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'It's so liberating': The people quitting social media

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Re: 'It's so liberating': The people quitting social media

#131

Post by te_chris »

recuter wrote: post #100
te_chris wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the “x who you followed liked this” that did me in. Turns out a lot of the smart people I followed followed complete tools. Twitter gave me no options to ignore, so I just deleted instead.

Never e-meet your heroes I suppose. But you know, your mind is your own, you can just literally ignore or make peace with parts of reality you find unpleasant. It seems quite strange to me how people clamor for push button blinders on what is actual life. You are not a horse to be led around by an app.

What a pretentious response. Bad art exists, twitter showing people you don’t follow in your feed is bad software art.

Who needs blinders when the feature could just work? Follow someone; see them. Don’t follow; don’t see.

Re: 'It's so liberating': The people quitting social media

#132

Post by DrBazza »

x55j33 wrote: post #125
DrBazza wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My blood does boil even there, with the subtle editorializing tell us what to feel about what is essentially a neutral news item, but it's much easier to control than the online media. The article is on the BBC news site. As someone that's a bit older than the average on here, I can remember when the BBC news site was just that - news. Now, it's changed subtly. Some articles now have 'by John Smith', the author, un…

Not sure if you're from the UK but if you're not then you should be aware that the BBC has become a lot more politicised as the government appointed a major donor as the director in 2021 [1] and have previously threatened the company, for example by changing the license fee to starve them of funding[2]. In addition, the BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg is not without controversy and accusations of pro-governme…

Yes, I'm in the UK. BBC used to be my "news of last resort", in the sense that it was the least worst of all the UK reporting.

But with things that you mentioned and recently Martine Croxall [1], I've pretty much switched to Reuters and Bloomberg quite some time ago without realising.

You only have to look at the BBC news site front page, versus their 'most read' section to see what the BBC editorial staff think we should be reading (relentless politics, doom and gloom) versus what people are actually reading (today, right now, Peter Kay's comeback! :) ).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-63500745

Re: 'It's so liberating': The people quitting social media

#133

Post by bart_spoon »

fullstackchris wrote: post #22

I disagree with this general sentiment. I don't think absolutely 0 social media is feasible or even wise this day in age. How are you going to keep up with family, friends, and so on? (In my case, family and friends span multiple states, countries, and continents!) You would at the very least need a phone - ok, that's maybe not "social media" in the sense this article talks about, but it's still tech at the end of th…

No, a phone is not social media. Nor is a standard messaging app. Social media is, in my opinion, any platform or service that connects you with an unknown number of users, a feed, and has some form of "likes" or "upvoting" involved. So simply messaging friends and family via your phone wouldn't qualify. But Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Reddit all would. And I agree with the author, social media (according to my definition), comes with an enormous number of negative consequences and we are all probably better off without it, on the whole (and yes, I realize that I am saying this on HackerNews, which also counts as social media according to that definition).

Re: 'It's so liberating': The people quitting social media

#134

Post by bart_spoon »

ResearchCode wrote: post #26

But didn't quit LinkedIn.

I wouldn't quit LinkedIn either. For 99% of the time, it's totally worthless, and has even more of an authenticity problem than most social media. But when it comes to finding a job its actually invaluable. I was laid off earlier in the year with a large number of others from my company, and I pretty much exclusively did my job searching through LinkedIn. I made a single post about having been laid off (which was my first personal post on the site ever), and within 24 hours I had so many people reaching out to me with job leads I needed a spreadsheet to keep track of them all. Within 2 weeks, I had 5 competing offers all of which were better than my previous job. I can't imagine being able to do all of that without LinkedIn.

Re: 'It's so liberating': The people quitting social media

#135

Post by bart_spoon »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #23

Amazing how as soon as Elon buys Twitter and bluechecks loose their privilege, there is one Mastodon endorsement [0] and one "quit social media" article on BCC in short succession trending on HN. Probably nothing. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33495817

Quitting social media is an evergreen topic and a new article about it pops up about once per month.

Re: 'It's so liberating': The people quitting social media

#136

Post by recuter »

te_chris wrote: post #131
recuter wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never e-meet your heroes I suppose. But you know, your mind is your own, you can just literally ignore or make peace with parts of reality you find unpleasant. It seems quite strange to me how people clamor for push button blinders on what is actual life. You are not a horse to be led around by an app.

