I quit social media over 10 years ago, already having been a conscientious objector to Facebook and other platforms, much to the chagrin of my classmates who didn't understand my idiosyncratic positions on digital privacy, attention span, banality, and brainrot.
It's gotten to the point where I view the narcissism of the modern 21st century social media user the same way I would view a crack addict smoking a pipe out in public, unable to pry their hands away from their glowing plastic rectangles, swiping incessantly in the hopes of getting just another dose of sweet dopamine with every refresh, or some artificial symbol of social validation in the form of more likes and upvotes.
Somehow even in the wake of the Snowden revelations people are still ambling off of cliffs for fear of being left behind by the herd of lemmings. I feel vindicated as the years go on with every news story or opinion piece I read about (dissatisfaction with) the growing encroachment of surveillance capitalism, ad-tech and social media into our personal lives, and all for what? Some shitty memes and "influencers" peddling their garbage through thinly veiled advertisements?
When I am exposed to mainstream social media content I can't believe people subject themselves to the digital equivalent of ass-to-mouth that is the brainrot of the algorithmically driven social media feed. If "you are what you eat" were analogized to an information diet, most social media users would be consuming informational shit and consequently producing the same 140-byte thoughts or reciting the same 5-second memes.
If the attention economy is indeed a real concept, there is a premium for the ability to hold your concentration on something for more than half an hour and produce thoughts whose complexity is more than just a few bytes.
I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”. The incentives are perverse, there is an inherent conflict of interest in the business model and there is an intermediary between the user and information/community they want to participate in. This leads to most problems we see in legacy, ad-based, social media.
Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry. In life we do not let everyone into the friend circle. Having a barrier to entry model may work well for an online community, although this remains to be seen. Were there any successful experiments with paid social media?
I would rephrase it further to "quit ad-based media." The problems and conflicts of interest introduced by an ad-based revenue model were discussed long before the advent of the modern Web and social media; the relationship between the advertisement industry and mass media (television, radio) was already discussed in depth in the late 20th century [0]:
The advertisers' choices influence media prosperity and survival.
The ad-based media receive an advertising subsidy that gives them
a price-marketing-quality edge, which allows them to encroach on
and further weaken their ad-free (or ad-disadvantaged) rivals.
Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with
serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere
with the "buying mood." They seek programs that will lightly
entertain and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose
of program purchases - the dissemination of a selling message.
I would love to pay for social software on a coop model (like a food coop, etc) — we would be "members" and, theoretically, we pay a small monthly fee that covers the costs of hosting and platform development. I've tried to think about what I would want that to look like — spoiler, something different than the model of "posting + reactions" that is so familiar from twitter+fb — but then when I think about the barriers to entry for a project like that, even though the technological part might not be that difficult (assuming it was Less Than Web Scale), I just give up hoping for it.
I've been following a lot of the bluesky + mastodon stuff but I don't like that their basic model of social interaction is just a clone of Twitter.
I can't remember the name of it, but over a decade ago I saw something like this - it was a single Linux server shared by (I think) hundreds of people. Really trying to do the multi-user paradigm. They advertised it as a private kind of social network, it was invite-only and I think you had to pay to help keep the server lights on.
Hopefully by posting something incorrect, A Person On The Internet Who Knows Better will come along and provide the correct details. :)
We also do not let people into the friend circle just because they have money (I hope).
IMHO healthiest "social media" I could think is interest groups. They eventually need some kind of donation from one or more people, but with no or minimal barriers.
> > Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry
This depends on the definition of success, the most successful as in impressive achievements goal reaching are the ones that are open to anybody who can get noticed and brought in. ANd in the social sense even open to the ones who are most capable of monopolizing the discourse and creating a buzz in the public square.
For example Trump did just that in 2016 and many tried to resist him, but in the end the GOP wants to be successful and opened itself to the guy who made the most noise in the public discourse and public square and made him the tip of the spear of the election effort.
Of course it feels pretty miserable knowing that you can be replaced at any time but I don't think there is an alternative or a solution thanks to a barrier to entry (or exit). Social groups that have a barrier to entry (and exit) such as marriage , when it deteriorates the barrier to entry (and exit) doesn't prevent the 2 people to just starting ignoring each other.
