My outrage quotient has dropped significantly in the two and a half months since I deleted facebook and twitter. Just removing those two things from my life has made a measurable improvement in my quality of life.
Did you try just... not following the outrage parts? Not getting outraged? If you want to spend more time connecting with people you care about, getting rid of facebook feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The problem is that whoever you follow (whether they're friends, family or just interesting people) they ARE following the outrage parts.
And of course there's the "trending" sidebars, and ads and other stuff that gets injected into your timeline without you asking for it.
So things bleed in no matter how careful you are. The platforms are designed to drag you in and outrage you. Trying to avoid that is a constant battle - and you're going to give in to it from time to time.
My current move is to delete Facebook completely (well, deleted that years ago). I just didn't find as much value there as elsewhere on the internet. And the psychological cost wasn't worth the little value there was there. So, complete deletion.
Twitter, I've deleted the mobile app and I follow no one. I have a separate list of profiles I find interesting. I have to physically go to that list and click on their profiles.
This keeps me out of 90% of the drama and into 90% of the worthwhile content.
It's hard to not look at "trending" but I'm trying. I wish there was a way to turn off "trending" and "timelines" completely.
End result: hugely more productive and psychologically lighter.
This will benefit from updates from the author whenever Twitter tries to foil blocking. It comes with a variety of tweaks like a separate timeline for retweets and forcing the latest timeline.
> Twitter, I've deleted the mobile app and I follow no one. I have a separate list of profiles I find interesting. I have to physically go to that list and click on their profiles.
Interestingly, this is the same solution I came to with Twitter, except I don't even keep a list of profiles, I just navigate based on memory and auto-complete in the address bar.
And having it separate helps keep me honest (I think my memory would suffer biases) and out of my head.
Mainly though - the act of having to physically click a few times to get to the list gives me a moment of pause where I'm able to wake up and recognise whether I'm about to make good use of twitter or habitually jump into the time-worm-hole we all know.
I actually tried facebook for a month with other windows covering up the "trending" sidebar. It was a little better but the ads in the main area still annoyed me.
Then I started unfriending people that just posted stuff that annoyed me.
Then I realized after 3 days there was literally no new posts.
Then I just deleted facebook.
I don't miss it at all.
I've got multiple group chats with friends that I like. People post funny and interesting stuff there and we talk about it without having to deal with what someone's crazy uncle thinks about the topic.
This doesn't address all the issues you raise, but my hack to deal with the Twitter sidebar is to set it to a language and region I don't understand.
1. Click "Show more" at the bottom of "What's happening"
2. Click the "settings cog" at the top of the page
3. Uncheck "Show content in this location"
4. Click "Explore locations" and choose a location whose language you can't read and you know nothing about.
And to avoid outrage leaking to me via people who end up in my main feed I simply aggressively mute pretty much anyone who talks about politics or similar. Sure, I therefore lack their signal but avoiding their noise more than makes up for that.
Those platforms want your attention so they will show you more of what you “engage” (tricky buzzword) with, occasionally injecting a bit of noise to try to keep you from getting bored. This is in fact what many critics complain about yet like.
I just tuned FB to show me stuff I wanted by scrolling past stuff I didn’t, “liking” stuff I did/do, and clicking through to read/respond to comments. It’s mostly friend&family updates, apolitical jokes, animal pics and other anodyne stuff fun to see.
And I block ppl who are on the outrage train, typically just for the 30-day automatic cool down and FB gets the message.
It’s my attention and I don’t have to give it to people.
You can use a 3rd party client (I use Tweetbot) to go back to a chronologically ordered list of tweets, with no promoted tweets, no sidebar, you have to explicitly click to find trending topics.
You can also keywords (which I think you can do with the Twitter app as well) for more granular curation.
I think solutions like this allow one to benefit from Twitter without paying the heavy price that their shitty engagement tactics demand.
The platforms are designed to show you more of what you engage with. I can understand that for people who are addicted to outrage-bait, blocking might be the only way to break out of that, but if you engage with the parts you want to see more of and not with the parts you don't, facebook learns pretty quickly, IME.
