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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
And that’s okay. It means 5 years later when we cross paths for real there’s lots to catch up on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These full fledged 'quit' posts are nothing more than an attempt at a political statement that falls on deaf ears.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 ?
But that’s also a guess. I suspect neither of us have any data to back up our guesses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Unfortunately, that makes up a tiny fraction of most feeds.
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.)
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
But there's also lots of upsides. I guess I dont know one way or the other.
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.
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.
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…
Now my feed is very pleasant. Family updates, sports news, friends vacation pictures and jokes.
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
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.
> Of course, the first thing men will say after that meeting is simply "I've been fine, can't complain. How about you?".
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.
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".
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.
Sounds perfect. I rather have a few close friends than two dozen semi-friends.
i deleted fb 10ish years ago.
and since then every family event that had been planned, was done on fb (just like before) and i find out about it by a text from my sister.
the trick is to not give a shit. Coz they don't.
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.
Also some people back then would brag about not having a TV, the same way vegans still do today.
I’m not saying it is, just that it’s so bizarre, it’s literally unbelievable.
Like something The Onion would write.
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.
I think this advice is generally harmful to networking as someone grows, which is vital in today's society
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.
Edit: Jokes aside, I'm vegan and I don't own a TV. Coincidence? Haha
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.
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.
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.
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 don't miss any of that. Those connections were beyond shallow, and weren't adding anything positive or useful to my life.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Not having seen a friend for a longer time and talking about all the things that happened is the one thing that friendship is about IMO.
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 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
Technology changes the world around us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That said I could have used airplane pilots for the same example (also based on personal experience).
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).
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.
You are not characteristic for the population at large (neither am I, don't feel sad :-) ).
Developers are not typical of regular people. They're, basically by design, outliers.
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.
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.
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.
Does https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr not work anymore? It should surface the chronological feed without reels and other recommended slop.
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.
The point being simply that Facebook as a social connections property hasn't been a thing for years.
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.
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.
Unless it was for an invitation to a board game evening and dinner at a friend's house. That would help to grow the friendship.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The video was interesting too, I’ll have a look at that channel. Thanks for sharing.
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 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.
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”.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY62dhVThbee...
I also recommend these two earlier videos, on unrelated matters.
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.
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.
The "protocols vs platforms" struggle is more relevant than ever.
(I am surprised that GP doesn't seem to have heard of Mastodon?)
You would think that this one place where you would specifically find out about huge life events like deaths / births ?!
To be honest, I'm actually disappointed in myself for helping fb retain a user
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's a little unreasonable to expect people to put in that effort.
I think I once used it to advise someone it’s owned my Facebook and sent them my public key.
For most people, that is arguably currently Facebook.
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.