The whole point of not using social media is to push you to actually meet people in real life. Form real connections instead of reading single sentence comments.
This guy is too scared to even make a new profile because he would have to send new friend requests to all of his "friends".
> The whole point of not using social media is to push you to actually meet people in real life.
While that can be a reason, it's not "the whole point". I backed way off on social media a few years ago simply because I found it toxic. I didn't have trouble before that meeting people in real life, nor did it particularly change my behavior in that regard when I left most of the social media behind.
I’m not sure if fear is the driver here, or something else. I think it might depend on how they went about leaving.
I’ve had friends leave social media in a very holier-than-thou manner.
Coming back for them wouldn’t just involve re-adding friends, but eating a lot of crow in the process.
But setting that aside, I do find the post a bit sad. I think it points to the fact that even while social media is making us depressed, the world changed so much with its introduction that it can be difficult to operate without it depending on your personality type, the nature of your current support system, and friend group.
And if you suffer from social anxiety on top of that, things are only worse.
I don’t actively use social media, don’t have the apps installed, don’t have active browser sessions, and use Firefox Facebook container, but I didn’t delete my accounts either.
The thing is they went further than not using it and they torched their accounts.
It's like when you bump into someone you know who you used to call on the phone and they ask you for your number. It's a little jarring knowing they consciously took actions to sever ties. This alone basically ensures that any preexisting bonds will most likely not ever be the same.
I deleted my accounts and felt similarly. There was a positive aspect to it but sometimes I try to find photos from certain period in my life but realise they were on a deleted account. Or I understand something someone once said to me and I want to reach out and tell them that I finally understood what they meant but I have no means of contacting them.
Its so easy to see the bad that social media has caused but if you have lived pre-internet you know the feeling of mistakenly loosing people forever. Maybe the risk of that enriched the experiences at the time though. It's so long ago now it's hard to remember.
I am in the opposite boat. Deleted all my stuff never looked back. Best decision. This is probably the only social thing I read now; its like 5 minutes a day to scan the front page, then close it.
I still have discord, but I am super careful to make sure I only stay in channels when I need them and then immediately leave when I no longer have a use for it.
I never 'delete' them. I just add them to my ublock and then do not use them anymore. I also am very careful about which site I join. Social media sites come and go quickly and am I missing out a ton of stuff? sure thing. I realized it was consuming my time for other things I care more about. When many of these sites turned from trying to connect me to people and more to trying to outrage me with dumb things as that feeds 'engagement'. I got out.
I also add their sites to ublock as they are many times disguised advertising networks. "why yes I love seeing the last thing I looked at on amazon all over the web" /s.
The time consumption was a big one for me. It is easy to underestimate how much time 30 minutes a day is in 10 years. People always talking about how they have no time etc. But if you can gain 30 minutes a day for something you really enjoy you can become so skilled at it and really enjoy it deeply much faster if you abandon any interruptions to that thing.
Zero regrets and if anything my social life improved, didn't get worse.
It is true that Facebook is nowadays the reference point to stay in touch with what's happening locally (events and things like that), but this has maybe impacted a bit my knowledge of cool events around, not my social life.
I feel like the issue with social media is you are not really social at a level that is helpful or relationship building. It is more of an observation of your friends doing things. That really isn't a friendship. A friendship is about connection and communication on a level deeper than what social media provides.
This is like me and TV. I gave up cold turkey a few years ago, and in the first few days and weeks, I felt some sort of guilt of not watching TV. Now I feel like it was probably the best thing I've ever done.
For sure. The only time I watch TV is when I am eating because my hands are occupied. I guess the other time is when my wife or kids want to watch a movie together.
But, we have still mailing-list and signal, but a pigeon is used for BBQ invitations...the important stuff, we have one where the pigeons can life and he cares for them...we pay our share (everyone is the owner of three pigeons).
I talk to my friends via text every so often to check in with them, and I use discord to talk to daily friends. The problem with social media is you don't check in with friends, you observe them and that isn't really a friendship.
Do you use any blocking/restriction tools or really just programmed yourself to only check once and for five minutes a day? I'm really bad at that, it's so easy for me to just randomly check and then lose a bunch of time. To be honest that is exactly what I am doing now :(, over the years i've just never been able to break this habit.
Check out LeechBlock. It's a browser extension that lets you define block lists and time limits that periodically reset so you can, for instance, limit yourself to 10 minutes every 4 hours of browsing Hacker News. It's one of my favorite productivity tools.
You probably haven't really tried other than what most people do - declare to themselves that they won't look at Twitter (for example) and then feel bad an hour later when they notice they are looking at Twitter.
