I don't want to stop breathing air, I just want air that is not going to harm me while I breath it"
I don't want to cease all contact with other people. I want to interact socially in non-harmful ways.
But I'm not the only one,
I hope someday you'll join us,
And the world will live as one"
This kind of setup imposes a cost for rude, nasty, aggressive and destructive behavior - since you can simply be excluded from the group in that case.
This is how most of the world works on a day to day basis; you don't let random people into a corporate strategy meeting or an academic council meeting. You only admit people who agree to abide by civil society rules.
Something like that can be incredibly useful, but it requires a lot of up-front organizing effort. Also, malicious types have been known to sneak into say, a closed mailing list, and leak the internal discussions to Twitter or whatever, so...
We're pretty bad at social systems level thinking, but this precise lack of skill is an opportunity for exploitation. In the same way that hobbyist day traders over-estimate their ability to turn a profit by not understanding the skill level of who they are losing against, social media participants over-estimate their ability to check out because they don't understand the skill level of players who want them to engage. This disparity in the games being played isn't spelled out and why would it be? At least there is hope in that social media systems while ubiquitous, are not yet hegemonic. As long as that holds, there is still hope.
Think about it this way, if you have a good job, fantastic relationships, and other great things going on are you really going to be arguing on Instagram with strangers ?
I have the exact opposite opinion, let’s confront them: real-life social spaces are toxic to me, and I seek refuge in computers, where you experience me. If we were a little less toxic to each others, maybe online wouldn’t be a high concentration of people retired from real life?
- Real life has a dump of major problems that “social people” constantly refuse to fix.
- And each time we bring them up, it’s the bane of your life, we get all the names, downvotes, exaggerations, parody, “we’re in $CURRENT_YEAR”, “Have you tried to man up?”, “You’re frustrated”, etc.
- And the problem continues. Online, are you are just meeting with the people that are invisible to you in real life.
The status of the scientific understanding today of gender imbalance in programming (excluding improper studies with doubtful scientific process) is that little boys end up in programming because it’s the only thing in the family which behaves expectedly, doesn’t sulk, calls mum, gets angry for expressing things as they are, retributes effort, etc. Making a little more room for boys in real life would also correct gender imbalance in IT.
It may even make that fewer people in general go to IT and science in general, because they would be more satisfied with real-life interactions. Science would go slower, but people would be happier.
It’s a tough path, but really one that upgrades the lives of millions.
Do you want to take it?
It's not even that people all agree with me at church. It's that they treat you like a human being. Those who are unvaxxed are just some guy down the street, not someone who we are supposed to target in our hour of hate and wish death upon as the more uncivilized amongst the internet regularly do.
I feel sorry for those who have to substitute something so vile for something so wholesome.
Social spaces are all vulnerable to the weaknesses of humanity. While I do think the mechanics of the medium play a role in how those weaknesses surface, the source is and will always be us.
My use of the word regime befits the current US government.
The American heritage dictionary says that regime means:
A usually heavy-handed administration or group in charge of an organization.
That is exactly what the current federal government and many state governments (including my own) are by the admissions of our own courts.
> I feel sorry for those who have to substitute something so vile for something so wholesome.
Here you are trying to proclaim how your church is so wholesome, while you yourself are being an unwholesome person. You're continuing to divide people with your rhetoric. So wholesome.
If you're a representation of your church, I am glad I am not part of your church, or any church for that matter. I've found that this type of behavior you're spewing is quite common and a reason why I hope organized religion finds its deathbed sooner rather than later.
And yes, social media is vile. I'm sorry you don't see that. There is nothing dismissive about calling a piece of software vile. Do you see how confused you've become under it's influence? I literally called a software service vile, after decades of published studies and news reports indicating it's I'll effects, and I've been accused of fostering division among people.
This is the great problem with social media. It confuses fake for real, virtual for physical, and computer programs for human beings.
But hey, you can keep blaming me for your shortcomings, that's what religious people like to do.
> But hey, you can keep blaming me for your shortcomings, that's what religious people like to do.
You're the one worshipping at the feet of Uncle Sam.
Far from it. But I'm not stupid enough to not grasp that we have it a lot better here in the US than others do. It may not be perfect, but it is far from authoritarian or a regime.
