Reasons to Quit Social Media

>>Is it the like/upvote mechanism?

Yes. This is what created the validation feedback loop, and what generally causes the social harm

The like button, and the variations on it is IMO the biggest problem with social media

Forums and other discussion boards did not have these problems and while you could have "flame war" that involved actual argumentation back and forth not 1000's of passive visitors choosing to upvote, or downvote on a post with no argumentation

The pagination on HN is one of its better UX decisions. Same with turning off auto-loading when you reach the end of the front page of Reddit (but that's not the default).

> Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case.

The way I've started to look at it is that all social media has some harmful and some beneficial aspects, but the nexus of identity-based (vs topic-based like HN) social media with upvote/like functionality is the most problematic for people struggling with identity and self worth. Even as someone established enough not to struggle with self-worth, I avoid that type of social media completely.

Topic based social media with clear and enforced guidelines for content seems to have the least bad trade-off between the harmful and the beneficial.

Of course no social media property is exclusively one or the other, but the design and operation of the service strongly influences the direction in which it goes.

I feel the same is true for me as well. I wasn't aware of this extension though. For now, what I do is if I see myself getting addicted to an app, I just uninstall/block it for 2-3 weeks. After that even if I install it back, the craving is mostly gone. It does come back though in 3-4 months. Facebook was boring for me so never used it again after uninstalling.

I'm not sure it's anything mechanical. Facebook is a wretched hive of scum and villainy for sociocultural inertial reasons. You may as well ask why Detroit is a crappier place to live than Madison. Facebook succumbed early on to echo chambers, disinformation campaigns, and marketing of snake oil and pyramid schemes. Hacker News set rules and followed them consistently, moderating the discussion in accordance with those rules.

Maybe for a better example, just look at Reddit. Something like AskHistorians or SilphRoad for Pokemon Go are terrific communities full of great information and productive discussion, whereas many other subs are as bad or worse than Facebook. That is in spite of exactly the same interface technology. The difference is culture.

If Facebook has a design problem, it's not having any sort of guiding principles other than engagement. The purely algorithmic curation isn't really curation. It doesn't create a culture at all. It just creates addiction. Infinite scroll is in service of that, but it doesn't create it. In fact, the mobile reader I use for Hacker News has infinite scroll and it doesn't make the site worse.

The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0], but pedants don't love that.)

Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice. If you can eliminate them, these services magically become tools rather than escapes.

[0] https://suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful

I think many definitely get obsessed with the need to like/upvote on here as a means to register their response. It seems to detract from the information you get out of other comments. Although it does help to hone in on which comments are most helpful.

I find scrolling easy to avoid on FB as I just click on the notifications icon, and there are usually only notifications that are of interest - and a relatively small number.

Also I use FBP plugin that let's me filter things out on a very fine-granular level, and I am very aggressive with filtering.

I think the problem is not necessarily things such as likes, upvotes, shares or other features but platforms which don't consider Goodhart's law when they introduce them.

Large Reddits tend toward bland and repetitive cookie-cutter content not solely because Reddit has a voting mechanism, but because the site's structure allows that mechanism to be highly vulnerable to karma farming. There are many casual users who don't notice the content is low-effort or repetitive, special interest subs make it easy to target posts, and the volume is too high for moderators to handle (and many will have a "we can't delete things which are popular and within the rules, even if we don't like them" policy).

Facebook (and YouTube, and to some extent Twitter) are a weird branch of that. The application of Goodhart's law wasn't initially to the users but to the platforms themselves. I have little doubt that initially they started with an altruistic observation that people spent more time on the site if they tended to see content from their most entertaining friends, but then someone realised seeing bad takes from a stranger was even more engaging and so you should see that instead. People realise they get more visibility for being controversial, and again there is no real moderation for this, so we have even more of a tyre fire than the blandness which upvote-driven sites tend toward.

(Twitter at least still offer tools to curate and remove algorithmic ranking from your feed, even if they try to nudge users away from them. That doesn't protect more popular users from the "trolling brings me attention" culture elsewhere on the site, though.)

