Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on. I asked them why they didn’t tell me and they were confused. They said the posted it on social media. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely. I have a few close friends and that’s it.
Maybe that’s an ok tradeoff to make, but it’s worth knowing that before getting into it.
This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post blasted to hundreds (or thousands) of people. Or, to put it another way: if you mattered, you would've gotten a direct message or call from them.
I'd argue that social media has normalized keeping up with people who aren't supposed to be part of your life forever. But, we should take a step back and realize that not everything should or will last forever. If you cross paths again then you can catch up, but having life updates constantly? No thanks.
That ignores the asymmetry of a lot of life events. For example, if a parent died, I'm not going to call everyone in my life to tell them, I would have more important stuff on my mind. I might post it on social media and then the onus is on other people to reach out to me. And if someone doesn't reach out, it will hurt the relationship a little even if I'm not conscience of it because when I think of people who were there for me during a tough time, the friend who never knew my parent died wouldn't come to mind.
quitting social media is not, on its own, going to fix your social life. and being on social media can make you more connected, or more miserable. the responsibility is yours
YMMV, but my quality of life increased in ways I can't even begin to describe by severing all the dozens or perhaps hundreds of shallow connections social media was encouraging me to cling to.
With the saved time and energy, I've been able to cultivate far fewer-- but much deeper and more (mutually) fulfilling-- connections with those who are _actually_ important.
I don't miss any of that. Those connections were beyond shallow, and weren't adding anything positive or useful to my life.
I think this advice is generally harmful to networking as someone grows, which is vital in today's society
GP mentions "severing" those connections, but I think that's even too strong a phrasing. There wasn't really anything there in the first place, so there wasn't anything to sever. Simply not reading someone else's social media posts anymore, when you didn't really interact with them outside Facebook (or for some people even inside Facebook) isn't really severing anything.
If someone's goal is to achieve CEO and/or the top 1%, certainly every single connection could hold extricable value. I'm perfectly fine hovering somewhere in the middle, even knowing I have the capability to achieve much more. My future is uncertain; I probably won't retire when I would have liked. I've accepted that, and choose to live in the present rather than focusing on the future. I know at least I won't die miserable tomorrow.
I don't deny I could have done better financially by maintaining the status quo. Now that I think of it, I'm doing worse financially than when I was using facebook & twitter. I had more money, and my career was progressing at a much higher rate, but I was inconsolable. Without the money, and without the accompanying social media-imposed drag, I see the world more clearly. My relationships are stronger with my wife, kids, and close friends. I am much happier.
2. Keep the other accounts, just in case.
3. How exactly are remote connections helping? In the Western world, for example, people you haven't interacted with for months and months in real life for sure won't help you financially. For jobs stuff like LinkedIn is probably better, plus regular chats on 1 instant messenger. You don't need Instagram to keep up with them.
With GitHub and Discord, these 3 are really hard to boycott for programmers (even more to publicly shame people for using them). And yet, we must dissent.
What I see over years is that, especially in developers online groups, any usual and normal way of socializing is stigmatized. I remember reading comments about how lazy people who socialize with friends are and how we are better if we code every evening. I remember people being proud about spending christmas coding supposedly being superior to the rest of the family that is socializing.
Now we are proud if we remove ourselves from social media.
It is always the same - however other people socialize is wrong, they are stupid and lazy. We remove ourselves, because it is superior to not participate. Eventually those places die out or change, but we do not like the new places either.
And in each iteration, we expect other people to do work of keeping and managing relationships while feeling superior over not doing that.
The role social media plays is in encouraging large numbers of superficial relationships, rather than a small handful of deep ones. It stands to reason: I don't need facebook to keep in touch with a dozen close family and friends. I can do that perfectly well in person, or over phone calls/messages. What the various social media apps did was kill the close circle of friends in favor of having 1000s of followers and turn everyone into a one-way broadcaster.
Developers are not typical of regular people. They're, basically by design, outliers.
You make it sound as if something was lost, maybe recently. In the grand scheme of things I'm not that old (41) but I don't even remember how that would have worked out, because I wasn't old enough to have people's parents die before social media, at least in my social circles. Yes, of course you'd hear about grandparents and such from your immediate friends but that's usually a handful and people would maybe not be shaken as much. I agree with you that social media doesn't have to mean "blasting it to hundreds or thousands of followers", but it's a thing where I actually liked Facebook. Not only techies, and getting enough updates from people who are not your closest friends that you have things to talk about (as in reference) when you met again (or talked synchronously, or privately).
You are not characteristic for the population at large (neither am I, don't feel sad :-) ).
It makes me really sad if it's true that people assume that when they post big, difficult stuff like that on social media, anyone who doesn't see it doesn't care about them. Even for people who are active on social media, the feed and post promotion algorithms make it fairly likely that a decent chunk of people who really should see that post might not see it.
That seems so bizarre. Just 20+ years ago this sort of sympathy seeking broadcasting action was associated with mental health illness, like Munchausen Biproxy. Yes, back in the day if tragedy happened people would take deliberate effort to call each other.
The aggressiveness of your response is absurd. No, it was not seen as a mental health illness at all.
When you expect personal one to one call, it is equivalent of removing yourself from other social structures in the past. You can do it, but your relationships will weaken and eventually die out. Just like it happened in the past.
You read the obituaries in your local paper, “oh, so and so has passed away”, you don’t know them particularly well, might or might not go to the funeral.
Posting it to social media, then thinking if whoever doesn’t contact you to… what? “Sorry for your loss”? “My condolences” … hurts your relationship with that person?
Call me old fashioned, but…
Is it narcissistic in here, or is it just me?
That's not what anyone said, you're out here fighting ghosts.
> And if someone doesn't reach out, it will hurt the relationship a little even if I'm not conscience of it because when I think of people who were there for me during a tough time, the friend who never knew my parent died wouldn't come to mind.
Technology changes the world around us.
Apart from phoning the airline or airport and checking whether the flight was on time. We used to do that all the time 30+ years ago.
20 years ago you could check on websites IIRC.
Back when men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
Instant messaging and group chat, I’d argue, are distinct services / protocols / products vis-à-vis social media.
Strained analogies are weird. I like to call them sieved analogies, the other definition of strained.
I strained your analogy and threw out the dross.
The "protocols vs platforms" struggle is more relevant than ever.
(I am surprised that GP doesn't seem to have heard of Mastodon?)
I think I once used it to advise someone it’s owned my Facebook and sent them my public key.
There was another discussion where this came up on HN recently, but people get quite emotionally defensive when you start scrutinizing their reasons for staying on social media, so it is hard to have an honest conversation about it without a bunch of hyperbolic takes.
In my experience, it was designed to be addictive, partly by using our own behavior against us and partly by vindicating the desire for attention. The idea that we need to be sharing every aspect of our personal narrative with the world is problematic, as it turns out, but we are so steeped in it that's there's no chance of purifying those waters, again.
To your point, yes, there was some aspect of this back in the day, what with obituaries in newspapers being out there to both acknowledge that a person lived, but also put out the call to any old acquaintances to come say goodbye, but it was a laughable effort by today's standards of maximum self-aggrandizing and competitive social engagement. We have to ask ourselves if that is a socially and mentally healthy position to be in, which is an admittedly scary question.
What does this mean?
> The idea that we need to be sharing every aspect of our personal narrative with the world is problematic
I know about one or two people who does this. And it's far away from an obituary.
I'm not quite sure I get what you a saying. I just meant in my upbringing it was quite normal to share publicly when someone died. And they still do it today.
Apologies if my wording was too vague. I am using 'Self-aggrandizing' to mean a high exhibition of self-importance, or to put it another way, advertising one's self in a way that makes minor events or details seem bigger than they are. I am using 'competitive social engagement' as an alternative phrase to "Keeping up with the Joneses" which illustrates comparing yourself to your neighbors in terms of status, wealth, moral fiber, etc.
The invention of Social Media propelled us into extreme versions of these two very-human aspects of our psychology, which I believe to be both dangerous and ill-fated.
My intention was not to attack in any way, I just thought your reference to obituaries was an interesting link to our past prior to social media that was worth exploring and comparing. In a way, we can think of our Facebook profile as an extended obituary since that data is all accessible after we die. In fact, I am experiencing this on Instagram, having just lost a friend on New Year's Day and sitting down to peruse his old Instagram posts for the happy memories therein. Your comment just got me thinking, so I decided to expound on it.
added: I should maybe clarify that I'm of an age that remembers what the world was like before Social Media and the Internet as we know it today. The differences when I compare those two halves of my life tend to be alarmingly drastic, which is something that warrants examination, to me, since many HN readers might be a bit too young to remember, so from their perspective, Social Media habits are likely more normalized.
I also had no social media in my upbringing, a bit of ICQ via dial up though. Got an Facebook account and smartphone way later compared to my peers.
Do you have a reference for the claim that the diagnostic criteria for Munchausen By Proxy (or Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another) once included broadcast-type notices when a family member dies? The DSM-IV would have been in effect 20 years ago, and while version 5 doesn't have that in its warning signs, I guess it could have changed from the previous version?
