First, there was LiveJournal. Then there was MySpace. Then there was FaceBook. I was on FaceBook until .edu stopped being a requirement. Shortly after that change, my wall became a mix of soft porn and hightimes. Nothing wrong with that, but it isn’t what I want to see so I deleted my FaceBook account. I went over to Twitter. Over time, Twitter ceased to be interesting as it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand very well. I deleted my Twitter account half a decade ago. All of it is actually useless, and it does nothing but eat time.
LinkedIn at least managed to retain its only useful function, a self-updating Rolodex. It would be nice to be able to disable the virtue signalling feed though.
LinkedIn's "only useful function" is insufficient to overcome its "deal killer": it's a farce. I have never met an I.T. manager whose LinkedIn profile was remotely close to reality. They all claim the same B.S. (detail oriented, results driven, digital transformation, blah blah blah blah blah blah), enabling them to get hired into roles that ruin the lives of programmers like me. Better they should just be honest and say, "Switch jobs every 3 years when they find out I'm a total poser but I promise to stay out of the programmers' way".
> I have never met an I.T. manager whose LinkedIn profile was remotely close to reality.
I really wish there was a way to flag false information in someone's profile.
I had a guy last year that we fired for substantial cause. He was hired as a mid-level engineer, but honestly was borderline-junior level when we got him. That's fine, he clearly "overstated" his resume. I had actually rang alarm bells about him during the interview process but was overruled by HR because his resume was so amazing.
So I shrugged it off and took him under my wing. I figured we could train him on stuff we needed. No big deal, he has at least foundational experience so its fine.
Fast forward 8 months. It has been nothing but a disaster. His personal attitude has been toxic enough that it drove me to consider leaving and we lost two other employees to his toxic attitude. Furthermore, he had already overstayed his welcome from a performance perspective. He directly caused multiple outages in our system in his short tenure and had failed to complete any significant projects by himself without it needing to be rescued by other teammates. In fact we had a junior engineer during his time that was outperforming this mid-level and used the fact that he outperformed this engineer in order to (reasonably) get a promotion.
After the sixth performance review warning in 8 months, I finally fire him for performance and creating a toxic work environment. Remember, he was a mid-level engineer that was being outperformed by our junior engineers.
Anyway, he was fired and I move on. The department significantly turned around for the better after he left. I really regretted not firing him sooner and spending so much effort trying to save him. The entire team was relieved when he left and happy.
Then one day, about a month later, I am having a 1x1 with an employee in my team who asked why that fired employee was a senior engineer and thought that it should justify a promotion for himself. I explained that he wasn't a senior, not even close and I was then pointed to his linkedin page.
On that page I read what the fired employee wrote about himself. First of all, he gave himself a promotion to "Senior / Lead Engineer". Keep in mind, this was someone who couldn't be trusted for basic junior level tasks by himself. Now he is presenting as a lead engineer.
In his accomplishments he said he lowered our AWS bill by 38.5%. Sounds great. Except that he wasn't even priviledged to our AWS expenses during that time, and furthermore our AWS bill had actually increased by over 20% during the same time period. He didn't just "inflate" his contribution (which is normal on resumes/CVs), but he was in no-way involved in managing the AWS expenses whatsoever.
Another bulletpoint said he had helped "integrate ChatGPT and AI tools into our platform to improve developer effeciency by 26%". Except that our company has (and still does) have a compliance regulation against using ChatGPT at all (we deal with sensitive government data that is restricted) and we were explicitly banned from using AI developer tools during his time here. So this is another entirely false claim.
He also said he was charged with launching an entirely new product for the company, which raised our revenues by 19.6% the first quarter that it was released. No such product was ever released, let along him running it. The companies revenues were mostly flat during his time there.
That wasn't even it, but i've made my point. I went down the 8-10 bullet points on his LinkedIn and only 1 was even based in reality (although exaggerated). The rest were entirely false. On top of that he promoted himself as a lead engineer, of which he was closer to a Junior.
Furthermore he said he worked at our company for 1 year and 3 months. When in reality he only worked there for 7 months and 3 weeks.
It's fine. I was happy to not have him in my life or organization anymore. I wasn't going to sue him over it or anything. But it does bother me that someone else would potentially hire him based on information that is essentially entirely fabricated. Yes they could try to get references. I assume he would cheat or lie his way through that as well, using friends that pose as past managers or something. If they called for an employment verification, the most any company would do is verify the employment dates and _maybe_ job title. But most companies in tech don't even bother with that.
Of course I don't know how much of this is a LinkedIn problem, as just hiring in general. Even if LinkedIn enforced community moderated accuracy, there's nothing to stop him from typing up stuff on his Resume that he sends around.
Then again, for anyone listening that works at LinkedIn, having a community moderated/validated accuracy platform might actually add significant value to LinkedIn for employers. It would probably be more real and trusted than a reference check and make LinkedIn an indispensable tool for employers.
> I had actually rang alarm bells about him during the interview process but was overruled by HR because his resume was so amazing.
Yikes. I have a great cost-cutting proposal for your company, then: don't bother with interviews. Just let HR hire directly based on resumes without ever talking to the candidate. Why would you bother with the interview if this is happening anyway?
> He also said he was charged with launching an entirely new product for the company, which raised our revenues by 19.6% the first quarter that it was released
If you're a public company, this should be easily falsified by the next employer doing due diligence. If not, yeah, hard to know.
> Furthermore he said he worked at our company for 1 year and 3 months. When in reality he only worked there for 7 months and 3 weeks.
This is the one he really should always get caught on. If companies say nothing else when asked about a former employees, they at least say what their tenure was.
> Having a community moderated/validated accuracy platform might actually add significant value to LinkedIn for employers.
Which dating site was it that admitted that they really didn't want their users to find their soulmates, because then they stopped using the dating site? LinkedIn doesn't want you to find your perfect job and work there happily until retirement. Then why would you bother using LinkedIn anymore?
LinkedIn (and resumes / CVs) exist for you to lie to HR and fit into the automated systems to so you can get a job. They don't exist to be uniquely useful. If they were anything but lies then you wouldn't need to deal with technical interviews as you could go off of the candidates LinkedIn or resume. As you say, it's a system that when games gets you through HR. HR doesn't know shit from anything so they pass the candidate along. If you convince HR that your shit doesn't stink they'll be convinced you're the second coming of Christ. That's the game to play.
3 Days late but this is a funny comic! (I'm more WandaWant than say, alGorithm so some of the coding references go over my head but the jokes are funny all the same!)
Don't underestimate yourself. My version of wandaWant would never admit that anything went over her head. She'd just pretend that she knew what we were talking about. So you're way ahead already :-)
Nice catch, ExtraRoulette! You're the first to notice.
This project is new. My plan was to write a "comic generator", where I would just input parameters and it would generate the comics.
It worked even better than I expected. In the last 6 months, it has generated 2700 comics from my inputs.
Then I realized that if I launched 7/1/23, it would take 10 years just to post what I already had, even at one per day.
So I just reset my start date from 1/1/23 to 1/1/14. I wanted to launch with a lot of content so people could explore.
I also wanted the site to be evergreen which is why I try not to dig too deep into specific technologies. But COVID was obviously too big to ignore.
I sorted my backlog a few weeks ago based on many factors, but I guess 344 slipped through the cracks. I think I'll leave it there to see if anyone else notices.
The joy of LinkedIn is you don't need to spend your life scrolling through it. Go in, spend 5 seconds seeing what's new or if you have any non-spam messages, then close the tab.
Ignore it for a week or two and repeat, no excessive engagement required.
Yeah I unironically really like LinkedIn. I use it to see who works at companies and who else people I know might know, and what all those people have been up to. This is all super useful information to me as I plan out what to work on and with whom.
But the feed could just not be there and it would make no difference. Not sure what you'd put in that real estate on the home page instead though.
My experience is an empty shell of people that only use it when they are looking for a job. The active ones post things that they think will make them look smart, cheap blog posts about “5 management tips”, “is your manager micromanaging you?”, “9 must have resume tools”, stuff like that.
The people that I’m actually interested in have a profile, but never actually use it. Or already got a job and don’t need to open it often, if at all.
The recruiters that reach out are always scammy or offer ridiculous things hoping that if I’m there, I’m desperate. 12/h do it all position, contract, for maybe 2 weeks, maybe 6 months, (doesn’t matter, I’m on the verge of homelessness anyway right?) for a “very important and growing company” that’s not even in the area I’m in.
It always gives me that fake useless vibe. I don’t really know how to turn it into something I actually want to be part of.
Seriously, discoverable linkable profiles with tracking of connections and links to businesses and schools is incredibly useful, and we're fortunate it exists.
Just don't pay attention to the "content"... that's the worthless drivel you describe (though you forgot some of the business promotion angle).
I maybe go there once a month because someone I use to work with came in conversation or I had some random thought about someone. I'll also go there to learn about business partners and people I'm about to have to deal with professionally... background kinda stuff. Sometimes that doesn't pay off, but usually it's just enough to not go into a meeting or project blind.
I am not going there to read articles, posts, and other "business self-help" stuff and I'm not going there often.
> The people that I’m actually interested in have a profile, but never actually use it.
Does it have their work and education history on it? If so, that is "using" LinkedIn. You click on the companies in their profile. You follow the link to that company's website, see what they do. Or you find their connections from their profile page and see if any of those people are interesting or have interesting histories. Then you can (often) send people messages.
These are (in my view) by far the most useful capabilities for grown up working professionals that have been invented in the social media era. Everything else (including everything else on LinkedIn, posts and the feed, etc.) is almost entirely just noise with limited utility beyond entertainment.
IMO the best way to use it is for professional networking. Add the people you work with at your current job. If one of them (or you) leaves, you have a reasonable avenue to get in contact with them again, either for jobs or just catching up.
Ok so I worked with you a decade ago, you have my phone number or email address, but you aren't on linkedin.
I remember you and I'm interested in what you've been up with for the last decade, so I go look for you on linkedin, but I can't find you. I shrug and forget about it.
Or maybe I also wrote down your phone number or email address along with your name. I remember you and get curious what you're up to. Can't find you on linkedin so I have no idea. But I have nothing to talk to you about, I just wondered what you were up to. So I don't email you. I shrug and move on.
Oh well. This is fine. But it's better if I can just go see what you've been up to like I can with everyone else I've worked with.
seconded. it's mostly useless, and for the things I do the profiles are meaningless. security doesn't put a lot of info, deliberately, so as to avoid malicious scans and intel gathering
Yes. It's professional, not personal, it is in no way weird or creepy to just say "hey interesting background, any interest in getting coffee with me?" just like you would with a new colleague at work. But it's pretty much everyone you can meet that way, not just people at your own company.