I don't know that I agree with this, but even if we assume it's 100% true, this is still a problem given Facebook's addictive nature. Practically speaking, most people don't have the impulse control to pull themselves away from mindless, addictive content. And I don't think it's a huge surprise that a lot of the people who have gone down the Facebook rabbit hole are older. Less tech savvy, and perhaps not as sharp as they were at the height of their lives.
Every hobby could be seen as a mindless addiction. Heck, talking to friends in person is much the same - people fall into the same conversation patterns, have the same arguments and reminiscences over and over, miss them if they're not having them even if they don't really take pleasure in them at the time. At some point Facebook is just life.
That is so foreign. I know what you are talking about. But it's something I utterly despise. I don't get why people do it. Sure I understand people forget or mix up who they said what to from time to time. But the same thing over and over week after week just to 'talk'? Please just shut up and let me read a book or something.
That's why I don't do social media or follow other people's social media. If I want to connect with them texting, phone calls, zoom is much better instead of trying to get the same from online outrage machines.
Just don't follow toxic sources, that's all he's advocating. If someone's sharing memes from a crazy political page, either block that page or remove the friend.
People say social media like Facebook is toxic for the most part because they only deal with toxic people.
It doesn't work that way. I pruned both Twitter and Facebook intentionally in the way you suggest and it became pretty clear (or maybe it's my biases) that both run on outrage. Facebook would insist on bringing arguments to the top of my feed as best it could. As an example, I am friends with a regional sportswriter on FB and he had a post asking something sports/ politics related. It generated about 50 responses, so FB condenses that into 2-3 replies and then offers to let you click to see more. Amazingly, the part it decided to call out was the one argument in the 50 comment thread. Controversy and upset are what drives engagement in social media.
IDK about FB, I always avoided it like a toxic plague.
But on Twitter, there seem to still be work-arounds. I use lists set to Private, curated for specific experts on particular topics, and many top and/or obscure experts post regularly.
This provides a reasonably straightforward chronological feed, curated to my interest, with well-tuned news and links to key analysis. Just NEVER use the main Home feed (which they do push on you).
IDK how long that feature will stay unpolluted by toxic algorithms, but Jack does seem a bit less determined than Zuck to pollute society.
I don't know what to say to stuff like this. I spent a ton of time treating Twitter the same way and in no way do I want to suggest that I am now enlightened or something, but when you hear people (and I include my past self in this) talk about Twitter, it's like they're talking about a really effective chainsaw where there's no guard and the handle is on the wrong end. You can use it to cut down trees if you figure out how, but 99% of people harm themselves in the process.
Constant curation and management is indeed everything. And I remember at my first encounter with real computers in college, when I had a choice of editors, I went for the one with the most powerful features, despite the stated hazards.
I do assume that the audience here tends to the more capable end, so most of them would not be in that 99%, but perhaps I'm mistaken?
Every community thinks it's Lake Wobegon. This place is no more above average than anywhere else AFAIK. That said, thanks for reminding me of this! http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html
The problem is that many of these "toxic people" are one's relatives that you can't just easily cut out of your life. Before social media, when they started on a racist rant or something you could get them to change the topic to sports or something, but these days they get encouragement in their extreme views from lots of other people they would have never met in real life.
He has a point, partially.. I used to use twitter, but naturally curating it with only funny or smart thinkers and creators. My view was mostly impressive tech, art or coding (one dude made fluid simulation in gl shaders). It was peaceful.
Thing is, you're still close to the toxic web you regularly step into it .. and that's why i'm banned from twitter now.
If I stepped out of 1980 and into 2021 and saw facebook and cell phones and people looking down the privacy nightmare. It is totally fucking batshit crazy.
Second of all, there's nothing crazy about what I said. By their own admission they've designed the apps to be addictive.
Would you tell your friends "go ahead, shoot up. have a great time!"? Would you tell your family? What I think is crazy is that we tolerate companies that make products like this.
