121–130 of 283 posts
I enjoy social media and use it to exchange information, observe trends in culture, and as a communication channel when convenient.
I’m no longer absorbed in sensationalist media and I’m no longer angry about some flavor of the week topic. I don’t see ads anymore and I’ve been a lot happier since. Now I can work towards minimizing other unproductive and unfulfilling screen time.
There has always been all kinds of drama, addiction, obsession, love and hatred.
But I can’t stop thinking that modern websites just monetize by growing the userbase. This model kills creativity and we are juste cattle for them to feed us with some bullshit.
And some random guy nowadays instead of registering a domain name and creating a bunch of html pages to share his thoughts and observations no matter how weird and awkward or enlightening they are, just a small comfort zone in the neverending blizzard of data traffic - this guy will go create a facebook/instagram/youtube/etc. page, get all sorts of rage and ignorance, get kicked by violating some stupid ToC rule of the bespoke “social” “media”.
Long gone the times when internet was a place where you could stumble upon something really touching.
There are nice places to visit but google favors to show crap on its first couple of search results pages nowadays
* Well, by “we” I mean to say people born before 1990 probably
But both platforms started actively working against that kind of usage. Eventually I just had to stop as they became unusable, not using Twitter at all anymore, and only using FB for messenger.
I have a question: before “social” “media” became a thing we* all had been using various irc chats, forums and theme websites of all kinds. There has always been all kinds of drama, addiction, obsession, love and hatred. But I can’t stop thinking that modern websites just monetize by growing the userbase. This model kills creativity and we are juste cattle for them to feed us with some bullshit. And some random guy n…
I disagree you can’t stumble on great content though. This website itself is an example. There’s more crap being published but the Internet has been too big to consume in it’s entirety for decades now. You have to learn to filter.
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…
How can you distinguish identity-based from topic-based social media? Doesn't your identity influence which topics you're interested in, and don't the topics which interest you form your identity? This forum says in the guidelines to submit "Anything that good hackers would find interesting." That reads to me like an identity-based forum. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>That a comment is flagged or at -4 is useful signal Knowing that something is a) spot on but ideologically inconvenient b) wrong doesn't really help if you don't have the subject matter familiarity to already know what's right and wrong. It just reduces your options to a binary choice.
"ideologically inconvenient" is indistinguishable from "incoherent nonsense" if you put yourself in the shoes of someone who disagrees with said ideology. It's typical of people knee-deep in weird politics to fall into "with us or against us" type of thinking.
No it's not. Counterexample (which is inconvenient to a wide variety of different ideologies):
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H. L. Mencken
I never had to quit social media. They quit me. I loved Facebook and Twitter when they were new, I connected to people that were way outside my normal group of friends and stayed in contact with people I knew who moved away, sometimes passively by reading their posts, sometimes actively. But both platforms started actively working against that kind of usage. Eventually I just had to stop as they became unusable, not…
But it basically does exactly what I want: when someone I follow posts something, it shows up in my feed. Which is what it’s been doing for years.
Again, maybe this is a matter of the client, but Tweetbot lets me see exactly what I want, and nothing more.