6 ms·

The End of the Social Era Can’t Come Soon Enough

86 points by noncoml 9y ago

dawhizkid 9y ago
'user engagement' is an SV-euphemism for addiction
- rwnspace 9y ago
  Appealing to worst instincts (and shaming those who are folly to them) is a real classic. Shaping products towards maximum capital extraction instead of holding that secondary to some kind of human-focused philosophy is also called 'efficiency' nowadays.
alexozer 9y ago
For a while when I was younger I naively thought Facebook would formulate my timeline in such a way that I could keep up with genuinely interesting and special things people who enjoy tech like me think and do, and likewise feel genuinely encouraged to reciprocate occasionally. Why instead does my timeline have to be so precisely boring, mindless, impersonal, and yet addictive? Maybe because 1) incentive to post is largely motivated by lowest-common-denominator, broadest appeal rather than niche, 2) posting about specialized interests are therefore unincentivized, and 3) such posts from friends produces a positive feedback loop in the rest of the group? Maybe it'd be worse if Facebook actually worked this way because it would be harder to avoid entirely.
- danso 9y ago
  > Why instead does my timeline have to be so precisely boring, mindless, impersonal, and yet addictive? Maybe because 1) incentive to post is largely motivated by lowest-common-denominator, broadest appeal rather than niche, 2) posting about specialized interests are therefore unincentivized, and 3) such posts from friends produces a positive feedback loop in the rest of the group? Maybe some of the addictive effects you're feeling are out of habit. When's the last time you quit Facebook cold turkey, and for how long did you do it? I found that quitting for a few days -- by doing something as simple as changing my password to gibberish so that I could not login without going through the email verification process, thereby preventing me from "reflexively" checking FB -- could be enough to get me to forget about FB for weeks, even months.
  - ProfessorLayton 9y ago
    It might sound silly, foregoing most apps and using private/incognito browsing on all my devices 100% of the time is a productivity booster for me. The friction of having to log into every site all the time means I'll only go if I feel I need to, thereby keeping my device usage "productive". A huge bonus is not being bombarded with push notifications and a lot less tracking.
    - danso 9y ago
      Not silly at all. I think we as humans vastly underestimate the degree that we're influenced by small subconscious things, even though there's entire professional fields and countless dollars devoted to the practice (e.g. design, copy-writing, ui-ux). It feels better to see things as rational decisions, sometimes between good versus evil, rather than to admit our mundane weaknesses. I do something similar to you, except that I log off at the desktop (except for HN, sadly). If I want to send out a pointless but time-consuming rant about something ultimately trivial, I'm going to have to do it on my phone's touchscreen. And the thought of doing so is often more than enough to kill the desire so I can just focus on real work and writing. When I find myself lying in bed longer than I should because I'm touchscreen-typing these comments/posts, then I go cold turkey on my phone :).
  - mercer 9y ago
    I agree you're right, speaking from the perspective of someone who uninstalled the mobile app and checks Facebook every few days. Nonetheless, I recently checked the 'recent/chronological' feed, as well as just profiles of individual friends and old friends that I cared about. In both cases I felt that the offering was better than the algorithmic and default news feed, and somehow a net positive to my life (I'll elaborate if necessary, but I really do believe this). If I'd have to choose, I'd go for chronological feed of of friend updates. And if I could choose what 'categories' of friends to filter by, that'd be great, but that's basically Google+ with its circles. Anyways, what surprised me most is that even though I only have a 'facebook browsing sesh' every few days (3+), the experience I've defaulted into, the regular feed, is nowhere close to the quality that of 'recent updates hose' or 'updates from specific friends, chronologically'. But at the same time good enough in a generic sense that I can see them optimizing for that. Not really all that far off from my experience with Reddit, by the way. On the one hand I can commend the clever nature of Facebook to go for the current News Feed approach. On the other hand it strikes me as a prime example of the dangers of algorithms and optimizing for very specific things, and the growing anti-SV narrative (much as I've grown to hate these sorts of things).
