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Comment by BirAdam | Hacker News Reader

First, there was LiveJournal. Then there was MySpace. Then there was FaceBook. I was on FaceBook until .edu stopped being a requirement. Shortly after that change, my wall became a mix of soft porn and hightimes. Nothing wrong with that, but it isn’t what I want to see so I deleted my FaceBook account. I went over to Twitter. Over time, Twitter ceased to be interesting as it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand very well. I deleted my Twitter account half a decade ago. All of it is actually useless, and it does nothing but eat time.

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LinkedIn at least managed to retain its only useful function, a self-updating Rolodex. It would be nice to be able to disable the virtue signalling feed though.

LinkedIn's "only useful function" is insufficient to overcome its "deal killer": it's a farce. I have never met an I.T. manager whose LinkedIn profile was remotely close to reality. They all claim the same B.S. (detail oriented, results driven, digital transformation, blah blah blah blah blah blah), enabling them to get hired into roles that ruin the lives of programmers like me. Better they should just be honest and say, "Switch jobs every 3 years when they find out I'm a total poser but I promise to stay out of the programmers' way".

I prefer to share my experience here:

https://eddiots.com/1038

https://eddiots.com/28

https://eddiots.com/1840

https://eddiots.com/983

> I have never met an I.T. manager whose LinkedIn profile was remotely close to reality.

I really wish there was a way to flag false information in someone's profile.

I had a guy last year that we fired for substantial cause. He was hired as a mid-level engineer, but honestly was borderline-junior level when we got him. That's fine, he clearly "overstated" his resume. I had actually rang alarm bells about him during the interview process but was overruled by HR because his resume was so amazing.

So I shrugged it off and took him under my wing. I figured we could train him on stuff we needed. No big deal, he has at least foundational experience so its fine.

Fast forward 8 months. It has been nothing but a disaster. His personal attitude has been toxic enough that it drove me to consider leaving and we lost two other employees to his toxic attitude. Furthermore, he had already overstayed his welcome from a performance perspective. He directly caused multiple outages in our system in his short tenure and had failed to complete any significant projects by himself without it needing to be rescued by other teammates. In fact we had a junior engineer during his time that was outperforming this mid-level and used the fact that he outperformed this engineer in order to (reasonably) get a promotion.

After the sixth performance review warning in 8 months, I finally fire him for performance and creating a toxic work environment. Remember, he was a mid-level engineer that was being outperformed by our junior engineers.

Anyway, he was fired and I move on. The department significantly turned around for the better after he left. I really regretted not firing him sooner and spending so much effort trying to save him. The entire team was relieved when he left and happy.

Then one day, about a month later, I am having a 1x1 with an employee in my team who asked why that fired employee was a senior engineer and thought that it should justify a promotion for himself. I explained that he wasn't a senior, not even close and I was then pointed to his linkedin page.

On that page I read what the fired employee wrote about himself. First of all, he gave himself a promotion to "Senior / Lead Engineer". Keep in mind, this was someone who couldn't be trusted for basic junior level tasks by himself. Now he is presenting as a lead engineer.

In his accomplishments he said he lowered our AWS bill by 38.5%. Sounds great. Except that he wasn't even priviledged to our AWS expenses during that time, and furthermore our AWS bill had actually increased by over 20% during the same time period. He didn't just "inflate" his contribution (which is normal on resumes/CVs), but he was in no-way involved in managing the AWS expenses whatsoever.

Another bulletpoint said he had helped "integrate ChatGPT and AI tools into our platform to improve developer effeciency by 26%". Except that our company has (and still does) have a compliance regulation against using ChatGPT at all (we deal with sensitive government data that is restricted) and we were explicitly banned from using AI developer tools during his time here. So this is another entirely false claim.

He also said he was charged with launching an entirely new product for the company, which raised our revenues by 19.6% the first quarter that it was released. No such product was ever released, let along him running it. The companies revenues were mostly flat during his time there.

That wasn't even it, but i've made my point. I went down the 8-10 bullet points on his LinkedIn and only 1 was even based in reality (although exaggerated). The rest were entirely false. On top of that he promoted himself as a lead engineer, of which he was closer to a Junior.

Furthermore he said he worked at our company for 1 year and 3 months. When in reality he only worked there for 7 months and 3 weeks.

It's fine. I was happy to not have him in my life or organization anymore. I wasn't going to sue him over it or anything. But it does bother me that someone else would potentially hire him based on information that is essentially entirely fabricated. Yes they could try to get references. I assume he would cheat or lie his way through that as well, using friends that pose as past managers or something. If they called for an employment verification, the most any company would do is verify the employment dates and _maybe_ job title. But most companies in tech don't even bother with that.

Of course I don't know how much of this is a LinkedIn problem, as just hiring in general. Even if LinkedIn enforced community moderated accuracy, there's nothing to stop him from typing up stuff on his Resume that he sends around.

Then again, for anyone listening that works at LinkedIn, having a community moderated/validated accuracy platform might actually add significant value to LinkedIn for employers. It would probably be more real and trusted than a reference check and make LinkedIn an indispensable tool for employers.

> I had actually rang alarm bells about him during the interview process but was overruled by HR because his resume was so amazing.

Yikes. I have a great cost-cutting proposal for your company, then: don't bother with interviews. Just let HR hire directly based on resumes without ever talking to the candidate. Why would you bother with the interview if this is happening anyway?

> He also said he was charged with launching an entirely new product for the company, which raised our revenues by 19.6% the first quarter that it was released

If you're a public company, this should be easily falsified by the next employer doing due diligence. If not, yeah, hard to know.

> Furthermore he said he worked at our company for 1 year and 3 months. When in reality he only worked there for 7 months and 3 weeks.

This is the one he really should always get caught on. If companies say nothing else when asked about a former employees, they at least say what their tenure was.

> Having a community moderated/validated accuracy platform might actually add significant value to LinkedIn for employers.

Which dating site was it that admitted that they really didn't want their users to find their soulmates, because then they stopped using the dating site? LinkedIn doesn't want you to find your perfect job and work there happily until retirement. Then why would you bother using LinkedIn anymore?

LinkedIn (and resumes / CVs) exist for you to lie to HR and fit into the automated systems to so you can get a job. They don't exist to be uniquely useful. If they were anything but lies then you wouldn't need to deal with technical interviews as you could go off of the candidates LinkedIn or resume. As you say, it's a system that when games gets you through HR. HR doesn't know shit from anything so they pass the candidate along. If you convince HR that your shit doesn't stink they'll be convinced you're the second coming of Christ. That's the game to play.

Thank you for the story, and the detailed write up.

My takeaway from this is that I'm undercutting my opportunities by telling the plain, unvarnished truth of my skill set on Linkedin.

> I had actually rang alarm bells about him during the interview process

> So I shrugged it off and took him under my wing.

You probably already know it now, but you shouldn't have done that. It never ends up well. If it feels like a no hire, it's a no hire.

That's a nightmare. Can I ask, candidly, how it was that HR had more say than you?

Reference checks are a thing.

3 Days late but this is a funny comic! (I'm more WandaWant than say, alGorithm so some of the coding references go over my head but the jokes are funny all the same!)

Thank you, ExtraRoulette!

