There's some real things I want to appreciate & root into here, but as a geek growing up, one of my greatest & most persistence annoyances was how easy & happy it was for so many around me to pick being so ignorant, so blind, so insular.
Heck yes ignoring the world & big matters makes you happier. Heck yes keeping blinders on & seeing less is safer, more secure, simpler.
But fuck that. Fuck ignorance. Face things, see the scope of things. I hated the choice of ignorance then. Today I can at least accept that there's validity in multiple paths. But when we dock the people opting into the world for the real emption, empathy, & pain they experiemce for trying to see more? This is a modern mind-poison. There's so little to be said for being aware, for caring, by any measurable form. But we should. Boiling everything down to what is good for the individual is insufficient to maintain a society & this view will keep going on and on and on and it's so gross, so deeply deeply inadequate & shit.
Edit: there's a lot of very very sorry followups with people with really shitty social feeds & want-anxiety. Yes, that is some people's experience. But it hasnt been what I've seen. It hasnt been what people I know experince. Some of the greater hazards I've seen have been a kind of para-societal living-in-the-event that some people have, without any real stake, but I generally dont see anywhere near the level of Fear Uncertainty or Doubt the social-network-panic comments widely want to freak us out about. There is a knowing, real, & reasonable wokeness & solidarity, and so little of the negative pressures in my feeds that others tout, the people everywhere around me from so many decades & places are so much more nuanced & in tune & multifaceted in their view of the affairs & goings on than the media. This demonization of social media is a panic I simply dont see, anywhere. I think society has warped itself into an unjustified & unreasonable frenzie against something that is far less scary than we & especially the media make it out to be.
I think the nuance here might be in keeping your head still in the general news of the world but avoiding the things that cause "tribal syndrome" or anything with "keeping up with the joneses".
Social media isn't the world, or a big matter. One can still read/engage with the news without having to deal with as many dark patterns. We don't have a public digital square, but I'm not going to help Zuckerberg et al further privatize it at my own mental expense.
idk about that, a lot of news sources feel like they're optimizing for clicks too. where is some boring neutral news? then am i to broken to even stick with something like at this point lol maybe i need the clickbait
i agree with the main point, social media isnt the world. i think people forget that
There are some news sources that are less click baity and partisan, such as Axios, DW, or Reuters. If you can read French, courrier international is decent too.
Courrier International is totally worth the reading and its concept is pretty smart : most of their article are just translated articles from foreign ( = not France based) newspapers. It allows the reader to get a view of the current topics from the outside of the country. Furthermore, by its nature of being translated, this newspaper have to be "slow" and can’t fall under the "breaking news" clickbait temptation.
In print form. That comes to your physical mailbox.
Newspapers are OK, but magazines are better, if you want "State of the world, processed and digested, after the fact, without the outrage of the moment leaking in."
I subscribe to... honestly more than I get around to reading fully, but part of it is to simply say, "Yes, I value this type of writing and information, please keep producing it."
If anything I think my social media feeds/friends have far far more nuance & balance, accept the duality of existence & show it off, far far far more than the bland & polemic media/news.
Imo the social media panic is mostly people afraid of genuineness & earnesty, or people jist afraid of an idea they dont at all have any connection to or understanding of.
There is a very very real problem that this world lacks accessible role models. That we dont know who to look to, that we dont have local examples. That's not a social media problem: that's just ehat happens when the well-to-do parts of the economy stratify up & up & up & real living gets trashy cheap & hard. Some people fall for the shallow signs that are projected, on social media or in other cultural distribution mechanisms (music is a big longstanding distributor of cultue for example). But the lack of real meaning far far far outstripsy concern with social mediacs ability to let shallow symbols spread.
The issue is the knowledge of bad things you cant change and wont impact your behavior at all just makes you informed and miserable.
Being informed is not a universal good, more is not always better. Should have a personal cost/benefit calculation, “is it worth it to be this informed?” Etc.
You can certainly hear about a lot of things on social media, but I don’t think reading a bunch of underinformed, overangry people fire memes, half-truths, and occasional outright lies back and forth constitutes facing anything in any meaningful way, nor will it make any difference in the world.
I think that in the context of social media it is less about ignoring the world & big matters but rather that you're getting a very biased view of the things that in the end is often useless and cause no tangible behavioral change in you.
The "fuck ignorance, face things" can be used to shove information down someone's throat that adds nothing to the person's life except maybe misery.
Being informed about stuff you can do nothing about that won't cause any tangible behavioral change (except maybe adding stress and anxiety) is not novel for the sake of it.
A rock that can't move, act or communicate that know the truth of the world, or Kardashians family dynamics, is no better than a rock that don't.
I’m all for engagement in news, world events and deliberate conversations.
Social media seems different in that increased feed engagement (read: revenue) for these companies can be to feed into insecurities. That’s not informational, that’s predatory.
if you decide to experience the entire world, all the time, there's no respite from the awful. the human mind just isn't capable of handling that well.
When someone develops a distorted picture of the world and becomes an activist based on it, that's just as bad for society as if they had never activated in the first place. In fact you could make a case that it's worse, mass shooters tend to be highly ideological and have views that are at odds with reality.
The problem we have with social media (and to a degree traditional media as well) is that both the nature of the technology and the profit incentives of the platforms encourage shallow thinking and cognitive bias among users. Going from paper to screens was bad enough in terms of its documented effects on focus and comprehension. Add to that shrinking the screen down to the size of our palms, enforcing 280 character limits, amplifying the most outrageous voices etc. and I sometimes wonder how civilization is still intact!
I agree that people should maintain some form of awareness of social issues and participation in them, democracy doesn't work without this. But an information diet heavy on social media will promote a distorted awareness of the world. And time spent on social media feels significant but it doesn't actually effect change. Things that do include: voting, attending a protest, writing to your congressman, volunteering your time and labor, earning extra income which you can donate to a cause, etc.
There are a lot of ways to get informed, participate & influence society, social media is one of the worst. It's the junk food of activism.
I would say that interacting with the physical world/people is much richer and more fulfilling than social media (or any other media). Being aware of 'the world & big matters' does not make a person good or interesting. What really matters is not what media a person consumes (or does not consume), but what they do.
1) The writer, Cal Newport, gets his news from reading a broadsheet newspaper cover to cover every morning. (Not in the link but he's written about it elsewhere). I think it would be hard to argue that he's less well informed than someone scrolling through reddit, let alone FB or Instagram.
2) He's also said, and I agree, that pre-2006 or so Twitter and FB were pretty benign social media and have a lot of positives. Critically, this is before they developed infinite scrolling style timelines which are setup to maximise engagement. They were just chronological feeds of things posted by people you chose to follow.
3) Similarly to (2), the way those algorithms are optimised is not to deliberately expose you to the views of a wider range of people than you affirmatively chose to follow (although they could be!) but to maximise eyeball-time regardless. It turns out that the way to do that is to let highly emotionally charged and extreme views rise to the top.
As a result, the things you see will be either things you violently agree with from your bubble or things likely to trigger an immediate counter-response from what I think of as your anti-bubble. The anti-bubble looks like diverse views but are actually just fully defined as the inverse of the bubble's views. This deadens the space for mutual political engagement.
I think that "social media" could do lots of great things if it worked differently but I just don't think that empirically it does.
Junk food's a great analogy. When encountering delicious junk food we're biologically compulsed to gorge. And just like we learn to moderate our junk food intake, it's easy enough to learn the warning signs of doom scrolling and put an end to it (just takes awareness and discipline).
Side note: I do the same when I (through force of habit) start a game of bullet chess, there's about 5 seconds before the game starts - just enough time to quickly cancel! (if I play 1 bullet chess game, I'll probably play 5 more right after, so quickly escaping when I shouldn't be playing is a huge benefit).
> why is this a recurring obsession of HN posters?
Most of us would have doom scrolled in one form or another, many do it regularly, which can be hugely detrimental to life satisfaction in the same way any addiction could be, and can also increase anxiety. It's also in the interest of app makers to encourage these mostly destructive habits.
I'd argue that it can include HN, but HN is not designed to be nearly as toxic, and actually goes out of the way to be "as not-toxic as possible without breaking the concept of what it's trying to be."
I've spent a while thinking through "What makes social media evil?" - I've read a number of studies, I grew up with the first wave of what we might call "social media" (never used MySpace but was quite familiar with it from friends, extensively used LiveJournal, etc). And my conclusion is that once you go away from "global state" to "individualized algorithmic feeds," it's probably gone evil.
HN, as far as I can tell, has a global state. There may be some replication delays (if it's hosted on multiple servers, which I simply don't know - I can't imagine it requires much in terms of resources to host), but "I see what you see what a non-logged in user sees," with only very, very few differences (flagged/dead posts, mostly). It's not reordering the state based on what it knows about me - it's reordering, globally, for all users, based on the consensus. The same was true of LJ - you had your own feed, but outside permission related differences, if I looked at a community and you did, we both saw the same thing.
This global state also means that there's no "slot machine" behavior of "pull the slider and see what's new." You refresh. It's the same stuff. Maybe two things switched positions. Go away, because it's simply not going to change that fast for you.
HN also doesn't go with the endless scrolling. There's a bottom of the first page. You have to make a deliberate decision to see beyond it, and that's something that historically was just "how things worked," but has been replaced with the bottomless bowl approach. We know that people, given a bottomless bowl of soup, eat more. And given that every ad revenue based social media company has gone to that model, clearly people consume more.
Humans are vulnerable to "metricification" quirks, and you see that with a lot of social medias too. HN only shows your up/down votes, and you can't see anything else. There's a demetrificator extension for it, though I would like the option to turn the metrics off in my profile.
And, finally, HN is "pull" - I have to go to the site, vs it reaching out with notifications to try and drag me back in. Plus, there's the noprocrast setting. It gives you the tools to make it a nuisance to use too much.
So, while HN can be somewhat addictive if you let it, the lack of any "weaponization of psychology" tricks and the very active "No, really, you've been looking at it too long, go away" coding means that I don't consider it particularly toxic, and certainly not in the same style as FB/Twitter/etc.
Why it's a recurring obsession? Probably because a lot of us have been in the tech industry, have seen how it works, have (probably) been addicted at some point, have watched the whole concept go from "Huh, this is kind of a neat way to connect with people I'd never talk to otherwise!" to "Braaaaaaiiiiiinss... via eeeeeyyyyyeeebaaaallllssss!" in the past 10-15 years, and really want no part of it anymore, and want to help ensure other people see it for the vile, human-toxic trash it is.
