[HN Gopher] The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on...
___________________________________________________________________
The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users'
emotional state
Author : imakwana
Score : 436 points
Date : 2025-04-21 04:24 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nber.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nber.org)
| revskill wrote:
| With ai, i hope the feed is more useful to me.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| On Facebook, I started seeing a lot of tiktok-type content and
| apparently you can turn that off in the settings. It works
| pretty well.
| hexator wrote:
| Sounds like a great way to totally kill Facebook
| revskill wrote:
| I mean more inteligent recommendation.
| ballooney wrote:
| How could you _possibly_ believe a company like meta would use
| a new technology to act in your interests rather than theirs?
| noduerme wrote:
| The same way people think a politician would?
| bee_rider wrote:
| The politicians in my state do a fairly good job, so that
| is easy to believe.
| noduerme wrote:
| I assume you mean they do a good job of not acting in
| their own interests...? Let me know what state I should
| move to.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > I assume you mean they do a good job of not acting in
| their own interests...?
|
| They do a good jobs of working in the interest of their
| constituents. Whether that also includes self interest, I
| don't know. They are politicians, their job is to work
| for their constituents, if we've managed to align their
| self interest with doing their jobs well, that seems
| fine.
|
| > Let me know what state I should move to.
|
| State and local governments seem to be rated fairly well,
| just go to one that matches your ideology.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2024/04/11/americans...
|
| Pew reports on a negative trend, but states have a huge
| head start on the federal government.
| t0lo wrote:
| it's obvious meritocracy in institutions is dead. people with
| half baked ideas float to the top for no reason now
| noduerme wrote:
| This also happens in corporate culture, because of nepotism
| and grift. It happens much faster after a corporation
| captures the government / institutions that would normally
| check it. I believe in meritocracy, but once you have
| institutional capture, meritocracy is just a con to
| convince smart people to work for a fraction of what they
| could earn on the type of unregulated market that allowed
| their overlords to become wildly rich. For example: I'm
| probably the best designer/coder of casino games ever to
| walk this planet. I can't make a living doing what I love
| and I'm great at, because it's either $150k a year from a
| shady company in Cyprus [edit: which is shit money from
| people I'd never work for], or it's wholesale illegal to do
| it on my own. Elon Musk never wrote a line of code, but a
| good chunk of his PayPal money came from facilitating
| gambling transactions, essentially illegal at the time and
| certainly more so now.
|
| Merit will get you a 401(k) and a job where you have a nice
| coffee station and some bean bags to sit on, and a ping
| pong table. Lord knows, the ping pong table proves you've
| got merit. But does your boss _really_ have more merit than
| you? It seems to me that the higher up the corporate ladder
| you go, the less actual merit people exhibit, and the less
| they notice it among their underlings (as opposed to
| _loyalty_ or ass-kissing), but the more they claim to
| believe in it.
|
| I'm not arguing against merit. I'm a capitalist. I'm just
| pointing out that the people who so often tout merit are
| the same people who get most of their tax credits from
| backroom deals with politicians, and don't seem to earn
| their keep by the sweat of their own brow. Merit would
| imply the ability to do both equally well.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| It is not _completely_ naive to believe that in order for a
| service like Facebook to continue being successful, they must
| do _something_ that makes their users want to use it.
|
| And therefore, it is not completely illogical to think that
| Meta's interests and users' interests must align.
|
| (Not my opinion, just responding to your question)
| ballooney wrote:
| No!
|
| "they must do _something_ that makes their users want to
| use it."
|
| Is fentanyl acting in the interests of its addicts?
| adastra22 wrote:
| You can hope, but certainly you don't expect it?
| revskill wrote:
| Yes. No expectation.
| nehal3m wrote:
| Remember when the feed was just a reverse chronological list of
| stuff you told Facebook you wanted to see? That was the peak.
| Once they started engagement farming using recommendation
| algorithms the site lost all of its appeal.
| perching_aix wrote:
| Append ?sk=h_chr at the end of its URL to get that. Can also
| be found by dumpster diving in the UI somewhere I'm sure. Be
| aware that they're _very_ intent on redirecting you to the
| regular feed though.
| nehal3m wrote:
| Thanks for the genuinely useful tip. I didn't know that was
| a thing, but I can't test it since I deleted my account
| almost a decade ago. I'm tired of adversarially wrestling
| usefulness out of a trillion dollar company.
| snoman wrote:
| > I'm tired of adversarially wrestling usefulness out of
| a trillion dollar company.
|
| Very well put.
| photonthug wrote:
| > I'm tired of adversarially wrestling usefulness out of
| a trillion dollar company.
|
| Hopefully people will learn to get tired of this sort of
| thing a LOT quicker, and this will be one good thing
| about out our new improved and now extremely shortened
| attention spans. Impatience could actually have an upside
| if it prevents decades of escalating arms racing with
| enshittification vs new-current-work-around. It's like
| with stages of grief, right? Denial / bargaining.
| Whatever is broken in a trillion dollar corporation is
| broken on purpose, and it's getting worse, not better..
| waiting around and hoping for improvement is a fools
| errand.
|
| Up until now, boiling the frog/consumer slowly has been
| one tactic. Or corporations can leverage their size and
| simply make things so bad for so long that a new
| generation arrives on the scene and has no idea how bad
| the stuff on offer actually is. Enough completely
| ubiquitous impatience in consumers really does undermine
| both of those strategies.. _if_ there 's actually
| meaningful competition that's still left around to choose
| from
| tayo42 wrote:
| I think the downfall was earlier then that. When businesses
| got on their. The first few times it was maybe clever, the
| Deli shop is my friend or what ever but I think that was the
| turning point for it's just friends connecting and the start
| of becoming ads and engagement.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| The ML model exists to benefit Facebook, not you. It maximizes
| for your engagement with the platform, not your happiness or
| usefulness.
| revskill wrote:
| That's why i hope.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Then it is misplaced.
| vippy wrote:
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ this right here ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
| fossgeller wrote:
| Could it be possible to counter it with another ML model that
| browses your feed?
|
| For example, scraping your feed and presenting to you only
| the content that corresponds to some pre-defined labels (with
| a tiny bit of randomness to spice things up).
|
| Although how could the automatic labeling work for videos
| from the user-end? Hashtags would be the simplest indicators,
| however also easily misleading.
| alwa wrote:
| Direct PDF link:
|
| https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33697/w336...
|
| Possibly relevant that the 6 week trial period occurred in the 6
| weeks leading up to the American election in 2020.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the
| election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an
| index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls
| who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who
| deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041
| standard deviation improvement relative to controls.
|
| Can anyone translate? Random web search find suggests multiplying
| by 37 to get a percentage, which sounds very questionable, but
| even then these improvements seem negligible.
|
| This doesn't really line up with my lived experience. Getting
| myself out of shitty platforms and community spaces improved my
| mental state significantly (although the damage that's been done
| remains).
| SamvitJ wrote:
| From the paper PDF (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_p
| apers/w33697/w336...):
|
| > We estimate that users in the Facebook deactivation group
| reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of
| happiness, anxiety, and depression, relative to control users.
| The effect is statistically distinguishable from zero at the p
| < 0.01 level, both when considered individually and after
| adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing along with the full
| set of political outcomes considered in Allcott et al. (2024).
| Non-preregistered subgroup analyses suggest larger effects of
| Facebook on people over 35, undecided voters, and people
| without a college degree.
|
| > We estimate that users in the Instagram deactivation group
| reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement in the
| emotional state index relative to control. The effect is
| statistically distinguishable from zero at the p = 0.016 level
| when considered individually, and at the p = 0.14 level after
| adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing along with the
| outcomes in Allcott et al. (2024). The latter estimate does not
| meet our pre-registered p = 0.05 significance threshold.
| Substitution analyses imply this improvement is achieved
| without shifts to offline activities. Non-preregistered
| subgroup analyses suggest larger effects of Instagram on women
| aged 1824.
| perching_aix wrote:
| Perhaps it wasn't clear what I meant. When I said
| significantly, I meant it in the colloquial sense, not in the
| statistical significance sense.
|
| I was looking for a more digestable figure describing the
| extent of improvements, not whether the study found them
| confidently distinguishable (which I just assumed they did
| based on the wording, good to know they didn't for
| Instagram).
| kacesensitive wrote:
| A 0.060 standard deviation improvement is super small. If
| the average person rates their happiness/anxiety/depression
| score at, say, 50 out of 100, and the standard deviation
| (how spread out people's scores are) is around 10 points,
| then 0.060 SD = 0.6 points. So quitting Facebook gave an
| average person a ~1% bump in mood score. Instagram was even
| smaller: ~0.4 points, or 0.8%.
|
| It's real, but barely noticeable for most people--unless
| you're in a more affected subgroup (e.g. undecided voters
| or younger women). Your experience feeling way better
| likely means you were an outlier (in a good way).
| mmooss wrote:
| On what scale? What do 'points' on the scale mean?
| Without knowing those things, we can't say what 6 or 60
| points mean.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| On the contrary, reporting changes relative to the
| standard deviation of a control group frees you from
| scales and their meanings, because it relates the
| observed change to the normal spread of scores before the
| intervention. In this way, you don't need to know the
| scale and its meaning to know if a change is big or
| small, and from a statistical perspective, that's
| (almost) all you need to find if a change is significant
| or due to random chance. Of course, looking back at the
| original scale and its meaning can help interpreting the
| meaning of the results in other ways
| mmooss wrote:
| Standard deviation helps, but you still need to know:
| standard deviation of what? It's no different than saying
| someone scored 78% - 78% of what? What is it in the
| denominator? Also, different scales can represent the
| same thing differently.
|
| Secondly, the impact of the difference isn't known - you
| don't know the curve representing the relationship of
| score to impact. In some contexts a little change is
| meaningless - the curve is flat; in others the curve is
| steep and it can be transformational. And impacts only
| sometimes scale linearly with performance or score, of
| course.
|
| Without that knowledge, standard deviation means nothing
| beyond how unusual, in the given population, the
| subject's performance is.
| perching_aix wrote:
| This is what I was interested in, thank you!
| kalkaran wrote:
| The best thing you can do is compare it to another study,
| since turning 0.06 standard deviations into a percentage of
| happiness isn't going to be that telling.
|
| In general, 0.2 is considered a small effect. So 0.06 is
| quite small -- likely not a practically noticeable change
| in well-being. But impressive to me when I compare it to
| effect sizes of therapy interventions which can lie around
| 0.3 for 12 weeks.
|
| Quote:
|
| > "50 randomized controlled trials that were published in
| 51 articles between 1998 and August 2018. We found
| standardized mean differences of Hedges' g = 0.34 for
| subjective well-being, Hedges' g = 0.39 for psychological
| well-being, indicating small to moderate effects, and
| Hedges' g = 0.29 for depression, and Hedges' g = 0.35 for
| anxiety and stress, indicating small effects."
|
| (Source: _The efficacy of multi-component positive
| psychology interventions_ , 2019 -- https://www.researchgat
| e.net/publication/331028589_The_Effic...)
| perching_aix wrote:
| This is a very useful insight, thank you. Wouldn't have
| occurred to me to check something like that.
| Balgair wrote:
| Caveat: I'm not very smart
|
| So, if 0.3 is 12 weeks of therapy, then 0.06 is ~2.5
| weeks of therapy (0.3/0.06 = 2.4), assuming you pick any
| 2.5 random weeks of the 12 week course.
|
| Yes, I'm sure the first session is the most important and
| then a logarithmic curve of blah blah blah.
|
| Essentially, deleting FB is not much, but it's not
| nothing either.
| hammock wrote:
| Multiply by .37 to get PERCENTILE change, not percent.
|
| If you were average happiness, and you improve that by 1
| stdev, you are now happier than 87% of your peers (when you
| were at 50%ile before). 0.6 stdev improvement would be vs
| 72% of your peers.
|
| So to put it colloquially, if you have 7 friends, and you
| were in the middle of them (4th happiest), by quitting
| Facebook you are now happier than all but 1 one them.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Multiply by .37 to get PERCENTILE ranking change, not
| percent. If you were average happiness, and you improve
| that by 1 stdev, you are now happier than 87% of your peers
| (when you were at 50%ile before). 0.6 stdev improvement
| would be vs 72% of your peers.
|
| So to put it colloquially, if you have 4 friends, and you
| were in the middle of them (3rd happiest aka happier than 2
| of them), by quitting Facebook you are now happier than all
| but 1 one them (aka happier than 3 of them).
|
| AKA for every 4 friends you have you can jump ahead of 1 of
| them in the happiness race by quitting facebook.
| nine_k wrote:
| So, ELI5 level.
|
| People who use Facebook also may feel depression, from very
| strong to none at all. In the middle of this interval there's
| the "expected value" point, sort of an average level of
| feeling depressed. This point is at an equal distance from
| the "most depressed users" group, and from the "not depressed
| at all" group. Let's call this distance of depression
| strength a "standard deviation".
|
| Now, the users who stopped using Facebook became slightly
| less depressed, by 6% of that "standard deviation" range. If
| you buy a small coke at a McDonald's, then take one sip, you
| make it about 6% smaller. It's not unnoticeable (you've made
| that refreshing sip), but about 15 more such sips still
| remain!
|
| In other words, there is an effect which can definitely be
| noticed ("statistically significant"), but it's not a big
| deal either.
| steventhedev wrote:
| It means that there is a statistically significant improvement,
| but that improvement is tiny, and will not make you happier
| than your peers all by itself (assuming a standard peer group
| of 200 people - you'd likely swap places with 1 or 2 people).
|
| Of course, this study only considered normative people, not
| marginalized or those who were experiencing active harm from
| exposure to social media - your personal results may vary and
| it's important to remember that science is imperfect and social
| sciences are doubly so.
|
| If going off Facebook improves your life - you do you.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| As far as I can tell, the algorithm can really harm people
| during times of mental illness/stress/anxiety. Part of it is
| that it is like a feedback loop.
|
| When we lost our pet and my wife was very upset for a while,
| the algo kept showing her more and more content associated
| with pet loss. It got to the point that some random content
| pushed to her social media was upsetting her daily.
|
| I can imagine someone experiencing depression, suicidal
| thoughts, etc can easily be pushed over the edge by the
| algorithmic feedback loop.
| perching_aix wrote:
| In a way this perfectly captures my experiences too,
| despite my struggles revolving around a different topic,
| and sometimes it wouldn't even be algorithmically
| inflicted, but self-inflicted.
|
| I'd keep coming across, and sometimes seeking out, threads
| with political content. But beyond that, I'd keep stumbling
| upon or even seeking out people who are being (in my view)
| inciteful or misleading. This would then piss me off, and
| I'd start to spiral. Naturally, these are not the kind of
| people who'd be posting in good faith, adding even more
| fuel to the fire when I engaged with them and their replies
| would eventually come about, which of course I'd
| "helpfully" get a notification for.
| mmooss wrote:
| If I understand you, just read the paper for its analysis and
| interpretation of those numbers.
|
| Alternatively, you'll want to grasp the meaning of "standard
| deviation" (you're right that you can't multiply all standard
| deviations by a number and get a percentage - and a percentage
| of _what_?), and then find the "index of happiness,
| depression, and anxiety" they use and grasp its meaning.
| perching_aix wrote:
| I'm not sure you understood me. I want to specifically avoid
| doing all that, to save time and effort.
| mmooss wrote:
| Alas, I don't know a faster way. The question asked, iiuc,
| demonstrates a lack of understanding of standard deviation.
| That's fine; none of us know everything. But without that
| we can't intepret the results, and also necessary is
| understanding what the scale represents. Thus the fastest
| solution seems to be reading the author's interpretation
| rather than trying to do it yourself.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Even if it's statistically significant, it's a laughably tiny
| effect.
|
| Like have one nice meal or a one walk in the woods 2 months ago
| and rate your mood today kind of effect size.
|
| 0.06 std deviation is not anything to write home about and
| really doubtfully real, given the general quality of
| psychological science.
|
| Perhaps, how much better of a day would you have if you found a
| dollar on the ground.
| The-loan-wolf wrote:
| >Getting myself out of shitty platforms and community spaces
| improved my mental state significantly
|
| True. I've experienced it too
| countWSS wrote:
| Anecdotal: Stopping commenting on reddit reduced emotional stress
| significantly. Reddit is one of those "social" anti-social
| circles where you can't afford to be on the "wrong side of
| argument" and every discussion can quickly spiral out.
| noncoml wrote:
| Same with stopping replyhing to HN. I just downvote and upvote.
| Emotional stress significantly reduced.
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| but then.... how did you say this!?!?!! and how will you
| answer this question!?!???!???!
| whatnow37373 wrote:
| Bring out the pitchforks!!
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| >Same with stopping replyhing to HN. I just downvote and
| upvote.
|
| I can't really put my finger on why, but I don't think I
| believe you.
| whatnow37373 wrote:
| Your comment is proof to the contrary. You are thus lying and
| everything you say or do is now severely tainted. I will now
| produce a seven-pronged argument for why exactly this type of
| behavior is the hidden root cause of climate change and why
| you should feel bad. (/s)
|
| Sorry, couldn't help myself.
|
| I know the feeling, but I have to admit that people being
| obtuse helped me to take them and myself less serious. That
| said, there are better ways to foster that kind of
| experience.
| noncoml wrote:
| I 100% knew a reply like this was coming :). So I kind of
| thank you for saying this...
| colechristensen wrote:
| There's a correlation between being really obnoxious and
| continuing threads on HN or anywhere else.
|
| Occasionally there are good real conversations where people
| are generally interested and curious but the most common are
| either marginally interested or very interested in worthless
| conflict.
| baq wrote:
| There's a few things that help:
|
| - do not engage with the technically correct but missing the
| point people
|
| - don't check your threads if you posted something that the
| groupthink disagrees with
|
| - don't try to win arguments if you know you're right
| whatnow37373 wrote:
| I can't help but notice how all those points are centered
| around you being the bearer of truth and others being the
| source of dismay.
|
| While these may be easy ways to avoid exposing yourself to
| sources of discomfort it might also not be a bad idea to
| learn how to deal with confrontation and dissonance in a
| productive manner.
|
| Besides being contrarian, I am nothing if not that, I
| honestly think our society at large will benefit from
| learning how to deal constructively with opposing
| perspectives and mindsets - assuming we ever get to that
| point.
| gusgus01 wrote:
| While I ostensibly agree about learning how to deal
| constructively with opposing perspectives, I also don't
| think online discourse (main stream avenues) will ever be
| the place to learn or partake in those sorts of
| conversations. Even in smaller subreddits, your comments
| will be viewed by thousands of people, some of whom are
| explicitly there to troll or to argue in bad faith or
| even people literally having mental breakdowns. You also
| end up in situations where every reply is to a new
| person, so you're not really having a discourse with
| anyone just an amorphous entity. Look at things like
| "Godwin's law" or "Poe's law", for some long running
| beliefs/commentary on internet discourse.
| earnestinger wrote:
| > don't try to win arguments if you know you're right
|
| Caveats:
|
| - I can be wrong (sometimes need some pointing out)
|
| - it is ok to post for the benefit of lurkers (inform
| others of fake news and such)
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| Along with don't check your threads, don't check your
| votes. I'm always struck by people saying "I don't know why
| I was downvoted for such-and-such." Where do they find the
| time to go back and check the votes on comments they made?
| I say the things I say and move on.
| Phlebsy wrote:
| The number of replies I cut & paste to my notes archive far
| exceeds the amount of posts I actually make. I still find it
| valuable to work through my own thoughts to better prepare
| myself to have the same conversations in more impactful
| circumstances, but there are some things I just don't care
| enough about persuading the other person - or believe the
| other person is actually going to consider the words as
| carefully as I put them together.
| 91bananas wrote:
| This is so true and cathartic, and it has me wondering if
| sites are collecting the angry data I type in to inputs but
| don't submit. I'd LOVEEE to know what the stats are on
| posts that almost got posted.
