9 ms·

They did a study using Facebook. But I'm more curious about Instagram. "Look at all these rich beautiful people with millions of followers sailing around the wo

They did a study using Facebook. But I'm more curious about Instagram. "Look at all these rich beautiful people with millions of followers sailing around the world on their yachts." Ten minutes on Instagram is enough to fill any sane person with existential dread and bring about severe depression.

MIKarlsen 9y ago
Not as much as LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a fairytale-land for adults, and it's bizzare (to me) that anyone wants to participate. It's not even humblebragging anymore. It's "Look what I made, and what I achieved" packed into casual "Oh this thing? Yeah it's just my perfect life"-packages...
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  Why would anyone browse LinkedIn? This is actually a serious question. I'm pretty good about keeping mine updated, but the only viewers I'm planning on are recruiters, who would be getting the same information regardless.
  - MIKarlsen 9y ago
    It's a good place to share information I guess. I would've liked it to be a bit more academic if I were to browse it more often. If you work in consulting etc., it's also a nice place to get updates on what people are doing, because everyone (over)shares so much.
  - runT1ME 9y ago
    Because Facebook/Twitter/Instagram is blocked at a lot of work places, while LinkedIn is not...
    - uep 9y ago
      That's ironic. To me, the implication of browsing LinkedIn at work is that you're looking for another job. Whereas if you're browsing Facebook or Instagram you're just wasting time.
      - kikoreis 9y ago
        A lot of inside sales teams use LinkedIn for active prospecting. It's reasonably successful.
      - taneq 9y ago
        That's how I've seen it, definitely. At my old job it was at the point where you could tell who was pissed off at what time by seeing who'd been working on their LinkedIn profile... and after a company-wide announcement, everyone would update within a day or two.
  - bootlooped 9y ago
    I think some people that just treat it like another Facebook. I've had several of people I barely know, and who I have nothing professionally in common with, try to add me.
    - TallGuyShort 9y ago
      And then people share that "solve this simple order of operations problem to prove you're a genius" bullshit on it, just like Facebook.
  - geodel 9y ago
    I don't know exactly why I do that. But every few weeks I login and browse through 100s of profiles starting with people I know, to suggestions I may know and then acquaintances of acquaintance and so on. I guess it is a mix of gossip and research for my personal consumption.
- drharby 9y ago
  Really? I found it a great resource to reach out and break into the tech sector. It only becomes a dick measuring contest when you've no clear goal on the platform.
  - ben_w 9y ago
    How do you do that? I get bombarded with recruiters who don’t read my profile. “I’m moving to Berlin because of Brexit and looking for iOS roles” -> “Would you like this job in London as a python developer?” (Given I’m now back in the UK helping family look after a parent with Alzheimer’s while she can still recognise me, I should probably update my profile...)
    - whatshisface 9y ago
      Maybe they are guessing that you might not have updated your profile, when they recruit you inaccurately. (More realistically, they have a quota to fill...)
    - peoplewindow 9y ago
      Either that or they don't believe you will really move, or they believe that with a different job you would stay.
      - blibble 9y ago
        that vote was 18 months ago if he's still looking after that long in this market they're probably right
        ben_w 9y ago
        I started looking seriously about 5 months ago. I moved back to the UK one month ago. And, hard as moving is, I see no future for me in the UK, only a dead parent.
        peoplewindow 9y ago
- Spooky23 9y ago
  LinkedIn is like baseball cards when I was a kid. There’s two metrics for dick-measuring contests, size of network and quality of network. Linkedin is there to show, yeah I’m a badass who got the <insert big shot here> to link to me, or look at me, I have lots of cards. There is some actual stuff happening there, but the bread and circus that brings the crowd are those two metrics.
  - Diederich 9y ago
    Huh. I have never heard anyone brag about the size of their linkedin network.
    - olympus 9y ago
