The benefits of staying off social media

Reminder that Hacker News is social media, of course.

I have been practicing "write-only" social media for about the last 5 years. It became a compromise between wanting to stay in touch with friends and extended family while not wasting too much of my own extremely valuable free time inside some corporation's walled sandbox.

The reality of it that 99% of social media is politics (arguing), hot-takes, and memes. And all of it has negative intellectual value.

In write-only social media, I will post occasional updates and photos, but as an absolute rule I do not scroll the newsfeed. I have all notifications turned off, so if someone replies or "likes" my posts, I don't know about it unless I remember to go back to check on it, which I usually don't.

This doesn't have to mean turning your social media presence into a one way street: if I'm thinking of someone, I will often to to their profile and see what they've been up to lately. But I certainly don't need daily updates of their cat or favorite political memes to get through my day.

I know there are those who are going to say that using social media like this is pretty selfish. It might be. And if it is, I'm more than okay with that. I would much rather be selfish than waste my all of my free time as a scrolling zombie.

> Society is satisfied with shallow thoughts and the pursuit of artificially created stimuli in an imaginary world.

That's what a lot of people think of gaming. Following the money of the first study (2nd link is dead), they appear to be pro-gaming and anti-social media.

The OASIS was gaming and social, if the Hackalariat believes one is good and one is bad, what will the Metaverse be?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_Huo

Vonnegut wrote about this a few times. It seems to have been something that bugged him. The short version of his complaint is that mass media, generally, have wiped out the social value of all kinds of moderate artistic talent—for example, fewer people may learn to plink out some holiday tunes on the family upright for everyone to sing along with, because you can just put on the radio, or Spotify. Live storytelling, or being good at dramatically reading from books (yes, people used to sit around and do that for entertainment)? Small, local theater? All replaced by radio plays and TV. And so on.

Basically, recording and mass broadcast means moderate talents lose nearly everything (as far as social, or even monetary, value of their skills) and discourage people from developing those talents in the first place, because those technologies place them in competition with people who are at the top edge of human achievement in those areas—including dead ones. It's broadened how many people get to experience those top-tier talents, and how often, but practically obliterated a formerly-major component of how people related to one another, socially.

The Internet has changed this a bit. Some folks have responded to the problem by digging hard into a niche and taking their act online, because you can succeed in an really tiny niche while being only pretty-good at something, since there are so many people that a niche with nearly-zero audience can still reach a lot of people, considered over the entire globe—think filk, or steampunk-themed music, or doing furry art on commission, or something like that. But in person value among their actual social circle, and among family, remains low, because Spotify and TV and Netflix et c. exist.

>In my experience over the last decade there are fewer and fewer ways to find a community and any success as a creator of any kind without getting corralled into social media and furthermore getting corralled into being a daily active user / consumer as to not get shadow banned by any given app.

Haha, my first thought after reading this comment was that I could've written it myself. I miss internet forums.

Also, I'm much more creative when I own the content I make. Doomscrolling is one thing, feeling like you're wasting your life by getting sucked into the dopamine/reward loop, another.

Reaching people is hard, because social is the main channel, but I'm experimenting with:

1) helping people (everyone) to reach me directly:

https://sonnet.io/posts/hi/

So far, I've met so, so many fascinating people this way and the depth of conversations I've (or just feedback) doesn't even compare to anything I could ever do on, say, Twitter.

2) content syndication This one's a bit harder as there's a certain amount of bureaucracy involved (https://mxb.dev/blog/syndicating-content-to-twitter-with-net...)

I found a perfect solution to Twitter blocking my account for whatever reason the might have:

1. go to https://www.potato.horse/shhh 2. scroll to the bottom of the page 3. roll over the Twitter button

If you're on mobile, here's the video: https://twitter.com/rafalpast/status/1457702588787433473?s=2...