12 ms·

The relationship between social media use and well-being

176 points by j_s 10y ago

debt 10y ago
I am curious what's the point of being connected all the time? It's a question I've been asking myself since the U.S. election. So I can have access to a bunch of garbage people post on the Internet? So I can chat people quickly? There's like a handful of truly useful things on the Internet. Most of the useless things though take up 90% of time on it. I'm failing to see the value at this point.
- lsniddy 10y ago
  to stave off the existential dread of course. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c
- two2two 10y ago
  As someone who doesn't participate in social media, I do see what the value was and still could be: a way for keeping up with people's lives you care a little or a lot about. My problem is, similar to yours, that the majority of content is external noise. I began to withdraw from social media when sharing external information became a norm, rather than internal information about someone's life. edit: formatting
- sp332 10y ago
  Why would you follow/friend people who post garbage? If you're using it as a contact list, you can "unfollow" your "friends" on Facebook, so their posts don't show up in your feed by default but you can still contact them. Or even use messenger.com instead of the main Facebook interface.
- colmvp 10y ago
  I never played WoW because I was afraid of how far I'd fall into an addiction. Having read "Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked," I was rather relieved to read game developers who have said they have willingly abstained from WoW for the same reasons. Even device-makers and tech leaders are cautious about introducing their own devices to their children. The book, along with others like Hooked, remind me that we have to be very careful about the technology we use on a day to day basis, because it effects our brains in a way we might not want it too. Our brain and willpower is being tested against the skills of thousands of incredibly smart and talented designers, developers, product managers, et al. Having chosen to abstain from apps like Facebook or social media websites, I don't feel like I lost anything. If anything, I've regained more time and mental space for things like getting deeper in my career. I'm not a luddite, as I am still a big believer in the productivity and information gains via the internet and computers. But our attention is a resource that a lot of companies want. And yet, I only feel like it's more recently that we've begun to question whether the benefits these companies give to us is worth the change in ourselves. Because of mindfulness, I have recognized the need to distract myself (via Twitter, Reddit, E-mail, Whatsapp) is sometimes a symptom of not wanting to deal with something that is hard or uncomfortable (e.g. paperwork, making a decision, etc.). Yet we know that become deep at something we care about, we truly do need focused time (Deep Work by Cal Newport is a worthwhile read). So I think it's really in our best interest to only choose apps that provide a lot of benefits with only marginal drawbacks to our mind, and to be very careful about how often we use them.
  - cableshaft 10y ago
    Game developer here who abstained from WoW and pretty much all MMOs or Free2Play shenanigans. Although I happily put plenty of hours into single player RPGs (currently Persona 5 and Breath of the Wild). But those have an ending, and they don't require me to schedule my life around them in order to play them. In fact they let me drop in and out of them very quickly, since they suspend and I don't have to connect to any networks.
- a_imho 10y ago
  It has nothing to do with the election though, it was always like this since it was called web 2.0. Especially for us, working with computers, we are pretty well connected.
esemor 10y ago
I was reluctant when I removed my fb account about six months ago but it felt like it was what I needed as it intruded on what I really wanted to focus my time and energy on. A few weeks in I was amazed at how I did not miss the social network at all and surprised that the contacts that previously only contactef me on fb now wrote email and text messages.
- eldavido 10y ago
  This. facebook is like the cheetos of content. It tastes great but if you stop buying it, you'll feel so much better, and wonder why you thought you "needed" it all along. I've been off (deactivated) for 4-5 years, maybe longer, and I rarely miss it. I have a pretty active in-person social life, though.
- omnimus 10y ago
  Same here. Deleted account just before end of 2014 (facebook changed their data policy). We did it with couple of friends and were amazed by the effect. After two weeks we realized we all feel better and we never needed fb. None of us came back (just more our friends left). Really the only pain for me were fb events. In my country fb events are the most important calendar to the point that many of the venues/places put events just on fb. The problem is that i organize events from time to time and its impossible without account. Its also getting pretty hard to make fake account (they require copy of ID for new accounts now). The events are even more pain because they dont have api. Its on purpose. Venues for example cant have automated posting of events from their site. You have to make events in the fb ui. They are read only so people started opposite aproach, they post ebents on fb and consume them in their site. Its limiting and just againts everything internet used to be about.
jgrahamc 10y ago
"Overall, our results showed that, while real-world social networks were positively associated with overall well-being, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with overall well-being." This is not a surprise. I quit Facebook specifically because of the endless stream of "my life is amazing" posts of people beig happy without any balance. Reminds me of those awful Christmas letters people send round about how wonderful their entire year had been and how amazing their children are.
- rconti 10y ago
  Serious question: Would you prefer to not receive those Christmas letters? Or is it more tolerable because it's only once a year, so the benefit of staying in touch is greater than the cost of the annoyance of the letter itself?
gnrlbzik 10y ago
I have quit facebook for most part, use messenger to sometime send messages to friends, it opened up lot's of free time. I still use Instagram, but that is so much more manageable and less invasive.
moonka 10y ago
>These results then may be relevant for other forms of social media. Does this mean they only studied Facebook, or did they look at other social media networks as well? It seems to me that it is the former, but I'm not sure. I imagine different networks would have different effects based on the way people use them.
- zzalpha 10y ago
  Facebook only based on my reading.
overcast 10y ago
I came to the same conclusion a few years ago, when I delete my social accounts like Facebook. They only show you the best slices of individual lives, all day, every day. When compared to your life, it makes it look like you're doing nothing with your life. That it's completely boring, while all of these people are living these amazing adventures everyday. Combine that with all of the vitriol comments plaguing all of these sites, and it's easy to see why someone would think less of themselves. It's good to be social, but these networks are not the answer.
- davehtaylor 10y ago
  >They only show you the best slices of individual lives, all day, every day. When compared to your life, it makes it look like you're doing nothing with your life. Exactly. You end up judging your interior by others' exterior. They show you a highly edited version of their life, made to impress everyone else. You're doing nothing but constantly chasing a phantom life you can never have, because no one else really has it either.
  - rconti 10y ago
    So many people complain about this, and I just don't get it. Maybe if I'm not part of the solution, I'm part of the problem? When I'm stuck at my desk and I see someone posting vacation pictures from Spain, I say "man, that looks nice, I wish I was there!" And that's it. Maybe it makes me think about where I want to go next, but it doesn't send me into some existential crisis. I wonder if there are personality types more prone to being affected by stuff like this? If anything, I'd think I would -- certainly prone to depression, particularly in my younger years. But I just don't care. I wonder why that is, and what is different among people who are affected by these things differently.
    - enraged_camel 10y ago
      The entire idea is that the effect is subconscious. Sure, seeing one person post vacation pictures from Spain won't affect you then and there, but over time as everyone posts awesome pictures you will inevitably feel that something must be lacking in or wrong with your life.
M_Grey 10y ago
I don't understand the appeal of FB; we have other means to be connected with the people we care about. I've never understood the appeal of broadcasting yourself to the entire planet either... it's bizarre.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
