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Reasons to Quit Social Media

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Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#71

Post by betenoire »

optimalsolver wrote: post #61
betenoire wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind sharing why? Is it the features or something else? When I think back 20 years to forums, HN feels most like those to me. It feels nothing like what most people call "social media"

Out of curiosity, do you condider Reddit to be social media? To me, HN is just a well-maintained subreddit (pseudonymous, karma-based voting system, recency bias, etc.)

Hmm... Yes. But I can't make a cogent argument why lol.

13 year club here, the Reddit I think of is probably not aligned with what Reddit thinks of itself anymore.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#72

Post by johnchristopher »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #39
zzzbra wrote: post #25

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 mor…

The pagination on HN is one of its better UX decisions. Same with turning off auto-loading when you reach the end of the front page of Reddit (but that's not the default).

Why does HN display a number next to a submission ?

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#73

Post by Igelau »

tarr11 wrote: post #8

Isn’t HN social media?

It doesn't have any networking features as far as I can tell.

If HN was ever directly instrumental in getting someone laid, you might have an argument, but I'm going to say "no".

If it had direct messaging and follow/subscribe features, it absolutely would be, and I say these are things that make Reddit social media while HN is only a forum.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#74

Post by starkd »

zzzbra wrote: post #25

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 mor…

I think many definitely get obsessed with the need to like/upvote on here as a means to register their response. It seems to detract from the information you get out of other comments. Although it does help to hone in on which comments are most helpful.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#75

Post by Igelau »

syshum wrote: post #42
clircle wrote: post #33

In reality, when people quit social media, they don't start using their time better, they mostly shift their time into different time waster websites. For example, people quit using facebook for 2 hours a day just start skimming reddit for 2 hours a day. They aren't going to start writing a book or bettering themselves in some way.

That has been my pattern, I will find a different time suck. Leave Reddit, come to HN, leave HN, play a new video game, stop playing a video game, binge watch a tv show. Never anything productive

I'd argue that's still an improvement. With the video game and the TV show your are focused on the appreciation of an art form. Granted, you're not strolling the halls of the Louvre or something, but it is art.

Time doesn't have to be spent productively to be time well spent.

When my third child was born and I took leave, I was spending a ton of time on Facebook. One day I put the phone down and realized I couldn't remember a single thing I'd been looking at the past two hours. If you can at least remember what you saw it's a major improvement.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#76

Post by intrasight »

zzzbra wrote: post #25

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 mor…

I find scrolling easy to avoid on FB as I just click on the notifications icon, and there are usually only notifications that are of interest - and a relatively small number.

Also I use FBP plugin that let's me filter things out on a very fine-granular level, and I am very aggressive with filtering.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#77

Post by MattKimber »

zzzbra wrote: post #25

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 mor…

I think the problem is not necessarily things such as likes, upvotes, shares or other features but platforms which don't consider Goodhart's law when they introduce them.

Large Reddits tend toward bland and repetitive cookie-cutter content not solely because Reddit has a voting mechanism, but because the site's structure allows that mechanism to be highly vulnerable to karma farming. There are many casual users who don't notice the content is low-effort or repetitive, special interest subs make it easy to target posts, and the volume is too high for moderators to handle (and many will have a "we can't delete things which are popular and within the rules, even if we don't like them" policy).

Facebook (and YouTube, and to some extent Twitter) are a weird branch of that. The application of Goodhart's law wasn't initially to the users but to the platforms themselves. I have little doubt that initially they started with an altruistic observation that people spent more time on the site if they tended to see content from their most entertaining friends, but then someone realised seeing bad takes from a stranger was even more engaging and so you should see that instead. People realise they get more visibility for being controversial, and again there is no real moderation for this, so we have even more of a tyre fire than the blandness which upvote-driven sites tend toward.

(Twitter at least still offer tools to curate and remove algorithmic ranking from your feed, even if they try to nudge users away from them. That doesn't protect more popular users from the "trolling brings me attention" culture elsewhere on the site, though.)

I think HN is less affected by karma farming due to having a broader range of topics, active moderation of repetitive content and perhaps most importantly a relatively small community with a strong appreciation that the upvote should be used sparingly for interesting and unique content. Also the text and link based format helps - this might change quickly if e.g. HN allowed posting photos of vintage computer equipment, which could disproportionately gain upvotes compared to insightful long-format articles despite being easier to produce.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#78

Post by jancsika »

ahmaman wrote: post #66

Good points and personally relate to some of these benefits. I try to keep my social media minimal. No Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, etc... At times has been difficult to use social media in moderation. Feels like I am competing with an Olympic champion in their own sport. With that said, here some things that I found helpful: - Never social media apps on my phone (no email either). - Only access social medi…

With that said, here some things that I found helpful:

- Never do cocaine straight out of my pocket.

- Only do cocaine in a restroom using the bag inside my valise, or on the mirrored table in my living room.

- only buy cocaine from a dealer who I trust, or dealers who that dealer trusts.

- when sharing cocaine with others in the restroom, don't tell them personal information about myself.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#80

Post by beckman466 »

zzzbra wrote: post #25

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 mor…

> it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm.

it's the fact that they're undemocratic black box algorithms that make the participation very one directional (explained below). add to that the centralization and non-interoperability/walled garden aspects, as well as platforms focusing on generating profit instead of helping us make deeper connections, and you've got a big dangerous stew.

the most constructive content doesn't actually surface; things that generate 'viralness' do. there are also few tools to individually manage this social data or build any sort of coherent framing/narrative. in other words: profit-seeking social media platforms are a straightjacketed collective stream of consciousness; they are undemocratically 'governed' spaces injected with ads that come with no useful tools to organize and structure information about the world around us.

"oh but that's not what social media is designed for!"

exactly, the medium is the message. by logging into a third party facebook server to connect with friends and people i want to follow, i am constrained by Zuck's rules and Zuck's black box 'social media' functions. going back to a peer to peer setup by using the ideas of bittorrent's DHTs combined with git's version control, like the holochain framework implements, seems to me to be a way to actually get at the root of this problem: it allows us to see the immense overlaps between today's SV platforms to then be able to quickly decommodify humanity's communication and coordination technology, by publicly sharing and collaboratively improving the underlying functions of our networked apps.

although in very early stages, these projects like IPFS, DAT, SSB, and especially holochain [1], which allows for a full distribution of social media functions (and more: http://valueflo.ws), and which has forking and complete distribution mechanics built into it from the start, will allow a powerful new wave of dweb application evolution/experimentation.

[1] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...

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