Quit Social Media (2016)

The pressure to quit is so large I keep quitting daily

It's like looking in the mirror

What makes Hacker News a social media website?

Love the dedication to a ‘low-social-media’ life!

Problem is that it is becoming a new reality. You can tune out, but you can't turn it off, and it (and society) will continue without it. And I say this as someone who thinks we should largely turn it off. Society will adapt, which means society is becoming something different.

I think you make valid points about the downsides of "influencer culture" and usage patterns of some forms of social media. BUT. I'm think the term "social media" is too broad to be useful in this kind of critique.

This conversation we're having is a bit meta, but it's also "real", to me. We both considered Cal Newport's stance, Matt Green shared some thoughts about it, and Chris Weekly responded to it. Those are real people interacting in a potentially useful way. Being "addicted" to ideas and conversations is not necessarily unhealthy. /$.02

Unfortunately, it can be worth it. Having a social media audience can be very valuable to entrepreneurs. Someone who lives online with a personal brand can replace tens of thousands of dollars in ad spend with a single tweet.

As someone who hasn't had a social media presence for most of my adult life, and happy about that, I'm now seeing the downsides. I don't have Ivy League connections like some of my peers. Social media may be the only way I could build a network like the one they cultivated in university.

I agree with this, but it's worth noting the quote is from a journalist/blogger who was not talking about social media. He was talking about keeping up with a 24 hour news cycle by any means. The problem here isn't specific to social media. It's with overwhelming information flow, the vast majority of which is not actionable to the person consuming it. People come down with a type of awareness FOMO such that they feel like they need to know all things as they happen, even though the information is incomplete, often wrong, misleading, and doesn't impact their everyday real lives in any way.

This is what Andrew Sullivan was getting at. People should worry themselves with information that actually concerns and impacts their real lives. All else is entertainment. If it stops being entertaining and starts being anxiety-inducing, stop consuming it.

> engagement bait, daily outrages,

I have a pet theory as to why social media causes many people to feel like it's draining them, and why I avoid news on social media like the plague ... I also tend to mute or silence people that share political content (regardless of partisan affiliation).

Social media, unless you are trying to build a business, is ultimately offering the service of entertainment.

Even if you use Twitter or Facebook as your news aggregator, unless you're engaged in some kind of productive and time-scoped research project, you're doing this on your leisure time.

That means that you just got done work, or you're on a break, or you finally got the kids to sleep or finished all of your household chores and you're now in a position where you can "enjoy" a bit of leisure time.

Which means that you approach social media PRE-drained. You're already tired and you're looking for cute cat memes when what should happen ... you get hit with a rage-bait headline, or one of those douche bags that vote differently from you just posted an opinion about a controversial topic that you have very strong feelings about.

We (on HN) all know that the algorithm is trying to promote what gets engagement, and anything that provokes a strong emotional reaction is likely to trigger engagement.

My thesis is that people turn to social media when they are already in an emotional state that is incredibly inappropriate for engaging with "serious" topics on a rational level.

So everyone just gets angrier and angrier at each other and you leave social media feeling even more exhausted than you were before you signed on looking for entertainment to spend your precious leisure time with.

And then you realize that you just wasted that short precious time that you needed to use for relaxation ... and if you don't do anything to rectify it then your stress levels just gradually creep up, your sleep starts to suffer, you might start to compensate with stress eating or consuming more alcohol or cannabis than is healthy and it just spirals.

A game where the "points" are likes, followers and engagement

I would rephrase it further to "quit ad-based media." The problems and conflicts of interest introduced by an ad-based revenue model were discussed long before the advent of the modern Web and social media; the relationship between the advertisement industry and mass media (television, radio) was already discussed in depth in the late 20th century [0]:

    The advertisers' choices influence media prosperity and survival.
    The ad-based media receive an advertising subsidy that gives them
    a price-marketing-quality edge, which allows them to encroach on
    and further weaken their ad-free (or ad-disadvantaged) rivals.

    Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with
    serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere
    with the "buying mood." They seek programs that will lightly
    entertain and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose
    of program purchases - the dissemination of a selling message.

Amend according to your preferences, run it whenever something annoys you, throw it in a cron job, etc.

.bash_aliases:

alias blocksocials='(echo ""; echo "127.0.0.1 reddit.com"; echo "127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com") | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts > /dev/null'

alias unblocksocials='sudo sed -i "/reddit.com/d" /etc/hosts'

We also do not let people into the friend circle just because they have money (I hope). IMHO healthiest "social media" I could think is interest groups. They eventually need some kind of donation from one or more people, but with no or minimal barriers.

