Ask HN: 90s kids happily less connected?

It’s more of an age thing than a generational thing, Once you get in your 30’s, you have had enough real human adult socialization to realize the value of actual relationships vs the fake personas that people generate, curate and filter on social media.

Born late 80s. Stopped using Twitter about 8 years ago. Stopped using Facebook 5 years ago. I still use Instagram, but mainly it’s just stories because I enjoy the ephemeral format and there’s no algorithm or suggested content. I stay in touch with different groups of friends using various messenger apps, mix of DMs and group chats, which is pretty consistent with your experience.

Im 36, I guess so? I don’t use “social media” at all anymore, but I use Discord a lot. It reminds me of the good ol’ days of AOL and IRC, and I prefer chat rooms over posting into the void.

I find Twitter and such intolerable because it mostly started to feel like I was just a mark for random grifts. At some point around ~2016 everything seemed to turn into a link for Patreon or a podcast or blah blah

I'm not observing this at all. Most of my Millennial family and friends are on Instagram, regularly posting Stories about their family or travel. Many 30-year-olds+ are as hooked on short-form content (TikTok, YouTube shorts, Reels etc.) as the younger generation, but the latter are more likely to contribute rather than passively consume.

Messenger apps are very popular, with WhatsApp still being the number one choice.

I don't know anyone outside of tech who regularly posts on Twitter. Most ignore it completely.

> have concluded that they aren’t helpful or interesting to them as a concept

Yeah they aren't. This site has a little bit of technical value and debate. Any of the big social networks are full of idiots that I'd rather not deal with

I think it is somewhat platform dependent. I don’t know anyone that uses Facebook except for the weird kids I went to high school with or senior citizens. People my age (20s-30s) will occasionally post major life event photos, ie wedding, baby, etc.

Instagram still seems wildly popular especially among women. My wife is definitely addicted.

YouTube will probably have the most longevity because of the breadth of topics on the platform. I can use youtube for anything tutorial/learning related, hobby related content, and also occasionally dive down a random rabbit hole.

I dont really know but Im curious how the generational waves of tech usage/adoption go.

I had kept expressing a hope that youthful observation & youthful rebellion again parents would someday mean kids seeing their parents vacuous screen addictions & pick to do something else for themselves.

My hope wained for a while, but Im starting to think other factors are helping. The sense of emergence as tech developed has all worn off- tech is all the same prepackaged shit, lacking in the niches and exploration it used to have. And it's apparent none of it has our interests at heart (or wont, after the next buy out).

To be clear, I think there are lots of really interesting & open frontiers of tech, but here we are in almost 2023 and we're only kust making oue way out of Walled Gardens/Neomainframes, and it s unclear that we will have a revival of a more personal computing or not, given the complexity & difficulty of connected/online tech. We need paths forwards (and I dont think retropunk nor simple static will have much real enticement, will have sufficient allure).

This is defiantly true in my case.

This may be less about being a 90’s kid and more about getting older and having less time for nonsense.

I just doubt this is true. I like to say and think I have no social media yet here I am. I also spend quite a bit of time watching youtube videos and looking at youtube comments.

I think for older millennials it’s sort of like moving on to high school and encountering middle schoolers. You get this icky feeling of what you once were. Like geez, you guys are really into that? Yuck.

It’s a form of self loathing. One has to understand that everyone goes through these phases and when you make it out, leave it behind, and don’t judge those in whatever phase of life they are in. As lame as it is, and as much it reminds you of how lame you once were.

I don’t know what’s wrong with all the dick riders on social media. I just accept that it’s a phase ( a long one ) for a lot of people.

I didn't notice this at all. My close friends are part of my finsta and I am part of theirs. That's two different accounts most maintain. I haven't posted on my instagram in forever but I post a story every once in a while. Most of my friends are the same way. Some of my friends have made their twitter completely professional, but most use it to shit post. Everyone I'm close to uses the 'close friends' feature on instagram, the standard stories are much less frequent.

In certain groups we have shifted to using discord for group messaging, not just a group channel, there's one for meme, new papers, food eaten, tv shows, we even had a world cup and did a group voice call during the finals. I don't know what member count would be considered social media vs . I am in small private ones and also huge, 2000+ people public ones. Arguably my friends are a healthy mix of millenial and gen z kids because I was born on imaginary border between the two. What size should be considered the limit?

I don't think 90s kids are happily less connected. I know friends that take breaks, sometimes for months, but they always come back and generally post holiday stories/posts. I know in the past, my "break" has been just looking at stories like once a week and posting stories but not opening stories.

I’ll toss in my two cents as someone born in the mid nineties, and is not very connected by modern standards. I have a Discord, Reddit, HN, YouTube (?) and Steam. I’ve deleted or completely stopped using any other social media accounts.

That being said I can count on one hand the number of people who have a similar level of disconnect. Most people +/- 5 years of me that I know maintain on if not multiple other social media accounts. Mostly Instagram, from my experience.

I think the biggest thing I’ve noticed is that people I talk to are _aware_ of the risks and dangers of engaging with social media. But for some reason or another still choose to do so. But the level of awareness is up quite a bit from where it was half a decade ago.

