18 ms·

Quit Social Media (2016)

218 points by skadamat 2y ago

johnea 2y ago
So, should I join so that I can quit? The coming of the current cluster fuck was clear decades ago. Anyone who wasn't enamored by meme illiteracy never took that train...
malfist 2y ago
I quit any non small community social media a few years ago and it's been really nice. My tolerance for trolls and thinking with people on the Internet is has dropped away down and I think I'm better for it. Certainly feels better
- elpocko 2y ago
  >thinking with people on the Internet is has dropped away down What? Also, congrats for being less tolerant. I like that.
  - malfist 2y ago
    Google's autocorrect "corrects" words it thought you meant, sometimes words later so you don't see it. I put arguing, but Google decided I meant thinking
    - JKCalhoun 2y ago
      That's some spooky shit right there. Is this a Chrome thing?
      - malfist 2y ago
        Nah, the android Gboard. Super frustrating. And the toggle to turn off that "feature" is shared with all autocorrection. If you disable grammar corrections you don't get any typo fixes. And there's no setting that says "only change the last word I typed"
Clubber 2y ago
I quit social media after the Snowden revelations.
- sourcepluck 2y ago
  I remember thinking it likely that many people would. My naivety knew few bounds at the time.
  - sourcepluck 2y ago
    Re-reading my own comment, and worried the poster I responded to might take that as a reverse-jibe about their own naivety - I didn't even think of that the first time I wrote it, and now want to explicitly say that wasn't my point. I sincerely thought people would quit social media following the Snowden revelations, and I did myself, and then could not believe that they didn't seem to care at all. It was a painful and jarring learning experience.
    - Clubber 2y ago
      >might take that as a reverse-jibe I did not, but thanks for being considerate. I took it as this: >I sincerely thought people would quit social media following the Snowden revelations, and I did myself, and then could not believe that they didn't seem to care at all. It was a painful and jarring learning experience. It's been over 11 years now. I would imagine it's not unlike living in a former soviet country in that everyone knows it's going on, but we just don't talk about it.
      - sourcepluck 2y ago
        Indeed. The same people from before who scoffed at the possibility of mass surveillance are the very same who pivoted immediately to a new justification of the status quo - something about national security, or it not being that bad, or it being a bit of a crazy world which we have to face, or whatever. It's almost as if their reasoned arguments were always nothing more than poorly slapped together ad hoc justifications for whatever happens to be the norm at a given moment.
benjaminwootton 2y ago
Isn’t it on the decline yet? Facebook is for boomers. Twitter is weird and we all realised how pointless it is to spend time falling out on there. Instagram feels a bit long in the tooth. LinkedIn is a parody of itself. Reddit feels like it’s growing but I think that avoids the worst of social media. TikTok and YouTube shorts seem popular but aren’t really social media. It’s just time wasting junk. All in all, social media feels like it peaked a while back.
- jjordan 2y ago
  Twitter/X is fantastic for breaking news. For example during the first assassination attempt you would find new details on there that would then appear on MSM newscasts one to two hours later. It also helps immensely to curate lists of interests to help filter out the noise and politics.
  - eterm 2y ago
    How is your life improved by getting that news minute by minute instead of an hour, or even a day, later?
    - throw_pm23 2y ago
      or indeed, not at all? :)
    - cal85 2y ago
      It’s an excellent question, but I do think you can get valuable insights from seeing how a major political event unfolds in real time, as long as it’s something you’re interested in. It can help you to view the subsequent news bulletins with a critical eye and interest and it can give you a richer depth of understanding than you would otherwise get. If it’s an event that you’re not particularly interested in, then there’s not much value in getting details in advance. Another thing, it’s not just hours. Sometimes it’s months (or in rare cases years) before a recurring topic on social media finally makes it to the news, because it’s controversial/narrative-defying, so it takes them a long time to work out how to talk about it. I don’t want to mention specific examples because it would be distracting, but there are a few topics I see mentioned daily/weekly on the news today that were pretty much absent a few years ago, yet were heavily discussed on Twitter at the time, and I am very glad I was aware of them.
freediver 2y ago
I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”. The incentives are perverse, there is an inherent conflict of interest in the business model and there is an intermediary between the user and information/community they want to participate in. This leads to most problems we see in legacy, ad-based, social media. Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry. In life we do not let everyone into the friend circle. Having a barrier to entry model may work well for an online community, although this remains to be seen. Were there any successful experiments with paid social media?
- decasia 2y ago
  I would love to pay for social software on a coop model (like a food coop, etc) — we would be "members" and, theoretically, we pay a small monthly fee that covers the costs of hosting and platform development. I've tried to think about what I would want that to look like — spoiler, something different than the model of "posting + reactions" that is so familiar from twitter+fb — but then when I think about the barriers to entry for a project like that, even though the technological part might not be that difficult (assuming it was Less Than Web Scale), I just give up hoping for it. I've been following a lot of the bluesky + mastodon stuff but I don't like that their basic model of social interaction is just a clone of Twitter.
  - hyggetrold 2y ago
    I can't remember the name of it, but over a decade ago I saw something like this - it was a single Linux server shared by (I think) hundreds of people. Really trying to do the multi-user paradigm. They advertised it as a private kind of social network, it was invite-only and I think you had to pay to help keep the server lights on. Hopefully by posting something incorrect, A Person On The Internet Who Knows Better will come along and provide the correct details. :)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - hoppyhoppy2 2y ago
Kye 2y ago
(2016) Especially important because most of his commentary focuses on the dominant social media paradigm of the time. Mastodon barely existed when this post went live, Mike Masnick was years from writing the paper that inspired Bluesky[0], and it would be strange if someone whose whole thing is getting away from social media kept up on new developments. This post is an interesting historical artifact, but shouldn't be mistaken for contemporary commentary. [0] https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  Mastodon and Bluesky are still such minor players (even though I enjoy these projects and am optimistic about their future) that I don’t see anywhere where this doesn’t pass for contemporary commentary.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - protocolture 2y ago
    It depends what the product is for you. If the product is the social graph, masto isnt even on the radar. If the product is the discussion framework without the advertising or social graph. If you can find 15 people to have the same interactions with manually its a superior player.
  - UnderScar 2y ago
    This is purely anecdotal but with Twitter/X removing blocks there seems to be an influx of new users on bluesky, it's definitely not quite on the scale of other major social medias but it seems like it is well on it's way there.
- immibis 2y ago
  Isn't Bluesky just a copy of Twitter from that era, anyway?
solomonb 2y ago
He states: > What the market values is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable. > what the market dismisses are activities that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value. Well social media use is the epitome of an easy to replicate activity that does not produce a lot of value [...] by definition the market is not going to give those activieis a lot of value [...]." Yet in the years since this TEDx talk we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.
- nimbius 2y ago
  perhaps a decade or more ago? not now. you will never become a streaming millionaire. talking heads like beast and pewdiepie employ literal armies of Hollywood editors and writers. For every organically grown insufferable content monster created on Youtube, ten more are vat-grown by a billion dollar industry designed to shepherd you into a fantasy consumerist lifestyle. These powerhouses of industry control the flow of capital at a level you will never be able to. they secure rights to music and video clips at rates you could never get, have tie-ins to major brands media and celebrities on day one, and are programmed with an endless firestorm of bots and preferential algorithmic treatment on every FAANG product in order to guarantee their success.
  - MisterBastahrd 2y ago
    You are painfully unaware of the difference between being a Youtube video creator and being a streamer. Mr. Beast is not a streamer. He is a packaged video creator. PewDiePie is a reaction video creator who occasionally streams. They are not what people think of when they think of streamers. To be a professional streamer usually takes a combination of talent and concentration that most people simply don't have. But to say that you can't become one? LOL. The AVERAGE millionaire streamer on twitch is so painfully unedited that they end up getting banned a couple times a year for saying stupid things live on air. Twitch and their sponsors practically THROW money at them to spend an hour or two to sponsor content. There's an entire backend bounty system which is only available to partners which will pay you based on your audience size. I've seen a guy with 3K viewers get a $30K check for 3 hours worth of sponsored content.
poppycock 2y ago
Programmers (cs students, "engineers") are one of the most pompous group of people who think their ability to #include <stdio.h> gives them some special ability to speak about efficiency, physics, math (other than your run of the mill discrete or remedial linear algebra) or pretty much any other topic on the face of the Earth. Don't worry about your active Facebook account. People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends). They are outliers not the rule.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  >People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends). What credentials do you hold to make this claim? It better not be a CS degree.
- a5c11 2y ago
  Are these programmers in the room with us now?
  - poppycock 2y ago
    [flagged]
- alt227 2y ago
  > just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends) I have no facebook account. I choose to have relationships with my family members and distant friends through physical contact by meeting up and talking regularly on the phone. IMO typing short text messages to people and 'reacting' to theirs with emojis and thumbs up is not a real relationship.
dang 2y ago