>I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”.

Facebook was terrible for your well being a long time before they enshitified with adds. You may be too young to remember but likes were a hot commodity people would ruin their lives over without any outside help.

For myself I find push notification based social media to be completely cancerous, and pull based one only mildly so. One need only look at the trolls from usenet to see people obsessed with nothing but text based emails.

There is no safe dose.

It’s not a coincidence that Facebook started out as a college-only social network. That was the real barrier to entry.

Metafilter comes to mind. Pay $5 one time for lifetime access. After about 20 years it has dwindled to a white star, but there is still a nuhhet of community left there. Amazing what a token cost does to weed out spam accounts, twinks, etc.

Hackernews is such a social circle. Besides the incredible moderation done by @dang I think the artificial barriers to interacting with the community are what make this a successful forum. I seem to recall needing at least 5 submission karma before you can comment - and that means 5 votes from _other_ people.

If the company you work for REALLY does behave like that, you SHOULD DEFINITELY advertise it. Companies like this must be acknowledged and celebrated. The owner must be a really good person.

I mean can the owner compromise and just do ads based on the content on the page? Those weren’t so bad in the “before times”. Maybe that just doesn’t bring in enough cash as ads that follow you around 10 different sites trying to sell you the same thing, but it seems like giving up free money and might be worth a shot.

I was one of those technology skids at that time and had more hope for the world. It was a time before I learned ****** was an *** *** *********** job. Before I watched Ron Paul collect the largest grassroots donation drive ('Moneybomb') and then his reach get clubbed like a baby seal by the establishment thereafter. It made me realize The Farm is real and what slop most Farm animals enjoy is just that: slop, prepared in a manner which makes the animal more useful/productive relative to cost. I also realize that there are complexities to ascending to the class of Farmer (or merely Farm-hand) which call for the cybernetic sentimental feedback system being built. How do you manage a farm of human livestock and not get killed? How do you do it in such a way that you can plan a hundred years out and hand it all off to your choice grandson(s)?

It's probably easier on your social life to be a vegan, compared to not being on Facebook.

I’ve been saying for a while that I expect the next big “veganeque” movement to be some kind of modern luddites. Maybe not as detached from modern society as the Amish, but a more 90s-like tech scene.

No cell phone on them at all times (but maybe some equivalent to a car phone/pay phone), placing the restriction to consciously “log on” to the internet, no (at least ad-based) social media, and maybe keep their online persona to appearances on mostly decentralized forums.

Personally, I know it would benefit me to detach from the one social media platform I have left and am fully addicted to (YouTube), but it’s hard when that is the platform that videos are stored on (though if I really cared, I would only subscribe to channels via RSS and watch them or individually search for things I wish to see instead of infinitely scrolling.) It’s also hard to keep up with group activities or the best classifieds listings or local music/arts events without Facebook.

I don’t believe that there will ever be a true competitor for services that can operate at scale like Facebook and YouTube (especially the latter), but I expect these modern luddites to accept this and reject those platforms even if it is socially ostracizing (much like veganism). To fill the void, they’ll create platforms and devices for them specifically. I imagine the goal of the platforms will be to avoid unnecessary bloat and keep hosting/maintenance costs low, which seems relatively easy if sucking every last second of retention out the user is not financially incentivized like it is in ad-based platforms. I expect the hardware to prioritize cost-efficiency, repairability, and a minimal feature set that doesn’t require frequent upgrades.

Then I imagine for a time, the movement will become trendy and people will begin flooding those platforms. The challenge then becomes to avoid capitalizing on the influx and keep the initial morals in mind and not start showing ads/trying to increase retention time. I think those projects may need to be decentralized and/or established as nonprofits with stated non-retractable tenets from their creation (“We shall never serve advertisements”, “We shall prioritize the distribution of useful information above all else”, etc.)

It’s a utopian view of the future, but I think it is possible. I think we’ll hit a day when we realize that spending 10+ hours a day staring at glowing rectangles is not bringing us closer to real fulfillment. I expect that as long as capitalism is the dominant economic force, businesses will always embrace the newest technology to avoid a massive gap in their output when compared to competitors, and the tech companies will always be pushing new addictive technology as long as it isn’t globally regulated, but after work, the people will wake up to the fact that they at least have a choice on whether or not they spend the rest of their leisure time staring at glowing rectangles.

