I've completely quit social media except for LinkedIn, which I need for my work, and Reddit, which I selectively use for product recommendations and advice on my career and relationships. And also Twitter, through which I receive the latest research in my domain. And Instagram, which my girlfriend uses to send me memes and videos. Occasionally Facebook for event invitations. And this website.
It is social media, but I'd argue that it lacks the worst incentives of social media: monetization and ads, which lead to attention-hacking algorithms and regression to lowest common denominator content.
Eh, its monetized in a different way. YC has a vested interest in programmers being exposed to YC companies such that they might go work/start one of them.
Sure the occasional "Promoted post" is way less than say Reddit or mid-roll ads.
I would argue the defining factor of social media which separates it from blogs/forums/etc. is the ubiquitous feedback metrics, in the form of likes/downvotes/retweets/etc.
Imagine attending party where whenever you finished a sentence, everyone who was listening immediately responded with a silent thumbs up / thumbs down in response. Pretty dystopian. The Onion did a sketch illustrating the problem a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFpK_r-jEXg
By this definition, HN is halfway to being social media. There are metrics, but they aren't displayed publicly.
I never thought that votes, etc. would be that important to what defines social media and would have included forums in it. But if I think of social media as "that thing that's addicting", then yeah, the feedback metrics are what make it addicting.
Otherwise, I would think of "social media" as places where visitors get the opportunity to be equal participants. Anyone can post, anyone can comment in places like these (including forums), but in a blog only one can post and the rest comment.
And popularity metrics facilitate mob rule. Lone voices of dissent get steamrolled.
Reddit is especially bad, IMO. It's almost like it was designed as a confirmation bias engine.
The frustrating part is that voting systems also solve a genuine quality-filtering problem. HN does a good job of balancing the costs and benefits, but I suspect there are other viable approaches.
I agree with that, however I would consider large forums (especially those that arose after the rise of the Web- so not BBS- and those that were more than simply vBulletin/phpBB message boards) to be basically photo-social media, even if they predate the term and concept.
I think we need more forums outside of mega-communities like Reddit or even HN, but at least there are many that are still alive:
Also, things were going viral even before the mid-'00s when the concept consolidated. All Your Base and Star Wars Kid went viral before it was called that, even if they garnered a fraction of the mindshare of the general public. Even that dancing CGI baby qualifies.
How does it foster a community? I don't think I've connected with anyone on here beyond a single thread in the few years I've been around, and I consider myself a typical user
Not looking for a fight or anything. I'm just curious about different perspectives and definitions of social media. The responses so far have been interesting
Then wouldn't public access TV, call-in radio shows, or the news be social media as well since they typically involve many-to-many interactions? Or is there more to it?
Sure. It's probably more helpful to think of this (like almost all things) on a spectrum.
HN is definitely on the social media end of the spectrum. For example, all your listed examples have very hands-on and comprehensive, opinionated editorial control. HN has moderation, but not really editorial control per se.
> “I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.”
This is the crux of the matter. Social media isn’t real; it’s a type of video game for adults.
The unreality fosters the growth of so many other things which are even less concerned with truth: fake news, engagement bait, daily outrages, chasing followers in a vain attempt to “build a personal brand.” The vacuousness of influencer culture has only accelerated these trends since Newport wrote this post.
In some sense, some of us already live online essentially through these social networks. Almost always this means some level of addiction, with concomitant real life consequences.
Problem is that it is becoming a new reality. You can tune out, but you can't turn it off, and it (and society) will continue without it. And I say this as someone who thinks we should largely turn it off. Society will adapt, which means society is becoming something different.
I think you make valid points about the downsides of "influencer culture" and usage patterns of some forms of social media.
BUT.
I'm think the term "social media" is too broad to be useful in this kind of critique.
This conversation we're having is a bit meta, but it's also "real", to me. We both considered Cal Newport's stance, Matt Green shared some thoughts about it, and Chris Weekly responded to it.
Those are real people interacting in a potentially useful way.
Being "addicted" to ideas and conversations is not necessarily unhealthy.
/$.02
Unfortunately, it can be worth it. Having a social media audience can be very valuable to entrepreneurs. Someone who lives online with a personal brand can replace tens of thousands of dollars in ad spend with a single tweet.
As someone who hasn't had a social media presence for most of my adult life, and happy about that, I'm now seeing the downsides. I don't have Ivy League connections like some of my peers. Social media may be the only way I could build a network like the one they cultivated in university.
I agree with this, but it's worth noting the quote is from a journalist/blogger who was not talking about social media. He was talking about keeping up with a 24 hour news cycle by any means. The problem here isn't specific to social media. It's with overwhelming information flow, the vast majority of which is not actionable to the person consuming it. People come down with a type of awareness FOMO such that they feel like they need to know all things as they happen, even though the information is incomplete, often wrong, misleading, and doesn't impact their everyday real lives in any way.
This is what Andrew Sullivan was getting at. People should worry themselves with information that actually concerns and impacts their real lives. All else is entertainment. If it stops being entertaining and starts being anxiety-inducing, stop consuming it.
I have a pet theory as to why social media causes many people to feel like it's draining them, and why I avoid news on social media like the plague ... I also tend to mute or silence people that share political content (regardless of partisan affiliation).
Social media, unless you are trying to build a business, is ultimately offering the service of entertainment.
Even if you use Twitter or Facebook as your news aggregator, unless you're engaged in some kind of productive and time-scoped research project, you're doing this on your leisure time.
That means that you just got done work, or you're on a break, or you finally got the kids to sleep or finished all of your household chores and you're now in a position where you can "enjoy" a bit of leisure time.
Which means that you approach social media PRE-drained. You're already tired and you're looking for cute cat memes when what should happen ... you get hit with a rage-bait headline, or one of those douche bags that vote differently from you just posted an opinion about a controversial topic that you have very strong feelings about.
We (on HN) all know that the algorithm is trying to promote what gets engagement, and anything that provokes a strong emotional reaction is likely to trigger engagement.
My thesis is that people turn to social media when they are already in an emotional state that is incredibly inappropriate for engaging with "serious" topics on a rational level.
So everyone just gets angrier and angrier at each other and you leave social media feeling even more exhausted than you were before you signed on looking for entertainment to spend your precious leisure time with.
And then you realize that you just wasted that short precious time that you needed to use for relaxation ... and if you don't do anything to rectify it then your stress levels just gradually creep up, your sleep starts to suffer, you might start to compensate with stress eating or consuming more alcohol or cannabis than is healthy and it just spirals.
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.
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.
>I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”.
Facebook was terrible for your well being a long time before they enshitified with adds. You may be too young to remember but likes were a hot commodity people would ruin their lives over without any outside help.
