Between the fight over AI, shifting geopolitics reigniting old conflicts, an overly-centralized technology industry, a lack of meaningful innovation from a consumer perspective, and the immense precarity of modern work in general, it feels like we’re at the start of the end of a cycle.
I’m noticing more people taking stock of what’s actually important to them and taking a stand on their values. This is good in the long run, but in the immediate it results in a lot of binary/black-and-white decision-making that results in dustups and conflicts between groups who would normally be allied behind common goals.
All of this is to say that I expect we’ll see many, many, many more of these types of posts in the future, as everyone remembers they can choose to shape their engagement with technology, and that naturally includes the right to disconnect from it - not out of any sort of anti-technology position itself, necessarily, but simply from realizing that a specific thing isn’t something they need or are interested in, and that’s okay.
Props to the author for being so clear about their engagement with social media, their background, and their thought process. If it encourages more folks to reassess their own relationship with social media (or any technology), I’m all for it.
People with their own name as the domain posting with a clearly technical background are hardly representative of the general populace. Most people are completely enthralled by social media and use it uncritically for most day-to-day interactions. I wouldn't hesitate to argue that they live their lives through something like tiktok or facebook messenger.
We're not so isolated from normal every day people that noticing trends within ourselves and other people like us have zero chance of bleeding into the mainstream. I too have begun limiting my usage of social media to basically zero, and I'm not so naive to think that I'm a trendsetter anymore rather I am responding to already occurring trends.
I remember what these social media platforms used to be like. They didn't consume my entire life because I was just checking in on my friends. I looked at my screen time recently and decided enough was enough, and deleted everything. Now I only look at my phone if I have an actual reason to. I don't think I'm the only person this is going to happen to.
> too have begun limiting my usage of social media to basically zero
Just delete your accounts. Trust me you’ll feel much better. If your usage is truly basically zero there is no need to keep having an account. Break it off completely.
My sister often only sends updates about her kids on Facebook, so I have to visit once in a while. Most of what is there is garbage I'm better off without (and those posting/sharing would be better off if they got a life), but there are some things that are useful.
Unlike the other reply, I disagree that those updates aren’t important. However, you can still get updates through email or text messages. My family and friends group has almost entirely moved to group chats where people will send pictures or updates on what they are doing. If they aren’t the kind to proactively send these to you, reach out and ask her how she and her kids are doing.
In my experience this makes for a far more meaningful way of staying in touch without much additional effort than passively checking up on each other through social media. And it comes without any of the additional baggage social media brings.
You don’t need the updates. It’s better to find those out in person or just not even find out about them. We are obsessed as a society with FOMO but the truth is, you’re not really missing out on much, even for so-called important family events.
That seems like a strange judgement to make for another person. While I agree that it’s typically better to get updates in person, it may be very difficult to do so based on their circumstances. And judging the importance of someone else’s family events feels even more inappropriate.
I’m not judging - I’m just stripping away the excuses. “Oh I just use social media for XYZ” ok so does everyone else who uses it for whatever random purposes that other people want to judge them for. People had great, meaningful relationships before social media.
You are in fact expressing judgement, and your comments are getting more judgemental as the thread goes on. This is the excuse people always use to portray their feelings and judgements as objective "uncomfortable truths".
That was quick. You are haranguing this person for not upholding your standards of social media use while failing to hold yourself to a standard of intellectual honesty.
When people think things are deeply true of themselves it can be very, very difficult for them to see when it isn't true of others. Especially if there's an embarrassing or shameful element.
People (and kids) were a hell of a lot more interesting the longer you didnt see them.
Pictures on social media counts as interaction but its very limited. You still get to feel like you see them regularly.
You get your desired social interaction but it is arguably fake. Then we stick a display on your mums forehead and rotate advertisements. Not offensive at all.
You get your desired fake soical interaction fix therefore, when you finally meet the person irl (after say a year) you can both look at your phone the whole time because you "interact" with them every day. There is no need to tell stories or go do something.
Alternatively, when someone understands a deep truth it can be easy for them to cut through the excuses others use to hide that truth from themselves or others.
Sure can, but when you refuse to entertain alternative hypothesis or respond to evidence, you're just building a cage to protect yourself from nuance or from recalibrating your views slightly.
The evidence provided wasn’t sufficient to me, nor is it anything I haven’t heard from dozens of other people both online and real life.
You’re free to disagree, hop on and Tweet a picture of it or whatever, but you should at least have respect enough for yourself to acknowledge that in matters such as this others can have genuine differences of opinion and be dogmatic about them, and have thought through such matters at least as much or maybe more than you yourself have.
Bsky/Twitter, same thing but with different marketing.
> Physician, heal thyself.
What opinion did you provide? As far as I can tell you started with this whole nonsense about judging others. Did you lose track of the conversation or do quips like this make you feel good about yourself?
I don't have Bluesky. I already told you twice I deleted my accounts.
> See what social media is doing to you?
I can see that you imagine I'm in some kind of torment nexus, but again, you're bringing your biases and preconceptions into this discussion and not listening to what people are saying, so you end up boxing shadows.
Sorry, my fault I genuinely must have confused you with someone else.
Though my general statement I think still stands regarding Blue Sky. That’s another damn cesspool.
> I can see that you imagine I'm in some kind of torment nexus, but again, you're bringing your biases and preconceptions into this discussion and not listening to what people are saying, so you end up boxing shadows
Hmm I must be imaging the comments you wrote calling me these things then.
I get it, when things get heated everyone you're talking to blends together. I tried my best not to be insulting or to piss you off, but to the extent I did I apologize.
I live several hundred miles from my sister. In-person events are rare things that need planning ahead. Sure I could not find out about events, but I'm better off because I can: when I do get a chance to visit I have an idea what has been going on and thus what to talk about.
Why do you need to have an idea about what’s going on? You could just ask and then talk about it. You’re using social media to skip the initial asking part, but you don’t need to do that.
I can tell you this works because I do it. You’re not missing anything. If you don’t communicate much because of distance either the relationship isn’t that important - so you’re lying to yourself about it, or you should move and live closer together.
You will have deeper and better conversations if you know what questions to ask.
Things that work for you might not work for others. Communication and connection is a need, not a vice.
The idea that you can tell them that their relationships aren't important is so chauvinistic and inappropriate. You ought to take a step back and reflect before commenting further, that's out of line.
You’ll have even deeper connections if you have more things to talk about and genuine curiosity about the novelty of those things instead of “already knowing the questions to ask” - good lord are we robots or something?
> The idea that you can tell them that their relationships aren't important is so chauvinistic and inappropriate. You ought to take a step back and reflect before commenting further, that's out of line.
Save this stuff for someone who cares because it’s not me.
There is no evidence their curiosity is ingenuine, that's your image of them but it doesn't have a basis in reality. It's based in your biases and preconceptions about social media.
I'll refrain from criticizing you for being a chauvinist if you agree to take that behavior someplace else, because it's not for this community. Save that for some toxic no-holds-barred social media. Maybe think on whether your actions are contributing to the social media environment you decry.
> I'll refrain from criticizing your for being a chauvinist if you agree to take that behavior someplace else, because it's not for this community. Save that for some toxic no-holds-barred community like Twitter.
No thanks. You don’t get to define what is toxic behavior nor do you speak for this community or others.
Also, grab a dictionary. Your usage of chauvinist here is incorrect.
> There is no evidence their curiosity is ingenuine, that's your image of them but it doesn't have a basis in reality.
They already said they need information about events to have something to talk about. That’s not how conversations work, nor is it how you establish new friendships or build and maintain existing relationships.
> It's based in your biases and preconceptions about social media.
Well they are biases (yours is showing) but they’re not preconceptions, they are just conceptions.
I don't believe you, but it doesn't really matter. (I'm happy to admit I have a small investment in helping you see my perspective, for what it's worth. It's part of my human need for connection.)
Why would I care about your opinion of me? If I recall from the thread so far it consists of being chauvinist and toxic. That’s no different than some random person yelling at me from across the street while out walking my dog or something.
Just looking out for you and for the community. If I was being a chauvinist I would want someone to tell me. If someone was being a chauvinist to me I would want someone to say something.
I'm not attacking you, I'm giving you feedback. I'm being as neutral and uninsulting as I can be.
You’re misusing the word chauvinist here or rather if you think you’re not can you please explain what the word means? I don’t understand your usage of it in this context.
> If someone was being a chauvinist to me I would want someone to say something.
On the flip side you’re being condescending toward others, “giving feedback”? C’mon. You know it’s good practice to not give advice to those who don’t ask for it, right?
When someone does something inappropriate, you tell them so as politely as possible. Just like if someone's shoe is untied or has toilet paper on it, you let them know. No one needs to ask, those are the table stakes.
(I would also point out that this thread started because you were offering unsolicited advice about using social media. I could be wrong but it seems to me like you think it's appropriate to offer someone advice unsolicited if you have a perspective that's able to see through their "excuses".)
This was the closest definition to my usage I found (American Heritage #4):
Exaggerated and unreasoning partisanship to any group or cause.
What I meant was that you were insisting your subjective viewpoint was the only one that was valid. Other viewpoints you reduced to "excuses."
I can see how it comes off condescending, and I apologize for it. There's a paternalistic element to telling someone they've done something inappropriate, and that should be reduced as much as possible, but I don't think it can stop us from saying something altogether.
If you got rid of social media tomorrow, completely, the world would be better. No doubt in my mind about that. It’s not irrational, I have seen first hand the destruction it causes.
Maybe you should ask yourself why you’re so upset that someone says to delete it? Does it cut too close to the truth?
True, but that is because there are bad parts of social media that we would also lose. The real question is how can we get rid of the bad parts of social media so we can keep the good? (I do not have an answer which is why I only check a few times per month)
The good parts of social media is basically Facebook's feature set in 2007 or so. Everything since then has been in the interest of increasing addiction and monetization. Unfortunately 95+% of Facebook's valuation is due to those bad parts, so I don't see a way back.
I've deleted my accounts too (HN obviously notwithstanding) but telling people they should disengage with their family because they don't need that information is patronizing and undermines your point. They get to decide what they need.
You need not get that information. Other people have different needs and priorities. What if the reason they are so concerned about getting updates on this kid is that they have serious medical issues? What if it brings a ray of sunshine on stressful days to see pictures of them? What if missing these updates means missing family functions and becoming more isolated and lonely? (Note that they confirmed my last speculation.)
What if, instead of berating people for using social media, we discussed how we might build a healthier alternative?
> What if, instead of berating people for using social media, we discussed how we might build a healthier alternative?
Why do we need to build one? Before the internet, we had letters and memos. The Email and IM came. The reason to have a feed is to share things, it shouldn't be for people to come consuming it. And there's no reason for it to be social. To have a special feed that mix everything from everyone on the platform according to "the algorithm"
No need to build something else. Blogs, Email, and IM are still here.
I think there's good parts of social media that are salvageable. I think it's generally good to be able to communicate with anyone and encounter people you otherwise wouldn't. I think we can have social media without having feeds optimized for "engagement" or any single metric. I think blogs and email are great, I just don't think they're the can-all-be-all.
Welp, I ought to stand on business I suppose, I think social media communities are too big. I think it would be less toxic if we were balkanized into smaller communities, and interacted with people of unlike minds in a more considered and intentional way. As it is, it becomes a free for all for dunking on people. Small communities of like minds can become too insular, ideas need to be challenged, but they also need space to grow and develop in a friendly environment.
I like the dichotomy on this site - constant complaining about loneliness on one hand ... and systematic refusal to engage in social ritual mainstream people do to keep connections.
From an addicts POV it’s no different, maybe worse because you are deluding yourself about the other aspects to make you feel like your addiction is ok.
Also, Blue Sky generally sucks. It’s another awful echo chamber.
She's not a programmer. She's an author of a book on health issues explaining why social media failed her as a marketing tool. She's probably still not representative of the general population, but she gives an interesting window into a community that is expected to use social media a lot.
It's tough to be an author. Publishers and retailers will only put major marketing efforts behind new books from authors who are already popular. Before social media, less popular authors had to try to market their own books through interviews on radio and TV but most authors weren't good at that either. So I don't think that social media has necessarily made things any worse, just different.
You know that buying a domain and setting up a few pages is something you can hire someone to do for you, right? And that it's a thing people often do if they want to engage in public relations, such as if they had a book coming out that they want people to buy.
> You know that buying a domain and setting up a few pages is something you can hire someone to do for you, right?
And yet the vast majority of the population doesn't do it, because they don't need it when they're perfectly happy with mainstream social media, which is the point.
The vast majority of the population doesn't do most individual things you could possibly name. There's a vanishingly small set of things you could name that the vast majority of people do without over-generalizing. That doesn't necessarily make them niche.
Most people work, but most people aren't a programmer/barber/chef/construction worker/farmer/etc. Most people listen to music, but most people don't actively listen to <insert any artist below top 100 or so>. Most people use some form of computer daily/weekly, but most people aren't visiting reddit every day, or HN, or a specific youtube channel. Most people aren't a small business owner, but small business owners aren't a niche thing, they are a cornerstone part of the economy.
Add all of these "not mainstream" activity participating people together, and suddenly you have most of the population.
I don't know about uncritically. It has been like 10 years since I heard anyone refer to social media in some positive sense.
Maybe normal people underestimate the scale of corruption the companies do or something. Often some bogey man is blamed not the main culprits by pundits but dunno if people believe that or not.
That doesn't change the message though: social media is not a great way to get attention. If you are social on social media with your friends (including online only friends) that is very different from on social media to get people to your business.
I am using old nokia phone for 3 months now, I am not going back to my iphone. (means no whatsapp, banking, uber, reddit, hn, whatever)
It took almost 1 week to get rid of the cravings "I am slightly bored, I *MUST* look at my phone"
Now, I am just bored, I had forgotten how nice it is to be bored, I just stare at things, poke something with a stick, look for patterns, ask questions, have ideas.. etc; when I have a meeting and the other person doesn't show up on time, I just watch the world and wait.
I also noticed I can watch movies properly, I have more patience, I dont look at my phone at the first "less exciting" moment. It is really nice especially for things like Star Trek where they have not algorithmically optimized every frame to keep you engaged because they were not competing with instagram for your attention.
I even bought a walkman. When the song is not very good, I just wait it out. Very quickly I got my sense of time back, just after few days I can measure time in 'songs' or 'cassette sides'.
I have also blocked all socials except hn on my local pihole.
If you survive the first week of cravings after that it gets nicer every day!
Some people say I am doing those things because of "nostalgia" but this is incorrect, I just want to be able to be bored.
That’s excellent to hear! Alas, I have not gotten to the point of replacing my iPhone (being in IT means I’ve long been married to a smartphone of some variety), but I’m with you on a lot of the above. For example:
> I also noticed I can watch movies properly, I have more patience, I dont look at my phone at the first "less exciting" moment.
I’ve started leaving my phone in the bedroom when I’m playing games or watching movies in the Living Room. It’s a PITA to extract myself from the sofa to retrieve it, and I find myself far more engrossed leaving it physically in a different space. The eventual goal is to have a designated “phone drop” for folks to drop the device on to charge that’s far away from living and sleeping areas, to further break that habit.
> I even bought a walkman.
Same! I turn off WiFi except for OS updates (it’s one of Sony’s new Android-based Walkmans), and have no streaming apps on it. It’s just my microSD card of music from my NAS, and it’s blissful. I need to use it more, but writing synchronization scripts has been a PITA.
> I just want to be able to be bored.
I’ll confess to using an “herbal” crutch for this of late, because of (diagnosed) OCD making it impossible to pause or stop on my own in most cases. Combined with an outdoor walk, I’ve developed a newfound appreciation for just laying on a bench and watching the clouds and planes go by in the sky, or watching cars on the highway. It’s helped me appreciate humanity more, forcing myself into a sort of bored observation of others instead of constantly rehearsing new work tasks, new project ideas, or new contingency plans.
Canceling streaming, on-demand media subscriptions and replacing them with cable is my next step in this process. The practices cable TV cultivates and requires seem healthier and more civilized than those streaming services cultivate.
I love the idea that media consumption is tied to a specific place, which the whole house shares, and that if I want to watch something, I may need to plan for it and know when it'll be available. Moreover, not always getting exactly what I want, when I want it, in the largest possible dose, seems the right way to consume media.
Sure, cable has huge downsides, such as cable news, reality television, and countless other sources of unconscionable garbage. On the other hand, I grew up with these and survived the onslaught of dreck with my wits basically intact, and I discovered a number of things through TV that I wouldn't otherwise have.
I really think that part of what's healthy about cable is precisely that you don't control when or how much of something is available.
That full hard drive doesn't hold much appeal for me.
Hey, it's OK to use the fast forward button. Just because you want to hear Back in the USSR and While My Guitar Gently Weeps doesn't mean you have to sit through Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, it's not good for you like eating your vegetables. And it's not good to let things bore you, you're mixing up being bored with being patient, the distinction matters.
Edit: but if you have actual OCD as you say below, that puts a different slant on things.
I do use fast forward :) just not a lot, but also really like cassettes that two good songs happen to be on the opposite sides of each other.
I am using 'bored' quite loosely, I mean allow yourself to not be constantly engaged, the content creators, the algorithms, the advertisers all are trying to keep me at this extreme state so that I could be sold. The bar is really high, in order to be patient I had to re-learn how to not be engaged all the time. Some times I think of nothing, but most of the time I am having fun with stuff either real or not.
PS: yea I do have ocd, my bored or patient probably mean different things to other people
I want a social media website that barely ever notifies me, has no algorithmic feed, no ads and limits the amount of connections I can have to about the size of a large wedding party. Something like that would be for actual friends and family and would be useless for influencers, trolls and bots.
Bonus points if it doesn't have an app and is only a website.
Mastadon is a more of a broadcast network with micro-blogging. It's got advantages over a place like twitter but not what I'm looking for. And having worked on decentralized social networking, I've turned off from it because it has a lot of ux, privacy and quality issues that are hard to solve.
Myspace or early Facebook is closer to what I'd want.
Digging into your clarifying comments further down, and what you’re describing isn’t social media but just a website people can post stuff on. Social media by its very nature is public, and when it’s public it becomes exploitable.
I do think there’s an opening for a “landing page” of sorts where invited persons can easily share photos and updates with one another (I’ve seen it in the Enterprise repeatedly, though it never gains traction) like the 2010-era Facebook you describe, but it’d have to be something you (or someone in your circles) hosts for everyone if you want the privacy and utility without the ads, spam, and miscreants.
Social media is defined in a lot of ways but what I'm talking about is defined by bi-directional connections between users and sharing within that verified graph.
Self-hosting is a non-starter but a service that charges a reasonable subscription fee could avoid the ads and dark patterns.
A non-profit model like Wikipedia plus low cost subscription would be ideal.
I don't know what 2010 era Facebook is, but I'm talking about small SMS, iMessage, Signal, or WhatsApp groups among people who know each other outside the platform. These groups are no more than maybe 10 people each, so you don't fall into the problem of context collapse [1]. You can have offshoot subgroups, and groups can also be ad-hoc for a particular event. The personal small-scale nature means they're governed entirely by shared social norms, not algorithms or formal moderation.
