The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

Before its fall, I had over 700 followers on Twitter. I could post any random thought and within minutes be having an interesting conversation with some rando about it. For example I pondered why phone manufacturers didn't use a p2p protocol for distributing updates and had an enlightening conversation with a person who worked for a major telco chiming in as to why that would be problematic for their infrastructure.

This was my biggest source of joy on the modern internet.

When the walls fell and everybody left, I dropped 200 followers to 500 but by X's own metrics no one sees my tweets. I would estimate between 13 and 20 is my average view count. When I do post, I am lucky a single person interacts, and it is almost always someone I know in the real world.

I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens. I don't think the market is there anymore for "dude that ponders technology questions". I tweet like it's 2010 and no one cares anymore.

This was the death of social media for me. This was the last place I was really "social" on the internet and it died.

Genuinely this has had a very negative effect on me, the only somewhat of a silver lining is that I now have these conversations with ChatGPT. It's not as much fun though.

Instagram is just brainrot these days. I'd used it for years to post my absolute best photos as a sort of curated gallery. No one cares anymore. Nothing I post ever gets seen. Why bother.

That sums up my general opinion of all social media these days, why bother.

Probably at some point soon social media companies will recognise this and provide everyone with very nearly human-like bots that engage happily with your content. This will probably be even more addictive than their previous products.

That is totally coming, facebook is already winding up for it. It's also enormously dystopian and kind of pathetic.

My sense is that Twitter’s fall was an opportunity for a lot of people to just drop out. I know for me it’s become a very occasional thing and neither Bluesky nor Mastodon ever achieved critical mass. As far as I’m concerned the format is largely done.

Never engaged with the political stuff.

Imagine the anti social network a billion people talking to the pigfeed robot. What a hellscape, what deformed characters ..

Ditto. 100%. Touché

This has been my experience as well. I was a heavy lurker during peak Twitter phase, but I still got lots of value from it.

I tried posting about tech and stuff and there’s absolute silence. No one cares anymore as if there are only tumbleweeds out there.

I logged out of all my social media accounts (except HN) and moved them to hidden apps category. As a result I managed to read 3 lovely books and finished my side project ever since.

Theres a boom and bust cycle that social media platforms seem to go through. Build something nice for socializing. Add ad breaks to the socializing. Replace content you want with content that can only be described as political / informatiom warefare.

people move to new platform that is nice for socializing. The cycle begins anew.

I for one dont have the energy for it anymore. Im done. Im burnt out. If it isnt a real human in front of me it can fuck off and burn in hell. I make an exception for hacker news, because it doesnt seem trashed to shit by bots astroturfing just about every post to sway public opinion, but the moment it starts I will unplug from the public net for good, and nothing of value will be lost.

Because twitter has been gutted, its history the information sector equivallent of vulture capitalism. Take platform, gut its credibility and audience for some end goal (e.g. buying an election, redefining the truth in the minds of many) and leave a smouldering corpse behind.

Twitter is dead, and its grave is marked with nothing more than an X.

I think Substack fills that gap for me. If you haven't already explored it then by the sounds of it I think you'd like it.

It functions more as a platform for blogs, but if you use the app there are blog-specific group chats, you can follow people, and the home page contains 'notes' that are pretty tweet-like in format. Once you have a collection of say 15-20 blogs that your subscribed to I found that the notes I got recommended were quite good and could spark some interesting conversations.

A few tech related ones I like are The Pragmatic Engineer, ByteByteGo, Bad Software Advice, and Exponential View.

This sycophant-as-a-service feature is already close to the way the major LLMs currently work. Discuss any moderately controversial topic with them, and they'll lean into your opinion within a couple of comments.

> Genuinely this has had a very negative effect on me

I think that's an issue. I totally see why you were negatively impacted but I think we tend to forget it is not real life and in 99% of cases not important conversations/debates we are having with random people on the internet - they could be fun to have (or not) but important they are not. We treat social media popularity as if it is part of our identity, as if its almost as important as actual family and friends - and it really isn't.

>I don't think the market is there anymore for "dude that ponders technology questions".

What do you mean? Aren't you looking at it right now?

> I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens.

I've been on Bluesky for a few months.

Around 300 followers, mostly generic female names being caricatures of progressive or traditional values, often "looking for true love".

I can post almost anything I want and no one reacts.

I downgraded my Instagram from curated feed of "interesting" things to just basically a journal of my travels and hobbies. Just less stressful this way.

All the interesting conversations, all the aha moments are now gone and buried behind the walled garden

Once in a while we’ll see screenshots of these insightful tweets but they’ll be lost forever, like tears in the rain.

And you all made place for guys like me; I don’t get booed away by 90% of the users anymore when engaging in discussion, more often I get an actual discussion out of it. Before that it was just a highly toxic “noo my opinion is the right one and I’m rigid on that and you’re an idiot” ambience.

Funny how things shift like that. Also never engaged with political stuff.

I have the complete opposite experience. I now get the aha moments I got from reddit before its private api downfall. I get actual discussions. There’s an equal split between opinions.

I think the difference here is that you were already “in” it, and it changed. I wasn’t “in” it because I hated the vibe and fakeness and just denying of my experience, but now I get the opportunity to join in a “resetting” environment. It’s refreshing and just way more real.

I blocked a few political accounts at the start and now I don’t see that at all btw

Whatever works for you personally I find there is no longer a critical mass of professional peers to engage with so I’ve mostly reluctantly just dropped it.

That era of Twitter where you could toss out a random thought and instantly end up in a rabbit hole with strangers who knew stuff...

It’s funny, because I took the suggestion and went thru the substack sign up process (which wanted email, phone number, contacts, and interests.. not exactly lightweight).

The first thing they show you is a feed, a never ending scroller.