We got a real pot, meet kettle situation here. It is absolutely wild to suggest that doing something standard like arranging for an obituary in the local newspaper would be viewed as a sign of mental illness.
But these days, I don’t even know where to even buy a newspaper, let alone make sure everyone is reading it and keeping up with local news.
So social media it is, which sucks because they’re extremely edited and filtered out by the algorithm.
My feeling is that if you only get updates about someone's life via their blasts on social media, you're not really friends. So why do you need to hear about all that stuff?
And you would have to understand socialization if you wanted to know why people published life events to the newspaper - births, deaths, graduations, marriages, etc.
Not everything in the world is for your bestest friends. It’s OK to not have close friends.
I very much would think your parents would expect that of their children.
>I'm not going to call everyone in my life to tell them
It's particularly the people in your parents life you should inform, not necessarily the people in your life.
Don't forget that your social media network is not the same as your parent's social media network (if at all they use it).
Nobody can expect that everyone is on social media, let alone a specific platform. You typically tell your family and some close friends and they will spread the word.
and yet people died quite often before social media; what did we do then?
If the realtionship is built upon the foundation of social media, it's actually not that strong, absent social media. We'll be fine.
Imagine deleting your email and telephone in 1999 and saying "if they were really my friend, they would drive/fly to my house and talk to me".
Also some people back then would brag about not having a TV, the same way vegans still do today.
This is the toupée fallacy mixed in with something else I haven’t yet put a name on.
Most vegans don’t brag about being vegan, just like most TVless people don’t brag about not having a TV. Some people are assholes and brag about anything, and some of those do the things you mentioned. It’s orders of magnitude more common to see people complaining about vegans (or, for an HN example, Apple users) than the actual bragging. It’s a meme, not the reality.
That said I could have used airplane pilots for the same example (also based on personal experience).
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacy
You only know about the people who let you know. You have no idea how many vegans or airplane pilots you encounter regularly who never tell you. A small sample is driving the reputation of the whole.
For people with whom you talk every day, it’s no surprise that you know. It’s bound to come up but I doubt it happened on your first conversation with everyone. If it did, you were hanging out with a weird group. If they knew each other, it’s normal that they’d talk about a shared interest. Just like people who hang out on HN would be likely to discuss tech when meeting in person.
I have no doubt you found your share of asshole vegans, just like there are assholes who make it a point to make everyone know they eat meat.
Though it is important to distinguish a true asshole from someone simply sharing an experience. Saying “no, thanks, I’m vegan” when offered a bite of a meat sandwich is not bragging, it’s context. Unfortunately, too many people take it to be a judgement when it most often is not.
I guess the thing I’m getting from you is I shouldn’t comment on my own observations because of toupee bias, and I shouldn’t comment on other people’s common observations because they are just memes an not real. Is there an acceptable threshold for situational humor short of a scientific study? If so, what is it?
I know, I didn’t say you did. In my first reply I said:
> Some people are assholes and brag about anything
And it’s that narrow definition I’ve been using throughout.
> I guess the thing I’m getting from you is I shouldn’t comment on my own observations
No, of course that’s not it. We can all comment on our own observations, but it’s also important to differentiate from what we each observe as individuals and what we believe the world to be. We shouldn’t let our limited view of the world cloud our understanding of how it is.
> Is there an acceptable threshold for situational humor short of a scientific study?
Were you doing situational humour? I reread your comments and can’t find the joke¹. Judging from the grey colour in the original comment, it doesn’t look like I was the only one to miss it if that was the intention.
Though I will say unambiguously that I don’t think you’re arguing in bad faith. From my perspective, this has been a cordial chat.
¹ I guess the newspaper comment was a joke, but calling that situational seems like a stretch.
HN in general does not like humorous tones, or at least has a mixed reception, I notice a lot of times where my comments go back and forth between +3/-2. This one probably is a worse one. It’s observational like Seinfeld, but then I don’t really like Seinfeld’s style so I probably shouldn’t have written it in the first place.
That said a well written joke at the right time has gotten me over +50. But as I said I probably shouldn’t have been writing here at all that day, nothing good was going to be posted.
The video was interesting too, I’ll have a look at that channel. Thanks for sharing.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY62dhVThbee...
I also recommend these two earlier videos, on unrelated matters.
Edit: Jokes aside, I'm vegan and I don't own a TV. Coincidence? Haha
The landscape of human relationships is deep and broad an varied, and if making bold assumptions about what other people should value is your starting point, you're liable to miss a lot of potential connections.
are you really? If you only notice that it's Bob's birthday because you get a FB reminder and the only form of communication is a post on their timeline once a year that's not a connection, that's like talking to your neighbor about the weather out of courtesy because it's awkward to say nothing at all.
The reason a lot of people miss out on life nowadays is not because they have too few connections but because they waste their time on fake ones. Life's short, instead of trying to warm up some high school friendship that's going nowhere, focus everything you have on the few people around you that matter. Cutting connections is as valuable a skill as making them, and an increasingly lost art.
But there's also lots of upsides. I guess I dont know one way or the other.
I would argue that there is much to miss on by wasting time looking up Jenny from primary school when you have your kids, friends and family who you meet day to day.
There is actually an option to run into mental health issues that we know social media is causing.
Yes, absolutely. The paths our lives take can lead us to have more in common with someone we knew in the past then when we first knew them. And there's a lot of value in having a history with someone, compared to getting to know someone new from scratch. Maintaining loose contact takes virtually no effort but can lead to meaningful interactions down the road.
However most of my "Facebook friends" were shallow faint contacts, where paths may have been close for a while but went apart as each went on with their lives. No more scrolling through which bar they visited, how their kids are doing, or which TV show they were watching didn't take anything from my life, while it encouraged me to reach out more actively to people I really care about, as I didn't "rely" on passive information anymore, assuming to hear about "relevant" events, but became interested in them and shared things which wouldn't make "public" social media.
I would not feel comfortable, to say the least, I would feel creeped out. I would start thinking what kind of MLM he joined or if he looks to borrow money as last resort as no one closer would lend him any.
If that would be my close friend that would be OK.
If I run today into someone from primary school we probably will connect over that.
If that someone will start talking how he have seen photos of my trips or my life events or how he totally loves band I added to my profile half a year ago - without ever sending me even happy new years message - I will be creeped out - and totally not “aw cool you follow my posts”.
Fully recognising that you said "IMO", I'll say that keeping up with acquaintances and people from the past is normal in my culture. Social media helps to make that more direct and easier to manage than the gossipy grapevine of yore.
What's normal depends on your culture and context, of course, and I suspect that's not true in yours — but it is in mine, so ditching something like Facebook is just out of the question for me and many people whose cultures place a heavy emphasis on those connections between people.
The middle ground for me has been to check Facebook less and less, accelerated by the algorithm delivering me fewer life updates and more slop reposted from reddit.
There are lots of things in the world where the work required IS the value. Think of a hand written note from your CEO; is it still valuable if it was their assistant and a picture of the signature? "keeping in touch" is not inheriently valuable; it's the effort required that makes it so.
Our people barely left our homelands, our pā and marae, for fear of them being stolen by pākeha-let governments who urbanised the rest of us into poverty.
Now that people in my culture are reconnecting with the importance of whakapapa for whānau, hapū, and iwi, which is a far wider set of people than just one’s immediate family in typical anglospherical thought, there has to be a way to reincorporate all the urbanised people who live far away. Social media, at least initially, provides that.
But thank you for your “is your culture only 20 years old” crack. It’s always refreshing to have the needs of my culture explained to me by someone from without it with an air of armchair authority, as though I or we don’t know what’s good for ourselves to meet our own needs.
It does seem quite normal now to keep up with people you haven't seen in 10 years in person and will never see again. Maybe even people you would go out of your way to make sure you don't see in person but you can give them a thumbs up when they post a picture of their lunch.
I have no idea why anyone does this but it would be hard for me to say that not having any social media like us is "normal".
And to large extend that is what is happening with "loneliness epidemics". We dont care to keep relationships and see it as negative. Then we dont have relationships and act all shocked.
Agree with that.
> However, if you decide that weaker relationships dont matter, they will never grow into friendships. They will die out.
I don't think putting thumbs up on social media posts count as "growing into friendship".
> And to large extend that is what is happening with "loneliness epidemics".
I am not even sure a _loneliness epidemics_ exists but if that is true it is mostly self induced and artificial relationship pretense on social medias do not help. Quite the contrary. If you get out of social medias you actually realize your only chance to make relationships is by going outside and meet people that are close to you. And this is how you build relationships that matters and prevent loneliness.
> We dont care to keep relationships and see it as negative. Then we dont have relationships and act all shocked.
I am an expatriate and moved countries several times. I have lost touch with a lot of my old friends as well as a huge part of my larger family because I don't use facebook and instagram. That doesn't mean I don't have relationships. I made new relationships locally, and am keeping in touch with people who are not in the same country but that are as eager as I am to travel once in a while to see me.
OTOH last few years I have called a number of friends who are living abroad or several hours of train/plane/driving away from me at least once a year. Some gave unsolicited apologies and promises that next time they will be the one calling, or that they have plan to visit my area. They never called back, nor visited me and I didn't prioritized them enough to try to visit them either. This year I didn't even try to call them. I just moved them from the _friends_ mental drawer to the _acquaintance_ mental drawer. This is very likely what they passively did 2 years ago already while I was still actively trying to stay in touch.
