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Comment by mattgreenrocks | Hacker News Reader

> “I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.”

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?

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Problem is that it is becoming a new reality. You can tune out, but you can't turn it off, and it (and society) will continue without it. And I say this as someone who thinks we should largely turn it off. Society will adapt, which means society is becoming something different.

I don’t buy it. We’re probably past peak social media at this point. And the outer reality will always have a higher status than any of the inner ones.

We might be past peak "bulk" social media, where people would be public, more or less, with their posts/videos. Now everything is closing and many people have "group chats" as they realize that free-for-all chatting/posting doesn't work.

In other words, people are returning to how online communication worked before Facebook.

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.

> people are returning to how online communication worked before Facebook.

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.

That's a valid complaint, and I sympathize because I have no love for 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.

Ugh I know the feeling. I may break down and do the immigrant-owned phone shop prepaid pseudonymous burner away-from-home SMS verification process on a completely fictitious account. I do not want Meta having any more of my dox than it has already gleaned in the past.

Private spaces where small groups collect may be social media by its definition, but it feels starkly different from something like posting on a facebook wall or making a public linkedin post where the audience largely consists of strangers.

>Private spaces where small groups collect may be social media by its definition

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.

I think this is the one benefit of recent "AI" advancements, it accelerates the downfall with even cheaper garbage. death to the internet, long live the internet

Hoping for reevaluation

You don't have to buy it.

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".

I wonder what will the cumulative effect be as more of life becomes virtual by default

I think you make valid points about the downsides of "influencer culture" and usage patterns of some forms of social media. BUT. I'm think the term "social media" is too broad to be useful in this kind of critique.

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 think there's a lot of value, both social and emotional, to social media. That doesn't change the fact that social media products as they exist are not only not creating that value, they are outwardly, openly hostile to it. HN being a notable exception and why I spend a lot of time here. The discussions are thoughtful and the topics are (usually) at least somewhat relevant to my career and life. That said, the more mainstream social medias are not relevant to me, they are not stimulating or thoughtful, and they are not valuable.

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.

The danger of the point I'm making is that the less-realness that I'm arguing justifies poor behavior online. It does not. Many posters become seduced by the less-realness of online contact that they disconnect their own notions of what decent behavior is.

> 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.

Unfortunately, it can be worth it. Having a social media audience can be very valuable to entrepreneurs. Someone who lives online with a personal brand can replace tens of thousands of dollars in ad spend with a single tweet.

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.

I feel this. However I also remind myself that social media connections are never as strong as those we've made in real life, and that there have been former influencers who've hung up their hat and lamented that their residual social connections regress to something close to a mean a lot quicker than they would've liked.

Ultimately, the act of winning at social media seems a bit too subordinate to me.

Just an FYI going to an Ivy doesn’t cultivate that network in most cases; you need to come from the right background and have some spending money to keep up with the lifestyle (ski trips, Broadway musicals, etc).

In that way social network is more meritocratic, as many people have come from very humble backgrounds and succeeded with skill and charisma.

It's an opportunity to meet people who have a higher likelihood of successful careers, who in turn also know many successful people. That makes getting meetings and fundraising much easier.

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.

I agree with this, but it's worth noting the quote is from a journalist/blogger who was not talking about social media. He was talking about keeping up with a 24 hour news cycle by any means. The problem here isn't specific to social media. It's with overwhelming information flow, the vast majority of which is not actionable to the person consuming it. People come down with a type of awareness FOMO such that they feel like they need to know all things as they happen, even though the information is incomplete, often wrong, misleading, and doesn't impact their everyday real lives in any way.

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.

> engagement bait, daily outrages,

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.

Even without considering all of the contentious topics, the infinite scroll of the home feed trains people to triage posts faster and faster, because there's always more content, and who knows what you've missed? Because the topics are flattened, you're context-switching on a second by second basis, and your mind is alert to something awful you might be about to see - cute cat, war crimes, Dan's birthday celebration, medical fundraiser, political campaign, sponsored ad... I'm really starting to see the value of legitimate boredom

A game where the "points" are likes, followers and engagement

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