For myself I find push notification based social media to be completely cancerous, and pull based one only mildly so. One need only look at the trolls from usenet to see people obsessed with nothing but text based emails.
Metafilter comes to mind. Pay $5 one time for lifetime access. After about 20 years it has dwindled to a white star, but there is still a nuhhet of community left there. Amazing what a token cost does to weed out spam accounts, twinks, etc.
Hackernews is such a social circle. Besides the incredible moderation done by @dang I think the artificial barriers to interacting with the community are what make this a successful forum. I seem to recall needing at least 5 submission karma before you can comment - and that means 5 votes from _other_ people.
Not sure about "paid", but there are plenty of examples of communities with barriers to entry which are successful and long-lived, e.g. private trackers (the forums in whatcd were excellent), very niche/technical interest communities, etc.
> > 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 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 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.
If the company you work for REALLY does behave like that, you SHOULD DEFINITELY advertise it. Companies like this must be acknowledged and celebrated. The owner must be a really good person.
I mean can the owner compromise and just do ads based on the content on the page? Those weren’t so bad in the “before times”. Maybe that just doesn’t bring in enough cash as ads that follow you around 10 different sites trying to sell you the same thing, but it seems like giving up free money and might be worth a shot.
I was one of those security/privacy people in the 00's who declined to join facebook or do any of the social media stuff. Feels like it was the right call.
Meta was the best possible company name for the social media machine, because when you turn it all off, you really do become less meta.
I'd suspect it's a bit like being a vegan, where it's a self-imposed constrant that makes you aloof from others and makes them treat you like an exception. It reduces some of the invites you get, and you just aren't up on the news about your friend groups as a result. We imagine it signals some kind of purity or difference, as though to say we're not like those regular IT people, maybe there's an air of mystery about what we might know, but it's just kind of fussy and it creates a polarizing filter where people really have to like you a lot to put up with the conditions you put on hanging out.
I still see the internet as a machine I operate for money and entertainment, and not the substrate of my identity or reality. This is also a fairly masculine coded view, as it dismisses the public sphere of gossip and narratives as separate from a Real made of consequences and competence, where the internet is not a dominion of truth the way real friendships are. It sounds marginal in the current discourse, but really there are still operators around who know ways out of this hallucination a lot of people were born into and can't see the edges of. It's not a mystery, you just turn the phone off for a bit and then live and relate according to the results.
I was one of those technology skids at that time and had more hope for the world. It was a time before I learned ****** was an *** *** *********** job. Before I watched Ron Paul collect the largest grassroots donation drive ('Moneybomb') and then his reach get clubbed like a baby seal by the establishment thereafter. It made me realize The Farm is real and what slop most Farm animals enjoy is just that: slop, prepared in a manner which makes the animal more useful/productive relative to cost. I also realize that there are complexities to ascending to the class of Farmer (or merely Farm-hand) which call for the cybernetic sentimental feedback system being built. How do you manage a farm of human livestock and not get killed? How do you do it in such a way that you can plan a hundred years out and hand it all off to your choice grandson(s)?
I’ve been saying for a while that I expect the next big “veganeque” movement to be some kind of modern luddites. Maybe not as detached from modern society as the Amish, but a more 90s-like tech scene.
No cell phone on them at all times (but maybe some equivalent to a car phone/pay phone), placing the restriction to consciously “log on” to the internet, no (at least ad-based) social media, and maybe keep their online persona to appearances on mostly decentralized forums.
Personally, I know it would benefit me to detach from the one social media platform I have left and am fully addicted to (YouTube), but it’s hard when that is the platform that videos are stored on (though if I really cared, I would only subscribe to channels via RSS and watch them or individually search for things I wish to see instead of infinitely scrolling.) It’s also hard to keep up with group activities or the best classifieds listings or local music/arts events without Facebook.
I don’t believe that there will ever be a true competitor for services that can operate at scale like Facebook and YouTube (especially the latter), but I expect these modern luddites to accept this and reject those platforms even if it is socially ostracizing (much like veganism). To fill the void, they’ll create platforms and devices for them specifically. I imagine the goal of the platforms will be to avoid unnecessary bloat and keep hosting/maintenance costs low, which seems relatively easy if sucking every last second of retention out the user is not financially incentivized like it is in ad-based platforms. I expect the hardware to prioritize cost-efficiency, repairability, and a minimal feature set that doesn’t require frequent upgrades.
Then I imagine for a time, the movement will become trendy and people will begin flooding those platforms. The challenge then becomes to avoid capitalizing on the influx and keep the initial morals in mind and not start showing ads/trying to increase retention time. I think those projects may need to be decentralized and/or established as nonprofits with stated non-retractable tenets from their creation (“We shall never serve advertisements”, “We shall prioritize the distribution of useful information above all else”, etc.)
It’s a utopian view of the future, but I think it is possible. I think we’ll hit a day when we realize that spending 10+ hours a day staring at glowing rectangles is not bringing us closer to real fulfillment. I expect that as long as capitalism is the dominant economic force, businesses will always embrace the newest technology to avoid a massive gap in their output when compared to competitors, and the tech companies will always be pushing new addictive technology as long as it isn’t globally regulated, but after work, the people will wake up to the fact that they at least have a choice on whether or not they spend the rest of their leisure time staring at glowing rectangles.
Quit social media if you cannot maintain a healthy relationship with it. But please do not just pull the plug because someone on the Internet told you it would improve your life. This is far from a guarantee.
I quit Facebook a few years back because of enough conversations on HN convincing me it would be a positive choice. It was not, and I regret it. I've since rejoined FB but my network of friends did not completely recover.
People here will tell you that FB friends you don't go out of your way to contact via not-FB methods aren't really friends. They are full of shit. That may be true for them.
I think you're hinting at a hidden problem: our vocabulary has not caught up with the way social media has evolved, and we need new terms.
People actually LIKE, perhaps even need, the social aspects of social media. But that's become such a small part of the experience for many people- the ads and attention-hacking with cheap stimuli burying the positive interactions.
I don't want to quit my connections, as you say. But I do want to quit this daily hypnosis that reels is trying to subject me to.
I would call that latter something more like "possessive media" - it needs to have your attention at all times and needs every scrap of data it can gather about you. I want less possessive media and more social media.
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.
It's very enlightening to fast from social media for an extended period of time (say about a month). If you return after that, you can almost feel the shift in your head. It's something I've experienced first hand.
As someone who’s strongly considering just this, could you describe the changes you felt? And — if you again returned to social media for a prolonged period — whether and how quickly those positive changes reverted?
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.
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.
Some other comments are along these lines but I’ll offer an anecdote.
