This advice to quit social media is always a hit on HN. When I was 10 years younger I read the same thing on HN, was thoroughly convinced and quit social media. I even followed the advice of trying to stay in touch by email. Sure.
Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on. I asked them why they didn’t tell me and they were confused. They said the posted it on social media. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely. I have a few close friends and that’s it.
Maybe that’s an ok tradeoff to make, but it’s worth knowing that before getting into it.
> Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on
This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post blasted to hundreds (or thousands) of people. Or, to put it another way: if you mattered, you would've gotten a direct message or call from them.
I'd argue that social media has normalized keeping up with people who aren't supposed to be part of your life forever. But, we should take a step back and realize that not everything should or will last forever. If you cross paths again then you can catch up, but having life updates constantly? No thanks.
>if you mattered, you would've gotten a direct message or call from them.
That ignores the asymmetry of a lot of life events. For example, if a parent died, I'm not going to call everyone in my life to tell them, I would have more important stuff on my mind. I might post it on social media and then the onus is on other people to reach out to me. And if someone doesn't reach out, it will hurt the relationship a little even if I'm not conscience of it because when I think of people who were there for me during a tough time, the friend who never knew my parent died wouldn't come to mind.
also in the old days, your friend bob would have told cory, "hey, did you hear alice's dad died? we should all go out for drinks". but we live in the bowling alone era, where we're increasingly isolated.
quitting social media is not, on its own, going to fix your social life. and being on social media can make you more connected, or more miserable. the responsibility is yours
I'm a firm believer being loosely connected to so many people isn't the fix many seem to think it is. I find shallow connections, which is about all social media can support IMO, are worthless at best and detrimental at worst.
YMMV, but my quality of life increased in ways I can't even begin to describe by severing all the dozens or perhaps hundreds of shallow connections social media was encouraging me to cling to.
With the saved time and energy, I've been able to cultivate far fewer-- but much deeper and more (mutually) fulfilling-- connections with those who are _actually_ important.
Couldn't agree more. I haven't deleted my Facebook account, but I no longer sign into it (I kept it because of event invitations, but at this point no one I know uses it for that anymore either). I have a little over 1,000 "friends" there. Back when I scrolled my feed multiple times per day, I read so many things about so many people who I hadn't interacted with outside of Facebook posts for years and years and years. I read so many things about so many people who I didn't even interact with on Facebook, let alone outside of it.
I don't miss any of that. Those connections were beyond shallow, and weren't adding anything positive or useful to my life.
This kind of comment always makes me wonder, are the people doing this doing well financially to afford cutting off all those "loose" connections with people like that? Because I couldn't imagine just destroying these relationships for no reason when I myself have benefited vastly from keeping them alive, even if barely communicating at all with these people.
I think this advice is generally harmful to networking as someone grows, which is vital in today's society
I don't think this discussion is about professional networking. It's about personal and social connections. If quitting Facebook makes you un-/under-employed then I think you're Doing Life Wrong.
GP mentions "severing" those connections, but I think that's even too strong a phrasing. There wasn't really anything there in the first place, so there wasn't anything to sever. Simply not reading someone else's social media posts anymore, when you didn't really interact with them outside Facebook (or for some people even inside Facebook) isn't really severing anything.
I wouldn't agree it is "vital," but that definitely depends on perspective and one's goals, as well as the baseline level of privilege one enjoys.
If someone's goal is to achieve CEO and/or the top 1%, certainly every single connection could hold extricable value. I'm perfectly fine hovering somewhere in the middle, even knowing I have the capability to achieve much more. My future is uncertain; I probably won't retire when I would have liked. I've accepted that, and choose to live in the present rather than focusing on the future. I know at least I won't die miserable tomorrow.
I don't deny I could have done better financially by maintaining the status quo. Now that I think of it, I'm doing worse financially than when I was using facebook & twitter. I had more money, and my career was progressing at a much higher rate, but I was inconsolable. Without the money, and without the accompanying social media-imposed drag, I see the world more clearly. My relationships are stronger with my wife, kids, and close friends. I am much happier.
3. How exactly are remote connections helping? In the Western world, for example, people you haven't interacted with for months and months in real life for sure won't help you financially. For jobs stuff like LinkedIn is probably better, plus regular chats on 1 instant messenger. You don't need Instagram to keep up with them.
With GitHub and Discord, these 3 are really hard to boycott for programmers (even more to publicly shame people for using them). And yet, we must dissent.
I had only financial losses from these loose connections. Nobody will shove profit down your throat, but there are many greedy people that will try to extract profit from you. I basically work as a bank for them, muh connections, lol.
> but we live in the bowling alone era, where we're increasingly isolated
What I see over years is that, especially in developers online groups, any usual and normal way of socializing is stigmatized. I remember reading comments about how lazy people who socialize with friends are and how we are better if we code every evening. I remember people being proud about spending christmas coding supposedly being superior to the rest of the family that is socializing.
Now we are proud if we remove ourselves from social media.
It is always the same - however other people socialize is wrong, they are stupid and lazy. We remove ourselves, because it is superior to not participate. Eventually those places die out or change, but we do not like the new places either.
And in each iteration, we expect other people to do work of keeping and managing relationships while feeling superior over not doing that.
I don't think the parent poster was arguing to exclude themselves from social life or do coding instead of talking with people. They merely argued that it's better to have fewer but meaningful and deep connections with people you genuinely care about (and they care about you), rather than having a 1000 meaningless connections with people who are basically strangers on facebook.
The role social media plays is in encouraging large numbers of superficial relationships, rather than a small handful of deep ones. It stands to reason: I don't need facebook to keep in touch with a dozen close family and friends. I can do that perfectly well in person, or over phone calls/messages. What the various social media apps did was kill the close circle of friends in favor of having 1000s of followers and turn everyone into a one-way broadcaster.
I'm not sure I agree, but I'm not disagreeing on principle.
You make it sound as if something was lost, maybe recently. In the grand scheme of things I'm not that old (41) but I don't even remember how that would have worked out, because I wasn't old enough to have people's parents die before social media, at least in my social circles. Yes, of course you'd hear about grandparents and such from your immediate friends but that's usually a handful and people would maybe not be shaken as much. I agree with you that social media doesn't have to mean "blasting it to hundreds or thousands of followers", but it's a thing where I actually liked Facebook. Not only techies, and getting enough updates from people who are not your closest friends that you have things to talk about (as in reference) when you met again (or talked synchronously, or privately).
In my circle, very few people maintain a social media presence. I cannot remember posting anything on social media myself - except maybe a job update on LinkedIn, and some light anonymous trolling on X. I don't have Facebook or Instagram accounts and so I never visit those sites anymore (as they require an account to read). Spending a lot of time posting on social media is seen as unintelligent, attention whoring, and a waste of time.
My mother died when I was in college, before social media was a thing. I told a few closer friends about it, and asked them to spread the news and to tell others that I didn't really want to talk about it. I was missing a few weeks of the semester because of it, and knew that people would ask me where I'd been once I was back, and knew I wouldn't have the emotional bandwidth to tell everyone the story over and over and over, and accept their condolences gracefully.
It makes me really sad if it's true that people assume that when they post big, difficult stuff like that on social media, anyone who doesn't see it doesn't care about them. Even for people who are active on social media, the feed and post promotion algorithms make it fairly likely that a decent chunk of people who really should see that post might not see it.
> I would have more important stuff on my mind. I might post it on social media and then the onus is on other people to reach out to me.
That seems so bizarre. Just 20+ years ago this sort of sympathy seeking broadcasting action was associated with mental health illness, like Munchausen Biproxy. Yes, back in the day if tragedy happened people would take deliberate effort to call each other.