brightball 10y ago
100% confirm. I quit FB after being on it for a decade and I'm significantly happier. More productive at work. Significantly less angry. The big one is that I'm making much more of a point to spend time with people who actually live near me rather than chatting it up with my friends from college. I think people take for granted how much of a motivator a little bit of loneliness can be.
- zzalpha 10y ago
  Ditto. The reality is the number of tenuous social "connections" I had went down, and the number of high quality connections went up, since I now actually have to invest time in those relationships (which I've also come to value quite a bit more). And I couldn't agree more with your comment about being less angry. Facebook is the worst kind of soapbox...
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  > The big one is that I'm making much more of a point to spend time with people who actually live near me rather than chatting it up with my friends from college. http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html "It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end. It’s a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left. The same often goes for old friends. In high school, I sat around playing hearts with the same four guys about five days a week. In four years, we probably racked up 700 group hangouts. Now, scattered around the country with totally different lives and schedules, the five of us are in the same room at the same time probably 10 days each decade. The group is in its final 7%. So what do we do with this information? Setting aside my secret hope that technological advances will let me live to 700, I see three takeaways here: 1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else. 2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia. 3) Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious."
elastic_church 10y ago
I've worked on social networks for several venture backed companies, and I opted out of their use half a decade ago. Drug dealers aren't users. I like the opium analogy. Socially acceptable as long as the East India Company is forcing it down our throats. (But at least we'll get Hong Kong out of it!)
Redditshill 10y ago
I think my experience and satisfaction with Facebook has steadily decreased in a linear relationship with how many friends I have on my friends list. My guess is because: 1) the more friends I add, the more likely I am to add that guy on Facebook. The guy who always posts very annoying political posts, or the guy who posts very smug+condescending posts. 2) I find myself comparing with my friends, especially when they post pics of them on vacation or news of some promotion. 3) I spend too much time worrying about how to curate posts and post stuff that a. impresses people and b. doesn't offend anyone. I probably just care too much what others think, but that's my 2c.
- 5thaccount 10y ago
  I think it is simpler than that - we like most people because we really don't know them that well, and the inverse si true as well. We all have quirks that other people might find distasteful. As an easy jump off point, the pr0n habits of people vary wildly, and I'd wager if everyone knew what someone was into... The more you know about many people, the more chance there is that a part you uniquely find distasteful will emerge. On top of that, the modern world in general, and SM specifically, has melded the public world, the private world and, most annoying of all, the inner world into a single, undifferentiated miasma. All these posts I see of people who can't work with Trump voters, or the religious right, or gay people or whatever shows how this melding causes real problems, even if it alleviates others. We now know too much about people, and that isn't a universal positive.
madiathomas 10y ago
My mental health improved dramatically when I deactivated facebook. I use instagram and Twitter sparingly these days. For some reason, I am unable to use facebook sparingly. When I am active, it is the first thing I check in the morning. I only use facebook after writing exams and deactivate as soon as I register for a new semester.
educar 10y ago
I strongly feel that social media must become a pull based model instead of a push based model - so like RSS where I subscribe. On the client side, we should use simple machine learning and filtering to show content that is truly useful to us (I love to know what is happening is my sister's life). The current setup of giving info to a company and that company pushing all sort of crap on me is not for me. Granted they could do the machine learning on their side but these for-profit ad driven corporations do not have the users best interest in mind. They just want to get us hooked. Ghost can have this feature!
- apozem 10y ago
  I'm with you- I love RSS and hate Facebook's news feed. Unfortunately, that is one of the biggest reasons why the masses chose Facebook over Twitter. > Facebook, meanwhile, continued to add to the variety of posts available to their algorithmically generated feed. Yes, the early adopters who had gone to the trouble to tune their feed complained, but the real beneficiaries were users who didn’t want to go to the trouble of making sure they saw something interesting — whether related to friends and family or not — whenever they visited Facebook. And, starting in 2009, those users had even less motivation to get Twitter working: Facebook was good enough. https://stratechery.com/2016/how-facebook-squashed-twitter/ https://stratechery.com/2016/how-facebook-squashed-twitter/
pdelbarba 10y ago
I've definitely noticed this myself. Friends that I've known to be depressed almost always posted very frequently on Facebook and those that had some negative life event occur almost always seemed to post way more than usual in the following months. It got to the point that back when I used FB, I would make a point of asking old friends how they were doing when I noticed an uptick in their posting habits.
tutufan 10y ago
Deleted mine a few months ago, and I do think I feel better. Only regret is that I probably can't get hired by Facebook now... :-)
- eunoia 10y ago
  Didn't get the job but I interviewed with FB a couple years ago. Flew me out to the Bay for a day of whiteboarding. Haven't had an actual FB account in 4 or 5 years. I'm sure they were aware but to their credit no one ever asked me about it.
  - rconti 10y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if nobody looked or noticed. Perhaps they're a big enough organization to check on this stuff, but the average interviewer has better stuff to do, and likely doesn't care.
dhruvkar 10y ago
Anecdotally, I completely fall in this category. I had a Facebook account from 2006-2010. Never missed it in the last 6 years. I don't really use other social networks either (HN counts?), email & phone is generally more than enough for me. However, also anecdotally, my mom and brother seem to thrive on it. It's a part of their daily ritual, and the few times they've decided to get rid of Facebook, they claim (and seem) to be missing a part of their identity. They don't live "amazing" lives, and most posts are pretty ordinary. >5,208 adults from a national longitudinal panel maintained by the Gallup organization So, anecdotally, I do think that there is a subsection of the population for which this this a positive influence. Or they've found a way to use it positively. It may help to study narrower bands of populations to determine if this holds true across the board.
013a 10y ago
I'm curious: Which aspects of Facebook cause this? Do other social networks, like Insta or Twitter, exhibit this behavior? In a way, this and studies like it are damning to Facebook's core mission to connect everyone in the world.
- tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
  I think it's the same regardless of the network and is more of a function of how many connections you have: if you have 1000 "friends" odds are most weeks somebody is having an amazing vacation, somebody else is getting a promotion, somebody other is getting engaged, others made a killing on some stock etc. etc. Of course among those there are also people getting sick, divorced, fired, and so on, but they are not going to necessarily post on social media about it, so your view on what is "normal" becomes more and more skewed and makes you feel worse and worse about what's going on with you, despite the fact that objectively you might be doing just fine.
- dankoss 10y ago
  This is just my speculation, but I think the utility of facebook declined when external linking took over user created posts on facebook. I don't go to facebook because I want to know how my friends feel about political news; I go to facebook because I want to know what they are up to. I think Instagram and Snapchat got this right, because even though you can regram something or paste a screenshot, that's not the default way to interact with the platform. I would check facebook a lot more often if they had an option to hide all external links / images. I know there are browser plugins that enable this but they're not on mobile.
