13 ms·

No Socials November

133 points by speckx 1y ago

tokai 1y ago
>set my YouTube to stop suggesting to me via algorithm It keeps suggesting based on usage though.
- shoelessone 1y ago
  I came here to ask if there is some way of fixing this. I'm guessing not. Youtube lately seems particularly bad in terms of showing lots of "shorts" all over when I have zero interest in watching them, but also suggested videos seem somehow aggressively chosen. I'm not sure how to describe that, but that's what it feels like to me.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    You can subscribe to channels you like, and then just look at your "Subscriptions" tab to see new content from them. They do stick a Shorts feed in there however which is annoying.
  - exo762 1y ago
    There is a plugin called Unhook. It allows to remove shorts, recommendation feed, or even set subscriptions as your default page.
  - driverdan 1y ago
    Stop looking at the homepage and go to your subscriptions instead.
- jobigoud 1y ago
  You may clear the watch history once in a while to reset.
  - plastic3169 1y ago
    Also history can be turned off. Added benefit that after that it only shows few shorts before blocking them.
bloudermilk 1y ago
My question for you all is: do you consider HN to be social media? I got off traditional social media (twitter, fb, insta, etc) years ago and feel all the better for it. But I still visit HN and YouTube multiple times daily. For the most part I find those to be information-dense and part of my continual personal development practice. That said, YT in particular has a tendency to draw me into endless shorts holes.
- imoverclocked 1y ago
  > do you consider HN to be social media? Yes, because I read/interact with comments. It's possible to just peruse headlines in which case it's less social. > YT in particular has a tendency to draw me into endless shorts holes Yeah, especially since there are no horrendous ads. YT on my AppleTV has become unwatchable with minutes of ads for minutes of content.
  - neilellis 1y ago
    YT: Yep the only pay-for-no-adds that I gave in to.
    - svachalek 1y ago
      I've taken the position that if something is too expensive without ads, it's too expensive for me. My life is blissfully, nearly entirely, ad free. The only downside is I'm an alien on my own planet, blind to the continuous swamp of advertising everyone around me lives in.
      - verdverm 1y ago
        I feel you on that, I almost never see ads and don't know how people subjugate themselves to it (by not running an ad blocker of any kind, nor paying to remove ads)
- didibus 1y ago
  I do yes. It's not as bad, but it definitely feeds you brain dopamine hits and quick rewards.
bachittle 1y ago
I use the following extensions to help with managing my social media intake while on my work computer: Focused Youtube: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/nfghbmabdoakhobmimnjkamfdnpfammn?utm_source=item-share-cb https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/nfghbmabdoakhobmimn... Removes all recommendations and just keeps a search bar. No shorts rabbit holes or algorithm-based media consumption StayFocusd: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfmgcngdelahlfoji?utm_source=item-share-cb https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfmg... I like using the nuclear option. Blocks a bunch of sites I have that are in a list, such that I cannot open them at all.
jvalencia 1y ago
My first thought was why would someone halt their socials? Too much holiday time? Then I realized this was social media :-P. Socials to me are precisely NOT social media. Is this a common language usage now?
- topaz0 1y ago
  Yes
- klardotsh 1y ago
  Yes. “Socials” has been functionally interchangeable, especially in written form, for probably 2+ years now, in my experience.
- nxor 1y ago
  Not where I live if you're older than middle school age
- numbers 1y ago
  this might be a generational thing or a geographic thing, my nieces and nephews use the word "socials" while I always use "social media".
overvale 1y ago
I'm genuinely interested in the world around me, and I like being entertained as much as the next person, but the problem with social media for me is that it creates a simulacrum of the world which does not correspond to the tangible reality I see around me. I would go further and say that social media is just another kind of "news". The News, essentially, takes an incomprehensibly complex world and distills/simplifies it into something you can understand. In the same way that one creates a mental model for how a complex system works in order to better understand it. That's a useful thing! But the distillation/simplification process introduces biases and distortions in its model of the world, which can lead to the model being extremely inaccurate. And with social media that inaccuracy extends to representations of your friends, family, and your self. To the extent that The News, and Social Media, creates a reasonably accurate model of the world around you they're useful, but I take it all with a heavy dose of skepticism.
- HeinzStuckeIt 1y ago
