No Socials November
146 comments
·November 3, 2025overvale
HeinzStuckeIt
> It creates a simulacrum of the world which does not correspond to the tangible reality I see around me.
5–10 years ago I would have agreed: “The real world is so different from the terminally-online space.” But the terminally-online space has seeped into real life all over the world. For example, I have traveled the developing world a lot in the last two years, and it’s unbelievable how many young men want to talk to me about Andrew Tate and related things when they see I’m a man from the West. Even in countries with shaky English skills, certain online memes are big.
Or take when I bikepacked a remote route down Mexico that is popular with Americans: in spite of this route being largely a two-month break from being always online, the conversations when those American cyclists met up were often indistinguishable from the social or political outrage that engagement-maximizing platforms stoke. Even if you disconnect, you can’t repair the damage.
everdrive
This is a really important comment, and I think people don't understand just how much the "call is coming from inside the house." We have really, really polluted our minds with all this trash outrage content. TV might have been stupid, but watching too much Cheers or Simpsons just never did this kind of damage.
c0balt
A minor point might also be that TV was far less addictive (non-linear, personalized,...) and consumption was significantly harder (carrying a TV is difficult, even in watch format)
brailsafe
I think the experience of jumping between destinations where people might be specifically interested in a sort of retail American culture is probably quite poluted unfortunately. I'm Canadian, but I don't feel the same sense of "lost cause" when I just talk to people I know in my community or at the gym where conversation goes marginally deeper than the most superficially relatable bits of sensational media.
I talk to my friends in their 30s about their relationships or lack of, the hobbies we enjoy, adventures we could go on, difficulties or success at work, family life, economic stuff, random ideas. Online stuff comes up almost only ironically at this point. Granted, I do specifically narrow the people I maintain ties with to only those I can engage with at that level and/or who are otherwise fun to be around. If even a noticeable minority of conversation was chronically online garbage or fake culture war crap, they just get muted/blocked like the rest of them and a friendship doesn't flourish, usually because in real life we can work through our real disagreements if they come up at all, but if it's derived from a presumption we should both be more mad or more aware of nonsense we don't need to think about, it's far more difficult.
cal_dent
I think this is true but the original point still stands. Online world now definitely plays a bigger role but I'd still suspect that for the majority online issues/drama are still a small % of what their real world looks like. Despite the media (social or news) bombarding the space with their 'model' of the world.
It has always felt to me like an amped up version of what the news is. As someone who has largely spent most of life as an immigrant, from a family of mostly immigrants all across the world, we always find it amusing how you get messages from people about the big x thing going on in whatever country you are, as per what is going on in the news/social media, and the person you're messaging is literally unaware that that is a big deal or is affected by it even indirectly enough for it to register. Anectodally, that happens far more frequently now than it did 5-10 years ago
mlsu
Back in the day, when you went onto the internet, you exited the Real World and went into the Internet World. I remember when like, there was one internet-connected device in the household, it was a computer with a keyboard that you sat down on. And it worked like you would "log on" to AOL instant messenger, and then when you "logged out" you'd have an "away message" that would indicate that you were offline, living your life, IRL. How quaint, right? You'd never have an "away message" nowadays -- you're never "away"!
These millenial terms of art have almost entirely disappeared. When's the last time you heard IRL?
Now, you (the general 'you', I mean, who spend 5-7 hours a day on social media) are always online. So when you log off, you're entering the Offline World, where you have to do some stupid BS that is totally boring and unstimulating. You wait to log on to figure out what happened in the Internet World, which actually has inserted itself and taken place of the Real World. Before, the important stuff, socially, culturally, politically, happened offline. Now, it's inverted; the important stuff socially, culturally, and politically, is happening online.
Unfortunately, this happened without any of us consenting or really knowing that it was happening. And like, parent comment put it perfectly: it's a simulacra of reality, with deeply bizarre/non-human scale rules, some explicitly built (algorithms, content policies, video filters etc.) and some totally implicit (viral behavior, memes, misinformation, AI).
The AI thing is also fucking crazy and it's happening in the Internet World. Y'all ain't seen nothing yet. It will get so much weirder. imho, it's horrific. The internet is like an alien facehugger for your mind, it will just totally fuck you up; the more you use it, the more mentally fucked up you will get. Most people have the alien facehugger totally strapped to their face and they don't even know it.
dontwannahearit
Totally with you on the facehugger thing.
