If police or judicial entites can obtain your social media posts as evidence against you, and things you do might be illegal but socially accepted (e.g. smoking weed), why would you post anything-at the very least why anything public?
I do believe Facebook stopped being cool (if it ever really was) when everyone's parents seemed to be on it. Now older people are the ones who can't seem to live without it.
I wonder if it's because social media started out as connecting with people you know, and maybe their friends, so you can maintain/expand your social circle, or join new ones?
But now it's an algorithmic feed(they're all feeds) designed to maximize engagement with the app, and socializing is a distant 2nd(or 10th) priority for the app makers?
I read HN & Reddit, but the only "social" media I still use regularly are group chats with <10 people in them.
As the article touches upon, I guess it's the network effect in reverse. Facebook became lame when your parents started using it. Twitter is just Nazis now, Instagram is just ads...
Not sure how old you are but in the advent days in the 00’s it was wonderful staying connected to the people you care about in a somewhat insulated space with no algorithm suggested content/engagement-driving rage bait or ads.. within 7-8 years it all went to shit in the name of monetization.
Nowadays, i don’t have time or mental energy to moderate my reactions to rage bait, i know that nobody important would give a fuck about my 120 character takes (since i’ve seen enough to know that i don’t care about others’), and I don’t need current or future employers and/or potential state actors foreign or domestic to form preconceived notions about me.
It was an innocent and naive time. We didn't know and can be excused for not having foreseen or listened to the warnings about the ways it was going to be used against us. Optimism was a luxury.
My question is, knowing what we know now, why are so many prostrating themselves to those who are selling us the new breakthrough that they're going to use to hurt us more than help us? This time, there's no excuse to fall for it.
My fellow humans' experiences are inherently valuable to me, and believe my contributions are, likewise, valuable to them. This is, as far as I know, a fundamental and universal aspect of the human experience.
I know what you mean. I knew people were going to get a lot out of it, and enshittification took a while to set in, not exactly as I would have expected.
But why so many after the human experience had been compromised badly enough for it to be pushed to the margins?
I left Facebook very early on because it was too intrusive and didn't respect my privacy. Some people want to share every aspect of their lives on social media. I don't. I'm from the generation that uses codenames online wherever possible.
On reddit, I first limited what subs I frequented and then stopped posting entirely. It's been almost 1 year since my last post on Reddit. These were conscious choices that took some effort to follow through on.
I left political subs years ago due to endless flamewars and bad moderation. Bad moderation tended to enforce dominant views in political subs, making honest discussion with diverse people (formerly the main draw of message boards) virtually impossible. Either everyone agreed with you or you were the literal Antichrist. It was also hard to tell just who the moderators were, who they represented, or just how much they were doing to control discourse. Sorting by new revealed a lot, but not all, of what was going on. To make matters worse, as subs became echo chambers, users themselves began to expect to never have their views challenged. They'd self-sort into subs that matched their views and then circlejerk endlessly, often becoming more extreme as time passed. I didn't want to see that happen to me, so I swore off political subs entirely.
After the Canada-U.S. tradewar broke out early this year, I made a passing historical joke about the war of 1812 that was perfectly in keeping with the norms of the sub I was in. I was temporarily banned (24 hours or something like that) by the main reddit admins, who appeared to be using AI to blanket ban people saying anything remotely anti-Trump. I appealed and the response denied this was AI moderation, but showed no understanding of a very obvious joke that any American or Canadian would get. (i.e. They misconstrued a tongue-in-cheek comment about burning the white house again as a real threat of violence).
This was the final straw for me. The overall feeling I was left with was that, by posting and voting on Reddit, I was volunteering my time to support a pro-Trump American corporation that didn't respect me or my country. I still search/read reddit for specific things due to a lack of alternatives, but I can't wait for the platform to die and the users to move onto something better. I no longer contribute to Reddit, even by reporting spam.
Hacker News is the last remnant of social media I participate in. We'll see how much longer that lasts. I suspect I am subconsciously trying to quit social media entirely. Doing so really does free up your time for far better things.
If police or judicial entites can obtain your social media posts as evidence against you, and things you do might be illegal but socially accepted (e.g. smoking weed), why would you post anything-at the very least why anything public?