If for some reason I travel close enough to their last known place, I may try to contact them but it is very likely that I may never see most of them. But I don't need to follow what they are posting on social medias nor publish stuff I am living and pretend that I or they care because really we do not, or not enough for it to matter.
The interactions I have seen on social media did not consisted from thumbs up only.
> If you get out of social medias you actually realize your only chance to make relationships is by going outside and meet people that are close to you.
What actually happen to most people is that they stop showing up in meetups organized through social media (majority of them) and over time loose those relationships. From what I have seen, removing yourself from social media does not create new relationships for most people.
You do not build relationships by NOT being somewhere.
Not necessarily but in my experience unless those people meet on a semi regular basis (as long as 2 years), or have a special bond (family) this usually slides toward superficiality.
> What actually happen to most people is that they stop showing up in meetups organized through social media (majority of them) and over time loose those relationships. From what I have seen, removing yourself from social media does not create new relationships for most people.
People don't only meet other people through meetups organized in social medias. I usually get invitations to events through calls and messages from friends, coworkers and ex-coworkers and meet other people there where we exchange phone numbers. I meet people on the road while cycling, some through their dance/yoga/crossfit/crochet class, etc. Several of my good friends I met over they years was by seeing them every day in my train commute and ending up talking to. I've met some random people in a bar and ending up sharing tapas with them and going home with their numbers.
Unless it was for an invitation to a board game evening and dinner at a friend's house. That would help to grow the friendship.
Some people HAVE gone through the "but I said in X group chat" like above, but it was all unimportant life events that they were happy to fill me in on there instead. All major things people told me directly. Just because I quit social media didn't mean I wasn't aware of the death of my dog from a world away within 2 minutes of it happening.
We have a finite amount of time and energy to maintain connections with people. Even shallow connections eat into that. I'd rather spend that time and energy on deeper connections. And while it's customary to say "but sure, I guess other people have different views on this, so to each their own", I... well, I honestly believe it's unhealthy to obsessively try to maintain all these sorts of shallow connections. I think this is a part of why I read about how so many people are lonely these days and have trouble forming friendships and keeping them going.
I rekindled a friendship with an old friend when I realized he was visiting the same foreign country as I was. Funny enough his wife is a mutual college friend of ours whom he had lost touch with but only met again after reconnecting on social media. I also reconnected with her through my friend.
um... will someone else tell him/her, or should I?
Apparently someone from that part of the family had posted it on facebook but she didn't notice it as she do not visit it every day.
For most people, that is arguably currently Facebook.
TBH I have no idea where or if my friend post stuff on social media anymore. I know maybe 1 person that posted updates often on Facebook, and that was pre-pandemic. Some post more business stuff on twitter.
But overall I just kind of accept that sometimes I'll meet up with someone after a few years and realize "oh yeah, they're married now, took a trip to Japan for 6 months, and is getting some local attention from their band they made a few years ago"
Of course, the first thing men will say after that meeting is simply "I've been fine, can't complain. How about you?". Maybe they'll mention their new job, but the rest will come after some 15-30 minutes of observation and chatting about the newest media.
>but I know a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely. I have a few close friends and that’s it.
likewise, but I'm not sure if social media would have saved that for me. It's definitely a cultural issue, especially with men.
I wish there was a better way but life updates still a posted there only. Facebook is the only one that has a concept of this is a for my friends only.
> Of course, the first thing men will say after that meeting is simply "I've been fine, can't complain. How about you?".
I sometimes do this despite not posting any personal stuff on social media. The reasoning here is pretty simple, I usually don't have a full list of all the stuff that happened in the last few years in mind. When meeting someone I see more often, it's quite easy to think about the last week/month and start with the noteworthy events; whereas, when meeting someone after a few years, not only do I need to think about what happened, but also which of those events might interest the person in question and what level of detail is appropriate
This was a big thing I realized, too. For some people in my life I do genuinely want to know about those sorts of things as they are happening, and for those people I'm in frequent contact with them through text, group chat, real-life meetings, etc. But for everyone else, it is completely fine if I hear about those big life updates months or years after they happen, on the less-frequent occasions when we get together and catch up. Some relationships are different, and that's fine.
Seeing people's updates on a wall isn't truly keeping up with friends. Keeping up and staying in touch requires consistent deliberate effort from both parties, via phone calls, messaging, and seeing each other in person. If you're not doing that with someone, then yeah, learning about life updates when you actually chat and catch up just makes sense to me.
This is about lifestyle ergonomics and your community. Like it or not, social media has significantly reshaped the world. Issues aside, it has brought people together and made communication significantly easier than in the past. There is a reason 1/3 of the world is on Facebook.
So, my point is that if you're choosing to be difficult, that is fine but you need to accept the burden falls on you. This is similar to adopting a vegan diet - your body your choice, but don't be intentionally difficult at dinner parties.
Personal example here: I've cut down social media significantly, in my case all notifications are off even if the apps are installed. So you're not bombarded and can engage on a cadence that makes sense to you. That said, I need to dedicate time to checking up on extended family, friends etc - as otherwise you do miss announcements and major events.
Certainly! I don't think that fact is in dispute. But we can definitely debate the quality of relationships that have resulted from that reshaping, and make our own personal determinations as to whether social media has been a net positive or negative in our lives.
The problem is that, for some people, it really has had a negative impact on their lives, but they don't or can't see it.
Dont have FB, twitter, reddit, linkedin, tiktok, not even google account... none of that crap. I am successfully avoiding getting my name anywhere on the internet, I am not posting my photos, videos,...
I have 7 friends I meet regularly, I have friends where our life separated years back and we meet once or twice per year and I have phone with 473 phone numbers of various contacts, from former colleges to dishwasher repair technician, etc.
And guess what, people call me, sms me (oh yes, it works so much better than having 20 various clients installed for different groups of people) or send me email if something important has happened and I am actually physically invited to birthdays, "i got son" celebrations, notified about death (luckily only one, former schoolmate).
When we meet, in person (i hate long phone calls), we have a quality chat as I dont know anything about their ingrown hair on the tip of their toe and they don't know anything about me changing job or having knot on hair in my beard.
For anyone else, I dont care. I dont disillusion myself how I have 473 good friends on some stupid online platform who need to share every intimate detail with me. I cant even handle so many people.
So maybe those tradeoffs are not really the real tradeoffs but rather self deception, how much you matter to the people and to how many people.
I can count them using my fingers. Which is perfectly fine.
Fine with me. They're acquaintances. Nobody has 200+ "friends", we have a handful of them. Is it nice to know that someone I hung out with a handful of times twenty years ago but otherwise don't really know and haven't said a word to in a decade made a big life change? Sure, I guess, but for the most part it has absolutely no bearing or impact on my day-to-day life nor the lives of those most important to me, and that's where I'm putting my energy.
I’m not saying it is, just that it’s so bizarre, it’s literally unbelievable.
Like something The Onion would write.
I think that’s a feature, not a bug.
Most of the life updates people post on social media are the best of the best, which is what triggers so much fomo and trying to measure up. That’s why social media makes most people feel worse about their own lives. (Not to mention all of the other garbage these platforms try to push on you that you didn’t even ask for.)
If these people are really important to us, then we’d find other means of staying in touch: text them, call them, invite them over (if that’s feasible).
And if enough people get off social media, everyone else might also realize they need to make an effort to stay in touch with others, instead of the lazy post of glamour shots for the purpose of internet likes and feeding the dopamine addiction.
Unfortunately, that makes up a tiny fraction of most feeds.
Which is why I don't think the way forward is for everybody to leave social media. It's just not going to happen en masse, that's asking too much. We need to build media which can't be owned. If we ask people to sacrifice something, it should be an extra few cents on their electric bill and yesteryear's phone plugged in somewhere and hosting their share of it.
I've only been exploring it for a few days now, but nostr seems promising for this kind of thing. The content is awful, just coin bro stuff, but as something to plug into and build apps for... seems legit.
I have quite a few group chats with no more than a dozen people in each one, with many that have only 3 or 4 people. And I make a point to message people one-on-one to keep in touch, and set up time to meet in person for people who are local to where I live. For people who aren't local, we make a point to meet up in some city somewhere once a year or so, depending on the closeness of the friendships in the group.
It requires more work than scrolling a Facebook feed and commenting on people's posts, but it's orders of magnitude more rewarding. And I don't miss the other hundreds of people on Facebook who I don't hear about at all now.
And that’s okay. It means 5 years later when we cross paths for real there’s lots to catch up on.
I've got my Facebook feed so well-curated that it rarely causes me distress. And like you, I like keeping up with old acquaintances, seeing their kids' milestones, etc. I get real enjoyment out of that.
Instagram I post pics when I travel and otherwise ignore it.
