This advice to quit social media is always a hit on HN. When I was 10 years younger I read the same thing on HN, was thoroughly convinced and quit social media. I even followed the advice of trying to stay in touch by email. Sure.
Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on. I asked them why they didn’t tell me and they were confused. They said the posted it on social media. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely. I have a few close friends and that’s it.
Maybe that’s an ok tradeoff to make, but it’s worth knowing that before getting into it.
> Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on
This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post blasted to hundreds (or thousands) of people. Or, to put it another way: if you mattered, you would've gotten a direct message or call from them.
I'd argue that social media has normalized keeping up with people who aren't supposed to be part of your life forever. But, we should take a step back and realize that not everything should or will last forever. If you cross paths again then you can catch up, but having life updates constantly? No thanks.
> This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post
The landscape of human relationships is deep and broad an varied, and if making bold assumptions about what other people should value is your starting point, you're liable to miss a lot of potential connections.
You write like somehow there would be something to miss out on by not valuing keeping up with people who are far away and most likely have no place in our lives.(by far away I mean you don’t actually get to talk or meet with them or even chat by messanger or so, even if they could live in the same city - I have friends who live far away but we actually meet at least once a year and chat once a week we are far in distance but not far in contact)
I would argue that there is much to miss on by wasting time looking up Jenny from primary school when you have your kids, friends and family who you meet day to day.
There is actually an option to run into mental health issues that we know social media is causing.
Maybe I could've worded that better, but I was just providing perspective on the obsessive nature that we have on social media now. IMO, it's not "normal" to keep up with acquaintances and people from past times. They're no longer part of your life and you need to let go. If others find the life updates useful and beneficial to them, then so be it. I don't care either way.
Due to some unknown circumstances this might not be true for this person, but it’s certainly true for a lot of people. Social media used in that context is effectively automating human relationships. It used to take effort to have a handful of friends, now you can have hundreds. Somewhere along the way though, friendship turned from active effort to passive status.
>you're liable to miss a lot of potential connections.
are you really? If you only notice that it's Bob's birthday because you get a FB reminder and the only form of communication is a post on their timeline once a year that's not a connection, that's like talking to your neighbor about the weather out of courtesy because it's awkward to say nothing at all.
The reason a lot of people miss out on life nowadays is not because they have too few connections but because they waste their time on fake ones. Life's short, instead of trying to warm up some high school friendship that's going nowhere, focus everything you have on the few people around you that matter. Cutting connections is as valuable a skill as making them, and an increasingly lost art.
> a call from them
um... will someone else tell him/her, or should I?
>Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on.
TBH I have no idea where or if my friend post stuff on social media anymore. I know maybe 1 person that posted updates often on Facebook, and that was pre-pandemic. Some post more business stuff on twitter.
But overall I just kind of accept that sometimes I'll meet up with someone after a few years and realize "oh yeah, they're married now, took a trip to Japan for 6 months, and is getting some local attention from their band they made a few years ago"
Of course, the first thing men will say after that meeting is simply "I've been fine, can't complain. How about you?". Maybe they'll mention their new job, but the rest will come after some 15-30 minutes of observation and chatting about the newest media.
>but I know a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely. I have a few close friends and that’s it.
likewise, but I'm not sure if social media would have saved that for me. It's definitely a cultural issue, especially with men.
Problem is facebook decides what you want to see unless you go to the feed which they make hard. Even then the vast majoritiy of what you see is garbage they share instead of life updates that you want.
I wish there was a better way but life updates still a posted there only. Facebook is the only one that has a concept of this is a for my friends only.
This is just said from my perspective and I understand that others might not share it -
Fine with me. They're acquaintances. Nobody has 200+ "friends", we have a handful of them. Is it nice to know that someone I hung out with a handful of times twenty years ago but otherwise don't really know and haven't said a word to in a decade made a big life change? Sure, I guess, but for the most part it has absolutely no bearing or impact on my day-to-day life nor the lives of those most important to me, and that's where I'm putting my energy.
I think it's perfectly fine to learn about huge life updates from people the next time you actually speak with them. That seems normal.
Seeing people's updates on a wall isn't truly keeping up with friends. Keeping up and staying in touch requires consistent deliberate effort from both parties, via phone calls, messaging, and seeing each other in person. If you're not doing that with someone, then yeah, learning about life updates when you actually chat and catch up just makes sense to me.
No, I disagree.
This is about lifestyle ergonomics and your community. Like it or not, social media has significantly reshaped the world. Issues aside, it has brought people together and made communication significantly easier than in the past. There is a reason 1/3 of the world is on Facebook.
So, my point is that if you're choosing to be difficult, that is fine but you need to accept the burden falls on you. This is similar to adopting a vegan diet - your body your choice, but don't be intentionally difficult at dinner parties.
Personal example here: I've cut down social media significantly, in my case all notifications are off even if the apps are installed. So you're not bombarded and can engage on a cadence that makes sense to you. That said, I need to dedicate time to checking up on extended family, friends etc - as otherwise you do miss announcements and major events.
Plus it's a lot more personal and meaningful when you can discuss the changes directly rather than on an impersonal "public" forum.
Losing touch with old acquaintances is just part of getting older. fwiw, my experience is that I stayed on social media (although I don't post anything, I just keep the account) and still missed huge life updates. I reckon about 80-90% of my FB friends don't post to FB or Insta anymore. They just don't post anywhere.
I'm sure the new FB AI will generate synthetic life updates that will seem just as convincing.
Yes, everyone uses social media differently and gets different things out of it.
