We often forget that we are easily scared mammals that love gossip from neighboring tribes.
The Internet broke the information firewall between nations. Today we just need to watch the TV for 45 minutes and to get an unhealthy dose of death and misery across the planet. The same thing goes with just about every news website.
Social media not only deliver this information to your front door, it also carries the other reader's comments that too often comes in forms of outrage, disgust, sadness, which then breeds more negative feelings.
I used to read The Guardian religiously for years. My mental health improved dramatically the day I stopped reading it. They are probably the “best” newspaper out there but it’s the media equivalent of high intensity doom scrolling.
I skim the G most mornings along with a lot of the other big media company's offerings. I read Dobelli's book after reading his Graun article, it's very good! Gave up all news for a year after that, gradually got sucked back into the doom Wurlitzer..
It’s interesting that most of the issues described there are specific to the online version of news. Breaking news updates, hyperlinks, etc.
I’ve been seriously considering going back to what my dad used to do and I did when I was young, and having a physical newspaper delivered to read for 15-30 mins in the morning, and then cutting off all online news.
This article (although unfortunately it’s largely unsupported by evidence, but I have indeed been feeling some of these effects personally) is a pointer in that direction.
Honestly, it's very difficult to cut social media.
We like to tell ourselves that those who managed to quit (and are informing us of how bad it is) are being snobs or acting superior: but the truth is unfortunately that we are just feeling defensive of our inability cut the habit.
I managed to get off of facebook and my mental health improved greatly, enough that I actually notice it. However, that was insanely hard and I did it years ago... and to this day I get tempted to go back.
I'm still on Instagram, I'm on tiktok, I'm on Twitter.
Twitter in particular always leaves me angry when I close it: people keep telling me that it's my fault, that I'm using the tool wrong, that I don't curate my feed enough.
I don't care, the truth is I can't quit because I feel like I'll be out of the loop, that people will not be able to reach me and I'll lose out on being a member of society.
For example: I lost connection with half of my family when I deleted whatsapp.
At some point we have to recognise that we've transitioned the majority of communication to these platforms: and telling people to quit is unreasonable.
I say this as a person who has tried, I recognise it is hard, I even believe it to be _necessary_ and even I can't do it.
Or a cold restart. You could delete your current accounts and start a new one. I’ve recently decided to try having an expiration on online identities like email addresses. I mean this account is nearing 15 years old. I’m thinking this is too long for most social networks.
Everything you mention here is well understood psychology of
addiction, attachment, social conditioning and intake management.
I always feel cheap to "plug" what I write (not great at marketing)
but please, if you've time, read some of Digital Vegan which re-frames
many of these digital harms through a metaphor of diet (here's a
review [1]).
I am myself quite surprised at what a useful and powerful metaphor
this has been, and the reported success rate amongst readers who
message me to say they successfully beat their dependency and sense of
subjugation to tech after reading. Hope you find a way out.
As a sibling said, I'm not sure WhatsApp is "social media". To me (a very occasional user), it's just a messenger (which may come with strings attached since it belongs to facebook, but still). Am I missing something?
Other than that, on what do you think you'll miss out, especially since whatever you're looking at leaves you angry? As someone who never really got hooked into facebook nor twitter [0], I don't get the impression I have a harder time reaching people than before these were a thing. Yet, most of my peers seem to always need to check something on the phone, scroll whenever they get a second, etc.
The only "social media" I've used is Instagram, by "following" some photographers whose art I enjoyed. Maybe a month or so ago, it started showing me random new crap once I "caught up" with the people I follow. Short videos, tik-tok style, not related in any way to the content I follow. This really pissed me off, since it seemed so... useless. I get trying to get me "engaged", but maybe show me some content which you've already seen my browse for? If I wanted to see practically naked girls jumping up and down, I'd just go to some porn site. Needless to say, my time spent browsing Instagram practically vanished.
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[0] I've never "quit": I never got hooked in the first place, since they never managed not to bore me to tears in more than 2 minutes flat.
There's probably some linguistic confusion surrounding the word 'media'.
WhatsApp is without a doubt a medium for social activity, in the same way that telephone lines and the postal service are.
However 'media' has kind of stopped being the plural for 'medium' and is now a term on its own. This means you can interpret also social media to mean the social exchange of information media, though perhaps it is more accurate to consider them an extension of the other broadcast media as social media seem to be increasingly in the grips of media magnates who fill it with advertising.
Moreover, I'd say "social media" has also stopped being a term where the component words matter. I'd argue in today's society "social media" itself is a standalone noun referring to many-to-many internet platforms where you are able to see other's content without an active subscription (as opposed to messengers, RSS, etc).
Yep. “You’re not curating your feed” is nonsense in 2022, and it has been for years. The only platform I’ve gotten close to this on is Instagram. Facebook and Twitter both exhibit the literally cancerous property of showing you what your contacts are engaging with. Once a social network does that, it’s basically game over unless you only connect with people who are similarly disciplined, which is just…untenable.
