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- Hacker News
- I think I'm on an A/B test on the Facebook app, now whenever I open the app it goes straight to reels and starts playing videos with sound enabled. I looked through all settings to try to disable this but couldn't, so I finally just gave up and uninstalled it
I open the app to keep up with what my friends are doing, and also check the dating portion of the app for new matches. I purposely always avoid reels on any app, because I hate them and what they do to people. So when I open the app and it immediately starts playing reels with sound on and no way to disable it, it feels like a slap in the face
by PcChip - Yes, we've moved from town squares to private parties - whatsapp chats, discord servers, even IRC still exists. (Bluesky is a bit of an exception but they'll need to get enough stable revenue at some point.)
Interestingly, in-person "nerd" events seem to be going just fine - LARP, D&D, board games, historical reenactment, trading card games and tournaments like M:tG, and a lot more.
by red_admiral - I used to browse through my instagram feed a few times per month. Just to keep updated about those friends who often posted there. Now it's mostly crappy shorts and I can't even find the "friend feed" anymore. No idea if it's just well hidden or completely gone. Now I don't use it anymore at all.by andix
- I was on it for the comic strips, but the rest of it is so noxious to me that I don't want to go there just to get a feed of comics.
Oh well, there's always GoComics :) It is missing a lot of the new ones that are on Instagram, though.
by projektfu - This is why I don’t understand why my family/friends keep wanting me on Facebook or Instagram. It’s not about keeping up with each other. They just want it to be slightly easier to send me memes. But if I wanted to browse memes, I could just go do that. I don’t need them sending me their feed with a bunch of jokes that are funny to them, but not me.by al_borland
- It is so well-hidden, in fact, that there is no visual indicator that it exists at all, so you cannot be blamed for thinking it is gone. On the homepage (house icon) tap the Instagram logo and select "Following." It will present you with a chronological feed of posts from only those you follow.
Again, there is NO ARROW or any UI to indicate this is possible. You used to be able to set it as the default view, but that has been eradicated it seems.
by zbikowski - If this subject interests you, and you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.by spking
- There is also a book called Infinite Jest that touches on this subject
Its a breezy novella you can finish over a lunch break
by ex-aws-dude - 40 years old now and as relevant as ever.
IMO even better than Chomsky's Necessary Illusions (1989) or Bernay's Propaganda (1928) at giving you that backstage at Disney world feeling.
by randusername - Facebook just isn't a social media site anymore. They pivoted, and did so multiple times.
Remember when they were going to be a games platform, where Farmville was their big hit? They eventually abandoned that and then wanted to be a video and streaming platform. Then Metaverse VR was going to replace everything. Now they're some sort of AI company.
People long ago started migrating to Whatsapp, Discord, and similar groups for actual socializing. They did seemingly panic a bit at that trend and bought Whatsapp.
by nitwit005 - The thing is socialising isn’t that profitable. People moved socialising to IM apps but hardly any of them are paying for it or consuming many ads.
Short form video media is massively profitable and those same people are eating it up.
by Gigachad - I've stopped using YouTube and Reddit since early April and it's been a mixed bag.
On one side my interest level has adjusted so that normal activities make sense again - like sitting in the garden or playing a game with my kid. I've also completed dozens of projects like replacing old silicon in the entire kitchen or updating the garden playground.
On the other side I'm feeling more isolated and lacking information / stimulation for creative output because I no longer have any idea what other people are doing. However given that massive amounts of time have been freed I'm more productive both at work and at home, more effort on health too.
It's definitely something to try but it's not all roses.
by kachurovskiy - You must have one high-tech kitchen!by switchbak
- Create rss feed of few curated favorite creators.by rnewme
- I'm a big YouTube addict, but I dropped social media well before that was cool.
I've felt quite disconnected from folks I knew, and I presume they feel like I've pulled away. Sounds like this is kind of similar, you end up feeling a bit disconnected? Doesn't sound all that bad, but I get what you mean - you feel isolated.
I've learned incredible amounts of things with YouTube - I curate it like a madman, but overall I'm still not sure it's a good thing. Corporations just tend to end up eating their customers eventually.
by switchbak - I've been forced to do it once for reddit, with the API fiasco, and I don't really notice improvement but I do notice reduced quality of life. Almost no other websites have easily accessible niche memes.
YouTube recommendation is never that good to me. I frequently just scroll desperately and ended up not watching anything, and when I'm peak bored I resort to rewatching my list of liked videos. That's why I feel weird whenever I see projects that want to make YouTube less engaging, it's already not engaging enough for me.
by mcmoor - I've effectively dropped reddit because they've made the mobile web version near-unusable (and I find old.reddit.com difficult on mobile). Honestly, it's an improvement in my life. I don't know how I found myself spending so much time on it for so little benefitby anitil
- Social media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel insecure, you leverage your emotions for someone else's aims.
Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation. It's long past time to leave it permanently.
And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
by everdrive - > And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word.
