It's worse than facebook as far as the "get attention" vibe.

Granted all social media is about getting attention, and I don't think there is anything wrong with it necessarily. Attention is nice, there is good reason for it, but when the message is so tailored to just that and there isn't anything else, I don't know what the point is.

I recently switched careers from a long networking career to web development and thought I'd take another spin on Twitter, but rather I just get sites that paste a link to their website, and hordes of people posting programming truisms or career / resume / coding lifestyle fodder .... so little feels like that person wrote it, so much feels like what those people thing "a commercial about me" should be.

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As for your other notes about the impact on people. It is horrifying. I see some relatives posting terrible things and I wish saying "but you've never met any of those people" had the impact that it should... but it doesn't.

Then, 2 years ago I created a new account that ONLY focused on a personal hobby of mine: retro-computing. I posted photos, links to cool articles, experiences from my workbench, etc. To my surprise, I began to get a lot of engagement. Like, 25-50X more than what I used to ever get on my professional persona's account.

I made a point to only follow back people who posted similarly to my own laser-beam focus. This takes a lot of time, but I have cultivated a stream of content I very much enjoy reading and scanning in my off-hours or lunch breaks. If you post about politics, or food, or cats, or simply whine or are acidic by nature, I don't follow those accounts back. I'm looking for good vibrations for a pastime hobby - that's it. And to my surprise (and those that know me personally and professionally that I've explained this to) it has worked beautifully for that. No one is a jerk and no one is trolling, none of that.

I've actually made several online friends around the country and the world as a result of the past 2+ years on Twitter.

Now, is my experience normal? No. If I were to guess it's probably in the top 2% in terms of the joy it brings me (vs. the rest of the user population who just hates to even look at Twitter anymore). And I totally get that.

I hope the service keeps going for my own greedy self-interests. But I also recognize that Mastadon may be the future, too. Or something else.

It's sort of how I changed my usage with Facebook. I deleted my personal account and created an anonymous account on FB that only is used for FB Groups (in, yes, the same hobby). These are closed groups that are moderated.

And holy smokes. It works.

Go figure.

Remove the YOU from social media, and use it to have fun about whatever it is you do to have fun, and it can actually be ... fun.

Most of my engagement consists of a private Slack groups with groups of friends who enjoy discussing various topics. (And within these groups I tend to subscribe to only the channels that I find more interesting.) Similarly, on Instagram I have one account where I follow a group of close friends I've mostly had since high school, and another where I mostly follow a bunch of car related channels I like. Having that separation and ability to go and seek out a specific kind of content is fantastic. (As opposed to just being subjected to a fire hose "feed" of whatever an algorithm thinks will be engaging.)

Actually, I resisted RSS in the past for much the same reason. Even though you curate the feed, I vastly preferred having a bookmarks folder of blogs and other sites I followed, which I could then pick and choose from to suit my mood, than to have it all served up in a reader.

It would be nice to see things move more in this direction. For example, the default Facebook view, rather than a general news feed, could be a set of groups you belong to, along with ad-hoc groups of interconnected contacts, encouraging you to pick what genre of updates or conversations suits your current mood. Even then I don't know if it would be siloed enough to capture the same benefits, but it would be a step in the right direction I think.

Discord today feels like how Facebook used to feel when it started: I'm actually friends with everyone on there, and we're having real conversations.

There's also 100% less politics, moral panic, virtue-signaling, outrage, ads, "fake news", Farmville invitations, and similar garbage.

It's nice.

Why use Twitter for such things, given its limitations? Why not use a blog, personal site, or forum where instead of just posting a link you can also write your thoughts about it, etc.? I get not wanting to bother with running a personal site or maintain a blog, but there are tons of hobby forums.

Personally, I never got the appeal of Twitter, and while I did enjoy early Facebook, since it jumped the shark I use it primarily as a long-term contact list for people that I don't talk to very often so that we'll still have a way to connect if one of us changes email addresses/phone numbers before the next time we talk.

