I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can stay connected with my school friends, college friends, and distant family without having to see irrelevant posts, like some stupid remark from a politician halfway around the world or influencers doing something outrageous just for attention.
This has moved heavily into group chats and I’m not sure it’s coming back.
Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances.
Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and local businesses share career and business updates and advertise their wares.
Any way you cut it, "feeds" are more addictive. Your family and friends only post a couple times a day, but you have all day at work to look for some quick stimulation.
I watch my girlfriend devolve into this stuff. Waking up and scrolling endless feeds from reddit and insta; it's her entertainment. It's not so much worse than me waking up and scrolling Google News...maybe it's better, in that she gets less depressed about it. But it's fake. It's all fake.
In real life, it took me a whole year to figure out that the people at one particular local pub actually hate me and talk shit about me whenever I'm not around. I only figured out why they were so hostile because the people at my other pub told me. (It's that I'm Jewish, with Israeli family. Ironically, the nice people at the other pub who told me are Lebanese. We get along a lot better than I do with my old antifa "friends") This was a hard-to-get real world experience in how fucked up people can be for no reason. It's not something you can understand properly, ever, on any kind of social media. The media format just gets in the way of understanding other people as people; of understanding truth and factual reality; of differentiating between opinion and fact.
"Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and local businesses share career and business updates and advertise their wares."
This is spot on. Facebook proper has supplanted private email chains for a lot of older people. This is ironic because they are moving in the opposite direction as everyone else. Everyone else is moving into private communities, older people are leaving the safety of email chains and, often unknowingly, posting publicly. Facebook (probably intentionally) upholds the illusion that they are posting for their friends. I've seen Facebook actually provide a compelling service to my older dad who keeps in touch with a lot of his old friends on there. It's a much more active community of seniors than you'd guess.
Of course, they are subject to all the ills of Facebook at the same time. Overall I'd rate it as a net loss for society because of that.
That's great if you are the kind of person wo is added into fun social group chats. But my group chats are mostly functional, like for hobbies, or parents groups for the kids' classes, and so on. There is one family group which sees annoying memes every now and then, and one group with friends from university which is also rarely used.
Old school social networks used to be this noncommital, low-threshold way to connect with others around you. It was really great if you were a socially awkward teen or twenty-something. It's no big deal to friend somebody on facebook (or MySpace, or your universities gamified campus management system or whatever) and see what they are doing, or strike up a conversation. I really miss that kind of network.
The best social networks i have are imessage group chats. One with my old college friends, one with my immediate family, and another with extended family. My kids have their own group chats with their classmates. They're much better than the social platforms.
The problem with Insta as a “hip LinkedIn” is I can’t even browse it properly without an account. Say I find an interesting business elsewhere and Ggogle them; their primary web presence is Insta; I find their page, but cannot browse their photos/posts.
So, it’s a pretty shit tool for a business to share what it’s about.
> A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances.
But sometimes I do, because saying something to one person feels like I'm demanding a response from them, but saying it to a broad circle of friends allows those interested to reply, and others to leave it. Back when I used Facebook, I was more likely to gripe (or brag) on the Facebook wall than in a personal text conversation with a friend.
(Friends in person are the best option, of course.)
While I never have used "social media" I recently changed my online viewing(news/reading) habit, to after work only, limiting myself to one or two forum comments before first coffee. And as a self employed person this has changed my whole day and work flow..,,.snappier.
Eh, I'd disagree on the Instagram front. If you look at the reels section, where most spend their time, it's just a more deplorable Tiktok. 80% of the content on there is soft core porn advertising one OnlyFans girl or another. The other 20% seems to be brain rot memes. I reinstalled it recently after 8 years of not having it, and immediately deleted it.
WhatsApp has really taken on this role for me, now that mention it.
I have a channel for my neighborhood, another for the parents at my children's school, another for my extended family, another for work colleagues and another for a few friends.
There are also the loners whos complete social and emotional life is the feed who send that feed onwards into group chats as input, isolating them further.
>solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life.
This is what Facebook was when we all signed up almost two decades ago. No one ever wanted a feed of people they didn't know. Free social media is inherently corrupt as they chase profits abusing the user base.
I think this is what your conscious mind thinks but your actual desires don’t.
Facebook was refocusing on friend and family content before TikTok came along. But they had to adjust to the TikTok trend otherwise they would have lost market share or potentially lost the entire market.
You might think you want friend and family content, but actually you don’t. Not as much as you want engaging content.
I read Facebook with the special URL[1] that gives a traditional reverse chronological feed (plus ads, of course), but it's all my friends and family.
Unfortunately, some of my family post insane political views, usually about now in the early AM. Being told that a King of the USA and the elimination of due process are good things doesn't help my mental health.
While there will always be unhinged relatives, maybe the problem would be less pronounced without the polarization that comes with the networks pushing polarizing posts into their faces in their never ending quest for more "engagement" by users.
I think the EU should flex their regulatory muscle and forbid algorithmic feeds on by default unless the networks break european society as the US is broken.
I don’t know how much of a difference it would make, as then we just become the algorithm.
I quit Facebook over a decade ago, because others used it to go “look at my shiny car/wife/house”, and I would use it to lose friends and alienate people.
These online environments do not foster any kind of human connection.
That wouldn't work. 95% of people ordinarily do usually stick with defaults, but not when chasing their (dopamine) addiction.
Imagine there's a toggle you can flip in the Settings of Instagram that was labeled "free oxy", and every morning and evening Meta would FedEx an oxy pill into your mailbox. Everyone would tell eachother about it, and few would be able to resist the temptation.
I'm not sure this model works as it just forbids lists of any kind. Algorithmic is an extremely poor choice of words as any method of selecting posts/messages for a list is an algorithm.
They should just say that algorithm is editorialised and needs to be subject to the same regulations as newspapers (fined for fake news, editor can lose his journalist status).
The result of a purely chronological feed is that you have to scroll through 10 posts from the same person and never see anything from people that post good content rarely.
Plenty of people like and enjoy "algorithmic feeds". I can enjoy occasionally scrolling through a feed. Banning it is like banning alcohol because there are alcoholics in society.
I'm sure that would work out fine. Just like the GDPR regulation made the web so much better & more private, and the promise of the AI act is boosting innovation in Europe...
> “…instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life…”
I’ve stopped using FB regularly, because I don’t like their feed algorithm. I don’t like the ads or the content, and I had curated it by joining local groups and BOFS. The only thing that brings me back now is the _possibility_ of a friends update.
That said, the _frequency_ of updates from friends and family will be vastly different for different people. The feed (if it speaks to you) works to regularize or smooth the frequency. I see FB’s problem and I don’t envy them. The vitality of the platform becomes precarious, and can be supplanted by some other platform with better engagement (ie TickTock).
I’m not a designer or researcher of Social Media, but I’m an emigre of sorts and not many people have that experience. The only platform all of my friends and family use are group private messages using our phones, and the most engaging chats we have are few and far between.
I'm inclined to agree. I remember when Facebook (and before that, MySpace) was new and was still mostly a reverse-chronological feed of your friend's updates. It caused zero stress or anxiety at all - and it was kind of nice checking in to see what was going on. Your feed was like an internet forum for your social circle.
Intellectually many want this. But the feed shortcuts our reptile brain and gains more engagement minutes / day. As you say, the algorithmic feed is superior for creators wanting reach, and more importantly, advertisers who want eyeballs on their ads. Due to network effects, it is likely impossible to get friends and family to join a boring and non-profit alternative.
Instead of pausing social media altogether, I recently took some time off from the endless scrolling feeds only. When returning it's so apparent how everything is bait for engagement.
The feed hijacks the human attention process on a visceral level. Either with visual stimulus that's extremely intriguing for evolved apes like us (cutting a cake that looks like a dog), or by activating an emotional response from a tribal species like us (stupid takes on politics, in- and out-group stuff).
The rest of most social media apps is fine and offers much of what you are asking for.
> Intellectually many want this. But the feed shortcuts our reptile brain and gains more engagement minutes / day.
I’m not sure if that’s actually a “shortcut” to the reptile brain and it’s just about “I have to scroll more to get stuff I’m interested in. At least for me it feels like that and it causes me to use these social media things far less.
For me it feels more like intermittent rewards vs full rewards at once.
Obviously for the ad-industry the intermittent rewards are more useful, that’s why we can’t have nice things
> it is likely impossible to get friends and family to join a boring and non-profit alternative.
Isn’t this just WhatsApp now though? The addition of Statuses, Following and now Communities almost confirms this. People are dropping Facebook and IG, but can’t give up WhatsApp (yet).
I've got a personal policy: No websites that have an infinite scroll. That means no new Reddit, mobile Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, or similar. This also means I can't use food delivery services, since those tend to be infinite as well.
If they're paginated that's fine, even if they're infinitely so. Infinite scrolling is just a very good touchstone as to the quality and addictiveness of a site, and I'll avoid anything that has it.
For this reason I get my news through RSS and like using Discord -- both have finite ends (even if there may be a lot of content in bursts.)
I’m reminded of how junk food was seen as a dominant and crushing force, and how today we have moved to people willingly embracing healthier lifestyles.
I rue the amount of damage caused, before people and society began resisting and arresting its deleterious effects.
But perhaps this is the same process being followed here. New shiny for the reptile brain, eventually the costs are made clear and people decide they would rather not become statistics and instead find joy in other formats and tools.
Then People make those formats or invent ways of engaging with our tools that includes self care and leads to more happiness. We grow older and we eventually get tired of all the online health fads and become crotchety older humans.
No, to my brain, reptile or not, these FB feed suggestions are a constant source of irritation.
I use FB only because I'm member of a couple of groups relevant to my hobby, and the stuff posted in those is worth following. Unfortunately there is currently no alternative for those, otherwise I would happily ditch FB.
