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Comment by have_faith | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me a lot of Facebook (and other social media), where people put up a fake persona, only show their best side etc. The effect that this must have on people growing up with social media as a major part of their lives while they develop intuition about the world and other people will have very interesting results I think.

I know that life before social media wasn't much different, in that people still gossiped, bragged about their accomplishments and so on. But social media amplifies these traits enormously and presents them to you daily in a concise list of why everyone is doing better than you.

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I was just thinking the same thing. It's so easy to look at someone else's public, social media persona and forget about the struggles that they've faced as well. There's immense pressure to show a face of complete perfection, even if that's not the reality.

I can imagine it being incredibly freeing to drop that pretense, both for others and oneself.

It's the main reason I refuse to take part in the whole 'social' media circus. Many people have called me strange and anti-social and whatnot, but one look at my girlfriend's timeline every now and I feel proven right again.

If I ever have children I'll make sure to teach them from the moment they are old enough to understand that social media is just posturing, self-promotion and narcissism, and in no way representative of 'real' people or 'real' lives. I wouldn't mind if they would use it, as long as it's pretty damn clear that the image other people paint of themselves is not something to aspire for.

Makes me think of this, Facebook vs reality

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz1BMCpPCzM

social media + developer ego = unreachable utopia.

The first company where I started developer, the developer egos I had to deal with were consistent with the egos of outside sales people. Most of them were quite active on social media touting the latest release of this iphone game, or this huge website they got done in three days. I only found out later that while most were true, there was a definite bending of reality in terms of what they actually did and how long it actually took.

After I left the company were the developers , I purged all my social media, keep Twitter as a news feed and only followed people who I had a common interest in and were actually inspiring to me. It completely changed my perspective on what people say they do and what they actually do.

It makes a big difference when you listen to the people who are actually humble in what they do compared to those who are only out for the retweets or excited looks from other developers.

One of my favourite Twitter people to follow is Remy Sharp, he tweets all the dumb stuff he does (he's a developer btw). All the mistakes he makes are there alongside the great things he achieves from day-to-day. It's inspiring to see someone much better at development than I am using twitter to learn, err, clarify and sort.

TV has been doing the same thing to us for a long time, you can't turn it on for more than five minutes before you see how the other half lives and how miserable your life is in comparison.

The main difference being hat before social media you probably had direct contact with those people on your friends list, because you either worked with them or hung out with them. That direct contact allows people to filter the bragging from the reality much more easily.

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