Don't underestimate yourself. My version of wandaWant would never admit that anything went over her head. She'd just pretend that she knew what we were talking about. So you're way ahead already :-)

Hah! I appreciate that. One question if that's okay. I notice a few comics refer to COVID though they seem to be dated pre-pandemic:

https://eddiots.com/344

I'm curious; how come?

Nice catch, ExtraRoulette! You're the first to notice.

This project is new. My plan was to write a "comic generator", where I would just input parameters and it would generate the comics.

It worked even better than I expected. In the last 6 months, it has generated 2700 comics from my inputs.

Then I realized that if I launched 7/1/23, it would take 10 years just to post what I already had, even at one per day.

So I just reset my start date from 1/1/23 to 1/1/14. I wanted to launch with a lot of content so people could explore.

I also wanted the site to be evergreen which is why I try not to dig too deep into specific technologies. But COVID was obviously too big to ignore.

I sorted my backlog a few weeks ago based on many factors, but I guess 344 slipped through the cracks. I think I'll leave it there to see if anyone else notices.

Ah I see! The comics kinda have a "generated" vibe if that makes sense, since all the panels, characters, text is precisely in the same place.

I assume you just create a script with the dialogue and your program does the rest? That's neat!

The joy of LinkedIn is you don't need to spend your life scrolling through it. Go in, spend 5 seconds seeing what's new or if you have any non-spam messages, then close the tab.

Ignore it for a week or two and repeat, no excessive engagement required.

Yeah I unironically really like LinkedIn. I use it to see who works at companies and who else people I know might know, and what all those people have been up to. This is all super useful information to me as I plan out what to work on and with whom.

But the feed could just not be there and it would make no difference. Not sure what you'd put in that real estate on the home page instead though.

I must not know how to use it.

My experience is an empty shell of people that only use it when they are looking for a job. The active ones post things that they think will make them look smart, cheap blog posts about “5 management tips”, “is your manager micromanaging you?”, “9 must have resume tools”, stuff like that.

The people that I’m actually interested in have a profile, but never actually use it. Or already got a job and don’t need to open it often, if at all.

The recruiters that reach out are always scammy or offer ridiculous things hoping that if I’m there, I’m desperate. 12/h do it all position, contract, for maybe 2 weeks, maybe 6 months, (doesn’t matter, I’m on the verge of homelessness anyway right?) for a “very important and growing company” that’s not even in the area I’m in.

It always gives me that fake useless vibe. I don’t really know how to turn it into something I actually want to be part of.

Pretty much how LI works unfortunately.

The people you'd hope were active are out there busy doing useful things not writing "5 lifehacks to do useful things".

> Pretty much how LI works fortunately.

Fixed that for you! :)

Seriously, discoverable linkable profiles with tracking of connections and links to businesses and schools is incredibly useful, and we're fortunate it exists.

Just don't pay attention to the "content"... that's the worthless drivel you describe (though you forgot some of the business promotion angle).

I maybe go there once a month because someone I use to work with came in conversation or I had some random thought about someone. I'll also go there to learn about business partners and people I'm about to have to deal with professionally... background kinda stuff. Sometimes that doesn't pay off, but usually it's just enough to not go into a meeting or project blind.

I am not going there to read articles, posts, and other "business self-help" stuff and I'm not going there often.

Yep, "I loved working XYZ, I wonder what they're up to now" is like a million times more useful to me than anything Facebook or Twitter has ever made.

> The people that I’m actually interested in have a profile, but never actually use it.

Does it have their work and education history on it? If so, that is "using" LinkedIn. You click on the companies in their profile. You follow the link to that company's website, see what they do. Or you find their connections from their profile page and see if any of those people are interesting or have interesting histories. Then you can (often) send people messages.

These are (in my view) by far the most useful capabilities for grown up working professionals that have been invented in the social media era. Everything else (including everything else on LinkedIn, posts and the feed, etc.) is almost entirely just noise with limited utility beyond entertainment.

IMO the best way to use it is for professional networking. Add the people you work with at your current job. If one of them (or you) leaves, you have a reasonable avenue to get in contact with them again, either for jobs or just catching up.

I just gather phone numbers and email addresses and add these people to my own records. There's no need to bring a third party into this.

Ok so I worked with you a decade ago, you have my phone number or email address, but you aren't on linkedin.

I remember you and I'm interested in what you've been up with for the last decade, so I go look for you on linkedin, but I can't find you. I shrug and forget about it.

Or maybe I also wrote down your phone number or email address along with your name. I remember you and get curious what you're up to. Can't find you on linkedin so I have no idea. But I have nothing to talk to you about, I just wondered what you were up to. So I don't email you. I shrug and move on.

Oh well. This is fine. But it's better if I can just go see what you've been up to like I can with everyone else I've worked with.

That's fair too!

seconded. it's mostly useless, and for the things I do the profiles are meaningless. security doesn't put a lot of info, deliberately, so as to avoid malicious scans and intel gathering

Profiles are meaningless in the sense that people don't say who they have worked for?

the trick is to not try to be a part of it, but only use it when looking for a job.

Sometimes the recruiters leads are worth it to me, but this must be very variable between users depending on profile, location,…

And do what in that scenario? Do you cold-chat (like cold call I guess) people?

Yes. It's professional, not personal, it is in no way weird or creepy to just say "hey interesting background, any interest in getting coffee with me?" just like you would with a new colleague at work. But it's pretty much everyone you can meet that way, not just people at your own company.

Have you come across a playbook for doing it the right way?

Here's a playbook:

- Find someone you're interested in connecting with. (Maybe you want to work where they work or where they used to work, maybe they live in your town and work on similar stuff, maybe they just seem to know a lot about something you're curious about.)

- Maybe get an intro from a person you both know. (This definitely increases the odds they'll respond to you.)

- Much lower friction than getting an intro and a nice feature of LinkedIn: You can both see people you both know. Reaching out to those "2nd" order connections increases the odds that they'll respond.

- Then I think the playbook for what to write is just "be yourself and sound like an actual person rather than a spam bot".

- Then don't be upset if you don't get a response, especially from people who probably get tons of messages.

There is also a step 0 that is an ongoing effort, which is to have a background and expertise yourself that is interesting to the person you're reaching out to. I love it when I get messages from people I might have messaged myself if I had come across them first.

So do I. Besides the fact that I got my current position directly through LinkedIn (cold contact from a recruiter), I use it to learn about people I'm going to meet.

I work with our Bizdev team a lot, discussing proposals for new business and it's great to be able to look up the management/development team of a company that we're going to have a meeting with to get a better picture of where they're coming from and what their company does.

The objections in this thread strike me as typical developer negativity: it's not directly tech-related so it must be useless.

Aside from the occasional lunatic post the feed's been pretty decent for me. A lot of it can be noise but I think the fact that it's kind of basic and doesn't manipulate you into constant engagement is what makes it better - I see a lot of stuff that I might not have come across otherwise rather than being fed content the algorithm thinks I enjoy, and the stuff I post gets decent visibility.

I suppose it's kind of old-skool in a way while also just being there to fill the space with... something. Meanwhile you couldn't pay me to sign up to FB, Twitter, Insta or TikTok.

