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Comment by DevKoala | Hacker News Reader

You don’t quit social media for “cred”. You do it to improve your life (less anxiety, less misinformation, more meaningful interactions with friends, etc). If you are expecting the approval of others for quitting social media then maybe you are better off being part of it.

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True, but I think if someone quits social media and then writes a big post about it and submits it to HN that could suggest they want some kind of recognition for it.

Not really. A lot of people write for the sake of sharing ideas and learning from replies. I understand that social influence is a powerful currency today, but not everybody is farming it.

Interesting point. It sounds almost like a relapse of social media use at that point.

I feel similarly.

People designed these things, and today feel guilty about doing so.

Fine, no one is holding you to not thinking it through, I can personally give someone a pass for this.

But to make a routine about your lack of foresight, when others clearly worried about it? Worse, were such an argument to be successful, it would be a statement on the rigor of the audience, and not the people trying to clean their reputation.

I think you mistake my opinion of Twitter for my opinion of all media and all social networks. Virality of the kind Twitter relies on is not essential to the definition of a social network. I do not quit out of a desire for some ascetic lifestyle or asocial tendency. I like to discuss ideas in the comment threads of HN as much as anyone. That's originally what drew me to the service over 10 years ago.

As to why I wrote this, I thought HN readers may be interested in my take on how we got here, having worked in the space professionally. After all, social media tech used to be a big thing on these forums back in the day.

Then again, maybe there's also a lesson in that we expect anyone who writes anything now only does it to farm clicks.

I don't think you need to be so cynical about it. People have been writing and sharing what they wrote for thousands of years.

This was my experience (You do it to improve your life...), and I'm very glad I did. It's almost the same feeling I had when after quitting smoking for a month, almost elation - I had really done it. The space that twitter occupied in my life was in amazing disproportion to the actual point of it. "Cred" doesn't come in to it.

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