When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. Now in 2025, the leader of the biggest platforms is talking about making people less lonely by connecting them to AI chatbots instead of making people find one another. That just feels like a huge lost potential.
> When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world.
I remember that feeling of being blown away at talking (typing) with people across the world without any limitations!
But for me this was in the late 80s and earliest 90s on the Internet. When all communication was standards-based, fully interoperable and completely free.
What we call today "social media" is just the proprietarization, for profit, of what existed before in a much more open fashion.
Quality was simply better, because reputation mattered. People used to gather in dedicated forums around a common hobby. People would eventually recognise each other's user names and you would built a reputation in the community.
Accounts like "Endwokeness" would have never worked in the old internet era. First of all, low effort political opening post with one sentence and a link would simply be removed. Secondly, people will make fun of him. Doesn't he have job? Why he is so obsessed with gays and trans people? Stuff like that will haunt him forever.
Could it be that the connection between like-minded people is the problem?
Until this century, people lived in a social world constrained by geography: your family, neighbors, and friends were the people physically present around you, an accident of geography rather than one of interest. The people around you might well not have shared many of your ideas, and that friction kept you in check just as you inhibited them to some extent. Nobody you knew went out in public dressed like a dog or advocated for the disenfranchisement of people who eat peanut butter because you and his other friends would intervene, telling him that those are crazy views.
Now, with the internet, your crazy friend can shun your inhibiting company, lock himself away in his house, and spend all his time on fora and discord and corners of social media where people share his views. His like-minded friends tell him that dressing as a dog is fulfilling his Dog-given identity, and that the peanut-butter eaters are committing genocide against his own like-minded people. Without the inhibition of friends drawn from the accident of geography, the man who surrounds himself with virtual e-friends in a social media echo chamber thinks that the crazy ideas he hears online are normal.
Maybe the inhibition we get from socializing with people who don't share our interests, that friction of dealing with people in real life, keeps us from sliding into mental illnesses and political extremism that spring up when we get nothing but validation from people who share our interests.
Social media started as a way to keep in touch with people you know. Then it became a way to scroll through people you don't know. Now it's becoming a way to scroll through people who don't even exist. "Social media" is dying and needs to be reinvented in a bot-proof, dopamine-safe way.
Back in 2004, some friends and I started a social network at yale called the “socially connected academic peer exchange” or scape. The concept was to help people have more meaningful connections IRL because it was easier to share one’s deeper interests online than at a party. Or so we thought.
We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was growing too fast though — it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.
When I was a teenager social media just started becoming a thing in my country and it has been a life saver, maybe even literally. I grew up in an incredibly dull countryside village where nearly everybody towed the same line (opinions, usually unsupported by reality). These people always made the same mean "jokes" at the cost of anybody that differed just in the slightest. Dumb, racist and a bit hill-billy, proud of not knowing things, with some cunning neo nazis and a hand full of more creative or outcast people that either found their way of dealing with it or just wanted to get out. The latter was me.
This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul.
The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally niché musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music.
The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet.
Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team.
Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did.
I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.
Social Media emerged in 2012 or so. The ability to connect already existed in the older forums and image boards for a decade prior to that, and their promise was fulfilled. The whole shtick of Social Media was it did NOT do that, Facebook, Instagram, etc was more about reinforcing preexisting connections with your real world identity than meeting others as strangers.
An AI chatbot is just the next stage on "like-minded people" continuum. It's a machine that bends over backwards to match what the user wants from it. (Maybe unhealthy but it's just the next step after interacting with anon posters over a shared niche interest)
I notice that Mastodon is only mentioned in the article in terms of protocols, but to me the killer feature there is the absolute lack of an algorithm.
Nothing is ever pushed on me by the platform, so the whole experience doesn't become combative. That does mean though that each user has to do some work finding others they like, and that can take some time. But that also weeds out those that just want to be spoonfed content, which is a plus.
The last three years on there have been some of the most wholesome social media interactions I have had in the last 25 years.
Mastodon literally has a trending feed. Is that not an "algorithm"? It has algorithmic popular hashtags, news feed, and user recommendations. Just a bog standard handful of algorithmic surfaces, so why are they still pretending like it's "algorithm free" is beyond me. "Absolute lack", right.
Mastodon and fediverse despite not running on algorithms sadly aren't free of spam and bots - probably nothing nowadays is. Last year in February there was a flood of messages attacking less populated instances, with... Spam can image in message body.
What grinds my gear after this attack is that majority of mastodon clients doesn't offer a simple way to block instance that would limit unwanted posts. Some even don't have that feature at all.
