I effectively shut down my Twitter account a while ago, best thing I did for my mental health in the past year. There are interesting people on Twitter but the algorithm just works like a slot machine that tries to keep you on the site no matter the cost, it's not optimized to serve you but to make you view more ads. In addition it's almost impossible to have a civilized discussion, it often feels more like two people standing in different corners of a public space screaming insults at each other, and various crowds cheering them on.
> but the algorithm just works like a slot machine
I'm always surprised that people, especially on HN, complain so much about twitter's algorithms that are so easy to bypass. I use Twidere as a client, and my feed doesn't have any of twitter's algorithms - it's simply a reverse chronological feed. Even the website and twitter's official app have a button right on the feed page that allows you to switch to a reverse chronological feed
> In addition it's almost impossible to have a civilized discussion
Just don't use it for discussion then. I use it to read opinions of people all across the ideological spectrum and form my own. You don't need to engage if you don't want to! Also, it's very easy to mute/block accounts that you find are being abusive or uncivilized
It's an invaluable tool to gather peoples' opinions and what they really think.
But then you only get opinions of those ppl that engage in the sort of "discussions" OP talks about.
You really aren't exposed to real ppl opinions, only the opinions of the most crazy and or manipulative.
Actually I've seen that if you're following accounts that get on average a few hundreds-low thousands of RTs/likes (vs 10s of thousands of RTs/likes), the discussions are pretty good. They're also easy to quickly scan and follow and are most likely real opinions of real people.
Another option is https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ with an ad blocker. No ads, feed in order. I mostly follow people I know and my feed is very decent and for the most part positive.
To see the loons, I typically have to find a popular account and read replies, and the Tweetdeck URL even hides most of those (which is fine by me - makes me realising I'm wasting my life reading rubbish).
Even if you're using a different client (which is already a strike against Twitter as a social network, along with the need to manually block users because it has no effective moderation) the content you're reading will have been written by users targeting the default algorithm.
> How? The value of the twitter's social network comes from the recommendations of the people I follow, not twitter's recommendation
It's an admission that the platform is broken. If you have to rely on workarounds to have an acceptable experience, you should probably just choose a different platform that doesn't have an adversarial relationship with its users.
>I wouldn't want it any other way! I want to be in control of who I block - I don't want anyone else deciding that for me
Individuals blocking each other does nothing to address problems with the community.
>That doesn't matter, since I'm not using their algorithm anyway
The content will be worse for targeting their algorithm regardless of how you access it.
> There are interesting people on Twitter but the algorithm just works like a slot machine that tries to keep you on the site no matter the cost, it's not optimized to serve you but to make you view more ads.
Yes. I don't know if it wants us to see more ads or be more "engaged". I'm currently fascinated by generative art and find a lot of interesting posts about this on Twitter.
Yet Twitter keeps showing me posts about politics that upset me; I can't help but "liking" some of those, which feeds the feedback machine.
I never follow any political poster but liking is enough. I could certainly block or mute all of them but that feels wrong, esp. people I fundamentally agree with.
I'm not sure what to do. Not use Twitter seems the best solution.
> I never follow any political poster but liking is enough.
I suspect that clicking, or perhaps even pausing is enough. The only time I look at Twitter is when running my organization's Twitter account. I try to follow technical people and organizations, and am mostly looking for something of a pulse on what's going on in the Linux / FLOSS crowd on Twitter. Since I'm representing my project, not myself, I never click 'like' on anything political; and I'm pretty sure my predecessor in the role never did either.
And yet, here I am every day, wading through loads of political posts which mysteriously mostly align with my preferences.
Have you seen https://genart.social/? Unfortunataly it looks like registration is closed right now. You could follow users you like using RSS and join when registrations open again, or maybe someone you know on twitter has an account there can send you an invite.
You can also create an account on any mastodon server and follow users from genart.social, but it's more fun to be in the middle of it.
I tried Twitter many times but always stopped using it after reading a lot of upsetting materials. Like you follow favorite musician and beside music announcements, there are political rants. I returned to Twitter when I learned to use Mute function liberally. Maybe in your case, you'd feel better on more art related sites like Tumblr or DeviantArt?
> In addition it's almost impossible to have a civilized discussion, it often feels more like two people standing in different corners of a public space screaming insults at each other, and various crowds cheering them on.