It has limitations, but it also has a lot of reach. A blog might not reach the people you are trying to share things with.

I actually do. I run a forum that I treat like a blog and link to my posts (and other members' posts) of interest.

Extrapolate that and compare it to these same kids going to apps like instagram or tiktok which are even more visually-heavy (and less text) with content that it's even simpler and more optimized for user reach than user participation.

Twitter is, like many things, what you make of it.

With a default mode of garbage.

I do have some family members on Facebook and in the past I would use Facebook to do things like share vacation photos, intended mainly for family members and close friends and the like. This now seems like an impossible task to do reliably -- there's no way I know that someone who hasn't seen my photos and want to will see it, from my perspective. So for me it's back to the ol' Smugmug and email. (I imagine there are other social networks that are able to work like I want, but most of my family isn't on it, and all of my family has email. This just works for me.)

Facebook does have "groups" which do work quite well as you mentioned, and Facebook works well from my perspective as an announcement / engagement platform for businesses and hobbies. Much of their core social network however seems broken to me personally.

(Regarding the parent linked article, I'm kind of curious where they are going to though and a better understanding of the reasons behind the shift. Most articles I've Googled don't seem to dive very deeply into these things beyond vague demographic musings like "Facebook isn't cool for teenagers" and mentioning Instagram and Snapchat as the replacement. The analysis level isn't even standard media depth to me, even more so than usual. If I look for articles on other things in relative decline where I do have a fair bit of insight -- like say NASCAR racing -- the general media articles actually seemed to (sometimes) make an effort to explain the often seem to make more efforts at explaining the declines, because the reasons are often multi-faceted. I have to believe that any Facebook decline is driven by a lot more details than "my parents are on Facebook".)

This doesn't change the fact that 99% of things people give credit for to social media can be easily done without mediation through a multi-billion dollar corporation.

Neither does it change the fact that Twitter and Facebook have a whole slew of horrible social effects. Centralization of the web, political polarization, emergent mobs trying to ruin people's lives, rise in depression and suicide rates, normalization of global surveillance, normalization of censorship, etc, etc.

Jaron Lanier has some interesting thoughts on the economy behind some of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc_Jq42Og7Q

Did you ever stop to think why? It's not like the barrier of entry was high. People simply did not find it worth their time. Chances are, big social media isn't worth their time either, but people are kept there by social pressure and purpose-built addiction mechanisms. And you're spinning it as if this is some kind of positive thing.

Connectivity is like food. The benefits to the person don's scale linearly. Forums and IM were already above the bare minimum. They were like a hearty meal. Social media today is like having a binge eating disorder.

I have a hard and fast rule of not friending anyone I see regularly or have a real private or personal relationship with (No family, no neighbors, no current coworkers). Avoids so much drama.

It's just finding those folks is hard.

I don't post personal stuff, I'm also not really intrested in that.

Although it pretends that replies are equivalent to top-level tweets, they're not really. It's just that there's a reply thread attach to everything.

Basically, CNN will tell you what your head of state did. Your regional media will tell you what your legislative representative did if it was newsworthy.

Twitter lets you keep tabs on your city councilman.

A sign of the times. A lot of people are just really pissed off right now. I also think a lot of people that used to ignore politics realized that it matters...

While political opinions are more numerous, they're divorced from evidence and calcified. As useful as no opinion, and possibly worse. (Then again, that's my opinion, right?)

The cost of communication, price and latency, has always defined the structure of our communities. Letters, cars, phones, internet, every invention expanded the reach of individual "community" while cost acted as friction to prevent bad ideas from gaining too much momentum - individuals still had to engage with their local community too.

Social media finally brought the cost to essentially zero. We can talk to anyone or about anything at any time. Great for early adopters and their critical/creative tendencies, but mass adoption by consumers has enabled mass tribalist tendencies to fully decouple from proximity constraints. This might be the "boiling point" for historical conflicts, but "supercritical" seems more appropriate here.

