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Sadly we've enfeebled the other options. Not being on social (at least the messaging platforms) media makes it tough to maintain social relationships. It can be

Sadly we've enfeebled the other options. Not being on social (at least the messaging platforms) media makes it tough to maintain social relationships. It can be done, of course, but with friction. It's also how a lot of orgs communicate with the world, annoyingly.

lynx23 3y ago
If I want to use WhatsApp or Messenger as a messaging tool, nothing forces me to follow any toxic feeds. I can just use WhatsApp and Messanger as a plain inbox and do not have to care about reading the FB feed. I am not so sure about Twitter, but I guess you can also use the DM features without having to dive headlong into flamey feeds.
9dev 3y ago
Asking out of curiosity: is Twitter the medium of choice in your social circle? Everyone I know uses messengers to communicate, and while I know lots of my friends use Instagram, you don’t have to to participate.
throwbadubadu 3y ago
There are so many people wanting to escape, but then also again claiming this. But it is an excuse: there are so many electronic good alternatives for friend cycles to stay connected if they want where you still can keep off social media.. And tbh, we did this well before even without those, and there was even a time we did this without mobile phones but just landline and mail... Just try it for a while, it really still works. If social relationships cannot be maintained without social media, I have no doubt, it is the wrong social relationships "maintained".
- dbspin 3y ago
  > there are so many electronic good alternatives for friend cycles to stay connected if they want where you still can keep off social media.. Network effects just don't work like this. I suspect thinking that they do is related to the kinds of friendships the commenter has - small, intense, long term group friendships; and proximity friendships. Personally I don't have the social capital to pull the dozens of people I keep in regular contact with off their preferred platform and into a new one. Very few people do. And I value those relationships far more than I hate the platforms that maintain them. > If social relationships cannot be maintained without social media, I have no doubt, it is the wrong social relationships "maintained". This is a value judgement, and not an argument. I have strong relationships with friends and former partners, as well as family, that I've maintained for decades through platforms like messenger - which is awful but ubiquitous - with real people who live across the world. We do meet when possible, but it's often years apart, and there's no one 'core group'. These are real world, profound friendships with people I met in person, lived or worked or studied with for years and care about. I completely agree with the characterisation of the harms wrought by social media. But prior to social media, more than a very few distant friendships were all but impossible to maintain. And when you lost contact with an old friend, you could never be quite certain if they had lost interest, were too busy, or had perhaps died or suffered some great setback in life.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >This is a value judgement, and not an argument. Value judgements are the ultimate arguments. In the end, nothing else matters aside from the kind of values we want to uphold.
    - dbspin 3y ago
      Not to get into a back and forth - but that's not remotely true. Our values are soft things next to the concrete realities of life. The need to eat, our health, social contacts, the hard limits on our healthy lifespan. Values are the ways of being we develop to bring our desires into alignments with the aspects of reality we can't control. Moreover - what you're describing is virtue ethics, which is only one of many ethical systems. Hold hard to your values and be evaluated based on your adherence to them. Personally I'm more of a soft utilitarian - it's the results of my decisions that matter, not how they adhere to an abstract value. But we all fight the chaos in our own way.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        >Our values are soft things next to the concrete realities of life. The need to eat, our health, social contacts, the hard limits on our healthy lifespan. All of the above can (and have) yield in order to uphold some values, including the ultimate sacrificing of one's life (much less health or social contacts). Plus, utilitarians have virtue ethics too. They just consider utility the virtue to uphold, downstream from that decision it's not different than plain old virtue ethics. After all the utility can only ultimately be judged by a value judgement (what we consider of higher utility). There's no neutral raw utility without a desired (value judgement) end result.
- klyrs 3y ago
  > If social relationships cannot be maintained without social media, I have no doubt, it is the wrong social relationships "maintained". I'm a person who abstains from social media. My family has not. They can contact me individually, and some do infrequently, but they complain that I'm extra work and the rest of my family is more connected because they post content once and everybody sees it. So, I'm missing out on the healthy part of social media -- as anti-social-media as I am, I must acknowledge that there is some good to it. Your insistence that my family is the "wrong social relationship" to maintain is missing the baby for the bathwater.
HEmanZ 3y ago
People used to be able to maintain large remote friend circles before the telegram was invented. If they could do it by snail mail, you can do it with a phone and no social media.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Not when all others that you want to reach have switched to social media.
  - lynx23 3y ago
    They disconnected their phone number and switched to social media? Or did they discontinue their postal address and switch to social media? I am sort of confused what you are trying to say.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      They're spending their time on social media (instead of meeting friends and going out as much), they preferentially make their arrangements when going on and keeping touch on social media, they will often actively snub or forget people outside social media, and even if you manage to get time with them face to face, they're likely to discuss social media drama or just stare at their social media smartphone screen.
      - lynx23 3y ago
        OK, but given the behaviour you describe, why do you miss them, then? Sounds like these people dont add anything to your life, or at least dont really want to add something, which is also reason enough to not care.
        coldtea 3y ago
        Because "these people" is most people. So minimizes the chances of finding people to "add something to your life". This is one result... https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-soci... https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/loneliness-in-america https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/loneliness-in-america

lynx23 3y ago

If I want to use WhatsApp or Messenger as a messaging tool, nothing forces me to follow any toxic feeds. I can just use WhatsApp and Messanger as a plain inbox and do not have to care about reading the FB feed. I am not so sure about Twitter, but I guess you can also use the DM features without having to dive headlong into flamey feeds.

