> Facebook and Instagram deactivation improved emotional state index by 0.060 standard deviations (p < 0.001)
The link didn't click through to the appendix. This seems off, as small effects (the small number of standard deviations) tend to be associated with undesirable high p-values, not low ones. Though also, the 0.060 itself seems lower than the visual graphs indicate.
Yesterday, I blocked it completely at home and partially at work - I might still need to read some posts from time to time, but I don’t want to be able to browse it.
It’s been a bit hard to come up with things to fill my time with again. Kinda scary.
For Instagram with you needing to log in to view pages, you find that you can’t find opening times for restaurants etc because many places use it to advertise that they’re open/closed at short notice.
You could offer to help the people who do all that posting to get it onto an email list or some other platform away from Facebook. A small indie website somewhere, even a blog.
I know this sounds like work, and you just want to enjoy your running club, but if it gets sticky, the people who are currently posting everything on FB will eventually realise there's value elsewhere and they'll keep it ticking over.
Yup! At the risk of being flippant, all healthy relationships require work.
I went and found forums for the hobbies I'm into, rather than social media groups. Thankfully, most of the underground music I'm into also maintain their own websites, while some of the more hush-hush groups maintain members-only email lists. If they don't do either? Well, nearly all of them sell tickets online via mainstream ticket vendors regardless of how underground they try to be, so I'll see the info eventually (and, hell - I know the event's coming up and I've put it on my calendar, I don't need to see an IG story about it every single day for two months reminding me). For backpacking, forums are fantastic compared to the oft-repeated and overrun social media groups.
For restaurants? Meh. So what if I show up and a place is closed on short notice? Worse things can happen than wasting a little bit of time. Do they only share their menu on social media but my friends swear it's amazing? Fine, I'll experience it O'Reilly-style ("We'll do it live! Fuck it!").
I don't need to know everything all the time, that's part of the adventure! And if I really do need to know something about a place that only posts on social media, I've found that I can usually find that info elsewhere if I dig hard enough.
This one is fine til it ruins your plans. My wife and I have a toddler, we went to a local Lebanese place for lunch on the one day a month we share working from home, place was closed, so we went home, no nice lunch out, found out after it was posted only on Instagram that they were closed. The other options close enough to where we live to nip out for lunch are... Mcdonalds or Burger King. I don't live in a metropolis.
People have been demanding 'please just let me see what my friends post' for YEARS
It's (probably) not going to change
I also use a browser plugin that blocks LinkedIn feed. This is because I can't stand seeing the nonsense that seemingly serious people post there.
www.elswhr.app
Additionally, assuming growth comes your way, how do you plan to support your platform/company from a financial perspective? Targeted ads, or...? What do you intend to do with user data?
Also cats.
I just scroll for like 10min before going to bed.
Been using it for about 6 months now.
Then life got busy and somewhat difficult, and I had no more time for this. Still, I'd occasionally go on Facebook and get really down. I'd see all my "friends" living it up, having fun etc while I was stuck in my rut. Very depressing.
But then, a few things happened. One, I understood it's really all fake. Two, all my real human friends stopped using Facebook, basically. And anyway, Facebook now just shows me AI slop that is nothing to do with anything - weird videos, people definitely shutting down a 5000 year old family business, you-wont-believe-what-she-did videos etc. Not that I use it much, just some friends for whatever reason are still on Messenger.
Yes, we can live without social media. I know it is possible from my own experience. And when everyone has a phone and e-mail address, you can stay connected without FB or other account.
It will require more effort, but valuable things rarely come without it.
So if by "plausible" you mean that, yes, you can imagine someone doing that, then you're right. If "plausible" means that you think it's justified, then that's another issue.
In this timeline, after a group of Hong Kong democracy activists planted bombs that killed a few hundred low-level people at the annual Chinese Communist Party meeting, China responded by announcing plans to bomb Hong Kong into rubble, rid themselves of the menace of democracy once and for all.
And then when they heard this, your country announced that they unconditionally supported China in this effort, and would supply them all the bombs they needed to take down these Electoral Terrorists, eliminate every last one who wasn't an enthusiastic proponent of single-Party rule. That local democracy advocates in your country had long been concerned with the Hong Kong situation, had long protested the government's inexplicable support for China in this matter, but were shouted down by every political party and called racists by a consensus that seemed to really be interested in using China to counter the prospect of Indian international ambitions. That watching the bombs drop, and watching your national media invite Chinese people on air for segment after segments, your democracy activists found in discussions online that they weren't actually some kind of radical fringe, that basically everyone outside the media+government was tired of the CCP and tired of our unending support for it.
There is a lot of nuance there, but what happened after Oct 7 is basically that Netanyahu & AIPAC, finally seeing an opportunity to answer the Gaza Question once and for all, jumped into their role as the villains in a pre-existing anti-semitic conspiracy theory, and proceeded to play the US like a puppet in order to effectuate a genocide.
I can have a nuanced view here; I can separate Jewishness and Zionism. I can talk to you about all the Jewish students at those protests who were holding signs supporting Palestine. I can note the extreme divergence between age cohorts within the Jewish community in the US, I can point out that the US is the largest Jewish population in the world (larger than Israel), who are coexisting perfectly well with gentiles, and that this isn't to Netanyahu's benefit at all. But these people constantly tell us that there is no separation there, that it is antisemitic to be against Greater Israel, that these concepts are one and the same. If that's the case, and you still disfavor genocide, there are Implications.
I can understand when some people misunderstand the situation; Antisemitism abroad is what Likud wants and needs to survive.
Someone that doesn't notice that he is "hated" might also be susceptible to such low key social manipulation to be made believe he is hated.
But ye, as I am not in clique A or B there is a lot of guesswork on my part and I cam't argue against someone else's story. I am just trying to bring up the possibility of bad mouthing.
The point of days like that, and what I highlighted to my oldest when we had a similar disappointing outing this weekend (we all wanted to grill in a park, packed everything up, but forgot it was Easter and every other family had the same idea and we were screwed), is that we still get to have a nice time with family one way or another, regardless of what we're eating.
It's definitely disappointing when time is super limited, I completely empathize! I guess I just always try and highlight the glass half full aspect of things and use that to find a way to make the best of a crummy situation.
For example, scraping your feed and presenting to you only the content that corresponds to some pre-defined labels (with a tiny bit of randomness to spice things up).
Although how could the automatic labeling work for videos from the user-end? Hashtags would be the simplest indicators, however also easily misleading.
And therefore, it is not completely illogical to think that Meta’s interests and users’ interests must align.
(Not my opinion, just responding to your question)
Many people prefer having anxiety about drama to being bored.
You know it is not good for you but your executive function and ability to plan long term are compromised (whether chronically or acutely), so you do it anyway, and regret it later.
Over and over the most stressed out anxious people I meet are the underemployed/nonworking spouse in very wealthy couples. Especially the childless ones.
Some people have shorter time horizons, for instance.
Merit will get you a 401(k) and a job where you have a nice coffee station and some bean bags to sit on, and a ping pong table. Lord knows, the ping pong table proves you've got merit. But does your boss really have more merit than you? It seems to me that the higher up the corporate ladder you go, the less actual merit people exhibit, and the less they notice it among their underlings (as opposed to loyalty or ass-kissing), but the more they claim to believe in it.
I'm not arguing against merit. I'm a capitalist. I'm just pointing out that the people who so often tout merit are the same people who get most of their tax credits from backroom deals with politicians, and don't seem to earn their keep by the sweat of their own brow. Merit would imply the ability to do both equally well.
“they must do _something_ that makes their users want to use it.”
Is fentanyl acting in the interests of its addicts?
I'm not the person you are asking this question of but, after reading your comment carefully in full, I would like to answer on behalf of myself:
I would feel absolutely no differently about any individual person of Chinese ethnicity or citizenship than I did before.
Personally, I try to distinguish between the individual and perceived collective associations. And I try not project my personal opinions about global politics or my personal prejudices about a country onto individual friends and acquaintances that I hang out with at a local pub in a completely different country than the one we're discussing.
My operating definition of "racism" is:
"The religious belief that you can know the contents of an individual's mind and heart based on superficial characteristics - such as their skin colour, ethnicity or country of origin."
You can bring your "nuanced" opinion of Israel into it all you want to. But to project that onto an individual in the context of hanging out with a group of friends fits my definition of "racism" exactly. And this would hold even if one were to, hypothetically, concede your opinion of Israel's actions entirely.
Your post is a great example of why people so often brand attacks against Israel as "antisemitism." There is nothing wrong with being critical of a government and its policies, or of how a war is conducted. But to project those opinions and feelings onto an individual who is living in a completely different country and who has nothing to do with that conflict other than the fact that they hold citizenship or ethic affiliations is another matter entirely. One is "nuanced" opinion, possibly even objective if the individual is trying to be. The other is trying to mask and justify bigotry and prejudice behind an heir of intellectualism.
A bit more than a century back, one branch of my family tree stems from somebody with the surname "Berlin".
Sometime in the vicinity of WW1, their ~dozen children each chose a different spelling variation and changed their names so that they wouldn't be directly associated with that city. Being seen as "German" went out of style.
You can call this some unique type of racism, or you could call it being dumb, or you could call it being... not nuanced. But generalization is a fundamental mode of human thought, and you shouldn't be surprised when something awful happens attributable to a group you happen to be a part of, that some significant fraction of the population generalizes their attitudes as your attitudes. This isn't some defensible ethical position I'm staking out, it's an observation that people were prone to make this ethnic generalization in the first place, and unlike in most cases in a liberal democracy, every authority figure in their lives have EMBRACED the generalization as a direct equivalence, at the request of the foreign ethnostate. Netanyahu wants to SPEND DOWN any social capital that the term "Antisemitism" has accrued, for short-term political gain, and both US political parties and media ecosystems have complied with this plan. If this causes harm abroad to non-Israeli Jews, Netanyahu only benefits because it drives Jewish refugees to seek Right of Return to the self-proclaimed Jewish ethnostate and its strongman leader who will provide you security.