| mrexroad wrote:
| Yeah, majority of my comments never get submitted. I'll
| type a reply, edit, challenge/research my assumptions, and
| then ask myself this it's adding material value to the
| conversation that doesn't need to be further
| explained/elaborated. Most often I'm content with having
| refined my thoughts on a topic and close tab without
| submitting. Kinda like work email chains pre-slack.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Procrastination Mode on HN (see links in footer) helps
| significantly. I wish I enabled it earlier, I just kept
| putting it off.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I think the trap is that many social platforms were genuinely
| fun, but then became a disaster
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Depends on what you do on Reddit.
|
| Politics, relationships, those are not things to talk about.
| But being able to respond to major FOSS contributors, that I'll
| do.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > Depends on what you do on Reddit.
|
| I agree to some extent, but even highly specialised / niche
| topics on dedicated subs are getting slammed by the
| "hivemind". I guess it's more apparent for non-us users, as
| we're not the target audience, but the political brigading is
| showing even on subs like space and ML related. Reddit is now
| very similar to ~2015-16 reddit when the-donald and other
| subs really peaked, just the other way around. 10/25 posts on
| all are bad orange man and bad space man related. The
| technology sub is a mess of weaponised autism. And then you
| get the same political bs coming from weird subs, like the
| cute pics sub, or the knitting sub suddenly having political
| submissions w/ 3k-6k upvotes, all saying the same thing.
|
| It doesn't help that it is still the easiest "social network"
| to create accounts on, and bot on. With the advances in LLMs
| I sometimes truly can't say if an account is real or a bot.
| And I work in this space...
| perching_aix wrote:
| I don't think the hivemind thing can be solved so long as
| people can see each others' comments. But then it's
| difficult to have a social media site without that.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| The biggest problem on reddit is having both up- and
| down-votes. That allows the majority to effectively
| eliminate dissenting opinions on any topic it cares about
| by down-voting them to oblivion, and then pat itself on
| the back for the fact that everyone apparently agrees
| with it. Since it's possible to do that, some see it as
| an obligation and go at it with gusto, making it hard to
| have a conversation that strays outside the current-year
| party line.
|
| Systems which only have up-votes/likes have their own
| issues, but at least not that one.
| perching_aix wrote:
| HN also has both, but the score is only visible to the
| person who commented. I think it's an improvement in this
| regard, but then I rarely have hivemind issues. What do
| you think about this?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I strongly prefer chronological sorting for discussions
| (and thus no voting). At least it gives all views a fair
| shot at being represented, and it's also easier to join
| later on.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| I used to edit Wikipedia and I was heavily involved in many,
| many disputes. And in fact, I would seek out disputes, even
| ones outside my topic area; it's not difficult to do on
| Wikipedia because there are entire notice boards where people
| go to have public disputes. We called them "dramaboards",
| especially the admins' disciplinary ones.
|
| And I would have these disputes, of course, over utterly
| trivial things, like how to spell something or where to place
| the apostrophe, or some manual-of-style nitpick in an infobox.
| And the disputes would drag on for weeks and we could utterly
| stall the editing process by disputing on talk pages. And yet
| we could edit-war over it, usually in slow-motion. And often
| the dispute would be couched in quite polite language but I
| would hate the guys' guts.
|
| And the tipping point came when I began to have dreams about
| Wikipedia, and I would wake up angry. I would wake up fighting.
| I would wake up and immediately tear into the web browser and
| catch-up on the discussion, or not, just to post my next
| riposte, because I'd composed it in my sleep, in my dreamless
| dreams.
|
| And I woke up angry more often than waking up in any other
| mood. And I was telling my psychiatrist this, and she said I
| should probably stop looking at blue light before bedtime. And
| I was incredulous that she would think if I turned my arguments
| red-hued that they would anger me less, or cause me to wake up
| happy and agreeable or something?
|
| And I know I wasn't taking enough medication to make anyone
| happy, but these guys on Wikipedia really knew how to piss me
| off, and if you've ever heard of "brinkers" it's a certain type
| of troll who will play by the rules, and basically trigger
| anyone with a hot temper, and that triggered person would
| forget their ethics and commit a fatal error, and get banned,
| and the brinker would go on to live another day and cause
| others to fall into similar traps. And many of us do that, if
| we have the volatile temperament. I lasted about 17 years on
| Wikipedia without a single block and with some low-grade
| warnings, but generally a clean discipline record, but finally
| it got to me.
|
| And a lot of time on Wikipedia I had spent fighting trolls and
| vandals and very disruptive editors. And I made sure a lot of
| them were banned. I filed a lot of reports. I was a petty
| bureaucrat there, filing reports and compiling evidence and
| arguing cases. There was no shortage of "wikilawyering". From
| the very beginning I was finding disputes and diving into them.
| Especially when they didn't concern me, didn't concern any
| topic I cared about. Just to have the disputes.
|
| And I kept waking up angry. And finally I got control of that.
| Nowadays I wake up frightened. I wake up traumatized. I wake up
| scared of something I dreamed about. It's spiritual torment,
| and it's attributable to nothing I did the night before.
| Perhaps the F.U.D. of Hacker News gets to me. But not on that
| level. At least I don't go on crusades or jihads against
| Wikipedia editors anymore.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > and if you've ever heard of "brinkers" it's a certain type
| of troll who will play by the rules, and basically trigger
| anyone with a hot temper
|
| Didn't know there was a term for this, good to know it wasn't
| just me seeing things. Witnessed this happen countless times
| while assisting with moderation on Discord. The only worse
| thing than the rules defending these people's behavior is
| when fellow moderators decide to cover for them too.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Re: "brinkers", this is where it's very useful to have a
| certain amount of mod discretion so that people who probe the
| fences like velociraptors in Jurassic Park eventually get
| banned for that. The downside is that it looks even more
| cliquey than it is.
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| I've done the same with HN, somewhat. I log out by default,
| just to add a barrier between reading something and responding
| to it. Has to be something I really feel I must reply to or
| worth adding more information to, to make me log in.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Leaving Reddit has significantly improved my quality of life.
| Would recommend it to anyone.
| epolanski wrote:
| I can confirm that deleting Instagram/Facebook has improved
| my QoL.
|
| But I have a hard time ditching Reddit, I canceled accounts
| multiple times, yet at some point I need to discuss something
| for which there's only a subreddit online and I'm back at
| square one.
| sneak wrote:
| If people didn't like the way these apps make them feel, they
| would stop using them.
|
| Many people prefer having anxiety about drama to being bored.
| safety1st wrote:
| That is not the only possible explanation. A more likely
| explanation imho is that social media falls into the long list
| of things you do for a short term reward even though you know
| you shouldn't, like smoking a cigarette or getting drunk.
|
| You know it is not good for you but your executive function and
| ability to plan long term are compromised (whether chronically
| or acutely), so you do it anyway, and regret it later.
| sneak wrote:
| Some people regret it. Some people prefer a marshmallow now
| to two tomorrow.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| There really is something to this. Living in NYC you meet a lot
| of people from different walks of life and levels of wealth.
|
| Over and over the most stressed out anxious people I meet are
| the underemployed/nonworking spouse in very wealthy couples.
| Especially the childless ones.
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| Have you heard of smoking addiction?
| ryandrake wrote:
| 50 years from now, we are going to be looking back at Social
| Media and Smartphone addiction like we currently look at smoking.
| "How insane were we to have allowed it and allowed it to be
| promoted?" our grandchildren will rightly ask!
| drilbo wrote:
| tbf, I think pre-AI social media will barely receive a
| paragraph in a 2075 history book.
| quaintdev wrote:
| No it will. Because it's the beginning of all that happened
| after it.
| highwaylights wrote:
| Maybe the record of history itself will change. When it's
| all LLM's feeding into each other then how long until every
| whackadoo conspiracy theory becomes a historical fact?
| busymom0 wrote:
| Hope you are right but I think it's different. Smoking has very
| visible side effects fairly soon though- types of cancer,
| photos of rotten lungs and throat everywhere on cigarette packs
| etc.
|
| Social media only seems to have psychological side effects
| which aren't as openly visible to our eyes.
| pmcginn wrote:
| Your attitude is exactly what the parent comment is
| describing. You have the benefit of decades of scientific
| research and government mandates that didn't exist for
| previous generations. Modern cigarettes date to the late
| 1800's but the link between smoking and cancer wasn't
| established until the 1950's. It took over a decade after
| that for the first warning labels to appear on packs, and the
| photo type you're describing didn't exist until the 2000's.
|
| It seems obvious to you because it has been made obvious to
| you. It wasn't the same for people in the first half of the
| 1900's. The parent comment is making the same point: it's not
| obvious to most people today, but in fifty years from now,
| people will look at the research, the decline in the birth
| rate, the increase of anxiety, and effects we can't imagine
| today and go "social media has very visible side effects
| fairly soon, how did they not know?"
| milesrout wrote:
| No. It is like alcohol: perfectly fine in reasonable doses, but
| harmful to people that get addicted.
| polar8 wrote:
| "Perfectly fine" is a bit of a stretch. No amount of alcohol
| is good for health. WHO now say even small amounts increase
| risk of cancer and liver disease.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I'd argue that small amounts of alcohol facilitate
| relaxation and socialization, which probably saves a lot
| more lives from preventing homicide and suicide than it
| costs in cancer and liver disease.
| polar8 wrote:
| After socialization comes drunk driving which alone kills
| a quarter million people annually.
| scrollaway wrote:
| It's deeply fascinating to many europeans living in
| cities that one would need to drive to go to a bar.
|
| My closest bar is 100 meters away. If I'm willing to walk
| 20 minutes, the radius can probably hit around 100
| different ones.
| polar8 wrote:
| I'm European and live in a city. There are still plenty
| of drunk driving fatalities here.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| That's why I specified a small amount, there's a strong
| inverted U curve for alcohol for sure.
| jpc0 wrote:
| Here the legal limit is approximately 2 440ml cans or a
| draft of beer.
|
| If you are drinking more than that across an evening I
| would argue it's a bit more than socialising. Maybe where
| you are from people are heavy drinkers and are not
| responsible enough to not slow down a fee hours before
| you know you will be driving but I feel like the quarter
| a million annually is quite overrepresented by heavy
| drinkers.
| milesrout wrote:
| If you are only drinking more than a single beer in an
| evening that is not "socialising"? What are you talking
| about?
|
| How about just don't drink and drive at all?
| milesrout wrote:
| This is nonsense. Drinking in moderation is beneficial or
| at worst harmless. Every two years the "science" changes.
| Anyone that pays too much attention to what it says is a
| fool.
| polar8 wrote:
| Can you provide more details on the health benefits of
| ethanol?
| SpaceL10n wrote:
| It does an okay job as a hand sanitizer.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Having to share a world with people who take way to
| seriously the long tail of things that will kill you so
| little you need massive sample sizes and meta studies to
| quantify the effect is a hell of a lot worse for my health
| than ~2 light beers per week and a steak a month.
| epolanski wrote:
| I want to believe you, yet I believe that socials will be even
| more ingrained in everyday life.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| First, I was an avid Facebook user. I cared about what photos I
| put up, my status updates, what groups I was in, the lot.
|
| Then life got busy and somewhat difficult, and I had no more time
| for this. Still, I'd occasionally go on Facebook and get really
| down. I'd see all my "friends" living it up, having fun etc while
| I was stuck in my rut. Very depressing.
|
| But then, a few things happened. One, I understood it's really
| all fake. Two, all my real human friends stopped using Facebook,
| basically. And anyway, Facebook now just shows me AI slop that is
| nothing to do with anything - weird videos, people definitely
| shutting down a 5000 year old family business, you-wont-believe-
| what-she-did videos etc. Not that I use it much, just some
| friends for whatever reason are still on Messenger.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| I mean, you can install only messenger without installing fb.
| Messenger even has own website
| 8s2ngy wrote:
| I believe many of the problems in our current social media
| landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead
| displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and
| those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the
| profit models of big tech social media and could go against what
| most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a
| smaller social network where I can stay connected with my school
| friends, college friends, and distant family without having to
| see irrelevant posts, like some stupid remark from a politician
| halfway around the world or influencers doing something
| outrageous just for attention.
| aramattamara wrote:
| Try MySpace, classmates.com? They are still around.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| The trouble is: broadly speaking, no one uses those.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I logged into classmates a couple of years ago. I had a
| message waiting from 2005 from one of my sister's insane
| ex-friends. That was a blast from the past and hilarious.
| 18 years without bothering to log in.
|
| Then I realized their business model is so low-rent, they
| had web 1.0 style protections on scraping all their scanned
| yearbooks. So I liberated all the ones with anyone I was
| likely to know and posted them to Archive.org.
|
| You're welcome.
|
| Also: #deletefacebook
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| i used facebook back when it functioned like that. and it was
| still retarded then
| LtWorf wrote:
| But less :D
| blitzar wrote:
| I got shot 7 times in the head rather than 10.
| LtWorf wrote:
| When I got on it I'd just see local events and stuff
| people I knew posted. Now it's "science" pages and
| shorts, which spread disinformation.
| 9rx wrote:
| The "Friends" tab (sometimes "Feed" instead; the A/B
| testing on this one seems strong) only shows the posts of
| people you know. Events is still there as well. But in
| both cases the rate of creation has dropped dramatically
| since the time you remember, making these nearly useless.
| That's why the social media services have had to focus on
| content created by professional content creators instead.
|
| The outcome was inevitable. People had fun posting posts
| and photos when it was a novelty, but once the novelty
| wore off they were back to not wanting to put in the
| effort. You can only post so many photos of your cat
| before you grow tired of it.
| LtWorf wrote:
| What's the point of posting stuff if nobody will see it
| because facebook decided so?
| zdc1 wrote:
| Instagram used to be closer to this when they showed posts in
| chronological order. Of course, Facebook got to work and ended
| this by showing posts in algo-sorted order, added an explore
| page, and even started showing non-followed people's viral
| content on the main feed. So unfortunately the trend has been a
| slow frog-boiling march towards engagement and
| enshittification.
|
| In the meantime, maybe I should just share more photos in the
| group chat instead...
| frankacter wrote:
| From Feeds in the sidebar, select Friends.
|
| https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| > This approach might conflict with the profit models of big
| tech social media... Personally, I would love a smaller social
| network where I can stay connected with my school friends
|
| This sort of longing for a cozy social media circles exists a
| lot in tech adjacent circles. However, unless you can align the
| needs of users with the revenue goals of the company, which in
| other words simply means that users pay for the pay for the
| product, this is not gonna happen. While you may be willing to
| do so, I'm sure many people would simply stop communicating
| with you because of the additional friction caused, especially
| when a free alternative exists.
|
| Additionally, the "viral content" you speak of exists for two
| reasons, which I'm not sure it could be entirely solved even if
| you had users pay for the product.
|
| Most people (me included) have very little intellectual
| capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some
| easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally
| tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good
| job at it at with all my energy sapped. This is where viral
| content, such as posts from politicians and celebrities, gain
| their initial spread.
|
| I would also like to note that someone may want to follow a
| politician or celebrity because they think what they're doing
| is generally useful or entertaining, respectively.
|
| This leads me to my second point, where even if you self-opted
| to not interact with viral content, I'm not sure your social
| circles would also follow through with the same choice. This
| ultimately means the platform has to take specific measures to
| suppress some posts based on its content or not show any of
| your friends' activity, both of which has disadvantages.
| Further, the former is in itself controversial depending upon
| which politician is in power and the current Overton window[1].
|
| (Re downvotes: I'd like to know what part of all of this people
| disagree with.)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window#
| nehal3m wrote:
| > However, unless you can align the needs of users with the
| revenue goals of the company
|
| I'm reading this as: The corporate internet is unable to
| fulfill the actual social needs of its users.
|
| >Most people (me included) have very little intellectual
| capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some
| easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally
| tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a
| good job at it at with all my energy sapped.
|
| And this translates to: Our economic system drains us of so
| much of our energy that living a fulfilling life is no longer
| possible, and so we fill our valuable time with the slop that
| same system serves us.
|
| I think you're being downvoted because your comment speaks to
| an uncomfortable truth, namely that none of this is working
| to advance quality of life but rather to advance the contents
| of a few wallets.
| designerarvid wrote:
| Intellectually many want this. But the feed shortcuts our
| reptile brain and gains more engagement minutes / day. As you
| say, the algorithmic feed is superior for creators wanting
| reach, and more importantly, advertisers who want eyeballs on
| their ads. Due to network effects, it is likely impossible to
| get friends and family to join a boring and non-profit
| alternative.
|
| Instead of pausing social media altogether, I recently took
| some time off from the endless scrolling feeds only. When
| returning it's so apparent how everything is bait for
| engagement.
|
| The feed hijacks the human attention process on a visceral
| level. Either with visual stimulus that's extremely intriguing
| for evolved apes like us (cutting a cake that looks like a
| dog), or by activating an emotional response from a tribal
| species like us (stupid takes on politics, in- and out-group
| stuff).
|
| The rest of most social media apps is fine and offers much of
| what you are asking for.
| UnreachableCode wrote:
| > it is likely impossible to get friends and family to join a
| boring and non-profit alternative.
|
| Isn't this just WhatsApp now though? The addition of
| Statuses, Following and now Communities almost confirms this.
| People are dropping Facebook and IG, but can't give up
| WhatsApp (yet).
| doubtfuluser wrote:
| > Intellectually many want this. But the feed shortcuts our
| reptile brain and gains more engagement minutes / day.
|
| I'm not sure if that's actually a "shortcut" to the reptile
| brain and it's just about "I have to scroll more to get stuff
| I'm interested in. At least for me it feels like that and it
| causes me to use these social media things far less.
|
| For me it feels more like intermittent rewards vs full
| rewards at once. Obviously for the ad-industry the
| intermittent rewards are more useful, that's why we can't
| have nice things
| xobs wrote:
| > endless scrolling feeds only
|
| I've got a personal policy: No websites that have an infinite
| scroll. That means no new Reddit, mobile Reddit, Facebook,
| Instagram, or similar. This also means I can't use food
| delivery services, since those tend to be infinite as well.
|
| If they're paginated that's fine, even if they're infinitely
| so. Infinite scrolling is just a very good touchstone as to
| the quality and addictiveness of a site, and I'll avoid
| anything that has it.
|
| For this reason I get my news through RSS and like using
| Discord -- both have finite ends (even if there may be a lot
| of content in bursts.)
| intended wrote:
| I'm reminded of how junk food was seen as a dominant and
| crushing force, and how today we have moved to people
| willingly embracing healthier lifestyles.
|
| I rue the amount of damage caused, before people and society
| began resisting and arresting its deleterious effects.
|
| But perhaps this is the same process being followed here. New
| shiny for the reptile brain, eventually the costs are made
| clear and people decide they would rather not become
| statistics and instead find joy in other formats and tools.
|
| Then People make those formats or invent ways of engaging
| with our tools that includes self care and leads to more
| happiness. We grow older and we eventually get tired of all
| the online health fads and become crotchety older humans.
|
| Get off my lawn, in advance.
| misja111 wrote:
| No, to my brain, reptile or not, these FB feed suggestions
| are a constant source of irritation.
|
| I use FB only because I'm member of a couple of groups
| relevant to my hobby, and the stuff posted in those is worth
| following. Unfortunately there is currently no alternative
| for those, otherwise I would happily ditch FB.
|
| I don't even care about posts from family and friends anymore
| because nowadays those are mostly about bragging about their
| fancy dinner/holiday/social life etc.
| xyzal wrote:
| I think the EU should flex their regulatory muscle and forbid
| algorithmic feeds on by default unless the networks break
| european society as the US is broken.
| LtWorf wrote:
| They should just say that algorithm is editorialised and
| needs to be subject to the same regulations as newspapers
| (fined for fake news, editor can lose his journalist status).
| somenameforme wrote:
| Newspapers can publish all the fake news they want. There's
| no special carve out for e.g. tabloids. The only constraint
| they have is they aren't protected by section 230, so they
| can be sued for things like defamation or libel.
| pooper wrote:
| The big one to me is paid content should be clearly
| labeled as paid content and should be skippable
| programmatically and in bulk. Things like product
| placement.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Is journalist a formal status? It's not like the owners of
| Linkedin or Facebook actually care if they can't get a
| press pass anyway.
| LtWorf wrote:
| In some EU countries yes it is. You need recognised
| journalists that can be disbarred to report news.