My Instagram feed is curated because it’s entirely for cat images and cat rescues, which for better or worse, there’s an over abundance of on the internet, so Instagram will never really need to start putting random depressing stuff on my feed.
Everything else I’m off of.
A necessary first step for my social media detox was deleting the apps. I started by only accessing them through the browser, so I wasn’t fully cut off, but I also didn’t have the fully curated experience that allows the social media platforms to really take over your senses.
I don't follow this argument. If you are following people whose engagements are triggering for you, surely that is on you? I follow ~300 people on Twitter and I only see content from them, or things they like.
I have no issues unfollowing overly political/negative/complaining people on Twitter (including what they 'like'), and my Twitter feed is full of people doing interesting things in the fields I'm interested in. Yes, sometimes this means you will need to stop following otherwise interesting people if they are net negative -- but I already do that IRL, so I don't see the issue.
I don't have any other social media, so I don't know how their algorithms fare, but Twitter can definitely be curated with little to no effort.
There are some twitter clients that allow you to follow other users without an account. I use Fritter on Android. It doesn't show ads and it only shows tweets and replies of those people that you actually follow directly.
I successfully quit Twitter. I used to be on it ~2 hours a day, now I haven't opened in for almost a year. Unfortunately that habit has been replaced by others and I still have FOMO from not being on Twitter when I see colleagues sharing Twitter links.
It's incredibly hard. The only thing that seems to work for me is to create a system to convince myself that I'm not missing out. For example, set aside a fixed 30 minutes a day, or 2 hours on a weekend, to go through the top links of your favorite social media state to satisfy the craving (I use RSS for that). That way at you can at least stop wasting time becoming distracted at random times during the day. Treat it like a cheat meal.
Another thing that has helped me cut some habits are reviews. After you spend a fixed hour on Twitter, ask yourself: What did I get out of this? Was it worth it? How did I feel before and after? Write it down in your journal. If you read your old entries week after week and they're all saying "I spent an hour on Twitter but I didn't feel like I got anything out of it" it makes it easier to quit.
Still, I can't help but feel that optimized social media feeds are the worst thing that has happened to our society in the last 10 years. Our brains haven't evolved to deal with this. And I don't think people have realized just how bad it is. Sure, we see news that social media is bad every day, but I don't think we as a society have truly understood the full implications. I think it's much worse than most think it is.
I'm on Twitter mostly out of morbid curiosity....and I've noticed since Elno took over that:
-The unending doomscroll is now about 6 inches long
-There are times where it's ad | ad | ad | content | ad | content
-IF you look at what IS there and categorize the entries as positive (+) or negative (-) it looks like: - - - - - + - - + - -
It's much easier to see the patterns now.
I heavily curated FAcebook to get rid of any hint of politics. At the worst of the midterms, there was nothing of note there.
Mastodon is a blast of fresh air, I really like the vibe and people...and it's not big enough (on my instance) to overwhelm with content, which makes it easy to disengage.
So, am I using social media? Yeah. But it's not as poisonous when you're AWARE of the poison, and it makes it really easy to disengage.
We're not evolved to deal with it, but it IS learnable. Much like we weren't evolved to deal with pretty much ANYTHING in this modern age...yet here we are.
I do pick up on the part about Twitter leaving you feeling angry. Is that due to conflict or politics or something? Do you like to feel angry? It’s just an observation but I think that feeling may be key
Cutting out WhatsApp and losing connection with half of your family, vs cutting Twitter/Tiktok/Instagram and losing connection with random people on the internet.
In my opinion, that's the wrong way around.
I specifically have Telegram and WhatsApp to keep in touch with family & friends. I specifically don't use those other websites because of the reasons you mention.
> I'm still on Instagram, I'm on tiktok, I'm on Twitter.
Tik Tok is another one that I just didn't see the utility in. Why would I want to watch a video of somebody being stupid? I just need to look around at people doing that in the normal walks of life.
You're really downplaying Tiktok. When it was starting up it was mostly a collection of teens dancing and making memes. Now there's content for everything made by a huge spectrum of people. Every person that relies on social media to maintain a brand needs to be on tiktok now. You scroll long enough and it'll feed you content hyper specific to your personality. I don't want to join Tiktok specifically because I know it'll show me things I enjoy but in a condensed form that will slowly rot away my attention span.
Curating Twitter is almost impossible. The most interesting accounts are also the ones that will occasionally tweet or retweet something that is likely to leave you angry, and after awhile you end up following enough of them that your feed will always have at least one person tweeting stuff that will just leave you feeling upset. My solution was to just walk away from the entire thing.
This is basically the social media addiction bargaining version of "I can't quit drinking, I will lose contact with all my friends at the bar!. Just have to accept that alcohol is part of society and social interaction."
