I enjoy social media and use it to exchange information, observe trends in culture, and as a communication channel when convenient.
Agreed. I curated my friends and family and who I follow and now it's more pleasant to use.
Reasons to Quit Social Media
131–140 of 283 posts
Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 b…
> Social media has never harmed me How do you know that? This isn't something you can typically know for your self with any degree of confidence. > To this day I check in on social media once in a while You've got a lot of recent comments on HN for this to be true. I think you use social media a lot more than you think you do, and it could be impacting you in ways that you don't notice.
> You've got a lot of recent comments on HN for this to be true. I think you use social media a lot more than you think you do, and it could be impacting you in ways that you don't notice.
Ah so you're that kind of user.
Semantics. I don't consider HN social media, when I say social media I mean instagram, facebook, etc. I consider HN a forum like reddit or other places. My usage of forums is a way to kill time when I'm at work.
> How do you know that? This isn't something you can typically know for your self with any degree of confidence.
Speak for yourself. Maybe you can't typically know this for yourself, but I can. And more importantly, if you're not coming into this exchange in good faith and willing to trust my claims, then any chance of reasonable conversation is gone. I'll be wrapping up my end of our conversation here, thanks.
Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media
#133I never had to quit social media. They quit me. I loved Facebook and Twitter when they were new, I connected to people that were way outside my normal group of friends and stayed in contact with people I knew who moved away, sometimes passively by reading their posts, sometimes actively. But both platforms started actively working against that kind of usage. Eventually I just had to stop as they became unusable, not…
Same here, and same with most people I know. I'm from the generation that got Facebook in ~2005, when you still needed a university email to sign up. It was definitely helpful for socializing at college, especially the almighty "relationship status" field. Fond memories. It's useless to me now except for seeing friends' photos, but Instagram is better at that anyway.
I imagine it's changed for the same reason loot boxes/gacha have taken over normal paid DLC or expansion packs: whales are more profitable. It's better for Facebook, Twitter, etc. if they have a fewer people engaging with the platform for 12 hours per day instead of more people for less time; the highly engaged people are creating the content, seeing the most ads, and interacting with the most items on their news feed, which leads to a more accurate user profile and better targeted ads.
Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media
#134I never had to quit social media. They quit me. I loved Facebook and Twitter when they were new, I connected to people that were way outside my normal group of friends and stayed in contact with people I knew who moved away, sometimes passively by reading their posts, sometimes actively. But both platforms started actively working against that kind of usage. Eventually I just had to stop as they became unusable, not…
I think it depends on how you use it. I find Twitter more useful than Linkedin.
Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media
#135Good 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…
I think COVID lockdown made keeping social media usage to a minimum really difficult. I noticed that I started to watch chatting streams on Twitch as a crutch for not being able to socialize outside. Socializing over a video call with your friends are also difficult because you're not left with much topics to talk about.
Indeed, for me it was podcasts…Found myself listening to way too many podcasts just to pass time!
Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media
#136In 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
This may be true, but being productive doesn't necessarily need to be your goal here. Maybe using social media as entertainment had negative effects on your mental health that playing a video game doesn't.
Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media
#137I never had to quit social media. They quit me. I loved Facebook and Twitter when they were new, I connected to people that were way outside my normal group of friends and stayed in contact with people I knew who moved away, sometimes passively by reading their posts, sometimes actively. But both platforms started actively working against that kind of usage. Eventually I just had to stop as they became unusable, not…
I really don’t get the complaints with Twitter as a product, at least from my usage. But maybe that’s because I’ve exclusively been using Tweetbot for several years. But it basically does exactly what I want: when someone I follow posts something, it shows up in my feed. Which is what it’s been doing for years. Again, maybe this is a matter of the client, but Tweetbot lets me see exactly what I want, and nothing more…
Yeah I exclusively use lists for this reason. Any time I take a look at my main feed or the curated psyops in the "Trending" column it does strike me as a horrorshow though.
Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media
#138I 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…
> Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. 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…
Hacker News IS harmful because there's no established standard for what should receive an upvote or downvote (>500 karma can downvote). This leads to people just upvoting things they agree with and downvoting things they don't. It's all groupthink. Alternatively, all well thought out comments should receive upvotes (despite personal cognitive dissonance) and inflammatory, trolling, or irrelevant comments should be downvoted. That would support diversity of thought and ideas.
Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media
#139I never had to quit social media. They quit me. I loved Facebook and Twitter when they were new, I connected to people that were way outside my normal group of friends and stayed in contact with people I knew who moved away, sometimes passively by reading their posts, sometimes actively. But both platforms started actively working against that kind of usage. Eventually I just had to stop as they became unusable, not…
I really don’t get the complaints with Twitter as a product, at least from my usage. But maybe that’s because I’ve exclusively been using Tweetbot for several years. But it basically does exactly what I want: when someone I follow posts something, it shows up in my feed. Which is what it’s been doing for years. Again, maybe this is a matter of the client, but Tweetbot lets me see exactly what I want, and nothing more…
> Again, maybe this is a matter of the client, but Tweetbot lets me see exactly what I want, and nothing more.
The official Twitter client allows this again now too (but with ads). You need to select "See latest tweets instead" at the top of Home.
Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise. but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer. the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful…
> the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise. > but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer. > the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is…
I was lurking here last year during the racial justice protests, and before that during the James Damore controversy. I still saw casually racist/sexist posts get upvoted fairly often. A discriminatory argument can be stated well and seem reasonable on its face, but still be discriminatory. It's the kind that moderators here are too lenient against and won't really want to delete as long as there isn't a pattern of it, because it could just be an well-meaning person suffering an error in judgement. I don't know how our world is supposed to move past that, or if it's even possible. I would have probably been a little less disappointed in the state of humanity if some of those posts had been flagged, because there were a lot of them across the whole internet.