I've got my Facebook feed so well-curated that it rarely causes me distress. And like you, I like keeping up with old acquaintances, seeing their kids' milestones, etc. I get real enjoyment out of that.
Instagram I post pics when I travel and otherwise ignore it.
Twitter OTOH is probably a net negative for me. I still keep it around to follow sports pundits during games, and I usually only follow my sports list. But I do check in on my main feed during major events, and then inevitably end up doomscrolling. For example, the LA fires hashtags are so far beyond toxic - nothing but engagement farming, malicious misinfo, political nonsense, etc. Amidst all that crap, maybe 1 in 10 tweets has good info, but I have to destroy my psyche to find it.
I quit on and off and came to the opposite conclusion. The acquaintances I never heard from, we weren’t really in touch in any way, seeing their posts had just tricked me into thinking we were.
And that’s okay. It means 5 years later when we cross paths for real there’s lots to catch up on.
I cannot say much as I don’t know the people.
Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on. I asked them why they didn’t tell me and they were confused. They said the posted it on social media
My impression is „how can one be so self centered” to imagine everyone HAS to know about their big event if they were not part of it and were not invited directly.
Is that person Kardashian family or something ;).
Even if it was a wedding and they posted photos. I wouldn’t remember a week later - if it is a person I see once in 5 years face to face and I was not invited. There are many big life events of such people.
Heck, I missed huge announcements when I was on social media because social media thought that the stuff they had to show me was more important.
If neither you nor they bothered reaching out, did either of you actually care? It might be a good time to reevaluate the nature of your relationships and start maintaining the ones you actively (instead of passively) care about outside of corporate shopping mall websites.
People drift apart over time sometimes. I’m on Facebook still (TBH it is hard to see much by my friends, between all the algorithmic stuff). Despite being on there, there are some folks I’ve just kind of… lost contact with.
Maybe have a text chain for your friends or something? The folks I really expect to know things about… they’d tell me while we were interacting.
> People drift apart over time sometimes.
It's admittedly a little easier to drift apart though when you deliberately delete your access to the place where they post all the shit that's happening in their lives...
That seems intuitive, but most of the people who I’ve stayed in touch with aren’t really active on Facebook anymore or don’t even have accounts. I wouldn’t be surprised if social media following people provided something like disincentive to actually stay in touch for real. No need to perform the checks that maintain the relationship if the info is all posted right there.
But that’s also a guess. I suspect neither of us have any data to back up our guesses.
The messages about going cold turkey are popular, but you do miss out on a lot. I deleted all my social media in 2015, and didn’t mind too much, but years later when I met my wife (and there was more pressure to be social) I made accounts again so people could message me and I’ve been able to hold back from spending all my time doomscrolling.
I think the social part of social media can be good for us, and we have to figure out a way to avoid the toxicity. I’d like to see more posts about how to bend the algorithm to show you less toxicity- at least on Instagram I’ve managed to use the “not interested/relevant” button enough and turned on content filtering that it mostly shows me wholesome content. I don’t know if everyone realizes that if you hate-watch a video or hate-read a post then the algorithm sees that as engagement and will show you more. You have to nope yourself out of the dark corners as fast as you realize where you are.
I just deleted my FB account yesterday. Believe or not, your experience makes me feel OK about it because even with FB, I’ve drifted apart from all but a few close friends. That makes me think it’s the norm and social media doesn’t do nearly as much to keep us connected as it would like us to believe.
Unfriending specific people in a huge cull of otherwise nice and well meaning people you no longer care about but are chained to by inertia is torturous. Much less psychologically burdensome to unfriend everyone by nuking the account and start over with a clean slate somewhere less corporate and shitty.
In general I agree with you that there are some tradeoffs to make. IME it's still worth it. For example, my mental wellness has improved immensely. Also, I tend to use my time in more purposeful ways instead of wasting it doomscrolling.
Regarding life events: I quit all social media about 5 years ago[1]. People I care about know about that, and if they want to tell me about life events they do it with other means. Those who don't, they weren't really friends, just acquaintances. I am OK with that.
[1] with the exception of Linkedin, which I hate and never use, but I have been asked by people in my company to keep a profile for PR-related reasons.
Lots of other replies already so apologies for adding to the clutter, but this sort of message always appears and it feels super dated. Like, 2003-era sentiment about the Facebook heyday.
Facebook is like a ghost town now from the "social" and family perspective. I imagine some circles might be strong on it, but from every time this comes up it's clear that the vast majority of normal people have largely abandoned it. They didn't delete their accounts, but updates are incredibly infrequent. The vast majority of Facebook activity seems to be people who don't really know each other in various conspiracy-oriented or political groups, sports arguments, etc.
As to huge life events you missed out on, even in 2003 if you only knew about something because of a Facebook post, you aren't very close. And the old acquaintances thing grows super old super quick. Everyone joined a bunch of graduating class groups, connected with old coworkers, and then... eh, turns out there was a reason we all lost contact.
In 2025 people use social media overwhelmingly to interact with strangers, not friends or family. Largely to argue and get angry and try to convince and coerce and convert. I mean, HN fits the bill in a microcosm.
Social media is a cancer on society. It has made everything much, much worse. It lets the ill-informed and unintelligent find each other and pump each other up. It monetizes and profits off of the absolute worst human traits. If Meta collapsed into a blackhole, Xitter disappeared, and so on, the world would be a much better place.
I totally understand you. What find is that when I need to get into touch with old acquaintances an call or email seems to do just fine. It is a bit more inconvenient.