It'll destroy your ability to focus, make you less emotionally unstable, warp your view of reality in one of a variety of ways, suck basically all the time you let it, try with every trick in the book to addict you. And in exchange, some tech billionaires get another couple feet on their yachts. Yay?
> Humans are vulnerable to "metricification" quirks, and you see that with a lot of social medias too. HN only shows your up/down votes, and you can't see anything else. There's a demetrificator extension for it, though I would like the option to turn the metrics off in my profile.
Where's this extension? That seems useful (I'm susceptible to "metricification" - quit reddit because of it. He said, knowing that mentioning quitting reddit would probably net him at least 5 upvotes).
>"Snark aside, why is this a recurring obsession of HN posters?"
The topic is related to technology (and thus easier to justify as relevant to the forum) and has a low barrier of entry to discuss. A significant majority of people in Western countries use social media and it doesn't require technical knowledge, so it's easier to share opinions about it.
Reading HN threads on social media is almost like consuming junk food: the arguments are predictable but comfortable and easy to digest. It's enjoyable in a perverse way, though not a real source of growth as the ideas aren't as hard to struggle with (versus threads on more technical topics).
I think many people want to spend less time consuming media ('social' or otherwise) and more time interacting with the physical world/people. But it is difficult to do that these days because there is endless attention-grabbing media to consume and that is what it feels like everyone else is doing so it becomes the default.
HN has been a significant contributor to my cynicism. There have been enough submissions in the past where I already knew what to expect from the comments section, especially in cases where my stance on the matter is already firm/obvious (such as with tech regulation, climate change, complaints about Twitter threads being reposted to HN, articles about social media dooming us like this one).
My reaction to these cases is typically along the lines of "yes, we know this bad, but what's going to change? What does continuing to complain here accomplish?" It's largely the same mechanism as those other toxic media platforms, and yet HN often falls for it as well. The band of people who decry Twitter et al. at the usual opportunities has persisted for years at this point, and they are unlikely to ever exit this community for good. Yet it's trivial from force of habit to click through to the comments anyway and continue to expose oneself to the usual negativity.
And I don't even use Twitter anymore - it's not like I disagree with many of those negative opinions. But after years and years of reading the same tired arguments, that negativity seems to transcend its original context to worm its way into your thought process as a general, persistent haze.
Every time I see a Firefox announcement of any kind I know the top comment will be a link to bugzilla showing some 15 year old bug that the commenter thinks is absolutely critical or something about the CEOs pay.
Maybe if you are lucky, page 2 has comments about the actual article.
I have a similar experience with anything related to Google or GCP - click through and there are endless comments about Google shutting down products and how people would never use them or how the customer support is bad.
However, I have noticed that this trend is starting to change so there is hope! I am not sure if it is because the HN community has changed, or if Google has changed its public perception (unlikely I expect)
Society's opinion of social media is by far the biggest boldest new pop-culture gazing-at-itself and snake-eating-it's-tale opportunity of the century. This is a cultural fixation, and one we've already largely convinced ourselves is awful & terrible & the source of great suffering. That it happens to be some pretty delinquent not great companies running the show is a great fuel for the bonfire, cause for pyrophilia.
HN hits the same buttons as reddit for me, that is, compulsion to constantly refresh to see if there is something new, karma goes up, or I've gotten replies, so no, HN isn't any different, though it has less of the toxicity and low or no-value comments.
> Snark aside, why is this a recurring obsession of HN posters?
I think that there are too related patterns on HN and both have to do with tech culture. First, complains about loneliness and seeing loneliness as major problem. Second, looking down on socialization or at least ways other people socialize - whether social media or young students partying and socializing. So, any bad news about social media is welcome.
There is ethos of not socializing the wrong way or not at all. And ethos of not wasting your time with fluff, doing side project or getting better in something instead (and some amount of this is absolutely good) and of working a lot. And combination then it leads to kind of magical thinking of "if only other people did not used these, everything would be better".
At Facebook / Meta, employees often questioned Mark Zuckerberg whenever a study like this came out. Zuckerberg noted that the same held true for news media. Reporters do not like to mention this.
My Twitter feed is basically the news. The first 4 of 5 posts are from established news organizations or about current events. Social media vs news media is a distinction without a difference.
Well no, not legally. Social media platforms have certain legal protections against litigation for their content while news organizations do not.
The distinctions are actually fairly profound and include established practices and professional norms concerning information sourcing, verification/due diligence, and editorial discretion. This is all before the agent-principal relationship, contractual obligations, and regulatory oversight to which news organizations are subject.
I understand why Zuckerberg needs to make the false equivalence, but we don’t (necessarily) share his profit motive and can be more objective here.
Depends on the news source. There is a noticeable difference between Tweets and unverified Facebook posts, news media from Buzzfeed or Salon, articles from a local newspaper, articles from The New York Times/Washington Post, and articles from the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal.
Not all news is designed for outrage. Several publications publish in-depth articles in a neutral way, where you can actually learn something. Investigations are also often genuinely useful for a better society. Zuckerberg's position therefore doesn't hold true for all news media.
Separately, depending on how your social media feed is set up, you can be feel jealous/lesser due to seeing the high points of the lives of people you know (depending on your personality type), seeing news on your feed, or seeing neither due to subscribing to accounts in niche fields.
That is the point of my comment: not all news sources are designed for clickbait. In contrast, consider The Financial Times's (FT's) headlines:
>Tiger Global slashes bets on tech groups after stock market sell-off
> News in-depth. Military briefing: why Russia and Ukraine are fighting over a Black Sea outcrop
> Investors pull $7bn from Tether as stablecoin jitters intensify
> Buffett buys $3bn Citi stake in value-hunting stock splurge
> Ethiopia atrocities cast long shadow as city of Lalibela prays for peace
> Qantas says synthetic fuel could power long flights by mid-2030s
Some of the news itself is tragic. But it's a false equivalence to claim that the headlines and article content between news sources (e.g. Washington Post vs. the FT) are equally outrage-provoking or informative. The Washington Post was listed in the middle because their articles are usually highly informative (from the number of interviewed people and documents analyzed), though their headlines are more clickbait.
Both The Washington Post or the FT are different from (typically) Salon, and each is a far cry from social media. Also, the debate of news media in place of discussing social media is exactly the effect that Zuckerberg intended with his comment.
To add to this. I don't watch the news anymore (maybe that makes me a bad person). I also rarely read it (except for hacker "news") but... Every few weeks I visit my mom for a few days and she wants to watch the news around 10pm. It always massively over hyped violence, crime, political outrage, and it's funny, in a sad way, that she always gets upset at it and ask her why she keeps watching. She says "for the weather" to which I reply (you can ask your ipad/iphone) but she keeps doing it even though every night it's clearly upsetting her. I think it's a habit like she feels they day isn't over unless she ends the night with news, even though it's 90% designed for outrage and sensationalism.
Maybe try FT. Currently the Most Read headlines are:
- Bitcoin has no future as a payments network, says FTX chief
- Putin signals acceptance of Finland and Sweden joining Nato
- China’s economic activity plummets as Covid lockdowns hit growth
- "Russia learns a hard lesson about the folly of war"
- Harrow Beijing school loses its hallowed British branding
Or Wikipedia's Current events Portal:
- Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (pictured) is elected as President of Somalia.
- In the United States, ten people are killed in a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
- Ukraine, represented by Kalush Orchestra with the song "Stefania", wins the Eurovision Song Contest.
- Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan inherits the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and becomes President of the United Arab Emirates after the death of Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
And you could say the same about social media. I'm on facebook. I get no outrage. I unfollowed anyone who posts it and FB doesn't insert any. As an example right now my FB feed is:
> Picture of a the blood moon eclipse a friend took
> A Picture of a CD cover of a song a friend is listing too
> Pictures from my sister visiting her best friend in another state.
> A funny gif from a friend making fun of crypto crashing
> A poster of the new Japanese Ultraman movie and a friend saying he saw it and really enjoyed it and is looking forward to the Masked Rider movie.
> More pictures from my sister
> A collection of doodles from an artist friend
> A picture of my sister with 2 x-neighbors I haven't seen in 35 years
> A friend saying he loved the video game "The Final Station"
> More pics from my sister
> A friend posting a link to a music video she loves
> A friend posting about a game they made at a game jam
> A friend saying he started doing trip planning for families going to Disneyland.
> My aunt posting a picture of flowers my uncle bought her.
> A friend posting about a show he went to in Argentina
> My sister posting a words of wisdom type picture
> A friend posting he can't believe he's had the same job he loves for 8yrs already
> A friend posting an artist concept drawing of Cassini taking a picture of Saturn
> A friend who makes one off dresses on etsy posting her latest creations
> A friend posting he likes "Picard" but it should have had a "Shut up, Wesley" scene.
No outrage in my feed.
To put it another way, social media is what you make of it. If you don't want the outrage the stop following the outrage.
That does not seem controversial. However Facebook/Instagram does not allow you to only see results for friends you follow. Explore page, ads, recommended posts, shorts, reels pepper your news feed. And your friends posts are also sorted with the intention of maximum engagement, not relevance.
This kind of reads like an ad for Facebook. It sounds way to ideal. My feed is just reposted meme pages with the occasional baby and vacation picture thrown in
I've stopped going to facebook myself because even though a lot of it for me was like that (and no outrage or politics, that's just outrage and edge cases that filter onto aggregators like reddit), I noticed at some point that a third was Facebook ads, and another third ads made by other people.
I'm latching onto your post because a number of those are advertisements / promotions; social media has turned a lot of people into unpaid marketeers. In a sense, I mean I get that people are fans of e.g. TV shows, but still. Anyway here's some that I think are advertisements in disguise:
> A Picture of a CD cover of a song a friend is listing too
> A poster of the new Japanese Ultraman movie and a friend saying he saw it and really enjoyed it and is looking forward to the Masked Rider movie.
> A friend saying he loved the video game "The Final Station"
> A friend posting a link to a music video she loves
> A friend posting about a game they made at a game jam
> A friend saying he started doing trip planning for families going to Disneyland.
> My aunt posting a picture of flowers my uncle bought her.
> A friend posting about a show he went to in Argentina
> A friend who makes one off dresses on etsy posting her latest creations
> A friend posting he likes "Picard" but it should have had a "Shut up, Wesley" scene.
I don't agree that it depends on the news source. The problem is consuming media and not acting on it. A person can use social media to inspire real positive change in their behaviors and their life, and a person can read in-depth, well-written articles about atrocities happening half-way around the world and just end up feeling powerless and depressed.
There are legitimate opportunities to act on the news. For example, I avoided a fairly convincing phishing attempt with my work email due to reading a relevant article in a mainstream newspaper. News can similarly help a person avoid scams and cons.
