I quit any non small community social media a few years ago and it's been really nice. My tolerance for trolls and thinking with people on the Internet is has dropped away down and I think I'm better for it.
Google's autocorrect "corrects" words it thought you meant, sometimes words later so you don't see it. I put arguing, but Google decided I meant thinking
Nah, the android Gboard. Super frustrating. And the toggle to turn off that "feature" is shared with all autocorrection. If you disable grammar corrections you don't get any typo fixes. And there's no setting that says "only change the last word I typed"
Re-reading my own comment, and worried the poster I responded to might take that as a reverse-jibe about their own naivety - I didn't even think of that the first time I wrote it, and now want to explicitly say that wasn't my point.
I sincerely thought people would quit social media following the Snowden revelations, and I did myself, and then could not believe that they didn't seem to care at all. It was a painful and jarring learning experience.
I did not, but thanks for being considerate. I took it as this:
>I sincerely thought people would quit social media following the Snowden revelations, and I did myself, and then could not believe that they didn't seem to care at all. It was a painful and jarring learning experience.
It's been over 11 years now. I would imagine it's not unlike living in a former soviet country in that everyone knows it's going on, but we just don't talk about it.
Indeed. The same people from before who scoffed at the possibility of mass surveillance are the very same who pivoted immediately to a new justification of the status quo - something about national security, or it not being that bad, or it being a bit of a crazy world which we have to face, or whatever.
It's almost as if their reasoned arguments were always nothing more than poorly slapped together ad hoc justifications for whatever happens to be the norm at a given moment.
Twitter/X is fantastic for breaking news. For example during the first assassination attempt you would find new details on there that would then appear on MSM newscasts one to two hours later.
It also helps immensely to curate lists of interests to help filter out the noise and politics.
It’s an excellent question, but I do think you can get valuable insights from seeing how a major political event unfolds in real time, as long as it’s something you’re interested in. It can help you to view the subsequent news bulletins with a critical eye and interest and it can give you a richer depth of understanding than you would otherwise get.
If it’s an event that you’re not particularly interested in, then there’s not much value in getting details in advance.
Another thing, it’s not just hours. Sometimes it’s months (or in rare cases years) before a recurring topic on social media finally makes it to the news, because it’s controversial/narrative-defying, so it takes them a long time to work out how to talk about it. I don’t want to mention specific examples because it would be distracting, but there are a few topics I see mentioned daily/weekly on the news today that were pretty much absent a few years ago, yet were heavily discussed on Twitter at the time, and I am very glad I was aware of them.
There is a marked difference between "Breaking new developments" and misinformation being spread to juice engagement.
Nobody should pretend that Twitter is a place where accurate information travels at light speed. It is in desperate need of moderation and being run by a man with clear monetary incentive to mislead the public.
Unless it's regarding immediate local emergency that you might need to respond to, breaking news has zero value besides a brain tickle and something to talk about.
If you feel you have any kind of mood or attention challenges, as many now do, you might want to double check if it's something you should be optimizing for.
Hard agree. Nearly nothing outside your real personal life is so important it can't be learnt about tomorrow, or next week.
There are exceptions; if you have a flight booked that day and didn't learn about the Crowdstrike thing till you got there, that'll be a problem, but it would've been a problem regardless of your immediate knowledge of it.
This is what I always wonder. Any time I see a news story (even on MSM) marked as "BREAKING" or "EXCLUSIVE", I'm like... who cares? That just means you either a) rushed to publish without making sure you got your details right, or b) you paid someone to not shop their story around to other outlets (which is gross).
My life would not have been impacted in the least knowing about the Trump assassination attempt a few hours later (or even the next day), rather than minutes after it happened.
The MSM has enough problems these days with journalistic integrity and practices. I don't think the teeming mobs on Twitter are an improvement, though.
It isn't important. The vast majority of "journalism" is as worthless as the vast majority of "discourse" around it. If it doesn't affect you personally, you can likely safely ignore it and if it does affect you personally, you probably won't need the news to tell you about it.
"Breaking news" used to be relevant in that it was news that "broke into" existing programming. It didn't necessarily make people's lives better but at least it tended to cover matters of high national interest like Presidential assassinations or disasters or wars. But now that everything is breaking news all the time everywhere, the term no longer means anything other than being a synonym for "current news," which isn't even really impressive anymore.
In today's world information overload is a bigger problem than lack of information. It follows that unactionable information is useless.
What is actionable about knowing about the assassination attempt 1-2 hours before others? Did you act differently based on this information? Did you benefit from this sufficiently to weigh up for the time spent on Twitter 20 times a day at the off-chance of catching a breaking newsstory before MSM would?
I haven’t used it much but I think the main feed is very algorithmic, so you swipe for your dopamine without paying much attention to the profile. Because of that it’s not really tied to your identity in quite the same way.
It also seems quite professionalised in that the big content producers fill the feed.
There’s also something about it being video which makes it feel harmful but in a different way than a text based platform.
I tend to think of TikTok as more of an entertainment platform rather than peer to peer social media.
I’m not the target audience though so could be wide of the mark!
The "new" reddit constantly tries to promote brainrot to you when you are in the main feed. You can evade this by never using the main feed. No one wants to let you just read what you want to read.
This is one of the reasons why I have returned to print media. Unfortunately, a lot of magazines and newspapers are also really bad now also. The Wall Street Journal has fallen off a cliff, turning into something between Cosmopolitan and Business Insider, and I am cancelling my subscription this year. The Economist has done a good job keeping up the quality level. The fact that something is in print does not necessarily make it better if all the writers have brainrot or the content is optimized for digital engagement first.
The internet has become a medium for poor people to watch unlimited user-generated episodes of Maury and Jerry Springer. The only internet I really want to use is to work, buy products, and read my email. Getting older is bad enough without the computer trying to make me dumber on top of that.
Although the line can get interesting. When I was active on Reddit I would argue that Reddit was not SM. From my perspective, Reddit was end stage web forum technology and link aggregators
All the bespoke forums of the late 90s and early 2000s died for the most part and there is now a subreddit for every niche hobby that used to have a forum
This stuff all predates Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, livejournal, that I would argue were new paradigms and the start of what we know as social media
However to anyone not online during those times, Reddit is just another site where people post details of their own lives. Reddit responded by adding profiles and followers and all kinds of pseudo SM features
I don't use it but I find that claim a bit odd. Would you consider YouTube social media technically? I personally wouldn't even though it has social components with comments and personal channels.
Instagram is a must if you want to get any real benefit out of using dating apps in 2024. The only way to talk to anybody without paying is to look at the profile, get their instagram url, and talk over there. I'm an old millennial who basically only uses HN for social media, and unfortunately IG is a must have.
A dating app subscription is super cheap, like 40 bucks a month. I think it makes more sense to pay that then try and circumvent the system by messaging people through Instagram
How is it a scam? They are running a service to connect you to other people looking for a relationship. The service works - I found my last 3 girlfriends through dating apps.
I'm not going to message random people's Instagram unsolicited, I would find it annoying to on the receiving end of that. My mother and girlfriend have both complained about receiving unwanted attention from unknown men through social media.
Honestly trying to understand your point of view, do you think dating apps should be free? They definitely aren't free to run.
Presumably your mother and girlfriend don't have their Instagram profiles listed on their dating app profile that say to message them there. Just like there's a very critical difference between a solicited and unsolicited dick pic, if someone is literally asking to be messaged on Instagram, it's different than messaging random people that didn't actually ask to be messaged, especially about crypto scams.
In my post I specifically said "unsolicited". There is of course ethical ways to message people through Instagram, but even in that case it is going to be less efficient then just using the dating app as intended.
Just pay for a subscription to a dating app if you can afford it. It's money well spent when you really want to meet a partner and are struggling to do so IRL. As long as you go for one that doesn't have the Tinder UX of course...
I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”. The incentives are perverse, there is an inherent conflict of interest in the business model and there is an intermediary between the user and information/community they want to participate in. This leads to most problems we see in legacy, ad-based, social media.
Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry. In life we do not let everyone into the friend circle. Having a barrier to entry model may work well for an online community, although this remains to be seen. Were there any successful experiments with paid social media?
I would love to pay for social software on a coop model (like a food coop, etc) — we would be "members" and, theoretically, we pay a small monthly fee that covers the costs of hosting and platform development. I've tried to think about what I would want that to look like — spoiler, something different than the model of "posting + reactions" that is so familiar from twitter+fb — but then when I think about the barriers to entry for a project like that, even though the technological part might not be that difficult (assuming it was Less Than Web Scale), I just give up hoping for it.
I've been following a lot of the bluesky + mastodon stuff but I don't like that their basic model of social interaction is just a clone of Twitter.
I can't remember the name of it, but over a decade ago I saw something like this - it was a single Linux server shared by (I think) hundreds of people. Really trying to do the multi-user paradigm. They advertised it as a private kind of social network, it was invite-only and I think you had to pay to help keep the server lights on.
Hopefully by posting something incorrect, A Person On The Internet Who Knows Better will come along and provide the correct details. :)
That can just be a forum - a forum I've been a member of for more than 20 years has been run by the members since 2010 [1], is registered as a co-operative/community benefit society in the UK and funded by voluntary memberships or donations, with members voting annually to elect people to positions required to run it.
A good chunk of those have been part of the same community on a newsgroup, then on a company-owned forum which got shuttered, then on a forum instance set up by a user who didn't want to run it any more after 6 years. The tech and platforms are ephemeral, always have been.
This is precisely https://social.coop, of which I am part of, except for the "not being Mastodon" bit :)
Governance happens on Loomio, which is a forum tailored for community decision making, but the main platform that coop members get access to is a Mastodon instance for now. We are experimenting with Bonfire, which is more flexible and might end up providing a solid base for federated apps in general.
We also do not let people into the friend circle just because they have money (I hope).
IMHO healthiest "social media" I could think is interest groups. They eventually need some kind of donation from one or more people, but with no or minimal barriers.
For me no of course, but if you think about unintentionally your friends are from the same income group really (for the most part),
if you are rich and go to private school, your friends are most likely rich, and usually hang around "fancy" places.
I was briefly a member of a church-related singles group. Their activities revolved around visiting a different church every Sunday. And also doing activities on weekends that involved a lot of car travel and significant admission fees, if only viewing a film at the mall cinema.
I had a real commitment to my home parish at the time. I was involved in ministries weekly, where I could not simply flit about anywhere I wanted. Sure, as a group we could meet many strangers on this itinerary, but I risked severing all ties with my spiritual home!
The activities were sometimes active and sometimes passive, such as hiking, dancing, or going to a festival or something. And I quickly gave up on everything, because it seemed like the group was not really oriented to pairing people off, but more of a self-sustaining club where people gained "volunteer responsibilities" and were thus pressured into staying in the "singles group" no matter what their relationship status. Also, having no vehicle of my own, I'd either opt out of traveling, or I'd hit someone up to carpool, and that wasn't always copacetic.
