The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use • Hacker News Board

Re: The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use

#71

Post by tancop » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 6:30 PM UTC

gnoll_of_gozag wrote: post #12

TomMasz wrote: post #6

Social media isn't "social" anymore. It's algorithmically designed to keep you scrolling. Burnout is inevitable.

big normie social media yes, but people still have hella actual conversations on bluesky and mastodon and (i think) they use chronological fields by default

i switched from twitter to bluesky and the first thing i noticed was the feed looking really boring so i almost quit. turns out the default is following only but then i found a great third party feed at [foryou.club] and now i can use it without getting bored. thank god for spacecowboy and their gaming pc.

Re: The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use

#72

Post by ericmcer » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 7:00 PM UTC

weagle05 wrote: post #23

I know many people who say they're "off" social media but they're still scrolling. They may post less or not at all, but the algorithm still has them.

I don't post at all and delete it periodically.

The concerning thing is you still feel the `itch` of like... I can't just sit here and stare out the window or listen to this boring person or whatever event. So even with social media deleted my brain reaches out for something: Hacker News or Zillow or even stock market tickers get swapped in as the void-fillers.

I wonder if life was always sort of boring and lacked meaning and people used to just sit in that reality patiently or if modern life has siphoned meaning off of it so we have had to replace it with these mindless activities.

Re: The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use

#73

Post by hnisnotbenign » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 7:51 PM UTC

alistairSH wrote: post #40

cryptopian wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's why I prefer not to get bogged down in litigation over what counts as social media. It's far more productive to look at the individual mechanisms that make web platforms bad for socialising.

Agreed. For me, "social media" is just any website/app that allows users to contribute content and make comments. HN is absolutely "social media", as it Facebook and WhatsApp. With that said, I do believe social media platforms exist on a spectrum of "mostly benign, maybe even useful" to "mostly harmful" with closed groups/forums well to the benign end, targeted subjects with heavy moderation somewhere to the benign…

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Re: The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use

#74

Post by nottorp » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 10:19 AM UTC

nirav72 wrote: post #53

nottorp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My facebook seems to have trained itself to never give me "political content". Still, I open it about once per week to check for events at my favorite saturday evening hang outs, look at some cat photos and close it.

It takes some effort, but you can get the recommendation algo to clean up your feed. My youtube account of 15 years was flooded with political content. Mainly just opinion stuff and lot of AI slop. So I just unsubbed all channels and started clicking the don't recommend this channel or I don't like this content. It took couple of months, but my recommended videos are back to what I liked watching. Mainly dev and hobb…

Hmm it's possible they still sneak something in those movies they try to cram down my throat every 3-4 text posts. But I never even look at those so it's wasted effort.