huangc10 10y ago
Sometime in the next few yrs or so (if not already), I suspect we'll see many research papers related to social media and suicide rates. Furthermore, it'll be interesting in cross examining this data with cultural views ie. Western culture vs. Asian culture where social media has really taken off.
surrey-fringe 10y ago
Interesting how much of an echo chamber HN is wrt social media use. I certainly agree, but most people I know would tell us that it's great for keeping in touch and organizing events.
- sandov 10y ago
  It certainly is, but I think it's a nice contrast to have in comparison with your day to day friends that are not hackers and wouldn't understand why you left facebook. You just should have in mind that the average HN user is pretty far from the average person.
kirykl 10y ago
I quit Facebook because it warped my perception of others gratification, making it appear instantly achieved for everyone and everything but me. The cumulative impact of a constant feed of this was incredibly demotivating.
midhunsezhi 10y ago
I deactivated my facebook account and deleted my whatsapp account a little over a month ago and with the amount of free time i got, I decided against the use of instagram as well. This article makes me feel not so antisocial anymore, thank you! :D
skolos 10y ago
Looks like this might be effect related to social apps which are used as a log to brag about your awesome life. Should be less of an issue with Twitter and maybe Snapchat.
abalashov 10y ago
I can certainly agree with the study abstract and most posts here, but would add a twist: social media use is depressing, but falling out of touch with faraway friends is even more depressing. I've been on and off FB over the years, and what I've found is that the only thing worse than being on FB is not being on FB. There are many people I'd just never talk to if I didn't use FB, and I do think the connection is something I'd miss -- with some of them. It's even worse when you're struggling through serious financial problems and/or a divorce, or some event like that. Nobody really wants to be your friend, and nobody wants to hear about it. Online: (a) One is more likely to find others in the same boat sooner or later, although those people are also more likely to have turned into embittered cranks/ideologues. But at least it's someone. Divorce IRL is a very lonely experience; just when you are most psychologically vulnerable and could really use a friend, you become radioactive. Double if you're a bootstrapped entrepreneur, since your already existing problems have just leapt from "minor-league brush fire" to "apocalyptic conflagration seen from low orbit". (b) While, one's not going to post much about these types of issues on social media in general, it allows you to keep conforming with your wider circle. You can keep on riding this carousel of wide-eyed, facile, optimistic communication on trivial or theoretical topics. It's much harder IRL, where it's harder to conceal that actually, real talk, things are really, really shitty.
- DannyB2 10y ago
  I have never been on FB. I email occasionally with far away friends. A phone call once in a while.
  - abalashov 10y ago
    It's certainly possible for the truly devoted.
    - ashark 10y ago
      Is that sarcasm, or is the occasional email or phone call really considered a sign of strong devotion for someone we consider a friend?
DannyB2 10y ago
I have never been on FaceTwit. Never missed it. (either of them) I've occasionally wondered if I should. Its amusing to read both about and from people (here in comments) being happier without it. There was a point I worried that one or both of them would become a mandatory authentication mechanism for other sites.
lsc 10y ago
I feel the 'social media is bad for you' thing, but for different reasons. I mean, I don't really understand the 'feeling inadequate because of my cousin's baby pictures' thing. I mean, I am happy for them, but that isn't the life I want, so I don't feel bad that I don't have it. Alternately, I could be less jealous than most people, but let's run with the more realistic first reason. For me, the problem with social media is a fundamental lack of self control; I get into 'someone is wrong on the internet' discussions, and for me, those are the 'addictive but not pleasant' aspects of social media. For me, a conversation is not fun if we aren't arguing in good faith ; if we can't acknowledge one another's good points and rhetorical flourishes, it is just not fun, and I end up feeling frustrated and rejected. The unhealthy part is that I feel the discussion is unfinished, and walking away takes a tremendous act of will, and even then, my mind keeps coming back to the conversation. I hope it is just a matter of practice; I mostly have left other mediums with these sorts of unfufilling conversations, or at least learned to restrain myself from participating in the most obviously unproductive conversations. I think the big difference with social media is largely cultural; lots of people are there who lack a background in early internet culture or academic culture, and our shared vocabulary doesn't run much past "you are wrong " and there isn't the social pressure to be civil like we have here, or to be smart, like there was in the heyday of kuro5hin.
- Swizec 10y ago
  > lots of people are there who lack a background in early internet culture or academic culture I think this hits it. Many (most?) people just aren't used to having people disagree with them. Let alone voice those disagreements and be expected to defend their beliefs and explain why they think they're right. For many people the way they think is correct, just is correct. It's not something that needs defending or even investigating. It's just how things are. Perhaps the problem is fundamentally how many different people social media exposes us to. And maybe if you weren't exposed to that in your formative years, it's a hard thing to get used to.
  - platz 10y ago
    Framing that difference as a "lack" the other person has, may be right, but creates a sense of superiority over that person which also seems wrong, for certain people that are aware of their differences (they may not be "lacking" anything"). Some people are emotivists (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism), which means that for them preferences are moral positions in themselves, not just reasons about the morality of preferences. it is “… the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” In other words, emotivism holds that there can be no way of rationally justifying one’s claims about controversial issues. I think this view describes a great many number of people; though it's true that academia, STEM, and rational enlightenment thinking tends to filter it out or select against it.
j_s 10y ago
Time to put together a study on the relationship between HN use and well-being!
- rconti 10y ago
  I actually find communities like this far more depressing than your average social network. I can go on the vacation my friend is on, but I cannot acquire the expertise of thousands of other brilliant professionals in every niche I see here.
  - castle-bravo 10y ago
    All you can do is learn. In the immortal words of Rush: "Those who wish to be must put aside the alienation, get on with the fascination, the real relation, the underlying theme."
cknight 10y ago
My use case is going to be in a minority, but I find Facebook vital for keeping in touch with friends and especially family back home. I was thinking about ditching the platform before making a rather abrupt decision to move to the other side of the world for a couple of years. That couple of years has turned in to 5 and counting, and it's really come in to its own. I've got a fairly heavily curated feed after I stopped following a bunch of people and pages, so I don't really feel like anything is being shoved in my face any more than other places I frequent online. It works. It's asynchronous so the timezone difference doesn't get in the way, while still being a heap more useful than email. It definitely maintains connections that I'd struggle to keep otherwise. Now, will I keep it once I return home? There's a good question.
seanwilson 10y ago