I don’t get an intro to any channel - it seems like Twitter for writers. Half the stuff I subscribed to (you can’t peek in the onboarding) was absolutely written by ChatGPT, emoji headers and all.

I’m sure there’s interesting stuff happening on there, but it’s a scroller just like Reddit, and it’s pretty disappointing how much apps like these don’t respect a single user need - only the needs of the platform to engage engage engage.

Also holy shit, there’s no option to not send emails - only “prefer push”. You can’t turn it off. There’s zero respect for users, their inboxes, or their attention here whatsoever.

That was the era before bots and normies made up the majority of the accounts, and before social media was weaponized.

It was the same for reddit, and honestly even 4chan in the early 2000s.

Hacker news kinda fills that gap now.

Just came by to admire that last line.

The irony of the toxicity of your comments to ghaff is amazing. You know nothing about him, but made him the villain in your story.

Try Lemmy, not sure about the whole "followers" count but you can do exactly what you've described on Lemmy today on any topical community or AskLemmy to get you started. You can ask or start basically any kind of conversation you want and gets very decent engagement

Oh those not accounts are everywhere, I get them on X too.

> For example I pondered why phone manufacturers didn't use a p2p protocol for distributing updates and had an enlightening conversation with a person who worked for a major telco chiming in as to why that would be problematic for their infrastructure. > … > I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens. I don't think the market is there anymore for "dude that ponders technology questions". I tweet like it's 2010 and no one cares anymore.

So, you miss having access to experts in fields you’re a layman to. That makes sense.

I wonder though if the experts miss your random guesses about their work? If they miss the compulsion to correct your assumptions before misinformation takes hold?

> My sense is that Twitter’s fall was an opportunity for a lot of people to just drop out.

Yeah, that was the case for me. I used Twitter quite a bit from about 2012 through 2020, but I was already phasing it out when the takeover happened, so it was an easy call to just close my account. While I do have an IG and Bsky account, I rarely use them. So Twitter's death basically meant the end of my mainstream social media usage.

Everything you’ve described is exactly what forums are for.

We didn’t need social media, we had everything we needed with the old PHP forums

Even better, Usenet, which is what the web-based forums were a poor replacement for.

Agreed. I think one of the big problems with current social media is that they are person-focused instead of topic-focused. This is backwards. This means if I want to follow a cool woodworker because I like their woodworking, I also see their other hobbies, or their political trash, or whatever. Topic-based forums are much better suited for what I actually want--discussions around woodworking. Forums are also self-limiting in size. If a single thread gets too active for people to follow, it makes sense to split off into separate threads, which keeps community sizes reasonable.

I've been a member of one of the internet's longer-running web forums for two decades, and nothing I've seen from the big social media corps comes close to providing the same level of usability and community health.

> Instagram is just brainrot these days.

PixelFed reminds me a bit of the old Instagram. Not many users, but people are there to post their pictures. You kinda have to rely on tags and trending content to find accounts/content, but that's not always a bad thing.

Same. Thanks Elon!

It wasn't without consequences though. I'd made some IRL connections through twitter that I thought would last for years - they migrated to bluesky and IG but I didn't. Suddenly they were not interested in speaking with me.

Lose your clout, don't be surprised if you get shunned by the clout obsessed.

Happens all the time in Lemmy

Thats funny, I have had a substack account for a couple years and haven't seen this infinite feed. It seems like LiveJournal 2.0 the way I use it.

I agree that required post emails is user hostile, but trivially mitigated with email filters. From substack -> trash [omit any you want]

Yeah I cut it by accident during the pandemic. It already sucked then - person you follow liked this is what did me in. Elon just finished it off.

I suspended my account, without realising if I left it for n days it would be deleted. Went back one day and there was someone else with my handle. Actually felt relieved as the whole thing was gone. Didn’t get a chance to worry about an archive.

Even forums eventually die out.

I've used both Usenet and web-based forums side by side in the 90s–2000s and I thought they were both perfectly adequate.

Can you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or aggressive comments to HN? We already asked you to stop and you've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> When the walls fell and everybody left, I dropped 200 followers to 500 but by X's own metrics no one sees my tweets

> I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens

So we all agree that follower count != engagement. You pointed that out in the first quote. It's a trueism we all claim to understand. But then you immediately jump to low followers on Mastodon or Bluesky being equivalent to low engagement, when that isn't necessarily the case.

I didn't mean to correlate the guy I'm replying to with the people I was describing, and I apologize if it seemed that way.

What does "ghaff" mean? I can't find a definition. I'm not a native English person.

I started using Twitter in 2007 and eventually got up to around 1400 followers. Indeed, it was amazing for a while, and I had many experiences that were only possible due to my connecting with many people on there. Unfortunately it had been getting worse and worse, even before it was taken over and renamed and so on.

Fortunately, Mastodon has completely taken its place for me, and it actually affords me a good degree of agency over what I see. It's a linear feed of posts by the people I follow, with comprehensive filtering (and even better, people voluntarily put content warnings on their posts about potentially-difficult topics). It's actually pretty badass, even if it isn't perfect.

You can certainly keep having cool conversations with people on Mastodon, like the good old days of Twitter. That's all I do. I follow people who post about neat stuff, and they follow me cuz I post about stuff I (and apparently they) find interesting. Just people hanging out, basically. You don't need to worry about growing an audience or whatever (though I'm sure you already knew that heh :))

Yeah, every single forum I ever regularly posted on is long gone. Some moved to Facebook, which, well, I ain't using that shit. Sad times :\

Some people I seriously admired followed me on there (maybe they still do, I don't use it now), like legendary game devs, authors, musicians... and I could have candid conversations/exchanges with them. That was awesome. I'll forever appreciate the awesome moments, conversations and even opportunities that arose from that site. :)

I do it literallly all the time