- Find someone you're interested in connecting with. (Maybe you want to work where they work or where they used to work, maybe they live in your town and work on similar stuff, maybe they just seem to know a lot about something you're curious about.)
- Maybe get an intro from a person you both know. (This definitely increases the odds they'll respond to you.)
- Much lower friction than getting an intro and a nice feature of LinkedIn: You can both see people you both know. Reaching out to those "2nd" order connections increases the odds that they'll respond.
- Then I think the playbook for what to write is just "be yourself and sound like an actual person rather than a spam bot".
- Then don't be upset if you don't get a response, especially from people who probably get tons of messages.
There is also a step 0 that is an ongoing effort, which is to have a background and expertise yourself that is interesting to the person you're reaching out to. I love it when I get messages from people I might have messaged myself if I had come across them first.
So do I. Besides the fact that I got my current position directly through LinkedIn (cold contact from a recruiter), I use it to learn about people I'm going to meet.
I work with our Bizdev team a lot, discussing proposals for new business and it's great to be able to look up the management/development team of a company that we're going to have a meeting with to get a better picture of where they're coming from and what their company does.
The objections in this thread strike me as typical developer negativity: it's not directly tech-related so it must be useless.
Aside from the occasional lunatic post the feed's been pretty decent for me. A lot of it can be noise but I think the fact that it's kind of basic and doesn't manipulate you into constant engagement is what makes it better - I see a lot of stuff that I might not have come across otherwise rather than being fed content the algorithm thinks I enjoy, and the stuff I post gets decent visibility.
I suppose it's kind of old-skool in a way while also just being there to fill the space with... something. Meanwhile you couldn't pay me to sign up to FB, Twitter, Insta or TikTok.
Overall though - LinkedIn definitely grows in value as your career moves from 'what you know' to 'who you know'.
Absolutely. I imagine the product meeting being "What are we going to put on the homepage? It's would be weird for your home page to just be your own profile... I guess a feed? Those seem popular and take up plenty of space...".
You log into LinkedIn every week or two to check messages there? I'd call that pretty solid engagement. If I were a product person there, I'd be happy to have a user like you. I log in every few years when I really have to for some reason and it's always a pain because I'm going to have to reset my password, figure out my login, blah, blech.
I log into it strictly to job search, and for that it has been fantastic. What I love is that I don’t need to engage with the site regularly in order to utilize it for that function. I’m on every year or two for a few weeks (minutes a day tops) to update resumes, clean up my “professional storefront” essentially, and do a few job searches - which then leads to me getting regular emails with job opportunities that match my parameters. And unlike other hiring sites, LinkedIn has actually produced results for me.
Every time I fall into the trap of scrolling through the LinkedIn news feed, I end up losing faith in humanity. What LinkedIn has decided that I want to see is a mix of conspiracy theories and narcistic self promotions; and under every post a chorus of congratulations and compliments.
On Twitter, I follow exactly one person. I don't even see all his comments on my feed. But I do see things like fights, light porn content (dicks, prostitutes), Musk trolling... And sometimes, I feel the urge to react to trolls or argue with people. Not a good social media in my opinion. I'm sure it could be vastly improved with a better feed algorithm, and better moderation.
Not only are there conspiracy theorists on the LinkedIn feed, also there is no censoring or warning like on FB. It's a conspiracy theorist's paradise ..
Worse, it’s coming from your office, your higher ups. Scary. Promotions tied to whether you agree with their “Biden caused the 2008 financial crisis” theory or if you are a “patriot” for attacking our capital. Don’t get me started with EU conspiracies about how Ukraine war beginning was an inside job.
Well, if it's "from above" the correct play is: yessir i am a $patriot please increase my $compensation to one befitting a fellow holder of correct opinions
I was referring to The Great Resignation (tm) but yes, you are correct, leave one place to roll the dice someplace else. It’s not greener, just different shades of dead and patches, with or without proper gardening tools.
Interesting, this might explain something someone started to talk to me about recently & I was just kinda like whatever - he’s not trump nor half as senile or incompetent as what conservatives make him out to be.
At this point I’d love a bill introducing max terms. Term limits. You can get re-elected but only so many times before you’re done. Do away with salaries for life “as compensation for your service”. They don’t need it if they are pulling in millions from enterprises, endorsements, book deals, merch, speaking fees in excess of $50,000.
Senate, you get 4 max terms. Reps, you get 6. SCOTUS, 4 and term limits of 6 years per term. Something to fix this professional career politicians we see like McConnell, Biden, Kennedy, Cruz, etc. The world moves too fast for one lifetime spent legislatively eliminating rights of people or bringing back “the good ol days”.
LinkedIn is a horrible place because I'll see posts from the worst people I've ever met about tips and tricks on "how to be better at X". It grates on my soul.
Its because those people aren't working, so they have time to write articles at how to be better at the stuff they don't actually do.
The rest of us that are already good at X, don't have the time or energy to write articles about how to be better at it because we are too busy doing it. And when we finally get done for the day, we want to do something else with our lives except go back and write about how to be better at it.
Really? I only added people I actually know and it seems like a much better facebook - it only shows me relevant information and what people I know from work are doing.
Install uBlock Origin and wipe those virtues away. Use the element zapper mode to temporarily remove things. Refresh and it'll be back. Use element picker to permanently hide parts of a website.
Around 15-16 years ago I _tried_ doing the same and found out that deletion was _not_ possible. I had a personal profile as well as a company profile there. The company was a one-man startup that went down around 2007-9 sometime with the crisis. So it was closed.
As there was no option to actually delete or remove profiles I had to resort to manually tracking every bit of content in groups/threads etc and editing each one-by-one to be blank. Also profile pages were blanked and company facts removed where possible. I even wrote a note on both profile pages that "I no longer use this site: this profile is no longer active". This work took days I recall.
As many years have passed I do not recall if there was an option to hide the personal profile or not, but no such option existed for the company, and no delete option existed either way.
Last time I logged in was around five-six years ago only to find out that my profiles were still there and my former company had now gained 100+ current and former employees from multiple countries!
I had no way to inform anyone that these people were not really employees, as said company no longer existed. And, they never had been.
I would still like to be able to permanently delete these profiles, but last time I checked it was still the digital equivalent of Hotel Califonia:
"you can check out any time you want,
but you can never leave"
Yes, I remember when LinkedIn was tricking people into spamming everyone in their contact list on their phone and using the information to suggest connections. A coworker was fooled and sent out invitations to everyone in his massive contact list. He was in sales for over 40 years and was mortified, then pissed off.
I refuse to install the LinkedIn apps on my devices. Microsoft didn’t help matters when they integrated it into Outlook.
Reddit was arguably the last “social media” I was using until a few weeks ago with the protest. I resigned as a moderator of a decently large sub and deleted the app. Let me tell you, it has been the best few weeks for me mentally in years. I set up inoreader and only grabbed a couple of publication/writers I really like. I don’t doom scroll, there’s no capability for comments so I don’t get dragged into any arguments, and even with HN still in my life the churn and burn of content and simplicity/general culture keeps me to a few comments a week at most.
I know a lot of people talk about “delete Facebook/hit the gym” etc. but gym or not, my life is infinitely better without social media now. It is very clear to me that it’s not even a situation where the cons outweighs the pros now, there simply aren’t any pros left.
Someone enumerated the issues with Reddit, as well as social media writ large, at the start of the Reddit blackout. There’s a lot of interesting insight about the failures of Web 2.0 from a consumer standpoint, but one line at the end really resonated with me: “The Internet just isn’t fun anymore.“ Obviously that’s a pretty broad stroke and we should always be wary of rose-tinted glasses, but I can’t say I don’t get what they mean.
How many of you have _never_ used any of these central-platform Social Media sites?
My purpose is not to virtue signal or brag about how I've never owned a TV etc, but I'm genuinely curious about how many people who are reading this never once signed up for or spent more than a minute on any of these garbage platforms?
Let's leave LinkedIn aside, for various reasons. I'm thinking here of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.
I am close to never having used a central-platform social media site. I had a Facebook account for a few months about ten years ago because the manager of a project I was working on insisted that we use it to communicate. I closed down the account soon after the project finished. I have never had an account on MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
The one exception, perhaps surprisingly, is Instagram. About eight or nine years ago, my daughter was starting out as a freelance illustrator, and I was fascinated with how she and other illustrators shared ideas and learned from each other through Instagram. It seemed like a new form of culture propagation. For a year or two, I posted my own music and photographs to an Instagram account that I set up under a pseudonym. I never got any engagement from it, but I started following some people who posted content that was interesting to me. I continue to follow twenty or thirty accounts and enjoy checking them every day or two, but I stopped posting myself a long time ago and my account continues to be under the pseudonym, so I don’t think it really counts as social media use.
Reasonable people disagree over whether it's appropriate to label any piece of software in which two or more people interact "social media". I tend to think it renders the term uselessly broad.
Right. Because some people use it that way and dictionaries have (not inappropriately!) leaned strongly descriptivist for decades. They should have such a definition in them.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure what about my post prompted you to jump to suggesting I'm an imbecile.
Good point. I was aware of that, of course, but, like some others here, I like to believe that HN is different in significant ways: no images or videos, no personalized feed, no following or being followed, no targeted advertising, etc.
You are correct, of course, but to me HN is more similar to a bbPHP forum than Facebook or Twitter. (Forums are themselves central-platform social media sites, but to me they are quite different.)
They are what you make of it. You have to take the time to understand what they are and how they can be used. Just because you don't understand something or it doesn't fit any of your uses doesn't mean it is garbage. I never would have met my wife if I hadn't been on MySpace.
I feel pretty confident that I have a deep understanding of what they are and how they can be used. And to me, they are pure garbage. Regarding use, they definitely fit my uses, though I would never use one. I was very active on several forums and such before these platforms appeared. I'm all about social networking - it's mostly the technology behind the platforms that I... don't like.
It's awesome that you met your wife on MySpace - that's great! It's also totally possible to meet your future SO at the local dump, but that doesn't make the location any less of a garbage pit.
Heck, even garbage itself can be useful while still being garbage. I'm sure some excellent installation artists have made impressive art with refuse, etc. But that doesn't make the medium less garbage-like; if anything, it emphasizes its garbage nature.
If you want me to be honest, the term "garbage" is far too kind when it comes to describing social networking sites, IMO. "Poison" may be a more accurate word to describe my sentiment.
I would never have met my wife if I hadn't taken a particular part-time job when I was in college. So many very banal everyday decisions can unexpectedly/in retrospect change the course of one's life.
I am close to that and nearing 50 years old. I blame it on two things mainly.