I won't advertise but I work for a company which holds a social media for cooking and recipes. Folks there are totally averse to those and based stuff.
It has been hard for the company. The owner decided the company will die before using ads (for many reasons). The paid plan is stupidly cheap and when people sign and use for a month they stick with the company for years.
But it is hard. Company laid off 80% of the team some time ago and is fighting to survive.
I won't defend the owner or anyone, but things came to a point where people think they are not having consequences by giving infinite permission for being tracked all the time. They think if they are not logged they are not identified so they can't be exploited.
It sucks because no one appreciates that. Though I have my opinions about business and whatever I kinda appreciate for the company not running on money from ads and not collecting a single piece of user information which is not required for work.
Especially important because most of his commentary focuses on the dominant social media paradigm of the time. Mastodon barely existed when this post went live, Mike Masnick was years from writing the paper that inspired Bluesky[0], and it would be strange if someone whose whole thing is getting away from social media kept up on new developments.
This post is an interesting historical artifact, but shouldn't be mistaken for contemporary commentary.
What's changed, though, really? I quit[0] social media near the end of 2019, and it greatly improved my mental health and life. While I haven't tried some of the newer options, I've kept up with new developments in the space. Nothing about the "new" social media platforms makes them at all attractive for me to take a second look and join back up.
If anything, things are worse. It's even more "algorithmic" and engagement-focused, continuing to promote outrage culture. Platforms like TikTok have turned addictive endless scrolling into a science. I know a few people who spend a significant number of hours of their days on TikTok and Twitter (ahem, sorry, "X"), and it just kinda makes me sad. (And I probably spend more time than is healthy on HN.)
[0] I still have my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, but I don't post to them anymore, and I'm signed out of them on all my devices (and I've deleted the mobile apps). I don't allow myself to ever sign in on mobile. Once every 6 months or so I'll sign into Facebook for some specific purpose (like looking up someone's contact information when it's for some reason not stored in any of my usual places). Out of curiosity I'll scroll down the feed, and it's just kinda crap. Stuff from people I don't actually follow, stuff from people I do follow but is kinda boring, and interestingly the feed is dominated by the same 15 or so people (even though I'd amassed a little over 1k "friends" before I quit). I limit myself to no more than five minutes, and I don't post, comment, or even like anything.
The last time I signed into Instagram (probably two or three years ago), the experience was awful. I remember when it was just a reverse-chronological feed of the people I follow (and only the people I follow). But now (well, 2-3 years ago) the majority of items in my feed are either ads or promoted/reshared posts from people I don't follow at all. Stuff from people I follow is maybe one out of every five or six items. And it's all out of order, so I'd see something that someone posted a week ago, followed by, 20 items later, something that they posted a couple days ago. It's a shame; 2012 Instagram was such a beautiful platform.
So while yes, this article is now 8 years old, I don't think anything has changed for the better. The fundamental problems are still there, and have only gotten worse.
Mastodon and Bluesky are still such minor players (even though I enjoy these projects and am optimistic about their future) that I don’t see anywhere where this doesn’t pass for contemporary commentary.
> What the market values is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable.
> what the market dismisses are activities that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value. Well social media use is the epitome of an easy to replicate activity that does not produce a lot of value [...] by definition the market is not going to give those activieis a lot of value [...]."
Yet in the years since this TEDx talk we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.
> ... we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.
For most influencers, they're not the ones with the wealth and power. Many of them are barely getting by. They rent content houses, clothing, cars, and other things they need to put on their facade.
Pretty much all of the wealth and power is in the hands of the people that employ the influencers.
you will never become a streaming millionaire. talking heads like beast and pewdiepie employ literal armies of Hollywood editors and writers. For every organically grown insufferable content monster created on Youtube, ten more are vat-grown by a billion dollar industry designed to shepherd you into a fantasy consumerist lifestyle.
