I went down the same path starting about a decade ago with airplane mode, and deleting apps until my phone was so boring and rarely used I canceled my cell subscription about 8 years ago.
Have not carried a phone at all since. I rarely carry any electronics at all and exclusively use cash in person to make me mostly digitally invisible IRL.
Stopped using X and all big tech services. Google, Apple, Microsoft... even deleted my Facebook and Linkedin with thousands of connections. Github I have not used in years and will probably delete once I finish migrating repos to my self hosted git.
Other than email, Matrix, and online forums like this one, I pretty much just use a terminal, and will probably do those things in a terminal soon too as my locally hosted AI helps me rapidly write better CLI tooling.
Also exclusively use freely licensed open source software and self host almost everything I rely on, including AI.
I have never been happier or more productive in my entire life.
You are missing out on a lot. And I don't mean the social media apps, or any of that nonsense. Allow me to try and explain:
Maps: Knowing what's around me physically, up-to-date information, public transport routes, etc. I found some remote paths on CoMaps in the UK which I walked recently, without the aid of the app I would have not known about these.
AntennaPod: the wealth of information and interesting topics I've been exposed to via podcasts is hard to overstate.
Home Assistant: being able to control my home, optimise the energy usage, improve security.
AI: I can talk to an AI anywhere. Instantly upload a photo, for example I use this to identity plants.
None of these things try and draw my attention all the time - so they don't affect your focus. They are there when I need them, and then are in my pocket when I don't.
Not the OP, but we have limited attention bandwidth. For everything the person advocated we spend our attention currency on (additional podcast information, location information, etc.) we are removing it from something else. It’s not that any of that is bad per se, it’s that attention is a zero sum game and we should be cognizant of where we spend it.
> Maps: Knowing what's around me physically, up-to-date information, public transport routes, etc. I found some remote paths on CoMaps in the UK which I walked recently, without the aid of the app I would have not known about these.
And I do something often almost no human in the developed world ever does; I get lost. I wander a bit. I give myself a bit of extra time so I can try alternative routes and see if I figure it out and maybe see a new part of my city along the way.
I look up maps in advance and print those when going somewhere the first time on a tight schedule, but that is about it. For the most part I just actually know my city.
Also research on Taxi driver brains indicates regular reliance on a GPS makes you as much as 20% more likely to develop Alzheimer's.
Turns out not using parts of our brains ever is bad for them.
> AntennaPod: the wealth of information and interesting topics I've been exposed to via podcasts is hard to overstate.
When I want music on the go I take a small standalone Rockbox media player. Can handle podcasts or years of music no problem. No internet on the go needed.
> Home Assistant: being able to control my home, optimise the energy usage, improve security.
I love Home Assistant and I optimize and automate it when I am at home, so I do not need to away from home for short periods. For long periods, I check it from a laptop at a hotel once a day or so and that is plenty.
> AI: I can talk to an AI anywhere. Instantly upload a photo, for example I use this to identity plants.
I use a notebook. I write down things that interest me. I do not need instant answers to every question. That leads to endless answers we remember few of. Better to be intentional with research that we still think matters in a day. Most of the things will not matter in a day, but there is a note just in case.
I once had google glass full time so I was never a second away from information and screens. I had every wearable that existed.
I am thankful for now not being reliant on any of it to be happy and productive on the go. I like to use computers intentionally at fixed locations so I can walk away from them and have a forcing function to exercise other parts of my brain.
I think people discount a lot of the upsides of the parts they are trying to “optimize” out of life.
To your maps example, some of my best road trips are not “optimized” but take two lane roads that are out of the way. Some of my favorite trips involve coming across places we came across by sheer happenstance. I also think boredom is the cocoon of creativity. But we have all but eliminated it from our lives when we constantly have a screen within arms reach.
I agree with the GP that GPS has opened new possibilities: some modern bikepacking routes were designed around a GPS. For example, there is simply no paper map that would safely get you along the 2000 kilometers through remote desert of the Baja Divide. The trail is not always easily identifiable, and not having a line on a screen to follow risks straying away from sources of water or help in the event of breakdown.
With regard to "GPS brain", a way to avoid it is to do OSM mapping while one is out and about. Then you are forced to get your bearings in a way that activates those parts of your brain, and in most cases you could backtrack or do the journey a second time even if the phone map were unavailable.
I go back and forth. It's useful to maintain certain social connections, which I find harder to do as I'm getting older (weird to say that, I am on the young xennial side).
This is the issue that I run into. I got rid of my facebook, but still have an instagram (very curated, but I get to see and stay in touch with friend's nonsense).
So it is a little hard for me to let that go as everyone becomes more and more spread out in the world. It's a weird soft 'push' of information that I am able to keep up with and enjoy.
Still, I see the ugliness of The Attention Economy...
Almost all of it is nonsense. Ten years ago I was at a funeral where I found out the relatives were all on Facebook. I never saw the need till then so I signed up. Turned into a constant barrage of kids photos and someone standing in front of a statue while on vacation. But that's all gone away, rarely does anyone post, and I'm tempted to just delete the account cause now ask I see is nonsense reels and advertising.
I kinda wonder if politics is what has killed Facebook. Between my choice to block anybody who posts the boring team politics soundbyte of the day, and my unwillingness to post something that might invite that same kind of response ... I don't see much in my feed. And I bet that's true for a lot of other people.
But ... I do notice a lot number of people who just sit there watching reels. So FB is probably doing just fine.
Facebook declined even in countries that don't have high levels of political polarization. Younger generations in the West and new internet users in the developing world favoured platforms that were designed as mobile-first (Facebook, even with an app developed later, was not), since they rarely use computers. Connected with that change of interface was a preference for image posts, not long text, so Instagram and then TikTok overtook FB.
I notice you don't mention much about physical social interactions.
How do you meet new people and engage with your community if you don't have a phone or aren't using to use the corporate media apps? Is in person enough to get you by? Generally curious because not having a cellphone seems really hard or maybe that's just a misplaced anxiety on my part
Turns out all the methods humans used for the few hundred years before smartphones still work!
I met most of my friends at hackerspaces, board game nights, conferences, giving conference talks, parties, bars, etc. Put yourself out there in spaces where human beings of likely overlapping interests exist and you will make the friends that matter most. I first had a conversation with my wife of over a decade by tagging along with a bunch of strangers to a random pizza place. My wife did not use dating apps at all, so in person was the only way a guy could have met her.
I also open my house once a week to anyone I know, and host events every month or so. Met a lot of friends-of-friends that way.
And look, I get it. Doing all that is scary. I still have a lot of anxiety about hanging out with people I do not live with, and I do it anyway. Never regretted it once.
Spending time around other people in person makes us better people.
In many developed countries, the hacker events and board game nights are organized over Facebook groups; Facebook itself is dead, except for the events niche because people don't see a better place to announce these things; people aren't necessarily doing flyers posted on a message board like in the 1990s.
Also, in not all countries is it acceptable to talk to strangers in public, like your pizza place example. In Finland this will make people very uncomfortable, though you might get away with it if you are a obvious clueless foreigner (or an unusually charismatic foreigner). About the only place it is acceptable is bars after a certain level of inebriation, but that is not the kind of interaction many people will find worthwhile.
The Nordic countries have been like that for long years, but I think this taboo is spreading because young people in some Central and even Southern European cities, even with a history of cafe culture and large student populations, are complaining online about the difficulty of meeting anyone when out and about. Telling someone that they should just take the first step isn't necessarily a solution, because like climate change or recycling, this is maybe something that cannot be solved by idealistic individual action but requires policy changes.
Life is too short to wait on policy changes. Everyone has to take responsibility for achieving their own goals.
I moved a lot growing up, and had to make friends quickly. I got pretty damn good at magic. When a stranger suddenly starts complaining about how spicy the burritos are and blows an actual fireball randomly, you end up in fun conversations with strangers.
My version of it these days is giving tech talks even when they terrify me, because it helps me find the select few people who share my interests faster.
But also if 9/10 strangers blow you off when you try to chat them up, who cares? That is their problem. The 1/10 are going to make it worth it.
I made new friends through an open source project. I attended BUG/LUG meetings and other tech events. There are plenty of alternative social events that you don't need a phone for. Email and even irc will do. I am a phone minimalist so its similar situation as I have no social media accounts.
> I rarely carry any electronics at all and exclusively use cash in person to make me mostly digitally invisible IRL.
> Stopped using X and all big tech services.
This right here. I haven't given up my cell phone yet, but I run GrapheneOS on a Pixel without Google anything and only with a handful of basic apps (OSMand, K9, Home Assistant...). If something can't be done in the browser, I pass.
Don't forget that your car may also have a cellular modem and rat out your driving habits to dealers, data brokers and insurers.
> Don't forget that your car may also have a cellular modem and rat out your driving habits to dealers, data brokers and insurers.
This is why I never drive a car I cannot repair myself in a pinch that requires zero software or even a working battery to operate, which means low tech, manual transmission.
I see some locales where this could work. But here in Shanghai you are basically tethered to a phone + big tech. You could easily go about your WEEK and never talk to a real person. It’s actually really dystopian. Coming from self hosting etc. it is a completely different perspective. Exposing any content online requires a license, your modem and IP are connected to your ID etcetc. There is no privacy. Very sobering experience.
You can get an ICP license easy with fake documents. Nonograph exists in China as "animal welfare" and "business to business" web portal even though it is for anonymous writing / leaks. I used to own the domain `秘密.网络` which literally means "secret[.]network".
> your modem and IP are connected to your ID etcetc
No different than America. Your modem and IP are tied to the billing contact.
> you are basically tethered to a phone
Weixin is a problem, but the other apps usually are not necessary.
I think describing it as horrendous is overdoing it. People have lived even more disconnected from devices except for the last 20-30 years and I wouldn’t call their existence “horrendous”
I'm a fan of Marshall McLuhan, famous for "The Medium is the Message". When Twitter first arrived, I thought "what is the message delivered by a medium that limits thoughts to 140 characters at a time?". My take: "thoughts that are dirt-simple are the most welcome." Also, "what is the message delivered by a medium that freely interrupts me at any time?" (I never investigated the options to not be interrupted.) perhaps "There's no need to worry about having my own thought train interrupted .... "
Nothing I've heard or seen about Twitter is enticing.... but I'm old and cranky. Not quite as old and cranky as Donald Knuth, who stepped away from email after 15 years, writing:
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
The goal of poetry is also to condense complex thoughts into few words. Single couplets are quoted over and over again in human discourse (assuming you speak the right languages, live in the right circles or read the right books).
You can certainly communicate deep and lasting thoughts in 140 characters.
You can in poetry. Also in Mathematics and in adages. No argument. But I seriously doubt that's the norm with tweets, although, as previously mentioned, I'm not on twitter. Further, it's hard to believe that as conversations progress, the nuances of a complex topic can be neatly packed into a bit of iambic pentameter.
You have to follow the right people. There are lots of scientists who took pains to carefully craft high quality tweets [1]. Of course, most people have left ever since engagement started getting paid.
When twitter appeared it was 140 chars because it had an sms interface. The point was from a conference or announcement made in a room once could post via sms and the news would break that way. That was before apps with data available generally. I think the called live-something like live-services or so. That was a new take at the time.
This is a great blog post. I do a lot of similar things on my phone (GrapheneOS, airplane mode, CoMaps).
The thing that I’d been looking for on this minimal setup was a way to prevent access to the browser or installing apps at will. It was easy enough when I was on iOS. I just used Apple Configurator [1] to block Safari and the App Store, but on GrapheneOS, there was no great option.
Recently I made a device owner app [2] which allows hiding any UI app and locking itself. It ended up being quite an elegant solution as it allows full access to app stores for updates (new apps you install are hidden until you unlock and approve them). The only way around it is with the lock code or a factory reset.
This makes my phone a quite private device whose functionality I intentionally set ahead of time. It can only do what the apps I’ve chosen can do. I prefer browsing and similar on a computer.
[1] Apple’s Mac MDM app anyone can use. You need a Mac and to factory reset your phone first.
I'm not disparaging you, it's neat that you built this and it clearly solves a problem for people. But IMO, leveraging behavioral friction is simpler than dealing with all of this administrative overhead.
I treat my phone as stateless by default. I don't keep many non-stock apps installed. The obvious exceptions are authenticators, I hate it but I get it, and I need my banking app. Pretty much everything else is ephemeral and disposable to me. If I genuinely need an app, I install it, use it, and wipe it.
The imposed friction here kills the compulsory behavior. Do I really want to see what's on Instagram? No, I really don't. Do I really want to spend $7 for a mediocre latte at Starbucks? No, not really. This unintended side-effect has been great. I have no tolerance now for modern retail coercion, and opting out of the enshittified layer of everything has been great for my wallet and my sanity.
Personally I find the friction of a factory reset to be enough, but yeah this doesn't work if you don't. I'm pretty sure [1] can be set up not not be bypassed but I don't know for sure.
I appreciate everyone has a different definition of "minimalism" and that I'm a bit of an outlier. But my version of minimalism includes a) using a dumb phone, b) doing most of my browsing via a text based browser in a terminal and c) I've heard of social media, but don't see the point (though you could argue that maybe the HN comments section is sort of like social media.)
Which is not to diminish the author's point (which I interpret as twitter is a cess-pit and think hard about what social media you want to engage in and the interface you want to use.) My point is you don't have to spend time on twitter to benefit from this world-view.
Yup. I do use a "real" browser from time to time. Mostly firefox w/ a hopelessly outdated version of uBlock Origin and Vanadium on the mobile phone. Firefox is not without its issues, but reader view seems to improve most sites. I'm sure chrome has an equivalent.
I do text browsers because I live my life in a terminal and it's easier than double-clicking on another part of the screen and waiting for the graphical browser to launch. I also only have 16Gb of RAM, so I can only have a few browser windows open at a time.
And yeah... using a mapping site on a text only browser would suck.
> Firefly is a multi-client that combines together X, BlueSky as well as Farcaster and Lens (both partially-Ethereum-based decentralized social media platforms). You can see tweets from all four platforms, and you can make a tweet that gets auto-posted to all four platforms.
It is really interesting to see a third-party client for Twitter still operational. How is this still possible? This seems like an unauthorized third-party hack that would likely get shut down with too much attention?
I think this is against API ToS? But Twitter APIs don't appear to have changed significantly so maybe this can be just done as a matter of the fact until it gets signature kicked out by their WAF?
I feel like this is... a bit too much, no? Particularly the cellular part. I see the appeal of staying off the grid, but people with families would certainly struggle with this. Not to mention the many inconveniences this would bring about.
And using Twitter/X even with a different client... it's not really minimalism is it?
I can agree to some extent about the gripes with social media. It's why I prefer using Substack over Twitter, Reddit, etc. It is much more limited, but certainly not as toxic. BlueSky has also been decent in my experience.
> Not to mention the many inconveniences this would bring about.
This is what reinforces the problem.
When we choose conveniences, we reinforce them. This makes it harder to get away from the things that brings us that convenience.
Conveniences to be able to get a hold of anyone in seconds rather than waiting. Believe it or not, there was a time when we were just, not available. It was OK.
Did that mean that things were a little more challenging? Of course, road trips or going anywhere new meant more upfront planning. Not knowing where your children were brought anxiety which meant rules. However, it was all manageable. By ALWAYS choosing conveniences, we shut the door on alternative options which in turn make it harder to deal with inconveniences.
The other side of this coin is that not everything about the past was better.
I’m struggling to see how having anxiety about losing your children is better. I’m struggling to understand how knowing where they are would lead to having fewer rules.
I struggle to figure out how my friends being more available to text is a negative. What was character-building about calling them on a landline or losing contact with them entirely as an alternative?
I got chicken pox as a kid, that doesn’t mean my kids should get it.
I’ve had arguments like this with my parents about urbanism. When they grew up, the city was dirty, crime-ridden, etc. They also grew up during a time when the automobile was like the tech industry of their day. It was an innovation that changed their lives for the better in their opinion and lived experience. Their house got bigger, their car got bettter and lasted longer and their neighborhood got cleaner and safer, in their eyes.
My parents feel like trying to use the car less and switching to public transit or cycling more is like denying progress. What was the point of all that innovation and progress if we are “going backwards” in their eyes?
The end result of these discussions isn’t that I don’t believe in urbanism anymore, but I’m now more accepting of their point of view on the subject. I see their viewpoint as more valid than I used to. There’s nothing horribly wrong about their way of life even though I don’t necessarily want to adopt many aspects of it.
I am not saying that those things have no value. The opposite is definitely true. However, you are accepting a lot of baggage by reinforcing the systems that bring those conveniences. Now, you MUST have a cellphone or you are a Luddite. You MUST have a cellphone or you can't read a menu at a restaurant, unlock the door to your hotel room or access your bank funds.
You now have lost digital sovereignty to large corporations because you need to be able to get a hold of your kids within seconds.
All conveniences come with costs that you and society must bare.
Last two sentences of your first paragraph are definitely not the sort of thing I was trying to say is okay.
I also don’t think some of the conveniences I talked about have much of a cost. My kids having a cell phone with basic phone and texting capability isn’t a digital sovereignty issue.
And I’m not sure if digital sovereignty matters if the alternative is digital abstinence.
That’s like saying “When you buy a Toyota Camry your life is beholden to Toyota, you should just walk to your destination.” The trade-off isn’t really even, is it?
Car dependency is an excellent parallel. People buy cars on the promise that they should expect freedom of movement, but then they arrange their lives so they can only go where roads have been paved, and arrive where buildings have been demolished for parking lots. They become financially dependent on oil extraction in the Middle East. They become incapable of getting anywhere alone when they lose the ability to drive, due to ailments or age.
So why do we do it? Because we can't imagine living without the convenience of our phones.
And similar to a phone, I don’t usually think that the answer is to just not own one at all.
I’m all for reducing trips and being more mindful about car dependency but I’m not personally going to sell my car because I can afford it and it makes my life better.
