Buried deep within the post there is self-platform shilling, lol.
"Why not use our social media webshit instead? We are different, I promise".
How to stop being “terminally online”
101–110 of 238 posts
Re: How to stop being “terminally online”
#102I think the internet has accelerated the evolution of "mind viruses". New arguments and rhetorical tricks arise and mutate very fast. If you jump off it, that'll be good for you, but when you get back on after a long time, you might have no "immune defense" against what the internet came up with in the meantime. Similar to how the USSR was outside Western cultural evolution for awhile, and when it broke up in the 90s…
I don't know if you're aware of this, but this "mind virus" is the original definition of the word "meme" (before it got adopted to mean a particular kind of image-based online joke). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
Besides that, I agree completely. Twitter is a sort of highly competitive petri dish in which only the most infectious viruses can survive, with "viruses" being 160 character pieces of text. These messages do not need to be true or actually informative to survive and spread.
Re: How to stop being “terminally online”
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are actually a huge chunk of the population that just isn't very online, and genuinely don't know these terms. (Even many young people.) It was a real eye opener to meet some 'terminally offline' people and realize you can actually just escape and things are fine without being here constantly.
I can be online constantly and escape whatever the flavour of the month is. The only time it bites me in the ass is when I get banned for not being up to date on whatever everyone good and decent has to agree with to be good and decent.
If you are getting banned regularly from online communities you might want to reconsider why that is happening
Re: How to stop being “terminally online”
#104I'm struggling with it. I have a website blocker on my Mac, but then I just turn it off eventually and go back to old habits, if I block hacker news, reddit etc, then I end up just having random thoughts and googling those and finding other sites to read through and of course sometimes reddit can have the answer for the thing i needed to google, so that can be annoying. I changed to a white list to try and solve this…
> trying to learn more about life, philosophy, how to be a better human, productivity porn etc
IMO The internet is not usually a good way to learn this stuff. These are big life concepts that require deep focus and patience. The internet rewards the opposite of that.
The Big Concepts require both study and application. If you’re mostly spending time in the study phase, it’s not working.
Re: How to stop being “terminally online”
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are actually a huge chunk of the population that just isn't very online, and genuinely don't know these terms. (Even many young people.) It was a real eye opener to meet some 'terminally offline' people and realize you can actually just escape and things are fine without being here constantly.
Makes me think it might be similar to the "I don't watch TV" or "movies" or "sports" crowds. Just any pervasive cultural activity in which some don't participate but still carry on. I remember before I deleted my FB account (I've since created a new one), my buddy said to me that I'd be ok, just that I might be strongly disconnected from culture—not necessarily to tell me to not do it, but to be aware of the potentia…
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Re: How to stop being “terminally online”
#106I uninstalled every social app. The reason I don't go back to a Nokia 3310 is because I have a company phone and I do part of my work on my phone (although I'd argue it's because I can't refuse to wait for when I'm in front of a laptop. It's convenient to do it now on the phone rather than waiting and doing it later.)
And I actually tried to go back to my mum phone this summer, she had an old unused Samsung Galaxy J3 (Android 5).
I only installed Telegram and Whatsapp.
It's totally doable but it's really slow. The positive thing is that most of the apps stopped working for Android 5. So even if I wanted to install them I cannot.
Unfortunately nobody uses in my area nothing else but discord, telegram and whatsapp so I feel I don't want to be completely disconnected that way.
I was thinking that, well, I could actually just wait to be in front of a laptop also for telegram and whatsapp but it seemed too much.
Re: How to stop being “terminally online”
#107Simply quitting social media is the wrong response to the problems of the attention economy. Wrong also is adopting "calming" practices while uncritically embracing the ethos of social media companies. Resistance requires examining, questioning, and changing the underlying economic forces driving Silicon Valley.
Publicly declaring abstention from social media demonstrates the abstainer's privilege and taste more than it does any higher purpose. The point is to be intentional about our attention, and decide what to focus on and how to do it. This requires discipline and planning.Discussions of the problems with social media must question the driving neoliberal economics, consumerism and the Free Market Fairy. Suggesting individuals should choose to abstain comes from a point of view where individual choice is elevated to moral dogma.
Social media profits from human fallibility. Maintaining those profits under the pressures of capitalism requires the business to make people feel worse, and then offering them a palliative. In some respects, it's like the indulgences of the Catholic church in Martin Luther's time. The supposed values of social media in connecting and informing people, building communities, providing a medium of self-expression are warped by profit incentives. They no longer help. Instead, they exacerbate negativity. Social media have a vested interest in making things worse, or at less making them seem so.
Re: How to stop being “terminally online”
#108Who really cares - 100 years ago you might as well have moaned about people living through books. We have to live and learn 2nd hand because: * Learning some things 1st hand has a high chance of being fatal * We cannot afford to live all possible lives but we do have to be able to understand each other and each other's motives to be able to get along - this means we have to imagine what it's like to be someone else.…
Eh, none of the bookworms I know ever had drastic changes in their personality consistent with anxiety or depression, or somehow became angry and bitter after binge-reading a 6 book fantasy series. It just isn't a thing that happens.
I also don't think the internet itself—we didn't see this problem with blogs/wikipedia/trashy chain emails from your uncle.
It's the feeds. Because everything is tuned for engagement, if there's a type of content that's going to mess with your head in particular, the algorithm will find it and hammer you with it.
Re: How to stop being “terminally online”
#109> if you find it hard to ditch tiktok, instagram, twitter, or some other similar site, going "cold turkey" will be even harder. try to gradually reduce your usage YMMV but my trick for Facebook was a hard commit to "I'm going to take 2 weeks off". Cold Turkey with a boundary. I think I check it once for five minutes every month or two now. HN is trickier because I don't have to login first to see it. When I start to…
What worked for me with Facebook is doing "Facebook Fridays" - as much Facebook as I wanted on Fridays and nothing the rest of the week. It didn't take long to realize I was not missing much.
With other sites like HN, I have short-term success with going cold turkey for a specific time-frame (e.g. a week). I can stick with that, and my use afterward is more moderate but eventually I come back to over-use.
Re: How to stop being “terminally online”
#110I have struggled with Internet addiction, and still do, for a long time, and so far the only thing that has helped to dramatically reduce usage time was the Firefox/Chrome extension News Feed Eradicator [1]. I didn't realize to what degree news feeds were attention black holes until I installed it. I still go often on social media, but thanks to this extension these visits now last a few seconds, to check messages an…
So would you categorize it as "news" addiction rather than internet addiction? I put quotes around news because today's news isn't really news, just over dramatization of current events, IMO.
I select "not interested/don't recommend channel" on all "news" type stuff on YouTube, and it's a much better experience. I learn more about all kinda stuff that I'm interested in. It took a few weeks for it all to filter out, but YouTube has a bunch of interesting stuff that's not news/current events related.