I know he doesn't have the best reputation around here, but James Clear's book Atomic Habits has some pretty good advice about building new habits.
If I were trying to stop reading HN, I would start small. Tell myself I won't reload it for 30 minutes (or whatever - some small easily achieved goal). I would keep setting small goals like that and then start to stretch the time. I would also need something to replace the activity in those time when I reach for HN reflexively. I keep a guitar at work that I'll noodle on or I'll read for a few minutes, write something to myself, go make tea, step outside for some sun and air, etc...
No. I found that if I used blocking programs, I would just unblock them. So I just ended up making a stance on what was most important in my life. I tried to fill any voids with something that I needed to do or something I enjoyed doing. The moment I would open it I would be like, NO, do this instead.
Eventually it just became natural to do other thing instead.
I don't think they are bragging. They are contributing to the conversation with directly relevant content/personal experience. I'm not sure why you decided to be confrontational and condescending about that.
I also deleted all of my social media several years ago (except LinkedIn in case I need to find a job) to enormous personal benefit. Most people don't care when I bring it up. When I lived in suburbia, however, it was a different story. For every person that was interested or congratulatory when I told them I encountered five that were defensive about it and chose to frame it as some type of personal failing akin to alcoholism - "well I'm sorry that _you_ can't use it responsibly, but I can!".
I've no idea why this is and have more important things to do with my time then try to explain or rationalize this phenomenon but it was definitely a thing.
Mainly because I don't have an impression that it contributing to the conversation in a meaningful sense. We have a lot of different social media platforms out there. If you decided not to use one or more - good for you, but what exactly the message here? Could you explain it please?
Hi. I am not bragging, just sharing opposite experience. I found it refreshing to view things in my own light and no be influenced by others as much. Observing my friends or social media people doing things and living their life was not really living mine, so I just self corrected every time I noticed until I didn't have to anymore. Sorry for the late reply, just now checking HN after my original post.
This person is just making things far more complicated than they need to be.
> cant make a new Facebook in 2023 and add all these old friends. Literally psychotic behavior.
There is nothing "psychotic" about signing up again and adding some old friends again. Many people leave social media and return when they feel more comfortable. They are the only thing blocking themselves from the social interaction they are missing.
> I live alone by choice with my cat and separate from my parents and all my siblings and yeah we all text but it’s still nice seeing social media posts from everyone. Maybe I’d feel less isolated. I also feel left out when they talk about some stuff they see.
Again they isolate themselves by choice then complain about isolation. There is nothing stopping them from socialising. Nobody has 'ghosted' them or excluded them from anything.
Seems to me like this is somebody that took things too far with a total cut of all social contact rather than just removing some of the more toxic elements of social media from their lives.
I don't use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok because I didn't enjoy the never ending stream of content but I still use reddit, Hacker News (obviously), Discord and Slack for keeping in touch with "online friends". You don't have to go to absolute zero for social media to cut out the majority of the toxic stuff but still get some of the benefits from it.
> There is nothing "psychotic" about signing up again and adding some old friends again
Maybe not so extreme but if an old friend added me on Facebook I would immediately assume they want something…
But I have to say, I still have Facebook on my phone, and open it from time to time, and it’s pretty barren. I think the consensus among my peers is that sharing something on Facebook is signaling that you’re socially undesirable… so if he signs up again, I think he will find it doesn’t help at all.
(Though I still like Facebook as a contact list of last resort)
> but if an old friend added me on Facebook I would immediately assume they want something
Fair point as this person does want something. They want that friendship back.
If an old friend adds me on Facebook and then starts trying to sell me some vitamin programme that is very different to if they add me back and are like "Oh man I've missed you, I deleted Facebook but it's so hard as an adult with a job, etc. to keep in touch with people isn't it? How you and the family doing? I'm sorry I just cut off contact like that, I thought it would be better but I was so wrong".
It all depends on the motives and actions. It seems this person is sincere in that they feel they really screwed up just cutting all social ties how they did.
It doesn’t always work that way. We sometimes have friends we might not stay actively in touch with, but are able to pick up where we left off when we are back in contact. Friendships are complex.
Ok but then they wouldn't have been lost by deleting the Facebook, the person could just get back in touch. But they seem to believe it would be weird (psychotic even?) if they did, which to me points to them not being actual friendships.
I think there is a difference between 'liking' an old friend's stuff, who you're no longer in actual contact with (not talking or meeting or anything), and kind of re-instating contact by 'adding friend' - even if you only intend to occasionally 'like' stuff in the same way as above, they don't know that after all.