The way I think of it is in the early 2000's you used the internet, but now you have to take care that the internet is not using you.
mlsu
BTW. how do you explain this without invoking 'back in the day'? I sound like a retiree!
vacuity
> These millenial terms of art have almost entirely disappeared. When's the last time you heard IRL?
Pretty recently. I use IRL plenty! Terms like LOL are also fairly alive.
Anyways, your comment is quite insightful.
overvale
A great point! I've experienced the same.
We reshape reality to match the mental models we create. To the extent this has always been the case I have to accept it, but it feels like we're in a logarithmic curve of that pattern becoming faster and more powerful.
0_____0
Baja Divide?
One of the things that I really enjoyed about bikepacking (GDMBR, various others) was that when you really get out in BFE, you meet people that live very different lives than you. They were also almost always quite nice, which was a pleasant surprise to this coastal city dweller.
HeinzStuckeIt
Yup. Interacting with the Mexican rancheros was really nice. But so many of the American cyclists I shared the BD with were almost caricatures of highly-online, outraged people. Why do I need to hear from people I just met talk about “TERFs”, or other Tumblr- and Twitter-disseminated memes, or be asked to take sides in political races I had never even heard of (because I’m not even from their country and state and don’t follow their local politics)? It was something that we foreign cyclists noted and wanted to get away from.
ryandv
> But the terminally-online space has seeped into real life all over the world.
That's Baudrillard's point, who popularized one sense of the term "simulacrum." Not quite real, but not quite fiction either - something that straddles the boundary between the two as "hyperreality."
F3nd0
My recent experience with social media has been very different. These days I'm mostly active on the Fediverse, and in contrast to the News, my timeline doesn’t feel like a model of the world at all. All I see are little snippets. Many individuals are sharing their feelings, creations, thoughts, or seeking advice. The posts don’t feel like a collage meant to capture the state of society as a whole, but rather as windows into different people’s lives.
I don’t think that’s how everyone feels on the Fediverse; browsing the federated timeline or viewing the public posts on some large instance doesn’t feel much different from the other big sites. But your own experience on your personal timeline is truly your own, and you decide what to make of it. I keep seeing personal snippets because I choose to follow people who post a lot of personal snippets that I’m interested in seeing. I get a relatively low amount of global politics and polarising topics because I seldom follow people who talk about those a lot. I quite literally get what I ask for—no less and no more.
At the end of the day, I think the key is understanding your network and adjusting your expectations. Following someone means you’ll be seeing their posts. So if you don’t want someone’s posts on your timeline, for whatever reason, just don’t follow them. Problem solved, easy as. (Then again, I imagine getting to see only the content you want to see might be more difficult on the more corporate networks, so if that’s the case, you might need a better social network.)
… and perhaps I should add that seeing only what you want to see won’t help you avoiding a simplified view of the world if such a view ultimately is what you want to see. Being in charge of your social experience is only useful if you're in charge of yourself. If you're not, you might need to change that before any social network, no matter how user-friendly, will be able to benefit you.
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bloudermilk
My question for you all is: do you consider HN to be social media?
I got off traditional social media (twitter, fb, insta, etc) years ago and feel all the better for it. But I still visit HN and YouTube multiple times daily. For the most part I find those to be information-dense and part of my continual personal development practice. That said, YT in particular has a tendency to draw me into endless shorts holes.
CactusBlue
Yes, and it is addicting as any of the others. I quit Twitter and Bluesky a while ago, locked myself out of my Reddit account, but HN is one of the hardest that I found to rid of.
celticninja
The reason I stay on HN is the signal to noise ratio is considerably higher here than on any other site.
It isn't even close. Digg.com used to have it and so did reddit, but it degraded so much that they became unuseable.
chasing0entropy
More interesting/well thought out bots on hn
whstl
To me there were two ways of using social media: #1 interacting with people I know about things in my life and #2 interacting with third-party content and then people I don't really know.
To me Facebook, Instagram and Twitter went completely downhill when it became about #2 for me and my social circle. Twitter was the first, followed by Facebook and then Instagram. I just deleted them in that order. To me they became divisive, angry, political, it made following certain friends impossible, it made people addicted to it, it generated influencers, it made certain friends behave strangely IRL (communicating via meme language only).