These powerhouses of industry control the flow of capital at a level you will never be able to. they secure rights to music and video clips at rates you could never get, have tie-ins to major brands media and celebrities on day one, and are programmed with an endless firestorm of bots and preferential algorithmic treatment on every FAANG product in order to guarantee their success.
You are painfully unaware of the difference between being a Youtube video creator and being a streamer. Mr. Beast is not a streamer. He is a packaged video creator. PewDiePie is a reaction video creator who occasionally streams. They are not what people think of when they think of streamers.
To be a professional streamer usually takes a combination of talent and concentration that most people simply don't have. But to say that you can't become one? LOL.
The AVERAGE millionaire streamer on twitch is so painfully unedited that they end up getting banned a couple times a year for saying stupid things live on air. Twitch and their sponsors practically THROW money at them to spend an hour or two to sponsor content. There's an entire backend bounty system which is only available to partners which will pay you based on your audience size. I've seen a guy with 3K viewers get a $30K check for 3 hours worth of sponsored content.
I quit social media, but the problem is that in the modern dating world a lot of people care whether you have an Instagram and that sort of thing. I truly hate social media, but I find myself considering remaking it just to improve my dating life. It's kind of a depressing situation, to be honest.
Would that be an improvement, though? Do you really want a relationship with someone who cares if you have an active Instagram account? Feels like a great filter (heh) to weed out the chaff.
(If you're just casually dating around / looking for hookups, then sure, do what you think you need to do.)
Twitter/X is fantastic for breaking news. For example during the first assassination attempt you would find new details on there that would then appear on MSM newscasts one to two hours later.
It also helps immensely to curate lists of interests to help filter out the noise and politics.
This is what I always wonder. Any time I see a news story (even on MSM) marked as "BREAKING" or "EXCLUSIVE", I'm like... who cares? That just means you either a) rushed to publish without making sure you got your details right, or b) you paid someone to not shop their story around to other outlets (which is gross).
My life would not have been impacted in the least knowing about the Trump assassination attempt a few hours later (or even the next day), rather than minutes after it happened.
The MSM has enough problems these days with journalistic integrity and practices. I don't think the teeming mobs on Twitter are an improvement, though.
Unless it's regarding immediate local emergency that you might need to respond to, breaking news has zero value besides a brain tickle and something to talk about.
If you feel you have any kind of mood or attention challenges, as many now do, you might want to double check if it's something you should be optimizing for.
Hard agree. Nearly nothing outside your real personal life is so important it can't be learnt about tomorrow, or next week.
There are exceptions; if you have a flight booked that day and didn't learn about the Crowdstrike thing till you got there, that'll be a problem, but it would've been a problem regardless of your immediate knowledge of it.
It’s an excellent question, but I do think you can get valuable insights from seeing how a major political event unfolds in real time, as long as it’s something you’re interested in. It can help you to view the subsequent news bulletins with a critical eye and interest and it can give you a richer depth of understanding than you would otherwise get.
If it’s an event that you’re not particularly interested in, then there’s not much value in getting details in advance.
Another thing, it’s not just hours. Sometimes it’s months (or in rare cases years) before a recurring topic on social media finally makes it to the news, because it’s controversial/narrative-defying, so it takes them a long time to work out how to talk about it. I don’t want to mention specific examples because it would be distracting, but there are a few topics I see mentioned daily/weekly on the news today that were pretty much absent a few years ago, yet were heavily discussed on Twitter at the time, and I am very glad I was aware of them.
There is a marked difference between "Breaking new developments" and misinformation being spread to juice engagement.
Nobody should pretend that Twitter is a place where accurate information travels at light speed. It is in desperate need of moderation and being run by a man with clear monetary incentive to mislead the public.
Although the line can get interesting. When I was active on Reddit I would argue that Reddit was not SM. From my perspective, Reddit was end stage web forum technology and link aggregators
All the bespoke forums of the late 90s and early 2000s died for the most part and there is now a subreddit for every niche hobby that used to have a forum
This stuff all predates Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, livejournal, that I would argue were new paradigms and the start of what we know as social media
However to anyone not online during those times, Reddit is just another site where people post details of their own lives. Reddit responded by adding profiles and followers and all kinds of pseudo SM features
I haven’t used it much but I think the main feed is very algorithmic, so you swipe for your dopamine without paying much attention to the profile. Because of that it’s not really tied to your identity in quite the same way.
