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I used to fear being a nobody, then I left social media

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Re: I used to fear being a nobody, then I left social media

#201

Post by chr1 »

I used to fear being a nobody, but then i came to accept that i am nobody and i never will manage to do anything that would make my name worth putting into physics textbooks. More than a decade spent studying physics turned out to be somewhat helpful to an ordinary programmer.

Guess what i am trying to say is that, this is not a new problem created by social media, but an old problem caused by most of us having to be not special. And while eventual acceptance of it is very important, the initial denial is even more important.

Re: I used to fear being a nobody, then I left social media

#202

Post by 3stripe »

vonseel wrote: post #180
polygotdomain wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that makes this so much harder is that there's still an algorithm between you and your FB feed. Even if you feel you're good the check in once a week, you still don't see the "important" posts and there's still mindless noise in your feed. I don't know if there's a way to curate this, but I've found that FB is all or nothing for me (and I feel better with nothing)

Yeah, I haven't done any tests on this myself but the algorithm is frustrating. I see a lot of posts from people I am not that close with, but I don't really scroll the feed anymore. The only people who really like my posts are family members, and I've heard that once Facebook marks a post as "relevant to family" then it mostly gets pushed to your relatives' newsfeeds, so I'm not sure if non-family people are even se…

Simple solution: unfollow everyone except your family. Unfollow anything/one you’ve liked too.

Edit: same comment as below oops

Re: I used to fear being a nobody, then I left social media

#203

Post by greggman2 »

vonseel wrote: post #162
fhbdukfrh wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't conflate the medium with the quality of interaction. Not on FB != hermit, that's just what Facebook wants you to believe. I prefer deep personal relationships with few over hyper connectivity. Others may want a broader, shallower network; neither is wrong just define happiness for yourself.

Understood, but you also have to remember you can't control how your friends communicate . I'd be perfectly fine communicating only via iMessage, but most of my friends have social media accounts and when I quit FB/Instagram and stopped liking their posts, I had less presence in their lives. Think about that - social networks are almost like an Internet schoolyard; just upvoting something shows presence and lets ever…

I'm not sure that's true. if 3 people like a post I see 3 names. If 15 people like a post I see 3 names so 12 people went unnoticed. Is that presence?

Re: I used to fear being a nobody, then I left social media

#204

Post by criddell »

jbarberu wrote: post #134
Swizec wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone can't be arsed to call me or send me an email inviting me to their birthday then I don't consider them a friend. And they think the same of you. If their preferred method of communication is Facebook message, are you really a friend if you don’t care?

If I have some friends who are into amateur radio, am I not really their friend if I don't get my own ham radio so they can contact me through that?

I wouldn't say that. But don't be surprised if the ham radio friends become grow apart from you. It isn't necessarily a bad thing because people change.

Re: I used to fear being a nobody, then I left social media

#205

Post by leviathant »

Steven_Vellon wrote: post #89
haolez wrote: post #66

In LinkedIn, I get the opposite feeling. It seems that a lot of people spend a considerable amount of energy pumping their profiles with lots of achievements, professional photos and blog posts, but it feels like everybody is talking to themselves. Nobody cares.

Do people actually interact with each other over LinkedIn? The only people I've every talked to are recruiters. I thought it was just a directory of potential employees for recruiters. If people actually do social things on LinkedIn then that's news for me.

After a long time in software development, I'm now a sales engineer, and LinkedIn is a very different place when your weeks involve interactions with C-suite and marketing types. I find LinkedIn to be pretty absurd, and I'm never going to (or want to) compete with the people who share life-affirming abstract business nonsense in a vertical video shot from their car, but I get a surprising amount of interaction from my screeds about the ecommerce ecosystem. I'm not using LinkedIn to boost my personal brand, but I do use it to talk about the Saas ecommerce platform we sell (because a lot of people hate Magento and find Shopify doesn't suit their needs)

A coworker has at times referred to me as a LinkedIn Shitpost Memelord, although I don't use image macros/memes. I just share information about a very niche corner of the internet, and it's way more effective than advertising. It actually serves as an outlet for the kind of writing I used to do, and sometimes still do, on forums - but instead of being about music and bands, it's about commerce and software. It's weird, but it scratches an itch I guess.

I do see more 'social' posts on LinkedIn, and it's pretty close to the worst of the net. It's like YouTube comments, except you can see the people who post them all wear suits in their photos. A surprisingly large number of people who like & reply to self-help garbage, effusively, as though Gary Vee's latest you-can-do-it schlock saved them from offing themselves at the water cooler that morning.

