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Every time I'm on FB. It's pleasant, really pleasant. But, every single time I'll go on the site and to do a thing like, check on the plans for my friend's birt
by slackstation 9y ago
Every time I'm on FB. It's pleasant, really pleasant. But, every single time I'll go on the site and to do a thing like, check on the plans for my friend's birthday party. I end up spending like 30min or so more time than I expected to just browsing aimlessly.
It's not like they are putting a gun to my head but, they are using a billion dollars of research and my friends' faces to entice me into doing something I don't want. I'm more or less a monkey and my social circuitry just is so super-stimulated that it's annoying.
And all of that is before the FOMO kicks in and I start feeling bad that my life isn't as nice as my friends even though among my friends, I have a very enviable life (my friends have confided in me as much). But, my every day life cannot compete with the highlight reel of all the best moments of all my friends' lives.
Even though I know all of this stuff consiously, it still affects me because keeping guard and watch over everything constantly is hard. Falling into how it's designed to make you feel is easy.
Deleting FB off your phone is the best thing.
This overwhelming feeling, I'm convinced, is one of the driving factors that created Instagram and Snapchat because it was smaller and less invasive. Ironically, they became just like FB or in some ways (to some people) worse as they grew.
We are social animals and FB weaponizes the faces of all of your friends to suck as much attention from you as possible. It's as unfair a fight as there ever has been in the history of commerce.
- beefield 9y agoFunny thing is that anyone with half a brain cell notices this if you just try to look at it even a bit. People are manipulable to do things they do not like to do. Yet any time there is a comment in HN stating that marketing may not be the best thing since sliced bread, there will be tons of messages of type "hey, just last week I saw an ad of an even I actually wanted to go, so there is nothing bad ever in people throwing ads at my face against my will". Weird. (And don't get me started on the whole damn "science" of economics being based on the (obviously unfalsifiable as per popper) assumption that people always and anywhere just maximize their utility.)