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Comment by legrande | Hacker News Reader

I quit social media for a year and nothing magical happened to me. I think it's because I never really had a problem with it, since all my feeds were heavily curated and I didn't scroll through mountains of noise. The content I consume is always high quality, because I made social media work for me. I avoid Instagram since it's too visual and full of posers. Twitter is more real and authentic. Facebook is mostly for the family group chat which I enjoy more than the timeline. You have to make it work for you.

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This is a good point, but just to be the devil's advocate, I will point out that most social networks are starting to implement features where they fill your feed with content you never signed up for. They'll call it something like "suggested" posts. Granted, I think Instagram is the one I've noticed it on the most, and you said you don't use that. But I could see that feature catching on to the point that feeds are harder and harder to maintain control of as a user.

> social networks are starting to implement features where they fill your feed with content you never signed up for. They'll call it something like "suggested" posts

Well Twitter has lists which I make full use of. I created a few private lists that I browse at my leisure, with different topics, like 'Tech', 'Design', 'Politics', 'Thought Leaders', 'Memes', 'Current Events' etc

At least for me, Twitter sneaks in sponsored content into my feeds and the profiles of the people I follow.

I'm at almost a week since looking at Facebook. Like you, I curated the content pretty well, but also wanted to avoid it being an echo chamber, so I don't think I unfriended more than 5 people in a decade because I disagree with them politically. Those were only because they were constantly posting inflammatory memes, always picking fights, and full of negativity. I don't need that in my life or in my feed.

A few weeks back, Facebook changed their algorithm significantly for me. Suddenly I'm getting tons of pages you may like, random comments from friends on pages that are completely useless (stuff like "What street did you grow up on?", "Only 17% of people can remember their kindergarten teachers name. What was yours?", "What do you think about this Manhattan loft?"), etc. No matter how many times I marked I want to see less content like this, it kept feeding me that crap. I don't want reactionary stuff force fed to me.

I'm sure I've missed a couple life events among friends I'd find value in seeing, but I haven't missed it enough to login.

Surveys to farm your password reset answers.

they want to know who you are, what you like, what you'll buy

I quit Facebook about a year ago and don't miss it at all, but I think I'd really miss Instagram, because about 90% of my feed there is contemporary artists, galleries, curators and critics. At the moment there is (sadly) no other platform that lets you see the latest work by your preferred slice of the international art world -- ranging from the famous to the mostly unknown.

At least in this area, I've encountered very few posers. I don't know if there are other subjects where the same holds true on Instagram, but it seems like there probably would be.

How can you call twitter more authentic when it seems pretty clear (to me ofc) that their stupid length limit is ideally cut out to stir controversy and create confrontation out of nowhere (by virtue of people assuming the worst when there's not enough info presented to them).

It’s easier to ignore bullshit on Twitter.

With Facebook, unless you actively block lots of people, your high school buddy’s uncle will show up with some valuable information to share.

With Twitter that crap is buried unless it hits some internet celebrity. Twitter is also less manipulative of the stream, while Facebook is focused on driving engagement.

I just opened up Twitter, the top 5 items are SwiftOnSecurity, my city’s mayor chief of staff, my little league, and a post about Roman artifacts. 100% signal.

Just opened up Facebook, and the top 5 are: somebody’s new curtains, a pitch to friend more people, an ad for noom, a colleague sharing his opinion about Texas abortion law, and a post from my favorite baseball team. 40% signal.

Depends on who you follow. I follow people like patio11 or different startup founders, they have good thoughts and insights. I don't use it to follow random people who stir up drama.

You could say it depends for every platform. It's just some of them employ formats that are cancerous to begin with.

Formats and patterns is pretty much the only things you can judge a social media site on since there's no real way to say that content is universally worse somewhere than other.

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