It also seems quite professionalised in that the big content producers fill the feed.
There’s also something about it being video which makes it feel harmful but in a different way than a text based platform.
I tend to think of TikTok as more of an entertainment platform rather than peer to peer social media.
I’m not the target audience though so could be wide of the mark!
I quit any non small community social media a few years ago and it's been really nice. My tolerance for trolls and thinking with people on the Internet is has dropped away down and I think I'm better for it.
Programmers (cs students, "engineers") are one of the most pompous group of people who think their ability to #include <stdio.h> gives them some special ability to speak about efficiency, physics, math (other than your run of the mill discrete or remedial linear algebra) or pretty much any other topic on the face of the Earth.
Don't worry about your active Facebook account. People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends). They are outliers not the rule.
>People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends).
What credentials do you hold to make this claim? It better not be a CS degree.
I quit social media over 10 years ago, already having been a conscientious objector to Facebook and other platforms, much to the chagrin of my classmates who didn't understand my idiosyncratic positions on digital privacy, attention span, banality, and brainrot.
It's gotten to the point where I view the narcissism of the modern 21st century social media user the same way I would view a crack addict smoking a pipe out in public, unable to pry their hands away from their glowing plastic rectangles, swiping incessantly in the hopes of getting just another dose of sweet dopamine with every refresh, or some artificial symbol of social validation in the form of more likes and upvotes.
Somehow even in the wake of the Snowden revelations people are still ambling off of cliffs for fear of being left behind by the herd of lemmings. I feel vindicated as the years go on with every news story or opinion piece I read about (dissatisfaction with) the growing encroachment of surveillance capitalism, ad-tech and social media into our personal lives, and all for what? Some shitty memes and "influencers" peddling their garbage through thinly veiled advertisements?
When I am exposed to mainstream social media content I can't believe people subject themselves to the digital equivalent of ass-to-mouth that is the brainrot of the algorithmically driven social media feed. If "you are what you eat" were analogized to an information diet, most social media users would be consuming informational shit and consequently producing the same 140-byte thoughts or reciting the same 5-second memes.
If the attention economy is indeed a real concept, there is a premium for the ability to hold your concentration on something for more than half an hour and produce thoughts whose complexity is more than just a few bytes.
I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”. The incentives are perverse, there is an inherent conflict of interest in the business model and there is an intermediary between the user and information/community they want to participate in. This leads to most problems we see in legacy, ad-based, social media.
Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry. In life we do not let everyone into the friend circle. Having a barrier to entry model may work well for an online community, although this remains to be seen. Were there any successful experiments with paid social media?
I would rephrase it further to "quit ad-based media." The problems and conflicts of interest introduced by an ad-based revenue model were discussed long before the advent of the modern Web and social media; the relationship between the advertisement industry and mass media (television, radio) was already discussed in depth in the late 20th century [0]:
[0] https://archive.org/details/manfacturingconsentnahomchomsky/...I would love to pay for social software on a coop model (like a food coop, etc) — we would be "members" and, theoretically, we pay a small monthly fee that covers the costs of hosting and platform development. I've tried to think about what I would want that to look like — spoiler, something different than the model of "posting + reactions" that is so familiar from twitter+fb — but then when I think about the barriers to entry for a project like that, even though the technological part might not be that difficult (assuming it was Less Than Web Scale), I just give up hoping for it.
I've been following a lot of the bluesky + mastodon stuff but I don't like that their basic model of social interaction is just a clone of Twitter.
I can't remember the name of it, but over a decade ago I saw something like this - it was a single Linux server shared by (I think) hundreds of people. Really trying to do the multi-user paradigm. They advertised it as a private kind of social network, it was invite-only and I think you had to pay to help keep the server lights on.
Hopefully by posting something incorrect, A Person On The Internet Who Knows Better will come along and provide the correct details. :)
Tilde.club nearly meets your definition.[1] It's at least 1 decade and 15 days old, but it appears it's open to join for anyone.[2]
[1] https://tilde.club/ [2] https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...