Another reason to not use big social media is that I would rather not have my network to be exploited by some big corp for who knows what they do with that info.
I would distinguish somewhere my friends post stuff for "friends" from social media.
Lets take my friend Em as our example. If the typical message from Em says "Where are you? What time did we say we'll meet" that's a messenger app, that's definitely not Social Media. It might be a fucking SMS, but if it's a WhatsApp or a Signal. it's all the same for this purpose and that's definitely not Social Media.
If the typical message from Em says "They don't know about my trees" and involves an in-joke reference to a movie that six people saw with her in 2008, that's maybe some sort of "social" experience but it's clearly not public. We have a Slack like this, created under pandemic conditions and named "Cabin Fever Mitigation".
If the typical message says "Aw! Piggy" and has a picture of a guinea pig, that is now shading into Social Media. Probably some of the people "following" this feed don't know who she is but they like guinea pigs, or they like her art, or something similar.
And yes obviously if the typical message is a reply to Elon Musk then it's social media and it can fuck off. But hopefully your friends aren't making crucial life updates as a public address to any watching fascists ?
I think if people want to 'quit' social media, then just use it to keep up to date with friends/family. You follow ONLY friends/family, and limit consumption to only that, don't consume content outside of that circle.
These full fledged 'quit' posts are nothing more than an attempt at a political statement that falls on deaf ears.
I've quit social media (only use Signal and SMS/telephone/email). My wife functions as my secretary in this. I get the perks without the BS. Win-win. Only thing to remember is SMS/telephone/email aren't secure.
also eschewed social media. it's a different way of relating. normal people now react the way minor celebrities used to react when I'd meet them and not know anything about them, either insulted or very relieved.
I think it has made me a better friend in some ways, as I'm a respite from the narratives they sustain, but to others, also a kind of legacy friend who may be an attachment to an old life, and who isn't part of their present.
there's an aspect where watching their social media would be to participate in the change in their lives, and separating from it (perhaps selfishly) preserves things that might be left behind. but on the other hand, I'm interested in relating in one way too. social media profiles are strange because they say, "see, I am all these things now!" and in not seeing them, it declines to recognize those, like an old uncle you're always going to be a kid to because that's how you always were.
I have more old friends than most, and I often think about whether there is an essential self we see in each other, like a character that all these stories happen around where we can peer across them to one another, protagonist to protagonist, as companions in the real. or are the relationships artifacts of the stories, and when they change, we do? it's prob a mix, but I don't think those essential(ist) aspects of friendship survive being mediated by the churn of updates and the curation of a public persona.
anyway, being outside social media is a very different way to relate and not everything survives.
Because the reasons to quit social media aren't that it isn't useful and that, absent the market conditions it exists within that denotes it's ability to continue existing, it isn't a good product. People love the stuff, it's why it's been the primary use case of the internet, arguably since it's inception depending on whether you consider early stuff like BBSes and news groups/email newsletters to be social media. We had early prototype social media functionality online before we had commerce.
The problem is that these platforms aren't satisfied merely providing a third place within which we can find and build communities, speak with and learn from others with similar interests, and otherwise, be human. Instead we each become a hamster locked in our own little cage, and the principle reason we're there is to sit on our wheel and run, and while we run we're shown a handful of things from people we actually want to hear from and see, and interspersed with those few things are a ton advertisements for products we don't want and aren't interested in, a few we might be, AI generated nonsense that prompts us to engage with the platform to bump metrics up, the dipshit of the day who's said something infuriating that makes us click into the comments and make sure they're getting dunked on (and possibly join!) appropriately that the social media site dug up from obscurity and is now parading to the entire world, and of course, the same posts again.
Genuinely, the way people talk about going back in time to kill baby Hitler, if I had a time machine, I would spend the rest of my days sabotaging whatever countless number of people invented or would invent the Curated Fucking Timeline, on however many platforms it was invented, by however many data scientists. I would argue it is the single most destructive thing Silicon Valley has ever turned out.
It's how humans lived for all of history before the Internet. Seems healthier to me. If you're not close enough to someone for them to want to share updates with you specifically, or to see them and catch up, why do you need to know every update on their life?
Tbf I'm in a family group WhatsApp chat, which I guess fulfills the "life updates" part for my family. But no public social media, don't see the need
I wouldn't delete social media accounts because they might become available to register for malicious actors who can then impersonate you. Keep the accounts, just don't use them any more.
Agreed. I’ve done this and I’d you have an existing fan base on those platforms, a final post that explains where you are and why you’re not active can help keep those folks engaged.
Plus I feel like I’m still costing the platform the fractions of fractions of a cent to keep my data stored, replicated and active somewhere
No worries, they more than paid for that storage with the data they sold off. At least before GDPR rulings shut that down.
There isn't anything unique about your account on most social media platforms. This isn't a "plant your flag" situation like when trying to prevent identity theft. You don't need to register your account before a bad actor does. Sure, I created an online account with the IRS, credit bureaus, etc. before somebody else could. That's important because they are tied to unique identifiers like your SSN, etc. But somebody could just create a social media account impersonating you even if you already have an account on that social network. There isn't anything enforcing the uniqueness.
My Twitter account has 140K+ followers and impersonators keep making copies that they use for cryptocurrency scams. So that's why I'm personally a little sensitive to deleting it, even if I've mostly committed to leaving that hellhole.
What does keeping the account actually do to prevent scamming? They’re going to scam regardless.