Just for some balance but I don't understand the hate for Facebook, I use it fairly often and it's been a positive impact for me. I use it occasionally to connect with people I've just met, see what friends are up to, send messages to meet up and keep in contact with people out of the country. I've connected to people I otherwise wouldn't have through it, got closer to people I know through it and met up with people because of it. I'm completely aware that people only share the best slices of their life on it and it doesn't depress me. I think if you let Facebook consume your life and it somehow impacts you a lot you need to think about why that is and not blame Facebook. You could get equally obsessed with hackernews comparing yourself to other users and clamouring for upvotes. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28093386 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28093386 > We investigated the associations of Facebook activity and real-world social network activity with self-reported physical health, self-reported mental health, self-reported life satisfaction, and body mass index. Our results showed that overall, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with well-being. For example, a 1-standard-deviation increase in "likes clicked" (clicking "like" on someone else's content), "links clicked" (clicking a link to another site or article), or "status updates" (updating one's own Facebook status) was associated with a decrease of 5%-8% of a standard deviation in self-reported mental health. So it's not a causal link then? If it's not there's surely many reasons why having low well-being would make you spend more time on social networks (e.g. you'd go out less so have more time to spend on social networks)?
- frenchy 10y ago
  > ... I don't understand the hate for Facebook ... I suspect that any hate of facebook has a fair bit to do with the fact that it is 1) pervasive, 2) a fairly closed system, and 3) comes with a lot of strings attached. The fact that it's a closed system is really the crux of the issue, everything else just kind of accentuates the problem. Here's an example of why facebook's existence is annoying My local climbing gym, for example, has a website, but instead of posting information there, they post most of their updates (like competition dates) on Facebook. Without having a facebook account (and regularly checking it!) there's no way to keep up-to-date on these postings. Now, if you create a facebook account, there's no good way to tell people "don't send me messages here, just email me", so now you have to keep an eye on your facebook messages, otherwise your friends will get annoyed that you're ignoring them. Facebook doesn't implement IMAP or anything though, so your also stuck going to their website regularly, or install their software on your phone and saying goodbye to your once-long battery life.
rybosome 10y ago
I removed the FB app from my phone and have the willpower not to use a browser to check it. Stopped short of deactivating my account so that I can still get the occasional message on Messenger. After the insanely contentious, toxic US election and cry of grief and fear from the left over the results, I got so burnt out with getting on FB and seeing so many reasons to be angry and afraid. Cut myself off completely and after a short time I completely forgot about it. The urge to check FB is totally gone, I feel like I'm missing nothing. It was a great decision, only wish I had made it sooner.
- sandov 10y ago
  you can deactivate your profile (i.e. You can't log on facebook) without deactivating your messenger account. I did this and chat normally from messenger.com, but can't log on facebook.com
borplk 10y ago
Only on internet forums like this I see people claiming about quitting facebook and so on. I don't see the signs in the real world. Having said that I too almost never used it from the beginning. I didn't need so many years to figure out why I'm not going to like it. I was on it in the early days just as a techy interested in internet technology then I gave it up and never looked back. Mind you it has become only more socially costly to not be on it. A few times I tempted to get back in again at least in a limited capacity (just having a basic profile so people can message me if needed). But didn't. I have also heard harsh comments and so on. Like one person said (not directly to me) ... "what do you mean?!! don't you have any friends?". More than anything what I find annoying is this expectation from the society that every person in the world must subject themselves to the invasion of Facebook for their convenience and amusement. I don't go around ordering everyone must eat at my favorite Pizza joint. Why should the people be pressured to some private social network? If it was more like email that isn't owned by any one entity I would be more understanding.
- gvurrdon 10y ago
  > If it was more like email that isn't owned by any one entity I would be more understanding. Definitely. If it operated in a Manner similar to Mastodon then FB would be a lot more tempting to use for the limited purposes I feel I need access. All I would like to use it for is to get an RSS feed of news from various clubs and to be able to reply to such posts (e.g. to confirm that I'll attend an event they've advertised). Unfortunately, FB disabled the RSS feed some time ago and to use rss-bridge (https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge) requires configuring proxies or trying to solve captchas. Even browsing the public page for an event will shove login boxes or random captchas in my face, and the more it is rammed down my throat the more I wish to avoid it.
drenvuk 10y ago
I know that it's easy to rag on Facebook specifically but it should be noted that this effect most likely exists in all forms of media where the user is able to compare their lives to someone else's. Even while using this site I doubt I'm immune to finding someone who's accomplished something cool while I'm still hacking away on the same thing from last month or whatever. It's just seems better for my health to live my life instead of seeing someone else live their's. Hell, maybe some day my accomplishments will make someone else feel bad about their lack of any. I mean, even Caesar cried when he read about Alexander's conquests.
leepowers 10y ago
Social media is a game, just like MMORPG's are games, and slot gambling is a game, or call of duty is a game. For some reason a large chunk of society has been convinced that social media is the "real" game and more normative than all other games. Overplaying any game is bad for the mental health of the player. Relatedly, a game becomes unhealthy whenever the game becomes the center of the player's life. This applies equally to WoW, Civilization, Facebook, or Twitter, or any other game. So, social media is a game that can be fun to play, but it shouldn't be a component of the player's identity.
shivagit 10y ago
Being overly obsessed with the social experience of the internet in general is detrimental to one's well-being, in my opinion. You can't live a full life if you spend most of your time interacting with people on websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, FourChan, Instagram, etc. It's just not the social experience we evolved to enjoy. Also there's the danger that you're being subtly manipulated by the moderators or programmers of such sites, or the wider community. Are these 'people' you talk to really real? You can never know for sure. In the end, if you want a quality social experience, you have to get out of your basement and enjoy the company of people in real life.
tdaltonc 10y ago
If anyone here is feeling like they spend too much time on Social Media, I recently made Space a set of apps to help with that. http://youjustneedspace.com http://youjustneedspace.com
castle-bravo 10y ago
facebook's business is advertising, and the more time people spend on facebook, the more valuable facebook's ad space is. If depressed people spend more time on facebook instead of getting out, then it's in facebook's interest to have their product make people depressed. If angry people spend more time writing rants on facebook, then it's in facebook's interest to make people angry. I may be confusing causation with correlation, but I am willing to bet that the reason facebook's product has repeatedly been shown to cause harm is because the harm is good for facebook, not by accident of design. The article linked below describes some of the anti-features that make slack addictive. I have no reason to believe that slack and facebook are not aware of the addictive power of their products and do not cynically designin their products to enhance their addictive potential. https://medium.com/@satyavh/the-real-reason-slack https://medium.com/@satyavh/the-real-reason-slack
- rogual 10y ago
  I wonder how many of these design decisions were actually made consciously, and how many are just the result of things like blind A/B testing. If your scientific test shows you that feature set A has better user retention than feature set B, you don't need to worry yourself over why.
hrasyid 10y ago
Shouldn't we be more critical about the methodology? For example, it's not clear to me how it proves that the correlation is due to causation.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
stevehiehn 10y ago
Ironically, I find the only internet interactions that stress me out is not FB or twitter its when i post on hacker news (like this:)) I think mostly because i care and also people here can be very confrontational.
- sandov 10y ago
  When I use facebook, I get angry at the stupidity of people. On HN I feel humbled because of how smart people are here.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
orschiro 10y ago
For me, Facebook is the new yellow pages telephone book that contains all addresses to people I may want to contact. That's about it. I do not see any other value in Facebook.