Are you imagining a modern society that developed without cars as being more of a burden to live in, or are you imagining the current society, developed with cars, as being more of a burden to live in when just getting rid of cars? Because yeah, getting rid of a car is going to make most people's lives harder. That's kind of what makes it a dependency.
When cars became popular, a lot of urban areas were developed under the assumption that all destinations would be reached by car from that point in time onward. There was no need to consider the idea that someone might not be able to or want to reach a destination without one.
I’m fine with cars being a beneficial convenience, an attainable luxury for the masses, but I think that any area with sufficient population (which isn’t very much) can support the idea of families being able to reach a significant percent of their daily destinations without a vehicle, and perhaps even preferring to do so.
It also saves a tremendous amount of resources and cost of living to reduce car trips per week per person by even a small amount.
When smartphones became popular, a lot of social functions developed under the assumption that all participants would have a smartphone, and have it with them at all times, connected. There has been no need to consider the idea that someone might want to participate without one.
You're arguing that car dependency is fine (for you). I'm arguing that car dependency is a good analogy for phone dependency.
> My kids having a cell phone with basic phone and texting capability isn’t a digital sovereignty issue.
Of course it is, the first version of Twitter was a texting platform. You can't draw some line and say that this is the end of the baggage that comes with this convenience because that is not how the world works. The inevitability of social pressure means "keeping up with the Joneses" so your kids need to communicate with others, not just you.
Just because it doesn't come in the form of an app doesn't mean it is safe or come without risks.
Telecoms (calling and texting) are literally regulated utilities. I’m confused at where the baggage is.
I’m failing to see how Twitter is relevant.
I’m failing to see the “keeping up with the Joneses” factor here. I am talking about basic cellular service not a $1,000 iPhone loaded up with brain rot apps.
Regulated in what way that is relevant to the concern about digital sovereignty or privacy?
> I’m failing to see how Twitter is relevant.
My point is that voice and text ONLY (dumb phones) isn't some significant change from apps in terms of the concerns I am raising.
> I am talking about basic cellular service
If you and your children can maintain that situation, great, it doesn't change that society has NOT accepted that. That society sees you as unusual for not conforming. Which is the entire point of my argument. The pressure to conform doesn't yield because of a single person's choice and many use the arguments you are using to maintain their children's access to a $1,000 iPhone loaded up with brain rot apps.
I gotta be honest I don’t care enough about this subject enough to keep going lol
I am really just not in any pickle and don’t lose sleep over any of this. That was my original entire point is that sometimes it’s acceptable to allow things to be convenient.
I'm not a parent and a bit autistic so excuse the unemotional reply but surely there are other ways not to have anxiety about your children surely?:
Teach independence/self-defence/street smarts, encourage weight lifting for older kids, therapy/meditation for yourself (some anxiety is natural of course!), move to a safer city, have more children (easier to pair them up on adventures, plus less subconscious physiological fear of losing your one and only child), distract yourself and stay busy, go with them to places the first few times to assure yourself then take off your training wheels. Or just say no to certain things.
It doesn't seem to me a special case of anxiety that can only be addressed by spy apps and knowing you might be able to instantly contact them.
Knowing where they are isn’t necessarily “installing spy apps,” it can just mean being able to call them or text them.
“Move to a safer city” is a lot more expensive than a phone plan. A lot of people don’t have that luxury.
I agree that all the things you talk about are life positives but the way I see it, giving a kid who is old and mature enough to use one a cell phone is like a $15/month cost proposition for an outsized benefit of being able to contact them.
lol, have my kids carry a phone or have more kids so the can be paired up.
That’s a wild thing to say out loud. And absolutely doesn’t solve the problem. Kids need to have their own friends and own social circles if you want to teach independence.
I have cellular and wi-fi permanently disabled on my phone since the beginning of smartphones. I only use it with Ethernet. Works really well. If it's important, call. If it's not I can get to it next time I connect an Ethernet cable.
We made all of this work before phones even existed. Getting your attention siphoned away by your phone isn't a convenience, it's an unhealthy dependence.
> I feel like this is... a bit too much, no? Particularly the cellular part. I see the appeal of staying off the grid, but people with families would certainly struggle with this. Not to mention the many inconveniences this would bring about.
Similarly, I think for people who are stuck in prison in Burkina Faso, I think much of this things also don't apply, as they don't have the freedom to chose if they want cellular service or not, if we're going through scenarios where all of those things might not apply :)
It's a shared personal experience, it is what it is? I don't think author is advocating that everyone in every circumstance should try to emulate all of those things. You read it, build your opinion, then learn from what you found useful and ignore the rest. If something would be impossible because of your personal circumstance, then you can just not think about that.
All these words and no mention of the book where the term comes from, also eponymous, by Cal Newport. His book is about actual digital minimalism versus whatever Vitalik is referencing here.
Hadn't gotten to TFA yet and assumed it was about Cal Newport's book (why I opened the thread). I was confused why AI kept coming up here in the comments, as the book predates the current AI fad. Thanks for pointing this out.
Actually if we take the phrase to refer to Cal Newport's book, no. What you're describing is digital abstinence. From the article,
> Explore ways of greatly decreasing or scoping your social media use ... Get the information benefits of the platform without getting sucked in to the vortex
This is more or less what Newport is recommending. Find ways to get the benefit of digital technology while refusing the manipulative aspects and other downsides.
EDIT: oops, TFA doesn't actually mention the book, I thought it did. I think this point still stands: "minimal" does not mean "none".
I am not describing digital abstinence. Note that I did not mention abstaining from:
- the web (I am posting on HN after all, although I recommend a very stripped down browsing experience)
- email
- general computer use
It's telling that you interpreted that (rather circumscribed) list as total digital abstinence. Social media, smartphones, and AI are all relatively recent appearances on the digital stage.
That's fair, though I was somewhat responding to the short list of topics from the article and discussion in this thread.
I still don't think minimalism inherently demands what you're suggesting. If you don't find social media has any beneficial uses for you, it makes sense to cut it out of your life completely. Someone else might find they need some specific things from it, and decide to keep some engagement - on their own carefully dictated terms.
I don’t have a phone, I don’t have an account on any AI (though google search gets me)
No AI is easy, I don’t want it.
No phone is inconvenient sometimes, but I’m well aware I don’t want my life to be more convenient, I want it to be more fulfilling. I do things that are inconvenient because I want to. Bake bread, chop wood to heat our house, hunt to fill the freezer. I talk to people face to face, I live basically the same as I did as an adult from 2000 onwards.
I spend my days outside where there is no cell service anyway, and have no interest in being contacted or contacting others. The people with me are who I want to spend time with.
I guess minimalism is relative. I wouldn’t describe this as minimalism. Minimalism is not using a tool “that combines together X, BlueSky as well as Farcaster and Lens”. To me that is a way to cope with the opposite of minimalism.
You actually can just leave Twitter and read a book instead.
I was a heavy Twitter user since its early years. 6-7 years ago I started trying to cut back on it because it was just consuming too much of my time, which was impacting me negatively, but found it really hard--it's addictive.
When Elon took it over I decided to go cold turkey and delete my account altogether so I couldn't go back. Best decision ever. I have twinges where I miss it, but I'm much better off without it.
I had already deleted my FB account about 12 years ago when I realized it wasn't making me happy. I still have IG which was great years ago (see your feed and then it stops when you've caught up), but I dislike what it's become (ad/promoted accounts infested). I still use it to share pics with friends/family and see but I use Screen Time (iPhone) to limit it to 20 min a day, and I had someone else set the screen time code so I can't just extend it. Works well and keeps me in check.
Thankfully HN doesn't have the same social media hooks so it's easier to keep in check. A couple of years ago I made some comment that dang didn't like and got my posts limited (max 5 within 12 hours, I think). It bothered me for a while, but now I'm actually happy because it acts as a limiting factor, so I wouldn't even ask for it to be lifted.
I agree with you, but this is probably not true for Vitalik, who is basically an influencer. We should all close our computers and spend our time in nature and reading books, but this does limit our outreach possibilities significantly.
The article is broken into three primary sections:
- Social media minimalism
- Cell data minimalism
- Web minimalism
What you say is true about the 2nd section, but the comment you are replying to is referencing the 1st section which states, in part:
"I did not leave X the platform, but I did leave X the interface. Instead, I have been doing most of my tweeting through Firefly:
Firefly is a multi-client that combines together X, BlueSky as well as Farcaster and Lens (both partially-Ethereum-based decentralized social media platforms)."
That experiment also felt more cute than actually minimalist to me.
When I decided to take a break from being terminally online, I didn’t turn off the phone feature but leave Wi-Fi on so I could still check my socials on the office Wi-Fi; that wouldn’t have actually done much. I forced my phone off the bulk of the internet by turning off Wi-Fi and disabling cellular data for everything but a few core apps like Messages and Maps.
Dead right on twitter. The normies have all left it. Pre Elon Twitter was the community bulletin board and meeting place for all sorts of interesting subgroups. They’ve all left. Normal younger people consider twitter to be as relevant to their lives as Compuserve.
My feed there used to be cool physics stuff. Now it’s just all the people in the world who want me dead and for every real one of those 99 bots joining in.
Not true from what I can see - the only cohort who left Twitter were the uncompromising leftwing folks. OTOH, people with moderate views now can get points across that had been previously suppressed.
English speakers left. Or so I assume. It's still roughly what it always was so long if you were somehow illiterate in English yet educated and plenty smart :p
LLM auto-translations haven't changed that much. The current corporate seems to be trying to figure out why and whether those remaining huge mass of foreign users lean left or right by the criteria of US politics, but still haven't have any clue about that nor had accepted that non-English-speakers actually don't speak English lol(or, to say, find translated contents natural as speeches with reasonable flows of logic, to be even more blunt)
Kind of, but I don't think this is strictly limited to the US. All languages are probably affected to degrees proportionate to language and culture compatibilities with the US English. If your ideas about left and right politics are the ones built up from first principle that isn't well correlated and connected with the orthodox interpretations, both sides will be nonsensical to one another, and that shields such bubbles from ... the massive negativity being poured into the platform, for example.
edit: since this is under a dead comment that might not bother too many: I'm suspecting that there must be two competing hypothesis inside the org that owns Twitter, one being more preferable than the other depending on where one is coming from, that users still remaining on the platform and active on it must be either A) appreciative of ultra right turn of the platform with increasingly dominant right wing ragemaxxing contents, or, B) they just exist as a colossal autonomous parasitic self-contained isolate hivemind that had always been at least equally influential as the host but now is also physically bigger and therefore more influential than what its owners consider the host.
Frankly, I find the Malfoy trend that was going on couple weeks ago to be highly sus, that it smelled like an artificial boosting campaign to map out political leanings of user clusters which has to be right leaning from the hypothesis A. It makes sense as to me as one, given my unique knowledge of political controversies surrounding Harry Potter and ... opinions expressed by its author JK Rowling, which absolutely everybody here knows about. And I'm imagining that, if it had been such an experiment, it must have been horrifying to watch the Potter villain simply accepted as completely non-controversial wholesome pro-LGBT pro-gay left-to-center content among the most influential and knowledgeable and skilled of Twitter users like nothing had happened since 2016 or so, supporting the undesirable hypothesis B, although that seems to have always been the reality to me.
You are right but I would use a different tone for what you're describing. E.g. I've seen a lot more antisemitism and full-blown racism on Twitter than I did in the past.
I put that into the "people who want to kill me" silo.
I vacillate on the value of seeing this stuff. Sometimes I think its important my radar be aware that these attitudes are way more prevalent in society than they used to be. Lot's of my not-on-twitter peers I suspect are in a bubble and don't realize how much societal decay there has been around norms and batsh*t conspiracy thinking. As a citizen I think it's important not to be in a total bubble until the frog boiling temperature is reached.
At the same time, I'm pretty sure that low grade daily exposure to "look at all these neighbors of yours who wish you were dead" overstates the prevalence and the fact that the people who feel this way do so in no small part because they are getting a daily algo feed claiming I wish they were dead (spoiler - I don't want them dead). Since I find it really hard to break my Twitter addiction there is something about all of these emotions which keeps some susceptible humans like myself clicking, but like the article says, it's quite rare that I emerge from an hour of Twitter scrolling feeling anything but gross.
All of this is frustrating because I was very late to Twitter. I joined a year or two before the acquisition. I loved how I could connect with all sorts of interesting brilliant people in all sorts of interesting fields. I wish I could get that back but I guess that iteration of Twitter didn't sell enough ads.
> All of this is frustrating because I was very late to Twitter. I joined a year or two before the acquisition. I loved how I could connect with all sorts of interesting brilliant people in all sorts of interesting fields. I wish I could get that back but I guess that iteration of Twitter didn't sell enough ads.
nuts. i joined in 2008. that was when it was cool.
It's also important to keep in mind that a lot of that shit on Twitter is literally just bots. I can mention some trigger word or name and the majority of the replies will be "name-bunchanumbers" with some generic profile picture posting the most caustic and idiotic bullshit. Like, go post something with the name "Brandon Johnson", the current mayor of Chicago, in it, and accounts you have never ever seen will come out of the woodwork to post irrelevant "huh huh progressive politics" slop, half the time they're just non-sequiturs. Same with Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, happens on posts plenty of right wing politicians too. Name-bunchanumbers, some AI generated "memes" to make it look organic. It's all bullshit. Automated bullshit.
I have no doubt there ARE people out there with those horrific views and ARE actually making AI generated meme slop and posting it feeling satisfied, but I choose to believe that the vast majority are bots, and a fraction of the real humans doing it learned it from the bots. Just reading that sort of shit over and over again can change how you think about things if you aren't vigilant and the outcomes are more division. Plenty of bad folks in the world just want the division. They want people mad, and feeling afraid.
No those are just "moderate" opinions of every day regular people, who were previously being "canceled" by "the far left". (/s)
The times I've had the misfortune of reading replies on xitter, even on what should be technical topics, they have consisted of extremist maximalist takes with others chiming in to call them "based" [0]. Whatever its "algorithm" is, it definitely leans into the outrage farming / Balkanization project, regardless of the bots.
[0] which from context would seem to be shorthand for "freebased", as in smoking crack, despite apparent intent to the contrary
I know the word gets thrown around in mainstream politics and has devolved into meaninglessness, but on Twitter it's actually really antisemitism, as in they want to expel and/or kill the Jews because they believe they secretly control the world.
As someone that feels both parties are irredeemably corrupt, I left because I am anti authoritarian and Twitter both before and after Musk has repeatedly unfairly applied rules for clear political reasons which made it no longer a fair or honest platform to participate in.
I think you're kind of proving their point about 'normies' when your first instinct is to start talking about 'leftwing folks' and 'moderate views'. Most normal people aren't talking politics on the internet.
My experience as a young adult in the UK was that most people I knew had moved from Facebook to Instagram & Twitter in their early 20's.
Normal people whose interests would be things like football, going out drinking, and reality TV. The extent of their politics would be sharing a meme of Boris Johnson or complaining about COVID restrictions. I don't like the word 'normie', but that's exactly how you would describe them.
Looking through my following list now, these type of people have now either deleted their account, or haven't posted in years.
I don't think it's entirely political. But the rebrand to X and Musk's involvement made using it very uncool. It's seen of in the same vein as Facebook now, it's kind of embarrassing to admit you still use it.
Yes, and the downvotes and replies you're getting on here perfectly prove your point.
The moderate views are always seen as too "boring" or "naive". There's always a vocal crowd who wants to tell you about it. Anyone willing to leave a comment is already too engaged enough to take a step back and find nuance in what is not being said.
Respectfully, the moderate isn't getting their point across because nobody is reading it. The only people the algo shows moderate views to are the extremes to feed their need for fresh meat. Normie moderate people in a point in the Overton window where they may respond to moderate points have as much organic attraction to spend time on Twitter as my teenage children do to chat with their peers via email (i.e., null).
The moderate on twitter is the proverbial old man yelling at clouds but imagining the clouds are actually some relevant audience of non-bots. I do admit we may define moderate differently here in which case there is a chance we are talking past each other.
> We need social media less than before, because you can talk to the bot for information instead (and for human connection, there's still the old-fashioned solution: going out and talking to people in real life).
I kinda believe this. The web for collaboration, work, dumping out information and doomscrolling is a great tool, but I think is bad for any kind of socializing or 'communitizing' at a human level, where you are forced to treat humans as such instead of looking at some transduced digital representation of a real person in the form or chars or pixels prone to dehumanization.
I think that's telling. If you're reducing digital human interaction on social media (which yes, has its share of problems) but replacing it with "social" interaction with AI, that's not minimalism. You're replacing one vice with an even worse one and coping about it.
He may be using it as a tool, but that doesn't mean it's not displacing social interaction. Previously he would've had to collaborate with people to get the same stuff done, which necessarily involves social interaction.
Sure but that's rather different from productive collaboration. People have previously replaced those things with Netflix or video games which also cannot replace human collaboration
Local LLMs are pretty powerful and useful for me personally, and the best compute I have locally is a an RTX2060. I certainly have no paid AI subscriptions.
Obviously depends what you're doing, and not suitable for everyone, but it's an unhelpful generalisation to say AI in its current form is purely a paid product subscription.
Effectively it is. I hear relatively very few people talking about self-hosting it, or even just using one of those GPU rental services. It's all about claude, openai, gemini, if you haven't tried this week's model revision you can't complain, and so on.
Not per se, but if you're using it as a substitute for human interaction (like most 'chatbot' style UIs want you to), then yes, absolutely.
The main problem is that talking to AI is like talking to a human without any of the thorny parts. It's only going to be nice and helpful and always available to you. Chatting with AI is to social interaction like candy is to a balanced diet. Sure it's more instantly gratifying but long-term it's really bad for you. You need the thorny parts to build important social skills like tactfulness and navigating conflict.
As a person who almost certainly has ADHD, AI has done wonders to my social skills. You can either analyze what went wrong when you accidentally blurted out something somewhat inappropriate or pre-plan your presence in a social setting to avoid a costly faux pas, e.g. in job interviews or formal gatherings. Most pre-AI advice on the Internet for these situations is either very heavily NT-coded (blogs, self-help) or has very strong social desirability bias (forums with an upvote system).