You're the one using the incorrect words trying to stir shit up.
I've considered this question at length (for similar reasons as you), experimented once or twice, and haven't cracked it yet.
You don't need a reason. Just quit.
I absolutely consider HN to be social media.
Thus it ticks up the social-ness score a bit for sites like HN as opposed to some old forums like one would find on Yahoo or used to find on Compuserv.
Karma and the wisdom of crowds gives way to herd mentality and vanity. It is what drives the form of discussion on these sites.
We are no longer strangers. Social-ness has been engaged ;)
When I think back 20 years to forums, HN feels most like those to me. It feels nothing like what most people call "social media"
To me, HN is just a well-maintained subreddit (pseudonymous, karma-based voting system, recency bias, etc.)
13 year club here, the Reddit I think of is probably not aligned with what Reddit thinks of itself anymore.
tied to specific accounts, where users have one-to-one public conversations and those conversations are foregrounded as the site's content.
I do feel that message forums/ usenet/ bbs/ etc meet those criteria in various ways and I do consider them forms of social media.
I know that this seems overly broad to some people (and they have good reasons even if I don't agree with them in the end). I don't think "social media" is a pejorative in the way a lot of folks use the term... I mean, sure, HN deals with a lot of the horrible parts of what can be done with that media in healthier ways than, say, myspace did.
But just because HN makes it harder to track specific users doesn't mean that it can't be done... people very much do have specific accounts here, and I have often looked up past commentary these users have generated to get more context about their points.
> I absolutely consider HN to be social media.
I've been online for the same period of time, and I absolutely do not consider HN to be social media.
Sure, there are some commonalities like upvotes, but I consider (my opinion only) these to be important criteria of something "being" social media:
a) Most importantly, a friends/connections list, or "followers"
b) Being able to see who liked/disliked posts
c) The "feed" being personalized/targeted
I feel that the sine qua non of "social media" is user generated content conducted between specific users:
tied to specific accounts, where users have one-to-one public conversations and those conversations are foregrounded as the site's content.
I don't agree that knowing who has up/down voted a comment is as fundamental as the fact that the sites' content -is- the comment.
And while the system doesn't foreground user accounts, I have often found it helpful to look at a user's contributions to better understand their commentary.
Finally, the fact that it's entirely possible to implement a "friends" list or a "feed" based on search results (and that this would apply to the foregrounded content of the site) seems to me to indicate that there's not just a social aspect to the content here, but that this is, in fact a social media site.
I mean, I could search user reviews on IMBD, amazon, or the wiki, but I've never found that to be in line with how I use those sites... here the conversations are the entire reason I use the site. That user generated content is the whole thing for me.
Let me put it another way, to me, one critical defining feature of a "social media" site: when you register, one of the first tasks you do is to identify people you know (or want to know) so they can be somehow linked to you as a friend or someone you're following.
and consider other feathers that you could remove, such as "likes" (or karma) and posting (ie, user submitted content and comment threads). I feel like if you removed those two features, neither HN/Reddit nor Facebook would be the "same" service.
Consider that we have commenters in here saying they don't use social media... So... Kinda, but certainly not in everyone's mind apparently. I feel some je ne sais quoi about the terminology. There is something different, I dunno
Historically, the term came up in the verge of Web 2.0 and was distinct from other social online media in that a specific software was the basis for each respective SN.
So for example Twitter is SN because you had the app on the phone that was only Twitter so that was SN. But an online forum was not, because everybody could obtain the same software and run a forum.
So by that defition HN is social media.
Without pictures, friends, followers, alerts, verified identities, personalization and emphasis on personal branding, an ad-driven revenue model, I wouldn't call it social media. If someone asked for my "social media accounts," I would not include HN in that, however, a subpoena might treat it differently. Security clearance people might think that as well. The fig-leaf pseudonymity provides some modesty, honesty, and civility for actual discourse, where social media is about status signalling, and not much else.
If HN was ever directly instrumental in getting someone laid, you might have an argument, but I'm going to say "no".
If it had direct messaging and follow/subscribe features, it absolutely would be, and I say these are things that make Reddit social media while HN is only a forum.
