Quit Social Media (2016)
calnewport.com
calnewport.com
But other than that I've totally quit.
The difference is it’s not deliberate, it’s just how they get us to rank training data for ChatGPT 5.
Sure the occasional "Promoted post" is way less than say Reddit or mid-roll ads.
For a real social media the content should be ranked by the likes of my peers, a feature non existent on HN
Imagine attending party where whenever you finished a sentence, everyone who was listening immediately responded with a silent thumbs up / thumbs down in response. Pretty dystopian. The Onion did a sketch illustrating the problem a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFpK_r-jEXg
By this definition, HN is halfway to being social media. There are metrics, but they aren't displayed publicly.
Otherwise, I would think of "social media" as places where visitors get the opportunity to be equal participants. Anyone can post, anyone can comment in places like these (including forums), but in a blog only one can post and the rest comment.
Popularity metrics facilitate popularity contests.
And popularity metrics facilitate mob rule. Lone voices of dissent get steamrolled.
Reddit is especially bad, IMO. It's almost like it was designed as a confirmation bias engine.
The frustrating part is that voting systems also solve a genuine quality-filtering problem. HN does a good job of balancing the costs and benefits, but I suspect there are other viable approaches.
That was the sweet spot IMO. The days before things were constantly "going viral". Sometimes memetic speedbumps are a good thing.
I think we need more forums outside of mega-communities like Reddit or even HN, but at least there are many that are still alive:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41783682
Also, things were going viral even before the mid-'00s when the concept consolidated. All Your Base and Star Wars Kid went viral before it was called that, even if they garnered a fraction of the mindshare of the general public. Even that dancing CGI baby qualifies.
Not looking for a fight or anything. I'm just curious about different perspectives and definitions of social media. The responses so far have been interesting
Social media is many people speaking to many
HN is social media
HN is definitely on the social media end of the spectrum. For example, all your listed examples have very hands-on and comprehensive, opinionated editorial control. HN has moderation, but not really editorial control per se.
social media is a definition of sourced content, nit the quality of the latter
It lacks the connection between the commenters.
You can’t follow or block comments, or at least filter or sort them
May as well disable comments and treat it like a user updated RSS feed, discuss links elsewhere.
STEM degrees and 20+ years in Eng; hardware then software
This community isn’t really peddling anything that hasn’t been done before; just like the story mode politics and economics often complained about
What’s that? You have a new state manager or a machine and some math euphemisms that translate cleanly to other math objects known for a century? WOW!
…There’s no beating physics and it doesn’t care humans exist. No matter how much symbolism we write down to represent it, it’s not imbuing us with magic powers. We just meat suits like everyone else. Get over yourselves; this a momentary social bubble that will vanish like all the ones they say came before
Really look forward to ML generation of new math built on the same old axioms so we can light a bunch of PhDs hanging on walls on fire
And that's 'ugh' in English. ;)
This is the crux of the matter. Social media isn’t real; it’s a type of video game for adults.
The unreality fosters the growth of so many other things which are even less concerned with truth: fake news, engagement bait, daily outrages, chasing followers in a vain attempt to “build a personal brand.” The vacuousness of influencer culture has only accelerated these trends since Newport wrote this post.
In some sense, some of us already live online essentially through these social networks. Almost always this means some level of addiction, with concomitant real life consequences.
Is it really worth it?
Offline, people have always tended to come together around common interests and values. My wife and I, for example, are part time performing magicians and we're a member of a local magic group that meets IRL.
Prior to what we have come to call "social media", existed forums. Forums were this wonderful utopian paradise of yesteryear where people engaged in long form discussions, often heated but mostly civil, about special interests that they cared about.
The term "social media" didn't start to catch on until the news feed was a thing. That was the "contribution" of both Facebook and Twatter and it was a big PART of what changed everything.
The other factor was the so-called "mobile revolution."
Forums are great when you're at a keyboard. They start to lose their appeal when you are engaging using a small touch screen.
What you are describing sounds like people returning to the state of the world as it existed before social media. Where people come together around common interests and values instead of using the news feed where you get fire-hozed with random shit that "the algorithm" thinks might trigger you into engaging with it.
Except now it's all on Facebook and it's incredibly hard to leave Facebook, because all communications with any type of group happens on Facebook. I have friends who can't leave Facebook, because their kids soccer team holds them hostage. Leave Facebook and we'll kill your child's social life. I can't even join the parents group for my child's school, almost no one else will do it, because it takes time, so they are lacking parents, but it is coordinated on Facebook.
I used to organise playtime for toddlers once a week, no one else wanted to do, but the kids loved it. Everyone was used to everything being organised via Facebook, where I don't have an account. So the communication was done by someone else in the umbrella organisation for all local sports, gymnastics, e-sport etc. More than once I showed up to get everything ready only to learn that the space was booked for something else that day, being cleaned or renovated. Everyone else had been informed, expect me, the guy who was suppose to be in charge of the damn thing, because the organisation had no real website or mailing list to speak of and just expected everyone to be on Facebook.
Everything is on f-ing Facebook, Sports, clubs, hobbies, reselling, announcements of everything local, and only on Facebook. The only exception is professional meetups, which Linkedin will happily inform you about two weeks after the meetup, stupid, brain dead, algorithmically power "news" feed.
I want mailing-lists and Usenet, but everyone else want a mobile app and apparently Facebook.
My only counter-argument, and it's not even a counter-argument really, is that this is a fact of life that exists with or without Facebook.
My personal pet peeve is that I don't want to own a mobile phone at all. Not even a dumb phone and not even a landline. If I find myself in an emergency without the ability to dial 911 that's a risk I'm willing to take on a personal level. I just don't want a phone because I find the idea of a noise making device that can interrupt me at unexpected times to be a crime against humanity. But more and more essential services like banking are assuming that people have smart phones. My bank would deny services to me if I didn't even have a landline, since they require a phone number tied to their account records. My work assumes that people not only have their own smart phone but are willing to install authenticator apps for MFA etc. And my workplace is not alone.