News also provides common conversational topics with different types of people. A lot of people in business read The Wall Street Journal, and it’s easier to find common talking points with them if I read the news (especially on news about their industry). Similarly, a lot of academics and people in education read The New York Times. Though reading the news isn’t necessary to start a conversation, it’s often an easy starting point.
Yes, the correct headline and takeaway should be: "Taking a break from ALL media makes you happier", or rather, "go outside and spend time with real people".
While that’s true, it misses the point – which is that Facebook is consciously and painstankingly designed you keep to “engaged”. Sure, everyone wants to keep their website visitors, but what Facebook does is a different level. (And many media consider their readers to be their customers, not the goods being sold. That’s a huge difference.)
Sure. But in the same way that 24 hour news networks are an obvious detriment compared to brief half hour or hour long "evening news" programs, social media's patterns to keep you engaged are also a detriment compared with, say, a quick text to the people you care about checking in. There's a real positive buried in there, but the financial incentive to capture eyeballs turns it into a negative.
The news has always been "almost entirely negative", even when the only source was newspapers. But being informed of what's going on, vs being clueless; there's a societal benefit in having an informed citizenry.
This does presume that that half hour or hour is not a purely editorial function (think Walter Cronkite vs Tucker Carlson), and that the goal is to actually cover the news of the world, not create partisan wedges and glue eyeballs (again, same comparison). But even if it's negative, understanding what is going on matters, and is likely a net gain for society, with a minimal individual cost.
What isn't a net gain is being so consumed by world events (or worse, editorialized versions of world events) that you lose sight on your personal world, and are unable to enjoy the moments around you. A similar effect is at play with social media.
> he news has always been "almost entirely negative", even when the only source was newspapers
This doesn't ring true for me at all.
What percentage of broadsheets were dedicated to crime/murder back in the day? Now estimate the same for crime/murder being covered in the local evening news.
From my experience it's not even close. Broadsheets were actually informative, cable news is a lot of fear-mongering.
"Studies have linked poor mental health to news exposure during negative and traumatic events such as terrorist attacks or natural disasters; the more news a person consumes during and after these events, the more likely they are to suffer from depression, stress and anxiety. For example, a 2014 study surveyed 4,675 Americans in the weeks following the Boston Marathon bombings and collected data on how much media they consumed. Participants who engaged with more than six hours of media coverage per day were nine times more likely to also experience symptoms of high acute stress than those who only watched a minimal amount of news."
Kinda agreeing with me though? I said "doesn't matter as much".
Case in point, I think someone that watches 1 hour of news about the Boston Marathon bombings is going to be worse off than someone who watches 12 hours of news that happens to be mildly positive. The problem is (as I said) that the news these days is almost entirely negative, because that is what sells.
It might be the case that the psychological process here is that making a conscious change to your lifestyle makes you happier and less anxious (temporarily?). If so then the same is true of literally anything.
Firstly, traditional news media’s intrusion is not as severe or wide ranging. To give one example, the surge in teenage mental health problems that Facebook and Instagram in particular seem likely to have caused.
Second, there is a very large qualitative difference between social media and traditional media. Social media is monitoring your every action, and adapting to it, and creates a tight feedback loop where you are manipulated into staying engaged and consuming more adverts. That personalised real-time feedback loop, based on giant datasets that are very invasive, is incomparable to traditional media.
Finally, the extent of attention capture by social media cannot be compared to traditional media. This can be observed by simply taking a walk down the high street and seeing how many people are staring at their phones. Traditional media do use apps as a medium, but there aren’t many people who would seriously argue that most of those glued to their screens are likely to be reading an online newspaper and not looking at Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok.
The only doubt I have is whether Zuckerberg actually believes what’s he saying, in order to have a clean conscience, or whether it’s a cynical argument used to reassure his staff.
> Social media is monitoring your every action, and adapting to it, and creates a tight feedback loop where you are manipulated into staying engaged and consuming more adverts. That personalised real-time feedback loop, based on giant datasets that are very invasive, is incomparable to traditional media.
I just want to add here that YouTube, while not exactly a social medium and not a traditional medium, also has a tight and instantly adaptive feedback loop. With this argument, staying off YouTube should be similarly relieving than staying off at least TikTok. At least, the hours you can waste are comparable.
You hear this kind of equivalence made a lot: social media is no different than the newspaper, or the TV news. This never made sense to me. Obviously, some characteristic of social media persuaded people to drop their newspapers and turn of their televisions to use their phones instead. There must be something qualitatively different about social media on mobile devices that explains this.
The difference may be that it is better and more enlightening, or it may be that it is more addictive and intrusive. But, it is not the same.
My significant other has a news app "addiction". A lot of them now mimic the feeds of social medias. She went up to spending 6 hours a day scrolling down the infinite scroll until we noticed the issue.
I did the same for Twitter. I turned off notifications. And I check it only when I feel like it. Read up on some things. Comment. And then go away. It’s been amazing.
I read more. I have much more time to spend doing other more social things in meat space. It’s been amazing to just turn off and the notification thing was the key: turning them off allowed me to control when I used the app and not the other way around (because a red notification counter triggers me to check it out etc.).
I stopped reading twitter and the boredom is only helping me find more interesting things to read (Kindle mainly)
But I miss being snarky with a small circuit of online acquaintances. It was ego fulfilling, dropping one liners on almost-famous people (in context) and getting some degree of recognition.
I'm getting some flak from family glued on, who want to know "where I went" but thats survivable.
On the whole, agree with the premise. Its trash. USENET pre great-re-org was slow trash, ML are trashy only in very minor ways. Fast trash is worserer.
HN is not that bad. I think it goes to moderation (Good job Dan!) which is done carefully. A blog I like has the byline "my blog my rules" and you know, for anything short of speakers corner I think this is fine: its not the commons.
For me, I've found that social media doesn't affect my level of happiness and/or anxiety directly. What it does do, is take up a lot of my time almost imperceptibly - leaving less time for other, more meaningful activities. It makes me feel like I'm running out of time every day, which in turn causes a feeling of anxiety.
Yes, few people probably aren't affected by social media just like smoking & drinking. But from my personal experience many people really feel jealous/unhappy/lonely when they look on false reality. And, those influencer really makes everything worst.
For me it’s not the fake people showing off, it’s all the news, drama and doom. And arguably it’s all irrelevant anyway. As an Australian, if I had known nothing about Ukraine, BLM protests, Trump, Kyle Rittenhouse, etc, my life would be no bit worse or less informed. It would probably be a bit better. But if I check social media it’s just a non stop stream of crap.
This is the kind of stuff that ends up filling my news feed. None of it has ever had any real effect on my life but it all seems to get equal feed real estate on reddit/twitter
Unsure about that.. I don't think Australia has been isolated from the rippling effects of price increases of grain and energy, that is one effect of the war in Ukraine. Probably not as much affected as many other countries, but I think you would still import products from countries where these effects are significant, and which have had to raise their prices due to it.
But none of that is likely to be actionable information for them.
It's like hearing that meteor is going to kill us all tomorrow and there is nothing you can do. Sure, it's going to affect you, but your life isn't going to be any better if you know.
Certainly, if you only want to hear about actionable information, you can strike out most of news all together. You can pick up a history book in 30 years to read up on what was happening in the world. Perhaps you will be happier for it, I don't know.
This is called uninformed voter - the one that votes on what went on 100 years ago, but ignores what contemporary parties and politicians actually do.
For the record, I did skipped news entirely for few years. Yes, I did not knew about some things that may be stressful to know about. I was also dumb af when it came to voting or just generally having opinion on what is going on. This sort of person is super easy to manipulate, because missing context accumulates. So I do read them ever since, because I dont want to be that kind of voter.
Doubt that. I’ve lived through some changes of the ruling party in my current country, the only changes I’ve observed were: 1) would taxes be 49.9% or 50.1%, 2) in which exact foreign country our military will be waging or supporting another useless war.
Compare that to the price of the stock of your company…
> yet you cannot change it, at all.
Oh, you can. I’ve changed the politics around me twice already: 1) I’ve participated in overthrowing the government- result was good for me, but not so good for the whole country, 2) I’ve swapped a country - that worked dramatically good, both for me and my new country. So use recipe 1 with extreme caution, but recipe 2 looks safe to recommend.
> in my country there are huge differences in legislation between legislatures of right or left parties.
Really? Somewhere in Europe? But I still doubt that these differences are something that “most impacts your life”. Let’s compare with the stock price of the company you are working in, e.g.
As someone out of Asia, the information the previous poster mentioned has near zero relevance to me. Barely any ripples from the events happening with the topics mentioned.
But still for some reason my feed is flooded with that news and it feels like there is a lot pressure to take a stand on topics I neither understand nor care about.
Social Media feels suffocating at times, it is like teenage peer pressure multiplied by a factor of 100.
Reports on price increases on grain and energy is not the same as minute details on troop movements and artillery hits or interviews with various retired US generals and former Russian officials.
The price increases started before the invasion and have more to do with the printing of money during corona. But people forget quickly, despite social media.
Yeah you need to start over if you plan to continue using social media at all
You’re stuck in a filter bubble thats irrelevant to you
If you start over, dont follow the same people, dont import your contacts, dont give it the same phone number, even for one time passcodes, dont use the same email address
If you're in the US, you'd be highly attuned to these events and putting them together would be a striking dissonance. But really the common trait of these events is that they are widely reported by US media but aren't really consequential or actionable to an ordinary person anywhere else in the world (excluding the war in Ukraine, which is also consequential in parts of Europe).
I switched my Twitter Trends location to Falkland Islands and my feed to "Latest Tweets". I guess this technically now is a filter bubble, but I don't feel like I have the obligation to expose myself to algorithmic content and its generated outrage.
When I was a kid and new to FB, someone told me to check the comments on the meme pages. They used to be funny and I thought that I had been missing out. So I made a habit of checking comments of all the posts.
Now it is a cesspool of trolls everywhere.
Now checking comments used to generate so many negative emotions in me that I have told myself the same - "never look at the comments". I feel happier now.
Tabloid magazines that only talk about the rich and celebrities have always been super popular which also makes people depressed. I think this is nothing new with social media.
I think social media is like our generations tobacco, everyone uses it and it is considered fashionable and cool but eventually it will start to come to light how unhealthy and insidious all the data harvesting, time sinks and gamifying social interactions at scale can be, especially with children who have much of the spare time to dedicate to it.
I suppose if you take $10 as the price of a pack of cigarettes and $15/hr as the wage earned, then you could argue 2/3 of an hour of leisure time/personal life is lost per pack purchased/smoked.
