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First, there was LiveJournal. Then there was MySpace. Then there was FaceBook. I was on FaceBook until .edu stopped being a requirement. Shortly after that chan

First, there was LiveJournal. Then there was MySpace. Then there was FaceBook. I was on FaceBook until .edu stopped being a requirement. Shortly after that change, my wall became a mix of soft porn and hightimes. Nothing wrong with that, but it isn’t what I want to see so I deleted my FaceBook account. I went over to Twitter. Over time, Twitter ceased to be interesting as it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand very well. I deleted my Twitter account half a decade ago. All of it is actually useless, and it does nothing but eat time.

sevrinsky 3y ago
Utter futility! — said Koheleth — Utter futility! All is futile!
dade_ 3y ago
LinkedIn at least managed to retain its only useful function, a self-updating Rolodex. It would be nice to be able to disable the virtue signalling feed though.
- ljm 3y ago
  The joy of LinkedIn is you don't need to spend your life scrolling through it. Go in, spend 5 seconds seeing what's new or if you have any non-spam messages, then close the tab. Ignore it for a week or two and repeat, no excessive engagement required.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Yeah I unironically really like LinkedIn. I use it to see who works at companies and who else people I know might know, and what all those people have been up to. This is all super useful information to me as I plan out what to work on and with whom. But the feed could just not be there and it would make no difference. Not sure what you'd put in that real estate on the home page instead though.
    - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
      I think LinkedIn doesn’t know either, so they just did … that
      - sanderjd 3y ago
        Absolutely. I imagine the product meeting being "What are we going to put on the homepage? It's would be weird for your home page to just be your own profile... I guess a feed? Those seem popular and take up plenty of space...".
    - culopatin 3y ago
      I must not know how to use it. My experience is an empty shell of people that only use it when they are looking for a job. The active ones post things that they think will make them look smart, cheap blog posts about “5 management tips”, “is your manager micromanaging you?”, “9 must have resume tools”, stuff like that. The people that I’m actually interested in have a profile, but never actually use it. Or already got a job and don’t need to open it often, if at all. The recruiters that reach out are always scammy or offer ridiculous things hoping that if I’m there, I’m desperate. 12/h do it all position, contract, for maybe 2 weeks, maybe 6 months, (doesn’t matter, I’m on the verge of homelessness anyway right?) for a “very important and growing company” that’s not even in the area I’m in. It always gives me that fake useless vibe. I don’t really know how to turn it into something I actually want to be part of.
      - intelVISA 3y ago
        Pretty much how LI works unfortunately. The people you'd hope were active are out there busy doing useful things not writing "5 lifehacks to do useful things".
        sanderjd 3y ago
        > Pretty much how LI works fortunately. Fixed that for you! :) Seriously, discoverable linkable profiles with tracking of connections and links to businesses and schools is incredibly useful, and we're fortunate it exists.
  - b112 3y ago
    Ignore it for a week or two and repeat, no excessive engagement required Oh my god, don't say that out loud! That'll send them into a full redesign!
    - antonvs 3y ago
      That’s nothing, I generally ignore it for months at a time
  - davidmurdoch 3y ago
    A week or two? More like a year or two.
  - stcroixx 3y ago
    You log into LinkedIn every week or two to check messages there? I'd call that pretty solid engagement. If I were a product person there, I'd be happy to have a user like you. I log in every few years when I really have to for some reason and it's always a pain because I'm going to have to reset my password, figure out my login, blah, blech.
  - Forgeties79 3y ago
    I log into it strictly to job search, and for that it has been fantastic. What I love is that I don’t need to engage with the site regularly in order to utilize it for that function. I’m on every year or two for a few weeks (minutes a day tops) to update resumes, clean up my “professional storefront” essentially, and do a few job searches - which then leads to me getting regular emails with job opportunities that match my parameters. And unlike other hiring sites, LinkedIn has actually produced results for me.
- Garlef 3y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linkedin-feed-blocker/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linkedin-feed...
- ian0 3y ago
  You can with a quick ublock filter. I find the following works a treat: www.linkedin.com###ember69 > div www.linkedin.com##.pb3.pt2.learning-top-courses www.linkedin.com##.clear-both.text-align-center.t-normal.t-12.global-footer-compact__content www.linkedin.com###ember131 > div www.linkedin.com###voyager-feed www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-bubble-header www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content--scrollable.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content www.linkedin.com###msg-overlay www.linkedin.com###messaging-nav-item