I think HN is less affected by karma farming due to having a broader range of topics, active moderation of repetitive content and perhaps most importantly a relatively small community with a strong appreciation that the upvote should be used sparingly for interesting and unique content. Also the text and link based format helps - this might change quickly if e.g. HN allowed posting photos of vintage computer equipment, which could disproportionately gain upvotes compared to insightful long-format articles despite being easier to produce.

> it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm.

it's the fact that they're undemocratic black box algorithms that make the participation very one directional (explained below). add to that the centralization and non-interoperability/walled garden aspects, as well as platforms focusing on generating profit instead of helping us make deeper connections, and you've got a big dangerous stew.

the most constructive content doesn't actually surface; things that generate 'viralness' do. there are also few tools to individually manage this social data or build any sort of coherent framing/narrative. in other words: profit-seeking social media platforms are a straightjacketed collective stream of consciousness; they are undemocratically 'governed' spaces injected with ads that come with no useful tools to organize and structure information about the world around us.

"oh but that's not what social media is designed for!"

exactly, the medium is the message. by logging into a third party facebook server to connect with friends and people i want to follow, i am constrained by Zuck's rules and Zuck's black box 'social media' functions. going back to a peer to peer setup by using the ideas of bittorrent's DHTs combined with git's version control, like the holochain framework implements, seems to me to be a way to actually get at the root of this problem: it allows us to see the immense overlaps between today's SV platforms to then be able to quickly decommodify humanity's communication and coordination technology, by publicly sharing and collaboratively improving the underlying functions of our networked apps.

although in very early stages, these projects like IPFS, DAT, SSB, and especially holochain [1], which allows for a full distribution of social media functions (and more: http://valueflo.ws), and which has forking and complete distribution mechanics built into it from the start, will allow a powerful new wave of dweb application evolution/experimentation.

[1] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...

Good points. On the other hand, I couldn’t fit your whole comment on one screen. I did scroll down to tap reply. Please stand by while I go recover.

> Is it the like/upvote mechanism?

Yes it is, HN pays people to keep things at bay. But that doesn't scale

>Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation.

I don't think it's the upvote/downvote system itself, but the fact that you can see your own "score" that changes behaviour.

It has definitely made me more likely to comment, even when I don't have much to add, and I've noticed my comments getting more and more inflammatory/polarising over the past few months as I start to optimise for engagement.

Before I turned on noprocrast, I'd often sit there "babysitting" my comments; checking on them every 10 minutes to see how people have reacted to it.

I'd be interested to see if @dang has found similar negative effects associated with giving precise counts and scores.

> I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm.

I believe it's advertisement-driven content curation. You're being fooled into thinking that your feed follows your interest, but instead it optimizes around stealing your attention. The feeds control you, not the other way around.

> it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm

Honestly, I think it's just the fact that it's a website that allows you to constantly be exposed to different things that are interesting and stimulating. You can remove upvotes, scrolling, all you want, but you'll still have the IV drip of novel content. Constant exposure to novelty is harmful, I think. We weren't designed to have our minds blown every 5 minutes.

Spend a few hours a day having your brain washed with memes and fascinating articles (or at least the titles), and your brain will re-calibrate to this as the new normal, and anything less stimulating (reading books etc.) will feel boring. Constant novelty makes the world seem unstable and makes me feel flighty and anxious compared to more mundane activities, so the mental health connection is no surprise.

Hacker News is less stimulating than other social media because it's text-based, it's about more serious topics, it's well moderated, and it doesn't abuse addictive techniques like infinite scrolling. However, I bet many people here will attest that they sometimes close HN only to open it right back up again. Closing a website only to open it immediately because you are bored is a sign that you subconsciously believe the website is one of the only interesting things you can do. Either your brain is right, and everything besides HN, reddit, Twitter, etc. is actually boring, or these things are just so artificially stimulating that using them causes everything else to feel boring in comparison. I'll let you decide which you think sounds more accurate.

This guy is making a lot of inferences based on his own experience and I think he may want to consider hiring a therapist to work through these issues:

"In reality, we hire social media to distract our minds from our unpleasant, average life. And, by faking photos, to convince others, including ourselves, that our life is amazing while internally we are in pain."

If you recognize the pitfalls/dangers of social media, I think you can utilize the platforms if you are mindful without falling for those pitfalls/dangers. Pitfalls such as creating "echo chambers" and "bubbles" with who you follow and further falling for emotional hooks ( Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788 )

That void is important because it allows you to find what you really want.

