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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

> 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

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.

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.

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...

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14082130

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?

This study shows that they are correlated, but not necessarily causation. It could EASILY be that people feeling worse use Facebook more.

> Although we can show that Facebook use seems to lead to diminished well-being

How do you define "diminished well-being"?

I'd be interested to know if there have been any studies like this that focus on Instagram.

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.

Does the article establish a causal link?

It isn't necessary a study to conclude that. Captain obvious!

It also depends on how you use Facebook.

I've noticed that people who use it to share political posts, rants, etc. tend to be some of the most emotionally negative people I've met. (reposting stuff entails low thinking effort)

Whereas people who write little David-Sedaris-like stories about their lives, sometimes with pictures, tend to receive positive emotional benefits. It's like the practice of writing Christmas letters but instead of doing it once a year, you get to do continuously. Sure there is the occasional flexing and humblebragging, but even the most humble among us can't help but share our little life victories on occasion (e.g. Ph.D. graduation, vacations taken, etc.). In my circles, people tend to share stories about their foibles and flaws too, often in a funny way, so it kind of balances things out.

Facebook is an especially great place for introverts to be vulnerable through the medium of the written word. In real life social settings, introverts tend to be crowded out by others and can sometimes struggle to tell their story. When we're in a face-to-face situation, there isn't always the occasion to truly share in detail because the politer ones among us want to avoid hogging all the attention. And even when the spotlight is on us, we don't always remember all the interesting stories to tell.

That's why the written form is so powerful as a tool for self-revelation and vulnerability. It helps deepens relationships. I've had friends who've read my posts come up to me in person to tell me, "I never knew that about you", which actually made it possible to have deeper in-person connection.

I do have a few rules about posting: if I didn't write/create it, I won't post it; and before I post, I ask: "is it kind? is it true?" These rules seem to keep me out of trouble.

Agreed. My actual USAGE of Facebook is a net positive in my life, by far. (this, of course, leaves aside all of the stuff the company does and is accused of).

I keep track of friends and family, see peoples' kids, see what vacations they're on, see nice photos, and yes, some news (some not so nice news).

Whereas twitter is a toxic cancerous cesspool of attention-seeking, all wrapped in an utterly unusably backwards UI.

Instagram's somewhere in between. Can't remember who's who anymore, bit more attention-seeking than FB, quite a bit less than Twitter.

I guess it depends on your use case. I've never found any value in following "influencers" or brands, I'm more interested in what my actual real-life friends and acquaintances are up to, and FB is far better at that. The reduction of anonymity really helps, too. It's more of a community, less of a shouting match.

I wonder if being on Facebook reduces your motivation to build new friendships (it does take some work) since it allows you (with little effort) to maintain some form of very limited remote relationship? Maybe without Facebook, we (remote people) would be more motivated to build new local, face to face, and fulfilling friendships?

Yup, same here.

I had to leave my home town for work after getting laid off during the Great Recession. It was supposed to be very temporary, well, turns out it ended up being more permanent than I ever imagined.

I use Facebook to keep in contact with all my hometown friends. On top of that Facebook has allowed me to get back in touch with a childhood friend I haven't seen or heard from in 15+ years and it's also given me a great way to connect to new friends.

One of my best friends now I met once at an event in person, we connected on Facebook, and got talking on there. Now we talk most days over text message and we see each other a couple times a month, sometimes going on trips together. Without Facebook we would have had a single conversation ever. Sure, without Facebook we might have exchanged phone numbers after meeting, except that Facebook lends itself to friction-free low "risk" interactions in the way that phone just doesn't.

I guess people look at you on social media and feel bad about themselves

A similar thing happened to me.

But social media ≠ Facebook. I never really used Facebook, and all my friends are (also) on other, smaller, even tiny networks, and some are just in email and video calls.

Through these tiny networks, I actually found new friends.

Comparing yourself to others isn't the only potential mechanism here. It might be that you get your social "fix" from facebook and don't make new connections here, feeling worse than you otherwise would have.

"I dunno, it didn't happen to me. (Therefore this problem is not _really_ a problem)."

While it's a very human reaction to go "I don't see what the problem is" until the waters are lapping at your front door, your single data point inference provides plausible cover for the damage-peddlers to go "see, everything is fine". You suggest the clear evidence for harm is at best, debatable.

Smoke your whole life and never get cancer? Lucky you. But don't be that guy saying "I dunno man, I'm fine you know".

It's not what you have; it's how you use it / what you do with it!

Why not adblock the news feed and delete the app?

Then you are able to stay in contact with those far away, and make new friends at random events you may not have heard about otherwise?

I dislike their monopoly on the friend graph just as much as anyone else, but at least in the Sydney university demographic FB Events are ubiquitous.

I take it you don't consider HN to be a kind of social media, then? What are your criteria?

Took a look at your landing page - some immediate feedback - first thing I see is a popup with a video with the title 'the problems with social media'.

I don't think that's the best way to frame what you're trying to do. Don't tell me what it's not or about all the problems with current social media platforms (I already know), just get straight to what your platform does differently. I can then decide for myself if that's better or if I'd prefer it to what's already out there.

For starters, you have a leaderboard. Any sort of number metric or gamification is enough to keep me off a platform.

Edit: I just realized the irony of the above as I type this on Hacker News.

no fault of yours, but if this is really successful it will be bought by facebook and drowned like a pillow case full of kittens.