      LinkedIn network size is almost treated as a binary big/little category to recruiters, because after 500 connections it just shows "500+" instead of the actual number of connections. So a recruiter sees "500+ connections" and thinks, "this person is serious about [finding a job/networking with professionals/staying connected with colleagues]," or the recruiter sees "79 connections" and thinks, "this person is only on LinkedIn as a formality." It's not really something to brag about and if you're a perfect fit for a job I doubt your network size will keep you from getting hired (unless you are in a social-heavy career like marketing). But, if you've got 475 connections it's probably worth it to send out 26 more random connection requests to get past past 500 and into that space where the recruiter doesn't know exactly how big your network is.
- macspoofing 9y ago
  It's not the same. LinkedIn is a network for recruiters, job-seekers, execs and folks from biz-dev and sales. They dynamics are different. It's very work oriented.
- rinze 9y ago
  It's the culprit of corporate self-help. I don't look at it as anything else.
- akhilcacharya 9y ago
  I definitely do this and it is not helping.
- chillfox 9y ago
  The worst thing about LinkedIn is the guys who think it is a dating site. I have completely stopped replying to "recruiters" who contact me on LinkedIn. I still keep it updated though.
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    If you aren't using it for career opportunities then why be on it at all?
- gaius 9y ago
  It’s amazing how many people have a “Senior” prefix that I don’t remember from when I worked with them... or are claiming sole responsibility for a team or even a different team’s project... There is also a trick used by people who attended college but never graduated, list the years and the subject and leave the reader to fill in the blanks, not technically lying but... The average LinkedIn profile is just if not more fictitious than Facebook. And everyone knows it but plays along anyway.
c0nducktr 9y ago
This might have been on HN a while ago, but it talks about different social media sites and came to the conclusion that Instagram was the worst of them as far as this stuff goes. https://www.rsph.org.uk/about-us/news/instagram-ranked-worst-for-young-people-s-mental-health.html https://www.rsph.org.uk/about-us/news/instagram-ranked-worst... I'm not able to open the report itself from that page, but I found a copy and uploaded it to archive.org. https://web.archive.org/web/20180128204404/http://www.infocoponline.es/pdf/SOCIALMEDIA-MENTALHEALTH.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20180128204404/http://www.infoco...
AckSyn 9y ago
Your hyperbole aside, being exposed to other people's lifestyles shouldn't result in any kind of depression for a healthy adult. I can see this happening to immature people or those without a firm grip on reality.
pmoriarty 9y ago
I'm not sure that "sane" is the right term to use for a person who becomes suicidal from looking at pictures of rich people. Obsessively materialiastic, maybe. Sane, no.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  It's not just material posessions that are flaunted on Instagram. Experiences, lifestyles, relationships, and accomplishments - most things that people want - are bubbled to the top.
- rdiddly 9y ago
  We're talking about teenagers here, give 'em a break.
Gargoyle 9y ago
I spend about 10 minutes a day on instagram and come away thinking how amazing the world is. You have to curate your feed. Curate curate curate.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  How do you prevent yourself from thinking "how amazing their world is", or "how amazing my world could be but isn't"? Most people can change their thinking about this manually to some extent, but I can definitely see how it could be a big problem for a significant subset.
  - rorykoehler 9y ago
    The things that bring most pleasure (family, friends, learning, creating and exercise) have nothing to do with any of the fake stuff on Instagram. I've been on yachts and frankly I was bored out of my mind and dying to leave.
- switch007 9y ago
  You've got to be a bit careful though. Top "influencers" hire food photographers for perfect shots, they'll pose casually in a $400 sweater etc. It's not a 100% true snapshot of real life.
- katrinamo 9y ago
  Exactly. I've carefully tailored my feed so it provides me with a huge amount of dog photos. Now every time I get on there my mood is usually boosted seeing cute dog photos and videos.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    That's not using Instagram in general anymore though, that's heavily censoring Instagram towards very non-typical streams. It's as if responding to someone that said that one can never find any positive stream on Instagram, when people actually complained about what Instagram, at its majority, and as is used by most, is.