Yes it's been shown that they're tricking people into addiction. I wasn't responding to the arguments more about the 'every ounce of hostility'. Their marketing strategies are sad[0], but you seemed to be all-in in a war against them which I think is misguided. Sorry if crazy was too strong of a word, I didn't meant it as a personal insult. I believe hostility and reaction is the wrong tool for this issue.. let's simply quit and invite others to do others to do so.
[0] we're still having deadly cigarettes sold everywhere you know..
It's impossible to avoid even in groups, because for each fb post the algorithm chooses the top 2-3 comments to show. And it will be ones which have the most interaction (replies, emojis). And the ones who outrage will have the most interaction thus will be shown.
That seems like the most obvious strategy for effecting this change.
I don't really understand the line of thinking that somehow you have to will yourself into things rather than changing your environment. I think it misses how predictable peoples' reactions to things really are.
I found that didn't work at all with Facebook and only works with Twitter by being _very_ selective. But I think that is intrinsic to Twitter, and not only for outrage reasons. I unfollow lots of interesting and smart people because they add too much to my feed. If I follow someone for technical content and half their tweets end up being about music or chit-chat with their friends or drama in their part of the industry, I unfollow them to get that material out of my feed. Even if everything they tweet is interesting, if they tweet a lot, I unfollow them.
> If you want to spend more time connecting with people you care about, getting rid of facebook feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Sadly, lots of people I care about think it's a moral imperative to broadcast their political position on Facebook on every issue of the day. The people I connect with are skewed pretty heavily towards my own point of view, but that doesn't make it any less corrosive to read what they have to say. Facebook is just too emotionally taxing to follow. (Using Facebook's tools to curate my feed just reminds me how much power I'm giving up to them, which is also depressing.)
I feel so much better with Facebook out of my life. I have the app installed on my phone in case somebody from twenty years ago wants to look me up and message me. That's all it's good for.
anecdotally, I felt like my only option was to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It was too hard to avoid the outrage. Everybody has that childhood friend who won't stop posting BS conspiracy theories or that aunt who thinks the world is ending. Do I unfollow these people? if so, what's the point of it all?
I only ever posted positive things like videos of me playing piano and only tried to interact with others in a positive way but I found myself becoming more and more angry over time so I just quit the whole thing and never looked back.
Pretty much exactly this for me. I realized that there's not really any value for me to be in touch with people from grade school/high school/college that I wouldn't otherwise interact with. I'm thinking that this will make going to reunions a bit more interesting as well since now I will genuinely not know what most of these people have been up to for the last decade and we will have that as a topic of conversation before we step out of each other's lives for the next decade.
This mostly works for me for Twitter. FB is just garbage so I haven't been on it in months. I don't need to delete it though, I just stopped going.
HN for the most part is still unique. Even when I see a comment I disagree with, most of the time it's articulated well and I can see their point. There are discussions that can happen.
FB is/was just nonsense, and Twitter is more comedy/entertainment than anything.
That's like saying you should swim in the ocean because you like fish, but just ignore the water. There are numerous ways to connect with people you care about that don't involve a corporate mediator (and many of them are much more fulfilling than Facebook!).
That's like telling a gambler addict to keep going to the slot machines for the social interactions. Just like slot machines, social media are designed to increase addiction; of which “user engagement” is just a euphemism. https://www.quitfacebook.org.
If facebook, twitter, crypto“currencies” were to suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth, society would be better off significantly.
I have a facebook account I rarely if ever login to unless it's something school related. When I do, without fail I see someone I would otherwise get along with posting some ridiculous, easily disproven nonsense about insert scaremongering of the day. Every now and again I'll respond with a link to a factcheck which inevitably upsets the person who is angry someone isn't reinforcing the echo chamber.
Then I promptly close it and remember that's why I don't even bother. Facebook's entire engagement strategy has become outrage and fear. It's what keeps people the most engaged and that's literally the only metric they care about.
I truly believe if Zuck had the option of nuking a third world country to make another billion or solve world peace and Facebook goes away entirely, he'd nuke the country without a second thought. Everything about him strikes me as a sociopath with little to no regard for mankind outside of his personal bubble.
> I truly believe if Zuck had the option of nuking a third world country to make another billion or solve world peace and Facebook goes away entirely, he'd nuke the country without a second thought.