20 years ago, death announcements were expected and normal. They appeared in places people were expected to see - including local newspapers. You would also see death announcement being read in churche, posted in buildings etc. 20 years ago people met in person more often and you learned this stuff via gossip and word of mouth. Not being told to you personally, but being told to a whole group of people.
The aggressiveness of your response is absurd. No, it was not seen as a mental health illness at all.
When you expect personal one to one call, it is equivalent of removing yourself from other social structures in the past. You can do it, but your relationships will weaken and eventually die out. Just like it happened in the past.
It's very country specific. I'm from Romania and I think there were obituaries in newspapers, but I'm having a hard time thinking of people I know that did it.
You read the obituaries in your local paper, “oh, so and so has passed away”, you don’t know them particularly well, might or might not go to the funeral.
Posting it to social media, then thinking if whoever doesn’t contact you to… what? “Sorry for your loss”? “My condolences” … hurts your relationship with that person?
> Posting it to social media, then thinking if whoever doesn’t contact you to… what? “Sorry for your loss”? “My condolences” … hurts your relationship with that person?
That's not what anyone said, you're out here fighting ghosts.
> And if someone doesn't reach out, it will hurt the relationship a little even if I'm not conscience of it because when I think of people who were there for me during a tough time, the friend who never knew my parent died wouldn't come to mind.
Right but it's not 20+ years ago. 20+ years ago when my family visited relatives abroad, our relatives would get to the airport and often have to wait for our delayed flight because they had no way of knowing and half the day would be lost. If your flight arrived early then you just waited. That was normal. Now we update each other over a web messenger, arrive at our destination, hop onto the free WiFi, then wait until our relatives greet us.
> 20+ years ago when my family visited relatives abroad, our relatives would get to the airport and often have to wait for our delayed flight because they had no way of knowing
Apart from phoning the airline or airport and checking whether the flight was on time. We used to do that all the time 30+ years ago.
Most of us would not have even done that, though yes, the option was there, but that sort of thing was much more popular 40+ years ago.
There was another discussion where this came up on HN recently, but people get quite emotionally defensive when you start scrutinizing their reasons for staying on social media, so it is hard to have an honest conversation about it without a bunch of hyperbolic takes.
In my experience, it was designed to be addictive, partly by using our own behavior against us and partly by vindicating the desire for attention. The idea that we need to be sharing every aspect of our personal narrative with the world is problematic, as it turns out, but we are so steeped in it that's there's no chance of purifying those waters, again.
To your point, yes, there was some aspect of this back in the day, what with obituaries in newspapers being out there to both acknowledge that a person lived, but also put out the call to any old acquaintances to come say goodbye, but it was a laughable effort by today's standards of maximum self-aggrandizing and competitive social engagement. We have to ask ourselves if that is a socially and mentally healthy position to be in, which is an admittedly scary question.
> but it was a laughable effort by today's standards of maximum self-aggrandizing and competitive social engagement.
What does this mean?
> The idea that we need to be sharing every aspect of our personal narrative with the world is problematic
I know about one or two people who does this. And it's far away from an obituary.
I'm not quite sure I get what you a saying. I just meant in my upbringing it was quite normal to share publicly when someone died. And they still do it today.
Apologies if my wording was too vague. I am using 'Self-aggrandizing' to mean a high exhibition of self-importance, or to put it another way, advertising one's self in a way that makes minor events or details seem bigger than they are. I am using 'competitive social engagement' as an alternative phrase to "Keeping up with the Joneses" which illustrates comparing yourself to your neighbors in terms of status, wealth, moral fiber, etc.
The invention of Social Media propelled us into extreme versions of these two very-human aspects of our psychology, which I believe to be both dangerous and ill-fated.
My intention was not to attack in any way, I just thought your reference to obituaries was an interesting link to our past prior to social media that was worth exploring and comparing. In a way, we can think of our Facebook profile as an extended obituary since that data is all accessible after we die. In fact, I am experiencing this on Instagram, having just lost a friend on New Year's Day and sitting down to peruse his old Instagram posts for the happy memories therein. Your comment just got me thinking, so I decided to expound on it.
added: I should maybe clarify that I'm of an age that remembers what the world was like before Social Media and the Internet as we know it today. The differences when I compare those two halves of my life tend to be alarmingly drastic, which is something that warrants examination, to me, since many HN readers might be a bit too young to remember, so from their perspective, Social Media habits are likely more normalized.
> Just 20+ years ago this sort of sympathy seeking broadcasting action was associated with mental health illness, like Munchausen Biproxy.
Do you have a reference for the claim that the diagnostic criteria for Munchausen By Proxy (or Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another) once included broadcast-type notices when a family member dies? The DSM-IV would have been in effect 20 years ago, and while version 5 doesn't have that in its warning signs, I guess it could have changed from the previous version?
We got a real pot, meet kettle situation here. It is absolutely wild to suggest that doing something standard like arranging for an obituary in the local newspaper would be viewed as a sign of mental illness.
On Facebook at least, the algorithm is heavily tuned to prioritize major life events: births, deaths, graduations, marriages, etc. Occasionally those posts get filtered out but usually they do get prioritized near the top of your feed.
For the people who you care about, you can contact them directly and set up a time to meet to catch up. Or catch up over text or email. Or start a messaging group with mutual friends and keep each other up to date that way.
My feeling is that if you only get updates about someone's life via their blasts on social media, you're not really friends. So why do you need to hear about all that stuff?
Right. You post it on social media to the exact same reason you would post it in the newspaper.
And you would have to understand socialization if you wanted to know why people published life events to the newspaper - births, deaths, graduations, marriages, etc.
Not everything in the world is for your bestest friends. It’s OK to not have close friends.
It must be quite common sense to actively contact the people you know were friends or family to your parents. Not necessarily by phone unless you also know them well, but by email or text or whatever contact details your parents have in their contact book.
I very much would think your parents would expect that of their children.
>I'm not going to call everyone in my life to tell them
It's particularly the people in your parents life you should inform, not necessarily the people in your life.
Don't forget that your social media network is not the same as your parent's social media network (if at all they use it).
> I might post it on social media and then the onus is on other people to reach out to me.
Nobody can expect that everyone is on social media, let alone a specific platform. You typically tell your family and some close friends and they will spread the word.
If someone literally thinks it's going to hurt our relationship that I am not following their facebook nonsense I am totally happy to not have them as friend anymore
When my father died, the last thing on my mind was trying to tell as many people as possible. I didn't (and still don't) have any social media accounts so that was out of the question but I didn't tell almost anyone for a long time until it came up in conversation.
you would find out at church or any number of the 3rd places you shared.
Yes, that may have been better, but that doesn't mean deleting social media automatically sends you back in time. Doubly so if all of your friends are still on social media and using it as the primary form of communication.
Imagine deleting your email and telephone in 1999 and saying "if they were really my friend, they would drive/fly to my house and talk to me".
In 1999 we had obits and mail, just like in 1899. Of course now all of the newspapers are gone (what’s black and white and dead all over?), so notifying the local community is much harder than 25 years ago.
Also some people back then would brag about not having a TV, the same way vegans still do today.
> Also some people back then would brag about not having a TV, the same way vegans still do today.
This is the toupée fallacy mixed in with something else I haven’t yet put a name on.
Most vegans don’t brag about being vegan, just like most TVless people don’t brag about not having a TV. Some people are assholes and brag about anything, and some of those do the things you mentioned. It’s orders of magnitude more common to see people complaining about vegans (or, for an HN example, Apple users) than the actual bragging. It’s a meme, not the reality.
Cool idea, but it’s based on my own experience in life, from a girlfriend and various people in college. And even a newspaper article I read literally this morning. Vegan folks who I knew and talked to every day.
That said I could have used airplane pilots for the same example (also based on personal experience).
You only know about the people who let you know. You have no idea how many vegans or airplane pilots you encounter regularly who never tell you. A small sample is driving the reputation of the whole.
