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Reasons to Quit Social Media

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Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#161

Post by slantyyz »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #149
slantyyz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For what little it's worth, I've been online since Compuserve and personal local BBSs... > I absolutely consider HN to be social media. I've been online for the same period of time, and I absolutely do not consider HN to be social media. Sure, there are some commonalities like upvotes, but I consider (my opinion only) these to be important criteria of something "being" social media: a) Most importantly, a friends/c…

Well, the ethos of how long we've been on the net isn't quite as important as our rationale. I feel that the sine qua non of "social media" is user generated content conducted between specific users: tied to specific accounts, where users have one-to-one public conversations and those conversations are foregrounded as the site's content. I don't agree that knowing who has up/down voted a comment is as fundamental as…

HN is social, and media, but I don't consider it social media in the same way as FB, Instagram, Twitter, and their ilk.

Let me put it another way, to me, one critical defining feature of a "social media" site: when you register, one of the first tasks you do is to identify people you know (or want to know) so they can be somehow linked to you as a friend or someone you're following.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#162

Post by jonny_eh »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #155
jonny_eh wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've yet to find a better tool for managing and communicating with local interest groups. For example, my local pinball group uses it to announce events, manage RSVPs, advertise machines for sale, and just chat about pinball. Meetup.com was a thing, but was more expensive and not quite as good of a product. This replaced a mailing list, but FB is frankly better at this, especially when it comes to managing events.

IME Facebook's interface is horrible and full of unnecessary cruft. Couldn't you just make a subreddit? Reddit is so much easier and cleaner IMO.

I don't believe it supports calendars/events for subreddits. You can "announce" and event, but it's not the same.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#163

Post by genewitch »

skinkestek wrote: post #93
tessierashpool wrote: post #68

Earlier 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…

Is being racist against the law? Why would someone tell law enforcement?

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#164

Post by gilbetron »

photochemsyn wrote: post #60
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.

Probably a walled city is the only way to achieve that. Such a setup is like a closed mailing list in which all participants have to pass an 'entrance exam' of some kind. 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 corp…

Facebook already has all that with groups. I think the issue is something more fundamental with humans.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#165

Post by tester756 »

m0ngr31 wrote: post #85

I have quit all social media except for HN and Reddit. Although on Reddit I just use a burner account for comments and I have a cron job that deletes all my comments/submissions at 5PM every day so I'm not providing any value to the site. Has helped me wean off of just endless scrolling. I only use it about 15 minutes a day now.

>s and I have a cron job that deletes all my comments/submissions at 5PM every day so I'm not providing any value to the site.

You probably should edit your comments and leave them empty

otherwise they're probably still visible - uneddit or something like that

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#166

Post by wintermutestwin »

jonny_eh wrote: post #162
wintermutestwin wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME Facebook's interface is horrible and full of unnecessary cruft. Couldn't you just make a subreddit? Reddit is so much easier and cleaner IMO.

I don't believe it supports calendars/events for subreddits. You can "announce" and event, but it's not the same.

You're right. There are other calendar solutions, but obviously using multiple services is not a clean solution.

I'd still think about using a subreddit + Notion, but that's because I despise FB.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#167

Post by poisonarena »

EasyTiger_ wrote: post #160

Firmly believe what’s ruined social media is special interest groups and the rest parading as people like you and me. My evidence for this is the overnight take-over of r/politics in 2016 and the subsequent introduction of extremely divisive talking points which eventually transformed it into the glorified hate-site it is today. YES I’m bitter, Reddit before then got me through some tough times.

I also noticed this. I recommend /r/geopolitics its heavily modded to prevent this kind of stuff

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#168

Post by reducesuffering »

tarr11 wrote: post #8

Isn’t HN social media?

HN is at it's essence a custom subreddit. And Reddit is definitely social media.

Social: majority of time is spent reading people's commentary, many who are just a slightly obscured version of the rest of their social media identity, and sometimes responding in dialogue. Even though it's pseudonymous it doesn't mean it's asocial.

Media: Basically what all the links are

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#169

Post by atlgator »

Avicebron wrote: post #144
atlgator wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

I'm confused, isn't established standard too nebulous a concept to be "needs to be upvoted", there is just too diverse of an opinion on what what is a "well thought out comment" and one person's "inflammatory" comment could be another person's "well thought out comment", the cognitive dissonance is upstream of all the voting patterns and there can be no set standard except organic, binary up/down voting. I think the…

You're right. I was just offering one scenario where it might work, but even then there are people that think they are the sole arbiter of moral thought and speech they disagree with is akin to violence, etc. I didn't want to get into all that. Sufficed to say upvote/downvote is not a great system.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#170

Post by whiddershins »

Social media allows lobbyist groups and foreign powers (not to mention domestic intelligence agencies) to continually modulate public discussion, opinion, and perception. The Overton Window is completely influenceable by these groups.

What a truly terrible idea.

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