I'm genuinely interested in the world around me, and I like being entertained as much as the next person, but the problem with social media for me is that it creates a simulacrum of the world which does not correspond to the tangible reality I see around me.
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.
> It creates a simulacrum of the world which does not correspond to the tangible reality I see around me.
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.
This is a really important comment, and I think people don't understand just how much the "call is coming from inside the house." We have really, really polluted our minds with all this trash outrage content. TV might have been stupid, but watching too much Cheers or Simpsons just never did this kind of damage.
A minor point might also be that TV was far less addictive (non-linear, personalized,...) and consumption was significantly harder (carrying a TV is difficult, even in watch format)
Back in the day, when you went onto the internet, you exited the Real World and went into the Internet World. I remember when like, there was one internet-connected device in the household, it was a computer with a keyboard that you sat down on. And it worked like you would "log on" to AOL instant messenger, and then when you "logged out" you'd have an "away message" that would indicate that you were offline, living your life, IRL. How quaint, right? You'd never have an "away message" nowadays -- you're never "away"!
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.
It was even called cyberspace.
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.
BTW. how do you explain this without invoking 'back in the day'? I sound like a retiree!
Totally with you on the facehugger thing.
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.
This is a cool perspective. I never really considered that there were that many people for whom there's no difference between Internet Life and Real Life. We used to call these people "chronically online." To me, Internet is still something I sit down to deliberately do. I don't carry my phone around with me unless I plan to use it for something. Otherwise it sits in a drawer (and often has no battery left by the time I get around to needing it for something).
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.
> These millenial terms of art have almost entirely disappeared. When's the last time you heard IRL?
Pretty recently. I use IRL plenty! Terms like LOL are also fairly alive.
Anyways, your comment is quite insightful.
> Pretty recently. I use IRL plenty! Terms like LOL are also fairly alive.
Millennial.
/s
> But the terminally-online space has seeped into real life all over the world.
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."
> The Wired can’t be allowed to interfere with the real world!
> 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 think the experience of jumping between destinations where people might be specifically interested in a sort of retail American culture is probably quite poluted unfortunately. I'm Canadian, but I don't feel the same sense of "lost cause" when I just talk to people I know in my community or at the gym where conversation goes marginally deeper than the most superficially relatable bits of sensational media.
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.
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I think this is true but the original point still stands. Online world now definitely plays a bigger role but I'd still suspect that for the majority online issues/drama are still a small % of what their real world looks like. Despite the media (social or news) bombarding the space with their 'model' of the world.
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
A great point! I've experienced the same.
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.
This resonates deeply with me. I don’t have any social media accounts, I’ve never been on tiktok or instagram, and the one social media I did have (facebook), I deleted 10 years ago. Yet I still can tell when there’s a new meme or trend. This is new though. Only in the last year or two have I felt like social media has really invaded offline spaces.
Baja Divide?
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.
Yup. Interacting with the Mexican rancheros was really nice. But so many of the American cyclists I shared the BD with were almost caricatures of highly-online, outraged people. Why do I need to hear from people I just met talk about “TERFs”, or other Tumblr- and Twitter-disseminated memes, or be asked to take sides in political races I had never even heard of (because I’m not even from their country and state and don’t follow their local politics)? It was something that we foreign cyclists noted and wanted to get away from.
My recent experience with social media has been very different. These days I'm mostly active on the Fediverse, and in contrast to the News, my timeline doesn’t feel like a model of the world at all. All I see are little snippets. Many individuals are sharing their feelings, creations, thoughts, or seeking advice. The posts don’t feel like a collage meant to capture the state of society as a whole, but rather as windows into different people’s lives.
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.
If you have customized your fediverse experience to avoid big social themes, you are arguably using it wrong. Several major founding figures of the fediverse have stated that they want trans and disabled advocacy to always remain central in the fediverse even as it grows larger. If people are able to use the fediverse without seeing issues of political concern to their community, then that represents a failure or abuse of what they created.