For people with whom you talk every day, it’s no surprise that you know. It’s bound to come up but I doubt it happened on your first conversation with everyone. If it did, you were hanging out with a weird group. If they knew each other, it’s normal that they’d talk about a shared interest. Just like people who hang out on HN would be likely to discuss tech when meeting in person.
I have no doubt you found your share of asshole vegans, just like there are assholes who make it a point to make everyone know they eat meat.
Though it is important to distinguish a true asshole from someone simply sharing an experience. Saying “no, thanks, I’m vegan” when offered a bite of a meat sandwich is not bragging, it’s context. Unfortunately, too many people take it to be a judgement when it most often is not.
I never called any vegans assholes. Personality quirks are not wrong, they actually make life fun.
I guess the thing I’m getting from you is I shouldn’t comment on my own observations because of toupee bias, and I shouldn’t comment on other people’s common observations because they are just memes an not real. Is there an acceptable threshold for situational humor short of a scientific study? If so, what is it?
I know, I didn’t say you did. In my first reply I said:
> Some people are assholes and brag about anything
And it’s that narrow definition I’ve been using throughout.
> I guess the thing I’m getting from you is I shouldn’t comment on my own observations
No, of course that’s not it. We can all comment on our own observations, but it’s also important to differentiate from what we each observe as individuals and what we believe the world to be. We shouldn’t let our limited view of the world cloud our understanding of how it is.
> Is there an acceptable threshold for situational humor short of a scientific study?
Were you doing situational humour? I reread your comments and can’t find the joke¹. Judging from the grey colour in the original comment, it doesn’t look like I was the only one to miss it if that was the intention.
Though I will say unambiguously that I don’t think you’re arguing in bad faith. From my perspective, this has been a cordial chat.
¹ I guess the newspaper comment was a joke, but calling that situational seems like a stretch.
It’s cordial here, yes, though some other things happened in my life which I shouldn’t have let intrude into this discussion.
HN in general does not like humorous tones, or at least has a mixed reception, I notice a lot of times where my comments go back and forth between +3/-2. This one probably is a worse one. It’s observational like Seinfeld, but then I don’t really like Seinfeld’s style so I probably shouldn’t have written it in the first place.
That said a well written joke at the right time has gotten me over +50. But as I said I probably shouldn’t have been writing here at all that day, nothing good was going to be posted.
Very interesting thought. I didn’t know the toupée itself neither the fallacy. Looks like a cousin of the famous survivor bias and both are children of a "observational bias" category. This is only my humble layman guess.
The video was interesting too, I’ll have a look at that channel. Thanks for sharing.
> This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post
The landscape of human relationships is deep and broad an varied, and if making bold assumptions about what other people should value is your starting point, you're liable to miss a lot of potential connections.
>you're liable to miss a lot of potential connections.
are you really? If you only notice that it's Bob's birthday because you get a FB reminder and the only form of communication is a post on their timeline once a year that's not a connection, that's like talking to your neighbor about the weather out of courtesy because it's awkward to say nothing at all.
The reason a lot of people miss out on life nowadays is not because they have too few connections but because they waste their time on fake ones. Life's short, instead of trying to warm up some high school friendship that's going nowhere, focus everything you have on the few people around you that matter. Cutting connections is as valuable a skill as making them, and an increasingly lost art.
Free for 8 years-ish. Yeah. its hard to look people up. Oh im in this town, yeah wonder what happened to xyz, no chance of finding them or shooting them a message. FB connections are so low key and keeping people around makes them easier to find and stay in touch with, IMO.
But there's also lots of upsides. I guess I dont know one way or the other.
You write like somehow there would be something to miss out on by not valuing keeping up with people who are far away and most likely have no place in our lives.(by far away I mean you don’t actually get to talk or meet with them or even chat by messanger or so, even if they could live in the same city - I have friends who live far away but we actually meet at least once a year and chat once a week we are far in distance but not far in contact)
I would argue that there is much to miss on by wasting time looking up Jenny from primary school when you have your kids, friends and family who you meet day to day.
There is actually an option to run into mental health issues that we know social media is causing.
> You write like somehow there would be something to miss out on by not valuing keeping up with people who are far away...
Yes, absolutely. The paths our lives take can lead us to have more in common with someone we knew in the past then when we first knew them. And there's a lot of value in having a history with someone, compared to getting to know someone new from scratch. Maintaining loose contact takes virtually no effort but can lead to meaningful interactions down the road.
Yes, I have a few very good remote friends which I meet only rarely, but when it's one of the best kind of things.
However most of my "Facebook friends" were shallow faint contacts, where paths may have been close for a while but went apart as each went on with their lives. No more scrolling through which bar they visited, how their kids are doing, or which TV show they were watching didn't take anything from my life, while it encouraged me to reach out more actively to people I really care about, as I didn't "rely" on passive information anymore, assuming to hear about "relevant" events, but became interested in them and shared things which wouldn't make "public" social media.
I think I would add that: if I would be posting stuff and then someone who was an acquaintance only - would hit up a conversation about my wedding photos from 5 years ago how he remembers all were great, or would go with conversation about tv show I just added on my profile.
I would not feel comfortable, to say the least, I would feel creeped out. I would start thinking what kind of MLM he joined or if he looks to borrow money as last resort as no one closer would lend him any.
If that would be my close friend that would be OK.
I think my main argument is having history with someone is not checking his profile.
If I run today into someone from primary school we probably will connect over that.
If that someone will start talking how he have seen photos of my trips or my life events or how he totally loves band I added to my profile half a year ago - without ever sending me even happy new years message - I will be creeped out - and totally not “aw cool you follow my posts”.
Maybe I could've worded that better, but I was just providing perspective on the obsessive nature that we have on social media now. IMO, it's not "normal" to keep up with acquaintances and people from past times. They're no longer part of your life and you need to let go. If others find the life updates useful and beneficial to them, then so be it. I don't care either way.
> IMO, it's not "normal" to keep up with acquaintances and people from past times.
Fully recognising that you said "IMO", I'll say that keeping up with acquaintances and people from the past is normal in my culture. Social media helps to make that more direct and easier to manage than the gossipy grapevine of yore.
What's normal depends on your culture and context, of course, and I suspect that's not true in yours — but it is in mine, so ditching something like Facebook is just out of the question for me and many people whose cultures place a heavy emphasis on those connections between people.
The middle ground for me has been to check Facebook less and less, accelerated by the algorithm delivering me fewer life updates and more slop reposted from reddit.
if the goal is easier to manage and more direct, I'd argue it's not that important. Is your culture 20 years old? What did they do before?
There are lots of things in the world where the work required IS the value. Think of a hand written note from your CEO; is it still valuable if it was their assistant and a picture of the signature? "keeping in touch" is not inheriently valuable; it's the effort required that makes it so.
> Is your culture 20 years old? What did they do before?
Our people barely left our homelands, our pā and marae, for fear of them being stolen by pākeha-let governments who urbanised the rest of us into poverty.
Now that people in my culture are reconnecting with the importance of whakapapa for whānau, hapū, and iwi, which is a far wider set of people than just one’s immediate family in typical anglospherical thought, there has to be a way to reincorporate all the urbanised people who live far away. Social media, at least initially, provides that.
But thank you for your “is your culture only 20 years old” crack. It’s always refreshing to have the needs of my culture explained to me by someone from without it with an air of armchair authority, as though I or we don’t know what’s good for ourselves to meet our own needs.
I agree with you but I think we are kind of the oddballs at this point.
It does seem quite normal now to keep up with people you haven't seen in 10 years in person and will never see again. Maybe even people you would go out of your way to make sure you don't see in person but you can give them a thumbs up when they post a picture of their lunch.