176 points by j_s 10y ago

debt 10y ago

I am curious what's the point of being connected all the time? It's a question I've been asking myself since the U.S. election. So I can have access to a bunch of garbage people post on the Internet? So I can chat people quickly? There's like a handful of truly useful things on the Internet. Most of the useless things though take up 90% of time on it. I'm failing to see the value at this point.

lsniddy 10y ago
to stave off the existential dread of course. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c
two2two 10y ago
As someone who doesn't participate in social media, I do see what the value was and still could be: a way for keeping up with people's lives you care a little or a lot about. My problem is, similar to yours, that the majority of content is external noise. I began to withdraw from social media when sharing external information became a norm, rather than internal information about someone's life. edit: formatting
sp332 10y ago
Why would you follow/friend people who post garbage? If you're using it as a contact list, you can "unfollow" your "friends" on Facebook, so their posts don't show up in your feed by default but you can still contact them. Or even use messenger.com instead of the main Facebook interface.
colmvp 10y ago
I never played WoW because I was afraid of how far I'd fall into an addiction. Having read "Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked," I was rather relieved to read game developers who have said they have willingly abstained from WoW for the same reasons. Even device-makers and tech leaders are cautious about introducing their own devices to their children. The book, along with others like Hooked, remind me that we have to be very careful about the technology we use on a day to day basis, because it effects our brains in a way we might not want it too. Our brain and willpower is being tested against the skills of thousands of incredibly smart and talented designers, developers, product managers, et al. Having chosen to abstain from apps like Facebook or social media websites, I don't feel like I lost anything. If anything, I've regained more time and mental space for things like getting deeper in my career. I'm not a luddite, as I am still a big believer in the productivity and information gains via the internet and computers. But our attention is a resource that a lot of companies want. And yet, I only feel like it's more recently that we've begun to question whether the benefits these companies give to us is worth the change in ourselves. Because of mindfulness, I have recognized the need to distract myself (via Twitter, Reddit, E-mail, Whatsapp) is sometimes a symptom of not wanting to deal with something that is hard or uncomfortable (e.g. paperwork, making a decision, etc.). Yet we know that become deep at something we care about, we truly do need focused time (Deep Work by Cal Newport is a worthwhile read). So I think it's really in our best interest to only choose apps that provide a lot of benefits with only marginal drawbacks to our mind, and to be very careful about how often we use them.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  Game developer here who abstained from WoW and pretty much all MMOs or Free2Play shenanigans. Although I happily put plenty of hours into single player RPGs (currently Persona 5 and Breath of the Wild). But those have an ending, and they don't require me to schedule my life around them in order to play them. In fact they let me drop in and out of them very quickly, since they suspend and I don't have to connect to any networks.
a_imho 10y ago
It has nothing to do with the election though, it was always like this since it was called web 2.0. Especially for us, working with computers, we are pretty well connected.

esemor 10y ago

I was reluctant when I removed my fb account about six months ago but it felt like it was what I needed as it intruded on what I really wanted to focus my time and energy on. A few weeks in I was amazed at how I did not miss the social network at all and surprised that the contacts that previously only contactef me on fb now wrote email and text messages.

eldavido 10y ago
This. facebook is like the cheetos of content. It tastes great but if you stop buying it, you'll feel so much better, and wonder why you thought you "needed" it all along. I've been off (deactivated) for 4-5 years, maybe longer, and I rarely miss it. I have a pretty active in-person social life, though.
omnimus 10y ago
Same here. Deleted account just before end of 2014 (facebook changed their data policy). We did it with couple of friends and were amazed by the effect. After two weeks we realized we all feel better and we never needed fb. None of us came back (just more our friends left). Really the only pain for me were fb events. In my country fb events are the most important calendar to the point that many of the venues/places put events just on fb. The problem is that i organize events from time to time and its impossible without account. Its also getting pretty hard to make fake account (they require copy of ID for new accounts now). The events are even more pain because they dont have api. Its on purpose. Venues for example cant have automated posting of events from their site. You have to make events in the fb ui. They are read only so people started opposite aproach, they post ebents on fb and consume them in their site. Its limiting and just againts everything internet used to be about.

jgrahamc 10y ago

"Overall, our results showed that, while real-world social networks were positively associated with overall well-being, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with overall well-being." This is not a surprise. I quit Facebook specifically because of the endless stream of "my life is amazing" posts of people beig happy without any balance. Reminds me of those awful Christmas letters people send round about how wonderful their entire year had been and how amazing their children are.

rconti 10y ago
Serious question: Would you prefer to not receive those Christmas letters? Or is it more tolerable because it's only once a year, so the benefit of staying in touch is greater than the cost of the annoyance of the letter itself?

gnrlbzik 10y ago

I have quit facebook for most part, use messenger to sometime send messages to friends, it opened up lot's of free time. I still use Instagram, but that is so much more manageable and less invasive.

moonka 10y ago

>These results then may be relevant for other forms of social media. Does this mean they only studied Facebook, or did they look at other social media networks as well? It seems to me that it is the former, but I'm not sure. I imagine different networks would have different effects based on the way people use them.

zzalpha 10y ago
Facebook only based on my reading.

overcast 10y ago

I came to the same conclusion a few years ago, when I delete my social accounts like Facebook. They only show you the best slices of individual lives, all day, every day. When compared to your life, it makes it look like you're doing nothing with your life. That it's completely boring, while all of these people are living these amazing adventures everyday. Combine that with all of the vitriol comments plaguing all of these sites, and it's easy to see why someone would think less of themselves. It's good to be social, but these networks are not the answer.

davehtaylor 10y ago
>They only show you the best slices of individual lives, all day, every day. When compared to your life, it makes it look like you're doing nothing with your life. Exactly. You end up judging your interior by others' exterior. They show you a highly edited version of their life, made to impress everyone else. You're doing nothing but constantly chasing a phantom life you can never have, because no one else really has it either.
- rconti 10y ago
  So many people complain about this, and I just don't get it. Maybe if I'm not part of the solution, I'm part of the problem? When I'm stuck at my desk and I see someone posting vacation pictures from Spain, I say "man, that looks nice, I wish I was there!" And that's it. Maybe it makes me think about where I want to go next, but it doesn't send me into some existential crisis. I wonder if there are personality types more prone to being affected by stuff like this? If anything, I'd think I would -- certainly prone to depression, particularly in my younger years. But I just don't care. I wonder why that is, and what is different among people who are affected by these things differently.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    The entire idea is that the effect is subconscious. Sure, seeing one person post vacation pictures from Spain won't affect you then and there, but over time as everyone posts awesome pictures you will inevitably feel that something must be lacking in or wrong with your life.