  > It creates a simulacrum of the world which does not correspond to the tangible reality I see around me. 5–10 years ago I would have agreed: “The real world is so different from the terminally-online space.” But the terminally-online space has seeped into real life all over the world. For example, I have traveled the developing world a lot in the last two years, and it’s unbelievable how many young men want to talk to me about Andrew Tate and related things when they see I’m a man from the West. Even in countries with shaky English skills, certain online memes are big. Or take when I bikepacked a remote route down Mexico that is popular with Americans: in spite of this route being largely a two-month break from being always online, the conversations when those American cyclists met up were often indistinguishable from the social or political outrage that engagement-maximizing platforms stoke. Even if you disconnect, you can’t repair the damage.
  - overvale 1y ago
    A great point! I've experienced the same. We reshape reality to match the mental models we create. To the extent this has always been the case I have to accept it, but it feels like we're in a logarithmic curve of that pattern becoming faster and more powerful.
bfkwlfkjf 1y ago
Im moving my email away from Google. The final frontier.
- numbers 1y ago
  there's some good options out there, good luck! I'm a happy Fastmail user.
  - bfkwlfkjf 1y ago
    I was only really considering tuta or proton (due to encryption at rest) leaning towards tuta.
- foxygen 1y ago
  Make sure to use your own domain.
  - LelouBil 1y ago
    And use a TLD from a well known registrar
    - bfkwlfkjf 1y ago
      Why does the registrar bring well known matter? If the registrar evaporates, it's still your domain (my understanding; correct me if wrong). Related question: would you say that dynadot qualifies as well known?
      - LelouBil 1y ago
        Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but since nowadays your email address is basically your online ID card I would do the maximum to keep it. > If the registrar evaporates, it's still your domain. I have no idea, I assume there's some special procedure ? The thing is that technically it's not *your* domain, you're still renting it at the end of the day. And no idea about dynadot sorry. Personally, I have domains at OVH and Cloudflare
catapart 1y ago
My last remaining social media account was with bluesky and when many of their visible employees took the opportunity to belittle and dismiss their community with that "waffles" horseshit, a month or so back, I dropped off of that one too. I really thought they were on to something with the "make it a protocol" thing. Now I see that no social media will satisfy me. I don't WANT a platform where "everyone can say anything (so long as its legal and you don't say anything bad about fascists so the fascist government will leave us alone)". I WANT a platform where productive people show what they produced and discuss it along with the things other people produce. Even if that product is "jokes" or "writing". I just want a marketplace of ideas that have some grounding in practical reality. Not a hyper-void filled with nonsense thoughts and ideologies that can withstand rounds and bouts of academic scrutiny but would wither instantly in any practical application. I don't want a place of arguments and gossip and attention. I want a place of content and challenge and speculation and application. I don't want social media, even for what it purports to offer. I don't want to "be in a room with everyone in the world". I want to "be in a room with people who are doing wild an interesting things and want to do so in a community of others like them." I don't want the unwashed masses. I want self-selection and communities. tl;dr: I want forums that work like feeds. Small groups of like-minded people engaging with one another. I just want it to WORK like social networks, with following, and topical follows (hashtags), and content feeds.
- CactusBlue 1y ago
  You made a right decision; The big-world social platforms are doomed to fail, as they have quadratic scaling costs. I am a big proponent of "curation over moderation". I am working on Mikoto Platforms, which is basically designed to be somewhere between Discord and Notion, but open source + decentralized. There is no global feed; in fact, some users thought it was a bug that it took you to such an empty screen when you first started it. Platforms are what you make of it.
  - catapart 1y ago
    Oh, sweet! This is an awesome-looking app! The tree-view of the discussion subjects or threads is pretty inspired. I really like that idea, especially as a way to moderate a thread that is purely managerial, rather than punitive or rewarding. Of course, it would be great if a discussion could always be efficiently branched by the participants in real time, but I imagine any good "posterity" thread would benefit from some maintenance. In any case, it's something I hadn't really considered before. Cool stuff! I mean, the whole app is pretty impressive. It's clear, from the blog posts, that we're of like minds when it comes to the "good parts" of the internet and what makes the "bad" parts so frustrating. If I used Discord more this might mean more, but I'm pretty satisfied to swap out my Discord usage for Mikoto platforms. Seems like a win to me, at least. All that said, I am still left a bit unsatisfied as far as a social media replacement. A "chat" presentation eschews the kind of "press release" posts that social media accommodates well for creatives. At the very least, I wouldn't feel "normal" posting announcements that didn't necessarily expect follow up engagement in a chat-style environment. Posting "here's this new thing I did" on a social media feed without any follow up is...lonely, but not particularly uncommon. But posting the same thing to an empty or unresponsive chat room is...somehow sadder? To me at least.