If it's not Facebook that "everyone" is using that leaves minority opinions wishing for an alternative, it's something else.
Kind of, depending on the platform, if you squint your eyes at it?
I suppose it doesn't matter what it's actually called. I call it community in general.
Communities in this sense are the middle ground between your direct personal network (which is also the deepest form of relation), and social media as the widest (the shallowest form of relation) form of reach.
But when a Presidential candidate (who will pick up roughly half the popular vote) is openly spreading social media misinformation, and the owner of Twitter is offering million dollar lotteries to influence the vote, it's fair to say enough people "buy it".
This conversation we're having is a bit meta, but it's also "real", to me. We both considered Cal Newport's stance, Matt Green shared some thoughts about it, and Chris Weekly responded to it. Those are real people interacting in a potentially useful way. Being "addicted" to ideas and conversations is not necessarily unhealthy. /$.02
I have Instagram and TikTok installed because both of my partners send me things from them that made them think of me, and in this way, and only this way, they are relevant and nurturing to my existence. That said, I never engage with them outside of that context, because it's just an endless barrage of vacuous bullshit, as are the rest, with TikTok personally, I think, being the largest firehose of stupid, worthless, intellectually bankrupt, pointless shit ever constructed by mankind. Holy fuck. Like they're all bad, but TikTok... it's just the modern social media apparatus refined and polished to a mirror shine. Takes absolutely no effort to engage with, and if you're sufficiently numb to outside stimulus, you will scroll it for literal hours. If social media is a drug, TikTok is black-tar heroin.
> Those are real people interacting in a potentially useful way. Being "addicted" to ideas and conversations is not necessarily unhealthy.
Agree! Addiction is compulsive use and the need to continually engage. My HN use is subject to a max of 15m a day with a browser extension that enforces it. I can at least try to curb it from blossoming into something more disruptive.
As someone who hasn't had a social media presence for most of my adult life, and happy about that, I'm now seeing the downsides. I don't have Ivy League connections like some of my peers. Social media may be the only way I could build a network like the one they cultivated in university.
Ultimately, the act of winning at social media seems a bit too subordinate to me.
In that way social network is more meritocratic, as many people have come from very humble backgrounds and succeeded with skill and charisma.
I simply wasn't able to meet those kinds of people as a mid 20s person transferring to a commuter university from a community college.
Existing wealth likely helps, but even the poor kids with scholarships have better outcomes at those universities.
This is what Andrew Sullivan was getting at. People should worry themselves with information that actually concerns and impacts their real lives. All else is entertainment. If it stops being entertaining and starts being anxiety-inducing, stop consuming it.
I have a pet theory as to why social media causes many people to feel like it's draining them, and why I avoid news on social media like the plague ... I also tend to mute or silence people that share political content (regardless of partisan affiliation).
Social media, unless you are trying to build a business, is ultimately offering the service of entertainment.
Even if you use Twitter or Facebook as your news aggregator, unless you're engaged in some kind of productive and time-scoped research project, you're doing this on your leisure time.
That means that you just got done work, or you're on a break, or you finally got the kids to sleep or finished all of your household chores and you're now in a position where you can "enjoy" a bit of leisure time.
Which means that you approach social media PRE-drained. You're already tired and you're looking for cute cat memes when what should happen ... you get hit with a rage-bait headline, or one of those douche bags that vote differently from you just posted an opinion about a controversial topic that you have very strong feelings about.
We (on HN) all know that the algorithm is trying to promote what gets engagement, and anything that provokes a strong emotional reaction is likely to trigger engagement.
My thesis is that people turn to social media when they are already in an emotional state that is incredibly inappropriate for engaging with "serious" topics on a rational level.
So everyone just gets angrier and angrier at each other and you leave social media feeling even more exhausted than you were before you signed on looking for entertainment to spend your precious leisure time with.
And then you realize that you just wasted that short precious time that you needed to use for relaxation ... and if you don't do anything to rectify it then your stress levels just gradually creep up, your sleep starts to suffer, you might start to compensate with stress eating or consuming more alcohol or cannabis than is healthy and it just spirals.
Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry. In life we do not let everyone into the friend circle. Having a barrier to entry model may work well for an online community, although this remains to be seen. Were there any successful experiments with paid social media?
The advertisers' choices influence media prosperity and survival.
The ad-based media receive an advertising subsidy that gives them
a price-marketing-quality edge, which allows them to encroach on
and further weaken their ad-free (or ad-disadvantaged) rivals.
Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with
serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere
with the "buying mood." They seek programs that will lightly
entertain and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose
of program purchases - the dissemination of a selling message.
I think this does describe legacy advertisers (and TikTok, for different reasons) – we might remember Tumblr's hyper-specific LGBTQ-friendly (often NSFW) communities being completely liquidated in the transfer of Tumblr to Verizon, arguably killing Tumblr on that date. Verizon's handling of Tumblr validates Chomsky.
But ad-fueled journalism seems to operate from exactly the opposite principle, so long as the controversies that drive engagement do not threaten the sensibility of specific large funders. I've seen a few times in recent memory where an article from the New York Times aired something quite sensational, only to quietly update later that what was initially reported didn't quite occur as depicted. But by that point it is too late, and profit was made.
The overall point still stands – that ad-based always results in a conflict of interest.
In general though it is true that ragebait and sensationalism do tend to drive "engagement" and thus ad revenue (often to the detriment of society).
A site is full of ragebait, hot takes and pictures of boobs? The ad economy has pushed them towards things that get a lot of engagement. Clicks are money!
A site is devoid of ragebait, hot takes and pictures of boobs? The ad economy forces everything to be brand-safe and censored.
In addition to discrimination against unfriendly media institutions,
advertisers also choose selectively among programs on the basis of their
own principles. With rare exceptions these are culturally and politically
conservative.
If they are incorrect, then non-conservatives are of equal power and culpability in discriminating for or against which content they will sponsor. This would seem to be your position, and points to a state of affairs in which content and communities exist in disjoint bubbles which thrive off of entirely separate streams of ad revenue, up to the principles of the advertisers that choose to direct funding at particular media institutions.