yakitori 9y ago
>"Look at all these rich beautiful people with millions of followers sailing around the world on their yachts." How is this any different than society at large? How is this any different from TV and newspapers? > Ten minutes on Instagram is enough to fill any sane person with existential dread and bring about severe depression. Ten minutes on HN is enough considering all the fear mongering being pushed here. And most people who use instagram are not severely depressed. Go figure. Wonder why that is"?
- aqsalose 9y ago
  >How is this any different than society at large? How is this any different from TV and newspapers? I suppose social media like Instagram makes the experience different, more intimate perhaps. Reading newspaper accounts of super-rich lifestyle is still a bit like hearing tales of life of Kublai Khan: it's something that happens far away, half mythical and half magical. A magazine publishes an article how the super-rich enjoy their life, sailing around the world on their yachts? Maybe it was an overview of the phenomenon in general, or if it was an in-depth portrait focused on some particular celebrity, it probably was a story about what they did maybe weeks or months ago. And in any case, when you've read the article, you put the magazine away, and continue with your life. Following people on the internet service, looking at the pictures and stories they personally share with their followers in near real time, it's a bit more like observing a person doing all those things on first hand basis. And that could make it more soul-crushing as an experience. But this is all conjecture. Someone pointed out in other comment that the true reason might be the economic downturn.
jeffmould 9y ago
Completely agree. I also believe that YouTube can have similar results. Kids watch videos of "professional" YouTubers having nice cars, traveling all the time, living in nice homes, etc... We have had to significantly limit the amount of time our kids are exposed to YouTube (and Instagram) simply because of the "I want it now" and "I want that one" mentality it has caused on some occasions.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  I completely stopped browsing YouTube years ago and only visit it for specific songs/videos - the pervasiveness of the advertising/product placement is worse than broadcast TV.
- goialoq 9y ago
  YouTube, like TV and the newsstand, has good content and bad content.
  - jeffmould 9y ago
    Very true. Unfortunately, for kids/teens they tend to gravitate towards the "bad" content. I don't mean the content is necessarily by definition (i.e. r-rated or poor production quality), simply that it provides no value other than "look at me" and "see how I live" value to viewers.
agumonkey 9y ago
Depends on the person. I don't respond to material wealth, I would probably end up annoyed by their lifestyle more than anything else. Facebook and similar on other hand rubbed my lack of social skills wound so much I deleted it really long ago.
paganel 9y ago
Depends on who and what you're following, I guess. Being a male in my mid- to late-30s I don't use Instagram for social purposes, as I don't have any personal photo of mine in there, I'm just using it to post architecture-related photos (mostly photos of communist brutalist buildings built in my city in the 1960s and 1970s) and to follow people interested in very similar things. For purposes like this one is quite an interesting medium.
limaoscarjuliet 9y ago
For my son (17 y.o.) it is online games and phone use in general. He has - I hope - mild depression, which - I believe - is caused by his online habits. His mom and I thought taking his PC away from him would fix it. But then he falls into school-sleep cycle, that looks like full-blown depression. Yes, his grades are affected and in not a good way. What works for now is to participate in his life with him. As of now we are at a Volleyball tournament. While he "sucks" at it, the social interaction and sense of belonging to the team/cause that puts a wide smile on his face. Not saying we should take phones away from kids, but certainly they should be treated as potentially harming things when used incorrectly: guns, alcohol (, drugs?), etc. In any case, Volleyball includes scores of girls dressed in spandex, so there is hope he will get interested in them and starts to think how to get to them rather than look at the phone.
- WWLink 9y ago
  lol, parental involvement is a good thing! You're doing a great job at the parenting.
- pixelperfect 9y ago
  When I was around that age I also had my PC taken away from me. My recommendation would be to see if you can kickstart some hobby by spending a few hundred dollars on something as a substitute for the PC. Something of his choice than is more constructive than video games. When my PC was taken away and not replaced with anything, I just got bored and didn't know what to do with my time.