Maybe SDF?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_Syste...
https://sdf.org/
This is called a forum.
We also do not let people into the friend circle just because they have money (I hope). IMHO healthiest "social media" I could think is interest groups. They eventually need some kind of donation from one or more people, but with no or minimal barriers.
It’s not a coincidence that Facebook started out as a college-only social network. That was the real barrier to entry.
> > Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry
This depends on the definition of success, the most successful as in impressive achievements goal reaching are the ones that are open to anybody who can get noticed and brought in. ANd in the social sense even open to the ones who are most capable of monopolizing the discourse and creating a buzz in the public square.
For example Trump did just that in 2016 and many tried to resist him, but in the end the GOP wants to be successful and opened itself to the guy who made the most noise in the public discourse and public square and made him the tip of the spear of the election effort.
Of course it feels pretty miserable knowing that you can be replaced at any time but I don't think there is an alternative or a solution thanks to a barrier to entry (or exit). Social groups that have a barrier to entry (and exit) such as marriage , when it deteriorates the barrier to entry (and exit) doesn't prevent the 2 people to just starting ignoring each other.
I won't advertise but I work for a company which holds a social media for cooking and recipes. Folks there are totally averse to those and based stuff.
It has been hard for the company. The owner decided the company will die before using ads (for many reasons). The paid plan is stupidly cheap and when people sign and use for a month they stick with the company for years.
But it is hard. Company laid off 80% of the team some time ago and is fighting to survive. I won't defend the owner or anyone, but things came to a point where people think they are not having consequences by giving infinite permission for being tracked all the time. They think if they are not logged they are not identified so they can't be exploited.
It sucks because no one appreciates that. Though I have my opinions about business and whatever I kinda appreciate for the company not running on money from ads and not collecting a single piece of user information which is not required for work.
(2016)
Especially important because most of his commentary focuses on the dominant social media paradigm of the time. Mastodon barely existed when this post went live, Mike Masnick was years from writing the paper that inspired Bluesky[0], and it would be strange if someone whose whole thing is getting away from social media kept up on new developments.
This post is an interesting historical artifact, but shouldn't be mistaken for contemporary commentary.
[0] https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
What's changed, though, really? I quit[0] social media near the end of 2019, and it greatly improved my mental health and life. While I haven't tried some of the newer options, I've kept up with new developments in the space. Nothing about the "new" social media platforms makes them at all attractive for me to take a second look and join back up.
If anything, things are worse. It's even more "algorithmic" and engagement-focused, continuing to promote outrage culture. Platforms like TikTok have turned addictive endless scrolling into a science. I know a few people who spend a significant number of hours of their days on TikTok and Twitter (ahem, sorry, "X"), and it just kinda makes me sad. (And I probably spend more time than is healthy on HN.)
[0] I still have my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, but I don't post to them anymore, and I'm signed out of them on all my devices (and I've deleted the mobile apps). I don't allow myself to ever sign in on mobile. Once every 6 months or so I'll sign into Facebook for some specific purpose (like looking up someone's contact information when it's for some reason not stored in any of my usual places). Out of curiosity I'll scroll down the feed, and it's just kinda crap. Stuff from people I don't actually follow, stuff from people I do follow but is kinda boring, and interestingly the feed is dominated by the same 15 or so people (even though I'd amassed a little over 1k "friends" before I quit). I limit myself to no more than five minutes, and I don't post, comment, or even like anything.
The last time I signed into Instagram (probably two or three years ago), the experience was awful. I remember when it was just a reverse-chronological feed of the people I follow (and only the people I follow). But now (well, 2-3 years ago) the majority of items in my feed are either ads or promoted/reshared posts from people I don't follow at all. Stuff from people I follow is maybe one out of every five or six items. And it's all out of order, so I'd see something that someone posted a week ago, followed by, 20 items later, something that they posted a couple days ago. It's a shame; 2012 Instagram was such a beautiful platform.
