One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together. I’m technically gen z and I’ve been off of social media (aside from HN, WhatsApp and discord) for years and you wouldn’t believe how great it’s been for my overall state of mind.
Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food and I’d argue that we’re all a lot more negatively affected by it than we think. There’s a reason ‘brain rot’ was word of the year.
I quit reddit too recently, I still look at it for info but I'm not logged in/scrolling through it
I find myself reaching for something when I have YouTube/chilling at my desk at the end of the day, can't code anymore/make something just on till I sleep. Sometimes have the desire to play a video game (I have a gaming rig too funny how that works)
I've been trying to read HN or IEEE, TechCrunch stuff like that as my "lazy fun"
I will miss posting stuff like "what is this car" or being part of the car talk for a sporty car I drive but idk kind of want to just live too
It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something
Anyway my main goal in life right now is getting out of debt/staying fit and work on projects
I checked reddit recently for the first time in a while, and I was shocked by how radicalized its become. An echo chamber of hateful people and perhaps GPTs that are agitating the big subreddits. The contrast is stark with all the "no place for hate" in the rules and endless banning of microaggressions.
I saw dozens of death threats. Even an explicit death threat thread with over 40,000 upvotes before reddit stepped in and shut the whole subreddit down.
It reminded me of Ghostbusters 2 with all the aggressively angry people and the ooze pouring out of the sewers, all building upon itself.
This is just the consequence of the API protests. Despite people claiming it had no lasting impact, admins coming in and making sweeping changes to mod teams replacing them with loyalists, alongside ramping up centralized feeds to serve more ads onto meant content quality took a nosedive. This is obvious in most subs if you actually look at who is submitting the threads (something the app and All/Popular pages hides in several views), most of these subs are dominated by a handful of accounts. It's a cycle too, because often they'll continue spamming subs in order to get on All/Popular, or make up weird stories to do so, effectively karma farming taken very seriously, with mods encouraging it because of the aforementioned loyalists.
It's all just driveby anger and reposts. Maybe some smaller subs with good communities here and there, but that often requires a mod team putting in substantial hours and remaining under the radar from All/Popular in any shape.
Forgot to mention, Reddit also started paying these accounts for posting. So a literal financial incentive to ragebait. It' called the "Contributor Program".
It's wild how bad it has gotten since the election. It's important to remember that free speech does not protect directly inciting violence and it does not protect advocating for the murder of anyone, even a politician. These are generally illegal
So what Reddit has morphed into, is an illegal content factory - there has already been a comment or two about it from the government and the Trump admin is not one that is likely to sit on my sidelines over this.
Whatever your politics may be, I'm just saying this is going to burn Reddit bad.
> It's important to remember that free speech does not protect directly inciting violence and it does not protect advocating for the murder of anyone, even a politician. These are generally illegal
Under US first amendment rights, it's actually sometimes legal.
For example, "Watts v. United States" established that if an anti-draft speaker tells a crowd "If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ" that's political hyperbole.
So if a crowd were to set up a guillotine outside congress and chant "hang mike pence" it's not necessarily illegal.
The only thing not covered by the concept (and law) of freedom of speech with regard to violence are direct, clear incitements to immediately commit violence. E.g. egging someone on to go lynch another person right now is not legal.
Saying “I think this person should be killed” is legally free speech.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but respect of law and norms is being thrown out of the window. That was the old USA and the paradigm is wildly shifting.
Reddit, by far, is one of the worst echo chambers on the internet. I've seen hundreds of death threats at one political group on there, but if any veiled threat is made against the "reddit approved party" it is instantly removed or accounts suspended. This really peaked during 2020, when open calls for violence stayed up, some with reddit admin approvals.
It used to be a good site, but that was many years ago.
the_donald was very hateful but I wouldn't call them violent. They were a cultish meme sub like /r/Conservative is. They got banned was for brigading not for being violent and hateful.
I would go as far as to say it was a childish meme sub (edit: and cultish, ye). I wonder if it was like that Flat Earth Society started. Once the "Qanon" type of guys turn up the memes become dogma.
I might have a different threshold for hateful on the internets or I didn't look closely enough.
Likely take a break from social media and talk with some real people. Lots of people voted for trump aren’t radical actually none that i know are. I come from a small town in a red state and yes they completely disagree with democrats on pretty much everything but the stuff you read on reddit is so far fetched and extreme I don’t know how anyone would take it seriously.
They believe people hate Americans and everyone should be ashamed traveling overseas. As someone who travels all the time to multiple continents not just Europe i have never encountered anyone who asked or even cared. Most people don’t live in a political bubble where they need to stop being friends with people over politics.
Anyway a lot people are choosing to live in an angry little bubble. It is really sad to see.
> Lots of people voted for trump aren’t radical actually none that i know are.
The same can be said for the supporters of many radical and terrible historical regimes. I'm not radical, I'm simply pushing this radical boulder along, and I can stop it whenever I wan tooo-oops."
No need for histrionics, it's simple: Someone doesn't need to actively desire a terrible outcome to be morally culpable of making bad choices, ones they should-have-known would enable or encourage it to happen. Multiple such people can and do form groups.
It's not limited to politics either, which is how we get idioms like "playing with fire."
Notably, people will also be nearly universally angry at anyone who points out the inevitable consequences of their actions in cases like this. Especially if they know you’re right.
Near as I can tell, the biggest failure of the left (and one that keeps getting repeated) is thinking words/knowledge matter in situations like this.
You realise this works both ways? The average left leaning person doesn't have 700 pronouns and isn't calling for a communist revolution. They're not paid by Soros. They don't have blue hair and have a meltdown at the slightest upset.
The online charicatures are just that. In both directions.
Real talk though: the US, via the current administration, is trashing its international reputation. With tariffs and lashing out at (former?) allies. Or with Musk demanding regime change in the UK, for instance. On a personal level people will still be chill no doubt, but you should be prepared for some negative attitudes towards the US if things continue unabated.
I was in Europe for a while starting right after 9/11 and there was a lot of shame and no lack of pointed questions. The locals didn’t hate us, but there was a decent amount of “what the hell is wrong with you guys?” It was not uncommon for American travelers to put Canadian flag pins on their backpacks to try to deflect attention or curry favor.
It’s surely ten times worse now. Trump makes W look like a statesman, and we could at least plead that W didn’t win a majority and only became president because the system is stupid.
I think it's more that there is nothing to be gained about asking an American in Europe about Trump. Most likely, they think he's a douchenozzle too so why bring him up and ruin a vacationer's day. On the off chance they are a Trump supporter, now the European has to listen to an idiot spout Newsmax nonsense until they can get away.
I’ve seen this sequence of events play out before.
In many was ‘go outside’ is dismissive of what many people feel is happening, that to within 15 days of this new presidency. This is a low key way of saying you don’t like people protesting.
While at the same time others are saying people aren’t protesting enough.
If you aren’t ok with all of this, I strongly suggest deleting all social media, including hacker news. Take your advice and go outside. Be good to your neighbors and your mental health.
There is zero space for passive consumption when one of the biggest cultural and economic forces in English speaking Internet land is dismantling itself.
There is going to be very little space for any tolerance of nuance - because Trump is going to continue to escalate. He is going to follow a plan which was known, and it aims at gutting the US, and justifying it with DEI or whatever the cassus belli of the month is.
This is eventually going to result in ‘riots.’
Which will feed the righteousness of the conservatives, which will result in a new round of “well you were so happy when the year started, where are you now.”
