[spadros]

Yes I quit social media a couple of years ago and agree with pretty much everything the author says. Social media environments encourage incendiary discussion because it fuels upvotes and general attention. Most people won't take the time to consider a more valid grey opinion because they've jumped to a conclusion and are busy attacking someone, or because it won't get as much attention. The first thing that came back for me after quitting social media was that "slow thinking" brain that tries to empathize with all sides rather than just call out some "evil" and check out intellectually.

[hnthrowaway2]

It is a bit like "don't let the truth get in the way of a good story". I have felt the urge to respond with something witty and scathing to a story online, only to realise after a moment's reflection that my response would be irrelevant in several scenarios. The disappointment that follows for wasting a witty response...that takes some resisting.

[FridayoLeary]

The amount of comments here on HN that i never post or delete.... That's largely thanks to HN being quite strictly policed.

[mkr-hn]

My struggle is finding something that brings out the wit like a good tweet so I can put it to a more productive purpose. I've written novels worth of tweets because there's just enough good stuff to reply to that it's hard to leave without an alternative.

[bluGill]

I found facebook became more valuable to me once I decided I would only post about things I want my friends to know. That is pictures of my kid's new bike, or a video of the baby babbling. Facebook does a very good job of ensuring my close friends and family keep up with the cute little things in life.

I'm still working on getting out of all the groups that waste space. Sadly many useful things have moved to facebook, and while good for facebook (more ads), other forums function better for keeping up with my hobbies - except for the lack of people checking them.

[asciident]

I wish there was a way to turn off "external content", and only view content created by your friends. If my friend has an opinion about something (even if political, or a social issue), and they post it, I'm interested in reading. But I don't care if they are just posting a link to content that some stranger wrote, or a meme that someone else is spreading. It seems like social media has intentionally blurred the lines between "posting your content" vs "spreading someone else's content".

[wussboy]

Interesting. I had the opposite experience to this. Even though all I ever wanted to know about was what was happening to my friend's kids, my feed was taken over with political and social justice outrage. Outrage sells.

[bluGill]

It matters what everyone clicks like on. So you need to be careful there, and also help others be careful.

There is way too much political outrage for sure. You just have to wade through it. Hopefully you can join me in spreading the facebook is about family message and get others to stop posting politics. (this is hard, it is so tempting to bait your political friends)

[Andrex]

> It matters what everyone clicks like on. So you need to be careful there, and also help others be careful.

The OP's title, "Don't Let Social Media Think for You," applies in this context too. Now you can't even click "Like" without being careful -- to be fair I avoid searching political topics and other sports teams on Google unless I'm incognito.

I feel like we're increasingly trapped in a box by these algorithms and the need to keep them appeased.

[goalieca]

I'm on linked-in for obvious reasons but i largely ignore the posts. I don't get how so many people are political on a site largely concerning itself with employment.

Other than that, reddit was the last piece of social media that i quit last year. I consider it more of a social media service than an a forum for discussion.

[chestervonwinch]

I enjoy LinkedIn for keeping up with old colleagues. But -- and I hate to be too sour on people who are earnestly excited about sharing their career progress -- everyone seems to announce every minor career move on LinkedIn in posts that read like a Grammy acceptance speech.

[TheHypnotist]

LinkedIn is chock full of people with bullshit professional titles posting nonsense. Half the time I wonder if they're bots.

[ta988]

They may not be but social media make people act like bots. Humans just optimize for whatever reward they are after (likes, followers...)

[ebcode]

> I don't get how so many people are political on a site largely concerning itself with employment.

Because employment, like almost everything else in life, is political[0].

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/politics (see definition 5 a, especially)

[weezin]

I recently deleted a lot of social media accounts. My concerns are any accounts I created for important things using social media accounts, and losing track of what behavior is publicly acceptable in the ever changing Overton window. I feel like the benefits to productivity and mental health will exceed those concerns greatly though.

[mkr-hn]

>> "losing track of what behavior is publicly acceptable in the ever changing Overton window."

A good skill to cultivate for this worry is listening without interrupting or judging when you get feedback. Often what someone who feels hurt wants, regardless of the merit of that hurt, is to feel heard. Listening is timeless.

"I don't fully understand, but I hear you."

Sometimes the best you can do is get someone to move you out of their enemy bucket, but that's often enough. I'm often on the other side of that because there are parts of me that people don't get, but often feel qualified to speak on. The things they say aren't what hurt. It's the often aggressive refusal to accept the limits of their knowledge and experience that hurts. Hubris is the timeless enemy of listening.

Real-world example: there was a now-closed Mastodon instance where it came out that the admin did a long, rambly thread where she confidently explained AMAB nonbinary people are just trans women who are too cowardly to transition. There's an interesting discussion to be had on how to define "woman" and where people draw the line on identifying as nonbinary vs woman vs nonbinary woman, but it doesn't start with a thread like that.

