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Comments (204)

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  everdrive
  Social media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel insecure, you leverage your emotions for someone else's aims.Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation. It's long past time to leave it permanently.And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
• hinata08
  I'm bored when I see how inactive platforms like Discord and forums have becomesnobs used to be thought on users who liked popular culture or "jejemons", "kikoolols", "eternal september,... posters who used to be actually active, experimental and creative, but at least newcommers were still postingnowadays the creative part is gone. Forums are dead. You're encouraged to use your actual identity everywhere on social media and to sign apps. You're indeed not guided to post and be creative. The internet became just passive :/
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  torben-friis
  If you're on Android, you can use revanced to patch social network apps, to, among other things, remove content from non-friends (and ads).It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this. It can be full days with the same post at the top. And the worst part is that I hadn't noticed how empty it was until I did the change.
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  twodave
  Yes, the game is over, the corps have won. Where the Internet used to be a forum for creativity, it's now a weapon of influence. Where we used to have an anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) playground, we are now monitored more than anywhere else. Where we used to be able to genuinely connect, everything is now artificial and manufactured. And where we once had control, we are now the product.
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  exabrial
  A new game: determine when you meet someone if they use tik-tok or not without asking them.People's opinions are groomed and programmed. It's pretty hilarious how small minded people are.
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  Insanity
  Social media was never really “social” in my opinion. Reading updates from hundreds of people you have shallow interactions with offers the illusion of having a social life. So I’m not sure if this change to “fads” makes it meaningfully less social than it already was.
• seydor
  The pendulum has finally swung the other way. There is no longer the need for people to shamelessly air their life on live feeds, and when something serious happens, people prefer to share it in a messaging group.The extreme gossipy porn of the past two decades has finally worn off.I think it has little to do with privacy concerns as they are hypothesizing.
• Neil44
  Facebook stopped being good when they took away the order by most recent option IMO.
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  andix
  I used to browse through my instagram feed a few times per month. Just to keep updated about those friends who often posted there. Now it's mostly crappy shorts and I can't even find the "friend feed" anymore. No idea if it's just well hidden or completely gone. Now I don't use it anymore at all.
• cbold
  Social media does not only spread bad ideas, but degrades the symbolic machinery people use to form ideas in the first place. It trains reflexes where thought should be. There is no symbolic lattice for things to land and it turns people into reactive zombies.
• PcChip
  I think I'm on an A/B test on the Facebook app, now whenever I open the app it goes straight to reels and starts playing videos with sound enabled. I looked through all settings to try to disable this but couldn't, so I finally just gave up and uninstalled itI open the app to keep up with what my friends are doing, and also check the dating portion of the app for new matches. I purposely always avoid reels on any app, because I hate them and what they do to people. So when I open the app and it immediately starts playing reels with sound on and no way to disable it, it feels like a slap in the face
• Isaackoz
  I've deleted all my social media and haven't looked back. It's safe to assume Meta tracks every little detail about you: what kind of content you like, how long you look at each post, your political stance, etc. Every single metric you can possibly think of... they're collecting.Humans are predictable (more than we'd like to admit). Now they have AI to crunch all that data and find patterns to predict your next move and find out what content will give you the most dopamine. Escape while you can.
• spking
  If this subject interests you, and you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
• spike021
  While I partly agree, I also disagree. I still use Instagram a lot to keep in touch with friends I've made in different places. Generally as long as they are making posts then my feeds have those posts. It's only when they do not and supposedly IG "runs out" that I don't.Personally what I hate more is that there are some content creators I've been happy to support over the years and now instead of doing regular content posts they now do the "collab post" thing as an ad that looks like a regular post. Some of them may do but many do not.
• groan
  This is usually why I collapse the 2-3 top-most ranked comment threads. They’re very often gamed and calibrated for engagement. Every so often anecdotes/stories that completely ignore the subject matter (sometimes dangerous if medical). I wish there were other ways to organize comments (rip slashdot) but this usually helps to make HN less social media-y.
• gwbas1c
  I (mostly) stopped looking at Facebook around 2016. It just wasn't fun anymore; and at least for me, my feed was all political nonsense trying to manipulate me.
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  defmetrix
  The only social media I really use is linkedin and X. I find linkedin useful for following companies and colleagues, and im pretty picky about who I accept or request as a friend. I also find X to be insightful, but I only use it to follow people for stock research.
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  throwawaypath
  The "NPC" insult thrown at leftists exists because of this phenomenon. Recreational outrage fads dominate social media feeds.
• 45612987
  Given that even reaction videos from modern Jerry Springer figures with 20 million subscribers can attract 20,000 comments that all parrot their guru and demand doxxing of the target or worse, it is no longer a mystery how totalitarian states form.Maybe that is unfair to Jerry Springer. He at least heard both sides of a story.
• hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
  What I find unsettling is the monoculture that is being created by platforms like Instagram. You will see a 30 year old man from Alabama engaging in the same trends as a 19 year old girl from Japan. Suddenly everyone likes matcha and is posting photos of themselves in photo booths. On dating apps, tons of women from all ethnicities suddenly love sushi or have a photo at the exact same location with the exact same pose.Same people who run these platforms will preach about diversity while destroying it.
