alt Hacker NewsAre we tired of social media? (2025)
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It's hard to put my thoughts into words. Those who are tired of social media are those that are not addicted to the never-ending dopamine injections (i.e. doomscrolling).
I don't have kids yet but I hope "social" media will be banned until at least 18 years old before they're born.
The human brain is wired to be lazy; it's much easier to doomscroll and get your dopamine than spend 40 hours reading a book. We want to be fit but we don't take the time to exercise; we want the candy but don't tolerate any effort to get it whatsoever.
It's always been the case during history but our ancestors didn't have access to those kinds of addicting tools.
It's an anecdote but I have long hair and there's a period where you cannot get a good haircut (too long to have a "short" haircut and too short to have a "long" haircut); I know some people who couldn't put up with the few months it takes to grow into a good-looking style and cut their hair back to short. Life is not Instagram, you cannot change something instantly. Everything that is worth the "candy" takes time. A hell of a lot of time. Of which we're losing track.
Very badly worded but maybe it resonated with some of you.
Algorithmic curation is something I'm trying to avoid in all cases. I think it's not highlighted enough. The fact that youtube shows an infinite number of videos to choose from does its own sort of harm in a way that the specifics of the content cannot.
When the internet was brand new, it was very novel that I had to go out seeking the content and could look at it any time I wanted. It was different than TV. TV was enjoyed passively and you just watched what they showed you. The early internet was so much better it's hard to describe. It was a purely active experience. Algorithmic curation is a return to the TV model. Someone else decides what you should watch, and you passively observe it materialize in front of you. Try this for an experience. log out of youtube, install some filters in uBlock Origin which prevent all algorithmic results (even on the home page and in search results) and then try to think of what you'd like to watch. For some of you out there, I'll bet this feels like exercising an old, unused muscle. You used to do this kind of querying all the time. But scan your mind. What possibilities are there to view? It feels emptier than it should.
The difference for me is that 20+ years ago if you went to an online community there was no filter to protect you. You’d have to choose wisely what to say and avoid being confrontational because there was the very possible chance of someone more knowledgeable than you putting you in place. With social media that exposure diminished because everyone can build a bubble of like-minded people. I like been corrected, while it hurts on a personal level it also helps you evolve as a human being because you become more knowledgeable. An Internet where everyone agrees with you is boring. And because everything is a bubble we went full circle and now there are culture wars everywhere. You can’t have a decent conversation where people just present their arguments without throwing punches and accusations all around. I feel like Hacker News is the last bastion of civilized conversations at scale.
Social media has long stopped being an actual social outlet and is filled with either bots or influencer types trying to be the loudest voice shouting into the void. I recall going to Reddit in like 2010-2012, back when there was pretty much only college kids on it, and the posts were often witty and interesting. That no longer exists anywhere on the major sites and trying for any kind of conversation is a dead end.
Eternal September combined with profit focused engineering has created a wasteland.
I recently had a baby. My wife and I are not on socials but wanted to share pics with close friends and family, so we created an iCloud shared album. We only realized that these shared albums had likes and comments once someone asked us if we had seen that my grandmother had left a comment.
I think the shared album is almost the perfect form of social media. We invited about 20 people who we all know well. This “community” has a singular and shared purpose of being interested in our baby. Content is presented in chronological order. There are no ads, no other content, not even suggested posts or “you may also like…”. If you want to see more you just swipe to the next picture and perhaps read what other people you know have to say about the funny face our child is making.
The author observes that social media creates bubbles and that people are tired of socializing. In some ways the shared album is the ultimate bubble and provides only a very limited way for our community to socialize. Nonetheless many of our friends, also twenty-somethings, have told us how lovely it is to interact with us and each other on such a limited platform.
I think—well, maybe I hope—that the future of social media is “hyperlocal” like this. It will not be as easy to meet people and find new perspectives, sure, but it will let the internet serve its purpose of connecting people who are physically far away but still very much in each others thoughts.
I find it interesting that the same process that played out in the forums to feed transition also took place in video games with dedicated servers to matchmaking. I joined a random Counter Strike server in 2005 and ended up becoming close friends with regulars on the server and I'm still in touch with some of them this day.
An extent presentation (IMHO) by Sam Vaknin on how the very way modern social networks operate even down to their form are deeply destructive. The "Internet Hate Machine" is real and it was created by anti social deeply narssistic nerds.
Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/Ef7bqgeHenU
i am tired of ads, algorithmic curation, public-ness, anonymity, and scale
i still crave social interaction but have moved to smaller private group chats with real people i either see in real life or have an ongoing connection with
Discord is still great. Not exactly traditional social media but it has features that are similar beyond just being a chat platform.
I would like to find a way out and often thought about starting a community / movement around this. Maybe this step feels easier collectively.
I hate to say it (not a doom and gloom kind of dude) but to the general population, social media either is, or at the very least appears to be, one of the only ways up and out of the deep, terrifying economic chasm that our societies have been carving to separate the haves from the have-nots.
Statistically, of course, the overwhelming majority of people who try to secure the bag from social media either fail, succeed and burn out quickly, or succeed BIG and lose their souls. And given that it's just a new form of old entertainment, I'd wager that the percentage of those that break through versus those that don't is probably in line with what it always was (slim, or short-lived)
Meanwhile in the real world, wages are stagnant, institutions have crumbled, safety nets blown away like a fart in the wind; we've legalized and lionized gambling on every single aspect of life, geopolitics are in upheaval, businesses are tightening up more than they have in years, information went from a daily newspaper to a debilitating firehose, prices are through the roof, and we're all left to fend for ourselves.
What do we do?
Shuck and jive on socials. Place leveraged bets on ephemeral concepts and world events on Polymarket. Plow into memecoins, tokenize all physical assets. Play the lottery, hit the casino. On and on, while cost of living goes L-shaped.