I also found, on dating websites, this mentality that single Catholics would be jet-setters, traveling all over the world on pilgrimage. That they would generate a steady stream of photographs and social media posts from their adventures. That they would have marvelous, expensive hobbies and be so active in volunteerism. For crying out loud! I wondered how these people would ever have space in their lives for a significant other! All I wanted to do was hang around home, go for walks, prepare a nice meal at home once in a while. But the dating sites seemed geared exclusively for high-maintenance and upper-middle-class go-getters. Again, I felt like it was a clique of "professional singles" who didn't really expect to pair off and get married.
Perhaps these Catholics are onto something. There's nothing wrong per se with individuals in a singles group or the group itself proper having no expectations of dating or marriage. It's probably not the norm, but I think it's actually somewhat better that way, especially for those who don't intend to date/marry. Community and fellowship in a church environment should not be withdrawn from those who choose to remain single or celibate. I think that historically many church groups have silently discouraged being single by ostracism or judgement, which is definitely not what Jesus would do, in my opinion.
I'm sure there is someone for you out there. All relationships are valid. Modern society has such intense focus on external sources of validation, such as a partner or spouse, but good friends are always in short supply. As the proverb says, a friend can be closer than a brother.
Barriers to entry don't have to be financial. One can imagine a community of artists who require you to mail them a traditional media sketch before they'll let you in. One of the clubs I know of requires you to go on three hikes before they'll make you a member and give you access to their website.
In both cases there's a small financial barrier (being able to pay for postage or your share or petrol money) but a sizeable time barrier (spending hours on a sketch or walking a total of about 50km).
There are a lot of things where effort is inherent in the derived value, or even the primary value. It's a solid proxy for how much you care, which is so important. A trivial example: I sent someone at work who loves to share candy a giant back of gummies; HR came after me because "tax reasons" (incorrectly in this case) and wanted to "gross up" their paycheque with a spot bonus. Which do you think is more impactful: the trip I took to the store, thinking of this person and mailing it to them, or the $26 pre-tax "bonus" they'd get in 2 weeks?
I would rephrase it further to "quit ad-based media." The problems and conflicts of interest introduced by an ad-based revenue model were discussed long before the advent of the modern Web and social media; the relationship between the advertisement industry and mass media (television, radio) was already discussed in depth in the late 20th century [0]:
The advertisers' choices influence media prosperity and survival.
The ad-based media receive an advertising subsidy that gives them
a price-marketing-quality edge, which allows them to encroach on
and further weaken their ad-free (or ad-disadvantaged) rivals.
Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with
serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere
with the "buying mood." They seek programs that will lightly
entertain and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose
of program purchases - the dissemination of a selling message.
in the old days even you paid to subscribe,the newspaper and journal and cable TV etc still carried commercials, they're always there,just getting much worse nowadays
everybody saw the exact same ads though, and due to regulation, it was impossible for newspapers to do things like broadcast outright misinformation as advertisements. Deepfake Musk and Bezos praising some shitcoin on a YouTube ad is par for the course, but would be logistically impossible on a traditional cable news channel or newspaper.
Interestingly this changed somewhat with the clickbait-based model – now, I would disagree that advertisers "want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies."
I think this does describe legacy advertisers (and TikTok, for different reasons) – we might remember Tumblr's hyper-specific LGBTQ-friendly (often NSFW) communities being completely liquidated in the transfer of Tumblr to Verizon, arguably killing Tumblr on that date. Verizon's handling of Tumblr validates Chomsky.
But ad-fueled journalism seems to operate from exactly the opposite principle, so long as the controversies that drive engagement do not threaten the sensibility of specific large funders. I've seen a few times in recent memory where an article from the New York Times aired something quite sensational, only to quietly update later that what was initially reported didn't quite occur as depicted. But by that point it is too late, and profit was made.
The overall point still stands – that ad-based always results in a conflict of interest.
As possible counterpoint consider the departure of several advertisers from X following the Musk acquisition, whose controversial online antics and positions (irrespective of one's potential value judgments of them) were deemed bad for business and a damper on the "buying mood."
In general though it is true that ragebait and sensationalism do tend to drive "engagement" and thus ad revenue (often to the detriment of society).
Well, this is the kind of argument you can make in both directions.
A site is full of ragebait, hot takes and pictures of boobs? The ad economy has pushed them towards things that get a lot of engagement. Clicks are money!
A site is devoid of ragebait, hot takes and pictures of boobs? The ad economy forces everything to be brand-safe and censored.
Sure. Chomsky et al continue in the cited chapter,
In addition to discrimination against unfriendly media institutions,
advertisers also choose selectively among programs on the basis of their
own principles. With rare exceptions these are culturally and politically
conservative.
There are two options; either Chomsky et al are incorrect in their assertion, or they are correct.
If they are incorrect, then non-conservatives are of equal power and culpability in discriminating for or against which content they will sponsor. This would seem to be your position, and points to a state of affairs in which content and communities exist in disjoint bubbles which thrive off of entirely separate streams of ad revenue, up to the principles of the advertisers that choose to direct funding at particular media institutions.
Otherwise, if they are correct, then your assertion that this argument can be made "in both directions" is shown to be false by supposition, and the ad economy pushes users towards conservative content - in which case, one had best boycott and abstain from ad-driven media and social media unless they want to finance conservative thought.
LGBT rights have been enshrined in US law for over a decade now.
It's time to wake up to the fact that being LGBT friendly is the conservative position. This may come as a shock to people who were cutting edge radicals in their youth in the 1990s - a decade that is now 30 years in the past.
> > Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry
This depends on the definition of success, the most successful as in impressive achievements goal reaching are the ones that are open to anybody who can get noticed and brought in. ANd in the social sense even open to the ones who are most capable of monopolizing the discourse and creating a buzz in the public square.
For example Trump did just that in 2016 and many tried to resist him, but in the end the GOP wants to be successful and opened itself to the guy who made the most noise in the public discourse and public square and made him the tip of the spear of the election effort.
Of course it feels pretty miserable knowing that you can be replaced at any time but I don't think there is an alternative or a solution thanks to a barrier to entry (or exit). Social groups that have a barrier to entry (and exit) such as marriage , when it deteriorates the barrier to entry (and exit) doesn't prevent the 2 people to just starting ignoring each other.
> You have to be a real pos to not get invites to stuff...
The "real pos" is just as often those doing the excluding, as it is those being excluded. Pettiness doesn't disappear at 18 years old. It's hurtful to assume anyone being excluded from something deserved it.
It's more that there are maybe a thousand or so people in your highschool, but 7 billion on planet earth. If a thousand people (more like a couple of hundred the same age) exclude you then there are probably unfair network effects or someone poisoning the well against you, but at bigger scales everyone is a stranger and you get to start fresh.
In those cases I think it's more likely mental illness that stops you from making friends, but if no social group has accepted you after tens or hundreds of attempts then it's possible that there's something you might be able to change.
Metafilter comes to mind. Pay $5 one time for lifetime access. After about 20 years it has dwindled to a white star, but there is still a nuhhet of community left there. Amazing what a token cost does to weed out spam accounts, twinks, etc.
>I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”.
Facebook was terrible for your well being a long time before they enshitified with adds. You may be too young to remember but likes were a hot commodity people would ruin their lives over without any outside help.
For myself I find push notification based social media to be completely cancerous, and pull based one only mildly so. One need only look at the trolls from usenet to see people obsessed with nothing but text based emails.
I use Kiwi Browser on Android, which is a Chrome-based browser with extension support. I have a userscript that gradually fades out and desaturates social media pages in 8 minutes. After 4-5 minutes, pages fade out so much that you are forced to stop scrolling and it's not enjoyable anymore.
The same can be done on Firefox, which supports installing Tampermonkey for managing userscripts.
But do we not? We meet friends in life through school, work, hobbies. There's at least a time commitment to some common space if not a financial one. Friendship grow and die based on whether you can easily continue to see them - a common scenario for the dynamic changing being they no longer participate in the common space.
Friends through work, school and most hobbies are transient - they come and go, temporary only.
With friends as in people in your life who you want to really be friends with, you both make changes to be able to keep the relationships. Otherwise it dies. And you certainly do not go "either you buy this app or I am not friend with you anymore".
I mean, you can go cold turkey when changing jobs/work/hobbies but you don't have to.
Sometimes people only want to do that hobby so you don't have a choice but if you hung out with them outside of the origin activity then likely you can hang out with them without that origin activity.
Not being a part of the scene I can't say first hand but I believe we literally do and they're called cover charges at clubs. Then there are the insufferably vain 'green bubble bad' people.
Not sure about "paid", but there are plenty of examples of communities with barriers to entry which are successful and long-lived, e.g. private trackers (the forums in whatcd were excellent), very niche/technical interest communities, etc.
Hackernews is such a social circle. Besides the incredible moderation done by @dang I think the artificial barriers to interacting with the community are what make this a successful forum. I seem to recall needing at least 5 submission karma before you can comment - and that means 5 votes from _other_ people.
That's partly true, but there's also a confounding factor that contrarian posts are more likely to break HN's guidelines [1]. For example, they're more likely to be snarky or ranty. These qualities are rightly downvoted and flagged on HN, not contrariness per se.
This comes from fundamentals, unfortunately, so it's hard to change.
The trouble is that someone posting a contrary view usually feels under pressure going in. They know that their post will land in hostile territory, anticipating that the majority won't receive their opinion (or them) well, and they're not wrong. They'll probably be met not just with disagreement, but with lazy truisms and putdowns that majorities always feel are obvious.
The more contrarian a view is, the more common the majority response is not to engage with it, but to question why anyone would ever say such a thing. Often the majority invents sinister or preposterous explanations for this. (On that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851.)
Because the contrarian commenter expects to be treated this way, they typically defend themselves pre-emptively with armor like snark, name-calling, and so on, presumably to lessen the pain of being rejected. It's as if there's an implicit (or sometimes even explicit) sentence, "I know you're all going to pile on me anyway so fuck you in advance."
Downvotes and flags do end up piling on such comments, no doubt partly because majorities consider them "obviously" wrong and bad, but more because of this pre-emptive guidelines breakage. This rejection only confirms the contrarian poster's feeling that the community is against them, so we end up in a tight and vicious bind.
The flip side to that bind is that when contrarian views are expressed in this defensive-aggressive way, it gives the majority a perfect excuse to keep on feeling that its views are obviously right while others are mean and bad. The contrarian ends up discrediting their own view. When they happen to have some truth on their side (as they often do), this is bad for everyone [2].
I spend a lot of time on this from a moderation point of view because it's such a tough tradeoff. It's terrible for HN when contrarian and minority views are reflexively rejected. It's also bad when guidelines breakage doesn't get downvoted or flagged. We can't carve out an exception that says it's ok to break the rules when you feel surrounded by people who disagree with you.
