Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshdavham | Hacker News Reader

One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together. I’m technically gen z and I’ve been off of social media (aside from HN, WhatsApp and discord) for years and you wouldn’t believe how great it’s been for my overall state of mind.

Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food and I’d argue that we’re all a lot more negatively affected by it than we think. There’s a reason ‘brain rot’ was word of the year.

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I quit reddit too recently, I still look at it for info but I'm not logged in/scrolling through it

I find myself reaching for something when I have YouTube/chilling at my desk at the end of the day, can't code anymore/make something just on till I sleep. Sometimes have the desire to play a video game (I have a gaming rig too funny how that works)

I've been trying to read HN or IEEE, TechCrunch stuff like that as my "lazy fun"

I will miss posting stuff like "what is this car" or being part of the car talk for a sporty car I drive but idk kind of want to just live too

It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something

Anyway my main goal in life right now is getting out of debt/staying fit and work on projects

The Instagram dating thing is because, in the heteronormative sense, a guy without one odd WAY more likely to be cheating. If you’re in a relationship, even if you don’t post, your significant other will likely tag you in their posts.

I’ve never really understood doomscrolling on Twitter or Reddit. The only social media I find remotely useful out entertaining is actually TikTok. The comments are IME the least toxic and most entertaining. And I’ve gone down fascinating rabbit holes of things that have absolutely no relevance to my life like medical residency TikTok.

My reddit scrolling wasn't doom for my case. I was either personal topics I liked (cars, computing, software, photography, etc...) or brain rot/stupid shi that's the main reason I've left because I could be more productive than looking at an endless supply of that stuff

You can mute subreddits and not see them anymore

Funny you have to purge the algo on things like YouTube if you click on a thubmnail with some hot chick, boom your feed is nothing but click bait of hot women

I 100% believe that guys with Instagram accounts are more likely to cheat than guys without them.

Agreed, but we are getting thrown in with the people who have an insta account, but say they don't so they don't get fact-checked on their relationship status.

One healthy way to consume Reddit that I recently learned about is creating a "custom feed" (see left margin of new UI).

You can just add subs that are of interest that lack the torrent of bad news and only ever visit that custom feed. It doesn't ever algorithmically add posts from subs you don't manually include, as far as I've seen.

User groups you would be interested in get hijacked by whatever the overall sentiment of Reddit is. Threads that aren't political suddenly get political for no reason. It's completely dead in there - content quality is brutally low.

I just bookmark subreddits for things I'm interested in, and visit them individually. I hardly ever see any political content doing that.

The key is to stay in smaller, dedicated subreddits and avoid anything remotely popular or generic.

r/localllama, r/bambulabs ... Politics has a way of creeping in.

Politicisation happens, though slowly. Therewasanattempt used to be funny pictures/videos and is now purely TDS. My city's sub used to have useful local content and is now about 50% national politics.

The wave of X bans was so frustrating. Particularly for sports subreddits where that’s where all of the breaking news and team announcements happen.

In fact NFL teams are specifically banned from having bluesky accounts as an official media channel, and r/nfl still banned X/Twitter.

sigh

Why are NFL teams banned from having an official account on Bluesky?

It’s not an “approved social media site”:

https://www.nbcsports.com/nfl/profootballtalk/rumor-mill/new...

Presumably there’s some money that needs to change hands between the NFL and a social media site.

> You can just add subs that are of interest that lack the torrent of bad news and only ever visit that custom feed.

I still use old.reddit and this is the only way I've ever used Reddit. My homepage only shows me posts from Reddits I follow and nothing else. I don't see all the craziness people here are talking about.

Yes, that's exactly the same as what I do. When I tried new reddit, it looked awful to use and look at, so I always stayed at old reddit. Like you I don't see any of the crazy stuff. Just discussions in the subreddits I follow.

Yeah I just use old Reddit, which still works like that.

Cannot stand unsolicited content.

>It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one

Outside of reddit/discord/hn, I haven't had any social media since roughly 2010, and I don't use reddit or discord for anything remotely "social media"-ish.

While I still get the occasional look as if I'm wearing a tinfoil hat when I say "I don't have FB. No, no insta either. No... not snapchat either", I find it's a lot less common now, thankfully. When I first left social media in ~2010, it was rough. Not only dating scene wise, but I lost out on a few job opportunities (at least a few, probably more than I know) as well.

Now you're just considered kind of weird/fringe, instead of being borderline insane. Moving (slowly) in the right direction, I think.

Maybe you're just iteratively refining your friend group.

I agree. In my 40s and at work most people my age do have fb instagram and TikTok but everyone’s super understanding when I say I like my privacy

I wouldn't care a whole lot if someone told me they weren't in IG, FB, Snap, Twitter, etc. However, if someone told me they never bothered with Linkedin, it would be hard for me to resist bowing at their feet.

Out of all the social media I don't have, that's the one that has lost me the most job opportunities for sure. I probably would have caved and signed up if I didn't end up getting a job through some old-fashioned (face-to-face) networking.

We were required to make linkedin profiles as part of the computer science career preparedness class. I got an internship out of that career day though so it was a win for me

Wait, really? I must be old. I technically have a LinkedIn but haven't really been on the site since the last time I was in the job market 8 yeras ago.

Very occasionally a potential client messages me through it but they are almost very low quality contacts.

I mean that's the correct way to use LinkedIn: it's a job board.

It's a social media platform. Full stop.

Headhunters are trying to be influencers, they have games, news feeds are full of junk or agenda pushing (lots of anti-WFH pieces because the wealthy owners need to keep their commercial property prices up), etc.

I deleted my LinkedIn several years ago.

I can only recommend it if you are independently wealthy, want to become an ascetic, or more broadly, your goal is to never be hired or really even evaluated for much in the business world again.

None of the rest of the social networks serve as a sanity check on your resume/application/meeting.

It is scary that one platform has so much control over people's lives. If LinkedIn were to ban me for whatever reason tomorrow, finding a job would become virtually impossible.

I could still get a job but it would require more effort. I keep my network updated on what I'm doing and new opportunities, not just jobs, present themselves to me. People who avoid LinkedIn remind of those who scoff at the stock market. Yes, it sucks if you hold it wrong.

    > People who avoid LinkedIn remind of those who scoff at the stock market. Yes, it sucks if you hold it wrong.

This is pithy. I am adding this to my copy-pasta arsenal. Thank you.

I've round linkedin extremely useful recently for finding a new job after being made redundant. It's where the recruiters are, and where the jobs are posted, at least here in the UK. I even paid for a couple of months enhanced membership, or whatever they call it, as a career investment. I'd say its worth the money over the short-term.

As for maintaining an up-to-date profile, I think its worth dialing-down the access unless you're actively looking for a new job.

But the bs that people post to try to get "engagement" makes my head hurt. I'm about to start a new job in a few weeks and it'll be a relief not to have to bother with linkedin again for a few (hopefully many) years.

I deactivated my account after finding a job and will reactivate when I am on a new search.

I know that people here on HN love to dump on LinkedIn. That said, for some industries, it is the primary way to connect with headhunters and future employers. For me, I don't use any of the social aspect. I only post my CV details and wait for headhunters to contact me directly. It works well.

Are there any women (in highly developed countries) under 40 who aren't on some form of social media? I never met any. I think it would be more difficult than men for social reasons.

I have no idea how. But after I quit social media I managed to convince my wife to give it a go. That was 4 years ago. Has linkedin for work, and goes to a couple of sports related subreddits, but that's it.