First, I have been around long enough to witness the many negative social behaviors of Usenet reappear in web forums. I reasoned by induction that this is what people will do in each large network that follows. I guess I prefer social sneaker-networks with limited scale.
Second, I am within three degrees of the Unabomber. (Kind of like three degrees of Kevin Bacon but with surprise amputation.) I identify too easily with victims of such targeted attacks, and I am uncomfortable with the idea of publicity in general.
I also don't consider HN to be in the same category. But if it had allowed anonymous posting, I would probably never had created an account here either.
I've never used any of them. I made a Facebook account years ago as it was required to log in to something else I needed, but I never did anything on Facebook proper. Never been on MySpace, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, or anything like that.
I used Facebook when it first came out. I thought it was pretty useful as an enhanced version of something like friend finder. I moved away very quickly when I first graduated high school and lost touch with a lot of people I had known. When Facebook opened up to non-university users, many of them showed up and I was able to reconnect. But to me, that was its purpose, re-finding a pre-existing social network of people I'd known from school. Once I had their real current contact info and had met back up with them, Facebook didn't serve much of a further purpose. The people I actually care about I'll see in person every few years when I go back to where I grew up to visit. I don't need to know what they or anyone else is doing or thinking on a daily basis in-between those visits.
For all the people thinking "hey, you're on Hacker News" is some kind of gotcha, I think it's useful to distinguish between what all these things are. I'm on Netflix, too, which is a centrally-hosted platform that distributes algorithmically-curated media. That isn't nearly the same thing as a social network. Hacker News is a link aggregator that you can comment on, effectively serving the purpose of a newspaper, but crowdsourcing both writing and editing. You can't follow other users. You can't tag other users or receive notifications (and I don't want notifications). I don't have a profile and don't think anyone else does. We don't send each other direct messages. There is no personalization. I don't see any meaningful way in which this is similar to Facebook or Twitter. It's more like an industry conference, but ongoing, virtual, and anonymous.
I am 48 years old man in Northern Europe and been working in IT since 1995. Currently would define myself as old-skool U*nix sysadmin. I have consciuosly avoided all social networking. For a short time around 2007 I had Google account only to save longer trips on Gmaps. I am reading HN occasionally for a long time but don't consider it social networking.
I technically have a Facebook account, but Facebook notified me that it was hacked about 8 years ago and I haven't bothered to go through the re-verification process because Facebook turned out to be useless to me.
I had a Twitter account and 10 years later they warned me that it was being removed because I had never used it. I have a new Twitter account that I log into daily because now I get value from it.
Never used MySpace. Have an Instagram account that I haven't used in probably 2 years. I just signed up for Threads to see what the hype was all about. Maybe it will be useful, maybe not.
Have an active LinkedIn account (got my current job through it) and I keep my network up to date to help with my next job or finding candidates for when we have opening. LinkedIn is useful to me.
I really don't get the vitriol in some of the responses here. No one is forcing you to use social media. If you don't like it, then don't use it.
I think there are not many who never even signed up with any of these platforms. If not anything else then at least out of curiosity I too have signed up on all three you mention. If you change the question to "never ever used past the first 2 weeks" - sign me in to that list.
Depends. Does logging on facebook once a month to see what the few family members are doing counts ? That at best, I went months never visting it and just used FB as a SSO provider for any site I didn't cared enough to create any proper account on.
As for others, I only visit twitter if it is a source for update of something I care about, and that's near always coming from some other site like HN
Both could disappear tomorrow and nothing of value would be lost.
I tried some FB groups related to hobbies but they're generally garbage with no way to bury useless/low effort content.
I’ve never used any of the ones you mention, aside from LinkedIn as you say.
There are different reasons in each case. E.g. Twitter’s short message limit seemed guaranteed to produce what it did, compared to e.g. Usenet or HN. Facebook originally seemed to me like a way to publish on the web for people who didn’t know how, like Geocities. MySpace seemed to be for teenagers. All of these were reasons not to use them initially, but over time nothing changed in a positive enough direction to change my mind.
I'm a Never Myspace, Snapchat, Instagram, Fediverse guy. I'm always threatening to delete my Facebook though and have parked it on disabled status for over half a decade. People get offended by me not these social medias.
I just learned early enough that I have to have internet life, professional life, social life and family life all isolated for on death other.
I made accounts at one point or another and will look at the thing someone links at me on twitter or whatever but I've just never been interested enough to browse these sites or post anything myself. Never felt like I was missing anything either.
I would be especially curious to know if anyone went to university in USA/Canada and avoided Facebook. I was never a heavy FB user prior to school, but it was the hub of everything. Even for alumni events, it remains the hub.
This site doesn't even have half the problems as most social media. Ragebait is usually handled well, the incentives to troll/virtue signal are low (karma is not visible) and the level of discussion is usually high.
And there is no customised feed, everyone sees the same thing.
I think about the pros and cons of a monoculture vs a polyculture every once in a while, and I suppose that this is an example of one of the benefits of a monoculture. That the existence of norms prevent/mitigate out of bounds behavior by individuals (although that of course could be a good or a bad thing depending on the bounds, and if the bounds are reasonably changeable)
I don't really agree..... if you look at my post history, I've posted quite a few very controversial things (not about politics but programming itself) and... lots of people disagreed with me heavily but there wasn't any flamewar or anything. It was quite civil for the overwhelming part, which I actually found surprising, it's been a breath of fresh air compared to everything else.
(note: this is a repost from another comment because I accidentally posted it in the wrong place)
Could you specify what characterises those topics, the discussions concerning them, and their treatments in your view?
In particular keywords or phrases which appear, preferably in titles, though perhaps also in comments, would be useful.
I'd also be curious as what might falsify a sense that HN's membership shies from politics, can't discuss political matters reasonably, and/or has a specific political leaning.
(I've created an archive of HN front-page submissions from 2007 to present, and am investigating various aspects of the site. The data itself comprises the post date, page position (1--30), submitted site (as noted in parentheses following the title, I'm not capturing the actual URL presently), the submitter, and the vote and comment counts. I've done some cursory exploration based on sites that correspond to political commentary, such as think-tanks or highly-partisan media, and a bit of looking at phrase patterns in titles, but not much beyond that. Sentiments on what topics HN discusses poorly might be useful here.)
Cool, find another forum that handles it outside of those accepted norms. Thus forum does not have to give alternative views placement. With politics it's especially bad because people can't separate their feelings from the discussion.
And, I believe, this is the way it should be. I don't want one forum for everything. I don't want those identities associated.
If I've understood what's said about Thomas Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', even science is all about consensus.
I'm fond of Max Planck's “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”, or its pithy summary "science advances one funeral at a time."
Science is primarily a methodology, and secondarily a body of provisional knowledge discovered and tested via that methodology.
As non practitioners, if we trust in the methodology, then to some extent we have to take a shortcut and make decisions based on the consensus judgement of expert practitioners. And, unlike some religious people, accept we can never act in absolute certainty.
But do you think you find that method in science? In science journals, academic departments?
I don't think you do, and I for one don't trust.
Science, like religion, like academia, like government - and all those individuals therein - are all in thrall to money, not truth. I don't think there is any doubt that the proclamations we receive from whichever institution are about providing us with information that is expedient for us to believe (not verify). The provided information is about control of minds. If whatever-it-is does have a relation to the underlying reality (and who checks?), that relationship is accidental/beneficial for whatever story we are currently being sold.
Yes. Science is a human institution, with all of the mess that entails.
But at least the ability to challenge authority with evidence is science's central dogma (rather than "this book is infallable"). It means one way to find fame and fortune in science is to conclusively disprove some accepted wisdom, in a way that others can repeat and see for themselves. That's not to say you won't meet resistance, partly because of human nature, and partly because, heuristically, most unexpected results turn out to be flawed on further examination.
I'm interested in specifics of which scientific institutions you think are trying to influence us in what way, and to what purpose.
Do you ever challenge any evidence? Have you even tried to put information out there that is outside the norm? I have and can confirm that most places - eg HN - is an echo chamber. This specific environment is cultivated by the administrators. Now, I don't mind administration, but it is clear to me that on certain hot button topics there is only one direction of discussion allowed - it is a controlled conversation.
> which scientific institutions you think are trying to influence us in what way, and to what purpose
Its a bigger issue than a specific institution. When you think about science in the US - it is all funded by one of 2 (or 3) sources - government (military) and corporations. If you then consider that government and corporations are really the same overarching control structure (eg FDA officials will go to work for pharmaceuticals, corporate lobbyists write the legislation for government officials to approve) you can argue that, in a sense there is only 1 source of funding! Funding is centralised.
Say you then want to prove/'have it widely believed' that helium is beneficial (I'm making a ridiculous hypothesis up to show the methodology in play) and you undertake 10 studies. The results are that 2 studies are supportive, 6 are neutral, and 2 are against. If you then promote the 2 that are supportive in journals, and fund more similar studies, and repeat that process for a while, you will soon end up with reams of supportive evidence. I think this shows any agenda can be promoted by funding alone, regardless of the assumed good intentions of the scientists who receive the funding.
Does that method help understand truth? No. Will your agenda appear to be very well supported - yes.
Now think, if it is your business to administer people in general - isn't it better to have those people desire for themselves the solution that you already have in mind? That it is better to engineer people's consent? If so, why wouldn't you use science, history, academia or whatever to engineer people into wanting whatever you have to sell? Why not provide the studies that move the people in the direction you want them to move to? You could say the studies are to get the turkeys voting for Christmas.
Favourable studies getting to publication, and unfavourable ones getting left in the desk drawer is a thing. But the same thing can happen with surprising results vs boring results. It is why some argue for preregistration of studies [0].
There is more than one government in the world, and corporations are in competition with each other. I'm not convinced that they amount to a single funding source. That's not to say that there is a perfect plurality.
Academics are also in competition with each other, and can make their name by demolishing a false consensus. They are also often motivated by things other than money, otherwise they would be quants or something. So there are balancing forces to those that would distort the truth.
At this point we're both just describing, without much evidence, how we think the world works. I agree there is plenty of shady shit and bullshit science going on, it just doesn't make sense to me that all the bad actors would be super-competent and pulling in the same direction on everything. At least not to the extent that it amounts to something akin to mind control.
Consider, there has been a hell of a lot of oil money poured into science funding, but the consensus has settled on "fossil fuels are heating up the planet".
There examples where a powerful lobby has held back the tide for years (tobacco, for example), but we know about them because the truth reasserted itself.
I'm not particularly familiar with HN moderation. I have expressed some reasonably controversial opinions in a calm and reasonable tone, and not been moderated. But perhaps my opinions are not among those you believe to be surpressed.