M_Grey 10y ago

I don't understand the appeal of FB; we have other means to be connected with the people we care about. I've never understood the appeal of broadcasting yourself to the entire planet either... it's bizarre.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

brightball 10y ago

100% confirm. I quit FB after being on it for a decade and I'm significantly happier. More productive at work. Significantly less angry. The big one is that I'm making much more of a point to spend time with people who actually live near me rather than chatting it up with my friends from college. I think people take for granted how much of a motivator a little bit of loneliness can be.

zzalpha 10y ago
Ditto. The reality is the number of tenuous social "connections" I had went down, and the number of high quality connections went up, since I now actually have to invest time in those relationships (which I've also come to value quite a bit more). And I couldn't agree more with your comment about being less angry. Facebook is the worst kind of soapbox...
toomuchtodo 10y ago
> The big one is that I'm making much more of a point to spend time with people who actually live near me rather than chatting it up with my friends from college. http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html "It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end. It’s a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left. The same often goes for old friends. In high school, I sat around playing hearts with the same four guys about five days a week. In four years, we probably racked up 700 group hangouts. Now, scattered around the country with totally different lives and schedules, the five of us are in the same room at the same time probably 10 days each decade. The group is in its final 7%. So what do we do with this information? Setting aside my secret hope that technological advances will let me live to 700, I see three takeaways here: 1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else. 2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia. 3) Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious."

elastic_church 10y ago

I've worked on social networks for several venture backed companies, and I opted out of their use half a decade ago. Drug dealers aren't users. I like the opium analogy. Socially acceptable as long as the East India Company is forcing it down our throats. (But at least we'll get Hong Kong out of it!)

Redditshill 10y ago

I think my experience and satisfaction with Facebook has steadily decreased in a linear relationship with how many friends I have on my friends list. My guess is because: 1) the more friends I add, the more likely I am to add that guy on Facebook. The guy who always posts very annoying political posts, or the guy who posts very smug+condescending posts. 2) I find myself comparing with my friends, especially when they post pics of them on vacation or news of some promotion. 3) I spend too much time worrying about how to curate posts and post stuff that a. impresses people and b. doesn't offend anyone. I probably just care too much what others think, but that's my 2c.

5thaccount 10y ago
I think it is simpler than that - we like most people because we really don't know them that well, and the inverse si true as well. We all have quirks that other people might find distasteful. As an easy jump off point, the pr0n habits of people vary wildly, and I'd wager if everyone knew what someone was into... The more you know about many people, the more chance there is that a part you uniquely find distasteful will emerge. On top of that, the modern world in general, and SM specifically, has melded the public world, the private world and, most annoying of all, the inner world into a single, undifferentiated miasma. All these posts I see of people who can't work with Trump voters, or the religious right, or gay people or whatever shows how this melding causes real problems, even if it alleviates others. We now know too much about people, and that isn't a universal positive.

madiathomas 10y ago

My mental health improved dramatically when I deactivated facebook. I use instagram and Twitter sparingly these days. For some reason, I am unable to use facebook sparingly. When I am active, it is the first thing I check in the morning. I only use facebook after writing exams and deactivate as soon as I register for a new semester.

educar 10y ago

I strongly feel that social media must become a pull based model instead of a push based model - so like RSS where I subscribe. On the client side, we should use simple machine learning and filtering to show content that is truly useful to us (I love to know what is happening is my sister's life). The current setup of giving info to a company and that company pushing all sort of crap on me is not for me. Granted they could do the machine learning on their side but these for-profit ad driven corporations do not have the users best interest in mind. They just want to get us hooked. Ghost can have this feature!

apozem 10y ago
I'm with you- I love RSS and hate Facebook's news feed. Unfortunately, that is one of the biggest reasons why the masses chose Facebook over Twitter. > Facebook, meanwhile, continued to add to the variety of posts available to their algorithmically generated feed. Yes, the early adopters who had gone to the trouble to tune their feed complained, but the real beneficiaries were users who didn’t want to go to the trouble of making sure they saw something interesting — whether related to friends and family or not — whenever they visited Facebook. And, starting in 2009, those users had even less motivation to get Twitter working: Facebook was good enough. https://stratechery.com/2016/how-facebook-squashed-twitter/ https://stratechery.com/2016/how-facebook-squashed-twitter/

pdelbarba 10y ago

I've definitely noticed this myself. Friends that I've known to be depressed almost always posted very frequently on Facebook and those that had some negative life event occur almost always seemed to post way more than usual in the following months. It got to the point that back when I used FB, I would make a point of asking old friends how they were doing when I noticed an uptick in their posting habits.

tutufan 10y ago

Deleted mine a few months ago, and I do think I feel better. Only regret is that I probably can't get hired by Facebook now... :-)

eunoia 10y ago
Didn't get the job but I interviewed with FB a couple years ago. Flew me out to the Bay for a day of whiteboarding. Haven't had an actual FB account in 4 or 5 years. I'm sure they were aware but to their credit no one ever asked me about it.
- rconti 10y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if nobody looked or noticed. Perhaps they're a big enough organization to check on this stuff, but the average interviewer has better stuff to do, and likely doesn't care.

dhruvkar 10y ago

Anecdotally, I completely fall in this category. I had a Facebook account from 2006-2010. Never missed it in the last 6 years. I don't really use other social networks either (HN counts?), email & phone is generally more than enough for me. However, also anecdotally, my mom and brother seem to thrive on it. It's a part of their daily ritual, and the few times they've decided to get rid of Facebook, they claim (and seem) to be missing a part of their identity. They don't live "amazing" lives, and most posts are pretty ordinary. >5,208 adults from a national longitudinal panel maintained by the Gallup organization So, anecdotally, I do think that there is a subsection of the population for which this this a positive influence. Or they've found a way to use it positively. It may help to study narrower bands of populations to determine if this holds true across the board.

013a 10y ago

I'm curious: Which aspects of Facebook cause this? Do other social networks, like Insta or Twitter, exhibit this behavior? In a way, this and studies like it are damning to Facebook's core mission to connect everyone in the world.

tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
I think it's the same regardless of the network and is more of a function of how many connections you have: if you have 1000 "friends" odds are most weeks somebody is having an amazing vacation, somebody else is getting a promotion, somebody other is getting engaged, others made a killing on some stock etc. etc. Of course among those there are also people getting sick, divorced, fired, and so on, but they are not going to necessarily post on social media about it, so your view on what is "normal" becomes more and more skewed and makes you feel worse and worse about what's going on with you, despite the fact that objectively you might be doing just fine.
dankoss 10y ago
This is just my speculation, but I think the utility of facebook declined when external linking took over user created posts on facebook. I don't go to facebook because I want to know how my friends feel about political news; I go to facebook because I want to know what they are up to. I think Instagram and Snapchat got this right, because even though you can regram something or paste a screenshot, that's not the default way to interact with the platform. I would check facebook a lot more often if they had an option to hide all external links / images. I know there are browser plugins that enable this but they're not on mobile.