Social: majority of time is spent reading people's commentary, many who are just a slightly obscured version of the rest of their social media identity, and sometimes responding in dialogue. Even though it's pseudonymous it doesn't mean it's asocial.
Media: Basically what all the links are
That said, could someone tell me what I might be missing? Ignorance is bliss, but it's also ignorance - is there any critical information or happiness that everyone else [who uses social media] enjoys that I do not?
The happiness you can enjoy from meeting people online is the same whether on a forum, on an online videogame, or on twitter.
Most people use social media instead for harmful things that do not help society. Left and Right wing conspiracy theorys abound. Pictures of some cat that you don't own.
All my best friends from high school live all over the country. Some of us have grown apart and that's okay, but I do enjoy passively keeping up with what they're doing on Facebook.
How about family members who you grew up with but now live on other sides of the country?
I have some older cousins that moved to California as soon as they graduated college. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time so it's not like I had any real way of keeping in touch with them. Now we're friends on Facebook and I can see what they're doing.
Ever wanted to go on a hike in the mountains in the spring and see if there's snow on the trail you're about to do? Someone probably tried already and posted a photo on Instagram.
Ever see some new construction in a building and wonder "What's moving in to this space?" There's probably a hyper local Facebook group where someone has already posted that information.
If you're watching a football game and want to get live commentary by people other than the announcers. Twitter is great for that.
I also use Facebook for organizing events like ski weekends or camping trips. I haven't found anything that even comes close for event planning.
HN being the exception to my 2+ years hiatus from Twitter, Facebook, etc, I am careful to represent myself sincerely, in part because I’m assuming my little stories might help someone practice better mental and physical health (I have found some of your collective comments to be helpful—-thank you!).
> We hire social media to observe the life we want, but never actually experience it.
Today I read this post instead of reading further into a book. If I practice reaching for the book instead of HN I may thank myself later, as this forum post is satisfying to complete but otherwise has a low ROI (I tend not to check back soon enough to be part of any discussion). I generally enjoy the life I have, and one action that will make it more enjoyable is to be reading more often, as I find engaging with longer stories over days and weeks to be gratifying.
Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation.
My vote for what's more harmful is the scroll. I have a web extension that just removes the scroll on my Facebook feed. A few months after setting it up I all but stopped using Facebook, checking in once maybe every two months to visit folks individually. I haven't done this for Twitter or IG, but then the quality of my main feed is such that I don't want to remove it outright and want that aggregation of content, somehow.
I think that scrolling in general is harmful as a UX pattern, but the obvious alternative of pagination could create all kinds of complexities around deep-linking and fragmentation of content. All the same I'd love to see more platforms adopt this intentional cap on content associated with a given URL. It turns my engagement with content online from scanning to actual reading.
Yes. This is what created the validation feedback loop, and what generally causes the social harm
The like button, and the variations on it is IMO the biggest problem with social media
Forums and other discussion boards did not have these problems and while you could have "flame war" that involved actual argumentation back and forth not 1000's of passive visitors choosing to upvote, or downvote on a post with no argumentation
Upvotes can lead to karma farming, and the need to see that number of likes go up can be a problem I admit. I just think the echo chamber effect is a worse problem. We've all dealt with fragile egos and boisterous idiots before.
I miss the days where you weren't shunned for wrong-think, just argued with constantly if your opinion differed from the norm.
The way I've started to look at it is that all social media has some harmful and some beneficial aspects, but the nexus of identity-based (vs topic-based like HN) social media with upvote/like functionality is the most problematic for people struggling with identity and self worth. Even as someone established enough not to struggle with self-worth, I avoid that type of social media completely.
Topic based social media with clear and enforced guidelines for content seems to have the least bad trade-off between the harmful and the beneficial.
Of course no social media property is exclusively one or the other, but the design and operation of the service strongly influences the direction in which it goes.
but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer.
the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions.
and this malicious example is just chosen for clarity. even in a more innocuous context, if there is no absolute correct answer and nobody is testing the answers for accuracy, upvotes often do more harm than good, and upvote sites are almost by definition groupthink factories, when they don't pertain to verifiable claims that are quickly tested (which is what makes upvotes helpful on a site like Stack Overflow).