Social media has taught us that some human group dynamics work at small scale but not at large scale. At large scale they have a much more sinister effect on society. One of these seems to be shame. Social media creates purity spirals, driven by fear of public shame. These spirals lead us to highly unethical places where not only are individual lives destroyed, but the progress of humanity is held back by kneejerk thinking, dogma and puritanism.
It's great that more and more people are starting to question whether social media is having an overall positive or negative affect on their own mental health. I'd like us to recognise, discuss, and combat, some of the wider problems that social media have brought, and how they're degrading to society as a whole.
I got off Instagram and Facebook about 2 years ago and never got on Tik-Tok and I can safely say it was one of the best choices I ever made.
I am still on Twitter which I check about once every few days for about 10 minutes.
I realized how my peers (umivesity students) are affected by social media, most of them are endlessly circling instagram and tik-tok every time there is a spare second. Once I got off I discovered how much time it frees up for thinking and/or doing other activities. I get the feeling that people are losing the joy of being alone with one's thoughts.
The hard part of being off social media is the fact that it is such a central part of our social interactions, sometimes I feel "out of the loop" and I still get A LOT of weird looks when I say to people that I am off social media.
All in all I am still convinced that being off social media is a net positive and I definitely advise people to try and see how it works out for them.
can you elaborate ? This has imho nothing to do with social media. I check hackernews daily, I pick articles (or discover new tools ...) that spark my curiosity and I read them, period.
Sometimes I engage and exchange with other people, leave my opinion etc ... This is nothing close to what Facebook, Instagram and co are up to ...
If you like it (HN for example), then it’s not social media.
I mean just look at what you just typed. You talk about a site you check daily for new content and interact with other people on. That’s social media — which in this case you just happen to like.
You're correct in some sense. But the kind of "social media" we're actually talking about is the one that tries to hook you up and manipulate you. I mean, this is what I am talking about here.
In that sense, everything is social media. A blog post is social media, because the strict definition of social media is something like that :
"Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks"
Social media’s addictive nature is driven by a personalized feed using every trick in the book to maximize the time you spend there.
Nothing about HN falls into that category. The UI is as unaddictive as it can get. The feed is not personalized. There are restrictions on how much you can post. You cannot follow anything. You cannot express interests (beyond the broad interest you’ve expressed by visiting HN in the first place). There is no endless scroll. Heck, even the pagination with very limited options is almost designed to ensure you don’t go beyond a couple of pages.
And it’s obviously not social media because there is no friend/follower/connection graph
I think we're all correct in some sense. The thing is @paulcole is taking "social media" in the strict definition of the term, when most of the people here are talking specifically about a bunch of social media.
Which makes sense to me. Because ask someone on the street to provide the names of 3 social media platforms, they'll in 99% of the cases mention Facebook, Instagram etc ... And none of them knows that a blog post is social media ...
Indeed. Most of the time I don't even bother to read the usernames of people I'm interacting with — or just glance at them briefly to separate the voices in any given thread. The comments here, for me, are about their content and their place within the context of the article linked and the following discussion, not who wrote them.
Social media is all about following people or interests and having the platform tailor an algorithm for you in order to present you with a unique view of their data. Hacker News has none of that.
I agree with what you just said. One cannot compare HN with Facebook for instance. Even though I understand what others are saying. We need a better definition for "social media" I guess. Or we might need a new definition to target specifically those you mentioned.
> Most of the time I don't even bother to read the usernames of people I'm interacting with
This is interesting because I never really noticed that I have no idea who wrote what unless somebody else points out "hey, look, John Carmack just replied!" or whatever.
Whatever is written on HN stands on its content alone. It is meritocratic in the best way.
it seems to me that you’re confusing this idea of “harmful social media” - i.e. facebook, twitter, etc - with the concept of social media itself. HN avoids dark patterns and tries to circumnavigate the engagement trap, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an online medium through which people - including you - communicate
"Social media is when u talk" has to be one of the worst internet revisionisms in recent times. The term describes big, massively centralized (micro)blogging platforms attached to your social circle and real identity. Forums are not social media, chatrooms are not social media, content aggregators are not social media.
This post reminded me I haven't looked at Facebook for a month or so (the frequency dropped hard after I stopped doing it every day). I saw about 5 ads in 3 min, reported 2 of them for misleading content. Nice. See you in a month or so (for some updates from my brother mostly).
This is why I hope Elon does burn Twitter to the ground, whether or not he means to.
On net, I believe it makes the world worse. Even if there are some who benefit from it, I think it's at the expense of far too many other people to be worth the cost.
As individuals, we should not wait for that to happen. If Twitter falls, something will replace it and the users of that new place will be the same people that made Twitter toxic.
So I don't know. "Rise above, focus on science" or something like that. Is anyone studying theories how to make people non-toxic online? People are notoriously malleable, so it's most probably possible.
What is it that attracts people to social media? Ever since facebook started it seemed full of people self-promoting which made it look sleazy . Things haven't changed since , it 's just that now it has become normalized to be sleazy. What is it that attracts people to social media?
