Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food and I’d argue that we’re all a lot more negatively affected by it than we think. There’s a reason ‘brain rot’ was word of the year.

However, shitty newsfeeds like Google news are my bane. I can’t stop.

This sounds so interesting to me - was it your responsibility? How did you detect if someone was addicted? And most importantly, how did you scale it?

But now, politics is getting involved because people are having government job offers rescinded and the entire federal government is in a free fall like a 3rd world banana republic.

Looking at it on my phone, if I can see three entries and 2 are anxiety inducing, I close the app. (I'm 99% certain they get that telemetry too)

That said, I also had days where I doomscrolled instagram and thought 'it's been 20 minutes and I haven't seen anything entertaining yet.' And that's when I decided to drop it. (It was the only app I could chat with my kids with...we've since moved to other methods)

I haven't cut it out completely, but I'm not hyper aware of how I'm consuming it.

My Facebook feed is all friends and family who don't discuss politics and ads for nerd shirts. I've purchased a few. It is also easy and effective to hit show me less of this.

I agree about LinkedIn and don't go there unless I'm actively job hunting, something I hope never to do again. I don't feel any bitterness when I see friends and family on FB go on expensive vacations, but I do feel an unhealthy and indefensible jealousy sometimes when I see former coworkers getting new jobs or promotions.

Reading "You should quit reddit" helped a little. The author tries to reframe your hidden beliefs about reddit like "finding useful information" or "it's filled with experts." Helped me to realize I was spending more time reading about my hobbies than actually doing them. Though I understand it's not that simple, doing requires more energy, etc.

I find myself reaching for something when I have YouTube/chilling at my desk at the end of the day, can't code anymore/make something just on till I sleep. Sometimes have the desire to play a video game (I have a gaming rig too funny how that works)

I've been trying to read HN or IEEE, TechCrunch stuff like that as my "lazy fun"

I will miss posting stuff like "what is this car" or being part of the car talk for a sporty car I drive but idk kind of want to just live too

It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something

Anyway my main goal in life right now is getting out of debt/staying fit and work on projects

That said, I recognize that I am speaking completely for myself in regards to my own interests. YMMV.

Yes. I still have to be at least aware of what is happening for work reasons, but removing social media was one of the better decisions for my sanity ( I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well, which in itself is a concern suggesting further digital landscape deterioration ).

I considered some more obvious solutions ( from buying subscription to WSJ/FT to personal news aggregator -- and objective/neutral observer rewrite using LLM and they all are not exactly ideal ).

Here is the good news. All this chaos is an opportunity to stand something useful up. And I mean something useful that cannot be so easily dismantled by powers that be ( and there are already heavy indications they are aware people may try going outside the defined paths ).

That's critical. My YouTube rule these days is to block any channel with a video name or thumbnail that says something like "This is why you fail at XYZ" or other statements designed to evoke an emotional response from me. And on top of that, I try to only click on videos where the title/thumbnail is properly informative, exposing the content rather than trying to hide it behind a vague hook. Hooks like "You won't believe this one trick!" and fluff like that, titles/thumbnails that should introduce the trick, not just allude to it.

Good luck out there.

I’ve never really understood doomscrolling on Twitter or Reddit. The only social media I find remotely useful out entertaining is actually TikTok. The comments are IME the least toxic and most entertaining. And I’ve gone down fascinating rabbit holes of things that have absolutely no relevance to my life like medical residency TikTok.

You can mute subreddits and not see them anymore

Funny you have to purge the algo on things like YouTube if you click on a thubmnail with some hot chick, boom your feed is nothing but click bait of hot women

HN also doesn’t seem to be as susceptible to rage-baiting / outrage-attention-seeking behavior. Not sure exactly what by this is the case but I’d venture a guess it has a lot to do with (1) “dang”s moderation, and (2) not having a personalized algorithm feed.

I’m increasingly of the view that personalized algorithm feeds generated to select the maximum attention grabbing content for each person is a truly dangerous idea.

Frankly, HN is not that engaging (by modern standards). In fact, probably 60-70% of the articles on the front page are boring to me on any given day. I view this as a feature and not a bug. Why should I expect that everything I look at must be maximally engaging?

I wish more sites were old skool like HN.

> but with the dial turned down a little.

Exactly for this reason. Yes, HN is a social network. And if it follows the same enshittification path as the others, I will be gone from here too. But until then, to me (YMMV) it still provides a bit of entertainment and news without rotting my brain.

Even the analogy works. Fast food is not that bad... in moderate quantities (/"with the dial turned down a little")

You can just add subs that are of interest that lack the torrent of bad news and only ever visit that custom feed. It doesn't ever algorithmically add posts from subs you don't manually include, as far as I've seen.

