I've completely quit social media except for LinkedIn, which I need for my work, and Reddit, which I selectively use for product recommendations and advice on my career and relationships. And also Twitter, through which I receive the latest research in my domain. And Instagram, which my girlfriend uses to send me memes and videos. Occasionally Facebook for event invitations. And this website.
It is social media, but I'd argue that it lacks the worst incentives of social media: monetization and ads, which lead to attention-hacking algorithms and regression to lowest common denominator content.
Eh, its monetized in a different way. YC has a vested interest in programmers being exposed to YC companies such that they might go work/start one of them.
Sure the occasional "Promoted post" is way less than say Reddit or mid-roll ads.
I would argue the defining factor of social media which separates it from blogs/forums/etc. is the ubiquitous feedback metrics, in the form of likes/downvotes/retweets/etc.
Imagine attending party where whenever you finished a sentence, everyone who was listening immediately responded with a silent thumbs up / thumbs down in response. Pretty dystopian. The Onion did a sketch illustrating the problem a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFpK_r-jEXg
By this definition, HN is halfway to being social media. There are metrics, but they aren't displayed publicly.
I never thought that votes, etc. would be that important to what defines social media and would have included forums in it. But if I think of social media as "that thing that's addicting", then yeah, the feedback metrics are what make it addicting.
Otherwise, I would think of "social media" as places where visitors get the opportunity to be equal participants. Anyone can post, anyone can comment in places like these (including forums), but in a blog only one can post and the rest comment.
And popularity metrics facilitate mob rule. Lone voices of dissent get steamrolled.
Reddit is especially bad, IMO. It's almost like it was designed as a confirmation bias engine.
The frustrating part is that voting systems also solve a genuine quality-filtering problem. HN does a good job of balancing the costs and benefits, but I suspect there are other viable approaches.
I agree with that, however I would consider large forums (especially those that arose after the rise of the Web- so not BBS- and those that were more than simply vBulletin/phpBB message boards) to be basically photo-social media, even if they predate the term and concept.
I think we need more forums outside of mega-communities like Reddit or even HN, but at least there are many that are still alive:
Also, things were going viral even before the mid-'00s when the concept consolidated. All Your Base and Star Wars Kid went viral before it was called that, even if they garnered a fraction of the mindshare of the general public. Even that dancing CGI baby qualifies.
How does it foster a community? I don't think I've connected with anyone on here beyond a single thread in the few years I've been around, and I consider myself a typical user
Not looking for a fight or anything. I'm just curious about different perspectives and definitions of social media. The responses so far have been interesting
Then wouldn't public access TV, call-in radio shows, or the news be social media as well since they typically involve many-to-many interactions? Or is there more to it?
Sure. It's probably more helpful to think of this (like almost all things) on a spectrum.
HN is definitely on the social media end of the spectrum. For example, all your listed examples have very hands-on and comprehensive, opinionated editorial control. HN has moderation, but not really editorial control per se.
Not much since it’s moderated to the point of being a boring headline aggregator, with a heavily biased, toxic community of vain Americans ignoring anything outside the HN RDF
May as well disable comments and treat it like a user updated RSS feed, discuss links elsewhere.
Only long enough to disperse a particular mind virus.
STEM degrees and 20+ years in Eng; hardware then software
This community isn’t really peddling anything that hasn’t been done before; just like the story mode politics and economics often complained about
What’s that? You have a new state manager or a machine and some math euphemisms that translate cleanly to other math objects known for a century? WOW!
…There’s no beating physics and it doesn’t care humans exist. No matter how much symbolism we write down to represent it, it’s not imbuing us with magic powers. We just meat suits like everyone else. Get over yourselves; this a momentary social bubble that will vanish like all the ones they say came before
Really look forward to ML generation of new math built on the same old axioms so we can light a bunch of PhDs hanging on walls on fire
Bruh... it's Friday. And this is a post about social media participation. Not your existential waxing. You don't see any irony whatsoever in what you're spouting?
Where? Definitely nowhere in the Western Hemisphere (excepting Chukotka and whatever else is floating out in the Pacific west of the IDL), and in maybe only half of the Eastern Hemisphere as of this very moment.
> “I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.”
This is the crux of the matter. Social media isn’t real; it’s a type of video game for adults.
The unreality fosters the growth of so many other things which are even less concerned with truth: fake news, engagement bait, daily outrages, chasing followers in a vain attempt to “build a personal brand.” The vacuousness of influencer culture has only accelerated these trends since Newport wrote this post.
In some sense, some of us already live online essentially through these social networks. Almost always this means some level of addiction, with concomitant real life consequences.
Problem is that it is becoming a new reality. You can tune out, but you can't turn it off, and it (and society) will continue without it. And I say this as someone who thinks we should largely turn it off. Society will adapt, which means society is becoming something different.
I don’t buy it. We’re probably past peak social media at this point. And the outer reality will always have a higher status than any of the inner ones.
We might be past peak "bulk" social media, where people would be public, more or less, with their posts/videos. Now everything is closing and many people have "group chats" as they realize that free-for-all chatting/posting doesn't work.
In other words, people are returning to how online communication worked before Facebook.
Offline, people have always tended to come together around common interests and values. My wife and I, for example, are part time performing magicians and we're a member of a local magic group that meets IRL.
Prior to what we have come to call "social media", existed forums. Forums were this wonderful utopian paradise of yesteryear where people engaged in long form discussions, often heated but mostly civil, about special interests that they cared about.
The term "social media" didn't start to catch on until the news feed was a thing. That was the "contribution" of both Facebook and Twatter and it was a big PART of what changed everything.
The other factor was the so-called "mobile revolution."
Forums are great when you're at a keyboard. They start to lose their appeal when you are engaging using a small touch screen.
What you are describing sounds like people returning to the state of the world as it existed before social media. Where people come together around common interests and values instead of using the news feed where you get fire-hozed with random shit that "the algorithm" thinks might trigger you into engaging with it.
> people are returning to how online communication worked before Facebook.
Except now it's all on Facebook and it's incredibly hard to leave Facebook, because all communications with any type of group happens on Facebook. I have friends who can't leave Facebook, because their kids soccer team holds them hostage. Leave Facebook and we'll kill your child's social life. I can't even join the parents group for my child's school, almost no one else will do it, because it takes time, so they are lacking parents, but it is coordinated on Facebook.
I used to organise playtime for toddlers once a week, no one else wanted to do, but the kids loved it. Everyone was used to everything being organised via Facebook, where I don't have an account. So the communication was done by someone else in the umbrella organisation for all local sports, gymnastics, e-sport etc. More than once I showed up to get everything ready only to learn that the space was booked for something else that day, being cleaned or renovated. Everyone else had been informed, expect me, the guy who was suppose to be in charge of the damn thing, because the organisation had no real website or mailing list to speak of and just expected everyone to be on Facebook.
Everything is on f-ing Facebook, Sports, clubs, hobbies, reselling, announcements of everything local, and only on Facebook. The only exception is professional meetups, which Linkedin will happily inform you about two weeks after the meetup, stupid, brain dead, algorithmically power "news" feed.
I want mailing-lists and Usenet, but everyone else want a mobile app and apparently Facebook.
That's a valid complaint, and I sympathize because I have no love for Facebook.
My only counter-argument, and it's not even a counter-argument really, is that this is a fact of life that exists with or without Facebook.
My personal pet peeve is that I don't want to own a mobile phone at all. Not even a dumb phone and not even a landline. If I find myself in an emergency without the ability to dial 911 that's a risk I'm willing to take on a personal level. I just don't want a phone because I find the idea of a noise making device that can interrupt me at unexpected times to be a crime against humanity. But more and more essential services like banking are assuming that people have smart phones. My bank would deny services to me if I didn't even have a landline, since they require a phone number tied to their account records. My work assumes that people not only have their own smart phone but are willing to install authenticator apps for MFA etc. And my workplace is not alone.
If it's not Facebook that "everyone" is using that leaves minority opinions wishing for an alternative, it's something else.
Ugh I know the feeling. I may break down and do the immigrant-owned phone shop prepaid pseudonymous burner away-from-home SMS verification process on a completely fictitious account. I do not want Meta having any more of my dox than it has already gleaned in the past.
Private spaces where small groups collect may be social media by its definition, but it feels starkly different from something like posting on a facebook wall or making a public linkedin post where the audience largely consists of strangers.
>Private spaces where small groups collect may be social media by its definition
Kind of, depending on the platform, if you squint your eyes at it?
I suppose it doesn't matter what it's actually called. I call it community in general.
Communities in this sense are the middle ground between your direct personal network (which is also the deepest form of relation), and social media as the widest (the shallowest form of relation) form of reach.
I think this is the one benefit of recent "AI" advancements, it accelerates the downfall with even cheaper garbage. death to the internet, long live the internet
But when a Presidential candidate (who will pick up roughly half the popular vote) is openly spreading social media misinformation, and the owner of Twitter is offering million dollar lotteries to influence the vote, it's fair to say enough people "buy it".
I think you make valid points about the downsides of "influencer culture" and usage patterns of some forms of social media.
BUT.
I'm think the term "social media" is too broad to be useful in this kind of critique.
This conversation we're having is a bit meta, but it's also "real", to me. We both considered Cal Newport's stance, Matt Green shared some thoughts about it, and Chris Weekly responded to it.
Those are real people interacting in a potentially useful way.
Being "addicted" to ideas and conversations is not necessarily unhealthy.
/$.02
The danger of the point I'm making is that the less-realness that I'm arguing justifies poor behavior online. It does not. Many posters become seduced by the less-realness of online contact that they disconnect their own notions of what decent behavior is.
> Those are real people interacting in a potentially useful way. Being "addicted" to ideas and conversations is not necessarily unhealthy.
Agree! Addiction is compulsive use and the need to continually engage. My HN use is subject to a max of 15m a day with a browser extension that enforces it. I can at least try to curb it from blossoming into something more disruptive.
I think there's a lot of value, both social and emotional, to social media. That doesn't change the fact that social media products as they exist are not only not creating that value, they are outwardly, openly hostile to it. HN being a notable exception and why I spend a lot of time here. The discussions are thoughtful and the topics are (usually) at least somewhat relevant to my career and life. That said, the more mainstream social medias are not relevant to me, they are not stimulating or thoughtful, and they are not valuable.
I have Instagram and TikTok installed because both of my partners send me things from them that made them think of me, and in this way, and only this way, they are relevant and nurturing to my existence. That said, I never engage with them outside of that context, because it's just an endless barrage of vacuous bullshit, as are the rest, with TikTok personally, I think, being the largest firehose of stupid, worthless, intellectually bankrupt, pointless shit ever constructed by mankind. Holy fuck. Like they're all bad, but TikTok... it's just the modern social media apparatus refined and polished to a mirror shine. Takes absolutely no effort to engage with, and if you're sufficiently numb to outside stimulus, you will scroll it for literal hours. If social media is a drug, TikTok is black-tar heroin.
Unfortunately, it can be worth it. Having a social media audience can be very valuable to entrepreneurs. Someone who lives online with a personal brand can replace tens of thousands of dollars in ad spend with a single tweet.
As someone who hasn't had a social media presence for most of my adult life, and happy about that, I'm now seeing the downsides. I don't have Ivy League connections like some of my peers. Social media may be the only way I could build a network like the one they cultivated in university.
I feel this. However I also remind myself that social media connections are never as strong as those we've made in real life, and that there have been former influencers who've hung up their hat and lamented that their residual social connections regress to something close to a mean a lot quicker than they would've liked.
Ultimately, the act of winning at social media seems a bit too subordinate to me.
Just an FYI going to an Ivy doesn’t cultivate that network in most cases; you need to come from the right background and have some spending money to keep up with the lifestyle (ski trips, Broadway musicals, etc).
In that way social network is more meritocratic, as many people have come from very humble backgrounds and succeeded with skill and charisma.
It's an opportunity to meet people who have a higher likelihood of successful careers, who in turn also know many successful people. That makes getting meetings and fundraising much easier.
I simply wasn't able to meet those kinds of people as a mid 20s person transferring to a commuter university from a community college.
Existing wealth likely helps, but even the poor kids with scholarships have better outcomes at those universities.
I have a pet theory as to why social media causes many people to feel like it's draining them, and why I avoid news on social media like the plague ... I also tend to mute or silence people that share political content (regardless of partisan affiliation).
Social media, unless you are trying to build a business, is ultimately offering the service of entertainment.
Even if you use Twitter or Facebook as your news aggregator, unless you're engaged in some kind of productive and time-scoped research project, you're doing this on your leisure time.
That means that you just got done work, or you're on a break, or you finally got the kids to sleep or finished all of your household chores and you're now in a position where you can "enjoy" a bit of leisure time.
Which means that you approach social media PRE-drained. You're already tired and you're looking for cute cat memes when what should happen ... you get hit with a rage-bait headline, or one of those douche bags that vote differently from you just posted an opinion about a controversial topic that you have very strong feelings about.
We (on HN) all know that the algorithm is trying to promote what gets engagement, and anything that provokes a strong emotional reaction is likely to trigger engagement.
My thesis is that people turn to social media when they are already in an emotional state that is incredibly inappropriate for engaging with "serious" topics on a rational level.
So everyone just gets angrier and angrier at each other and you leave social media feeling even more exhausted than you were before you signed on looking for entertainment to spend your precious leisure time with.
And then you realize that you just wasted that short precious time that you needed to use for relaxation ... and if you don't do anything to rectify it then your stress levels just gradually creep up, your sleep starts to suffer, you might start to compensate with stress eating or consuming more alcohol or cannabis than is healthy and it just spirals.
Even without considering all of the contentious topics, the infinite scroll of the home feed trains people to triage posts faster and faster, because there's always more content, and who knows what you've missed? Because the topics are flattened, you're context-switching on a second by second basis, and your mind is alert to something awful you might be about to see - cute cat, war crimes, Dan's birthday celebration, medical fundraiser, political campaign, sponsored ad... I'm really starting to see the value of legitimate boredom
I agree with this, but it's worth noting the quote is from a journalist/blogger who was not talking about social media. He was talking about keeping up with a 24 hour news cycle by any means. The problem here isn't specific to social media. It's with overwhelming information flow, the vast majority of which is not actionable to the person consuming it. People come down with a type of awareness FOMO such that they feel like they need to know all things as they happen, even though the information is incomplete, often wrong, misleading, and doesn't impact their everyday real lives in any way.
This is what Andrew Sullivan was getting at. People should worry themselves with information that actually concerns and impacts their real lives. All else is entertainment. If it stops being entertaining and starts being anxiety-inducing, stop consuming it.
I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”. The incentives are perverse, there is an inherent conflict of interest in the business model and there is an intermediary between the user and information/community they want to participate in. This leads to most problems we see in legacy, ad-based, social media.
Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry. In life we do not let everyone into the friend circle. Having a barrier to entry model may work well for an online community, although this remains to be seen. Were there any successful experiments with paid social media?
I would rephrase it further to "quit ad-based media." The problems and conflicts of interest introduced by an ad-based revenue model were discussed long before the advent of the modern Web and social media; the relationship between the advertisement industry and mass media (television, radio) was already discussed in depth in the late 20th century [0]:
The advertisers' choices influence media prosperity and survival.
The ad-based media receive an advertising subsidy that gives them
a price-marketing-quality edge, which allows them to encroach on
and further weaken their ad-free (or ad-disadvantaged) rivals.
Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with
serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere
with the "buying mood." They seek programs that will lightly
entertain and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose
of program purchases - the dissemination of a selling message.
Interestingly this changed somewhat with the clickbait-based model – now, I would disagree that advertisers "want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies."
I think this does describe legacy advertisers (and TikTok, for different reasons) – we might remember Tumblr's hyper-specific LGBTQ-friendly (often NSFW) communities being completely liquidated in the transfer of Tumblr to Verizon, arguably killing Tumblr on that date. Verizon's handling of Tumblr validates Chomsky.
But ad-fueled journalism seems to operate from exactly the opposite principle, so long as the controversies that drive engagement do not threaten the sensibility of specific large funders. I've seen a few times in recent memory where an article from the New York Times aired something quite sensational, only to quietly update later that what was initially reported didn't quite occur as depicted. But by that point it is too late, and profit was made.
The overall point still stands – that ad-based always results in a conflict of interest.
As possible counterpoint consider the departure of several advertisers from X following the Musk acquisition, whose controversial online antics and positions (irrespective of one's potential value judgments of them) were deemed bad for business and a damper on the "buying mood."
In general though it is true that ragebait and sensationalism do tend to drive "engagement" and thus ad revenue (often to the detriment of society).
Well, this is the kind of argument you can make in both directions.
A site is full of ragebait, hot takes and pictures of boobs? The ad economy has pushed them towards things that get a lot of engagement. Clicks are money!
A site is devoid of ragebait, hot takes and pictures of boobs? The ad economy forces everything to be brand-safe and censored.
Sure. Chomsky et al continue in the cited chapter,
In addition to discrimination against unfriendly media institutions,
advertisers also choose selectively among programs on the basis of their
own principles. With rare exceptions these are culturally and politically
conservative.
There are two options; either Chomsky et al are incorrect in their assertion, or they are correct.
If they are incorrect, then non-conservatives are of equal power and culpability in discriminating for or against which content they will sponsor. This would seem to be your position, and points to a state of affairs in which content and communities exist in disjoint bubbles which thrive off of entirely separate streams of ad revenue, up to the principles of the advertisers that choose to direct funding at particular media institutions.
Otherwise, if they are correct, then your assertion that this argument can be made "in both directions" is shown to be false by supposition, and the ad economy pushes users towards conservative content - in which case, one had best boycott and abstain from ad-driven media and social media unless they want to finance conservative thought.
LGBT rights have been enshrined in US law for over a decade now.
It's time to wake up to the fact that being LGBT friendly is the conservative position. This may come as a shock to people who were cutting edge radicals in their youth in the 1990s - a decade that is now 30 years in the past.
in the old days even you paid to subscribe,the newspaper and journal and cable TV etc still carried commercials, they're always there,just getting much worse nowadays
everybody saw the exact same ads though, and due to regulation, it was impossible for newspapers to do things like broadcast outright misinformation as advertisements. Deepfake Musk and Bezos praising some shitcoin on a YouTube ad is par for the course, but would be logistically impossible on a traditional cable news channel or newspaper.