Are you sure our more normalized now? The back of magazines and comic books were also full of scams and sleaze when I was a kid. I am 40 and remember people forwarding letters around with a dollar in them for some kind of pyramid scheme.
I don't think there was another time in history when people self proclaimed the things you find today in a social media profile , and not getting laughed at
It's great to see that some people have experienced the same thing I have.
I have deleted Facebook and Instagram 4 years ago. Best decision I ever made. As @smeej said, there's benefits to it, but there's too many downsides to it so in the end, for me, it's definitely not worth it.
Have also done the same thing with mainstream media, television and streaming services (Netflix & co).
Instead I focus on reading books or blogs that I am really interested in, I take time to write, take notes, think, spend time with my loved ones and pursuing hobbies.
I'm sure I do not even need to elaborate on the privacy aspect of all the (mainstream) social media apps ...
Also, I will be transitioning from Whatsapp to Threema in the next few weeks. People ask themselves "how to", when you have friends, groups or whatever in Whatsapp. At one point, you need to take a decision. Your well-being and mental health and/or privacy or being "mainstream" (or whatever term fits inside the quotes). I personally do not care (as I am a privacy advocate). I will notify everybody and then I will move on. There's still other ways they can contact me if needed and they do not want to ditch whatsapp, and tbh, I am not asking anybody to do it. I somehow think that the better way is to lead by your actions. So I will try my best.
There is a way out. I'm not saying everybody should quit, but everybody should assess the impacts all of it has in their own life. I'm also thinking it might be important for us to realize this pretty quickly, because in the end, we might create a system that resembles the one they have in China, i.e. you do everything from your smartphone and you're tracked 24/7.
For e.g. a poll in Germany found that 23% of 18-30 years think that it might be good to have a social credit system [1] (this tendency is up around 30-40% in comparison to the same poll a few years back). This is scary. And imho, social media is greatly contributing to it, because the main point in social media is to hook people, i.e. providing addictive dopamine shots.
Anyone who has dropped social media and looks around notices that most of social media users are completely addicted and zoned out of (real - [whatever this is supposed to mean]) life.
This. Social media is not heroin or crack cocaine. If you, as an adult, are getting fulfillment and dopamine through screaming at people on the internet, instead of the life you've established and the interactions you have in it, you are a TOTAL failure.
The reason why it's so 'hard' for these people to quit, is that they absolutely refuse to accept that they are at fault and need to seriously rethink their lives.
It pains me to see a friend of mine constantly, just forever, in a depressed state. I do realise of course that social media isn't the only, or even probable, cause of depression in the first place but god damn does it keep you there!
Constantly getting wound up over rage bait material. The people posting these things literally did it that way so that you have a passionate response and engage ffs! Anger is easier to manufacture than happiness and you fall for it every time!
I used to call it as I saw it whenever they tried to share the rage with me but I realised all that was doing was making them dislike talking to me. At least the attempts to share the rage with me stopped.
Pull the thorn out of your brain and you might not be so pissed off and miserable all the time!
Like what I said yesterday, the only solution is to delete your social media accounts. [0]
The solution is obvious but perhaps the digital crack / cocaine is so addictive to many, I don't think people have the guts to delete their accounts let alone avoid the site in the first place.
Until you are off of social media, then you can see that you are not missing out on anything. If celebrities can do that, what is your excuse?
The mistake one can do is to open another account or attempt to replace it with another, which solves absolutely nothing.
My excuse is that people use Facebook to plan events.
Nobody held me down to the ground and put a gun in my mouth. It's a useful tool. As with any tool, if you can't see it as such, it says more about you than it does about the tool.
Instagram and TikTok - Delete this nonsense if you have any self respect. Why would you, a grown adult, be engaging with a platform where people share information via frivolous pictures and video clips.
Facebook - Yes you should have a Facebook account, and you should use it to stay in touch and up to date with friends and family. You should log in every few days and “like” some posts, give people a little bit of validation which they’ll appreciate. Occasionally post a holiday snap or a funny anecdote.
Whatsapp - women probably should not join whatsapp groups (except immediate family), but it is a good medium for banter among male friends.
Twitter - It’s reasonable to spend a lot of time reading Twitter, given the quality of content and its primacy in global discourse. You must disable “media preview” so that it’s text-only by default. Your account should be anonymous, or at least, not obviously associated with your real name and real identity, given that it’s public by default. In general it’s a mistake to become too invested in your online persona - I suspect most social media addicts make this mistake. Contribute sparingly. Forget “the algorithm” - carefully curate your feed and unfollow anyone with a bad signal-to-noise ratio, or who tweets excessively.
> You should log in every few days and “like” some posts, give people a little bit of validation with they’ll appreciate. Occasionally post a holiday snap or a funny anecdote.
Why would I want a Facebook account at this point, who even goes there anymore?
> Women should not join WhatsApp groups
Would love to hear your attempts to justify this position.