I have no idea why anyone does this but it would be hard for me to say that not having any social media like us is "normal".
Due to some unknown circumstances this might not be true for this person, but it’s certainly true for a lot of people. Social media used in that context is effectively automating human relationships. It used to take effort to have a handful of friends, now you can have hundreds. Somewhere along the way though, friendship turned from active effort to passive status.
People you met and appreciated in the past evolve into friends and friends evolve into people you met and appreciated in the past. Each person can change "the status" multiple times, depending on circumstances. However, if you decide that weaker relationships dont matter, they will never grow into friendships. They will die out.
And to large extend that is what is happening with "loneliness epidemics". We dont care to keep relationships and see it as negative. Then we dont have relationships and act all shocked.
> People you met and appreciated in the past evolve into friends and friends evolve into people you met and appreciated in the past. Each person can change "the status" multiple times, depending on circumstances.
Agree with that.
> However, if you decide that weaker relationships dont matter, they will never grow into friendships. They will die out.
I don't think putting thumbs up on social media posts count as "growing into friendship".
> And to large extend that is what is happening with "loneliness epidemics".
I am not even sure a _loneliness epidemics_ exists but if that is true it is mostly self induced and artificial relationship pretense on social medias do not help. Quite the contrary. If you get out of social medias you actually realize your only chance to make relationships is by going outside and meet people that are close to you. And this is how you build relationships that matters and prevent loneliness.
> We dont care to keep relationships and see it as negative. Then we dont have relationships and act all shocked.
I am an expatriate and moved countries several times. I have lost touch with a lot of my old friends as well as a huge part of my larger family because I don't use facebook and instagram. That doesn't mean I don't have relationships. I made new relationships locally, and am keeping in touch with people who are not in the same country but that are as eager as I am to travel once in a while to see me.
OTOH last few years I have called a number of friends who are living abroad or several hours of train/plane/driving away from me at least once a year. Some gave unsolicited apologies and promises that next time they will be the one calling, or that they have plan to visit my area. They never called back, nor visited me and I didn't prioritized them enough to try to visit them either. This year I didn't even try to call them. I just moved them from the _friends_ mental drawer to the _acquaintance_ mental drawer. This is very likely what they passively did 2 years ago already while I was still actively trying to stay in touch.
If for some reason I travel close enough to their last known place, I may try to contact them but it is very likely that I may never see most of them. But I don't need to follow what they are posting on social medias nor publish stuff I am living and pretend that I or they care because really we do not, or not enough for it to matter.
> I don't think putting thumbs up on social media posts count as "growing into friendship".
The interactions I have seen on social media did not consisted from thumbs up only.
> If you get out of social medias you actually realize your only chance to make relationships is by going outside and meet people that are close to you.
What actually happen to most people is that they stop showing up in meetups organized through social media (majority of them) and over time loose those relationships. From what I have seen, removing yourself from social media does not create new relationships for most people.
You do not build relationships by NOT being somewhere.
> The interactions I have seen on social media did not consisted from thumbs up only.
Not necessarily but in my experience unless those people meet on a semi regular basis (as long as 2 years), or have a special bond (family) this usually slides toward superficiality.
> What actually happen to most people is that they stop showing up in meetups organized through social media (majority of them) and over time loose those relationships. From what I have seen, removing yourself from social media does not create new relationships for most people.
People don't only meet other people through meetups organized in social medias. I usually get invitations to events through calls and messages from friends, coworkers and ex-coworkers and meet other people there where we exchange phone numbers. I meet people on the road while cycling, some through their dance/yoga/crossfit/crochet class, etc. Several of my good friends I met over they years was by seeing them every day in my train commute and ending up talking to. I've met some random people in a bar and ending up sharing tapas with them and going home with their numbers.
Yes, agreed. For me, quitting social media went hand in hand with a recognition that I maintained superficial contact with a large number of old friends. My relationship with these people was already “illusory”, or at least unsatisfying. Now my relationships are the product of active work, which I find more valuable, even if it means maintaining contact with a smaller group of close contacts (outside my day to day relationships). It doesn’t mean my relationship with old friends and family has died… we just have a lot more to catch-up about when we talk to each other!
Agreed. I also went through it and have found no difficulty with throwing away Facebook, Twitter, etc and sticking to only direct or group messaging.
Some people HAVE gone through the "but I said in X group chat" like above, but it was all unimportant life events that they were happy to fill me in on there instead. All major things people told me directly. Just because I quit social media didn't mean I wasn't aware of the death of my dog from a world away within 2 minutes of it happening.
But why, though? If all you have is a shallow social-media connection with someone, why is it nice to know what's going on in their lives?
We have a finite amount of time and energy to maintain connections with people. Even shallow connections eat into that. I'd rather spend that time and energy on deeper connections. And while it's customary to say "but sure, I guess other people have different views on this, so to each their own", I... well, I honestly believe it's unhealthy to obsessively try to maintain all these sorts of shallow connections. I think this is a part of why I read about how so many people are lonely these days and have trouble forming friendships and keeping them going.
Because sometimes you rekindle relationships that have drifted apart but you still stayed somewhat tethered to thanks to social media.
I rekindled a friendship with an old friend when I realized he was visiting the same foreign country as I was. Funny enough his wife is a mutual college friend of ours whom he had lost touch with but only met again after reconnecting on social media. I also reconnected with her through my friend.
Sometimes, those casual connections can spark something more meaningful down the line or just bring small moments of joy! Like, for instance, seeing an old friend’s travel photos or knowing that you're school friend had a baby
My partner (who's family is living 10000km away on another side of an ocean) learned her estranged father died a few days ago and that he had been terminally ill for months.
Apparently someone from that part of the family had posted it on facebook but she didn't notice it as she do not visit it every day.
>Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on.
TBH I have no idea where or if my friend post stuff on social media anymore. I know maybe 1 person that posted updates often on Facebook, and that was pre-pandemic. Some post more business stuff on twitter.
But overall I just kind of accept that sometimes I'll meet up with someone after a few years and realize "oh yeah, they're married now, took a trip to Japan for 6 months, and is getting some local attention from their band they made a few years ago"
Of course, the first thing men will say after that meeting is simply "I've been fine, can't complain. How about you?". Maybe they'll mention their new job, but the rest will come after some 15-30 minutes of observation and chatting about the newest media.
>but I know a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely. I have a few close friends and that’s it.
likewise, but I'm not sure if social media would have saved that for me. It's definitely a cultural issue, especially with men.
Problem is facebook decides what you want to see unless you go to the feed which they make hard. Even then the vast majoritiy of what you see is garbage they share instead of life updates that you want.
I wish there was a better way but life updates still a posted there only. Facebook is the only one that has a concept of this is a for my friends only.
Yeah, I couldn't put it into words on why "Facebook got worse over the years". But that was definitely one of the keys shifts (outside of my friends leaving). I was getting less updates from people I know and more "news that will make you angry" kind of stuff. I probably really "left" around 2017. But 2020 is when I finally got around to freezing the account.
Realistically everything my several hundred friends have to share with me takes maybe 5 minutes a day to go through (close friends of course would call about things that are too personal for facebook so this is about things more distance friends would care about) . There is a lot more money in the handful of people who are scrolling through, finding, and sharing various memes and news that will make you angry (though this is fun if you - like most people - have friends on both the right and the left doing this and so you can see the bias each side is taking) than there is in friends sharing their life which is not lived on facebook (unless your a physically disabled and so you can only live vicariously through others)
> Of course, the first thing men will say after that meeting is simply "I've been fine, can't complain. How about you?".