I don't even care about posts from family and friends anymore because nowadays those are mostly about bragging about their fancy dinner/holiday/social life etc.
You're talking about something exactly like the ‘Moments’ of WeChat, China's largest social media. It doesn't have a feed, but only updates from friends and family. But still, people spend so much time on that - 900 million people spending an average of 1 hour and 42 minutes per person per day.
The single problem with social media is that they are not public, but are heavily thought of (and propagandized) as such.
Any marketplace that is privately owned, is not a free market place. And, the elephant in the room, these social media marketplaces are owned by parties with very particular interests. As long as don't recognise that, we will let ourselves be distracted by details that are always the result of this private control.
Something social must be public, or it isn't social, and it isn't what you and I really want.
There's a version of Facebook that only shows things from your friends, and not "suggested" or "reels" etc.: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr (it still shows ads but not the other random stuff)
And it doesn't scroll endlessly. It will display this at the bottom of the page:
And any page you follow, including anything that tries to convince you to click through to their website via clickbait, anxiety-inducing headlines, etc.. It also shows FB groups you're in, which are often full of their own unnecessary drama.
The “like” button killed genuine engagement, and made Facebook an exercise in lever-pressing. The problem is that in a lot of cases (not all), those stupid remarks and outrageous influencers are being “liked” and “reposted” by your network in order to gather reflected glory and dopamine hits.
A social network is no better than the sum of its parts, and to create something really worthwhile, you have to limit what people are allowed to post (original content only, for example).
Instagram used to be closer to this when they showed posts in chronological order. Of course, Facebook got to work and ended this by showing posts in algo-sorted order, added an explore page, and even started showing non-followed people's viral content on the main feed. So unfortunately the trend has been a slow frog-boiling march towards engagement and enshittification.
In the meantime, maybe I should just share more photos in the group chat instead...
I think the fact that "the algorithm" capitalizes on negative emotion has been known for a while. The problem is that Zuck (and Elon, etc.) is at best motivated by making money, at worst motivated by swaying public opinion, and certainly not motivating by improving the emotional state of the users of these services, or even giving them a good experience.
I think this goes beyond social media to all kinds of media.
I cannot agree more. It's amazing that WeChat, a Chinese app, has figured this out years ago; its Moments feature had no ads, no influencers, only posts by contacts. It even suppresses comments made by people you don't know, even if the subject of a comment is a post by people you do know.
Of course there are other Chinese apps that operate entirely based on feeds. What I found interesting is that on Rednote it tried to suppress your posts from what it infers to be your friends in real life.
I think it is a great approach. There are sometimes I just want to see updates from friends and family. There are other times when I only want to see something interesting to me without necessarily telling all my friends what I'm interested in. These are two entirely different categories of social media and it is a good thing to require users to switch apps.
I wrote my own client for Twitter, which was later adapted to also support Bluesky. The idea behind the project was to scrape porn easily, but it's also an amazing tool where it shows me the feed I personally want to see. This is pretty much the only way I interact with these services.
It's tough, because even within real friend circles there can be a lot of junk. I have a friend who constantly posts "What does your favorite color say about your personality?" type of stuff. I don't want to hide her posts because I don't want to miss anything actually important that happens in her life. But there's no clear line between that and the cruft that you can solve with a rule.
So either we train all our friends to use it sensibly -- and convince them to agree with us on what's sensible -- or we sort through cruft to find the value.
On the Instagram home page, on the top left there's an option to switch to only following feed which shows posts only from the people I follow. I found this somewhat useful but wish it was the default.
Social media started as a way to stay connected with people you actually know, but it's morphed into this performative attention economy where the loudest, most extreme content wins.
> ..and could go against what most people have become accustomed to.
I think that’s the tough reality—over time, people gradually become accustomed to consuming random content from random accounts or pages, to the point where the original idea of interacting with friends and family on social media starts to fade away. That said, messaging apps might still bridge that gap through groups.
The issue for social media companies is that its dead. No one posts like they did in 2010 anymore. Go ahead and follow only your friends actual posts on fb and it is going to be pretty dead. Likewise for instagram and other platforms. They don’t want you to be able to scan an entire chronological feed in 10 mins and be updated.
You mean, what it was to begin with? Right now WhatsApp is basically my family Facebook. Images, videos, chat. Separate groups of people so you can remain friends with two former friends who are now mortal enemies. Facebook is just another toxic, addictive social media.
There's a spectrum; when it comes to short videos on YT and IG merely ditching the slide-down-for-next video for a thumbnail grid gives some agency - and liberally using "don't recommend" (which I think most normies never notice is there) cleans it up further.
I've been using BeReal this way with a bunch of friends and family for the last couple of years. It definitely fills its purpose of seeing what my friends are up to without occupying too much of my headspace. Can't be happier about it
> and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life.
Friends and family more or less stopped posting a long time ago, when everyone became worried about what happens when others have their personal information/drunk party photos. Which is why "the feed" started seeking content from outside content creators so that the services could give you... something.
Facebook, at least, has maintained the "friends and family" feed like you describe, but who uses it? I expect asymptotically nobody.
> This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media... Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can stay connected with my school friends
This sort of longing for a cozy social media circles exists a lot in tech adjacent circles. However, unless you can align the needs of users with the revenue goals of the company, which in other words simply means that users pay for the pay for the product, this is not gonna happen. While you may be willing to do so, I'm sure many people would simply stop communicating with you because of the additional friction caused, especially when a free alternative exists.
Additionally, the "viral content" you speak of exists for two reasons, which I'm not sure it could be entirely solved even if you had users pay for the product.
Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped. This is where viral content, such as posts from politicians and celebrities, gain their initial spread.
I would also like to note that someone may want to follow a politician or celebrity because they think what they're doing is generally useful or entertaining, respectively.
This leads me to my second point, where even if you self-opted to not interact with viral content, I'm not sure your social circles would also follow through with the same choice. This ultimately means the platform has to take specific measures to suppress some posts based on its content or not show any of your friends' activity, both of which has disadvantages. Further, the former is in itself controversial depending upon which politician is in power and the current Overton window[1].
(Re downvotes: I'd like to know what part of all of this people disagree with.)
> However, unless you can align the needs of users with the revenue goals of the company
I’m reading this as: The corporate internet is unable to fulfill the actual social needs of its users.
>Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped.
And this translates to: Our economic system drains us of so much of our energy that living a fulfilling life is no longer possible, and so we fill our valuable time with the slop that same system serves us.
I think you’re being downvoted because your comment speaks to an uncomfortable truth, namely that none of this is working to advance quality of life but rather to advance the contents of a few wallets.
On Twitter, don't follow anyone, put everyone in a list, only read that list - you get a feed of chronological posts from only the people on the list, no algorithmic bullshit.
Or use Nostr. Definitely zero algorithm nonsense over there.
> many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life
You want nourishment instead of toxins! ^_^
The thing called "social media" is mostly a US export. It craves monetisation — at the expense of all else, including factual information.
What it has done to US society and public discourse is plain to see.
Before its fall, I had over 700 followers on Twitter. I could post any random thought and within minutes be having an interesting conversation with some rando about it. For example I pondered why phone manufacturers didn't use a p2p protocol for distributing updates and had an enlightening conversation with a person who worked for a major telco chiming in as to why that would be problematic for their infrastructure.
This was my biggest source of joy on the modern internet.
When the walls fell and everybody left, I dropped 200 followers to 500 but by X's own metrics no one sees my tweets. I would estimate between 13 and 20 is my average view count. When I do post, I am lucky a single person interacts, and it is almost always someone I know in the real world.
I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens. I don't think the market is there anymore for "dude that ponders technology questions". I tweet like it's 2010 and no one cares anymore.
This was the death of social media for me. This was the last place I was really "social" on the internet and it died.
Genuinely this has had a very negative effect on me, the only somewhat of a silver lining is that I now have these conversations with ChatGPT. It's not as much fun though.
Instagram is just brainrot these days. I'd used it for years to post my absolute best photos as a sort of curated gallery. No one cares anymore. Nothing I post ever gets seen. Why bother.
That sums up my general opinion of all social media these days, why bother.
I think Substack fills that gap for me. If you haven't already explored it then by the sounds of it I think you'd like it.
It functions more as a platform for blogs, but if you use the app there are blog-specific group chats, you can follow people, and the home page contains 'notes' that are pretty tweet-like in format. Once you have a collection of say 15-20 blogs that your subscribed to I found that the notes I got recommended were quite good and could spark some interesting conversations.
A few tech related ones I like are The Pragmatic Engineer, ByteByteGo, Bad Software Advice, and Exponential View.
It’s funny, because I took the suggestion and went thru the substack sign up process (which wanted email, phone number, contacts, and interests.. not exactly lightweight).
The first thing they show you is a feed, a never ending scroller.
I don’t get an intro to any channel - it seems like Twitter for writers. Half the stuff I subscribed to (you can’t peek in the onboarding) was absolutely written by ChatGPT, emoji headers and all.
I’m sure there’s interesting stuff happening on there, but it’s a scroller just like Reddit, and it’s pretty disappointing how much apps like these don’t respect a single user need - only the needs of the platform to engage engage engage.
Also holy shit, there’s no option to not send emails - only “prefer push”. You can’t turn it off. There’s zero respect for users, their inboxes, or their attention here whatsoever.
My sense is that Twitter’s fall was an opportunity for a lot of people to just drop out. I know for me it’s become a very occasional thing and neither Bluesky nor Mastodon ever achieved critical mass. As far as I’m concerned the format is largely done.
> My sense is that Twitter’s fall was an opportunity for a lot of people to just drop out.
Yeah, that was the case for me. I used Twitter quite a bit from about 2012 through 2020, but I was already phasing it out when the takeover happened, so it was an easy call to just close my account. While I do have an IG and Bsky account, I rarely use them. So Twitter's death basically meant the end of my mainstream social media usage.
