[asdfman123]

I think the trick is getting off social media.

When I was a computer nerd in the 2000s, I noticed people used to like to hang around and chat, but I mostly didn't.

Now, everyone is an internet addict, and I was just ahead of the curve. No one hangs around and chats anymore.

When you get off social media, real life becomes far more interesting. The problem with addiction is that it's so stimulating that everything else is boring. You have to let your mind reset.

[munificent]

I agree but if your goal is to socialize more, it's not enough to get off social media. You need to be in a place where enough other people do too.

Think of a city as both a spatial and a temporal grouping of people that are in the same place at the same time. Every hour a person spends at home on social media is an hour that they aren't really in the city and are not available for you to socialize with.

The cumulative hours that people spend staring at their phones are effectively a massive loss of population density. That lost density makes it harder to find people even if you yourself are getting off a screen and looking for them.

[publicdebates]

I thought of this the other day. I was on the train ride back from Chicago, and there was a family of four adults, sitting across from me, all just staring at their phones. I was effectively alone at that point in time. None of them were present. But you explained it in a new way I had not thought of before. They're quite literally not there in that moment, for however long that moment lasts.

[chasd00]

just find a hobby that involves other people. any kind of team sport, r/c airplanes, shooting, bird watching, the options are pretty endless. You'll meet other people, make friends, and not be so lonely.

[SchemaLoad]

This problem is not going to be solved by individual action. Sure there is some things you can and should do, but for it to be solved at a population scale it has to involve changing the actual structure of society that caused the problem in the first place.

Tackling phone addiction and lack of public spaces is going to be critical.

[encrypted_bird]

A big problem for me personally is that, well, frankly, there really aren't many options around me. I live in a small farming town of 6000 people, and most things are 25-45 min away *by car*.

[abalashov]

> I was just ahead of the curve.

I can relate to this. I was always moderately extroverted and sociable, but the irony has never ceased to flabbergast me that the very behaviours and interests for which nerds like me would have been stuffed into lockers and garbage cans (if I had dared to tell anyone in school that I was into computers) became, only a decade later, de rigueur for every young person.

I remember sitting in a coffee shop in 2003 (senior year of HS) trying to get kernel drivers for a PCMCIA 802.11b card to work on an ancient Compaq laptop, and being pointed, laughed at, and called -- by modern standards -- unconscienable names by a table of high schoolers nearby. It must have seemed so strange to them to see someone's head so deeply in a laptop.

And my goodness, I wouldn't have dared to confess that I talk to strangers in faraway places _online_. To be known to have substantive computer-based interactions would have branded one so profoundly socially unsuccessful, that one's very family name would be cursed with this prejudice for two generations. AIMing one's classmates on the family PC was one thing, but chatting online to likeminded peers in other countries? Why, that was radiantly gay!

But literally a few years later, I can't get anyone to make eye contact and they frequently plough into me because their heads are buried in their phones, texting people they never see.

A'ight.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Trust me I am in 2025 and I am in senior high school and whenever I try to talk about open source or linux or anything others. Friends have point blank said that they aren't interested in it. (only one friend showed interest/shows interests at times)

the most ironical part is that they want to become software engineers for just the money aspect but fundamentally they really don't know anything about the field or are even interested to talk about.

So in a sense this still happens :) This happened so much that I had to cut off my friends because the only thing that they were interested in talking about were woman or insta shorts and very few intellectual discussion could happen (atleast with that friend group and I would consider that friend group to be more intellectual among other peers but for some reason they just never wanted to discuss intellectual topics other than some very few occasions, mostly just shitposting being honest and I didn't enjoy the shit posting aspect that much if I am being honest as well)

[barbs]

Hah! I had a very similar thought enter mind recently. I used to get shamed for being on screens too much, now the situation seems to have flipped. Who's the nerd now??

Also just an aside - I love your writing style.

[windowpains]

Let me tell you about real life. I’m a caregiver and leaving the home is simply not an option. Short trips to the store, a walk around the block, maybe, if it’s before sundown, provided the person I’m caring for is in the right mental state to be left alone for 45 minutes. If there were neighborhood pubs that might be a thing to do if I drank. Getting off social media is great for those lucky enough to have the option, but with an increasing number of people getting into their dementia years, many with no savings to afford respite or other forms of care, social media is going to be the only option for a lot of people like myself. It’s better than nothing.