I do believe Facebook stopped being cool (if it ever really was) when everyone's parents seemed to be on it. Now older people are the ones who can't seem to live without it.
Because social media largely sucks and brings out the worst in people.
No I didn't read the article.
I wonder if it's because social media started out as connecting with people you know, and maybe their friends, so you can maintain/expand your social circle, or join new ones? But now it's an algorithmic feed(they're all feeds) designed to maximize engagement with the app, and socializing is a distant 2nd(or 10th) priority for the app makers?
I read HN & Reddit, but the only "social" media I still use regularly are group chats with <10 people in them.
interesting take
Did you ever hear about the dead internet theory?
As the article touches upon, I guess it's the network effect in reverse. Facebook became lame when your parents started using it. Twitter is just Nazis now, Instagram is just ads...
The real question is why did so many people even start?
Not sure how old you are but in the advent days in the 00’s it was wonderful staying connected to the people you care about in a somewhat insulated space with no algorithm suggested content/engagement-driving rage bait or ads.. within 7-8 years it all went to shit in the name of monetization.
Nowadays, i don’t have time or mental energy to moderate my reactions to rage bait, i know that nobody important would give a fuck about my 120 character takes (since i’ve seen enough to know that i don’t care about others’), and I don’t need current or future employers and/or potential state actors foreign or domestic to form preconceived notions about me.
I liked seeing what friends and acquaintances were up to and their pics…
I miss that.
It was an innocent and naive time. We didn't know and can be excused for not having foreseen or listened to the warnings about the ways it was going to be used against us. Optimism was a luxury.
My question is, knowing what we know now, why are so many prostrating themselves to those who are selling us the new breakthrough that they're going to use to hurt us more than help us? This time, there's no excuse to fall for it.
[dead]
My fellow humans' experiences are inherently valuable to me, and believe my contributions are, likewise, valuable to them. This is, as far as I know, a fundamental and universal aspect of the human experience.
Isn't that obvious?
I know what you mean. I knew people were going to get a lot out of it, and enshittification took a while to set in, not exactly as I would have expected.
But why so many after the human experience had been compromised badly enough for it to be pushed to the margins?
I left Facebook very early on because it was too intrusive and didn't respect my privacy. Some people want to share every aspect of their lives on social media. I don't. I'm from the generation that uses codenames online wherever possible.
On reddit, I first limited what subs I frequented and then stopped posting entirely. It's been almost 1 year since my last post on Reddit. These were conscious choices that took some effort to follow through on.
I left political subs years ago due to endless flamewars and bad moderation. Bad moderation tended to enforce dominant views in political subs, making honest discussion with diverse people (formerly the main draw of message boards) virtually impossible. Either everyone agreed with you or you were the literal Antichrist. It was also hard to tell just who the moderators were, who they represented, or just how much they were doing to control discourse. Sorting by new revealed a lot, but not all, of what was going on. To make matters worse, as subs became echo chambers, users themselves began to expect to never have their views challenged. They'd self-sort into subs that matched their views and then circlejerk endlessly, often becoming more extreme as time passed. I didn't want to see that happen to me, so I swore off political subs entirely.
After the Canada-U.S. tradewar broke out early this year, I made a passing historical joke about the war of 1812 that was perfectly in keeping with the norms of the sub I was in. I was temporarily banned (24 hours or something like that) by the main reddit admins, who appeared to be using AI to blanket ban people saying anything remotely anti-Trump. I appealed and the response denied this was AI moderation, but showed no understanding of a very obvious joke that any American or Canadian would get. (i.e. They misconstrued a tongue-in-cheek comment about burning the white house again as a real threat of violence).
This was the final straw for me. The overall feeling I was left with was that, by posting and voting on Reddit, I was volunteering my time to support a pro-Trump American corporation that didn't respect me or my country. I still search/read reddit for specific things due to a lack of alternatives, but I can't wait for the platform to die and the users to move onto something better. I no longer contribute to Reddit, even by reporting spam.
Hacker News is the last remnant of social media I participate in. We'll see how much longer that lasts. I suspect I am subconsciously trying to quit social media entirely. Doing so really does free up your time for far better things.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/11/20/americans-so...
Not clear with these things about 'posting' of course, but there must be something to look at on these things