It's depressing seeing friends fall down conspiracy theory rabbit holes, or publicly wallow in their racism.
It’s the “x who you followed liked this” that did me in. Turns out a lot of the smart people I followed followed complete tools. Twitter gave me no options to ignore, so I just deleted instead.
Never e-meet your heroes I suppose. But you know, your mind is your own, you can just literally ignore or make peace with parts of reality you find unpleasant.
It seems quite strange to me how people clamor for push button blinders on what is actual life. You are not a horse to be led around by an app.
> a lot of the smart people I followed followed complete tools
There is no technological solution to this. It isn't bad software art. Sometimes life is disappointing.
Maybe I like Harry Potter and enjoy fan fiction of a certain flavor on twitter and follow the author only to discover she doesn't share my politics (via her tweets and retweets). That is not the fault of Twitter. Well, if I didn't find certain views held by JK Rowling's disagreeable everything would actually be working as it should and there would be no complaints.
You can't pick and choose only the things you like about the people you are interested in. Having those books in common doesn't guarantee fellow fans are agreeable - same thing would happen if I were to attend a book reading in the olden days before twitter and overhear people expressing views that upset me.
I can of course demand everybody at the venue accommodate me on everything since we all enjoy Harry Potter and I am very special but that might not fly. I could compartmentalize and stick to the the things we have in common. Or I could excuse myself.
I honestly can’t work out if I’m arguing with a bot or not. There is literally a single solution: the main stream is purely a stream of tweets from who you follow. I realise this is an existential threat to machine learning engineers who just love to build recommender systems, but that’s it, that’s all it is.
Dude that is exactly how it works in most Twitter clients. On the website you click on "Lists" and curate away, no ML or recommender systems are involved.
Most people don't bother, they sign up and follow JK Rowlling or whatever and she tweets once a year or something so there's nothing to show you so it treats her as a subject not an individual. Bad UX and terminology for sure but most of the complaints are not about that.
Do you also get mad at reddit for whatever the hell the weirdos post in the default sub-reddits when you login?
It also kinda follows from your "public space" analogy, that the loudest people screaming the most obnoxious and entertaining insults, will dominate this space.
Extending your analogy a bit further, this "public space" is really more of a "public bathroom" wall, where people scribble hot takes, and others react to those with more hot takes of their own.
I'm happy for you that you shut down your account a while ago -- I haven't used mine in months, and should probably do the same right now.
I find Twitter teaching me to stand my ground in terms of my boundaries and what I enjoy. If I talk to somebody and they start insulting me, I mute. I mute people who insult others too. Difference between physical public space is that if some people are screaming at each other, you'd have to engage somehow (like break them off) or disengage by walking away. In Twitter you can mute them. Let them fight between themselves.
Twitter is the least taxing of the social media sites to use and I actually get useful info from it. Just curate who you follow to keep the SNR up. I don't have any other social media accounts. The rest is just trash
Exactly, since 2016, it's been a cesspit. One can argue the world would be better off without Twitter, even keeping in mind The Arab Spring, and during Covid outbreak (was that net positive? I would say initially during the outbreak it was very useful, and then later more misinformation came about.)
I felt even better when I quit news media as well. Now I read the print newspapers, just to see whether there is any change in legislation that I need to know about.
My blood does boil even there, with the subtle editorializing tell us what to feel about what is essentially a neutral news item, but it's much easier to control than the online media.
> My blood does boil even there, with the subtle editorializing tell us what to feel about what is essentially a neutral news item, but it's much easier to control than the online media.
The article is on the BBC news site. As someone that's a bit older than the average on here, I can remember when the BBC news site was just that - news.
Now, it's changed subtly.
Some articles now have 'by John Smith', the author, underneath it, whereas some do not. Way back in the mists of time, almost all articles seemed to be anonymous.
The other change, and your point, is that select articles now have commentary or opinion by one of the BBC journalists, which it never previously had.
Still, if the BBC are paying big salaries for 'big' name journos they have to promote them.
My folks are around 70 now. I just flew back home to visit them. Every day in the evening the news goes on, and they sit together and watch (muting only the advertisements). Years ago I would watch to, but this time I was observing my folks and wondering about the origins of this pattern / habit.