Social media is better than drinking.

"you have to work on yourself, and in that domain there are no easy answers."

I couldn't agree more.

But, if you step back, its a pretty easy resolution.. Do you want to be endlessly troughing at stupid cat pictures, or do you want to make the attempt to understand what you want, why you are here, and what you need to do?

Most people won't take the first step, ever.

>You want to aspire to be something, and looking for someone else to copy would mean you at least have some kind of aspiration to work towards, instead of nothing at all.

And this were I watch athletes, cars and gave fun with the IT group and programming meme page.

When I'm opening Facebook I'm laughing at posts. It's genuine.

I can't do this in the place where I live. It's almost if things are flipped around. Facebook positive, real world negative. Very weird.

You won't find yourself by seeking distraction. You need to eliminate distractions and feel the pain of boredom, which will motivate you to try things.

Then you focus on finding what you want to do.

Honestly, pretty much any idle activity is more productive for the human mind than doomscrolling social media feeds. Sitting in the void. Going for a walk. Watching the grass blow in the wind. Putting together a puzzle, doing a crossword.

There is a unique unhealthiness to chronic overuse of social media, in my opinion, and the point is that it is addictive and takes work to break free - but once you do, you feel freer.

People did just fine without social media for 7000+ years. You don't suddenly need social media to fill some void that wasn't possible to fill before social media existed.

Note: I'm not dissing social media. I like it when it works well. I'm just responding to this idea that it's a need.

> I think to reduce social media to some of the crappy jobs it does serve artificially diminishes what it can be.

I agree completely with this. The article takes two bad parts of social media and assumes that those are the only uses for it. You've mentioned more. There's also keeping connected in a group context with family and friends that are scattered across the globe. I have an active family group in which my family shares pictures of nephews/nieces, vacation, and more - all stuff that helps keep us close when we can't see each other for long periods of time. I have an active friend group with my college roommates that does the same - when one of them discovered that his spouse was having an affair, we could all support him together.

I've yet to find a better tool for managing and communicating with local interest groups. For example, my local pinball group uses it to announce events, manage RSVPs, advertise machines for sale, and just chat about pinball. Meetup.com was a thing, but was more expensive and not quite as good of a product. This replaced a mailing list, but FB is frankly better at this, especially when it comes to managing events.

"I don't want to stop using drugs, I just want drugs that are not going to harm me while I use them"

Unfortunately, social media by its nature is going to be harmful. It was never designed to consider the world we live in now.

Haha.... Sounds like you want World Peace...

"You may say I'm a dreamer,

But I'm not the only one,

I hope someday you'll join us,

And the world will live as one"

Probably a walled city is the only way to achieve that. Such a setup is like a closed mailing list in which all participants have to pass an 'entrance exam' of some kind.

This kind of setup imposes a cost for rude, nasty, aggressive and destructive behavior - since you can simply be excluded from the group in that case.

This is how most of the world works on a day to day basis; you don't let random people into a corporate strategy meeting or an academic council meeting. You only admit people who agree to abide by civil society rules.

Something like that can be incredibly useful, but it requires a lot of up-front organizing effort. Also, malicious types have been known to sneak into say, a closed mailing list, and leak the internal discussions to Twitter or whatever, so...

I'm less and less confident that is possible, not necessarily because personal interactions and online spaces themselves form an inherent contradiction (though they might). But because the incentive, and ability to commodify, and capitalize these interactions are necessary and sufficient conditions for the creation of these destructive social systems.

We're pretty bad at social systems level thinking, but this precise lack of skill is an opportunity for exploitation. In the same way that hobbyist day traders over-estimate their ability to turn a profit by not understanding the skill level of who they are losing against, social media participants over-estimate their ability to check out because they don't understand the skill level of players who want them to engage. This disparity in the games being played isn't spelled out and why would it be? At least there is hope in that social media systems while ubiquitous, are not yet hegemonic. As long as that holds, there is still hope.

Negative content flows upwards, the more negative or edgy you are the more upvotes you get. Users crave this fake validation to make up for other things that are lacking.

