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One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together. I’m technically gen z and I’ve been of

One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together. I’m technically gen z and I’ve been off of social media (aside from HN, WhatsApp and discord) for years and you wouldn’t believe how great it’s been for my overall state of mind. Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food and I’d argue that we’re all a lot more negatively affected by it than we think. There’s a reason ‘brain rot’ was word of the year.

dr_dshiv 2y ago
I find LinkedIn a healthy collection of professional accomplishments with minimal news. It’s also not very addictive. However, shitty newsfeeds like Google news are my bane. I can’t stop.
- gbin 2y ago
  I have seen an increasing amount of Trump non sense popping up more and more from the VC community the past 6 months on LI
  - vaccineai 2y ago
    that's because VC and billionaires know when a party is winning, and when the other party is unvotable for 10+ years.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  I find LinkedIn to be the worse of the social media sites. My feed is full of wannabe “thought leaders”, people posting about a meaningless vendor certificate they got, recruiters giving advice, people who can’t get a job or were recently laid off, etc. But now, politics is getting involved because people are having government job offers rescinded and the entire federal government is in a free fall like a 3rd world banana republic.
  - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
    > My feed is full of wannabe “thought leaders” Block them, it's easy. I have only close friends and coworkers that I don't hate on that site.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      you'll be spending every day blocking people, speaking from experience. Your dam can only push back so much.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  > It’s also not very addictive. For me, it's quite addictive unfortunately, even though I agree that it's pretty dull.
1970-01-01 2y ago
In principal it's a great method to get back to normal, however there are key areas (subreddits, local groups, etc.) that really do provide information, expertise, and news content that isn't available anywhere else online. It's a double edged sword. The best way I've found is to be in there with a read-only mindset or perhaps only participating inside those key areas where political discussions are strictly prohibited.
- codinhood 2y ago
  This has been my exact issue with giving up reddit. It's really hard to replace very niche topics without it, since many online forums are dead. I also append so many searches on google with "reddit" because the top results are generally SEO spam. Reading "You should quit reddit" helped a little. The author tries to reframe your hidden beliefs about reddit like "finding useful information" or "it's filled with experts." Helped me to realize I was spending more time reading about my hobbies than actually doing them. Though I understand it's not that simple, doing requires more energy, etc.
  - gipp 2y ago
    My approach, finally mostly successful after over a decade, is just "no main feed or subreddit pages." Reading a thread off a Google search or whatever because it has information I want is fine.
    - myroon5 2y ago
      News feed eradicator extension helps with that across ~8 sites: https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator
- jjulius 2y ago
  I have found this to be completely untrue. Yes, maybe not at the same scale that Reddit is, but if you dig, there's a community for everything. You can find what you're looking for. That said, I recognize that I am speaking completely for myself in regards to my own interests. YMMV.
neom 2y ago
This is the way. I was a director of the community team at deviantart when it got going and I remember so many times thinking "if we get one of these apps for everything people are going to drown themselves in the internet" - because I used to have to actively check in on community members who we deemed addicted. Sure enough, here we are, except it seems nobody is looking out for the best interests of their communities anymore. Thank god for dang.
- bartekpacia 2y ago
  > I was a director of the community team at deviantart (...) I used to have to actively check in on community members who we deemed addicted This sounds so interesting to me - was it your responsibility? How did you detect if someone was addicted? And most importantly, how did you scale it?
  - neom 2y ago
    Well early deviantart was pretty small, and I don't think anyone building it was over 25y/o at the time, so we all had lots of free time to work on it. Deviantart was arranged in a way we all had communities we were responsible for, it changed a lot after it reached million+ users scale, but in the beginning at 100k or so users it was very manageable. Your responsibility per Scott Jarkoff who lead that team was "to love, nurture, protect and grow your community" - and then there were things we were taught to watch out for or check in on. Backend you could see pretty much everything about the user, plus you just got used to the users in your communities, so "additive like behavior" was not difficult to detect, literally I would just see some users online ALL THE TIME, so we would always check in to make sure everything is ok, and tell them they're probably spending too much time on the site (it was a bit harder for me because I was one of the people responsible for communities generally.) I don't know how actively other GDs did this, but it was a widly discussed topic in our staff only irc channel very frequently. This all came from the teams want to be mindful to avoid hurting other people using the internet, most of us building it genuinely gave 2 shits and genuinely cared about our users. This was the same playbook I then used to build devrel at DigitalOcean in the beginning, I had devrel structured per community with the same instruction Scott gave me back in the day. (I think it's part of why y'all originally picked us! so thanks!)
barbazoo 2y ago
I agree. My Reddit outrage addiction flares up every now and then and it makes my mental health objectively shitty. Doesn’t matter if there’s some good content and connection on there, it’s just not worth the (mental) cost.
- 93po 2y ago
  Reddit is overwhelmingly fake information and covert ads. Investigate any random post on the front page of /r/all, even if it's just like a cute gif of an old person, then go to the comments. Like 75% chance there is something fake or made up about the title or context. It's such a mind pollutant, I can't stand it.
  - mavamaarten 2y ago
    In my opinion reddit is still such a great community if you subscribe to topics that interest you and leave the default subreddits. There's plenty of subreddits that I would not be able to find a good alternative forum for, maybe a Facebook group exists here and there but is that really better?
    - barbazoo 2y ago
      Good for you for being able to ignore /r/all, /r/popular, etc. I just can't, I always end up relapsing.
  - andelink 2y ago
    This is to be expected for /r/all. But who cares because why would anyone want to go there in the first place? In general once something becomes a certain size wrt users, its value to those users plummets. The only thing to do is leave.
Damogran6 2y ago
The services go through phases (I suspect depending on botnet activity)...Middle of the day, Threads is a fun place to hang, 9pm? It's a wall of anxiety producing ragebait, 2am? It's even worse. Looking at it on my phone, if I can see three entries and 2 are anxiety inducing, I close the app. (I'm 99% certain they get that telemetry too) That said, I also had days where I doomscrolled instagram and thought 'it's been 20 minutes and I haven't seen anything entertaining yet.' And that's when I decided to drop it. (It was the only app I could chat with my kids with...we've since moved to other methods) I haven't cut it out completely, but I'm not hyper aware of how I'm consuming it.
nineplay 2y ago
Alternatively carefully curate your social media accounts. My reddit home page is all books and formula 1. I'm quick to hit 'show me less like this' when anything drifts in from the front page. My Facebook feed is all friends and family who don't discuss politics and ads for nerd shirts. I've purchased a few. It is also easy and effective to hit show me less of this. I agree about LinkedIn and don't go there unless I'm actively job hunting, something I hope never to do again. I don't feel any bitterness when I see friends and family on FB go on expensive vacations, but I do feel an unhealthy and indefensible jealousy sometimes when I see former coworkers getting new jobs or promotions.
- gleenn 2y ago
  I totally understand the desire to avoid politics on all these platforms but in some way I always expect the greater powers want to destroy these platforms and make us even more hopeless.
  - nineplay 2y ago
    The greater powers control these platforms and want to keep us engaged so we believe what they want us to believe.
- teuobk 2y ago
  Indeed. I've unsubscribed from all subreddits that have become infested with political content, and I've "unfollowed" all of my acquaintances on Facebook and LinkedIn who post anything political. So much more enjoyable.
- lbarron6868 2y ago
  This is how I've dealt with Instagram. My IG account is literally nothing but cats. it's actually very refreshing to look at for five or ten minutes. But it takes work. IG wants to keep feeding me their BS reels. Sometimes I don't think it's worth it, they really make you put up a fight.
  - sien 2y ago
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
I reduced my news intake to a daily email from reuters + HN. Special thanks go to AI, as reddit and others no longer allow reading content without login.