Counter point - why is it an issue to wipe the account of its content and update the bio to simply say the owner is no longer on social media and any other accounts you come across are not them.
Removing your account completely from Twitter makes it immediately available for anyone else to take, and for larger accounts you can bet theres a whole host of automated monitoring going on, ready to nab it and use it for easy profit.
Keeping the account doesn't have to mean you're 'giving away' any info. Hell delete it and instantly recrate it if thats the worry.
> Removing your account completely from Twitter makes it immediately available for anyone else to take,
Do you have a source for this? The only thing i can find is a random tweet from Elmo in 2023. I deleted my twitter account in the 2022-ish timeframe, and the handle I had (created in 2007) was my first initial + last name, which I would think would be claimed by now. It's not, so I'm thinking that deleted account handles can't be reused.
They can be taken immediately. Source me, former Twitter employee pre 2021
That's pretty much the only upside to that blue checkmark these days. Making anyone able to buy one was a huge mistake, but they will at least do the minium check to see if someone else with that name already has a checkmark.
Will they? I'd actually be surprised if there are many people that, upon receiving a suspicious message from someone who claims to be Joe Schmoe, will actually go and check to see if a different account from Joe Schmoe with a blue check. I think it's much more likely that they're either going to recognize it as a scam right away, or they won't and they'll fall for it. In either of those cases, it doesn't help for the blue-checkmark-holder to keep their account.
I’m pretty sure GP is saying if you already had an account and you delete it, it’s trivially easy for someone to register with your old handle and impersonate you
Of course people can always impersonate you but the goal here is to prevent them from impersonating you with a social handle people knew you had.
If I recall correctly, the handle you deleted stays inactive and is unavailable to new registrants. This is present on Google at least, I assume it's the same elsewhere.
The concept of a handle goes beyond a username. If someone can construct a profile that looks like someone's profile on another site and contains approximately the words in the username, like _username or imusername instead of username, they might be able to impersonate it. In that case it would be good to have an active profile on that platform to counteract it.
Not the case on Twitter. It becomes instantly available to anyone who wants it.
Well that seems... dumb.
That's an interesting point that I had not considered. In that case, your handle itself is the unique identifier. That said, if I recall correctly some sites do not recycle handles, but this is still an interesting point nonetheless.
I have a very common name, and monkey's paw wish managed to get the unnumbered version for my gmail address.
It has been a significant amount of work just dealing with all the derppelgängers out there who use an address they don't own for important things. Medical records. Divorce papers. Mortgages. The short of it is that it doesn't even require maliciousness on someone else's part to be affected by impersonation, accidental or otherwise. So yeah, keep what you've got, because there's no guarantee the next person to get it will not somehow affect you.
I registered a domain with my name, many moons ago.
Sometime later, a lawyer in Australia registered the .au version, but it was <MY NAME>.com.au, not <MY NAME>.au. <MY NAME>.com (no .au) was (and still is) my domain, and I get email, there.
I started getting really confidential stuff sent to my email, from the Australian courts. Stuff that could easily get people fired and sued.
I reported it for ages to both the courts and the lawyers. Eventually (after about 2 years), it stopped. I haven't gotten one of those for a long time.
Agree. Hold onto them, else someone can snatch them up and you may have to clean up the reputational mess later. See this happen to an acquaintance of mine.
Some, like LinkedIn, allow you to place the account in "hibernation." Which removes the ability to login without reactivating it, but doesn't completely remove it.
Not as reliable as doing a small amount of gardening of yours.
They will do this either way. Fake profiles are created all the time that are copied exactly from a real person's profile. If you have an account, and don't log in and check it every now and then, this will probably happen to you too.
I love this:
"Maybe I’ll go old-school and write more blog posts. Like back in the early 2000s, when you actually had to think before sharing your thoughts with the world. Sounds quaint, doesn’t it?"
I use croissant to cross post on social media accounts but I never use the services themselves to read any content. I’m screaming into the void and I’m fine with it.
It is quaint but if my friends and family each had their own blog that they wanted me to look at, I wouldn't. There's a reason these social media places caught on, because they act as aggregators.
I get it, it's different types of content, one requires more effort than the other, and the argument is that, if you don't have anything of substance to say, don't say it, but it still requires extra effort to read that I probably don't feel inclined to give.
>It is quaint but if my friends and family each had their own blog that they wanted me to look at, I wouldn't.
Great! What's the problem?
Genuinely curious, because I see this tossed around everywhere as I quit social media, too. Why is there this massive pressure that everything everyone does has to be seen and I have to see it all? Nobody needs to see every blog that everyone they know (does every person on your friends list actually qualify as a "friend", or are they acquaintances?) puts out.
I genuinely don't care about this friend's political opinion or that friend's gardening adventures. I also genuinely hope they enjoy their pursuits and that they keep after what makes them happy. IF I get curious about Jan's gardening exploits, the blog is there if I want to read it for some tips, but I certainly don't owe it routine visits.
I guess my problem is for people like my grandmother. It's nice to see comments and interactions from her, but she's certainly not going to set up a blog. There's a whole gamut of toxic social media stuff, hustle culture and people trying to make a name for themselves as influencers, but before that, it was a way to passively keep in touch with people you may not normally get in touch with.
That’s what RSS is for.
That solves the "there is a new post" aggregator problem, sure, but I still need to go there and read it.
Make them include the full post in feed.
Do you?
> they act as aggregators
RSS, my friend
I'm just not reading any of it - not interested. SM addiction is so 2015. I have technical accounts to be able to search for something (e.g. while training loras) or to watch without annoying popups when someone links me to it.