It will escalate into attacks on democrats as the devil. And HN will swing from left outrage to right outrage.
At that time the roles will be reversed, and the positions will switch.
Again - If you or anyone reading these comments is tired on Feb 6th - leave the internet right now. This is your tornado / natural disaster warning.
This isn’t meant to be hurtful to you, or to be any defense of anything.
I always assume I am wrong, and I hope I can look back at these comments with embarrassment over what looks like histrionics.
The problem I have is that i deal with social media and online safety as work and as research. Papers on this topic are my fun reading when my brain isn’t fogged up.
This is going to be worse than brexit. And that’s if we are all lucky.
I was asking bankers if there’s any slack in the financial system in November - and I asked this in multiple countries.
The answer was no. So when the trade shocks start hitting the system, expect a downturn.
This is aside from the walking dead syndrome which america will face after gutting multiple systems in-flight.
> Subreddits like r/pics are packed full of thinly veiled death threats towards the sitting president or Elon Musk.
This is just blatant misinformation. Since r/pics is the only example you've chosen to give us, let's evaluate it: I've scrolled through the current first 50 posts in Hot, and 0 of them are death threats, thinly veiled or otherwise. "Packed full", indeed.
And here, so it isn't simply my word vs. his; these are the current posts:
Protest, "Musk Stole Your Tax Data"
Picture of Nazi being punched after making a Nazi salute
Protest, "The Whole World is Watching"
Painting over values at the FBI
McConnell in a wheelchair
Flag upside down outside State Dept.
Kid covering ears with politician in foreground
"Buy Canadian Instead" sign in CA store
Protest, no visible message, flag with corp logos instead of stars
German anti-fascism protest
UFC fight match post KO [KO'd opponent is a neo-Nazi]
US Marine holding flag in distress position
Protestor, "No kings in America", dressed as Cap. America, mouth taped over
Protest "Nobody voted for Elon"
Protest "Stop Musk's Takeover"
Picture of Trudeau
Protest "Smells like Fascism"
… none of which are death threats. I could scroll all night and not see any examples.
Yeah "packed full" is probably a bit too heavy here. To pick a few examples though:
- The nazi punching thread had several moderated comments ranked near the top which were presumably calls to violence.
- The Mitch McConnal thread has many people looking forward to his death, hoping he goes to hell, and a few deleted comments.
- A musk thread has "eat the rich" and storm the capitol. Not super highly ranked.
I didn't go through all of them but it certainly is a bit odious.
Also note though how there's only 1 non political thread and the remainder are anti trump. This is on a general interest sub and what is likely to be an unremarkable day in the administration!
I’m a researcher working at a supposedly prestigious university and I can see homeless people with rotting limbs if I step off my campus and don’t look the other way. Some of my colleagues recently were awarded significant private funds to push a compound for a currently incurable dementia to clinical trials. They attended an instructional conference with other awardees and found that several were not there because they are at the NIH and so are under a gag order and travel ban. I am pretty sure Mitch “McConnal,” who spent his career obstructing any progress on the issues I describe below and who paved the way for current events, is actually dying of either a related dementia or the one they are working on, btw. So, what do you recommend Americans do? Never reveal we might have some anger towards being at the whims of people who would rather die themselves than help others? Don’t get me started on the genius who invented the single-person subway or et al.
You are misattributing American madness to the people it is being inflicted on rather than the instigators. We have oil wells behind our homes and schools and the white picket fence chemists I knew and looked up to as a kid are the reason we all have PFAs in our blood. Our president vacillates between saber-rattling at our closest allies, starting a new war in the Middle East, and causing constitutional crises every other day. We don’t have a single-payer healthcare option like every other developed country and our “social safety nets” are so impacted and difficult to get, they might as well not exist for most people. We do, however, have some very, very profitable oligopolies (some which make very tasty fish sandwiches) and higher income inequality than India or Russia.
Merely looking forward to someone’s death is now going too far? I get why overt threats are bad, but that’s getting ridiculous. Public figures are going to get some hate and that’s within the boundaries of what should be acceptable. Are we supposed to pretend there aren’t a bunch of destructive people in power we’d like to see gone?
There is a reason people are angry and the truth is Musk/trump have gone too far. It's bizarre to say but we are watching the downfall of the USA in real time. The country has been captured by criminals who are working to destroy it–folks are going to be angry about that.
Are you for real? Is this seriously a good faith argument? My man, you may be a true believer, and that is no compliment. Course correct. Try to steelman a bit.
That helped the issue click into place - NONE of the past 15 days are unremarkable. And again, ITS BEEN 15 Days!
If you stop your thought at just “people are losing their shit”, thats seeing half the world.
I’d say thats disingenuous, because it misses or dismisses the incredibly alarming actions that have precipitated them.
If you genuinely care about it, then you might be interested in knowing why people are responding like this. For example, people generally hate Nazis, and punching Nazis is a popular idea.
DO people expect themselves to be polite when the see a takeover and destruction of their government? “it looks like pre WW2 Germany out there, do pass the salt dear.”
Let me put it another way. Trump is likely to try many outrageous and unexpected things.
As someone who tries to be non partisan, and isn't even american, I am fatigued by all of the claims that the world within the USA is ending. Whenever I take the time to examine any of the claims they tend to be fairly hollow or making slippery slope arguments.
As an international user of reddit, there are many of us I presume, I want the outrage to be saved for Trumps undeniable and worst offenses. In my eyes the memecoin was worse than anything which has happened since he became president and yet it has completely left the collective focus. Everything since then has just been a mix of people allowing trump to dictate the media cycle and the deep state deploying its immune system.
If we review democracies through history that have at some point become less democratic, I think describing the process of how that actually happens as being a slippery slope is quite apt. I’d say it’s more of a fallacy to assume that democracy is a secure default state of being rather than an ideal that we must collectively support or lose entirely—that we can safely “slip” a little without risking a slide further down the slope.
The reason why a slippery slope is a fallacy is that the starting point is an arbitrary threshold. Nothing here indicates the end of democracy to me. To someone looking to find some indication, anything can look like the beginning of the end.
Many of the circumstances being called out as concerning in recent weeks map well to historical examples—the framing of the argument alone doesn’t inherently invalidate it when we have good examples of comparable events (e.g. purge and installation of unqualified loyalists) precipitating critical, difficult to recover from outcomes (democratic backsliding) in other societies. When the stakes are so high, vigilance is rational.
Personally I enjoy slippery slope arguments which is why I didn't use the term fallacy. What I dislike is the reddit framing of having already slipped!
There is a certain point where the calls for calmness come across as "stop making noise about the coup in progress". People should be calling out the people blatantly breaking the law and undermining the foundations of society.
You're missing the point. The real issue is that r/pics, a subreddit that should be about photography enthusiasm, has become so hyperfocused on politics, that it only features posts that are critical of Musk and Trump. As is evident from the list of active topics you posted.
Is r/pics explicitly apolitical? Does it tend to feature current events and is that lineup just proportional to the magnitude of what's happening right now?
> You're missing the point. The real issue is that r/pics, a subreddit that should be about photography enthusiasm, has become so hyperfocused on politics,
No, I'm not. I'm making a statement about a particular claim: that Reddit is overwhelmed with leftist death threats.
I said nothing about r/pics being apolitical, and I'm not taking a stance in this comment chain about whether I think r/pics should or should not be apolitical. That's a different claim, and you're moving the goalposts.