Think about it this way, if you have a good job, fantastic relationships, and other great things going on are you really going to be arguing on Instagram with strangers ?

> for interactions with other people in online spaces to be less destructive

I have the exact opposite opinion, let’s confront them: real-life social spaces are toxic to me, and I seek refuge in computers, where you experience me. If we were a little less toxic to each others, maybe online wouldn’t be a high concentration of people retired from real life?

- Real life has a dump of major problems that “social people” constantly refuse to fix.

- And each time we bring them up, it’s the bane of your life, we get all the names, downvotes, exaggerations, parody, “we’re in $CURRENT_YEAR”, “Have you tried to man up?”, “You’re frustrated”, etc.

- And the problem continues. Online, are you are just meeting with the people that are invisible to you in real life.

The status of the scientific understanding today of gender imbalance in programming (excluding improper studies with doubtful scientific process) is that little boys end up in programming because it’s the only thing in the family which behaves expectedly, doesn’t sulk, calls mum, gets angry for expressing things as they are, retributes effort, etc. Making a little more room for boys in real life would also correct gender imbalance in IT.

It may even make that fewer people in general go to IT and science in general, because they would be more satisfied with real-life interactions. Science would go slower, but people would be happier.

It’s a tough path, but really one that upgrades the lives of millions.

Do you want to take it?

I really don’t get the complaints with Twitter as a product, at least from my usage. But maybe that’s because I’ve exclusively been using Tweetbot for several years.

But it basically does exactly what I want: when someone I follow posts something, it shows up in my feed. Which is what it’s been doing for years.

Again, maybe this is a matter of the client, but Tweetbot lets me see exactly what I want, and nothing more.

Same here, and same with most people I know. I'm from the generation that got Facebook in ~2005, when you still needed a university email to sign up. It was definitely helpful for socializing at college, especially the almighty "relationship status" field. Fond memories. It's useless to me now except for seeing friends' photos, but Instagram is better at that anyway.

I imagine it's changed for the same reason loot boxes/gacha have taken over normal paid DLC or expansion packs: whales are more profitable. It's better for Facebook, Twitter, etc. if they have a fewer people engaging with the platform for 12 hours per day instead of more people for less time; the highly engaged people are creating the content, seeing the most ads, and interacting with the most items on their news feed, which leads to a more accurate user profile and better targeted ads.

I think it depends on how you use it. I find Twitter more useful than Linkedin.

This 100%. I strongly embraced both platforms early on, but their nature has changed in so many ways, and the balance of benefit to me vs. benefit to the vendor has tilted way too far towards benefiting the vendor.

At this point I've blocked all FB-related domains for my computers (Pi-hole) and use other methods to keep in touch with family and friends.

The same thing is happening with Twitter. Every time I view the web interface (or official mobile app), I'm disgusted by how exploitative and user-hostile its current iteration is. Luckily I normally use a 3rd-party mobile client which retains some of the aspects that made the platform appealing (permanently-linear timeline, no ads). The disparity is night and day. Unfortunately I'm "forced" to use the official clients from time to time as the 3rd party one is no longer being updated and lacks some features (for example some videos simply don't play). Still, at least it keeps the service mostly-usable. Regardless, I'm using Mastodon more and more as it's what Twitter "was" and can never be again.

Social media is one more day in the Eternal September.

I disagree you can’t stumble on great content though. This website itself is an example. There’s more crap being published but the Internet has been too big to consume in it’s entirety for decades now. You have to learn to filter.

> They're the people who don't know what's happening in the news unless there is a major crisis that might actually effect them.

To that end its increasingly hard to stay informed and sift through the negativity, even in Journalism.

While I havent been on Facebook since 2008 or so, and never signed up for Twitter, i have been on reddit since basically launch and digg before that. I use them less and less becuase, as you point out, it directly correlates to my moods.

But moreover, my long term method of staying informed, a highly curated list of RSS feeds, is also hard to maintain and keep a good mood. I find this method preferable because I am less influenced by "popular" talking points and free to make my own assessment. But just the writing is now so biased and negative I find myself cynically reading multiple sources on a single issue and intrinsically distrusting what almost any of them say at their face unless its backed up or said in another source.