> but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer.
> the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions.
The obvious answer to this however is not to remove the very useful upvote button everywhere but to
- stop frequenting racist forums,
- if they are actually racist, tell law enforcement (where applicable)
isn't it?
For example: https://www.report-it.org.uk/reporting_internet_hate_crime
Consider both:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_Sta...
Sure, there's correlation but the correlation always breaks down whenever anyone needs it most.
If you ask an easy question you could have just googled or read the man pages to get a decent answer is what's upvoted. But few people really need help answering those questions.
If you ask a hard question potentially involving nuances and situational constraints or if you ask a very specific question requiring expertise you will get the same naive surface level answers highly up-voted and the one guy who actually knows your question has his answer downvoted to oblivion by the people who know just enough to be dangerous.
If you aren't familiar with the subject matter in question it's even worse because a guy who knows what he's talking about answering your hard question and getting downvoted for it is indistinguishable from a guy who has no idea what he's talking about giving a wrong answer to an easy question.
Of course the end result is that everyone who knows WTF they're talking about contributes minimally if at all.
Stack Overflow is better than most subreddits because you can link a man page or doc but the more a subject requires subjective judgement the more it displays the pattern I described above.
This has the effect, however, of making it clear that the forum itself is mostly racist, rather than masquerading as not being that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Topic based forums are a thing. I'm a member of a paid (gasp!) forum for high-performance building methods.
but I would like to see how an established standard could be set for what should or shouldn't be upvoted?
So nothing social going on here, just weird/interesting discussions between persons x, y, z, i, j and k.
Edit: I just noticed that some usernames are green. I don't know what that signifies and I do not want to know.
New user.
>I do not want to know
Too bad :)
So it seems like what can make social media a positive or a negative in a person's life is pretty complex. What each person brings to their interactions with the media varies a lot and the ways mechanics are used in the different sites and apps vary a lot.
So it seems like a lot social is going on here on this site. The social group here is responsible for all of the content, I think? Right? It wouldn't be the same if it were posts selected by an elite group and we were just allowed to comment on them.
So I think the article's suggestion to "quit social media" is too simplistic and lacks the nuance it would need to be helpful advice.
It is possible to see someone's profile, posts and comments. I wonder how many users do this to form opinions about others.
OK, let's call it a discussion forum instead. I'd still argue that is a subcategory of social media. The general shape of these things has been around since at least the BBS days.
These terms, however, don't seem to capture the difference I posited between identity-based and topic-based social-discussion-service thingies, and I don't think there exists a standard terminology to make this distinction at this time.
So I both agree with you and disagree with you. Our terminology is lacking for sure. And I agree that this is _more_ of a discussion forum, but not just simply that. But I wouldn't classify a discussion forum as a subcategory of social media. Maybe the other way around.
Discussions are social interactions. HNs format just makes them very shallow because they start from zero each time.
Maybe for a better example, just look at Reddit. Something like AskHistorians or SilphRoad for Pokemon Go are terrific communities full of great information and productive discussion, whereas many other subs are as bad or worse than Facebook. That is in spite of exactly the same interface technology. The difference is culture.
If Facebook has a design problem, it's not having any sort of guiding principles other than engagement. The purely algorithmic curation isn't really curation. It doesn't create a culture at all. It just creates addiction. Infinite scroll is in service of that, but it doesn't create it. In fact, the mobile reader I use for Hacker News has infinite scroll and it doesn't make the site worse.
I don't think it was happy times at Facebook when they figured out what they'd collaborated with, but it put them on the defensive. And Mark Zuckerberg isn't really wired to play defense. He is not a natural diplomat.
Feeds 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
> Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice.
Isn't the problem more one of open-ended feeds rather than feeds generally?
I can live fine with my RSS feed for example: nothing gets in there if I don't actually put it there.
My Facebook and Twitter feeds however are full of this person liked this, reshared that and commented there. So full that I cannot finish it ever.
Of course my addiction is HN, I frequently forget to visit Facebook for weeks (booooring maybe especially after people stopped posting what they did and started just posting motivational posters and memes) and I only visit Twitter as some kind of duty (it is one of the dumbest ideas that ever got traction IMO so I don't exactly enjoy it).