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  News feeds are basically slot machines, and intermittent reinforcement is psychologically powerful
- sp527 9y ago
  The reason for this has to do with ‘variable reward’. Specifically, the brain quickly acclimates to a constant stream of rewards and gets bored. By contrast, spacing out rewards at unpredictable intervals is much likelier to keep the brain hooked. As someone else noted, this is the same principle that underpins slot machines.
malvosenior 9y ago
The latest barrage of anti-SV articles from old media seem very focused on Trump. Where were these complaints before the election? I remember the press loving how Obama used social media to his advantage. All of this reeks of political propaganda.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  There's a simple answer to that, and it is before Trump, it wasn't obvious that social media of all kinds was dominated by propaganda. Now we are aware, now there's a reaction. You are missing the causality. If there's a legitimate problem with society, why does it matter who points it out? I don't like the messenger was never a valid response to criticism.
  - malvosenior 9y ago
    My point is that most people who aren’t politically motivated to say so don’t see this as a “legitimate problem”. I know I see no issue with social media. Is it really worse than TV or newspapers? I don’t think so.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      The feedback loops inherent in attention based (advertising funded) social media content selection are potentially more problematic than TV or newspapers. TV and newspapers have them, but they don't work as fast and it is harder to place content in those channels.
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    > before Trump, it wasn't obvious that social media of all kinds was dominated by propaganda There were tons of articles written about this before Trump, they just didn't get any page views until afterwards. (E.g. check my submission history from before the election.) It was very very obvious, but people didn't start caring about the issue until after the election when it started getting promoted by Democrats for propaganda purposes.
- 9y ago
jswizzy 9y ago
We are living in Universe 25. The millennial are the beautiful ones for sure.
joe_the_user 9y ago
The thing about the reviling of social networks is it generally takes this sort of media as an upsurge that came out of nowhere and could somehow stop in a fashion that returns things to people making nebulous "face to face" contacts, in a world that's not changed since the pre-social-network era. Actually, there was an explosion of isolation before all this[1]. It seems to me that the world has become massively more socially isolated and social networks are as much a response to this as they are an addictive phenomena unto themselves - indeed, explosion of opioids, addiction and suicide has very much also been an effect of this social isolation and is naturally more destructive. TL;DR; If one complains about social dysfunction, give us a path to social function, please. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
- Top19 9y ago