At the end of the day its time consuming. And I waver between just watching a nightly news that i KNOW is extremely biased or sifting through the trash to "find" what i feel is a more accurate depiction.

Of course, this waivers depending on what is occurring. During relative "quiet" times ill watch the news, when large events like the Floyd protests or Afghanistan withdrawal occurs, Ill key into RSS feeds to try and suss out a better picture.

That said....there almost always seems to be some major event these days.

Same. I like it for the funny memes, learning news, seeing what my friends are up to. I don't see it as particularly sinister or anything. I certainly don't think of it as an escape from a "mediocre" life.

Agreed. I curated my friends and family and who I follow and now it's more pleasant to use.

I also noticed this. I recommend /r/geopolitics its heavily modded to prevent this kind of stuff

Well, judging by the extremely racist and most often dumb as hell /r/Europe, the racist and self-hating r/ukpolitics and the racist, smug and self-important r/germany, it's people who ruined social media. And the Internet, for that matter. Let in too many idiots and everything turns into Idiocracy.

This is why Google+ Circles were cool

Isn't it a forum? It doesn't have friends, following, asking for your contacts, etc. I guess the line is subjective, this is just a plain old forum, managed very well, imo.

Depends on how you define the term.

Historically, the term came up in the verge of Web 2.0 and was distinct from other social online media in that a specific software was the basis for each respective SN.

So for example Twitter is SN because you had the app on the phone that was only Twitter so that was SN. But an online forum was not, because everybody could obtain the same software and run a forum.

So by that defition HN is social media.

Yes, Hacker News and Reddit are both social media.

Best question. Declined to join or participate any social media from the beginning. HN is absolutely is on the spectrum of social media, but more like a well moderated usenet group. It's a well run decoupled internet comment section, sort of like a fat tailed reddit.

Without pictures, friends, followers, alerts, verified identities, personalization and emphasis on personal branding, an ad-driven revenue model, I wouldn't call it social media. If someone asked for my "social media accounts," I would not include HN in that, however, a subpoena might treat it differently. Security clearance people might think that as well. The fig-leaf pseudonymity provides some modesty, honesty, and civility for actual discourse, where social media is about status signalling, and not much else.

It doesn't have any networking features as far as I can tell.

If HN was ever directly instrumental in getting someone laid, you might have an argument, but I'm going to say "no".

If it had direct messaging and follow/subscribe features, it absolutely would be, and I say these are things that make Reddit social media while HN is only a forum.

HN is at it's essence a custom subreddit. And Reddit is definitely social media.

Social: majority of time is spent reading people's commentary, many who are just a slightly obscured version of the rest of their social media identity, and sometimes responding in dialogue. Even though it's pseudonymous it doesn't mean it's asocial.

Media: Basically what all the links are

For those of you who have successfully minimized social media in their life. Where does you go for real conversations on the internet?

I sometimes use Twitter for that but feels like the ratio of noise vs. signal is too high!

With that said, here some things that I found helpful:

- Never do cocaine straight out of my pocket.

- Only do cocaine in a restroom using the bag inside my valise, or on the mirrored table in my living room.

- only buy cocaine from a dealer who I trust, or dealers who that dealer trusts.

- when sharing cocaine with others in the restroom, don't tell them personal information about myself.

I think COVID lockdown made keeping social media usage to a minimum really difficult. I noticed that I started to watch chatting streams on Twitch as a crutch for not being able to socialize outside. Socializing over a video call with your friends are also difficult because you're not left with much topics to talk about.

Technically what you’re doing is ad hominem—invalidating the arguments of the post by attacking what the author does for a living. It’s not even necessary that someone who makes (possibly extra) money publishing insights is out for validation—there really are just people who are willing to pay for insights and he’s simply fulfilling a demand. Anything else beyond seeing what he does as simply business is pure speculation.

I have had success reaching larger corporations using Facebook. I use it strictly as a directory of contacts both personal and professional. I never look to it for casual content consumption. I have hackernews and sometimes reddit for that.

>Like, why write this blog at all if you aren’t after the validation?

Social Media, especially large ones like FB / TW / IG / SC etc are mass aggregators.

A blog is a publishing platform. Like an article in a web page or a news article.