This dilemma is not the contrarian/minority's fault. They're genuinely under greater pressure. It's easy to stay within the rails when all you have to say is conventional and the smug majority (aren't all majorities smug?) will upvote you. It's hard not to protect yourself with barbs when you're in a vulnerable position to begin with.
Worst is when the contrarian is coming from a minority—any kind of minority, not just the obvious kinds—who have a different background from most of the community, and so naturally have different views. The majority response in such cases can get ugly quickly. I've seen mobs hound such commenters off HN, which is one of the worst things that can happen and one of the most important to protect against. It happens by itself; no one is thinking "let's form a mob and hound that deviant". It comes from the fundamentals, as I said, of how groups (and forums) work.
From a moderation point of view we have two tools, I guess, for this. The first is to try to explain to contrarian commenters the unfortunate situation that there's a greater burden on them than there is on others, and that if they don't want their posts to be self-defeating, they need to bear that pressure while writing their comments neutrally [3]. It's not fair; it sucks; but it's how group dynamics work—we can't change it. If the majority&#...
Especially important because most of his commentary focuses on the dominant social media paradigm of the time. Mastodon barely existed when this post went live, Mike Masnick was years from writing the paper that inspired Bluesky[0], and it would be strange if someone whose whole thing is getting away from social media kept up on new developments.
This post is an interesting historical artifact, but shouldn't be mistaken for contemporary commentary.
Mastodon and Bluesky are still such minor players (even though I enjoy these projects and am optimistic about their future) that I don’t see anywhere where this doesn’t pass for contemporary commentary.
If the product is the social graph, masto isnt even on the radar.
If the product is the discussion framework without the advertising or social graph. If you can find 15 people to have the same interactions with manually its a superior player.
This is purely anecdotal but with Twitter/X removing blocks there seems to be an influx of new users on bluesky, it's definitely not quite on the scale of other major social medias but it seems like it is well on it's way there.
Not at all, not even close. They took the Twitter model and reinvented and reimagined it from 140 character posts to a timeline and brought us the 300 character posts to a timeline.
Source? From everything I've read, BlueSky made a theoretically federated protocol, pulled millions of users onto its single central instance, then refused to enable federation in any meaningful way, so you're either on the central instance or you're effectively on some other platform that is separate from BlueSky and is shit. (Meanwhile on Mastodon, there are so many instances and no clear center - not even mastodon.social, since I block that one and rarely notice any loss)
It's all there. Bluesky itself is split into tens of instances and has been since last year. A few people even run their own relays. Your information is very out of date.
What's changed, though, really? I quit[0] social media near the end of 2019, and it greatly improved my mental health and life. While I haven't tried some of the newer options, I've kept up with new developments in the space. Nothing about the "new" social media platforms makes them at all attractive for me to take a second look and join back up.
If anything, things are worse. It's even more "algorithmic" and engagement-focused, continuing to promote outrage culture. Platforms like TikTok have turned addictive endless scrolling into a science. I know a few people who spend a significant number of hours of their days on TikTok and Twitter (ahem, sorry, "X"), and it just kinda makes me sad. (And I probably spend more time than is healthy on HN.)
[0] I still have my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, but I don't post to them anymore, and I'm signed out of them on all my devices (and I've deleted the mobile apps). I don't allow myself to ever sign in on mobile. Once every 6 months or so I'll sign into Facebook for some specific purpose (like looking up someone's contact information when it's for some reason not stored in any of my usual places). Out of curiosity I'll scroll down the feed, and it's just kinda crap. Stuff from people I don't actually follow, stuff from people I do follow but is kinda boring, and interestingly the feed is dominated by the same 15 or so people (even though I'd amassed a little over 1k "friends" before I quit). I limit myself to no more than five minutes, and I don't post, comment, or even like anything.
The last time I signed into Instagram (probably two or three years ago), the experience was awful. I remember when it was just a reverse-chronological feed of the people I follow (and only the people I follow). But now (well, 2-3 years ago) the majority of items in my feed are either ads or promoted/reshared posts from people I don't follow at all. Stuff from people I follow is maybe one out of every five or six items. And it's all out of order, so I'd see something that someone posted a week ago, followed by, 20 items later, something that they posted a couple days ago. It's a shame; 2012 Instagram was such a beautiful platform.
So while yes, this article is now 8 years old, I don't think anything has changed for the better. The fundamental problems are still there, and have only gotten worse.
Oddly enough, the most beneficial thing I have is my Twitter account, because I can often DM airlines or companies support (like fedex support) for quicker responses.
> What the market values is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable.
> what the market dismisses are activities that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value. Well social media use is the epitome of an easy to replicate activity that does not produce a lot of value [...] by definition the market is not going to give those activieis a lot of value [...]."
Yet in the years since this TEDx talk we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.
you will never become a streaming millionaire. talking heads like beast and pewdiepie employ literal armies of Hollywood editors and writers. For every organically grown insufferable content monster created on Youtube, ten more are vat-grown by a billion dollar industry designed to shepherd you into a fantasy consumerist lifestyle.
These powerhouses of industry control the flow of capital at a level you will never be able to. they secure rights to music and video clips at rates you could never get, have tie-ins to major brands media and celebrities on day one, and are programmed with an endless firestorm of bots and preferential algorithmic treatment on every FAANG product in order to guarantee their success.
You are painfully unaware of the difference between being a Youtube video creator and being a streamer. Mr. Beast is not a streamer. He is a packaged video creator. PewDiePie is a reaction video creator who occasionally streams. They are not what people think of when they think of streamers.
To be a professional streamer usually takes a combination of talent and concentration that most people simply don't have. But to say that you can't become one? LOL.
The AVERAGE millionaire streamer on twitch is so painfully unedited that they end up getting banned a couple times a year for saying stupid things live on air. Twitch and their sponsors practically THROW money at them to spend an hour or two to sponsor content. There's an entire backend bounty system which is only available to partners which will pay you based on your audience size. I've seen a guy with 3K viewers get a $30K check for 3 hours worth of sponsored content.
> ... we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.
For most influencers, they're not the ones with the wealth and power. Many of them are barely getting by. They rent content houses, clothing, cars, and other things they need to put on their facade.
Pretty much all of the wealth and power is in the hands of the people that employ the influencers.
Programmers (cs students, "engineers") are one of the most pompous group of people who think their ability to #include <stdio.h> gives them some special ability to speak about efficiency, physics, math (other than your run of the mill discrete or remedial linear algebra) or pretty much any other topic on the face of the Earth.
Don't worry about your active Facebook account. People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends). They are outliers not the rule.
>People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends).
What credentials do you hold to make this claim? It better not be a CS degree.
> just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends)
I have no facebook account. I choose to have relationships with my family members and distant friends through physical contact by meeting up and talking regularly on the phone. IMO typing short text messages to people and 'reacting' to theirs with emojis and thumbs up is not a real relationship.
I won't advertise but I work for a company which holds a social media for cooking and recipes. Folks there are totally averse to those and based stuff.
It has been hard for the company. The owner decided the company will die before using ads (for many reasons). The paid plan is stupidly cheap and when people sign and use for a month they stick with the company for years.
But it is hard. Company laid off 80% of the team some time ago and is fighting to survive.
I won't defend the owner or anyone, but things came to a point where people think they are not having consequences by giving infinite permission for being tracked all the time. They think if they are not logged they are not identified so they can't be exploited.
It sucks because no one appreciates that. Though I have my opinions about business and whatever I kinda appreciate for the company not running on money from ads and not collecting a single piece of user information which is not required for work.
If the company you work for REALLY does behave like that, you SHOULD DEFINITELY advertise it. Companies like this must be acknowledged and celebrated. The owner must be a really good person.
Find sites that let you pay for content then I guess? Very few sites are charity sites, and need money to keep the lights on unless it’s just a passion site for the owners and they don’t care to be a community service. I don’t blame people trying to make some money for (many times) obviously hard work and curation of a site.
Unfortunately people love to complain about ads, but rarely actually get their wallets out when an alternative payment method is presented. Case in point: the frequent archive.org links to get around paywalls.
Piracy is a service problem. A paywall literally says “you might like this but pay me first to see what it is.” Substack has a “let me read it first” button and I’ve never seen an archive link to that even though there are plenty of private articles.
The concept of gift links exists, but these websites footaxe themselves by limiting their most viral content —- ostensibly the best and cheapest marketing they could get, down the drain.
Substack's "let me read it first" is just a way to close the subscription popup, it has nothing to do with reading otherwise paywalled content.
The thing is, having had some of my own content "go viral" before - it's not worth much. Most people will read it for a minute and move on. A tiny percentage will subscribe and an even tinier percentage will give you any money. So from the point of view of a creator, it makes a ton of sense to put up paywalls on things – but only once you've already gotten a bit of an audience and distribution method figured out.
> Substack's "let me read it first" is just a way to close the subscription popup, it has nothing to do with reading otherwise paywalled content.
It has everything to do with telegraphed intention of not having content be gratis. The fact that you cannot even mentally keep the idea of subscription gates in the same bucket as paywalls says a lot.
I think that big issue there might just be that infinite reoccurring payments for cooking app is just not something reasonable for most people to set up. People likely prefer to not have a cooking app over paying regularly for it and it is actually reasonable decision.
That's the challenge. But at the same time, it costs like 1 usd/month if you get a holiday promotion and maybe 2/mon if full price. I know subscriptions and to the end of the month but there is no ad, no tracking, no personal stuff sold anywhere...
Advertising is a facade industry for companies who tracks and sell your data. They gather info wether you have healthy habits, if you watch adult stuff, if drive well or if you need money and then sell that data for someone who will use to personalize prices to extract as much from you as they can.
Not sure if he is a good person or not. There may be multiple reasons for doing something BUT what matter s is that anyway it is a transparent honest product. If some one wants to look for it, it is called cookpad. Probably not the best but it works and although the subscription does not look super promising it works.
I mean can the owner compromise and just do ads based on the content on the page? Those weren’t so bad in the “before times”. Maybe that just doesn’t bring in enough cash as ads that follow you around 10 different sites trying to sell you the same thing, but it seems like giving up free money and might be worth a shot.
I quit social media, but the problem is that in the modern dating world a lot of people care whether you have an Instagram and that sort of thing. I truly hate social media, but I find myself considering remaking it just to improve my dating life. It's kind of a depressing situation, to be honest.
Would that be an improvement, though? Do you really want a relationship with someone who cares if you have an active Instagram account? Feels like a great filter (heh) to weed out the chaff.
(If you're just casually dating around / looking for hookups, then sure, do what you think you need to do.)
Some other comments are along these lines but I’ll offer an anecdote.
In college I was wearing a Halo biking shirt in the computer lab. A female friend remarked, “no one is going to date you if you wear that shirt.” Another friend nearby heard and quipped back, “or only the right girls will date him wearing that shirt.”
You should view your preferences more as a filter. While you should be open to new experiences which may change those presences, if something makes you truly unhappy, you are better finding a partner who won’t force that in your life.
