I would go further and say that social media is just another kind of "news". The News, essentially, takes an incomprehensibly complex world and distills/simplifies it into something you can understand. In the same way that one creates a mental model for how a complex system works in order to better understand it. That's a useful thing!
But the distillation/simplification process introduces biases and distortions in its model of the world, which can lead to the model being extremely inaccurate. And with social media that inaccuracy extends to representations of your friends, family, and your self.
To the extent that The News, and Social Media, creates a reasonably accurate model of the world around you they're useful, but I take it all with a heavy dose of skepticism.
5–10 years ago I would have agreed: “The real world is so different from the terminally-online space.” But the terminally-online space has seeped into real life all over the world. For example, I have traveled the developing world a lot in the last two years, and it’s unbelievable how many young men want to talk to me about Andrew Tate and related things when they see I’m a man from the West. Even in countries with shaky English skills, certain online memes are big.
Or take when I bikepacked a remote route down Mexico that is popular with Americans: in spite of this route being largely a two-month break from being always online, the conversations when those American cyclists met up were often indistinguishable from the social or political outrage that engagement-maximizing platforms stoke. Even if you disconnect, you can’t repair the damage.
These millenial terms of art have almost entirely disappeared. When's the last time you heard IRL?
Now, you (the general 'you', I mean, who spend 5-7 hours a day on social media) are always online. So when you log off, you're entering the Offline World, where you have to do some stupid BS that is totally boring and unstimulating. You wait to log on to figure out what happened in the Internet World, which actually has inserted itself and taken place of the Real World. Before, the important stuff, socially, culturally, politically, happened offline. Now, it's inverted; the important stuff socially, culturally, and politically, is happening online.
Unfortunately, this happened without any of us consenting or really knowing that it was happening. And like, parent comment put it perfectly: it's a simulacra of reality, with deeply bizarre/non-human scale rules, some explicitly built (algorithms, content policies, video filters etc.) and some totally implicit (viral behavior, memes, misinformation, AI).
The AI thing is also fucking crazy and it's happening in the Internet World. Y'all ain't seen nothing yet. It will get so much weirder. imho, it's horrific. The internet is like an alien facehugger for your mind, it will just totally fuck you up; the more you use it, the more mentally fucked up you will get. Most people have the alien facehugger totally strapped to their face and they don't even know it.
The way I think of it is in the early 2000's you used the internet, but now you have to take care that the internet is not using you.
I feel like cyberspace was never meant to use your real name and identity. The entire point was that you were free from the constraints of the real world to be something else.
Cyberspace is still alive and well though at the individual level. The only social media I have is twitter with no followers and I have never posted anything. I don't cultivate any kind of online "brand" of my real world self. My twitter is basically an art machine that shows me wonderful works of art. Even the slightest mention of political nonsense, I block the sender no matter who it is.
Society is a lost cause in this regard but the individual can still enter cyberspace if they want to.
The real lost cause is even the word "simulation" is lost to a science fiction computer internet fantasy as opposed to the process of creating and sustaining simulacra like most people are spending their lives doing on social media.
Nothing that happens on the Internet really affects my life. Someone could be flaming me on Twitter right now, and I don't know and don't care, and it will never reach into my real life. When I log off for the day and someone replies to this thread telling me I'm wrong, I won't know it until tomorrow morning when I log back in, and it won't have affected my sleep or anything. You can still keep Internet and IRL separate.
Pretty recently. I use IRL plenty! Terms like LOL are also fairly alive.
Anyways, your comment is quite insightful.
Millennial.
/s
That's Baudrillard's point, who popularized one sense of the term "simulacrum." Not quite real, but not quite fiction either - something that straddles the boundary between the two as "hyperreality."
> No matter where you go, everyone’s connected.
https://youtu.be/24rPXmWWXek?si=QSn7ysb2OEm8OwzH
I know that HN culturally frowns on video links and unexplained references, so to be explicit:
The seeping of the internet into the real world is an important theme of the anime Serial Experiments Lain, which is excellent, and if you generally like anime and resonate with the kind of stuff that people are bringing up in this subthread, then I recommend giving it a watch.
