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Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

I never had to quit social media. They quit me. I loved Facebook and Twitter when they were new, I connected to people that were way outside my normal group of friends and stayed in contact with people I knew who moved away, sometimes passively by reading their posts, sometimes actively.

But both platforms started actively working against that kind of usage. Eventually I just had to stop as they became unusable, not using Twitter at all anymore, and only using FB for messenger.

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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.

> Same here, and same with most people I know.

Well yeah. By definition you're no longer engaging with people on Facebook for the most part. People who are organizing events, participating in Facebook groups, posting memes to Facebook no longer exist to you (and vice versa). The contingent of people that have moved of Facebook is larger today, but I'd be wary of drawing conclusions based on "well my friends don't use it" method of gathering data. Eg depending on who you friends are, Snapchat is either one more copied Instagram feature away from failing, or the only platform they'll ever use and couldn't be more successful.

There’s a good xkcd for this one. It is worth remembering just how many people there are and how big the world is. Considering this, I think it is pretty easy to find yourself in a group that is multiple standard deviations away from the mean.

https://xkcd.com/2357/

The difference is that facebook used to be an elite corner of the web where you knew you were talking to people who would be in the upper 1% of US society.

The reddit tech subs used to be populated with the people writing the software they talked about.

There just isn't a place like that any more that is neutral ground. HN and lobste.rs are the two closest and they ban maintainers of open source crown jewels for political reasons.

I can't even be bothered to finish this post because someone will flag it and then dang will show up saying it's not true.

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.

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

The official Twitter client allows this again now too (but with ads). You need to select "See latest tweets instead" at the top of Home.

Your wording "allows" is exactly what people dont like about these tech companies.

They are not real authorities on the Internet. If they left, the internet would improve a thousand times.

They aren't keeping the rest of the internet from being used, though. If you like forums, you can use them regardless of whether reddit exists or not. Same applies for blogs and facebook, IRC and messaging apps, etc.

If forums are better than reddit/discord, why are so many communities there? If blogs are better than twitter, why did the majority choose twitter?

> They aren't keeping the rest of the internet from being used

This is a half-truth. One uses a forum to interact with others, and if most of the users have moved to a Facebook group, the forum doesn't have the same utility it did before.

Yeah I exclusively use lists for this reason. Any time I take a look at my main feed or the curated psyops in the "Trending" column it does strike me as a horrorshow though.

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.

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

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