J-Street and similar groups need to be out there on the streets, frankly, not just as a normative moral stance, but to protect themselves from Israel's blowback.
October 7th was many things, but the narrative these particular people focused on was of a prison break, by a prison gang, who was imprisoned by act of military conquest in a concentration camp, which has been periodically bombed and starved for as long as they've been alive. Israel's ruling coalition had grown increasingly right wing, incorporating people who were actively discussing a final annexation of this land and expulsion/extirpation of its people. It has also accelerated "Settlement" activity on Palestinian land. These acts drew harsh condemnation from the rest of the world... but not the US. The US has bent over backwards to support Israel despite any ideals it might have; We have sacrificed relationships with other nations and given away diplomatic priorities to extort them to support Israel. It's done so because Israel has corrupted the US legislature in a top-down fashion, going back to the 60's, using a combination of Cold War logic, captive military-industrial ties, espionage (Among the most salacious examples, Epstein/Maxwell), racism, evangelical rapture, and cold hard... uhh... lobbying. They dumped a hundred million dollars on our political establishment's primary campaign system this past election to secure their consent, and we are told growing up that this isn't something a foreign state actor would ever be allowed to do.
In the _days_ after October 7th, before the bombing started, those of us with a lot of exposure to media were watching nonstop war propaganda about things like hundreds of babies being beheaded, much of it in an Israeli accent; There was talk of the immediate urgent need to Solve the Hamas Problem by any means necessary. And we've watched this happen with Iraq/Afghanistan after 9/11 - we've seen these characters say these things before, played by an earlier generation but making the same "mistakes" to appeal to the same urges. But Iraq & Afghanistan are not one of the most densely populated cities on Earth, which was on the verge of starving in the best of times.
We were told growing up that "dual loyalty" was some kind of warped Nazi idea, while it was marketed to impressionable young American Jews by Israel as an ideal in all-expenses-paid Birthright tours. My largely apolitical friend in high school with an American sports scholarship staring him in the face ended up doing his IDF term of service in the Second Intifada instead because that was just what was expected of him in his family, and because of how Israel treats dual citizenship & Return. I don't think we should be surprised if some people just choose to believe what Israel says about Jews, and conclude that they should be generically opposed to Jews. It takes _effort_ to understand perspectives and _exposure_ to Jews that aren't ethnonationalists, to avoid these sorts of conclusions.
Hamas is not a pro democracy group. It's a radical jihadist group. Its mission is not to free Gaza, but to destroy Israel and kill all Jews. The people it killed on 10/7 were not low level government officials, they were civilians, including children. The method of killing was extremely brutal.
Moreover, Hamas is not some tiny group within Gaza. It is the elected government of Gaza.
You set up this whole false narrative that has no relation to reality. But I will tell you this: I know a Russian who is pro-Putin. I find his politics despicable. But I still treat him with courtesy and am willing to discuss things with him. I don't believe in cutting off people you disagree with. It's bad form and it doesn't serve to change anything. How much more so, someone whose politics I don't even know. Why would I make an assumption based on someone's national origin or race?
If you queried a hundred random people who knew this same Russian and were similarly opposed to his politics, do you believe that one hundred of them would share your perspective? Or would a handful give that guy dirty looks at the bar because they were not in the exact same headspace you are in?
I struggle with comparisons because I'm trying to illustrate for you what those people are seeing when they spontaneously start acting that way that is different from what you're seeing. It's difficult to find any comparable situation as lopsided as Israel's relationship with Palestine, and the almost inscrutable international response to that relationship. Liberal tolerance ethics takes deliberate effort (generalization is a natural cognitive bias), and all of the people who would typically provide guidance on normative ideals suddenly took on the unprecedented position that we should exterminate a couple million people in what is effectively a concentration camp because of a violent outburst against the people who put them there, that this was Good and Righteous Justice, that anybody who didn't want to exterminate them were dangerous fringe actors. People who rejected this propaganda storm found themselves ideologically adrift, latching on to whatever floats.
Very well put.
Hopefully people will learn to get tired of this sort of thing a LOT quicker, and this will be one good thing about out our new improved and now extremely shortened attention spans. Impatience could actually have an upside if it prevents decades of escalating arms racing with enshittification vs new-current-work-around. It’s like with stages of grief, right? Denial / bargaining. Whatever is broken in a trillion dollar corporation is broken on purpose, and it's getting worse, not better.. waiting around and hoping for improvement is a fools errand.
Up until now, boiling the frog/consumer slowly has been one tactic. Or corporations can leverage their size and simply make things so bad for so long that a new generation arrives on the scene and has no idea how bad the stuff on offer actually is. Enough completely ubiquitous impatience in consumers really does undermine both of those strategies.. if there's actually meaningful competition that's still left around to choose from
They do a good jobs of working in the interest of their constituents. Whether that also includes self interest, I don’t know. They are politicians, their job is to work for their constituents, if we’ve managed to align their self interest with doing their jobs well, that seems fine.
> Let me know what state I should move to.
State and local governments seem to be rated fairly well, just go to one that matches your ideology.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/11/americans...
Pew reports on a negative trend, but states have a huge head start on the federal government.
Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances.
Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and local businesses share career and business updates and advertise their wares.
I watch my girlfriend devolve into this stuff. Waking up and scrolling endless feeds from reddit and insta; it's her entertainment. It's not so much worse than me waking up and scrolling Google News...maybe it's better, in that she gets less depressed about it. But it's fake. It's all fake.
In real life, it took me a whole year to figure out that the people at one particular local pub actually hate me and talk shit about me whenever I'm not around. I only figured out why they were so hostile because the people at my other pub told me. (It's that I'm Jewish, with Israeli family. Ironically, the nice people at the other pub who told me are Lebanese. We get along a lot better than I do with my old antifa "friends") This was a hard-to-get real world experience in how fucked up people can be for no reason. It's not something you can understand properly, ever, on any kind of social media. The media format just gets in the way of understanding other people as people; of understanding truth and factual reality; of differentiating between opinion and fact.
Feeds are garbage, optimized for chaos.
This is spot on. Facebook proper has supplanted private email chains for a lot of older people. This is ironic because they are moving in the opposite direction as everyone else. Everyone else is moving into private communities, older people are leaving the safety of email chains and, often unknowingly, posting publicly. Facebook (probably intentionally) upholds the illusion that they are posting for their friends. I've seen Facebook actually provide a compelling service to my older dad who keeps in touch with a lot of his old friends on there. It's a much more active community of seniors than you'd guess.
Of course, they are subject to all the ills of Facebook at the same time. Overall I'd rate it as a net loss for society because of that.
No LinkedIn, not you, you boring Ted Talk humblebrag.
Old school social networks used to be this noncommital, low-threshold way to connect with others around you. It was really great if you were a socially awkward teen or twenty-something. It's no big deal to friend somebody on facebook (or MySpace, or your universities gamified campus management system or whatever) and see what they are doing, or strike up a conversation. I really miss that kind of network.
Don't forget FB marketplace. I know a few younger coworkers who have FB just for market place.
So, it’s a pretty shit tool for a business to share what it’s about.
But sometimes I do, because saying something to one person feels like I'm demanding a response from them, but saying it to a broad circle of friends allows those interested to reply, and others to leave it. Back when I used Facebook, I was more likely to gripe (or brag) on the Facebook wall than in a personal text conversation with a friend.
(Friends in person are the best option, of course.)
I have a channel for my neighborhood, another for the parents at my children's school, another for my extended family, another for work colleagues and another for a few friends.
This is what Facebook was when we all signed up almost two decades ago. No one ever wanted a feed of people they didn't know. Free social media is inherently corrupt as they chase profits abusing the user base.
Facebook was refocusing on friend and family content before TikTok came along. But they had to adjust to the TikTok trend otherwise they would have lost market share or potentially lost the entire market.
You might think you want friend and family content, but actually you don’t. Not as much as you want engaging content.
VC-backed corporations masquerading as public services to gain user networks they can later monetize is the problem.
Unfortunately, some of my family post insane political views, usually about now in the early AM. Being told that a King of the USA and the elimination of due process are good things doesn't help my mental health.
Would they still if any such poster's feed would strictly only be viewable by families and friends?
(I have no idea)
I quit Facebook over a decade ago, because others used it to go “look at my shiny car/wife/house”, and I would use it to lose friends and alienate people.
These online environments do not foster any kind of human connection.
Imagine there's a toggle you can flip in the Settings of Instagram that was labeled "free oxy", and every morning and evening Meta would FedEx an oxy pill into your mailbox. Everyone would tell eachother about it, and few would be able to resist the temptation.
Plenty of people like and enjoy "algorithmic feeds". I can enjoy occasionally scrolling through a feed. Banning it is like banning alcohol because there are alcoholics in society.
If you can't handle it, switch it off.
I’ve stopped using FB regularly, because I don’t like their feed algorithm. I don’t like the ads or the content, and I had curated it by joining local groups and BOFS. The only thing that brings me back now is the _possibility_ of a friends update.
That said, the _frequency_ of updates from friends and family will be vastly different for different people. The feed (if it speaks to you) works to regularize or smooth the frequency. I see FB’s problem and I don’t envy them. The vitality of the platform becomes precarious, and can be supplanted by some other platform with better engagement (ie TickTock).
I’m not a designer or researcher of Social Media, but I’m an emigre of sorts and not many people have that experience. The only platform all of my friends and family use are group private messages using our phones, and the most engaging chats we have are few and far between.
Instead of pausing social media altogether, I recently took some time off from the endless scrolling feeds only. When returning it's so apparent how everything is bait for engagement.
