Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Quit Social Media for a Year

joshcsimmons.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 380 posts

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#241

Post by rjf72 »

istjohn wrote: post #145
hyperdunc wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to say that Western society was built with white males as the presumed default, you might want to also mention who the builders were. And as a broader point, it also might be worth considering how Western society stacks up against all other societies to ever exist.

Slave labor built this country.

There's an extremely interesting datum that most are not familiar with. In total in the transatlantic slave trade, about 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. Of these, 10.7 million survived the voyage. And of those, about 388,000 thousand went to North America. [1] Up to 60-70k more would make their way North America eventually for a total of up to ~450k - about 4% of the slaves that made their way to the New World.

North America's use of slavery was relatively low compared to many other places in the world. Even within the United States itself it's interesting to compare the states where slaves disproportionately ended up to those where they did not. And the Confederate/Union states works as a pretty solid proxy there.

- Confederate: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas

- Union: California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and many others.

Suffice to say, slavery does not seem have had a lasting positive effect for the states that most actively utilized it. Ultimately I think the reason slavery is more of a focus for the United States than other countries is not because of any unusual usage of slavery, but because of an extremely unusual outcome.

For instance Brazil alone ended up taking on about 5 million slaves yet, like much of the south, has little to show for it. The point of this is not to say 'what about other countries' but to emphasize that the relative impact of slavery in the US was smaller than in many other places, yet we achieved vastly more than those places. So to attribute the exceptionalism of the United States to slavery, in any meaningful way, seems driven more by bias than logic.

https://www.theroot.com/how-many-slaves-landed-in-the-us-179...

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#242

Post by SirHound »

Beldin wrote: post #228
agotterer wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I like social media and I’m capable of controlling my usage. I’ve developed some ground rules to ensure a good healthy experience. To start, I have an iOS rule that prevents more than 7 minutes of each social media app per day. I pretty much only use Facebook. After the timer is up that’s it for the day. I honestly enjoy seeing picture of my friends, their kids, their vacations, and the…

> I pretty much only use Facebook. After the timer is up that’s it for the day. Any reasonable definition of social media would include any site whose main content is user-contributed, and allows users to comment and vote on content and comments. For example: reddit, youtube, imgur, .....HN. You may be consuming a lot more social media than you thought.

Not all social media is equal in its mental effects

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#243

Post by sachdevap »

nautilus12 wrote: post #204

Writing yet another I quit social media and now my life is better but dishonestly saying in the title that nothing happened is clickbaitey

Right away in the first paragraph too. So much hypocrisy. Right alongside "I hate clickbait, and here are 10 reasons you should too."

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#244

Post by nathan_f77 »

flukus wrote: post #119
bjornjaja wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think newspapers are the best—say you get a daily or even weekly summary of events. That’s been good enough for centuries. The problem today is all the rehashing of events. Professional journalists honestly do a better job than all the rest of us. Internet information is mostly garbage (where social media is concerned). Don’t get me wrong the quick access to information is nice—but ”quick” means “less thought out”…

Does anyone do weekly news summaries? A weekly digest might be something worth paying for, even the nightly news bulletins on TV seem to assume you've watched the morning ones and won't tell you about something that happened at 3AM. Back when I was still reading newspapers even the weekend ones were pretty much only reporting the news of the day and not a weekly summary. Annoyingly news is also stuck in the document…

I'm a big fan of the Quartz Daily Brief email newsletter [1]. (Although these are daily emails.)

[1] https://qz.com/emails/

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#245

Post by 0xCMP »

Social media is about getting attention via free, easy to use, and highly distributed platforms. It has _very little_ to do with being social or staying in touch with friends and _everything_ with being a mini media business with the goal of growing your following and influence enough to make money (somehow). Social media is simply a free performance.

Unless you're building a personal brand or selling something the work required to achieve growth it doesn't make sense for most people.

You're better off making group chats and using private iCloud Photos albums to be _social_ than posting on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#246

Post by nabla9 »

There is tendency to cynically comment "Yet another..." but I don't see how repetition makes this any less relevant. Social media seems to have clearly negative effect on most people. Herd animals have deep fear of being left out and that keeps people using them. They create little or no value.

If you have to send mail or message to people you want to interact with, it's more personal and works better.

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#247

Post by beshrkayali »

The title is kind of clickbaity, but the most important note in this write-up is the following:

> I don’t see myself ever going back to social media. I don’t see the point of it, and after leaving for a while, and getting a good outside look, it seems like an abusive relationship – millions of workers generating data for tech-giants to crunch through and make money off of.

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#249

Post by moksly »

nabla9 wrote: post #246

There is tendency to cynically comment "Yet another..." but I don't see how repetition makes this any less relevant. Social media seems to have clearly negative effect on most people. Herd animals have deep fear of being left out and that keeps people using them. They create little or no value. If you have to send mail or message to people you want to interact with, it's more personal and works better.

What I find truly curious is how many people on HN (a social media) seem to agree that social media is bad.

I know this is anecdotal, but HN is the cause of a lot more of the bad things from social media in my life than Facebook is. Because I only use Facebook to organise events, meaning I log on two or three times a month. On the flip side I’ve just wasted five minutes of my life replying to you. I mean no offence by that, but there is fair chance we won’t even talk here because you may not see my reply (and I might not see yours if you do), and we’ll certainly never speak to each other again.

I think this blog-entry is insightful and well written, but are we going to remember it in two hours, or is it just another “baby picture” on the HN news feed?

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#250

Post by Sean1708 »

SirHound wrote: post #242
Beldin wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I pretty much only use Facebook. After the timer is up that’s it for the day. Any reasonable definition of social media would include any site whose main content is user-contributed, and allows users to comment and vote on content and comments. For example: reddit, youtube, imgur, .....HN. You may be consuming a lot more social media than you thought.

Not all social media is equal in its mental effects

I'm not at all convinced that HN is better than Facebook.
Post reply on HN