Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on. I asked them why they didn’t tell me and they were confused. They said the posted it on social media. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely. I have a few close friends and that’s it.
Maybe that’s an ok tradeoff to make, but it’s worth knowing that before getting into it.
This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post blasted to hundreds (or thousands) of people. Or, to put it another way: if you mattered, you would've gotten a direct message or call from them.
I'd argue that social media has normalized keeping up with people who aren't supposed to be part of your life forever. But, we should take a step back and realize that not everything should or will last forever. If you cross paths again then you can catch up, but having life updates constantly? No thanks.
TBH I have no idea where or if my friend post stuff on social media anymore. I know maybe 1 person that posted updates often on Facebook, and that was pre-pandemic. Some post more business stuff on twitter.
But overall I just kind of accept that sometimes I'll meet up with someone after a few years and realize "oh yeah, they're married now, took a trip to Japan for 6 months, and is getting some local attention from their band they made a few years ago"
Of course, the first thing men will say after that meeting is simply "I've been fine, can't complain. How about you?". Maybe they'll mention their new job, but the rest will come after some 15-30 minutes of observation and chatting about the newest media.
>but I know a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely. I have a few close friends and that’s it.
likewise, but I'm not sure if social media would have saved that for me. It's definitely a cultural issue, especially with men.
Seeing people's updates on a wall isn't truly keeping up with friends. Keeping up and staying in touch requires consistent deliberate effort from both parties, via phone calls, messaging, and seeing each other in person. If you're not doing that with someone, then yeah, learning about life updates when you actually chat and catch up just makes sense to me.
Fine with me. They're acquaintances. Nobody has 200+ "friends", we have a handful of them. Is it nice to know that someone I hung out with a handful of times twenty years ago but otherwise don't really know and haven't said a word to in a decade made a big life change? Sure, I guess, but for the most part it has absolutely no bearing or impact on my day-to-day life nor the lives of those most important to me, and that's where I'm putting my energy.
Dont have FB, twitter, reddit, linkedin, tiktok, not even google account... none of that crap. I am successfully avoiding getting my name anywhere on the internet, I am not posting my photos, videos,...
I have 7 friends I meet regularly, I have friends where our life separated years back and we meet once or twice per year and I have phone with 473 phone numbers of various contacts, from former colleges to dishwasher repair technician, etc.
And guess what, people call me, sms me (oh yes, it works so much better than having 20 various clients installed for different groups of people) or send me email if something important has happened and I am actually physically invited to birthdays, "i got son" celebrations, notified about death (luckily only one, former schoolmate).
When we meet, in person (i hate long phone calls), we have a quality chat as I dont know anything about their ingrown hair on the tip of their toe and they don't know anything about me changing job or having knot on hair in my beard.
For anyone else, I dont care. I dont disillusion myself how I have 473 good friends on some stupid online platform who need to share every intimate detail with me. I cant even handle so many people.
So maybe those tradeoffs are not really the real tradeoffs but rather self deception, how much you matter to the people and to how many people.
I can count them using my fingers. Which is perfectly fine.
I think that’s a feature, not a bug.
Most of the life updates people post on social media are the best of the best, which is what triggers so much fomo and trying to measure up. That’s why social media makes most people feel worse about their own lives. (Not to mention all of the other garbage these platforms try to push on you that you didn’t even ask for.)
If these people are really important to us, then we’d find other means of staying in touch: text them, call them, invite them over (if that’s feasible).
And if enough people get off social media, everyone else might also realize they need to make an effort to stay in touch with others, instead of the lazy post of glamour shots for the purpose of internet likes and feeding the dopamine addiction.
Which is why I don't think the way forward is for everybody to leave social media. It's just not going to happen en masse, that's asking too much. We need to build media which can't be owned. If we ask people to sacrifice something, it should be an extra few cents on their electric bill and yesteryear's phone plugged in somewhere and hosting their share of it.
I've only been exploring it for a few days now, but nostr seems promising for this kind of thing. The content is awful, just coin bro stuff, but as something to plug into and build apps for... seems legit.
And that’s okay. It means 5 years later when we cross paths for real there’s lots to catch up on.
I've got my Facebook feed so well-curated that it rarely causes me distress. And like you, I like keeping up with old acquaintances, seeing their kids' milestones, etc. I get real enjoyment out of that.
Instagram I post pics when I travel and otherwise ignore it.
Twitter OTOH is probably a net negative for me. I still keep it around to follow sports pundits during games, and I usually only follow my sports list. But I do check in on my main feed during major events, and then inevitably end up doomscrolling. For example, the LA fires hashtags are so far beyond toxic - nothing but engagement farming, malicious misinfo, political nonsense, etc. Amidst all that crap, maybe 1 in 10 tweets has good info, but I have to destroy my psyche to find it.
Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on. I asked them why they didn’t tell me and they were confused. They said the posted it on social media
My impression is „how can one be so self centered” to imagine everyone HAS to know about their big event if they were not part of it and were not invited directly.
Is that person Kardashian family or something ;).
Even if it was a wedding and they posted photos. I wouldn’t remember a week later - if it is a person I see once in 5 years face to face and I was not invited. There are many big life events of such people.
And that light connection to people through social media wasn't a thing that created "close friends" anyway. It add to those weak connections that do have value but I doubt many people create intimate friend relationships solely through social media.
I think it has made me a better friend in some ways, as I'm a respite from the narratives they sustain, but to others, also a kind of legacy friend who may be an attachment to an old life, and who isn't part of their present.
there's an aspect where watching their social media would be to participate in the change in their lives, and separating from it (perhaps selfishly) preserves things that might be left behind. but on the other hand, I'm interested in relating in one way too. social media profiles are strange because they say, "see, I am all these things now!" and in not seeing them, it declines to recognize those, like an old uncle you're always going to be a kid to because that's how you always were.
I have more old friends than most, and I often think about whether there is an essential self we see in each other, like a character that all these stories happen around where we can peer across them to one another, protagonist to protagonist, as companions in the real. or are the relationships artifacts of the stories, and when they change, we do? it's prob a mix, but I don't think those essential(ist) aspects of friendship survive being mediated by the churn of updates and the curation of a public persona.
anyway, being outside social media is a very different way to relate and not everything survives.
Maybe have a text chain for your friends or something? The folks I really expect to know things about… they’d tell me while we were interacting.
I think the social part of social media can be good for us, and we have to figure out a way to avoid the toxicity. I’d like to see more posts about how to bend the algorithm to show you less toxicity- at least on Instagram I’ve managed to use the “not interested/relevant” button enough and turned on content filtering that it mostly shows me wholesome content. I don’t know if everyone realizes that if you hate-watch a video or hate-read a post then the algorithm sees that as engagement and will show you more. You have to nope yourself out of the dark corners as fast as you realize where you are.
I wish I would still see those. While I have an account, I rarely use FB nowadays, because the algorithm thinks I’ll be more interested in stuff I don’t care about. So when I go to FB I tend to close the tab again a few seconds later…
My social media are WhatsApp and Telegram. I get in touch there with people I care about and I don't get streams of useless information like I would if I'd be on FB, X, Instagram or TikTok. I do look for videos on YouTube when I want to learn something for which watching is better that reading.
Regarding life events: I quit all social media about 5 years ago[1]. People I care about know about that, and if they want to tell me about life events they do it with other means. Those who don't, they weren't really friends, just acquaintances. I am OK with that.
[1] with the exception of Linkedin, which I hate and never use, but I have been asked by people in my company to keep a profile for PR-related reasons.
These full fledged 'quit' posts are nothing more than an attempt at a political statement that falls on deaf ears.
To me, it seems like if someone has so many friends or is so busy that they need to manage their life using this strategy, you probably aren't going to have much of a connection anyway.
i deleted fb 10ish years ago.
and since then every family event that had been planned, was done on fb (just like before) and i find out about it by a text from my sister.
the trick is to not give a shit. Coz they don't.
Another reason to not use big social media is that I would rather not have my network to be exploited by some big corp for who knows what they do with that info.
I feel like that's the downside of social media in general, like the network effect - since most people are on social media, that's the place where people will post life updates, as opposed to talking to others about that stuff directly as much.
Maybe there could be a healthy way to use social media: to catch up with the people in your social circle, maybe look at a few cute pictures of animals or memes, but don't obsessively doomscroll or compare yourself to the highlights of others' lives.
Conventional media can be ok for casual reading/scrolling, but feels increasingly out-of-touch. Interestingly these days cnn, bbc, dw, en, and aj list different headlines, which is not what it was 15 y.ago.
Still I'd strongly advise against all push media, and in particular Meta's products which pose a very high-risk of (screen) addiction thanks to hundreds of hidden retention mechanisms.
The only winning move is not to play.
I just got together with two friends in RL. One I have not seen for 10 years. There were a lot of missed news we all had to catch up on. This is how it's always been, and it's completely normal. Even the olden Facebook way of being so plugged in into your friends' lives was very unhealthy. If you HAVE to know something, life will find a way of letting you know.
I had the same thing happen, but both they and I were Facebook users, it's just the algorithm decided I don't need to see posts from my friends and it's better that I see adverts (I can live with that, I don't pay to use the platform after all) and hundreds of random pages/groups that I have zero interest in following.
This 2nd "feature" is slowly driving me towards the point where the FOMO of no longer passively interacting with my friends may longer keep me on there.
