Guess what i am trying to say is that, this is not a new problem created by social media, but an old problem caused by most of us having to be not special. And while eventual acceptance of it is very important, the initial denial is even more important.
If they ever add RSS to their own websites, I will have no more reason to be on FB.
Please make RSS a thing again !
On the other hand, I was reading a tweeter feed an hour ago, and I was so disgusted by the hatred of the exchange that I told myself (again...) "Why are you inflicting this on your sanity ?"
Also: to get a flip phone and disable JavaScript
If you have problems with self control then take steps to deal with it. Delete phone apps, set specific times when you use social media with limits, and if necessary talk to a mental health professional.
See this interview with Adam Alter here:
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/podcast-420-what-mak...
This is an interesting question, and one that I have to admit has never been on my radar. I don’t intend to have a legacy at all. Do others worry about this?
Well, a particular orange website has a audience that appeals to opinions from liberal tech folks. I couldn't care less about if they agree / disagree with my opinions. They are free to do so, which I support.
What's worse is the censoring, shadow-banning, flagging of genuine posts or opinions on these social networks including the orange site that really ruins the discussion and distorts the situation.
As soon as you see that trying to please everyone + looking at everyone's updates is an eternal race to the bottom, then social media gradually becomes irrelevant to you.
I go to a board gaming club once a week. It used to be reasonably easy to find someone to play with, but nowadays:
1. all groups are already formed the moment the club opens (one per board game), 2. newcomers come in groups already decided which game they're going to play, don't waste time looking around and play among themselves.
So you can be there on time, and that's not enough to find someone to play with. It feels like fb/social media is a kind of lobby for board games in that place. Wanted to go out and meet some new people over board games? Think again. It's like those stories you might hear about bars, dating and tinder - that nowadays even bar goers stare at their smartphones. Guess what, the same mechanism affects not just bar goers but also nerds like me. It's like each board game at a table is its own social media bubble(different people like different board game(s)).
There are two ways to deal with this: a) submit to social media b) resist
I'm doing b), I bring in my copy of Spirit Island and if there's no one to play with the game is also great solo.
It would befit social media to rate someone with importance not according to a check or star but according to actual real world accomplishment. I realize that creates a natural bias against the underachieved, but without such weights, anyone can say anything about anything no matter what the education or perspective, and have it essentially equivalent to a subject matter in the field, at least until further examination.
She forgot the part when she wrote a New York Times piece about her life.
Also, I must be using social media wrong. I use it mainly to talk to and send pictures to my grandma, look at videos of baby animals, and find out about concerts and shows in my area.
It has had a highly net-positive impact on my life, especially the puppy and kitten videos.
That is why I think this was written in order to receive attention from others (not necessarily the readers), but I tend toward cynicism.
"Philosophy is good advice; and no one can give advice at the top of his lungs...
Words should be scattered like seed; no matter how small the seed may be, if it has once found favourable ground, it unfolds its strength and from an insignificant thing spreads to its greatest growth. Reason grows in the same way; it is not large to the outward view, but increases as it does its work. Few words are spoken; but if the mind has truly caught them, they come into their strength and spring up. Yes, precepts and seeds have the same quality; they produce much, and yet they are slight things. Only, as I said, let a favourable mind receive and assimilate them. Then of itself the mind also will produce bounteously in its turn, giving back more than it has received."
We began with institutions whose voices were the authority, period. With the internet, anyone could spread their own ideas and thoughts thereby decentralizing the power. We have now accepted the presence of fake news and voices with vested interests. Is the pendulum swinging back to the established individuals/institutions in response to this?
Is this true? I don't recall that occurring, it seemed more like a young-techie-people, grassroots phenomenon when people started using MySpace and FB.
Facebook? I don't regard a company that sells people's information without their consent as "social media". There's nothing social about going behind someone's back and deceiving them.
Really, I’m starting to think that opting out of social media altogether is a bit like opting to be a hermit in today’s society. Sure, I’m not advocating posting every 5 minutes on Facebook and getting into dumb arguments, but it really feels like opting out is a way of putting walls between yourself and the rest of the world (that is on social media). You will miss out on news of friends having kids, graduating college, going to college, getting new jobs, and even planning events together since many events are organized officially on Facebook - from free local concerts to your friends bachelors party. Many people just go through Facebook and create a private event and invite their Facebook friends when they have a birthday gathering nowadays. You will miss out on these if you opt-out completely. I did.
My sister now posts her baby pics to me via whatsapp (yup: facebook owned) and email. Mom SMSes me when she wants to contact me. Dad emails me from overseas bi-weekly.
Other people, I meet over a beer, or a coffee. And the best of it all? You have actual stuff to talk about. No! I did not know you had a second child already. Wow! Do tell!
I had a brief 1-2 year stint on FB where someone finally convinced me to get on it, and I had 13 friends on there. All of them people I know and hang out with regularly in real life. All I ever did was post funny things I came across, and I eventually got pushed off during the election cycle because I got REALLY sick of seeing all the misinformation about hilary and trump (both sides were doing it).
I just don't understand FB.
This has been my experience. It's a valid pragmatic argument for staying, and a valid principled argument for opting out.
