[HN Gopher] Reasons to Quit Social Media
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Reasons to Quit Social Media
Author : durmonski
Score : 275 points
Date : 2021-09-22 13:47 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (durmonski.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (durmonski.com)
| spentrent wrote:
| #3: Your old-ass relatives are on Facebook and they want to see
| your kids.
|
| Def feel a validation dopamine fix from engagement...but it's not
| the only factor.
|
| (This is why I love Tinybeans and hope it rockets. It's like
| Instagram but for sharing family pics.)
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Funny that you can join Tinybeans through FB. They say they
| don't sell your data, but I couldn't figure out the
| monetization strategy.
| not2b wrote:
| This article seems to miss that a number of people use groups on
| social media to organize activities in real life and keep in
| touch with family, and the nontechnical friends and family aren't
| up to the task of building their own solutions for this. For
| these uses it isn't a substitute for a fulfilling life but rather
| a help. And unfortunately network effects often mean that the
| only effective option is to use a service that most people are
| on.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| > After the habit of scrolling and liking wears off, you suddenly
| find yourself in a joyful place. A quieter, calmer, less
| demanding place where you don't want to know what others are
| doing. You focus on what you want to do.
|
| But what if you _don 't_ know what you want to do?
|
| I feel like this post was written from the perspective of someone
| who already has their own life goals sorted out, and social media
| was clearly acting as an obstacle to accomplishing those well-
| defined goals, so they dropped social media.
|
| But when you're on your own, it is not a given that you have
| everything figured out and all you need to do is give yourself a
| lot of free time and just do what you want. The void that remains
| is exactly the kind that social media is designed to fill for
| many people.
|
| That kind of feeling almost legitimizes the concept of FOMO,
| because at a certain point you cannot imagine how anything you're
| doing could be more interesting than the things that other people
| are moving forward with in their lives. You want to aspire to be
| something, and looking for someone else to copy would mean you at
| least have _some_ kind of aspiration to work towards, instead of
| nothing at all.
|
| Social media is a net negative overall, but once it's out of the
| picture you have to work on yourself, and in that domain there
| are no easy answers.
| ipaddr wrote:
| That void is important because it allows you to find what you
| really want.
|
| Social media is better than drinking.
| eloff wrote:
| It's not a void though. It's a distraction.
|
| And as much as I dislike the evils that come with alcohol
| (not in a religious sense, just the problems it causes), at
| least you get out and interact with real people.
| verisimi wrote:
| "you have to work on yourself, and in that domain there are no
| easy answers."
|
| I couldn't agree more.
|
| But, if you step back, its a pretty easy resolution.. Do you
| want to be endlessly troughing at stupid cat pictures, or do
| you want to make the attempt to understand what you want, why
| you are here, and what you need to do?
|
| Most people won't take the first step, ever.
| eloff wrote:
| You won't find yourself by seeking distraction. You need to
| eliminate distractions and feel the pain of boredom, which will
| motivate you to try things.
| MonaroVXR wrote:
| >You want to aspire to be something, and looking for someone
| else to copy would mean you at least have some kind of
| aspiration to work towards, instead of nothing at all.
|
| And this were I watch athletes, cars and gave fun with the IT
| group and programming meme page.
|
| When I'm opening Facebook I'm laughing at posts. It's genuine.
|
| I can't do this in the place where I live. It's almost if
| things are flipped around. Facebook positive, real world
| negative. Very weird.
| Zababa wrote:
| Social media is what you make of it. I use twitter to
| interact with a few close friends and see nice stuff that I
| couldn't share with my family or at work. It's great! But
| like a garden, you have to protect it, and tend it. That
| means for me having a private account, following a small
| number of people, muting stuff I don't like, desactivating
| retweets I don't like, carefully picking who can follow me. I
| have no chance of making viral content with that account, and
| I don't meet many new people, but it's a tradeoff.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Social media is addictive but dangerous. I retire my username
| every couple of months or so. Internet points don't matter.
| [deleted]
| dhosek wrote:
| One of the arguments for social media is that it keeps you in
| touch with friends you've lost touch with.
|
| Except, that there's probably a good reason you've lost touch
| with a lot of those people. What Facebook showed me was how
| racist and vulgar most of the people I went to school with are.
| Better to just see them once every ten years at a reunion event
| where people are on their best behavior than to have to face it
| every day.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| While in principle I agree with so much that the author has
| said,I think they miss a large advantage of social media,at least
| for my digital life: I am an author and I use social media to
| advertise my writing. I also run across cool tech, and I share
| that. I also use Twitter as a source of links to reading material
| and open source projects.
|
| I use https://freedom.to to only allow access to social media
| during a few short pre-specified times during the day.
| m1117 wrote:
| I think the best way to quit social media is to make people more
| social in real life.
| wowaname wrote:
| Your site blocks read-only access via Tor with a CAPTCHA.
| iammisc wrote:
| Once the current regime let us go back to church, I deleted my
| Facebook. It's much better at church. Firstly, they feed me.
| Secondly, I can say what I think without being censored.
|
| It's not even that people all agree with me at church. It's that
| they treat you like a human being. Those who are unvaxxed are
| just some guy down the street, not someone who we are supposed to
| target in our hour of hate and wish death upon as the more
| uncivilized amongst the internet regularly do.
|
| I feel sorry for those who have to substitute something so vile
| for something so wholesome.
| shredprez wrote:
| If this weren't HN, I'd assume this comment is satire. Churches
| certainly aren't immune to censorship, hours of hate, death
| wishes (explicit or otherwise), or dehumanization.
|
| Social spaces are all vulnerable to the weaknesses of humanity.
| While I do think the mechanics of the medium play a role in how
| those weaknesses surface, the source is and will always be us.
| iammisc wrote:
| Absolutely, but the difference is that no one church is
| dominant in the United States. Even if we were to claim that
| Catholicism (the largest faction, although not a majority by
| any means) were the dominant one, within that church there is
| also a lot of diversity of thought. As an adult, you can
| realistically pick and choose with whom to associate at these
| churches, unlike say Twitter or Facebook where are beholden
| to whatever religion they follow.
| selykg wrote:
| Meanwhile, here you are using words like "regime" in your post
| here.
| iammisc wrote:
| What other word should I use to describe a de facto
| government of America that blatantly, and loudly, refuses to
| follow the American constitution? This is not my opinion. The
| courts have agreed with me that religious service is an
| essential activity, despite many governor's and the federal
| government's attempts to ban it. Moreover, the current
| federal regime has unequivocally said that although the
| Supreme Court itself has ruled its eviction moratoria
| illegal, it would enforce them anyway (despite the SC ruling
| unequivocally that this constituted a violation of the
| takings clause). That is a constitutonal crisis, that was
| only glossed over because the media decided it didn't exist.
|
| My use of the word regime befits the current US government.
|
| The American heritage dictionary says that regime means:
|
| A usually heavy-handed administration or group in charge of
| an organization.
|
| That is exactly what the current federal government and many
| state governments (including my own) are by the admissions of
| our own courts.
| pope_meat wrote:
| I was raised by fundamentalists, and that was not my
| experience. Wrong kind of opinions got me surrounded by elders
| who would attempt to brow beat me in to submission. Towards my
| late teens I'd spend the entire hour and a half of every Sunday
| hiding out in the kitchen/dining hall in the back of the
| building, tending to the pot of coffee, until I was old enough
| to leave and strike out on my own. I still get panic attacks at
| the idea of stepping foot in to a religious building.
| Basically, your experience is far from universal, in my
| experience.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| I think I was 14 when I figured out I could skip Sunday
| school and just wander around without getting caught. What a
| waste of perfectly good Sundays from the cradle until 16.
| Haven't been back.
| iammisc wrote:
| The nice thing about being an adult and going to church is
| that if you don't like it... you don't have to be there?
| There are many competing churches in the United States. The
| same cannot be said realistically of social media.
| SonicScrub wrote:
| As the western world secularizes, we need a replacement for the
| community fulfillment role that organized religion used to
| take. As someone who was raised religious, but no longer
| identifies as such, I find my self missing the wonderful sense
| of community that my church facilitated by bringing broad
| spectrums of different people together to achieve a higher
| purpose. I know people's mileage will vary depending on their
| specific church, and I don't intend to whitewash the toxic
| actions, or the rejection of certain groups in some churches.
| But many elements of my church were positive. The sense of
| community, the volunteering, the people genuinely caring for
| each other, and even just as a place for people to hangout. I
| consider being raised in that environment to be a net good,
| despite later being turned off the actual theology. Is there
| away we can move to a secular alternative that has the same
| level of social penetration as the church once did?
| lurker619 wrote:
| Agreed, I liked the community and bonding aspects as well.
| And I'm saying this as a first-generation immigrant who isn't
| even Christian - even though I know the church's overall
| mandate is to 'convert' people or whatever, I got a sense
| that the youth ministers at the church didn't really care -
| we all just wanted to share some good times.
| shredprez wrote:
| I think the "cosmic purpose and stakes" component of religion
| is really tough to beat, hence the enduring power of
| churches. Transposing that element into other spaces creates
| a lot of the same issues. Subtracting it eliminates the
| secret sauce that makes a church sticky.
|
| I've considered this question at length (for similar reasons
| as you), experimented once or twice, and haven't cracked it
| yet.
| andreyk wrote:
| All things in moderation!
