Reasons to Quit Social Media • Hacker News Board

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#21

Post by selykg » Wed, Sep 22, 2021, 3:51 PM UTC

iammisc wrote: post #6

Once the current regime let us go back to church, I deleted my Facebook. It's much better at church. Firstly, they feed me. Secondly, I can say what I think without being censored. It's not even that people all agree with me at church. It's that they treat you like a human being. Those who are unvaxxed are just some guy down the street, not someone who we are supposed to target in our hour of hate and wish death upon…

Meanwhile, here you are using words like "regime" in your post here.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#22

Post by CannoloBlahnik » Wed, Sep 22, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

tarr11 wrote: post #8

Isn’t HN social media?

Yes, Hacker News and Reddit are both social media.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#23

Post by pope_meat » Wed, Sep 22, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

iammisc wrote: post #6

Once the current regime let us go back to church, I deleted my Facebook. It's much better at church. Firstly, they feed me. Secondly, I can say what I think without being censored. It's not even that people all agree with me at church. It's that they treat you like a human being. Those who are unvaxxed are just some guy down the street, not someone who we are supposed to target in our hour of hate and wish death upon…

I was raised by fundamentalists, and that was not my experience. Wrong kind of opinions got me surrounded by elders who would attempt to brow beat me in to submission. Towards my late teens I'd spend the entire hour and a half of every Sunday hiding out in the kitchen/dining hall in the back of the building, tending to the pot of coffee, until I was old enough to leave and strike out on my own. I still get panic attacks at the idea of stepping foot in to a religious building. Basically, your experience is far from universal, in my experience.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#24

Post by rjtavares » Wed, Sep 22, 2021, 3:54 PM UTC

clipradiowallet wrote: post #10

I don't have(and never have had) any social media accounts...ie facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok, etc. The closest would be an HN account. That said, could someone tell me what I might be missing? Ignorance is bliss, but it's also ignorance - is there any critical information or happiness that everyone else [who uses social media] enjoys that I do not?

Social media is not fundamentally different from other ways of connecting with people online, like blogs and forums.

The happiness you can enjoy from meeting people online is the same whether on a forum, on an online videogame, or on twitter.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#25

Post by zzzbra » Wed, Sep 22, 2021, 3:55 PM UTC

I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm.

Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation.

My vote for what's more harmful is the scroll. I have a web extension that just removes the scroll on my Facebook feed. A few months after setting it up I all but stopped using Facebook, checking in once maybe every two months to visit folks individually. I haven't done this for Twitter or IG, but then the quality of my main feed is such that I don't want to remove it outright and want that aggregation of content, somehow.

I think that scrolling in general is harmful as a UX pattern, but the obvious alternative of pagination could create all kinds of complexities around deep-linking and fragmentation of content. All the same I'd love to see more platforms adopt this intentional cap on content associated with a given URL. It turns my engagement with content online from scanning to actual reading.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#26

Post by SonicScrub » Wed, Sep 22, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC

iammisc wrote: post #6

Once the current regime let us go back to church, I deleted my Facebook. It's much better at church. Firstly, they feed me. Secondly, I can say what I think without being censored. It's not even that people all agree with me at church. It's that they treat you like a human being. Those who are unvaxxed are just some guy down the street, not someone who we are supposed to target in our hour of hate and wish death upon…

As the western world secularizes, we need a replacement for the community fulfillment role that organized religion used to take. As someone who was raised religious, but no longer identifies as such, I find my self missing the wonderful sense of community that my church facilitated by bringing broad spectrums of different people together to achieve a higher purpose. I know people's mileage will vary depending on their specific church, and I don't intend to whitewash the toxic actions, or the rejection of certain groups in some churches. But many elements of my church were positive. The sense of community, the volunteering, the people genuinely caring for each other, and even just as a place for people to hangout. I consider being raised in that environment to be a net good, despite later being turned off the actual theology. Is there away we can move to a secular alternative that has the same level of social penetration as the church once did?

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#27

Post by fjabre » Wed, Sep 22, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC

scarecrowbob wrote: post #15

betenoire wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it a forum? It doesn't have friends, following, asking for your contacts, etc. I guess the line is subjective, this is just a plain old forum, managed very well, imo.

For what little it's worth, I've been online since Compuserve and personal local BBSs... I absolutely consider HN to be social media.

Yes it is particularly social because it has the concept of Karma. It has tamed it by policy but vanity can never be tamed outright. It will always exist in some form on these networks and HN/Reddit style forums capitalize on humans’ vanity by appealing to it through Karma.

Thus it ticks up the social-ness score a bit for sites like HN as opposed to some old forums like one would find on Yahoo or used to find on Compuserv.

Karma and the wisdom of crowds gives way to herd mentality and vanity. It is what drives the form of discussion on these sites.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#28

Post by harmeswoul12 » Wed, Sep 22, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

I strictly use social media for only about 30 minutes. I divide them into three uses. In that way, I can check out what's happening with my friends and on the internet while not taking too much of our time.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#29

Post by silicon2401 » Wed, Sep 22, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

trutannus wrote: post #3

shuntress wrote: post #2

I don't want to quit social media What I want is for interactions with other people in online social spaces to be less destructive.

"I don't want to stop using drugs, I just want drugs that are not going to harm me while I use them" Unfortunately, social media by its nature is going to be harmful. It was never designed to consider the world we live in now.

> Unfortunately, social media by its nature is going to be harmful.

I disagree. Social media has never harmed me, I just realized it wasn't worth my time. I've never had issues with self-esteem, confidence, popularity, whatever. I used social media as a photo diary for myself, shared pictures and videos with friends, kept up with what my friends are doing. To this day I check in on social media once in a while just because it's more effective than texting 100+ people to see what they're up to. That being said, I don't think social media is worth more of my time than a few minutes every few weeks or months

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#30

Post by bluGill » Wed, Sep 22, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

clipradiowallet wrote: post #10

I don't have(and never have had) any social media accounts...ie facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok, etc. The closest would be an HN account. That said, could someone tell me what I might be missing? Ignorance is bliss, but it's also ignorance - is there any critical information or happiness that everyone else [who uses social media] enjoys that I do not?

That depends on you. Social media should be a way to better connect to your friends and family. In particular distant ones that you don't see daily but still want to be in contact with. I haven't seen my 7th grade crush since high school, but I'm glad to see pictures of her kid's first day of college - as one example.

Most people use social media instead for harmful things that do not help society. Left and Right wing conspiracy theorys abound. Pictures of some cat that you don't own.