I quit social media over 10 years ago, already having been a conscientious objector to Facebook and other platforms, much to the confusion of my classmates who didn't understand my idiosyncratic positions on digital privacy, attention span, banality, and brainrot.
It's gotten to the point where I view the narcissism of the modern 21st century social media user the same way I would view a crack addict smoking a pipe out in public, unable to pry their hands away from their glowing plastic rectangles, swiping incessantly in the hopes of getting just another dose of sweet dopamine with every refresh, or some artificial symbol of social validation in the form of more likes and upvotes.
Somehow even in the wake of the Snowden revelations people are still ambling off of cliffs for fear of being left behind by the herd of lemmings. I feel vindicated as the years go on with every news story or opinion piece I read about (dissatisfaction with) the growing encroachment of surveillance capitalism, ad-tech and social media into our personal lives, and all for what? Some shitty memes and "influencers" peddling their garbage through thinly veiled advertisements?
When I am exposed to mainstream social media content I can't believe people subject themselves to the digital equivalent of ass-to-mouth that is the brainrot of the algorithmically driven social media feed. If "you are what you eat" were analogized to an information diet, most social media users would be consuming informational shit and consequently producing the same 140-byte thoughts or reciting the same 5-second memes.
If the attention economy is indeed a real concept, there is a premium for the ability to hold your concentration on something for more than half an hour and produce thoughts whose complexity is more than just a few bytes.
Less resentfulness and more contempt or pity, as one would regard a methhead tweaking out in public; except here it's a wirehead getting off on social media.
I did this without having to get inspiration from others. And I did it at a young age (under 18), when all my friends and the world were flocking to social media and spilling their thoughts and PII everywhere. I have nothing, and have had nothing ever since (discounting HN).
People are sheep, and people are stupid. Most people waste their lives looking at a mass fake digital mask of their peers, and people they don’t even know.
Myself on the other hand, I spend almost all my spare time with people and animals I love, studying, reading books, and thinking about bigger things.
You are what you consume, which makes most people morons. Same if you consume “the news”, care about celebrities.
Several of the comments here certainly have some superiority complex issues as well as what would appear isolation issues. You seem cynical towards a large majority of modern society. If you need a hug, I’m here.
That may be but it doesn't take much page turning in a history book to find plenty of instances where society has been very wrong and not even in the distant past.
Society changes slowly. The iterative speed of computers, the iterative speed of feedback on a global communications network based on those computers is new, it has many orders of magnitude faster response times than society's ability to adapt to the changes it brings and the systemic study of human behavior over years and years leading to mathematical models of behavior and responses has created massive information asymmetry in society and the scale of manipulation a small group of people can leverage is astounding, being skeptical of society's value propositions seems in order.
It's fairly straightforward. Just take a look at a few of the top comments here wherein the commenter describes not being as dumb (for lack of a better term) as peers for not joining into social media. I'm not linking to them as I'm not trying to incite anything here. Bros need hugs too.
It's very enlightening to fast from social media for an extended period of time (say about a month). If you return after that, you can almost feel the shift in your head. It's something I've experienced first hand.
As someone who’s strongly considering just this, could you describe the changes you felt? And — if you again returned to social media for a prolonged period — whether and how quickly those positive changes reverted?
My platform of choice was YouTube until they introduced shorts and took a more aggressive stance against ad-blockers. I quit initially because I was against the direction the platform was heading, but realized quickly that I didn't miss it. It dawned on me that I had been investing 8 - 12 hours of my life weekly to passively consume content that I couldn't even remember. I noticed that at any slight moment of down-time I'd impulsively reach for YouTube, it's almost like I was conditioned to do so.
At the end of the day that's what Google wants. They want you to spend as much of your time as possible watching as many advertisements as possible. Most social media platforms are adversarial. Once I saw this I could not unsee it. Warning others is pointless. They'll be annoyed or just think you're weird. Not one person I know has taken my advice, so I've stopped giving it.
Tangent aside, for me the benefit of not using social media has been that I can invest the time into what I find fulfilling. The quality of the entertainment I consume has gone way up. The downside is that it's isolating. No I can't follow you on platform X, no I cannot view the link you've sent me to platform Y. Everyone, especially in my age group, considers it strange.
I have pretty much quit Reddit. It didn’t completely change my life, but it was a good thing.
Not getting involved in internet drama is great. I have completely lost the appetite for it. I haven’t heard about American politics for a while. I read and sketch more. My phone is easier to put down and less tempting to pick up; it gets boring quickly. I noticed that I’ll often be the last one to look at my phone when I am around others.
I spend a lot more time in the real world, touching grass. I’d say that this is the cause of my departure, not the effect. Online interactions are not nearly as satisfying.
Being out of it and staying out of it means that you don’t know about the local internet drama, and that you don’t get any notifications from that site. With each visit, the website gets less interesting because nothing interesting is waiting for you there.
My poison of choice was Twitter. I doomscroll, RT stuff which I "identified with", shit post etc. I can't completely describe the feelings since they were subtle but I'll try.
1. I used to have a fear of missing out on what's happening if I didn't stay upto date on Twitter. That went away. I was pretty upto date using HN and Google news. That fear went away. I announced before I went offline so when someone tagged me, some friends actually told them that I'd be away.
2. I used to take out my phone when I was bored or waiting for something and then scroll through making me jittery and anxious. That went away. I did it automatically but finding the site logged out of during that time just made me go back to being bored.
3. There was a state of mind. I'd say it was similar to the stereotypical "drooling in front of a TV" stereotype when I'm doom scrolling. Shortening temper, needless urgency, snapping when people interrupt my "flow". I get back into it every time I opened the site. I slipped out of this and when I then logged back in after a month, I could feel it pulling me back into that state of mind. I didn't explicitly track things but I quickly fell back into my old habits.
> Tenured professors with status in a discipline can tune out the world and do "deep work" peers recognize as "important" before it is done (with accompanying ivory-tower/angels-on-pinhead risks).
> But a free agent, with no institutional safety net, no underwriting of exploratory expeditions by disciplinary consensus, and no research grants, cannot afford this luxury.
Social media is about exploiting gossip and social comparison to make money. It has been from the start a stupid habit with no redeeming qualities. However, after Zuck released Llamma and other AI models for free, i consider it a fair tax on stupidity that is helping to advance frontier technology
I did, deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X). And it helped me a lot to gain back my inner peace. My meditation was deeper, more profound, I genuinely gained back my inner peace. The constant bombardement with posts made to boost the ego of people is toxic for the consumer of these images / texts.
But then, in the context of the Gaza conflict, I realized that X is a very good source to follow intellectuals, thinkers, journalits whom I wouldn't read otherwise in Germany, where anyone is vilified who even wears a Kefiyeh. When you see how our western media frames, justifies, whitewashes a conflict caracterised as a genocide by many scholars, we need other platforms to hear those voices.
Now this sounds like the alt right that wants its platforms. But hear me out. There are intellectuals who show the headlines, the framing, and you cannot help but think that Noam Chomsky's book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media", written in 1988, is more relevant than ever.
X has the capacity to show different perspectives and can be invaluable. But it's also a curse exploited by many. Russia, China, Iran, but also our allies. See this for instance[1].
Agree with everything in your comment except I assume Reddit is better than X (I don't use X for other reasons, but occasionally see things posted from there on Reddit or Instagram).
But worth noting, you've presumably been using HN since 2016 which is also "social media" :P
I'd reckon the median user is not someone who has been "publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week" at any point of their life and that the most likely risk is mindless consumption rather than endless production.
But just quit following random strangers on the Internet, keep social media as a way to maintain your irw network of relations, and you'll usually be alright.
Sure, then we can discuss about the inherent issues of the platforms (which are many), but first one has to exploit their own agency to the utmost degree.
> “I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.”
This is the crux of the matter. Social media isn’t real; it’s a type of video game for adults.
The unreality fosters the growth of so many other things which are even less concerned with truth: fake news, engagement bait, daily outrages, chasing followers in a vain attempt to “build a personal brand.” The vacuousness of influencer culture has only accelerated these trends since Newport wrote this post.
In some sense, some of us already live online essentially through these social networks. Almost always this means some level of addiction, with concomitant real life consequences.
Problem is that it is becoming a new reality. You can tune out, but you can't turn it off, and it (and society) will continue without it. And I say this as someone who thinks we should largely turn it off. Society will adapt, which means society is becoming something different.
I don’t buy it. We’re probably past peak social media at this point. And the outer reality will always have a higher status than any of the inner ones.
I think this is the one benefit of recent "AI" advancements, it accelerates the downfall with even cheaper garbage. death to the internet, long live the internet
We might be past peak "bulk" social media, where people would be public, more or less, with their posts/videos. Now everything is closing and many people have "group chats" as they realize that free-for-all chatting/posting doesn't work.
Private spaces where small groups collect may be social media by its definition, but it feels starkly different from something like posting on a facebook wall or making a public linkedin post where the audience largely consists of strangers.
>Private spaces where small groups collect may be social media by its definition
Kind of, depending on the platform, if you squint your eyes at it?
I suppose it doesn't matter what it's actually called. I call it community in general.
Communities in this sense are the middle ground between your direct personal network (which is also the deepest form of relation), and social media as the widest (the shallowest form of relation) form of reach.
In other words, people are returning to how online communication worked before Facebook.
Offline, people have always tended to come together around common interests and values. My wife and I, for example, are part time performing magicians and we're a member of a local magic group that meets IRL.
Prior to what we have come to call "social media", existed forums. Forums were this wonderful utopian paradise of yesteryear where people engaged in long form discussions, often heated but mostly civil, about special interests that they cared about.
The term "social media" didn't start to catch on until the news feed was a thing. That was the "contribution" of both Facebook and Twatter and it was a big PART of what changed everything.
The other factor was the so-called "mobile revolution."
Forums are great when you're at a keyboard. They start to lose their appeal when you are engaging using a small touch screen.
What you are describing sounds like people returning to the state of the world as it existed before social media. Where people come together around common interests and values instead of using the news feed where you get fire-hozed with random shit that "the algorithm" thinks might trigger you into engaging with it.
> people are returning to how online communication worked before Facebook.
Except now it's all on Facebook and it's incredibly hard to leave Facebook, because all communications with any type of group happens on Facebook. I have friends who can't leave Facebook, because their kids soccer team holds them hostage. Leave Facebook and we'll kill your child's social life. I can't even join the parents group for my child's school, almost no one else will do it, because it takes time, so they are lacking parents, but it is coordinated on Facebook.
I used to organise playtime for toddlers once a week, no one else wanted to do, but the kids loved it. Everyone was used to everything being organised via Facebook, where I don't have an account. So the communication was done by someone else in the umbrella organisation for all local sports, gymnastics, e-sport etc. More than once I showed up to get everything ready only to learn that the space was booked for something else that day, being cleaned or renovated. Everyone else had been informed, expect me, the guy who was suppose to be in charge of the damn thing, because the organisation had no real website or mailing list to speak of and just expected everyone to be on Facebook.