Some of this is natural (though I don't believe healthy) but I think some of this is due to social media where people expect others to be aware of all their major events. Ironically I find this aspect of social media fairly dehumanizing. It disincentivizes direct communication. Why tell someone about things they already know? Getting the first account always coveys so much more than a facebook post. Sometimes I think we've forgotten how to talk to one another and read all the communication besides that in text. Text is at such a higher compression rate and it certainly isn't lossless. No matter how many emojis, memes, or images you include.
> Some of this is natural (though I don't believe healthy) but I think some of this is due to social media where people expect others to be aware of all their major events.
I sometimes do this despite not posting any personal stuff on social media. The reasoning here is pretty simple, I usually don't have a full list of all the stuff that happened in the last few years in mind. When meeting someone I see more often, it's quite easy to think about the last week/month and start with the noteworthy events; whereas, when meeting someone after a few years, not only do I need to think about what happened, but also which of those events might interest the person in question and what level of detail is appropriate
> But overall I just kind of accept that sometimes I'll meet up with someone after a few years and realize "oh yeah, they're married now, took a trip to Japan for 6 months, and is getting some local attention from their band they made a few years ago"
This was a big thing I realized, too. For some people in my life I do genuinely want to know about those sorts of things as they are happening, and for those people I'm in frequent contact with them through text, group chat, real-life meetings, etc. But for everyone else, it is completely fine if I hear about those big life updates months or years after they happen, on the less-frequent occasions when we get together and catch up. Some relationships are different, and that's fine.
I think it's perfectly fine to learn about huge life updates from people the next time you actually speak with them. That seems normal.
Seeing people's updates on a wall isn't truly keeping up with friends. Keeping up and staying in touch requires consistent deliberate effort from both parties, via phone calls, messaging, and seeing each other in person. If you're not doing that with someone, then yeah, learning about life updates when you actually chat and catch up just makes sense to me.
Right, and when I meet up with a friend in person to catch up (whether it's a close friend who I see weekly or a less-close friend who I see once or twice a year), we both give each other those life updates in a personally-tailored manner that perfectly fits the nature of our relationship with each other. That's how I want my interactions with people to be.
This is about lifestyle ergonomics and your community. Like it or not, social media has significantly reshaped the world. Issues aside, it has brought people together and made communication significantly easier than in the past. There is a reason 1/3 of the world is on Facebook.
So, my point is that if you're choosing to be difficult, that is fine but you need to accept the burden falls on you. This is similar to adopting a vegan diet - your body your choice, but don't be intentionally difficult at dinner parties.
Personal example here: I've cut down social media significantly, in my case all notifications are off even if the apps are installed. So you're not bombarded and can engage on a cadence that makes sense to you. That said, I need to dedicate time to checking up on extended family, friends etc - as otherwise you do miss announcements and major events.
I don’t understand how you’re being “difficult” by not keeping up to date on the Facebook updates of your friends. I will of course update all my close friends 1:1 on any life changes, and I expect they will do the same to me. For everyone else, there’s nothing “difficult” about asking for a life update the next time you see them. If anything, it shows interest and is a kind thing to do.
I might guess my comment here in a "meta sense" is looked down upon here (for good reason) but that comment you responded to rings a certain way and along with other dialog here and the issue at hand (world scale industry of eyeballs and diversion) i have to politely guess the thought of astroturfing that came to me might be fair.
> Like it or not, social media has significantly reshaped the world.
Certainly! I don't think that fact is in dispute. But we can definitely debate the quality of relationships that have resulted from that reshaping, and make our own personal determinations as to whether social media has been a net positive or negative in our lives.
The problem is that, for some people, it really has had a negative impact on their lives, but they don't or can't see it.
This is just said from my perspective and I understand that others might not share it -
Fine with me. They're acquaintances. Nobody has 200+ "friends", we have a handful of them. Is it nice to know that someone I hung out with a handful of times twenty years ago but otherwise don't really know and haven't said a word to in a decade made a big life change? Sure, I guess, but for the most part it has absolutely no bearing or impact on my day-to-day life nor the lives of those most important to me, and that's where I'm putting my energy.
I was applying for a job once and recruiter told me I need to have at least 100 Facebook friends to be hired. Played Mafia for a couple of days and got 400 "friends". Was hired and HR presented me at the company meeting as a social media star)
If I'd been talking to that recruiter I would have politely declined to continue the interview process. Unless the job itself was directly related to interacting with people on Facebook, the number of Facebook "friends" you have has nothing to do with your ability to do the job.
I never had any social media account. Never. When Facebook was still in diapers I have predicted what will happen (while what really happened was far worse) and distance myself from it and warned all the others who, normally, didn't listen.
Dont have FB, twitter, reddit, linkedin, tiktok, not even google account... none of that crap. I am successfully avoiding getting my name anywhere on the internet, I am not posting my photos, videos,...
I have 7 friends I meet regularly, I have friends where our life separated years back and we meet once or twice per year and I have phone with 473 phone numbers of various contacts, from former colleges to dishwasher repair technician, etc.
And guess what, people call me, sms me (oh yes, it works so much better than having 20 various clients installed for different groups of people) or send me email if something important has happened and I am actually physically invited to birthdays, "i got son" celebrations, notified about death (luckily only one, former schoolmate).
When we meet, in person (i hate long phone calls), we have a quality chat as I dont know anything about their ingrown hair on the tip of their toe and they don't know anything about me changing job or having knot on hair in my beard.
For anyone else, I dont care. I dont disillusion myself how I have 473 good friends on some stupid online platform who need to share every intimate detail with me. I cant even handle so many people.
So maybe those tradeoffs are not really the real tradeoffs but rather self deception, how much you matter to the people and to how many people.
I can count them using my fingers. Which is perfectly fine.
Amen! Same situation, same preferences, same values, same result. Only difference is I have about 70 phone nrs on my dumbphone, I don't own a smart phone, and my vices are this site, usenet and mastodon.
> I know a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely
I think that’s a feature, not a bug.
Most of the life updates people post on social media are the best of the best, which is what triggers so much fomo and trying to measure up. That’s why social media makes most people feel worse about their own lives. (Not to mention all of the other garbage these platforms try to push on you that you didn’t even ask for.)
If these people are really important to us, then we’d find other means of staying in touch: text them, call them, invite them over (if that’s feasible).
And if enough people get off social media, everyone else might also realize they need to make an effort to stay in touch with others, instead of the lazy post of glamour shots for the purpose of internet likes and feeding the dopamine addiction.
I don't know about other people but social media doesn't make me feel worse about my life. There's no fomo when my 2nd cousin in another state posts about having a baby. She's important to me, and I don't expect her to waste time emailing me directly when the rest of the extended family is all on social media.
Losing touch with old acquaintances is just part of getting older. fwiw, my experience is that I stayed on social media (although I don't post anything, I just keep the account) and still missed huge life updates. I reckon about 80-90% of my FB friends don't post to FB or Insta anymore. They just don't post anywhere.
I quit social media 12 years ago and it's been an amazing boost to my personal psychology and productivity. My life is 10x better without it. I've forgotten many acquaintances and gained many more, and forgotten them again. Life is like that, but the core group of people is there, and I'm happy with that.
I did the same thing. Now all I have is github, stackoverflow, and HN. I end up missing out on all sorts of things that I'd like to have been along for. I'm not about to go back, I think that being at the business end of somebody's propaganda machine was even worse for me, but it's still a significant sacrifice.
Which is why I don't think the way forward is for everybody to leave social media. It's just not going to happen en masse, that's asking too much. We need to build media which can't be owned. If we ask people to sacrifice something, it should be an extra few cents on their electric bill and yesteryear's phone plugged in somewhere and hosting their share of it.
I've only been exploring it for a few days now, but nostr seems promising for this kind of thing. The content is awful, just coin bro stuff, but as something to plug into and build apps for... seems legit.
For me (been off social media since 2019 or so), the solution has been smaller, targeted groups of friends, as well as making one-on-one effort.
