7 ms·

Took the plunge and deactivated my Facebook and Twitter accounts over a month ago. I haven't missed them.

bigredhdl 9y ago
I 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 ago
Welcome 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    HN 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 ago
      Although 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 ago
        I'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 ago
        This 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 ago
        Interesting. I use ttrss as well, do you have a blog-post or anything about how you are doing that?
        kakarot 9y ago
        I'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.
    - vacri 9y ago
      > most of us are here to discuss business and learn HN stopped being about business quite a while ago. It's a general-interest board now. For example, I literally can't recall the last time I saw an article on A/B testing on the front page, nor an article about how best to deal with employee issues from the employer's side. Or an article about how to increase your product's market reach.
  - egypturnash 9y ago
    Worth 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 ago
  Try 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      I 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 ago
        So we're labeling people as mentally ill with a view towards criticizing them and their opinions now?
        snerbles 9y ago
        The nail that sticks out will be hammered down.
        louithethrid 9y ago
        We 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 ago
  Why 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 ago
  The 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 ago
Same, 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 ago
  Reddit 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 ago
    Irrelevant. 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 ago
    I agree. r/boardgames is awesome if you are into board games.
  - steveeq1 9y ago
    What reddit communities do you consider "toxic"?
    - dragontamer 9y ago
      Generally 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 ago
I 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 ago
I'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.

I 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 ago

Welcome 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 ago
I 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 ago
  HN 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 ago
    Although 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 ago
      I'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 ago
        This 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 ago
        Interesting. I use ttrss as well, do you have a blog-post or anything about how you are doing that?
        kakarot 9y ago
        I'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.
  - vacri 9y ago
    > most of us are here to discuss business and learn HN stopped being about business quite a while ago. It's a general-interest board now. For example, I literally can't recall the last time I saw an article on A/B testing on the front page, nor an article about how best to deal with employee issues from the employer's side. Or an article about how to increase your product's market reach.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  Worth 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 ago
Try 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      So we're labeling people as mentally ill with a view towards criticizing them and their opinions now?
      - snerbles 9y ago
        The nail that sticks out will be hammered down.
      - louithethrid 9y ago
        We 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 ago
Why 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 ago
The 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 ago

Same, 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 ago
Reddit 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 ago
  Irrelevant. 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 ago
  I agree. r/boardgames is awesome if you are into board games.
- steveeq1 9y ago
  What reddit communities do you consider "toxic"?
  - dragontamer 9y ago
    Generally 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 ago

I 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 ago

I'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.