Outside of reddit/discord/hn, I haven't had any social media since roughly 2010, and I don't use reddit or discord for anything remotely "social media"-ish.

While I still get the occasional look as if I'm wearing a tinfoil hat when I say "I don't have FB. No, no insta either. No... not snapchat either", I find it's a lot less common now, thankfully. When I first left social media in ~2010, it was rough. Not only dating scene wise, but I lost out on a few job opportunities (at least a few, probably more than I know) as well.

Now you're just considered kind of weird/fringe, instead of being borderline insane. Moving (slowly) in the right direction, I think.

I used to waste so much time posting about cars on Reddit. I'd open my computer at 11pm, reply a few times to a single post on Reddit, and before long, I'd see 1:45am on the clock.

Not posting anything has been a massive time saver.

1. Turn off all notifications, especially for replies, likes, and content suggestions.

2. Train yourself not to look for feedback on the things you do post as a matter of habit. Intentionally check on the important discussions IFF you _remember_ to do so.

3. If possible, hide or remove any karma-like indications. Your life is better if the internet points aren't visible.

"Someone who cares about you on the internet"

instead of

"Something that prevents you from posting hate/snuff/nude on the internet"

Obviously lots of problems, tons of them, and 1984 vibes, but still, the basic idea. A bit more like humans were meant to interact?

I saw dozens of death threats. Even an explicit death threat thread with over 40,000 upvotes before reddit stepped in and shut the whole subreddit down.

It reminded me of Ghostbusters 2 with all the aggressively angry people and the ooze pouring out of the sewers, all building upon itself.

I do think, though, that for at least some platforms it's possible to use them in a limited way where you confine yourself to relatively small communities that are focused on some common interest that genuinely brings together people who enjoy sharing it. You mentioned Discord for instance and that's one, if you can find the right servers. I think it's possible to do that on Reddit too. You just have to never visit the "front page" and stick only to subreddits that you actually get value out of. It's harder approaching impossible with ones like Facebook that are more doggedly algorithm-driven and don't put moderation in the control of users in the same way.

Of course, the lurking issue is that putting moderation in the control of users is building the platform on free labor and those good subcommunities are at risk of imploding when cracks emerge in the dike separating them from the wider platform userbase. And that's likely to happen because even those "safely usable" platforms are ultimately beholden to VC money that's going to demand enshittification eventually.

Cohost was by far the best attempt I've seen for many years, but sadly couldn't make a go of it in the toxic ecosystem we've got.

It's disheartening when the one-track politics infects every square inch. It's a good point about bots because 1) they can be sold or rented to advertisers, 2) they are more valuable with higher karma, and 3) the easiest way to get a bot to harvest karma is by agreeing with the hive. So they're amplifying "the message" without even intending to.

In general, the goal should be improvement of humans, not avoidance of negative stimuli. Something has to exist where humans are rewarded for aligning to truth and reality, rather than emotion.

I more or less agree. Thus the humans who created and enshittified such platforms should be correspondingly punished for their disalignment to truth and reality. It's not just about rewarding "consumers" of stimuli; the creators and promulgators of stumili also need to be incentivized (and disincentivized) in just the manner you mention.

I'm going to offer my two accounts as examples

https://mastodon.social/@UP8

https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social

both of these are 'cyborg' accounts in that I have my RSS reader, classifier and autoposter. I am looking to build a lot more automation.

My Mastodon feed took a large set of rules to block out #uspol and certain communities of miserable people. My feed has stayed outrage-free since last month.

My measurements showed that Bluesky's 'Discover' feed blocked about 75% of emotionally negative material before Jan 20, since then people are inflamed but looking closely at my feed it seems they are deliberately trying to help certain people who felt stuck on X to migrate, that is, giving huge amounts of visibility to journalists, journalism professors, activists, and such so that they can run up 200k+ follower counts.

I understand. (I've been brainstorming ideas about "how to get people off X" with a friend and tonight I'm going to tell him that Bluesky has it) I've used "less like this", "unfollow" [1], "mute", "block" and such and my discover feed is getting good again.

I have two classifiers in the development pipeline, one to detect "screenshots of text" and "image memes", also a text classifier that is better at sentiment than my current one (I think ModernBERT + LSTM should be possible to train reliably, unlike fine-tuned BERTs.) I'm not so much interested in classifying posts as I am in classifying people; some of them are easy, there are 40,000 people who have a certain image meme pinned that I know I never want to follow. Just recently I figured out how to make training sets for these things without having to look too closely at a lot of toxic content.

I'm also eliminating the dependencies that are keeping this from being open sourced or commercialized so I may I have something to share this summer.

