Social Cooling (2017)
socialcooling.com
Social Cooling (2017)
1–10 of 299 posts
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#2I wouldn't blame the culture of conformity solely on social media really.
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#3I honestly love this as someone who never has a consistent identity in terms of the name I use online and not keeping a long history such as re-creating accounts whenever it is convenient.
This is especially relevant on social media platforms where I don't want to feel like someone can just dig up something I've said or shared 5 years ago and use that against me. It also helps me stay myself without changing my behavior to align with others.
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#4I wouldn't blame the culture of conformity solely on social media really.
Not what this is about. It is more like everyone needs to earn stars on their star chart to survive and big techs algorithm decides who gets the stars.
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#5This page dates from 2017. See also earlier submissions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363 (2692 upvotes, 1099 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882 (389 upvotes, 190 comments)
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#6I honestly love this as someone who never has a consistent identity in terms of the name I use online and not keeping a long history such as re-creating accounts whenever it is convenient. This is especially relevant on social media platforms where I don't want to feel like someone can just dig up something I've said or shared 5 years ago and use that against me. It also helps me stay myself without changing my behav…
Good but temporary. Big tech has your browser fingerprint against that plus LLMs will probably be able to match it again by text using cosine similarly.
Maybe you use tails everywhere and run what you say through LLMs to rephrase. Might be OK then.
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#7I honestly love this as someone who never has a consistent identity in terms of the name I use online and not keeping a long history such as re-creating accounts whenever it is convenient. This is especially relevant on social media platforms where I don't want to feel like someone can just dig up something I've said or shared 5 years ago and use that against me. It also helps me stay myself without changing my behav…
Good but temporary. Big tech has your browser fingerprint against that plus LLMs will probably be able to match it again by text using cosine similarly. Maybe you use tails everywhere and run what you say through LLMs to rephrase. Might be OK then.
oh I've accepted that. luckily I have GDPR on my side.
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#8I honestly love this as someone who never has a consistent identity in terms of the name I use online and not keeping a long history such as re-creating accounts whenever it is convenient. This is especially relevant on social media platforms where I don't want to feel like someone can just dig up something I've said or shared 5 years ago and use that against me. It also helps me stay myself without changing my behav…
{
concerned_with_privacy: true,
online_usernames: ['kachapopopow', ...]
}
;)
As someone else mentioned, most likely you've been fingerprinted. But at least yes you can't be looked up directly, only if someone uses a databroker.
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good but temporary. Big tech has your browser fingerprint against that plus LLMs will probably be able to match it again by text using cosine similarly. Maybe you use tails everywhere and run what you say through LLMs to rephrase. Might be OK then.
oh I've accepted that. luckily I have GDPR on my side.
With that use case you either dont have enough anonymity, or will forget the number of identities and leave a lot of traces, like admitting you are in the euro zone.
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#10It's important to note that this page is almost 10 years old.
I do find myself self-censoring in 2025, but it's for a far more boring reason than surveillance capitalism. It's because leaders on the far right literally said people should snitch on each other and dox each other.
Much as I hate to say it, I'm sure people on the right have felt the same way for at least a decade.