|
| As others on here have said, I think social media use has various
| benefits - I've discovered lots of interesting papers and
| researchers on Twitter, come across life updates on FB, scroll
| through cool photos on Instagram. Yes it can be bad, so like many
| other things that can be bad, it's a matter of using it
| mindfully. This binary use/don't use mentality seems rather
| simplistic to me.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| I was reluctant but, since quitting all traditional social media
| other than imageboards I feel like my online life is much less
| toxic. Which is ironic considering the type of verbal abuse one
| is to tolerate from said websites...
| sneak wrote:
| Quitting social media is more than unfollowing: it's deleting
| your accounts on the social media services so you are
| uncontactable via them.
| OliverJones wrote:
| Here's another reason to quit social media: the lords of the
| engagement economy make money off "mimetic desire" -- off your
| envy of me and my envy of you. The more anxious they can make me
| and you about measuring up to each other, the more money they
| make.
|
| That's evil. Some might say it's demonic.
|
| Here's a writeup. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n16/john-
| lanchester/you-...
|
| (Said he, writing on the Hacker News social media network :-)
| jensensbutton wrote:
| Honestly this seems like an argument to quit everything _except_
| facebook. For me, fb is the only social media built to enhance
| relationships with your real friends.
| skadamat wrote:
| Messaging apps maybe, but Facebook? I think once FB started to
| put news and content from people you don't know alongside
| content from people you know / care about, IMO they stopped
| making this a priority
| Semaphor wrote:
| I never had to quit social media. They quit me. I loved Facebook
| and Twitter when they were new, I connected to people that were
| way outside my normal group of friends and stayed in contact with
| people I knew who moved away, sometimes passively by reading
| their posts, sometimes actively.
|
| But both platforms started actively working against that kind of
| usage. Eventually I just had to stop as they became unusable, not
| using Twitter at all anymore, and only using FB for messenger.
| mjr00 wrote:
| Same here, and same with most people I know. I'm from the
| generation that got Facebook in ~2005, when you still needed a
| university email to sign up. It was definitely helpful for
| socializing at college, especially the almighty "relationship
| status" field. Fond memories. It's useless to me now except for
| seeing friends' photos, but Instagram is better at that anyway.
|
| I imagine it's changed for the same reason loot boxes/gacha
| have taken over normal paid DLC or expansion packs: whales are
| more profitable. It's better for Facebook, Twitter, etc. if
| they have a fewer people engaging with the platform for 12
| hours per day instead of more people for less time; the highly
| engaged people are creating the content, seeing the most ads,
| and interacting with the most items on their news feed, which
| leads to a more accurate user profile and better targeted ads.
| fragmede wrote:
| > Same here, and same with most people I know.
|
| Well yeah. By definition you're no longer engaging with
| people on Facebook for the most part. People who are
| organizing events, participating in Facebook groups, posting
| memes to Facebook no longer exist to you (and vice versa).
| The contingent of people that have moved of Facebook is
| larger today, but I'd be wary of drawing conclusions based on
| "well my friends don't use it" method of gathering data. Eg
| depending on who you friends are, Snapchat is either one more
| copied Instagram feature away from failing, or the _only_
| platform they 'll ever use and couldn't be more successful.
| ImaCake wrote:
| There's a good xkcd for this one. It is worth remembering
| just how many people there are and how _big_ the world is.
| Considering this, I think it is pretty easy to find
| yourself in a group that is multiple standard deviations
| away from the mean.
|
| https://xkcd.com/2357/
| ___luigi wrote:
| I think it depends on how you use it. I find Twitter more
| useful than Linkedin.
| jader201 wrote:
| I really don't get the complaints with Twitter as a product, at
| least from my usage. But maybe that's because I've exclusively
| been using Tweetbot for several years.
|
| But it basically does exactly what I want: when someone I
| follow posts something, it shows up in my feed. Which is what
| it's been doing for years.
|
| Again, maybe this is a matter of the client, but Tweetbot lets
| me see exactly what I want, and nothing more.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| Yeah I exclusively use lists for this reason. Any time I take
| a look at my main feed or the curated psyops in the
| "Trending" column it does strike me as a horrorshow though.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Again, maybe this is a matter of the client, but Tweetbot
| lets me see exactly what I want, and nothing more.
|
| The official Twitter client allows this again now too (but
| with ads). You need to select "See latest tweets instead" at
| the top of Home.
| peakaboo wrote:
| Your wording "allows" is exactly what people dont like
| about these tech companies.
|
| They are not real authorities on the Internet. If they
| left, the internet would improve a thousand times.
| 8589934591 wrote:
| I have an account on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, and
| many more, but I don't use them actively or passively. Maybe the
| occasional browsing.
|
| On facebook I made it a point to unfollow all friends so that my
| newsfeed is blank at any point of time. When I did this initially
| a few years back I felt.. weird. But I got used to it and now I
| visit once in a while for the facebook groups. After that I don't
| end up spending time on FB. For quora after I blocked a majority
| of tags/topics, the feed was cleaner, but it got boring to be a
| passive consumer. Similarly for Twitter, I blocked a lot of
| topics/tags/people and followed a certain few which has made it
| easier to scroll twitter once in a while.
|
| I have an app (StayFree) on android which calculates the time
| spent on each app. When I see it now for the last 7 months, I see
| I have used it for 185 hours, of which 40 hours are on reddit.
| With whatsapp at 11 hours, the rest of the apps are below 8 hours
| of usage. I also have trackercontrol which blocks the trackers in
| my phone. In my browser I have ActivityWatch which shows HN is my
| most visited apart from the occasional reddit.
|
| For me, the benefits of being a part of these social media comes
| _after_ investing the time to filter and refine my experience.
| That does take time. Overall I feel my experience with social
| media has been better, I 'm able to interact with people around
| the world and learn and ask questions. I dunno if I've turned
| these evil entities (social media) into my friends.
|
| Maybe off topic, does having an account on these social media
| sites / apps on phone be harmful in any way when you don't
| consume it that much? If yes then what sort of harm does it have?
| Is it mitigated by having trackercontrol? What _evil_ happens if
| tracking my account gives these companies nothing but close to 0
| activity? Are there others like me here?
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Maybe off topic, does having an account on these social media
| sites / apps on phone be harmful in any way when you don't
| consume it that much?
|
| For me, it's not about harm to me. It's that I despise the
| business models of those companies.
|
| So I voted with my (lack of) attention because I don't want to
| be responsible for generating any revenue for those rapacious
| scumbags.
|
| I certainly don't push others to get off those platforms, but I
| choose to live my values and don't support them.
|
| It was never about trying to limit my time on such _websites_
| (those phone apps are just poorly implemented interfaces to the
| existing web platform), rather it was about what sorts of
| businesses I (don 't) wish to support.
|
| I'm glad you found your sweet spot with that. Mine is
| altogether elsewhere.
| clepto wrote:
| I have not used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc etc
| for the last 10+ years. There wasn't really an event or a moment
| where I said "I'm quitting social media", rather I just sort of
| faded out of it.
|
| I do browse Reddit and occasionally comment on something, or here
| on HN, so I still see things like Twitter posts frequently and
| keep up with things through some of those channels.
|
| When I say I don't use social media, I mean it directed more
| towards the kind of posting what I made for dinner so my friends
| can comment on it use case. I think our society is heavily
| focused on social media and it's become an integral part of
| staying informed and up to date.
|
| For that reason, I do check on certain people's Twitter from time
| to time, or look at some replies to a tweet that was linked to
| from an article or something, what's troublesome to me is that I
| can't do almost any of this without signing up. I have more of a
| problem with it in regards to Twitter, as that has seemingly
| become the nearly exclusive place for a lot of prominent
| figures(including elected officials, high profile CEOs, etc) to
| give updates. Creating this walled garden feels like an attempt
| to limit access to information that is intended to be publicly
| available, and at this point my unwillingness to create an
| account is stemming more from my disdain for this practice than
| my desire to "quit social media".
| [deleted]
| taytus wrote:
| TL;DR
|
| You don't need a reason. Just quit.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| " We persuade our minds that liking pictures and joining virtual
| groups gives us a sense of belonging. Connection with others"
|
| Except in many cases its not persuasion. Joining groups actually
| does give us these things. My gf is part of "bay area moms" group
| and the amount of useful tips she gets out of participating in
| that is significant. Or "bay area hikers" for me. Also, if i want
| to sell something, I hire facebook to find a buyer for my old
| ipad or iphone.
|
| Social media has caught on to the jobs framework. Jack Dorsey
| references it directly on Twitter earnings calls. He says we need
| to fill more jobs for more people. He constantly asks what can
| people hire twitter for?
|
| I think to reduce social media to some of the crappy jobs it does
| serve artificially diminishes what it can be.
| dfmooreqqq wrote:
| > I think to reduce social media to some of the crappy jobs it
| does serve artificially diminishes what it can be.
|
| I agree completely with this. The article takes two bad parts
| of social media and assumes that those are the only uses for
| it. You've mentioned more. There's also keeping connected in a
| group context with family and friends that are scattered across
| the globe. I have an active family group in which my family
| shares pictures of nephews/nieces, vacation, and more - all
| stuff that helps keep us close when we can't see each other for
| long periods of time. I have an active friend group with my
| college roommates that does the same - when one of them
| discovered that his spouse was having an affair, we could all
| support him together.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I've yet to find a better tool for managing and communicating
| with local interest groups. For example, my local pinball group
| uses it to announce events, manage RSVPs, advertise machines
| for sale, and just chat about pinball. Meetup.com was a thing,
| but was more expensive and not quite as good of a product. This
| replaced a mailing list, but FB is frankly better at this,
| especially when it comes to managing events.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| IME Facebook's interface is horrible and full of unnecessary
| cruft. Couldn't you just make a subreddit? Reddit is so much
| easier and cleaner IMO.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I don't believe it supports calendars/events for
| subreddits. You can "announce" and event, but it's not the
| same.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| You're right. There are other calendar solutions, but
| obviously using multiple services is not a clean
| solution.