Twitter OTOH is probably a net negative for me. I still keep it around to follow sports pundits during games, and I usually only follow my sports list. But I do check in on my main feed during major events, and then inevitably end up doomscrolling. For example, the LA fires hashtags are so far beyond toxic - nothing but engagement farming, malicious misinfo, political nonsense, etc. Amidst all that crap, maybe 1 in 10 tweets has good info, but I have to destroy my psyche to find it.
Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on. I asked them why they didn’t tell me and they were confused. They said the posted it on social media
My impression is „how can one be so self centered” to imagine everyone HAS to know about their big event if they were not part of it and were not invited directly.
Is that person Kardashian family or something ;).
Even if it was a wedding and they posted photos. I wouldn’t remember a week later - if it is a person I see once in 5 years face to face and I was not invited. There are many big life events of such people.
And that light connection to people through social media wasn't a thing that created "close friends" anyway. It add to those weak connections that do have value but I doubt many people create intimate friend relationships solely through social media.
Maybe part of the seeming increasing anxiety of society is that we don't have friends in the correct sense and instead we have "friends" in the "just another user ID attached to a database query for your user ID" sense.
I think it has made me a better friend in some ways, as I'm a respite from the narratives they sustain, but to others, also a kind of legacy friend who may be an attachment to an old life, and who isn't part of their present.
there's an aspect where watching their social media would be to participate in the change in their lives, and separating from it (perhaps selfishly) preserves things that might be left behind. but on the other hand, I'm interested in relating in one way too. social media profiles are strange because they say, "see, I am all these things now!" and in not seeing them, it declines to recognize those, like an old uncle you're always going to be a kid to because that's how you always were.
I have more old friends than most, and I often think about whether there is an essential self we see in each other, like a character that all these stories happen around where we can peer across them to one another, protagonist to protagonist, as companions in the real. or are the relationships artifacts of the stories, and when they change, we do? it's prob a mix, but I don't think those essential(ist) aspects of friendship survive being mediated by the churn of updates and the curation of a public persona.
anyway, being outside social media is a very different way to relate and not everything survives.
Maybe have a text chain for your friends or something? The folks I really expect to know things about… they’d tell me while we were interacting.
It's admittedly a little easier to drift apart though when you deliberately delete your access to the place where they post all the shit that's happening in their lives...
But that’s also a guess. I suspect neither of us have any data to back up our guesses.
I think the social part of social media can be good for us, and we have to figure out a way to avoid the toxicity. I’d like to see more posts about how to bend the algorithm to show you less toxicity- at least on Instagram I’ve managed to use the “not interested/relevant” button enough and turned on content filtering that it mostly shows me wholesome content. I don’t know if everyone realizes that if you hate-watch a video or hate-read a post then the algorithm sees that as engagement and will show you more. You have to nope yourself out of the dark corners as fast as you realize where you are.
In the case of IG what worked for me, without me even trying to be explicit about it, was to like and watch lots of photos/reels involving dogs and dog-ownership and right now my IG feed is 90% full with dog-related posts, and that’s the way I like it. Maybe it works the same way if one were to adopt similar strategies for other subjects of interest, such as cats, owning cars etc., the thing is that there’s almost no political/societal info on my feed anymore.
I can scroll through Facebook now on my laptop, and it means I stop doing so on my phone. I have the phone app just to post updates or to quickly check the location of an event or something.
I wish I would still see those. While I have an account, I rarely use FB nowadays, because the algorithm thinks I’ll be more interested in stuff I don’t care about. So when I go to FB I tend to close the tab again a few seconds later…
Now my feed is very pleasant. Family updates, sports news, friends vacation pictures and jokes.
Reels every few posts are usually sexily dressed Asian women, or more normally dressed White women, with some kind of clickbait text overlaid. I think I maybe clicked on a reel once or twice ever.
Then my feed is full of suggested content. Which I also don’t want to see. From metal bands I don’t care about and festivals I don’t wanna go to, to offensive content.
And finally: Ordering. Non-chronological ordering makes no sense, because everything is random (probably not, somehow maximizes engagement for users very different from me, I guess). So I can’t even scroll for the stuff I want to see.
Does https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr not work anymore? It should surface the chronological feed without reels and other recommended slop.
This does exactly what I want! It makes FB usable again!
To be honest, I'm actually disappointed in myself for helping fb retain a user
It does seem to keep showing you more of what you click on though, so I hit a good trend of funny clips from Modern Family, How I Met Your Mother, Friends and random interesting nature videos and for the most part those dominate now.
But no matter what you click on it seems like they are really determined to keep throwing in the various ladies clips.
My social media are WhatsApp and Telegram. I get in touch there with people I care about and I don't get streams of useless information like I would if I'd be on FB, X, Instagram or TikTok. I do look for videos on YouTube when I want to learn something for which watching is better that reading.
Regarding life events: I quit all social media about 5 years ago[1]. People I care about know about that, and if they want to tell me about life events they do it with other means. Those who don't, they weren't really friends, just acquaintances. I am OK with that.
[1] with the exception of Linkedin, which I hate and never use, but I have been asked by people in my company to keep a profile for PR-related reasons.
The other side to this is how aggressively a person is willing to take deliberate action to maintain personal relationships in the absence of social media automation. If you are that social butterfly who really owns that aspect of life you are likely to never miss any aspect of social media. Most people aren’t that good at taking dedicated action regularly reach out to people outside their most immediate circle though.
To me, it seems like if someone has so many friends or is so busy that they need to manage their life using this strategy, you probably aren't going to have much of a connection anyway.
In such cases, there's still some reason for the two people involved to at least have a general idea of what's going on in other people's lives, and even reach out should there be something significant, such as a birth of a child or a loss in their families, etc. Without the broadcast aspect, once communication has ceased for some amount of time, it is very difficult to restart it, at any level.
As an introvert, I still find broadcasts weird, because there's that tingling notion that people wouldn't care anyway; and was one of the reasons I ceased to be on social media many years ago. However, I understand why some people choose to do things differently.
(There are similar anecdotes throughout this thread, I'd encourage you to read it for perspectives on this matter.)
You would think that this one place where you would specifically find out about huge life events like deaths / births ?!
It's a little unreasonable to expect people to put in that effort.
These full fledged 'quit' posts are nothing more than an attempt at a political statement that falls on deaf ears.
i deleted fb 10ish years ago.
and since then every family event that had been planned, was done on fb (just like before) and i find out about it by a text from my sister.
the trick is to not give a shit. Coz they don't.
Another reason to not use big social media is that I would rather not have my network to be exploited by some big corp for who knows what they do with that info.
I feel like that's the downside of social media in general, like the network effect - since most people are on social media, that's the place where people will post life updates, as opposed to talking to others about that stuff directly as much.
Maybe there could be a healthy way to use social media: to catch up with the people in your social circle, maybe look at a few cute pictures of animals or memes, but don't obsessively doomscroll or compare yourself to the highlights of others' lives.
Conventional media can be ok for casual reading/scrolling, but feels increasingly out-of-touch. Interestingly these days cnn, bbc, dw, en, and aj list different headlines, which is not what it was 15 y.ago.
Still I'd strongly advise against all push media, and in particular Meta's products which pose a very high-risk of (screen) addiction thanks to hundreds of hidden retention mechanisms.
I'm drawing a blank for MR. What does it stand for?
The only winning move is not to play.
I just got together with two friends in RL. One I have not seen for 10 years. There were a lot of missed news we all had to catch up on. This is how it's always been, and it's completely normal. Even the olden Facebook way of being so plugged in into your friends' lives was very unhealthy. If you HAVE to know something, life will find a way of letting you know.
I had the same thing happen, but both they and I were Facebook users, it's just the algorithm decided I don't need to see posts from my friends and it's better that I see adverts (I can live with that, I don't pay to use the platform after all) and hundreds of random pages/groups that I have zero interest in following.
This 2nd "feature" is slowly driving me towards the point where the FOMO of no longer passively interacting with my friends may longer keep me on there.
Bring that together with your idea about friendship before you run behind them.
Maybe it's fine for you. Maybe your conclusion is that it's not worth the thing.
It's not a new topic. For me, iit was around 15 years ago. I never had FB or WA. Not even for a day. And that brought a lot of friendships to an end. Most of my friendships in fact. And that was sad!! But well, no other way would even be an option, admittedly! It's sad, but it was the best I could do.
The advice to "quit social media" , "get a FairPhone", " get an FTP account and mount it with curlftps... " is often tossed around HN a lot, but real life flies in the diametrically opposite direction. While I'm not largely affected by it, I still feel a twinge of disappointment not finding out when an old friend has had a major life event.
Losing such a network of people is costly, socially and from an opportunity perspective.
Still trying to not click anything not related to people I follow, the algorithms on meta apps are just insane.
Even with close friends who live far away, I prefer catching up once a year around a beer and some food than get a week by week journal of their lives on social media, it makes you feel like you're connected but you really aren't
I think that's the key point. I realized that ultimately I didn't actually care about those huge life updates if they concerned people who I'm not in somewhat-regular contact with. Like, if my Facebook friend John Smith (let's say he's an old high-school friend I haven't seen since high school) posts about his marriage, or new job, or new child, and I don't actually chat with John anymore and don't know anything about his life outside of what I read on Facebook, why do I even care to know this stuff at all? And it turns out the answer is that... I don't! And there's nothing wrong with that. It's not rude or mean; some people are the closest of friends, and some people barely even warrant the "acquaintance" tag -- and everything in between -- and there's nothing wrong with any of that.
