My biggest issue with social media is less that it's distracting (IMO not necessarily an unhealthy thing) but that it has, for me, more than anything else seemed to make all aspects of my life a competition with others.
On Instagram, you're competing with others on who has the happiest life.
On LinkedIn, you're competing with others on who has the steepest career trajectory.
Even on Twitter, perhaps more acutely in certain jobs or industries, it seems like you're competing with other in gaining professional influence.
It creates a lot of anxiety that stems from a feeling like you're constantly on the verge of falling behind others.
Plenty of scholars/thinkers/philosophers have said something to the effect of focusing on just being a better version of you. Social media enables the exact opposite i.e. forcing you to constantly evaluate how you compare to others.
Maybe I’m in the minority, but I like social media and I’m capable of controlling my usage. I’ve developed some ground rules to ensure a good healthy experience.
To start, I have an iOS rule that prevents more than 7 minutes of each social media app per day. I pretty much only use Facebook. After the timer is up that’s it for the day.
I honestly enjoy seeing picture of my friends, their kids, their vacations, and the fun things they are doing. I don’t have FOMO and I’m not depressed seeing people doing something more fun than I am in that exact moment. In some cases I’m inspired to go somewhere or do something because I know my family or I would enjoy it. I rarely post myself, even if I’m doing something FOMO worthy (okay, maybe sometimes). I’ll share some photos from big occasions like birthdays or weddings since I think other people may want to see them, especially if they are in the photos.
I generally use social media when I’m waiting for a train, sitting in a doctors office, or going to the bathroom. I never itch for it during the day and rarely find myself reaching for the app robotically. One thing that’s definitely help to curb constant dopamine hits and addiction is disabling all social media notifications. I’m never pushed content, I only pull it. Actually, I’ve disabled almost every single notification on my phone with the exception of imessage, slack, citizen, and photos. My phone never buzzes from email, social media, or anything else that I find distracting.
One thing I’ve always wanted to do but never do is clean up my Facebook friend list so it’s only the people I care about. For what it’s worth Facebook seems to do a decent job of filtering it. But one day I’ll do it right.
> To start, I have an iOS rule that prevents more than 7 minutes of each social media app per day.
But when you open the app at minute 8, there's a prominent "Ignore Limit" button right there. Are you relying on mere self control? Or do you have some way to actually prevent app usage?
I don't know if we're in the minority, but I'm completely with you. I use social media for about 15 minutes a day and it only improves my life. I'm happy when I see my friends being happy.
I think people who blame their life problems on social media have deeper underlying issues. Mark Zuckerberg didn't invent envy in 2004.
nice setup. personally i've moved to a two device solution in two physical different places, where the "serious" device has /etc/hosts black holing of addictive domains + social media; were i able to consume it in a healthy manner on a mobile device, the iOS rule would be great.
In between the SV hivemind posts is distributed just enough nuggets of mindblowing technical, business and even medical wisdom (from insanely switched-on people) that it keeps me checking. It's the ultimate infovore loot box.
Well said, finding compelling info on here is such a dopamine rush. Receiving a dopamine rush from learning something interesting is probably a good thing though.
Question: how many of the articles do you read in their entirety? Do you spend 1 or 5 or 20 minutes thinking about the content? I’d like a comparison between, say, a library where you can find a nice book and sit-and-read for a good 2 hours.
I think HN is more of a news aggregator with comments than social media platform. But it has the same problem as anything compared with “crack” and that’s a quick information fix.
I like a lot of the stuff on here too but I often book mark things and don’t necessarily go back to it. Some things yes but mostly no.
To be fair, I think you can get the “competition” phenomenon anywhere. I always read people’s blogs about programming and internships and feel like no matter how much I do, I’ll always be behind. So it’s possible that it’s not a social media-only thing.
I agree with your broad premise about social media frequently being a poor representation of day to day life. The it's all shit part probably implies you're at least somewhat cynical. It's clearly not all shit, plenty of it certainly is. People frequently live different quality of lives vs their peers in fact; some people live amazing lives, some people live horrible lives. In a developed country, by far the largest distribution is likely to be a mixture of good and blah, with some occasional amazing and some bad thrown in.
> We need to drop this total farce of a behavior and stop conning each other if we hope to rise above it.
That behavior has always existed, it will always exist, so long as humanity does. Nothing can change it short of altering humanity through technology (and then we're something else), forced evolution (which we have begun, first pitch of the first inning; but it will probably take hundreds of years before we very substantially alter what we are; and we may make these things even worse, sharper). It's hard wired signaling and competition built into human nature, all the way down to the most fundamental aspects of what we are, including the pursuit of reproduction. Social media is nothing more than an aggressive, in your face, projected expression of it. It's the expression of many of the driving forces of human nature, amped up: sex, lust, attraction, status, materialism, greed, competition, envy, jealousy, pride, fear, validation, anger, inspiration, with some awww kittens & puppies thrown in. And that's also why people are drawn to it so intensely, it's a drug rush.
You missed an important checkmark on realism: 'we' can't rise above these things, humanity is these things. That's the actual reality. And it isn't going away, people will be complaining about all of this stuff in exactly the same way 20 or 30 years from now, except this will all seem tame compared to what will occur in the future: it will get worse yet.
The way to compensate for this is to realize the perception bias you're applying to yourself.
If you have 52 friends on Facebook, and each of them takes a vacation for one week out of the year, then every week you see someone broadcasting how they're having a more awesome time than you.
That doesn't mean they're doing any better than you. You just don't see the 52 reactions for the one week that you've got the vacation 'advantage' over them. You only notice the comparison when you're on the worse side of it.
I think there is an opportunity for a new perspective here...a positive one. Once you realize that all your seeing is a highlight real on these social platforms and move past that I think there is a great opportunity to be a good friend, family, community member. Let others you follow know you are happy for them and the things they felt were important enough to capture and share with you and their audience via their profiles/accounts. Click like and leave supportive comments and turn social media into a positive! I have found the more I celebrate with others and interact in positive ways that it is reciprocated and strengths relationships.