Also I use FBP plugin that let's me filter things out on a very fine-granular level, and I am very aggressive with filtering.
Large Reddits tend toward bland and repetitive cookie-cutter content not solely because Reddit has a voting mechanism, but because the site's structure allows that mechanism to be highly vulnerable to karma farming. There are many casual users who don't notice the content is low-effort or repetitive, special interest subs make it easy to target posts, and the volume is too high for moderators to handle (and many will have a "we can't delete things which are popular and within the rules, even if we don't like them" policy).
Facebook (and YouTube, and to some extent Twitter) are a weird branch of that. The application of Goodhart's law wasn't initially to the users but to the platforms themselves. I have little doubt that initially they started with an altruistic observation that people spent more time on the site if they tended to see content from their most entertaining friends, but then someone realised seeing bad takes from a stranger was even more engaging and so you should see that instead. People realise they get more visibility for being controversial, and again there is no real moderation for this, so we have even more of a tyre fire than the blandness which upvote-driven sites tend toward.
(Twitter at least still offer tools to curate and remove algorithmic ranking from your feed, even if they try to nudge users away from them. That doesn't protect more popular users from the "trolling brings me attention" culture elsewhere on the site, though.)
I think HN is less affected by karma farming due to having a broader range of topics, active moderation of repetitive content and perhaps most importantly a relatively small community with a strong appreciation that the upvote should be used sparingly for interesting and unique content. Also the text and link based format helps - this might change quickly if e.g. HN allowed posting photos of vintage computer equipment, which could disproportionately gain upvotes compared to insightful long-format articles despite being easier to produce.
This is important for two reasons:
- If a website is full of normies - sorry for the word, feel free to suggest a more appropriate one - then mainstream cultural references, information sources, opinions and so on are bound to dominate the scene. This makes the community far less interesting, because mainstream sources necessarly aim for the lowest common denominator. Those communities also look very similar to each other, as though they were TV channels.
- The community is prone to segment itself along the same lines that divide us in real life. Language, politics, education, etc.
As harsh as it sounds, I have come to think that being exclusionary in at least some dimensions is necessary for any kind of community to be interesting.
> I think HN is less affected by karma farming
A very underrated feature that I have come to really like is how positive scores are hidden for everyone except yourself. That a comment is flagged or at -4 is useful signal (I might disagree with the signal but it's clear that other commenters really disliked that), but on the other hand not knowing whether a comment sits at +1 or +20 forces you to think about what the comment is actually saying.
Knowing that something is a) spot on but ideologically inconvenient b) wrong doesn't really help if you don't have the subject matter familiarity to already know what's right and wrong. It just reduces your options to a binary choice.
It's typical of people knee-deep in weird politics to fall into "with us or against us" type of thinking.
No it's not. Counterexample (which is inconvenient to a wide variety of different ideologies):
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H. L. Mencken
That's an interesting point. The ThinkPad subreddit has been taken over by "Thinkstagram" photos. People seem to love them, based on the votes, but I'd hoped for a place to have actual discussion of ThinkPads.
Of course even being text-only may not help. I used to be an active participant in the old ThinkPad mailing list. A small group but very knowledgeable people with interesting discussion of ThinkPad issues.
But then one person turned the list into his own tech support channel. He would ask things like "How do I do X in Microsoft Word?" People would tell him "That's not really a ThinkPad question." And he would say "Yeah, but you are the smartest people I know, so I figured I would ask here."
After that went on for a while I kind of lost interest in the mailing list and unsubscribed.
it's the fact that they're undemocratic black box algorithms that make the participation very one directional (explained below). add to that the centralization and non-interoperability/walled garden aspects, as well as platforms focusing on generating profit instead of helping us make deeper connections, and you've got a big dangerous stew.
the most constructive content doesn't actually surface; things that generate 'viralness' do. there are also few tools to individually manage this social data or build any sort of coherent framing/narrative. in other words: profit-seeking social media platforms are a straightjacketed collective stream of consciousness; they are undemocratically 'governed' spaces injected with ads that come with no useful tools to organize and structure information about the world around us.
