I agree with him 100%. I also feel like this cancer has spread beyond social media. The internet as a whole feels rotten.
I grew up with the internet, so it felt natural to adopt things like social media (early days of FB), cloud storage, YouTube, etc etc. They just seemed to work their way into my life, aided by the adoption of smartphones (essentially a pocket computer).
Today, I've become a Free Software and Privacy advocate. I use libreboot+Debian, have a dumbphone, no social media, and aggressively restrict usage of services like Google et al.
But I feel this isn't going far enough. The real toxic element is the 90% of the internet which is not designed to bring any positivity or enrichment to my life. I recently made the decision to make my main workstation air-gap/offline and it was the best decision ever. My laptop will be my internet connected machine and I'll probably set-up some sort of whitelist on it. I also find it easier to physically isolate a laptop (e.g. put it in a drawer) outside of work hours and thereby regulate outside intrusion into my personal life.
I'm also very sympathetic to the concerns about not triggering the mass bovine herd of professional offense-takers. I work as a Doctor so it's a constant effort to police my opinions and actions on a daily basis. The internet used to be a refuge where I could do daft things like engage in a flame war on a random forum about a random obscure hobby. Today, the risk of inadvertently triggering someone and having it cross into my real life removes any incentive to participate. Even HN feels like that. I've lost count of the number of replies I've typed out, only to delete without posting. I just think there's no point. It's not fun anymore.
I'll probably give up HN soon. It's the last of anything resembling social media that I use. I strongly dislike the inability to completely delete an account and past posts. It's not like I post controversial stuff, but I've grown uncomfortable about leaving any trace online.
I grew up with the internet, so it felt natural to adopt things like social media (early days of FB), cloud storage, YouTube, etc etc. They just seemed to work their way into my life, aided by the adoption of smartphones (essentially a pocket computer).
Today, I've become a Free Software and Privacy advocate. I use libreboot+Debian, have a dumbphone, no social media, and aggressively restrict usage of services like Google et al.
But I feel this isn't going far enough. The real toxic element is the 90% of the internet which is not designed to bring any positivity or enrichment to my life. I recently made the decision to make my main workstation air-gap/offline and it was the best decision ever. My laptop will be my internet connected machine and I'll probably set-up some sort of whitelist on it. I also find it easier to physically isolate a laptop (e.g. put it in a drawer) outside of work hours and thereby regulate outside intrusion into my personal life.
I'm also very sympathetic to the concerns about not triggering the mass bovine herd of professional offense-takers. I work as a Doctor so it's a constant effort to police my opinions and actions on a daily basis. The internet used to be a refuge where I could do daft things like engage in a flame war on a random forum about a random obscure hobby. Today, the risk of inadvertently triggering someone and having it cross into my real life removes any incentive to participate. Even HN feels like that. I've lost count of the number of replies I've typed out, only to delete without posting. I just think there's no point. It's not fun anymore.
I'll probably give up HN soon. It's the last of anything resembling social media that I use. I strongly dislike the inability to completely delete an account and past posts. It's not like I post controversial stuff, but I've grown uncomfortable about leaving any trace online.