During WW2, the AM radio informed the population, no doubt saving lives. Families would gather around the radio for BBC news, compelled by uncertainty and fear. The war finished, the years went by, radio became a TV. When I suggest maybe skipping the news, it's met with shock and something along the lines of "not watch the news? we need to be informed".
Not sure if you're from the UK but if you're not then you should be aware that the BBC has become a lot more politicised as the government appointed a major donor as the director in 2021 [1] and have previously threatened the company, for example by changing the license fee to starve them of funding[2]. In addition, the BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg is not without controversy and accusations of pro-government bias[3].
Unfortunately both sides of the political spectrum now mistrust the BBC's impartiality.
Yes, I'm in the UK. BBC used to be my "news of last resort", in the sense that it was the least worst of all the UK reporting.
But with things that you mentioned and recently Martine Croxall [1], I've pretty much switched to Reuters and Bloomberg quite some time ago without realising.
You only have to look at the BBC news site front page, versus their 'most read' section to see what the BBC editorial staff think we should be reading (relentless politics, doom and gloom) versus what people are actually reading (today, right now, Peter Kay's comeback! :) ).
I listened to the BBC World Service (and VOA and Radio Moscow and many others) via shortwave "back in the day" and the reporter was always introduced by name, and even if they hadn't, they were identifiable by the sound of their voice.
I've not paid attention to that detail of the news website. We but we've always had named correspondents on BBC Radio news. And newsreaders for that matter.
Frankly, the change in the way the stories are written is probably more to do with the evolution of the internet as another form of media. I can remember when the BBC website launched, and it was clear that they, and everyone else, had no idea how things would evolve.
At least the BBC hasn't gone down the route of "Boris ate cake. You won't believe what happened next!" style headlines.
I used to listen to NPR news now EVERY morning, mulled over nearly every post on /r/worldnews and then I slowly realized it's mostly fluff and media outlets trying to squeeze discussion out of things that a really just a one and done event. Nowadays, there is just so much drama and noise surrounding every single thing that happens in the world. It's of no value actually. So I've quit news consumption altogether as well, it's super liberating.
This is like the Tim Ferriss approach: if some news is really that huge, you'll hear about it from a friend or coworker eventually. And if it's news like globalthermonuclear war, you won't benefit from hearing about it 5 minutes earlier anyway ;)
My life was filled with unnecessary external inputs / noise (such as news) that often dictated the mood and output of my day. Example, waking, unconsciously unlocking my phone and scrolling news or socials. It was like gambling my day away but with no upside. These days I start with things I can control (make bed, tidy up) to build positive momentum to plow through the inevitable challenges of the day.
News was one of my worst... along with sugar :) Now I beat both (kinda).
>My blood does boil even there, with the subtle editorializing tell us what to feel about what is essentially a neutral news item, but it's much easier to control than the online media.
Dear god yes. Give me the facts without trying to insert your politics there. Even the AP does this constantly. I'd pay gold for a news organization which prints something to the effect of:
>The current situation in XYZ in unknown. We have heard from partisan sources that A happened, we have heard from other partisan sources that B happened and the state department has told us C would happen. Please check back in three weeks for an update.
It is very likely that there is a lot more cause to make one's blood boil today, especially with the growing radicalisation of those who enjoy being contrarian for the sake of it.
One can't blame the news for being a mirror. Especially where I live (India), it is almost a joke to suggest (as so many here do) that the media should focus on "positive" stories - when doing so would be Goebbelsian.
I stopped using facebook and Twitter about 10 years ago. I can't say I noticed any difference back then.
The thing I am noticing now is that a larger part of civil society has moved to Facebook. I can't even find the opening hours or phone numbers of many restaurants, which means I just have to guess or not go at all. One company I quickly left had support through Facebook.
I hate it. And I think people are crazy to hand such a large chunk of society over to social media companies.
The default public interface for many small businesses these days seems to be facebook for the simple reason that it is free to have your page on there. They don't get much else though unless they are willing to be interacting with the local community 24/7 or paying £30 for their random posts to be shown to another 12 people, etc.
I had the idea of having a local site for small towns where every business could have its own free page and post stuff that everyone could see for free. But, having dealt with a few local businesses and realizing they just don't want to make any effort at all, like I should do everything from providing imagery and content at no cost, I quickly released it was a non-starter. Facebook is actually the perfect solution for these kind of businesses after all.
