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- Hacker News
- 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - HN is social media. Social media is a spectrum.
You can imagine HN like a documentary channel compared to Facebook’s reality TV, but even “documentaries” can be dopamine sinks that aren’t actually informative (or accurate).
(But personally, I see lots of short and pure opinion posts here, documentaries are long and at least pretend to contain facts; so I’d hesitate to compare it to a documentary channel even with the caveat.)
- If you're on Android, you can use revanced to patch social network apps, to, among other things, remove content from non-friends (and ads).
It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this. It can be full days with the same post at the top. And the worst part is that I hadn't noticed how empty it was until I did the change.
by torben-friis - Yes, the game is over, the corps have won. Where the Internet used to be a forum for creativity, it's now a weapon of influence. Where we used to have an anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) playground, we are now monitored more than anywhere else. Where we used to be able to genuinely connect, everything is now artificial and manufactured. And where we once had control, we are now the product.by twodave
- This article has struck a nerve in the comment section. It's describing how traditional social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are not used for social features anymore, but for content discovery. The descriptions of how people are using Facebook to find new content anonymously are not that different from how we use Hacker News, which has reignited the debate about whether Hacker News is social media.
I had to use the Wayback Machine to dig this up:
> 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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinato...
Even Hacker News acknowledged 15 years ago that it was a social site and that social news sites could be "dangerously addictive". The goalposts for defining social media keep moving as people try to avoid any definition that captures their own internet usage, but I think it's important to be honest about what we're all doing here.
Also the noprocrast feature is still there right in your profile, though I don't know if it's documented anywhere.
by Aurornis