|
| I'd still think about using a subreddit + Notion, but
| that's because I despise FB.
| milirera wrote:
| Imagine how our life will look like with the extra hours we spend
| on social media? Maybe we can become productive enough and finish
| something that we always wanted.
| EasyTiger_ wrote:
| Firmly believe what's ruined social media is special interest
| groups and the rest parading as people like you and me. My
| evidence for this is the overnight take-over of r/politics in
| 2016 and the subsequent introduction of extremely divisive
| talking points which eventually transformed it into the glorified
| hate-site it is today. YES I'm bitter, Reddit before then got me
| through some tough times.
| poisonarena wrote:
| I also noticed this. I recommend /r/geopolitics its heavily
| modded to prevent this kind of stuff
| [deleted]
| bserge wrote:
| Well, judging by the extremely racist and most often dumb as
| hell /r/Europe, the racist and self-hating r/ukpolitics and the
| racist, smug and self-important r/germany, it's people who
| ruined social media. And the Internet, for that matter. Let in
| too many idiots and everything turns into Idiocracy.
| qwertox wrote:
| How odd, I find r/Europe mostly pretty wholesome and somehow
| generally with a unifying spirit which I don't find
| elsewhere, specially when a specific topic arises and many
| posts start showing up, dealing with that topic from the
| perspective of each country. And r/Germany often has very
| nice pictures making me wish to go on weekend trips, also
| sometimes interesting topics and topics helpful to
| foreigners. I don't really see any other racism than then
| normal one which you find in the non-internet media, like
| Greece/Italy hating on Germans and stuff like that, but in
| r/Europe somehow this is understood and dealt with as
| something which is a given and nobody sees a reason to expand
| on it, to turn it into a topic. It's somehow accepted like a
| cliche where fun of the stereotypization is made, sometimes
| with a bit of humor. I wonder how this is on Facebook.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| While it is not conducive to monetizing a platform, maybe we
| should have forums which are arbitrarily limited to a
| manageable number of people. r/politics claims to have 7.7M
| subscribers. That defies common sense. And 30K people online
| right now. Even if these numbers are inflated, they're
| completely nuts. It seems inevitable that when you put that
| many people in a room, the crazy ones take over.
| bserge wrote:
| I actually entertain a similar idea often. A service with a
| _limited_ number of customers /clients/subscribers.
|
| Enough for the developer(s) to make a living and provide
| quality.
|
| It very much goes against common business sense, though.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Right along with my idea to make a Facebook-alike that
| has no tracking, no ads, etc, but costs $20/year. Another
| dead end business idea.
| hi5eyes wrote:
| Mobile-posting, and general acceptance of the internet into
| mainstream culture; ruined the internet. Eternal September.
| Maybe recency bias (?) bc my reddit acc is 10 years old, my
| original hn account is little more than half that
| jhpankow wrote:
| The eternal September continues.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| Maybe I'm not the typical user here, but I don't have most of the
| problems described in this post. I use Twitter somewhat heavily,
| but I just use it to post jokes, and mostly follow people who use
| Twitter the same way.
|
| It's definitely a time-sink, and to some degree the "fake sense
| of belonging", so I'm being less social irl. But I don't think I
| can blame the second point entirely on Twitter, and I think I'm
| ok with the tradeoff of Twitter being a time-sink in exchange for
| the entertainment it provides me.
|
| So imo, the solution to around 30% of these problems is just not
| to follow the "Jim just purchased a BMW" people.
| anaphor wrote:
| They're presenting a bit of a false dichotomy. You can use
| social media and still be sane, you just have to have some
| amount of self awareness so the troubling aspects don't affect
| you as much.
| whiddershins wrote:
| Social media allows lobbyist groups and foreign powers (not to
| mention domestic intelligence agencies) to continually modulate
| public discussion, opinion, and perception. The Overton Window is
| completely influenceable by these groups.
|
| What a truly terrible idea.
| tarr11 wrote:
| Isn't HN social media?
| Torwald wrote:
| Depends on how you define the term.
|
| Historically, the term came up in the verge of Web 2.0 and was
| distinct from other social online media in that a specific
| software was the basis for each respective SN.
|
| So for example Twitter is SN because you had the app on the
| phone that was only Twitter so that was SN. But an online forum
| was not, because everybody could obtain the same software and
| run a forum.
|
| So by that defition HN is social media.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| HN is at it's essence a custom subreddit. And Reddit is
| definitely social media.
|
| Social: majority of time is spent reading people's commentary,
| many who are just a slightly obscured version of the rest of
| their social media identity, and sometimes responding in
| dialogue. Even though it's pseudonymous it doesn't mean it's
| asocial.
|
| Media: Basically what all the links are
| Igelau wrote:
| It doesn't have any networking features as far as I can tell.
|
| If HN was ever directly instrumental in getting someone laid,
| you might have an argument, but I'm going to say "no".
|
| If it had direct messaging and follow/subscribe features, it
| absolutely would be, and I say these are things that make
| Reddit social media while HN is only a forum.
| CannoloBlahnik wrote:
| Yes, Hacker News and Reddit are both social media.
| fullshark wrote:
| I think I agree, they are media providers that publish
| headlines/news feeds based on user engagement.
| betenoire wrote:
| Isn't it a forum? It doesn't have friends, following, asking
| for your contacts, etc. I guess the line is subjective, this is
| just a plain old forum, managed very well, imo.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I would not consider it a forum in the sense of an old-
| fashioned phpBB community, because it has the concept of
| moving people's contributions to more visible places based on
| how many people upvote them. In the way I understand the
| term, a forum would only rank posts and topics based on when
| people choose to contribute, and nothing more.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Aren't forums social media?
| betenoire wrote:
| Would you say ALL forums are social media?
|
| Consider that we have commenters in here saying they don't
| use social media... So... Kinda, but certainly not in
| everyone's mind apparently. I feel some je ne sais quoi
| about the terminology. There is something different, I
| dunno
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| For what little it's worth, I've been online since Compuserve
| and personal local BBSs...
|
| I absolutely consider HN to be social media.
| slantyyz wrote:
| > For what little it's worth, I've been online since
| Compuserve and personal local BBSs...
|
| > I absolutely consider HN to be social media.
|
| I've been online for the same period of time, and I
| absolutely do not consider HN to be social media.
|
| Sure, there are some commonalities like upvotes, but I
| consider (my opinion only) these to be important criteria
| of something "being" social media:
|
| a) Most importantly, a friends/connections list, or
| "followers"
|
| b) Being able to see who liked/disliked posts
|
| c) The "feed" being personalized/targeted
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| Well, the ethos of how long we've been on the net isn't
| quite as important as our rationale.
|
| I feel that the sine qua non of "social media" is user
| generated content conducted between specific users:
|
| tied to specific accounts, where users have one-to-one
| public conversations and those conversations are
| foregrounded as the site's content.
|
| I don't agree that knowing who has up/down voted a
| comment is as fundamental as the fact that the sites'
| content -is- the comment.
|
| And while the system doesn't foreground user accounts, I
| have often found it helpful to look at a user's
| contributions to better understand their commentary.
|
| Finally, the fact that it's entirely possible to
| implement a "friends" list or a "feed" based on search
| results (and that this would apply to the foregrounded
| content of the site) seems to me to indicate that there's
| not just a social aspect to the content here, but that
| this is, in fact a social media site.
|
| I mean, I could search user reviews on IMBD, amazon, or
| the wiki, but I've never found that to be in line with
| how I use those sites... here the conversations are the
| entire reason I use the site. That user generated content
| is the whole thing for me.
| slantyyz wrote:
| HN is social, and media, but I don't consider it social
| media in the same way as FB, Instagram, Twitter, and
| their ilk.
|
| Let me put it another way, to me, one critical defining
| feature of a "social media" site: when you register, one
| of the first tasks you do is to identify _people_ you
| know (or want to know) so they can be somehow linked to
| you as a friend or someone you 're following.
| betenoire wrote:
| D) no notifications
| fjabre wrote:
| Yes it is particularly social because it has the concept of
| Karma. It has tamed it by policy but vanity can never be
| tamed outright. It will always exist in some form on these
| networks and HN/Reddit style forums capitalize on humans'
| vanity by appealing to it through Karma.
|
| Thus it ticks up the social-ness score a bit for sites like
| HN as opposed to some old forums like one would find on
| Yahoo or used to find on Compuserv.
|
| Karma and the wisdom of crowds gives way to herd mentality
| and vanity. It is what drives the form of discussion on
| these sites.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Is karma the line where the social-ness is drawn? I mean,
| I've been on here for a while and haven't even recognized
| anyone in any meaningful capacity by their handle. 100%
| of my interactions on here have been with strangers that
| have and will remain as strangers, as I am also a
| stranger to them.
| fjabre wrote:
| There is no line for online communities. They are all
| social to some extent. Karma simply makes them more so.
|
| We are no longer strangers. Social-ness has been engaged
| ;)
| betenoire wrote:
| Mind sharing why? Is it the features or something else?
|
| When I think back 20 years to forums, HN feels most like
| those to me. It feels nothing like what most people call
| "social media"
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Out of curiosity, do you condider Reddit to be social
| media?