I think it's ironic that people are up in arms about random posts on Reddit while many of those same people cheer at pardoning those who attacked the capital and brought actual violence on police officers. Will people letting off steam on Reddit lead to a violent insurrection?
The temperature is so high right now, and it's only continuing to rise because there seems to be zero accountability for what's happening whether it's pardons or Musk running unfettered through government accounts. Unfortunately, it's natural for people to keep escalating when they see no other avenue.
> after this liberals are going to be proud members of the NRA.
I grew up an active NRA member, shooting since I was 6. I have long since disassociated myself with the group but want to make it clear - a lot of liberals have guns and regularly practice using them.
We don't need the NRA (a Putin funded organization) to do that!
The only way to round up the numbers Trump wants to round up at this point is by going to job sites. You may think differently, but I don't think criminal gang members are typically working construction, in meat packing plants or picking crops. They are busy doing...you know, criminal things.
Also, Biden has already addressed the numbers coming across the border [1]. So again, the people who are left are mostly hard working people trying to make a life.
It feels like everyone forgot Reddit's roots as far as its politics are concerned. Namely, the place was Libertarian Central on the internet until 2015 when it got astroturfed basically overnight to swing the other way. I was there to witness it and the whiplash was something fierce.
Reddit has been basically unusable for anything concerning politics since, and nowadays with politics leaking out into every damn sub possible it definitely has a problem.
It’s not a Reddit thing. I also remember the days when everyone online was a libertarian. But Conservatives then turned to nationalist ideologies that don’t emphasize the free market, that are anti-immigration, and that take a dim view of personal sexual freedom. There are fewer people expressing libertarian points of view all over the shop. There’s a good article about it here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/05/the-individual...
Libertarianism was never my thing, but I get the impression that it's not as popular with people in their teens and twenties now as it was in the 2000s.
That particular subreddit isn't shut down, it was temporarily suspended as the moderators simply got overwhelmed. There's no indication of bad faith from either the mod team nor the reddit admins, the floodgate was just too much for them to handle. It pretty much says so in the ban message, admins are gonna help them take back control and it will be up within a couple of days.
To be even more precise, here's the message from the source;
> This community has been banned
> This subreddit has been temporarily banned due to a prevalence of violent content. Inciting and glorifying violence or doxing are against Reddit’s platform-wide Rules. It will reopen in 72 hours, during which Reddit will support moderators and provide resources to keep Reddit a healthy place for discussion and debate.
> I checked reddit recently for the first time in a while, and I was shocked by how radicalized its become.
Reddit has always had these elements, but they were previously isolated to certain subreddits.
I noticed the biggest change when the app and website became aggressive about getting people to join other subreddits and inserting posts from other subreddits into people's feeds. Suddenly the isolated subreddits I followed were full of low effort content and angry comments.
Reddit's front page is shockingly bad. The amount of misinformation and ragebait that gets upvoted to the front page is almost hard to believe.
It's also interesting that many subreddits have embraced the ragebait. Subreddits like /r/AITA have been clear about how they don't care if stories are real or not, but legions of Redditors engage with obvious ChatGPT spam as if it was a real situation they need to weigh in on.
I just stick to the niche subreddits (games, interests, whatever). The main subreddits have been especially aggressive echo chambers for a long time now.
I tried that with work. I created an account where I can just follow a few things related to my job. The problem is that reddit will start showing you things you didn't subscribe to. It's a battle to keep them at bay. If you look at my work account feed it's all mycology, bad tattoos, what-is-this-thing. I never subscribed to any of them. Yea, they are interesting but that's not what I wanted or need at work.
Old Reddit still doesn't have any suggested posts. Also, the Reddit API works just fine within limit. It's unusable for scraping but as a single user it works fine.
/r/worldnews is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet. Some of those commenters are so nationalist and bloodthirsty they unnerve me. The ban hammer is extremely active on this sub, and for saying completely innocuous political statements about personal preference. I'm absolutely sure this is broader than just that sub but I've probably heard this specific complaint from probably a dozen other people too.
I will say, the subreddit system does a decent job of quarantining the dysfunction to that sub. The mod quality is everything and the mod drama is an absolute dumpster fire. (Extremely curiously, Ghislaine Maxwell seems to have been one of the most prolific of the mods, and one of her suspected accounts may be one of the most successful (karma-wise) posters of all reddit.) But on the flipside, /r/askhistorians is still one of the best resources on the internet. Many of the specialty subreddits I frequent (Aviation, UkraineRussiaReport, video game subs, several miscellaneous african subs) are still functioning fine.
> Wasn't it formed when the mod got called out in a different sub?
Most subreddits gets formed by someone who's tired of the existing subs, gets into one too many arguments with a mod, and thinks they can do better. I don't know anything about these specific subs but I wouldn't see "this guy formed this sub after getting called out by a mod in another sub" as any kind of red flag.
The concern is understandable, I suppose. It's just a convenient way to see clips from both sides of the conflict, and it's the best source for combat footage clips anywhere. I do have a working brain and can use it to identify when people have a polemic. I prefer it to telegram, which is the alternative. The comments are indeed... uh, very strident in their support for either side. So I'm not sure if it's "propaganda" so much as people regurgitating propaganda at each other at full volume.
Anyway, it's a war. Propaganda is essentially impossible to avoid without ignoring the topic entirely. Still, it's what we have to work with. And to be clear my sympathies lie with the ukrainian people.
Propaganda is big on mixing just enough 'both sides' to lend legitimacy. Again, if I'm remembering correctly this dude was called out on another sub and ended up creating this one specifically to continue his propaganda narrative. There's a lot better subs to work with on Reddit than that sub
/r/UkraineRussiaReport is basically the only forum on the whole site where anything that isn't 100% cheerleading for Ukraine is allowed to be posted. It seems like pro-Russian propaganda only in contrast to the rest of Reddit where the pro-Ukraine bias is actively enforced by the mods. You say the creator was "called out" on other subs which is why he created the alternative. But that just lends legitimacy to the sub, if you're interested in anything approaching an unbiased source of information.
Agreed. There is exactly one way to think and believe on Reddit. The "outrage" might be tolerable or even informative in some cases if it was equally distributed.
It's disheartening when the one-track politics infects every square inch. It's a good point about bots because 1) they can be sold or rented to advertisers, 2) they are more valuable with higher karma, and 3) the easiest way to get a bot to harvest karma is by agreeing with the hive. So they're amplifying "the message" without even intending to.
> I will miss posting stuff like "what is this car" or being part of the car talk for a sporty car I drive but idk kind of want to just live too
I used to waste so much time posting about cars on Reddit. I'd open my computer at 11pm, reply a few times to a single post on Reddit, and before long, I'd see 1:45am on the clock.
Not posting anything has been a massive time saver.
Same, except i reply on the drugs and harm reduction subreddit trying to help kids make decisions that dont destroy their lives. It's really difficult to leave because i remember when i needed those people and sometimes it feels like all the adults left the room and I'm the only one left. Who's gonna help these kids? Seems futile to attempt to stem the tide of gen alpha tiktok brainrot idiocy but sometimes people actually listen to me and their life improves. I've given myself a time that I'll work down to 15 minutes a day to try to consolidate that extra time. Recently I've been using some of my addiction advice on myself to quit reddit
One healthy way to consume Reddit that I recently learned about is creating a "custom feed" (see left margin of new UI).
You can just add subs that are of interest that lack the torrent of bad news and only ever visit that custom feed. It doesn't ever algorithmically add posts from subs you don't manually include, as far as I've seen.