So while yes, this article is now 8 years old, I don't think anything has changed for the better. The fundamental problems are still there, and have only gotten worse.
Mastodon and Bluesky are still such minor players (even though I enjoy these projects and am optimistic about their future) that I don’t see anywhere where this doesn’t pass for contemporary commentary.
Isn't Bluesky just a copy of Twitter from that era, anyway?
Related:
Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38720087 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)
Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16697004 - March 2018 (262 comments)
Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714509 - Feb 2017 (1 comment)
Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998698 - Nov 2016 (548 comments)
The NYT piece those were about is https://web.archive.org/web/20171114021224/https://www.nytim.... Not the same as OP but same topic, author, year.
He states:
> What the market values is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable.
> what the market dismisses are activities that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value. Well social media use is the epitome of an easy to replicate activity that does not produce a lot of value [...] by definition the market is not going to give those activieis a lot of value [...]."
Yet in the years since this TEDx talk we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.
> ... we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.
For most influencers, they're not the ones with the wealth and power. Many of them are barely getting by. They rent content houses, clothing, cars, and other things they need to put on their facade.
Pretty much all of the wealth and power is in the hands of the people that employ the influencers.
perhaps a decade or more ago? not now.
you will never become a streaming millionaire. talking heads like beast and pewdiepie employ literal armies of Hollywood editors and writers. For every organically grown insufferable content monster created on Youtube, ten more are vat-grown by a billion dollar industry designed to shepherd you into a fantasy consumerist lifestyle.
These powerhouses of industry control the flow of capital at a level you will never be able to. they secure rights to music and video clips at rates you could never get, have tie-ins to major brands media and celebrities on day one, and are programmed with an endless firestorm of bots and preferential algorithmic treatment on every FAANG product in order to guarantee their success.
You are painfully unaware of the difference between being a Youtube video creator and being a streamer. Mr. Beast is not a streamer. He is a packaged video creator. PewDiePie is a reaction video creator who occasionally streams. They are not what people think of when they think of streamers.
To be a professional streamer usually takes a combination of talent and concentration that most people simply don't have. But to say that you can't become one? LOL.
The AVERAGE millionaire streamer on twitch is so painfully unedited that they end up getting banned a couple times a year for saying stupid things live on air. Twitch and their sponsors practically THROW money at them to spend an hour or two to sponsor content. There's an entire backend bounty system which is only available to partners which will pay you based on your audience size. I've seen a guy with 3K viewers get a $30K check for 3 hours worth of sponsored content.
I quit social media, but the problem is that in the modern dating world a lot of people care whether you have an Instagram and that sort of thing. I truly hate social media, but I find myself considering remaking it just to improve my dating life. It's kind of a depressing situation, to be honest.
Would that be an improvement, though? Do you really want a relationship with someone who cares if you have an active Instagram account? Feels like a great filter (heh) to weed out the chaff.
(If you're just casually dating around / looking for hookups, then sure, do what you think you need to do.)
So, should I join so that I can quit?
The coming of the current cluster fuck was clear decades ago. Anyone who wasn't enamored by meme illiteracy never took that train...
Isn’t it on the decline yet?
Facebook is for boomers.
Twitter is weird and we all realised how pointless it is to spend time falling out on there.
Instagram feels a bit long in the tooth.
LinkedIn is a parody of itself.
Reddit feels like it’s growing but I think that avoids the worst of social media.
TikTok and YouTube shorts seem popular but aren’t really social media. It’s just time wasting junk.
All in all, social media feels like it peaked a while back.
Twitter/X is fantastic for breaking news. For example during the first assassination attempt you would find new details on there that would then appear on MSM newscasts one to two hours later.
It also helps immensely to curate lists of interests to help filter out the noise and politics.
Honest question, why is breaking news important? How exactly does knowing unsubstantiated details about an event immediately male one’s life better?
This is what I always wonder. Any time I see a news story (even on MSM) marked as "BREAKING" or "EXCLUSIVE", I'm like... who cares? That just means you either a) rushed to publish without making sure you got your details right, or b) you paid someone to not shop their story around to other outlets (which is gross).