|
| To me, HN is just a well-maintained subreddit
| (pseudonymous, karma-based voting system, recency bias,
| etc.)
| betenoire wrote:
| Hmm... Yes. But I can't make a cogent argument why lol.
|
| 13 year club here, the Reddit I think of is probably not
| aligned with what Reddit thinks of itself anymore.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| I feel that the sine qua non of "social media" is user
| generated content conducted between specific users:
|
| tied to specific accounts, where users have one-to-one
| public conversations and those conversations are
| foregrounded as the site's content.
|
| I do feel that message forums/ usenet/ bbs/ etc meet
| those criteria in various ways and I do consider them
| forms of social media.
|
| I know that this seems overly broad to some people (and
| they have good reasons even if I don't agree with them in
| the end). I don't think "social media" is a pejorative in
| the way a lot of folks use the term... I mean, sure, HN
| deals with a lot of the horrible parts of what can be
| done with that media in healthier ways than, say, myspace
| did.
|
| But just because HN makes it harder to track specific
| users doesn't mean that it can't be done... people very
| much do have specific accounts here, and I have often
| looked up past commentary these users have generated to
| get more context about their points.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Best question. Declined to join or participate any social media
| from the beginning. HN is absolutely is on the spectrum of
| social media, but more like a well moderated usenet group. It's
| a well run decoupled internet comment section, sort of like a
| fat tailed reddit.
|
| Without pictures, friends, followers, alerts, verified
| identities, personalization and emphasis on personal branding,
| an ad-driven revenue model, I wouldn't call it social media. If
| someone asked for my "social media accounts," I would not
| include HN in that, however, a subpoena might treat it
| differently. Security clearance people might think that as
| well. The fig-leaf pseudonymity provides some modesty, honesty,
| and civility for actual discourse, where social media is about
| status signalling, and not much else.
| [deleted]
| zzzbra wrote:
| I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to
| figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it's
| not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm.
|
| Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute
| harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a
| powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation
| and moderation.
|
| My vote for what's more harmful is the scroll. I have a web
| extension that just removes the scroll on my Facebook feed. A few
| months after setting it up I all but stopped using Facebook,
| checking in once maybe every two months to visit folks
| individually. I haven't done this for Twitter or IG, but then the
| quality of my main feed is such that I don't want to remove it
| outright and want that aggregation of content, somehow.
|
| I think that scrolling in general is harmful as a UX pattern, but
| the obvious alternative of pagination could create all kinds of
| complexities around deep-linking and fragmentation of content.
| All the same I'd love to see more platforms adopt this
| intentional cap on content associated with a given URL. It turns
| my engagement with content online from scanning to actual
| reading.
| suketk wrote:
| The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0], but
| pedants don't love that.)
|
| Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted
| directions and induce FOMO through overchoice. If you can
| eliminate them, these services magically become tools rather
| than escapes.
|
| [0] https://suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful
| skinkestek wrote:
| > The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0],
| but pedants don't love that.)
|
| > Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in
| unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice.
|
| Isn't the problem more one of open-ended feeds rather than
| feeds generally?
|
| I can live fine with my RSS feed for example: nothing gets in
| there if I don't actually put it there.
|
| My Facebook and Twitter feeds however are full of this person
| liked this, reshared that and commented there. So full that I
| cannot finish it ever.
|
| Of course my addiction is HN, I frequently forget to visit
| Facebook for weeks (booooring maybe especially after people
| stopped posting what they did and started just posting
| motivational posters and memes) and I only visit Twitter as
| some kind of duty (it is one of the dumbest ideas that ever
| got traction IMO so I don't exactly enjoy it).
| [deleted]
| beckman466 wrote:
| > it's not clear what specifically within social media
| constitutes harm.
|
| it's the fact that they're undemocratic black box algorithms
| that make the participation very one directional (explained
| below). add to that the centralization and non-
| interoperability/walled garden aspects, as well as platforms
| focusing on generating profit instead of helping us make deeper
| connections, and you've got a big dangerous stew.
|
| the most constructive content doesn't actually surface; things
| that generate 'viralness' do. there are also few tools to
| individually manage this social data or build any sort of
| coherent framing/narrative. in other words: profit-seeking
| social media platforms are a straightjacketed collective stream
| of consciousness; they are undemocratically 'governed' spaces
| injected with ads that come with no useful tools to organize
| and structure information about the world around us.
|
| "oh but that's not what social media is designed for!"
|
| exactly, the medium is the message. by logging into a third
| party facebook server to connect with friends and people i want
| to follow, i am constrained by Zuck's rules and Zuck's black
| box 'social media' functions. going back to a peer to peer
| setup by using the ideas of bittorrent's DHTs combined with
| git's version control, like the holochain framework implements,
| seems to me to be a way to actually get at the root of this
| problem: it allows us to see the immense overlaps between
| today's SV platforms to then be able to quickly decommodify
| humanity's communication and coordination technology, by
| publicly sharing and collaboratively improving the underlying
| functions of our networked apps.
|
| although in very early stages, these projects like IPFS, DAT,
| SSB, and especially holochain [1], which allows for a full
| distribution of social media functions (and more:
| http://valueflo.ws), and which has forking and complete
| distribution mechanics built into it from the start, will allow
| a powerful new wave of dweb application
| evolution/experimentation.
|
| [1] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-
| applicati...
| syshum wrote:
| >>Is it the like/upvote mechanism?
|
| Yes. This is what created the validation feedback loop, and
| what generally causes the social harm
|
| The like button, and the variations on it is IMO the biggest
| problem with social media
|
| Forums and other discussion boards did not have these problems
| and while you could have "flame war" that involved actual
| argumentation back and forth not 1000's of passive visitors
| choosing to upvote, or downvote on a post with no argumentation
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| The pagination on HN is one of its better UX decisions. Same
| with turning off auto-loading when you reach the end of the
| front page of Reddit (but that's not the default).
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Why does HN display a number next to a submission ?
| tait wrote:
| Good points. On the other hand, I couldn't fit your whole
| comment on one screen. I did scroll down to tap reply. Please
| stand by while I go recover.
| kkcorps wrote:
| I feel the same is true for me as well. I wasn't aware of this
| extension though. For now, what I do is if I see myself getting
| addicted to an app, I just uninstall/block it for 2-3 weeks.
| After that even if I install it back, the craving is mostly
| gone. It does come back though in 3-4 months. Facebook was
| boring for me so never used it again after uninstalling.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I'm not sure it's anything mechanical. Facebook is a wretched
| hive of scum and villainy for sociocultural inertial reasons.
| You may as well ask why Detroit is a crappier place to live
| than Madison. Facebook succumbed early on to echo chambers,
| disinformation campaigns, and marketing of snake oil and
| pyramid schemes. Hacker News set rules and followed them
| consistently, moderating the discussion in accordance with
| those rules.
|
| Maybe for a better example, just look at Reddit. Something like
| AskHistorians or SilphRoad for Pokemon Go are terrific
| communities full of great information and productive
| discussion, whereas many other subs are as bad or worse than
| Facebook. That is in spite of exactly the same interface
| technology. The difference is culture.
|
| If Facebook has a design problem, it's not having any sort of
| guiding principles other than engagement. The purely
| algorithmic curation isn't really curation. It doesn't create a
| culture at all. It just creates addiction. Infinite scroll is
| in service of that, but it doesn't create it. In fact, the
| mobile reader I use for Hacker News has infinite scroll and it
| doesn't make the site worse.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Facebook was PAID to carry disinformation campaigns. It's
| just another sort of advertising to a certain way of
| thinking, and they probably figured they were acting like a
| common carrier and waited to see if counter-disinformation
| campaigns coughed up any money to retort.
|
| I don't think it was happy times at Facebook when they
| figured out what they'd collaborated with, but it put them on
| the defensive. And Mark Zuckerberg isn't really wired to play
| defense. He is not a natural diplomat.
| starkd wrote:
| I think many definitely get obsessed with the need to
| like/upvote on here as a means to register their response. It
| seems to detract from the information you get out of other
| comments. Although it does help to hone in on which comments
| are most helpful.
| intrasight wrote:
| I find scrolling easy to avoid on FB as I just click on the
| notifications icon, and there are usually only notifications
| that are of interest - and a relatively small number.
|
| Also I use FBP plugin that let's me filter things out on a very
| fine-granular level, and I am very aggressive with filtering.
| danans wrote:
| > Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute
| harmful social media in that case.
|
| The way I've started to look at it is that all social media has
| some harmful and some beneficial aspects, but the nexus of
| identity-based (vs topic-based like HN) social media with
| upvote/like functionality is the most problematic for people
| struggling with identity and self worth. Even as someone
| established enough not to struggle with self-worth, I avoid
| that type of social media completely.
|
| Topic based social media with clear and enforced guidelines for
| content seems to have the least bad trade-off between the
| harmful and the beneficial.
|
| Of course no social media property is exclusively one or the
| other, but the design and operation of the service strongly
| influences the direction in which it goes.
| tessierashpool wrote:
| the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases,
| because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise.
|
| but it's also definitely _beneficial_ in places like Stack
| Overflow, where there 's a logical reason to assume that the
| most popular answer might have _any correlation at all_ with
| the best answer.
|
| the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place
| like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there.
| but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top
| in a forum where racist people just share opinions.