It wasn't without consequences though. I'd made some IRL connections through twitter that I thought would last for years - they migrated to bluesky and IG but I didn't. Suddenly they were not interested in speaking with me.
Lose your clout, don't be surprised if you get shunned by the clout obsessed.
And you all made place for guys like me; I don’t get booed away by 90% of the users anymore when engaging in discussion, more often I get an actual discussion out of it. Before that it was just a highly toxic “noo my opinion is the right one and I’m rigid on that and you’re an idiot” ambience.
Funny how things shift like that. Also never engaged with political stuff.
> Genuinely this has had a very negative effect on me
I think that's an issue. I totally see why you were negatively impacted but I think we tend to forget it is not real life and in 99% of cases not important conversations/debates we are having with random people on the internet - they could be fun to have (or not) but important they are not.
We treat social media popularity as if it is part of our identity, as if its almost as important as actual family and friends - and it really isn't.
Agreed. I think one of the big problems with current social media is that they are person-focused instead of topic-focused. This is backwards. This means if I want to follow a cool woodworker because I like their woodworking, I also see their other hobbies, or their political trash, or whatever. Topic-based forums are much better suited for what I actually want--discussions around woodworking. Forums are also self-limiting in size. If a single thread gets too active for people to follow, it makes sense to split off into separate threads, which keeps community sizes reasonable.
I've been a member of one of the internet's longer-running web forums for two decades, and nothing I've seen from the big social media corps comes close to providing the same level of usability and community health.
Try Lemmy, not sure about the whole "followers" count but you can do exactly what you've described on Lemmy today on any topical community or AskLemmy to get you started. You can ask or start basically any kind of conversation you want and gets very decent engagement
Some people I seriously admired followed me on there (maybe they still do, I don't use it now), like legendary game devs, authors, musicians... and I could have candid conversations/exchanges with them. That was awesome. I'll forever appreciate the awesome moments, conversations and even opportunities that arose from that site. :)
This has been my experience as well. I was a heavy lurker during peak Twitter phase, but I still got lots of value from it.
I tried posting about tech and stuff and there’s absolute silence. No one cares anymore as if there are only tumbleweeds out there.
I logged out of all my social media accounts (except HN) and moved them to hidden apps category. As a result I managed to read 3 lovely books and finished my side project ever since.
Because twitter has been gutted, its history the information sector equivallent of vulture capitalism. Take platform, gut its credibility and audience for some end goal (e.g. buying an election, redefining the truth in the minds of many) and leave a smouldering corpse behind.
Twitter is dead, and its grave is marked with nothing more than an X.
PixelFed reminds me a bit of the old Instagram. Not many users, but people are there to post their pictures. You kinda have to rely on tags and trending content to find accounts/content, but that's not always a bad thing.
Probably at some point soon social media companies will recognise this and provide everyone with very nearly human-like bots that engage happily with your content. This will probably be even more addictive than their previous products.
This sycophant-as-a-service feature is already close to the way the major LLMs currently work. Discuss any moderately controversial topic with them, and they'll lean into your opinion within a couple of comments.
I started using Twitter in 2007 and eventually got up to around 1400 followers. Indeed, it was amazing for a while, and I had many experiences that were only possible due to my connecting with many people on there. Unfortunately it had been getting worse and worse, even before it was taken over and renamed and so on.
Fortunately, Mastodon has completely taken its place for me, and it actually affords me a good degree of agency over what I see. It's a linear feed of posts by the people I follow, with comprehensive filtering (and even better, people voluntarily put content warnings on their posts about potentially-difficult topics). It's actually pretty badass, even if it isn't perfect.
You can certainly keep having cool conversations with people on Mastodon, like the good old days of Twitter. That's all I do. I follow people who post about neat stuff, and they follow me cuz I post about stuff I (and apparently they) find interesting. Just people hanging out, basically. You don't need to worry about growing an audience or whatever (though I'm sure you already knew that heh :))
Theres a boom and bust cycle that social media platforms seem to go through. Build something nice for socializing. Add ad breaks to the socializing. Replace content you want with content that can only be described as political / informatiom warefare.
people move to new platform that is nice for socializing. The cycle begins anew.
I for one dont have the energy for it anymore. Im done. Im burnt out. If it isnt a real human in front of me it can fuck off and burn in hell. I make an exception for hacker news, because it doesnt seem trashed to shit by bots astroturfing just about every post to sway public opinion, but the moment it starts I will unplug from the public net for good, and nothing of value will be lost.
> For example I pondered why phone manufacturers didn't use a p2p protocol for distributing updates and had an enlightening conversation with a person who worked for a major telco chiming in as to why that would be problematic for their infrastructure.
> …
> I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens. I don't think the market is there anymore for "dude that ponders technology questions". I tweet like it's 2010 and no one cares anymore.
So, you miss having access to experts in fields you’re a layman to. That makes sense.
I wonder though if the experts miss your random guesses about their work? If they miss the compulsion to correct your assumptions before misinformation takes hold?
> When the walls fell and everybody left, I dropped 200 followers to 500 but by X's own metrics no one sees my tweets
> I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens
So we all agree that follower count != engagement. You pointed that out in the first quote. It's a trueism we all claim to understand. But then you immediately jump to low followers on Mastodon or Bluesky being equivalent to low engagement, when that isn't necessarily the case.
I downgraded my Instagram from curated feed of "interesting" things to just basically a journal of my travels and hobbies. Just less stressful this way.
I'm certainly an anomaly but since to me the downsides of social media have always been quite prominent and seemed to outweigh the benefits by a margin, I never jumped on the social media train.
But I've got to say, it's getting harder and harder to keep that up. As our kids get older especially, almost all of their social activities are somehow tied to social media one way or the other: no matter what they're joining, minimally there's a WhatsApp group. My wife has reluctantly joined WhatsApp and if it wasn't for that, it feels like we would pretty much be destined to become social outcasts.
In one recent instance, we weren't even aware of a parent group for one of our children's school class until someone asked us (in person!) why we didn't come bowling the previous night. We had no idea, and no-one sees the necessity to include someone who - for whatever reason - is not on WhatsApp.
I can see the argument that we are inconveniencing others by not wanting to be reachable to what has now become a standard means of being in touch, and that we cannot expect others to jump through hoops just to include us. But a few years back, I was quite deeply involved in privacy research and I definitely feel no inclination to share all of my communications (and pictures) with Meta.
I'd still not class WhatsApp as a social media platform as your story implies. It is a communication tool for the most part with some social features slowly being baked in. The downsides you're speaking of are far more applicable to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and similar, more than WhatsApp, Telegram, or Discord.
I don't know where you're based, but in general these days at least one "chat app" of some kind is the de facto standard in most countries. For a lot of the world, that's WhatsApp.
The US is an outlier in still relying majorly on SMS as the communications platform.
I’m with the GP on this on. WhatsApp should absolutely be covered under the same umbrella here due to it being owned by Meta, who have a long history of breaking promises regarding privacy.
And since a lot of people do keep in contact via WhatsApp group chats, it’s hard to ignore the social implications of WhatsApp too. It’s as much a social platform as the others albeit with a different broadcast model.
As a parent, I have to monitor my child’s WhatsApp groups to check they’re safe, just like I would their YouTube and Instagram feeds. And I have to check they’re also being safe with the stuff that they share on WhatsApp, just like you would on any other social network.
> As our kids get older especially, almost all of their social activities are somehow tied to social media one way or the other: no matter what they're joining, minimally there's a WhatsApp group.
That is by design. To privatize public spaces and control what is said in that spaces to monetize it is the goal. No individual parent can fight the power of the corporations that push us in that direction.
The public discourse of TV and other media is dying, while the private echo chambers owned by corporations are increasing. That is not good either.
What I think the study is missing is the impact of social media on society, and impact on society on individuals wellbeing. I see an increase in paranoia, extremism, pessimism, etc. caused directly by that closed communities that spin out of control and create the perfect dish plate to grow the most paranoid people. For kids and teenagers it will be worse, as they are still growing and learning.
I feel your point but I don't think WhatsApp counts as social media. It's a group messaging app, same as Facebook Messenger, Signal, etc. Those messaging apps don't have the typical social media downsides -- you don't need to maintain a profile, there's no doom scrolling, etc.
Whatsapp is the main doomscrolling app for older Indians. They share endless AI generated right-wing slop, their brains are absolutely cooked by this stuff.
Another problem is the social fragmentation caused by electronic social interaction being split among so many different platforms: Facebook, WhatsApp, Viber, iMessage, SMS, etc.
Even the device platform you choose segregates you. There are a few neighbor families our family is close to. They(neighbors and my family) all talk on iMessage. I've got an Android/eOS device so I am excluded from the chats. At least my wife shares them with me.
There was a time that people set standards for (landline) telephone communications for the sake of interoperability. We need the same for other technologies. I'm sick of trying to be social in corporate controlled gated communities surrounded by impassible walls.
The OP doesn't seem to make a difference between social media for consuming content that the "algorithm" crams down your throat and simple group chats that are usually closed and invite only.
Tbh I have a feeling it's the kids' fault. They call everything social media now. No separate names for FB and WhatsApp even though they do totally different things.
I never used any "social media" besides the instant messengers. I try to minimize WhatsApp in favor of better options.
It's a constant, uphill battle. I feel that dating is impossible w/o WhatsApp, if you exchange phone numbers with someone at a bar, it's completely useless if you can't contact them on WhatsApp afterwards. Almost nobody (at least here in central Europe) has any other messenger, and every other avenue of contact would be either considered very pushy (like calling) or from the 90s (like SMS).
Taking part in group events also becomes a headache if you don't join the related WhatsApp group.
I find it appalling that basic features of human social functions are subject to the whims and profiteering of a quasi-monopolist company. There should be heavy regulations, at the very least.