And yes, I've missed social media posts about big-life stuff from closer friends who I do care about, but that's fine! I chat with those people via some avenue (email, text, messaging group, real-life, whatever) often enough that I still get those big-life updates, and usually it's in a more personalized manner, that gets me details that are tailored to the level of closeness of our friendship.
For people who I'm not super close with, but still maintain a relationship with, maybe I get that update about their life 6 months later, when we are next in contact. That's also fine! If we were closer friends, we'd chat more often, and I'd hear about it earlier. But we're not, and I don't, and there's nothing wrong with that.
> a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely. I have a few close friends and that’s it.
That's more your choice than anything else. You always have the option to text or email someone directly to say hello and see how they're doing, or to set up a time to meet in person to catch up. Even if they're perhaps not the one-on-one type of friends, you can start a group chat with that person and other mutual friends who might enjoy keeping in touch that way. There are so so so many options for communication these days that it's almost overwhelming! But it certainly need not be a binary between "social media firehose of every person I've ever met" and "I only hear about the lives of few people".
Is it important to you to be in touch with those old acquaintances? If so, reach out to them! If not, then it sounds like quitting social media was fine for you.
Such radical takes are always a hit on HN because they are essentially playing to the gallery. Leaving social media is futile if you don't take efforts to maintain contacts with your friends and families in other ways.
Sounds perfect. I rather have a few close friends than two dozen semi-friends.
Not having seen a friend for a longer time and talking about all the things that happened is the one thing that friendship is about IMO.
Facebook is like a ghost town now from the "social" and family perspective. I imagine some circles might be strong on it, but from every time this comes up it's clear that the vast majority of normal people have largely abandoned it. They didn't delete their accounts, but updates are incredibly infrequent. The vast majority of Facebook activity seems to be people who don't really know each other in various conspiracy-oriented or political groups, sports arguments, etc.
As to huge life events you missed out on, even in 2003 if you only knew about something because of a Facebook post, you aren't very close. And the old acquaintances thing grows super old super quick. Everyone joined a bunch of graduating class groups, connected with old coworkers, and then... eh, turns out there was a reason we all lost contact.
In 2025 people use social media overwhelmingly to interact with strangers, not friends or family. Largely to argue and get angry and try to convince and coerce and convert. I mean, HN fits the bill in a microcosm.
Social media is a cancer on society. It has made everything much, much worse. It lets the ill-informed and unintelligent find each other and pump each other up. It monetizes and profits off of the absolute worst human traits. If Meta collapsed into a blackhole, Xitter disappeared, and so on, the world would be a much better place.
I looked at my Facebook profile with 400 friends and they are mostly ads, memes and inspirational sayings. It’s really useless.
I have four SMS groups of friends/family I care about. My wife gets more value out of it than I do because she is part of a few groups that she cares about
Facebook's last hook on me is groups - small town community groups especially. If you live in an area with its own group, there's a high likelihood that it's going to be on Facebook.
I don't really have the time to campaign to non tech-savvy retiring gen Xers and their parents that I don't want to use Facebook to know what's happening in my area, find services, etc.
The point being simply that Facebook as a social connections property hasn't been a thing for years.
The problem is that these platforms aren't satisfied merely providing a third place within which we can find and build communities, speak with and learn from others with similar interests, and otherwise, be human. Instead we each become a hamster locked in our own little cage, and the principle reason we're there is to sit on our wheel and run, and while we run we're shown a handful of things from people we actually want to hear from and see, and interspersed with those few things are a ton advertisements for products we don't want and aren't interested in, a few we might be, AI generated nonsense that prompts us to engage with the platform to bump metrics up, the dipshit of the day who's said something infuriating that makes us click into the comments and make sure they're getting dunked on (and possibly join!) appropriately that the social media site dug up from obscurity and is now parading to the entire world, and of course, the same posts again.
Genuinely, the way people talk about going back in time to kill baby Hitler, if I had a time machine, I would spend the rest of my days sabotaging whatever countless number of people invented or would invent the Curated Fucking Timeline, on however many platforms it was invented, by however many data scientists. I would argue it is the single most destructive thing Silicon Valley has ever turned out.
Tbf I'm in a family group WhatsApp chat, which I guess fulfills the "life updates" part for my family. But no public social media, don't see the need
Lets take my friend Em as our example. If the typical message from Em says "Where are you? What time did we say we'll meet" that's a messenger app, that's definitely not Social Media. It might be a fucking SMS, but if it's a WhatsApp or a Signal. it's all the same for this purpose and that's definitely not Social Media.
If the typical message from Em says "They don't know about my trees" and involves an in-joke reference to a movie that six people saw with her in 2008, that's maybe some sort of "social" experience but it's clearly not public. We have a Slack like this, created under pandemic conditions and named "Cabin Fever Mitigation".
If the typical message says "Aw! Piggy" and has a picture of a guinea pig, that is now shading into Social Media. Probably some of the people "following" this feed don't know who she is but they like guinea pigs, or they like her art, or something similar.
And yes obviously if the typical message is a reply to Elon Musk then it's social media and it can fuck off. But hopefully your friends aren't making crucial life updates as a public address to any watching fascists ?
This dramatic deletion is overreaction, solve the underlying problem instead.
Rather than scrolling instagram and tiktok, visit /news and /newest, and then /ask, /show. If nothing interesting there, refresh the /newest until there is. You can be first in upvoting or commenting on it, and can get a good bump to your score if you say something that sounds smart before it hits the frontpage. Then you can re-read the quality content you produced and count how much is left to the round number, like it's only 40 to 9700, only 340 to 10000, etc. Much healthier than just scrolling endlessly and sharing memes.
it's more prevalent today than it was then, so no.
> solve the underlying problem instead
that would be to get rid of FB, X etc. altogether; but since we can't do that, we can do the things that we have control over, i.e., our own accounts
But some forums ask nicely to not do that, so I don't, cause I'm a relatively nice guy, and if they ask instead of commanding it, then why not.
As a result, the score keeps piling up for decades. Idk what to do with it, maybe I should start a quest after 10k.
When you know your opinion is shared by the majority of the site, you'll be less careful about what you write and less charitable to folks with different viewpoints. You're more likely to sneer at the "opposition" and performatively signal about your superiority. That's how upvote social sites, like Reddit, end up getting so many highly upvoted "hivemind-like" uncharitable takes. Likewise, if you know your opinion is not shared by the community. You will hedge your writing, emphasize how it's simply your opinion, and water it down with caveats and complications that while true are a lot less emotionally evocative as the comments written by the majority. Eventually folks with minority opinions may just churn as the stepping around eggshells becomes exhausting. This creates further pressure to conform to the majority.
Some folks with majority opinions may not feel that strongly about their opinion but will post strongly anyway, knowing that they'll get upvotes. I've done this when I was younger as the dopamine boost makes you feel like a community hero, like you're "fighting the good fight." I've actually said some incorrect things due to this in the past but have nonetheless been highly upvoted.
HN has some safeguards here, like not being able to downvote someone who replied to you, hiding downvotes behind a karma threshold, and judicious moderation separate from upvotes/downvotes. But it's hard to change the fundamental nature of upvote based sites and the clique dynamics that form as a result.
I really admire HN dynamics in this regard, as it has a few less obvious tricks in its sleeves, but let’s keep these observations to it.
Removing your account completely from Twitter makes it immediately available for anyone else to take, and for larger accounts you can bet theres a whole host of automated monitoring going on, ready to nab it and use it for easy profit.
Keeping the account doesn't have to mean you're 'giving away' any info. Hell delete it and instantly recrate it if thats the worry.
Do you have a source for this? The only thing i can find is a random tweet from Elmo in 2023. I deleted my twitter account in the 2022-ish timeframe, and the handle I had (created in 2007) was my first initial + last name, which I would think would be claimed by now. It's not, so I'm thinking that deleted account handles can't be reused.
So it seems unlikely they would keep deleted handles forever. I bet they become part of this marketplace program a la "premium domains".
Only one of us can have a blue check on Twitter? Which one?
also, I just noticed "they" is ambiguous here. I meant "the twitter staff giving checkmarks". At least I hope they do some basic check before handing out a checkmark to an obvious impersonator.
Of course people can always impersonate you but the goal here is to prevent them from impersonating you with a social handle people knew you had.
It has been a significant amount of work just dealing with all the derppelgängers out there who use an address they don't own for important things. Medical records. Divorce papers. Mortgages. The short of it is that it doesn't even require maliciousness on someone else's part to be affected by impersonation, accidental or otherwise. So yeah, keep what you've got, because there's no guarantee the next person to get it will not somehow affect you.
Sometime later, a lawyer in Australia registered the .au version, but it was <MY NAME>.com.au, not <MY NAME>.au. <MY NAME>.com (no .au) was (and still is) my domain, and I get email, there.
I started getting really confidential stuff sent to my email, from the Australian courts. Stuff that could easily get people fired and sued.