Related: Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38720087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38720087 - Dec 2023 (1 comment) Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16697004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16697004 - March 2018 (262 comments) Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714509 - Feb 2017 (1 comment) Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998698 - Nov 2016 (548 comments) The NYT piece those were about is https://web.archive.org/web/20171114021224/https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/jobs/quit-social-media-your-career-may-depend-on-it.html https://web.archive.org/web/20171114021224/https://www.nytim.... Not the same as OP but same topic, author, year.
motbus3 2y ago
I won't advertise but I work for a company which holds a social media for cooking and recipes. Folks there are totally averse to those and based stuff. It has been hard for the company. The owner decided the company will die before using ads (for many reasons). The paid plan is stupidly cheap and when people sign and use for a month they stick with the company for years. But it is hard. Company laid off 80% of the team some time ago and is fighting to survive. I won't defend the owner or anyone, but things came to a point where people think they are not having consequences by giving infinite permission for being tracked all the time. They think if they are not logged they are not identified so they can't be exploited. It sucks because no one appreciates that. Though I have my opinions about business and whatever I kinda appreciate for the company not running on money from ads and not collecting a single piece of user information which is not required for work.
- kikokikokiko 2y ago
  If the company you work for REALLY does behave like that, you SHOULD DEFINITELY advertise it. Companies like this must be acknowledged and celebrated. The owner must be a really good person.
  - purple-leafy 2y ago
    No form of advertising is good, I don’t want your advertising assaulting my senses. I don’t care if you piss gold or if you’re the pope or king, don’t advertise to me
    - pessimizer 2y ago
      Please advertise or you will go out of business before I ever hear about you.
    - EasyMark 2y ago
      Find sites that let you pay for content then I guess? Very few sites are charity sites, and need money to keep the lights on unless it’s just a passion site for the owners and they don’t care to be a community service. I don’t blame people trying to make some money for (many times) obviously hard work and curation of a site.
uejfiweun 2y ago
I quit social media, but the problem is that in the modern dating world a lot of people care whether you have an Instagram and that sort of thing. I truly hate social media, but I find myself considering remaking it just to improve my dating life. It's kind of a depressing situation, to be honest.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Would that be an improvement, though? Do you really want a relationship with someone who cares if you have an active Instagram account? Feels like a great filter (heh) to weed out the chaff. (If you're just casually dating around / looking for hookups, then sure, do what you think you need to do.)
- purple-leafy 2y ago
  If they care, they aren’t worth it - why date a sheep?
- tyleo 2y ago
  Some other comments are along these lines but I’ll offer an anecdote. In college I was wearing a Halo biking shirt in the computer lab. A female friend remarked, “no one is going to date you if you wear that shirt.” Another friend nearby heard and quipped back, “or only the right girls will date him wearing that shirt.” You should view your preferences more as a filter. While you should be open to new experiences which may change those presences, if something makes you truly unhappy, you are better finding a partner who won’t force that in your life.
- shadowmanifold 2y ago
  It reminds me when I was young thinking I couldn't get a date because I didn't have six pack abs. Then when I got in really good shape I thought it was because I didn't make enough money. When I started making money I thought it was because I wasn't tall enough. There is no way having social media or not is mattering that much. It is just in your head.
ryandv 2y ago
I quit social media over 10 years ago, already having been a conscientious objector to Facebook and other platforms, much to the confusion of my classmates who didn't understand my idiosyncratic positions on digital privacy, attention span, banality, and brainrot. It's gotten to the point where I view the narcissism of the modern 21st century social media user the same way I would view a crack addict smoking a pipe out in public, unable to pry their hands away from their glowing plastic rectangles, swiping incessantly in the hopes of getting just another dose of sweet dopamine with every refresh, or some artificial symbol of social validation in the form of more likes and upvotes. Somehow even in the wake of the Snowden revelations people are still ambling off of cliffs for fear of being left behind by the herd of lemmings. I feel vindicated as the years go on with every news story or opinion piece I read about (dissatisfaction with) the growing encroachment of surveillance capitalism, ad-tech and social media into our personal lives, and all for what? Some shitty memes and "influencers" peddling their garbage through thinly veiled advertisements? When I am exposed to mainstream social media content I can't believe people subject themselves to the digital equivalent of ass-to-mouth that is the brainrot of the algorithmically driven social media feed. If "you are what you eat" were analogized to an information diet, most social media users would be consuming informational shit and consequently producing the same 140-byte thoughts or reciting the same 5-second memes. If the attention economy is indeed a real concept, there is a premium for the ability to hold your concentration on something for more than half an hour and produce thoughts whose complexity is more than just a few bytes.
- purple-leafy 2y ago
  Your comment and mine (see my other comment) are almost mirror reflections lol. Sounds like similar ages at the time too
- watwut 2y ago
  Shouldn't lack of social media make people happier in theory? Because you sound to be quite resentful and angry.
  - ryandv 2y ago
    Less resentfulness and more contempt or pity, as one would regard a methhead tweaking out in public; except here it's a wirehead getting off on social media.
purple-leafy 2y ago
I did this without having to get inspiration from others. And I did it at a young age (under 18), when all my friends and the world were flocking to social media and spilling their thoughts and PII everywhere. I have nothing, and have had nothing ever since (discounting HN). People are sheep, and people are stupid. Most people waste their lives looking at a mass fake digital mask of their peers, and people they don’t even know. Myself on the other hand, I spend almost all my spare time with people and animals I love, studying, reading books, and thinking about bigger things. You are what you consume, which makes most people morons. Same if you consume “the news”, care about celebrities.
- alt227 2y ago
  Do you happen to have purple hair and wear all black clothes with as many piercings in your face as you can get? /s
TSUTiger 2y ago
Several of the comments here certainly have some superiority complex issues as well as what would appear isolation issues. You seem cynical towards a large majority of modern society. If you need a hug, I’m here.
- yard2010 2y ago
  Why not both?
- scrps 2y ago
  That may be but it doesn't take much page turning in a history book to find plenty of instances where society has been very wrong and not even in the distant past. Society changes slowly. The iterative speed of computers, the iterative speed of feedback on a global communications network based on those computers is new, it has many orders of magnitude faster response times than society's ability to adapt to the changes it brings and the systemic study of human behavior over years and years leading to mathematical models of behavior and responses has created massive information asymmetry in society and the scale of manipulation a small group of people can leverage is astounding, being skeptical of society's value propositions seems in order.
- alt227 2y ago
  Can you explain what you mean by that?
  - TSUTiger 2y ago
    It's fairly straightforward. Just take a look at a few of the top comments here wherein the commenter describes not being as dumb (for lack of a better term) as peers for not joining into social media. I'm not linking to them as I'm not trying to incite anything here. Bros need hugs too.
noufalibrahim 2y ago
It's very enlightening to fast from social media for an extended period of time (say about a month). If you return after that, you can almost feel the shift in your head. It's something I've experienced first hand.
- fumblebee 2y ago
  As someone who’s strongly considering just this, could you describe the changes you felt? And — if you again returned to social media for a prolonged period — whether and how quickly those positive changes reverted?
  - acureau 2y ago
    My platform of choice was YouTube until they introduced shorts and took a more aggressive stance against ad-blockers. I quit initially because I was against the direction the platform was heading, but realized quickly that I didn't miss it. It dawned on me that I had been investing 8 - 12 hours of my life weekly to passively consume content that I couldn't even remember. I noticed that at any slight moment of down-time I'd impulsively reach for YouTube, it's almost like I was conditioned to do so. At the end of the day that's what Google wants. They want you to spend as much of your time as possible watching as many advertisements as possible. Most social media platforms are adversarial. Once I saw this I could not unsee it. Warning others is pointless. They'll be annoyed or just think you're weird. Not one person I know has taken my advice, so I've stopped giving it. Tangent aside, for me the benefit of not using social media has been that I can invest the time into what I find fulfilling. The quality of the entertainment I consume has gone way up. The downside is that it's isolating. No I can't follow you on platform X, no I cannot view the link you've sent me to platform Y. Everyone, especially in my age group, considers it strange.
  - nicbou 2y ago
    I have pretty much quit Reddit. It didn’t completely change my life, but it was a good thing. Not getting involved in internet drama is great. I have completely lost the appetite for it. I haven’t heard about American politics for a while. I read and sketch more. My phone is easier to put down and less tempting to pick up; it gets boring quickly. I noticed that I’ll often be the last one to look at my phone when I am around others. I spend a lot more time in the real world, touching grass. I’d say that this is the cause of my departure, not the effect. Online interactions are not nearly as satisfying. Being out of it and staying out of it means that you don’t know about the local internet drama, and that you don’t get any notifications from that site. With each visit, the website gets less interesting because nothing interesting is waiting for you there.
fx1994 2y ago
Social media or news or tv/netflix/streaming influence your life alot. Just stop using it and you will feel much better.
rob137 2y ago
Would love to hear Venkatesh Rao / Cal Newport discuss this at some point: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/against-waldenponding https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/against-waldenpondin... Another related post: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-people https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo... From the second link: > Tenured professors with status in a discipline can tune out the world and do "deep work" peers recognize as "important" before it is done (with accompanying ivory-tower/angels-on-pinhead risks). > But a free agent, with no institutional safety net, no underwriting of exploratory expeditions by disciplinary consensus, and no research grants, cannot afford this luxury.
seydor 2y ago