You should see the wonders of the smoke breaks some 'senior' people had in the first consulting firm I worked for. One cigarette here, one cigarette there... aaand that wraps it up for the day, here's hoping the interns did some actual work.
To add to your idea, social media shares a deep property with tobacco: people know it’s bad and keep consuming it. Part of the reason is soft social pressure: nobody wants to be the odd one out by quitting.
And much like non-smokers are effected by smokers (particularly when they were the majority) non-social media users are still affected in the sense that it has completely changed and polarised our politics, social/justice issues etc.
It's much worse than tobacco. At least tobacco only kills people when they're older, whereas social media robs young people of their mental health while simultaneously threatening truth and democracy
This seems to be the latest topic from the outrage machine. Can you explain how social media is an actual threat to the democracy or democratic process to a reasonable person?
Roughly 50% of the population in the US have an absolute distrust of the media, election results, and science. But wrap something up in a meme and post in on Facebook and it's treated like Gospel.
Here's something that's extremely disturbing to me.
"Republicans have become the purveyors of misinformation, and when our two-party system is broken like that, democracy is seriously in trouble. The president acknowledged that it's time to actually start doing things and maybe taking some names and putting people in jail."
I would say jailing press for printing things the government doesn't like is way more obvious a threat to democracy than the information they publish. This is no longer a slippery slope if this guy would even consider uttering this on national TV. We would be going into pretty blatant authoritarianism.
> Can you explain how social media is an actual threat to the democracy or democratic process to a reasonable person?
The best explanation I've read of this is Tim Urban's "The Story of Us" series [1]. It builds up a model from individual behavior to societal behavior and how it's changed over the decades due to how online interactions have shifted behavior (both individual and societal).
I don't know whether it's the right or wrong model and explanation, but he lays it out very clearly.
I read that series when it first came out, so it's been a while. Forgive me if it's hazy. I completely understand the political divide and how it started in the late 80s. Limbaugh was really the frontrunner of our modern version of it. Fox took his model and applied it to TV. Many traditional news companies adopted that model for the left, and here we are. Social media is really just an extension of that.
I'm not sure how it's a threat to democracy though. I certainly don't believe it originated on social media either. People on both sides repeat some really dumb shit, but that's always been the case.
> Social media is really just an extension of that
This is true, however extensions are by their very nature different than the thing they're extending.
Social media is an extension to traditional media at a scale, speed, and attack vector (friends, family, community) which humans are much more vulnerable to
People are pretty vulnerable to the garbage that passes for news in the last 20+ years. I'm not so sure "fixing" (read censoring) social media will solve any of this, even if it was possible. The outrage machine will still exist in traditional news media, but they won't have to worry about new technologies unseating them. I'm not sure that is a good thing. Social media, to me, seems like just a comment section to current events, most of which are presented from traditional media.
FWIW, I haven't used social media since Snowden, so I don't know what it looks like today compared to 9 or so years ago.
It might be worth your time to explore outside the realm of singular, anecdotal, HN comments and dive a bit into the history and research. Good luck to you, friend!
>It might be worth your time to explore outside the realm of singular, anecdotal, HN comments and dive a bit into the history and research. Good luck to you, friend!
I don't buy the statement that social media is a threat to democracy. I think it's a political football and used hyperbolically in an attempt to normalize further censorship of people and press. I was hoping for at least one reasonable example of how social media is literally a threat to democracy to ease my mind, but I have yet to see a convincing one. I would say if anything, government censoring press and citizens is significantly more of a threat to democracy than garbage people post on social media that most people can see through.
You've also stated that you aren't up to date on the latest information around the topic. I've recommend you familiarize yourself and even provided resources (Cambridge Analytica, Social Dilemma).
It seems you're incredibly invested in this conversation. Take this time and passion to learn about it.
When you say reasonable person, do you mean layman? If so, watch the Social Dilemma. There was Cambridge Analytica and other countless misinformation campaign examples
I was originally going to write a whole drawn out thing, but I realized it wasn't necessary.
One interesting aspect to think about on how social media affects democracy is the aspect of education. I can't find the video right now, but I remember seeing or maybe reading a post that said how you watch all these videos on all these topics ranging from math to economics to civil engineering etc, and you build this false perception of "oh yeah I know this shit", but really you don't, you know one summary that was presented to you.
Those channels: Tom Scott, Johnny Harris, 3B1B, etc. Are all amazing in the time they spend learning their material and then producing such high quality instruction, but even if you watched an hour long video on econ you still wouldn't be an economist. A lot of us know this, but there are a lot of us that don't, and we then go to vote on bills and politicians thinking we know the implications of our actions and how it might affect the country when we really don't.
Of course this isn't just a conversation about social media and it can devolve into a conversation about the dangers of an uneducated democracy overall. But I feel that social media definitely contributes to this false sense of educated that a lot of people have, pair that with echo chambers, misinformation, and an addictive formula and you've got a troublesome future.
I'd argue it's more similar to cocaine. Tobacco is unhealthy, but the consequences were somewhat intuitive long before being proven (repeatedly cycling smoke through the lungs is intuitively unhealthy), and the real health effects aren't especially visible except over long time frames and with large samples.
By contrast, the shifts in behavior, effects, and downsides, of cocaine become apparent extremely rapidly and it's consumed in a way that makes it less obvious of the dangers. Vin Mariani [1] was a popular wine created in the mid 19th century. It's advocates included royalty, Popes, Thomas Edison, Ulysses S Grant, and countless others. It was wine mixed with cocaine. That wine itself also served as the inspiration for Coca-Cola - Coke, whose name derived from its two primary ingredients: Cocaine + Kola Nut.
Employers would give their workers cocaine to improve productivity, individuals themselves would use it (or various common products containing it) for similar ends, or just simple recreation. And we basically had a society where a large chunk of people were frequently coked out. But it was undoubtedly difficult to realize how absurd we all were because when something becomes ubiquitous, what do you have to compare it against?
And I think that's much closer to the reality we now live in where the impacts of social media are rather extremely evident on both a micro and macro scale, yet not only is the vast majority of society already hooked on it - but the people in power with the capacity to curtail its ails are themselves just as addicted to it, or alternatively exploiting it for their own personal benefit.
Yes, I have seen the same pattern with myself. Tiktok makes me happy in moderation. But when it starts to displace too much of my life and I get less social interaction, exercise, etc, then I start to have some depressive symptoms. This would be more of an indirect cause.
I think there are also a lot of people for whom social media is a direct cause of anxiety, especially young women.
I mainly use it to fill the time to be honest, spare moments here and there in between work and video games lol. That and taking my mind off things at work, which probably says a lot about my job satisfaction. But I'm starting a new job in a few weeks so we'll see how it goes, if it fits my activity on HN and co will drop significantly.
Do you/does anyone think this is something you would use?
I'm working on My Productive Homepage, a custom dynamic homepage you can set and customize the exact topics and goals that you care about. It will recommend unseen info/updates on only those things and display info in summary form (with links to sources).
No distracting or trending news unless they are highly relevant to the topics/goals you explicitly choose. We intend to maximize user productivity, rather than engagement.
I believe it can help people stay focused on what really matters to them while getting updates and stimulated, and discover useful info for work or serious hobbies.
(And in work mode, it'd be a homepage you can open without guilt while at work. ;))
What important features would you like to get on such a custom, dynamic homepage?
Comments about the project in general would also be appreciated, eg on how helpful or unhelpful you think the project will be to you or people you know.
> I've found that social media doesn't affect my level of happiness and/or anxiety directly.
American privilege? Each time a war flares up in my home country I am going into a pretty deep depression. And the only cure is to switch off the Telegram. Which is frankly rather hard to do, but possible. A third week going strong…
Ugh. I’m not even on Facebook or active on Twitter and I have the same. I need to read the newspaper. Then I need to know the Economist’s and The Guardian’s and the NY Times’ view on the daily news as well. Plus I need to keep up to date on the COVID situation and the war in Ukraine. Oh and I’m also behind on Better Call Saul. And I need to watch 1917 and Dune. And I want to read at least 10 pages in a novel every day. And my RSS feeds.
Oh, and I have a full time job and I need to exercise and I want to be in bed by 23:00.
As for your news issues, I'd honestly go with the approach of never reading information about breaking stories. Most often breaking stories aren't breaking and they rarely have the full picture.
By delaying your news consumption a few days (or even a week) you'll have a much better picture of the news with the benefit of never needing to "keep up."
Also my personal opinion, very often the news isn't relevant. The decade defining stories don't happen every day and there's very few stories that require your immediate attention, versus say your weekly attention.
That's why I'm a big fan of Delayed Gratification (someone posted this on HN a few months back):
I quit social media entirely many years ago: it felt like quitting smoking, just less difficult but the same level of benefits.
I also shifted how I get news: I don't read or watch "event-oriented" journalism (aka, reporting) and shifted entirely to analysis (through radio and press). The biggest win is that the timeframe is different, as analysis requires perspective, opposite to reporting which only focuses on the now.
I feel like I have a better, deeper, understanding of the world now, and with a slower pace, allowing a quieter perspective (which does not prevent from objective worry wrt current events).
Old school forums were still social media, they just hadn’t been labeled as such yet.
Some of my most toxic moments as a teenager/young adult occurred on forums. I had to leave them entirely. Praise the lord I left them when I did because some of my old friends said some rather stupid stuff on forums and are paying for it now.
FWIW, I'm not objecting HN or forums are not social media.
Rather that nowadays, social media have more mechanics that are typical:
* presence of brands
* influencers
* algorithmic bubble filters
* attention hoarding
Of course, forums and HN are social media and can be toxic as well.
I may he wrong and I'm happy to read more, but I hope I clarified where I draw the line with what (I think) is typical and expected of social media, from a business/industry perspective.
old school forums were the single greatest thing that human kind has ever invented, including all medicine that has ever been invented. In fact, we should all be using old school forums.
I don’t think it is because I can’t follow people (can I??). At least my use of it is only hitting the homepage and the occasional search. More similar to a newspaper with better comments. I agree that HN is social as in community but “social media” has a very tainted definition in my mind that mostly involves following a predefined set of people, creating all kinds of positive and negative side effects. HN belongs more to forums in my mind. I wouldn’t consider forums or IRC social media, at the same time I understand other persons might see it differently.
This is genius (although I do wonder how you get your war news, then. Do you not follow the Russia war at all? Would it change if you had relevates there? Would it change if the war came to your backyard? Say another 9/11? War reporting is essential, but it would break your rule of not following live reporting.
