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While Twitter can be a cesspool, my personal recommendation is to make aggressive usage of lists, stay off the main feed, and view things through a client such as TweetDeck so you can avoid the ads and other "suggestions".
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For sure. Filters help a lot as well, I was very aggressive with those too. The perpetual news cycle stuff would still probably leak through some but I’d imagine it would be cut down a ton.
Stacker news is basically the only “news” I get in my life now. So much high signal only content.
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I agree there is always leakage. And you don't really think it would impact you, but it does.
I really enjoyed your post yesterday. It reminded me of this classic essay by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
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Thank you! And thanks for sharing that post, an interesting read.
It’s a fine balance between what’s part of your identity, what’s a strongly held belief of yours, and what’s an opinion. And maybe a problem with some of that is how you engage in conversations and treat people, not so much that it’s “part of your identity”. I agree with anti-labels though, and minimizing (but not completely removing) what’s “part of your identity”. But if we as a society were more civil, open to change, and accepting of differences more - it would be less of an issue.
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Would you use social media if there were a viable decentralized alternative?
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I debate this question a lot. Some of what I’m working on now is along the lines of a decentralized web. I think there’s certain aspects that I would like to use, and if it was a decentralized as much as possible, I should have more control in what I see and how I see it. But even mastodon didn’t do it for me either (though it’s more distributed than decentralized).
For now, I’m in the mindset that I’d really like to avoid almost all online interactions in favor of physical experiences. Id have to see if a decentralized alternative were to pop up AND be socially healthy as well. A responsible social media of some sorts.
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Many of us feel this way but aren't brave enough to pull the plug. There's a cost to being on social media and a cost to being off it - the cost to being on it is probably greater for most.
I spend most of my time on there finding signal among Bitcoin/Lightning builders to repost to SN but once a day I'll end up scrolling through a feed of noise or worse, all the builders are engaged in some noisy political debate themselves.
In a world of endless online content, the inputs that exist far exceed what we’re able to consume. The number of false inputs is limitless and they outnumber the truths.
Said another way, there's negative cost to creating noise online - you can post noise for free and possibly get a return on the noise you create via engagement. Only the audience pays for your content, whether it's good or bad. The incentives are broken.
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Definitely. If I had not already built some rep & education, it would clearly be more difficult to achieve some of the things I had and continue to have. Not impossible, and not to say different paths wouldnt have had equally joyful outcomes, but it’s more logical to reason about keeping social media to network towards goals.
&& yeah I like some of Roy’s thoughts (from Breez) on consuming content. It all has a cost, but when we aren’t paying for it, it’s hidden. Micro pay walls are an important step in conceptualizing that everything that consumes time in life has a cost.
wen stacker news paywalls? 😂
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Suun
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