> Twitter
I feel twitter is trending downhill at this point. Recent changes mean you see lots of garbage whether you chose to or not. Perhaps this is inevitable with social media.
I've been getting back into social media via Mastodon.
Social media never had the hold on me that it did for some of the people interviewed in that article, but I had stopped checking Facebook and Twitter a few years ago, largely for the negativity and argumentativeness I felt it bringing out. I don't know if that's due to algorithms designed to maximize engagement, or if it's just human nature. If it's the former, then Mastodon may offer a path to the benefits of social media without optimizing for addiction.
Mastodon currently has nowhere near the reach of Facebook or Twitter. Maybe it never will. But in the meantime I'm enjoying following interesting people on Mastodon and the generally positive discussions I've seen there. Curation is certainly required since there's no algorithm making an effort to hook you in.
I just wish FaceBook was presented to me like HackerNews:
- My Favorite Group is meeting next week at a local restaurant
- My Neighbor is on yet another amazing trip with his perfect family
- My old classmate found a preachy article that he wants to share
- etc.
I crave the connection, but there is such a thin line between that and bragging. I love it at a party when I ask what someone has been up to and they have an interesting response. I would hate if that same person just walked up in my face and said, "I went to Aruba, a Paul McCartney Concert, and that new trendy restaurant in town". Then I also hate that I feel that way.
I could do a better job of self moderating if the presentation wasn't so intentionally in my face.
I deleted all social media over the span from 2016 to 2019, and after an short period of actively missing it, I don't even think about it anymore, unless the topic comes up as one of societal concern, or in connection with my kids. Phones are still distracting without social media, but materially less so. Being off social media has not just been a net positive, it is almost an unmitigated positive. The social connection it promises to provide is illusory, and it gets in the way of actual social interactions. It is sad to see people who obviously know each other sitting next to each other while staring at their phones, many of them presumable looking at social media. I see it among young people at my kids' events, among my social set, and especially among other families out to dinner.
The harm it appears to be causing to kids is my main concern, given social pressure to do what other kids are doing. Banning communication platforms for kids would be hard to implement in practice. A good starting point would be to ban phones from K-12 schools. They are raising a generation of kids with really bad habits and poorly developed social skills, attention spans, and creativity.
I deleted all my social media 5 months ago, and I feel amazing. I didn't think I would be able to do it, but after all this time without it, I almost forget that Instagram and Snapchat are a thing. I no longer see the selfies of people who bullied me in high school every day. I no longer feel like every experience and accomplishment needs to be milked to boost my reputation to my peers via social media. It's so freeing. And the amount of extra free time I have now is great too
I've never seen the point of Instagram so don't really use it. But Twitter is a garbage dump of toxicity that has been done a favor by The Musk buying and destroying it.
I've gone years without social media at a time and now I've finally learned to just balance it better.
- On Facebook, I heavily scrutinize the friends I accept and use the "hide" button judiciously. I also only check it about once a week, max. I do find value in Facebook groups and Facebook's event scheduling features. As someone else mentioned, I wish there was a way to tune Facebook to a more community-driven view than whatever trash they want you to see to drive max "engagement" (see: conflict).
- On Instagram, I just don't see much value in it. I have the account so I can authenticate when I need to.
- TikTok, I just enjoy. The interesting thing is the "social" aspect of TikTok is off-platform for me - I generally share TikToks via text message or show my phone in person. I am a little creeped out by how addictive it is, but for right now I'm ok with it.
- Twitter, I see value in as a news site but the social aspect just never caught on for me. It all feels very "extroverted".
I do agree with the idea that, largely, social media is toxic and we'd be better off without it. But that could also be said about much of the Internet and mainstream media at this point.
I bailed on all social media some five years ago. The most shocking consequence was how interested I became in people when I saw them in person. I had questions about their lives, the careers, family, activities and more. I suddenly didn't know everything about a person and had to ask.
Twitter and other social networks have rules against hate speech, but their algorithms do everything they can to provoke their users to express hate speech.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadThe Internet broke the information firewall between nations. Today we just need to watch the TV for 45 minutes and to get an unhealthy dose of death and misery across the planet. The same thing goes with just about every news website.
Social media not only deliver this information to your front door, it also carries the other reader's comments that too often comes in forms of outrage, disgust, sadness, which then breeds more negative feelings.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
I’ve been seriously considering going back to what my dad used to do and I did when I was young, and having a physical newspaper delivered to read for 15-30 mins in the morning, and then cutting off all online news.
This article (although unfortunately it’s largely unsupported by evidence, but I have indeed been feeling some of these effects personally) is a pointer in that direction.
We like to tell ourselves that those who managed to quit (and are informing us of how bad it is) are being snobs or acting superior: but the truth is unfortunately that we are just feeling defensive of our inability cut the habit.
I managed to get off of facebook and my mental health improved greatly, enough that I actually notice it. However, that was insanely hard and I did it years ago... and to this day I get tempted to go back.