There is a lot of difference. You can't build echo chambers around blogs. (You can, if you try hard enough, but you can also do that in the real life) Social Media makes is buttery smooth to slide into well walled echo chambers.

Personally, I also think they have fueled the rise of crass materialism and wealth worship to an absurd degree. Having a streaming channel is a legitimate career these days, which just blows my mind. Of course, not all streamers, but many budding ones seem to think that behaving crazy on a channel will make them millionaires and bring them a lot of females to mess with. I can't even imagine what sort of warping this does to a young impressionable mind. There was a time when education and character were seen as must achieve goals, to have a stable life and family. We are raising a generation of poorly motivated, warped world view children, who are supposed to take charge in a decade or so.

>Maybe off topic, does having an account on these social media sites / apps on phone be harmful in any way when you don't consume it that much?

For me, it's not about harm to me. It's that I despise the business models of those companies.

So I voted with my (lack of) attention because I don't want to be responsible for generating any revenue for those rapacious scumbags.

I certainly don't push others to get off those platforms, but I choose to live my values and don't support them.

It was never about trying to limit my time on such websites (those phone apps are just poorly implemented interfaces to the existing web platform), rather it was about what sorts of businesses I (don't) wish to support.

I'm glad you found your sweet spot with that. Mine is altogether elsewhere.

They're presenting a bit of a false dichotomy. You can use social media and still be sane, you just have to have some amount of self awareness so the troubling aspects don't affect you as much.

Funny that you can join Tinybeans through FB. They say they don't sell your data, but I couldn't figure out the monetization strategy.

I am worried about the babies who show up on Tinybeans.

Indoctrinated into Instagram culture from the instant of their birth, from before they even knew how to think or talk.

Later on they'll be able to see thousands and thousands of pictures of themselves as a baby, which will surely do something warped to their young fragile egos. "The Internet? Why yes, I know all about it --- that is where all the pictures of ME are stored!"

Wasn't there some big reason that children under thirteen weren't allowed to have a Facebook account?

Messaging apps maybe, but Facebook? I think once FB started to put news and content from people you don't know alongside content from people you know / care about, IMO they stopped making this a priority

I detest talking on the phone. I also accept that there are some people who I'm just not going to get around to arranging a meetup with, as there are too many demands on my time. I don't look at Facebook any more but I follow a lot of illustrators and animators on instagram so my feed is usually full of their interesting stuff. There are few enough people that I can catch up easily if I don't check for a day or two. I also follow friends who've moved to different part of the country and can see how their kids are doing, although I have never posted a pic of my boy on social media (and never will until he can give informed consent).

No. People (like myself) are ultimately using it for a distraction from something more important or a dopamine rush when someone "likes" something you post. You're better off.

Social media is not fundamentally different from other ways of connecting with people online, like blogs and forums.

The happiness you can enjoy from meeting people online is the same whether on a forum, on an online videogame, or on twitter.

That depends on you. Social media should be a way to better connect to your friends and family. In particular distant ones that you don't see daily but still want to be in contact with. I haven't seen my 7th grade crush since high school, but I'm glad to see pictures of her kid's first day of college - as one example.

Most people use social media instead for harmful things that do not help society. Left and Right wing conspiracy theorys abound. Pictures of some cat that you don't own.

Do you have any friends that you've lost touch with?

All my best friends from high school live all over the country. Some of us have grown apart and that's okay, but I do enjoy passively keeping up with what they're doing on Facebook.

How about family members who you grew up with but now live on other sides of the country?

I have some older cousins that moved to California as soon as they graduated college. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time so it's not like I had any real way of keeping in touch with them. Now we're friends on Facebook and I can see what they're doing.

Ever wanted to go on a hike in the mountains in the spring and see if there's snow on the trail you're about to do? Someone probably tried already and posted a photo on Instagram.

Ever see some new construction in a building and wonder "What's moving in to this space?" There's probably a hyper local Facebook group where someone has already posted that information.

If you're watching a football game and want to get live commentary by people other than the announcers. Twitter is great for that.

I also use Facebook for organizing events like ski weekends or camping trips. I haven't found anything that even comes close for event planning.

I dunno if this counts. I use reddit/r/funny together whenever we feel a bit bored or just want to kill time. Other things include finding like minded people on facebook groups which you can use to meet other people too.

