Reasons to Quit Social Media

The way I've started to look at it is that all social media has some harmful and some beneficial aspects, but the nexus of identity-based (vs topic-based like HN) social media with upvote/like functionality is the most problematic for people struggling with identity and self worth. Even as someone established enough not to struggle with self-worth, I avoid that type of social media completely.

Topic based social media with clear and enforced guidelines for content seems to have the least bad trade-off between the harmful and the beneficial.

Of course no social media property is exclusively one or the other, but the design and operation of the service strongly influences the direction in which it goes.

It seems that before social media people were engaged and productive and attentive and whatever.

Wait. MySpace was founded in 2003, twitter in 2006, Facebook in 2004, etc. I was an adult by then. I grew up before social media.

And yeah, people are more or less still people. Those 20 reasons are a wishlist. They're the same 20 things we always promise ourselves every single day after we spent the previous day failing to achieve those 20 things.

I'm not saying there aren't problems with social media, but let's not pretend we'll all become ubermensch if we all log off of twitter.

I do browse Reddit and occasionally comment on something, or here on HN, so I still see things like Twitter posts frequently and keep up with things through some of those channels.

When I say I don’t use social media, I mean it directed more towards the kind of posting what I made for dinner so my friends can comment on it use case. I think our society is heavily focused on social media and it’s become an integral part of staying informed and up to date.

For that reason, I do check on certain people’s Twitter from time to time, or look at some replies to a tweet that was linked to from an article or something, what’s troublesome to me is that I can’t do almost any of this without signing up. I have more of a problem with it in regards to Twitter, as that has seemingly become the nearly exclusive place for a lot of prominent figures(including elected officials, high profile CEOs, etc) to give updates. Creating this walled garden feels like an attempt to limit access to information that is intended to be publicly available, and at this point my unwillingness to create an account is stemming more from my disdain for this practice than my desire to “quit social media”.

This kind of setup imposes a cost for rude, nasty, aggressive and destructive behavior - since you can simply be excluded from the group in that case.

This is how most of the world works on a day to day basis; you don't let random people into a corporate strategy meeting or an academic council meeting. You only admit people who agree to abide by civil society rules.

Something like that can be incredibly useful, but it requires a lot of up-front organizing effort. Also, malicious types have been known to sneak into say, a closed mailing list, and leak the internal discussions to Twitter or whatever, so...