I talk to my friends in their 30s about their relationships or lack of, the hobbies we enjoy, adventures we could go on, difficulties or success at work, family life, economic stuff, random ideas. Online stuff comes up almost only ironically at this point. Granted, I do specifically narrow the people I maintain ties with to only those I can engage with at that level and/or who are otherwise fun to be around. If even a noticeable minority of conversation was chronically online garbage or fake culture war crap, they just get muted/blocked like the rest of them and a friendship doesn't flourish, usually because in real life we can work through our real disagreements if they come up at all, but if it's derived from a presumption we should both be more mad or more aware of nonsense we don't need to think about, it's far more difficult.
It has always felt to me like an amped up version of what the news is. As someone who has largely spent most of life as an immigrant, from a family of mostly immigrants all across the world, we always find it amusing how you get messages from people about the big x thing going on in whatever country you are, as per what is going on in the news/social media, and the person you're messaging is literally unaware that that is a big deal or is affected by it even indirectly enough for it to register. Anectodally, that happens far more frequently now than it did 5-10 years ago
We reshape reality to match the mental models we create. To the extent this has always been the case I have to accept it, but it feels like we're in a logarithmic curve of that pattern becoming faster and more powerful.
One of the things that I really enjoyed about bikepacking (GDMBR, various others) was that when you really get out in BFE, you meet people that live very different lives than you. They were also almost always quite nice, which was a pleasant surprise to this coastal city dweller.
I don’t think that’s how everyone feels on the Fediverse; browsing the federated timeline or viewing the public posts on some large instance doesn’t feel much different from the other big sites. But your own experience on your personal timeline is truly your own, and you decide what to make of it. I keep seeing personal snippets because I choose to follow people who post a lot of personal snippets that I’m interested in seeing. I get a relatively low amount of global politics and polarising topics because I seldom follow people who talk about those a lot. I quite literally get what I ask for—no less and no more.
At the end of the day, I think the key is understanding your network and adjusting your expectations. Following someone means you’ll be seeing their posts. So if you don’t want someone’s posts on your timeline, for whatever reason, just don’t follow them. Problem solved, easy as. (Then again, I imagine getting to see only the content you want to see might be more difficult on the more corporate networks, so if that’s the case, you might need a better social network.)
… and perhaps I should add that seeing only what you want to see won’t help you avoiding a simplified view of the world if such a view ultimately is what you want to see. Being in charge of your social experience is only useful if you're in charge of yourself. If you're not, you might need to change that before any social network, no matter how user-friendly, will be able to benefit you.
In practice, there is no authority nor built-in mechanism to decide what people should be talking about on the Fediverse. Everyone is free and even encouraged to host their own server and make it about whatever they like. I’ve seen guides explain how federation works and encourage newbies to pick a server they like and try to have a fun experience, but I’ve never seen them present specific topics as inherent to the Fediverse, much less mandatory. And that doesn’t feel like abuse, but the way it’s intended to work, and has been advertised to work from as far as I can remember. And frankly, I find it disturbing to think it should work any other way.
I got off traditional social media (twitter, fb, insta, etc) years ago and feel all the better for it. But I still visit HN and YouTube multiple times daily. For the most part I find those to be information-dense and part of my continual personal development practice. That said, YT in particular has a tendency to draw me into endless shorts holes.
It isn't even close. Digg.com used to have it and so did reddit, but it degraded so much that they became unuseable.
To me Facebook, Instagram and Twitter went completely downhill when it became about #2 for me and my social circle. Twitter was the first, followed by Facebook and then Instagram. I just deleted them in that order. To me they became divisive, angry, political, it made following certain friends impossible, it made people addicted to it, it generated influencers, it made certain friends behave strangely IRL (communicating via meme language only).
HN is definitely #2, but way less political due to moderation.
For interacting with the people I know, I try to collect Signal/Discord contacts for those who I find valuable enough to talk at a future point, with the end goal of moving all contacts I know to Mikoto Platforms (a messaging platform that I am building).