Everything is on f-ing Facebook, Sports, clubs, hobbies, reselling, announcements of everything local, and only on Facebook. The only exception is professional meetups, which Linkedin will happily inform you about two weeks after the meetup, stupid, brain dead, algorithmically power "news" feed.
I want mailing-lists and Usenet, but everyone else want a mobile app and apparently Facebook.
Ugh I know the feeling. I may break down and do the immigrant-owned phone shop prepaid pseudonymous burner away-from-home SMS verification process on a completely fictitious account. I do not want Meta having any more of my dox than it has already gleaned in the past.
That's a valid complaint, and I sympathize because I have no love for Facebook.
My only counter-argument, and it's not even a counter-argument really, is that this is a fact of life that exists with or without Facebook.
My personal pet peeve is that I don't want to own a mobile phone at all. Not even a dumb phone and not even a landline. If I find myself in an emergency without the ability to dial 911 that's a risk I'm willing to take on a personal level. I just don't want a phone because I find the idea of a noise making device that can interrupt me at unexpected times to be a crime against humanity. But more and more essential services like banking are assuming that people have smart phones. My bank would deny services to me if I didn't even have a landline, since they require a phone number tied to their account records. My work assumes that people not only have their own smart phone but are willing to install authenticator apps for MFA etc. And my workplace is not alone.
If it's not Facebook that "everyone" is using that leaves minority opinions wishing for an alternative, it's something else.
But when a Presidential candidate (who will pick up roughly half the popular vote) is openly spreading social media misinformation, and the owner of Twitter is offering million dollar lotteries to influence the vote, it's fair to say enough people "buy it".
I have a pet theory as to why social media causes many people to feel like it's draining them, and why I avoid news on social media like the plague ... I also tend to mute or silence people that share political content (regardless of partisan affiliation).
Social media, unless you are trying to build a business, is ultimately offering the service of entertainment.
Even if you use Twitter or Facebook as your news aggregator, unless you're engaged in some kind of productive and time-scoped research project, you're doing this on your leisure time.
That means that you just got done work, or you're on a break, or you finally got the kids to sleep or finished all of your household chores and you're now in a position where you can "enjoy" a bit of leisure time.
Which means that you approach social media PRE-drained. You're already tired and you're looking for cute cat memes when what should happen ... you get hit with a rage-bait headline, or one of those douche bags that vote differently from you just posted an opinion about a controversial topic that you have very strong feelings about.
We (on HN) all know that the algorithm is trying to promote what gets engagement, and anything that provokes a strong emotional reaction is likely to trigger engagement.
My thesis is that people turn to social media when they are already in an emotional state that is incredibly inappropriate for engaging with "serious" topics on a rational level.
So everyone just gets angrier and angrier at each other and you leave social media feeling even more exhausted than you were before you signed on looking for entertainment to spend your precious leisure time with.
And then you realize that you just wasted that short precious time that you needed to use for relaxation ... and if you don't do anything to rectify it then your stress levels just gradually creep up, your sleep starts to suffer, you might start to compensate with stress eating or consuming more alcohol or cannabis than is healthy and it just spirals.
Even without considering all of the contentious topics, the infinite scroll of the home feed trains people to triage posts faster and faster, because there's always more content, and who knows what you've missed? Because the topics are flattened, you're context-switching on a second by second basis, and your mind is alert to something awful you might be about to see - cute cat, war crimes, Dan's birthday celebration, medical fundraiser, political campaign, sponsored ad... I'm really starting to see the value of legitimate boredom
I agree with this, but it's worth noting the quote is from a journalist/blogger who was not talking about social media. He was talking about keeping up with a 24 hour news cycle by any means. The problem here isn't specific to social media. It's with overwhelming information flow, the vast majority of which is not actionable to the person consuming it. People come down with a type of awareness FOMO such that they feel like they need to know all things as they happen, even though the information is incomplete, often wrong, misleading, and doesn't impact their everyday real lives in any way.
This is what Andrew Sullivan was getting at. People should worry themselves with information that actually concerns and impacts their real lives. All else is entertainment. If it stops being entertaining and starts being anxiety-inducing, stop consuming it.
I think you make valid points about the downsides of "influencer culture" and usage patterns of some forms of social media.
BUT.
I'm think the term "social media" is too broad to be useful in this kind of critique.
This conversation we're having is a bit meta, but it's also "real", to me. We both considered Cal Newport's stance, Matt Green shared some thoughts about it, and Chris Weekly responded to it.
Those are real people interacting in a potentially useful way.
Being "addicted" to ideas and conversations is not necessarily unhealthy.
/$.02
I think there's a lot of value, both social and emotional, to social media. That doesn't change the fact that social media products as they exist are not only not creating that value, they are outwardly, openly hostile to it. HN being a notable exception and why I spend a lot of time here. The discussions are thoughtful and the topics are (usually) at least somewhat relevant to my career and life. That said, the more mainstream social medias are not relevant to me, they are not stimulating or thoughtful, and they are not valuable.
I have Instagram and TikTok installed because both of my partners send me things from them that made them think of me, and in this way, and only this way, they are relevant and nurturing to my existence. That said, I never engage with them outside of that context, because it's just an endless barrage of vacuous bullshit, as are the rest, with TikTok personally, I think, being the largest firehose of stupid, worthless, intellectually bankrupt, pointless shit ever constructed by mankind. Holy fuck. Like they're all bad, but TikTok... it's just the modern social media apparatus refined and polished to a mirror shine. Takes absolutely no effort to engage with, and if you're sufficiently numb to outside stimulus, you will scroll it for literal hours. If social media is a drug, TikTok is black-tar heroin.
The danger of the point I'm making is that the less-realness that I'm arguing justifies poor behavior online. It does not. Many posters become seduced by the less-realness of online contact that they disconnect their own notions of what decent behavior is.
> Those are real people interacting in a potentially useful way. Being "addicted" to ideas and conversations is not necessarily unhealthy.
Agree! Addiction is compulsive use and the need to continually engage. My HN use is subject to a max of 15m a day with a browser extension that enforces it. I can at least try to curb it from blossoming into something more disruptive.
Unfortunately, it can be worth it. Having a social media audience can be very valuable to entrepreneurs. Someone who lives online with a personal brand can replace tens of thousands of dollars in ad spend with a single tweet.
As someone who hasn't had a social media presence for most of my adult life, and happy about that, I'm now seeing the downsides. I don't have Ivy League connections like some of my peers. Social media may be the only way I could build a network like the one they cultivated in university.
I feel this. However I also remind myself that social media connections are never as strong as those we've made in real life, and that there have been former influencers who've hung up their hat and lamented that their residual social connections regress to something close to a mean a lot quicker than they would've liked.
Ultimately, the act of winning at social media seems a bit too subordinate to me.
Just an FYI going to an Ivy doesn’t cultivate that network in most cases; you need to come from the right background and have some spending money to keep up with the lifestyle (ski trips, Broadway musicals, etc).
In that way social network is more meritocratic, as many people have come from very humble backgrounds and succeeded with skill and charisma.
It's an opportunity to meet people who have a higher likelihood of successful careers, who in turn also know many successful people. That makes getting meetings and fundraising much easier.
I simply wasn't able to meet those kinds of people as a mid 20s person transferring to a commuter university from a community college.
Existing wealth likely helps, but even the poor kids with scholarships have better outcomes at those universities.
Where does one advertise these days if not social media? Where does one learn about local goings-on outside of their _immediate_ circle of family/close friends/colleagues if not social media?
With a small local business, social media gives an audience. If you're selling anything visually captivating, it performs well in these spaces. We sell cut flowers on the side, so…
I don't ask these questions out of support of Instagram or Facebook, but I stop in there regularly because I don't know to learn a little bit about the greater community around me. My life is busy enough with work/family.
The cost of all this is being exposed to a lot of attention bait and I honestly don't like how I feel using it sometimes. But we've built up the social media ecosystem as a pillar of society at this point.
> Where does one learn about local goings-on outside [...] if nor social media?
Imagine, there are people who don't care that much besides their family/friends circle. Maybe some newspaper/-site from time to time, but why cope with all the other stuff too all the time? Life goes on too if one doesn't know abou the latest stuff.
Imagine there were hundreds or thousands of year of humanity you didn't know how your neighbour is except you walked there.
At least that's fine for me. I don't miss social media (besides HN), and I don't miss anything.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadThe coming of the current cluster fuck was clear decades ago. Anyone who wasn't enamored by meme illiteracy never took that train...
Certainly feels better
What?
Also, congrats for being less tolerant. I like that.
I sincerely thought people would quit social media following the Snowden revelations, and I did myself, and then could not believe that they didn't seem to care at all. It was a painful and jarring learning experience.
I did not, but thanks for being considerate. I took it as this:
>I sincerely thought people would quit social media following the Snowden revelations, and I did myself, and then could not believe that they didn't seem to care at all. It was a painful and jarring learning experience.
It's been over 11 years now. I would imagine it's not unlike living in a former soviet country in that everyone knows it's going on, but we just don't talk about it.
It's almost as if their reasoned arguments were always nothing more than poorly slapped together ad hoc justifications for whatever happens to be the norm at a given moment.
Facebook is for boomers.
Twitter is weird and we all realised how pointless it is to spend time falling out on there.
Instagram feels a bit long in the tooth.
LinkedIn is a parody of itself.
Reddit feels like it’s growing but I think that avoids the worst of social media.
TikTok and YouTube shorts seem popular but aren’t really social media. It’s just time wasting junk.
All in all, social media feels like it peaked a while back.
It also helps immensely to curate lists of interests to help filter out the noise and politics.
If it’s an event that you’re not particularly interested in, then there’s not much value in getting details in advance.
Another thing, it’s not just hours. Sometimes it’s months (or in rare cases years) before a recurring topic on social media finally makes it to the news, because it’s controversial/narrative-defying, so it takes them a long time to work out how to talk about it. I don’t want to mention specific examples because it would be distracting, but there are a few topics I see mentioned daily/weekly on the news today that were pretty much absent a few years ago, yet were heavily discussed on Twitter at the time, and I am very glad I was aware of them.
Nobody should pretend that Twitter is a place where accurate information travels at light speed. It is in desperate need of moderation and being run by a man with clear monetary incentive to mislead the public.
I don't think you wrote that the way you meant to.
I agree, but I think a lot of people who use it view it that way.
If you feel you have any kind of mood or attention challenges, as many now do, you might want to double check if it's something you should be optimizing for.
There are exceptions; if you have a flight booked that day and didn't learn about the Crowdstrike thing till you got there, that'll be a problem, but it would've been a problem regardless of your immediate knowledge of it.
My life would not have been impacted in the least knowing about the Trump assassination attempt a few hours later (or even the next day), rather than minutes after it happened.