|
| and this malicious example is just chosen for clarity. even
| in a more innocuous context, if there is no absolute correct
| answer and nobody is testing the answers for accuracy,
| upvotes often do more harm than good, and upvote sites are
| almost by definition groupthink factories, when they don't
| pertain to verifiable claims that are quickly tested (which
| is what makes upvotes helpful on a site like Stack Overflow).
| danans wrote:
| > but the most racist answer will always be at or near the
| top in a forum where racist people just share opinions
|
| This has the effect, however, of making it clear that the
| forum itself is mostly racist, rather than masquerading as
| not being that.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use
| cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise.
|
| > but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack
| Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the
| most popular answer might have any correlation at all with
| the best answer.
|
| > the best answer will always be at or near the top in a
| place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is
| useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at
| or near the top in a forum where racist people just share
| opinions.
|
| The obvious answer to this however is not to remove the
| very useful upvote button everywhere but to
|
| - stop frequenting racist forums,
|
| - if they are actually racist, tell law enforcement (where
| applicable)
|
| isn't it?
| BrightGlow wrote:
| I was lurking here last year during the racial justice
| protests, and before that during the James Damore
| controversy. I still saw casually racist/sexist posts get
| upvoted fairly often. A discriminatory argument can be
| stated well and seem reasonable on its face, but still be
| discriminatory. It's the kind that moderators here are
| too lenient against and won't really want to delete as
| long as there isn't a pattern of it, because it could
| just be an well-meaning person suffering an error in
| judgement. I don't know how our world is supposed to move
| past that, or if it's even possible. I would have
| probably been a little less disappointed in the state of
| humanity if some of those posts had been flagged, because
| there were a lot of them across the whole internet.
| genewitch wrote:
| Is being racist against the law? Why would someone tell
| law enforcement?
| vadfa wrote:
| Racism can be considered hate speech, which is illegal in
| places with no right to free speech such as most
| countries in Europe.
|
| For example: https://www.report-
| it.org.uk/reporting_internet_hate_crime
| wowaname wrote:
| I don't know why you're getting downvoted when you're
| correct here.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack
| Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the
| most popular answer might have any correlation at all with
| the best answer.
|
| Sure, there's correlation but the correlation always breaks
| down whenever anyone needs it most.
|
| If you ask an easy question you could have just googled or
| read the man pages to get a decent answer is what's
| upvoted. But few people really need help answering those
| questions.
|
| If you ask a hard question potentially involving nuances
| and situational constraints or if you ask a very specific
| question requiring expertise you will get the same naive
| surface level answers highly up-voted and the one guy who
| actually knows your question has his answer downvoted to
| oblivion by the people who know just enough to be
| dangerous.
|
| If you aren't familiar with the subject matter in question
| it's even worse because a guy who knows what he's talking
| about answering your hard question and getting downvoted
| for it is indistinguishable from a guy who has no idea what
| he's talking about giving a wrong answer to an easy
| question.
|
| Of course the end result is that everyone who knows WTF
| they're talking about contributes minimally if at all.
|
| Stack Overflow is better than most subreddits because you
| can link a man page or doc but the more a subject requires
| subjective judgement the more it displays the pattern I
| described above.
| atlgator wrote:
| Hacker News IS harmful because there's no established
| standard for what should receive an upvote or downvote (>500
| karma can downvote). This leads to people just upvoting
| things they agree with and downvoting things they don't. It's
| all groupthink. Alternatively, all well thought out comments
| should receive upvotes (despite personal cognitive
| dissonance) and inflammatory, trolling, or irrelevant
| comments should be downvoted. That would support diversity of
| thought and ideas.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I'm confused, isn't established standard too nebulous a
| concept to be "needs to be upvoted", there is just too
| diverse of an opinion on what what is a "well thought out
| comment" and one person's "inflammatory" comment could be
| another person's "well thought out comment", the cognitive
| dissonance is upstream of all the voting patterns and there
| can be no set standard except organic, binary up/down
| voting. I think the ideal is that on average the local
| maxima (upvote groupthink) eventually is balanced by local
| minima (downvote groupthink)...
|
| but I would like to see how an established standard could
| be set for what should or shouldn't be upvoted?
| atlgator wrote:
| You're right. I was just offering one scenario where it
| might work, but even then there are people that think
| they are the sole arbiter of moral thought and speech
| they disagree with is akin to violence, etc. I didn't
| want to get into all that. Sufficed to say
| upvote/downvote is not a great system.
| mnsc wrote:
| Hacker news is not social media. I have never recognized a
| user/username in between two sessions. And I would probably
| miss the mythical PG if he showed up in a thread. I don't
| know his handle anyways. Sometimes I'm made aware that a
| relevant "celebrity" is present in the thread but that's when
| people act obviously star struck like "oh thank you for that
| seminal paper back in '15".
|
| So nothing social going on here, just weird/interesting
| discussions between persons x, y, z, i, j and k.
|
| Edit: I just noticed that some usernames are green. I don't
| know what that signifies and I do not want to know.
| wowaname wrote:
| >some usernames are green
|
| New user.
|
| >I do not want to know
|
| Too bad :)
| buckyfull wrote:
| It isn't? It seems to me like it is. We have groups of
| people discussing issues in these online forums. Isn't that
| social media? And although we don't seem to have "clout
| mechanics" for users, we do have the upvote/downvote
| mechanics for posts and comment count per post. Admittedly
| I quickly scan all posts for these numbers to help me
| decide where to click.
|
| So it seems like what can make social media a positive or a
| negative in a person's life is pretty complex. What each
| person brings to their interactions with the media varies a
| lot and the ways mechanics are used in the different sites
| and apps vary a lot.
|
| So it seems like a lot social is going on here on this
| site. The social group here is responsible for all of the
| content, I think? Right? It wouldn't be the same if it were
| posts selected by an elite group and we were just allowed
| to comment on them.
|
| So I think the article's suggestion to "quit social media"
| is too simplistic and lacks the nuance it would need to be
| helpful advice.
| rovolo wrote:
| How can you distinguish identity-based from topic-based
| social media? Doesn't your identity influence which topics
| you're interested in, and don't the topics which interest you
| form your identity? This forum says in the guidelines to
| submit "Anything that _good hackers_ would find interesting.
| " That reads to me like an identity-based forum.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| danans wrote:
| I think you are misunderstanding my use of the the phrase
| "identity-based". What I mean is that the primary entity
| around which conversation and content revolve on HN is the
| topic (from URLs or questions), not the individual user's
| identity.
|
| Topic based forums are a thing. I'm a member of a paid
| (gasp!) forum for high-performance building methods.
| psyc wrote:
| Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, are primarily networks
| of personal (or corporate) identities. The centerpiece is
| the user. HN and Reddit are primarily ranked lists of
| interesting URLs. I don't know one user from another, apart
| from a handful of prolific users, and half the accounts
| start with "throwaway". (It wasn't so in the beginning, but
| even then there was no reason to go to someone's user
| page.)
| MattKimber wrote:
| I think the problem is not necessarily things such as likes,
| upvotes, shares or other features but platforms which don't
| consider Goodhart's law when they introduce them.
|
| Large Reddits tend toward bland and repetitive cookie-cutter
| content not solely because Reddit has a voting mechanism, but
| because the site's structure allows that mechanism to be highly
| vulnerable to karma farming. There are many casual users who
| don't notice the content is low-effort or repetitive, special
| interest subs make it easy to target posts, and the volume is
| too high for moderators to handle (and many will have a "we
| can't delete things which are popular and within the rules,
| even if we don't like them" policy).
|
| Facebook (and YouTube, and to some extent Twitter) are a weird
| branch of that. The application of Goodhart's law wasn't
| initially to the users but to the platforms themselves. I have
| little doubt that initially they started with an altruistic
| observation that people spent more time on the site if they
| tended to see content from their most entertaining friends, but
| then someone realised seeing bad takes from a stranger was even
| more engaging and so you should see that instead. People
| realise they get more visibility for being controversial, and
| again there is no real moderation for this, so we have even
| more of a tyre fire than the blandness which upvote-driven
| sites tend toward.
|
| (Twitter at least still offer tools to curate and remove
| algorithmic ranking from your feed, even if they try to nudge
| users away from them. That doesn't protect more popular users
| from the "trolling brings me attention" culture elsewhere on
| the site, though.)
|
| I think HN is less affected by karma farming due to having a
| broader range of topics, active moderation of repetitive
| content and perhaps most importantly a relatively small
| community with a strong appreciation that the upvote should be
| used sparingly for interesting and unique content. Also the
| text and link based format helps - this might change quickly if
| e.g. HN allowed posting photos of vintage computer equipment,
| which could disproportionately gain upvotes compared to
| insightful long-format articles despite being easier to
| produce.
| qsort wrote:
| In my opinion the main differentiator is whether or not the
| platform's userbase is more or less like the population at
| large.
|
| This is important for two reasons:
|
| - If a website is full of normies - sorry for the word, feel
| free to suggest a more appropriate one - then mainstream
| cultural references, information sources, opinions and so on
| are bound to dominate the scene. This makes the community far
| less interesting, because mainstream sources necessarly aim
| for the lowest common denominator. Those communities also
| look very similar to each other, as though they were TV
| channels.
|
| - The community is prone to segment itself along the same
| lines that divide us in real life. Language, politics,
| education, etc.
|
| As harsh as it sounds, I have come to think that being
| exclusionary in at least some dimensions is necessary for any
| kind of community to be interesting.
|
| > I think HN is less affected by karma farming
|
| A very underrated feature that I have come to really like is
| how positive scores are hidden for everyone except yourself.