I disagree, but that's just me and my opinion. It probably comes down to personality type. For me Facebook/Instagram is simply a form of communication, where am just seeing pictures of family and friends. Again am ruthless about pruning my contacts ( will hide all the narcissistic ones). LinkedIn - only active when am looking for a job, I'll post from time to time.
It's more insidious than that though. The most damaging aspect of it is that these anxieties are evoked 24/7 thanks to social media companies trying their best to get their userbase addicted to their product to maximize user engagement.
Back in the day, you might have felt those social pressures, but only in limited settings and ultimately you could control the situation by removing yourself from anxiety invoking situations. There was ample room for getting a mental break from these situations.
But social media completely destroys any respite anyone could possibly have. They exploit the FOMO feeling as best they can to essentially guilt their users to constantly "engage" on their platform, which leaves the end user pretty helpless in being able to seek respite from these negative social pressures. I'm only 35 and I haven't used social media in any meaningful way for 5+ years and it has been the best decision ever. I don't really miss out on much and I definitely am much happier than when I had to wade through all the crap people post on social media just to keep up appearances in the social media rat race.
That’s my take. The bigger downside IMO is that the most successful people, i.e. experts, at something exist in the 10^9 social group, rather than the 10^3, and likely multiple experts exist in the 10^9 space.
A strange side effect is that the digital world also amplifies the outliers and makes the others in the large group of people seem non existent, leaving you to feel like you are majorly behind, when the reality is you are likely closer than most.
I was thinking more "10 to 20". I suppose from person to person and at different stages of life the filter of who is appropriate for your playing field might change. . but even 10^2 seems high. I can barely name 20 critically important people in my life let alone those which are on my playing field. I have managed this, a bit unconsciously. Generally when my field is managed in line with my conscious values I'd only regard a person who I know and respect professionally. Further filtering on whether I actually feel like I personally (not just professionally) know the person.
curious what a different playing field mechanism might be described as
Upvote mad on this. This is exactly what I have been saying to all of my friends who quitted social media. One of aspects was also the narrow view social media creates for bipolarizing spectrum of one's opinions using extremistic news and probably fakes news.
We used to wake up, read the paper, see all the terrible things in the world and say “oh well, at least my life is better than those poor slobs.” But now it’s the opposite. Social media tells you everyone is having more fun, with more toys and more friends than you. They’re always in Saint Kitts having Mai Tais at sunset while you’re in Canoga Park selling your plasma at dusk. Yolo!
Before Instagram, you could be a loser but not feel it because the winners weren’t always in your face. Even the most mundane post of avocado toast in a hipster coffee shop sends the message “I’m having fun and you’re not.”
Used to be you'd read the paper and all the shitty things going on in the world and then... you'd stop reading the paper. And talk and deal with people making an ordinary day of it.
Blind is one of the worst. Useful for information, but super toxic for comparison. The problem with social media is not that it's 100% useless, it's that it's hard to walk the line. In the example of Blind, it is good to be informed, but it's bad to compare.
>Blind is one of the worst. Useful for information, but super toxic for comparison
Blind seems more like 4chan parading around as linkedin, and I haven't found much substance there at all. It seems like a bunch of recent college grads trying to one up each other even while being anonymous. Just a lot of thinly veiled humblebrags pretending to be questions like "I got an offer for $350k at google, but I like my current position making $320k at Apple. Should I take it?", along with extremely simple questions that would be better answered by google like "what does company xyz do?". I've only poked around for about an hour, so if anyone has suggestions for a better experience I'm all ears. My initial exposure did not leave a good taste in my mouth.
Something's wrong with this era. Super subtly wrong.
Has it been the case that so many ~innovations things become quickly a problem, that you need another thing to use it safely, and when you happen to stop well, you don't miss it.
> Even on Twitter, perhaps more acutely in certain jobs or industries, it seems like you're competing with other in gaining professional influence.
Interestingly, as someone who uses Twitter for a purely anonymous psychological outlet, I do not feel this at all. Instead, I find it a place of earnest concern and solidarity—when not plagued by trolls.
I used to use Twitter. My country's political news and related commentary usually got me into a mental state of frustration and misanthropy.
I deleted Twitter. Political news still frustrate me but I rarely see them anymore. Ignorance is bliss. I've effectively created a safe space where political idiocy can't cognitively harass me.
Is it wrong to be so uninformed? I don't know. I think a lot about it and I haven't come to a satisfactory conclusion. By being uninformed I'm somewhat unable to fight against the "wrong" opinions, but maybe if I was informed my opinions wouldn't change a thing anyway.
My mental health is better off just accepting any idiotic laws my country passes instead of trying to "protest" (in the most useless sense of the word: tweeting about it) against them, for the most part.
Are you sure that you are uninformed? Do you think that trends on twitter reflect meaningful news that you wont pick up through other means? Could it be possible that by spending time on twitter you might not be becoming informed, but rather misinformed?
Most news isn't even actionable. If you feel like you're a bad person if you're not paying attention to the news, it means you're listening to the wrong news. Focus on bigger picture issues. Give precedence to numbers and detailed analyses. If it's still keeping you down, then just turn it off because it's wasting your time and draining your life force.
"I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed."
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business"
I wouldn't say it's wrong, but I would say it is an expression of privilege. People who don't find their race, gender or identity regularly being touted as either some up and coming new social fad or the boogeyman to a given group that oppose them and the source of everything evil in the world or what have you can pretty safely disconnect from the discourse with no real ramifications to their lives.
So again, no I wouldn't say it's wrong, and hell, I have to disconnect occasionally too simply to keep my sanity. But I also say that from a similar position of privilege. I don't have lawmakers attempting to restrict my rights, my gender and race aren't an oppressed group. But, exercising privileges doesn't make you a bad person in my book so long as you're not fighting to maintain those privileges at the expense of others.
