How many of you have _never_ used any of these central-platform Social Media sites?
My purpose is not to virtue signal or brag about how I've never owned a TV etc, but I'm genuinely curious about how many people who are reading this never once signed up for or spent more than a minute on any of these garbage platforms?
Let's leave LinkedIn aside, for various reasons. I'm thinking here of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.
I am close to never having used a central-platform social media site. I had a Facebook account for a few months about ten years ago because the manager of a project I was working on insisted that we use it to communicate. I closed down the account soon after the project finished. I have never had an account on MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
The one exception, perhaps surprisingly, is Instagram. About eight or nine years ago, my daughter was starting out as a freelance illustrator, and I was fascinated with how she and other illustrators shared ideas and learned from each other through Instagram. It seemed like a new form of culture propagation. For a year or two, I posted my own music and photographs to an Instagram account that I set up under a pseudonym. I never got any engagement from it, but I started following some people who posted content that was interesting to me. I continue to follow twenty or thirty accounts and enjoy checking them every day or two, but I stopped posting myself a long time ago and my account continues to be under the pseudonym, so I don’t think it really counts as social media use.
Reasonable people disagree over whether it's appropriate to label any piece of software in which two or more people interact "social media". I tend to think it renders the term uselessly broad.
Right. Because some people use it that way and dictionaries have (not inappropriately!) leaned strongly descriptivist for decades. They should have such a definition in them.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure what about my post prompted you to jump to suggesting I'm an imbecile.
Good point. I was aware of that, of course, but, like some others here, I like to believe that HN is different in significant ways: no images or videos, no personalized feed, no following or being followed, no targeted advertising, etc.
You are correct, of course, but to me HN is more similar to a bbPHP forum than Facebook or Twitter. (Forums are themselves central-platform social media sites, but to me they are quite different.)
They are what you make of it. You have to take the time to understand what they are and how they can be used. Just because you don't understand something or it doesn't fit any of your uses doesn't mean it is garbage. I never would have met my wife if I hadn't been on MySpace.
I feel pretty confident that I have a deep understanding of what they are and how they can be used. And to me, they are pure garbage. Regarding use, they definitely fit my uses, though I would never use one. I was very active on several forums and such before these platforms appeared. I'm all about social networking - it's mostly the technology behind the platforms that I... don't like.
It's awesome that you met your wife on MySpace - that's great! It's also totally possible to meet your future SO at the local dump, but that doesn't make the location any less of a garbage pit.
Heck, even garbage itself can be useful while still being garbage. I'm sure some excellent installation artists have made impressive art with refuse, etc. But that doesn't make the medium less garbage-like; if anything, it emphasizes its garbage nature.
If you want me to be honest, the term "garbage" is far too kind when it comes to describing social networking sites, IMO. "Poison" may be a more accurate word to describe my sentiment.
I would never have met my wife if I hadn't taken a particular part-time job when I was in college. So many very banal everyday decisions can unexpectedly/in retrospect change the course of one's life.
I am close to that and nearing 50 years old. I blame it on two things mainly.
First, I have been around long enough to witness the many negative social behaviors of Usenet reappear in web forums. I reasoned by induction that this is what people will do in each large network that follows. I guess I prefer social sneaker-networks with limited scale.
Second, I am within three degrees of the Unabomber. (Kind of like three degrees of Kevin Bacon but with surprise amputation.) I identify too easily with victims of such targeted attacks, and I am uncomfortable with the idea of publicity in general.
I also don't consider HN to be in the same category. But if it had allowed anonymous posting, I would probably never had created an account here either.
I've never used any of them. I made a Facebook account years ago as it was required to log in to something else I needed, but I never did anything on Facebook proper. Never been on MySpace, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, or anything like that.
I used Facebook when it first came out. I thought it was pretty useful as an enhanced version of something like friend finder. I moved away very quickly when I first graduated high school and lost touch with a lot of people I had known. When Facebook opened up to non-university users, many of them showed up and I was able to reconnect. But to me, that was its purpose, re-finding a pre-existing social network of people I'd known from school. Once I had their real current contact info and had met back up with them, Facebook didn't serve much of a further purpose. The people I actually care about I'll see in person every few years when I go back to where I grew up to visit. I don't need to know what they or anyone else is doing or thinking on a daily basis in-between those visits.
For all the people thinking "hey, you're on Hacker News" is some kind of gotcha, I think it's useful to distinguish between what all these things are. I'm on Netflix, too, which is a centrally-hosted platform that distributes algorithmically-curated media. That isn't nearly the same thing as a social network. Hacker News is a link aggregator that you can comment on, effectively serving the purpose of a newspaper, but crowdsourcing both writing and editing. You can't follow other users. You can't tag other users or receive notifications (and I don't want notifications). I don't have a profile and don't think anyone else does. We don't send each other direct messages. There is no personalization. I don't see any meaningful way in which this is similar to Facebook or Twitter. It's more like an industry conference, but ongoing, virtual, and anonymous.
I am 48 years old man in Northern Europe and been working in IT since 1995. Currently would define myself as old-skool U*nix sysadmin. I have consciuosly avoided all social networking. For a short time around 2007 I had Google account only to save longer trips on Gmaps. I am reading HN occasionally for a long time but don't consider it social networking.
I technically have a Facebook account, but Facebook notified me that it was hacked about 8 years ago and I haven't bothered to go through the re-verification process because Facebook turned out to be useless to me.
I had a Twitter account and 10 years later they warned me that it was being removed because I had never used it. I have a new Twitter account that I log into daily because now I get value from it.
