This is how society has worked for thousands of years. Where some people go and find success, others will follow. It's a positive feedback loop. In hindsight, did we really think the virtual world would scale less well than the physical one?
Social media is terrible, and also great. The worst thing I can say about it is perhaps: it's easy. And like anything in modern life that's easy, it brings out the worst in us. We've reached the point where large swaths of people can spend all day doing easy, nonproductive things, and it's not good for the individual or society. We want things to be easy, but we don't do well when they are.
I'd say it's the last place one would (or should) look for "beautiful art"...
It's a honey pot of whatever can be made by frighteningly dedicated amoral money driven software engineers and data scientists. The goal is to make a zero marginal cost product that uses your friends to make content and so entrap you spending time looking at adverts to make facebook money.
We regulate gambling because a certain proportion of the populations mental heuristics can be exploited by it. But we are now seeing incredible effort expended to find more exploits of peoples mental heuristics. Perhaps you are immune to facebook as I am immune to gambling? But it's only a matter of time before all our brains fall victim to something.
Being easy is the very problem with addiction. It's not merely spending an excessive amount of time on some activity. People talk about being "addicted" to, say, running marathons, but nobody views that in the same way they do gambling or alcohol addiction.
I've noticed that people who use it to share political posts, rants, etc. tend to be some of the most emotionally negative people I've met. (reposting stuff entails low thinking effort)
Whereas people who write little David-Sedaris-like stories about their lives, sometimes with pictures, tend to receive positive emotional benefits. It's like the practice of writing Christmas letters but instead of doing it once a year, you get to do continuously. Sure there is the occasional flexing and humblebragging, but even the most humble among us can't help but share our little life victories on occasion (e.g. Ph.D. graduation, vacations taken, etc.). In my circles, people tend to share stories about their foibles and flaws too, often in a funny way, so it kind of balances things out.
Facebook is an especially great place for introverts to be vulnerable through the medium of the written word. In real life social settings, introverts tend to be crowded out by others and can sometimes struggle to tell their story. When we're in a face-to-face situation, there isn't always the occasion to truly share in detail because the politer ones among us want to avoid hogging all the attention. And even when the spotlight is on us, we don't always remember all the interesting stories to tell.
That's why the written form is so powerful as a tool for self-revelation and vulnerability. It helps deepens relationships. I've had friends who've read my posts come up to me in person to tell me, "I never knew that about you", which actually made it possible to have deeper in-person connection.
I do have a few rules about posting: if I didn't write/create it, I won't post it; and before I post, I ask: "is it kind? is it true?" These rules seem to keep me out of trouble.
I keep track of friends and family, see peoples' kids, see what vacations they're on, see nice photos, and yes, some news (some not so nice news).
Whereas twitter is a toxic cancerous cesspool of attention-seeking, all wrapped in an utterly unusably backwards UI.
Instagram's somewhere in between. Can't remember who's who anymore, bit more attention-seeking than FB, quite a bit less than Twitter.
I guess it depends on your use case. I've never found any value in following "influencers" or brands, I'm more interested in what my actual real-life friends and acquaintances are up to, and FB is far better at that. The reduction of anonymity really helps, too. It's more of a community, less of a shouting match.
As someone who moved away from my home country about 8 years ago and is still in touch with old friends via WhatsApp on an almost daily basis, this (regretfully) definitely rings true.
It didn't for me. I still made friends in real life, and FB helped me deepen some of those friendships by helping me reveal more about myself (I'm an introvert who's much better at writing than talking).
I had to leave my home town for work after getting laid off during the Great Recession. It was supposed to be very temporary, well, turns out it ended up being more permanent than I ever imagined.
I use Facebook to keep in contact with all my hometown friends. On top of that Facebook has allowed me to get back in touch with a childhood friend I haven't seen or heard from in 15+ years and it's also given me a great way to connect to new friends.
One of my best friends now I met once at an event in person, we connected on Facebook, and got talking on there. Now we talk most days over text message and we see each other a couple times a month, sometimes going on trips together. Without Facebook we would have had a single conversation ever. Sure, without Facebook we might have exchanged phone numbers after meeting, except that Facebook lends itself to friction-free low "risk" interactions in the way that phone just doesn't.
But social media ≠ Facebook. I never really used Facebook, and all my friends are (also) on other, smaller, even tiny networks, and some are just in email and video calls.
Through these tiny networks, I actually found new friends.
That and I'm 44. I'm at the age where it is increasingly difficult to generate real friendships with people. I used to be a 'renaissance man', but after I got divorced I basically just work all the time. There's not much left to connect to others with. My stomach is shot so I can't socially drink much. I lack the patience for gaming. I used to like to hike and can't afford the time now. It feels like the next 20 years are something I just need to endure and hope for a nice retirement. It's completely opposite to my worldview, but I'm pretty much starting over financially and don't have a lot of options. If I'd just accepted the other job offer last year, I would literally be sitting on $1M of stock options. I chose wrong. I picked the company whose stock tanked.