I have not had this issue since quitting facebook around 2011. But then again I have clearly notified those people that are actually my friends that if they want to include me they need to call or email or something like that. Nobody has issues with that and fully understand my desire to stay away from facebook.
However, I'm on the edge of leaving again because moderation is very difficult.
The problem with social media is that using it in moderation is an uphill battle against our own nature. It is designed to be addictive. Much like an alcoholic that keeps a bottle of vodka in the freezer and the dieter who keeps chips in the cupboard, you will constantly have to exercise restraint to keep yourself in check.
If you've woken up to the downsides of social media, and are trying to moderate, is that struggle worth the upside? I'm not so sure any more.
Few enough that I can still participate and get updates about friends and interests without feeling the urge to check multiple times per day. If anything "important" happens to someone I'm not following, my friends are kind enough to fill me in if it's interesting.
In some ways, my mental health has improved since I'm not chasing online validation/FOMO all the time. My current friends don't use Facebook a ton, so organizing happens via text or other methods.
But for my college/HS friends, I'm definitely less close because I'm not present in the online arenas that they socialize in. Hopefully I can get back into social media without partaking in all the behaviors that made me quit it in the fist place.
I wish there were ways to distinguish between periodically checking FB and essentially being addicted to it (several times daily use). Perhaps we could employ language like "I use FB" versus "FB uses me". Only half-joking...
I almost think it's my own fault as I never interacted with those posts about friends having kids or getting new jobs (at least not on Facebook), so I wonder if the algorithms just showed me less and less of my own friends content. If it matters I only ever looked at FB through the mobile web browser - I didn't have the app and never looked at it on my computer.
Why focus on pretending you’re all still in school? Live in the now.
For me personally, I didn’t see much value in getting second hand info from Facebook. It felt too impersonal and distant.
If I cared about someone getting pregnant or married or whatever I would have preferred the direct conversation over the social optimisation of receiving a broadcast. And if we weren’t close enough for that, then I’m sure it’d come up in conversation at some point. No need to be looking out for an announcement.
Getting rid of social media was basically my decision to cultivate a small handful of meaningful, high quality relationships over a much larger number of less meaningful associations. I see a lot more people in person now I’ve done that.
As an aside, it was as if one aspect of my depression was fuelled by having too much of the rest of the world in my head and not enough of myself, so it was a great move for self-care too.
As opposed to faux-connected through FB though?
I guess it depends on where you are in life on how much it matters to you. Personally, I'm single and live alone, so it's nice to keep a superficial awareness of people I met in school not that many years ago. If I were married and having my own kids, I'd probably have enough social contact at home and through my wife and kids that I don't really care about observing others' lives from 1000 feet away.
Either that is a misplaced apostrophe, or you are revealing more about your family than you intended! Punctuation is important :)
I think the key is really just using the services in ways where they can't dark pattern you into engaging with them. So notifications get shut off and anything you can do to turn off "endless scroll" mode is worth doing.
Facebook was originally designed as a sort of directory or phone book type page for people and that's still what it's best at. Instead of using the regular page, which just tries to dark pattern you into engaging with it, I've bookmarked mbasic.facebook.com which lets you see only the top 5 to 10 posts on your feed at a time and then I shut off all notifications that weren't sent to me directly.
Once I got rid of the "one more post" effect of wanting to keep reading, I found myself spending a lot more time going through my RSS feed, which is nice as that's content I find much more edifying.
Maybe you'll move locations to be closer to the people you love. I've often wondered if I might have lived in a different country if I couldn't watch my friends from afar.
Up until a few years ago, it wasn't common but it wasn't super rare. I knew more than a handful of people who didn't have any Facebook/Insta/etc. accounts and mostly I just assumed they wanted to keep their personal lives private from friends and colleagues.
In recent years though, I can only think of two persons that I know directly who I could not find a trace of online. The first was a smart programmer I assumed to be into HN privacy-activism type groups or something like Anonymous. The second, which was more baffling, is someone I knew in college that appears to have disappeared off the face of the planet, and I thought maybe he had died until someone told me he "doesn't want to be found".
When people do gossip now a days, it's about politics, or celebrities.
Perhaps this is what the network wants you to think? Or how your behavior has been modified by too much reliance on this technology?
Now I have 17000 HN points and I'm starting to feel like I gave up meth and replaced it with cocaine. Maybe better, but still not good.
Going to stop posting here now too. Thanks everyone for the good times.
And I would think that's fine, except that I fall into the latter group, and social media has come to consume so much of the online world that it means that I can't avoid it without excluding myself from large swathes of public life.
I don't volunteer at my kids' school because coordination is done through Facebook. I don't stay in touch with people I meet at events because Facebook has thoroughly supplanted other modes of casual communication. I don't hear about events at some of my local community spaces because they only advertise them on Facebook. Etc.
So it's not entirely like coffee. It's like what it would be like if coffee were healthy for some, unhealthy for others, and quasi-mandatory for all.