The advice to "quit social media" , "get a FairPhone", " get an FTP account and mount it with curlftps... " is often tossed around HN a lot, but real life flies in the diametrically opposite direction. While I'm not largely affected by it, I still feel a twinge of disappointment not finding out when an old friend has had a major life event.
Bring that together with your idea about friendship before you run behind them.
Maybe it's fine for you. Maybe your conclusion is that it's not worth the thing.
It's not a new topic. For me, iit was around 15 years ago. I never had FB or WA. Not even for a day. And that brought a lot of friendships to an end. Most of my friendships in fact. And that was sad!! But well, no other way would even be an option, admittedly! It's sad, but it was the best I could do.
Losing such a network of people is costly, socially and from an opportunity perspective.
Still trying to not click anything not related to people I follow, the algorithms on meta apps are just insane.
Even with close friends who live far away, I prefer catching up once a year around a beer and some food than get a week by week journal of their lives on social media, it makes you feel like you're connected but you really aren't
I think that's the key point. I realized that ultimately I didn't actually care about those huge life updates if they concerned people who I'm not in somewhat-regular contact with. Like, if my Facebook friend John Smith (let's say he's an old high-school friend I haven't seen since high school) posts about his marriage, or new job, or new child, and I don't actually chat with John anymore and don't know anything about his life outside of what I read on Facebook, why do I even care to know this stuff at all? And it turns out the answer is that... I don't! And there's nothing wrong with that. It's not rude or mean; some people are the closest of friends, and some people barely even warrant the "acquaintance" tag -- and everything in between -- and there's nothing wrong with any of that.
And yes, I've missed social media posts about big-life stuff from closer friends who I do care about, but that's fine! I chat with those people via some avenue (email, text, messaging group, real-life, whatever) often enough that I still get those big-life updates, and usually it's in a more personalized manner, that gets me details that are tailored to the level of closeness of our friendship.
For people who I'm not super close with, but still maintain a relationship with, maybe I get that update about their life 6 months later, when we are next in contact. That's also fine! If we were closer friends, we'd chat more often, and I'd hear about it earlier. But we're not, and I don't, and there's nothing wrong with that.
> a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely. I have a few close friends and that’s it.
That's more your choice than anything else. You always have the option to text or email someone directly to say hello and see how they're doing, or to set up a time to meet in person to catch up. Even if they're perhaps not the one-on-one type of friends, you can start a group chat with that person and other mutual friends who might enjoy keeping in touch that way. There are so so so many options for communication these days that it's almost overwhelming! But it certainly need not be a binary between "social media firehose of every person I've ever met" and "I only hear about the lives of few people".
Is it important to you to be in touch with those old acquaintances? If so, reach out to them! If not, then it sounds like quitting social media was fine for you.
Such radical takes are always a hit on HN because they are essentially playing to the gallery. Leaving social media is futile if you don't take efforts to maintain contacts with your friends and families in other ways.
Sounds perfect. I rather have a few close friends than two dozen semi-friends.
Not having seen a friend for a longer time and talking about all the things that happened is the one thing that friendship is about IMO.
Facebook is like a ghost town now from the "social" and family perspective. I imagine some circles might be strong on it, but from every time this comes up it's clear that the vast majority of normal people have largely abandoned it. They didn't delete their accounts, but updates are incredibly infrequent. The vast majority of Facebook activity seems to be people who don't really know each other in various conspiracy-oriented or political groups, sports arguments, etc.
As to huge life events you missed out on, even in 2003 if you only knew about something because of a Facebook post, you aren't very close. And the old acquaintances thing grows super old super quick. Everyone joined a bunch of graduating class groups, connected with old coworkers, and then... eh, turns out there was a reason we all lost contact.
In 2025 people use social media overwhelmingly to interact with strangers, not friends or family. Largely to argue and get angry and try to convince and coerce and convert. I mean, HN fits the bill in a microcosm.
Social media is a cancer on society. It has made everything much, much worse. It lets the ill-informed and unintelligent find each other and pump each other up. It monetizes and profits off of the absolute worst human traits. If Meta collapsed into a blackhole, Xitter disappeared, and so on, the world would be a much better place.
That's enough :)
The problem is that these platforms aren't satisfied merely providing a third place within which we can find and build communities, speak with and learn from others with similar interests, and otherwise, be human. Instead we each become a hamster locked in our own little cage, and the principle reason we're there is to sit on our wheel and run, and while we run we're shown a handful of things from people we actually want to hear from and see, and interspersed with those few things are a ton advertisements for products we don't want and aren't interested in, a few we might be, AI generated nonsense that prompts us to engage with the platform to bump metrics up, the dipshit of the day who's said something infuriating that makes us click into the comments and make sure they're getting dunked on (and possibly join!) appropriately that the social media site dug up from obscurity and is now parading to the entire world, and of course, the same posts again.