That's interesting to hear. I feel like in the states, SMS/iMessage is an expectation. I only have whatsApp because some of my clients use it for communication. It's a bit confusing when I get a cold call, or a message from a new number through whatsApp.
It's not that bad or that hard to avoid social media. I'm in my early twenties and never had much social media. You're right in that WhatsApp is almost everywhere (in certain countries) and hard to avoid. But WhatsApp is still a messaging app and not as bad as Instagram, TikTok etc. I'd say, use something like Signal for all your close communication with family and close friends. If those are close friends I'm sure they'll use Signal to communicate with you too. I guess keep WhatsApp installed but use it only for those groups and not really for any personal chats.
As for the really attention grabbing social media like Instagram and TikTok, if your kids want to get on there I'd say provide a good alternative. Something they can use or open if boredom strikes, because there definitely are those moments when that happens and one just grabs the phone. For me it's mostly been HN and books, some YouTube channels with NewPipe and some podcasts.
Social media (and apps like WhatsApp) have basically become the new default infrastructure for everyday communication, and opting out can unintentionally make you feel like you're opting out of life, especially when it comes to your kids' social circles.
Are you in the US? No one uses whatsapp in the US. This would have been done as an sms groupchat in all likelihood. Everything friends plan is on sms these days. Maybe its my generation, we don’t like signing up for accounts anymore when everyone can trivially text.
Your comment made me breathe a sigh of relief, because my kids are rapidly approaching “I need to communicate with their friends’ parents” age, and I don’t think I have it in me to sign up for WhatsApp. I’m in the US and I’m ok just texting. iOS supports RCS now, it’s good enough.
I actually took the time to sign up for WhatsApp just now to see how it works nowadays, and it’s still the same as it was before: nags you to no end to enable full Contacts access (no, Meta, I’m not letting you dump my entire contacts database into your app so that you can data mine it). iOS lets you select a minimal set of contacts to give it, but if you do this, it still shows you a full screen saying to enable full contacts access before it will let you contact anyone. No thanks. (I deleted my account immediately again, maybe I’ll try again in another 5 years.)
I'm guessing you are a younger generation than I am. My friends group tends to use Facebook Messenger for this. I never use Facebook myself, but do use messenger for essentially texting people.
I see the opposite trend, as the (imo much needed) shock from Jonathan Haidt's 'The Anxious Generation' is only starting to really resonate in the minds of educators and parents.
No smartphones allowed at school, strict usage limits for older kids at home, etc.
If only somehow we managed to make social media uncool for the kids, that’s the most sure way they’d stay away from it.
I guess proper education on the real aspects of the social media phenomenon would be the real deal. For example, explaining how/why the companies use their algorithms to keep you in there; influencers only want to sell you a product; why posts/stories don’t reflect reality at all, etc.
But understanding all that would require quite some amount of emotional maturity from both the kids and parents themselves. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the reality at all, there are adults that still can’t see through the cracks..
The surprise here is how little of an effect it has. Deactivating facebook makes you only 1/16th of one standard deviation happier. And instagram even less. And this was measured during elections, when the effect is likely to be greatest.
Kinda crazy that the magnitude is so small! (my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")
I think this is an important and often overlooked phenomenon actually. Studies of Internet engagement are filled with these skewed distributions that follow something like a Pareto principle, or I've heard it termed the 90-9-1 distribution in engagement where 90% of users just lurk a bit, 9% contribute casually, and then 1% are contributing like half of the content on the platform.
It would follow logically that whatever kind of brain rot social media causes, would affect 1% of the population very dramatically, another 9% somewhat more noticeably, and then there would be this vast ocean of people who are only marginally aware/affected. From the perspective of online activity they appear to not even exist.
This always seems counterintuitive to the 9% or the 1% (and just by commenting we're already in one of those demogs). But there's lots of data out there supporting these skewed distributions in online activity.
These percentages are similar to those that one sees for alcohol consumption or problematic gambling.
The business model of the casinos and the drug dealers and the alcohol venders is the same - you need a huge pool of unproblematic recreational users to find the problematic users who generate the bulk of your profits.
The same model works for video games and social media.
"This project is part of the U.S. 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study (Gonz´alez-Bail´on et al. 2023; Guess et al. 2023a,b; Nyhan et al. 2023; Allcott et al. 2024), a partnership between Meta researchers and unpaid independent academics. Under the terms of the collaboration, the independent academic authors had final authority over the pre-analysis plan, data analysis, and manuscript text, and Meta could not block any results from being published."
I’d be interested in the results of a study that cuts out all social media, but the problem I can already see with that is self-selection bias (the people that would volunteer for it are probably already eager to get away from social media so the results would likely be skewed).
Personally I’ve been mentally in a better place since getting rid of my social media accounts during COVID, but it does cause problems because Facebook has become a utility as well (schools and real-life social groups use it for co-ordinating activities).
The perceived utility of social media seems pretty variable, not just across people, but with the same person in different circumstances. With covid, social media might scare people out who were regular users previously, and yet for other occasional or reluctant users it's suddenly seen as the only option for human contact and they use it constantly. After lock-downs are over, people flip to the polar opposite of their previous preference. With recessions, social media might be the only affordable entertainment but during better times, many would rather do something else. In general I bet it's insanely hard to run good experiments for behavioural economics in volatile times, even if you're really trying to be careful about methodology.
It’s marginal but the study addresses this, it says essentially it’s impossible to tell if the participants are telling the truth about deactivation, as well as if they are supplementing their Facebook time with other platforms.
For example, if you deactivate Facebook but still doom scroll the NY Times et al homepages. Your happiness wouldn’t necessarily change because almost ALL media has adopted the addictive techniques of social media.
I think social media has some sort of amplifier effect. If you are someone easily influenced, you'll be a lot more affected compared to someone who is more of a sceptic. If you are already depressed, it'll probably make it worse when you see holiday pictures of everyone in your network (no one shares pictures where they look like shit). If you are in a good place in life, you'll probably be smashing the like button without care.
In any case I didn't like the amplification - unamplified life is hard enough - so I got rid of it a long time ago and don't regret it at all.
> The fact that less than one percent of the people who were invited to the study completed the experiment underscores that one should be cautious in generalizing results outside our sample. Most of this sample selection is driven by the fact that only a few percent of people click on research study invitations or social media ad
The self selection bias in these ad based invitation studies is just out of whack.
I suspect that those who participate were already considering quitting.
> The surprise here is how little of an effect it has [..] measured during elections, when the effect is likely to be greatest.
If you were depressed because of divisive politics on social media, then you leave social media during elections where divisive politics is everywhere in the real world anyway.. self-reported depression seems like it would not change much. So the results might make sense as long as they are targeting people that are old enough to be depressed by politics in the first place, and assuming politics rather than body-image issues etc is the main driver.
Some follow up questions.. does social media make divisive political issues in the real world worse? Seems like it! How old is old enough to be depressed by politics? Probably everyone now, which phenomenon is also likely caused by social media. Honestly regardless of elections, you can't actually leave social media by leaving social media anymore, it's kinda in the very fabric of things.
> my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")
Same, I mean this seems to be going against most of the other research on this. For what it's worth, here's a paper with some of the same authors on digital addiction ( https://www.nber.org/papers/w28936 ). Abstract states that
> Looking at these facts through the lens of our model suggests that self-control problems cause 31 percent of social media use.
So.. not necessarily painting social media as wonderful. Social media companies would be interested in research about social media addiction for obvious reasons, but probably do not in general want that research public. Unless of course it hurts competitors more than it hurts them, and this paper is in the middle of drama about a tiktok ban. Maybe the authors just say what people in power want to hear at the time?
I think the below poster got it right. Cutting out Facebook certainly improved my life; cutting out instagram later was an additive improvement. Now I’m left with HN (which generally avoids the bad parts of social media) and Reddit (which has plenty of brain rot).
It also took a lot more than 6 weeks to get acclimated to it. You get psychological withdrawal. It took months for it to feel normal. My income went up a lot in the years after as well (in part due to more time to focus on finding a new job), so that also contributed to my happiness.
I find Reddit (and HN to a lesser extent) even worse than Facebook. There is a lot more content, for one thing, and so it's easier to waste even more time :(. I wish I could quit...
Removing one dopamine addicting and cortisol antagonising source might just be replaced by more of all the other sources that are being consumed.
Perhaps they just watched TV news more, for example?
But perhaps the study shows that the effect works in the right direction even if small and even when replaced by any other behaviours that cause unhappiness, depression and anxiety.
It's like if you ask people to quit drinking beer but then they just drink wine instead. It might be a tiny bit healthier but it doesn't get at the underlying problem. And it wouldn't be fair to fault beer by itself for their negative experiences.
Anecdotal: Stopping commenting on reddit reduced
emotional stress significantly.
Reddit is one of those "social" anti-social circles where
you can't afford to be on the "wrong side of argument" and
every discussion can quickly spiral out.
I've done the same with HN, somewhat. I log out by default, just to add a barrier between reading something and responding to it. Has to be something I really feel I must reply to or worth adding more information to, to make me log in.
I can confirm that deleting Instagram/Facebook has improved my QoL.
But I have a hard time ditching Reddit, I canceled accounts multiple times, yet at some point I need to discuss something for which there's only a subreddit online and I'm back at square one.
I agree to some extent, but even highly specialised / niche topics on dedicated subs are getting slammed by the "hivemind". I guess it's more apparent for non-us users, as we're not the target audience, but the political brigading is showing even on subs like space and ML related. Reddit is now very similar to ~2015-16 reddit when the-donald and other subs really peaked, just the other way around. 10/25 posts on all are bad orange man and bad space man related. The technology sub is a mess of weaponised autism. And then you get the same political bs coming from weird subs, like the cute pics sub, or the knitting sub suddenly having political submissions w/ 3k-6k upvotes, all saying the same thing.