Having now read through some of this persons comments on the thread it seems a huge area of regret for them is that they didn't export the content before they closed their accounts.
That I can understand is upsetting much like not having backups of family photos and the drive dying. Why they did not export their content I do not know. Facebook, etc. have all had "check out" functionality for many years now, all before the pandemic hit.
Seems they rushed into closing their accounts rather than exporting and backing all those memories up and without any kind of plan on what to do to fill the social void it would great. As a commenter wrote in reply to them "I gave up eating McDonald's everyday but now I have no food."
I guess people should "deactivate" their socials rather than "deleting" them if they are not entirely sure. I left Instagram and Facebook a year ago but I cam go back whenever I want to.
Right! I simply abandoned Facebook. Changed my password, deleted my cookies, stopped going there. If I need to, I can look up the password and login. For example, I needed to participate in the event page for the local burn. Then I deleted my cookies again.
Yes. I also don't understand this thing about deleting social media accounts. Just don't login and don't look at the app? Why delete, removing your history permanently?
I suspect there's something psychological going on. The mere existance of the profile and history, not active use, causes mental strain.
Social media is addictive (edit: to some people). It's like telling an alcoholic "why bother throwing away the beer in your fridge, keep it around if a friend comes over and wants to drink, why is it so hard to just not drink it?"
I don't understand the desire to delete them. It seems to stem from the misconception that this triggers the service to delete everything in their ad targeting profiles. They don't delete everything they know about you just because you delete your account, though, as they maintain those dossiers even about people who don't have accounts.
That's why I keep the account. And there's slim chance of any imposter trying to create one in my place, though I guess after all these years that is less likely.
You don't realize how expensive these so called free platforms are until you try to leave. You will never recover much of what you invested. It is a hard lesson for many.
>”He has all these weird extremist overthought concepts about social interactions.”
This seems like a good description for most of Reddit. I have a feeling that the platform’s karma system is geared towards incentivizing these kinds of posts and thought patterns.
It's both less and more specific than that. Subreddits are ideal (or at least best-yet) implementations echo chambers. A particular idiosyncratic groupthink emerges for each subreddit, and the platform then filters incoming communications according to it. Because it's gamified, people are actively competing to conform to the local cultures.
And here we are, where some guy believes that rekindling a prior conversation with a friend or acquaintance is psychotic.
It's just reddit-brain, IMO. You're right, it's not news worthy.
I saw it happen to a few people from my high school. Above average IQ people spending too much time reading reddit and ending up with some weirdly elitist but also juvenile opinions on social interactions. Stuff like "DAE think small talk is pointless?" or "I never realized how impossible it is to make friends in adulthood" is pretty common.
Subs like /r/relationships, /r/offmychest, /r/amitheasshole, etc. are the worst because while the topics are about offline, real-life encounters, it's mostly just very-online, neuroatypical folks sharing their thoughts. One ends up thinking they're getting a fair majority perspective, when really you're getting the perspective of what's otherwise a pretty marginal outgroup.
I have plenty of non-online friends who are not on reddit who keep telling me that it's difficult to make friends in adulthood so, yes it's rather common outside of that bubble.
Some people just never really learned to initiate new friendship and only relied on people inviting them, being in a university with events helping new friendships etc..
I've quit social media as well and I've found that it's very difficult to stay in touch with most friends who aren't in the vicinity.
They never initiate contact while communicating nonstop with everyone on social media- just not me. It started when I left social media.
I think that we have all been trained to expect communication to come as a social media post, message, like, emoji, etc. It's too much effort to reach out to one person privately.
> It's too much effort to reach out to one person privately.
And yet millions of people do it every day, so it's not too much effort. The difference is we reach out to those that we have more than a superficial connection to. If we develop real relationships. they won't rely solely on low effort communication.
> Seems to me like this is somebody that took things too far with a total cut of all social contact rather than just removing some of the more toxic elements of social media from their lives.
My takeaway. It's not enough to cut off social media if it consumes your life, you have to replace it with something. We're social creatures that require validation.
> There is nothing "psychotic" about signing up again and adding some old friends again
In fact - I did that, and my facebook (and Twitter) experiences have been a lot better, since I was a lot more careful about who I added. I quit Facebook years ago (around the time of the 2016 election) because I had so many casual acquaintances on my feed posting things I really didn't want to be reading, but then I felt weird going through and unfriending them one by one. I re-joined just recently and I have only a handful of people on my feed who only post positive things, and it's actually a pleasant experience.