grim_io 1y ago
My November schedules are getting crowded. No shaving, no faps, no socials, ...
- jtmarl1n 1y ago
  These things should free up your schedule :)
- Vinnl 1y ago
  At least you can still vember, right? What's that? Oh...
nekusar 1y ago
I'd argue that "No Socials November" should be "No corporate Socials November". Places like the Fediverse (Mastodon, Peertube, Lemmy, pixelfed, etc) are that non-corporate non-gamified breath of fresh air. Sure, there's less people on those networks, but that too is a great benefit - less bots and less "temperature". And 10 years ago, in 2015, we already saw videos analyzing social media hatred with CGP Grey's "This video will make you angry" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc But why anger? Because anger and screaming at people is a guaranteed way to make "engagement", which seems to be the predominant way to prove to advertisers of "people per month". But is it good? Absolutely not. Its poison, slowly but surely. But how do we avoid the poison? The root cause here is money from advertising, which is from engagement. But you cut out the profit motive, you also cut out advertisers, and you also cut out arbitrary and forced anger-gagement. And that, is the Fediverse. The opposite is your Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit. And they're full of bots, quazi and directly hateful content posted for "engagement", and the same set of hate memes populated froom 1 site to all the rest by bots. No wonder people hate this type of social media. It's wholly toxic and poisonous.
- righthand 1y ago
  I disagree. While smaller networks are a good thing for the social media landscape, ultimately people should go seek other activities where socializing is a secondary benefit. Rather than spending time on a social network. If we take a month to refocus on non-social-first activity we will be healthier 1000000x as communities. Lemmy is great btw. I started putting “lemmy” instead of “reddit” in my searches and it often works.
dlm24 1y ago
I'm gona try, X Reddit HackerN Insta Cheers
sehugg 1y ago
Does RSS count? I've appreciated having NetNewsWire and its iCloud sync. Having no urge/obligation to comment or retoot is a different experience.
huijzer 1y ago
Also due to being dissapointed with social media, especially how it always makes you feel that you know more while you actually go deeper in your bubble, I created a mini blogging platform mostly inspired by X/BlueSky called fx [1]. You can use f**k X as a mnemonic device for the name. It's running for a few months now and works very well for me. Whenever I have a random thought that I want to publicly write down, I use my phone or computer to quickly put it on my site. Unlike X or other social media sites, the post is fully under my control. I can edit it, delete it, share it, link it, and it's all backupped in GitHub. [1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/fx https://github.com/rikhuijzer/fx
- poolnoodle 1y ago
  No disrespect but isn't this just a blog?
  - huijzer 1y ago
    Yes but with a few features that are like social media. For example, you can create a post without a title. Also, you can create a post by typing a text and clicking on publish, so without any other intermediate step. I guess you could call it a blog. Potayto, potahto?
yepguy 1y ago
I would encourage people to consider permanent solutions to use social media more intentionally instead of taking a month off here and there. Two things that the apps really want you to do, but that you should resist as much as possible, are doomscrolling through meaningless content and compulsively checking apps or websites in case you miss out on interesting updates. For myself, I've decided to direct anything and everything possible to my email (with plenty of filters to keep my main inbox tidy). For apps that don't offer email notifications, I use MacroDroid to forward Android push notifications to email. There are also plenty of ways to forward RSS to email. I batch process my email 1-3x/day, and anything I don't want to see during this time is not worth seeing at all. It gets ignored, filtered out, or unsubscribed from.
- MisterTea 1y ago
  I have been off social media completely since 2016. Only have a Facebook left for family and the occasional marketplace browse. When I do check it I only log in via browser and spend maybe 5-10 minutes on the site. I posted a few times that people should contact me via email if they want to chat though so far no one has taken up my offer.
  - yepguy 1y ago
    If it works for you, great! I've tried that before and it didn't work for me. I like the stuff I find on Hacker News, and I need Instagram to keep up with my friends, so this was the solution I came up with mostly to keep myself from compulsively checking both of those in an unhealthy way.