[1] one strike for an outrage post

It's even possible the places that people then move to (such as HN) also get more radical if the leavers have higher levels of radicalism than the place they join.

I still use old.reddit and this is the only way I've ever used Reddit. My homepage only shows me posts from Reddits I follow and nothing else. I don't see all the craziness people here are talking about.

I will be explicit in that I am not condoning doxxing Reddit mods. I just don’t think we’d be fine with this in normal day to day life.

That’s not really a gotcha statement.

It's all just driveby anger and reposts. Maybe some smaller subs with good communities here and there, but that often requires a mod team putting in substantial hours and remaining under the radar from All/Popular in any shape.

Forgot to mention, Reddit also started paying these accounts for posting. So a literal financial incentive to ragebait. It' called the "Contributor Program".

Advertisers currently

On more than one occasion the direct feedback of why I didn't move further in the hiring process was a lack of internet presence.

But, again, keep in mind this was early 2010s. Social media hadn't had as much time to show the world how poisonous it is.

It's an interesting relevant short story. Won the 2024 Hugo Award. It was posted a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263876

There’s a clear difference of kind between modern social media and the forums/usenet of old.

What I did was unfollow everyone and everything, and block all suggested content. The front page is literally empty. Nothing on those websites captures my attention unless I specifically look for it.

This was very effective. These websites have effectively become write-only media for me. They're still here if I need them, but I end up browsing just one page of /r/curatedtumblr and then doing something else.

It doesn't help to stare at rage/anxiety inducing things - it doesn't mean you're actually informed all the time.

Plus I'd argue that most things you'll see end up being hogwash and the important stuff will rise to the top and you're generally hear about it anyway.

There are neighbourhood groups and other really useful forums on Facebook. There are tech discussions on BlueSky.

But it's annoyingly hard to run the gauntlet of politics and outrage bait to get to the stuff I actually want.

Very occasionally a potential client messages me through it but they are almost very low quality contacts.

Cannot stand unsolicited content.

Block them, it's easy. I have only close friends and coworkers that I don't hate on that site.

I believe a good portion of Reddit could have had been the same. However, the way moderators are chosen-- in other words, whoever creates the sub first gets to rule the roost-- has left that site with almost universally unqualified moderation.

I can only recommend it if you are independently wealthy, want to become an ascetic, or more broadly, your goal is to never be hired or really even evaluated for much in the business world again.

None of the rest of the social networks serve as a sanity check on your resume/application/meeting.

I will say, the subreddit system does a decent job of quarantining the dysfunction to that sub. The mod quality is everything and the mod drama is an absolute dumpster fire. (Extremely curiously, Ghislaine Maxwell seems to have been one of the most prolific of the mods, and one of her suspected accounts may be one of the most successful (karma-wise) posters of all reddit.) But on the flipside, /r/askhistorians is still one of the best resources on the internet. Many of the specialty subreddits I frequent (Aviation, UkraineRussiaReport, video game subs, several miscellaneous african subs) are still functioning fine.

It used to be a good site, but that was many years ago.

Reddit has always had these elements, but they were previously isolated to certain subreddits.

I noticed the biggest change when the app and website became aggressive about getting people to join other subreddits and inserting posts from other subreddits into people's feeds. Suddenly the isolated subreddits I followed were full of low effort content and angry comments.

Reddit's front page is shockingly bad. The amount of misinformation and ragebait that gets upvoted to the front page is almost hard to believe.

It's also interesting that many subreddits have embraced the ragebait. Subreddits like /r/AITA have been clear about how they don't care if stories are real or not, but legions of Redditors engage with obvious ChatGPT spam as if it was a real situation they need to weigh in on.

Please back that statement up with some facts.

Probably worth Googling something like [men who don't have social media] to think what women think about this, it's more positive than you might think :)

Sticking your head in the sand is of course a "solution", but that is willfully choosing to be nothing more than a subject to the rulers.

Another solution is to limit your news intake and your political passion to the things that have the most real implications on your life and on the people you care about, while limiting your own exposure and vulnerability to governments as much as possible.

Yeah I did conciously omit it actually, but only because I consider Youtube to be basic internet infrastructure and quite valuable if used right.

However, for me personally, I've actually blocked Youtube from Chrome when not in incognito mode to keep me signed out by default and I've also completely blocked the site from my iPad (and ofc I also don't have the app installed).

I unfortunately struggle with some form of social media addiction and I've made pretty dramatic changes to keep myself away from these sites.

In fact NFL teams are specifically banned from having bluesky accounts as an official media channel, and r/nfl still banned X/Twitter.

sigh

For me, it's quite addictive unfortunately, even though I agree that it's pretty dull.

Yeah! That's one of the cool things I first noticed when I stopped consuming as much news: I started to form my own unique and nuanced opinions.

