Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Did you try just... not following the outrage parts? Not getting outraged? If you want to spend more time connecting with people you care about, getting rid of facebook feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

View on HN

The problem is that whoever you follow (whether they're friends, family or just interesting people) they ARE following the outrage parts.

And of course there's the "trending" sidebars, and ads and other stuff that gets injected into your timeline without you asking for it.

So things bleed in no matter how careful you are. The platforms are designed to drag you in and outrage you. Trying to avoid that is a constant battle - and you're going to give in to it from time to time.

Exactly this.

My current move is to delete Facebook completely (well, deleted that years ago). I just didn't find as much value there as elsewhere on the internet. And the psychological cost wasn't worth the little value there was there. So, complete deletion.

Twitter, I've deleted the mobile app and I follow no one. I have a separate list of profiles I find interesting. I have to physically go to that list and click on their profiles.

This keeps me out of 90% of the drama and into 90% of the worthwhile content.

It's hard to not look at "trending" but I'm trying. I wish there was a way to turn off "trending" and "timelines" completely.

End result: hugely more productive and psychologically lighter.

I use

twitter.com##section div[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]

In Ublock - origin rules to hide the trending sidebar

Better: https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter

This will benefit from updates from the author whenever Twitter tries to foil blocking. It comes with a variety of tweaks like a separate timeline for retweets and forcing the latest timeline.

This is fantastic.

Oh my gosh, that's beautiful. Thanks.

well thats handy

Thanks!

> Move retweets to a separate Retweets timeline, or hide them entirely

This alone completely changes Twitter for me. Making Twitter mostly original content? Sign me up.

> Twitter, I've deleted the mobile app and I follow no one. I have a separate list of profiles I find interesting. I have to physically go to that list and click on their profiles.

Interestingly, this is the same solution I came to with Twitter, except I don't even keep a list of profiles, I just navigate based on memory and auto-complete in the address bar.

Cool. It's changed twitter completely for me.

My list is far too long to memorise, though.

And having it separate helps keep me honest (I think my memory would suffer biases) and out of my head.

Mainly though - the act of having to physically click a few times to get to the list gives me a moment of pause where I'm able to wake up and recognise whether I'm about to make good use of twitter or habitually jump into the time-worm-hole we all know.

That's why I don't do social media or follow other people's social media. If I want to connect with them texting, phone calls, zoom is much better instead of trying to get the same from online outrage machines.

This doesn't address all the issues you raise, but my hack to deal with the Twitter sidebar is to set it to a language and region I don't understand.

1. Click "Show more" at the bottom of "What's happening"

2. Click the "settings cog" at the top of the page

3. Uncheck "Show content in this location"

4. Click "Explore locations" and choose a location whose language you can't read and you know nothing about.

And to avoid outrage leaking to me via people who end up in my main feed I simply aggressively mute pretty much anyone who talks about politics or similar. Sure, I therefore lack their signal but avoiding their noise more than makes up for that.

I use

twitter.com##section div[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]

In Ublock - origin rules to hide the trending sidebar

The platforms are designed to show you more of what you engage with. I can understand that for people who are addicted to outrage-bait, blocking might be the only way to break out of that, but if you engage with the parts you want to see more of and not with the parts you don't, facebook learns pretty quickly, IME.

I don't know that I agree with this, but even if we assume it's 100% true, this is still a problem given Facebook's addictive nature. Practically speaking, most people don't have the impulse control to pull themselves away from mindless, addictive content. And I don't think it's a huge surprise that a lot of the people who have gone down the Facebook rabbit hole are older. Less tech savvy, and perhaps not as sharp as they were at the height of their lives.

Every hobby could be seen as a mindless addiction. Heck, talking to friends in person is much the same - people fall into the same conversation patterns, have the same arguments and reminiscences over and over, miss them if they're not having them even if they don't really take pleasure in them at the time. At some point Facebook is just life.

That is so foreign. I know what you are talking about. But it's something I utterly despise. I don't get why people do it. Sure I understand people forget or mix up who they said what to from time to time. But the same thing over and over week after week just to 'talk'? Please just shut up and let me read a book or something.

Those platforms want your attention so they will show you more of what you “engage” (tricky buzzword) with, occasionally injecting a bit of noise to try to keep you from getting bored. This is in fact what many critics complain about yet like.

I just tuned FB to show me stuff I wanted by scrolling past stuff I didn’t, “liking” stuff I did/do, and clicking through to read/respond to comments. It’s mostly friend&family updates, apolitical jokes, animal pics and other anodyne stuff fun to see.

And I block ppl who are on the outrage train, typically just for the 30-day automatic cool down and FB gets the message.

It’s my attention and I don’t have to give it to people.

Twitter provides some pretty decent tools for curating your feed

You can use a 3rd party client (I use Tweetbot) to go back to a chronologically ordered list of tweets, with no promoted tweets, no sidebar, you have to explicitly click to find trending topics.

You can also keywords (which I think you can do with the Twitter app as well) for more granular curation.