Otherwise, if they are correct, then your assertion that this argument can be made "in both directions" is shown to be false by supposition, and the ad economy pushes users towards conservative content - in which case, one had best boycott and abstain from ad-driven media and social media unless they want to finance conservative thought.
It's time to wake up to the fact that being LGBT friendly is the conservative position. This may come as a shock to people who were cutting edge radicals in their youth in the 1990s - a decade that is now 30 years in the past.
.bash_aliases:
alias blocksocials='(echo ""; echo "127.0.0.1 reddit.com"; echo "127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com") | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts > /dev/null'
alias unblocksocials='sudo sed -i "/reddit.com/d" /etc/hosts'
The same can be done on Firefox, which supports installing Tampermonkey for managing userscripts.
In both cases there's a small financial barrier (being able to pay for postage or your share or petrol money) but a sizeable time barrier (spending hours on a sketch or walking a total of about 50km).
I had a real commitment to my home parish at the time. I was involved in ministries weekly, where I could not simply flit about anywhere I wanted. Sure, as a group we could meet many strangers on this itinerary, but I risked severing all ties with my spiritual home!
The activities were sometimes active and sometimes passive, such as hiking, dancing, or going to a festival or something. And I quickly gave up on everything, because it seemed like the group was not really oriented to pairing people off, but more of a self-sustaining club where people gained "volunteer responsibilities" and were thus pressured into staying in the "singles group" no matter what their relationship status. Also, having no vehicle of my own, I'd either opt out of traveling, or I'd hit someone up to carpool, and that wasn't always copacetic.
I also found, on dating websites, this mentality that single Catholics would be jet-setters, traveling all over the world on pilgrimage. That they would generate a steady stream of photographs and social media posts from their adventures. That they would have marvelous, expensive hobbies and be so active in volunteerism. For crying out loud! I wondered how these people would ever have space in their lives for a significant other! All I wanted to do was hang around home, go for walks, prepare a nice meal at home once in a while. But the dating sites seemed geared exclusively for high-maintenance and upper-middle-class go-getters. Again, I felt like it was a clique of "professional singles" who didn't really expect to pair off and get married.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Epistle_to_the_Corinthia...
Perhaps these Catholics are onto something. There's nothing wrong per se with individuals in a singles group or the group itself proper having no expectations of dating or marriage. It's probably not the norm, but I think it's actually somewhat better that way, especially for those who don't intend to date/marry. Community and fellowship in a church environment should not be withdrawn from those who choose to remain single or celibate. I think that historically many church groups have silently discouraged being single by ostracism or judgement, which is definitely not what Jesus would do, in my opinion.
I'm sure there is someone for you out there. All relationships are valid. Modern society has such intense focus on external sources of validation, such as a partner or spouse, but good friends are always in short supply. As the proverb says, a friend can be closer than a brother.
Facebook was terrible for your well being a long time before they enshitified with adds. You may be too young to remember but likes were a hot commodity people would ruin their lives over without any outside help.
For myself I find push notification based social media to be completely cancerous, and pull based one only mildly so. One need only look at the trolls from usenet to see people obsessed with nothing but text based emails.
There is no safe dose.
This comes from fundamentals, unfortunately, so it's hard to change.
The trouble is that someone posting a contrary view usually feels under pressure going in. They know that their post will land in hostile territory, anticipating that the majority won't receive their opinion (or them) well, and they're not wrong. They'll probably be met not just with disagreement, but with lazy truisms and putdowns that majorities always feel are obvious.
The more contrarian a view is, the more common the majority response is not to engage with it, but to question why anyone would ever say such a thing. Often the majority invents sinister or preposterous explanations for this. (On that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851.)
Because the contrarian commenter expects to be treated this way, they typically defend themselves pre-emptively with armor like snark, name-calling, and so on, presumably to lessen the pain of being rejected. It's as if there's an implicit (or sometimes even explicit) sentence, "I know you're all going to pile on me anyway so fuck you in advance."
Downvotes and flags do end up piling on such comments, no doubt partly because majorities consider them "obviously" wrong and bad, but more because of this pre-emptive guidelines breakage. This rejection only confirms the contrarian poster's feeling that the community is against them, so we end up in a tight and vicious bind.
The flip side to that bind is that when contrarian views are expressed in this defensive-aggressive way, it gives the majority a perfect excuse to keep on feeling that its views are obviously right while others are mean and bad. The contrarian ends up discrediting their own view. When they happen to have some truth on their side (as they often do), this is bad for everyone [2].
I spend a lot of time on this from a moderation point of view because it's such a tough tradeoff. It's terrible for HN when contrarian and minority views are reflexively rejected. It's also bad when guidelines breakage doesn't get downvoted or flagged. We can't carve out an exception that says it's ok to break the rules when you feel surrounded by people who disagree with you.
This dilemma is not the contrarian/minority's fault. They're genuinely under greater pressure. It's easy to stay within the rails when all you have to say is conventional and the smug majority (aren't all majorities smug?) will upvote you. It's hard not to protect yourself with barbs when you're in a vulnerable position to begin with.
Worst is when the contrarian is coming from a minority—any kind of minority, not just the obvious kinds—who have a different background from most of the community, and so naturally have different views. The majority response in such cases can get ugly quickly. I've seen mobs hound such commenters off HN, which is one of the worst things that can happen and one of the most important to protect against. It happens by itself; no one is thinking "let's form a mob and hound that deviant". It comes from the fundamentals, as I said, of how groups (and forums) work.
From a moderation point of view we have two tools, I guess, for this. The first is to try to explain to contrarian commenters the unfortunate situation that there's a greater burden on them than there is on others, and that if they don't want their posts to be self-defeating, they need to bear that pressure while writing their comments neutrally [3]. It's not fair; it sucks; but it's how group dynamics work—we can't change it. If the majority/minority demographics were reversed, people would be doing the same in the opposite direction. I don't like to tell people that they have to do more than others through no fault of their own, so I try to make it clear that I'm on their side—not necessarily in agreeing with their view, but in feeling the position they're in.