If you want actual meaningful social interactions online, it needs to be small-scale and completely useless for advertisers. Group chats are that.
Yeah the whole idea of public mass social media has basically failed thus far.
Maybe someone will create some enlightened LLM based algorithm that solves the engagement optimization problem but what we have now has proven to be pretty disastrous through many iterations.
Small scale group chats/discord servers are the clear solution right now. Which is sad in some ways because the question then becomes how do you find your way into a good group chat.
But it’s the only way for the sane to not be overwhelmed by the engagement farming, political nonsense, and what Noah Smith calls the “shouting class” of people that have nothing else to do in life but dominate these platforms by stirring up drama all day every day.
Yes, an imessage group chat with a few close friends is the best social network IMO. I have two, one with me and some college buddies and another for my family.
As I said below, I’m not interested in a chat program in the least. Especially discord. I use it when I have to but it’s a much more demanding and ephemeral experience than I described.
Is this a generational divide? There’s no way I’d ever convince my immediate family let alone my extended family to join a discord server.
I think one thing to remember that is often forgotten is just how new all this is. Society is moving incredibly fast and that can be both good and bad. Even 10 years ago the way people interacted with technology would be unrecognizable today. 20 years ago is the distant pass. We sacrificed a generation of kids to figure this out and hopefully we will actually figure this all out, but we shouldn't be surprised that we've had seismic shifts in how technology is impacting our society and we didn't get it immediately right from the get go.
That’s something that still blows my mind, and gives me serious pause when I consider the impacts. Sure, I’ve been involved in technology and the internet since the mid-90s as an elementary schooler, but I’m the exception to the rule. In thirty short years we’ve gone from bank tellers to bank apps, from dreary Government buildings with long waiting times to poorly-designed websites that crash frequently, and from only being reachable via post or landline to never being unavailable unless you’re somewhere isolated and remote - and then building technology to bring connectivity into those areas as well.
In three decades computing went from a toy of the rich and tools of the biggest businesses to a “necessity” of the everyman, but without any formal training on usage, value, or feedback on boundaries. Thirty years to go from only nation states being able to effectively surveil people at scale, to any tech company with a magic pixel being able to gather far more and accurate data than anyone prior could hope to.
This has been a gargantuan shift in civilization in an impossibly short amount of time, and we’re only really just now agreeing that there’s some growing pains that need sorting out. Maybe most businesses don’t need cloud-based services for everything, maybe most humans don’t actually need public social media, and maybe some of the stuff we take for granted as necessary today are actually quite worthless to most people/entities.
Viewed through that lens, I also see the desperation of the AI movement to continue accelerating “advancement” forward, before more people start asking the same questions regarding necessity and importance of existing tools and technologies. Once people start questioning the utility of a purchase, they’re less likely to spend money on it - and there goes your business.
I know a few people on the internet long enough to have IP assignments that were originally recorded in Jon Postel's notebook. They have always been on the forefront of everything new and exciting on the internet. Today, there's a fairly even split between bluesky, various mastodon instances, and going back and hanging out on IRC. Nobody that has been in the trenches for a few decades wants to touch an algorithmically-curated platform.
If there's one thing twitter showed us it's that humanity isn't yet ready for the hive mind.
As for me, I am on bluesky, but I limit who I follow to the point that I can mostly take in a whole week of posts in about five minutes. I'm at the age where a few hours of my time is a horrifyingly significant fraction of a percent of my remaining time on this planet. I have better things to do with that time than to squander it being miserable so the world's third richest person can get a little richer and buy another private island.
I want an LLM that I control to sit between me and any social media feed. Let it filter the garbage and engagement-bait and boil it down to something that actually adds value to my life
I wrote a comment a bit ago on what this adversarial interoperability [1] could look like with local LLMs and accessibility APIs [2]. Big AT Proto and Bluesky fan, as it cannot be captured ("protocols, not platforms"), but it isn't enough to have this capability only with Bluesky; it must be able to support any social network or graph. It should be a robust content processor under the user's control for any firehose they wish to consume, whether that is a REST API endpoint, an RSS feed, a plain 'ol website that the agent will login as the user as, or a closed app that the agent will use accessibility APIs to operate the app as the user.
That's not what the social media site wants. It has it's own algorithms and AI, ensuring that you get exactly what they need you to see.
You want an AI to sift though endless piles of crap, just to find the few specks of gold. Why not stop mixing your gold into the dung heap before consuming it?
I want to communicate with actual humans and enjoy meaningful conversation, 5-10 actual humans is enough really, I don't have a public-facing brand I need to maintain like the author. That's what social media is for and thus it's simply not for me.
Similarly, I've been watching the rise of the "minimal phone", and "analog tech" with interest lately.
People have lost agency to the degree that they're looking to the very tech that stole their agency for answers, and I view that a sign that perhaps the push-back is actually beginning in earnest.
There's no push-back. Manifestos posted by a few members of the terminally online chattering class don't constitute any sort of real trend. I've yet to see anyone using a "minimal phone" (other than a few older people who might still have a working feature phone).
I still have a smartphone, but I barely have any apps on it. I literally have a handful of email apps and two weather apps and that's it.
So yeah, I have a smartphone, but I barely use it compared to how I used to use it even 5 years ago. By unplugging, I've found myself way more productive. I'm reading two or three books a month now. Its an amazing feeling knowing you can drive what you want to do instead of having social media driving your life, manipulating you into using it more and more and not feeling like you're in control.
I've essentially logged off and I really don't miss it. I feel like I can't be the only one.
You're not, but you're also not the majority. I'm continually surprised that people are still on Facebook. I get why they use Facebook Messenger, or Facebook Marketplace, but the actual Facebook "news" feed? Have you seen that, it's ads or ads disguised as content... How the hell that thing isn't dead i beyond me.
As an anecdatum, one of my gen Y embedded engineers is using a little stick phone that can barely text, and avoids all social media except Discord (assuming that counts). One of the other younger folk in a different department has something similar. And we've only got around 100 people in this building.
“I don’t see what you’re seeing and therefore your position is invalid” isn’t really the slam-dunk your tone suggests. I’m also seeing pushback and withdrawal from my own highly-technical circles as we come to terms with how much time and energy these things sap from us with little given in return, and decide to exert more agency as a result. Developers are retiring to work on farms, for crying out loud, suggesting there’s something deeply, intrinsically toxic about the state of things that the people with the most expertise are leaving the field for areas less glamorous or lower in compensation.
You might not be seeing it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
Nah. The "back to the land" movement is nothing new. Some office workers were trying to become farmers (and mostly failing) back in the 1970s when there were only a tiny number of developers. Again, complaints about the state of society by a few disaffected individuals are meaningless and highly technical circles aren't representative of the broader society. No matter how amazing everything is a few people are going to be unhappy. Nothing has changed.
stego-tech is the equivalent of an anti-tech influencer ("zealot") on HN. Pretty much all they post about on here, and they post a lot on here, is about how tech is ethically bankrupt.
HN is big enough now imo that it's worth starting to tag users so you can know where they're coming from.
I found a tampermonkey extension for Firefox based on this comment. So far it seems to work well. I'm not sure if that's what they were referring to though.
Yeah, I’ve been noticing the same. But let’s be honest, most people don’t really get to choose their relationship with tech. The whole analog tech and minimal phone thing sounds nice, but it’s still a luxury. You need a certain level of stability to even consider disengaging. So while I’m hopeful and happy to see those small changes, I’m also skeptical. Real change won’t happen until it stops being a lifestyle choice and becomes a bigger shift (or its part).
I'm calling it right now. Develop world costumers are increasingly seeing smartphones as limiting rather than empowering. It will shift into a product for areas with poor infrastructure as higher income push back against this invasive and manipulative technology. This will create a feedback loop. Lower average income will drive down the utility of the platform for those who fund it (advertisers), smartphones will gradually lose their status signalling value and in another generation it will be prevalent only in areas with poor infrastructure.
I suspect that you're right, but only because of the rise in AI.
At a certain point we'll all have AI personal assistants that are easier to use, more convenient, and less harmful to us than smartphones have historically been. The cool kids will move to the shinier new format, and the poor will continue to use the moderately dangerous, addictive, less efficient legacy tech for a long while.
Maybe these things will come in smart glasses format that we interact with primarily by voice, better smart watches that don't require a phone at all, or maybe it will be something like the star trek communicator?
The problems with social media are partly network related. You may opt out, but those naked pictures or nasty comments about you are still up there, the division and polarization that social media causes is still there. Basically society is just as bad off as before you decided to opt out, and you can't opt out of society. This is one of those technologies that we shouldn't have invented (one of Bostrom's black balls), but once you invent it it's too late because the incentives make it too difficult to roll back.
> everyone remembers they can choose to shape their engagement with technology, and that naturally includes the right to disconnect from it
The thing that scares me the most about the times we are living in right now is that while I can choose how I shape my engagement with technology, I am still stuck living in a planet/country/society/democracy filled with people who may be making radically different choices and I still have to deal with the consequences of that.
It really doesn't matter that much if I figure out ways to avoid toxic disinformation when I'm outvoted by idiots who haven't. It doesn't matter that much if I spend less time staring at a screen so that I can spend more in-person time with people I care about when it's a grueling task getting anyone else to commit to hanging out because they are still enthralled by the glowing rectangle.
I'm doing my best to navigate this chaotic stressful time, but ultimately I share a boat with many many other people and have only my own tiny little oar.
Well, isn’t this a ”build it and they will come” situation? Do what you feel is right and that will communicate to others around you that there’s an alternative.
But on many other days, I remember that all the asshats are also doing their own "build it and they will come" and pimping their own brand of toxic nonsense. And, worse, the billionaires are all doing it too and they have many orders of magnitude more influence than I ever will.
Yesterday I got a mail from Facebook: "*Woman_I_have_known mentioned you on Facebook".
Haven't used FB in years, mail looks legit, I get kinda curious. I tap it, and am immediately logged in, in DDG browser (which has 0 cookies when closing)!
To top it off, she didn't mention me, she mentioned some #tag on some stupid lottery for a van.
It's so disrespectful. So dirty. I know they don't give a * about me, but do they have to put it on so thick?
This is a big reason why I'm so suspicious of AI. Those systems are largely backed by the same companies who have spent the last 15+ years disrespecting users and treating them as resources to extract, not actual people to serve.
The ethos in tech seems to be a simplistic toddler-like mindset for "more for more's sake" that doesn't care about others' agency.
The ddg browser part is simple to explain: you followed a link that was generated specifically for this email sent to you. When you click it fb knows who you are (so they directly log you in), but also that you reacted to this specific clickbait campaign.
Yes, these are often referred to as "Magic Links."
When it comes to the security implications, consider that email has long been a "single point of failure" for a lot of services in the form of the "forgot password" feature that emails you a link to reset your password.
When I'm talking to non-tech people in my life about how best to protect themselves, I usually tell them to think about priorities and disaster scenarios. What would suck the most if it got hacked? The two that are usually at the top of the list for pretty much everyone are email and online banking. Others might include Amazon accounts (hackers can order themselves gift cards with your CC if compromised etc.) Prioritize securing those with a strong password + MFA. The rest is case by case but make sure to use a password manager so you're not reusing passwords.
I have never seen a use of a Magic Link that wasn't because I asked the Magic Link to be sent to me. Never, ever had one sent to me in a marketing/engagement email.
Facebook is able to realize outsize cross-web tracking benefits by having you logged in as long as possible. Few other companies are able to realize comparable benefits because they don't have the same ad-serving aspirations coupled with "Login with Facebook" reach.
Google is comparable, but it's too risky for them to have so many magic links hanging around in customer inboxes, because Google identities tend to be tied to far more sensitive 3rd party applications. Which is not to say that there are no sensitive applications with "Login with Facebook", but I'll argue there are fewer.
> So if someone gains access to your email, they also get FB access…?
I mean, that's how it works for most websites. I think I have 2FA turned on for FB, but honestly the phone system is way less secure than email at Google/Microsoft.
If they had forwarded that mail to someone else--"Hey look! Someone mentioned me on facebook!"--then that second person could have logged into the first person's account with a single tap.
It's scummy and terribly insecure to pass around someone else's credentials via email.
I wonder if it's part of some growth hacking scam. They want their metrics to show x amount of people logging in each month, so they show these emails that auto log you in.
I wonder if Facebook has slowly began to lean into the scammer email pattern where ... they really want the people who are ok with these patterns so they can hook them in other equally scummy ways.
Perhaps social media companies are not interested in anyone who wants to manage their feed or is looking for somethings specific, they want to point their product AT you, not have you use it.
Oh my god I’ve been at the end of my rope wirh LinkedIn too. Between the obnoxious notifications and the absolute brain rot that is The Feed™ there’s basically nothing good about that site apart from the obligate profile-as-a-resume.
It is so pathetic how they beg and wheedle and connive to get you to engage. I’ve honestly lost all respect for that site at this point.
For those who don't even open TFA: she is a creator, not a consumer in social media, and she only started two years ago.
It's a long ass post about how fake those people are and how fake you yourself become once you start creating that content.
Wishing the best of luck for the journey.
This was a refreshing exception among all those "enough, I quit social media". OTOH, here I am still surprised how many people find it fulfilling to either be a performing monkey in this palm-sized vertical cage, or the opposite, why is it so fulfilling to watch those monkeys hours long, daily. "monkey" sounds harsh, I know, but in reality, these performers are barely more than just copying, mirroring other ones, with possibly more followers.
At the very least, one should be a regular user of a platform prior to marketing on that platform. Every platform has nuance to it, and if you don't understand that nuance, then you're better off paying someone else to do it on your behalf.
The OP was never going to succeed in her efforts there.
On one hand it seems she already has audience so she should have positive traction.
On the other hand it seems like she started from 0 on the platforms and expected to be already a star “because I am an author”. Then she wanted to hack away with tricks like “posting daily” attracting people who liked her “dog posts” - because she didn’t have better stuff to post.
I read that post yesterday and it started sinking in. She did everything wrong.
Her audience as she mentioned wasn’t transferable to socials so she really was starting there from scratch. Posting your funny dog pictures and your daily routine will not make you stand out - everyone does that. Being “an author” also doesn’t make much of a difference when I can follow J.K Rowling and watch her funny dog pictures or laugh at her making inappropriate comments.
Edit: I also checked just now what was her book. That’s definitely not aligning with lifestyle influencing with happy dogs or husband in perfect golden hour video.
> OTOH, here I am still surprised how many people find it fulfilling to either be a performing monkey in this palm-sized vertical cage, or the opposite, why is it so fulfilling to watch those monkeys hours long, daily.
Social media's been coasting on unearned legitimacy since at least 2012 or so.
Remember the countless thinkpieces about the wisdom of crowds? Conceivably, social media crowds could somehow solve all sorts of really hard problems because in the mass of people conversing we'd be able to amplify voices who weren't being heard and get harder problems solved.
The truth of it is social media is a massively multiplayer video game where the goal is to build a following through posts, replies, and various social metrics.
This reframing situates it correctly for me: should I play video games for 4 hours straight everyday? Maybe not if I want to feel balanced as an individual. Should I let randos from a video game tell me I should be putting more time in? Absolutely not: they are still randos, regardless of how many Internet Points they have. Do I want their level of brainrot? No, thus I should I always be mindful of the effects on me.
It also makes exceedingly clear that social media should never be confused with whatever your quality work is that needs to get done. It is not a substitute for actually doing things. It offers a pale shadow of communication, friendship, and action. People should want more than the lousy facsimiles that it provides.
I think posting a note about your graduation so that all your friends and family can read a single note is a great use of social media. Reading about your niece's archery trophy is social media.
You can do this through email. But a personal website is a bit more interesting and preserves some privacy for the audience. Hosting your own site is beyond the abilities of most people, so it makes sense to have some easy hosting solution. A social media service is a fantastic idea.
Doom scrolling through Tiktok is not social.
Most people do not use "social media" services strictly as social media services. They use them as news services, music streaming services, etc. And most "social media" services encourage this and make it difficult to use their sites for social media.
A decent social media provider, like a decent email provider or hosting provider would have to charge money for their service. I don't know how many people would want such a service nor how many people would be willing to pay for it.
I want the old internet back, considering that history is cyclical I have high hopes that it will come back. However I subscribe to the idea that history doesn't repeat itself but rhymes so I expect it to be amazing again in a slightly different form.
Currently its infestation of for-profit content that got even worse with generative AI and curated through for-profit algorithms that drain our life for attention.
However, if you pay close attention to the non-advertiser friendly content and content that AI refuses to generate(which is mostly extremist left and right BS), you will see that there's a sustainable path for content that is not discovered and created the way it is now.
Yes, currently the only organic content is the extremist content. Yes, those de-platformed people actually didn't go away. They create authentic high quality Bull Shit, have audience that care and they are doing just fine. Which makes me believe that there must be a way for non-crazy, non-racist, non-extremist people for once again have authentic high quality content.
Interestingly, when Erdogan of Turkey cornered the mainstream media and deplatformed the non-complying journalists those journalists also adopted new ways. For many years, the advertisement on those channels were laughing stock. It was mostly hair removal cream and ideology oriented books but they survived anyway and the Erdogan acquired media lost steam as it wasn't authentic anymore and those small channels and social media platforms became mainstream. To the point that he is now once again trying to destroy them as his media is no good to push his narrative.
The old internet has never left, it's just the vast majority of people went to the corporatized internet instead. You can still find small communities of a few dozen or hundred people posting on forums that aren't reddit or facebook.
You aren't going to find them because Google does not care about discovery they care about ads.
Webrings are one trick to find your people, but it's hard and most webrings don't point to "gathering spots."
>You aren't going to find them because Google does not care about discovery they care about ads.
I frequently post to two very small, hobby-specific phpBB forums with old-internet-style communities that I found by googling the hobby. The forums themselves were listed at the top of Google's results when looking for the broader hobby, and I regularly find specific posts in Google results when searching for very specific subject matter.
They're only going to get harder to find as they disable unauthenticated access to topics due to being swamped with thousands of LLM company scrapers, if the user-owned-and-run forum I've been a member of for more than 20 years is anything to go by.
>considering that history is cyclical I have high hopes that it will come back
Not quite. As McLuhan said, the medium is the message. Once you get a new medium, it changes how people think and behave. Television changed how people treated entertainment forever, cars changed how transportation worked forever (I'm sure the horse industry hoped history was cyclical), etc, etc.
Even within the realm of social media itself, we saw successive irreversible stages. Text content gave way to images and memes which gave way to videos which finally gave way to short term video content. They are all competing in a Darwinian struggle in the attention economy, and once they gain traction, they change how people use their devices completely.
Discord is pretty close to the old internet. I have lots of friends on Discord who I am quite close with but have never met in person. Discord servers are isolated and usually invite only, and generally you are not aware of what is happening in other discord servers and getting rage baited.
Yesterday I woke up, naturally, I started scrolling. The very first video (on Instagram) was an Uber driver getting pulled out of his car, a guy cocking a gun and executing him. I was barely awake and didn't really have time to react.