I think solutions like this allow one to benefit from Twitter without paying the heavy price that their shitty engagement tactics demand.

I actually tried facebook for a month with other windows covering up the "trending" sidebar. It was a little better but the ads in the main area still annoyed me.

Then I started unfriending people that just posted stuff that annoyed me.

Then I realized after 3 days there was literally no new posts.

Then I just deleted facebook.

I don't miss it at all.

I've got multiple group chats with friends that I like. People post funny and interesting stuff there and we talk about it without having to deal with what someone's crazy uncle thinks about the topic.

Here's the guy telling everyone they're using heroin wrong and the fact that it destroys their life is their problem.

No, guy. The concensus is growing around social media being really fucking toxic.

He has a point, partially.. I used to use twitter, but naturally curating it with only funny or smart thinkers and creators. My view was mostly impressive tech, art or coding (one dude made fluid simulation in gl shaders). It was peaceful.

Thing is, you're still close to the toxic web you regularly step into it .. and that's why i'm banned from twitter now.

These apps are still _by design_ trying to capture the maximum amount of your attention.

That deserves every ounce of hostility that we can muster. And then some.

They are parasites. It doesn't matter if you "made it work for you".

Please don't be crazy. I don't like the current web either but it's important to be objective and calm.

First of all, I am calm.

Second of all, there's nothing crazy about what I said. By their own admission they've designed the apps to be addictive.

Would you tell your friends "go ahead, shoot up. have a great time!"? Would you tell your family? What I think is crazy is that we tolerate companies that make products like this.

I guess greed is a powerful force.

Yes it's been shown that they're tricking people into addiction. I wasn't responding to the arguments more about the 'every ounce of hostility'. Their marketing strategies are sad[0], but you seemed to be all-in in a war against them which I think is misguided. Sorry if crazy was too strong of a word, I didn't meant it as a personal insult. I believe hostility and reaction is the wrong tool for this issue.. let's simply quit and invite others to do others to do so.

[0] we're still having deadly cigarettes sold everywhere you know..

Isn't it because of the effects we've seen from nicotine and alcohol that we should be so vigilant about mainstreaming new vices in society?

If I stepped out of 1980 and into 2021 and saw facebook and cell phones and people looking down the privacy nightmare. It is totally fucking batshit crazy.

We're all Slowly Boiled Frogs.

The poster may be impassioned, but characterizing a hot take as "crazy" looks like a bad faith argument.

I may have read it with the wrong tone.

Just don't follow toxic sources, that's all he's advocating. If someone's sharing memes from a crazy political page, either block that page or remove the friend.

People say social media like Facebook is toxic for the most part because they only deal with toxic people.

That’s not “not following toxic sources” that’s actively pruning them from your connections.

Why participate in that in the first place when toxicity grows there like a weed?

The problem is that many of these "toxic people" are one's relatives that you can't just easily cut out of your life. Before social media, when they started on a racist rant or something you could get them to change the topic to sports or something, but these days they get encouragement in their extreme views from lots of other people they would have never met in real life.

It doesn't work that way. I pruned both Twitter and Facebook intentionally in the way you suggest and it became pretty clear (or maybe it's my biases) that both run on outrage. Facebook would insist on bringing arguments to the top of my feed as best it could. As an example, I am friends with a regional sportswriter on FB and he had a post asking something sports/ politics related. It generated about 50 responses, so FB condenses that into 2-3 replies and then offers to let you click to see more. Amazingly, the part it decided to call out was the one argument in the 50 comment thread. Controversy and upset are what drives engagement in social media.

IDK about FB, I always avoided it like a toxic plague.

But on Twitter, there seem to still be work-arounds. I use lists set to Private, curated for specific experts on particular topics, and many top and/or obscure experts post regularly.

This provides a reasonably straightforward chronological feed, curated to my interest, with well-tuned news and links to key analysis. Just NEVER use the main Home feed (which they do push on you).

IDK how long that feature will stay unpolluted by toxic algorithms, but Jack does seem a bit less determined than Zuck to pollute society.

I don't know what to say to stuff like this. I spent a ton of time treating Twitter the same way and in no way do I want to suggest that I am now enlightened or something, but when you hear people (and I include my past self in this) talk about Twitter, it's like they're talking about a really effective chainsaw where there's no guard and the handle is on the wrong end. You can use it to cut down trees if you figure out how, but 99% of people harm themselves in the process.

Good point, and great chainsaw analogy

Constant curation and management is indeed everything. And I remember at my first encounter with real computers in college, when I had a choice of editors, I went for the one with the most powerful features, despite the stated hazards.

I do assume that the audience here tends to the more capable end, so most of them would not be in that 99%, but perhaps I'm mistaken?

Every community thinks it's Lake Wobegon. This place is no more above average than anywhere else AFAIK. That said, thanks for reminding me of this! http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html

Ah yes, perspective -- "...that's not a knife... That's a knife"

Agreed. My FB & TW timelines are 95% non-toxic b/c I muted those people out of my life. The same with news feeds.