The feed hijacks the human attention process on a visceral level. Either with visual stimulus that's extremely intriguing for evolved apes like us (cutting a cake that looks like a dog), or by activating an emotional response from a tribal species like us (stupid takes on politics, in- and out-group stuff).
The rest of most social media apps is fine and offers much of what you are asking for.
I’m not sure if that’s actually a “shortcut” to the reptile brain and it’s just about “I have to scroll more to get stuff I’m interested in. At least for me it feels like that and it causes me to use these social media things far less.
For me it feels more like intermittent rewards vs full rewards at once. Obviously for the ad-industry the intermittent rewards are more useful, that’s why we can’t have nice things
Isn’t this just WhatsApp now though? The addition of Statuses, Following and now Communities almost confirms this. People are dropping Facebook and IG, but can’t give up WhatsApp (yet).
I've got a personal policy: No websites that have an infinite scroll. That means no new Reddit, mobile Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, or similar. This also means I can't use food delivery services, since those tend to be infinite as well.
If they're paginated that's fine, even if they're infinitely so. Infinite scrolling is just a very good touchstone as to the quality and addictiveness of a site, and I'll avoid anything that has it.
For this reason I get my news through RSS and like using Discord -- both have finite ends (even if there may be a lot of content in bursts.)
I rue the amount of damage caused, before people and society began resisting and arresting its deleterious effects.
But perhaps this is the same process being followed here. New shiny for the reptile brain, eventually the costs are made clear and people decide they would rather not become statistics and instead find joy in other formats and tools.
Then People make those formats or invent ways of engaging with our tools that includes self care and leads to more happiness. We grow older and we eventually get tired of all the online health fads and become crotchety older humans.
Get off my lawn, in advance.
I use FB only because I'm member of a couple of groups relevant to my hobby, and the stuff posted in those is worth following. Unfortunately there is currently no alternative for those, otherwise I would happily ditch FB.
I don't even care about posts from family and friends anymore because nowadays those are mostly about bragging about their fancy dinner/holiday/social life etc.
Any marketplace that is privately owned, is not a free market place. And, the elephant in the room, these social media marketplaces are owned by parties with very particular interests. As long as don't recognise that, we will let ourselves be distracted by details that are always the result of this private control.
Something social must be public, or it isn't social, and it isn't what you and I really want.
And it doesn't scroll endlessly. It will display this at the bottom of the page:
> You're all caught up on Most Recent posts
> Check back later for more updates
And any page you follow, including anything that tries to convince you to click through to their website via clickbait, anxiety-inducing headlines, etc.. It also shows FB groups you're in, which are often full of their own unnecessary drama.
A social network is no better than the sum of its parts, and to create something really worthwhile, you have to limit what people are allowed to post (original content only, for example).
Doing that at scale I think is very hard.
In the meantime, maybe I should just share more photos in the group chat instead...
I think this goes beyond social media to all kinds of media.
Of course there are other Chinese apps that operate entirely based on feeds. What I found interesting is that on Rednote it tried to suppress your posts from what it infers to be your friends in real life.
I think it is a great approach. There are sometimes I just want to see updates from friends and family. There are other times when I only want to see something interesting to me without necessarily telling all my friends what I'm interested in. These are two entirely different categories of social media and it is a good thing to require users to switch apps.
So either we train all our friends to use it sensibly -- and convince them to agree with us on what's sensible -- or we sort through cruft to find the value.
This was my biggest source of joy on the modern internet.
When the walls fell and everybody left, I dropped 200 followers to 500 but by X's own metrics no one sees my tweets. I would estimate between 13 and 20 is my average view count. When I do post, I am lucky a single person interacts, and it is almost always someone I know in the real world.
I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens. I don't think the market is there anymore for "dude that ponders technology questions". I tweet like it's 2010 and no one cares anymore.
This was the death of social media for me. This was the last place I was really "social" on the internet and it died.
Genuinely this has had a very negative effect on me, the only somewhat of a silver lining is that I now have these conversations with ChatGPT. It's not as much fun though.
Instagram is just brainrot these days. I'd used it for years to post my absolute best photos as a sort of curated gallery. No one cares anymore. Nothing I post ever gets seen. Why bother.
That sums up my general opinion of all social media these days, why bother.
But I've got to say, it's getting harder and harder to keep that up. As our kids get older especially, almost all of their social activities are somehow tied to social media one way or the other: no matter what they're joining, minimally there's a WhatsApp group. My wife has reluctantly joined WhatsApp and if it wasn't for that, it feels like we would pretty much be destined to become social outcasts.
In one recent instance, we weren't even aware of a parent group for one of our children's school class until someone asked us (in person!) why we didn't come bowling the previous night. We had no idea, and no-one sees the necessity to include someone who - for whatever reason - is not on WhatsApp.
I can see the argument that we are inconveniencing others by not wanting to be reachable to what has now become a standard means of being in touch, and that we cannot expect others to jump through hoops just to include us. But a few years back, I was quite deeply involved in privacy research and I definitely feel no inclination to share all of my communications (and pictures) with Meta.
Kinda crazy that the magnitude is so small! (my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")
Social media only seems to have psychological side effects which aren't as openly visible to our eyes.
It seems obvious to you because it has been made obvious to you. It wasn't the same for people in the first half of the 1900's. The parent comment is making the same point: it's not obvious to most people today, but in fifty years from now, people will look at the research, the decline in the birth rate, the increase of anxiety, and effects we can't imagine today and go "social media has very visible side effects fairly soon, how did they not know?"
I was never on Instagram or TikTok, but neither seems to be "social" media as much as a communal fire hose anyway.
I was on Bluesky for a minute, but it was 99.9% people trying to one-up each other with witty or ironic one-liners for clout, with most of the rest being ex-Twitter people trying to keep Twitter combat alive in an arena (blessedly) free of the people who have made Twitter unbearable. I got tired of witnessing a neverending improv open mic while being randomly assaulted by people I agreed with.
So now I'm just living my life, aware of the challenges of the world, but not bathing in them.
Aside from Reddit, my only social media is Instagram. On my Instagram, I only follow people I personally know or national-park/state-park/non-profit conservation accounts. I only like posts of people I personally know and nothing else, and I never comment on anything. I only post pretty pictures of nature with no people visible in a recognizable way. My feed is almost exclusively nature and animals (lots of seals and sea lions) with a lot of scuba diving mixed in. I also get a lot of xennial humor posts too, which I send to my wife and a buddy.
It's a very limited level of engagement, and I'm very happy with it. I don't need anything more.
Can anyone translate? Random web search find suggests multiplying by 37 to get a percentage, which sounds very questionable, but even then these improvements seem negligible.
This doesn't really line up with my lived experience. Getting myself out of shitty platforms and community spaces improved my mental state significantly (although the damage that's been done remains).
Even though I am rationally aware that people work in better environments and get paid while I'm job searching for the past 6 months, it feels like seeing any sort of announcement regarding other people's successes hits a subconscious chord my brain hates. It felt like I'm being actively intimidated, making my already depressed and sad state of job searching worse. The "highlights reel effect" on LinkedIn is deliberate and I'd argue inevitable, because everyone is trying their best to show how good they are as candidates and workers.
Now that I closed it, and I'm sticking to the usual communities (Discord, etc.) may be running into better engineers than me but I see it either as a neutral event or a positive one, because they share their code and insights which I can learn from.
It's been a bliss. I don't over consume, I have more time to get things done now, and it's sort of obvious but everything feels better with bigger screens and keyboard and mouse.
Look at HN as an example, if I see a post on here that is related to some programming thing, I have my terminal right here where I can play with the concept. Even things like youtube are much nicer on a big screen.
My only pet-peeve is with web front-end designers insisting on wasting screen real-estate at the left and right margins. I wish there was a button on every such site where you can "maximize" the content div so that it takes up 100% width.
Using the Youtube app on my phone shocks me every time. I'm so used to an add blocker on my pc's big screen.
Didn't matter if it was news, social or whatever, it messed with my dopamine apparatus, as Gabor Mate calls it.
I do limit my self to the first page or two of the HN feed though, to keep up on tech developments for my career, which I still have to be careful about.
It's feeds in general. It leads to abnormal dopamine release which affects motivation.
I started deleting Instagram every Sunday evening and installing every Friday.
I had this hypothesis that it’s the weekends that people have the best stuff to share and when it makes sense for me to still exist to everyone. And then nobody notices me disappear over the week. It’s a lot more enjoyable to be engaging with others’ content when you’re posting your own.
But the surprising result, after a few months, is that I’ve started missing weekends. The memory of all those people has faded and so has the urge to share.
Which brings me to a point: on one hand I do feel better day to day, but I’ve also felt a bit of a mourning period not being reminded about acquaintances’ lives. Kind of like a smoker who’s now missing out on social smoke breaks.
We don't need to be reminded of acquaintances lives - what people I barely know do in their free time has zero bearing on my life. They're acquaintances, not friends, so their actual importance/impact to my life is next to nil.
I never smoked but often hung out with smokers outside on their lunch breaks. If an acquaintance is truly important to us, we can be reminded of our acquaintances lives by making an effort to turn them into real friendships that interact with each other in meatspace.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33697/w336...
Possibly relevant that the 6 week trial period occurred in the 6 weeks leading up to the American election in 2020.
But I know that once I create an account, I'll get hooked to the feed, to uploading pictures, etc. because I know myself.
I don't know if the positive social aspect (meeting people, or creating a lasting connection with people that I meet once IRL) is going to offset that addiction and the general anxiety that comes with having an account.
If you hate Instagram and the anxiety it gives you, the people you meet on there will never be really on your level, or you on theirs. You will waste your time and effort on shallower relationships that can't get deep because you want to engage with life differently and not be on social media.