As some have pointed out below, It is more like a new drug that essentially has billions of people prescribed and now addicted to. Its creators (Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Spegiel) have invented the Like, Follow, Heart tools to give us the equivalent of a dopamine hit to manipulate us to stay and continue to get more of them. It then becomes a livelihood to do extreme things just for more attention and followers which dangerously merges social media into the real world and makes it difficult to distinguish on what is real or fake, which is very unhealthy for the mind.
Imagine if FB was a drugs-manufacturer and they are selling drugs called "The Facebook" or "Instagram", etc to you. To use it, just "Post/Like/Follow". Advertisers are also the drug dealers. When we are talking about billions of prescribed users and 100m daily active users, that sounds as if Zuckerberg has become one of the most successful drug kin-pins in history.
If this analogy doesn't sound terrifying, then perhaps its time for some social media therapy then.
I have never been a really social person. I have never had many friends. No one really asks me ever where I have been or what I have been doing or whatever. I used facebook to shitpost. To shitpost a lot and MAYBE get a few likes. It worked. It worked for way too long. Then someday i literally fell on my head, my depression got way worse and I finally started working on it.
I then realized that I had no values at all. I always felt like facebook is bad, but i never acted accordingly. So I quit that. I thought 'yeah, maybe i will feel better now.' and i do. I feel great. But now, I don't even have anyone to contact and ask if there is something going on on the weekend or if people want to go out. I don't really have anyones number either (because i deleted A LOT of my private stuff in a furious rage). Now I am alone and I don't know how to get out of it. Social media is no option though, I don't want to be that attention seeking person anymore. I want to be the person i am and find people who like me for that exact reason. I just don't know how.
End of story: Quitting social media made me a better person, but if I add everything together i don't feel better (yet)
Woops. Went a bit offtopic, but whatever. Thanks for reading.
This is too real. The curse of taking the irony pill.
I quit FB two years ago after 11 years of active use. For a few weeks after deleting my account, I had these temptations to go back but after two months, I totally forgot about it and after two years, I'm very happy about leaving the platform.
I also realized that it wasn't just FB or social media that contributed to my stress and anxiety; sensational and provocative news was as much to blame. These days, I try to get my news from only a handful of news outlets that I trust. I know this is not a perfect solution but at least, I've been able to avoid click-bait titles.
You cut out the news-induced anxiety this way. After a while, you also realize that most news is noise, and doesn’t matter even a day later.
If something really significant happens, you’ll still hear about it.
It's usually from the same people that are super active and obnoxious on FB. Posting every single hours of their life. And suddenly realizing they addicted to it. And they still need to post about it.
I guess I’m posting this here to say that there is a middle(?) ground that works for me. I rarely find myself envious or jealous on fb. I will confess that I do experience these emotions in my offline life (much less frequently than daily, more often than monthly). Come to think of it, while I spend under 20 minutes a week on LinkedIn, I feel some negative emotions while browsing this feed. I’ve just realized I should limit my LinkedIn better.
I’m not posting this to brag, just to share another perspective because it felt relevant.
I have a Twitter account. I log in about once every couple of months. Nothing changes. The cancel culture hasn't died off, it's just gotten stronger, more pervasive and more corrosive than ever before.
This has lead me to believe we are on a downward spiral with no bottom in site.
It was always a pretty poor way to communicate, imo. At last for my use case, which was wanting friends to hear about interesting / exciting things going on in my life.
I had like 300 friends on there -- a good mix of family, old coworkers, old school friends, people from a local sports league, etc. -- and I happened to have a fairly successful startup at the time, so I'd post about that... and got back crickets.
For whatever reason, at least back then, the algorithm would only show my post to a few people at first, and if none of them liked or commented, it wouldn't show it to anyone else. At least that's my assumption.
So I was like 26, pulling in $1k / day in AdSense revenue, and trying to tell my family and friends how exciting it was, and every post I'd submit would just get totally ignored. Out of ten posts that actually had a bit of depth, nothing super dense or overly intellectual, just describing some of the challenges and successes, (like a $12k hosting bill from Rackspace), I probably got around 2-3 comments total. The vast majority of things I posted were ignored completely.
Then I'd see the most banal and superficial crap get put on my feed with tons of comments, so eventually one week I posted, "TGIF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Out of my last 10 posts that actually mattered to me, that one immediately got tons of traction and something like 60 replies, etc. I quit right after that.
Facebook forced me to confront how boring my passion for startups really is to normal people... so why waste my time sharing it?
Or their algorithm was just really poor and my posts weren't being displayed to my friends, either way, what's the point?
So close that we're like a village -- blasting out clickbait and accusations with rare repercussions and making sure we say "hi" to all our neighbors in the village while also maintaining our "social status" within this village: i.e. reputation.
I'm glad I took off from there a while back.
People are physical. We have bodies and brains. We have thoughts and opinions. We have friends.
Avatars are conceptual. They have representations, not bodies; "profile pics" that are edited and changed constantly, never bearing much resemblance to the human it claims to represent.
Avatars have agendas, not opinions or thoughts. They seek to convince you of something. To buy, to vote, to protest, or simply that the anonymized human behind the avatar has a life full of wonders and happiness. Agenda.
An avatar has followers, fans, not friends. Social media avatars have little to no interest in you as a human being. Your body's eyeballs are an avatar's currency. It wants your them to see its agenda so it can win.