I think that’s a stretch. They may have hoped for the Fediverse to be used a certain way and/or by a certain kind of people, but the network itself and the design thereof don’t really reflect, support or enforce this in any way. (I also haven’t read any statements by said figures on this, although I know some of them do care about these topics a lot.)
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.
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My question for you all is: do you consider HN to be social media?
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.
Yes, and it is addicting as any of the others. I quit Twitter and Bluesky a while ago, locked myself out of my Reddit account, but HN is one of the hardest that I found to rid of.
The reason I stay on HN is the signal to noise ratio is considerably higher here than on any other site.
It isn't even close. Digg.com used to have it and so did reddit, but it degraded so much that they became unuseable.
More interesting/well thought out bots on hn
To me there were two ways of using social media: #1 interacting with people I know about things in my life and #2 interacting with third-party content and then people I don't really know.
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.
I like the fact that there's less politics - I know that many people might call it censorship or something, but I feel like it does do somewhat to reduce doomscrolling, as it is one of the topics that people are deeply invested about. Still, there's that mix of "A Modest Proposal" style faux-intellectualism (low-effort social conservatism, kneejerk reactions to technology, toxic startup grindset positivity), that I still tend to get sniped by.
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).
I wonder if we can even call what happens here with politics "censorship". Apart from things that get flagged, political articles, or anything that causes flamewars, are still there if people want to keep posting/replying... they just get dropped out of the homepage. So it's really anti-doomscrolling. And the exact opposite of what Facebook/Twitter/Instagram do!
> 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!
> they just get dropped out of the homepage. So it's really anti-doomscrolling
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?
Is it because of moderation or because people come here to learn about STEM & tech?
You could have HN for politics, or art and philosophy.
That split can also be recognised by the change in naming- social networks vs social media.
It's the only social media I use. I used to use Reddit too, until they blocked usability/accessibility tools.
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.
> It's the only social media I use. I used to use Reddit too, until they blocked usability/accessibility tools.
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.
I don't think it's quite social media as most people think of it. I treat it more like a message forum.
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.
It's not engagement-optimized social media (good old sepia orange, sorted by upvotes only) but it is social media, albeit in a form closer to private communities. Engagement-optimized social media is definitely the problem for me, hours and hours can fly by. HN + no recs/history yt has been the trusty setup for a while.
> do you consider HN to be social media?
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.
YT: Yep the only pay-for-no-adds that I gave in to.
I've taken the position that if something is too expensive without ads, it's too expensive for me. My life is blissfully, nearly entirely, ad free. The only downside is I'm an alien on my own planet, blind to the continuous swamp of advertising everyone around me lives in.
I feel you on that, I almost never see ads and don't know how people subjugate themselves to it (by not running an ad blocker of any kind, nor paying to remove ads)
I think HN has aspects of social media, but I wouldn't call it that. I do get some similar feelings and "rewards" from reading and commenting on HN that I used to get with Facebook, Instagram, etc. But I quit FB & Insta years ago because those sites were overall making me feel bad and unhappy. HN isn't perfect, and I do occasionally get those negative feelings, but overall I enjoy reading the articles people post, and reading and discussing people's reactions to them.
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.
Social media can mean so many things these days, I can't tell anymore.
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.
> Comment sections - encouraging pile-ons, and vitriolic debate
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.
It's crazy how much vitriol there is in local newspaper websites, and this is something that's been going on since the 2000s indeed. It wasn't just flamewars, it was law breaking stuff.
A bunch of the local ones that were super vitriolic just started removing them 5-10 years ago. Godspeed.
Ha, I just recently had uBlock Origin remove all HTML elements on news sites that 1) link to comments (in my country this is usually in the form of comment count right after the headline - and typically the comments are printed in red, ugh), and 2) allow me to comment (usually a button at the end of the article).
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.
