[ajxs]

I stopped using any kind of social media five or so years ago, and I've never looked back. I have a bare bones profile with no personally identifiable information on one particular social network so I can keep in touch with a few people who are interstate, but I never browse the public site. My fears that I would lose touch with people close to me were unfounded. It may be a platitude to say that the people who don't make the extra effort to contact you aren't your real friends, but it is true. I lost touch with many people, but not with anyone who mattered to me. My real friendships all endured. The impetus for my exodus from social media was the realisation that my online activities weren't a reflection of my real life persona, but was directly affecting it. I realised that by using these mediums in the manner that was intended I ( and so many others ) was beginning to engage in what I would call dysfunctional, histrionic behaviour. I came to the realisation that the person that I want to be does not do this kind of thing, and I was completely right.

Not only do I disavow Facebook on moral grounds for the political implications of their overreach, but I think that it is a product engineered to prey on human insecurity and profit by perpetuating dysfunctional, harmful behaviour.

[jakecopp]

Why not adblock the news feed and delete the app?

Then you are able to stay in contact with those far away, and make new friends at random events you may not have heard about otherwise?

I dislike their monopoly on the friend graph just as much as anyone else, but at least in the Sydney university demographic FB Events are ubiquitous.

[ajxs]

I'll admit you have a good point with keeping abreast of events in certain circles. That's essentially what I did though. In my original post I noted that I have an anonymous profile on one social network that doesn't do anything except for chat with a few people, it doesn't even have any 'connections'. Hi from another Sydney-sider by the way!

[jakecopp]

That's true, I guess it works out to be the same.

Isn't Sydney wonderful!

[ken]

I take it you don't consider HN to be a kind of social media, then? What are your criteria?

[remarkEon]

I think there's something about interacting with visual depictions of other human beings that makes the other "real" social networks much different than HN - what's essentially a pseudo anon message board that has well defined rules about interactions on the platform (that are easily enforceable but more importantly well known and easy to describe). We generally come in here to talk about tech (or tech adjacent things), and we know what we're getting when we come in here. The people are (usually!) well informed and the discussion classy and highbrow.

That's not an accident, and neither is what Facebook's doing.

Facebook, and Instagram especially (but I repeat myself), absolutely do prey on the visual. It's hard for me to put into words what I'm describing (heh) but I do think visual depictions trigger latent or dormant responses in us that are too easy to manipulate and control.

[ajxs]

I'm sure you can tell the difference between how people interact on HN and Facebook. Obviously there's some small degree of ego in effect with how people interact on HN, but it's vastly different to 'profile-based' social media. Among other differences, we're here discussing a topic, not just projecting ourselves at each-other.