| People are realizing that social media is draining, predatory, and entirely superfluous. Of course there are employees here of social media corporations who would want to stem the tide of this mass exodus, but it's useless. Social media corporations have overstepped their boundaries and become a net negative on human society. Deleting your social media accounts results in an immediate improvement of quality of life and mental wellbeing. These sites are intentionally designed with predatory psychological mechanisms, they are designed by hackers like ourselves, but the hackers who see "social engineering" as a perfectly ethical practice and not simply psychological manipulation. These services are designed to be addictive, full stop. Addiction is not healthy, and neither is social media. Maybe this will bring SV back to its roots, real technological progress for the nation and not desperate bids for data mining based on cheap psychological tricks. People are growing sickened of the endless scrolls of psychological disturbing viral content combined with the false positivity of human interest stories. It is deepening social divisions, racial conflicts, political partisanship, and general misery. We don't need social media, what we need is real social connections in an increasingly isolated society, and social media stands in the way of this. |
Is there evidence of a mass exodus? The parent post seems to me like kind of social media post driven by addictive emotions. It's an expression of strong emotions, but curious, exploratory, or providing knowledge.
> real technological progress for the nation
When was YC's motive to serve the 'nation'? They existed long before the recent surge in economic nationalism (a platform of some very bad people in history, BTW), are an international company in an exceptionally international business - one mainly driven by a free international WAN, and, I would have said, and I long heard from SV in general, a desire to change the world for the better. To help people, not some putative 'nation' - which always ends up meaning 'my power', and by talking about the 'nation' instead of people, they exclude other people from power and basic human rights. The purpose of government is to serve and protect people.