Overall though - LinkedIn definitely grows in value as your career moves from 'what you know' to 'who you know'.

Yeah I agree. I find the feed useless but harmless.

I think LinkedIn doesn’t know either, so they just did … that

Absolutely. I imagine the product meeting being "What are we going to put on the homepage? It's would be weird for your home page to just be your own profile... I guess a feed? Those seem popular and take up plenty of space...".

You log into LinkedIn every week or two to check messages there? I'd call that pretty solid engagement. If I were a product person there, I'd be happy to have a user like you. I log in every few years when I really have to for some reason and it's always a pain because I'm going to have to reset my password, figure out my login, blah, blech.

I log into it strictly to job search, and for that it has been fantastic. What I love is that I don’t need to engage with the site regularly in order to utilize it for that function. I’m on every year or two for a few weeks (minutes a day tops) to update resumes, clean up my “professional storefront” essentially, and do a few job searches - which then leads to me getting regular emails with job opportunities that match my parameters. And unlike other hiring sites, LinkedIn has actually produced results for me.

Ignore it for a week or two and repeat, no excessive engagement required

Oh my god, don't say that out loud! That'll send them into a full redesign!

That’s nothing, I generally ignore it for months at a time

A week or two? More like a year or two.

You can with a quick ublock filter. I find the following works a treat:

www.linkedin.com###ember69 > div

www.linkedin.com##.pb3.pt2.learning-top-courses

www.linkedin.com##.clear-both.text-align-center.t-normal.t-12.global-footer-compact__content

www.linkedin.com###ember131 > div

www.linkedin.com###voyager-feed

www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-bubble-header

www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content--scrollable.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content

www.linkedin.com###msg-overlay

www.linkedin.com###messaging-nav-item

Every time I fall into the trap of scrolling through the LinkedIn news feed, I end up losing faith in humanity. What LinkedIn has decided that I want to see is a mix of conspiracy theories and narcistic self promotions; and under every post a chorus of congratulations and compliments.

Every time I log in, I unfollow everyone on my feed. LinkedIn is great if you don't follow anyone. I've done the same thing with other social media.

On Twitter, I follow exactly one person. I don't even see all his comments on my feed. But I do see things like fights, light porn content (dicks, prostitutes), Musk trolling... And sometimes, I feel the urge to react to trolls or argue with people. Not a good social media in my opinion. I'm sure it could be vastly improved with a better feed algorithm, and better moderation.

This is what got me to leave Facebook definitely. I could not follow the only family member I cared about. Facebook just wouldn't show me their posts.

Twitter forced "recommended content" onto me recently. Now I just visit /notifications directly. I cut the feed out entirely.

There’s conspiritainment on LinkedIn now? Holy hell.

I haven’t logged into that clunker in a long time so I haven’t seen it. Our sales team is forced to use it. Poor souls.

all social media trends to clickbate eventually.

like how everything evolves into crabs

Not only are there conspiracy theorists on the LinkedIn feed, also there is no censoring or warning like on FB. It's a conspiracy theorist's paradise ..

Worse, it’s coming from your office, your higher ups. Scary. Promotions tied to whether you agree with their “Biden caused the 2008 financial crisis” theory or if you are a “patriot” for attacking our capital. Don’t get me started with EU conspiracies about how Ukraine war beginning was an inside job.

Well, if it's "from above" the correct play is: yessir i am a $patriot please increase my $compensation to one befitting a fellow holder of correct opinions

Not always. We’ve seen a generation choose the door instead.

Not many, be honest. Most of us need an income.

I was referring to The Great Resignation (tm) but yes, you are correct, leave one place to roll the dice someplace else. It’s not greener, just different shades of dead and patches, with or without proper gardening tools.

Interesting, this might explain something someone started to talk to me about recently & I was just kinda like whatever - he’s not trump nor half as senile or incompetent as what conservatives make him out to be.

At this point I’d love a bill introducing max terms. Term limits. You can get re-elected but only so many times before you’re done. Do away with salaries for life “as compensation for your service”. They don’t need it if they are pulling in millions from enterprises, endorsements, book deals, merch, speaking fees in excess of $50,000.

Senate, you get 4 max terms. Reps, you get 6. SCOTUS, 4 and term limits of 6 years per term. Something to fix this professional career politicians we see like McConnell, Biden, Kennedy, Cruz, etc. The world moves too fast for one lifetime spent legislatively eliminating rights of people or bringing back “the good ol days”.

LinkedIn is a horrible place because I'll see posts from the worst people I've ever met about tips and tricks on "how to be better at X". It grates on my soul.

Its because those people aren't working, so they have time to write articles at how to be better at the stuff they don't actually do.

The rest of us that are already good at X, don't have the time or energy to write articles about how to be better at it because we are too busy doing it. And when we finally get done for the day, we want to do something else with our lives except go back and write about how to be better at it.

I'm just too busy over here commenting on HN :)

Really? I only added people I actually know and it seems like a much better facebook - it only shows me relevant information and what people I know from work are doing.

Install uBlock Origin and wipe those virtues away. Use the element zapper mode to temporarily remove things. Refresh and it'll be back. Use element picker to permanently hide parts of a website.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linkedin-feed...

I deleted my LinkedIn account years ago because it had no useful function for me. All it did was get me a constant stream of recruiter spam.

> I deleted my LinkedIn account...

Genuinely curious: Can you delete now? How?

Around 15-16 years ago I _tried_ doing the same and found out that deletion was _not_ possible. I had a personal profile as well as a company profile there. The company was a one-man startup that went down around 2007-9 sometime with the crisis. So it was closed.

As there was no option to actually delete or remove profiles I had to resort to manually tracking every bit of content in groups/threads etc and editing each one-by-one to be blank. Also profile pages were blanked and company facts removed where possible. I even wrote a note on both profile pages that "I no longer use this site: this profile is no longer active". This work took days I recall.

As many years have passed I do not recall if there was an option to hide the personal profile or not, but no such option existed for the company, and no delete option existed either way.

Last time I logged in was around five-six years ago only to find out that my profiles were still there and my former company had now gained 100+ current and former employees from multiple countries!

I had no way to inform anyone that these people were not really employees, as said company no longer existed. And, they never had been.

I would still like to be able to permanently delete these profiles, but last time I checked it was still the digital equivalent of Hotel Califonia:

     "you can check out any time  you  want,
      but you can never leave"

I refuse to sign up for linked-in because I'm still salty about the years when 2/3 of my inbox was emails asking me to sign up.

Yes, I remember when LinkedIn was tricking people into spamming everyone in their contact list on their phone and using the information to suggest connections. A coworker was fooled and sent out invitations to everyone in his massive contact list. He was in sales for over 40 years and was mortified, then pissed off.

I refuse to install the LinkedIn apps on my devices. Microsoft didn’t help matters when they integrated it into Outlook.

Super easy to disable the feed, just unfollow all of your connections.

Is there a batch way to do that without triggering some safety check? I have several K of them.

Afraid not! The ublock origin method is probably your best bet.

"Virtue signalling?"