It doesn't help that it is still the easiest "social network" to create accounts on, and bot on. With the advances in LLMs I sometimes truly can't say if an account is real or a bot. And I work in this space...
I used to edit Wikipedia and I was heavily involved in many, many disputes. And in fact, I would seek out disputes, even ones outside my topic area; it's not difficult to do on Wikipedia because there are entire notice boards where people go to have public disputes. We called them "dramaboards", especially the admins' disciplinary ones.
And I would have these disputes, of course, over utterly trivial things, like how to spell something or where to place the apostrophe, or some manual-of-style nitpick in an infobox. And the disputes would drag on for weeks and we could utterly stall the editing process by disputing on talk pages. And yet we could edit-war over it, usually in slow-motion. And often the dispute would be couched in quite polite language but I would hate the guys' guts.
And the tipping point came when I began to have dreams about Wikipedia, and I would wake up angry. I would wake up fighting. I would wake up and immediately tear into the web browser and catch-up on the discussion, or not, just to post my next riposte, because I'd composed it in my sleep, in my dreamless dreams.
And I woke up angry more often than waking up in any other mood. And I was telling my psychiatrist this, and she said I should probably stop looking at blue light before bedtime. And I was incredulous that she would think if I turned my arguments red-hued that they would anger me less, or cause me to wake up happy and agreeable or something?
And I know I wasn't taking enough medication to make anyone happy, but these guys on Wikipedia really knew how to piss me off, and if you've ever heard of "brinkers" it's a certain type of troll who will play by the rules, and basically trigger anyone with a hot temper, and that triggered person would forget their ethics and commit a fatal error, and get banned, and the brinker would go on to live another day and cause others to fall into similar traps. And many of us do that, if we have the volatile temperament. I lasted about 17 years on Wikipedia without a single block and with some low-grade warnings, but generally a clean discipline record, but finally it got to me.
And a lot of time on Wikipedia I had spent fighting trolls and vandals and very disruptive editors. And I made sure a lot of them were banned. I filed a lot of reports. I was a petty bureaucrat there, filing reports and compiling evidence and arguing cases. There was no shortage of "wikilawyering". From the very beginning I was finding disputes and diving into them. Especially when they didn't concern me, didn't concern any topic I cared about. Just to have the disputes.
And I kept waking up angry. And finally I got control of that. Nowadays I wake up frightened. I wake up traumatized. I wake up scared of something I dreamed about. It's spiritual torment, and it's attributable to nothing I did the night before. Perhaps the F.U.D. of Hacker News gets to me. But not on that level. At least I don't go on crusades or jihads against Wikipedia editors anymore.
Re: "brinkers", this is where it's very useful to have a certain amount of mod discretion so that people who probe the fences like velociraptors in Jurassic Park eventually get banned for that. The downside is that it looks even more cliquey than it is.
> and if you've ever heard of "brinkers" it's a certain type of troll who will play by the rules, and basically trigger anyone with a hot temper
Didn't know there was a term for this, good to know it wasn't just me seeing things. Witnessed this happen countless times while assisting with moderation on Discord. The only worse thing than the rules defending these people's behavior is when fellow moderators decide to cover for them too.
The number of replies I cut & paste to my notes archive far exceeds the amount of posts I actually make. I still find it valuable to work through my own thoughts to better prepare myself to have the same conversations in more impactful circumstances, but there are some things I just don't care enough about persuading the other person - or believe the other person is actually going to consider the words as carefully as I put them together.
There's a correlation between being really obnoxious and continuing threads on HN or anywhere else.
Occasionally there are good real conversations where people are generally interested and curious but the most common are either marginally interested or very interested in worthless conflict.
Your comment is proof to the contrary. You are thus lying and everything you say or do is now severely tainted. I will now produce a seven-pronged argument for why exactly this type of behavior is the hidden root cause of climate change and why you should feel bad. (/s)
Sorry, couldn’t help myself.
I know the feeling, but I have to admit that people being obtuse helped me to take them and myself less serious. That said, there are better ways to foster that kind of experience.
50 years from now, we are going to be looking back at Social Media and Smartphone addiction like we currently look at smoking. “How insane were we to have allowed it and allowed it to be promoted?” our grandchildren will rightly ask!
Hope you are right but I think it's different. Smoking has very visible side effects fairly soon though- types of cancer, photos of rotten lungs and throat everywhere on cigarette packs etc.
Social media only seems to have psychological side effects which aren't as openly visible to our eyes.
Your attitude is exactly what the parent comment is describing. You have the benefit of decades of scientific research and government mandates that didn't exist for previous generations. Modern cigarettes date to the late 1800's but the link between smoking and cancer wasn't established until the 1950's. It took over a decade after that for the first warning labels to appear on packs, and the photo type you're describing didn't exist until the 2000's.
It seems obvious to you because it has been made obvious to you. It wasn't the same for people in the first half of the 1900's. The parent comment is making the same point: it's not obvious to most people today, but in fifty years from now, people will look at the research, the decline in the birth rate, the increase of anxiety, and effects we can't imagine today and go "social media has very visible side effects fairly soon, how did they not know?"
“Perfectly fine” is a bit of a stretch. No amount of alcohol is good for health. WHO now say even small amounts increase risk of cancer and liver disease.
Weird. There is little that depresses me more than watching my wife sit at the table for hours a day slowly scrolling Facebook while ignoring me and the kids. We have talked about it and she's tried to reduce it to no avail.
There's something about the social media influencer industrial complex that short circuits women's brains worse, as far as I can tell. Most of my friends quit social media years to a decade ago but our wives are all on it. Men seem to get sucked into Youtube wormholes instead.
I think the only way out is cold turkey. The number of conversations my wife starts with telling me about some distant acquaintances recent vacation (as seen thru IG) is distressing.
My "social" internet use is more hobby based - forum/reddit hobby focussed content.
It is anecdotal but eg. me and my brother and some of my male friends "burned out" on silly meme feeds on sites like Memebase and what not before there was any very addictive feeds. Maybe fewer women was full of it by the time Instagram came?
When my girlfriend told me on our first date that she doesn't use social media, I nearly proposed on the spot.
And even she does some doom-scrolling though news sites. She claims to know it's mostly nonsense, and then says she has to do it to know what's going on. I try not to point out the contradiction too much, because she does limit it pretty well.
It's an addiction and really hard to stop. Facebook spends billions designing it to be as addictive as possible.
In this study, they paid people $25 to not use it for a week. I wonder if your wife would agree to that. It seems like for most people who are addicted, you need to go "sober" and not use it all.
This worked for me in a similar situation, and you gotta do the same:
Make 2 or 3 rules and remind each other of them.
No phones in the bedroom.
No phones at meals.
No phones at the park.
(Something like that)
Or even a "let's go out for dinner without our phones!"
I also made a little "Phone jail." It is essentially a shoebox on top of the fridge. I announce when I am putting my phone in "jail" as a way to show my kids that I am trying to have a healthy relationship with screens.
My wife and I have both reduced our screen time (though ew aren't perfect.)
Semantic point: nice and kind are not the same thing.
The nice thing to do when somebody is behaving poorly, is to ignore it until it becomes untenable (firing them, leaving them, and so on). The kind thing is to address it and let them change their ways.
Wanting to be nice is baked into our social structures - nobody wants to be seen as the un-nice person - but being kind is where relationships and interactions get strong. You just need to do it with empathy.
If she tried to reduce it she wouldn't do it. Nobody is holding a gun to her head. She does it because she wants to do it. Until she takes responsibility for her actions she will not change.
Yeah this is how all therapy works. It’s about learning what change you can make and taking responsibility and making that change. Not sure why you’re being downvoted but likely because there’s an idea floating around now that all such issues are purely externally imposed by a defect in society, and that it has nothing to do with the actions of the individual who is portrayed as helpless. I think that is a deeply depressing and disturbing trend. I’ve literally seen communities of people telling others they should kill themselves because it’s impossible to be happy under capitalism…
I'm distinctly happier since I ditched Facebook and Twitter. It's not a radical change, because the world kinda sucks in general. And I'm a little sad that a few of my older family members are effectively invisible since they only communicate on Facebook, but, honestly, I didn't talk to my mother's first cousins pre-Facebook anyway so, net, I haven't actually lost very much.
I was never on Instagram or TikTok, but neither seems to be "social" media as much as a communal fire hose anyway.
I was on Bluesky for a minute, but it was 99.9% people trying to one-up each other with witty or ironic one-liners for clout, with most of the rest being ex-Twitter people trying to keep Twitter combat alive in an arena (blessedly) free of the people who have made Twitter unbearable. I got tired of witnessing a neverending improv open mic while being randomly assaulted by people I agreed with.
So now I'm just living my life, aware of the challenges of the world, but not bathing in them.
Just speaking for myself. Facebook was fun when it was the underdog to MySpace. But I closed me account just a few years later and haven't looked back. Was never engaged on twitter, but have an account just so I can verify "yes, they actually posted that"
Aside from Reddit, my only social media is Instagram. On my Instagram, I only follow people I personally know or national-park/state-park/non-profit conservation accounts. I only like posts of people I personally know and nothing else, and I never comment on anything. I only post pretty pictures of nature with no people visible in a recognizable way. My feed is almost exclusively nature and animals (lots of seals and sea lions) with a lot of scuba diving mixed in. I also get a lot of xennial humor posts too, which I send to my wife and a buddy.
It's a very limited level of engagement, and I'm very happy with it. I don't need anything more.
Can I just tell you? I rejoined Reddit a couple of years ago, and (I cannot believe I'm about to type this) it is, generally speaking, a positive experience filled with people who are generally not terribly toxic, and the toxic people are pretty easy to avoid. There are some hotbeds of awful, mainly fandoms, and many of the tech subs are just tech-grumpy, but overall it's been an amazingly nice experience.