I use Kiwi Browser on Android, which is a Chrome-based browser with extension support. I have a userscript that gradually fades out and desaturates social media pages in 8 minutes. After 4-5 minutes, pages fade out so much that you are forced to stop scrolling and it's not enjoyable anymore.
The same can be done on Firefox, which supports installing Tampermonkey for managing userscripts.
We also do not let people into the friend circle just because they have money (I hope).
IMHO healthiest "social media" I could think is interest groups. They eventually need some kind of donation from one or more people, but with no or minimal barriers.
Barriers to entry don't have to be financial. One can imagine a community of artists who require you to mail them a traditional media sketch before they'll let you in. One of the clubs I know of requires you to go on three hikes before they'll make you a member and give you access to their website.
In both cases there's a small financial barrier (being able to pay for postage or your share or petrol money) but a sizeable time barrier (spending hours on a sketch or walking a total of about 50km).
There are a lot of things where effort is inherent in the derived value, or even the primary value. It's a solid proxy for how much you care, which is so important. A trivial example: I sent someone at work who loves to share candy a giant back of gummies; HR came after me because "tax reasons" (incorrectly in this case) and wanted to "gross up" their paycheque with a spot bonus. Which do you think is more impactful: the trip I took to the store, thinking of this person and mailing it to them, or the $26 pre-tax "bonus" they'd get in 2 weeks?
For me no of course, but if you think about unintentionally your friends are from the same income group really (for the most part),
if you are rich and go to private school, your friends are most likely rich, and usually hang around "fancy" places.
I was briefly a member of a church-related singles group. Their activities revolved around visiting a different church every Sunday. And also doing activities on weekends that involved a lot of car travel and significant admission fees, if only viewing a film at the mall cinema.
I had a real commitment to my home parish at the time. I was involved in ministries weekly, where I could not simply flit about anywhere I wanted. Sure, as a group we could meet many strangers on this itinerary, but I risked severing all ties with my spiritual home!
The activities were sometimes active and sometimes passive, such as hiking, dancing, or going to a festival or something. And I quickly gave up on everything, because it seemed like the group was not really oriented to pairing people off, but more of a self-sustaining club where people gained "volunteer responsibilities" and were thus pressured into staying in the "singles group" no matter what their relationship status. Also, having no vehicle of my own, I'd either opt out of traveling, or I'd hit someone up to carpool, and that wasn't always copacetic.
I also found, on dating websites, this mentality that single Catholics would be jet-setters, traveling all over the world on pilgrimage. That they would generate a steady stream of photographs and social media posts from their adventures. That they would have marvelous, expensive hobbies and be so active in volunteerism. For crying out loud! I wondered how these people would ever have space in their lives for a significant other! All I wanted to do was hang around home, go for walks, prepare a nice meal at home once in a while. But the dating sites seemed geared exclusively for high-maintenance and upper-middle-class go-getters. Again, I felt like it was a clique of "professional singles" who didn't really expect to pair off and get married.
Perhaps these Catholics are onto something. There's nothing wrong per se with individuals in a singles group or the group itself proper having no expectations of dating or marriage. It's probably not the norm, but I think it's actually somewhat better that way, especially for those who don't intend to date/marry. Community and fellowship in a church environment should not be withdrawn from those who choose to remain single or celibate. I think that historically many church groups have silently discouraged being single by ostracism or judgement, which is definitely not what Jesus would do, in my opinion.
I'm sure there is someone for you out there. All relationships are valid. Modern society has such intense focus on external sources of validation, such as a partner or spouse, but good friends are always in short supply. As the proverb says, a friend can be closer than a brother.
>I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”.
Facebook was terrible for your well being a long time before they enshitified with adds. You may be too young to remember but likes were a hot commodity people would ruin their lives over without any outside help.
For myself I find push notification based social media to be completely cancerous, and pull based one only mildly so. One need only look at the trolls from usenet to see people obsessed with nothing but text based emails.
Hackernews is such a social circle. Besides the incredible moderation done by @dang I think the artificial barriers to interacting with the community are what make this a successful forum. I seem to recall needing at least 5 submission karma before you can comment - and that means 5 votes from _other_ people.
That's partly true, but there's also a confounding factor that contrarian posts are more likely to break HN's guidelines [1]. For example, they're more likely to be snarky or ranty. These qualities are rightly downvoted and flagged on HN, not contrariness per se.
This comes from fundamentals, unfortunately, so it's hard to change.
The trouble is that someone posting a contrary view usually feels under pressure going in. They know that their post will land in hostile territory, anticipating that the majority won't receive their opinion (or them) well, and they're not wrong. They'll probably be met not just with disagreement, but with lazy truisms and putdowns that majorities always feel are obvious.
The more contrarian a view is, the more common the majority response is not to engage with it, but to question why anyone would ever say such a thing. Often the majority invents sinister or preposterous explanations for this. (On that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851.)
Because the contrarian commenter expects to be treated this way, they typically defend themselves pre-emptively with armor like snark, name-calling, and so on, presumably to lessen the pain of being rejected. It's as if there's an implicit (or sometimes even explicit) sentence, "I know you're all going to pile on me anyway so fuck you in advance."
Downvotes and flags do end up piling on such comments, no doubt partly because majorities consider them "obviously" wrong and bad, but more because of this pre-emptive guidelines breakage. This rejection only confirms the contrarian poster's feeling that the community is against them, so we end up in a tight and vicious bind.
The flip side to that bind is that when contrarian views are expressed in this defensive-aggressive way, it gives the majority a perfect excuse to keep on feeling that its views are obviously right while others are mean and bad. The contrarian ends up discrediting their own view. When they happen to have some truth on their side (as they often do), this is bad for everyone [2].
I spend a lot of time on this from a moderation point of view because it's such a tough tradeoff. It's terrible for HN when contrarian and minority views are reflexively rejected. It's also bad when guidelines breakage doesn't get downvoted or flagged. We can't carve out an exception that says it's ok to break the rules when you feel surrounded by people who disagree with you.
This dilemma is not the contrarian/minority's fault. They're genuinely under greater pressure. It's easy to stay within the rails when all you have to say is conventional and the smug majority (aren't all majorities smug?) will upvote you. It's hard not to protect yourself with barbs when you're in a vulnerable position to begin with.
Worst is when the contrarian is coming from a minority—any kind of minority, not just the obvious kinds—who have a different background from most of the community, and so naturally have different views. The majority response in such cases can get ugly quickly. I've seen mobs hound such commenters off HN, which is one of the worst things that can happen and one of the most important to protect against. It happens by itself; no one is thinking "let's form a mob and hound that deviant". It comes from the fundamentals, as I said, of how groups (and forums) work.
From a moderation point of view we have two tools, I guess, for this. The first is to try to explain to contrarian commenters the unfortunate situation that there's a greater burden on them than there is on others, and that if they don't want their posts to be self-defeating, they need to bear that pressure while writing their comments neutrally [3]. It's not fair; it sucks; but it's how group dynamics work—we can't change it. If the majority/minority demographics were reversed, people would be doing the same in the opposite direction. I don't like to tell people that they have to do more than others through no fault of their own, so I try to make it clear that I'm on their side—not necessarily in agreeing with their view, but in feeling the position they're in.
The other moderation response is to try to recognize these dynamics when they're occurring and find ways to tilt the ship a bit back towards even. It's not ok to break the rules when expressing a minority opinion, but there are ways of explaining the rules that hopefully communicate a sense of welcome along with the explanation. Conversely, when majority commenters are breaking the rules, there are ways of responding to that which add an additional layer of reproof that is appropriate to the worseness of the phenomenon.
Unfortunately these "tools" are quite insufficient—partly because they're so costly in moderator time, energy, and feeling, and partly because the phenomenon is so large and intense. I do think, or faintly hope at least, it's possible for some of this knowledge to find its way into the culture, and that the community as a whole can shift—only a little, and slowly, but for real.
Not sure about "paid", but there are plenty of examples of communities with barriers to entry which are successful and long-lived, e.g. private trackers (the forums in whatcd were excellent), very niche/technical interest communities, etc.
Metafilter comes to mind. Pay $5 one time for lifetime access. After about 20 years it has dwindled to a white star, but there is still a nuhhet of community left there. Amazing what a token cost does to weed out spam accounts, twinks, etc.
But do we not? We meet friends in life through school, work, hobbies. There's at least a time commitment to some common space if not a financial one. Friendship grow and die based on whether you can easily continue to see them - a common scenario for the dynamic changing being they no longer participate in the common space.
Friends through work, school and most hobbies are transient - they come and go, temporary only.
With friends as in people in your life who you want to really be friends with, you both make changes to be able to keep the relationships. Otherwise it dies. And you certainly do not go "either you buy this app or I am not friend with you anymore".
I mean, you can go cold turkey when changing jobs/work/hobbies but you don't have to.
Sometimes people only want to do that hobby so you don't have a choice but if you hung out with them outside of the origin activity then likely you can hang out with them without that origin activity.
Not being a part of the scene I can't say first hand but I believe we literally do and they're called cover charges at clubs. Then there are the insufferably vain 'green bubble bad' people.
> > Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry
This depends on the definition of success, the most successful as in impressive achievements goal reaching are the ones that are open to anybody who can get noticed and brought in. ANd in the social sense even open to the ones who are most capable of monopolizing the discourse and creating a buzz in the public square.
For example Trump did just that in 2016 and many tried to resist him, but in the end the GOP wants to be successful and opened itself to the guy who made the most noise in the public discourse and public square and made him the tip of the spear of the election effort.
Of course it feels pretty miserable knowing that you can be replaced at any time but I don't think there is an alternative or a solution thanks to a barrier to entry (or exit). Social groups that have a barrier to entry (and exit) such as marriage , when it deteriorates the barrier to entry (and exit) doesn't prevent the 2 people to just starting ignoring each other.
I would love to pay for social software on a coop model (like a food coop, etc) — we would be "members" and, theoretically, we pay a small monthly fee that covers the costs of hosting and platform development. I've tried to think about what I would want that to look like — spoiler, something different than the model of "posting + reactions" that is so familiar from twitter+fb — but then when I think about the barriers to entry for a project like that, even though the technological part might not be that difficult (assuming it was Less Than Web Scale), I just give up hoping for it.
I've been following a lot of the bluesky + mastodon stuff but I don't like that their basic model of social interaction is just a clone of Twitter.
This is precisely https://social.coop, of which I am part of, except for the "not being Mastodon" bit :)
Governance happens on Loomio, which is a forum tailored for community decision making, but the main platform that coop members get access to is a Mastodon instance for now. We are experimenting with Bonfire, which is more flexible and might end up providing a solid base for federated apps in general.
That can just be a forum - a forum I've been a member of for more than 20 years has been run by the members since 2010 [1], is registered as a co-operative/community benefit society in the UK and funded by voluntary memberships or donations, with members voting annually to elect people to positions required to run it.
A good chunk of those have been part of the same community on a newsgroup, then on a company-owned forum which got shuttered, then on a forum instance set up by a user who didn't want to run it any more after 6 years. The tech and platforms are ephemeral, always have been.
I can't remember the name of it, but over a decade ago I saw something like this - it was a single Linux server shared by (I think) hundreds of people. Really trying to do the multi-user paradigm. They advertised it as a private kind of social network, it was invite-only and I think you had to pay to help keep the server lights on.
Hopefully by posting something incorrect, A Person On The Internet Who Knows Better will come along and provide the correct details. :)
> You have to be a real pos to not get invites to stuff...
The "real pos" is just as often those doing the excluding, as it is those being excluded. Pettiness doesn't disappear at 18 years old. It's hurtful to assume anyone being excluded from something deserved it.
It's more that there are maybe a thousand or so people in your highschool, but 7 billion on planet earth. If a thousand people (more like a couple of hundred the same age) exclude you then there are probably unfair network effects or someone poisoning the well against you, but at bigger scales everyone is a stranger and you get to start fresh.
In those cases I think it's more likely mental illness that stops you from making friends, but if no social group has accepted you after tens or hundreds of attempts then it's possible that there's something you might be able to change.
I won't advertise but I work for a company which holds a social media for cooking and recipes. Folks there are totally averse to those and based stuff.
It has been hard for the company. The owner decided the company will die before using ads (for many reasons). The paid plan is stupidly cheap and when people sign and use for a month they stick with the company for years.
But it is hard. Company laid off 80% of the team some time ago and is fighting to survive.
I won't defend the owner or anyone, but things came to a point where people think they are not having consequences by giving infinite permission for being tracked all the time. They think if they are not logged they are not identified so they can't be exploited.
It sucks because no one appreciates that. Though I have my opinions about business and whatever I kinda appreciate for the company not running on money from ads and not collecting a single piece of user information which is not required for work.
If the company you work for REALLY does behave like that, you SHOULD DEFINITELY advertise it. Companies like this must be acknowledged and celebrated. The owner must be a really good person.
Not sure if he is a good person or not. There may be multiple reasons for doing something BUT what matter s is that anyway it is a transparent honest product. If some one wants to look for it, it is called cookpad. Probably not the best but it works and although the subscription does not look super promising it works.
I think that big issue there might just be that infinite reoccurring payments for cooking app is just not something reasonable for most people to set up. People likely prefer to not have a cooking app over paying regularly for it and it is actually reasonable decision.
Find sites that let you pay for content then I guess? Very few sites are charity sites, and need money to keep the lights on unless it’s just a passion site for the owners and they don’t care to be a community service. I don’t blame people trying to make some money for (many times) obviously hard work and curation of a site.
Unfortunately people love to complain about ads, but rarely actually get their wallets out when an alternative payment method is presented. Case in point: the frequent archive.org links to get around paywalls.
Piracy is a service problem. A paywall literally says “you might like this but pay me first to see what it is.” Substack has a “let me read it first” button and I’ve never seen an archive link to that even though there are plenty of private articles.
The concept of gift links exists, but these websites footaxe themselves by limiting their most viral content —- ostensibly the best and cheapest marketing they could get, down the drain.
Substack's "let me read it first" is just a way to close the subscription popup, it has nothing to do with reading otherwise paywalled content.
The thing is, having had some of my own content "go viral" before - it's not worth much. Most people will read it for a minute and move on. A tiny percentage will subscribe and an even tinier percentage will give you any money. So from the point of view of a creator, it makes a ton of sense to put up paywalls on things – but only once you've already gotten a bit of an audience and distribution method figured out.
> Substack's "let me read it first" is just a way to close the subscription popup, it has nothing to do with reading otherwise paywalled content.
It has everything to do with telegraphed intention of not having content be gratis. The fact that you cannot even mentally keep the idea of subscription gates in the same bucket as paywalls says a lot.
I mean can the owner compromise and just do ads based on the content on the page? Those weren’t so bad in the “before times”. Maybe that just doesn’t bring in enough cash as ads that follow you around 10 different sites trying to sell you the same thing, but it seems like giving up free money and might be worth a shot.
I was one of those security/privacy people in the 00's who declined to join facebook or do any of the social media stuff. Feels like it was the right call.
Meta was the best possible company name for the social media machine, because when you turn it all off, you really do become less meta.
I'd suspect it's a bit like being a vegan, where it's a self-imposed constrant that makes you aloof from others and makes them treat you like an exception. It reduces some of the invites you get, and you just aren't up on the news about your friend groups as a result. We imagine it signals some kind of purity or difference, as though to say we're not like those regular IT people, maybe there's an air of mystery about what we might know, but it's just kind of fussy and it creates a polarizing filter where people really have to like you a lot to put up with the conditions you put on hanging out.
I still see the internet as a machine I operate for money and entertainment, and not the substrate of my identity or reality. This is also a fairly masculine coded view, as it dismisses the public sphere of gossip and narratives as separate from a Real made of consequences and competence, where the internet is not a dominion of truth the way real friendships are. It sounds marginal in the current discourse, but really there are still operators around who know ways out of this hallucination a lot of people were born into and can't see the edges of. It's not a mystery, you just turn the phone off for a bit and then live and relate according to the results.
I was one of those technology skids at that time and had more hope for the world. It was a time before I learned ****** was an *** *** *********** job. Before I watched Ron Paul collect the largest grassroots donation drive ('Moneybomb') and then his reach get clubbed like a baby seal by the establishment thereafter. It made me realize The Farm is real and what slop most Farm animals enjoy is just that: slop, prepared in a manner which makes the animal more useful/productive relative to cost. I also realize that there are complexities to ascending to the class of Farmer (or merely Farm-hand) which call for the cybernetic sentimental feedback system being built. How do you manage a farm of human livestock and not get killed? How do you do it in such a way that you can plan a hundred years out and hand it all off to your choice grandson(s)?
I’ve been saying for a while that I expect the next big “veganeque” movement to be some kind of modern luddites. Maybe not as detached from modern society as the Amish, but a more 90s-like tech scene.
No cell phone on them at all times (but maybe some equivalent to a car phone/pay phone), placing the restriction to consciously “log on” to the internet, no (at least ad-based) social media, and maybe keep their online persona to appearances on mostly decentralized forums.
Personally, I know it would benefit me to detach from the one social media platform I have left and am fully addicted to (YouTube), but it’s hard when that is the platform that videos are stored on (though if I really cared, I would only subscribe to channels via RSS and watch them or individually search for things I wish to see instead of infinitely scrolling.) It’s also hard to keep up with group activities or the best classifieds listings or local music/arts events without Facebook.
I don’t believe that there will ever be a true competitor for services that can operate at scale like Facebook and YouTube (especially the latter), but I expect these modern luddites to accept this and reject those platforms even if it is socially ostracizing (much like veganism). To fill the void, they’ll create platforms and devices for them specifically. I imagine the goal of the platforms will be to avoid unnecessary bloat and keep hosting/maintenance costs low, which seems relatively easy if sucking every last second of retention out the user is not financially incentivized like it is in ad-based platforms. I expect the hardware to prioritize cost-efficiency, repairability, and a minimal feature set that doesn’t require frequent upgrades.
