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.
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.