  - rock_hard 9y ago
    Same with me when I was a kid. My parents also missed tons of opportunities to help me start other hobbies such as learning to play a instrument which I would have loved. So I stayed with the PC...lots of gaming initially, which lead to learning about hardware and how to build computers myself (gotta overclock that CPU)...but I also have to admit that it sparked the interest to make my own games early which led me to pick up programming and that opened up a ocean of opportunities later in life. It’s really hard to know what skill will be useful later in life...so now that I have kids in my own I try to support their natural interests which also allows my wife and I to moderate thins like gaming to some reasonable degree.
jimmaswell 9y ago
This is ridiculous. Depressed and filled with existential dread over seeing pictures of rich people on yachts, really? Do you feel that way every time you pass by a large house or see an expensive car on the road too?
- TheDong 9y ago
  As silly as it sounds, strangers on the road or houses you pass by aren't human Social media / instagram / etc allow the other party to feel human to you, at which point you can easily get into the thought of "They're not really better than me, are they? Why is their life so gilded"..
  - jimmaswell 9y ago
    I knew kids with huge houses and rich parents as a kid and I didn't feel more strongly about it than "this house/pool/whatever is pretty cool". Maybe "gee I wish I had every video game console too" at most. In high school too mosy people I knew were materially better off. It never gave me a complex about it. It's just life, almost everybody can find examples of people with more money.
- yakitori 9y ago
  > This is ridiculous. It's not. It's just your daily anti-facebook/social media propaganda. Every day there is something about the "evils of social media". It's the new gangsta rap or violent video games. The news media spreads fear in order to sell ads. It wasn't too long ago when the news media hyped up violent videos to sell ads. Violent video games were blamed for everything from school shootings to depression to anti-social behavior and everything in between. It wasn't too long ago that gangsta rap had to have parental advisory notices.
  - abusoufiyan 9y ago
    I never bought into this argument that gangsta rap, violent video games, porn, etc have NO effect on our society. You, yourself mentioned ads in your comment. What is an ad but a type of media? And yet, ads are so effective that they are basically the backbone of many of the largest tech companies in the world. Clearly media DOES affect our society. It may not be as simple as "listen to gangsta rap -> commit the crimes you heard about in gangsta rap" but there can totally be changes in our behavior which come directly from our media. If this wasn't possible, advertising wouldn't be one of the largest industries in the world.
j0hnml 9y ago
I think the same can be applied to just about any source/site/app where these feelings of inferiority can arise. Even here if I spend enough time browsing posts with topics I’m not strong in, I feel like I still have so much catching up/learning to do in tech, and it kills me. Drawing comparisons is way too easy and it really is the devil.
madaxe_again 9y ago
There should be a health warning to the effect of: “Objects seen on instagram are faker than they appear.” They may be beautiful, they may be on a yacht - but the thing has been chartered for an hour for an instagram shoot, they’re staying in a backpacker’s hostel, that methuselah of champagne was bought empty and filled with water, and they’re not actually called Montague Herostache, but rather Duane Dibbley. It’s all artifice. Source: I watched gaggles of instagrammers faking the lifestyle at Royal Phuket Marina during a yacht show last year, paying to pose on megayachts. It was rather sad - like caged birds primping their plumage.
- goialoq 9y ago
  http://www.momminitup.com/emily-thinks-shes-funny/objects-in-this-picture-may-be-faker-than-they-appear/ http://www.momminitup.com/emily-thinks-shes-funny/objects-in... Nothing new under the sun.
andrei_says_ 9y ago
Curation comes to mind. I follow accounts dedicated to art, design, nature photography, and a cartoonist. So I’m mostly exposed to beauty, mostly invited to learning and delight.
nojvek 9y ago
Yeah stopped using Instagram and Facebook since 2016. Life has been great!
rorykoehler 9y ago
It's pretty easy to avoid that side of instagram. I haven't seen it in over a year and I browse it every day.