> Consider, there has been a hell of a lot of oil money poured into science funding, but the consensus has settled on "fossil fuels are heating up the planet".
Ok - have you personally noticed anything at all? I have not. For example, I have been to the same beaches for years and there has been no change. Can you forests be mis-managed with the result that there are huge fires? Yes - this is a man-made crisis though. Can you remove trees and build in flood plains to make floods more severe? Yes, and again - man-made. Can the media make it seem that the world is burning up? Yes again - but this is just perception management - using alarming graphics and allocating large slots to whatever.
On the other hand, I do see the control value of climate change. Everyone will willingly move to smart metering of water, electricity, etc though. This allows for the governance structure to exercise fine grained control over individuals.
> Ok - have you personally noticed anything at all?
As it happens, yes I have. Summers where I am seem way hotter than when I was a kid 30 years ago. But to be honest, what an unreliable way to judge! Better to measure and analyse the data methodologically.
Tracking sucks, but do you really think people need global heating to convince them to put data-sniffing smart devices in their homes?
And what about the trillions in the oil industry? We've fought wars over the stuff, but now the oil lobby has been defeated or paid off because enough powerful people want to know when I make a coffee?
It would be strangely comforting if our chaotic world could be explained by a grand conspiracy. It's too easy an explanation for me. It feels like religion.
By the way, not sure if you're aware that Vanguard operates index funds. Those shares are owned by very many different investors, many of them with small holdings. I only know this because I'm one of them, so this may be the case for some of the other big hitters in those lists too. As far as I know they don't get actively involved in corporate strategy. They are passive funds with very low management fees.
“I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”
> Tracking sucks, but do you really think people need global heating to convince them to put data-sniffing smart devices in their homes?
Yes - to accept pervasive monitoring and control, you need a good reason.
> Those shares are owned by very many different investors, many of them with small holdings. I only know this because I'm one of them, so this may be the case for some of the other big hitters in those lists too.
AFAIK, you don't get to choose where and how they invest. And these funds are somewhat larger than the corporate strategy level. They would be more at international legislation level, no?
>AFAIK, you don't get to choose where and how they invest.
Fair point, but neither does Vanguard really. Index funds are automatically allocated to all the stocks in an index proportionally to market cap.
> Do you mean you trust the data provided?
I'm a software engineer. It is not feasible for me to sufficiently collect or analyse data outside my limited areas of expertise. As I said at the beginning, I must provisionally accept and make personal decisions based on the consensus view of experts. In theory that leaves me open to manipulation by shadowy, powerful forces capable of exerting influence over an entire field of scientists. In practice I observe enough skepticism amongst scientists to give me confidence.
I'm not talking about acting on every story of the form "study indicates link between x and y". Talk to me when it's been replicated, and confounders controlled. Talk to me about reviews and meta-analyses.
I remember reading about climategate emails at the time. I see a few out-of-context quotes cherry-picked from thousands of emails. I could link articles defending the scientists [0], but ultimately the grand conspiracy hypothesis is unfalsifiable - you can keep expanding the conspiracy to include anyone who denies the conspiracy. Conspiracies can exist, but the wider you have to go to make them work, the less plausible they become as an explanation.
And on climate specifically, it's especially implausible when there are huge, wealthy vested interests who stand to lose money if we burn less fossil fuels.
While I think its fair enough to 'default trust' the world you know, there is a risk in so doing. I think you're acknowledging that conspiring is a possibility - most people can't consider this. Although, I can't imagine anything more natural - of course people would work together to gain advantage!
There is lots of information to support the grand conspiracy hypothesis if you choose to look. Eg the fact that all the US presidents are bloodline relations. Or that the UN (a non-elected entity) is determining the future infrastructure in your local city (pedestrianised, apartment blocks, smart meters, etc). Or that all the worlds' governments acted in tandem during the last 3 years - it was no long 'the economy stupid' but a mass media campaign. Etc.
I would encourage you to look more deeply into any area where you are already an expert, and see who determines the parameters of acceptable discussion. Is there legislation, an administrative body, a licensing scheme? Who gets to determine the parameters under consideration, that all the companies and institutions then have to follow? Then consider, are these the parameters you yourself think are important? Can you envisage a way whereby the data can be subverted to misrepresent the reality? I think you'll be surprised how available the information for a grand conspiracy is.
Of course its far more pleasant to imagine that life is unfolding naturally. IMO it simply is not the case and never has been. As Edward Bernais (the father of public relations and Freud's double nephew) expressed it, in 1928, in his book Propaganda:
> The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.
Each individual is faced with a question - do I want to know the reality of the situation, or not? Its not as easy to answer as you might think. Each of us has to answer this for ourselves - pretending we weren't aware or something, is disingenuous.
I would encourage you to consider: what evidence would convince you that you're wrong? If the answer is "Nothing, any evidence against the conspiracy could have been manufactured by the conspirators", then you have a problem.
For me, I would be convinced by an insider or two turning whistleblower. With documentary evidence that stands up to scrutiny. I was convinced by Snowden.
Obviously I would expect a backlash and smear campaign from outlets under the influence of the conspirators in response. But I would expect a good proportion of established, serious journalists and experts (not just the usual suspects) to recognise the truth. You could say every established journalist is compromised. To me that just expands massively the pool of potential whistleblowers.
> There is lots of information to support the grand conspiracy hypothesis if you choose to look.
Do be wary of anomaly-hunting and take care to guard against confirmation bias. Seeking out confirmatory evidence for a hypothesis (rather than repeatedly trying to disprove it until it starts to look convincing) puts you at risk of this. Anything a bit weird or unusual becomes evidence for a conspiracy. But you should expect to find weird and unusual stuff all the time if you go looking for it, because the world is a big, chaotic place.
You think whistleblowers are real. Ok - but there used to be footage of Snowden which showed some seriously odd anomalies - eg the arms of glasses his disappeared, his hand was see-through, etc. This is hard to find nowadays - but I have seen it.
What that says to me, is that it is more than a possibility that footage of Snowden was faked - that he was a made-for-tv character. I don't know why that would be the case.. Perhaps its a case of the info he exposed was something of a controlled release - we were meant to hear about it in the way we did.
What that also indicates is that one needs to be wary of the source of information. Eg what to make of the BBC reporting that WTC7 collapsed on 911, when it is still standing in the background? Or when Rishi Sunak's briefcase changes colour live on a news program:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyHfzcItoFs
(Re Rishi - I didn't see it myself - but the colour change point isn't under debate.)
The question is who is mediating your information? Which sources are trustworthy? Can Snopes be part of the control mechanism? Is it possible that a trick can be played on the whole world? Once you are aware that trusted sources of information lied, should you continue to trust them? Or is it more plausible to accept that they are intentional liars? (And no, not everyone has to be in on it.. very few need to know.)
So, if I reverse the question now - why would you continue to trust proven liars, who are using news etc to present a fictionalised version of reality? Are you able to discern the facts from the fiction from what is presented to you on a screen?
Of course the media lie, distort, and make mistakes. And media organisations have their agendas. You have to be careful to attempt to figure out fact from fiction. This is hard and I am honest with myself that I do it imperfectly.
This anomaly hunting is precisely what I'm worried about though. If you take every anomaly as confirmation of your theory then you're lost in terms of the scientific method. Like scientific studies that haven't been pre-registered, you're subconsciously trawling through reams of mundane stuff that we all ignore, and eventually finding something superficially strange, remembering only that, and leaping from "this is unexplained" to "therefore my unfalsifiable hypothesis".
This essentially lets you believe any number of things though. Perhaps there's a god that enjoys testing/messing with us, or we're in the matrix, or we're mentally ill and delusional, or everything we were ever told was a lie, or there is alien interference in human affairs, or our perceptions are being manipulated by a mind control device for the purpose of profit. All these theories are essentially unfalsifiable - which one, or which combination, to pick? What evidence can we use to discriminate between them? I put it to you that there is no evidence that could possibly do this.
Sometimes apparently weird things will happen for ultimately mundane reasons. Sometimes those reasons will be obscure, but often they will known and you'll distrust the explanation. It took me seconds to find extremely boring explanations for two of the three anomalies you mention (I couldn't find anything either way on Snowden's glasses). So now I have a choice: believe that one rolling news reporter somewhere in the world made an honest mistake in a confusing and rapidly developing situation which then, by grim coincidence, later came true. Or believe that, what? The news were incompetently following a script? Even if 9/11 were an orchestrated inside job, why risk sharing the script so widely when you could just let them report events as they happened?
Believe the Sky news producer who says the video editor changed the colour of a folder as a probably-too-subtle special effect intended to illustrate the script of a prepared piece about the UK budget statement (asking how "green" it would be). Or believe what? This piece of video was faked, and therefore all mediated information is deliberately manufactured by a secret world government?
Again, I encourage you to honestly consider, what sort of evidence would convince you that you're wrong?
> I encourage you to honestly consider, what sort of evidence would convince you that you're wrong?
ditto. If you have some evidence of a trick, should you ignore that evidence, because of the consensus view? Are you authority of yourself, or is the consensus right?
I'm not anomaly hunting. Perhaps there is a god messing with us, perhaps we are mentally ill (most of us, myself not included - most people are in 'default trust' of their authorities). I don't care about god and mental illness - not when there are are real examples of fakery that can be seen (and I have pointed to). And you can also read about the 'mega plans' - the plans are not hidden - look at the Huxleys for an example.
The changing of the briefcase colour is a comic example - but it is also a signal. Had you realised that they are able to edit the visuals in real time on news shows, without any disclaimers? What else do they do? Is this acting in good faith? The message I take is that media companies show that they have a strong control over the presentation. You are of course free to believe it is just a bit of fun.
The bottom line is that you cannot know the truth from anything you see on the screen, or even anything you don't personally verify. You can only know what you personally experience, as discomfiting as that is. And even then, the ideas you have been provided by education, culture, parents, etc will have moulded and framed what you are able to consider.
I've gone very deeply into several areas, and I'm certain that the media is there as a governance tool - their purpose is purely propagandistic. To say otherwise, is to fail to acknowledge reality - which is entirely understandable. Media is literally there to support and promote whatever narrative is considered to be the best to support. Russian propaganda is in kindergarten, compared to the Western form - but no, the news programs won't tell you this. Not only the media, but science (consensus science, not the scientific method), history (written by the victors), religion (always a form of control to promote the servile mentality), law (an extranised and controllable expression of morality), politics, etc - all are bent to serve the interests of a landed bloodline.
