A world that's designed to make you sad and angry | Hacker News Reader

A world that's designed to make you sad and angry

paramsingh.github.io

I deleted my Facebook account years ago. I stayed with Instagram and Twitter, thinking I could just follow people in tech or other interesting people that would expose me to interesting news, etc, but I always found myself getting sucked back in to political news and other negativity. There is so much negativity on Twitter. It feels like the one-liners cause more contention because we can just make a quip about the other tribe - take that! - and receive quick praise from our tribe. I can sincerely say that not visiting Twitter or Instagram anymore makes me happier. I never gained much of value from it, at least not anything I can't find elsewhere.

I tried to do the same in Twitter but you can never avoid the politics/anger. Even if you follow just subject experts, some of them will tweet things unrelated to their expertise, or retweet something political.

Yes, almost as if political issues affect everyone, you included. What a shame there aren’t more “apolitical” tech drones out there willing to go silently along with the status quo. Please, tell me more about fucking micro services or whatever.

Its getting harder to be online without facebook. I have no account, and the last few years I see more and more places requiring an account to get anywhere.

Mom and pop stores publish their opening hours on facebook, semi governemental entities requiring facebook to enter their site, etc...

The only social media I have is twitter. I have had it since 2014 but I have never tweeted anything.

I think I follow 15 people right now and for me it is perfect. I will sometimes try to add new people but the moment someone posts something political or if they pass a threshold for posting too much useless content I instantly block them. I also don't follow anyone I know personally and can just txt them.

For me, my twitter feed is a phenomenal resource and an absolutely life positive thing. The problem though is the whole platform would collapse if everyone used it as I use it.

I never really got into Twitter or Instagram because I felt like they're both about advertising yourself to the world. Twitter with advertising your ideas and Instagram with your photos.

As for Facebook, I never deleted it since I use messenger all the time to plan things with friends and family. But I never visit Facebook the website. I just don't visit it.

You can deactivate your Facebook account and still use Messenger. Of course, if you're not logging into Facebook itself at all, I guess there's not much need to.

I can easily guess that the author and most of the commenters here are from USA. The reason is, to my experience, in "governmentally undeveloped/developing countries"[1] like USA, Russia, Turkey and China, news mostly consist of bad things. However that's not necessarily true for some European countries, especially Northern Europe.

I live in Estonia and most of the news here bear positive news, since we have proper social government and a good social justice here. For an example you can go to https://news.err.ee (English, although less news) and see for yourself. One other thing that are in these countries is that the top news are about politics, entertainment and sports and does not include much culture value.

In a distant past news could be good or bad, but now (in many countries) it feels like it's usually either bad or distraction.

[1]: I just made that up, sorry.

> I’m gonna stop reading the news, it’s too much stress for me.

While in college, I read the newspaper each and every day, cover to cover... from 100 years ago. (Microfiche... those were the days.)

Anyway, I found that all the same issues (drugs, abortion, corruption, race relations, etc) were discussed. With the same arguments on both sides.

It gave me a lot of perspective that my contemporaries didn’t have.

Highly recommend it.

Whoa that's really interesting & something I might try. Where'd you find these newspapers?

At the library. Microfiche. I'd get a bagel and coffee, walk across courtyard to the library, and read through that days paper (100 years back.)

Very depressing comparing the news then to now... if there was a bill at issue, the text of the bill would be included in full. The grammar was perfect. Few typos. Vocabulary was rich. In short, it was well-written and edited. There is nothing like it ... anywhere ... any more.

Sorry I assumed Microfiche was some German word for nostalgia or something similar LOL. I'm not sure how accessible microforms would be to me today but I'm sure I can find general archives somewhere.

Thanks for sharing!

Lapham’s Quarterly is good for this too: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/

These companies have such breathtaking contempt for human beings. Mind you that's not that unusual for business.

I completely agree with you on almost all points (I don't have a social media account either for the exact reasons you mentioned; dropped all of them like a hot potato when I read some of those social media experiment papers) except for this:

> I’m gonna stop reading the news, it’s too much stress for me.

This I feel is actively dangerous. You _need_ to know what is going on out there. While I agree that most of the news counts as opinion (and is marked as such sometimes), you need to develop a skill which parses through the fluff and take just the facts into account. This might not be easy, but it is worth it.

I'm not that good at articulating why I think a lot of what's news these days seems mostly irrelevant to me, but I was very influenced by Aaron Swartz's blog post [0] about how reading the news is a waste of time very often.

[0]: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

Nah, me reading the news is part of a two way transaction. If I have a "duty" to be informed by reading the news, the news had a "duty" to be high quality and not be in the current state it is now. Most of the news anyways is of things happening on the other side of the world which I can't influence or change. I think if people focused more on their local issues and tried to fix their local communities, that would be much more productive.

IMO the saturation of ads in traditional media / means dwarfs the scale of the current majors of social media. Not that I wish this to be a minimalization of their role of despair in modern society.

But the current standards of beauty, happiness, and success are a product of decades of tailoring by the traditional ad media and the businesses that use them to sell their kewpie dolls.

Needing things is central to producing consumer demand, and therefore drives GDP and the economy.

I only use Twitter and only follow a handful of researchers, not many of them are friends or coworkers. I also occasionally mute or unfollow people who share venomous content, no matter whether it's right, left, or center-leaning. I also don't consume too much news. Just a quick glance at the headlines and stay away from comments which are mostly hate-filled and idiotic.

Anybody remembers the tv series Columbo? Maybe this explains why he was always snooping around in beautiful mansions.

I had high hopes for WT Social (Wikimedia's news & social networking website), but from my experience it doesn't work really well (yet). The concept looked good, though. They claim to have solved the issues (by design) mentioned in the article.

It seems that the WT Social app hasn't been working for almost a year (according to Google Play Store reviews). I'm curious and will look further on their website. Thanks for making me aware.

I've decided to host a Mastodon instance for usage among my friend circle. I'm hoping that that brings down the negativity a fair bit.

Very short, but I can appreciate a succinct and no-nonsense blog post.

Thank you!

i frankly cant live without social media, so i just try to balance my feed so i can see both side's bullshit

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