I deleted my social media accounts (opens in new tab)

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 ?

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"

I'm 45 and wondering if I should be offended by this....

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."

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.

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.

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.

Did the Hive approve this, or are you breaking the rules of individualism?

Criminals are not willing to have rational conversations. But they just won a free pass from the platforms.

simple as that, just avoid 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?

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://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2979

(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.

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 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 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.