A lot of sites removed even tranquil and harmonious comments sections due to fear of legal liability, and also because moderating them was a cost center. IMDB used to have a comments section where film buffs could talk about cinema, often in much greater depth and competence than one would find on e.g. Reddit today. Lonely Planet had the Thorn Tree forums where one could discuss travel with a real community of fellow travel nerds. All gone.
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 was wondering if the removal of IMDB's comment section coincided with Amazon's purchase of IMDB, but I looked it up, and apparently Amazon has owned IMDB since 1998?! Somehow I thought it was more recent, like within the past 10 years, at most.
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.
Yeah, IMDB losing its discussion board was definitely a loss for the planet.
Nope, but only because I use it anonymously, same as reddit. To me, context is the key to every designation, so it's not whether a site is or isn't social media. Some platforms support social media usage, but it's the way the individual user uses it that makes it social media to them. I personally do not have a social media presence, and can't see ever wanting one.
EDIT: At best, HN is a link aggregator in the form of a discussion forum.
I browse TikTok and Instagram anonymously. Does that mean I'm not using social media?
You're not doing the "social" part of it, but, depending on how you browse, your habit might still be unhealthy, driven by the engagement/addiction algorithms. That's up for you to decide, though, of course.
It means you're not using those sites socially, so you're not using social media, you're just browsing media.
idk, i've never had a non-pseudonymous social media account, but that didn't stop the algorithmic feed pull
>But I still visit HN and YouTube multiple times daily.
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.
It's not the algorithmic feed, it's the karmic feedback hit ...
Yes, absolutely. Because it has a gamified comment ranking system. IMO anything where a thumbs up makes your comment more visible is Social Media.
This is actually a really good "bright line" distinction between something being a forum and something being "social media". On any site (forum, S.M. or otherwise), comments or articles must necessarily be ranked top-to-bottom, where top usually is the most visible. How this ranking happens often is the main driver of what the site is like.
- 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
> User-voted: 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.
A funny thing; the Ars Technica front page sorta feels like social media—they don’t quite algorithmically rank the comments, but they do hide very downvoted comments (as a sort of community moderation feature), and sometimes the author of an article will highlight your comment (making it visible on the article page). I would call it exactly the dividing line between social media and not social media, to the point where I’m not sure which side it falls on.
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.
The definition of Social Media [1], as opposed to say, forums, email lists, or comment sections typically includes algorithm-driven content pushes and a social network. In that sense, while HN facilitates communication between posters, it is not what is commonly referred to as "Social Media."
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.
For myself, HN yes because I interact. YT, no because I rarely even like a video nevermimd comment or I teract with anyone, although I do sometimes read comments. YT is basically equivalent to TV for me, but I have shorts blocked.
No but I do consider reddit to be and yet hacker news is in essence very similar to a specific subreddit.
It's mostly the community (and moderation on HN) that sets it aside.
I think the right way to frame it is that the particular format of a site doesn't necessarily dictate whether or not something is "social media". It's important to look at how people actually use the site[0], as well as whether the voting/ranking/whatever system looks more like a popularity contest or objective moderation. It usually won't be 100% of either of those, but it will certainly lean one way or the other. I think HN leans toward objective moderation much more than Reddit does, even though HN's moderation is certainly not fully objective.
[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.
I think this is a good analogy, though something I've noticed is that as reddit has taken their product direction more towards social media, it seems that it has been harder to maintain quality in smaller discussion subreddits, because popular posts get picked up and injected into non-subscribers' feeds, so the ability to have a subreddit approaching HN's level of conversation is reduced.
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.
More than 15 years for me and the day they switch off old.reddit.com is the day I leave.
Non corporate and non-addictive social media doesn't really count. For example, Upscrolled [1] is an ethical social media that's doesn't aim to be addictive (among other ethical aspects). I don't think it's the same as being part of the dopamine machine like on IG.
[1] https://upscrolled.com/ - fyi I work with them
Yes, mainly because of upvotes.
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.