It's not the miracle you seem to imagine! I deleted my linkedin account at least fifteen years ago now, disgusted by their spammy, underhanded recruitment tactics, and I have never had any trouble finding interesting work.

I understand that some people find it reassuring to receive a constant stream of recruiter inquiries, but from what I hear these messages are mostly low-effort, shotgun-blast attempts to fill undesirable positions, so I don't feel like I am missing out.

How did you miss out on job opportunities by not being on social media?

The first step in the resume vetting process was looking the applicant up on LinkedIn. If they didn't exist, the resume goes in the bin. I doubt it's that severe still as more and more people move away from having social media (it's been awhile since I've been on either side of job hunt/hiring).

On more than one occasion the direct feedback of why I didn't move further in the hiring process was a lack of internet presence.

But, again, keep in mind this was early 2010s. Social media hadn't had as much time to show the world how poisonous it is.

Oh I see. I’ve never found LinkedIn useful, but I still have a profile for some reason. I suppose I’ve never fallen into that particular trap.

I've found work via twitter. I left it last year, but I can't deny it had some networking benefits which can lead to job opportunities.

> I will miss posting stuff like "what is this car" or being part of the car talk for a sporty car I drive but idk kind of want to just live too

I used to waste so much time posting about cars on Reddit. I'd open my computer at 11pm, reply a few times to a single post on Reddit, and before long, I'd see 1:45am on the clock.

Not posting anything has been a massive time saver.

Same, except i reply on the drugs and harm reduction subreddit trying to help kids make decisions that dont destroy their lives. It's really difficult to leave because i remember when i needed those people and sometimes it feels like all the adults left the room and I'm the only one left. Who's gonna help these kids? Seems futile to attempt to stem the tide of gen alpha tiktok brainrot idiocy but sometimes people actually listen to me and their life improves. I've given myself a time that I'll work down to 15 minutes a day to try to consolidate that extra time. Recently I've been using some of my addiction advice on myself to quit reddit

I checked reddit recently for the first time in a while, and I was shocked by how radicalized its become. An echo chamber of hateful people and perhaps GPTs that are agitating the big subreddits. The contrast is stark with all the "no place for hate" in the rules and endless banning of microaggressions.

I saw dozens of death threats. Even an explicit death threat thread with over 40,000 upvotes before reddit stepped in and shut the whole subreddit down.

It reminded me of Ghostbusters 2 with all the aggressively angry people and the ooze pouring out of the sewers, all building upon itself.

Agreed. There is exactly one way to think and believe on Reddit. The "outrage" might be tolerable or even informative in some cases if it was equally distributed.

It's disheartening when the one-track politics infects every square inch. It's a good point about bots because 1) they can be sold or rented to advertisers, 2) they are more valuable with higher karma, and 3) the easiest way to get a bot to harvest karma is by agreeing with the hive. So they're amplifying "the message" without even intending to.

That particular subreddit isn't shut down, it was temporarily suspended as the moderators simply got overwhelmed. There's no indication of bad faith from either the mod team nor the reddit admins, the floodgate was just too much for them to handle. It pretty much says so in the ban message, admins are gonna help them take back control and it will be up within a couple of days.

To be even more precise, here's the message from the source;

> This community has been banned

> This subreddit has been temporarily banned due to a prevalence of violent content. Inciting and glorifying violence or doxing are against Reddit’s platform-wide Rules. It will reopen in 72 hours, during which Reddit will support moderators and provide resources to keep Reddit a healthy place for discussion and debate.

This is just the consequence of the API protests. Despite people claiming it had no lasting impact, admins coming in and making sweeping changes to mod teams replacing them with loyalists, alongside ramping up centralized feeds to serve more ads onto meant content quality took a nosedive. This is obvious in most subs if you actually look at who is submitting the threads (something the app and All/Popular pages hides in several views), most of these subs are dominated by a handful of accounts. It's a cycle too, because often they'll continue spamming subs in order to get on All/Popular, or make up weird stories to do so, effectively karma farming taken very seriously, with mods encouraging it because of the aforementioned loyalists.

It's all just driveby anger and reposts. Maybe some smaller subs with good communities here and there, but that often requires a mod team putting in substantial hours and remaining under the radar from All/Popular in any shape.

Forgot to mention, Reddit also started paying these accounts for posting. So a literal financial incentive to ragebait. It' called the "Contributor Program".

RDDT was a good buy, but the site is absolutely going to be destroyed. That’s what’s valuable. I’m not selling until Reddit is Facebook-tier garbage.

It's wild how bad it has gotten since the election. It's important to remember that free speech does not protect directly inciting violence and it does not protect advocating for the murder of anyone, even a politician. These are generally illegal

So what Reddit has morphed into, is an illegal content factory - there has already been a comment or two about it from the government and the Trump admin is not one that is likely to sit on my sidelines over this.

Whatever your politics may be, I'm just saying this is going to burn Reddit bad.

> It's important to remember that free speech does not protect directly inciting violence and it does not protect advocating for the murder of anyone, even a politician. These are generally illegal

Under US first amendment rights, it's actually sometimes legal.

For example, "Watts v. United States" established that if an anti-draft speaker tells a crowd "If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ" that's political hyperbole.

So if a crowd were to set up a guillotine outside congress and chant "hang mike pence" it's not necessarily illegal.

The only thing not covered by the concept (and law) of freedom of speech with regard to violence are direct, clear incitements to immediately commit violence. E.g. egging someone on to go lynch another person right now is not legal.

Saying “I think this person should be killed” is legally free speech.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but respect of law and norms is being thrown out of the window. That was the old USA and the paradigm is wildly shifting.

This behavior has been going on long before the API protests.

I just stick to the niche subreddits (games, interests, whatever). The main subreddits have been especially aggressive echo chambers for a long time now.

I tried that with work. I created an account where I can just follow a few things related to my job. The problem is that reddit will start showing you things you didn't subscribe to. It's a battle to keep them at bay. If you look at my work account feed it's all mycology, bad tattoos, what-is-this-thing. I never subscribed to any of them. Yea, they are interesting but that's not what I wanted or need at work.

Old Reddit still doesn't have any suggested posts. Also, the Reddit API works just fine within limit. It's unusable for scraping but as a single user it works fine.

/r/worldnews is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet. Some of those commenters are so nationalist and bloodthirsty they unnerve me. The ban hammer is extremely active on this sub, and for saying completely innocuous political statements about personal preference. I'm absolutely sure this is broader than just that sub but I've probably heard this specific complaint from probably a dozen other people too.

I will say, the subreddit system does a decent job of quarantining the dysfunction to that sub. The mod quality is everything and the mod drama is an absolute dumpster fire. (Extremely curiously, Ghislaine Maxwell seems to have been one of the most prolific of the mods, and one of her suspected accounts may be one of the most successful (karma-wise) posters of all reddit.) But on the flipside, /r/askhistorians is still one of the best resources on the internet. Many of the specialty subreddits I frequent (Aviation, UkraineRussiaReport, video game subs, several miscellaneous african subs) are still functioning fine.

Reddit, by far, is one of the worst echo chambers on the internet. I've seen hundreds of death threats at one political group on there, but if any veiled threat is made against the "reddit approved party" it is instantly removed or accounts suspended. This really peaked during 2020, when open calls for violence stayed up, some with reddit admin approvals.

It used to be a good site, but that was many years ago.

Did people forget the_donald?

