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Comment by mastazi | Hacker News Reader

For me the greatest improvement came from stopping using Twitter and Reddit rather than Facebook or Instagram (I quit using all four within the last year, Youtube is the only social media service that I'm still regularly consuming, I'd like to quit that too), of course this is based on my personal situation and the way I personally use all of those media. In my specific case I have the impression that Twitter and Reddit are somehow more addictive and they used to have the largest detrimental impact on my mental health. With Facebook, that impact is moderate and with Instagram I would say almost non existent.

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Same here. At least in Facebook you mostly communicate with people you've chosen to accept as friends, and know who they really are.

Reddit and Twitter on the other hand show all the bad sides of anonymity to the fullest. Way too much blind tribalism and conflict seeking, few adults actually capable of real discussion. So it's not only a waste of time, but one that gives you a bad mood as well.

The echo chamber is real. I went cold turkey on Twitter after using it for 10 years and gaining about 6k followers.

Twitter was the #1 source of left-wing extremist noise in my life. I'm sure there were/are right-wing extremists on that platform too, but one seemed to appear in my algorithmic feed more than the other. Or perhaps it was confirmation bias. Who knows!

Good riddance.

Both side's on it. In fact there's no sides. Just that Twitter is competent at removing constructive elements and distilling hatred/rage/anger for profit and it's working against you.

There are few ways to strip out some of their 10-year "improvement" and oh how deserted it looks under there...

I don't have any numbers to back this up, but I'm quite convinced certain subcultures are overrepresented on Twitter, and that while Twitter is open to all, that doesn't mean it's a representative cross-section of the general population.

I think this is true of most social networks, and is more obvious in certain cases, e.g., Tumblr.

It's pretty notable on the left - for example, tankies, who are almost nonexistant irl, flood that website.

The internet attracts people who are marginalized in meatspace. Queer people and neonazis are both marginalized.

Message to the shareholders: "Millions of active users, billions of messages"

The truth: most of those messages are angry and argumentative, and most of those "active users" are just the same people being angry and tribal towards each other.

It makes for good stats, but like all stats, they're just numbers if presented without the context and analysis behind them.

It makes for good stats and it makes revenues. For those angered victims they would express sympathy if that's what you are going to ask for I guess...? My fear is this is going to destroy the society in a decade or two but then not many company survive that long so in financial risktaking standpoint this can't be significant.

Both sides are indeed on Ttwitter but it feels like it has a strong skew to the left. And as Time Pool discussed on Joe Rogan, the platform itself censors right wing opinion far more than left wing opinion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbTXqrS9l5E

There are more than two sides.

I actually like Reddit for this. Not being locked in the same circle with the same baby pictures etc.

Of course it depends a lot which subreddits you use. Some are toxic. The more technically oriented ones are fine in my experience.

People on Hacker News, by and large, don't seem to grasp the concept of using Twitter for things other than having debates/arguments. The criticisms of it here typically boil down to it not being a good platform for discussion, when in reality, that's just not the point of Twitter!

Most people are using Twitter for the memes, the (often educational) content, the news, and direct messaging. The average person is probably not there to look for people to have a long form discussion with, especially if that person is a stranger who is trying to argue with them.

I never understood the value of Twitter. It looked to me like a few people machine gun blasting personal details to the world. Why anybody would do that or even read it was bizarre to me. I guess some people just crave attention.

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