by ken on 9/5/19, 6:24 AM
Facebook is a city. It's full of zany characters, and beautiful art, and people crying for attention for their cause, and not much privacy. The longer I live in a city, the more of a jerk I find myself becoming, and if I stay too long, I feel bad. Lots of people say they've had enough and want to go live in a cabin in the woods. Few actually do.
This is how society has worked for thousands of years. Where some people go and find success, others will follow. It's a positive feedback loop. In hindsight, did we really think the virtual world would scale less well than the physical one?
Social media is terrible, and also great. The worst thing I can say about it is perhaps: it's easy. And like anything in modern life that's easy, it brings out the worst in us. We've reached the point where large swaths of people can spend all day doing easy, nonproductive things, and it's not good for the individual or society. We want things to be easy, but we don't do well when they are.
by 01100011 on 9/4/19, 10:37 PM
I dunno. After moving to the valley and leaving all my friends behind, social media is my one connection to anyone besides my wife. I don't compare myself to people on SM and feel bad. I see my friends and family and generally feel good.
by ajxs on 9/5/19, 1:18 AM
I stopped using any kind of social media five or so years ago, and I've never looked back. I have a bare bones profile with no personally identifiable information on one particular social network so I can keep in touch with a few people who are interstate, but I never browse the public site. My fears that I would lose touch with people close to me were unfounded. It may be a platitude to say that the people who don't make the extra effort to contact you aren't your real friends, but it is true. I lost touch with many people, but not with anyone who mattered to me. My real friendships all endured.
The impetus for my exodus from social media was the realisation that my online activities weren't a reflection of my real life persona, but was directly affecting it. I realised that by using these mediums in the manner that was intended I ( and so many others ) was beginning to engage in what I would call dysfunctional, histrionic behaviour. I came to the realisation that the person that I want to be does not do this kind of thing, and I was completely right.
Not only do I disavow Facebook on moral grounds for the political implications of their overreach, but I think that it is a product engineered to prey on human insecurity and profit by perpetuating dysfunctional, harmful behaviour.
by ubercow13 on 9/4/19, 10:21 PM
Does this still hold up? 95% of my facebook feed is now shared posts that aren’t related to things my friends are doing, and are often posts about products. There is almost nothing I see on facebook that invites social comparison with my facebook friends any more.
by kevingadd on 9/4/19, 11:29 PM
One interesting trade-off here is that modern Facebook intentionally hides posts from your friends and family, often important ones. See
https://twitter.com/Hellchick/status/942863353403150336 for one big example. I can imagine this selective filtering having a big impact on mood, and it seems like they were already doing it back in 2017. Maybe it's connected with FB's previous research on how to manipulate users' moods (positively or negatively) with timeline biasing and filtering?
by moron4hire on 9/4/19, 11:01 PM
I've noticed recently that very few people in my circles on Facebook seem to be sharing their own posts. Mostly it's resharing another article of some kind, one they probably found through an ad on Facebook itself. So between the ads Facebook sends me, and the ones my friends forward on, literally 90% of my feed is ads.
by schiavi on 9/4/19, 10:46 PM
I have been working in this problem space for the past year or so developing a new kind of social media that I think has some merits. Take away the advertisement model, the public nature of discourse, and replace it with meaningful context-driven one-on-one conversation and I think we might have something. My platform can take any topic and disseminate a discussion to as many one-on-one conversations as people who are willing to participate.
https://www.confidist.com -- Would appreciate it if anyone wants to take a look at the current build. Cheers -Nicholas
by jammygit on 9/5/19, 3:52 AM
> Our approach had three strengths that set it apart from most of the previous work on the topic. First, we had three waves of data for many of our respondents over a period of two years.
I don’t honestly think that 2 years is a meaningful time span to measure how a tech changes people’s lives. It is certainly better than a single snapshot, but some effects take time to manifest - it’s simple behaviourism. More changes require more repetitions.
Edit:
> Second, we had objective measures of Facebook use, pulled directly from participants’ Facebook accounts, rather than measures based on a person’s self-report.
What about twitter, Instagram, and whatever else people use?
This study design also cannot show causation, just correlation. The control group is self selecting
by ineedasername on 9/5/19, 12:07 AM
I think ( or at least for me, this is the case ) that there is a threshold. A certain amount of casual usage doesn't make me feel bad, and in fact can be gratifying-- sharing nice photos with family & friends. But very regular or constant use is bad.
by randomsearch on 9/5/19, 6:34 AM
I find it strange that people consider HN to be social media. For me, social media is synonymous with manipulation engines designed to keep you engaged in order to sell advertising. HN isn’t selling advertising, it isn’t trying to addict you. Maybe ten years ago “social media” just meant “interacting with others online” but I think language has moved on.
I don’t like placing HN in the same bracket, because it devalues it. It would be like labelling your local vegan restaurant “junk food” and treating it like McDonalds. Lots of work has gone into actively making HN not like that, and it devalues that effort and the genuine efforts of posters to maintain civil discourse.
by shakna on 9/5/19, 2:11 AM
Worth pointing out that how you feel when using Facebook will also change, not just with environmental and other personal factors, but always with how Facebook chooses to respond to you.
Facebook has had at least one experiment in the past to change how the user feels, and it was A-B tested, not run against everyone. [0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
by dang on 9/4/19, 9:34 PM
by tim333 on 9/5/19, 11:48 AM
Though this study is better it still doesn't really seem to distinguish cause and effect. ie is it
- your real social life sucks so you spend time on facebook, or
- facebook causes your life to suck?
From personal experience I find more the first one. You could try an experiment where you persuade participants to be chosen at random to either spend much longer on facebook or much less so the change would just be facebook usage rather than other life factors?
by ekanes on 9/5/19, 4:23 AM
This study shows that they are correlated, but not necessarily causation. It could EASILY be that people feeling worse use Facebook more.
by shikharja on 9/4/19, 10:41 PM
> Although we can show that Facebook use seems to lead to diminished well-being
How do you define "diminished well-being"?
by magerleagues on 9/4/19, 11:41 PM
I'd be interested to know if there have been any studies like this that focus on Instagram.
by crispinb on 9/5/19, 12:35 AM
Well this is how capitalism is supposed to work - the creation of disvalues to motivate consumption. You degrade environments so people have to buy posh housing to insulate themselves from physical reality. Etc. Ultimately (social media) you degrade human attention to reduce people's freedom to evade trivial commercial blandishments.
Happy populations would be a catastrophe for capitalism.
by wfbarks on 9/5/19, 12:03 AM
Does the article establish a causal link?
by felipelalli on 9/4/19, 11:26 PM
It isn't necessary a study to conclude that. Captain obvious!