| Exceptions exist for specialised publications, so science
| journals don't need journalists.
| milesrout wrote:
| The result of a purely chronological feed is that you have to
| scroll through 10 posts from the same person and never see
| anything from people that post good content rarely.
|
| Plenty of people like and enjoy "algorithmic feeds". I can
| enjoy occasionally scrolling through a feed. Banning it is
| like banning alcohol because there are alcoholics in society.
|
| If you can't handle it, switch it off.
| hansworst wrote:
| Obviously there's a balance to be struck here. We could
| legalise fentanyl and tell people to just not use it, but
| that probably wouldn't have a very positive impact on
| society.
|
| At the very least we should acknowledge the negative
| externalities. Just leaving it up to the market to figure
| out (especially if we allow the current tech monopolies to
| exist) will result in serious societal impact.
| lukan wrote:
| "The result of a purely chronological feed is that you have
| to scroll through 10 posts from the same person and never
| see anything from people that post good content rarely."
|
| But who made the demand, to have everything shown from
| everyone?
|
| Imagine a social network, where you make your own rules for
| your feed. That special person who posts rarely, but good
| will have special visibility. And from that bored family
| member that basically spams, you will see the message "X
| has posted 50 pictures and text today" and with a click you
| can go there.
| delusional wrote:
| Plenty of people like and enjoy "algorithmic feeds".
|
| Plenty of people like heroin too. Liking something doesn't
| make it good.
| intended wrote:
| Alcohol consumption is gated behind age laws.
|
| There are society level effects based on the consumption of
| several goods and services.
|
| Gambling, alcohol, drugs, for example.
|
| The individuals story, in aggregate, mm impacts, over and
| over, has effects that we must address when arguing for the
| optimal friction for that good.
| milesrout wrote:
| Scrolling on social media isn't like any of those things.
| veunes wrote:
| Having algorithmic feeds as an option, not the default,
| would be a huge step forward
| Zambyte wrote:
| > The result of a purely chronological feed is that you
| have to scroll through 10 posts from the same person and
| never see anything from people that post good content
| rarely.
|
| I follow over 700 accounts on Bluesky and strictly use the
| following feed, and this is not my experience.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I don't know how much of a difference it would make, as then
| we just become the algorithm.
|
| I quit Facebook over a decade ago, because others used it to
| go "look at my shiny car/wife/house", and I would use it to
| lose friends and alienate people.
|
| These online environments do not foster _any_ kind of human
| connection.
| blitzar wrote:
| madaxe_again checked in at the First Class lounge.
| ay wrote:
| Blue sky allows you to have many different kinds of feeds
| and I can say the difference in adrenaline level and mood
| is palpable depending on the feed I use.
|
| News items - frustration at the state the world is in.
|
| Urban bicycle feed: annoyance at the atrocities of the
| inept drivers.
|
| Feed with cycle side trip pictures: fun.
|
| Rust projects, Electronics: the curiosity of learning.
|
| Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing feature which is
| you can subscribe to someone else's block lists. That
| changes the experience quite a lot, to the better.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Bluesky has felt like the healthiest experience I have
| ever had with social media. I don't really use any
| algorithmic feeds (though I have been toying with
| building my own), just my following feed.
| ay wrote:
| I find the algorithmic topical feeds nicely solve the
| problem of discovery for me. There's a lot of people who
| are experts in their fields, totally different to mine
| (e.g. astronomy, physics, photography etc) which makes it
| interesting for me.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Yeah, I'm sure they're useful! I have just found myself
| in a neat community, and I have > 700 followers and
| followers (mostly mutual), so I haven't really felt a
| need for discovery. I usually just find people through
| replies to people I know already at this point.
| ay wrote:
| Nice! That's the beautiful part - everyone can shape it
| according to how they like, and be comfortable with that.
| exceptione wrote:
| * Bluesky is from the same people that launched Twitter
| and, optics aside, just the same ideology. There is no
| real deep divide on values. It is about locking up people
| in echo chambers, information filtering and ultimately
| ripping out people's ability to organize around a common
| good.
|
| There is only one danger for the 0.1%. The 99,9%.
|
| * The people that got disturbed by Twitter's boosting of
| extremists and nazis, now took refuge to bsky. Only to
| get ripe for the next iteration. But see how many people
| are still on X, increasingly less aware of the
| abnormality they are drowning in.
|
| This playbook of cultural engineering should be super
| clear by now. Ad tech => Private Intelligence.
|
| * How to sell it? Invest in narratives that bend the
| notion of free trade in order to instill rigid beliefs
| about Free Markets. Now look at the free markets. :) It
| only takes you a few million bucks and a dinner to set
| your company free.
|
| Like parent hinted at, "social media" means the opposite
| for society.
| ay wrote:
| I can not argue about the values of people I do not know
| personally. I only said that the tool they made seems to
| be okay _in my experience_ , which I shared.
|
| "Free markets" is an uneducated nonsense. An entirely
| unregulated market evolves into monopoly. Even without
| corruption.
|
| Social media for me is just a tool (HN is also social
| media btw). I find it useful and it meaningfully
| interacts with the other aspects of my life. When it
| stops being the case (eg facebook and twitter) - I leave
| it behind.
|
| As for the hierarchy: it had always existed and for
| better or worse the humans and other animals are wired
| for it. Likewise, they are wired for maintaining the
| total perceived fairness of the system - so the system
| eventually autocorrects the extreme imbalance. Often
| brutally, though.
| projectazorian wrote:
| > Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing feature which
| is you can subscribe to someone else's block lists. That
| changes the experience quite a lot, to the better.
|
| Oh yeah I remember how this worked on Twitter. Make a
| post that annoys some anonymous blocklist maintainer, and
| suddenly you're blocked by a whole swath of accounts.
| Sometimes just following the wrong person or liking the
| wrong post is enough. No accountability for these
| decisions and no way to reverse them, or even figure out
| whom to approach to reverse them.
|
| Sounds awfully exclusionary for a service that purports
| to be inclusive. It encourages the formation of
| authoritarian cliques, as tends to happen in any left-
| wing group sooner or later.
| ay wrote:
| The solution is trivial: just be polite and respectful to
| others.
|
| Everyone is entitled to say their opinion.
|
| Nobody is entitled to force others listen to it.
|
| It's quite simple, really.
| projectazorian wrote:
| I was always polite and respectful on Twitter and still
| wound up on a blocklist. So did many others. There was no
| notification or explanation provided and no recourse, I
| just suddenly found myself blocked from various accounts
| to the extent it degraded the utility of the platform.
|
| Lots of people on the left love to be little commissars,
| and this sort of thing provides a perfect opportunity.
|
| The implication of your statement is "you probably did
| something to deserve it, comrade" which is very much in
| keeping with that mentality.
| barnabee wrote:
| My Instagram account is private and I only follow real life
| friends and family. I mute (posts or stories or both from)
| any that post in ways that I don't find positive. I haven't
| had to mute many, but it's some.
|
| If it wasn't for the algorithmic feed showing "recommended"
| posts from accounts I don't follow and the constant ads, I
| would have a perfectly healthy and pleasant experience with
| Instagram.
|
| I really wish they'd let us pay to get rid of ads and
| configure the algorithm to e.g. only recommend from
| accounts I follow.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Click on the instagram logo at the top of the app and
| click "following" to get a chronological feed.
| lc9er wrote:
| I lasted a little bit longer, but it grew shocking to see
| how eager friends and family were to display how cruel and
| bigoted they can be.
|
| I sometimes wonder if it's the addictive, attention seeking
| nature of social media that encouraged such behavior, or if
| they simply lacked the courage to be so inhumane in person.
| ljm wrote:
| I wouldn't rule out the radicalising properties of social
| media either. You don't have to fly out to the Middle
| East and join a militia to be turned against Western
| ideals when Facebook can flood your feed with targeted
| propaganda for a price.
|
| It does say something about one's character that they
| would be targeted by this and would also buy into it,
| though. You'd hope people might see it for what it is and
| take a step back.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| These people are just as inhumane in person actually. In
| fact they want to test their opinions on you and see if
| you signal that you are also in their in group. Stuff
| like an old creepy guy gawking at a woman and asking you
| "how about that" is a someone common example of this. Or
| telling some story about some human condition where the
| punch line is well they were black and this isn't
| surprising behavior given the racist stereotypes they
| believe in. These guys come out of the woodwork too. Like
| a total stranger on the bus would be like this, turn over
| at you unsolicited.
| itake wrote:
| EU companies benefit from the feeds, because that is where
| many ad slots are.
| vekker wrote:
| I'm sure that would work out fine. Just like the GDPR
| regulation made the web so much better & more private, and
| the promise of the AI act is boosting innovation in Europe...
| earnestinger wrote:
| You probably mean the visible cooky thing.
|
| But behind the scenes companies did start to think about
| customer data gathering, retention and deletion in terms of
| maximal fine of 4% of turnover.
| sureglymop wrote:
| The GDPR regulation is great and arguably does make the web
| more private and better. At the very least, it's better
| than having no regulations.
|
| I've even been able to successfully use it to remove
| something private about me from the internet. I don't think
| I would have even gotten a response had there been no legal
| precedent.
|
| You can always argue about how some regulations are badly
| implemented or incomplete but I believe it would be very
| misguided to believe that no regulations are instead the
| better alternative.
| intended wrote:
| Yes, the Americas are a hot bed for innovation.
| Enshittification is also an innovation.
| jorvi wrote:
| That wouldn't work. 95% of people ordinarily do usually stick
| with defaults, but not when chasing their (dopamine)
| addiction.
|
| Imagine there's a toggle you can flip in the Settings of
| Instagram that was labeled "free oxy", and every morning and
| evening Meta would FedEx an oxy pill into your mailbox.
| Everyone would tell eachother about it, and few would be able
| to resist the temptation.
| indymike wrote:
| I'm not sure this model works as it just forbids lists of any
| kind. Algorithmic is an extremely poor choice of words as any
| method of selecting posts/messages for a list is an
| algorithm.
| smelendez wrote:
| This has moved heavily into group chats and I'm not sure it's
| coming back.
|
| Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need
| for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don't
| want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of
| friends and acquaintances.
|
| Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is
| turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is
| turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and
| local businesses share career and business updates and
| advertise their wares.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Wife went cold turkey on social media and then had to join
| Instagram and LinkedIn for her business. Now she's addicted
| to Instagram.
|
| No LinkedIn, not you, you boring Ted Talk humblebrag.
| blitzar wrote:
| People love LinkedIn cringe on instagram and twitter - but
| on LinkedIn itself you have to confront the reality that
| these people, often colleagues / former colleagues etc. are
| being serious
| lazide wrote:
| Well, serious in the same way cult members have to be
| serious.
|
| If you crack and admit it's fake, everything falls apart
| and it's _your fault_. Expulsion out onto the street
| follows.
|
| Even worse, now everyone else is going 'how could you be
| so dumb to believe it' and/or 'you sure fucked up by
| admitting it was fake' _all at the same time_.
| throwawee wrote:
| >now everyone else is going 'how could you be so dumb to
| believe it' and/or 'you sure fucked up by admitting it
| was fake' all at the same time.
|
| Not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's like
| professional wrestling, stage magic, or politics. Some
| lies people really love.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I do judge people who post thought leadership on LinkedIn
| about the same as people who are really into pro
| wrestling.
| lazide wrote:
| I bet you also tell the Mormons to take a hike when they
| come visit.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Honestly, I'm really nice to the LDS when they drop by.
|
| My experience has been that Mormons are generally self-
| aware, polite, and willing the engage in interesting
| conversation.
|
| In contrast, LinkedIn influencers' eyes glaze over
| whenever you try to dig into the details of what they're
| purporting to talk about. Because, ugh, nerd stuff that's
| beneath them.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| I mean.. if you go into with the right frame of mind, it
| is harmless. It is starts being an issue when you take it
| seriously and someone ends up with back broken in
| someone's backyard.
| harvey9 wrote:
| A comedy act called 'Wankernomics' just showed up in my
| YouTube recommendations. I thought about booking a ticket
| to their show but its too close to reality.
| cmsj wrote:
| I have made one post ever to LinkedIn and it was
| something I said as a joke in a 1-1 that I realised was
| perfect LinkedIn fodder. It did some pretty good numbers,
| and made me respect that site even less than I already
| did.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| > but on LinkedIn itself you have to confront the reality
| that these people, often colleagues / former colleagues
| etc. are being serious
|
| I doubt many are being serious.
|
| Business culture (at least in the US) is so steeped in
| lying and general fake-ness that in-group signaling as
| "real business person" involves public performances of
| bullshit.
|
| It's what you're supposed to do in interviews: bullshit
| just the right way, to show you understand the game and
| are willing to debase yourself to play it. Otherwise
| you're "risky", either due to excessive commitment to
| ethical principles or to being too clueless or inept to
| play the game right. That's what's going on, on LinkedIn.
| "Humility" and "realness" even have to be faked just the
| right way.
|
| It's incredibly gross.
| moritonal wrote:
| Google+ by any other name and four years earlier would have
| been an incredible platform. Circles were so neat.
| fsckboy wrote:
| two years earlier it was Google Buzz. two years before that
| it was Google Wave.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I don't recall Buzz or Wave having the Circles feature
| that many (including myself) miss from Google+.
| starkparker wrote:
| The closest thing that I remember within a Google product
| was actually Google Reader's optional friend-of-a-friend
| visibility on shared items/comments. A lot of little
| circles-like communities that sprung up around individual
| people.
| FeloniousHam wrote:
| 100%. I got pulled into Old School Revival TTRPGs there. It
| was smaller and quieter, and in the sections I read mostly
| free of politics and other noise. I miss the "anti-social
| network".
| chasd00 wrote:
| The best social networks i have are imessage group chats. One
| with my old college friends, one with my immediate family,
| and another with extended family. My kids have their own
| group chats with their classmates. They're much better than
| the social platforms.
| captainmuon wrote:
| That's great if you are the kind of person wo is added into
| fun social group chats. But my group chats are mostly
| functional, like for hobbies, or parents groups for the kids'
| classes, and so on. There is one family group which sees
| annoying memes every now and then, and one group with friends
| from university which is also rarely used.
|
| Old school social networks used to be this noncommital, low-
| threshold way to connect with others around you. It was
| really great if you were a socially awkward teen or twenty-
| something. It's no big deal to friend somebody on facebook
| (or MySpace, or your universities gamified campus management
| system or whatever) and see what they are doing, or strike up
| a conversation. I really miss that kind of network.
| Aromasin wrote:
| Eh, I'd disagree on the Instagram front. If you look at the
| reels section, where most spend their time, it's just a more
| deplorable Tiktok. 80% of the content on there is soft core
| porn advertising one OnlyFans girl or another. The other 20%
| seems to be brain rot memes. I reinstalled it recently after
| 8 years of not having it, and immediately deleted it.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I guess it really depends if you have fed the algorithm
| with your preferences already.
| sojournerc wrote:
| Here's the thing, Instagram figured it quickly that I
| might spend another second or two looking at an
| attractive lady, but that isn't my preference for what I
| would see in the feed. Merely because I have libido
| Instagram became absolutely unusable no matter how many
| times I tell it I'm not interested in insta-bitches
| showing skin, it knows I'll look, so Instagram is gone
| out of my life.
|
| Too bad because other topics like woodworking and
| mountain biking we're interesting and less...
| provocative, but that's not good for Instagram.
| navbaker wrote:
| This definitely works. I have two profiles on IG: one for
| musical instrument related things and one for painting
| miniatures. I've been able to keep both profiles strictly
| on topic by aggressively using the "not interested"
| button whenever something not related pops up.
| lupusreal wrote:
| That's basically what I do on youtube, except not logged
| in, using browser profiles to keep the cookies separate.
| If you exercise strict discipline then you can make the
| youtube algorithm work for you. Slip ups ruin it quick
| though.
| noduerme wrote:
| Any way you cut it, "feeds" are more addictive. Your family
| and friends only post a couple times a day, but you have all
| day at work to look for some quick stimulation.
|
| I watch my girlfriend devolve into this stuff. Waking up and
| scrolling endless feeds from reddit and insta; it's her
| entertainment. It's not so much worse than me waking up and
| scrolling Google News...maybe it's better, in that she gets
| less depressed about it. But it's fake. It's all fake.
|
| In real life, it took me a whole year to figure out that the
| people at one particular local pub actually hate me and talk
| shit about me whenever I'm not around. I only figured out why
| they were so hostile because the people at my other pub told
| me. (It's that I'm Jewish, with Israeli family. Ironically,
| the nice people at the other pub who told me are Lebanese. We
| get along a lot better than I do with my old antifa
| "friends") This was a hard-to-get real world experience in
| how fucked up people can be for no reason. It's not something
| you can understand properly, ever, on any kind of social
| media. The media format just gets in the way of understanding
| other people as people; of understanding truth and factual
| reality; of differentiating between opinion and fact.
|
| Feeds are garbage, optimized for chaos.
| rightbyte wrote:
| If the people in the pub don't show they hate you, they
| don't hate you. It might as well be the people in the other
| pub that are making stuff up about the others.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| They were provided with a quite plausible motivation.
| What is the plausible motivation in your scenario?
| noduerme wrote:
| I appreciate what you're saying, but plausibility is a
| funny way to put it, since such a motivation would not
| have been plausible prior to Oct 7. Before that, I was a
| curious minority, and they liked to congratulate
| themsleves on welcoming minorities. Since no one had any
| problem with me before Oct 7th and then within days of
| seeing a lot of Jews killed, they apparently all got the
| bloodlust, I can only conclude that what makes this
| "plausible" is that they innately have some quantum of
| racism that, having been forced to suppress themselves so
| long and not criticize anyone, they're overjoyed to find
| a group of people to unleash it on. Particularly if they
| can call those people "white" like themselves, as a way
| to offset the shame they've been taught. Of which
| external group I'm probably the only one they've ever
| met. My only other Jewish acquaintance in the area - who
| is an absolute pacifist - has also been almost equally
| shunned out of every place. Except again, strangely, the
| Arabic-owned places. He works at one.
|
| So if by "plausible" you mean that, yes, you can imagine
| someone doing that, then you're right. If "plausible"
| means that you think it's justified, then that's another
| issue.
| throw99841216 wrote:
| You said upthread you said you appreciate honesty: it's
| not just "seeing a lot of Jews killed" but also "see Jews
| kill a lot".
| dingnuts wrote:
| the guy is talking about personal prejudice he
| experienced abroad because of his race, and you just
| tried to justify it based upon group guilt assigned to
| his race because you disagree with a distant government?
|
| Hey bud, that makes you a massive racist, and in this
| case, an antisemite, if you think it's okay to be rude to
| a Jewish person at a bar because of literally anything to
| do with Israel. You're also using that justification to
| bully him online.
|
| Please reconsider your beliefs and stop advocating for
| the persecution of Jews
| viccis wrote:
| Schrodinger's Israel: Both intrinsically Jewish and not
| intrinsically Jewish until the convenient narrative is
| discovered.
|
| If you oppose it, you're an antisemite because Jewish
| identity is linked to it and so criticisms of it are
| antisemitic. But if you tie Jewishness to it then you're
| an antisemite because you've assigned "group guilt to his
| race".
|
| In reality, the likeliest explanation is that the
| commenter was probably saying some offensive stuff, like
| many Israelis I knew around Oct 7 (this is not an
| intrinsically Israeli phenomenon, the US got just as
| psychotic post-9/11), and the folks at the pub didn't
| care the cut of his jib. The fact that he said a Arab
| person being nice to him is "ironic" tells you a lot.
| noduerme wrote:
| This is the second time in this thread you've made an
| unfounded assumption that I must have acted a certain way
| or said certain things to deserve being treated badly.
|
| As I said above, the only other Jewish person I know in
| the area is an absolute pacifist and he also started
| being treated badly by the same people, immediately
| following 10/7.
|
| So gee whiz, maybe they don't like the cut of our gib for
| some reason other than our personal politics. This would
| occur to you if I told you we were the only two black
| people in the neighborhood right after George Floyd was
| murdered. I think you have a blind spot to the fact that
| the war has been an excuse for people to go after Jews,
| just like 9/11 was an excuse for America to go after
| Muslims, just like MS-13 is an excuse to violently deport
| immigrants.