> Still, there's that mix of "A Modest Proposal" style faux-intellectualism that I still tend to get sniped by.
Hah, same, this also grinds my gears!
Can those two sentences really live together? I mean, if you go hunting down content and more importantly discussions outside the homepage, isn't that some flavor of doomscrolling?
You could have HN for politics, or art and philosophy.
YouTube has social media features, but they languish in comparison to its use as a video broadcasting platform. I suppose for people who regularly comment and chat on streams, YouTube is a social media platform, but for the vast majority of its user base, it's more like Netflix than Twitter.
Same. Did lemmy for a while but fell off it. Was just doing the reddit thing again. I’m guilty of that here from time to time but I feel a little more accountable on HN so I generally find I can keep my cool more often than not.
To me, social media is a broadcast type of media where people are posting for their specific followers and people are following individuals, so you end up with people posting specifically to get more followers (maybe not initially, but it's what fuels further posting).
Hacker News is social, but I don't go here to follow individuals. I usually don't even look at names of who's commenting.
Yes, because I read/interact with comments. It's possible to just peruse headlines in which case it's less social.
> YT in particular has a tendency to draw me into endless shorts holes
Yeah, especially since there are no horrendous ads. YT on my AppleTV has become unwatchable with minutes of ads for minutes of content.
Each of these things need to be studied separately, IMO. As different social media sites have/less of each of these:
* Algorithmic feed - encouraging rabbit holes, reinforcing clicbait and ragebait
* Comment sections - encouraging pile-ons, and vitriolic debate
* Short form content - TikTok videos, etc, quick, snackable content and destroying people's attention span . Then there's the overall ad-based incentive to put all these together to keep you engaged. TBH the fact hacker news has a different model, makes me feel better about it, rather than caring if its social media or not.
The early millennium blogosphere had comments sections, and lots of vitriolic debate. They inspired XKCD 635, after all. I think the problem today is not the opportunity to comment and debate, but rather the fact that the phone keyboard is the input device for the majority of internet users. Population-wide, phone keyboards discourage longform text and nuance, even if some individuals will claim they can comfortably type just as much as on a physical keyboard.
A bunch of the local ones that were super vitriolic just started removing them 5-10 years ago. Godspeed.
News comments in my country have really become almost completely pointless. It's ridiculous or even incredible - honestly, you have something like 1 sensible comment out of 30 or 40. Things started to go noticeably downhill during Covid, and it got worse with the war in Ukraine (we are battling Russian trolls over here). In this light, the uBock Origin solution has really worked wonders for me. Having also removed some other "cruft" like content marketing stories etc, I can read news in a calm, peaceful atmosphere again. Not thinking about commenters (dubbed "commentariat" by a witty local intellectual - scornfully hinting to "proletariat", obviously) or commenting at all.
Beyond the decline of longform text due to phone keyboards, I actually think that the restriction of active communication to a handful of detrimental social-media platforms is a big part of why people report feeling more lonely today. Back when the blogosphere and Phpbb forum ecosystems were healthy, people talked about finding friends around the world online.
I guess Amazon was content to leave it alone for many many years, but more recently decided to push harder at monetizing it. Even the mobile IMDB app now has ads for random products on amazon.com. It's gross.
I never participated in IMDB's comment forum, but I would sometimes read through some of it, and generally found the quality of discussion to be very high.
Certainly I waste some amount of time on HN when I could or should be doing something else, but I think I've also learned a lot from HN, and get to read reasonable points of view that differ from my own.
I think HN's user moderation system (as well as HN's guidelines, and how the in-house moderators moderate and engage with the community) also push more toward HN being a discussion forum and not social media. While HN's moderation isn't perfect, it's not the engagement-at-all-costs popularity contest that plagues most social media sites and makes things unbearable.
EDIT: At best, HN is a link aggregator in the form of a discussion forum.