9dev 3y ago

Asking out of curiosity: is Twitter the medium of choice in your social circle? Everyone I know uses messengers to communicate, and while I know lots of my friends use Instagram, you don’t have to to participate.

throwbadubadu 3y ago

There are so many people wanting to escape, but then also again claiming this. But it is an excuse: there are so many electronic good alternatives for friend cycles to stay connected if they want where you still can keep off social media.. And tbh, we did this well before even without those, and there was even a time we did this without mobile phones but just landline and mail... Just try it for a while, it really still works. If social relationships cannot be maintained without social media, I have no doubt, it is the wrong social relationships "maintained".

dbspin 3y ago
> there are so many electronic good alternatives for friend cycles to stay connected if they want where you still can keep off social media.. Network effects just don't work like this. I suspect thinking that they do is related to the kinds of friendships the commenter has - small, intense, long term group friendships; and proximity friendships. Personally I don't have the social capital to pull the dozens of people I keep in regular contact with off their preferred platform and into a new one. Very few people do. And I value those relationships far more than I hate the platforms that maintain them. > If social relationships cannot be maintained without social media, I have no doubt, it is the wrong social relationships "maintained". This is a value judgement, and not an argument. I have strong relationships with friends and former partners, as well as family, that I've maintained for decades through platforms like messenger - which is awful but ubiquitous - with real people who live across the world. We do meet when possible, but it's often years apart, and there's no one 'core group'. These are real world, profound friendships with people I met in person, lived or worked or studied with for years and care about. I completely agree with the characterisation of the harms wrought by social media. But prior to social media, more than a very few distant friendships were all but impossible to maintain. And when you lost contact with an old friend, you could never be quite certain if they had lost interest, were too busy, or had perhaps died or suffered some great setback in life.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >This is a value judgement, and not an argument. Value judgements are the ultimate arguments. In the end, nothing else matters aside from the kind of values we want to uphold.
  - dbspin 3y ago
    Not to get into a back and forth - but that's not remotely true. Our values are soft things next to the concrete realities of life. The need to eat, our health, social contacts, the hard limits on our healthy lifespan. Values are the ways of being we develop to bring our desires into alignments with the aspects of reality we can't control. Moreover - what you're describing is virtue ethics, which is only one of many ethical systems. Hold hard to your values and be evaluated based on your adherence to them. Personally I'm more of a soft utilitarian - it's the results of my decisions that matter, not how they adhere to an abstract value. But we all fight the chaos in our own way.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >Our values are soft things next to the concrete realities of life. The need to eat, our health, social contacts, the hard limits on our healthy lifespan. All of the above can (and have) yield in order to uphold some values, including the ultimate sacrificing of one's life (much less health or social contacts). Plus, utilitarians have virtue ethics too. They just consider utility the virtue to uphold, downstream from that decision it's not different than plain old virtue ethics. After all the utility can only ultimately be judged by a value judgement (what we consider of higher utility). There's no neutral raw utility without a desired (value judgement) end result.
klyrs 3y ago
> If social relationships cannot be maintained without social media, I have no doubt, it is the wrong social relationships "maintained". I'm a person who abstains from social media. My family has not. They can contact me individually, and some do infrequently, but they complain that I'm extra work and the rest of my family is more connected because they post content once and everybody sees it. So, I'm missing out on the healthy part of social media -- as anti-social-media as I am, I must acknowledge that there is some good to it. Your insistence that my family is the "wrong social relationship" to maintain is missing the baby for the bathwater.

HEmanZ 3y ago

People used to be able to maintain large remote friend circles before the telegram was invented. If they could do it by snail mail, you can do it with a phone and no social media.

coldtea 3y ago
Not when all others that you want to reach have switched to social media.
- lynx23 3y ago
  They disconnected their phone number and switched to social media? Or did they discontinue their postal address and switch to social media? I am sort of confused what you are trying to say.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    They're spending their time on social media (instead of meeting friends and going out as much), they preferentially make their arrangements when going on and keeping touch on social media, they will often actively snub or forget people outside social media, and even if you manage to get time with them face to face, they're likely to discuss social media drama or just stare at their social media smartphone screen.
    - lynx23 3y ago
      OK, but given the behaviour you describe, why do you miss them, then? Sounds like these people dont add anything to your life, or at least dont really want to add something, which is also reason enough to not care.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        Because "these people" is most people. So minimizes the chances of finding people to "add something to your life". This is one result... https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-soci... https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/loneliness-in-america https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/loneliness-in-america