MIKarlsen 9y ago

Not as much as LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a fairytale-land for adults, and it's bizzare (to me) that anyone wants to participate. It's not even humblebragging anymore. It's "Look what I made, and what I achieved" packed into casual "Oh this thing? Yeah it's just my perfect life"-packages...

wutbrodo 9y ago
Why would anyone browse LinkedIn? This is actually a serious question. I'm pretty good about keeping mine updated, but the only viewers I'm planning on are recruiters, who would be getting the same information regardless.
- MIKarlsen 9y ago
  It's a good place to share information I guess. I would've liked it to be a bit more academic if I were to browse it more often. If you work in consulting etc., it's also a nice place to get updates on what people are doing, because everyone (over)shares so much.
- runT1ME 9y ago
  Because Facebook/Twitter/Instagram is blocked at a lot of work places, while LinkedIn is not...
  - uep 9y ago
    That's ironic. To me, the implication of browsing LinkedIn at work is that you're looking for another job. Whereas if you're browsing Facebook or Instagram you're just wasting time.
    - kikoreis 9y ago
      A lot of inside sales teams use LinkedIn for active prospecting. It's reasonably successful.
    - taneq 9y ago
      That's how I've seen it, definitely. At my old job it was at the point where you could tell who was pissed off at what time by seeing who'd been working on their LinkedIn profile... and after a company-wide announcement, everyone would update within a day or two.
- bootlooped 9y ago
  I think some people that just treat it like another Facebook. I've had several of people I barely know, and who I have nothing professionally in common with, try to add me.
  - TallGuyShort 9y ago
    And then people share that "solve this simple order of operations problem to prove you're a genius" bullshit on it, just like Facebook.
- geodel 9y ago
  I don't know exactly why I do that. But every few weeks I login and browse through 100s of profiles starting with people I know, to suggestions I may know and then acquaintances of acquaintance and so on. I guess it is a mix of gossip and research for my personal consumption.
drharby 9y ago
Really? I found it a great resource to reach out and break into the tech sector. It only becomes a dick measuring contest when you've no clear goal on the platform.
- ben_w 9y ago
  How do you do that? I get bombarded with recruiters who don’t read my profile. “I’m moving to Berlin because of Brexit and looking for iOS roles” -> “Would you like this job in London as a python developer?” (Given I’m now back in the UK helping family look after a parent with Alzheimer’s while she can still recognise me, I should probably update my profile...)
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    Maybe they are guessing that you might not have updated your profile, when they recruit you inaccurately. (More realistically, they have a quota to fill...)
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    Either that or they don't believe you will really move, or they believe that with a different job you would stay.
    - blibble 9y ago
      that vote was 18 months ago if he's still looking after that long in this market they're probably right
      - ben_w 9y ago
        I started looking seriously about 5 months ago. I moved back to the UK one month ago. And, hard as moving is, I see no future for me in the UK, only a dead parent.
        peoplewindow 9y ago
Spooky23 9y ago
LinkedIn is like baseball cards when I was a kid. There’s two metrics for dick-measuring contests, size of network and quality of network. Linkedin is there to show, yeah I’m a badass who got the <insert big shot here> to link to me, or look at me, I have lots of cards. There is some actual stuff happening there, but the bread and circus that brings the crowd are those two metrics.
- Diederich 9y ago
  Huh. I have never heard anyone brag about the size of their linkedin network.
  - olympus 9y ago
    LinkedIn network size is almost treated as a binary big/little category to recruiters, because after 500 connections it just shows "500+" instead of the actual number of connections. So a recruiter sees "500+ connections" and thinks, "this person is serious about [finding a job/networking with professionals/staying connected with colleagues]," or the recruiter sees "79 connections" and thinks, "this person is only on LinkedIn as a formality." It's not really something to brag about and if you're a perfect fit for a job I doubt your network size will keep you from getting hired (unless you are in a social-heavy career like marketing). But, if you've got 475 connections it's probably worth it to send out 26 more random connection requests to get past past 500 and into that space where the recruiter doesn't know exactly how big your network is.
macspoofing 9y ago
It's not the same. LinkedIn is a network for recruiters, job-seekers, execs and folks from biz-dev and sales. They dynamics are different. It's very work oriented.
rinze 9y ago
It's the culprit of corporate self-help. I don't look at it as anything else.
akhilcacharya 9y ago
I definitely do this and it is not helping.
chillfox 9y ago
The worst thing about LinkedIn is the guys who think it is a dating site. I have completely stopped replying to "recruiters" who contact me on LinkedIn. I still keep it updated though.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  If you aren't using it for career opportunities then why be on it at all?
gaius 9y ago
It’s amazing how many people have a “Senior” prefix that I don’t remember from when I worked with them... or are claiming sole responsibility for a team or even a different team’s project... There is also a trick used by people who attended college but never graduated, list the years and the subject and leave the reader to fill in the blanks, not technically lying but... The average LinkedIn profile is just if not more fictitious than Facebook. And everyone knows it but plays along anyway.