Social media is about exploiting gossip and social comparison to make money. It has been from the start a stupid habit with no redeeming qualities. However, after Zuck released Llamma and other AI models for free, i consider it a fair tax on stupidity that is helping to advance frontier technology
amelius 2y ago
Quit? Ban!
submeta 2y ago
I did, deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X). And it helped me a lot to gain back my inner peace. My meditation was deeper, more profound, I genuinely gained back my inner peace. The constant bombardement with posts made to boost the ego of people is toxic for the consumer of these images / texts. But then, in the context of the Gaza conflict, I realized that X is a very good source to follow intellectuals, thinkers, journalits whom I wouldn't read otherwise in Germany, where anyone is vilified who even wears a Kefiyeh. When you see how our western media frames, justifies, whitewashes a conflict caracterised as a genocide by many scholars, we need other platforms to hear those voices. Now this sounds like the alt right that wants its platforms. But hear me out. There are intellectuals who show the headlines, the framing, and you cannot help but think that Noam Chomsky's book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media", written in 1988, is more relevant than ever. X has the capacity to show different perspectives and can be invaluable. But it's also a curse exploited by many. Russia, China, Iran, but also our allies. See this for instance[1]. [1] "The Israelis Destabilizing Democracy and Disrupting Elections Worldwide - National Security & Cyber - Haaretz" // https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2022-11-16/ty-article-static-ext/the-israelis-destabilizing-democracy-and-disrupting-elections-worldwide/00000186-461e-d80f-abff-6e9e08b10000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2022-1...
- pcthrowaway 2y ago
  Agree with everything in your comment except I assume Reddit is better than X (I don't use X for other reasons, but occasionally see things posted from there on Reddit or Instagram). But worth noting, you've presumably been using HN since 2016 which is also "social media" :P
lou1306 2y ago
I'd reckon the median user is not someone who has been "publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week" at any point of their life and that the most likely risk is mindless consumption rather than endless production. But just quit following random strangers on the Internet, keep social media as a way to maintain your irw network of relations, and you'll usually be alright. Sure, then we can discuss about the inherent issues of the platforms (which are many), but first one has to exploit their own agency to the utmost degree.
kleiba 2y ago
> Quit Social Media You can follow the author at https://x.com/profcalnewport https://x.com/profcalnewport .
- jptoor 2y ago
  From bio - "Not Cal Newport and unaffiliated w/ Newport, he's not on social media."
- magneticz 2y ago
  In bio it states `Not Cal Newport and unaffiliated w/ Newport, he's not on social media.`
- alt227 2y ago
  Heavy irony here
mattgreenrocks 2y ago
> “I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.” This is the crux of the matter. Social media isn’t real; it’s a type of video game for adults. The unreality fosters the growth of so many other things which are even less concerned with truth: fake news, engagement bait, daily outrages, chasing followers in a vain attempt to “build a personal brand.” The vacuousness of influencer culture has only accelerated these trends since Newport wrote this post. In some sense, some of us already live online essentially through these social networks. Almost always this means some level of addiction, with concomitant real life consequences. Is it really worth it?
- gilbetron 2y ago
  Problem is that it is becoming a new reality. You can tune out, but you can't turn it off, and it (and society) will continue without it. And I say this as someone who thinks we should largely turn it off. Society will adapt, which means society is becoming something different.
  - interludead 2y ago
    I wonder what will the cumulative effect be as more of life becomes virtual by default
  - mattgreenrocks 2y ago
    I don’t buy it. We’re probably past peak social media at this point. And the outer reality will always have a higher status than any of the inner ones.
    - codyvoda 2y ago
      I think this is the one benefit of recent "AI" advancements, it accelerates the downfall with even cheaper garbage. death to the internet, long live the internet
    - gilbetron 2y ago
      We might be past peak "bulk" social media, where people would be public, more or less, with their posts/videos. Now everything is closing and many people have "group chats" as they realize that free-for-all chatting/posting doesn't work.
nefrix 2y ago
The funny think, this youtube video it is on YouTube which is a social media platform
- wkjagt 2y ago
  It's where their target audience is.
efields 2y ago
Where does one advertise these days if not social media? Where does one learn about local goings-on outside of their _immediate_ circle of family/close friends/colleagues if not social media? With a small local business, social media gives an audience. If you're selling anything visually captivating, it performs well in these spaces. We sell cut flowers on the side, so… I don't ask these questions out of support of Instagram or Facebook, but I stop in there regularly because I don't know to learn a little bit about the greater community around me. My life is busy enough with work/family. The cost of all this is being exposed to a lot of attention bait and I honestly don't like how I feel using it sometimes. But we've built up the social media ecosystem as a pillar of society at this point.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  > Where does one learn about local goings-on I subscribed to my local NHPR newsletter that tells me local events. There is also local news, newspaper, or radio.
- Schiendelman 2y ago
  One way: You make a list of the venues and organizations that host the things you are interested in, you go to those events, and you talk to people.
- _qbxi 2y ago
  He still advertises on social media. He still uses Facebook for his courses. He just uses his wife's account.
- chrisandchris 2y ago
  > Where does one learn about local goings-on outside [...] if nor social media? Imagine, there are people who don't care that much besides their family/friends circle. Maybe some newspaper/-site from time to time, but why cope with all the other stuff too all the time? Life goes on too if one doesn't know abou the latest stuff. Imagine there were hundreds or thousands of year of humanity you didn't know how your neighbour is except you walked there. At least that's fine for me. I don't miss social media (besides HN), and I don't miss anything.
stonethrowaway 2y ago
The elephant in the room for me is that the person who bought Twitter and keeps shitposting also keeps launching rockets into space and landing them back, among other things that fall into the category of “how the fuck are we going to pull this off?” I don’t know who Cal is and I have no idea what Deep Work he’s done since he quit social media, but, best of luck to the lad.
flkiwi 2y ago
My almost post-social media life has been interesting. I ditched Twitter, came back to it briefly, then ditched it again when it was purchased because I found my mental health growing increasingly fragile with the constant outrage, the need to keep track of who the main character of the day was or risk the ire of your circle, and the increasing filtering of my timeline. I quit Facebook, other than keeping an account for announcing major life events to the older people who were still on it, because I was frustrated that I never received any posts from family or close friends in the heavily filtered timeline, I kept receiving time-sensitive posts (say about a hurricane event) for weeks after the post was no longer relevant, and Meta's increasingly metastasized privacy practices. I joined Mastodon and found a calm, down to earth, almost boring place. The decentralized nature of the platform certainly means there are some not-at-all boring parts of the Mastoverse, but it felt more like being in an old-style forum than anything else. I'm still there, though my participation isn't significant. I tried Blue Sky because all my Twitter people were there ... and it was IMMEDIATELY like hitting a drug after being off it for a while. It was all about main characters and outrage. For me, in hindsight, it was like sitting in front of a slot machine, feeding in quarters, waiting for one to win. And watching people who did win inevitably milkshake duck themselves out of favor. It was briefly an amazing, buzzy world to share both humor and excitement about whatever events you wanted, but that certainly didn't last. I don't miss it.
- alecco 2y ago
  Where is this magic side of the Fediverse? What I saw: Rust lunatics, hardline Communists or straight up Nazis, the most extreme alphabet people or the most extreme red-pillers. And many of them have the overlapping topics of questionable *orn or even more questionable anime content. Every time I get a random post from a an a Fediverse instance and I dare check it's main feed to see what it's like, it's always (always!) a dumpster fire. I don't like Twitter much but if I had to pick one or the other it would be a no-brainer.
  - flkiwi 2y ago
    Meanwhile, my feed is photographers, linux people (because of course), and a weird confluence of unobjectionable academics. I saw what you're describing in my brief visit to the Lemmy world, and I absolutely know that there are hostile and degenerate Mastodon instances, but most of the big instances have defederated with them, so I don't get sniped by any of the freaks. Now, I do pretend the global list simply doesn't exist and focus on the local instance list and people I follow. I don't know of anyone who uses the global list. I also tend to follow hashtags rather than individuals. (I'm 100% sure that twitter would show at least as much garbage on their feed if they didn't filter, especially these days. This is not an argument for Twitter's style of filtering.)
motohagiography 2y ago
I was one of those security/privacy people in the 00's who declined to join facebook or do any of the social media stuff. Feels like it was the right call. Meta was the best possible company name for the social media machine, because when you turn it all off, you really do become less meta. I'd suspect it's a bit like being a vegan, where it's a self-imposed constrant that makes you aloof from others and makes them treat you like an exception. It reduces some of the invites you get, and you just aren't up on the news about your friend groups as a result. We imagine it signals some kind of purity or difference, as though to say we're not like those regular IT people, maybe there's an air of mystery about what we might know, but it's just kind of fussy and it creates a polarizing filter where people really have to like you a lot to put up with the conditions you put on hanging out. I still see the internet as a machine I operate for money and entertainment, and not the substrate of my identity or reality. This is also a fairly masculine coded view, as it dismisses the public sphere of gossip and narratives as separate from a Real made of consequences and competence, where the internet is not a dominion of truth the way real friendships are. It sounds marginal in the current discourse, but really there are still operators around who know ways out of this hallucination a lot of people were born into and can't see the edges of. It's not a mystery, you just turn the phone off for a bit and then live and relate according to the results.
- theboogieman 2y ago