It's actually pretty surprising when you learn about how many of your opinions were just absorbed through culture and media and not really 'your own'.

I really hate this one in particular. Why did the biggest Job board become another Facebook (but more blatantly trying to sell you stuff)? This is a hard one to leave unless you're very comfortable in your job prospects.

Yeah I agree that many HN comments are unfortunately pretty bad, but I think this should only motivate people like you and me to try harder to make HN a better place with constructive, useful comments :)

It's not about scoping you out. Asking for your Instagram is like what asking for your number was in the past. It's flirting, it's that they want to get in touch again, set up a date.

If you say "I don't have Instagram", the girl will assume that you don't like her, not that you don't have Instagram.

So just make an empty Instagram (with a normal profile photo) for connecting with people. And say so when sharing it with a girl. If it's somebody who wants to "scope you out", you're already dealing with a person who you don't want to deal with.

it's similar to how you can go to a bar and just say "I'm here to watch the game". You can be asosial in a social community.

To me, HN is more like an online forum.

IMHO for a service to be defined as Social Media it needs to at least have a 'social graph' of some kind.

HN has never suggested an account to follow, or tried to suggest trending posts or topics to me.

Yes, HN does have a voting system. But that to me doesn't make it social media. HN posts are not measured and promoted based on engagement.

What do people think others will do, when they see that the_donald behavior gets rewarded by electoral and political support?

If its not clear, everyone is going to radicalize, because its getting success.

I unfollowed/unfriended anybody who kept posting political stuff. I did the same for anybody I didn’t interact with in real-life regularly.

That basically left my parents, and about 5 friends. None of whom post anything regularly.

So, now my feed is just random shitposts and memes from “influencers”.

So, I deactivated my Meta accounts. And I’m still alive. And probably saner.

Anyway, it's a war. Propaganda is essentially impossible to avoid without ignoring the topic entirely. Still, it's what we have to work with. And to be clear my sympathies lie with the ukrainian people.

I wouldn't have known that my best friend from middle school lost her house.

I wouldn't have known that a family member was pregnant.

But yeah, I feel like news stuff is better curated elsewhere, because outrage keeps eyeballs viewing, so algorithmic feeds tend to highlight it.

But 1 year into that, I read an article by Swyx on how to use social media. I tried but gave up for another 2 years. But the end of that last 2 years was the election...and I was curious...so I went to X.

Within 3 days my opinion of the outcome flipped.

And...since I already read Swyx's article, I was ready to effectively navigate other topics of interest.

But the key to effective media usage is to ALWAYS be on guard. Your mental filters have to be running all the time. The second you drop your guard, you're vulnerable because the stream never lets up.

But when you do this, you find that you quickly run out of truly interesting things to read. Luckily I've also got physical hobbies. I now spend a TOTAL of 2 hrs/day across all media, and my mental health is just fine!

But also I find it highly rewarding in many areas such as investing, history (the X format works so well!), international (language, culture, politics).

I also highly recommend taking a second to put each post in scale or context. This does 2 things: helps decide importance of post, and slows scrolling so your brain doesn't get DDOSed into a mental health crisis.

And the (increasingly cheap, powerful and ubiquitous) LLMs can be used to either save time or power you further into the conversations.

They believe people hate Americans and everyone should be ashamed traveling overseas. As someone who travels all the time to multiple continents not just Europe i have never encountered anyone who asked or even cared. Most people don’t live in a political bubble where they need to stop being friends with people over politics.

Anyway a lot people are choosing to live in an angry little bubble. It is really sad to see.

Otters, dogs, cats, snow leopards, red pandas whatever floats your boat.

Also, as you say the big platforms will still try and get you into an outrage loop.

Banning the_donald was the beginning of the end for Reddit, at least as far as balanced discourse went. At that time, the r/all was relatively balanced and you'd see major news stories from both POVs.

Now it's a hysterical echo chamber full of thinly veiled death threats towards the sitting president.

Disclaimer: I have money invested in RDDT.

It is obviously a completely unfinished thought.

But something about humans innate tendency to self-organise into tribes and villages.

https://www.nbcsports.com/nfl/profootballtalk/rumor-mill/new...

Presumably there’s some money that needs to change hands between the NFL and a social media site.

> This community has been banned

> This subreddit has been temporarily banned due to a prevalence of violent content. Inciting and glorifying violence or doxing are against Reddit’s platform-wide Rules. It will reopen in 72 hours, during which Reddit will support moderators and provide resources to keep Reddit a healthy place for discussion and debate.