Media consolidation has been synonymous with consolidation of broadcasting viewer opinions and their political parties - many unhappy with both choices but faced with the false dichotomy of "their guy" and "the enemy". Meanwhile grass-roots are numerous but now diffuse and ineffective, cut off from broadcasting influence and digitally disconnected.

Hopefully society starts correcting back to offline engagement. Anecdotes suggest we are, but undoing the damage will still take a while.

>The cost of communication, price and latency, has always defined the structure of our communities. [..] Social media finally brought the cost to essentially zero.

Worse. It brought it in the negative, at least perceptually.

It is people trapped in their echo chambers. Some chambers are better than others (some, much better, but alas). I personally don't hold much hope for things to ever get de-calcified without some kind of large-scale real-world incident to force it. It is almost like two entirely different species of humans at this point who are almost incapable of empathising with each other.

(and note, in many cases, refusing to empathise.... I refuse to empathize with alt-right supporters for example.)

Democracies have never been about evidence, they are about making sure the "rulers" enjoy the support of the people and are strongly incentivised to listen to the concerns of said people. Democracies have a long and storied history of being arbitrary and unfair in defiance of evidence.

In light of that, I'd suggest interpreting political opinions as "I think this person understands what my problems are". When I mentally add that to the end of a political rant usually the rant moves from incomprehensible railing against reality to something rational, but disagreeable.

https://gist.github.com/potatoqualitee/d873c10d8cc578c11fc2e...

Other than that, and perhaps sharing more substantive articles/blog posts/etc to a wider audience, it's at best silly, and at worse, well...much worse.

Kinda sad.

You can also disable Twitter's annoying engagement-boosting features by muting special undocumented tokens like "suggest_recycled_tweet_inline" and "suggest_who_to_follow". https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/09/19/twitters-annoying-f...

So that’s all to say that there are less common uses of these platforms than you might know. Also, because of how I use it, Twitter doesn’t bother showing me any ads. I get about one ad a week. Go figure.

I think a huge feature for that is “mute”. Being publicly observed to follow a Twitter without actually seeing its content is, shamefully enough, important and useful a lot more than you’d think.

I will tell you what I use it for: follow interesting people, and pictures of cute animals. My goto rule of thumb for the first is, are they saying something where you go "hu?" in a positive way?

I have a few people in my feed who do this, from both sides. It almost feels like they've turned into nothing but meme/share-bots. It gets so annoying that I should probably block them already.

If you try to call out the content, you either get childishly shouted down because you're on "the other side", or called out as "the problem" because you don't agree with their group-think.

It feels good to have someone verbalize this.

I can't enjoy much social media anymore because there's an expectation that discussing anything opinionated requires a preface about what side you're on.

Making a politically neutral statement means you're with the enemy (where the enemy is on the side opposite whoever reads your neutral statement).

I'm not even referring to politics or discussion of world events: even more futurist/what-if thoughts about how society works/could work.

HN is the calmest place to have a discussion with someone, because no one's looking for clues about your personal beliefs and what side you're ostensibly warring for.

9 times out of 10, only the content of your comment seems to matter. As it should be.

just scroll to the bottom where everything is downvote-collapsed already, anything that isn't Silicon Valley political echo chamber isn't really discussed holistically and garners the same "you're the enemy" or "you're not in the middle if you don't already agree with me" response as other networks

need a patch for this

My thoughts are that Americans need a credible external threat for unity, and currently we don't have one. The Cold War thing jumped the shark decades ago and just doesn't have unifying consensus as being a problem for America, the religious extremist story has fallen apart with everyone knowing its all part of our cozy relationship with the House of Saud. So here we are

Honestly if I talk/debate with someone long enough I can tell if they won’t be convinced, but sometimes it’s not the person you are debating that you are going to convince, but someone on the sidelines. Honestly the people that are most vocal are likely the ones that are already polarized and irrational, but that doesn’t mean the world is full of irrational people. Sometimes I believe not participating in an online debate is the right thing to do, but on the other hand the only way the tone will change about politics is if people change it.