huangc10 10y ago

Sometime in the next few yrs or so (if not already), I suspect we'll see many research papers related to social media and suicide rates. Furthermore, it'll be interesting in cross examining this data with cultural views ie. Western culture vs. Asian culture where social media has really taken off.

surrey-fringe 10y ago

Interesting how much of an echo chamber HN is wrt social media use. I certainly agree, but most people I know would tell us that it's great for keeping in touch and organizing events.

sandov 10y ago
It certainly is, but I think it's a nice contrast to have in comparison with your day to day friends that are not hackers and wouldn't understand why you left facebook. You just should have in mind that the average HN user is pretty far from the average person.

kirykl 10y ago

I quit Facebook because it warped my perception of others gratification, making it appear instantly achieved for everyone and everything but me. The cumulative impact of a constant feed of this was incredibly demotivating.

midhunsezhi 10y ago

I deactivated my facebook account and deleted my whatsapp account a little over a month ago and with the amount of free time i got, I decided against the use of instagram as well. This article makes me feel not so antisocial anymore, thank you! :D

skolos 10y ago

Looks like this might be effect related to social apps which are used as a log to brag about your awesome life. Should be less of an issue with Twitter and maybe Snapchat.

abalashov 10y ago

I can certainly agree with the study abstract and most posts here, but would add a twist: social media use is depressing, but falling out of touch with faraway friends is even more depressing. I've been on and off FB over the years, and what I've found is that the only thing worse than being on FB is not being on FB. There are many people I'd just never talk to if I didn't use FB, and I do think the connection is something I'd miss -- with some of them. It's even worse when you're struggling through serious financial problems and/or a divorce, or some event like that. Nobody really wants to be your friend, and nobody wants to hear about it. Online: (a) One is more likely to find others in the same boat sooner or later, although those people are also more likely to have turned into embittered cranks/ideologues. But at least it's someone. Divorce IRL is a very lonely experience; just when you are most psychologically vulnerable and could really use a friend, you become radioactive. Double if you're a bootstrapped entrepreneur, since your already existing problems have just leapt from "minor-league brush fire" to "apocalyptic conflagration seen from low orbit". (b) While, one's not going to post much about these types of issues on social media in general, it allows you to keep conforming with your wider circle. You can keep on riding this carousel of wide-eyed, facile, optimistic communication on trivial or theoretical topics. It's much harder IRL, where it's harder to conceal that actually, real talk, things are really, really shitty.

DannyB2 10y ago
I have never been on FB. I email occasionally with far away friends. A phone call once in a while.
- abalashov 10y ago
  It's certainly possible for the truly devoted.
  - ashark 10y ago
    Is that sarcasm, or is the occasional email or phone call really considered a sign of strong devotion for someone we consider a friend?

DannyB2 10y ago

I have never been on FaceTwit. Never missed it. (either of them) I've occasionally wondered if I should. Its amusing to read both about and from people (here in comments) being happier without it. There was a point I worried that one or both of them would become a mandatory authentication mechanism for other sites.

lsc 10y ago

I feel the 'social media is bad for you' thing, but for different reasons. I mean, I don't really understand the 'feeling inadequate because of my cousin's baby pictures' thing. I mean, I am happy for them, but that isn't the life I want, so I don't feel bad that I don't have it. Alternately, I could be less jealous than most people, but let's run with the more realistic first reason. For me, the problem with social media is a fundamental lack of self control; I get into 'someone is wrong on the internet' discussions, and for me, those are the 'addictive but not pleasant' aspects of social media. For me, a conversation is not fun if we aren't arguing in good faith ; if we can't acknowledge one another's good points and rhetorical flourishes, it is just not fun, and I end up feeling frustrated and rejected. The unhealthy part is that I feel the discussion is unfinished, and walking away takes a tremendous act of will, and even then, my mind keeps coming back to the conversation. I hope it is just a matter of practice; I mostly have left other mediums with these sorts of unfufilling conversations, or at least learned to restrain myself from participating in the most obviously unproductive conversations. I think the big difference with social media is largely cultural; lots of people are there who lack a background in early internet culture or academic culture, and our shared vocabulary doesn't run much past "you are wrong " and there isn't the social pressure to be civil like we have here, or to be smart, like there was in the heyday of kuro5hin.

Swizec 10y ago
> lots of people are there who lack a background in early internet culture or academic culture I think this hits it. Many (most?) people just aren't used to having people disagree with them. Let alone voice those disagreements and be expected to defend their beliefs and explain why they think they're right. For many people the way they think is correct, just is correct. It's not something that needs defending or even investigating. It's just how things are. Perhaps the problem is fundamentally how many different people social media exposes us to. And maybe if you weren't exposed to that in your formative years, it's a hard thing to get used to.
- platz 10y ago
  Framing that difference as a "lack" the other person has, may be right, but creates a sense of superiority over that person which also seems wrong, for certain people that are aware of their differences (they may not be "lacking" anything"). Some people are emotivists (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism), which means that for them preferences are moral positions in themselves, not just reasons about the morality of preferences. it is “… the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” In other words, emotivism holds that there can be no way of rationally justifying one’s claims about controversial issues. I think this view describes a great many number of people; though it's true that academia, STEM, and rational enlightenment thinking tends to filter it out or select against it.

j_s 10y ago

Time to put together a study on the relationship between HN use and well-being!

rconti 10y ago
I actually find communities like this far more depressing than your average social network. I can go on the vacation my friend is on, but I cannot acquire the expertise of thousands of other brilliant professionals in every niche I see here.
- castle-bravo 10y ago
  All you can do is learn. In the immortal words of Rush: "Those who wish to be must put aside the alienation, get on with the fascination, the real relation, the underlying theme."

cknight 10y ago

My use case is going to be in a minority, but I find Facebook vital for keeping in touch with friends and especially family back home. I was thinking about ditching the platform before making a rather abrupt decision to move to the other side of the world for a couple of years. That couple of years has turned in to 5 and counting, and it's really come in to its own. I've got a fairly heavily curated feed after I stopped following a bunch of people and pages, so I don't really feel like anything is being shoved in my face any more than other places I frequent online. It works. It's asynchronous so the timezone difference doesn't get in the way, while still being a heap more useful than email. It definitely maintains connections that I'd struggle to keep otherwise. Now, will I keep it once I return home? There's a good question.