Disconnecting from people trying to push a so called 'culture war' on the general populous seems like a rational choice - as a white male, social media seems to tell me emphatically that I am the problem. Similarly social media pundits from the other side are trying to blame all measure of economic and social ills on brown people/gay people/trans people.
Both narratives are patently false.
To touch very lightly on politics, we blame the poor for being poor, and the marginalized for being marginalized - the so called 'culture war' (and the outrage on both sides) is just another round of 'circuses and bread' to distract us from real issues and prevent any real change from happening.
I’m LGBTQ, and I am not a federally protected class. It is legal to fire me for my identity in many states, and the current republicans in power are continuing to make it legal and condoned to discriminate against LGBTQ people at the federal level- rolling back several policies that benefited marginalized folks along this umbrella. These changes happen with very little fanfare or any notification safe for observant reporters and the spread of social media.
I find this comment overtly dismissing that there might be very real, legitimate reasons to be keyed into social media and the news.
I'm also LGBTQ - and I believe effectively we're being used a pawn to score points with the conservative base. Employment protections I believe do very little, because in most states you can fire someone for any reason, or no reason at all. It's a law that effectively only punishes stupid people.
I find that catching up on what’s going on once every week or so provides enough information to make the decisions I can. Social media, in contrast, serves up a sub 24 hour news cycle that prevents focus and produces emotional exhaustion and constant anxiety.
I’m sure there are people for whom it’s valuable (e.g. if immigration raids could affect you directly), but for members of most groups, being plugged in all time probably does more harm than good.
And I am simply arguing that that is not always the case and the original statement, that it is a privilege to be able to unplug from news and social media, may be true given that I as an LGBTQ person often feel the need to keep abreast of new and rarely-covered updates to local and federal policy that are associated with LGBTQ issues. For example, the department of labor moving through fairly recently to make it legal for federal contractors to fire LGBTQ or unmarried pregnant women on the grounds of religious beliefs.
Did you change anything about your behavior immediately when you found that out?
I’m saying the high proportion of button-pushing click-bait and the low probability that I need any particular info in real time means i’ll be better off getting news through other sources.
You don’t win a war by maximizing fear, outrage, and low quality info on your own side (which, IMO, social media does).
That sucks. I’m sorry you have to deal with that shit.
So far, I haven’t run into any “shit, if only I had known that five days ago!” situations. I doubt I ever will, no matter how hostile the current administration is to women. But who knows; you pays your money and you takes your choice.
well a problem is that lgbtq doesnt belong together anyway because what are you fighting for? sexual orientation or gender identity? those are really different and are people really being fired for it?
>are really different and are people really being fired for it?
Absolutely not. The nice thing about being LGBTQPA+* is all the constitutional lawyers that will take your case pro-bono to persecute anyone you can speculatively accuse of discerning something about you.
If you are straight then there is basically no such free help available to protect your rights, and have fun trying to bring something up to the supreme court all by yourself if you don't want to be forced to express homophilic opinions.
Actually, as I said, it is legal to discriminate against LGBTQ people in much of the country and the federal government had recently rolled back protections for LGBTQ people. Lawyers are not going to take pro bono cases because LGBTQ status is not constitutionally or federally protected.
Just as a minor correction: Nobody is telling you that you specifically are the problem. The problem is that as a white male, what is called "western society" was built with you as the presumed default, and that confers to you tons of small benefits that fall into one of two categories:
1) Unfair advantages that allow you certain freedoms other groups don't have, that one could argue no one should have
2) Advantages that everyone should have, but due to being ethnic or female, they don't.
The best example I usually have for this is that when I'm pulled over by a cop for speeding, I'm annoyed to be sure and it's going to be a really bad inconvenience and probably a fair financial burden too. But I don't fear for my life. I'm not panicking on whether or not my vehicle will be searched or if the officer might plant something on me. That's not to say those things can't happen, but it's intrinsically not on my mind at all, even though it could. And those things happen to other groups all the time.
It’s funny to me that you’re treating white here as the “presumed default.” White people have ethnicities, just like midwestern newscasters have accents.
If you're not at least mildly afraid of the cops when being pulled over, you're not paying attention. My whiteness (in my opinion) does very little for me in a situation with such a large power imbalance.
Except that Western civilization as in the minds of it's inhabitants likely wouldn't have existed without the subjugation and exploitation of those other societies, including but not limited to: China, India, the Middle East, most of Africa minus Ethiopia, and even some parts of Europe, and much more recently, South America.
The West has largely won because it won a lot back in the day, and that inertia builds up and continues to favor us.
There is no realistic scenario where one civilization does not dominate others.
Macro-history is fundamentally about the rise and fall of civilizations - the undesirable elements of this are consistent, but Western tradition and enlightenment has also given us democracy and science, and put us in a collective position where we are so relatively prosperous that we can look at the past with an inflated sense of shame.
Getting tweets that make you emotionally upset isn't furthering any groups rights minority or otherwise. If you want to make a real difference you need to get out and connect with local political forces.
Twitter can make you feel like you are making a difference. If you can only share this with one more person maybe my rights won't abused. It is distracting you from making that difference.
It wasn’t until I quit social media that I found time to get engaged locally. Joined the board of a nonprofit, spoke with my council people, started becoming engaged in other community orgs and attending zoning and policy hearings. If you have political drive, staying away from the timeline as an outlet of that energy can be liberating.
no thats not what privilege is, you can turn off social media too, youre not forced to listen to anything
and youre showing the problem with the news because theres really not that much going on. who is losing their rights? what oppression are you talking about?
Of course the ramifications hit me, just like everyone else. Why do you think I get upset about the news?. The question is whether I should accept those negative ramifications or spend energy protesting against them.
I wouldn't care about politics at all if I didn't think I and/or other people were being fucked over.
If you have any political opinion at all, then at some point you'll think that you or others are being treated unfairly by society or by the state. Isn't that the whole point of expressing political opinions?