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  jdw64
  i have cut off social media related to my actual career, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Because people laughed at me for becoming a programmer. So I created my own homepage, and for communication, I mainly read posts on large Chinese tech communities, Hacker News, or dev.to.However, when I try to communicate through GitHub or something, I wonder if I'm just using another form of social media. My main daily routine is to gradually add posts to my own homepage that no one will see, and start from there.
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  abhaynayar
  I've been able to quit short-form content, but does anyone have any tips on how to quit long-form content like YouTube or Netflix?
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  nailer
  Yes, Tiktok staff made this point when they emerged in 2020 - "Tiktok isn't a social media platform, they're an entertainment platform". Meta's catching up.
• api
  Social media hasn't been "social" in more than a decade. It stopped being that when algorithmic feeds and infinite scroll were introduced.
• jrflo
  I built a safari extension called Scrolless [1] to try and solve this issue (Disclaimer: it's a $4.99 one time unlock). If you use social media in the web instead of the native apps, and use Scrolless, you'll only see posts from your friends, no recommendation algorithms anywhere.It's absolutely insane how much influence we have given over to social media algorithms as a society. I know so many people who I'd consider to be intelligent just completely believe whatever they see on tiktok/reels. These recommendation algorithms can create such intense polarization, I really hope we can find a way to scale back their use and encourage people to think more for themselves.[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scrolless-feed-blocker/id67588...
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  lenerdenator
  Friends haven't been a focus of social media feeds for almost 20 years now.There's not a lot of money in hosting a website where people share in-jokes and comment on each others' graduations, engagements, and baby announcements. Well, maybe there is, but there's a lot more money in farming engagement through ragebait and division.Meta in particular is a great example of why you cannot judge companies purely by profitability and why you shouldn't ever let the CEO also be the primary shareholder and chairman of the board that's meant to govern the company's behavior.
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  avaer
  Imagine if everyone called it "fad media" or something more accurate. It would be dead overnight.The only thing keeping it afloat is the lie that it's social.
• j45
  As soon as devices inserted themselves as a barrier between people and called it social, when it was really the media in waiting, they could hide and direct the nature of interactions, and ultimately, attention.
• ChrisArchitect
  hot take maybe: but alot of these shifts have come with the sheer explosion in number of people on these platforms and online in general - the arrival of many/most of the mainstream/normies as it were. Perhaps the reality is that alot of these people's lives on and offline actually are dominated by 'fads' and so this is just naturally following that.Think 'keeping up with the jones', 'the latest fahsion, food, entertainment, music, x, trends' etc. People live by what I dunno, magazines, Oprah, local morning show hosts, entertainment news shows, etc, tell them. They've brought that view of things with them online.
• IshKebab
  Now? It's been like that for a decade.
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  keybored
  I deleted my FB when they gave us the Your Data Or Your Subscription ultimatum. I don’t scroll TikTok, Instagram, or any other video “content”. I do watch some YouTube shorts but only while sitting at a personal computer type laptop or the ones which are connected to external monitors.I read this site. But lately it’s been more difficult since the AI “content” stresses me out. Maybe social media always did that. But it’s come to the point where I cannot kid myself. Many times it just makes me more wound-up than it winds me down. So then what’s the point? Then I intentionally search for specific topics. When I’m out of those I can stare out the window. Which is a nice change.
• lo_zamoyski
  In other news, water is wet.This has virtually always been the case and it is only "social media" is an Orwellian sense. It is an antisocial consumerist machine.In consumerism, everything is for sale.
• sublinear
  > What we're seeing is social media splitting in two [...] young people publish a lot of content but it's more funny parodies and remixes of existing material. The goal is to make people laugh, not to tell people about their lives. [...] Whether it's TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram, we are a long way from the "digital town square" of personal interaction that social media was even just a few years ago.I don't understand why this article has to play dumb. This is how most of the internet always was until commercial interest invaded social media. They yelled their billions of dollars worth of messaging so loudly for over a decade that it drowned out anything authentic.Now that there's a political break away from all the tone deaf pseudoprogressive messaging and the money for it has dried up, what did they expect to see there? Most people never posted sincere "life updates" unless they had something to sell or were a naive part of the bandwagon.
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  IAmBroom
  This thread is doomed by a common HN* affliction: People are bandying around key terms without defining them, assuming and pretending that the definitions are universally accepted.Here, the term is "social media", which can also be pronounced "boogeye man". We all seem to agree it is bad, but very few are willing to lay down a solid definition.It isn't limited to bad terms. It happens anytime we argue over whether X displays consciousness, or X has a mind, or X can think.* And other forums, obviously.
• yurtking
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• kin-txt
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• anzerarkin
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• popupeyecare
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• treebuscartruck
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  p1dda
  Anti-social doesn't mean what this ignorant BBC employee think it means.Not that I would expect anything intelligent coming from BBC but they could at least look up a word before they use it
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  SirFatty
  And this is a revelation to the BBC? Who doesn't know this?