The other moderation response is to try to recognize these dynamics when they're occurring and find ways to tilt the ship a bit back towards even. It's not ok to break the rules when expressing a minority opinion, but there are ways of explaining the rules that hopefully communicate a sense of welcome along with the explanation. Conversely, when majority commenters are breaking the rules, there are ways of responding to that which add an additional layer of reproof that is appropriate to the worseness of the phenomenon.
Unfortunately these "tools" are quite insufficient—partly because they're so costly in moderator time, energy, and feeling, and partly because the phenomenon is so large and intense. I do think, or faintly hope at least, it's possible for some of this knowledge to find its way into the culture, and that the community as a whole can shift—only a little, and slowly, but for real.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It was always like this. At least it's not as bad as reddit. :)
With friends as in people in your life who you want to really be friends with, you both make changes to be able to keep the relationships. Otherwise it dies. And you certainly do not go "either you buy this app or I am not friend with you anymore".
Sometimes people only want to do that hobby so you don't have a choice but if you hung out with them outside of the origin activity then likely you can hang out with them without that origin activity.
This depends on the definition of success, the most successful as in impressive achievements goal reaching are the ones that are open to anybody who can get noticed and brought in. ANd in the social sense even open to the ones who are most capable of monopolizing the discourse and creating a buzz in the public square.
For example Trump did just that in 2016 and many tried to resist him, but in the end the GOP wants to be successful and opened itself to the guy who made the most noise in the public discourse and public square and made him the tip of the spear of the election effort.
Of course it feels pretty miserable knowing that you can be replaced at any time but I don't think there is an alternative or a solution thanks to a barrier to entry (or exit). Social groups that have a barrier to entry (and exit) such as marriage , when it deteriorates the barrier to entry (and exit) doesn't prevent the 2 people to just starting ignoring each other.
The thing called Social Media is an unconstrained grift-circus peddling pure Barnumium. [1]
It attracts movers/actors who enjoy the incentives, as well as followers/gawkers who have trouble seeing that their time and reality have been stolen.
From The Fine Article:
"Finally [...] he quit, explaining: 'I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.'”
---
I've been following a lot of the bluesky + mastodon stuff but I don't like that their basic model of social interaction is just a clone of Twitter.
Governance happens on Loomio, which is a forum tailored for community decision making, but the main platform that coop members get access to is a Mastodon instance for now. We are experimenting with Bonfire, which is more flexible and might end up providing a solid base for federated apps in general.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Hopefully by posting something incorrect, A Person On The Internet Who Knows Better will come along and provide the correct details. :)
[1] https://tilde.club/ [2] https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...
A good chunk of those have been part of the same community on a newsgroup, then on a company-owned forum which got shuttered, then on a forum instance set up by a user who didn't want to run it any more after 6 years. The tech and platforms are ephemeral, always have been.
Thought that ended in high school. You have to be a real pos to not get invites to stuff...
The "real pos" is just as often those doing the excluding, as it is those being excluded. Pettiness doesn't disappear at 18 years old. It's hurtful to assume anyone being excluded from something deserved it.
In those cases I think it's more likely mental illness that stops you from making friends, but if no social group has accepted you after tens or hundreds of attempts then it's possible that there's something you might be able to change.
It has been hard for the company. The owner decided the company will die before using ads (for many reasons). The paid plan is stupidly cheap and when people sign and use for a month they stick with the company for years.
But it is hard. Company laid off 80% of the team some time ago and is fighting to survive. I won't defend the owner or anyone, but things came to a point where people think they are not having consequences by giving infinite permission for being tracked all the time. They think if they are not logged they are not identified so they can't be exploited.
It sucks because no one appreciates that. Though I have my opinions about business and whatever I kinda appreciate for the company not running on money from ads and not collecting a single piece of user information which is not required for work.
Advertising is a facade industry for companies who tracks and sell your data. They gather info wether you have healthy habits, if you watch adult stuff, if drive well or if you need money and then sell that data for someone who will use to personalize prices to extract as much from you as they can.
I don’t care if you piss gold or if you’re the pope or king, don’t advertise to me
for example this comment on the current top post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41961894
in fact I don't think I've ever seen archive.org used to jump paywalls. it's not designed for it
IA is a tool to help you access websites that literally can't be accessed ever again otherwise. It's a noble and beautiful project.
Some people use it just to get free stuff, to commit piracy, to infringe upon copyright. It's a perversion of what it was meant for.
The concept of gift links exists, but these websites footaxe themselves by limiting their most viral content —- ostensibly the best and cheapest marketing they could get, down the drain.
You’re right. It is sickening.
The thing is, having had some of my own content "go viral" before - it's not worth much. Most people will read it for a minute and move on. A tiny percentage will subscribe and an even tinier percentage will give you any money. So from the point of view of a creator, it makes a ton of sense to put up paywalls on things – but only once you've already gotten a bit of an audience and distribution method figured out.
It has everything to do with telegraphed intention of not having content be gratis. The fact that you cannot even mentally keep the idea of subscription gates in the same bucket as paywalls says a lot.
PS: using a new green account to make snarky put-downs isn't welcome on HN. Make a point or don't make it, but do it without those.
To me, you burned a hospital bed to send a message that capitalism is bad. I don't care what your opinion is. You burned the bed.
I'd suspect it's a bit like being a vegan, where it's a self-imposed constrant that makes you aloof from others and makes them treat you like an exception. It reduces some of the invites you get, and you just aren't up on the news about your friend groups as a result. We imagine it signals some kind of purity or difference, as though to say we're not like those regular IT people, maybe there's an air of mystery about what we might know, but it's just kind of fussy and it creates a polarizing filter where people really have to like you a lot to put up with the conditions you put on hanging out.