Surprised about the FB thing, it has been as good as dead in the Eastern European country where I live when it comes to interactions with friends and family. No-one posts personal stuff on it anymore (and that's a good thing). I personally still do use it as a reddit-replacement, i.e. commenting on news items and the like.
It feels the same here in UK - people are still using FB, but I haven't had any friends or family post anything in months. My entire feed is just posts from a watches and cars groups that I'm in. I personally haven't posted anything on my feed since at least.....2018? (But I do post plenty in private groups)
i left stackoverflow years ago. at the time i was one of the highest rated C++ answerers, but got fed up with the new company direction and insane moderation, but i haven't really missed it. i have recently rejoined just to add the odd comment on the C++ tag. several people have welcomed me back, so i don't really thing there would be a problem with this guy re-engaging.
Maybe I'm weird in a way but I never saw the appeal of social media besides casually keeping in touch with friends. I have social media accounts but almost everyone I have added as a friend are people that I know in real life. I never feel the urge to check compulsively to see what they've posted.
Although it would be hypercritical in my part to not point out that I do waste a lot more time in websites like Reddit or Hacker News where I'm anonymous but still talk with others so it is a kind of social media. I guess it would be very difficult for me to go completely free of social media. Even though I rarely use Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
Because most people on these kinds of forums proclaiming some great benefits from deleting their social media don't have those friends in the first place.
I was a part of the nosurf community at it's inception, for what little community there was (given that it was a group of people trying to convince themselves and one another to disengage from the online).
I've seen a handful of cases of people like the reddit OP who seemed to try to divorce themselves from the content mills, in spite of the fact that they had a healthy relationship with social media, and an internal drive for these little interactions with old acquaintances that facebook is great at fostering. It's not clear why some of these folks, including the OP, choose to fix something that's not a problem, but the outcome he received is largely the outcome that is intended.
The idea of divorcing yourself from social media is to achieve a bunch of subjective goals. Less time wasted, less distraction, less meaningless interactions etc., are all in the eye of the beholder.
That's because they're still on reddit. Need to wean off completely from social media addictions, not only halfway through, and reddit is even more toxic hivemindish than most other social medias. It's healthier for your mental health to have real life friends timelines with stupid posts and the zuch on your shoulder than it is dodging mass amount of downvotes on reddit for speaking honestly. Anything that will bring you back to your devices at a notification's notice is bad for your sanity. Control how you focus your attention through and through.
Whenever I read these I interpret it as reading about an alcoholic. They also have to call it quits completely and can't have a little buzz during social events or enjoy some wine, or find an interesting new craft beer, all because they couldn't cope with it. Regular people that keep it in check can enjoy it and not have to make a big deal about how they quit. Same with social media. If you use it regularly, don't spend all your day on it, post every detail of your life there and get your self worth from it, obviously it's better to use it.
Do you think the companies that produce the food you eat, the electronic devices you use, etc are all great? From slaves mining for making your phone to animal cruelty, to just being bad people, if you let your morals affect how you consume so much you'd go live in a cave.
> They also have to call it quits completely and can't have a little buzz during social events or enjoy some wine, or find an interesting new craft beer, all because they couldn't cope with it.
This is a very AA model of addiction and recovery that doesn't align with the experiences of many people or the frameworks used by many medical professionals specialized in addiction.
It's not wrong but it's only one very specific expression of what addicts "have to" do and why. If it's not completely true in that context it probably isn't in this one either.
Facebook was a great way to keep in touch with friends that I don't really speak to anymore. Ex: People I went to college with 10 years ago. Now that FB is mostly unused, I have no idea what is happening to these people.
You would never call "friend" such a person in many other languages, in both Polish and Italian we have a word for such people which is similar to acquaintance.
Because by the description you people don't seem like friend at all. You just happen to have hanged out a decade ago for some time but never really had a meaningful long lasting relationship like a friendship.
Yet in the UI in these languages isn't using the nuanced word, is it? I don't think it's an issue of the language, they sugarcoated it deliberately (or everyone misunderstood the meaning anyway).
There is no "normal" way an individual can relate to these things(, or relate to the world at large). Social media is more a financially backed mind-altering alien invasion than some extension of human social life. And yet, people regularly shame each other or themselves about it. Or they provide prescriptive statements as if its about how many cups of water you should drink a day. Its all just a silly circle of normativity on top of a framework that just more or less sells and delivers ads.
Just kind of reflect on your impulse here to be mean to this person, or to poke holes in their story, show their hypocrisy. Why? Whats really at stake here? Is this really something like a moral failing? Do you counter them with a more normal way to be a person? It is precisely bad faith, in Sartre's schema, to act like you know, to forget the ineffable uncertainty of being human and to act like, actually, we are all users, and there are good ways to be one or not, or good places to be a user or not.