What do people think others will do, when they see that the_donald behavior gets rewarded by electoral and political support?

If its not clear, everyone is going to radicalize, because its getting success.

Likely take a break from social media and talk with some real people. Lots of people voted for trump aren’t radical actually none that i know are. I come from a small town in a red state and yes they completely disagree with democrats on pretty much everything but the stuff you read on reddit is so far fetched and extreme I don’t know how anyone would take it seriously.

They believe people hate Americans and everyone should be ashamed traveling overseas. As someone who travels all the time to multiple continents not just Europe i have never encountered anyone who asked or even cared. Most people don’t live in a political bubble where they need to stop being friends with people over politics.

Anyway a lot people are choosing to live in an angry little bubble. It is really sad to see.

> Lots of people voted for trump aren’t radical actually none that i know are.

The same can be said for the supporters of many radical and terrible historical regimes. I'm not radical, I'm simply pushing this radical boulder along, and I can stop it whenever I wan tooo-oops."

You realise this works both ways? The average left leaning person doesn't have 700 pronouns and isn't calling for a communist revolution. They're not paid by Soros. They don't have blue hair and have a meltdown at the slightest upset.

The online charicatures are just that. In both directions.

Real talk though: the US, via the current administration, is trashing its international reputation. With tariffs and lashing out at (former?) allies. Or with Musk demanding regime change in the UK, for instance. On a personal level people will still be chill no doubt, but you should be prepared for some negative attitudes towards the US if things continue unabated.

Hey, this is a PSA: this was going to happen.

I’ve seen this sequence of events play out before.

In many was ‘go outside’ is dismissive of what many people feel is happening, that to within 15 days of this new presidency. This is a low key way of saying you don’t like people protesting.

While at the same time others are saying people aren’t protesting enough.

If you aren’t ok with all of this, I strongly suggest deleting all social media, including hacker news. Take your advice and go outside. Be good to your neighbors and your mental health.

There is zero space for passive consumption when one of the biggest cultural and economic forces in English speaking Internet land is dismantling itself.

There is going to be very little space for any tolerance of nuance - because Trump is going to continue to escalate. He is going to follow a plan which was known, and it aims at gutting the US, and justifying it with DEI or whatever the cassus belli of the month is.

This is eventually going to result in ‘riots.’

Which will feed the righteousness of the conservatives, which will result in a new round of “well you were so happy when the year started, where are you now.”

It will escalate into attacks on democrats as the devil. And HN will swing from left outrage to right outrage.

At that time the roles will be reversed, and the positions will switch.

Again - If you or anyone reading these comments is tired on Feb 6th - leave the internet right now. This is your tornado / natural disaster warning.

This isn’t meant to be hurtful to you, or to be any defense of anything.

I always assume I am wrong, and I hope I can look back at these comments with embarrassment over what looks like histrionics.

The problem I have is that i deal with social media and online safety as work and as research. Papers on this topic are my fun reading when my brain isn’t fogged up.

This is going to be worse than brexit. And that’s if we are all lucky.

I was asking bankers if there’s any slack in the financial system in November - and I asked this in multiple countries.

The answer was no. So when the trade shocks start hitting the system, expect a downturn.

This is aside from the walking dead syndrome which america will face after gutting multiple systems in-flight.

I wish you luck and the very best. Sorry.

I was in Europe for a while starting right after 9/11 and there was a lot of shame and no lack of pointed questions. The locals didn’t hate us, but there was a decent amount of “what the hell is wrong with you guys?” It was not uncommon for American travelers to put Canadian flag pins on their backpacks to try to deflect attention or curry favor.

It’s surely ten times worse now. Trump makes W look like a statesman, and we could at least plead that W didn’t win a majority and only became president because the system is stupid.

I remember the anti-US sentiment among people at the time of the invasion of Iraq as way harsher than now during Trump. Like not even close.

It seems to be mainly European neoliberals that are more upset about Trump.

I think it's more that there is nothing to be gained about asking an American in Europe about Trump. Most likely, they think he's a douchenozzle too so why bring him up and ruin a vacationer's day. On the off chance they are a Trump supporter, now the European has to listen to an idiot spout Newsmax nonsense until they can get away.

'thedonald' was not violent are even hateful by Reddit standards. Banning it was a big mistake and gave fringe supporters headroom.

Reddit has in general got way worse since 2016. The amount of bloodthirst and hate is very unsettling.

the_donald was very hateful but I wouldn't call them violent. They were a cultish meme sub like /r/Conservative is. They got banned was for brigading not for being violent and hateful.

I would go as far as to say it was a childish meme sub (edit: and cultish, ye). I wonder if it was like that Flat Earth Society started. Once the "Qanon" type of guys turn up the memes become dogma.

I might have a different threshold for hateful on the internets or I didn't look closely enough.

It optimizes for echo chambers. You see what gets upvoted the most.

> I checked reddit recently for the first time in a while, and I was shocked by how radicalized its become.

Reddit has always had these elements, but they were previously isolated to certain subreddits.

I noticed the biggest change when the app and website became aggressive about getting people to join other subreddits and inserting posts from other subreddits into people's feeds. Suddenly the isolated subreddits I followed were full of low effort content and angry comments.

Reddit's front page is shockingly bad. The amount of misinformation and ragebait that gets upvoted to the front page is almost hard to believe.

It's also interesting that many subreddits have embraced the ragebait. Subreddits like /r/AITA have been clear about how they don't care if stories are real or not, but legions of Redditors engage with obvious ChatGPT spam as if it was a real situation they need to weigh in on.

> The contrast is stark with all the "no place for hate" in the rules and endless banning of microaggressions.

Please be specific.

My suggestion: music! Give the eyes a break.

I have music/noise on all the time, rarely in silence. I play the same playlist/song over and over when focusing. Unfortunately working in an open office it sucks people having conversions (to each other or to computer)

If I don't have music playing, a song will play in my head. Over and over....

I'm always growing my "playlist" though. One room of the house is where I auditioning new music. Another room plays my entire music catalog on shuffle.

I feel that, can't play something new if trying to focus, but if doing chores/physical task can do new music passively in the background

Man, I hope you wear headphones.

Fun fact: No one is impressed by your "sports" car, but I'll bet 100% don't want hear it and wish the worst upon you.

I know some places are testing sound ticketing, which I cannot wait to see implemented everywhere.

https://www.autoweek.com/news/technology/a39906304/californi...

I hope you get over your noise addiction sooner than later. Or, go broke in the process.

They're clearly not talking about their car, let's chill out. They're just saying they're always listening to their own music or (white?) noise, because their open office is noisy from conversations.

Also, books. Books are amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-Le9SH4mvU

I read on and off, have a kindle, read through the whole Bobiverse series for ex

One unfortunate aspect of this phenomena is that as reddit "evaporatively cools" (ala https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ... ) as the more level headed people leave reddit gets even more radical.

It's even possible the places that people then move to (such as HN) also get more radical if the leavers have higher levels of radicalism than the place they join.

> It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something

Probably worth Googling something like [men who don't have social media] to think what women think about this, it's more positive than you might think :)

It's not about scoping you out. Asking for your Instagram is like what asking for your number was in the past. It's flirting, it's that they want to get in touch again, set up a date.

If you say "I don't have Instagram", the girl will assume that you don't like her, not that you don't have Instagram.

So just make an empty Instagram (with a normal profile photo) for connecting with people. And say so when sharing it with a girl. If it's somebody who wants to "scope you out", you're already dealing with a person who you don't want to deal with.

