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Reasons to Quit Social Media

durmonski.com

171–180 of 283 posts

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#171
Quitting Facebook has been one of the most positive experiences of my life. I still use Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, but the mildly anonymous aspects of those platforms mean that I use them for what I want to use them for, not as an extension of my life.

HN is social media too, lest you forget.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#172
I checked out after the first few paragraphs because his viewpoint is so b&w. I'm either using social media for validation or as an observer, because apparently I'm shallow and needy. This is such a broad generalization that I don't feel the need to read further, even though I generally agree that social media is a problem. Cynicism isn't how to start that conversation.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#173

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.

Well, judging by the extremely racist and most often dumb as hell /r/Europe, the racist and self-hating r/ukpolitics and the racist, smug and self-important r/germany, it's people who ruined social media. And the Internet, for that matter. Let in too many idiots and everything turns into Idiocracy.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#174
I'm sure there are reasons to quit social media but this essay seems hyperbolic. I use social media because I like to see photos and read updates about my friends and family. That strikes me as a pretty normal and healthy use for it. My wife's Instagram account is a collection of all the cookies and cakes she's baked. She follows other Instagramers who do they the same thing and they inspire each other to make different kinds of things or with different ingredients. Again, seems like a perfectly valid use of social media (though probably not healthy for me).

The author also seems to look down on people with "average lives" like that was a bad thing. Assuming life quality is a normal distribution, most people will lead average-ish lives. Many people will lead worse than average lives. There's nothing wrong with that.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#175

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…

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

Racism can be considered hate speech, which is illegal in places with no right to free speech such as most countries in Europe.

For example: https://www.report-it.org.uk/reporting_internet_hate_crime

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#176
post #173

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.

Well, judging by the extremely racist and most often dumb as hell /r/Europe, the racist and self-hating r/ukpolitics and the racist, smug and self-important r/germany, it's people who ruined social media. And the Internet, for that matter. Let in too many idiots and everything turns into Idiocracy.

The eternal September continues.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#177
post #50

Earlier 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.

And why should you or I judge and decide on that? If their opinion is that it doesn't impact them, that's good enough.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#178
post #173

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.

Well, judging by the extremely racist and most often dumb as hell /r/Europe, the racist and self-hating r/ukpolitics and the racist, smug and self-important r/germany, it's people who ruined social media. And the Internet, for that matter. Let in too many idiots and everything turns into Idiocracy.

While it is not conducive to monetizing a platform, maybe we should have forums which are arbitrarily limited to a manageable number of people. r/politics claims to have 7.7M subscribers. That defies common sense. And 30K people online right now. Even if these numbers are inflated, they're completely nuts. It seems inevitable that when you put that many people in a room, the crazy ones take over.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#179
post #52
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…

> 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 not social media. I have never recognized a user/username in between two sessions. And I would probably miss the mythical PG if he showed up in a thread. I don't know his handle anyways. Sometimes I'm made aware that a relevant "celebrity" is present in the thread but that's when people act obviously star struck like "oh thank you for that seminal paper back in '15".

So nothing social going on here, just weird/interesting discussions between persons x, y, z, i, j and k.

Edit: I just noticed that some usernames are green. I don't know what that signifies and I do not want to know.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#180
post #50

Earlier 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.

The drunk driver contradiction. Drunk people are terrible and assessing how drunk they are.

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