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Comment by _mkef | Hacker News Reader

Great movie that I agree with 1000% . I suggest Lost Connections and 10 Arguments for deleting your social media ( mentioned in the movie) as well. I stopped using all social media as of last year and the results have been amazing.

I'm more at peace , I no longer getting into stupid Facebook arguments. Online you aren't interacting with whole people, so being absurdly mean is easy.

Most people online are just their for validation( or are bots , see the Ashley Madison hack and the FTC complaint against the Match Group). At this point in my life I'm no longer seeking that. Plus , as the movie points out constant validation seeking will wreck your mental health.

I was having an amazing time meeting folks pre Covid and I have a plan to become more active whenever this ends. I'm thinking I'll try improv. Being around people does something for you that internet interactions simply can't.

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>10 Arguments for deleting your social media

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Mostly for this golden quote which I have saved:

>Cats have done the seemingly impossible: They’ve integrated themselves into the modern high-tech world without giving themselves up. They are still in charge. There is no worry that some stealthy meme crafted by algorithms and paid for by a creepy, hidden oligarch has taken over your cat. No one has taken over your cat; not you, not anyone.

No offence, but you are arguing on HN, Reddit, Chan boards, /. now. Where is the difference? I did similarly but keep getting sucked into these communities simply because I'm alone in my head a lot of the time.

As mentioned below hacker news is a niche website, the dialogue here is much more intelligent than on Facebook.

For now I don't see talking on hacker news as stressful, but I definitely will stop using this site if it becomes so.

Hacker News is, and has been for years, extremely main-stream. Everyone who ever gets into coding ends up here to voice their biased opinions.

> I'm alone in my head a lot of the time.

Better than not!

Discussion on HN and Reddit tends to be more thoughtful in my experience.

Yes, it's still just wasting time away but it can be somewhat more mentally stimulating than FB drama.

I no longer getting into stupid Facebook arguments

That's the one thing I absolutely loathe about Facebook. There's no constructive dialogue going on. Everyone is so full of themselves that any kind of argument derails pretty fast. And then there is the fact that the platform doesn't provide the structure for long conversations. After a couple of replies all text has the same indentation so it's hard to see who's responding to what comment. I've been online for twenty years, and I've never seen a environment more hostile to conversation than Facebook.

I have a lot of great conversations on Facebook, typically better than the conversations my blog posts elsewhere. It's a matter of cultivating a good community.

In my experience, reddit and other online discussion forums have been just as bad as Facebook at times.

Online communities like reddit and, yes, HN, are echo chambers to varying degrees. They can also elicit a sort of inhumane treatment of others by depersonalizing them, sort of like what happens when people get behind the wheel of a vehicle.

Sometimes I have commented on facebook forgetting it was not HN or another niche community. If you start talking about how your country's weather bureau monitors itself for forecast accuracy then you will almost certainly be met with silence if you try to do that on facebook.

You may need smarter friends, just saying. Also, facebook does have niche groups for such topics.

> I stopped using all social media as of last year

You're posting this comment on social media.

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

> I'm more at peace , I no longer getting into stupid Facebook arguments. Online you aren't interacting with whole people, so being absurdly mean is easy.

What makes HN different?

I don't think people here appreciate you pointing out their hypocrisy. HN is different in many ways(not tailoring content based on profiles, not trying to maximize engagement, etc), but it still has many problems (groupthink, suppression of contrarian ideas, karma whoring, inconsistent fact checking, etc).

I see what you're getting at, but eh, I'm not entirely convinced. What is a social network? I think there's some gray area there. The Wikipedia article you shared calls out Social Media as being "Web 2.0" (which itself is a nebulous term). One could argue that HN is just a forum, not unlike news groups that predated Web 2.0. Like I said: I see what you're getting at, and maybe HN is social media, but I would still assert that when considered as social media, HN is a far cry from a network like Facebook in terms of platform-functionality/feature-set/behavior/agenda.

It's ridiculous to compare hacker news to Facebook or any other social network mentioned in the documentary.

Used to waste so much time arguing on FB comments -- and now that I'm off of it all of that energy has been reclaimed. It's been a remarkably positive change in every way.

I got off Facebook a couple of years ago. A couple of months later, I got rid of my smart phone and went back to a Nokia 3310 for a full year. Actually was a huge relief and felt really good. I'm like many people here on HN, I suspect: I work a desk/computer job. My attitude: If I want something online, I'm in front of my computer 12-14 hours a day. If I'm not in front of my computer, then I WANT to be offline. If I'm offline, but you need to reach my for something important, you can text or call me.

One of the most interesting observations about not having a smart phone was not how my behavior changed, but how others behavior changed. As my friends became painfully aware that I don't have a smart phone, I'm not checking my email 24/7, their texts don't get read-receipts, and they don't see the ellipses as I type text replies... they became less demanding/insistent of my time (except for the urgent things, of course). It was really freeing.

I only got a smartphone again when I lost my Nokia 6 hours before I had to catch a plane for a week long trip -- I pulled an old smartphone out of my junk drawer, threw a SIM card in it real fast, and headed to the airport. I have hardly any apps on it now, and it's great.

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