I would like to say no, but I do feel the same kind of dopamine hit from checking HN as I do other sites, and that makes me uncomfortable.
I don't have my login cached on my phone, plus HN isn't really great on mobile, so that helps a lot. I do find myself spending too much time on it on desktop.
But the toxicity levels I find to be lower - definitely not zero, but much lower than the actual social media where the toxic content is actively prioritised.
Agreed, and that lower toxicity combined with the limited amount of content is what has kept me from trying to leave. It’s the nicotine patch of social media.
I petition to make the message notification, and karma count spoilered until clicked on
I don't really. I'm not on any of the other social media sites anymore (including LinkedIn, to the chagrin of many professional peers), but I remember them being very different from my experience here on HN. I choose what I want to read and engage with here, and there's almost always something interesting to me. I'm not force-fed anything.
It's social media, but an older form that's halfway between the forums and BBSs that used to be dominant and the modern stream-of-ads style. It's not quite as conducive to discussion as a forum with sequential threading but also not quite as detrimental to it as the more ephemeral reaction-based platforms.
The problem for me with social media is that it triggers intense envy. People are constantly talking about their lives, and everyone's doing well but me.
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.
> People are constantly talking about their lives, and everyone's doing well but me.
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'm not talking about that stuff. I'm talking about simpler things like people earning enough money to live on their own.
No website makes me feel worse than HN on that front so big disagree on that.
Out of curiosity, why?
This site is filled with highly successful people who make/have made fortunes (or at least extremely good salaries) by playing around with computers. My failures are my own fault, but that doesn't stop the irrational feeling of jealousy when I read about jobs doing interesting things that pay more than 2x minimum wage and don't involve standing for 10 hours a day.
A lot of people wildly exaggerate on HN. It's become a trope whenever the discussions drift into salary: Everyone on HN works in FAANG, makes $400K, drives a Maserati, has a supermodel girlfriend, and has two vacation homes in Tahoe. I wouldn't work myself up over it if I were you.
40k and works in an office is more than enough to make me jealous. FAANG numbers are so far from my frame of reference that they don't feel real enough to care about.
If this horrible site with its intentionally addictive algorithm traps you here like it has me, you will eventually realize that's not true at all. This website has its uber successfully celebrities and hordes of glazers who appear in their wake: swillison, tptacek, Arathorn, gwern. You just have to pay attention to usernames.
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
> its intentionally addictive algorithm
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'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."
It doesn't need to be personalized to be addictive, in the same way that tobacco is addictive without personalization.
I didn't say it was a necessary condition, I'm saying that those are the typical ways in which social media sites are designed to be addictive, and this site lacks all of them, so I'm wondering how it can be said to be intentionally designed to be addictive.
"Internet points go up" is the most basic of basics when it comes to making an addictive website, and this site definitely has internet points.
> This website has its uber successfully celebrities and hordes of glazers who appear in their wake: swillison, tptacek, Arathorn, gwern. You just have to pay attention to usernames.
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.
If that's a problem you're experiencing consider speaking with a mental health professional. That is not normal.
I considered it, but honestly, social media just tends to have that effect on many people. I don't think humans were built to have this much awareness of how everyone's life is going.
This is totally normal, especially if one is following social-media content related to travel or consumption (e.g. hobbies requiring the purchase of gear). It’s so normal that it is often expressed by the widely understood acronym FOMO, and indeed, it’s commonly talked about as one of the drawbacks of social media today.
Not only is it quite common, a large motivation of many social authors is to induce this feeling in others.
I do yes. It's not as bad, but it definitely feeds you brain dopamine hits and quick rewards.
No. Only if you are being completely literal. It's 100% text based, no media embedding, no direct messages, no user feeds. It's a forum. I don't think anyone considers text only forums with no bells and whistles to be social media.
I don't consider HN, Reddit and YouTube to be social media because they are not "social" imo. It's more of a discussion board than social as I don't know anyone in person.
Also the lack of any pictures on HN makes it even less social imo.