What a pretentious response. Bad art exists, twitter showing people you don’t follow in your feed is bad software art. Who needs blinders when the feature could just work? Follow someone; see them. Don’t follow; don’t see.

> a lot of the smart people I followed followed complete tools

There is no technological solution to this. It isn't bad software art. Sometimes life is disappointing.

Maybe I like Harry Potter and enjoy fan fiction of a certain flavor on twitter and follow the author only to discover she doesn't share my politics (via her tweets and retweets). That is not the fault of Twitter. Well, if I didn't find certain views held by JK Rowling's disagreeable everything would actually be working as it should and there would be no complaints.

You can't pick and choose only the things you like about the people you are interested in. Having those books in common doesn't guarantee fellow fans are agreeable - same thing would happen if I were to attend a book reading in the olden days before twitter and overhear people expressing views that upset me.

I can of course demand everybody at the venue accommodate me on everything since we all enjoy Harry Potter and I am very special but that might not fly. I could compartmentalize and stick to the the things we have in common. Or I could excuse myself.

Re: 'It's so liberating': The people quitting social media

#137

Post by DrBazza »

afandian wrote: post #91
DrBazza wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My blood does boil even there, with the subtle editorializing tell us what to feel about what is essentially a neutral news item, but it's much easier to control than the online media. The article is on the BBC news site. As someone that's a bit older than the average on here, I can remember when the BBC news site was just that - news. Now, it's changed subtly. Some articles now have 'by John Smith', the author, un…

I've not paid attention to that detail of the news website. We but we've always had named correspondents on BBC Radio news. And newsreaders for that matter.

Frankly, the change in the way the stories are written is probably more to do with the evolution of the internet as another form of media. I can remember when the BBC website launched, and it was clear that they, and everyone else, had no idea how things would evolve.

At least the BBC hasn't gone down the route of "Boris ate cake. You won't believe what happened next!" style headlines.

I still wish they'd lay off the op-ed pieces.

Re: 'It's so liberating': The people quitting social media

#138

Post by ivanmontillam »

What I think is happening to our brains is that we are already too fried from the over-stimulus of the constant "feeding" (pun intended with the term "Feed").

The endless treadmill of posts will always overpower you. Doomscrolling is an appropriate term for it. You always end up beaten. It's just too much for people, let alone your brain who has not caught up with the technology pace in terms of evolution.

I've slowly stopped using social media, though I'll never surrender my handles, that'd be leaving people to impersonate me.

Re: 'It's so liberating': The people quitting social media

#139

Post by te_chris »

recuter wrote: post #136
te_chris wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a pretentious response. Bad art exists, twitter showing people you don’t follow in your feed is bad software art. Who needs blinders when the feature could just work? Follow someone; see them. Don’t follow; don’t see.

> a lot of the smart people I followed followed complete tools There is no technological solution to this. It isn't bad software art. Sometimes life is disappointing. Maybe I like Harry Potter and enjoy fan fiction of a certain flavor on twitter and follow the author only to discover she doesn't share my politics (via her tweets and retweets). That is not the fault of Twitter. Well, if I didn't find certain views hel…

I honestly can’t work out if I’m arguing with a bot or not. There is literally a single solution: the main stream is purely a stream of tweets from who you follow. I realise this is an existential threat to machine learning engineers who just love to build recommender systems, but that’s it, that’s all it is.

Re: 'It's so liberating': The people quitting social media

#140

Post by recuter »

te_chris wrote: post #139
recuter wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a lot of the smart people I followed followed complete tools There is no technological solution to this. It isn't bad software art. Sometimes life is disappointing. Maybe I like Harry Potter and enjoy fan fiction of a certain flavor on twitter and follow the author only to discover she doesn't share my politics (via her tweets and retweets). That is not the fault of Twitter. Well, if I didn't find certain views hel…

I honestly can’t work out if I’m arguing with a bot or not. There is literally a single solution: the main stream is purely a stream of tweets from who you follow. I realise this is an existential threat to machine learning engineers who just love to build recommender systems, but that’s it, that’s all it is.

Dude that is exactly how it works in most Twitter clients. On the website you click on "Lists" and curate away, no ML or recommender systems are involved.

Most people don't bother, they sign up and follow JK Rowlling or whatever and she tweets once a year or something so there's nothing to show you so it treats her as a subject not an individual. Bad UX and terminology for sure but most of the complaints are not about that.

Do you also get mad at reddit for whatever the hell the weirdos post in the default sub-reddits when you login?

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