So, I’m questioning my stance on social media apps. Recently I started talking to a girl on a dating site and after a few days of talking today, she asked for my Instagram ID. I don’t have an active Instagram account because I hate their data-hoarding practices. For nearly 6 years now, r/privacy has been stuffing into my brain that Instagram is inherently bad for privacy. So I avoided it. Now coming back to the situation, I remembered that I created a burner account long back and I hastily reactivated it. It had 0 followers, no name, no bio and was set to private. I changed the username, followed some random accounts and gave this Instagram account to that girl and while sharing my ID I made up a story that I deactivated my account several months ago and reactivated only recently and my followers “vanished” due to deactivation. She immediately got weird about it and asked whether I still used the account to which I replied yes and then she asked if I had any posts on that account, luckily I posted some shitposts and memes on that account and had a couple of story highlights. She softened her guard now and gave me a follow request. After going through my account she got somewhat reassured that I was a real person and was not a bot. This has got me questioning my stance on social media apps, like whether I should follow such a stringent No-No policy or should I follow a lax approach. Last year, the Clubhouse app was getting popular and every single one of my friends created accounts and hopped on to chat rooms but I didn’t even install it solely because of my philosophy of privacy. I’ve noticed that frequenting communities such as r/privacy and /c/privacy tends to make users form a more extreme take on privacy over time and it also makes them more and more anti-social over time. I was a social butterfly 10 years ago and had a ton of friends on Facebook, in 2015 I deleted my Facebook account and in 2017 I passively started visiting r/privacy, I immediately got into digital footprint cleansing and burned most of my accounts. I slowly became more anti-social and didn’t use any social network- no Instagram, Snapchat, Discord etc., This has taken a toll on my social life. And in this debacle, I don’t WISH to be anti-social, I’m anti-social but not in a voluntary manner. I’m in my prime years and I need friends and relationships at this age but my privacy standpoint is mangling with those. We all know that having a social life is essential for dating and that social life also includes the use of social media apps but my extreme takes on privacy disturbs all of this- like I change all my usernames every 3 months. This kind of practice is seen as “weird” and “extreme” by many. In my honest opinion, I think that a user should draw a line between privacy and social life and should stop things and analyse if they think things are going downhill and also consume privacy-related content in moderation.
Not having an insta isn’t weird or what turned her off - being fucking creepy and weird about it then lying is what turned her off… Jesus
Being active on a social network is not the same as having a social life - meet people, make friends, and make an effort to reach out to them. THAT’s having a social life
Being active on a social network is not the same as having a social life - meet people, make friends, and make an effort to reach out to them. THAT’s having a social life
In this digital age social media apps are part of the social life, if you don’t have them you’re limiting your social life by not partaking in them.
Odd, I have plenty of social interaction and haven’t had facebook in over a decade. I even moved states and made an entirely new friend group, all without having a facebook.
Your problem is you lied to someone you were trying to create a relationship with. What did you expect? That she wouldn’t see through a hasty attempt to make it look like you actually used the account instead of just being a dead account? For all she knows, you’re going to leave her in a ditch somewhere and you’re just hiding your tracks…
Just be honest, and if someone’s not going to want to hang because you don’t have a particular social network already, they’re doing you a favor by not wasting your time.Find better friends that you’ll actually enjoy spending time with and communicating. Get a hobby or something…
Dude, being privacy oriented was not where you fucked up.
You fucked up by lying to her and coming up with some half assed cover story rather than just saying ‘i don’t really use it.’ That is bullshit behaviour, makes you look extremely untrustworthy, and would end in her rejecting you no matter your stance on traditional social media.
You are confusing social life activity with social media engagement activity.
social media isn’t social. go out and meet people like a normal human being like we have done for thousands of years. get a jmp.chat number dedicated for randoms.
sounds like you want to use social media but dont want the guilt, so you made this post.
If you wrote that post and came to the conclusion being privacy oriented was your big issue you got a long road ahead.
Your young and dumb and pretty much all of what you did was weird af and creepy. You will learn. Take the L.
Not having a social life and limiting your social life aren’t the same thing.
I’ve got multiple group chats going on Signal with people I spend time with in real life. I exchange emails and texts with people all day long, and spend time with my friends locally, as well as check in regularly with friends and family that aren’t local.
My social life is rather full, in fact.
And I’ve never had an account with a Meta property.
So don’t worry about limiting your social life, when there’s more opportunities to be actually social with people than there are hours in the day.
Do you have an insta?
No.
Problem solved.
But then when do I interject my 20 minute long run on sentence about the dangers of social media?
At least wait until you meet their parents so you can give your full presentation in front of the whole family.