For the rest of the day I couldn't stop thinking about it, had high levels of anxiety for a few hours. I told all my friends I'm switching off for a bit on the socials. Mastodon and signal for a bit.
Edit: Just thinking about this happening yesterday puts me into a high state of anxiety.. Its absolutely bllsht these companies can effect us in this way.
Second Edit: Its my choice to expose myself knowingly, not entirely blaming meta. And I'm not going to anymore, but this is a more common experience than usual since Zuck got a chain and Tall-T
> Its absolutely bllsht these companies can effect us in this way.
I'd be one of the last people to defend Instagram/Meta/Zuck, but is that really your takeaway from this? Execution videos are absolutely against Instagram's TOS and I'm sure they want it on their platform even less than you.
If anything, Instagram's issue is they're too heavy on the robo-censorship. My friend posted a photo of him standing on one leg with a chair in his hands, making a goofy face, with the caption "I'm gonna hit you with this chair!" directed at no one in particular, and it was taken down for, quote: "encouraging violence and leading to risk of physical harm, or a direct threat to public safety." Appeal was rejected too, and the post had to be deleted.
This happens because they're trying to moderate against people posting execution videos. One slipped through the cracks seemingly, but it's not like they don't put a lot of effort into preventing that. It's pretty hard to do at Meta's scale where most of the earth's population is using their platforms.
Moderation has basically gone away... Don't you think there's a extra bit of ML that goes into the first reel I'm seeing after not opening the app for 10 hours also? I'm making assumptions here, but this was the first reel. These videos have thousands of likes.
Yep. Just see YouTube comment sections with clear pornographic images in certain users' profiles–accounts which have existed for enough time for the dumbest of moderation campaigns to have identified as inappropriate.
The take-away is that not that they are poorly moderated (which is true).
The point is that these short-form videos deliver no actual value to those consuming them but come with plenty of mental health downsides. (Literal PTSD, for starters.)
The ML moderation false positives/negatives do not annoy me as much as the slot machine design of reels/tiktoks/shorts. I do think the constraints of the medium's design (very short, random, visual, crowd-controlled) create perverse incentives.
I almost never get videos where people actually die unless I really want to (and usually, I don't). Lots of close calls, suggestive images, but an actual death caught on camera, no. Even the killing of animals is not something I see often, even though it is part of daily life for many farmers. Maybe some of it slips through, but algorithms tend to not let that kind of content pass.
If anything, I find mainstream news to be worse. They don't show the act of murder itself, but they are definitely going to show you a bunch of scenes and let your imagination fill the gaps. They constantly tell you how ugly the world is and how it is becoming worse. It is all war, natural disasters, climate crisis, overpopulation (or is it underpopulation), toxic chemicals, etc... Yes, these are real problems, but these are problems we solve. Wars end, natural disasters are better predicted and mitigated, we are using more and more renewable energies, it turns out that population self-regulates, toxic chemicals get banned and replacements are found, etc... It seems we are breeding a whole generation of people who think we are doomed instead of seeing all these things as obstacles to overcome.
Overall, I find social media more positive than mainstream news. I dislike how they turn our brains into mush, but we get more cute girls dancing and less massacres in Gaza.
A couple assumptions you're making here I'd disagree with:
1. Yudkowski is ever worth listening to.
2. That this is just some antecdotal experience (the whole world is having), that isn't backed by any scientific merrit. I don't have time in the middle of my work day to go find all that, but we all know this is something measurable.
How humans adapt remains to be seen, it seems like a lot of (young) people adapt by shoving the barrel of a gun in their... Maybe they would have done that anyways idk.
> Yesterday I woke up, naturally, I started scrolling. The very first video (on Instagram) was an Uber driver getting pulled out of his car, a guy cocking a gun and executing him. I was barely awake and didn't really have time to react.
Remember that (old?) internet 'meme' (concept, more like it) that was something like "can't unsee this"? Yeah, that.
There's all sorts of "infohazards" (written and visual) that one has to avoid today, largely a product of the social media landscape.
I've heard such practices and attempts at curation as psycho-social security (or something like that); the process of deliberate avoidance of certain "content" and attempts/diligence when interacting with these various platforms and landscapes to avoid such things. It actually does take a concerted effort now to avoid being exposed to "content" like you described, as addiction and "habit" of "scrolling" is in some ways more natural than not, now. Strange time to be alive.
that's one thing I miss about the old internet. Not every piece of info was a "meme." Some were literally just ideas. Not everything is a freaking meme!!!!
Yeah X/Twitter was running ads for a hunting game that showed you a real video of a fox dying slowly after being shot repeatedly. Can't block it and it popped up multiple times over a few weeks. It's getting to the point that I can't browse Twitter in public just due to the ads.
You are lucky. Most people don't have the introspection to draw the link between a video they consumed and the resulting anxiety afterward. They just keep coming back for the dopamine hit without realizing that they are effectively volunteering themselves for PTSD.
I think growing up online alongside websites like Rotten and LiveLeak from a young age pretty much desensitized me to being bothered by such types of videos or images. The late 90s and early 00s internet was wild.
The difference between then and now is that on the 90's and 00's Internet, you had to go and actively find that kind of content yourself. Now it's the first thing you see in your feed after logging into FaceBook, YouTube, Instagram, and whatever else.
I grew up with this, born in 90, have witnessed gun violence in real life. I'm still not prepared to see someone getting executed in 4k immediately after I wake up. My past experiences don't prevent the type of anxiety that it causes, nor am I going to sweep for Instagram because I'm less of a pussy than the 12 yr olds seeing it right when they wake up also.
"Although the blog will be the main home for all my stuff (you can follow it via RSS and I think you should, because RSS is possibly the best and purest tech we still have)"
This. I watch youtube through my RSS feed. The videos actually loads instantly, without their BS loading times if you load it on their page (in FF with adblock). I can set up rules in my RSS feed to filter out previews/trailers from channels I follow. I can sort my YT channels into categories (music, sports, etc). It's actually usable, and the controls are in my hand.
More people needs to use RSS feeds. Don't let algorithms dictate your life. Youtube engineers are the worst.
If you're willing to pay a little, I have used https://bazqux.com/ for many years and it has every feature I've ever needed built in. You can set up everything the parent comment mentioned in a few minutes.
It does support Reddit comments. HN feeds are provided by a third party (https://github.com/hnrss/hnrss) which doesn't provide comments on posts, but you could request or implement that feature if you wanted to.
As I just wrote to the author of this piece (who also happens to send out one of the best weekly roundups of weird and wonderful articles I get), her experience captures what so many authors I’ve worked with over the years in publishing have struggled with. When i can, i try to disabuse them of the idea that social media is somehow a reliable or necessary tool for promoting a book. As Caroline writes, if you already have a platform and it comes naturally to you, great, but I’ve personally never seen an author join social media in order to promote a book and actually succeed. And that’s before you even get to the exploitative dynamics she lays out so clearly here (aptly described as a pyramid scheme). Anyway, it’s all articulated beautifully, and I wish every author, especially those just starting to consider it, could read this and know there’s another way.
I'm starting to sloooowly build up an audience as I work on my game project, and I can already tell I do not at all have the necessary drive to build that audience as large as it needs to be for the game to "go viral" based on that alone, no matter how good it is. No, I think the necessary evil will be actual marketing, possibly by reaching out to other streamers and whatnot that DO have those followings and seeing if I can spark their interest in the project. I know I don't have the mental energy to keep it up myself, especially not solo. I'll focus on what I'm good at: making the best game that I can, the sort of thing I'd love to play. The rest will have to be up to the experts in their field, which I am not.
"Being a social media star is a skillset completely distinct from being someone who writes books — they may overlap occasionally, but it's not the norm."
I've met some folks, even taken classes from some people who are involved with some important frameworks and so on, all great experiences ... and yet their social media posts about coding are just pithy garbage, even when they try to say something important.
At times the profession and social media posts straight up seem at odds where I think "I get why this limited number of words plays well on social media, but it's not correct... and I think it even indicted the opposite of what the words originally meant."
Social media doesn't really make for a good communication channel for anything except social media.
In defense of social media, going to share a typical conversation I have with some younger (mid 20s) folks that I mentor:
Me: "Do you use social media?"
Them: "NO! Social media is so toxic!"
Me: "You mentioned earlier that you are trying to get a job in X field, correct?"
Them: "Yes, that's true"
Me: "Have you found the relevant sub-Reddit, part of Twitter etc where people in that field hang out and/or share ideas?"
Them: "Well, no."
Me: "So how about this: first find the online place where those people hang out. Second, why don't you write up a blog post or summary of something you've done in the field and post it there. If you haven't done something IN the field, then maybe talk about how you learned about the field or what you find interesting about it etc. Then post that in the sub-Reddit etc."
<few weeks go by>
Them: "I followed your advice and someone from a firm in the field I'm interested saw it, read it, commented on it and reached about having a conversation."
Me: "Excellent! I always say that the lifetime marginal benefit of going from zero to one social media post about you describing/writing about your preferred industry is ENORMOUS"
(We usually move on to another topic with the mentee after this)
Prior to social media, the only way you could do this was to do one of the following:
- go to college in that field
- hangout, physically, where the folks you wanted to interact with were
- physically send letters to people with your article/summary idea
- etc
I feel like a lot of folks forget this and are blinded by the downsides of social media (which, to be fair, there are many)
What you describe is the best of what social media can be. Real people connecting, interacting with each other and helping folks. Sadly, a lot of social media is not this. Its people and bots posting content designed to inflame, generate hate and make people feel bad about themselves by comparing their own lives to unattainable goals (eg: Instagram).
Add to this the addictive way Social Media engineers their sites to keep people swiping rather than interacting with real people and you have a product which may be more net negative than positive.
I wish there were more instances of Social Media operating in the way you describe. That was the dream...
> - hangout, physically, where the folks you wanted to interact with were
There's also nothing wrong with this! The more and more interactions we move online, the more purely transactional they become and we miss out on a lot of connection with our fellow humans, which have a multitude of benefits other than just professional networking.
The other problem with social media is your choice is removed from you. I run a photography business as a side hustle, and without social media, it would have never gotten off the ground and if I want it to continue I'm required to basically not only be good at the photography aspect, but to be good at social media and having that social media persona.
It's draining, and extremely damaging for one's mental health and if you run a small business chances are you just don't have a choice, you have to do it or you don't get to exist (up to a certain point until word of mouth can carry you, but even then not having a social media presence is a red flag for many).
Social media itself doesn't need to be bad, or harmful, but that would require getting rid of algorithmic feeds, and to stop rewarding engagement, which will solve the "influencer" problem. I'd also go as far to say that social media shouldn't be the end game, but a tool that eventually leads to a real, physical connection/in person event. Social media should augment those communities, but not be the entirety of the community.
I've been trying to use social media to promote my music & mobile app for years, to very little luck. I don't even really like using social media, but it felt "necessary" in order to "make it," even though there is nothing to see for all this effort.
Sometimes Facebook et al feel like a complete ghost town, with algorithmic content completely overwhelming any engagement from friends or acquaintances.
Social media networks start to suck as soon as your circle of friends graduates college.
Mine is mostly one old friend posting about politics (and like, I agree with his politics but the stuff reposted on social media is hit by the dumb-viral filter and becomes unbearable even if you agree with it).
I think the author was a bit confused on what „do social media“ means. This, like any other promotional marketing channel, lives based on building an audience that comes for that value OR is genuinely interested in your content.
Just creating some random videos about god knows what without any overarching context or value (entertainment) provided, leaves the audience clueless about what this channel means.
It’s like your uncle uploading random videos without any sort of narrative and each video being completely random.
Doing „social media“ probably means to either build a following by providing content that involves book or are around the topic books, that regardless of interest in the current book in question, will make the audience come back because they are getting some kind of value and/or entertainment.
Posting videos about a book and then next about a husband walking the dog does not really spark an interest to come back for more (unless I am personally interested to support a particular creator (which these followers also did)).
Unfortunately just trying to build a social media presence to promote a book is naive. The advice to „do social media“ is too broad. But social media IS a powerful channel to reach audiences, just not without either already owning a channel that covers the subject matter on a regular basis to attract the audience or without the willingness to spend money. Placing advertisements or striking deals with book related channels would probably be more effective.
It's 2025 and McDonald's is still the #1 most popular restaurant in the whole world.
Social Media is fast food. The masses will consume it to their death...
The rest of the population is bifurcating. The only people who will remain on Social Media will be poor, uneducated and the stupid. Not that different than the people who eat fast food, often.
Sure but she's frustrated because she's trying a use case that does not apply to most social media users. You can have a miserable experience in competitive races but it's a bit heavy handed to swear off jogging entirely.
I think the entire point is that to find out about it, you have to have a much higher level of interest in the topic than someone who would find out about it via algorithm and virality.
Getting rid of most social media has been one of the best things I have ever done. I didn’t just delete my accounts, I also blocked the sites so I can’t visit them.
The best one to delete was definitely reddit. It’s too easy to doomscroll. It’s such a time sink, and being hyper-aware of everything that’s going on nowadays just made me anxious all the time.
HN hasn’t proven to be much of an issue for me. I guess it’s just less active, so I run out of new content faster whenever I visit.
I did the same, but I'm still holding on to Reddit with many restrictions:
- No mobile apps
- 10 min/day time limit on web
- Only browse 6 subreddits individually
- Filtering all posts below a certain karma level (depending on the subreddit)
- Collapsing all comments by default
This has completely changed my relationship with the platform for the better. I would quit it entirely, but unfortunately it's the best news source for a few of my hobbies.
I have a hypothesis - media production [1] will gradually shift from social medial platforms to individualized (decentralized) platforms [2].
I think there are a lot of reasons for this trend:
* People are becoming increasing distrustful of platforms and there owners.
* The platform algos push a lot of noise and inflammatory content for engagement, something that users are getting fatigue from.
* On the creator side, the professional producers of social media will find it increasingly difficult to monetize from their platforms. In fact, I think the platforms will eventually realize how much power they have over their popular creators and charge the creators in order to have full access to their audiences.
* Additionally on the creator side, they can be banned at any moment with little or no recourse. Imagine being a professional creator on instagram, and one day you are banned for no reason. You lose total access to your following.
So I think the attention will slowly shift away from the platforms, which increasingly just serve as a parasitic middle men, back to creators + their followers (newsletters, blogs, private chat, websites with owned domains, etc).
[1] Whatever people tend to post on social media, whether its images, text, audio, or video.
There’s an easier way to promote on social media without becoming a life consuming personal brand. Get yourself on those accounts that curate content.
Get your song featured on curated Spotify lists or Instagram/TikTok accounts that review books of a specific genre, or get a guest spot on a podcast about your topic.
This is like the old way of marketing. In the old days, you’d apply to talk at writing conventions, table, do book tours at stores, go to relevant events locally, and partner with libraries locally. To follow the song analogy, musicians used to send songs to DJs and radio hosts. Maybe your at a college radio level, or local broadcasting. Find your stations, build up your reputation.
In the end of the day, people have found their networks and communities. You should try to enter them and be a part of those communities rather than build one up for yourself.
The author has this insite when she describes most of her following is through some form of word of mouth. This social media era is the same, except some of the word of mouth is direct (DMs, IRL conversations) and others are through communities.
In an era of everything being algorithmically served to you, I’m impressed by how often personal recommendations weigh far heavier for people. A good example I’ve seen is restaurants. Sure, I might Google or Yelp, but if someone I know has similar taste recommends a place, I’ll give it a shot. It doesn’t need to be someone I know IRL or virtual, it’s just a person who shares the same interests.
I think this works well if you’re trying to promote something real, like what this author is doing. I have no solution for personal content.
I started blogging in 2012, have been going pretty consistently since then.
I currently 'go hard' on tiktok, because I've recently been collecting tons of footage of mobility networks via drone and 360 camera (mostly while I ride my scooter/small motorcycle around)
the tiktok editor is pretty good for that purpose, and then I bring some clips back to my blog.
For instance, https://josh.works/traffic-bean has text, links to some substacks I wrote, a youtube video embed (drone footage) and tiktok embeds (insta360 footage).
It does the trick.
But everything that isn't on my website I count as ephemeral, discard, creative detritus that I create lots of so I can occasionally get the good bits.
I love having my website. I can write whatever I want. I can write about grief, or supremacy, or ruby, or american road networks, and I have a list of subscribers (~300) via email that I can talk to directly.
I love to see other people's blogs. It's so much more interesting to me than an instagram or tik tok or whatever.
I've often wondered if you can't have your cake and eat it too by treating social media as write-only. If you just post, but don't read comments, demonetize, don't track performance, you break the cycle of feedback and measurement that shapes inauthentic behavior. This doesn't mean you take NO feedback, because you can always offer an intentionally "high-friction" means of contacting you (I personally like the idea of a time-limited email address that is the answer to a riddle presented in the content. Or a PO Box).
It's deeply uncertain, even unlikely, that this will work because users crave engagement, feeling like their involved, and this "shape" of social media is more akin to legacy TV and print media which is "fire and forget". But still, I think it's an experiment worth doing.
Been doing this for almost a decade. Drive-by social media. My pages are all public too.
Check iluvlawyering on Instagram and you'll see hundreds of posts without any responses. There's even a post that I made as a channel marker of sorts (paraphrasing: click on this and tap on that, all day long its click, click, clack, feel free to click on this there's no tapping back.
Needless to say I haven't scrolled or engaged with anything on any of my own feeds in years. It's also important not to curate or review what you've already posted. That was an issue for the first couple years but it's all smooth sailing now.
of course you can, theres lots of healthy ways of engaging with and using social media...
its just that for whatever reason, we've invested the lives of many of our best minds into pulling you into the unhealthy ways, as they make the line go up.
I suppose my question was less about whether or not one can do the experiment, and more about whether or not anyone has done it and whether it was successful. I could see it going either way.
I don't understand it either. Perhaps word of mouth? Your friends and work colleagues read your blog and share the ones they love to their own friends, etc.
I have abstained from most social media since 2012, to include Linkedin. I enjoy that my friendships and social connections feel satisfying but more importantly, consensual. The decision has been to my detriment in some ways, but affirming in others - for instance, I recorded an album for my metal project. It has 200 listens on Bandcamp. Could I have more ears if I blasted shit out over X or intentionally marketed myself and the project? Of course. But do I care to? No. Social media broke its promise by degenerating into a billboard. I have no interest in contributing to that beast.
Part of the problem is that most of these social media platforms have abandoned the "social media" paradigm entirely (which is to say, a platform that lets you interact and stay in touch with people you know via the internet) and shifted to an enshittified attention economy monster that turns users into content producers and content consumers, not always of content that has anything to do with socializing. It seems like this author is effectively struggling with marketing in the attention economy. It sucks, but honestly this just sounds like the same challenge that marketing has been grappling with for ages.
It's always weird when two worlds collide - I listen to Caroline's podcast "Shedunnit", a lovely warm hug of a show about the golden age of detective fiction, so I was a bit surprised to see her on HN. I highly recommend the podcast - it's not a subject I have a great deal of interest in, I just love listening to people talk about a niche that they're deeply interested in, and Caroline's love for the subject matter is contagious.
