I agree but if your goal is to socialize more, it's not enough to get off social media. You need to be in a place where enough other people do too.

Think of a city as both a spatial and a temporal grouping of people that are in the same place at the same time. Every hour a person spends at home on social media is an hour that they aren't really in the city and are not available for you to socialize with.

The cumulative hours that people spend staring at their phones are effectively a massive loss of population density. That lost density makes it harder to find people even if you yourself are getting off a screen and looking for them.

> I was just ahead of the curve.

I can relate to this. I was always moderately extroverted and sociable, but the irony has never ceased to flabbergast me that the very behaviours and interests for which nerds like me would have been stuffed into lockers and garbage cans (if I had dared to tell anyone in school that I was into computers) became, only a decade later, de rigueur for every young person.

I remember sitting in a coffee shop in 2003 (senior year of HS) trying to get kernel drivers for a PCMCIA 802.11b card to work on an ancient Compaq laptop, and being pointed, laughed at, and called -- by modern standards -- unconscienable names by a table of high schoolers nearby. It must have seemed so strange to them to see someone's head so deeply in a laptop.

And my goodness, I wouldn't have dared to confess that I talk to strangers in faraway places _online_. To be known to have substantive computer-based interactions would have branded one so profoundly socially unsuccessful, that one's very family name would be cursed with this prejudice for two generations. AIMing one's classmates on the family PC was one thing, but chatting online to likeminded peers in other countries? Why, that was radiantly gay!

But literally a few years later, I can't get anyone to make eye contact and they frequently plough into me because their heads are buried in their phones, texting people they never see.

A'ight.

Let me tell you about real life. I’m a caregiver and leaving the home is simply not an option. Short trips to the store, a walk around the block, maybe, if it’s before sundown, provided the person I’m caring for is in the right mental state to be left alone for 45 minutes. If there were neighborhood pubs that might be a thing to do if I drank. Getting off social media is great for those lucky enough to have the option, but with an increasing number of people getting into their dementia years, many with no savings to afford respite or other forms of care, social media is going to be the only option for a lot of people like myself. It’s better than nothing.

It's like China during the opium epidemic.

Maybe we'll see Europe try and ban social media, leading to a kind of "Opium War" to keep it going on the pretext of "freedom" and so on.

> Now, everyone is an internet addict, and I was just ahead of the curve. No one hangs around and chats anymore.

A lot of the events and spaces I go to have people who hang around and chat.

I agree that internet use has had an impact, but I think it's easy to underestimate how much situations change as you grow up. Now that I have kids, it seems like we're always ending up in spaces where people are hanging out and chatting. As far as my kids know, that's just the way the world works.

I thought the same up through college, then I graduated and suddenly spontaneous socialization ended. I had to change my habits to go find other people.

Thankfully social media is getting so much worse so fast it's making this easier and easier. HN is the last social media platform I still participate in... and I suspect that might not be for too much longer.

I recently logged onto Facebook and Instagram to update my 2-factor auth settings after having too many notifications of malicious login attempts. It was incredible to see what a transformation has happened there, it's like going to a decaying suburban shopping mall with only a few stores left open (and sort of sad to see the remaining users so continually desperate for a drop of approval from some imagined community).

Reddit is mostly bots, astro-turfers and people so brainwashed it's hard to tell the difference. I remember disagreeing with people on there (this in the pre-Digg migration era) you would get interesting divergent points of view. Now it's like people are reading from a script.

Twitter used to be my strongest addiction, but it's almost unbelievable how big a transformation has occurred since it became X. It's almost a parody of everyone's dystopian social media fears.

HN has obviously held up a bit better, but the AI driven mass hallucination impacting this community, combined with the increasingly aggressive manipulation of the home page, is continually making logging out for good seem like the best option.

I feel like the idea social media prevents socializing in real life is a bit of a straw man.

I've made many friends over the years through platforms like Instagram, some in countries I don't even live in, and we've met many times in person.

Of course that won't necessarily work for everyone but the point I'm trying to make is that social media isn't some one way street that won't return value.

People are seeking multiple things on social media. One common one is connection. I am in Mexico dealing with family business. I am in a rural area. My Spanish skills are developing but are still weak. I can have light conversation here, but I can't deeply connect. My desire to use social media has drastically increased.

But I only want to engage with my friends. Every platform feeds me various flavors of rage bait mixed in with my friends' content. Some of my friends groups have moved to chats on other less public platforms like Discord, Signal, or Whatsapp. But that's not the same experience. And a lot of the people I like to engage with aren't moving over to those platforms.

We all thought maybe social media would evolve into something good... but it was enshitified. So maybe part of the solution here is to develop a tool that offers that connection without the whole being exploited aspect?