> If you say "I don't have Instagram", the girl will assume that you don't like her, not that you don't have Instagram.

> So just make an empty Instagram

Why not, instead, say "I don't have Instagram, here's my [ bluesky handle / phone number / email address ]"?

> bluesky handle

Just tell her you are an Arch Linux admin and skip the flirting.

> phone number

Yes, in regions where people use phone numbers / WhatsApp numbers in that way.

> email address

Just tell her you wanna sell her a time share and skip the flirting.

> Asking for your Instagram is like what asking for your number was in the past. It's flirting, it's that they want to get in touch again, set up a date.

Personal website is the way to go. Preferably a static site built with a home-made templating engine written in Ruby and running on a non-mainstream budget cloud provider. The chicks dig it man.

Even a hint of Wordpress is social death.

I actually feel really good when people expect me to be on social media and I tell them Im not.

Kind of similar to the feeling when I say that I quit cigarettes. Im still surprised by it and talking about it makes me feel very blessed to be free of it.

This is the way. I was a director of the community team at deviantart when it got going and I remember so many times thinking "if we get one of these apps for everything people are going to drown themselves in the internet" - because I used to have to actively check in on community members who we deemed addicted. Sure enough, here we are, except it seems nobody is looking out for the best interests of their communities anymore. Thank god for dang.

> I was a director of the community team at deviantart (...) I used to have to actively check in on community members who we deemed addicted

This sounds so interesting to me - was it your responsibility? How did you detect if someone was addicted? And most importantly, how did you scale it?

Well early deviantart was pretty small, and I don't think anyone building it was over 25y/o at the time, so we all had lots of free time to work on it. Deviantart was arranged in a way we all had communities we were responsible for, it changed a lot after it reached million+ users scale, but in the beginning at 100k or so users it was very manageable. Your responsibility per Scott Jarkoff who lead that team was "to love, nurture, protect and grow your community" - and then there were things we were taught to watch out for or check in on. Backend you could see pretty much everything about the user, plus you just got used to the users in your communities, so "additive like behavior" was not difficult to detect, literally I would just see some users online ALL THE TIME, so we would always check in to make sure everything is ok, and tell them they're probably spending too much time on the site (it was a bit harder for me because I was one of the people responsible for communities generally.) I don't know how actively other GDs did this, but it was a widly discussed topic in our staff only irc channel very frequently. This all came from the teams want to be mindful to avoid hurting other people using the internet, most of us building it genuinely gave 2 shits and genuinely cared about our users. This was the same playbook I then used to build devrel at DigitalOcean in the beginning, I had devrel structured per community with the same instruction Scott gave me back in the day. (I think it's part of why y'all originally picked us! so thanks!)

This is amazing! I needed to read it today. Thank you.

Interesting. Would this be implementable today but on a larger scale?

"Someone who cares about you on the internet"

instead of

"Something that prevents you from posting hate/snuff/nude on the internet"

Obviously lots of problems, tons of them, and 1984 vibes, but still, the basic idea. A bit more like humans were meant to interact?

I think sadly the scale becomes less about the size per say and more about the unpredictability. The "vibes" on the internet late 90s early 2000s where very... on point, so it didn't feel like emotional labour. I can imagine being someone who cares about someone on the internet in 2025 would be, frankly, exhausting, in 2002 it was just fun.

Yes: "Better Living Through Algorithms" - https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_05_23/

It's an interesting relevant short story. Won the 2024 Hugo Award. It was posted a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263876

Corporate social media does not care about its users. They are just biomass to fuel various goals: ad revenue, political influence, etc. In fact, the more addicted you are, the better.

And the weather does not care about farmers either.

It is obviously a completely unfinished thought.

But something about humans innate tendency to self-organise into tribes and villages.

Wow, thanks for the sharing this lovely tidbit!

What advice would you have for someone running a discord community?

1. a community is simply an abstract place people meet around the intersection of a shared interest. It's important to first recognize that. 2. Communities are not people who are all the same, they just commune together for reasons. 3. communities form, they are not built. 4. communities are ultimately selfless, however, good communities know what they are and why they exist, this can be a learning process and can be malleable, but at any given moment in time that should be understood. 5. Good communities enforce strong rules strongly. Community steering and moderation should be as diffuse as possible without losing the next point in fact keeping it central: 6. Good communities look to proactively raise up people who energetically build the community for the sake of the community not for the sake of themselves, for themselves should be the second order effect of any raising up within a community, this is subtle and community leaders need to spend time understanding this. I think that is all.

> Sure enough, here we are, except it seems nobody is looking out for the best interests of their communities anymore. Thank god for dang.

Here's to dang! Even when you do things I might not agree with if I knew about them, this is a place where interesting things can be shared and found without all the blah-blah.

Alternatively carefully curate your social media accounts. My reddit home page is all books and formula 1. I'm quick to hit 'show me less like this' when anything drifts in from the front page.

My Facebook feed is all friends and family who don't discuss politics and ads for nerd shirts. I've purchased a few. It is also easy and effective to hit show me less of this.

I agree about LinkedIn and don't go there unless I'm actively job hunting, something I hope never to do again. I don't feel any bitterness when I see friends and family on FB go on expensive vacations, but I do feel an unhealthy and indefensible jealousy sometimes when I see former coworkers getting new jobs or promotions.

I totally understand the desire to avoid politics on all these platforms but in some way I always expect the greater powers want to destroy these platforms and make us even more hopeless.

The greater powers control these platforms and want to keep us engaged so we believe what they want us to believe.

Indeed. I've unsubscribed from all subreddits that have become infested with political content, and I've "unfollowed" all of my acquaintances on Facebook and LinkedIn who post anything political. So much more enjoyable.

This is how I've dealt with Instagram. My IG account is literally nothing but cats. it's actually very refreshing to look at for five or ten minutes. But it takes work. IG wants to keep feeding me their BS reels. Sometimes I don't think it's worth it, they really make you put up a fight.

Adding animal feeds to whatever is a very good way to tone things down.

Otters, dogs, cats, snow leopards, red pandas whatever floats your boat.

Also, as you say the big platforms will still try and get you into an outrage loop.

I used to have the same thing (other less wholesome content has made its way back, I've not been strong enough). It was a better experience than what my feed was like before or after, but I'd still waste hours watching cat videos! Trying to stay off the feeds entirely, now.

That didn’t work for me, at least with FB and Insta.

I unfollowed/unfriended anybody who kept posting political stuff. I did the same for anybody I didn’t interact with in real-life regularly.

That basically left my parents, and about 5 friends. None of whom post anything regularly.

So, now my feed is just random shitposts and memes from “influencers”.

So, I deactivated my Meta accounts. And I’m still alive. And probably saner.

Yeah, I you should see the curation totally from the top, so fully dropping certain platforms is part of the curation. I mean, in essence we all already do that as certain platforms are not even considered a candidate in our 'portfolio'.

I can't imagine identifying myself on a forum...much less reddit.

Why do you exclude HN from your list? It is literally social media, but with the dial turned down a little. Yet, you don't have to dig to deeply to see flamewars, outrage, and trolling. I mean, look at many of the garbage comments in this very thread that are on par with /.,xchan.