That it's less destructive than Meta doesn't make it less "social media" - and I'd argue that it's style (links fall off the page quickly and discussion becomes impossible after a relatively short period of time, solely to foster a sense of "missing out") is part of what defines current "social media".
It's a noisy attention sink, whatever high-mindedness people want to pretend it has.
by jmye - > HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word.
The article's main claim is that traditional social media is not social media any more. That Facebook et al are now junk entertainment. So IMO HN hews much closer to the traditional role of social media than Facebook et al do.
by bryanlarsen - Ads became the default business model of the web. When people started to get sick of blaring in-your-face blinking banners, it mutated into search ads and placement. The same thing happened to mobile apps and games, YouTube, Facebook, instagram, even Tik Tok. When it becomes too blatant then it embeds itself one level deeper as placements and endorsements.
It will never stop because the parasitic ads are the only thing holding up the edifice anymore. It's crazy to me because ultimately what holds up the economy is money changing hands for services, and ads aren't that. So ads are fundamentally driving people to spend money elsewhere. I just don't understand how the system holds up a multi-hundred billion dollar advertising parasite...everything would be cheaper if there were no ads.
by titzer - When a professor at Rice walked us through Don Tapscott's book Growing up Digital in 2001, we had such an optimistic view of the future. Don highlighted how with broadcast media in the 20th century, the viewer had little choice on what to watch. Now that the internet was available to the masses, he explained how much new generations would benefit from what he called interactive media which enabled someone to explore and learn anything of interest instead of being forced to consume whatever was being fed through the television. When we'd say there was "nothing on" we felt bored, and maybe we did endure some manipulation by commercials, but I agree that contemporary social media is far worse. In the 20th century, boredom from channel surfing at least encouraged some to get off the couch and go read a book or shoot some hoops or play a board game with friends. Allow me the stereotype (exaggeration?) for a moment to note that we had the ultimate nerdy kid who wanted to be cool, and all he could think of with gazillions of dollars at his disposal was to make a thing that turned everyone into anti-social nerds by staying glued to their screens instead of interacting IRL with fellow humans. Who would have accepted that fictional plot as believable?by stephenhuey
- > And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
I came here after reading the comment section for the "Dopamine Fracking" story right below this one. In that comment section there are arguments that Hacker News isn't social media because it doesn't have social features like friending people you know. The argument is that it's a place to discover cool content and comment on it.
Which is precisely the argument being made in this BBC article: That traditional social media is becoming less about communicating with friends and more about discovering content and commenting on it. Which is the exact purpose of sites like Hacker News and Reddit.
> "I spend a lot of time scrolling through videos made by content-creators," says Lucie, also 16. "They're more interesting than the posts of people I know."
> "What we're seeing is social media splitting in two," says social media consultant Matt Navarra, author of the Geekout Newsletter. "Big platforms like Instagram and TikTok are becoming more about entertainment and discovery. WhatsApp is becoming the place people go to actually be social.
EDIT: I had to use Wayback Machine to find this:
> 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features
> Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.
That's from https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinato...
That has been erased from the internet, but it was widely understood that sites like Reddit and HN could were social and had addictive properties for people without strong self control.
by Aurornis - > And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
Whatever you want to call it, HN has followed a similar trend. It's rare to see the authors of small, but interesting/innovative, projects show up in the comments, surprised to see their work on the front page. That used to be common, even the default, if you look far enough back.
Now the front page is current events and marketing campaigns. I don't think I've seen a single software project here in the last year that wasn't already extremely popular, or being pushed by a company with a marketing budget.
In theory AI should have helped. I know people are still making cool stuff, faster now with AI, but it's harder and harder to find it.
by alphazard - > And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
I am thrilled you pointed this out. I also get tired of seeing that.
- Your theory about cable television is fascinating. I never really watched TV growing up, but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time.
Social media is totally that today too. I quit facebook in 2016 and reddit in 2023 over similar fears. Back then I said facebook was bad for my mental health, and I quit reddit when they made it harder for me to prevent what I called amygdala-bait. But it's totally the same thing.
These days I love to watch nuanced explanations on youtube of complex issues, but youtube's algorithm desperately wants to feed me stuff like How Money Works and other channels where it's dressed up as nuanced explanations of the world, but every single episode is how X is screwing you over or how the Y is going to blow up the economy any second now.
by malfist - A new game: determine when you meet someone if they use tik-tok or not without asking them.
People's opinions are groomed and programmed. It's pretty hilarious how small minded people are.
by exabrial - Nah, this is the same self-congratulatory dismissive mindset humans have been having about each other for years. “Wake up, sheeple,” “NPC,” etc.
We’re not lacking for opportunities to believe the worst of each other. It’s not something TikTok invented.
by snowwrestler - Anti-social take. People are being exploited by some of the smartest people in the world who use natural human desires against people but somehow they are at fault for being small minded?
- I could very quickly sus out what was on FOX news last night by the conversations my coworkers have.by AlfredBarnes