Genuinely, the way people talk about going back in time to kill baby Hitler, if I had a time machine, I would spend the rest of my days sabotaging whatever countless number of people invented or would invent the Curated Fucking Timeline, on however many platforms it was invented, by however many data scientists. I would argue it is the single most destructive thing Silicon Valley has ever turned out.
Tbf I'm in a family group WhatsApp chat, which I guess fulfills the "life updates" part for my family. But no public social media, don't see the need
Lets take my friend Em as our example. If the typical message from Em says "Where are you? What time did we say we'll meet" that's a messenger app, that's definitely not Social Media. It might be a fucking SMS, but if it's a WhatsApp or a Signal. it's all the same for this purpose and that's definitely not Social Media.
If the typical message from Em says "They don't know about my trees" and involves an in-joke reference to a movie that six people saw with her in 2008, that's maybe some sort of "social" experience but it's clearly not public. We have a Slack like this, created under pandemic conditions and named "Cabin Fever Mitigation".
If the typical message says "Aw! Piggy" and has a picture of a guinea pig, that is now shading into Social Media. Probably some of the people "following" this feed don't know who she is but they like guinea pigs, or they like her art, or something similar.
And yes obviously if the typical message is a reply to Elon Musk then it's social media and it can fuck off. But hopefully your friends aren't making crucial life updates as a public address to any watching fascists ?
This dramatic deletion is overreaction, solve the underlying problem instead.
Rather than scrolling instagram and tiktok, visit /news and /newest, and then /ask, /show. If nothing interesting there, refresh the /newest until there is. You can be first in upvoting or commenting on it, and can get a good bump to your score if you say something that sounds smart before it hits the frontpage. Then you can re-read the quality content you produced and count how much is left to the round number, like it's only 40 to 9700, only 340 to 10000, etc. Much healthier than just scrolling endlessly and sharing memes.
it's more prevalent today than it was then, so no.
> solve the underlying problem instead
that would be to get rid of FB, X etc. altogether; but since we can't do that, we can do the things that we have control over, i.e., our own accounts
It has been a significant amount of work just dealing with all the derppelgängers out there who use an address they don't own for important things. Medical records. Divorce papers. Mortgages. The short of it is that it doesn't even require maliciousness on someone else's part to be affected by impersonation, accidental or otherwise. So yeah, keep what you've got, because there's no guarantee the next person to get it will not somehow affect you.
Plus I feel like I’m still costing the platform the fractions of fractions of a cent to keep my data stored, replicated and active somewhere
TSA officer: "please log in to your social media account"
You: "I have no social media"
TSA officer: "step out of the line please"
The reality is always a mundane core that gets complicated by human tragicomedy. Of course its wholesome to be able to connect digitally with friends and family. Its also a great economic enabler to connect digitally with professionals. Or to be able to publish to a bulletin board about your brilliant accomplishments.
But to paraphrase Gates, we need these connections, we don't need the self-appointed universal connectors.
Its 2025, and this is HN. I put it to you that technically the only thing preventing us today from having good "connections infrastructure" is the corrupting influence of big adtech. One possible vision of how to organize the digital space in technical and economic terms has become the only vision.
I do not care if they do the same. I am old now (almost 30) and came to the realization that all of our lifes are packet and busy and ppl are very bad at keeping up with other ppl that are not continuously presented to them.
This is the price I have to pay to not be on instagram: writing my friends and ask them how they doing.
And it is a very nice price to pay.
I'm 45 and wondering if I should be offended by this....
"Maybe I’ll go old-school and write more blog posts. Like back in the early 2000s, when you actually had to think before sharing your thoughts with the world. Sounds quaint, doesn’t it?"
I get it, it's different types of content, one requires more effort than the other, and the argument is that, if you don't have anything of substance to say, don't say it, but it still requires extra effort to read that I probably don't feel inclined to give.
What you say reminds me of an ancient Greek saying (I think it was Epictetus). I'm paraphrasing from memory:
"You starved for a whole day to practice discipline? Great! Now resist not telling it to anyone."
I'm always curious here what counts as Social Media, and what's just a useful site?
Github? HackerNews? Reddit? Facebook, but only for FB Marketplace which is now a better local sales site than Craigslist?
What makes it social? Originally with FB and before it with MySpace it was the ability to put up a page about yourself, and then chat with others. HN has a profile and communication, so do the others listed.
For the modern definition of social, nowadays: incentives to generate engagement (connect with people, post, like, comment) to build up data to drive advertising sales.
If after a few months you have zero "facebook friends" nuke the account.
Internet updates are no substitute for good old meat space.