Dig deep into the hobbies that give you joy, and go to as many meetups and social occasions around them as you can. Leverage your friend and family network - the people who know you, and get you - and build on it.
The only reason I had it, in the first place, was so I could participate in a technical forum for an infrastructure platform that I authored.
That platform has long since left the nest, and is in very capable hands. Like a spent first-stage booster, I am no longer relevant.
Before completely walking away from Facebook, I had turned off all notifications, and never doomscrolled. Made walking away, much easier.
I miss it like it like I miss a painful boil on my arse. It was just old white people, screaming at each other.
* Who died this week
* Spammers liking your posts and asking for friend adds
* Gofundme's for ppl who will now spend the rest of their lives in medical debt
* Interesting articles maybe twice a week or so.
Nobody I know in town is on Mastodon or BSky.
The silence is deafening.
I found that for social media, platforms like Mastodon feel more comfy and less commercialized, whereas for chatting with other people either 1:1 or group chats across various apps feel nicer without being directly tied to a social media platform. At the same time, platforms that are more focused on a particular set of topics/activities like Reddit/Discord/HN/... instead of people just trying to advertise their lives or build a brand in a sense (the likes of LinkedIn as well) or whatever are more meaningful to me.
To some degree, it probably has something to do with the size of those communities: Mastodon is niche enough not to get spammed with as many bots or adverts or people trying to push a certain narrative, it going under that radar is one of the best things about it, instead it's more organic content.
here's one: https://unsplash.com/photos/GuK3U7typ18
I do have an Instagram account, and use that to follow the Slackwyrm comic (and ignore people asking me to give them my "desirable" id.)
I did try Blind, but quickly gave up on that mess of an app. 1 day of using it and it just was rage bait after rage bait. Maybe next time I'm job hunting - a friend stated that it was very useful for her negotiations.
Most of my WA group chats are archived & no notifications - no pressure to read them immediately. Left every group chat except close friends and family anyway.
Since then, only tried reddit, but it has a different problem - it's an echo chamber where no real discussion is possible on any topic as anyone who disagrees with even minute details in dominating dogma of every subreddit, gets downvoted to invisibility. Plus too many subreddits are merely karma mills that people use to boost their karma to allow themselves at least some actual voice in other subreddits - and those useless-by-design subreddits dominate the whole thing because you need to do a lot of those "filler" posts to allow oneself one real one, thus SNR on the platform is ridiculously low - but it's not some evil bots who's creating noise, but actual live people, and not even dumb ones, just because they HAVE to. And going through this - for what? To get a chance to participate in one more "someone on the internet is wrong" debate?
Meaningful talk is possible in groups where people are united by at least something and where is at least some real barrier of entry. These are not the social media. They can't afford filtering who gets in because that way they'll lose viewership and leave a lot of money on the table. I wonder why that comes as a surprise to anyone.
Hypothesis: people who regularly use social media score higher then the average population in narcissic personality trait.
This is called "email" (and/or "text messaging" i.e. iMessage or SMS).
I think that’s the tough reality—over time, people gradually become accustomed to consuming random content from random accounts or pages, to the point where the original idea of interacting with friends and family on social media starts to fade away. That said, messaging apps might still bridge that gap through groups.
Friends and family more or less stopped posting a long time ago, when everyone became worried about what happens when others have their personal information/drunk party photos. Which is why "the feed" started seeking content from outside content creators so that the services could give you... something.
Facebook, at least, has maintained the "friends and family" feed like you describe, but who uses it? I expect asymptotically nobody.
elswhr.app
Would love to hear your feedback and any feature requests you might have.
This sort of longing for a cozy social media circles exists a lot in tech adjacent circles. However, unless you can align the needs of users with the revenue goals of the company, which in other words simply means that users pay for the pay for the product, this is not gonna happen. While you may be willing to do so, I'm sure many people would simply stop communicating with you because of the additional friction caused, especially when a free alternative exists.
Additionally, the "viral content" you speak of exists for two reasons, which I'm not sure it could be entirely solved even if you had users pay for the product.
Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped. This is where viral content, such as posts from politicians and celebrities, gain their initial spread.
I would also like to note that someone may want to follow a politician or celebrity because they think what they're doing is generally useful or entertaining, respectively.
This leads me to my second point, where even if you self-opted to not interact with viral content, I'm not sure your social circles would also follow through with the same choice. This ultimately means the platform has to take specific measures to suppress some posts based on its content or not show any of your friends' activity, both of which has disadvantages. Further, the former is in itself controversial depending upon which politician is in power and the current Overton window[1].
(Re downvotes: I'd like to know what part of all of this people disagree with.)
I’m reading this as: The corporate internet is unable to fulfill the actual social needs of its users.
>Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped.
And this translates to: Our economic system drains us of so much of our energy that living a fulfilling life is no longer possible, and so we fill our valuable time with the slop that same system serves us.
I think you’re being downvoted because your comment speaks to an uncomfortable truth, namely that none of this is working to advance quality of life but rather to advance the contents of a few wallets.
The addictive properties are the reason for the prevalence of the product.
On Twitter, don't follow anyone, put everyone in a list, only read that list - you get a feed of chronological posts from only the people on the list, no algorithmic bullshit.
Or use Nostr. Definitely zero algorithm nonsense over there.
You want nourishment instead of toxins! ^_^
The thing called "social media" is mostly a US export. It craves monetisation — at the expense of all else, including factual information.
What it has done to US society and public discourse is plain to see.
It functions more as a platform for blogs, but if you use the app there are blog-specific group chats, you can follow people, and the home page contains 'notes' that are pretty tweet-like in format. Once you have a collection of say 15-20 blogs that your subscribed to I found that the notes I got recommended were quite good and could spark some interesting conversations.
A few tech related ones I like are The Pragmatic Engineer, ByteByteGo, Bad Software Advice, and Exponential View.
The first thing they show you is a feed, a never ending scroller.
I don’t get an intro to any channel - it seems like Twitter for writers. Half the stuff I subscribed to (you can’t peek in the onboarding) was absolutely written by ChatGPT, emoji headers and all.
I’m sure there’s interesting stuff happening on there, but it’s a scroller just like Reddit, and it’s pretty disappointing how much apps like these don’t respect a single user need - only the needs of the platform to engage engage engage.
Also holy shit, there’s no option to not send emails - only “prefer push”. You can’t turn it off. There’s zero respect for users, their inboxes, or their attention here whatsoever.
Never engaged with the political stuff.
Yeah, that was the case for me. I used Twitter quite a bit from about 2012 through 2020, but I was already phasing it out when the takeover happened, so it was an easy call to just close my account. While I do have an IG and Bsky account, I rarely use them. So Twitter's death basically meant the end of my mainstream social media usage.
It wasn't without consequences though. I'd made some IRL connections through twitter that I thought would last for years - they migrated to bluesky and IG but I didn't. Suddenly they were not interested in speaking with me.
Lose your clout, don't be surprised if you get shunned by the clout obsessed.
Funny how things shift like that. Also never engaged with political stuff.
I think that's an issue. I totally see why you were negatively impacted but I think we tend to forget it is not real life and in 99% of cases not important conversations/debates we are having with random people on the internet - they could be fun to have (or not) but important they are not. We treat social media popularity as if it is part of our identity, as if its almost as important as actual family and friends - and it really isn't.
We didn’t need social media, we had everything we needed with the old PHP forums
I've been a member of one of the internet's longer-running web forums for two decades, and nothing I've seen from the big social media corps comes close to providing the same level of usability and community health.
I've been on Bluesky for a few months.
Around 300 followers, mostly generic female names being caricatures of progressive or traditional values, often "looking for true love".
I can post almost anything I want and no one reacts.
It was the same for reddit, and honestly even 4chan in the early 2000s.
Hacker news kinda fills that gap now.
This has been my experience as well. I was a heavy lurker during peak Twitter phase, but I still got lots of value from it.
I tried posting about tech and stuff and there’s absolute silence. No one cares anymore as if there are only tumbleweeds out there.
I logged out of all my social media accounts (except HN) and moved them to hidden apps category. As a result I managed to read 3 lovely books and finished my side project ever since.
Twitter is dead, and its grave is marked with nothing more than an X.
What do you mean? Aren't you looking at it right now?
PixelFed reminds me a bit of the old Instagram. Not many users, but people are there to post their pictures. You kinda have to rely on tags and trending content to find accounts/content, but that's not always a bad thing.
Fortunately, Mastodon has completely taken its place for me, and it actually affords me a good degree of agency over what I see. It's a linear feed of posts by the people I follow, with comprehensive filtering (and even better, people voluntarily put content warnings on their posts about potentially-difficult topics). It's actually pretty badass, even if it isn't perfect.
You can certainly keep having cool conversations with people on Mastodon, like the good old days of Twitter. That's all I do. I follow people who post about neat stuff, and they follow me cuz I post about stuff I (and apparently they) find interesting. Just people hanging out, basically. You don't need to worry about growing an audience or whatever (though I'm sure you already knew that heh :))
people move to new platform that is nice for socializing. The cycle begins anew.
I for one dont have the energy for it anymore. Im done. Im burnt out. If it isnt a real human in front of me it can fuck off and burn in hell. I make an exception for hacker news, because it doesnt seem trashed to shit by bots astroturfing just about every post to sway public opinion, but the moment it starts I will unplug from the public net for good, and nothing of value will be lost.
So, you miss having access to experts in fields you’re a layman to. That makes sense.
I wonder though if the experts miss your random guesses about their work? If they miss the compulsion to correct your assumptions before misinformation takes hold?
> I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens
So we all agree that follower count != engagement. You pointed that out in the first quote. It's a trueism we all claim to understand. But then you immediately jump to low followers on Mastodon or Bluesky being equivalent to low engagement, when that isn't necessarily the case.