c0nducktr 9y ago

This might have been on HN a while ago, but it talks about different social media sites and came to the conclusion that Instagram was the worst of them as far as this stuff goes. https://www.rsph.org.uk/about-us/news/instagram-ranked-worst-for-young-people-s-mental-health.html https://www.rsph.org.uk/about-us/news/instagram-ranked-worst... I'm not able to open the report itself from that page, but I found a copy and uploaded it to archive.org. https://web.archive.org/web/20180128204404/http://www.infocoponline.es/pdf/SOCIALMEDIA-MENTALHEALTH.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20180128204404/http://www.infoco...

AckSyn 9y ago

Your hyperbole aside, being exposed to other people's lifestyles shouldn't result in any kind of depression for a healthy adult. I can see this happening to immature people or those without a firm grip on reality.

pmoriarty 9y ago

I'm not sure that "sane" is the right term to use for a person who becomes suicidal from looking at pictures of rich people. Obsessively materialiastic, maybe. Sane, no.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago
It's not just material posessions that are flaunted on Instagram. Experiences, lifestyles, relationships, and accomplishments - most things that people want - are bubbled to the top.
rdiddly 9y ago
We're talking about teenagers here, give 'em a break.

Gargoyle 9y ago

I spend about 10 minutes a day on instagram and come away thinking how amazing the world is. You have to curate your feed. Curate curate curate.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago
How do you prevent yourself from thinking "how amazing their world is", or "how amazing my world could be but isn't"? Most people can change their thinking about this manually to some extent, but I can definitely see how it could be a big problem for a significant subset.
- rorykoehler 9y ago
  The things that bring most pleasure (family, friends, learning, creating and exercise) have nothing to do with any of the fake stuff on Instagram. I've been on yachts and frankly I was bored out of my mind and dying to leave.
switch007 9y ago
You've got to be a bit careful though. Top "influencers" hire food photographers for perfect shots, they'll pose casually in a $400 sweater etc. It's not a 100% true snapshot of real life.
katrinamo 9y ago
Exactly. I've carefully tailored my feed so it provides me with a huge amount of dog photos. Now every time I get on there my mood is usually boosted seeing cute dog photos and videos.
- coldtea 9y ago
  That's not using Instagram in general anymore though, that's heavily censoring Instagram towards very non-typical streams. It's as if responding to someone that said that one can never find any positive stream on Instagram, when people actually complained about what Instagram, at its majority, and as is used by most, is.