  The larger issue that your getting at is the rise of “individualism” over the last 40 years. The first time I heard that I remember thinking what a ridiculous concept, people have always been interested in success and self-improvement in America. But after hearing nearly every brilliant sociologist and conservative/liberal political commentator make the same comment, I started to see things differently. The loss of community in America has been really sad. As jobs have become harder to get, as social programs from the government have decreased, as people have turned away from churches, people have either lost the community embedded in those institutions or the financial guarantees that allowed them to pursue community without worrying about-side hustles or growth hacking. Christopher Lasch’s The Age of Narcissism (1979) or anything recently by Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Lind, or even Laura Ingraham all point to the same loss. A really sad statistic I heard the other day was the experience in suicides of those 12-14 years old. It’s doubled in the last 5 years among boys and girls. I would think childhood would be a somewhat happier place but even it is engulfed by sadness. EDIT: Just saw you mentioned Bowling Alone so I took that out. Also want to say community vs individualism is a recurring theme in the history of America, one tends to dominate for 40-50 years before succumbing to the other.
  - ghostcluster 9y ago
    > as social programs from the government have decreased what programs are you talking about?
danschumann 9y ago
I'm playing a bit coy here, so play along or don't read this: How is facebook different from the internet as a whole? In a way is it a mirror of the internet? Everyone has a presence, they surf pages, they make comments, they have pages, games, etc. In some countries where internet access is new, they don't even know the difference between facebook and the internet, because they never use anything else. In a way, facebook is like the dark web. It's a version of the internet with different rules. We think the dark web is bad, and now people are starting to think facebook is bad. If we start to hate facebook, what's separating us from hating the internet as a whole? Is it the separation? On the main internet, your real world friends won't know what you posted. You can let off steam, express your interest in nerdy topics, etc. Is it because facebook is like public speaking, but without the emotional signals that scare you into being on your best behavior, so you're very likely to say something that could offend the whole room ( and you won't even know you've offended them! ) Is facebook like a dating site? One where you can play 'under the radar' because it's not exactly a dating site? You can be yourself without being yourself. Facebook is an aggregator. It's like someone took the internet and boiled it down, reduced it, and increased its strength. When I used to use the internet, I used to think of what I wanted to look at, then search specifically for that, or go to a website that has a niche interest, like nintendopower. Now, I go to a 'generalist' website, like facebook, and I let it suggest something I'd be interested in seeing. There was discovery in the old method, but I was still at the wheel. The search had an aim before, and is now aimless. Aimlessness, purposeless, nihilism, these are all related. They are all related to having no responsibilities. On facebook, the question is: are you responsible? Sort of. Sort of not. Sometimes you should like a post, sometimes you shouldn't. It's very unclear. It's very discouraging. The "shoulds" are very poorly defined, because everyone has different rules for what good manners are. Winning on facebook is what, more friends? Until you have so many friends that it dilutes your real friendships into a sea of acquaintances. Or, until you feel like a slave to faux-fame. The alternative is: don't use facebook. You ditch everyone who uses it, and they think you're a snob, or worse, they think you specifically unfriended them and only them, because they don't know you quit. It's like the whole world jumped off a bridge. Sure, it's the wrong thing to do, but literally everyone did it. A better alternative: a bot that auto responds to things and tells people you aren't on facebook anymore, and how to reach you. This may be the best way to quit.
Simulacra 9y ago
I would welcome a decrease in social networks, and hope they're burning out soon. IMO we've become so desensitized to in-person communication, that it's lost a lot of its importance. When was the last time someone called you to find out how you're doing, rather than just liking a facebook post? Perhaps I'm too old fashioned...