- upcoming-sesame 2y ago
  Interesting. What's your setup ?
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    A World Wide Web browser.
    - upcoming-sesame 2y ago
      You've mentioned AI so thought you had something different
      - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
        I meant that, because of AI scrapers, reddit is no longer accessible)
ge96 2y ago
I quit reddit too recently, I still look at it for info but I'm not logged in/scrolling through it I find myself reaching for something when I have YouTube/chilling at my desk at the end of the day, can't code anymore/make something just on till I sleep. Sometimes have the desire to play a video game (I have a gaming rig too funny how that works) I've been trying to read HN or IEEE, TechCrunch stuff like that as my "lazy fun" I will miss posting stuff like "what is this car" or being part of the car talk for a sporty car I drive but idk kind of want to just live too It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something Anyway my main goal in life right now is getting out of debt/staying fit and work on projects
- jmyeet 2y ago
  The Instagram dating thing is because, in the heteronormative sense, a guy without one odd WAY more likely to be cheating. If you’re in a relationship, even if you don’t post, your significant other will likely tag you in their posts. I’ve never really understood doomscrolling on Twitter or Reddit. The only social media I find remotely useful out entertaining is actually TikTok. The comments are IME the least toxic and most entertaining. And I’ve gone down fascinating rabbit holes of things that have absolutely no relevance to my life like medical residency TikTok.
  - ge96 2y ago
    My reddit scrolling wasn't doom for my case. I was either personal topics I liked (cars, computing, software, photography, etc...) or brain rot/stupid shi that's the main reason I've left because I could be more productive than looking at an endless supply of that stuff You can mute subreddits and not see them anymore Funny you have to purge the algo on things like YouTube if you click on a thubmnail with some hot chick, boom your feed is nothing but click bait of hot women
  - kbelder 2y ago
    I 100% believe that guys with Instagram accounts are more likely to cheat than guys without them.
su8898 2y ago
Not sure if you’ve intentionally omitted it but I would also include YouTube in this list. YouTube can be very addictive with all the clickbait thumbnails etc.
- ge96 2y ago
  haha yeah that's where you inject custom CSS on the page to hide thumbnails, come to YouTube to see something? no thumbnails to distract your original intent
  - youainti 2y ago
    do you have a link to instructions on how to do that? It sounds really nice.
    - ge96 2y ago
      by chrome extension, chrome extensions are pretty straight forward to build but yeah, you just inject a CSS file that hides what you want you don't have to release the extension, you just load it unpackaged by developer mode in the extensions settings
- joshdavham 2y ago
  > Not sure if you’ve intentionally omitted it but I would also include YouTube in this list Yeah I did conciously omit it actually, but only because I consider Youtube to be basic internet infrastructure and quite valuable if used right. However, for me personally, I've actually blocked Youtube from Chrome when not in incognito mode to keep me signed out by default and I've also completely blocked the site from my iPad (and ofc I also don't have the app installed). I unfortunately struggle with some form of social media addiction and I've made pretty dramatic changes to keep myself away from these sites.
analog31 2y ago
I thank myself for having avoided social media so far. I've also developed a keen eye for headlines that lead to "outrage articles" which I avoid.
- ysavir 2y ago
  > I've also developed a keen eye for headlines that lead to "outrage articles" which I avoid. That's critical. My YouTube rule these days is to block any channel with a video name or thumbnail that says something like "This is why you fail at XYZ" or other statements designed to evoke an emotional response from me. And on top of that, I try to only click on videos where the title/thumbnail is properly informative, exposing the content rather than trying to hide it behind a vague hook. Hooks like "You won't believe this one trick!" and fluff like that, titles/thumbnails that should introduce the trick, not just allude to it.
  - analog31 2y ago
    Another dead giveaway is "X is outraged by Y."
iugtmkbdfil834 2y ago
<< One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together. Yes. I still have to be at least aware of what is happening for work reasons, but removing social media was one of the better decisions for my sanity ( I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well, which in itself is a concern suggesting further digital landscape deterioration ). I considered some more obvious solutions ( from buying subscription to WSJ/FT to personal news aggregator -- and objective/neutral observer rewrite using LLM and they all are not exactly ideal ). Here is the good news. All this chaos is an opportunity to stand something useful up. And I mean something useful that cannot be so easily dismantled by powers that be ( and there are already heavy indications they are aware people may try going outside the defined paths ).
- joshdavham 2y ago
  > I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well Yeah I agree that many HN comments are unfortunately pretty bad, but I think this should only motivate people like you and me to try harder to make HN a better place with constructive, useful comments :)
iancmceachern 2y ago
Same, I participate is very curated, self-selected communities online and that's it. I don't know how others who don't can do it. Good luck out there.
draw_down 2y ago
[dead]
sporkydistance 2y ago
Why do you exclude HN from your list? It is literally social media, but with the dial turned down a little. Yet, you don't have to dig to deeply to see flamewars, outrage, and trolling. I mean, look at many of the garbage comments in this very thread that are on par with /.,xchan.
- xorvoid 2y ago
  Yes, but it’s the old skool version of social media and the conversations here are generally higher quality and more genuine. I strongly disagree that it’s “on par with /.,xchan” HN also doesn’t seem to be as susceptible to rage-baiting / outrage-attention-seeking behavior. Not sure exactly what by this is the case but I’d venture a guess it has a lot to do with (1) “dang”s moderation, and (2) not having a personalized algorithm feed. I’m increasingly of the view that personalized algorithm feeds generated to select the maximum attention grabbing content for each person is a truly dangerous idea. Frankly, HN is not that engaging (by modern standards). In fact, probably 60-70% of the articles on the front page are boring to me on any given day. I view this as a feature and not a bug. Why should I expect that everything I look at must be maximally engaging? I wish more sites were old skool like HN.
  - boznz 2y ago
    There is still a lot of taboo subjects and comments you can make on HN, just look through your comment history on all the things downvoted to hell that you still believe are true. Like a good sheep I now refuse to defend anything that will leave me open to this.
    - musicale 2y ago
      A problem with downvoting on many sites (perhaps HN to some extent) is that people seem to just use it as a generic "I don't like this" button or as part of an upvote/downvote war to make sure that their preferred comment "wins."
- jbombadil 2y ago
  Not GP, but feel similarly. I'll offer my 2 cents: > but with the dial turned down a little. Exactly for this reason. Yes, HN is a social network. And if it follows the same enshittification path as the others, I will be gone from here too. But until then, to me (YMMV) it still provides a bit of entertainment and news without rotting my brain. Even the analogy works. Fast food is not that bad... in moderate quantities (/"with the dial turned down a little")
dudu24 2y ago
For better or worse, news flows through social media, so this approach basically amounts to ignoring all the bad stuff going on. If you read HN, chances are you can probably safely get through the next four years doing this. But as the saying goes, "first they came for the communists..."
daft_pink 2y ago
I find that just muting anyone who has anything to do with politics on facebook works well for me. I go on facebook to see your cutesy images and how your life is going not for long political diatribes.
- myth2018 2y ago
  For some short time, that worked for me, until facebook noticed that I was spending less time on it. Then, they started to push posts from other politics-related accounts (especially from ones at the side of the spectrum I used to antagonize most with). That was 4 years ago. I left that crap and didn't look back.
samspot 2y ago
If you decide not to totally quit a network, do what I do: 1. Turn off all notifications, especially for replies, likes, and content suggestions. 2. Train yourself not to look for feedback on the things you do post as a matter of habit. Intentionally check on the important discussions IFF you _remember_ to do so. 3. If possible, hide or remove any karma-like indications. Your life is better if the internet points aren't visible.
- prpl 2y ago
  Just use the webapp too, when possible. Remove all native apps on your phones. Don’t read emails.
- amelius 2y ago
  4. If you do scroll social media and you see a bad post then "punish" the platform by leaving.
Helmut10001 2y ago