I’ve been using social media less and less over the past few years. Especially short videos, they just make my brain feel foggy. At first I thought it was just distracting but later I realized it was affecting my mood and focus. Now I mostly use it to post photos and write more on my own blog, mainly for people I know. There is less interaction but it feels a lot more peaceful.
I definitely doom scroll hacker news and feel bad when I lose karma. But on the plus side I only engage with it when I choose to and its easy to set aside.
I read things and I think: "I have an experience I want to relate!" But I am trying to take a breath more and realize people aren't really that interested in my opinion. I am trying to be at peace with that in general.
You wrote a long blog post. Shows that you are not done yet. Social media is about craving for attention and spending your attention. That's not bad. Getting attention gives a purpose for what you do. Giving attention gives you new exposures. New exposures cause aging, like the scales in the wood. New attention you get, gives you existence. The idea is to grow bigger in existence without much aging.
> I'm not a natural on camera and I don't have that talent for talking effortlessly and engagingly to a lens when alone in a room that successful social media personalities need. I was forcing it all the time, making myself record multiple takes and doing things again and again until they looked "natural" (a highly unnatural behaviour). My video editing skills are basic, so turning out regular videos took me a long time.
They would have done better and would have resented it less if they had just owned it and not worried as much. They would have become more comfortable on camera as a result. You first attempts at this are going to be rubbish anyway.
So it better to just put stuff out there and iterate. All the big mistakes have been made by others and if you avoid those you will be fine.
When I first started doing YouTube vids. I was determined I should be like some big coding channel. I didn't have the video editing skills, nor really knew enough OBS to do it effectively. So I was stressing about it. My videos did pretty decently (I had less than 50 subs and I had 1200 views on one of my videos).
Now I am doing as if it is a hobby that I will hopefully turn into something more and I am enjoying it a lot more. I get decent engagement / views for my channel considering the size (200-1000 views per vid) when you have less than 500 subs is decent IMO. As I get better with the OBS/Kdenlive/Resolve I am sure I will have more fun editing.
Same thing with LinkedIn for me specifically. I heard that it could be a great way to get a job. But then I tried it, was inundated with AI slop, and contacted by recruiters from companies that sounded dreadfully boring. And when it came to nearly 100% of the people I encountered there who were actually active, I'd rather freeze to death than work with them.
The common way to use LinkedIn is to create a profile, keep it updated, and then ignore the platform until you need to use the job search function.
The majority of people on LinkedIn aren't posting and interacting with things all day.
To be honest, most people I know consider being highly active (posting) on LinkedIn to be a potential warning sign for a hire, because it's associated with people who will spend more time hustling on LinkedIn for their next job than working for your company.
> The common way to use LinkedIn is to create a profile, keep it updated, and then ignore the platform until you need to use the job search function.
Personally, I've had better luck finding jobs in other ways (searching companies websites, using more old-school platforms like Indeed), compared to LinkedIn.
I check LinkedIn to see who is the next person to be laid off from my previous employer. They post a picture of their badge and write this overly positive thank you to the company for the opportunity. They laid you off after 30 years in a group video call where you can't speak, don't thank them.
I haven't posted to (or even logged into) LinkedIn since I was 17 (~15 years ago) and although I've never been hired by one even the ycombinator startups that demand it don't seem to mind and interview me.
The pattern of active LinkedIn posters has a weird thing where it gives off strong vibes of that one person at work who seems to have their hands in everything, but actually accomplishes nothing except to toot their own horn.
In a general sense I'd love to hear about what people do, see where people I've worked with ... work and do now. LinkedIn should be the place I can do that right? And yet LinkedIn feels like such an artificial place that I would want nothing to do with the most active people posting as far as working with them.
I don’t how it is lately, but 4-5 years ago when I used LinkedIn to land a job, a recruiter sent me to a JavaScript interview instead of Java. Not sure what went wrong on their side but it was hilarious and a bit irritating.
Use it to keep in contact with peers from previous jobs. When they see you're looking they'll refer you internally, and that is 1000% more likely to land a job than submitting applications cold.
No thanks, I'd rather not use it at all. If people can't be bothered to keep in touch via email or something less disgusting than LinkedIn, I'm not interested in them anyway.
I saw one on LinkedIn that was so egregious of a lie I just stopped and paused.
A guy claiming he vibe coded "30 startups" in a weekend (yes, 30—with some becoming instantly profitable/revenue generating) and then went on to shame actual developers as being "cooked" and "over" if they were taking their time to build something.
Did he have any evidence or links to these 30 apps? Of course not. But that didn't stop him from lying and peacocking about it on LinkedIn.
This is what scares me the most about social media. We've lost all sense of judgment of what makes someone a professional or expert and have delegated that to likes, comments, and subscribes. Everything is just a "hype" game now, and real honesty and truth are given a "eh, have anything that can entertain me?"
> We've lost all sense of judgment of what makes someone a professional or expert [...]
Well you see, everybody is equal, especially in the age of AI which is the great cognitive equalizer (in the same way gunpowder and firearms equalized one's capacity for violence). There is no such thing as individual expertise now; expertise is soon to become the exclusive domain of AI.
So yes, in the future, the only thing that will matter is hype, marketing, and how good of an "ideas guy" you are. Surface appearances don't need to have anything real underneath - that can just be synthesized and backfilled as needed, on demand, by the AI.
> Well you see, everybody is equal, especially in the age of AI which is the great cognitive equalizer (in the same way gunpowder and firearms equalized one's capacity for violence). There is no such thing as individual expertise now; expertise is soon to become the exclusive domain of AI.
That is right, and it's a terrible shame because society has been built upon the uniqueness of individuals. The loss of that will be a very bit psychological hit to human beings and make life seem much more meaningless. Because in reality, it's demeaning to be an orchestrator of AI, and after the novelty of it wears off we will all be just pulling levers, having lost the uniqueness of our culture and spirit.
> I think the persistent advice to authors to "do social media" is, at best, part of a strategy that can be generously described as throwing everything at the proverbial wall in the hope that something, anything, will stick.
It also probably was pretty good advice until ~3 years ago.
My rule for social media is “don’t feed the sirens.” Like Caroline, there are many things I’d rather do than donate my time to help Mark Zuckerberg sell ads. This is why, for example, I don’t post my art on social media.
I just got declined for a job yesterday because I had a post on my blog talking about my history with major depressive disorder and medication to address that. That's not just a cope on my end, they actually said that. I don't think I'm ambitious enough to try and sue them for it, I might report to some department in NYC for it though.
But I think I learned that being candid about yourself on the internet is a mistake. I have no idea why the fuck it would be a good idea to be upfront about my mental health history; who the hell knows how many jobs I've been declined for where they were smart enough to not say that that's why they were declining me.
I had already deleted most of my social media, the only ones I use regularly are Hacker News and the aforementioned blog [1], and I think I should probably just stop mentioning anything that isn't purely technical on either of them.
[1] Not really social media, but it is a public-facing thing with my name on it.
I'm not sure if I want to do it, because this is a relatively small company, it would be very clearly me who reported them, and the leader of this company is sort of a known sociopath who would probably not be above blackballing me and making it very hard for me to be employed.
It's a little depressing, because I wrote that blog post so that I people searching for how certain medications affect them could know what they were in for, I didn't think it would be weaponized against me, but I guess that was a little naive on my end.
I don't want to say the person's name in fear of getting a letter from an attorney, but this person is connected enough to where I am hesitant to do anything.
>One evening, as I made my husband walk our dog past the same scenic view multiple times so that I could get the best shot of it for a video, I experienced a sudden wave of revulsion for myself and what I was doing.
There's a beach in Northeastern Brazil called Maragogi. The water is calm and warm, and you can easily see schools of fish passing through your legs in many points. "Brazilian Caribbean" is its moniker, but if you ask me, the Caribbean should be called the "Central American Maragogi".
Anyway, I rented a small apartment there for a while, and this one morning I observed this couple acting quite strangely. The young lady was repeating some movements -- none of them naughty. She was going in and out of the sea, splashing theatrically through the surf. Then I noticed the man of the couple: he was chasing after her maybe 4 or 5m away, holding and looking at the phone all the time. I went about my morning, walked a bunch, enjoyed the water, and started back after a couple of hours - the Sun gets dangerously strong around noon. The couple was still at the same spot, tirelessly repeating the same sad, pathetic choreography, again and again.
I still can't understand those people. What a miserable existence we've built for ourselves.
I saw a lot of this exact behaviour in Ibiza recently, I will never understand it. I use the iOS photos widget to always have a photo from my camera roll on my home screen, and the little moment of joy I get from that is usually the memory of the event depicted. What future joy is going to come from a photo popping into your day of that time you spent 2 hours standing in front of something doing very slightly different poses while your long-suffering friend or partner was forced to take photos of each and every one of them?
The only real sign that you're free from social media is that you don't have the compulsion to write long posts and tell internet strangers all about it. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Reddit, Substack, Hacker News...it's all the same. If you want to be free be truly free.
I never started with social media (I guess you can count reddit/HN) but beyond that - nope.
This isn't a "I'm so smart I saw the writing on the wall" thing it's entirely that I'm not hugely social anyway and social media is a weak reflection of been actually social.
Same with doom scrolling, it just doesn't seem to take with me.
More and more Hacker News seems to be the contrarians and the “get off my lawn”s when it comes to AI and social media alike. I feel like there was a time in the late 2000s to early 2010s where we were still young and our skills were sharp and the tech was new and shiny, but the technology world kept moving and kept evolving and a lot of people…didn’t. Every day I see another post like “AI isn’t really smart, it’s just hype and I don’t like it!” or “I don’t use social media and here’s why!” or “Look at this phone I started using that isn’t a smartphone, I’m so much happier now”, all without realizing that this is just the “I don’t use the internet, it’s dangerous! My kids aren’t allowed to use it either!” or “I don’t need a cellphone, people can wait to call me when I’m home!” or “Why would I send a text message when I can just call?” of our time. People age and get set in their ways, and in my opinion in this rapidly evolving world of technology, it’s something that has to be actively avoided or we’ll get left behind.
I disagree. I think back in the late 2000s to early 2010s, many of us were eager to adopt the bleeding edge of technology because we were in the middle of tangible year-over-year progress. Twitter was a great way to broadcast updates to mobile devices with fledgling data plans. Instagram rode the wave of camera development in smartphones, allowing people to do something the increasingly higher quality photos they were taking. But in our rush to adopt these user experiences and stretch our wings, we ignored all of the potential pitfalls of creating these large, centralized repositories of heuristic and tracking data. We sold our single family homes on the open web for the opportunity to rent an apartment in a massive building with a few nice amenities like a gym with a heated pool.
Ten to fifteen years later and the rent has been increasing by huge amounts every year on that apartment, our maintenance requests go unanswered, and the neighborhood outside has gone downhill. Meanwhile, the same property management company is trying to get us to sign a perpetual lease in their new building just down the block. Is it really a surprise why people aren't jumping at that the opportunity?
We are very much still in the middle of tangible year over year progress. LLMs are changing the world in big ways, and the progress has never been faster. On the programming side of things, the libraries and frameworks and languages have never been better and yet still have a long way to go. Consumer hardware has never been better and continues to rapidly evolve.
TikTok has changed the way people communicate and interact more than Twitter or Instagram ever did. I agree that not all things have gotten better and some have gotten worse, but it’s mostly just that the world has changed and it’s required a lot of adaptation. The same could have been said 20 years ago too.
We have become less social as a result of social media, when I walk outside almost every single person has earbuds or headphones in, and people won't even look at me when I walk past, let alone say hi or anything. There's just too much going on, people are drained by these opaque algorithms that does not care about us, created by people who do not care about us.
How do LLM's assist us in this regard? It creates more content, but it's not even made by anyone, whilst guzzling up resources that we actually need (this applies to physical things like water as well as our own attention/time).
It feels like technology gets put out to the world and then humanity gets dragged "forward" by it, when there's nothing inherently wrong with resisting change if the current evidence points towards further problems.
I think it's a bit much to criticize being contrarian, when being a conformist is basically the same thing.
A conformist does exactly what the public does, and a contrarian does exactly what the public doesn't do.
Either way the public decides.
If you independently decide that you don't like social media, then that's not being a contrarian. Just as independently deciding that you do want to engage in social media doesn't make you a conformist.
Sure and I don’t disagree with anything you said related to social media. It’s the pattern I see that I’m commenting on. The public has largely decided, but this community’s opinions are not really reflective of larger society.
Or perhaps people mature, take stock in what actually matters to them rather than what is being forced onto them by the economy. If being left behind means I have real relationships with real humans in the real world, I'm good with that.
Sure, but we were _right_ back then on the bleeding edge of technology, whereas our parents simply didn’t get it. They were closed off to new ideas and the rapidly changing world. Or were they more mature, and the internet and texting and cellphones were bad ideas?
Social media was never a wholly cosy or useful place for me, although I was utterly addicted to it for a number of years because "being a journalist" in the 2010s felt synonymous with "being on social media all the time".
Wait what? Is this true? Can anyone familiar with the journalism field chime in here? Because if this is true then it would explain the general deterioration of the media environment we live in.
Hell sometimes I listen to NPR while driving and I here the jounralists talk about random reddit comments and I feel perturbed that browsing reddit would be considered journalism. But being on social media all the time is considered journalism apparently?
There may be already existent threads covering my thoughts
Big tech algorithms are filled with absolute dog shit. What were previously information discovery algorithms have been replaced by, basically dog shit.
I have gave up on Facebook, Twitter, and most recently LinkedIn as a millennial. All I see is fantastical nonsense and spam. The rate it's going, if you want to reach someone over 40 in the UK, try Ceefax.
> If all of this — a non-famous writer with a podcast deciding she's replacing Instagram with blogging — feels too inconsequential to write 4,500 words about, then you're not alone. I think so too, but I also couldn't not write this.
Crazy that she gets it but doesn't get it at the same time.
If the author was really done with social media they would delete their accounts. Since the accounts are not deleted the door is still open. I deleted my accounts over 5 years ago and don't miss anything. In fact I think it has strengthened my connections with friends pushing me to text and call more people. The only regret I have is as a security researcher I lose out on some good OSINT data. There are ways around it but the walled gardens are quite secure and require ID to enter.
Between the fight over AI, shifting geopolitics reigniting old conflicts, an overly-centralized technology industry, a lack of meaningful innovation from a consumer perspective, and the immense precarity of modern work in general, it feels like we’re at the start of the end of a cycle.
I’m noticing more people taking stock of what’s actually important to them and taking a stand on their values. This is good in the long run, but in the immediate it results in a lot of binary/black-and-white decision-making that results in dustups and conflicts between groups who would normally be allied behind common goals.
All of this is to say that I expect we’ll see many, many, many more of these types of posts in the future, as everyone remembers they can choose to shape their engagement with technology, and that naturally includes the right to disconnect from it - not out of any sort of anti-technology position itself, necessarily, but simply from realizing that a specific thing isn’t something they need or are interested in, and that’s okay.
Props to the author for being so clear about their engagement with social media, their background, and their thought process. If it encourages more folks to reassess their own relationship with social media (or any technology), I’m all for it.
People with their own name as the domain posting with a clearly technical background are hardly representative of the general populace. Most people are completely enthralled by social media and use it uncritically for most day-to-day interactions. I wouldn't hesitate to argue that they live their lives through something like tiktok or facebook messenger.
We're not so isolated from normal every day people that noticing trends within ourselves and other people like us have zero chance of bleeding into the mainstream. I too have begun limiting my usage of social media to basically zero, and I'm not so naive to think that I'm a trendsetter anymore rather I am responding to already occurring trends.
I remember what these social media platforms used to be like. They didn't consume my entire life because I was just checking in on my friends. I looked at my screen time recently and decided enough was enough, and deleted everything. Now I only look at my phone if I have an actual reason to. I don't think I'm the only person this is going to happen to.
> too have begun limiting my usage of social media to basically zero
Just delete your accounts. Trust me you’ll feel much better. If your usage is truly basically zero there is no need to keep having an account. Break it off completely.
My sister often only sends updates about her kids on Facebook, so I have to visit once in a while. Most of what is there is garbage I'm better off without (and those posting/sharing would be better off if they got a life), but there are some things that are useful.
Unlike the other reply, I disagree that those updates aren’t important. However, you can still get updates through email or text messages. My family and friends group has almost entirely moved to group chats where people will send pictures or updates on what they are doing. If they aren’t the kind to proactively send these to you, reach out and ask her how she and her kids are doing.
In my experience this makes for a far more meaningful way of staying in touch without much additional effort than passively checking up on each other through social media. And it comes without any of the additional baggage social media brings.
You don’t need the updates. It’s better to find those out in person or just not even find out about them. We are obsessed as a society with FOMO but the truth is, you’re not really missing out on much, even for so-called important family events.
That seems like a strange judgement to make for another person. While I agree that it’s typically better to get updates in person, it may be very difficult to do so based on their circumstances. And judging the importance of someone else’s family events feels even more inappropriate.
I’m not judging - I’m just stripping away the excuses. “Oh I just use social media for XYZ” ok so does everyone else who uses it for whatever random purposes that other people want to judge them for. People had great, meaningful relationships before social media.
You are in fact expressing judgement, and your comments are getting more judgemental as the thread goes on. This is the excuse people always use to portray their feelings and judgements as objective "uncomfortable truths".
Ok I’m expressing judgement then.
Now that I’m expressing judgement, I stand by my judgements.
That was quick. You are haranguing this person for not upholding your standards of social media use while failing to hold yourself to a standard of intellectual honesty.
Maybe it just takes an addict to know one?
When people think things are deeply true of themselves it can be very, very difficult for them to see when it isn't true of others. Especially if there's an embarrassing or shameful element.
People (and kids) were a hell of a lot more interesting the longer you didnt see them.
Pictures on social media counts as interaction but its very limited. You still get to feel like you see them regularly.
You get your desired social interaction but it is arguably fake. Then we stick a display on your mums forehead and rotate advertisements. Not offensive at all.
You get your desired fake soical interaction fix therefore, when you finally meet the person irl (after say a year) you can both look at your phone the whole time because you "interact" with them every day. There is no need to tell stories or go do something.
Alternatively, when someone understands a deep truth it can be easy for them to cut through the excuses others use to hide that truth from themselves or others.
Sure can, but when you refuse to entertain alternative hypothesis or respond to evidence, you're just building a cage to protect yourself from nuance or from recalibrating your views slightly.
The evidence provided wasn’t sufficient to me, nor is it anything I haven’t heard from dozens of other people both online and real life.
You’re free to disagree, hop on and Tweet a picture of it or whatever, but you should at least have respect enough for yourself to acknowledge that in matters such as this others can have genuine differences of opinion and be dogmatic about them, and have thought through such matters at least as much or maybe more than you yourself have.
Like I said before, I deleted my accounts, I'm not on Twitter.
> [You] should at least have respect enough for yourself to acknowledge that in matters such as this others can have genuine differences of opinion...
Physician, heal thyself.
Bsky/Twitter, same thing but with different marketing.
> Physician, heal thyself.
What opinion did you provide? As far as I can tell you started with this whole nonsense about judging others. Did you lose track of the conversation or do quips like this make you feel good about yourself?