Social media doesn't affect my mental health. I use social media (e.g. Twitter) to get information on what my peers and the people whose work am interested in are doing. They don't post a lot, but when they do it's worth reading nearly always. I visit it 2 or 3 times a week
Good that it doesn't in moderation. But what you're implying is anecdata, and better phrased that you do not have evidence if social media affects your health - since you don't use it as often. Bit pedantic, but important to state as not being counterpoint to the article presented in context :)
Easy way to discern if site is social Cookie Clicker:
1.Does it provide a rating/score for content.
2.Does it reward users with larger rating/score?
3.Does it limit users with lower rating/score?
If all three question are positive, then it is
optimizing for content-score engagement type
of users, pushing the lever for extra dopamine hits.
Yes, I only visit reddit when I have only have something curious about, I don't actively scroll through it, maybe a few minutes when I'm on it. That's healthy boundary.
As for Hacker News, there is https://hackernewsletter.com/ that sends you mail of the best articles on startups, technology, programming, and more. All links are curated by hand from Hacker News. Join 60,000+ other subscribers and don't miss another week.
They also offer daily mails, but I'd say avoid it.
Are we meant to be happy through ignorance? I'd rather be anxious and motivated to improve my life by fixing the issues that upset me, even in a "hyper-competitive" environment like social media... There's nothing wrong with trying to get a Lamborghini because some celebrity is showing off his.
I run a local resolver on my home network and I block most social media for 23~ hours of the day. Definitely also helps with productivity. See yourself abusing time on a site? blackhole it via dns.
Whilst I've taken breaks, indeed quit social media years ago it does somewhat pain me that many services needed are accesable via such platforms and you can send a tweet to the local council all public and they will respond. Send an email - maybe, eventualy, though often not as gets bounced about and phone calls, well they embraced work from home as given my local council opertunity to sell the crown jewls (aka historic building they base out of). So it sadly does seem somewhat a neccesary evil.
FOr me social media needs the ability to censor and filter placed into the hands of the user and let them decide what offends them or not and give them to tools to filter that for their own comfort. Sadly that is kinda lacking and you get the social media's flavout of censoring, which can be biased to the stage of fueling issues.
One question though - has anybody ever taken a break from Hacker News due to content? Me - nope, and doubt many if any who have been that way due to content/engagements. The level of docurum and interactions upon this social media format does attract and enforce a more civil and factual level of discourse that trancends anything your twitters or facebooks etc offer.
So thank you once again Dang for keeping things real.
Cal Newport's time-block planner saved my career. At the beginning of the pandemic I was struggling to focus at work, like many others. His time-block planner got me back into action and feeling more productive.
I love the quick "Shutdown" routine at the end of each day, so I can easily switch back to life outside of work without dragging work thoughts with me.
For me I found this made me check them more, as I would be thinking "well maybe someone has sent me a message since I last checked" and it might be true. It's a tricky one! I found uninstalling the apps and logging out on the web after each session helps a bit, as then there is some friction in having to check what's going on since I have to log in every time.
I pretty much live in a box (apt no land). Always on the computer. I work a lot/work on projects. But then I hit that point where I can't do logical things/can't write more code. I can switch to physical projects or go to the park. But I really have been isolated from people I think since 2014 or so. I had a roommate for a few years after that then he moved out. I briefly worked jobs where you interacted with people day to day that helps with comradery.
Lately though I'm getting tired of the scrolling/point driven life. I still can't make the jump yet (get property so I can spend most of my free time outside). Still social media is nice to pass the time and along with YT/TV, to fill that social void. In the past I've found it weird to be around people like I don't know what is normal and usually can't stand the slowness of the moment. Then it's super weird when you're in a crowded place ha (usually freaks me out).
This is why when the internet dies I can't stand it... I remember my life how it's constantly using the internet to be in that state of motion. I'm not saying internet bad. Idk I'm like 3/10 of the way through life so far, I gotta see what is considered worth still.
I definitely agree that getting a property is a good idea. I feel much better and it's easier to stay away from news & social media whenever I go to countryside, where I have lots of free space and things to do outside. In an apartment there are only so many things one can do, and too many screens nearby, especially for a remote-worker like me.
Maybe urban life works for some people, but it definitely causes boredom to me, and social media & news are a distraction from that.
I took a break from social media for a year; it was excellent. Briefly after my return, I found out an extended family member passed away. Nobody would have told me otherwise. People will assume you're on there and in-the-loop even if you aren't. It's hard to navigate any social environment where that's an implicit given of others.
I have a similar story, but for me it is 4 years and still going. I am generally calmer and my emotional amplitude is less pronounced during the day than when I was on SM, but getting involved socially means you really have to be proactive, otherwise you sort of disappear
I only used traditional social media for a brief moment around 16 years ago. What works nicely for me is I have noted down the birthdays of everyone I care about with org-mode. I always try to contact them, and also send messages on christmas.
In topics like these on HN, people often compare social media (SM) with tobacco/drugs. I still disagree with this comparison.
For one, social media is not inherently bad like smoking/some drugs.
The only SM I use currently is Instagram. I spend 30 minutes or less per day and I’m usually happy at the end.
In fact I would argue IG made me a better person — I got into fitness, helped me connect with a football club I now play with, etc. In the past I used Facebook a lot and it changed my life — I found jobs and built connection with people I would have never had the opportunity to meet.
The majority of my friends have a similar experience. My father (60) who lives in a remote part of the world uses “joy” to express his experience with SM.
Secondly, on the topic of social media making people feel insecure about something (like their bodies). Isn’t that everywhere? At the beach? In magazines? On TV? At parties? In school?
I’m into fitness and I see people that have better aesthetics than me on SM and IRL. I appreciate their beauty but it doesn’t faze me. Isn’t it common knowledge that someone always have more X than you? And these people are usually the minority?
Lastly, influencers react to the market. Anyone who has ever posted content know that wholesome content are usually not engaged on as much as exaggerated/superficial content. If people want less of these, maybe they should vote with their likes & follows?
PS: I do realize some part of my comment might not be as practical as simply not using social media at all. But I think we should be teaching people these skills as it applies beyond SM usage.
These sorts of responses always come up to these kinds of posts and, with respect, they always seem to come down to: "I don't have any issues with social media so I can't see why anyone else does"
But imagine saying to an alcoholic: "I can have a few beers on a Friday night and then stop, and so can the majority of my friends, so I dont see what the problem is."
Again, I think this analogy doesn’t work. Firstly, alcohol is inherently bad for you. SM is not. SM to me is more malleable and we can choose to make it what we want. We could apply this to most things from video games to work.
Video games or work do not expose you to ads or recommendation systems, or feeds of your friends living a perfect life.
There are no parallels among these, I think you’re trying a bit too hard to go against the current. Its good for you that you have a healthy relationship with social media, but as evidenced by the study in this post and others it does have a negative impact that you can’t wish away.
> Secondly, on the topic of social media making people feel insecure about something (like their bodies). Isn’t that everywhere? At the beach? In magazines? On TV? At parties? In school?
The thought that I have overcome about this is that SM is different from the examples that you gave. In magazines or TV, you assume that is going to be filled with "non-real" people (esthetic surgeries...), but at the end of the day, you will be surrounded by people like you.
At parties, school, or at the beach, yes you can find some perfect people, but the vast majority are going to be just normal people like you.
SM is different for that, you are comparing every nuance of you with an adulterated version of normal people (just people like you, not famous people). Personally, SM makes me feel that everybody except me has an ideal life and I know that's not true.
I don't like the "social" aspect of social media, I like the "media" part though. I like to follow photographers, use to follow some type of hobby, but not to see people's life.
That makes sense. Do you see the general public making a similar shift that most people on SM besides some of my friends are “not real” people?
I slightly disagree with the parties, school part. Most people with “great bodies” are most likely the ones with revealing clothes at these places. There are lots of “not real” people there (they are not at a celebrity level but they make sure they are visible). Maybe your experience differs?
> I like the "media" part though. I like to follow photographers, use to follow some type of hobby, but not to see people's life.
> SM makes me feel that everybody except me has an ideal life and I know that's not true.
I’m split between both. I follow some people for the media part; And others for their wholesome content which usually includes part of their lives.
The sad part is that these wholesome people sometimes turn into “not real” people.
When I started a fitness account, I quickly realized the engagement from people were taking me into being a fake person. Thankfully, I closed that a while ago. But my takeaway from this experience, is that the problem is with people and not SM? (But what do I know :) )
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 319 ms ] threadHeck yes ignoring the world & big matters makes you happier. Heck yes keeping blinders on & seeing less is safer, more secure, simpler.
But fuck that. Fuck ignorance. Face things, see the scope of things. I hated the choice of ignorance then. Today I can at least accept that there's validity in multiple paths. But when we dock the people opting into the world for the real emption, empathy, & pain they experiemce for trying to see more? This is a modern mind-poison. There's so little to be said for being aware, for caring, by any measurable form. But we should. Boiling everything down to what is good for the individual is insufficient to maintain a society & this view will keep going on and on and on and it's so gross, so deeply deeply inadequate & shit.
Edit: there's a lot of very very sorry followups with people with really shitty social feeds & want-anxiety. Yes, that is some people's experience. But it hasnt been what I've seen. It hasnt been what people I know experince. Some of the greater hazards I've seen have been a kind of para-societal living-in-the-event that some people have, without any real stake, but I generally dont see anywhere near the level of Fear Uncertainty or Doubt the social-network-panic comments widely want to freak us out about. There is a knowing, real, & reasonable wokeness & solidarity, and so little of the negative pressures in my feeds that others tout, the people everywhere around me from so many decades & places are so much more nuanced & in tune & multifaceted in their view of the affairs & goings on than the media. This demonization of social media is a panic I simply dont see, anywhere. I think society has warped itself into an unjustified & unreasonable frenzie against something that is far less scary than we & especially the media make it out to be.
i agree with the main point, social media isnt the world. i think people forget that
And so, Facebook's dark patterns to some extent poison everything.
In print form. That comes to your physical mailbox.
Newspapers are OK, but magazines are better, if you want "State of the world, processed and digested, after the fact, without the outrage of the moment leaking in."
I subscribe to... honestly more than I get around to reading fully, but part of it is to simply say, "Yes, I value this type of writing and information, please keep producing it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
(And to a much lesser extend, https://text.npr.org/)
Is it the dark patterns that are causing anxiety and depression?
Imo the social media panic is mostly people afraid of genuineness & earnesty, or people jist afraid of an idea they dont at all have any connection to or understanding of.
There is a very very real problem that this world lacks accessible role models. That we dont know who to look to, that we dont have local examples. That's not a social media problem: that's just ehat happens when the well-to-do parts of the economy stratify up & up & up & real living gets trashy cheap & hard. Some people fall for the shallow signs that are projected, on social media or in other cultural distribution mechanisms (music is a big longstanding distributor of cultue for example). But the lack of real meaning far far far outstripsy concern with social mediacs ability to let shallow symbols spread.