You should check these articles out, they were written in 2018[1][2] and then in 2020[3].
I found I had to get rid of a decent portion of the news too, and news-adjacent comedy shows like Colbert. It's not enough to personally not read FB/Twitter, since they have gotten so integrated into mainstream media. Maybe 10 years ago you could just ignore social media, but by 2018 (when I started making an effort to avoid it), you could end up seeing thousands of tweets without ever using twitter yourself, if you just regularly watched TV news and/or current events comedy. Whole portions of these shows turned into literally putting a tweet on the screen and then talking about the tweet and responses to it. Especially Trump tweets and their replies, but not solely those.
Getting rid of “newstainment” and 24-hour news programs significantly improved the quality and breadth of the news I consume.
By just reading a quality daily newspaper and a couple of newsmagazines, I’m better informed than when I was a news junkie with cable news on in the background and news websites refreshing on my phone.
“Breaking news” is broken. Print media, especially weekly newsmagazines, have the luxury of time to actually think about their coverage and provide adequate research and follow-up. Conversely, space is limited, so if it’s not adding value, it gets chopped.
Live news, on the other hand, needs to alternate between being first to report, then filling time until something else occurs, all while making whatever is occurring seem more important than it really is.
(This is not addressed directly at you, parent commenter, these are just general thoughts.)
I studied journalism in undergrad, and I have never understood why people are so drawn to watch these national 24hr 'news' channels. During a major crisis, sure, but day in and day out? I just don't get it. There just isn't that much that happens at a non-personal level (personal meaning self-, family-, friend-, work-oriented) each day. In terms of staying "up to date," I still am not clear on why this is important to do daily at a national-focused level, but if it's important to you, it can be done in a few minutes by reading a brief recap. If you do want a more traditional news cast, PBS News Hour is a good one.
But with these 24 hr networks, given how little of import happens on an average day, most of the time what you are being shown are not facts, but opinions. And these networks are all owned by massive, massive megacorps. Not sure why anyone is interested in getting drip fed opinions that originate, however loosely, from these conglomerates.
They try to get you to buy into them by convincing you it's important to "stay informed," but never really explain why. They play on your desires to be a good citizen, to be seen as intelligent, to feel 'serious.' If staying informed is important, it's most important at a local level, where your real connections can help you have a real impact. People are so focused on what all the senators tweeted yesterday that they are missing the real problems, issues, etc. that they could help address in their local communities. In this sense, news might not come from media at all -- and here is where social media could actually have real value.
> They try to get you to buy into them by convincing you it's important to "stay informed," but never really explain why.
The common explanation you hear everywhere, even here on HN, is that citizens "staying informed" is the key to an effective democracy. While it may be true in the abstract, using this as an argument for 24h news - or even daily news - is quietly omitting the fact that these news sources provide negative information value. Your worldview becomes less accurate, not more. Widespread addiction to breaking news is thus creating a less effective democracy.
Honestly, I think it's addiction by design (intentionally, or merely A/B tested into existence, end result is similar). Emotional swings are impactful, even if repeated ones are not very individually memorable, and the endless rollercoaster is one way to keep you looking at the rollercoaster rather than at e.g. boredom elsewhere. Eventually you're habituated, and looking away looks less interesting than this fire that just erupted in you-wouldn't-guess-where / it-could-happen-to-you.
Guessing, but it would make a lot of sense if there was a fair number of humans that are just primed to constantly look out for threats. If such people exist, they would love 24-7 news coverage of bad news even though it makes their lives worse.
Following news makes little sense for keeping a person informed. There are too many completely conflicting sources of news. All the news informs of is what other people who watch the news will have opinions on.
> I studied journalism in undergrad, and I have never understood why people are so drawn to watch these national 24hr 'news' channels.
Because the alternative (other than going out for a walk) is watching re-runs of many years old shows or other outright crap.
Personally, I like the 24/7 radio news channel of the local public broadcaster ("B5 Aktuell") - news and information program, but no pop music that was bad already when it came out.