|
| The abuse started immediately after 10/7, before there
| was any military response from Israel, in fact while they
| were still trying to find missing and dead people at the
| music festival. The very first thing I heard from most of
| the antifa people was some variation of "They had it
| coming."
|
| I'm not a complete pacifist like my friend. But I'm
| consistent in my beliefs, and I would say the same things
| in an Arab-owned place as I would in an all-white antifa
| place. The reason I say it's _ironic_ that I 'm accepted
| at a Lebanese place is that the owner and son have much
| closer personal experience with Israel and the history of
| the Levant, being _literally from right next door_ and
| having at one point actively supported a certain jihadist
| organization. And with them, I can have a real
| conversation about the facts without any hatred or heated
| tempers. The irony is not that they 're Arabs, it's that
| the overeducated yet completely ignorant white Americans
| down the street, who have never been to the region or had
| any connection to it, and who claim to be full of love
| and acceptance, should be the ones to turn their backs on
| me.
|
| Love and acceptance, apparently, do not equate to basic
| tolerance. Or they don't extend to Jews.
|
| And to clarify for you: Israel's intrinsically Jewish
| like Greece is Greek, or Japan is Japanese. It's
| indigenous homeland of the Jewish people. It's actually
| just _less_ of an ethnostate in that regard, because
| "Jewish" is broader than a single ethnicity. I don't need
| to sit here and explain to you what Jewish is or who's a
| Jew, you can look it up. The fact that you have a problem
| with one particular ethno/religious state out of all the
| states in the Middle East and the world says plenty about
| your personal biases.
| viccis wrote:
| >I think you have a blind spot to the fact that the war
| has been an excuse for people to go after Jews
|
| I don't think antisemites have ever needed excuses to
| justify their conduct to themselves or others. And I have
| yet to see any outcomes for Jews in the US or UK that
| even approach the consequences that Arabs and those who
| have vocally opposed Israel's actions have faced.
|
| >The very first thing I heard from most of the antifa
| people was some variation of "They had it coming."
|
| Imagine asking some Jewish friends in 1944 in Poland what
| they thought about the victims of the Home Army during
| the Warsaw Uprising. You have to put yourself in other
| peoples' shoes if you want to understand their
| perspective.
|
| >And with them, I can have a real conversation about the
| facts without any hatred or heated tempers.
|
| You actually can't. Arabs know very well that they are
| being racially scrutinized when it comes to their views
| about this conflict, and they all know that the best
| course of action is to be as loudly and visibly Not Mean
| To Jewish Or Israeli People. It's not a real conversation
| because the power balance is way off; you have the state
| apparatus behind you (assuming US or UK) as well as a
| wide range of doxxing and terrorizing organizations like
| Betar. There is no free speech when it comes to opinions
| on Israel in either country I mentioned.
|
| >It's indigenous homeland of the Jewish people.
|
| I'm well aware of the Blut und Boden narrative about it,
| and settler colonialism has made fantastic use of it many
| times in the past (Liberia for example). It is absolutely
| an ethnostate however, per its own government's
| legislation (the 2018 Nation-State Bill). An ethnostate
| can include preferential treatment to a variety of types
| of Jews (though not all, as many African ones are
| excluded or subjected to scrutiny not faced by European
| ones).
|
| >The fact that you have a problem with one particular
| ethno/religious state out of all the states in the Middle
| East and the world says plenty about your personal
| biases.
|
| I don't, and hell it ain't even just the Middle East. Ask
| me what I think about the Azeris...
| noduerme wrote:
| > You actually can't. Arabs know very well that they are
| being racially scrutinized
|
| What a remarkably sweeping assumption. Firstly, this
| thread is exactly about how I've felt racially
| scrutinized and suspect for what I may or may not think
| about Israel. Secondly, as I've made clear, it's any pro-
| Israel opinion which is verboten in my neighborhood.
| Palestinian flags fly from every other house. Yet somehow
| you have turned this into a power imbalance in which
| someone could only conceivably be civil to me because I'm
| oppressing them? Extra points for simultaneously taking
| away the agency of all Arabs everywhere. You seem to
| understand them so well. Tell us what they all think.
| viccis wrote:
| >Firstly, this thread is exactly about how I've felt
| racially scrutinized and suspect
|
| I'm actually not talking about thoughts and feelings at
| all. I'm talking about domestic murders, deportations,
| and similar violence both from the state and from
| vigilantes.
|
| >any pro-Israel opinion which is verboten in my
| neighborhood
|
| This, and the massive shift against Israel among every
| demographic, is a result of a well publicized series of
| atrocities, a series that dwarfs the 725 civilians killed
| during the Gazan military's Operation Al-Aqsa Flood
| operation in both scope and cruelty.
|
| >Extra points for simultaneously taking away the agency
| of all Arabs everywhere.
|
| It's not a matter of agency, it's a matter of power. They
| still have agency, and the power structure I am talking
| about isn't contingent; it's categorical given its
| racialized nature.
|
| >You seem to understand them so well.
|
| I do, yes.
|
| >Tell us what they all think.
|
| None of my categorical statements have concerned the
| subjectivity of Arabs, only the objective contingencies
| with which they are presented. Plenty of them have chosen
| not to hide their opinions, and they are currently being
| tracked and rounded up in the US as a consequence.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > if you think it's okay to be rude to a Jewish person at
| a bar because of literally anything to do with Israel
|
| Look I don't have full context here, but more generally
| there's recently been a _lot_ of conflating Judaism with
| "support of Israel". If a person is at a bar and you know
| they support Israel and you're "rude to them" (a
| subjective statement which can include telling them to
| re-calibrate their moral compass), then _many_ people,
| myself included, think that 's perfectly OK, regardless
| of whether that person is Jewish or not. To suggest it's
| somehow suddenly not OK if that person happens to be
| Jewish (but presumably it's fine if they're not Jewish?)
| is kind of ridiculous.
|
| I say this as a Jewish person with family in Israel also,
| who is completely over people (many in my family
| included) reducing criticism of Israel or intense
| disapproval of Israel to "antisemitism"
| noduerme wrote:
| You're talking about a political conversation in which
| people are discussing ideas. I'm talking about
| experiencing a situation in which people I've never even
| met are actively rude to me because someone told them I
| "support Israel". I'm perfectly willing to have a
| conversation about its faults and mistakes. That's not
| what's going on here.
|
| One can be Jewish and not support Israel. One can condemn
| Israeli policies without being an antisemite. But the
| reason you're seeing a lot of conflation is that a lot of
| Jews were murdered, tortured, raped and kidnapped from
| their homes on 10/7, and the world took that as an
| opportunity to blame Israel and to discuss whether these
| Jews should really have a country at all. The singling
| out of Israel as an illegitimate state, out of all
| countries in the world, _is_ antisemitic. Taking issue
| with its policies is one thing; taking issue with its
| right to exist is quite another. If only because the
| inescapable reality is this: The destruction of Israel
| would involve the deaths of millions of Jews who don 't
| have any other country to go to. The world may not care,
| and you may not care, but they care, so they're not going
| to lay down and die.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| To be clear, I was responding to the insinuation that
| being rude to someone at a bar due to "literally anything
| to do with Israel" is antisemitic if they're Jewish. Of
| course being _specifically_ rude to Jewish people due to
| their support of Israel is antisemitic, but being rude to
| people who support Israel is not (we can debate whether
| it 's productive or deserved separately).
|
| But since you've gone out of your way to make your
| position here clearer, I'll offer my response:
|
| > But the reason you're seeing a lot of conflation is
| that a lot of Jews were murdered, tortured, raped and
| kidnapped from their homes on 10/7
|
| A lot of people, Jews and non-Jews were killed on 10/7
| (perhaps you're unaware that the majority of casualties
| that day were not of Jews).
|
| > and the world took that as an opportunity to blame
| Israel and to discuss whether these Jews should really
| have a country at all
|
| "the world" really didn't jump to blaming Israel quite so
| unanimously on 10/7, though I'm sure those who were
| already fighting for Palestinian liberation, or who had a
| deeper awareness of the history surrounding the ongoing
| occupation, or who were already of the opinion that
| Palestinians were undergoing a genocide (prior to 10/7)
| likely thought it important to use the opportunity to
| raise awareness of the injustices Palestinians had faced
| since long before October 7.
|
| My own opinion at the time was largely "I don't know too
| much about the history besides what I learned in my
| Zionist school and from clearly Zionist friends/family,
| but as someone who appreciated the separation of church
| and state in the U.S. and Canada growing up, I disagree
| with religious statehood and ethno-nationalism... but
| perhaps a lot of the criticism of Israel is driven by
| antisemitism also and Zionists seem very convinced that
| it's justified and necessary in this one specific
| instance because of antisemitism."
|
| Since then, having spent much more time reading various
| narratives, I've come to entirely disagree with that.
| While yes, there is antisemitism, including among those
| who criticize Israel, it doesn't seem to me that it's any
| more common among anti-Zionists than it is among Zionists
| (believe it or not, many anti-semites support Israel).
|
| Furthermore, Westerners "singling out" Israel is much
| more evidently explained by the Western financial and
| military support of Israel (in addition to tampering in
| other middle-eastern affairs) which has enabled a litany
| of horrifying atrocities inflicted upon Palestinians to
| continue unchecked.
|
| > The destruction of Israel would involve the deaths of
| millions of Jews who don't have any other country to go
| to
|
| The end of Zionism does not mean the deaths of millions
| of Jews, any more than the end of Nazi Germany meant the
| deaths of millions of Germans (incidentally, it did
| _because_ so many chose to lay down their lives in its
| defense, or in some cases were compelled to). Beyond the
| casualties in the war (which if we 're being honest was
| more about stopping Germany's expansion than about
| liberating people from concentration camps and death
| camps), only a few high-ranking Nazi officials were put
| to death after the fall of the third reich; beyond the
| executions of those convicted of war crimes, Germany was
| indeed able to continue existing as a state which didn't
| brutally oppress marginalized groups; there weren't
| widespread executions of ethnic Germans as some may have
| feared, merely an end to the unjust system of supremacy.
|
| And this is exactly what so many who "single out" Israel
| are calling for; not "another genocide of Jews" as you're
| claiming, but a free Palestine for all.
| mapt wrote:
| I want you to think about how you would feel in a
| hypothetical about Chinese people.
|
| In this timeline, after a group of Hong Kong democracy
| activists planted bombs that killed a few hundred low-
| level people at the annual Chinese Communist Party
| meeting, China responded by announcing plans to bomb Hong
| Kong into rubble, rid themselves of the menace of
| democracy once and for all.
|
| And then when they heard this, your country announced
| that they unconditionally supported China in this effort,
| and would supply them all the bombs they needed to take
| down these Electoral Terrorists, eliminate every last one
| who wasn't an enthusiastic proponent of single-Party
| rule. That local democracy advocates in your country had
| long been concerned with the Hong Kong situation, had
| long protested the government's inexplicable support for
| China in this matter, but were shouted down by every
| political party and called racists by a consensus that
| seemed to really be interested in using China to counter
| the prospect of Indian international ambitions. That
| watching the bombs drop, and watching your national media
| invite Chinese people on air for segment after segments,
| your democracy activists found in discussions online that
| they weren't actually some kind of radical fringe, that
| basically everyone outside the media+government was tired
| of the CCP and tired of our unending support for it.
|
| There is a lot of nuance there, but what happened after
| Oct 7 is basically that Netanyahu & AIPAC, finally seeing
| an opportunity to answer the Gaza Question once and for
| all, jumped into their role as the villains in a pre-
| existing anti-semitic conspiracy theory, and proceeded to
| play the US like a puppet in order to effectuate a
| genocide.
|
| I can have a nuanced view here; I can separate Jewishness
| and Zionism. I can talk to you about all the Jewish
| students at those protests who were holding signs
| supporting Palestine. I can note the extreme divergence
| between age cohorts within the Jewish community in the
| US, I can point out that the US is the largest Jewish
| population in the world (larger than Israel), who are
| coexisting perfectly well with gentiles, and that this
| isn't to Netanyahu's benefit at all. But these people
| constantly tell us that there is no separation there,
| that it is antisemitic to be against Greater Israel, that
| these concepts are one and the same. If that's the case,
| and you still disfavor genocide, there are Implications.
|
| I can understand when some people misunderstand the
| situation; Antisemitism abroad is what Likud wants and
| needs to survive.
| gspencley wrote:
| > I want you to think about how you would feel in a
| hypothetical about Chinese people.
|
| I'm not the person you are asking this question of but,
| after reading your comment carefully in full, I would
| like to answer on behalf of myself:
|
| I would feel absolutely no differently about any
| individual person of Chinese ethnicity or citizenship
| than I did before.
|
| Personally, I try to distinguish between the individual
| and perceived collective associations. And I try not
| project my personal opinions about global politics or my
| personal prejudices about a country onto individual
| friends and acquaintances that I hang out with at a local
| pub in a completely different country than the one we're
| discussing.
|
| My operating definition of "racism" is:
|
| "The religious belief that you can know the contents of
| an individual's mind and heart based on superficial
| characteristics - such as their skin colour, ethnicity or
| country of origin."
|
| You can bring your "nuanced" opinion of Israel into it
| all you want to. But to project that onto an individual
| in the context of hanging out with a group of friends
| fits my definition of "racism" exactly. And this would
| hold even if one were to, hypothetically, concede your
| opinion of Israel's actions entirely.
|
| Your post is a great example of why people so often brand
| attacks against Israel as "antisemitism." There is
| nothing wrong with being critical of a government and its
| policies, or of how a war is conducted. But to project
| those opinions and feelings onto an individual who is
| living in a completely different country and who has
| nothing to do with that conflict other than the fact that
| they hold citizenship or ethic affiliations is another
| matter entirely. One is "nuanced" opinion, possibly even
| objective if the individual is trying to be. The other is
| trying to mask and justify bigotry and prejudice behind
| an heir of intellectualism.
| mapt wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm trying to help GP understand the way they
| were being seen, and why that worldview might have
| arisen, not defending/endorsing that worldview.
|
| A bit more than a century back, one branch of my family
| tree stems from somebody with the surname "Berlin".
|
| Sometime in the vicinity of WW1, their ~dozen children
| each chose a different spelling variation and changed
| their names so that they wouldn't be directly associated
| with that city. Being seen as "German" went out of style.
|
| You can call this some unique type of racism, or you
| could call it being dumb, or you could call it being...
| not nuanced. But generalization is a fundamental mode of
| human thought, and you shouldn't be surprised when
| something awful happens attributable to a group you
| happen to be a part of, that some significant fraction of
| the population generalizes their attitudes as your
| attitudes. This isn't some defensible ethical position
| I'm staking out, it's an observation that people were
| prone to make this ethnic generalization in the first
| place, and unlike in most cases in a liberal democracy,
| every authority figure in their lives have EMBRACED the
| generalization as a direct equivalence, at the request of
| the foreign ethnostate. Netanyahu wants to SPEND DOWN any
| social capital that the term "Antisemitism" has accrued,
| for short-term political gain, and both US political
| parties and media ecosystems have complied with this
| plan. If this causes harm abroad to non-Israeli Jews,
| Netanyahu only benefits because it drives Jewish refugees
| to seek Right of Return to the self-proclaimed Jewish
| ethnostate and its strongman leader who will provide you
| security.
|
| J-Street and similar groups need to be out there on the
| streets, frankly, not just as a normative moral stance,
| but to protect themselves from Israel's blowback.
|
| October 7th was many things, but the narrative these
| particular people focused on was of a prison break, by a
| prison gang, who was imprisoned by act of military
| conquest in a concentration camp, which has been
| periodically bombed and starved for as long as they've
| been alive. Israel's ruling coalition had grown
| increasingly right wing, incorporating people who were
| actively discussing a final annexation of this land and
| expulsion/extirpation of its people. It has also
| accelerated "Settlement" activity on Palestinian land.
| These acts drew harsh condemnation from the rest of the
| world... but not the US. The US has bent over backwards
| to support Israel despite any ideals it might have; We
| have sacrificed relationships with other nations and
| given away diplomatic priorities to extort them to
| support Israel. It's done so because Israel has corrupted
| the US legislature in a top-down fashion, going back to
| the 60's, using a combination of Cold War logic, captive
| military-industrial ties, espionage (Among the most
| salacious examples, Epstein/Maxwell), racism, evangelical
| rapture, and cold hard... uhh... lobbying. They dumped a
| hundred million dollars on our political establishment's
| primary campaign system this past election to secure
| their consent, and we are told growing up that this isn't
| something a foreign state actor would ever be allowed to
| do.
|
| In the _days_ after October 7th, before the bombing
| started, those of us with a lot of exposure to media were
| watching nonstop war propaganda about things like
| hundreds of babies being beheaded, much of it in an
| Israeli accent; There was talk of the immediate urgent
| need to Solve the Hamas Problem by any means necessary.
| And we've watched this happen with Iraq/Afghanistan after
| 9/11 - we've seen these characters say these things
| before, played by an earlier generation but making the
| same "mistakes" to appeal to the same urges. But Iraq &
| Afghanistan are not one of the most densely populated
| cities on Earth, which was on the verge of starving in
| the best of times.
|
| We were told growing up that "dual loyalty" was some kind
| of warped Nazi idea, while it was marketed to
| impressionable young American Jews by Israel as an ideal
| in all-expenses-paid Birthright tours. My largely
| apolitical friend in high school with an American sports
| scholarship staring him in the face ended up doing his
| IDF term of service in the Second Intifada instead
| because that was just what was expected of him in his
| family, and because of how Israel treats dual citizenship
| & Return. I don't think we should be surprised if some
| people just choose to believe what Israel says about
| Jews, and conclude that they should be generically
| opposed to Jews. It takes _effort_ to understand
| perspectives and _exposure_ to Jews that aren't
| ethnonationalists, to avoid these sorts of conclusions.
| noduerme wrote:
| Your hypothetical is intentionally skewed.
|
| Hamas is not a pro democracy group. It's a radical
| jihadist group. Its mission is not to free Gaza, but to
| destroy Israel and kill all Jews. The people it killed on
| 10/7 were not low level government officials, they were
| civilians, including children. The method of killing was
| extremely brutal.
|
| Moreover, Hamas is not some tiny group within Gaza. It is
| the elected government of Gaza.
|
| You set up this whole false narrative that has no
| relation to reality. But I will tell you this: I know a
| Russian who is pro-Putin. I find his politics despicable.
| But I still treat him with courtesy and am willing to
| discuss things with him. I don't believe in cutting off
| people you disagree with. It's bad form and it doesn't
| serve to change anything. How much more so, someone whose
| politics I don't even know. Why would I make an
| assumption based on someone's national origin or race?
| mapt wrote:
| Your attitude of tolerance is admirable.
|
| If you queried a hundred random people who knew this same
| Russian and were similarly opposed to his politics, do
| you believe that one hundred of them would share your
| perspective? Or would a handful give that guy dirty looks
| at the bar because they were not in the exact same
| headspace you are in?
|
| I struggle with comparisons because I'm trying to
| illustrate for you what those people are seeing when they
| spontaneously start acting that way that is different
| from what you're seeing. It's difficult to find any
| comparable situation as lopsided as Israel's relationship
| with Palestine, and the almost inscrutable international
| response to that relationship. Liberal tolerance ethics
| takes deliberate effort (generalization is a natural
| cognitive bias), and all of the people who would
| typically provide guidance on normative ideals suddenly
| took on the unprecedented position that we should
| exterminate a couple million people in what is
| effectively a concentration camp because of a violent
| outburst against the people who put them there, that this
| was Good and Righteous Justice, that anybody who didn't
| want to exterminate them were dangerous fringe actors.
| People who rejected this propaganda storm found
| themselves ideologically adrift, latching on to whatever
| floats.
| rightbyte wrote:
| The clique on pub B might talk down on the clique on pub
| A without any motivation but not B.
|
| Someone that doesn't notice that he is "hated" might also
| be susceptible to such low key social manipulation to be
| made believe he is hated.