For opening hours and phone numbers, Google Maps seems to cover that fine in my area. It's not great, as it's still a private company, but Maps is ran more like a public utility, at least compared to Facebook.
Just as an experiment I tried to access the facebook pages for the local restaurants. I could easily see the opening hours and phone number even though I wasn't logged in.
I'm in the UK. Is it a different experience where you are?
Or are you refusing to access the facebook website at all?
The problem of current round-the-clock media is the inevitable lack of actually meaningful events to present. Real meaningful events are rare and cannot solely drive the for-profit ad-driven legacy media and social media. As a result, we see unnecessary "news" like: this public figure said something stupid, discussion on the implications of that, interviewing solely to instigate the interviewee to say something edgy and then broadcast it as breaking news, etc. And social media sites pioneered the idea of getting creators to constantly churn out "content" to catch the attention of the users. News should be event-based like: hurricane to hit this part of the world, and actually useful to the public like: parliament passes this law and what you should know about it and not what you should feel about it. And social media should be used in regulation, if at all.
An actually useful news source would be the one which periodically lists the important happenings in the local area and (optionally) a couple of sentences about them.
> An actually useful news source would be the one which periodically lists the important happenings in the local area
This is why I subscribe to a local news paper. It's much more interesting and more relevant to read about what is happening in and around my own town than what's going on in world politics or the other side of the world.
In my experience, I feel like Mastodon is a way healthier social media platform than most. No (intrusive) trends, no "likes of friends", no randomized timeline, but just other people posting pictures of their oscilloscopes, cats, plants and hobbies, or starting healthy discussions about things.
It's not a panacea by any means, but makes an almost mind-blowing difference from the "usual" addictive social platforms (FB, Twitter, YouTube, etc.).
It feels a bit like joining a café where everyone is human, and imperfect, rather than a shiny videolottery casino where the higher liked profiles keep winning.
You are describing an experience closed to the old forums of early 2000. I am still an active member of such a forum, we are less than 50 active people that interact for almost 20 years, we meet face to face quite rarely because we live now in several different countries (we were all in one initially) and overall is a nice atmosphere of spending a bit of time with old friends, just async and without the commute time to the same bar.
I used TikTok for about a month earlier this year out of curiosity. I feel like it still has significant effects on my emotional and psychological state months later. I can't imagine what it does to a person to use anything like it daily for years.
I could only imagine what kind of imprinting something like TikTok can do to a developing mind, especially if that person lacks any kind of healthy role models in their real lives.
Personally I'm glad that that the hyper-availability of information was something I experienced only after I became an adult, so I'm able to be more aware of how influential the firehouse of information and manipulation by algorithms can be.
Sorry, I was a bit too vague. Negative effects. For example, my depression got worse and my ability to cope with social contacts elsewhere in my life got worse (such as becoming more sensitive to perceived rejection, and consequently turning more to TikTok to counteract the negative feelings, leading to my reducing maintenance of real relationships).
I don't have Facebook. I don't have Twitter. I don't even have Instagram, or TikTok. I stay away from all kinds of social media, aside from Telegram to chat with my friends, and it's been this way for the last 10 or so years... and boy do I get confirmation that I made a very good choice very, very often.
I just had to quit Reddit this weekend. Deleted the app off my phone, edited my hosts file on my computer to send it to 127.0.0.1 along with a whole bunch of mass media sites. I noticed this year that I was scrolling and scrolling and scrolling hours away on reddit and then it hit me, this is a tiny minority of the world having an outsized influence on my thoughts and opinions both in a positive and negative manner but more often than not negative and getting worse over time. The most outraged, the biggest whiners would get the most upvotes so all you see is outrage and rants and I thought to myself, is that really how the general public is? Is this really my experience of it?...then I thought no it's not, it's an algorithm that's feeding off my fear to instil more fear in me in a never ending loop. Delete...
I don't see sites that just have user discussions as social media. To me they're essentially usenet but on a web site.
I'd say to qualify as social media you need to make the experience about connecting people with each other or with groups, and finding people to connect with. Things like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter are all definitely social media.
A site that just posts news headlines that people comment on is not really social media IMHO.