To find superiority at all in yourself for your particular consumption or social habits is, if you reflect honestly for a second, the truly shameful thing. We are all figuring it out.
>Social media is more an financially backed mind-altering alien invasion than some extension of human sociality.
It's worse than that, which is why OP is upset.
Social media is more an financially backed mind-altering alien takeover of human sociality.
It's like poisoning the water supply. People can't just say "well, the water's poisonous; obviously the smart choice is to stop drinking water." People need water. People need people. And when your people are socializing on social media, your water supply is poisoned.
Love the description, but what's the solution on an individual level?
I've missed social events in the past and then bumped into someone and they've said something like 'why weren't you at x? Didn't you see it on social media?', nobody asked me directly, so i wasn't aware / didn't go.
Some acquientices and a few friends have a group chat, they meet up about twice a year, but all year round they are posting memes and general nonsense, mostly from the people I barely know, so i put the chat on mute, but then I miss out on the meet ups i've attended for many years, since i didn't even know they where happening, it's just assumed everyone is reading the thousands of messages and huge intrusion of time from everyone all the time.
I feel like it's altered the very way we socialise and not just that, they way we learn about new stuff (most marketing is social media or internet based these days).
this is not meant to be judgmental (of you or your circle of friends), but if nobody asked you directly, would that not send a signal to you that maybe they are not that interested in hanging out?
I personally don't have many friends, but among the few that i have, it is unlikely that they would fail to notify me in person if there was an event that we would mutually enjoy (and vice versa). Are you talking here about more distant acquaintances/coworkers than friends?
These aren't super close friends, from my understanding all the arrangements are done in the group chat, when i saw one of these people in the street they stopped me directly to ask if i was in the group chat, since i hadn't come to the event.
Thank you for posting this. Restored a little bit of faith in humanity for me. It just felt like people were being needlessly cruel to someone who is clearly struggling.
Social media, to me, is groups. Different groups that I associate with. There's family. There's close friends. There's youth sports, which I'm actively involved in. There's funny "I know what I have" groups, poking fun at people wanting way too much money for things.
It is what you make of it. If you make $16/hr and you follow people who post short videos from their yacht, you're gonna have a bad time. If you drive a 1991 Ford Taurus and you follow people who have $4M in vehicles, you're going to have a bad time. If you can't fucking stand your Aunt Suzy with her hot takes, yet you have her listed as a close relative, you're going to have a bad time.
If you coach youth sports and you follow a few local area to fringe area groups, you will find camps/clinics/tournaments, keep up to date in the goings on, and have a good time. If you enjoy working on cars and you follow a few groups related to tips and tricks in that genre, you'll have a good time. If you really want to get into gardening, but don't think you can do it yourself, you can find a local group that does stuff in various community gardens, which will give you a push (in either direction) to help your curiosity about gardening.
I wonder how many people who feel so much better after deleting social media, used social media to be in contact with strangers and people they don’t like.
I’d never felt the need to delete my social media, mainly because it was a tool to stay in contact with friends, and people I care about, and stay up to date on events without having to personally ask all the time.
This doesn’t really work anymore, nowadays, as FB didn’t get enough engagement from this use case and destroyed it, but it was great while it lasted.
I deleted all my social media coming on 8 years ago and I only regret it when I see something on facebook marketplace and have to coordinate with a friend on facebook to contact someone.
I deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc, but I'm still here on HN. You don't have to quit all social media to get rid of the toxic sites. If I was on Reddit, I'd just sub to things like gardening and cute animal memes. If I was still into car clubs I'm sure I'd still be posting on the old car forums.
I've been wondering about what the term social media means. It came into circulation fairly late, around 2010 or so; although we used to have all sorts of phpbb forums prior to that, and nobody bothered calling them social media. Some people say social media are centered on people and their social graphs whereas the older forums were centered around topics. If so, HN would not qualify as social media, nor would reddit.
It's type of social media - maybe social media light?
I haven't used FB in years, sometimes check Twitter when linked to something there, do check reddit (but follow only a few subs), and HN obviously. For me, online boards/social are for anonymous-ish socializing. My IRL friends I see/text/email.
Yup, HN is a web forum, not social media. Forums actually predate social media by a lot—going back to Internet news groups, which were organized topically.
The key point is that conversations are transactional around content; the only interactions are in public comment threads under links or text posts.
Social media is the opposite: you start by connecting with people, and then talk about whatever you or your connections feel like talking about.