Reddit was arguably the last “social media” I was using until a few weeks ago with the protest. I resigned as a moderator of a decently large sub and deleted the app. Let me tell you, it has been the best few weeks for me mentally in years. I set up inoreader and only grabbed a couple of publication/writers I really like. I don’t doom scroll, there’s no capability for comments so I don’t get dragged into any arguments, and even with HN still in my life the churn and burn of content and simplicity/general culture keeps me to a few comments a week at most.

I know a lot of people talk about “delete Facebook/hit the gym” etc. but gym or not, my life is infinitely better without social media now. It is very clear to me that it’s not even a situation where the cons outweighs the pros now, there simply aren’t any pros left.

Someone enumerated the issues with Reddit, as well as social media writ large, at the start of the Reddit blackout. There’s a lot of interesting insight about the failures of Web 2.0 from a consumer standpoint, but one line at the end really resonated with me: “The Internet just isn’t fun anymore.“ Obviously that’s a pretty broad stroke and we should always be wary of rose-tinted glasses, but I can’t say I don’t get what they mean.

How many of you have _never_ used any of these central-platform Social Media sites?

My purpose is not to virtue signal or brag about how I've never owned a TV etc, but I'm genuinely curious about how many people who are reading this never once signed up for or spent more than a minute on any of these garbage platforms?

Let's leave LinkedIn aside, for various reasons. I'm thinking here of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.

I am close to never having used a central-platform social media site. I had a Facebook account for a few months about ten years ago because the manager of a project I was working on insisted that we use it to communicate. I closed down the account soon after the project finished. I have never had an account on MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

The one exception, perhaps surprisingly, is Instagram. About eight or nine years ago, my daughter was starting out as a freelance illustrator, and I was fascinated with how she and other illustrators shared ideas and learned from each other through Instagram. It seemed like a new form of culture propagation. For a year or two, I posted my own music and photographs to an Instagram account that I set up under a pseudonym. I never got any engagement from it, but I started following some people who posted content that was interesting to me. I continue to follow twenty or thirty accounts and enjoy checking them every day or two, but I stopped posting myself a long time ago and my account continues to be under the pseudonym, so I don’t think it really counts as social media use.

This comment is super funny. You are on a central-platform social media site making this comment.

No feed. No social network. Et c.

Reasonable people disagree over whether it's appropriate to label any piece of software in which two or more people interact "social media". I tend to think it renders the term uselessly broad.

Reasonable people know how to use a dictionary:

"websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking"

Right. Because some people use it that way and dictionaries have (not inappropriately!) leaned strongly descriptivist for decades. They should have such a definition in them.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure what about my post prompted you to jump to suggesting I'm an imbecile.

> Meanwhile, I'm not sure what about my post prompted you to jump to suggesting I'm an imbecile.

If that's your take I can't stop you but it's just a play on your own wording.

Good point. I was aware of that, of course, but, like some others here, I like to believe that HN is different in significant ways: no images or videos, no personalized feed, no following or being followed, no targeted advertising, etc.

You are correct, of course, but to me HN is more similar to a bbPHP forum than Facebook or Twitter. (Forums are themselves central-platform social media sites, but to me they are quite different.)

> these garbage platforms

They are what you make of it. You have to take the time to understand what they are and how they can be used. Just because you don't understand something or it doesn't fit any of your uses doesn't mean it is garbage. I never would have met my wife if I hadn't been on MySpace.

I feel pretty confident that I have a deep understanding of what they are and how they can be used. And to me, they are pure garbage. Regarding use, they definitely fit my uses, though I would never use one. I was very active on several forums and such before these platforms appeared. I'm all about social networking - it's mostly the technology behind the platforms that I... don't like.

It's awesome that you met your wife on MySpace - that's great! It's also totally possible to meet your future SO at the local dump, but that doesn't make the location any less of a garbage pit.

Heck, even garbage itself can be useful while still being garbage. I'm sure some excellent installation artists have made impressive art with refuse, etc. But that doesn't make the medium less garbage-like; if anything, it emphasizes its garbage nature.

If you want me to be honest, the term "garbage" is far too kind when it comes to describing social networking sites, IMO. "Poison" may be a more accurate word to describe my sentiment.

I would never have met my wife if I hadn't taken a particular part-time job when I was in college. So many very banal everyday decisions can unexpectedly/in retrospect change the course of one's life.

I am close to that and nearing 50 years old. I blame it on two things mainly.

First, I have been around long enough to witness the many negative social behaviors of Usenet reappear in web forums. I reasoned by induction that this is what people will do in each large network that follows. I guess I prefer social sneaker-networks with limited scale.

Second, I am within three degrees of the Unabomber. (Kind of like three degrees of Kevin Bacon but with surprise amputation.) I identify too easily with victims of such targeted attacks, and I am uncomfortable with the idea of publicity in general.

I also don't consider HN to be in the same category. But if it had allowed anonymous posting, I would probably never had created an account here either.

I've never used any of them. I made a Facebook account years ago as it was required to log in to something else I needed, but I never did anything on Facebook proper. Never been on MySpace, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, or anything like that.

I used Facebook when it first came out. I thought it was pretty useful as an enhanced version of something like friend finder. I moved away very quickly when I first graduated high school and lost touch with a lot of people I had known. When Facebook opened up to non-university users, many of them showed up and I was able to reconnect. But to me, that was its purpose, re-finding a pre-existing social network of people I'd known from school. Once I had their real current contact info and had met back up with them, Facebook didn't serve much of a further purpose. The people I actually care about I'll see in person every few years when I go back to where I grew up to visit. I don't need to know what they or anyone else is doing or thinking on a daily basis in-between those visits.

For all the people thinking "hey, you're on Hacker News" is some kind of gotcha, I think it's useful to distinguish between what all these things are. I'm on Netflix, too, which is a centrally-hosted platform that distributes algorithmically-curated media. That isn't nearly the same thing as a social network. Hacker News is a link aggregator that you can comment on, effectively serving the purpose of a newspaper, but crowdsourcing both writing and editing. You can't follow other users. You can't tag other users or receive notifications (and I don't want notifications). I don't have a profile and don't think anyone else does. We don't send each other direct messages. There is no personalization. I don't see any meaningful way in which this is similar to Facebook or Twitter. It's more like an industry conference, but ongoing, virtual, and anonymous.

I am 48 years old man in Northern Europe and been working in IT since 1995. Currently would define myself as old-skool U*nix sysadmin. I have consciuosly avoided all social networking. For a short time around 2007 I had Google account only to save longer trips on Gmaps. I am reading HN occasionally for a long time but don't consider it social networking.

Needs and perspectives change.

I technically have a Facebook account, but Facebook notified me that it was hacked about 8 years ago and I haven't bothered to go through the re-verification process because Facebook turned out to be useless to me.

I had a Twitter account and 10 years later they warned me that it was being removed because I had never used it. I have a new Twitter account that I log into daily because now I get value from it.

Never used MySpace. Have an Instagram account that I haven't used in probably 2 years. I just signed up for Threads to see what the hype was all about. Maybe it will be useful, maybe not.

Have an active LinkedIn account (got my current job through it) and I keep my network up to date to help with my next job or finding candidates for when we have opening. LinkedIn is useful to me.

I really don't get the vitriol in some of the responses here. No one is forcing you to use social media. If you don't like it, then don't use it.

