7 ms·

I went back to my forums, find myself easily disengaging from Reddit (around the election, Reddit was nothing but stress), Check Twitter maybe 10 minutes a week

I went back to my forums, find myself easily disengaging from Reddit (around the election, Reddit was nothing but stress), Check Twitter maybe 10 minutes a week, go to Instagram once a week because my kid posts his artwork there. But in general, ALL of the sticky sites aren’t…sticky anymore. I took 2 weeks off at the worst of it and it did an amazing job of breaking the feedback loop. Facebook tried to take over forums and mailing lists, their market was full of scams (which had me going round and round with Paypal and the bank when ‘Sally’ selling an iPad from Massachusetts sent a receipt with an email from a Guy in Turkey. Then they started poking around with VR and Meta and man, I really don’t want to use this headset if I’m forced to log into Facebook and you’ve got 6 outward facing cameras, Zuckerberg. Good. Can’t come soon enough.

stadium 5y ago
They finally monitized their products and customers to a breaking point. They run on engagement metrics without common sense or empathy to how fear and anger impact their user's wellbeing. I most definitely do not need or want a VR immersed version of that toxicity.
- rubicon33 5y ago
  VR has nothing to do with facebook, at least at the moment. Just logging in with your facebook account doesn't mean its suddenly sucking all your life from you and piping it right to facebook. If you enjoy video games, its hands down the best way to game right now.
  - TeeMassive 5y ago
    > Just logging in with your facebook account doesn't mean its suddenly sucking all your life from you and piping it right to facebook. You don't have to login into Facebook to have it build a profile of you: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17254312/facebook-shadow-profiles-data-collection-non-users-mark-zuckerberg https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17254312/facebook-shadow-profi...
  - Damogran6 5y ago
    Which just KILLS me. They’re clearly on another level with the Oculus hardware, it just feels like a deal with the Devil that’s going to have a downside sooner or later and they’re trying to get you locked in before that.
  - synthos 5y ago
    Is it? Last I understood, most games have no real locomotion to prevent motion sickness. Is it really the pinnacle of gaming if you have to teleport from A->B all the time?
  - stadium 5y ago
    Guilt by association. I won't touch it. Sooner or later all that usage data would be used to manipulate me.
NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
reddit used to be great until they pulled their great bait & switch, then added all kinds of authoritarian features. A brief history of reddit: >We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. — Reddit FAQ 2005 >We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content — u/kn0thing 2008 >A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets. — u/kn0thing 2012 >We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal. — u/reddit 2012 >We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse). — u/yishan 2012 >Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech — u/spez 2015
- sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
  reddit wouldn't be so bad re: free speech if you could ignore all of the non-sense, sadly they push it out to everyone by design
  - Damogran6 5y ago
    For a platform built on user contributions, they got too big (everybody ends up saying the same thing and getting downvoted as a result) and the moderation got hostile to the point you don’t WANT to contribute. Eventually you find the site that used to be fun, with lots of interesting things from interesting people…turned into a chore.
kumarvvr 5y ago
> I went back to my forums, find myself easily disengaging from Reddit (around the election, Reddit was nothing but stress), Check Twitter maybe 10 minutes a week, go to Instagram once a week because my kid posts his artwork there. Are you a teen or a young adult. I am guessing you are in between age of 35 - 45 because, I am that age myself and have started weaning off of social media lately. The dopamine rewards are just not worth it. I have, however, moved on to saner places like HN.
- enkid 5y ago
  There are definitely parts users of HN that are not same, but the conversation is normally at auch higher level and most people welcome a different viewpoint instead of seeing it as an attack.
- pishpash 5y ago
  Every social network (including so many bulletins and forums from ≤90's) models the relationships and culture of its initial cohort, and it always becomes self-isolated to that imprint, so as people change their life priorities they leave and the network dies. The same will happen to hacker news.
- teitoklien 5y ago
  I’m not the poster, but I’m between 16-19 and seeing the same thing over last 2 years I’ve been almost completely out of social media, - 0 minutes of facebook - 0 minutes of Instagram - 0 minutes of Twitter - 20 minutes of Telegram per day to catchup on messages - 10 minutes of Matrix A few years back the aggregate was easily 10-12 hrs per day (rest were spent watching movies and writing code) . Nowadays my brain automatically will close the sites if I spend more then 2 minutes on them. But it’s not just social media, I lost my appetite for movies, tv shows too. Most of this purge was unintentional , however now that it’s done. I’m glad. Other than that I come on HN once or twice a day to have fun and comment and read stuff. I wouldn’t say HN is more saner then other social media, most of the peers I engaged with in the more popular social media apps were equally as nice, amicable and fun to talk with. But these days I mostly spend my days reading story books, blogs, write code, make drinks and cook food, and solve fun puzzles that I design. Who knows, maybe it’ll all change to something else in 2 years again. I hope you have a lovely day !
heavyset_go 5y ago
> Facebook tried to take over forums and mailing lists, their market was full of scams (which had me going round and round with Paypal and the bank when ‘Sally’ selling an iPad from Massachusetts sent a receipt with an email from a Guy in Turkey. What blows my mind are all of the blatant scam replies on sponsored content. You'll get sponsored content from, say, Bloomberg or CNBC, and half of the replies are cryptocurrency scams. I've even seen top replies that were 'ads' for witch doctors that will cast spells for you if you send them money on Venmo. It makes both Facebook/Meta and the sponsored brands look terrible.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
stjohnswarts 5y ago
reddit is great if you curate your feed. If you go to "popular" or "trending" it's a dumpster fire. I still love reddit though with my 10 or so subreddits that I follow.