Then I imagine for a time, the movement will become trendy and people will begin flooding those platforms. The challenge then becomes to avoid capitalizing on the influx and keep the initial morals in mind and not start showing ads/trying to increase retention time. I think those projects may need to be decentralized and/or established as nonprofits with stated non-retractable tenets from their creation (“We shall never serve advertisements”, “We shall prioritize the distribution of useful information above all else”, etc.)
It’s a utopian view of the future, but I think it is possible. I think we’ll hit a day when we realize that spending 10+ hours a day staring at glowing rectangles is not bringing us closer to real fulfillment. I expect that as long as capitalism is the dominant economic force, businesses will always embrace the newest technology to avoid a massive gap in their output when compared to competitors, and the tech companies will always be pushing new addictive technology as long as it isn’t globally regulated, but after work, the people will wake up to the fact that they at least have a choice on whether or not they spend the rest of their leisure time staring at glowing rectangles.
Quit social media if you cannot maintain a healthy relationship with it. But please do not just pull the plug because someone on the Internet told you it would improve your life. This is far from a guarantee.
I quit Facebook a few years back because of enough conversations on HN convincing me it would be a positive choice. It was not, and I regret it. I've since rejoined FB but my network of friends did not completely recover.
People here will tell you that FB friends you don't go out of your way to contact via not-FB methods aren't really friends. They are full of shit. That may be true for them.
I think you're hinting at a hidden problem: our vocabulary has not caught up with the way social media has evolved, and we need new terms.
People actually LIKE, perhaps even need, the social aspects of social media. But that's become such a small part of the experience for many people- the ads and attention-hacking with cheap stimuli burying the positive interactions.
I don't want to quit my connections, as you say. But I do want to quit this daily hypnosis that reels is trying to subject me to.
I would call that latter something more like "possessive media" - it needs to have your attention at all times and needs every scrap of data it can gather about you. I want less possessive media and more social media.
> I do want to quit this daily hypnosis that reels is trying to subject me to.
100% agree on that. A couple months ago I got caught up in reels and spent like two hours watching videos. And then I thought ... what the hell did I just do? I don't feel fulfilled, I didn't learn anything meaningful, I feel like I just binged on candy and want to throw up.
Now I avoid reels like the plague. I just log in a couple times a week to see pictures from friends and family. As soon as I see a really attractive reel preview, I remind myself that it isn't nearly as awesome as the preview looks, and close the page.
I had friends on FB going back to high school. Neighborhood kids we hung with after school. People I've met at various jobs over the years and become friendly enough to keep in touch outside of work.
Did we interact every day? Nope. Just casually. But we have a shared history going back 50 years, and had enjoyable low key interactions periodically.
Turning off FB killed all of those connections, and not all of them came back when I got a new account a year later. Heck, a couple thought I had unfriended them and felt slighted.
And to top it off -- I didn't actually have a problem with FB. It didn't ruin my life. I did (and still do) visit about once or twice a week. I don't doom scroll, I don't get all jealous of someone's vacation pictures, new house, new car, whatever. I did not actually have a social media problem that needed solving. I gave too much value to what randos on HN said.
> why it is important that 'your network of friends recovers'?
Because I enjoy the casual contact with all of these people I've known over the years. Even if I don't share enough current interests to spend a lot of time hanging out with them, I get positive feelings from staying connected.
Especially important because most of his commentary focuses on the dominant social media paradigm of the time. Mastodon barely existed when this post went live, Mike Masnick was years from writing the paper that inspired Bluesky[0], and it would be strange if someone whose whole thing is getting away from social media kept up on new developments.
This post is an interesting historical artifact, but shouldn't be mistaken for contemporary commentary.
What's changed, though, really? I quit[0] social media near the end of 2019, and it greatly improved my mental health and life. While I haven't tried some of the newer options, I've kept up with new developments in the space. Nothing about the "new" social media platforms makes them at all attractive for me to take a second look and join back up.
If anything, things are worse. It's even more "algorithmic" and engagement-focused, continuing to promote outrage culture. Platforms like TikTok have turned addictive endless scrolling into a science. I know a few people who spend a significant number of hours of their days on TikTok and Twitter (ahem, sorry, "X"), and it just kinda makes me sad. (And I probably spend more time than is healthy on HN.)
[0] I still have my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, but I don't post to them anymore, and I'm signed out of them on all my devices (and I've deleted the mobile apps). I don't allow myself to ever sign in on mobile. Once every 6 months or so I'll sign into Facebook for some specific purpose (like looking up someone's contact information when it's for some reason not stored in any of my usual places). Out of curiosity I'll scroll down the feed, and it's just kinda crap. Stuff from people I don't actually follow, stuff from people I do follow but is kinda boring, and interestingly the feed is dominated by the same 15 or so people (even though I'd amassed a little over 1k "friends" before I quit). I limit myself to no more than five minutes, and I don't post, comment, or even like anything.
The last time I signed into Instagram (probably two or three years ago), the experience was awful. I remember when it was just a reverse-chronological feed of the people I follow (and only the people I follow). But now (well, 2-3 years ago) the majority of items in my feed are either ads or promoted/reshared posts from people I don't follow at all. Stuff from people I follow is maybe one out of every five or six items. And it's all out of order, so I'd see something that someone posted a week ago, followed by, 20 items later, something that they posted a couple days ago. It's a shame; 2012 Instagram was such a beautiful platform.
So while yes, this article is now 8 years old, I don't think anything has changed for the better. The fundamental problems are still there, and have only gotten worse.
Oddly enough, the most beneficial thing I have is my Twitter account, because I can often DM airlines or companies support (like fedex support) for quicker responses.
Mastodon and Bluesky are still such minor players (even though I enjoy these projects and am optimistic about their future) that I don’t see anywhere where this doesn’t pass for contemporary commentary.
This is purely anecdotal but with Twitter/X removing blocks there seems to be an influx of new users on bluesky, it's definitely not quite on the scale of other major social medias but it seems like it is well on it's way there.
If the product is the social graph, masto isnt even on the radar.
If the product is the discussion framework without the advertising or social graph. If you can find 15 people to have the same interactions with manually its a superior player.
Not at all, not even close. They took the Twitter model and reinvented and reimagined it from 140 character posts to a timeline and brought us the 300 character posts to a timeline.
Source? From everything I've read, BlueSky made a theoretically federated protocol, pulled millions of users onto its single central instance, then refused to enable federation in any meaningful way, so you're either on the central instance or you're effectively on some other platform that is separate from BlueSky and is shit. (Meanwhile on Mastodon, there are so many instances and no clear center - not even mastodon.social, since I block that one and rarely notice any loss)
It's all there. Bluesky itself is split into tens of instances and has been since last year. A few people even run their own relays. Your information is very out of date.
It's very enlightening to fast from social media for an extended period of time (say about a month). If you return after that, you can almost feel the shift in your head. It's something I've experienced first hand.
As someone who’s strongly considering just this, could you describe the changes you felt? And — if you again returned to social media for a prolonged period — whether and how quickly those positive changes reverted?
I have pretty much quit Reddit. It didn’t completely change my life, but it was a good thing.
Not getting involved in internet drama is great. I have completely lost the appetite for it. I haven’t heard about American politics for a while. I read and sketch more. My phone is easier to put down and less tempting to pick up; it gets boring quickly. I noticed that I’ll often be the last one to look at my phone when I am around others.
I spend a lot more time in the real world, touching grass. I’d say that this is the cause of my departure, not the effect. Online interactions are not nearly as satisfying.
Being out of it and staying out of it means that you don’t know about the local internet drama, and that you don’t get any notifications from that site. With each visit, the website gets less interesting because nothing interesting is waiting for you there.
My platform of choice was YouTube until they introduced shorts and took a more aggressive stance against ad-blockers. I quit initially because I was against the direction the platform was heading, but realized quickly that I didn't miss it. It dawned on me that I had been investing 8 - 12 hours of my life weekly to passively consume content that I couldn't even remember. I noticed that at any slight moment of down-time I'd impulsively reach for YouTube, it's almost like I was conditioned to do so.
At the end of the day that's what Google wants. They want you to spend as much of your time as possible watching as many advertisements as possible. Most social media platforms are adversarial. Once I saw this I could not unsee it. Warning others is pointless. They'll be annoyed or just think you're weird. Not one person I know has taken my advice, so I've stopped giving it.
Tangent aside, for me the benefit of not using social media has been that I can invest the time into what I find fulfilling. The quality of the entertainment I consume has gone way up. The downside is that it's isolating. No I can't follow you on platform X, no I cannot view the link you've sent me to platform Y. Everyone, especially in my age group, considers it strange.
I quit any non small community social media a few years ago and it's been really nice. My tolerance for trolls and thinking with people on the Internet is has dropped away down and I think I'm better for it.
Google's autocorrect "corrects" words it thought you meant, sometimes words later so you don't see it. I put arguing, but Google decided I meant thinking
Nah, the android Gboard. Super frustrating. And the toggle to turn off that "feature" is shared with all autocorrection. If you disable grammar corrections you don't get any typo fixes. And there's no setting that says "only change the last word I typed"
I quit social media, but the problem is that in the modern dating world a lot of people care whether you have an Instagram and that sort of thing. I truly hate social media, but I find myself considering remaking it just to improve my dating life. It's kind of a depressing situation, to be honest.
Some other comments are along these lines but I’ll offer an anecdote.
In college I was wearing a Halo biking shirt in the computer lab. A female friend remarked, “no one is going to date you if you wear that shirt.” Another friend nearby heard and quipped back, “or only the right girls will date him wearing that shirt.”
You should view your preferences more as a filter. While you should be open to new experiences which may change those presences, if something makes you truly unhappy, you are better finding a partner who won’t force that in your life.
Would that be an improvement, though? Do you really want a relationship with someone who cares if you have an active Instagram account? Feels like a great filter (heh) to weed out the chaff.
(If you're just casually dating around / looking for hookups, then sure, do what you think you need to do.)
My almost post-social media life has been interesting. I ditched Twitter, came back to it briefly, then ditched it again when it was purchased because I found my mental health growing increasingly fragile with the constant outrage, the need to keep track of who the main character of the day was or risk the ire of your circle, and the increasing filtering of my timeline.
I quit Facebook, other than keeping an account for announcing major life events to the older people who were still on it, because I was frustrated that I never received any posts from family or close friends in the heavily filtered timeline, I kept receiving time-sensitive posts (say about a hurricane event) for weeks after the post was no longer relevant, and Meta's increasingly metastasized privacy practices.
I joined Mastodon and found a calm, down to earth, almost boring place. The decentralized nature of the platform certainly means there are some not-at-all boring parts of the Mastoverse, but it felt more like being in an old-style forum than anything else. I'm still there, though my participation isn't significant.
I tried Blue Sky because all my Twitter people were there ... and it was IMMEDIATELY like hitting a drug after being off it for a while. It was all about main characters and outrage.
For me, in hindsight, it was like sitting in front of a slot machine, feeding in quarters, waiting for one to win. And watching people who did win inevitably milkshake duck themselves out of favor. It was briefly an amazing, buzzy world to share both humor and excitement about whatever events you wanted, but that certainly didn't last.
Where is this magic side of the Fediverse? What I saw: Rust lunatics, hardline Communists or straight up Nazis, the most extreme alphabet people or the most extreme red-pillers. And many of them have the overlapping topics of questionable *orn or even more questionable anime content. Every time I get a random post from a an a Fediverse instance and I dare check it's main feed to see what it's like, it's always (always!) a dumpster fire.
I don't like Twitter much but if I had to pick one or the other it would be a no-brainer.
Meanwhile, my feed is photographers, linux people (because of course), and a weird confluence of unobjectionable academics. I saw what you're describing in my brief visit to the Lemmy world, and I absolutely know that there are hostile and degenerate Mastodon instances, but most of the big instances have defederated with them, so I don't get sniped by any of the freaks.
Now, I do pretend the global list simply doesn't exist and focus on the local instance list and people I follow. I don't know of anyone who uses the global list. I also tend to follow hashtags rather than individuals. (I'm 100% sure that twitter would show at least as much garbage on their feed if they didn't filter, especially these days. This is not an argument for Twitter's style of filtering.)
Where does one advertise these days if not social media? Where does one learn about local goings-on outside of their _immediate_ circle of family/close friends/colleagues if not social media?
With a small local business, social media gives an audience. If you're selling anything visually captivating, it performs well in these spaces. We sell cut flowers on the side, so…
I don't ask these questions out of support of Instagram or Facebook, but I stop in there regularly because I don't know to learn a little bit about the greater community around me. My life is busy enough with work/family.
The cost of all this is being exposed to a lot of attention bait and I honestly don't like how I feel using it sometimes. But we've built up the social media ecosystem as a pillar of society at this point.
> Where does one learn about local goings-on outside [...] if nor social media?
Imagine, there are people who don't care that much besides their family/friends circle. Maybe some newspaper/-site from time to time, but why cope with all the other stuff too all the time? Life goes on too if one doesn't know abou the latest stuff.
Imagine there were hundreds or thousands of year of humanity you didn't know how your neighbour is except you walked there.
At least that's fine for me. I don't miss social media (besides HN), and I don't miss anything.
It depends heavily on where you are in life and what demographics you belong to. If you're a guy in your 40s with a wife and kids and a white picket fence there's probably no harm in quitting. I was drawn to social media (and earlier forms, like forums and IRC) because I grew up in a backwards, repressive rural community and was outcasted in school and was able to find "my people" online. Online social communities are how a lot of people who are rejected by society due to disability, sexual orientation etc. get all of their positive social interaction from.
> Tenured professors with status in a discipline can tune out the world and do "deep work" peers recognize as "important" before it is done (with accompanying ivory-tower/angels-on-pinhead risks).
> But a free agent, with no institutional safety net, no underwriting of exploratory expeditions by disciplinary consensus, and no research grants, cannot afford this luxury.
I don't use any of facebook, instagram, LinkedIn, tiktok, X, bluesky, mastodon, snap, ... and it's not even hard. On the rare occasions I took a look at those I found them boring beyond believe. Even mastodon following people I am actually interested in feels like a 90% waste of time.
> What the market values is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable.
> what the market dismisses are activities that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value. Well social media use is the epitome of an easy to replicate activity that does not produce a lot of value [...] by definition the market is not going to give those activieis a lot of value [...]."
Yet in the years since this TEDx talk we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.
> ... we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.
For most influencers, they're not the ones with the wealth and power. Many of them are barely getting by. They rent content houses, clothing, cars, and other things they need to put on their facade.
Pretty much all of the wealth and power is in the hands of the people that employ the influencers.
you will never become a streaming millionaire. talking heads like beast and pewdiepie employ literal armies of Hollywood editors and writers. For every organically grown insufferable content monster created on Youtube, ten more are vat-grown by a billion dollar industry designed to shepherd you into a fantasy consumerist lifestyle.
These powerhouses of industry control the flow of capital at a level you will never be able to. they secure rights to music and video clips at rates you could never get, have tie-ins to major brands media and celebrities on day one, and are programmed with an endless firestorm of bots and preferential algorithmic treatment on every FAANG product in order to guarantee their success.
You are painfully unaware of the difference between being a Youtube video creator and being a streamer. Mr. Beast is not a streamer. He is a packaged video creator. PewDiePie is a reaction video creator who occasionally streams. They are not what people think of when they think of streamers.
To be a professional streamer usually takes a combination of talent and concentration that most people simply don't have. But to say that you can't become one? LOL.
The AVERAGE millionaire streamer on twitch is so painfully unedited that they end up getting banned a couple times a year for saying stupid things live on air. Twitch and their sponsors practically THROW money at them to spend an hour or two to sponsor content. There's an entire backend bounty system which is only available to partners which will pay you based on your audience size. I've seen a guy with 3K viewers get a $30K check for 3 hours worth of sponsored content.
Instagram is a must if you want to get any real benefit out of using dating apps in 2024. The only way to talk to anybody without paying is to look at the profile, get their instagram url, and talk over there. I'm an old millennial who basically only uses HN for social media, and unfortunately IG is a must have.
Just pay for a subscription to a dating app if you can afford it. It's money well spent when you really want to meet a partner and are struggling to do so IRL. As long as you go for one that doesn't have the Tinder UX of course...
A dating app subscription is super cheap, like 40 bucks a month. I think it makes more sense to pay that then try and circumvent the system by messaging people through Instagram
How is it a scam? They are running a service to connect you to other people looking for a relationship. The service works - I found my last 3 girlfriends through dating apps.
I'm not going to message random people's Instagram unsolicited, I would find it annoying to on the receiving end of that. My mother and girlfriend have both complained about receiving unwanted attention from unknown men through social media.
Honestly trying to understand your point of view, do you think dating apps should be free? They definitely aren't free to run.
Presumably your mother and girlfriend don't have their Instagram profiles listed on their dating app profile that say to message them there. Just like there's a very critical difference between a solicited and unsolicited dick pic, if someone is literally asking to be messaged on Instagram, it's different than messaging random people that didn't actually ask to be messaged, especially about crypto scams.
In my post I specifically said "unsolicited". There is of course ethical ways to message people through Instagram, but even in that case it is going to be less efficient then just using the dating app as intended.
Twitter/X is fantastic for breaking news. For example during the first assassination attempt you would find new details on there that would then appear on MSM newscasts one to two hours later.
It also helps immensely to curate lists of interests to help filter out the noise and politics.
It isn't important. The vast majority of "journalism" is as worthless as the vast majority of "discourse" around it. If it doesn't affect you personally, you can likely safely ignore it and if it does affect you personally, you probably won't need the news to tell you about it.
"Breaking news" used to be relevant in that it was news that "broke into" existing programming. It didn't necessarily make people's lives better but at least it tended to cover matters of high national interest like Presidential assassinations or disasters or wars. But now that everything is breaking news all the time everywhere, the term no longer means anything other than being a synonym for "current news," which isn't even really impressive anymore.