    - MisterTea 1y ago
      Keeping up with friends in my circle means a group chat. We moved around a few platforms but settled on google chat as that was most common among everyone. HN isn't very social to me, just a water cooler.
    - brailsafe 1y ago
      > I need Instagram to keep up with my friends Wdym? I think this idea should be included in your top-level comment about things Instagram wants you to do. I can believe it's likely that other people have very different relationships with people that are dependent on a particular platform, but I do my best not to accept that and make it clear that I probably won't check anything other than a DM whenever I feel like it, which consequently categorizes Insta as an unimportant means of connection. Put another way, my relationships are defined by the communication and connection we have in real life or DMs regardless of the platform. Seeing posts does not count as friendship to me, and if I don't hear from someone or think about them because I disabled my insta, then it wasn't meant to be. A sibling replyer said they use group chats, which is fine for some, but I find has personally just become another passive comms dump that I actively refuse to participate in; there's too much noise. All that said, a real friendship formed in person after a real time investment can survive with very little or zero fake interaction from social media. It's ok that I see my bros from my home town maybe once a year. If I fear not receiving any direct communication from anyone should I decide to dip out of social media, then it's possible I have no friends and I should sit with that feeling until I can take action on that. People get too complacent imo thinking their posts count as friendship.
65 1y ago
I've never had a problem with social media usage - and I'd be surprised if other developers here haven't enacted their own solutions to prevent doomscrolling. I have user scripts on both my iPhone and my computer that completely disable the Instagram recommended feed. I have disabled YouTube thumbnails and the YouTube sidebar. /r/popular or other popular subreddits get automatically redirected to my Reddit homepage which has a lot less garbage on it. I have completely disabled my Twitter feed. I even have certain domains removed on HackerNews and made an extension to only update a few times a day. And a ton more. If you're a developer and you want to stop doomscrolling... you have the power.
- leonhard 1y ago
  How can you do that in the apps? Or do you just do it for the websites and not install the apps in the first place?
  - 65 1y ago
    I only visit social media in browser, I don't have any social media apps installed on my phone. Safari supports user scripts which I have installed on my phone.
- poolnoodle 1y ago
  I also have the power to disable all the contraptions I've built.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I just stopped using Facebook, a number of months ago. It just wasn't giving me anything, and half the posts I made, were flagged as spam (of course, with zero appeal ability; when you appeal, and every time, it's denied, then that's no recourse). I tended to do "Lookit this!" types of posts, where I either referenced a project that I'd released, or some Web site that I thought was worth sharing. I've never really used Twitter, and I don't browse YouTube, or bother looking at comments. I had stopped reading my feed, a couple of years ago. It was just old white people, screaming at each other. > set my YouTube to stop suggesting to me via algorithm This suggests a less-than-total commitment to backing out. I would consider "no social" to mean not even visiting the site, or running the app. In my case, this is about the only place I engage in anything like social media. I would have to stop reading HN to be "no social," and I'm not interested in doing that.
amelius 1y ago
Can we have ad-free February? Or, alternatively, if X% of people are against advertising, can we have X% of the year without advertising? Sounds fair to me.
dollylambda 1y ago
I've managed to kick all social media except Github. That for me is the most difficult if you want to collaborate on software projects. No, I don't consider hacker-news to be social media, rather a news aggregator with a message board. Although, I would frequent here less probably if I was on other social media.
josefrichter 1y ago
Damn, I might try this, just to get a better perspective. Does HN fall within “socials” though? :-)
mayanraisins 1y ago
If you or anyone you know uses Instagram, you can select the logo in the upper-left to change the feed to “following”, which is a chronological list of posts from people you follow. My wife didn’t know about this and I saved her from endlessly scrolling reels.
bashmelek 1y ago
I ask everyone to never stop creating, never stop sharing. And when your friend shares, appreciate it, for what it is, that it is theirs, that they did it, and that it is them. Draw, play an instrument, paint, write a poem, sing, cook, shoot hoops, talk about books over coffee. Be personal.
bfkwlfkjf 1y ago
HN is social media.
musicale 1y ago
Already broke it unfortunately by posting on HN.