> You can just add subs that are of interest that lack the torrent of bad news and only ever visit that custom feed.
I still use old.reddit and this is the only way I've ever used Reddit. My homepage only shows me posts from Reddits I follow and nothing else. I don't see all the craziness people here are talking about.
Yes, that's exactly the same as what I do. When I tried new reddit, it looked awful to use and look at, so I always stayed at old reddit. Like you I don't see any of the crazy stuff. Just discussions in the subreddits I follow.
User groups you would be interested in get hijacked by whatever the overall sentiment of Reddit is. Threads that aren't political suddenly get political for no reason. It's completely dead in there - content quality is brutally low.
Politicisation happens, though slowly. Therewasanattempt used to be funny pictures/videos and is now purely TDS. My city's sub used to have useful local content and is now about 50% national politics.
I have music/noise on all the time, rarely in silence. I play the same playlist/song over and over when focusing. Unfortunately working in an open office it sucks people having conversions (to each other or to computer)
If I don't have music playing, a song will play in my head. Over and over....
I'm always growing my "playlist" though. One room of the house is where I auditioning new music. Another room plays my entire music catalog on shuffle.
They're clearly not talking about their car, let's chill out. They're just saying they're always listening to their own music or (white?) noise, because their open office is noisy from conversations.
>It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one
Outside of reddit/discord/hn, I haven't had any social media since roughly 2010, and I don't use reddit or discord for anything remotely "social media"-ish.
While I still get the occasional look as if I'm wearing a tinfoil hat when I say "I don't have FB. No, no insta either. No... not snapchat either", I find it's a lot less common now, thankfully. When I first left social media in ~2010, it was rough. Not only dating scene wise, but I lost out on a few job opportunities (at least a few, probably more than I know) as well.
Now you're just considered kind of weird/fringe, instead of being borderline insane. Moving (slowly) in the right direction, I think.
I wouldn't care a whole lot if someone told me they weren't in IG, FB, Snap, Twitter, etc. However, if someone told me they never bothered with Linkedin, it would be hard for me to resist bowing at their feet.
I know that people here on HN love to dump on LinkedIn. That said, for some industries, it is the primary way to connect with headhunters and future employers. For me, I don't use any of the social aspect. I only post my CV details and wait for headhunters to contact me directly. It works well.
Are there any women (in highly developed countries) under 40 who aren't on some form of social media? I never met any. I think it would be more difficult than men for social reasons.
I have no idea how. But after I quit social media I managed to convince my wife to give it a go. That was 4 years ago. Has linkedin for work, and goes to a couple of sports related subreddits, but that's it.
I can only recommend it if you are independently wealthy, want to become an ascetic, or more broadly, your goal is to never be hired or really even evaluated for much in the business world again.
None of the rest of the social networks serve as a sanity check on your resume/application/meeting.
I've round linkedin extremely useful recently for finding a new job after being made redundant. It's where the recruiters are, and where the jobs are posted, at least here in the UK. I even paid for a couple of months enhanced membership, or whatever they call it, as a career investment. I'd say its worth the money over the short-term.
As for maintaining an up-to-date profile, I think its worth dialing-down the access unless you're actively looking for a new job.
But the bs that people post to try to get "engagement" makes my head hurt. I'm about to start a new job in a few weeks and it'll be a relief not to have to bother with linkedin again for a few (hopefully many) years.
It is scary that one platform has so much control over people's lives. If LinkedIn were to ban me for whatever reason tomorrow, finding a job would become virtually impossible.
I could still get a job but it would require more effort. I keep my network updated on what I'm doing and new opportunities, not just jobs, present themselves to me. People who avoid LinkedIn remind of those who scoff at the stock market. Yes, it sucks if you hold it wrong.
Wait, really? I must be old. I technically have a LinkedIn but haven't really been on the site since the last time I was in the job market 8 yeras ago.
Very occasionally a potential client messages me through it but they are almost very low quality contacts.
Headhunters are trying to be influencers, they have games, news feeds are full of junk or agenda pushing (lots of anti-WFH pieces because the wealthy owners need to keep their commercial property prices up), etc.
Out of all the social media I don't have, that's the one that has lost me the most job opportunities for sure. I probably would have caved and signed up if I didn't end up getting a job through some old-fashioned (face-to-face) networking.
We were required to make linkedin profiles as part of the computer science career preparedness class. I got an internship out of that career day though so it was a win for me
It's not the miracle you seem to imagine! I deleted my linkedin account at least fifteen years ago now, disgusted by their spammy, underhanded recruitment tactics, and I have never had any trouble finding interesting work.
I understand that some people find it reassuring to receive a constant stream of recruiter inquiries, but from what I hear these messages are mostly low-effort, shotgun-blast attempts to fill undesirable positions, so I don't feel like I am missing out.
The first step in the resume vetting process was looking the applicant up on LinkedIn. If they didn't exist, the resume goes in the bin. I doubt it's that severe still as more and more people move away from having social media (it's been awhile since I've been on either side of job hunt/hiring).
On more than one occasion the direct feedback of why I didn't move further in the hiring process was a lack of internet presence.
But, again, keep in mind this was early 2010s. Social media hadn't had as much time to show the world how poisonous it is.
> It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something
I actually feel really good when people expect me to be on social media and I tell them Im not.
Kind of similar to the feeling when I say that I quit cigarettes. Im still surprised by it and talking about it makes me feel very blessed to be free of it.
It's even possible the places that people then move to (such as HN) also get more radical if the leavers have higher levels of radicalism than the place they join.
> It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something
Probably worth Googling something like [men who don't have social media] to think what women think about this, it's more positive than you might think :)
> It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something
It's not about scoping you out. Asking for your Instagram is like what asking for your number was in the past. It's flirting, it's that they want to get in touch again, set up a date.
If you say "I don't have Instagram", the girl will assume that you don't like her, not that you don't have Instagram.
So just make an empty Instagram (with a normal profile photo) for connecting with people. And say so when sharing it with a girl. If it's somebody who wants to "scope you out", you're already dealing with a person who you don't want to deal with.
> Asking for your Instagram is like what asking for your number was in the past. It's flirting, it's that they want to get in touch again, set up a date.
Personal website is the way to go. Preferably a static site built with a home-made templating engine written in Ruby and running on a non-mainstream budget cloud provider. The chicks dig it man.
I discovered the same recently and have abandoned it. It's unfortunate because the potential is there for a real city wide or nation wide group discussion platform. But who moderates the moderators?
I don’t have too much issue with Reddits politics at the moment, but I do think it’s odd that such a powerful platform in society is managed by volunteer (mostly) anonymous moderators.
I will be explicit in that I am not condoning doxxing Reddit mods. I just don’t think we’d be fine with this in normal day to day life.
Do you know the editors at your local TV stations? The local radio stations? The people who curate the datasets that train the YouTube recommendation model?
Slightly off-topic: Do you know if Spotify (and other music streaming services) are allowed to accept payment to play/recommend songs for users? I am unsure if payola rules in the United States are strictly for radio stations.
They openly allow you to pay to put your songs in playlists, but they're marked as sponsored songs and users can opt out. Supposedly that's them following the rules; there are rumours of shadier deals going on as well, but there always are in the music industry.
Nah, what we are seeing is that they just leave the site, and the site becomes more radicalized overall.
Banning the_donald was the beginning of the end for Reddit, at least as far as balanced discourse went. At that time, the r/all was relatively balanced and you'd see major news stories from both POVs.