This is what I always wonder. Any time I see a news story (even on MSM) marked as "BREAKING" or "EXCLUSIVE", I'm like... who cares? That just means you either a) rushed to publish without making sure you got your details right, or b) you paid someone to not shop their story around to other outlets (which is gross).
My life would not have been impacted in the least knowing about the Trump assassination attempt a few hours later (or even the next day), rather than minutes after it happened.
The MSM has enough problems these days with journalistic integrity and practices. I don't think the teeming mobs on Twitter are an improvement, though.
Unless it's regarding immediate local emergency that you might need to respond to, breaking news has zero value besides a brain tickle and something to talk about.
If you feel you have any kind of mood or attention challenges, as many now do, you might want to double check if it's something you should be optimizing for.
Hard agree. Nearly nothing outside your real personal life is so important it can't be learnt about tomorrow, or next week.
There are exceptions; if you have a flight booked that day and didn't learn about the Crowdstrike thing till you got there, that'll be a problem, but it would've been a problem regardless of your immediate knowledge of it.
It’s an excellent question, but I do think you can get valuable insights from seeing how a major political event unfolds in real time, as long as it’s something you’re interested in. It can help you to view the subsequent news bulletins with a critical eye and interest and it can give you a richer depth of understanding than you would otherwise get.
If it’s an event that you’re not particularly interested in, then there’s not much value in getting details in advance.
Another thing, it’s not just hours. Sometimes it’s months (or in rare cases years) before a recurring topic on social media finally makes it to the news, because it’s controversial/narrative-defying, so it takes them a long time to work out how to talk about it. I don’t want to mention specific examples because it would be distracting, but there are a few topics I see mentioned daily/weekly on the news today that were pretty much absent a few years ago, yet were heavily discussed on Twitter at the time, and I am very glad I was aware of them.
In today's world information overload is a bigger problem than lack of information. It follows that unactionable information is useless.
What is actionable about knowing about the assassination attempt 1-2 hours before others? Did you act differently based on this information? Did you benefit from this sufficiently to weigh up for the time spent on Twitter 20 times a day at the off-chance of catching a breaking newsstory before MSM would?
There is a marked difference between "Breaking new developments" and misinformation being spread to juice engagement.
Nobody should pretend that Twitter is a place where accurate information travels at light speed. It is in desperate need of moderation and being run by a man with clear monetary incentive to mislead the public.
Although the line can get interesting. When I was active on Reddit I would argue that Reddit was not SM. From my perspective, Reddit was end stage web forum technology and link aggregators
All the bespoke forums of the late 90s and early 2000s died for the most part and there is now a subreddit for every niche hobby that used to have a forum
This stuff all predates Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, livejournal, that I would argue were new paradigms and the start of what we know as social media
However to anyone not online during those times, Reddit is just another site where people post details of their own lives. Reddit responded by adding profiles and followers and all kinds of pseudo SM features
I haven’t used it much but I think the main feed is very algorithmic, so you swipe for your dopamine without paying much attention to the profile. Because of that it’s not really tied to your identity in quite the same way.
It also seems quite professionalised in that the big content producers fill the feed.
There’s also something about it being video which makes it feel harmful but in a different way than a text based platform.
I tend to think of TikTok as more of an entertainment platform rather than peer to peer social media.
I’m not the target audience though so could be wide of the mark!
The "new" reddit constantly tries to promote brainrot to you when you are in the main feed. You can evade this by never using the main feed. No one wants to let you just read what you want to read.
This is one of the reasons why I have returned to print media. Unfortunately, a lot of magazines and newspapers are also really bad now also. The Wall Street Journal has fallen off a cliff, turning into something between Cosmopolitan and Business Insider, and I am cancelling my subscription this year. The Economist has done a good job keeping up the quality level. The fact that something is in print does not necessarily make it better if all the writers have brainrot or the content is optimized for digital engagement first.
The internet has become a medium for poor people to watch unlimited user-generated episodes of Maury and Jerry Springer. The only internet I really want to use is to work, buy products, and read my email. Getting older is bad enough without the computer trying to make me dumber on top of that.
I don't use it but I find that claim a bit odd. Would you consider YouTube social media technically? I personally wouldn't even though it has social components with comments and personal channels.
Social media is about exploiting gossip and social comparison to make money. It has been from the start a stupid habit with no redeeming qualities. However, after Zuck released Llamma and other AI models for free, i consider it a fair tax on stupidity that is helping to advance frontier technology
Re-reading my own comment, and worried the poster I responded to might take that as a reverse-jibe about their own naivety - I didn't even think of that the first time I wrote it, and now want to explicitly say that wasn't my point.
I sincerely thought people would quit social media following the Snowden revelations, and I did myself, and then could not believe that they didn't seem to care at all. It was a painful and jarring learning experience.
I did not, but thanks for being considerate. I took it as this:
>I sincerely thought people would quit social media following the Snowden revelations, and I did myself, and then could not believe that they didn't seem to care at all. It was a painful and jarring learning experience.
It's been over 11 years now. I would imagine it's not unlike living in a former soviet country in that everyone knows it's going on, but we just don't talk about it.
Indeed. The same people from before who scoffed at the possibility of mass surveillance are the very same who pivoted immediately to a new justification of the status quo - something about national security, or it not being that bad, or it being a bit of a crazy world which we have to face, or whatever.
It's almost as if their reasoned arguments were always nothing more than poorly slapped together ad hoc justifications for whatever happens to be the norm at a given moment.
I use social media merely for distraction. Over the years I gained nearly zero benefit from using it. Shallow connections, useful looking useless content.
Several of the comments here certainly have some superiority complex issues as well as what would appear isolation issues. You seem cynical towards a large majority of modern society. If you need a hug, I’m here.
That may be but it doesn't take much page turning in a history book to find plenty of instances where society has been very wrong and not even in the distant past.
Society changes slowly. The iterative speed of computers, the iterative speed of feedback on a global communications network based on those computers is new, it has many orders of magnitude faster response times than society's ability to adapt to the changes it brings and the systemic study of human behavior over years and years leading to mathematical models of behavior and responses has created massive information asymmetry in society and the scale of manipulation a small group of people can leverage is astounding, being skeptical of society's value propositions seems in order.
It's fairly straightforward. Just take a look at a few of the top comments here wherein the commenter describes not being as dumb (for lack of a better term) as peers for not joining into social media. I'm not linking to them as I'm not trying to incite anything here. Bros need hugs too.
I'd reckon the median user is not someone who has been "publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week" at any point of their life and that the most likely risk is mindless consumption rather than endless production.
But just quit following random strangers on the Internet, keep social media as a way to maintain your irw network of relations, and you'll usually be alright.
Sure, then we can discuss about the inherent issues of the platforms (which are many), but first one has to exploit their own agency to the utmost degree.
I would say he is write about LinkedIn, TikTok, Snap, Meta and its associated gram's, threads and face... BUT - HN has a different vibe, this is a community with sharing knowledge and information - on HN, I never doom scroll - there is genuine interaction and useful content. To some extent X provides useful updates from the main AI labs, so it is knowing how to use it and not be used by it.
It’s all the same. HN is just smaller, but before Reddit disabled 3rd party apps HN was even more focused and, IMO, a little less startup/growth hacking focused.
I’m about 9 months off social media (not including Hackernews, if you consider that SM). I have no regrets whatsoever. I’m in my late 20’s so SM came into my sphere when I was around 16. I haven’t quite “grown up with it”, but it’s been an omnipresent force for most of my teenage and adult life.
> I am better at making time to catch up with the people I really care about, be that in-person or over WhatsApp.
> When I do catch up with someone, I genuinely have no idea what’s been going on in their life and that makes the catch up a lot more enjoyable and engaging. I haven’t passively kept up to date on their every movement through Instagram stories or Tweets like some kind of ghostly stalker. The best example of this that I can give is that my partner and I got engaged to be married ~4 months ago. Nothing posted on SM, just WhatsApp messages to close friends and family. I get to keep reliving the joy of telling people and witnessing the ecstatic surprise and pure love on their faces each time I catch up with someone I haven’t seen for a while.
> I am much more aware of just how much everyone uses their phones. Take a look around you. Sitting on the bus, waiting in a queue, riding an escalator, pissing at a urinal. Our minds are being constantly bombarbed with mostly useless, inane shite. Cat videos, stories of that person you went to school with 10 years ago doing stupid drunk things, misinformation from your scary uncle on Facebook etc. I let my mind wander more and it feels all the better for it.
I did, deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X). And it helped me a lot to gain back my inner peace. My meditation was deeper, more profound, I genuinely gained back my inner peace. The constant bombardement with posts made to boost the ego of people is toxic for the consumer of these images / texts.
But then, in the context of the Gaza conflict, I realized that X is a very good source to follow intellectuals, thinkers, journalits whom I wouldn't read otherwise in Germany, where anyone is vilified who even wears a Kefiyeh. When you see how our western media frames, justifies, whitewashes a conflict caracterised as a genocide by many scholars, we need other platforms to hear those voices.
Now this sounds like the alt right that wants its platforms. But hear me out. There are intellectuals who show the headlines, the framing, and you cannot help but think that Noam Chomsky's book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media", written in 1988, is more relevant than ever.
X has the capacity to show different perspectives and can be invaluable. But it's also a curse exploited by many. Russia, China, Iran, but also our allies. See this for instance[1].
Agree with everything in your comment except I assume Reddit is better than X (I don't use X for other reasons, but occasionally see things posted from there on Reddit or Instagram).
But worth noting, you've presumably been using HN since 2016 which is also "social media" :P
I'm trying to learn to use RSS to replace some of my social media use. I recommend RSS Guard, it seems to be the best client around. Liferea and Thunderbird are good options, too.
Social media is not problematic if you engage with intent and use alternative sources to check claims. People unfortunate to never have been trained in Defense Against The Dark Arts of Propaganda and Manipulation are at risk but that's always been true, even when all media was of the printed sort. Basic critical analysis skills are vital to survival and mental health in this world.
By 'engage with intent' I just mean not being a passive absorber of the stream of content that's being promoted at whatever site, but instead always have some focus on a particular topic that interests you. Incidentally I notice many of the 'quit social media' stories are published in outlets like the NYTimes which would instead like you to be a passive, well-conditioned absorber of their content, and hence off their advertising stream.
The corporation is run for profit, it doesn't care about the collateral damage it may cause as long as it doesn't impact the bottom line.
The elephant in the room for me is that the person who bought Twitter and keeps shitposting also keeps launching rockets into space and landing them back, among other things that fall into the category of “how the fuck are we going to pull this off?”
I don’t know who Cal is and I have no idea what Deep Work he’s done since he quit social media, but, best of luck to the lad.
I quit social media over 10 years ago, already having been a conscientious objector to Facebook and other platforms, much to the confusion of my classmates who didn't understand my idiosyncratic positions on digital privacy, attention span, banality, and brainrot.
It's gotten to the point where I view the narcissism of the modern 21st century social media user the same way I would view a crack addict smoking a pipe out in public, unable to pry their hands away from their glowing plastic rectangles, swiping incessantly in the hopes of getting just another dose of sweet dopamine with every refresh, or some artificial symbol of social validation in the form of more likes and upvotes.
Somehow even in the wake of the Snowden revelations people are still ambling off of cliffs for fear of being left behind by the herd of lemmings. I feel vindicated as the years go on with every news story or opinion piece I read about (dissatisfaction with) the growing encroachment of surveillance capitalism, ad-tech and social media into our personal lives, and all for what? Some shitty memes and "influencers" peddling their garbage through thinly veiled advertisements?
When I am exposed to mainstream social media content I can't believe people subject themselves to the digital equivalent of ass-to-mouth that is the brainrot of the algorithmically driven social media feed. If "you are what you eat" were analogized to an information diet, most social media users would be consuming informational shit and consequently producing the same 140-byte thoughts or reciting the same 5-second memes.
If the attention economy is indeed a real concept, there is a premium for the ability to hold your concentration on something for more than half an hour and produce thoughts whose complexity is more than just a few bytes.
Less resentfulness and more contempt or pity, as one would regard a methhead tweaking out in public; except here it's a wirehead getting off on social media.
I did this without having to get inspiration from others. And I did it at a young age (under 18), when all my friends and the world were flocking to social media and spilling their thoughts and PII everywhere. I have nothing, and have had nothing ever since (discounting HN).
People are sheep, and people are stupid. Most people waste their lives looking at a mass fake digital mask of their peers, and people they don’t even know.
Myself on the other hand, I spend almost all my spare time with people and animals I love, studying, reading books, and thinking about bigger things.
You are what you consume, which makes most people morons. Same if you consume “the news”, care about celebrities.
Programmers (cs students, "engineers") are one of the most pompous group of people who think their ability to #include <stdio.h> gives them some special ability to speak about efficiency, physics, math (other than your run of the mill discrete or remedial linear algebra) or pretty much any other topic on the face of the Earth.
Don't worry about your active Facebook account. People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends). They are outliers not the rule.
>People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends).
What credentials do you hold to make this claim? It better not be a CS degree.
> just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends)
I have no facebook account. I choose to have relationships with my family members and distant friends through physical contact by meeting up and talking regularly on the phone. IMO typing short text messages to people and 'reacting' to theirs with emojis and thumbs up is not a real relationship.
I've completely quit social media except for LinkedIn, which I need for my work, and Reddit, which I selectively use for product recommendations and advice on my career and relationships. And also Twitter, through which I receive the latest research in my domain. And Instagram, which my girlfriend uses to send me memes and videos. Occasionally Facebook for event invitations. And this website.
But other than that I've totally quit.
The pressure to quit is so large I keep quitting daily
It's like looking in the mirror
What makes Hacker News a social media website?
It's an infinite feed of content with comments and ranking based on upvotes (aka likes)
It is social media, but I'd argue that it lacks the worst incentives of social media: monetization and ads, which lead to attention-hacking algorithms and regression to lowest common denominator content.
It still leverages social and internet points which for some is attention-hijacking enough.
> It still leverages social and internet points which for some is attention-hijacking enough.
The difference is it’s not deliberate, it’s just how they get us to rank training data for ChatGPT 5.
Eh, its monetized in a different way. YC has a vested interest in programmers being exposed to YC companies such that they might go work/start one of them.
Sure the occasional "Promoted post" is way less than say Reddit or mid-roll ads.
The ranking doesn’t seem to be based on likes alone.
For a real social media the content should be ranked by the likes of my peers, a feature non existent on HN
I would argue the defining factor of social media which separates it from blogs/forums/etc. is the ubiquitous feedback metrics, in the form of likes/downvotes/retweets/etc.
Imagine attending party where whenever you finished a sentence, everyone who was listening immediately responded with a silent thumbs up / thumbs down in response. Pretty dystopian. The Onion did a sketch illustrating the problem a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFpK_r-jEXg
By this definition, HN is halfway to being social media. There are metrics, but they aren't displayed publicly.
I never thought that votes, etc. would be that important to what defines social media and would have included forums in it. But if I think of social media as "that thing that's addicting", then yeah, the feedback metrics are what make it addicting.
Otherwise, I would think of "social media" as places where visitors get the opportunity to be equal participants. Anyone can post, anyone can comment in places like these (including forums), but in a blog only one can post and the rest comment.
IMO, the popularity metrics are the cause of the Lord of the Flies dynamics you so often see on Reddit, X, etc.
Popularity metrics facilitate popularity contests.
And popularity metrics facilitate mob rule. Lone voices of dissent get steamrolled.
Reddit is especially bad, IMO. It's almost like it was designed as a confirmation bias engine.
The frustrating part is that voting systems also solve a genuine quality-filtering problem. HN does a good job of balancing the costs and benefits, but I suspect there are other viable approaches.
HN is simply pre-Web 2.0 social media, a la Slashdot, Metafilter, the WELL, kuro5hin, etc.
IIRC, the term "social media" came about with Facebook/Twitter/Youtube. Before that, we had forums/blogs/wikis.
That was the sweet spot IMO. The days before things were constantly "going viral". Sometimes memetic speedbumps are a good thing.
I agree with that, however I would consider large forums (especially those that arose after the rise of the Web- so not BBS- and those that were more than simply vBulletin/phpBB message boards) to be basically photo-social media, even if they predate the term and concept.
I think we need more forums outside of mega-communities like Reddit or even HN, but at least there are many that are still alive:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41783682
Also, things were going viral even before the mid-'00s when the concept consolidated. All Your Base and Star Wars Kid went viral before it was called that, even if they garnered a fraction of the mindshare of the general public. Even that dancing CGI baby qualifies.
The fact that I come in it just to read comments
HN might seem more focused and professional than typical social media, but it fosters a community and interactions
How does it foster a community? I don't think I've connected with anyone on here beyond a single thread in the few years I've been around, and I consider myself a typical user
Not looking for a fight or anything. I'm just curious about different perspectives and definitions of social media. The responses so far have been interesting
Media used to be few or one entity speaking to many
Social media is many people speaking to many
HN is social media
Then wouldn't public access TV, call-in radio shows, or the news be social media as well since they typically involve many-to-many interactions? Or is there more to it?
Sure. It's probably more helpful to think of this (like almost all things) on a spectrum.
HN is definitely on the social media end of the spectrum. For example, all your listed examples have very hands-on and comprehensive, opinionated editorial control. HN has moderation, but not really editorial control per se.
HN is exactly what social media is.
social media is a definition of sourced content, nit the quality of the latter
To me it’s just a crowd curated list of links, more like early day Yahoo
Remove the comments and votes and I agree. But you just left a comment
A comment isn’t social media to me, every news site used to have a comment section but wasn’t social media.
It lacks the connection between the commenters.
You can’t follow or block comments, or at least filter or sort them
Karma
Not much since it’s moderated to the point of being a boring headline aggregator, with a heavily biased, toxic community of vain Americans ignoring anything outside the HN RDF
May as well disable comments and treat it like a user updated RSS feed, discuss links elsewhere.
You forgot antisocial.
And yet here you are!
That doesn't actually refute any of the points in the comment you are replying to.
Only long enough to disperse a particular mind virus.
STEM degrees and 20+ years in Eng; hardware then software
This community isn’t really peddling anything that hasn’t been done before; just like the story mode politics and economics often complained about
What’s that? You have a new state manager or a machine and some math euphemisms that translate cleanly to other math objects known for a century? WOW!