[publicdebates]

First, sorry for what you're going through. Also, your situation is definitely an outlier that I can't focus my main efforts on. Maybe someone else is meant for that. But I'm curious, why not have friends over? Is anything like this possible?

[alexisread]

Tip of the hat there, it’s a very selfless thing to commit to caregiving. From a 50kft view, we have an aging demographic globally, and the bet seems to be robotics- hopefully they will get good enough to help meaningfully in this capacity. What happens to an economic system predicated around having more kids (GDP growth) is another concern.

[HPsquared]

It's like China during the opium epidemic.

Maybe we'll see Europe try and ban social media, leading to a kind of "Opium War" to keep it going on the pretext of "freedom" and so on.

[tekne]

My friend, don't scare quote freedom.

Sure, it may not have infinite value, but there are plenty of far less valuable things we endure significant harm to be able to enjoy.

And I say this as someone who absolutely hates social media.

[Aurornis]

> Now, everyone is an internet addict, and I was just ahead of the curve. No one hangs around and chats anymore.

A lot of the events and spaces I go to have people who hang around and chat.

I agree that internet use has had an impact, but I think it's easy to underestimate how much situations change as you grow up. Now that I have kids, it seems like we're always ending up in spaces where people are hanging out and chatting. As far as my kids know, that's just the way the world works.

I thought the same up through college, then I graduated and suddenly spontaneous socialization ended. I had to change my habits to go find other people.

[pixl97]

>how much situations change as you grow up

And yet this looks very different from what 40+ years back looked like for adults so it's not just about growing up, there was other massive changes in our society.

For example the number of kids we had in the past dramatically affected 'forced' socialization.

The post war suburbanization that forced us to spend huge amounts of time on the road.

Things like TV that took entertainment from a group activity to a single person event.

All these things added up.

[roadside_picnic]

Thankfully social media is getting so much worse so fast it's making this easier and easier. HN is the last social media platform I still participate in... and I suspect that might not be for too much longer.

I recently logged onto Facebook and Instagram to update my 2-factor auth settings after having too many notifications of malicious login attempts. It was incredible to see what a transformation has happened there, it's like going to a decaying suburban shopping mall with only a few stores left open (and sort of sad to see the remaining users so continually desperate for a drop of approval from some imagined community).

Reddit is mostly bots, astro-turfers and people so brainwashed it's hard to tell the difference. I remember disagreeing with people on there (this in the pre-Digg migration era) you would get interesting divergent points of view. Now it's like people are reading from a script.

Twitter used to be my strongest addiction, but it's almost unbelievable how big a transformation has occurred since it became X. It's almost a parody of everyone's dystopian social media fears.

HN has obviously held up a bit better, but the AI driven mass hallucination impacting this community, combined with the increasingly aggressive manipulation of the home page, is continually making logging out for good seem like the best option.

[epistasis]

> Reddit is mostly bots, astro-turfers and people so brainwashed it's hard to tell the difference. I remember disagreeing with people on there (this in the pre-Digg migration era) you would get interesting divergent points of view. Now it's like people are reading from a script.

It's hard to classify Reddit as one thing, the communities are all so different.

The subreddit for my town has led to several new friends that I meet with in person. Most of that came from coming together to advocate for something at a city council meeting or similar, where there was a directed meat space purpose. Getting together for hobbies like hiking or other things happens once in a while too.

On other, technical subreddits dedicated to digging deep into details, there are few bots. It's all real people with shared interests. Reddit is far better than most forums that I frequent for finding those communities.

The few times I have been swarmed by bots on Reddit was when I touched on a topic where, say, Russia had a strategic interest, then the subreddit would get tons of new commentators from other subreddits, which was the indication of bots. Fortunately the mods took swift action when this happened, becuase my god the discourse is awful when bots flood the zone with their babble.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Yes I feel the same way too. This exactly captures what I am feeling right now. I wish there was a way to upvote this twice, thank you so much for writing this!

The only place I am usually active is on Hackernews and on bluesky as wel

> HN has obviously held up a bit better, but the AI driven mass hallucination impacting this community, combined with the increasingly aggressive manipulation of the home page, is continually making logging out for good seem like the best option.

I am not kidding, this is so true. I don't know if I can get flagged again but oh well, The amount of manipulation happening in HN is insane and flagging and just about everything

People called me bots twice on Hackernews for no apparent reason which really hurt and then I created a post about it which got flagged again as well and the responses were.. well not so sympathetic

I feel like I would be better off being an robot than a human in hackernews at this point smh. You get called bots for simply existing and showing your viewpoint or having a viewpoint (different?) or just no apparent reason and I genuinely don't know.

