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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm the outlier - but everybody I am "friends" with on social media I'm friends with IRL (save for Twitter, but that's more blogging than social media). We just post what we did this weekend and stuff like that. Post stuff that the kids are doing (and for some of my friends what the grandkids are doing). No one is trying to impress anyone else. People just staying in touch. Maybe we older folks have a better feel for how to integrate technology into our everyday lives than we're given credit for.

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I agree - Instagram and Facebook I only follow / friend people that I'm actually friends with and would normally speak with. Limiting it this (1) makes it less frustrating / argumentative content, but also (2) makes it run out of content faster, which means spending less time on it.

My biggest complaint about Facebook (besides the obvious shitty company stuff) is that I don't want to see what other people are sharing (meme posts, etc). I wish there was an "only show me OC" filter.

> Maybe I'm the outlier

A good sanity check of this is to use Dunbar's number (usually considered at ~150)[0] and see how many of your friends and friends of friends have a number of social media "friends" that reaches or exceeds that number.

In case you are unfamiliar: Dunbar's number is a proposed cognitive limit to the number of real social relationships we can have based on brain size.

The total number of real, stable social relationships you can have is physiologically limited, so having 200 facebook "friends" that truly are your friends is impossible.

Because we do have connections with people outside of social media (hopefully!) even 150 friends is nearly impossible unless you are friends with literally every social relationship you have.

So if you want to see, I would first establish that you are really in the group you think you are. If you are only connected with true, irl friends you likely don't have much more than 30 "friends". Then sample the graph of that network a bit and see where you are in the distribution of "friends".

0.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

I have roughly 70-80 social media friends, discounting Twitter which I don't engage with my friends at all but instead engage with other computer science, mathematics, physics and beer enthusiasts. These are people having similar interests to me, but they're not my friends. Sort of like HN - you can think of HN as a professional community where we all have like interests, but we're not friends. Like this conversation, we're just strangers who've met and are talking for a brief moment.

What makes the real difference is curating followers and avoiding mindless "reel type" scrolling. As always, it's being intentional rather than setting hard limits (e.g., being friends only in real life, limiting the number of follows after some weak sociological studies) that makes the difference in the quality of the experience.

I've learned a lot from Tiktok, Reddit, Twitter, certain corners of Facebook, etc., and met a lot of interesting people on dating apps. And I hope people have learned from me. Sure, I've wasted time too, and waited too long before I muted people who made me angry, and it took me some unnecessary time before I realized they weren't talking to me, but my world has gotten a lot bigger and more interesting and more adventurous than before.

Who your friends with changes a lot during our younger years. School, college, job changes, neighborhood changes, …etc, all bring new friends and old friends you can’t find time for. These changes are rarely reflected in social media.

In addition, younger people do follow a lot of “influencers” - the worst kinda people to follow in social media.

What generation do you fall into?

I’ve noticed some groups of people are better than others. Most of my baby boomer relatives are really bad about social media, sharing tons of political things (often nasty and offputting) and seem to liken social media to spending time with people or catching up with them a bit inappropriately.

I'm a Gen Xer. The majority of my friends are Gen Xers and Millennials. I have a few friends who are Boomers, and a few who are Zoomers.

I think it’s wildly interesting how different generations appear to have totally different relationships with social media

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