This dramatic deletion is overreaction, solve the underlying problem instead.
Rather than scrolling instagram and tiktok, visit /news and /newest, and then /ask, /show. If nothing interesting there, refresh the /newest until there is. You can be first in upvoting or commenting on it, and can get a good bump to your score if you say something that sounds smart before it hits the frontpage. Then you can re-read the quality content you produced and count how much is left to the round number, like it's only 40 to 9700, only 340 to 10000, etc. Much healthier than just scrolling endlessly and sharing memes.
> SM addiction is so 2015
it's more prevalent today than it was then, so no.
> solve the underlying problem instead
that would be to get rid of FB, X etc. altogether; but since we can't do that, we can do the things that we have control over, i.e., our own accounts
"So, I quit. Twitter, TikTok, Facebook — all gone"
I'm always curious here what counts as Social Media, and what's just a useful site?
Github? HackerNews? Reddit? Facebook, but only for FB Marketplace which is now a better local sales site than Craigslist?
What makes it social? Originally with FB and before it with MySpace it was the ability to put up a page about yourself, and then chat with others. HN has a profile and communication, so do the others listed.
How about a simple rule of thumb: you have to actually meet or talk with a "facebook friend" (every month or more) or else delete/unfriend them.
If after a few months you have zero "facebook friends" nuke the account.
Internet updates are no substitute for good old meat space.
It always shocked me that isn’t the way for all. When I was on FB, I only friended people that I “knew” in real-life. I guess that’s why I only had a handful of friends :)
I deleted social media around 2.5 years ago. After feeling extreme anxiety and withdrawal for about a week I realized this was the right move. I gained massive amounts of productivity, felt more awake than ever, and realized just how many HOURS I was killing browsing. It sounds like the usual rant, but I truly think that in 10-15 years there will be a huge anti social media movement after we fully realize the damage. Social media as a concept is wonderful but in reality it adds nothing meaningful to our lives.
What if I told you Hacker News is social media?
there are a several key aspects of HN that are very different than social media networks, and that's why it's in a different category
One of my biggest gripes with the social media you and I have quit is that it has strongly encouraged flippant, black-and-white responses like the one you're responding to. Nuance, by and large, has been removed from public discourse.
Edit: Just speaking for me, HN is next. Doubt I'll stick 'round much longer.
Yes, yes, heard it all before. And it’s never matched my lived experience.
Social media does have a powerful use case: keeping in touch with friends and family you don’t see often. It feels trite to watch a video of them with their kid and give it a ‘like’ but I’d miss it if it were gone. Especially if it was still there for everyone else, I’d miss their collective presence more than they’d miss my singular one.
Rather than another scolding post telling everyone to delete social media I’d much rather folks think and talk about how we can make a better social media, preferably divorced from the control of giant corporations.
My hot take, offered respectfully: The companies attempting to get you hooked on their products have succeeded via the auspices of "FOMO".
For those who have achieved this, well done. I've experienced the positive impact of reducing my social media usage over the years, while still keeping my accounts for the occasional need to connect. I've taken steps to limit social platforms from accessing my phone contact list and have set a cap of 20 contacts, including on WhatsApp. This has significantly reduced Meta's profiling and advertising targeting.
No.
Because of what nindalf said, basically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42678031
For me outright deletion just led to other issues like missing out on events / family photos / chats with people I otherwise wasn’t connected to. The target for most people is probably low-moderate use. <shamelessplug> Personally I struggled to achieve balance with my social media usage for years and spent the last two years building out a coaching service to help people like myself keeping social media under a daily time allowance…think of it as a personal trainer (with real accountability and all) for social media and other everyday habits. We just launched this week at zabit.com if anyone wants to check it out.</shamelessplug>
Related:
Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet
I had FB account when it was novelty and it was still a social network.
I removed account like 10 years ago when it already was clear it is not social network anymore.
I also never had a twitter really besides some account to check what it is and left it unused.
Only LI is one I keep for business purposes but I don’t care about social aspect or discussion there - it is basically a virtual business card and it is quite popular so it’s useful I guess.
I stopped going on social media apps and felt my mental health improved at least 2x.
You should try it too!
> Once the accounts were finally gone, I realized just how much of a grip these platforms had on me. The number of times I reflexively typed "t" or "f" into my browser bar (which autocompletes to twitter.com or facebook.com) was honestly terrifying. Waiting for assets to build? Hit Twitter. Software update running? Quick Facebook check
How many different accounts do you have to delete though? For many of those people "t" and "f" would be substituted by "y"toube, "r"eddit, etc. It doesn't have to be a social media site, might be news you're intrested in, tech sites, deals aggregator.
I get what you mean, but for someone with habit of looking for distraction whenever they have nothing to do it won't be a cure, bandaid at best.
100% this.
While I deleted all of my social media, I will still end up spamming on reddit or reading HN or watching Youtube.
But I have to say I find them better alternatives, as those social medias are nothing but people screaming for attention.
During work time I have an extension that blocks them all.
The answer is completely subjective, whatever the individual feels is important for them to quit.
>I get what you mean, but for someone with habit of looking for distraction whenever they have nothing to do it won't be a cure, bandaid at best.
This is something society seems to have forgotten to do, and what I've focused on helping my kids remain capable of as they grow older - knowing how to be bored.
It's a stepping stone. The mere act of noticing yourself typing "t" and remembering it's not there, and feeling the feelings and realizations that accompany that, can lead to real behavioral change.
