Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

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> - It is better to not use social media. You never know if you are discussing with normal person, a political party troll, or Russian troll.

Completely valid, but there is a middleground of very deliberately curating your social media:

- Avoid using services that are engineered for outrage and views

- be ruthless with who you follow and block (someone trying to drum up some unimportant javascript outrage? get them off your feed)

- for twitter-likes, mute phrases from your timeline like crazy (included in my muted words is plainly trump, kamala, elon, gop, democrats, doge, dei, covid, etc)

- always be skeptical that everyone else online is some PSYOP effort, even those that share views you politically align with

It is possible to use social media, but you must have agency over it and not allow it to just happen to you. That's why I'm much more enthusastic about decentralised/open and non-commercial social networks because they currently give users much more control.

Don't disagree with you, but I'll counter with 2 big issues:

1. the services themselves continually change, and are incentivized to get much more manipulative, and much, much worse. I used to use LinkedIn as an employment network, and now it's a full-on social media hub (though weirdly positive in a very phony way...) even HN has changed for the worse (despite the efforts of dang)

2. won't someone think of the kids? in seriousness though, they're struggling to build agency over themselves; how can they be expected to control social media, and to pile on, it's the only world they've ever known?

> the services themselves continually change

Nothing is perfect, and nothing is immune to change, but that's why I'm attracted to open, and non-commercial social networks. Non-commercial networks have less incentives to enshittify, and being decentralised/open can act as a relief value to give more control to users (like Bluesky's labellers) and help counteract any changes they do make for the worse.

> won't someone think of the kids?

not me. I don't see why I children using social media should impact my decision about how I spend my time?

Can you give some examples of decentralized/open and non-commercial networks? I would be very interested to use such platforms but I don’t know of them (nor do the people in my life, unfortunately)!

In agreement with all your points above.

Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/

Good points about how to better use social media but I don’t personally think the benefits outweigh the downsides

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