I did the same. I have some exceptions for technical topics on Reddit. I also still use Facebook in a very drilled down state (looking into it every 3-5 months and checking in with some remote friends). I have also set up my own Mastodon server, which is fine for niche topics and I can reach out to interesting people directly, where other channels fail (email). I heavily rely on RSS, particularly from people that I trust or who gained my trust over longer periods.
polishdude20 2y ago
Is WhatsApp really considered social media? I mainly use it as my sms alternative.
- lukan 2y ago
  Depends how you use it. Once there were groups, it became quite similar - but since Telegram became so much better at it and I used it for some special groups and contacts - I now suddenly had lots of groups with subgroups and notifications for people liking my posts or replying to it - that suddenly I had social media again. What works for me is uninstalling it once in a while and only come back if I feel a specific need.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  It can be and is in other countries, ones that didn't have unlimited SMS for 15+ years. It usually isn't in the US, though.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
BrenBarn 2y ago
I basically agree, which is why it's kind of funny to see all the discussion in other threads here with people arguing about why can't ban AI or how Facebook was good because it created market value or whatever. Most of those platforms would be better off just outright banned. I do think, though, that for at least some platforms it's possible to use them in a limited way where you confine yourself to relatively small communities that are focused on some common interest that genuinely brings together people who enjoy sharing it. You mentioned Discord for instance and that's one, if you can find the right servers. I think it's possible to do that on Reddit too. You just have to never visit the "front page" and stick only to subreddits that you actually get value out of. It's harder approaching impossible with ones like Facebook that are more doggedly algorithm-driven and don't put moderation in the control of users in the same way. Of course, the lurking issue is that putting moderation in the control of users is building the platform on free labor and those good subcommunities are at risk of imploding when cracks emerge in the dike separating them from the wider platform userbase. And that's likely to happen because even those "safely usable" platforms are ultimately beholden to VC money that's going to demand enshittification eventually. Cohost was by far the best attempt I've seen for many years, but sadly couldn't make a go of it in the toxic ecosystem we've got.
- ActorNightly 2y ago
  > Most of those platforms would be better off just outright banned. In general, the goal should be improvement of humans, not avoidance of negative stimuli. Something has to exist where humans are rewarded for aligning to truth and reality, rather than emotion.
  - BrenBarn 2y ago
    > Something has to exist where humans are rewarded for aligning to truth and reality, rather than emotion. I more or less agree. Thus the humans who created and enshittified such platforms should be correspondingly punished for their disalignment to truth and reality. It's not just about rewarding "consumers" of stimuli; the creators and promulgators of stumili also need to be incentivized (and disincentivized) in just the manner you mention.
PaulHoule 2y ago
My take is almost the opposite, that it's important to develop healthy social networking insofar as there is some alternative to the outrage. It takes effort though. I'm going to offer my two accounts as examples https://mastodon.social/@UP8 https://mastodon.social/@UP8 https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social both of these are 'cyborg' accounts in that I have my RSS reader, classifier and autoposter. I am looking to build a lot more automation. My Mastodon feed took a large set of rules to block out #uspol and certain communities of miserable people. My feed has stayed outrage-free since last month. My measurements showed that Bluesky's 'Discover' feed blocked about 75% of emotionally negative material before Jan 20, since then people are inflamed but looking closely at my feed it seems they are deliberately trying to help certain people who felt stuck on X to migrate, that is, giving huge amounts of visibility to journalists, journalism professors, activists, and such so that they can run up 200k+ follower counts. I understand. (I've been brainstorming ideas about "how to get people off X" with a friend and tonight I'm going to tell him that Bluesky has it) I've used "less like this", "unfollow" [1], "mute", "block" and such and my discover feed is getting good again. I have two classifiers in the development pipeline, one to detect "screenshots of text" and "image memes", also a text classifier that is better at sentiment than my current one (I think ModernBERT + LSTM should be possible to train reliably, unlike fine-tuned BERTs.) I'm not so much interested in classifying posts as I am in classifying people; some of them are easy, there are 40,000 people who have a certain image meme pinned that I know I never want to follow. Just recently I figured out how to make training sets for these things without having to look too closely at a lot of toxic content. I'm also eliminating the dependencies that are keeping this from being open sourced or commercialized so I may I have something to share this summer. [1] one strike for an outrage post
- gergo_b 2y ago
  Wow that sounds awesome. I was thinking of doing something like that but never had the time to commit.
sneak 2y ago
Discord suffers from the same problems; censorship platforms in general have the same cancer everywhere.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
Have more self respect and consume a better information diet of printed media.
nicbou 2y ago
I need social media for work. What I did was unfollow everyone and everything, and block all suggested content. The front page is literally empty. Nothing on those websites captures my attention unless I specifically look for it. This was very effective. These websites have effectively become write-only media for me. They're still here if I need them, but I end up browsing just one page of /r/curatedtumblr and then doing something else.
huijzer 2y ago
I’m still on social media (HN, YouTube and Reddit), but blocked all other news sites. They’re mostly about outrage too.
corytheboyd 2y ago
Yeah it sure is nice this way isn’t it! It’s pretty boring, but you get to form your own opinions about things, and aren’t constantly mad about things that don’t affect you. I’ll admit to scrolling HN a lot, but I at least get a lot of very useful info out of it, it has leveled me up in unexpected ways over the years.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  > you get to form your own opinions about things Yeah! That's one of the cool things I first noticed when I stopped consuming as much news: I started to form my own unique and nuanced opinions. It's actually pretty surprising when you learn about how many of your opinions were just absorbed through culture and media and not really 'your own'.
IBCNU 2y ago
Thanks for your comment. Same here, Gen X. Off social media since pandemic. As Nassim Taleb says if it's really important someone will tell you. I feel like I'm on an island. I'm never outraged at all. Of course I hope there's more justice and equity in the world, but I am at peace with things and have no hatred or rage compared to when I was glued to social media.
jjice 2y ago
Completely agree. Sounds like we're similarly on the older end of Gen Z, and getting off social media in my first year of college was excellent. I get messages in my group chats from friends being pissed off (often rightfully) by things that our out of their control, but they're force-fed it on social media. It doesn't help to stare at rage/anxiety inducing things - it doesn't mean you're actually informed all the time. Plus I'd argue that most things you'll see end up being hogwash and the important stuff will rise to the top and you're generally hear about it anyway.
stevage 2y ago
The challenge for me is that there is useful stuff in there that I want to access. There are neighbourhood groups and other really useful forums on Facebook. There are tech discussions on BlueSky. But it's annoyingly hard to run the gauntlet of politics and outrage bait to get to the stuff I actually want.
lykahb 2y ago
I think that the social media is okay as long as no algorithmic feed gets involved. Visiting a few select tech subreddits doesn't affect me negatively. On other platforms the feed can't be avoided as easily.
- djh85 2y ago
  True. Curate who you follow carefully, and stay away from that "for you" tab
s1mplicissimus 2y ago
digital junk food. I haven't stumbled across this term and I gotta say as someone whose right on the edge between millenial and genz this term summarizes what most "public" social media is. I'm old enough to have grown up mostly with TV, with Internet being my escape hatch and twitter/facebook/tiktok/insta feel waaaay closer to old schoold programming TV than Internet. Anyway I'm an Internet person, not a TV person, so I've quit using all of them (I do have some "just in case" unused in years accounts everywhere because I suffer from a bad case of FOMO...)
zombiwoof 2y ago
Isn’t this how they win? I mean the people in Germany in 1930 just said , this is crazy , it doesn’t feel right, but hey I have outrage fatigue so the concentration camps are just fine
- warkdarrior 2y ago
  Much of the German population in the 1930s and 1940s was not aware of concentration camps, and learned of them once the Allies arrived.
  - anamdhek 2y ago
    Early 30s, sure. Late 30s and 40s? You should qualify your statement with “this is a heated historical debate, but some people argue that…” Keep in mind the significant incentives to not seek out information, to disbelieve the information one did come across, and to lie after the war was over.
    - NickC25 2y ago