In college I was wearing a Halo biking shirt in the computer lab. A female friend remarked, “no one is going to date you if you wear that shirt.” Another friend nearby heard and quipped back, “or only the right girls will date him wearing that shirt.”
You should view your preferences more as a filter. While you should be open to new experiences which may change those presences, if something makes you truly unhappy, you are better finding a partner who won’t force that in your life.
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.)
My almost post-social media life has been interesting. I ditched Twitter, came back to it briefly, then ditched it again when it was purchased because I found my mental health growing increasingly fragile with the constant outrage, the need to keep track of who the main character of the day was or risk the ire of your circle, and the increasing filtering of my timeline.
I quit Facebook, other than keeping an account for announcing major life events to the older people who were still on it, because I was frustrated that I never received any posts from family or close friends in the heavily filtered timeline, I kept receiving time-sensitive posts (say about a hurricane event) for weeks after the post was no longer relevant, and Meta's increasingly metastasized privacy practices.
I joined Mastodon and found a calm, down to earth, almost boring place. The decentralized nature of the platform certainly means there are some not-at-all boring parts of the Mastoverse, but it felt more like being in an old-style forum than anything else. I'm still there, though my participation isn't significant.
I tried Blue Sky because all my Twitter people were there ... and it was IMMEDIATELY like hitting a drug after being off it for a while. It was all about main characters and outrage.
For me, in hindsight, it was like sitting in front of a slot machine, feeding in quarters, waiting for one to win. And watching people who did win inevitably milkshake duck themselves out of favor. It was briefly an amazing, buzzy world to share both humor and excitement about whatever events you wanted, but that certainly didn't last.
Where is this magic side of the Fediverse? What I saw: Rust lunatics, hardline Communists or straight up Nazis, the most extreme alphabet people or the most extreme red-pillers. And many of them have the overlapping topics of questionable *orn or even more questionable anime content. Every time I get a random post from a an a Fediverse instance and I dare check it's main feed to see what it's like, it's always (always!) a dumpster fire.
I don't like Twitter much but if I had to pick one or the other it would be a no-brainer.
Social media is not problematic if you engage with intent and use alternative sources to check claims. People unfortunate to never have been trained in Defense Against The Dark Arts of Propaganda and Manipulation are at risk but that's always been true, even when all media was of the printed sort. Basic critical analysis skills are vital to survival and mental health in this world.
By 'engage with intent' I just mean not being a passive absorber of the stream of content that's being promoted at whatever site, but instead always have some focus on a particular topic that interests you. Incidentally I notice many of the 'quit social media' stories are published in outlets like the NYTimes which would instead like you to be a passive, well-conditioned absorber of their content, and hence off their advertising stream.
The corporation is run for profit, it doesn't care about the collateral damage it may cause as long as it doesn't impact the bottom line.
> Tenured professors with status in a discipline can tune out the world and do "deep work" peers recognize as "important" before it is done (with accompanying ivory-tower/angels-on-pinhead risks).
> But a free agent, with no institutional safety net, no underwriting of exploratory expeditions by disciplinary consensus, and no research grants, cannot afford this luxury.
Where does one advertise these days if not social media? Where does one learn about local goings-on outside of their _immediate_ circle of family/close friends/colleagues if not social media?
With a small local business, social media gives an audience. If you're selling anything visually captivating, it performs well in these spaces. We sell cut flowers on the side, so…
I don't ask these questions out of support of Instagram or Facebook, but I stop in there regularly because I don't know to learn a little bit about the greater community around me. My life is busy enough with work/family.
The cost of all this is being exposed to a lot of attention bait and I honestly don't like how I feel using it sometimes. But we've built up the social media ecosystem as a pillar of society at this point.
> Where does one learn about local goings-on outside [...] if nor social media?
Imagine, there are people who don't care that much besides their family/friends circle. Maybe some newspaper/-site from time to time, but why cope with all the other stuff too all the time? Life goes on too if one doesn't know abou the latest stuff.
Imagine there were hundreds or thousands of year of humanity you didn't know how your neighbour is except you walked there.
At least that's fine for me. I don't miss social media (besides HN), and I don't miss anything.
It depends heavily on where you are in life and what demographics you belong to. If you're a guy in your 40s with a wife and kids and a white picket fence there's probably no harm in quitting. I was drawn to social media (and earlier forms, like forums and IRC) because I grew up in a backwards, repressive rural community and was outcasted in school and was able to find "my people" online. Online social communities are how a lot of people who are rejected by society due to disability, sexual orientation etc. get all of their positive social interaction from.
> 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.
Instagram is a must if you want to get any real benefit out of using dating apps in 2024. The only way to talk to anybody without paying is to look at the profile, get their instagram url, and talk over there. I'm an old millennial who basically only uses HN for social media, and unfortunately IG is a must have.
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.
The elephant in the room for me is that the person who bought Twitter and keeps shitposting also keeps launching rockets into space and landing them back, among other things that fall into the category of “how the fuck are we going to pull this off?”
I don’t know who Cal is and I have no idea what Deep Work he’s done since he quit social media, but, best of luck to the lad.
I don't use any of facebook, instagram, LinkedIn, tiktok, X, bluesky, mastodon, snap, ... and it's not even hard. On the rare occasions I took a look at those I found them boring beyond believe. Even mastodon following people I am actually interested in feels like a 90% waste of time.
Social media is about exploiting gossip and social comparison to make money. It has been from the start a stupid habit with no redeeming qualities. However, after Zuck released Llamma and other AI models for free, i consider it a fair tax on stupidity that is helping to advance frontier technology
Several of the comments here certainly have some superiority complex issues as well as what would appear isolation issues. You seem cynical towards a large majority of modern society. If you need a hug, I’m here.
That may be but it doesn't take much page turning in a history book to find plenty of instances where society has been very wrong and not even in the distant past.
Society changes slowly. The iterative speed of computers, the iterative speed of feedback on a global communications network based on those computers is new, it has many orders of magnitude faster response times than society's ability to adapt to the changes it brings and the systemic study of human behavior over years and years leading to mathematical models of behavior and responses has created massive information asymmetry in society and the scale of manipulation a small group of people can leverage is astounding, being skeptical of society's value propositions seems in order.
I'm trying to learn to use RSS to replace some of my social media use. I recommend RSS Guard, it seems to be the best client around. Liferea and Thunderbird are good options, too.
I use social media merely for distraction. Over the years I gained nearly zero benefit from using it. Shallow connections, useful looking useless content.
I'd reckon the median user is not someone who has been "publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week" at any point of their life and that the most likely risk is mindless consumption rather than endless production.