  I’ve been saying for a while that I expect the next big “veganeque” movement to be some kind of modern luddites. Maybe not as detached from modern society as the Amish, but a more 90s-like tech scene. No cell phone on them at all times (but maybe some equivalent to a car phone/pay phone), placing the restriction to consciously “log on” to the internet, no (at least ad-based) social media, and maybe keep their online persona to appearances on mostly decentralized forums. Personally, I know it would benefit me to detach from the one social media platform I have left and am fully addicted to (YouTube), but it’s hard when that is the platform that videos are stored on (though if I really cared, I would only subscribe to channels via RSS and watch them or individually search for things I wish to see instead of infinitely scrolling.) It’s also hard to keep up with group activities or the best classifieds listings or local music/arts events without Facebook. I don’t believe that there will ever be a true competitor for services that can operate at scale like Facebook and YouTube (especially the latter), but I expect these modern luddites to accept this and reject those platforms even if it is socially ostracizing (much like veganism). To fill the void, they’ll create platforms and devices for them specifically. I imagine the goal of the platforms will be to avoid unnecessary bloat and keep hosting/maintenance costs low, which seems relatively easy if sucking every last second of retention out the user is not financially incentivized like it is in ad-based platforms. I expect the hardware to prioritize cost-efficiency, repairability, and a minimal feature set that doesn’t require frequent upgrades. Then I imagine for a time, the movement will become trendy and people will begin flooding those platforms. The challenge then becomes to avoid capitalizing on the influx and keep the initial morals in mind and not start showing ads/trying to increase retention time. I think those projects may need to be decentralized and/or established as nonprofits with stated non-retractable tenets from their creation (“We shall never serve advertisements”, “We shall prioritize the distribution of useful information above all else”, etc.) It’s a utopian view of the future, but I think it is possible. I think we’ll hit a day when we realize that spending 10+ hours a day staring at glowing rectangles is not bringing us closer to real fulfillment. I expect that as long as capitalism is the dominant economic force, businesses will always embrace the newest technology to avoid a massive gap in their output when compared to competitors, and the tech companies will always be pushing new addictive technology as long as it isn’t globally regulated, but after work, the people will wake up to the fact that they at least have a choice on whether or not they spend the rest of their leisure time staring at glowing rectangles. Yet I still haven’t woken up myself.
golly_ned 2y ago
I've completely quit social media except for LinkedIn, which I need for my work, and Reddit, which I selectively use for product recommendations and advice on my career and relationships. And also Twitter, through which I receive the latest research in my domain. And Instagram, which my girlfriend uses to send me memes and videos. Occasionally Facebook for event invitations. And this website. But other than that I've totally quit.
- salomonk_mur 2y ago
  The pressure to quit is so large I keep quitting daily
- Minor49er 2y ago
  What makes Hacker News a social media website?
  - jesterson 2y ago
    HN is exactly what social media is. social media is a definition of sourced content, nit the quality of the latter
    - croes 2y ago
      To me it’s just a crowd curated list of links, more like early day Yahoo
      - willsmith72 2y ago
        Remove the comments and votes and I agree. But you just left a comment
        croes 2y ago
        A comment isn’t social media to me, every news site used to have a comment section but wasn’t social media. It lacks the connection between the commenters. You can’t follow or block comments, or at least filter or sort them
drcwpl 2y ago
I would say he is write about LinkedIn, TikTok, Snap, Meta and its associated gram's, threads and face... BUT - HN has a different vibe, this is a community with sharing knowledge and information - on HN, I never doom scroll - there is genuine interaction and useful content. To some extent X provides useful updates from the main AI labs, so it is knowing how to use it and not be used by it.
- dartos 2y ago
  It’s all the same. HN is just smaller, but before Reddit disabled 3rd party apps HN was even more focused and, IMO, a little less startup/growth hacking focused. If HN ever gets big, you’ll see the same things.
photochemsyn 2y ago
Social media is not problematic if you engage with intent and use alternative sources to check claims. People unfortunate to never have been trained in Defense Against The Dark Arts of Propaganda and Manipulation are at risk but that's always been true, even when all media was of the printed sort. Basic critical analysis skills are vital to survival and mental health in this world. By 'engage with intent' I just mean not being a passive absorber of the stream of content that's being promoted at whatever site, but instead always have some focus on a particular topic that interests you. Incidentally I notice many of the 'quit social media' stories are published in outlets like the NYTimes which would instead like you to be a passive, well-conditioned absorber of their content, and hence off their advertising stream. The corporation is run for profit, it doesn't care about the collateral damage it may cause as long as it doesn't impact the bottom line.
tarkin2 2y ago
Someone needs to make a good Facebook groups/pages alternative. That'd make it easier for most.
jcass8695 2y ago
I’m about 9 months off social media (not including Hackernews, if you consider that SM). I have no regrets whatsoever. I’m in my late 20’s so SM came into my sphere when I was around 16. I haven’t quite “grown up with it”, but it’s been an omnipresent force for most of my teenage and adult life. > I am better at making time to catch up with the people I really care about, be that in-person or over WhatsApp. > When I do catch up with someone, I genuinely have no idea what’s been going on in their life and that makes the catch up a lot more enjoyable and engaging. I haven’t passively kept up to date on their every movement through Instagram stories or Tweets like some kind of ghostly stalker. The best example of this that I can give is that my partner and I got engaged to be married ~4 months ago. Nothing posted on SM, just WhatsApp messages to close friends and family. I get to keep reliving the joy of telling people and witnessing the ecstatic surprise and pure love on their faces each time I catch up with someone I haven’t seen for a while. > I am much more aware of just how much everyone uses their phones. Take a look around you. Sitting on the bus, waiting in a queue, riding an escalator, pissing at a urinal. Our minds are being constantly bombarbed with mostly useless, inane shite. Cat videos, stories of that person you went to school with 10 years ago doing stupid drunk things, misinformation from your scary uncle on Facebook etc. I let my mind wander more and it feels all the better for it.
0xdeadbeefbabe 2y ago
Still I'm glad Mr. Newport has a comments section on his youtube videos. He doesn't always explain things that clearly.
rootusrootus 2y ago
Quit social media if you cannot maintain a healthy relationship with it. But please do not just pull the plug because someone on the Internet told you it would improve your life. This is far from a guarantee. I quit Facebook a few years back because of enough conversations on HN convincing me it would be a positive choice. It was not, and I regret it. I've since rejoined FB but my network of friends did not completely recover. People here will tell you that FB friends you don't go out of your way to contact via not-FB methods aren't really friends. They are full of shit. That may be true for them.
- alt227 2y ago
  Can you please tell us why leaving Facebook was not a positive choice for you? Also why it is important that 'your network of friends recovers'?
  - rootusrootus 2y ago
    I had friends on FB going back to high school. Neighborhood kids we hung with after school. People I've met at various jobs over the years and become friendly enough to keep in touch outside of work. Did we interact every day? Nope. Just casually. But we have a shared history going back 50 years, and had enjoyable low key interactions periodically. Turning off FB killed all of those connections, and not all of them came back when I got a new account a year later. Heck, a couple thought I had unfriended them and felt slighted. And to top it off -- I didn't actually have a problem with FB. It didn't ruin my life. I did (and still do) visit about once or twice a week. I don't doom scroll, I don't get all jealous of someone's vacation pictures, new house, new car, whatever. I did not actually have a social media problem that needed solving. I gave too much value to what randos on HN said. > why it is important that 'your network of friends recovers'? Because I enjoy the casual contact with all of these people I've known over the years. Even if I don't share enough current interests to spend a lot of time hanging out with them, I get positive feelings from staying connected.
- causal 2y ago
  I think you're hinting at a hidden problem: our vocabulary has not caught up with the way social media has evolved, and we need new terms. People actually LIKE, perhaps even need, the social aspects of social media. But that's become such a small part of the experience for many people- the ads and attention-hacking with cheap stimuli burying the positive interactions. I don't want to quit my connections, as you say. But I do want to quit this daily hypnosis that reels is trying to subject me to. I would call that latter something more like "possessive media" - it needs to have your attention at all times and needs every scrap of data it can gather about you. I want less possessive media and more social media.
mdavid626 2y ago
I use social media merely for distraction. Over the years I gained nearly zero benefit from using it. Shallow connections, useful looking useless content.
perihelion_zero 2y ago
Less "social" media, more social research paper / life hack resharing makes the world a better place. PS: Always hide the best meme in endnote 14 so your fellow meme scientists know exactly where to find the real discovery.
SirMaster 2y ago
I'm 36 and somehow I simply avoided social media for the most part. At least never used platforms like facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc. It all just seemed like a time waster and not really anything interesting. I use sites like this of course, and I suppose that is some form of social media though.
AlienRobot 2y ago
I'm trying to learn to use RSS to replace some of my social media use. I recommend RSS Guard, it seems to be the best client around. Liferea and Thunderbird are good options, too.
segasaturn 2y ago
It depends heavily on where you are in life and what demographics you belong to. If you're a guy in your 40s with a wife and kids and a white picket fence there's probably no harm in quitting. I was drawn to social media (and earlier forms, like forums and IRC) because I grew up in a backwards, repressive rural community and was outcasted in school and was able to find "my people" online. Online social communities are how a lot of people who are rejected by society due to disability, sexual orientation etc. get all of their positive social interaction from.
rustcleaner 2y ago
There is only one I use: Orange Reddit (aka HackerNews).
aktuel 2y ago
I don't use any of facebook, instagram, LinkedIn, tiktok, X, bluesky, mastodon, snap, ... and it's not even hard. On the rare occasions I took a look at those I found them boring beyond believe. Even mastodon following people I am actually interested in feels like a 90% waste of time.