I'm always growing my "playlist" though. One room of the house is where I auditioning new music. Another room plays my entire music catalog on shuffle.

you don't have to release the extension, you just load it unpackaged by developer mode in the extensions settings

I didn't exlude it from my list. See here:

> I’ve been off of social media (aside from HN, WhatsApp and discord) for years

I did, however, leave it out of this list

> Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food

because I don't consider HN to be digital junk food.

I know! I'm currently looking for work so have been forced to use it a bit, but once I find my next position, I'm out!

That is to say, some people really are willing to be activists. They will organize protests and boycotts and things like that.

Other people are in marginalized communities and are trying to get a feel for whether they should move to a different region or even a different country.

Some folks don't really have a plan but they want to stay informed. If at some point a magical line is crossed, they might suddenly say, "That's IT! I can't take it anymore! I have to DO SOMETHNG!" and that's when they'll become activists.

But some folks are realistically never going to lift a finger to help themselves or anybody else. They'll just bitch online and/or be stressed.

What I'm working on is figuring out in what ways I might, in the right situation, be moved to contribute. If things get really bad (and they will), what will I realistically be doing? I'm disabled, so I can't be out in the streets. If things get even worse, I might write about the niche public health / politics topics I've accidentally become an expert in. And if something happens where medicare and medicaid are shut off, well then all hospitals everywhere will basically be non-functional. This will be a crisis for all but most immediately for the chronically ill -- any of us at that point who are able to will be leaving the country ASAP.

In other words, I need to know enough to keep writing (which I would do anyways) and I need to know when things are hopeless enough that a person with a messed up spine should travel out of the country anyways. That is currently all I need to know because it's all that is actionable for me.

There is a massive temptation to doomscroll into infinity, but that merely serves the enemies of sanity. I know what happens next because I've read Sarah Kendzior and Hannah Arendt. It's not good. But I also know that one of the first things that happened during the anti-semitic purges in Nazi Germany was that a ton of Jews got appendicitis from stress. Sometimes the body wants to align with power so badly, it aligns even with evil power and against its own interests. We have to be very careful not to poison ourselves and make evil's job easier.

The same can be said for the supporters of many radical and terrible historical regimes. I'm not radical, I'm simply pushing this radical boulder along, and I can stop it whenever I wan tooo-oops."

Please be specific.

2. Algorithms driving ever-increasing "engagement" to deliver advertising

3. Surveillance capitalism

Most subreddits gets formed by someone who's tired of the existing subs, gets into one too many arguments with a mod, and thinks they can do better. I don't know anything about these specific subs but I wouldn't see "this guy formed this sub after getting called out by a mod in another sub" as any kind of red flag.

Not personally, but their names are public, and if they were taking backhanders there would be a scandal. Remember the payola lawsuits?

Take a breather, compose your emotions, take off hours or a days, but then re-engage, interact, observe, document, etc.

This can't be healthy, for two reasons:

(1) The health of the company. As an investor in RDDT, I am not a fan of the site's landing page alienating 50% of Americans right off the bat.

(2) The health of public discourse. We should all be against the creation of echo chambers and weaponization of headlines.

No, there isn't.

My politics are to the left of the American left, but I’d be crazy to believe that the mountains of the anti-Trump posts are organic & the spoonfuls of pro-Trump posts are paid, especially after an election where Trump won the popular vote.

This is just blatant misinformation. Since r/pics is the only example you've chosen to give us, let's evaluate it: I've scrolled through the current first 50 posts in Hot, and 0 of them are death threats, thinly veiled or otherwise. "Packed full", indeed.

And here, so it isn't simply my word vs. his; these are the current posts:

  Protest, "Musk Stole Your Tax Data"
  Picture of Nazi being punched after making a Nazi salute
  Protest, "The Whole World is Watching"
  Painting over values at the FBI
  McConnell in a wheelchair
  Flag upside down outside State Dept.
  Kid covering ears with politician in foreground
  "Buy Canadian Instead" sign in CA store
  Protest, no visible message, flag with corp logos instead of stars
  German anti-fascism protest
  UFC fight match post KO [KO'd opponent is a neo-Nazi]
  US Marine holding flag in distress position
  Protestor, "No kings in America", dressed as Cap. America, mouth taped over
  Protest "Nobody voted for Elon"
  Protest "Stop Musk's Takeover"
  Picture of Trudeau
  Protest "Smells like Fascism"

- The nazi punching thread had several moderated comments ranked near the top which were presumably calls to violence.

- The Mitch McConnal thread has many people looking forward to his death, hoping he goes to hell, and a few deleted comments.

- A musk thread has "eat the rich" and storm the capitol. Not super highly ranked.

I didn't go through all of them but it certainly is a bit odious.

Also note though how there's only 1 non political thread and the remainder are anti trump. This is on a general interest sub and what is likely to be an unremarkable day in the administration!