Now it's a hysterical echo chamber full of thinly veiled death threats towards the sitting president.
What’s odd is when you read popular Reddit comments, you find the userbase believes that the site is full of pro-Trump bots and shills.
My politics are to the left of the American left, but I’d be crazy to believe that the mountains of the anti-Trump posts are organic & the spoonfuls of pro-Trump posts are paid, especially after an election where Trump won the popular vote.
The English speaking world outside of the US is left of Democrats and generally hates Trump, and not everyone on Reddit is USAmerican. Reddit is going to be left of the US and also not representative of the US.
Oh please. Posts from /r/conservative show up in /r/popular all the time, and it remains a hotbed of conspiracy theorists, grifters, and old fashioned racists.
The ratio is what matters. Easily 95%+ of r/all is far-left content, typically with "rage-bait" headlines that fail to expose the nuance of the situation.
This can't be healthy, for two reasons:
(1) The health of the company. As an investor in RDDT, I am not a fan of the site's landing page alienating 50% of Americans right off the bat.
(2) The health of public discourse. We should all be against the creation of echo chambers and weaponization of headlines.
The Instagram dating thing is because, in the heteronormative sense, a guy without one odd WAY more likely to be cheating. If you’re in a relationship, even if you don’t post, your significant other will likely tag you in their posts.
I’ve never really understood doomscrolling on Twitter or Reddit. The only social media I find remotely useful out entertaining is actually TikTok. The comments are IME the least toxic and most entertaining. And I’ve gone down fascinating rabbit holes of things that have absolutely no relevance to my life like medical residency TikTok.
My reddit scrolling wasn't doom for my case. I was either personal topics I liked (cars, computing, software, photography, etc...) or brain rot/stupid shi that's the main reason I've left because I could be more productive than looking at an endless supply of that stuff
You can mute subreddits and not see them anymore
Funny you have to purge the algo on things like YouTube if you click on a thubmnail with some hot chick, boom your feed is nothing but click bait of hot women
Agreed, but we are getting thrown in with the people who have an insta account, but say they don't so they don't get fact-checked on their relationship status.
This is the way. I was a director of the community team at deviantart when it got going and I remember so many times thinking "if we get one of these apps for everything people are going to drown themselves in the internet" - because I used to have to actively check in on community members who we deemed addicted. Sure enough, here we are, except it seems nobody is looking out for the best interests of their communities anymore. Thank god for dang.
Well early deviantart was pretty small, and I don't think anyone building it was over 25y/o at the time, so we all had lots of free time to work on it. Deviantart was arranged in a way we all had communities we were responsible for, it changed a lot after it reached million+ users scale, but in the beginning at 100k or so users it was very manageable. Your responsibility per Scott Jarkoff who lead that team was "to love, nurture, protect and grow your community" - and then there were things we were taught to watch out for or check in on. Backend you could see pretty much everything about the user, plus you just got used to the users in your communities, so "additive like behavior" was not difficult to detect, literally I would just see some users online ALL THE TIME, so we would always check in to make sure everything is ok, and tell them they're probably spending too much time on the site (it was a bit harder for me because I was one of the people responsible for communities generally.) I don't know how actively other GDs did this, but it was a widly discussed topic in our staff only irc channel very frequently. This all came from the teams want to be mindful to avoid hurting other people using the internet, most of us building it genuinely gave 2 shits and genuinely cared about our users. This was the same playbook I then used to build devrel at DigitalOcean in the beginning, I had devrel structured per community with the same instruction Scott gave me back in the day. (I think it's part of why y'all originally picked us! so thanks!)
Corporate social media does not care about its users. They are just biomass to fuel various goals: ad revenue, political influence, etc. In fact, the more addicted you are, the better.
I think sadly the scale becomes less about the size per say and more about the unpredictability. The "vibes" on the internet late 90s early 2000s where very... on point, so it didn't feel like emotional labour. I can imagine being someone who cares about someone on the internet in 2025 would be, frankly, exhausting, in 2002 it was just fun.
1. a community is simply an abstract place people meet around the intersection of a shared interest. It's important to first recognize that. 2. Communities are not people who are all the same, they just commune together for reasons. 3. communities form, they are not built. 4. communities are ultimately selfless, however, good communities know what they are and why they exist, this can be a learning process and can be malleable, but at any given moment in time that should be understood. 5. Good communities enforce strong rules strongly. Community steering and moderation should be as diffuse as possible without losing the next point in fact keeping it central: 6. Good communities look to proactively raise up people who energetically build the community for the sake of the community not for the sake of themselves, for themselves should be the second order effect of any raising up within a community, this is subtle and community leaders need to spend time understanding this. I think that is all.
> Sure enough, here we are, except it seems nobody is looking out for the best interests of their communities anymore. Thank god for dang.
Here's to dang! Even when you do things I might not agree with if I knew about them, this is a place where interesting things can be shared and found without all the blah-blah.
Alternatively carefully curate your social media accounts. My reddit home page is all books and formula 1. I'm quick to hit 'show me less like this' when anything drifts in from the front page.
My Facebook feed is all friends and family who don't discuss politics and ads for nerd shirts. I've purchased a few. It is also easy and effective to hit show me less of this.
I agree about LinkedIn and don't go there unless I'm actively job hunting, something I hope never to do again. I don't feel any bitterness when I see friends and family on FB go on expensive vacations, but I do feel an unhealthy and indefensible jealousy sometimes when I see former coworkers getting new jobs or promotions.
This is how I've dealt with Instagram. My IG account is literally nothing but cats. it's actually very refreshing to look at for five or ten minutes. But it takes work. IG wants to keep feeding me their BS reels. Sometimes I don't think it's worth it, they really make you put up a fight.
I used to have the same thing (other less wholesome content has made its way back, I've not been strong enough). It was a better experience than what my feed was like before or after, but I'd still waste hours watching cat videos! Trying to stay off the feeds entirely, now.
Indeed. I've unsubscribed from all subreddits that have become infested with political content, and I've "unfollowed" all of my acquaintances on Facebook and LinkedIn who post anything political. So much more enjoyable.
Yeah, I you should see the curation totally from the top, so fully dropping certain platforms is part of the curation. I mean, in essence we all already do that as certain platforms are not even considered a candidate in our 'portfolio'.
I totally understand the desire to avoid politics on all these platforms but in some way I always expect the greater powers want to destroy these platforms and make us even more hopeless.
Why do you exclude HN from your list? It is literally social media, but with the dial turned down a little. Yet, you don't have to dig to deeply to see flamewars, outrage, and trolling. I mean, look at many of the garbage comments in this very thread that are on par with /.,xchan.
Yes, but it’s the old skool version of social media and the conversations here are generally higher quality and more genuine. I strongly disagree that it’s “on par with /.,xchan”
HN also doesn’t seem to be as susceptible to rage-baiting / outrage-attention-seeking behavior. Not sure exactly what by this is the case but I’d venture a guess it has a lot to do with (1) “dang”s moderation, and (2) not having a personalized algorithm feed.
I’m increasingly of the view that personalized algorithm feeds generated to select the maximum attention grabbing content for each person is a truly dangerous idea.
Frankly, HN is not that engaging (by modern standards). In fact, probably 60-70% of the articles on the front page are boring to me on any given day. I view this as a feature and not a bug. Why should I expect that everything I look at must be maximally engaging?