218 points by skadamat 2y ago

So, should I join so that I can quit? The coming of the current cluster fuck was clear decades ago. Anyone who wasn't enamored by meme illiteracy never took that train...

malfist 2y ago

I quit any non small community social media a few years ago and it's been really nice. My tolerance for trolls and thinking with people on the Internet is has dropped away down and I think I'm better for it. Certainly feels better

elpocko 2y ago
>thinking with people on the Internet is has dropped away down What? Also, congrats for being less tolerant. I like that.
- malfist 2y ago
  Google's autocorrect "corrects" words it thought you meant, sometimes words later so you don't see it. I put arguing, but Google decided I meant thinking
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    That's some spooky shit right there. Is this a Chrome thing?
    - malfist 2y ago
      Nah, the android Gboard. Super frustrating. And the toggle to turn off that "feature" is shared with all autocorrection. If you disable grammar corrections you don't get any typo fixes. And there's no setting that says "only change the last word I typed"

Clubber 2y ago

I quit social media after the Snowden revelations.

sourcepluck 2y ago
I remember thinking it likely that many people would. My naivety knew few bounds at the time.
- sourcepluck 2y ago
  Re-reading my own comment, and worried the poster I responded to might take that as a reverse-jibe about their own naivety - I didn't even think of that the first time I wrote it, and now want to explicitly say that wasn't my point. I sincerely thought people would quit social media following the Snowden revelations, and I did myself, and then could not believe that they didn't seem to care at all. It was a painful and jarring learning experience.
  - Clubber 2y ago
    >might take that as a reverse-jibe I did not, but thanks for being considerate. I took it as this: >I sincerely thought people would quit social media following the Snowden revelations, and I did myself, and then could not believe that they didn't seem to care at all. It was a painful and jarring learning experience. It's been over 11 years now. I would imagine it's not unlike living in a former soviet country in that everyone knows it's going on, but we just don't talk about it.
    - sourcepluck 2y ago
      Indeed. The same people from before who scoffed at the possibility of mass surveillance are the very same who pivoted immediately to a new justification of the status quo - something about national security, or it not being that bad, or it being a bit of a crazy world which we have to face, or whatever. It's almost as if their reasoned arguments were always nothing more than poorly slapped together ad hoc justifications for whatever happens to be the norm at a given moment.

benjaminwootton 2y ago

Isn’t it on the decline yet? Facebook is for boomers. Twitter is weird and we all realised how pointless it is to spend time falling out on there. Instagram feels a bit long in the tooth. LinkedIn is a parody of itself. Reddit feels like it’s growing but I think that avoids the worst of social media. TikTok and YouTube shorts seem popular but aren’t really social media. It’s just time wasting junk. All in all, social media feels like it peaked a while back.

jjordan 2y ago
Twitter/X is fantastic for breaking news. For example during the first assassination attempt you would find new details on there that would then appear on MSM newscasts one to two hours later. It also helps immensely to curate lists of interests to help filter out the noise and politics.
- eterm 2y ago
  How is your life improved by getting that news minute by minute instead of an hour, or even a day, later?
  - throw_pm23 2y ago
    or indeed, not at all? :)
  - cal85 2y ago
    It’s an excellent question, but I do think you can get valuable insights from seeing how a major political event unfolds in real time, as long as it’s something you’re interested in. It can help you to view the subsequent news bulletins with a critical eye and interest and it can give you a richer depth of understanding than you would otherwise get. If it’s an event that you’re not particularly interested in, then there’s not much value in getting details in advance. Another thing, it’s not just hours. Sometimes it’s months (or in rare cases years) before a recurring topic on social media finally makes it to the news, because it’s controversial/narrative-defying, so it takes them a long time to work out how to talk about it. I don’t want to mention specific examples because it would be distracting, but there are a few topics I see mentioned daily/weekly on the news today that were pretty much absent a few years ago, yet were heavily discussed on Twitter at the time, and I am very glad I was aware of them.

freediver 2y ago

I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”. The incentives are perverse, there is an inherent conflict of interest in the business model and there is an intermediary between the user and information/community they want to participate in. This leads to most problems we see in legacy, ad-based, social media. Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry. In life we do not let everyone into the friend circle. Having a barrier to entry model may work well for an online community, although this remains to be seen. Were there any successful experiments with paid social media?

decasia 2y ago
I would love to pay for social software on a coop model (like a food coop, etc) — we would be "members" and, theoretically, we pay a small monthly fee that covers the costs of hosting and platform development. I've tried to think about what I would want that to look like — spoiler, something different than the model of "posting + reactions" that is so familiar from twitter+fb — but then when I think about the barriers to entry for a project like that, even though the technological part might not be that difficult (assuming it was Less Than Web Scale), I just give up hoping for it. I've been following a lot of the bluesky + mastodon stuff but I don't like that their basic model of social interaction is just a clone of Twitter.
- hyggetrold 2y ago
  I can't remember the name of it, but over a decade ago I saw something like this - it was a single Linux server shared by (I think) hundreds of people. Really trying to do the multi-user paradigm. They advertised it as a private kind of social network, it was invite-only and I think you had to pay to help keep the server lights on. Hopefully by posting something incorrect, A Person On The Internet Who Knows Better will come along and provide the correct details. :)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - hoppyhoppy2 2y ago

Kye 2y ago

(2016) Especially important because most of his commentary focuses on the dominant social media paradigm of the time. Mastodon barely existed when this post went live, Mike Masnick was years from writing the paper that inspired Bluesky[0], and it would be strange if someone whose whole thing is getting away from social media kept up on new developments. This post is an interesting historical artifact, but shouldn't be mistaken for contemporary commentary. [0] https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...

DiggyJohnson 2y ago
Mastodon and Bluesky are still such minor players (even though I enjoy these projects and am optimistic about their future) that I don’t see anywhere where this doesn’t pass for contemporary commentary.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- protocolture 2y ago
  It depends what the product is for you. If the product is the social graph, masto isnt even on the radar. If the product is the discussion framework without the advertising or social graph. If you can find 15 people to have the same interactions with manually its a superior player.
- UnderScar 2y ago
  This is purely anecdotal but with Twitter/X removing blocks there seems to be an influx of new users on bluesky, it's definitely not quite on the scale of other major social medias but it seems like it is well on it's way there.
immibis 2y ago
Isn't Bluesky just a copy of Twitter from that era, anyway?

solomonb 2y ago

He states: > What the market values is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable. > what the market dismisses are activities that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value. Well social media use is the epitome of an easy to replicate activity that does not produce a lot of value [...] by definition the market is not going to give those activieis a lot of value [...]." Yet in the years since this TEDx talk we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.

nimbius 2y ago
perhaps a decade or more ago? not now. you will never become a streaming millionaire. talking heads like beast and pewdiepie employ literal armies of Hollywood editors and writers. For every organically grown insufferable content monster created on Youtube, ten more are vat-grown by a billion dollar industry designed to shepherd you into a fantasy consumerist lifestyle. These powerhouses of industry control the flow of capital at a level you will never be able to. they secure rights to music and video clips at rates you could never get, have tie-ins to major brands media and celebrities on day one, and are programmed with an endless firestorm of bots and preferential algorithmic treatment on every FAANG product in order to guarantee their success.
- MisterBastahrd 2y ago
  You are painfully unaware of the difference between being a Youtube video creator and being a streamer. Mr. Beast is not a streamer. He is a packaged video creator. PewDiePie is a reaction video creator who occasionally streams. They are not what people think of when they think of streamers. To be a professional streamer usually takes a combination of talent and concentration that most people simply don't have. But to say that you can't become one? LOL. The AVERAGE millionaire streamer on twitch is so painfully unedited that they end up getting banned a couple times a year for saying stupid things live on air. Twitch and their sponsors practically THROW money at them to spend an hour or two to sponsor content. There's an entire backend bounty system which is only available to partners which will pay you based on your audience size. I've seen a guy with 3K viewers get a $30K check for 3 hours worth of sponsored content.

poppycock 2y ago

Programmers (cs students, "engineers") are one of the most pompous group of people who think their ability to #include <stdio.h> gives them some special ability to speak about efficiency, physics, math (other than your run of the mill discrete or remedial linear algebra) or pretty much any other topic on the face of the Earth. Don't worry about your active Facebook account. People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends). They are outliers not the rule.

ziddoap 2y ago
>People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends). What credentials do you hold to make this claim? It better not be a CS degree.
a5c11 2y ago
Are these programmers in the room with us now?
- poppycock 2y ago
  [flagged]
alt227 2y ago
> just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends) I have no facebook account. I choose to have relationships with my family members and distant friends through physical contact by meeting up and talking regularly on the phone. IMO typing short text messages to people and 'reacting' to theirs with emojis and thumbs up is not a real relationship.

dang 2y ago

Related: Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38720087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38720087 - Dec 2023 (1 comment) Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16697004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16697004 - March 2018 (262 comments) Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714509 - Feb 2017 (1 comment) Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998698 - Nov 2016 (548 comments) The NYT piece those were about is https://web.archive.org/web/20171114021224/https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/jobs/quit-social-media-your-career-may-depend-on-it.html https://web.archive.org/web/20171114021224/https://www.nytim.... Not the same as OP but same topic, author, year.