But just quit following random strangers on the Internet, keep social media as a way to maintain your irw network of relations, and you'll usually be alright.
Sure, then we can discuss about the inherent issues of the platforms (which are many), but first one has to exploit their own agency to the utmost degree.
I would say he is write about LinkedIn, TikTok, Snap, Meta and its associated gram's, threads and face... BUT - HN has a different vibe, this is a community with sharing knowledge and information - on HN, I never doom scroll - there is genuine interaction and useful content. To some extent X provides useful updates from the main AI labs, so it is knowing how to use it and not be used by it.
It’s all the same. HN is just smaller, but before Reddit disabled 3rd party apps HN was even more focused and, IMO, a little less startup/growth hacking focused.
I did, deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X). And it helped me a lot to gain back my inner peace. My meditation was deeper, more profound, I genuinely gained back my inner peace. The constant bombardement with posts made to boost the ego of people is toxic for the consumer of these images / texts.
But then, in the context of the Gaza conflict, I realized that X is a very good source to follow intellectuals, thinkers, journalits whom I wouldn't read otherwise in Germany, where anyone is vilified who even wears a Kefiyeh. When you see how our western media frames, justifies, whitewashes a conflict caracterised as a genocide by many scholars, we need other platforms to hear those voices.
Now this sounds like the alt right that wants its platforms. But hear me out. There are intellectuals who show the headlines, the framing, and you cannot help but think that Noam Chomsky's book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media", written in 1988, is more relevant than ever.
X has the capacity to show different perspectives and can be invaluable. But it's also a curse exploited by many. Russia, China, Iran, but also our allies. See this for instance[1].
Agree with everything in your comment except I assume Reddit is better than X (I don't use X for other reasons, but occasionally see things posted from there on Reddit or Instagram).
But worth noting, you've presumably been using HN since 2016 which is also "social media" :P
I’m about 9 months off social media (not including Hackernews, if you consider that SM). I have no regrets whatsoever. I’m in my late 20’s so SM came into my sphere when I was around 16. I haven’t quite “grown up with it”, but it’s been an omnipresent force for most of my teenage and adult life.
> I am better at making time to catch up with the people I really care about, be that in-person or over WhatsApp.
> When I do catch up with someone, I genuinely have no idea what’s been going on in their life and that makes the catch up a lot more enjoyable and engaging. I haven’t passively kept up to date on their every movement through Instagram stories or Tweets like some kind of ghostly stalker. The best example of this that I can give is that my partner and I got engaged to be married ~4 months ago. Nothing posted on SM, just WhatsApp messages to close friends and family. I get to keep reliving the joy of telling people and witnessing the ecstatic surprise and pure love on their faces each time I catch up with someone I haven’t seen for a while.
> I am much more aware of just how much everyone uses their phones. Take a look around you. Sitting on the bus, waiting in a queue, riding an escalator, pissing at a urinal. Our minds are being constantly bombarbed with mostly useless, inane shite. Cat videos, stories of that person you went to school with 10 years ago doing stupid drunk things, misinformation from your scary uncle on Facebook etc. I let my mind wander more and it feels all the better for it.
I quit social media over 10 years ago, already having been a conscientious objector to Facebook and other platforms, much to the confusion 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 did this without having to get inspiration from others. And I did it at a young age (under 18), when all my friends and the world were flocking to social media and spilling their thoughts and PII everywhere. I have nothing, and have had nothing ever since (discounting HN).
People are sheep, and people are stupid. Most people waste their lives looking at a mass fake digital mask of their peers, and people they don’t even know.
Myself on the other hand, I spend almost all my spare time with people and animals I love, studying, reading books, and thinking about bigger things.
You are what you consume, which makes most people morons. Same if you consume “the news”, care about celebrities.
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.
> just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends)
I have no facebook account. I choose to have relationships with my family members and distant friends through physical contact by meeting up and talking regularly on the phone. IMO typing short text messages to people and 'reacting' to theirs with emojis and thumbs up is not a real relationship.
I've completely quit social media except for LinkedIn, which I need for my work, and Reddit, which I selectively use for product recommendations and advice on my career and relationships. And also Twitter, through which I receive the latest research in my domain. And Instagram, which my girlfriend uses to send me memes and videos. Occasionally Facebook for event invitations. And this website.
But other than that I've totally quit.
The pressure to quit is so large I keep quitting daily
It's like looking in the mirror
What makes Hacker News a social media website?
It's an infinite feed of content with comments and ranking based on upvotes (aka likes)
It is social media, but I'd argue that it lacks the worst incentives of social media: monetization and ads, which lead to attention-hacking algorithms and regression to lowest common denominator content.
It still leverages social and internet points which for some is attention-hijacking enough.
> It still leverages social and internet points which for some is attention-hijacking enough.
The difference is it’s not deliberate, it’s just how they get us to rank training data for ChatGPT 5.
Eh, its monetized in a different way. YC has a vested interest in programmers being exposed to YC companies such that they might go work/start one of them.
Sure the occasional "Promoted post" is way less than say Reddit or mid-roll ads.
The ranking doesn’t seem to be based on likes alone.
For a real social media the content should be ranked by the likes of my peers, a feature non existent on HN
I would argue the defining factor of social media which separates it from blogs/forums/etc. is the ubiquitous feedback metrics, in the form of likes/downvotes/retweets/etc.
Imagine attending party where whenever you finished a sentence, everyone who was listening immediately responded with a silent thumbs up / thumbs down in response. Pretty dystopian. The Onion did a sketch illustrating the problem a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFpK_r-jEXg
By this definition, HN is halfway to being social media. There are metrics, but they aren't displayed publicly.
I never thought that votes, etc. would be that important to what defines social media and would have included forums in it. But if I think of social media as "that thing that's addicting", then yeah, the feedback metrics are what make it addicting.
Otherwise, I would think of "social media" as places where visitors get the opportunity to be equal participants. Anyone can post, anyone can comment in places like these (including forums), but in a blog only one can post and the rest comment.
IMO, the popularity metrics are the cause of the Lord of the Flies dynamics you so often see on Reddit, X, etc.
Popularity metrics facilitate popularity contests.
And popularity metrics facilitate mob rule. Lone voices of dissent get steamrolled.
Reddit is especially bad, IMO. It's almost like it was designed as a confirmation bias engine.
The frustrating part is that voting systems also solve a genuine quality-filtering problem. HN does a good job of balancing the costs and benefits, but I suspect there are other viable approaches.
HN is simply pre-Web 2.0 social media, a la Slashdot, Metafilter, the WELL, kuro5hin, etc.
IIRC, the term "social media" came about with Facebook/Twitter/Youtube. Before that, we had forums/blogs/wikis.