I have quite a few group chats with no more than a dozen people in each one, with many that have only 3 or 4 people. And I make a point to message people one-on-one to keep in touch, and set up time to meet in person for people who are local to where I live. For people who aren't local, we make a point to meet up in some city somewhere once a year or so, depending on the closeness of the friendships in the group.
It requires more work than scrolling a Facebook feed and commenting on people's posts, but it's orders of magnitude more rewarding. And I don't miss the other hundreds of people on Facebook who I don't hear about at all now.
I quit on and off and came to the opposite conclusion. The acquaintances I never heard from, we weren’t really in touch in any way, seeing their posts had just tricked me into thinking we were.
And that’s okay. It means 5 years later when we cross paths for real there’s lots to catch up on.
Yes, everyone uses social media differently and gets different things out of it.
I've got my Facebook feed so well-curated that it rarely causes me distress. And like you, I like keeping up with old acquaintances, seeing their kids' milestones, etc. I get real enjoyment out of that.
Instagram I post pics when I travel and otherwise ignore it.
Twitter OTOH is probably a net negative for me. I still keep it around to follow sports pundits during games, and I usually only follow my sports list. But I do check in on my main feed during major events, and then inevitably end up doomscrolling. For example, the LA fires hashtags are so far beyond toxic - nothing but engagement farming, malicious misinfo, political nonsense, etc. Amidst all that crap, maybe 1 in 10 tweets has good info, but I have to destroy my psyche to find it.
You could just call the people most important in your life and speak and hear their updates. It would mean more to them than a comment on FB or whatever other social they are on.
Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on. I asked them why they didn’t tell me and they were confused. They said the posted it on social media
My impression is „how can one be so self centered” to imagine everyone HAS to know about their big event if they were not part of it and were not invited directly.
Is that person Kardashian family or something ;).
Even if it was a wedding and they posted photos. I wouldn’t remember a week later - if it is a person I see once in 5 years face to face and I was not invited. There are many big life events of such people.
If your acquaintances didn't take the time to update you directly, then maybe either the updates or the acquaintances themselves aren't really relevant for you. And that's ok.
I just deleted my FB account yesterday. Believe or not, your experience makes me feel OK about it because even with FB, I’ve drifted apart from all but a few close friends. That makes me think it’s the norm and social media doesn’t do nearly as much to keep us connected as it would like us to believe.
Unfriending specific people in a huge cull of otherwise nice and well meaning people you no longer care about but are chained to by inertia is torturous. Much less psychologically burdensome to unfriend everyone by nuking the account and start over with a clean slate somewhere less corporate and shitty.
Thinking you can blast something on social media and your friends and family will see it is an old mentality. Even non super tech-savvy people know now what the algorithms are, and they know that everyone regularly misses updates from everyone else.
And that light connection to people through social media wasn't a thing that created "close friends" anyway. It add to those weak connections that do have value but I doubt many people create intimate friend relationships solely through social media.
Maybe part of the seeming increasing anxiety of society is that we don't have friends in the correct sense and instead we have "friends" in the "just another user ID attached to a database query for your user ID" sense.
also eschewed social media. it's a different way of relating. normal people now react the way minor celebrities used to react when I'd meet them and not know anything about them, either insulted or very relieved.
I think it has made me a better friend in some ways, as I'm a respite from the narratives they sustain, but to others, also a kind of legacy friend who may be an attachment to an old life, and who isn't part of their present.
there's an aspect where watching their social media would be to participate in the change in their lives, and separating from it (perhaps selfishly) preserves things that might be left behind. but on the other hand, I'm interested in relating in one way too. social media profiles are strange because they say, "see, I am all these things now!" and in not seeing them, it declines to recognize those, like an old uncle you're always going to be a kid to because that's how you always were.
I have more old friends than most, and I often think about whether there is an essential self we see in each other, like a character that all these stories happen around where we can peer across them to one another, protagonist to protagonist, as companions in the real. or are the relationships artifacts of the stories, and when they change, we do? it's prob a mix, but I don't think those essential(ist) aspects of friendship survive being mediated by the churn of updates and the curation of a public persona.
anyway, being outside social media is a very different way to relate and not everything survives.
If neither you nor they bothered reaching out, did either of you actually care? It might be a good time to reevaluate the nature of your relationships and start maintaining the ones you actively (instead of passively) care about outside of corporate shopping mall websites.
People drift apart over time sometimes. I’m on Facebook still (TBH it is hard to see much by my friends, between all the algorithmic stuff). Despite being on there, there are some folks I’ve just kind of… lost contact with.
Maybe have a text chain for your friends or something? The folks I really expect to know things about… they’d tell me while we were interacting.
It's admittedly a little easier to drift apart though when you deliberately delete your access to the place where they post all the shit that's happening in their lives...
That seems intuitive, but most of the people who I’ve stayed in touch with aren’t really active on Facebook anymore or don’t even have accounts. I wouldn’t be surprised if social media following people provided something like disincentive to actually stay in touch for real. No need to perform the checks that maintain the relationship if the info is all posted right there.
But that’s also a guess. I suspect neither of us have any data to back up our guesses.
The messages about going cold turkey are popular, but you do miss out on a lot. I deleted all my social media in 2015, and didn’t mind too much, but years later when I met my wife (and there was more pressure to be social) I made accounts again so people could message me and I’ve been able to hold back from spending all my time doomscrolling.
I think the social part of social media can be good for us, and we have to figure out a way to avoid the toxicity. I’d like to see more posts about how to bend the algorithm to show you less toxicity- at least on Instagram I’ve managed to use the “not interested/relevant” button enough and turned on content filtering that it mostly shows me wholesome content. I don’t know if everyone realizes that if you hate-watch a video or hate-read a post then the algorithm sees that as engagement and will show you more. You have to nope yourself out of the dark corners as fast as you realize where you are.
> algorithm to show you less toxicity- at least on Instagram
In the case of IG what worked for me, without me even trying to be explicit about it, was to like and watch lots of photos/reels involving dogs and dog-ownership and right now my IG feed is 90% full with dog-related posts, and that’s the way I like it. Maybe it works the same way if one were to adopt similar strategies for other subjects of interest, such as cats, owning cars etc., the thing is that there’s almost no political/societal info on my feed anymore.
FB Purity plugin helps. It removes all the suggested posts, advert and other junk. Unfortunately, it only works on desktop: https://www.fbpurity.com/
I can scroll through Facebook now on my laptop, and it means I stop doing so on my phone. I have the phone app just to post updates or to quickly check the location of an event or something.
> Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on.
I wish I would still see those. While I have an account, I rarely use FB nowadays, because the algorithm thinks I’ll be more interested in stuff I don’t care about. So when I go to FB I tend to close the tab again a few seconds later…
I just started aggressively unfollowing and hiding stuff I really didn’t want to see. I used to hate the idea of doing that, but I realized if not doing it was making me want to cut off everybody then I was probably better off just filtering aggressively.
Now my feed is very pleasant. Family updates, sports news, friends vacation pictures and jokes.
I only follow stuff I want to see. But facebook shows me a ton of other things.
Reels every few posts are usually sexily dressed Asian women, or more normally dressed White women, with some kind of clickbait text overlaid. I think I maybe clicked on a reel once or twice ever.
Then my feed is full of suggested content. Which I also don’t want to see. From metal bands I don’t care about and festivals I don’t wanna go to, to offensive content.
And finally: Ordering. Non-chronological ordering makes no sense, because everything is random (probably not, somehow maximizes engagement for users very different from me, I guess). So I can’t even scroll for the stuff I want to see.
>And finally: Ordering. Non-chronological ordering makes no sense, because everything is random (probably not, somehow maximizes engagement for users very different from me, I guess). So I can’t even scroll for the stuff I want to see.