Yes, but it’s the old skool version of social media and the conversations here are generally higher quality and more genuine. I strongly disagree that it’s “on par with /.,xchan”

HN also doesn’t seem to be as susceptible to rage-baiting / outrage-attention-seeking behavior. Not sure exactly what by this is the case but I’d venture a guess it has a lot to do with (1) “dang”s moderation, and (2) not having a personalized algorithm feed.

I’m increasingly of the view that personalized algorithm feeds generated to select the maximum attention grabbing content for each person is a truly dangerous idea.

Frankly, HN is not that engaging (by modern standards). In fact, probably 60-70% of the articles on the front page are boring to me on any given day. I view this as a feature and not a bug. Why should I expect that everything I look at must be maximally engaging?

I wish more sites were old skool like HN.

There is still a lot of taboo subjects and comments you can make on HN, just look through your comment history on all the things downvoted to hell that you still believe are true. Like a good sheep I now refuse to defend anything that will leave me open to this.

A problem with downvoting on many sites (perhaps HN to some extent) is that people seem to just use it as a generic "I don't like this" button or as part of an upvote/downvote war to make sure that their preferred comment "wins."

Not GP, but feel similarly. I'll offer my 2 cents:

> but with the dial turned down a little.

Exactly for this reason. Yes, HN is a social network. And if it follows the same enshittification path as the others, I will be gone from here too. But until then, to me (YMMV) it still provides a bit of entertainment and news without rotting my brain.

Even the analogy works. Fast food is not that bad... in moderate quantities (/"with the dial turned down a little")

HN remains distinct from Reddit almost entirely due to dang's hard work moderating the site. Spend a few minutes with showdead turned on and you'll see real quick what that site might turn into without effective moderation. The site would be full of politics and flamewars.

I believe a good portion of Reddit could have had been the same. However, the way moderators are chosen-- in other words, whoever creates the sub first gets to rule the roost-- has left that site with almost universally unqualified moderation.

HN has a non personalized feed. That alone distinguishes from most social media today. And that matter a LOT.

If HN is social media, then old online forums from the time before "social media" are also social media.

Well, yes.

That’s not really a gotcha statement.

But that makes the term "social media" a very broad category that doesn't tell you much.

Yes but more importantly it's a definition that allows those who wield it to feel as though they are on the right hand side of the 'bell curve meme'.

Sure, but it’s also not a useful distinction.

There’s a clear difference of kind between modern social media and the forums/usenet of old.

I really would like to know what exactly you consider a "clear difference" between how Usenet and differ conceptually (e.g., ignoring the GUI, the # of users, and mechanics, [e.g., usenet updates diffused around the globe because we didn't have cloud servers]).

Please back that statement up with some facts.

1. Centralized control by for-profit corporations (and their investors) chasing perpetual growth

2. Algorithms driving ever-increasing "engagement" to deliver advertising

3. Surveillance capitalism

Sorry, I was refering to Hacker News, not all social media. My question was unclear.

1. HN is centralized, but not for-profit.

2. HN does not drive engagement, AFAIK

3. HN is not surveillance capitalism.

You haven't demonstrated how Usenet differs from HN, but since my question had a typo and omitted HN, I can see how that is confusing.

"social" implies that relationships between users are a core part of the platform. I can't follow another user or mark them as a "friend" on HN.

HN users put a lot less emphasis on who says something and we focus more on what they say. There are exceptions of course, because we have our own share of renowned experts posting here. But for the most part, people don't take note of what username writes a post.

Ah, thanks. That's a good answer. I was coming at it from the discussion angle only. However, both Usenet and HN don't allow you to friend people, like other social media. I see I accidentally dropped the term HN, which makes my question unclear. I still don't see spiritual difference between HN and Usenet when framed around your response, though.

> There’s a clear difference of kind between modern social media and the forums/usenet of old.

No, there isn't.

I'm here to talk about technology and it's usage. I'm not here to socialize, I don't know your name, don't care, and haven't even looked at your username. You're just a sentence to me. It's more impersonal than the old newsgroups. How is it social?

We're literally socializing right now. We're a special interest group meeting to communicate about special interests. The opposite of socialization is isolation. If you hadn't posted, you wouldn't be socializing, but here we are, socializing.

Semi-anonymous community is still community. HN isn't unique there.

it's similar to how you can go to a bar and just say "I'm here to watch the game". You can be asosial in a social community.

I disagree with the often stated claim that HN is social media!

To me, HN is more like an online forum.

IMHO for a service to be defined as Social Media it needs to at least have a 'social graph' of some kind.

HN has never suggested an account to follow, or tried to suggest trending posts or topics to me.

Yes, HN does have a voting system. But that to me doesn't make it social media. HN posts are not measured and promoted based on engagement.

> Why do you exclude HN from your list? It is literally social media

I didn't exlude it from my list. See here:

> I’ve been off of social media (aside from HN, WhatsApp and discord) for years

I did, however, leave it out of this list

> Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food

because I don't consider HN to be digital junk food.

I learned much from just scrolling HN. Technical articles help me know the latest updates in various areas, dive deep into a topic, or develop new skills. I applied quite a few things I learned in my job. Fundamentally, most links on HN are articles, many of which are quite long, which tend to be more focused and informative.

Completely non-technical ones are few, and you can always choose to ignore them.

The feed is also non-personalized. It's not going to show a few more article on politics just because you linked on one.

By comparison, reddit is much, much worse, almost the opposite of HN. Just a bit better than Twitter, maybe. Most of my reddit browsing/participation falls into tech/hobby, yet I always find that spend more time than I'd like on meaningless stuff, and reddit keeps pushing/promoting political content (even in the context of technology).

My solution? Don't browse reddit unless I really need to for some reason (or if I really don't have anything else to do at that time).

In principal it's a great method to get back to normal, however there are key areas (subreddits, local groups, etc.) that really do provide information, expertise, and news content that isn't available anywhere else online. It's a double edged sword. The best way I've found is to be in there with a read-only mindset or perhaps only participating inside those key areas where political discussions are strictly prohibited.

This has been my exact issue with giving up reddit. It's really hard to replace very niche topics without it, since many online forums are dead. I also append so many searches on google with "reddit" because the top results are generally SEO spam.

Reading "You should quit reddit" helped a little. The author tries to reframe your hidden beliefs about reddit like "finding useful information" or "it's filled with experts." Helped me to realize I was spending more time reading about my hobbies than actually doing them. Though I understand it's not that simple, doing requires more energy, etc.

My approach, finally mostly successful after over a decade, is just "no main feed or subreddit pages." Reading a thread off a Google search or whatever because it has information I want is fine.

News feed eradicator extension helps with that across ~8 sites:

https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator

I have found this to be completely untrue. Yes, maybe not at the same scale that Reddit is, but if you dig, there's a community for everything. You can find what you're looking for.

That said, I recognize that I am speaking completely for myself in regards to my own interests. YMMV.

I think too that one thing that's important is to decide beforehand -- what can I do? What would I be willing to do?

That is to say, some people really are willing to be activists. They will organize protests and boycotts and things like that.

Other people are in marginalized communities and are trying to get a feel for whether they should move to a different region or even a different country.

Some folks don't really have a plan but they want to stay informed. If at some point a magical line is crossed, they might suddenly say, "That's IT! I can't take it anymore! I have to DO SOMETHNG!" and that's when they'll become activists.

But some folks are realistically never going to lift a finger to help themselves or anybody else. They'll just bitch online and/or be stressed.