And people talk about how bad Facebook is, LinkedIn is far worse. Everyone is trying to be a “thought leader” and no one is genuine on it.
I have a decent LinkedIn Profile with recommendations, up to date career information. But I never post to it.
I’m only really active when I’m looking for a job. I will respond to messages and try to keep my network somewhat warm.
A small group of people surely do, but for others the benefit doesn't outweigh the negative. Social media is great, in theory, but Facebooks implementations suck and I won't support a company like Facebook who I believe negatively impacts society. The problems and much of the anger stems from feeling almost forced to use the products of a company I think manipulates and exploit it's users. It's almost impossible for my kid to have a social life and for me to be involved without a Facebook account and I can't even offer an alternative form of communication because pretty much anything else would be more work for everyone else.
Agree on you with Linkedin. It's basically an account to a job board, that you keep active in case you need to look for work. The people trying to get engagement on their posts are almost all pretty much insane.
I have to facebook friends that I don't interact with very much outside some electronic music events. This helps me find events that might interest me.
Some venues don't even put the dates on their website.
But some people just can't fathom there's different lives too their own and throw the baby out with the bath water.
You should try it too!
It’s hard to quit when everyone else doesn’t.
I removed account like 10 years ago when it already was clear it is not social network anymore.
I also never had a twitter really besides some account to check what it is and left it unused.
Only LI is one I keep for business purposes but I don’t care about social aspect or discussion there - it is basically a virtual business card and it is quite popular so it’s useful I guess.
How many different accounts do you have to delete though? For many of those people "t" and "f" would be substituted by "y"toube, "r"eddit, etc. It doesn't have to be a social media site, might be news you're intrested in, tech sites, deals aggregator.
I get what you mean, but for someone with habit of looking for distraction whenever they have nothing to do it won't be a cure, bandaid at best.
If you care about yourself and want to have healthier and more mindful habits, you will hopefully start redirecting what were once mindless impulses of avoidance or boredom into more meaningful activities for yourself.
>I get what you mean, but for someone with habit of looking for distraction whenever they have nothing to do it won't be a cure, bandaid at best.
This is something society seems to have forgotten to do, and what I've focused on helping my kids remain capable of as they grow older - knowing how to be bored.
While I deleted all of my social media, I will still end up spamming on reddit or reading HN or watching Youtube.
But I have to say I find them better alternatives, as those social medias are nothing but people screaming for attention.
During work time I have an extension that blocks them all.
But, some options are better than others. I used to be on Twitter a lot, and had that reflex for a time after deleting it. Now... it's just not there. I did replace it with a handful of communities and some other forms of content, but it still feels better than before.
And the thing is, I am interested still. But I do miss a lot, because the group is chaotic and really important announcements are mixed in with memes and chatter, so it was a chore to waddle through that everyday, only to discover that nothing important was announced.
They kinda have to do it, I guess, because engagement metrics are no joke, and if you don't have them, then why are you here. But it really opened my eyes to how to social media completely failed on its premise when it decided that time spent on app would be a good metric.
Sometimes people just have nothing important to say other to announce, and them it should be okay to keep silent for a while, without being downranked.
And seeing how those, who always chatter even when they having nothing to say, will ultimately rise to the top on any platform that values time wasted, I left social media again.
People in comments say how it's better to have a few close friends then shallow connections, but social networks did allow us to meet someone that shared our more specific interests. My best friend I have met on a forum: our interests aligned and we spend hours talking about things we couldn't discuss with real friends before meeting up. There is value in shallow connections when they are based on shared interests. This value is lost on most social networks today.
IMO mastodon and blue sky are "good social networks" for people who want to connect over specific topics.
People often ask me why I don't have Instagram: I'm in the business of making these platforms and Pablo Escobar never used cocaine either. I know how these platforms are built and I know how we think about the people that use it.
Did the Hive approve this, or are you breaking the rules of individualism?
I do find the reactionary response a bit disturbing. Having been caught up in the trap of "fact checkers" for reposting a political cartoon and similar, I'd definitely prefer the community notes approach. All said the inability of many to have a rational conversation with those they don't completely agree is very wrong on so many levels.
Criminals are not willing to have rational conversations. But they just won a free pass from the platforms.
Social media is a reality one can't simply ignore completely. One can complicatedly ignore it though to some level of success. For me, the minimal rules are: don't write on reddit, don't read on linkedin. Don't touch anything else. The orange site is ok-ish.
I hate to promote Reddit, because it’s not worth it, but I have a pretty nicely curated home page of just “good things”, cats, pics, etc that I love to browse when I want to jeep my mind idly occupied. If I make the mistake and go back to popular I get filled with rage, feeling of injustice and hopelessness.
Honestly, there are good reasons to quit social media because of their intrinsic toxicities, but at least if you are doing it for ideological motives admit that its about you.