> It's only going to be nice and helpful and always available to you.
You could always try "You are a thorny internet troll" as your system prompt instead. Works wonders.
> social skills like tactfulness and navigating conflict.
We're not still talking about social media, are we?
(I agree that substituting AI for human interaction is bonkers, btw. But I'm not sure social media helps, or doesn't also involve mostly AI interactions these days.)
Prompting the AI to be mean doesn't do shit. It doesn't change that your interaction with it is always consequence-free. It will never refuse to talk to you, and if it gets too mean you can just nuke it and start an new session. You don't have to build or retain any social skills.
Yes it is because it's the next stage in the emergent phenomenon of tech becoming more addictive so that we can't help but develop it. AI puts technology first over the needs of humans and it's harder to avoid.
But where’s the line? You could say the same about the Internet (or movies or books…) It can be used badly, but also to learn and reduce mundane tasks, unlike social media (though you actually can learn from social media, asking the AI is way more effective).
There isn't a line, just like 'dangerous speed' isn't a line. The addictive and deleterious effect of a technology is more like a continuous quantity and as that quantity increases, the probability of misuse and deleterious effects increase too.
Depends, if you care for the bot or develop a para-social relationship with it, then yes, it will be much worse. It does not care or have emotions or understand the human experience. It simulates those things through words and that really messes with the human brain.
If you are using it as an assistant, coach, or deep researcher to chat about interesting things with, then no.
No one knows for sure, but my guess is no? The difficulty with this conversation of course, lies in the details - specifically in terms of "to what extent can the user, or other presumably positive forces, modify what the person puts in their own brains."
This is why I'm a huge proponent of something like "small AI."
> If you access a web application, you end up re-downloading the application from the server thousands of times, and you are fully trusting the server each time. If the server gets hacked even one of the thousands of times that you open the site, you might be screwed. Regular old-fashioned applications (where you explicitly click "download") are better than this: you only need to trust the server to not be malicious or hacked at that exact moment once.
That's precisely why something like signed distributions packages are way more secure than curl bash'ing.
But many simply don't understand that. We had plenty of forged Web certificates likely. And even without that, with curl bash'ing anything sensitive you have to cross fingers that the server ain't serving one in 10 000 request with a backdoored version.
With curl bash'ing everybody is trusting every single time that the server ain't compromised or intentionally malicious.
At this point I've lost any hope: people simply don't understand security.
And as long as we'll have people saying that curl bash'ing is just as safe as signed distros packages, we'll have daily posts about major security incidents.
Security is a mindset and most people simply don't have it.
I did not leave X the platform, but I did leave X the interface
Left Facebook and twitter 6-7 years ago. If you just can't leave something without constantly trying to reach back to it in some shape, then you are no different from the junkie that thinks he can quit anytime if he really wanted to.
Rant aside, beside social media minimalism I am also a big fan of compute minimalism. I don't use VScode with 100+ plugins or a zsh maxed up with so much bells and whistles that the terminal looks like Christmas and respond with the speed of microsoft powershell.
But I guess most people in SF are in the opposite camp.
When you said compute minimalism, I thought you were going to talk about using a RISC-V processor and using Emacs for any text editing. I'd say that's the real compute minimalism. xD
Good ol' Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping holds up well these days when the competition is stuff like vscode. But yeah, I think vim is probably a bit more minimal.
> beside social media minimalism I am also a big fan of compute minimalism. I don't use VScode with 100+ plugins or a zsh maxed up with so much bells and whistles
That’s what I thought the article would talk about. If it were social media, I’d rather buy a cheap used phone, put the app on it, and turn it on only when I want to check something. Then it’s off. But I deleted/haven’t logged into my accounts for years now.
As for as minimal compute goes. my daily driver is an old laptop I put OpenBSD on. I also have an m1 air that I mostly use for shopping and meeting. Then an iPad for reading. But the key thing is that app and software are tools. It’s either tied to an activity (even relaxing ones) or it’s not used. No ricing or theming, just basic configuration to get the job done.
Twitter is still super relevant in crypto circles (you can see for example the (ex) binance CEO using it to give updates about their latest scandal) so I think Vitalik at the very least has financial interests in keeping a presence there.
But then again, he's already fabulously wealthy and could just walk away from the space forever if he wanted to and be just fine.
If I were him I'd just hire a person to handle comms on it for me but I suppose that's not really minimalism.
> I turned it on briefly to receive a confirmation code that I needed in order to maintain that phone plan itself, and once spiritually but not literally - when going on a remote and slightly dangerous hike, friends insisted that I bring along a few communication devices that they had for emergency comms and use them to check in once every few hours.
It is funny to have witnessed the conversion from the default state of people is being not connected digitally to being connected digitally and once people start living with the 24/h connection they start the perceive simply being out of cell network as carrying inherent risk.
I've noticed people reacting to going hiking beyond cell networks with a "but that's dangerous!" response. Being outside of cell networks was the natural state of being for the vast majority of human existence!
> I've noticed people reacting to going hiking beyond cell networks with a "but that's dangerous!" response. Being outside of cell networks was the natural state of being for the vast majority of human existence!
And it was dangerous.
Also: I grew up just before cellphones started to be a thing and I felt a lot of times as a kid the frustration of not being able to contact someone remotely.
Kind of a dream for me. I suspect I will be heading down this path as I get older. Minimalism in relationships seem to be already occurring when I have lesser tolerance of "noise" in conversation, niceties, and especially conscious of finding common points of conversation, let alone agreements. I hadn't gone as far as to cull relationships due to lesser relevance, but it started to feel necessary to disengage more quickly and move on even after bumping into an old acquiantence having not met or spoken for many years. This is relevant to digital minimalism especially social media (as cited in the article), and if social media, why not also every other source of information that otherwise takes up our cognitive and emotional space?
Its definitely not a super toxic site though, but its social media. Same as discord and other chatrooms. Something like IRC we would have called by another name in the past but I think nowadays we could say it's a form of social media.
> HN has no recommender system so I dont count it in.
HN front page is digitally curated. HN has an opaque post ranking algorithm.
> How are stories ranked?
> The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.
> Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
I suppose the difference is that the algorithm isn't specific per user. There are no bubbles like on social media, and the algorithm isn't designed to keep users engaged by tailoring their feed based on their viewing history.
It's an interesting question: How do you define the line between a 'forum' (which most don't consider addictive or harmful), and 'social media' (where there is growing evidence of addiction and harm)? What are some attributes of social media that are missing on forums?
Opaque ranking algorithms?
Human curation / moderation?
Automated curation / moderation?
Voting / flagging?
Infinite scroll?
Images and/or auto-playing video?
Advertising inline with posts?
Profit motive to get users to do certain things?
I don't know where you draw the line, and what makes Facebook harmful but Hacker News not harmful.
Dang has spoken about this at some length in interviews, but the critical element is whether or not we're all seeing the same thing or not. HN is special in the world of social media because the front page is the same for everyone. That makes it quite a bit different than other social media sitesfolks mention (Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook, Insta). It means the algorithm can be tweaked for engagement (like demoting stories that have more comments than upvotes), but that you can't optimize per-visitor, but instead across the whole population. That one simple feature makes a world of difference, in my opinion.
>What are some attributes of social media that are missing on forums
I find it surprising that the thing that's missing from the list is to me the only thing that matters, the creation of an identity and social graph. I don't think the algorithm or technical details are that important, the qualitative difference is that on social media you are someone. You have a persistent profile, you have "friends", you invest in building rapport and status, you have followers or are a follower.
On social media you interact with people, not with topics. There are creators, not discussions. On HN you could for practical purposes shuffle everyone's username each morning and it wouldn't matter for 99% of us, and that eliminates most of the dynamics associated with social media today.
Think about when the term was invented. It wasn't in the days of IRC, ICQ and forums. It wasn't even the launch of facebook (2004). It only came up after people used their real identities and got algorithmically addicted to spend more of their time on a given platform.
If you want to retroactively attribute the term to things, you'd also have to add it to newspapers featuring reader's letters. But that's not what social media is.
There are converters for Ethernet to USB-C. Every modern phone can do this. The only downside (or upside given recent developments) is that Android is unwilling to download updates via Ethernet.
He's still on social media. He just wants a better bullhorn for his own position.
"Around the same time, "Crypto Twitter" was spiraling into a mood that I saw described as "financial nihilism": roughly, that the natural end state of blockchains is gambling, this is good, and if you dislike this and wish for something better then you are a stuck-up elitist prick. Naturally, I had (and continue to have) my intellectual disagreements with both of these trends." (This is the guy behind Ethereum.)
So he built a tool that allowed him to post simultaneously on multiple services.
That's not digital minimalism. That's a spamming tool.
> My primary goal in doing this was to support decentralized social media, and to continue to engage with X but in a way that distributes network effect rather than locking it in. But in my months of using Firefly, I found that it also has a different effect: I feel much better using it.
> I suspect the primary reason is that while Firefly allows you to tweet, and see other people's tweets, it is missing one central part of the X interface: The Algorithm™.
What he likes isn't being able to spam multiple networks, he likes the change in the content presented to him.
I use Freetube instead of YouTube exactly because no login, no algorithm, no ads, no sponsored content. Just chronological actual content from channels I care about.
It really is a big difference.
That said I would only -consume- content ripped from YouTube. I have no account and no interest in publishing there.
I have skimmed the post but some of the things are not minimalism, but replacement of delivery mechanisms. On the other hand I'm also doing something similar in my digital life.
I have reduced my social media to two sites: Here and Mastodon (with a very limited follow circle). I don't follow tons of ad-ridden websites. I have a self-hosted RSS reader, following 10 feeds. Instead of following junk tech news, I read LWN.
Next step might be enabling antiproc on HN to reduce my time here, since I added time limits on applications on my phone and love that artificial limit.
I have limited energy and I want to focus it instead of spreading it around. Otherwise progressing beyond a certain point becomes impossible.
> I also became interested in the concept of local world knowledge apps. In principle, the data size of meaningful packs of information about the whole world is not that large. Compressed English wikipedia (without media) is only 27 GB. OpenStreetMap's planet.asm is 2.2 TB, though you can doubtlessly prune that down to 1-10% of its size and have everything you might conceivably need.
We need more of these types of apps; the challenge is keeping it updated and synced with new information.
I hope Digital Minimalism doesn't mean depending on an AI product subscription, his written code(which is not minimal) or having a black hole of npm dependencies for running a wallet on the cli that(reporting what's on their repo):
"NOTICE: this CLI has NOT BEEN AUDITED and IS UNDER ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT and HAS BEEN WRITTEN WITH HELP FROM CLAUDE et al"
What a "fantastic" era we're entering into. I think eventually these people will have a minimalistic life, with malware stealing everything
Although he mentioned how easily cellular location data can be obtained from telecom operators, both legally and illegally, he forgot to mention that mercenary groups continuously obtain cellular location data through SS7/Diameter attacks in a continuous manner rather than using any special exploitation technique. We recently had a case involving tracking a few civilians in different foreign jurisdictions having our agency contracted a specialist company that provided us with cellular location data of the targets on a 24/7 basis. This can be used against any operator in any country, with only one of two pieces of PII required: the IMEI or the phone number (with the second piece always retrieved once the first is looked up).
Kind of a misleading title. I would call this creating a dashboard through which you interact with social media. Which is a good idea, and conceivably a lot easier to build nowadays with AI. I'd even expand it to the internet at large, using RSS or something like it.
Having some kind of notification system would be helpful as well, since most platforms are actively trying to minimize the accounts you follow and replace them with their algorithmic suggestions.
Because the big centralized corporate banks having complete control of our lives is a great solution that we should never try to compete with in decentralized and sovereign ways?
Still, many of us are experimenting with ways to decentralize power and have no interest in the traders and grifters. We have an interest in buying things online with privacy like VPNs or servers. Donating to people that were cut off from banks like political dissidents. Having some access to liquidity that will work even when a false accusation freezes your bank accounts. Or a way to pay creators tiny amounts of value in exchange for content without needing ads or big payment network fees. See projects like LBRY making an alternative to Youtube. Most of the interesting things happening in crypto are happening quietly without VC marketing budgets to attract the finance bros.
It is important these experiments continue to evolve until something checks enough boxes for the average person to trust it more than a bank or paypal.
This may take decades to get right, but humanity will be better for it.
I deleted my mainstream social media accounts about 15 years ago after realizing what they are. I am convinced that at some point most of them will be viewed the same as nicotine.
I still have accounts on niche sites (like this one) that are mostly neutral, have nice, civil discussions, and are not designed to steal my time.
For me it's less about the tools I use, and more about building health habits (or reducing the bad habits). I use ScreenZen to enforce limited short session for a short list of harmful apps and websites (socials & news), and I configured it to allow a few 5-min-long sessions per day. The short sessions being cut in the middle help me stay informed but break the addictive nature of socials/news. I also use Android's Digital Wellbeing with Bedtime Mode (like Do Not Disturb) and Focus Mode (pause apps and notifications for almost all apps at night). Also uninstalled specific apps (e.g. Facebook) and using the mobile web version, which has subpar experience, which also helps in making it less addictive.
> I propose a philosophy of technology use called digital minimalism in which you radically reduce the time you spend staring at screens, focusing on a small number of digital activities that strongly support things you deeply value, and then happily ignoring the rest.
Regarding the social media part, hugely recommend revanced, for those in android.
My Instagram app (besides showing no ads) shows just the stories and feeds of people I follow, chronologically. Just a couple days this way will make you realize how little content there is, my friend's Korea trip has been the top one for like a couple weeks already.
Then you can get the DMs to avoid FOMO and realize how antisocial the whole thing is.
No idea if it works for x, I left that long ago and everytime I've checked out of curiosity I've been shocked at the absolute cesspit it is.
This really resonates for me. I've gone back and forth on staying on social media given the mental side effects but also how useful it can be. I was on Instagram one day and I noticed that only one in five posts it showed me were from people I actually followed. I found a feature that let met only see stuff from people I followed (Insta makes this hard to find and use) and I felt a lot more at peace when scrolling my feed. Maybe I need to look for a firefly equivalent for it.
> ...used some kind of semantic search to show the user a search result from the local database immediately, and then followed that up with a very small LLM writing a text answer. This gives actually-good answers in a very reasonable timeframe
I have tried this very same thing on https://grimoire.bio. Large corpus of biological knowledge with detailed visualizations that are shown immediately upon searching, but adding LLM answer when missing/needed.
Interesting! On a similar journey. For me, the novelty of tech has been wearing off for the last few years. Slowly deleting apps. After this election I am going on media detox. We have also started reading again for fun - it took a while to regain my patience for reading but it has been so much more satisfying than endless web stuff. Have not missed anything so far. Now I have to loose my HN addiction… ;-)
This is why I am so careful about what I click and what signals I send to the algorithm. If you don't want to see car crashes then don't rubber neck with morbid curiosity at the first one.
I have never seen a Hitler post but if I saw one I would immediately block that user and the algorithm knows that. It doesn't show me people arguing it shows me debates and tech. Because that's what I taught it to do. It is not even hard it just requires a little discipline.
When a friend sends a link I refuse to click on it unless my VPN is on and I'm using Mullvad Browser. I don't want their taste (which is quite often look at this outrageous thing) ruining my feed.
One trick I have is if I see a video in my sidebar on YT that I don't want to taint my profile, I copy the url without going to it and open it in mpv directly. I tend to watch all my videos in mpv, but I do usually like to have them in my browser history and save them to playlists to find later as well, so I'm just skipping that part. I don't know if this method is perfect, they should still see my IP, but anecdotally I think it's been fine.
I recently got into reviving old tech and was looking at a Nokia 3210. The main challenge is that these only work on 2G which is getting shut down in more and more countries across the world.
There are 4G mainboards you can buy and projects like https://www.nokia3310lteproject.com that aim to bring them into the modern world but for me these don't go far enough as they try to preserve the original UI. For me, the ideal device would be a 4G/GPS/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth-capable Nokia brick with modern interpretations of apps for maps, music, messaging etc. with optimized user interfaces for the limited screen space their tiny LCDs offer.
TOTP at least should be doable on pretty old/basic stuff. I saw someone make a TOTP app for 3DS. Maybe a literal 15 year old Nokia is pushing it, though. This wouldn't cover SMS MFA or the one where you need to hit a button from a specific app, but ideally those would die out anyway...
It’s clear that many people don’t understand how the algorithms work. There is no such thing as “bad” engagement on these platforms. Engagement is engagement. Whether you’re supporting the content or violently opposing it, you’re feeding into boosting it further.
If you’re sick and tired of algorithms pushing crap on you that you don’t like, you need to ignore it.
Tools like Firefly that remove you from the algorithm definitely help, but as long as people are engaging with the content, the problem will never go away.
minimalism, privacy, security, these are all mostly a pursuit of luxury.
ive spent a lot of time on that topic, and tech always comes up just short of producing a truly distinguishing luxury good.
the ones that succeeded became the macbook and iphone, blackberry, early facebook when it was only open to ivy schools, blue check twitter, tidal, early slack, Signal, and some others.
the looming question is, what is luxury? the answer as a positive definition is a kind of alchemical mystery. its failure mode is vulgarity, its imitations are cheap, economics only criticizes it, and its very context specific.
my working model is a triad of desirable, thoughtfulness, and belonging, where you can describe a luxury product on these axis and predict whether it will succeed.
for minimalism, notable challenges are things like the ReMarkable tablets that are high desire and thoughtfulness but lack the integration for belonging.
post-systemd Linux has low belonging vs the bsd communities, and is kind of mid in nerd desire and has too much slop attached to be thoughtful.
when you take an obvious luxury product like the proverbial LP pullover or a Ferrari, they imbue a belonging, where an entry level watch or a lamborghini do not. "class" was always a dumb framework bc its critical instead of constructive.
digital minimalist luxury hasn't really been invented yet in spite of some really good attempts. id argue because they lack something in this triad.