"oh but that's not what social media is designed for!"
exactly, the medium is the message. by logging into a third party facebook server to connect with friends and people i want to follow, i am constrained by Zuck's rules and Zuck's black box 'social media' functions. going back to a peer to peer setup by using the ideas of bittorrent's DHTs combined with git's version control, like the holochain framework implements, seems to me to be a way to actually get at the root of this problem: it allows us to see the immense overlaps between today's SV platforms to then be able to quickly decommodify humanity's communication and coordination technology, by publicly sharing and collaboratively improving the underlying functions of our networked apps.
although in very early stages, these projects like IPFS, DAT, SSB, and especially holochain [1], which allows for a full distribution of social media functions (and more: http://valueflo.ws), and which has forking and complete distribution mechanics built into it from the start, will allow a powerful new wave of dweb application evolution/experimentation.
[1] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
Yes it is, HN pays people to keep things at bay. But that doesn't scale
I don't think it's the upvote/downvote system itself, but the fact that you can see your own "score" that changes behaviour.
It has definitely made me more likely to comment, even when I don't have much to add, and I've noticed my comments getting more and more inflammatory/polarising over the past few months as I start to optimise for engagement.
Before I turned on noprocrast, I'd often sit there "babysitting" my comments; checking on them every 10 minutes to see how people have reacted to it.
I'd be interested to see if @dang has found similar negative effects associated with giving precise counts and scores.
I believe it's advertisement-driven content curation. You're being fooled into thinking that your feed follows your interest, but instead it optimizes around stealing your attention. The feeds control you, not the other way around.
Honestly, I think it's just the fact that it's a website that allows you to constantly be exposed to different things that are interesting and stimulating. You can remove upvotes, scrolling, all you want, but you'll still have the IV drip of novel content. Constant exposure to novelty is harmful, I think. We weren't designed to have our minds blown every 5 minutes.
Spend a few hours a day having your brain washed with memes and fascinating articles (or at least the titles), and your brain will re-calibrate to this as the new normal, and anything less stimulating (reading books etc.) will feel boring. Constant novelty makes the world seem unstable and makes me feel flighty and anxious compared to more mundane activities, so the mental health connection is no surprise.
Hacker News is less stimulating than other social media because it's text-based, it's about more serious topics, it's well moderated, and it doesn't abuse addictive techniques like infinite scrolling. However, I bet many people here will attest that they sometimes close HN only to open it right back up again. Closing a website only to open it immediately because you are bored is a sign that you subconsciously believe the website is one of the only interesting things you can do. Either your brain is right, and everything besides HN, reddit, Twitter, etc. is actually boring, or these things are just so artificially stimulating that using them causes everything else to feel boring in comparison. I'll let you decide which you think sounds more accurate.
"In reality, we hire social media to distract our minds from our unpleasant, average life. And, by faking photos, to convince others, including ourselves, that our life is amazing while internally we are in pain."
If you recognize the pitfalls/dangers of social media, I think you can utilize the platforms if you are mindful without falling for those pitfalls/dangers. Pitfalls such as creating "echo chambers" and "bubbles" with who you follow and further falling for emotional hooks ( Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788 )
Leave Reddit, come to HN, leave HN, play a new video game, stop playing a video game, binge watch a tv show.
Never anything productive
Time doesn't have to be spent productively to be time well spent.
When my third child was born and I took leave, I was spending a ton of time on Facebook. One day I put the phone down and realized I couldn't remember a single thing I'd been looking at the past two hours. If you can at least remember what you saw it's a major improvement.
Except in many cases its not persuasion. Joining groups actually does give us these things. My gf is part of “bay area moms” group and the amount of useful tips she gets out of participating in that is significant. Or “bay area hikers” for me. Also, if i want to sell something, I hire facebook to find a buyer for my old ipad or iphone.
Social media has caught on to the jobs framework. Jack Dorsey references it directly on Twitter earnings calls. He says we need to fill more jobs for more people. He constantly asks what can people hire twitter for?
I think to reduce social media to some of the crappy jobs it does serve artificially diminishes what it can be.