yakitori 9y ago

>"Look at all these rich beautiful people with millions of followers sailing around the world on their yachts." How is this any different than society at large? How is this any different from TV and newspapers? > Ten minutes on Instagram is enough to fill any sane person with existential dread and bring about severe depression. Ten minutes on HN is enough considering all the fear mongering being pushed here. And most people who use instagram are not severely depressed. Go figure. Wonder why that is"?

aqsalose 9y ago
>How is this any different than society at large? How is this any different from TV and newspapers? I suppose social media like Instagram makes the experience different, more intimate perhaps. Reading newspaper accounts of super-rich lifestyle is still a bit like hearing tales of life of Kublai Khan: it's something that happens far away, half mythical and half magical. A magazine publishes an article how the super-rich enjoy their life, sailing around the world on their yachts? Maybe it was an overview of the phenomenon in general, or if it was an in-depth portrait focused on some particular celebrity, it probably was a story about what they did maybe weeks or months ago. And in any case, when you've read the article, you put the magazine away, and continue with your life. Following people on the internet service, looking at the pictures and stories they personally share with their followers in near real time, it's a bit more like observing a person doing all those things on first hand basis. And that could make it more soul-crushing as an experience. But this is all conjecture. Someone pointed out in other comment that the true reason might be the economic downturn.

jeffmould 9y ago

Completely agree. I also believe that YouTube can have similar results. Kids watch videos of "professional" YouTubers having nice cars, traveling all the time, living in nice homes, etc... We have had to significantly limit the amount of time our kids are exposed to YouTube (and Instagram) simply because of the "I want it now" and "I want that one" mentality it has caused on some occasions.

stevenwoo 9y ago
I completely stopped browsing YouTube years ago and only visit it for specific songs/videos - the pervasiveness of the advertising/product placement is worse than broadcast TV.
goialoq 9y ago
YouTube, like TV and the newsstand, has good content and bad content.
- jeffmould 9y ago
  Very true. Unfortunately, for kids/teens they tend to gravitate towards the "bad" content. I don't mean the content is necessarily by definition (i.e. r-rated or poor production quality), simply that it provides no value other than "look at me" and "see how I live" value to viewers.

agumonkey 9y ago

Depends on the person. I don't respond to material wealth, I would probably end up annoyed by their lifestyle more than anything else. Facebook and similar on other hand rubbed my lack of social skills wound so much I deleted it really long ago.

paganel 9y ago

Depends on who and what you're following, I guess. Being a male in my mid- to late-30s I don't use Instagram for social purposes, as I don't have any personal photo of mine in there, I'm just using it to post architecture-related photos (mostly photos of communist brutalist buildings built in my city in the 1960s and 1970s) and to follow people interested in very similar things. For purposes like this one is quite an interesting medium.

limaoscarjuliet 9y ago

For my son (17 y.o.) it is online games and phone use in general. He has - I hope - mild depression, which - I believe - is caused by his online habits. His mom and I thought taking his PC away from him would fix it. But then he falls into school-sleep cycle, that looks like full-blown depression. Yes, his grades are affected and in not a good way. What works for now is to participate in his life with him. As of now we are at a Volleyball tournament. While he "sucks" at it, the social interaction and sense of belonging to the team/cause that puts a wide smile on his face. Not saying we should take phones away from kids, but certainly they should be treated as potentially harming things when used incorrectly: guns, alcohol (, drugs?), etc. In any case, Volleyball includes scores of girls dressed in spandex, so there is hope he will get interested in them and starts to think how to get to them rather than look at the phone.

