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I deleted my social media accounts

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Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#421
post #2

I wouldn't delete social media accounts because they might become available to register for malicious actors who can then impersonate you. Keep the accounts, just don't use them any more.

That is poor advice. There are now roughly a dozen people who have social media accounts in my name, because it’s their name too. This isn’t impersonation. It’s also not a problem.

Someone recently created a "duplicate" account for the dad of one of my friends. Same profile picture, username very similar. But one of his friends who received a friend request from the new account was already friends with the old account and wrote a message asking what that was about, which is how my friend discovered it. So at least in that one instance, having the account was helpful.

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#422

I don't oppose deleting social media, but I can't see to understand one simple thing. LinkedIn is the de-facto standard for looking for a job in certain places. I wonder, people who deleted LinkedIn, how do they get along with looking for a job?

LinkedIn is an oddity in that, while there is a (very strange) social network there, the vast majority of LinkedIn users do not use it as a social network, they use it as a CV host, and may not even look at it in any given year.

(I do think think contributes to extreme weirdness of LinkedIn posts; there's really ~no-one normal using the social network bit of LinkedIn.)

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#423
post #38

This advice to quit social media is always a hit on HN. When I was 10 years younger I read the same thing on HN, was thoroughly convinced and quit social media. I even followed the advice of trying to stay in touch by email. Sure. Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on. I asked them why they didn’t tell me and they were confused. They said the posted it on socia…

Maybe that was possible with Facebook from 2009. Right now, to have any friend updates, you first you need to scroll through a firehose of bots, AI schlock, and ads. Then risk getting pulled into it and wasting valuable hours of your life.

The only winning move is not to play.

I just got together with two friends in RL. One I have not seen for 10 years. There were a lot of missed news we all had to catch up on. This is how it's always been, and it's completely normal. Even the olden Facebook way of being so plugged in into your friends' lives was very unhealthy. If you HAVE to know something, life will find a way of letting you know.

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#424
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You write like somehow there would be something to miss out on by not valuing keeping up with people who are far away and most likely have no place in our lives.(by far away I mean you don’t actually get to talk or meet with them or even chat by messanger or so, even if they could live in the same city - I have friends who live far away but we actually meet at least once a year and chat once a week we are far in dist…

> You write like somehow there would be something to miss out on by not valuing keeping up with people who are far away... Yes, absolutely. The paths our lives take can lead us to have more in common with someone we knew in the past then when we first knew them. And there's a lot of value in having a history with someone, compared to getting to know someone new from scratch. Maintaining loose contact takes virtually…

Yes, I have a few very good remote friends which I meet only rarely, but when it's one of the best kind of things.

However most of my "Facebook friends" were shallow faint contacts, where paths may have been close for a while but went apart as each went on with their lives. No more scrolling through which bar they visited, how their kids are doing, or which TV show they were watching didn't take anything from my life, while it encouraged me to reach out more actively to people I really care about, as I didn't "rely" on passive information anymore, assuming to hear about "relevant" events, but became interested in them and shared things which wouldn't make "public" social media.

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just started aggressively unfollowing and hiding stuff I really didn’t want to see. I used to hate the idea of doing that, but I realized if not doing it was making me want to cut off everybody then I was probably better off just filtering aggressively. Now my feed is very pleasant. Family updates, sports news, friends vacation pictures and jokes.

I only follow stuff I want to see. But facebook shows me a ton of other things. Reels every few posts are usually sexily dressed Asian women, or more normally dressed White women, with some kind of clickbait text overlaid. I think I maybe clicked on a reel once or twice ever. Then my feed is full of suggested content. Which I also don’t want to see. From metal bands I don’t care about and festivals I don’t wanna go t…

>And finally: Ordering. Non-chronological ordering makes no sense, because everything is random (probably not, somehow maximizes engagement for users very different from me, I guess). So I can’t even scroll for the stuff I want to see.

Does https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr not work anymore? It should surface the chronological feed without reels and other recommended slop.

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#427
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also some people back then would brag about not having a TV, the same way vegans still do today. This is the toupée fallacy mixed in with something else I haven’t yet put a name on. Most vegans don’t brag about being vegan, just like most TVless people don’t brag about not having a TV. Some people are assholes and brag about anything , and some of those do the things you mentioned. It’s orders of magnitude more com…

Cool idea, but it’s based on my own experience in life, from a girlfriend and various people in college. And even a newspaper article I read literally this morning. Vegan folks who I knew and talked to every day. That said I could have used airplane pilots for the same example (also based on personal experience).