Unfortunately, we discovered that people would rather be told what to watch, rather that self-discover their interests, because that’s a lot of “work”.
The problem is that people are addicted to tension, by raising tension it fills a need, but the release of that tension is also addictive. Social media is just uppers and downers churned over and over. In one moment you can see some guy assassinated and then a box full of puppies rolling around and being cute. But that tension is only present at the extremes.
The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.
"The point where social media failed" was rather when most agreed to pretend that the services are for free and our attention may be hijacked by advertisement companies who have the goal of maximizing your engagement, meaning making you addicted.
> The problem is that people are addicted to tension
And some.
We've known that humans prefer to hear about trouble, strife, and tension for a very long time - that's why the evening news was always a downer, and newspapers before that.
I would argue that financialization of the social media is what made it fail. Once there’s direct dollar cost to your posts, ideas and etc., the incentives change from “fun” to “commercial”. That started heavily around 2017ish, where every social media switched to algorithm-first, and heavily started tracking engagement/attention per post.
"exhaustion" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think about social media.
At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like
"people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop".
Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user?
"Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.
There is a neurotic personality type that doomscrolls out of a compulsion. A lot of it is hyper-vigilance, constantly scanning for threats. Where will the next shoe drop? We feel threatened, then some feel like they need to take some kind of drastic action.
Of course what you’re reading is other neurotic folks sharing their anxieties. And algorithmic feed gives you their content. So it becomes self-reinforcing.
Exhaustion is absolutely the first word that comes to mind for me. Even when I'm not using it myself, I'm exhausted of all the oxygen it takes up in the room
It's interesting to see Tumblr mentioned as a dead/zombified platform, while I understand it's found a perfectly fine niche for itself and it's living a great life in that sense.
It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.
The algorithmic feed should be banned for all public discourse.
That is what’s killing us (quite literally).
Let topics be searchable and people should find what they need.
Very simple algorithms such as “most recent conversation” may be allowed.
I'm fairly convinced that "upvotes" and all the similar strategies might have been great for growth and engagement, but it's horrible for actual human conversation where we want to actually understand each other's perspective, and for others to not chase cheap "points" by saying catching/sounds-true stuff.
I think it's less obvious when looking at Twitter, Facebook, HN or similar, where things are kind of sneakily re-ranked depending on "the algorithm", but when you look at reddit this effect is really visible and obvious. Doesn't matter how true/false something is, it sounds true or is easy to agree with it, so up to the top it goes.
The problem is - it's not "social" and it's pure "media" at this point. It's almost impossible to have social aspect on the platforms where you only have real people with sane number of connections that interact with eachother. Rather you have a bunch of huge "pages" that simply push their news publications...
IMHO it would be awesome to have again sane, SOCIAL-media. Probably with the correct regulation it could be done… And the current SM platforms could use the regulation as well (force viewing only what one follows, make it transparent like other media - i.e. if someone has more than 10k "followers" it's just a media so put same requirements: full ID disclosure and having to respond to the takedowns immediatelly…)
I don't know if it's true but supposedly some birds will eat indigestible cigarette butts thinking they are food, then starve to death because their stomach is full.
Feels a lot like what going all-in on social media does to your social life. Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Social media is exhausting and drains your energy so you don't feel like talking to real people.
Tangentially related, I've read recently (Twitter? article?) someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc.
Because unifying everything down to a single one dumbed us down and gave unwarranted control to fewer and fewer people on what we may listen to, what we may write, what we may photograph, what we may share. And how and where and why we do it.
(notwithstanding that this would allow to significantly enrich the affordance of each device/appliance, relative to its use, rather than just having everything only tactile on a screen made of glass and 2 buttons).
My fingers are not fully compatible with touch screens so I'm not a big phone guy, so I can't speak for them, but I've been trying to make my computer more task oriented, to make choices more explicit.
I've experimented with using PWAs instead of browser windows, or even having different user accounts for different activities.
It works pretty well in combating the sort of tab cycling zombie mode it's easy to fall into where you aren't really doing anything but checking feeds and notifications. It doesn't block me from doing anything, it just forces me to do one activity at a time, which needs to be chosen upfront.
My inspiration behind this was basically old desktop computers, which with their single CPU core and small screen basically only permitted you to single-task (even if you could technically have multiple windows open you only really worked in the one).
> someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc.
It’s is perfectly possible today. Sony still produces Walkmans and there are 100s digital cameras (not to mention analog ones). I don’t think there was ever a time when SM and e-mail had separate devices.