- misja111 3y ago
  Every time I fall into the trap of scrolling through the LinkedIn news feed, I end up losing faith in humanity. What LinkedIn has decided that I want to see is a mix of conspiracy theories and narcistic self promotions; and under every post a chorus of congratulations and compliments.
  - nicbou 3y ago
    Every time I log in, I unfollow everyone on my feed. LinkedIn is great if you don't follow anyone. I've done the same thing with other social media.
    - yodsanklai 3y ago
      On Twitter, I follow exactly one person. I don't even see all his comments on my feed. But I do see things like fights, light porn content (dicks, prostitutes), Musk trolling... And sometimes, I feel the urge to react to trolls or argue with people. Not a good social media in my opinion. I'm sure it could be vastly improved with a better feed algorithm, and better moderation.
      - nicbou 3y ago
        This is what got me to leave Facebook definitely. I could not follow the only family member I cared about. Facebook just wouldn't show me their posts. Twitter forced "recommended content" onto me recently. Now I just visit /notifications directly. I cut the feed out entirely.
  - api 3y ago
    There’s conspiritainment on LinkedIn now? Holy hell. I haven’t logged into that clunker in a long time so I haven’t seen it. Our sales team is forced to use it. Poor souls.
    - misja111 3y ago
      Not only are there conspiracy theorists on the LinkedIn feed, also there is no censoring or warning like on FB. It's a conspiracy theorist's paradise ..
- walthamstow 3y ago
  Super easy to disable the feed, just unfollow all of your connections.
  - FeistySkink 3y ago
    Is there a batch way to do that without triggering some safety check? I have several K of them.
    - walthamstow 3y ago
      Afraid not! The ublock origin method is probably your best bet.
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  "Virtue signalling?"
- edw519 3y ago
  LinkedIn's "only useful function" is insufficient to overcome its "deal killer": it's a farce. I have never met an I.T. manager whose LinkedIn profile was remotely close to reality. They all claim the same B.S. (detail oriented, results driven, digital transformation, blah blah blah blah blah blah), enabling them to get hired into roles that ruin the lives of programmers like me. Better they should just be honest and say, "Switch jobs every 3 years when they find out I'm a total poser but I promise to stay out of the programmers' way". I prefer to share my experience here: https://eddiots.com/1038 https://eddiots.com/1038 https://eddiots.com/28 https://eddiots.com/28 https://eddiots.com/1840 https://eddiots.com/1840 https://eddiots.com/983 https://eddiots.com/983
  - ExtraRoulette 3y ago
    3 Days late but this is a funny comic! (I'm more WandaWant than say, alGorithm so some of the coding references go over my head but the jokes are funny all the same!)
    - edw519 3y ago
      Thank you, ExtraRoulette! Don't underestimate yourself. My version of wandaWant would never admit that anything went over her head. She'd just pretend that she knew what we were talking about. So you're way ahead already :-)
      - ExtraRoulette 3y ago
        Hah! I appreciate that. One question if that's okay. I notice a few comics refer to COVID though they seem to be dated pre-pandemic: https://eddiots.com/344 https://eddiots.com/344 I'm curious; how come?
        edw519 3y ago
        Nice catch, ExtraRoulette! You're the first to notice. This project is new. My plan was to write a "comic generator", where I would just input parameters and it would generate the comics. It worked even better than I expected. In the last 6 months, it has generated 2700 comics from my inputs. Then I realized that if I launched 7/1/23, it would take 10 years just to post what I already had, even at one per day. So I just reset my start date from 1/1/23 to 1/1/14. I wanted to launch with a lot of content so people could explore. I also wanted the site to be evergreen which is why I try not to dig too deep into specific technologies. But COVID was obviously too big to ignore. I sorted my backlog a few weeks ago based on many factors, but I guess 344 slipped through the cracks. I think I'll leave it there to see if anyone else notices.
- wesapien 3y ago
  Install uBlock Origin and wipe those virtues away. Use the element zapper mode to temporarily remove things. Refresh and it'll be back. Use element picker to permanently hide parts of a website.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  I refuse to sign up for linked-in because I'm still salty about the years when 2/3 of my inbox was emails asking me to sign up.
  - dade_ 3y ago
    Yes, I remember when LinkedIn was tricking people into spamming everyone in their contact list on their phone and using the information to suggest connections. A coworker was fooled and sent out invitations to everyone in his massive contact list. He was in sales for over 40 years and was mortified, then pissed off. I refuse to install the LinkedIn apps on my devices. Microsoft didn’t help matters when they integrated it into Outlook.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I deleted my LinkedIn account years ago because it had no useful function for me. All it did was get me a constant stream of recruiter spam.