If you care about yourself and want to have healthier and more mindful habits, you will hopefully start redirecting what were once mindless impulses of avoidance or boredom into more meaningful activities for yourself.
Yes, that's right. But social media platforms always tend to have something new on it each time you check them, which creates a strong incentive to check them even more often. News sites, for example, on the other hand, don’t use algorithms that encourage doom scrolling and keep you engaged far longer than you intended.
I don't think deleting social media accounts is a good idea. Used appropriately, social media can be very useful and open doors that would otherwise not be available.
The problem is when you are just looping[1], absentmindedly opening and closing news and social media sites for hours. This can eat a lot of time, and is generally pretty draining.
I've been adding separate user accounts based on what tasks I'm doing, and locking them down so they can only perform those tasks.
I have a social media account (which I'm on right now), I have a coding account which I can not access news or social media from, and I have a few other accounts. This creates friction when task switching, and makes it so I have to be a bit more deliberate with how I use the computer. (I have social media blocked on my phone, as I find that's just not compatible with a happy life)
I've also recently been setting up Site Specific Browsers[2], basically custom PWAs, a web browser with no URL bar and no tabs, to further add barriers between tasks (like checking CI) and just noodling on the web. (I use electron to do this, but you can also use chrome by starting it with --app=https://www.example.com/ . Sadly Firefox has removed the ability to do this. )
(Corporate) social media is a casino or shopping mall. There are fun things to do there but it's not a place for serious things. It's designed by intelligent people to be addictive like a drug. They hide the clocks and outside world, comp you food and drinks, and dazzle you with lights and sounds to keep you there as long as possible. Every moment you spend there is profit for them and a loss for you. The only thing you gain is the rush of being there.
My social media presence directly affects my income, as the more I talk about the stuff I'm doing, the more visibility it gets, and the more money I make. Social media visibility (while doing something interesting) is also a good way of getting podcast invites and similar opportunities for even more visibility.
Social media isn't the only means of getting visibility, but it's a very important one.
I get it. You go where the people are. That doesn't really negate anything I said except the rush part. Although being able to afford food is certainly a rush.
The part I'm raising an objection about is "[that it's] not a place for serious things". It's in many ways key to being able to do serious things, if used deliberately. It's the mindless consumption part that is bad, and the point of my original post is that you can largely engineer that away.
Like everything else, community is key. I simply deleted some of my social media because I realized I'd come out more angry than social connected. Deletion is simply a nice hard cold turkey approach if you find yourself commenting for hours on end everyday. I'd prefer a hard freeze for X amount of time, but IIRC no one does it in a meaningful way. FB can freeze your account, but it's not hard to unfreeze.
But it's not like all my social media is gone. I'm still obviously here on HN. I have a tildes account for more general news. I have two discord for personal and semi-anonymous servers. And for future connections I semi-regret missing in the Twitter age, I have a Bluesky ready.
I'm simply being more mindful of what sites I use and and what communities I join to prevent the issues that arose with Reddit, Facebook, and Tumblr.
I’m hoping we look back at the social media era with some embarrassment at the amount of time we confused typing in a text box with meaningful communication.
If we're getting more and more separated, typing into a box and having a (hopeful) human respond is better than nothing.
Hell of a thing to post on HackerNews...
I quit facebook long ago. Recently I found out an old friend from years ago had died in the past 6 months, and I had no idea. I got an email at an old email address but that aside everyone knew except me.
It’s hard to quit when everyone else doesn’t.
I doubled down on my social media account (twitter) and htmx finished first in the 2024 rising stars for front end frameworks:
https://risingstars.js.org/2024/en#section-framework
so... it depends.
Nothing like a random politically biased opinion piece to drum up random political opinions on HN. Pass.
Does hacker news count as social media?
No imo. no real names, no real profiles, no following or friending people aka no connections, no chat/DMs, no personal updates, no tagging, no pictures/videos/stories
No opaque ranking system, no advertising, no opaque ranking system to favour content that induces negative engagement...
And now more than before, HN is not social media because it actually has useful content and quality moderation.
> opaque ranking system
people confused by the first page
> no advertising
all the hiring ads, and thinly veiled corp marketing blogs
By the dictionary definition, yes. However, there are three key differences. (1) People rank the HN feed instead of an algorithm; (2) the incentives of YC, companies, and the HN community seem better aligned; (3) the user experience degrades significantly when posts get too many comments.
Yes.
Another problem with Twitter is that majority of content there is provided by content farms, and then it gets reacted by bots. It is difficult to get interactions with real individuals there. I'm not sure if it should called "social" anymore.
See also:
Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms (2021)
https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
HN Discussion:
Does this mean I have to delete my friendster account?
I just deleted bluesky and mastodon last week.
Aside from Facebook (which I was never on), I'm still on Mastodon, but have let Twitter go fallow due its moribund nature.
I deleted LinkedIn (after the MSFT acquisition) 10 years ago, due to the business model change. Even prior to that, it was getting too spammy anyways.
I keep a token Instagram just for viewing the rare family/friend that insists I see something from a trip, but I never post there.
The right-turns on FB and Twitter make for big openings in the space. It strikes me as quite an opportunity to eat FB's lunch, just as BlueSky has been eating Twitter's lunch.
>The right-turns on FB and Twitter make for big openings in the space.
I argue that the whole thing was a net mistake and any "openings" should not be filled. The lunch has spoiled, don't eat it.
I like communicating with friends, old and new. It's not hard to eliminate the cruft by using chrome extensions and filtering only by friends' posts, ie https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends
So again, it strikes me as a huge opportunity, especially for someone who just does the basics.
