Posted by skadamat 10/24/2024
In college I was wearing a Halo biking shirt in the computer lab. A female friend remarked, “no one is going to date you if you wear that shirt.” Another friend nearby heard and quipped back, “or only the right girls will date him wearing that shirt.”
You should view your preferences more as a filter. While you should be open to new experiences which may change those presences, if something makes you truly unhappy, you are better finding a partner who won’t force that in your life.
(If you're just casually dating around / looking for hookups, then sure, do what you think you need to do.)
Then when I got in really good shape I thought it was because I didn't make enough money.
When I started making money I thought it was because I wasn't tall enough.
There is no way having social media or not is mattering that much. It is just in your head.
I quit Facebook, other than keeping an account for announcing major life events to the older people who were still on it, because I was frustrated that I never received any posts from family or close friends in the heavily filtered timeline, I kept receiving time-sensitive posts (say about a hurricane event) for weeks after the post was no longer relevant, and Meta's increasingly metastasized privacy practices.
I joined Mastodon and found a calm, down to earth, almost boring place. The decentralized nature of the platform certainly means there are some not-at-all boring parts of the Mastoverse, but it felt more like being in an old-style forum than anything else. I'm still there, though my participation isn't significant.
I tried Blue Sky because all my Twitter people were there ... and it was IMMEDIATELY like hitting a drug after being off it for a while. It was all about main characters and outrage.
For me, in hindsight, it was like sitting in front of a slot machine, feeding in quarters, waiting for one to win. And watching people who did win inevitably milkshake duck themselves out of favor. It was briefly an amazing, buzzy world to share both humor and excitement about whatever events you wanted, but that certainly didn't last.
I don't miss it.
I don't like Twitter much but if I had to pick one or the other it would be a no-brainer.
Now, I do pretend the global list simply doesn't exist and focus on the local instance list and people I follow. I don't know of anyone who uses the global list. I also tend to follow hashtags rather than individuals. (I'm 100% sure that twitter would show at least as much garbage on their feed if they didn't filter, especially these days. This is not an argument for Twitter's style of filtering.)
By 'engage with intent' I just mean not being a passive absorber of the stream of content that's being promoted at whatever site, but instead always have some focus on a particular topic that interests you. Incidentally I notice many of the 'quit social media' stories are published in outlets like the NYTimes which would instead like you to be a passive, well-conditioned absorber of their content, and hence off their advertising stream.
The corporation is run for profit, it doesn't care about the collateral damage it may cause as long as it doesn't impact the bottom line.
Another related post: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo...
From the second link:
> Tenured professors with status in a discipline can tune out the world and do "deep work" peers recognize as "important" before it is done (with accompanying ivory-tower/angels-on-pinhead risks).
> But a free agent, with no institutional safety net, no underwriting of exploratory expeditions by disciplinary consensus, and no research grants, cannot afford this luxury.
With a small local business, social media gives an audience. If you're selling anything visually captivating, it performs well in these spaces. We sell cut flowers on the side, so…
I don't ask these questions out of support of Instagram or Facebook, but I stop in there regularly because I don't know to learn a little bit about the greater community around me. My life is busy enough with work/family.
The cost of all this is being exposed to a lot of attention bait and I honestly don't like how I feel using it sometimes. But we've built up the social media ecosystem as a pillar of society at this point.
Imagine, there are people who don't care that much besides their family/friends circle. Maybe some newspaper/-site from time to time, but why cope with all the other stuff too all the time? Life goes on too if one doesn't know abou the latest stuff.
Imagine there were hundreds or thousands of year of humanity you didn't know how your neighbour is except you walked there.
At least that's fine for me. I don't miss social media (besides HN), and I don't miss anything.
I subscribed to my local NHPR newsletter that tells me local events. There is also local news, newspaper, or radio.
He just uses his wife's account.
It all just seemed like a time waster and not really anything interesting.
I use sites like this of course, and I suppose that is some form of social media though.
> What the market values is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable.
> what the market dismisses are activities that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value. Well social media use is the epitome of an easy to replicate activity that does not produce a lot of value [...] by definition the market is not going to give those activieis a lot of value [...]."
Yet in the years since this TEDx talk we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.
For most influencers, they're not the ones with the wealth and power. Many of them are barely getting by. They rent content houses, clothing, cars, and other things they need to put on their facade.
Pretty much all of the wealth and power is in the hands of the people that employ the influencers.
you will never become a streaming millionaire. talking heads like beast and pewdiepie employ literal armies of Hollywood editors and writers. For every organically grown insufferable content monster created on Youtube, ten more are vat-grown by a billion dollar industry designed to shepherd you into a fantasy consumerist lifestyle.
These powerhouses of industry control the flow of capital at a level you will never be able to. they secure rights to music and video clips at rates you could never get, have tie-ins to major brands media and celebrities on day one, and are programmed with an endless firestorm of bots and preferential algorithmic treatment on every FAANG product in order to guarantee their success.