I reported it for ages to both the courts and the lawyers. Eventually (after about 2 years), it stopped. I haven't gotten one of those for a long time.
Plus I feel like I’m still costing the platform the fractions of fractions of a cent to keep my data stored, replicated and active somewhere
The reality is always a mundane core that gets complicated by human tragicomedy. Of course its wholesome to be able to connect digitally with friends and family. Its also a great economic enabler to connect digitally with professionals. Or to be able to publish to a bulletin board about your brilliant accomplishments.
But to paraphrase Gates, we need these connections, we don't need the self-appointed universal connectors.
Its 2025, and this is HN. I put it to you that technically the only thing preventing us today from having good "connections infrastructure" is the corrupting influence of big adtech. One possible vision of how to organize the digital space in technical and economic terms has become the only vision.
I do not care if they do the same. I am old now (almost 30) and came to the realization that all of our lifes are packet and busy and ppl are very bad at keeping up with other ppl that are not continuously presented to them.
This is the price I have to pay to not be on instagram: writing my friends and ask them how they doing.
And it is a very nice price to pay.
I'm 45 and wondering if I should be offended by this....
( TBH I still split wood by hand and walk long trails, etc. My father (born 1935) is showing signs of age now )
That's incredible. Everyone I know is using an axe these days.
Any similarity to tech sector corporate politics is purely coincidental.
Come, come and join the elders . . .
"Maybe I’ll go old-school and write more blog posts. Like back in the early 2000s, when you actually had to think before sharing your thoughts with the world. Sounds quaint, doesn’t it?"
Can we also get the other direction, i.e. scrape posts from SM platforms and implement our own (non-toxic) feed algorithms?
I get it, it's different types of content, one requires more effort than the other, and the argument is that, if you don't have anything of substance to say, don't say it, but it still requires extra effort to read that I probably don't feel inclined to give.
Great! What's the problem?
Genuinely curious, because I see this tossed around everywhere as I quit social media, too. Why is there this massive pressure that everything everyone does has to be seen and I have to see it all? Nobody needs to see every blog that everyone they know (does every person on your friends list actually qualify as a "friend", or are they acquaintances?) puts out.
I genuinely don't care about this friend's political opinion or that friend's gardening adventures. I also genuinely hope they enjoy their pursuits and that they keep after what makes them happy. IF I get curious about Jan's gardening exploits, the blog is there if I want to read it for some tips, but I certainly don't owe it routine visits.
Sometimes she chats, other times she says she's good, we tell each other to have a nice day and that's that, it only lasts seconds.
But for some reason, to me, those short calls have felt far better than a like or a comment on FB or whatever. They feel more meaningful and I definitely feel more connected to her these days than I had for years.
YMMV. /shrug
Edit: Just speaking for me, HN is next. Doubt I'll stick 'round much longer.
- no followers / following (no incentive to increase engagement)
- no notifications of responses to comments (maybe there's a way to do this with RSS but at least it's not obvious)
- no ads
- no endless feed
HN is much more like an RSS feed of interesting articles, where people can leave comments -- there is some back and forth (as in this case) but not a lot; it's centered around the linked content and thoughts on that content, not on engaging with other users. It's not monetized and therefore doesn't employ all the tricks that SM uses to "drive engagement", which is often driven by outrage (which is therefore a highly desirable component of a SM).
If you notice you keep hitting the "threads" link, then perhaps there is a case of addiction.
I browse the titles and click on what seems interesting to me, regardless of the number of upvotes.
I like technology. I like making things I love and others can enjoy. I like when others make something they think is cool and love and enjoy and I can enjoy them too.
That's why this place is dope. I can't press 'Share' so that's not social media to me.
Plus I can have my name be FJsdkfhKFsdffflKJSHFl and nobody cares. I can just be me.
Kindness > *
(I don't really think that HN is not exactly social media either - since poster ego is de-emphasized so much (not as much as on 4chan of course), we don't even have avatars here ! - but HN sure is addictive ! speaking of...
What you say reminds me of an ancient Greek saying (I think it was Epictetus). I'm paraphrasing from memory:
"You starved for a whole day to practice discipline? Great! Now resist not telling it to anyone."
I'm always curious here what counts as Social Media, and what's just a useful site?
Github? HackerNews? Reddit? Facebook, but only for FB Marketplace which is now a better local sales site than Craigslist?
What makes it social? Originally with FB and before it with MySpace it was the ability to put up a page about yourself, and then chat with others. HN has a profile and communication, so do the others listed.
For the modern definition of social, nowadays: incentives to generate engagement (connect with people, post, like, comment) to build up data to drive advertising sales.
If after a few months you have zero "facebook friends" nuke the account.
Internet updates are no substitute for good old meat space.
I think if you don't talk to someone in a few years it makes them less of a friend.
And people talk about how bad Facebook is, LinkedIn is far worse. Everyone is trying to be a “thought leader” and no one is genuine on it.
I have a decent LinkedIn Profile with recommendations, up to date career information. But I never post to it.
I’m only really active when I’m looking for a job. I will respond to messages and try to keep my network somewhat warm.
A small group of people surely do, but for others the benefit doesn't outweigh the negative. Social media is great, in theory, but Facebooks implementations suck and I won't support a company like Facebook who I believe negatively impacts society. The problems and much of the anger stems from feeling almost forced to use the products of a company I think manipulates and exploit it's users. It's almost impossible for my kid to have a social life and for me to be involved without a Facebook account and I can't even offer an alternative form of communication because pretty much anything else would be more work for everyone else.
Agree on you with Linkedin. It's basically an account to a job board, that you keep active in case you need to look for work. The people trying to get engagement on their posts are almost all pretty much insane.
I have to facebook friends that I don't interact with very much outside some electronic music events. This helps me find events that might interest me.
Some venues don't even put the dates on their website.
But some people just can't fathom there's different lives too their own and throw the baby out with the bath water.
You should try it too!
It’s hard to quit when everyone else doesn’t.
I removed account like 10 years ago when it already was clear it is not social network anymore.
I also never had a twitter really besides some account to check what it is and left it unused.
Only LI is one I keep for business purposes but I don’t care about social aspect or discussion there - it is basically a virtual business card and it is quite popular so it’s useful I guess.
How many different accounts do you have to delete though? For many of those people "t" and "f" would be substituted by "y"toube, "r"eddit, etc. It doesn't have to be a social media site, might be news you're intrested in, tech sites, deals aggregator.
I get what you mean, but for someone with habit of looking for distraction whenever they have nothing to do it won't be a cure, bandaid at best.
If you care about yourself and want to have healthier and more mindful habits, you will hopefully start redirecting what were once mindless impulses of avoidance or boredom into more meaningful activities for yourself.
>I get what you mean, but for someone with habit of looking for distraction whenever they have nothing to do it won't be a cure, bandaid at best.
This is something society seems to have forgotten to do, and what I've focused on helping my kids remain capable of as they grow older - knowing how to be bored.
While I deleted all of my social media, I will still end up spamming on reddit or reading HN or watching Youtube.
But I have to say I find them better alternatives, as those social medias are nothing but people screaming for attention.
During work time I have an extension that blocks them all.
But, some options are better than others. I used to be on Twitter a lot, and had that reflex for a time after deleting it. Now... it's just not there. I did replace it with a handful of communities and some other forms of content, but it still feels better than before.
And the thing is, I am interested still. But I do miss a lot, because the group is chaotic and really important announcements are mixed in with memes and chatter, so it was a chore to waddle through that everyday, only to discover that nothing important was announced.
They kinda have to do it, I guess, because engagement metrics are no joke, and if you don't have them, then why are you here. But it really opened my eyes to how to social media completely failed on its premise when it decided that time spent on app would be a good metric.
Sometimes people just have nothing important to say other to announce, and them it should be okay to keep silent for a while, without being downranked.
And seeing how those, who always chatter even when they having nothing to say, will ultimately rise to the top on any platform that values time wasted, I left social media again.
People in comments say how it's better to have a few close friends then shallow connections, but social networks did allow us to meet someone that shared our more specific interests. My best friend I have met on a forum: our interests aligned and we spend hours talking about things we couldn't discuss with real friends before meeting up. There is value in shallow connections when they are based on shared interests. This value is lost on most social networks today.
IMO mastodon and blue sky are "good social networks" for people who want to connect over specific topics.
People often ask me why I don't have Instagram: I'm in the business of making these platforms and Pablo Escobar never used cocaine either. I know how these platforms are built and I know how we think about the people that use it.
Did the Hive approve this, or are you breaking the rules of individualism?
I do find the reactionary response a bit disturbing. Having been caught up in the trap of "fact checkers" for reposting a political cartoon and similar, I'd definitely prefer the community notes approach. All said the inability of many to have a rational conversation with those they don't completely agree is very wrong on so many levels.
Criminals are not willing to have rational conversations. But they just won a free pass from the platforms.
Bot activity is best handled through system pattern matching, not correcting political cartoons.
You also assume that the people doing the fact checking are better informed or otherwise better people than those with the access to propose and vote on community notes. This is unsubstantiated at best.