Reddit has been basically unusable for anything concerning politics since, and nowadays with politics leaking out into every damn sub possible it definitely has a problem.

Reddit - hobbies

Instagram - catching up with friends

LinkedIn - Job Search

HN users put a lot less emphasis on who says something and we focus more on what they say. There are exceptions of course, because we have our own share of renowned experts posting here. But for the most part, people don't take note of what username writes a post.

If you stop your thought at just “people are losing their shit”, thats seeing half the world.

I’d say thats disingenuous, because it misses or dismisses the incredibly alarming actions that have precipitated them.

If you genuinely care about it, then you might be interested in knowing why people are responding like this. For example, people generally hate Nazis, and punching Nazis is a popular idea.

DO people expect themselves to be polite when the see a takeover and destruction of their government? “it looks like pre WW2 Germany out there, do pass the salt dear.”

Hacker News is radicalizing, and is very likely going to have to decide if it’s going to be pro MAGA or not.

What did people think the response was going to be once Trump did everything he said he would? People would lie back and let things happen?

In America? The land of the second amendment? I mean people should be happy, after this liberals are going to be proud members of the NRA.

As someone who tries to be non partisan, and isn't even american, I am fatigued by all of the claims that the world within the USA is ending. Whenever I take the time to examine any of the claims they tend to be fairly hollow or making slippery slope arguments.

As an international user of reddit, there are many of us I presume, I want the outrage to be saved for Trumps undeniable and worst offenses. In my eyes the memecoin was worse than anything which has happened since he became president and yet it has completely left the collective focus. Everything since then has just been a mix of people allowing trump to dictate the media cycle and the deep state deploying its immune system.

> So just make an empty Instagram

Why not, instead, say "I don't have Instagram, here's my [ bluesky handle / phone number / email address ]"?

Are there any women (in highly developed countries) under 40 who aren't on some form of social media? I never met any. I think it would be more difficult than men for social reasons.

    > People who avoid LinkedIn remind of those who scoff at the stock market. Yes, it sucks if you hold it wrong.

The online charicatures are just that. In both directions.

Real talk though: the US, via the current administration, is trashing its international reputation. With tariffs and lashing out at (former?) allies. Or with Musk demanding regime change in the UK, for instance. On a personal level people will still be chill no doubt, but you should be prepared for some negative attitudes towards the US if things continue unabated.

No need for histrionics, it's simple: Someone doesn't need to actively desire a terrible outcome to be morally culpable of making bad choices, ones they should-have-known would enable or encourage it to happen. Multiple such people can and do form groups.

It's not limited to politics either, which is how we get idioms like "playing with fire."

- Mute any subreddit you do not enjoy

- Generously block any asshole in the comments

- Subscribe to the subreddits you do enjoy

- Create one or more themed multireddits of the subreddits you enjoy

My Reddit experience is cheesy feel good clips, cool videos of skilled people or weird occurences, funny niche humor and nerdy niche hobbies. No drama.

Wait... how?

Your family only communicate via facebook?

I'm not judging here, I'm genuinely curious

If we review democracies through history that have at some point become less democratic, I think describing the process of how that actually happens as being a slippery slope is quite apt. I’d say it’s more of a fallacy to assume that democracy is a secure default state of being rather than an ideal that we must collectively support or lose entirely—that we can safely “slip” a little without risking a slide further down the slope.

You are misattributing American madness to the people it is being inflicted on rather than the instigators. We have oil wells behind our homes and schools and the white picket fence chemists I knew and looked up to as a kid are the reason we all have PFAs in our blood. Our president vacillates between saber-rattling at our closest allies, starting a new war in the Middle East, and causing constitutional crises every other day. We don’t have a single-payer healthcare option like every other developed country and our “social safety nets” are so impacted and difficult to get, they might as well not exist for most people. We do, however, have some very, very profitable oligopolies (some which make very tasty fish sandwiches) and higher income inequality than India or Russia.

As well as thousands who are normal hard-working people.

> taken back Panama Canal from Chinese dictatorship

By using threats of force like a dictatorship.

> attempted to shrink the size of the government and American tax burden

In illegal, non-democratic ways.

> put more tariffs on Chinese dictatorship

As well as more democratic allies.

> focused US on AI

Without understanding the huge risks involved for all of humanity.

> taken over Gaza to prevent another war between Israel and Hamas

By doing ethnic cleansing.

> gotten Mexico and Canada to finally own up to protecting the border

And in the process lost the trust and respect of allies.

But the emotionally violent resistance I get from people who are embedded in it is wild. I've commented on here before and subsequently pissed people off, but it is an addiction and needs to be treated like one.

They did not do this. Everyone can read the post that you’re responding to.