|
| But ye, as I am not in clique A or B there is a lot of
| guesswork on my part and I cam't argue against someone
| else's story. I am just trying to bring up the
| possibility of bad mouthing.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| The word "hate" itself also offers a lot of room for
| interpretation.
| johnisgood wrote:
| > actually hate me and talk shit about me whenever I'm not
| around.
|
| This happens virtually everywhere. It is extremely rampant.
| I have yet to find a place where there are humans and it
| does not happen, excl. friend circles.
| noduerme wrote:
| Yeh, I know. It's a kinda sad fact about humans. You can
| handle it a few ways. The most tempting and easiest is to
| compete on the same level, sniping at other people. More
| difficult but similar is to take it a step further and be
| the biggest guy at the pub, deal some drugs, fuck more
| girls, act like a friend and _then_ talk shit. Every bar
| has one... it 's just a method. They learned it from the
| internet, or possibly from being abused as a child. My
| method in all cases, everywhere, is to be extremely
| honest and see what comes out of people. What I find
| respectable is someone who tells you honestly what they
| think, even if they're not your friend. The people who
| tell you the unfiltered truth as they see it. Those are
| the good humans. Making other people reveal themselves,
| so you know what you're dealing with. That's actually
| understanding the world.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I am mostly just a listener, and at times a mediator. It
| worked well for me in cases where I was liked by most.
| Sadly it does not work well even when it comes to family,
| they talk shit about me behind my back to people and so
| forth.
|
| > What I find respectable is someone who tells you
| honestly what they think
|
| Agreed.
| noduerme wrote:
| I think. Hear me out. To be a good mediator is also to be
| brutally honest with everyone. And your takeaway isn't
| them liking you. If either side liked you, you'd be a
| shit mediator. lol
|
| The good news is they'll respect you for something they
| can't get anywhere else.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I try to keep quiet when they trashtalk each other. :D
| ljm wrote:
| Friend circles can be just as bad at excluding or
| ostracising others in the group for the pettiest of
| reasons.
|
| There's always going to be a shot caller or instigator
| behind it and everyone else who is weak willed will get
| on board with it.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Had a long-time friend group explode last year over this.
| Years of behind-their-backs shit-stirring lies by a
| couple members of the group finally got figured out and
| _called_ out, publicly, which lit the fuse. Exact same
| behavior that was called out was immediately employed to
| try to spin _that_ and get these people 's "enemies"
| pushed out of the group, which was the bomb going off.
| About half the group survived with some scarring, the
| rest just shattered.
|
| Toxic people gonna toxic.
|
| > There's always going to be a shot caller or instigator
| behind it and everyone else who is weak willed will get
| on board with it.
|
| Yeah, a major factor was lots of people putting up with
| some real bullshit for _years_ to try to keep the peace.
| That, and the ones who did try to do something about it
| approached the problem-people one-on-one, which just led
| to them being lied to ( "oh no, there's no problem
| between us") and then smeared _even harder_ to others,
| and marginalized, having no idea why any of it was
| happening.
| johnisgood wrote:
| That sounds extremely toxic. I would not even consider
| such people friends to begin with.
| projectazorian wrote:
| I've gotten in the habit of straight out calling out
| these people, including throwing them out of my house
| when they start down this road.
|
| They tend to have some form of serious mental illness
| and/or a major substance problem they're not interested
| in addressing, which leads to emotional dysregulation. So
| not exactly great people to have around anyway.
|
| Have I lost friends over it? Yes. But that's fine, having
| no friends is better than having fake friends who
| undermine you.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I would not punish them for having a mental illness, I am
| understanding of it as I have, too, but it is completely
| fine if you, yourself, do not want to handle or deal with
| it.
|
| I tend to call people out, too. I keep the ones that take
| it gracefully.
|
| Quality > quantity. :)
| projectazorian wrote:
| Yeah, I try to give people some grace but if their
| behavior is repeatedly disruptive over a period of months
| to years, eventually something has to give. Everyone
| needs to have some boundaries.
| viccis wrote:
| >Ironically, the nice people at the other pub who told me
| are Lebanese.
|
| Why is it ironic that an Arab would be nice to you?
| Ignoring the racial/national assumption here, political
| views from diasporic Arabs, especially older ones who
| immigrated many years ago, are incredibly diverse and often
| more contingent on their local issues than world politics.
| People make the same mistake when assuming political views
| towards Mexico from Latinos (both Tejano and Mexican) in
| Texas, for example.
|
| >my old antifa "friends"
|
| Most antifa folks are gonna have a very clear cut moral
| stance on the state of Israel, even before Hamas' military
| began the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. Be honest now, have they
| distanced themselves from you because of your identity, or
| is it because of your opinions on the actions of the state
| of Israel? Because even the most hardline "antifa" types I
| know are more than happy to organize with the likes of SJP
| and similar organizations of Jewish and Israeli people.
| mrandish wrote:
| > It's that I'm Jewish, with Israeli family... This was a
| hard-to-get real world experience in how fucked up people
| can be for no reason.
|
| Don't be too discouraged. IMHO it's as simple as there
| being a significant portion of the population who tend to
| talk shit about other people in their circle when those
| people aren't around. If asked, they'll often attribute
| this oddly unmotivated malice to some conveniently
| proximate reason but, in most cases, if that reason didn't
| exist they'd _still_ talk some slightly different shit
| about that same person.
|
| In my experience, these kind of people will, at various
| times and in various contexts, talk shit about around half
| the people in their relevant circle. And who's in the half
| varies over time and each shit-talker can have different
| individuals in their half. So how does one end up in a
| given talker's shit-talked half? It can seem almost random
| but definite contributing factors include the talker
| perceiving you as better than them in any way (even if you
| _never_ imply that - and even if it 's not remotely
| correct). It's enough that their insecurity gets triggered
| even if it's over something 100% imaginary. Heaven help you
| if you actually are slightly more attractive in some way,
| have a slightly better job, spouse, education, hobby,
| hairdo, car - it can be anything or nothing. It's them -
| not you. And if it wasn't that one thing, it would be about
| something else.
|
| The truly strange thing is, in my experience, when many of
| these people shit-talk about their friend group it's
| unconsciously triggered behavior that relieves some
| internal psychological stressor. It's almost like some kind
| of bizarre Tourette syndrome. On another day, in another
| context, that same shit-talker would tell someone you're
| their friend, that you're a great person - and, strangely,
| in that moment they would sincerely mean it. In some ways,
| I'd almost prefer it if these people were two-faced liars
| who spend every moment secretly hating me but act nice to
| my face. While unpleasant, that's at least easy to
| understand. The reality that they're just socially
| schizophrenic and almost randomly acting out triggered
| emotional stress but without harboring any deep rooted
| animosity toward me is much harder to mentally model.
|
| Once I gained an understanding of this. I learned to avoid
| not only the shit-talkers, but the people close to them who
| don't shit talk but listen to their shit talk passively.
| While the shit-talkers are flawed, insecure people, the
| regular shit-listeners are just weak and unprincipled. I
| decided I don't have time to waste on either type. It's
| also a good reminder to myself to avoid ever slipping into
| passive shit-listening. Whenever I'd hear shit-talk about
| someone else, I'd usually politely question the shit-talker
| on their inconsistent behavior. This pretty quickly ensures
| no one shit-talks about anyone when I'm around - and it
| often leads to being excluded from the group entirely.
| Which I consider an excellent outcome.
|
| Note: Based on the broad circumstances you related, I'll
| also add a general reminder to always consider the
| motivations of whoever told you about the shit-talking.
| Obviously, that's an all-to-common way to stir up drama
| and/or deepen their relationship with you. Always remember,
| if they weren't considered a 'safe' shit-listener by the
| shit-talker, they wouldn't have heard the shit-talk about
| you. And, of course, exaggerating (or entirely fabricating)
| the supposed shit-talk they reported to you is another
| level of shit-stirring.
| alistairSH wrote:
| The problem with Insta as a "hip LinkedIn" is I can't even
| browse it properly without an account. Say I find an
| interesting business elsewhere and Ggogle them; their primary
| web presence is Insta; I find their page, but cannot browse
| their photos/posts.
|
| So, it's a pretty shit tool for a business to share what it's
| about.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'd say that's a feature from Insta's perspective:
| leveraging user-created content into new user acquisition.
|
| And all they have to do is be shitty about monetizing their
| existing userbase via social pressure.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Oh yeah, Insta wants me to join. But I quit Meta last
| year because the algorithms suck donkey bollocks and
| drive me crazy. I'm much happier for it, but it is
| annoying to find a restaurant or craftsman who only uses
| Insta (or FB or whatever else).
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| For some reason Meta destroyed Insta as a monetisation
| tool. The algo used to be good for self-promo for artists
| and writers, and they tweaked it to kill that. Now it's
| useless.
|
| There was a mass exodus to Threads, which is now a weird
| toxic liminal space apparently tuned for woke-adjacent
| rage bait blended with LinkedIn-for-creatives. "I have an
| opinion, now buy my fan art."
|
| My take on all of these is that huge corporations are all
| polluters. We think of pollution as chemical and
| environmental, but Meta and X are the world's biggest
| sources of mental and emotional pollution - outside of
| the MSM.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If there's a link to an Insta page that I'm actually
| interested in, I turn on the devtools and hide their modal
| pop up about logging in. That allows me to continue to
| scroll the page. Then instead of clicking on the item of
| interest directly, I use the browser's copy link which I
| then paste into a new tab. This avoids their attempt at
| getting you to login again. They'll let you land on any
| post without throttling the number of direct loads. It's a
| total pain in the ass, so I only do it for the rare account
| that actually looks interesting. After a couple of posts, I
| quickly realize that the account isn't actually worth all
| of that, and just close and move on.
| grumple wrote:
| Group chats existed before any of this social media did.
| Pretty funny that we've come full circle on that.
| lobsterthief wrote:
| iOS added more social network-like functionality to the
| group chats--like being able to name them, set a photo,
| etc. To me, this helped cement their popularity since you
| can create a bespoke "named thing" that makes it easier to
| return to. You don't accidentally leave someone off when
| returning to the convo.
| grumple wrote:
| I have never used any of these features, I just see the
| names on the group chat - same as groups texts 15 years
| ago. I don't want to hide that with a group name that
| might make me forget who I'm messaging.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people.
|
| Don't forget FB marketplace. I know a few younger coworkers
| who have FB just for market place.
| FeloniousHam wrote:
| I'm Old, but this is me. Marketplace is big improvement
| over Craigslist, it's the only reason I have a FB account.
| bentt wrote:
| "Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is
| turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is
| turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and
| local businesses share career and business updates and
| advertise their wares."
|
| This is spot on. Facebook proper has supplanted private email
| chains for a lot of older people. This is ironic because they
| are moving in the opposite direction as everyone else.
| Everyone else is moving into private communities, older
| people are leaving the safety of email chains and, often
| unknowingly, posting publicly. Facebook (probably
| intentionally) upholds the illusion that they are posting for
| their friends. I've seen Facebook actually provide a
| compelling service to my older dad who keeps in touch with a
| lot of his old friends on there. It's a much more active
| community of seniors than you'd guess.
|
| Of course, they are subject to all the ills of Facebook at
| the same time. Overall I'd rate it as a net loss for society
| because of that.
| JauntTrooper wrote:
| WhatsApp has really taken on this role for me, now that
| mention it.
|
| I have a channel for my neighborhood, another for the parents
| at my children's school, another for my extended family,
| another for work colleagues and another for a few friends.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| You mean, what it was to begin with? Right now WhatsApp is
| basically my family Facebook. Images, videos, chat. Separate
| groups of people so you can remain friends with two former
| friends who are now mortal enemies. Facebook is just another
| toxic, addictive social media.
| tianqi wrote:
| You're talking about something exactly like the 'Moments' of
| WeChat, China's largest social media. It doesn't have a feed,
| but only updates from friends and family. But still, people
| spend so much time on that - 900 million people spending an
| average of 1 hour and 42 minutes per person per day.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| The "like" button killed genuine engagement, and made Facebook
| an exercise in lever-pressing. The problem is that in a lot of
| cases (not all), those stupid remarks and outrageous
| influencers are being "liked" and "reposted" by your network in
| order to gather reflected glory and dopamine hits.
|
| A social network is no better than the sum of its parts, and to
| create something really worthwhile, you have to limit what
| people are allowed to post (original content only, for
| example).
|
| Doing that at scale I think is very hard.
| openplatypus wrote:
| You described Mastodon.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I wrote my own client for Twitter, which was later adapted to
| also support Bluesky. The idea behind the project was to scrape
| porn easily, but it's also an amazing tool where it shows me
| the feed I personally want to see. This is pretty much the only
| way I interact with these services.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| username checks out
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| its what whatsapp is for many and why the metastasis crams
| feeds, ai and horrors to it.
| brnt wrote:
| The single problem with social media is that they are not
| public, but are heavily thought of (and propagandized) as such.
|
| Any marketplace that is privately owned, is not a free market
| place. And, the elephant in the room, these social media
| marketplaces are owned by parties with very particular
| interests. As long as don't recognise that, we will let
| ourselves be distracted by details that are always the result
| of this private control.
|
| Something social must be public, or it isn't social, and it
| isn't what you and I really want.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I read Facebook with the special URL[1] that gives a
| traditional reverse chronological feed (plus ads, of course),
| but it's all my friends and family.
|
| Unfortunately, some of my family post insane political views,
| usually about now in the early AM. Being told that a King of
| the USA and the elimination of due process are good things
| doesn't help my mental health.
|
| [1] https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
| lloeki wrote:
| > some of my family post insane political views
|
| Would they still if any such poster's feed would strictly
| only be viewable by families and friends?
|
| (I have no idea)
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| Yes. Crazy political people are crazy political people and
| think the issue they care about is the most important thing
| ever.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| The issue they've been told is important, right? For
| example it was vital in the minds of some in USA to put
| import taxes (tariffs) >100% on all Chinese goods.
|
| They would have seemed to care about that, until Trump
| got told that wasn't working (or, as likely, the market
| had been swung far enough) and did a 180 removing tariffs
| on what the public were told were the most vital things
| to tariff...
|
| All those people didn't change their mind at the exact
| moment it was needed to swing the stock market back and
| for you mate the oligarchs money - just Musk et al. have
| built a brainwash machine at a national level.
|
| It's an important distinction - when interviewed it seems
| barely any of those being manipulated can form a coherent
| thought about "the issue they care about".
| pjc50 wrote:
| But remember that this is supported by traditional media
| (Fox news). It's not _just_ social media.
| tomrod wrote:
| Correct. The term for these type of unreliable sources in
| support of an ideology is propaganda.
| lupusreal wrote:
| That's a good definition of propaganda. The way it's
| usually taught in schools is that propaganda is all lies,
| but propaganda is any communication intended to promote a
| cause or agenda and opportunistically uses both truth and
| lies, choosing whichever align with the agenda.
| Unreliable captured this neatly.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| We were taught in school that what they choose to cover
| is as important as what they don't choose to cover. Of
| course I am realizing I had better critical media
| analysis sort of education than most.
| whstl wrote:
| Group chats say that: yes, they do.
|
| Also socializing becomes impossible. I once went to a
| birthday party only to have it ruined by a friend of the
| host. Said friend only wanted to talk partisan politics
| non-stop.
| avhception wrote:
| While there will always be unhinged relatives, maybe the
| problem would be less pronounced without the polarization
| that comes with the networks pushing polarizing posts into
| their faces in their never ending quest for more "engagement"
| by users.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| It's important to note that this is not a new or unique
| feature of social media. At least in our lifetimes,
| conservative moguls have always had a habit of buying up as
| many media outlets as possible and polarizing the
| constituency with unhinged stories. Before social media
| (everything I don't like is woke), it was cable news
| (Obamacare means death panels for your grandmother, stay
| tuned), before that it was talk radio (Rush Limbaugh
| calling _Bill Clinton_ an extreme leftist), before that, it
| was the papers (get a load of this nerd Dukakis in a tank,
| in this op ed...). Today, it 's all of the above.
|
| If anything is different today, it's not that social media
| makes things easier or faster, because we've always had
| 24/7 talking heads on TV or the radio, we had dailies with
| evening editions, etc. It's that consolidation is even more
| prevalent today.
| Sammi wrote:
| I unfollow quickly and swiftly if I don't enjoy your posts. I
| don't care how close family you are or how long I've known
| you.
| The-loan-wolf wrote:
| Whatsapp stories
| veunes wrote:
| Social media started as a way to stay connected with people you
| actually know, but it's morphed into this performative
| attention economy where the loudest, most extreme content wins.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| There's a spectrum; when it comes to short videos on YT and IG
| merely ditching the slide-down-for-next video for a thumbnail
| grid gives some agency - and liberally using "don't recommend"
| (which I think most normies never notice is there) cleans it up
| further.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > many of the problems in our current social media landscape
| could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead
| displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family,
| and those we know in real life
|
| You want nourishment instead of toxins! ^_^
|
| The thing called "social media" is mostly a US export. It
| craves monetisation -- at the expense of all else, including
| factual information.
|
| What it has done to US society and public discourse is plain to
| see.
| jeffjobs4000 wrote:
| Yes. Social networking was fun. Social media is brain rot.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| > "...instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from
| friends, family, and those we know in real life..."
|
| I've stopped using FB regularly, because I don't like their
| feed algorithm. I don't like the ads or the content, and I had
| curated it by joining local groups and BOFS. The only thing
| that brings me back now is the _possibility_ of a friends
| update.
|
| That said, the _frequency_ of updates from friends and family
| will be vastly different for different people. The feed (if it
| speaks to you) works to regularize or smooth the frequency. I
| see FB's problem and I don't envy them. The vitality of the
| platform becomes precarious, and can be supplanted by some
| other platform with better engagement (ie TickTock).
|
| I'm not a designer or researcher of Social Media, but I'm an
| emigre of sorts and not many people have that experience. The
| only platform all of my friends and family use are group
| private messages using our phones, and the most engaging chats
| we have are few and far between.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I'm inclined to agree. I remember when Facebook (and before
| that, MySpace) was new and was still mostly a reverse-
| chronological feed of your friend's updates. It caused zero
| stress or anxiety at all - and it was kind of nice checking in
| to see what was going on. Your feed was like an internet forum
| for your social circle.
| juancroldan wrote:
| I've been using BeReal this way with a bunch of friends and
| family for the last couple of years. It definitely fills its
| purpose of seeing what my friends are up to without occupying
| too much of my headspace. Can't be happier about it
| redbell wrote:
| > ..and could go against what most people _have become
| accustomed to_.
|
| I think that's the tough reality--over time, people gradually
| become accustomed to consuming random content from random
| accounts or pages, to the point where the original idea of
| interacting with friends and family on social media starts to
| fade away. That said, messaging apps might still bridge that
| gap through _groups_.
| dsego wrote:
| Whatsapp group chats.
| amarant wrote:
| This is basically how I use WhatsApp.
| erkt wrote:
| >solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts,
| updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know
| in real life.
|
| This is what Facebook was when we all signed up almost two
| decades ago. No one ever wanted a feed of people they didn't
| know. Free social media is inherently corrupt as they chase
| profits abusing the user base.
| zpeti wrote:
| I think this is what your conscious mind thinks but your
| actual desires don't.
|
| Facebook was refocusing on friend and family content before
| TikTok came along. But they had to adjust to the TikTok trend
| otherwise they would have lost market share or potentially
| lost the entire market.
|
| You might think you want friend and family content, but
| actually you don't. Not as much as you want engaging content.
| svnt wrote:
| This is slightly inaccurate.
|
| You might want friend and family content, but engaging
| content will increase your dwell time and profitability as
| a user, often against your will.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| You are equating action and desire which is a false
| equivalence. You wouldn't claim that somebody who died in a
| car accident wanted that to happen, would you?
| jjulius wrote:
| This ignores nuance. There's "engaging content" (nods head)
| and "engaging content" (shakes head).
|
| I want the former, not the latter. Social media is
| optimized for the latter.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| My mind also wants lots of cocaine. That doesn't mean it
| should have it.
| svnt wrote:
| Maybe just phrasing but free social media isn't the problem.
|
| VC-backed corporations masquerading as public services to
| gain user networks they can later monetize is the problem.
