I've been weary of social media and its psychological (and social) toll for a long time. Despite the fact that I initially signed up for Facebook in 2006, my Facebook account has been deactivated for most of the 12 years that I've had it.

But about a year ago or two ago, I started using Twitter. I was really struck by how useful it is. I saw it more as a tool than as a platform for communication. I don't know if there's a more efficient way to stay up to date on the news, for exposure to a wide diversity of opinions, and to hear news before it even breaks on media outlets. (Don't anybody know of one?)

At the same time, I also have noticed recently that using the platform has really taken a toll on me. It's made me less attentive, less focused, more embittered, more eager to have strong, simplistic opinions, when I lack the understanding to warrant them. So I stopped using it for a few days, and I've really got to say, I'm stunned by how quickly and by how much staying off it has improved my mental well-being.

Has anyone else experimented with social media detox before? Despite the fact that it's increased my well-being, unfortunately, I may have to return to using it.

Twitter was the only one I ever really used (from late 2009 'til early 2016), by which I had gotten tired of all the "Trump this and Breitbart that" stuff everyone was posting.

Yet I don't think that stopping to use it really improved things that much, or if it had already multiplied my "stoopid hoomans!" misanthropy by a thousand, because I still get far more annoyed at ... everything ... than I did back in the day.

(And yet, I have no reason to go back to Twitter)

I used Facebook from about 2009 to 2011, Twitter for maybe a few months in 2012. Didn’t find them good or useful. They’re definitely not mentally healthy, and I don’t miss them at all. Never understood why you’d want whole websites full of nothing but YouTube comments... or why you’d want to know what your coworkers’ friends’ YouTube posts look like.

I use a few forums, that’s it. I don’t think most of them count as social media the way people normally think about it, but some probably do. I also use LinkedIn as a place to host my resume. I don’t participate on that platform otherwise, and although I catch glimpses of it every time I open the app, I can’t imagine what kind of deranged moron would associate their professional reputation with ****posting.

I wouldn't say that the problem is with the content of the news you want to read, but rather the medium, which has been hijacked by corporations in order to manipulate you.

To understand what I'm talking about, read this: https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3

I found the solution in my case was to avoid like the plague anything that is shown to you as an unbounded, potentially infinite feed, which trains you to continue keep scrolling to pull out more content. This is makes your brain want it more, even though it never converges to a happy stopping point. No wonder social media makes people unhappy.

Instead, I only browse currated or otherwise aggregated links to high quality content. The key is to make this a finite list, so that you never have to scroll past the first page. But the aggregated content is different every day, and if you miss a day you can always go back to yesterday's version of the page. Here is a list of sites that you can just check once or twice a day at regular times, and which also support going to arbitrary archival versions of the aggregated list so that you never worry about having missed anything.

Political press:
https://www.memeorandum.com

Literary editorials and essays: https://aldaily.com/

Technology press:
https://www.techmeme.com/

These last three all support arbitrary selection of archival versions of the page by date.

Hacker News broken up by date (all on one page, so it still has the scrolling pattern which I dislike, plus its uglier than the original HN page, but you could try it):

https://hckrnews.com/

Finally, anything that falls between the cracks in the way of big news usually ends up being discussed on the more liberal parts of Reddit and (yes) 4chan:

http://reddit.com/r/politics
http://boards.4chan.org/news

/politics is a well known liberal circle jerk full of low quality comments. I use it only to occasionally double check that I didn't miss something major, since they almost always upvote the most explosive anti-Trump content to the top in no time at all. But I don't really look at it very much at all since I don't care that much, and when I do I take it with a grain of salt, since the publications they link to are themselves champing at the bit to satiate the anti-Trump rage. Usually just reading the headline is enough, and then I switch to memeorandum.com and find the high quality, nob-clickbait version of the story from the hill.com or nytimes.com.

Finally, the 4chan board /news is suprisingly high quality, low volume, and free of memes. There are obnoxious pricks and offensive posts on there, but also a lot of insightful (if edgy) comments on there from more liberal posters. It's basically a forum.

4chan has liberal parts?

See my edit.

That board is more or less about tearing poltards a new one with devestating news about their savior. I've found it somewhat cathartic to see the alt right so thoroughly eviscerated there (when I still cared).

https://www.realclearworld.com/ isn't a bad news aggregator either.

I've thought that subscribing to email newsletters might be a good way to go. I've gotten the impression that newsletters have been enjoying a renaissance as of late. They may be also be helpful for getting a deep dive on niche issues that I care about. But Twitter is also good for hearing takes from knowledgeable people who don't have a public platform outside of Twitter (such as professors). I think for that there may be no replacement.