I'm still on Instagram, I'm on tiktok, I'm on Twitter.
Twitter in particular always leaves me angry when I close it: people keep telling me that it's my fault, that I'm using the tool wrong, that I don't curate my feed enough.
I don't care, the truth is I can't quit because I feel like I'll be out of the loop, that people will not be able to reach me and I'll lose out on being a member of society.
For example: I lost connection with half of my family when I deleted whatsapp.
At some point we have to recognise that we've transitioned the majority of communication to these platforms: and telling people to quit is unreasonable.
I say this as a person who has tried, I recognise it is hard, I even believe it to be _necessary_ and even I can't do it.
I also don’t see it a social media per se. Otherwise Apple Messages or SMS should also be considered one.
Like going to delete your Twitter account right now?
I always feel cheap to "plug" what I write (not great at marketing) but please, if you've time, read some of Digital Vegan which re-frames many of these digital harms through a metaphor of diet (here's a review [1]).
I am myself quite surprised at what a useful and powerful metaphor this has been, and the reported success rate amongst readers who message me to say they successfully beat their dependency and sense of subjugation to tech after reading. Hope you find a way out.
[1] https://techrights.org/2022/12/26/oliva-on-farnell-and-moody...
Other than that, on what do you think you'll miss out, especially since whatever you're looking at leaves you angry? As someone who never really got hooked into facebook nor twitter [0], I don't get the impression I have a harder time reaching people than before these were a thing. Yet, most of my peers seem to always need to check something on the phone, scroll whenever they get a second, etc.
The only "social media" I've used is Instagram, by "following" some photographers whose art I enjoyed. Maybe a month or so ago, it started showing me random new crap once I "caught up" with the people I follow. Short videos, tik-tok style, not related in any way to the content I follow. This really pissed me off, since it seemed so... useless. I get trying to get me "engaged", but maybe show me some content which you've already seen my browse for? If I wanted to see practically naked girls jumping up and down, I'd just go to some porn site. Needless to say, my time spent browsing Instagram practically vanished.
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[0] I've never "quit": I never got hooked in the first place, since they never managed not to bore me to tears in more than 2 minutes flat.
Until Zuckerberg starts pushing "recommended oneway groupchats" or whatever I would not see WhatsApp as social media any-more than ICQ.
WhatsApp is without a doubt a medium for social activity, in the same way that telephone lines and the postal service are.
However 'media' has kind of stopped being the plural for 'medium' and is now a term on its own. This means you can interpret also social media to mean the social exchange of information media, though perhaps it is more accurate to consider them an extension of the other broadcast media as social media seem to be increasingly in the grips of media magnates who fill it with advertising.
Everything else I’m off of.
A necessary first step for my social media detox was deleting the apps. I started by only accessing them through the browser, so I wasn’t fully cut off, but I also didn’t have the fully curated experience that allows the social media platforms to really take over your senses.
I have no issues unfollowing overly political/negative/complaining people on Twitter (including what they 'like'), and my Twitter feed is full of people doing interesting things in the fields I'm interested in. Yes, sometimes this means you will need to stop following otherwise interesting people if they are net negative -- but I already do that IRL, so I don't see the issue.
I don't have any other social media, so I don't know how their algorithms fare, but Twitter can definitely be curated with little to no effort.
It's incredibly hard. The only thing that seems to work for me is to create a system to convince myself that I'm not missing out. For example, set aside a fixed 30 minutes a day, or 2 hours on a weekend, to go through the top links of your favorite social media state to satisfy the craving (I use RSS for that). That way at you can at least stop wasting time becoming distracted at random times during the day. Treat it like a cheat meal.
Another thing that has helped me cut some habits are reviews. After you spend a fixed hour on Twitter, ask yourself: What did I get out of this? Was it worth it? How did I feel before and after? Write it down in your journal. If you read your old entries week after week and they're all saying "I spent an hour on Twitter but I didn't feel like I got anything out of it" it makes it easier to quit.
Still, I can't help but feel that optimized social media feeds are the worst thing that has happened to our society in the last 10 years. Our brains haven't evolved to deal with this. And I don't think people have realized just how bad it is. Sure, we see news that social media is bad every day, but I don't think we as a society have truly understood the full implications. I think it's much worse than most think it is.
It's much easier to see the patterns now.
I heavily curated FAcebook to get rid of any hint of politics. At the worst of the midterms, there was nothing of note there.
Mastodon is a blast of fresh air, I really like the vibe and people...and it's not big enough (on my instance) to overwhelm with content, which makes it easy to disengage.
So, am I using social media? Yeah. But it's not as poisonous when you're AWARE of the poison, and it makes it really easy to disengage.
We're not evolved to deal with it, but it IS learnable. Much like we weren't evolved to deal with pretty much ANYTHING in this modern age...yet here we are.
The main insight is that FOMO can apply to "a normal life without social media" too ...