See what social media is doing to you?
I don't have Bluesky. I already told you twice I deleted my accounts.
> See what social media is doing to you?
I can see that you imagine I'm in some kind of torment nexus, but again, you're bringing your biases and preconceptions into this discussion and not listening to what people are saying, so you end up boxing shadows.
Sorry, my fault I genuinely must have confused you with someone else.
Though my general statement I think still stands regarding Blue Sky. That’s another damn cesspool.
> I can see that you imagine I'm in some kind of torment nexus, but again, you're bringing your biases and preconceptions into this discussion and not listening to what people are saying, so you end up boxing shadows
Hmm I must be imaging the comments you wrote calling me these things then.
I get it, when things get heated everyone you're talking to blends together. I tried my best not to be insulting or to piss you off, but to the extent I did I apologize.
It’s just words on the Internet - none of it matters. I think it’s kind of fun to trade barbs sometimes even if that’s not really useful.
Ok I admit it - even I have found a use for social media. To pointlessly argue with folks!
(quick reminder, hacker news is a social media platform.)
I live several hundred miles from my sister. In-person events are rare things that need planning ahead. Sure I could not find out about events, but I'm better off because I can: when I do get a chance to visit I have an idea what has been going on and thus what to talk about.
Why do you need to have an idea about what’s going on? You could just ask and then talk about it. You’re using social media to skip the initial asking part, but you don’t need to do that.
I can tell you this works because I do it. You’re not missing anything. If you don’t communicate much because of distance either the relationship isn’t that important - so you’re lying to yourself about it, or you should move and live closer together.
You will have deeper and better conversations if you know what questions to ask.
Things that work for you might not work for others. Communication and connection is a need, not a vice.
The idea that you can tell them that their relationships aren't important is so chauvinistic and inappropriate. You ought to take a step back and reflect before commenting further, that's out of line.
You’ll have even deeper connections if you have more things to talk about and genuine curiosity about the novelty of those things instead of “already knowing the questions to ask” - good lord are we robots or something?
> The idea that you can tell them that their relationships aren't important is so chauvinistic and inappropriate. You ought to take a step back and reflect before commenting further, that's out of line.
Save this stuff for someone who cares because it’s not me.
There is no evidence their curiosity is ingenuine, that's your image of them but it doesn't have a basis in reality. It's based in your biases and preconceptions about social media.
I'll refrain from criticizing you for being a chauvinist if you agree to take that behavior someplace else, because it's not for this community. Save that for some toxic no-holds-barred social media. Maybe think on whether your actions are contributing to the social media environment you decry.
> I'll refrain from criticizing your for being a chauvinist if you agree to take that behavior someplace else, because it's not for this community. Save that for some toxic no-holds-barred community like Twitter.
No thanks. You don’t get to define what is toxic behavior nor do you speak for this community or others.
Also, grab a dictionary. Your usage of chauvinist here is incorrect.
> There is no evidence their curiosity is ingenuine, that's your image of them but it doesn't have a basis in reality.
They already said they need information about events to have something to talk about. That’s not how conversations work, nor is it how you establish new friendships or build and maintain existing relationships.
> It's based in your biases and preconceptions about social media.
Well they are biases (yours is showing) but they’re not preconceptions, they are just conceptions.
You don't get to define your behavior as nontoxic, either. I'm not arguing about what words mean.
I didn’t define my behavior one way or another. I said I don’t care what you think about it.
I don't believe you, but it doesn't really matter. (I'm happy to admit I have a small investment in helping you see my perspective, for what it's worth. It's part of my human need for connection.)
Why would I care about your opinion of me? If I recall from the thread so far it consists of being chauvinist and toxic. That’s no different than some random person yelling at me from across the street while out walking my dog or something.
Just looking out for you and for the community. If I was being a chauvinist I would want someone to tell me. If someone was being a chauvinist to me I would want someone to say something.
I'm not attacking you, I'm giving you feedback. I'm being as neutral and uninsulting as I can be.
You’re misusing the word chauvinist here or rather if you think you’re not can you please explain what the word means? I don’t understand your usage of it in this context.
> If someone was being a chauvinist to me I would want someone to say something.
On the flip side you’re being condescending toward others, “giving feedback”? C’mon. You know it’s good practice to not give advice to those who don’t ask for it, right?
When someone does something inappropriate, you tell them so as politely as possible. Just like if someone's shoe is untied or has toilet paper on it, you let them know. No one needs to ask, those are the table stakes.
(I would also point out that this thread started because you were offering unsolicited advice about using social media. I could be wrong but it seems to me like you think it's appropriate to offer someone advice unsolicited if you have a perspective that's able to see through their "excuses".)
This was the closest definition to my usage I found (American Heritage #4):
What I meant was that you were insisting your subjective viewpoint was the only one that was valid. Other viewpoints you reduced to "excuses."I can see how it comes off condescending, and I apologize for it. There's a paternalistic element to telling someone they've done something inappropriate, and that should be reduced as much as possible, but I don't think it can stop us from saying something altogether.
I agree with this commenter. Y'all making excuses and then complaining you need to use a platform.
It's fake as hell.
What a weird comment. I'm glad my relatives aren't like you.
What a weird comment. I'm glad my relatives aren't like you. Your irrational hatred of social media is distorting your views.
If you got rid of social media tomorrow, completely, the world would be better. No doubt in my mind about that. It’s not irrational, I have seen first hand the destruction it causes.
Maybe you should ask yourself why you’re so upset that someone says to delete it? Does it cut too close to the truth?
True, but that is because there are bad parts of social media that we would also lose. The real question is how can we get rid of the bad parts of social media so we can keep the good? (I do not have an answer which is why I only check a few times per month)
The good parts of social media is basically Facebook's feature set in 2007 or so. Everything since then has been in the interest of increasing addiction and monetization. Unfortunately 95+% of Facebook's valuation is due to those bad parts, so I don't see a way back.
I've deleted my accounts too (HN obviously notwithstanding) but telling people they should disengage with their family because they don't need that information is patronizing and undermines your point. They get to decide what they need.
... yet I respectfully think the above point still stands, "people need not get even that family info via Zuck's brain-grinder".-
You need not get that information. Other people have different needs and priorities. What if the reason they are so concerned about getting updates on this kid is that they have serious medical issues? What if it brings a ray of sunshine on stressful days to see pictures of them? What if missing these updates means missing family functions and becoming more isolated and lonely? (Note that they confirmed my last speculation.)
What if, instead of berating people for using social media, we discussed how we might build a healthier alternative?
> What if, instead of berating people for using social media, we discussed how we might build a healthier alternative?
Why do we need to build one? Before the internet, we had letters and memos. The Email and IM came. The reason to have a feed is to share things, it shouldn't be for people to come consuming it. And there's no reason for it to be social. To have a special feed that mix everything from everyone on the platform according to "the algorithm"
No need to build something else. Blogs, Email, and IM are still here.
I think there's good parts of social media that are salvageable. I think it's generally good to be able to communicate with anyone and encounter people you otherwise wouldn't. I think we can have social media without having feeds optimized for "engagement" or any single metric. I think blogs and email are great, I just don't think they're the can-all-be-all.
> we discussed how we might build a healthier alternative?
Totally for that. We really need it.-
Welp, I ought to stand on business I suppose, I think social media communities are too big. I think it would be less toxic if we were balkanized into smaller communities, and interacted with people of unlike minds in a more considered and intentional way. As it is, it becomes a free for all for dunking on people. Small communities of like minds can become too insular, ideas need to be challenged, but they also need space to grow and develop in a friendly environment.
Wherein the balance, eh? Though nut to crack.-
I like the dichotomy on this site - constant complaining about loneliness on one hand ... and systematic refusal to engage in social ritual mainstream people do to keep connections.
I already have lol. I still use bluesky occasionally on my computer. That's what I mean by "basically zero"
All you’ve done is basically switch from drinking beer, wine, and liquor to only drinking gin.
I'd say it's more like switching from bottom shelf, burn your throat vodka to a nice white wine.
From an addicts POV it’s no different, maybe worse because you are deluding yourself about the other aspects to make you feel like your addiction is ok.
Also, Blue Sky generally sucks. It’s another awful echo chamber.
Great way to make your point, telling people they’re addicts. That’ll change my mind.
Gin doesn't smell.
So I’m drinking less?
She's not a programmer. She's an author of a book on health issues explaining why social media failed her as a marketing tool. She's probably still not representative of the general population, but she gives an interesting window into a community that is expected to use social media a lot.
It's tough to be an author. Publishers and retailers will only put major marketing efforts behind new books from authors who are already popular. Before social media, less popular authors had to try to market their own books through interviews on radio and TV but most authors weren't good at that either. So I don't think that social media has necessarily made things any worse, just different.
Parent didn't mention she was a programmer
> People with their own name as the domain
You know that buying a domain and setting up a few pages is something you can hire someone to do for you, right? And that it's a thing people often do if they want to engage in public relations, such as if they had a book coming out that they want people to buy.
> You know that buying a domain and setting up a few pages is something you can hire someone to do for you, right?
And yet the vast majority of the population doesn't do it, because they don't need it when they're perfectly happy with mainstream social media, which is the point.
The vast majority of the population doesn't do most individual things you could possibly name. There's a vanishingly small set of things you could name that the vast majority of people do without over-generalizing. That doesn't necessarily make them niche.
Most people work, but most people aren't a programmer/barber/chef/construction worker/farmer/etc. Most people listen to music, but most people don't actively listen to <insert any artist below top 100 or so>. Most people use some form of computer daily/weekly, but most people aren't visiting reddit every day, or HN, or a specific youtube channel. Most people aren't a small business owner, but small business owners aren't a niche thing, they are a cornerstone part of the economy.
Add all of these "not mainstream" activity participating people together, and suddenly you have most of the population.
I don't know about uncritically. It has been like 10 years since I heard anyone refer to social media in some positive sense.
Maybe normal people underestimate the scale of corruption the companies do or something. Often some bogey man is blamed not the main culprits by pundits but dunno if people believe that or not.
That doesn't change the message though: social media is not a great way to get attention. If you are social on social media with your friends (including online only friends) that is very different from on social media to get people to your business.
You nailed it. However, it is good to see more people waking up from the contrived nightmare that is social media.
Yes!
I am using old nokia phone for 3 months now, I am not going back to my iphone. (means no whatsapp, banking, uber, reddit, hn, whatever)
It took almost 1 week to get rid of the cravings "I am slightly bored, I *MUST* look at my phone"
Now, I am just bored, I had forgotten how nice it is to be bored, I just stare at things, poke something with a stick, look for patterns, ask questions, have ideas.. etc; when I have a meeting and the other person doesn't show up on time, I just watch the world and wait.
I also noticed I can watch movies properly, I have more patience, I dont look at my phone at the first "less exciting" moment. It is really nice especially for things like Star Trek where they have not algorithmically optimized every frame to keep you engaged because they were not competing with instagram for your attention.
I even bought a walkman. When the song is not very good, I just wait it out. Very quickly I got my sense of time back, just after few days I can measure time in 'songs' or 'cassette sides'.
I have also blocked all socials except hn on my local pihole.
If you survive the first week of cravings after that it gets nicer every day!
Some people say I am doing those things because of "nostalgia" but this is incorrect, I just want to be able to be bored.
That’s excellent to hear! Alas, I have not gotten to the point of replacing my iPhone (being in IT means I’ve long been married to a smartphone of some variety), but I’m with you on a lot of the above. For example:
> I also noticed I can watch movies properly, I have more patience, I dont look at my phone at the first "less exciting" moment.
I’ve started leaving my phone in the bedroom when I’m playing games or watching movies in the Living Room. It’s a PITA to extract myself from the sofa to retrieve it, and I find myself far more engrossed leaving it physically in a different space. The eventual goal is to have a designated “phone drop” for folks to drop the device on to charge that’s far away from living and sleeping areas, to further break that habit.
> I even bought a walkman.
Same! I turn off WiFi except for OS updates (it’s one of Sony’s new Android-based Walkmans), and have no streaming apps on it. It’s just my microSD card of music from my NAS, and it’s blissful. I need to use it more, but writing synchronization scripts has been a PITA.
> I just want to be able to be bored.
I’ll confess to using an “herbal” crutch for this of late, because of (diagnosed) OCD making it impossible to pause or stop on my own in most cases. Combined with an outdoor walk, I’ve developed a newfound appreciation for just laying on a bench and watching the clouds and planes go by in the sky, or watching cars on the highway. It’s helped me appreciate humanity more, forcing myself into a sort of bored observation of others instead of constantly rehearsing new work tasks, new project ideas, or new contingency plans.
More people need to be bored.
when hungry eat, when tired sleep; as the poet said, no need to rush
I also have severe ocd, maybe I should try the herb
PS: I am on call for 25 years, so far I have no issues because of no smartphone, opsgenie just calls me and then I get my laptop few minutes later
Canceling streaming, on-demand media subscriptions and replacing them with cable is my next step in this process. The practices cable TV cultivates and requires seem healthier and more civilized than those streaming services cultivate.
I love the idea that media consumption is tied to a specific place, which the whole house shares, and that if I want to watch something, I may need to plan for it and know when it'll be available. Moreover, not always getting exactly what I want, when I want it, in the largest possible dose, seems the right way to consume media.
Cable is a good downgrade but still insidious. I personally would recommend just a hard drive full of whatever media you want to store on it.
Sure, cable has huge downsides, such as cable news, reality television, and countless other sources of unconscionable garbage. On the other hand, I grew up with these and survived the onslaught of dreck with my wits basically intact, and I discovered a number of things through TV that I wouldn't otherwise have.
I really think that part of what's healthy about cable is precisely that you don't control when or how much of something is available.
That full hard drive doesn't hold much appeal for me.
Hey, it's OK to use the fast forward button. Just because you want to hear Back in the USSR and While My Guitar Gently Weeps doesn't mean you have to sit through Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, it's not good for you like eating your vegetables. And it's not good to let things bore you, you're mixing up being bored with being patient, the distinction matters.
Edit: but if you have actual OCD as you say below, that puts a different slant on things.
I do use fast forward :) just not a lot, but also really like cassettes that two good songs happen to be on the opposite sides of each other.
I am using 'bored' quite loosely, I mean allow yourself to not be constantly engaged, the content creators, the algorithms, the advertisers all are trying to keep me at this extreme state so that I could be sold. The bar is really high, in order to be patient I had to re-learn how to not be engaged all the time. Some times I think of nothing, but most of the time I am having fun with stuff either real or not.
PS: yea I do have ocd, my bored or patient probably mean different things to other people
I want a social media website that barely ever notifies me, has no algorithmic feed, no ads and limits the amount of connections I can have to about the size of a large wedding party. Something like that would be for actual friends and family and would be useless for influencers, trolls and bots.
Bonus points if it doesn't have an app and is only a website.
This is basically Mastodon, but I think the mass appeal of that is limited given its distributed nature.
Mastadon is a more of a broadcast network with micro-blogging. It's got advantages over a place like twitter but not what I'm looking for. And having worked on decentralized social networking, I've turned off from it because it has a lot of ux, privacy and quality issues that are hard to solve.
Myspace or early Facebook is closer to what I'd want.
Digging into your clarifying comments further down, and what you’re describing isn’t social media but just a website people can post stuff on. Social media by its very nature is public, and when it’s public it becomes exploitable.
I do think there’s an opening for a “landing page” of sorts where invited persons can easily share photos and updates with one another (I’ve seen it in the Enterprise repeatedly, though it never gains traction) like the 2010-era Facebook you describe, but it’d have to be something you (or someone in your circles) hosts for everyone if you want the privacy and utility without the ads, spam, and miscreants.
Social media is defined in a lot of ways but what I'm talking about is defined by bi-directional connections between users and sharing within that verified graph.
Self-hosting is a non-starter but a service that charges a reasonable subscription fee could avoid the ads and dark patterns.
A non-profit model like Wikipedia plus low cost subscription would be ideal.
Path (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network) was ten years too early.
It's called a private group chat.
Come again? I don't want to be in a discord or WhatsApp chat, I want 2010 era Facebook. Those are different experiences and products.
I don't know what 2010 era Facebook is, but I'm talking about small SMS, iMessage, Signal, or WhatsApp groups among people who know each other outside the platform. These groups are no more than maybe 10 people each, so you don't fall into the problem of context collapse [1]. You can have offshoot subgroups, and groups can also be ad-hoc for a particular event. The personal small-scale nature means they're governed entirely by shared social norms, not algorithms or formal moderation.
If you want actual meaningful social interactions online, it needs to be small-scale and completely useless for advertisers. Group chats are that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse
Yeah the whole idea of public mass social media has basically failed thus far.
Maybe someone will create some enlightened LLM based algorithm that solves the engagement optimization problem but what we have now has proven to be pretty disastrous through many iterations.
Small scale group chats/discord servers are the clear solution right now. Which is sad in some ways because the question then becomes how do you find your way into a good group chat.
But it’s the only way for the sane to not be overwhelmed by the engagement farming, political nonsense, and what Noah Smith calls the “shouting class” of people that have nothing else to do in life but dominate these platforms by stirring up drama all day every day.
Yeah that's not really what I'm interested in. Chat is a very different thing.
Yes, an imessage group chat with a few close friends is the best social network IMO. I have two, one with me and some college buddies and another for my family.
I emailed you regarding this idea.
Discord does all that
As I said below, I’m not interested in a chat program in the least. Especially discord. I use it when I have to but it’s a much more demanding and ephemeral experience than I described.
Is this a generational divide? There’s no way I’d ever convince my immediate family let alone my extended family to join a discord server.
I think one thing to remember that is often forgotten is just how new all this is. Society is moving incredibly fast and that can be both good and bad. Even 10 years ago the way people interacted with technology would be unrecognizable today. 20 years ago is the distant pass. We sacrificed a generation of kids to figure this out and hopefully we will actually figure this all out, but we shouldn't be surprised that we've had seismic shifts in how technology is impacting our society and we didn't get it immediately right from the get go.
That’s something that still blows my mind, and gives me serious pause when I consider the impacts. Sure, I’ve been involved in technology and the internet since the mid-90s as an elementary schooler, but I’m the exception to the rule. In thirty short years we’ve gone from bank tellers to bank apps, from dreary Government buildings with long waiting times to poorly-designed websites that crash frequently, and from only being reachable via post or landline to never being unavailable unless you’re somewhere isolated and remote - and then building technology to bring connectivity into those areas as well.
In three decades computing went from a toy of the rich and tools of the biggest businesses to a “necessity” of the everyman, but without any formal training on usage, value, or feedback on boundaries. Thirty years to go from only nation states being able to effectively surveil people at scale, to any tech company with a magic pixel being able to gather far more and accurate data than anyone prior could hope to.
This has been a gargantuan shift in civilization in an impossibly short amount of time, and we’re only really just now agreeing that there’s some growing pains that need sorting out. Maybe most businesses don’t need cloud-based services for everything, maybe most humans don’t actually need public social media, and maybe some of the stuff we take for granted as necessary today are actually quite worthless to most people/entities.