…There’s no beating physics and it doesn’t care humans exist. No matter how much symbolism we write down to represent it, it’s not imbuing us with magic powers. We just meat suits like everyone else. Get over yourselves; this a momentary social bubble that will vanish like all the ones they say came before
Really look forward to ML generation of new math built on the same old axioms so we can light a bunch of PhDs hanging on walls on fire
Bruh... it's Friday. And this is a post about social media participation. Not your existential waxing. You don't see any irony whatsoever in what you're spouting?
Urg, so American. It's Saturday.
Where? Definitely nowhere in the Western Hemisphere (excepting Chukotka and whatever else is floating out in the Pacific west of the IDL), and in maybe only half of the Eastern Hemisphere as of this very moment.
And that's 'ugh' in English. ;)
[dead]
Yeah but I tried a Linux laptop for a week and just couldn’t make it work, Apple products are the best.
Love the dedication to a ‘low-social-media’ life!
> “I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.”
This is the crux of the matter. Social media isn’t real; it’s a type of video game for adults.
The unreality fosters the growth of so many other things which are even less concerned with truth: fake news, engagement bait, daily outrages, chasing followers in a vain attempt to “build a personal brand.” The vacuousness of influencer culture has only accelerated these trends since Newport wrote this post.
In some sense, some of us already live online essentially through these social networks. Almost always this means some level of addiction, with concomitant real life consequences.
Is it really worth it?
Problem is that it is becoming a new reality. You can tune out, but you can't turn it off, and it (and society) will continue without it. And I say this as someone who thinks we should largely turn it off. Society will adapt, which means society is becoming something different.
I don’t buy it. We’re probably past peak social media at this point. And the outer reality will always have a higher status than any of the inner ones.
We might be past peak "bulk" social media, where people would be public, more or less, with their posts/videos. Now everything is closing and many people have "group chats" as they realize that free-for-all chatting/posting doesn't work.
In other words, people are returning to how online communication worked before Facebook.
Offline, people have always tended to come together around common interests and values. My wife and I, for example, are part time performing magicians and we're a member of a local magic group that meets IRL.
Prior to what we have come to call "social media", existed forums. Forums were this wonderful utopian paradise of yesteryear where people engaged in long form discussions, often heated but mostly civil, about special interests that they cared about.
The term "social media" didn't start to catch on until the news feed was a thing. That was the "contribution" of both Facebook and Twatter and it was a big PART of what changed everything.
The other factor was the so-called "mobile revolution."
Forums are great when you're at a keyboard. They start to lose their appeal when you are engaging using a small touch screen.
What you are describing sounds like people returning to the state of the world as it existed before social media. Where people come together around common interests and values instead of using the news feed where you get fire-hozed with random shit that "the algorithm" thinks might trigger you into engaging with it.
> people are returning to how online communication worked before Facebook.
Except now it's all on Facebook and it's incredibly hard to leave Facebook, because all communications with any type of group happens on Facebook. I have friends who can't leave Facebook, because their kids soccer team holds them hostage. Leave Facebook and we'll kill your child's social life. I can't even join the parents group for my child's school, almost no one else will do it, because it takes time, so they are lacking parents, but it is coordinated on Facebook.
I used to organise playtime for toddlers once a week, no one else wanted to do, but the kids loved it. Everyone was used to everything being organised via Facebook, where I don't have an account. So the communication was done by someone else in the umbrella organisation for all local sports, gymnastics, e-sport etc. More than once I showed up to get everything ready only to learn that the space was booked for something else that day, being cleaned or renovated. Everyone else had been informed, expect me, the guy who was suppose to be in charge of the damn thing, because the organisation had no real website or mailing list to speak of and just expected everyone to be on Facebook.
Everything is on f-ing Facebook, Sports, clubs, hobbies, reselling, announcements of everything local, and only on Facebook. The only exception is professional meetups, which Linkedin will happily inform you about two weeks after the meetup, stupid, brain dead, algorithmically power "news" feed.
I want mailing-lists and Usenet, but everyone else want a mobile app and apparently Facebook.
That's a valid complaint, and I sympathize because I have no love for Facebook.
My only counter-argument, and it's not even a counter-argument really, is that this is a fact of life that exists with or without Facebook.
My personal pet peeve is that I don't want to own a mobile phone at all. Not even a dumb phone and not even a landline. If I find myself in an emergency without the ability to dial 911 that's a risk I'm willing to take on a personal level. I just don't want a phone because I find the idea of a noise making device that can interrupt me at unexpected times to be a crime against humanity. But more and more essential services like banking are assuming that people have smart phones. My bank would deny services to me if I didn't even have a landline, since they require a phone number tied to their account records. My work assumes that people not only have their own smart phone but are willing to install authenticator apps for MFA etc. And my workplace is not alone.
If it's not Facebook that "everyone" is using that leaves minority opinions wishing for an alternative, it's something else.
Ugh I know the feeling. I may break down and do the immigrant-owned phone shop prepaid pseudonymous burner away-from-home SMS verification process on a completely fictitious account. I do not want Meta having any more of my dox than it has already gleaned in the past.
Private spaces where small groups collect may be social media by its definition, but it feels starkly different from something like posting on a facebook wall or making a public linkedin post where the audience largely consists of strangers.
>Private spaces where small groups collect may be social media by its definition
Kind of, depending on the platform, if you squint your eyes at it?
I suppose it doesn't matter what it's actually called. I call it community in general.
Communities in this sense are the middle ground between your direct personal network (which is also the deepest form of relation), and social media as the widest (the shallowest form of relation) form of reach.
I think this is the one benefit of recent "AI" advancements, it accelerates the downfall with even cheaper garbage. death to the internet, long live the internet
You don't have to buy it.
But when a Presidential candidate (who will pick up roughly half the popular vote) is openly spreading social media misinformation, and the owner of Twitter is offering million dollar lotteries to influence the vote, it's fair to say enough people "buy it".
Hoping for reevaluation
I wonder what will the cumulative effect be as more of life becomes virtual by default
I think you make valid points about the downsides of "influencer culture" and usage patterns of some forms of social media. BUT. I'm think the term "social media" is too broad to be useful in this kind of critique.
This conversation we're having is a bit meta, but it's also "real", to me. We both considered Cal Newport's stance, Matt Green shared some thoughts about it, and Chris Weekly responded to it. Those are real people interacting in a potentially useful way. Being "addicted" to ideas and conversations is not necessarily unhealthy. /$.02
The danger of the point I'm making is that the less-realness that I'm arguing justifies poor behavior online. It does not. Many posters become seduced by the less-realness of online contact that they disconnect their own notions of what decent behavior is.
> Those are real people interacting in a potentially useful way. Being "addicted" to ideas and conversations is not necessarily unhealthy.
Agree! Addiction is compulsive use and the need to continually engage. My HN use is subject to a max of 15m a day with a browser extension that enforces it. I can at least try to curb it from blossoming into something more disruptive.
I think there's a lot of value, both social and emotional, to social media. That doesn't change the fact that social media products as they exist are not only not creating that value, they are outwardly, openly hostile to it. HN being a notable exception and why I spend a lot of time here. The discussions are thoughtful and the topics are (usually) at least somewhat relevant to my career and life. That said, the more mainstream social medias are not relevant to me, they are not stimulating or thoughtful, and they are not valuable.
I have Instagram and TikTok installed because both of my partners send me things from them that made them think of me, and in this way, and only this way, they are relevant and nurturing to my existence. That said, I never engage with them outside of that context, because it's just an endless barrage of vacuous bullshit, as are the rest, with TikTok personally, I think, being the largest firehose of stupid, worthless, intellectually bankrupt, pointless shit ever constructed by mankind. Holy fuck. Like they're all bad, but TikTok... it's just the modern social media apparatus refined and polished to a mirror shine. Takes absolutely no effort to engage with, and if you're sufficiently numb to outside stimulus, you will scroll it for literal hours. If social media is a drug, TikTok is black-tar heroin.
Unfortunately, it can be worth it. Having a social media audience can be very valuable to entrepreneurs. Someone who lives online with a personal brand can replace tens of thousands of dollars in ad spend with a single tweet.
As someone who hasn't had a social media presence for most of my adult life, and happy about that, I'm now seeing the downsides. I don't have Ivy League connections like some of my peers. Social media may be the only way I could build a network like the one they cultivated in university.
I feel this. However I also remind myself that social media connections are never as strong as those we've made in real life, and that there have been former influencers who've hung up their hat and lamented that their residual social connections regress to something close to a mean a lot quicker than they would've liked.
Ultimately, the act of winning at social media seems a bit too subordinate to me.
Just an FYI going to an Ivy doesn’t cultivate that network in most cases; you need to come from the right background and have some spending money to keep up with the lifestyle (ski trips, Broadway musicals, etc).
In that way social network is more meritocratic, as many people have come from very humble backgrounds and succeeded with skill and charisma.
It's an opportunity to meet people who have a higher likelihood of successful careers, who in turn also know many successful people. That makes getting meetings and fundraising much easier.
I simply wasn't able to meet those kinds of people as a mid 20s person transferring to a commuter university from a community college.
Existing wealth likely helps, but even the poor kids with scholarships have better outcomes at those universities.
> engagement bait, daily outrages,
I have a pet theory as to why social media causes many people to feel like it's draining them, and why I avoid news on social media like the plague ... I also tend to mute or silence people that share political content (regardless of partisan affiliation).
Social media, unless you are trying to build a business, is ultimately offering the service of entertainment.
Even if you use Twitter or Facebook as your news aggregator, unless you're engaged in some kind of productive and time-scoped research project, you're doing this on your leisure time.
That means that you just got done work, or you're on a break, or you finally got the kids to sleep or finished all of your household chores and you're now in a position where you can "enjoy" a bit of leisure time.
Which means that you approach social media PRE-drained. You're already tired and you're looking for cute cat memes when what should happen ... you get hit with a rage-bait headline, or one of those douche bags that vote differently from you just posted an opinion about a controversial topic that you have very strong feelings about.
We (on HN) all know that the algorithm is trying to promote what gets engagement, and anything that provokes a strong emotional reaction is likely to trigger engagement.
My thesis is that people turn to social media when they are already in an emotional state that is incredibly inappropriate for engaging with "serious" topics on a rational level.
So everyone just gets angrier and angrier at each other and you leave social media feeling even more exhausted than you were before you signed on looking for entertainment to spend your precious leisure time with.
And then you realize that you just wasted that short precious time that you needed to use for relaxation ... and if you don't do anything to rectify it then your stress levels just gradually creep up, your sleep starts to suffer, you might start to compensate with stress eating or consuming more alcohol or cannabis than is healthy and it just spirals.
Even without considering all of the contentious topics, the infinite scroll of the home feed trains people to triage posts faster and faster, because there's always more content, and who knows what you've missed? Because the topics are flattened, you're context-switching on a second by second basis, and your mind is alert to something awful you might be about to see - cute cat, war crimes, Dan's birthday celebration, medical fundraiser, political campaign, sponsored ad... I'm really starting to see the value of legitimate boredom
A game where the "points" are likes, followers and engagement
I agree with this, but it's worth noting the quote is from a journalist/blogger who was not talking about social media. He was talking about keeping up with a 24 hour news cycle by any means. The problem here isn't specific to social media. It's with overwhelming information flow, the vast majority of which is not actionable to the person consuming it. People come down with a type of awareness FOMO such that they feel like they need to know all things as they happen, even though the information is incomplete, often wrong, misleading, and doesn't impact their everyday real lives in any way.
This is what Andrew Sullivan was getting at. People should worry themselves with information that actually concerns and impacts their real lives. All else is entertainment. If it stops being entertaining and starts being anxiety-inducing, stop consuming it.
I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”. The incentives are perverse, there is an inherent conflict of interest in the business model and there is an intermediary between the user and information/community they want to participate in. This leads to most problems we see in legacy, ad-based, social media.
Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry. In life we do not let everyone into the friend circle. Having a barrier to entry model may work well for an online community, although this remains to be seen. Were there any successful experiments with paid social media?
I would rephrase it further to "quit ad-based media." The problems and conflicts of interest introduced by an ad-based revenue model were discussed long before the advent of the modern Web and social media; the relationship between the advertisement industry and mass media (television, radio) was already discussed in depth in the late 20th century [0]:
[0] https://archive.org/details/manfacturingconsentnahomchomsky/...Interestingly this changed somewhat with the clickbait-based model – now, I would disagree that advertisers "want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies."
I think this does describe legacy advertisers (and TikTok, for different reasons) – we might remember Tumblr's hyper-specific LGBTQ-friendly (often NSFW) communities being completely liquidated in the transfer of Tumblr to Verizon, arguably killing Tumblr on that date. Verizon's handling of Tumblr validates Chomsky.
But ad-fueled journalism seems to operate from exactly the opposite principle, so long as the controversies that drive engagement do not threaten the sensibility of specific large funders. I've seen a few times in recent memory where an article from the New York Times aired something quite sensational, only to quietly update later that what was initially reported didn't quite occur as depicted. But by that point it is too late, and profit was made.
The overall point still stands – that ad-based always results in a conflict of interest.
As possible counterpoint consider the departure of several advertisers from X following the Musk acquisition, whose controversial online antics and positions (irrespective of one's potential value judgments of them) were deemed bad for business and a damper on the "buying mood."
In general though it is true that ragebait and sensationalism do tend to drive "engagement" and thus ad revenue (often to the detriment of society).
Well, this is the kind of argument you can make in both directions.
A site is full of ragebait, hot takes and pictures of boobs? The ad economy has pushed them towards things that get a lot of engagement. Clicks are money!
A site is devoid of ragebait, hot takes and pictures of boobs? The ad economy forces everything to be brand-safe and censored.
Sure. Chomsky et al continue in the cited chapter,
There are two options; either Chomsky et al are incorrect in their assertion, or they are correct.If they are incorrect, then non-conservatives are of equal power and culpability in discriminating for or against which content they will sponsor. This would seem to be your position, and points to a state of affairs in which content and communities exist in disjoint bubbles which thrive off of entirely separate streams of ad revenue, up to the principles of the advertisers that choose to direct funding at particular media institutions.
Otherwise, if they are correct, then your assertion that this argument can be made "in both directions" is shown to be false by supposition, and the ad economy pushes users towards conservative content - in which case, one had best boycott and abstain from ad-driven media and social media unless they want to finance conservative thought.
LGBT rights have been enshrined in US law for over a decade now.
It's time to wake up to the fact that being LGBT friendly is the conservative position. This may come as a shock to people who were cutting edge radicals in their youth in the 1990s - a decade that is now 30 years in the past.
lol, please
Still, his "Go f--- yourself" reply was one of the best things ever since sliced bread. I am still appaulding.
in the old days even you paid to subscribe,the newspaper and journal and cable TV etc still carried commercials, they're always there,just getting much worse nowadays
everybody saw the exact same ads though, and due to regulation, it was impossible for newspapers to do things like broadcast outright misinformation as advertisements. Deepfake Musk and Bezos praising some shitcoin on a YouTube ad is par for the course, but would be logistically impossible on a traditional cable news channel or newspaper.
Amend according to your preferences, run it whenever something annoys you, throw it in a cron job, etc.
.bash_aliases:
alias blocksocials='(echo ""; echo "127.0.0.1 reddit.com"; echo "127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com") | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts > /dev/null'
alias unblocksocials='sudo sed -i "/reddit.com/d" /etc/hosts'
Doesn't do much for phone usage, which is where I actually want to block things. The best solution I've found for that is NextDNS.
I use Kiwi Browser on Android, which is a Chrome-based browser with extension support. I have a userscript that gradually fades out and desaturates social media pages in 8 minutes. After 4-5 minutes, pages fade out so much that you are forced to stop scrolling and it's not enjoyable anymore.
The same can be done on Firefox, which supports installing Tampermonkey for managing userscripts.
We also do not let people into the friend circle just because they have money (I hope). IMHO healthiest "social media" I could think is interest groups. They eventually need some kind of donation from one or more people, but with no or minimal barriers.
Barriers to entry don't have to be financial. One can imagine a community of artists who require you to mail them a traditional media sketch before they'll let you in. One of the clubs I know of requires you to go on three hikes before they'll make you a member and give you access to their website.
In both cases there's a small financial barrier (being able to pay for postage or your share or petrol money) but a sizeable time barrier (spending hours on a sketch or walking a total of about 50km).
There are a lot of things where effort is inherent in the derived value, or even the primary value. It's a solid proxy for how much you care, which is so important. A trivial example: I sent someone at work who loves to share candy a giant back of gummies; HR came after me because "tax reasons" (incorrectly in this case) and wanted to "gross up" their paycheque with a spot bonus. Which do you think is more impactful: the trip I took to the store, thinking of this person and mailing it to them, or the $26 pre-tax "bonus" they'd get in 2 weeks?
For me no of course, but if you think about unintentionally your friends are from the same income group really (for the most part), if you are rich and go to private school, your friends are most likely rich, and usually hang around "fancy" places.
I was briefly a member of a church-related singles group. Their activities revolved around visiting a different church every Sunday. And also doing activities on weekends that involved a lot of car travel and significant admission fees, if only viewing a film at the mall cinema.
I had a real commitment to my home parish at the time. I was involved in ministries weekly, where I could not simply flit about anywhere I wanted. Sure, as a group we could meet many strangers on this itinerary, but I risked severing all ties with my spiritual home!
The activities were sometimes active and sometimes passive, such as hiking, dancing, or going to a festival or something. And I quickly gave up on everything, because it seemed like the group was not really oriented to pairing people off, but more of a self-sustaining club where people gained "volunteer responsibilities" and were thus pressured into staying in the "singles group" no matter what their relationship status. Also, having no vehicle of my own, I'd either opt out of traveling, or I'd hit someone up to carpool, and that wasn't always copacetic.