I think there are not many who never even signed up with any of these platforms. If not anything else then at least out of curiosity I too have signed up on all three you mention. If you change the question to "never ever used past the first 2 weeks" - sign me in to that list.

I mean never have even created an account.

Depends. Does logging on facebook once a month to see what the few family members are doing counts ? That at best, I went months never visting it and just used FB as a SSO provider for any site I didn't cared enough to create any proper account on.

As for others, I only visit twitter if it is a source for update of something I care about, and that's near always coming from some other site like HN

Both could disappear tomorrow and nothing of value would be lost.

I tried some FB groups related to hobbies but they're generally garbage with no way to bury useless/low effort content.

I’ve never used any of the ones you mention, aside from LinkedIn as you say.

There are different reasons in each case. E.g. Twitter’s short message limit seemed guaranteed to produce what it did, compared to e.g. Usenet or HN. Facebook originally seemed to me like a way to publish on the web for people who didn’t know how, like Geocities. MySpace seemed to be for teenagers. All of these were reasons not to use them initially, but over time nothing changed in a positive enough direction to change my mind.

I'm a Never Myspace, Snapchat, Instagram, Fediverse guy. I'm always threatening to delete my Facebook though and have parked it on disabled status for over half a decade. People get offended by me not these social medias.

I just learned early enough that I have to have internet life, professional life, social life and family life all isolated for on death other.

I made accounts at one point or another and will look at the thing someone links at me on twitter or whatever but I've just never been interested enough to browse these sites or post anything myself. Never felt like I was missing anything either.

I would be especially curious to know if anyone went to university in USA/Canada and avoided Facebook. I was never a heavy FB user prior to school, but it was the hub of everything. Even for alumni events, it remains the hub.

Stay where you are. A team is on its way to extract you.

And yet, you read and comment on Hacker News, a social media site akin to reddit. Do you have the same conclusion about this space?

This site doesn't even have half the problems as most social media. Ragebait is usually handled well, the incentives to troll/virtue signal are low (karma is not visible) and the level of discussion is usually high. And there is no customised feed, everyone sees the same thing.

>Ragebait is usually handled well

Because there's a monoculture here, and you are part of it (so am I, for the most part).

Pay attention to topics even moderately political and see what happens to comments that fall outside the accepted norm.

I think about the pros and cons of a monoculture vs a polyculture every once in a while, and I suppose that this is an example of one of the benefits of a monoculture. That the existence of norms prevent/mitigate out of bounds behavior by individuals (although that of course could be a good or a bad thing depending on the bounds, and if the bounds are reasonably changeable)

Yup. The fun posts are where the site demographics clashes with the ideology- check out posts about Affirmative Action for example.

People seem shocked that a site with a large Desi and East Asian population may be against AA. It’s good fun.

Also known as woke capital, California style.

Optically left/ultra progressive when its inconsequential anyway, neo-libertarian when it counts.

Controversial posts go down waayy better here than on reddit. To the point that its ridiculous to even draw the comparison.

So why do you draw the comparison?

I don't really agree..... if you look at my post history, I've posted quite a few very controversial things (not about politics but programming itself) and... lots of people disagreed with me heavily but there wasn't any flamewar or anything. It was quite civil for the overwhelming part, which I actually found surprising, it's been a breath of fresh air compared to everything else.

(note: this is a repost from another comment because I accidentally posted it in the wrong place)

Could you specify what characterises those topics, the discussions concerning them, and their treatments in your view?

In particular keywords or phrases which appear, preferably in titles, though perhaps also in comments, would be useful.

I'd also be curious as what might falsify a sense that HN's membership shies from politics, can't discuss political matters reasonably, and/or has a specific political leaning.

(I've created an archive of HN front-page submissions from 2007 to present, and am investigating various aspects of the site. The data itself comprises the post date, page position (1--30), submitted site (as noted in parentheses following the title, I'm not capturing the actual URL presently), the submitter, and the vote and comment counts. I've done some cursory exploration based on sites that correspond to political commentary, such as think-tanks or highly-partisan media, and a bit of looking at phrase patterns in titles, but not much beyond that. Sentiments on what topics HN discusses poorly might be useful here.)

nah the monoculture isn't a big as you'd think -- see any posts about BTC or unions.

but it is a small sample of mostly STEM / technically oriented folks, and generally better educated (and paid) than average.

Cool, find another forum that handles it outside of those accepted norms. Thus forum does not have to give alternative views placement. With politics it's especially bad because people can't separate their feelings from the discussion.

And, I believe, this is the way it should be. I don't want one forum for everything. I don't want those identities associated.

Indeed - it is a monoculture that pays lip service to science, but actually is all about consensus.

If I've understood what's said about Thomas Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', even science is all about consensus.

I'm fond of Max Planck's “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”, or its pithy summary "science advances one funeral at a time."

You think science is what the consensus says it is, even if you cannot personally verify it?

If that's it, what exactly is the difference between science and religion?

Science is primarily a methodology, and secondarily a body of provisional knowledge discovered and tested via that methodology.

As non practitioners, if we trust in the methodology, then to some extent we have to take a shortcut and make decisions based on the consensus judgement of expert practitioners. And, unlike some religious people, accept we can never act in absolute certainty.

I absolutely hold to the scientific method.

But do you think you find that method in science? In science journals, academic departments?

I don't think you do, and I for one don't trust.

Science, like religion, like academia, like government - and all those individuals therein - are all in thrall to money, not truth. I don't think there is any doubt that the proclamations we receive from whichever institution are about providing us with information that is expedient for us to believe (not verify). The provided information is about control of minds. If whatever-it-is does have a relation to the underlying reality (and who checks?), that relationship is accidental/beneficial for whatever story we are currently being sold.

Yes. Science is a human institution, with all of the mess that entails.

But at least the ability to challenge authority with evidence is science's central dogma (rather than "this book is infallable"). It means one way to find fame and fortune in science is to conclusively disprove some accepted wisdom, in a way that others can repeat and see for themselves. That's not to say you won't meet resistance, partly because of human nature, and partly because, heuristically, most unexpected results turn out to be flawed on further examination.

I'm interested in specifics of which scientific institutions you think are trying to influence us in what way, and to what purpose.

Do you ever challenge any evidence? Have you even tried to put information out there that is outside the norm? I have and can confirm that most places - eg HN - is an echo chamber. This specific environment is cultivated by the administrators. Now, I don't mind administration, but it is clear to me that on certain hot button topics there is only one direction of discussion allowed - it is a controlled conversation.

> which scientific institutions you think are trying to influence us in what way, and to what purpose

Its a bigger issue than a specific institution. When you think about science in the US - it is all funded by one of 2 (or 3) sources - government (military) and corporations. If you then consider that government and corporations are really the same overarching control structure (eg FDA officials will go to work for pharmaceuticals, corporate lobbyists write the legislation for government officials to approve) you can argue that, in a sense there is only 1 source of funding! Funding is centralised.

Say you then want to prove/'have it widely believed' that helium is beneficial (I'm making a ridiculous hypothesis up to show the methodology in play) and you undertake 10 studies. The results are that 2 studies are supportive, 6 are neutral, and 2 are against. If you then promote the 2 that are supportive in journals, and fund more similar studies, and repeat that process for a while, you will soon end up with reams of supportive evidence. I think this shows any agenda can be promoted by funding alone, regardless of the assumed good intentions of the scientists who receive the funding.

