Comment by ahmedfromtunis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahmedfromtunis | Hacker News Reader

To protect my mental wellbeing, I find that carefully selecting who to follow on some of these services improves considerably my experience.

For Instagram and Twitter, my rule of thumb is to prefer topical accounts to entity ones. That is, accounts that are dedicated to a single topic, no matter how narrow or large the scope, over those of people and/or companies.

Personal and business accounts, no matter how focused they are, tend to go off topic very often, and there's nothing to do about it. A designer or an art studio can still post about politics, religion, or whatever the controversy du jour is about. An account about logo design or some python framework, not so much if ever.

This allows me to have a feed whose content I sort of control. With Twitter, it gets even better with lists, so I have ones about dev stuff, others about business topics, etc. and the content there is almost on topic most of the time.

Since I started doing this, the impact of social media on my mood almost vanished, yet I'm still able to closely follow what's happening on topics I really care about.

When I want to see what's happening on the real world, I check my Facebook.

I'm sure aware of how bad these companies are with personal data. So it you think it'd be better to delete your account, then, yes, do it.

> To protect my mental wellbeing, I find that carefully selecting who to follow on some of these services improves considerably my experience. For Instagram and Twitter, my rule of thumb

This. These services aren't toxic if you don't follow toxic accounts.

Also, I didn't think much about it in the past but now that I split my time between 3 countries and 2 continents, having FB (messenger) is the best way to keep in touch with people without bugging them with my several phone numbers (and charges that may occur, thanks Canadian telecoms).

>This. These services aren't toxic if you don't follow toxic accounts.

Your ability to moderate your usage of these services doesn’t make them not toxic. Your statement is victim blaming.

These services are still major proprietors of surveillance capitalism. They sell your future behavior to the highest bidder. This is toxic in itself.

Beyond which, your participation in these services is a signal to those who trust you that these services are safe for them to use. They are not, because they are not safe for anyone to use. That you have mitigated the harm through devoting even more of your attention to them doesn’t change that.

> Your statement is victim blaming.

Really? You're going to equate this to crimes someone perpetuates against another?

For weeks I've seen posts blaming Ukraine for being invaded and having genocide committed against them. That's victim blaming.

Social media users aren't victims of anything except their own inability to limit and moderate usage. Back in the day people would sit in front of the TV, now it's just a different screen. That's on them. Many people also use social media constructively; to do things like run their business, keep in touch with friends and family, etc...

The naïveté of this take is astounding for someone who frequents a technology message board. You’re just going to ignore the part where these services employ A/B tests to make their services more addictive? You’re going to ignore the countless stories about how Facebook knew that the content they boost is bad for mental health and is addictive but they did it anyway? You’re going to ignore .. the entire surveillance capitalism aspect where an entire industry is predicated upon keeping people engaged?

Have a feeling you’d get a long with the Sackler family famously. Christ.

And commercial food producers make their products more addictive too... How about the tobacco industry? How about illicit drugs? Porn?

At some point you need to talk about personal responsibility...

> And commercial food producers make their products more addictive too... How about the tobacco industry? How about illicit drugs? Porn?

How about them? They also designed their products to be addictive.

“Personal Responsibility” is just the shield that powerful companies use to avoid being regulated.

Shift the blame to the exploited and make it clear that their problems stem from their moral deficiency. Pretty convenient all told —- the personal responsibility of the architects of these systems and products somehow evaporates.

Personal responsibility cannot overcome AI designed to addict you. These services are not your friends. You are not the customer or the product. Your future behavior is the product. The only way to win is not to play.

> Personal responsibility cannot overcome AI designed to addict you.

I agree with your general arguments but you're going too far here. Individuals can overcome addiction. That doesn't change the big picture of how additive substances and services effect society as a whole, and I agree corporations use personal responsibility rhetoric to stave off government regulation. But you're going too far by suggesting that individual addicts have no chance of quitting. Many people have quit, proving that it's not impossible. It's good to see the whole forest, but don't forget the trees.

I mean we also shouldn't let a few healthy trees blind us from a generally sickly forest, to continue this metaphor.

You can be an impartial observer of predator/prey behavior without considering yourself part of either group. But it doesn’t change the fact that there is a predator/prey relationship. In the case of social media, just like many addictions, there are too many variables at play to propose a simple solution like “just stop doing it.” So when you say people (who are indeed targeted) should “just” do the simple solution or else suffer the consequences, that is victim blaming.

I largely agree with the thrust of your argument, but you need to ease off the throttle a bit man.

> This. These services aren't toxic if you don't follow toxic accounts

Well. They do their best with recommendations and popular posts which try to lurk into your feed anyway. The whole TikTok is kinda based in that idea.

I just reported every post FB recommend to me (not from someone I’m following) as spam and blocked the user. Over time it stopped showing crap to me (at least it seems so..).

I wish my experience was similar. About a month ago, Facebook started showing really low quality, and even spammy, content as "Recommended for you".

I spent a day or two reporting every recommended post that I didn't like hoping to tell the algorithm to leave me alone. To no avail.

I still see these posts on my feed whenever I check it. And it's very bad.

> This. These services aren't toxic if you don't follow toxic accounts.

This is so wrong, on so many levels. They will capture your clicks, your usage patterns, your interests, and the internet will present to you in a non-neutral way, in a way which will not be in your interest, but in the interest of whoever is paying for the results of your data analysis. A way which will influence your perception of reality in microscopic and permanent ways, because they will know you more intimately than you know yourself.

Do not interact with surveillance capitalists. You will lose.

One should instead protect its behavioural breadcrumbs and try to use non surveillance ways of communication.

No. The parent comment’s viewpoint is fine, whereas your absolutist viewpoint is not helpful.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are what you make of them. There’s nothing to “present” if you don’t mindlessly scroll but use them the way they were originally intended: to keep in touch with contacts. For some people it’s just easiest to keep in touch with them on Facebook, etc.

There also a lot of good Facebook groups, and marketplace is very useful.

Being able to stay in contact with people is extremely useful. Cutting that out entirely out of spite doesn’t do any good.

I don’t know about you, but when I cut out the toxic folks I actually discovered I wasn’t using Facebook for keeping up with folks at all. That was a side-benefit of the arguing I was doing with folks I hadn’t seen in years. I didn’t realize how insane that was of me, just giving all of these people my emotional and mental energy, until I stopped. And yeah, you can point to me and say, “see? Just stop! It works!” but it took MANY years for me to realize what was happening.

Yea, I have followed a lot of philosophy professors and when COVID started the accounts started to behave like a botnet really aggressively retweeting anti-trump and covid mainstream media. I really don't know if that was actually a set of hacked accounts or if people really started to behave like locust. But just unfollowing people that just have opinions about 'current thing' will do a lot for the quality of your timeline.

Can’t endorse this approach enough. I blocked/unfriended about 15-20 people on Facebook and it got exponentially more pleasant. What’s more, I barely use it now because as it turned out…I was mostly using Facebook to have political arguments and I had no idea. I just thought I needed it to keep up with folks.

Frankly, it’s shocking how much mental energy some random dude you met once 8 years ago can occupy if you let him on your feed. We choose to not remove them due to some vague fear of “the social media bubble” as if we don’t filter out people and organizations we don’t like all the time with or without it.

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