I don't know where you're based, but in general these days at least one "chat app" of some kind is the de facto standard in most countries. For a lot of the world, that's WhatsApp.
The US is an outlier in still relying majorly on SMS as the communications platform.
And since a lot of people do keep in contact via WhatsApp group chats, it’s hard to ignore the social implications of WhatsApp too. It’s as much a social platform as the others albeit with a different broadcast model.
As a parent, I have to monitor my child’s WhatsApp groups to check they’re safe, just like I would their YouTube and Instagram feeds. And I have to check they’re also being safe with the stuff that they share on WhatsApp, just like you would on any other social network.
That is by design. To privatize public spaces and control what is said in that spaces to monetize it is the goal. No individual parent can fight the power of the corporations that push us in that direction.
The public discourse of TV and other media is dying, while the private echo chambers owned by corporations are increasing. That is not good either.
What I think the study is missing is the impact of social media on society, and impact on society on individuals wellbeing. I see an increase in paranoia, extremism, pessimism, etc. caused directly by that closed communities that spin out of control and create the perfect dish plate to grow the most paranoid people. For kids and teenagers it will be worse, as they are still growing and learning.
Even the device platform you choose segregates you. There are a few neighbor families our family is close to. They(neighbors and my family) all talk on iMessage. I've got an Android/eOS device so I am excluded from the chats. At least my wife shares them with me.
There was a time that people set standards for (landline) telephone communications for the sake of interoperability. We need the same for other technologies. I'm sick of trying to be social in corporate controlled gated communities surrounded by impassible walls.
Tbh I have a feeling it's the kids' fault. They call everything social media now. No separate names for FB and WhatsApp even though they do totally different things.
Taking part in group events also becomes a headache if you don't join the related WhatsApp group.
I find it appalling that basic features of human social functions are subject to the whims and profiteering of a quasi-monopolist company. There should be heavy regulations, at the very least.
As for the really attention grabbing social media like Instagram and TikTok, if your kids want to get on there I'd say provide a good alternative. Something they can use or open if boredom strikes, because there definitely are those moments when that happens and one just grabs the phone. For me it's mostly been HN and books, some YouTube channels with NewPipe and some podcasts.
You don't have to share your messages or pictures with Meta to fix the problems you laid out in your post. Certainly not all of them.
For example with the bowling situation, all you had to do was listen passively to times/events being posted.
I actually took the time to sign up for WhatsApp just now to see how it works nowadays, and it’s still the same as it was before: nags you to no end to enable full Contacts access (no, Meta, I’m not letting you dump my entire contacts database into your app so that you can data mine it). iOS lets you select a minimal set of contacts to give it, but if you do this, it still shows you a full screen saying to enable full contacts access before it will let you contact anyone. No thanks. (I deleted my account immediately again, maybe I’ll try again in another 5 years.)
No smartphones allowed at school, strict usage limits for older kids at home, etc.
I guess proper education on the real aspects of the social media phenomenon would be the real deal. For example, explaining how/why the companies use their algorithms to keep you in there; influencers only want to sell you a product; why posts/stories don’t reflect reality at all, etc.
But understanding all that would require quite some amount of emotional maturity from both the kids and parents themselves. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the reality at all, there are adults that still can’t see through the cracks..
WhatsApp is E2E encrypted, right? Can you go into more detail about what you suspect Meta is doing or will do?
It would follow logically that whatever kind of brain rot social media causes, would affect 1% of the population very dramatically, another 9% somewhat more noticeably, and then there would be this vast ocean of people who are only marginally aware/affected. From the perspective of online activity they appear to not even exist.
This always seems counterintuitive to the 9% or the 1% (and just by commenting we're already in one of those demogs). But there's lots of data out there supporting these skewed distributions in online activity.
The business model of the casinos and the drug dealers and the alcohol venders is the same - you need a huge pool of unproblematic recreational users to find the problematic users who generate the bulk of your profits.
The same model works for video games and social media.
Page 7 of the PDF shows the following:
"This project is part of the U.S. 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study (Gonz´alez-Bail´on et al. 2023; Guess et al. 2023a,b; Nyhan et al. 2023; Allcott et al. 2024), a partnership between Meta researchers and unpaid independent academics. Under the terms of the collaboration, the independent academic authors had final authority over the pre-analysis plan, data analysis, and manuscript text, and Meta could not block any results from being published."
Personally I’ve been mentally in a better place since getting rid of my social media accounts during COVID, but it does cause problems because Facebook has become a utility as well (schools and real-life social groups use it for co-ordinating activities).
For example, if you deactivate Facebook but still doom scroll the NY Times et al homepages. Your happiness wouldn’t necessarily change because almost ALL media has adopted the addictive techniques of social media.
In any case I didn't like the amplification - unamplified life is hard enough - so I got rid of it a long time ago and don't regret it at all.
The self selection bias in these ad based invitation studies is just out of whack.
I suspect that those who participate were already considering quitting.
If you were depressed because of divisive politics on social media, then you leave social media during elections where divisive politics is everywhere in the real world anyway.. self-reported depression seems like it would not change much. So the results might make sense as long as they are targeting people that are old enough to be depressed by politics in the first place, and assuming politics rather than body-image issues etc is the main driver.
Some follow up questions.. does social media make divisive political issues in the real world worse? Seems like it! How old is old enough to be depressed by politics? Probably everyone now, which phenomenon is also likely caused by social media. Honestly regardless of elections, you can't actually leave social media by leaving social media anymore, it's kinda in the very fabric of things.
> my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")
Same, I mean this seems to be going against most of the other research on this. For what it's worth, here's a paper with some of the same authors on digital addiction ( https://www.nber.org/papers/w28936 ). Abstract states that
> Looking at these facts through the lens of our model suggests that self-control problems cause 31 percent of social media use.
So.. not necessarily painting social media as wonderful. Social media companies would be interested in research about social media addiction for obvious reasons, but probably do not in general want that research public. Unless of course it hurts competitors more than it hurts them, and this paper is in the middle of drama about a tiktok ban. Maybe the authors just say what people in power want to hear at the time?
If a significant part of someone's Social life is run through Facebook, it's surprising that there's even a net positive in the end.
It also took a lot more than 6 weeks to get acclimated to it. You get psychological withdrawal. It took months for it to feel normal. My income went up a lot in the years after as well (in part due to more time to focus on finding a new job), so that also contributed to my happiness.
But perhaps the study shows that the effect works in the right direction even if small and even when replaced by any other behaviours that cause unhappiness, depression and anxiety.
But I have a hard time ditching Reddit, I canceled accounts multiple times, yet at some point I need to discuss something for which there's only a subreddit online and I'm back at square one.
Politics, relationships, those are not things to talk about. But being able to respond to major FOSS contributors, that I'll do.
I agree to some extent, but even highly specialised / niche topics on dedicated subs are getting slammed by the "hivemind". I guess it's more apparent for non-us users, as we're not the target audience, but the political brigading is showing even on subs like space and ML related. Reddit is now very similar to ~2015-16 reddit when the-donald and other subs really peaked, just the other way around. 10/25 posts on all are bad orange man and bad space man related. The technology sub is a mess of weaponised autism. And then you get the same political bs coming from weird subs, like the cute pics sub, or the knitting sub suddenly having political submissions w/ 3k-6k upvotes, all saying the same thing.
It doesn't help that it is still the easiest "social network" to create accounts on, and bot on. With the advances in LLMs I sometimes truly can't say if an account is real or a bot. And I work in this space...
And I would have these disputes, of course, over utterly trivial things, like how to spell something or where to place the apostrophe, or some manual-of-style nitpick in an infobox. And the disputes would drag on for weeks and we could utterly stall the editing process by disputing on talk pages. And yet we could edit-war over it, usually in slow-motion. And often the dispute would be couched in quite polite language but I would hate the guys' guts.
And the tipping point came when I began to have dreams about Wikipedia, and I would wake up angry. I would wake up fighting. I would wake up and immediately tear into the web browser and catch-up on the discussion, or not, just to post my next riposte, because I'd composed it in my sleep, in my dreamless dreams.
And I woke up angry more often than waking up in any other mood. And I was telling my psychiatrist this, and she said I should probably stop looking at blue light before bedtime. And I was incredulous that she would think if I turned my arguments red-hued that they would anger me less, or cause me to wake up happy and agreeable or something?
And I know I wasn't taking enough medication to make anyone happy, but these guys on Wikipedia really knew how to piss me off, and if you've ever heard of "brinkers" it's a certain type of troll who will play by the rules, and basically trigger anyone with a hot temper, and that triggered person would forget their ethics and commit a fatal error, and get banned, and the brinker would go on to live another day and cause others to fall into similar traps. And many of us do that, if we have the volatile temperament. I lasted about 17 years on Wikipedia without a single block and with some low-grade warnings, but generally a clean discipline record, but finally it got to me.
And a lot of time on Wikipedia I had spent fighting trolls and vandals and very disruptive editors. And I made sure a lot of them were banned. I filed a lot of reports. I was a petty bureaucrat there, filing reports and compiling evidence and arguing cases. There was no shortage of "wikilawyering". From the very beginning I was finding disputes and diving into them. Especially when they didn't concern me, didn't concern any topic I cared about. Just to have the disputes.
And I kept waking up angry. And finally I got control of that. Nowadays I wake up frightened. I wake up traumatized. I wake up scared of something I dreamed about. It's spiritual torment, and it's attributable to nothing I did the night before. Perhaps the F.U.D. of Hacker News gets to me. But not on that level. At least I don't go on crusades or jihads against Wikipedia editors anymore.
Didn't know there was a term for this, good to know it wasn't just me seeing things. Witnessed this happen countless times while assisting with moderation on Discord. The only worse thing than the rules defending these people's behavior is when fellow moderators decide to cover for them too.