> Around the same time, "Crypto Twitter" was spiraling into a mood that I saw described as "financial nihilism": roughly, that the natural end state of blockchains is gambling, this is good, and if you dislike this and wish for something better then you are a stuck-up elitist prick.
Surely he sees that the nihilists are winning. Crypto's main use case at this point is undeniably deeply corrosive corruption and money laundering, and as far as I know there's nothing plausible on the horizon to replace that (I kind of stopped paying attention after crypto industry leaders started meeting with Trump, though.)
There's another strong benefit to digital minimalism, which is the reduction in personal software footprint. The more software and network dependencies one is using, the greater security risks they take on. We live in an age where the supply chain risk is greater than ever, and it's useful to be mindful of the stacks our digital lives rest on. "How much can I get done with as little software and Internet dependencies as possible?" has always been an important question to be asking ourselves, and it's even truer now. Minimalism is not just a helpful principle to support our own cognitive wellness, but for our digital wellness as well.
Every time I read a Vitalik blog post, I end up wondering - how did a thinker so smart and so deep end up creating a technology that’s (now) so crass and shallow
I guess you haven't paid much attention to defi, then. DAI for a example is another defi project that creates an autonomously pegged trustless and permissionless stablecoin.
Rocketpool is a project that allows users to contribute to the proof of stake system with very small amounts of capital, and share in the returns thereof, again trustlessly.
There are miles and miles of useful projects out there. Any truly permissionless ecosystem is going to be full of scams, that's the nature of the beast. It doesn't mean that there aren't extremely clever and elegant projects being built by very talented teams of developers trying to make something that reduces the amount of global suck.
Wow, that's not a leap I would ever have made, let alone posted online. The rest of the article felt similar, like it was well intentioned but maybe somewhat unrelatable: hopping off X by using a different app to read/post, quitting mobile internet by mapping every hotspot in town. Maybe it's relevant more as a break from the author's norm?
Not sure who you mean by "this person" but if you mean the author of the article, that would be dipping a toe into personal attack, which we really ask people to avoid here.
(Note the "evokes worse from others bit" in my comment below—I'm sure it's not what you intended but this is exactly how that works.)
(Also of course, persons don't need to be relevant for articles to be interesting, and it's the latter that we're shooting for.)
It wasn't meant as an attack, but I did want to draw the connection to the author's identity, which I felt explained a lot of the aspects of the article I found jarring. I'll try to reframe it!
I’m going to sound like an ass, but is this the sort of crap we’re going to see published in 10yr when all these crypto folk grow up a bit and start reflecting on their “glorious revolution”?
At least the Beanie Baby people realized it was ridiculous.
I guess the better comparison is dotcom folks, and they were pretty insufferable for quite a while
Can you please not do this here? That is, not fulminate and not cross into personal attack in HN comments?
I realize that this kind of remark is better-intentioned than it comes across on the internet. In personal conversation it can be just another way of chatting and making sense of the world. Tone of voice can do a lot to modulate pejoratives.
But in an online forum like HN it degrades and makes conversation more shallow, and tends to evoke worse from others, leading to downward-spiral-mode, which we're trying to avoid here.
That is a fair criticism. I’m letting my frustration with longer-term behaviors in social media influence my comments, and this is an inappropriate forum. I appreciate the correction.
You have a hard unenviable job. No reason for me to make your day worse, and you were right to call me out. Sometimes we all need someone else to give us a little friendly reminder that this is not the time or place.
Thanks for all the work you put into making sure this place isn’t a cess pool.
> Now, in fairness to X and Elon and its hard-working employees, the Adolf Hitler fandom does seem to have greatly wound down in the one and a half years since then. I suspect part of this is because such movements inevitably burn out once people realize how immoral and stupid they are. But another part is undoubtedly genuine improvements in how The Algorithm™ works.
> Click on the tweet and look around its quotes and responses, the same way that someone would morbidly stare at a car accident.
Twitter gets money from ads. They can sell more ads for more money when they can demonstrate eyeballs and eyeball time. Therefore, they're incentivized to keep your eyeballs on the app for as long as possible. If that means putting car accidents in front of you, that's what it'll do!
I strongly believe that social media is basically a lost cause for this and a few other reasons. I tried out Mastodon and Bluesky, but people there don't seem to actually be interested in conversation, and there's physical limitations that prevent meaningful conversation anyway in the form of character limits. ~200 characters is simply not enough space for anything meaningful to be conveyed, so the platform selects for snippy clapbacks and pithy virtue signalling.
I'm also unconvinced there's anything of value to be had from these platforms, maybe including HN. I seem to be hearing about the new hotness in the AI space for example by just regularly attending coworking events. I guess if everyone stopped using Twitter, that would stop being the case. Or maybe we'd go back to RSS...
Bluesky inherited Twitter's toxic culture and most of its users switched over for political reasons. That creates an echo chamber full of the worst "2020 cancel culture liberal" types who think they're radical but are really just annoying.
There are parts of the community where it's a lot better (atmosphere and open source devs, some digital artists who are not vocally pro/anti AI) but most people will see the front page that's almost exclusively US politics and get turned off.
I don't know how to fix this. Maybe create a new site that starts out focused on a specific large, politically mixed group like gaming or football fans and then expands to a general audience. Or use a personalized algorithm by default and initialize it randomly so new users see more diverse content.
> some digital artists who are not vocally pro/anti AI
I finally unsubscribed from the RSS feed of a web comic creator who has for over a year now (I think) not posted a single comic that is not about AI.
I mean there is not a single plot point beside "AI is bad" in those dozens of newer strips. I‘m not exaggerating as a rhetorical device, I mean this literally.
I‘m actually sympathetic to his view, but I came for the wonderful world and drawings. I‘m sad about the effect AI had on this artist, because yes, he‘s objectively endangered and right to protest it, but it has already taken away his oeuvre in a way.
1. Small social like Discord, WhatsApp / facebook groups, Bandcamp (I was recently invited to a topical group there).
I have some designs for something like ATProto by fully permissioned and focused on small social modalities. I'm not interested in platforms with globalness, reposts/quotes, or blocking (fence sitting this one tbh)
2. Spending more time offline, with people in real life, then taking those social dynamics and interaction patterns back to online ones. We are currently doing the opposite as a society.
Even if the platform weren't originally a microblogging one, longform text is basically over at a societal level because the majority of internet users now are on phones, and that medium discourages longform text. You can see this from Reddit, where comments a decade ago where often much longer, a couple of solid paragraphs, and now they tend to be microblogging-length inane quips.
It depends on which subreddit you're on. Reddit has this strange dynamic where it's simultaneously a series of web forums, and a single feed scrolling app. Some subs have more of a community feel and they can encourage longer form posts depending on the subject matter.
What's really notable is how the tone of a small subreddit post changes completely if a post gets boosted to everyone's front page. There's a small cycling sub I read with good posts about routes, tips, and advice. When something reaches the front page, it becomes a shitshow of car v bike culture war bullshit.
Until I gave up on Reddit this year, I was solely on small hobby subs. I hadn't even seen the big general subs since sometime before Covid. And yet all of those small subs I was on had degenerated into insubstantial comments and image posts. Posting substantial comments, the kind that used to be normal, started making one look like an autistic-infobombing weirdo.
Substantial discussion of some hobbies has moved from Reddit to invite-only WhatsApp groups, precisely because Reddit went downhill. (This is true for long-haul bicycle travel, for example.) Unfortunately, on WA, too, everyone is on their phone, so messages are on average too short for comfort, and also there is no FAQ culture so people just ask the same questions again and again.
I would recommend Pleroma over Mastodon. Character limits are configurable and I've often seen ones 10k or higher. While Mastodon can see and reply to the fedi posts that long, it may not be able to make them.
I reply to people on fedi quite a bit, personally. I think people are conversing.
Or one is living in a country where all banks require a phone as the second factor for authentication. Or living in a country where access to government services, public transportation and/or the healthcare system is now via smartphone. And just try living in China without WeChat at all.
Before making blanket statements like that, please always remember HN is an international community, and countries are different.
> Or one is living in a country where all banks require a phone as the second factor for authentication.
A cheap smartphone left at home and powered on occasionally to log into the bank's website should be enough for this. No cell plan, just WiFi. If you want to carry a cell phone and actually use it, I would suggest a degoogled Android ROM. By cutting out Google, privacy is significantly increased.
surveillance capitalism harvest privacy for profits while giving consumers a slice of benefits/convenience.
majority of consumers needs every bits of benefit to get by their lives.
minimalism is a lifestyle for the upper middle class to give up the convenience to protect their own privacy. while its no wrong protecting yourself, it doesn't change the system for broader community.
> if you spent a lot of time on X you will likely remember a particular one: everyone seemed to be suddenly becoming fans of Adolf Hitler... I did not leave X the platform, but I did leave X the interface
You know, it really is entirely optional to hang out at the Nazi bar.
> A phone connected to cell is an always-on tracking device
A phone connected to wifi is also an always-on tracking device. You can't really escape this without removing the "phone" part of the equation
Wifi is much less of a concern than cellular. The phone only connects to networks you choose, and MAC randomization keeps it anonymous. GrapheneOS also fixes VPN leaks that stock Android has, which helps on wifi too. Linux, Windows, and MacOS are not good at preventing VPN leaks.
Phones are not inherently bad for privacy. The cell connection, telemetry, and default apps are the main problems. The first can be solved with airplane mode, and the latter two with a custom OS (or an iPhone to an extent), just as you’d install Linux for those advantages over Windows. Due to their security model (app sandboxing, permissions, exploit protections), they’re a much better place to start for making a private OS that protects user data. GrapheneOS with airplane mode is more private than most desktop setups.
Unfortunately the network prison keeps people at the Nazi bar.
Mandatory Interoperability is the only solution here, which depends on the government, which depends on Nov 11 folks.
You know, there’s a world out there beyond the prison. It has no locks and no fences. You can just choose to go outside, right now; go for a hike, see some trees, watch a bird. There is nothing stopping you from never visiting the prison or the bar ever again.
What is so important on xitter? I've ended up following a link there at most a small handful of times in the last 5-10 years. I can't think of anything I would miss if it shut down tomorrow.
People on Twitter really overblow it's importance, but the vast majority of humans do not use it. Things posted there really only matter to other Twitter users, and are inconsequential in the real world.
I used to go to that bar a lot. When it became clear it was becoming a Nazi bar, and the owner saw that as a feature, not a bug, I stopped. Describing it as a network prison seems to imply that staying there isn't just a choice like anything else. Yes, it's a choice with consequences, potentially very negative ones, but these things often are. If it were always easier to be moral than amoral, we wouldn't be in this mess.
I mean, the rest of us just stopped going there. The interesting tech discussions long since left twitter, and if you are jonesing for a fix there is always bluesky or mastodon
> It's where influential folks post. Whether you like it or not.
It's where a bunch of rich (and often very right-leaning) assholes post. I'm not clear that correlates with "influential" outside of very specific circles - certainly all the thinkers and doers I used to follow on twitter left long since.
I pretty much stopped reading at the justification for hanging around on X. Lots of people are still there! But at least own it. "I implicitly support the owner of the Nazi bar as long as he tells most of the Nazis to stay away from me" isn't a moral stand I'd be comfortable committing to on paper, digitally, or otherwise.
I just don't understand what do you think you are getting from these places besides filling your head with nonsense?
Try not checking the news for a week too. What did you really miss? Right now is the best time. What does it matter if you miss the election results?
It is just a compulsive information consuming hobby with negative return. If you stopped wasting your brain power on this for a week you would probably be surprised how much more time you have to spend on things that are actually intellectually interesting.
What tech news that matters would you not hear about on here? Again, nothing.
I am not looking for any kind of news. Online spaces were for sharing, not just consuming. Sharing creativity, work, experiences, opinions - not 'creating content' for clout. It's a shame that the last two generations did not get to experience this. The ones who lived through that, are still trying to find (or rebuild) those spaces.
X is the only social media I use, and I use it a lot. I’ve never seen a Hitler or a Mao post. My feed is saturated with my intellectual interests. It’s a joy to use, filled with novel discoveries that I often want learn more about.
Getting this experience is simple: don’t click or garbage, occasionally block content you don’t like.
You're getting downvoted without even any responses.
My guess is that it's because filtering is irrelevant to the anger towards X, or rather, Elon. That's fine, I don't have a horse in the race.
That said, I agree with you. X is the only social media site that filters out stuff I've expressed disinterest in. This has been true for at least a couple years. I only need to hit the "Not interested in this post" or "mute" buttons maybe once per week.
So for me, I see nearly zero politics, engagement bait, or slop (in the traditional sense). I see a lot of people working on really cool stuff, talking about it in real time, who just want to keep the focus on those topics.
I went down the same path starting about a decade ago with airplane mode, and deleting apps until my phone was so boring and rarely used I canceled my cell subscription about 8 years ago.
Have not carried a phone at all since. I rarely carry any electronics at all and exclusively use cash in person to make me mostly digitally invisible IRL.
Stopped using X and all big tech services. Google, Apple, Microsoft... even deleted my Facebook and Linkedin with thousands of connections. Github I have not used in years and will probably delete once I finish migrating repos to my self hosted git.
Other than email, Matrix, and online forums like this one, I pretty much just use a terminal, and will probably do those things in a terminal soon too as my locally hosted AI helps me rapidly write better CLI tooling.
Also exclusively use freely licensed open source software and self host almost everything I rely on, including AI. I have never been happier or more productive in my entire life.
You are missing out on a lot. And I don't mean the social media apps, or any of that nonsense. Allow me to try and explain:
Maps: Knowing what's around me physically, up-to-date information, public transport routes, etc. I found some remote paths on CoMaps in the UK which I walked recently, without the aid of the app I would have not known about these.
AntennaPod: the wealth of information and interesting topics I've been exposed to via podcasts is hard to overstate.
Home Assistant: being able to control my home, optimise the energy usage, improve security.
AI: I can talk to an AI anywhere. Instantly upload a photo, for example I use this to identity plants.
None of these things try and draw my attention all the time - so they don't affect your focus. They are there when I need them, and then are in my pocket when I don't.
> You are missing out on a lot. > Maps: Knowing what's around me physically, up-to-date information, public transport routes, etc.
You are also missing out on a lot. In fact, there's an infinite number of things you, too, are missing out on.
Please elaborate....
Not the OP, but we have limited attention bandwidth. For everything the person advocated we spend our attention currency on (additional podcast information, location information, etc.) we are removing it from something else. It’s not that any of that is bad per se, it’s that attention is a zero sum game and we should be cognizant of where we spend it.
> Maps: Knowing what's around me physically, up-to-date information, public transport routes, etc. I found some remote paths on CoMaps in the UK which I walked recently, without the aid of the app I would have not known about these.
And I do something often almost no human in the developed world ever does; I get lost. I wander a bit. I give myself a bit of extra time so I can try alternative routes and see if I figure it out and maybe see a new part of my city along the way.
I look up maps in advance and print those when going somewhere the first time on a tight schedule, but that is about it. For the most part I just actually know my city.
Also research on Taxi driver brains indicates regular reliance on a GPS makes you as much as 20% more likely to develop Alzheimer's.
Turns out not using parts of our brains ever is bad for them.
> AntennaPod: the wealth of information and interesting topics I've been exposed to via podcasts is hard to overstate.
When I want music on the go I take a small standalone Rockbox media player. Can handle podcasts or years of music no problem. No internet on the go needed.
> Home Assistant: being able to control my home, optimise the energy usage, improve security.
I love Home Assistant and I optimize and automate it when I am at home, so I do not need to away from home for short periods. For long periods, I check it from a laptop at a hotel once a day or so and that is plenty.
> AI: I can talk to an AI anywhere. Instantly upload a photo, for example I use this to identity plants.
I use a notebook. I write down things that interest me. I do not need instant answers to every question. That leads to endless answers we remember few of. Better to be intentional with research that we still think matters in a day. Most of the things will not matter in a day, but there is a note just in case.
I once had google glass full time so I was never a second away from information and screens. I had every wearable that existed.
I am thankful for now not being reliant on any of it to be happy and productive on the go. I like to use computers intentionally at fixed locations so I can walk away from them and have a forcing function to exercise other parts of my brain.
I think people discount a lot of the upsides of the parts they are trying to “optimize” out of life.
To your maps example, some of my best road trips are not “optimized” but take two lane roads that are out of the way. Some of my favorite trips involve coming across places we came across by sheer happenstance. I also think boredom is the cocoon of creativity. But we have all but eliminated it from our lives when we constantly have a screen within arms reach.
I agree with the GP that GPS has opened new possibilities: some modern bikepacking routes were designed around a GPS. For example, there is simply no paper map that would safely get you along the 2000 kilometers through remote desert of the Baja Divide. The trail is not always easily identifiable, and not having a line on a screen to follow risks straying away from sources of water or help in the event of breakdown.
With regard to "GPS brain", a way to avoid it is to do OSM mapping while one is out and about. Then you are forced to get your bearings in a way that activates those parts of your brain, and in most cases you could backtrack or do the journey a second time even if the phone map were unavailable.
I go back and forth. It's useful to maintain certain social connections, which I find harder to do as I'm getting older (weird to say that, I am on the young xennial side).
This is the issue that I run into. I got rid of my facebook, but still have an instagram (very curated, but I get to see and stay in touch with friend's nonsense).
So it is a little hard for me to let that go as everyone becomes more and more spread out in the world. It's a weird soft 'push' of information that I am able to keep up with and enjoy.
Still, I see the ugliness of The Attention Economy...
It's weird finding a balance.
Almost all of it is nonsense. Ten years ago I was at a funeral where I found out the relatives were all on Facebook. I never saw the need till then so I signed up. Turned into a constant barrage of kids photos and someone standing in front of a statue while on vacation. But that's all gone away, rarely does anyone post, and I'm tempted to just delete the account cause now ask I see is nonsense reels and advertising.
I kinda wonder if politics is what has killed Facebook. Between my choice to block anybody who posts the boring team politics soundbyte of the day, and my unwillingness to post something that might invite that same kind of response ... I don't see much in my feed. And I bet that's true for a lot of other people.