The MSM has enough problems these days with journalistic integrity and practices. I don't think the teeming mobs on Twitter are an improvement, though.
"Breaking news" used to be relevant in that it was news that "broke into" existing programming. It didn't necessarily make people's lives better but at least it tended to cover matters of high national interest like Presidential assassinations or disasters or wars. But now that everything is breaking news all the time everywhere, the term no longer means anything other than being a synonym for "current news," which isn't even really impressive anymore.
What is actionable about knowing about the assassination attempt 1-2 hours before others? Did you act differently based on this information? Did you benefit from this sufficiently to weigh up for the time spent on Twitter 20 times a day at the off-chance of catching a breaking newsstory before MSM would?
It also seems quite professionalised in that the big content producers fill the feed.
There’s also something about it being video which makes it feel harmful but in a different way than a text based platform.
I tend to think of TikTok as more of an entertainment platform rather than peer to peer social media.
I’m not the target audience though so could be wide of the mark!
This is one of the reasons why I have returned to print media. Unfortunately, a lot of magazines and newspapers are also really bad now also. The Wall Street Journal has fallen off a cliff, turning into something between Cosmopolitan and Business Insider, and I am cancelling my subscription this year. The Economist has done a good job keeping up the quality level. The fact that something is in print does not necessarily make it better if all the writers have brainrot or the content is optimized for digital engagement first.
The internet has become a medium for poor people to watch unlimited user-generated episodes of Maury and Jerry Springer. The only internet I really want to use is to work, buy products, and read my email. Getting older is bad enough without the computer trying to make me dumber on top of that.
Although the line can get interesting. When I was active on Reddit I would argue that Reddit was not SM. From my perspective, Reddit was end stage web forum technology and link aggregators
All the bespoke forums of the late 90s and early 2000s died for the most part and there is now a subreddit for every niche hobby that used to have a forum
This stuff all predates Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, livejournal, that I would argue were new paradigms and the start of what we know as social media
However to anyone not online during those times, Reddit is just another site where people post details of their own lives. Reddit responded by adding profiles and followers and all kinds of pseudo SM features
I'm not going to message random people's Instagram unsolicited, I would find it annoying to on the receiving end of that. My mother and girlfriend have both complained about receiving unwanted attention from unknown men through social media.
Honestly trying to understand your point of view, do you think dating apps should be free? They definitely aren't free to run.
Really?
Reddit is a cesspool because they drove off the power users in favor of normies who won't block the ads.
Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry. In life we do not let everyone into the friend circle. Having a barrier to entry model may work well for an online community, although this remains to be seen. Were there any successful experiments with paid social media?
I've been following a lot of the bluesky + mastodon stuff but I don't like that their basic model of social interaction is just a clone of Twitter.
Hopefully by posting something incorrect, A Person On The Internet Who Knows Better will come along and provide the correct details. :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_Syste...
https://sdf.org/
[1] https://tilde.club/ [2] https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...
A good chunk of those have been part of the same community on a newsgroup, then on a company-owned forum which got shuttered, then on a forum instance set up by a user who didn't want to run it any more after 6 years. The tech and platforms are ephemeral, always have been.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RLLMUK
Governance happens on Loomio, which is a forum tailored for community decision making, but the main platform that coop members get access to is a Mastodon instance for now. We are experimenting with Bonfire, which is more flexible and might end up providing a solid base for federated apps in general.
Let me know if you have any questions!
I had a real commitment to my home parish at the time. I was involved in ministries weekly, where I could not simply flit about anywhere I wanted. Sure, as a group we could meet many strangers on this itinerary, but I risked severing all ties with my spiritual home!
The activities were sometimes active and sometimes passive, such as hiking, dancing, or going to a festival or something. And I quickly gave up on everything, because it seemed like the group was not really oriented to pairing people off, but more of a self-sustaining club where people gained "volunteer responsibilities" and were thus pressured into staying in the "singles group" no matter what their relationship status. Also, having no vehicle of my own, I'd either opt out of traveling, or I'd hit someone up to carpool, and that wasn't always copacetic.
I also found, on dating websites, this mentality that single Catholics would be jet-setters, traveling all over the world on pilgrimage. That they would generate a steady stream of photographs and social media posts from their adventures. That they would have marvelous, expensive hobbies and be so active in volunteerism. For crying out loud! I wondered how these people would ever have space in their lives for a significant other! All I wanted to do was hang around home, go for walks, prepare a nice meal at home once in a while. But the dating sites seemed geared exclusively for high-maintenance and upper-middle-class go-getters. Again, I felt like it was a clique of "professional singles" who didn't really expect to pair off and get married.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Epistle_to_the_Corinthia...
Perhaps these Catholics are onto something. There's nothing wrong per se with individuals in a singles group or the group itself proper having no expectations of dating or marriage. It's probably not the norm, but I think it's actually somewhat better that way, especially for those who don't intend to date/marry. Community and fellowship in a church environment should not be withdrawn from those who choose to remain single or celibate. I think that historically many church groups have silently discouraged being single by ostracism or judgement, which is definitely not what Jesus would do, in my opinion.
I'm sure there is someone for you out there. All relationships are valid. Modern society has such intense focus on external sources of validation, such as a partner or spouse, but good friends are always in short supply. As the proverb says, a friend can be closer than a brother.
In both cases there's a small financial barrier (being able to pay for postage or your share or petrol money) but a sizeable time barrier (spending hours on a sketch or walking a total of about 50km).
I think this does describe legacy advertisers (and TikTok, for different reasons) – we might remember Tumblr's hyper-specific LGBTQ-friendly (often NSFW) communities being completely liquidated in the transfer of Tumblr to Verizon, arguably killing Tumblr on that date. Verizon's handling of Tumblr validates Chomsky.
But ad-fueled journalism seems to operate from exactly the opposite principle, so long as the controversies that drive engagement do not threaten the sensibility of specific large funders. I've seen a few times in recent memory where an article from the New York Times aired something quite sensational, only to quietly update later that what was initially reported didn't quite occur as depicted. But by that point it is too late, and profit was made.
The overall point still stands – that ad-based always results in a conflict of interest.
In general though it is true that ragebait and sensationalism do tend to drive "engagement" and thus ad revenue (often to the detriment of society).
A site is full of ragebait, hot takes and pictures of boobs? The ad economy has pushed them towards things that get a lot of engagement. Clicks are money!
A site is devoid of ragebait, hot takes and pictures of boobs? The ad economy forces everything to be brand-safe and censored.
If they are incorrect, then non-conservatives are of equal power and culpability in discriminating for or against which content they will sponsor. This would seem to be your position, and points to a state of affairs in which content and communities exist in disjoint bubbles which thrive off of entirely separate streams of ad revenue, up to the principles of the advertisers that choose to direct funding at particular media institutions.
Otherwise, if they are correct, then your assertion that this argument can be made "in both directions" is shown to be false by supposition, and the ad economy pushes users towards conservative content - in which case, one had best boycott and abstain from ad-driven media and social media unless they want to finance conservative thought.
It's time to wake up to the fact that being LGBT friendly is the conservative position. This may come as a shock to people who were cutting edge radicals in their youth in the 1990s - a decade that is now 30 years in the past.
This depends on the definition of success, the most successful as in impressive achievements goal reaching are the ones that are open to anybody who can get noticed and brought in. ANd in the social sense even open to the ones who are most capable of monopolizing the discourse and creating a buzz in the public square.
For example Trump did just that in 2016 and many tried to resist him, but in the end the GOP wants to be successful and opened itself to the guy who made the most noise in the public discourse and public square and made him the tip of the spear of the election effort.
Of course it feels pretty miserable knowing that you can be replaced at any time but I don't think there is an alternative or a solution thanks to a barrier to entry (or exit). Social groups that have a barrier to entry (and exit) such as marriage , when it deteriorates the barrier to entry (and exit) doesn't prevent the 2 people to just starting ignoring each other.
Thought that ended in high school. You have to be a real pos to not get invites to stuff...
The "real pos" is just as often those doing the excluding, as it is those being excluded. Pettiness doesn't disappear at 18 years old. It's hurtful to assume anyone being excluded from something deserved it.
In those cases I think it's more likely mental illness that stops you from making friends, but if no social group has accepted you after tens or hundreds of attempts then it's possible that there's something you might be able to change.
Facebook was terrible for your well being a long time before they enshitified with adds. You may be too young to remember but likes were a hot commodity people would ruin their lives over without any outside help.
For myself I find push notification based social media to be completely cancerous, and pull based one only mildly so. One need only look at the trolls from usenet to see people obsessed with nothing but text based emails.
There is no safe dose.
.bash_aliases:
alias blocksocials='(echo ""; echo "127.0.0.1 reddit.com"; echo "127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com") | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts > /dev/null'
alias unblocksocials='sudo sed -i "/reddit.com/d" /etc/hosts'
The same can be done on Firefox, which supports installing Tampermonkey for managing userscripts.
With friends as in people in your life who you want to really be friends with, you both make changes to be able to keep the relationships. Otherwise it dies. And you certainly do not go "either you buy this app or I am not friend with you anymore".
Sometimes people only want to do that hobby so you don't have a choice but if you hung out with them outside of the origin activity then likely you can hang out with them without that origin activity.
The thing called Social Media is an unconstrained grift-circus peddling pure Barnumium. [1]
It attracts movers/actors who enjoy the incentives, as well as followers/gawkers who have trouble seeing that their time and reality have been stolen.
From The Fine Article:
"Finally [...] he quit, explaining: 'I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.'”
---
[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum
This comes from fundamentals, unfortunately, so it's hard to change.
The trouble is that someone posting a contrary view usually feels under pressure going in. They know that their post will land in hostile territory, anticipating that the majority won't receive their opinion (or them) well, and they're not wrong. They'll probably be met not just with disagreement, but with lazy truisms and putdowns that majorities always feel are obvious.
The more contrarian a view is, the more common the majority response is not to engage with it, but to question why anyone would ever say such a thing. Often the majority invents sinister or preposterous explanations for this. (On that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851.)
Because the contrarian commenter expects to be treated this way, they typically defend themselves pre-emptively with armor like snark, name-calling, and so on, presumably to lessen the pain of being rejected. It's as if there's an implicit (or sometimes even explicit) sentence, "I know you're all going to pile on me anyway so fuck you in advance."
Downvotes and flags do end up piling on such comments, no doubt partly because majorities consider them "obviously" wrong and bad, but more because of this pre-emptive guidelines breakage. This rejection only confirms the contrarian poster's feeling that the community is against them, so we end up in a tight and vicious bind.
The flip side to that bind is that when contrarian views are expressed in this defensive-aggressive way, it gives the majority a perfect excuse to keep on feeling that its views are obviously right while others are mean and bad. The contrarian ends up discrediting their own view. When they happen to have some truth on their side (as they often do), this is bad for everyone [2].