86 points by noncoml 9y ago

dawhizkid 9y ago

'user engagement' is an SV-euphemism for addiction

rwnspace 9y ago
Appealing to worst instincts (and shaming those who are folly to them) is a real classic. Shaping products towards maximum capital extraction instead of holding that secondary to some kind of human-focused philosophy is also called 'efficiency' nowadays.

alexozer 9y ago

For a while when I was younger I naively thought Facebook would formulate my timeline in such a way that I could keep up with genuinely interesting and special things people who enjoy tech like me think and do, and likewise feel genuinely encouraged to reciprocate occasionally. Why instead does my timeline have to be so precisely boring, mindless, impersonal, and yet addictive? Maybe because 1) incentive to post is largely motivated by lowest-common-denominator, broadest appeal rather than niche, 2) posting about specialized interests are therefore unincentivized, and 3) such posts from friends produces a positive feedback loop in the rest of the group? Maybe it'd be worse if Facebook actually worked this way because it would be harder to avoid entirely.

danso 9y ago
> Why instead does my timeline have to be so precisely boring, mindless, impersonal, and yet addictive? Maybe because 1) incentive to post is largely motivated by lowest-common-denominator, broadest appeal rather than niche, 2) posting about specialized interests are therefore unincentivized, and 3) such posts from friends produces a positive feedback loop in the rest of the group? Maybe some of the addictive effects you're feeling are out of habit. When's the last time you quit Facebook cold turkey, and for how long did you do it? I found that quitting for a few days -- by doing something as simple as changing my password to gibberish so that I could not login without going through the email verification process, thereby preventing me from "reflexively" checking FB -- could be enough to get me to forget about FB for weeks, even months.
- ProfessorLayton 9y ago
  It might sound silly, foregoing most apps and using private/incognito browsing on all my devices 100% of the time is a productivity booster for me. The friction of having to log into every site all the time means I'll only go if I feel I need to, thereby keeping my device usage "productive". A huge bonus is not being bombarded with push notifications and a lot less tracking.
  - danso 9y ago
    Not silly at all. I think we as humans vastly underestimate the degree that we're influenced by small subconscious things, even though there's entire professional fields and countless dollars devoted to the practice (e.g. design, copy-writing, ui-ux). It feels better to see things as rational decisions, sometimes between good versus evil, rather than to admit our mundane weaknesses. I do something similar to you, except that I log off at the desktop (except for HN, sadly). If I want to send out a pointless but time-consuming rant about something ultimately trivial, I'm going to have to do it on my phone's touchscreen. And the thought of doing so is often more than enough to kill the desire so I can just focus on real work and writing. When I find myself lying in bed longer than I should because I'm touchscreen-typing these comments/posts, then I go cold turkey on my phone :).
- mercer 9y ago
  I agree you're right, speaking from the perspective of someone who uninstalled the mobile app and checks Facebook every few days. Nonetheless, I recently checked the 'recent/chronological' feed, as well as just profiles of individual friends and old friends that I cared about. In both cases I felt that the offering was better than the algorithmic and default news feed, and somehow a net positive to my life (I'll elaborate if necessary, but I really do believe this). If I'd have to choose, I'd go for chronological feed of of friend updates. And if I could choose what 'categories' of friends to filter by, that'd be great, but that's basically Google+ with its circles. Anyways, what surprised me most is that even though I only have a 'facebook browsing sesh' every few days (3+), the experience I've defaulted into, the regular feed, is nowhere close to the quality that of 'recent updates hose' or 'updates from specific friends, chronologically'. But at the same time good enough in a generic sense that I can see them optimizing for that. Not really all that far off from my experience with Reddit, by the way. On the one hand I can commend the clever nature of Facebook to go for the current News Feed approach. On the other hand it strikes me as a prime example of the dangers of algorithms and optimizing for very specific things, and the growing anti-SV narrative (much as I've grown to hate these sorts of things).
ghostcluster 9y ago
News feeds are basically slot machines, and intermittent reinforcement is psychologically powerful
sp527 9y ago
The reason for this has to do with ‘variable reward’. Specifically, the brain quickly acclimates to a constant stream of rewards and gets bored. By contrast, spacing out rewards at unpredictable intervals is much likelier to keep the brain hooked. As someone else noted, this is the same principle that underpins slot machines.

malvosenior 9y ago

The latest barrage of anti-SV articles from old media seem very focused on Trump. Where were these complaints before the election? I remember the press loving how Obama used social media to his advantage. All of this reeks of political propaganda.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
There's a simple answer to that, and it is before Trump, it wasn't obvious that social media of all kinds was dominated by propaganda. Now we are aware, now there's a reaction. You are missing the causality. If there's a legitimate problem with society, why does it matter who points it out? I don't like the messenger was never a valid response to criticism.
- malvosenior 9y ago
  My point is that most people who aren’t politically motivated to say so don’t see this as a “legitimate problem”. I know I see no issue with social media. Is it really worse than TV or newspapers? I don’t think so.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    The feedback loops inherent in attention based (advertising funded) social media content selection are potentially more problematic than TV or newspapers. TV and newspapers have them, but they don't work as fast and it is harder to place content in those channels.
- Alex3917 9y ago
  > before Trump, it wasn't obvious that social media of all kinds was dominated by propaganda There were tons of articles written about this before Trump, they just didn't get any page views until afterwards. (E.g. check my submission history from before the election.) It was very very obvious, but people didn't start caring about the issue until after the election when it started getting promoted by Democrats for propaganda purposes.
9y ago

jswizzy 9y ago

We are living in Universe 25. The millennial are the beautiful ones for sure.