  - yetanother12345 3y ago
    > I deleted my LinkedIn account... Genuinely curious: Can you delete now? How? Around 15-16 years ago I _tried_ doing the same and found out that deletion was _not_ possible. I had a personal profile as well as a company profile there. The company was a one-man startup that went down around 2007-9 sometime with the crisis. So it was closed. As there was no option to actually delete or remove profiles I had to resort to manually tracking every bit of content in groups/threads etc and editing each one-by-one to be blank. Also profile pages were blanked and company facts removed where possible. I even wrote a note on both profile pages that "I no longer use this site: this profile is no longer active". This work took days I recall. As many years have passed I do not recall if there was an option to hide the personal profile or not, but no such option existed for the company, and no delete option existed either way. Last time I logged in was around five-six years ago only to find out that my profiles were still there and my former company had now gained 100+ current and former employees from multiple countries! I had no way to inform anyone that these people were not really employees, as said company no longer existed. And, they never had been. I would still like to be able to permanently delete these profiles, but last time I checked it was still the digital equivalent of Hotel Califonia: "you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave"
pmlnr 3y ago
In all that time, and before, I had my website - along with the moves. The site is still there.
azangru 3y ago
> Over time, Twitter ceased to be interesting as it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand very well I don't have a Twitter account; but I have found Twitter quite interesting to learn opinions of several people on the state of web development, which I used to regularly check out. Some of them have since migrated to Mastodon; others haven't; some of those who had migrated, went back, because, it seems, they were after the audience after all. When Twitter stopped anonymous readers from accessing its user feeds, that was a big disappointment.
Eupraxias 3y ago
How many of you have _never_ used any of these central-platform Social Media sites? My purpose is not to virtue signal or brag about how I've never owned a TV etc, but I'm genuinely curious about how many people who are reading this never once signed up for or spent more than a minute on any of these garbage platforms? Let's leave LinkedIn aside, for various reasons. I'm thinking here of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.
- api 3y ago
  Stay where you are. A team is on its way to extract you.
- alentred 3y ago
  I think there are not many who never even signed up with any of these platforms. If not anything else then at least out of curiosity I too have signed up on all three you mention. If you change the question to "never ever used past the first 2 weeks" - sign me in to that list.
  - Eupraxias 3y ago
    I mean never have even created an account.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  I would be especially curious to know if anyone went to university in USA/Canada and avoided Facebook. I was never a heavy FB user prior to school, but it was the hub of everything. Even for alumni events, it remains the hub.
- adql 3y ago
  Depends. Does logging on facebook once a month to see what the few family members are doing counts ? That at best, I went months never visting it and just used FB as a SSO provider for any site I didn't cared enough to create any proper account on. As for others, I only visit twitter if it is a source for update of something I care about, and that's near always coming from some other site like HN Both could disappear tomorrow and nothing of value would be lost. I tried some FB groups related to hobbies but they're generally garbage with no way to bury useless/low effort content.
beebmam 3y ago
And yet, you read and comment on Hacker News, a social media site akin to reddit. Do you have the same conclusion about this space?
- mlekoszek 3y ago
  The people here are nice
  - yccs27 3y ago
    ... for now ;)
- zowie_vd 3y ago
  The feature list of Hacker News is similar to Reddit, but the content and the nature of quality control are entirely different, and his issues were about the content he saw on those websites. In light of that I don't agree that his comment is hypocritical.
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  This site doesn't even have half the problems as most social media. Ragebait is usually handled well, the incentives to troll/virtue signal are low (karma is not visible) and the level of discussion is usually high. And there is no customised feed, everyone sees the same thing.
  - adql 3y ago
    ...people look at other people's karma on reddit ?
    - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
      The karma of individual comments absolutely changes the way people interact with them
      - ljm 3y ago
mmaunder 3y ago