Bluesky has some faults as well but It's (I must admit) more focused on politics. i like the weeds of things in coding. I found some coding spaces in bluesky but they are just not there yet. I ended up spending 2 hours or something trying to build an extension which can automatically create threads for large posts because (you can see) i love writing large posts and bluesky has 300 characters limit and that annoyed me

I don't know what to do as well. I am thinking of still using Hackernews and bluesky but to an degree of moderation. I have tried discord and that doesn't work as well.

Honestly I just don't know as well but right now I atleast feel that I am not alone in this. I am not feeling lonely about feeling like this so once again massive thank you man, these are the comments which lure me into entering hackernews. Not people accusing me of being bots for no apparent reason and this happened on both bluesky and hackernews where pople called me bot and I actually try to be respectful and uh in bluesky someone went on 10 thread comment saying silence AI or silence bot when I was trying to be reasonable for the most part until I trolled them back

And in all of this questioning myself what did I do wrong, did I have a stance and they wanted to deny it and said something, the HN instance just mentioned my name as the reason I am a clanker. All of these things genuinely made me feel like people just wont trust me in being part of this community if someone (even after being a year in) trying to respond nicely and following the rules mostly can call me clanker

Like I just don't know what to do with either bots or people who accuse (you) of being bots. Both just feel the worst in social media and are actively rotting both HN and many other communties to the point that I dont even know what are some good alternatives

I think the biggest negative impact of AI is the fact that we aren't able to trust each other online in my opinion or trust art and other issues as well.

Once again thank you man for writing this. Your comment gets what I am talking about as well and I didn't know how to summarize what I wanted to say!

[Zaskoda]

People are seeking multiple things on social media. One common one is connection. I am in Mexico dealing with family business. I am in a rural area. My Spanish skills are developing but are still weak. I can have light conversation here, but I can't deeply connect. My desire to use social media has drastically increased.

But I only want to engage with my friends. Every platform feeds me various flavors of rage bait mixed in with my friends' content. Some of my friends groups have moved to chats on other less public platforms like Discord, Signal, or Whatsapp. But that's not the same experience. And a lot of the people I like to engage with aren't moving over to those platforms.

We all thought maybe social media would evolve into something good... but it was enshitified. So maybe part of the solution here is to develop a tool that offers that connection without the whole being exploited aspect?

[mtrovo]

I know the feeling but my impression is that interacting with people that are strictly internet friends is a proxy to the real thing, the same way watching porn is a proxy for the real thing. When you spend X hours talking to people on the Internet you're spending at least less X hours talking to people IRL and building the sense of community that we now feel thinning away.

I know people that are internet famous and are terminally online all the time. I'm pretty sure it must feel like they're accomplishing something but for somebody IRL not familiar with the game they're playing their life looks very weird socially.

My current mindset for this is that social media should only work augmenting my real world social life, not take what's left of it away from me.

[spike021]

I feel like the idea social media prevents socializing in real life is a bit of a straw man.

I've made many friends over the years through platforms like Instagram, some in countries I don't even live in, and we've met many times in person.

Of course that won't necessarily work for everyone but the point I'm trying to make is that social media isn't some one way street that won't return value.

[SchemaLoad]

There's social media, and then theres "social" media. Someone veged out to tiktok or instagram reels is not socialising. They are trapped in an endless state of scrolling slop.

We probably need some laws or regulation that strip out the random algorithm selected junk from feeds and return it to just posts from your friends and family.

[Teknoman117]

Maybe it’s ironic that I’m saying this because right now I’m scrolling HN while waiting for my flight to board rather than trying to strike up conversations with people … but when I was riding the bus home a few days ago, I got fed up with the algorithmic feed (too many “you’re single because you don’t follow a dating coach that will tell you to gaslight people” ads in a row). I put my phone away and just decided to take in the scene around me.

Every other person was on their phone. Started wondering what these people did with their day, what new restaurants they discovered, what quirky thing they may have seen in the city. Conversations that might have been had if people weren’t afraid to strike up conversations with strangers. (something I definitely struggle with myself too)

Anyways, random thoughts as usual.

[unfitted2545]

It's honestly very scary, and if people aren't on their phone, they have something masking the outside world and blasting noise into their ear.