WWLink 9y ago
lol, parental involvement is a good thing! You're doing a great job at the parenting.
pixelperfect 9y ago
When I was around that age I also had my PC taken away from me. My recommendation would be to see if you can kickstart some hobby by spending a few hundred dollars on something as a substitute for the PC. Something of his choice than is more constructive than video games. When my PC was taken away and not replaced with anything, I just got bored and didn't know what to do with my time.
- rock_hard 9y ago
  Same with me when I was a kid. My parents also missed tons of opportunities to help me start other hobbies such as learning to play a instrument which I would have loved. So I stayed with the PC...lots of gaming initially, which lead to learning about hardware and how to build computers myself (gotta overclock that CPU)...but I also have to admit that it sparked the interest to make my own games early which led me to pick up programming and that opened up a ocean of opportunities later in life. It’s really hard to know what skill will be useful later in life...so now that I have kids in my own I try to support their natural interests which also allows my wife and I to moderate thins like gaming to some reasonable degree.

jimmaswell 9y ago

This is ridiculous. Depressed and filled with existential dread over seeing pictures of rich people on yachts, really? Do you feel that way every time you pass by a large house or see an expensive car on the road too?

TheDong 9y ago
As silly as it sounds, strangers on the road or houses you pass by aren't human Social media / instagram / etc allow the other party to feel human to you, at which point you can easily get into the thought of "They're not really better than me, are they? Why is their life so gilded"..
- jimmaswell 9y ago
  I knew kids with huge houses and rich parents as a kid and I didn't feel more strongly about it than "this house/pool/whatever is pretty cool". Maybe "gee I wish I had every video game console too" at most. In high school too mosy people I knew were materially better off. It never gave me a complex about it. It's just life, almost everybody can find examples of people with more money.
yakitori 9y ago
> This is ridiculous. It's not. It's just your daily anti-facebook/social media propaganda. Every day there is something about the "evils of social media". It's the new gangsta rap or violent video games. The news media spreads fear in order to sell ads. It wasn't too long ago when the news media hyped up violent videos to sell ads. Violent video games were blamed for everything from school shootings to depression to anti-social behavior and everything in between. It wasn't too long ago that gangsta rap had to have parental advisory notices.
- abusoufiyan 9y ago
  I never bought into this argument that gangsta rap, violent video games, porn, etc have NO effect on our society. You, yourself mentioned ads in your comment. What is an ad but a type of media? And yet, ads are so effective that they are basically the backbone of many of the largest tech companies in the world. Clearly media DOES affect our society. It may not be as simple as "listen to gangsta rap -> commit the crimes you heard about in gangsta rap" but there can totally be changes in our behavior which come directly from our media. If this wasn't possible, advertising wouldn't be one of the largest industries in the world.

j0hnml 9y ago

I think the same can be applied to just about any source/site/app where these feelings of inferiority can arise. Even here if I spend enough time browsing posts with topics I’m not strong in, I feel like I still have so much catching up/learning to do in tech, and it kills me. Drawing comparisons is way too easy and it really is the devil.

madaxe_again 9y ago

There should be a health warning to the effect of: “Objects seen on instagram are faker than they appear.” They may be beautiful, they may be on a yacht - but the thing has been chartered for an hour for an instagram shoot, they’re staying in a backpacker’s hostel, that methuselah of champagne was bought empty and filled with water, and they’re not actually called Montague Herostache, but rather Duane Dibbley. It’s all artifice. Source: I watched gaggles of instagrammers faking the lifestyle at Royal Phuket Marina during a yacht show last year, paying to pose on megayachts. It was rather sad - like caged birds primping their plumage.

goialoq 9y ago
http://www.momminitup.com/emily-thinks-shes-funny/objects-in-this-picture-may-be-faker-than-they-appear/ http://www.momminitup.com/emily-thinks-shes-funny/objects-in... Nothing new under the sun.

andrei_says_ 9y ago

Curation comes to mind. I follow accounts dedicated to art, design, nature photography, and a cartoonist. So I’m mostly exposed to beauty, mostly invited to learning and delight.

nojvek 9y ago

Yeah stopped using Instagram and Facebook since 2016. Life has been great!

rorykoehler 9y ago

It's pretty easy to avoid that side of instagram. I haven't seen it in over a year and I browse it every day.