Right before LiveJournal there was MovableType and when MT crashed and burned because they changed their license terms to be less open source, WordPress took off. That moment was when the road forked into social media vs open source publishing on WordPress. Almost 20 years later WP is 40% of the Web for anyone who cares to pull their heads out of their favorite walled garden to take a look.
- ValentineC 3y ago
  > Almost 20 years later WP is 40% of the Web for anyone who cares to pull their heads out of their favorite walled garden to take a look. I wonder if anyone has ever critically evaluated the methodology used by W3Techs [1][2]: > We investigate technologies of websites, not of individual web pages. If we find a technology on any of the pages, it is considered to be used by the website. > We do not consider subdomains to be separate websites. For instance, sub1.example.com and sub2.example.com are considered to belong to the same site as example.com. That means for example, that all the subdomains of wix.com, wordpress.com and similar sites are counted only as one website. So if Microsoft has a wp.subsite.microsoft.com subdomain, W3Techs considers WordPress as part of the technologies that Microsoft uses. Is that really 43% of the "relevant web"? [1] https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/technologies [2] https://w3techs.com/faq https://w3techs.com/faq
- antonvs 3y ago
  What that statistic means is that nearly 40% of business card websites and similar sites use Wordpress. It’s nowhere near as significant as some people seem to think it is. Personal blogs are a vanishingly small fraction of that. The only reason it might seem otherwise is due to social bubbles or interest bubbles.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    It remains the clear front-runner, with no close competition, for most any site that'll be run by non-geeks, unless you're hosting on a managed platform with its own (closed) content management system. Exception for certain narrow use cases that are well-served by special-purpose software, but it's broadly true. That includes use cases well beyond personal blogs and business card sites.
tim333 3y ago
>Over time, Twitter ceased to be interesting as it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand The trick is to follow experts who do understand what they are on about, eg a top general on Ukraine, top scientist on covid. Having done that I find it disappointing going back to reading mainstream journalists who post with less understanding. You have to fight a little with the recommendation algos pushing random nonsense at you but it's doable.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  But why? The current top reply sums it up so well: "All of it is actually useless, and it does nothing but eat time."
  - tim333 3y ago
    Better info? In my case it's mostly a hobby interest so you could debate if it's worth while.
- anchochilis 3y ago
  This was my great frustration with Twitter the last time I tried it. Even when I carefully curated my followers, random crap would constantly sneak into my feed. It was annoying enough that I started just manually navigating to a few bookmarked profiles periodically to read their latest tweets.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    publicly traded companies in the social media space need to get clicks. so do influencers and pundits. no surprise that economic forces push them together, to the detriment of your feed.
  - tim333 3y ago
    I find clicking "not interested" followed by "show fewer tweets from..." kinda works. But yeah it's a battle.
- 3y ago
Dowwie 3y ago
Friendster in 2002/2003 was pretty great
cjvirtucio 3y ago
reddit and youtube were my last remaining social platforms. quit reddit because of the API changes. might be quitting youtube, as well, because of the ads. and then there'll be nothing left for me to spend time on except code and family.
unobatbayar 3y ago
Your experience is isolated to your own network of friends and the people you're following. It doesn't represent the platform itself.
Forgeties79 3y ago
Reddit was arguably the last “social media” I was using until a few weeks ago with the protest. I resigned as a moderator of a decently large sub and deleted the app. Let me tell you, it has been the best few weeks for me mentally in years. I set up inoreader and only grabbed a couple of publication/writers I really like. I don’t doom scroll, there’s no capability for comments so I don’t get dragged into any arguments, and even with HN still in my life the churn and burn of content and simplicity/general culture keeps me to a few comments a week at most. I know a lot of people talk about “delete Facebook/hit the gym” etc. but gym or not, my life is infinitely better without social media now. It is very clear to me that it’s not even a situation where the cons outweighs the pros now, there simply aren’t any pros left. Someone enumerated the issues with Reddit, as well as social media writ large, at the start of the Reddit blackout. There’s a lot of interesting insight about the failures of Web 2.0 from a consumer standpoint, but one line at the end really resonated with me: “The Internet just isn’t fun anymore.“ Obviously that’s a pretty broad stroke and we should always be wary of rose-tinted glasses, but I can’t say I don’t get what they mean.