Occasionally there are good real conversations where people are generally interested and curious but the most common are either marginally interested or very interested in worthless conflict.
- do not engage with the technically correct but missing the point people
- don’t check your threads if you posted something that the groupthink disagrees with
- don’t try to win arguments if you know you’re right
I can’t really put my finger on why, but I don’t think I believe you.
Sorry, couldn’t help myself.
I know the feeling, but I have to admit that people being obtuse helped me to take them and myself less serious. That said, there are better ways to foster that kind of experience.
I think the only way out is cold turkey. The number of conversations my wife starts with telling me about some distant acquaintances recent vacation (as seen thru IG) is distressing.
My "social" internet use is more hobby based - forum/reddit hobby focussed content.
And even she does some doom-scrolling though news sites. She claims to know it's mostly nonsense, and then says she has to do it to know what's going on. I try not to point out the contradiction too much, because she does limit it pretty well.
In this study, they paid people $25 to not use it for a week. I wonder if your wife would agree to that. It seems like for most people who are addicted, you need to go "sober" and not use it all.
No phones in the bedroom. No phones at meals. No phones at the park. (Something like that)
Or even a "let's go out for dinner without our phones!"
I also made a little "Phone jail." It is essentially a shoebox on top of the fridge. I announce when I am putting my phone in "jail" as a way to show my kids that I am trying to have a healthy relationship with screens.
My wife and I have both reduced our screen time (though ew aren't perfect.)
The nice thing to do when somebody is behaving poorly, is to ignore it until it becomes untenable (firing them, leaving them, and so on). The kind thing is to address it and let them change their ways.
Wanting to be nice is baked into our social structures - nobody wants to be seen as the un-nice person - but being kind is where relationships and interactions get strong. You just need to do it with empathy.
> We estimate that users in the Facebook deactivation group reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, anxiety, and depression, relative to control users. The effect is statistically distinguishable from zero at the p < 0.01 level, both when considered individually and after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing along with the full set of political outcomes considered in Allcott et al. (2024). Non-preregistered subgroup analyses suggest larger effects of Facebook on people over 35, undecided voters, and people without a college degree.
> We estimate that users in the Instagram deactivation group reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement in the emotional state index relative to control. The effect is statistically distinguishable from zero at the p = 0.016 level when considered individually, and at the p = 0.14 level after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing along with the outcomes in Allcott et al. (2024). The latter estimate does not meet our pre-registered p = 0.05 significance threshold. Substitution analyses imply this improvement is achieved without shifts to offline activities. Non-preregistered subgroup analyses suggest larger effects of Instagram on women aged 1824.
I was looking for a more digestable figure describing the extent of improvements, not whether the study found them confidently distinguishable (which I just assumed they did based on the wording, good to know they didn't for Instagram).
People who use Facebook also may feel depression, from very strong to none at all. In the middle of this interval there's the "expected value" point, sort of an average level of feeling depressed. This point is at an equal distance from the "most depressed users" group, and from the "not depressed at all" group. Let's call this distance of depression strength a "standard deviation".
Now, the users who stopped using Facebook became slightly less depressed, by 6% of that "standard deviation" range. If you buy a small coke at a McDonald's, then take one sip, you make it about 6% smaller. It's not unnoticeable (you've made that refreshing sip), but about 15 more such sips still remain!
In other words, there is an effect which can definitely be noticed ("statistically significant"), but it's not a big deal either.
Like have one nice meal or a one walk in the woods 2 months ago and rate your mood today kind of effect size.
0.06 std deviation is not anything to write home about and really doubtfully real, given the general quality of psychological science.
Perhaps, how much better of a day would you have if you found a dollar on the ground.
Of course, this study only considered normative people, not marginalized or those who were experiencing active harm from exposure to social media - your personal results may vary and it's important to remember that science is imperfect and social sciences are doubly so.
If going off Facebook improves your life - you do you.
When we lost our pet and my wife was very upset for a while, the algo kept showing her more and more content associated with pet loss. It got to the point that some random content pushed to her social media was upsetting her daily.
I can imagine someone experiencing depression, suicidal thoughts, etc can easily be pushed over the edge by the algorithmic feedback loop.
Alternatively, you'll want to grasp the meaning of "standard deviation" (you're right that you can't multiply all standard deviations by a number and get a percentage - and a percentage of what?), and then find the "index of happiness, depression, and anxiety" they use and grasp its meaning.
True. I've experienced it too
If anything is different today, it's not that social media makes things easier or faster, because we've always had 24/7 talking heads on TV or the radio, we had dailies with evening editions, etc. It's that consolidation is even more prevalent today.
You might want friend and family content, but engaging content will increase your dwell time and profitability as a user, often against your will.
I want the former, not the latter. Social media is optimized for the latter.
But behind the scenes companies did start to think about customer data gathering, retention and deletion in terms of maximal fine of 4% of turnover.
I've even been able to successfully use it to remove something private about me from the internet. I don't think I would have even gotten a response had there been no legal precedent.
You can always argue about how some regulations are badly implemented or incomplete but I believe it would be very misguided to believe that no regulations are instead the better alternative.
The thing about moving to a new location is you're consciously choosing to start over: that has positives and negatives, but either way it's a ton of work to get re-established. Be brave, you'll find people the more you look for them.
... go and do your hobby. Whatever it is. You're likely to meet people along the way who are also into whatever it is that you're doing. Even in the less sociable hobbies, you're bound to encounter like-minded folk at some point (take it from me, the not-so-social backpacker who likes going to remote places). You might not know where the groups are yet, but you'll figure it out, just like you figured out everything else about being in a new location - where the grocery stores are, where the good restaurants are, where whatever it is that you need might be located.
Yeah CL is dead by comparison, and everything is listed on Marketplace, but better? I dunno.
And all they have to do is be shitty about monetizing their existing userbase via social pressure.
There was a mass exodus to Threads, which is now a weird toxic liminal space apparently tuned for woke-adjacent rage bait blended with LinkedIn-for-creatives. "I have an opinion, now buy my fan art."
My take on all of these is that huge corporations are all polluters. We think of pollution as chemical and environmental, but Meta and X are the world's biggest sources of mental and emotional pollution - outside of the MSM.
Then I realized their business model is so low-rent, they had web 1.0 style protections on scraping all their scanned yearbooks. So I liberated all the ones with anyone I was likely to know and posted them to Archive.org.
You're welcome.
Also: #deletefacebook
I agree that required post emails is user hostile, but trivially mitigated with email filters. From substack -> trash [omit any you want]
I suspended my account, without realising if I left it for n days it would be deleted. Went back one day and there was someone else with my handle. Actually felt relieved as the whole thing was gone. Didn’t get a chance to worry about an archive.
The digital camera was barely a thing back then let alone a camera in your pocket 24 hours a day! Nevertheless, lots of happy memories captured in the only way that really matters - in person without a screen.
Have you been able to adopt another pet?
I follow over 700 accounts on Bluesky and strictly use the following feed, and this is not my experience.
At the very least we should acknowledge the negative externalities. Just leaving it up to the market to figure out (especially if we allow the current tech monopolies to exist) will result in serious societal impact.
But who made the demand, to have everything shown from everyone?
Imagine a social network, where you make your own rules for your feed. That special person who posts rarely, but good will have special visibility. And from that bored family member that basically spams, you will see the message "X has posted 50 pictures and text today" and with a click you can go there.
There are society level effects based on the consumption of several goods and services.
Gambling, alcohol, drugs, for example.
The individuals story, in aggregate, mm impacts, over and over, has effects that we must address when arguing for the optimal friction for that good.
Plenty of people like heroin too. Liking something doesn't make it good.
No, VC money is what enables the entire multi-billion-dollar loss-leading front end effort that creates the network that is sold in an IPO.
No one else will take that level of risk, and the first eight years of its existence wouldn’t occur without VC money.
You’ll also notice how I didn’t say VC money was the problem. That was a long list of very specific qualifiers I wrote that you strawmanned very efficiently.
What does "ghaff" mean? I can't find a definition. I'm not a native English person.
Once in a while we’ll see screenshots of these insightful tweets but they’ll be lost forever, like tears in the rain.
I think the difference here is that you were already “in” it, and it changed. I wasn’t “in” it because I hated the vibe and fakeness and just denying of my experience, but now I get the opportunity to join in a “resetting” environment. It’s refreshing and just way more real.
I blocked a few political accounts at the start and now I don’t see that at all btw
Also socializing becomes impossible. I once went to a birthday party only to have it ruined by a friend of the host. Said friend only wanted to talk partisan politics non-stop.
They would have seemed to care about that, until Trump got told that wasn't working (or, as likely, the market had been swung far enough) and did a 180 removing tariffs on what the public were told were the most vital things to tariff...
All those people didn't change their mind at the exact moment it was needed to swing the stock market back and for you mate the oligarchs money - just Musk et al. have built a brainwash machine at a national level.
It's an important distinction - when interviewed it seems barely any of those being manipulated can form a coherent thought about "the issue they care about".
Too bad because other topics like woodworking and mountain biking we're interesting and less... provocative, but that's not good for Instagram.
I have found out that the algorithm will adjust itself relatively quickly if you don't click on stuff (at some point it decided I was into foot fetish and it disappeared quickly). With that I get stuff about philosophy, math (memes), science and technology stuff with a lot of animals videos.
The algorithim is optimized for "engagement", and therefore optimized specifically to trigger addiction as quickly and effectively as possible. The lower level softcore porn and rage bait and brainrot memes are what triggers addiction in people prone to it.
It's exactly the same situation as slot machines. They are made by the same companies in many cases that made some of the best and most fun arcade and video games. But if you aren't prone to gambling addiction, they aren't fun, because they aren't optimized for fun, they are optimized for addiction. The same triggers and stimuli that are most effective at triggering addiction behaviors are LESS effective at being "fun" to non-addictive people.