A social network that brought humans together would fulfill the promise of social media. Meetup.com might be the closest thing to that. For now, social media does not connect people, it connects avatars--personifications of agendas which are built, almost always, to serve its master without regard for others.
But realistically, this doesn't happen; unless that avatar is anonymous and can't be linked to you. I think this is why places like Reddit and HN to some extent are good: they allow people to freely speak, but at the same time you're technically still being manipulated by what others think (on r/popular for example)... which brings me to my last point:
You're a composition of years of manipulation. It just depends on who you trust, whether it's in real life or online.
In all, I agree with your point, but giving anonymity brings people to talk more about themselves, which hopefully is a bit better than the world that you described is.
I never joined social meadia because of this. I didn’t see the point. Seemed like a boring waste of time to me when it first dawned. Sure that has dramatically reduced the number of acquaintances I have in comparison to others, but I feel that the relationships I do have are of very high intimacy and quality.
Where does this need to “be somebody” come from? Has there been research on it? Are you more likely to develop a thirst for fame if you’re given a lot of external motivation/reinforcement as a child? If your parents focus on appluading you rather than the things you do? Not trying to be snarky here, I am genuinely curious as someone who has always been quite indifferent to the concept of fame.
These tendencies vary by the individual and life experience.
One thing is for certain, being plugged into the hive mind has clear advantages, especially as it relates to employment. It's like the old adage - it's about who you know, not necessarily what you know.
Part of me wanted to push updates to Facebook and Instagram to get the dopamine rush from likes. I pushed myself to not post any updates others than calling//emailing my close friends and family and after a couple months I didn't miss it at all. I felt like I was living for myself in the moment without the need to publicize what I was doing.
Coming back, I still have my social media account and go there maybe once a week. I usually come out of it a bit burned out with the feeling that everything is fake. But overall cutting out social medias has been hugely beneficial.
I'm convinced that Social medias are a negative to humanity and overall causes more depression and anxiety than anything else. It must be extremely difficult to be a teenager in high school without the mental strength to resist that fake world of social medias nowadays
No more fake celebratory comments. No more fake photos. No more fake LIVES portrayed by others (early on, I participated in this).
I must say that one of the best things you can do for your mental health is to delete these social networks off your devices. I've actually gone so far as to block all these sites network-wide via my pi-hole so nobody can mindless scroll through content while in my home.
My quality of life has improved as a result; I can now live in the moment and be grateful for not only where I'm at, but also where I am going (i.e., goal(s)) and what I will learn on the way there.
Facebook - While i need to check my friends's life events and keep a tab on what they are up to, i dont want to see the constant tirade of posts regarding their political views.. How ya'll are handling friends with crazy political extremist thoughts, completely ignore those areas ? try to make them sane?
Twitter is even worse, so stopped posting all together and limited my time only to like few tweets .
Alternative to Twitter is Reddit, which you can scroll through for few laughs and that itself will become an addiction.
Finally, i think we need social media at the same time we dont need social media, no amount of filtering and altering the news feed can put us in a place of what we want to see.. So..
Twitter is worse, yes.
Reddit is OK if you avoid political subreddits and keep it light. I've curated my subs to be just that and it's delightful.
I believe that we shouldn't "need" social media (as other comments here pointed out, an external locus of control or validation is unhealthy), but rather we should use social media. Have a purpose whenever you open the app, even if it's just passing the time (Reddit).
I deleted my facebook back in 2015; I was afraid I'd have some kind of withdrawal, but bizarrely after about two days I sort of forgot that I had ever even used Facebook.
Below is the original comment:
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I tend to stay away from Instagram as I once read a study (too lazy to find the paper) that Instagram is more detrimental to mental health than other social networks and is generally to be avoided (partly this is because you are comparing other people's highlight reel to your boring drab life).
I use Facebook, albeit sparingly and only ever to make meaningful interactions with my family, and nothing else. I don't feverishly 'check in' to locations, don't engage in 'groups', don't 'like' a million-and-one things, or otherwise engage in the Facebook app in any big way. It means Facebook can't build a dossier of my interests, although they do know my social graph, but then: I'm not a person of interest anyway. I am actually very forgettable.
For Twitter, I have a locked down account and only follow what I'm interested in. I don't actively seek to get more followers, and have literally nothing in my bio that is about me. I don't use my real name. My account is purely for discovery of positive news, and content that stimulates me intellectually.
I recently started to experiment with Neuro Linguistic Programming[0] and a big part of that is deciding what you pay attention to (especially online) and feeding your brain with content that enables you to grow as a person and not be bogged down with negative content that only appeals to your 'monkey brain'. I haven't gone to extremes by cutting out all social media, instead I just use it mindfully and by carefully choosing the types of content I consume.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming
When I finally stopped using Facebook, I didn't close the account. It's just there. It's no longer part of what I do. At some point I realized that the worst thing about the network is not that they do shady things, or trick you into staying, or meddle with politics. The worst thing is the person you gradually become.