I also found, on dating websites, this mentality that single Catholics would be jet-setters, traveling all over the world on pilgrimage. That they would generate a steady stream of photographs and social media posts from their adventures. That they would have marvelous, expensive hobbies and be so active in volunteerism. For crying out loud! I wondered how these people would ever have space in their lives for a significant other! All I wanted to do was hang around home, go for walks, prepare a nice meal at home once in a while. But the dating sites seemed geared exclusively for high-maintenance and upper-middle-class go-getters. Again, I felt like it was a clique of "professional singles" who didn't really expect to pair off and get married.
Well, Paul did say (paraphrasing), maybe it would be better if you did not marry...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Epistle_to_the_Corinthia...
Perhaps these Catholics are onto something. There's nothing wrong per se with individuals in a singles group or the group itself proper having no expectations of dating or marriage. It's probably not the norm, but I think it's actually somewhat better that way, especially for those who don't intend to date/marry. Community and fellowship in a church environment should not be withdrawn from those who choose to remain single or celibate. I think that historically many church groups have silently discouraged being single by ostracism or judgement, which is definitely not what Jesus would do, in my opinion.
I'm sure there is someone for you out there. All relationships are valid. Modern society has such intense focus on external sources of validation, such as a partner or spouse, but good friends are always in short supply. As the proverb says, a friend can be closer than a brother.
>I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”.
Facebook was terrible for your well being a long time before they enshitified with adds. You may be too young to remember but likes were a hot commodity people would ruin their lives over without any outside help.
For myself I find push notification based social media to be completely cancerous, and pull based one only mildly so. One need only look at the trolls from usenet to see people obsessed with nothing but text based emails.
There is no safe dose.
It’s not a coincidence that Facebook started out as a college-only social network. That was the real barrier to entry.
Hackernews is such a social circle. Besides the incredible moderation done by @dang I think the artificial barriers to interacting with the community are what make this a successful forum. I seem to recall needing at least 5 submission karma before you can comment - and that means 5 votes from _other_ people.
Good luck with a contrarian post or comment here. They get flagged or downvoted to oblivion.
That's partly true, but there's also a confounding factor that contrarian posts are more likely to break HN's guidelines [1]. For example, they're more likely to be snarky or ranty. These qualities are rightly downvoted and flagged on HN, not contrariness per se.
This comes from fundamentals, unfortunately, so it's hard to change.
The trouble is that someone posting a contrary view usually feels under pressure going in. They know that their post will land in hostile territory, anticipating that the majority won't receive their opinion (or them) well, and they're not wrong. They'll probably be met not just with disagreement, but with lazy truisms and putdowns that majorities always feel are obvious.
The more contrarian a view is, the more common the majority response is not to engage with it, but to question why anyone would ever say such a thing. Often the majority invents sinister or preposterous explanations for this. (On that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851.)
Because the contrarian commenter expects to be treated this way, they typically defend themselves pre-emptively with armor like snark, name-calling, and so on, presumably to lessen the pain of being rejected. It's as if there's an implicit (or sometimes even explicit) sentence, "I know you're all going to pile on me anyway so fuck you in advance."
Downvotes and flags do end up piling on such comments, no doubt partly because majorities consider them "obviously" wrong and bad, but more because of this pre-emptive guidelines breakage. This rejection only confirms the contrarian poster's feeling that the community is against them, so we end up in a tight and vicious bind.
The flip side to that bind is that when contrarian views are expressed in this defensive-aggressive way, it gives the majority a perfect excuse to keep on feeling that its views are obviously right while others are mean and bad. The contrarian ends up discrediting their own view. When they happen to have some truth on their side (as they often do), this is bad for everyone [2].
I spend a lot of time on this from a moderation point of view because it's such a tough tradeoff. It's terrible for HN when contrarian and minority views are reflexively rejected. It's also bad when guidelines breakage doesn't get downvoted or flagged. We can't carve out an exception that says it's ok to break the rules when you feel surrounded by people who disagree with you.
This dilemma is not the contrarian/minority's fault. They're genuinely under greater pressure. It's easy to stay within the rails when all you have to say is conventional and the smug majority (aren't all majorities smug?) will upvote you. It's hard not to protect yourself with barbs when you're in a vulnerable position to begin with.
Worst is when the contrarian is coming from a minority—any kind of minority, not just the obvious kinds—who have a different background from most of the community, and so naturally have different views. The majority response in such cases can get ugly quickly. I've seen mobs hound such commenters off HN, which is one of the worst things that can happen and one of the most important to protect against. It happens by itself; no one is thinking "let's form a mob and hound that deviant". It comes from the fundamentals, as I said, of how groups (and forums) work.
From a moderation point of view we have two tools, I guess, for this. The first is to try to explain to contrarian commenters the unfortunate situation that there's a greater burden on them than there is on others, and that if they don't want their posts to be self-defeating, they need to bear that pressure while writing their comments neutrally [3]. It's not fair; it sucks; but it's how group dynamics work—we can't change it. If the majority/minority demographics were reversed, people would be doing the same in the opposite direction. I don't like to tell people that they have to do more than others through no fault of their own, so I try to make it clear that I'm on their side—not necessarily in agreeing with their view, but in feeling the position they're in.
The other moderation response is to try to recognize these dynamics when they're occurring and find ways to tilt the ship a bit back towards even. It's not ok to break the rules when expressing a minority opinion, but there are ways of explaining the rules that hopefully communicate a sense of welcome along with the explanation. Conversely, when majority commenters are breaking the rules, there are ways of responding to that which add an additional layer of reproof that is appropriate to the worseness of the phenomenon.
Unfortunately these "tools" are quite insufficient—partly because they're so costly in moderator time, energy, and feeling, and partly because the phenomenon is so large and intense. I do think, or faintly hope at least, it's possible for some of this knowledge to find its way into the culture, and that the community as a whole can shift—only a little, and slowly, but for real.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Thank you, dang.
It was always like this. At least it's not as bad as reddit. :)
Not sure about "paid", but there are plenty of examples of communities with barriers to entry which are successful and long-lived, e.g. private trackers (the forums in whatcd were excellent), very niche/technical interest communities, etc.
Metafilter comes to mind. Pay $5 one time for lifetime access. After about 20 years it has dwindled to a white star, but there is still a nuhhet of community left there. Amazing what a token cost does to weed out spam accounts, twinks, etc.
We do not filter real world friends based on them paying for arbitrary product.
But do we not? We meet friends in life through school, work, hobbies. There's at least a time commitment to some common space if not a financial one. Friendship grow and die based on whether you can easily continue to see them - a common scenario for the dynamic changing being they no longer participate in the common space.
Friends through work, school and most hobbies are transient - they come and go, temporary only.
With friends as in people in your life who you want to really be friends with, you both make changes to be able to keep the relationships. Otherwise it dies. And you certainly do not go "either you buy this app or I am not friend with you anymore".
I mean, you can go cold turkey when changing jobs/work/hobbies but you don't have to.
Sometimes people only want to do that hobby so you don't have a choice but if you hung out with them outside of the origin activity then likely you can hang out with them without that origin activity.
Not being a part of the scene I can't say first hand but I believe we literally do and they're called cover charges at clubs. Then there are the insufferably vain 'green bubble bad' people.
https://wip.co/
> > Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry
This depends on the definition of success, the most successful as in impressive achievements goal reaching are the ones that are open to anybody who can get noticed and brought in. ANd in the social sense even open to the ones who are most capable of monopolizing the discourse and creating a buzz in the public square.
For example Trump did just that in 2016 and many tried to resist him, but in the end the GOP wants to be successful and opened itself to the guy who made the most noise in the public discourse and public square and made him the tip of the spear of the election effort.
Of course it feels pretty miserable knowing that you can be replaced at any time but I don't think there is an alternative or a solution thanks to a barrier to entry (or exit). Social groups that have a barrier to entry (and exit) such as marriage , when it deteriorates the barrier to entry (and exit) doesn't prevent the 2 people to just starting ignoring each other.
I would not call GOP and pro-Trump people to be "open" at all. The whole point is authoritarianism, exclusion and pure aggression toward others.
> the incentives are perverse
The thing called Social Media is an unconstrained grift-circus peddling pure Barnumium. [1]
It attracts movers/actors who enjoy the incentives, as well as followers/gawkers who have trouble seeing that their time and reality have been stolen.
From The Fine Article:
"Finally [...] he quit, explaining: 'I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.'”
---
[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum
I would love to pay for social software on a coop model (like a food coop, etc) — we would be "members" and, theoretically, we pay a small monthly fee that covers the costs of hosting and platform development. I've tried to think about what I would want that to look like — spoiler, something different than the model of "posting + reactions" that is so familiar from twitter+fb — but then when I think about the barriers to entry for a project like that, even though the technological part might not be that difficult (assuming it was Less Than Web Scale), I just give up hoping for it.
I've been following a lot of the bluesky + mastodon stuff but I don't like that their basic model of social interaction is just a clone of Twitter.
This is precisely https://social.coop, of which I am part of, except for the "not being Mastodon" bit :)
Governance happens on Loomio, which is a forum tailored for community decision making, but the main platform that coop members get access to is a Mastodon instance for now. We are experimenting with Bonfire, which is more flexible and might end up providing a solid base for federated apps in general.
Let me know if you have any questions!
That can just be a forum - a forum I've been a member of for more than 20 years has been run by the members since 2010 [1], is registered as a co-operative/community benefit society in the UK and funded by voluntary memberships or donations, with members voting annually to elect people to positions required to run it.
A good chunk of those have been part of the same community on a newsgroup, then on a company-owned forum which got shuttered, then on a forum instance set up by a user who didn't want to run it any more after 6 years. The tech and platforms are ephemeral, always have been.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RLLMUK
I can't remember the name of it, but over a decade ago I saw something like this - it was a single Linux server shared by (I think) hundreds of people. Really trying to do the multi-user paradigm. They advertised it as a private kind of social network, it was invite-only and I think you had to pay to help keep the server lights on.
Hopefully by posting something incorrect, A Person On The Internet Who Knows Better will come along and provide the correct details. :)
Tilde.club nearly meets your definition.[1] It's at least 1 decade and 15 days old, but it appears it's open to join for anyone.[2]
[1] https://tilde.club/ [2] https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...
The first link you put gives me a security warning so I didn't click through. But the medium article would suggest that this is the one!
Maybe SDF?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_Syste...
https://sdf.org/
This is called a forum.
> In life we do not let everyone into the friend circle
Thought that ended in high school. You have to be a real pos to not get invites to stuff...
> You have to be a real pos to not get invites to stuff...
The "real pos" is just as often those doing the excluding, as it is those being excluded. Pettiness doesn't disappear at 18 years old. It's hurtful to assume anyone being excluded from something deserved it.
It's more that there are maybe a thousand or so people in your highschool, but 7 billion on planet earth. If a thousand people (more like a couple of hundred the same age) exclude you then there are probably unfair network effects or someone poisoning the well against you, but at bigger scales everyone is a stranger and you get to start fresh.
In those cases I think it's more likely mental illness that stops you from making friends, but if no social group has accepted you after tens or hundreds of attempts then it's possible that there's something you might be able to change.
I won't advertise but I work for a company which holds a social media for cooking and recipes. Folks there are totally averse to those and based stuff.
It has been hard for the company. The owner decided the company will die before using ads (for many reasons). The paid plan is stupidly cheap and when people sign and use for a month they stick with the company for years.
But it is hard. Company laid off 80% of the team some time ago and is fighting to survive. I won't defend the owner or anyone, but things came to a point where people think they are not having consequences by giving infinite permission for being tracked all the time. They think if they are not logged they are not identified so they can't be exploited.
It sucks because no one appreciates that. Though I have my opinions about business and whatever I kinda appreciate for the company not running on money from ads and not collecting a single piece of user information which is not required for work.
If the company you work for REALLY does behave like that, you SHOULD DEFINITELY advertise it. Companies like this must be acknowledged and celebrated. The owner must be a really good person.
Not sure if he is a good person or not. There may be multiple reasons for doing something BUT what matter s is that anyway it is a transparent honest product. If some one wants to look for it, it is called cookpad. Probably not the best but it works and although the subscription does not look super promising it works.
I think that big issue there might just be that infinite reoccurring payments for cooking app is just not something reasonable for most people to set up. People likely prefer to not have a cooking app over paying regularly for it and it is actually reasonable decision.
No form of advertising is good, I don’t want your advertising assaulting my senses.
I don’t care if you piss gold or if you’re the pope or king, don’t advertise to me
Find sites that let you pay for content then I guess? Very few sites are charity sites, and need money to keep the lights on unless it’s just a passion site for the owners and they don’t care to be a community service. I don’t blame people trying to make some money for (many times) obviously hard work and curation of a site.
Please advertise or you will go out of business before I ever hear about you.
Unfortunately people love to complain about ads, but rarely actually get their wallets out when an alternative payment method is presented. Case in point: the frequent archive.org links to get around paywalls.
you mean archive.is?
No, I meant archive.org's wayback machine, but there are other tools out there with the same function.
https://web.archive.org
That's sickening, honestly.
IA is a tool to help you access websites that literally can't be accessed ever again otherwise. It's a noble and beautiful project.
Some people use it just to get free stuff, to commit piracy, to infringe upon copyright. It's a perversion of what it was meant for.
Piracy is a service problem. A paywall literally says “you might like this but pay me first to see what it is.” Substack has a “let me read it first” button and I’ve never seen an archive link to that even though there are plenty of private articles.
The concept of gift links exists, but these websites footaxe themselves by limiting their most viral content —- ostensibly the best and cheapest marketing they could get, down the drain.
You’re right. It is sickening.
Substack's "let me read it first" is just a way to close the subscription popup, it has nothing to do with reading otherwise paywalled content.
The thing is, having had some of my own content "go viral" before - it's not worth much. Most people will read it for a minute and move on. A tiny percentage will subscribe and an even tinier percentage will give you any money. So from the point of view of a creator, it makes a ton of sense to put up paywalls on things – but only once you've already gotten a bit of an audience and distribution method figured out.
> Substack's "let me read it first" is just a way to close the subscription popup, it has nothing to do with reading otherwise paywalled content.
It has everything to do with telegraphed intention of not having content be gratis. The fact that you cannot even mentally keep the idea of subscription gates in the same bucket as paywalls says a lot.
No, not really. It's mostly just a typical CTA for getting email subscribers. Plenty of completely free newsletters have popups like that.
PS: using a new green account to make snarky put-downs isn't welcome on HN. Make a point or don't make it, but do it without those.
It doesn't matter how you rationalize your acts, the fact you're abusing IA's infrastructure doesn't change.
To me, you burned a hospital bed to send a message that capitalism is bad. I don't care what your opinion is. You burned the bed.
What? I’m pretty sure people are talking about archive.is and not archive.org here.
I mean can the owner compromise and just do ads based on the content on the page? Those weren’t so bad in the “before times”. Maybe that just doesn’t bring in enough cash as ads that follow you around 10 different sites trying to sell you the same thing, but it seems like giving up free money and might be worth a shot.
I was one of those security/privacy people in the 00's who declined to join facebook or do any of the social media stuff. Feels like it was the right call. Meta was the best possible company name for the social media machine, because when you turn it all off, you really do become less meta.
I'd suspect it's a bit like being a vegan, where it's a self-imposed constrant that makes you aloof from others and makes them treat you like an exception. It reduces some of the invites you get, and you just aren't up on the news about your friend groups as a result. We imagine it signals some kind of purity or difference, as though to say we're not like those regular IT people, maybe there's an air of mystery about what we might know, but it's just kind of fussy and it creates a polarizing filter where people really have to like you a lot to put up with the conditions you put on hanging out.
I still see the internet as a machine I operate for money and entertainment, and not the substrate of my identity or reality. This is also a fairly masculine coded view, as it dismisses the public sphere of gossip and narratives as separate from a Real made of consequences and competence, where the internet is not a dominion of truth the way real friendships are. It sounds marginal in the current discourse, but really there are still operators around who know ways out of this hallucination a lot of people were born into and can't see the edges of. It's not a mystery, you just turn the phone off for a bit and then live and relate according to the results.
I was one of those technology skids at that time and had more hope for the world. It was a time before I learned ****** was an *** *** *********** job. Before I watched Ron Paul collect the largest grassroots donation drive ('Moneybomb') and then his reach get clubbed like a baby seal by the establishment thereafter. It made me realize The Farm is real and what slop most Farm animals enjoy is just that: slop, prepared in a manner which makes the animal more useful/productive relative to cost. I also realize that there are complexities to ascending to the class of Farmer (or merely Farm-hand) which call for the cybernetic sentimental feedback system being built. How do you manage a farm of human livestock and not get killed? How do you do it in such a way that you can plan a hundred years out and hand it all off to your choice grandson(s)?
It's probably easier on your social life to be a vegan, compared to not being on Facebook.
and yet...
I’ve been saying for a while that I expect the next big “veganeque” movement to be some kind of modern luddites. Maybe not as detached from modern society as the Amish, but a more 90s-like tech scene.
No cell phone on them at all times (but maybe some equivalent to a car phone/pay phone), placing the restriction to consciously “log on” to the internet, no (at least ad-based) social media, and maybe keep their online persona to appearances on mostly decentralized forums.
Personally, I know it would benefit me to detach from the one social media platform I have left and am fully addicted to (YouTube), but it’s hard when that is the platform that videos are stored on (though if I really cared, I would only subscribe to channels via RSS and watch them or individually search for things I wish to see instead of infinitely scrolling.) It’s also hard to keep up with group activities or the best classifieds listings or local music/arts events without Facebook.
I don’t believe that there will ever be a true competitor for services that can operate at scale like Facebook and YouTube (especially the latter), but I expect these modern luddites to accept this and reject those platforms even if it is socially ostracizing (much like veganism). To fill the void, they’ll create platforms and devices for them specifically. I imagine the goal of the platforms will be to avoid unnecessary bloat and keep hosting/maintenance costs low, which seems relatively easy if sucking every last second of retention out the user is not financially incentivized like it is in ad-based platforms. I expect the hardware to prioritize cost-efficiency, repairability, and a minimal feature set that doesn’t require frequent upgrades.
