I always find these "quitting social media" blog posts a bit ironic... "social media is addictive and encourages doing and posting things just for the attention and to make other people think I am interesting... so I wrote this blog post about quitting social media, and am posting it to hacker news and other sites... I hope lots of people read it and think I am insightful"
The internet is for sharing. Social media is for driving engagement from users, mining their data, and encouraging unhealthy social comparison (as well as, you know, organizing events and messages and stuff). Nothing wrong with sharing a blog post on an experience you had that you think may be of value to others.
To dive a bit further into this, I was very socially active on the Internet 20 years ago, and it was a magical thing. I made friends that I still communicate with today, and I credit the amazing community I aligned myself with for helping me become the person I am today (in a good way).
Social media today is nothing like those early communities, and I rarely participate for that reason. Some of the core motivations (e.g. desire for connection/community) exist in both places, but the similarities pretty much end there.
The closest modern day equivalent (for me) is HN and some very niche subreddits.
Ditto. The important thing about the forums of yore were that they were largely composed of users who self-selected into it, and were oriented around a particular topic. They didn't have the thing were tons of people latched on and then just hung around for no reason other than their own boredom.
I think there's a fundamental difference in how forums are used vs social media. The catch-all nature of social media molds it into a device which people use to construct an idealized representation of themselves. Forums seem to head more in the direction of discussing/arguing about focused topics, rather than identity-creation.
I understand your POV on this, I quit social media relatively silently[1]. From my POV, ex-social-media-addict now "clean" for 838 days[2], there is a strong degree of FOMO attached to not being on SM. Here are a few examples of where I wish I had "told folks" that I was quitting:
* For the first 9 months folks would often say: "I missed you at my such-and-such event last month", and I would reply: "email me next time". Perhaps if I had quit loudly I'd have felt less FOMO-y and been invited to more events.
* Births / Deaths / Marriages; I'm completely out of the loop, which is almost always a worse off situation. I've come to learn that I want to know sooner rather than later when folks have died because going through grief a week or two after other folks absolutely sucks. I wonder if I quit loudly folks would reach out more proactively in these situations?
* Generally feeling connected: a "personal talent" of mine is a relatively strong ability to remember what I read about folks on their FB timelines. Without that I feel pretty disconnected; and there are a lot of folks I "miss" as a result. Would this have been different if I quit in the open? Would folks have said: "oh you can follow my photo stream and see what I'm up to?"
That final example, when coupled with deaths, is particularly acute. You're left wondering whether you could have helped prevent self harm, etc.
Leaving social media really helped me evaluate who my actual friends are, and who were just names on a list. If someone is only willing to communicate with me if it's through a single corporate-mediated ad/promotion machine, and will just stop contacting if I'm not on said machine, are they really my friend? I've come to the conclusion "No" and honestly, I feel my life is better off interacting with fewer real friends than awash in the feeds of numerous names-on-a-list.
At the end of the day, I realized I don't care about such-and-such events, births, deaths, etc. of people who will only talk to me if it's through Facebook.
> so I wrote this blog post about quitting social media, and am posting it to hacker news and other sites
I'm not sure if the fact that the author includes "Share to Facebook/Twitter" links at the bottom of the blog post is more comical or downright insulting to the reader.
They spend several paragraphs describing all the harm social media causes to themselves and society as a whole, then describe their epiphany and the joy of freeing themselves from its psychological chains, and then ask you to contribute to it. At very least it's extremely insincere.
I feel the same, for the most part. I quit social media during the pandemic early on and didn't even post to say I wouldn't respond anymore. I didn't delete my account, I just deleted the apps and I no longer visit any of the sites. I never blogged about it, and while I'm open about it and have told a few people directly so they would use alternative paths to contact me, it just doesn't seem like a story I need to share widely. I realize the irony in saying that while writing this comment.
Point is, I found that social media was mostly feeding a need I had to be "on display" or "performing" that I used to get in person pre-pandemic by "holding court" in group settings and leading interesting conversations. After making that realization, it caused me to rethink the behavior altogether. I still comment on HN and read HN daily, but this is basically the only site I go on now that's akin to social media. Blogging about quitting social media would have just been me doing this same behavior in another pathway. To a large degree, I feel like that's the "point" of social media. To make us crave attention and to act out specifically to get attention and it's bled into everyday life and in-person interactions.
If the point of the attention-seeking is to encourage others to leave the attention-seeking platform, then it belongs in the set of special self-subverting cases.
Same logic applied to Stallman using a proprietary compiler to build a free-software compiler that obviated the need for said proprietary compiler. He really did do that. (Unironically, at that.)
Same feeling. Additionally, the author stands he felt used by social media, but you find a properly newsletter subscription at the end of the article. Of course, if you create a writing piece which implied some time to produce, you're looking for something in return.. same than social media. The difference is that usually behind the last ones there is a corporate logic.
I write a blog too, but I do not want people to become addicted to it and spend hours on my site. I do not even want to track them, so Jetpack was uninstalled promptly.
Blogs are like books or newspapers. We can live with books and newspapers, they have been around for centuries. Social media are like fentanyl.
