Does anyone see a tipping point or an event that could in scale drive people from social media of Facebook, Twitter. By that I don't mean to a competitor.(perhaps a naive question)
Also, is there a common denominator among people here who have stopped using social media? I mean, other than self awareness, retrospective ect. which people here generally have more than the average population.
What was the "I need to reduce or stop looking at facebook so often moment?"
Mine was the fact that I became aware that I'm essentially a dog from Pavlovs experiment where instead of a bell I have a notification sound/buzz and instead of a biscuit I get a little dopamin shot.
Second was the trackers, especially as they got better and faster. I started feeling 'cheap', as I feel in reality when a merchant uses obviously exaggerated claims while acting as a friend to try to convince me to buy something. (Like last time I went to a car dealership, yuck)
Third is that the connection to people I care about, close family and friends, is much better served via private group messaging apps and news via HN and others.
I could possibly see the upcoming US Election causing a bit of an exodus from Social Media platforms as more people become drained by the fatiguing constant flow of extreme views from both sides (mind, I thought that last time).
I will say the big thing for me that made me put my mobile device down (of which I now barely use) was the sheer quantity of hours a day I was wasting away looking at it - this was being amplified by Covid. My thing was getting worked up by stupidity or hateful opinions on Twitter or Reddit (obviously the platforms helped out). The more I looked the more I got annoyed, seeking out arguments if you will. It wasn't until I just stepped back and realised that I'm seeking the opinions of a tiny tiny fraction of a global population that I realised how stupid it was. There are 7 billion people in the world, you can find any opinion you want - it's foolish to spend your day hunting these down and what's worse is that it starts to warp your own personal view away from who you really are. I think the catalyst was Covid for making me realise this, I think more people will start waking up to the same reality.
Wow, thank you! You nail down the issue with a very personal and relatable story.
I think only difference between you and I is that I never had a need to go into arguments over posts/tweets I considered wrong (I was a mazohist that just read them).
What 'got to me' was not the sheer untruthfulness of things shared on twitter nor insults that flow there and back, but the behavior of people that I think could and should know better.
Another lightbulb moment was the realization that any nuanced conversation after 5 to 10 comments goes into the extremes (usually two) that it can boiled down to. There are no different shades of gray, just black or white. In case of covid19, this changed to 3 comments.
Another lightbulb moment was the so called "twitter/facebook isn't real life" where I realized that in my surroundings I have a hard time finding a single person that has ever
participated in twitter ststorms or facebook comment fights.
I think there's a common missing perspective in this whole debate of social media. Sure, social media is addictive and is not easy to live in the modern world without it, but what if social media is not the only culprit today, and the decadence of real life shared spaces is also part of the problem? Everything is a product nowadays, and public spaces are treated like private spaces by local governments: "we don't want problems in our land" is the default attitude, even if unconsciously. They keep spending money on absurd events, but they never realize the social potential they have around. If streets are not actively promoted as the places where society should live, and we have social media pulling from the other side, what do we expect to happen?
As we have been living with it for a while, the poisoning effects of social media have become more obvious to more people, but if so many are already in social media and public spaces are half dead, it's not easy to escape. Though I actually believe we can use technology to revert this back. We can use technology to get people who is geographically close to interact with other people, in more local networks. It's not about driving people out from X, it's about giving them better spaces. We are not completely unaware of the poisoning, so we just need to offer people better alternatives. And even if local governments have no vision, we can educate them and build spaces on our own, even if the first ones need to be half-digital for the bootstrapping. I was working on something like this, and while I've had to stop for a while both for personal and global pandemic reasons (and the best ideas are still not clear to me and I'm still improving my skills on web development and other areas), I'll keep working on this kind of projects. People likes to be with people if they have a decent place to stay and something to interact around. And everyone has very different preferences, but it's just a matter of working on it.
Also, is there a common denominator among people here who have stopped using social media? I mean, other than self awareness, retrospective ect. which people here generally have more than the average population.
What was the "I need to reduce or stop looking at facebook so often moment?" Mine was the fact that I became aware that I'm essentially a dog from Pavlovs experiment where instead of a bell I have a notification sound/buzz and instead of a biscuit I get a little dopamin shot. Second was the trackers, especially as they got better and faster. I started feeling 'cheap', as I feel in reality when a merchant uses obviously exaggerated claims while acting as a friend to try to convince me to buy something. (Like last time I went to a car dealership, yuck) Third is that the connection to people I care about, close family and friends, is much better served via private group messaging apps and news via HN and others.