I agree completely with this. The article takes two bad parts of social media and assumes that those are the only uses for it. You've mentioned more. There's also keeping connected in a group context with family and friends that are scattered across the globe. I have an active family group in which my family shares pictures of nephews/nieces, vacation, and more - all stuff that helps keep us close when we can't see each other for long periods of time. I have an active friend group with my college roommates that does the same - when one of them discovered that his spouse was having an affair, we could all support him together.
- Local community groups - I have a few groups localised for my suburb and surrounds, specifically "good karma" groups which are for people asking for/offering help. I'm also part of volunteer organisations and specific interest groups that post updates.
- Buying/selling, both on the marketplace and groups specific for certain things.
- Events. Useful for keeping up-to-date with event information, offering lifts to places and buying/selling tickets.
- Chat. Both with my friends and certain chat groups and also being able to contact people within my network quickly and easily.
I rarely if ever post anything on my profile, and I block the News Feed with plugins/extensions to avoid the infinite scroll.
Granted, a lot of these things could be replaced with other services out there. I'm aware of the privacy concerns and the UI/UX is getting worse over time. I hate Facebook, but the community and people I want to access all use it, so I don't really have a choice if I want to keep in touch.
To claim that people only use social media to seek validation or because your life is so mediocre that you need to consume the best moments of other people's lives, strikes me as a bit out-of-touch and arrogant.
I'd still think about using a subreddit + Notion, but that's because I despise FB.
It seems that before social media people were engaged and productive and attentive and whatever.
Wait. MySpace was founded in 2003, twitter in 2006, Facebook in 2004, etc. I was an adult by then. I grew up before social media.
And yeah, people are more or less still people. Those 20 reasons are a wishlist. They're the same 20 things we always promise ourselves every single day after we spent the previous day failing to achieve those 20 things.
I'm not saying there aren't problems with social media, but let's not pretend we'll all become ubermensch if we all log off of twitter.
I do browse Reddit and occasionally comment on something, or here on HN, so I still see things like Twitter posts frequently and keep up with things through some of those channels.
When I say I don’t use social media, I mean it directed more towards the kind of posting what I made for dinner so my friends can comment on it use case. I think our society is heavily focused on social media and it’s become an integral part of staying informed and up to date.
For that reason, I do check on certain people’s Twitter from time to time, or look at some replies to a tweet that was linked to from an article or something, what’s troublesome to me is that I can’t do almost any of this without signing up. I have more of a problem with it in regards to Twitter, as that has seemingly become the nearly exclusive place for a lot of prominent figures(including elected officials, high profile CEOs, etc) to give updates. Creating this walled garden feels like an attempt to limit access to information that is intended to be publicly available, and at this point my unwillingness to create an account is stemming more from my disdain for this practice than my desire to “quit social media”.
I try to keep my social media minimal. No Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, etc...
At times has been difficult to use social media in moderation. Feels like I am competing with an Olympic champion in their own sport.
With that said, here some things that I found helpful:
- Never social media apps on my phone (no email either).
- Only access social media via laptop/desktop.
- Use services like Mailbrew to follow Youtube channels I want to follow (very few).
- Never save my session, always enter the credentials every time I want to check social media.
I do however follow Twitter & HN. More like a passive user.
I sometimes use Twitter for that but feels like the ratio of noise vs. signal is too high!
- Never do cocaine straight out of my pocket.
- Only do cocaine in a restroom using the bag inside my valise, or on the mirrored table in my living room.
- only buy cocaine from a dealer who I trust, or dealers who that dealer trusts.
- when sharing cocaine with others in the restroom, don't tell them personal information about myself.
On facebook I made it a point to unfollow all friends so that my newsfeed is blank at any point of time. When I did this initially a few years back I felt.. weird. But I got used to it and now I visit once in a while for the facebook groups. After that I don't end up spending time on FB. For quora after I blocked a majority of tags/topics, the feed was cleaner, but it got boring to be a passive consumer. Similarly for Twitter, I blocked a lot of topics/tags/people and followed a certain few which has made it easier to scroll twitter once in a while.
I have an app (StayFree) on android which calculates the time spent on each app. When I see it now for the last 7 months, I see I have used it for 185 hours, of which 40 hours are on reddit. With whatsapp at 11 hours, the rest of the apps are below 8 hours of usage. I also have trackercontrol which blocks the trackers in my phone. In my browser I have ActivityWatch which shows HN is my most visited apart from the occasional reddit.
