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colinbartlett parent
Absolutely insane. Until recently, I had none. Now I at least have a LinkedIn account. My mother has no social media at all.

wombatpm
New business idea- AI powered burner profiles. Company starts building generic profiles that follow acceptable account, occasionally likes some or posts some lame LLM generated posts. Some point in the future company sells you access to the account.
aitchnyu
In India people are going around asking to buy Telegram accounts. Not exactly a centralized operation.
lanstin
And a self-hosted version where it can be fed some personalized info as basic prompt.
TZubiri
That's against ToS, you are on the wrong ethical side. This is the technology and behaviour patterns that fraudsters use, you would be indistinguishable from an enemy .
wombatpm
What’s the violation again? Automating account activity? Liking stupid cat pictures? Following mid tier influencers? Having vanilla posts?

I’m not engaging in click fraud or attempting to monetize an account illegally. And it’s certainly doing what anyone could do on their own. Or is everyone 100% honest on social media all of the time?

areyourllySorry
the very legally binding novel-sized tos? the tos they change as often as they like to benefit only them? nobody is ethical here - they abuse us, we abuse them
TZubiri
Yeah.Those rules protect websites from spam for example, and in the case of more serious sites like linkedin, fraud.

If you go deep into this route you'll end up using proxies to rotate ips, which are sometimes obtained through compromised devices.

One thing is the theory, but look into how this is done, robotic interfaces like with selenium, shady proxies, account markets, you get a feel of exactly what type of people use this. If you into forums there's a lot of third worlders that go as far as using or selling fakepassports to make LI accounts.

Alupis
So you have no HN account? No YouTube Account? No Reddit Account?

These are all forms of Social Media.

energywut
I create and delete HN accounts every... 80-200 karma. I don't have a youtube account. I don't have a reddit account.

Why is it so difficult to believe that there are people here who view social media as a harmful thing they try to mostly avoid?

ninjin
If the world is heading the way the US is heading, I may be inclined to start doing the same. This is the only "social media" account I have left, but if my freedom of expressing myself will be impaired by governmental stalking like this I will sadly have to "adapt". Losing my ability to help filter and manage by upvoting and flagging blows though.
ProllyInfamous
Become ungovernable...

This hn account is my only social media account.

I do not use apps, nor carry a cell phone.

If your parking requires an app, I am not paying.

Should the court require me to sign an affadavid stating I do not use email nor text messaging, so shall I attest.

Fun tip for ex-redditors: you can view multiple subreddits (without an account) adding `+` between communities within URLs, e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/hackernews+worldnews+dataISbeautifu...

FireBeyond
> I create and delete HN accounts every... 80-200 karma. Why is it so difficult to believe that there are people here who view social media as a harmful thing they try to mostly avoid?

I don't know that "resetting my account" is the solution to "harmful and I want to avoid". I get why you're doing it in your mind (and there's validity to some parts), but to me "I see social media as harmful" means "I don't go on social media", not "I keep going on it, just with different credentials every so often".

energywut
Alcohol is harmful, but I have a glass of wine or whiskey from time to time. HN is my glass of whiskey.

I create an account, and delete it once I start feeling invested. If I can downvote people, I've probably ridden that account too long.

Once I start seeing the number next to my name and think "I should make that number bigger! This is fun!" then I've hit the point that I'm too invested. I'm letting the number make decisions, not me.

Then I delete it. I'll leave it deleted until I find a comment I simply cannot not respond to, and deal with being a green text person again for awhile. I'll get irritated at being blocked by default for most folks, and engage less.

It helps me self-moderate a slightly toxic experience so it's something I enjoy without it becoming a problem.

cool_beanz
I think it's about tracking and profiling? Not wanting to be part of that is a valid choice and shouldn't be punished in any way. Forcing a certain behavior or else you're considered suspicious is pretty twisted and dystopian. Not my problem whoever is doing this can't find a better way of separating threats from certain privacy conscious mental profiles.
redczar
I’ve been on HN since the beginning. I’m on my 12th or so username. Like you I don’t have a Reddit, Facebook, etc. account. Social Media is a plague on society.
Alupis
The OP comment in this thread has an account over 13 years old. That was the point when they said they didn't have any social media accounts.
TZubiri
I think at this point the onus is on you to provide some form of alternative. Can you provide to the officers at port of entry some proof of employment, or whatever?

If you are just going to blindly be indistinguishable from bad actors and do no effort in distinguishing yourself., then yea, don't travel to that country.

It's become very hard to tell whether this is sarcasm. I sure hope it is, though.
fc417fc802
Speaking for myself I have an HN account but why would I want those other two? And I certainly don't have any "social" accounts under my legal name.

I'm not even comfortable with ICANN based DNS given that the identity requirements amount to an impressum. That's fine for business dealings but interpersonal communications (including the metadata) should be private from outside observers.

Social media is where one shares ones social life (it's in the name!). Technical discussion forums are something entirely different.

Naturally, there is sometimes crossover (I'm thinking of a motorbike forum I frequent), but to suggest the likes of HN is social media is demonstrably false.

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