I've deleted all my social media and haven't looked back. It's safe to assume Meta tracks every little detail about you: what kind of content you like, how long you look at each post, your political stance, etc. Every single metric you can possibly think of... they're collecting.

Humans are predictable (more than we'd like to admit). Now they have AI to crunch all that data and find patterns to predict your next move and find out what content will give you the most dopamine. Escape while you can.

I remember trying bluesky and realizing it isn't just the services I don't like. I don't like ... what all the social media users like. The heavy memeification / gamification for attention. Trite posts, posts that seem like the middle of a conversation ... really all negative bits about internet discourse.

But most everyone there likes it that way...

The only social media I really use is linkedin and X. I find linkedin useful for following companies and colleagues, and im pretty picky about who I accept or request as a friend. I also find X to be insightful, but I only use it to follow people for stock research.

Given that even reaction videos from modern Jerry Springer figures with 20 million subscribers can attract 20,000 comments that all parrot their guru and demand doxxing of the target or worse, it is no longer a mystery how totalitarian states form.

Maybe that is unfair to Jerry Springer. He at least heard both sides of a story.

The pendulum has finally swung the other way. There is no longer the need for people to shamelessly air their life on live feeds, and when something serious happens, people prefer to share it in a messaging group.

The extreme gossipy porn of the past two decades has finally worn off.

I think it has little to do with privacy concerns as they are hypothesizing.

We used to call them social networking sites, now they're social media sites.

But I think the problem is that people don't contribute very much too them, so if none of your friends are sharing things that interest you then the media part has to come in as a fallback

It's so frustrating when this is brought up as if this hasn't been the case for almost 10 years now.

Social media does not only spread bad ideas, but degrades the symbolic machinery people use to form ideas in the first place. It trains reflexes where thought should be. There is no symbolic lattice for things to land and it turns people into reactive zombies.

Does anyone remember Path?

Limit circle social network, I think capped at 50 people. Beautiful app, and I remember it was a great place to spend time when you really just wanted to be with true friends.

Time for someone to reboot this

I actually used hacker news to get off of social media 2 years ago. I consider it ‘medically assisted treatment’ like suboxone for heroin addicts.