I deleted my social media accounts
asylumsquare.com400 points by joemanaco 3 months ago
400 points by joemanaco 3 months ago
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.
1. LinkedIn.
2. Keep the other accounts, just in case.
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.
GP deleted their LinkedIn account too.
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.
> What I see over years is that, especially in developers online groups, any usual and normal way of socializing is stigmatized.
Developers are not typical of regular people. They're, basically by design, outliers.
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.
> In my circle, very few people maintain a social media presence.
You are not characteristic for the population at large (neither am I, don't feel sad :-) ).
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.
I’m not on social media but people have been posting obituaries publicly in newspapers and such for centuries.
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.
Scale matters.
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?
Call me old fashioned, but…
Is it narcissistic in here, or is it just me?
> 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.
It's implied, "And if someone doesn't reach out to say “Sorry for your loss”, it will hurt the relationship a little".
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.
Technology changes the world around 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.
20 years ago you could check on websites IIRC.
Back in my day, we had to walk fifty miles in the snow, up hill both ways, and we couldn’t afford shoes, just to phone the airline.
Back when men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
and you tell young people of today that and they just won't believe you.
Thanks for that, I hadn’t seen it for a couple decades, gave me a good chuckle.
What has that got to do with social media?
Instant messaging and group chat, I’d argue, are distinct services / protocols / products vis-à-vis social media.
Strained analogies are weird. I like to call them sieved analogies, the other definition of strained.
I strained your analogy and threw out the dross.
If GP has an issue with Zuckerberg => Meta, they might have an issue with WhatsApp too.
The "protocols vs platforms" struggle is more relevant than ever.
(I am surprised that GP doesn't seem to have heard of Mastodon?)
Approximately no one I’ve ever know in Australia uses WhatsApp, so I generally don’t remember to remember it in these conversations.
I think I once used it to advise someone it’s owned my Facebook and sent them my public key.
20+ years ago you would have put it in the local news paper.
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.
> What does this mean?
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.
Ah, yeah no problem :D
I also had no social media in my upbringing, a bit of ICQ via dial up though. Got an Facebook account and smartphone way later compared to my peers.
> 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?
> That seems so bizarre.
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.
Indeed and in the olden times a lot of these life events would have been announced in the local newspaper.
But these days, I don’t even know where to even buy a newspaper, let alone make sure everyone is reading it and keeping up with local news.
So social media it is, which sucks because they’re extremely edited and filtered out by the algorithm.
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.
>> For example, if a parent died...
and yet people died quite often before social media; what did we do then?
If the realtionship is built upon the foundation of social media, it's actually not that strong, absent social media. We'll be fine.
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).
Right, that’s the toupée fallacy.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacy
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.