Covering your eyes does not stop the oncoming train.
It's more like thinking you can push back on a train, because maybe a disaster is legitmately coming.
Then you realize you're not bound to the tracks and it's probably best to simply let the trainwreck happen rather than add one more fatality to it.
Yea but if the train is coming regardless then there’s no harm in closing your eyes if you like. Makes no difference.
I should whatever I feel like, thank you very much.
This is actually a really tough one.
Obviously, FB, twitter, insta, LinkedIn etc. are a toxic cesspool. I've left my accounts there pretty much dormant for 10+ years.
Ideally, I'd have maintained connections and contacts with my own network, using my own media, direct emails / texts, phone calls, in contexts that I controlled. The problem is... I didn't. I basically just buried my head in the sand and withdrew.
I guess the takeaway is to try to use these platforms in a positive way, as a means to an end, and not get sucked in, or to network in some other, better way, rather than withdrawing, because that's not actually a good alternative.
... this was me in 2016. (Facebook had Cambridge Analytica, LinkedIn had taken on a demonic element to me in that I'd spent years prospecting and it had brought so many grifters and bullshitters into my life I felt like I was becoming a bullshitter... It would have been one thing if I was making money but I wasn't.)
I got back into social media about 1.5 years ago when Mastodon seemed to be coming on strong. I've lately gotten into Bluesky and all I can say is: (1) come on in, the water is fine, and (2) sure it will go bad someday when the money gets tight but back in the day we expected platforms to decay and for the cool kids to move on to the next one.
I'm puzzled as to why people rage about Twitter and Facebook going down the drain, and then switch to new services like Bluesky or Threads and try to convince everyone to do the same.
I mean, why on earth would you expect anything different this time from yet another "social" thing made and run by a corporate entity?
I moved to Mastodon, which at least has the benefit of not being owned by a corporation, which will perhaps save it from the usual paths of ensh*ttification.
To be frank, I don't. That migration when a bad community becomes "the" community is simply inevitable and a part of social media. I haven't seen a good way to stop it without extreme measures like paid entry or an invite system. So that's the cost of "free" here.
It's still useful, but it's more like a a car than a town square. you'll have a lot of fun in the beginning, you'll normalize it, it'll start to break down as you try to keep it running, and then eventually it gives up the ghost. So you either accept that and not own a car or you buy a new one.
> he casually mentioned that Meta is teaming up with Trump to fight EU regulations affecting their platforms.
I really hope EU just bans Meta from operating here.
"There you go Zuck, you don't need to worry about our regulations anymore"
I think we would live just fine around here without their awful products. It would also serve as a cautionary tale to other companies willing to undermine regulations around here.
Meh I still use IRC, whatever.
> and why you should too
This is not actually explained in the article.
It rightfully explains how X, meta and others have taken a turn for the worse to say the least, but it doesn't say why I should delete my Facebook or Twitter account.
Neither do the hundreds of calls to delete such accounts in the past few weeks or months have.
I get that the point is "You should stop using such social media", but I don't get what __deleting your account__ actually adds on top, especially when put in relation to the political reasons behind stopping to use them.
Suppose someone was attacking you on some social media site and the site's algorithm was promoting that attack greatly enhancing its damage, and you wanted to try to sue the site. There will almost certainly be something in their terms of service (TOS) that says you have to arbitrate (with an arbiter chosen by the site) instead of sue.
Even if the TOS doesn't require this so you can actually sue they would likely have a choice of venue provision that would make it inconvenient for you and/or a choice of law provision that would be favorable to them.
If you have an account at the site it will likely be very hard to get out from under the arbitration/venue/law provisions of the TOS.
If you no longer have an account you will probably have a better chance of escaping the TOS, especially if whatever you want to sue over took place entirely after you deleted your account.
Deleting your account makes somebody's numbers look bad. It also marks a more serious commitment. (I deleted my Facebook in 2016. I did make a new one recently when I got my Meta Quest 3. I was hoping to get into Instagram recently because (i) I think the content I post on Mastodon/Bluesky would do great there and (ii) was thinking about doing a marketing project where that was the right venue. Meta won't let me create an Instagram account, probably because I deleted my Facebook account, I sure as hell haven't done anything else offensive with a Meta property)
It’s not clear, yes: I think they have way too much power in the wrong hands. Now, hypothetically speaking: If they were to lose most of their users, they would lose their power. So, in one way or another, everyone supporting those platforms (by using them) is part of the problem - and that would be the reason to stop using them (again, I know this is quite hypothetically).
Yes but again, this is about stopping to USE them. Deleting your account versus not using your account at all doesn't have any difference of outcome here.
> It rightfully explains how X, meta and others have taken a turn for the worse to say the least, but it doesn't say why I should delete my Facebook or Twitter account.
Isn't it a tautology? If you continue using a product that sucks rather than abandon it, you're using a bad product and it also has license to keep getting worse. Deleting an account is the strongest signal of rejection.
I did not know that we could post stupid stuff on hacker news.
The truth is that nobody cares if we delete our accounts on social media.
Excelent call to action.
The distictions between made "deleting the accout" and "just stop using it" are really mute. The main point is to disengage from such platforms.
Of course, almost no will. In spite of the clear conection between these platforms and individual mental health, and even more importantly massive distribution of seriously mileading "fake news", most people quite frankly just don't give a shit.
Look at the near total indifference to the petro mafia's distruction of the natural world. Most people just can't be bothered.
