There's a subreddit dedicated to something like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/digitalminimalism/

We are also building a non-algorithmic private social network if anyone's interested: https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev

(Thanks to everyone who have already joined the waitlist and provided feedback)

The algorithm is far worse than people realize. It is a pan-platform behavioral nudge strategy to contain people to behave a specific way and box them in. It is an effective social credit score.

After watching how it behaves across X, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube - its clear the recommendations and nudges are coordinated. It is more than likely there are secret data sharing agreements to enable it.

Its insidious because it controls your reach and "score" across all platforms and then can "attack" you by attempting to surface content to push your buttons negatively across channels.

My opinion is this isnt anything to do with advertising, its a kind of government level shaping operation to try to create societal stability.

I personally have seen:

- The algorithm deliberately "neg" me multiple times, it knows what I don't like and shows me content to trigger keywords it knows will get my attention or deliberately cause insecurity ("old" "broke" "loser" "creep" "bigot" "fat"). I never interact with any content with these words, but it shows them - My conclusion is this is some sort of behavioral nudge. It happens across platforms.

- After I spoke out about Microsoft's approach to H1B, my content was permanently shadowbanned and limited on LinkedIn

- YouTubers continually censor themselves. Instead of "sex" they say "ess." Instead of "murder" they say "delete." They are consciously changing their speech. This is pure 1984.

Furthermore, I am convinced the algorithm also "shapes" the opinions of those around you in relation to you. Something much bigger than simply "being advertiser friendly" is going on, its a back door social credit score, emotional containment and psychological warfare structure.It will only get worse.

I used to be a hybrid user, mixing RSS feeds with scrolling a set of pages a few page downs. Now I only use RSS feeds. To keep it manageable, they can be configured to be updated once or twice a day and have set restrictions on sites or search terms. https://hnrss.org/frontpage works for me as a restriction for stories on this site, but it can also filter by points or other criteria as well.

There are many mobile readers, for desktop I like QuiteRss & RSS Guard.

> It's also not possible to fully check out from social media.

Why not?

Perfect length post, perfect CSS, perfect font family.

For whatever it's worth after years of being in a space that felt very similar to this my solution was... Having a kid and / or going to Recurse Center and / or moving to a non-LA/NY city.

I don't know if any of it's causal but I have finally crossed over some kind of line. I read books again (like I ever really did), I don't think about social media, I don't have that toxic icky parasocial relationship feeling, I don't even know how to use social media UIs when I see them anymore.

Its fantastic, I'm sure writing / reading this kind of post is a good first step so bravo and welcome (back) to the resistance.

Wait does HN count as social media? Does linkedin? Does Slack ir Teams at work? Does SMS??

In the spirit of tech to enable more offline connection, this is why we built Soonly: https://soonly.com

Hope it helps in remembering to call friend and family!

At some point this leads to "abolish the DMCA".

Otherwise everybody figuring out how to disable the infinite scrolling or control your own subscriptions gets punished by the dark-pattern-pushers through the legal system.

Unscramble ROT-13 in order to stop a full-page autoplaying video? Federal felony.

This is cringe