Well actually we are all victims of the lawmakers as noone dares to punish the CO2 polluters. All this talk of privilege is meaningless compared to what we will all have to endure if we keep destroying our enviroment like that.
I think newspapers are the best—say you get a daily or even weekly summary of events. That’s been good enough for centuries.
The problem today is all the rehashing of events. Professional journalists honestly do a better job than all the rest of us.
Internet information is mostly garbage (where social media is concerned). Don’t get me wrong the quick access to information is nice—but ”quick” means “less thought out” for the majority of readers and writers.
Does anyone do weekly news summaries? A weekly digest might be something worth paying for, even the nightly news bulletins on TV seem to assume you've watched the morning ones and won't tell you about something that happened at 3AM. Back when I was still reading newspapers even the weekend ones were pretty much only reporting the news of the day and not a weekly summary.
Annoyingly news is also stuck in the document model from newspapers, every little update has to repeat all the background information under the assumption that people didn't read the previous articles. Even worse is when they update the same articles so you have no idea of what you've read and what you haven't.
On a related note, I've removed the distraction of personal email notifications from my life recently and become more organised as a result. When I check every day or two it's at a convenient time where I can actually pay that bill or at least move it to the bills folder, or unsubscribe from that piece of spam instead of just swiping it away. Turns out one of the killer apps that made me get my first smartphone a decade ago has been making my life worse.
Edit - I did some googling of weekly news and it seems like just about everything with weekly in the title is live updating and/or not news.
Edit 2 - for Australians I found a twice daily news subscription from the ABC: https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/alerts/ . It's not exactly what I wanted but with an email filter it might be workable.
I've genuinely wanted to launch this for myself. For what it's worth my wife has The Skimm and it does a reasonable job of being unbiased and presenting many sides of a story with plenty of context.It's daily but I still think it accomplishes most of what you're probably looking for.
Even better, newspapers often benefit from having a couple hours at least between when the story breaks and when it goes into print for at least rudimentary sanity checks on the details.
It doesn't work 100% of the time, but it's very handy in scenarios like mass shootings where seemingly every one has initial reports of "multiple gunmen" only to have that evaporate within a few hours.
I did the same, about 18 months ago. It's a definite improvement in my mental health.
I choose not to see it as uninformed, but informed in more focused ways. Most of the news we see doesn't actually matter, there is no action to be taken by the individual. By filtering that out you can focus on things important to you, where you can take action. Family, work, local community if you're inclined.
I would argue you're potentially better informed. Better to be ignorant than know a half truth devoid of context skewed for an agenda and that's what most of politics on social media is anyways.
IMO it's better to read real-time Reddit threads when something is happening; it's usually unfiltered and you can get raw data, not the curated ones from mainstream news once propagandists from all sides plug in and offer only selective evidence.
I would argue against this, especially if you're in specific subreddits, it's usually heavily biased. Even if you're reading articles from /r/worldnews or /r/news, there's usually a general sentiment, and popular opinions that validate those sentiments get upvoted.
I personally can't stand reading the comments, since every comment is either a meme or something irrelevant.
You can still follow politics through Reuters or the Associated Press, which shouldn't contain inflammatory language -- they're about as neutral as you can come by.
I'm going to adopt this strategy. If you follow politics people will demand you pick a side which they can then use to attack you. If you just pretend to be stupid, it's harder for them to find an opening. Plus, pretending to be stupid is a lot easier than pretending to be smart, so it'll save energy. What I really need to do is stop posting on Silicon Valley gossip boards.
When I quit I ended up reading books and watching TV for entertainment. I literally read over a million words of fiction (Worm) in one month with the spare time.
It was a lot more fulfilling, and I'll remember that time. While in contrast there are few social media moments I'll miss.
I had to actually force myself to get back into social media. I'm not sure what the author here means by withdrawal; there was maybe a period of 1 week trying to get back in, but it was over quickly.
One big thing that happened was the number of consulting contracts went down significantly and never recovered. I'm quite Facebook active and used to get two interview offers a month. In fact last month I got a huge opportunity that I would have gladly accepted if I wasn't committed to anything else.
I'd be happy if social media was just wiped out and we went back to socializing on forums and IRC.
The web serial Worm is amazing. The sequel, Ward, is really far along now and is even better IMO. You can catch up on https://www.parahumans.net/
The HN crowd would probably really like Worm in general. Basically a sci-fi superhero story with realistic uses of powers and complex characters. The protagonist has the powers of insect control and scalable multitasking.
I read Worm and hated it. So here's a strong anti-recommendation for anyone who's considering reading it.
For reference, Worm is divided into 30 arcs, of roughly 50,000 words each. I divide this into a few major sections.
Arcs 1-3: Taylor (the main character) gains her superpowers, learns to use them, and joins a team. She struggles a bit with hiding her new powers from her family. This is the only part of the story I thought was any good. By the end of this section, Taylor completes her metamorphosis from awkward teenageer into standardized rationalfic protagonist, and generally stops being an interesting character.
Arcs 4-20: Taylor and her team do typical cape stuff, mostly fighting various superpowered opponents, finding allies, and building influence in their home city. This was tolerable until I realized that the author is constitutionally incapable of letting his protagonists take any kind of meaningful loss. This section is a million words long and has no substantial consequences.
Arcs 21-27: I may have gotten the exact cutoff wrong, but somewhere around arc 20, there's an event that looks like it's going to cause a major shift in the story. Unfortunately, those major changes generally fail to materialize. This section is more of the same, though a bit more tolerable due to the novelty of having a bunch of new characters running around.
Arcs 28-29: Again, I'm probably off by an arc or two, but around arc 27, there's another big event. This time, there are some big changes to the story, but they're largely for the worse. All logic goes out the window, and the consequences of the big event are almost entirely ignored, in favor of buildup for the big finale.