motbus3 2y ago

I won't advertise but I work for a company which holds a social media for cooking and recipes. Folks there are totally averse to those and based stuff. It has been hard for the company. The owner decided the company will die before using ads (for many reasons). The paid plan is stupidly cheap and when people sign and use for a month they stick with the company for years. But it is hard. Company laid off 80% of the team some time ago and is fighting to survive. I won't defend the owner or anyone, but things came to a point where people think they are not having consequences by giving infinite permission for being tracked all the time. They think if they are not logged they are not identified so they can't be exploited. It sucks because no one appreciates that. Though I have my opinions about business and whatever I kinda appreciate for the company not running on money from ads and not collecting a single piece of user information which is not required for work.

kikokikokiko 2y ago
If the company you work for REALLY does behave like that, you SHOULD DEFINITELY advertise it. Companies like this must be acknowledged and celebrated. The owner must be a really good person.
- purple-leafy 2y ago
  No form of advertising is good, I don’t want your advertising assaulting my senses. I don’t care if you piss gold or if you’re the pope or king, don’t advertise to me
  - pessimizer 2y ago
    Please advertise or you will go out of business before I ever hear about you.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    Find sites that let you pay for content then I guess? Very few sites are charity sites, and need money to keep the lights on unless it’s just a passion site for the owners and they don’t care to be a community service. I don’t blame people trying to make some money for (many times) obviously hard work and curation of a site.

uejfiweun 2y ago

I quit social media, but the problem is that in the modern dating world a lot of people care whether you have an Instagram and that sort of thing. I truly hate social media, but I find myself considering remaking it just to improve my dating life. It's kind of a depressing situation, to be honest.

kelnos 2y ago
Would that be an improvement, though? Do you really want a relationship with someone who cares if you have an active Instagram account? Feels like a great filter (heh) to weed out the chaff. (If you're just casually dating around / looking for hookups, then sure, do what you think you need to do.)
purple-leafy 2y ago
If they care, they aren’t worth it - why date a sheep?
tyleo 2y ago
Some other comments are along these lines but I’ll offer an anecdote. In college I was wearing a Halo biking shirt in the computer lab. A female friend remarked, “no one is going to date you if you wear that shirt.” Another friend nearby heard and quipped back, “or only the right girls will date him wearing that shirt.” You should view your preferences more as a filter. While you should be open to new experiences which may change those presences, if something makes you truly unhappy, you are better finding a partner who won’t force that in your life.
shadowmanifold 2y ago
It reminds me when I was young thinking I couldn't get a date because I didn't have six pack abs. Then when I got in really good shape I thought it was because I didn't make enough money. When I started making money I thought it was because I wasn't tall enough. There is no way having social media or not is mattering that much. It is just in your head.

ryandv 2y ago

I quit social media over 10 years ago, already having been a conscientious objector to Facebook and other platforms, much to the confusion of my classmates who didn't understand my idiosyncratic positions on digital privacy, attention span, banality, and brainrot. It's gotten to the point where I view the narcissism of the modern 21st century social media user the same way I would view a crack addict smoking a pipe out in public, unable to pry their hands away from their glowing plastic rectangles, swiping incessantly in the hopes of getting just another dose of sweet dopamine with every refresh, or some artificial symbol of social validation in the form of more likes and upvotes. Somehow even in the wake of the Snowden revelations people are still ambling off of cliffs for fear of being left behind by the herd of lemmings. I feel vindicated as the years go on with every news story or opinion piece I read about (dissatisfaction with) the growing encroachment of surveillance capitalism, ad-tech and social media into our personal lives, and all for what? Some shitty memes and "influencers" peddling their garbage through thinly veiled advertisements? When I am exposed to mainstream social media content I can't believe people subject themselves to the digital equivalent of ass-to-mouth that is the brainrot of the algorithmically driven social media feed. If "you are what you eat" were analogized to an information diet, most social media users would be consuming informational shit and consequently producing the same 140-byte thoughts or reciting the same 5-second memes. If the attention economy is indeed a real concept, there is a premium for the ability to hold your concentration on something for more than half an hour and produce thoughts whose complexity is more than just a few bytes.

purple-leafy 2y ago
Your comment and mine (see my other comment) are almost mirror reflections lol. Sounds like similar ages at the time too
watwut 2y ago
Shouldn't lack of social media make people happier in theory? Because you sound to be quite resentful and angry.
- ryandv 2y ago
  Less resentfulness and more contempt or pity, as one would regard a methhead tweaking out in public; except here it's a wirehead getting off on social media.

purple-leafy 2y ago

I did this without having to get inspiration from others. And I did it at a young age (under 18), when all my friends and the world were flocking to social media and spilling their thoughts and PII everywhere. I have nothing, and have had nothing ever since (discounting HN). People are sheep, and people are stupid. Most people waste their lives looking at a mass fake digital mask of their peers, and people they don’t even know. Myself on the other hand, I spend almost all my spare time with people and animals I love, studying, reading books, and thinking about bigger things. You are what you consume, which makes most people morons. Same if you consume “the news”, care about celebrities.

alt227 2y ago
Do you happen to have purple hair and wear all black clothes with as many piercings in your face as you can get? /s

TSUTiger 2y ago

Several of the comments here certainly have some superiority complex issues as well as what would appear isolation issues. You seem cynical towards a large majority of modern society. If you need a hug, I’m here.

yard2010 2y ago
Why not both?
scrps 2y ago
That may be but it doesn't take much page turning in a history book to find plenty of instances where society has been very wrong and not even in the distant past. Society changes slowly. The iterative speed of computers, the iterative speed of feedback on a global communications network based on those computers is new, it has many orders of magnitude faster response times than society's ability to adapt to the changes it brings and the systemic study of human behavior over years and years leading to mathematical models of behavior and responses has created massive information asymmetry in society and the scale of manipulation a small group of people can leverage is astounding, being skeptical of society's value propositions seems in order.
alt227 2y ago
Can you explain what you mean by that?
- TSUTiger 2y ago
  It's fairly straightforward. Just take a look at a few of the top comments here wherein the commenter describes not being as dumb (for lack of a better term) as peers for not joining into social media. I'm not linking to them as I'm not trying to incite anything here. Bros need hugs too.

noufalibrahim 2y ago

It's very enlightening to fast from social media for an extended period of time (say about a month). If you return after that, you can almost feel the shift in your head. It's something I've experienced first hand.

fumblebee 2y ago
As someone who’s strongly considering just this, could you describe the changes you felt? And — if you again returned to social media for a prolonged period — whether and how quickly those positive changes reverted?
- acureau 2y ago
  My platform of choice was YouTube until they introduced shorts and took a more aggressive stance against ad-blockers. I quit initially because I was against the direction the platform was heading, but realized quickly that I didn't miss it. It dawned on me that I had been investing 8 - 12 hours of my life weekly to passively consume content that I couldn't even remember. I noticed that at any slight moment of down-time I'd impulsively reach for YouTube, it's almost like I was conditioned to do so. At the end of the day that's what Google wants. They want you to spend as much of your time as possible watching as many advertisements as possible. Most social media platforms are adversarial. Once I saw this I could not unsee it. Warning others is pointless. They'll be annoyed or just think you're weird. Not one person I know has taken my advice, so I've stopped giving it. Tangent aside, for me the benefit of not using social media has been that I can invest the time into what I find fulfilling. The quality of the entertainment I consume has gone way up. The downside is that it's isolating. No I can't follow you on platform X, no I cannot view the link you've sent me to platform Y. Everyone, especially in my age group, considers it strange.
- nicbou 2y ago
  I have pretty much quit Reddit. It didn’t completely change my life, but it was a good thing. Not getting involved in internet drama is great. I have completely lost the appetite for it. I haven’t heard about American politics for a while. I read and sketch more. My phone is easier to put down and less tempting to pick up; it gets boring quickly. I noticed that I’ll often be the last one to look at my phone when I am around others. I spend a lot more time in the real world, touching grass. I’d say that this is the cause of my departure, not the effect. Online interactions are not nearly as satisfying. Being out of it and staying out of it means that you don’t know about the local internet drama, and that you don’t get any notifications from that site. With each visit, the website gets less interesting because nothing interesting is waiting for you there.

fx1994 2y ago

Social media or news or tv/netflix/streaming influence your life alot. Just stop using it and you will feel much better.

rob137 2y ago

Would love to hear Venkatesh Rao / Cal Newport discuss this at some point: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/against-waldenponding https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/against-waldenpondin... Another related post: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-people https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo... From the second link: > Tenured professors with status in a discipline can tune out the world and do "deep work" peers recognize as "important" before it is done (with accompanying ivory-tower/angels-on-pinhead risks). > But a free agent, with no institutional safety net, no underwriting of exploratory expeditions by disciplinary consensus, and no research grants, cannot afford this luxury.

seydor 2y ago

Social media is about exploiting gossip and social comparison to make money. It has been from the start a stupid habit with no redeeming qualities. However, after Zuck released Llamma and other AI models for free, i consider it a fair tax on stupidity that is helping to advance frontier technology

amelius 2y ago

Quit? Ban!