It is. It's just different forms of them. HN comment section can be considered a social media, Reddit definitely is a social network. If you are broad with the term, anything with a community can be considered social media. What I quit are the "passive" social media that market themselves as such, with the social part being their primary function and attraction.
Kind of. The difference is that with Telegram you are mostly required to actively participate in your network, directly sending messages/media to a specific person/group (YMMV obviously), whereas with "traditional" social media you put your contents out there, which, depending on the algorithm, may or may not be seen by your followers or the platform's userbase, with a much more passive engagement model where users can consume content without ever putting some out themselves, thus much more vulnerable to algorithm-driven user engagement exploits.
Discord is also very similar to Telegram conceptually, but very different at the same time because of the role it fulfills. Different tools, with different properties, for different needs. Even phone calls can be considered social media! The key is using them responsibly.
I never understood the charm of social media… why should I care about what people I couldn’t care less think about my life (hence share what I do) and conversely why should I follow people I couldn’t care less. With the people I care I usually have real conversations… no need for social media.
But... you are here in HN with the rest of us. Why are you reading the comments of people you couldn't care less about?
Of course, as someone who never uses Twitter and yet has been here since 2013 I have a good feeling of what your answer is likely to be. But my deeper point is: people get out of Twitter the same that I (and maybe you) get out of HN. Different strokes for different folks.
I think we shouldn't call HN social media, I wouldn't even call reddit social media. Yes, there are discussions. But the topic is the focus, while many other platforms, including Twitter, are people oriented. People curate your content, on the other platforms said content is decided by topic.
Maybe use social media if you want to, but there is an inherit difference between these platforms. I had good discussions on HN but I couldn't name you any user, not even their handle. It isn't of particular interest most of the time. There are a few exceptions of course but those are far and few between.
A bus ride just isn't the same as a party, even if many people come together.
For me that's half social banter, half discovering things I did not know about, but someone discovered and found fascinating enough to share. Pretty close to HN. I completely don't care what other people think about me on the internet, but I care about the things they do or appreciate.
As a farmer, Twitter has shown to be the best place to keep abreast on what other farmers are trying in their operations. I've never met most of them, but insights into what they are doing is still useful information. It provides much the same charm as HN, where I've also not met most, for keeping abreast in what tech is doing.
Facebook has been useful as a modern day telephone book.
I don't see them as competing against real conversations. They serve a very different function.
I use a third-party Twitter client TweetBot on both iOS and MacOS, and all I see are the folks I follow and any retweets they do. And that's it. No suggested tweets to rile and inflame and engage me. I only see what I want to see.
And if one particular person I follow gets too verbose, I mute them for 6 hours, a day, a week, or forever, until they calm down. I've even permanently muted acquaintances who it makes them happy to think I follow them as they go off the deep end.
If Twitter takes away the API that TweetBot uses, well, I think that'll be my exit, since I can't imagine having to put up with what I perceive everyone else is experiencing on Twitter.
7 years ago I deleted my FB account. The mental relief was immediate.
Since then, I deleted all my social media accounts - LinkedIn (in some insanely magical way I'm still employed!) and twitter.
Being the old fart I am, I had no other social media accounts.
Not taking any needless selfies, not posting crap, not waiting anxiously for likes or comments, not reading BS from people I don't know just because some algorithm decided that's a good content for me for reasons I have no control over.
I kept LinkedIn account alive. enjoying those spam letters telling me how much xx new contacts I got. might even log in and take a look who's that if/when I'll look for a new job
For me LinkedIn just became another kind of FB, with people writing stupid posts, trying to present themselves as smart and successful and beautiful and PC and blah blah blah.
What did it for me was June 2016 (aah, Brexit), and two blokes from very different parts of my life— whom I both love for very different reasons— went to the most perverse ad hominem attacks on each other (they have never even met) on my profile. Such a weird hatred that I decided I did not want to be a part of that.
Considering how many people on HN (Almost every FB related thread has at least one upvoted "I deleted facebook, it’s been so much better since" comment.) and apparently in some other places seem to have a social media addiction, that becomes liberating once they quit, I wonder if it’s a widespread problem, or if it’s a loud minority?