It’s worth reflecting on what democracy means in this context. For me, it means being willing to tolerate other thought bubbles, even when it’s challenging. This openness is preferable to having our thoughts policed. In an ideal world, thought bubbles would be more permeable, fostering trust and understanding between people with differing perspectives. That trust can’t grow if we only defend our own bubble. Overcoming the divide is crucial if we want democracy to thrive (or not die).
Turning off the machine feeding stuff to my brain really has helped me. I feel better, cleaner and less disturbed/distracted.
Now I am actually considering leaving YouTube as well, although it has been such a lovely place at times, since I notice it is deteriorating my health.
I recommend you try it; nothing has to be deleted. It's simply removing the habit of using it. It does make life a bit better :)
Oh, and a good first step is to install the extension `News Feed Eradicator`. This is how I got started. I run it on everything.
Very little discussion of the actual problems with regulating speech the way the EU or Fact Checkers does. Just an implicit statement it was correct.
This added step makes it hard enough to not mindlessly browse it.
I reflexively type "news" into the browser. It may not be quite as bad as FB or X, but I should probably stop.
It is awfully lonely I must admit. I have a partner of over a decade which helps but not having social media is very isolating. My wife has all the social medias and knows what happens with my family before I do!
My last 'experiment' was the shortest - I registered for an Instagram account and when it suggested that I add my real-life next door neighbour in the sign-up process I immediately stopped and deleted the account. That is scary.
Instagram went first and then I realized I hadn't logged on to Facebook in 2 years so why bother keeping it around?
I think for people who can just decide to keep the account and no longer use it, they should keep it just to stay in touch with some folks. But I realize that as long as I'd have an account, I'd keep using it.
Personally, for me the tradeoff between 2+ hours every day on Instagram for an occasional few hours with an acquaintance isn't worth it.
E.g. facebook for me is mainly the messenger and a few random photos or people. Everything else on there is not enjoyable.
Reddit is like a forum where I can occassionally say things about my hobbies. Also nothing that sucks me in, in an unhealthy way.
X and Mastodon are mostly news and random people showing off things.
Youtube is like TV where at some point you watched what you wanted to watch for the day.
The only thing that seems addicting to me are Apps like Tiktok or Instagram, where you are just one simple swipe away from the next bit of short term entertainment.
Social media does have a powerful use case: keeping in touch with friends and family you don’t see often. It feels trite to watch a video of them with their kid and give it a ‘like’ but I’d miss it if it were gone. Especially if it was still there for everyone else, I’d miss their collective presence more than they’d miss my singular one.
Rather than another scolding post telling everyone to delete social media I’d much rather folks think and talk about how we can make a better social media, preferably divorced from the control of giant corporations.
simple as that, just avoid them
On my downtime I still participate in social media though usually anonymously in the form of shit posting. Or just watching YouTube. I did get sucked into that crap of posting everyday about my glamorous life. Eventually I found I didn't know what to post anymore. Had to find something to post. I'm glad I never got sucked into it completely like TikTok/Instagram.
1. Some companies will not look at your resume or do business with you unless you have a LinkedIn account, especially in the age of AI. Fine by me.
2. If you go to start a business, you will find most of these social media companies require you to have a personal account in order to make a business/marketing account. This is very annoying.
3. Damn I miss Facebook Marketplace. But it's not worth having FB. You can usually have a friend do marketplace stuff for you.
This is not actually explained in the article.
It rightfully explains how X, meta and others have taken a turn for the worse to say the least, but it doesn't say why I should delete my Facebook or Twitter account.
Neither do the hundreds of calls to delete such accounts in the past few weeks or months have.
I get that the point is "You should stop using such social media", but I don't get what __deleting your account__ actually adds on top, especially when put in relation to the political reasons behind stopping to use them.
Isn't it a tautology? If you continue using a product that sucks rather than abandon it, you're using a bad product and it also has license to keep getting worse. Deleting an account is the strongest signal of rejection.
Even if the TOS doesn't require this so you can actually sue they would likely have a choice of venue provision that would make it inconvenient for you and/or a choice of law provision that would be favorable to them.
If you have an account at the site it will likely be very hard to get out from under the arbitration/venue/law provisions of the TOS.
If you no longer have an account you will probably have a better chance of escaping the TOS, especially if whatever you want to sue over took place entirely after you deleted your account.
Yet you still have an account?
Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet
- I write blogs and share them there. On multiple occasions, I’ve received job offers in my inbox. Job opportunities from acquaintances on Twitter are far better than LinkedIn DM spam.
- Staying up to date with the latest fads also teaches me what not to chase. Sometimes, the firehose is the only way to get that information.
I never had problems dropping the mic and not arguing with strangers.
Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms (2021)
https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
HN Discussion:
I deleted LinkedIn (after the MSFT acquisition) 10 years ago, due to the business model change. Even prior to that, it was getting too spammy anyways.
I keep a token Instagram just for viewing the rare family/friend that insists I see something from a trip, but I never post there.
What if they structured the financing like they do with science?
The problem with the EU market is that if I launched anything social, I'm immediately hit with a localization problem so I have to launch first either in English (you lost 53% of people)* or start with a few select countries first with their native language.
It's kinda a mess. Money is not really the issue with EU startups, it's the cultural fragmentation.
There are also many small niche social platforms, but of course nothing like FB/X/etc..
https://risingstars.js.org/2024/en#section-framework
so... it depends.
They were so good and knew exactly what kinds of things would interest me, that it kept me coming back (subconsciously).
However in Amazon’s own app and website, they really have poor suggestions.
LinkedIn is the de-facto standard for looking for a job in certain places. I wonder, people who deleted LinkedIn, how do they get along with looking for a job?
(I do think think contributes to extreme weirdness of LinkedIn posts; there's really ~no-one normal using the social network bit of LinkedIn.)
LinkedIn is closer to other portfolio sites (ArtStation, Behance, SoundCloud, etc). It’s basically professional achievements with comments.
I suppose it is social media in the broadest sense. But a lot of evils of social media aren’t there, just how perfect people pretend their lives are. But there aren’t many echo chambers, instances of shock content, manufactured outrage, cancel culture, politicking, lord of the fly-ing, etc.
LinkedIn is merely a glamour social network + "pro" dynamic address book + kind of a standardised CV, nothing much more.
Because of what nindalf said, basically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42678031
HN is my only form of social media now on my phone. Now, it’s time to build meaningful relationships in my life again.
Obviously, FB, twitter, insta, LinkedIn etc. are a toxic cesspool. I've left my accounts there pretty much dormant for 10+ years.
Ideally, I'd have maintained connections and contacts with my own network, using my own media, direct emails / texts, phone calls, in contexts that I controlled. The problem is... I didn't. I basically just buried my head in the sand and withdrew.
I guess the takeaway is to try to use these platforms in a positive way, as a means to an end, and not get sucked in, or to network in some other, better way, rather than withdrawing, because that's not actually a good alternative.
Hi Jochen wink
The problem is when you are just looping[1], absentmindedly opening and closing news and social media sites for hours. This can eat a lot of time, and is generally pretty draining.
I've been adding separate user accounts based on what tasks I'm doing, and locking them down so they can only perform those tasks.
I have a social media account (which I'm on right now), I have a coding account which I can not access news or social media from, and I have a few other accounts. This creates friction when task switching, and makes it so I have to be a bit more deliberate with how I use the computer. (I have social media blocked on my phone, as I find that's just not compatible with a happy life)
I've also recently been setting up Site Specific Browsers[2], basically custom PWAs, a web browser with no URL bar and no tabs, to further add barriers between tasks (like checking CI) and just noodling on the web. (I use electron to do this, but you can also use chrome by starting it with --app=https://www.example.com/ . Sadly Firefox has removed the ability to do this. )
But it's not like all my social media is gone. I'm still obviously here on HN. I have a tildes account for more general news. I have two discord for personal and semi-anonymous servers. And for future connections I semi-regret missing in the Twitter age, I have a Bluesky ready.
I'm simply being more mindful of what sites I use and and what communities I join to prevent the issues that arose with Reddit, Facebook, and Tumblr.
I really hope EU just bans Meta from operating here.
"There you go Zuck, you don't need to worry about our regulations anymore"
I think we would live just fine around here without their awful products. It would also serve as a cautionary tale to other companies willing to undermine regulations around here.
I argue that the whole thing was a net mistake and any "openings" should not be filled. The lunch has spoiled, don't eat it.
I got back into social media about 1.5 years ago when Mastodon seemed to be coming on strong. I've lately gotten into Bluesky and all I can say is: (1) come on in, the water is fine, and (2) sure it will go bad someday when the money gets tight but back in the day we expected platforms to decay and for the cool kids to move on to the next one.
The distictions between made "deleting the accout" and "just stop using it" are really mute. The main point is to disengage from such platforms.
Of course, almost no will. In spite of the clear conection between these platforms and individual mental health, and even more importantly massive distribution of seriously mileading "fake news", most people quite frankly just don't give a shit.
Look at the near total indifference to the petro mafia's distruction of the natural world. Most people just can't be bothered.
So when you compare something like failing to respond to corporations eliminating the ecosystem services required for life on earth, to a call to action against the crimes of asocial media, do you really expect a significant number of people to care?
I'm doubting it...