No Socials November

133 points by speckx 1y ago

tokai 1y ago

>set my YouTube to stop suggesting to me via algorithm It keeps suggesting based on usage though.

shoelessone 1y ago
I came here to ask if there is some way of fixing this. I'm guessing not. Youtube lately seems particularly bad in terms of showing lots of "shorts" all over when I have zero interest in watching them, but also suggested videos seem somehow aggressively chosen. I'm not sure how to describe that, but that's what it feels like to me.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  You can subscribe to channels you like, and then just look at your "Subscriptions" tab to see new content from them. They do stick a Shorts feed in there however which is annoying.
- exo762 1y ago
  There is a plugin called Unhook. It allows to remove shorts, recommendation feed, or even set subscriptions as your default page.
- driverdan 1y ago
  Stop looking at the homepage and go to your subscriptions instead.
jobigoud 1y ago
You may clear the watch history once in a while to reset.
- plastic3169 1y ago
  Also history can be turned off. Added benefit that after that it only shows few shorts before blocking them.

bloudermilk 1y ago

My question for you all is: do you consider HN to be social media? I got off traditional social media (twitter, fb, insta, etc) years ago and feel all the better for it. But I still visit HN and YouTube multiple times daily. For the most part I find those to be information-dense and part of my continual personal development practice. That said, YT in particular has a tendency to draw me into endless shorts holes.

imoverclocked 1y ago
> do you consider HN to be social media? Yes, because I read/interact with comments. It's possible to just peruse headlines in which case it's less social. > YT in particular has a tendency to draw me into endless shorts holes Yeah, especially since there are no horrendous ads. YT on my AppleTV has become unwatchable with minutes of ads for minutes of content.
- neilellis 1y ago
  YT: Yep the only pay-for-no-adds that I gave in to.
  - svachalek 1y ago
    I've taken the position that if something is too expensive without ads, it's too expensive for me. My life is blissfully, nearly entirely, ad free. The only downside is I'm an alien on my own planet, blind to the continuous swamp of advertising everyone around me lives in.
    - verdverm 1y ago
      I feel you on that, I almost never see ads and don't know how people subjugate themselves to it (by not running an ad blocker of any kind, nor paying to remove ads)
didibus 1y ago
I do yes. It's not as bad, but it definitely feeds you brain dopamine hits and quick rewards.

bachittle 1y ago

I use the following extensions to help with managing my social media intake while on my work computer: Focused Youtube: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/nfghbmabdoakhobmimnjkamfdnpfammn?utm_source=item-share-cb https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/nfghbmabdoakhobmimn... Removes all recommendations and just keeps a search bar. No shorts rabbit holes or algorithm-based media consumption StayFocusd: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfmgcngdelahlfoji?utm_source=item-share-cb https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfmg... I like using the nuclear option. Blocks a bunch of sites I have that are in a list, such that I cannot open them at all.

jvalencia 1y ago

My first thought was why would someone halt their socials? Too much holiday time? Then I realized this was social media :-P. Socials to me are precisely NOT social media. Is this a common language usage now?

topaz0 1y ago
Yes
klardotsh 1y ago
Yes. “Socials” has been functionally interchangeable, especially in written form, for probably 2+ years now, in my experience.
nxor 1y ago
Not where I live if you're older than middle school age
numbers 1y ago
this might be a generational thing or a geographic thing, my nieces and nephews use the word "socials" while I always use "social media".

overvale 1y ago

I'm genuinely interested in the world around me, and I like being entertained as much as the next person, but the problem with social media for me is that it creates a simulacrum of the world which does not correspond to the tangible reality I see around me. I would go further and say that social media is just another kind of "news". The News, essentially, takes an incomprehensibly complex world and distills/simplifies it into something you can understand. In the same way that one creates a mental model for how a complex system works in order to better understand it. That's a useful thing! But the distillation/simplification process introduces biases and distortions in its model of the world, which can lead to the model being extremely inaccurate. And with social media that inaccuracy extends to representations of your friends, family, and your self. To the extent that The News, and Social Media, creates a reasonably accurate model of the world around you they're useful, but I take it all with a heavy dose of skepticism.