I still see the internet as a machine I operate for money and entertainment, and not the substrate of my identity or reality. This is also a fairly masculine coded view, as it dismisses the public sphere of gossip and narratives as separate from a Real made of consequences and competence, where the internet is not a dominion of truth the way real friendships are. It sounds marginal in the current discourse, but really there are still operators around who know ways out of this hallucination a lot of people were born into and can't see the edges of. It's not a mystery, you just turn the phone off for a bit and then live and relate according to the results.
No cell phone on them at all times (but maybe some equivalent to a car phone/pay phone), placing the restriction to consciously “log on” to the internet, no (at least ad-based) social media, and maybe keep their online persona to appearances on mostly decentralized forums.
Personally, I know it would benefit me to detach from the one social media platform I have left and am fully addicted to (YouTube), but it’s hard when that is the platform that videos are stored on (though if I really cared, I would only subscribe to channels via RSS and watch them or individually search for things I wish to see instead of infinitely scrolling.) It’s also hard to keep up with group activities or the best classifieds listings or local music/arts events without Facebook.
I don’t believe that there will ever be a true competitor for services that can operate at scale like Facebook and YouTube (especially the latter), but I expect these modern luddites to accept this and reject those platforms even if it is socially ostracizing (much like veganism). To fill the void, they’ll create platforms and devices for them specifically. I imagine the goal of the platforms will be to avoid unnecessary bloat and keep hosting/maintenance costs low, which seems relatively easy if sucking every last second of retention out the user is not financially incentivized like it is in ad-based platforms. I expect the hardware to prioritize cost-efficiency, repairability, and a minimal feature set that doesn’t require frequent upgrades.
Then I imagine for a time, the movement will become trendy and people will begin flooding those platforms. The challenge then becomes to avoid capitalizing on the influx and keep the initial morals in mind and not start showing ads/trying to increase retention time. I think those projects may need to be decentralized and/or established as nonprofits with stated non-retractable tenets from their creation (“We shall never serve advertisements”, “We shall prioritize the distribution of useful information above all else”, etc.)
It’s a utopian view of the future, but I think it is possible. I think we’ll hit a day when we realize that spending 10+ hours a day staring at glowing rectangles is not bringing us closer to real fulfillment. I expect that as long as capitalism is the dominant economic force, businesses will always embrace the newest technology to avoid a massive gap in their output when compared to competitors, and the tech companies will always be pushing new addictive technology as long as it isn’t globally regulated, but after work, the people will wake up to the fact that they at least have a choice on whether or not they spend the rest of their leisure time staring at glowing rectangles.
Yet I still haven’t woken up myself.
Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38720087 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)
Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16697004 - March 2018 (262 comments)
Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714509 - Feb 2017 (1 comment)
Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998698 - Nov 2016 (548 comments)
The NYT piece those were about is https://web.archive.org/web/20171114021224/https://www.nytim.... Not the same as OP but same topic, author, year.
I quit Facebook a few years back because of enough conversations on HN convincing me it would be a positive choice. It was not, and I regret it. I've since rejoined FB but my network of friends did not completely recover.
People here will tell you that FB friends you don't go out of your way to contact via not-FB methods aren't really friends. They are full of shit. That may be true for them.
People actually LIKE, perhaps even need, the social aspects of social media. But that's become such a small part of the experience for many people- the ads and attention-hacking with cheap stimuli burying the positive interactions.
I don't want to quit my connections, as you say. But I do want to quit this daily hypnosis that reels is trying to subject me to.
I would call that latter something more like "possessive media" - it needs to have your attention at all times and needs every scrap of data it can gather about you. I want less possessive media and more social media.
100% agree on that. A couple months ago I got caught up in reels and spent like two hours watching videos. And then I thought ... what the hell did I just do? I don't feel fulfilled, I didn't learn anything meaningful, I feel like I just binged on candy and want to throw up.
Now I avoid reels like the plague. I just log in a couple times a week to see pictures from friends and family. As soon as I see a really attractive reel preview, I remind myself that it isn't nearly as awesome as the preview looks, and close the page.
Also why it is important that 'your network of friends recovers'?
Did we interact every day? Nope. Just casually. But we have a shared history going back 50 years, and had enjoyable low key interactions periodically.
Turning off FB killed all of those connections, and not all of them came back when I got a new account a year later. Heck, a couple thought I had unfriended them and felt slighted.
And to top it off -- I didn't actually have a problem with FB. It didn't ruin my life. I did (and still do) visit about once or twice a week. I don't doom scroll, I don't get all jealous of someone's vacation pictures, new house, new car, whatever. I did not actually have a social media problem that needed solving. I gave too much value to what randos on HN said.
> why it is important that 'your network of friends recovers'?
Because I enjoy the casual contact with all of these people I've known over the years. Even if I don't share enough current interests to spend a lot of time hanging out with them, I get positive feelings from staying connected.
Especially important because most of his commentary focuses on the dominant social media paradigm of the time. Mastodon barely existed when this post went live, Mike Masnick was years from writing the paper that inspired Bluesky[0], and it would be strange if someone whose whole thing is getting away from social media kept up on new developments.
This post is an interesting historical artifact, but shouldn't be mistaken for contemporary commentary.
[0] https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
If anything, things are worse. It's even more "algorithmic" and engagement-focused, continuing to promote outrage culture. Platforms like TikTok have turned addictive endless scrolling into a science. I know a few people who spend a significant number of hours of their days on TikTok and Twitter (ahem, sorry, "X"), and it just kinda makes me sad. (And I probably spend more time than is healthy on HN.)
[0] I still have my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, but I don't post to them anymore, and I'm signed out of them on all my devices (and I've deleted the mobile apps). I don't allow myself to ever sign in on mobile. Once every 6 months or so I'll sign into Facebook for some specific purpose (like looking up someone's contact information when it's for some reason not stored in any of my usual places). Out of curiosity I'll scroll down the feed, and it's just kinda crap. Stuff from people I don't actually follow, stuff from people I do follow but is kinda boring, and interestingly the feed is dominated by the same 15 or so people (even though I'd amassed a little over 1k "friends" before I quit). I limit myself to no more than five minutes, and I don't post, comment, or even like anything.
