I don’t think that’s dramatic. It’s part of the thesis of that recent Netflix film (‘Social Dilemma’) Basically: If you are not paying for it, then you are the product, not the consumer. A restatement of ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’.
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i don’t see the point of removing myself from social networks.
because i’m absolutely sure that if i do — i’ll instantly find another way to waste my time 
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I’ve long left Facebook and never had any desire to go back. These days I use Strava to help me maintain an active life style. I’m also on Instagram, and while it can be quite a cess pit, there are quite a few folks on there that I wouldn’t want to completely lose touch with.
I guess the key is to use what is useful and discard the rest, a lot of it is time wasting crap but there is no doubt that certain things are very useful.
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I’m completely addicted to Facebook and rely on it for my information and synth feeds everyday. Just to balance out the thread a little. But never use anything else including twitter and instagram. Still don’t get the point of those.
Like making music? 
that would be to easy 
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I’m Facebook free now: I left IG as soon as FB bought it; FB (+ Gmail) went next, >5 years ago; WhatsApp was the hardest to drop due to all my friend groups and my kid’s friends parents using it, but that’s gone as of this year. I have three google accounts - work, YouTube and group projects, but I don’t “social” on them. If I could move my various hobby/project/volunteer teams to Notion, or some kind of shared text file thing, I’d do it… but I know it’ll fail. I ran a Mastodon server for a year as an experiment, but didn’t use it so I’ve shut that now.
I read Elektronauts, HackerNews and some music nerd blogs/aggregators. I rarely watch TV news. I spent about 5mins a day on a couple of general centre-left news websites. It’s a low-stress, high joy media habit, but kinda lonely. It’d be better if I saw friends and went to debates/lectures more often but work/parenting/pandemic make that trickier. Plus I’m getting more a-social these days.
The constant public rage and clickbait news on social bothers me less than the tracking. The former is awful but almost justified given we still haven’t created a coherent system for living well on this planet yet. But I viscerally hate the surveillance economy (ad networks, tracking, Google, Facebook). I’m appalled that we have, collectively, done this to ourselves. I’m regularly tempted to start a content-based advertising network, to help wean advertisers off personalised ad targeting/survellance. But my ideas are ill-formed and I don’t have bags of capital. And now my free time is about music again 
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That’s exactly what’s happening. Or rather, it’s the people influencing the direction of the mass populations internet use that are in control.
Plus EVERYTHING @Octagonist said, spot on
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Instagram is the best social media because there’s more emphasis on pictures than text, which leads to less boring shit. Just don’t follow anything that annoys you and you’re set. I only follow musicians, bands, record labels and friends or acquaintances who post stuff that interests me. There’s less adds (or they’re less invasive) than on other networks, too. Facebook is the worst but I’m still there for messenger.
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no.
making music is something rather productive.
however, human brain can’t always be productive. it needs some amount of chaos and entropy.
and social networks cover that need really good
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I got rid of Facebook in 2009 as it was clear to me it was garbage. I don’t use Twitter or Instagram either. I deleted LinkedIn a few months ago too. I frequent this site a bit too much and a few other music related blogs. I use the bbc for news (mostly sports tbh). I would love to get rid of my smartphone but I live in another country to my family so WhatsApp etc is important to me. Last week I deleted the mail app on my phone and it was the best thing I’ve done in a long time.
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FB is total garbage, fast food for the brain. But the Marketplace and Events are solid. Messenger is necessary, unfortunately. Twitter seems depraved and sometimes I have the inclination to sign up to “join in on the conversation” but then I get a whiff of the quality of the convo and drop it. YT is horrendous now if you’re not paying; the algorithm seems . Viber is fine; use it for the fam. I haven’t and will never use WhatsApp. The kid loves TikTok. I think if I were younger I’d be in to but my brain doesn’t move that fast anymore. Everything just comes off as a blur to me (though people share stuff from TikTok regularly on IG and it’s honestly some of the best content).
I’m pretty picky with my IG feed. It’s mostly made up of individuals or outfits I want to support; I’ve picked up some good music from it too (holla @jonsimon) But there are a couple gems on that service - la_meme_young in particular - that are absolutely fabulous. It’s a clean UI and, unlike FB, garbage doesn’t pile up in your feed. I’m against social media in principle, but the quality of IG is ok. I just don’t follow shit I don’t want taking up head space.
Someday I plan to do a clean sweep and migrate to Protonmail and use Signal and Telegram exclusively. I wish DuckDuckGo provided better search results…pretty bad atm. Brave web browser only.
Alternatives are getting better and better. For those so inclined, at least. All of us here seem to at least acknowledge how problematic the machine of social media is. I find it’s harder to get others on board, unfortunately. People seem more than willing to give up their mental space to these monsters.
My Achilles heel are these goddamn forums and idiots like yall! 
I can’t fathom giving up news. I just don’t go looking for it on sites which regularly offer up clickbait, partisan tripe.
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Are you familiar with Jonathan haidt? He likens social media usage to cigarette and fatty/sugary food usage. America used to smoke a lot more, and America is still in an obesity epidemic its coming out of… Same will be said for social media. At least I hope.
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Just curious how you use YouTube with no other social media to promote your YouTube content?
I really hope that’s true! The direction of travel is not encouraging right now.
Relevant reading:
http://www.jaronlanier.com/
The left/right bullshit propaganda is there to confuse the rest of humankind, keep us divided and controlled. The graphic is also not accurate, because if you put the owning big companies instead of their fake media outlets, there are in reality only 7 companies in the USA that do put out mainstream media.
P.s. 5 in Germany that are connected to the US ones via the Atlantic bridge.
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It’s not too bad for a quick search where the results are fairly popular; but a better alternative is startpage.com, which is essentially the Google API but with the datamining stripped out.
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Duckduckgo works for me. Standard search engine in my firefox browsers on laptop and mobile.
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I use their browser on my phone as it’s pretty lightweight and shows privacy risks per site visited, and the search is perfectly adequate for most of my phone usage too.
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