HeinzStuckeIt 1y ago
> It creates a simulacrum of the world which does not correspond to the tangible reality I see around me. 5–10 years ago I would have agreed: “The real world is so different from the terminally-online space.” But the terminally-online space has seeped into real life all over the world. For example, I have traveled the developing world a lot in the last two years, and it’s unbelievable how many young men want to talk to me about Andrew Tate and related things when they see I’m a man from the West. Even in countries with shaky English skills, certain online memes are big. Or take when I bikepacked a remote route down Mexico that is popular with Americans: in spite of this route being largely a two-month break from being always online, the conversations when those American cyclists met up were often indistinguishable from the social or political outrage that engagement-maximizing platforms stoke. Even if you disconnect, you can’t repair the damage.
- overvale 1y ago
  A great point! I've experienced the same. We reshape reality to match the mental models we create. To the extent this has always been the case I have to accept it, but it feels like we're in a logarithmic curve of that pattern becoming faster and more powerful.

bfkwlfkjf 1y ago

Im moving my email away from Google. The final frontier.

numbers 1y ago
there's some good options out there, good luck! I'm a happy Fastmail user.
- bfkwlfkjf 1y ago
  I was only really considering tuta or proton (due to encryption at rest) leaning towards tuta.
foxygen 1y ago
Make sure to use your own domain.
- LelouBil 1y ago
  And use a TLD from a well known registrar
  - bfkwlfkjf 1y ago
    Why does the registrar bring well known matter? If the registrar evaporates, it's still your domain (my understanding; correct me if wrong). Related question: would you say that dynadot qualifies as well known?
    - LelouBil 1y ago
      Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but since nowadays your email address is basically your online ID card I would do the maximum to keep it. > If the registrar evaporates, it's still your domain. I have no idea, I assume there's some special procedure ? The thing is that technically it's not *your* domain, you're still renting it at the end of the day. And no idea about dynadot sorry. Personally, I have domains at OVH and Cloudflare

catapart 1y ago

My last remaining social media account was with bluesky and when many of their visible employees took the opportunity to belittle and dismiss their community with that "waffles" horseshit, a month or so back, I dropped off of that one too. I really thought they were on to something with the "make it a protocol" thing. Now I see that no social media will satisfy me. I don't WANT a platform where "everyone can say anything (so long as its legal and you don't say anything bad about fascists so the fascist government will leave us alone)". I WANT a platform where productive people show what they produced and discuss it along with the things other people produce. Even if that product is "jokes" or "writing". I just want a marketplace of ideas that have some grounding in practical reality. Not a hyper-void filled with nonsense thoughts and ideologies that can withstand rounds and bouts of academic scrutiny but would wither instantly in any practical application. I don't want a place of arguments and gossip and attention. I want a place of content and challenge and speculation and application. I don't want social media, even for what it purports to offer. I don't want to "be in a room with everyone in the world". I want to "be in a room with people who are doing wild an interesting things and want to do so in a community of others like them." I don't want the unwashed masses. I want self-selection and communities. tl;dr: I want forums that work like feeds. Small groups of like-minded people engaging with one another. I just want it to WORK like social networks, with following, and topical follows (hashtags), and content feeds.

CactusBlue 1y ago
You made a right decision; The big-world social platforms are doomed to fail, as they have quadratic scaling costs. I am a big proponent of "curation over moderation". I am working on Mikoto Platforms, which is basically designed to be somewhere between Discord and Notion, but open source + decentralized. There is no global feed; in fact, some users thought it was a bug that it took you to such an empty screen when you first started it. Platforms are what you make of it.
- catapart 1y ago
  Oh, sweet! This is an awesome-looking app! The tree-view of the discussion subjects or threads is pretty inspired. I really like that idea, especially as a way to moderate a thread that is purely managerial, rather than punitive or rewarding. Of course, it would be great if a discussion could always be efficiently branched by the participants in real time, but I imagine any good "posterity" thread would benefit from some maintenance. In any case, it's something I hadn't really considered before. Cool stuff! I mean, the whole app is pretty impressive. It's clear, from the blog posts, that we're of like minds when it comes to the "good parts" of the internet and what makes the "bad" parts so frustrating. If I used Discord more this might mean more, but I'm pretty satisfied to swap out my Discord usage for Mikoto platforms. Seems like a win to me, at least. All that said, I am still left a bit unsatisfied as far as a social media replacement. A "chat" presentation eschews the kind of "press release" posts that social media accommodates well for creatives. At the very least, I wouldn't feel "normal" posting announcements that didn't necessarily expect follow up engagement in a chat-style environment. Posting "here's this new thing I did" on a social media feed without any follow up is...lonely, but not particularly uncommon. But posting the same thing to an empty or unresponsive chat room is...somehow sadder? To me at least.