"social" is the most important word. I'm surprised that so many people in this thread focus on algorithms, ranking and addiction. These things can be part of social media platforms, but they are orthogonal to what social media is: A platform that is centered around the identities of its users and the relationship between users.
Hacker news is just a good old web 2.0 website.
Reddit has paid ads that appear as threads with auto starting videos AND posts that look like highlight replies but are actually ads.
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.
For me it falls under the "social news" umbrella. It's content aggregation and commentary. I am not a huge fan of short-form video content, especially if it loops or automatically queues up another video, so HN is perfect for me.
If you can avoid reading too many comments I find it to be fine, I too have ditched all social media except YouTube and HN. I find YT doesn't pester me with toxic content, and HN you kind of just gotta read a few comments only :-)
I don't think the comments are the problem. It's the doomscrolling. On YT, that would be shorts. Here, I guess it would be skimming thread titles and occasionally checking out the link. More convo = less of that nonstop dopamine uptake train. At least I think.
Yes, absolutely
in the same way I consider forums and chat rooms a form of small social media
> That said, YT in particular has a tendency to draw me into endless shorts holes.
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.
Definitely wrt the dopamine. The shorts are the main issue there for me, and I’m eager to tune my unlock to get rid of those. The content I’m on there for is long-form educational and it’s the best medium/source for that.
Of course. It's also the one of the most addictive ones.
HN, to me, is unlike anything else. It has a "feed", but it feels more like a forum with one category for threads.
If you want to avoid shorts, unhook seems pretty good at disabling parts of the UI to hide things
No. It's not manipulating you.
That is highly personal.
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.
Yes I do, because the HN comments are a big part of why I come here.
I think it depends on how one interacts with it. As far as I know it doesn't have a personalised feed and I'm seeing the same front page as everyone else. So I mainly use it to scan once or twice a day to pick out if there's anything going on in the world I need to know about.
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.
It’s an addictive site, yes. But IMO it’s not social media.
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.
reflect on what about social media you do not like and whether HN encourages or discourages said behavior
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No it is not. Here’s why:
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.
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Yes.
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.
I would encourage people to consider permanent solutions to use social media more intentionally instead of taking a month off here and there. Two things that the apps really want you to do, but that you should resist as much as possible, are doomscrolling through meaningless content and compulsively checking apps or websites in case you miss out on interesting updates.
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.
30 days is long enough to form a habit, so it might be a good way to see how you can live without social media. My life is unquestionably better without Meta/Twitter/etc., but I have a hard time convincing anyone that that is the case.
I have been off social media completely since 2016. Only have a Facebook left for family and the occasional marketplace browse. When I do check it I only log in via browser and spend maybe 5-10 minutes on the site. I posted a few times that people should contact me via email if they want to chat though so far no one has taken up my offer.
If it works for you, great! I've tried that before and it didn't work for me. I like the stuff I find on Hacker News, and I need Instagram to keep up with my friends, so this was the solution I came up with mostly to keep myself from compulsively checking both of those in an unhealthy way.
Keeping up with friends in my circle means a group chat. We moved around a few platforms but settled on google chat as that was most common among everyone. HN isn't very social to me, just a water cooler.
> I need Instagram to keep up with my friends
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.
A good chunk of the social events I attend are coordinated mainly through very busy group chats, and then announced with Instagram stories (yes really, even though they disappear after 24 hours). I'm not really in a position to change that either, so I'd rather get the 1 update from Instagram than sift through hundreds of group chat messages.
I agree with you in principle, though. There are better tools for all of this that they just won't use.
I occasionally feel like I miss out on impersonal events that do only get announced that way, and I definitely miss out on a bunch of group chat events, but personally I guess I just feel like that's ok, and if I was meant to be there someone would have hit me up. There are exceptions, like recently having attended a wedding (very personal) with a specific group of close contacts, but I received the invitation personally. There are some people that I've lost regular contact with or didn't form friendships with on the basis that they relied entirely on group chat to organize things, which I just refuse to participate in, and that's not for everyone. If nobody can be bothered to contact me, then I can't be bothered to show up. That said, if I was trying to monitor meetup groups or raves or something, I'd probably just do what you're doing.