I quit most social media, not because it’s liberating, but because either a) the website became unusable (Facebook, I still use it for groups which are closer to how the timeline used to be) or b) It became boring (Twitter many years ago after I had been there since the start). Neither of those felt liberating, and especially in the Facebook case, I missed the interactions I had.
I quit facebook in 2015. I felt like it had stopped being about sharing what I'm doing with my audience of close friends and started to become an infinite outrage machine. Posting things to facebook became akin to slapping the feeder bar. I realized that is was not sustainable, mentally, to indulge in a constantly escalating verbal war with people I only knew by 2 to 3 degrees of separation. I made a full backup of my facebook account to save my pictures I had posted and deleted me account. I feel that was similar in some aspects from unplugging from the matrix.
What I think is happening to our brains is that we are already too fried from the over-stimulus of the constant "feeding" (pun intended with the term "Feed").
The endless treadmill of posts will always overpower you. Doomscrolling is an appropriate term for it. You always end up beaten. It's just too much for people, let alone your brain who has not caught up with the technology pace in terms of evolution.
I've slowly stopped using social media, though I'll never surrender my handles, that'd be leaving people to impersonate me.
I have quitted social media many many times. But i always end back up, even tho i get that liberating feeling. There is alway this boring evening that makes you want to just check in and se what is going on and then it grabs hold of you.
I wish there was a way i could ban my IP or something else more permanent to really remove me from most social media platforms. As it is now, its too easy to create a new account or reactivate your old one.
I thought of something like a reverse robots.txt, a file residing in your device(s) that could tell servers you don't want to see news nor social features. Something like no-news.txt or even no-social.txt.
Some ISPs have this kind of function (usually because "won't someone think of the children"). You could hand your account details to your ISP to a friend to enable such a function.
In the past 6 months I accidentally transitioned to only using BeReal, the finiteness of the app is really comfortable, in its current state you get a quick little update, send yours and the whole thing is over in 2 minutes. I hope it doesn't get ruined, but I also have no idea how they are keeping the lights on.
Yeah, no, it's like "Have you tried not being depressed", for some people, there's FOMO hitting hard, very addictive, because social media were designed to be addictive, each like is a shot of dopamine, like Fortnite hacks kids brains with random rewards, rewarding sound effects, specific colours, etc., it's too strong to stop on your own (then again, for some people, not all).
If you are a modern journalist you probably are some kind of social media prisoner. Yes, you can argue that tweets aren't and shouldn't be news, but they have to appease their masters too. And those demand attention.
I hate to say it but at least for me, yes. On many occasions I catch myself on a mindless infinite scroll, or youtube binge while filling a seemingly small gap of idleness. So even though I'm completely aware of this being possible, while also being in some sort of moral opposition against such behavior, I still fall for it rather easily. Addiction to some is a strong word I guess, but once I started associating it with my own behavior, it was easier to make some more drastic changes to get away from it.
I'm one of those weirdos. This is kind of how it actually works. I don't know anyone who has truly stopped all the social media (like hn). But things like facebook, instagram and tiktok; I don't feel getting anything good out of it so I don't use those at all.
You’re missing the point. A man with the wrong opinions bought a social media site. This is why there is a flood of articles like this lately - people who don’t like his opinions are screeching in pain.
I'm not on twitter, but I still view the 'best' tweets on various sites that gather them together. This works for me, I can read the newsworthy or particularly funny ones without all the bla-bla ones to dilute them. It's not real-time, but that's fine.
I disagree with this general sentiment. I don't think absolutely 0 social media is feasible or even wise this day in age. How are you going to keep up with family, friends, and so on? (In my case, family and friends span multiple states, countries, and continents!) You would at the very least need a phone - ok, that's maybe not "social media" in the sense this article talks about, but it's still tech at the end of the day. You'd anyway likely need an app like WhatsApp or Telegram to keep track of everybody and everything - and those technically ARE considered social media right?
Like all things, "social media" is good only with strict moderation and balance. The real problem is that people let their usage get out of hand.
That is like solving the opioid crisis by saying "you should use painkillers in moderation" or the obesity epidemic by saying "we all just need to be disciplined with what you eat."
The issue is systemic. Most people's idea of "social Media" today is the algorithm-fueled, privacy-invading, advertising funded model which divorces the users from the curation of good content.
We need social media platforms that are not owned by Big Tech, and we need to reject the notion that it is okay to data tracking and ads one exchange of a "free" service.