When you think of the output of the apparent consensus, and then compare that to what an individual with only a fair handle of reasoning would decide, you can see that all human tendencies are bent to serve an agenda that is expressed. Despite all one's cultural training, one ought to have trust and faith in oneself and one's reasoning - the truth is consistent, no need to provide excuses and justifications for the control structure. Unfortunately the external world is already under mind control (a self-affirming group psychosis) and there's no reasoning with it. However, one is free to follow one's own reasoning, and act according to that. Truth, and acting in alignment with truth, is foundational to the individual.
> You think science is what the consensus says it is, even if you cannot personally verify it?
Well, no, but I might be able to see how you got that. I'm all for falsifiable hypotheses, empirical data, repeatable experiments, and revisions as we find limits to our collected hypotheses and data.
I do think that others(e.g. Planck, Kuhn) have observed the effects of consensus in science, and to treat science as though those effects are not present is a form of religion.
i disagree. i’d posit that science finds the truth about the cosmos. religion offers a lens through which you can interpret and apply the truths that science has discovered.
i think what you’re describing is how various practitioners of each have traditionally presented the tools of science and religion.
I think science and religion are even less coupled than that. The newest gravimesobaryon discovered through the LHC probably doesn't have any bearings on religion, and rituals such as Ramadan aren't performed for a benefit based in science. One's moral values/axioms and one's factual understanding of the universe can largely be separated, but a lot of people nowadays seem to heavily conflate them.
I think it’s because some people wants to impose their values on others, especially if it gives them an advantage in society. Moral values are fluid and can be manipulated, facts are not. Religion used to shroud values into fictions and present them as the truth. But, because science are demystifying most of them, leaving only the moral parts, people are starting to see that moral values are relatives, not absolutes, and it involves only oneself. So now, they want to dress science as one of the other religions, something that is wrong.
i believe the point is that the consensus is the verification.
repeat the assay under the same conditions and record the results to verify the original findings. repeat. it deliberately creates a monoculture to generate results.
the “religion” of it all is interpreting the results
It's somewhat better in FOSS than in science-land because there are generally at least a few people who find a new FOSS project genuinely interesting and worth supporting, whereas scientific conformity is much less forgiving.
Correct, and a lot of it is posting either very short comments, which are parsed easily, or very long comments that seem like they are correct by length alone (Bardfinn and PoppinKream). Neither has much to do with being "good" comments
> This site doesn't even have half the problems as most social media.
All social media has the same problems. This site is no different. It is just a smaller social media - essentially a single subreddit with one mod who you agree with.
> And there is no customised feed, everyone sees the same thing.
The entire site is a customized feed which everyone sees after it has been customized.
The feature list of Hacker News is similar to Reddit, but the content and the nature of quality control are entirely different, and his issues were about the content he saw on those websites. In light of that I don't agree that his comment is hypocritical.
Right before LiveJournal there was MovableType and when MT crashed and burned because they changed their license terms to be less open source, WordPress took off. That moment was when the road forked into social media vs open source publishing on WordPress. Almost 20 years later WP is 40% of the Web for anyone who cares to pull their heads out of their favorite walled garden to take a look.
> Almost 20 years later WP is 40% of the Web for anyone who cares to pull their heads out of their favorite walled garden to take a look.
I wonder if anyone has ever critically evaluated the methodology used by W3Techs [1][2]:
> We investigate technologies of websites, not of individual web pages. If we find a technology on any of the pages, it is considered to be used by the website.
> We do not consider subdomains to be separate websites. For instance, sub1.example.com and sub2.example.com are considered to belong to the same site as example.com. That means for example, that all the subdomains of wix.com, wordpress.com and similar sites are counted only as one website.
So if Microsoft has a wp.subsite.microsoft.com subdomain, W3Techs considers WordPress as part of the technologies that Microsoft uses.
What that statistic means is that nearly 40% of business card websites and similar sites use Wordpress. It’s nowhere near as significant as some people seem to think it is.
Personal blogs are a vanishingly small fraction of that. The only reason it might seem otherwise is due to social bubbles or interest bubbles.
It remains the clear front-runner, with no close competition, for most any site that'll be run by non-geeks, unless you're hosting on a managed platform with its own (closed) content management system. Exception for certain narrow use cases that are well-served by special-purpose software, but it's broadly true. That includes use cases well beyond personal blogs and business card sites.
>Over time, Twitter ceased to be interesting as it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand
The trick is to follow experts who do understand what they are on about, eg a top general on Ukraine, top scientist on covid. Having done that I find it disappointing going back to reading mainstream journalists who post with less understanding.
You have to fight a little with the recommendation algos pushing random nonsense at you but it's doable.
I don't know, I have too little faith for even that. For your "top general" on Ukraine example, do you really think a top general is actually going on Twitter and writing tweets telling you the honest truth about what's happening, vs. just writing what they're expected to in order to maintain the wartime propaganda message they're supposed to be pushing? For your covid example do you think a "top scientist" would go on Twitter and really risk being cancelled and having their career and life destroyed if they write what they believe to be true, if it goes against the narrative they're supposed to agree with?
Well even the top guys have bias so you have to choose who you like to follow but personally on Ukraine I like @general_ben who was Commanding General of the US Army Europe and also Mike Martin @ThreshedThought who wasn't a general but was an officer fighting in Afghanistan and has a PhD in War Studies, teaches at Kings London and written various books.
There are also a bunch of scientist on twitter. Personally I followed the lab leak stuff and pro lab leak you have @R_H_Ebright Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers and anti you have @MichaelWorobey, Professor and Head of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. Both pretty outspoken, especially Ebright. I guess they have tenure.
It's sometimes interesting to follow both sides a bit when there's an argument going on.
This was my great frustration with Twitter the last time I tried it. Even when I carefully curated my followers, random crap would constantly sneak into my feed. It was annoying enough that I started just manually navigating to a few bookmarked profiles periodically to read their latest tweets.
reddit and youtube were my last remaining social platforms. quit reddit because of the API changes. might be quitting youtube, as well, because of the ads. and then there'll be nothing left for me to spend time on except code and family.
> Over time, Twitter ceased to be interesting as it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand very well
I don't have a Twitter account; but I have found Twitter quite interesting to learn opinions of several people on the state of web development, which I used to regularly check out. Some of them have since migrated to Mastodon; others haven't; some of those who had migrated, went back, because, it seems, they were after the audience after all. When Twitter stopped anonymous readers from accessing its user feeds, that was a big disappointment.
I left WhatsApp when it was acquired by Meta (née Facebook) in 2014. I actually lost friends because of it-- they didn't answer calls or texts or any other form of communication on another platform reliably. It was surprisingly difficult to stick to my guns. I did--but it very much impacted my life.
I didn’t have WhatsApp in a country where it’s synonymous to instant message. It did very much impacted my life, missed parties, etc.
I caved in during the pandemic. Lots of dear friends and family members, especially elderlies who couldn’t be bothered with anything else, and volunteer work to help the medical emergencies.
It felt ridiculous to ask people to use other means of communications under such circumstances. My noble ideologies felt very small and I said fuck it. I’m glad I did.
It’s the only Meta service I use, but I’m a heavy user. There’s no turning back.
Sad truth is most Spanish-speaking countries are effectively run on whatsapp and twitter.
Whatsapp is where your mailman will contact you to clarify an address, and twitter is where you will receive customer support for your internet.
Emails are not getting responded to or very very late. Regular phone calls are also disappearing due to staff shortage - no one to take your call.
Hah I sent an email to a Spanish website about a shipping issue.
I received a response. Three months later. They said “please send more money and we’ll ship your item”. Very helpful. I’d guess they check that email inbox once every few months based on this.
The flipside of this is that the only people who actually bothered establishing an XMPP server at scale were those who wanted to spam Google or Facebook users.
Think of it this way: why doesn't Gmail just close their SMTP gateways and defederate from e-mail? Because there's shittons of systems that expect to be able to send mail this way. They'd have to spend loads of time and energy corralling people out of open standards and into a proprietary Gmail API for no externally-visible benefit.
That doesn't apply to XMPP. It was an entirely new protocol with only two very large adopters federating with one another. Legitimate automated systems that needed to send messages didn't really exist yet, so there was no legacy cruft holding people to the open standard. But there were plenty of spammers who realized that they could get into literally every Gmail and Facebook screen with it.
In e-mail, we have a complicated setup of blocklists, heuristics, and domain authentication to handle spam. This inherently costs more time and money to set up than just having a closed messaging system with sign-ups that are controlled by one entity. But the big e-mail providers deal with it because open[0] federation is an iron rule of the e-mail system.
[0] Ok it's more like "open if you spend enough time getting an originating IP that isn't on every blocklist, setting up SPF/DKIM, getting your recipients to add you to contacts and check the spam filter, and so on"
It's similar for me, but I have WhatsApp on a separate device that's at home and I only use it for WhatsApp. This keeps it strictly isolated from my primary smartphone and the list of contacts on it. Meta still has part of the social graph that surrounds me, but not all of it. How effective that is in the end is of no concern to me. I enjoy not just giving up completely, but resisting within my means. It reminds me a bit of the people who didn't pull their masks up over their noses during the pandemic. That's exactly how we should relate to tech giants if we can't avoid them completely.
By continuing to use a problematic messaging app you are feeding its network effect. You give it the blood that keeps it alive, and propagate the privacy issues that it brings. You know that 99% of your contacts will not take any of the measures you take and just deliver entire graphs, with yourself included, to the evil Meta or whomever on a golden plate. How many have a spare smartphone solely for this app? How many will deny it full access to contacts?
Coincidentally, just like not covering the nose with a mask in protest, this half-measure only makes the problem worse.
The only way to affect this is to pull up the mask. Stop the spread. Quit using such an app with explanations, offer alternatives to people seeking to contact you, support legislation that breaks shady business models like that, etc. Sadly, few people have courage to look weird, boring or slightly crazy in this way. (Not unlike people who are afraid to be thought of as ugly if they wear the mask.)
(I have no such problems with WhatsApp, but I’m guilty of the same with regards to Telegram. It’s built intentionally insecure by default: I have literally no contacts who use E2EE chats now, because those are opt-in and so half-assedly implemented—I used to have a couple of “secret chats” but one vanished and another broke so nothing is delivered anymore; we switched to plaintext and I keep postponing quitting the app.)
How did it start? Some people adopted it, then their friends adopted it, etc. How does it stop? The same way!
If people are made aware and meet resistance (e.g., a person they really want to keep in touch with who doesn’t use that app), things change.
A boycott that does not drive the company out of business is not automatically unsuccessful: more people learn about the issue, some stores might start stocking competitor’s goods, etc. In a functioning system, if a bunch of people voted for the loser the winner would feel the pressure to adjust policies (vs. if no one did and the winner feels righteous enacting the extreme version of the policies you disagree with), and if not well next time more people may support the losing party.