Does that method help understand truth? No. Will your agenda appear to be very well supported - yes.

Now think, if it is your business to administer people in general - isn't it better to have those people desire for themselves the solution that you already have in mind? That it is better to engineer people's consent? If so, why wouldn't you use science, history, academia or whatever to engineer people into wanting whatever you have to sell? Why not provide the studies that move the people in the direction you want them to move to? You could say the studies are to get the turkeys voting for Christmas.

Ok, I partially agree.

Favourable studies getting to publication, and unfavourable ones getting left in the desk drawer is a thing. But the same thing can happen with surprising results vs boring results. It is why some argue for preregistration of studies [0].

There is more than one government in the world, and corporations are in competition with each other. I'm not convinced that they amount to a single funding source. That's not to say that there is a perfect plurality.

Academics are also in competition with each other, and can make their name by demolishing a false consensus. They are also often motivated by things other than money, otherwise they would be quants or something. So there are balancing forces to those that would distort the truth.

At this point we're both just describing, without much evidence, how we think the world works. I agree there is plenty of shady shit and bullshit science going on, it just doesn't make sense to me that all the bad actors would be super-competent and pulling in the same direction on everything. At least not to the extent that it amounts to something akin to mind control.

Consider, there has been a hell of a lot of oil money poured into science funding, but the consensus has settled on "fossil fuels are heating up the planet".

There examples where a powerful lobby has held back the tide for years (tobacco, for example), but we know about them because the truth reasserted itself.

I'm not particularly familiar with HN moderation. I have expressed some reasonably controversial opinions in a calm and reasonable tone, and not been moderated. But perhaps my opinions are not among those you believe to be surpressed.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preregistration_(science)

I would argue for pre-registration of studies. Good call. And I would also argue for free access to all studies.

> corporations are in competition with each other

I don't think there's as much competition as you might think! Are Apple and Google competitors? Have you seen who their shareholders are?

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders

Vanguard Group, Inc. (The) - 8.33%

Blackrock Inc. - 6.58%

State Street Corporation - 3.66%

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/holders/

Vanguard Group, Inc. (The) - 7.14%

Blackrock Inc. - 6.23%

State Street Corporation - 3.27%

Meta?

Vanguard Group, Inc. (The) - 8.18%

Blackrock Inc. - 6.91%

State Street Corporation - 3.93%

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META/holders

erm.. Amazon?

Vanguard Group, Inc. (The) - 7.05%

Blackrock Inc. - 5.92%

State Street Corporation - 3.23%

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/holders

> Consider, there has been a hell of a lot of oil money poured into science funding, but the consensus has settled on "fossil fuels are heating up the planet".

Ok - have you personally noticed anything at all? I have not. For example, I have been to the same beaches for years and there has been no change. Can you forests be mis-managed with the result that there are huge fires? Yes - this is a man-made crisis though. Can you remove trees and build in flood plains to make floods more severe? Yes, and again - man-made. Can the media make it seem that the world is burning up? Yes again - but this is just perception management - using alarming graphics and allocating large slots to whatever.

On the other hand, I do see the control value of climate change. Everyone will willingly move to smart metering of water, electricity, etc though. This allows for the governance structure to exercise fine grained control over individuals.

> Ok - have you personally noticed anything at all?

As it happens, yes I have. Summers where I am seem way hotter than when I was a kid 30 years ago. But to be honest, what an unreliable way to judge! Better to measure and analyse the data methodologically.

Tracking sucks, but do you really think people need global heating to convince them to put data-sniffing smart devices in their homes?

And what about the trillions in the oil industry? We've fought wars over the stuff, but now the oil lobby has been defeated or paid off because enough powerful people want to know when I make a coffee?

It would be strangely comforting if our chaotic world could be explained by a grand conspiracy. It's too easy an explanation for me. It feels like religion.

By the way, not sure if you're aware that Vanguard operates index funds. Those shares are owned by very many different investors, many of them with small holdings. I only know this because I'm one of them, so this may be the case for some of the other big hitters in those lists too. As far as I know they don't get actively involved in corporate strategy. They are passive funds with very low management fees.

> Better to measure and analyse the data methodologically.

Have you? Or do you mean you trust the data provided?

Do you recollect the climategate email, where historical data was "updated"?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/11/23/climateg...

“I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”

> Tracking sucks, but do you really think people need global heating to convince them to put data-sniffing smart devices in their homes?

Yes - to accept pervasive monitoring and control, you need a good reason.

> Those shares are owned by very many different investors, many of them with small holdings. I only know this because I'm one of them, so this may be the case for some of the other big hitters in those lists too.

AFAIK, you don't get to choose where and how they invest. And these funds are somewhat larger than the corporate strategy level. They would be more at international legislation level, no?

>AFAIK, you don't get to choose where and how they invest.

Fair point, but neither does Vanguard really. Index funds are automatically allocated to all the stocks in an index proportionally to market cap.

> Do you mean you trust the data provided?

I'm a software engineer. It is not feasible for me to sufficiently collect or analyse data outside my limited areas of expertise. As I said at the beginning, I must provisionally accept and make personal decisions based on the consensus view of experts. In theory that leaves me open to manipulation by shadowy, powerful forces capable of exerting influence over an entire field of scientists. In practice I observe enough skepticism amongst scientists to give me confidence.

I'm not talking about acting on every story of the form "study indicates link between x and y". Talk to me when it's been replicated, and confounders controlled. Talk to me about reviews and meta-analyses.

I remember reading about climategate emails at the time. I see a few out-of-context quotes cherry-picked from thousands of emails. I could link articles defending the scientists [0], but ultimately the grand conspiracy hypothesis is unfalsifiable - you can keep expanding the conspiracy to include anyone who denies the conspiracy. Conspiracies can exist, but the wider you have to go to make them work, the less plausible they become as an explanation.

And on climate specifically, it's especially implausible when there are huge, wealthy vested interests who stand to lose money if we burn less fossil fuels.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2019/nov/09/climateg...

Thanks for your thoughts.

While I think its fair enough to 'default trust' the world you know, there is a risk in so doing. I think you're acknowledging that conspiring is a possibility - most people can't consider this. Although, I can't imagine anything more natural - of course people would work together to gain advantage!

There is lots of information to support the grand conspiracy hypothesis if you choose to look. Eg the fact that all the US presidents are bloodline relations. Or that the UN (a non-elected entity) is determining the future infrastructure in your local city (pedestrianised, apartment blocks, smart meters, etc). Or that all the worlds' governments acted in tandem during the last 3 years - it was no long 'the economy stupid' but a mass media campaign. Etc.

I would encourage you to look more deeply into any area where you are already an expert, and see who determines the parameters of acceptable discussion. Is there legislation, an administrative body, a licensing scheme? Who gets to determine the parameters under consideration, that all the companies and institutions then have to follow? Then consider, are these the parameters you yourself think are important? Can you envisage a way whereby the data can be subverted to misrepresent the reality? I think you'll be surprised how available the information for a grand conspiracy is.