The acceleration (into automation) of language and images - both arbitrary units - requiring cost-benefit for shareholders inevitably reduces the input to noise and then chaos. Because the dark matter of language is control, bias, manipulation for status, status becomes the central factor, not the sharing.
That we bemoan sub-industries of media, rather than notice the system effects across it is suspicious.
“… if we say that linguistic structure "reflects" social structure, we are really assigning to language a role that is too passive ... Rather we should say that linguistic structure is the realization of social structure, actively symbolizing it in a process of mutual creativity. Because it stands as a metaphor for society, language has the property of not only transmitting the social order but also maintaining and potentially modifying it. (This is undoubtedly the explanation of the violent attitudes that under certain social conditions come to be held by one group towards the speech of others.)”
Excerpts from Halliday Language and Society Volume 10
Fall, or Dodge in hell, by Neil Stephenson has a take on this.
The internet is flooded with slop and rage-bait on purpose. So filled as to be unusable, like a firehose of shit. So in there comes a role if "editor" whose job it is (you pay them) to only give you, well not even what's "true", rather what reflects your world view. So which editor you have becomes a factor in how you live, where your educated, your status.
It will be interesting to see if something as explicit as editors arise.
I will say this, if you stay off Facebook and some of the other big social sites for a while, it is like a madhouse when you glance back
Doesn’t this just reinforce your echo chamber? Your “editor” only gives you stuff you want to see not the stuff you need or should see.
And once you empower someone to gate or filter your access to information, what’s stopping them from treating you like the product for a better paying customer, like today?
I believe it takes maturity and wisdom to unhook from social media - facebook, youtube, linkedin, instagram etc. Especially reactive use, not the one which comes from internal pause / response.
I tried to unhook pretty much for the past 15 years as I sensed that it basically doesn't serve me. If I would summarize the one primary cause for my inability to do it is the following - the belief that consuming content online is better for my own being than learning to manage my monkey mind.
I mean any content - from scrolling dumb instagram and facebook feeds to factory making process videos on youtube and streamers playing online games, political debates etc.
The problem is not consuming content on social media, but doing it reactively, excessively.
What helps with unhooking is basically wisdom and experience because how to do it when pretty much everybody is doing it?
Realizing that entire social media world is just incredibly fucking corrupt. Like omg corrupt. It's the epitome of corruption, starting with CEOs themselves.
Last week I've had situation where the person I knew who has professional instagram profile with +10k and runs business there just went fucking nuts. Instead of focusing on working on herself she decided to double down on her narcisism and went mental. Episode, however this is where it leads.
I am just happy that I can see it better and better and step into the right direction - away from social media.
PS. I removed X account few months ago, oh my, what a relief!
I'm a little conflicted about using social media growing a business. If I do make content, I'll probably only commit to making actually useful posts, not putting up stuff that's vapid or shallow.
If you're talking about that person experiencing a mental episode- i think we are about to see a shattering of composure and an end to the social arms race as image and reality become increasingly difficult to connect. I'm quietly excited. These animalised (through social media) sociopaths might just deserve what is coming for them. The ego economy can only huff its farts for so long.
This piece makes a great point about needing "architectures of intention." The default social media experience is pure passive consumption, and I felt my own intentions for the day slipping away.
As a personal project, I built an extension to create my own little architecture of intention. It introduces a 20-second pause before I enter distracting sites, and during the pause, it nudges me with a positive micro-habit, like fixing my posture or taking a deep breath.
It's called The 20s Rule (Chrome/Firefox) if anyone else finds that idea useful.
A couple people have mentioned this but I think it's worth isolating (no pun intended) for emphasis
We started social media with chats that connected people across the world.
Then we handed over the majority of the Internet to Google who, in their pursuit to build out personally useful services, inadvertently jailed us into a hyper localized bubble
That bubble then became the standard of the Internet, and all sorts of pipes of toxic gas hooked in to the bubble and started poisoning us en masse.
This is why we started Favs - social network for close friends only. No ads, no brands, no influencers. Of course though we’ve had the cold start problem but fundamentally it’s what you’d want if your favorite people wanted to stay connected beyond a group chat.
- one to many posts
- maps of which city you’re in
- upcoming plans
- no new inbox either
[+] [-] mattikl|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jjav|6 months ago|reply
I remember that feeling of being blown away at talking (typing) with people across the world without any limitations!
But for me this was in the late 80s and earliest 90s on the Internet. When all communication was standards-based, fully interoperable and completely free.