| That a comment is flagged or at -4 is useful signal (I might
| disagree with the signal but it's clear that other commenters
| _really_ disliked that), but on the other hand not knowing
| whether a comment sits at +1 or +20 forces you to think about
| what the comment is actually saying.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >That a comment is flagged or at -4 is useful signal
|
| Knowing that something is a) spot on but ideologically
| inconvenient b) wrong doesn't really help if you don't have
| the subject matter familiarity to already know what's right
| and wrong. It just reduces your options to a binary choice.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| It does a good job of saying, "That comment isn't a good
| fit for this community." You may decide you don't care;
| you may decide to adjust your tone or approach; you may
| decide HN isn't for you. But it provides useful
| information.
| qsort wrote:
| "ideologically inconvenient" is indistinguishable from
| "incoherent nonsense" if you put yourself in the shoes of
| someone who disagrees with said ideology.
|
| It's typical of people knee-deep in weird politics to
| fall into "with us or against us" type of thinking.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > "ideologically inconvenient" is indistinguishable from
| "incoherent nonsense" if
|
| No it's not. Counterexample (which is inconvenient to a
| wide variety of different ideologies):
|
| "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one
| spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is
| against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed,
| and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is
| to be stopped at all." - H. L. Mencken
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I agree that Upvote based sites and engagement based sites
| usually produce different dynamics, and that upvote places
| become echo chambers and that engagement based sites tend
| toward controversial content for exactly those reasons. I
| think the frustration comes from the fact that many highly
| specific communities use upvotes as a proxy for correctness.
| It's one thing to write off Twitter's lack of quality as a
| facet of its highly general audience, bit it's another one
| when highly technical (not necessarily computing) forums full
| of expert hobbyists and practitioners succumb to groupthink.
| And if you think HN is immune to karma games and groupthink,
| just look at any thread about $CURRENT_HYPE programming
| language.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| > _the text and link based format helps - this might change
| quickly if e.g. HN allowed posting photos of vintage computer
| equipment, which could disproportionately gain upvotes_
|
| That's an interesting point. The ThinkPad subreddit has been
| taken over by "Thinkstagram" photos. People seem to love
| them, based on the votes, but I'd hoped for a place to have
| actual _discussion_ of ThinkPads.
|
| Of course even being text-only may not help. I used to be an
| active participant in the old ThinkPad mailing list. A small
| group but very knowledgeable people with interesting
| discussion of ThinkPad issues.
|
| But then one person turned the list into his own tech support
| channel. He would ask things like "How do I do _X_ in
| Microsoft Word? " People would tell him "That's not really a
| ThinkPad question." And he would say "Yeah, but you are the
| smartest people I know, so I figured I would ask here."
|
| After that went on for a while I kind of lost interest in the
| mailing list and unsubscribed.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > Is it the like/upvote mechanism?
|
| Yes it is, HN pays people to keep things at bay. But that
| doesn't scale
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It scales, just not at the price companies are willing to
| pay. Or, put another way, the main social media platforms
| aren't spending enough to ensure their service works well.
| rpmisms wrote:
| Quitting Facebook has been one of the most positive experiences
| of my life. I still use Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, but the
| mildly anonymous aspects of those platforms mean that I use them
| for what I want to use them for, not as an extension of my life.
|
| HN is social media too, lest you forget.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| > HN is social media too, lest you forget.
|
| Is it if you don't know a single person here? That's more a
| message board, no?
| butterfi wrote:
| I checked out after the first few paragraphs because his
| viewpoint is so b&w. I'm either using social media for validation
| or as an observer, because apparently I'm shallow and needy. This
| is such a broad generalization that I don't feel the need to read
| further, even though I generally agree that social media is a
| problem. Cynicism isn't how to start that conversation.
| Qi_ wrote:
| I have a problem with the way the author frames social media. I
| seem to not clearly fall into either the observer or validator
| camp. I generally use social media as a way to try to add value
| to others through comments. I care less about the actual content
| and more about the discussion around the content. Thus, a lot of
| the author's points are irrelevant to me because I see social
| media as an uplifting, positive thing. Why would I then want it
| gone from my life?
| m0ngr31 wrote:
| I have quit all social media except for HN and Reddit.
|
| Although on Reddit I just use a burner account for comments and I
| have a cron job that deletes all my comments/submissions at 5PM
| every day so I'm not providing any value to the site. Has helped
| me wean off of just endless scrolling. I only use it about 15
| minutes a day now.
| devmunchies wrote:
| I found reddit worse than twitter as far as self esteem and
| group think. Reddit's downvoting is used as punishment for not
| being "bubbly" (don't know how else to describe the reddit
| vibe) enough. I do think a feed of programming posts would be
| nice but I don't want to visit that site.
| m0ngr31 wrote:
| I haven't experienced self esteem issues on Reddit, but the
| group think problem is one of the biggest issues I have with
| the platform.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - the lack of retention control on these platforms makes
| me hesitant to use them.
|
| For Twitter there are third party sites that make it easy to
| remove old tweets, but it's nearly impossible to remove likes
| (you have to start a process with their DPO office and then
| manually remove them in 3k batches and they have to reload them
| after each).
|
| Reddit is tedious in that you have to do it one by one, there
| are some scripts to assist (if you edit and clear first it
| actually removes the comment content they have saved in their
| DB, but I didn't know this at the time).
|
| FB was also extremely tedious - there's a third party plugin
| that removes things one by one from the UI of the activity log,
| but the activity log barely works and fails to load often. It
| took months of rerunning it to clear out the history.
|
| I get why a forum like reddit or HN doesn't want to allow
| deletion since it removes value from the forum, but FB should
| really make it easier. In theory account deletion removes it,
| but I'm not sure what that looks like on the backend. You can
| request the data from FB and see it (including details about
| what profiles you looked at, images you loaded, etc.).
|
| I've reduced down to HN, reddit (a bit), and Twitter without
| likes. I reject new social apps where I don't have control over
| my content.
| m0ngr31 wrote:
| Lucky for me I didn't post very much on Twitter so it wasn't
| too bad to just manually delete them one at a time.
|
| I'm using shreddit to edit and then delete my comments on
| Reddit. It has worked out pretty good for me so far.
|
| I deleted my FB account maybe 8 years ago but didn't think to
| delete my posts first.
| tester756 wrote:
| >s and I have a cron job that deletes all my
| comments/submissions at 5PM every day so I'm not providing any
| value to the site.
|
| You probably should edit your comments and leave them empty
|
| otherwise they're probably still visible - uneddit or something
| like that
| m0ngr31 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm using shreddit which edits the comment and then
| deletes it.
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| I don't have(and never have had) any social media accounts...ie
| facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok, etc. The closest would be
| an HN account.
|
| That said, could someone tell me what I might be missing?
| Ignorance is bliss, but it's also ignorance - is there any
| critical information or happiness that everyone else [who uses
| social media] enjoys that I do not?
| [deleted]
| klondike_klive wrote:
| I detest talking on the phone. I also accept that there are
| some people who I'm just not going to get around to arranging a
| meetup with, as there are too many demands on my time. I don't
| look at Facebook any more but I follow a lot of illustrators
| and animators on instagram so my feed is usually full of their
| interesting stuff. There are few enough people that I can catch
| up easily if I don't check for a day or two. I also follow
| friends who've moved to different part of the country and can
| see how their kids are doing, although I have never posted a
| pic of my boy on social media (and never will until he can give
| informed consent).
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Do you have any friends that you've lost touch with?
|
| All my best friends from high school live all over the country.
| Some of us have grown apart and that's okay, but I do enjoy
| passively keeping up with what they're doing on Facebook.
|
| How about family members who you grew up with but now live on
| other sides of the country?
|
| I have some older cousins that moved to California as soon as
| they graduated college. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time so
| it's not like I had any real way of keeping in touch with them.
| Now we're friends on Facebook and I can see what they're doing.
|
| Ever wanted to go on a hike in the mountains in the spring and
| see if there's snow on the trail you're about to do? Someone
| probably tried already and posted a photo on Instagram.
|
| Ever see some new construction in a building and wonder "What's
| moving in to this space?" There's probably a hyper local
| Facebook group where someone has already posted that
| information.
|
| If you're watching a football game and want to get live
| commentary by people other than the announcers. Twitter is
| great for that.
|
| I also use Facebook for organizing events like ski weekends or
| camping trips. I haven't found anything that even comes close
| for event planning.
| hvs wrote:
| No. People (like myself) are ultimately using it for a
| distraction from something more important or a dopamine rush
| when someone "likes" something you post. You're better off.
| rjtavares wrote:
| Social media is not fundamentally different from other ways of
| connecting with people online, like blogs and forums.
|
| The happiness you can enjoy from meeting people online is the
| same whether on a forum, on an online videogame, or on twitter.
| 8589934591 wrote:
| I dunno if this counts. I use reddit/r/funny together whenever
| we feel a bit bored or just want to kill time. Other things
| include finding like minded people on facebook groups which you
| can use to meet other people too.
| bluGill wrote:
| That depends on you. Social media should be a way to better
| connect to your friends and family. In particular distant ones
| that you don't see daily but still want to be in contact with.
| I haven't seen my 7th grade crush since high school, but I'm
| glad to see pictures of her kid's first day of college - as one
| example.
|
| Most people use social media instead for harmful things that do
| not help society. Left and Right wing conspiracy theorys
| abound. Pictures of some cat that you don't own.
| hourislate wrote:
| The mindset of someone who would willingly engage in social media
| (reddit, insta, FB, TikTok, etc) is the real crux of all of this.