I've also done some journalism but, for many years, my primary news source was getting Time Magazine delivered to my mailbox plus the evening news every now and then along with one of the Sunday morning news programs. That was pretty much it.
Today I don't get live TV but I do pretty much get real-time news through Twitter, etc.
The Economist is the gold standard, with unbiased, quality writing. Brilliant all round. However, it’s expensive (especially if you prefer print over digital). I subscribe on and off.
I also really like Foreign Policy. Despite its name, it’s not really a specialist publication, just a general overview of global current affairs with a bit of a policy focus.
The Guardian Weekly has great international coverage. Its editorial stance is also less overt than it once was (far more measured than the website). There are still occasional stories and writers that make my eyes roll, but it also covers really interesting global stories I don’t find anywhere else.
My daily newspaper is the Sydney Morning Herald. I’ve been based in Australia since travel restrictions hit, and I’m really happy with the paper. It seems to be just as good as it was a decade ago when I was last based here.
Contrary to popular opinion, there’s plenty of quality print journalism out there.
You just need to read an individual paper for a while to internalise the house style and (with the notable exception of The Economist) get to know the individual predilections of each journalist. That level of engagement with the paper and its writers is not something you get from skimming Google News, but I really feel it’s at the heart of getting the most from journalism.
Just buy a particular paper or newsmagazine for a month or two, and see if it’s for you. One local/national and one with a global focus is all you need. If you find them, you’ll hopefully be set for years.
not OP but I've had a long running subscription to The Economist since the early 90ies. One of my favorite sections usually glossed over by everyone I know (but I'm weird) is the quality from "Letters to the Editor" that are incredibly well selected and often hilarious when checked with the original piece that they are referring to. The Letters are not my causa primera for reading it, but if something so mundane is done with so much attention to detail, the rest should also be up to my expectation (and it usually is).
Secondly there is also their Tech section which compared to politics / economics / finance ..., I can as an insider judge its quality. It stands out among the rest IMO. I also like the FT for similar reasons.
yes it's my own opinion and I don't consider myself to be an authority on these other subjects, so my only tools are intuition or trying to piggyback on people I think (or was told) are authorities. (but both are blunt tools since if I can't judge the subject my trust in others who I think know those things is equally questionable)
The Financial Times is my main news source. It seems to be the only one that I've found which doesn't have sensationalist stories/click baity headlines
Financial journalism really outperforms most media sources in terms of picking important stories and telling them in an unbiased way.
Maybe their wealthier audience means that they're not racing to the bottom for clicks. Maybe the people in charge know to run a business that gives people what they want without alienating half of potential customers. Maybe something else entirely. Whatever it is, it's working, and I hope it stays that way.
I once did an exercise where I went over every single news article on the front page of my prefered online paper and asked myself if that was relevant to me and my life.
The answer was no to everything single one. That was pre-covid, and sometimes the news are relevant, but you can mostly do a quick checkup once a week. Prefer something in text form that you can scan over.
A weekly news magazine was where I got most of my news for a long time. The US ones are all pretty bad these days; I dropped my Time subscription a few years back after having it for decades. The Economist is probably the go-to in English these days.
But those two services are not the internet as a whole. The internet is just the medium, unfortunately it has been taken over by a handful of private organisations.
I completely agree. My anxiety has been so much better since I stopped reading the news, facebook and twitter.
I don't really need a constant drip feed of all the terrible things going on in the world. Most of it doesn't affect me, and only serves to make me feel worse about humanity
I deleted my facebook account some years ago. Also, I set my Twitter account to private. I use it to be connected to some people, and read their stuff. I'm pretty happy.
Also, I have a second account for "open" discussions and work-related stuff that I barely use. It would be awesome if one could set certain tweets in a locked account to "visible for everyone".
Pretty much that. Can I look back over my day and see that I spent time being angry/unhappy? It's not zero. There are other human beings on the planet with or without social media. But I have much less of the provocation-outrage-anger-depression cycle without Facebook and Twitter in my life.
But maybe you are now like the turkey who thinks everything is fine, and then it gets eaten at the end of the year. You might wake up in Socialism one day, with a mob outside of your house wanting to evict you.