Then I imagine for a time, the movement will become trendy and people will begin flooding those platforms. The challenge then becomes to avoid capitalizing on the influx and keep the initial morals in mind and not start showing ads/trying to increase retention time. I think those projects may need to be decentralized and/or established as nonprofits with stated non-retractable tenets from their creation (“We shall never serve advertisements”, “We shall prioritize the distribution of useful information above all else”, etc.)
It’s a utopian view of the future, but I think it is possible. I think we’ll hit a day when we realize that spending 10+ hours a day staring at glowing rectangles is not bringing us closer to real fulfillment. I expect that as long as capitalism is the dominant economic force, businesses will always embrace the newest technology to avoid a massive gap in their output when compared to competitors, and the tech companies will always be pushing new addictive technology as long as it isn’t globally regulated, but after work, the people will wake up to the fact that they at least have a choice on whether or not they spend the rest of their leisure time staring at glowing rectangles.
Yet I still haven’t woken up myself.
Related:
Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38720087 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)
Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16697004 - March 2018 (262 comments)
Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714509 - Feb 2017 (1 comment)
Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998698 - Nov 2016 (548 comments)
The NYT piece those were about is https://web.archive.org/web/20171114021224/https://www.nytim.... Not the same as OP but same topic, author, year.
Quit social media if you cannot maintain a healthy relationship with it. But please do not just pull the plug because someone on the Internet told you it would improve your life. This is far from a guarantee.
I quit Facebook a few years back because of enough conversations on HN convincing me it would be a positive choice. It was not, and I regret it. I've since rejoined FB but my network of friends did not completely recover.
People here will tell you that FB friends you don't go out of your way to contact via not-FB methods aren't really friends. They are full of shit. That may be true for them.
I think you're hinting at a hidden problem: our vocabulary has not caught up with the way social media has evolved, and we need new terms.
People actually LIKE, perhaps even need, the social aspects of social media. But that's become such a small part of the experience for many people- the ads and attention-hacking with cheap stimuli burying the positive interactions.
I don't want to quit my connections, as you say. But I do want to quit this daily hypnosis that reels is trying to subject me to.
I would call that latter something more like "possessive media" - it needs to have your attention at all times and needs every scrap of data it can gather about you. I want less possessive media and more social media.
> I do want to quit this daily hypnosis that reels is trying to subject me to.
100% agree on that. A couple months ago I got caught up in reels and spent like two hours watching videos. And then I thought ... what the hell did I just do? I don't feel fulfilled, I didn't learn anything meaningful, I feel like I just binged on candy and want to throw up.
Now I avoid reels like the plague. I just log in a couple times a week to see pictures from friends and family. As soon as I see a really attractive reel preview, I remind myself that it isn't nearly as awesome as the preview looks, and close the page.
Can you please tell us why leaving Facebook was not a positive choice for you?
Also why it is important that 'your network of friends recovers'?
I had friends on FB going back to high school. Neighborhood kids we hung with after school. People I've met at various jobs over the years and become friendly enough to keep in touch outside of work.
Did we interact every day? Nope. Just casually. But we have a shared history going back 50 years, and had enjoyable low key interactions periodically.
Turning off FB killed all of those connections, and not all of them came back when I got a new account a year later. Heck, a couple thought I had unfriended them and felt slighted.
And to top it off -- I didn't actually have a problem with FB. It didn't ruin my life. I did (and still do) visit about once or twice a week. I don't doom scroll, I don't get all jealous of someone's vacation pictures, new house, new car, whatever. I did not actually have a social media problem that needed solving. I gave too much value to what randos on HN said.
> why it is important that 'your network of friends recovers'?
Because I enjoy the casual contact with all of these people I've known over the years. Even if I don't share enough current interests to spend a lot of time hanging out with them, I get positive feelings from staying connected.
(2016)
Especially important because most of his commentary focuses on the dominant social media paradigm of the time. Mastodon barely existed when this post went live, Mike Masnick was years from writing the paper that inspired Bluesky[0], and it would be strange if someone whose whole thing is getting away from social media kept up on new developments.
This post is an interesting historical artifact, but shouldn't be mistaken for contemporary commentary.
[0] https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
What's changed, though, really? I quit[0] social media near the end of 2019, and it greatly improved my mental health and life. While I haven't tried some of the newer options, I've kept up with new developments in the space. Nothing about the "new" social media platforms makes them at all attractive for me to take a second look and join back up.
If anything, things are worse. It's even more "algorithmic" and engagement-focused, continuing to promote outrage culture. Platforms like TikTok have turned addictive endless scrolling into a science. I know a few people who spend a significant number of hours of their days on TikTok and Twitter (ahem, sorry, "X"), and it just kinda makes me sad. (And I probably spend more time than is healthy on HN.)
[0] I still have my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, but I don't post to them anymore, and I'm signed out of them on all my devices (and I've deleted the mobile apps). I don't allow myself to ever sign in on mobile. Once every 6 months or so I'll sign into Facebook for some specific purpose (like looking up someone's contact information when it's for some reason not stored in any of my usual places). Out of curiosity I'll scroll down the feed, and it's just kinda crap. Stuff from people I don't actually follow, stuff from people I do follow but is kinda boring, and interestingly the feed is dominated by the same 15 or so people (even though I'd amassed a little over 1k "friends" before I quit). I limit myself to no more than five minutes, and I don't post, comment, or even like anything.
The last time I signed into Instagram (probably two or three years ago), the experience was awful. I remember when it was just a reverse-chronological feed of the people I follow (and only the people I follow). But now (well, 2-3 years ago) the majority of items in my feed are either ads or promoted/reshared posts from people I don't follow at all. Stuff from people I follow is maybe one out of every five or six items. And it's all out of order, so I'd see something that someone posted a week ago, followed by, 20 items later, something that they posted a couple days ago. It's a shame; 2012 Instagram was such a beautiful platform.
So while yes, this article is now 8 years old, I don't think anything has changed for the better. The fundamental problems are still there, and have only gotten worse.
Oddly enough, the most beneficial thing I have is my Twitter account, because I can often DM airlines or companies support (like fedex support) for quicker responses.
Mastodon and Bluesky are still such minor players (even though I enjoy these projects and am optimistic about their future) that I don’t see anywhere where this doesn’t pass for contemporary commentary.
This is purely anecdotal but with Twitter/X removing blocks there seems to be an influx of new users on bluesky, it's definitely not quite on the scale of other major social medias but it seems like it is well on it's way there.
It depends what the product is for you.
If the product is the social graph, masto isnt even on the radar.
If the product is the discussion framework without the advertising or social graph. If you can find 15 people to have the same interactions with manually its a superior player.
Isn't Bluesky just a copy of Twitter from that era, anyway?
Not at all, not even close. They took the Twitter model and reinvented and reimagined it from 140 character posts to a timeline and brought us the 300 character posts to a timeline.
Bluesky was supposed to replace Twitter and turn it into a federated platform.
Some details on its creation and exit from Twitter here: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/13/bluesky-is-building-the-...
But federation is no longer on the table?
What do you mean? It's federated now.
Source? From everything I've read, BlueSky made a theoretically federated protocol, pulled millions of users onto its single central instance, then refused to enable federation in any meaningful way, so you're either on the central instance or you're effectively on some other platform that is separate from BlueSky and is shit. (Meanwhile on Mastodon, there are so many instances and no clear center - not even mastodon.social, since I block that one and rarely notice any loss)
I don't know what you've read, but:
https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting
https://atproto.com/guides/applications
https://github.com/bluesky-social
It's all there. Bluesky itself is split into tens of instances and has been since last year. A few people even run their own relays. Your information is very out of date.
It's very enlightening to fast from social media for an extended period of time (say about a month). If you return after that, you can almost feel the shift in your head. It's something I've experienced first hand.
As someone who’s strongly considering just this, could you describe the changes you felt? And — if you again returned to social media for a prolonged period — whether and how quickly those positive changes reverted?
I have pretty much quit Reddit. It didn’t completely change my life, but it was a good thing.
Not getting involved in internet drama is great. I have completely lost the appetite for it. I haven’t heard about American politics for a while. I read and sketch more. My phone is easier to put down and less tempting to pick up; it gets boring quickly. I noticed that I’ll often be the last one to look at my phone when I am around others.
I spend a lot more time in the real world, touching grass. I’d say that this is the cause of my departure, not the effect. Online interactions are not nearly as satisfying.
Being out of it and staying out of it means that you don’t know about the local internet drama, and that you don’t get any notifications from that site. With each visit, the website gets less interesting because nothing interesting is waiting for you there.
My platform of choice was YouTube until they introduced shorts and took a more aggressive stance against ad-blockers. I quit initially because I was against the direction the platform was heading, but realized quickly that I didn't miss it. It dawned on me that I had been investing 8 - 12 hours of my life weekly to passively consume content that I couldn't even remember. I noticed that at any slight moment of down-time I'd impulsively reach for YouTube, it's almost like I was conditioned to do so.
At the end of the day that's what Google wants. They want you to spend as much of your time as possible watching as many advertisements as possible. Most social media platforms are adversarial. Once I saw this I could not unsee it. Warning others is pointless. They'll be annoyed or just think you're weird. Not one person I know has taken my advice, so I've stopped giving it.
Tangent aside, for me the benefit of not using social media has been that I can invest the time into what I find fulfilling. The quality of the entertainment I consume has gone way up. The downside is that it's isolating. No I can't follow you on platform X, no I cannot view the link you've sent me to platform Y. Everyone, especially in my age group, considers it strange.
I quit any non small community social media a few years ago and it's been really nice. My tolerance for trolls and thinking with people on the Internet is has dropped away down and I think I'm better for it.
Certainly feels better
>thinking with people on the Internet is has dropped away down
What?
Also, congrats for being less tolerant. I like that.
Google's autocorrect "corrects" words it thought you meant, sometimes words later so you don't see it. I put arguing, but Google decided I meant thinking
That's some spooky shit right there. Is this a Chrome thing?
Nah, the android Gboard. Super frustrating. And the toggle to turn off that "feature" is shared with all autocorrection. If you disable grammar corrections you don't get any typo fixes. And there's no setting that says "only change the last word I typed"
I quit social media, but the problem is that in the modern dating world a lot of people care whether you have an Instagram and that sort of thing. I truly hate social media, but I find myself considering remaking it just to improve my dating life. It's kind of a depressing situation, to be honest.
Some other comments are along these lines but I’ll offer an anecdote.
In college I was wearing a Halo biking shirt in the computer lab. A female friend remarked, “no one is going to date you if you wear that shirt.” Another friend nearby heard and quipped back, “or only the right girls will date him wearing that shirt.”
You should view your preferences more as a filter. While you should be open to new experiences which may change those presences, if something makes you truly unhappy, you are better finding a partner who won’t force that in your life.
Would that be an improvement, though? Do you really want a relationship with someone who cares if you have an active Instagram account? Feels like a great filter (heh) to weed out the chaff.
(If you're just casually dating around / looking for hookups, then sure, do what you think you need to do.)
It reminds me when I was young thinking I couldn't get a date because I didn't have six pack abs.
Then when I got in really good shape I thought it was because I didn't make enough money.
When I started making money I thought it was because I wasn't tall enough.
There is no way having social media or not is mattering that much. It is just in your head.
If they care, they aren’t worth it - why date a sheep?
My almost post-social media life has been interesting. I ditched Twitter, came back to it briefly, then ditched it again when it was purchased because I found my mental health growing increasingly fragile with the constant outrage, the need to keep track of who the main character of the day was or risk the ire of your circle, and the increasing filtering of my timeline.
I quit Facebook, other than keeping an account for announcing major life events to the older people who were still on it, because I was frustrated that I never received any posts from family or close friends in the heavily filtered timeline, I kept receiving time-sensitive posts (say about a hurricane event) for weeks after the post was no longer relevant, and Meta's increasingly metastasized privacy practices.
I joined Mastodon and found a calm, down to earth, almost boring place. The decentralized nature of the platform certainly means there are some not-at-all boring parts of the Mastoverse, but it felt more like being in an old-style forum than anything else. I'm still there, though my participation isn't significant.
I tried Blue Sky because all my Twitter people were there ... and it was IMMEDIATELY like hitting a drug after being off it for a while. It was all about main characters and outrage.
For me, in hindsight, it was like sitting in front of a slot machine, feeding in quarters, waiting for one to win. And watching people who did win inevitably milkshake duck themselves out of favor. It was briefly an amazing, buzzy world to share both humor and excitement about whatever events you wanted, but that certainly didn't last.
I don't miss it.
Where is this magic side of the Fediverse? What I saw: Rust lunatics, hardline Communists or straight up Nazis, the most extreme alphabet people or the most extreme red-pillers. And many of them have the overlapping topics of questionable *orn or even more questionable anime content. Every time I get a random post from a an a Fediverse instance and I dare check it's main feed to see what it's like, it's always (always!) a dumpster fire.
I don't like Twitter much but if I had to pick one or the other it would be a no-brainer.
Meanwhile, my feed is photographers, linux people (because of course), and a weird confluence of unobjectionable academics. I saw what you're describing in my brief visit to the Lemmy world, and I absolutely know that there are hostile and degenerate Mastodon instances, but most of the big instances have defederated with them, so I don't get sniped by any of the freaks.
Now, I do pretend the global list simply doesn't exist and focus on the local instance list and people I follow. I don't know of anyone who uses the global list. I also tend to follow hashtags rather than individuals. (I'm 100% sure that twitter would show at least as much garbage on their feed if they didn't filter, especially these days. This is not an argument for Twitter's style of filtering.)
I'm 36 and somehow I simply avoided social media for the most part. At least never used platforms like facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc.
It all just seemed like a time waster and not really anything interesting.
I use sites like this of course, and I suppose that is some form of social media though.
Where does one advertise these days if not social media? Where does one learn about local goings-on outside of their _immediate_ circle of family/close friends/colleagues if not social media?
With a small local business, social media gives an audience. If you're selling anything visually captivating, it performs well in these spaces. We sell cut flowers on the side, so…
I don't ask these questions out of support of Instagram or Facebook, but I stop in there regularly because I don't know to learn a little bit about the greater community around me. My life is busy enough with work/family.
The cost of all this is being exposed to a lot of attention bait and I honestly don't like how I feel using it sometimes. But we've built up the social media ecosystem as a pillar of society at this point.
> Where does one learn about local goings-on outside [...] if nor social media?
Imagine, there are people who don't care that much besides their family/friends circle. Maybe some newspaper/-site from time to time, but why cope with all the other stuff too all the time? Life goes on too if one doesn't know abou the latest stuff.
Imagine there were hundreds or thousands of year of humanity you didn't know how your neighbour is except you walked there.
At least that's fine for me. I don't miss social media (besides HN), and I don't miss anything.
One way: You make a list of the venues and organizations that host the things you are interested in, you go to those events, and you talk to people.
He still advertises on social media. He still uses Facebook for his courses.
He just uses his wife's account.
> Where does one learn about local goings-on
I subscribed to my local NHPR newsletter that tells me local events. There is also local news, newspaper, or radio.
It depends heavily on where you are in life and what demographics you belong to. If you're a guy in your 40s with a wife and kids and a white picket fence there's probably no harm in quitting. I was drawn to social media (and earlier forms, like forums and IRC) because I grew up in a backwards, repressive rural community and was outcasted in school and was able to find "my people" online. Online social communities are how a lot of people who are rejected by society due to disability, sexual orientation etc. get all of their positive social interaction from.
Would love to hear Venkatesh Rao / Cal Newport discuss this at some point: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/against-waldenpondin...
Another related post: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo...
From the second link:
> Tenured professors with status in a discipline can tune out the world and do "deep work" peers recognize as "important" before it is done (with accompanying ivory-tower/angels-on-pinhead risks).
> But a free agent, with no institutional safety net, no underwriting of exploratory expeditions by disciplinary consensus, and no research grants, cannot afford this luxury.
I don't use any of facebook, instagram, LinkedIn, tiktok, X, bluesky, mastodon, snap, ... and it's not even hard. On the rare occasions I took a look at those I found them boring beyond believe. Even mastodon following people I am actually interested in feels like a 90% waste of time.
He states:
> What the market values is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable.
> what the market dismisses are activities that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value. Well social media use is the epitome of an easy to replicate activity that does not produce a lot of value [...] by definition the market is not going to give those activieis a lot of value [...]."
Yet in the years since this TEDx talk we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.
> ... we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.
For most influencers, they're not the ones with the wealth and power. Many of them are barely getting by. They rent content houses, clothing, cars, and other things they need to put on their facade.
Pretty much all of the wealth and power is in the hands of the people that employ the influencers.
perhaps a decade or more ago? not now.
you will never become a streaming millionaire. talking heads like beast and pewdiepie employ literal armies of Hollywood editors and writers. For every organically grown insufferable content monster created on Youtube, ten more are vat-grown by a billion dollar industry designed to shepherd you into a fantasy consumerist lifestyle.
These powerhouses of industry control the flow of capital at a level you will never be able to. they secure rights to music and video clips at rates you could never get, have tie-ins to major brands media and celebrities on day one, and are programmed with an endless firestorm of bots and preferential algorithmic treatment on every FAANG product in order to guarantee their success.
You are painfully unaware of the difference between being a Youtube video creator and being a streamer. Mr. Beast is not a streamer. He is a packaged video creator. PewDiePie is a reaction video creator who occasionally streams. They are not what people think of when they think of streamers.
To be a professional streamer usually takes a combination of talent and concentration that most people simply don't have. But to say that you can't become one? LOL.
The AVERAGE millionaire streamer on twitch is so painfully unedited that they end up getting banned a couple times a year for saying stupid things live on air. Twitch and their sponsors practically THROW money at them to spend an hour or two to sponsor content. There's an entire backend bounty system which is only available to partners which will pay you based on your audience size. I've seen a guy with 3K viewers get a $30K check for 3 hours worth of sponsored content.
Isn’t it on the decline yet?
Facebook is for boomers.
Twitter is weird and we all realised how pointless it is to spend time falling out on there.
Instagram feels a bit long in the tooth.
LinkedIn is a parody of itself.
Reddit feels like it’s growing but I think that avoids the worst of social media.
TikTok and YouTube shorts seem popular but aren’t really social media. It’s just time wasting junk.
