Comment by ookblah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ookblah | Hacker News Reader

unrelated, but i logged in the other day to fb after months away (after the school and charlie kirk shooting b/c i was curious). huge mistake, every other feed item was something political either from a friend or some random page. the experience was decidedly worse than the last time i logged in. i had not been engaging in months and i could instantly feel the pull of wanting to respond or react to something inflammatory. promptly deleted the app again.

SM in its current form is truly a cancer on society. i can't say IG is that much better, but at least i can sort of curate what i want to see and i still see photos from friends and such and just random ads. i know it's just pointless scrolling for a few mins. FB truly is one of those pull you into the echo chamber to tell and show you how to think and it only took a few minutes. i don't even know what years of that does to you.

anecdotally, most people my age already left for other pastures. the ones left there are largely those who joined up to connect back when FB was actually useful and are now around for the ragebait.

Everyone refers to FB and IG as the representatives of social media. FB is a ghost town, and IG is a major advertising online. (I also have said nice things about using FB while in Japan, all of which stand for the time in which I said them; I don't let my children use either.)

What I really find annoying is that Reddit never comes up in these discussions. Just because people tend to agree with the bias doesn't change the fact that it has no doubt left people radicalised. I was watching an Ezra Klein interview with some pollsters after the election, and it even shocked me the level of difference between what polling showed as of importance to most Americans, and what Reddit portrayed as being the common American opinion.

It's a cancer, just like Twitter, but no one ever mentions it. Not even Trump, who you would think would want to squash this safe space.

(I am indulging a bit in conspiracies, but the Elgins Air Force Base conspiracy seems more and more likely given how this site goes unnamed in the US, despite being so busy and so weird)

reddit largely went the same way as FB for me and it's continuing full steam, but for now i can at least stick to topics i want to lurk about. never saw the need for twitter or tiktok (former i can't express myself adequately and the entire place felt like hot takes. tiktok i suppose is like the next level IG but i'm happy being the older guy getting the "trickle down" content to ig heh).

everything is so polarized and vitriolic now to gain views. i used to love online discussion and debate. i find it a fruitless endeavor the majority of the time now. mainly just to give my 2 cents as some kind of self-carthasis lol. HN is probably the only place i bother to expend actual energy writing a comment.

reddit has a lot of sick puppies of all sorts and kinds. that is not a place of wellness in any sense ime.

> FB is a ghost town

I've done surveys in cities about what social media people use and came to the same conclusion. However, I was completely wrong.

Facebook is so alive and well it's hard to believe. Besides that they skillfully connected two ecosystems together and there is much more people having FB than IG. Stories show up in messenger and quietly lead back to facebook just as links to fb videos people send to each other frequently.

It's just that people simply lie in their actual usage patterns because it's really uncool.

Primary people's identity online is still their Facebook profile.

> > FB is a ghost town

FB is not a ghost town, you think that it is because no "thought leader" of the stuff you are interested in (tech, finance, business, stock market etc.) has their major presence or main channel of distribution of content on FB as they are mostly on YT and Twitter.

I called it a "ghost town" because none of my friends post on it anymore. There is nothing social about it, it is like a message board at this time.

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