I do pick up on the part about Twitter leaving you feeling angry. Is that due to conflict or politics or something? Do you like to feel angry? It’s just an observation but I think that feeling may be key
In my opinion, that's the wrong way around.
I specifically have Telegram and WhatsApp to keep in touch with family & friends. I specifically don't use those other websites because of the reasons you mention.
https://i.redd.it/5tqpouqebvp11.jpg
My whole post is about how I've been trying, have tried, and how I've failed.
I'm 33 now, I've quit many other addictive things but this one seems to rope me back.
Tik Tok is another one that I just didn't see the utility in. Why would I want to watch a video of somebody being stupid? I just need to look around at people doing that in the normal walks of life.
If not, don’t do it. Learned this from a podcast.
It's great that more and more people are starting to question whether social media is having an overall positive or negative affect on their own mental health. I'd like us to recognise, discuss, and combat, some of the wider problems that social media have brought, and how they're degrading to society as a whole.
I realized how my peers (umivesity students) are affected by social media, most of them are endlessly circling instagram and tik-tok every time there is a spare second. Once I got off I discovered how much time it frees up for thinking and/or doing other activities. I get the feeling that people are losing the joy of being alone with one's thoughts. The hard part of being off social media is the fact that it is such a central part of our social interactions, sometimes I feel "out of the loop" and I still get A LOT of weird looks when I say to people that I am off social media.
All in all I am still convinced that being off social media is a net positive and I definitely advise people to try and see how it works out for them.
Sometimes I engage and exchange with other people, leave my opinion etc ... This is nothing close to what Facebook, Instagram and co are up to ...
Please explain.
If you like it (HN for example), then it’s not social media.
I mean just look at what you just typed. You talk about a site you check daily for new content and interact with other people on. That’s social media — which in this case you just happen to like.
In that sense, everything is social media. A blog post is social media, because the strict definition of social media is something like that :
"Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks"
Do we agree on some points or I am totally off?
Yes.
> In that sense, everything is social media
Correct.
> But the kind of "social media" we're actually talking about
There are social media that you think are good and social media that you think are bad. Both both are still social media.
Nothing about HN falls into that category. The UI is as unaddictive as it can get. The feed is not personalized. There are restrictions on how much you can post. You cannot follow anything. You cannot express interests (beyond the broad interest you’ve expressed by visiting HN in the first place). There is no endless scroll. Heck, even the pagination with very limited options is almost designed to ensure you don’t go beyond a couple of pages.
And it’s obviously not social media because there is no friend/follower/connection graph
1. I’ve described the factors that make social media especially addictive.
2. I’ve defined social media.
So your criticism, however accurate, applies only to the single sentence at the end of my comment.
Which makes sense to me. Because ask someone on the street to provide the names of 3 social media platforms, they'll in 99% of the cases mention Facebook, Instagram etc ... And none of them knows that a blog post is social media ...
Social media is all about following people or interests and having the platform tailor an algorithm for you in order to present you with a unique view of their data. Hacker News has none of that.
This is interesting because I never really noticed that I have no idea who wrote what unless somebody else points out "hey, look, John Carmack just replied!" or whatever.
Whatever is written on HN stands on its content alone. It is meritocratic in the best way.
On net, I believe it makes the world worse. Even if there are some who benefit from it, I think it's at the expense of far too many other people to be worth the cost.
So I don't know. "Rise above, focus on science" or something like that. Is anyone studying theories how to make people non-toxic online? People are notoriously malleable, so it's most probably possible.
I don't think there was another time in history when people self proclaimed the things you find today in a social media profile , and not getting laughed at
I have deleted Facebook and Instagram 4 years ago. Best decision I ever made. As @smeej said, there's benefits to it, but there's too many downsides to it so in the end, for me, it's definitely not worth it. Have also done the same thing with mainstream media, television and streaming services (Netflix & co). Instead I focus on reading books or blogs that I am really interested in, I take time to write, take notes, think, spend time with my loved ones and pursuing hobbies.
I'm sure I do not even need to elaborate on the privacy aspect of all the (mainstream) social media apps ...
Also, I will be transitioning from Whatsapp to Threema in the next few weeks. People ask themselves "how to", when you have friends, groups or whatever in Whatsapp. At one point, you need to take a decision. Your well-being and mental health and/or privacy or being "mainstream" (or whatever term fits inside the quotes). I personally do not care (as I am a privacy advocate). I will notify everybody and then I will move on. There's still other ways they can contact me if needed and they do not want to ditch whatsapp, and tbh, I am not asking anybody to do it. I somehow think that the better way is to lead by your actions. So I will try my best.
There is a way out. I'm not saying everybody should quit, but everybody should assess the impacts all of it has in their own life. I'm also thinking it might be important for us to realize this pretty quickly, because in the end, we might create a system that resembles the one they have in China, i.e. you do everything from your smartphone and you're tracked 24/7.