There is still a lot of taboo subjects and comments you can make on HN, just look through your comment history on all the things downvoted to hell that you still believe are true. Like a good sheep I now refuse to defend anything that will leave me open to this.
A problem with downvoting on many sites (perhaps HN to some extent) is that people seem to just use it as a generic "I don't like this" button or as part of an upvote/downvote war to make sure that their preferred comment "wins."
I learned much from just scrolling HN. Technical articles help me know the latest updates in various areas, dive deep into a topic, or develop new skills. I applied quite a few things I learned in my job. Fundamentally, most links on HN are articles, many of which are quite long, which tend to be more focused and informative.
Completely non-technical ones are few, and you can always choose to ignore them.
The feed is also non-personalized. It's not going to show a few more article on politics just because you linked on one.
By comparison, reddit is much, much worse, almost the opposite of HN. Just a bit better than Twitter, maybe. Most of my reddit browsing/participation falls into tech/hobby, yet I always find that spend more time than I'd like on meaningless stuff, and reddit keeps pushing/promoting political content (even in the context of technology).
My solution? Don't browse reddit unless I really need to for some reason (or if I really don't have anything else to do at that time).
I'm here to talk about technology and it's usage. I'm not here to socialize, I don't know your name, don't care, and haven't even looked at your username. You're just a sentence to me. It's more impersonal than the old newsgroups. How is it social?
We're literally socializing right now. We're a special interest group meeting to communicate about special interests. The opposite of socialization is isolation. If you hadn't posted, you wouldn't be socializing, but here we are, socializing.
I really would like to know what exactly you consider a "clear difference" between how Usenet and differ conceptually (e.g., ignoring the GUI, the # of users, and mechanics, [e.g., usenet updates diffused around the globe because we didn't have cloud servers]).
"social" implies that relationships between users are a core part of the platform. I can't follow another user or mark them as a "friend" on HN.
HN users put a lot less emphasis on who says something and we focus more on what they say. There are exceptions of course, because we have our own share of renowned experts posting here. But for the most part, people don't take note of what username writes a post.
Ah, thanks. That's a good answer. I was coming at it from the discussion angle only. However, both Usenet and HN don't allow you to friend people, like other social media. I see I accidentally dropped the term HN, which makes my question unclear. I still don't see spiritual difference between HN and Usenet when framed around your response, though.
Not GP, but feel similarly. I'll offer my 2 cents:
> but with the dial turned down a little.
Exactly for this reason. Yes, HN is a social network. And if it follows the same enshittification path as the others, I will be gone from here too.
But until then, to me (YMMV) it still provides a bit of entertainment and news without rotting my brain.
Even the analogy works. Fast food is not that bad... in moderate quantities (/"with the dial turned down a little")
HN remains distinct from Reddit almost entirely due to dang's hard work moderating the site. Spend a few minutes with showdead turned on and you'll see real quick what that site might turn into without effective moderation. The site would be full of politics and flamewars.
I believe a good portion of Reddit could have had been the same. However, the way moderators are chosen-- in other words, whoever creates the sub first gets to rule the roost-- has left that site with almost universally unqualified moderation.
In principal it's a great method to get back to normal, however there are key areas (subreddits, local groups, etc.) that really do provide information, expertise, and news content that isn't available anywhere else online. It's a double edged sword. The best way I've found is to be in there with a read-only mindset or perhaps only participating inside those key areas where political discussions are strictly prohibited.
This has been my exact issue with giving up reddit. It's really hard to replace very niche topics without it, since many online forums are dead. I also append so many searches on google with "reddit" because the top results are generally SEO spam.
Reading "You should quit reddit" helped a little. The author tries to reframe your hidden beliefs about reddit like "finding useful information" or "it's filled with experts." Helped me to realize I was spending more time reading about my hobbies than actually doing them. Though I understand it's not that simple, doing requires more energy, etc.
My approach, finally mostly successful after over a decade, is just "no main feed or subreddit pages." Reading a thread off a Google search or whatever because it has information I want is fine.
I have found this to be completely untrue. Yes, maybe not at the same scale that Reddit is, but if you dig, there's a community for everything. You can find what you're looking for.
That said, I recognize that I am speaking completely for myself in regards to my own interests. YMMV.
You can potentially rely on friends or family members to source such information (e.g., only one member of the household really needs to be checking the local group, etc...)
I think too that one thing that's important is to decide beforehand -- what can I do? What would I be willing to do?
That is to say, some people really are willing to be activists. They will organize protests and boycotts and things like that.
Other people are in marginalized communities and are trying to get a feel for whether they should move to a different region or even a different country.
Some folks don't really have a plan but they want to stay informed. If at some point a magical line is crossed, they might suddenly say, "That's IT! I can't take it anymore! I have to DO SOMETHNG!" and that's when they'll become activists.
But some folks are realistically never going to lift a finger to help themselves or anybody else. They'll just bitch online and/or be stressed.
What I'm working on is figuring out in what ways I might, in the right situation, be moved to contribute. If things get really bad (and they will), what will I realistically be doing? I'm disabled, so I can't be out in the streets. If things get even worse, I might write about the niche public health / politics topics I've accidentally become an expert in. And if something happens where medicare and medicaid are shut off, well then all hospitals everywhere will basically be non-functional. This will be a crisis for all but most immediately for the chronically ill -- any of us at that point who are able to will be leaving the country ASAP.
In other words, I need to know enough to keep writing (which I would do anyways) and I need to know when things are hopeless enough that a person with a messed up spine should travel out of the country anyways. That is currently all I need to know because it's all that is actionable for me.
There is a massive temptation to doomscroll into infinity, but that merely serves the enemies of sanity. I know what happens next because I've read Sarah Kendzior and Hannah Arendt. It's not good. But I also know that one of the first things that happened during the anti-semitic purges in Nazi Germany was that a ton of Jews got appendicitis from stress. Sometimes the body wants to align with power so badly, it aligns even with evil power and against its own interests. We have to be very careful not to poison ourselves and make evil's job easier.
If you decide not to totally quit a network, do what I do:
1. Turn off all notifications, especially for replies, likes, and content suggestions.
2. Train yourself not to look for feedback on the things you do post as a matter of habit. Intentionally check on the important discussions IFF you _remember_ to do so.
3. If possible, hide or remove any karma-like indications. Your life is better if the internet points aren't visible.
Isn’t this how they win? I mean the people in Germany in 1930 just said , this is crazy , it doesn’t feel right, but hey I have outrage fatigue so the concentration camps are just fine
Laughably false, camps like Dachau were on newspapers and newsreels. Almost every Germans were aware that they were rounding up Jews and murdering them in camps.
Early 30s, sure. Late 30s and 40s? You should qualify your statement with “this is a heated historical debate, but some people argue that…” Keep in mind the significant incentives to not seek out information, to disbelieve the information one did come across, and to lie after the war was over.
One of my neighbors when I grew up was part of Hitler Youth, and had moved to the US after the war. (for time context, I'm in my mid 30s, and he died a decade ago at IIRC 95 or 96, and I asked him about it maybe 20 years ago.)
I asked him if he and his fellow youths knew of anything. He said at first, no, but pretty quickly when all the jewish-owned businesses vanished almost overnight, everyone knew something was up. Did they know about the camps? Debatable. But even the kids knew that they jewish population was kicked out of society.
<< One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together.
Yes. I still have to be at least aware of what is happening for work reasons, but removing social media was one of the better decisions for my sanity ( I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well, which in itself is a concern suggesting further digital landscape deterioration ).