Near as I can tell, the biggest failure of the left (and one that keeps getting repeated) is thinking words/knowledge matter in situations like this.

Do you have sources for that? Honestly trying to find out. Thanks!

So what Reddit has morphed into, is an illegal content factory - there has already been a comment or two about it from the government and the Trump admin is not one that is likely to sit on my sidelines over this.

Whatever your politics may be, I'm just saying this is going to burn Reddit bad.

I’ve seen this sequence of events play out before.

In many was ‘go outside’ is dismissive of what many people feel is happening, that to within 15 days of this new presidency. This is a low key way of saying you don’t like people protesting.

While at the same time others are saying people aren’t protesting enough.

If you aren’t ok with all of this, I strongly suggest deleting all social media, including hacker news. Take your advice and go outside. Be good to your neighbors and your mental health.

There is zero space for passive consumption when one of the biggest cultural and economic forces in English speaking Internet land is dismantling itself.

There is going to be very little space for any tolerance of nuance - because Trump is going to continue to escalate. He is going to follow a plan which was known, and it aims at gutting the US, and justifying it with DEI or whatever the cassus belli of the month is.

This is eventually going to result in ‘riots.’

Which will feed the righteousness of the conservatives, which will result in a new round of “well you were so happy when the year started, where are you now.”

It will escalate into attacks on democrats as the devil. And HN will swing from left outrage to right outrage.

At that time the roles will be reversed, and the positions will switch.

Again - If you or anyone reading these comments is tired on Feb 6th - leave the internet right now. This is your tornado / natural disaster warning.

This isn’t meant to be hurtful to you, or to be any defense of anything.

I always assume I am wrong, and I hope I can look back at these comments with embarrassment over what looks like histrionics.

The problem I have is that i deal with social media and online safety as work and as research. Papers on this topic are my fun reading when my brain isn’t fogged up.

This is going to be worse than brexit. And that’s if we are all lucky.

I was asking bankers if there’s any slack in the financial system in November - and I asked this in multiple countries.

The answer was no. So when the trade shocks start hitting the system, expect a downturn.

This is aside from the walking dead syndrome which america will face after gutting multiple systems in-flight.

I wish you luck and the very best. Sorry.

You're the one who's been making all the personal condemnations of evil intent, stop with the psychological projection.

As for maintaining an up-to-date profile, I think its worth dialing-down the access unless you're actively looking for a new job.

But the bs that people post to try to get "engagement" makes my head hurt. I'm about to start a new job in a few weeks and it'll be a relief not to have to bother with linkedin again for a few (hopefully many) years.

Fun fact: No one is impressed by your "sports" car, but I'll bet 100% don't want hear it and wish the worst upon you.

I know some places are testing sound ticketing, which I cannot wait to see implemented everywhere.

https://www.autoweek.com/news/technology/a39906304/californi...

I hope you get over your noise addiction sooner than later. Or, go broke in the process.

Personal website is the way to go. Preferably a static site built with a home-made templating engine written in Ruby and running on a non-mainstream budget cloud provider. The chicks dig it man.

Even a hint of Wordpress is social death.

/s

Headhunters are trying to be influencers, they have games, news feeds are full of junk or agenda pushing (lots of anti-WFH pieces because the wealthy owners need to keep their commercial property prices up), etc.

Just tell her you are an Arch Linux admin and skip the flirting.

> phone number

Yes, in regions where people use phone numbers / WhatsApp numbers in that way.

> email address

Just tell her you wanna sell her a time share and skip the flirting.

The temperature is so high right now, and it's only continuing to rise because there seems to be zero accountability for what's happening whether it's pardons or Musk running unfettered through government accounts. Unfortunately, it's natural for people to keep escalating when they see no other avenue.

Also, Biden has already addressed the numbers coming across the border [1]. So again, the people who are left are mostly hard working people trying to make a life.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36e41dx425o

Completely non-technical ones are few, and you can always choose to ignore them.

The feed is also non-personalized. It's not going to show a few more article on politics just because you linked on one.

By comparison, reddit is much, much worse, almost the opposite of HN. Just a bit better than Twitter, maybe. Most of my reddit browsing/participation falls into tech/hobby, yet I always find that spend more time than I'd like on meaningless stuff, and reddit keeps pushing/promoting political content (even in the context of technology).

My solution? Don't browse reddit unless I really need to for some reason (or if I really don't have anything else to do at that time).

When I’m really brain-tired but have downtime, I’ll 1) do nothing and just think in silence, 2) listen to a podcast or music or 3) watch Netflix.

Spotify and Netflix are definitely media apps but they don’t quite have that same negative and addictive effect that normal social media apps do.

