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My life after quitting social media

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Re: My life after quitting social media

#101

Post by tomjen3 »

bee_rider wrote: post #79
coding123 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And checking to see if your comment stays near the top, how many up votes, reading the replies to see if you're a smart person or not.

This is what made me delete my Reddit account. I realized I was putting an inappropriate amount of effort into impressing people I'd never meet. Not sure if that treadmill is just built into my personality or if it was specifically caused by the site. I don't feel it here as much, although it could just be that the account there was older, so it felt like it'd developed more of an 'identity' (silly as that is).

I have a couple Reddit accounts and that is a game you can get caught up in. The trick is that you can always score more points by making a stupid in-group comment on /r/politics or /r/funny than you can being smart. Once you know this the number matters a lot less (at least to me).

Re: My life after quitting social media

#102

Post by randomdata »

vymague wrote: post #28
billfruit wrote: post #20

Sometimes I feel HN also is a similar attention sink, even Wikipedia as well. They also can draw you in for information snacking, and before you know hours have gone. Commenting and reading responses in HN is also another attention consuming loop.

"HN comments are terrible. On any topic I’m informed about, the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong." From https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ . I happen to agree.

Stands to reason. The purpose of commenting is to be wrong, so that someone will correct you, allowing you to learn more about the subject matter. Cunningham's Law.

If you are well versed in a topic there is no reason to talk about it. You are already well versed in it and gain nothing from discussing it further.

Re: My life after quitting social media

#103

Post by mmcdermott »

hinkley wrote: post #86
retro64 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple thoughts here. I was an adult before social media was a thing, or even the web, and I sometimes wonder if I would have even attempted much of the experimentation I did - doubtful, at least at that age. Why bother when now it takes only a few minutes searching to find someone who already solved the problem, and better than you (think) you could have. But now I understand I would have missed out on so much had…

I've noticed that I did a lot more theorycrafting in games prior to the easy availability of game streams. I think I am finally coming around to the idea that these videos should inspire me to do more theorycrafting instead of letting other people do it for me, but it's been a long journey. The safety lectures in videos for some hobbies probably would have let me get farther along in them as a child, if I had bothere…

I've had the same reaction to watching videos about strategies and combos in fighting games. What I started doing was asking myself how I could have discovered this idea and taking it back to the lab to reconstruct the discovery, so to speak.

What I've found over time is that I got better at discovering what I needed, but that it was still worth looking over some theorycrafting type videos to see anything I might have missed.

This brought me full circle to the point where, even though I was still watching a video, I felt like there was a dialogue going on ("yeah, I know A, B and C, but D is a neat trick. You seemed to have missed E though.").

Re: My life after quitting social media

#104

Post by cercatrova »

gear54rus wrote: post #100
legrande wrote: post #99

I quit social media for a year and nothing magical happened to me. I think it's because I never really had a problem with it, since all my feeds were heavily curated and I didn't scroll through mountains of noise. The content I consume is always high quality, because I made social media work for me. I avoid Instagram since it's too visual and full of posers. Twitter is more real and authentic. Facebook is mostly for…

How can you call twitter more authentic when it seems pretty clear (to me ofc) that their stupid length limit is ideally cut out to stir controversy and create confrontation out of nowhere (by virtue of people assuming the worst when there's not enough info presented to them).

Depends on who you follow. I follow people like patio11 or different startup founders, they have good thoughts and insights. I don't use it to follow random people who stir up drama.

Re: My life after quitting social media

#105

Post by throwaway20371 »

I quit most social media (I'm still here, aren't I?) and I found a lot more peace. I ended up working a lot more, which stressed me out, but I finally identified my lack of work-life balance, and now I'm back to a healthy state. No outrage at irrelevant trivia, no other people's lives being a distraction in mine. If anything I just have too much personal stuff to do now. Life feels a bit more meaningful, healthy. I recommend it.

Re: My life after quitting social media

#107

Post by karaterobot »

I quit Facebook and Twitter around 2008, and the biggest downside in all that time was finding out about my niece's birth days later than everyone else in the family, because it was only announced on Facebook. Not a huge issue in the scheme of things.

The biggest upside is that I'm completely disengaged with a lot of things people are angry about, because they aren't on my radar at all. In practice, I don't find that closely following breaking news is all that useful to me, since I'm not in a position to do anything about it, and it just makes me anxious to worry about things which are out of my control.

Instead, I read longform articles about major events when they get written a few weeks later, and supplement that reading with Wikipedia. This alternative seems to work well enough. If someone wants to talk to me about current events, I just ask them what their opinion is, which is usually what they want to happen anyway.

Re: My life after quitting social media

#108

Post by satellites »

legrande wrote: post #99

I quit social media for a year and nothing magical happened to me. I think it's because I never really had a problem with it, since all my feeds were heavily curated and I didn't scroll through mountains of noise. The content I consume is always high quality, because I made social media work for me. I avoid Instagram since it's too visual and full of posers. Twitter is more real and authentic. Facebook is mostly for…

This is a good point, but just to be the devil's advocate, I will point out that most social networks are starting to implement features where they fill your feed with content you never signed up for. They'll call it something like "suggested" posts. Granted, I think Instagram is the one I've noticed it on the most, and you said you don't use that. But I could see that feature catching on to the point that feeds are harder and harder to maintain control of as a user.

Re: My life after quitting social media

#109

Post by SavantIdiot »

billfruit wrote: post #20

Sometimes I feel HN also is a similar attention sink, even Wikipedia as well. They also can draw you in for information snacking, and before you know hours have gone. Commenting and reading responses in HN is also another attention consuming loop.

It is. There's a lot more than hacker news on here. And the rules aren't always followed, which makes it a bit more social-media-y, but the mods do a great job keeping it tidy. I guess there is more non-hacker news stuff appearing because it gets a little tedious to see "New programming language X" or "CSS tricks you never heard of" every week.

Re: My life after quitting social media

#110

Post by Spooky23 »

gear54rus wrote: post #100
legrande wrote: post #99

I quit social media for a year and nothing magical happened to me. I think it's because I never really had a problem with it, since all my feeds were heavily curated and I didn't scroll through mountains of noise. The content I consume is always high quality, because I made social media work for me. I avoid Instagram since it's too visual and full of posers. Twitter is more real and authentic. Facebook is mostly for…

How can you call twitter more authentic when it seems pretty clear (to me ofc) that their stupid length limit is ideally cut out to stir controversy and create confrontation out of nowhere (by virtue of people assuming the worst when there's not enough info presented to them).

It’s easier to ignore bullshit on Twitter.

With Facebook, unless you actively block lots of people, your high school buddy’s uncle will show up with some valuable information to share.

With Twitter that crap is buried unless it hits some internet celebrity. Twitter is also less manipulative of the stream, while Facebook is focused on driving engagement.

I just opened up Twitter, the top 5 items are SwiftOnSecurity, my city’s mayor chief of staff, my little league, and a post about Roman artifacts. 100% signal.

Just opened up Facebook, and the top 5 are: somebody’s new curtains, a pitch to friend more people, an ad for noom, a colleague sharing his opinion about Texas abortion law, and a post from my favorite baseball team. 40% signal.

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