I'm much older than that, but I have millenial kids and just some days ago we talked about it. They all use social media apps sometimes, but do it for communication (private messages/groups/etc) or for entertainment. They all consider social media in social media sense far too toxic and unhealthy. They all know people using social media actively though and there seems to be two reasons – as part of trying to build a professional brand or inertia. The last group seem rather sad for them and reminds me my experience from my thirties. I think that all of us know people who are stuck in some area in our past and can't understand that the world around them has moved on.

Note that these observations are probably very specific to area and social group.

Born in ‘88. Haven’t had Facebook since 2010; Instagram since 2012; Twitter since 2017. Not on Reddit, only use Discord for voice calls with a couple friends while gaming.

My few friends are more or less the same way, but I’ve felt very isolated from my peers for a long time due to their passive relationship maintenance and growth through social media. All the ways I used to meet new people seem to be ineffective these days. I have developed a Youtube consumption problem and I suspect it’s because it gives me the hit a better social life would.

I hear sentiments like yours every now and then, but I’m sure not seeing a change myself. Most people seem to agree the platforms are bad, but also seem more addicted than ever.

There's a challenge to define the terms in this conversation. Is Facebook social media? I think most people would agree yes. Is Youtube? Is Tiktok? Is WhatsApp?

Social media started off as a place to connect online with your offline social network--your friends and family. Then it became a place where you could meet new people. Finally, it became a place where you could find interesting content... sort of a modern version of "turning on the TV" in the 1980s. (And from the other perspective... a place you could go to build an audience, if you wanted one.)

Today, I would argue that those features have been split up. Messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage etc. are where people go to stay connected with friends and family. And video apps like Youtube, Tiktok, and (increasingly) Instagram are where people go to be entertained.

Facebook is left in the middle, pushing news, then Groups, now Marketplace to try to keep people coming back. Twitter is also skewing toward 100% entertainment, a trend that Musk is leaning into with his tabloid approach to content management.

Meanwhile, people still call Tiktok and Instagram "social media" even though they don't work like social media websites did 15 years ago. Some folks even call Reddit or HN social media. (I would call them web forums.)

Fuck social media. There are too many people clamoring for attention through manufactured viral outrage and victimhood. Plus, I don't give a shit about someone's lunch, their winter family vacation montage, or random people resharing viral conspiracy theories. Twitter is a cesspool of anonymous, thoughtless, and shallow noise, and Musk's tweets are par for the course.

And fuck viral micro-vlog influencer platforms. If people have life to waste on useless idle consumption rather than production, that's their choice. People with shit to do don't have time to watch crap that doesn't add value.

Also, LinkedIn is a cesspool of annoying, lazy, keyword-matching, slimy, labor pimps. I don't even use a resume anymore because there is little or no meaningful professionalism in the engineering of software or systems and resumes are basically lies. It's how someone works on real problems that matters, not trivial pursuit interview questions or brain teasers. Anyone looking for an easy paycheck can become an unethical, unprofessional, ignorant software developer. When I hear an organization hires people without relevant engineering expertise, I look for the door because it's going to be an amateur-hour shitshow.

But I can tell you who I won't talk about startup ideas with: uncurious, close-minded, complacent, dependent, niche specialists who refuse to realize they are living on borrowed time as employees rather than owners of something else much more valuable. Anyone who goes home and plays video games isn't self-aware enough to realize they are squandering their life assuming their current security will continue. It won't.

Can confirm.

Born in 1992, haven’t been using social media in like 6-7 years.

Before I completely dismiss social media I would like to “play” the game a second time, from scratch. See if I can create a “better” environment as-in “train the algorithm better” know that I know the surroundings.

Also born in the 90s, I feel like we were the last generation to grow up with technology advanced enough to be useful/educational but not yet so heavily DRM-ed and Ad-optimized as to be effectively manipulative to us as children.

This made the era amazingly fruitful for growing new developers (biased view but this is the orange site); as another piece of anecdata I have a sister who was born just after 2000 and she's plagued by every type of social disorder known to the world.

She's expressed interest in doing things like running a linux OS, but her laptop's secure boot and lack of MBR support meant she had to learn to create an efi partition first! It was tough trying not to flood her with 2 decades of history while letting her explore.

where are you from?

I notice similar in my case and case of my friends (born between 1985-1990).

I've seen fair share of new services and social networks being branded as "Facebook killer" in last 10 years but for me group texting was the thing that replaced the main use case of Facebook and Instagram - sharing important/funny/interesting moments and stuff with friends and family.

Back in the day I could use IRC or some messengers for this, but Facebook was the first to enable this at scale. Afterwards messaging apps (Viber in case of my country but I guess Telegram/WhatsApp for the rest of the world) made this more convenient but also more intimate/rewarding.

We don't have mutes or bans in our group texts. Discussions, even political ones, don't blow up like on Twitter. There's less incentive for things to go crazy when you're exchaning intersting/important stuff with people you know and care about.

Also, before Facebook I created and administreted phpBB forum for the same group of friends. We were in late teens, early 20s at that point so the main topics were "What are you listening too?", "What are you drinking tonight?", "How was Saturday night for you" (but also topics around literature, comic books, movies, video games). I get similar vibes from our group texts that I had on that forum more than 15 years ago.

I personally think everyone including 90s kids are just burnt out by social media. It’s too much. The only ones that seem to still engage are teenagers because they are evergreen. That’s probably why Facebook tries to target teenagers.