Arc 30: This is hands-down the worst ending I have ever read in any piece of fiction. The climactic fight scene is largely told, not shown, and the author utterly fails at conveying the intended epic scale. The worst part of all, I'll omit due to spoilers, but in short, certain details of the battle make the previous 6,000 pages look like a complete and total waste of the reader's time.
There were two reasons I stuck with Worm for the full 1,600,000 words, in spite of its main plotline being dreadfully repetitive and boring. First, the interlude chapters, which explore backstories of side characters and the nature of superpowers, I thought were generally decent. And second, I was expecting all of Taylor's team's politicking and base-building to pay off eventually. (I had previously read Austraeoh, where I slogged through the million words of books 2-4, and it was worth it due to the excellent book 6.) But I was utterly wrong on the second point, and the first alone is not sufficient to make Worm worth reading.
I found the squeal hard to start because it was a struggle to remember how worm left off-- the end of worm was a real whirlwind, and I read it around the time it finished IIRC.
"I'm not sure what the author here means by withdrawal"
An attention-getting pull quote, I guess. I found the physical symptoms claim hilarious. "non [sic] unlike those seen in individuals quitting opiods"? Ha!
This write-up really ends up understating the benefits and "magical" things that actually did happen, but I fully approve of the understated approach. Hyping everything up is part of the problem. If something is beneficial, I shouldn't need to sell you on it; I can just tell you about it, and you can decide. (In fact it's almost an intrusion into your free will when I start persuading you, and it betrays some vested interest on my part.) That's why you don't brag about quitting social media. And why you quit social media in the first place is a related example of the same thing: If I'm a worthwhile and valid human being, I shouldn't need to sell you on me, and maintain this continual online sales platform for the "me" product. You can discover it on your own and maybe reach the conclusion that I'm awesome, or maybe not, but either way it's fine. Zen, baby. (I think the meditation helped more than he realizes LOL)
> If I'm a worthwhile and valid human being, I shouldn't need to sell you on me, and maintain this continual online sales platform for the "me" product. You can discover it on your own and maybe reach the conclusion that I'm awesome, or maybe not, but either way it's fine.
Presuming that you aren't the type of person who spends all their time out in public giving talks or something, how are you expecting people to "discover" you? By chasing links from your work? By just bumping into you in the grocery store?
I'm pretty sure I'm a worthwhile human being, but, y'know, I'd like to have friends, and I'd especially like to have friends that share interests with me, and are doing interesting things themselves. And I don't live in a place where those type of people are. So it'd be great if those friends found me... probably through the Internet. And how do I encourage that to happen? Well...
(None of which is to say that there's any reason to consume social media. Only to publish to it. Though that creates a funny Nash equilibrium...)
Main complaint with Facebook is how rigid the friendships are. There are people I'm friends with on Facebook that I haven't spoken to in ten years. But it feels weird to delete them. For some reason it feels natural to add everyone you know, even if you've only ever spoken to them for a single evening. To put it another way the edges of the Facebook friend graph don't have weights where the IRL graph does.
The author is playing the /r/mildlyinteresting card. /r/mildlyinteresting succeeded where /r/interesting did not because it tempered the expectations of visitors. People expecting a 10x productivity gain because they quit social media will surely be disappointed.
I've been off Facebook for about a year now as well... Lets see the effects have been, a lot less options for dating, lost communication with a ton of various car parts companies and tuners (I was into a lot of car hobbies for a while), and overall I feel more alone then I did when I was on Facebook.
But this is an honest way to live, I used to just sit there and scroll through other peoples lives peering through them as if I was somehow a part of whatever they were doing. It was a fake reality.
"You know what else is exhausting? Pretending to care about people you don’t give a shit about. Maybe you’re just a better person than I am and you genuinely and deeply care about everyone you are ‘friends’ with on Facebook. I didn’t. "
This was one of the reasons that pushed my of Facebook, in the end, my newsfeed was heavily filtered because I don't care that one my friends bought a new phone, or checked in into a shopping mall. I'll probably miss some more important life events, but I would argue that if they don't share that with me in person, we weren't really friends in the first place.
I might quit soon too. To be honest - seeing my peers buying homes (with, of course, no discussion about how they made it happen), getting married, traveling a lot, enjoying nice things, and having kids is kinda putting a sour taste in my mouth. It's a very biased feed. It's basically an endless feed of the highest points of everyone in your entire social circle. I do some of it but I tend to balance it out with, "I don't think I'm ever gonna fucking make it in this area."
Social media is a bit like the news but on the opposite side of the spectrum. "Yes, yes, I get it. The world is ending." I care but I don't care to where I need to have it shoved in my face where I'm going to do things to make the world even worse. (What good is a world that survives if it is full of anxiety?)
I'm not reading the general news generally anymore when I can and maybe I'll transfer that to social media soon. (Today was a bad day - a peer of mine who is younger than me just bought a place in SF; I'm struggling to make it in a 400sqft in-law unit) I notice I feel better and it's not like anything I missed is of real substantial importance to my daily life. It's just filler. I know my core political philosophy - so it's not like it'll affect my voting decision much. Reminds me of the article someone posted in response to the 8 year old dying. Something about ignoring the bullshit in life because you don't have time for it. You don't have time for bullshit and most of social media and the news is full of bullshit. I think it could be really great but most of the time... it's just bullshit. Here it is - life is short: http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html
Do you think your peers were able to purchase homes through means not accessible to you? Not to speculate on your circumstances, but it's truly something how many people I know making six figures that choose to rent these days (in competitive, expensive housing markets). One possibility might be, we become so accustomed to renting. I can't imagine developing my career further, and then all of a sudden in 5 years, having to care for a lawn, home maintenance, etc. on top of the demands of work.
I also wouldn't discount the number of people who might be house poor: banks will give you loans for far more than a financially savvy person would suggest taking (e.g, only borrow up to 2/3rd's of the maximum amount a bank will give), to keep flexibility in your budget.
To tie this to social media: what we see isn't reality. You're "competing" with their curated self versus your own. You may see the purchases, but certainly not the debt coming with it. The people with the best-looking lives on social media probably don't have the healthiest of finances, unless you're following truly wealthy people.
