Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

I was addicted to Twitter in high school. I spent hours on it at night, getting no sleep. I spent so much time and mental bandwidth thinking of funny things to say or memes to make to get more likes. I was addicted to the likes and keeping up with everyone I knew.

First semester of college, I stopped using Twitter. My sleep got better, I had more free time, and I was noticeably happier and freer. I no longer spent time in that dopamine cycle.

I've been weening off of Reddit and HN the past few months as well. YouTube is my next beast to conquer, and that might be the biggest one for me right now. I'm trying to adapt to longer form content again, instead of only watching videos under a minute or reading 280 character tweets. I want to have an attention span again, I really do.

Is social media an inherently evil thing? I don't think so, but I don't think I should use it. I also think that it can be toxic for teenagers in general. There are a variety of reasons, but the one that applied to me was the dopamine cycle caused by "likes".

Getting off of Facebook and Twitter was the best thing I ever did - I can't believe how much more mental space I have now that I'm no longer stuck in conversation loops with strangers.

Interestingly, it was a mushroom trip that did it. The mushroom spirit (or whatever you want to call it) lucidly explained how I was wasting my life on those websites. The next day I quit, and its been years now, though I def felt withdrawals for a few weeks being off of twitter. Now it's like I was never even there.

I feel so bad for all of the young people who can't understand, due to peer pressure, just how bad it is for them. And shame on parents for not making more of an effort to ask questions.

Glad you're getting some space from them. I'm doing the same myself. Not sure how much I blame parents, though. These sites are designed like slot machines, which means there are a number of professionals and executives out there who consciously sought to addict people to their platforms. Shame on them.

I played the Diablo games addictively for a while in the early-mid 2000s. Later when I got to doing some adulting I ended up in Las Vegas trying out some slot machines when it hit me what was happening any time a named boss died. The games lost all the magic after that.

I am an old fart so when Twitter came around the UI was just confusing enough for me and at the same time I cared just a bit less than needed to overcome the activation energy that I still never figured out how to use it. Any time I read about the anxiety of being on Twitter I am fascinated anew at how isolated that community is and how little it all matters in the grand scheme of things.

This comes shockingly close to my experience growing up playing WoW.

I went from playing 8 hours / day (well, per night truthfully) of Eve Online during high school to logging in every few months when I began college. The new environment of college made me too busy with "IRL" stuff.

I wouldn't say that social media is inherently bad because it can be addicting, because games aren't seen as inherently bad because they can be addicting.

Leaving my xbox behind at my parents house when I went to college was one of the best things I ever did for myself.

Sadly during COVID times, Youtube and gaming have absorbed and taken the place of my "IRL" stuff. Hopefully, it will be easy to switch back to being back in the real world socially.

I’ve got great mileage out of RSS feeds from Reddit and HN. I have them run once a day for the subreddits I find interesting and cruise those in the morning. Then that’s it. No more checking multiple times per day

That way I can engage in a topic if I really want to.

I use Twitter via Nitter.net and just a few Unix people.

As if doesn't have infinite scroll, is less addicting.

HN has the same problem with upvotes. It would be healthier not to display karma scores at all, even privately. Use them for ranking etc but hide the numbers completely.

My view right from the start of the internet has been to make quarrelling exact a cost, just as it does in real life. Thus downvoting should cost equal karma...

That’s a great idea.

I know, right? The thought is that people wouldn't downvote ideas that they dislike as much as they regrettably do now.

Yet at least some of them would gladly downvote a poster who behaves badly, e.g. is deliberately disruptive.

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