| naasking wrote:
| I think that's just rephrasing the same argument. If social
| media weren't free, then you would be the customer and
| those VC-backed corps would be serving you. Social media
| being free means they're not serving you because you are
| not the customer. The "free" part and the "VC-backed" part
| aren't the problem, it's the incentive structure created by
| combining the two.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Well if we don't want them to monetize the user-network,
| someone would have to straight-up pay to use the sites.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| VC is just a lazy boogieman. Facebook IPO'ed 13 years ago.
| I dont think it would be different if was owned by the
| other boogie man private equity, owned entirely by
| Zuckerberg, or publicly traded.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I cannot agree more. It's amazing that WeChat, a Chinese app,
| has figured this out years ago; its Moments feature had no ads,
| no influencers, only posts by contacts. It even suppresses
| comments made by people you don't know, even if the subject of
| a comment is a post by people you do know.
|
| Of course there are other Chinese apps that operate entirely
| based on feeds. What I found interesting is that on Rednote it
| tried to suppress your posts from what it infers to be your
| friends in real life.
|
| I think it is a great approach. There are sometimes I just want
| to see updates from friends and family. There are other times
| when I only want to see something interesting to me without
| necessarily telling all my friends what I'm interested in.
| These are two entirely different categories of social media and
| it is a good thing to require users to switch apps.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| This is what Facebook was the last time I used it, which is
| like a decade ago at least
| amitp wrote:
| There's a version of Facebook that only shows things from your
| friends, and not "suggested" or "reels" etc.:
| https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr (it still shows
| ads but not the other random stuff)
|
| And it doesn't scroll endlessly. It will display this at the
| bottom of the page:
|
| > You're all caught up on Most Recent posts
|
| > Check back later for more updates
| jjulius wrote:
| >... that only shows things from your friends...
|
| And any page you follow, including anything that tries to
| convince you to click through to their website via clickbait,
| anxiety-inducing headlines, etc.. It also shows FB groups
| you're in, which are often full of their own unnecessary
| drama.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I think the fact that "the algorithm" capitalizes on negative
| emotion has been known for a while. The problem is that Zuck
| (and Elon, etc.) is at best motivated by making money, at worst
| motivated by swaying public opinion, and certainly not
| motivating by improving the emotional state of the users of
| these services, or even giving them a good experience.
|
| I think this goes beyond social media to all kinds of media.
| sullivantrevor wrote:
| I agree with you and I am building this app right now.
|
| elswhr.app
|
| Would love to hear your feedback and any feature requests you
| might have.
| dansimco wrote:
| This is where I want to see legislation. Required opt-out
| ability for algorithmic timelines.
| kube-system wrote:
| That will work just as well as requiring Philip Morris to
| allow one to opt out of nicotine in their cigarettes.
|
| The addictive properties are the reason for the prevalence of
| the product.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family,
| and those we know in real life
|
| This is called "email" (and/or "text messaging" i.e. iMessage
| or SMS).
| 9rx wrote:
| _> and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from
| friends, family, and those we know in real life._
|
| Friends and family more or less stopped posting a long time
| ago, when everyone became worried about what happens when
| others have their personal information/drunk party photos.
| Which is why "the feed" started seeking content from outside
| content creators so that the services could give you...
| _something_.
|
| Facebook, at least, has maintained the "friends and family"
| feed like you describe, but who uses it? I expect
| asymptotically nobody.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The issue for social media companies is that its dead. No one
| posts like they did in 2010 anymore. Go ahead and follow only
| your friends actual posts on fb and it is going to be pretty
| dead. Likewise for instagram and other platforms. They don't
| want you to be able to scan an entire chronological feed in 10
| mins and be updated.
| methuselah_in wrote:
| Well, let me tell you its far better. I had been using in collage
| upto 2013 i suppose. It use to make me sick in multiple ways. Now
| i use mastodon, almost same goes with it as well. But i just
| check things in mastodon which you can check without signing up
| as well. The Urge to check news multiple times a day is there.
| But i am getting hang of it. I didn't knew that how these
| companies suck your brain. With adblock and using just few times
| the phone makes me feel better.
| nomilk wrote:
| The surprise here is how _little_ of an effect it has.
| Deactivating facebook makes you only 1 /16th of one standard
| deviation happier. And instagram even less. And this was measured
| during elections, when the effect is likely to be greatest.
|
| Kinda crazy that the magnitude is so small! (my next [admittedly
| rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")
| highwaylights wrote:
| I'd be interested in the results of a study that cuts out _all_
| social media, but the problem I can already see with that is
| self-selection bias (the people that would volunteer for it are
| probably already eager to get away from social media so the
| results would likely be skewed).
|
| Personally I've been mentally in a better place since getting
| rid of my social media accounts during COVID, but it does cause
| problems because Facebook has become a utility as well (schools
| and real-life social groups use it for co-ordinating
| activities).
| photonthug wrote:
| The perceived utility of social media seems pretty variable,
| not just across people, but with the same person in different
| circumstances. With covid, social media might scare people
| out who were regular users previously, and yet for other
| occasional or reluctant users it's suddenly seen as the only
| option for human contact and they use it constantly. After
| lock-downs are over, people flip to the polar opposite of
| their previous preference. With recessions, social media
| might be the only affordable entertainment but during better
| times, many would rather do something else. In general I bet
| it's insanely hard to run good experiments for behavioural
| economics in volatile times, even if you're really trying to
| be careful about methodology.
| safety1st wrote:
| I think this is an important and often overlooked phenomenon
| actually. Studies of Internet engagement are filled with these
| skewed distributions that follow something like a Pareto
| principle, or I've heard it termed the 90-9-1 distribution in
| engagement where 90% of users just lurk a bit, 9% contribute
| casually, and then 1% are contributing like half of the content
| on the platform.
|
| It would follow logically that whatever kind of brain rot
| social media causes, would affect 1% of the population very
| dramatically, another 9% somewhat more noticeably, and then
| there would be this vast ocean of people who are only
| marginally aware/affected. From the perspective of online
| activity they appear to not even exist.
|
| This _always_ seems counterintuitive to the 9% or the 1% (and
| just by commenting we 're already in one of those demogs). But
| there's lots of data out there supporting these skewed
| distributions in online activity.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| These percentages are similar to those that one sees for
| alcohol consumption or problematic gambling.
|
| The business model of the casinos and the drug dealers and
| the alcohol venders is the same - you need a huge pool of
| unproblematic recreational users to find the problematic
| users who generate the bulk of your profits.
|
| The same model works for video games and social media.
| safety1st wrote:
| If we want to go really wild with associations, I think the
| original discussion about the 90-9-1 in The Atlantic was
| looking at contributors to Wikipedia...!
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I really hate this projecting of the software gaming
| industry's behavior back into the "original" vices.
|
| The casino, liquor store and drug dealer all make the same
| margin regardless of who they're selling to. If anything
| the problem users are more likely to cause problems for
| them so they'd rather make the money on casual users and
| scale.
|
| Having your whole operation be basically a wash except for
| all the money from a few people with problems is fairly
| unique to digital gaming and the software industry.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| The top 10% of drinkers consume the majority of alcohol.
| Their average consumption is over 10 drinks per day,
| which I think clearly suggestions a problem. I think it's
| hard to imagine that losing >50% of revenue wouldn't
| matter to sellers.
|
| Gambling is also very skewed. Studies place it something
| like 5% of in person gamblers accounting for 50% of
| profits or 1% for online gambling. I would guess for
| sports betting it's similar.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Of course it's not even really specific to vices, the top
| 10% of travelers take around 50% of flights, and you see
| similar effects in pretty much every area of consumption.
| mentalgear wrote:
| follow the money ...
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Removing one dopamine addicting and cortisol antagonising
| source might just be replaced by more of all the other sources
| that are being consumed. Perhaps they just watched TV news
| more, for example?
|
| But perhaps the study shows that the effect works in the right
| direction even if small and even when replaced by any other
| behaviours that cause unhappiness, depression and anxiety.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| It's like if you ask people to quit drinking beer but then
| they just drink wine instead. It might be a tiny bit
| healthier but it doesn't get at the underlying problem. And
| it wouldn't be fair to fault beer by itself for their
| negative experiences.
| baxtr wrote:
| Maybe social media usage is a symptom of unhappiness and not
| the cause?
| blablabla123 wrote:
| > Kinda crazy that the magnitude is so small! (my next
| [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")
|
| If a significant part of someone's Social life is run through
| Facebook, it's surprising that there's even a net positive in
| the end.
| photonthug wrote:
| > The surprise here is how little of an effect it has [..]
| measured during elections, when the effect is likely to be
| greatest.
|
| If you were depressed because of divisive politics on social
| media, then you leave social media during elections where
| divisive politics is everywhere in the real world anyway..
| self-reported depression seems like it would not change much.
| So the results might make sense as long as they are targeting
| people that are old enough to be depressed by politics in the
| first place, and assuming politics rather than body-image
| issues etc is the main driver.
|
| Some follow up questions.. does social media make divisive
| political issues in the real world worse? Seems like it! How
| old is old enough to be depressed by politics? Probably
| everyone now, which phenomenon is also likely caused by social
| media. Honestly regardless of elections, you can't actually
| _leave_ social media by leaving social media anymore, it 's
| kinda in the very fabric of things.
|
| > my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded
| this?")
|
| Same, I mean this seems to be going against most of the other
| research on this. For what it's worth, here's a paper with some
| of the same authors on digital addiction (
| https://www.nber.org/papers/w28936 ). Abstract states that
|
| > Looking at these facts through the lens of our model suggests
| that self-control problems cause 31 percent of social media
| use.
|
| So.. not necessarily painting social media as wonderful. Social
| media companies would be interested in research about social
| media addiction for obvious reasons, but probably do not in
| general want that research public. Unless of course it hurts
| competitors more than it hurts them, and this paper is in the
| middle of drama about a tiktok ban. Maybe the authors just say
| what people in power want to hear at the time?
| nabla9 wrote:
| > The fact that less than one percent of the people who were
| invited to the study completed the experiment underscores that
| one should be cautious in generalizing results outside our
| sample. Most of this sample selection is driven by the fact
| that only a few percent of people click on research study
| invitations or social media ad
|
| The self selection bias in these ad based invitation studies is
| just out of whack.
|
| I suspect that those who participate were already considering
| quitting.
| grumple wrote:
| I think the below poster got it right. Cutting out Facebook
| certainly improved my life; cutting out instagram later was an
| additive improvement. Now I'm left with HN (which generally
| avoids the bad parts of social media) and Reddit (which has
| plenty of brain rot).
|
| It also took a lot more than 6 weeks to get acclimated to it.
| You get psychological withdrawal. It took months for it to feel
| normal. My income went up a lot in the years after as well (in
| part due to more time to focus on finding a new job), so that
| also contributed to my happiness.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I find Reddit (and HN to a lesser extent) even worse than
| Facebook. There is a lot more content, for one thing, and so
| it's easier to waste even more time :(. I wish I could
| quit...
| prophesi wrote:
| > "who funded this?"
|
| Page 7 of the PDF shows the following:
|
| "This project is part of the U.S. 2020 Facebook and Instagram
| Election Study (Gonz'alez-Bail'on et al. 2023; Guess et al.
| 2023a,b; Nyhan et al. 2023; Allcott et al. 2024), a partnership
| between Meta researchers and unpaid independent academics.
| Under the terms of the collaboration, the independent academic
| authors had final authority over the pre-analysis plan, data
| analysis, and manuscript text, and Meta could not block any
| results from being published."
| righthand wrote:
| It's marginal but the study addresses this, it says essentially
| it's impossible to tell if the participants are telling the
| truth about deactivation, as well as if they are supplementing
| their Facebook time with other platforms.
|
| For example, if you deactivate Facebook but still doom scroll
| the NY Times et al homepages. Your happiness wouldn't
| necessarily change because almost ALL media has adopted the
| addictive techniques of social media.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Well the study was a couple of weeks, right? I guess it takes
| time to rebound.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I think social media has some sort of amplifier effect. If you
| are someone easily influenced, you'll be a lot more affected
| compared to someone who is more of a sceptic. If you are
| already depressed, it'll probably make it worse when you see
| holiday pictures of everyone in your network (no one shares
| pictures where they look like shit). If you are in a good place
| in life, you'll probably be smashing the like button without
| care.
|
| In any case I didn't like the amplification - unamplified life
| is hard enough - so I got rid of it a long time ago and don't
| regret it at all.
| rimeice wrote:
| Bad time to do it during what turned out to be very emotionally
| charged election where traditional news turns in to social media
| style instantaneous reporting and is inescapable. I'd also
| suggest 6 weeks is not long enough to fully recover. In fact in
| that time frame you may still be experiencing FOMO type symptoms.
| Would have been interesting to see how the participants faired
| after a year/two years.
| rimeice wrote:
| Also fb and instagram are just two of many social media
| platforms, so this study doesn't sound like a full cold turkey
| test.
| milesrout wrote:
| How is traditional news "inescapable"? You can just not go to
| the websites and not watch it on TV. It is very easy not to
| consume breathless mainstream media rubbish.
| Kozmik1 wrote:
| Weird. There is little that depresses me more than watching my
| wife sit at the table for hours a day slowly scrolling Facebook
| while ignoring me and the kids. We have talked about it and she's
| tried to reduce it to no avail.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| There's something about the social media influencer industrial
| complex that short circuits women's brains worse, as far as I
| can tell. Most of my friends quit social media years to a
| decade ago but our wives are all on it. Men seem to get sucked
| into Youtube wormholes instead.
|
| I think the only way out is cold turkey. The number of
| conversations my wife starts with telling me about some distant
| acquaintances recent vacation (as seen thru IG) is distressing.
|
| My "social" internet use is more hobby based - forum/reddit
| hobby focussed content.
| rightbyte wrote:
| It is anecdotal but eg. me and my brother and some of my male
| friends "burned out" on silly meme feeds on sites like
| Memebase and what not before there was any very addictive
| feeds. Maybe fewer women was full of it by the time Instagram
| came?
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| When my girlfriend told me on our first date that she doesn't
| use social media, I nearly proposed on the spot.
|
| And even she does some doom-scrolling though news sites. She
| claims to know it's mostly nonsense, and then says she has to
| do it to know what's going on. I try not to point out the
| contradiction too much, because she does limit it pretty
| well.
| milesrout wrote:
| If she tried to reduce it she wouldn't do it. Nobody is holding
| a gun to her head. She does it because she wants to do it.
| Until she takes responsibility for her actions she will not
| change.
| f1refly wrote:
| "Why don't people just stop taking heroin"
| darkwater wrote:
| Hey, you just solved drug dependency issues all over the
| world. Just stop doing it!
| bowsamic wrote:
| Well yes, the essential working part of all interventions
| and therapies is to help the client understand how they can
| take responsibility and what control they have, and to
| believe in it. They aren't pure victims, no one is.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Yeah this is how all therapy works. It's about learning what
| change you can make and taking responsibility and making that
| change. Not sure why you're being downvoted but likely
| because there's an idea floating around now that all such
| issues are purely externally imposed by a defect in society,
| and that it has nothing to do with the actions of the
| individual who is portrayed as helpless. I think that is a
| deeply depressing and disturbing trend. I've literally seen
| communities of people telling others they should kill
| themselves because it's impossible to be happy under
| capitalism...
| jpc0 wrote:
| Because wanting to change is the first step.
|
| If there is no external stimuli to push a desire to change
| it is unlikely a person will even want to change in the
| first place.
|
| Hence the other comments, well done you just solved all
| drug dependency, just stop doing drugs.
|
| Therapy isn't just about how to take responsibility and
| making changes. It's about learning how to build a support
| network and the mental resolve to actually go through with
| the change in the long term.
|
| Blaming the person in addiction doesn't help much without
| actually taking steps to improve. But it's all too common
| to believe you have brought an issue to an addicts
| attention but it didn't quite sink in to them.
|
| Sometimes a phrase like "this is a problem and if you don't
| seek help I am going to have to take action by doing x" can
| be a decent wake up call. But if it comes over as
| aggressive or happens during a fight of some sort you will
| still not get the response you were looking for.
|
| Inter personal relationships are hard, sometimes it is
| beneficial for the person's effected be someone else
| addiction to seek therapy at the same time or even before
| the addict seeks therapy.
|
| In this case it's even more true, a long term relationship
| with children is the one place you really do want all the
| support you can get to ensure the person that needs help
| gets it and the family as a whole doesn't suffer more than
| needed.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You're enabling it by being kind. Stop being so nice.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Semantic point: nice and kind are not the same thing.
|
| The nice thing to do when somebody is behaving poorly, is to
| ignore it until it becomes untenable (firing them, leaving
| them, and so on). The kind thing is to address it and let
| them change their ways.
|
| Wanting to be nice is baked into our social structures -
| nobody wants to be seen as the un-nice person - but being
| kind is where relationships and interactions get strong. You
| just need to do it with empathy.
| rambambram wrote:
| Indeed. Take the kids out to do something active or just kick
| a ball or look at the squirrels.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| Take a photo of her and send it while on a walk with your kids.
| drewvolpe wrote:
| It's an addiction and really hard to stop. Facebook spends
| billions designing it to be as addictive as possible.
|
| In this study, they paid people $25 to not use it for a week. I
| wonder if your wife would agree to that. It seems like for most
| people who are addicted, you need to go "sober" and not use it
| all.
| anovikov wrote:
| Quit all social media 8 years ago, never missed it one bit. It
| was all good and i truly enjoyed it before ~2014 but then it
| started deteriorating so rapidly due to political polarisation
| and domination of "influencers" that kept peddling worthless
| trash, by about 2016 i no longer understood wtf i was doing
| there.
|
| Since then, only tried reddit, but it has a different problem -
| it's an echo chamber where no real discussion is possible on any
| topic as anyone who disagrees with even minute details in
| dominating dogma of every subreddit, gets downvoted to
| invisibility. Plus too many subreddits are merely karma mills
| that people use to boost their karma to allow themselves at least
| some actual voice in other subreddits - and those useless-by-
| design subreddits dominate the whole thing because you need to do
| a lot of those "filler" posts to allow oneself one real one, thus
| SNR on the platform is ridiculously low - but it's not some evil
| bots who's creating noise, but actual live people, and not even
| dumb ones, just because they HAVE to. And going through this -
| for what? To get a chance to participate in one more "someone on
| the internet is wrong" debate?
|
| Meaningful talk is possible in groups where people are united by
| at least something and where is at least some real barrier of
| entry. These are not the social media. They can't afford
| filtering who gets in because that way they'll lose viewership
| and leave a lot of money on the table. I wonder why that comes as
| a surprise to anyone.
| submeta wrote:
| Deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts years ago and my inner
| peace increased immediately, my meditations became deeper, better
| within days. I never would have guessed how much negative energy
| these platforms created within me. People will post mostly how
| perfect their life is on these platforms. Distorting reality,
| inducing jealousy, guilt, and other forms of negative emotions.
| And finally a sense of depression.
| donatj wrote:
| Before its fall, I had over 700 followers on Twitter. I could
| post any random thought and within minutes be having an
| interesting conversation with some rando about it. For example I
| pondered why phone manufacturers didn't use a p2p protocol for
| distributing updates and had an enlightening conversation with a
| person who worked for a major telco chiming in as to why that
| would be problematic for their infrastructure.
|
| This was my biggest source of joy on the modern internet.
|
| When the walls fell and everybody left, I dropped 200 followers
| to 500 but by X's own metrics no one sees my tweets. I would
| estimate between 13 and 20 is my average view count. When I do
| post, I am lucky a single person interacts, and it is almost
| always someone I know in the real world.
|
| I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count
| on both remains in the low teens. I don't think the market is
| there anymore for "dude that ponders technology questions". I
| tweet like it's 2010 and no one cares anymore.
|
| This was the death of social media for me. This was the last
| place I was really "social" on the internet and it died.
|
| Genuinely this has had a very negative effect on me, the only
| somewhat of a silver lining is that I now have these
| conversations with ChatGPT. It's not as much fun though.
|
| Instagram is just brainrot these days. I'd used it for years to
| post my absolute best photos as a sort of curated gallery. No one
| cares anymore. Nothing I post ever gets seen. Why bother.
|
| That sums up my general opinion of all social media these days,
| why bother.
| j4coh wrote:
| Probably at some point soon social media companies will
| recognise this and provide everyone with very nearly human-like
| bots that engage happily with your content. This will probably
| be even more addictive than their previous products.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| That is totally coming, facebook is already winding up for
| it. It's also enormously dystopian and kind of pathetic.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| Imagine the anti social network a billion people talking to
| the pigfeed robot. What a hellscape, what deformed
| characters ..