I spend a lot of time on this from a moderation point of view because it's such a tough tradeoff. It's terrible for HN when contrarian and minority views are reflexively rejected. It's also bad when guidelines breakage doesn't get downvoted or flagged. We can't carve out an exception that says it's ok to break the rules when you feel surrounded by people who disagree with you.
This dilemma is not the contrarian/minority's fault. They're genuinely under greater pressure. It's easy to stay within the rails when all you have to say is conventional and the smug majority (aren't all majorities smug?) will upvote you. It's hard not to protect yourself with barbs when you're in a vulnerable position to begin with.
Worst is when the contrarian is coming from a minority—any kind of minority, not just the obvious kinds—who have a different background from most of the community, and so naturally have different views. The majority response in such cases can get ugly quickly. I've seen mobs hound such commenters off HN, which is one of the worst things that can happen and one of the most important to protect against. It happens by itself; no one is thinking "let's form a mob and hound that deviant". It comes from the fundamentals, as I said, of how groups (and forums) work.
From a moderation point of view we have two tools, I guess, for this. The first is to try to explain to contrarian commenters the unfortunate situation that there's a greater burden on them than there is on others, and that if they don't want their posts to be self-defeating, they need to bear that pressure while writing their comments neutrally [3]. It's not fair; it sucks; but it's how group dynamics work—we can't change it. If the majority&#...
It was always like this. At least it's not as bad as reddit. :)
Especially important because most of his commentary focuses on the dominant social media paradigm of the time. Mastodon barely existed when this post went live, Mike Masnick was years from writing the paper that inspired Bluesky[0], and it would be strange if someone whose whole thing is getting away from social media kept up on new developments.
This post is an interesting historical artifact, but shouldn't be mistaken for contemporary commentary.
[0] https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
If the product is the social graph, masto isnt even on the radar.
If the product is the discussion framework without the advertising or social graph. If you can find 15 people to have the same interactions with manually its a superior player.
Some details on its creation and exit from Twitter here: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/13/bluesky-is-building-the-...
https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting
https://atproto.com/guides/applications
https://github.com/bluesky-social
It's all there. Bluesky itself is split into tens of instances and has been since last year. A few people even run their own relays. Your information is very out of date.
If anything, things are worse. It's even more "algorithmic" and engagement-focused, continuing to promote outrage culture. Platforms like TikTok have turned addictive endless scrolling into a science. I know a few people who spend a significant number of hours of their days on TikTok and Twitter (ahem, sorry, "X"), and it just kinda makes me sad. (And I probably spend more time than is healthy on HN.)
[0] I still have my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, but I don't post to them anymore, and I'm signed out of them on all my devices (and I've deleted the mobile apps). I don't allow myself to ever sign in on mobile. Once every 6 months or so I'll sign into Facebook for some specific purpose (like looking up someone's contact information when it's for some reason not stored in any of my usual places). Out of curiosity I'll scroll down the feed, and it's just kinda crap. Stuff from people I don't actually follow, stuff from people I do follow but is kinda boring, and interestingly the feed is dominated by the same 15 or so people (even though I'd amassed a little over 1k "friends" before I quit). I limit myself to no more than five minutes, and I don't post, comment, or even like anything.
The last time I signed into Instagram (probably two or three years ago), the experience was awful. I remember when it was just a reverse-chronological feed of the people I follow (and only the people I follow). But now (well, 2-3 years ago) the majority of items in my feed are either ads or promoted/reshared posts from people I don't follow at all. Stuff from people I follow is maybe one out of every five or six items. And it's all out of order, so I'd see something that someone posted a week ago, followed by, 20 items later, something that they posted a couple days ago. It's a shame; 2012 Instagram was such a beautiful platform.
So while yes, this article is now 8 years old, I don't think anything has changed for the better. The fundamental problems are still there, and have only gotten worse.
> What the market values is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable.
> what the market dismisses are activities that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value. Well social media use is the epitome of an easy to replicate activity that does not produce a lot of value [...] by definition the market is not going to give those activieis a lot of value [...]."
Yet in the years since this TEDx talk we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.
you will never become a streaming millionaire. talking heads like beast and pewdiepie employ literal armies of Hollywood editors and writers. For every organically grown insufferable content monster created on Youtube, ten more are vat-grown by a billion dollar industry designed to shepherd you into a fantasy consumerist lifestyle.
These powerhouses of industry control the flow of capital at a level you will never be able to. they secure rights to music and video clips at rates you could never get, have tie-ins to major brands media and celebrities on day one, and are programmed with an endless firestorm of bots and preferential algorithmic treatment on every FAANG product in order to guarantee their success.
To be a professional streamer usually takes a combination of talent and concentration that most people simply don't have. But to say that you can't become one? LOL.
The AVERAGE millionaire streamer on twitch is so painfully unedited that they end up getting banned a couple times a year for saying stupid things live on air. Twitch and their sponsors practically THROW money at them to spend an hour or two to sponsor content. There's an entire backend bounty system which is only available to partners which will pay you based on your audience size. I've seen a guy with 3K viewers get a $30K check for 3 hours worth of sponsored content.
For most influencers, they're not the ones with the wealth and power. Many of them are barely getting by. They rent content houses, clothing, cars, and other things they need to put on their facade.
Pretty much all of the wealth and power is in the hands of the people that employ the influencers.
Don't worry about your active Facebook account. People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends). They are outliers not the rule.
What credentials do you hold to make this claim? It better not be a CS degree.
I have no facebook account. I choose to have relationships with my family members and distant friends through physical contact by meeting up and talking regularly on the phone. IMO typing short text messages to people and 'reacting' to theirs with emojis and thumbs up is not a real relationship.
Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38720087 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)
Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16697004 - March 2018 (262 comments)
Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714509 - Feb 2017 (1 comment)
Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998698 - Nov 2016 (548 comments)
The NYT piece those were about is https://web.archive.org/web/20171114021224/https://www.nytim.... Not the same as OP but same topic, author, year.
It has been hard for the company. The owner decided the company will die before using ads (for many reasons). The paid plan is stupidly cheap and when people sign and use for a month they stick with the company for years.
But it is hard. Company laid off 80% of the team some time ago and is fighting to survive. I won't defend the owner or anyone, but things came to a point where people think they are not having consequences by giving infinite permission for being tracked all the time. They think if they are not logged they are not identified so they can't be exploited.
It sucks because no one appreciates that. Though I have my opinions about business and whatever I kinda appreciate for the company not running on money from ads and not collecting a single piece of user information which is not required for work.
I don’t care if you piss gold or if you’re the pope or king, don’t advertise to me
IA is a tool to help you access websites that literally can't be accessed ever again otherwise. It's a noble and beautiful project.
Some people use it just to get free stuff, to commit piracy, to infringe upon copyright. It's a perversion of what it was meant for.
The concept of gift links exists, but these websites footaxe themselves by limiting their most viral content —- ostensibly the best and cheapest marketing they could get, down the drain.
You’re right. It is sickening.
The thing is, having had some of my own content "go viral" before - it's not worth much. Most people will read it for a minute and move on. A tiny percentage will subscribe and an even tinier percentage will give you any money. So from the point of view of a creator, it makes a ton of sense to put up paywalls on things – but only once you've already gotten a bit of an audience and distribution method figured out.
It has everything to do with telegraphed intention of not having content be gratis. The fact that you cannot even mentally keep the idea of subscription gates in the same bucket as paywalls says a lot.
PS: using a new green account to make snarky put-downs isn't welcome on HN. Make a point or don't make it, but do it without those.
To me, you burned a hospital bed to send a message that capitalism is bad. I don't care what your opinion is. You burned the bed.
https://web.archive.org
for example this comment on the current top post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41961894
in fact I don't think I've ever seen archive.org used to jump paywalls. it's not designed for it
Advertising is a facade industry for companies who tracks and sell your data. They gather info wether you have healthy habits, if you watch adult stuff, if drive well or if you need money and then sell that data for someone who will use to personalize prices to extract as much from you as they can.
(If you're just casually dating around / looking for hookups, then sure, do what you think you need to do.)
In college I was wearing a Halo biking shirt in the computer lab. A female friend remarked, “no one is going to date you if you wear that shirt.” Another friend nearby heard and quipped back, “or only the right girls will date him wearing that shirt.”
You should view your preferences more as a filter. While you should be open to new experiences which may change those presences, if something makes you truly unhappy, you are better finding a partner who won’t force that in your life.
Then when I got in really good shape I thought it was because I didn't make enough money.
When I started making money I thought it was because I wasn't tall enough.
There is no way having social media or not is mattering that much. It is just in your head.
It's gotten to the point where I view the narcissism of the modern 21st century social media user the same way I would view a crack addict smoking a pipe out in public, unable to pry their hands away from their glowing plastic rectangles, swiping incessantly in the hopes of getting just another dose of sweet dopamine with every refresh, or some artificial symbol of social validation in the form of more likes and upvotes.
Somehow even in the wake of the Snowden revelations people are still ambling off of cliffs for fear of being left behind by the herd of lemmings. I feel vindicated as the years go on with every news story or opinion piece I read about (dissatisfaction with) the growing encroachment of surveillance capitalism, ad-tech and social media into our personal lives, and all for what? Some shitty memes and "influencers" peddling their garbage through thinly veiled advertisements?
When I am exposed to mainstream social media content I can't believe people subject themselves to the digital equivalent of ass-to-mouth that is the brainrot of the algorithmically driven social media feed. If "you are what you eat" were analogized to an information diet, most social media users would be consuming informational shit and consequently producing the same 140-byte thoughts or reciting the same 5-second memes.
If the attention economy is indeed a real concept, there is a premium for the ability to hold your concentration on something for more than half an hour and produce thoughts whose complexity is more than just a few bytes.
People are sheep, and people are stupid. Most people waste their lives looking at a mass fake digital mask of their peers, and people they don’t even know.
Myself on the other hand, I spend almost all my spare time with people and animals I love, studying, reading books, and thinking about bigger things.
You are what you consume, which makes most people morons. Same if you consume “the news”, care about celebrities.
Society changes slowly. The iterative speed of computers, the iterative speed of feedback on a global communications network based on those computers is new, it has many orders of magnitude faster response times than society's ability to adapt to the changes it brings and the systemic study of human behavior over years and years leading to mathematical models of behavior and responses has created massive information asymmetry in society and the scale of manipulation a small group of people can leverage is astounding, being skeptical of society's value propositions seems in order.
At the end of the day that's what Google wants. They want you to spend as much of your time as possible watching as many advertisements as possible. Most social media platforms are adversarial. Once I saw this I could not unsee it. Warning others is pointless. They'll be annoyed or just think you're weird. Not one person I know has taken my advice, so I've stopped giving it.
Tangent aside, for me the benefit of not using social media has been that I can invest the time into what I find fulfilling. The quality of the entertainment I consume has gone way up. The downside is that it's isolating. No I can't follow you on platform X, no I cannot view the link you've sent me to platform Y. Everyone, especially in my age group, considers it strange.