submeta 2y ago

I did, deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X). And it helped me a lot to gain back my inner peace. My meditation was deeper, more profound, I genuinely gained back my inner peace. The constant bombardement with posts made to boost the ego of people is toxic for the consumer of these images / texts. But then, in the context of the Gaza conflict, I realized that X is a very good source to follow intellectuals, thinkers, journalits whom I wouldn't read otherwise in Germany, where anyone is vilified who even wears a Kefiyeh. When you see how our western media frames, justifies, whitewashes a conflict caracterised as a genocide by many scholars, we need other platforms to hear those voices. Now this sounds like the alt right that wants its platforms. But hear me out. There are intellectuals who show the headlines, the framing, and you cannot help but think that Noam Chomsky's book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media", written in 1988, is more relevant than ever. X has the capacity to show different perspectives and can be invaluable. But it's also a curse exploited by many. Russia, China, Iran, but also our allies. See this for instance[1]. [1] "The Israelis Destabilizing Democracy and Disrupting Elections Worldwide - National Security & Cyber - Haaretz" // https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2022-11-16/ty-article-static-ext/the-israelis-destabilizing-democracy-and-disrupting-elections-worldwide/00000186-461e-d80f-abff-6e9e08b10000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2022-1...

pcthrowaway 2y ago
Agree with everything in your comment except I assume Reddit is better than X (I don't use X for other reasons, but occasionally see things posted from there on Reddit or Instagram). But worth noting, you've presumably been using HN since 2016 which is also "social media" :P

lou1306 2y ago

I'd reckon the median user is not someone who has been "publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week" at any point of their life and that the most likely risk is mindless consumption rather than endless production. But just quit following random strangers on the Internet, keep social media as a way to maintain your irw network of relations, and you'll usually be alright. Sure, then we can discuss about the inherent issues of the platforms (which are many), but first one has to exploit their own agency to the utmost degree.

kleiba 2y ago

> Quit Social Media You can follow the author at https://x.com/profcalnewport https://x.com/profcalnewport .

jptoor 2y ago
From bio - "Not Cal Newport and unaffiliated w/ Newport, he's not on social media."
magneticz 2y ago
In bio it states `Not Cal Newport and unaffiliated w/ Newport, he's not on social media.`
alt227 2y ago
Heavy irony here

mattgreenrocks 2y ago

> “I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.” This is the crux of the matter. Social media isn’t real; it’s a type of video game for adults. The unreality fosters the growth of so many other things which are even less concerned with truth: fake news, engagement bait, daily outrages, chasing followers in a vain attempt to “build a personal brand.” The vacuousness of influencer culture has only accelerated these trends since Newport wrote this post. In some sense, some of us already live online essentially through these social networks. Almost always this means some level of addiction, with concomitant real life consequences. Is it really worth it?

gilbetron 2y ago
Problem is that it is becoming a new reality. You can tune out, but you can't turn it off, and it (and society) will continue without it. And I say this as someone who thinks we should largely turn it off. Society will adapt, which means society is becoming something different.
- interludead 2y ago
  I wonder what will the cumulative effect be as more of life becomes virtual by default
- mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  I don’t buy it. We’re probably past peak social media at this point. And the outer reality will always have a higher status than any of the inner ones.
  - codyvoda 2y ago
    I think this is the one benefit of recent "AI" advancements, it accelerates the downfall with even cheaper garbage. death to the internet, long live the internet
  - gilbetron 2y ago
    We might be past peak "bulk" social media, where people would be public, more or less, with their posts/videos. Now everything is closing and many people have "group chats" as they realize that free-for-all chatting/posting doesn't work.

nefrix 2y ago

The funny think, this youtube video it is on YouTube which is a social media platform

wkjagt 2y ago
It's where their target audience is.

efields 2y ago

Where does one advertise these days if not social media? Where does one learn about local goings-on outside of their _immediate_ circle of family/close friends/colleagues if not social media? With a small local business, social media gives an audience. If you're selling anything visually captivating, it performs well in these spaces. We sell cut flowers on the side, so… I don't ask these questions out of support of Instagram or Facebook, but I stop in there regularly because I don't know to learn a little bit about the greater community around me. My life is busy enough with work/family. The cost of all this is being exposed to a lot of attention bait and I honestly don't like how I feel using it sometimes. But we've built up the social media ecosystem as a pillar of society at this point.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
> Where does one learn about local goings-on I subscribed to my local NHPR newsletter that tells me local events. There is also local news, newspaper, or radio.
Schiendelman 2y ago
One way: You make a list of the venues and organizations that host the things you are interested in, you go to those events, and you talk to people.
_qbxi 2y ago
He still advertises on social media. He still uses Facebook for his courses. He just uses his wife's account.
chrisandchris 2y ago
> Where does one learn about local goings-on outside [...] if nor social media? Imagine, there are people who don't care that much besides their family/friends circle. Maybe some newspaper/-site from time to time, but why cope with all the other stuff too all the time? Life goes on too if one doesn't know abou the latest stuff. Imagine there were hundreds or thousands of year of humanity you didn't know how your neighbour is except you walked there. At least that's fine for me. I don't miss social media (besides HN), and I don't miss anything.

stonethrowaway 2y ago

The elephant in the room for me is that the person who bought Twitter and keeps shitposting also keeps launching rockets into space and landing them back, among other things that fall into the category of “how the fuck are we going to pull this off?” I don’t know who Cal is and I have no idea what Deep Work he’s done since he quit social media, but, best of luck to the lad.

flkiwi 2y ago

My almost post-social media life has been interesting. I ditched Twitter, came back to it briefly, then ditched it again when it was purchased because I found my mental health growing increasingly fragile with the constant outrage, the need to keep track of who the main character of the day was or risk the ire of your circle, and the increasing filtering of my timeline. I quit Facebook, other than keeping an account for announcing major life events to the older people who were still on it, because I was frustrated that I never received any posts from family or close friends in the heavily filtered timeline, I kept receiving time-sensitive posts (say about a hurricane event) for weeks after the post was no longer relevant, and Meta's increasingly metastasized privacy practices. I joined Mastodon and found a calm, down to earth, almost boring place. The decentralized nature of the platform certainly means there are some not-at-all boring parts of the Mastoverse, but it felt more like being in an old-style forum than anything else. I'm still there, though my participation isn't significant. I tried Blue Sky because all my Twitter people were there ... and it was IMMEDIATELY like hitting a drug after being off it for a while. It was all about main characters and outrage. For me, in hindsight, it was like sitting in front of a slot machine, feeding in quarters, waiting for one to win. And watching people who did win inevitably milkshake duck themselves out of favor. It was briefly an amazing, buzzy world to share both humor and excitement about whatever events you wanted, but that certainly didn't last. I don't miss it.

alecco 2y ago
Where is this magic side of the Fediverse? What I saw: Rust lunatics, hardline Communists or straight up Nazis, the most extreme alphabet people or the most extreme red-pillers. And many of them have the overlapping topics of questionable *orn or even more questionable anime content. Every time I get a random post from a an a Fediverse instance and I dare check it's main feed to see what it's like, it's always (always!) a dumpster fire. I don't like Twitter much but if I had to pick one or the other it would be a no-brainer.
- flkiwi 2y ago
  Meanwhile, my feed is photographers, linux people (because of course), and a weird confluence of unobjectionable academics. I saw what you're describing in my brief visit to the Lemmy world, and I absolutely know that there are hostile and degenerate Mastodon instances, but most of the big instances have defederated with them, so I don't get sniped by any of the freaks. Now, I do pretend the global list simply doesn't exist and focus on the local instance list and people I follow. I don't know of anyone who uses the global list. I also tend to follow hashtags rather than individuals. (I'm 100% sure that twitter would show at least as much garbage on their feed if they didn't filter, especially these days. This is not an argument for Twitter's style of filtering.)

motohagiography 2y ago

I was one of those security/privacy people in the 00's who declined to join facebook or do any of the social media stuff. Feels like it was the right call. Meta was the best possible company name for the social media machine, because when you turn it all off, you really do become less meta. I'd suspect it's a bit like being a vegan, where it's a self-imposed constrant that makes you aloof from others and makes them treat you like an exception. It reduces some of the invites you get, and you just aren't up on the news about your friend groups as a result. We imagine it signals some kind of purity or difference, as though to say we're not like those regular IT people, maybe there's an air of mystery about what we might know, but it's just kind of fussy and it creates a polarizing filter where people really have to like you a lot to put up with the conditions you put on hanging out. I still see the internet as a machine I operate for money and entertainment, and not the substrate of my identity or reality. This is also a fairly masculine coded view, as it dismisses the public sphere of gossip and narratives as separate from a Real made of consequences and competence, where the internet is not a dominion of truth the way real friendships are. It sounds marginal in the current discourse, but really there are still operators around who know ways out of this hallucination a lot of people were born into and can't see the edges of. It's not a mystery, you just turn the phone off for a bit and then live and relate according to the results.