On 4chan /news: most of the comments on there right now in the three top political threads are full of trash comments, and the rest of the threads are about tabloid-level sensational crap. Lol, sorry.

Oh yeah, I get the nytimes daily briefing. But I don't read it for the most part, and the writing style makes me squirm at times at its clickbaity wonky geeky pretentiousness.

Okay, but the medium is the message, i.e., it's not that the posts aren't often great, but that it's Twitter the corporation that is probably giving you unease (if you buy the slot machine argument in the article in my original post).

Maybe if there were an external site that scraped and curated twitter into a sane format. You could search hacker news to see if somebody has done this (I am sure they've tried).

See, these corporations could give you better tools to separate the wheat from the memes, but they don't because their entire MO is to distract you in the first place.

Yeah, for sure. A part of the article that you posted which I found quite relatable was the bit about menus. It's definitely the case that the question "what's happening now and what are people saying about it?" has been transformed into "scroll mindlessly on Twitter for three minutes". It's pretty clear that the point of displaying the content in a newsfeed isn't to help you find something that you want or what you're looking for, but to keep you on it.

I think the thing that's getting to me most about Twitter has more to do with the social dimensions of it. Especially after the Peterson video we were talking about in the Trump thread, I began noticing that a lot of the behaviors the interviewer exhibited are visible all over Twitter -- especially summarizing arguments, so that they are as polarizing and outrageous as possible, no matter how much it distorts them. That is definitely an instance where the medium is the message: if you post a full-length NYT op-ed, and you want to rebut it in 140 characters, you can't qualify your criticism by acknowledging all of the points the writer made you actually agree with. All you care about is how many times it gets retweeted, and if you evoke an emotional response in your followers it's probably more likely the tweet will get some action. It doesn't matter if what's tweeted is a completely unwarranted criticism of the piece.

Also, yeah, there are a few people who I started following who've become Twitter celebrities since I started following. I've watched as they've adjusted their opinions as they've seen what gets retweets and likes, and what doesn't. And, yeah, their tweets only get more polarizing and less subtle as their base grows.

I thought I became completely inured to click bait headlines. I thought that that was just how the internet is now, and that my mind had become permanently accustomed to them because they're so prevalent. Then I stopped using Twitter for three days, went to Vox.com, and started to feel grossed out. I'm glad I can find them repelling again!

I almost would suggest emailing the people you care about hearing from and asking to be put on some kind of mailing list, but the sad thing is that Twitter and other forms of so-called social media have mostly sucked dry those "old-fashioned" forms of correspondence.

OTOH you could just start a newsgroup yourself instead of emailing the person and asking them to keep you up to date, and hope that you pull in the relevant people around the point of discussion. But nope! Those days are gone too, and Usenet is a zombie spam farm (thanks Google), and its successor, Reddit, is full of people who just spout off whatever bull**** they can circle jerk over (this is a result of voting being central, a huge mistake in my opinion, and something that 4chan gets right by not having).

That leaves us with web forums. No scrolling, no voting, better than email even in some ways (but clunkier overall). So if you can't get people the people you care about hearing from to author their content in the form of emails or newsgroup posts, the best you can do might simply be to find people like yourself and observe them from the outside through the modern approximation of a mailing list, i.e., the web forum.

The only thing that remains is to write a tool to convert Twitter posts into a sane format. Here's a start, which takes sequences of Twitter posts and merges them.

https://threadreaderapp.com/

Re: listening to professors who have no other platform, maybe that is an actual social problem that social media can solve, and much better than current solutions. Maybe there should be a closely moderated social media site where professors and other recognized experts can post information from their field of expertise, and only their field of expertise, and interact with interested laypeople. A sort of dispassionate and informed alternative to the mainstream media crossed with scientific advocacy.

Would anybody actually use that **** though?

I think stackexchange.com (and its precursors, stackoverflow.com and mathoverflow.net) fulfill that niche for technical discussion where the fundamental unit of discussion is a question.

For everything else? Blogs. E.g., https://lawfareblog.com/

And actually, perhaps the comment section of good podcasts (Youtube is the adulterated, corporate version of this that only kids can't see anything wrong with).

Is IRC still widely used outside of technical niches? I wonder what people are using now. Discord? Might also be something to consider, but in my experience most IRC conversations are idiotic (or at the very least, chaotic).

I would. I really wish something like that existed (not as much for scientific research as for history/international relations). I'd be curious to see how any kind of curated social network would work.

Edit: this seems like something Medium makes possible, even if it's content-agnostic and not a curated space.