"The algorithm" is literally not meant to feed people what they want. "The algorithm" serves only the interests of the company, which is to efficiently keep eyeballs looking at a feed in order to sell ads. Giving most people what they want is genuinely counter to that.
I'd keep coming across, and sometimes seeking out, threads with political content. But beyond that, I'd keep stumbling upon or even seeking out people who are being (in my view) inciteful or misleading. This would then piss me off, and I'd start to spiral. Naturally, these are not the kind of people who'd be posting in good faith, adding even more fuel to the fire when I engaged with them and their replies would eventually come about, which of course I'd "helpfully" get a notification for.
I doubt many are being serious.
Business culture (at least in the US) is so steeped in lying and general fake-ness that in-group signaling as "real business person" involves public performances of bullshit.
It's what you're supposed to do in interviews: bullshit just the right way, to show you understand the game and are willing to debase yourself to play it. Otherwise you're "risky", either due to excessive commitment to ethical principles or to being too clueless or inept to play the game right. That's what's going on, on LinkedIn. "Humility" and "realness" even have to be faked just the right way.
It's incredibly gross.
If you crack and admit it’s fake, everything falls apart and it’s your fault. Expulsion out onto the street follows.
Even worse, now everyone else is going ‘how could you be so dumb to believe it’ and/or ‘you sure fucked up by admitting it was fake’ all at the same time.
Not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's like professional wrestling, stage magic, or politics. Some lies people really love.
Systems which only have up-votes/likes have their own issues, but at least not that one.
If there is no external stimuli to push a desire to change it is unlikely a person will even want to change in the first place.
Hence the other comments, well done you just solved all drug dependency, just stop doing drugs.
Therapy isn't just about how to take responsibility and making changes. It's about learning how to build a support network and the mental resolve to actually go through with the change in the long term.
Blaming the person in addiction doesn't help much without actually taking steps to improve. But it's all too common to believe you have brought an issue to an addicts attention but it didn't quite sink in to them.
Sometimes a phrase like "this is a problem and if you don't seek help I am going to have to take action by doing x" can be a decent wake up call. But if it comes over as aggressive or happens during a fight of some sort you will still not get the response you were looking for.
Inter personal relationships are hard, sometimes it is beneficial for the person's effected be someone else addiction to seek therapy at the same time or even before the addict seeks therapy.
In this case it's even more true, a long term relationship with children is the one place you really do want all the support you can get to ensure the person that needs help gets it and the family as a whole doesn't suffer more than needed.
That is - you don't need to read 18 different articles about how Pete the drunk defense secretary (and probable assaulter/abuser) likes to text on his personal phone about war plans (including to non-govt officials), but when you see the article pop up in enough of the less biased news places you browse, you get the idea that it's true & bad.
Generally I find business news like FT/Bloomberg/CNBC and (if you ignore the opinion section) WSJ are best for the less-biased news sourcing.
I also browse a bit of known-biased news on each side to understand what each side is going to talk about (and makes it clearer what each side may be BSing about). This is helpful so I don't get jumped by some of my more left/right wing nut social circle when discussing a topic with a known-false partisan argument (as 99% of people just repeat what they see in their-sides news).
The casino, liquor store and drug dealer all make the same margin regardless of who they're selling to. If anything the problem users are more likely to cause problems for them so they'd rather make the money on casual users and scale.
Having your whole operation be basically a wash except for all the money from a few people with problems is fairly unique to digital gaming and the software industry.
Gambling is also very skewed. Studies place it something like 5% of in person gamblers accounting for 50% of profits or 1% for online gambling. I would guess for sports betting it's similar.
People can’t get addicted to flying in the same manner as we have seen people get addicted to gambling or to some of these social media applications.
Essentially a disturbing way to look at it is that the people with alcohol addiction are allowing everyone else to be able to consume alcohol for cheaper than it would otherwise be.
Same phenomena exist for other addictive things like sugar in soda and free to play video games. (Although obviously soda and video games are nowhere close to alcohol in terms of destructive potential for those who develop an addiction).
While these may be easy ways to avoid exposing yourself to sources of discomfort it might also not be a bad idea to learn how to deal with confrontation and dissonance in a productive manner.
Besides being contrarian, I am nothing if not that, I honestly think our society at large will benefit from learning how to deal constructively with opposing perspectives and mindsets - assuming we ever get to that point.
Caveats:
- I can be wrong (sometimes need some pointing out)
- it is ok to post for the benefit of lurkers (inform others of fake news and such)
Edit: wait, that could be interpreted as referring to HN, which it isn't. More everything else digital in the world.
The outcome was inevitable. People had fun posting posts and photos when it was a novelty, but once the novelty wore off they were back to not wanting to put in the effort. You can only post so many photos of your cat before you grow tired of it.
If you are drinking more than that across an evening I would argue it's a bit more than socialising. Maybe where you are from people are heavy drinkers and are not responsible enough to not slow down a fee hours before you know you will be driving but I feel like the quarter a million annually is quite overrepresented by heavy drinkers.
My closest bar is 100 meters away. If I'm willing to walk 20 minutes, the radius can probably hit around 100 different ones.
Why is it ironic that an Arab would be nice to you? Ignoring the racial/national assumption here, political views from diasporic Arabs, especially older ones who immigrated many years ago, are incredibly diverse and often more contingent on their local issues than world politics. People make the same mistake when assuming political views towards Mexico from Latinos (both Tejano and Mexican) in Texas, for example.
>my old antifa "friends"
Most antifa folks are gonna have a very clear cut moral stance on the state of Israel, even before Hamas' military began the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. Be honest now, have they distanced themselves from you because of your identity, or is it because of your opinions on the actions of the state of Israel? Because even the most hardline "antifa" types I know are more than happy to organize with the likes of SJP and similar organizations of Jewish and Israeli people.
Unfortunately most people seem allergic to nuance on this topic, which really sucks for both Palestinians and Israelis.
This happens virtually everywhere. It is extremely rampant. I have yet to find a place where there are humans and it does not happen, excl. friend circles.
> What I find respectable is someone who tells you honestly what they think
Agreed.
There’s always going to be a shot caller or instigator behind it and everyone else who is weak willed will get on board with it.
Toxic people gonna toxic.
> There’s always going to be a shot caller or instigator behind it and everyone else who is weak willed will get on board with it.
Yeah, a major factor was lots of people putting up with some real bullshit for years to try to keep the peace. That, and the ones who did try to do something about it approached the problem-people one-on-one, which just led to them being lied to ("oh no, there's no problem between us") and then smeared even harder to others, and marginalized, having no idea why any of it was happening.
They tend to have some form of serious mental illness and/or a major substance problem they're not interested in addressing, which leads to emotional dysregulation. So not exactly great people to have around anyway.
Have I lost friends over it? Yes. But that's fine, having no friends is better than having fake friends who undermine you.
Don't be too discouraged. IMHO it's as simple as there being a significant portion of the population who tend to talk shit about other people in their circle when those people aren't around. If asked, they'll often attribute this oddly unmotivated malice to some conveniently proximate reason but, in most cases, if that reason didn't exist they'd still talk some slightly different shit about that same person.
In my experience, these kind of people will, at various times and in various contexts, talk shit about around half the people in their relevant circle. And who's in the half varies over time and each shit-talker can have different individuals in their half. So how does one end up in a given talker's shit-talked half? It can seem almost random but definite contributing factors include the talker perceiving you as better than them in any way (even if you never imply that - and even if it's not remotely correct). It's enough that their insecurity gets triggered even if it's over something 100% imaginary. Heaven help you if you actually are slightly more attractive in some way, have a slightly better job, spouse, education, hobby, hairdo, car - it can be anything or nothing. It's them - not you. And if it wasn't that one thing, it would be about something else.
The truly strange thing is, in my experience, when many of these people shit-talk about their friend group it's unconsciously triggered behavior that relieves some internal psychological stressor. It's almost like some kind of bizarre Tourette syndrome. On another day, in another context, that same shit-talker would tell someone you're their friend, that you're a great person - and, strangely, in that moment they would sincerely mean it. In some ways, I'd almost prefer it if these people were two-faced liars who spend every moment secretly hating me but act nice to my face. While unpleasant, that's at least easy to understand. The reality that they're just socially schizophrenic and almost randomly acting out triggered emotional stress but without harboring any deep rooted animosity toward me is much harder to mentally model.
Once I gained an understanding of this. I learned to avoid not only the shit-talkers, but the people close to them who don't shit talk but listen to their shit talk passively. While the shit-talkers are flawed, insecure people, the regular shit-listeners are just weak and unprincipled. I decided I don't have time to waste on either type. It's also a good reminder to myself to avoid ever slipping into passive shit-listening. Whenever I'd hear shit-talk about someone else, I'd usually politely question the shit-talker on their inconsistent behavior. This pretty quickly ensures no one shit-talks about anyone when I'm around - and it often leads to being excluded from the group entirely. Which I consider an excellent outcome.
Note: Based on the broad circumstances you related, I'll also add a general reminder to always consider the motivations of whoever told you about the shit-talking. Obviously, that's an all-to-common way to stir up drama and/or deepen their relationship with you. Always remember, if they weren't considered a 'safe' shit-listener by the shit-talker, they wouldn't have heard the shit-talk about you. And, of course, exaggerating (or entirely fabricating) the supposed shit-talk they reported to you is another level of shit-stirring.
Am Yisrael Chai.
Look at how broad the definition on Wikipedia is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
I don’t think that’s the kids fault.
Also, from that Wikipedia article:
> Depending on interpretation, other popular platforms that are sometimes referred to as social media services include YouTube, Letterboxd, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Viber, Reddit, Discord, and TikTok.