Of course its far more pleasant to imagine that life is unfolding naturally. IMO it simply is not the case and never has been. As Edward Bernais (the father of public relations and Freud's double nephew) expressed it, in 1928, in his book Propaganda:

> The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

Each individual is faced with a question - do I want to know the reality of the situation, or not? Its not as easy to answer as you might think. Each of us has to answer this for ourselves - pretending we weren't aware or something, is disingenuous.

I would encourage you to consider: what evidence would convince you that you're wrong? If the answer is "Nothing, any evidence against the conspiracy could have been manufactured by the conspirators", then you have a problem.

For me, I would be convinced by an insider or two turning whistleblower. With documentary evidence that stands up to scrutiny. I was convinced by Snowden.

Obviously I would expect a backlash and smear campaign from outlets under the influence of the conspirators in response. But I would expect a good proportion of established, serious journalists and experts (not just the usual suspects) to recognise the truth. You could say every established journalist is compromised. To me that just expands massively the pool of potential whistleblowers.

> There is lots of information to support the grand conspiracy hypothesis if you choose to look.

Do be wary of anomaly-hunting and take care to guard against confirmation bias. Seeking out confirmatory evidence for a hypothesis (rather than repeatedly trying to disprove it until it starts to look convincing) puts you at risk of this. Anything a bit weird or unusual becomes evidence for a conspiracy. But you should expect to find weird and unusual stuff all the time if you go looking for it, because the world is a big, chaotic place.

Sorry - a bit late to see this.

You think whistleblowers are real. Ok - but there used to be footage of Snowden which showed some seriously odd anomalies - eg the arms of glasses his disappeared, his hand was see-through, etc. This is hard to find nowadays - but I have seen it.

What that says to me, is that it is more than a possibility that footage of Snowden was faked - that he was a made-for-tv character. I don't know why that would be the case.. Perhaps its a case of the info he exposed was something of a controlled release - we were meant to hear about it in the way we did.

What that also indicates is that one needs to be wary of the source of information. Eg what to make of the BBC reporting that WTC7 collapsed on 911, when it is still standing in the background? Or when Rishi Sunak's briefcase changes colour live on a news program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyHfzcItoFs

(Re Rishi - I didn't see it myself - but the colour change point isn't under debate.)

The question is who is mediating your information? Which sources are trustworthy? Can Snopes be part of the control mechanism? Is it possible that a trick can be played on the whole world? Once you are aware that trusted sources of information lied, should you continue to trust them? Or is it more plausible to accept that they are intentional liars? (And no, not everyone has to be in on it.. very few need to know.)

So, if I reverse the question now - why would you continue to trust proven liars, who are using news etc to present a fictionalised version of reality? Are you able to discern the facts from the fiction from what is presented to you on a screen?

Of course the media lie, distort, and make mistakes. And media organisations have their agendas. You have to be careful to attempt to figure out fact from fiction. This is hard and I am honest with myself that I do it imperfectly.

This anomaly hunting is precisely what I'm worried about though. If you take every anomaly as confirmation of your theory then you're lost in terms of the scientific method. Like scientific studies that haven't been pre-registered, you're subconsciously trawling through reams of mundane stuff that we all ignore, and eventually finding something superficially strange, remembering only that, and leaping from "this is unexplained" to "therefore my unfalsifiable hypothesis".

This essentially lets you believe any number of things though. Perhaps there's a god that enjoys testing/messing with us, or we're in the matrix, or we're mentally ill and delusional, or everything we were ever told was a lie, or there is alien interference in human affairs, or our perceptions are being manipulated by a mind control device for the purpose of profit. All these theories are essentially unfalsifiable - which one, or which combination, to pick? What evidence can we use to discriminate between them? I put it to you that there is no evidence that could possibly do this.

Sometimes apparently weird things will happen for ultimately mundane reasons. Sometimes those reasons will be obscure, but often they will known and you'll distrust the explanation. It took me seconds to find extremely boring explanations for two of the three anomalies you mention (I couldn't find anything either way on Snowden's glasses). So now I have a choice: believe that one rolling news reporter somewhere in the world made an honest mistake in a confusing and rapidly developing situation which then, by grim coincidence, later came true. Or believe that, what? The news were incompetently following a script? Even if 9/11 were an orchestrated inside job, why risk sharing the script so widely when you could just let them report events as they happened?

Believe the Sky news producer who says the video editor changed the colour of a folder as a probably-too-subtle special effect intended to illustrate the script of a prepared piece about the UK budget statement (asking how "green" it would be). Or believe what? This piece of video was faked, and therefore all mediated information is deliberately manufactured by a secret world government?

Again, I encourage you to honestly consider, what sort of evidence would convince you that you're wrong?

> I encourage you to honestly consider, what sort of evidence would convince you that you're wrong?

ditto. If you have some evidence of a trick, should you ignore that evidence, because of the consensus view? Are you authority of yourself, or is the consensus right?

I'm not anomaly hunting. Perhaps there is a god messing with us, perhaps we are mentally ill (most of us, myself not included - most people are in 'default trust' of their authorities). I don't care about god and mental illness - not when there are are real examples of fakery that can be seen (and I have pointed to). And you can also read about the 'mega plans' - the plans are not hidden - look at the Huxleys for an example.

The changing of the briefcase colour is a comic example - but it is also a signal. Had you realised that they are able to edit the visuals in real time on news shows, without any disclaimers? What else do they do? Is this acting in good faith? The message I take is that media companies show that they have a strong control over the presentation. You are of course free to believe it is just a bit of fun.

The bottom line is that you cannot know the truth from anything you see on the screen, or even anything you don't personally verify. You can only know what you personally experience, as discomfiting as that is. And even then, the ideas you have been provided by education, culture, parents, etc will have moulded and framed what you are able to consider.

I've gone very deeply into several areas, and I'm certain that the media is there as a governance tool - their purpose is purely propagandistic. To say otherwise, is to fail to acknowledge reality - which is entirely understandable. Media is literally there to support and promote whatever narrative is considered to be the best to support. Russian propaganda is in kindergarten, compared to the Western form - but no, the news programs won't tell you this. Not only the media, but science (consensus science, not the scientific method), history (written by the victors), religion (always a form of control to promote the servile mentality), law (an extranised and controllable expression of morality), politics, etc - all are bent to serve the interests of a landed bloodline.

When you think of the output of the apparent consensus, and then compare that to what an individual with only a fair handle of reasoning would decide, you can see that all human tendencies are bent to serve an agenda that is expressed. Despite all one's cultural training, one ought to have trust and faith in oneself and one's reasoning - the truth is consistent, no need to provide excuses and justifications for the control structure. Unfortunately the external world is already under mind control (a self-affirming group psychosis) and there's no reasoning with it. However, one is free to follow one's own reasoning, and act according to that. Truth, and acting in alignment with truth, is foundational to the individual.

> You think science is what the consensus says it is, even if you cannot personally verify it?

Well, no, but I might be able to see how you got that. I'm all for falsifiable hypotheses, empirical data, repeatable experiments, and revisions as we find limits to our collected hypotheses and data.

