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I deleted my social media accounts

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Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#141

Post by insane_dreamer »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #10
chmaynard wrote: post #6

I love this: "Maybe I’ll go old-school and write more blog posts. Like back in the early 2000s, when you actually had to think before sharing your thoughts with the world. Sounds quaint, doesn’t it?"

It is quaint but if my friends and family each had their own blog that they wanted me to look at, I wouldn't. There's a reason these social media places caught on, because they act as aggregators. I get it, it's different types of content, one requires more effort than the other, and the argument is that, if you don't have anything of substance to say, don't say it, but it still requires extra effort to read that I p…

> they act as aggregators

RSS, my friend

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#142

Post by insane_dreamer »

wruza wrote: post #29

I'm just not reading any of it - not interested. SM addiction is so 2015. I have technical accounts to be able to search for something (e.g. while training loras) or to watch without annoying popups when someone links me to it. This dramatic deletion is overreaction, solve the underlying problem instead. Rather than scrolling instagram and tiktok, visit /news and /newest, and then /ask, /show. If nothing interesting…

> SM addiction is so 2015

it's more prevalent today than it was then, so no.

> solve the underlying problem instead

that would be to get rid of FB, X etc. altogether; but since we can't do that, we can do the things that we have control over, i.e., our own accounts

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#143

Post by insane_dreamer »

dehrmann wrote: post #137
amikaeel wrote: post #42

I deleted social media around 2.5 years ago. After feeling extreme anxiety and withdrawal for about a week I realized this was the right move. I gained massive amounts of productivity, felt more awake than ever, and realized just how many HOURS I was killing browsing. It sounds like the usual rant, but I truly think that in 10-15 years there will be a huge anti social media movement after we fully realize the damage.…

What if I told you Hacker News is social media?

there are a several key aspects of HN that are very different than social media networks, and that's why it's in a different category

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#144

Post by exitb »

standardUser wrote: post #94
hypeatei wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post blasted to hundreds (or thousands) of people. Or, to put it another way: if you mattered, you would've gotten a direct message or call from them. I'd argue that social media has normalized keeping up with people who aren't supposed to b…

> This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post The landscape of human relationships is deep and broad an varied, and if making bold assumptions about what other people should value is your starting point, you're liable to miss a lot of potential connections.

Due to some unknown circumstances this might not be true for this person, but it’s certainly true for a lot of people. Social media used in that context is effectively automating human relationships. It used to take effort to have a handful of friends, now you can have hundreds. Somewhere along the way though, friendship turned from active effort to passive status.

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#145

Post by arccy »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #116
2024user wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No imo. no real names, no real profiles, no following or friending people aka no connections, no chat/DMs, no personal updates, no tagging, no pictures/videos/stories

No opaque ranking system, no advertising, no opaque ranking system to favour content that induces negative engagement... And now more than before, HN is not social media because it actually has useful content and quality moderation.

> opaque ranking system

people confused by the first page

> no advertising

all the hiring ads, and thinly veiled corp marketing blogs

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#146

Post by angoragoats »

pessimizer wrote: post #131
angoragoats wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s odd how so many people have developed the attitude of “censorship bad” without thinking about the consequences of removing it or whether “censorship” on private, profit-driven, opaque-algorithm-powered social media should even be considered bad.

I don't understand this. You think that social media is so bad that you want to give it as much power to censor speech as possible?

I do think social media is bad. And ideally, no, to the extent that any social media sites have feeds more complicated than a chronological feed of people I follow, I want the algorithms powering those feeds to be open for inspection by anyone (by law), and for regulations to be put in place so that dangerous content is never promoted on the platform just because it attracts eyeballs (and thus advertising dollars). Opaque social media algorithms are bad for society, the same way that fentanyl is bad for society, or violent crime is bad for society.

There is no precedent in human history that you can compare social-media black-box algorithms to. It's not the same as a "public square," or a newspaper, or books, or talking to friends in person. It's a new paradigm.