Being informed is not a universal good, more is not always better. Should have a personal cost/benefit calculation, “is it worth it to be this informed?” Etc.
The "fuck ignorance, face things" can be used to shove information down someone's throat that adds nothing to the person's life except maybe misery. Being informed about stuff you can do nothing about that won't cause any tangible behavioral change (except maybe adding stress and anxiety) is not novel for the sake of it.
A rock that can't move, act or communicate that know the truth of the world, or Kardashians family dynamics, is no better than a rock that don't.
Social media seems different in that increased feed engagement (read: revenue) for these companies can be to feed into insecurities. That’s not informational, that’s predatory.
The problem we have with social media (and to a degree traditional media as well) is that both the nature of the technology and the profit incentives of the platforms encourage shallow thinking and cognitive bias among users. Going from paper to screens was bad enough in terms of its documented effects on focus and comprehension. Add to that shrinking the screen down to the size of our palms, enforcing 280 character limits, amplifying the most outrageous voices etc. and I sometimes wonder how civilization is still intact!
I agree that people should maintain some form of awareness of social issues and participation in them, democracy doesn't work without this. But an information diet heavy on social media will promote a distorted awareness of the world. And time spent on social media feels significant but it doesn't actually effect change. Things that do include: voting, attending a protest, writing to your congressman, volunteering your time and labor, earning extra income which you can donate to a cause, etc.
There are a lot of ways to get informed, participate & influence society, social media is one of the worst. It's the junk food of activism.
1) The writer, Cal Newport, gets his news from reading a broadsheet newspaper cover to cover every morning. (Not in the link but he's written about it elsewhere). I think it would be hard to argue that he's less well informed than someone scrolling through reddit, let alone FB or Instagram.
2) He's also said, and I agree, that pre-2006 or so Twitter and FB were pretty benign social media and have a lot of positives. Critically, this is before they developed infinite scrolling style timelines which are setup to maximise engagement. They were just chronological feeds of things posted by people you chose to follow.
3) Similarly to (2), the way those algorithms are optimised is not to deliberately expose you to the views of a wider range of people than you affirmatively chose to follow (although they could be!) but to maximise eyeball-time regardless. It turns out that the way to do that is to let highly emotionally charged and extreme views rise to the top.
As a result, the things you see will be either things you violently agree with from your bubble or things likely to trigger an immediate counter-response from what I think of as your anti-bubble. The anti-bubble looks like diverse views but are actually just fully defined as the inverse of the bubble's views. This deadens the space for mutual political engagement.
I think that "social media" could do lots of great things if it worked differently but I just don't think that empirically it does.
Use self-discipline to cultivate a state of mind like you would cultivate a healthy body.
Side note: I do the same when I (through force of habit) start a game of bullet chess, there's about 5 seconds before the game starts - just enough time to quickly cancel! (if I play 1 bullet chess game, I'll probably play 5 more right after, so quickly escaping when I shouldn't be playing is a huge benefit).
Snark aside, why is this a recurring obsession of HN posters?
Most of us would have doom scrolled in one form or another, many do it regularly, which can be hugely detrimental to life satisfaction in the same way any addiction could be, and can also increase anxiety. It's also in the interest of app makers to encourage these mostly destructive habits.
I've spent a while thinking through "What makes social media evil?" - I've read a number of studies, I grew up with the first wave of what we might call "social media" (never used MySpace but was quite familiar with it from friends, extensively used LiveJournal, etc). And my conclusion is that once you go away from "global state" to "individualized algorithmic feeds," it's probably gone evil.
HN, as far as I can tell, has a global state. There may be some replication delays (if it's hosted on multiple servers, which I simply don't know - I can't imagine it requires much in terms of resources to host), but "I see what you see what a non-logged in user sees," with only very, very few differences (flagged/dead posts, mostly). It's not reordering the state based on what it knows about me - it's reordering, globally, for all users, based on the consensus. The same was true of LJ - you had your own feed, but outside permission related differences, if I looked at a community and you did, we both saw the same thing.
This global state also means that there's no "slot machine" behavior of "pull the slider and see what's new." You refresh. It's the same stuff. Maybe two things switched positions. Go away, because it's simply not going to change that fast for you.
HN also doesn't go with the endless scrolling. There's a bottom of the first page. You have to make a deliberate decision to see beyond it, and that's something that historically was just "how things worked," but has been replaced with the bottomless bowl approach. We know that people, given a bottomless bowl of soup, eat more. And given that every ad revenue based social media company has gone to that model, clearly people consume more.
Humans are vulnerable to "metricification" quirks, and you see that with a lot of social medias too. HN only shows your up/down votes, and you can't see anything else. There's a demetrificator extension for it, though I would like the option to turn the metrics off in my profile.
And, finally, HN is "pull" - I have to go to the site, vs it reaching out with notifications to try and drag me back in. Plus, there's the noprocrast setting. It gives you the tools to make it a nuisance to use too much.
So, while HN can be somewhat addictive if you let it, the lack of any "weaponization of psychology" tricks and the very active "No, really, you've been looking at it too long, go away" coding means that I don't consider it particularly toxic, and certainly not in the same style as FB/Twitter/etc.
Why it's a recurring obsession? Probably because a lot of us have been in the tech industry, have seen how it works, have (probably) been addicted at some point, have watched the whole concept go from "Huh, this is kind of a neat way to connect with people I'd never talk to otherwise!" to "Braaaaaaiiiiiinss... via eeeeeyyyyyeeebaaaallllssss!" in the past 10-15 years, and really want no part of it anymore, and want to help ensure other people see it for the vile, human-toxic trash it is.
It'll destroy your ability to focus, make you less emotionally unstable, warp your view of reality in one of a variety of ways, suck basically all the time you let it, try with every trick in the book to addict you. And in exchange, some tech billionaires get another couple feet on their yachts. Yay?
Where's this extension? That seems useful (I'm susceptible to "metricification" - quit reddit because of it. He said, knowing that mentioning quitting reddit would probably net him at least 5 upvotes).
The topic is related to technology (and thus easier to justify as relevant to the forum) and has a low barrier of entry to discuss. A significant majority of people in Western countries use social media and it doesn't require technical knowledge, so it's easier to share opinions about it.
Reading HN threads on social media is almost like consuming junk food: the arguments are predictable but comfortable and easy to digest. It's enjoyable in a perverse way, though not a real source of growth as the ideas aren't as hard to struggle with (versus threads on more technical topics).
For me it includes HN.
HN has been a significant contributor to my cynicism. There have been enough submissions in the past where I already knew what to expect from the comments section, especially in cases where my stance on the matter is already firm/obvious (such as with tech regulation, climate change, complaints about Twitter threads being reposted to HN, articles about social media dooming us like this one).
My reaction to these cases is typically along the lines of "yes, we know this bad, but what's going to change? What does continuing to complain here accomplish?" It's largely the same mechanism as those other toxic media platforms, and yet HN often falls for it as well. The band of people who decry Twitter et al. at the usual opportunities has persisted for years at this point, and they are unlikely to ever exit this community for good. Yet it's trivial from force of habit to click through to the comments anyway and continue to expose oneself to the usual negativity.
And I don't even use Twitter anymore - it's not like I disagree with many of those negative opinions. But after years and years of reading the same tired arguments, that negativity seems to transcend its original context to worm its way into your thought process as a general, persistent haze.
Maybe if you are lucky, page 2 has comments about the actual article.
However, I have noticed that this trend is starting to change so there is hope! I am not sure if it is because the HN community has changed, or if Google has changed its public perception (unlikely I expect)
HN is not constantly measuring your behaviour and trying to feed you more addictive and outrageous content.
HN does not advertise your karma to others as a measure of self esteem.
HN does not make money from advertising.
HN is not like social media in the ways that matter when discussing how damaging social media is.
I think that there are too related patterns on HN and both have to do with tech culture. First, complains about loneliness and seeing loneliness as major problem. Second, looking down on socialization or at least ways other people socialize - whether social media or young students partying and socializing. So, any bad news about social media is welcome.
There is ethos of not socializing the wrong way or not at all. And ethos of not wasting your time with fluff, doing side project or getting better in something instead (and some amount of this is absolutely good) and of working a lot. And combination then it leads to kind of magical thinking of "if only other people did not used these, everything would be better".
The distinctions are actually fairly profound and include established practices and professional norms concerning information sourcing, verification/due diligence, and editorial discretion. This is all before the agent-principal relationship, contractual obligations, and regulatory oversight to which news organizations are subject.
I understand why Zuckerberg needs to make the false equivalence, but we don’t (necessarily) share his profit motive and can be more objective here.
Not all news is designed for outrage. Several publications publish in-depth articles in a neutral way, where you can actually learn something. Investigations are also often genuinely useful for a better society. Zuckerberg's position therefore doesn't hold true for all news media.
Separately, depending on how your social media feed is set up, you can be feel jealous/lesser due to seeing the high points of the lives of people you know (depending on your personality type), seeing news on your feed, or seeing neither due to subscribing to accounts in niche fields.
I don't think I get anxiety from content "designed for outrage". But if I go to the front page of the Washington Post, here's what I see:
>Buffalo shooting suspect wrote of plans months ago, online messages show
>Only 22 saw the Buffalo shooting live. Millions have seen it since.
>A barrage of ‘never-ending gunshots’: Inside the Buffalo massacre
>Ukraine ends bloody battle for Mariupol, evacuates fighters in steel plant
>Republicans are bringing extremism to the mainstream
>White Americans must speak out against white supremacy
>Russia is losing. That might make Putin more dangerous.
I'd say that these headlines are more in the "giving me anxiety" camp than not.
>Tiger Global slashes bets on tech groups after stock market sell-off
> News in-depth. Military briefing: why Russia and Ukraine are fighting over a Black Sea outcrop
> Investors pull $7bn from Tether as stablecoin jitters intensify
> Buffett buys $3bn Citi stake in value-hunting stock splurge
> Ethiopia atrocities cast long shadow as city of Lalibela prays for peace
> Qantas says synthetic fuel could power long flights by mid-2030s
Some of the news itself is tragic. But it's a false equivalence to claim that the headlines and article content between news sources (e.g. Washington Post vs. the FT) are equally outrage-provoking or informative. The Washington Post was listed in the middle because their articles are usually highly informative (from the number of interviewed people and documents analyzed), though their headlines are more clickbait.
Both The Washington Post or the FT are different from (typically) Salon, and each is a far cry from social media. Also, the debate of news media in place of discussing social media is exactly the effect that Zuckerberg intended with his comment.