The broad interpretation that includes Reddit would also categorise HN as social media which I think is fair.
I think the problem actually is the adults that are not being specific about which problems they want to stop when they broadly say that social media is bad.
Like you say, the problem is specifically things like algorithms that are tuned for engagement, which results in all kinds of negative effects.
That being said even this is not specific enough. HN although different is also run on an algorithm that is meant to surface the most interesting things. The site rules on HN avoid some of the bad effects, but it’s still possible to be negatively impacted in other ways like checking HN too often and too long instead of doing other things.
I think you are attributing too much psychology nonsense on the matter; it's a pretty bad tendency of our times to try to make every behavior some sort of mental illness.
While part of the behavior might look schizophrenic, the reality is that it is that way for plenty of reasons, you being unable to understand/sense them doesn't mean they doesn't exist. Before even going too deep, you can always assume it's some kind of power play or a cheap way to grab attention and support. The people doing this are always working "from behind", because the whole point of it is to gain power without risking a direct confrontation (that could in theory lead into physical altercation or have them loose much more than what they want to bargain for).
I don't like this behavior for many reasons but you can't go around and pretend its mental illness or some nonsense like that; summarizing it as shit talking is a mistake. It's actually the whole point of politics and while you may have an autistic view of the world (no offense intended, I am one) it's how regular people work things out. Not everything can be a perfect competition or a science project with pure facts...
But wikipedia doesn't make up definitions, just lists the commonly used meaning.
> I think the problem actually is the adults that are not being specific about which problems they want to stop when they broadly say that social media is bad.
Adults are also talking about cell phone addiction, like browsing FB/Instagram on your laptop is any better.
> HN although different is also run on an algorithm that is meant to surface the most interesting things.
Is it? I thought it was human upvotes and maybe a few human mods...
It would be interesting to determine why HN still works btw. It's a pretty unified community that is fairly large.
Is the main reason that it's basically a non profit?
That’s the algorithm of HN :)
It computes the score of posts based on some combination of time since posted + number of comments + number of upvotes, etc.
> It would be interesting to determine why HN still works btw. It's a pretty unified community that is fairly large.
> Is the main reason that it's basically a non profit?
Yea I think so. Being driven not for profit, plus having a specific overarching guideline for what type of content belongs here;
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
My experience has been that Mormons are generally self-aware, polite, and willing the engage in interesting conversation.
In contrast, LinkedIn influencers' eyes glaze over whenever you try to dig into the details of what they're purporting to talk about. Because, ugh, nerd stuff that's beneath them.
It's real, but barely noticeable for most people—unless you're in a more affected subgroup (e.g. undecided voters or younger women). Your experience feeling way better likely means you were an outlier (in a good way).
In general, 0.2 is considered a small effect. So 0.06 is quite small — likely not a practically noticeable change in well-being. But impressive to me when I compare it to effect sizes of therapy interventions which can lie around 0.3 for 12 weeks.
Quote:
> “50 randomized controlled trials that were published in 51 articles between 1998 and August 2018. We found standardized mean differences of Hedges’ g = 0.34 for subjective well-being, Hedges’ g = 0.39 for psychological well-being, indicating small to moderate effects, and Hedges’ g = 0.29 for depression, and Hedges’ g = 0.35 for anxiety and stress, indicating small effects.”
(Source: The efficacy of multi-component positive psychology interventions, 2019 — https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331028589_The_Effic...)
So, if 0.3 is 12 weeks of therapy, then 0.06 is ~2.5 weeks of therapy (0.3/0.06 = 2.4), assuming you pick any 2.5 random weeks of the 12 week course.
Yes, I'm sure the first session is the most important and then a logarithmic curve of blah blah blah.
Essentially, deleting FB is not much, but it's not nothing either.
So to put it colloquially, if you have 4 friends, and you were in the middle of them (3rd happiest aka happier than 2 of them), by quitting Facebook you are now happier than all but 1 one them (aka happier than 3 of them).
AKA for every 4 friends you have you can jump ahead of 1 of them in the happiness race by quitting facebook.
If you were average happiness, and you improve that by 1 stdev, you are now happier than 87% of your peers (when you were at 50%ile before). 0.6 stdev improvement would be vs 72% of your peers.
So to put it colloquially, if you have 7 friends, and you were in the middle of them (4th happiest), by quitting Facebook you are now happier than all but 1 one them.
Secondly, the impact of the difference isn't known - you don't know the curve representing the relationship of score to impact. In some contexts a little change is meaningless - the curve is flat; in others the curve is steep and it can be transformational. And impacts only sometimes scale linearly with performance or score, of course.
Without that knowledge, standard deviation means nothing beyond how unusual, in the given population, the subject's performance is.
The good news is they'll respect you for something they can't get anywhere else.
But, in practice, nowadays people who have something to share with those they care about will do so through some sort of messaging application, including Facebook Messenger, so posting really only ends up being for the sake of the casual acquaintances you've accumulated as Facebook friends over the years. What, exactly, do you want to let them know?
Also the way it works, for some reason it decides 2-3 people are my besties (they are not) and just shows me what they post, ignoring what everyone else is posting, so it's still useless.
It's much the same as the people who get books ghostwritten and say "I wrote a book". It doesn't matter if you understand someone else wrote it, if you say that in your head or out loud enough, your brain will treat it as reality and you will think it to be reality, and that will effect future thinking and feeling.
It doesn't matter if you are playing a character. Play it convincingly enough and it WILL bleed into your reality.
I tend to call people out, too. I keep the ones that take it gracefully.
Quality > quantity. :)
News items - frustration at the state the world is in.
Urban bicycle feed: annoyance at the atrocities of the inept drivers.
Feed with cycle side trip pictures: fun.
Rust projects, Electronics: the curiosity of learning.
Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing feature which is you can subscribe to someone else’s block lists. That changes the experience quite a lot, to the better.
Oh yeah I remember how this worked on Twitter. Make a post that annoys some anonymous blocklist maintainer, and suddenly you're blocked by a whole swath of accounts. Sometimes just following the wrong person or liking the wrong post is enough. No accountability for these decisions and no way to reverse them, or even figure out whom to approach to reverse them.
Sounds awfully exclusionary for a service that purports to be inclusive. It encourages the formation of authoritarian cliques, as tends to happen in any left-wing group sooner or later.
Everyone is entitled to say their opinion.
Nobody is entitled to force others listen to it.
It’s quite simple, really.
There is only one danger for the 0.1%. The 99,9%.
* The people that got disturbed by Twitter's boosting of extremists and nazis, now took refuge to bsky. Only to get ripe for the next iteration. But see how many people are still on X, increasingly less aware of the abnormality they are drowning in.
This playbook of cultural engineering should be super clear by now. Ad tech => Private Intelligence.
* How to sell it? Invest in narratives that bend the notion of free trade in order to instill rigid beliefs about Free Markets. Now look at the free markets. :) It only takes you a few million bucks and a dinner to set your company free.
Like parent hinted at, "social media" means the opposite for society.
“Free markets” is an uneducated nonsense. An entirely unregulated market evolves into monopoly. Even without corruption.
Social media for me is just a tool (HN is also social media btw). I find it useful and it meaningfully interacts with the other aspects of my life. When it stops being the case (eg facebook and twitter) - I leave it behind.
As for the hierarchy: it had always existed and for better or worse the humans and other animals are wired for it. Likewise, they are wired for maintaining the total perceived fairness of the system - so the system eventually autocorrects the extreme imbalance. Often brutally, though.
I sometimes wonder if it’s the addictive, attention seeking nature of social media that encouraged such behavior, or if they simply lacked the courage to be so inhumane in person.
It does say something about one’s character that they would be targeted by this and would also buy into it, though. You’d hope people might see it for what it is and take a step back.
If it wasn’t for the algorithmic feed showing “recommended” posts from accounts I don’t follow and the constant ads, I would have a perfectly healthy and pleasant experience with Instagram.
I really wish they’d let us pay to get rid of ads and configure the algorithm to e.g. only recommend from accounts I follow.
Also, you can choose to filter that feed by "Favorites". Did you mistakenly end up in that mode?
I could understand that! I wanted to make a general comment, to warn people that although things feel fine now, they should imho pay caution to what these things devolve into. There doesn't even need to be any particular evil scheming from people involved. We usually focus on tech solutions. While blindness to cultural forces is generally what leads us into problems. It is a self-feedback loop in which societal fracturing and extremism is fostered.
> When it stops being the case (eg facebook and twitter) - I leave it behind.
I feel the same. But most people, not only the young, are hooked to social media. For the young, they are essential for social validation, and thus they are easily pried on by people with less morality than you likely do.
> HN is also social media btw
Sure, but it is in a different class. HN at least does it best to be the least dopamine awarding. It is hard to read, and it is difficult to see if someone replied to a question or remark you made.
Traditional fora, mailing lists, HN--they are far more benign than what we are talking about.
To your other points: I find that people who are addicted never heed the warnings, they just get annoying. Just occurred to me: wonder if the addiction is to some extent internalization of the habit; so that fighting the habit becomes fighting oneself….
About HN being less addictive than the others: that is arguable :-) though it is much less driven by pure emotions than the other forms of exchange, indeed !
Lots of people on the left love to be little commissars, and this sort of thing provides a perfect opportunity.
The implication of your statement is "you probably did something to deserve it, comrade" which is very much in keeping with that mentality.
Now, if their blocklists were popular - either they weren’t lunatics or there was a crowd of lunatics. Now, why would you worry about not talking with a crowd of lunatics ?
But, regardless - again - nobody is entitled to an interaction with those that don’t want it, directly or by proxy.
Baffles me, why is it so hard to understand this ?
(You do know that blocking removes the ability to view posts, not just interact with them, right?)