I considered some more obvious solutions ( from buying subscription to WSJ/FT to personal news aggregator -- and objective/neutral observer rewrite using LLM and they all are not exactly ideal ).
Here is the good news. All this chaos is an opportunity to stand something useful up. And I mean something useful that cannot be so easily dismantled by powers that be ( and there are already heavy indications they are aware people may try going outside the defined paths ).
> I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well
Yeah I agree that many HN comments are unfortunately pretty bad, but I think this should only motivate people like you and me to try harder to make HN a better place with constructive, useful comments :)
The services go through phases (I suspect depending on botnet activity)...Middle of the day, Threads is a fun place to hang, 9pm? It's a wall of anxiety producing ragebait, 2am? It's even worse.
Looking at it on my phone, if I can see three entries and 2 are anxiety inducing, I close the app. (I'm 99% certain they get that telemetry too)
That said, I also had days where I doomscrolled instagram and thought 'it's been 20 minutes and I haven't seen anything entertaining yet.' And that's when I decided to drop it. (It was the only app I could chat with my kids with...we've since moved to other methods)
I haven't cut it out completely, but I'm not hyper aware of how I'm consuming it.
> One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together.
This is hard to overstate. Checkout Jonathan Haidts research into social medias role in skyrocketing mental health problems in kids over the past decade.
The junkfood comparison is great. It feels good now but makes you extremely unhealthy long term. Its deceptive because it doesnt look that bad, but it displaces things that you actually need to be healthy.
I love that guy! He generally makes the rounds as a guest on most of the large podcasts and I’d recommend anyone listen to at least one podcast where he’s a guest.
I hope he becomes more influential. He is the tip of the spear in terms of combating the negative effects of social media and improving youth mental health.
I think Minimum Effective Dose applies. I quit most media for 4 years. The next 2 years were 2 hrs/day on Reddit for jokes. It was the best.
But 1 year into that, I read an article by Swyx on how to use social media. I tried but gave up for another 2 years. But the end of that last 2 years was the election...and I was curious...so I went to X.
Within 3 days my opinion of the outcome flipped.
And...since I already read Swyx's article, I was ready to effectively navigate other topics of interest.
But the key to effective media usage is to ALWAYS be on guard. Your mental filters have to be running all the time. The second you drop your guard, you're vulnerable because the stream never lets up.
But when you do this, you find that you quickly run out of truly interesting things to read. Luckily I've also got physical hobbies. I now spend a TOTAL of 2 hrs/day across all media, and my mental health is just fine!
But also I find it highly rewarding in many areas such as investing, history (the X format works so well!), international (language, culture, politics).
I also highly recommend taking a second to put each post in scale or context. This does 2 things: helps decide importance of post, and slows scrolling so your brain doesn't get DDOSed into a mental health crisis.
And the (increasingly cheap, powerful and ubiquitous) LLMs can be used to either save time or power you further into the conversations.
Just want to add that, while Reddit is a huge time sink, it is pretty easy to just see the good parts of it:
- Mute any subreddit you do not enjoy
- Generously block any asshole in the comments
- Subscribe to the subreddits you do enjoy
- Create one or more themed multireddits of the subreddits you enjoy
My Reddit experience is cheesy feel good clips, cool videos of skilled people or weird occurences, funny niche humor and nerdy niche hobbies. No drama.
Just be aware than while HN appears to carry a wide range of interesting topics and discussions both the community and mods do have biases. It presents an incomplete and skewed perspective and has to be consumed in moderation as part of a balanced diet.
A lot of submissions are flagged every day. Some of them are well offtopic, repetitive or judged to be too biased or political and clearly if the site allowed all submissions it would break.
The act of curation is a form of censorship and while it is often justified, many posts about topical developments that have a technical/financial angle, perhaps even posted by technical/financial media or bloggers and featuring people who are well known in the technical/financial field appear to be getting flagged in ways that could appear to be politically motivated.
Pointless outrage over trivialities isn't good for us but when issues of genuine concern arise we shouldn't go out of our way to avoid them because they make us feel bad. We are supposed to feel bad when things are bad as it provokes us to action. The media/tech industry exploits our behavioral quirks to keep us engaged on their platforms but the fatique caused by the fire hose could numb us to real dangers. Disconnecting is very good for personal wellbeing but not to the point of dangerous ignorance.
Completely agree. Sounds like we're similarly on the older end of Gen Z, and getting off social media in my first year of college was excellent. I get messages in my group chats from friends being pissed off (often rightfully) by things that our out of their control, but they're force-fed it on social media.
It doesn't help to stare at rage/anxiety inducing things - it doesn't mean you're actually informed all the time.
Plus I'd argue that most things you'll see end up being hogwash and the important stuff will rise to the top and you're generally hear about it anyway.
I agree. My Reddit outrage addiction flares up every now and then and it makes my mental health objectively shitty. Doesn’t matter if there’s some good content and connection on there, it’s just not worth the (mental) cost.
Reddit is overwhelmingly fake information and covert ads. Investigate any random post on the front page of /r/all, even if it's just like a cute gif of an old person, then go to the comments. Like 75% chance there is something fake or made up about the title or context. It's such a mind pollutant, I can't stand it.
In my opinion reddit is still such a great community if you subscribe to topics that interest you and leave the default subreddits. There's plenty of subreddits that I would not be able to find a good alternative forum for, maybe a Facebook group exists here and there but is that really better?
This is to be expected for /r/all. But who cares because why would anyone want to go there in the first place? In general once something becomes a certain size wrt users, its value to those users plummets. The only thing to do is leave.
Good on you. I have been pushing the idea of leaving social media to people for well over a decade now, for the same of people learning to communicate with each other in more meaningful ways and improve their mental health. It worked for me and everyone that actually listened to me.
But the emotionally violent resistance I get from people who are embedded in it is wild. I've commented on here before and subsequently pissed people off, but it is an addiction and needs to be treated like one.
Not sure if you’ve intentionally omitted it but I would also include YouTube in this list. YouTube can be very addictive with all the clickbait thumbnails etc.
> Not sure if you’ve intentionally omitted it but I would also include YouTube in this list
Yeah I did conciously omit it actually, but only because I consider Youtube to be basic internet infrastructure and quite valuable if used right.
However, for me personally, I've actually blocked Youtube from Chrome when not in incognito mode to keep me signed out by default and I've also completely blocked the site from my iPad (and ofc I also don't have the app installed).
I unfortunately struggle with some form of social media addiction and I've made pretty dramatic changes to keep myself away from these sites.
haha yeah that's where you inject custom CSS on the page to hide thumbnails, come to YouTube to see something? no thumbnails to distract your original intent
I reduced my news intake to a daily email from reuters + HN. Special thanks go to AI, as reddit and others no longer allow reading content without login.
Thanks for your comment. Same here, Gen X. Off social media since pandemic. As Nassim Taleb says if it's really important someone will tell you. I feel like I'm on an island. I'm never outraged at all. Of course I hope there's more justice and equity in the world, but I am at peace with things and have no hatred or rage compared to when I was glued to social media.
I have tried to quit social media many times, but I end up using something again after a few weeks. It usually happens when I'm too tired to think about anything like games, or to read an article, or when I have a lot of waiting time without a lot of entertainment (eg airports). I wonder what do you do during those times?
digital junk food. I haven't stumbled across this term and I gotta say as someone whose right on the edge between millenial and genz this term summarizes what most "public" social media is.