That was the sweet spot IMO. The days before things were constantly "going viral". Sometimes memetic speedbumps are a good thing.
I agree with that, however I would consider large forums (especially those that arose after the rise of the Web- so not BBS- and those that were more than simply vBulletin/phpBB message boards) to be basically photo-social media, even if they predate the term and concept.
I think we need more forums outside of mega-communities like Reddit or even HN, but at least there are many that are still alive:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41783682
Also, things were going viral even before the mid-'00s when the concept consolidated. All Your Base and Star Wars Kid went viral before it was called that, even if they garnered a fraction of the mindshare of the general public. Even that dancing CGI baby qualifies.
The fact that I come in it just to read comments
HN might seem more focused and professional than typical social media, but it fosters a community and interactions
How does it foster a community? I don't think I've connected with anyone on here beyond a single thread in the few years I've been around, and I consider myself a typical user
Not looking for a fight or anything. I'm just curious about different perspectives and definitions of social media. The responses so far have been interesting
I get that it may not feel as connected as other social platforms, but for me, it’s a place where people genuinely want to learn from each other
Media used to be few or one entity speaking to many
Social media is many people speaking to many
HN is social media
Then wouldn't public access TV, call-in radio shows, or the news be social media as well since they typically involve many-to-many interactions? Or is there more to it?
Sure. It's probably more helpful to think of this (like almost all things) on a spectrum.
HN is definitely on the social media end of the spectrum. For example, all your listed examples have very hands-on and comprehensive, opinionated editorial control. HN has moderation, but not really editorial control per se.
Viewing it as a spectrum makes a lot of sense.
Love the dedication to a ‘low-social-media’ life!
> “I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.”
This is the crux of the matter. Social media isn’t real; it’s a type of video game for adults.
The unreality fosters the growth of so many other things which are even less concerned with truth: fake news, engagement bait, daily outrages, chasing followers in a vain attempt to “build a personal brand.” The vacuousness of influencer culture has only accelerated these trends since Newport wrote this post.
In some sense, some of us already live online essentially through these social networks. Almost always this means some level of addiction, with concomitant real life consequences.
Is it really worth it?
Problem is that it is becoming a new reality. You can tune out, but you can't turn it off, and it (and society) will continue without it. And I say this as someone who thinks we should largely turn it off. Society will adapt, which means society is becoming something different.
I think you make valid points about the downsides of "influencer culture" and usage patterns of some forms of social media. BUT. I'm think the term "social media" is too broad to be useful in this kind of critique.
This conversation we're having is a bit meta, but it's also "real", to me. We both considered Cal Newport's stance, Matt Green shared some thoughts about it, and Chris Weekly responded to it. Those are real people interacting in a potentially useful way. Being "addicted" to ideas and conversations is not necessarily unhealthy. /$.02
Unfortunately, it can be worth it. Having a social media audience can be very valuable to entrepreneurs. Someone who lives online with a personal brand can replace tens of thousands of dollars in ad spend with a single tweet.
As someone who hasn't had a social media presence for most of my adult life, and happy about that, I'm now seeing the downsides. I don't have Ivy League connections like some of my peers. Social media may be the only way I could build a network like the one they cultivated in university.
I agree with this, but it's worth noting the quote is from a journalist/blogger who was not talking about social media. He was talking about keeping up with a 24 hour news cycle by any means. The problem here isn't specific to social media. It's with overwhelming information flow, the vast majority of which is not actionable to the person consuming it. People come down with a type of awareness FOMO such that they feel like they need to know all things as they happen, even though the information is incomplete, often wrong, misleading, and doesn't impact their everyday real lives in any way.
This is what Andrew Sullivan was getting at. People should worry themselves with information that actually concerns and impacts their real lives. All else is entertainment. If it stops being entertaining and starts being anxiety-inducing, stop consuming it.
> engagement bait, daily outrages,
I have a pet theory as to why social media causes many people to feel like it's draining them, and why I avoid news on social media like the plague ... I also tend to mute or silence people that share political content (regardless of partisan affiliation).
Social media, unless you are trying to build a business, is ultimately offering the service of entertainment.
Even if you use Twitter or Facebook as your news aggregator, unless you're engaged in some kind of productive and time-scoped research project, you're doing this on your leisure time.
That means that you just got done work, or you're on a break, or you finally got the kids to sleep or finished all of your household chores and you're now in a position where you can "enjoy" a bit of leisure time.
Which means that you approach social media PRE-drained. You're already tired and you're looking for cute cat memes when what should happen ... you get hit with a rage-bait headline, or one of those douche bags that vote differently from you just posted an opinion about a controversial topic that you have very strong feelings about.
We (on HN) all know that the algorithm is trying to promote what gets engagement, and anything that provokes a strong emotional reaction is likely to trigger engagement.
My thesis is that people turn to social media when they are already in an emotional state that is incredibly inappropriate for engaging with "serious" topics on a rational level.
So everyone just gets angrier and angrier at each other and you leave social media feeling even more exhausted than you were before you signed on looking for entertainment to spend your precious leisure time with.
And then you realize that you just wasted that short precious time that you needed to use for relaxation ... and if you don't do anything to rectify it then your stress levels just gradually creep up, your sleep starts to suffer, you might start to compensate with stress eating or consuming more alcohol or cannabis than is healthy and it just spirals.
A game where the "points" are likes, followers and engagement
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/...Amend according to your preferences, run it whenever something annoys you, throw it in a cron job, etc.
.bash_aliases:
alias blocksocials='(echo ""; echo "127.0.0.1 reddit.com"; echo "127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com") | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts > /dev/null'
alias unblocksocials='sudo sed -i "/reddit.com/d" /etc/hosts'
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.
>I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”.
Facebook was terrible for your well being a long time before they enshitified with adds. You may be too young to remember but likes were a hot commodity people would ruin their lives over without any outside help.
For myself I find push notification based social media to be completely cancerous, and pull based one only mildly so. One need only look at the trolls from usenet to see people obsessed with nothing but text based emails.
There is no safe dose.
It’s not a coincidence that Facebook started out as a college-only social network. That was the real barrier to entry.
Metafilter comes to mind. Pay $5 one time for lifetime access. After about 20 years it has dwindled to a white star, but there is still a nuhhet of community left there. Amazing what a token cost does to weed out spam accounts, twinks, etc.
Hackernews is such a social circle. Besides the incredible moderation done by @dang I think the artificial barriers to interacting with the community are what make this a successful forum. I seem to recall needing at least 5 submission karma before you can comment - and that means 5 votes from _other_ people.