Youtube is definitely the greater evil here. Anything with an algorithmic feed and an engagement-based UI will be harmful to you. HN could be harmful in a much more mundane way, the way that some kids could get addicted to Pac-Mac. There's nothing really addicting built in, but some people are susceptible. When it comes to algorithmic feeds, everyone is susceptible.
- Chronological (either first on top or last on top): Not social media
- Site-moderator curated: Not social media
- User-voted: Social media
- Algorithmic (usually based on some opaque measurement of engagement): Social media
I don't think user voting automatically makes something social media. I think there's a blurry line between voting/"likes" and user-driven moderation.
User-driven moderation can certainly develop aspects of a popularity contest like social media has, but often it looks like a somewhat hopefully objective assessment of the quality of a comment, regardless of whether or not the moderator agrees with the point the commenter is making.
I'm not saying that HN's user moderation is fully objective. It certainly isn't; I don't fully moderate that way, myself, even. But HN's user moderation is absolutely not the same as the liking done on a Facebook post or its comments.
Meanwhile their forum feels more like an old school PhpBB thing. Actually I think it was PhpBB at one point, until a recent redesign.
Now their front page comment section and their forum have exactly the same back-end. (Like if you leave a comment on their front page, it also goes into a thread in their forum). Largely overlapping community. But, the vibe in the two different areas is completely different.
So Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, BlueSky, YouTube, LinkedIn... Yes. HN, Slashdot, no. Reddit is now social media; it has both networking and algorithmic pushes now, though in it's better days was more like HN or Slashdot.
It's mostly the community (and moderation on HN) that sets it aside.
[0] This use can be heavily influenced by how the owners of the site push things, e.g. HN's guidelines and in-house moderation decisions vs. Facebook's algorithmic news feed that chases user engagement above all else.
Increasingly it seems users have no concept of subreddits at all, and simply consume a singular home feed (I don't actually know what the new user experience of signing up for reddit on the app looks like, but this is my impression), more like the major social media platforms.
I've been using reddit for a long time and still check it, but I've become considerably less engaged as they've moved towards this kind of lowest-common-denominator slop trough feed approach.
[1] https://upscrolled.com/ - fyi I work with them
Back when voting systems were fairly new to the social web, there was a lot of resistance for this reason. Now its become the norm.
This website doesn't have as much of that. It has a much larger focus on content than on people, so I can just read in peace.
It's not problematic in the same way.
I wouldn't trust any of it. A huge amount of Social Media is phony "lifestyle porn." A lot of these things you think your "friends" are doing is totally fabricated, photoshopped, and/or exaggerated. Did you know it's fairly inexpensive to rent an hour with a private jet, parked on the ground, so you can take pictures in it and pretend to be rich for social media?
I for one feel intense jealousy about these grifters. Gwern especially -- the guy got lucky buying Bitcoin early and has spent enough of his early retirement writing that he has convinced a huge number of people (especially here) that he's some kind of expert, through sheer volume of writing!
He's a nobody! fuck I hate this website and I'll leave the moment the algorithm is no longer designed to keep me trapped here.
until then, you're stuck with me
It's a single list that everyone sees. No personalization, meaningful customization, recommendations, or notifications. I'm not sure how it can be considered "intentionally addictive."
And yeah, every forum has its minor celebrities. People can be a bit silly like that. Doesn't really bother me.
It doesn't need to be personalized to be addictive, in the same way that tobacco is addictive without personalization.
I guess it's a good thing I don't pay much attention to usernames then? Other than dang, pg, and one guy who shares the same username as someone in a PC gaming community I'm in, I couldn't name any usernames I've seen frequently on HN.
Also the lack of any pictures on HN makes it even less social imo.
Hacker news is just a good old web 2.0 website.
YouTube has insidious ads and go out of their way to attack any method of circumventing them.
It is an offense to posit that ad-free original content spewing fountain that is HN in the same league as Reddit or YouTube.
in the same way I consider forums and chat rooms a form of small social media
Does it matter if it's social media or not? I'm sure you could do a lot better with that wasted time and dopamine.
Some people are lonely and use the internet as a way of reaching out to other humans. And in those cases, HN comments can become your social media fix.
