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The benefits of staying off social media

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Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#181

Post by II2II »

irrational wrote: post #113
ipdashc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where people consider talking to someone a chore. This bit in particular really hit me. I've noticed a rising trend around the Internet (or maybe I was just blind to it before), mostly on Reddit, of people who really do seem to consider any sort of real-life social interaction a chore and an attack. I forget the exact context, I think the conversation that stood out to me was about someone in a gas station or somet…

> Most of us consider (or used to consider; and I'm not even old) that enjoyable. Eh, I’m 50 years old and don’t really use social media (certainly not Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, twitter, etc.). I don’t even really text other people. But, I don’t agree with your sentiment. I’ve never understood people who want to have small talk with strangers. It is the opposite of enjoyable.

Heck, I'm not even a fan of small talk. It's not as though I have an aversion to talking. Discussing things of mutual interest is fine. Listening to people who have interesting stories, or even need to get something off their chest, is fine. But small talk has always struck me as the means by which people fill silence. You don't really learn anything about each other.

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#182

Post by mistermann »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #56
civilized wrote: post #5

I have no idea how HN does it (I hear this "dang" guy plays a big role) but HN shows the possibility of a largely positive and edifying social media IMO. I have maybe needed a break from time to time though. I generally don't take that break but maybe I should... EDIT: I know we're not supposed to comment on downvotes but it was very funny to me that the first vote I got on this comment was a down. Like, "HN sucks! H…

HN does it with heavy moderation. For one, the scope of what's allowed to be posted is small. You're never going to see a post about Kylie Jenner's latest trip here. Second, low-quality comments are universally downvoted. Jokes and fun are allowed, but we don't tend to beat dead horses into a bloody pulp like reddit does. You will never see "Username checks out" as a comment here. Lastly, HN is mostly populated by te…

These surely account for much of what works here at HN, but what other items from the comprehensive list are we missing?

One I can think of: the less diversity of viewpoints a community has, the more harmonious (less polarized) it will be. Moderation & voting can plausibly establish and maintain such a phenomenon, but my intuition is that this (roughly: ~echo chamber, and please pardon the pejorative nature of that term) may not have been what you had in mind?

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#183

Post by bagacrap »

dijit wrote: post #83
shtopointo wrote: post #34

Another day, another person telling you how to live your life... Sorry, but even though we know social media has its downsides, it also has advantages: keeping in touch with friends, socializing, a way to stay up to date with your community, new recipe ideas, exercise ideas, time management ideas, maybe even the occasional envy that someone's success triggers more ambition in you to succeed etc. It's a tool, like any…

"Drugs, if taken properly, are no harm". Correct in theory, but we universally agree that illicit drugs can be damaging to your life. -- even in some cases taking them not seriously enough can cause addiction and serious issues stemming from that. We just need to figure out if Facebook/Twitter/Youtube are paracetamol, codeine, vicodin, cocaine or heroin.

We definitely do not universally agree whether cocaine should be illegal. Drugs are a good analogy though because they can be used to improve life or misused with very bad outcomes. Tarring all instances with the same brush, or expecting every user to experience them the same way, are both mistakes that shouldn't be applied to drugs or SM.

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#184

Post by corobo »

kingcharles wrote: post #155

OK, so I just went to jail for 8 years and that was an abrupt disconnect from social media, which I used on a heavy basis. So, I "stayed off" social media. I can tell you that since getting out TikTok has been one of the biggest benefits to my mental health. We don't need to disconnect entirely, we just need a healthier limit on our use. Now, if someone could please tell me how to break my HN addiction?! (for real)

> Now, if someone could please tell me how to break my HN addiction?! (for real)

It has a function for that in your profile. I can't find the original for my quote, it appears to have rotted. Still accurate though.

> Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#185

Post by throwawaygh »

GingerMidas wrote: post #134
MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's because reddits user base has significantly decreased in age. I have been using it since late 2012, which even then I felt like a late adopter. The content on Reddit back then was like a more ”normie" version of HN and slashdot. It had good articles consistently with maybe 1 or 2 default meme subreddits. Then Reddit started cutting down content it didn't like and now it's just a leftwing cesspool of anti…

Have you considered the target age hasn't changed, but you're just a decade older now?

Kids these days are such radicals ;-)

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#186

Post by throwawaygh »

smoldesu wrote: post #84
Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this won't happen unless something or someone takes actions. If governments is not going to bother to do the enforcement of the laws, then nothing changed until they do it. If there is a new player in the field, what or who is going to stop FAANGs from buying the competitors (even it violated the antitrust law)? Sure we do have Sherman Antitrust Act for this... but no one bothering to do the enforcement…

> Frankly, the Congress prefers to listen to their corporate masters over their constituents. There's the crux of it all. We know firsthand that our addiction to companies like Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon are unhealthy, but the only thing stopping us from keeping them in check is our government. I've been saying this for a while now, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the SEC cuts deals to FAANG comp…

Everyone hates these companies but there's enormous disagreement about the "why".