Not sure about "paid", but there are plenty of examples of communities with barriers to entry which are successful and long-lived, e.g. private trackers (the forums in whatcd were excellent), very niche/technical interest communities, etc.
We do not filter real world friends based on them paying for arbitrary product.
https://wip.co/
> > 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.
> the incentives are perverse
The thing called Social Media is an unconstrained grift-circus peddling pure Barnumium. [1]
It attracts movers/actors who enjoy the incentives, as well as followers/gawkers who have trouble seeing that their time and reality have been stolen.
From The Fine Article:
"Finally [...] he quit, explaining: 'I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.'”
---
[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum
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.
> In life we do not let everyone into the friend circle
Thought that ended in high school. You have to be a real pos to not get invites to stuff...
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.
If the company you work for REALLY does behave like that, you SHOULD DEFINITELY advertise it. Companies like this must be acknowledged and celebrated. The owner must be a really good person.
I mean can the owner compromise and just do ads based on the content on the page? Those weren’t so bad in the “before times”. Maybe that just doesn’t bring in enough cash as ads that follow you around 10 different sites trying to sell you the same thing, but it seems like giving up free money and might be worth a shot.
I was one of those security/privacy people in the 00's who declined to join facebook or do any of the social media stuff. Feels like it was the right call. Meta was the best possible company name for the social media machine, because when you turn it all off, you really do become less meta.
I'd suspect it's a bit like being a vegan, where it's a self-imposed constrant that makes you aloof from others and makes them treat you like an exception. It reduces some of the invites you get, and you just aren't up on the news about your friend groups as a result. We imagine it signals some kind of purity or difference, as though to say we're not like those regular IT people, maybe there's an air of mystery about what we might know, but it's just kind of fussy and it creates a polarizing filter where people really have to like you a lot to put up with the conditions you put on hanging out.
I still see the internet as a machine I operate for money and entertainment, and not the substrate of my identity or reality. This is also a fairly masculine coded view, as it dismisses the public sphere of gossip and narratives as separate from a Real made of consequences and competence, where the internet is not a dominion of truth the way real friendships are. It sounds marginal in the current discourse, but really there are still operators around who know ways out of this hallucination a lot of people were born into and can't see the edges of. It's not a mystery, you just turn the phone off for a bit and then live and relate according to the results.
I was one of those technology skids at that time and had more hope for the world. It was a time before I learned ****** was an *** *** *********** job. Before I watched Ron Paul collect the largest grassroots donation drive ('Moneybomb') and then his reach get clubbed like a baby seal by the establishment thereafter. It made me realize The Farm is real and what slop most Farm animals enjoy is just that: slop, prepared in a manner which makes the animal more useful/productive relative to cost. I also realize that there are complexities to ascending to the class of Farmer (or merely Farm-hand) which call for the cybernetic sentimental feedback system being built. How do you manage a farm of human livestock and not get killed? How do you do it in such a way that you can plan a hundred years out and hand it all off to your choice grandson(s)?
It's probably easier on your social life to be a vegan, compared to not being on Facebook.
I’ve been saying for a while that I expect the next big “veganeque” movement to be some kind of modern luddites. Maybe not as detached from modern society as the Amish, but a more 90s-like tech scene.
No cell phone on them at all times (but maybe some equivalent to a car phone/pay phone), placing the restriction to consciously “log on” to the internet, no (at least ad-based) social media, and maybe keep their online persona to appearances on mostly decentralized forums.
Personally, I know it would benefit me to detach from the one social media platform I have left and am fully addicted to (YouTube), but it’s hard when that is the platform that videos are stored on (though if I really cared, I would only subscribe to channels via RSS and watch them or individually search for things I wish to see instead of infinitely scrolling.) It’s also hard to keep up with group activities or the best classifieds listings or local music/arts events without Facebook.
I don’t believe that there will ever be a true competitor for services that can operate at scale like Facebook and YouTube (especially the latter), but I expect these modern luddites to accept this and reject those platforms even if it is socially ostracizing (much like veganism). To fill the void, they’ll create platforms and devices for them specifically. I imagine the goal of the platforms will be to avoid unnecessary bloat and keep hosting/maintenance costs low, which seems relatively easy if sucking every last second of retention out the user is not financially incentivized like it is in ad-based platforms. I expect the hardware to prioritize cost-efficiency, repairability, and a minimal feature set that doesn’t require frequent upgrades.
Then I imagine for a time, the movement will become trendy and people will begin flooding those platforms. The challenge then becomes to avoid capitalizing on the influx and keep the initial morals in mind and not start showing ads/trying to increase retention time. I think those projects may need to be decentralized and/or established as nonprofits with stated non-retractable tenets from their creation (“We shall never serve advertisements”, “We shall prioritize the distribution of useful information above all else”, etc.)
It’s a utopian view of the future, but I think it is possible. I think we’ll hit a day when we realize that spending 10+ hours a day staring at glowing rectangles is not bringing us closer to real fulfillment. I expect that as long as capitalism is the dominant economic force, businesses will always embrace the newest technology to avoid a massive gap in their output when compared to competitors, and the tech companies will always be pushing new addictive technology as long as it isn’t globally regulated, but after work, the people will wake up to the fact that they at least have a choice on whether or not they spend the rest of their leisure time staring at glowing rectangles.
Yet I still haven’t woken up myself.
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.
Quit social media if you cannot maintain a healthy relationship with it. But please do not just pull the plug because someone on the Internet told you it would improve your life. This is far from a guarantee.
I quit Facebook a few years back because of enough conversations on HN convincing me it would be a positive choice. It was not, and I regret it. I've since rejoined FB but my network of friends did not completely recover.
People here will tell you that FB friends you don't go out of your way to contact via not-FB methods aren't really friends. They are full of shit. That may be true for them.
I think you're hinting at a hidden problem: our vocabulary has not caught up with the way social media has evolved, and we need new terms.
People actually LIKE, perhaps even need, the social aspects of social media. But that's become such a small part of the experience for many people- the ads and attention-hacking with cheap stimuli burying the positive interactions.
I don't want to quit my connections, as you say. But I do want to quit this daily hypnosis that reels is trying to subject me to.
I would call that latter something more like "possessive media" - it needs to have your attention at all times and needs every scrap of data it can gather about you. I want less possessive media and more social media.
Can you please tell us why leaving Facebook was not a positive choice for you?
Also why it is important that 'your network of friends recovers'?
(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?
It's very enlightening to fast from social media for an extended period of time (say about a month). If you return after that, you can almost feel the shift in your head. It's something I've experienced first hand.
As someone who’s strongly considering just this, could you describe the changes you felt? And — if you again returned to social media for a prolonged period — whether and how quickly those positive changes reverted?
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.