Yeah, that’s my “The CIA is putting tracking devices in raccoons” powerpoint slot. But since thanksgiving is coming up and all those people will be
trapped with mesocially obligated to listen I can save it for that.i love this thread rn
having a privacy oriented mindset online doesn’t make you antisocial in person though. This post makes it sound like you need an Instagram account to be a valid human but like, why is that even important?
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Fair point, hadn’t even considered that
Hahah, damn, nice reframing! Have an upvote.
why is that even important?
This is our mentality (privacy loving people).
You need an Instagram account to be a valid human
This is their mentality (mainstream people).
I don’t know which age group you belong to but social media apps are very essential for 18-24 age group to make connections. This is also the age where peer pressure is high and those who don’t partake in some activities get sidelined very quickly. Instagram and Snapchat play a vital role in the dating, no one is willing to share their # anymore. If you say you don’t have Insta or Snap all you’ll get is a weird up to down stare and the words “I’m sorry”.
having a privacy oriented mindset online doesn’t make you antisocial in person though.
Unfortunately, it does. There has been multiple research conducted in this field. Please look up the following for yourself:
“The Social Costs of Privacy”, by Jonathan Zittrain,
“Privacy and Social Connection” by Sherry Turkle.
A person’s social life isn’t limited to being online. I’m in your age group. It’s really not that deep to meet people in person.
Pardon me for sounding like an armchair psychologist here, but it seems to me like you have fallen down some weird rabbit hole where you are excusing your creepy behavior patterns with this concept of privacy. I suggest you take an honest look at how you behaved in this interaction, because “privacy loving” is neither a cause or justification for what you described doing in the OP.
Instagram and Snapchat play a vital role in the dating, no one is willing to share their # anymore. If you say you don’t have Insta or Snap all you’ll get is a weird up to down stare and the words “I’m sorry”.
If you really believe that, then tough shit: you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You chose to stay off insta and snap, so you have to accept the consequences of that choice. Your decision to try to spin up a burner account and hastily attempt to make it look legitimate was stalker-tier behavior. Not to mention that painting a whole class of people with such a broad brush as “no one is willing to share their number anymore” is dangerously close to incel bullshit all on its own. It is far more likely that no one is willing to share their number with you because you are pushing to get too familiar too quickly and they are rightly picking up on the major red flags.
The appropriate response would have been to be honest about not using it (and in general being honest is ALWAYS THE RIGHT MOVE when you’re meeting people, so long as sharing wouldn’t put your safety at undue risk), and to accept the odds of the weird stare you expect to get.
Because everyone is a unique person, and you don’t actually know when you’re going to run into someone with similar views as you about privacy, if that is really your true concern. But it seems like your desperation overrode whatever principles you purport to have in that moment. Changing who you are to try and get in someone’s good books is fundamentally manipulative and is a serious problem. You are never going to be capable of a healthy relationship until you nip that in the bud.
It sounds like you are young, so the good news is that most people have been a fucking idiot in this regard at one point or another, and it’s easily fixed! Accept that you fucked this up and take an honest look at how you approach interaction with others, and you will already be farther along the path to normal social relations than you think.
In a way, Instagram is a great filter for me. I tend to socialize with a lot of people from kids to the elderly. The type of Instagram-first people are exactly the ones I don’t want to spend much of my time on. People with common interests and the ability to relate to others of various generations are the type of people I want to spend time with, and they tend to show up in the same circles I hang out in.
When you’re dealing with a full set of more than 7.6 billion people, those sidelining people who don’t follow them on Instagram is a vanishingly small portion, and worth the privacy.
I feel like this is similar to being a non drinker, or atheist, or not into clubs, or not into drugs, etc. You will sort of limit your social circle because of what you’re not interested in doing. Privacy is the same. The question is - do you want to make new friends who are into those things? If so, then your have to moderate your views and be part of that scene.
I talked to a girl on a dating app once and she asked me for my Instagram. I told her i don’t have social media. She said that’s a red flag. Well, that is a red flag for me and i moved on with my life. I wouldn’t get along with someone who values their social media this much anyway.
That’s so simple that I can’t believe I haven’t thought of it before. I was worried about not drinking, not partying, etc etc. But do I want friends that are into those things? Not really lol Thanks for enlightening me haha
That’s straight up the actions of the people who are the reason women need to think about privacy for real life reasons instead of just idealistic principles.
Being a creep will definitely affect your social life.
Choosing to prioritize privacy will definitely affect your online social life—especially if you’re trying to get to know real people using your real identity. Privacy-centered communities are not the ones you should be blaming, however. This is just the unfortunate state of the Internet, and privacy communities simply make us aware of that truth.
A lot of us here are trying to find ways to push back against regulations and groups of people that are violating our privacy before it gets to a place where we no longer have a choice. Going upstream is always more challenging and less convenient than going with the flow, but the hope is that it will be worth it in the long run.
If your online social life is more valuable to you than privacy, you have the total freedom to choose how you want to balance that. Just be careful of projecting your own experience on everyone else.