sevrinsky 3y ago

Utter futility! — said Koheleth — Utter futility! All is futile!

dade_ 3y ago

LinkedIn at least managed to retain its only useful function, a self-updating Rolodex. It would be nice to be able to disable the virtue signalling feed though.

ljm 3y ago
The joy of LinkedIn is you don't need to spend your life scrolling through it. Go in, spend 5 seconds seeing what's new or if you have any non-spam messages, then close the tab. Ignore it for a week or two and repeat, no excessive engagement required.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yeah I unironically really like LinkedIn. I use it to see who works at companies and who else people I know might know, and what all those people have been up to. This is all super useful information to me as I plan out what to work on and with whom. But the feed could just not be there and it would make no difference. Not sure what you'd put in that real estate on the home page instead though.
  - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    I think LinkedIn doesn’t know either, so they just did … that
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Absolutely. I imagine the product meeting being "What are we going to put on the homepage? It's would be weird for your home page to just be your own profile... I guess a feed? Those seem popular and take up plenty of space...".
  - culopatin 3y ago
    I must not know how to use it. My experience is an empty shell of people that only use it when they are looking for a job. The active ones post things that they think will make them look smart, cheap blog posts about “5 management tips”, “is your manager micromanaging you?”, “9 must have resume tools”, stuff like that. The people that I’m actually interested in have a profile, but never actually use it. Or already got a job and don’t need to open it often, if at all. The recruiters that reach out are always scammy or offer ridiculous things hoping that if I’m there, I’m desperate. 12/h do it all position, contract, for maybe 2 weeks, maybe 6 months, (doesn’t matter, I’m on the verge of homelessness anyway right?) for a “very important and growing company” that’s not even in the area I’m in. It always gives me that fake useless vibe. I don’t really know how to turn it into something I actually want to be part of.
    - intelVISA 3y ago
      Pretty much how LI works unfortunately. The people you'd hope were active are out there busy doing useful things not writing "5 lifehacks to do useful things".
      - sanderjd 3y ago
        > Pretty much how LI works fortunately. Fixed that for you! :) Seriously, discoverable linkable profiles with tracking of connections and links to businesses and schools is incredibly useful, and we're fortunate it exists.
- b112 3y ago
  Ignore it for a week or two and repeat, no excessive engagement required Oh my god, don't say that out loud! That'll send them into a full redesign!
  - antonvs 3y ago
    That’s nothing, I generally ignore it for months at a time
- davidmurdoch 3y ago
  A week or two? More like a year or two.
- stcroixx 3y ago
  You log into LinkedIn every week or two to check messages there? I'd call that pretty solid engagement. If I were a product person there, I'd be happy to have a user like you. I log in every few years when I really have to for some reason and it's always a pain because I'm going to have to reset my password, figure out my login, blah, blech.
- Forgeties79 3y ago
  I log into it strictly to job search, and for that it has been fantastic. What I love is that I don’t need to engage with the site regularly in order to utilize it for that function. I’m on every year or two for a few weeks (minutes a day tops) to update resumes, clean up my “professional storefront” essentially, and do a few job searches - which then leads to me getting regular emails with job opportunities that match my parameters. And unlike other hiring sites, LinkedIn has actually produced results for me.
Garlef 3y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linkedin-feed-blocker/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linkedin-feed...
ian0 3y ago
You can with a quick ublock filter. I find the following works a treat: www.linkedin.com###ember69 > div www.linkedin.com##.pb3.pt2.learning-top-courses www.linkedin.com##.clear-both.text-align-center.t-normal.t-12.global-footer-compact__content www.linkedin.com###ember131 > div www.linkedin.com###voyager-feed www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-bubble-header www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content--scrollable.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content www.linkedin.com###msg-overlay www.linkedin.com###messaging-nav-item
misja111 3y ago
Every time I fall into the trap of scrolling through the LinkedIn news feed, I end up losing faith in humanity. What LinkedIn has decided that I want to see is a mix of conspiracy theories and narcistic self promotions; and under every post a chorus of congratulations and compliments.
- nicbou 3y ago
  Every time I log in, I unfollow everyone on my feed. LinkedIn is great if you don't follow anyone. I've done the same thing with other social media.
  - yodsanklai 3y ago
    On Twitter, I follow exactly one person. I don't even see all his comments on my feed. But I do see things like fights, light porn content (dicks, prostitutes), Musk trolling... And sometimes, I feel the urge to react to trolls or argue with people. Not a good social media in my opinion. I'm sure it could be vastly improved with a better feed algorithm, and better moderation.
    - nicbou 3y ago