grim_io 1y ago

My November schedules are getting crowded. No shaving, no faps, no socials, ...

jtmarl1n 1y ago
These things should free up your schedule :)
Vinnl 1y ago
At least you can still vember, right? What's that? Oh...

nekusar 1y ago

I'd argue that "No Socials November" should be "No corporate Socials November". Places like the Fediverse (Mastodon, Peertube, Lemmy, pixelfed, etc) are that non-corporate non-gamified breath of fresh air. Sure, there's less people on those networks, but that too is a great benefit - less bots and less "temperature". And 10 years ago, in 2015, we already saw videos analyzing social media hatred with CGP Grey's "This video will make you angry" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc But why anger? Because anger and screaming at people is a guaranteed way to make "engagement", which seems to be the predominant way to prove to advertisers of "people per month". But is it good? Absolutely not. Its poison, slowly but surely. But how do we avoid the poison? The root cause here is money from advertising, which is from engagement. But you cut out the profit motive, you also cut out advertisers, and you also cut out arbitrary and forced anger-gagement. And that, is the Fediverse. The opposite is your Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit. And they're full of bots, quazi and directly hateful content posted for "engagement", and the same set of hate memes populated froom 1 site to all the rest by bots. No wonder people hate this type of social media. It's wholly toxic and poisonous.

righthand 1y ago
I disagree. While smaller networks are a good thing for the social media landscape, ultimately people should go seek other activities where socializing is a secondary benefit. Rather than spending time on a social network. If we take a month to refocus on non-social-first activity we will be healthier 1000000x as communities. Lemmy is great btw. I started putting “lemmy” instead of “reddit” in my searches and it often works.

dlm24 1y ago

I'm gona try, X Reddit HackerN Insta Cheers

sehugg 1y ago

Does RSS count? I've appreciated having NetNewsWire and its iCloud sync. Having no urge/obligation to comment or retoot is a different experience.

huijzer 1y ago

Also due to being dissapointed with social media, especially how it always makes you feel that you know more while you actually go deeper in your bubble, I created a mini blogging platform mostly inspired by X/BlueSky called fx [1]. You can use f**k X as a mnemonic device for the name. It's running for a few months now and works very well for me. Whenever I have a random thought that I want to publicly write down, I use my phone or computer to quickly put it on my site. Unlike X or other social media sites, the post is fully under my control. I can edit it, delete it, share it, link it, and it's all backupped in GitHub. [1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/fx https://github.com/rikhuijzer/fx

poolnoodle 1y ago
No disrespect but isn't this just a blog?
- huijzer 1y ago
  Yes but with a few features that are like social media. For example, you can create a post without a title. Also, you can create a post by typing a text and clicking on publish, so without any other intermediate step. I guess you could call it a blog. Potayto, potahto?

yepguy 1y ago

I would encourage people to consider permanent solutions to use social media more intentionally instead of taking a month off here and there. Two things that the apps really want you to do, but that you should resist as much as possible, are doomscrolling through meaningless content and compulsively checking apps or websites in case you miss out on interesting updates. For myself, I've decided to direct anything and everything possible to my email (with plenty of filters to keep my main inbox tidy). For apps that don't offer email notifications, I use MacroDroid to forward Android push notifications to email. There are also plenty of ways to forward RSS to email. I batch process my email 1-3x/day, and anything I don't want to see during this time is not worth seeing at all. It gets ignored, filtered out, or unsubscribed from.