Chat programs are not stores in any typical sense of the word.
Chat programs are effectively clubhouses. Convincing a person that they’ve joined the wrong club, invested time and effort in the wrong club, and should make better and more informed choices in clubs…
Chat programs are not stores. That part was responding to the analogy of boycotts and elections.
Chat programs are also not clubs. There is no associated identity. No hardcore WhatsAppers it Telegrammers.
In fact, if you regularly meet actual humans, you might find out that most of them simply don’t care.
You dislike WhatsApp? Give them something equally convenient but that cares about privacy and they will just use it. Refuse to add them on WhatsApp and if you are an interesting person they will install whatever you use, even Signal, to stay in touch.
I get what you're saying, but realize your response is tone-deaf when the GP comment said that they had to give in to support the elderly and emergency responses in their area during the pandemic.
There's some opportunity cost you just can't accept. If your only two options are a) don't use Whatsapp or b) use Whatsapp to help your elderly neighbors, I'm going to think you're not a good person if you stick to your ideology in this specific case. You can't really start arguing 'what-ifs' because you don't know the details of their situation and the decisions they made, so we should take them at their word that those are the two options they considered.
All to say, the world isn't as black and white as sticking to your guns no matter what. People that want true change would do well to remember that, since a majority of folks do not think along these lines and act with much more simple motivators.
Hey, I don't want to argue with you and I wish you all the best. But you are twisting my mask comparison. In my comparison, pulling the mask all the way over your nose means giving in and using WhatsApp without any objections. The comparison is not a moral one but refers to how one behaves to an imperative that does not come from an individual but from a mass of people that surrounds one.
I also think that WhatsApp is evil, but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of communication takes place via this medium. Doing without it altogether has real opportunity costs. In this respect, it's up to each individual to decide whether and how to use it. It's similar to criticism of consumption and capitalism: in the end, you still have to buy your food somewhere and pay for it with money.
Choosing not to interact with people has opportunity costs, but we do it. For example, many of us choose not to interact with people with certain views (political or moral), even if we would gain a whole lot if we did.
The way I read it was “hmm that’s nice, people are now able to see the lunacy of that period in such a way as to make an off hand comment like that.”
The masks did nothing positive. It was the law of the land in public health that they were useless at preventing respiratory infections before people in positions of power wanted to scare people into compliance with massive overreach of their authority, then it became “mask up.” And once everybody “masked up,” all we got was yet more confirmation that yeah they are pointless in trying to prevent respiratory viral spread. Even if they kinda, sorta worked for that, which they don’t, the costs are still far too high.
All the masks contributed to was oxygen deprivation, micro plastic inhalation, and the degradation of the fabric of society. Think about it, it was bad enough for adults trying interact with faces wrapped up and concealed, “think of the children!”(actual legitimate usage of the phrase, btw) much worse for them having to do the same. People were harassed, assaulted, tased, arrested, for not wearing a “mask,” it was insanity.
You could use the damn phone as such and call. They even might appreciate it more. (Unless you have to be “chatting” continuously, of course.) And no, nobody really wants to see your face, believe me.
I was am expat in a country that used WhatsApp everywhere. Not using it myself was a huge pain on quite a few occasions, I was nearly forced into making a WhatsApp account when I had to take a Covid test before travel.
It's been slow, but I've noticed a slow trickle of users towards Signal, at least in Europe. I was happily surprised when the owners of a house we viewed defaulted to reaching us via Signal instead of whatsapp.
Most people I know are on Signal here (Germany), that includes older relatives.
Alas, for group conversations or bad connection situations (e.g. at a festival), everyone uses WA. Not sure why groups are always WA, but Signal (and actually any other messenger) sucks for bad connections.
and at unsecure communication. Their chats aren't e2ee by default, making it worse than Whatsapp. Also, videocalls in telegram are much worse compared to said messenger
No, WhatsApp is truly e2e encrypted and uses the same Ratchet algorithm in Signal, IIRC. That's why tptacek and moxie were generally positive about it.
I think there's something about key rotation and a default setting where it doesn't notify you if the keys change, or something like that, at one point.
It's most likely e2e up until the moment LEO requests information on a particular user and then Meta updates your app to a trojaned version, that just APPEARS E2E.
It also heavily encourages you to “back up” your messages to them in an unencrypted manner. It will bug you literally every time you enter the app if you opt out of this “feature”.
For what it's worth I have a few Signal group chats going. We had our video call to talk to the owners (we're moving to the Netherlands from Ireland) over Signal and it worked well, but that was on a strong wifi connection
Everyone I communicate with uses Signal now. In Europe using Signal costs the same amount as using WhatsApp, if not less because of the missing bloatware (backups etc).
In a lot of the world, WhatsApp is free (I assume some kind of payment from Meta to the telecom). There's no way Signal will compete with something that is bundled with every phone contract for whatever reason.
In Australia both Signal and WhatsApp are free, aside from using the data service rather than the "telephone" service, and we pay for a monthly or annual data quota with our phone plan.
Do you have separate charges for Signal and/or WhatsApp?
Yeah I guess I confused a lot of people: the charges are for the data, not the app. They are tiny, but if you use the app heavily and rely on it, you don't want to be disconnected when your data runs out.
I read this as a phone contract having a bundled: unlimited whatsapp, Spotify, Facebook bundles where data usage is not counted towards your total data allowance in the contract. For example in my country in the middle of Europe you have bundles with unlimited traditional communication and 20 50 80GB of mobile data.
When you WhatsApp all day sending videos, gifs, messages, voice messages, pictures, documents..I can consume up to 12GB per month, this costing me an amount of my 20GB data plan. While a other provider I can choose has a 20GB data plan with a unlimited WhatsApp bundle. Sadly they don’t offer eSIM and 5G so it’s a no go for me.
This has been a big downside for years, I'm surprised it hasn't been fixed yet. Your account has to be tired to a phone number (though you can use voip) and only their mobile apps act as a primary that can register the account.
The social-media business is neither trustworthy for me as a consumer nor more fulfilling than a real conversation with a real human somewhere. I don't want a relationship with social media.
But I'm not going to be delusional about it, if literally hundreds of millions of people are depending on social-media business for their social happiness, I can see that it works for them.
I want a secure, trustworthy, minimally-viable telecommunications channel for some contacts. I support Signal, it has characteristics that I trust, including being open source.[1]
I also have shown other people how to enable Google's RCS messaging.[2] It's better than SMS.
The crypto integration put me off as well. Not because I'm opposed to crypto currencies in principle, but integrating them into a privacy focused chat app is plain idiotic.
Crypto disposals are taxable in the UK and I believe in most other countries as well. So tax authorities have a legitimate reason to look into what's going on there. There is no right to privacy when it comes to buying and selling securities.
As someone else in Eastern Europe, 99% of people I know communicate over Messenger, Instagram (if more hip), or Viber (if 40+). I believe that the messaging app situation varies a lot from one city to another or even one "group" to another.
Interesting, my contacts are mostly in Romania, Estonia, Latvia and Poland, and mostly IT savvy (as users, not programmers), so the latter could well be a factor.
Telegram is getting almost as common as whatsapp for my social circle, including friends, co-workers and family. Most people I interact with are on either platform.
Thought something similar, but for my personal network of friends and contacts. Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised to learn, that yet another person I know has or is willing to get Signal.
We need to build and keep asking people whether they have Signal or would please get it.
My whole extended family is on Line. It does it all really, and no ads or intrusion. It has only one single drawback - one device only (or one, plus a Windows PC, which is not an option for me).
Practically it's impossible to quit WhatsApp, more so in certain countries. However if you still have that old account, you can choose not to accept any of Meta'a new terms and agreements, and surprisingly they still let you use it! The last time I accepted the terms was probably around 2013.
Aside from people, a significant number of companies, and even government services, offer service through WhatsApp as well. In some parts of the world it's really impossible not to use it.
Why have they been so successful? Why didn't MMS 6.0 implement everything that exists in modern chat applications. Why is Meta anything more than the anonymous humble entities producing sms and "phone" apps?
I guess because Whatsapp provides a unified and standard way to communicate between people on different provider networks / countries for free? You get groups, text/images/location sharing, video/audio calls, cross-countries, that works very reliably, and you only need internet (which can be found almost anywhere even if that's just wifi).
MMS still don't work reliably for me (lost a message just last week that someone swear to have sent). And for a long time they were not free as well.
I'm not actually suggesting using MMS. I just wanted to illustrate that we've had instant communication technology (even "rich" multi-media) long before Whatsapp etc. Why didn't the providers of that technology (telecom companies) become Meta?
The difference is that MMS/SMS is standardized and agnostic to the client interface. While WhatsApp is proprietary and monopolizes the client.
We could easily have had a "internet direct message" standard implementing most of WhatsApps features. (Wait... Isn't that SMTP?)
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but what does WhatsApp bring that let's say email++ does not have?
MMS has been exorbitantly, insanely expensive and with extremely high failure rates in much of the world until...
... actually that's still the case in varying degrees and locations. And once you've got great market penetration in an area, there's little to no reason to switch unless the competition is noticeably better, which MMS really has no claim to.
Email definitely did not. When WhatsApp was beginning its rise to domination, it was on tons of feature phones - mostly just calls, texts, and WhatsApp. Email implies a lot more general internet access than was generally supported or understood by people, since it supports arbitrary data and hosts.
Where in Africa? People just use Uber or alternatives, and it works fine pretty much everywhere I've been (I'm Kenyan. I've lived in South Africa for extended periods, and travelled extensively in Namibia and Tanzania). I've never once heard of anyone using WhatsApp for cab hailing. It gets pretty exhausting finding people talking about a whole continent on HN in broad strokes as though it's some small town they once went to on holiday, and can now offer their expert opinion on.
If it makes you feel any better, people also do the same sort of inaccurate cultural reductivism about the United States -- a vast geographical area containing many strongly differentiated local regional cultures -- on a daily basis.
It does, actually Quite unexpectedly, too. I have an American friend who keeps recommending places I should visit in the States, but I always respond by saying I don't want to get shot or racially profiled. It's a source of constant frustration for him. I did not expect HN to be where I'd find empathy for his perspective.
As an Australian I sympathise, it's not all HN'rs [1] but there's certainly a strong core of proud ignorance confident in their assertaions about other cultures, countries, political systems, etc.
Here I was expecting something from Tanzania or Kenya and we're back in Northern Mali!
I'm a bit old - I travelled extensively about the globe when I was younger doing geophysicsl survey work and ground truthing the transition from many paper map systems to WGS84.
Africa has some fantastic musicians.
All I can offer in return is some Australians and their collaborations ...