The moment you meet someone, you check their facebook, look through their pictures, browse their posts. When you become friends with someone, everytime there is tension you check facebook to see if they haven't posted about it. If it's a lover, you base the status of the relationship on their posts and frequency of pictures. If it's an ex...
In 2015 I wrote [1]:
> On facebook, why would I give someone privacy when I have access to all this information. And I don't even need their permission. I can watch your private pictures because you made them available. It's not that I can find out where you work, where you live, where you eat, everything about you. It's that I actually do find out without ever hiring a private detective. It's not what I can do, it's what I do!
Facebook turns you into an insecure person.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37830765-ten-arguments-f...
It makes the arguments for doing so very clearly and with a good sense of humor. Lanier, is a treasure, I always like how balanced he sees the tech industry, it isn't all good or bad but a mingling of ideas.
One way to gradually lessen your facebook usage is to use this addon (chrome version available on the chrome web store).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/news-feed-era...
I think most people have been conditioned to keep themselves plugged in so to speak, gradually minimizing interactions rather than going cold turkey may prove more effective at re-framing your perspective.
The lack of any visible sign of new replies removes a lot of compulsion. I only stay engaged with the conversations actually interesting enough to get me to keep reading them.
Compare with Reddit where the best thing I learned to do was to decide when I was 'done' and open the list of unread messages while looking away and closing the tab...
This is so true. I'll often delete a reddit comment a few minutes after writing it if I think it's potentially inviting some troll or person with shit reading skills to respond back negatively. Even the so-called "good" small communities have a couple people like that, which is enough.
Apollo has had a bug the past few days with iOS 13 where the mail icon doesn't light up. This has honestly been really nice.
I started being more active on social media (only to an extent - for example I use the built-in Instagram timer to only allow up to 15 minutes of usage a day) to cope with the lack of interactions I used to have at work and around it. Some of the old 'friends' found and started to add/follow me but there was no other meaningful interaction from their side. Before they would call and ask to go out and do something after work - not anymore. I reached out to some of them a few times but felt that there is an imbalance in both quality and quantity in communication from their side. Since I found that to be very shallow, I started regularly wiping my contacts who are there just to leech on my private life and give nothing in return.
Some people aren't your friends, they just happen to spend time with you because of common activities in your and their lives - they're simply stuck with you in the same place and time. I cut these people off from my life and trust me, it has been over 2 months and I have less relationships but only the high quality ones survived - it makes me much happier, less drained on a daily basis and more content knowing that they're the few good ones.
There is no need to be attached to people who aren't attached to you. And there is no need to force anything - it will only cause harm.
The difference for me is, on Twitter you get people quote-RTing you to ask their friends to hate you. Here... it's a relatively polite reply explaining why I'm wrong (and I often am!) in their perspective. Or that I've missed some key point which utterly skewers my argument.
Maybe it's more like giving up meth and replacing it with codeine...
I've never found this. It's generally a three hundred word roundabout way of saying "You're an idiot" to fit in the faux civility guidelines.
Whereas FB is more "flat"; I see what people who I actually care about post. Nice vacation, hey, your kid did something unremarkable, cool, you got a new dog.
If your usage pattern is to try to game the system and gather likes and shares, you're probably not someone I'm interested in, hence my distaste for twitter, or, generally, 'following' anyone I'm not personal friends with. Twitter seems to be setup for the latter; I keep trying to like it and use it, but I get uninteresting shit from the "public" figures I try to follow; eg, race drivers I'm interested in, cybersecurity figures, etc.
I blog publicly but also journal privately using git and vim. I have been on and off for about 5 years.
The raw thoughts rarely show the light of day, but sometimes I synthesize my journal entries as blog posts or HN comments. I refine my true self for the public. This saves me from letter downvotes sway what I believe.
By the time I post on HN I've already collected my thoughts in my other journals.
I do feel very disconnected from people these days.
It's been about a little over a year since moving my of my status updates to Mastodon from Twitter where I follow exactly one IRL friend from high school, a friend from two jobs ago, a person who found me randomly, and a customer for Remarkbox.
When I do post on Twitter it's often a link to my Mastodon post, or a link to my blog, or side project I'm working on.
It's sort of selfish but I only read tweets on my timeline up to the first ad, which is typically a scroll and a half on my phone.
In this way, I sort of use Twitter as a broadcast, like updating a RSS feed with something I'm proud of. I rarely digest the tweets others put on there. This seems selfish, but really it's not.
In what way? Do you write for yourself then make it public not caring if anyone sees? That doesn't sound fulfilling; I have blog posts over the years which I have no idea if anyone ever saw and it feels a bit of a waste. Do you write as if you're trying to contribute to the world? Then doesn't that depend on feedback to know if you are succeeding or failing, and put you in the mind of "I have to create something good" as a competitor in the world of content-creation competition?
It's really healthy to have people challenge your ideas sometimes, which happens a lot more on the internet than in real life in my experience.
And there is obviously some degree of benefit in being a software developer who is tune with his fellow tech dorks.
Did look something like this: https://serendipitygreece.com/wp-content/uploads/comforting-...
To me, this is the problem with seeking validation through these systems. You are rewarded for saying pleasing things and for conforming to group think.