      One of my neighbors when I grew up was part of Hitler Youth, and had moved to the US after the war. (for time context, I'm in my mid 30s, and he died a decade ago at IIRC 95 or 96, and I asked him about it maybe 20 years ago.) I asked him if he and his fellow youths knew of anything. He said at first, no, but pretty quickly when all the jewish-owned businesses vanished almost overnight, everyone knew something was up. Did they know about the camps? Debatable. But even the kids knew that they jewish population was kicked out of society.
  - wnc3141 2y ago
    They definitely knew something was up. There were active roundups of victims and a staunch public policy of ghettos etc.
  - bobcatmin 2y ago
    Laughably false, camps like Dachau were on newspapers and newsreels. Almost every Germans were aware that they were rounding up Jews and murdering them in camps.
carlosjobim 2y ago
You can get just as outraged by diving deep into official government PDFs and finding out by yourself from the source what they are doing. Sticking your head in the sand is of course a "solution", but that is willfully choosing to be nothing more than a subject to the rulers. Another solution is to limit your news intake and your political passion to the things that have the most real implications on your life and on the people you care about, while limiting your own exposure and vulnerability to governments as much as possible.
burgerrito 2y ago
Always prioritize your own wellbeing first.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
>LinkedIn I really hate this one in particular. Why did the biggest Job board become another Facebook (but more blatantly trying to sell you stuff)? This is a hard one to leave unless you're very comfortable in your job prospects.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  > This is a hard one to leave unless you're very comfortable in your job prospects. I know! I'm currently looking for work so have been forced to use it a bit, but once I find my next position, I'm out!
anothercoup 2y ago
[flagged]
WesternWind 2y ago
Eh I wouldn't have known a friend died if I didn't occasionally log into FB. I wouldn't have known that my best friend from middle school lost her house. I wouldn't have known that a family member was pregnant. But yeah, I feel like news stuff is better curated elsewhere, because outrage keeps eyeballs viewing, so algorithmic feeds tend to highlight it.
- chikere232 2y ago
  > I wouldn't have known that a family member was pregnant. Wait... how? Your family only communicate via facebook? I'm not judging here, I'm genuinely curious
  - WesternWind 2y ago
    It was a cousin on my dad's side, they don't live near me and we just don't talk that much directly.
yowayb 2y ago
I think Minimum Effective Dose applies. I quit most media for 4 years. The next 2 years were 2 hrs/day on Reddit for jokes. It was the best. But 1 year into that, I read an article by Swyx on how to use social media. I tried but gave up for another 2 years. But the end of that last 2 years was the election...and I was curious...so I went to X. Within 3 days my opinion of the outcome flipped. And...since I already read Swyx's article, I was ready to effectively navigate other topics of interest. But the key to effective media usage is to ALWAYS be on guard. Your mental filters have to be running all the time. The second you drop your guard, you're vulnerable because the stream never lets up. But when you do this, you find that you quickly run out of truly interesting things to read. Luckily I've also got physical hobbies. I now spend a TOTAL of 2 hrs/day across all media, and my mental health is just fine! But also I find it highly rewarding in many areas such as investing, history (the X format works so well!), international (language, culture, politics). I also highly recommend taking a second to put each post in scale or context. This does 2 things: helps decide importance of post, and slows scrolling so your brain doesn't get DDOSed into a mental health crisis. And the (increasingly cheap, powerful and ubiquitous) LLMs can be used to either save time or power you further into the conversations.
khana 2y ago
[dead]
smrtinsert 2y ago
We have to be aware of our disregulation as they try to swarm us with seemingly unstoppable energy. That is the point onslaught. Take a breather, compose your emotions, take off hours or a days, but then re-engage, interact, observe, document, etc.
arvinsim 2y ago
I still find value in some of these but just focused to a specific use case for each Reddit - hobbies Instagram - catching up with friends LinkedIn - Job Search
htamas 2y ago
I have tried to quit social media many times, but I end up using something again after a few weeks. It usually happens when I'm too tired to think about anything like games, or to read an article, or when I have a lot of waiting time without a lot of entertainment (eg airports). I wonder what do you do during those times?
- joshdavham 2y ago
  > I wonder what do you do during those times? When I’m really brain-tired but have downtime, I’ll 1) do nothing and just think in silence, 2) listen to a podcast or music or 3) watch Netflix. Spotify and Netflix are definitely media apps but they don’t quite have that same negative and addictive effect that normal social media apps do.
eleveriven 2y ago
Many people don't even realize how much better they'd feel until they step away for a while.
leokennis 2y ago
Just want to add that, while Reddit is a huge time sink, it is pretty easy to just see the good parts of it: - Mute any subreddit you do not enjoy - Generously block any asshole in the comments - Subscribe to the subreddits you do enjoy - Create one or more themed multireddits of the subreddits you enjoy My Reddit experience is cheesy feel good clips, cool videos of skilled people or weird occurences, funny niche humor and nerdy niche hobbies. No drama.
- gergo_b 2y ago
  the same can be said about any social media. you can block/unfollow/mute anything, but it creeps through anyway.
0xEF 2y ago
Good on you. I have been pushing the idea of leaving social media to people for well over a decade now, for the same of people learning to communicate with each other in more meaningful ways and improve their mental health. It worked for me and everyone that actually listened to me. But the emotionally violent resistance I get from people who are embedded in it is wild. I've commented on here before and subsequently pissed people off, but it is an addiction and needs to be treated like one.
jimt1234 2y ago
> ...equivalent of digital junk food Love it! Well, I hate that this situation exists, but the metaphor is great.
Dowwie 2y ago
what are your sources for news?
- joshdavham 2y ago
  > what are your sources for news? Unironically, my friends, family and colleagues. If anything truly important happens that ends up being relevant to me, the probability that one of them tells me is close to 100%. I don’t need the news or social media for that.
nonethewiser 2y ago
> One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together. This is hard to overstate. Checkout Jonathan Haidts research into social medias role in skyrocketing mental health problems in kids over the past decade. The junkfood comparison is great. It feels good now but makes you extremely unhealthy long term. Its deceptive because it doesnt look that bad, but it displaces things that you actually need to be healthy.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  > Checkout Jonathan Haidts research I love that guy! He generally makes the rounds as a guest on most of the large podcasts and I’d recommend anyone listen to at least one podcast where he’s a guest.
  - nonethewiser 2y ago
    I hope he becomes more influential. He is the tip of the spear in terms of combating the negative effects of social media and improving youth mental health.
asadotzler 2y ago
HN, WhatsApp, and Discord are also junk food depending on how you use them.
TiredOfLife 2y ago
In my personal experience from X, Facebook, Reddit and HN: The place with the worst takes, most rage inducing, most filled with conspiracy theories, falsehoods and misinformation is HN.
shirro 2y ago
Just be aware than while HN appears to carry a wide range of interesting topics and discussions both the community and mods do have biases. It presents an incomplete and skewed perspective and has to be consumed in moderation as part of a balanced diet. A lot of submissions are flagged every day. Some of them are well offtopic, repetitive or judged to be too biased or political and clearly if the site allowed all submissions it would break. The act of curation is a form of censorship and while it is often justified, many posts about topical developments that have a technical/financial angle, perhaps even posted by technical/financial media or bloggers and featuring people who are well known in the technical/financial field appear to be getting flagged in ways that could appear to be politically motivated. Pointless outrage over trivialities isn't good for us but when issues of genuine concern arise we shouldn't go out of our way to avoid them because they make us feel bad. We are supposed to feel bad when things are bad as it provokes us to action. The media/tech industry exploits our behavioral quirks to keep us engaged on their platforms but the fatique caused by the fire hose could numb us to real dangers. Disconnecting is very good for personal wellbeing but not to the point of dangerous ignorance.
recroad 2y ago
So the only things you check are HN, WhatsApp and Discord?
- joshdavham 2y ago
  Yes. However I occasionally hop on LinkedIn for its job board, YouTube to watch a tutorial or Reddit when I’ve made something that I wanna share like a project or a meme. Other than that, I avoid these sites like the absolute plague. I virtually never browse them for fun.
  - recroad 2y ago
    So do you check world events? Like geopolitics?