When I dropped social media, I did lose a few friends. I stopped being invited to certain things. I don’t have as much to talk about with some people. Still worth it though. My brain rots so fast on socials.
I used to use FB until 2015 when divisive news was pushed hard to increase interaction metrics. I wish we could go back in time to prevent news article sharing unless by DM.
Deleting my social media accounts tangibly improved my life. It’s been many years now and I don’t care to look back at all. A nice side-effect was how much more productive I became (in a number of ways). It also made it much clearer who my real friends were and who truly cared about me. Zuck couldn’t pay me to get back on Facebook.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadThe whole point of not using social media is to push you to actually meet people in real life. Form real connections instead of reading single sentence comments.
This guy is too scared to even make a new profile because he would have to send new friend requests to all of his "friends".
While that can be a reason, it's not "the whole point". I backed way off on social media a few years ago simply because I found it toxic. I didn't have trouble before that meeting people in real life, nor did it particularly change my behavior in that regard when I left most of the social media behind.
I’ve had friends leave social media in a very holier-than-thou manner.
Coming back for them wouldn’t just involve re-adding friends, but eating a lot of crow in the process.
But setting that aside, I do find the post a bit sad. I think it points to the fact that even while social media is making us depressed, the world changed so much with its introduction that it can be difficult to operate without it depending on your personality type, the nature of your current support system, and friend group.
And if you suffer from social anxiety on top of that, things are only worse.
I don’t actively use social media, don’t have the apps installed, don’t have active browser sessions, and use Firefox Facebook container, but I didn’t delete my accounts either.
It's like when you bump into someone you know who you used to call on the phone and they ask you for your number. It's a little jarring knowing they consciously took actions to sever ties. This alone basically ensures that any preexisting bonds will most likely not ever be the same.
I deleted my accounts and felt similarly. There was a positive aspect to it but sometimes I try to find photos from certain period in my life but realise they were on a deleted account. Or I understand something someone once said to me and I want to reach out and tell them that I finally understood what they meant but I have no means of contacting them.
Its so easy to see the bad that social media has caused but if you have lived pre-internet you know the feeling of mistakenly loosing people forever. Maybe the risk of that enriched the experiences at the time though. It's so long ago now it's hard to remember.
I still have discord, but I am super careful to make sure I only stay in channels when I need them and then immediately leave when I no longer have a use for it.
I also add their sites to ublock as they are many times disguised advertising networks. "why yes I love seeing the last thing I looked at on amazon all over the web" /s.
Zero regrets and if anything my social life improved, didn't get worse.
It is true that Facebook is nowadays the reference point to stay in touch with what's happening locally (events and things like that), but this has maybe impacted a bit my knowledge of cool events around, not my social life.
Remember before you delete the bird on your phone buy some real ones.
BTW: Don't use the pigeons around the us/mexican border.
But, we have still mailing-list and signal, but a pigeon is used for BBQ invitations...the important stuff, we have one where the pigeons can life and he cares for them...we pay our share (everyone is the owner of three pigeons).
You probably haven't really tried other than what most people do - declare to themselves that they won't look at Twitter (for example) and then feel bad an hour later when they notice they are looking at Twitter.
I know he doesn't have the best reputation around here, but James Clear's book Atomic Habits has some pretty good advice about building new habits.
If I were trying to stop reading HN, I would start small. Tell myself I won't reload it for 30 minutes (or whatever - some small easily achieved goal). I would keep setting small goals like that and then start to stretch the time. I would also need something to replace the activity in those time when I reach for HN reflexively. I keep a guitar at work that I'll noodle on or I'll read for a few minutes, write something to myself, go make tea, step outside for some sun and air, etc...
Eventually it just became natural to do other thing instead.
I've no idea why this is and have more important things to do with my time then try to explain or rationalize this phenomenon but it was definitely a thing.
> cant make a new Facebook in 2023 and add all these old friends. Literally psychotic behavior.
There is nothing "psychotic" about signing up again and adding some old friends again. Many people leave social media and return when they feel more comfortable. They are the only thing blocking themselves from the social interaction they are missing.
> I live alone by choice with my cat and separate from my parents and all my siblings and yeah we all text but it’s still nice seeing social media posts from everyone. Maybe I’d feel less isolated. I also feel left out when they talk about some stuff they see.
Again they isolate themselves by choice then complain about isolation. There is nothing stopping them from socialising. Nobody has 'ghosted' them or excluded them from anything.
Seems to me like this is somebody that took things too far with a total cut of all social contact rather than just removing some of the more toxic elements of social media from their lives.