I'm old enough to have grown up mostly with TV, with Internet being my escape hatch and twitter/facebook/tiktok/insta feel waaaay closer to old schoold programming TV than Internet.
Anyway I'm an Internet person, not a TV person, so I've quit using all of them (I do have some "just in case" unused in years accounts everywhere because I suffer from a bad case of FOMO...)
I think that the social media is okay as long as no algorithmic feed gets involved. Visiting a few select tech subreddits doesn't affect me negatively. On other platforms the feed can't be avoided as easily.
I find that just muting anyone who has anything to do with politics on facebook works well for me. I go on facebook to see your cutesy images and how your life is going not for long political diatribes.
For some short time, that worked for me, until facebook noticed that I was spending less time on it. Then, they started to push posts from other politics-related accounts (especially from ones at the side of the spectrum I used to antagonize most with). That was 4 years ago. I left that crap and didn't look back.
I did the same. I have some exceptions for technical topics on Reddit. I also still use Facebook in a very drilled down state (looking into it every 3-5 months and checking in with some remote friends). I have also set up my own Mastodon server, which is fine for niche topics and I can reach out to interesting people directly, where other channels fail (email). I heavily rely on RSS, particularly from people that I trust or who gained my trust over longer periods.
> I've also developed a keen eye for headlines that lead to "outrage articles" which I avoid.
That's critical. My YouTube rule these days is to block any channel with a video name or thumbnail that says something like "This is why you fail at XYZ" or other statements designed to evoke an emotional response from me. And on top of that, I try to only click on videos where the title/thumbnail is properly informative, exposing the content rather than trying to hide it behind a vague hook. Hooks like "You won't believe this one trick!" and fluff like that, titles/thumbnails that should introduce the trick, not just allude to it.
What I did was unfollow everyone and everything, and block all suggested content. The front page is literally empty. Nothing on those websites captures my attention unless I specifically look for it.
This was very effective. These websites have effectively become write-only media for me. They're still here if I need them, but I end up browsing just one page of /r/curatedtumblr and then doing something else.
I basically agree, which is why it's kind of funny to see all the discussion in other threads here with people arguing about why can't ban AI or how Facebook was good because it created market value or whatever. Most of those platforms would be better off just outright banned.
I do think, though, that for at least some platforms it's possible to use them in a limited way where you confine yourself to relatively small communities that are focused on some common interest that genuinely brings together people who enjoy sharing it. You mentioned Discord for instance and that's one, if you can find the right servers. I think it's possible to do that on Reddit too. You just have to never visit the "front page" and stick only to subreddits that you actually get value out of. It's harder approaching impossible with ones like Facebook that are more doggedly algorithm-driven and don't put moderation in the control of users in the same way.
Of course, the lurking issue is that putting moderation in the control of users is building the platform on free labor and those good subcommunities are at risk of imploding when cracks emerge in the dike separating them from the wider platform userbase. And that's likely to happen because even those "safely usable" platforms are ultimately beholden to VC money that's going to demand enshittification eventually.
Cohost was by far the best attempt I've seen for many years, but sadly couldn't make a go of it in the toxic ecosystem we've got.
> Most of those platforms would be better off just outright banned.
In general, the goal should be improvement of humans, not avoidance of negative stimuli. Something has to exist where humans are rewarded for aligning to truth and reality, rather than emotion.
> Something has to exist where humans are rewarded for aligning to truth and reality, rather than emotion.
I more or less agree. Thus the humans who created and enshittified such platforms should be correspondingly punished for their disalignment to truth and reality. It's not just about rewarding "consumers" of stimuli; the creators and promulgators of stumili also need to be incentivized (and disincentivized) in just the manner you mention.
I really hate this one in particular. Why did the biggest Job board become another Facebook (but more blatantly trying to sell you stuff)? This is a hard one to leave unless you're very comfortable in your job prospects.
My take is almost the opposite, that it's important to develop healthy social networking insofar as there is some alternative to the outrage. It takes effort though.
both of these are 'cyborg' accounts in that I have my RSS reader, classifier and autoposter. I am looking to build a lot more automation.
My Mastodon feed took a large set of rules to block out #uspol and certain communities of miserable people. My feed has stayed outrage-free since last month.
My measurements showed that Bluesky's 'Discover' feed blocked about 75% of emotionally negative material before Jan 20, since then people are inflamed but looking closely at my feed it seems they are deliberately trying to help certain people who felt stuck on X to migrate, that is, giving huge amounts of visibility to journalists, journalism professors, activists, and such so that they can run up 200k+ follower counts.
I understand. (I've been brainstorming ideas about "how to get people off X" with a friend and tonight I'm going to tell him that Bluesky has it) I've used "less like this", "unfollow" [1], "mute", "block" and such and my discover feed is getting good again.
I have two classifiers in the development pipeline, one to detect "screenshots of text" and "image memes", also a text classifier that is better at sentiment than my current one (I think ModernBERT + LSTM should be possible to train reliably, unlike fine-tuned BERTs.) I'm not so much interested in classifying posts as I am in classifying people; some of them are easy, there are 40,000 people who have a certain image meme pinned that I know I never want to follow. Just recently I figured out how to make training sets for these things without having to look too closely at a lot of toxic content.
I'm also eliminating the dependencies that are keeping this from being open sourced or commercialized so I may I have something to share this summer.
For better or worse, news flows through social media, so this approach basically amounts to ignoring all the bad stuff going on. If you read HN, chances are you can probably safely get through the next four years doing this. But as the saying goes, "first they came for the communists..."
I find LinkedIn to be the worse of the social media sites. My feed is full of wannabe “thought leaders”, people posting about a meaningless vendor certificate they got, recruiters giving advice, people who can’t get a job or were recently laid off, etc.
But now, politics is getting involved because people are having government job offers rescinded and the entire federal government is in a free fall like a 3rd world banana republic.
You can get just as outraged by diving deep into official government PDFs and finding out by yourself from the source what they are doing.
Sticking your head in the sand is of course a "solution", but that is willfully choosing to be nothing more than a subject to the rulers.
Another solution is to limit your news intake and your political passion to the things that have the most real implications on your life and on the people you care about, while limiting your own exposure and vulnerability to governments as much as possible.
Depends how you use it. Once there were groups, it became quite similar - but since Telegram became so much better at it and I used it for some special groups and contacts - I now suddenly had lots of groups with subgroups and notifications for people liking my posts or replying to it - that suddenly I had social media again. What works for me is uninstalling it once in a while and only come back if I feel a specific need.
Yes. However I occasionally hop on LinkedIn for its job board, YouTube to watch a tutorial or Reddit when I’ve made something that I wanna share like a project or a meme. Other than that, I avoid these sites like the absolute plague. I virtually never browse them for fun.
Yeah it sure is nice this way isn’t it! It’s pretty boring, but you get to form your own opinions about things, and aren’t constantly mad about things that don’t affect you. I’ll admit to scrolling HN a lot, but I at least get a lot of very useful info out of it, it has leveled me up in unexpected ways over the years.
Unironically, my friends, family and colleagues. If anything truly important happens that ends up being relevant to me, the probability that one of them tells me is close to 100%. I don’t need the news or social media for that.
In my personal experience from X, Facebook, Reddit and HN:
The place with the worst takes, most rage inducing, most filled with conspiracy theories, falsehoods and misinformation is HN.
Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food and I’d argue that we’re all a lot more negatively affected by it than we think. There’s a reason ‘brain rot’ was word of the year.