- Bitcoin has no future as a payments network, says FTX chief
- Putin signals acceptance of Finland and Sweden joining Nato
- China’s economic activity plummets as Covid lockdowns hit growth
- "Russia learns a hard lesson about the folly of war"
- Harrow Beijing school loses its hallowed British branding
Or Wikipedia's Current events Portal:
- Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (pictured) is elected as President of Somalia.
- In the United States, ten people are killed in a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
- Ukraine, represented by Kalush Orchestra with the song "Stefania", wins the Eurovision Song Contest.
- Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan inherits the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and becomes President of the United Arab Emirates after the death of Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
> Picture of a the blood moon eclipse a friend took
> A Picture of a CD cover of a song a friend is listing too
> Pictures from my sister visiting her best friend in another state.
> A funny gif from a friend making fun of crypto crashing
> A poster of the new Japanese Ultraman movie and a friend saying he saw it and really enjoyed it and is looking forward to the Masked Rider movie.
> More pictures from my sister
> A collection of doodles from an artist friend
> A picture of my sister with 2 x-neighbors I haven't seen in 35 years
> A friend saying he loved the video game "The Final Station"
> More pics from my sister
> A friend posting a link to a music video she loves
> A friend posting about a game they made at a game jam
> A friend saying he started doing trip planning for families going to Disneyland.
> My aunt posting a picture of flowers my uncle bought her.
> A friend posting about a show he went to in Argentina
> My sister posting a words of wisdom type picture
> A friend posting he can't believe he's had the same job he loves for 8yrs already
> A friend posting an artist concept drawing of Cassini taking a picture of Saturn
> A friend who makes one off dresses on etsy posting her latest creations
> A friend posting he likes "Picard" but it should have had a "Shut up, Wesley" scene.
No outrage in my feed.
To put it another way, social media is what you make of it. If you don't want the outrage the stop following the outrage.
But somehow that’s not what happening to the population as a whole.
My guess, is the mere fact you’re on HN means you’re separate from the population writ large
I'm latching onto your post because a number of those are advertisements / promotions; social media has turned a lot of people into unpaid marketeers. In a sense, I mean I get that people are fans of e.g. TV shows, but still. Anyway here's some that I think are advertisements in disguise:
> A Picture of a CD cover of a song a friend is listing too
> A poster of the new Japanese Ultraman movie and a friend saying he saw it and really enjoyed it and is looking forward to the Masked Rider movie.
> A friend saying he loved the video game "The Final Station"
> A friend posting a link to a music video she loves
> A friend posting about a game they made at a game jam
> A friend saying he started doing trip planning for families going to Disneyland.
> My aunt posting a picture of flowers my uncle bought her.
> A friend posting about a show he went to in Argentina
> A friend who makes one off dresses on etsy posting her latest creations
> A friend posting he likes "Picard" but it should have had a "Shut up, Wesley" scene.
News also provides common conversational topics with different types of people. A lot of people in business read The Wall Street Journal, and it’s easier to find common talking points with them if I read the news (especially on news about their industry). Similarly, a lot of academics and people in education read The New York Times. Though reading the news isn’t necessary to start a conversation, it’s often an easy starting point.
This is not obvious to me personally. I don't think it matters how much you consume the news as much as it matters what the news is.
And the news these days is almost entirely negative, even in a half-hour-long evening news segment.
This does presume that that half hour or hour is not a purely editorial function (think Walter Cronkite vs Tucker Carlson), and that the goal is to actually cover the news of the world, not create partisan wedges and glue eyeballs (again, same comparison). But even if it's negative, understanding what is going on matters, and is likely a net gain for society, with a minimal individual cost.
What isn't a net gain is being so consumed by world events (or worse, editorialized versions of world events) that you lose sight on your personal world, and are unable to enjoy the moments around you. A similar effect is at play with social media.
This doesn't ring true for me at all.
What percentage of broadsheets were dedicated to crime/murder back in the day? Now estimate the same for crime/murder being covered in the local evening news.
From my experience it's not even close. Broadsheets were actually informative, cable news is a lot of fear-mongering.
"Studies have linked poor mental health to news exposure during negative and traumatic events such as terrorist attacks or natural disasters; the more news a person consumes during and after these events, the more likely they are to suffer from depression, stress and anxiety. For example, a 2014 study surveyed 4,675 Americans in the weeks following the Boston Marathon bombings and collected data on how much media they consumed. Participants who engaged with more than six hours of media coverage per day were nine times more likely to also experience symptoms of high acute stress than those who only watched a minimal amount of news."
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/science-doomscrolling/stor...
Case in point, I think someone that watches 1 hour of news about the Boston Marathon bombings is going to be worse off than someone who watches 12 hours of news that happens to be mildly positive. The problem is (as I said) that the news these days is almost entirely negative, because that is what sells.
Firstly, traditional news media’s intrusion is not as severe or wide ranging. To give one example, the surge in teenage mental health problems that Facebook and Instagram in particular seem likely to have caused.
Second, there is a very large qualitative difference between social media and traditional media. Social media is monitoring your every action, and adapting to it, and creates a tight feedback loop where you are manipulated into staying engaged and consuming more adverts. That personalised real-time feedback loop, based on giant datasets that are very invasive, is incomparable to traditional media.
Finally, the extent of attention capture by social media cannot be compared to traditional media. This can be observed by simply taking a walk down the high street and seeing how many people are staring at their phones. Traditional media do use apps as a medium, but there aren’t many people who would seriously argue that most of those glued to their screens are likely to be reading an online newspaper and not looking at Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok.
The only doubt I have is whether Zuckerberg actually believes what’s he saying, in order to have a clean conscience, or whether it’s a cynical argument used to reassure his staff.
I just want to add here that YouTube, while not exactly a social medium and not a traditional medium, also has a tight and instantly adaptive feedback loop. With this argument, staying off YouTube should be similarly relieving than staying off at least TikTok. At least, the hours you can waste are comparable.
The difference may be that it is better and more enlightening, or it may be that it is more addictive and intrusive. But, it is not the same.
I read more. I have much more time to spend doing other more social things in meat space. It’s been amazing to just turn off and the notification thing was the key: turning them off allowed me to control when I used the app and not the other way around (because a red notification counter triggers me to check it out etc.).
But I miss being snarky with a small circuit of online acquaintances. It was ego fulfilling, dropping one liners on almost-famous people (in context) and getting some degree of recognition.
I'm getting some flak from family glued on, who want to know "where I went" but thats survivable.
On the whole, agree with the premise. Its trash. USENET pre great-re-org was slow trash, ML are trashy only in very minor ways. Fast trash is worserer.
HN is not that bad. I think it goes to moderation (Good job Dan!) which is done carefully. A blog I like has the byline "my blog my rules" and you know, for anything short of speakers corner I think this is fine: its not the commons.
Elon and Donald can play there all they like.
It's like hearing that meteor is going to kill us all tomorrow and there is nothing you can do. Sure, it's going to affect you, but your life isn't going to be any better if you know.
It's just pointless anxiety.
Questioning "why know things" is a weird take on HN, which is itself a news aggregator.
For the record, I did skipped news entirely for few years. Yes, I did not knew about some things that may be stressful to know about. I was also dumb af when it came to voting or just generally having opinion on what is going on. This sort of person is super easy to manipulate, because missing context accumulates. So I do read them ever since, because I dont want to be that kind of voter.
Doubt that. I’ve lived through some changes of the ruling party in my current country, the only changes I’ve observed were: 1) would taxes be 49.9% or 50.1%, 2) in which exact foreign country our military will be waging or supporting another useless war.
Compare that to the price of the stock of your company…
> yet you cannot change it, at all.
Oh, you can. I’ve changed the politics around me twice already: 1) I’ve participated in overthrowing the government- result was good for me, but not so good for the whole country, 2) I’ve swapped a country - that worked dramatically good, both for me and my new country. So use recipe 1 with extreme caution, but recipe 2 looks safe to recommend.
Regarding impact, no, you individually have not changed a single thing. A single person in a protest or a single vote simply has no impact.
Changing country is one way to take control, but I would argue that the politics itself are unaffected.
Really? Somewhere in Europe? But I still doubt that these differences are something that “most impacts your life”. Let’s compare with the stock price of the company you are working in, e.g.
But still for some reason my feed is flooded with that news and it feels like there is a lot pressure to take a stand on topics I neither understand nor care about.
Social Media feels suffocating at times, it is like teenage peer pressure multiplied by a factor of 100.
You’re stuck in a filter bubble thats irrelevant to you
If you start over, dont follow the same people, dont import your contacts, dont give it the same phone number, even for one time passcodes, dont use the same email address
Twitter is terrible for discussions, so there I agree with Joe Rogan: “never look at the comments”.
Now it is a cesspool of trolls everywhere.
Now checking comments used to generate so many negative emotions in me that I have told myself the same - "never look at the comments". I feel happier now.
Something about online comments (twitter in particular) gives off the vibe that they're more reactions than well thought out comments.
Tobacco is addictive but I’m not sure if it is a time sink.
Uhm… how do you know that?
This seems to be the latest topic from the outrage machine. Can you explain how social media is an actual threat to the democracy or democratic process to a reasonable person?
"Republicans have become the purveyors of misinformation, and when our two-party system is broken like that, democracy is seriously in trouble. The president acknowledged that it's time to actually start doing things and maybe taking some names and putting people in jail."
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/05/17/carl_came...
I would say jailing press for printing things the government doesn't like is way more obvious a threat to democracy than the information they publish. This is no longer a slippery slope if this guy would even consider uttering this on national TV. We would be going into pretty blatant authoritarianism.
The best explanation I've read of this is Tim Urban's "The Story of Us" series [1]. It builds up a model from individual behavior to societal behavior and how it's changed over the decades due to how online interactions have shifted behavior (both individual and societal).
I don't know whether it's the right or wrong model and explanation, but he lays it out very clearly.
[1]: https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html
I'm not sure how it's a threat to democracy though. I certainly don't believe it originated on social media either. People on both sides repeat some really dumb shit, but that's always been the case.
This is true, however extensions are by their very nature different than the thing they're extending.
Social media is an extension to traditional media at a scale, speed, and attack vector (friends, family, community) which humans are much more vulnerable to
FWIW, I haven't used social media since Snowden, so I don't know what it looks like today compared to 9 or so years ago.
I don't buy the statement that social media is a threat to democracy. I think it's a political football and used hyperbolically in an attempt to normalize further censorship of people and press. I was hoping for at least one reasonable example of how social media is literally a threat to democracy to ease my mind, but I have yet to see a convincing one. I would say if anything, government censoring press and citizens is significantly more of a threat to democracy than garbage people post on social media that most people can see through.