Never used MySpace. Have an Instagram account that I haven't used in probably 2 years. I just signed up for Threads to see what the hype was all about. Maybe it will be useful, maybe not.
Have an active LinkedIn account (got my current job through it) and I keep my network up to date to help with my next job or finding candidates for when we have opening. LinkedIn is useful to me.
I really don't get the vitriol in some of the responses here. No one is forcing you to use social media. If you don't like it, then don't use it.
I think there are not many who never even signed up with any of these platforms. If not anything else then at least out of curiosity I too have signed up on all three you mention. If you change the question to "never ever used past the first 2 weeks" - sign me in to that list.
Depends. Does logging on facebook once a month to see what the few family members are doing counts ? That at best, I went months never visting it and just used FB as a SSO provider for any site I didn't cared enough to create any proper account on.
As for others, I only visit twitter if it is a source for update of something I care about, and that's near always coming from some other site like HN
Both could disappear tomorrow and nothing of value would be lost.
I tried some FB groups related to hobbies but they're generally garbage with no way to bury useless/low effort content.
I’ve never used any of the ones you mention, aside from LinkedIn as you say.
There are different reasons in each case. E.g. Twitter’s short message limit seemed guaranteed to produce what it did, compared to e.g. Usenet or HN. Facebook originally seemed to me like a way to publish on the web for people who didn’t know how, like Geocities. MySpace seemed to be for teenagers. All of these were reasons not to use them initially, but over time nothing changed in a positive enough direction to change my mind.
I'm a Never Myspace, Snapchat, Instagram, Fediverse guy. I'm always threatening to delete my Facebook though and have parked it on disabled status for over half a decade. People get offended by me not these social medias.
I just learned early enough that I have to have internet life, professional life, social life and family life all isolated for on death other.
I made accounts at one point or another and will look at the thing someone links at me on twitter or whatever but I've just never been interested enough to browse these sites or post anything myself. Never felt like I was missing anything either.
I would be especially curious to know if anyone went to university in USA/Canada and avoided Facebook. I was never a heavy FB user prior to school, but it was the hub of everything. Even for alumni events, it remains the hub.
Anyone interested in Einstein's ontological and epistemological beliefs should read Arthur Fine's excellent "The Shaky Game - Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory".
Yes, but I think Peter's point is that they moved because their demographic decline means they have less and less chance of achieving the main goal - securing the eight access points along the Russian border. Ukraine is just "on the way to two of them".
i toss and turn all night and this thing stays on most of the time, is incredibly comfortable, and i am so grateful i received it as a gift (would never have bought for self)
As a side sleeper I had the opposite experience unfortunately, so YMMV. The Manta Pro is touted for side sleepers, but I've used both the pro and original and they both suffer from the same problem: it still slips around and the walls of the eye cups press into my eyes as I sleep. I gave it a few weeks of waking up with soreness and misaligned vision. No amount of fiddling with eye cup positions or strap tightness helped. The thickness of the strap is a fundamental design problem with the Manta approach, even with the expensive tech fabrics on the pro. It's overbuilt.
After trying about 10 other sleep masks, I ended up with the Alaska Bear Silk Two Strap [1] which has straps so thin they're imperceptible, and a much more effective retention mechanism, for a fraction of the price.
I have used (and loved) the Alaska Bear Silk mask for years, but it does come off occasionally. I’m absolutely going to try the double strap one now, thanks for sharing!
Thanks for posting this. I've been looking for a mask with eye cups but couldn't find anything decent on Amazon.
Have you tried the Silk one? I'm tempted to get that one instead of the Pro since the materials sound nicer, but the site is really unclear about the differences...
Hmm… I just bought one but I notice their page has a quote of customer praise saying they can no longer sleep without one. That seems a little bit troubling
Earplugs and sleep masks are habit forming, but speaking as a light sleeper, it's better than the alternative. It's easy enough to always have one on hand, and makes a big difference in my restfulness.
I've been using a Manta Sleep mask (no speakers) for the last year and half, and love it. Unlike the cheap eye mask, it doesn't have an elastic strap that eventually gets out of shape. And it blocks 100% of light for me.
As a side sleeper, I can't use masks with speakers or even long ear plugs, as they put enough pressure on my ear cartilage that they make sleep uncomfortable.
Got one and it’s pretty much the bees knees. A nice evolution over their earlier generation, which I also own. It even seals about 99% of light over a full task CPAP Darth Vader setup
Great read. What conclusions should we draw? What should we do, if "money is no longer money"?
It seems like most normal people operate as though money... is money. What should change in the way most normal people do what they do with... whatever it's called now?
Sign up with a brokerage. Use their cash management account. Confirm its FDIC limits (many cover $1M+ with sweep functionality). If you exceed those limits, consider investing excess cash or cash equivalents in treasuries or money market funds that solely hold short dated government backed securities. This is what a Narrow Bank would do with demand deposits. Treasuries are backed by the Fed and the full faith and credit of the US gov; they are considered risk free.
Tada! You have replicated narrow bank functionality. None of us have enough pull to change Fed fractional reserve and banking regulatory policy unfortunately. If you can't change the wind, adjust your sails.
If you don't mind your deposits being exposed to fractional reserve lending and FDIC insurance, CDARS: https://www.intrafinetworkdeposits.com/ To my knowledge, it can provide at least $50M in FDIC coverage with sweeps under the hood, although someone on HN mentioned the other day the limit might be more. Ask your financial services institution what their limit is.
Many do, but even if they didn't, it's free to ACH money to your real bank checking account every now and then that you can spend and write checks with.
Brokers only lend out of specific core cash accounts (FCASH at Fidelity, for example). Whether you hold cash in those account types is your choice, it isn’t mandatory.
