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Reasons to Quit Social Media

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Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#211

Post by Zababa »

MonaroVXR wrote: post #199
nonbirithm wrote: post #186

> After the habit of scrolling and liking wears off, you suddenly find yourself in a joyful place. A quieter, calmer, less demanding place where you don’t want to know what others are doing. You focus on what you want to do. But what if you don't know what you want to do? I feel like this post was written from the perspective of someone who already has their own life goals sorted out, and social media was clearly act…

>You want to aspire to be something, and looking for someone else to copy would mean you at least have some kind of aspiration to work towards, instead of nothing at all. And this were I watch athletes, cars and gave fun with the IT group and programming meme page. When I'm opening Facebook I'm laughing at posts. It's genuine. I can't do this in the place where I live. It's almost if things are flipped around. Facebo…

Social media is what you make of it. I use twitter to interact with a few close friends and see nice stuff that I couldn't share with my family or at work. It's great! But like a garden, you have to protect it, and tend it. That means for me having a private account, following a small number of people, muting stuff I don't like, desactivating retweets I don't like, carefully picking who can follow me. I have no chance of making viral content with that account, and I don't meet many new people, but it's a tradeoff.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#212

Post by not2b »

This article seems to miss that a number of people use groups on social media to organize activities in real life and keep in touch with family, and the nontechnical friends and family aren't up to the task of building their own solutions for this. For these uses it isn't a substitute for a fulfilling life but rather a help. And unfortunately network effects often mean that the only effective option is to use a service that most people are on.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#213

Post by stanislavb »

eloff wrote: post #203
nonbirithm wrote: post #186

> After the habit of scrolling and liking wears off, you suddenly find yourself in a joyful place. A quieter, calmer, less demanding place where you don’t want to know what others are doing. You focus on what you want to do. But what if you don't know what you want to do? I feel like this post was written from the perspective of someone who already has their own life goals sorted out, and social media was clearly act…

You won't find yourself by seeking distraction. You need to eliminate distractions and feel the pain of boredom, which will motivate you to try things.

This.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#214

Post by moffkalast »

stanislavb wrote: post #213
eloff wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't find yourself by seeking distraction. You need to eliminate distractions and feel the pain of boredom, which will motivate you to try things.

This.

There was this Veratasium video recently about this very thing, apparently boredom is indeed crucial for creativity.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#215

Post by mmaunder »

I've written a few posts of my own like this. My biggest win in terms of SM strategy has been to actually get back on to SM to build an audience, and to schedule posts. I use Hootsuite to schedule Instagram posts over a month in advance. It's transformative in terms of user experience. I totally forget I have an SM presence because it's on autopilot. And when I do post, I don't have the constant engagement hooks confronting me that Instagram has. Instead I'm using the hootsuite calendar to just schedule stuff, and then leave it alone.

I don't work for Hootsuite and I'm sure there are plenty of other options. Also, it's not free, so there's that. But it works for me.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#216

Post by scarecrowbob »

slantyyz wrote: post #161
scarecrowbob wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you removed the a feature of trying to get other people to sign up from FB would it still be facebook? I think it very much could be....

and consider other feathers that you could remove, such as "likes" (or karma) and posting (ie, user submitted content and comment threads). I feel like if you removed those two features, neither HN/Reddit nor Facebook would be the "same" service.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#217

Post by scarecrowbob »

Minor49er wrote: post #153
scarecrowbob wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno... I feel that the sine qua non of "social media" is user generated content conducted between specific users, tied to specific accounts. Not even wikis meet that definition, and certainly not most of the author-generated content-based site like blogs or market sites such as amazon, or news sites where the discussion isn't the putative content.

But don't wikis commonly have a "Talk" section or similar? The pages that are posted and edited would surely fall under author-generated content.

I believe a lot of the internet has social aspects. Is it possible that the "social" aspects of this media operate on a sliding scale?

I understand the point that literally any website could be thought of as "user generated"... I've personally made quite a few websites. But the level of interaction and the modalities of how I and a lot of folks use things isn't as interactive as, say, twitter.

So, perhaps for some user populations a Wiki is a social experience, especially for the folks who edit them. Though from my perspective, it feels entirely possible to use it without engaging in that social aspect.

I don't feel the same about Hackernews and/or reddit in general.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#218

Post by torben-friis »

peakaboo wrote: post #158
jonny_eh wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Your wording "allows" is exactly what people dont like about these tech companies. They are not real authorities on the Internet. If they left, the internet would improve a thousand times.

They aren't keeping the rest of the internet from being used, though. If you like forums, you can use them regardless of whether reddit exists or not. Same applies for blogs and facebook, IRC and messaging apps, etc.

If forums are better than reddit/discord, why are so many communities there? If blogs are better than twitter, why did the majority choose twitter?

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#219

Post by unethical_ban »

nonbirithm wrote: post #186

> After the habit of scrolling and liking wears off, you suddenly find yourself in a joyful place. A quieter, calmer, less demanding place where you don’t want to know what others are doing. You focus on what you want to do. But what if you don't know what you want to do? I feel like this post was written from the perspective of someone who already has their own life goals sorted out, and social media was clearly act…

Then you focus on finding what you want to do.

Honestly, pretty much any idle activity is more productive for the human mind than doomscrolling social media feeds. Sitting in the void. Going for a walk. Watching the grass blow in the wind. Putting together a puzzle, doing a crossword.

There is a unique unhealthiness to chronic overuse of social media, in my opinion, and the point is that it is addictive and takes work to break free - but once you do, you feel freer.

Re: Reasons to Quit Social Media

#220

Post by danans »

mnsc wrote: post #179
danans wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, ju…

> Hacker news is not social media. I have never recognized a user/username in between two sessions.

OK, let's call it a discussion forum instead. I'd still argue that is a subcategory of social media. The general shape of these things has been around since at least the BBS days.

These terms, however, don't seem to capture the difference I posited between identity-based and topic-based social-discussion-service thingies, and I don't think there exists a standard terminology to make this distinction at this time.

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