What we call today "social media" is just the proprietarization, for profit, of what existed before in a much more open fashion.
[+] [-] enaaem|6 months ago|reply
Accounts like "Endwokeness" would have never worked in the old internet era. First of all, low effort political opening post with one sentence and a link would simply be removed. Secondly, people will make fun of him. Doesn't he have job? Why he is so obsessed with gays and trans people? Stuff like that will haunt him forever.
[+] [-] Telemakhos|6 months ago|reply
Until this century, people lived in a social world constrained by geography: your family, neighbors, and friends were the people physically present around you, an accident of geography rather than one of interest. The people around you might well not have shared many of your ideas, and that friction kept you in check just as you inhibited them to some extent. Nobody you knew went out in public dressed like a dog or advocated for the disenfranchisement of people who eat peanut butter because you and his other friends would intervene, telling him that those are crazy views.
Now, with the internet, your crazy friend can shun your inhibiting company, lock himself away in his house, and spend all his time on fora and discord and corners of social media where people share his views. His like-minded friends tell him that dressing as a dog is fulfilling his Dog-given identity, and that the peanut-butter eaters are committing genocide against his own like-minded people. Without the inhibition of friends drawn from the accident of geography, the man who surrounds himself with virtual e-friends in a social media echo chamber thinks that the crazy ideas he hears online are normal.
Maybe the inhibition we get from socializing with people who don't share our interests, that friction of dealing with people in real life, keeps us from sliding into mental illnesses and political extremism that spring up when we get nothing but validation from people who share our interests.
[+] [-] artursapek|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|6 months ago|reply
We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was growing too fast though — it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.
[+] [-] atoav|6 months ago|reply
This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul.
The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally niché musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music.
The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet.
Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team.
Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did.
I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.
[+] [-] corimaith|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] weregiraffe|6 months ago|reply
Traditional forums still exist.
[+] [-] mantas|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] UmGuys|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] HPsquared|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cyanydeez|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] MrDresden|6 months ago|reply
Nothing is ever pushed on me by the platform, so the whole experience doesn't become combative. That does mean though that each user has to do some work finding others they like, and that can take some time. But that also weeds out those that just want to be spoonfed content, which is a plus.
The last three years on there have been some of the most wholesome social media interactions I have had in the last 25 years.
[+] [-] pxoe|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] robin_reala|6 months ago|reply
1. No algorithm beyond most-recent-first
2. Stick to a maximum of ~250 following
3. Pay for the service instead of ad-supported
I can easily do all of those on Mastodon.
[+] [-] pndy|6 months ago|reply
What grinds my gear after this attack is that majority of mastodon clients doesn't offer a simple way to block instance that would limit unwanted posts. Some even don't have that feature at all.
[+] [-] tokioyoyo|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Popeyes|6 months ago|reply
The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.
[+] [-] lukan|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] awesome_dude|6 months ago|reply
And some.
We've known that humans prefer to hear about trouble, strife, and tension for a very long time - that's why the evening news was always a downer, and newspapers before that.
[+] [-] tokioyoyo|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nottorp|6 months ago|reply
Now it's just a platform for content mills. Producer to consumer.
Social media was peer to peer and it's dead.
[+] [-] weinzierl|6 months ago|reply
At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like
"people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop".
Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user?
"Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.
[+] [-] softwaredoug|6 months ago|reply
Of course what you’re reading is other neurotic folks sharing their anxieties. And algorithmic feed gives you their content. So it becomes self-reinforcing.
[+] [-] gipp|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 3form|6 months ago|reply
It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.
[+] [-] Swenrekcah|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] diggan|6 months ago|reply
I think it's less obvious when looking at Twitter, Facebook, HN or similar, where things are kind of sneakily re-ranked depending on "the algorithm", but when you look at reddit this effect is really visible and obvious. Doesn't matter how true/false something is, it sounds true or is easy to agree with it, so up to the top it goes.
[+] [-] ktosobcy|6 months ago|reply
IMHO it would be awesome to have again sane, SOCIAL-media. Probably with the correct regulation it could be done… And the current SM platforms could use the regulation as well (force viewing only what one follows, make it transparent like other media - i.e. if someone has more than 10k "followers" it's just a media so put same requirements: full ID disclosure and having to respond to the takedowns immediatelly…)
[+] [-] chmod775|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] acd|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|6 months ago|reply
Feels a lot like what going all-in on social media does to your social life. Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Social media is exhausting and drains your energy so you don't feel like talking to real people.
[+] [-] benrutter|6 months ago|reply
I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts, what would a social media built for nuanced, meaningful interaction look like? Could there be such a thing?
