Broadcast social media is so odd to me now. It feels like walking to the center of town and shouting about your life to everyone.

I go to Facebook once a week or so, scroll for about a minute, then close it. It was a novel experience reconnecting with people from my past, but in the end, I just found out too much about people, realized it may be best to let people in your past stay there, and that comparison is truly the thief of joy.

Now, I just like watching interesting people talk about interesting things. I get that here, somewhat, reddit but lately only in a very narrow way, tik tok as long as I carefully maintain the algorithm, and youtube. All of them I have to be careful with, otherwise I can get pulled into hellholes of outrage bait. And I'm really, really wary of engaging in dicussions anymore. HN is about the only place, and even then I often regret it.

One time, on reddit, there was a discussion about dishwashers, and how people needed to clean food off dishes, otherwise it would fill up the filters. I posted a link to a user manual showing that it was common to hook up the dishwasher to the garbage disposal to take care of that. I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just posting something simple and factual.

Even here, half the time I post, I feel I will end up regretting it.

I've had the same mental model as you (shouting in a town square) and that's why Twitter always seemed weird to me.

Lately, I've found that another mental model fits that sort of medium even better:

Hot takes scrawled on the bathroom walls of pubs.

And here, if you post something you later regret, you can't delete it or delete your account, which is pretty questionable on a social network in the modern age. So much for 'the right to be forgotten'.

At least once a day, I type up a comment somewhere, proofread it, think about whether I really want/need to post it, and then hit the back button. I figure that next-to-last step of asking myself whether it's really something I want out there is a good habit, and if the answer is always yes, I probably haven't thought about it enough.

Glad to hear my own experienced echo'd. I've been dialing off of the stuff (even HN) for these very reasons. The staggering one is this:

> I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just posting something simple and factual.

One of the darker side-effects of social media is that everything now feels very ideological and "team sports." You're either "with us" or "against us," nuance has basically been obliterated. Even more shocking is that in some places, it seems like anything that's truthful/factual or plausibly truthful triggers a visceral negative reaction in people (to the point where, what used to be polite disagreement is now a rage-dump).