What I'm working on is figuring out in what ways I might, in the right situation, be moved to contribute. If things get really bad (and they will), what will I realistically be doing? I'm disabled, so I can't be out in the streets. If things get even worse, I might write about the niche public health / politics topics I've accidentally become an expert in. And if something happens where medicare and medicaid are shut off, well then all hospitals everywhere will basically be non-functional. This will be a crisis for all but most immediately for the chronically ill -- any of us at that point who are able to will be leaving the country ASAP.

In other words, I need to know enough to keep writing (which I would do anyways) and I need to know when things are hopeless enough that a person with a messed up spine should travel out of the country anyways. That is currently all I need to know because it's all that is actionable for me.

There is a massive temptation to doomscroll into infinity, but that merely serves the enemies of sanity. I know what happens next because I've read Sarah Kendzior and Hannah Arendt. It's not good. But I also know that one of the first things that happened during the anti-semitic purges in Nazi Germany was that a ton of Jews got appendicitis from stress. Sometimes the body wants to align with power so badly, it aligns even with evil power and against its own interests. We have to be very careful not to poison ourselves and make evil's job easier.

You can potentially rely on friends or family members to source such information (e.g., only one member of the household really needs to be checking the local group, etc...)

<< One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together.

Yes. I still have to be at least aware of what is happening for work reasons, but removing social media was one of the better decisions for my sanity ( I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well, which in itself is a concern suggesting further digital landscape deterioration ).

I considered some more obvious solutions ( from buying subscription to WSJ/FT to personal news aggregator -- and objective/neutral observer rewrite using LLM and they all are not exactly ideal ).

Here is the good news. All this chaos is an opportunity to stand something useful up. And I mean something useful that cannot be so easily dismantled by powers that be ( and there are already heavy indications they are aware people may try going outside the defined paths ).

> I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well

Yeah I agree that many HN comments are unfortunately pretty bad, but I think this should only motivate people like you and me to try harder to make HN a better place with constructive, useful comments :)

If you decide not to totally quit a network, do what I do:

1. Turn off all notifications, especially for replies, likes, and content suggestions.

2. Train yourself not to look for feedback on the things you do post as a matter of habit. Intentionally check on the important discussions IFF you _remember_ to do so.

3. If possible, hide or remove any karma-like indications. Your life is better if the internet points aren't visible.

Just use the webapp too, when possible. Remove all native apps on your phones. Don’t read emails.

4. If you do scroll social media and you see a bad post then "punish" the platform by leaving.

Isn’t this how they win? I mean the people in Germany in 1930 just said , this is crazy , it doesn’t feel right, but hey I have outrage fatigue so the concentration camps are just fine

Much of the German population in the 1930s and 1940s was not aware of concentration camps, and learned of them once the Allies arrived.

Early 30s, sure. Late 30s and 40s? You should qualify your statement with “this is a heated historical debate, but some people argue that…” Keep in mind the significant incentives to not seek out information, to disbelieve the information one did come across, and to lie after the war was over.

One of my neighbors when I grew up was part of Hitler Youth, and had moved to the US after the war. (for time context, I'm in my mid 30s, and he died a decade ago at IIRC 95 or 96, and I asked him about it maybe 20 years ago.)

I asked him if he and his fellow youths knew of anything. He said at first, no, but pretty quickly when all the jewish-owned businesses vanished almost overnight, everyone knew something was up. Did they know about the camps? Debatable. But even the kids knew that they jewish population was kicked out of society.

They definitely knew something was up. There were active roundups of victims and a staunch public policy of ghettos etc.

Laughably false, camps like Dachau were on newspapers and newsreels. Almost every Germans were aware that they were rounding up Jews and murdering them in camps.

The services go through phases (I suspect depending on botnet activity)...Middle of the day, Threads is a fun place to hang, 9pm? It's a wall of anxiety producing ragebait, 2am? It's even worse.

Looking at it on my phone, if I can see three entries and 2 are anxiety inducing, I close the app. (I'm 99% certain they get that telemetry too)

That said, I also had days where I doomscrolled instagram and thought 'it's been 20 minutes and I haven't seen anything entertaining yet.' And that's when I decided to drop it. (It was the only app I could chat with my kids with...we've since moved to other methods)

I haven't cut it out completely, but I'm not hyper aware of how I'm consuming it.

I think Minimum Effective Dose applies. I quit most media for 4 years. The next 2 years were 2 hrs/day on Reddit for jokes. It was the best.

But 1 year into that, I read an article by Swyx on how to use social media. I tried but gave up for another 2 years. But the end of that last 2 years was the election...and I was curious...so I went to X.

Within 3 days my opinion of the outcome flipped.

And...since I already read Swyx's article, I was ready to effectively navigate other topics of interest.

But the key to effective media usage is to ALWAYS be on guard. Your mental filters have to be running all the time. The second you drop your guard, you're vulnerable because the stream never lets up.

But when you do this, you find that you quickly run out of truly interesting things to read. Luckily I've also got physical hobbies. I now spend a TOTAL of 2 hrs/day across all media, and my mental health is just fine!

But also I find it highly rewarding in many areas such as investing, history (the X format works so well!), international (language, culture, politics).

I also highly recommend taking a second to put each post in scale or context. This does 2 things: helps decide importance of post, and slows scrolling so your brain doesn't get DDOSed into a mental health crisis.

And the (increasingly cheap, powerful and ubiquitous) LLMs can be used to either save time or power you further into the conversations.

> One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together.

This is hard to overstate. Checkout Jonathan Haidts research into social medias role in skyrocketing mental health problems in kids over the past decade.

The junkfood comparison is great. It feels good now but makes you extremely unhealthy long term. Its deceptive because it doesnt look that bad, but it displaces things that you actually need to be healthy.

> Checkout Jonathan Haidts research

I love that guy! He generally makes the rounds as a guest on most of the large podcasts and I’d recommend anyone listen to at least one podcast where he’s a guest.

I hope he becomes more influential. He is the tip of the spear in terms of combating the negative effects of social media and improving youth mental health.

Just want to add that, while Reddit is a huge time sink, it is pretty easy to just see the good parts of it:

- Mute any subreddit you do not enjoy

- Generously block any asshole in the comments

- Subscribe to the subreddits you do enjoy

- Create one or more themed multireddits of the subreddits you enjoy

My Reddit experience is cheesy feel good clips, cool videos of skilled people or weird occurences, funny niche humor and nerdy niche hobbies. No drama.

the same can be said about any social media. you can block/unfollow/mute anything, but it creeps through anyway.

I agree. My Reddit outrage addiction flares up every now and then and it makes my mental health objectively shitty. Doesn’t matter if there’s some good content and connection on there, it’s just not worth the (mental) cost.

Reddit is overwhelmingly fake information and covert ads. Investigate any random post on the front page of /r/all, even if it's just like a cute gif of an old person, then go to the comments. Like 75% chance there is something fake or made up about the title or context. It's such a mind pollutant, I can't stand it.

In my opinion reddit is still such a great community if you subscribe to topics that interest you and leave the default subreddits. There's plenty of subreddits that I would not be able to find a good alternative forum for, maybe a Facebook group exists here and there but is that really better?

Good for you for being able to ignore /r/all, /r/popular, etc. I just can't, I always end up relapsing.

This is to be expected for /r/all. But who cares because why would anyone want to go there in the first place? In general once something becomes a certain size wrt users, its value to those users plummets. The only thing to do is leave.

Completely agree. Sounds like we're similarly on the older end of Gen Z, and getting off social media in my first year of college was excellent. I get messages in my group chats from friends being pissed off (often rightfully) by things that our out of their control, but they're force-fed it on social media.