Why don't you spend down your points by playing devil's advocate? Then, when you run low on points, you can fill-up-the-tank by saying nice things that everyone wants to hear again.
HN can be too, and I like to think that I am asynchronously contributing stuff that may lay off the typical radar of the Venn diagram of typical HN readers.
The problem is our mindsets, our shallow culture and our lack of resilient thinking. We’re being provocative about the wrong things and we’re focusing our creative wonder on only the superficial.
I'm wondering if Hacker News is better or worse than Facebook/Instagram.
At least on Facebook and Instagram, you usually interact with your friends, right?
Here, I feel like I read a lot of insightful posts and stories and have good discussions. But I'm not making any friends or strengthening any friendships.
Is it worth the time? I don't know. I'm definitely addicted.
Suggestion: give up your 17000 HN point mabbo account and start from scratch. Only with moderation this time :-)
Too many people.
So I've made it a conscious decision to constantly be getting rid of things I accumulate.
For HN and other such sites, I regularly open new accounts. This is both for ego reasons, as well as doxing: rotating through accounts and usernames helps leave less of a trace.
It's a useful feature for those of us working on discipline + distractibility issues.
The alternative view is that you are perfectly normal and that craving validation from strangers is what built human society.
You can remove all externalities but then it becomes an internal barometer. “Did I do enough? Was what I said funny/insightful/smart? Do they like me?”
The voice is always there. It just doesn’t have a number assigned to it.
FB tends to be a net negative while HN is the opposite (at least for me) because of the content and engagement.
I'm not saying that the way social media tries to suck you in doesn't make you unhealthy, or their ideal patterns of engagement won't make you miserable, but in my mind that's like saying that Smirnoff's ideal of your consumption will make you an alcoholic, therefore alcohol is bad. Alcohol and social media are perfectly able to be consumed responsibly; perhaps not by everyone, and I would never begrudge someone not partaking if they don't want to. I just get tired of the drumbeat that "social media bad, delete your facebook, don't post on instagram" when I've had and have Facebook, Instagram, Hacker News, Reddit, on and on and they don't make me miserable because I don't obsess over them.
Just saying.
A social network is not inherently bad. It could be a simple extension of our analog life, a simple tool to stay in contact with friends an family or share things with people that we do not have regular interactions with in our day to day life.
The problem is not the social media, but the way is has been instrumentalized to capture our attention, since this is the product being sold to advertisers. All the mechanisms to keep the user hooked -- akin to the way slot machines work -- have been pointed out many times already.
It doesn't have to be that way, we could design a neutral platform that is built around fostering personal connections with the people we care about.
I actually kind of like it, since I only have to check what they posted and can respond to them, and not have to check and read every single thread in a forum to see who I know has posted.
I think there's pressure to keep people in your lives that are not involved, partly to do with tradition and partly to do with the way social media now works.
Instead of browsing Facebook, why not make the time to actually see these people in real lives, call them on the phone, facetime them, write them a letter?
What I am trying to do for myself is invest in the meaningful relationships and eliminating personal social media has helped provide that focus for the people that I want in my life.
I've noticed the most active commenters on my Facebook stuff these days are all family members, so I have a ton of extended family that stays aware of what I'm doing through that. And of my ~850 connections on Facebook, I could probably delete 80% of those and it would be a more realistic picture of either 1) family or 2) people I actually know and have talked to in the last 3-5 years.
I don't feel out of the loop, though. I text or email friends and ask them what's going on. If there's an event I ought to go to, one of them usually lets me know. It's more effort, but I think that's a benefit: relationships based on scrolling through feeds and liking stuff are pretty shallow. And I don't let myself feel bad if I do miss something, because I know that's a small price to pay to excise that source of anxiety from my life.
for me the trick is that i set my password to random and keep it locked in keepass and never installed the app, never logged in from work computer. so i do only check in 1-2 / week and only briefly. that's enough to catch up on extended circle, local skateboarding groups etc, but not waste too much time on memes. i am also hopeful that without sharing any personal info and installing the app FB does not track too much about me .. maybe just wishful thinking!
There is also the idea of "quality of interaction". My relatively nearby sphere of family that posts updates aren't really looking for my validation. They'll let me know what their children have been up to the next time I see them in meatspace. I'll get more enjoyment out of talking with them about them, too, then I ever will by posting an emoji or liking their post. My proverbial crazy uncle that posts political screes will still corner me at the next family gathering and I'll using coping strategies until I can escape. Do I really need to keep tabs on the lives of the people I would casually say 'hi' to in the hallway in middle school 40 years ago?
If the cost were trivial, then maybe this would all be worth it. But the privacy concerns drive me away. I have an account. I use it once every year or two to give my condolences when I hear someone I know had a relative pass away or something. Other than that, I do without. It makes me wonder what life would be like if there was a corporation like that that I could actually trust.
My dad loves Facebook, but he has no clue about security, so he isn't burdened by any of the same thoughts as you. I'm overall a tech-person and software developer, but I either don't care that much about privacy or I'm just clueless. Ignorance is bliss?