Does https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr not work anymore? It should surface the chronological feed without reels and other recommended slop.
I mean, without a curating algorithm, facebook is pretty cool. I’ve been one of the earlier users (having had to register my German university e-mail as a student mail to be allowed in), and the only negative parts have ever been Facebook forcing things on me that I don’t want.
It does seem to keep showing you more of what you click on though, so I hit a good trend of funny clips from Modern Family, How I Met Your Mother, Friends and random interesting nature videos and for the most part those dominate now.
But no matter what you click on it seems like they are really determined to keep throwing in the various ladies clips.
I recently learned that the daughter of a friend of mine got married and had two children. That happened in the last 5 years, when I actually didn't hear from that friend of mine. Given that we didn't feel the need to send messages to each other for 5 years, are we really friends or only acquaintances? In the latter case it's OK not to be informed about what is going on.
My social media are WhatsApp and Telegram. I get in touch there with people I care about and I don't get streams of useless information like I would if I'd be on FB, X, Instagram or TikTok. I do look for videos on YouTube when I want to learn something for which watching is better that reading.
In general I agree with you that there are some tradeoffs to make. IME it's still worth it. For example, my mental wellness has improved immensely. Also, I tend to use my time in more purposeful ways instead of wasting it doomscrolling.
Regarding life events: I quit all social media about 5 years ago[1]. People I care about know about that, and if they want to tell me about life events they do it with other means. Those who don't, they weren't really friends, just acquaintances. I am OK with that.
[1] with the exception of Linkedin, which I hate and never use, but I have been asked by people in my company to keep a profile for PR-related reasons.
I also quit social media . I did not have this experience. I had no problem following what went on with friends and acquaintances?! I don't know why you had this experience. I'm sorry you felt like that. but for me the info that is important always gets to me. And I enjoy emailing and using the phone and meeting people for social events in stead. And when I miss some post on face I always hear it from someone else....
It’s a matter of perspective and trade offs. If you are a person who experiences anxiety from missing things (FOMO) you are much more likely to notice this. I know since deleting my social media accounts I have missed out on a lot, only because my wife keeps up with stuff, but I cannot say how much I have missed because I really don’t care.
The other side to this is how aggressively a person is willing to take deliberate action to maintain personal relationships in the absence of social media automation. If you are that social butterfly who really owns that aspect of life you are likely to never miss any aspect of social media. Most people aren’t that good at taking dedicated action regularly reach out to people outside their most immediate circle though.
I think if people want to 'quit' social media, then just use it to keep up to date with friends/family. You follow ONLY friends/family, and limit consumption to only that, don't consume content outside of that circle.
These full fledged 'quit' posts are nothing more than an attempt at a political statement that falls on deaf ears.
Does that really work? I haven't used one of these for a while but if I recall they're quite keen to take content that your friends/family have engaged with and ram it down your throat in hopes that you will too. It seems like you'd need all of your friends/family to do the same thing.
So I only use facebook on desktop, I don't have it installed on my phone. When I go to the website, at the top of the page is 'feeds' and on the left is 'friends' filter. I just bookmark that page and only view that.
If someone relies on broadcast notifications to communicate, whether it be by snail mail, SMS, email, megaphone, or otherwise, maybe it is not really worth hearing?
To me, it seems like if someone has so many friends or is so busy that they need to manage their life using this strategy, you probably aren't going to have much of a connection anyway.
Let us just say that not all friendships, even the ones that start out strong, end up having the same depth to them because of the loss of shared context (e.g. moving out of the same city for jobs, new responsibilities caused by marriage etc.)
In such cases, there's still some reason for the two people involved to at least have a general idea of what's going on in other people's lives, and even reach out should there be something significant, such as a birth of a child or a loss in their families, etc. Without the broadcast aspect, once communication has ceased for some amount of time, it is very difficult to restart it, at any level.
As an introvert, I still find broadcasts weird, because there's that tingling notion that people wouldn't care anyway; and was one of the reasons I ceased to be on social media many years ago. However, I understand why some people choose to do things differently.
(There are similar anecdotes throughout this thread, I'd encourage you to read it for perspectives on this matter.)
Most people do not have a unified workflow for reading multiple blogs (RSS etc.) and replying to them, and they also lack the privacy control that is available in social media.
It's a little unreasonable to expect people to put in that effort.
I totally understand you. What find is that when I need to get into touch with old acquaintances an call or email seems to do just fine. It is a bit more inconvenient.
Another reason to not use big social media is that I would rather not have my network to be exploited by some big corp for who knows what they do with that info.
> I can’t speak for everyone, but I know a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely. I have a few close friends and that’s it.
I feel like that's the downside of social media in general, like the network effect - since most people are on social media, that's the place where people will post life updates, as opposed to talking to others about that stuff directly as much.
Maybe there could be a healthy way to use social media: to catch up with the people in your social circle, maybe look at a few cute pictures of animals or memes, but don't obsessively doomscroll or compare yourself to the highlights of others' lives.
I think some way of batching information from the people/sources that you're interested in (and then perhaps running an LLM over it to surface the most important information) which is then emailed or texted to one might be a solution.
Dropped FB for HN in 2017... and eventually I find myself now again on X for some #genaury stuff which is basically nowhere else to find. Happily most reasonable tech stuff lists on HN, some interesting stuff on MR, both being more-or-less a social network (of sorts) in a 90s disguise.
Conventional media can be ok for casual reading/scrolling, but feels increasingly out-of-touch. Interestingly these days cnn, bbc, dw, en, and aj list different headlines, which is not what it was 15 y.ago.
Still I'd strongly advise against all push media, and in particular Meta's products which pose a very high-risk of (screen) addiction thanks to hundreds of hidden retention mechanisms.
Maybe that was possible with Facebook from 2009. Right now, to have any friend updates, you first you need to scroll through a firehose of bots, AI schlock, and ads. Then risk getting pulled into it and wasting valuable hours of your life.
The only winning move is not to play.
I just got together with two friends in RL. One I have not seen for 10 years. There were a lot of missed news we all had to catch up on. This is how it's always been, and it's completely normal. Even the olden Facebook way of being so plugged in into your friends' lives was very unhealthy. If you HAVE to know something, life will find a way of letting you know.
> Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on.
I had the same thing happen, but both they and I were Facebook users, it's just the algorithm decided I don't need to see posts from my friends and it's better that I see adverts (I can live with that, I don't pay to use the platform after all) and hundreds of random pages/groups that I have zero interest in following.
This 2nd "feature" is slowly driving me towards the point where the FOMO of no longer passively interacting with my friends may longer keep me on there.
This is my experience too. While I do maintain some accounts, I don't check them much anymore except for updating my statuses and life events, and even then I haven't done those in a while now.
The advice to "quit social media" , "get a FairPhone", " get an FTP account and mount it with curlftps... " is often tossed around HN a lot, but real life flies in the diametrically opposite direction. While I'm not largely affected by it, I still feel a twinge of disappointment not finding out when an old friend has had a major life event.
Also good to consider for that tradeoff: Those people are completely fine to ignore you without some Zuck accounts.
Bring that together with your idea about friendship before you run behind them.
Maybe it's fine for you. Maybe your conclusion is that it's not worth the thing.
It's not a new topic. For me, iit was around 15 years ago. I never had FB or WA. Not even for a day. And that brought a lot of friendships to an end. Most of my friendships in fact. And that was sad!! But well, no other way would even be an option, admittedly! It's sad, but it was the best I could do.
I agree completely, I did the same thing and now I've been going back gradually. Staying in contact passively makes starting conversations much easier, commenting on their stories, them reacting to a big event, etc. It keeps people in contact, because nobody reaches out of the blue now.
Losing such a network of people is costly, socially and from an opportunity perspective.