Viewed through that lens, I also see the desperation of the AI movement to continue accelerating “advancement” forward, before more people start asking the same questions regarding necessity and importance of existing tools and technologies. Once people start questioning the utility of a purchase, they’re less likely to spend money on it - and there goes your business.
yes, us millennials should be called the "guinea pig generation"
I know a few people on the internet long enough to have IP assignments that were originally recorded in Jon Postel's notebook. They have always been on the forefront of everything new and exciting on the internet. Today, there's a fairly even split between bluesky, various mastodon instances, and going back and hanging out on IRC. Nobody that has been in the trenches for a few decades wants to touch an algorithmically-curated platform.
If there's one thing twitter showed us it's that humanity isn't yet ready for the hive mind.
As for me, I am on bluesky, but I limit who I follow to the point that I can mostly take in a whole week of posts in about five minutes. I'm at the age where a few hours of my time is a horrifyingly significant fraction of a percent of my remaining time on this planet. I have better things to do with that time than to squander it being miserable so the world's third richest person can get a little richer and buy another private island.
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I want an LLM that I control to sit between me and any social media feed. Let it filter the garbage and engagement-bait and boil it down to something that actually adds value to my life
If my roof leaks and my drip bucket is full, do I need a shinier bucket or a better roof?
Achievable goal! Bluesky lets you create your own moderation tools using whatever technologies you like. https://deepwiki.com/bluesky-social/bsky-docs/2.5-moderation...
I wrote a comment a bit ago on what this adversarial interoperability [1] could look like with local LLMs and accessibility APIs [2]. Big AT Proto and Bluesky fan, as it cannot be captured ("protocols, not platforms"), but it isn't enough to have this capability only with Bluesky; it must be able to support any social network or graph. It should be a robust content processor under the user's control for any firehose they wish to consume, whether that is a REST API endpoint, an RSS feed, a plain 'ol website that the agent will login as the user as, or a closed app that the agent will use accessibility APIs to operate the app as the user.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42879342
That's not what the social media site wants. It has it's own algorithms and AI, ensuring that you get exactly what they need you to see.
You want an AI to sift though endless piles of crap, just to find the few specks of gold. Why not stop mixing your gold into the dung heap before consuming it?
I want to communicate with actual humans and enjoy meaningful conversation, 5-10 actual humans is enough really, I don't have a public-facing brand I need to maintain like the author. That's what social media is for and thus it's simply not for me.
I smell a business idea here.
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Similarly, I've been watching the rise of the "minimal phone", and "analog tech" with interest lately.
People have lost agency to the degree that they're looking to the very tech that stole their agency for answers, and I view that a sign that perhaps the push-back is actually beginning in earnest.
There's no push-back. Manifestos posted by a few members of the terminally online chattering class don't constitute any sort of real trend. I've yet to see anyone using a "minimal phone" (other than a few older people who might still have a working feature phone).
I still have a smartphone, but I barely have any apps on it. I literally have a handful of email apps and two weather apps and that's it.
So yeah, I have a smartphone, but I barely use it compared to how I used to use it even 5 years ago. By unplugging, I've found myself way more productive. I'm reading two or three books a month now. Its an amazing feeling knowing you can drive what you want to do instead of having social media driving your life, manipulating you into using it more and more and not feeling like you're in control.
I've essentially logged off and I really don't miss it. I feel like I can't be the only one.
> I feel like I can't be the only one.
You're not, but you're also not the majority. I'm continually surprised that people are still on Facebook. I get why they use Facebook Messenger, or Facebook Marketplace, but the actual Facebook "news" feed? Have you seen that, it's ads or ads disguised as content... How the hell that thing isn't dead i beyond me.
As an anecdatum, one of my gen Y embedded engineers is using a little stick phone that can barely text, and avoids all social media except Discord (assuming that counts). One of the other younger folk in a different department has something similar. And we've only got around 100 people in this building.
“I don’t see what you’re seeing and therefore your position is invalid” isn’t really the slam-dunk your tone suggests. I’m also seeing pushback and withdrawal from my own highly-technical circles as we come to terms with how much time and energy these things sap from us with little given in return, and decide to exert more agency as a result. Developers are retiring to work on farms, for crying out loud, suggesting there’s something deeply, intrinsically toxic about the state of things that the people with the most expertise are leaving the field for areas less glamorous or lower in compensation.
You might not be seeing it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
Nah. The "back to the land" movement is nothing new. Some office workers were trying to become farmers (and mostly failing) back in the 1970s when there were only a tiny number of developers. Again, complaints about the state of society by a few disaffected individuals are meaningless and highly technical circles aren't representative of the broader society. No matter how amazing everything is a few people are going to be unhappy. Nothing has changed.
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/science/back-land-mo...
stego-tech is the equivalent of an anti-tech influencer ("zealot") on HN. Pretty much all they post about on here, and they post a lot on here, is about how tech is ethically bankrupt.
HN is big enough now imo that it's worth starting to tag users so you can know where they're coming from.
Is there a "HN enhanced" extension that would facilitate such tagging?
I found a tampermonkey extension for Firefox based on this comment. So far it seems to work well. I'm not sure if that's what they were referring to though.
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Yeah, I’ve been noticing the same. But let’s be honest, most people don’t really get to choose their relationship with tech. The whole analog tech and minimal phone thing sounds nice, but it’s still a luxury. You need a certain level of stability to even consider disengaging. So while I’m hopeful and happy to see those small changes, I’m also skeptical. Real change won’t happen until it stops being a lifestyle choice and becomes a bigger shift (or its part).
I'm calling it right now. Develop world costumers are increasingly seeing smartphones as limiting rather than empowering. It will shift into a product for areas with poor infrastructure as higher income push back against this invasive and manipulative technology. This will create a feedback loop. Lower average income will drive down the utility of the platform for those who fund it (advertisers), smartphones will gradually lose their status signalling value and in another generation it will be prevalent only in areas with poor infrastructure.
I suspect that you're right, but only because of the rise in AI.
At a certain point we'll all have AI personal assistants that are easier to use, more convenient, and less harmful to us than smartphones have historically been. The cool kids will move to the shinier new format, and the poor will continue to use the moderately dangerous, addictive, less efficient legacy tech for a long while.
Maybe these things will come in smart glasses format that we interact with primarily by voice, better smart watches that don't require a phone at all, or maybe it will be something like the star trek communicator?
The problems with social media are partly network related. You may opt out, but those naked pictures or nasty comments about you are still up there, the division and polarization that social media causes is still there. Basically society is just as bad off as before you decided to opt out, and you can't opt out of society. This is one of those technologies that we shouldn't have invented (one of Bostrom's black balls), but once you invent it it's too late because the incentives make it too difficult to roll back.
> everyone remembers they can choose to shape their engagement with technology, and that naturally includes the right to disconnect from it
The thing that scares me the most about the times we are living in right now is that while I can choose how I shape my engagement with technology, I am still stuck living in a planet/country/society/democracy filled with people who may be making radically different choices and I still have to deal with the consequences of that.
It really doesn't matter that much if I figure out ways to avoid toxic disinformation when I'm outvoted by idiots who haven't. It doesn't matter that much if I spend less time staring at a screen so that I can spend more in-person time with people I care about when it's a grueling task getting anyone else to commit to hanging out because they are still enthralled by the glowing rectangle.
I'm doing my best to navigate this chaotic stressful time, but ultimately I share a boat with many many other people and have only my own tiny little oar.
Well, isn’t this a ”build it and they will come” situation? Do what you feel is right and that will communicate to others around you that there’s an alternative.
In my more optimistic days, I believe that, yes.
But on many other days, I remember that all the asshats are also doing their own "build it and they will come" and pimping their own brand of toxic nonsense. And, worse, the billionaires are all doing it too and they have many orders of magnitude more influence than I ever will.
> If it encourages more folks to reassess their own relationship with social media (or any technology), I’m all for it.
Great point, this.-
Yesterday I got a mail from Facebook: "*Woman_I_have_known mentioned you on Facebook".
Haven't used FB in years, mail looks legit, I get kinda curious. I tap it, and am immediately logged in, in DDG browser (which has 0 cookies when closing)!
To top it off, she didn't mention me, she mentioned some #tag on some stupid lottery for a van.
It's so disrespectful. So dirty. I know they don't give a * about me, but do they have to put it on so thick?
This is a big reason why I'm so suspicious of AI. Those systems are largely backed by the same companies who have spent the last 15+ years disrespecting users and treating them as resources to extract, not actual people to serve.
The ethos in tech seems to be a simplistic toddler-like mindset for "more for more's sake" that doesn't care about others' agency.
The ddg browser part is simple to explain: you followed a link that was generated specifically for this email sent to you. When you click it fb knows who you are (so they directly log you in), but also that you reacted to this specific clickbait campaign.
Expect more trash from them since it worked once.
So if someone gains access to your email, they also get FB access…?
Yes, these are often referred to as "Magic Links."
When it comes to the security implications, consider that email has long been a "single point of failure" for a lot of services in the form of the "forgot password" feature that emails you a link to reset your password.
When I'm talking to non-tech people in my life about how best to protect themselves, I usually tell them to think about priorities and disaster scenarios. What would suck the most if it got hacked? The two that are usually at the top of the list for pretty much everyone are email and online banking. Others might include Amazon accounts (hackers can order themselves gift cards with your CC if compromised etc.) Prioritize securing those with a strong password + MFA. The rest is case by case but make sure to use a password manager so you're not reusing passwords.
I have never seen a use of a Magic Link that wasn't because I asked the Magic Link to be sent to me. Never, ever had one sent to me in a marketing/engagement email.
Facebook is able to realize outsize cross-web tracking benefits by having you logged in as long as possible. Few other companies are able to realize comparable benefits because they don't have the same ad-serving aspirations coupled with "Login with Facebook" reach.
Google is comparable, but it's too risky for them to have so many magic links hanging around in customer inboxes, because Google identities tend to be tied to far more sensitive 3rd party applications. Which is not to say that there are no sensitive applications with "Login with Facebook", but I'll argue there are fewer.
Yes, but that's pretty common for most services.
Clicking "forgot password" typically sends you an email prompting to set a new one; this is similar, in a sense.
They'll probably make you reauthenticate as soon as you do anything, but who knows...
Thats usually how password reset emails work.
> So if someone gains access to your email, they also get FB access…?
I mean, that's how it works for most websites. I think I have 2FA turned on for FB, but honestly the phone system is way less secure than email at Google/Microsoft.
Yeah, I gathered as much, but still, just a single URL to an email address to log me in? What about my 36 char password and my 2fa app?
Edit: I just found I didn't set up 2fa. I wonder, if I had, would they still do this? Then it would have just blatantly ignored my second factor...
They want control over the post content (in case it's deleted, edited, etc) and also track your interaction ASAP, so they link it instead of embed.
You will be asked to authenticate if you try to do anything.
Just checked, I am fully logged in in a clean ddg browser session, and can accept friend requests, etc. But I don't have 2fa enabled.
It may be that the link only worked once. Try again after logging out. Does it work?
Clicked it again, it says: The link you clicked may have stopped working or the page has been moved.
Can still log in as often as I want into clean browser sessions. Even when I log out, clean the session, tapping the url logs me in again.
And every time FB sends me an email: "Someone logged in from some location, was it you?"
A mention without a mention - I get that, but why do you think it's dirty to skip the log in?
Look at the context of the email he received.
It's a lie to get him onto the site and to start scrolling. In that context, skipping the login is pretty dirty.
because though we know BigCo know too much about us nore than ourselves, revealling that ugly fact so frontally is tasteless.
If they had forwarded that mail to someone else--"Hey look! Someone mentioned me on facebook!"--then that second person could have logged into the first person's account with a single tap.
It's scummy and terribly insecure to pass around someone else's credentials via email.
That was my first thought. This can go downhill pretty quickly. Nobody suspects that you expose your account with a link to a mention.
Yup. Somehow, despite this, they're not even that good at the one thing their business relies on, correctly targeting adverts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40083838
I wonder if it's part of some growth hacking scam. They want their metrics to show x amount of people logging in each month, so they show these emails that auto log you in.
Yeah, I'm now back in that monthly active users group. Should have resisted more.
I wonder if Facebook has slowly began to lean into the scammer email pattern where ... they really want the people who are ok with these patterns so they can hook them in other equally scummy ways.
Perhaps social media companies are not interested in anyone who wants to manage their feed or is looking for somethings specific, they want to point their product AT you, not have you use it.
Slowly begun? I’ve received this kind of email since their beginnings. The only reason they’re not #1 at this is that linkedIn does even more of it.
Oh my god I’ve been at the end of my rope wirh LinkedIn too. Between the obnoxious notifications and the absolute brain rot that is The Feed™ there’s basically nothing good about that site apart from the obligate profile-as-a-resume.
It is so pathetic how they beg and wheedle and connive to get you to engage. I’ve honestly lost all respect for that site at this point.
I like “beg” as term for their notifications.
For those who don't even open TFA: she is a creator, not a consumer in social media, and she only started two years ago.
It's a long ass post about how fake those people are and how fake you yourself become once you start creating that content.
Wishing the best of luck for the journey.
This was a refreshing exception among all those "enough, I quit social media". OTOH, here I am still surprised how many people find it fulfilling to either be a performing monkey in this palm-sized vertical cage, or the opposite, why is it so fulfilling to watch those monkeys hours long, daily. "monkey" sounds harsh, I know, but in reality, these performers are barely more than just copying, mirroring other ones, with possibly more followers.
What a time to be alive in.
At the very least, one should be a regular user of a platform prior to marketing on that platform. Every platform has nuance to it, and if you don't understand that nuance, then you're better off paying someone else to do it on your behalf.
The OP was never going to succeed in her efforts there.
That’s tricky part to understand.
On one hand it seems she already has audience so she should have positive traction.
On the other hand it seems like she started from 0 on the platforms and expected to be already a star “because I am an author”. Then she wanted to hack away with tricks like “posting daily” attracting people who liked her “dog posts” - because she didn’t have better stuff to post.
I read that post yesterday and it started sinking in. She did everything wrong.
Her audience as she mentioned wasn’t transferable to socials so she really was starting there from scratch. Posting your funny dog pictures and your daily routine will not make you stand out - everyone does that. Being “an author” also doesn’t make much of a difference when I can follow J.K Rowling and watch her funny dog pictures or laugh at her making inappropriate comments.
Edit: I also checked just now what was her book. That’s definitely not aligning with lifestyle influencing with happy dogs or husband in perfect golden hour video.
> OTOH, here I am still surprised how many people find it fulfilling to either be a performing monkey in this palm-sized vertical cage, or the opposite, why is it so fulfilling to watch those monkeys hours long, daily.
He says in a post on social media website.
This is like comparing a snow cone to meth.
[dead]
Social media's been coasting on unearned legitimacy since at least 2012 or so.
Remember the countless thinkpieces about the wisdom of crowds? Conceivably, social media crowds could somehow solve all sorts of really hard problems because in the mass of people conversing we'd be able to amplify voices who weren't being heard and get harder problems solved.
The truth of it is social media is a massively multiplayer video game where the goal is to build a following through posts, replies, and various social metrics.
This reframing situates it correctly for me: should I play video games for 4 hours straight everyday? Maybe not if I want to feel balanced as an individual. Should I let randos from a video game tell me I should be putting more time in? Absolutely not: they are still randos, regardless of how many Internet Points they have. Do I want their level of brainrot? No, thus I should I always be mindful of the effects on me.
It also makes exceedingly clear that social media should never be confused with whatever your quality work is that needs to get done. It is not a substitute for actually doing things. It offers a pale shadow of communication, friendship, and action. People should want more than the lousy facsimiles that it provides.
I think posting a note about your graduation so that all your friends and family can read a single note is a great use of social media. Reading about your niece's archery trophy is social media.
You can do this through email. But a personal website is a bit more interesting and preserves some privacy for the audience. Hosting your own site is beyond the abilities of most people, so it makes sense to have some easy hosting solution. A social media service is a fantastic idea.
Doom scrolling through Tiktok is not social.
Most people do not use "social media" services strictly as social media services. They use them as news services, music streaming services, etc. And most "social media" services encourage this and make it difficult to use their sites for social media.
A decent social media provider, like a decent email provider or hosting provider would have to charge money for their service. I don't know how many people would want such a service nor how many people would be willing to pay for it.
I want the old internet back, considering that history is cyclical I have high hopes that it will come back. However I subscribe to the idea that history doesn't repeat itself but rhymes so I expect it to be amazing again in a slightly different form.
Currently its infestation of for-profit content that got even worse with generative AI and curated through for-profit algorithms that drain our life for attention.
However, if you pay close attention to the non-advertiser friendly content and content that AI refuses to generate(which is mostly extremist left and right BS), you will see that there's a sustainable path for content that is not discovered and created the way it is now.
Yes, currently the only organic content is the extremist content. Yes, those de-platformed people actually didn't go away. They create authentic high quality Bull Shit, have audience that care and they are doing just fine. Which makes me believe that there must be a way for non-crazy, non-racist, non-extremist people for once again have authentic high quality content.
Interestingly, when Erdogan of Turkey cornered the mainstream media and deplatformed the non-complying journalists those journalists also adopted new ways. For many years, the advertisement on those channels were laughing stock. It was mostly hair removal cream and ideology oriented books but they survived anyway and the Erdogan acquired media lost steam as it wasn't authentic anymore and those small channels and social media platforms became mainstream. To the point that he is now once again trying to destroy them as his media is no good to push his narrative.
So yes, content is king and nature finds its way.
The old internet has never left, it's just the vast majority of people went to the corporatized internet instead. You can still find small communities of a few dozen or hundred people posting on forums that aren't reddit or facebook.
You aren't going to find them because Google does not care about discovery they care about ads.
Webrings are one trick to find your people, but it's hard and most webrings don't point to "gathering spots."
>You aren't going to find them because Google does not care about discovery they care about ads.
I frequently post to two very small, hobby-specific phpBB forums with old-internet-style communities that I found by googling the hobby. The forums themselves were listed at the top of Google's results when looking for the broader hobby, and I regularly find specific posts in Google results when searching for very specific subject matter.
They're only going to get harder to find as they disable unauthenticated access to topics due to being swamped with thousands of LLM company scrapers, if the user-owned-and-run forum I've been a member of for more than 20 years is anything to go by.
>considering that history is cyclical I have high hopes that it will come back
Not quite. As McLuhan said, the medium is the message. Once you get a new medium, it changes how people think and behave. Television changed how people treated entertainment forever, cars changed how transportation worked forever (I'm sure the horse industry hoped history was cyclical), etc, etc.
Even within the realm of social media itself, we saw successive irreversible stages. Text content gave way to images and memes which gave way to videos which finally gave way to short term video content. They are all competing in a Darwinian struggle in the attention economy, and once they gain traction, they change how people use their devices completely.
The vast majority of the web is the small web. Modern social media platforms are not incentivized to show you them.
Discord is pretty close to the old internet. I have lots of friends on Discord who I am quite close with but have never met in person. Discord servers are isolated and usually invite only, and generally you are not aware of what is happening in other discord servers and getting rage baited.
