Hacker News Reader

Comment by core-questions | Hacker News Reader

Sure, why not? I quit Facebook et al. years ago. The only place I still post is here, for a little catharsis; but overall I don't miss it much. Maybe you mean a full exit, not using the Internet at all even for information purposes; but there's no reason to be so drastic. Just exercise self control and become read-only, for the most part.

I am more in contact with the people I care about now. Voice calls and texts are so much more direct and personal; you become involved in people's lives, rather than perfecting the art of exchanging the role of being the bystander.

What are you so scared you're going to miss out on?

View on HN

i mean i agree -- for context, i've been in read-only mode aside from here for a bit now, but i wonder what the remaining venues for social interaction will be in our internet-dominated culture, especially post-covid.

even as i quit everything personal, it's still functionally the mode through which many of us now work. slack is social media, whether or not they or our employers would cop to that.

maybe i'm extra pessimistic, but it increasingly feels like the internet is also becoming a mandatory component of having a social life (i'm in my early 20s, grew up on this stuff, etc).

just can't shake the feeling that to recede from it could be futile, if only because it's becoming equivalent to receding from society itself. and the idea of not even having the option to is mildly uncomfortable.

> slack is social media

That is far fetched, but I don't know where do you work. I've got 2 slacks going at any point of time - work one is pretty tame and business only (our work culture is dry). The other one is for a developer community and I wouldn't call it "social media", but a community focused on certain topic.

> it increasingly feels like the internet is also becoming a mandatory component of having a social life

Everyone still has a phone number, right? Voice calls, SMS, just remind people you exist, have little chats here and there. Get together in person, plan it old school. People might even like it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com