I don't use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok because I didn't enjoy the never ending stream of content but I still use reddit, Hacker News (obviously), Discord and Slack for keeping in touch with "online friends". You don't have to go to absolute zero for social media to cut out the majority of the toxic stuff but still get some of the benefits from it.
Maybe not so extreme but if an old friend added me on Facebook I would immediately assume they want something…
But I have to say, I still have Facebook on my phone, and open it from time to time, and it’s pretty barren. I think the consensus among my peers is that sharing something on Facebook is signaling that you’re socially undesirable… so if he signs up again, I think he will find it doesn’t help at all.
(Though I still like Facebook as a contact list of last resort)
Fair point as this person does want something. They want that friendship back.
If an old friend adds me on Facebook and then starts trying to sell me some vitamin programme that is very different to if they add me back and are like "Oh man I've missed you, I deleted Facebook but it's so hard as an adult with a job, etc. to keep in touch with people isn't it? How you and the family doing? I'm sorry I just cut off contact like that, I thought it would be better but I was so wrong".
It all depends on the motives and actions. It seems this person is sincere in that they feel they really screwed up just cutting all social ties how they did.
If a friendship stops existing because you delete a Facebook account, it was never a friendship. Or at least wasn't one by then.
> It’s perfectly okay to have causal online friends from school, childhood, work etc and only talk through social media and keep up that way.
That's fine, because OP missed their friends who do share on Facebook, not your status-chasing peers and their current Meta meta.
That I can understand is upsetting much like not having backups of family photos and the drive dying. Why they did not export their content I do not know. Facebook, etc. have all had "check out" functionality for many years now, all before the pandemic hit.
Seems they rushed into closing their accounts rather than exporting and backing all those memories up and without any kind of plan on what to do to fill the social void it would great. As a commenter wrote in reply to them "I gave up eating McDonald's everyday but now I have no food."
I suspect there's something psychological going on. The mere existance of the profile and history, not active use, causes mental strain.
Just turning notifications off for all of them is a pretty good balance for me. That way I'm only opening them when I think to do it.
I'd highly recommend that as a first step if anyone's feeling overwhelmed and considering what OP did.
Maybe autistic or with some heavy anxiety.
Not exactly news worthy IMO...
This seems like a good description for most of Reddit. I have a feeling that the platform’s karma system is geared towards incentivizing these kinds of posts and thought patterns.
And here we are, where some guy believes that rekindling a prior conversation with a friend or acquaintance is psychotic.
I saw it happen to a few people from my high school. Above average IQ people spending too much time reading reddit and ending up with some weirdly elitist but also juvenile opinions on social interactions. Stuff like "DAE think small talk is pointless?" or "I never realized how impossible it is to make friends in adulthood" is pretty common.
Subs like /r/relationships, /r/offmychest, /r/amitheasshole, etc. are the worst because while the topics are about offline, real-life encounters, it's mostly just very-online, neuroatypical folks sharing their thoughts. One ends up thinking they're getting a fair majority perspective, when really you're getting the perspective of what's otherwise a pretty marginal outgroup.
Articles about this topic have been on very respected news sites for awhile, so at least that one exists outside the bubble you're referring to.
Some people just never really learned to initiate new friendship and only relied on people inviting them, being in a university with events helping new friendships etc..
They never initiate contact while communicating nonstop with everyone on social media- just not me. It started when I left social media.
I think that we have all been trained to expect communication to come as a social media post, message, like, emoji, etc. It's too much effort to reach out to one person privately.
My takeaway. It's not enough to cut off social media if it consumes your life, you have to replace it with something. We're social creatures that require validation.
In fact - I did that, and my facebook (and Twitter) experiences have been a lot better, since I was a lot more careful about who I added. I quit Facebook years ago (around the time of the 2016 election) because I had so many casual acquaintances on my feed posting things I really didn't want to be reading, but then I felt weird going through and unfriending them one by one. I re-joined just recently and I have only a handful of people on my feed who only post positive things, and it's actually a pleasant experience.
I'm pretty sure Facebook 'archives' your account and allows reactivation just for people in this position...
edit: not intended to be specifically about SO
Although it would be hypercritical in my part to not point out that I do waste a lot more time in websites like Reddit or Hacker News where I'm anonymous but still talk with others so it is a kind of social media. I guess it would be very difficult for me to go completely free of social media. Even though I rarely use Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
Why do write like that's not a major part of human emotional health?
I've seen a handful of cases of people like the reddit OP who seemed to try to divorce themselves from the content mills, in spite of the fact that they had a healthy relationship with social media, and an internal drive for these little interactions with old acquaintances that facebook is great at fostering. It's not clear why some of these folks, including the OP, choose to fix something that's not a problem, but the outcome he received is largely the outcome that is intended.