Still trying to not click anything not related to people I follow, the algorithms on meta apps are just insane.
It’s funny, a few groups I belong to solely use FB. One group is for the preservation of weatern history and a friend digitizes and uploads thousands of pictures (if not 10s of rhoughsands) yearly. The only actual digital copies are on FB. It bugs me that he won’t archive elsewhere. The reason is fb is a commons and an additional backup would be a magnitude more work. I’ve offered to buy hard drives.
If they're close enough they'll tell you irl, if they don't tell you they're not that close and it really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things
Even with close friends who live far away, I prefer catching up once a year around a beer and some food than get a week by week journal of their lives on social media, it makes you feel like you're connected but you really aren't
> Maybe that’s an ok tradeoff to make, but it’s worth knowing that before getting into it.
I think that's the key point. I realized that ultimately I didn't actually care about those huge life updates if they concerned people who I'm not in somewhat-regular contact with. Like, if my Facebook friend John Smith (let's say he's an old high-school friend I haven't seen since high school) posts about his marriage, or new job, or new child, and I don't actually chat with John anymore and don't know anything about his life outside of what I read on Facebook, why do I even care to know this stuff at all? And it turns out the answer is that... I don't! And there's nothing wrong with that. It's not rude or mean; some people are the closest of friends, and some people barely even warrant the "acquaintance" tag -- and everything in between -- and there's nothing wrong with any of that.
And yes, I've missed social media posts about big-life stuff from closer friends who I do care about, but that's fine! I chat with those people via some avenue (email, text, messaging group, real-life, whatever) often enough that I still get those big-life updates, and usually it's in a more personalized manner, that gets me details that are tailored to the level of closeness of our friendship.
For people who I'm not super close with, but still maintain a relationship with, maybe I get that update about their life 6 months later, when we are next in contact. That's also fine! If we were closer friends, we'd chat more often, and I'd hear about it earlier. But we're not, and I don't, and there's nothing wrong with that.
> a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely. I have a few close friends and that’s it.
That's more your choice than anything else. You always have the option to text or email someone directly to say hello and see how they're doing, or to set up a time to meet in person to catch up. Even if they're perhaps not the one-on-one type of friends, you can start a group chat with that person and other mutual friends who might enjoy keeping in touch that way. There are so so so many options for communication these days that it's almost overwhelming! But it certainly need not be a binary between "social media firehose of every person I've ever met" and "I only hear about the lives of few people".
Is it important to you to be in touch with those old acquaintances? If so, reach out to them! If not, then it sounds like quitting social media was fine for you.
I do think this trade off is real. I came off most of social media for a few years and was the happiest I’ve been in a long time. It is however a bit isolating. I stayed in touch with friends, but lots of acquaintances slipped away without an easy way to keep in touch.
Such radical takes are always a hit on HN because they are essentially playing to the gallery. Leaving social media is futile if you don't take efforts to maintain contacts with your friends and families in other ways.
Lots of other replies already so apologies for adding to the clutter, but this sort of message always appears and it feels super dated. Like, 2003-era sentiment about the Facebook heyday.
Facebook is like a ghost town now from the "social" and family perspective. I imagine some circles might be strong on it, but from every time this comes up it's clear that the vast majority of normal people have largely abandoned it. They didn't delete their accounts, but updates are incredibly infrequent. The vast majority of Facebook activity seems to be people who don't really know each other in various conspiracy-oriented or political groups, sports arguments, etc.
As to huge life events you missed out on, even in 2003 if you only knew about something because of a Facebook post, you aren't very close. And the old acquaintances thing grows super old super quick. Everyone joined a bunch of graduating class groups, connected with old coworkers, and then... eh, turns out there was a reason we all lost contact.
In 2025 people use social media overwhelmingly to interact with strangers, not friends or family. Largely to argue and get angry and try to convince and coerce and convert. I mean, HN fits the bill in a microcosm.
Social media is a cancer on society. It has made everything much, much worse. It lets the ill-informed and unintelligent find each other and pump each other up. It monetizes and profits off of the absolute worst human traits. If Meta collapsed into a blackhole, Xitter disappeared, and so on, the world would be a much better place.
> Facebook is like a ghost town now from the "social" and family perspective.
I looked at my Facebook profile with 400 friends and they are mostly ads, memes and inspirational sayings. It’s really useless.
I have four SMS groups of friends/family I care about. My wife gets more value out of it than I do because she is part of a few groups that she cares about
You can easily replace FB with Instagram in this context. Nobody I know personally posts very much on Facebook, but they do post their updates on Instagram stories.
Facebook's last hook on me is groups - small town community groups especially. If you live in an area with its own group, there's a high likelihood that it's going to be on Facebook.
I don't really have the time to campaign to non tech-savvy retiring gen Xers and their parents that I don't want to use Facebook to know what's happening in my area, find services, etc.
I've quit social media (only use Signal and SMS/telephone/email). My wife functions as my secretary in this. I get the perks without the BS. Win-win. Only thing to remember is SMS/telephone/email aren't secure.
Because the reasons to quit social media aren't that it isn't useful and that, absent the market conditions it exists within that denotes it's ability to continue existing, it isn't a good product. People love the stuff, it's why it's been the primary use case of the internet, arguably since it's inception depending on whether you consider early stuff like BBSes and news groups/email newsletters to be social media. We had early prototype social media functionality online before we had commerce.
The problem is that these platforms aren't satisfied merely providing a third place within which we can find and build communities, speak with and learn from others with similar interests, and otherwise, be human. Instead we each become a hamster locked in our own little cage, and the principle reason we're there is to sit on our wheel and run, and while we run we're shown a handful of things from people we actually want to hear from and see, and interspersed with those few things are a ton advertisements for products we don't want and aren't interested in, a few we might be, AI generated nonsense that prompts us to engage with the platform to bump metrics up, the dipshit of the day who's said something infuriating that makes us click into the comments and make sure they're getting dunked on (and possibly join!) appropriately that the social media site dug up from obscurity and is now parading to the entire world, and of course, the same posts again.
Genuinely, the way people talk about going back in time to kill baby Hitler, if I had a time machine, I would spend the rest of my days sabotaging whatever countless number of people invented or would invent the Curated Fucking Timeline, on however many platforms it was invented, by however many data scientists. I would argue it is the single most destructive thing Silicon Valley has ever turned out.
It's how humans lived for all of history before the Internet. Seems healthier to me. If you're not close enough to someone for them to want to share updates with you specifically, or to see them and catch up, why do you need to know every update on their life?
Tbf I'm in a family group WhatsApp chat, which I guess fulfills the "life updates" part for my family. But no public social media, don't see the need
I would distinguish somewhere my friends post stuff for "friends" from social media.
Lets take my friend Em as our example. If the typical message from Em says "Where are you? What time did we say we'll meet" that's a messenger app, that's definitely not Social Media. It might be a fucking SMS, but if it's a WhatsApp or a Signal. it's all the same for this purpose and that's definitely not Social Media.
If the typical message from Em says "They don't know about my trees" and involves an in-joke reference to a movie that six people saw with her in 2008, that's maybe some sort of "social" experience but it's clearly not public. We have a Slack like this, created under pandemic conditions and named "Cabin Fever Mitigation".
If the typical message says "Aw! Piggy" and has a picture of a guinea pig, that is now shading into Social Media. Probably some of the people "following" this feed don't know who she is but they like guinea pigs, or they like her art, or something similar.
And yes obviously if the typical message is a reply to Elon Musk then it's social media and it can fuck off. But hopefully your friends aren't making crucial life updates as a public address to any watching fascists ?
Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on. I asked them why they didn’t tell me and they were confused. They said the posted it on social media. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely. I have a few close friends and that’s it.
Maybe that’s an ok tradeoff to make, but it’s worth knowing that before getting into it.