It doesn't help to stare at rage/anxiety inducing things - it doesn't mean you're actually informed all the time.

Plus I'd argue that most things you'll see end up being hogwash and the important stuff will rise to the top and you're generally hear about it anyway.

Just be aware than while HN appears to carry a wide range of interesting topics and discussions both the community and mods do have biases. It presents an incomplete and skewed perspective and has to be consumed in moderation as part of a balanced diet.

A lot of submissions are flagged every day. Some of them are well offtopic, repetitive or judged to be too biased or political and clearly if the site allowed all submissions it would break.

The act of curation is a form of censorship and while it is often justified, many posts about topical developments that have a technical/financial angle, perhaps even posted by technical/financial media or bloggers and featuring people who are well known in the technical/financial field appear to be getting flagged in ways that could appear to be politically motivated.

Pointless outrage over trivialities isn't good for us but when issues of genuine concern arise we shouldn't go out of our way to avoid them because they make us feel bad. We are supposed to feel bad when things are bad as it provokes us to action. The media/tech industry exploits our behavioral quirks to keep us engaged on their platforms but the fatique caused by the fire hose could numb us to real dangers. Disconnecting is very good for personal wellbeing but not to the point of dangerous ignorance.

Good on you. I have been pushing the idea of leaving social media to people for well over a decade now, for the same of people learning to communicate with each other in more meaningful ways and improve their mental health. It worked for me and everyone that actually listened to me.

But the emotionally violent resistance I get from people who are embedded in it is wild. I've commented on here before and subsequently pissed people off, but it is an addiction and needs to be treated like one.

Not sure if you’ve intentionally omitted it but I would also include YouTube in this list. YouTube can be very addictive with all the clickbait thumbnails etc.

haha yeah that's where you inject custom CSS on the page to hide thumbnails, come to YouTube to see something? no thumbnails to distract your original intent

do you have a link to instructions on how to do that? It sounds really nice.

by chrome extension, chrome extensions are pretty straight forward to build but yeah, you just inject a CSS file that hides what you want

you don't have to release the extension, you just load it unpackaged by developer mode in the extensions settings

> Not sure if you’ve intentionally omitted it but I would also include YouTube in this list

Yeah I did conciously omit it actually, but only because I consider Youtube to be basic internet infrastructure and quite valuable if used right.

However, for me personally, I've actually blocked Youtube from Chrome when not in incognito mode to keep me signed out by default and I've also completely blocked the site from my iPad (and ofc I also don't have the app installed).

I unfortunately struggle with some form of social media addiction and I've made pretty dramatic changes to keep myself away from these sites.

I reduced my news intake to a daily email from reuters + HN. Special thanks go to AI, as reddit and others no longer allow reading content without login.

Interesting. What's your setup ?

A World Wide Web browser.

You've mentioned AI so thought you had something different

I meant that, because of AI scrapers, reddit is no longer accessible)

Thanks for your comment. Same here, Gen X. Off social media since pandemic. As Nassim Taleb says if it's really important someone will tell you. I feel like I'm on an island. I'm never outraged at all. Of course I hope there's more justice and equity in the world, but I am at peace with things and have no hatred or rage compared to when I was glued to social media.

I have tried to quit social media many times, but I end up using something again after a few weeks. It usually happens when I'm too tired to think about anything like games, or to read an article, or when I have a lot of waiting time without a lot of entertainment (eg airports). I wonder what do you do during those times?

> I wonder what do you do during those times?

When I’m really brain-tired but have downtime, I’ll 1) do nothing and just think in silence, 2) listen to a podcast or music or 3) watch Netflix.

Spotify and Netflix are definitely media apps but they don’t quite have that same negative and addictive effect that normal social media apps do.

> ...equivalent of digital junk food

Love it! Well, I hate that this situation exists, but the metaphor is great.

digital junk food. I haven't stumbled across this term and I gotta say as someone whose right on the edge between millenial and genz this term summarizes what most "public" social media is. I'm old enough to have grown up mostly with TV, with Internet being my escape hatch and twitter/facebook/tiktok/insta feel waaaay closer to old schoold programming TV than Internet. Anyway I'm an Internet person, not a TV person, so I've quit using all of them (I do have some "just in case" unused in years accounts everywhere because I suffer from a bad case of FOMO...)

I think that the social media is okay as long as no algorithmic feed gets involved. Visiting a few select tech subreddits doesn't affect me negatively. On other platforms the feed can't be avoided as easily.

True. Curate who you follow carefully, and stay away from that "for you" tab

I find that just muting anyone who has anything to do with politics on facebook works well for me. I go on facebook to see your cutesy images and how your life is going not for long political diatribes.

For some short time, that worked for me, until facebook noticed that I was spending less time on it. Then, they started to push posts from other politics-related accounts (especially from ones at the side of the spectrum I used to antagonize most with). That was 4 years ago. I left that crap and didn't look back.

I did the same. I have some exceptions for technical topics on Reddit. I also still use Facebook in a very drilled down state (looking into it every 3-5 months and checking in with some remote friends). I have also set up my own Mastodon server, which is fine for niche topics and I can reach out to interesting people directly, where other channels fail (email). I heavily rely on RSS, particularly from people that I trust or who gained my trust over longer periods.

I thank myself for having avoided social media so far. I've also developed a keen eye for headlines that lead to "outrage articles" which I avoid.

> I've also developed a keen eye for headlines that lead to "outrage articles" which I avoid.

That's critical. My YouTube rule these days is to block any channel with a video name or thumbnail that says something like "This is why you fail at XYZ" or other statements designed to evoke an emotional response from me. And on top of that, I try to only click on videos where the title/thumbnail is properly informative, exposing the content rather than trying to hide it behind a vague hook. Hooks like "You won't believe this one trick!" and fluff like that, titles/thumbnails that should introduce the trick, not just allude to it.

Another dead giveaway is "X is outraged by Y."

I need social media for work.

What I did was unfollow everyone and everything, and block all suggested content. The front page is literally empty. Nothing on those websites captures my attention unless I specifically look for it.

This was very effective. These websites have effectively become write-only media for me. They're still here if I need them, but I end up browsing just one page of /r/curatedtumblr and then doing something else.

I’m still on social media (HN, YouTube and Reddit), but blocked all other news sites. They’re mostly about outrage too.

Many people don't even realize how much better they'd feel until they step away for a while.

The challenge for me is that there is useful stuff in there that I want to access.

There are neighbourhood groups and other really useful forums on Facebook. There are tech discussions on BlueSky.

But it's annoyingly hard to run the gauntlet of politics and outrage bait to get to the stuff I actually want.

We have to be aware of our disregulation as they try to swarm us with seemingly unstoppable energy. That is the point onslaught.

Take a breather, compose your emotions, take off hours or a days, but then re-engage, interact, observe, document, etc.

I basically agree, which is why it's kind of funny to see all the discussion in other threads here with people arguing about why can't ban AI or how Facebook was good because it created market value or whatever. Most of those platforms would be better off just outright banned.

I do think, though, that for at least some platforms it's possible to use them in a limited way where you confine yourself to relatively small communities that are focused on some common interest that genuinely brings together people who enjoy sharing it. You mentioned Discord for instance and that's one, if you can find the right servers. I think it's possible to do that on Reddit too. You just have to never visit the "front page" and stick only to subreddits that you actually get value out of. It's harder approaching impossible with ones like Facebook that are more doggedly algorithm-driven and don't put moderation in the control of users in the same way.