Right, that’s the toupée fallacy.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacy

You only know about the people who let you know. You have no idea how many vegans or airplane pilots you encounter regularly who never tell you. A small sample is driving the reputation of the whole.

For people with whom you talk every day, it’s no surprise that you know. It’s bound to come up but I doubt it happened on your first conversation with everyone. If it did, you were hanging out with a weird group. If they knew each other, it’s normal that they’d talk about a shared interest. Just like people who hang out on HN would be likely to discuss tech when meeting in person.

I have no doubt you found your share of asshole vegans, just like there are assholes who make it a point to make everyone know they eat meat.

Though it is important to distinguish a true asshole from someone simply sharing an experience. Saying “no, thanks, I’m vegan” when offered a bite of a meat sandwich is not bragging, it’s context. Unfortunately, too many people take it to be a judgement when it most often is not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExEHuNrC8yU

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#428
> Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Meta is ditching its fact-checkers

There is a global recession coming, everybody is trimming the fat where possible, all tech industries are cutting where possible. I think it can be reasonably argued that the very nature of fact-checking is a dangerous one anyway - by nature of which facts are used (perspective problem) and what gets checked.

> Meta is teaming up with Trump to fight EU regulations affecting their platforms

Why is this a problem? What specific EU regulation being removed causes issue? The ones that curtail freedom of speech? The EU is a largely undemocratic body, where significant positions are not even voted on. Do you really want to be controlled by this unaccountable body?

> Recently, he hosted a live chat on Twitter with Alice Weidel, the co-leader of Germany’s AfD, a party flagged by the “Verfassungsschutz” as a far-right extremist group.

It's the only popular right wing party that has been allowed to exist, and they picked up a large range of unrepresented voters. A unified block of right wing voters is exactly the situation created by trying to suppress an entire wing of politics. The right-wing party of Germany is technically somewhat ideologically aligned with the government Elon will be working for - this is far from crazy that they talk to each other.

> Alice Weidel claimed that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was not "right-wing," but a communist instead.

When you get to such extremes, the difference between fascism and communism become difficult to see. Putting people in death camps for example, are we talking about the concentration camps or gulags? Extreme nationalism is unique to which ideology? Which ideology was uniquely a dictatorship?

> Profit First, Morality... Somewhere in the Basement

Nothing new. If something is for free, then _you_ are the product.

> Teens and Social Media: A Toxic Cocktail

I have said this for a long time, stop exposing children to unfiltered access on the internet, under any context.

> Once the accounts were finally gone, I realized just how much of a grip these platforms had on me. The number of times I reflexively typed "t" or "f" into my browser bar (which autocompletes to twitter.com or facebook.com) was honestly terrifying.

The trick is to know your limitations and account for them. I don't use social media on my work computer at all, and until recently I didn't even have any chat apps. These were all relegated to my phone, and it's purposefully slow and old.

> Honestly? No idea. Some friends recommended Bluesky, but I’m holding off for now. Maybe I’ll go old-school and write more blog posts. Like back in the early 2000s, when you actually had to think before sharing your thoughts with the world. Sounds quaint, doesn’t it?

The magical new social media will not resolve your issues with social media, social media has been around long enough to know this.

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of other replies already so apologies for adding to the clutter, but this sort of message always appears and it feels super dated. Like, 2003-era sentiment about the Facebook heyday. Facebook is like a ghost town now from the "social" and family perspective. I imagine some circles might be strong on it, but from every time this comes up it's clear that the vast majority of normal people have largely abandoned it…

Facebook didn’t exist in 2003.

I was being facetious that Facemash was started in 2003, for the Harvard homies.

The point being simply that Facebook as a social connections property hasn't been a thing for years.

Re: I deleted my social media accounts

#430
Are you relying on mainstream media again in the same way you did in the pre-social media era?

Oh no, it has something to do with the president-elect Trump and of course politics too. The first two paragraphs explained a lot and the later paragraphs were there to cover up his opinions by dragging in morality, teens and how bad the world had become due to social media.

I didn't read a single about misinformation, disinformation, fake news and how to counter them.

Hacker News was created by Paul Graham, and he is using social media. Which means ignoring social media isn't a wise decision.

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