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.
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.
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.
The nazi salute is a fact, the question is where do you draw the line. Is his nazism okay because it's a joke? Not that big a deal for other reasons? I admit it's difficult for me to steelman here because the best arguments I can come up with for him are unconvincing.
If you feel the need to defend the salute I would suggest digging into that.
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!
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, 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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