There is a reason people are angry and the truth is Musk/trump have gone too far. It's bizarre to say but we are watching the downfall of the USA in real time. The country has been captured by criminals who are working to destroy it–folks are going to be angry about that.

I grew up an active NRA member, shooting since I was 6. I have long since disassociated myself with the group but want to make it clear - a lot of liberals have guns and regularly practice using them.

We don't need the NRA (a Putin funded organization) to do that!

They also map to historical counter-examples.

You don't have to go far. Take hysterical false positives like #RussiaGate, which turned out to be a manufactured hoax.

I asked him if he and his fellow youths knew of anything. He said at first, no, but pretty quickly when all the jewish-owned businesses vanished almost overnight, everyone knew something was up. Did they know about the camps? Debatable. But even the kids knew that they jewish population was kicked out of society.

Then I realized that my kindergarten teacher was onto something when she told us we should be nice and share our toys, and I grew up.

Reddit has in general got way worse since 2016. The amount of bloodthirst and hate is very unsettling.

It’s surely ten times worse now. Trump makes W look like a statesman, and we could at least plead that W didn’t win a majority and only became president because the system is stupid.

Are you for real? Is this seriously a good faith argument? My man, you may be a true believer, and that is no compliment. Course correct. Try to steelman a bit.

Under US first amendment rights, it's actually sometimes legal.

For example, "Watts v. United States" established that if an anti-draft speaker tells a crowd "If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ" that's political hyperbole.

So if a crowd were to set up a guillotine outside congress and chant "hang mike pence" it's not necessarily illegal.

Saying “I think this person should be killed” is legally free speech.

Love it! Well, I hate that this situation exists, but the metaphor is great.

This is hard to overstate. Checkout Jonathan Haidts research into social medias role in skyrocketing mental health problems in kids over the past decade.

The junkfood comparison is great. It feels good now but makes you extremely unhealthy long term. Its deceptive because it doesnt look that bad, but it displaces things that you actually need to be healthy.

I actually feel really good when people expect me to be on social media and I tell them Im not.

Kind of similar to the feeling when I say that I quit cigarettes. Im still surprised by it and talking about it makes me feel very blessed to be free of it.

Here's to dang! Even when you do things I might not agree with if I knew about them, this is a place where interesting things can be shared and found without all the blah-blah.

Whose morals? What morals?

I understand that some people find it reassuring to receive a constant stream of recruiter inquiries, but from what I hear these messages are mostly low-effort, shotgun-blast attempts to fill undesirable positions, so I don't feel like I am missing out.

It seems to be mainly European neoliberals that are more upset about Trump.

No, I'm not. I'm making a statement about a particular claim: that Reddit is overwhelmed with leftist death threats.

I said nothing about r/pics being apolitical, and I'm not taking a stance in this comment chain about whether I think r/pics should or should not be apolitical. That's a different claim, and you're moving the goalposts.

No, as evidenced by the "Politics" flair. (But also no, the rules of the sub do not forbid political images.)

> Does it tend to feature current events and is that lineup just proportional to the magnitude of what's happening right now?

Yep.

I love that guy! He generally makes the rounds as a guest on most of the large podcasts and I’d recommend anyone listen to at least one podcast where he’s a guest.

Unironically, my friends, family and colleagues. If anything truly important happens that ends up being relevant to me, the probability that one of them tells me is close to 100%. I don’t need the news or social media for that.

A lot of submissions are flagged every day. Some of them are well offtopic, repetitive or judged to be too biased or political and clearly if the site allowed all submissions it would break.

The act of curation is a form of censorship and while it is often justified, many posts about topical developments that have a technical/financial angle, perhaps even posted by technical/financial media or bloggers and featuring people who are well known in the technical/financial field appear to be getting flagged in ways that could appear to be politically motivated.

Pointless outrage over trivialities isn't good for us but when issues of genuine concern arise we shouldn't go out of our way to avoid them because they make us feel bad. We are supposed to feel bad when things are bad as it provokes us to action. The media/tech industry exploits our behavioral quirks to keep us engaged on their platforms but the fatique caused by the fire hose could numb us to real dangers. Disconnecting is very good for personal wellbeing but not to the point of dangerous ignorance.

I also had trouble with all the far right wingers who kept talking about civil war.

I might have a different threshold for hateful on the internets or I didn't look closely enough.

https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator

Or you didn't experience, or don't know what they are, what they think and what they want ; neither the aftermath.

1. HN is centralized, but not for-profit.

2. HN does not drive engagement, AFAIK

3. HN is not surveillance capitalism.

You haven't demonstrated how Usenet differs from HN, but since my question had a typo and omitted HN, I can see how that is confusing.

If you feel the need to defend the salute I would suggest digging into that.