HN is definitely #2, but way less political due to moderation.
CactusBlue
I like the fact that there's less politics - I know that many people might call it censorship or something, but I feel like it does do somewhat to reduce doomscrolling, as it is one of the topics that people are deeply invested about. Still, there's that mix of "A Modest Proposal" style faux-intellectualism (low-effort social conservatism, kneejerk reactions to technology, toxic startup grindset positivity), that I still tend to get sniped by.
For interacting with the people I know, I try to collect Signal/Discord contacts for those who I find valuable enough to talk at a future point, with the end goal of moving all contacts I know to Mikoto Platforms (a messaging platform that I am building).
Chilko
That split can also be recognised by the change in naming- social networks vs social media.
dlcarrier
It's the only social media I use. I used to use Reddit too, until they blocked usability/accessibility tools.
YouTube has social media features, but they languish in comparison to its use as a video broadcasting platform. I suppose for people who regularly comment and chat on streams, YouTube is a social media platform, but for the vast majority of its user base, it's more like Netflix than Twitter.
BolexNOLA
> It's the only social media I use. I used to use Reddit too, until they blocked usability/accessibility tools.
Same. Did lemmy for a while but fell off it. Was just doing the reddit thing again. I’m guilty of that here from time to time but I feel a little more accountable on HN so I generally find I can keep my cool more often than not.
knuppar
It's not engagement-optimized social media (good old sepia orange, sorted by upvotes only) but it is social media, albeit in a form closer to private communities. Engagement-optimized social media is definitely the problem for me, hours and hours can fly by. HN + no recs/history yt has been the trusty setup for a while.
allenu
I don't think it's quite social media as most people think of it. I treat it more like a message forum.
To me, social media is a broadcast type of media where people are posting for their specific followers and people are following individuals, so you end up with people posting specifically to get more followers (maybe not initially, but it's what fuels further posting).
Hacker News is social, but I don't go here to follow individuals. I usually don't even look at names of who's commenting.
imoverclocked
> do you consider HN to be social media?
Yes, because I read/interact with comments. It's possible to just peruse headlines in which case it's less social.
> YT in particular has a tendency to draw me into endless shorts holes
Yeah, especially since there are no horrendous ads. YT on my AppleTV has become unwatchable with minutes of ads for minutes of content.
neilellis
YT: Yep the only pay-for-no-adds that I gave in to.
svachalek
I've taken the position that if something is too expensive without ads, it's too expensive for me. My life is blissfully, nearly entirely, ad free. The only downside is I'm an alien on my own planet, blind to the continuous swamp of advertising everyone around me lives in.
everdrive
>But I still visit HN and YouTube multiple times daily.
Youtube is definitely the greater evil here. Anything with an algorithmic feed and an engagement-based UI will be harmful to you. HN could be harmful in a much more mundane way, the way that some kids could get addicted to Pac-Mac. There's nothing really addicting built in, but some people are susceptible. When it comes to algorithmic feeds, everyone is susceptible.
PaulDavisThe1st
It's not the algorithmic feed, it's the karmic feedback hit ...
softwaredoug
Social media can mean so many things these days, I can't tell anymore.
Each of these things need to be studied separately, IMO. As different social media sites have/less of each of these:
* Algorithmic feed - encouraging rabbit holes, reinforcing clicbait and ragebait
* Comment sections - encouraging pile-ons, and vitriolic debate
* Short form content - TikTok videos, etc, quick, snackable content and destroying people's attention span . Then there's the overall ad-based incentive to put all these together to keep you engaged. TBH the fact hacker news has a different model, makes me feel better about it, rather than caring if its social media or not.
HeinzStuckeIt
> Comment sections - encouraging pile-ons, and vitriolic debate
The early millennium blogosphere had comments sections, and lots of vitriolic debate. They inspired XKCD 635, after all. I think the problem today is not the opportunity to comment and debate, but rather the fact that the phone keyboard is the input device for the majority of internet users. Population-wide, phone keyboards discourage longform text and nuance, even if some individuals will claim they can comfortably type just as much as on a physical keyboard.
whstl
It's crazy how much vitriol there is in local newspaper websites, and this is something that's been going on since the 2000s indeed. It wasn't just flamewars, it was law breaking stuff.