|
| The need for attention, validation, to fit in, and be seen
| fitting it. It encourages the worst traits of old internet
| forums. The upvote system is a compounding factor on all of this
| because it gives direct feedback. Violating the group think is
| instantly punished. Conforming to the group think is instantly
| rewarded. They are thereby programmed to attempt to appease the
| group constantly. They live for the rush of validation and
| dopamine when the upvotes start ticking.
|
| This shit becomes such a powerful feedback loop that they really
| have no grasp on reality at all. I've had the misfortune of
| talking to some IRL hardcore redditors face to face. They're
| socially inept in an entirely unique way. They're capable of
| basic social graces that an actual mentally ill people aren't,
| but they still lack critical self awareness. They don't know how
| to differentiate between the internet and real life. They're
| gullible and will believe anything even if it's half way
| agreeable to them. Its tragic, they're virtually lobotomized.
| Genuine NPCs.
| harmeswoul12 wrote:
| I strictly use social media for only about 30 minutes. I divide
| them into three uses. In that way, I can check out what's
| happening with my friends and on the internet while not taking
| too much of our time.
| goofballlogic wrote:
| I enjoy social media and use it to exchange information, observe
| trends in culture, and as a communication channel when
| convenient.
| quest88 wrote:
| Agreed. I curated my friends and family and who I follow and
| now it's more pleasant to use.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Same. I like it for the funny memes, learning news, seeing what
| my friends are up to. I don't see it as particularly sinister
| or anything. I certainly don't think of it as an escape from a
| "mediocre" life.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I'm sure there are reasons to quit social media but this essay
| seems hyperbolic. I use social media because I like to see photos
| and read updates about my friends and family. That strikes me as
| a pretty normal and healthy use for it. My wife's Instagram
| account is a collection of all the cookies and cakes she's baked.
| She follows other Instagramers who do they the same thing and
| they inspire each other to make different kinds of things or with
| different ingredients. Again, seems like a perfectly valid use of
| social media (though probably not healthy for me).
|
| The author also seems to look down on people with "average lives"
| like that was a bad thing. Assuming life quality is a normal
| distribution, most people will lead average-ish lives. Many
| people will lead worse than average lives. There's nothing wrong
| with that.
| devmunchies wrote:
| many of these are problems social media _on smart phones_. the
| convenience and presence of an internet device is an irresistible
| entrapment.
| shuntress wrote:
| I don't want to quit social media
|
| What I want is for interactions with other people in online
| social spaces to be less destructive.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Negative content flows upwards, the more negative or edgy you
| are the more upvotes you get. Users crave this fake validation
| to make up for other things that are lacking.
|
| Think about it this way, if you have a good job, fantastic
| relationships, and other great things going on are you really
| going to be arguing on Instagram with strangers ?
| laurent92 wrote:
| I would say that the top driver to toxic online communication
| is wanting to convince others.
| laurent92 wrote:
| > for interactions with other people in online spaces to be
| less destructive
|
| I have the exact opposite opinion, let's confront them: real-
| life social spaces are toxic to me, and I seek refuge in
| computers, where you experience me. If we were a little less
| toxic to each others, maybe online wouldn't be a high
| concentration of people retired from real life?
|
| - Real life has a dump of major problems that "social people"
| constantly refuse to fix.
|
| - And each time we bring them up, it's the bane of your life,
| we get all the names, downvotes, exaggerations, parody, "we're
| in $CURRENT_YEAR", "Have you tried to man up?", "You're
| frustrated", etc.
|
| - And the problem continues. Online, are you are just meeting
| with the people that are invisible to you in real life.
|
| The status of the scientific understanding today of gender
| imbalance in programming (excluding improper studies with
| doubtful scientific process) is that little boys end up in
| programming because it's the only thing in the family which
| behaves expectedly, doesn't sulk, calls mum, gets angry for
| expressing things as they are, retributes effort, etc. Making a
| little more room for boys in real life would also correct
| gender imbalance in IT.
|
| It may even make that _fewer people in general_ go to IT and
| science in general, because they would be more satisfied with
| real-life interactions. Science would go slower, but people
| would be happier.
|
| It's a tough path, but really one that upgrades the lives of
| millions.
|
| Do you want to take it?
| LightG wrote:
| "You may say I'm a dreamer,
|
| But I'm not the only one,
|
| I hope someday you'll join us,
|
| And the world will live as one"
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Probably a walled city is the only way to achieve that. Such a
| setup is like a closed mailing list in which all participants
| have to pass an 'entrance exam' of some kind.
|
| This kind of setup imposes a cost for rude, nasty, aggressive
| and destructive behavior - since you can simply be excluded
| from the group in that case.
|
| This is how most of the world works on a day to day basis; you
| don't let random people into a corporate strategy meeting or an
| academic council meeting. You only admit people who agree to
| abide by civil society rules.
|
| Something like that can be incredibly useful, but it requires a
| lot of up-front organizing effort. Also, malicious types have
| been known to sneak into say, a closed mailing list, and leak
| the internal discussions to Twitter or whatever, so...
| gilbetron wrote:
| Facebook already has all that with groups. I think the issue
| is something more fundamental with humans.
| aaron-santos wrote:
| I'm less and less confident that is possible, not necessarily
| because personal interactions and online spaces themselves form
| an inherent contradiction (though they might). But because the
| incentive, and ability to commodify, and capitalize these
| interactions are necessary and sufficient conditions for the
| creation of these destructive social systems.
|
| We're pretty bad at social systems level thinking, but this
| precise lack of skill is an opportunity for exploitation. In
| the same way that hobbyist day traders over-estimate their
| ability to turn a profit by not understanding the skill level
| of who they are losing against, social media participants over-
| estimate their ability to check out because they don't
| understand the skill level of players who want them to engage.
| This disparity in the games being played isn't spelled out and
| why would it be? At least there is hope in that social media
| systems while ubiquitous, are not yet hegemonic. As long as
| that holds, there is still hope.
| mlang23 wrote:
| Haha.... Sounds like you want World Peace...
| qaq wrote:
| you misspelled WordPress :)
| trutannus wrote:
| "I don't want to stop using drugs, I just want drugs that are
| not going to harm me while I use them"
|
| Unfortunately, social media by its nature is going to be
| harmful. It was never designed to consider the world we live in
| now.
| shuntress wrote:
| Do you drink coffee?
| drdeadringer wrote:
| Do you eat food? Do you breathe air?
|
| Somehow coffee is completely different.
|
| Somehow coffee is on the same tier as tobacco or cocaine.
|
| It's not.
|
| Relax.
|
| Enjoy a cocoa.
| shuntress wrote:
| That is exactly my point.
|
| _" I don't want to stop eating food, I just want food
| that is not going to harm me while I eat it"_
|
| _" I don't want to stop breathing air, I just want air
| that is not going to harm me while I breath it"_
|
| I don't want to cease all contact with other people. I
| want to interact socially in non-harmful ways.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| Food and air sustain your life, they don't create
| chemical dependencies.
| trutannus wrote:
| Yep, and I can't wake up with out it, nor can I stop using
| it despite multiple attempts. Dependence is a harm of it's
| own.
| xphx wrote:
| There is a not so subtle implication of your comments
| being voted down that those claiming HN is not an
| instance of social media would be well-advised to reflect
| on.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| > Unfortunately, social media by its nature is going to be
| harmful.
|
| I disagree. Social media has never harmed me, I just realized
| it wasn't worth my time. I've never had issues with self-
| esteem, confidence, popularity, whatever. I used social media
| as a photo diary for myself, shared pictures and videos with
| friends, kept up with what my friends are doing. To this day
| I check in on social media once in a while just because it's
| more effective than texting 100+ people to see what they're
| up to. That being said, I don't think social media is worth
| more of my time than a few minutes every few weeks or months
| cryptoz wrote:
| > Social media has never harmed me
|
| How do you know that? This isn't something you can
| typically know for your self with any degree of confidence.
|
| > To this day I check in on social media once in a while
|
| You've got a lot of recent comments on HN for this to be
| true. I think you use social media a lot more than you
| think you do, and it could be impacting you in ways that
| you don't notice.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| > You've got a lot of recent comments on HN for this to
| be true. I think you use social media a lot more than you
| think you do, and it could be impacting you in ways that
| you don't notice.
|
| Ah so you're that kind of user.
|
| Semantics. I don't consider HN social media, when I say
| social media I mean instagram, facebook, etc. I consider
| HN a forum like reddit or other places. My usage of
| forums is a way to kill time when I'm at work.
|
| > How do you know that? This isn't something you can
| typically know for your self with any degree of
| confidence.
|
| Speak for yourself. Maybe you can't typically know this
| for yourself, but I can. And more importantly, if you're
| not coming into this exchange in good faith and willing
| to trust my claims, then any chance of reasonable
| conversation is gone. I'll be wrapping up my end of our
| conversation here, thanks.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| > You've got a lot of recent comments on HN for this to
| be true. I think you use social media a lot more than you
| think you do, and it could be impacting you in ways that
| you don't notice.
|
| The drunk driver contradiction. Drunk people are terrible
| and assessing how drunk they are.
| bserge wrote:
| And why should you or I judge and decide on that? If
| their opinion is that it doesn't impact them, that's good
| enough.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Social media has never harmed me, I just realized it
| wasn 't worth my time._
|
| Is wasting your time not a harm?