[+] [-] unknown|6 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|6 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Juliate|6 months ago|reply
Because unifying everything down to a single one dumbed us down and gave unwarranted control to fewer and fewer people on what we may listen to, what we may write, what we may photograph, what we may share. And how and where and why we do it.
(notwithstanding that this would allow to significantly enrich the affordance of each device/appliance, relative to its use, rather than just having everything only tactile on a screen made of glass and 2 buttons).
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|6 months ago|reply
I've experimented with using PWAs instead of browser windows, or even having different user accounts for different activities.
It works pretty well in combating the sort of tab cycling zombie mode it's easy to fall into where you aren't really doing anything but checking feeds and notifications. It doesn't block me from doing anything, it just forces me to do one activity at a time, which needs to be chosen upfront.
My inspiration behind this was basically old desktop computers, which with their single CPU core and small screen basically only permitted you to single-task (even if you could technically have multiple windows open you only really worked in the one).
[+] [-] tumdum_|6 months ago|reply
It’s is perfectly possible today. Sony still produces Walkmans and there are 100s digital cameras (not to mention analog ones). I don’t think there was ever a time when SM and e-mail had separate devices.
[+] [-] mallowdram|6 months ago|reply
That we bemoan sub-industries of media, rather than notice the system effects across it is suspicious.
“… if we say that linguistic structure "reflects" social structure, we are really assigning to language a role that is too passive ... Rather we should say that linguistic structure is the realization of social structure, actively symbolizing it in a process of mutual creativity. Because it stands as a metaphor for society, language has the property of not only transmitting the social order but also maintaining and potentially modifying it. (This is undoubtedly the explanation of the violent attitudes that under certain social conditions come to be held by one group towards the speech of others.)” Excerpts from Halliday Language and Society Volume 10
[+] [-] roomey|6 months ago|reply
The internet is flooded with slop and rage-bait on purpose. So filled as to be unusable, like a firehose of shit. So in there comes a role if "editor" whose job it is (you pay them) to only give you, well not even what's "true", rather what reflects your world view. So which editor you have becomes a factor in how you live, where your educated, your status.
It will be interesting to see if something as explicit as editors arise.
I will say this, if you stay off Facebook and some of the other big social sites for a while, it is like a madhouse when you glance back
[+] [-] close04|6 months ago|reply
And once you empower someone to gate or filter your access to information, what’s stopping them from treating you like the product for a better paying customer, like today?
[+] [-] fullshark|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] StopDisinfo910|6 months ago|reply
The feed was honestly the beginning of the end. It turns people from actor of their experience to mindless consumer.
[+] [-] matesz|6 months ago|reply
I tried to unhook pretty much for the past 15 years as I sensed that it basically doesn't serve me. If I would summarize the one primary cause for my inability to do it is the following - the belief that consuming content online is better for my own being than learning to manage my monkey mind.
I mean any content - from scrolling dumb instagram and facebook feeds to factory making process videos on youtube and streamers playing online games, political debates etc.
The problem is not consuming content on social media, but doing it reactively, excessively.
What helps with unhooking is basically wisdom and experience because how to do it when pretty much everybody is doing it?
Realizing that entire social media world is just incredibly fucking corrupt. Like omg corrupt. It's the epitome of corruption, starting with CEOs themselves.
Last week I've had situation where the person I knew who has professional instagram profile with +10k and runs business there just went fucking nuts. Instead of focusing on working on herself she decided to double down on her narcisism and went mental. Episode, however this is where it leads.
I am just happy that I can see it better and better and step into the right direction - away from social media.
PS. I removed X account few months ago, oh my, what a relief!
[+] [-] devoutsalsa|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] t0lo|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] full-stack-dev|6 months ago|reply
As a personal project, I built an extension to create my own little architecture of intention. It introduces a 20-second pause before I enter distracting sites, and during the pause, it nudges me with a positive micro-habit, like fixing my posture or taking a deep breath.
It's called The 20s Rule (Chrome/Firefox) if anyone else finds that idea useful.
[+] [-] homeonthemtn|6 months ago|reply
We started social media with chats that connected people across the world.
Then we handed over the majority of the Internet to Google who, in their pursuit to build out personally useful services, inadvertently jailed us into a hyper localized bubble
That bubble then became the standard of the Internet, and all sorts of pipes of toxic gas hooked in to the bubble and started poisoning us en masse.
[+] [-] sabakarimmm|6 months ago|reply
I hope it people give it a shot one day.