Of course, the lurking issue is that putting moderation in the control of users is building the platform on free labor and those good subcommunities are at risk of imploding when cracks emerge in the dike separating them from the wider platform userbase. And that's likely to happen because even those "safely usable" platforms are ultimately beholden to VC money that's going to demand enshittification eventually.

Cohost was by far the best attempt I've seen for many years, but sadly couldn't make a go of it in the toxic ecosystem we've got.

> Most of those platforms would be better off just outright banned.

In general, the goal should be improvement of humans, not avoidance of negative stimuli. Something has to exist where humans are rewarded for aligning to truth and reality, rather than emotion.

> Something has to exist where humans are rewarded for aligning to truth and reality, rather than emotion.

I more or less agree. Thus the humans who created and enshittified such platforms should be correspondingly punished for their disalignment to truth and reality. It's not just about rewarding "consumers" of stimuli; the creators and promulgators of stumili also need to be incentivized (and disincentivized) in just the manner you mention.

>LinkedIn

I really hate this one in particular. Why did the biggest Job board become another Facebook (but more blatantly trying to sell you stuff)? This is a hard one to leave unless you're very comfortable in your job prospects.

> This is a hard one to leave unless you're very comfortable in your job prospects.

I know! I'm currently looking for work so have been forced to use it a bit, but once I find my next position, I'm out!

My take is almost the opposite, that it's important to develop healthy social networking insofar as there is some alternative to the outrage. It takes effort though.

I'm going to offer my two accounts as examples

https://mastodon.social/@UP8

https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social

both of these are 'cyborg' accounts in that I have my RSS reader, classifier and autoposter. I am looking to build a lot more automation.

My Mastodon feed took a large set of rules to block out #uspol and certain communities of miserable people. My feed has stayed outrage-free since last month.

My measurements showed that Bluesky's 'Discover' feed blocked about 75% of emotionally negative material before Jan 20, since then people are inflamed but looking closely at my feed it seems they are deliberately trying to help certain people who felt stuck on X to migrate, that is, giving huge amounts of visibility to journalists, journalism professors, activists, and such so that they can run up 200k+ follower counts.

I understand. (I've been brainstorming ideas about "how to get people off X" with a friend and tonight I'm going to tell him that Bluesky has it) I've used "less like this", "unfollow" [1], "mute", "block" and such and my discover feed is getting good again.

I have two classifiers in the development pipeline, one to detect "screenshots of text" and "image memes", also a text classifier that is better at sentiment than my current one (I think ModernBERT + LSTM should be possible to train reliably, unlike fine-tuned BERTs.) I'm not so much interested in classifying posts as I am in classifying people; some of them are easy, there are 40,000 people who have a certain image meme pinned that I know I never want to follow. Just recently I figured out how to make training sets for these things without having to look too closely at a lot of toxic content.

I'm also eliminating the dependencies that are keeping this from being open sourced or commercialized so I may I have something to share this summer.

[1] one strike for an outrage post

Wow that sounds awesome. I was thinking of doing something like that but never had the time to commit.

I find LinkedIn a healthy collection of professional accomplishments with minimal news. It’s also not very addictive.

However, shitty newsfeeds like Google news are my bane. I can’t stop.

I have seen an increasing amount of Trump non sense popping up more and more from the VC community the past 6 months on LI

that's because VC and billionaires know when a party is winning, and when the other party is unvotable for 10+ years.

I find LinkedIn to be the worse of the social media sites. My feed is full of wannabe “thought leaders”, people posting about a meaningless vendor certificate they got, recruiters giving advice, people who can’t get a job or were recently laid off, etc.

But now, politics is getting involved because people are having government job offers rescinded and the entire federal government is in a free fall like a 3rd world banana republic.

> My feed is full of wannabe “thought leaders”

Block them, it's easy. I have only close friends and coworkers that I don't hate on that site.

you'll be spending every day blocking people, speaking from experience. Your dam can only push back so much.

> It’s also not very addictive.

For me, it's quite addictive unfortunately, even though I agree that it's pretty dull.

For better or worse, news flows through social media, so this approach basically amounts to ignoring all the bad stuff going on. If you read HN, chances are you can probably safely get through the next four years doing this. But as the saying goes, "first they came for the communists..."

Always prioritize your own wellbeing first.

I still find value in some of these but just focused to a specific use case for each

Reddit - hobbies

Instagram - catching up with friends

LinkedIn - Job Search

You can get just as outraged by diving deep into official government PDFs and finding out by yourself from the source what they are doing.

Sticking your head in the sand is of course a "solution", but that is willfully choosing to be nothing more than a subject to the rulers.

Another solution is to limit your news intake and your political passion to the things that have the most real implications on your life and on the people you care about, while limiting your own exposure and vulnerability to governments as much as possible.

HN, WhatsApp, and Discord are also junk food depending on how you use them.

Is WhatsApp really considered social media? I mainly use it as my sms alternative.

Depends how you use it. Once there were groups, it became quite similar - but since Telegram became so much better at it and I used it for some special groups and contacts - I now suddenly had lots of groups with subgroups and notifications for people liking my posts or replying to it - that suddenly I had social media again. What works for me is uninstalling it once in a while and only come back if I feel a specific need.

It can be and is in other countries, ones that didn't have unlimited SMS for 15+ years. It usually isn't in the US, though.

Have more self respect and consume a better information diet of printed media.

So the only things you check are HN, WhatsApp and Discord?

Yes. However I occasionally hop on LinkedIn for its job board, YouTube to watch a tutorial or Reddit when I’ve made something that I wanna share like a project or a meme. Other than that, I avoid these sites like the absolute plague. I virtually never browse them for fun.

So do you check world events? Like geopolitics?

Yeah it sure is nice this way isn’t it! It’s pretty boring, but you get to form your own opinions about things, and aren’t constantly mad about things that don’t affect you. I’ll admit to scrolling HN a lot, but I at least get a lot of very useful info out of it, it has leveled me up in unexpected ways over the years.

> you get to form your own opinions about things

Yeah! That's one of the cool things I first noticed when I stopped consuming as much news: I started to form my own unique and nuanced opinions.

It's actually pretty surprising when you learn about how many of your opinions were just absorbed through culture and media and not really 'your own'.

what are your sources for news?

> what are your sources for news?

Unironically, my friends, family and colleagues. If anything truly important happens that ends up being relevant to me, the probability that one of them tells me is close to 100%. I don’t need the news or social media for that.

Discord suffers from the same problems; censorship platforms in general have the same cancer everywhere.

Same, I participate is very curated, self-selected communities online and that's it. I don't know how others who don't can do it.

Good luck out there.

Eh I wouldn't have known a friend died if I didn't occasionally log into FB.

I wouldn't have known that my best friend from middle school lost her house.

I wouldn't have known that a family member was pregnant.

But yeah, I feel like news stuff is better curated elsewhere, because outrage keeps eyeballs viewing, so algorithmic feeds tend to highlight it.

> I wouldn't have known that a family member was pregnant.

Wait... how?

Your family only communicate via facebook?

I'm not judging here, I'm genuinely curious

It was a cousin on my dad's side, they don't live near me and we just don't talk that much directly.

In my personal experience from X, Facebook, Reddit and HN: The place with the worst takes, most rage inducing, most filled with conspiracy theories, falsehoods and misinformation is HN.

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