You follow any other good blogs these days? A while back I peeked at some of Ezra Klein's old blogs from the mid-2000s, and it made me feel nostalgic for a medium that I missed entirely. I think there was something really special happening back then.

Stack Exchange is deeply flawed.

For one thing, the Q&A centric format isn’t a good starting point for intelligent discussion because, yes, there is in fact such a thing as a stupid question. And the best questions, the ones that will produce the most insightful commentary and educate the public, are the very questions that experts are themselves toiling to solve. The greatest public service that experts and academics can provide isn’t answering our questions, it’s telling us what they think is important and why, and increasingly the media is taking that role away from them.

But the far bigger problem is that public moderation and reputation systems are trivially gamed. Stack Exchange user moderation is dominated by cliques who gang up to downvote, close, or remove posts that any one of them dislikes. The site may as well be staff-moderated, for as powerful, capricious and unaccountable the user groups have become there. And like any other social media site with likes and upvotes and whatever else, the reach of your voice on Stack Exchange has nothing at all to do with whether you’re correct or an authority with something valuable to say, and everything to do with how many unqualified idiots wish you’re right.

People are using Facebook Messenger. Everything else is in a niche. I think Discord is what gamers are using, Slack was where a lot of software people were a couple of years ago. Offices have a bunch of choices: Office Communicator, self-hosted Jabber, HipChat, Slack, Cisco’s irredeemable garbage (whatever they’ve branded it this week).

I don’t know who’s still broadly using IRC - I think maybe Twitch chat is based on it?

Content agnostic is what such a service should avoid, I think. Having expert voices float to the top is important, but it’s also important to recognize that expertise is necessarily narrow.

I guess it’s not so much a question of whether you’d use it, as whether you think experts would contribute, or whether you think people would be fine with a system that almost-literally makes peoples’ voices louder if they have a TLA.

Is there any centralized medium of discourse on the web, then, that doesn't suck? Or is it just the long tail of smaller forums, and ultimately people, who we should be directly addressing?

I mean, I guess it wouldn't be terrible if at the end of the day the conclusion of this thread was that it's not necessary to reach a large audience to have something valuable to contribute. Of course, finding out who these experts truly are has always been a non-trivial task (it's called research!), and one that mostly requires not more social activity, but instead the opposite: radio silence while either party goes about his/her research, and getting back to the others in a very specific context. But this is the exact opposite of what you would want if your revenue model is to increase traffic. Social media is the television of the internet. You can make fun of cord cutting cliches, but perhaps it's not a good thing that more people are being herded online for dubious reasons on the part of both parties.

There has to be a middle ground, though. But I don't see one becoming a big deal if we don't shed the present advertising model of the big social media companies. They are poisonous.

Reddit feels close in a lot of ways. Metafilter and other 2000-era sites are closer, but there is too much chatter to make it worth spending time on. Of course, you also have to realize that at the end of the day, most people use the web for entertainment purposes. So maybe when people are talking about something specific, whether it be mathematics or computer games, they are using the medium at its best.

In fact I think mailing lists are still the best, but when was the last time you saw a new interest group founded around one of those? I think today you'd more likely see more social activity around Meetup or Facebook groups.

Also, for what it's worth, check out hacker news. Unfortunately it's very limited in its worldview and demographic, and there is a ton of pretentious bull****, but there is a ton of interesting, often quite obscure and insightful content if you read through the different comment threads. I've also seen some interesting Google+ threads, but the site is basically unusable (and nobody who isn't two degrees of separation from a Google employee uses it anyway).

Actually, Hacker News is approximately this, but the moderation is done by commenters, and the topics and vibe of the site is rather skewed in a certain direction. Also, the site is structured around links, which creates a certain amount of anxiety, hype, and spamminess.

But if you were a professor who had a strong opinion about a topic that happened to come up in a discussion, and it looks like you have something incisive to say, there's a good chance you'll be upvoted to the top, or somewhere close.

Finally, maybe this is a good idea: instead of consuming media, why not write it? Start a blog and hope that Hacker News or Reddit vote it up to the front page.

The surest way to find an expert opinion on a topic you care about is to write something sort of right but flawed enough to get Jon`C (or someone else) to take the time to explain why you are wrong.

Have you tried Reddit?

Subscribe to the New Yorker. Then talk about it on metafilter.

For example, there's a discussion of a New Yorker article already on the front page:

https://www.metafilter.com/172031/Assume-any-link-is-NSFW

Other sources of articles include the aldaily.com site I linked to earlier, which curates links to essays of the kind you'll find in the New Yorker.

