501–510 of 527 posts
Yesterday, I blocked it completely at home and partially at work - I might still need to read some posts from time to time, but I don’t want to be able to browse it.
It’s been a bit hard to come up with things to fill my time with again. Kinda scary.
I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can…
So either we train all our friends to use it sensibly -- and convince them to agree with us on what's sensible -- or we sort through cruft to find the value.
I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can…
It's tough, because even within real friend circles there can be a lot of junk. I have a friend who constantly posts "What does your favorite color say about your personality?" type of stuff. I don't want to hide her posts because I don't want to miss anything actually important that happens in her life. But there's no clear line between that and the cruft that you can solve with a rule. So either we train all our fr…
I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can…
It's tough, because even within real friend circles there can be a lot of junk. I have a friend who constantly posts "What does your favorite color say about your personality?" type of stuff. I don't want to hide her posts because I don't want to miss anything actually important that happens in her life. But there's no clear line between that and the cruft that you can solve with a rule. So either we train all our fr…
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I can not argue about the values of people I do not know personally. I only said that the tool they made seems to be okay in my experience , which I shared. “Free markets” is an uneducated nonsense. An entirely unregulated market evolves into monopoly. Even without corruption. Social media for me is just a tool (HN is also social media btw). I find it useful and it meaningfully interacts with the other aspects of my…
> I only said that the tool they made seems to be okay in my experience, I could understand that! I wanted to make a general comment, to warn people that although things feel fine now, they should imho pay caution to what these things devolve into. There doesn't even need to be any particular evil scheming from people involved. We usually focus on tech solutions. While blindness to cultural forces is generally what l…
To your other points: I find that people who are addicted never heed the warnings, they just get annoying. Just occurred to me: wonder if the addiction is to some extent internalization of the habit; so that fighting the habit becomes fighting oneself….
About HN being less addictive than the others: that is arguable :-) though it is much less driven by pure emotions than the other forms of exchange, indeed !
I'm certainly an anomaly but since to me the downsides of social media have always been quite prominent and seemed to outweigh the benefits by a margin, I never jumped on the social media train. But I've got to say, it's getting harder and harder to keep that up. As our kids get older especially, almost all of their social activities are somehow tied to social media one way or the other: no matter what they're joinin…
I never used any "social media" besides the instant messengers. I try to minimize WhatsApp in favor of better options. It's a constant, uphill battle. I feel that dating is impossible w/o WhatsApp, if you exchange phone numbers with someone at a bar, it's completely useless if you can't contact them on WhatsApp afterwards. Almost nobody (at least here in central Europe) has any other messenger, and every other avenue…
I'm certainly an anomaly but since to me the downsides of social media have always been quite prominent and seemed to outweigh the benefits by a margin, I never jumped on the social media train. But I've got to say, it's getting harder and harder to keep that up. As our kids get older especially, almost all of their social activities are somehow tied to social media one way or the other: no matter what they're joinin…
Are you in the US? No one uses whatsapp in the US. This would have been done as an sms groupchat in all likelihood. Everything friends plan is on sms these days. Maybe its my generation, we don’t like signing up for accounts anymore when everyone can trivially text.
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Wife went cold turkey on social media and then had to join Instagram and LinkedIn for her business. Now she's addicted to Instagram. No LinkedIn, not you, you boring Ted Talk humblebrag.
People love LinkedIn cringe on instagram and twitter - but on LinkedIn itself you have to confront the reality that these people, often colleagues / former colleagues etc. are being serious
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I really hate this projecting of the software gaming industry's behavior back into the "original" vices. The casino, liquor store and drug dealer all make the same margin regardless of who they're selling to. If anything the problem users are more likely to cause problems for them so they'd rather make the money on casual users and scale. Having your whole operation be basically a wash except for all the money from a…
Of course it's not even really specific to vices, the top 10% of travelers take around 50% of flights, and you see similar effects in pretty much every area of consumption.
People can’t get addicted to flying in the same manner as we have seen people get addicted to gambling or to some of these social media applications.
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I really hate this projecting of the software gaming industry's behavior back into the "original" vices. The casino, liquor store and drug dealer all make the same margin regardless of who they're selling to. If anything the problem users are more likely to cause problems for them so they'd rather make the money on casual users and scale. Having your whole operation be basically a wash except for all the money from a…
While it may be true that margins are independent of the buyer at a given scale , margins certainly do depend on scale. If 15% of the population is buying 75% of the alcohol (these are not ridiculous numbers), cutting that 15% out would put many alcohol producers (in particular those who sell cheap) out of business.
Essentially a disturbing way to look at it is that the people with alcohol addiction are allowing everyone else to be able to consume alcohol for cheaper than it would otherwise be.
Same phenomena exist for other addictive things like sugar in soda and free to play video games. (Although obviously soda and video games are nowhere close to alcohol in terms of destructive potential for those who develop an addiction).