joe_the_user 9y ago

The thing about the reviling of social networks is it generally takes this sort of media as an upsurge that came out of nowhere and could somehow stop in a fashion that returns things to people making nebulous "face to face" contacts, in a world that's not changed since the pre-social-network era. Actually, there was an explosion of isolation before all this[1]. It seems to me that the world has become massively more socially isolated and social networks are as much a response to this as they are an addictive phenomena unto themselves - indeed, explosion of opioids, addiction and suicide has very much also been an effect of this social isolation and is naturally more destructive. TL;DR; If one complains about social dysfunction, give us a path to social function, please. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

Top19 9y ago
The larger issue that your getting at is the rise of “individualism” over the last 40 years. The first time I heard that I remember thinking what a ridiculous concept, people have always been interested in success and self-improvement in America. But after hearing nearly every brilliant sociologist and conservative/liberal political commentator make the same comment, I started to see things differently. The loss of community in America has been really sad. As jobs have become harder to get, as social programs from the government have decreased, as people have turned away from churches, people have either lost the community embedded in those institutions or the financial guarantees that allowed them to pursue community without worrying about-side hustles or growth hacking. Christopher Lasch’s The Age of Narcissism (1979) or anything recently by Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Lind, or even Laura Ingraham all point to the same loss. A really sad statistic I heard the other day was the experience in suicides of those 12-14 years old. It’s doubled in the last 5 years among boys and girls. I would think childhood would be a somewhat happier place but even it is engulfed by sadness. EDIT: Just saw you mentioned Bowling Alone so I took that out. Also want to say community vs individualism is a recurring theme in the history of America, one tends to dominate for 40-50 years before succumbing to the other.
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  > as social programs from the government have decreased what programs are you talking about?

danschumann 9y ago

I'm playing a bit coy here, so play along or don't read this: How is facebook different from the internet as a whole? In a way is it a mirror of the internet? Everyone has a presence, they surf pages, they make comments, they have pages, games, etc. In some countries where internet access is new, they don't even know the difference between facebook and the internet, because they never use anything else. In a way, facebook is like the dark web. It's a version of the internet with different rules. We think the dark web is bad, and now people are starting to think facebook is bad. If we start to hate facebook, what's separating us from hating the internet as a whole? Is it the separation? On the main internet, your real world friends won't know what you posted. You can let off steam, express your interest in nerdy topics, etc. Is it because facebook is like public speaking, but without the emotional signals that scare you into being on your best behavior, so you're very likely to say something that could offend the whole room ( and you won't even know you've offended them! ) Is facebook like a dating site? One where you can play 'under the radar' because it's not exactly a dating site? You can be yourself without being yourself. Facebook is an aggregator. It's like someone took the internet and boiled it down, reduced it, and increased its strength. When I used to use the internet, I used to think of what I wanted to look at, then search specifically for that, or go to a website that has a niche interest, like nintendopower. Now, I go to a 'generalist' website, like facebook, and I let it suggest something I'd be interested in seeing. There was discovery in the old method, but I was still at the wheel. The search had an aim before, and is now aimless. Aimlessness, purposeless, nihilism, these are all related. They are all related to having no responsibilities. On facebook, the question is: are you responsible? Sort of. Sort of not. Sometimes you should like a post, sometimes you shouldn't. It's very unclear. It's very discouraging. The "shoulds" are very poorly defined, because everyone has different rules for what good manners are. Winning on facebook is what, more friends? Until you have so many friends that it dilutes your real friendships into a sea of acquaintances. Or, until you feel like a slave to faux-fame. The alternative is: don't use facebook. You ditch everyone who uses it, and they think you're a snob, or worse, they think you specifically unfriended them and only them, because they don't know you quit. It's like the whole world jumped off a bridge. Sure, it's the wrong thing to do, but literally everyone did it. A better alternative: a bot that auto responds to things and tells people you aren't on facebook anymore, and how to reach you. This may be the best way to quit.

Simulacra 9y ago

I would welcome a decrease in social networks, and hope they're burning out soon. IMO we've become so desensitized to in-person communication, that it's lost a lot of its importance. When was the last time someone called you to find out how you're doing, rather than just liking a facebook post? Perhaps I'm too old fashioned...