I quit Facebook, Instagram and other social sites They became boring | Hacker News Reader

I quit Facebook, Instagram and other social sites They became boring

13 pointssuperdario13 comments

I'm not the only one. I didn't quit because I hated them or because it invaded my privacy (after all I was using it and gave away my data because I wanted to)

I quit because they are boring, content and people are boring. I'm 30 now and before I had a group of friends with similar interests: high school and college. I was meeting new people with also similar interests so they were posting what was interesting to me and vice versa.

It was fun to be on FB, IG and such. But now when I lost touch with 99% of people it got boring. Some of them post pics of their kids, some of their job and so on. I don't care, I can't relate to that. I don't even talk to 99% of the people, so it turned into stalking each other.

Also following celebrities is not interesting to me, they live in totally different dimension. I feel like my "online social life" is dead.

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I quit Hacker News and other social sites They became boring

I'm not the only one. I didn't quit because I hated them or because it invaded my privacy (after all I was using it and gave away my data because I wanted to)

I quit because they are boring, content and people are boring. I'm 30 now and before I had a group of friends with similar interests: programming and technology. I was meeting new people with also similar interests so they were posting what was interesting to me and vice versa.

It was fun to be on Hacker News and such. But now when I lost touch with 99% of people it got boring. Some of them post about their new JS tool, some of their job and so on. I don't care, I can't relate to that. I don't even talk to 99% of the people, so it turned into stalking each other.

Also following funders is not interesting to me, they live in totally different dimension. I feel like my "online social life" is dead.

Please don't shit post on Hacker News. We all need to make an effort to maintain the quality on this site and not turn it into Reddit

You're posting here though? Hackernews is definitely a social site.

I agree, TikTok is the only platform that has maintained my interest to some degree because of the novelty of the content (built for discovery). But Twitter, FB, etc are the same old boring news cycles (even worse, sometimes reflexive topics like the popularization of The Current Thing meme, which is just a meta-news cycle but a news cycle all the same). I visit a few particular subreddits to keep up with stuff I care about but generally just socialize with my friends privately.

Fwiw, the platforms are aware of this shift (people shifting to preferring private content), and its behind a lot of changes like Instagram’s. But social media as we knew it (big public info dumps) were likely in an “attention bubble” over the past 15 years because of their sheer novelty.

I feel I have to push back on that a bit. "Novelty of the content" is not the be-all and end-all for everyone. Fine if it is for you, but some people might actually like seeing stuff from people they know on Facebook and that's fine too. (The fact that Facebook drifted away from that is one of its biggest flaws IMO and it's good to see that they're drifting back.) Some people might like following particular subreddits, or particular people on Tumblr, because of a certain non-algorithmic taste in content, and that's fine too. Not everyone wants or should want the same thing from social media. Overgeneralizing from one's own experiences or preferences to the entire rest of the world is a plague. Let's not spread it. Celebrate diversity and choice instead.

You'll be back on those platforms soon enough. That's the pattern.

Back for what? It's boring, I don't have any interest there

Quitting something addictive is never that easy. You'll be back in less than a week. I wonder if you'll even last 24 hours.

It has been a month and I feel no desire to go back

Try quitting HN. If you are able to stop the urge to reply my message, then you are on a good path.

Quitting HN is one thing. Getting HN to actually delete your account is something entirely different, or so I'm told.

Same here, for about two years now. I'm just not interested at all anymore and my "online social life" used to be my main concern. Now I have a Slack with a couple of friends and once in a while I look at Twitter while in the bathroom.

I just make new accounts to reset the recommendation engine and try to follow only my latest interests. Still it becomes boring too fast. Everyone is trying to sell you something. Very few genuine content creators out there.

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