Readit News
Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances.
Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and local businesses share career and business updates and advertise their wares.
I watch my girlfriend devolve into this stuff. Waking up and scrolling endless feeds from reddit and insta; it's her entertainment. It's not so much worse than me waking up and scrolling Google News...maybe it's better, in that she gets less depressed about it. But it's fake. It's all fake.
In real life, it took me a whole year to figure out that the people at one particular local pub actually hate me and talk shit about me whenever I'm not around. I only figured out why they were so hostile because the people at my other pub told me. (It's that I'm Jewish, with Israeli family. Ironically, the nice people at the other pub who told me are Lebanese. We get along a lot better than I do with my old antifa "friends") This was a hard-to-get real world experience in how fucked up people can be for no reason. It's not something you can understand properly, ever, on any kind of social media. The media format just gets in the way of understanding other people as people; of understanding truth and factual reality; of differentiating between opinion and fact.
Feeds are garbage, optimized for chaos.
This is spot on. Facebook proper has supplanted private email chains for a lot of older people. This is ironic because they are moving in the opposite direction as everyone else. Everyone else is moving into private communities, older people are leaving the safety of email chains and, often unknowingly, posting publicly. Facebook (probably intentionally) upholds the illusion that they are posting for their friends. I've seen Facebook actually provide a compelling service to my older dad who keeps in touch with a lot of his old friends on there. It's a much more active community of seniors than you'd guess.
Of course, they are subject to all the ills of Facebook at the same time. Overall I'd rate it as a net loss for society because of that.
No LinkedIn, not you, you boring Ted Talk humblebrag.
Old school social networks used to be this noncommital, low-threshold way to connect with others around you. It was really great if you were a socially awkward teen or twenty-something. It's no big deal to friend somebody on facebook (or MySpace, or your universities gamified campus management system or whatever) and see what they are doing, or strike up a conversation. I really miss that kind of network.
Don't forget FB marketplace. I know a few younger coworkers who have FB just for market place.
So, it’s a pretty shit tool for a business to share what it’s about.
But sometimes I do, because saying something to one person feels like I'm demanding a response from them, but saying it to a broad circle of friends allows those interested to reply, and others to leave it. Back when I used Facebook, I was more likely to gripe (or brag) on the Facebook wall than in a personal text conversation with a friend.
(Friends in person are the best option, of course.)
I have a channel for my neighborhood, another for the parents at my children's school, another for my extended family, another for work colleagues and another for a few friends.
This is what Facebook was when we all signed up almost two decades ago. No one ever wanted a feed of people they didn't know. Free social media is inherently corrupt as they chase profits abusing the user base.
Facebook was refocusing on friend and family content before TikTok came along. But they had to adjust to the TikTok trend otherwise they would have lost market share or potentially lost the entire market.
You might think you want friend and family content, but actually you don’t. Not as much as you want engaging content.
VC-backed corporations masquerading as public services to gain user networks they can later monetize is the problem.
Unfortunately, some of my family post insane political views, usually about now in the early AM. Being told that a King of the USA and the elimination of due process are good things doesn't help my mental health.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
Would they still if any such poster's feed would strictly only be viewable by families and friends?
(I have no idea)
I quit Facebook over a decade ago, because others used it to go “look at my shiny car/wife/house”, and I would use it to lose friends and alienate people.
These online environments do not foster any kind of human connection.
Imagine there's a toggle you can flip in the Settings of Instagram that was labeled "free oxy", and every morning and evening Meta would FedEx an oxy pill into your mailbox. Everyone would tell eachother about it, and few would be able to resist the temptation.
Plenty of people like and enjoy "algorithmic feeds". I can enjoy occasionally scrolling through a feed. Banning it is like banning alcohol because there are alcoholics in society.
If you can't handle it, switch it off.
I’ve stopped using FB regularly, because I don’t like their feed algorithm. I don’t like the ads or the content, and I had curated it by joining local groups and BOFS. The only thing that brings me back now is the _possibility_ of a friends update.
That said, the _frequency_ of updates from friends and family will be vastly different for different people. The feed (if it speaks to you) works to regularize or smooth the frequency. I see FB’s problem and I don’t envy them. The vitality of the platform becomes precarious, and can be supplanted by some other platform with better engagement (ie TickTock).
I’m not a designer or researcher of Social Media, but I’m an emigre of sorts and not many people have that experience. The only platform all of my friends and family use are group private messages using our phones, and the most engaging chats we have are few and far between.
Instead of pausing social media altogether, I recently took some time off from the endless scrolling feeds only. When returning it's so apparent how everything is bait for engagement.
The feed hijacks the human attention process on a visceral level. Either with visual stimulus that's extremely intriguing for evolved apes like us (cutting a cake that looks like a dog), or by activating an emotional response from a tribal species like us (stupid takes on politics, in- and out-group stuff).
The rest of most social media apps is fine and offers much of what you are asking for.
I’m not sure if that’s actually a “shortcut” to the reptile brain and it’s just about “I have to scroll more to get stuff I’m interested in. At least for me it feels like that and it causes me to use these social media things far less.
For me it feels more like intermittent rewards vs full rewards at once. Obviously for the ad-industry the intermittent rewards are more useful, that’s why we can’t have nice things
Isn’t this just WhatsApp now though? The addition of Statuses, Following and now Communities almost confirms this. People are dropping Facebook and IG, but can’t give up WhatsApp (yet).
I've got a personal policy: No websites that have an infinite scroll. That means no new Reddit, mobile Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, or similar. This also means I can't use food delivery services, since those tend to be infinite as well.
If they're paginated that's fine, even if they're infinitely so. Infinite scrolling is just a very good touchstone as to the quality and addictiveness of a site, and I'll avoid anything that has it.
For this reason I get my news through RSS and like using Discord -- both have finite ends (even if there may be a lot of content in bursts.)
I rue the amount of damage caused, before people and society began resisting and arresting its deleterious effects.
But perhaps this is the same process being followed here. New shiny for the reptile brain, eventually the costs are made clear and people decide they would rather not become statistics and instead find joy in other formats and tools.
Then People make those formats or invent ways of engaging with our tools that includes self care and leads to more happiness. We grow older and we eventually get tired of all the online health fads and become crotchety older humans.
Get off my lawn, in advance.
I use FB only because I'm member of a couple of groups relevant to my hobby, and the stuff posted in those is worth following. Unfortunately there is currently no alternative for those, otherwise I would happily ditch FB.
I don't even care about posts from family and friends anymore because nowadays those are mostly about bragging about their fancy dinner/holiday/social life etc.
Any marketplace that is privately owned, is not a free market place. And, the elephant in the room, these social media marketplaces are owned by parties with very particular interests. As long as don't recognise that, we will let ourselves be distracted by details that are always the result of this private control.
Something social must be public, or it isn't social, and it isn't what you and I really want.
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
And it doesn't scroll endlessly. It will display this at the bottom of the page:
> You're all caught up on Most Recent posts
> Check back later for more updates
And any page you follow, including anything that tries to convince you to click through to their website via clickbait, anxiety-inducing headlines, etc.. It also shows FB groups you're in, which are often full of their own unnecessary drama.
A social network is no better than the sum of its parts, and to create something really worthwhile, you have to limit what people are allowed to post (original content only, for example).
Doing that at scale I think is very hard.
In the meantime, maybe I should just share more photos in the group chat instead...
I think this goes beyond social media to all kinds of media.
Of course there are other Chinese apps that operate entirely based on feeds. What I found interesting is that on Rednote it tried to suppress your posts from what it infers to be your friends in real life.
I think it is a great approach. There are sometimes I just want to see updates from friends and family. There are other times when I only want to see something interesting to me without necessarily telling all my friends what I'm interested in. These are two entirely different categories of social media and it is a good thing to require users to switch apps.
So either we train all our friends to use it sensibly -- and convince them to agree with us on what's sensible -- or we sort through cruft to find the value.
This is called "email" (and/or "text messaging" i.e. iMessage or SMS).
I think that’s the tough reality—over time, people gradually become accustomed to consuming random content from random accounts or pages, to the point where the original idea of interacting with friends and family on social media starts to fade away. That said, messaging apps might still bridge that gap through groups.
Friends and family more or less stopped posting a long time ago, when everyone became worried about what happens when others have their personal information/drunk party photos. Which is why "the feed" started seeking content from outside content creators so that the services could give you... something.
Facebook, at least, has maintained the "friends and family" feed like you describe, but who uses it? I expect asymptotically nobody.
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elswhr.app
Would love to hear your feedback and any feature requests you might have.
This sort of longing for a cozy social media circles exists a lot in tech adjacent circles. However, unless you can align the needs of users with the revenue goals of the company, which in other words simply means that users pay for the pay for the product, this is not gonna happen. While you may be willing to do so, I'm sure many people would simply stop communicating with you because of the additional friction caused, especially when a free alternative exists.
Additionally, the "viral content" you speak of exists for two reasons, which I'm not sure it could be entirely solved even if you had users pay for the product.
Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped. This is where viral content, such as posts from politicians and celebrities, gain their initial spread.
I would also like to note that someone may want to follow a politician or celebrity because they think what they're doing is generally useful or entertaining, respectively.
This leads me to my second point, where even if you self-opted to not interact with viral content, I'm not sure your social circles would also follow through with the same choice. This ultimately means the platform has to take specific measures to suppress some posts based on its content or not show any of your friends' activity, both of which has disadvantages. Further, the former is in itself controversial depending upon which politician is in power and the current Overton window[1].
(Re downvotes: I'd like to know what part of all of this people disagree with.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window#
I’m reading this as: The corporate internet is unable to fulfill the actual social needs of its users.
>Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped.
And this translates to: Our economic system drains us of so much of our energy that living a fulfilling life is no longer possible, and so we fill our valuable time with the slop that same system serves us.