Banks will definitely loan out crazy stuff. But it's not very common, from my knowledge, to buy a $1m+ home with less than 20-30% down. (You have to pay PMI and a really high mortgage then anyway) To have a few hundred thousand dollars lying around before you're 28 is pretty remarkable. Especially if you aren't at FAANG.
The means they were able to do it through were likely rich family (no one here of course will say their family is rich) and high paying job ($300k+/yr). Both of which I am not in (for my position in my region). I'm at a startup. Watching my peers, who are not in companies like mine, just skyrocket in wealth is rather discouraging. It's even more harsh because it's usually a couple who are sky rocketing and I'm just sitting here with a SO who will never make anything substantial. Love them to bits but the lack of financial contribution is practically suicide here.
I know everything isn't perfect. It's curated. But the point is that often their highs are way higher than mine. I already know their lows are nothing like mine because I know a lot of the people well enough to know that much.
Side note about home buying: a lot of statistics online about homes being bought for x and what kind and where and all that. But there's very little information on who is buying and what they're doing with the home!
I only recently discovered that all the homes being bought under $1m in the Bay area aren't being owner inhabited. They're all being converted into rentals and as investment property. It explains why East Palo Alto hasn't gentrified.
Frankly I'm a little bored at these "quit social media" articles. They look sort of all the same to me. Quitting altogether is simple, because there's only one way to do it; quitting altogether. Moderation, on the other hand, is more interesting because there are a number of ways to moderate its use; not just limiting time but also limiting use cases. I'd like to know more about the latter.
This is a good question, and imo an underrated answer is to use them for digital journaling. I use an app called Journey which lets you make entries and attach photos to them, and this justifies taking photos to sort of help spur memories of fun events and such.
As a side note, a hobby/hack I've found recently has really helped me decrease screen time.
I need to work a lot due to job circumstances, so I thought I could not afford screen off time.
But one thing I picked up is writing in a notebook. I realized that a lot of work, regardless of where you are on the totem, is planning ahead. Writing in a notebook for both work and personal introspection is very therapeutic and really helps me to focus and crystalize my thoughts. I've also bundled this with my work out sessions to pre-plan what I want to pontificate about. The general process has both helped decrease my screen time, increase my work productivity, and help me sleep better because I know that my frayed thoughts are on paper.
The thing I have found to be extremely helpful is to very carefully curate who who I follow - in particular I don't friend/follow anyone I have any sort of regular f2f interactions with - family, coworkers, neighbors. I use it exclusively to keep up with out-of-state friends, others involved with the same sort of niche hobbies, that sort of thing. Avoids sooo much drama.
I did it for a year too! deleted fb/insta/twitter accounts for a year.
a lot of good things happened. 1. Never bothered about taking photos for everyshit I did. 2. A lot of white space and time I got, to be empty. Not sure if I used them enough. But white space yes! 100% 3. I never grazed useless info off the feed.
in the middle of the year, i tried an experiment. created a twitter/fb accounts and followed some of the useful accounts. browsed for 1 hour. and then closed twitter/fb and tried to recollect all the info I gathered in this 1 hour. And trustme, it was huge. really huge.
X got married. Y had a job change. Z disappointment about something. A's vacation. B's witty remark on C.
then i immedietly deleted my account, coz none of these were useful for me. I was never interested in what other poeple's life about.
Another 6 months passed. I realized only thing I missed was the option for events, and groups where u can post.
coz i play fifa on xbox one. to find teammates.. ofcourse the best place is on fb. To sell something. Even to reach out to somebody for help at sometime, fb is the best.
so finally after 1 year, I created twitter/fb accounts. and I never posted any photos or my personal stuff.
Just add 30 friends in fb. the most important ones. u know.. and no more. but i can unfollow some of them. ANd posted all info in groups, and got teammates right away for Fifa.
and also, if I want to reach out someone, its just one step away.
Twitter, follow all useful ppl mostly tech/football/humor
and now i dont feel overwhelmed at all.
Everytime i open fb, i ll not get enough updates.
The key idea, how to be in it and not get overwhelmed. How to be in it an use it the way u want it.
P.S Insta -> never felt like going back. absolutely boring and useless for me personally.
None of the top comments respond to or discuss the actual content in the post (e.g. "my ..."), and instead focus on their own anecdotal experiences, based on the headline or social media in general.
this also is mirrors the lack of discussion and engagement often associated with social media.
I stayed away from most social media sites and use mostly chat/email to stay in contact with friends. So I can relate to the point of having fewer and better relationships, but I found that you have to be more active for that to work. If you don't feel comfortable reaching out to people you will get lonely as well.
I’m not sure whether this is just post college life but I feel like social media has really reduced the amount of direct interaction between people, both via phone / computer, and in real life.
I don’t really care to passively consume what my friends are doing, or broadcast to them what I’m doing; I want to interact with them.
Thus could be a millennial issue though - the next generation seems to use Snapchat and iMessage for much more direct interaction.
I quit posting and checking Facebook roughly a year ago (I still have an account for event invitations, but I've disabled all other notifications and uninstalled the app). I still have an Instagram account, and page through the feed once or twice a week (in the past, it was usually a few times a day), but I haven't posted in about six months.
I'm less anxious and stressed out, and generally less annoyed at people around me. My initial reason for avoiding FB was because I was tired of being bombarded by rageful posts about politics and social justice issues (regardless of whether or not I agreed with those posts) day in and day out.
On occasion, after asking a friend a specific question about their life, they're surprised I don't know the answer already because they'd posted about it on FB. I then have to explain that I haven't checked FB (aside from events) in a year. No one has even come close to complaining about having to tell me something separately; people generally enjoy talking about themselves, especially when prompted, so that shouldn't be a surprise.
I still take a similar quantity of photos, even though I don't post them anywhere anymore. I do share photos taken during a group activity/trip/outing, but privately, through Google Photos, and only to the people who were there.