      This is what got me to leave Facebook definitely. I could not follow the only family member I cared about. Facebook just wouldn't show me their posts. Twitter forced "recommended content" onto me recently. Now I just visit /notifications directly. I cut the feed out entirely.
- api 3y ago
  There’s conspiritainment on LinkedIn now? Holy hell. I haven’t logged into that clunker in a long time so I haven’t seen it. Our sales team is forced to use it. Poor souls.
  - misja111 3y ago
    Not only are there conspiracy theorists on the LinkedIn feed, also there is no censoring or warning like on FB. It's a conspiracy theorist's paradise ..
walthamstow 3y ago
Super easy to disable the feed, just unfollow all of your connections.
- FeistySkink 3y ago
  Is there a batch way to do that without triggering some safety check? I have several K of them.
  - walthamstow 3y ago
    Afraid not! The ublock origin method is probably your best bet.
ubermonkey 3y ago
"Virtue signalling?"
edw519 3y ago
LinkedIn's "only useful function" is insufficient to overcome its "deal killer": it's a farce. I have never met an I.T. manager whose LinkedIn profile was remotely close to reality. They all claim the same B.S. (detail oriented, results driven, digital transformation, blah blah blah blah blah blah), enabling them to get hired into roles that ruin the lives of programmers like me. Better they should just be honest and say, "Switch jobs every 3 years when they find out I'm a total poser but I promise to stay out of the programmers' way". I prefer to share my experience here: https://eddiots.com/1038 https://eddiots.com/1038 https://eddiots.com/28 https://eddiots.com/28 https://eddiots.com/1840 https://eddiots.com/1840 https://eddiots.com/983 https://eddiots.com/983
- ExtraRoulette 3y ago
  3 Days late but this is a funny comic! (I'm more WandaWant than say, alGorithm so some of the coding references go over my head but the jokes are funny all the same!)
  - edw519 3y ago
    Thank you, ExtraRoulette! Don't underestimate yourself. My version of wandaWant would never admit that anything went over her head. She'd just pretend that she knew what we were talking about. So you're way ahead already :-)
    - ExtraRoulette 3y ago
      Hah! I appreciate that. One question if that's okay. I notice a few comics refer to COVID though they seem to be dated pre-pandemic: https://eddiots.com/344 https://eddiots.com/344 I'm curious; how come?
      - edw519 3y ago
        Nice catch, ExtraRoulette! You're the first to notice. This project is new. My plan was to write a "comic generator", where I would just input parameters and it would generate the comics. It worked even better than I expected. In the last 6 months, it has generated 2700 comics from my inputs. Then I realized that if I launched 7/1/23, it would take 10 years just to post what I already had, even at one per day. So I just reset my start date from 1/1/23 to 1/1/14. I wanted to launch with a lot of content so people could explore. I also wanted the site to be evergreen which is why I try not to dig too deep into specific technologies. But COVID was obviously too big to ignore. I sorted my backlog a few weeks ago based on many factors, but I guess 344 slipped through the cracks. I think I'll leave it there to see if anyone else notices.
wesapien 3y ago
Install uBlock Origin and wipe those virtues away. Use the element zapper mode to temporarily remove things. Refresh and it'll be back. Use element picker to permanently hide parts of a website.
aidenn0 3y ago
I refuse to sign up for linked-in because I'm still salty about the years when 2/3 of my inbox was emails asking me to sign up.
- dade_ 3y ago
  Yes, I remember when LinkedIn was tricking people into spamming everyone in their contact list on their phone and using the information to suggest connections. A coworker was fooled and sent out invitations to everyone in his massive contact list. He was in sales for over 40 years and was mortified, then pissed off. I refuse to install the LinkedIn apps on my devices. Microsoft didn’t help matters when they integrated it into Outlook.
JohnFen 3y ago
I deleted my LinkedIn account years ago because it had no useful function for me. All it did was get me a constant stream of recruiter spam.
- yetanother12345 3y ago
  > I deleted my LinkedIn account... Genuinely curious: Can you delete now? How? Around 15-16 years ago I _tried_ doing the same and found out that deletion was _not_ possible. I had a personal profile as well as a company profile there. The company was a one-man startup that went down around 2007-9 sometime with the crisis. So it was closed. As there was no option to actually delete or remove profiles I had to resort to manually tracking every bit of content in groups/threads etc and editing each one-by-one to be blank. Also profile pages were blanked and company facts removed where possible. I even wrote a note on both profile pages that "I no longer use this site: this profile is no longer active". This work took days I recall. As many years have passed I do not recall if there was an option to hide the personal profile or not, but no such option existed for the company, and no delete option existed either way. Last time I logged in was around five-six years ago only to find out that my profiles were still there and my former company had now gained 100+ current and former employees from multiple countries! I had no way to inform anyone that these people were not really employees, as said company no longer existed. And, they never had been. I would still like to be able to permanently delete these profiles, but last time I checked it was still the digital equivalent of Hotel Califonia: "you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave"