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| What exactly is wrong with that?
|
| We decided we wanted to derive cars, but without the harmful
| effects of being in crashes, so we decided to create safer
| vehicles. I like some drugs, and a lot of them are okay in
| some situations with some boundaries... even if a lot of the
| users are using them for unhealthy reasons in situations that
| make the drugs problematic.
|
| I like social media-- I'm literally using it right now to
| communicate with you. But I do that because I value your
| thought (even though I disagree with it) and I am able to
| interact with you in a space that both moderates my behavior
| by giving up/down vote feedback and which doesn't have a lot
| of tolerance for poor discourse habits.
|
| If you apply those same rubrics to other social media and
| don't tolerate them when it violates those boundaries, I
| believe it's possible to use them in healthy ways.
| trutannus wrote:
| Nothing is wrong with wanting that. I just don't think it
| is realistic. I've purged all social media other than HN at
| this point.
| Minor49er wrote:
| > I like social media-- I'm literally using it right now to
| communicate with you
|
| If you're extending the definition of social media to
| include sites like Hacker News, you may as well categorize
| the entire Internet as social media
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| I dunno...
|
| I feel that the sine qua non of "social media" is user
| generated content conducted between specific users, tied
| to specific accounts.
|
| Not even wikis meet that definition, and certainly not
| most of the author-generated content-based site like
| blogs or market sites such as amazon, or news sites where
| the discussion isn't the putative content.
| Minor49er wrote:
| But don't wikis commonly have a "Talk" section or
| similar? The pages that are posted and edited would
| surely fall under author-generated content.
| colecut wrote:
| What you're looking for are the illegal drugs
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I don't much like sharing personal fun life events with pictures
| and a lot of detail on social media. As an example, my family
| just went on a cruise to celebrate my Dad's 100th birthday (yay
| Dad!). I posted a very short text message on Facebook and Twitter
| after the fact. What I did do was create a private photo and
| video slideshow that I shared with about 15 family members and
| about 25 friends. In comparison my Brother was frequently posting
| pictures and text to Facebook during the trip. To be honest, a
| few friends in real life mentioned that they liked seeing
| pictures of my wife and I that my brother posted. Anyway, to me,
| sharing means more when done directly, and instead of getting
| Facebook likes and a few comments, I had about 15 people respond
| with more meaningful emails, with a few private conversations
| starting.
| nso95 wrote:
| This is why Google+ Circles were cool
| [deleted]
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I think the eternal september has become so deep that social
| media lose its value. Pure mobs don't work, and regulated mobs
| don't scale. People can get addicted to counting their 'likes'
| for so long, after that they realize it's a rigged, impossible
| game. Upvotes are not the way forward, and that puts an end to
| social media based on pure popularity.
| sailorganymede wrote:
| Personally, I use social media as a way for inspiration. As an
| artist, I'm always curious about a new style or something I've
| never seen before. Social media does a good job curating it so I
| can explore my hobby more . Don't feel that this is covered well
| here.
| paulpauper wrote:
| The biggest problem with twitter is low engagement. You can
| comment on popular stories and likely no one will see or engage
| at all. Same for sending direct messages or replying. Much of
| twitter is just a few thousand big accounts doing all the
| broadcasting.
| risedotmoe wrote:
| I've limited my social media to a group chat with friends, an
| entertainment website with discussion, and an informative website
| with discussion (HN)
|
| I'm no longer absorbed in sensationalist media and I'm no longer
| angry about some flavor of the week topic. I don't see ads
| anymore and I've been a lot happier since. Now I can work towards
| minimizing other unproductive and unfulfilling screen time.
| meristohm wrote:
| > We hire social media to create a virtual representation of the
| life we want to live, but never actually live it.
|
| HN being the exception to my 2+ years hiatus from Twitter,
| Facebook, etc, I am careful to represent myself sincerely, in
| part because I'm assuming my little stories might help someone
| practice better mental and physical health (I have found some of
| your collective comments to be helpful---thank you!).
|
| > We hire social media to observe the life we want, but never
| actually experience it.
|
| Today I read this post instead of reading further into a book. If
| I practice reaching for the book instead of HN I may thank myself
| later, as this forum post is satisfying to complete but otherwise
| has a low ROI (I tend not to check back soon enough to be part of
| any discussion). I generally enjoy the life I have, and one
| action that will make it more enjoyable is to be reading more
| often, as I find engaging with longer stories over days and weeks
| to be gratifying.
| bena wrote:
| Man, the time before social media must have been glorious indeed.
|
| It seems that before social media people were engaged and
| productive and attentive and whatever.
|
| Wait. MySpace was founded in 2003, twitter in 2006, Facebook in
| 2004, etc. I was an adult by then. I grew up before social media.
|
| And yeah, people are more or less still people. Those 20 reasons
| are a wishlist. They're the same 20 things we always promise
| ourselves every single day after we spent the previous day
| failing to achieve those 20 things.
|
| I'm not saying there aren't problems with social media, but let's
| not pretend we'll all become ubermensch if we all log off of
| twitter.
| ahmaman wrote:
| Good points and personally relate to some of these benefits.
|
| I try to keep my social media minimal. No Facebook, Instagram,
| Snapchat, Reddit, etc...
|
| At times has been difficult to use social media in moderation.
| Feels like I am competing with an Olympic champion in their own
| sport.
|
| With that said, here some things that I found helpful:
|
| - Never social media apps on my phone (no email either).
|
| - Only access social media via laptop/desktop.
|
| - Use services like Mailbrew to follow Youtube channels I want to
| follow (very few).
|
| - Never save my session, always enter the credentials every time
| I want to check social media.
|
| I do however follow Twitter & HN. More like a passive user.
| ahmaman wrote:
| For those of you who have successfully minimized social media
| in their life. Where does you go for real conversations on the
| internet?
|
| I sometimes use Twitter for that but feels like the ratio of
| noise vs. signal is too high!
| jancsika wrote:
| With that said, here some things that I found helpful:
|
| - Never do cocaine straight out of my pocket.
|
| - Only do cocaine in a restroom using the bag inside my valise,
| or on the mirrored table in my living room.
|
| - only buy cocaine from a dealer who I trust, or dealers who
| that dealer trusts.
|
| - when sharing cocaine with others in the restroom, don't tell
| them personal information about myself.
| pknomad wrote:
| I think COVID lockdown made keeping social media usage to a
| minimum really difficult. I noticed that I started to watch
| chatting streams on Twitch as a crutch for not being able to
| socialize outside. Socializing over a video call with your
| friends are also difficult because you're not left with much
| topics to talk about.
| ahmaman wrote:
| Indeed, for me it was podcasts...Found myself listening to
| way too many podcasts just to pass time!
| nrvn wrote:
| I have a question: before "social" "media" became a thing we* all
| had been using various irc chats, forums and theme websites of
| all kinds.
|
| There has always been all kinds of drama, addiction, obsession,
| love and hatred.
|
| But I can't stop thinking that modern websites just monetize by
| growing the userbase. This model kills creativity and we are
| juste cattle for them to feed us with some bullshit.
|
| And some random guy nowadays instead of registering a domain name
| and creating a bunch of html pages to share his thoughts and
| observations no matter how weird and awkward or enlightening they
| are, just a small comfort zone in the neverending blizzard of
| data traffic - this guy will go create a
| facebook/instagram/youtube/etc. page, get all sorts of rage and
| ignorance, get kicked by violating some stupid ToC rule of the
| bespoke "social" "media".
|
| Long gone the times when internet was a place where you could
| stumble upon something really touching.
|
| There are nice places to visit but google favors to show crap on
| its first couple of search results pages nowadays
|
| * Well, by "we" I mean to say people born before 1990 probably
| mulmen wrote:
| Social media is one more day in the Eternal September.
|
| I disagree you can't stumble on great content though. This
| website itself is an example. There's more crap being published
| but the Internet has been too big to consume in it's entirety
| for decades now. You have to learn to filter.
| clircle wrote:
| In reality, when people quit social media, they don't start using
| their time better, they mostly shift their time into different
| time waster websites. For example, people quit using facebook for
| 2 hours a day just start skimming reddit for 2 hours a day. They
| aren't going to start writing a book or bettering themselves in
| some way.
| syshum wrote:
| That has been my pattern, I will find a different time suck.
|
| Leave Reddit, come to HN, leave HN, play a new video game, stop
| playing a video game, binge watch a tv show.
|
| Never anything productive
| giantrobot wrote:
| If you enjoyed the things you did why the fuck do they need
| to be productive? No one needs to be "productive" 100% of the
| time.
| tqi wrote:
| I think that it is a trap to feel like all time needs to be
| productive. Not only is it an unachievable ideal, it also
| makes time spent doing "unproductive" stuff less restorative.
| Igelau wrote:
| I'd argue that's still an improvement. With the video game
| and the TV show your are focused on the appreciation of an
| art form. Granted, you're not strolling the halls of the
| Louvre or something, but it is art.
|
| Time doesn't have to be spent productively to be time well
| spent.
|
| When my third child was born and I took leave, I was spending
| a ton of time on Facebook. One day I put the phone down and
| realized I couldn't remember a single thing I'd been looking
| at the past two hours. If you can at least remember what you
| saw it's a major improvement.
| thethethethe wrote:
| This may be true, but being productive doesn't necessarily
| need to be your goal here. Maybe using social media as
| entertainment had negative effects on your mental health that
| playing a video game doesn't.
| Igelau wrote:
| 11 seems like "I'm no longer addicted to smoking, but I do smoke
| sometimes".
| wowaname wrote:
| People can use things occasionally without having an addiction
| that impacts their lives.
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