Tjamuku Ngurra is beautiful. I don't think I've listened to Aboriginal fusion (there's all sorts of interesting things happening there) before. My consumption of Australian music has mostly been limited to Tame Impala, whom I love, but this is special. Thank you so much for sharing.
Australian music is surprisingly broad for such a small (population wise, physically it's the same land area as mainland USofA (and together the US + Australia are less than the area of Africa ..)) .. "aboriginal fusion" (that works) is also broader than many might imagine.
That may well be true for your one experience in Tanzania. I wasn't there with you. I have neither a reason, nor the desire to counter your personal experience.
Here's what I find baffling. You had a single, curated, extremely limited travel experience, in (I'm guessing) a handful of places, in one country, over a limited time period. You extrapolated from that experience to making a bold, sweeping claim about an odd 1.2 billion people living in 54 countries. And with an air of worldly confidence, to boot. What you said of Africa is not even generally true of the city of Dar es Salaam, let alone all of Tanzania. How could it possibly be true for a whole continent? I'm genuinely in awe of both the audacity it takes to make such a claim, and the thought process that leads to it. I do feel a bit bad for singling you out (but only a little bad) since it's sadly not unusual for people to choose to talk about places in this way when they don't expect to be challenged.
I just say "can we use Signal? It's super secure." And people generally are fine to use Signal. They don't use SMS because it's expensive and many that own an iPhone in countries where Android dominate don't use iMessage because, well, few around them use iPhone and the interface (i.e., the phone number) doesn't really tell them that they won't get charged for a text message.
I've posted up in many countries, and it's rarely a show stopper.
For this use case, I use a burner Google voice number, give that to Whatsapp and don't give it access to my contacts or anything on my phone. Late model phones don't give apps IMEI or real MAC.
It's not perfect: when you connect with people they can easily associate your WhatsApp account with your identity (add contact) and also share info/pics/etc about you that you wouldn't want shared. They can do this even if you're not on WhatsApp, and Meta can use face recognition and other techniques to create a profile for you, then associate that profile with the other days and profile they have for you. It's trivial to narrow the down to a few million users then match on photo etc. Unclear if they bother, given that 99% of users just give away their privacy.
Also, Whatsapp verification uses SMS. If they'd used a verification URL, they could've (bounced through) Facebook.com, Instagram.com, etc and associated the account via (first party) cookies. I'm guessing they don't because 99% of users happily give the app all the permissions it needs and SMS is more universal.
Anecdotally, all of my friends who are part of group chats are annoyed by them. Too much noise for too little signal. On a personal level, if there’s anything in a group chat that would be relevant to me I’ll know about it from one of the participants through another medium, like an SMS or phone call or when we see each other.
If you want to know what they talk about, then you have to use the same platform. This is trivial, and doesn't have much to do with being able to quit WhatsApp.
It does have a lot to do with quitting WhatsApp - because WhatsApp is the platform that is the de-facto application for this in some parts of the world.
If they are really your only option, you can use whatever insane platform they are on long enough to forge a couple friendships, explain your stance and then quit.
If they are your friends they will understand, if not it wasn't worth the effort to begin with.
Someone does not have to understand your idiosyncrasies to be your friend.
Most people will not, in fact, understand why you are so picky about the chat platforms you are willing to use, and they will think (correctly, I would say) that you care more about your social media stances than you care about their friendship. So you will think they were not worth the effort to begin with, and they will think the same in return, but ultimately they are not restricting their potential friend pool nearly as much as you are. If it works out well for you, great, otherwise you have to be a bit more pragmatic.
My statement still stands. If you ask me to do hard drugs with you, I will say no. Does that mean I value my physical and mental integrity over our friendship? YES! I absolutely do.
It is perfectly fine to value certain things over friendship. You just have to be conscious of the friction that your convictions will cause and ask yourself whether it's worth it for you. Health is worth it. Chat apps? I don't know. If you ask me to use Signal, that seems reasonable enough and I'll do it, but if we're a group of 10 coordinating over Whatsapp and you want me to tell you whenever plans are being made, it's like, OK, but I'm doing the effort for our personal convos, can't you meet me halfway or something? That's the kind of friction you're going to deal with. Up to you.
If the content is compelling enough you will chat where you both agree to. If not it is like telling someone the only way you will talk is in the park by the chess tables.
Sure maybe you talk to them by chess tables sometimes, but if they won't meet you for coffee then they aren't your friends, just chess table acquaitances.
Real example: My friend group has a hiking group on WhatsApp and there is one friend who is not on it. One person will propose a hike, and will keep messaging the group with information about it. Someone then has to message that other friend and tell them about it, every time there is a slight adjustment to plans.
Let's say you are my friend, and Bob is arranging a hike for 10am on Saturday. You usually come on the hike so I let you know. Even though all the details are on the group, you ask me all the questions and I have to fill you in. Then on the morning of the hike Darcy's car breaks down and the time gets rearranged from 10am to 11am, so then I have to tell you that as well because you aren't on the group chat, and suddenly I feel like I am becoming your PA (and if I forget to tell you the time has changed then suddenly it's my fault - even though i'm not arranging the damn hike and you could have been on the group in the first place you just refuse).
Some of my best friends decided to quit certain platforms like Facebook and yes, Whatsapp too (two people). I definitely understood. I even have signal and telegram installed. But I never remember to check them. It's just not practical.
> if they are people worth your while, they'll make sure to let you know about it using other means...
Ugh, I might but it's annoying for me (your friend) to be your personal messenger whenever there is something you might be interested in on the group chat.
Why is it on me to keep you in the loop? It's why we created the group chat, Dave.
Particularly that time when you got all annoyed at me for not being invited camping - I didn't even organise the trip in the first place, it's not my job to tell you about every event on the group chat just because you won't download WhatsApp.
In countries where WhatsApp is ubiquitous, it is used for more than just messaging friends.
For example, many childcare places will send updates through WhatsApp groups. So you have to convince the business and all their clients to switch to signal or do without notifications for your child's childcare.
Because, I am guessing it was less like friendship and more like convenient boredom reduction. The WhatsApp group is there, a joke or whatever gets posted, maybe a lets go to the bar guys (or girls?) but the bond
is not strong enough that they bother to contact people who are
on another medium.
This is called "splitting", or all-or-nothing thinking. It's a common psychological defense mechanism.
You don't just have friends and non-friends. It's a spectrum. By raising the bar for reaching you some people no longer cared to be your acquaintances, and others remained connected but talked to you less frequently. And so you lose some of the contact that you had with other people because of your own actions, no one else's.
At the "far end of friendship spectrum", that is the closest form of friendship, there's no one there. Given enough obstacles that you yourself put up eventually you'll lose absolutely everyone.
"By raising the bar for reaching you some people no longer cared to be your acquaintances, and others remained connected but talked to you less frequently. And so you lose some of the contact that you had with other people because of your own actions, no one else's."
This is completely ass-backwards thinking. We don't have apps growing out of us and we are not doing things to ourselves "because of our own actions".
Leaving a bad app is a bit like leaving a country where a dangerous tyrannical dictator has set up shop. You didn't decide to rape murder and pillage your neighbors, the corrupt leader did. Getting the hell out of dodge is an extremely reasonable thing to do, and you are not cutting yourself off from your acquaintances, the evil dictator is.
Besides, app messaging is completely backwards anyways, we invented protocols because they are the best way to reliably communicate.
If you leave a "country where a dangerous tyrannical dictator has set up shop" you will also almost certainly lose friends and acquaintances. And if you don't you won't. It's always heartbreaking for all kinds of refugees. But leaving, arguably, has more upsides, for example not getting brutalized by the internal security services.
I genuinely don't get how people manage to find excuses to talk to most people. Even before I left Facebook I mostly spoke to people face to face and when that became impractical I stopped talking altogether.
I think this sentiment underplays how useful casual acquaintances are, on their own but more importantly as a step towards forming those strong bonds in the first place.
As an adult, how do you make the strong bonds that lead to people going out of their way to remember to invite you to things? Maybe you meet someone and click immediately, more likely it's someone you know from work, and commonly it's acquaintances from seemingly superficial activities that become close friends after you're mingled and mixed with enough folks to find your tribe.
"everyone complains about group chats being noisy" but there's a good reason they're still in there (obviously a big part of it is fomo but it's not obvious to me that everyone's lives would be better rejecting them. Human social dynamics are messy and not efficient).
That second step is the hardest part. How on earth do you make new close friends, I try to be the first to reach out but people seem too guarded or busy the only way they'll meet is if the gathering is large enough but the problem with that is those are very hard to organize since everyone has their own schedule.
I think the answer to that.... is that you can't, unless by accident :( All of my close-ish friends I met randomly and we just clicked.
But like, the world is going in a direction sadly where meaningful human friendships are disappearing, being replaced with endless acquittances who do not care about you, and you do not care about them either. Which I find really sad.
Most of organising problems are btw due to the lack of effort, not a true lack of time. "I am busy" is usually just a convenient excuse to why you don't want to do something together, not that you don't actually have time. (You do have time binging netflix, do ya?)
I guess I should be out more so I can have those "accidents" with like-minded people. Ironic how we're more connected than ever yet so distant to each other. You'd think it would make things a lot easier but it's like it's done the opposite.
I have personally found that "being out more" doesn't help with it at all. The accidents happen in unexpected places and times. Going "out" mostly gets you the "usual" activities - where you are almost guaranteed to not find anything like that.
Yeah, the internet has been a blessing in the past in terms of socialisation, but nowadays, it has made it even worse than before. IRL activities are dying because everyone is on social media - but not spending any time with each other, just scrolling alone. I find it very sad.
With that being said, if you want to chat, I'd be happy to :)
Every additional form of communication you take part in is a burden to some degree, and depending on the person they may only have the capacity for a handful before it becomes overwhelming. Personally I can handle like 4 forms of primary communication before either further forms become mostly ignored or it starts hurting my ability to communicate with anyone on anything. I can understand that someone, no matter how much they may want to stay in touch, may just be unable to through some forms of communication.
Yep, I use SMS and email, and don't see a need for anything else. Neither of these impose any particular demand on anyone who wants to contact me; they don't need to install any apps or set up any new accounts.
Who says they ignored them? Everyone seems to be jumping to this conclusion that these people weren't friends and that they disliked him in the first place.
We've all lost touch with friends. That's how things happen in life. We move on and what not. If you're using one app to talk to all your buddies and one person messages you on a different app. It's very easy to not even notice the other app especially if they don't have it installed or don't get notifications and only go in and check messages once a day and go through the list so they don't get constantly distracted.
I was ready to post the same thing. If someone is unwilling to communicate with you, well… I have some bad news for ya: they aren’t much of a friend.
