from Hacker News

Facebook is the 21st century tech equivalent of cigarettes

by oznathan on 12/1/13, 4:26 PM with 15 comments

  • by graeme on 12/1/13, 6:20 PM

    This is consistent with my anecdotal experience. People talk about Facebook as something that gives no satisfaction, but they do anyway.

    Facebook also has some extraordinary benefits, so it's hard to quit. I meet more people when I travel, I've made new friends in town, and I met my favourite author as a result of his Facebook presence.

    But that's 1% of my time on Facebook. The other 99% is pure waste. But something about it makes it very hard to go in, take care of what I intend to, and leave. I don't have the same trouble with most sites.

  • by kken on 12/1/13, 5:55 PM

    "How to quit XXX" can mean many things.

    * Smoking: How to stop a nicotine additiction

    * Alcohol: How to stop an alcohol additiction

    * Vi: How to end the program once you have started it out of curiosity. (Hint: Kill process from another console and never look back)

    * Facebook: How to find the hidden options to erase your account and data.

    The pretense of the article is a bit idiotic, but I am not sure it is to be taken at face (haha) value.

  • by Atroxide on 12/1/13, 7:18 PM

    And this article is the 21st century article equivalent of cigarettes.. Both will give you cancer.

    First off, he uses his personal google results, in incognito mode you wouldn't get these results (and you don't get anything related to facebook at all with this search query). Second, the term "How to quit facebook" isn't the same as "How to quit smoking" since "How to quit facebook" could be asking how to delete an account (which has nothing to do with addiction.) Third, there is a bias towards technology when using google search, things dealing with technology and especially the web will ALWAYS be higher up than searches relating to physical things, you can't use frequency of web searches as any type of statistic when comparing between a web based search and a physical based search.

    So basically, this article is just as cancerous as cigarettes. Take it with a (HUGE) grain of salt.

  • by thewarrior on 12/1/13, 7:36 PM

    Its become fashionable to bash Facebook but comparing it to cigarettes is a bit extreme.

    People need something to waste their time. Real life can get very bland at times. If Facebook didnt exist its not as if people would suddenly start self actualizing , writing novels and building companies. They'd probably be watching TV. We all need to turn our brains off for a few hours every day.

    Till recently it was television and now its Facebook. But its way better as it is interactive and ties into the basic human need to gain the approval of others.

    Those who profit are the ones who recognize these basic human needs and tap into them.

    HN is the same thing but targeted at nerds. But the basic flow is the same. Its mindless and effortless , offering just enough novelty that you don't get bored.

    People criticize things like Facebook and Farmville for being mindless and dull. But thats precisely why they're popular. Its an endless stream of slight novelty for very little effort. We need novelty and creating it ourselves can take too much effort. At the end of a long day our brains are just too tired.

    Thats why we have Michael Bay Movies , Chick Lit and Twilight.

    In the days before TV and electricity, alcohol and drugs may have been one of the ways to unwind and maybe in a weird way that validates OPs thesis.

    I use Facebook mainly for the chat feature. Facebook turns acquaintances into friends and though some people dislike this ,for me its a big plus. It keeps me in touch with people who share common interests whom I wouldnt get to meet as often in real life.

    Also Facebook is a gateway drug to participating in other online communities and realizing the power of people forming groups over the internet.

  • by scotchmi_st on 12/1/13, 6:08 PM

    Addiction is quite a vague word, and gets mistreated. It isn't a good word when we're considering whether continue with a particular behaviour. Instead, we should just be looking at whether something has a negative impact on the individual. Smoking is generally thought to have a overall negative impact on a person, and those around them, mostly as it significantly increases their chance of death. To some degree it's possible that someone who spends their whole day on Facebook wouldn't have time for more important activities, and would see some bad outcomes there. But those people aside, using facebook has a lot of very beneficial social effects, such as allowing friends who don't see each other very often to stay in contact. I think the effects of using Facebook are a net positive.

  • by hornbaker on 12/1/13, 6:41 PM

    He really should have used an incognito browser window for his Google "how to quit..." autocomplete example (facebook, smoking, vim, drinking), as it's apparently biased from his own browsing habits.

    Going incognito in Chrome, the list is quite different (smoking, a job, your job, smoking weed): http://i.imgur.com/wsH60zm.png

    Which makes me curious: does everyone else see the same list in Chrome incognito, or is Google doing some tracking by IP / browser fingerprint?

    (Someone should build GoogleCounselor.com, an automated service to tell you what your bad habits are.)

  • by croisillon on 12/1/13, 5:38 PM

    As a non-smoker currently reading Allen Carr's "Easyway" in order to find a solution against my procrastination problem, I completely understand the parallel but I don't agree. Facebook might be OP's habit to kill time but this works equally good with any Twitter, Reddit, or even HN. The problem (for addicts) is that those websites constantly stream some short new items, easily read, easily forgotten. It's the same dynamic indeed as going for a smoke instead of doing some work but it's not exclusive to facebook and facebook is not killing you.

  • by vezzy-fnord on 12/1/13, 5:34 PM

    I lost it at the idea that there are more poor souls trying to figure out how you exit from vi[m] than there are alcoholics looking for advice on quitting.

    Alternatively, one could argue that using vi[m] is equivalent to a harmful addiction and the only cure is Emacs.

    Otherwise, the issue is more accurate when you do 's/Facebook/web/'.