For what it’s worth, I have met TurnTrout in real life, use social media, and was initially skeptical about the Digital Minimalism thesis. After reading this post, and having had it recommended to me by another friend, I read the first half of Digital Minimalism. I found it basically unconvincing. In particular, it seemed like chapter 1 was supposed to provide motivation for why social media was bad for me, but didn’t really deliver—I didn’t think the evidence given distiguished “social media is designed to be addictive” with “social media is designed to be valuable and usable”. For instance, it seems to interpret social media tools that let you interact with your friends in ways that have significance for your relationship (e.g. tagging them in pictures) as a way to addict people, but it seems to me that that’s just a nice feature. In some places it seemed sort of obtuse—the author talks about how the ostensive benefit of FB is letting you see things like friends’ baby pictures, and claims that the like button increases addictiveness but doesn’t help deliver the ostensive benefit. But it seems obvious to me that seeing which posts are ‘liked’ would help FB distinguish between pictures that people want to see (babies, engagement photos) and pictures that they don’t (poorly-lit food photos, boring party pictures).
Strong-upvoted, even though I disagree on the overall argument strength (I think there were some weak arguments but in total the evidence seemed pretty good to me). I look forward to paying out if you want to collect on that.
For what it’s worth, I have met TurnTrout in real life, use social media, and was initially skeptical about the Digital Minimalism thesis. After reading this post, and having had it recommended to me by another friend, I read the first half of Digital Minimalism. I found it basically unconvincing. In particular, it seemed like chapter 1 was supposed to provide motivation for why social media was bad for me, but didn’t really deliver—I didn’t think the evidence given distiguished “social media is designed to be addictive” with “social media is designed to be valuable and usable”. For instance, it seems to interpret social media tools that let you interact with your friends in ways that have significance for your relationship (e.g. tagging them in pictures) as a way to addict people, but it seems to me that that’s just a nice feature. In some places it seemed sort of obtuse—the author talks about how the ostensive benefit of FB is letting you see things like friends’ baby pictures, and claims that the like button increases addictiveness but doesn’t help deliver the ostensive benefit. But it seems obvious to me that seeing which posts are ‘liked’ would help FB distinguish between pictures that people want to see (babies, engagement photos) and pictures that they don’t (poorly-lit food photos, boring party pictures).
Strong-upvoted, even though I disagree on the overall argument strength (I think there were some weak arguments but in total the evidence seemed pretty good to me). I look forward to paying out if you want to collect on that.
Have PM-ed.