dr_dshiv 2y ago

I find LinkedIn a healthy collection of professional accomplishments with minimal news. It’s also not very addictive. However, shitty newsfeeds like Google news are my bane. I can’t stop.

gbin 2y ago
I have seen an increasing amount of Trump non sense popping up more and more from the VC community the past 6 months on LI
- vaccineai 2y ago
  that's because VC and billionaires know when a party is winning, and when the other party is unvotable for 10+ years.
scarface_74 2y ago
I find LinkedIn to be the worse of the social media sites. My feed is full of wannabe “thought leaders”, people posting about a meaningless vendor certificate they got, recruiters giving advice, people who can’t get a job or were recently laid off, etc. But now, politics is getting involved because people are having government job offers rescinded and the entire federal government is in a free fall like a 3rd world banana republic.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  > My feed is full of wannabe “thought leaders” Block them, it's easy. I have only close friends and coworkers that I don't hate on that site.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    you'll be spending every day blocking people, speaking from experience. Your dam can only push back so much.
joshdavham 2y ago
> It’s also not very addictive. For me, it's quite addictive unfortunately, even though I agree that it's pretty dull.

1970-01-01 2y ago

In principal it's a great method to get back to normal, however there are key areas (subreddits, local groups, etc.) that really do provide information, expertise, and news content that isn't available anywhere else online. It's a double edged sword. The best way I've found is to be in there with a read-only mindset or perhaps only participating inside those key areas where political discussions are strictly prohibited.

codinhood 2y ago
This has been my exact issue with giving up reddit. It's really hard to replace very niche topics without it, since many online forums are dead. I also append so many searches on google with "reddit" because the top results are generally SEO spam. Reading "You should quit reddit" helped a little. The author tries to reframe your hidden beliefs about reddit like "finding useful information" or "it's filled with experts." Helped me to realize I was spending more time reading about my hobbies than actually doing them. Though I understand it's not that simple, doing requires more energy, etc.
- gipp 2y ago
  My approach, finally mostly successful after over a decade, is just "no main feed or subreddit pages." Reading a thread off a Google search or whatever because it has information I want is fine.
  - myroon5 2y ago
    News feed eradicator extension helps with that across ~8 sites: https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator
jjulius 2y ago
I have found this to be completely untrue. Yes, maybe not at the same scale that Reddit is, but if you dig, there's a community for everything. You can find what you're looking for. That said, I recognize that I am speaking completely for myself in regards to my own interests. YMMV.

neom 2y ago

This is the way. I was a director of the community team at deviantart when it got going and I remember so many times thinking "if we get one of these apps for everything people are going to drown themselves in the internet" - because I used to have to actively check in on community members who we deemed addicted. Sure enough, here we are, except it seems nobody is looking out for the best interests of their communities anymore. Thank god for dang.

bartekpacia 2y ago
> I was a director of the community team at deviantart (...) I used to have to actively check in on community members who we deemed addicted This sounds so interesting to me - was it your responsibility? How did you detect if someone was addicted? And most importantly, how did you scale it?
- neom 2y ago
  Well early deviantart was pretty small, and I don't think anyone building it was over 25y/o at the time, so we all had lots of free time to work on it. Deviantart was arranged in a way we all had communities we were responsible for, it changed a lot after it reached million+ users scale, but in the beginning at 100k or so users it was very manageable. Your responsibility per Scott Jarkoff who lead that team was "to love, nurture, protect and grow your community" - and then there were things we were taught to watch out for or check in on. Backend you could see pretty much everything about the user, plus you just got used to the users in your communities, so "additive like behavior" was not difficult to detect, literally I would just see some users online ALL THE TIME, so we would always check in to make sure everything is ok, and tell them they're probably spending too much time on the site (it was a bit harder for me because I was one of the people responsible for communities generally.) I don't know how actively other GDs did this, but it was a widly discussed topic in our staff only irc channel very frequently. This all came from the teams want to be mindful to avoid hurting other people using the internet, most of us building it genuinely gave 2 shits and genuinely cared about our users. This was the same playbook I then used to build devrel at DigitalOcean in the beginning, I had devrel structured per community with the same instruction Scott gave me back in the day. (I think it's part of why y'all originally picked us! so thanks!)

barbazoo 2y ago

I agree. My Reddit outrage addiction flares up every now and then and it makes my mental health objectively shitty. Doesn’t matter if there’s some good content and connection on there, it’s just not worth the (mental) cost.

93po 2y ago
Reddit is overwhelmingly fake information and covert ads. Investigate any random post on the front page of /r/all, even if it's just like a cute gif of an old person, then go to the comments. Like 75% chance there is something fake or made up about the title or context. It's such a mind pollutant, I can't stand it.
- mavamaarten 2y ago
  In my opinion reddit is still such a great community if you subscribe to topics that interest you and leave the default subreddits. There's plenty of subreddits that I would not be able to find a good alternative forum for, maybe a Facebook group exists here and there but is that really better?
  - barbazoo 2y ago
    Good for you for being able to ignore /r/all, /r/popular, etc. I just can't, I always end up relapsing.
- andelink 2y ago
  This is to be expected for /r/all. But who cares because why would anyone want to go there in the first place? In general once something becomes a certain size wrt users, its value to those users plummets. The only thing to do is leave.

Damogran6 2y ago

The services go through phases (I suspect depending on botnet activity)...Middle of the day, Threads is a fun place to hang, 9pm? It's a wall of anxiety producing ragebait, 2am? It's even worse. Looking at it on my phone, if I can see three entries and 2 are anxiety inducing, I close the app. (I'm 99% certain they get that telemetry too) That said, I also had days where I doomscrolled instagram and thought 'it's been 20 minutes and I haven't seen anything entertaining yet.' And that's when I decided to drop it. (It was the only app I could chat with my kids with...we've since moved to other methods) I haven't cut it out completely, but I'm not hyper aware of how I'm consuming it.

nineplay 2y ago

Alternatively carefully curate your social media accounts. My reddit home page is all books and formula 1. I'm quick to hit 'show me less like this' when anything drifts in from the front page. My Facebook feed is all friends and family who don't discuss politics and ads for nerd shirts. I've purchased a few. It is also easy and effective to hit show me less of this. I agree about LinkedIn and don't go there unless I'm actively job hunting, something I hope never to do again. I don't feel any bitterness when I see friends and family on FB go on expensive vacations, but I do feel an unhealthy and indefensible jealousy sometimes when I see former coworkers getting new jobs or promotions.

gleenn 2y ago
I totally understand the desire to avoid politics on all these platforms but in some way I always expect the greater powers want to destroy these platforms and make us even more hopeless.
- nineplay 2y ago
  The greater powers control these platforms and want to keep us engaged so we believe what they want us to believe.
teuobk 2y ago
Indeed. I've unsubscribed from all subreddits that have become infested with political content, and I've "unfollowed" all of my acquaintances on Facebook and LinkedIn who post anything political. So much more enjoyable.
lbarron6868 2y ago
This is how I've dealt with Instagram. My IG account is literally nothing but cats. it's actually very refreshing to look at for five or ten minutes. But it takes work. IG wants to keep feeding me their BS reels. Sometimes I don't think it's worth it, they really make you put up a fight.
- sien 2y ago

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago

I reduced my news intake to a daily email from reuters + HN. Special thanks go to AI, as reddit and others no longer allow reading content without login.