I think for the vast majority of people, social media is both dead yet completely inescapable... but I have a nascent, vague feeling that while people are sick and tired of being algorithmically manipulated and want to bail, if pushed far enough, become hungry enough, they'll come right back and spin the wheel from the side of a creator out of desperation, feeding the machine that we all hate LOL
Anyways. More optimism, less doomerism! It ain't gotta be like this long-term!
I'm fine with social media, but not with the illusion of it from Facebook, Instagram, etc. Those are ad delivery systems. I'm on Discord, Github, Substack, and Reddit.
Social media has been on the decline for a while. The trouble is that many people have put their web pages onto it. There were several groups I used to be involved in which closed their websites and just have a Facebook page now.
In a word, yes. I have many fond memories of forums and chats that have been abandoned in favor of platforms like Reddit and Discord (which I find to be bloated and grating).
I do participate in small iMessage and Signal chats. Email remains nice as well.
Large social platforms hold no appeal given the algorithmic curation that favors the platform owners and the pervasive advertising. I’ve never seen the appeal of TikTok short form video either, though I’ll willingly acknowledge I’m in the minority there.
I’ve never abandoned RSS and love the slow pace and small scale of Mastodon.
"At this point, I don't even know if I would want to connect with others that much."
Seeing this recent comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46469403) gave me the idea:
Check out the searches "We could" | "what if we could" | "people should" from HN:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Going forward, isn't there the potential right now to connect the right people together for the right reasons?
Nobody goes on Instagram anymore, it's too crowded!
No matter how many of us on Hacker News are absolutely exhausted with social media… no, “we” as a society are as addicted as ever.
It is interesting to note, though, that over the years the “social” in social media exists almost exclusively in the comments. We used to have feeds heavily populated by people we actually know. Now algorithmic feeds pump influencers in many people’s faces 24/7. In some ways it’s not that different to old school media, it’s just finely optimized to addict us.
1. The size of a healthy, general social network is limited by Dunbar's number, because this is the number of people an individual can get to know individually. For a social network to grow beyond this and remain healthy, it must become specific (e.g., an online forum with a specific focus), so that the effort required to interact with any given individual is minimised, because there are fewer points of difference.
2. People who pine for the good old days of the internet are university-educated elites who enjoyed those good old days because the only other internet users were other university educated elites. Social media didn't destroy online culture; it gave the Great Unwashed a reason to be online, and they changed online culture into something that resembled their offline culture.
3. We like to think of the good old days as a time without bubbles online, but in reality, it was just one big bubble.
4. Conventional social media platforms have just become media platforms because only a small proportion of their users - influencers - regularly produce anything interesting.
I'm totally not tired of Facebook circa 2008 - a bunch of my friends, people I actually know, posting about our lives and having conversations. A fantastic way of reconnecting with old friends and staying in touch with people.
I'm utterly tired of what it is now.
Text-based social media is cancer, the best example being X but also its derivatives, Facebook, Reddit etc. They are too susceptible to astroturfing, manipulation, political slop and outrage, bullying etc.
I get a lot of value out of Instagram despite its ongoing enslopification. It lets me keep up with old friends, share memes with my friends, and the reel algorithm never fails to put me in a good mood.
I'm 50/50 on HN, because even though it's a text-based platform it's not so bad compared to X for example.
I do think people will be drastically reevaluating their internet usage over the next decade tho, especially as the dead internet theory becomes more than just a theory and people return to the real world.
> However after a while I realized that people just post into the void. Everyone has something to say or promote, yet no one wants to listen. It's like we're all having our booth on a crowded public space, but there are no actual receivers...
> Thus I concluded that people overall are tired of socializing.
I don't think people are tired of socialising. People are tired of the self-centered, propagandized publication that social media companies have addicted us to, both as consumers and providers. This makes people want to socialise less because:
a) They get more immediate satisfaction from consuming or providing content than actually socialising
b) Satisfying this (any) addiction takes a lot of time and emotional effort that might otherwise be used for socialising
Ironically, I think the author discovered exactly what social media ACTUALLY looks like without the addictive algorithms: lots of people yelling and nobody listening.
Absolutely. The worst part about this by far is the fact that you are virtually required to participate in at least one of these platforms if you want to exist in the professional world.
No, we are tired of "social media" demanding all of our free time and utmost attention - and for what, our eyeballs on ads. We've seen that it brings no intelligent discussion but rather maximalist thinking in bubbles and hatred towards others. We're divided into so many categories that we figured we might as well just spend time by ourselves. That's where the new LLM chatbots come in.
Lots of people talk about being tired of it but few do anything about it. The entrenched social media has become a sort of flypaper for the Eternal September keeping them off the newer, smaller, better options. Anyone discerning has left Twitter/Reddit/etc. But rather than try to replace those it's better to think of the newer places as off-ramps from social media rather than forming new dependence on them.
It's all ignorant bigots. Everywhere. Painfully stupid angry ignorant people yelling about conspiracies they read in a meme.
We should all dedicate 0 seconds of our life to this.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines is undefeated
social media needs to evolve
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yo why do I need javascript to layout your web page when all the contents are right there and u could just turn that pre into a p and add a monospace font and make that gigantic photo of your face a little smaller
With old chat programs and forums I was talking to real people over a long span of time. On the modern platforms I’m just talking to the internet. It feels very different.
In 2024 I was looking for a place to see the eclipse, and someone I knew from a forum 20 years ago told me I could come to his house, as it was going right over it. It was my first time meeting him in person, despite having known him for 20 years. We don’t talk as often anymore, but for many years we talked everyday. I probably talked to him more than anyone else I knew for a good 5-10 years. I don’t feel like that stuff happens when people are just blasting out memes.