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Teens 'rebelling against social media', say headteachers
- michaelmarion 9y agoTook the plunge and deactivated my Facebook and Twitter accounts over a month ago. I haven't missed them.
- bigredhdl 9y agoI haven't used facebook much for years now. Twitter might be next because while I like its ability to keep me up on many interests, the "lets take complicated issues and turn them into one liners" thing is souring me.
- danjoc 9y agoWelcome to the club. I did this years ago. That was sincere. I found it is hard to talk about it without being treated like a smug asshole. It's like everyone who hears you talk about it, even other people doing it, interpret you as a zealot extremist or something. For instance, if I didn't include this paragraph, I would be flag killed.
- willismichael 9y agoI made a goal to not sign into facebook for the summer of 2017 (I defined summer as all of June, July, and August). In September I signed back in and poked around a bit, only to feel like it was a waste of time and that I didn't have a compelling reason to stay. Maybe I should try the same experiment with Hacker News and other online forums that I frequent.
- overcast 9y agoHN is a bit different scenario, most of us are here to discuss business and learn. Being text only also removes the fear of missing out, anxiety shit you get from people showing all the best moments of their lives.
- CaptSpify 9y agoAlthough I agree with you, I think the grandparent's point has merit. I've had to consciously curb my HN usage recently, and found it to be a struggle. I do think we get real and tangible benefits out of HN, but I guess the same could be said for more traditional social media as well.
- ekzy 9y agoI've been looking a bit more at "top of the week" on alt websites, and a bit less at the HN homepage. I think you can get most of it like this; maybe you could try. (e.g. http://www.hntoplinks.com/week http://www.hntoplinks.com/week or https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best)
- kakarot 9y agoThis works well if you are mainly a lurker, but not if you're looking to engage in a conversation while it's hot. For me, the article is often just an excuse for discourse around its themes, which I find much more stimulating. My personal angle for solving this problem of spending too much time sifting through news/comments is an auto-tagging and summarization platform built in Python with rss feeds as both input and output, sending the output to a self-hosted TTRSS instance. I plan to also store the output in a database with robust query support.
- CaptSpify 9y agoInteresting. I use ttrss as well, do you have a blog-post or anything about how you are doing that?
- kakarot 9y agoI'm still in the prototyping phase, and juggling it between work and another side project. I have a decent understanding of the stack I will need. I have feed parsing and HTML/XML stripping in place, currently I'm comparing auto-tagging libraries and seeing if any of them meets all of my needs. If you're interested in bouncing around ideas and possibly contributing at some point (I plan to open source after the research and legwork is done), let me know.
- egypturnash 9y agoWorth doing, I think. Which ones do you miss after a week or three? I've been doing some cutting back - deleted Twitter off my phone, unsubscribed from several subreddits (some of which I just never clicked on posts from, others which I spent a decent amount of time answering questions on) - and it's been pretty nice.
- heroprotagonist 9y agoTry asking other people not to put your photo on Facebook. More people are becoming understanding about that, but there's still a range of responses like incredulity, contempt, or the inevitable person who wants to turn it into some kind of debate of abstract principles.
- danjoc 9y agoI can see how that would be a problem. I'm pretty fortunate in that I have no real friends. I don't need to worry about people wanting to take pictures of/with me, much less post them on their facebooks.
- brookside 9y agoI must say, this last addition to the thread makes you sound like less a content and healthy escapee of the social media vortex, and more of an isolated depressive. Quite a less inspiring model.
- hacking_again 9y agoSo we're labeling people as mentally ill with a view towards criticizing them and their opinions now?
- snerbles 9y agoThe nail that sticks out will be hammered down.
- louithethrid 9y agoWe are a whole society unravelling, because we did the Icarus and flew to high. Men retreating back into electronice dreams of the purposes of the past. Woman, errecting warped social pagodas to enforce freedom and basic income contracts against the building backlash. Beeing mentally ill, as in unable to adjust to this, is the new normal. The only people well adapted to our circumstances, are drug addicted, no life work-aholics and ironically they are the group to force its standards down humanitys throat. I guess that never appeared in anyones singularity vision- that the species as a whole could step away from its invention, smash it all to bits and errect some codex hamurabi with just one rule: "You shall not wrap thy fellow man in machinery."