A bunch of the local ones that were super vitriolic just started removing them 5-10 years ago. Godspeed.
stronglikedan
Nope, but only because I use it anonymously, same as reddit. To me, context is the key to every designation, so it's not whether a site is or isn't social media. Some platforms support social media usage, but it's the way the individual user uses it that makes it social media to them. I personally do not have a social media presence, and can't see ever wanting one.
EDIT: At best, HN is a link aggregator in the form of a discussion forum.
Kiro
I browse TikTok and Instagram anonymously. Does that mean I'm not using social media?
stronglikedan
It means you're not using those sites socially, so you're not using social media, you're just browsing media.
throawayonthe
idk, i've never had a non-pseudonymous social media account, but that didn't stop the algorithmic feed pull
yepguy
I would encourage people to consider permanent solutions to use social media more intentionally instead of taking a month off here and there. Two things that the apps really want you to do, but that you should resist as much as possible, are doomscrolling through meaningless content and compulsively checking apps or websites in case you miss out on interesting updates.
For myself, I've decided to direct anything and everything possible to my email (with plenty of filters to keep my main inbox tidy). For apps that don't offer email notifications, I use MacroDroid to forward Android push notifications to email. There are also plenty of ways to forward RSS to email.
I batch process my email 1-3x/day, and anything I don't want to see during this time is not worth seeing at all. It gets ignored, filtered out, or unsubscribed from.
coffeefirst
Yeah. I will say, the best place to start is just deactivate one for 30 days and see whether you miss it.
It turns out I didn't actually like any of these apps. If I did, they wouldn't need to play all these dumb games to keep me engaged.
MisterTea
I have been off social media completely since 2016. Only have a Facebook left for family and the occasional marketplace browse. When I do check it I only log in via browser and spend maybe 5-10 minutes on the site. I posted a few times that people should contact me via email if they want to chat though so far no one has taken up my offer.
yepguy
If it works for you, great! I've tried that before and it didn't work for me. I like the stuff I find on Hacker News, and I need Instagram to keep up with my friends, so this was the solution I came up with mostly to keep myself from compulsively checking both of those in an unhealthy way.
MisterTea
Keeping up with friends in my circle means a group chat. We moved around a few platforms but settled on google chat as that was most common among everyone. HN isn't very social to me, just a water cooler.
brailsafe
> I need Instagram to keep up with my friends
Wdym? I think this idea should be included in your top-level comment about things Instagram wants you to do. I can believe it's likely that other people have very different relationships with people that are dependent on a particular platform, but I do my best not to accept that and make it clear that I probably won't check anything other than a DM whenever I feel like it, which consequently categorizes Insta as an unimportant means of connection.
Put another way, my relationships are defined by the communication and connection we have in real life or DMs regardless of the platform. Seeing posts does not count as friendship to me, and if I don't hear from someone or think about them because I disabled my insta, then it wasn't meant to be.
A sibling replyer said they use group chats, which is fine for some, but I find has personally just become another passive comms dump that I actively refuse to participate in; there's too much noise.
All that said, a real friendship formed in person after a real time investment can survive with very little or zero fake interaction from social media. It's ok that I see my bros from my home town maybe once a year. If I fear not receiving any direct communication from anyone should I decide to dip out of social media, then it's possible I have no friends and I should sit with that feeling until I can take action on that. People get too complacent imo thinking their posts count as friendship.
grim_io
My November schedules are getting crowded. No shaving, no faps, no socials, ...
jtmarl1n
These things should free up your schedule :)
Vinnl
At least you can still vember, right? What's that? Oh...
nekusar
I'd argue that "No Socials November" should be "No corporate Socials November".
Places like the Fediverse (Mastodon, Peertube, Lemmy, pixelfed, etc) are that non-corporate non-gamified breath of fresh air.
Sure, there's less people on those networks, but that too is a great benefit - less bots and less "temperature". And 10 years ago, in 2015, we already saw videos analyzing social media hatred with CGP Grey's "This video will make you angry" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
But why anger? Because anger and screaming at people is a guaranteed way to make "engagement", which seems to be the predominant way to prove to advertisers of "people per month". But is it good? Absolutely not. Its poison, slowly but surely. But how do we avoid the poison? The root cause here is money from advertising, which is from engagement.