So when you compare something like failing to respond to corporations eliminating the ecosystem services required for life on earth, to a call to action against the crimes of asocial media, do you really expect a significant number of people to care?
I'm doubting it...
Facebook removing 'fact' checkers is good, they weren't fact checkers, they were bias enforcers.
Community notes is far superior to the bias enforcers.
I agree that community notes works well. But for breaking news, by the time it kicks in the damage is already done. I've seen malicious misinfo about the LA fires get millions of views and 20k retweets before the community note was finally approved.
Another major issue is that if enough people believe/support a lie, it doesn't get noted. So in practice, you end up having "official" lies that go un-noted, making them appear true.
I dont think this is remotely true. On any given subject there is an overwhelming horde of people desperate to disagree. And anyway, even if true, how would this be different from the previous arrangement where "official" lies were rigidly enforced by biased fact-checkers?
No? Simply look at Elon's X account. And that's the point - if there's "controversy" then it doesn't get noted, falsely implying it's true.
It’s the why, the how, and the context of how the replacement will be built, and the context of how he’s selling the change. Zuck told Trump’s team before he told his own content board. He’s building something aligned to the new administration more than the principle of relaxing a problematic fact checking solution.
He complained about undue influence from the Biden administration, as if he isn’t going to be subject to undue influence by the Trump administration.
And if all this is so he can buy TikTok, then…
Say what you will about fact-checkers, there are countless issues with the platform beyond that...
> Alex Schultz, [Meta]'s chief marketing officer and highest-ranking gay executive, suggested in an internal post that people seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights.
Yea it’s odd how so many people have become pro-censorship.
I don't think it's that strange. Most people are happy to have their views supported even if it's by means that they would call terrible if used against them.
There's "censorship" and (1) you can only read so much so you have to be selective and (2) there is a lot written by people who have an NMA (negative mental attitude) and it's a burden I can only take on for people I really care out.
If somebody is writing every day about how some class of people is responsible for their problems I just can't take it, and if I can't effectively block this crap with the tools they give me (20 or so rules on Mastodon, as opposed to Bluesky making me a decent feed out of the box, better with a little "less like this") I will move on.
I talked about how social media terms and service have become a middle man between social etiquette and laws in shaping social behaviour off and online on agora. Using social media feels closer to thinking than speaking sometimes, and anything that infringes on thought is dangerous.
Change of geopolitics, tovarishch. Turns out being radically anti-censorship just allows the criminals to flourish.
It’s odd how so many people have developed the attitude of “censorship bad” without thinking about the consequences of removing it or whether “censorship” on private, profit-driven, opaque-algorithm-powered social media should even be considered bad.
I don't understand this. You think that social media is so bad that you want to give it as much power to censor speech as possible?
I do think social media is bad. And ideally, no, to the extent that any social media sites have feeds more complicated than a chronological feed of people I follow, I want the algorithms powering those feeds to be open for inspection by anyone (by law), and for regulations to be put in place so that dangerous content is never promoted on the platform just because it attracts eyeballs (and thus advertising dollars). Opaque social media algorithms are bad for society, the same way that fentanyl is bad for society, or violent crime is bad for society.
There is no precedent in human history that you can compare social-media black-box algorithms to. It's not the same as a "public square," or a newspaper, or books, or talking to friends in person. It's a new paradigm.
I would drastically prefer regulations to letting the companies police themselves, but, well, waves hands at the current environment, and what Meta did removing their content reviewers is a step in the wrong direction. The platform will get worse as a result.
In other words, the problem is free reach, not free speech. You might have heard of it -- it has recently been popularized, co-opted, and slightly twisted by Twitter to mean what is more akin to "shadowbanning" problematic accounts, but I'm saying that no one deserves free reach by default on social media.
Because censorship isn't about censoring false information, its about silencing voices you disagree with. It's exactly why Trump got into power, because people feel like they are not being heard and the left is trampling all over them, despite the fact the left is the one spreading misinformation far more than the right.
It's odd that you think social media would be viable without it. There's a reason there are teams of Kenyan moderators getting PTSD from the sheer deluge of unimaginable horror which is regularly posted and filtered out.
That's not all FB is doing.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee...
"Meta will allow its billions of social media users to accuse people of being mentally ill based on their sexuality or gender identity, among broader changes it made to its moderation policies and practices Tuesday.
...
The long list of changes to the new hate speech guidelines include removing rules that forbid insults about a person’s appearance based on race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease. Meta also scrapped policies that prohibited expressions of hate against a person or a group on the basis of their protected class and that banned users from referring to transgender or nonbinary people as “it.”"
>accuse people of being mentally ill based on their sexuality or gender identity
But the question is, are trans people actually mentally ill objectively? It certainly doesn't help them reproduce (a form of survival) from a biological perspective, for example.
This Johns Hopkins professor thinks it's mental illness:
https://www.boarddocs.com/vsba/scpsva/Board.nsf/files/B8UR4X...
[flagged]
Not OP, but that was one of the primary justifications that Mark Zuckerberg gave in regards to retiring "fact" checkers for community notes.
>"But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S."
While political bias is undisputable, I prefer notes over deleting in general.
I like to read dead/flagged posts sometimes hwre on HN to be able to see what the moderators flag, and generally they are doing amazing job: even if I don't agree with the flagging, I am able to spreak about it with others and I understand the reason.
Not every anti-censorship person is pro Trump. Considering I’m not a U.S. citizen nor do I live in the U.S. and actually fear the outcome of Trump on my family since American politics affects people world wide.