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Comment by mc3301 | Hacker News Reader

Youtube: There are a few long-form creators I watch, maybe 4 hours a month of content. Besides that, viewing history is off, no apps, browser extensions block mostly everything (comments, suggestions, etc.)

Instagram: I have a 15 minute daily timer, because I sometimes post, and I sometimes receive DMs.

Reddit: Fully blocked, I think I ublocked everything.

Tiktok: I won't even download it ever again. It has an algorithm like no other for sucking me in. Dangerously addictive.

Facebook? Deleted it completely around 2013, so no idea what's going on there.

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For those that are subscribed to Youtube channels: no need to have account. Youtube has RSS.

IMHO, the account is esp. useful for one thing: selecting explicitly which channels you want to block - if you do this over some time, then you see that YouTube content is by far not unlimited, acutally rather limited if you select only really interesting things for you :-))

How's the dating scene where you are? Whatever bubble I'm in, in the US, while I could not be on Instagram, that would be making things harder on myself.

No idea about the dating scene in central Japan; I'm not in it.

I’m curious what you mean by this. Most of the guys I know treat their Instagram accounts like their LinkedIn accounts: It has enough information and occasional updates with major life changes, but they don’t actively engage with it all the time. Just let it exist and respond to any messages if they come in. Would that work, or are you saying the dating scene in your area requires some type of active constant engagement with Instagram?

Some level of engagement with it, anyway. Only having one post from 7 years isn't going to do you want favors, but I'm not saying you need to be on it 97 hours a day either. But the younger crowd seems to favor that app as a first level of contact, and you can escalate (as welcome) from there.

If you steadfastly refuse to have one, it seems like it'd be the same as trying with job seeking without a LinkedIn. Which you can do, but it seems like making things harder than they need to be when things are already difficult.

I totally get this sentiment and I think it applies equally to the actual dating apps, these apps are all garbage fires that you don't really want in your life, but they do have utility if you want to date.

So an idea I've been thinking about lately, is that evolution didn't produce humans that were wired to date forever. These app publishers undoubtedly would prefer that you keep using their apps until you die, so they're happy to see you also keep dating until you die. But that shouldn't really be how things go and it's not how most of us are wired. Most humans throughout history went through a brief courtship period and then they settled down with someone, even if that person wasn't perfect.

The app has utility in that courtship period, but the activity itself is meant to be temporary, possibly even brief, and ultimately give way to something else. The app publisher has an incentive to make you forget that.

No, that really wouldn't.

Instagram is a tool to help women manage their fan club of orbiters and get validation from them on demand (which is what makes so addictive for women). It might look like "hey there's all these hot women here if i hang out here i will get dates with them" but that's the mirage.

Hmm in our community it's also a way to connect when you meet someone at parties, that doesn't expose too many details like your real name or phone number.

Yes men don't do none of that at all!

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