pmlnr 3y ago

In all that time, and before, I had my website - along with the moves. The site is still there.

azangru 3y ago

> Over time, Twitter ceased to be interesting as it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand very well I don't have a Twitter account; but I have found Twitter quite interesting to learn opinions of several people on the state of web development, which I used to regularly check out. Some of them have since migrated to Mastodon; others haven't; some of those who had migrated, went back, because, it seems, they were after the audience after all. When Twitter stopped anonymous readers from accessing its user feeds, that was a big disappointment.

Eupraxias 3y ago

How many of you have _never_ used any of these central-platform Social Media sites? My purpose is not to virtue signal or brag about how I've never owned a TV etc, but I'm genuinely curious about how many people who are reading this never once signed up for or spent more than a minute on any of these garbage platforms? Let's leave LinkedIn aside, for various reasons. I'm thinking here of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.

api 3y ago
Stay where you are. A team is on its way to extract you.
alentred 3y ago
I think there are not many who never even signed up with any of these platforms. If not anything else then at least out of curiosity I too have signed up on all three you mention. If you change the question to "never ever used past the first 2 weeks" - sign me in to that list.
- Eupraxias 3y ago
  I mean never have even created an account.
MattGaiser 3y ago
I would be especially curious to know if anyone went to university in USA/Canada and avoided Facebook. I was never a heavy FB user prior to school, but it was the hub of everything. Even for alumni events, it remains the hub.
adql 3y ago
Depends. Does logging on facebook once a month to see what the few family members are doing counts ? That at best, I went months never visting it and just used FB as a SSO provider for any site I didn't cared enough to create any proper account on. As for others, I only visit twitter if it is a source for update of something I care about, and that's near always coming from some other site like HN Both could disappear tomorrow and nothing of value would be lost. I tried some FB groups related to hobbies but they're generally garbage with no way to bury useless/low effort content.

beebmam 3y ago

And yet, you read and comment on Hacker News, a social media site akin to reddit. Do you have the same conclusion about this space?

mlekoszek 3y ago
The people here are nice
- yccs27 3y ago
  ... for now ;)
zowie_vd 3y ago
The feature list of Hacker News is similar to Reddit, but the content and the nature of quality control are entirely different, and his issues were about the content he saw on those websites. In light of that I don't agree that his comment is hypocritical.
Pannoniae 3y ago
This site doesn't even have half the problems as most social media. Ragebait is usually handled well, the incentives to troll/virtue signal are low (karma is not visible) and the level of discussion is usually high. And there is no customised feed, everyone sees the same thing.
- adql 3y ago
  ...people look at other people's karma on reddit ?
  - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    The karma of individual comments absolutely changes the way people interact with them
    - ljm 3y ago

mmaunder 3y ago

Right before LiveJournal there was MovableType and when MT crashed and burned because they changed their license terms to be less open source, WordPress took off. That moment was when the road forked into social media vs open source publishing on WordPress. Almost 20 years later WP is 40% of the Web for anyone who cares to pull their heads out of their favorite walled garden to take a look.