Yesterday I woke up, naturally, I started scrolling. The very first video (on Instagram) was an Uber driver getting pulled out of his car, a guy cocking a gun and executing him. I was barely awake and didn't really have time to react.
For the rest of the day I couldn't stop thinking about it, had high levels of anxiety for a few hours. I told all my friends I'm switching off for a bit on the socials. Mastodon and signal for a bit.
Edit: Just thinking about this happening yesterday puts me into a high state of anxiety.. Its absolutely bllsht these companies can effect us in this way.
Second Edit: Its my choice to expose myself knowingly, not entirely blaming meta. And I'm not going to anymore, but this is a more common experience than usual since Zuck got a chain and Tall-T
> Its absolutely bllsht these companies can effect us in this way.
I'd be one of the last people to defend Instagram/Meta/Zuck, but is that really your takeaway from this? Execution videos are absolutely against Instagram's TOS and I'm sure they want it on their platform even less than you.
If anything, Instagram's issue is they're too heavy on the robo-censorship. My friend posted a photo of him standing on one leg with a chair in his hands, making a goofy face, with the caption "I'm gonna hit you with this chair!" directed at no one in particular, and it was taken down for, quote: "encouraging violence and leading to risk of physical harm, or a direct threat to public safety." Appeal was rejected too, and the post had to be deleted.
This happens because they're trying to moderate against people posting execution videos. One slipped through the cracks seemingly, but it's not like they don't put a lot of effort into preventing that. It's pretty hard to do at Meta's scale where most of the earth's population is using their platforms.
> Execution videos are absolutely against Instagram's TOS and I'm sure they want it on their platform even less than you.
Hardly a comforting statement to someone who just watched one of these videos served algorithmically to them on a very, very mature platform.
Moderation has basically gone away... Don't you think there's a extra bit of ML that goes into the first reel I'm seeing after not opening the app for 10 hours also? I'm making assumptions here, but this was the first reel. These videos have thousands of likes.
Yep. Just see YouTube comment sections with clear pornographic images in certain users' profiles–accounts which have existed for enough time for the dumbest of moderation campaigns to have identified as inappropriate.
The take-away is that not that they are poorly moderated (which is true).
The point is that these short-form videos deliver no actual value to those consuming them but come with plenty of mental health downsides. (Literal PTSD, for starters.)
The only way to win is not to play!
Some of the funniest things I've ever seen are on those platforms, but is it worth it.. Prob not.
Still there tho. The principles are irrelevant to the reality.
The ML moderation false positives/negatives do not annoy me as much as the slot machine design of reels/tiktoks/shorts. I do think the constraints of the medium's design (very short, random, visual, crowd-controlled) create perverse incentives.
I almost never get videos where people actually die unless I really want to (and usually, I don't). Lots of close calls, suggestive images, but an actual death caught on camera, no. Even the killing of animals is not something I see often, even though it is part of daily life for many farmers. Maybe some of it slips through, but algorithms tend to not let that kind of content pass.
If anything, I find mainstream news to be worse. They don't show the act of murder itself, but they are definitely going to show you a bunch of scenes and let your imagination fill the gaps. They constantly tell you how ugly the world is and how it is becoming worse. It is all war, natural disasters, climate crisis, overpopulation (or is it underpopulation), toxic chemicals, etc... Yes, these are real problems, but these are problems we solve. Wars end, natural disasters are better predicted and mitigated, we are using more and more renewable energies, it turns out that population self-regulates, toxic chemicals get banned and replacements are found, etc... It seems we are breeding a whole generation of people who think we are doomed instead of seeing all these things as obstacles to overcome.
Overall, I find social media more positive than mainstream news. I dislike how they turn our brains into mush, but we get more cute girls dancing and less massacres in Gaza.
Yudkowski mentioned a nice thought blurb about cancer.
1. More cancer cases being recognized efficiently.
2. More bombardment of cancer cases news through diverse outlets.
3. Social media refreshing our minds with same cancer cases, even 4-5 year old ones.
4. The same news circulating through offline interactions.
This gives us insecurity that a particular disease is out of control. I think there was a Lesswrong post about this phenomenon.
A couple assumptions you're making here I'd disagree with: 1. Yudkowski is ever worth listening to. 2. That this is just some antecdotal experience (the whole world is having), that isn't backed by any scientific merrit. I don't have time in the middle of my work day to go find all that, but we all know this is something measurable.
How humans adapt remains to be seen, it seems like a lot of (young) people adapt by shoving the barrel of a gun in their... Maybe they would have done that anyways idk.
"Yesterday I woke up, naturally, I started scrolling. The very first video ..."
May I suggest this minor hygienic practice ?
When you wake up in the morning, immediately go on a walk.
Just 5 minutes. Walk around the block. Whatever.
The first thing your eyes see in the morning should not be print/screen and the first thing your body does should not be sitting.
> Yesterday I woke up, naturally, I started scrolling. The very first video (on Instagram) was an Uber driver getting pulled out of his car, a guy cocking a gun and executing him. I was barely awake and didn't really have time to react.
Remember that (old?) internet 'meme' (concept, more like it) that was something like "can't unsee this"? Yeah, that.
There's all sorts of "infohazards" (written and visual) that one has to avoid today, largely a product of the social media landscape.
I've heard such practices and attempts at curation as psycho-social security (or something like that); the process of deliberate avoidance of certain "content" and attempts/diligence when interacting with these various platforms and landscapes to avoid such things. It actually does take a concerted effort now to avoid being exposed to "content" like you described, as addiction and "habit" of "scrolling" is in some ways more natural than not, now. Strange time to be alive.
that's one thing I miss about the old internet. Not every piece of info was a "meme." Some were literally just ideas. Not everything is a freaking meme!!!!
Yeah X/Twitter was running ads for a hunting game that showed you a real video of a fox dying slowly after being shot repeatedly. Can't block it and it popped up multiple times over a few weeks. It's getting to the point that I can't browse Twitter in public just due to the ads.
You are lucky. Most people don't have the introspection to draw the link between a video they consumed and the resulting anxiety afterward. They just keep coming back for the dopamine hit without realizing that they are effectively volunteering themselves for PTSD.
random sidenote:
I think growing up online alongside websites like Rotten and LiveLeak from a young age pretty much desensitized me to being bothered by such types of videos or images. The late 90s and early 00s internet was wild.
The difference between then and now is that on the 90's and 00's Internet, you had to go and actively find that kind of content yourself. Now it's the first thing you see in your feed after logging into FaceBook, YouTube, Instagram, and whatever else.
I grew up with this, born in 90, have witnessed gun violence in real life. I'm still not prepared to see someone getting executed in 4k immediately after I wake up. My past experiences don't prevent the type of anxiety that it causes, nor am I going to sweep for Instagram because I'm less of a pussy than the 12 yr olds seeing it right when they wake up also.
"Although the blog will be the main home for all my stuff (you can follow it via RSS and I think you should, because RSS is possibly the best and purest tech we still have)"
This. I watch youtube through my RSS feed. The videos actually loads instantly, without their BS loading times if you load it on their page (in FF with adblock). I can set up rules in my RSS feed to filter out previews/trailers from channels I follow. I can sort my YT channels into categories (music, sports, etc). It's actually usable, and the controls are in my hand.
More people needs to use RSS feeds. Don't let algorithms dictate your life. Youtube engineers are the worst.
Hey, if you’re someone just getting into rss feeds, can you point me to a good guide to get started with a setup like yours?
If you're willing to pay a little, I have used https://bazqux.com/ for many years and it has every feature I've ever needed built in. You can set up everything the parent comment mentioned in a few minutes.
This almost sold me: read comments. Does it support Reddit and HN comments?
It does support Reddit comments. HN feeds are provided by a third party (https://github.com/hnrss/hnrss) which doesn't provide comments on posts, but you could request or implement that feature if you wanted to.
Thanks, will check it out!
I'm really happy with Fluent Reader - it's available on all of Windows/Mac/Linux
https://github.com/yang991178/fluent-reader
As I just wrote to the author of this piece (who also happens to send out one of the best weekly roundups of weird and wonderful articles I get), her experience captures what so many authors I’ve worked with over the years in publishing have struggled with. When i can, i try to disabuse them of the idea that social media is somehow a reliable or necessary tool for promoting a book. As Caroline writes, if you already have a platform and it comes naturally to you, great, but I’ve personally never seen an author join social media in order to promote a book and actually succeed. And that’s before you even get to the exploitative dynamics she lays out so clearly here (aptly described as a pyramid scheme). Anyway, it’s all articulated beautifully, and I wish every author, especially those just starting to consider it, could read this and know there’s another way.
I'm starting to sloooowly build up an audience as I work on my game project, and I can already tell I do not at all have the necessary drive to build that audience as large as it needs to be for the game to "go viral" based on that alone, no matter how good it is. No, I think the necessary evil will be actual marketing, possibly by reaching out to other streamers and whatnot that DO have those followings and seeing if I can spark their interest in the project. I know I don't have the mental energy to keep it up myself, especially not solo. I'll focus on what I'm good at: making the best game that I can, the sort of thing I'd love to play. The rest will have to be up to the experts in their field, which I am not.
"Being a social media star is a skillset completely distinct from being someone who writes books — they may overlap occasionally, but it's not the norm."
Absolutely
Same with coding, pretty much everything.
I've met some folks, even taken classes from some people who are involved with some important frameworks and so on, all great experiences ... and yet their social media posts about coding are just pithy garbage, even when they try to say something important.
At times the profession and social media posts straight up seem at odds where I think "I get why this limited number of words plays well on social media, but it's not correct... and I think it even indicted the opposite of what the words originally meant."
Social media doesn't really make for a good communication channel for anything except social media.
I was about to comment on how much I agree with this quote.
Then I realized that pretending to be witty on HN is a skillset that completely distinct from being someone who writes software as well.
quod erat demonstrandum
I binned off my instagram, it made my hobby (wildlife photography) feel like a job.
Made my own site instead: https://photos.dombarker.co.uk/
Gets about 1 visit a week from google. And thats ok.
I don't know if it's the colours or the composition (or both), but some of the pictures look absolutely gorgeous
that's very kind thank you :)
These are beautiful photos.
Would you consider adding an RSS feed to your website to help people keep up with it?
done!
https://photos.dombarker.co.uk/rss
Thank you!
I just wanted to say that these are some seriously great photos!
In defense of social media, going to share a typical conversation I have with some younger (mid 20s) folks that I mentor:
Me: "Do you use social media?"
Them: "NO! Social media is so toxic!"
Me: "You mentioned earlier that you are trying to get a job in X field, correct?"
Them: "Yes, that's true"
Me: "Have you found the relevant sub-Reddit, part of Twitter etc where people in that field hang out and/or share ideas?"
Them: "Well, no."
Me: "So how about this: first find the online place where those people hang out. Second, why don't you write up a blog post or summary of something you've done in the field and post it there. If you haven't done something IN the field, then maybe talk about how you learned about the field or what you find interesting about it etc. Then post that in the sub-Reddit etc."
<few weeks go by>
Them: "I followed your advice and someone from a firm in the field I'm interested saw it, read it, commented on it and reached about having a conversation."
Me: "Excellent! I always say that the lifetime marginal benefit of going from zero to one social media post about you describing/writing about your preferred industry is ENORMOUS"
(We usually move on to another topic with the mentee after this)
Prior to social media, the only way you could do this was to do one of the following:
- go to college in that field
- hangout, physically, where the folks you wanted to interact with were
- physically send letters to people with your article/summary idea
- etc
I feel like a lot of folks forget this and are blinded by the downsides of social media (which, to be fair, there are many)
What you describe is the best of what social media can be. Real people connecting, interacting with each other and helping folks. Sadly, a lot of social media is not this. Its people and bots posting content designed to inflame, generate hate and make people feel bad about themselves by comparing their own lives to unattainable goals (eg: Instagram).
Add to this the addictive way Social Media engineers their sites to keep people swiping rather than interacting with real people and you have a product which may be more net negative than positive.
I wish there were more instances of Social Media operating in the way you describe. That was the dream...
> - hangout, physically, where the folks you wanted to interact with were
There's also nothing wrong with this! The more and more interactions we move online, the more purely transactional they become and we miss out on a lot of connection with our fellow humans, which have a multitude of benefits other than just professional networking.
The other problem with social media is your choice is removed from you. I run a photography business as a side hustle, and without social media, it would have never gotten off the ground and if I want it to continue I'm required to basically not only be good at the photography aspect, but to be good at social media and having that social media persona.
It's draining, and extremely damaging for one's mental health and if you run a small business chances are you just don't have a choice, you have to do it or you don't get to exist (up to a certain point until word of mouth can carry you, but even then not having a social media presence is a red flag for many).
Social media itself doesn't need to be bad, or harmful, but that would require getting rid of algorithmic feeds, and to stop rewarding engagement, which will solve the "influencer" problem. I'd also go as far to say that social media shouldn't be the end game, but a tool that eventually leads to a real, physical connection/in person event. Social media should augment those communities, but not be the entirety of the community.
I've been trying to use social media to promote my music & mobile app for years, to very little luck. I don't even really like using social media, but it felt "necessary" in order to "make it," even though there is nothing to see for all this effort.
Sometimes Facebook et al feel like a complete ghost town, with algorithmic content completely overwhelming any engagement from friends or acquaintances.
Social media networks start to suck as soon as your circle of friends graduates college.
Mine is mostly one old friend posting about politics (and like, I agree with his politics but the stuff reposted on social media is hit by the dumb-viral filter and becomes unbearable even if you agree with it).
I think the author was a bit confused on what „do social media“ means. This, like any other promotional marketing channel, lives based on building an audience that comes for that value OR is genuinely interested in your content.
Just creating some random videos about god knows what without any overarching context or value (entertainment) provided, leaves the audience clueless about what this channel means.
It’s like your uncle uploading random videos without any sort of narrative and each video being completely random.
Doing „social media“ probably means to either build a following by providing content that involves book or are around the topic books, that regardless of interest in the current book in question, will make the audience come back because they are getting some kind of value and/or entertainment.
Posting videos about a book and then next about a husband walking the dog does not really spark an interest to come back for more (unless I am personally interested to support a particular creator (which these followers also did)).
Unfortunately just trying to build a social media presence to promote a book is naive. The advice to „do social media“ is too broad. But social media IS a powerful channel to reach audiences, just not without either already owning a channel that covers the subject matter on a regular basis to attract the audience or without the willingness to spend money. Placing advertisements or striking deals with book related channels would probably be more effective.
It's 2025 and McDonald's is still the #1 most popular restaurant in the whole world.
Social Media is fast food. The masses will consume it to their death...
The rest of the population is bifurcating. The only people who will remain on Social Media will be poor, uneducated and the stupid. Not that different than the people who eat fast food, often.
It isn't clear from the title but becomes clear in the second paragraph:
She's saying "I'm done trying to use social media for commercial purposes".
She is no longer posting personal content on social media apps either. She will send you stuff via her newsletter though.
But that's more than just abandoning it for business reasons.
Sure but she's frustrated because she's trying a use case that does not apply to most social media users. You can have a miserable experience in competitive races but it's a bit heavy handed to swear off jogging entirely.
Is this an email newsletter? I’d never see it.
I think the entire point is that to find out about it, you have to have a much higher level of interest in the topic than someone who would find out about it via algorithm and virality.
Getting rid of most social media has been one of the best things I have ever done. I didn’t just delete my accounts, I also blocked the sites so I can’t visit them.
The best one to delete was definitely reddit. It’s too easy to doomscroll. It’s such a time sink, and being hyper-aware of everything that’s going on nowadays just made me anxious all the time.
HN hasn’t proven to be much of an issue for me. I guess it’s just less active, so I run out of new content faster whenever I visit.
I did the same, but I'm still holding on to Reddit with many restrictions:
- No mobile apps
- 10 min/day time limit on web
- Only browse 6 subreddits individually
- Filtering all posts below a certain karma level (depending on the subreddit)
- Collapsing all comments by default
This has completely changed my relationship with the platform for the better. I would quit it entirely, but unfortunately it's the best news source for a few of my hobbies.
subreddits also have a RSS feed. That helps when you just want stories and links.
I have a hypothesis - media production [1] will gradually shift from social medial platforms to individualized (decentralized) platforms [2].
I think there are a lot of reasons for this trend:
* People are becoming increasing distrustful of platforms and there owners.
* The platform algos push a lot of noise and inflammatory content for engagement, something that users are getting fatigue from.
* On the creator side, the professional producers of social media will find it increasingly difficult to monetize from their platforms. In fact, I think the platforms will eventually realize how much power they have over their popular creators and charge the creators in order to have full access to their audiences.
* Additionally on the creator side, they can be banned at any moment with little or no recourse. Imagine being a professional creator on instagram, and one day you are banned for no reason. You lose total access to your following.
So I think the attention will slowly shift away from the platforms, which increasingly just serve as a parasitic middle men, back to creators + their followers (newsletters, blogs, private chat, websites with owned domains, etc).
[1] Whatever people tend to post on social media, whether its images, text, audio, or video.
[2] Blogs, websites, email, owned domains, etc.
There’s an easier way to promote on social media without becoming a life consuming personal brand. Get yourself on those accounts that curate content.
Get your song featured on curated Spotify lists or Instagram/TikTok accounts that review books of a specific genre, or get a guest spot on a podcast about your topic.
This is like the old way of marketing. In the old days, you’d apply to talk at writing conventions, table, do book tours at stores, go to relevant events locally, and partner with libraries locally. To follow the song analogy, musicians used to send songs to DJs and radio hosts. Maybe your at a college radio level, or local broadcasting. Find your stations, build up your reputation.
In the end of the day, people have found their networks and communities. You should try to enter them and be a part of those communities rather than build one up for yourself.
The author has this insite when she describes most of her following is through some form of word of mouth. This social media era is the same, except some of the word of mouth is direct (DMs, IRL conversations) and others are through communities.
In an era of everything being algorithmically served to you, I’m impressed by how often personal recommendations weigh far heavier for people. A good example I’ve seen is restaurants. Sure, I might Google or Yelp, but if someone I know has similar taste recommends a place, I’ll give it a shot. It doesn’t need to be someone I know IRL or virtual, it’s just a person who shares the same interests.
I think this works well if you’re trying to promote something real, like what this author is doing. I have no solution for personal content.
I started blogging in 2012, have been going pretty consistently since then.
I currently 'go hard' on tiktok, because I've recently been collecting tons of footage of mobility networks via drone and 360 camera (mostly while I ride my scooter/small motorcycle around)
the tiktok editor is pretty good for that purpose, and then I bring some clips back to my blog.
For instance, https://josh.works/traffic-bean has text, links to some substacks I wrote, a youtube video embed (drone footage) and tiktok embeds (insta360 footage).
It does the trick.
But everything that isn't on my website I count as ephemeral, discard, creative detritus that I create lots of so I can occasionally get the good bits.
I love having my website. I can write whatever I want. I can write about grief, or supremacy, or ruby, or american road networks, and I have a list of subscribers (~300) via email that I can talk to directly.
I love to see other people's blogs. It's so much more interesting to me than an instagram or tik tok or whatever.
