I deleted my social media accounts

>if you mattered, you would've gotten a direct message or call from them.

That ignores the asymmetry of a lot of life events. For example, if a parent died, I'm not going to call everyone in my life to tell them, I would have more important stuff on my mind. I might post it on social media and then the onus is on other people to reach out to me. And if someone doesn't reach out, it will hurt the relationship a little even if I'm not conscience of it because when I think of people who were there for me during a tough time, the friend who never knew my parent died wouldn't come to mind.

> This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post

The landscape of human relationships is deep and broad an varied, and if making bold assumptions about what other people should value is your starting point, you're liable to miss a lot of potential connections.

Yes, agreed. For me, quitting social media went hand in hand with a recognition that I maintained superficial contact with a large number of old friends. My relationship with these people was already “illusory”, or at least unsatisfying. Now my relationships are the product of active work, which I find more valuable, even if it means maintaining contact with a smaller group of close contacts (outside my day to day relationships). It doesn’t mean my relationship with old friends and family has died… we just have a lot more to catch-up about when we talk to each other!

Agreed. I also went through it and have found no difficulty with throwing away Facebook, Twitter, etc and sticking to only direct or group messaging.

Some people HAVE gone through the "but I said in X group chat" like above, but it was all unimportant life events that they were happy to fill me in on there instead. All major things people told me directly. Just because I quit social media didn't mean I wasn't aware of the death of my dog from a world away within 2 minutes of it happening.

But it’s also nice to know what’s going on in people’s lives without needing a deep connection...

> a call from them

um... will someone else tell him/her, or should I?

Good thing we have you, hypeatai, telling us who (and who not) we're "supposed" to stay in touch with.

Problem is facebook decides what you want to see unless you go to the feed which they make hard. Even then the vast majoritiy of what you see is garbage they share instead of life updates that you want.

I wish there was a better way but life updates still a posted there only. Facebook is the only one that has a concept of this is a for my friends only.

  > Of course, the first thing men will say after that meeting is simply "I've been fine, can't complain. How about you?".

> But overall I just kind of accept that sometimes I'll meet up with someone after a few years and realize "oh yeah, they're married now, took a trip to Japan for 6 months, and is getting some local attention from their band they made a few years ago"

This was a big thing I realized, too. For some people in my life I do genuinely want to know about those sorts of things as they are happening, and for those people I'm in frequent contact with them through text, group chat, real-life meetings, etc. But for everyone else, it is completely fine if I hear about those big life updates months or years after they happen, on the less-frequent occasions when we get together and catch up. Some relationships are different, and that's fine.

Plus it's a lot more personal and meaningful when you can discuss the changes directly rather than on an impersonal "public" forum.

No, I disagree.

This is about lifestyle ergonomics and your community. Like it or not, social media has significantly reshaped the world. Issues aside, it has brought people together and made communication significantly easier than in the past. There is a reason 1/3 of the world is on Facebook.

So, my point is that if you're choosing to be difficult, that is fine but you need to accept the burden falls on you. This is similar to adopting a vegan diet - your body your choice, but don't be intentionally difficult at dinner parties.

Personal example here: I've cut down social media significantly, in my case all notifications are off even if the apps are installed. So you're not bombarded and can engage on a cadence that makes sense to you. That said, I need to dedicate time to checking up on extended family, friends etc - as otherwise you do miss announcements and major events.

I was applying for a job once and recruiter told me I need to have at least 100 Facebook friends to be hired. Played Mafia for a couple of days and got 400 "friends". Was hired and HR presented me at the company meeting as a social media star)

Amen! Same situation, same preferences, same values, same result. Only difference is I have about 70 phone nrs on my dumbphone, I don't own a smart phone, and my vices are this site, usenet and mastodon.

I don't know about other people but social media doesn't make me feel worse about my life. There's no fomo when my 2nd cousin in another state posts about having a baby. She's important to me, and I don't expect her to waste time emailing me directly when the rest of the extended family is all on social media.

I'm sure the new FB AI will generate synthetic life updates that will seem just as convincing.

We can move to Mastodon and attract some friends with good posts.

The OP is surely joking. Less than 10k karma since 2015 isn't a serious karma race ;)

This is our nature. People who aren't affected by "KPI" are the minority. That's why forums must be very careful with choosing a set of published indicators, because people will "play" these, often unreflectively. HN is well-established so its score system is likely balanced by other means. Or maybe they'd like to change it, but changes like that may literally boil the forum and turn it upside down.

The desire for upvotes is largely what makes HN and Reddit approach groupthink so quickly. Folks with an opinion that they know will be popular will hyperbolize their opinion knowing that it will appeal to the dominant opinion of the community and get upvotes. People who feel really strongly about an issue then go into a thread and upvote everything they like and downvote the things they don't. They are often also the people with the most time on their hands. That's why heavily moderated subs (like AskHistorians and AskScience) that rely on a more formal moderation structure with credentialed moderators result in much higher quality discourse.