While it's a very human reaction to go "I don't see what the problem is" until the waters are lapping at your front door, your single data point inference provides plausible cover for the damage-peddlers to go "see, everything is fine". You suggest the clear evidence for harm is at best, debatable.
Smoke your whole life and never get cancer? Lucky you. But don't be that guy saying "I dunno man, I'm fine you know".
Not only do I disavow Facebook on moral grounds for the political implications of their overreach, but I think that it is a product engineered to prey on human insecurity and profit by perpetuating dysfunctional, harmful behaviour.
Then you are able to stay in contact with those far away, and make new friends at random events you may not have heard about otherwise?
I dislike their monopoly on the friend graph just as much as anyone else, but at least in the Sydney university demographic FB Events are ubiquitous.
That's not an accident, and neither is what Facebook's doing.
Facebook, and Instagram especially (but I repeat myself), absolutely do prey on the visual. It's hard for me to put into words what I'm describing (heh) but I do think visual depictions trigger latent or dormant responses in us that are too easy to manipulate and control.
Of course they brag about their awesome expensive new gear, including how durable it is, which is ridiculous, of course, but even more ridiculously, I have to shelter myself from advertising to protect my conviction that I'm not really the ridiculous one. When I'm barraged with advertising, I can't even feel good about choices that reflect my values. More and more that yucky feeling stops me from checking Instagram, which was the last social media app I checked regularly. I'm had enough of paying for "free" services by trading away control over my own thoughts and feelings.
I don't think that's the best way to frame what you're trying to do. Don't tell me what it's not or about all the problems with current social media platforms (I already know), just get straight to what your platform does differently. I can then decide for myself if that's better or if I'd prefer it to what's already out there.
Edit: I just realized the irony of the above as I type this on Hacker News.
Compare this to Reddit where I often check the profile of someone who made an atrocious comment (in quality or content), and they have tens or hundreds of thousands of points. I rarely see that on HN.
I don’t honestly think that 2 years is a meaningful time span to measure how a tech changes people’s lives. It is certainly better than a single snapshot, but some effects take time to manifest - it’s simple behaviourism. More changes require more repetitions.
Edit:
> Second, we had objective measures of Facebook use, pulled directly from participants’ Facebook accounts, rather than measures based on a person’s self-report.
What about twitter, Instagram, and whatever else people use?
This study design also cannot show causation, just correlation. The control group is self selecting
The study seems pretty sound and they did a multivariate regression for inference too. What is your concern? Confounding factors? Lack of calibration?
> This study design also cannot show causation, just correlation. The control group is self selecting
Sure but then again, causation models are currently barely picking up steam in term of being studied and more of a PhD academia study right now. All you have are statistical inference models that we've been using for most research papers that are doing inference.
While a statistician is going to word conclusion carefully, at the end of the day, somebody is going to have the paint a picture and make some plausible leap.
And then other researchers can build upon the paper and redo it with better data set or a different inference models.
https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/
Disclaimer: I'm the founder.
I realize that makes me sound crazy, but after years of reflecting on software, privacy, data ownership, and decentralization, I have not been able to avoid the conclusion that Stallman was basically right.
If your data lives in a cluster with a bunch of other people's, it's a tempting target, both to legitimate businesses and to outright theft. It's only a matter of time before someone gets it, as the constant parade of breaches and data sharing scandals show, and once it's out there you can't undo it.
I have speculated that open source services that are easily self-hosted (start the installer, enter a domain name, and pick a cloud provider) might be a passable answer to the desire to have both accessibility, shareability, and independence.
Funding their development is trickier, obviously.
I don’t like placing HN in the same bracket, because it devalues it. It would be like labelling your local vegan restaurant “junk food” and treating it like McDonalds. Lots of work has gone into actively making HN not like that, and it devalues that effort and the genuine efforts of posters to maintain civil discourse.
Facebook has had at least one experiment in the past to change how the user feels, and it was A-B tested, not run against everyone. [0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
- your real social life sucks so you spend time on facebook, or
- facebook causes your life to suck?
From personal experience I find more the first one. You could try an experiment where you persuade participants to be chosen at random to either spend much longer on facebook or much less so the change would just be facebook usage rather than other life factors?
How do you define "diminished well-being"?
Happy populations would be a catastrophe for capitalism.
Only an experiment, doing an intervention on a group, can establish causality. You stop eating for two days, you're starving - hey, not eating causes starving, who knew ? In this case, if you can make low-Facebook-using groups to use a lot, and vice-versa, and measure the effect of this intervention, that would establish causality. However, you can imagine the practical difficulty of ensuring people change their habits. They rarely do it when it has a positive impact on their health, they certainly won't do it for an experiment. This is called patient compliance in medical jargon.