I don’t use any of these social media sites, don’t use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, or whatever else is out there, and still manage to have a robust social life and actual friends. They know my phone number if they want to talk, and I know their numbers. It doesn’t have to be complicated or mediated by some megacorp.
Did the same for a very long time until recently I had to join a group for colleagues from Istanbul. Just wanted to be notified of any social activities in that group still refuse to use it for anything else. It even cost me a job opportunity one time. You should see the look on peoples faces when I ask them to email me something.
When you die and go to secular-heaven you will be able to tell Saint Dawkins that you successfully resisted the billionaires by not giving them the pleasure of messaging your friends on their platforms, and will be permitted entry. Just don't tell him you were resisting from your iPhone.
Kind of like Marquess Brownlee reviewing tech phones, recommending a ton of them, being asked constantly which one of them he uses, saying it's one of the phones he recommended.
And then seeing him in non phone review videos reading stuff constantly from... his iPhone :-)
Can you tell me in words the value (V1) or values that you're filtering for with this life choice? And whether there are other values (Vall) that you hold and would like your friends to hold. And talk to me about the correlation between V1 and Vall.
Because my opinion is that my friends willingness (or preference) to use a non secure messaging app owned by a giant tech corp has very very very low correlation with whether I'd like them to be a friend.
I'd also point out that this is exactly how bubbles occur. "Everyone I know hates WhatsApp/Facebook/whatever" says the person who refuses to communicate via those platforms.
> I'd also point out that this is exactly how bubbles occur
No it isn't. You'd be surprised in the variety of people that you meet when you don't use algorithmic systems to do so. Just because you only maintain relationships with people who are not so glued to WhatsApp that they won't communicate through any other means, does not mean you have created a bubble for yourself.
It's true you are always able to avoid bubbles, and nothing I say precludes that ability.
However, information bubbles are a function of friction and defaults. If communication lessens with a people who don't share a particular view (ie, that Whatsapp has to be avoided) then that friction lessens exposure to that viewpoint, forming a bubble.
> you meet when you don't use algorithmic systems to do so.
AFAIK there is no algorithmic system on Whatsapp to meet people.
i use whatsapp to call my grandma and my aunt among other people, because that's what they use. Actually, my parents too, now that i think about it, they fall back to whatsapp all the time. How in tf is that an "algorithmic people-meeting system"??? did it pick a grandma for me according to some algorithm?
> think about it, they fall back to whatsapp all the time. How in tf is that an "algorithmic people-meeting system"???
It isn't. Nor did I say it was. The person I replied to said that not using WhatsApp is how social bubbles are formed. It isn't. That's what I was refuting.
People who use WhatsApp also go places, do things and talk to people. They don't sit at home alone in their room on WhatsApp 24/7. That's what Hacker News is for.
This is a useful thing to consider when using social media or, say, dating apps in general, come to think of it.
Like you, the choice of messaging app is quite beside the point (except FB Messenger being out of the question for reasons I'll explain). So, I still use a combination of WhatsApp, Signal and Skype.
If a friendship depended on me having a Twitter/FB/TikTok/Instagram profile though, I'm more likely to let that fade away. Similarly with dating: it'd be a dealbreaker to have to maintain a social media presence or find someone solely through Tinder or Bumble or whatever. I enjoy life more without social media in it, and without tech companies gatekeeping human connection through a mobile app. Some things just have to stay offline for the sake of me and my mental health.
Most non-techies don't give a crap indeed. Maybe these people haven't traveled much at all. When you are in the middle of a non-US city, you're trying to get the keys to your stay and the night is falling, you fire up that one messenger you're not supposed to use because zuck bad, and figure out the key situation in 1 second. Then you lecture your newfound "whatsapp bubble friend" who brought you the keys about how low and unethical it is of them to use whatsapp.
- They don't need your contact list to still build your contact graph.
- They still collect things like your location, your call history, etc. In Brazil it's quite common for people to use WhatsApp to call their doctors. This means that Facebook can know what type of health issues you have just by checking if you are calling/texting a specialist.
- They are still owned by Facebook and they take whatever data they can to feed the Borg.
- I can not prove it, but I am convinced that they scan the video stream in the device.
Taking your first three points as true, the trade is you get free global multi-way instant messaging, including pictures and video/audio clips, and video calling, for no cost other than minimal data costs.
Lots of people are currently willing to make that trade, at least until a competitor comes along that offers something better.
Why wouldn't you assume they do? Sorry if that sounds argumentative, it's not my intent. As I understand it, their software processes everything you send to/through them. (And it's easy to imagine reasons why they would be interested in doing so)
If I tell a friend "I am not going to use WhatsApp. But you can call me, email me, text me, use Signal, use Matrix, knock on my door..." and this friend refuses to keep in touch, who is the one "dictating" the messaging system?
This is madness, I will say it explicitly, spelt-out.
There exist systems which may violate your privacy, and you think that a possible demand to use them from any third party would be "fair", aproblematic?!
Good normalcy is that if some acquaintance put as a condition any controversial constraint, such as destructive behaviour ("binge drinking" etc.), irresponsible behaviour, degrading behaviour (that spyware is part of this latter) - the reply is simply "No".
And that would be antisocial behaviour, "No, I will not get tattooed (etc.) just because you would like that"?!
Children have replaced Men in this world.
Edit: oh, and by the way: behaviour that would stick to the framework of proper Society would be «[anti-]social»?!?!?! That is a dire reversal terms, and it shows the (satanic) perversity these """societies""" have reached.
I'm not asking them to change their mode of communication with others. I'm just saying that I'm not going to join something that I believe to be harmful out of peer pressure.
> Some of you really are absolutely socially inept.
So if someone tells you "I'm sorry, I am not available at this channel, can we arrange some other method?" and you refuse to accomodate you take the other as socially inept?
I hope you do not have the expectation that in order to contact """friends""" one would ever adopt bestial behaviour. It takes a beast to act like a beast. Everybody will live according to nature.
Your post seems to be assumptions loaded. It sounds as if you were accusing strawmen of expecting people to behave rationally, wisely etc. That image has been superseded even in the theoretical grounds in which it had been used historically as a premise (e.g. Economics).
I have no control over what they do. If they’re so attached to using whatsapp that they’d stop being friends with me rather than use signal, the friendship wasn’t worth a lot in the first place.
I recently started using WhatsApp regularly because it's the only convenient end-to-end encrypted messaging app I know. The only thing they seem to be getting out of it is some metadata and the opportunity to sell services to businesses. Seems like an acceptable compromise to me.
Previously I used Matrix/Element but never got it to work reliably with my friends (decryption issues, session verification obsession). And Signal has no web app. So WhatsApp it is for now.
Here’s a fact: Meta grossed $117 billion in 2022. Almost as much as a major car manufacturer. They’re doing things with that data. It’s a scary amount of power.
Not having WhatsApp here in Brazil is tough - Basically my entire family and close friends(?) use it as an asynchronous way of communication, which is good at the end of the day. But not answering regular phone calls is not good.
Unfortunately I cannot just walk away from it because of this.
I did the same in 2014 and lost touch with lots of friends. I am now in touch with a very few via Signal and email or phone. But I couldn't convert many to use Signal, even though they I got them to try it with a lot of effort.
I left FB when somebody on HN leaked they were feeding data straight to some military intelligence agency pipeline. I lost many acquaintances because of it but I saved a huge amount of time and completed two graduate degrees after.
The HN search doesn't show anything like that. I wish I saved the link somewhere. It was a long time ago but IIRC they had some bug that browser was directly contacting the agency instead of doing it via a backend or redirects so people monitoring their own online traffic could see the target servers directly.
I did the same (although some years after the acquisition) and had a similar experience, though over the years I've managed to claw back some of the friends I lost. Though it's still hard to communicate with them.
In my view, and as someone who's never used instant messaging, it should be a small accommodation to make for a friendship. In the same way that I would be happy to provide a vegetarian option at a dinner.
The analogy doesn't work because providing a vegetarian option is something you only have to do once, or at least only the few times the vegetarian friend has dinner at your house. Changing your messaging platform for a friend is more like becoming a vegetarian yourself and convincing all your other friends to go vegetarian to please your friend (because a messaging app is only useful if most of your friends are on it).
There was a time when you could contact anyone on any platform through a centralized application which simply called into libpurple. Really the problem here is that you along with everyone else have caved into big tech's insistence on being incompatible with everything.
Also, more people understand your morale position of "I don't want to kill animals".
Few people understand "this messenger is slightly less privacy focused. It's owned by Meta. It's against my principles".
I am vegan so I would definitely break ties with friends that make mean "jokes" about veganism or myself. But I certainly would never let go of friends because they want me to use WhatsApp.
Probably true. Still, perceptions change over time. Not too long ago vegetarianism (never mind veganism!) was widely seen as an irrational fringe position.
Similarly, I live sans messaging for the simple reason that I never upgraded to a smartphone. In the 2000s this solicited reactions of amazed befuddlement and surprise, occasionally mirth. Nowadays, in my experience, most people intuitively understand the decision.
I don’t get your analogy having multiple messaging apps on your device is not forcing you to do anything. Just to get in the right messaging app to talk to your different communities. I mean my kids are doing that all the time between snap (their friends), whatsapp (family) or Signal (me) (and I’m pretty sure they use at least a lot more channels (discord, insta, etc.)
That can work if groups of contacts are still grouped by app, like friends and family using different apps and you don't need to talk to both at once. But in the example given by the OP, if one friend wants to use a different app than other friends, it would be really awkward. You'd have to copy every message to your friends twice -- once on the app with the other friends and once in the app for the contrarian friend. In practice, that friend would be left out of many social events.
Sure. The point was more about the many small frictions that may or may not exist in any given friendship, with a lack of messaging capacity being no more egregious than any other.
Demanding all your friends switch or kill their messaging apps is quite another matter, and an eccentric one at that.
Let's say that person A refuses to use $APP and person B only communicates through $APP.
Then, from A's perspective, it is just a small accommodation for B to communicate through alternative means. And from B's perspective, it is just a small accommodation for A to use $APP.
"Look, I am not letting Zuck suck up my personal data and watch ads if there is an alternative that's owned by a non-profit, does not show ads and end-to-end encrypts everything as a rule."
Asking to use Zucks apps anyway as a small accommodation would paint the one asking as an ignorant who is being unreasonable and does not take care of their digital hygiene properly. Sure, they might resent the other person for pointing their own failings out, but it's hard to actually argue.
I think it's pretty clear at this point that most non-techies place no value on digital privacy. So, from the perspective of someone whose friends all use Zuck's app, the other person is trying to complicate their life for no benefit.
Within their value system, they're not being ignorant. Rather, they're perfectly rational.