To be a professional streamer usually takes a combination of talent and concentration that most people simply don't have. But to say that you can't become one? LOL.
The AVERAGE millionaire streamer on twitch is so painfully unedited that they end up getting banned a couple times a year for saying stupid things live on air. Twitch and their sponsors practically THROW money at them to spend an hour or two to sponsor content. There's an entire backend bounty system which is only available to partners which will pay you based on your audience size. I've seen a guy with 3K viewers get a $30K check for 3 hours worth of sponsored content.
Facebook is for boomers.
Twitter is weird and we all realised how pointless it is to spend time falling out on there.
Instagram feels a bit long in the tooth.
LinkedIn is a parody of itself.
Reddit feels like it’s growing but I think that avoids the worst of social media.
TikTok and YouTube shorts seem popular but aren’t really social media. It’s just time wasting junk.
All in all, social media feels like it peaked a while back.
I'm not going to message random people's Instagram unsolicited, I would find it annoying to on the receiving end of that. My mother and girlfriend have both complained about receiving unwanted attention from unknown men through social media.
Honestly trying to understand your point of view, do you think dating apps should be free? They definitely aren't free to run.
It also helps immensely to curate lists of interests to help filter out the noise and politics.
"Breaking news" used to be relevant in that it was news that "broke into" existing programming. It didn't necessarily make people's lives better but at least it tended to cover matters of high national interest like Presidential assassinations or disasters or wars. But now that everything is breaking news all the time everywhere, the term no longer means anything other than being a synonym for "current news," which isn't even really impressive anymore.
My life would not have been impacted in the least knowing about the Trump assassination attempt a few hours later (or even the next day), rather than minutes after it happened.
The MSM has enough problems these days with journalistic integrity and practices. I don't think the teeming mobs on Twitter are an improvement, though.
If you feel you have any kind of mood or attention challenges, as many now do, you might want to double check if it's something you should be optimizing for.
There are exceptions; if you have a flight booked that day and didn't learn about the Crowdstrike thing till you got there, that'll be a problem, but it would've been a problem regardless of your immediate knowledge of it.
If it’s an event that you’re not particularly interested in, then there’s not much value in getting details in advance.
Another thing, it’s not just hours. Sometimes it’s months (or in rare cases years) before a recurring topic on social media finally makes it to the news, because it’s controversial/narrative-defying, so it takes them a long time to work out how to talk about it. I don’t want to mention specific examples because it would be distracting, but there are a few topics I see mentioned daily/weekly on the news today that were pretty much absent a few years ago, yet were heavily discussed on Twitter at the time, and I am very glad I was aware of them.
What is actionable about knowing about the assassination attempt 1-2 hours before others? Did you act differently based on this information? Did you benefit from this sufficiently to weigh up for the time spent on Twitter 20 times a day at the off-chance of catching a breaking newsstory before MSM would?
Nobody should pretend that Twitter is a place where accurate information travels at light speed. It is in desperate need of moderation and being run by a man with clear monetary incentive to mislead the public.
I agree, but I think a lot of people who use it view it that way.
I don't think you wrote that the way you meant to.
Although the line can get interesting. When I was active on Reddit I would argue that Reddit was not SM. From my perspective, Reddit was end stage web forum technology and link aggregators
All the bespoke forums of the late 90s and early 2000s died for the most part and there is now a subreddit for every niche hobby that used to have a forum
This stuff all predates Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, livejournal, that I would argue were new paradigms and the start of what we know as social media
However to anyone not online during those times, Reddit is just another site where people post details of their own lives. Reddit responded by adding profiles and followers and all kinds of pseudo SM features
It also seems quite professionalised in that the big content producers fill the feed.
There’s also something about it being video which makes it feel harmful but in a different way than a text based platform.
I tend to think of TikTok as more of an entertainment platform rather than peer to peer social media.
I’m not the target audience though so could be wide of the mark!
This is one of the reasons why I have returned to print media. Unfortunately, a lot of magazines and newspapers are also really bad now also. The Wall Street Journal has fallen off a cliff, turning into something between Cosmopolitan and Business Insider, and I am cancelling my subscription this year. The Economist has done a good job keeping up the quality level. The fact that something is in print does not necessarily make it better if all the writers have brainrot or the content is optimized for digital engagement first.
The internet has become a medium for poor people to watch unlimited user-generated episodes of Maury and Jerry Springer. The only internet I really want to use is to work, buy products, and read my email. Getting older is bad enough without the computer trying to make me dumber on top of that.
Really?
Reddit is a cesspool because they drove off the power users in favor of normies who won't block the ads.
The coming of the current cluster fuck was clear decades ago. Anyone who wasn't enamored by meme illiteracy never took that train...