When I flip through Instagram, I'm definitely less engaged than I used to be. I don't really comment anymore unless I have something substantive to say/ask, and I usually don't bother to "like" anything.
I have several healthy in-person friend groups, and some remote ones. I hear about what's going on with my friends in person, or via smaller group chats or one-on-one texting. I certainly don't see all the other things my random FB "friends" (at ~1100, of course the majority of them are acquaintances at most) are posting about their lives, but I find I don't really miss it. While it might be a novelty to see what some random old high school or college classmate is doing day-to-day, I'd much rather turn that limited energy and brain space toward my closer friends.
Regarding news, I get a daily politics newsletter in my email inbox, so I can restrict that to a small chunk of time and only pursue things further if I want to. For other types of news, I have to seek it out specifically, which works well for me.
I guess it depends on what magical means, but the Mental Health Benefits, Enhanced Interpersonal Relationships and Presence the author lists after the conclusion do seem magical to me.
Having time to stop, think and/or have a conversation with another human being is a magical experience nowadays.
I'm sure the 1000 days of meditation he experimented with, had a lot more impact on his mind/body/soul than his Social fasting. But a blend of both for most I think would be ideal. https://joshcsimmons.com/2019/05/21/meditaton-practice/
For those worried they will become uninformed by disconnecting from news and social media. I highly recommend reading/listening to long-form history works. You can gain a lot of perspective and understanding from learning about what has happened in the past and you might be surprised by how useful such information is for being informed about what is happening at the moment.
I didn't sign up for Facebook until 2007 I think. It was only to keep in touch with friends from the military.
Since then I've made friends with people that I know, but no one beyond that. So I don't fall into the trap that a lot of other people seem to fall into (including the author).
That said, I think social media is something all of us can use a lot less of.
> the sole reason I have taken photos is to share them via social media
That's quite a realization. I think it's true for a lot of people though and it's part of why people experience the best times of their life through a 6" display.
My experience is that rest of the world has moved on to group chats and sharing a lot there
In the US my experience is that tail end millenials and gen Z are gravitating to group chats too. Pretty much just millenials and older and the subset of those with no international friends are the people stuck on the public oversharing train. And some women that could pass in a forever 21 catalogue.
Yeah I totally see this trend too. I think there's a reasonable hybrid model between private group chats and traditional social networking (i.e. photo albums, events, payments, posts, etc).
In fact, I've been working on this idea for a while now and just launched on HN a few hours ago! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20933272. It's definitely a response to current trends of people leaving social media due to negative effects on social and mental health. I saw this happening to my friend groups first hand and knew something had to change.
Yep, I've noticed this. I'm in the younger part of the millenials, and am a teacher. My students pretty much all use Snapchat for group chats, and quite a few are using Discord, even if they're non-gamers. I use Discord, and have recently found myself trying to get more of my real-life friends into Telegram, and have multiple group chats running via SMS. It's just so much better, imo. Only reason I have Facebook is for some event notifications but I might delete it soon (deactivated it for over 6 months, didn't miss it).
I've been 2 years without Facebook, Instagram and others. I've kept my Twitter account, but I barely use it. When i quit Facebook and Instagram I noticed relief. Instant relief and huge amount of batery life. I also found out who were my true friends, they write me to my whatsapp or telegram or write emails. The rest where like fake friends.
My main beef with social media is that you can't have a decent conversation with anyone. Partially because everyone builds a network of like minded people and has little to no tolerance at all to opposite views, and partially due to the real name policy, all conversations seem to derail quite easily. Then you have sites like LinkedIn where everyone presents himself like they invented the cure for cancer. People seem so fixated on being right and pompous to the point that there's no real fun anymore in interaction. And if I can't discuss with strangers I don't see any point of joining social media sites. For me communities is all there is on sites like that.
> The only logical reason I could figure for why this is done, is to make you feel bad about having a lower number than other people, otherwise why would they bother broadcasting this number, proudly at the top of your profile page, to other users?
The reason probably is so that people connect more and see more stuff from other people, and stay active on the network.
partialrecall: Of course it's motivated by profit.
Is that motivated by a desire to help the user, or does the social network have a more selfish motivation for driving user engagement? I think it's more the later than the former, though I expect the social network to pretend it's the former.
Interesting, I have noticed ("excuse based") defensive mechanism when it comes to this topic ...
most people I have witnessed start to use very poor arguments of why they want to stay on social networks ... very similar to people with "un-noticed" alcohol problem.
But yes, nothing magical happend without it. Just maybe realization how stupid it is.
I'm curious what arguments you've heard that you think are stupid.
I like having a way to contact old class-mates, etc. I've moved a lot and feel very sentimental about a lot of old friends. On the other hand, there are other people I'd just as soon never hear from again. I'm torn on this. But it doesn't require me being active on social media anyway - just maintaining the friends list and occasionally messaging people.
I like it as a convenient way to share photos with people who give a crap - siblings like to see their nieces & nephews growing up, and my wife uses ChatBooks heavily. And I get a lot of positive feedback on my humorous posts - which I continue to do for my own ego and because I know other people get value from it.
But beyond that I find Facebook just makes me angry, and I rarely scan my feed and have unfollowed a lot of people who just post crap. I'm curious to hear other reasons I should use it less :)
Nothing magical happening is what's supposed to happen. I've seen lower stress levels simply because I'm not as connected to the news and political cycle. But that's also because I only check once a week. It's the new normal, which isn't magical, because it was also the old normal.
This about sums up my experience in deleting Facebook. It seemed like a shallow form of communication at the time, now as an outsider it feels even more so. I do feel less stressed and emotionally burdened by constantly being exposed to everyone else though.
I think this posts discussion of “why do we take photos” is really great and deserves more consideration. I’ve not had any form of social media account for over 8 years and something I notice is that I just take waaay fewer photos than everyone else I know. A few on vacation or when I see something stupid I can turn into a pun or a joke. Seriously maybe 3-5 photos per month.