Social media is a reality one can't simply ignore completely. One can complicatedly ignore it though to some level of success. For me, the minimal rules are: don't write on reddit, don't read on linkedin. Don't touch anything else. The orange site is ok-ish.
I hate to promote Reddit, because it’s not worth it, but I have a pretty nicely curated home page of just “good things”, cats, pics, etc that I love to browse when I want to jeep my mind idly occupied. If I make the mistake and go back to popular I get filled with rage, feeling of injustice and hopelessness.
It’s worth reflecting on what democracy means in this context. For me, it means being willing to tolerate other thought bubbles, even when it’s challenging. This openness is preferable to having our thoughts policed. In an ideal world, thought bubbles would be more permeable, fostering trust and understanding between people with differing perspectives. That trust can’t grow if we only defend our own bubble. Overcoming the divide is crucial if we want democracy to thrive (or not die).
Honestly, there are good reasons to quit social media because of their intrinsic toxicities, but at least if you are doing it for ideological motives admit that its about you.
Turning off the machine feeding stuff to my brain really has helped me. I feel better, cleaner and less disturbed/distracted.
Now I am actually considering leaving YouTube as well, although it has been such a lovely place at times, since I notice it is deteriorating my health.
I recommend you try it; nothing has to be deleted. It's simply removing the habit of using it. It does make life a bit better :)
Oh, and a good first step is to install the extension `News Feed Eradicator`. This is how I got started. I run it on everything.
Very little discussion of the actual problems with regulating speech the way the EU or Fact Checkers does. Just an implicit statement it was correct.
I reflexively type "news" into the browser. It may not be quite as bad as FB or X, but I should probably stop.
This added step makes it hard enough to not mindlessly browse it.
It is awfully lonely I must admit. I have a partner of over a decade which helps but not having social media is very isolating. My wife has all the social medias and knows what happens with my family before I do!
My last 'experiment' was the shortest - I registered for an Instagram account and when it suggested that I add my real-life next door neighbour in the sign-up process I immediately stopped and deleted the account. That is scary.
Instagram went first and then I realized I hadn't logged on to Facebook in 2 years so why bother keeping it around?
I think for people who can just decide to keep the account and no longer use it, they should keep it just to stay in touch with some folks. But I realize that as long as I'd have an account, I'd keep using it.
Personally, for me the tradeoff between 2+ hours every day on Instagram for an occasional few hours with an acquaintance isn't worth it.
E.g. facebook for me is mainly the messenger and a few random photos or people. Everything else on there is not enjoyable.
Reddit is like a forum where I can occassionally say things about my hobbies. Also nothing that sucks me in, in an unhealthy way.
X and Mastodon are mostly news and random people showing off things.
Youtube is like TV where at some point you watched what you wanted to watch for the day.
The only thing that seems addicting to me are Apps like Tiktok or Instagram, where you are just one simple swipe away from the next bit of short term entertainment.
Social media does have a powerful use case: keeping in touch with friends and family you don’t see often. It feels trite to watch a video of them with their kid and give it a ‘like’ but I’d miss it if it were gone. Especially if it was still there for everyone else, I’d miss their collective presence more than they’d miss my singular one.
Rather than another scolding post telling everyone to delete social media I’d much rather folks think and talk about how we can make a better social media, preferably divorced from the control of giant corporations.
The real game is to keep you on the platform when you compulsively open it. You go in to check in on your second cousins, you stay to scroll through their TikTok clone or whatever attention harvesting algorithm is trendy currently.
simple as that, just avoid them
On my downtime I still participate in social media though usually anonymously in the form of shit posting. Or just watching YouTube. I did get sucked into that crap of posting everyday about my glamorous life. Eventually I found I didn't know what to post anymore. Had to find something to post. I'm glad I never got sucked into it completely like TikTok/Instagram.
1. Some companies will not look at your resume or do business with you unless you have a LinkedIn account, especially in the age of AI. Fine by me.
2. If you go to start a business, you will find most of these social media companies require you to have a personal account in order to make a business/marketing account. This is very annoying.
3. Damn I miss Facebook Marketplace. But it's not worth having FB. You can usually have a friend do marketplace stuff for you.
Yet you still have an account?
And now more than before, HN is not social media because it actually has useful content and quality moderation.
people confused by the first page
> no advertising
all the hiring ads, and thinly veiled corp marketing blogs
This is not actually explained in the article.
It rightfully explains how X, meta and others have taken a turn for the worse to say the least, but it doesn't say why I should delete my Facebook or Twitter account.
Neither do the hundreds of calls to delete such accounts in the past few weeks or months have.
I get that the point is "You should stop using such social media", but I don't get what __deleting your account__ actually adds on top, especially when put in relation to the political reasons behind stopping to use them.
Isn't it a tautology? If you continue using a product that sucks rather than abandon it, you're using a bad product and it also has license to keep getting worse. Deleting an account is the strongest signal of rejection.
Even if the TOS doesn't require this so you can actually sue they would likely have a choice of venue provision that would make it inconvenient for you and/or a choice of law provision that would be favorable to them.
If you have an account at the site it will likely be very hard to get out from under the arbitration/venue/law provisions of the TOS.
If you no longer have an account you will probably have a better chance of escaping the TOS, especially if whatever you want to sue over took place entirely after you deleted your account.
- I write blogs and share them there. On multiple occasions, I’ve received job offers in my inbox. Job opportunities from acquaintances on Twitter are far better than LinkedIn DM spam.
- Staying up to date with the latest fads also teaches me what not to chase. Sometimes, the firehose is the only way to get that information.
I never had problems dropping the mic and not arguing with strangers.
Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms (2021)
https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
HN Discussion:
I deleted LinkedIn (after the MSFT acquisition) 10 years ago, due to the business model change. Even prior to that, it was getting too spammy anyways.
I keep a token Instagram just for viewing the rare family/friend that insists I see something from a trip, but I never post there.
What if they structured the financing like they do with science?
The problem with the EU market is that if I launched anything social, I'm immediately hit with a localization problem so I have to launch first either in English (you lost 53% of people)* or start with a few select countries first with their native language.
It's kinda a mess. Money is not really the issue with EU startups, it's the cultural fragmentation.
There are also many small niche social platforms, but of course nothing like FB/X/etc..
They were so good and knew exactly what kinds of things would interest me, that it kept me coming back (subconsciously).
However in Amazon’s own app and website, they really have poor suggestions.
https://risingstars.js.org/2024/en#section-framework
so... it depends.
LinkedIn is the de-facto standard for looking for a job in certain places. I wonder, people who deleted LinkedIn, how do they get along with looking for a job?
(I do think think contributes to extreme weirdness of LinkedIn posts; there's really ~no-one normal using the social network bit of LinkedIn.)
LinkedIn is closer to other portfolio sites (ArtStation, Behance, SoundCloud, etc). It’s basically professional achievements with comments.
I suppose it is social media in the broadest sense. But a lot of evils of social media aren’t there, just how perfect people pretend their lives are. But there aren’t many echo chambers, instances of shock content, manufactured outrage, cancel culture, politicking, lord of the fly-ing, etc.
LinkedIn is merely a glamour social network + "pro" dynamic address book + kind of a standardised CV, nothing much more.
Because of what nindalf said, basically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42678031
Hi Jochen wink
HN is my only form of social media now on my phone. Now, it’s time to build meaningful relationships in my life again.
Obviously, FB, twitter, insta, LinkedIn etc. are a toxic cesspool. I've left my accounts there pretty much dormant for 10+ years.
Ideally, I'd have maintained connections and contacts with my own network, using my own media, direct emails / texts, phone calls, in contexts that I controlled. The problem is... I didn't. I basically just buried my head in the sand and withdrew.
I guess the takeaway is to try to use these platforms in a positive way, as a means to an end, and not get sucked in, or to network in some other, better way, rather than withdrawing, because that's not actually a good alternative.
The problem is when you are just looping[1], absentmindedly opening and closing news and social media sites for hours. This can eat a lot of time, and is generally pretty draining.
I've been adding separate user accounts based on what tasks I'm doing, and locking them down so they can only perform those tasks.
I have a social media account (which I'm on right now), I have a coding account which I can not access news or social media from, and I have a few other accounts. This creates friction when task switching, and makes it so I have to be a bit more deliberate with how I use the computer. (I have social media blocked on my phone, as I find that's just not compatible with a happy life)
I've also recently been setting up Site Specific Browsers[2], basically custom PWAs, a web browser with no URL bar and no tabs, to further add barriers between tasks (like checking CI) and just noodling on the web. (I use electron to do this, but you can also use chrome by starting it with --app=https://www.example.com/ . Sadly Firefox has removed the ability to do this. )
Social media isn't the only means of getting visibility, but it's a very important one.
I'm not talking about lowercase social media which is generally socializing online. I'm talking about the massive survelliance and engagement bait economy that props up these horrifying data behemoths that cynically run these networks for giant profits.
You're there because you have no choice. You have no choice because that's where everyone is. That's where everyone is because of inertia, addiction, and novelty.
But it's not like all my social media is gone. I'm still obviously here on HN. I have a tildes account for more general news. I have two discord for personal and semi-anonymous servers. And for future connections I semi-regret missing in the Twitter age, I have a Bluesky ready.