:)
I've often wondered if you can't have your cake and eat it too by treating social media as write-only. If you just post, but don't read comments, demonetize, don't track performance, you break the cycle of feedback and measurement that shapes inauthentic behavior. This doesn't mean you take NO feedback, because you can always offer an intentionally "high-friction" means of contacting you (I personally like the idea of a time-limited email address that is the answer to a riddle presented in the content. Or a PO Box).
It's deeply uncertain, even unlikely, that this will work because users crave engagement, feeling like their involved, and this "shape" of social media is more akin to legacy TV and print media which is "fire and forget". But still, I think it's an experiment worth doing.
Been doing this for almost a decade. Drive-by social media. My pages are all public too.
Check iluvlawyering on Instagram and you'll see hundreds of posts without any responses. There's even a post that I made as a channel marker of sorts (paraphrasing: click on this and tap on that, all day long its click, click, clack, feel free to click on this there's no tapping back.
Needless to say I haven't scrolled or engaged with anything on any of my own feeds in years. It's also important not to curate or review what you've already posted. That was an issue for the first couple years but it's all smooth sailing now.
Without feedback, how will you optimize your posts for attention? If you don't want to optimize for attention, why are you posting?
of course you can, theres lots of healthy ways of engaging with and using social media...
its just that for whatever reason, we've invested the lives of many of our best minds into pulling you into the unhealthy ways, as they make the line go up.
I suppose my question was less about whether or not one can do the experiment, and more about whether or not anyone has done it and whether it was successful. I could see it going either way.
"I still want to be in touch with those who are interested in my work. I've spent most of 2025 so far working out what that might look like."
I don't understand how you can get eyes on your blog without social media, and with how Google works nowadays, unless you are a celebrity.
I don't understand it either. Perhaps word of mouth? Your friends and work colleagues read your blog and share the ones they love to their own friends, etc.
I don't know.
I have abstained from most social media since 2012, to include Linkedin. I enjoy that my friendships and social connections feel satisfying but more importantly, consensual. The decision has been to my detriment in some ways, but affirming in others - for instance, I recorded an album for my metal project. It has 200 listens on Bandcamp. Could I have more ears if I blasted shit out over X or intentionally marketed myself and the project? Of course. But do I care to? No. Social media broke its promise by degenerating into a billboard. I have no interest in contributing to that beast.
Part of the problem is that most of these social media platforms have abandoned the "social media" paradigm entirely (which is to say, a platform that lets you interact and stay in touch with people you know via the internet) and shifted to an enshittified attention economy monster that turns users into content producers and content consumers, not always of content that has anything to do with socializing. It seems like this author is effectively struggling with marketing in the attention economy. It sucks, but honestly this just sounds like the same challenge that marketing has been grappling with for ages.
It's always weird when two worlds collide - I listen to Caroline's podcast "Shedunnit", a lovely warm hug of a show about the golden age of detective fiction, so I was a bit surprised to see her on HN. I highly recommend the podcast - it's not a subject I have a great deal of interest in, I just love listening to people talk about a niche that they're deeply interested in, and Caroline's love for the subject matter is contagious.
I’ve been using social media less and less over the past few years. Especially short videos, they just make my brain feel foggy. At first I thought it was just distracting but later I realized it was affecting my mood and focus. Now I mostly use it to post photos and write more on my own blog, mainly for people I know. There is less interaction but it feels a lot more peaceful.
I understand this place (HN) is not considered "social media" by most guys who leave social media?
For me the (bad) usage patterns are very similar between here and there.
I definitely doom scroll hacker news and feel bad when I lose karma. But on the plus side I only engage with it when I choose to and its easy to set aside.
I read things and I think: "I have an experience I want to relate!" But I am trying to take a breath more and realize people aren't really that interested in my opinion. I am trying to be at peace with that in general.
You wrote a long blog post. Shows that you are not done yet. Social media is about craving for attention and spending your attention. That's not bad. Getting attention gives a purpose for what you do. Giving attention gives you new exposures. New exposures cause aging, like the scales in the wood. New attention you get, gives you existence. The idea is to grow bigger in existence without much aging.
> I'm not a natural on camera and I don't have that talent for talking effortlessly and engagingly to a lens when alone in a room that successful social media personalities need. I was forcing it all the time, making myself record multiple takes and doing things again and again until they looked "natural" (a highly unnatural behaviour). My video editing skills are basic, so turning out regular videos took me a long time.
They would have done better and would have resented it less if they had just owned it and not worried as much. They would have become more comfortable on camera as a result. You first attempts at this are going to be rubbish anyway.
So it better to just put stuff out there and iterate. All the big mistakes have been made by others and if you avoid those you will be fine.
When I first started doing YouTube vids. I was determined I should be like some big coding channel. I didn't have the video editing skills, nor really knew enough OBS to do it effectively. So I was stressing about it. My videos did pretty decently (I had less than 50 subs and I had 1200 views on one of my videos).
Now I am doing as if it is a hobby that I will hopefully turn into something more and I am enjoying it a lot more. I get decent engagement / views for my channel considering the size (200-1000 views per vid) when you have less than 500 subs is decent IMO. As I get better with the OBS/Kdenlive/Resolve I am sure I will have more fun editing.
Same thing with LinkedIn for me specifically. I heard that it could be a great way to get a job. But then I tried it, was inundated with AI slop, and contacted by recruiters from companies that sounded dreadfully boring. And when it came to nearly 100% of the people I encountered there who were actually active, I'd rather freeze to death than work with them.
The common way to use LinkedIn is to create a profile, keep it updated, and then ignore the platform until you need to use the job search function.
The majority of people on LinkedIn aren't posting and interacting with things all day.
To be honest, most people I know consider being highly active (posting) on LinkedIn to be a potential warning sign for a hire, because it's associated with people who will spend more time hustling on LinkedIn for their next job than working for your company.
> The common way to use LinkedIn is to create a profile, keep it updated, and then ignore the platform until you need to use the job search function.
Personally, I've had better luck finding jobs in other ways (searching companies websites, using more old-school platforms like Indeed), compared to LinkedIn.
I check LinkedIn to see who is the next person to be laid off from my previous employer. They post a picture of their badge and write this overly positive thank you to the company for the opportunity. They laid you off after 30 years in a group video call where you can't speak, don't thank them.
I haven't posted to (or even logged into) LinkedIn since I was 17 (~15 years ago) and although I've never been hired by one even the ycombinator startups that demand it don't seem to mind and interview me.
linkedin is good at:
- publicly hosting a resume in an "industry standard" format that can easily be shared
- playing queens each day
linkedin is bad at:
- being a social media platform
- accurately capturing real-world relationships/networks/skill assesements
- everything else
The pattern of active LinkedIn posters has a weird thing where it gives off strong vibes of that one person at work who seems to have their hands in everything, but actually accomplishes nothing except to toot their own horn.
In a general sense I'd love to hear about what people do, see where people I've worked with ... work and do now. LinkedIn should be the place I can do that right? And yet LinkedIn feels like such an artificial place that I would want nothing to do with the most active people posting as far as working with them.
I don’t how it is lately, but 4-5 years ago when I used LinkedIn to land a job, a recruiter sent me to a JavaScript interview instead of Java. Not sure what went wrong on their side but it was hilarious and a bit irritating.
Use it to keep in contact with peers from previous jobs. When they see you're looking they'll refer you internally, and that is 1000% more likely to land a job than submitting applications cold.
No thanks, I'd rather not use it at all. If people can't be bothered to keep in touch via email or something less disgusting than LinkedIn, I'm not interested in them anyway.
I saw one on LinkedIn that was so egregious of a lie I just stopped and paused.
A guy claiming he vibe coded "30 startups" in a weekend (yes, 30—with some becoming instantly profitable/revenue generating) and then went on to shame actual developers as being "cooked" and "over" if they were taking their time to build something.
Did he have any evidence or links to these 30 apps? Of course not. But that didn't stop him from lying and peacocking about it on LinkedIn.
This is what scares me the most about social media. We've lost all sense of judgment of what makes someone a professional or expert and have delegated that to likes, comments, and subscribes. Everything is just a "hype" game now, and real honesty and truth are given a "eh, have anything that can entertain me?"
> We've lost all sense of judgment of what makes someone a professional or expert [...]
Well you see, everybody is equal, especially in the age of AI which is the great cognitive equalizer (in the same way gunpowder and firearms equalized one's capacity for violence). There is no such thing as individual expertise now; expertise is soon to become the exclusive domain of AI.
So yes, in the future, the only thing that will matter is hype, marketing, and how good of an "ideas guy" you are. Surface appearances don't need to have anything real underneath - that can just be synthesized and backfilled as needed, on demand, by the AI.
> Well you see, everybody is equal, especially in the age of AI which is the great cognitive equalizer (in the same way gunpowder and firearms equalized one's capacity for violence). There is no such thing as individual expertise now; expertise is soon to become the exclusive domain of AI.
That is right, and it's a terrible shame because society has been built upon the uniqueness of individuals. The loss of that will be a very bit psychological hit to human beings and make life seem much more meaningless. Because in reality, it's demeaning to be an orchestrator of AI, and after the novelty of it wears off we will all be just pulling levers, having lost the uniqueness of our culture and spirit.
> I think the persistent advice to authors to "do social media" is, at best, part of a strategy that can be generously described as throwing everything at the proverbial wall in the hope that something, anything, will stick.
It also probably was pretty good advice until ~3 years ago.
Wrote something related on my blog - https://www.rxjourney.net/decoupling-from-social-media
My rule for social media is “don’t feed the sirens.” Like Caroline, there are many things I’d rather do than donate my time to help Mark Zuckerberg sell ads. This is why, for example, I don’t post my art on social media.
Another step toward the ultimate wisdom which is: who cares?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41115911
We as engineers did this and we should fix this!
Personal plug:
https://nabraj.com/blog/swipe-scroll-repeat-addiction/
I just got declined for a job yesterday because I had a post on my blog talking about my history with major depressive disorder and medication to address that. That's not just a cope on my end, they actually said that. I don't think I'm ambitious enough to try and sue them for it, I might report to some department in NYC for it though.
But I think I learned that being candid about yourself on the internet is a mistake. I have no idea why the fuck it would be a good idea to be upfront about my mental health history; who the hell knows how many jobs I've been declined for where they were smart enough to not say that that's why they were declining me.
I had already deleted most of my social media, the only ones I use regularly are Hacker News and the aforementioned blog [1], and I think I should probably just stop mentioning anything that isn't purely technical on either of them.
[1] Not really social media, but it is a public-facing thing with my name on it.
You're probably looking for the New York State department of Labor
https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-02488
Yeah that's the one I was looking at.
I'm not sure if I want to do it, because this is a relatively small company, it would be very clearly me who reported them, and the leader of this company is sort of a known sociopath who would probably not be above blackballing me and making it very hard for me to be employed.
It's a little depressing, because I wrote that blog post so that I people searching for how certain medications affect them could know what they were in for, I didn't think it would be weaponized against me, but I guess that was a little naive on my end.
"Blackmail" you how? It's sort of already "public" as it is. I would highly recommend reporting them anyways, but they choice is yours
I didn't say blackmail, I said blackball; basically "poison me in some markets". https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blackball
I don't want to say the person's name in fear of getting a letter from an attorney, but this person is connected enough to where I am hesitant to do anything.
I even went further, I moved my WEB page to gopher and gemini, the real gemini :)
Me too. Let’s hope the micro net can survive.
I hope for a curated, personal internet
Link in my profile
She has a blog, podcast, and email newsletter- is she really not using social media?
Most people don't consider those as social media.
>One evening, as I made my husband walk our dog past the same scenic view multiple times so that I could get the best shot of it for a video, I experienced a sudden wave of revulsion for myself and what I was doing.
There's a beach in Northeastern Brazil called Maragogi. The water is calm and warm, and you can easily see schools of fish passing through your legs in many points. "Brazilian Caribbean" is its moniker, but if you ask me, the Caribbean should be called the "Central American Maragogi".
Anyway, I rented a small apartment there for a while, and this one morning I observed this couple acting quite strangely. The young lady was repeating some movements -- none of them naughty. She was going in and out of the sea, splashing theatrically through the surf. Then I noticed the man of the couple: he was chasing after her maybe 4 or 5m away, holding and looking at the phone all the time. I went about my morning, walked a bunch, enjoyed the water, and started back after a couple of hours - the Sun gets dangerously strong around noon. The couple was still at the same spot, tirelessly repeating the same sad, pathetic choreography, again and again.
I still can't understand those people. What a miserable existence we've built for ourselves.
I saw a lot of this exact behaviour in Ibiza recently, I will never understand it. I use the iOS photos widget to always have a photo from my camera roll on my home screen, and the little moment of joy I get from that is usually the memory of the event depicted. What future joy is going to come from a photo popping into your day of that time you spent 2 hours standing in front of something doing very slightly different poses while your long-suffering friend or partner was forced to take photos of each and every one of them?
The only real sign that you're free from social media is that you don't have the compulsion to write long posts and tell internet strangers all about it. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Reddit, Substack, Hacker News...it's all the same. If you want to be free be truly free.
snarky comment, but not applicable. She is a writer, writing stuff for others to read is her goal.
I never started with social media (I guess you can count reddit/HN) but beyond that - nope.
This isn't a "I'm so smart I saw the writing on the wall" thing it's entirely that I'm not hugely social anyway and social media is a weak reflection of been actually social.
Same with doom scrolling, it just doesn't seem to take with me.
More and more Hacker News seems to be the contrarians and the “get off my lawn”s when it comes to AI and social media alike. I feel like there was a time in the late 2000s to early 2010s where we were still young and our skills were sharp and the tech was new and shiny, but the technology world kept moving and kept evolving and a lot of people…didn’t. Every day I see another post like “AI isn’t really smart, it’s just hype and I don’t like it!” or “I don’t use social media and here’s why!” or “Look at this phone I started using that isn’t a smartphone, I’m so much happier now”, all without realizing that this is just the “I don’t use the internet, it’s dangerous! My kids aren’t allowed to use it either!” or “I don’t need a cellphone, people can wait to call me when I’m home!” or “Why would I send a text message when I can just call?” of our time. People age and get set in their ways, and in my opinion in this rapidly evolving world of technology, it’s something that has to be actively avoided or we’ll get left behind.
I disagree. I think back in the late 2000s to early 2010s, many of us were eager to adopt the bleeding edge of technology because we were in the middle of tangible year-over-year progress. Twitter was a great way to broadcast updates to mobile devices with fledgling data plans. Instagram rode the wave of camera development in smartphones, allowing people to do something the increasingly higher quality photos they were taking. But in our rush to adopt these user experiences and stretch our wings, we ignored all of the potential pitfalls of creating these large, centralized repositories of heuristic and tracking data. We sold our single family homes on the open web for the opportunity to rent an apartment in a massive building with a few nice amenities like a gym with a heated pool.
Ten to fifteen years later and the rent has been increasing by huge amounts every year on that apartment, our maintenance requests go unanswered, and the neighborhood outside has gone downhill. Meanwhile, the same property management company is trying to get us to sign a perpetual lease in their new building just down the block. Is it really a surprise why people aren't jumping at that the opportunity?
We are very much still in the middle of tangible year over year progress. LLMs are changing the world in big ways, and the progress has never been faster. On the programming side of things, the libraries and frameworks and languages have never been better and yet still have a long way to go. Consumer hardware has never been better and continues to rapidly evolve.
TikTok has changed the way people communicate and interact more than Twitter or Instagram ever did. I agree that not all things have gotten better and some have gotten worse, but it’s mostly just that the world has changed and it’s required a lot of adaptation. The same could have been said 20 years ago too.
We have become less social as a result of social media, when I walk outside almost every single person has earbuds or headphones in, and people won't even look at me when I walk past, let alone say hi or anything. There's just too much going on, people are drained by these opaque algorithms that does not care about us, created by people who do not care about us.
How do LLM's assist us in this regard? It creates more content, but it's not even made by anyone, whilst guzzling up resources that we actually need (this applies to physical things like water as well as our own attention/time).
It feels like technology gets put out to the world and then humanity gets dragged "forward" by it, when there's nothing inherently wrong with resisting change if the current evidence points towards further problems.
I think it's a bit much to criticize being contrarian, when being a conformist is basically the same thing.
A conformist does exactly what the public does, and a contrarian does exactly what the public doesn't do.
Either way the public decides.
If you independently decide that you don't like social media, then that's not being a contrarian. Just as independently deciding that you do want to engage in social media doesn't make you a conformist.
Sure and I don’t disagree with anything you said related to social media. It’s the pattern I see that I’m commenting on. The public has largely decided, but this community’s opinions are not really reflective of larger society.
Is that larger society actually healthy?
Or perhaps people mature, take stock in what actually matters to them rather than what is being forced onto them by the economy. If being left behind means I have real relationships with real humans in the real world, I'm good with that.
Sure, but we were _right_ back then on the bleeding edge of technology, whereas our parents simply didn’t get it. They were closed off to new ideas and the rapidly changing world. Or were they more mature, and the internet and texting and cellphones were bad ideas?
Being a hacker was never about unquestioningly lapping up every new thing that was pushed out.
It's clear we've pretty much completely lost the spirit of the hacker ethos to Silicon Valley.
the only blogs i’ve found worth reading are the ones that have something to say other than just “why i have a blog”
Social media was never a wholly cosy or useful place for me, although I was utterly addicted to it for a number of years because "being a journalist" in the 2010s felt synonymous with "being on social media all the time".
Wait what? Is this true? Can anyone familiar with the journalism field chime in here? Because if this is true then it would explain the general deterioration of the media environment we live in.
Hell sometimes I listen to NPR while driving and I here the jounralists talk about random reddit comments and I feel perturbed that browsing reddit would be considered journalism. But being on social media all the time is considered journalism apparently?
These kinds of posts are so played out
Oops a blog is social media
I like the irony of making a very public blog/social media post about not using social media.
There may be already existent threads covering my thoughts
Big tech algorithms are filled with absolute dog shit. What were previously information discovery algorithms have been replaced by, basically dog shit.
I have gave up on Facebook, Twitter, and most recently LinkedIn as a millennial. All I see is fantastical nonsense and spam. The rate it's going, if you want to reach someone over 40 in the UK, try Ceefax.
Welcome to the club! https://chriswoolfe.wordpress.com/2020/12/12/why-ive-left-fa...
welcome to the anti-social club!
yes. the irony is that social media promotes para-socialization to the detriment of actual socialization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsaeFYGbK2M
good decision
Ok, good point. Good luck with the book.
[dead]
who.
gives.
a.
shit.
> If all of this — a non-famous writer with a podcast deciding she's replacing Instagram with blogging — feels too inconsequential to write 4,500 words about, then you're not alone. I think so too, but I also couldn't not write this.
Crazy that she gets it but doesn't get it at the same time.
It's a trend. Digital detox also.
If the author was really done with social media they would delete their accounts. Since the accounts are not deleted the door is still open. I deleted my accounts over 5 years ago and don't miss anything. In fact I think it has strengthened my connections with friends pushing me to text and call more people. The only regret I have is as a security researcher I lose out on some good OSINT data. There are ways around it but the walled gardens are quite secure and require ID to enter.