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.
Some other comments are along these lines but I’ll offer an anecdote.
In college I was wearing a Halo biking shirt in the computer lab. A female friend remarked, “no one is going to date you if you wear that shirt.” Another friend nearby heard and quipped back, “or only the right girls will date him wearing that shirt.”
You should view your preferences more as a filter. While you should be open to new experiences which may change those presences, if something makes you truly unhappy, you are better finding a partner who won’t force that in your life.
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.)
It reminds me when I was young thinking I couldn't get a date because I didn't have six pack abs.
Then when I got in really good shape I thought it was because I didn't make enough money.
When I started making money I thought it was because I wasn't tall enough.
There is no way having social media or not is mattering that much. It is just in your head.
If they care, they aren’t worth it - why date a sheep?
My almost post-social media life has been interesting. I ditched Twitter, came back to it briefly, then ditched it again when it was purchased because I found my mental health growing increasingly fragile with the constant outrage, the need to keep track of who the main character of the day was or risk the ire of your circle, and the increasing filtering of my timeline.
I quit Facebook, other than keeping an account for announcing major life events to the older people who were still on it, because I was frustrated that I never received any posts from family or close friends in the heavily filtered timeline, I kept receiving time-sensitive posts (say about a hurricane event) for weeks after the post was no longer relevant, and Meta's increasingly metastasized privacy practices.
I joined Mastodon and found a calm, down to earth, almost boring place. The decentralized nature of the platform certainly means there are some not-at-all boring parts of the Mastoverse, but it felt more like being in an old-style forum than anything else. I'm still there, though my participation isn't significant.
I tried Blue Sky because all my Twitter people were there ... and it was IMMEDIATELY like hitting a drug after being off it for a while. It was all about main characters and outrage.
For me, in hindsight, it was like sitting in front of a slot machine, feeding in quarters, waiting for one to win. And watching people who did win inevitably milkshake duck themselves out of favor. It was briefly an amazing, buzzy world to share both humor and excitement about whatever events you wanted, but that certainly didn't last.
I don't miss it.
Where is this magic side of the Fediverse? What I saw: Rust lunatics, hardline Communists or straight up Nazis, the most extreme alphabet people or the most extreme red-pillers. And many of them have the overlapping topics of questionable *orn or even more questionable anime content. Every time I get a random post from a an a Fediverse instance and I dare check it's main feed to see what it's like, it's always (always!) a dumpster fire.
I don't like Twitter much but if I had to pick one or the other it would be a no-brainer.
Social media is not problematic if you engage with intent and use alternative sources to check claims. People unfortunate to never have been trained in Defense Against The Dark Arts of Propaganda and Manipulation are at risk but that's always been true, even when all media was of the printed sort. Basic critical analysis skills are vital to survival and mental health in this world.
By 'engage with intent' I just mean not being a passive absorber of the stream of content that's being promoted at whatever site, but instead always have some focus on a particular topic that interests you. Incidentally I notice many of the 'quit social media' stories are published in outlets like the NYTimes which would instead like you to be a passive, well-conditioned absorber of their content, and hence off their advertising stream.
The corporation is run for profit, it doesn't care about the collateral damage it may cause as long as it doesn't impact the bottom line.
Would love to hear Venkatesh Rao / Cal Newport discuss this at some point: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/against-waldenpondin...
Another related post: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo...
From the second link:
> Tenured professors with status in a discipline can tune out the world and do "deep work" peers recognize as "important" before it is done (with accompanying ivory-tower/angels-on-pinhead risks).
> But a free agent, with no institutional safety net, no underwriting of exploratory expeditions by disciplinary consensus, and no research grants, cannot afford this luxury.
Where does one advertise these days if not social media? Where does one learn about local goings-on outside of their _immediate_ circle of family/close friends/colleagues if not social media?
With a small local business, social media gives an audience. If you're selling anything visually captivating, it performs well in these spaces. We sell cut flowers on the side, so…
I don't ask these questions out of support of Instagram or Facebook, but I stop in there regularly because I don't know to learn a little bit about the greater community around me. My life is busy enough with work/family.
The cost of all this is being exposed to a lot of attention bait and I honestly don't like how I feel using it sometimes. But we've built up the social media ecosystem as a pillar of society at this point.
> Where does one learn about local goings-on outside [...] if nor social media?
Imagine, there are people who don't care that much besides their family/friends circle. Maybe some newspaper/-site from time to time, but why cope with all the other stuff too all the time? Life goes on too if one doesn't know abou the latest stuff.
Imagine there were hundreds or thousands of year of humanity you didn't know how your neighbour is except you walked there.
At least that's fine for me. I don't miss social media (besides HN), and I don't miss anything.
One way: You make a list of the venues and organizations that host the things you are interested in, you go to those events, and you talk to people.
> Where does one learn about local goings-on
I subscribed to my local NHPR newsletter that tells me local events. There is also local news, newspaper, or radio.
He still advertises on social media. He still uses Facebook for his courses.
He just uses his wife's account.
I'm 36 and somehow I simply avoided social media for the most part. At least never used platforms like facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc.
It all just seemed like a time waster and not really anything interesting.
I use sites like this of course, and I suppose that is some form of social media though.
It depends heavily on where you are in life and what demographics you belong to. If you're a guy in your 40s with a wife and kids and a white picket fence there's probably no harm in quitting. I was drawn to social media (and earlier forms, like forums and IRC) because I grew up in a backwards, repressive rural community and was outcasted in school and was able to find "my people" online. Online social communities are how a lot of people who are rejected by society due to disability, sexual orientation etc. get all of their positive social interaction from.
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.
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.
Instagram is a must if you want to get any real benefit out of using dating apps in 2024. The only way to talk to anybody without paying is to look at the profile, get their instagram url, and talk over there. I'm an old millennial who basically only uses HN for social media, and unfortunately IG is a must have.
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.
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?
> Reddit feels like it’s growing but I think that avoids the worst of social media.
Really?
Reddit is a cesspool because they drove off the power users in favor of normies who won't block the ads.
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...
The elephant in the room for me is that the person who bought Twitter and keeps shitposting also keeps launching rockets into space and landing them back, among other things that fall into the category of “how the fuck are we going to pull this off?”
I don’t know who Cal is and I have no idea what Deep Work he’s done since he quit social media, but, best of luck to the lad.
Social media or news or tv/netflix/streaming influence your life alot. Just stop using it and you will feel much better.
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 don't use any of facebook, instagram, LinkedIn, tiktok, X, bluesky, mastodon, snap, ... and it's not even hard. On the rare occasions I took a look at those I found them boring beyond believe. Even mastodon following people I am actually interested in feels like a 90% waste of time.