Yeah. I will say, the best place to start is just deactivate one for 30 days and see whether you miss it.
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.
Nothing wrong with that. One thing I like about my approach though is that I can get what little value there is out of platforms that rarely ever serve up anything useful to me.
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.
My November schedules are getting crowded. No shaving, no faps, no socials, ...
These things should free up your schedule :)
At least you can still vember, right? What's that? Oh...
I use the following extensions to help with managing my social media intake while on my work computer:
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.
I'd argue that "No Socials November" should be "No corporate Socials November".
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.
I disagree. While smaller networks are a good thing for the social media landscape, ultimately people should go seek other activities where socializing is a secondary benefit. Rather than spending time on a social network. If we take a month to refocus on non-social-first activity we will be healthier 1000000x as communities.
Lemmy is great btw. I started putting “lemmy” instead of “reddit” in my searches and it often works.
I ask everyone to never stop creating, never stop sharing. And when your friend shares, appreciate it, for what it is, that it is theirs, that they did it, and that it is them.
Draw, play an instrument, paint, write a poem, sing, cook, shoot hoops, talk about books over coffee. Be personal.
If you or anyone you know uses Instagram, you can select the logo in the upper-left to change the feed to “following”, which is a chronological list of posts from people you follow. My wife didn’t know about this and I saved her from endlessly scrolling reels.
>set my YouTube to stop suggesting to me via algorithm
It keeps suggesting based on usage though.
You may clear the watch history once in a while to reset.
Also history can be turned off. Added benefit that after that it only shows few shorts before blocking them.
I came here to ask if there is some way of fixing this. I'm guessing not.
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.
You can subscribe to channels you like, and then just look at your "Subscriptions" tab to see new content from them. They do stick a Shorts feed in there however which is annoying.
Stop looking at the homepage and go to your subscriptions instead.
There is a plugin called Unhook. It allows to remove shorts, recommendation feed, or even set subscriptions as your default page.
Already broke it unfortunately by posting on HN.
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.
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?
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.
I also have the power to disable all the contraptions I've built.
Im moving my email away from Google. The final frontier.
Make sure to use your own domain.
And use a TLD from a well known registrar
Why does the registrar bring well known matter? If the registrar evaporates, it's still your domain (my understanding; correct me if wrong). Related question: would you say that dynadot qualifies as well known?
Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but since nowadays your email address is basically your online ID card I would do the maximum to keep it.
> If the registrar evaporates, it's still your domain.
I have no idea, I assume there's some special procedure ?
The thing is that technically it's not *your* domain, you're still renting it at the end of the day.
And no idea about dynadot sorry.
Personally, I have domains at OVH and Cloudflare
Well technically you're not renting it from the registrar either.
there's some good options out there, good luck! I'm a happy Fastmail user.
I was only really considering tuta or proton (due to encryption at rest) leaning towards tuta.
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.
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?
Yes. “Socials” has been functionally interchangeable, especially in written form, for probably 2+ years now, in my experience.
this might be a generational thing or a geographic thing, my nieces and nephews use the word "socials" while I always use "social media".
Not where I live if you're older than middle school age
Yes
Does RSS count? I've appreciated having NetNewsWire and its iCloud sync. Having no urge/obligation to comment or retoot is a different experience.
Damn, I might try this, just to get a better perspective. Does HN fall within “socials” though? :-)
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.
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.
No disrespect but isn't this just a blog?
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?
HN is social media.
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.
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.
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.
I'm gona try, X Reddit HackerN Insta Cheers
Can we have ad-free February?
Or, alternatively, if X% of people are against advertising, can we have X% of the year without advertising? Sounds fair to me.