Quit Social Media (2016)

> Where does one learn about local goings-on outside [...] if nor social media?

Imagine, there are people who don't care that much besides their family/friends circle. Maybe some newspaper/-site from time to time, but why cope with all the other stuff too all the time? Life goes on too if one doesn't know abou the latest stuff.

Imagine there were hundreds or thousands of year of humanity you didn't know how your neighbour is except you walked there.

At least that's fine for me. I don't miss social media (besides HN), and I don't miss anything.

I agree with this, but it's worth noting the quote is from a journalist/blogger who was not talking about social media. He was talking about keeping up with a 24 hour news cycle by any means. The problem here isn't specific to social media. It's with overwhelming information flow, the vast majority of which is not actionable to the person consuming it. People come down with a type of awareness FOMO such that they feel like they need to know all things as they happen, even though the information is incomplete, often wrong, misleading, and doesn't impact their everyday real lives in any way.

This is what Andrew Sullivan was getting at. People should worry themselves with information that actually concerns and impacts their real lives. All else is entertainment. If it stops being entertaining and starts being anxiety-inducing, stop consuming it.

My almost post-social media life has been interesting. I ditched Twitter, came back to it briefly, then ditched it again when it was purchased because I found my mental health growing increasingly fragile with the constant outrage, the need to keep track of who the main character of the day was or risk the ire of your circle, and the increasing filtering of my timeline.

I quit Facebook, other than keeping an account for announcing major life events to the older people who were still on it, because I was frustrated that I never received any posts from family or close friends in the heavily filtered timeline, I kept receiving time-sensitive posts (say about a hurricane event) for weeks after the post was no longer relevant, and Meta's increasingly metastasized privacy practices.

I joined Mastodon and found a calm, down to earth, almost boring place. The decentralized nature of the platform certainly means there are some not-at-all boring parts of the Mastoverse, but it felt more like being in an old-style forum than anything else. I'm still there, though my participation isn't significant.

I tried Blue Sky because all my Twitter people were there ... and it was IMMEDIATELY like hitting a drug after being off it for a while. It was all about main characters and outrage.

For me, in hindsight, it was like sitting in front of a slot machine, feeding in quarters, waiting for one to win. And watching people who did win inevitably milkshake duck themselves out of favor. It was briefly an amazing, buzzy world to share both humor and excitement about whatever events you wanted, but that certainly didn't last.

I don't miss it.

Why would you willingly pay the scamming middlemen?

I was one of those security/privacy people in the 00's who declined to join facebook or do any of the social media stuff. Feels like it was the right call. Meta was the best possible company name for the social media machine, because when you turn it all off, you really do become less meta.

I'd suspect it's a bit like being a vegan, where it's a self-imposed constrant that makes you aloof from others and makes them treat you like an exception. It reduces some of the invites you get, and you just aren't up on the news about your friend groups as a result. We imagine it signals some kind of purity or difference, as though to say we're not like those regular IT people, maybe there's an air of mystery about what we might know, but it's just kind of fussy and it creates a polarizing filter where people really have to like you a lot to put up with the conditions you put on hanging out.

I still see the internet as a machine I operate for money and entertainment, and not the substrate of my identity or reality. This is also a fairly masculine coded view, as it dismisses the public sphere of gossip and narratives as separate from a Real made of consequences and competence, where the internet is not a dominion of truth the way real friendships are. It sounds marginal in the current discourse, but really there are still operators around who know ways out of this hallucination a lot of people were born into and can't see the edges of. It's not a mystery, you just turn the phone off for a bit and then live and relate according to the results.