> You'd anyway likely need an app like WhatsApp or Telegram to keep track of everybody and everything - and those technically ARE considered social media right?
If you consider them social media, that would imply telephone itself is a social media, which makes a definition of the word "social media" somewhat useless for distinguishing services such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and similar.
>You'd anyway likely need an app like WhatsApp or Telegram to keep track of everybody and everything - and those technically ARE considered social media right?...
Are they? I don't consider WhatsApp, Telegram and the like as social media. I don't know if there's a definitive definition for what is or isn't social media. But my own definition is that social media is a medium where you have your discussions in public. So Twitter, Facebook, Discord.. etc. [And, by that definition, I suppose a lot of forums and even HN discussions would be social media].
WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. I'd class more as private communications, alongside email and written letters.
>I don't think absolutely 0 social media is feasible or even wise this day in age. How are you going to keep up with family, friends, and so on?...
I use Telegram for that. I have managed to persuade everyone in my family to join Telegram and a lot of my friends are on it too. I've set up a Family Channel which includes siblings, in-laws etc. where we can all share the latest goings on within the extended family and swap photos etc. All the social interaction we need, with a geographically scattered family, to all keep in touch. But without the [to me, anyway] incomprehensible need that so many other people seem to feel to broadcast our private family and circle of friends business to the entire world.
On the rare occaasions I've looked at social media content --especially Twitter or Facebook, I'm gobsmacked by the way conversations between people reveal so much personal info about themselves. It's like a huge number of social media users have some kind of mental block whereby they think if they @friend some really personal stuff, only @friend will see it. When the reality is @friend, @enemy, @employer, @parents, @spouse, @anyone-who-happens-to-be-passing-by... etc. are now privvy to that personal info.
I wonder how many of these people are also concerned about buying a Chinese phone, in case it 'spies' on them. When they're broadcasting practically their entire personal life, for all the world to see.
Yeah the only reasons I can think of to cut it out entirely is because you want people to see how brave and pious you are, or because you're addicted and need to cut out the temptation to waste your life on Twitter entirely.
I can understand the latter, but there's nothing noble about refusing to use social media at all.
>How are you going to keep up with family, friends, and so on?
Yeah, god forbid you actually visit them, invite them over, and talk to them on the phone, or, text them...
>you'd anyway likely need an app like WhatsApp or Telegram to keep track of everybody and everything - and those technically ARE considered social media right?
Or god forbid that you find out a week after the event that Mavis, your cousins aunt went to the shops only to discover that you couldnt get any green apples today.
> Yeah, god forbid you actually visit them, invite them over, and talk to them on the phone, or, text them...
Think for a minute. You went on a vacation and want to show your families and relatives your photos. Are you going to send 20 photos to each of them via zip file?
There’s a problem with the definition of “social media”—we no longer differentiate between messaging apps and what we used to just call “social network sites”, which are generally understood to be content feeds that are optimised for infinite consumption. I think that people would generally agree that messaging apps are not as harmful as the latter, but it’s usually the latter that most people are trying to avoid.
I understand the need to communicate with loved ones, but really, you don’t even need to “keep up” because living one’s own life and reaching for one’s own ambitions should be time-consuming and tiring enough. And then I’m not willing to listen to any perspective that justifies the need for content feeds in one’s life—no news feed is innocent and all news feeds are just utilities for ads. If you really want to know what’s up with someone who matters in your life, you can and you should just ask them directly.
No, a phone is not social media. Nor is a standard messaging app. Social media is, in my opinion, any platform or service that connects you with an unknown number of users, a feed, and has some form of "likes" or "upvoting" involved. So simply messaging friends and family via your phone wouldn't qualify. But Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Reddit all would. And I agree with the author, social media (according to my definition), comes with an enormous number of negative consequences and we are all probably better off without it, on the whole (and yes, I realize that I am saying this on HackerNews, which also counts as social media according to that definition).
If you use a platform just for that, it seems fine. The problem is when you use multiple platforms under the excuse that you need to keep up with family. The problem is the distractions that the platform is pushing to you, making you waste a significant amount of time.
10 years ago, I had a Facebook account and the rule to have up to 50 contacts ("friends") that I was using 10 minutes per day. When that was no longer possible, I closed the account.