You've also stated that you aren't up to date on the latest information around the topic. I've recommend you familiarize yourself and even provided resources (Cambridge Analytica, Social Dilemma).
It seems you're incredibly invested in this conversation. Take this time and passion to learn about it.
Have a great day!
One interesting aspect to think about on how social media affects democracy is the aspect of education. I can't find the video right now, but I remember seeing or maybe reading a post that said how you watch all these videos on all these topics ranging from math to economics to civil engineering etc, and you build this false perception of "oh yeah I know this shit", but really you don't, you know one summary that was presented to you.
Those channels: Tom Scott, Johnny Harris, 3B1B, etc. Are all amazing in the time they spend learning their material and then producing such high quality instruction, but even if you watched an hour long video on econ you still wouldn't be an economist. A lot of us know this, but there are a lot of us that don't, and we then go to vote on bills and politicians thinking we know the implications of our actions and how it might affect the country when we really don't.
Of course this isn't just a conversation about social media and it can devolve into a conversation about the dangers of an uneducated democracy overall. But I feel that social media definitely contributes to this false sense of educated that a lot of people have, pair that with echo chambers, misinformation, and an addictive formula and you've got a troublesome future.
By contrast, the shifts in behavior, effects, and downsides, of cocaine become apparent extremely rapidly and it's consumed in a way that makes it less obvious of the dangers. Vin Mariani [1] was a popular wine created in the mid 19th century. It's advocates included royalty, Popes, Thomas Edison, Ulysses S Grant, and countless others. It was wine mixed with cocaine. That wine itself also served as the inspiration for Coca-Cola - Coke, whose name derived from its two primary ingredients: Cocaine + Kola Nut.
Employers would give their workers cocaine to improve productivity, individuals themselves would use it (or various common products containing it) for similar ends, or just simple recreation. And we basically had a society where a large chunk of people were frequently coked out. But it was undoubtedly difficult to realize how absurd we all were because when something becomes ubiquitous, what do you have to compare it against?
And I think that's much closer to the reality we now live in where the impacts of social media are rather extremely evident on both a micro and macro scale, yet not only is the vast majority of society already hooked on it - but the people in power with the capacity to curtail its ails are themselves just as addicted to it, or alternatively exploiting it for their own personal benefit.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani
I think there are also a lot of people for whom social media is a direct cause of anxiety, especially young women.
I figured I would fight fire with fire and last week got into a few particularly ridiculous flamewars on different platforms and... it worked.
I'm working on My Productive Homepage, a custom dynamic homepage you can set and customize the exact topics and goals that you care about. It will recommend unseen info/updates on only those things and display info in summary form (with links to sources).
No distracting or trending news unless they are highly relevant to the topics/goals you explicitly choose. We intend to maximize user productivity, rather than engagement.
I believe it can help people stay focused on what really matters to them while getting updates and stimulated, and discover useful info for work or serious hobbies.
(And in work mode, it'd be a homepage you can open without guilt while at work. ;))
What important features would you like to get on such a custom, dynamic homepage?
Comments about the project in general would also be appreciated, eg on how helpful or unhelpful you think the project will be to you or people you know.
No “unless”, please. No news should be present. No events should be discussed until they are a week old, at least.
Should discussions be optional (ie available but can be turned off) or simply not available on this site?
American privilege? Each time a war flares up in my home country I am going into a pretty deep depression. And the only cure is to switch off the Telegram. Which is frankly rather hard to do, but possible. A third week going strong…
Oh, and I have a full time job and I need to exercise and I want to be in bed by 23:00.
I’m always in a hurry…
By delaying your news consumption a few days (or even a week) you'll have a much better picture of the news with the benefit of never needing to "keep up."
Also my personal opinion, very often the news isn't relevant. The decade defining stories don't happen every day and there's very few stories that require your immediate attention, versus say your weekly attention.
That's why I'm a big fan of Delayed Gratification (someone posted this on HN a few months back):
https://www.slow-journalism.com/
Journalism that is deliberately slow and very informative (IMO).
I also shifted how I get news: I don't read or watch "event-oriented" journalism (aka, reporting) and shifted entirely to analysis (through radio and press). The biggest win is that the timeframe is different, as analysis requires perspective, opposite to reporting which only focuses on the now.
I feel like I have a better, deeper, understanding of the world now, and with a slower pace, allowing a quieter perspective (which does not prevent from objective worry wrt current events).
(Not to detract entirely from your statement with my pendantics.)
This is true to some extent.
Yet the scale and mechanics of HN are (vastly?) different from your typical social media.
Also, brands are mostly absent, except for the YC specific posts.
In my opinion, HN relates more to a good ol' forum rather than typical social media, as defined nowadays.
Some of my most toxic moments as a teenager/young adult occurred on forums. I had to leave them entirely. Praise the lord I left them when I did because some of my old friends said some rather stupid stuff on forums and are paying for it now.
Rather that nowadays, social media have more mechanics that are typical: * presence of brands * influencers * algorithmic bubble filters * attention hoarding
Of course, forums and HN are social media and can be toxic as well.
I may he wrong and I'm happy to read more, but I hope I clarified where I draw the line with what (I think) is typical and expected of social media, from a business/industry perspective.
Some exceptions apply, as you point out.
One thing is that I cannot escape major events, no matter what I do (I live in a capital). And I see it very positively.
For such events, and other exceptions, live coverage or daily news apply.
As for Hacker News, there is https://hackernewsletter.com/ that sends you mail of the best articles on startups, technology, programming, and more. All links are curated by hand from Hacker News. Join 60,000+ other subscribers and don't miss another week.
They also offer daily mails, but I'd say avoid it.
FOr me social media needs the ability to censor and filter placed into the hands of the user and let them decide what offends them or not and give them to tools to filter that for their own comfort. Sadly that is kinda lacking and you get the social media's flavout of censoring, which can be biased to the stage of fueling issues.
One question though - has anybody ever taken a break from Hacker News due to content? Me - nope, and doubt many if any who have been that way due to content/engagements. The level of docurum and interactions upon this social media format does attract and enforce a more civil and factual level of discourse that trancends anything your twitters or facebooks etc offer.
So thank you once again Dang for keeping things real.
https://www.timeblockplanner.com
This video covers how the planner works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eff9h1WYxSo
I love the quick "Shutdown" routine at the end of each day, so I can easily switch back to life outside of work without dragging work thoughts with me.
This doesn't work in the beginning but I noticed that over time this is giving more and more rest and makes you rething social media usage.
Lately though I'm getting tired of the scrolling/point driven life. I still can't make the jump yet (get property so I can spend most of my free time outside). Still social media is nice to pass the time and along with YT/TV, to fill that social void. In the past I've found it weird to be around people like I don't know what is normal and usually can't stand the slowness of the moment. Then it's super weird when you're in a crowded place ha (usually freaks me out).
This is why when the internet dies I can't stand it... I remember my life how it's constantly using the internet to be in that state of motion. I'm not saying internet bad. Idk I'm like 3/10 of the way through life so far, I gotta see what is considered worth still.
Maybe urban life works for some people, but it definitely causes boredom to me, and social media & news are a distraction from that.
- news
- work
- kids
- spouse
- day-trading
- etc.
This is known. Very well known. Reported on many times? How is this news?
Is it just news because HN wants to comment on it? Again?
For one, social media is not inherently bad like smoking/some drugs.
The only SM I use currently is Instagram. I spend 30 minutes or less per day and I’m usually happy at the end.
In fact I would argue IG made me a better person — I got into fitness, helped me connect with a football club I now play with, etc. In the past I used Facebook a lot and it changed my life — I found jobs and built connection with people I would have never had the opportunity to meet.
The majority of my friends have a similar experience. My father (60) who lives in a remote part of the world uses “joy” to express his experience with SM.
Secondly, on the topic of social media making people feel insecure about something (like their bodies). Isn’t that everywhere? At the beach? In magazines? On TV? At parties? In school?
I’m into fitness and I see people that have better aesthetics than me on SM and IRL. I appreciate their beauty but it doesn’t faze me. Isn’t it common knowledge that someone always have more X than you? And these people are usually the minority?
Lastly, influencers react to the market. Anyone who has ever posted content know that wholesome content are usually not engaged on as much as exaggerated/superficial content. If people want less of these, maybe they should vote with their likes & follows?
PS: I do realize some part of my comment might not be as practical as simply not using social media at all. But I think we should be teaching people these skills as it applies beyond SM usage.
But imagine saying to an alcoholic: "I can have a few beers on a Friday night and then stop, and so can the majority of my friends, so I dont see what the problem is."
There are no parallels among these, I think you’re trying a bit too hard to go against the current. Its good for you that you have a healthy relationship with social media, but as evidenced by the study in this post and others it does have a negative impact that you can’t wish away.
> Video games or work do not expose you to *ads or recommendation systems*
You must be joking? When last did you play free games on your phone? Are even ads or recommendation system unique to SM?
> friends living a perfect life
This happens anyways is my argument. Although it can be more persistent with SM, I admit.
> I think you’re trying a bit too hard to go against the current.
My issue is with comments like “SM is like smoking/alcohol/drugs”. Which I don’t think is a correct comparison.
The thought that I have overcome about this is that SM is different from the examples that you gave. In magazines or TV, you assume that is going to be filled with "non-real" people (esthetic surgeries...), but at the end of the day, you will be surrounded by people like you.
At parties, school, or at the beach, yes you can find some perfect people, but the vast majority are going to be just normal people like you.
SM is different for that, you are comparing every nuance of you with an adulterated version of normal people (just people like you, not famous people). Personally, SM makes me feel that everybody except me has an ideal life and I know that's not true.
I don't like the "social" aspect of social media, I like the "media" part though. I like to follow photographers, use to follow some type of hobby, but not to see people's life.
Edit: typo
I slightly disagree with the parties, school part. Most people with “great bodies” are most likely the ones with revealing clothes at these places. There are lots of “not real” people there (they are not at a celebrity level but they make sure they are visible). Maybe your experience differs?
> I like the "media" part though. I like to follow photographers, use to follow some type of hobby, but not to see people's life. > SM makes me feel that everybody except me has an ideal life and I know that's not true.
I’m split between both. I follow some people for the media part; And others for their wholesome content which usually includes part of their lives.
The sad part is that these wholesome people sometimes turn into “not real” people.
When I started a fitness account, I quickly realized the engagement from people were taking me into being a fake person. Thankfully, I closed that a while ago. But my takeaway from this experience, is that the problem is with people and not SM? (But what do I know :) )