seanwilson 10y ago

Just for some balance but I don't understand the hate for Facebook, I use it fairly often and it's been a positive impact for me. I use it occasionally to connect with people I've just met, see what friends are up to, send messages to meet up and keep in contact with people out of the country. I've connected to people I otherwise wouldn't have through it, got closer to people I know through it and met up with people because of it. I'm completely aware that people only share the best slices of their life on it and it doesn't depress me. I think if you let Facebook consume your life and it somehow impacts you a lot you need to think about why that is and not blame Facebook. You could get equally obsessed with hackernews comparing yourself to other users and clamouring for upvotes. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28093386 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28093386 > We investigated the associations of Facebook activity and real-world social network activity with self-reported physical health, self-reported mental health, self-reported life satisfaction, and body mass index. Our results showed that overall, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with well-being. For example, a 1-standard-deviation increase in "likes clicked" (clicking "like" on someone else's content), "links clicked" (clicking a link to another site or article), or "status updates" (updating one's own Facebook status) was associated with a decrease of 5%-8% of a standard deviation in self-reported mental health. So it's not a causal link then? If it's not there's surely many reasons why having low well-being would make you spend more time on social networks (e.g. you'd go out less so have more time to spend on social networks)?

frenchy 10y ago
> ... I don't understand the hate for Facebook ... I suspect that any hate of facebook has a fair bit to do with the fact that it is 1) pervasive, 2) a fairly closed system, and 3) comes with a lot of strings attached. The fact that it's a closed system is really the crux of the issue, everything else just kind of accentuates the problem. Here's an example of why facebook's existence is annoying My local climbing gym, for example, has a website, but instead of posting information there, they post most of their updates (like competition dates) on Facebook. Without having a facebook account (and regularly checking it!) there's no way to keep up-to-date on these postings. Now, if you create a facebook account, there's no good way to tell people "don't send me messages here, just email me", so now you have to keep an eye on your facebook messages, otherwise your friends will get annoyed that you're ignoring them. Facebook doesn't implement IMAP or anything though, so your also stuck going to their website regularly, or install their software on your phone and saying goodbye to your once-long battery life.

rybosome 10y ago

I removed the FB app from my phone and have the willpower not to use a browser to check it. Stopped short of deactivating my account so that I can still get the occasional message on Messenger. After the insanely contentious, toxic US election and cry of grief and fear from the left over the results, I got so burnt out with getting on FB and seeing so many reasons to be angry and afraid. Cut myself off completely and after a short time I completely forgot about it. The urge to check FB is totally gone, I feel like I'm missing nothing. It was a great decision, only wish I had made it sooner.

sandov 10y ago
you can deactivate your profile (i.e. You can't log on facebook) without deactivating your messenger account. I did this and chat normally from messenger.com, but can't log on facebook.com

borplk 10y ago

Only on internet forums like this I see people claiming about quitting facebook and so on. I don't see the signs in the real world. Having said that I too almost never used it from the beginning. I didn't need so many years to figure out why I'm not going to like it. I was on it in the early days just as a techy interested in internet technology then I gave it up and never looked back. Mind you it has become only more socially costly to not be on it. A few times I tempted to get back in again at least in a limited capacity (just having a basic profile so people can message me if needed). But didn't. I have also heard harsh comments and so on. Like one person said (not directly to me) ... "what do you mean?!! don't you have any friends?". More than anything what I find annoying is this expectation from the society that every person in the world must subject themselves to the invasion of Facebook for their convenience and amusement. I don't go around ordering everyone must eat at my favorite Pizza joint. Why should the people be pressured to some private social network? If it was more like email that isn't owned by any one entity I would be more understanding.

gvurrdon 10y ago
> If it was more like email that isn't owned by any one entity I would be more understanding. Definitely. If it operated in a Manner similar to Mastodon then FB would be a lot more tempting to use for the limited purposes I feel I need access. All I would like to use it for is to get an RSS feed of news from various clubs and to be able to reply to such posts (e.g. to confirm that I'll attend an event they've advertised). Unfortunately, FB disabled the RSS feed some time ago and to use rss-bridge (https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge) requires configuring proxies or trying to solve captchas. Even browsing the public page for an event will shove login boxes or random captchas in my face, and the more it is rammed down my throat the more I wish to avoid it.

drenvuk 10y ago

I know that it's easy to rag on Facebook specifically but it should be noted that this effect most likely exists in all forms of media where the user is able to compare their lives to someone else's. Even while using this site I doubt I'm immune to finding someone who's accomplished something cool while I'm still hacking away on the same thing from last month or whatever. It's just seems better for my health to live my life instead of seeing someone else live their's. Hell, maybe some day my accomplishments will make someone else feel bad about their lack of any. I mean, even Caesar cried when he read about Alexander's conquests.

leepowers 10y ago

Social media is a game, just like MMORPG's are games, and slot gambling is a game, or call of duty is a game. For some reason a large chunk of society has been convinced that social media is the "real" game and more normative than all other games. Overplaying any game is bad for the mental health of the player. Relatedly, a game becomes unhealthy whenever the game becomes the center of the player's life. This applies equally to WoW, Civilization, Facebook, or Twitter, or any other game. So, social media is a game that can be fun to play, but it shouldn't be a component of the player's identity.

shivagit 10y ago

Being overly obsessed with the social experience of the internet in general is detrimental to one's well-being, in my opinion. You can't live a full life if you spend most of your time interacting with people on websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, FourChan, Instagram, etc. It's just not the social experience we evolved to enjoy. Also there's the danger that you're being subtly manipulated by the moderators or programmers of such sites, or the wider community. Are these 'people' you talk to really real? You can never know for sure. In the end, if you want a quality social experience, you have to get out of your basement and enjoy the company of people in real life.

tdaltonc 10y ago

If anyone here is feeling like they spend too much time on Social Media, I recently made Space a set of apps to help with that. http://youjustneedspace.com http://youjustneedspace.com

castle-bravo 10y ago

facebook's business is advertising, and the more time people spend on facebook, the more valuable facebook's ad space is. If depressed people spend more time on facebook instead of getting out, then it's in facebook's interest to have their product make people depressed. If angry people spend more time writing rants on facebook, then it's in facebook's interest to make people angry. I may be confusing causation with correlation, but I am willing to bet that the reason facebook's product has repeatedly been shown to cause harm is because the harm is good for facebook, not by accident of design. The article linked below describes some of the anti-features that make slack addictive. I have no reason to believe that slack and facebook are not aware of the addictive power of their products and do not cynically designin their products to enhance their addictive potential. https://medium.com/@satyavh/the-real-reason-slack https://medium.com/@satyavh/the-real-reason-slack

rogual 10y ago
I wonder how many of these design decisions were actually made consciously, and how many are just the result of things like blind A/B testing. If your scientific test shows you that feature set A has better user retention than feature set B, you don't need to worry yourself over why.

hrasyid 10y ago

Shouldn't we be more critical about the methodology? For example, it's not clear to me how it proves that the correlation is due to causation.

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stevehiehn 10y ago

Ironically, I find the only internet interactions that stress me out is not FB or twitter its when i post on hacker news (like this:)) I think mostly because i care and also people here can be very confrontational.

sandov 10y ago
When I use facebook, I get angry at the stupidity of people. On HN I feel humbled because of how smart people are here.
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orschiro 10y ago

For me, Facebook is the new yellow pages telephone book that contains all addresses to people I may want to contact. That's about it. I do not see any other value in Facebook.