All in all, social media feels like it peaked a while back.
Instagram is a must if you want to get any real benefit out of using dating apps in 2024. The only way to talk to anybody without paying is to look at the profile, get their instagram url, and talk over there. I'm an old millennial who basically only uses HN for social media, and unfortunately IG is a must have.
Devil's advocate: Not having an IG let me filter out a lot more unserious matches on said apps.
Just pay for a subscription to a dating app if you can afford it. It's money well spent when you really want to meet a partner and are struggling to do so IRL. As long as you go for one that doesn't have the Tinder UX of course...
A dating app subscription is super cheap, like 40 bucks a month. I think it makes more sense to pay that then try and circumvent the system by messaging people through Instagram
Why would you willingly pay the scamming middlemen?
How is it a scam? They are running a service to connect you to other people looking for a relationship. The service works - I found my last 3 girlfriends through dating apps.
I'm not going to message random people's Instagram unsolicited, I would find it annoying to on the receiving end of that. My mother and girlfriend have both complained about receiving unwanted attention from unknown men through social media.
Honestly trying to understand your point of view, do you think dating apps should be free? They definitely aren't free to run.
Presumably your mother and girlfriend don't have their Instagram profiles listed on their dating app profile that say to message them there. Just like there's a very critical difference between a solicited and unsolicited dick pic, if someone is literally asking to be messaged on Instagram, it's different than messaging random people that didn't actually ask to be messaged, especially about crypto scams.
In my post I specifically said "unsolicited". There is of course ethical ways to message people through Instagram, but even in that case it is going to be less efficient then just using the dating app as intended.
Twitter/X is fantastic for breaking news. For example during the first assassination attempt you would find new details on there that would then appear on MSM newscasts one to two hours later.
It also helps immensely to curate lists of interests to help filter out the noise and politics.
Honest question, why is breaking news important? How exactly does knowing unsubstantiated details about an event immediately male one’s life better?
It isn't important. The vast majority of "journalism" is as worthless as the vast majority of "discourse" around it. If it doesn't affect you personally, you can likely safely ignore it and if it does affect you personally, you probably won't need the news to tell you about it.
"Breaking news" used to be relevant in that it was news that "broke into" existing programming. It didn't necessarily make people's lives better but at least it tended to cover matters of high national interest like Presidential assassinations or disasters or wars. But now that everything is breaking news all the time everywhere, the term no longer means anything other than being a synonym for "current news," which isn't even really impressive anymore.
This is what I always wonder. Any time I see a news story (even on MSM) marked as "BREAKING" or "EXCLUSIVE", I'm like... who cares? That just means you either a) rushed to publish without making sure you got your details right, or b) you paid someone to not shop their story around to other outlets (which is gross).
My life would not have been impacted in the least knowing about the Trump assassination attempt a few hours later (or even the next day), rather than minutes after it happened.
The MSM has enough problems these days with journalistic integrity and practices. I don't think the teeming mobs on Twitter are an improvement, though.
Unless it's regarding immediate local emergency that you might need to respond to, breaking news has zero value besides a brain tickle and something to talk about.
If you feel you have any kind of mood or attention challenges, as many now do, you might want to double check if it's something you should be optimizing for.
Hard agree. Nearly nothing outside your real personal life is so important it can't be learnt about tomorrow, or next week.
There are exceptions; if you have a flight booked that day and didn't learn about the Crowdstrike thing till you got there, that'll be a problem, but it would've been a problem regardless of your immediate knowledge of it.
How is your life improved by getting that news minute by minute instead of an hour, or even a day, later?
It’s an excellent question, but I do think you can get valuable insights from seeing how a major political event unfolds in real time, as long as it’s something you’re interested in. It can help you to view the subsequent news bulletins with a critical eye and interest and it can give you a richer depth of understanding than you would otherwise get.
If it’s an event that you’re not particularly interested in, then there’s not much value in getting details in advance.
Another thing, it’s not just hours. Sometimes it’s months (or in rare cases years) before a recurring topic on social media finally makes it to the news, because it’s controversial/narrative-defying, so it takes them a long time to work out how to talk about it. I don’t want to mention specific examples because it would be distracting, but there are a few topics I see mentioned daily/weekly on the news today that were pretty much absent a few years ago, yet were heavily discussed on Twitter at the time, and I am very glad I was aware of them.
or indeed, not at all? :)
In today's world information overload is a bigger problem than lack of information. It follows that unactionable information is useless.
What is actionable about knowing about the assassination attempt 1-2 hours before others? Did you act differently based on this information? Did you benefit from this sufficiently to weigh up for the time spent on Twitter 20 times a day at the off-chance of catching a breaking newsstory before MSM would?
At what cost? You would need to monitor your spyware all day to gain any value. I'd rather save the time and read the news more efficiently.
There is a marked difference between "Breaking new developments" and misinformation being spread to juice engagement.
Nobody should pretend that Twitter is a place where accurate information travels at light speed. It is in desperate need of moderation and being run by a man with clear monetary incentive to mislead the public.
> Nobody should pretend that Twitter is a place where accurate information travels at light speed.
I agree, but I think a lot of people who use it view it that way.
> It is in desperate need of moderation and being run by a man with clear monetary incentive to mislead the public.
I don't think you wrote that the way you meant to.
I don't know how you can possibly say TikTok isn't social media. That seems like a rather absurd claim. What's your justification?
TikTok is 100% social media
Although the line can get interesting. When I was active on Reddit I would argue that Reddit was not SM. From my perspective, Reddit was end stage web forum technology and link aggregators
All the bespoke forums of the late 90s and early 2000s died for the most part and there is now a subreddit for every niche hobby that used to have a forum
This stuff all predates Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, livejournal, that I would argue were new paradigms and the start of what we know as social media
However to anyone not online during those times, Reddit is just another site where people post details of their own lives. Reddit responded by adding profiles and followers and all kinds of pseudo SM features
I haven’t used it much but I think the main feed is very algorithmic, so you swipe for your dopamine without paying much attention to the profile. Because of that it’s not really tied to your identity in quite the same way.
It also seems quite professionalised in that the big content producers fill the feed.
There’s also something about it being video which makes it feel harmful but in a different way than a text based platform.
I tend to think of TikTok as more of an entertainment platform rather than peer to peer social media.
I’m not the target audience though so could be wide of the mark!
The "new" reddit constantly tries to promote brainrot to you when you are in the main feed. You can evade this by never using the main feed. No one wants to let you just read what you want to read.
This is one of the reasons why I have returned to print media. Unfortunately, a lot of magazines and newspapers are also really bad now also. The Wall Street Journal has fallen off a cliff, turning into something between Cosmopolitan and Business Insider, and I am cancelling my subscription this year. The Economist has done a good job keeping up the quality level. The fact that something is in print does not necessarily make it better if all the writers have brainrot or the content is optimized for digital engagement first.
The internet has become a medium for poor people to watch unlimited user-generated episodes of Maury and Jerry Springer. The only internet I really want to use is to work, buy products, and read my email. Getting older is bad enough without the computer trying to make me dumber on top of that.
I don't use it but I find that claim a bit odd. Would you consider YouTube social media technically? I personally wouldn't even though it has social components with comments and personal channels.
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> Reddit feels like it’s growing but I think that avoids the worst of social media.
Really?
Reddit is a cesspool because they drove off the power users in favor of normies who won't block the ads.
Social media or news or tv/netflix/streaming influence your life alot. Just stop using it and you will feel much better.
So, should I join so that I can quit?
The coming of the current cluster fuck was clear decades ago. Anyone who wasn't enamored by meme illiteracy never took that train...
Social media is about exploiting gossip and social comparison to make money. It has been from the start a stupid habit with no redeeming qualities. However, after Zuck released Llamma and other AI models for free, i consider it a fair tax on stupidity that is helping to advance frontier technology
Less "social" media, more social research paper / life hack resharing makes the world a better place.
PS: Always hide the best meme in endnote 14 so your fellow meme scientists know exactly where to find the real discovery.
I quit social media after the Snowden revelations.
I remember thinking it likely that many people would. My naivety knew few bounds at the time.
Re-reading my own comment, and worried the poster I responded to might take that as a reverse-jibe about their own naivety - I didn't even think of that the first time I wrote it, and now want to explicitly say that wasn't my point.
I sincerely thought people would quit social media following the Snowden revelations, and I did myself, and then could not believe that they didn't seem to care at all. It was a painful and jarring learning experience.
>might take that as a reverse-jibe
I did not, but thanks for being considerate. I took it as this:
>I sincerely thought people would quit social media following the Snowden revelations, and I did myself, and then could not believe that they didn't seem to care at all. It was a painful and jarring learning experience.
It's been over 11 years now. I would imagine it's not unlike living in a former soviet country in that everyone knows it's going on, but we just don't talk about it.
Indeed. The same people from before who scoffed at the possibility of mass surveillance are the very same who pivoted immediately to a new justification of the status quo - something about national security, or it not being that bad, or it being a bit of a crazy world which we have to face, or whatever.
It's almost as if their reasoned arguments were always nothing more than poorly slapped together ad hoc justifications for whatever happens to be the norm at a given moment.
The funny think, this youtube video it is on YouTube which is a social media platform
It's where their target audience is.
I use social media merely for distraction. Over the years I gained nearly zero benefit from using it. Shallow connections, useful looking useless content.
Several of the comments here certainly have some superiority complex issues as well as what would appear isolation issues. You seem cynical towards a large majority of modern society. If you need a hug, I’m here.
That may be but it doesn't take much page turning in a history book to find plenty of instances where society has been very wrong and not even in the distant past.
Society changes slowly. The iterative speed of computers, the iterative speed of feedback on a global communications network based on those computers is new, it has many orders of magnitude faster response times than society's ability to adapt to the changes it brings and the systemic study of human behavior over years and years leading to mathematical models of behavior and responses has created massive information asymmetry in society and the scale of manipulation a small group of people can leverage is astounding, being skeptical of society's value propositions seems in order.
Can you explain what you mean by that?
It's fairly straightforward. Just take a look at a few of the top comments here wherein the commenter describes not being as dumb (for lack of a better term) as peers for not joining into social media. I'm not linking to them as I'm not trying to incite anything here. Bros need hugs too.
Why not both?
I'd reckon the median user is not someone who has been "publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week" at any point of their life and that the most likely risk is mindless consumption rather than endless production. But just quit following random strangers on the Internet, keep social media as a way to maintain your irw network of relations, and you'll usually be alright.
Sure, then we can discuss about the inherent issues of the platforms (which are many), but first one has to exploit their own agency to the utmost degree.
I would say he is write about LinkedIn, TikTok, Snap, Meta and its associated gram's, threads and face... BUT - HN has a different vibe, this is a community with sharing knowledge and information - on HN, I never doom scroll - there is genuine interaction and useful content. To some extent X provides useful updates from the main AI labs, so it is knowing how to use it and not be used by it.
It’s all the same. HN is just smaller, but before Reddit disabled 3rd party apps HN was even more focused and, IMO, a little less startup/growth hacking focused.
If HN ever gets big, you’ll see the same things.
Someone needs to make a good Facebook groups/pages alternative. That'd make it easier for most.
I’m about 9 months off social media (not including Hackernews, if you consider that SM). I have no regrets whatsoever. I’m in my late 20’s so SM came into my sphere when I was around 16. I haven’t quite “grown up with it”, but it’s been an omnipresent force for most of my teenage and adult life.
> I am better at making time to catch up with the people I really care about, be that in-person or over WhatsApp. > When I do catch up with someone, I genuinely have no idea what’s been going on in their life and that makes the catch up a lot more enjoyable and engaging. I haven’t passively kept up to date on their every movement through Instagram stories or Tweets like some kind of ghostly stalker. The best example of this that I can give is that my partner and I got engaged to be married ~4 months ago. Nothing posted on SM, just WhatsApp messages to close friends and family. I get to keep reliving the joy of telling people and witnessing the ecstatic surprise and pure love on their faces each time I catch up with someone I haven’t seen for a while. > I am much more aware of just how much everyone uses their phones. Take a look around you. Sitting on the bus, waiting in a queue, riding an escalator, pissing at a urinal. Our minds are being constantly bombarbed with mostly useless, inane shite. Cat videos, stories of that person you went to school with 10 years ago doing stupid drunk things, misinformation from your scary uncle on Facebook etc. I let my mind wander more and it feels all the better for it.
I did, deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X). And it helped me a lot to gain back my inner peace. My meditation was deeper, more profound, I genuinely gained back my inner peace. The constant bombardement with posts made to boost the ego of people is toxic for the consumer of these images / texts.
But then, in the context of the Gaza conflict, I realized that X is a very good source to follow intellectuals, thinkers, journalits whom I wouldn't read otherwise in Germany, where anyone is vilified who even wears a Kefiyeh. When you see how our western media frames, justifies, whitewashes a conflict caracterised as a genocide by many scholars, we need other platforms to hear those voices.
Now this sounds like the alt right that wants its platforms. But hear me out. There are intellectuals who show the headlines, the framing, and you cannot help but think that Noam Chomsky's book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media", written in 1988, is more relevant than ever.
X has the capacity to show different perspectives and can be invaluable. But it's also a curse exploited by many. Russia, China, Iran, but also our allies. See this for instance[1].
[1] "The Israelis Destabilizing Democracy and Disrupting Elections Worldwide - National Security & Cyber - Haaretz" // https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2022-1...
Agree with everything in your comment except I assume Reddit is better than X (I don't use X for other reasons, but occasionally see things posted from there on Reddit or Instagram).
But worth noting, you've presumably been using HN since 2016 which is also "social media" :P
There is only one I use: Orange Reddit (aka HackerNews).
> Quit Social Media
You can follow the author at https://x.com/profcalnewport .
In bio it states `Not Cal Newport and unaffiliated w/ Newport, he's not on social media.`
From bio - "Not Cal Newport and unaffiliated w/ Newport, he's not on social media."
Heavy irony here
Quit? Ban!
I'm trying to learn to use RSS to replace some of my social media use. I recommend RSS Guard, it seems to be the best client around. Liferea and Thunderbird are good options, too.
Still I'm glad Mr. Newport has a comments section on his youtube videos. He doesn't always explain things that clearly.
Social media is not problematic if you engage with intent and use alternative sources to check claims. People unfortunate to never have been trained in Defense Against The Dark Arts of Propaganda and Manipulation are at risk but that's always been true, even when all media was of the printed sort. Basic critical analysis skills are vital to survival and mental health in this world.
By 'engage with intent' I just mean not being a passive absorber of the stream of content that's being promoted at whatever site, but instead always have some focus on a particular topic that interests you. Incidentally I notice many of the 'quit social media' stories are published in outlets like the NYTimes which would instead like you to be a passive, well-conditioned absorber of their content, and hence off their advertising stream.
The corporation is run for profit, it doesn't care about the collateral damage it may cause as long as it doesn't impact the bottom line.
The elephant in the room for me is that the person who bought Twitter and keeps shitposting also keeps launching rockets into space and landing them back, among other things that fall into the category of “how the fuck are we going to pull this off?”
I don’t know who Cal is and I have no idea what Deep Work he’s done since he quit social media, but, best of luck to the lad.
I quit social media over 10 years ago, already having been a conscientious objector to Facebook and other platforms, much to the confusion of my classmates who didn't understand my idiosyncratic positions on digital privacy, attention span, banality, and brainrot.
It's gotten to the point where I view the narcissism of the modern 21st century social media user the same way I would view a crack addict smoking a pipe out in public, unable to pry their hands away from their glowing plastic rectangles, swiping incessantly in the hopes of getting just another dose of sweet dopamine with every refresh, or some artificial symbol of social validation in the form of more likes and upvotes.
Somehow even in the wake of the Snowden revelations people are still ambling off of cliffs for fear of being left behind by the herd of lemmings. I feel vindicated as the years go on with every news story or opinion piece I read about (dissatisfaction with) the growing encroachment of surveillance capitalism, ad-tech and social media into our personal lives, and all for what? Some shitty memes and "influencers" peddling their garbage through thinly veiled advertisements?
When I am exposed to mainstream social media content I can't believe people subject themselves to the digital equivalent of ass-to-mouth that is the brainrot of the algorithmically driven social media feed. If "you are what you eat" were analogized to an information diet, most social media users would be consuming informational shit and consequently producing the same 140-byte thoughts or reciting the same 5-second memes.
If the attention economy is indeed a real concept, there is a premium for the ability to hold your concentration on something for more than half an hour and produce thoughts whose complexity is more than just a few bytes.
Shouldn't lack of social media make people happier in theory? Because you sound to be quite resentful and angry.
Less resentfulness and more contempt or pity, as one would regard a methhead tweaking out in public; except here it's a wirehead getting off on social media.
Your comment and mine (see my other comment) are almost mirror reflections lol. Sounds like similar ages at the time too
I did this without having to get inspiration from others. And I did it at a young age (under 18), when all my friends and the world were flocking to social media and spilling their thoughts and PII everywhere. I have nothing, and have had nothing ever since (discounting HN).
People are sheep, and people are stupid. Most people waste their lives looking at a mass fake digital mask of their peers, and people they don’t even know.
Myself on the other hand, I spend almost all my spare time with people and animals I love, studying, reading books, and thinking about bigger things.
You are what you consume, which makes most people morons. Same if you consume “the news”, care about celebrities.
Do you happen to have purple hair and wear all black clothes with as many piercings in your face as you can get? /s
Programmers (cs students, "engineers") are one of the most pompous group of people who think their ability to #include <stdio.h> gives them some special ability to speak about efficiency, physics, math (other than your run of the mill discrete or remedial linear algebra) or pretty much any other topic on the face of the Earth.
Don't worry about your active Facebook account. People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends). They are outliers not the rule.
>People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends).
What credentials do you hold to make this claim? It better not be a CS degree.
Are these programmers in the room with us now?
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> just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends)
I have no facebook account. I choose to have relationships with my family members and distant friends through physical contact by meeting up and talking regularly on the phone. IMO typing short text messages to people and 'reacting' to theirs with emojis and thumbs up is not a real relationship.