- ryandrake 9y agoWhy the need to talk about it? It's never occurred to me to go telling everyone I meet that I don't use FB. My friends already know that if they want to contact me, they can call or E-mail, so it generally never comes up in conversation.
- evmar 9y agoThe comment "Welcome to the club. I did this years ago." in isolation contributes nothing to the conversation. If you had posted it I probably would've downvoted it for that reason, not for the smugness.
- overcast 9y agoSame, Reddit was the big one. Facebook happened years ago. Twitter gone. LinkedIN is just garbage. All useless wastes of time. HN is the only community I actively participate in for personal. Instagram is business only.
- dragontamer 9y agoReddit is a community of communities. Certain subreddits are incredibly toxic. Others are not. /r/factorio is one of the best communities I've ever been a part of for example. I guess the age-old rule applies. 90% of everything is crap.
- overcast 9y agoIrrelevant. Reddit is not something I need in my life. Sure I'll use it as a reference, linked in from google searches. But that's my extent.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- irrational 9y agoI agree. r/boardgames is awesome if you are into board games.
- steveeq1 9y agoWhat reddit communities do you consider "toxic"?
- dragontamer 9y agoGenerally speaking, the political ones qualify. Moderators pick sides and nobody agrees on anything. The best you can do is troll people and become apathetic to other people's problems while you visit. Otherwise, you go crazy during your stay. Be it /r/pol, KotakuInAction, TheDonald, etc. etc. They're all toxic in my experience. Some communities are only toxic if you say certain keywords. /r/hardware has good info for instance, but if you start a flamewar on AMD vs Intel or AMD vs NVidia, then the community immediately becomes toxic and its just not worth listening to. In general, a lot of "discussions" end up like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJX4ytfqw6k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJX4ytfqw6k And that's simply not helpful to anybody.
- weeksie 9y agoI haven't completely disconnected but I HAVE turned off all notifications for anything except for direct messages. Lo and behold my usage rates dropped right off a cliff. I can now use Facebook and Twitter like they are tools for keeping in touch or reading news instead of compulsively checking them for that little endorphin rush (or rage vibe in some useless flame war).
- yodsanklai 9y agoI've found what I think is a good compromise. I don't ever post anything (and painfully deleted everything I've ever posted or liked) but I keep my account to stay in touch with some more distant friends via messenger (which can be used separately from facebook). As for the notification feed, I've disciplined myself to hide permanently uninteresting content (e.g. friend showing off or too politically active). In the end, there's not much left besides annoying ads so I don't feel the urge to go there as often as I used too. Btw, is it me or there are a lot more ads compared to a year ago? I find them very intrusive.
- jedberg 9y agoNot surprising. My 18 year old cousin only seems to use Snapchat. He only got FB right before going to college so he could participate in the groups.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- temp-dude-87844 9y agoThe captive social environment of school interacts with the captive social environment of social networks to extend the active hours during which Fear-of-Missing-Out and interpersonal conflicts can occur. I'm sure teens would happily detox from school as well, if they were given the chance. Of course, social networks are always on your phone, even in the middle of the night. But chances are, if for some reason, someone were to have an entirely different stock of people on their Instagram than their school peers, the amount of social pressure experienced would be lessened. In fact, I'd posit that this can be seen with social networks like Tumblr, Twitch, and YouTube, where one is far more likely to cultivate interest-based friends than a mere combination of schoolmates and a few choice super-popular accounts.
- pgeorgep 9y agoAt some point, the general population has to realize that the relationship with social media is pretty one-sided. It's an egregiously impersonal landscape with zero regards for personal well being. Plain and simple, social media companies exist to cash in on your personal data. It's about time that a generation takes a stand.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoThey actually sell your psychological well-being to advertisers after binning you based on personal data. That's Facebook's business model (and what made them a useful stooge during the election).
- oceanghost 9y agoIt's not just the companies behind it that are a problem. The concept of civil debate and discourse is, in large part a thing of the past. Issue any opinion, politely, well reasoned on facebook and you most likely be savaged.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoIn my experience there is plenty of civil debate and discourse going on, just that Facebook isn't where it's happening, except may be some closed groups. Even in the small city I live in, population ~87,000, there are two regular philosophy meet ups and a skeptics group. The local state university hosts regular guest speakers. There is a tonne of podcasts and books produced from around the world with vastly differing opinions.