Social media is about exploiting gossip and social comparison to make money. It has been from the start a stupid habit with no redeeming qualities. However, after Zuck released Llamma and other AI models for free, i consider it a fair tax on stupidity that is helping to advance frontier technology
The funny think, this youtube video it is on YouTube which is a social media platform
It's where their target audience is.
Less "social" media, more social research paper / life hack resharing makes the world a better place.
PS: Always hide the best meme in endnote 14 so your fellow meme scientists know exactly where to find the real discovery.
Several of the comments here certainly have some superiority complex issues as well as what would appear isolation issues. You seem cynical towards a large majority of modern society. If you need a hug, I’m here.
That may be but it doesn't take much page turning in a history book to find plenty of instances where society has been very wrong and not even in the distant past.
Society changes slowly. The iterative speed of computers, the iterative speed of feedback on a global communications network based on those computers is new, it has many orders of magnitude faster response times than society's ability to adapt to the changes it brings and the systemic study of human behavior over years and years leading to mathematical models of behavior and responses has created massive information asymmetry in society and the scale of manipulation a small group of people can leverage is astounding, being skeptical of society's value propositions seems in order.
Can you explain what you mean by that?
Why not both?
I'm trying to learn to use RSS to replace some of my social media use. I recommend RSS Guard, it seems to be the best client around. Liferea and Thunderbird are good options, too.
I use social media merely for distraction. Over the years I gained nearly zero benefit from using it. Shallow connections, useful looking useless content.
I'd reckon the median user is not someone who has been "publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week" at any point of their life and that the most likely risk is mindless consumption rather than endless production. But just quit following random strangers on the Internet, keep social media as a way to maintain your irw network of relations, and you'll usually be alright.
Sure, then we can discuss about the inherent issues of the platforms (which are many), but first one has to exploit their own agency to the utmost degree.
Still I'm glad Mr. Newport has a comments section on his youtube videos. He doesn't always explain things that clearly.
I would say he is write about LinkedIn, TikTok, Snap, Meta and its associated gram's, threads and face... BUT - HN has a different vibe, this is a community with sharing knowledge and information - on HN, I never doom scroll - there is genuine interaction and useful content. To some extent X provides useful updates from the main AI labs, so it is knowing how to use it and not be used by it.
It’s all the same. HN is just smaller, but before Reddit disabled 3rd party apps HN was even more focused and, IMO, a little less startup/growth hacking focused.
If HN ever gets big, you’ll see the same things.
Someone needs to make a good Facebook groups/pages alternative. That'd make it easier for most.
I did, deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X). And it helped me a lot to gain back my inner peace. My meditation was deeper, more profound, I genuinely gained back my inner peace. The constant bombardement with posts made to boost the ego of people is toxic for the consumer of these images / texts.
But then, in the context of the Gaza conflict, I realized that X is a very good source to follow intellectuals, thinkers, journalits whom I wouldn't read otherwise in Germany, where anyone is vilified who even wears a Kefiyeh. When you see how our western media frames, justifies, whitewashes a conflict caracterised as a genocide by many scholars, we need other platforms to hear those voices.
Now this sounds like the alt right that wants its platforms. But hear me out. There are intellectuals who show the headlines, the framing, and you cannot help but think that Noam Chomsky's book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media", written in 1988, is more relevant than ever.
X has the capacity to show different perspectives and can be invaluable. But it's also a curse exploited by many. Russia, China, Iran, but also our allies. See this for instance[1].
[1] "The Israelis Destabilizing Democracy and Disrupting Elections Worldwide - National Security & Cyber - Haaretz" // https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2022-1...
Agree with everything in your comment except I assume Reddit is better than X (I don't use X for other reasons, but occasionally see things posted from there on Reddit or Instagram).
But worth noting, you've presumably been using HN since 2016 which is also "social media" :P
I’m about 9 months off social media (not including Hackernews, if you consider that SM). I have no regrets whatsoever. I’m in my late 20’s so SM came into my sphere when I was around 16. I haven’t quite “grown up with it”, but it’s been an omnipresent force for most of my teenage and adult life.
> I am better at making time to catch up with the people I really care about, be that in-person or over WhatsApp. > When I do catch up with someone, I genuinely have no idea what’s been going on in their life and that makes the catch up a lot more enjoyable and engaging. I haven’t passively kept up to date on their every movement through Instagram stories or Tweets like some kind of ghostly stalker. The best example of this that I can give is that my partner and I got engaged to be married ~4 months ago. Nothing posted on SM, just WhatsApp messages to close friends and family. I get to keep reliving the joy of telling people and witnessing the ecstatic surprise and pure love on their faces each time I catch up with someone I haven’t seen for a while. > I am much more aware of just how much everyone uses their phones. Take a look around you. Sitting on the bus, waiting in a queue, riding an escalator, pissing at a urinal. Our minds are being constantly bombarbed with mostly useless, inane shite. Cat videos, stories of that person you went to school with 10 years ago doing stupid drunk things, misinformation from your scary uncle on Facebook etc. I let my mind wander more and it feels all the better for it.
There is only one I use: Orange Reddit (aka HackerNews).
> Quit Social Media
You can follow the author at https://x.com/profcalnewport .
In bio it states `Not Cal Newport and unaffiliated w/ Newport, he's not on social media.`
From bio - "Not Cal Newport and unaffiliated w/ Newport, he's not on social media."
Heavy irony here
Quit? Ban!
I quit social media over 10 years ago, already having been a conscientious objector to Facebook and other platforms, much to the confusion 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.
Shouldn't lack of social media make people happier in theory? Because you sound to be quite resentful and angry.
Your comment and mine (see my other comment) are almost mirror reflections lol. Sounds like similar ages at the time too
I did this without having to get inspiration from others. And I did it at a young age (under 18), when all my friends and the world were flocking to social media and spilling their thoughts and PII everywhere. I have nothing, and have had nothing ever since (discounting HN).
People are sheep, and people are stupid. Most people waste their lives looking at a mass fake digital mask of their peers, and people they don’t even know.
Myself on the other hand, I spend almost all my spare time with people and animals I love, studying, reading books, and thinking about bigger things.
You are what you consume, which makes most people morons. Same if you consume “the news”, care about celebrities.
Do you happen to have purple hair and wear all black clothes with as many piercings in your face as you can get? /s
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?
> just people who have no one in their personal lives to connect with (e.g. nieces, nephews, family, friends)
I have no facebook account. I choose to have relationships with my family members and distant friends through physical contact by meeting up and talking regularly on the phone. IMO typing short text messages to people and 'reacting' to theirs with emojis and thumbs up is not a real relationship.