I'm simply being more mindful of what sites I use and and what communities I join to prevent the issues that arose with Reddit, Facebook, and Tumblr.
I really hope EU just bans Meta from operating here.
"There you go Zuck, you don't need to worry about our regulations anymore"
I think we would live just fine around here without their awful products. It would also serve as a cautionary tale to other companies willing to undermine regulations around here.
I argue that the whole thing was a net mistake and any "openings" should not be filled. The lunch has spoiled, don't eat it.
So again, it strikes me as a huge opportunity, especially for someone who just does the basics.
I got back into social media about 1.5 years ago when Mastodon seemed to be coming on strong. I've lately gotten into Bluesky and all I can say is: (1) come on in, the water is fine, and (2) sure it will go bad someday when the money gets tight but back in the day we expected platforms to decay and for the cool kids to move on to the next one.
The distictions between made "deleting the accout" and "just stop using it" are really mute. The main point is to disengage from such platforms.
Of course, almost no will. In spite of the clear conection between these platforms and individual mental health, and even more importantly massive distribution of seriously mileading "fake news", most people quite frankly just don't give a shit.
Look at the near total indifference to the petro mafia's distruction of the natural world. Most people just can't be bothered.
So when you compare something like failing to respond to corporations eliminating the ecosystem services required for life on earth, to a call to action against the crimes of asocial media, do you really expect a significant number of people to care?
I'm doubting it...
I mean, why on earth would you expect anything different this time from yet another "social" thing made and run by a corporate entity?
I moved to Mastodon, which at least has the benefit of not being owned by a corporation, which will perhaps save it from the usual paths of ensh*ttification.
I got good years out of Twitter before it sucked, I have no regrets about getting in early on it.
It's still useful, but it's more like a a car than a town square. you'll have a lot of fun in the beginning, you'll normalize it, it'll start to break down as you try to keep it running, and then eventually it gives up the ghost. So you either accept that and not own a car or you buy a new one.
Then you realize you're not bound to the tracks and it's probably best to simply let the trainwreck happen rather than add one more fatality to it.
> The content? Let’s just say it made me want to yeet my phone into the nearest ocean. How anyone can take that level of garbage seriously is beyond me. But hey, bubbles are cozy, right? Musk, Zuckerberg, and Trump — what a trio. Honestly, this could be the perfect setup for a dystopian sci-fi thriller. Except, spoiler alert: no happy ending here.
He doesn't explain further what "garbage" he's talking about.
Sorry but I just can't take your grievance seriously if you won't at least explain it. This type of writing is the epitome of the echo chamber. If you don't already know what the author is talking about and already aggressively agree with them, not only are you not the target audience but they intentionally make the writing impenetrable to you.
This is the absolute worst type of internet dreck. It's ironic that the author rails against "bubbles" in the quoted paragraph.
Honestly this is the tech equivalent of putting your hands over your ears and posting "LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU." just in case someone says something you disagree with.
The truth is that nobody cares if we delete our accounts on social media.
I'm not actually the bad guy you think I am. It was basically all a show. You had suuuuuuch a hard and looong time understanding the danger of all these corporate social media silos. Where we control what opinions are visible and what not so much. Social media (in that particular fashion) was always a trap, a problem to definitely avoid, since day 1, but it was sooooooo teeeeerribly hard to make you understand.
So I though, well, if you are all too stupid to understand it, I will make a veeeeeery bizarre and freaky show for you that you will never forget. It will be so unreal, even you all will actually _get_ it now!!! Because it's such an important lessons for the upcoming future...
Oh no, it has something to do with the president-elect Trump and of course politics too. The first two paragraphs explained a lot and the later paragraphs were there to cover up his opinions by dragging in morality, teens and how bad the world had become due to social media.
I didn't read a single about misinformation, disinformation, fake news and how to counter them.
Hacker News was created by Paul Graham, and he is using social media. Which means ignoring social media isn't a wise decision.
There is a global recession coming, everybody is trimming the fat where possible, all tech industries are cutting where possible. I think it can be reasonably argued that the very nature of fact-checking is a dangerous one anyway - by nature of which facts are used (perspective problem) and what gets checked.
> Meta is teaming up with Trump to fight EU regulations affecting their platforms
Why is this a problem? What specific EU regulation being removed causes issue? The ones that curtail freedom of speech? The EU is a largely undemocratic body, where significant positions are not even voted on. Do you really want to be controlled by this unaccountable body?
> Recently, he hosted a live chat on Twitter with Alice Weidel, the co-leader of Germany’s AfD, a party flagged by the “Verfassungsschutz” as a far-right extremist group.
It's the only popular right wing party that has been allowed to exist, and they picked up a large range of unrepresented voters. A unified block of right wing voters is exactly the situation created by trying to suppress an entire wing of politics. The right-wing party of Germany is technically somewhat ideologically aligned with the government Elon will be working for - this is far from crazy that they talk to each other.
> Alice Weidel claimed that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was not "right-wing," but a communist instead.
When you get to such extremes, the difference between fascism and communism become difficult to see. Putting people in death camps for example, are we talking about the concentration camps or gulags? Extreme nationalism is unique to which ideology? Which ideology was uniquely a dictatorship?
> Profit First, Morality... Somewhere in the Basement
Nothing new. If something is for free, then _you_ are the product.
> Teens and Social Media: A Toxic Cocktail
I have said this for a long time, stop exposing children to unfiltered access on the internet, under any context.
> Once the accounts were finally gone, I realized just how much of a grip these platforms had on me. The number of times I reflexively typed "t" or "f" into my browser bar (which autocompletes to twitter.com or facebook.com) was honestly terrifying.
The trick is to know your limitations and account for them. I don't use social media on my work computer at all, and until recently I didn't even have any chat apps. These were all relegated to my phone, and it's purposefully slow and old.
> Honestly? No idea. Some friends recommended Bluesky, but I’m holding off for now. Maybe I’ll go old-school and write more blog posts. Like back in the early 2000s, when you actually had to think before sharing your thoughts with the world. Sounds quaint, doesn’t it?
The magical new social media will not resolve your issues with social media, social media has been around long enough to know this.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/meta-platforms/operating-marg...
What recession??? We've heard this line for 5+ years now. They're cutting where possible because they can and because the job market is in a dumpster at the moment.
Community notes is far superior to the bias enforcers.
He complained about undue influence from the Biden administration, as if he isn’t going to be subject to undue influence by the Trump administration.
And if all this is so he can buy TikTok, then…
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee...
"Meta will allow its billions of social media users to accuse people of being mentally ill based on their sexuality or gender identity, among broader changes it made to its moderation policies and practices Tuesday.
...
The long list of changes to the new hate speech guidelines include removing rules that forbid insults about a person’s appearance based on race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease. Meta also scrapped policies that prohibited expressions of hate against a person or a group on the basis of their protected class and that banned users from referring to transgender or nonbinary people as “it.”"
But the question is, are trans people actually mentally ill objectively? It certainly doesn't help them reproduce (a form of survival) from a biological perspective, for example.
This Johns Hopkins professor thinks it's mental illness:
https://www.boarddocs.com/vsba/scpsva/Board.nsf/files/B8UR4X...
> Like all DSM illnesses, one key component of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, all of that, is that you have to be functionally impaired by it, otherwise it doesn’t count as a diagnosis
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/07/19/health/is-gender-dysphori...
Many trans people fought to keep it in the DSM for the simple reason that health providers would have refused treatment if it was removed.
There are many trans people that have had treatment and live perfectly happy lives. What makes many trans people unhappy is society’s persistent persecution of them in politics and media.
Then maybe they should have thought of that before advocating for males to invade women's spaces and for children to be medically harmed.
This so-called "persecution" is happening because boundaries need to be asserted. They abused the kindness and tolerance of others, and are now seeing the effects of this.
Also trans people tend to have many other correlated mental issues and for example have high suicide attempt rates.
> Alex Schultz, [Meta]'s chief marketing officer and highest-ranking gay executive, suggested in an internal post that people seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights.
If somebody is writing every day about how some class of people is responsible for their problems I just can't take it, and if I can't effectively block this crap with the tools they give me (20 or so rules on Mastodon, as opposed to Bluesky making me a decent feed out of the box, better with a little "less like this") I will move on.
There is no precedent in human history that you can compare social-media black-box algorithms to. It's not the same as a "public square," or a newspaper, or books, or talking to friends in person. It's a new paradigm.
I would drastically prefer regulations to letting the companies police themselves, but, well, waves hands at the current environment, and what Meta did removing their content reviewers is a step in the wrong direction. The platform will get worse as a result.
In other words, the problem is free reach, not free speech. You might have heard of it -- it has recently been popularized, co-opted, and slightly twisted by Twitter to mean what is more akin to "shadowbanning" problematic accounts, but I'm saying that no one deserves free reach by default on social media.
>"But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S."
I like to read dead/flagged posts sometimes hwre on HN to be able to see what the moderators flag, and generally they are doing amazing job: even if I don't agree with the flagging, I am able to spreak about it with others and I understand the reason.
They're clearly hypocrites as posting to a blog or HN is pretty much the same thing.