- pmoriarty 9y agoWhat % of your city's population attends philosophy meetups or skeptics groups? Would you say it's more than 0.1% ? As for university talks, at least at my university they were attended by a tiny minority of students. Most students went only to the lectures they had to for class and did something else in their free time than go to more lectures. Outside of students and the occasional professor, it was rare for these talks to be attended by anyone else, unless someone really famous was talking -- even then, only a small minority of the people in the surrounding area would even hear of these events, much less bother to go. The sad fact is that most people, in the US at least, aren't very interested in intellectual pursuits like this. They'd much rather go to a ballgame, party, watch TV, or hang out at the bar.
- searine 9y agoBecause twitter and Facebook are full of their parents and other angry adults throwing fits about politics that are carved in digital stone. That's not cool. In an age where digital permanence is common, being ephemeral and mysterious is unique and luxurious. Now, cool is having FB be a highlight reel, while you conduct actual socializing in private, protected spaces.
- ferdbold 9y agoThat's pretty much how I'm approaching social media as well in my twenties. I'm barely posting anything anymore on Facebook, but the Messenger groups I share with 10 or so of my closest friends are alive and well. I guess I just don't like the feeling of someone "butting in" into conversations meant for other people on Facebook posts. For the same reason I barely comment anything anymore on other people's posts, it just feels like walking on glass most of the time.
- 3452354326 9y agoAs a teenager (probably a bit younger than the average HN reader) there's definitely been a change in how we approach social media. Most kids now take advantage of privacy settings to moderate who can see what messages, often creating private or "fake" accounts that only a few friends can see that contrast with their "public" accounts. Ironically the "fake" accounts are more "real" due to the more honest and realistic posts that they only allow their friends to see. Even in public settings, people are moving away from only showing "perfect" images instead favoring a more realistic image.
- zlynx 9y agoWith so many people wanting to abuse our social media profiles, it only makes sense to use fake accounts. That way our "real" one looks OK to our employers, parents, acquaintances, etc. Our fake profiles can have all of what we actually think.
- legitster 9y agoWouldn't all of the private groups and secret messages make it worse? School for me was cliquey enough as it was, without the assistance of technology. It seems this would blow that up by an order of magnitude..
- hbosch 9y ago> often creating private or "fake" accounts that only a few friends can see that contrast with their "public" accounts The younger sister of a family friend called this a "sin-stagram", but some people also call them by the more family-friendly "fun-stagrams" or "funstas". Kind of a hilarious concept, creating multiple social media accounts for multiple sides of your personality. Coincidentally I was reading an article today about a YouTuber who was doing this same sort of thing. A famous, promoted, well-followed channel with his regular content (music reviews), and secondary accounts for alt-right meme commentary (which was shut down recently). I guess it makes sense... but for some weird reason I find it weirdly grotesque*. It's like containerization for your life: stream my optimism to my family, stream my partying to my friends, stream my depression to strangers... keep them all separated and you have can maintain (and in the above YouTuber's case, monetize?) multiple digital lives. Another interesting tidbit was a friend of mine who just graduated med school and started their residency. This person changed the names/handles on all their social media accounts, because patients have a habit of trying to search for their doctors on Facebook and Instagram. Apparently this causes issues from time to time in the doctor/patient relationship, so it's common practice among many in the medical field. ——— 0. https://www.thefader.com/2017/10/03/needle-drop-deleted-youtube-channel-this-is-the-plan https://www.thefader.com/2017/10/03/needle-drop-deleted-yout...
- ninju 9y agoA little off-topic but wonder why there is, what appears to be, a camera attached to the girl in the last photo in the article?
- DeepYogurt 9y agoI feel like this is more about teens not wanting their social circles to include their parents/teachers/etc... than it is about any business motivation.
- ionised 9y agoHmm, a slight replenishment of my faith in humanity. That was unexpected.
- misterHN 9y agoFacebook and Twitter are evil, period. Good kids.