Not getting involved in internet drama is great. I have completely lost the appetite for it. I haven’t heard about American politics for a while. I read and sketch more. My phone is easier to put down and less tempting to pick up; it gets boring quickly. I noticed that I’ll often be the last one to look at my phone when I am around others.
I spend a lot more time in the real world, touching grass. I’d say that this is the cause of my departure, not the effect. Online interactions are not nearly as satisfying.
Being out of it and staying out of it means that you don’t know about the local internet drama, and that you don’t get any notifications from that site. With each visit, the website gets less interesting because nothing interesting is waiting for you there.
1. I used to have a fear of missing out on what's happening if I didn't stay upto date on Twitter. That went away. I was pretty upto date using HN and Google news. That fear went away. I announced before I went offline so when someone tagged me, some friends actually told them that I'd be away.
2. I used to take out my phone when I was bored or waiting for something and then scroll through making me jittery and anxious. That went away. I did it automatically but finding the site logged out of during that time just made me go back to being bored.
3. There was a state of mind. I'd say it was similar to the stereotypical "drooling in front of a TV" stereotype when I'm doom scrolling. Shortening temper, needless urgency, snapping when people interrupt my "flow". I get back into it every time I opened the site. I slipped out of this and when I then logged back in after a month, I could feel it pulling me back into that state of mind. I didn't explicitly track things but I quickly fell back into my old habits.
Another related post: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo...
From the second link:
> Tenured professors with status in a discipline can tune out the world and do "deep work" peers recognize as "important" before it is done (with accompanying ivory-tower/angels-on-pinhead risks).
> But a free agent, with no institutional safety net, no underwriting of exploratory expeditions by disciplinary consensus, and no research grants, cannot afford this luxury.
But then, in the context of the Gaza conflict, I realized that X is a very good source to follow intellectuals, thinkers, journalits whom I wouldn't read otherwise in Germany, where anyone is vilified who even wears a Kefiyeh. When you see how our western media frames, justifies, whitewashes a conflict caracterised as a genocide by many scholars, we need other platforms to hear those voices.
Now this sounds like the alt right that wants its platforms. But hear me out. There are intellectuals who show the headlines, the framing, and you cannot help but think that Noam Chomsky's book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media", written in 1988, is more relevant than ever.
X has the capacity to show different perspectives and can be invaluable. But it's also a curse exploited by many. Russia, China, Iran, but also our allies. See this for instance[1].
[1] "The Israelis Destabilizing Democracy and Disrupting Elections Worldwide - National Security & Cyber - Haaretz" // https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2022-1...
But worth noting, you've presumably been using HN since 2016 which is also "social media" :P
Sure, then we can discuss about the inherent issues of the platforms (which are many), but first one has to exploit their own agency to the utmost degree.
You can follow the author at https://x.com/profcalnewport .
This is the crux of the matter. Social media isn’t real; it’s a type of video game for adults.
The unreality fosters the growth of so many other things which are even less concerned with truth: fake news, engagement bait, daily outrages, chasing followers in a vain attempt to “build a personal brand.” The vacuousness of influencer culture has only accelerated these trends since Newport wrote this post.
In some sense, some of us already live online essentially through these social networks. Almost always this means some level of addiction, with concomitant real life consequences.
Is it really worth it?
Kind of, depending on the platform, if you squint your eyes at it?
I suppose it doesn't matter what it's actually called. I call it community in general.
Communities in this sense are the middle ground between your direct personal network (which is also the deepest form of relation), and social media as the widest (the shallowest form of relation) form of reach.
Offline, people have always tended to come together around common interests and values. My wife and I, for example, are part time performing magicians and we're a member of a local magic group that meets IRL.
Prior to what we have come to call "social media", existed forums. Forums were this wonderful utopian paradise of yesteryear where people engaged in long form discussions, often heated but mostly civil, about special interests that they cared about.
The term "social media" didn't start to catch on until the news feed was a thing. That was the "contribution" of both Facebook and Twatter and it was a big PART of what changed everything.
The other factor was the so-called "mobile revolution."
Forums are great when you're at a keyboard. They start to lose their appeal when you are engaging using a small touch screen.
What you are describing sounds like people returning to the state of the world as it existed before social media. Where people come together around common interests and values instead of using the news feed where you get fire-hozed with random shit that "the algorithm" thinks might trigger you into engaging with it.
Except now it's all on Facebook and it's incredibly hard to leave Facebook, because all communications with any type of group happens on Facebook. I have friends who can't leave Facebook, because their kids soccer team holds them hostage. Leave Facebook and we'll kill your child's social life. I can't even join the parents group for my child's school, almost no one else will do it, because it takes time, so they are lacking parents, but it is coordinated on Facebook.
I used to organise playtime for toddlers once a week, no one else wanted to do, but the kids loved it. Everyone was used to everything being organised via Facebook, where I don't have an account. So the communication was done by someone else in the umbrella organisation for all local sports, gymnastics, e-sport etc. More than once I showed up to get everything ready only to learn that the space was booked for something else that day, being cleaned or renovated. Everyone else had been informed, expect me, the guy who was suppose to be in charge of the damn thing, because the organisation had no real website or mailing list to speak of and just expected everyone to be on Facebook.
Everything is on f-ing Facebook, Sports, clubs, hobbies, reselling, announcements of everything local, and only on Facebook. The only exception is professional meetups, which Linkedin will happily inform you about two weeks after the meetup, stupid, brain dead, algorithmically power "news" feed.
I want mailing-lists and Usenet, but everyone else want a mobile app and apparently Facebook.
My only counter-argument, and it's not even a counter-argument really, is that this is a fact of life that exists with or without Facebook.
My personal pet peeve is that I don't want to own a mobile phone at all. Not even a dumb phone and not even a landline. If I find myself in an emergency without the ability to dial 911 that's a risk I'm willing to take on a personal level. I just don't want a phone because I find the idea of a noise making device that can interrupt me at unexpected times to be a crime against humanity. But more and more essential services like banking are assuming that people have smart phones. My bank would deny services to me if I didn't even have a landline, since they require a phone number tied to their account records. My work assumes that people not only have their own smart phone but are willing to install authenticator apps for MFA etc. And my workplace is not alone.
If it's not Facebook that "everyone" is using that leaves minority opinions wishing for an alternative, it's something else.
But when a Presidential candidate (who will pick up roughly half the popular vote) is openly spreading social media misinformation, and the owner of Twitter is offering million dollar lotteries to influence the vote, it's fair to say enough people "buy it".
I have a pet theory as to why social media causes many people to feel like it's draining them, and why I avoid news on social media like the plague ... I also tend to mute or silence people that share political content (regardless of partisan affiliation).
Social media, unless you are trying to build a business, is ultimately offering the service of entertainment.
Even if you use Twitter or Facebook as your news aggregator, unless you're engaged in some kind of productive and time-scoped research project, you're doing this on your leisure time.
That means that you just got done work, or you're on a break, or you finally got the kids to sleep or finished all of your household chores and you're now in a position where you can "enjoy" a bit of leisure time.
Which means that you approach social media PRE-drained. You're already tired and you're looking for cute cat memes when what should happen ... you get hit with a rage-bait headline, or one of those douche bags that vote differently from you just posted an opinion about a controversial topic that you have very strong feelings about.
We (on HN) all know that the algorithm is trying to promote what gets engagement, and anything that provokes a strong emotional reaction is likely to trigger engagement.
My thesis is that people turn to social media when they are already in an emotional state that is incredibly inappropriate for engaging with "serious" topics on a rational level.
So everyone just gets angrier and angrier at each other and you leave social media feeling even more exhausted than you were before you signed on looking for entertainment to spend your precious leisure time with.
And then you realize that you just wasted that short precious time that you needed to use for relaxation ... and if you don't do anything to rectify it then your stress levels just gradually creep up, your sleep starts to suffer, you might start to compensate with stress eating or consuming more alcohol or cannabis than is healthy and it just spirals.
This is what Andrew Sullivan was getting at. People should worry themselves with information that actually concerns and impacts their real lives. All else is entertainment. If it stops being entertaining and starts being anxiety-inducing, stop consuming it.
This conversation we're having is a bit meta, but it's also "real", to me. We both considered Cal Newport's stance, Matt Green shared some thoughts about it, and Chris Weekly responded to it. Those are real people interacting in a potentially useful way. Being "addicted" to ideas and conversations is not necessarily unhealthy. /$.02
I have Instagram and TikTok installed because both of my partners send me things from them that made them think of me, and in this way, and only this way, they are relevant and nurturing to my existence. That said, I never engage with them outside of that context, because it's just an endless barrage of vacuous bullshit, as are the rest, with TikTok personally, I think, being the largest firehose of stupid, worthless, intellectually bankrupt, pointless shit ever constructed by mankind. Holy fuck. Like they're all bad, but TikTok... it's just the modern social media apparatus refined and polished to a mirror shine. Takes absolutely no effort to engage with, and if you're sufficiently numb to outside stimulus, you will scroll it for literal hours. If social media is a drug, TikTok is black-tar heroin.
> Those are real people interacting in a potentially useful way. Being "addicted" to ideas and conversations is not necessarily unhealthy.
Agree! Addiction is compulsive use and the need to continually engage. My HN use is subject to a max of 15m a day with a browser extension that enforces it. I can at least try to curb it from blossoming into something more disruptive.
As someone who hasn't had a social media presence for most of my adult life, and happy about that, I'm now seeing the downsides. I don't have Ivy League connections like some of my peers. Social media may be the only way I could build a network like the one they cultivated in university.
Ultimately, the act of winning at social media seems a bit too subordinate to me.
In that way social network is more meritocratic, as many people have come from very humble backgrounds and succeeded with skill and charisma.
I simply wasn't able to meet those kinds of people as a mid 20s person transferring to a commuter university from a community college.
Existing wealth likely helps, but even the poor kids with scholarships have better outcomes at those universities.
With a small local business, social media gives an audience. If you're selling anything visually captivating, it performs well in these spaces. We sell cut flowers on the side, so…
I don't ask these questions out of support of Instagram or Facebook, but I stop in there regularly because I don't know to learn a little bit about the greater community around me. My life is busy enough with work/family.
The cost of all this is being exposed to a lot of attention bait and I honestly don't like how I feel using it sometimes. But we've built up the social media ecosystem as a pillar of society at this point.
I subscribed to my local NHPR newsletter that tells me local events. There is also local news, newspaper, or radio.
He just uses his wife's account.
Imagine, there are people who don't care that much besides their family/friends circle. Maybe some newspaper/-site from time to time, but why cope with all the other stuff too all the time? Life goes on too if one doesn't know abou the latest stuff.
Imagine there were hundreds or thousands of year of humanity you didn't know how your neighbour is except you walked there.
At least that's fine for me. I don't miss social media (besides HN), and I don't miss anything.