Josh Hawley, Bernie Sanders, Mitt Romney, and Nancy Pelosi all hate big tech. Their reasons and suggested interventions are about as far apart as you can get.

There's also an enormous amount of cross-ideology jealousy about the amount of money FAANG nerds are making.

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#187

Post by karaterobot »

tqi wrote: post #145
karaterobot wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it also has advantages: keeping in touch with friends, socializing, a way to stay up to date with your community, new recipe ideas, exercise ideas, time management ideas, maybe even the occasional envy that someone's success triggers more ambition in you to succeed etc. In what way are these advantages over not using social media? They're all things you can do — provably — without social media. In fact, the problem…

> They're all things you can do — provably — without social media. People who hold this opinion, when asked to define what counts as social media, will invariably draw the line based on "what do I like/dislike." Facebook, Snapchat: social media. HN, WhatsApp: not social media.

I'm not making that argument though. What I'm saying is, you can do all of those things (keeping up to date with friends, socializing, finding recipes, etc.) without social media. Indeed, without computers of any kind. The proof is that people did it for thousands of years before social media existed. If the argument is that you can do those things better with social media, my second point was that that hasn't turned out to be the case for many people, particularly when it comes to maintaining meaningful social connections.

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#188

Post by jkaptur »

andrew_ wrote: post #27
aluminussoma wrote: post #4

I am now off popular social media (Facebook, Instagram). The void is now replaced with other forms of social media (Reddit, Hacker News). Reddit, arguably, is more toxic than my version of Facebook - but it is strangers being toxic, and zero FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) which is prevalent on Facebook and Instagram.

I don't count HN as modern social media. For me, it's more akin to older phpBB boards and the like. We have no avatars, we come and go on posting, reading. We have only usernames and karma, and no one cares how much karma someone has. There's very little dopamine hit.

It seems like that should be true, but my observation is that HN causes similar stress in people.

For example, "I'm so stressed out by all these new frameworks" is a frequent comment on HN. That's FOMO, that's keeping-up-with-the-Jones's, that's a negative reaction to social media.

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#189

Post by notacoward »

supernovae wrote: post #139
pkdpic wrote: post #12

> A futuristic dystopia. A place where the real world sucks. Where people consider talking to someone a chore. Connection, closeness, ambition are replaced by detachment and dogmatic slumber. Society is satisfied with shallow thoughts and the pursuit of artificially created stimuli in an imaginary world. Beautifully written top-notch orwellian poetry. Seriously inspiring. Also as someone who has only ever used social…

I sort of raged on twitter the other day that what we call "community" (while online) is sick. I'll take my example of Astrophotography - the "online community" is soul sucking, competitive and not nice at all - sort of hundreds of assholes all competing to be the biggest asshole... Yet, the astronomy clubs that meet in person that are shrinking in numbers and dwindling over the years (the comet just a little while a…

> being social in permanence

That's a really important point. Joining an online community has become much lower effort than joining an in-person one. Just finding a time and place for everyone to meet is more of a chore than even running a small site online. Depending on the type of community you might also need to deal with recruiting speakers, storing/maintaining shared equipment, etc. My family belongs to a ski club, and it's a commitment in both time and money. It's not a full time job or anything, but it's on the same level as a typical four-credit college course. If not for the fact that the underlying shared interest is physical in nature, the online alternative would seem very compelling.

The downside of online is that the conflicts and competition for "internet points" often colors the conversation or even drowns it out. People start to show up who actually don't care as much about the shared interest as they do about having another arena in which to fight. Without the real-world mechanisms that tend to curb the most outrageous behavior, and often with substitutes that encourage it, the need for explicit moderation becomes greater ... but brings its own share of problems. In my thirty years or so of online experience, moderation and moderators have exacerbated conflict and degradation more often than they've helped. Just read the news and you'll see it happening today on all of the big sites.

The solution, IMO, is to pay attention to the actual science of how people coexist, and apply its lessons. What are the empirical effects of upvotes and downvotes and other reactions? Of showing or not showing view counts? Of hierarchical vs. flat conversations? Of content restrictions or moderator behaviors? Unfortunately, that kind of examination will never happen where "soft" sciences are disrespected, which is every place where these decisions actually need to be made. Everyone just flies by the seat of their pants, and most of them fly into mountainsides.

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#190

Post by [deleted] »

streamofdigits wrote: post #129

We are stuck in the twilight zone. I have never seen a serious defense of the dystopic status quo of current tech. I would have loved to. If you read an honest, intelligent argument (that comes from a recognizably human psyche, not a lawyer, or a cynical, amoral capital accumulator) it can "open your eyes". It can convince you that your view is missing an important angle. That can be liberating, exhilarating even as…

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