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Posted by speckx 1 day ago

No Socials November(bjhess.com)
130 points | 168 commentspage 2
dollylambda 1 day ago|
I've managed to kick all social media except Github. That for me is the most difficult if you want to collaborate on software projects.

No, I don't consider hacker-news to be social media, rather a news aggregator with a message board. Although, I would frequent here less probably if I was on other social media.

bfkwlfkjf 10 hours ago||
HN is social media.
jvalencia 1 day ago||
My first thought was why would someone halt their socials? Too much holiday time? Then I realized this was social media :-P. Socials to me are precisely NOT social media. Is this a common language usage now?
klardotsh 1 day ago||
Yes. “Socials” has been functionally interchangeable, especially in written form, for probably 2+ years now, in my experience.
numbers 1 day ago|||
this might be a generational thing or a geographic thing, my nieces and nephews use the word "socials" while I always use "social media".
nxor 1 day ago|||
Not where I live if you're older than middle school age
topaz0 1 day ago||
Yes
sehugg 1 day ago||
Does RSS count? I've appreciated having NetNewsWire and its iCloud sync. Having no urge/obligation to comment or retoot is a different experience.
josefrichter 1 day ago||
Damn, I might try this, just to get a better perspective. Does HN fall within “socials” though? :-)
ChrisMarshallNY 1 day ago||
I just stopped using Facebook, a number of months ago. It just wasn't giving me anything, and half the posts I made, were flagged as spam (of course, with zero appeal ability; when you appeal, and every time, it's denied, then that's no recourse). I tended to do "Lookit this!" types of posts, where I either referenced a project that I'd released, or some Web site that I thought was worth sharing.

I've never really used Twitter, and I don't browse YouTube, or bother looking at comments.

I had stopped reading my feed, a couple of years ago. It was just old white people, screaming at each other.

> set my YouTube to stop suggesting to me via algorithm

This suggests a less-than-total commitment to backing out. I would consider "no social" to mean not even visiting the site, or running the app.

In my case, this is about the only place I engage in anything like social media. I would have to stop reading HN to be "no social," and I'm not interested in doing that.

huijzer 1 day ago||
Also due to being dissapointed with social media, especially how it always makes you feel that you know more while you actually go deeper in your bubble, I created a mini blogging platform mostly inspired by X/BlueSky called fx [1]. You can use f**k X as a mnemonic device for the name. It's running for a few months now and works very well for me. Whenever I have a random thought that I want to publicly write down, I use my phone or computer to quickly put it on my site. Unlike X or other social media sites, the post is fully under my control. I can edit it, delete it, share it, link it, and it's all backupped in GitHub.

[1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/fx

poolnoodle 1 day ago|
No disrespect but isn't this just a blog?
huijzer 3 hours ago||
Yes but with a few features that are like social media. For example, you can create a post without a title. Also, you can create a post by typing a text and clicking on publish, so without any other intermediate step. I guess you could call it a blog. Potayto, potahto?
catapart 1 day ago||
My last remaining social media account was with bluesky and when many of their visible employees took the opportunity to belittle and dismiss their community with that "waffles" horseshit, a month or so back, I dropped off of that one too.

I really thought they were on to something with the "make it a protocol" thing. Now I see that no social media will satisfy me. I don't WANT a platform where "everyone can say anything (so long as its legal and you don't say anything bad about fascists so the fascist government will leave us alone)". I WANT a platform where productive people show what they produced and discuss it along with the things other people produce. Even if that product is "jokes" or "writing". I just want a marketplace of ideas that have some grounding in practical reality. Not a hyper-void filled with nonsense thoughts and ideologies that can withstand rounds and bouts of academic scrutiny but would wither instantly in any practical application.

I don't want a place of arguments and gossip and attention. I want a place of content and challenge and speculation and application. I don't want social media, even for what it purports to offer. I don't want to "be in a room with everyone in the world". I want to "be in a room with people who are doing wild an interesting things and want to do so in a community of others like them."

I don't want the unwashed masses. I want self-selection and communities.

tl;dr: I want forums that work like feeds. Small groups of like-minded people engaging with one another. I just want it to WORK like social networks, with following, and topical follows (hashtags), and content feeds.

CactusBlue 1 day ago|
You made a right decision; The big-world social platforms are doomed to fail, as they have quadratic scaling costs. I am a big proponent of "curation over moderation".

I am working on Mikoto Platforms, which is basically designed to be somewhere between Discord and Notion, but open source + decentralized. There is no global feed; in fact, some users thought it was a bug that it took you to such an empty screen when you first started it. Platforms are what you make of it.

catapart 1 day ago||
Oh, sweet! This is an awesome-looking app! The tree-view of the discussion subjects or threads is pretty inspired. I really like that idea, especially as a way to moderate a thread that is purely managerial, rather than punitive or rewarding. Of course, it would be great if a discussion could always be efficiently branched by the participants in real time, but I imagine any good "posterity" thread would benefit from some maintenance. In any case, it's something I hadn't really considered before. Cool stuff!

I mean, the whole app is pretty impressive. It's clear, from the blog posts, that we're of like minds when it comes to the "good parts" of the internet and what makes the "bad" parts so frustrating. If I used Discord more this might mean more, but I'm pretty satisfied to swap out my Discord usage for Mikoto platforms. Seems like a win to me, at least.

All that said, I am still left a bit unsatisfied as far as a social media replacement. A "chat" presentation eschews the kind of "press release" posts that social media accommodates well for creatives. At the very least, I wouldn't feel "normal" posting announcements that didn't necessarily expect follow up engagement in a chat-style environment. Posting "here's this new thing I did" on a social media feed without any follow up is...lonely, but not particularly uncommon. But posting the same thing to an empty or unresponsive chat room is...somehow sadder? To me at least.

dlm24 1 day ago||
I'm gona try, X Reddit HackerN Insta Cheers
65 1 day ago|
I've never had a problem with social media usage - and I'd be surprised if other developers here haven't enacted their own solutions to prevent doomscrolling.

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.

poolnoodle 1 day ago||
I also have the power to disable all the contraptions I've built.
leonhard 1 day ago||
How can you do that in the apps? Or do you just do it for the websites and not install the apps in the first place?
65 1 day ago||
I only visit social media in browser, I don't have any social media apps installed on my phone. Safari supports user scripts which I have installed on my phone.