But you cut out the profit motive, you also cut out advertisers, and you also cut out arbitrary and forced anger-gagement. And that, is the Fediverse.
The opposite is your Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit. And they're full of bots, quazi and directly hateful content posted for "engagement", and the same set of hate memes populated froom 1 site to all the rest by bots. No wonder people hate this type of social media. It's wholly toxic and poisonous.
righthand
I disagree. While smaller networks are a good thing for the social media landscape, ultimately people should go seek other activities where socializing is a secondary benefit. Rather than spending time on a social network. If we take a month to refocus on non-social-first activity we will be healthier 1000000x as communities.
Lemmy is great btw. I started putting “lemmy” instead of “reddit” in my searches and it often works.
bachittle
I use the following extensions to help with managing my social media intake while on my work computer:
Focused Youtube: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/nfghbmabdoakhobmimn... Removes all recommendations and just keeps a search bar. No shorts rabbit holes or algorithm-based media consumption
StayFocusd: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfmg... I like using the nuclear option. Blocks a bunch of sites I have that are in a list, such that I cannot open them at all.
dollylambda
I've managed to kick all social media except Github. That for me is the most difficult if you want to collaborate on software projects.
No, I don't consider hacker-news to be social media, rather a news aggregator with a message board. Although, I would frequent here less probably if I was on other social media.
tokai
>set my YouTube to stop suggesting to me via algorithm
It keeps suggesting based on usage though.
jobigoud
You may clear the watch history once in a while to reset.
plastic3169
Also history can be turned off. Added benefit that after that it only shows few shorts before blocking them.
shoelessone
I came here to ask if there is some way of fixing this. I'm guessing not.
Youtube lately seems particularly bad in terms of showing lots of "shorts" all over when I have zero interest in watching them, but also suggested videos seem somehow aggressively chosen. I'm not sure how to describe that, but that's what it feels like to me.
driverdan
Stop looking at the homepage and go to your subscriptions instead.
SoftTalker
You can subscribe to channels you like, and then just look at your "Subscriptions" tab to see new content from them. They do stick a Shorts feed in there however which is annoying.
exo762
There is a plugin called Unhook. It allows to remove shorts, recommendation feed, or even set subscriptions as your default page.
sehugg
Does RSS count? I've appreciated having NetNewsWire and its iCloud sync. Having no urge/obligation to comment or retoot is a different experience.
ChrisMarshallNY
I just stopped using Facebook, a number of months ago. It just wasn't giving me anything, and half the posts I made, were flagged as spam (of course, with zero appeal ability; when you appeal, and every time, it's denied, then that's no recourse). I tended to do "Lookit this!" types of posts, where I either referenced a project that I'd released, or some Web site that I thought was worth sharing.
I've never really used Twitter, and I don't browse YouTube, or bother looking at comments.
I had stopped reading my feed, a couple of years ago. It was just old white people, screaming at each other.
> set my YouTube to stop suggesting to me via algorithm
This suggests a less-than-total commitment to backing out. I would consider "no social" to mean not even visiting the site, or running the app.
In my case, this is about the only place I engage in anything like social media. I would have to stop reading HN to be "no social," and I'm not interested in doing that.
jvalencia
My first thought was why would someone halt their socials? Too much holiday time? Then I realized this was social media :-P. Socials to me are precisely NOT social media. Is this a common language usage now?
klardotsh
Yes. “Socials” has been functionally interchangeable, especially in written form, for probably 2+ years now, in my experience.
numbers
this might be a generational thing or a geographic thing, my nieces and nephews use the word "socials" while I always use "social media".
nxor
Not where I live if you're older than middle school age
topaz0
Yes
I'm genuinely interested in the world around me, and I like being entertained as much as the next person, but the problem with social media for me is that it creates a simulacrum of the world which does not correspond to the tangible reality I see around me.
I would go further and say that social media is just another kind of "news". The News, essentially, takes an incomprehensibly complex world and distills/simplifies it into something you can understand. In the same way that one creates a mental model for how a complex system works in order to better understand it. That's a useful thing!
But the distillation/simplification process introduces biases and distortions in its model of the world, which can lead to the model being extremely inaccurate. And with social media that inaccuracy extends to representations of your friends, family, and your self.
To the extent that The News, and Social Media, creates a reasonably accurate model of the world around you they're useful, but I take it all with a heavy dose of skepticism.