[jerf]

Unfortunately, in terms of staying in the Overton window, that advice is useless. You give good advice at how not to annoy one particular person, but the entire problem is that when speaking in public, everyone gets a crack at accusing you. It doesn't even have to be based on truth; they can accuse based on misunderstandings. They can accuse based on deliberate misunderstandings, because they have other reasons to take you down, or just simply see a chance to be a hero at your expense. As weezin also shares in a sibling post, you can be attacked for not doing something. It doesn't matter how kind you are to one person, you can't do that for hundreds at a time, let alone to the millions that a wrong tweet can reach.

In modern parlance, your post amounts to victim blaming. You can't simultaneously engage with thousands of people in any manner that all of those thousands will find acceptable. That's always been true; the change is the belief in a large number of powerful subcultures that they have a right to be engaged with in manners they find acceptable, by people they've never heard of, in interactions they aren't really a part of except that they happened to be within broadcast range, in the worst cases that they possibly even actively sought out precisely because it would give them something to be angry about. (I'm not accusing everybody of doing that. I think it's rare, most people have better things to do with their time. But there only has to be a few to be a problem.) In the long term, this is an impossible standard.

[weezin]

Thank you for sharing, I think what I'm also worried about is lack of sharing, for example the black squares on instagram. I was called out for not posting one (I had 1 picture on IG from 3 years ago). Although I imagine that wouldn't have happened had I deleted IG prior. I just can see "I don't fully understand" when asked about something will become willful ignorance to people that deem the context unavoidable.

[mkr-hn]

I think I'll have to take my own advice and say that, within the limits of my experience hanging out with lots of other marginalized people, this isn't something I see. It mostly seems to come from Well-Intentioned Allies™ outside the worlds I inhabit, and the people who aggro at folks who don't make the gesture are a subset of that.

What I do for gestures aimed at marginalizations I don't share is listen to the people they're aimed at, but that can be hard if you aren't in a community where they exist in sufficient numbers and are comfortable sharing for a broad cross-section of opinions. I didn't even know any other out and vocal queer people until I started hanging out with furries, and even they have trouble making space for people of color to be out and vocal.

I don't have a good solution to finding that cross-section, so I can see how getting off social media entirely is the safest path.

[seneca]

> "losing track of what behavior is publicly acceptable in the ever changing Overton window"

The largest benefit of abandoning social media is probably the realization that the "very online" type don't actually dictate social mores, and can (and should) be largely ignored. That feeling that the Twitter mob can tell you what is acceptable is "[letting] social media think for you", and is exactly the problem.

[wayoutthere]

This is it. People who are “very online” are a small percentage of the population — one that is almost the polar opposite of people in meatspace. They tend to be a lot more isolated from society and radicalized by the echo chamber they exist in.

Those with strong offline relationships tend not to have time to participate in these communities enough to influence them.

I find the media is particularly egregious in giving these voices an outsized level of influence because journalists are lazy and source stories on Twitter and try to manufacture drama and page views. But this media is consumed by “less online” people which contributes to the view that those opinions are more prevalent than they really are.

[dharmach]

On the flip side, all with nuanced, grey opinions will be left with no motivation to act and the fanatic, opinionated people will act.

In a war if the leader has to select an army of thinkers & intellectuals versus that of fanatics & fundamentalists, which one will he choose?

[anigbrowl]

Quite true. It's also the case that some situations demand a timely response, eg when a violation of some fundamental principle is occurring and ought to be interrupted. Intellectualizing everything can become an excuse for passivity. To be clear, if one is uncertain about what's going on it's generally better to hold back, but there are circumstances where someone does comprehend an issue clearly and simply wants to shirk an unpleasant engagement with it.

[emc3]

> more valid grey opinion

What makes the "grey" opinion "more valid"?

[tristor]

It may not be. In fact, I'd suggest discussing the idea of validity in relation to opinions is probably fraught with peril itself. That said, any opinion which is more close to the unbridled truth is generally more structurally sound (and maybe that's a good hallmark for "validity") than opinions which are more sensationalized.

"Grey opinions" are essentially the opposite of sensationalized. I'm not the original commenter, but if I read them correctly, I believe they mean that the least sensational and most deliberate opinions are more likely to fully account for the truth of the matter (and hence be "more" valid) than those opinions which sensationalize.

[riebschlager]

I would assume the author of that comment was using "grey" to describe an opinion that is more nuanced and carefully considered. A black/white opinion would be hyperbolic or simply expressed to provoke reaction.

So if that's what a grey opinion is... then yeah. That's more valid. Especially if you value conversations aimed at exploring some reality rather than performative shouting matches.

[cindarin]

because the person you're replying to agrees with that opinion at the exclusion of all others