stadium 5y ago

They finally monitized their products and customers to a breaking point. They run on engagement metrics without common sense or empathy to how fear and anger impact their user's wellbeing. I most definitely do not need or want a VR immersed version of that toxicity.

rubicon33 5y ago
VR has nothing to do with facebook, at least at the moment. Just logging in with your facebook account doesn't mean its suddenly sucking all your life from you and piping it right to facebook. If you enjoy video games, its hands down the best way to game right now.
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  > Just logging in with your facebook account doesn't mean its suddenly sucking all your life from you and piping it right to facebook. You don't have to login into Facebook to have it build a profile of you: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17254312/facebook-shadow-profiles-data-collection-non-users-mark-zuckerberg https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17254312/facebook-shadow-profi...
- Damogran6 5y ago
  Which just KILLS me. They’re clearly on another level with the Oculus hardware, it just feels like a deal with the Devil that’s going to have a downside sooner or later and they’re trying to get you locked in before that.
- synthos 5y ago
  Is it? Last I understood, most games have no real locomotion to prevent motion sickness. Is it really the pinnacle of gaming if you have to teleport from A->B all the time?
- stadium 5y ago
  Guilt by association. I won't touch it. Sooner or later all that usage data would be used to manipulate me.

NaturalPhallacy 5y ago

reddit used to be great until they pulled their great bait & switch, then added all kinds of authoritarian features. A brief history of reddit: >We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. — Reddit FAQ 2005 >We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content — u/kn0thing 2008 >A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets. — u/kn0thing 2012 >We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal. — u/reddit 2012 >We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse). — u/yishan 2012 >Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech — u/spez 2015

sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
reddit wouldn't be so bad re: free speech if you could ignore all of the non-sense, sadly they push it out to everyone by design
- Damogran6 5y ago
  For a platform built on user contributions, they got too big (everybody ends up saying the same thing and getting downvoted as a result) and the moderation got hostile to the point you don’t WANT to contribute. Eventually you find the site that used to be fun, with lots of interesting things from interesting people…turned into a chore.

kumarvvr 5y ago

> I went back to my forums, find myself easily disengaging from Reddit (around the election, Reddit was nothing but stress), Check Twitter maybe 10 minutes a week, go to Instagram once a week because my kid posts his artwork there. Are you a teen or a young adult. I am guessing you are in between age of 35 - 45 because, I am that age myself and have started weaning off of social media lately. The dopamine rewards are just not worth it. I have, however, moved on to saner places like HN.

enkid 5y ago
There are definitely parts users of HN that are not same, but the conversation is normally at auch higher level and most people welcome a different viewpoint instead of seeing it as an attack.
pishpash 5y ago
Every social network (including so many bulletins and forums from ≤90's) models the relationships and culture of its initial cohort, and it always becomes self-isolated to that imprint, so as people change their life priorities they leave and the network dies. The same will happen to hacker news.
teitoklien 5y ago
I’m not the poster, but I’m between 16-19 and seeing the same thing over last 2 years I’ve been almost completely out of social media, - 0 minutes of facebook - 0 minutes of Instagram - 0 minutes of Twitter - 20 minutes of Telegram per day to catchup on messages - 10 minutes of Matrix A few years back the aggregate was easily 10-12 hrs per day (rest were spent watching movies and writing code) . Nowadays my brain automatically will close the sites if I spend more then 2 minutes on them. But it’s not just social media, I lost my appetite for movies, tv shows too. Most of this purge was unintentional , however now that it’s done. I’m glad. Other than that I come on HN once or twice a day to have fun and comment and read stuff. I wouldn’t say HN is more saner then other social media, most of the peers I engaged with in the more popular social media apps were equally as nice, amicable and fun to talk with. But these days I mostly spend my days reading story books, blogs, write code, make drinks and cook food, and solve fun puzzles that I design. Who knows, maybe it’ll all change to something else in 2 years again. I hope you have a lovely day !

heavyset_go 5y ago

> Facebook tried to take over forums and mailing lists, their market was full of scams (which had me going round and round with Paypal and the bank when ‘Sally’ selling an iPad from Massachusetts sent a receipt with an email from a Guy in Turkey. What blows my mind are all of the blatant scam replies on sponsored content. You'll get sponsored content from, say, Bloomberg or CNBC, and half of the replies are cryptocurrency scams. I've even seen top replies that were 'ads' for witch doctors that will cast spells for you if you send them money on Venmo. It makes both Facebook/Meta and the sponsored brands look terrible.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

stjohnswarts 5y ago

reddit is great if you curate your feed. If you go to "popular" or "trending" it's a dumpster fire. I still love reddit though with my 10 or so subreddits that I follow.