upcoming-sesame 2y ago
Interesting. What's your setup ?
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  A World Wide Web browser.
  - upcoming-sesame 2y ago
    You've mentioned AI so thought you had something different
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
      I meant that, because of AI scrapers, reddit is no longer accessible)

ge96 2y ago

I quit reddit too recently, I still look at it for info but I'm not logged in/scrolling through it I find myself reaching for something when I have YouTube/chilling at my desk at the end of the day, can't code anymore/make something just on till I sleep. Sometimes have the desire to play a video game (I have a gaming rig too funny how that works) I've been trying to read HN or IEEE, TechCrunch stuff like that as my "lazy fun" I will miss posting stuff like "what is this car" or being part of the car talk for a sporty car I drive but idk kind of want to just live too It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something Anyway my main goal in life right now is getting out of debt/staying fit and work on projects

jmyeet 2y ago
The Instagram dating thing is because, in the heteronormative sense, a guy without one odd WAY more likely to be cheating. If you’re in a relationship, even if you don’t post, your significant other will likely tag you in their posts. I’ve never really understood doomscrolling on Twitter or Reddit. The only social media I find remotely useful out entertaining is actually TikTok. The comments are IME the least toxic and most entertaining. And I’ve gone down fascinating rabbit holes of things that have absolutely no relevance to my life like medical residency TikTok.
- ge96 2y ago
  My reddit scrolling wasn't doom for my case. I was either personal topics I liked (cars, computing, software, photography, etc...) or brain rot/stupid shi that's the main reason I've left because I could be more productive than looking at an endless supply of that stuff You can mute subreddits and not see them anymore Funny you have to purge the algo on things like YouTube if you click on a thubmnail with some hot chick, boom your feed is nothing but click bait of hot women
- kbelder 2y ago
  I 100% believe that guys with Instagram accounts are more likely to cheat than guys without them.

su8898 2y ago

Not sure if you’ve intentionally omitted it but I would also include YouTube in this list. YouTube can be very addictive with all the clickbait thumbnails etc.

ge96 2y ago
haha yeah that's where you inject custom CSS on the page to hide thumbnails, come to YouTube to see something? no thumbnails to distract your original intent
- youainti 2y ago
  do you have a link to instructions on how to do that? It sounds really nice.
  - ge96 2y ago
    by chrome extension, chrome extensions are pretty straight forward to build but yeah, you just inject a CSS file that hides what you want you don't have to release the extension, you just load it unpackaged by developer mode in the extensions settings
joshdavham 2y ago
> Not sure if you’ve intentionally omitted it but I would also include YouTube in this list Yeah I did conciously omit it actually, but only because I consider Youtube to be basic internet infrastructure and quite valuable if used right. However, for me personally, I've actually blocked Youtube from Chrome when not in incognito mode to keep me signed out by default and I've also completely blocked the site from my iPad (and ofc I also don't have the app installed). I unfortunately struggle with some form of social media addiction and I've made pretty dramatic changes to keep myself away from these sites.

analog31 2y ago

I thank myself for having avoided social media so far. I've also developed a keen eye for headlines that lead to "outrage articles" which I avoid.

ysavir 2y ago
> I've also developed a keen eye for headlines that lead to "outrage articles" which I avoid. That's critical. My YouTube rule these days is to block any channel with a video name or thumbnail that says something like "This is why you fail at XYZ" or other statements designed to evoke an emotional response from me. And on top of that, I try to only click on videos where the title/thumbnail is properly informative, exposing the content rather than trying to hide it behind a vague hook. Hooks like "You won't believe this one trick!" and fluff like that, titles/thumbnails that should introduce the trick, not just allude to it.
- analog31 2y ago
  Another dead giveaway is "X is outraged by Y."

iugtmkbdfil834 2y ago

<< One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together. Yes. I still have to be at least aware of what is happening for work reasons, but removing social media was one of the better decisions for my sanity ( I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well, which in itself is a concern suggesting further digital landscape deterioration ). I considered some more obvious solutions ( from buying subscription to WSJ/FT to personal news aggregator -- and objective/neutral observer rewrite using LLM and they all are not exactly ideal ). Here is the good news. All this chaos is an opportunity to stand something useful up. And I mean something useful that cannot be so easily dismantled by powers that be ( and there are already heavy indications they are aware people may try going outside the defined paths ).

joshdavham 2y ago
> I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well Yeah I agree that many HN comments are unfortunately pretty bad, but I think this should only motivate people like you and me to try harder to make HN a better place with constructive, useful comments :)

iancmceachern 2y ago

Same, I participate is very curated, self-selected communities online and that's it. I don't know how others who don't can do it. Good luck out there.

draw_down 2y ago

[dead]

sporkydistance 2y ago

Why do you exclude HN from your list? It is literally social media, but with the dial turned down a little. Yet, you don't have to dig to deeply to see flamewars, outrage, and trolling. I mean, look at many of the garbage comments in this very thread that are on par with /.,xchan.

xorvoid 2y ago
Yes, but it’s the old skool version of social media and the conversations here are generally higher quality and more genuine. I strongly disagree that it’s “on par with /.,xchan” HN also doesn’t seem to be as susceptible to rage-baiting / outrage-attention-seeking behavior. Not sure exactly what by this is the case but I’d venture a guess it has a lot to do with (1) “dang”s moderation, and (2) not having a personalized algorithm feed. I’m increasingly of the view that personalized algorithm feeds generated to select the maximum attention grabbing content for each person is a truly dangerous idea. Frankly, HN is not that engaging (by modern standards). In fact, probably 60-70% of the articles on the front page are boring to me on any given day. I view this as a feature and not a bug. Why should I expect that everything I look at must be maximally engaging? I wish more sites were old skool like HN.
- boznz 2y ago
  There is still a lot of taboo subjects and comments you can make on HN, just look through your comment history on all the things downvoted to hell that you still believe are true. Like a good sheep I now refuse to defend anything that will leave me open to this.
  - musicale 2y ago
    A problem with downvoting on many sites (perhaps HN to some extent) is that people seem to just use it as a generic "I don't like this" button or as part of an upvote/downvote war to make sure that their preferred comment "wins."
jbombadil 2y ago
Not GP, but feel similarly. I'll offer my 2 cents: > but with the dial turned down a little. Exactly for this reason. Yes, HN is a social network. And if it follows the same enshittification path as the others, I will be gone from here too. But until then, to me (YMMV) it still provides a bit of entertainment and news without rotting my brain. Even the analogy works. Fast food is not that bad... in moderate quantities (/"with the dial turned down a little")

dudu24 2y ago

For better or worse, news flows through social media, so this approach basically amounts to ignoring all the bad stuff going on. If you read HN, chances are you can probably safely get through the next four years doing this. But as the saying goes, "first they came for the communists..."

daft_pink 2y ago

I find that just muting anyone who has anything to do with politics on facebook works well for me. I go on facebook to see your cutesy images and how your life is going not for long political diatribes.

myth2018 2y ago
For some short time, that worked for me, until facebook noticed that I was spending less time on it. Then, they started to push posts from other politics-related accounts (especially from ones at the side of the spectrum I used to antagonize most with). That was 4 years ago. I left that crap and didn't look back.

samspot 2y ago

If you decide not to totally quit a network, do what I do: 1. Turn off all notifications, especially for replies, likes, and content suggestions. 2. Train yourself not to look for feedback on the things you do post as a matter of habit. Intentionally check on the important discussions IFF you _remember_ to do so. 3. If possible, hide or remove any karma-like indications. Your life is better if the internet points aren't visible.

prpl 2y ago
Just use the webapp too, when possible. Remove all native apps on your phones. Don’t read emails.
amelius 2y ago
4. If you do scroll social media and you see a bad post then "punish" the platform by leaving.