For e.g. a poll in Germany found that 23% of 18-30 years think that it might be good to have a social credit system [1] (this tendency is up around 30-40% in comparison to the same poll a few years back). This is scary. And imho, social media is greatly contributing to it, because the main point in social media is to hook people, i.e. providing addictive dopamine shots.
Anyone who has dropped social media and looks around notices that most of social media users are completely addicted and zoned out of (real - [whatever this is supposed to mean]) life.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/d4i6ac/20_of_germa...
Anyone who equates social media to that is being either weak, or unserious, or simply incapable of dealing with life. People need to get a grip.
Remember that anything you feel from a social media interaction is self-inflicted -- it is your own reaction to what you saw.
The reason why it's so 'hard' for these people to quit, is that they absolutely refuse to accept that they are at fault and need to seriously rethink their lives.
Constantly getting wound up over rage bait material. The people posting these things literally did it that way so that you have a passionate response and engage ffs! Anger is easier to manufacture than happiness and you fall for it every time!
I used to call it as I saw it whenever they tried to share the rage with me but I realised all that was doing was making them dislike talking to me. At least the attempts to share the rage with me stopped.
Pull the thorn out of your brain and you might not be so pissed off and miserable all the time!
The solution is obvious but perhaps the digital crack / cocaine is so addictive to many, I don't think people have the guts to delete their accounts let alone avoid the site in the first place.
Until you are off of social media, then you can see that you are not missing out on anything. If celebrities can do that, what is your excuse?
The mistake one can do is to open another account or attempt to replace it with another, which solves absolutely nothing.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34161859
Nobody held me down to the ground and put a gun in my mouth. It's a useful tool. As with any tool, if you can't see it as such, it says more about you than it does about the tool.
Instagram and TikTok - Delete this nonsense if you have any self respect. Why would you, a grown adult, be engaging with a platform where people share information via frivolous pictures and video clips.
Facebook - Yes you should have a Facebook account, and you should use it to stay in touch and up to date with friends and family. You should log in every few days and “like” some posts, give people a little bit of validation which they’ll appreciate. Occasionally post a holiday snap or a funny anecdote.
Whatsapp - women probably should not join whatsapp groups (except immediate family), but it is a good medium for banter among male friends.
Twitter - It’s reasonable to spend a lot of time reading Twitter, given the quality of content and its primacy in global discourse. You must disable “media preview” so that it’s text-only by default. Your account should be anonymous, or at least, not obviously associated with your real name and real identity, given that it’s public by default. In general it’s a mistake to become too invested in your online persona - I suspect most social media addicts make this mistake. Contribute sparingly. Forget “the algorithm” - carefully curate your feed and unfollow anyone with a bad signal-to-noise ratio, or who tweets excessively.
Wow, what?
Why would I want a Facebook account at this point, who even goes there anymore?
> Women should not join WhatsApp groups
Would love to hear your attempts to justify this position.
> Twitter
I feel twitter is trending downhill at this point. Recent changes mean you see lots of garbage whether you chose to or not. Perhaps this is inevitable with social media.
Social media never had the hold on me that it did for some of the people interviewed in that article, but I had stopped checking Facebook and Twitter a few years ago, largely for the negativity and argumentativeness I felt it bringing out. I don't know if that's due to algorithms designed to maximize engagement, or if it's just human nature. If it's the former, then Mastodon may offer a path to the benefits of social media without optimizing for addiction.
Mastodon currently has nowhere near the reach of Facebook or Twitter. Maybe it never will. But in the meantime I'm enjoying following interesting people on Mastodon and the generally positive discussions I've seen there. Curation is certainly required since there's no algorithm making an effort to hook you in.
I could do a better job of self moderating if the presentation wasn't so intentionally in my face.
The harm it appears to be causing to kids is my main concern, given social pressure to do what other kids are doing. Banning communication platforms for kids would be hard to implement in practice. A good starting point would be to ban phones from K-12 schools. They are raising a generation of kids with really bad habits and poorly developed social skills, attention spans, and creativity.
- On Facebook, I heavily scrutinize the friends I accept and use the "hide" button judiciously. I also only check it about once a week, max. I do find value in Facebook groups and Facebook's event scheduling features. As someone else mentioned, I wish there was a way to tune Facebook to a more community-driven view than whatever trash they want you to see to drive max "engagement" (see: conflict).
- On Instagram, I just don't see much value in it. I have the account so I can authenticate when I need to.
- TikTok, I just enjoy. The interesting thing is the "social" aspect of TikTok is off-platform for me - I generally share TikToks via text message or show my phone in person. I am a little creeped out by how addictive it is, but for right now I'm ok with it.
- Twitter, I see value in as a news site but the social aspect just never caught on for me. It all feels very "extroverted".
I do agree with the idea that, largely, social media is toxic and we'd be better off without it. But that could also be said about much of the Internet and mainstream media at this point.
No, HN is not social media - it's a forum.