The last time I signed into Instagram (probably two or three years ago), the experience was awful. I remember when it was just a reverse-chronological feed of the people I follow (and only the people I follow). But now (well, 2-3 years ago) the majority of items in my feed are either ads or promoted/reshared posts from people I don't follow at all. Stuff from people I follow is maybe one out of every five or six items. And it's all out of order, so I'd see something that someone posted a week ago, followed by, 20 items later, something that they posted a couple days ago. It's a shame; 2012 Instagram was such a beautiful platform.
So while yes, this article is now 8 years old, I don't think anything has changed for the better. The fundamental problems are still there, and have only gotten worse.
If the product is the social graph, masto isnt even on the radar.
If the product is the discussion framework without the advertising or social graph. If you can find 15 people to have the same interactions with manually its a superior player.
Some details on its creation and exit from Twitter here: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/13/bluesky-is-building-the-...
https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting
https://atproto.com/guides/applications
https://github.com/bluesky-social
It's all there. Bluesky itself is split into tens of instances and has been since last year. A few people even run their own relays. Your information is very out of date.
1. I used to have a fear of missing out on what's happening if I didn't stay upto date on Twitter. That went away. I was pretty upto date using HN and Google news. That fear went away. I announced before I went offline so when someone tagged me, some friends actually told them that I'd be away.
2. I used to take out my phone when I was bored or waiting for something and then scroll through making me jittery and anxious. That went away. I did it automatically but finding the site logged out of during that time just made me go back to being bored.
3. There was a state of mind. I'd say it was similar to the stereotypical "drooling in front of a TV" stereotype when I'm doom scrolling. Shortening temper, needless urgency, snapping when people interrupt my "flow". I get back into it every time I opened the site. I slipped out of this and when I then logged back in after a month, I could feel it pulling me back into that state of mind. I didn't explicitly track things but I quickly fell back into my old habits.
At the end of the day that's what Google wants. They want you to spend as much of your time as possible watching as many advertisements as possible. Most social media platforms are adversarial. Once I saw this I could not unsee it. Warning others is pointless. They'll be annoyed or just think you're weird. Not one person I know has taken my advice, so I've stopped giving it.
Tangent aside, for me the benefit of not using social media has been that I can invest the time into what I find fulfilling. The quality of the entertainment I consume has gone way up. The downside is that it's isolating. No I can't follow you on platform X, no I cannot view the link you've sent me to platform Y. Everyone, especially in my age group, considers it strange.
Not getting involved in internet drama is great. I have completely lost the appetite for it. I haven’t heard about American politics for a while. I read and sketch more. My phone is easier to put down and less tempting to pick up; it gets boring quickly. I noticed that I’ll often be the last one to look at my phone when I am around others.
I spend a lot more time in the real world, touching grass. I’d say that this is the cause of my departure, not the effect. Online interactions are not nearly as satisfying.
Being out of it and staying out of it means that you don’t know about the local internet drama, and that you don’t get any notifications from that site. With each visit, the website gets less interesting because nothing interesting is waiting for you there.
Certainly feels better
What?
Also, congrats for being less tolerant. I like that.
In college I was wearing a Halo biking shirt in the computer lab. A female friend remarked, “no one is going to date you if you wear that shirt.” Another friend nearby heard and quipped back, “or only the right girls will date him wearing that shirt.”
You should view your preferences more as a filter. While you should be open to new experiences which may change those presences, if something makes you truly unhappy, you are better finding a partner who won’t force that in your life.
(If you're just casually dating around / looking for hookups, then sure, do what you think you need to do.)
Then when I got in really good shape I thought it was because I didn't make enough money.
When I started making money I thought it was because I wasn't tall enough.
There is no way having social media or not is mattering that much. It is just in your head.
I quit Facebook, other than keeping an account for announcing major life events to the older people who were still on it, because I was frustrated that I never received any posts from family or close friends in the heavily filtered timeline, I kept receiving time-sensitive posts (say about a hurricane event) for weeks after the post was no longer relevant, and Meta's increasingly metastasized privacy practices.
I joined Mastodon and found a calm, down to earth, almost boring place. The decentralized nature of the platform certainly means there are some not-at-all boring parts of the Mastoverse, but it felt more like being in an old-style forum than anything else. I'm still there, though my participation isn't significant.
I tried Blue Sky because all my Twitter people were there ... and it was IMMEDIATELY like hitting a drug after being off it for a while. It was all about main characters and outrage.
For me, in hindsight, it was like sitting in front of a slot machine, feeding in quarters, waiting for one to win. And watching people who did win inevitably milkshake duck themselves out of favor. It was briefly an amazing, buzzy world to share both humor and excitement about whatever events you wanted, but that certainly didn't last.
I don't miss it.
I don't like Twitter much but if I had to pick one or the other it would be a no-brainer.
Now, I do pretend the global list simply doesn't exist and focus on the local instance list and people I follow. I don't know of anyone who uses the global list. I also tend to follow hashtags rather than individuals. (I'm 100% sure that twitter would show at least as much garbage on their feed if they didn't filter, especially these days. This is not an argument for Twitter's style of filtering.)
By 'engage with intent' I just mean not being a passive absorber of the stream of content that's being promoted at whatever site, but instead always have some focus on a particular topic that interests you. Incidentally I notice many of the 'quit social media' stories are published in outlets like the NYTimes which would instead like you to be a passive, well-conditioned absorber of their content, and hence off their advertising stream.
The corporation is run for profit, it doesn't care about the collateral damage it may cause as long as it doesn't impact the bottom line.
Another related post: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo...
From the second link:
> Tenured professors with status in a discipline can tune out the world and do "deep work" peers recognize as "important" before it is done (with accompanying ivory-tower/angels-on-pinhead risks).
> But a free agent, with no institutional safety net, no underwriting of exploratory expeditions by disciplinary consensus, and no research grants, cannot afford this luxury.