But ... I do notice a lot number of people who just sit there watching reels. So FB is probably doing just fine.
Facebook declined even in countries that don't have high levels of political polarization. Younger generations in the West and new internet users in the developing world favoured platforms that were designed as mobile-first (Facebook, even with an app developed later, was not), since they rarely use computers. Connected with that change of interface was a preference for image posts, not long text, so Instagram and then TikTok overtook FB.
I notice you don't mention much about physical social interactions.
How do you meet new people and engage with your community if you don't have a phone or aren't using to use the corporate media apps? Is in person enough to get you by? Generally curious because not having a cellphone seems really hard or maybe that's just a misplaced anxiety on my part
Turns out all the methods humans used for the few hundred years before smartphones still work!
I met most of my friends at hackerspaces, board game nights, conferences, giving conference talks, parties, bars, etc. Put yourself out there in spaces where human beings of likely overlapping interests exist and you will make the friends that matter most. I first had a conversation with my wife of over a decade by tagging along with a bunch of strangers to a random pizza place. My wife did not use dating apps at all, so in person was the only way a guy could have met her.
I also open my house once a week to anyone I know, and host events every month or so. Met a lot of friends-of-friends that way.
And look, I get it. Doing all that is scary. I still have a lot of anxiety about hanging out with people I do not live with, and I do it anyway. Never regretted it once.
Spending time around other people in person makes us better people.
In many developed countries, the hacker events and board game nights are organized over Facebook groups; Facebook itself is dead, except for the events niche because people don't see a better place to announce these things; people aren't necessarily doing flyers posted on a message board like in the 1990s.
Also, in not all countries is it acceptable to talk to strangers in public, like your pizza place example. In Finland this will make people very uncomfortable, though you might get away with it if you are a obvious clueless foreigner (or an unusually charismatic foreigner). About the only place it is acceptable is bars after a certain level of inebriation, but that is not the kind of interaction many people will find worthwhile.
The Nordic countries have been like that for long years, but I think this taboo is spreading because young people in some Central and even Southern European cities, even with a history of cafe culture and large student populations, are complaining online about the difficulty of meeting anyone when out and about. Telling someone that they should just take the first step isn't necessarily a solution, because like climate change or recycling, this is maybe something that cannot be solved by idealistic individual action but requires policy changes.
Life is too short to wait on policy changes. Everyone has to take responsibility for achieving their own goals.
I moved a lot growing up, and had to make friends quickly. I got pretty damn good at magic. When a stranger suddenly starts complaining about how spicy the burritos are and blows an actual fireball randomly, you end up in fun conversations with strangers.
My version of it these days is giving tech talks even when they terrify me, because it helps me find the select few people who share my interests faster.
But also if 9/10 strangers blow you off when you try to chat them up, who cares? That is their problem. The 1/10 are going to make it worth it.
I made new friends through an open source project. I attended BUG/LUG meetings and other tech events. There are plenty of alternative social events that you don't need a phone for. Email and even irc will do. I am a phone minimalist so its similar situation as I have no social media accounts.
My personal experience is I've had better luck meeting people thru physical real world events than thru phone apps.
Church, friendly local game store, kids sports and activities, the general category of "festivals".
How do you ... Talk to people? How do you agree when and where to meet? Genuine question.
> I rarely carry any electronics at all and exclusively use cash in person to make me mostly digitally invisible IRL.
> Stopped using X and all big tech services.
This right here. I haven't given up my cell phone yet, but I run GrapheneOS on a Pixel without Google anything and only with a handful of basic apps (OSMand, K9, Home Assistant...). If something can't be done in the browser, I pass.
Don't forget that your car may also have a cellular modem and rat out your driving habits to dealers, data brokers and insurers.
> Don't forget that your car may also have a cellular modem and rat out your driving habits to dealers, data brokers and insurers.
This is why I never drive a car I cannot repair myself in a pinch that requires zero software or even a working battery to operate, which means low tech, manual transmission.
I see some locales where this could work. But here in Shanghai you are basically tethered to a phone + big tech. You could easily go about your WEEK and never talk to a real person. It’s actually really dystopian. Coming from self hosting etc. it is a completely different perspective. Exposing any content online requires a license, your modem and IP are connected to your ID etcetc. There is no privacy. Very sobering experience.
> Exposing any content online requires a license
You can get an ICP license easy with fake documents. Nonograph exists in China as "animal welfare" and "business to business" web portal even though it is for anonymous writing / leaks. I used to own the domain `秘密.网络` which literally means "secret[.]network".
> your modem and IP are connected to your ID etcetc
No different than America. Your modem and IP are tied to the billing contact.
> you are basically tethered to a phone
Weixin is a problem, but the other apps usually are not necessary.
What would happen if you self-hosted something? Prison?
Honestly… i dont want to find out. But yeah, prison, expulsion and 5 year travel ban is certainly on the menu
I get the motive but this is overdoing it. Sounds like a horrendous existence
I think describing it as horrendous is overdoing it. People have lived even more disconnected from devices except for the last 20-30 years and I wouldn’t call their existence “horrendous”
I'm a fan of Marshall McLuhan, famous for "The Medium is the Message". When Twitter first arrived, I thought "what is the message delivered by a medium that limits thoughts to 140 characters at a time?". My take: "thoughts that are dirt-simple are the most welcome." Also, "what is the message delivered by a medium that freely interrupts me at any time?" (I never investigated the options to not be interrupted.) perhaps "There's no need to worry about having my own thought train interrupted .... "
Nothing I've heard or seen about Twitter is enticing.... but I'm old and cranky. Not quite as old and cranky as Donald Knuth, who stepped away from email after 15 years, writing:
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
The goal of poetry is also to condense complex thoughts into few words. Single couplets are quoted over and over again in human discourse (assuming you speak the right languages, live in the right circles or read the right books).
You can certainly communicate deep and lasting thoughts in 140 characters.
You can in poetry. Also in Mathematics and in adages. No argument. But I seriously doubt that's the norm with tweets, although, as previously mentioned, I'm not on twitter. Further, it's hard to believe that as conversations progress, the nuances of a complex topic can be neatly packed into a bit of iambic pentameter.
You have to follow the right people. There are lots of scientists who took pains to carefully craft high quality tweets [1]. Of course, most people have left ever since engagement started getting paid.
[1] https://x.com/michael_nielsen was among the highest quality accounts when he posted regularly.
When twitter appeared it was 140 chars because it had an sms interface. The point was from a conference or announcement made in a room once could post via sms and the news would break that way. That was before apps with data available generally. I think the called live-something like live-services or so. That was a new take at the time.
This is a great blog post. I do a lot of similar things on my phone (GrapheneOS, airplane mode, CoMaps).
The thing that I’d been looking for on this minimal setup was a way to prevent access to the browser or installing apps at will. It was easy enough when I was on iOS. I just used Apple Configurator [1] to block Safari and the App Store, but on GrapheneOS, there was no great option.
Recently I made a device owner app [2] which allows hiding any UI app and locking itself. It ended up being quite an elegant solution as it allows full access to app stores for updates (new apps you install are hidden until you unlock and approve them). The only way around it is with the lock code or a factory reset.
This makes my phone a quite private device whose functionality I intentionally set ahead of time. It can only do what the apps I’ve chosen can do. I prefer browsing and similar on a computer.
[1] Apple’s Mac MDM app anyone can use. You need a Mac and to factory reset your phone first.
[2] https://beeswax.getflourish.org/
I use the minimalist phone launcher which has the option to set up blocking schedules for certain apps.
Between 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. I cannot use YouTube, Vivaldi, The real estate app, WhatsApp, etc.
If I want to unblock it I have to wait down a 3-minute timer to make sure that I really want to turn off the blocker
I'm not disparaging you, it's neat that you built this and it clearly solves a problem for people. But IMO, leveraging behavioral friction is simpler than dealing with all of this administrative overhead.
I treat my phone as stateless by default. I don't keep many non-stock apps installed. The obvious exceptions are authenticators, I hate it but I get it, and I need my banking app. Pretty much everything else is ephemeral and disposable to me. If I genuinely need an app, I install it, use it, and wipe it.
The imposed friction here kills the compulsory behavior. Do I really want to see what's on Instagram? No, I really don't. Do I really want to spend $7 for a mediocre latte at Starbucks? No, not really. This unintended side-effect has been great. I have no tolerance now for modern retail coercion, and opting out of the enshittified layer of everything has been great for my wallet and my sanity.
You can use Ente Auth if you want to use TOTP cross-platform.
easy to bypass [1] and [2]. back up factory reset
Personally I find the friction of a factory reset to be enough, but yeah this doesn't work if you don't. I'm pretty sure [1] can be set up not not be bypassed but I don't know for sure.
Pretty neat!
I appreciate everyone has a different definition of "minimalism" and that I'm a bit of an outlier. But my version of minimalism includes a) using a dumb phone, b) doing most of my browsing via a text based browser in a terminal and c) I've heard of social media, but don't see the point (though you could argue that maybe the HN comments section is sort of like social media.)
Which is not to diminish the author's point (which I interpret as twitter is a cess-pit and think hard about what social media you want to engage in and the interface you want to use.) My point is you don't have to spend time on twitter to benefit from this world-view.
A graphical browser with uBlock Origin doesn't stray too far from your version of minimalism.
EDIT: I don't see any downsides to being able to use OpenStreetMap, have used it from a KaiOS phone too.
Yup. I do use a "real" browser from time to time. Mostly firefox w/ a hopelessly outdated version of uBlock Origin and Vanadium on the mobile phone. Firefox is not without its issues, but reader view seems to improve most sites. I'm sure chrome has an equivalent.
I do text browsers because I live my life in a terminal and it's easier than double-clicking on another part of the screen and waiting for the graphical browser to launch. I also only have 16Gb of RAM, so I can only have a few browser windows open at a time.
And yeah... using a mapping site on a text only browser would suck.
> Firefly is a multi-client that combines together X, BlueSky as well as Farcaster and Lens (both partially-Ethereum-based decentralized social media platforms). You can see tweets from all four platforms, and you can make a tweet that gets auto-posted to all four platforms.
It is really interesting to see a third-party client for Twitter still operational. How is this still possible? This seems like an unauthorized third-party hack that would likely get shut down with too much attention?
I think this is against API ToS? But Twitter APIs don't appear to have changed significantly so maybe this can be just done as a matter of the fact until it gets signature kicked out by their WAF?
you pay 1-20 cents per post create via x api. I'm sure vk is happy to cover the cost.
Are there requirements to sign up? I want to load in $100 and promote my projects.
I feel like this is... a bit too much, no? Particularly the cellular part. I see the appeal of staying off the grid, but people with families would certainly struggle with this. Not to mention the many inconveniences this would bring about.
And using Twitter/X even with a different client... it's not really minimalism is it?
I can agree to some extent about the gripes with social media. It's why I prefer using Substack over Twitter, Reddit, etc. It is much more limited, but certainly not as toxic. BlueSky has also been decent in my experience.
> Not to mention the many inconveniences this would bring about.
This is what reinforces the problem.
When we choose conveniences, we reinforce them. This makes it harder to get away from the things that brings us that convenience.
Conveniences to be able to get a hold of anyone in seconds rather than waiting. Believe it or not, there was a time when we were just, not available. It was OK.
Did that mean that things were a little more challenging? Of course, road trips or going anywhere new meant more upfront planning. Not knowing where your children were brought anxiety which meant rules. However, it was all manageable. By ALWAYS choosing conveniences, we shut the door on alternative options which in turn make it harder to deal with inconveniences.
The other side of this coin is that not everything about the past was better.
I’m struggling to see how having anxiety about losing your children is better. I’m struggling to understand how knowing where they are would lead to having fewer rules.
I struggle to figure out how my friends being more available to text is a negative. What was character-building about calling them on a landline or losing contact with them entirely as an alternative?
I got chicken pox as a kid, that doesn’t mean my kids should get it.
I’ve had arguments like this with my parents about urbanism. When they grew up, the city was dirty, crime-ridden, etc. They also grew up during a time when the automobile was like the tech industry of their day. It was an innovation that changed their lives for the better in their opinion and lived experience. Their house got bigger, their car got bettter and lasted longer and their neighborhood got cleaner and safer, in their eyes.
My parents feel like trying to use the car less and switching to public transit or cycling more is like denying progress. What was the point of all that innovation and progress if we are “going backwards” in their eyes?
The end result of these discussions isn’t that I don’t believe in urbanism anymore, but I’m now more accepting of their point of view on the subject. I see their viewpoint as more valid than I used to. There’s nothing horribly wrong about their way of life even though I don’t necessarily want to adopt many aspects of it.
I am not certain but I think you missed my point.
I am not saying that those things have no value. The opposite is definitely true. However, you are accepting a lot of baggage by reinforcing the systems that bring those conveniences. Now, you MUST have a cellphone or you are a Luddite. You MUST have a cellphone or you can't read a menu at a restaurant, unlock the door to your hotel room or access your bank funds.
You now have lost digital sovereignty to large corporations because you need to be able to get a hold of your kids within seconds.
All conveniences come with costs that you and society must bare.
Last two sentences of your first paragraph are definitely not the sort of thing I was trying to say is okay.
I also don’t think some of the conveniences I talked about have much of a cost. My kids having a cell phone with basic phone and texting capability isn’t a digital sovereignty issue.
And I’m not sure if digital sovereignty matters if the alternative is digital abstinence.
That’s like saying “When you buy a Toyota Camry your life is beholden to Toyota, you should just walk to your destination.” The trade-off isn’t really even, is it?
Car dependency is an excellent parallel. People buy cars on the promise that they should expect freedom of movement, but then they arrange their lives so they can only go where roads have been paved, and arrive where buildings have been demolished for parking lots. They become financially dependent on oil extraction in the Middle East. They become incapable of getting anywhere alone when they lose the ability to drive, due to ailments or age.
So why do we do it? Because we can't imagine living without the convenience of our phones.
And similar to a phone, I don’t usually think that the answer is to just not own one at all.
I’m all for reducing trips and being more mindful about car dependency but I’m not personally going to sell my car because I can afford it and it makes my life better.
Are you imagining a modern society that developed without cars as being more of a burden to live in, or are you imagining the current society, developed with cars, as being more of a burden to live in when just getting rid of cars? Because yeah, getting rid of a car is going to make most people's lives harder. That's kind of what makes it a dependency.
When cars became popular, a lot of urban areas were developed under the assumption that all destinations would be reached by car from that point in time onward. There was no need to consider the idea that someone might not be able to or want to reach a destination without one.
I’m fine with cars being a beneficial convenience, an attainable luxury for the masses, but I think that any area with sufficient population (which isn’t very much) can support the idea of families being able to reach a significant percent of their daily destinations without a vehicle, and perhaps even preferring to do so.
It also saves a tremendous amount of resources and cost of living to reduce car trips per week per person by even a small amount.
When smartphones became popular, a lot of social functions developed under the assumption that all participants would have a smartphone, and have it with them at all times, connected. There has been no need to consider the idea that someone might want to participate without one.
You're arguing that car dependency is fine (for you). I'm arguing that car dependency is a good analogy for phone dependency.
> My kids having a cell phone with basic phone and texting capability isn’t a digital sovereignty issue.
Of course it is, the first version of Twitter was a texting platform. You can't draw some line and say that this is the end of the baggage that comes with this convenience because that is not how the world works. The inevitability of social pressure means "keeping up with the Joneses" so your kids need to communicate with others, not just you.
Just because it doesn't come in the form of an app doesn't mean it is safe or come without risks.
Telecoms (calling and texting) are literally regulated utilities. I’m confused at where the baggage is.
I’m failing to see how Twitter is relevant.
I’m failing to see the “keeping up with the Joneses” factor here. I am talking about basic cellular service not a $1,000 iPhone loaded up with brain rot apps.
> literally regulated utilities.
Regulated in what way that is relevant to the concern about digital sovereignty or privacy?
> I’m failing to see how Twitter is relevant.
My point is that voice and text ONLY (dumb phones) isn't some significant change from apps in terms of the concerns I am raising.
> I am talking about basic cellular service
If you and your children can maintain that situation, great, it doesn't change that society has NOT accepted that. That society sees you as unusual for not conforming. Which is the entire point of my argument. The pressure to conform doesn't yield because of a single person's choice and many use the arguments you are using to maintain their children's access to a $1,000 iPhone loaded up with brain rot apps.
I gotta be honest I don’t care enough about this subject enough to keep going lol
I am really just not in any pickle and don’t lose sleep over any of this. That was my original entire point is that sometimes it’s acceptable to allow things to be convenient.
I'm not a parent and a bit autistic so excuse the unemotional reply but surely there are other ways not to have anxiety about your children surely?:
Teach independence/self-defence/street smarts, encourage weight lifting for older kids, therapy/meditation for yourself (some anxiety is natural of course!), move to a safer city, have more children (easier to pair them up on adventures, plus less subconscious physiological fear of losing your one and only child), distract yourself and stay busy, go with them to places the first few times to assure yourself then take off your training wheels. Or just say no to certain things.
It doesn't seem to me a special case of anxiety that can only be addressed by spy apps and knowing you might be able to instantly contact them.
Knowing where they are isn’t necessarily “installing spy apps,” it can just mean being able to call them or text them.
“Move to a safer city” is a lot more expensive than a phone plan. A lot of people don’t have that luxury.
I agree that all the things you talk about are life positives but the way I see it, giving a kid who is old and mature enough to use one a cell phone is like a $15/month cost proposition for an outsized benefit of being able to contact them.
lol, have my kids carry a phone or have more kids so the can be paired up.
That’s a wild thing to say out loud. And absolutely doesn’t solve the problem. Kids need to have their own friends and own social circles if you want to teach independence.
I said /easier/ to pair up and I didn't say they shouldn't have their own friends.
I have cellular and wi-fi permanently disabled on my phone since the beginning of smartphones. I only use it with Ethernet. Works really well. If it's important, call. If it's not I can get to it next time I connect an Ethernet cable.