The message is "I AM A DEVOTED MEMBER OF THIS TRIBE, AND I'M READY TO FIGHT FOR IT! DON'T ABANDON ME!"

What I realized recently is that Facebook is built in a way that makes it really hard to have a real conversation. People only share links and shout their opinions with no real place for exchange.

I said that because the more I think about it, the more I find social media platforms don't really help me stay in touch with anyone. I mean, yeah, I can see they got a third kid or that hunting season was great this year, but nothing near a real conversation around a coffee or a beer.

That's why I started using MatterMost ,an open source Slack clone, or like I tell my less tech-savvy friends: IRC on steroids. (IRC was the go to choice when we were teens)

1. There is no private (there is, but ignore that)

2. Choose a topic to post about. Further that and none else.

3. Post topical discussions only.

4. Don't involve yourself in screeds. There will be a sentence that is taken out of context.

Doing these creates a really cool group over $thing. And that positive attraction pulls more in :)

This is the good side of social media: connecting people with similar interests from around the world.

It became work to make Facebook worthwhile.

Such a signal, combined with actual research on the veracity and tone of the post could be combined to highlight places where people need help and where bad actors might be plying their wares.

But I don't honestly expect anyone in management at Facebook to advocate such a system.

It would instantly be weaponized. Already, right-wing groups specialize in taking down antifa and LGBT pages on Facebook or Twitter by abusing the report feature. To make it worse, Facebook apparently automatically locks pages upon getting a high number of reports in a short timeframe.

You can bet that anything not from Fox News or Infowars would be flag-abused as "fake news" in an instant.

The one my in-laws have on all day is Glenn Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Levin. It's a constant stream of angry/crazy white guy. Even the late night isn't a refuge. Whatever the show is that used to be Art Bell is quasi-political now.

I've ... accidentally ... tuned in to Hannity on occasion. I thought I'd tuned in to the local lunatic asylum.

How is it with all our technology, the cutting edge are these digital septic tanks (or sewers if you live in the city)?

Or just willing to take the paycheck while pushing everything else to the back of your mind.

I have my facebook only to announce big events and let immigration officers know that I love my wife very much by having a detailed photo album of all our interactions over many years.

It's incredibly annoying that at this juncture I have to keep it because of what other people / entities want rather than myself. This is why I refuse to use LinkdIn instead of job boards or the career sites for the company.

The aggressive commercialization of Social Media has been the greatest failure to be borne out of the internet and our society will be suffering its effects for many years. At least the stockholders (who are probably too darn old to use the site) are very happy.

Edit: I also very much appreciate the irony of spending so much time and energy on posting on Hacker News!

I think some people unconsciously know this, but they fail to act on it due to the addictive nature of the product, creating false excuses to justify their account (it doesn't matter how important you think you are, no one cares really).

Others are completely oblivious to what Facebook is doing to them. I don't think there is any hope for them. Facebook will continue to use them to squeeze every bit of free time they have into pointless egocentric activity.

The Brainwashing Of My Dad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXTjz2H57rE

FWIW I now have my own blog (not associated with HN, yet) that I use to type out my thoughts on things. I've shared it with a few people in my life that I think might care. The act of it being a blog instead of posts on Facebook is very intentional, and I don't care that not many see it. It is more of a journal.

But if that is the reason why you are reading or traveling, you might as well not.

Travel or read book to get new perspectives, experiences and learn new things. Not to tell others to make yourself feel superior over others.

I would be interested in the values for other platforms. I think it builds a more tangible argument when explaining the hidden costs of using various "free" products.

http://matthewbrecher.com/socialmedia.html

https://www.upmc.com/media/news/lin-primack-sm-depression

"Social Media Use Associated With Depression Among U.S. Young Adults"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3477910/

"There is increasing evidence that the Internet and social media can influence suicide-related behavior. "

It's an uncomfortable topic to broach, but you can't blame everyone else but your father for the opinions he holds.

Poster should call him out. Say you find it unpleasant. If the online echo chamber extends into real life as well he's got no hope.