It's sufficiently tranquil that my wife now asks to read my feeds. It just took some filter cycles to get there.

It's impossible to avoid even in groups, because for each fb post the algorithm chooses the top 2-3 comments to show. And it will be ones which have the most interaction (replies, emojis). And the ones who outrage will have the most interaction thus will be shown.

FWIW, I use https://socialfixer.com/ to hide politics and COVID posts.

There's not much facebook left over, but oh well.

> Did you try just... Not getting outraged?

Yes, they did it by leaving Facebook and Twitter.

That seems like the most obvious strategy for effecting this change.

I don't really understand the line of thinking that somehow you have to will yourself into things rather than changing your environment. I think it misses how predictable peoples' reactions to things really are.

I found that didn't work at all with Facebook and only works with Twitter by being _very_ selective. But I think that is intrinsic to Twitter, and not only for outrage reasons. I unfollow lots of interesting and smart people because they add too much to my feed. If I follow someone for technical content and half their tweets end up being about music or chit-chat with their friends or drama in their part of the industry, I unfollow them to get that material out of my feed. Even if everything they tweet is interesting, if they tweet a lot, I unfollow them.

> If you want to spend more time connecting with people you care about, getting rid of facebook feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Sadly, lots of people I care about think it's a moral imperative to broadcast their political position on Facebook on every issue of the day. The people I connect with are skewed pretty heavily towards my own point of view, but that doesn't make it any less corrosive to read what they have to say. Facebook is just too emotionally taxing to follow. (Using Facebook's tools to curate my feed just reminds me how much power I'm giving up to them, which is also depressing.)

I feel so much better with Facebook out of my life. I have the app installed on my phone in case somebody from twenty years ago wants to look me up and message me. That's all it's good for.

anecdotally, I felt like my only option was to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It was too hard to avoid the outrage. Everybody has that childhood friend who won't stop posting BS conspiracy theories or that aunt who thinks the world is ending. Do I unfollow these people? if so, what's the point of it all?

I only ever posted positive things like videos of me playing piano and only tried to interact with others in a positive way but I found myself becoming more and more angry over time so I just quit the whole thing and never looked back.

Pretty much exactly this for me. I realized that there's not really any value for me to be in touch with people from grade school/high school/college that I wouldn't otherwise interact with. I'm thinking that this will make going to reunions a bit more interesting as well since now I will genuinely not know what most of these people have been up to for the last decade and we will have that as a topic of conversation before we step out of each other's lives for the next decade.

> Not getting outraged?

This mostly works for me for Twitter. FB is just garbage so I haven't been on it in months. I don't need to delete it though, I just stopped going.

HN for the most part is still unique. Even when I see a comment I disagree with, most of the time it's articulated well and I can see their point. There are discussions that can happen.

FB is/was just nonsense, and Twitter is more comedy/entertainment than anything.

That's like saying you should swim in the ocean because you like fish, but just ignore the water. There are numerous ways to connect with people you care about that don't involve a corporate mediator (and many of them are much more fulfilling than Facebook!).

That's like telling a gambler addict to keep going to the slot machines for the social interactions. Just like slot machines, social media are designed to increase addiction; of which “user engagement” is just a euphemism. https://www.quitfacebook.org.

If facebook, twitter, crypto“currencies” were to suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth, society would be better off significantly.

Given that outrage is very attractive. And facebook aims to attract you. It's safe to say that they will slip in outrage every chance they get.

Unfortunately, the people that I care about mostly want to talk about what they're outraged about.

What if I never had facebook? Does the baby exist? Should I GET facebook now?

I know this is frowned upon here but:

Nice try Mark

First rule of HN: don't astroturf.

Second rule of HN: don't call out people who you think are astroturfing.

Third rule: astroturf.

Nice try Paul.

Just the term 'astroturf' and the meaning behind it makes me feel like an ancient roman 5 years before the collapse of the roman empire.

I have a facebook account I rarely if ever login to unless it's something school related. When I do, without fail I see someone I would otherwise get along with posting some ridiculous, easily disproven nonsense about insert scaremongering of the day. Every now and again I'll respond with a link to a factcheck which inevitably upsets the person who is angry someone isn't reinforcing the echo chamber.

Then I promptly close it and remember that's why I don't even bother. Facebook's entire engagement strategy has become outrage and fear. It's what keeps people the most engaged and that's literally the only metric they care about.

I truly believe if Zuck had the option of nuking a third world country to make another billion or solve world peace and Facebook goes away entirely, he'd nuke the country without a second thought. Everything about him strikes me as a sociopath with little to no regard for mankind outside of his personal bubble.

> I truly believe if Zuck had the option of nuking a third world country to make another billion or solve world peace and Facebook goes away entirely, he'd nuke the country without a second thought.

You should check these articles out, they were written in 2018[1][2] and then in 2020[3].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...

[3] https://time.com/5880118/myanmar-rohingya-genocide-facebook-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com