We made all of this work before phones even existed. Getting your attention siphoned away by your phone isn't a convenience, it's an unhealthy dependence.
How do you connect your phone to Ethernet?
Ethernet to USB-C adapter. Any USB-C docking station will work, too.
> I feel like this is... a bit too much, no? Particularly the cellular part. I see the appeal of staying off the grid, but people with families would certainly struggle with this. Not to mention the many inconveniences this would bring about.
Similarly, I think for people who are stuck in prison in Burkina Faso, I think much of this things also don't apply, as they don't have the freedom to chose if they want cellular service or not, if we're going through scenarios where all of those things might not apply :)
It's a shared personal experience, it is what it is? I don't think author is advocating that everyone in every circumstance should try to emulate all of those things. You read it, build your opinion, then learn from what you found useful and ignore the rest. If something would be impossible because of your personal circumstance, then you can just not think about that.
> I feel like this is... a bit too much, no?
I never understood those with the need to ultra optimize every millimeter of their existence and I find this kind of posts extra boring
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All these words and no mention of the book where the term comes from, also eponymous, by Cal Newport. His book is about actual digital minimalism versus whatever Vitalik is referencing here.
Hadn't gotten to TFA yet and assumed it was about Cal Newport's book (why I opened the thread). I was confused why AI kept coming up here in the comments, as the book predates the current AI fad. Thanks for pointing this out.
This is not digital minimism. Digital minimism would be:
- Not using social media at all
- Not using your phone at all
- Not using AI at all
Actually if we take the phrase to refer to Cal Newport's book, no. What you're describing is digital abstinence. From the article,
> Explore ways of greatly decreasing or scoping your social media use ... Get the information benefits of the platform without getting sucked in to the vortex
This is more or less what Newport is recommending. Find ways to get the benefit of digital technology while refusing the manipulative aspects and other downsides.
EDIT: oops, TFA doesn't actually mention the book, I thought it did. I think this point still stands: "minimal" does not mean "none".
I am not describing digital abstinence. Note that I did not mention abstaining from:
- the web (I am posting on HN after all, although I recommend a very stripped down browsing experience)
- email
- general computer use
It's telling that you interpreted that (rather circumscribed) list as total digital abstinence. Social media, smartphones, and AI are all relatively recent appearances on the digital stage.
That's fair, though I was somewhat responding to the short list of topics from the article and discussion in this thread.
I still don't think minimalism inherently demands what you're suggesting. If you don't find social media has any beneficial uses for you, it makes sense to cut it out of your life completely. Someone else might find they need some specific things from it, and decide to keep some engagement - on their own carefully dictated terms.
Also fair.
I don’t have a phone, I don’t have an account on any AI (though google search gets me)
No AI is easy, I don’t want it.
No phone is inconvenient sometimes, but I’m well aware I don’t want my life to be more convenient, I want it to be more fulfilling. I do things that are inconvenient because I want to. Bake bread, chop wood to heat our house, hunt to fill the freezer. I talk to people face to face, I live basically the same as I did as an adult from 2000 onwards.
I spend my days outside where there is no cell service anyway, and have no interest in being contacted or contacting others. The people with me are who I want to spend time with.
It's virtue signaling with extra steps
I guess minimalism is relative. I wouldn’t describe this as minimalism. Minimalism is not using a tool “that combines together X, BlueSky as well as Farcaster and Lens”. To me that is a way to cope with the opposite of minimalism.
You actually can just leave Twitter and read a book instead.
I was a heavy Twitter user since its early years. 6-7 years ago I started trying to cut back on it because it was just consuming too much of my time, which was impacting me negatively, but found it really hard--it's addictive.
When Elon took it over I decided to go cold turkey and delete my account altogether so I couldn't go back. Best decision ever. I have twinges where I miss it, but I'm much better off without it.
I had already deleted my FB account about 12 years ago when I realized it wasn't making me happy. I still have IG which was great years ago (see your feed and then it stops when you've caught up), but I dislike what it's become (ad/promoted accounts infested). I still use it to share pics with friends/family and see but I use Screen Time (iPhone) to limit it to 20 min a day, and I had someone else set the screen time code so I can't just extend it. Works well and keeps me in check.
Thankfully HN doesn't have the same social media hooks so it's easier to keep in check. A couple of years ago I made some comment that dang didn't like and got my posts limited (max 5 within 12 hours, I think). It bothered me for a while, but now I'm actually happy because it acts as a limiting factor, so I wouldn't even ask for it to be lifted.
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I agree with you, but this is probably not true for Vitalik, who is basically an influencer. We should all close our computers and spend our time in nature and reading books, but this does limit our outreach possibilities significantly.
"Vitalik as basically an influencer" is kind of a wild take, like maybe saying Linus Torvalds is an influencer.
Love or hate it, he invented the 2nd -- maybe even the 1st -- most impactful form of cryptocurrency.
You can leave Twitter and not read a book.
Twister is a cancer that doesn't need replacement.
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The article is about using your phone in airplane mode for 100 days...
The article is broken into three primary sections:
- Social media minimalism
- Cell data minimalism
- Web minimalism
What you say is true about the 2nd section, but the comment you are replying to is referencing the 1st section which states, in part:
"I did not leave X the platform, but I did leave X the interface. Instead, I have been doing most of my tweeting through Firefly:
Firefly is a multi-client that combines together X, BlueSky as well as Farcaster and Lens (both partially-Ethereum-based decentralized social media platforms)."
That experiment also felt more cute than actually minimalist to me.
When I decided to take a break from being terminally online, I didn’t turn off the phone feature but leave Wi-Fi on so I could still check my socials on the office Wi-Fi; that wouldn’t have actually done much. I forced my phone off the bulk of the internet by turning off Wi-Fi and disabling cellular data for everything but a few core apps like Messages and Maps.
wifi was still enabled, so internet access remained, and also used a number of wifi hot spots when not at home
having a phone with "flip to shhh" (put it face down, notifications are silenced) is really nice
Dead right on twitter. The normies have all left it. Pre Elon Twitter was the community bulletin board and meeting place for all sorts of interesting subgroups. They’ve all left. Normal younger people consider twitter to be as relevant to their lives as Compuserve.
My feed there used to be cool physics stuff. Now it’s just all the people in the world who want me dead and for every real one of those 99 bots joining in.
Musk clearly turned it into a Balkanization project.
He was effectively paid to by a soverign fund, the fact it aligned with his interests was a bonus.
Not true from what I can see - the only cohort who left Twitter were the uncompromising leftwing folks. OTOH, people with moderate views now can get points across that had been previously suppressed.
English speakers left. Or so I assume. It's still roughly what it always was so long if you were somehow illiterate in English yet educated and plenty smart :p
LLM auto-translations haven't changed that much. The current corporate seems to be trying to figure out why and whether those remaining huge mass of foreign users lean left or right by the criteria of US politics, but still haven't have any clue about that nor had accepted that non-English-speakers actually don't speak English lol(or, to say, find translated contents natural as speeches with reasonable flows of logic, to be even more blunt)
ITYM "American speakers".
Kind of, but I don't think this is strictly limited to the US. All languages are probably affected to degrees proportionate to language and culture compatibilities with the US English. If your ideas about left and right politics are the ones built up from first principle that isn't well correlated and connected with the orthodox interpretations, both sides will be nonsensical to one another, and that shields such bubbles from ... the massive negativity being poured into the platform, for example.
edit: since this is under a dead comment that might not bother too many: I'm suspecting that there must be two competing hypothesis inside the org that owns Twitter, one being more preferable than the other depending on where one is coming from, that users still remaining on the platform and active on it must be either A) appreciative of ultra right turn of the platform with increasingly dominant right wing ragemaxxing contents, or, B) they just exist as a colossal autonomous parasitic self-contained isolate hivemind that had always been at least equally influential as the host but now is also physically bigger and therefore more influential than what its owners consider the host.
Frankly, I find the Malfoy trend that was going on couple weeks ago to be highly sus, that it smelled like an artificial boosting campaign to map out political leanings of user clusters which has to be right leaning from the hypothesis A. It makes sense as to me as one, given my unique knowledge of political controversies surrounding Harry Potter and ... opinions expressed by its author JK Rowling, which absolutely everybody here knows about. And I'm imagining that, if it had been such an experiment, it must have been horrifying to watch the Potter villain simply accepted as completely non-controversial wholesome pro-LGBT pro-gay left-to-center content among the most influential and knowledgeable and skilled of Twitter users like nothing had happened since 2016 or so, supporting the undesirable hypothesis B, although that seems to have always been the reality to me.
You are right but I would use a different tone for what you're describing. E.g. I've seen a lot more antisemitism and full-blown racism on Twitter than I did in the past.
I put that into the "people who want to kill me" silo.
I vacillate on the value of seeing this stuff. Sometimes I think its important my radar be aware that these attitudes are way more prevalent in society than they used to be. Lot's of my not-on-twitter peers I suspect are in a bubble and don't realize how much societal decay there has been around norms and batsh*t conspiracy thinking. As a citizen I think it's important not to be in a total bubble until the frog boiling temperature is reached.
At the same time, I'm pretty sure that low grade daily exposure to "look at all these neighbors of yours who wish you were dead" overstates the prevalence and the fact that the people who feel this way do so in no small part because they are getting a daily algo feed claiming I wish they were dead (spoiler - I don't want them dead). Since I find it really hard to break my Twitter addiction there is something about all of these emotions which keeps some susceptible humans like myself clicking, but like the article says, it's quite rare that I emerge from an hour of Twitter scrolling feeling anything but gross.
All of this is frustrating because I was very late to Twitter. I joined a year or two before the acquisition. I loved how I could connect with all sorts of interesting brilliant people in all sorts of interesting fields. I wish I could get that back but I guess that iteration of Twitter didn't sell enough ads.
> All of this is frustrating because I was very late to Twitter. I joined a year or two before the acquisition. I loved how I could connect with all sorts of interesting brilliant people in all sorts of interesting fields. I wish I could get that back but I guess that iteration of Twitter didn't sell enough ads.
nuts. i joined in 2008. that was when it was cool.
It's also important to keep in mind that a lot of that shit on Twitter is literally just bots. I can mention some trigger word or name and the majority of the replies will be "name-bunchanumbers" with some generic profile picture posting the most caustic and idiotic bullshit. Like, go post something with the name "Brandon Johnson", the current mayor of Chicago, in it, and accounts you have never ever seen will come out of the woodwork to post irrelevant "huh huh progressive politics" slop, half the time they're just non-sequiturs. Same with Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, happens on posts plenty of right wing politicians too. Name-bunchanumbers, some AI generated "memes" to make it look organic. It's all bullshit. Automated bullshit.
I have no doubt there ARE people out there with those horrific views and ARE actually making AI generated meme slop and posting it feeling satisfied, but I choose to believe that the vast majority are bots, and a fraction of the real humans doing it learned it from the bots. Just reading that sort of shit over and over again can change how you think about things if you aren't vigilant and the outcomes are more division. Plenty of bad folks in the world just want the division. They want people mad, and feeling afraid.
No those are just "moderate" opinions of every day regular people, who were previously being "canceled" by "the far left". (/s)
The times I've had the misfortune of reading replies on xitter, even on what should be technical topics, they have consisted of extremist maximalist takes with others chiming in to call them "based" [0]. Whatever its "algorithm" is, it definitely leans into the outrage farming / Balkanization project, regardless of the bots.
[0] which from context would seem to be shorthand for "freebased", as in smoking crack, despite apparent intent to the contrary
Don’t confuse opposing genocide with antisemitism
I know the word gets thrown around in mainstream politics and has devolved into meaninglessness, but on Twitter it's actually really antisemitism, as in they want to expel and/or kill the Jews because they believe they secretly control the world.
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The far right genuinely believes that far-right views are moderate.
Please cite an example.
Yes, this has been my experience. I keep hearing "nobody uses X!" from people who are pretty politically extreme left — there have been no exceptions.
that's because you flag everyone you disagree with as "pretty politically extreme left"
As someone that feels both parties are irredeemably corrupt, I left because I am anti authoritarian and Twitter both before and after Musk has repeatedly unfairly applied rules for clear political reasons which made it no longer a fair or honest platform to participate in.
I think you're kind of proving their point about 'normies' when your first instinct is to start talking about 'leftwing folks' and 'moderate views'. Most normal people aren't talking politics on the internet.
My experience as a young adult in the UK was that most people I knew had moved from Facebook to Instagram & Twitter in their early 20's.
Normal people whose interests would be things like football, going out drinking, and reality TV. The extent of their politics would be sharing a meme of Boris Johnson or complaining about COVID restrictions. I don't like the word 'normie', but that's exactly how you would describe them.
Looking through my following list now, these type of people have now either deleted their account, or haven't posted in years.
I don't think it's entirely political. But the rebrand to X and Musk's involvement made using it very uncool. It's seen of in the same vein as Facebook now, it's kind of embarrassing to admit you still use it.
Yes, and the downvotes and replies you're getting on here perfectly prove your point.
The moderate views are always seen as too "boring" or "naive". There's always a vocal crowd who wants to tell you about it. Anyone willing to leave a comment is already too engaged enough to take a step back and find nuance in what is not being said.
Respectfully, the moderate isn't getting their point across because nobody is reading it. The only people the algo shows moderate views to are the extremes to feed their need for fresh meat. Normie moderate people in a point in the Overton window where they may respond to moderate points have as much organic attraction to spend time on Twitter as my teenage children do to chat with their peers via email (i.e., null).
The moderate on twitter is the proverbial old man yelling at clouds but imagining the clouds are actually some relevant audience of non-bots. I do admit we may define moderate differently here in which case there is a chance we are talking past each other.
points about Hitler, I take it?
Sounds like modern Twitter to me. Glad I deleted my account years ago.
Ok boomer
> We need social media less than before, because you can talk to the bot for information instead (and for human connection, there's still the old-fashioned solution: going out and talking to people in real life).
I kinda believe this. The web for collaboration, work, dumping out information and doomscrolling is a great tool, but I think is bad for any kind of socializing or 'communitizing' at a human level, where you are forced to treat humans as such instead of looking at some transduced digital representation of a real person in the form or chars or pixels prone to dehumanization.
> and for human connection, there's still the old-fashioned solution: going out and talking to people in real life
lol, looks like someone haven't learned from the early internet of the 90s
people talk on internet *because* going out in real life is not a preferable option
It’s more akin to giving up smoking.
This.
Social media is like a townhall where humans and bots interchange information, meme, find work, collaboratrs and meet n greet (socialize).
But just as in real life, spending your entire existence in the town hall is akin to being homeless.
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Notably absent: AI minimalism.
I think that's telling. If you're reducing digital human interaction on social media (which yes, has its share of problems) but replacing it with "social" interaction with AI, that's not minimalism. You're replacing one vice with an even worse one and coping about it.
But OP is using AI as a tool, not as a social interaction replacement.
He may be using it as a tool, but that doesn't mean it's not displacing social interaction. Previously he would've had to collaborate with people to get the same stuff done, which necessarily involves social interaction.
I don't think LLMs can replace human collaboration. More like replace documentation and editor drudgery
> I don't think LLMs can replace human collaboration
People are using LLMs to fill friendship, romantic, and mental health voids. Instead of turning to friends, lovers, and therapists/priests/mentors.
Sure but that's rather different from productive collaboration. People have previously replaced those things with Netflix or video games which also cannot replace human collaboration
I think most people would report that LLMs tend to be much more magnetic on that front than passive video entertainment or games!
AI in its current form, it's not a tool, it's a product you pay a subscription for
Local LLMs are pretty powerful and useful for me personally, and the best compute I have locally is a an RTX2060. I certainly have no paid AI subscriptions.
Obviously depends what you're doing, and not suitable for everyone, but it's an unhelpful generalisation to say AI in its current form is purely a paid product subscription.
Effectively it is. I hear relatively very few people talking about self-hosting it, or even just using one of those GPU rental services. It's all about claude, openai, gemini, if you haven't tried this week's model revision you can't complain, and so on.
the attention economy becomes the affection economy
Is AI a worse vice than social media?
Not per se, but if you're using it as a substitute for human interaction (like most 'chatbot' style UIs want you to), then yes, absolutely.
The main problem is that talking to AI is like talking to a human without any of the thorny parts. It's only going to be nice and helpful and always available to you. Chatting with AI is to social interaction like candy is to a balanced diet. Sure it's more instantly gratifying but long-term it's really bad for you. You need the thorny parts to build important social skills like tactfulness and navigating conflict.
As a person who almost certainly has ADHD, AI has done wonders to my social skills. You can either analyze what went wrong when you accidentally blurted out something somewhat inappropriate or pre-plan your presence in a social setting to avoid a costly faux pas, e.g. in job interviews or formal gatherings. Most pre-AI advice on the Internet for these situations is either very heavily NT-coded (blogs, self-help) or has very strong social desirability bias (forums with an upvote system).
> It's only going to be nice and helpful and always available to you.
You could always try "You are a thorny internet troll" as your system prompt instead. Works wonders.
> social skills like tactfulness and navigating conflict.
We're not still talking about social media, are we?
(I agree that substituting AI for human interaction is bonkers, btw. But I'm not sure social media helps, or doesn't also involve mostly AI interactions these days.)
Prompting the AI to be mean doesn't do shit. It doesn't change that your interaction with it is always consequence-free. It will never refuse to talk to you, and if it gets too mean you can just nuke it and start an new session. You don't have to build or retain any social skills.
My comment was, of course, tongue-in-cheek.
I'm trying to work out if your own commment was satirical, replying in that prompt's form -- if it was, then kudos. If not:
> It doesn't change that your interaction with it is always consequence-free.
I entirely agree, but this is a major issue with social media currently too. Neither AI or social media improve real social engagement skills, sadly.
True.
But that’s better than social media, which substitutes human interaction with chronically online weirdos. At least AI is smart and respectful.
Exactly. Interaction with healthy humans is, of course, better than interacting with AI.
But I'd also guess that interacting with AI is better than unhealthy humans, esp those put in front of you by social media.