Yet I still haven’t woken up myself.

I think you're hinting at a hidden problem: our vocabulary has not caught up with the way social media has evolved, and we need new terms.

People actually LIKE, perhaps even need, the social aspects of social media. But that's become such a small part of the experience for many people- the ads and attention-hacking with cheap stimuli burying the positive interactions.

I don't want to quit my connections, as you say. But I do want to quit this daily hypnosis that reels is trying to subject me to.

I would call that latter something more like "possessive media" - it needs to have your attention at all times and needs every scrap of data it can gather about you. I want less possessive media and more social media.

Can you please tell us why leaving Facebook was not a positive choice for you?

Also why it is important that 'your network of friends recovers'?

What's changed, though, really? I quit[0] social media near the end of 2019, and it greatly improved my mental health and life. While I haven't tried some of the newer options, I've kept up with new developments in the space. Nothing about the "new" social media platforms makes them at all attractive for me to take a second look and join back up.

If anything, things are worse. It's even more "algorithmic" and engagement-focused, continuing to promote outrage culture. Platforms like TikTok have turned addictive endless scrolling into a science. I know a few people who spend a significant number of hours of their days on TikTok and Twitter (ahem, sorry, "X"), and it just kinda makes me sad. (And I probably spend more time than is healthy on HN.)

[0] I still have my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, but I don't post to them anymore, and I'm signed out of them on all my devices (and I've deleted the mobile apps). I don't allow myself to ever sign in on mobile. Once every 6 months or so I'll sign into Facebook for some specific purpose (like looking up someone's contact information when it's for some reason not stored in any of my usual places). Out of curiosity I'll scroll down the feed, and it's just kinda crap. Stuff from people I don't actually follow, stuff from people I do follow but is kinda boring, and interestingly the feed is dominated by the same 15 or so people (even though I'd amassed a little over 1k "friends" before I quit). I limit myself to no more than five minutes, and I don't post, comment, or even like anything.

The last time I signed into Instagram (probably two or three years ago), the experience was awful. I remember when it was just a reverse-chronological feed of the people I follow (and only the people I follow). But now (well, 2-3 years ago) the majority of items in my feed are either ads or promoted/reshared posts from people I don't follow at all. Stuff from people I follow is maybe one out of every five or six items. And it's all out of order, so I'd see something that someone posted a week ago, followed by, 20 items later, something that they posted a couple days ago. It's a shame; 2012 Instagram was such a beautiful platform.

So while yes, this article is now 8 years old, I don't think anything has changed for the better. The fundamental problems are still there, and have only gotten worse.

Mastodon and Bluesky are still such minor players (even though I enjoy these projects and am optimistic about their future) that I don’t see anywhere where this doesn’t pass for contemporary commentary.

Isn't Bluesky just a copy of Twitter from that era, anyway?

As someone who’s strongly considering just this, could you describe the changes you felt? And — if you again returned to social media for a prolonged period — whether and how quickly those positive changes reverted?

>thinking with people on the Internet is has dropped away down

What?

Also, congrats for being less tolerant. I like that.

Some other comments are along these lines but I’ll offer an anecdote.

In college I was wearing a Halo biking shirt in the computer lab. A female friend remarked, “no one is going to date you if you wear that shirt.” Another friend nearby heard and quipped back, “or only the right girls will date him wearing that shirt.”

You should view your preferences more as a filter. While you should be open to new experiences which may change those presences, if something makes you truly unhappy, you are better finding a partner who won’t force that in your life.

Would that be an improvement, though? Do you really want a relationship with someone who cares if you have an active Instagram account? Feels like a great filter (heh) to weed out the chaff.

(If you're just casually dating around / looking for hookups, then sure, do what you think you need to do.)

It reminds me when I was young thinking I couldn't get a date because I didn't have six pack abs.

Then when I got in really good shape I thought it was because I didn't make enough money.

When I started making money I thought it was because I wasn't tall enough.

There is no way having social media or not is mattering that much. It is just in your head.

If they care, they aren’t worth it - why date a sheep?

Where is this magic side of the Fediverse? What I saw: Rust lunatics, hardline Communists or straight up Nazis, the most extreme alphabet people or the most extreme red-pillers. And many of them have the overlapping topics of questionable *orn or even more questionable anime content. Every time I get a random post from a an a Fediverse instance and I dare check it's main feed to see what it's like, it's always (always!) a dumpster fire.

I don't like Twitter much but if I had to pick one or the other it would be a no-brainer.