I love living this way and consider it healthy and normal for a wide variety of people in most modern life circumstances. I think the need to take dozens of photos of vacation/meal/baby/lifestyle is seriously a universally bad mental state for humans, and one that people will stubbornly try in vain to argue is somehow acceptable or ok.
If sitting is the new smoking, then social media photo sharing is the new vaping.
This is interesting, because I do not have social media but take a TON of pictures and videos of my kids (4 years old and 4.months old).... I send some to family via group texts, but most just sit on my phone/computer/cloud until I look at them.
I take so many for a few reasons. One, I think they are crazy cute and want to take pictures and videos when I see them doing cute things. Two, my 4 year old loves looking at them... she wants to see videos of herself all the time, and cracks up seeing herself as a baby.
Three, I don't do a baby book but want to be able to remember how they were at these ages when they are older. It is already trippy/fun to look at pictures and videos of my daughter at 4 months and compare them to her baby brother now. It is fun to watch old videos and see the first bits and pieces of the kid I love now.
99% of the pictures and videos haven't been looked at by anyone but me and my daughter, but I am SO glad I have them.
What’s your backup strategy? I’m paranoid of losing my pictures. I have one regular backup drive, one offsite backup drive I sync once a week and several cloud backups.
I am also paranoid... I copy all the photos to my computer hard drive every few days, and use backblaze to back up my hard drive. I also have a local backup drive.
I also periodically upload archives of my photos and videos to Amazon glacier
I’m sure that your use case for so many photos is fine and just rooted in your family’s specific hobbies in a way that social media image sharing totally isn’t.
At the same time though, I think a ton of people use the excuse “because KIDS” to justify all manner of things. Just because kids enjoy something doesn’t in any way endorse it as constructive, healthy or a good or worthwhile habit or activity.
I actually think there are two main camps here: people who take photos to share to their followers, and people who take photos for their own recollection and to share with the people closest to them (e.g. family photo albums).
I totally agree that the former is toxic and damages our mental health in many ways, like a digital version of smoking and vaping.
I recently launched a tool for our generation to manage and maintain a healthy relationship with social media - it moves away from the current trend of superficiality that exists on FB and IG right now.
I think your tool is very cool and building tools for recreational image libraries is super neat. But I can’t agree with you that “a healthy relationship with social media” is a possible state of affairs apart from wholesale avoidance of social media. There is simply too much asymmetry information advantage for platform maintainers (even in decentralized cases) for it to be possible.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "asymmetry information advantage"?
Personally, I've used tons of social media services growing up - AIM, MSN Messenger, GChat, G+, Blogspot, FB, IG, etc. I think all of them have positive traits, at least had positive traits when they started out. I've also experienced a healthy balance between online relationships and in-personal relationships. I just think it's super critical for our generation to move back to platforms that are healthier and better for our mental and social wellbeing.
I think AIM / MSN Messenger etc. don’t remotely qualify as social media, but already it feels like we’re veering into unproductive debate. My position is that “healthy” and “social media” don’t mix. There is no positive subset of Facebook. The entire conceptual value proposition of the platform is unhealthy from first principles. It requires you to trust a provider with data in such a manner that this trust is, literally by definition, unobtainable. Just can’t be done. The type of draconian HIPAA-like legal framework (plus untold billions spent on enforcement & compliance) that represents the minimum requirement is just not compatible with the existence of a corporation that makes money from being a repository and sharing platform for this data.
As a person with aphantasia, I will not be able to remember what my children looked like, sounded like, or acted like growing up unless I have pictures and videos.
I don't think it's harmful for me to try to preserve some of that, since I don't have the neurological wiring to use my brain for that job.
While it seems like nothing, the peace in my life is much greater with less influence from the gamified social media emotion casino. I am closer to where I feel like I need to be, whatever that may mean. Ymmv. Enjoy life.
I quit Facebook for a few years, it didn't do anything to my life one way or another, except maybe put me in a group of people others had to reach out "out of band" to invite to things, which practically meant I had to hear about events second hand or not go to things.
The emotional vitriol inspired by social media is completely unfounded. You can make it whatever experience you want; people just like to complain.
This article should be titled, "I don't know how to use social media so I gave up on it."
Agreed and pretty accurate way to describe all the people I know who quit Facebook.
The rest of us use Facebook or Messenger to organize events because there's a lot of us and it's the most convenient mechanism for organizing group activities. If people choose to opt out, it's up to the organizer whether they want to go through the additional mental effort of communicating everything to the Luddites through whatever special communication method they require.
Mostly, we just require the Luddites to find out about events and updates themselves. (Usually they find out by overhearing the rest of us talking about upcoming stuff as its being planned.)
The end result is usually that the Luddites get themselves back on to Facebook after 6 months of missing out on shenanigans.
Yes! I’ve never used FB, and refuse to, as a result I miss all sorts of notification of things occurring because everyone seems to assume everyone does use it. Drives me nuts!
I keep hearing this, but all my friends just text me. I'm under 30 too. Maybe it's just that I have a small friend group. Though even my grad department informs me of events. We're all fairly close though, so maybe that makes a difference.
sigh Too bad this is now the special case. While I agree this is me just having a get off my lawn moment, I liked it better when you just talked to your friends on the phone. With lands lines, and all their beautiful fidelity.
But, can't be a Luddite. It's here to stay, like smoking, and I tolerate it as such.
On Instagram, you're competing with others on who has the happiest life.
On LinkedIn, you're competing with others on who has the steepest career trajectory.
Even on Twitter, perhaps more acutely in certain jobs or industries, it seems like you're competing with other in gaining professional influence.
It creates a lot of anxiety that stems from a feeling like you're constantly on the verge of falling behind others.
Plenty of scholars/thinkers/philosophers have said something to the effect of focusing on just being a better version of you. Social media enables the exact opposite i.e. forcing you to constantly evaluate how you compare to others.
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