Yes it is because it's the next stage in the emergent phenomenon of tech becoming more addictive so that we can't help but develop it. AI puts technology first over the needs of humans and it's harder to avoid.
But where’s the line? You could say the same about the Internet (or movies or books…) It can be used badly, but also to learn and reduce mundane tasks, unlike social media (though you actually can learn from social media, asking the AI is way more effective).
There isn't a line, just like 'dangerous speed' isn't a line. The addictive and deleterious effect of a technology is more like a continuous quantity and as that quantity increases, the probability of misuse and deleterious effects increase too.
Depends, if you care for the bot or develop a para-social relationship with it, then yes, it will be much worse. It does not care or have emotions or understand the human experience. It simulates those things through words and that really messes with the human brain.
If you are using it as an assistant, coach, or deep researcher to chat about interesting things with, then no.
Sherry Turkle breaks it down more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMiR-GxTrtM
No one knows for sure, but my guess is no? The difficulty with this conversation of course, lies in the details - specifically in terms of "to what extent can the user, or other presumably positive forces, modify what the person puts in their own brains."
This is why I'm a huge proponent of something like "small AI."
AI's future is like how Unity is represented in Rick and Morty.
Yes.
> If you access a web application, you end up re-downloading the application from the server thousands of times, and you are fully trusting the server each time. If the server gets hacked even one of the thousands of times that you open the site, you might be screwed. Regular old-fashioned applications (where you explicitly click "download") are better than this: you only need to trust the server to not be malicious or hacked at that exact moment once.
That's precisely why something like signed distributions packages are way more secure than curl bash'ing.
But many simply don't understand that. We had plenty of forged Web certificates likely. And even without that, with curl bash'ing anything sensitive you have to cross fingers that the server ain't serving one in 10 000 request with a backdoored version.
With curl bash'ing everybody is trusting every single time that the server ain't compromised or intentionally malicious.
At this point I've lost any hope: people simply don't understand security.
And as long as we'll have people saying that curl bash'ing is just as safe as signed distros packages, we'll have daily posts about major security incidents.
Security is a mindset and most people simply don't have it.
Agree with the overall sentiment of commenters:
Digital minimalism is less time on devices/platforms.
This article is more about digital curation, which has value in it's own right.
Rant aside, beside social media minimalism I am also a big fan of compute minimalism. I don't use VScode with 100+ plugins or a zsh maxed up with so much bells and whistles that the terminal looks like Christmas and respond with the speed of microsoft powershell.
But I guess most people in SF are in the opposite camp.
When you said compute minimalism, I thought you were going to talk about using a RISC-V processor and using Emacs for any text editing. I'd say that's the real compute minimalism. xD
Surely there is no universe in which Emacs hits the definition of a minimal anything?
Look, as long as nobody looks inside my .doom.d directory nobody has to get hurt.
Good ol' Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping holds up well these days when the competition is stuff like vscode. But yeah, I think vim is probably a bit more minimal.
> beside social media minimalism I am also a big fan of compute minimalism. I don't use VScode with 100+ plugins or a zsh maxed up with so much bells and whistles
That’s what I thought the article would talk about. If it were social media, I’d rather buy a cheap used phone, put the app on it, and turn it on only when I want to check something. Then it’s off. But I deleted/haven’t logged into my accounts for years now.
As for as minimal compute goes. my daily driver is an old laptop I put OpenBSD on. I also have an m1 air that I mostly use for shopping and meeting. Then an iPad for reading. But the key thing is that app and software are tools. It’s either tied to an activity (even relaxing ones) or it’s not used. No ricing or theming, just basic configuration to get the job done.
Twitter is still super relevant in crypto circles (you can see for example the (ex) binance CEO using it to give updates about their latest scandal) so I think Vitalik at the very least has financial interests in keeping a presence there.
But then again, he's already fabulously wealthy and could just walk away from the space forever if he wanted to and be just fine.
If I were him I'd just hire a person to handle comms on it for me but I suppose that's not really minimalism.
> I turned it on briefly to receive a confirmation code that I needed in order to maintain that phone plan itself, and once spiritually but not literally - when going on a remote and slightly dangerous hike, friends insisted that I bring along a few communication devices that they had for emergency comms and use them to check in once every few hours.
It is funny to have witnessed the conversion from the default state of people is being not connected digitally to being connected digitally and once people start living with the 24/h connection they start the perceive simply being out of cell network as carrying inherent risk.
I've noticed people reacting to going hiking beyond cell networks with a "but that's dangerous!" response. Being outside of cell networks was the natural state of being for the vast majority of human existence!
> I've noticed people reacting to going hiking beyond cell networks with a "but that's dangerous!" response. Being outside of cell networks was the natural state of being for the vast majority of human existence!
And it was dangerous.
Also: I grew up just before cellphones started to be a thing and I felt a lot of times as a kid the frustration of not being able to contact someone remotely.
Kind of a dream for me. I suspect I will be heading down this path as I get older. Minimalism in relationships seem to be already occurring when I have lesser tolerance of "noise" in conversation, niceties, and especially conscious of finding common points of conversation, let alone agreements. I hadn't gone as far as to cull relationships due to lesser relevance, but it started to feel necessary to disengage more quickly and move on even after bumping into an old acquiantence having not met or spoken for many years. This is relevant to digital minimalism especially social media (as cited in the article), and if social media, why not also every other source of information that otherwise takes up our cognitive and emotional space?
> Digital Minimalism
Sounds great.
> But it's just using social media less, not using the Internet on your phone and using the CLI more
Never used social media, my phone only gets internet via a cable connection and I only use GUI where the CLI isn't capable enough, like a web browser.
Not sure what I was expecting. It's great advice, but kinda preaching to the choir.
Hackernews is social media i'd say.
Particularly if you comment.
Its definitely not a super toxic site though, but its social media. Same as discord and other chatrooms. Something like IRC we would have called by another name in the past but I think nowadays we could say it's a form of social media.
Talking with people on the Phone is social media too then.
I agree it needs a definition and its no easy limes to draw, but id put it around algorithmic infinite feed recommender systems.
HN has no recommender system so I dont count it in. For me, its a forum. Plain, sometimes boring and often deep & rich.
> HN has no recommender system so I dont count it in.
HN front page is digitally curated. HN has an opaque post ranking algorithm.
> How are stories ranked?
> The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.
> Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Ever noticed the YC posts that cannot be commented on?
I suppose the difference is that the algorithm isn't specific per user. There are no bubbles like on social media, and the algorithm isn't designed to keep users engaged by tailoring their feed based on their viewing history.
There is definitely a HN bubble, we’re just all in it together
It's an interesting question: How do you define the line between a 'forum' (which most don't consider addictive or harmful), and 'social media' (where there is growing evidence of addiction and harm)? What are some attributes of social media that are missing on forums?
Opaque ranking algorithms?
Human curation / moderation?
Automated curation / moderation?
Voting / flagging?
Infinite scroll?
Images and/or auto-playing video?
Advertising inline with posts?
Profit motive to get users to do certain things?
I don't know where you draw the line, and what makes Facebook harmful but Hacker News not harmful.
Dang has spoken about this at some length in interviews, but the critical element is whether or not we're all seeing the same thing or not. HN is special in the world of social media because the front page is the same for everyone. That makes it quite a bit different than other social media sitesfolks mention (Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook, Insta). It means the algorithm can be tweaked for engagement (like demoting stories that have more comments than upvotes), but that you can't optimize per-visitor, but instead across the whole population. That one simple feature makes a world of difference, in my opinion.
>What are some attributes of social media that are missing on forums
I find it surprising that the thing that's missing from the list is to me the only thing that matters, the creation of an identity and social graph. I don't think the algorithm or technical details are that important, the qualitative difference is that on social media you are someone. You have a persistent profile, you have "friends", you invest in building rapport and status, you have followers or are a follower.
On social media you interact with people, not with topics. There are creators, not discussions. On HN you could for practical purposes shuffle everyone's username each morning and it wouldn't matter for 99% of us, and that eliminates most of the dynamics associated with social media today.
> Images and/or auto-playing video?
This is the problem. Text only allows you to consume a certain amount of information at once. Anything more is harmful imo.
Social media is public or public-ish. HN is public, talking to someone is not.
Think about when the term was invented. It wasn't in the days of IRC, ICQ and forums. It wasn't even the launch of facebook (2004). It only came up after people used their real identities and got algorithmically addicted to spend more of their time on a given platform.
If you want to retroactively attribute the term to things, you'd also have to add it to newspapers featuring reader's letters. But that's not what social media is.
> my phone only gets internet via a cable connection
Interesting... are you using a particularly old blackberry or PDA? Or is this something you've got your modern phone to use.
There are converters for Ethernet to USB-C. Every modern phone can do this. The only downside (or upside given recent developments) is that Android is unwilling to download updates via Ethernet.
He's still on social media. He just wants a better bullhorn for his own position.
"Around the same time, "Crypto Twitter" was spiraling into a mood that I saw described as "financial nihilism": roughly, that the natural end state of blockchains is gambling, this is good, and if you dislike this and wish for something better then you are a stuck-up elitist prick. Naturally, I had (and continue to have) my intellectual disagreements with both of these trends." (This is the guy behind Ethereum.)
So he built a tool that allowed him to post simultaneously on multiple services. That's not digital minimalism. That's a spamming tool.
Did you even read what he said he liked about it?
> My primary goal in doing this was to support decentralized social media, and to continue to engage with X but in a way that distributes network effect rather than locking it in. But in my months of using Firefly, I found that it also has a different effect: I feel much better using it.
> I suspect the primary reason is that while Firefly allows you to tweet, and see other people's tweets, it is missing one central part of the X interface: The Algorithm™.
What he likes isn't being able to spam multiple networks, he likes the change in the content presented to him.
I use Freetube instead of YouTube exactly because no login, no algorithm, no ads, no sponsored content. Just chronological actual content from channels I care about.
It really is a big difference.
That said I would only -consume- content ripped from YouTube. I have no account and no interest in publishing there.
The purpose of a system is what it does. If it spams multiple networks, that is its purpose.
POSIWID is dumb, but also, why are you ignoring that it reads posts from multiple networks? Why isn't that its purpose?
I have skimmed the post but some of the things are not minimalism, but replacement of delivery mechanisms. On the other hand I'm also doing something similar in my digital life.
I have reduced my social media to two sites: Here and Mastodon (with a very limited follow circle). I don't follow tons of ad-ridden websites. I have a self-hosted RSS reader, following 10 feeds. Instead of following junk tech news, I read LWN.
Next step might be enabling antiproc on HN to reduce my time here, since I added time limits on applications on my phone and love that artificial limit.
I have limited energy and I want to focus it instead of spreading it around. Otherwise progressing beyond a certain point becomes impossible.
> I also became interested in the concept of local world knowledge apps. In principle, the data size of meaningful packs of information about the whole world is not that large. Compressed English wikipedia (without media) is only 27 GB. OpenStreetMap's planet.asm is 2.2 TB, though you can doubtlessly prune that down to 1-10% of its size and have everything you might conceivably need.
We need more of these types of apps; the challenge is keeping it updated and synced with new information.
I hope Digital Minimalism doesn't mean depending on an AI product subscription, his written code(which is not minimal) or having a black hole of npm dependencies for running a wallet on the cli that(reporting what's on their repo): "NOTICE: this CLI has NOT BEEN AUDITED and IS UNDER ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT and HAS BEEN WRITTEN WITH HELP FROM CLAUDE et al"
What a "fantastic" era we're entering into. I think eventually these people will have a minimalistic life, with malware stealing everything
Although he mentioned how easily cellular location data can be obtained from telecom operators, both legally and illegally, he forgot to mention that mercenary groups continuously obtain cellular location data through SS7/Diameter attacks in a continuous manner rather than using any special exploitation technique. We recently had a case involving tracking a few civilians in different foreign jurisdictions having our agency contracted a specialist company that provided us with cellular location data of the targets on a 24/7 basis. This can be used against any operator in any country, with only one of two pieces of PII required: the IMEI or the phone number (with the second piece always retrieved once the first is looked up).
For more details read https://citizenlab.ca/research/uncovering-global-telecom-exp...
Kind of a misleading title. I would call this creating a dashboard through which you interact with social media. Which is a good idea, and conceivably a lot easier to build nowadays with AI. I'd even expand it to the internet at large, using RSS or something like it.
Having some kind of notification system would be helpful as well, since most platforms are actively trying to minimize the accounts you follow and replace them with their algorithmic suggestions.
He goes about it in more ways beyond the initial thing about twitter. Like airplane mode and offline maps.
You could go further, such as not getting involved with cryptocurrency.
Because the big centralized corporate banks having complete control of our lives is a great solution that we should never try to compete with in decentralized and sovereign ways?
Don't have a bank account either then. I didn't for years. We're talking about minimalism supposedly.
The Fed is most problematic bank, who prints money at the discretion of the President, apparently.
If all money is fake anyway, I want fake money where the value is decided by the market, not by one person.
The "cure" is worse than the disease. But sure, 95% crypto projects give the 5% a bad name, and that's not fair.
5 percent is generous!
Still, many of us are experimenting with ways to decentralize power and have no interest in the traders and grifters. We have an interest in buying things online with privacy like VPNs or servers. Donating to people that were cut off from banks like political dissidents. Having some access to liquidity that will work even when a false accusation freezes your bank accounts. Or a way to pay creators tiny amounts of value in exchange for content without needing ads or big payment network fees. See projects like LBRY making an alternative to Youtube. Most of the interesting things happening in crypto are happening quietly without VC marketing budgets to attract the finance bros.
It is important these experiments continue to evolve until something checks enough boxes for the average person to trust it more than a bank or paypal.
This may take decades to get right, but humanity will be better for it.
I agree with that. Thanks for your patience, and for taking my comment the right way.
I deleted my mainstream social media accounts about 15 years ago after realizing what they are. I am convinced that at some point most of them will be viewed the same as nicotine. I still have accounts on niche sites (like this one) that are mostly neutral, have nice, civil discussions, and are not designed to steal my time.
For me it's less about the tools I use, and more about building health habits (or reducing the bad habits). I use ScreenZen to enforce limited short session for a short list of harmful apps and websites (socials & news), and I configured it to allow a few 5-min-long sessions per day. The short sessions being cut in the middle help me stay informed but break the addictive nature of socials/news. I also use Android's Digital Wellbeing with Bedtime Mode (like Do Not Disturb) and Focus Mode (pause apps and notifications for almost all apps at night). Also uninstalled specific apps (e.g. Facebook) and using the mobile web version, which has subpar experience, which also helps in making it less addictive.
See also the 2019 book by Cal Newport, "Digital Minimalism": https://calnewport.com/my-new-book-digital-minimalism/
> I propose a philosophy of technology use called digital minimalism in which you radically reduce the time you spend staring at screens, focusing on a small number of digital activities that strongly support things you deeply value, and then happily ignoring the rest.
The biggest change for me was transitioning to feeds for everything I can
I wrote something for myself that fits my style of link consumption. Uses sqlite tables for search
https://github.com/rumca-js/OfflineWebSearch
I also use my own search index to find domains, channels. I find less often distracted by some algorithm trying to exploit me
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
Regarding the social media part, hugely recommend revanced, for those in android.
My Instagram app (besides showing no ads) shows just the stories and feeds of people I follow, chronologically. Just a couple days this way will make you realize how little content there is, my friend's Korea trip has been the top one for like a couple weeks already.
Then you can get the DMs to avoid FOMO and realize how antisocial the whole thing is.
No idea if it works for x, I left that long ago and everytime I've checked out of curiosity I've been shocked at the absolute cesspit it is.
This really resonates for me. I've gone back and forth on staying on social media given the mental side effects but also how useful it can be. I was on Instagram one day and I noticed that only one in five posts it showed me were from people I actually followed. I found a feature that let met only see stuff from people I followed (Insta makes this hard to find and use) and I felt a lot more at peace when scrolling my feed. Maybe I need to look for a firefly equivalent for it.
> ...used some kind of semantic search to show the user a search result from the local database immediately, and then followed that up with a very small LLM writing a text answer. This gives actually-good answers in a very reasonable timeframe
I have tried this very same thing on https://grimoire.bio. Large corpus of biological knowledge with detailed visualizations that are shown immediately upon searching, but adding LLM answer when missing/needed.
Interesting! On a similar journey. For me, the novelty of tech has been wearing off for the last few years. Slowly deleting apps. After this election I am going on media detox. We have also started reading again for fun - it took a while to regain my patience for reading but it has been so much more satisfying than endless web stuff. Have not missed anything so far. Now I have to loose my HN addiction… ;-)
This is why I am so careful about what I click and what signals I send to the algorithm. If you don't want to see car crashes then don't rubber neck with morbid curiosity at the first one.
I have never seen a Hitler post but if I saw one I would immediately block that user and the algorithm knows that. It doesn't show me people arguing it shows me debates and tech. Because that's what I taught it to do. It is not even hard it just requires a little discipline.
When a friend sends a link I refuse to click on it unless my VPN is on and I'm using Mullvad Browser. I don't want their taste (which is quite often look at this outrageous thing) ruining my feed.
One trick I have is if I see a video in my sidebar on YT that I don't want to taint my profile, I copy the url without going to it and open it in mpv directly. I tend to watch all my videos in mpv, but I do usually like to have them in my browser history and save them to playlists to find later as well, so I'm just skipping that part. I don't know if this method is perfect, they should still see my IP, but anecdotally I think it's been fine.
Went to a family reunion and an aunt pulled out a 15 year old Nokia. That's my dream. Unfortunately I need uber and MFAs.
I recently got into reviving old tech and was looking at a Nokia 3210. The main challenge is that these only work on 2G which is getting shut down in more and more countries across the world.
There are 4G mainboards you can buy and projects like https://www.nokia3310lteproject.com that aim to bring them into the modern world but for me these don't go far enough as they try to preserve the original UI. For me, the ideal device would be a 4G/GPS/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth-capable Nokia brick with modern interpretations of apps for maps, music, messaging etc. with optimized user interfaces for the limited screen space their tiny LCDs offer.