That doesn’t sound like her getting spooked because you didn’t have an insta, it sounds like she got spooked because instead of being straight up and going “I mean, I do, but it’s old and I never really used it at all” you got weird and made up some weird BS about it.
And I know it’s that because not only would it make me raise an eyebrow if some random did something like that to me, I always tell people “Unless you’ve got a Whatsapp, its either text me or call me. The two social medias i have are ancient, I barely used em in the past, and the logins are lost to time I’m pretty sure.” Never given people weird vibes or anything by being honest like that, and we more often than not have a pretty nice time.
Also, being mindful of one’s privacy does not make said person anti-social. I’m pretty protective of mine, but i still reach out and talk to my friends and family near daily via face to face or messaging, am pretty receptive to a stranger or acquaintance wanting to have a chat or a coffee with me after work, all that jazz. That I don’t like the thought of Meta, Samsung, Google, and Microsoft snooping around people’s info, trivial as it may or may not be and thus distince myself from them (within reason, mind. I can cut myself off completely, but that’d be making both life, work, and everything inbetween too much of an unnecessary hassle), doesn’t diminish any of that.
And in this debacle, I don’t WISH to be anti-social, I’m anti-social but not in a voluntary manner. I’m in my prime years and I need friends and relationships at this age but my privacy standpoint is mangling with those.
But so this isn’t a conundrum you chose. That’s why people here are so into privacy. Instagram is social, sure, but is that the kind of socializing you want? Really? We know it’s bad for the mental health of teenage girls. What’s to desire about that? What’s to desire about the algorithm that actively tries to make you hooked on the app?
These are the kinds of questions behind the privacy communities, among others.
Also, don’t lie to women. Extreme things usually only look extreme until a person understands them. Explain yourself and give them an opportunity to come around and/or be willing to make compromises. Having an Instagram account you use every now and then to verify your humanity in a virtual world seems reasonable to me.
and every single one of my friends created accounts and hopped on to chat rooms
FOMO and Privacy usually do not mix well. Unless you can come out of “All my friends are doing it, so it must be cool” mindset, you will find it difficult to appreciate privacy.
You yourself said
and that social life also includes the use of social media apps
Note the keyword “includes”. So Social Life is not JUST social media apps. As someone mentioned already, dating starts best with face to face interactions.
Have you tried the good old phone number exchange, may be to try out texting?
Lastly, if someone wants to understand the real me based on my Instagram profile and activities - I would stay away from that person. YMMV.
The downvotes are because of the title and the example (cause yeah; just tell her “no”). I had to read the post three times to find them, but there are good points in there. I feel bad for you.
Social health is important, and if you think something is wrong, then something is wrong. Absolutely don’t waste the prime of your life being alone Look at your city events, find clubs, get a dog and meet people at the dog park, volunteer, go to the gym, go to a skate park.
But
social life ≠ social media*The caveat* is group chats. Being excluded from a basketball pickup-games chat because of privacy has no easy answer: either compromise on privacy to improve social health, or be alone. That is something that’s not brought up in privacy communities, and I think it’s wise of you to see that problem and not be afraid to bring it up.
For the rest of the social media though, that’s absolutely not the case. It’s well documented social media always caused poor mental health, the companies know it’s bad, and they spend billions trying to cover it up.
So if you change your stance on social media, just remember: Followers and internet points are a horrible substitute for friendship.
Being a privacy-oriented person has forced me to interact with individuals in real life and not care about other people’s opinions. I am not willing to compromise.
Why didn’t you just say you don’t have an Insta account, and just mention that you’re just quite a private person (don’t need to go too heavy into that on a first date)?
There are some people who care way too much about it, but I feel like most people would be more on guard because of the weird explanation for having one that barely exists than the lack of one at all.I feel like this is similar to being a non drinker, or atheist, or not into clubs, or not into drugs, etc. You will sort of limit your social circle because of what you’re not interested in doing. Privacy is the same. The question is - do you want to make new friends who are into those things? If so, then your have to moderate your views and be part of that scene.
I don’t think this post deserves the downvotes it has gotten. I do think that OP is wrong in his take on this, unless anti-social means not engaging in hashtags, social media is not important. All you need to be social online is basically a group chat, either with friends or open groups if you want to chat with new people.
It’s an important discussion to have in the end though. Life happens outside social media, even (especially?) the things that doesn’t get posted. Being open about not liking social media and not wanting to engage with that has earned me a lot more respect than I ever thought it would. There’s still hope.
I agree and thats why threat models are important. Of course the more extreme models will lead to less interactions with strangers in this digital age. In hindsight, using a dating site should’ve been your first indication that maybe you should re-think your’s. As for the friends argument, It should be stated that changing the contact method shouldn’t be the deciding factor for a friendship to continue that just screams a red flag imo.