MisterTea 1y ago
I have been off social media completely since 2016. Only have a Facebook left for family and the occasional marketplace browse. When I do check it I only log in via browser and spend maybe 5-10 minutes on the site. I posted a few times that people should contact me via email if they want to chat though so far no one has taken up my offer.
- yepguy 1y ago
  If it works for you, great! I've tried that before and it didn't work for me. I like the stuff I find on Hacker News, and I need Instagram to keep up with my friends, so this was the solution I came up with mostly to keep myself from compulsively checking both of those in an unhealthy way.
  - MisterTea 1y ago
    Keeping up with friends in my circle means a group chat. We moved around a few platforms but settled on google chat as that was most common among everyone. HN isn't very social to me, just a water cooler.
  - brailsafe 1y ago
    > I need Instagram to keep up with my friends Wdym? I think this idea should be included in your top-level comment about things Instagram wants you to do. I can believe it's likely that other people have very different relationships with people that are dependent on a particular platform, but I do my best not to accept that and make it clear that I probably won't check anything other than a DM whenever I feel like it, which consequently categorizes Insta as an unimportant means of connection. Put another way, my relationships are defined by the communication and connection we have in real life or DMs regardless of the platform. Seeing posts does not count as friendship to me, and if I don't hear from someone or think about them because I disabled my insta, then it wasn't meant to be. A sibling replyer said they use group chats, which is fine for some, but I find has personally just become another passive comms dump that I actively refuse to participate in; there's too much noise. All that said, a real friendship formed in person after a real time investment can survive with very little or zero fake interaction from social media. It's ok that I see my bros from my home town maybe once a year. If I fear not receiving any direct communication from anyone should I decide to dip out of social media, then it's possible I have no friends and I should sit with that feeling until I can take action on that. People get too complacent imo thinking their posts count as friendship.

65 1y ago

I've never had a problem with social media usage - and I'd be surprised if other developers here haven't enacted their own solutions to prevent doomscrolling. I have user scripts on both my iPhone and my computer that completely disable the Instagram recommended feed. I have disabled YouTube thumbnails and the YouTube sidebar. /r/popular or other popular subreddits get automatically redirected to my Reddit homepage which has a lot less garbage on it. I have completely disabled my Twitter feed. I even have certain domains removed on HackerNews and made an extension to only update a few times a day. And a ton more. If you're a developer and you want to stop doomscrolling... you have the power.

leonhard 1y ago
How can you do that in the apps? Or do you just do it for the websites and not install the apps in the first place?
- 65 1y ago
  I only visit social media in browser, I don't have any social media apps installed on my phone. Safari supports user scripts which I have installed on my phone.
poolnoodle 1y ago
I also have the power to disable all the contraptions I've built.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

I just stopped using Facebook, a number of months ago. It just wasn't giving me anything, and half the posts I made, were flagged as spam (of course, with zero appeal ability; when you appeal, and every time, it's denied, then that's no recourse). I tended to do "Lookit this!" types of posts, where I either referenced a project that I'd released, or some Web site that I thought was worth sharing. I've never really used Twitter, and I don't browse YouTube, or bother looking at comments. I had stopped reading my feed, a couple of years ago. It was just old white people, screaming at each other. > set my YouTube to stop suggesting to me via algorithm This suggests a less-than-total commitment to backing out. I would consider "no social" to mean not even visiting the site, or running the app. In my case, this is about the only place I engage in anything like social media. I would have to stop reading HN to be "no social," and I'm not interested in doing that.

amelius 1y ago

Can we have ad-free February? Or, alternatively, if X% of people are against advertising, can we have X% of the year without advertising? Sounds fair to me.

dollylambda 1y ago

I've managed to kick all social media except Github. That for me is the most difficult if you want to collaborate on software projects. No, I don't consider hacker-news to be social media, rather a news aggregator with a message board. Although, I would frequent here less probably if I was on other social media.

josefrichter 1y ago

Damn, I might try this, just to get a better perspective. Does HN fall within “socials” though? :-)

mayanraisins 1y ago

If you or anyone you know uses Instagram, you can select the logo in the upper-left to change the feed to “following”, which is a chronological list of posts from people you follow. My wife didn’t know about this and I saved her from endlessly scrolling reels.

bashmelek 1y ago

I ask everyone to never stop creating, never stop sharing. And when your friend shares, appreciate it, for what it is, that it is theirs, that they did it, and that it is them. Draw, play an instrument, paint, write a poem, sing, cook, shoot hoops, talk about books over coffee. Be personal.

bfkwlfkjf 1y ago

HN is social media.

musicale 1y ago

Already broke it unfortunately by posting on HN.