There was a lot of hacking done on the modem in the PinePhone, might be worth reusing it.
TOTP at least should be doable on pretty old/basic stuff. I saw someone make a TOTP app for 3DS. Maybe a literal 15 year old Nokia is pushing it, though. This wouldn't cover SMS MFA or the one where you need to hit a button from a specific app, but ideally those would die out anyway...
How does firefly bypass a ban from X for violating their no 3rd party app policies?
> Twitter (aka X) has always had a strain of toxicity to it
truth is, all most popular platforms have an insane amount of toxicity. it doesn't strictly comes from the platform it self, but from people.
Easy to go airplane mode when you're Vitalik. Most of us need Uber, SMS codes and our boss on Teams.
Exactly. Being able to log off to this a degree can be a bit of a privilege.
Attention is all they need.
It’s clear that many people don’t understand how the algorithms work. There is no such thing as “bad” engagement on these platforms. Engagement is engagement. Whether you’re supporting the content or violently opposing it, you’re feeding into boosting it further.
If you’re sick and tired of algorithms pushing crap on you that you don’t like, you need to ignore it.
Tools like Firefly that remove you from the algorithm definitely help, but as long as people are engaging with the content, the problem will never go away.
minimalism, privacy, security, these are all mostly a pursuit of luxury.
ive spent a lot of time on that topic, and tech always comes up just short of producing a truly distinguishing luxury good.
the ones that succeeded became the macbook and iphone, blackberry, early facebook when it was only open to ivy schools, blue check twitter, tidal, early slack, Signal, and some others.
the looming question is, what is luxury? the answer as a positive definition is a kind of alchemical mystery. its failure mode is vulgarity, its imitations are cheap, economics only criticizes it, and its very context specific.
my working model is a triad of desirable, thoughtfulness, and belonging, where you can describe a luxury product on these axis and predict whether it will succeed.
for minimalism, notable challenges are things like the ReMarkable tablets that are high desire and thoughtfulness but lack the integration for belonging.
post-systemd Linux has low belonging vs the bsd communities, and is kind of mid in nerd desire and has too much slop attached to be thoughtful.
when you take an obvious luxury product like the proverbial LP pullover or a Ferrari, they imbue a belonging, where an entry level watch or a lamborghini do not. "class" was always a dumb framework bc its critical instead of constructive.
digital minimalist luxury hasn't really been invented yet in spite of some really good attempts. id argue because they lack something in this triad.
> digital minimalist luxury hasn't really been invented yet in spite of some really good attempts. id argue because they lack something in this triad.
My gut is telling me it's "belonging".
> Around the same time, "Crypto Twitter" was spiraling into a mood that I saw described as "financial nihilism": roughly, that the natural end state of blockchains is gambling, this is good, and if you dislike this and wish for something better then you are a stuck-up elitist prick.
Surely he sees that the nihilists are winning. Crypto's main use case at this point is undeniably deeply corrosive corruption and money laundering, and as far as I know there's nothing plausible on the horizon to replace that (I kind of stopped paying attention after crypto industry leaders started meeting with Trump, though.)
There's another strong benefit to digital minimalism, which is the reduction in personal software footprint. The more software and network dependencies one is using, the greater security risks they take on. We live in an age where the supply chain risk is greater than ever, and it's useful to be mindful of the stacks our digital lives rest on. "How much can I get done with as little software and Internet dependencies as possible?" has always been an important question to be asking ourselves, and it's even truer now. Minimalism is not just a helpful principle to support our own cognitive wellness, but for our digital wellness as well.
Every time I read a Vitalik blog post, I end up wondering - how did a thinker so smart and so deep end up creating a technology that’s (now) so crass and shallow
You do a huge disservice to the technology stack that is Ethereum - it's not crass and shallow, it's really quite an elegant system
The only crypto I'm interested in is Monero. What's do you like about Ethereum?
It's programmable, so you're not just running useless hashes. And with Proof of Stake it's way more efficient than Bitcoin.
Programmable doesn't mean anything to me. Is there any useful things made with Ethereum for privacy and self-custody?
A) really weird to see knee jerk crypto tribalism in 2026.
B)Specifically regarding self custody? Quite a few. Argent is one notable example https://argentwallet.io/
No tribalism here. If another cryptocurrency provided low fees, privacy-by-default, and a good track record I would totally use it.
I'm simply curious as I've always seen defi as weird because nothing i've seen seemed useful.
I guess you haven't paid much attention to defi, then. DAI for a example is another defi project that creates an autonomously pegged trustless and permissionless stablecoin.
Rocketpool is a project that allows users to contribute to the proof of stake system with very small amounts of capital, and share in the returns thereof, again trustlessly.
There are miles and miles of useful projects out there. Any truly permissionless ecosystem is going to be full of scams, that's the nature of the beast. It doesn't mean that there aren't extremely clever and elegant projects being built by very talented teams of developers trying to make something that reduces the amount of global suck.
> Also, I learned that Toronto has a fraternity (or sorority) that seems to be named after SBF.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Sigma_Phi
> Founded in Abilene Kansas, in 1931...
Wow, that's not a leap I would ever have made, let alone posted online. The rest of the article felt similar, like it was well intentioned but maybe somewhat unrelatable: hopping off X by using a different app to read/post, quitting mobile internet by mapping every hotspot in town. Maybe it's relevant more as a break from the author's norm?
> Why is this person relevant?
Not sure who you mean by "this person" but if you mean the author of the article, that would be dipping a toe into personal attack, which we really ask people to avoid here.
(Note the "evokes worse from others bit" in my comment below—I'm sure it's not what you intended but this is exactly how that works.)
(Also of course, persons don't need to be relevant for articles to be interesting, and it's the latter that we're shooting for.)
It wasn't meant as an attack, but I did want to draw the connection to the author's identity, which I felt explained a lot of the aspects of the article I found jarring. I'll try to reframe it!
Appreciated!
Ethereum
That actually explains a lot.
Glad someone else noticed that.
I’m going to sound like an ass, but is this the sort of crap we’re going to see published in 10yr when all these crypto folk grow up a bit and start reflecting on their “glorious revolution”?
At least the Beanie Baby people realized it was ridiculous.
I guess the better comparison is dotcom folks, and they were pretty insufferable for quite a while
Can you please not do this here? That is, not fulminate and not cross into personal attack in HN comments?
I realize that this kind of remark is better-intentioned than it comes across on the internet. In personal conversation it can be just another way of chatting and making sense of the world. Tone of voice can do a lot to modulate pejoratives.
But in an online forum like HN it degrades and makes conversation more shallow, and tends to evoke worse from others, leading to downward-spiral-mode, which we're trying to avoid here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That is a fair criticism. I’m letting my frustration with longer-term behaviors in social media influence my comments, and this is an inappropriate forum. I appreciate the correction.
Thanks for the kind reply!
You have a hard unenviable job. No reason for me to make your day worse, and you were right to call me out. Sometimes we all need someone else to give us a little friendly reminder that this is not the time or place.
Thanks for all the work you put into making sure this place isn’t a cess pool.
> Now, in fairness to X and Elon and its hard-working employees, the Adolf Hitler fandom does seem to have greatly wound down in the one and a half years since then. I suspect part of this is because such movements inevitably burn out once people realize how immoral and stupid they are. But another part is undoubtedly genuine improvements in how The Algorithm™ works.
> Click on the tweet and look around its quotes and responses, the same way that someone would morbidly stare at a car accident.
Twitter gets money from ads. They can sell more ads for more money when they can demonstrate eyeballs and eyeball time. Therefore, they're incentivized to keep your eyeballs on the app for as long as possible. If that means putting car accidents in front of you, that's what it'll do!
I strongly believe that social media is basically a lost cause for this and a few other reasons. I tried out Mastodon and Bluesky, but people there don't seem to actually be interested in conversation, and there's physical limitations that prevent meaningful conversation anyway in the form of character limits. ~200 characters is simply not enough space for anything meaningful to be conveyed, so the platform selects for snippy clapbacks and pithy virtue signalling.
I'm also unconvinced there's anything of value to be had from these platforms, maybe including HN. I seem to be hearing about the new hotness in the AI space for example by just regularly attending coworking events. I guess if everyone stopped using Twitter, that would stop being the case. Or maybe we'd go back to RSS...
Bluesky inherited Twitter's toxic culture and most of its users switched over for political reasons. That creates an echo chamber full of the worst "2020 cancel culture liberal" types who think they're radical but are really just annoying.
There are parts of the community where it's a lot better (atmosphere and open source devs, some digital artists who are not vocally pro/anti AI) but most people will see the front page that's almost exclusively US politics and get turned off.
I don't know how to fix this. Maybe create a new site that starts out focused on a specific large, politically mixed group like gaming or football fans and then expands to a general audience. Or use a personalized algorithm by default and initialize it randomly so new users see more diverse content.
> some digital artists who are not vocally pro/anti AI
I finally unsubscribed from the RSS feed of a web comic creator who has for over a year now (I think) not posted a single comic that is not about AI.
I mean there is not a single plot point beside "AI is bad" in those dozens of newer strips. I‘m not exaggerating as a rhetorical device, I mean this literally.
I‘m actually sympathetic to his view, but I came for the wonderful world and drawings. I‘m sad about the effect AI had on this artist, because yes, he‘s objectively endangered and right to protest it, but it has already taken away his oeuvre in a way.
> I don't know how to fix this.
(imo)
1. Small social like Discord, WhatsApp / facebook groups, Bandcamp (I was recently invited to a topical group there).
I have some designs for something like ATProto by fully permissioned and focused on small social modalities. I'm not interested in platforms with globalness, reposts/quotes, or blocking (fence sitting this one tbh)
2. Spending more time offline, with people in real life, then taking those social dynamics and interaction patterns back to online ones. We are currently doing the opposite as a society.
s/Bandcamp/Basecamp/
Even if the platform weren't originally a microblogging one, longform text is basically over at a societal level because the majority of internet users now are on phones, and that medium discourages longform text. You can see this from Reddit, where comments a decade ago where often much longer, a couple of solid paragraphs, and now they tend to be microblogging-length inane quips.
It depends on which subreddit you're on. Reddit has this strange dynamic where it's simultaneously a series of web forums, and a single feed scrolling app. Some subs have more of a community feel and they can encourage longer form posts depending on the subject matter.
What's really notable is how the tone of a small subreddit post changes completely if a post gets boosted to everyone's front page. There's a small cycling sub I read with good posts about routes, tips, and advice. When something reaches the front page, it becomes a shitshow of car v bike culture war bullshit.
Until I gave up on Reddit this year, I was solely on small hobby subs. I hadn't even seen the big general subs since sometime before Covid. And yet all of those small subs I was on had degenerated into insubstantial comments and image posts. Posting substantial comments, the kind that used to be normal, started making one look like an autistic-infobombing weirdo.
Substantial discussion of some hobbies has moved from Reddit to invite-only WhatsApp groups, precisely because Reddit went downhill. (This is true for long-haul bicycle travel, for example.) Unfortunately, on WA, too, everyone is on their phone, so messages are on average too short for comfort, and also there is no FAQ culture so people just ask the same questions again and again.
I would recommend Pleroma over Mastodon. Character limits are configurable and I've often seen ones 10k or higher. While Mastodon can see and reply to the fedi posts that long, it may not be able to make them. I reply to people on fedi quite a bit, personally. I think people are conversing.
Unpopular opinion: you don’t need a mobile phone, let alone a smartphone.
You are using it, because you were told you need it.
I don't know, I am quite minimalist but a bottom of the line android phone is a great bargain.
For me, it is a wonderful mp3 and audiobook player that also acts as a portable harddrive.
Loved ones can send it an emergency txt in a true emergency.
There is a lot you can do with a portable little computer with a nice screen that has nothing to do with the nonsense most people use it for.
Or one is living in a country where all banks require a phone as the second factor for authentication. Or living in a country where access to government services, public transportation and/or the healthcare system is now via smartphone. And just try living in China without WeChat at all.
Before making blanket statements like that, please always remember HN is an international community, and countries are different.
> Or one is living in a country where all banks require a phone as the second factor for authentication.
A cheap smartphone left at home and powered on occasionally to log into the bank's website should be enough for this. No cell plan, just WiFi. If you want to carry a cell phone and actually use it, I would suggest a degoogled Android ROM. By cutting out Google, privacy is significantly increased.
> Or one is living in a country where all banks require a phone as the second factor for authentication.
Can you name those banks?
> Or living in a country where access to government services, public transportation and/or the healthcare system is now via smartphone.
Can you name those countries?
> And just try living in China without WeChat at all.
I can't follow.
surveillance capitalism harvest privacy for profits while giving consumers a slice of benefits/convenience.
majority of consumers needs every bits of benefit to get by their lives.
minimalism is a lifestyle for the upper middle class to give up the convenience to protect their own privacy. while its no wrong protecting yourself, it doesn't change the system for broader community.
> if you spent a lot of time on X you will likely remember a particular one: everyone seemed to be suddenly becoming fans of Adolf Hitler... I did not leave X the platform, but I did leave X the interface
You know, it really is entirely optional to hang out at the Nazi bar.
> A phone connected to cell is an always-on tracking device
A phone connected to wifi is also an always-on tracking device. You can't really escape this without removing the "phone" part of the equation
Wifi is much less of a concern than cellular. The phone only connects to networks you choose, and MAC randomization keeps it anonymous. GrapheneOS also fixes VPN leaks that stock Android has, which helps on wifi too. Linux, Windows, and MacOS are not good at preventing VPN leaks.
Phones are not inherently bad for privacy. The cell connection, telemetry, and default apps are the main problems. The first can be solved with airplane mode, and the latter two with a custom OS (or an iPhone to an extent), just as you’d install Linux for those advantages over Windows. Due to their security model (app sandboxing, permissions, exploit protections), they’re a much better place to start for making a private OS that protects user data. GrapheneOS with airplane mode is more private than most desktop setups.
> The phone only connects to networks you choose
For most people, the phone records and relays network SSIDs it sees as well, even if not connecting to them.
Unfortunately the network prison keeps people at the Nazi bar. Mandatory Interoperability is the only solution here, which depends on the government, which depends on Nov 11 folks.
You know, there’s a world out there beyond the prison. It has no locks and no fences. You can just choose to go outside, right now; go for a hike, see some trees, watch a bird. There is nothing stopping you from never visiting the prison or the bar ever again.
What is so important on xitter? I've ended up following a link there at most a small handful of times in the last 5-10 years. I can't think of anything I would miss if it shut down tomorrow.
The election in the US is Nov 3, the first Tuesday of the month
That is this next Tuesday, four days from now.
example: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voters/helpful-information/...
In what way will your life change if you never access twitter again?
People on Twitter really overblow it's importance, but the vast majority of humans do not use it. Things posted there really only matter to other Twitter users, and are inconsequential in the real world.
I used to go to that bar a lot. When it became clear it was becoming a Nazi bar, and the owner saw that as a feature, not a bug, I stopped. Describing it as a network prison seems to imply that staying there isn't just a choice like anything else. Yes, it's a choice with consequences, potentially very negative ones, but these things often are. If it were always easier to be moral than amoral, we wouldn't be in this mess.
I mean, the rest of us just stopped going there. The interesting tech discussions long since left twitter, and if you are jonesing for a fix there is always bluesky or mastodon
You clearly have not been on in a while, such discussions have returned.
For example just yesterday there was a tweet by Richard Sutton.
Even Zuckerberg tweets.
Richard Sutton is on this great social network https://arxiv.org/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Sutton,+...
> Even Zuckerberg tweets.
Having worked for the man some time ago, I'm pretty sure a bowl of oatmeal has more insightful things to say
That may be the case.
But misses the point. The guy owns his own Twitter competitor, yet has to go there if he wishes to have any influence.
It's where influential folks post. Whether you like it or not.
> It's where influential folks post. Whether you like it or not.
It's where a bunch of rich (and often very right-leaning) assholes post. I'm not clear that correlates with "influential" outside of very specific circles - certainly all the thinkers and doers I used to follow on twitter left long since.
You clearly have not been on in a while.
I pretty much stopped reading at the justification for hanging around on X. Lots of people are still there! But at least own it. "I implicitly support the owner of the Nazi bar as long as he tells most of the Nazis to stay away from me" isn't a moral stand I'd be comfortable committing to on paper, digitally, or otherwise.
The retelling of Hitler's arc deserves powerful voices like Vitalik's.
just leave twitter for the love of god
leave to where? bluesky and mastodon are nearly dead for tech. threads is facebook.
For nothing.
I just don't understand what do you think you are getting from these places besides filling your head with nonsense?
Try not checking the news for a week too. What did you really miss? Right now is the best time. What does it matter if you miss the election results?
It is just a compulsive information consuming hobby with negative return. If you stopped wasting your brain power on this for a week you would probably be surprised how much more time you have to spend on things that are actually intellectually interesting.
What tech news that matters would you not hear about on here? Again, nothing.
I am not looking for any kind of news. Online spaces were for sharing, not just consuming. Sharing creativity, work, experiences, opinions - not 'creating content' for clout. It's a shame that the last two generations did not get to experience this. The ones who lived through that, are still trying to find (or rebuild) those spaces.
to a nice little café with a book :)
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X is the only social media I use, and I use it a lot. I’ve never seen a Hitler or a Mao post. My feed is saturated with my intellectual interests. It’s a joy to use, filled with novel discoveries that I often want learn more about.
Getting this experience is simple: don’t click or garbage, occasionally block content you don’t like.
You're getting downvoted without even any responses.
My guess is that it's because filtering is irrelevant to the anger towards X, or rather, Elon. That's fine, I don't have a horse in the race.
That said, I agree with you. X is the only social media site that filters out stuff I've expressed disinterest in. This has been true for at least a couple years. I only need to hit the "Not interested in this post" or "mute" buttons maybe once per week.
So for me, I see nearly zero politics, engagement bait, or slop (in the traditional sense). I see a lot of people working on really cool stuff, talking about it in real time, who just want to keep the focus on those topics.