theboogieman 2y ago
I’ve been saying for a while that I expect the next big “veganeque” movement to be some kind of modern luddites. Maybe not as detached from modern society as the Amish, but a more 90s-like tech scene. No cell phone on them at all times (but maybe some equivalent to a car phone/pay phone), placing the restriction to consciously “log on” to the internet, no (at least ad-based) social media, and maybe keep their online persona to appearances on mostly decentralized forums. Personally, I know it would benefit me to detach from the one social media platform I have left and am fully addicted to (YouTube), but it’s hard when that is the platform that videos are stored on (though if I really cared, I would only subscribe to channels via RSS and watch them or individually search for things I wish to see instead of infinitely scrolling.) It’s also hard to keep up with group activities or the best classifieds listings or local music/arts events without Facebook. I don’t believe that there will ever be a true competitor for services that can operate at scale like Facebook and YouTube (especially the latter), but I expect these modern luddites to accept this and reject those platforms even if it is socially ostracizing (much like veganism). To fill the void, they’ll create platforms and devices for them specifically. I imagine the goal of the platforms will be to avoid unnecessary bloat and keep hosting/maintenance costs low, which seems relatively easy if sucking every last second of retention out the user is not financially incentivized like it is in ad-based platforms. I expect the hardware to prioritize cost-efficiency, repairability, and a minimal feature set that doesn’t require frequent upgrades. Then I imagine for a time, the movement will become trendy and people will begin flooding those platforms. The challenge then becomes to avoid capitalizing on the influx and keep the initial morals in mind and not start showing ads/trying to increase retention time. I think those projects may need to be decentralized and/or established as nonprofits with stated non-retractable tenets from their creation (“We shall never serve advertisements”, “We shall prioritize the distribution of useful information above all else”, etc.) It’s a utopian view of the future, but I think it is possible. I think we’ll hit a day when we realize that spending 10+ hours a day staring at glowing rectangles is not bringing us closer to real fulfillment. I expect that as long as capitalism is the dominant economic force, businesses will always embrace the newest technology to avoid a massive gap in their output when compared to competitors, and the tech companies will always be pushing new addictive technology as long as it isn’t globally regulated, but after work, the people will wake up to the fact that they at least have a choice on whether or not they spend the rest of their leisure time staring at glowing rectangles. Yet I still haven’t woken up myself.

golly_ned 2y ago

I've completely quit social media except for LinkedIn, which I need for my work, and Reddit, which I selectively use for product recommendations and advice on my career and relationships. And also Twitter, through which I receive the latest research in my domain. And Instagram, which my girlfriend uses to send me memes and videos. Occasionally Facebook for event invitations. And this website. But other than that I've totally quit.

salomonk_mur 2y ago
The pressure to quit is so large I keep quitting daily
Minor49er 2y ago
What makes Hacker News a social media website?
- jesterson 2y ago
  HN is exactly what social media is. social media is a definition of sourced content, nit the quality of the latter
  - croes 2y ago
    To me it’s just a crowd curated list of links, more like early day Yahoo
    - willsmith72 2y ago
      Remove the comments and votes and I agree. But you just left a comment
      - croes 2y ago
        A comment isn’t social media to me, every news site used to have a comment section but wasn’t social media. It lacks the connection between the commenters. You can’t follow or block comments, or at least filter or sort them

drcwpl 2y ago

I would say he is write about LinkedIn, TikTok, Snap, Meta and its associated gram's, threads and face... BUT - HN has a different vibe, this is a community with sharing knowledge and information - on HN, I never doom scroll - there is genuine interaction and useful content. To some extent X provides useful updates from the main AI labs, so it is knowing how to use it and not be used by it.

dartos 2y ago
It’s all the same. HN is just smaller, but before Reddit disabled 3rd party apps HN was even more focused and, IMO, a little less startup/growth hacking focused. If HN ever gets big, you’ll see the same things.

photochemsyn 2y ago

Social media is not problematic if you engage with intent and use alternative sources to check claims. People unfortunate to never have been trained in Defense Against The Dark Arts of Propaganda and Manipulation are at risk but that's always been true, even when all media was of the printed sort. Basic critical analysis skills are vital to survival and mental health in this world. By 'engage with intent' I just mean not being a passive absorber of the stream of content that's being promoted at whatever site, but instead always have some focus on a particular topic that interests you. Incidentally I notice many of the 'quit social media' stories are published in outlets like the NYTimes which would instead like you to be a passive, well-conditioned absorber of their content, and hence off their advertising stream. The corporation is run for profit, it doesn't care about the collateral damage it may cause as long as it doesn't impact the bottom line.

tarkin2 2y ago

Someone needs to make a good Facebook groups/pages alternative. That'd make it easier for most.

jcass8695 2y ago

I’m about 9 months off social media (not including Hackernews, if you consider that SM). I have no regrets whatsoever. I’m in my late 20’s so SM came into my sphere when I was around 16. I haven’t quite “grown up with it”, but it’s been an omnipresent force for most of my teenage and adult life. > I am better at making time to catch up with the people I really care about, be that in-person or over WhatsApp. > When I do catch up with someone, I genuinely have no idea what’s been going on in their life and that makes the catch up a lot more enjoyable and engaging. I haven’t passively kept up to date on their every movement through Instagram stories or Tweets like some kind of ghostly stalker. The best example of this that I can give is that my partner and I got engaged to be married ~4 months ago. Nothing posted on SM, just WhatsApp messages to close friends and family. I get to keep reliving the joy of telling people and witnessing the ecstatic surprise and pure love on their faces each time I catch up with someone I haven’t seen for a while. > I am much more aware of just how much everyone uses their phones. Take a look around you. Sitting on the bus, waiting in a queue, riding an escalator, pissing at a urinal. Our minds are being constantly bombarbed with mostly useless, inane shite. Cat videos, stories of that person you went to school with 10 years ago doing stupid drunk things, misinformation from your scary uncle on Facebook etc. I let my mind wander more and it feels all the better for it.

0xdeadbeefbabe 2y ago

Still I'm glad Mr. Newport has a comments section on his youtube videos. He doesn't always explain things that clearly.

rootusrootus 2y ago

Quit social media if you cannot maintain a healthy relationship with it. But please do not just pull the plug because someone on the Internet told you it would improve your life. This is far from a guarantee. I quit Facebook a few years back because of enough conversations on HN convincing me it would be a positive choice. It was not, and I regret it. I've since rejoined FB but my network of friends did not completely recover. People here will tell you that FB friends you don't go out of your way to contact via not-FB methods aren't really friends. They are full of shit. That may be true for them.

alt227 2y ago
Can you please tell us why leaving Facebook was not a positive choice for you? Also why it is important that 'your network of friends recovers'?
- rootusrootus 2y ago
  I had friends on FB going back to high school. Neighborhood kids we hung with after school. People I've met at various jobs over the years and become friendly enough to keep in touch outside of work. Did we interact every day? Nope. Just casually. But we have a shared history going back 50 years, and had enjoyable low key interactions periodically. Turning off FB killed all of those connections, and not all of them came back when I got a new account a year later. Heck, a couple thought I had unfriended them and felt slighted. And to top it off -- I didn't actually have a problem with FB. It didn't ruin my life. I did (and still do) visit about once or twice a week. I don't doom scroll, I don't get all jealous of someone's vacation pictures, new house, new car, whatever. I did not actually have a social media problem that needed solving. I gave too much value to what randos on HN said. > why it is important that 'your network of friends recovers'? Because I enjoy the casual contact with all of these people I've known over the years. Even if I don't share enough current interests to spend a lot of time hanging out with them, I get positive feelings from staying connected.
causal 2y ago
I think you're hinting at a hidden problem: our vocabulary has not caught up with the way social media has evolved, and we need new terms. People actually LIKE, perhaps even need, the social aspects of social media. But that's become such a small part of the experience for many people- the ads and attention-hacking with cheap stimuli burying the positive interactions. I don't want to quit my connections, as you say. But I do want to quit this daily hypnosis that reels is trying to subject me to. I would call that latter something more like "possessive media" - it needs to have your attention at all times and needs every scrap of data it can gather about you. I want less possessive media and more social media.

mdavid626 2y ago

I use social media merely for distraction. Over the years I gained nearly zero benefit from using it. Shallow connections, useful looking useless content.

perihelion_zero 2y ago

Less "social" media, more social research paper / life hack resharing makes the world a better place. PS: Always hide the best meme in endnote 14 so your fellow meme scientists know exactly where to find the real discovery.

SirMaster 2y ago

I'm 36 and somehow I simply avoided social media for the most part. At least never used platforms like facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc. It all just seemed like a time waster and not really anything interesting. I use sites like this of course, and I suppose that is some form of social media though.

AlienRobot 2y ago

I'm trying to learn to use RSS to replace some of my social media use. I recommend RSS Guard, it seems to be the best client around. Liferea and Thunderbird are good options, too.

segasaturn 2y ago

It depends heavily on where you are in life and what demographics you belong to. If you're a guy in your 40s with a wife and kids and a white picket fence there's probably no harm in quitting. I was drawn to social media (and earlier forms, like forums and IRC) because I grew up in a backwards, repressive rural community and was outcasted in school and was able to find "my people" online. Online social communities are how a lot of people who are rejected by society due to disability, sexual orientation etc. get all of their positive social interaction from.

rustcleaner 2y ago

There is only one I use: Orange Reddit (aka HackerNews).

aktuel 2y ago

I don't use any of facebook, instagram, LinkedIn, tiktok, X, bluesky, mastodon, snap, ... and it's not even hard. On the rare occasions I took a look at those I found them boring beyond believe. Even mastodon following people I am actually interested in feels like a 90% waste of time.