The idea of divorcing yourself from social media is to achieve a bunch of subjective goals. Less time wasted, less distraction, less meaningless interactions etc., are all in the eye of the beholder.
This is a very AA model of addiction and recovery that doesn't align with the experiences of many people or the frameworks used by many medical professionals specialized in addiction.
It's not wrong but it's only one very specific expression of what addicts "have to" do and why. If it's not completely true in that context it probably isn't in this one either.
How many hours a week are you on social media, and how does that compare with the benefits you get?
They basically voluntarily isolated themselves.
You would never call "friend" such a person in many other languages, in both Polish and Italian we have a word for such people which is similar to acquaintance.
Because by the description you people don't seem like friend at all. You just happen to have hanged out a decade ago for some time but never really had a meaningful long lasting relationship like a friendship.
Yet in the UI in these languages isn't using the nuanced word, is it? I don't think it's an issue of the language, they sugarcoated it deliberately (or everyone misunderstood the meaning anyway).
Just kind of reflect on your impulse here to be mean to this person, or to poke holes in their story, show their hypocrisy. Why? Whats really at stake here? Is this really something like a moral failing? Do you counter them with a more normal way to be a person? It is precisely bad faith, in Sartre's schema, to act like you know, to forget the ineffable uncertainty of being human and to act like, actually, we are all users, and there are good ways to be one or not, or good places to be a user or not.
To find superiority at all in yourself for your particular consumption or social habits is, if you reflect honestly for a second, the truly shameful thing. We are all figuring it out.
It's worse than that, which is why OP is upset.
Social media is more an financially backed mind-altering alien takeover of human sociality.
It's like poisoning the water supply. People can't just say "well, the water's poisonous; obviously the smart choice is to stop drinking water." People need water. People need people. And when your people are socializing on social media, your water supply is poisoned.
I've missed social events in the past and then bumped into someone and they've said something like 'why weren't you at x? Didn't you see it on social media?', nobody asked me directly, so i wasn't aware / didn't go.
Some acquientices and a few friends have a group chat, they meet up about twice a year, but all year round they are posting memes and general nonsense, mostly from the people I barely know, so i put the chat on mute, but then I miss out on the meet ups i've attended for many years, since i didn't even know they where happening, it's just assumed everyone is reading the thousands of messages and huge intrusion of time from everyone all the time.
I feel like it's altered the very way we socialise and not just that, they way we learn about new stuff (most marketing is social media or internet based these days).
this is not meant to be judgmental (of you or your circle of friends), but if nobody asked you directly, would that not send a signal to you that maybe they are not that interested in hanging out? I personally don't have many friends, but among the few that i have, it is unlikely that they would fail to notify me in person if there was an event that we would mutually enjoy (and vice versa). Are you talking here about more distant acquaintances/coworkers than friends?
They did then invite me directly to the next one.
It is what you make of it. If you make $16/hr and you follow people who post short videos from their yacht, you're gonna have a bad time. If you drive a 1991 Ford Taurus and you follow people who have $4M in vehicles, you're going to have a bad time. If you can't fucking stand your Aunt Suzy with her hot takes, yet you have her listed as a close relative, you're going to have a bad time.
If you coach youth sports and you follow a few local area to fringe area groups, you will find camps/clinics/tournaments, keep up to date in the goings on, and have a good time. If you enjoy working on cars and you follow a few groups related to tips and tricks in that genre, you'll have a good time. If you really want to get into gardening, but don't think you can do it yourself, you can find a local group that does stuff in various community gardens, which will give you a push (in either direction) to help your curiosity about gardening.
I’d never felt the need to delete my social media, mainly because it was a tool to stay in contact with friends, and people I care about, and stay up to date on events without having to personally ask all the time.
This doesn’t really work anymore, nowadays, as FB didn’t get enough engagement from this use case and destroyed it, but it was great while it lasted.
But I agree with you that the most basic (or old) experience of reddit is not of a social media platform.
You can't dm users, you can't subscribe to/follow users and the content on the page isn't catered to you: it's the same for everyone.
I don't really believe message boards are social media.
I haven't used FB in years, sometimes check Twitter when linked to something there, do check reddit (but follow only a few subs), and HN obviously. For me, online boards/social are for anonymous-ish socializing. My IRL friends I see/text/email.
The key point is that conversations are transactional around content; the only interactions are in public comment threads under links or text posts.
Social media is the opposite: you start by connecting with people, and then talk about whatever you or your connections feel like talking about.