I would drastically prefer regulations to letting the companies police themselves, but, well, waves hands at the current environment, and what Meta did removing their content reviewers is a step in the wrong direction. The platform will get worse as a result.

In other words, the problem is free reach, not free speech. You might have heard of it -- it has recently been popularized, co-opted, and slightly twisted by Twitter to mean what is more akin to "shadowbanning" problematic accounts, but I'm saying that no one deserves free reach by default on social media.

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#147

Post by ozim »

standardUser wrote: post #94
hypeatei wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post blasted to hundreds (or thousands) of people. Or, to put it another way: if you mattered, you would've gotten a direct message or call from them. I'd argue that social media has normalized keeping up with people who aren't supposed to b…

> This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post The landscape of human relationships is deep and broad an varied, and if making bold assumptions about what other people should value is your starting point, you're liable to miss a lot of potential connections.

You write like somehow there would be something to miss out on by not valuing keeping up with people who are far away and most likely have no place in our lives.(by far away I mean you don’t actually get to talk or meet with them or even chat by messanger or so, even if they could live in the same city - I have friends who live far away but we actually meet at least once a year and chat once a week we are far in distance but not far in contact)

I would argue that there is much to miss on by wasting time looking up Jenny from primary school when you have your kids, friends and family who you meet day to day.

There is actually an option to run into mental health issues that we know social media is causing.

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#148

Post by Barrin92 »

standardUser wrote: post #94
hypeatei wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post blasted to hundreds (or thousands) of people. Or, to put it another way: if you mattered, you would've gotten a direct message or call from them. I'd argue that social media has normalized keeping up with people who aren't supposed to b…

> This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post The landscape of human relationships is deep and broad an varied, and if making bold assumptions about what other people should value is your starting point, you're liable to miss a lot of potential connections.

>you're liable to miss a lot of potential connections.

are you really? If you only notice that it's Bob's birthday because you get a FB reminder and the only form of communication is a post on their timeline once a year that's not a connection, that's like talking to your neighbor about the weather out of courtesy because it's awkward to say nothing at all.

The reason a lot of people miss out on life nowadays is not because they have too few connections but because they waste their time on fake ones. Life's short, instead of trying to warm up some high school friendship that's going nowhere, focus everything you have on the few people around you that matter. Cutting connections is as valuable a skill as making them, and an increasingly lost art.

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#149

Post by hugoromano »

For those who have achieved this, well done. I've experienced the positive impact of reducing my social media usage over the years, while still keeping my accounts for the occasional need to connect. I've taken steps to limit social platforms from accessing my phone contact list and have set a cap of 20 contacts, including on WhatsApp. This has significantly reduced Meta's profiling and advertising targeting.

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#150

Post by tialaramex »

nindalf wrote: post #38

This advice to quit social media is always a hit on HN. When I was 10 years younger I read the same thing on HN, was thoroughly convinced and quit social media. I even followed the advice of trying to stay in touch by email. Sure. Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on. I asked them why they didn’t tell me and they were confused. They said the posted it on socia…

I would distinguish somewhere my friends post stuff for "friends" from social media.

Lets take my friend Em as our example. If the typical message from Em says "Where are you? What time did we say we'll meet" that's a messenger app, that's definitely not Social Media. It might be a fucking SMS, but if it's a WhatsApp or a Signal. it's all the same for this purpose and that's definitely not Social Media.

If the typical message from Em says "They don't know about my trees" and involves an in-joke reference to a movie that six people saw with her in 2008, that's maybe some sort of "social" experience but it's clearly not public. We have a Slack like this, created under pandemic conditions and named "Cabin Fever Mitigation".

If the typical message says "Aw! Piggy" and has a picture of a guinea pig, that is now shading into Social Media. Probably some of the people "following" this feed don't know who she is but they like guinea pigs, or they like her art, or something similar.

And yes obviously if the typical message is a reply to Elon Musk then it's social media and it can fuck off. But hopefully your friends aren't making crucial life updates as a public address to any watching fascists ?

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