As an anecdatum, one of my gen Y embedded engineers is using a little stick phone that can barely text, and avoids all social media except Discord (assuming that counts). One of the other younger folk in a different department has something similar. And we've only got around 100 people in this building.

I still have a smartphone, but I barely have any apps on it. I literally have a handful of email apps and two weather apps and that's it.

So yeah, I have a smartphone, but I barely use it compared to how I used to use it even 5 years ago. By unplugging, I've found myself way more productive. I'm reading two or three books a month now. Its an amazing feeling knowing you can drive what you want to do instead of having social media driving your life, manipulating you into using it more and more and not feeling like you're in control.

I've essentially logged off and I really don't miss it. I feel like I can't be the only one.

> I feel like I can't be the only one.

You're not, but you're also not the majority. I'm continually surprised that people are still on Facebook. I get why they use Facebook Messenger, or Facebook Marketplace, but the actual Facebook "news" feed? Have you seen that, it's ads or ads disguised as content... How the hell that thing isn't dead i beyond me.

“I don’t see what you’re seeing and therefore your position is invalid” isn’t really the slam-dunk your tone suggests. I’m also seeing pushback and withdrawal from my own highly-technical circles as we come to terms with how much time and energy these things sap from us with little given in return, and decide to exert more agency as a result. Developers are retiring to work on farms, for crying out loud, suggesting there’s something deeply, intrinsically toxic about the state of things that the people with the most expertise are leaving the field for areas less glamorous or lower in compensation.

You might not be seeing it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

Nah. The "back to the land" movement is nothing new. Some office workers were trying to become farmers (and mostly failing) back in the 1970s when there were only a tiny number of developers. Again, complaints about the state of society by a few disaffected individuals are meaningless and highly technical circles aren't representative of the broader society. No matter how amazing everything is a few people are going to be unhappy. Nothing has changed.

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/science/back-land-mo...

stego-tech is the equivalent of an anti-tech influencer ("zealot") on HN. Pretty much all they post about on here, and they post a lot on here, is about how tech is ethically bankrupt.

HN is big enough now imo that it's worth starting to tag users so you can know where they're coming from.

Is there a "HN enhanced" extension that would facilitate such tagging?

I found a tampermonkey extension for Firefox based on this comment. So far it seems to work well. I'm not sure if that's what they were referring to though.