So the process is: writer has a good idea for an essay -> the New Yorker or some other publisher picks it up -> either you read it as a subscriber to that particular publication, or a curator on (say) aldaily.com links to it -> people then submit the same link to hacker news or metafilter after seeing it there -> it finally trickles down to smaller forums like this one after someone like me sees it on hacker news.

So at the end of the day i guess I'm just a cuck feeding out of the trough provided to be by the elite liberal inteligencia.

Actually, if you think about it, this sort of makes something clear: there are two choices of top down mechanism for receiving insight: from the educated elite, like in the pipeline I just described, or through the corporate harvesting of the ignorant masses (television redux: see Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death). So in this sense, social media is inherently a right wing medium: it is most enjoyed by those who are okay with overcoming the role of experts in society by DDOSing the people's field of view with material that doesn't need them: memes, stupid jokes, antagonism, you name it. And just witness the fact that when left wing people use social media, they simply wind up unhappy: and no wonder, of the medium itself is biased against them.

In fact, this reminds me of an article I read in a hacker news comment: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-02-13/how-america-lost-faith-expertise

In fact, I also got that article by Tristan Harris from hacker news. As well as the Neil Postman book, which is a favorite of Alan Kay's (Kay and Postman are / were mutual fans of Marshall McLuhan, who I've mentioned twice in this thread, and Postman was McLuhan's student), and Kay is basically a saint on hacker news.

So your four choices are:

1. Consume corporate media (television or social),

a. without shame: be an ignorant boob and just enjoy the ****posting, or

b. fail to realize that only right wingers are happy on this medium and cringe every day.

2. Rather than feed at the corporate trough, feed at the elite liberal one, and either subscribe to their publications / read their digest newsletters / read curated links to them, or indirectly as it trickles down to the smaller communities, from metafilter all the way to this one.

3. Physically go to a place where expertise is produced, and participate (this is what universities provide).

There remains the question of the long tail of personalized, intellectually focused aggregation of smaller sources, like a lone professor who occasionally blogs. This is a huge gap left uncovered by both by the liberal (academic) and corporate (social) forms of top down media I proposed.

Reddit doesn't cover it: it's just a diluted version of metafilter or hacker news, and is focused on links and stupid ass comments layered on top. Blogs aggregated by RSS are what should have facilitated what I'm talking about here: a decentralized mechanism to aggregate a long tail of personalized, low-traffic writing (and which is unidirectional: comments are notably missing from RSS).

But twitter has replaced RSS. Instead of subscribing to a ring of fellow bloggers, people are retweeting. Which is fine in principle. The problem is that you can't trust Twitter not to subvert these qualities in the name of growth, which they have. Also it's stupid that people are using the medium to have entire discussions inside of tweets. The fact that this happens is already a sign that something is very, very wrong with the medium.

For the time being, the best substitute for RSS and blogs is sites like hacker news, where the comments lie somewhere between blog posts unto themselves, and more intelligent twitter conversations (longer, but still mostly serving to syndicate other content, but now with adequate room for explanation).

Incidentally, this turn of events makes a lot of sense when you think about what Kay's Personal Dynamic Media vision for personal computing was meant to be. Essentially what we have is the confluence of a corporate media deregulation and a crippled version of what personal computing should have been (Berners Lee's World Wide Web was never good enough to replace offline personal computing, and meanwhile the web was infused with a large influx of capital as it took off as an e-commerce platform, all the while firewalls were causing further centralization), and it is being salvaged for profit and entertainment (see Postman) for television audiences.

Actually, immersive games (and not to mention decentralized forums forming communities for building worlds within them) are probably much better realizations of what computing can offer in the way of opening up meaningful new experiences than what the web became. Barring that I think you are going to need to begin learning about real life magic and starting your own cult in order to get the same kind of feeling.

Does LinkedIn even ****ing work for getting employment for professions that require at least a degree? It seems more like an checklist appeasement for HR and not actually finding a job. Sooner and later you might have to have one because REASONS.

It should be abandoned because if it doesn't help you, at best, get laid it's not worth having around.

I get contacted by enough software recruiters on LinkedIn to believe that it must work for somebody, although I’ve never responded positively to any of them.

Didn't somebody here once say this is what they used it for?

lmao

That was me! Because I remain so unconvinced that LinkedIn helps professionally that at least you can see if that person who popped in your head at 2 in the morning is still bangable when viewing a best-case-scenario, tidied-up, phone screen backlit profile pic that has to be a basis to their "professional identity".

Aside from the fact that LinkedIn tells you when and who’s been creeping on you

I know (given that I receive those emails too) so I don’t actually do that. It’s just a roundabout way of saying that site seems like a waste of time.

I also get random people from China.