But if you just use it for news, keeping up, reading discussions, chiming in if you have something important to add, then no I don't consider it social media.
Then for one or two threads I'll perouse the comments to see what our particular class of HN-esque people think about a topic. About once a month or a fortnight I might even post a comment. But it all has to be taken in context. Half of the time I'll close out the comments section immediately because it's clear the whole thing has gone down a tangent in not interested in hearing about. Another risk is when talking about topics that the HN crowd knows nothing about, which in my case is primarily economics where some of the takes are borderline delusional/ignorant and backed by a kind of tech worker/startup ideology.
The anti-politics thing is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it's one of the last sites on the internet where there is comparatively little vitriol and thankfully, comparatively little populism. On the other hand, it means defacto support for a dominant ideology and compressive censorship of anything that threatens that ideology, and obviously that ideology is the one that supports tech workers, startups and venture capitalists.
I think taking all those things into account you can still get value out of it but know what you're engaging with. But like the other forms of social media since the death of forums, it's not made for serious engagement or deep thinking on a subject, and discussion can't really be anything more than temporally ephemeral.
At the very least it's borderline whereas the other forms of social media can basically be judged to be explicit write offs in my opinion.
For me one of the primary factors in determining the social media that I really want to avoid / does the most harm - is the primacy of the individual profile. It’s always seemed to me that the most toxic and appallingly addictive sites (X, Fb, Insta, any of the X-clones etc) are all about views, likes, re-posting, and have a user right at the centre of this.
Whereas for me, HN is about the topic, and not the individual. You are interested in a topic, you read it, you vote it up. Yes there are people profiles but they’re significantly unimportant - there’s karma but I’m not sure anyone really looks at that. People aren’t “followed”.
Controversially I sort of apply the same thinking to Reddit. Yes there are individuals and yes the profile side is a bit more visible but you generally (or at least, this is the way I use it) are interested in the topics and not the people.
Broadly, my take is that the less narcissistic something is, the better.
Hackernews is more accurately called a forum, and forums have been around way longer than social media.
The key defining aspect of a social media platform, is that the members are minting social currency and building a network. The social net worth of users comes in the form of followers and influence. The content you post on your profile is an asset, it farms for you while you sleep.
On social media, your media is socializing for you long after you’ve posted it. It exists forever, welcoming people to like, to comment, to subscribe, etc. On a forum, your post is read for a few days then never again, as people move on to newer posts. On social media, algorithms keep your content circulating to fresh eyes.
On hackernews, there are no followers or following, there is no network being built. Your comments are not assets, they are ephemeral ideas that quickly dissolve and are never read beyond the first few days they exist. People’s reputation depends on their good name, and most people will not even remember the vast amount of people they talk to in the comments. Often people don’t even look at usernames. There is a karma system, but it is of limited value in terms of influence, it is used more as a sorting mechanism for good posts within comment sections.
On true social media networks, your profile stats are like a credit score. You can post stuff and if you’re a big shot you instantly collect the attention of a vast number of people and easily pick up new momentum.
On HN, you have to fight for attention, and it doesn’t matter if you are a long time user or a brand new noob, you will fight just as hard. There is no long term reward for writing good comments, only momentary glory. This means there is little incentive to chase trends. If you miss a trend, no one will notice or care, and you gain nothing by following the trend. A key aspect of being socially active is that you have some awareness of societal trends and are able to keep up with them, it shows you are conforming to the larger conversation in society and are relatable. This is what social media is about.
So the takeaway is, just because you are socializing on a site, does not mean it is social media.
But, you can still be manipulated even on a forum. Look at the insane cargo cult around Rust that formed here on hackernews a few years back. You can even be manipulated into becoming enraged, but at least because there is little to no monetary gain from writing anonymous comments on the internet, it is the purest form of trolling.
People have quit HN. Very valuable people who found the shift in community was distasteful and appalling.
I don’t consider YT social media myself because there’s nothing social about binging Sam Ben-Yaakov videos.