My life would not have been impacted in the least knowing about the Trump assassination attempt a few hours later (or even the next day), rather than minutes after it happened.
The MSM has enough problems these days with journalistic integrity and practices. I don't think the teeming mobs on Twitter are an improvement, though.
Unless it's regarding immediate local emergency that you might need to respond to, breaking news has zero value besides a brain tickle and something to talk about.
If you feel you have any kind of mood or attention challenges, as many now do, you might want to double check if it's something you should be optimizing for.
Hard agree. Nearly nothing outside your real personal life is so important it can't be learnt about tomorrow, or next week.
There are exceptions; if you have a flight booked that day and didn't learn about the Crowdstrike thing till you got there, that'll be a problem, but it would've been a problem regardless of your immediate knowledge of it.
How is your life improved by getting that news minute by minute instead of an hour, or even a day, later?
It’s an excellent question, but I do think you can get valuable insights from seeing how a major political event unfolds in real time, as long as it’s something you’re interested in. It can help you to view the subsequent news bulletins with a critical eye and interest and it can give you a richer depth of understanding than you would otherwise get.
If it’s an event that you’re not particularly interested in, then there’s not much value in getting details in advance.
Another thing, it’s not just hours. Sometimes it’s months (or in rare cases years) before a recurring topic on social media finally makes it to the news, because it’s controversial/narrative-defying, so it takes them a long time to work out how to talk about it. I don’t want to mention specific examples because it would be distracting, but there are a few topics I see mentioned daily/weekly on the news today that were pretty much absent a few years ago, yet were heavily discussed on Twitter at the time, and I am very glad I was aware of them.
or indeed, not at all? :)
There is a marked difference between "Breaking new developments" and misinformation being spread to juice engagement.
Nobody should pretend that Twitter is a place where accurate information travels at light speed. It is in desperate need of moderation and being run by a man with clear monetary incentive to mislead the public.
> Nobody should pretend that Twitter is a place where accurate information travels at light speed.
I agree, but I think a lot of people who use it view it that way.
> It is in desperate need of moderation and being run by a man with clear monetary incentive to mislead the public.
I don't think you wrote that the way you meant to.
I don't know how you can possibly say TikTok isn't social media. That seems like a rather absurd claim. What's your justification?
TikTok is 100% social media
Although the line can get interesting. When I was active on Reddit I would argue that Reddit was not SM. From my perspective, Reddit was end stage web forum technology and link aggregators
All the bespoke forums of the late 90s and early 2000s died for the most part and there is now a subreddit for every niche hobby that used to have a forum
This stuff all predates Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, livejournal, that I would argue were new paradigms and the start of what we know as social media
However to anyone not online during those times, Reddit is just another site where people post details of their own lives. Reddit responded by adding profiles and followers and all kinds of pseudo SM features
I haven’t used it much but I think the main feed is very algorithmic, so you swipe for your dopamine without paying much attention to the profile. Because of that it’s not really tied to your identity in quite the same way.
It also seems quite professionalised in that the big content producers fill the feed.
There’s also something about it being video which makes it feel harmful but in a different way than a text based platform.
I tend to think of TikTok as more of an entertainment platform rather than peer to peer social media.
I’m not the target audience though so could be wide of the mark!
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I quit social media after the Snowden revelations.
I remember thinking it likely that many people would. My naivety knew few bounds at the time.
I quit any non small community social media a few years ago and it's been really nice. My tolerance for trolls and thinking with people on the Internet is has dropped away down and I think I'm better for it.
Certainly feels better
>thinking with people on the Internet is has dropped away down
What?
Also, congrats for being less tolerant. I like that.
Programmers (cs students, "engineers") are one of the most pompous group of people who think their ability to #include <stdio.h> gives them some special ability to speak about efficiency, physics, math (other than your run of the mill discrete or remedial linear algebra) or pretty much any other topic on the face of the Earth.
Don't worry about your active Facebook account. People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends). They are outliers not the rule.
>People who make it a point to signal otherwise are just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends).
What credentials do you hold to make this claim? It better not be a CS degree.
Are these programmers in the room with us now?