With a small local business, social media gives an audience. If you're selling anything visually captivating, it performs well in these spaces. We sell cut flowers on the side, so…
I don't ask these questions out of support of Instagram or Facebook, but I stop in there regularly because I don't know to learn a little bit about the greater community around me. My life is busy enough with work/family.
The cost of all this is being exposed to a lot of attention bait and I honestly don't like how I feel using it sometimes. But we've built up the social media ecosystem as a pillar of society at this point.
Imagine, there are people who don't care that much besides their family/friends circle. Maybe some newspaper/-site from time to time, but why cope with all the other stuff too all the time? Life goes on too if one doesn't know abou the latest stuff.
Imagine there were hundreds or thousands of year of humanity you didn't know how your neighbour is except you walked there.
At least that's fine for me. I don't miss social media (besides HN), and I don't miss anything.
I subscribed to my local NHPR newsletter that tells me local events. There is also local news, newspaper, or radio.
He just uses his wife's account.
It all just seemed like a time waster and not really anything interesting.
I use sites like this of course, and I suppose that is some form of social media though.
> What the market values is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable.
> what the market dismisses are activities that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value. Well social media use is the epitome of an easy to replicate activity that does not produce a lot of value [...] by definition the market is not going to give those activieis a lot of value [...]."
Yet in the years since this TEDx talk we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.
For most influencers, they're not the ones with the wealth and power. Many of them are barely getting by. They rent content houses, clothing, cars, and other things they need to put on their facade.
Pretty much all of the wealth and power is in the hands of the people that employ the influencers.
you will never become a streaming millionaire. talking heads like beast and pewdiepie employ literal armies of Hollywood editors and writers. For every organically grown insufferable content monster created on Youtube, ten more are vat-grown by a billion dollar industry designed to shepherd you into a fantasy consumerist lifestyle.
These powerhouses of industry control the flow of capital at a level you will never be able to. they secure rights to music and video clips at rates you could never get, have tie-ins to major brands media and celebrities on day one, and are programmed with an endless firestorm of bots and preferential algorithmic treatment on every FAANG product in order to guarantee their success.
To be a professional streamer usually takes a combination of talent and concentration that most people simply don't have. But to say that you can't become one? LOL.
The AVERAGE millionaire streamer on twitch is so painfully unedited that they end up getting banned a couple times a year for saying stupid things live on air. Twitch and their sponsors practically THROW money at them to spend an hour or two to sponsor content. There's an entire backend bounty system which is only available to partners which will pay you based on your audience size. I've seen a guy with 3K viewers get a $30K check for 3 hours worth of sponsored content.
Facebook is for boomers.
Twitter is weird and we all realised how pointless it is to spend time falling out on there.
Instagram feels a bit long in the tooth.
LinkedIn is a parody of itself.
Reddit feels like it’s growing but I think that avoids the worst of social media.
TikTok and YouTube shorts seem popular but aren’t really social media. It’s just time wasting junk.
All in all, social media feels like it peaked a while back.
I'm not going to message random people's Instagram unsolicited, I would find it annoying to on the receiving end of that. My mother and girlfriend have both complained about receiving unwanted attention from unknown men through social media.
Honestly trying to understand your point of view, do you think dating apps should be free? They definitely aren't free to run.
It also helps immensely to curate lists of interests to help filter out the noise and politics.
"Breaking news" used to be relevant in that it was news that "broke into" existing programming. It didn't necessarily make people's lives better but at least it tended to cover matters of high national interest like Presidential assassinations or disasters or wars. But now that everything is breaking news all the time everywhere, the term no longer means anything other than being a synonym for "current news," which isn't even really impressive anymore.
My life would not have been impacted in the least knowing about the Trump assassination attempt a few hours later (or even the next day), rather than minutes after it happened.
The MSM has enough problems these days with journalistic integrity and practices. I don't think the teeming mobs on Twitter are an improvement, though.
If you feel you have any kind of mood or attention challenges, as many now do, you might want to double check if it's something you should be optimizing for.
There are exceptions; if you have a flight booked that day and didn't learn about the Crowdstrike thing till you got there, that'll be a problem, but it would've been a problem regardless of your immediate knowledge of it.
If it’s an event that you’re not particularly interested in, then there’s not much value in getting details in advance.
Another thing, it’s not just hours. Sometimes it’s months (or in rare cases years) before a recurring topic on social media finally makes it to the news, because it’s controversial/narrative-defying, so it takes them a long time to work out how to talk about it. I don’t want to mention specific examples because it would be distracting, but there are a few topics I see mentioned daily/weekly on the news today that were pretty much absent a few years ago, yet were heavily discussed on Twitter at the time, and I am very glad I was aware of them.
What is actionable about knowing about the assassination attempt 1-2 hours before others? Did you act differently based on this information? Did you benefit from this sufficiently to weigh up for the time spent on Twitter 20 times a day at the off-chance of catching a breaking newsstory before MSM would?
Nobody should pretend that Twitter is a place where accurate information travels at light speed. It is in desperate need of moderation and being run by a man with clear monetary incentive to mislead the public.
I agree, but I think a lot of people who use it view it that way.
I don't think you wrote that the way you meant to.
Although the line can get interesting. When I was active on Reddit I would argue that Reddit was not SM. From my perspective, Reddit was end stage web forum technology and link aggregators
All the bespoke forums of the late 90s and early 2000s died for the most part and there is now a subreddit for every niche hobby that used to have a forum
This stuff all predates Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, livejournal, that I would argue were new paradigms and the start of what we know as social media
However to anyone not online during those times, Reddit is just another site where people post details of their own lives. Reddit responded by adding profiles and followers and all kinds of pseudo SM features
It also seems quite professionalised in that the big content producers fill the feed.
There’s also something about it being video which makes it feel harmful but in a different way than a text based platform.
I tend to think of TikTok as more of an entertainment platform rather than peer to peer social media.
I’m not the target audience though so could be wide of the mark!