Helmut10001 2y ago

I did the same. I have some exceptions for technical topics on Reddit. I also still use Facebook in a very drilled down state (looking into it every 3-5 months and checking in with some remote friends). I have also set up my own Mastodon server, which is fine for niche topics and I can reach out to interesting people directly, where other channels fail (email). I heavily rely on RSS, particularly from people that I trust or who gained my trust over longer periods.

polishdude20 2y ago

Is WhatsApp really considered social media? I mainly use it as my sms alternative.

lukan 2y ago
Depends how you use it. Once there were groups, it became quite similar - but since Telegram became so much better at it and I used it for some special groups and contacts - I now suddenly had lots of groups with subgroups and notifications for people liking my posts or replying to it - that suddenly I had social media again. What works for me is uninstalling it once in a while and only come back if I feel a specific need.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
It can be and is in other countries, ones that didn't have unlimited SMS for 15+ years. It usually isn't in the US, though.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

BrenBarn 2y ago

I basically agree, which is why it's kind of funny to see all the discussion in other threads here with people arguing about why can't ban AI or how Facebook was good because it created market value or whatever. Most of those platforms would be better off just outright banned. I do think, though, that for at least some platforms it's possible to use them in a limited way where you confine yourself to relatively small communities that are focused on some common interest that genuinely brings together people who enjoy sharing it. You mentioned Discord for instance and that's one, if you can find the right servers. I think it's possible to do that on Reddit too. You just have to never visit the "front page" and stick only to subreddits that you actually get value out of. It's harder approaching impossible with ones like Facebook that are more doggedly algorithm-driven and don't put moderation in the control of users in the same way. Of course, the lurking issue is that putting moderation in the control of users is building the platform on free labor and those good subcommunities are at risk of imploding when cracks emerge in the dike separating them from the wider platform userbase. And that's likely to happen because even those "safely usable" platforms are ultimately beholden to VC money that's going to demand enshittification eventually. Cohost was by far the best attempt I've seen for many years, but sadly couldn't make a go of it in the toxic ecosystem we've got.

ActorNightly 2y ago
> Most of those platforms would be better off just outright banned. In general, the goal should be improvement of humans, not avoidance of negative stimuli. Something has to exist where humans are rewarded for aligning to truth and reality, rather than emotion.
- BrenBarn 2y ago
  > Something has to exist where humans are rewarded for aligning to truth and reality, rather than emotion. I more or less agree. Thus the humans who created and enshittified such platforms should be correspondingly punished for their disalignment to truth and reality. It's not just about rewarding "consumers" of stimuli; the creators and promulgators of stumili also need to be incentivized (and disincentivized) in just the manner you mention.

PaulHoule 2y ago

My take is almost the opposite, that it's important to develop healthy social networking insofar as there is some alternative to the outrage. It takes effort though. I'm going to offer my two accounts as examples https://mastodon.social/@UP8 https://mastodon.social/@UP8 https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social both of these are 'cyborg' accounts in that I have my RSS reader, classifier and autoposter. I am looking to build a lot more automation. My Mastodon feed took a large set of rules to block out #uspol and certain communities of miserable people. My feed has stayed outrage-free since last month. My measurements showed that Bluesky's 'Discover' feed blocked about 75% of emotionally negative material before Jan 20, since then people are inflamed but looking closely at my feed it seems they are deliberately trying to help certain people who felt stuck on X to migrate, that is, giving huge amounts of visibility to journalists, journalism professors, activists, and such so that they can run up 200k+ follower counts. I understand. (I've been brainstorming ideas about "how to get people off X" with a friend and tonight I'm going to tell him that Bluesky has it) I've used "less like this", "unfollow" [1], "mute", "block" and such and my discover feed is getting good again. I have two classifiers in the development pipeline, one to detect "screenshots of text" and "image memes", also a text classifier that is better at sentiment than my current one (I think ModernBERT + LSTM should be possible to train reliably, unlike fine-tuned BERTs.) I'm not so much interested in classifying posts as I am in classifying people; some of them are easy, there are 40,000 people who have a certain image meme pinned that I know I never want to follow. Just recently I figured out how to make training sets for these things without having to look too closely at a lot of toxic content. I'm also eliminating the dependencies that are keeping this from being open sourced or commercialized so I may I have something to share this summer. [1] one strike for an outrage post

gergo_b 2y ago
Wow that sounds awesome. I was thinking of doing something like that but never had the time to commit.

sneak 2y ago

Discord suffers from the same problems; censorship platforms in general have the same cancer everywhere.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

Have more self respect and consume a better information diet of printed media.

nicbou 2y ago

I need social media for work. What I did was unfollow everyone and everything, and block all suggested content. The front page is literally empty. Nothing on those websites captures my attention unless I specifically look for it. This was very effective. These websites have effectively become write-only media for me. They're still here if I need them, but I end up browsing just one page of /r/curatedtumblr and then doing something else.

huijzer 2y ago

I’m still on social media (HN, YouTube and Reddit), but blocked all other news sites. They’re mostly about outrage too.

corytheboyd 2y ago

Yeah it sure is nice this way isn’t it! It’s pretty boring, but you get to form your own opinions about things, and aren’t constantly mad about things that don’t affect you. I’ll admit to scrolling HN a lot, but I at least get a lot of very useful info out of it, it has leveled me up in unexpected ways over the years.

joshdavham 2y ago
> you get to form your own opinions about things Yeah! That's one of the cool things I first noticed when I stopped consuming as much news: I started to form my own unique and nuanced opinions. It's actually pretty surprising when you learn about how many of your opinions were just absorbed through culture and media and not really 'your own'.

IBCNU 2y ago

Thanks for your comment. Same here, Gen X. Off social media since pandemic. As Nassim Taleb says if it's really important someone will tell you. I feel like I'm on an island. I'm never outraged at all. Of course I hope there's more justice and equity in the world, but I am at peace with things and have no hatred or rage compared to when I was glued to social media.

jjice 2y ago

Completely agree. Sounds like we're similarly on the older end of Gen Z, and getting off social media in my first year of college was excellent. I get messages in my group chats from friends being pissed off (often rightfully) by things that our out of their control, but they're force-fed it on social media. It doesn't help to stare at rage/anxiety inducing things - it doesn't mean you're actually informed all the time. Plus I'd argue that most things you'll see end up being hogwash and the important stuff will rise to the top and you're generally hear about it anyway.

stevage 2y ago

The challenge for me is that there is useful stuff in there that I want to access. There are neighbourhood groups and other really useful forums on Facebook. There are tech discussions on BlueSky. But it's annoyingly hard to run the gauntlet of politics and outrage bait to get to the stuff I actually want.

lykahb 2y ago

I think that the social media is okay as long as no algorithmic feed gets involved. Visiting a few select tech subreddits doesn't affect me negatively. On other platforms the feed can't be avoided as easily.

djh85 2y ago
True. Curate who you follow carefully, and stay away from that "for you" tab

s1mplicissimus 2y ago

digital junk food. I haven't stumbled across this term and I gotta say as someone whose right on the edge between millenial and genz this term summarizes what most "public" social media is. I'm old enough to have grown up mostly with TV, with Internet being my escape hatch and twitter/facebook/tiktok/insta feel waaaay closer to old schoold programming TV than Internet. Anyway I'm an Internet person, not a TV person, so I've quit using all of them (I do have some "just in case" unused in years accounts everywhere because I suffer from a bad case of FOMO...)

zombiwoof 2y ago

Isn’t this how they win? I mean the people in Germany in 1930 just said , this is crazy , it doesn’t feel right, but hey I have outrage fatigue so the concentration camps are just fine

warkdarrior 2y ago
Much of the German population in the 1930s and 1940s was not aware of concentration camps, and learned of them once the Allies arrived.
- anamdhek 2y ago
  Early 30s, sure. Late 30s and 40s? You should qualify your statement with “this is a heated historical debate, but some people argue that…” Keep in mind the significant incentives to not seek out information, to disbelieve the information one did come across, and to lie after the war was over.
  - NickC25 2y ago
    One of my neighbors when I grew up was part of Hitler Youth, and had moved to the US after the war. (for time context, I'm in my mid 30s, and he died a decade ago at IIRC 95 or 96, and I asked him about it maybe 20 years ago.) I asked him if he and his fellow youths knew of anything. He said at first, no, but pretty quickly when all the jewish-owned businesses vanished almost overnight, everyone knew something was up. Did they know about the camps? Debatable. But even the kids knew that they jewish population was kicked out of society.
- wnc3141 2y ago
  They definitely knew something was up. There were active roundups of victims and a staunch public policy of ghettos etc.
- bobcatmin 2y ago
  Laughably false, camps like Dachau were on newspapers and newsreels. Almost every Germans were aware that they were rounding up Jews and murdering them in camps.