Re: I used to fear being a nobody, then I left social media

#206

Post by namirez »

SnowflakeOnIce wrote: post #200
namirez wrote: post #19

Many years ago someone told me that we should care about our mental hygiene as much as we care about the hygiene of the food that we consume. I quit FB two years ago after 11 years of active use. For a few weeks after deleting my account, I had these temptations to go back but after two months, I totally forgot about it and after two years, I'm very happy about leaving the platform. I also realized that it wasn't jus…

Next, take it one step further and skip going directly to any news sites or aggregators, and cut out news TV and radio. You cut out the news-induced anxiety this way. After a while, you also realize that most news is noise, and doesn’t matter even a day later. If something really significant happens, you’ll still hear about it.

I'm not sure about that. I still enjoy the long reads in the New Yorker and a few other magazines. But if you mean the 24-hour news cycle, I agree with you.

Re: I used to fear being a nobody, then I left social media

#207

Post by not_a_cop75 »

wasdfff wrote: post #193
WhompingWindows wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oddly enough, social media made it's big entrance via movie stars - I could not possibly be any less surprised at this. Is this true? I don't recall that occurring, it seemed more like a young-techie-people, grassroots phenomenon when people started using MySpace and FB.

When fan pages gave way to official profiles was a watershed moment. It showed facebook wasnt just a teenage myspace replacement, but a commercial engine.

When user's information was leaked to third parties without proper management or oversight, while Facebook stock continued to go through the roof, that was another watershed moment. That was the moment people realized that Facebook is full of crooks and enables other crooks to boot.

Re: I used to fear being a nobody, then I left social media

#208

Post by naravara »

vonseel wrote: post #21

I quit social media for a long time too. And then I noticed how disconnected I was from all my old school friends and contacts. Even close family that still uses Facebook but I otherwise don’t talk to much directly (brother’s wives posting about their kids and stuff like that, maybe even more extended than that). Really, I’m starting to think that opting out of social media altogether is a bit like opting to be a her…

Most of my relationships that were worth anything have largely moved to platforms that involve actual conversation rather than the posting format of Facebook. This is stuff like WhatsApp and Discord and Slack mostly. Most of the life update stuff that doesn't merit conversation is on Instagram at this point.

I think the key is really just using the services in ways where they can't dark pattern you into engaging with them. So notifications get shut off and anything you can do to turn off "endless scroll" mode is worth doing.

Facebook was originally designed as a sort of directory or phone book type page for people and that's still what it's best at. Instead of using the regular page, which just tries to dark pattern you into engaging with it, I've bookmarked mbasic.facebook.com which lets you see only the top 5 to 10 posts on your feed at a time and then I shut off all notifications that weren't sent to me directly.

Once I got rid of the "one more post" effect of wanting to keep reading, I found myself spending a lot more time going through my RSS feed, which is nice as that's content I find much more edifying.

Re: I used to fear being a nobody, then I left social media

#209

Post by gfo »

vonseel wrote: post #162
fhbdukfrh wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't conflate the medium with the quality of interaction. Not on FB != hermit, that's just what Facebook wants you to believe. I prefer deep personal relationships with few over hyper connectivity. Others may want a broader, shallower network; neither is wrong just define happiness for yourself.

Understood, but you also have to remember you can't control how your friends communicate . I'd be perfectly fine communicating only via iMessage, but most of my friends have social media accounts and when I quit FB/Instagram and stopped liking their posts, I had less presence in their lives. Think about that - social networks are almost like an Internet schoolyard; just upvoting something shows presence and lets ever…

To me, it's opting into different means for keeping in touch and hence, keeping that "presence" in my friends' lives.

I quit Facebook a year ago - I had 800+ friends. I was only "close" (subjectively) with a slim fraction of that. Now, I text, call, send birthday cards, and use other means to communicate with those I truly care about. Not that I don't care about the other, it's more of my way to prioritize the people who I've shared more life experiences with and/or can better relate to.

If I see the others who aren't in that close circle, we have plenty to talk about. If I see my close friends, well, we do as close friends always have done.

No offense, but I would argue the notion of needing "presence" in people's lives contains some inherent narcissism which is also prevalent on social media; and to be fair, the other piece is the need for belonging. True, it was a tough pill to swallow when first disconnecting, but over time this faded and via the other means I suggested, I've found I get that same level of belonging.

Re: I used to fear being a nobody, then I left social media

#210

Post by 92ace7830f00029 »

92ace7830f00029 wrote: post #148

I do get the point of the author and I share it's thoughts and values, but for me it went quite different. I have never been a really social person. I have never had many friends. No one really asks me ever where I have been or what I have been doing or whatever. I used facebook to shitpost. To shitpost a lot and MAYBE get a few likes. It worked. It worked for way too long. Then someday i literally fell on my head, m…

Fuck, I pressed way too many times F5 on this to see if anyone replied or upvoted. That's why I got rid of my HN account. I guess I should press logout on this one, too.
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