Deleting social media apps from your phone is a good start. I removed Facebook earlier this year after getting into one too many arguments with my conspiracy prone father.
I still login from time to time. I just do it via the website. It has become less of a compulsion, to the point that my partner sometimes has to prompt me to look at some photos or like some important life event from a friend. I'm ok with that.
I keep up with my closest friends with a Signal group chat, and the rest of my friends just text/call/email me to get in touch.
I guess your point that “anything can be social media if you call it that” is… technically true linguistically, I have genuinely no idea what that has to do with people that choose not to use Facebook/Instagram/Twitter.
I self-moderate people on social media who go into politics too often.
Luckily my family mostly moved to messenger and keeps the discussion to personal matters (kids, illnesses, activities etc)
The few times we talk about politics, are calm and measured discussions even though we disagree on many policy issues.
Anecdotally, I’m the opposite, I started using mainstream social media a year ago, I make sure to avoid toxicity and focus on actually beneficial interactions. So far it’s been fun.
I wouldn't quit LinkedIn either. For 99% of the time, it's totally worthless, and has even more of an authenticity problem than most social media. But when it comes to finding a job its actually invaluable. I was laid off earlier in the year with a large number of others from my company, and I pretty much exclusively did my job searching through LinkedIn. I made a single post about having been laid off (which was my first personal post on the site ever), and within 24 hours I had so many people reaching out to me with job leads I needed a spreadsheet to keep track of them all. Within 2 weeks, I had 5 competing offers all of which were better than my previous job. I can't imagine being able to do all of that without LinkedIn.
A tech platform, or a social mechanism, can be multiple things at once. And doubly so when you're talking about multiple platforms. Social networks are...
* A commercial advertising delivery mechanism
* A US government mass-surveillance honeypot
* A way for Jane Smith to follow what her acquaintances or family members are doing elsewhere in the world
* An outlet for venting frustrations about politics
etc. etc. And all that dopes not really contradict "big psy-op".
It is not a psy-op aside from people trying to get people addicted and exposed to advertising. Zuckerberg once said that people are stupid to share so much voluntarily. Everyone underestimated stupidity vastly. And for public personas there certainly are some advantages and some just use it to contact others. But the normal user perhaps doesn't reflect the costs.
If it isn't, it had certainly worked out like one.
Mounds upon mounds of personal data, recent photographs of the population, countless "private" conversations are all available easily and instantly if you just ask your mate up in SIGINT.
Uncomfortable take, maybe its a necessary PsyOp. In ancient times, when you screwed up the village would shun you and that status as a shunned, would act as a reminder for others to not engage in unacceptable behaviour.
This is what social media is now. If you engage in warcrimes, your face and name will be known to the world for all times.
I'm suspect you're being a little optimistic. Although there is a
small niche for socially positive influence campaigns the overwhelming
function of "necessary psyops" has been for the powerful to make sure
their "warcrimes" remain hidden from the world.
Sadly, I think many of us are still carrying a working model of social
media as a "peoples' tool" from the Arab Spring. There are plenty of
places in the world today where you can see that's been suppressed,
recruited and inverted by those in power.
If we want technology to reduce evil in the world then we need to
redouble our efforts.
Yes, and after societies grew larger than villages, many of them started coming up with things like "courts" and "due process".
Thankfully we're moving back to a more openly reputation-based system. I'm currently looking for a group of seven respected men that will swear oaths to my innocence if I'm accused of anything.
I wonder what a significant change in attitudes toward social-tech
will mean for those of us, still in a minority, who have never been on
it?
No doubt the irony will be I'll have to listen to endless "news" from
friends who haven't spoken to me in real-life for 15 years, about how
"Liberating it is". :)
Nahh that is totally different. When you were not into social media - it was weird and creepy. Now not being into social media is liberating and responsible.
I feel like I should try and get back my account which got banned for covid misinformation - who could have seen that the vaccines wouldn't be 99% effective?
I disgree. In this particular case, isn't it wonderful that public broadcasting is reporting about it, so people can evaluate the idea/concept for themselves?
Amazing how as soon as Elon buys Twitter and bluechecks loose their privilege, there is one Mastodon endorsement [0] and one "quit social media" article on BCC in short succession trending on HN. Probably nothing.
