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Comment by mrcwinn | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't agree more. It's like when you see headlines claiming "people" are outraged by a jeans advertisement. Are they really? Who? How many? Really I think it's just something to argue about for entertainment's sake.

Outside of bullying, which I do think is a real risk for kids, I don't feel like the time I spend on social media is unhealthy at all. Granted I'm mostly YouTube, zero percent IG or Facebook. I'm really grateful for what Google bought/built.

Excuse me now as I need to go watch a short that explains the difference between Australian and British accents. Very important, goodbye!

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> Excuse me now as I need to go watch a short that explains the difference between Australian and British accents. Very important, goodbye!

I also am a big fan of YouTube for exactly this reason, but you need to be careful.

There's all kinds of great educational content on there.

But, for anything "political" or controversial, YouTube can get toxic very quickly. I believe this is going to be true for most social media as long as engagement is the KPI. It directly incentivizes echo chambers, ragebait, and all kinds of terrible discourse.

> I don't feel like the time I spend on social media is unhealthy at all. Granted I'm mostly YouTube, zero percent IG or Facebook.

This is a good point. Social media isn’t unhealthy if you don’t use it

I use Instagram mostly for educational and artistic content.

It's generally a positive experience for me. It's not the network but what people follow there.

> It's like when you see headlines claiming "people" are outraged by a jeans advertisement. Are they really? Who? How many? Really I think it's just something to argue about for entertainment's sake.

The media activist classes were absolutely genuinely offended by it; here are two mainstream pieces from July 28th, five days after the ad campaign launched:

The Washington Post discussing how the ad's tagline reminded them of "the DHS Instagram account, which posted a subtly racist painting a few weeks ago and an explicitly racist painting last week":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2025/07/28/sydney-sween...

An MSNBC opinion piece, by an MSNBC producer: "Sydney Sweeney's ad shows an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness":

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/sydney-sweeney-a...

"The advertisement, the choice of Sweeney as the sole face in it and the internet’s reaction reflect an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness, conservatism and capitalist exploitation. Sweeney is both a symptom and a participant."

Aren't like MSNBC and CNBC part of the same group? isn't CNBC a news channel about capitalism and the free market?

I find it so odd when billion dollar corporations publish pieces like that... like, can't you first look in the mirror? this weird alliance between economic liberalism and that neo marxist intersectionality is so... hypocritical...

> I couldn't agree more. It's like when you see headlines claiming "people" are outraged by a jeans advertisement. Are they really? Who? How many? Really I think it's just something to argue about for entertainment's sake.

It is a common tactic to create a new controversy to take attention away from a much more important topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring

The whole Sydney Sweeney Jeans Advert "controversy" felt like it was AstroTurf-ed.

Less than a few weeks ago. Trump was getting a huge amount of pressure about the lack of transparency with the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. All of that seems to have been forgotten now (or that is at least is my impression).

> I couldn't agree more. It's like when you see headlines claiming "people" are outraged by a jeans advertisement.

Well, it turns out that some people are actually outraged by a jeans ads... the problem is that these social networks tend to amplify these sort of divise issues for engagement purposes.

My problem with Twitter/X was that, for instance I was following somebody in 2010's who talked about Javascript and Node, only to end up with that person constantly ranting about partisan issues that had nothing to do with it (especially after Trump election), but at the time, Twitter provided no way to limit feeds to center of interests. That made me quit the platform and I imagine it's getting way wore now...

Sounds almost like we need something similar to Google+'s circles, but instead of just being able to tag followers/followees into categories, it'd also be useful to be able to tag your own posts into different feeds that people can individually follow or avoid (hashtags aren't really robust enough for this).

Of course, if you see everyone following you for topic X but that nobody wants to hear your opinion about anything else, I can imagine that making it feel like people are just using you as a tool, and that decreasing incentive to participate in the whole thing. But it'd be interesting to try at scale.

It's funny you talk about Google Plus. the only reason I didn't stay more than 10 minutes on that social media is because of that horrible sticky header that was taking 1/3 of the browser screen on a laptop.

How could that design choice go past basic UI/UX checks is still beyond me after all these years, it made that website horrible to browse.

I don't remember an annoying header bar, and that's beside the topic of algorithms and content. I do think the UX of circles themselves were much better than e.g. Facebook lists-- circles were much more visual, easier to add/remove people in (drag and drop!), and much more central to the posting experience, which all made them easier to understand and more universally used. Facebook lists feel like an after-thought that only power users even know about at all, and Twitter hashtag/word block lists feel like a heavy-handed last resort rather than something everyone's supposed to use.

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