When you know your opinion is shared by the majority of the site, you'll be less careful about what you write and less charitable to folks with different viewpoints. You're more likely to sneer at the "opposition" and performatively signal about your superiority. That's how upvote social sites, like Reddit, end up getting so many highly upvoted "hivemind-like" uncharitable takes. Likewise, if you know your opinion is not shared by the community. You will hedge your writing, emphasize how it's simply your opinion, and water it down with caveats and complications that while true are a lot less emotionally evocative as the comments written by the majority. Eventually folks with minority opinions may just churn as the stepping around eggshells becomes exhausting. This creates further pressure to conform to the majority.

Some folks with majority opinions may not feel that strongly about their opinion but will post strongly anyway, knowing that they'll get upvotes. I've done this when I was younger as the dopamine boost makes you feel like a community hero, like you're "fighting the good fight." I've actually said some incorrect things due to this in the past but have nonetheless been highly upvoted.

HN has some safeguards here, like not being able to downvote someone who replied to you, hiding downvotes behind a karma threshold, and judicious moderation separate from upvotes/downvotes. But it's hard to change the fundamental nature of upvote based sites and the clique dynamics that form as a result.

My Twitter account has 140K+ followers and impersonators keep making copies that they use for cryptocurrency scams. So that's why I'm personally a little sensitive to deleting it, even if I've mostly committed to leaving that hellhole.

I’m pretty sure GP is saying if you already had an account and you delete it, it’s trivially easy for someone to register with your old handle and impersonate you

Of course people can always impersonate you but the goal here is to prevent them from impersonating you with a social handle people knew you had.

I registered a domain with my name, many moons ago.

Sometime later, a lawyer in Australia registered the .au version, but it was <MY NAME>.com.au, not <MY NAME>.au. <MY NAME>.com (no .au) was (and still is) my domain, and I get email, there.

I started getting really confidential stuff sent to my email, from the Australian courts. Stuff that could easily get people fired and sued.

I reported it for ages to both the courts and the lawyers. Eventually (after about 2 years), it stopped. I haven't gotten one of those for a long time.

No worries, they more than paid for that storage with the data they sold off. At least before GDPR rulings shut that down.

Someone recently created a "duplicate" account for the dad of one of my friends. Same profile picture, username very similar. But one of his friends who received a friend request from the new account was already friends with the old account and wrote a message asking what that was about, which is how my friend discovered it. So at least in that one instance, having the account was helpful.

Not as reliable as doing a small amount of gardening of yours.

surely annoying, probably illegal

I'm > 60 and if you can find me somewhere to sit and watch while I catch my breath you can beat the young whippersnapper about the upper body with my zimmer frame.

( TBH I still split wood by hand and walk long trails, etc. My father (born 1935) is showing signs of age now )

Almost 30... so 28. I have to say at 40 I'm feeling "different". Like "can I wear sling bags?"

Interesting. Do SM companies have an API that allows croissant to do its work? Or do they use unofficial means?

Can we also get the other direction, i.e. scrape posts from SM platforms and implement our own (non-toxic) feed algorithms?

>It is quaint but if my friends and family each had their own blog that they wanted me to look at, I wouldn't.

Great! What's the problem?

Genuinely curious, because I see this tossed around everywhere as I quit social media, too. Why is there this massive pressure that everything everyone does has to be seen and I have to see it all? Nobody needs to see every blog that everyone they know (does every person on your friends list actually qualify as a "friend", or are they acquaintances?) puts out.

I genuinely don't care about this friend's political opinion or that friend's gardening adventures. I also genuinely hope they enjoy their pursuits and that they keep after what makes them happy. IF I get curious about Jan's gardening exploits, the blog is there if I want to read it for some tips, but I certainly don't owe it routine visits.

That’s what RSS is for.

> they act as aggregators

RSS, my friend

there are a several key aspects of HN that are very different than social media networks, and that's why it's in a different category

It's too boring to be social media (in a good way)

Rather like minded nerds than fear mongering, fake, AI generated, influencer, 'look at how amazing my life is', 'buy this', new age spirituality 'let go of what doesn't serve you' narcissistic brainwashing the algo machines are pushing.

I like technology. I like making things I love and others can enjoy. I like when others make something they think is cool and love and enjoy and I can enjoy them too.

That's why this place is dope. I can't press 'Share' so that's not social media to me.

Plus I can have my name be FJsdkfhKFsdffflKJSHFl and nobody cares. I can just be me.

Kindness > *

But how will other people know about this after a while ? If only there was some tech platform where you get to pretend you're better than other people to people that don't care about you. This is the problem we set out to solve with Bluesky.

There's a degree to how much you continue to engage with people once they've made that decision to leave though. Once someone's on the other side of the world, you're not keeping the friendship up by viewing their Instagram/Facebook posts, it's a totally one sided consumption unless you continue to speak to one another at least semi-regularly.

He said meet OR talk.

I think if you don't talk to someone in a few years it makes them less of a friend.