For the entire history of humanity, we didn't know anything about anyone's lives unless we saw or talked or heard about them. I don't consider it a loss to not know distance acquaintances' life updates...if it's important, I'll hear it from other FB users or from an important friend.
I agree about the invite part, some communities are really build on top of fb. Here in the Netherlands I started missing things when I was off of Whatsapp (lived without a smartphone for 1.5 months).
A coworker has at times referred to me as a LinkedIn Shitpost Memelord, although I don't use image macros/memes. I just share information about a very niche corner of the internet, and it's way more effective than advertising. It actually serves as an outlet for the kind of writing I used to do, and sometimes still do, on forums - but instead of being about music and bands, it's about commerce and software. It's weird, but it scratches an itch I guess.
I do see more 'social' posts on LinkedIn, and it's pretty close to the worst of the net. It's like YouTube comments, except you can see the people who post them all wear suits in their photos. A surprisingly large number of people who like & reply to self-help garbage, effusively, as though Gary Vee's latest you-can-do-it schlock saved them from offing themselves at the water cooler that morning.
There's also companies who are posting things like "Hey we won some irrelevant award yay us." Or more likely, employees posting this about their own as a public signal that they are "all in" on "company."
It's mostly for signalling for especially aspirational people. But generally speaking, 99% of the utility of LinkedIn is to have a public resume so recruiters can find you. At least in my case.
This is sad, but as someone who will happily admit failures, frustrations and annoyances on LinkedIn I have been in interviews where people have dinged me heavily for it. So far these have all been quite toxic work environments - maybe you could count it as a useful filter, but I understand given this why people feel pressure to do little more than copy/paste the same Oleg posts ad infinitum.
Contrast that with the real world where (outside of some fringe goofballs) having deeply different political beliefs doesn't mean that much. You can vehemently disagree with one another... while also enjoying each other's company (and also talking about things other than politics!).
You have many allies, but they are doing more productive things than arguing with senseless people on social media :)
It's all just tribal bs -- mostly via imprinting -- very few people actually care about genuine principles or have nuanced takes on issues.
Be very careful criticizing socialism, for instance, or the mods (one in particular) will accuse you of starting "flame wars".
Of course any debate that isn't related to their personal politics or against their worldview is fine.
Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20830862
Note that criticizing capitalism endlessly is just fine. Defending it? Not so much.
I cannot emphasize how positive this is. I deleted my Facebook account about two years ago, and it's amazing how much more intimate my conversations with friends have become for precisely this reason. They now can't assume that I know things that are going on in their lives, which was hard at first (due to social pressure—"What? You haven't heard?") but became a blessing really quickly. I didn't realize how shallow some of my interactions with friends and acquaintances were until I dumped social media. By actually having a deep, face-to-face conversation with someone, you're much less likely to skip over some of the more nuanced bits that you're assumed to already know.
I use facebook to keep in touch with hundreds of people that I would never normally keep in touch with.
I use it to plan events like birthdays, bachelor parties, and vacations. I fully believe it enriches my life.
Edit: same comment as below oops
Point is: Sarcasm works best when writing somewhat snarky. But probably most HN readers don't understand sarcasm and that's the problem. (See what I did there?)
IOW - Your comment is ignorant :D
Also, if you care at all what your "score" is on a social media site you will grow to hate it. No matter what the site is remind yourself it always has Who's Line rules: The points don't matter. If you're not an asshole they tend to just come naturally with time. If you're being hidden because your score is too low then you should probably step back and ask if you really want to be part of that community, since you seem to be so at odds with it.
We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to
the kind of look we wish to live under.
The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other
words, for the look of the public. That is the case with the German singer, the American
actress, and even the tall, stooped editor with the big chin. He was accustomed to his
readers, and when one day the Russians banned his newspaper, he had the feeling
that the atmosphere was suddenly a hundred times thinner. Nothing could replace the
look of unknown eyes. He thought he would suffocate. Then one day he realized that
he was constantly being followed, bugged, and surreptitiously photographed in the
street. Suddenly he had anonymous eyes on him and he could breathe again! He
began making theatrical speeches to the microphones in his wall. In the police, he had
found his lost public.
The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by
many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are
happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the
feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens to nearly all
of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the other hand, can always
come up with the eyes they need. Marie-Claude and her daughter belong in the second
category.
Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly
before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation
of people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the
room will go dark. Tereza and Tomas belong in the third category.
And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the
imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers. Franz, for
example. He traveled to the borders of Cambodia only for Sabina. As the bus bumped
along the Thai road, he could feel her eyes fixed on him in a long stare.I write primarily for myself, but I do put my words into a form that others could digest, understand, and learn from.
The words on my blog may be the butterfly flapping her wings.
I do not and likely cannot measure how much my writing changes the world and trying to do so often discouraged me from writing. Do book authors really know how much their work changes the world? To me, it seems like an infinitely complex relationship.
I can tell you I have saved many people time on their research and learning and I'm sure I've swayed some to think differently, more like me.
My blog is the storm, ans is cast out to the world and left to chaos and entropy to find who it must.
Links in my profile.
Whatever stigma exists online with people who have the "incorrect" opinion- I haven't really seen reflected in real life.
