alt Hacker NewsNo Socials November
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My question for you all is: do you consider HN to be social media?
I got off traditional social media (twitter, fb, insta, etc) years ago and feel all the better for it. But I still visit HN and YouTube multiple times daily. For the most part I find those to be information-dense and part of my continual personal development practice. That said, YT in particular has a tendency to draw me into endless shorts holes.
I would encourage people to consider permanent solutions to use social media more intentionally instead of taking a month off here and there. Two things that the apps really want you to do, but that you should resist as much as possible, are doomscrolling through meaningless content and compulsively checking apps or websites in case you miss out on interesting updates.
For myself, I've decided to direct anything and everything possible to my email (with plenty of filters to keep my main inbox tidy). For apps that don't offer email notifications, I use MacroDroid to forward Android push notifications to email. There are also plenty of ways to forward RSS to email.
I batch process my email 1-3x/day, and anything I don't want to see during this time is not worth seeing at all. It gets ignored, filtered out, or unsubscribed from.
My November schedules are getting crowded. No shaving, no faps, no socials, ...
I use the following extensions to help with managing my social media intake while on my work computer:
Focused Youtube: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/nfghbmabdoakhobmimn... Removes all recommendations and just keeps a search bar. No shorts rabbit holes or algorithm-based media consumption
StayFocusd: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfmg... I like using the nuclear option. Blocks a bunch of sites I have that are in a list, such that I cannot open them at all.
I'd argue that "No Socials November" should be "No corporate Socials November".
Places like the Fediverse (Mastodon, Peertube, Lemmy, pixelfed, etc) are that non-corporate non-gamified breath of fresh air.
Sure, there's less people on those networks, but that too is a great benefit - less bots and less "temperature". And 10 years ago, in 2015, we already saw videos analyzing social media hatred with CGP Grey's "This video will make you angry" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
But why anger? Because anger and screaming at people is a guaranteed way to make "engagement", which seems to be the predominant way to prove to advertisers of "people per month". But is it good? Absolutely not. Its poison, slowly but surely. But how do we avoid the poison? The root cause here is money from advertising, which is from engagement.
But you cut out the profit motive, you also cut out advertisers, and you also cut out arbitrary and forced anger-gagement. And that, is the Fediverse.
The opposite is your Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit. And they're full of bots, quazi and directly hateful content posted for "engagement", and the same set of hate memes populated froom 1 site to all the rest by bots. No wonder people hate this type of social media. It's wholly toxic and poisonous.
>set my YouTube to stop suggesting to me via algorithm
It keeps suggesting based on usage though.
I've managed to kick all social media except Github. That for me is the most difficult if you want to collaborate on software projects.
No, I don't consider hacker-news to be social media, rather a news aggregator with a message board. Although, I would frequent here less probably if I was on other social media.
Im moving my email away from Google. The final frontier.
Does RSS count? I've appreciated having NetNewsWire and its iCloud sync. Having no urge/obligation to comment or retoot is a different experience.
My first thought was why would someone halt their socials? Too much holiday time? Then I realized this was social media :-P. Socials to me are precisely NOT social media. Is this a common language usage now?
I just stopped using Facebook, a number of months ago. It just wasn't giving me anything, and half the posts I made, were flagged as spam (of course, with zero appeal ability; when you appeal, and every time, it's denied, then that's no recourse). I tended to do "Lookit this!" types of posts, where I either referenced a project that I'd released, or some Web site that I thought was worth sharing.
I've never really used Twitter, and I don't browse YouTube, or bother looking at comments.
I had stopped reading my feed, a couple of years ago. It was just old white people, screaming at each other.
> set my YouTube to stop suggesting to me via algorithm
This suggests a less-than-total commitment to backing out. I would consider "no social" to mean not even visiting the site, or running the app.
In my case, this is about the only place I engage in anything like social media. I would have to stop reading HN to be "no social," and I'm not interested in doing that.
Also due to being dissapointed with social media, especially how it always makes you feel that you know more while you actually go deeper in your bubble, I created a mini blogging platform mostly inspired by X/BlueSky called fx [1]. You can use f**k X as a mnemonic device for the name. It's running for a few months now and works very well for me. Whenever I have a random thought that I want to publicly write down, I use my phone or computer to quickly put it on my site. Unlike X or other social media sites, the post is fully under my control. I can edit it, delete it, share it, link it, and it's all backupped in GitHub.
My last remaining social media account was with bluesky and when many of their visible employees took the opportunity to belittle and dismiss their community with that "waffles" horseshit, a month or so back, I dropped off of that one too.
I really thought they were on to something with the "make it a protocol" thing. Now I see that no social media will satisfy me. I don't WANT a platform where "everyone can say anything (so long as its legal and you don't say anything bad about fascists so the fascist government will leave us alone)". I WANT a platform where productive people show what they produced and discuss it along with the things other people produce. Even if that product is "jokes" or "writing". I just want a marketplace of ideas that have some grounding in practical reality. Not a hyper-void filled with nonsense thoughts and ideologies that can withstand rounds and bouts of academic scrutiny but would wither instantly in any practical application.
I don't want a place of arguments and gossip and attention. I want a place of content and challenge and speculation and application. I don't want social media, even for what it purports to offer. I don't want to "be in a room with everyone in the world". I want to "be in a room with people who are doing wild an interesting things and want to do so in a community of others like them."
I don't want the unwashed masses. I want self-selection and communities.
tl;dr: I want forums that work like feeds. Small groups of like-minded people engaging with one another. I just want it to WORK like social networks, with following, and topical follows (hashtags), and content feeds.
I'm gona try, X Reddit HackerN Insta Cheers
I've never had a problem with social media usage - and I'd be surprised if other developers here haven't enacted their own solutions to prevent doomscrolling.
I have user scripts on both my iPhone and my computer that completely disable the Instagram recommended feed. I have disabled YouTube thumbnails and the YouTube sidebar. /r/popular or other popular subreddits get automatically redirected to my Reddit homepage which has a lot less garbage on it. I have completely disabled my Twitter feed. I even have certain domains removed on HackerNews and made an extension to only update a few times a day. And a ton more.
If you're a developer and you want to stop doomscrolling... you have the power.
Can we have ad-free February?
Or, alternatively, if X% of people are against advertising, can we have X% of the year without advertising? Sounds fair to me.
I'm genuinely interested in the world around me, and I like being entertained as much as the next person, but the problem with social media for me is that it creates a simulacrum of the world which does not correspond to the tangible reality I see around me.
I would go further and say that social media is just another kind of "news". The News, essentially, takes an incomprehensibly complex world and distills/simplifies it into something you can understand. In the same way that one creates a mental model for how a complex system works in order to better understand it. That's a useful thing!
But the distillation/simplification process introduces biases and distortions in its model of the world, which can lead to the model being extremely inaccurate. And with social media that inaccuracy extends to representations of your friends, family, and your self.
To the extent that The News, and Social Media, creates a reasonably accurate model of the world around you they're useful, but I take it all with a heavy dose of skepticism.