Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation. It's long past time to leave it permanently.

And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this. It can be full days with the same post at the top. And the worst part is that I hadn't noticed how empty it was until I did the change.

I had to use the Wayback Machine to dig this up:

> 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features

> Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinato...

Even Hacker News acknowledged 15 years ago that it was a social site and that social news sites could be "dangerously addictive". The goalposts for defining social media keep moving as people try to avoid any definition that captures their own internet usage, but I think it's important to be honest about what we're all doing here.

Also the noprocrast feature is still there right in your profile, though I don't know if it's documented anywhere.

People's opinions are groomed and programmed. It's pretty hilarious how small minded people are.

Interestingly, in-person "nerd" events seem to be going just fine - LARP, D&D, board games, historical reenactment, trading card games and tournaments like M:tG, and a lot more.

So much of social media now feels built around whatever is trending that week, not the relationships you actually want to keep up with.

That’s why I’m building Dearest (https://dearest.co) : a private, email-based Sunday photo digest for families and friends. Everyone sends a photo and a short update by Saturday night, and contributors get the group’s digest on Sunday morning. Hopefully this keeps us social and in touch.

Instagram gets ~$27/mo/user from advertisers. Would you spend $27/mo for Instagram? Probably not. Hence the financial void is filled with ads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

I open the app to keep up with what my friends are doing, and also check the dating portion of the app for new matches. I purposely always avoid reels on any app, because I hate them and what they do to people. So when I open the app and it immediately starts playing reels with sound on and no way to disable it, it feels like a slap in the face

I have an alt account for business / lifestyle content that I like consuming. That's the only place I actually follow content creators. And even then, I check the account once or twice a day and rarely view/engage with Instagram stories.

Back to my personal account - I have 2-3 people out of the 198 that I follow that are trying to hop on trends and become influencers. Rest just do photo dumps + daily stories. But the reality is only 20-30% of my friends actually share something (post or story), rest are just silent observers.

Personally what I hate more is that there are some content creators I've been happy to support over the years and now instead of doing regular content posts they now do the "collab post" thing as an ad that looks like a regular post. Some of them may do but many do not.

snobs used to be thought on users who liked popular culture or "jejemons", "kikoolols", "eternal september,... posters who used to be actually active, experimental and creative, but at least newcommers were still posting

nowadays the creative part is gone. Forums are dead. You're encouraged to use your actual identity everywhere on social media and to sign apps. You're indeed not guided to post and be creative. The internet became just passive :/

But most everyone there likes it that way...

Humans are predictable (more than we'd like to admit). Now they have AI to crunch all that data and find patterns to predict your next move and find out what content will give you the most dopamine. Escape while you can.

But I think the problem is that people don't contribute very much too them, so if none of your friends are sharing things that interest you then the media part has to come in as a fallback

The extreme gossipy porn of the past two decades has finally worn off.

I think it has little to do with privacy concerns as they are hypothesizing.

Maybe that is unfair to Jerry Springer. He at least heard both sides of a story.

Limit circle social network, I think capped at 50 people. Beautiful app, and I remember it was a great place to spend time when you really just wanted to be with true friends.

Time for someone to reboot this

However, when I try to communicate through GitHub or something, I wonder if I'm just using another form of social media. My main daily routine is to gradually add posts to my own homepage that no one will see, and start from there.

Recently, I made a dumb little app for my kids and decided to try marketing it on social media just to see what it is like. It is fascinating in a sense and disheartening as well. I have been very unsuccessful, but the most signal tends to come from the dumbest content I have tried.

In doing this, I have come into contact with the social media feeds I never felt the need to look at and man… they are like a drug. I find myself mesmerized by random IG reels. It is one thing to understand what they are on an intellectual level and a totally different to feel it first hand.

I miss MySpace.

But, I guess, there's still room for those channels to be run through the enshittificator. Wouldn't surprise me if we in the not-so-distant future start to see random ads and paid content in group chats.

It's absolutely insane how much influence we have given over to social media algorithms as a society. I know so many people who I'd consider to be intelligent just completely believe whatever they see on tiktok/reels. These recommendation algorithms can create such intense polarization, I really hope we can find a way to scale back their use and encourage people to think more for themselves.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scrolless-feed-blocker/id67588...

There's not a lot of money in hosting a website where people share in-jokes and comment on each others' graduations, engagements, and baby announcements. Well, maybe there is, but there's a lot more money in farming engagement through ragebait and division.

Meta in particular is a great example of why you cannot judge companies purely by profitability and why you shouldn't ever let the CEO also be the primary shareholder and chairman of the board that's meant to govern the company's behavior.

Same people who run these platforms will preach about diversity while destroying it.

Before, people were reposting memes, articles, chain letters, etc. Most of the content you’d see wasn’t created by the person you are friends with.

This isn’t really new. And as someone who makes original content and posts it regularly - people do enjoy original stuff from their friends. It’s just that it’s hard for people to do. Most people are very insecure, have little original thought, and/or the interest in sharing anything they think to a broader audience than 2-3 close friends. I buck the trend here.

The only thing keeping it afloat is the lie that it's social.

Think 'keeping up with the jones', 'the latest fahsion, food, entertainment, music, x, trends' etc. People live by what I dunno, magazines, Oprah, local morning show hosts, entertainment news shows, etc, tell them. They've brought that view of things with them online.

I read this site. But lately it’s been more difficult since the AI “content” stresses me out. Maybe social media always did that. But it’s come to the point where I cannot kid myself. Many times it just makes me more wound-up than it winds me down. So then what’s the point? Then I intentionally search for specific topics. When I’m out of those I can stare out the window. Which is a nice change.

This has virtually always been the case and it is only "social media" is an Orwellian sense. It is an antisocial consumerist machine.

In consumerism, everything is for sale.

I don't understand why this article has to play dumb. This is how most of the internet always was until commercial interest invaded social media. They yelled their billions of dollars worth of messaging so loudly for over a decade that it drowned out anything authentic.

Now that there's a political break away from all the tone deaf pseudoprogressive messaging and the money for it has dried up, what did they expect to see there? Most people never posted sincere "life updates" unless they had something to sell or were a naive part of the bandwagon.

Here, the term is "social media", which can also be pronounced "boogeye man". We all seem to agree it is bad, but very few are willing to lay down a solid definition.

It isn't limited to bad terms. It happens anytime we argue over whether X displays consciousness, or X has a mind, or X can think.

* And other forums, obviously.

Not that I would expect anything intelligent coming from BBC but they could at least look up a word before they use it