For myself, I've decided to direct anything and everything possible to my email (with plenty of filters to keep my main inbox tidy). For apps that don't offer email notifications, I use MacroDroid to forward Android push notifications to email. There are also plenty of ways to forward RSS to email.
I batch process my email 1-3x/day, and anything I don't want to see during this time is not worth seeing at all. It gets ignored, filtered out, or unsubscribed from.
Wdym? I think this idea should be included in your top-level comment about things Instagram wants you to do. I can believe it's likely that other people have very different relationships with people that are dependent on a particular platform, but I do my best not to accept that and make it clear that I probably won't check anything other than a DM whenever I feel like it, which consequently categorizes Insta as an unimportant means of connection.
Put another way, my relationships are defined by the communication and connection we have in real life or DMs regardless of the platform. Seeing posts does not count as friendship to me, and if I don't hear from someone or think about them because I disabled my insta, then it wasn't meant to be.
A sibling replyer said they use group chats, which is fine for some, but I find has personally just become another passive comms dump that I actively refuse to participate in; there's too much noise.
All that said, a real friendship formed in person after a real time investment can survive with very little or zero fake interaction from social media. It's ok that I see my bros from my home town maybe once a year. If I fear not receiving any direct communication from anyone should I decide to dip out of social media, then it's possible I have no friends and I should sit with that feeling until I can take action on that. People get too complacent imo thinking their posts count as friendship.
I agree with you in principle, though. There are better tools for all of this that they just won't use.
It turns out I didn't actually like any of these apps. If I did, they wouldn't need to play all these dumb games to keep me engaged.
Facebook, for example, hardly ever gives me any value, but sometimes it does. If I used Facebook like most people, I would have to check it regularly for that one time I get something valuable from it. The downsides would far outweigh the upside, so it would make sense to delete it. But instead I can go months without ever opening Facebook, and then get notified when there's a post I actually care about, and give it my attention on my own schedule.
Draw, play an instrument, paint, write a poem, sing, cook, shoot hoops, talk about books over coffee. Be personal.
Focused Youtube: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/nfghbmabdoakhobmimn... Removes all recommendations and just keeps a search bar. No shorts rabbit holes or algorithm-based media consumption
StayFocusd: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfmg... I like using the nuclear option. Blocks a bunch of sites I have that are in a list, such that I cannot open them at all.
Places like the Fediverse (Mastodon, Peertube, Lemmy, pixelfed, etc) are that non-corporate non-gamified breath of fresh air.
Sure, there's less people on those networks, but that too is a great benefit - less bots and less "temperature". And 10 years ago, in 2015, we already saw videos analyzing social media hatred with CGP Grey's "This video will make you angry" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
But why anger? Because anger and screaming at people is a guaranteed way to make "engagement", which seems to be the predominant way to prove to advertisers of "people per month". But is it good? Absolutely not. Its poison, slowly but surely. But how do we avoid the poison? The root cause here is money from advertising, which is from engagement.
But you cut out the profit motive, you also cut out advertisers, and you also cut out arbitrary and forced anger-gagement. And that, is the Fediverse.
The opposite is your Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit. And they're full of bots, quazi and directly hateful content posted for "engagement", and the same set of hate memes populated froom 1 site to all the rest by bots. No wonder people hate this type of social media. It's wholly toxic and poisonous.
Lemmy is great btw. I started putting “lemmy” instead of “reddit” in my searches and it often works.
It keeps suggesting based on usage though.
Youtube lately seems particularly bad in terms of showing lots of "shorts" all over when I have zero interest in watching them, but also suggested videos seem somehow aggressively chosen. I'm not sure how to describe that, but that's what it feels like to me.
I have user scripts on both my iPhone and my computer that completely disable the Instagram recommended feed. I have disabled YouTube thumbnails and the YouTube sidebar. /r/popular or other popular subreddits get automatically redirected to my Reddit homepage which has a lot less garbage on it. I have completely disabled my Twitter feed. I even have certain domains removed on HackerNews and made an extension to only update a few times a day. And a ton more.
If you're a developer and you want to stop doomscrolling... you have the power.