carlosjobim 2y ago

You can get just as outraged by diving deep into official government PDFs and finding out by yourself from the source what they are doing. Sticking your head in the sand is of course a "solution", but that is willfully choosing to be nothing more than a subject to the rulers. Another solution is to limit your news intake and your political passion to the things that have the most real implications on your life and on the people you care about, while limiting your own exposure and vulnerability to governments as much as possible.

burgerrito 2y ago

Always prioritize your own wellbeing first.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

>LinkedIn I really hate this one in particular. Why did the biggest Job board become another Facebook (but more blatantly trying to sell you stuff)? This is a hard one to leave unless you're very comfortable in your job prospects.

joshdavham 2y ago
> This is a hard one to leave unless you're very comfortable in your job prospects. I know! I'm currently looking for work so have been forced to use it a bit, but once I find my next position, I'm out!

anothercoup 2y ago

[flagged]

WesternWind 2y ago

Eh I wouldn't have known a friend died if I didn't occasionally log into FB. I wouldn't have known that my best friend from middle school lost her house. I wouldn't have known that a family member was pregnant. But yeah, I feel like news stuff is better curated elsewhere, because outrage keeps eyeballs viewing, so algorithmic feeds tend to highlight it.

chikere232 2y ago
> I wouldn't have known that a family member was pregnant. Wait... how? Your family only communicate via facebook? I'm not judging here, I'm genuinely curious
- WesternWind 2y ago
  It was a cousin on my dad's side, they don't live near me and we just don't talk that much directly.

yowayb 2y ago

I think Minimum Effective Dose applies. I quit most media for 4 years. The next 2 years were 2 hrs/day on Reddit for jokes. It was the best. But 1 year into that, I read an article by Swyx on how to use social media. I tried but gave up for another 2 years. But the end of that last 2 years was the election...and I was curious...so I went to X. Within 3 days my opinion of the outcome flipped. And...since I already read Swyx's article, I was ready to effectively navigate other topics of interest. But the key to effective media usage is to ALWAYS be on guard. Your mental filters have to be running all the time. The second you drop your guard, you're vulnerable because the stream never lets up. But when you do this, you find that you quickly run out of truly interesting things to read. Luckily I've also got physical hobbies. I now spend a TOTAL of 2 hrs/day across all media, and my mental health is just fine! But also I find it highly rewarding in many areas such as investing, history (the X format works so well!), international (language, culture, politics). I also highly recommend taking a second to put each post in scale or context. This does 2 things: helps decide importance of post, and slows scrolling so your brain doesn't get DDOSed into a mental health crisis. And the (increasingly cheap, powerful and ubiquitous) LLMs can be used to either save time or power you further into the conversations.

khana 2y ago

[dead]

smrtinsert 2y ago

We have to be aware of our disregulation as they try to swarm us with seemingly unstoppable energy. That is the point onslaught. Take a breather, compose your emotions, take off hours or a days, but then re-engage, interact, observe, document, etc.

arvinsim 2y ago

I still find value in some of these but just focused to a specific use case for each Reddit - hobbies Instagram - catching up with friends LinkedIn - Job Search

htamas 2y ago

I have tried to quit social media many times, but I end up using something again after a few weeks. It usually happens when I'm too tired to think about anything like games, or to read an article, or when I have a lot of waiting time without a lot of entertainment (eg airports). I wonder what do you do during those times?

joshdavham 2y ago
> I wonder what do you do during those times? When I’m really brain-tired but have downtime, I’ll 1) do nothing and just think in silence, 2) listen to a podcast or music or 3) watch Netflix. Spotify and Netflix are definitely media apps but they don’t quite have that same negative and addictive effect that normal social media apps do.

eleveriven 2y ago

Many people don't even realize how much better they'd feel until they step away for a while.

leokennis 2y ago

Just want to add that, while Reddit is a huge time sink, it is pretty easy to just see the good parts of it: - Mute any subreddit you do not enjoy - Generously block any asshole in the comments - Subscribe to the subreddits you do enjoy - Create one or more themed multireddits of the subreddits you enjoy My Reddit experience is cheesy feel good clips, cool videos of skilled people or weird occurences, funny niche humor and nerdy niche hobbies. No drama.

gergo_b 2y ago
the same can be said about any social media. you can block/unfollow/mute anything, but it creeps through anyway.

0xEF 2y ago

Good on you. I have been pushing the idea of leaving social media to people for well over a decade now, for the same of people learning to communicate with each other in more meaningful ways and improve their mental health. It worked for me and everyone that actually listened to me. But the emotionally violent resistance I get from people who are embedded in it is wild. I've commented on here before and subsequently pissed people off, but it is an addiction and needs to be treated like one.

jimt1234 2y ago

> ...equivalent of digital junk food Love it! Well, I hate that this situation exists, but the metaphor is great.

Dowwie 2y ago

what are your sources for news?

joshdavham 2y ago
> what are your sources for news? Unironically, my friends, family and colleagues. If anything truly important happens that ends up being relevant to me, the probability that one of them tells me is close to 100%. I don’t need the news or social media for that.

nonethewiser 2y ago

> One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together. This is hard to overstate. Checkout Jonathan Haidts research into social medias role in skyrocketing mental health problems in kids over the past decade. The junkfood comparison is great. It feels good now but makes you extremely unhealthy long term. Its deceptive because it doesnt look that bad, but it displaces things that you actually need to be healthy.

joshdavham 2y ago
> Checkout Jonathan Haidts research I love that guy! He generally makes the rounds as a guest on most of the large podcasts and I’d recommend anyone listen to at least one podcast where he’s a guest.
- nonethewiser 2y ago
  I hope he becomes more influential. He is the tip of the spear in terms of combating the negative effects of social media and improving youth mental health.

asadotzler 2y ago

HN, WhatsApp, and Discord are also junk food depending on how you use them.

TiredOfLife 2y ago

In my personal experience from X, Facebook, Reddit and HN: The place with the worst takes, most rage inducing, most filled with conspiracy theories, falsehoods and misinformation is HN.

shirro 2y ago

Just be aware than while HN appears to carry a wide range of interesting topics and discussions both the community and mods do have biases. It presents an incomplete and skewed perspective and has to be consumed in moderation as part of a balanced diet. A lot of submissions are flagged every day. Some of them are well offtopic, repetitive or judged to be too biased or political and clearly if the site allowed all submissions it would break. The act of curation is a form of censorship and while it is often justified, many posts about topical developments that have a technical/financial angle, perhaps even posted by technical/financial media or bloggers and featuring people who are well known in the technical/financial field appear to be getting flagged in ways that could appear to be politically motivated. Pointless outrage over trivialities isn't good for us but when issues of genuine concern arise we shouldn't go out of our way to avoid them because they make us feel bad. We are supposed to feel bad when things are bad as it provokes us to action. The media/tech industry exploits our behavioral quirks to keep us engaged on their platforms but the fatique caused by the fire hose could numb us to real dangers. Disconnecting is very good for personal wellbeing but not to the point of dangerous ignorance.

recroad 2y ago

So the only things you check are HN, WhatsApp and Discord?

joshdavham 2y ago
Yes. However I occasionally hop on LinkedIn for its job board, YouTube to watch a tutorial or Reddit when I’ve made something that I wanna share like a project or a meme. Other than that, I avoid these sites like the absolute plague. I virtually never browse them for fun.
- recroad 2y ago
  So do you check world events? Like geopolitics?