I mean, why on earth would you expect anything different this time from yet another "social" thing made and run by a corporate entity?
I moved to Mastodon, which at least has the benefit of not being owned by a corporation, which will perhaps save it from the usual paths of ensh*ttification.
I got good years out of Twitter before it sucked, I have no regrets about getting in early on it.
It's still useful, but it's more like a a car than a town square. you'll have a lot of fun in the beginning, you'll normalize it, it'll start to break down as you try to keep it running, and then eventually it gives up the ghost. So you either accept that and not own a car or you buy a new one.
> The content? Let’s just say it made me want to yeet my phone into the nearest ocean. How anyone can take that level of garbage seriously is beyond me. But hey, bubbles are cozy, right? Musk, Zuckerberg, and Trump — what a trio. Honestly, this could be the perfect setup for a dystopian sci-fi thriller. Except, spoiler alert: no happy ending here.
He doesn't explain further what "garbage" he's talking about.
Sorry but I just can't take your grievance seriously if you won't at least explain it. This type of writing is the epitome of the echo chamber. If you don't already know what the author is talking about and already aggressively agree with them, not only are you not the target audience but they intentionally make the writing impenetrable to you.
This is the absolute worst type of internet dreck. It's ironic that the author rails against "bubbles" in the quoted paragraph.
Honestly this is the tech equivalent of putting your hands over your ears and posting "LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU." just in case someone says something you disagree with.
The truth is that nobody cares if we delete our accounts on social media.
I'm not actually the bad guy you think I am. It was basically all a show. You had suuuuuuch a hard and looong time understanding the danger of all these corporate social media silos. Where we control what opinions are visible and what not so much. Social media (in that particular fashion) was always a trap, a problem to definitely avoid, since day 1, but it was sooooooo teeeeerribly hard to make you understand.
So I though, well, if you are all too stupid to understand it, I will make a veeeeeery bizarre and freaky show for you that you will never forget. It will be so unreal, even you all will actually _get_ it now!!! Because it's such an important lessons for the upcoming future...
Oh no, it has something to do with the president-elect Trump and of course politics too. The first two paragraphs explained a lot and the later paragraphs were there to cover up his opinions by dragging in morality, teens and how bad the world had become due to social media.
I didn't read a single about misinformation, disinformation, fake news and how to counter them.
Hacker News was created by Paul Graham, and he is using social media. Which means ignoring social media isn't a wise decision.
There is a global recession coming, everybody is trimming the fat where possible, all tech industries are cutting where possible. I think it can be reasonably argued that the very nature of fact-checking is a dangerous one anyway - by nature of which facts are used (perspective problem) and what gets checked.
> Meta is teaming up with Trump to fight EU regulations affecting their platforms
Why is this a problem? What specific EU regulation being removed causes issue? The ones that curtail freedom of speech? The EU is a largely undemocratic body, where significant positions are not even voted on. Do you really want to be controlled by this unaccountable body?
> Recently, he hosted a live chat on Twitter with Alice Weidel, the co-leader of Germany’s AfD, a party flagged by the “Verfassungsschutz” as a far-right extremist group.
It's the only popular right wing party that has been allowed to exist, and they picked up a large range of unrepresented voters. A unified block of right wing voters is exactly the situation created by trying to suppress an entire wing of politics. The right-wing party of Germany is technically somewhat ideologically aligned with the government Elon will be working for - this is far from crazy that they talk to each other.
> Alice Weidel claimed that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was not "right-wing," but a communist instead.
When you get to such extremes, the difference between fascism and communism become difficult to see. Putting people in death camps for example, are we talking about the concentration camps or gulags? Extreme nationalism is unique to which ideology? Which ideology was uniquely a dictatorship?
> Profit First, Morality... Somewhere in the Basement
Nothing new. If something is for free, then _you_ are the product.
> Teens and Social Media: A Toxic Cocktail
I have said this for a long time, stop exposing children to unfiltered access on the internet, under any context.
> Once the accounts were finally gone, I realized just how much of a grip these platforms had on me. The number of times I reflexively typed "t" or "f" into my browser bar (which autocompletes to twitter.com or facebook.com) was honestly terrifying.
The trick is to know your limitations and account for them. I don't use social media on my work computer at all, and until recently I didn't even have any chat apps. These were all relegated to my phone, and it's purposefully slow and old.
> Honestly? No idea. Some friends recommended Bluesky, but I’m holding off for now. Maybe I’ll go old-school and write more blog posts. Like back in the early 2000s, when you actually had to think before sharing your thoughts with the world. Sounds quaint, doesn’t it?
The magical new social media will not resolve your issues with social media, social media has been around long enough to know this.
Community notes is far superior to the bias enforcers.
They're clearly hypocrites as posting to a blog or HN is pretty much the same thing.