I think you’re being downvoted because your comment speaks to an uncomfortable truth, namely that none of this is working to advance quality of life but rather to advance the contents of a few wallets.
The addictive properties are the reason for the prevalence of the product.
On Twitter, don't follow anyone, put everyone in a list, only read that list - you get a feed of chronological posts from only the people on the list, no algorithmic bullshit.
Or use Nostr. Definitely zero algorithm nonsense over there.
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You want nourishment instead of toxins! ^_^
The thing called "social media" is mostly a US export. It craves monetisation — at the expense of all else, including factual information.
What it has done to US society and public discourse is plain to see.
This was my biggest source of joy on the modern internet.
When the walls fell and everybody left, I dropped 200 followers to 500 but by X's own metrics no one sees my tweets. I would estimate between 13 and 20 is my average view count. When I do post, I am lucky a single person interacts, and it is almost always someone I know in the real world.
I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens. I don't think the market is there anymore for "dude that ponders technology questions". I tweet like it's 2010 and no one cares anymore.
This was the death of social media for me. This was the last place I was really "social" on the internet and it died.
Genuinely this has had a very negative effect on me, the only somewhat of a silver lining is that I now have these conversations with ChatGPT. It's not as much fun though.
Instagram is just brainrot these days. I'd used it for years to post my absolute best photos as a sort of curated gallery. No one cares anymore. Nothing I post ever gets seen. Why bother.
That sums up my general opinion of all social media these days, why bother.
It functions more as a platform for blogs, but if you use the app there are blog-specific group chats, you can follow people, and the home page contains 'notes' that are pretty tweet-like in format. Once you have a collection of say 15-20 blogs that your subscribed to I found that the notes I got recommended were quite good and could spark some interesting conversations.
A few tech related ones I like are The Pragmatic Engineer, ByteByteGo, Bad Software Advice, and Exponential View.
The first thing they show you is a feed, a never ending scroller.
I don’t get an intro to any channel - it seems like Twitter for writers. Half the stuff I subscribed to (you can’t peek in the onboarding) was absolutely written by ChatGPT, emoji headers and all.
I’m sure there’s interesting stuff happening on there, but it’s a scroller just like Reddit, and it’s pretty disappointing how much apps like these don’t respect a single user need - only the needs of the platform to engage engage engage.
Also holy shit, there’s no option to not send emails - only “prefer push”. You can’t turn it off. There’s zero respect for users, their inboxes, or their attention here whatsoever.
Never engaged with the political stuff.
Yeah, that was the case for me. I used Twitter quite a bit from about 2012 through 2020, but I was already phasing it out when the takeover happened, so it was an easy call to just close my account. While I do have an IG and Bsky account, I rarely use them. So Twitter's death basically meant the end of my mainstream social media usage.
It wasn't without consequences though. I'd made some IRL connections through twitter that I thought would last for years - they migrated to bluesky and IG but I didn't. Suddenly they were not interested in speaking with me.
Lose your clout, don't be surprised if you get shunned by the clout obsessed.
Funny how things shift like that. Also never engaged with political stuff.
I think that's an issue. I totally see why you were negatively impacted but I think we tend to forget it is not real life and in 99% of cases not important conversations/debates we are having with random people on the internet - they could be fun to have (or not) but important they are not. We treat social media popularity as if it is part of our identity, as if its almost as important as actual family and friends - and it really isn't.
We didn’t need social media, we had everything we needed with the old PHP forums
I've been a member of one of the internet's longer-running web forums for two decades, and nothing I've seen from the big social media corps comes close to providing the same level of usability and community health.
I've been on Bluesky for a few months.
Around 300 followers, mostly generic female names being caricatures of progressive or traditional values, often "looking for true love".
I can post almost anything I want and no one reacts.
It was the same for reddit, and honestly even 4chan in the early 2000s.
Hacker news kinda fills that gap now.
This has been my experience as well. I was a heavy lurker during peak Twitter phase, but I still got lots of value from it.
I tried posting about tech and stuff and there’s absolute silence. No one cares anymore as if there are only tumbleweeds out there.
I logged out of all my social media accounts (except HN) and moved them to hidden apps category. As a result I managed to read 3 lovely books and finished my side project ever since.
Twitter is dead, and its grave is marked with nothing more than an X.
What do you mean? Aren't you looking at it right now?
PixelFed reminds me a bit of the old Instagram. Not many users, but people are there to post their pictures. You kinda have to rely on tags and trending content to find accounts/content, but that's not always a bad thing.
Fortunately, Mastodon has completely taken its place for me, and it actually affords me a good degree of agency over what I see. It's a linear feed of posts by the people I follow, with comprehensive filtering (and even better, people voluntarily put content warnings on their posts about potentially-difficult topics). It's actually pretty badass, even if it isn't perfect.
You can certainly keep having cool conversations with people on Mastodon, like the good old days of Twitter. That's all I do. I follow people who post about neat stuff, and they follow me cuz I post about stuff I (and apparently they) find interesting. Just people hanging out, basically. You don't need to worry about growing an audience or whatever (though I'm sure you already knew that heh :))
people move to new platform that is nice for socializing. The cycle begins anew.
I for one dont have the energy for it anymore. Im done. Im burnt out. If it isnt a real human in front of me it can fuck off and burn in hell. I make an exception for hacker news, because it doesnt seem trashed to shit by bots astroturfing just about every post to sway public opinion, but the moment it starts I will unplug from the public net for good, and nothing of value will be lost.
So, you miss having access to experts in fields you’re a layman to. That makes sense.
I wonder though if the experts miss your random guesses about their work? If they miss the compulsion to correct your assumptions before misinformation takes hold?
> I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens
So we all agree that follower count != engagement. You pointed that out in the first quote. It's a trueism we all claim to understand. But then you immediately jump to low followers on Mastodon or Bluesky being equivalent to low engagement, when that isn't necessarily the case.
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But I've got to say, it's getting harder and harder to keep that up. As our kids get older especially, almost all of their social activities are somehow tied to social media one way or the other: no matter what they're joining, minimally there's a WhatsApp group. My wife has reluctantly joined WhatsApp and if it wasn't for that, it feels like we would pretty much be destined to become social outcasts.
In one recent instance, we weren't even aware of a parent group for one of our children's school class until someone asked us (in person!) why we didn't come bowling the previous night. We had no idea, and no-one sees the necessity to include someone who - for whatever reason - is not on WhatsApp.
I can see the argument that we are inconveniencing others by not wanting to be reachable to what has now become a standard means of being in touch, and that we cannot expect others to jump through hoops just to include us. But a few years back, I was quite deeply involved in privacy research and I definitely feel no inclination to share all of my communications (and pictures) with Meta.
I don't know where you're based, but in general these days at least one "chat app" of some kind is the de facto standard in most countries. For a lot of the world, that's WhatsApp.
The US is an outlier in still relying majorly on SMS as the communications platform.
And since a lot of people do keep in contact via WhatsApp group chats, it’s hard to ignore the social implications of WhatsApp too. It’s as much a social platform as the others albeit with a different broadcast model.
As a parent, I have to monitor my child’s WhatsApp groups to check they’re safe, just like I would their YouTube and Instagram feeds. And I have to check they’re also being safe with the stuff that they share on WhatsApp, just like you would on any other social network.
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That is by design. To privatize public spaces and control what is said in that spaces to monetize it is the goal. No individual parent can fight the power of the corporations that push us in that direction.
The public discourse of TV and other media is dying, while the private echo chambers owned by corporations are increasing. That is not good either.
What I think the study is missing is the impact of social media on society, and impact on society on individuals wellbeing. I see an increase in paranoia, extremism, pessimism, etc. caused directly by that closed communities that spin out of control and create the perfect dish plate to grow the most paranoid people. For kids and teenagers it will be worse, as they are still growing and learning.
Even the device platform you choose segregates you. There are a few neighbor families our family is close to. They(neighbors and my family) all talk on iMessage. I've got an Android/eOS device so I am excluded from the chats. At least my wife shares them with me.
There was a time that people set standards for (landline) telephone communications for the sake of interoperability. We need the same for other technologies. I'm sick of trying to be social in corporate controlled gated communities surrounded by impassible walls.
Tbh I have a feeling it's the kids' fault. They call everything social media now. No separate names for FB and WhatsApp even though they do totally different things.
Taking part in group events also becomes a headache if you don't join the related WhatsApp group.
I find it appalling that basic features of human social functions are subject to the whims and profiteering of a quasi-monopolist company. There should be heavy regulations, at the very least.
As for the really attention grabbing social media like Instagram and TikTok, if your kids want to get on there I'd say provide a good alternative. Something they can use or open if boredom strikes, because there definitely are those moments when that happens and one just grabs the phone. For me it's mostly been HN and books, some YouTube channels with NewPipe and some podcasts.
You don't have to share your messages or pictures with Meta to fix the problems you laid out in your post. Certainly not all of them.
For example with the bowling situation, all you had to do was listen passively to times/events being posted.
I actually took the time to sign up for WhatsApp just now to see how it works nowadays, and it’s still the same as it was before: nags you to no end to enable full Contacts access (no, Meta, I’m not letting you dump my entire contacts database into your app so that you can data mine it). iOS lets you select a minimal set of contacts to give it, but if you do this, it still shows you a full screen saying to enable full contacts access before it will let you contact anyone. No thanks. (I deleted my account immediately again, maybe I’ll try again in another 5 years.)
No smartphones allowed at school, strict usage limits for older kids at home, etc.
I guess proper education on the real aspects of the social media phenomenon would be the real deal. For example, explaining how/why the companies use their algorithms to keep you in there; influencers only want to sell you a product; why posts/stories don’t reflect reality at all, etc.
But understanding all that would require quite some amount of emotional maturity from both the kids and parents themselves. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the reality at all, there are adults that still can’t see through the cracks..