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| This sycophant-as-a-service feature is already close to the
| way the major LLMs currently work. Discuss any moderately
| controversial topic with them, and they'll lean into your
| opinion within a couple of comments.
| ghaff wrote:
| My sense is that Twitter's fall was an opportunity for a lot of
| people to just drop out. I know for me it's become a very
| occasional thing and neither Bluesky nor Mastodon ever achieved
| critical mass. As far as I'm concerned the format is largely
| done.
|
| Never engaged with the political stuff.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| And you all made place for guys like me; I don't get booed
| away by 90% of the users anymore when engaging in discussion,
| more often I get an actual discussion out of it. Before that
| it was just a highly toxic "noo my opinion is the right one
| and I'm rigid on that and you're an idiot" ambience.
|
| Funny how things shift like that. Also never engaged with
| political stuff.
| ghaff wrote:
| Whatever works for you personally I find there is no longer
| a critical mass of professional peers to engage with so
| I've mostly reluctantly just dropped it.
| snozolli wrote:
| The irony of the toxicity of your comments to ghaff is
| amazing. You know nothing about him, but made him the
| villain in your story.
| coldpie wrote:
| > My sense is that Twitter's fall was an opportunity for a
| lot of people to just drop out.
|
| Yeah, that was the case for me. I used Twitter quite a bit
| from about 2012 through 2020, but I was already phasing it
| out when the takeover happened, so it was an easy call to
| just close my account. While I do have an IG and Bsky
| account, I rarely use them. So Twitter's death basically
| meant the end of my mainstream social media usage.
| te_chris wrote:
| Yeah I cut it by accident during the pandemic. It already
| sucked then - person you follow liked this is what did me
| in. Elon just finished it off.
|
| I suspended my account, without realising if I left it for
| n days it would be deleted. Went back one day and there was
| someone else with my handle. Actually felt relieved as the
| whole thing was gone. Didn't get a chance to worry about an
| archive.
| projectazorian wrote:
| Same. Thanks Elon!
|
| It wasn't without consequences though. I'd made some IRL
| connections through twitter that I thought would last for
| years - they migrated to bluesky and IG but I didn't.
| Suddenly they were not interested in speaking with me.
|
| Lose your clout, don't be surprised if you get shunned by the
| clout obsessed.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Ditto. 100%. Touche
|
| This has been my experience as well. I was a heavy lurker
| during peak Twitter phase, but I still got lots of value from
| it.
|
| I tried posting about tech and stuff and there's absolute
| silence. No one cares anymore as if there are only tumbleweeds
| out there.
|
| I logged out of all my social media accounts (except HN) and
| moved them to hidden apps category. As a result I managed to
| read 3 lovely books and finished my side project ever since.
| Grimblewald wrote:
| Because twitter has been gutted, its history the information
| sector equivallent of vulture capitalism. Take platform, gut
| its credibility and audience for some end goal (e.g. buying
| an election, redefining the truth in the minds of many) and
| leave a smouldering corpse behind.
|
| Twitter is dead, and its grave is marked with nothing more
| than an X.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| All the interesting conversations, all the aha moments are
| now gone and buried behind the walled garden
|
| Once in a while we'll see screenshots of these insightful
| tweets but they'll be lost forever, like tears in the rain.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| I have the complete opposite experience. I now get the
| aha moments I got from reddit before its private api
| downfall. I get actual discussions. There's an equal
| split between opinions.
|
| I think the difference here is that you were already "in"
| it, and it changed. I wasn't "in" it because I hated the
| vibe and fakeness and just denying of my experience, but
| now I get the opportunity to join in a "resetting"
| environment. It's refreshing and just way more real.
|
| I blocked a few political accounts at the start and now I
| don't see that at all btw
| jtwoodhouse wrote:
| Just came by to admire that last line.
| Grimblewald wrote:
| Theres a boom and bust cycle that social media platforms seem
| to go through. Build something nice for socializing. Add ad
| breaks to the socializing. Replace content you want with
| content that can only be described as political / informatiom
| warefare.
|
| people move to new platform that is nice for socializing. The
| cycle begins anew.
|
| I for one dont have the energy for it anymore. Im done. Im
| burnt out. If it isnt a real human in front of me it can fuck
| off and burn in hell. I make an exception for hacker news,
| because it doesnt seem trashed to shit by bots astroturfing
| just about every post to sway public opinion, but the moment it
| starts I will unplug from the public net for good, and nothing
| of value will be lost.
| Hadi-Khan wrote:
| I think Substack fills that gap for me. If you haven't already
| explored it then by the sounds of it I think you'd like it.
|
| It functions more as a platform for blogs, but if you use the
| app there are blog-specific group chats, you can follow people,
| and the home page contains 'notes' that are pretty tweet-like
| in format. Once you have a collection of say 15-20 blogs that
| your subscribed to I found that the notes I got recommended
| were quite good and could spark some interesting conversations.
|
| A few tech related ones I like are The Pragmatic Engineer,
| ByteByteGo, Bad Software Advice, and Exponential View.
| taurath wrote:
| It's funny, because I took the suggestion and went thru the
| substack sign up process (which wanted email, phone number,
| contacts, and interests.. not exactly lightweight).
|
| The first thing they show you is a feed, a never ending
| scroller.
|
| I don't get an intro to any channel - it seems like Twitter
| for writers. Half the stuff I subscribed to (you can't peek
| in the onboarding) was absolutely written by ChatGPT, emoji
| headers and all.
|
| I'm sure there's interesting stuff happening on there, but
| it's a scroller just like Reddit, and it's pretty
| disappointing how much apps like these don't respect a single
| user need - only the needs of the platform to engage engage
| engage.
|
| Also holy shit, there's no option to not send emails - only
| "prefer push". You can't turn it off. There's zero respect
| for users, their inboxes, or their attention here whatsoever.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Thats funny, I have had a substack account for a couple
| years and haven't seen this infinite feed. It seems like
| LiveJournal 2.0 the way I use it.
|
| I agree that required post emails is user hostile, but
| trivially mitigated with email filters. From substack ->
| trash [omit any you want]
| weatherlite wrote:
| > Genuinely this has had a very negative effect on me
|
| I think that's an issue. I totally see why you were negatively
| impacted but I think we tend to forget it is not real life and
| in 99% of cases not important conversations/debates we are
| having with random people on the internet - they could be fun
| to have (or not) but important they are not. We treat social
| media popularity as if it is part of our identity, as if its
| almost as important as actual family and friends - and it
| really isn't.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| >I don't think the market is there anymore for "dude that
| ponders technology questions".
|
| What do you mean? Aren't you looking at it right now?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| This is just nostalgia porn. You used a lot of words to say you
| miss the past. Get over it and keep going.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower
| count on both remains in the low teens.
|
| I've been on Bluesky for a few months.
|
| Around 300 followers, mostly generic female names being
| caricatures of progressive or traditional values, often
| "looking for true love".
|
| I can post almost anything I want and no one reacts.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Oh those not accounts are everywhere, I get them on X too.
| arvinsim wrote:
| I downgraded my Instagram from curated feed of "interesting"
| things to just basically a journal of my travels and hobbies.
| Just less stressful this way.
| veunes wrote:
| That era of Twitter where you could toss out a random thought
| and instantly end up in a rabbit hole with strangers who knew
| stuff...
| baxuz wrote:
| That was the era before bots and normies made up the majority
| of the accounts, and before social media was weaponized.
|
| It was the same for reddit, and honestly even 4chan in the
| early 2000s.
|
| Hacker news kinda fills that gap now.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Happens all the time in Lemmy
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Try Lemmy, not sure about the whole "followers" count but you
| can do exactly what you've described on Lemmy today on any
| topical community or AskLemmy to get you started. You can ask
| or start basically any kind of conversation you want and gets
| very decent engagement
| thoroughburro wrote:
| > For example I pondered why phone manufacturers didn't use a
| p2p protocol for distributing updates and had an enlightening
| conversation with a person who worked for a major telco chiming
| in as to why that would be problematic for their
| infrastructure. > ... > I have presences on Mastodon and
| Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low
| teens. I don't think the market is there anymore for "dude that
| ponders technology questions". I tweet like it's 2010 and no
| one cares anymore.
|
| So, you miss having access to experts in fields you're a layman
| to. That makes sense.
|
| I wonder though if the experts miss your random guesses about
| their work? If they miss the compulsion to correct your
| assumptions before misinformation takes hold?
| rubicon33 wrote:
| Everything you've described is exactly what forums are for.
|
| We didn't need social media, we had everything we needed with
| the old PHP forums
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| Even better, Usenet, which is what the web-based forums were
| a poor replacement for.
| coldpie wrote:
| Agreed. I think one of the big problems with current social
| media is that they are person-focused instead of topic-
| focused. This is backwards. This means if I want to follow a
| cool woodworker because I like their woodworking, I also see
| their other hobbies, or their political trash, or whatever.
| Topic-based forums are much better suited for what I actually
| want--discussions around woodworking. Forums are also self-
| limiting in size. If a single thread gets too active for
| people to follow, it makes sense to split off into separate
| threads, which keeps community sizes reasonable.
|
| I've been a member of one of the internet's longer-running
| web forums for two decades, and nothing I've seen from the
| big social media corps comes close to providing the same
| level of usability and community health.
| wvenable wrote:
| Even forums eventually die out.
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| > Instagram is just brainrot these days.
|
| PixelFed reminds me a bit of the old Instagram. Not many users,
| but people are there to post their pictures. You kinda have to
| rely on tags and trending content to find accounts/content, but
| that's not always a bad thing.
| anshumankmr wrote:
| Removing Instagram from my daily routine has been the best change
| I did, apart from adopting a cat. Just saw some stuff on my feed
| I had no desire to see apart from brainrot, and the algorithm
| kept shovelling some controversial figures too, which I had no
| interest in, so that also did not help its cause.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Have you considered creating an IG account for the cat? Could
| be really famous. The next "Tardar Sauce".
| anshumankmr wrote:
| Have given it thought yes, my photography skills are not that
| great, but I do have good shots of him here and there.
|
| here's one: https://unsplash.com/photos/GuK3U7typ18
| blitzar wrote:
| I wish my cat was around in the phone camera and instagram
| days, he would have cleaned up online.
| anshumankmr wrote:
| Never too late you know... assuming you still have your
| catto.
| blitzar wrote:
| Sadly passed as a dignified old cat many, many years ago
| now.
|
| The digital camera was barely a thing back then let alone a
| camera in your pocket 24 hours a day! Nevertheless, lots of
| happy memories captured in the only way that really matters
| - in person without a screen.
| anshumankmr wrote:
| I understand your loss, I have also lost some cats, some
| due to moving and giving away, and other strays I used to
| take care of, breaks my heart every time I think of the
| strays.
|
| Have you been able to adopt another pet?
| young_unixer wrote:
| Recently, I've been thinking about creating an Instagram account.
| I've never used it before, and I dislike it in general, but
| because of recent circumstances in my life (a breakup that almost
| gave me depression, and some other things), I need to go out more
| and meet new people IRL, and Instagram is the de facto way to
| meet people in my country, at least for those of us under 30, to
| the point that you're seen as weird if you don't have one.
|
| But I know that once I create an account, I'll get hooked to the
| feed, to uploading pictures, etc. because I know myself.
|
| I don't know if the positive social aspect (meeting people, or
| creating a lasting connection with people that I meet once IRL)
| is going to offset that addiction and the general anxiety that
| comes with having an account.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| There are people out there - probably many people - in your
| country under the age of 30 who feels the same way about
| Instagram as you do. These are the people you want to meet, not
| the people on Instagram.
|
| If you hate Instagram and the anxiety it gives you, the people
| you meet on there will never be really on your level, or you on
| theirs. You will waste your time and effort on shallower
| relationships that can't get deep because you want to engage
| with life differently and not be on social media.
|
| Dig deep into the hobbies that give you joy, and go to as many
| meetups and social occasions around them as you can. Leverage
| your friend and family network - the people who know you, and
| get you - and build on it.
| systemz wrote:
| Those are good tips but what to do when you are new in
| location and your family/friends doesn't have contacts with
| people that like your hobby? Joining new social circles isn't
| that easy for less social ones.
| jjulius wrote:
| This is hobby-dependent and YMMV of course, but...
|
| ... go and do your hobby. Whatever it is. You're likely to
| meet people along the way who are also into whatever it is
| that you're doing. Even in the less sociable hobbies,
| you're bound to encounter like-minded folk at some point
| (take it from me, the not-so-social backpacker who likes
| going to remote places). You might not know where the
| groups are yet, but you'll figure it out, just like you
| figured out everything else about being in a new location -
| where the grocery stores are, where the good restaurants
| are, where whatever it is that you need might be located.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Not sure there is a shortcut. You're just going to have to
| go do your hobby and look out for opportunities to meet
| other people who are into it too.
|
| The thing about moving to a new location is you're
| consciously choosing to start over: that has positives and
| negatives, but either way it's a ton of work to get re-
| established. Be brave, you'll find people the more you look
| for them.
| Drew_ wrote:
| I don't know what country you're in, but I'm almost certain
| people your age are not meeting each other on Instagram. It is
| not really a platform to meet anyone, especially not in the
| last 5 years. Joining communities (clubs, churches, etc) are
| the way to meet new people.
| JasmineSCZ wrote:
| My idea is that as long as there is a social idea, in the same
| small circle, there are also "Internet celebrities" who are
| considered by everyone to post some of their photos. It is
| essentially social. In WeChat's circle of friends, people already
| need to make money by doing e-commerce in this private domain,
| not to mention that his friends may be the people around him, but
| his work forces him to...
| physicsguy wrote:
| Facebook can be hard to get rid of if you actually have hobbies
| and things because so much gets organised via it. I tried to get
| rid but my Running club exclusively posts stuff on Facebook.
|
| For Instagram with you needing to log in to view pages, you find
| that you can't find opening times for restaurants etc because
| many places use it to advertise that they're open/closed at short
| notice.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| If you really value your running club, why not help them set
| something else up?
|
| You could offer to help the people who do all that posting to
| get it onto an email list or some other platform away from
| Facebook. A small indie website somewhere, even a blog.
|
| I know this sounds like work, and you just want to enjoy your
| running club, but if it gets sticky, the people who are
| currently posting everything on FB will eventually realise
| there's value elsewhere and they'll keep it ticking over.
| jjulius wrote:
| >I know this sounds like work...
|
| Yup! At the risk of being flippant, all healthy relationships
| require work.
| jjulius wrote:
| This is probably a "YMMV" kinda thing, because I thought that I
| would experience the same struggle, but in reality I've found
| out that I encounter those moments but... I don't really care.
| It's like being removed from all of the bullshit that comes
| with social media is worth the tradeoff of occasionally missing
| a detail like that.
|
| I went and found forums for the hobbies I'm into, rather than
| social media groups. Thankfully, most of the underground music
| I'm into also maintain their own websites, while some of the
| more hush-hush groups maintain members-only email lists. If
| they don't do either? Well, nearly all of them sell tickets
| online via mainstream ticket vendors regardless of how
| underground they try to be, so I'll see the info eventually
| (and, hell - I know the event's coming up and I've put it on my
| calendar, I don't need to see an IG story about it _every
| single day_ for two months reminding me). For backpacking,
| forums are _fantastic_ compared to the oft-repeated and overrun
| social media groups.
|
| For restaurants? Meh. So what if I show up and a place is
| closed on short notice? Worse things can happen than wasting a
| little bit of time. Do they only share their menu on social
| media but my friends swear it's amazing? Fine, I'll experience
| it O'Reilly-style ("We'll do it live! Fuck it!").
|
| I don't need to know everything all the time, that's part of
| the adventure! And if I _really_ do need to know something
| about a place that only posts on social media, I 've found that
| I can usually find that info elsewhere if I dig hard enough.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| The people who remain on social media deserve it. It's social
| media darwinism.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I still have a Facebook account, but never log in. Haven't done
| so, in months.
|
| The only reason I had it, in the first place, was so I could
| participate in a technical forum for an infrastructure platform
| that I authored.
|
| That platform has long since left the nest, and is in very
| capable hands. Like a spent first-stage booster, I am no longer
| relevant.
|
| Before completely walking away from Facebook, I had turned off
| all notifications, and never doomscrolled. Made walking away,
| much easier.
|
| I miss it like it like I miss a painful boil on my arse. It was
| just old white people, screaming at each other.
| kleiba wrote:
| I'm certainly an anomaly but since to me the downsides of social
| media have always been quite prominent and seemed to outweigh the
| benefits by a margin, I never jumped on the social media train.
|
| But I've got to say, it's getting harder and harder to keep that
| up. As our kids get older especially, almost all of their social
| activities are somehow tied to social media one way or the other:
| no matter what they're joining, minimally there's a WhatsApp
| group. My wife has reluctantly joined WhatsApp and if it wasn't
| for that, it feels like we would pretty much be destined to
| become social outcasts.
|
| In one recent instance, we weren't even aware of a parent group
| for one of our children's school class until someone asked us (in
| person!) why we didn't come bowling the previous night. We had no
| idea, and no-one sees the necessity to include someone who - for
| whatever reason - is not on WhatsApp.
|
| I can see the argument that _we_ are inconveniencing _others_ by
| not wanting to be reachable to what has now become a standard
| means of being in touch, and that we cannot expect others to jump
| through hoops just to include us. But a few years back, I was
| quite deeply involved in privacy research and I definitely feel
| no inclination to share all of my communications (and pictures)
| with Meta.