That has been my pattern, I will find a different time suck.

Leave Reddit, come to HN, leave HN, play a new video game, stop playing a video game, binge watch a tv show.

Never anything productive

Agree with this. Smartphones have enabled profligation of low effort posts and comments, emotional outbursts and mood based content.

This sort of direct or indirect attention grabbing content which is more often than not extremely unhealthy for society gets pushed up by people, because it satisfies our primal dopamine instincts.

As communities get larger and harder to moderate, more and more people assume it is the status quo to create such unhealthy content, and because of smartphones, it is extremely easy to push up such content, and those who werent originally into this also get dragged in.

On an aside, is it really ethical for a company to make insane amounts of profit for being a platform which enables people to bicker, fight and create echo chambers? Agreed that not all social media communities are like this, but even so, is it fair?

People can use things occasionally without having an addiction that impacts their lives.

If this weren't HN, I'd assume this comment is satire. Churches certainly aren't immune to censorship, hours of hate, death wishes (explicit or otherwise), or dehumanization.

Social spaces are all vulnerable to the weaknesses of humanity. While I do think the mechanics of the medium play a role in how those weaknesses surface, the source is and will always be us.

Meanwhile, here you are using words like "regime" in your post here.

I was raised by fundamentalists, and that was not my experience. Wrong kind of opinions got me surrounded by elders who would attempt to brow beat me in to submission. Towards my late teens I'd spend the entire hour and a half of every Sunday hiding out in the kitchen/dining hall in the back of the building, tending to the pot of coffee, until I was old enough to leave and strike out on my own. I still get panic attacks at the idea of stepping foot in to a religious building. Basically, your experience is far from universal, in my experience.

As the western world secularizes, we need a replacement for the community fulfillment role that organized religion used to take. As someone who was raised religious, but no longer identifies as such, I find my self missing the wonderful sense of community that my church facilitated by bringing broad spectrums of different people together to achieve a higher purpose. I know people's mileage will vary depending on their specific church, and I don't intend to whitewash the toxic actions, or the rejection of certain groups in some churches. But many elements of my church were positive. The sense of community, the volunteering, the people genuinely caring for each other, and even just as a place for people to hangout. I consider being raised in that environment to be a net good, despite later being turned off the actual theology. Is there away we can move to a secular alternative that has the same level of social penetration as the church once did?

I found reddit worse than twitter as far as self esteem and group think. Reddit's downvoting is used as punishment for not being "bubbly" (don't know how else to describe the reddit vibe) enough. I do think a feed of programming posts would be nice but I don't want to visit that site.

Yeah - the lack of retention control on these platforms makes me hesitant to use them.

For Twitter there are third party sites that make it easy to remove old tweets, but it's nearly impossible to remove likes (you have to start a process with their DPO office and then manually remove them in 3k batches and they have to reload them after each).

Reddit is tedious in that you have to do it one by one, there are some scripts to assist (if you edit and clear first it actually removes the comment content they have saved in their DB, but I didn't know this at the time).

FB was also extremely tedious - there's a third party plugin that removes things one by one from the UI of the activity log, but the activity log barely works and fails to load often. It took months of rerunning it to clear out the history.

I get why a forum like reddit or HN doesn't want to allow deletion since it removes value from the forum, but FB should really make it easier. In theory account deletion removes it, but I'm not sure what that looks like on the backend. You can request the data from FB and see it (including details about what profiles you looked at, images you loaded, etc.).

I've reduced down to HN, reddit (a bit), and Twitter without likes. I reject new social apps where I don't have control over my content.

>s and I have a cron job that deletes all my comments/submissions at 5PM every day so I'm not providing any value to the site.

You probably should edit your comments and leave them empty

otherwise they're probably still visible - uneddit or something like that

I use shreddit whitelisting a handful of subreddits that talk about programming (where I think my comments are useful) otherwise I see Reddit as ephemeral.

Reddit has started to throttle it's API though and I have a feeling they will eventually prevent comment deletion.

What I really want is the ability to disconnect the link between my account and a comment (currently you need to delete the entire account to do this). If I could do that I'd most of them up instead of deleting them.