This is one of the reasons why I have returned to print media. Unfortunately, a lot of magazines and newspapers are also really bad now also. The Wall Street Journal has fallen off a cliff, turning into something between Cosmopolitan and Business Insider, and I am cancelling my subscription this year. The Economist has done a good job keeping up the quality level. The fact that something is in print does not necessarily make it better if all the writers have brainrot or the content is optimized for digital engagement first.
The internet has become a medium for poor people to watch unlimited user-generated episodes of Maury and Jerry Springer. The only internet I really want to use is to work, buy products, and read my email. Getting older is bad enough without the computer trying to make me dumber on top of that.
Really?
Reddit is a cesspool because they drove off the power users in favor of normies who won't block the ads.
The coming of the current cluster fuck was clear decades ago. Anyone who wasn't enamored by meme illiteracy never took that train...
I don’t know who Cal is and I have no idea what Deep Work he’s done since he quit social media, but, best of luck to the lad.
I sincerely thought people would quit social media following the Snowden revelations, and I did myself, and then could not believe that they didn't seem to care at all. It was a painful and jarring learning experience.
I did not, but thanks for being considerate. I took it as this:
>I sincerely thought people would quit social media following the Snowden revelations, and I did myself, and then could not believe that they didn't seem to care at all. It was a painful and jarring learning experience.
It's been over 11 years now. I would imagine it's not unlike living in a former soviet country in that everyone knows it's going on, but we just don't talk about it.
It's almost as if their reasoned arguments were always nothing more than poorly slapped together ad hoc justifications for whatever happens to be the norm at a given moment.
PS: Always hide the best meme in endnote 14 so your fellow meme scientists know exactly where to find the real discovery.
Society changes slowly. The iterative speed of computers, the iterative speed of feedback on a global communications network based on those computers is new, it has many orders of magnitude faster response times than society's ability to adapt to the changes it brings and the systemic study of human behavior over years and years leading to mathematical models of behavior and responses has created massive information asymmetry in society and the scale of manipulation a small group of people can leverage is astounding, being skeptical of society's value propositions seems in order.
Sure, then we can discuss about the inherent issues of the platforms (which are many), but first one has to exploit their own agency to the utmost degree.
If HN ever gets big, you’ll see the same things.
But then, in the context of the Gaza conflict, I realized that X is a very good source to follow intellectuals, thinkers, journalits whom I wouldn't read otherwise in Germany, where anyone is vilified who even wears a Kefiyeh. When you see how our western media frames, justifies, whitewashes a conflict caracterised as a genocide by many scholars, we need other platforms to hear those voices.
Now this sounds like the alt right that wants its platforms. But hear me out. There are intellectuals who show the headlines, the framing, and you cannot help but think that Noam Chomsky's book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media", written in 1988, is more relevant than ever.
X has the capacity to show different perspectives and can be invaluable. But it's also a curse exploited by many. Russia, China, Iran, but also our allies. See this for instance[1].
[1] "The Israelis Destabilizing Democracy and Disrupting Elections Worldwide - National Security & Cyber - Haaretz" // https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2022-1...
But worth noting, you've presumably been using HN since 2016 which is also "social media" :P
> I am better at making time to catch up with the people I really care about, be that in-person or over WhatsApp. > When I do catch up with someone, I genuinely have no idea what’s been going on in their life and that makes the catch up a lot more enjoyable and engaging. I haven’t passively kept up to date on their every movement through Instagram stories or Tweets like some kind of ghostly stalker. The best example of this that I can give is that my partner and I got engaged to be married ~4 months ago. Nothing posted on SM, just WhatsApp messages to close friends and family. I get to keep reliving the joy of telling people and witnessing the ecstatic surprise and pure love on their faces each time I catch up with someone I haven’t seen for a while. > I am much more aware of just how much everyone uses their phones. Take a look around you. Sitting on the bus, waiting in a queue, riding an escalator, pissing at a urinal. Our minds are being constantly bombarbed with mostly useless, inane shite. Cat videos, stories of that person you went to school with 10 years ago doing stupid drunk things, misinformation from your scary uncle on Facebook etc. I let my mind wander more and it feels all the better for it.
You can follow the author at https://x.com/profcalnewport .
It's gotten to the point where I view the narcissism of the modern 21st century social media user the same way I would view a crack addict smoking a pipe out in public, unable to pry their hands away from their glowing plastic rectangles, swiping incessantly in the hopes of getting just another dose of sweet dopamine with every refresh, or some artificial symbol of social validation in the form of more likes and upvotes.
Somehow even in the wake of the Snowden revelations people are still ambling off of cliffs for fear of being left behind by the herd of lemmings. I feel vindicated as the years go on with every news story or opinion piece I read about (dissatisfaction with) the growing encroachment of surveillance capitalism, ad-tech and social media into our personal lives, and all for what? Some shitty memes and "influencers" peddling their garbage through thinly veiled advertisements?
When I am exposed to mainstream social media content I can't believe people subject themselves to the digital equivalent of ass-to-mouth that is the brainrot of the algorithmically driven social media feed. If "you are what you eat" were analogized to an information diet, most social media users would be consuming informational shit and consequently producing the same 140-byte thoughts or reciting the same 5-second memes.
If the attention economy is indeed a real concept, there is a premium for the ability to hold your concentration on something for more than half an hour and produce thoughts whose complexity is more than just a few bytes.
People are sheep, and people are stupid. Most people waste their lives looking at a mass fake digital mask of their peers, and people they don’t even know.
Myself on the other hand, I spend almost all my spare time with people and animals I love, studying, reading books, and thinking about bigger things.
You are what you consume, which makes most people morons. Same if you consume “the news”, care about celebrities.
Don't worry about your active Facebook account. People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends). They are outliers not the rule.
What credentials do you hold to make this claim? It better not be a CS degree.
I have no facebook account. I choose to have relationships with my family members and distant friends through physical contact by meeting up and talking regularly on the phone. IMO typing short text messages to people and 'reacting' to theirs with emojis and thumbs up is not a real relationship.