Main complaint with Facebook is how rigid the friendships are. There are people I'm friends with on Facebook that I haven't spoken to in ten years. But it feels weird to delete them. For some reason it feels natural to add everyone you know, even if you've only ever spoken to them for a single evening. To put it another way the edges of the Facebook friend graph don't have weights where the IRL graph does.
I Quit Social Media for a Year
161–170 of 380 posts
Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just as a minor correction: Nobody is telling you that you specifically are the problem. The problem is that as a white male, what is called "western society" was built with you as the presumed default, and that confers to you tons of small benefits that fall into one of two categories: 1) Unfair advantages that allow you certain freedoms other groups don't have, that one could argue no one should have 2) Advantages…
If you're going to say that Western society was built with white males as the presumed default, you might want to also mention who the builders were. And as a broader point, it also might be worth considering how Western society stacks up against all other societies to ever exist.
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Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disconnecting from people trying to push a so called 'culture war' on the general populous seems like a rational choice - as a white male, social media seems to tell me emphatically that I am the problem. Similarly social media pundits from the other side are trying to blame all measure of economic and social ills on brown people/gay people/trans people. Both narratives are patently false. To touch very lightly on po…
Just as a minor correction: Nobody is telling you that you specifically are the problem. The problem is that as a white male, what is called "western society" was built with you as the presumed default, and that confers to you tons of small benefits that fall into one of two categories: 1) Unfair advantages that allow you certain freedoms other groups don't have, that one could argue no one should have 2) Advantages…
>Nobody is telling you that you specifically are the problem.
You are either blissfully unaware of the existence of semi-mainstream news/gossip/propaganda sources like Vox, Salon, Huffington Post and countless others, or you conveniently pretending not to.
>The problem is that as a white male, what is called "western society" was built with you as the presumed default,
Do you have the same problem with Asian people being the presumed default in every Asian country, Latino people being the presumed default in every South American country, Black people being the presumed default in every African country, an so on and so forth? If you choose to answer this question, please refrain from cultural relativism.
Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
>are really different and are people really being fired for it? Absolutely not. The nice thing about being LGBTQPA+* is all the constitutional lawyers that will take your case pro-bono to persecute anyone you can speculatively accuse of discerning something about you. If you are straight then there is basically no such free help available to protect your rights, and have fun trying to bring something up to the suprem…
Actually, as I said, it is legal to discriminate against LGBTQ people in much of the country and the federal government had recently rolled back protections for LGBTQ people. Lawyers are not going to take pro bono cases because LGBTQ status is not constitutionally or federally protected.
Should we change the constitution for you?
Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year
#165My biggest issue with social media is less that it's distracting (IMO not necessarily an unhealthy thing) but that it has, for me, more than anything else seemed to make all aspects of my life a competition with others. On Instagram, you're competing with others on who has the happiest life. On LinkedIn, you're competing with others on who has the steepest career trajectory. Even on Twitter, perhaps more acutely in c…
To be fair, I think you can get the “competition” phenomenon anywhere. I always read people’s blogs about programming and internships and feel like no matter how much I do, I’ll always be behind. So it’s possible that it’s not a social media-only thing.
Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
In between the SV hivemind posts is distributed just enough nuggets of mindblowing technical, business and even medical wisdom (from insanely switched-on people) that it keeps me checking. It's the ultimate infovore loot box.
Well said, finding compelling info on here is such a dopamine rush. Receiving a dopamine rush from learning something interesting is probably a good thing though.
I got a dopamine rush reading this!
Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year
#167My biggest issue with social media is less that it's distracting (IMO not necessarily an unhealthy thing) but that it has, for me, more than anything else seemed to make all aspects of my life a competition with others. On Instagram, you're competing with others on who has the happiest life. On LinkedIn, you're competing with others on who has the steepest career trajectory. Even on Twitter, perhaps more acutely in c…
It is all shit. Everywhere you go it will be shit, just a different flavor. That is what I have taken away from life. Social media is simply white-washing shit experiences and pretending they are gold. Life is not always positive, otherwise you are fooling yourself. I am not cynical. I am just a realist. We need to drop this total farce of a behavior and stop conning each other if we hope to rise above it. Life is ha…
> I am not cynical. I am just a realist.
I agree with your broad premise about social media frequently being a poor representation of day to day life. The it's all shit part probably implies you're at least somewhat cynical. It's clearly not all shit, plenty of it certainly is. People frequently live different quality of lives vs their peers in fact; some people live amazing lives, some people live horrible lives. In a developed country, by far the largest distribution is likely to be a mixture of good and blah, with some occasional amazing and some bad thrown in.
> We need to drop this total farce of a behavior and stop conning each other if we hope to rise above it.
That behavior has always existed, it will always exist, so long as humanity does. Nothing can change it short of altering humanity through technology (and then we're something else), forced evolution (which we have begun, first pitch of the first inning; but it will probably take hundreds of years before we very substantially alter what we are; and we may make these things even worse, sharper). It's hard wired signaling and competition built into human nature, all the way down to the most fundamental aspects of what we are, including the pursuit of reproduction. Social media is nothing more than an aggressive, in your face, projected expression of it. It's the expression of many of the driving forces of human nature, amped up: sex, lust, attraction, status, materialism, greed, competition, envy, jealousy, pride, fear, validation, anger, inspiration, with some awww kittens & puppies thrown in. And that's also why people are drawn to it so intensely, it's a drug rush.
You missed an important checkmark on realism: 'we' can't rise above these things, humanity is these things. That's the actual reality. And it isn't going away, people will be complaining about all of this stuff in exactly the same way 20 or 30 years from now, except this will all seem tame compared to what will occur in the future: it will get worse yet.
Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year
#168Frankly I'm a little bored at these "quit social media" articles. They look sort of all the same to me. Quitting altogether is simple, because there's only one way to do it; quitting altogether. Moderation, on the other hand, is more interesting because there are a number of ways to moderate its use; not just limiting time but also limiting use cases. I'd like to know more about the latter.
Sometimes quitting something entirely is necessary to finally see, in relief, the place that it occupied in your life. After that balance is possible.
Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year
#169None of the top comments respond to or discuss the actual content in the post (e.g. "my ..."), and instead focus on their own anecdotal experiences, based on the headline or social media in general. this also is mirrors the lack of discussion and engagement often associated with social media.
Everyone's just waiting for an excuse to talk.
Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're going to say that Western society was built with white males as the presumed default, you might want to also mention who the builders were. And as a broader point, it also might be worth considering how Western society stacks up against all other societies to ever exist.
Except that Western civilization as in the minds of it's inhabitants likely wouldn't have existed without the subjugation and exploitation of those other societies, including but not limited to: China, India, the Middle East, most of Africa minus Ethiopia, and even some parts of Europe, and much more recently, South America. The West has largely won because it won a lot back in the day, and that inertia builds up and…
There is no realistic scenario where one civilization does not dominate others.
Macro-history is fundamentally about the rise and fall of civilizations - the undesirable elements of this are consistent, but Western tradition and enlightenment has also given us democracy and science, and put us in a collective position where we are so relatively prosperous that we can look at the past with an inflated sense of shame.