I do think that others(e.g. Planck, Kuhn) have observed the effects of consensus in science, and to treat science as though those effects are not present is a form of religion.

Science tells you there's a truth and gives you the methods to find it.

Religion says it's the truth, and wants you to follow it.

It's the same thing as giving a fish or teaching how to fish. Receiving a fish is convenient, but I'd rather not depend on someone for food.

i disagree. i’d posit that science finds the truth about the cosmos. religion offers a lens through which you can interpret and apply the truths that science has discovered.

i think what you’re describing is how various practitioners of each have traditionally presented the tools of science and religion.

I think science and religion are even less coupled than that. The newest gravimesobaryon discovered through the LHC probably doesn't have any bearings on religion, and rituals such as Ramadan aren't performed for a benefit based in science. One's moral values/axioms and one's factual understanding of the universe can largely be separated, but a lot of people nowadays seem to heavily conflate them.

I think it’s because some people wants to impose their values on others, especially if it gives them an advantage in society. Moral values are fluid and can be manipulated, facts are not. Religion used to shroud values into fictions and present them as the truth. But, because science are demystifying most of them, leaving only the moral parts, people are starting to see that moral values are relatives, not absolutes, and it involves only oneself. So now, they want to dress science as one of the other religions, something that is wrong.

Real! I mean uhhhhh well said. Many people absolutely twist facts though.

i believe the point is that the consensus is the verification.

repeat the assay under the same conditions and record the results to verify the original findings. repeat. it deliberately creates a monoculture to generate results.

the “religion” of it all is interpreting the results

Religion is a black box. Science is FOSS.

It's somewhat better in FOSS than in science-land because there are generally at least a few people who find a new FOSS project genuinely interesting and worth supporting, whereas scientific conformity is much less forgiving.

You must be looking at some niche topics then.

...people look at other people's karma on reddit ?

The karma of individual comments absolutely changes the way people interact with them

Not to mention it's a race to the bottom in terms of posting the most low-effort, low-quality content because they tend to get the most upvoted.

It doesn't do anything to encourage nuance or thoughtful interaction.

Correct, and a lot of it is posting either very short comments, which are parsed easily, or very long comments that seem like they are correct by length alone (Bardfinn and PoppinKream). Neither has much to do with being "good" comments

> This site doesn't even have half the problems as most social media.

All social media has the same problems. This site is no different. It is just a smaller social media - essentially a single subreddit with one mod who you agree with.

> And there is no customised feed, everyone sees the same thing.

The entire site is a customized feed which everyone sees after it has been customized.

The feature list of Hacker News is similar to Reddit, but the content and the nature of quality control are entirely different, and his issues were about the content he saw on those websites. In light of that I don't agree that his comment is hypocritical.

The people here are nice

... for now ;)

HN has more in common with a bbs from the 1980s than it does a social media site of today.

Right before LiveJournal there was MovableType and when MT crashed and burned because they changed their license terms to be less open source, WordPress took off. That moment was when the road forked into social media vs open source publishing on WordPress. Almost 20 years later WP is 40% of the Web for anyone who cares to pull their heads out of their favorite walled garden to take a look.

> Almost 20 years later WP is 40% of the Web for anyone who cares to pull their heads out of their favorite walled garden to take a look.

I wonder if anyone has ever critically evaluated the methodology used by W3Techs [1][2]:

> We investigate technologies of websites, not of individual web pages. If we find a technology on any of the pages, it is considered to be used by the website.

> We do not consider subdomains to be separate websites. For instance, sub1.example.com and sub2.example.com are considered to belong to the same site as example.com. That means for example, that all the subdomains of wix.com, wordpress.com and similar sites are counted only as one website.

So if Microsoft has a wp.subsite.microsoft.com subdomain, W3Techs considers WordPress as part of the technologies that Microsoft uses.

Is that really 43% of the "relevant web"?

[1] https://w3techs.com/technologies

[2] https://w3techs.com/faq

What that statistic means is that nearly 40% of business card websites and similar sites use Wordpress. It’s nowhere near as significant as some people seem to think it is.

Personal blogs are a vanishingly small fraction of that. The only reason it might seem otherwise is due to social bubbles or interest bubbles.

It remains the clear front-runner, with no close competition, for most any site that'll be run by non-geeks, unless you're hosting on a managed platform with its own (closed) content management system. Exception for certain narrow use cases that are well-served by special-purpose software, but it's broadly true. That includes use cases well beyond personal blogs and business card sites.

>Over time, Twitter ceased to be interesting as it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand

The trick is to follow experts who do understand what they are on about, eg a top general on Ukraine, top scientist on covid. Having done that I find it disappointing going back to reading mainstream journalists who post with less understanding.

You have to fight a little with the recommendation algos pushing random nonsense at you but it's doable.

I don't know, I have too little faith for even that. For your "top general" on Ukraine example, do you really think a top general is actually going on Twitter and writing tweets telling you the honest truth about what's happening, vs. just writing what they're expected to in order to maintain the wartime propaganda message they're supposed to be pushing? For your covid example do you think a "top scientist" would go on Twitter and really risk being cancelled and having their career and life destroyed if they write what they believe to be true, if it goes against the narrative they're supposed to agree with?

Well even the top guys have bias so you have to choose who you like to follow but personally on Ukraine I like @general_ben who was Commanding General of the US Army Europe and also Mike Martin @ThreshedThought who wasn't a general but was an officer fighting in Afghanistan and has a PhD in War Studies, teaches at Kings London and written various books.

There are also a bunch of scientist on twitter. Personally I followed the lab leak stuff and pro lab leak you have @R_H_Ebright Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers and anti you have @MichaelWorobey, Professor and Head of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. Both pretty outspoken, especially Ebright. I guess they have tenure.

It's sometimes interesting to follow both sides a bit when there's an argument going on.

This was my great frustration with Twitter the last time I tried it. Even when I carefully curated my followers, random crap would constantly sneak into my feed. It was annoying enough that I started just manually navigating to a few bookmarked profiles periodically to read their latest tweets.

I find clicking "not interested" followed by "show fewer tweets from..." kinda works. But yeah it's a battle.

publicly traded companies in the social media space need to get clicks. so do influencers and pundits.

no surprise that economic forces push them together, to the detriment of your feed.

But why? The current top reply sums it up so well: "All of it is actually useless, and it does nothing but eat time."

Better info? In my case it's mostly a hobby interest so you could debate if it's worth while.

reddit and youtube were my last remaining social platforms. quit reddit because of the API changes. might be quitting youtube, as well, because of the ads. and then there'll be nothing left for me to spend time on except code and family.

Your experience is isolated to your own network of friends and the people you're following. It doesn't represent the platform itself.

> Over time, Twitter ceased to be interesting as it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand very well

I don't have a Twitter account; but I have found Twitter quite interesting to learn opinions of several people on the state of web development, which I used to regularly check out. Some of them have since migrated to Mastodon; others haven't; some of those who had migrated, went back, because, it seems, they were after the audience after all. When Twitter stopped anonymous readers from accessing its user feeds, that was a big disappointment.

  Utter futility! — said Koheleth —
  Utter futility! All is futile!

In all that time, and before, I had my website - along with the moves. The site is still there.

Friendster in 2002/2003 was pretty great

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