ValentineC 3y ago
> Almost 20 years later WP is 40% of the Web for anyone who cares to pull their heads out of their favorite walled garden to take a look. I wonder if anyone has ever critically evaluated the methodology used by W3Techs [1][2]: > We investigate technologies of websites, not of individual web pages. If we find a technology on any of the pages, it is considered to be used by the website. > We do not consider subdomains to be separate websites. For instance, sub1.example.com and sub2.example.com are considered to belong to the same site as example.com. That means for example, that all the subdomains of wix.com, wordpress.com and similar sites are counted only as one website. So if Microsoft has a wp.subsite.microsoft.com subdomain, W3Techs considers WordPress as part of the technologies that Microsoft uses. Is that really 43% of the "relevant web"? [1] https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/technologies [2] https://w3techs.com/faq https://w3techs.com/faq
antonvs 3y ago
What that statistic means is that nearly 40% of business card websites and similar sites use Wordpress. It’s nowhere near as significant as some people seem to think it is. Personal blogs are a vanishingly small fraction of that. The only reason it might seem otherwise is due to social bubbles or interest bubbles.
- bamfly 3y ago
  It remains the clear front-runner, with no close competition, for most any site that'll be run by non-geeks, unless you're hosting on a managed platform with its own (closed) content management system. Exception for certain narrow use cases that are well-served by special-purpose software, but it's broadly true. That includes use cases well beyond personal blogs and business card sites.

tim333 3y ago

>Over time, Twitter ceased to be interesting as it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand The trick is to follow experts who do understand what they are on about, eg a top general on Ukraine, top scientist on covid. Having done that I find it disappointing going back to reading mainstream journalists who post with less understanding. You have to fight a little with the recommendation algos pushing random nonsense at you but it's doable.

SoftTalker 3y ago
But why? The current top reply sums it up so well: "All of it is actually useless, and it does nothing but eat time."
- tim333 3y ago
  Better info? In my case it's mostly a hobby interest so you could debate if it's worth while.
anchochilis 3y ago
This was my great frustration with Twitter the last time I tried it. Even when I carefully curated my followers, random crap would constantly sneak into my feed. It was annoying enough that I started just manually navigating to a few bookmarked profiles periodically to read their latest tweets.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  publicly traded companies in the social media space need to get clicks. so do influencers and pundits. no surprise that economic forces push them together, to the detriment of your feed.
- tim333 3y ago
  I find clicking "not interested" followed by "show fewer tweets from..." kinda works. But yeah it's a battle.
3y ago

Dowwie 3y ago

Friendster in 2002/2003 was pretty great

cjvirtucio 3y ago

reddit and youtube were my last remaining social platforms. quit reddit because of the API changes. might be quitting youtube, as well, because of the ads. and then there'll be nothing left for me to spend time on except code and family.

unobatbayar 3y ago

Your experience is isolated to your own network of friends and the people you're following. It doesn't represent the platform itself.

Forgeties79 3y ago

Reddit was arguably the last “social media” I was using until a few weeks ago with the protest. I resigned as a moderator of a decently large sub and deleted the app. Let me tell you, it has been the best few weeks for me mentally in years. I set up inoreader and only grabbed a couple of publication/writers I really like. I don’t doom scroll, there’s no capability for comments so I don’t get dragged into any arguments, and even with HN still in my life the churn and burn of content and simplicity/general culture keeps me to a few comments a week at most. I know a lot of people talk about “delete Facebook/hit the gym” etc. but gym or not, my life is infinitely better without social media now. It is very clear to me that it’s not even a situation where the cons outweighs the pros now, there simply aren’t any pros left. Someone enumerated the issues with Reddit, as well as social media writ large, at the start of the Reddit blackout. There’s a lot of interesting insight about the failures of Web 2.0 from a consumer standpoint, but one line at the end really resonated with me: “The Internet just isn’t fun anymore.“ Obviously that’s a pretty broad stroke and we should always be wary of rose-tinted glasses, but I can’t say I don’t get what they mean.