For me, the benefits of being a part of these social media comes after investing the time to filter and refine my experience. That does take time. Overall I feel my experience with social media has been better, I'm able to interact with people around the world and learn and ask questions. I dunno if I've turned these evil entities (social media) into my friends.
Maybe off topic, does having an account on these social media sites / apps on phone be harmful in any way when you don't consume it that much? If yes then what sort of harm does it have? Is it mitigated by having trackercontrol? What evil happens if tracking my account gives these companies nothing but close to 0 activity? Are there others like me here?
For me, it's not about harm to me. It's that I despise the business models of those companies.
So I voted with my (lack of) attention because I don't want to be responsible for generating any revenue for those rapacious scumbags.
I certainly don't push others to get off those platforms, but I choose to live my values and don't support them.
It was never about trying to limit my time on such websites (those phone apps are just poorly implemented interfaces to the existing web platform), rather it was about what sorts of businesses I (don't) wish to support.
I'm glad you found your sweet spot with that. Mine is altogether elsewhere.
Although on Reddit I just use a burner account for comments and I have a cron job that deletes all my comments/submissions at 5PM every day so I'm not providing any value to the site. Has helped me wean off of just endless scrolling. I only use it about 15 minutes a day now.
For Twitter there are third party sites that make it easy to remove old tweets, but it's nearly impossible to remove likes (you have to start a process with their DPO office and then manually remove them in 3k batches and they have to reload them after each).
Reddit is tedious in that you have to do it one by one, there are some scripts to assist (if you edit and clear first it actually removes the comment content they have saved in their DB, but I didn't know this at the time).
FB was also extremely tedious - there's a third party plugin that removes things one by one from the UI of the activity log, but the activity log barely works and fails to load often. It took months of rerunning it to clear out the history.
I get why a forum like reddit or HN doesn't want to allow deletion since it removes value from the forum, but FB should really make it easier. In theory account deletion removes it, but I'm not sure what that looks like on the backend. You can request the data from FB and see it (including details about what profiles you looked at, images you loaded, etc.).
I've reduced down to HN, reddit (a bit), and Twitter without likes. I reject new social apps where I don't have control over my content.
I'm using shreddit to edit and then delete my comments on Reddit. It has worked out pretty good for me so far.
I deleted my FB account maybe 8 years ago but didn't think to delete my posts first.
You probably should edit your comments and leave them empty
otherwise they're probably still visible - uneddit or something like that
Reddit has started to throttle it's API though and I have a feeling they will eventually prevent comment deletion.
What I really want is the ability to disconnect the link between my account and a comment (currently you need to delete the entire account to do this). If I could do that I'd most of them up instead of deleting them.
This sort of direct or indirect attention grabbing content which is more often than not extremely unhealthy for society gets pushed up by people, because it satisfies our primal dopamine instincts.
As communities get larger and harder to moderate, more and more people assume it is the status quo to create such unhealthy content, and because of smartphones, it is extremely easy to push up such content, and those who werent originally into this also get dragged in.
On an aside, is it really ethical for a company to make insane amounts of profit for being a platform which enables people to bicker, fight and create echo chambers? Agreed that not all social media communities are like this, but even so, is it fair?
The need for attention, validation, to fit in, and be seen fitting it. It encourages the worst traits of old internet forums. The upvote system is a compounding factor on all of this because it gives direct feedback. Violating the group think is instantly punished. Conforming to the group think is instantly rewarded. They are thereby programmed to attempt to appease the group constantly. They live for the rush of validation and dopamine when the upvotes start ticking.
This shit becomes such a powerful feedback loop that they really have no grasp on reality at all. I've had the misfortune of talking to some IRL hardcore redditors face to face. They're socially inept in an entirely unique way. They're capable of basic social graces that an actual mentally ill people aren't, but they still lack critical self awareness. They don't know how to differentiate between the internet and real life. They're gullible and will believe anything even if it's half way agreeable to them. Its tragic, they're virtually lobotomized. Genuine NPCs.