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The benefits of staying off social media

durmonski.com

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Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#21

Post by civilized »

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 feel like the challenge for creators is less the "social media Orwellian dystopian hellscape etc" and more that virtually everything you can contribute has been done better by someone else before you.

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#22

Post by ronnier »

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'm of the opinion Reddit is the most toxic and hateful website on the internet. It's also the most influential.

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#23

Post by CapmCrackaWaka »

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 played around with different methods of interacting with these websites and found one that works for me. With Reddit, I deleted my account and simply visit the site on the mobile browser. I just have the subreddits I like bookmarked. Eventually, a little screen pops up and says "get the app or get off", and that's usually about the time I should get off Reddit anyway. It's a shame, I used to be an active contributor to subreddits like /datascience and /, but I noticed on multiple separate instances that I was talking to / arguing with a troll karma farming account. On my home town subreddit. I feel a lot better now that I am simply incapable of arguing on that website anymore.

I also deleted my accounts with all of my other social media sites. I think HN is the only social media site I still have an account with.

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#24

Post by jaynetics »

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…

> Beautifully written top-notch orwellian poetry. Seriously inspiring.

yeah, that paragraph was probably the best one.

all in all i find this text really painful to read.

main issues:

- a lot of sentences feel superfluous, like time-wasting boilerplate

- poor grammar, punctuation and paragraph structure disrupt the reading flow

- there is little logical structure or flow of arguments

- there is far too much repetition

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#25

Post by civilized »

justapassenger wrote: post #15
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 is a huge echo chamber. That’s a characteristic of a most of social medias, and can have very bad consequences. But in this case it’s just geeks talking about tech. If you’d make HN general network, it wouldn’t be any better than other todays networks, as growth to general public is what kills them.

I think you get what you put in. I've had plenty of interesting, challenging conversations here. On Twitter too, although it's more work and ultimately I decided it wasn't worth it.

I agree that HN would not survive an incursion by the general public. Fortunately we're protected by being a bunch of boring nerds. Who would bother?

The boring, minimalist UI is probably our strongest moat.

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#26

Post by cool_scatter »

someoneiknow wrote: post #20

I am not on social media (I tried it for a year, then quit), and sometimes I find it weird why people treat it like a big goliath dystopian thing which will consume your entire life if you aren't careful. It's not impossible, or even that difficult to leave (or not join) in the first place. You won't have convulsions/palpitations/stuff you get when you try to quit the genuinely addictive stuff. For sure it's a lot mo…

>I am not on social media

That's wrong. You are on social media right now.

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#27

Post by andrew_ »

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.

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#28

Post by sudhirj »

version_five wrote: post #10
sudhirj wrote: post #6

So does HN count as social media? I’m a recovering HN addict (couldn’t bear to keep noprocrast on). I’ve found getting into the flow in new projects keeps me off for days at a time, but not much else.

HN is definitely social media. It has some features that stop the feedback cycles that others have (I mean no notifications of replies, de-emphasizing the person posting in favor of the content, etc). I think the biggest difference is that social media amplifies the lowest common denominator view (I don't mean stupidest, but more most risk averse, most easily offended, angriest, whatever) and the lowest common denomi…

I didn't even know you could be notified of replies. Not sure I wanted to find that out either.

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#29

Post by politelemon »

version_five wrote: post #10
sudhirj wrote: post #6

So does HN count as social media? I’m a recovering HN addict (couldn’t bear to keep noprocrast on). I’ve found getting into the flow in new projects keeps me off for days at a time, but not much else.

HN is definitely social media. It has some features that stop the feedback cycles that others have (I mean no notifications of replies, de-emphasizing the person posting in favor of the content, etc). I think the biggest difference is that social media amplifies the lowest common denominator view (I don't mean stupidest, but more most risk averse, most easily offended, angriest, whatever) and the lowest common denomi…

What about Github, could someone comment on that? I know at some point they used to call themselves 'social coding'.

I use it quite regularly for several of my projects and dealing with issues that users raise. It has reply notifications via email. It has emojis. You can star and watch repositories. I've never used IG, FB, WA etc but I assume they have similar concepts.

Re: The benefits of staying off social media

#30

Post by DisjointedHunt »

I humbly believe the answer is to allow more transparency, choice and control back to the users instead of allowing these companies to choose a greedy recommendation algorithm that ranks for 'exploit' over 'explore'.

I recently started a new twitter account with the hope of creating lists of quantum physics and some financial research individuals such as the heads of investment banks who post amazing short form content all the time.

Twitter randomly starts injecting abject nonsense in my feed from other topics such as "investing" which, okay, i get may be related, but the contents of those topics are nowhere near the level of quality that my core lists had. Absolute idiots posts content of a passive aggressive nature and raking up the likes and reshares which i had no interest to be a part of.

A few days of constantly giving feedback to the algorithm and aggressively hiding sources and topics from my feed and the quality just keeps getting worse. My mood started slipping if i wake up and have a push notification from twitter suggesting yet another tweet about some finance bro dunking on some company they hold a short position on because they can't believe it's valued above 0.

I plan on spending some time now understanding how i completely kill all recommendations and only keep follow lists of the people i explicitly follow, but that is frustrating.

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