The logbook of my opinions is actually really interesting for me to look back on. See how I've reevaluated some opinions, or take a critical look at older arguments that I hadn't considered recently. Of course- I do some sanitation as well, removing certain things that may have been particularly dumb.
I quit Facebook a year ago - I had 800+ friends. I was only "close" (subjectively) with a slim fraction of that. Now, I text, call, send birthday cards, and use other means to communicate with those I truly care about. Not that I don't care about the other, it's more of my way to prioritize the people who I've shared more life experiences with and/or can better relate to.
If I see the others who aren't in that close circle, we have plenty to talk about. If I see my close friends, well, we do as close friends always have done.
No offense, but I would argue the notion of needing "presence" in people's lives contains some inherent narcissism which is also prevalent on social media; and to be fair, the other piece is the need for belonging. True, it was a tough pill to swallow when first disconnecting, but over time this faded and via the other means I suggested, I've found I get that same level of belonging.
On the upside, I've discovered a great decaf: Slow Motion from Counter Culture. So hard to find high quality decaf, and I'm glad I was recommended this one. I actually drink more coffee now than before because I've been able to switch to decaf.
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I am perplexed at the value of these 'distant relationships' and question if they're necessary. I have spent a lot of time thinking about that and have no good answer.
Honestly, if you aren't super worried about privacy, having a FB account just to open when you get curious and want to check in on someone (if they are an active poster) isn't so bad. It's the mindless addictive scrolling that gets me.
I held on to the account because I am into competitive Bass Fishing and my clubs only presence was on Facebook.
Since I've left Facebook, I'm no longer in the club and it really hasn't made much of a difference.
And they think the same of you. If their preferred method of communication is Facebook message, are you really a friend if you don’t care?
Of course there are many ways to state that preference, ranging from "you're an idiot if you want to keep that advertising agency alive" to "I don't feel comfortable putting details of my personal life, including our friendship, on the Internet for private companies to profit". If someone truly belittled the second, then yeah, they aren't a friend.
It's hardly the same though, it's not like the other commenter's expressing a preference for a call or text where the other would be equally possible. It's exceedingly unlikely that someone with the capacity to have a preference for Facebook messaging is unable to call or text; the reverse isn't true.
Saying 'I would rather we texted' vs. email or whatever is not the same as 'I would rather you sign up for this service and use it to contact me'.
For information I still have the same set of core friends from elementary school so it has not stopped anyone that I actually care about from contacting me.
Edit: and yes as the a side comment here suggest I do not say this in a patronising way, I just explain why I am not on facebook and that there are other ways to contact me.
I would believe it if someone didn't want to use cellphones at all, for moral reasons, but that person wouldn't have a Facebook account anyway.
An empty FaceBook account that does nothing but notify you when someone invites you to an event? Requires no maintenance.
Asking someone to remember that you need to be specially invited because you're special -- that's ongoing maintenance right there.
Honestly—there’s no reason a social network can’t be decentralized these days. Give people back their friendship circles and their information.
My understanding of Facebook is that it taps into human necessity for socialization, but it’s only masquerading as such and yields too-many, and over-stimulating relationships based on false pretense.
To me, FB is a way to keep in touch with non close friends and relatives. I know what my close friends are up to anyway, but without FB I'd have no clue what the "next tier" 50-100 people do.
I only tend to post once every few weeks, but I enjoy reading about what people I know are doing.
Facebook groups have been a great way for neighborhoods and communities to come together.
I would argue that we would have organically developed much better online ways for neighbourhoods and communities to come together, absent the monopolistic Facebook.
You know what a blog is, what photo-sharing is, and RSS too. You know how people are social, a little bit vain, and like to brag. I'm sure you know about ad-tech, data-mining, EULAs nobody reads and dark patterns. I'm sure you've used email and chat, and you know deep down all email clients suck anyway.
Mix it all together, put it on phones with push notifications, and boom, you have Facebook and control half the Internet.
People who use Facebook mostly do so because they don't understand how it works, in some cases they do understand but prefer to be ignorant.
Trying to keep up with 200-300 people sounds fucking exhausting to me, yet this is the reason most people have given in response as to why they use FB.
I just have to question if these people actually do anything in life besides socialize.
To add more information, FB doesn't actually connect you to 200-2000 people literally. When you think of RSS, you think of seeing every single article that you subscribed to, but FB doesn't do that. It shows you only some of the what others publish, and it uses its dark algorithms to make sure those are the most engaging and addictive stories (reposts of click-bait titles, trending gossip, politically divisive arguments, etc.). And then it pads the feed with ads and more click-bait.
Actually the "genius" of FB is to tap into the social-reward centers of the brain by letting you inflate the number of friends, the number of followers, number of notifications, while still trimming down the firehose of pictures of your second cousin's roommate's tacos. Conversely, it lets you post your food pictures into the void and feel that others care about it, without actually bothering too many people.
To answer your question directly, yes these people spend inordinate amount of time doing this, but I believe they feel it is a good thing, to have a big social circle and feel connected to all those people--without always seeing how they were manipulated into being addicted to something that is not real socialization.
I get more value out of being useful than socializing. That's just the way I'm built.