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| I'd still not class WhatsApp as a social media platform as your
| story implies. It is a communication tool for the most part
| with some social features slowly being baked in. The downsides
| you're speaking of are _far_ more applicable to Facebook,
| Instagram, TikTok, and similar, more than WhatsApp, Telegram,
| or Discord.
|
| I don't know where you're based, but in general these days at
| least one "chat app" of some kind is the de facto standard in
| most countries. For a lot of the world, that's WhatsApp.
|
| The US is an outlier in still relying majorly on SMS as the
| communications platform.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I'm with the GP on this on. WhatsApp should absolutely be
| covered under the same umbrella here due to it being owned by
| Meta, who have a long history of breaking promises regarding
| privacy.
|
| And since a lot of people do keep in contact via WhatsApp
| group chats, it's hard to ignore the social implications of
| WhatsApp too. It's as much a social platform as the others
| albeit with a different broadcast model.
|
| As a parent, I have to monitor my child's WhatsApp groups to
| check they're safe, just like I would their YouTube and
| Instagram feeds. And I have to check they're also being safe
| with the stuff that they share on WhatsApp, just like you
| would on any other social network.
| xyzal wrote:
| I think the problem are not group chats, but algorithms
| optimizing for engagement, and therefore for outrage. Think of
| the facebook feed.
| nottorp wrote:
| The OP doesn't seem to make a difference between social media
| for consuming content that the "algorithm" crams down your
| throat and simple group chats that are usually closed and
| invite only.
|
| Tbh I have a feeling it's the kids' fault. They call
| everything social media now. No separate names for FB and
| WhatsApp even though they do totally different things.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > I have a feeling it's the kids' fault.
|
| Look at how broad the definition on Wikipedia is.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
|
| I don't think that's the kids fault.
|
| Also, from that Wikipedia article:
|
| > Depending on interpretation, other popular platforms that
| are sometimes referred to as social media services include
| YouTube, Letterboxd, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal,
| LINE, Snapchat, Viber, Reddit, Discord, and TikTok.
|
| The broad interpretation that includes Reddit would also
| categorise HN as social media which I think is fair.
|
| I think the problem actually is the adults that are not
| being specific about which problems they want to stop when
| they broadly say that social media is bad.
|
| Like you say, the problem is specifically things like
| algorithms that are tuned for engagement, which results in
| all kinds of negative effects.
|
| That being said even this is not specific enough. HN
| although different is also run on an algorithm that is
| meant to surface the most interesting things. The site
| rules on HN avoid some of the bad effects, but it's still
| possible to be negatively impacted in other ways like
| checking HN too often and too long instead of doing other
| things.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Look at how broad the definition on Wikipedia is.
|
| But wikipedia doesn't make up definitions, just lists the
| commonly used meaning.
|
| > I think the problem actually is the adults that are not
| being specific about which problems they want to stop
| when they broadly say that social media is bad.
|
| Adults are also talking about cell phone addiction, like
| browsing FB/Instagram on your laptop is any better.
|
| > HN although different is also run on an algorithm that
| is meant to surface the most interesting things.
|
| Is it? I thought it was human upvotes and maybe a few
| human mods...
|
| It would be interesting to determine why HN still works
| btw. It's a pretty unified community that is fairly
| large.
|
| Is the main reason that it's basically a non profit?
| codetrotter wrote:
| > I thought it was human upvotes and maybe a few human
| mods
|
| That's the algorithm of HN :)
|
| It computes the score of posts based on some combination
| of time since posted + number of comments + number of
| upvotes, etc.
|
| > It would be interesting to determine why HN still works
| btw. It's a pretty unified community that is fairly
| large.
|
| > Is the main reason that it's basically a non profit?
|
| Yea I think so. Being driven not for profit, plus having
| a specific overarching guideline for what type of content
| belongs here;
|
| > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find
| interesting. That includes more than hacking and
| startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
| answer might be: anything that gratifies one's
| intellectual curiosity.
|
| > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or
| sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some
| interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or
| disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on
| TV news, it's probably off-topic.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| sureglymop wrote:
| It's not that bad or that hard to avoid social media. I'm in my
| early twenties and never had much social media. You're right in
| that WhatsApp is almost everywhere (in certain countries) and
| hard to avoid. But WhatsApp is still a messaging app and not as
| bad as Instagram, TikTok etc. I'd say, use something like
| Signal for all your close communication with family and close
| friends. If those are close friends I'm sure they'll use Signal
| to communicate with you too. I guess keep WhatsApp installed
| but use it only for those groups and not really for any
| personal chats.
|
| As for the really attention grabbing social media like
| Instagram and TikTok, if your kids want to get on there I'd say
| provide a good alternative. Something they can use or open if
| boredom strikes, because there definitely are those moments
| when that happens and one just grabs the phone. For me it's
| mostly been HN and books, some YouTube channels with NewPipe
| and some podcasts.
| musha68k wrote:
| I see the opposite trend, as the (imo much needed) shock from
| Jonathan Haidt's 'The Anxious Generation' is only starting to
| really resonate in the minds of educators and parents.
|
| No smartphones allowed at school, strict usage limits for older
| kids at home, etc.
| fossgeller wrote:
| If only somehow we managed to make social media uncool for
| the kids, that's the most sure way they'd stay away from it.
|
| I guess proper education on the real aspects of the social
| media phenomenon would be the real deal. For example,
| explaining how/why the companies use their algorithms to keep
| you in there; influencers only want to sell you a product;
| why posts/stories don't reflect reality at all, etc.
|
| But understanding all that would require quite some amount of
| emotional maturity from both the kids and parents themselves.
| Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the reality at all, there are
| adults that still can't see through the cracks..
| avhception wrote:
| I never used any "social media" besides the instant messengers.
| I try to minimize WhatsApp in favor of better options. It's a
| constant, uphill battle. I feel that dating is impossible w/o
| WhatsApp, if you exchange phone numbers with someone at a bar,
| it's completely useless if you can't contact them on WhatsApp
| afterwards. Almost nobody (at least here in central Europe) has
| any other messenger, and every other avenue of contact would be
| either considered very pushy (like calling) or from the 90s
| (like SMS).
|
| Taking part in group events also becomes a headache if you
| don't join the related WhatsApp group.
|
| I find it appalling that basic features of human social
| functions are subject to the whims and profiteering of a quasi-
| monopolist company. There should be heavy regulations, at the
| very least.
| pton_xd wrote:
| I feel your point but I don't think WhatsApp counts as social
| media. It's a group messaging app, same as Facebook Messenger,
| Signal, etc. Those messaging apps don't have the typical social
| media downsides -- you don't need to maintain a profile,
| there's no doom scrolling, etc.
| jonfromsf wrote:
| Whatsapp is the main doomscrolling app for older Indians.
| They share endless AI generated right-wing slop, their brains
| are absolutely cooked by this stuff.
| veunes wrote:
| Social media (and apps like WhatsApp) have basically become the
| new default infrastructure for everyday communication, and
| opting out can unintentionally make you feel like you're opting
| out of life, especially when it comes to your kids' social
| circles.
| Frieren wrote:
| > As our kids get older especially, almost all of their social
| activities are somehow tied to social media one way or the
| other: no matter what they're joining, minimally there's a
| WhatsApp group.
|
| That is by design. To privatize public spaces and control what
| is said in that spaces to monetize it is the goal. No
| individual parent can fight the power of the corporations that
| push us in that direction.
|
| The public discourse of TV and other media is dying, while the
| private echo chambers owned by corporations are increasing.
| That is not good either.
|
| What I think the study is missing is the impact of social media
| on society, and impact on society on individuals wellbeing. I
| see an increase in paranoia, extremism, pessimism, etc. caused
| directly by that closed communities that spin out of control
| and create the perfect dish plate to grow the most paranoid
| people. For kids and teenagers it will be worse, as they are
| still growing and learning.
| krunck wrote:
| Another problem is the social fragmentation caused by
| electronic social interaction being split among so many
| different platforms: Facebook, WhatsApp, Viber, iMessage, SMS,
| etc.
|
| Even the device platform you choose segregates you. There are a
| few neighbor families our family is close to. They(neighbors
| and my family) all talk on iMessage. I've got an Android/eOS
| device so I am excluded from the chats. At least my wife shares
| them with me.
|
| There was a time that people set standards for (landline)
| telephone communications for the sake of interoperability. We
| need the same for other technologies. I'm sick of trying to be
| social in corporate controlled gated communities surrounded by
| impassible walls.
| gretch wrote:
| > I definitely feel no inclination to share all of my
| communications (and pictures) with Meta.
|
| You don't have to share your messages or pictures with Meta to
| fix the problems you laid out in your post. Certainly not all
| of them.
|
| For example with the bowling situation, all you had to do was
| listen passively to times/events being posted.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Are you in the US? No one uses whatsapp in the US. This would
| have been done as an sms groupchat in all likelihood.
| Everything friends plan is on sms these days. Maybe its my
| generation, we don't like signing up for accounts anymore when
| everyone can trivially text.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| I know this post is for Facebook, but I've noticed my mood
| improving when I decided to leave LinkedIn.
|
| Even though I am rationally aware that people work in better
| environments and get paid while I'm job searching for the past 6
| months, it feels like seeing any sort of announcement regarding
| other people's successes hits a subconscious chord my brain
| hates. It felt like I'm being actively intimidated, making my
| already depressed and sad state of job searching worse. The
| "highlights reel effect" on LinkedIn is deliberate and I'd argue
| inevitable, because everyone is trying their best to show how
| good they are as candidates and workers.
|
| Now that I closed it, and I'm sticking to the usual communities
| (Discord, etc.) may be running into better engineers than me but
| I see it either as a neutral event or a positive one, because
| they share their code and insights which I can learn from.
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| TLDR?
| jokoon wrote:
| I only watch standup bits, and Instagram keeps trying to show me
| other things, I skip them as often as I can.
|
| Also cats.
|
| I just scroll for like 10min before going to bed.
|
| Been using it for about 6 months now.
| veunes wrote:
| What I'd love to see next is whether the improvements last after
| reactivation, or if it's just a temporary detox effect
| KronisLV wrote:
| I deactivated my Facebook account because I wasn't really using
| it for much and haven't felt any sort of a downside at all.
|
| I found that for social media, platforms like Mastodon feel more
| comfy and less commercialized, whereas for chatting with other
| people either 1:1 or group chats across various apps feel nicer
| without being directly tied to a social media platform. At the
| same time, platforms that are more focused on a particular set of
| topics/activities like Reddit/Discord/HN/... instead of people
| just trying to advertise their lives or build a brand in a sense
| (the likes of LinkedIn as well) or whatever are more meaningful
| to me.
|
| To some degree, it probably has something to do with the size of
| those communities: Mastodon is niche enough not to get spammed
| with as many bots or adverts or people trying to push a certain
| narrative, it going under that radar is one of the best things
| about it, instead it's more organic content.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Surprised FB is even in this category anymore. Anecdotally, not
| many people post there anymore. I stay mostly for the groups not
| what people who I am connected to as a friend are doing. Status
| updates and check in's seem like a thing of the past. It's an
| easy way to share pictures with family. Group feature is very
| good. Our HOA has a group on there.
| tushar-r wrote:
| Left Facebook in 2015. Other than missing the death announcement
| of an old friend, I haven't really been bothered. HN & curated
| Reddit subs (basically Goretzky's security sub list) are more
| than I need to keep up with things.
|
| I do have an Instagram account, and use that to follow the
| Slackwyrm comic (and ignore people asking me to give them my
| "desirable" id.)
|
| I did try Blind, but quickly gave up on that mess of an app. 1
| day of using it and it just was rage bait after rage bait. Maybe
| next time I'm job hunting - a friend stated that it was very
| useful for her negotiations.
|
| Most of my WA group chats are archived & no notifications - no
| pressure to read them immediately. Left every group chat except
| close friends and family anyway.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Imagine waking up every morning to go and work on something which
| objectively harms people and makes the world a more dangerous
| place to live.
| TriangleEdge wrote:
| I remember having a conversation with my friend some 15 years ago
| when FB only allow .edu accounts. I argued that the incentives
| for the company cannot be to connect people because that in
| itself isn't profitable. I signed up maybe 10 years ago for 6
| months or so and never tried again. I think this has isolated me
| in some ways, but I'm quite comfortable with the friends I
| currently have.
|
| Hypothesis: people who regularly use social media score higher
| then the average population in narcissic personality trait.
| MaxGripe wrote:
| As someone who hasn't used these things for a long time, I can
| say that my well-being is excellent. However, it might be easier
| for me due to my age (43) and the lack of need to please peers or
| friends.
|
| I also use a browser plugin that blocks LinkedIn feed. This is
| because I can't stand seeing the nonsense that seemingly serious
| people post there.
| theaussiestew wrote:
| Hmm shameless plug but I recognised this specific phenomena a
| long time ago and I made a Chrome extension to selectively hide
| negative content on feeds and the general web. Because I still
| get value from feeds, just not certain types of content.
|
| https://filtrum-seven.vercel.app/
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| Look, if your "connections" require you to engage in the social
| media slop, they are not worth it. If your family forces you to
| be on FB, your family is dysfunctional. If you have lost your
| friends after deleting your account, you had no friends in a
| first place.
|
| Yes, we can live without social media. I know it is possible from
| my own experience. And when everyone has a phone and e-mail
| address, you can stay connected without FB or other account.
|
| It will require more effort, but valuable things rarely come
| without it.
| grumple wrote:
| Give them a year, they'll feel even better.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I have been experimenting with using smartphones only for phone
| calls, SMS messaging and services like Uber or airbnb. No content
| consumption whatsoever.
|
| It's been a bliss. I don't over consume, I have more time to get
| things done now, and it's sort of obvious but everything feels
| better with bigger screens and keyboard and mouse.
|
| Look at HN as an example, if I see a post on here that is related
| to some programming thing, I have my terminal right here where I
| can play with the concept. Even things like youtube are much
| nicer on a big screen.
|
| My only pet-peeve is with web front-end designers insisting on
| wasting screen real-estate at the left and right margins. I wish
| there was a button on every such site where you can "maximize"
| the content div so that it takes up 100% width.
| rambambram wrote:
| > and it's sort of obvious but everything feels better with
| bigger screens and keyboard and mouse.
|
| Using the Youtube app on my phone shocks me every time. I'm so
| used to an add blocker on my pc's big screen.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| I have a love/hate thing with Instagram. I've been an avid user
| and it has been incredibly popular in my IRL social-circles over
| the last 5-10 years. Much has been said about the mechanics
| underpinning it but I've embarked on this experiment since the
| beginning of this year:
|
| I started deleting Instagram every Sunday evening and installing
| every Friday.
|
| I had this hypothesis that it's the weekends that people have the
| best stuff to share and when it makes sense for me to still
| _exist_ to everyone. And then nobody notices me disappear over
| the week. It's a lot more enjoyable to be engaging with others'
| content when you're posting your own.
|
| But the surprising result, after a few months, is that I've
| started missing weekends. The memory of all those people has
| faded and so has the urge to share.
|
| Which brings me to a point: on one hand I do feel better day to
| day, but I've also felt a bit of a mourning period not being
| reminded about acquaintances' lives. Kind of like a smoker who's
| now missing out on social smoke breaks.
| jjulius wrote:
| >... but I've also felt a bit of a mourning period not being
| reminded about acquaintances' lives.
|
| We don't need to be reminded of acquaintances lives - what
| people I barely know do in their free time has zero bearing on
| my life. They're _acquaintances_ , not friends, so their actual
| importance/impact to my life is next to nil.
|
| I never smoked but often hung out with smokers outside on their
| lunch breaks. If an acquaintance is truly important to us, we
| can be reminded of our acquaintances lives by making an effort
| to turn them into real friendships that interact with each
| other in meatspace.
| nachox999 wrote:
| deactivating Facebook was a great move for me; i wish i could
| make the same with IG, but the FOMO is too big
| spenrose wrote:
| Direct link:
| https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33697/w336...
| jmount wrote:
| I'd worry a bit about the summary of what is being reported.
|
| > Facebook and Instagram deactivation improved emotional state
| index by 0.060 standard deviations (p < 0.001)
|
| The link didn't click through to the appendix. This seems off, as
| small effects (the small number of standard deviations) tend to
| be associated with undesirable high p-values, not low ones.
| Though also, the 0.060 itself seems lower than the visual graphs
| indicate.
| jdeaton wrote:
| 0.061 standard deviations? Thats like almost nothing?
| sullivantrevor wrote:
| If you are sick of current social media and long for what we had
| in the past, check out what I am building.
|
| www.elswhr.app
| jjulius wrote:
| After ditching social media, I've come to greatly value close
| connections with my friends and family. Meeting up and hanging
| out, or calling them regularly if they live far away, have
| proved far more fruitful than any value I thought I got out of
| using even tools such as AIM or MySpace (as referenced on your
| site). What does this provide that could improve upon these
| high-quality connections?
|
| Additionally, assuming growth comes your way, how do you plan
| to support your platform/company from a financial perspective?
| Targeted ads, or...? What do you intend to do with user data?
| Thoreandan wrote:
| It'd be a privilege to be able to disconnect from the feeds, but
| trying to rebuild in-person social interactions when you're old
| and have no family or local friends really sucks. Facebook's
| become:
|
| * Who died this week
|
| * Spammers liking your posts and asking for friend adds
|
| * Gofundme's for ppl who will now spend the rest of their lives
| in medical debt
|
| * Interesting articles maybe twice a week or so.
|
| Nobody I know in town is on Mastodon or BSky.
|
| The silence is deafening.
| flkiwi wrote:
| I'm distinctly happier since I ditched Facebook and Twitter. It's
| not a radical change, because the world kinda sucks in general.
| And I'm a little sad that a few of my older family members are
| effectively invisible since they only communicate on Facebook,
| but, honestly, I didn't talk to my mother's first cousins pre-
| Facebook anyway so, net, I haven't actually lost very much.
|
| I was never on Instagram or TikTok, but neither seems to be
| "social" media as much as a communal fire hose anyway.
|
| I was on Bluesky for a minute, but it was 99.9% people trying to
| one-up each other with witty or ironic one-liners for clout, with
| most of the rest being ex-Twitter people trying to keep Twitter
| combat alive in an arena (blessedly) free of the people who have
| made Twitter unbearable. I got tired of witnessing a neverending
| improv open mic while being randomly assaulted by people I agreed
| with.
|
| So now I'm just living my life, aware of the challenges of the
| world, but not bathing in them.
| daveslash wrote:
| Just speaking for myself. Facebook was fun when it was the
| underdog to MySpace. But I closed me account just a few years
| later and haven't looked back. Was never engaged on twitter,
| but have an account just so I can verify _" yes, they actually
| posted that"_
|
| Aside from Reddit, my only social media is Instagram. On my
| Instagram, I only follow people I personally know or national-
| park/state-park/non-profit conservation accounts. I only like
| posts of people I personally know and nothing else, and I never
| comment on anything. I only post pretty pictures of nature with
| no people visible in a recognizable way. My feed is almost
| exclusively nature and animals (lots of seals and sea lions)
| with a lot of scuba diving mixed in. I also get a lot of
| xennial humor posts too, which I send to my wife and a buddy.
|
| It's a very limited level of engagement, and I'm very happy
| with it. I don't need anything more.
| flkiwi wrote:
| Can I just tell you? I rejoined Reddit a couple of years ago,
| and (I cannot believe I'm about to type this) it is,
| generally speaking, a positive experience filled with people
| who are generally not terribly toxic, and the toxic people
| are pretty easy to avoid. There are some hotbeds of awful,
| mainly fandoms, and many of the tech subs are just tech-
| grumpy, but overall it's been an amazingly nice experience.
| daveslash wrote:
| Regarding Reddit, I completely agree. I recognize that it
| is technically "social media", but I consider it to be a
| different animal from the majority of social media
| (Facebook, Twitter, Insta, etc...). Glad you're largely
| enjoying it! If you're still relatively knew to Reddit,
| there are some Reddit Classics with which you should be
| familiar -- namely, the infamous Poop Knife. https://www.re
| ddit.com/r/poopknife/comments/1d5f1sq/original...
| flkiwi wrote:
| I'm old enough in Internet years to have ample experience
| with many of the Reddit-originating cultural touchpoints
| like poop knife. God help me, my Internet culture goes
| back beyond, uh, citrus parties. I joined Reddit (again)
| to get help with NixOS, and I've found this weird
| comfortable place in communities about my cameras, some
| strange linguistics interests, and whatnot. I can't think
| of anyone I "know" on Reddit--thus you're right that it's
| questionable whether it's "social" media--but somehow
| it's kept a very strong sense of culture without
| devolving into ... you know ... <waves hands>
|
| Edit: wait, that could be interpreted as referring to HN,
| which it isn't. More everything else digital in the
| world.
| daveslash wrote:
| Agree. It's social, but also semi-anonymous. It's a nice
| balance. It's not anonymous like 4chan, because on Reddit
| you still have a username and post/comment history, so
| you have a _reputation_. But it 's largely anonymous
| because most people don't actually know people and it's
| not filled with "influencers". Though... it does have a
| bot problem. Glad to know you know of poop knife! My
| internet culture goes back to whitehouse.com and
| towel.blinkenlights.nl. :) Nice term for, uh... citrus
| parties.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| I've been "feed free" for over two years now. Took a while, but
| damn is it a better life!!!!
|
| Didn't matter if it was news, social or whatever, it messed with
| my dopamine apparatus, as Gabor Mate calls it.
|
| I do limit my self to the first page or two of the HN feed
| though, to keep up on tech developments for my career, which I
| still have to be careful about.
|
| It's feeds in general. It leads to abnormal dopamine release
| which affects motivation.
| ein0p wrote:
| Wait till they study what happens when you stop reading
| (political) news as well. A complete game changer for mental
| health. You can't really do anything about any of it, and most of
| it is fake either by omission or outright, yet over the past
| decade or so the media perfected the art of making you anxious,
| and getting you to constantly doom scroll so they show more ads.
| This isn't harmless for your well being either.
| alex1138 wrote:
| ITT: people deriding social media as a concept while also
| correctly pointing out the feeds on Zuckerberg owned products
| completely suck
|
| People have been demanding 'please just let me see what my
| friends post' for YEARS
|
| It's (probably) not going to change
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
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