WhatsApp is E2E encrypted, right? Can you go into more detail about what you suspect Meta is doing or will do?
Kinda crazy that the magnitude is so small! (my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")
It would follow logically that whatever kind of brain rot social media causes, would affect 1% of the population very dramatically, another 9% somewhat more noticeably, and then there would be this vast ocean of people who are only marginally aware/affected. From the perspective of online activity they appear to not even exist.
This always seems counterintuitive to the 9% or the 1% (and just by commenting we're already in one of those demogs). But there's lots of data out there supporting these skewed distributions in online activity.
The business model of the casinos and the drug dealers and the alcohol venders is the same - you need a huge pool of unproblematic recreational users to find the problematic users who generate the bulk of your profits.
The same model works for video games and social media.
Page 7 of the PDF shows the following:
"This project is part of the U.S. 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study (Gonz´alez-Bail´on et al. 2023; Guess et al. 2023a,b; Nyhan et al. 2023; Allcott et al. 2024), a partnership between Meta researchers and unpaid independent academics. Under the terms of the collaboration, the independent academic authors had final authority over the pre-analysis plan, data analysis, and manuscript text, and Meta could not block any results from being published."
Personally I’ve been mentally in a better place since getting rid of my social media accounts during COVID, but it does cause problems because Facebook has become a utility as well (schools and real-life social groups use it for co-ordinating activities).
For example, if you deactivate Facebook but still doom scroll the NY Times et al homepages. Your happiness wouldn’t necessarily change because almost ALL media has adopted the addictive techniques of social media.
In any case I didn't like the amplification - unamplified life is hard enough - so I got rid of it a long time ago and don't regret it at all.
The self selection bias in these ad based invitation studies is just out of whack.
I suspect that those who participate were already considering quitting.
If you were depressed because of divisive politics on social media, then you leave social media during elections where divisive politics is everywhere in the real world anyway.. self-reported depression seems like it would not change much. So the results might make sense as long as they are targeting people that are old enough to be depressed by politics in the first place, and assuming politics rather than body-image issues etc is the main driver.
Some follow up questions.. does social media make divisive political issues in the real world worse? Seems like it! How old is old enough to be depressed by politics? Probably everyone now, which phenomenon is also likely caused by social media. Honestly regardless of elections, you can't actually leave social media by leaving social media anymore, it's kinda in the very fabric of things.
> my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")
Same, I mean this seems to be going against most of the other research on this. For what it's worth, here's a paper with some of the same authors on digital addiction ( https://www.nber.org/papers/w28936 ). Abstract states that
> Looking at these facts through the lens of our model suggests that self-control problems cause 31 percent of social media use.
So.. not necessarily painting social media as wonderful. Social media companies would be interested in research about social media addiction for obvious reasons, but probably do not in general want that research public. Unless of course it hurts competitors more than it hurts them, and this paper is in the middle of drama about a tiktok ban. Maybe the authors just say what people in power want to hear at the time?
If a significant part of someone's Social life is run through Facebook, it's surprising that there's even a net positive in the end.
It also took a lot more than 6 weeks to get acclimated to it. You get psychological withdrawal. It took months for it to feel normal. My income went up a lot in the years after as well (in part due to more time to focus on finding a new job), so that also contributed to my happiness.
But perhaps the study shows that the effect works in the right direction even if small and even when replaced by any other behaviours that cause unhappiness, depression and anxiety.
But I have a hard time ditching Reddit, I canceled accounts multiple times, yet at some point I need to discuss something for which there's only a subreddit online and I'm back at square one.
Politics, relationships, those are not things to talk about. But being able to respond to major FOSS contributors, that I'll do.
I agree to some extent, but even highly specialised / niche topics on dedicated subs are getting slammed by the "hivemind". I guess it's more apparent for non-us users, as we're not the target audience, but the political brigading is showing even on subs like space and ML related. Reddit is now very similar to ~2015-16 reddit when the-donald and other subs really peaked, just the other way around. 10/25 posts on all are bad orange man and bad space man related. The technology sub is a mess of weaponised autism. And then you get the same political bs coming from weird subs, like the cute pics sub, or the knitting sub suddenly having political submissions w/ 3k-6k upvotes, all saying the same thing.
It doesn't help that it is still the easiest "social network" to create accounts on, and bot on. With the advances in LLMs I sometimes truly can't say if an account is real or a bot. And I work in this space...
And I would have these disputes, of course, over utterly trivial things, like how to spell something or where to place the apostrophe, or some manual-of-style nitpick in an infobox. And the disputes would drag on for weeks and we could utterly stall the editing process by disputing on talk pages. And yet we could edit-war over it, usually in slow-motion. And often the dispute would be couched in quite polite language but I would hate the guys' guts.
And the tipping point came when I began to have dreams about Wikipedia, and I would wake up angry. I would wake up fighting. I would wake up and immediately tear into the web browser and catch-up on the discussion, or not, just to post my next riposte, because I'd composed it in my sleep, in my dreamless dreams.
And I woke up angry more often than waking up in any other mood. And I was telling my psychiatrist this, and she said I should probably stop looking at blue light before bedtime. And I was incredulous that she would think if I turned my arguments red-hued that they would anger me less, or cause me to wake up happy and agreeable or something?
And I know I wasn't taking enough medication to make anyone happy, but these guys on Wikipedia really knew how to piss me off, and if you've ever heard of "brinkers" it's a certain type of troll who will play by the rules, and basically trigger anyone with a hot temper, and that triggered person would forget their ethics and commit a fatal error, and get banned, and the brinker would go on to live another day and cause others to fall into similar traps. And many of us do that, if we have the volatile temperament. I lasted about 17 years on Wikipedia without a single block and with some low-grade warnings, but generally a clean discipline record, but finally it got to me.
And a lot of time on Wikipedia I had spent fighting trolls and vandals and very disruptive editors. And I made sure a lot of them were banned. I filed a lot of reports. I was a petty bureaucrat there, filing reports and compiling evidence and arguing cases. There was no shortage of "wikilawyering". From the very beginning I was finding disputes and diving into them. Especially when they didn't concern me, didn't concern any topic I cared about. Just to have the disputes.
And I kept waking up angry. And finally I got control of that. Nowadays I wake up frightened. I wake up traumatized. I wake up scared of something I dreamed about. It's spiritual torment, and it's attributable to nothing I did the night before. Perhaps the F.U.D. of Hacker News gets to me. But not on that level. At least I don't go on crusades or jihads against Wikipedia editors anymore.
Didn't know there was a term for this, good to know it wasn't just me seeing things. Witnessed this happen countless times while assisting with moderation on Discord. The only worse thing than the rules defending these people's behavior is when fellow moderators decide to cover for them too.
Occasionally there are good real conversations where people are generally interested and curious but the most common are either marginally interested or very interested in worthless conflict.
- do not engage with the technically correct but missing the point people
- don’t check your threads if you posted something that the groupthink disagrees with
- don’t try to win arguments if you know you’re right
I can’t really put my finger on why, but I don’t think I believe you.
Sorry, couldn’t help myself.
I know the feeling, but I have to admit that people being obtuse helped me to take them and myself less serious. That said, there are better ways to foster that kind of experience.
Social media only seems to have psychological side effects which aren't as openly visible to our eyes.
It seems obvious to you because it has been made obvious to you. It wasn't the same for people in the first half of the 1900's. The parent comment is making the same point: it's not obvious to most people today, but in fifty years from now, people will look at the research, the decline in the birth rate, the increase of anxiety, and effects we can't imagine today and go "social media has very visible side effects fairly soon, how did they not know?"
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I think the only way out is cold turkey. The number of conversations my wife starts with telling me about some distant acquaintances recent vacation (as seen thru IG) is distressing.
My "social" internet use is more hobby based - forum/reddit hobby focussed content.
And even she does some doom-scrolling though news sites. She claims to know it's mostly nonsense, and then says she has to do it to know what's going on. I try not to point out the contradiction too much, because she does limit it pretty well.
In this study, they paid people $25 to not use it for a week. I wonder if your wife would agree to that. It seems like for most people who are addicted, you need to go "sober" and not use it all.
No phones in the bedroom. No phones at meals. No phones at the park. (Something like that)
Or even a "let's go out for dinner without our phones!"
I also made a little "Phone jail." It is essentially a shoebox on top of the fridge. I announce when I am putting my phone in "jail" as a way to show my kids that I am trying to have a healthy relationship with screens.
My wife and I have both reduced our screen time (though ew aren't perfect.)
The nice thing to do when somebody is behaving poorly, is to ignore it until it becomes untenable (firing them, leaving them, and so on). The kind thing is to address it and let them change their ways.
Wanting to be nice is baked into our social structures - nobody wants to be seen as the un-nice person - but being kind is where relationships and interactions get strong. You just need to do it with empathy.
I was never on Instagram or TikTok, but neither seems to be "social" media as much as a communal fire hose anyway.
I was on Bluesky for a minute, but it was 99.9% people trying to one-up each other with witty or ironic one-liners for clout, with most of the rest being ex-Twitter people trying to keep Twitter combat alive in an arena (blessedly) free of the people who have made Twitter unbearable. I got tired of witnessing a neverending improv open mic while being randomly assaulted by people I agreed with.
So now I'm just living my life, aware of the challenges of the world, but not bathing in them.
Aside from Reddit, my only social media is Instagram. On my Instagram, I only follow people I personally know or national-park/state-park/non-profit conservation accounts. I only like posts of people I personally know and nothing else, and I never comment on anything. I only post pretty pictures of nature with no people visible in a recognizable way. My feed is almost exclusively nature and animals (lots of seals and sea lions) with a lot of scuba diving mixed in. I also get a lot of xennial humor posts too, which I send to my wife and a buddy.
It's a very limited level of engagement, and I'm very happy with it. I don't need anything more.